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Comment by recursive | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't have to be either one! You could just exercise more.

You mostly have to control what you eat. One donut takes like 3 hours to burn off at a good clip on a treadmill.

I think that thinking you can make up for eating habits with exercise at all will just get you into trouble. You should exercise for health, but unless you’re a professional athlete, your voluntary physical activity is a rounding error in terms of weight management

> One donut takes like 3 hours to burn off at a good clip on a treadmill

I don't know where you get this idea but I see this meme really often in defeatist "it's impossible to lose weight" discussions. It's so easy to research, I don't know why it spreads so easily.

A Krispy Kreme caramel glazed doughnut is about 220 kcal[0] and a very light treadmill session (30 minute, 5% incline, 3 mph) will probably burn in the 220 range[1].

> unless you’re a professional athlete, your voluntary physical activity is a rounding error in terms of weight management

Absolutely not. It's true that for somebody that eats/burns ~2000 kcal in a day, about 1500 of that is for just existing (the resting metabolic rate[2]). But even small amounts of exercise are significant: that 30-minute speedwalk is 10% of your calorie intake! Turning it up to a jog can easily be twice that.

[0]: https://s3.amazonaws.com/kkd-e1-images.kktestkitchen.com/eco...

[1]: https://www.sparkpeople.com/resource/calories_burned.asp?exe...

[2]: https://www.verywellfit.com/metabolism-facts-101-3495605

and to add on an important extra data point, 1lb of fat is roughly 3500 calories. So that one 220 calorie treadmill walk is 0.06lb or about 1lb lost per 16 walks, changing nothing else.

Or put another way, if your office is a 30 minute walk away then you can lose just over 2.5 lb/mo by just changing your routine to walking instead of driving (5×2×4×220÷3500 = ~2.5) and not changing your diet at all.

> One donut takes like 3 hours to burn off at a good clip on a treadmill.

You're way off. A "Frosted Snowflake Donut" from Dunkin weighs in at 270 calories. [1]

A 155-pound person will burn 298 calories in 30 minutes doing 12-minute miles on a treadmill, [2] which is probably less than "a good clip".

> You should exercise for health, but unless you’re a professional athlete, your voluntary physical activity is a rounding error in terms of weight management

My personal experience just does not bear this out.

I used to ride bikes a lot. The I stopped because I didn't have as much time for it anymore. I eat noticeably less. I also gained 20 pounds.

[1]: https://www.dunkindonuts.com/content/dam/dd/pdf/nutrition.pd...

[2]: https://www.health.harvard.edu/diet-and-weight-loss/calories...

Sure, I was abstracting "Eat less" to mean "Be at a caloric deficit", which is the only requirement for weight loss. Exercising more obviously meets that criteria as well.

Exercise helps you eat less. It really does have to be all 3.

No, and in fact, most people report an increased level of hunger when starting an exercise regime because of their increased energy expenditure.

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