Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds

Kristian essentially eats pasta and Nutella and bread all day.

So technically, yes, you can outrun a bad diet..

Though me thinks this article is aimed at the average person.

Running is around 600 calories per hour [1]. A large fries from McDonald's is 480 calories. A can of Coke is 140 calories.

What's easier? Not eating the fries and drinking the Coke or running vigorously for an hour?

When you look at the group who have become morbidly obese, you see diets that reach 10, 20 or 30+ thousand calories a day. You get to 600+ pounds and you actually need like 20,000 calories just to maintain that weight. When such people decide to change, they're often put on a medical diet of ~2400 calories. There is no way they could exercise down to this kind of calorie deficit.

Peple should think of food in terms of how much exercise it is because it becomes impossible to ignore just how much easier it is to alter diet than it is to increase calorie expenditure.

[1]: https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/in-...

I've found that engaging in simple activities like walking is a sweet spot for weight loss. Anything more rigorous and I just can't do it. But that is very anecdotal and may not apply to many people. I would not say I have the strongest willpower when it comes to hunger, especially when stressed due to work or life.

You can't outrun a bad diet. This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from. Perhaps it's a nice lie one can tell himself to continue eating junk and not feel guilty about it.

Athletes, especially body builders require a lot of calories but their diet is surprisingly healthy. They eat plenty of protein, carbohydrates minerals, vitamins and healthy fats.

--you

>Food — not lack of exercise — fuels obesity

--the article headline

I'm being genuine and not at all snarky when I say I'm having a hard time seeing daylight between these two positions. I would love for someone to help me understand better please.

That seems like a kind of large assumption to make. Obviously it seems like it has to be either diet or exercise, but if the obvious answer was always right we wouldn't need to do studies in the first place.

This is technically correct, but is so misleading that I classify it as incorrect.

That statement is exploitative of how the English language is understood, even if not intentionally so, that the lack of any other key points or instructions is itself used as contextual information.

In other words, the sentence likely translates something similar to the following incorrect statement: “A perfectly level 50-50 effort balance of both lowering daily calories to the [2000] calorie limit for [your demographic], because this is the stated necessary calories to support a healthy [demographic] for 1 day, as well as achieving the minimum daily recommended exercise limit of [1 hour for your demographic] plus [1 hour per 100 calories] consumed over [2000 calories] are both of equal value in the goal of losing weight, and are equal requirement to support the other such that one holds no value without the other.”

Anyone who has done extensive athletic physical activity knows that you will up your calorie intake unless you take explicit and intentional effort not to.

Obviously, energy has to come from somewhere, so enough exercise will overcome any adaptations your body makes, but the current evidence seems to suggest that there is a lot of wiggle room for your body to cut energy expenditure to make up for any exercising you do. The evidence suggests this takes time, but it does also suggest that the 20 minutes on the bike daily that helped you drop some pounds at the start will not do much for your weight a year in.

I don't know if it's true or not, but when I first read one of the studies, it did make some intuitive sense to me - humans have spent much of their evolutionary history having to expend significant energy to procure food. If you had to walk 30,000 steps in a day to forage or hunt, it makes sense that limiting other movements while idle, etc., to help preserve energy stores would be beneficial.

That sounds like more or less exactly what the title says to me.

> anyone who has done extensive 'athletic' physical activity

Yes, and there are few such people. Extensive athletic physical activity, becoming an athlete, are at odds with working an office job. You can get out of work and go play soccer for 2-3 hours every day instead of doing household chores, pursuing other hobbies, etc, but most people won't - it's a huge ask.

> not really useful for personal or localised health advice

It absolutely is useful. Becoming an athlete or doing extensive athletics takes a huge time commitment. Eating less does not.

I'm not claiming that there's zero issues with eating less, or that people shouldn't exercise, just that the arguments seem to be off base.

I always welcome hunger knowing that I live in a society of calorie abundance. I generally tend to feel annoyed when people that are hungry start treating like an emergency.

2000 calories is pretty near the daily calory requirement for a healthy weight human. If you are of healthy weight and eat appropriately, you pretty much have to eat twice as much to compensate for that marathon

Discovered that as a broken uni student, and has become my goto fix to lose weight. Lost 10-11kgs over the last year by means of that. The occasional “cheat” (mostly social events really) slows the process down but don’t really stop it. It’s not really a fast process though… but it strongly depends on how under nourished you are and how active you are. For me keeping myself between 8000 and 10’000 steps a day was sufficient.

