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Comment by zelos | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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.

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