Hacker News Reader

Comment by meremortals | Hacker News Reader

You can't outrun a bad diet

You can, but it takes a LOT of work, and you still need to hit macros.

Honestly, high level endurance or strength sports make eating a chore. You simply need a LOT of food with decent macros, and you need to be eating all the time. I was once a fairly competitive 100mpw runner. It's eating before you go to bed, so you can wake up at 5 and eat before going back to bed to wake up at 6 so you can do a long run and eat 150+ calories an hour during that, then immediately hit a protein shake and some rice/pasta after the run, then lunch, so you can be prepped to go out again at like 6pm for an evening shakeout run, then you do dinner, then snack before bed, and repeat. 4k+ calories a day is a grind unless you're hammering a lot of really empty calories.

This is sort-of true.

Buy I've found that when you exercise more, my diet automatically gets better. Not great, but significantly less bad.

A funny twist on this saying: You can't outrun a cheeseburger.

too true. When I trained for a marathon I did not watch my food intake and figured I'd just automatically loose weight: I did not :/

This. Exercise is a hilariously inefficient way to lose weight (but it's really good for you, otherwise). The metabolic boost that vigorous, regular exercise will give you will also make you hungrier, so you're still in the woods if you can't moderate what/how much you eat anyway.

Less Cal in than out is the way to go.

Read the article - the whole point is that the increase in hunger is capped at about 1000 calories of week regardless of amount of exercise.

Sounds plausible; when I was biking 100+ miles/week (mostly commuting) I could eat whatever I felt like and I was still losing tons of weight.

> Less Cal in than out is the way to go.

That mantra always drives me nuts. Not because it's false (on the contrary, by the laws of thermodynamics it's trivially true), but because it's not helpful for people trying to lose weight as it ignores the dynamic homeostasis systems of the human body. I.e. as reported by this article, if you try to increase your "out" energy expenditure, your body releases hormones specifically attempting to increase your "in" by making you hungrier. Similarly, if you try to reduce your "in", your body will lower its metabolism to try to reduce your "out".

> Similarly, if you try to reduce your "in", your body will lower its metabolism to try to reduce your "out".

...as well as torturing you and trying to trick you into gorging.

The "calories in / calories out" people make me angry too. There's an old joke that goes: "Q. How do you carve a statue of an elephant? A. Take a big stone, and chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant." Technically true, completely useless in practice.

What people need is methods which take into account these regulatory mechanisms. Fasting one day a week (dinner until breakfast the day after) may give you the same calorie deficit as eating 300 less calories per day than you're burning, but it's a heck of a lot more pleasant to have 1 day of complete abstinence and then 6 days of homeostasis, than spending 7 days a week wrestling millions of years of evolution, and being blamed as having "no willpower" when you inevitably fail.

The real issue is that sometimes in life you need to have discipline and willpower, and people are very resistant to that idea. I would counter that the advice is helpful, it's just not what people want to hear because it requires more effort than they want to put in.

Look at film reels or images from, say, the 1950s. Better yet find one of relatively rural parts of the US. You'll be hard pressed to find an obese person, yet if you took the same picture today in many of those places you'd see a majority of obese people, many grotesquely so.

So what, did people magically lose all willpower and discipline in the past 60 years? Of course not, but we have instead build up a society, both around industrialized food and sedentary lifestyles, that is basically geared to make people fat.

Similarly, while "discipline and willpower" may work for any one individual, it is completely useless as societal-wide advice, mainly because it's been proven over decades that this advice (again, societal-wide) doesn't work: we've been saying this same thing for years and yet Americans are as fat as ever. What's that definition of insanity again?

> Of course not, but we have instead build up a society, both around industrialized food and sedentary lifestyles, that is basically geared to make people fat.

This is why I said you need willpower and discipline. These are some of the reasons that make them needed for the average person to stay fit.

> "discipline and willpower" may work for any one individual, it is completely useless as societal-wide advice

This is why I address individual readers on HN. I'm not interested in fixing society, but I'm happy to offer my personal experiences if it can help one person out there. There are plenty of people nowadays who combat the idea of accountability, and if that helps others, then great. I believe in accountability, discipline, willpower, etc, and I offer my perspective for others who believe the same

Reply on news.ycombinator.com