Not exactly my experience.

My did a exercise schedule involves climbing a mountain every week. The mountain is about 400 meters (that's ~1312 feet, or more than four American football fields laid end-to-end) tall, and the exercise was usually done during afternoon (1 or 2 hours before dinner) without eating lunch.

After two mouths of that, I've noticed:

1. My weight or belly size don't really changed much. I also notice that some people who also frequented the mountain have big bellies.

2. I got very hungry after that, which triggers me to eat more during dinner, usually salty food.

3. The delight of salt becomes craving, probably due to the lost of liquid/electrolyte through sweat (and tears, probably).

4. For comparison, I stops craving salty thing the next day.

I guess you need to actively suppress some of your inner urges to really make the "nutrition feedback sensation" work. Otherwise, exercise more only leads to consume more.

P.S. Also, doctors really can't recommend doing heavy physical activity with empty stomach, as it might increase your heat rate or something (I might be hearing it wrong). I've since changed the schedule so I can eat something before start climbing, though my belly size still remained the same, and I'm still craving for salty food if uncontrolled.

But maybe it's just because I don't know how to do it correctly.

Nope, they do gain weight, or avoid gaining weight by counting calories [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/SVS0ioOdfuE?t=225

Objectively, I don't think this is accurate.

Most people who are overweight got that way slowly.

Dr Mike[1]'s theory is that modern processed food is to blame - not because it's unhealthy, but because it's too tasty. Companies that make food are in an evolutionary arms race with other companies to get consumers to choose their products. And one of the best ways to do that is to make the food as tasty as possible.

Another things many companies probably try to optimize their food for is low satiety[2]. That way consumers consume, and therefore buy, more of their products.

---

1. From Renaissance Periodization

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satiety_value

You can hop on a plane and go from a driving-city to a walking city, look around and see the difference. I can't accept that this doesn't matter.

But if you take the common American diet where the bread of your sandwich is shelf-stable because it's packed with sugar and oil, and that's before we even talk about portion size, "more running than most people want to do" quickly becomes "recreate the scene from Forest Gump."

I used to house whole pizzas for lunch. Now I only eat 2 slices and weigh the same.

I'm not a dietician, but when I read things like this NPR report, I wonder how much of it is motivated reasoning. "It is not your fault", is always a good come-on for a sales pitch. This report seems like something people would like to hear, especially if they haven't come to enjoy strenuous exercise.

That said, I've always had a bias against highly processed foods.

I have been quite sedentary for several years, since going fully remote.

I had seasons where I would gain wait and lose weight, and my level of activity remained unchanged.

A few years ago, I started paying more attention to my weight, and got to where I was consistently in my ideal weight range. Again, level of activity remained unchanged.

About a year ago, I started indoor cycling (Zwift) quite regularly — about 2.5 hours per week, averaging right in the middle of my target heart rate zone. Diet remained the same. Weight remained mostly unchanged (still in my ideal weight range — I’ve maybe lost 5 or so pounds, but I lost way more weight when only changing my diet).

So — for me — diet has definitely had more impact on my weight than my level of activity.

That's because you are doing it on a treadmill...

Try doing a more fun activity outside in the world and in nature. Like cycling.

I can cycle for 120 miles outdoors in about 6 hours in a single day and have a positive experience and memory of doing it and that burns about 8200 calories according to a calculators for my weight.

The scale is really dramatic in my experience. The more the lifting sucks, the more your body will compensate. This trend can be non-linear for a good period of time before you begin to plateau. The tricky bit is not pushing too far and injuring yourself early on.

One interesting hybrid is running or walking with a weighted vest on. This requires some extra precautions - the vest should be very, very snug on your body. You don't want it slinging around and imposing weird lateral loads.

Of course, there are many, many other reasons to lift weights. Health and longevity aside, the reason most people want to lose weight is to look better - so what they should really aim for isn't to lose weight, it's to lose fat and increase muscle mass. For that, you need both a caloric deficit and weight lifting.

