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Comment by dec0dedab0de | Hacker News Reader

The meals that some athletes eat are outrageous, so there has got to be something to maintaining a high metabolism. You'll never do it with just walking and weight lifting though. When I was way skinnier I had hobbies and habits that had me doing high intensity cardio multiple times a day. As those went away I gained weight, even though my diet has not changed much. I'm sure getting older is a big part of it too.

I have no answers though, I was sure not drinking, and being on chemo therapy all year would help me lose weight, but somehow I gained.

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High levels of activity burn lots of calories.

The author of this blog post made a simple mistake: he thought that if he had big muscles, he would burn a lot of calories even when sitting still. That doesn’t happen.

The only way to burn a lot of calories is to do a lot of physical activity.

Edit to add: controlling diet is more effective than adding activity for most people in rich western societies because most of those people do not have the time, inclination, or opportunity to do a lot of hard physical activity every day.

> As those went away I gained weight, even though my diet has not changed much.

I'm not sure if this is your point, but if your "calories in" stayed the same, and "calories out" significantly decreased, it's expected that you would continually gain bodyfat until you reach a new equilibrium point. That seems to have been what's happened.

If the amount of exercise changes, your diet should optimally change with it - but perfectly managing your habits in this way is hard.

Endurance athletes train for hours per day. Skill athletes spend hours per day doing what we call "exercise" but which they think of as low-intensity skill work, separate from their physical training. But even then, their physiques are a reflection of professionalism. Look at the NFL: the linemen must burn more calories than the receivers, but the linemen are chubby and the receivers are lean. So while they're all eating a lot compared to a regular person, they're not eating some random huge amount; they're eating the right diet to support the physique they need for competition, with the support of doctors and nutritional professionals.

You absolutely can maintain a high TDEE with just walking alone.

For example, if you walk for 8+ hours per day, as people do when thru hiking, you will struggle to maintain bodyweight. Hikers spend a lot of time thinking about the most energy dense foods they can take with them to fuel their activity, which is low intensity but sufficiently high in volume that it drastically increases their energy expenditure due to activity.

The description of your own experience is most simply explained by your usual diet putting you into a caloric surplus at your current activity levels, whereas when you were more active it was just enough to maintain or put you into a small deficit regularly.

I had similar experience. I had not done high intensity activity tho, I walked a lot multiple times a day and had trained non competitive sport 3 times a week.

I'm much more a believer in diet is 90% of the results these days, I just need to tinker until I find one that I can stick to more easily.

And definitely agree about the athlete diets--I was skinny all my life until I stopped playing sports 3-4 times a week. Oh, I also met my wonderful friend called beer, which certainly didn't help. Good luck with your own journey!

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