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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

It was eye-opening once I started tracking my calorie intact and adjusting until I was in balance to realise just how far off typical dietary advice was for me. Especially as I was actively powerlifting at the time, and forums were full of advice about the massive amounts of food I "needed".

UK NHS still say 2000kcal for women and 2500 for men, but for me after actually counting and tracking my weight at different intake, the balance was ~1800-2000 when exercising 5 times a week including 3x1 hour long weightlifting sessions.

Of course for some men 2500 is fine, if you're actually active. But I've found most people overestimate how active they actually are because they do some sports outside of work. Without actually being in a physically demanding job, odds are you're not "active" in any meaningful sense (of course there are exceptions).

2500kcal was on the high end of my bulking intake when I wanted to add weight for my lifting.

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> ... the balance was ~1800-2000 when exercising 5 times a week including 3x1 hour long weightlifting sessions.

I see you added a couple more details to your post. Weight lifting sessions really aren't that productive as far as calorie burn is concerned. I pulled a random 30m weight workout and my avg HR was just over 50% resulting in approximately 130kCal/hr burned (estimated based on HR, actual could be a bit higher but unlikely to be higher than 200/hr), which does not come even close to cycling. My average calorie burn for a recovery ride is about 500kCal/hr, 575kCal/hr for endurance, 750kCal/hr for tempo and 975kCal/hr for threshold. Recovery/endurance are sustainable basically for an entire day (barring discomfort and boredom), tempo for 3-5hrs and threshold for <1hr (the 975kCal/hr effort was a 40 minutes). Cycling values are calculated from measured power output and and assume approximately 25% metabolic efficiency. My numbers are also on the lower side because I'm smaller (smaller typically means less power and so fewer calories).

> 2500kcal was on the high end of my bulking intake when I wanted to add weight for my lifting.

I would be surprised if I averaged less than 2500, though I haven't tracked in a long time. I can always feel when my intake isn't enough. My workout related output is 5000-7500+/week which is probably higher than average, though the low end is fairly well in-line with someone who runs/rides 5+ times per week. To your point, 2500 for an 'average' male is more than likely on the very high side.

> Weight lifting sessions really aren't that productive as far as calorie burn is concerned.

That's kinda the point. Very few people do high intensity workout very often or very long. Most people who think they're "active" are actually not burning all that much. Weight lifting can be quite intensive. Mine usually are at substantially higher HR than 50% unless I'm going for a 1RM. E.g. I'd do power cleans into press for reps quite regularly, and that gets brutal. But for most people they're not because most people take their time and don't push themselves to progress very fast towards the limits of what they could lift. But even for someone who takes the lifts seriously, sure, it's not going to compete with someone who takes cycling seriously for calorie burn. But then again, most people don't push themselves with cardio either. The proportion who pushes the limits in pretty much any given exercise regime is tiny.

> I would be surprised if I averaged less than 2500, though I haven't tracked in a long time.

You're quite likely right you're above that if you do a lot of cycling.

> Without actually being in a physically demanding job, odds are you're not "active" in any meaningful sense (of course there are exceptions).

That's a curious conclusion. I and most others in my circle of friends are active in a meaningful sense, at least based on my definition of "meaningfully active". Most of us are in desk jobs, and none that I know have what I would define as a "physically demanding" job.

In the context of calories burned, most people in office jobs will fit firmly within ranges usually given for sedentary people. It takes a lot of physical activity outside of working hours to make up for an office job.

E.g. for me, an hour of high intensity exercise five days a week still placed me firmly in the sedentary range.

Part of the issue is that we tend to "forget" about the hours spent at work when evaluating if we consider ourselves active.

I haven't really looked at sedentary ranges, can you point me to the guideline you reference? Are they based on calories burned during an activity, amount of activity, time in HR zones?

As for intensity exercises, unless you actually measure your activity it will be difficult to estimate exactly how much time you're active inside of your hour exercise. I would guess a lot of people will over-estimate how much active time they really had. For example, weight lifting would be on the low side, HIIT classes somewhere in the middle and running/rowing/cycling on the high side.

It's been a long time since a looked at it in any detail, but a quick search for "calories burned sedentary" gave me a page full of calculators and estimates.

Looking quickly at a few of them, they mostly have tdee estimates for my age now that were still to high for me at the peak of my exercise fitness a decade ago... That includes the calculators trying to take weight and height into account.

The issue is that most of these are repeating and deriving categories based on guidelines set at points in time when a much larger proportion of the population had jobs that involved physical exertion.

And so you can be much more active than average for todays population and still be considered sedentary relative to the activity levels assumed in guidelines.

E.g. the UK NHS guideline of 2500 kcal for an average male would take me adding a couple of hours of walking during the day to reach despite exercising more than average...

And I'm sure you're right that people's failure to estimate their activity when they are exercising or being active is also a big part of it.

I think it is even more complicated. When I was having after work activities that required me to walk to places, load/unload shelves, water the garden etc, I started loosing weight more then when exercising. And all those activities were not intensive at all. I was moving little bit a lot of time, basically.

Same goes when I go for hikes in summer. I am loosing weight, but I am walking at comfortable pace max.

I did not felt hungry at no point either. I dont know what it is, but intensity is not the only factor.

Wearing a Fitbit 24/7 was enlightening in terms of seeing how little activity it takes to get a fairly substantial increase in heart rate, so yeah, just amlittle more activity sustained over hours can make a huge difference.

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