Hacker News Reader

Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

A general rule is that you burn about 100 calories in a mile jog. A 12oz can of Coke has about 140 calories, a quarter of a cup of nuts has about 200 calories, an apple has about 100 calories.

Exercise is important for many reasons, but not for preventing obesity. Unless you're running marathons, or exercising like somebody who is, the amount of calories you will burn from exercising will in no way whatsoever compare to what you eat. If you start eating more because you go to the gym, you'll almost certainly end up gaining weight.

The answer today is the same as it's been for thousands of years.

View on HN

The critical piece you're missing is that building and maintaining muscle mass increases your metabolism greatly. Michael Phelps eats 10,000 calories a day. This an extreme example, but the principle is true for all of us.

Supposedly the 10,000 calorie diet of Michael Phelps is marketing vs factual. I don’t have a source for this (but happy to search if requested) but humans are not likely to be able to absorb 10,000 calories daily; I believe the maximum is a function of one’s basal metabolism but would lie around 6,500 calories for an elite athlete.

It may actually not. The hypothesis may be that building and maintaining muscle simply increases linearly with the increase of lean muscle mass. If (and these are made up numbers) one lb of lean muscle mass takes 10 cals to maintain, adding 5lbs of muscle would only increase your caloric needs be 50 cals.

At 190lb, my BMI is 26.5, but I'm relatively muscular with a body fat % of around 15%. I have more than 5lbs more muscle than an average person, but my required daily caloric needs are only a few hundred cals more a day at most.

Over the course of a year that’s a pretty significant advantage in overall calories burned, though.

Is it though?

I would think the 20-40 hours/week of exercise I do has more of an impact on how my calories are burned than the raising of my basal metabolism of the extra 20lbs of muscle I have over a very passive version of myself.

Like if I took a week off and ate the same, I as well would put on fat. Just 50-200 x 7 calories (.10 to .4 lbs) less of it. And that is if my eating habits were the same, which they would not - exercise is an incredibly good appetite stimulant, which people who attempt to exercise to lose weight find out quickly.

What I'm getting at - and maybe what you're getting at to is: long term - decades let's say of lifestyle choices leads to things like diabetes. It's not change that happens in a year. Hard for humans to grok.

I'm pretty skeptical of their numbers as well. It costs calories to build the muscle in the first place. It's a snowballing effect.

I don't know if there's a way to properly measure the amount of cals it takes to build muscle. "Building Muscle" isn't just one thing. Muscle fiber being different than simply glycogen storing in the muscle, being different than mitochondria proliferation within the muscle cell being different than just water weight from getting on Creatine. All which produce "bigger muscle".

Agreed, it's a thorny issue. My own subjective experience of lifting weights 3x per week vs. biking 5+ miles into work 5x a week is that the lifting was far more successful in helping me lose weight. Ideally, you do both. But I worry that many people, especially those in this industry, underestimate the weight loss gains from building muscle.

FWIW, bikes are built to be efficient means of moving. Biking 50 or 100 miles per week only burns 250-500 calories, so you wouldn’t expect much weight change.

That volume is good for keeping your body limber, but it’s not really exercise in terms of weight loss or cardio conditioning.

>Biking 50 or 100 miles per week only burns 250-500 calories, so you wouldn’t expect much weight change.

You may want to double check that math.

https://www.bikeradar.com/advice/fitness-and-training/how-ma...

Perhaps 500 calories/hour is a rough estimate. 100 miles @ 15 mph = 6.66 hours = 3333 cals or roughly what it takes to burn 1lb of fat.

Your personal experience sounds exceptional. Do you think that lifestyle changes you made while weightlifting also impacting your waistline? As in: you probably looked a little closer at what you were eating, so as to properly support you weightlifting habit.

I think it has more to do with the time spent in cold water and calories burnt from his training. Having said that, I’ve read that muscle mass is the main driver of a “high metabolism.”

I'm not sold on ice baths, but maybe I'm wrong. Training certainly inflates that number. My own anecdata indicates that building muscle has been far more time-efficient for me than running or cycling. At least with respect to burning fat.

Exercise is the key to fighting bad inflammation, making it the key to fight off a legion of inflammatory diseases including many related cancers.

Is that so? I often get headaches after excercise, that only go away after taking anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen. So I always thought exercise triggers inflammation for me (especially if I go harder than usual).

Exercise does trigger inflammation, and countering that inflammation can in fact degrade the positive effects of exercise. Inflammation is the body's signal to rebuild and strengthen.

I obviously can't tell from your hn post (and IANA doctor), but sometimes I get headaches because I haven't drank enough water, or I've just gone out too hard.

This is right. The body has all kinds of mechanisms that use inflammation to repair and reshape. Exercise channels this into breakdown and strengthening of muscles, blood vessel enlargement, and a host of other beneficial tissue manipulations.

Making sure you're adequately hydrated is important, as is supporting the cellular activity with nutrition.

Where things go off the rails is when the body spends excess energy and inflammatory responses on things not connected to repair and replenish operations. You get acid reflux, allergies, tumors, even dementia-related diseases.

Of course it's not that simple, but for nearly every single one of those pathologies, exercise improves the chances to avoid them, or helps reduce their negative outcomes. (IANA doctor either.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com