I've been doing some strength training (arms, legs, core) for the past year and a half. Nothing too heavy, but enough that I can see nice muscle-tone changes in my body, and I notice that day-to-day physical tasks are easier. At most, I've put on about 10lbs of muscle (and honestly it's probably more like half that). So I'm burning another 45 to 70 calories per day. That's like... 4 to 7 plain potato chips of calories.

So lift if you want to look good, be generally stronger (core strength is especially good for you!), or just feel healthier. And sure, the act of lifting those weights will burn calories that you weren't otherwise burning. But the muscle mass you gain isn't going to burn a useful amount of extra calories per day.

And yes, cardio does suck! Unfortunately, doing only strength training is leaving out really important parts of your body that need to be strong and healthy: your heart and lungs. I'm in decent physical shape, but if I stop working on cardio even for a month or so, walking up the four flights of stairs in my condo building leaves me a little winded, and I don't like that feeling.

I guess my point is: do cardio and strength training to increase your general level of health and fitness. But if you want to lose weight, change your diet. Change it sustainably and permanently. If you just change it until you get to your target weight, you're going to put those pounds right back on afterward.

That's not a surprise. Changing diet composition can in the short-run lead to lower caloric intake than what preceeded (e.g. SAD diet), but doesn't guarantee a sustained caloric deficit, which is why controlling for macros like fat or carbs eventually hits a wall. What are you going to do when there are no more carbs to cut? If you have a lot of excess to lose, you can't "intuitively" eat your way down to your target.

The fasts work similarly owing to deficit: a fasted day lowers the average caloric intake for the week (assuming you don't overcompensate other days). As with macros, here again, what are you going to do to increase deficit further? Fast for 48 hours? If with a fast your caloric intake isn't dropping further week-to-week, weight loss will stagnate.

Whichever approach, one of the pitfalls is steep deficit followed by metabolic adaptation i.e. crashing metabolism. This is why it's helpful to keep a small caloric deficit, and incrementally change your intake target. That is only reliably achieved by tracking calories.

Another protocol that is sustainable is 4:3, ie 4 days of normal eating and 3 of intermittent fasting.

It's well known though that as you build muscle, your rest calorie consumption increases, so probably if you build/maintain enough muscle, then you can just outrun your intake, since you consume more without doing anything to start with...

Like I wonder what the Grimace's 400 meters time is.

Of course! There are always outliers. But I think it is fair to say, as a general statement, that to lose or maintain weight, you have to focus on your diet, and exercise is not going to cut it. Sure, 1% of people might be able to "outrun their unhealthy diet", but that's not really useful information for the staggeringly vast majority of people out there. (Making up a percentage there; I think my point is still valid at 10%.)

1200 miles per year is a lot of running. That's 23 miles a week, or let's say ~6 miles, 4 days per week. Very few people are going to be able to -- or just flat out want to -- commit to that regimen.

I found that I was eating over double the amount of nut butter that I was estimating once I started weighing it. After a couple of months I was able to go back to eyeballing it while remaining accurate.

A lot of wisdom suggests being +/- 300 calories from your TDEE to cut/bulk. Three tablespoons of peanut butter is ~285 calories. So it's entirely possible that something as small as an estimation error is responsible for whether you're gaining or maintaining. Same goes for eyeballing cooking oils, seeds & nuts, and, to a lesser extent, processed carbs.

Ozempic was the only thing that actually solved my hunger. I would eat healthy, do exercise, but without ozempic my appetite was unstoppable and would think of food 24/7.

BTW you can still improve your diet. PB and bread are bad for weight loss. Go with high protein, low carb. But even that was not enough for me.

Clean/natural/unprocessed is an independent variable from fattening. There is correlation in that processed foods are sometimes highly palatable, but there is no causation. To illustrate, you could top your toast with either honey or Mrs Butterworth's Sugar Free syrup. Honey will add like 10x more calories, but is unprocessed, while the syrup is as processed as there can be

The only difference being the amount of processed food and the lack of my daily walking routines. But granted, I gained 10kg while im on one meal a day.

Assuming you don't have some metabolic disorders, you'll get used to being hungry for part of the day.

