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Comment by bckr | Hacker News Reader

Wait, how could exercise not lead to weight loss? Given that you eat the same amount of calories, exercising will lead to a lower overall calorie count, and building muscle will lead to a higher metabolic rate.

Wut?

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Most exercise does not burn the number of calories people expect. For example, running a 5K doesn't quite burn the calories of a single Big Mac. If you think "I am exercising so I can eat a little bit more" it's very easy to eat more calories than burned.

Exercise because exercise is good for you. Try to eat fewer calories if overweight because that's good for you. It's best to treat these as separate problems: don't expect exercise to help you lose your weight.

Exactly this. Also it nowadays in the Big Mac world promotes the Halo Effect - I trained so much, now I take my reward and go binge eating/drinking.

This is the vicious cycle: People expect more kcal to lose from exercising while underestimate the amount of kcal, eating and drinking can cause, especially alcohol.

The trick is to exercise after your last meal just before bed. That way you clear out your glycogen reserves and your body has no choice but to fuel itself on fat until breakfast (or lunch if you can manage a mild intermittent fasting and skip breakfast)

> Exercise because exercise is good for you

If at all possible, find an exercise activity you enjoy, and do it because you enjoy it.

Over- and underestimating: Overestimating the effects of exercising, while underestimating the amount of kcal people eat and drink, especially alcohol.

Also the amount of muscle people build. Human beings are extremely energy efficient. And excess muscles only drain human bodies from energy. Does not make sense.

My pro tip: count your kcal for one month. Everything that goes into your mouth - except water - needs to be tracked and especially weighted. You gonna be surprised. Everything, no exception.

I count kcals and exercising for years now. My simple best advise: eating is 80-90% of the deal. Disciplined eating beats sports every time. More sports leads to more energy demand. And many overweight people cannot do sports.

I give you another example. If I manage to get a negative kcal of more than 500kcal a day, this is very tough to take. Your body revolts. It takes a lot of discipline to go with -500kcal for a couple of days in a row.

Another tip: go plant based. Added sugar etc. does not help.

Anecdotally, I think this underestimates the impact of physical activity. It's much easier to lose weight when I'm physically active. I suspect that this is part of the bodies conditioning response.

Too much fat, particularly fat above the bodies carrying capacity - leads to steep declines in athletic performance. If you suddenly need to shed heat for regular high intensity aerobic work, or pull yourself up a mountain - then its in your bodies best interest to lose the excess weight (up to a point). Our bodies seem to be extremely good at maintaining homeostasis in different conditions, why would body fat percentage be any different?

> I count kcals and exercising for years now. My simple best advise: eating is 80-90% of the deal

Exactly this. A climb up the local hill with my MTB taxes me for 1000kcal. Skipping three beers after amounts for the same amount of energy, and is way easier to achieve

> count your kcal for one month

Bingo. When I was much younger I was super skinny. I was weight lifting, but simply not gaining weight. I thought I ate a lot, and decided to start tracking. I barely ate anything. Even as a kid I hated to stop doing whatever it was I was doing and taking time to eat. That spilled over into adult life. But, once I saw numbers it became clear and I was finally able to adjust.

Humans are generally terrible at estimations like this. I suggest tracking anything that you think may be a negative in your life.

I wouldn't say that cutting 500 calories a day is tough. I cut out breakfast recently and I was only really hungry for the first 3-4 days and only for a couple of hours each day. Thereafter I didn't even think of eating in the morning. Lost 3 kilos in about a month. I am going to the gym daily and also go for runs outside.

> If I manage to get a negative kcal of more than 500kcal a day, this is very tough to take. Your body revolts. It takes a lot of discipline to go with -500kcal for a couple of days in a row.

And -500kcal per day is only 1 pound of weight lost per week.

Gaining weight is easy. Losing weight is very rough.

> Losing weight is very rough.

As someone who went from 105kg to 75kg, I wouldn't describe the process as "rough". It took a series of small, sustainable changes to activity levels and diet over an extended period of time.

