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Comment by SulfurHexaFluri | Hacker News Reader

Once you start tracking the energy usage of exercise with a smart watch or similar, you'll notice that even extended exercise consumes almost no energy compared to the energy used simply living. Doing an hour of heavy exercise only changes my total energy usage for the day by a fairly small % compared to no exercise.

Diet is clearly a much more important aspect for weight loss. Exercise has many other benefits though.

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I don't know, my Garmin watch says my daily 1h-1.5h long walk burns about 500-600 calories. It could be wildly inaccurate. But it definitely gives me more cushion to eat comfortably during the day that is for sure! I realize it is dwarfed by the 2000+ calories I burn naturally but that is almost another meal in calories.

You burn about 100-150 calories just by existing for 1h-1.5h, so walking for an hour or so only gets you an additional 400 calories. Versus eating, you can consume a 400 calorie cookie in one minute.

When I lost 70lbs, I did so by deciding it was easier just to not consume the calories in the first place rather than trying to burn them off.

It’s really a case of the rich getting richer when it comes to exercise, because if you’re fitter you can sustain a calorie burn rate far higher than someone who isn’t.

On my bike I have a power meter which uses strain guages and an accelerometer to calculate force x distance / time at the crankset so I have accurate calorie burn numbers.

Riding for an hour at the output a generally sedentary person can manage, I’ll burn sub 500 calories. Riding at my maximum output for an hour burns about 1000. Given that the recommended energy intake for a day is 2500, you can see what a difference that makes proportionally to what you can consume.

Indeed, energy intake is a big part of the equation and indeed a single run/exercise will not burn off a gigantic amount of calories. What repeated exercise does do is to raise your metabolism and increase muscle mass which will increase energy consumption at rest and combat all kinds of other symptoms.

Heart rate or step based calorie tracking is so inaccurate that you might as well just use Math.random.

The fact that companies sell you these “features” in products is a scandal in my opinion, because it’s nothing more than a totally inappropriate guess. They always overestimate based on my experience when compared against actual output measurements, and that can only be harmful to people that are trying to use them to lose weight.

An average 10km run burns 600cal. Sure just living burns 2000cal, but its a noticeable change. In Addition, for most people its much easier to track their exercise, than pedantic tracking calories.

A casual search on google says a chocolate bar is about 500~600 calories ... so you could maybe skip that chocolate bar and not feel the need to run so much.

(Not to totally give up exercise tho' - there are other health benefits besides losing weight)

This is often expressed as: You can't outrun your fork.

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