Failure is inevitable, much more so if you live alone, so living through disaster becomes the option. Variety is probably also good.
Running the numbers, though, the greater return is on managing your calorie intake. You can burn 200 extra calories managing chickens every day or you can figure out where that 200 calories needs to be cut out of your diet. The latter is a far more reliable approach.
Apparently you're not actually appreciably affecting your total calorie burn by doing exercise, as the body keeps that number within a narrow range.
Where does the energy come from then? Other processes, like inflammation, which are invested in less.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25162652/#:~:text=Caloric%20....
Until relatively recently(20 years) studies have been measuring the wrong thing, assuming metabolism is flexible and follows activity.
Studies measuring actual energy expenditure (using methods like double labelled water) confirmed, counterintuitively, that adjusted for weight, lean mass and age, people have roughly the same metabolic rate regardless of activity.
It's an evolutionary adaptation for periods of low food availability - the body does everything it can to not touch those fat stores.
Here's a podcast with one of the researchers who studied this:
https://theproof.com/rethinking-diet-exercise-with-herman-po...
The gist is that he went to a modern hunter-gatherer community, studied their activities and measured their energy expenditure. To his incredulity, the results indicated that these very active people use as much energy as their sedentary counterparts living in civilisation.
Initial conclusion was that there must have been a mistake somewhere, but the same measurement using a different method yielded the same results.
Also it's not just this study. Research on this actually started in the 1980s when the double labelled water method became practical - unfortunately it's still massively expensive.
All in all there's a much larger body of research indicating that exercise is not effective at controlling weight. The Hadza study at least gives some clues and indicates that there's something we're missing and this mechanistic approach to metabolism where you can just coax it into burning more is a model that doesn't reflect reality.
Similar studies on rats showed that increased activity reduces processes like inflammation, healing of wounds and production of reproductive hormones like estrogen.
Essentially our digestive systems are already doing their best.
There was an additional study in cooperation with several zoos which showed that other primates work the same. Humans have actually a pretty active metabolism in comparison, as it burns an average of 400kcal more.
Within a limited range, I assume? Athletes being the obvious counter example of this failing past a certain limit.
> Other processes, like inflammation, which are invested in less.
Is the implication that inflammation is a response to not being active?
For a more granular look, comparing individuals instead of population averages, I recently joined Luke and her team, including Dugas, to examine activity and energy expenditure in a large, multiyear analysis known as the Modeling the Epidemiological Transition Study (METS). More than 300 participants wore accelerometers similar to a Fitbit or other fitness tracker 24 hours a day for an entire week while their daily energy expenditure was measured with doubly labeled water. We found that daily physical activity, tracked by the accelerometers, was only weakly related to metabolism. On average, couch potatoes tended to spend about 200 fewer calories each day than people who were moderately active: the kind of folks who get some exercise during the week and make a point to take the stairs. But more important, energy expenditure plateaued at higher activity levels: people with the most intensely active daily lives burned the same number of calories each day as those with moderately active lives. The same phenomenon keeping Hadza energy expenditure in line with that of other populations was evident among individuals in the study.