At no point did I feel like I was forcing myself to do stuff I didn't want to or was depriving myself of anything.

Couldn't be happier with the results (with how I feel, with the various active pursuits that are now part of my life etc).

> And -500kcal per day is only 1 pound of weight lost per week.

So 500kcal per day is only 1 pound gained per week? Sounds like gaining weight is a lot of work! Basically you have to eat 5 large meals for just a single pound? At that rate it will take years of work to go from healthy to obese!

While 500kcal is a good meal (by no means large), it's also less than a 100 gram chocolate bar which I can devour in about 25 seconds. Most of the problem nowadays it that a lot of food is of EXTREME caloric density.

> Gaining weight is easy. Losing weight is very rough.

For many, this is not true. My normal activity levels and eating tendencies make gaining weight quite hard for me.

It definitely isn't a given that you eat the same amount of calories. The train of thought seems to be that if you exercise at moderate or low intensity, people will often eat enough to compensate (or more). And the kinds of exercise studied often don't build appreciably muscle.

Given you eat the same number of calories, your body expenses the same amount of calories metabolically, and you move around exactly as much before....

That's a lot of givens, given you're talking about a complex system that's evolved over the last million years to keep you from starving.

But actual answer is exercise causes most people's metabolism to slow down slightly, to engage in less movements both conscious and unconscious, and their hunger to increase.

Basically if your body realizes you're expending a bunch of energy it starts to conserve energy in all the other ways.

Your body doesn't want to waste away, so it tries to concerve energy. Whether this be aspects such as slightly reducing your metabolism, or by stopping various 'fidgety' behaviours that, while small, add up to burn calories during the day (think actions like bouncing your legs or moving your ankles). After exercise, you are more likely to just sit still. It can also divert resources away from your immune system in the short-ish term (e.g. colds spread easily through the Tour De France peloton, which partly is due to close proximity for ours at a time, but is also just people being worn down and more vulnerable when working out heavily for a prolonged period).

Exercise CAN lead to weight loss (I used to weigh ~115kg/250lb/18st, now weigh 74kg/160lb/11.5st ...mostly lost over 2 years), but as the old saying goes "You can't out-run a bad diet". It's much easier to eat 500 (k)calories than it is to burn 500 cal.

As for exercise-induced hunger, yes some people don't feel hungry 'after' exercise...but e.g. if you exercise mid-day, do you add more to the following meals (e.g. evening, or more snacking?), adding more calories overall?

Note: I found weight loss 'simple', as I find it very easy to follow a repetitive diet, so while calorie counting has flaws with the inaccuracy of estimates, calorie counting works IF YOU USE IT RIGHT. I at least knew if I eat roughly the same breakfasts and lunches, it's much easier to identify dietary habit changes or volume reductions if I wasn't achieving weight loss.

Very hard to outrun the kitchen. Diet is almost the whole picture for weight loss.

Train more, eat more, gain muscle. Easy.

You could get hungrier because of the exercise and therefore eat more, which would prevent weight loss.

After a hard workout I've often felt not all that hungry at all.

Being lazy, sitting on the couch etc seems to have the opposite effect... I also wonder about what our brain consumes visually. If you're watching other people eating and drinking, it kinda makes you want to do the same.

It depends on the kind of exercise IME. Swimming is one I've found that generates an enormous appetite.

In short, you cannot outrun your fork.

Possinly by replacing fat tissue with muscle?

I guess it will depend on protein vs sugar and fat content in the diet.

^ this is what happens. When i started working out i lost a shitton of fat and gained muscle over like 2 years about what i lost from fat. For the whole time I just recomped not gaining or losing much weight but massive change still. Maybe this is more the case for men since we have high androgens and build lots more muscle? Interested to see how it differs in women.

Even men have a hard time putting on a pound of muscle per month after the first couple of months of training. You must've been very dedicated if you managed to replace a "shitton" of fat with muscle. I don't think the average gymgoer can expect that to happen.

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