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Comment by coffeebeqn | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely. Unless you do some very vigorous exercise for many hours per week it’s not going to make much of a dent. I remember jogging for an hour (I’m out of shape) and it was very difficult - I felt like getting a pizza afterwards as a reward. That would have been something like -500 calories from the jog, +2000 from the whole pizza == +1500 net.

After many years of doing it wrong - now I go with low calorie and high protein meals until dinner. ~150 calories for breakfast for example and no snacking. Once I got used to being hungry most of the day, weight loss actually became realistic.

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I think the 'exercise isn't the key to weight loss' meme has been overplayed a little, I understand why but it's a take that lacks nuance.

To be sure: dietary control is the cornerstone of weight management. It ultimately comes down to CICO as the most impactful lever you can pull, and not putting stuff in your pie hole is the simplest way to pull it.

Your example of rewarding yourself with a pizza every time you go jogging though is contrived though. I felt that way when I started exercising, and I often did eat a lot after a workout, but eventually (6-12 months) exercising became a more comfortable and routine thing for me, and that bad habit disappeared.

Now I just get a nice 600 calorie deficit every time I go to the gym, and basically eat normally afterwards. The psychological need to reward myself is gone, it's just what I do, the endorphins and the physical improvements to my body are reward enough.

Trained athletes almost always have some sense of what both their CI and their CO is and they have developed the discipline to regulate both. If someone is 50 lbs overweight yeah 90% of the work for them in the beginning will probably be bringing CI down, they are going to be way above maintenance and way out of shape so incapable of maintaining a highly energetic exercise anyway.

But once you get over that initial hump you want to start incorporating light exercise as quickly as is comfortably possible, and dial up the intensity (as well as calorie burn) as your body adapts. Moving the needle on CO is slower and harder than moving it on CI but that doesn't mean you shouldn't bother at all.

There are 2 things that (for me at least) make exercise a core component of weight control:

1) When I lose abdominal tone, I can eat way more food before my satiety signals start firing. I screwed myself early in life by hoovering up as much of every meal as I could until I was physically uncomfortable, and that was my signal to stop eating. When I have good core tone, it's physically harder to distend my gut to pack more food in (I'm 5'6", so the smaller intestinal cavity may have a greater impact for my tiny ass).

2) The more muscle mass I'm carrying, in combination with better cardio capabilities, the greater caloric burn I can effect in the same amount of time, and the greater duration of energy output I can sustain.

My current exercise regime is a mix of kettlebells and heavy mace for strength training, and skating in the mini ramp in my backyard. 20 minutes of continuous moving of a kettlebell or heavy mace dynamically is an excellent conditioning routine on its own, and combine that with another 45 minutes of rock-to-fakie, tail stall, fakie-rock, 50-50s, 180s, backside disasters, and of course kickflips in the mini ramp all add up to a ridiculous caloric load and demand that the whole body be firing coherently at the same time.

I strongly recommend transition skateboarding for cardio, but I don't think many people are physically capable of it (although I only picked it up in my early thirties, so it's not necessary to have been doing it your whole life to get good mileage out of the sport later in life).

it is even worse than that. the energy constrained model suggests it is impossible to ever work off a pizza. you just simply burn fewer calories later to negate exercise, such as lowed BMR or less NEAT. As you lose weight, your constraint is lowered and any calories above it will produce weight gain regardless of exercise.

The constraint throws off all the calorie math in regard to exercise. You find that no amount of exercise helps at producing lasting weight loss even if the meter/app says you burned 700 or whatever, which is .2 lbs. If you do this for 10 days you should lose 2 pounds of fat , keeping diet constant, but you don't. Either you lose less or just water.

I find it very hard understand your paragraphs.

> (when i eat a pizza) i simply burn fewer calories later to negate exercise, such as lowered BMR/NEAT. as i lose weight my constraint is lowered. (constraint of what?) and any calories above it (above what?) will produce weight gain regardless of exercise.

what does this have to do with pizza? eating pizza negates exercise through lower BMR/NEAT: umm are you sure it's negating exercise itself? so michael phellps cannot possibly burn off a pizza? it's physically impossible?

felt compelled to comment cuz while i understand the terminology and know about this subject, i think its the particular form of writing that's just very hard to understand. thought you should know.

edit: i think you're saying you can't out work a bad diet. i usually hear it from the opposite pov: if you fast your body will compensate through lowered BMR/NEAT and so it's diminishing returns. surprised to hear your point seems to be it's physically impossible to burn off a pizza because a pizza will negate (seemingly any and all attempts at) exercise. ???

If only we could find some way to harness the power of these thermodynamics-violating pizzas.

Obviously this isn't completely correct, because elite athletes work to eat 6000 calories/day and manage to "burn it off."

That said, it seems clear that exercise does not help most people lose weight; adding a small amount as you're losing weight may be a way to retain more muscle mass and improve health in other ways, though.

Exercise helps people to lose weight. Just go to a local group bike ride. Then first observe average BMI there and then talk to people and you will find out a lot of them started fat. The problem is that people delude themselves about calories - both burnt and eaten. For example riding a bike at somewhat brisk but sustainable (for a healthy average man) pace may burn 500kcal per hour (that would be around 140W). Similarly running or walking for 7km as 70kg person burns around 500kcal. You do it 7 days a week and you still can't really eat more than your baseline if you want to lose weight. We can argue if 7 hours a week is a lot of exercise or not but most people would feel they exercise a lot and use that as justification to eat more.

The problem is that we are so sedentary that a very mild volume of exercise like 7 hours a week (let alone things like going to the gym 4 days a week) is seen as "very active lifestyle" and used as license to eat a lot.

Unfortunately you're still sedentary if you do that and sit at the desk, drive a car or lie on a sofa for the rest of the day.

It's not like adding more exercise is bad. It's the fact people are sedentary, drive everywhere that it's not feasible for them to get to activity level to really make a dent. Imagine you have to walk to your office for 30 minutes every day (and then back) then walk to a store to buy food. Then do some sports on top of that and suddenly the amount of food you can eat changes drastically.

Unfortunately it's very hard to do in today's world. We even started SUV'ing children to school instead of letting them walk. No wonder almost everyone is getting fat and complains that "no amount of exercise makes a difference".

When I look at photos of my parents in their 20s I struggle to see any fat people. Almost no one had a car back then (in my country) and that needed to walk a lot just to get to school/job, buy food, get anything done around the town (no online forms back then). People usually attribute it to food availability but when I try to estimate how much they needed to walk every day I see a completely different picture.

> Exercise helps people to lose weight.

Exercise has been extensively studied in relation to weight loss, and has been found to be of limited effectiveness. Many studies found no effect, and meta-analyses found modest effect sizes.

Your anecdotes don't change my mind. The problem seems to be, exercise uses up willpower and makes you want to eat more, and only in very indirect ways (improving BMR, etc) really helps.

Of course, exercise improves a bazillion other things: cardiovascular health, blood pressure, insulin resistance, etc, etc, etc.

"Uses up willpower," I thought, was also studied and found to be lacking as a thing?

I think it is fair that "exercise" in the form of specific activity with the sole purpose of doing the activity is likely much harder to get results from than folks admit. I think it is also fair that getting more active, period, is more effective than people will admit. You don't have to have a gym membership to keep from getting over weight. You do have to be active.

I don't think your basal metabolic rate goes down to zero as you increase exercise. There's probably at some point in which your daily total expenditure must increase, but it's unsustainable.

That sounds idiotic. I'm on a very clear downtrend in weight and on days where I burn more calories I eat more to avoid going into too high a deficit.

(cycling workouts with power meter or on Zwift, accurate calorie counts)

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