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Comment by Mistletoe | Hacker News Reader

Anyone with an app or watch that tells them how many calories they burn in exercise would have to agree. I ran 7 miles yesterday for my long run for the week and only burned 924 calories it says. You could undo that with a single poor decision at a fast food establishment.

https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/1c4pvnp/a_cool_...

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I think it's worse than that, though. Burning 924 calories running then means (if I understand the paradox correctly) that you probably end up then burning a decent fraction of 924 fewer calories over the rest of the day, thanks to metabolism changes and being less active.

This can work the other way as well. On many occasions if I ate really, really poorly, I would wake up the next morning drenched in sweat. My body would turn up things up to try and burn off what I did. The body does a decent job of trying to maintain where you’re at (within reason). If it didn’t very minor things could compound into drastic effects over time.

Of course I noticed this, relied on it too much, and pushed past the limits of what it could handle. Oops.

I exercise semi regularly and use a watch + phone combo to watch my health stats regardless of my physical activity, to include calories, so I feel like my experience is decent data.

On a day that I don't work out, I burn about 2000 calories. On days that I work out (weekly run), I burn 2800 calories, but I am so hungry that I have to eat huge meals and I have consumed the additional 800 I burned within 12 hours. Perhaps weekly runs are sufficiently infrequent for my body to not get "used to" the run, fitting it into the 2k calorie burn, thus I go way over on those days no matter what, but my body is getting those extra calories no matter what, to make up for it due to how significantly more hungry I am after.

Everyone I know who lost weight basically just starved themselves (net calorie loss).

Smartwatches are poor estimators of energy expenditure of exercise: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/research-spotlight-wearabl...

The same authors publish regular research reviews on nutrition and health at https://massresearchreview.com/; the general conclusion remains that exercise is a poor intervention for the purpose of weight loss is true. But estimating the effects of exercise is incredibly difficult, it varies wildly and is subject to many confounders.

But this is not the finding of the research, which is, according to their finding (I'm personally skeptical) that physical activity doesn't have an impact on daily calories expenditure. In short, accoding to their finding, in your case, yesterday, your body compensated buring those 924 in some way, so that you consumed approximately as much as a day when you didn't run (again, I'm very skeptical of the research).

Having said that, the article itself doesn't mention how much physical activity the Hazda did. Walking is "physical activity", but not significant.

The research is population level research on estimated calories expenditure of some tribes and HDI countries. It shows exactly zero about what happens when you replace netflix with exercising in your day. It also shows exactly zero about what happens when you replace going 5km by car every day by walking those 5km every day.

Getting food is the main thing. They do not store food so every day the men hunt and the women gather.

So for the men lots of walking, a fair bit of running, carrying dead animals back home. The men also gather honey from beehives high up in tall trees.

The women dig up roots and tubers and gather other plant food, and carry it back home. They also gather honey from beehives that are not high up in tall trees.

I've read that it amounts to about 75 minutes a day of MVPA (moderate to vigorous physical activity), but they are active for much more of the day.

For me, the fear of undoing it means I eat healthier.

Should i eat 1000kcal chocolate bar for some brief pleasure? Sure why not

Should i eat 1000kcal chocolate bat for some brief pleasure, more than undoing the hour of torture? Hell naw

And you’re more likely to treat yourself after such a workout.

I’m assuming the tribe in this study didn’t have access to junk food because in my experience it takes a lot of discipline to stick to a diet if you repeatedly work out to exhaustion

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