The second problem is people simply not being honest with their calorie tracking. You may only eat 3 meals but then when you're hungry you will eat a handful of raisins, peanuts, or something else, a lot of people will think to themselves "well, it's just a handful, so it can't be that many calories" - but repeated habit of eating those adds up, and most people don't account for that in their calorie tracking app. Similar to adding a small bit of, say, butter to your pan before making scrambled eggs. You may think, "it's only about 10 grams of butter, it's not much so why bother tracking it", but that 10 grams of butter is 75 calories, over the course of a month of preparing scrambled eggs every morning for breakfast, that's 2250 kcal, after 3 months, that's an entire KILO of bodyweight fat that you either gained or could have lost - small things add up.

Sometimes (but less frequently) it's also hormonal issues, you may want to go to a clinic to do a bloodtest (specifically thyroid hormones and diabetes markers).

Also, low intensity cardio (slow pace incline treadmill/stairmaster) can go a long way in aiding weight loss.

Unless you just really struggle with impulse control and you need those guard rails, for me the only way that I managed to loose about 45 lbs was by looking at things this way.

I did not cut a single thing out of my diet, what I did was make smart choices/swaps at home that still satisfied cravings most of the time so when I want to go to the store and get a candy bar I will go to the store and get a candy bar and not feel bad about it.

Easy one was not keeping soda in the house anymore, I have switched almost entirely to water outside of milk in my coffee. When I am out I may sometimes grab a soda but meh.

I make homemade peanut butter. I buy dry roasted unsalted peanuts, add in a small amount of salt and its great.

Trying a bunch of different apples and finding the sweetest apples I could find, and then eating that with peanut butter for some added protein.

Strawberries with chocolate humas.

I started making my own chicken stock which had more flavor and less sodium.

Making my own heartier soups that tasted great.

Also... Seasoning. More than just salt and pepper. Some really good (non American generally) seasoning will go a long way and is basically a zero calory way to really good food.

Other random small changes that are very situational for you. Look at your snacking habbits, that is where most of my issues came in.

Where I could I would choose things that would also increase my protein intake. I didn't go crazy. I never counted calories or anything and the weight just came off. Sure I could have lost a bit more had I done that, but I am at the point now that is the 10 more lbs going to make that big of a difference in the grand scheme of things as I work towards gaining more muscle anyways.

I realize this may not work for everyone, but I am not on any sort of "diet" in any traditional sense of the word. What I am doing now is perfectly sustainable for the rest of my life because I can still live my life and largely eat what I want within reason. I had taco bell today and don't feel bad about it in the slightest.

I should add that during most of this weight loss I did not change my workout habbits. I was focusing on my nutrition first. I do live in a city and I walk everywhere, but that did not change in this time.

Like I straight up just don't eat nut butters anymore because they are a massive calorie bomb, and I find the loose nuts more satiating. When you track for a while you start building an instinct for optimizing the satiety/calorie ratio of your meals.

That diet isn't going to have the same effect for most people, but in my case it significantly lowered my inflammation and general discomfort, which led me to lose 90lbs with no actual effort on my part.

I knew one dude who was always hungry and it turned out he just desperately needed B12. Now he snacks on B12 gummies and feels much better. Debugging our bodies is more complicated than debugging a software program, but no programmer would say "Just run the program less!" if someone complained a program was eating up all the CPU.

The one thing that is always good for humans, whether we lose weight or not, is some physical activity. Whatever we can enjoy enough to do regularly, without injury, is a great choice.

I wish the medical profession would stop focusing on diet, when it doesn't understand it and calorie restrictive diets are one of two lifestyle components we know actually do contribute to obesity.

> ... I ate very small portions for each meal.

That's what does it. Decreasing the calories you eat.

> I'm not sure why I can't change my habits such that I continue to eat those small portions (now that the fear is gone).

Because, like all of us, you're only human, and human psychology, plus how our stomachs and brains signal each other, is complex and sometimes makes it really hard for us to achieve our goals. It sucks, but that's how it is. This is why the semaglutide weight loss drugs are proving so effective: they short-circuit some of that and help you just not want to eat as much food.

If drugs aren't for you, try counting calories, and use an app to help with it and help keep you honest. I experimented with it back in 2017 or so, and it actually did cause me to be more mindful about how much I ate, and made me think twice if I'd already hit my calorie budget for the day but wanted more food. I was pleasantly surprised to find I actually did lose weight. I didn't stick with it (don't remember why), but it did work for me for a time.

