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Comment by chitowneats | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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 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.

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