Linemen would be a better example than linebackers here. Linebackers tend (like most positions other than line, and especially offensive line, positions) to have body fat percentages at the high end of the normal range, rather than being “insanely fat”.

- I enjoy running, and eating poorly will affect my ability to run in the short-term, as lots of junk food makes my running experience that day poorer; and

- Recently I've started going to the gym. Best to be fairly lean to see those new muscles, though I don't take it to an extreme. I prefer a balance.

Shifting the consequences from long to short- and medium-term helps!

I have a friend with a heart condition, prior to surgery he couldn't even walk 100 ft or stand for more than a minute. He put on significant weight, partially due to lifestyle changes when his heart was failing. Now he _has_ to walk a lot to strengthen his heart again, and he's working on his diet to lose weight as a whole separate component. The walking has nothing to do with weight loss for him, it's purely about strength. I think a lot of people fail to make any kind of distinction there, and they just think of exercise as a way to lose weight.

Sleep is also a commonly overlooked but incredibly important aspect. You could be busting your ass in the gym, have your diet on point, but not be making gains if you don't sleep or sleep poorly. For hypertrophy focused folks, muscle isn't built in the gym, it's built while you sleep - you tear it down in the gym so that it can rebuild during recovery.

Each of those is a 1,000 Calorie deficit.

if you measure a body builder during a bulk

Incidentally, the terms "bulking" and "cutting" come from bodybuilders taking steroids. I know that non-chemically-enhanced people have started using these terms, but it's honestly foolish. When you're not cycling anabolic steroids against metabolic stimulants like Clenbuterol, it really doesn't apply.

No, you’ll lose less weight (I mean, assuming the difference in what you are burning is from exercise, if you find a way, e.g. by some chemical intervention, to kick your metabolism up to burning 4× your baseline amount without doing additional exercise, this doesn't apply), because you have the same calorie deficit and more of the weight you lose (unless you are in fairly great shape to start with, more than 100% of the weight you lose!) will be fat, and it takes a greater calorie deficit to lose a pound of fat than a pound of muscle.

OTOH, most people want to lose fat and avoid losing muscle, so this is a good thing, but its not more weight loss.

This study specifically excluded athletes, so its conclusions would be applicable to someone running 26km per day.

But the idea that there is little evidence that obesity causes health issues is absurd. There's absolutely mountains of evidence, and we have very firm understandings of the mechanisms underlying many of these issues, too. Hell, just being bigger, even if it's all muscle mass, is bad for your heart.

The all-cause mortality curve is J shaped because many more of the people at 10% bf are there because of disease and not because they're shredded from a strict diet and a consistent exercise.

I've lost roughly 100lb of fat over the past 9 months. I have gotten back to lifting 5 days a week, but even before that with just losing weight my health markers improved significantly, I've felt better, aches and pains and discomforts have all but disappeared, etc. My stress, alienation, environmental contamination, etc. conditions are all the same, and I'm working just as much, if not more.

You can maintain a healthy level of fitness by adding some exercise into your life and being mindful of what you eat. But maintaining abs is a whole other project you practically have to center your life around. And indeed, it's mostly a matter of very strict dieting.

Whether it's more likely than the average human body to do so, to process them for immediate energy, or to process them for longer term storage in conjunction with how it benchmarks your hunger and satiation signals is colloquially known as your "metabolism".

Want to tell me next how the laws of mechanical engineering conclusively prove that no one human being can be stronger than another, since we all weigh the same?

Hindsight is 20/20 in this case. It's nice that the explanation is not complicated ("calories in, calories out"), but many other simple things have been thought of as true, only to be put on their head by science. I welcome the scientific confirmation, and I hold that the path to knowledge it's not straightforward at all.

No.

I ran 10km three times a week and didn't lose a pound. <https://np.reddit.com/r/running/comments/1vq3k1/should_i_do_...> Every bit of my weight loss has always come from counting calories.

I've never had that problem. When I exercise a lot, my body just starts to crave a higher proportion of calorie-dense foods - ice cream, cheese, breads. The actual volume of food might not go up all that much, but the balance changes.

Of course, "a lot" for me is 10-15 hours cardio/week plus 3-4 hours/week weight training. My baseline is 3-5 hours cardio and the same 3-4 weight training. I only ramp up to 10+ hours cardio if I have a major event planned (100 mile mtn bike race or similar).

Notice the past tense there?