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Comment by Delphiza | Hacker News Reader

Unsurprisingly, the title is sensationalist and not representative of the study. The study compares energy expenditure across different economic groups i.e. western people sitting in offices versus hunter-gatherers in Africa, and found that difference in energy expenditure does not account for differences in obesity, so points to consumption as the likely reason.

The sample dataset explicitly excluded 'athletes', so would exclude people that _are_ outrunning a bad diet. We know that a little weekly jog around the park doesn't mean you can eat a cheesecake every day, but anyone who has done extensive 'athletic' physical activity knows that if you don't up your calorie intake that you will lose weight. The study does not conclude, at all, that you cannot outrun a bad diet. Instead, it suggests "that dietary intake plays a far greater role than reduced energy expenditure in obesity related to economic development."

Edit: My point is specifically not about running. I am merely pointing out that if you read the study you will find that it is more of a study on economic development, and not really useful for personal or localised health advice. It observes that economically developed population groups may be more sedentary, but do not expend significantly more energy - so a hunter-gatherer picking berries all day does not burn significantly more energy than an office worker (at least not enough to explain why the office worker is obese). Therefore, the link between economic development and obesity is likely related to food (dietary intake) than daily activity.

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> anyone who has done extensive 'athletic' physical activity knows that if you don't up your calorie intake that you will lose weight.

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.

> 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.

It also seems to be harder to dial your dietary intake back down if you cease that extra activity.

This doesn't even require you to be an athlete, or do extensive physical activity. Add even a half-hour jog three days a week to your otherwise-mostly-sedentary routine and you'll tend to engage in "compensatory eating" even if you don't realize it.

This is why exercise alone often doesn't cause you to lose weight, or at least not as much as you'd expect given the extra calories you're burning: you're probably eating more (or the same amount, but foods with higher calorie density) than you were before, even if you didn't consciously choose to do so.

Absolutely.

This is one reason bodybuilders (the closest thing to professional dieters) will only do low intensity cardio -- walking etc -- when cutting weight.

High intensity cardio burns calories but increases appetite disproportionately. Albeit otherwise excellent for overall health.

I hate /fit/ and the bodybuilding forums so much. Stupid memes like this, SS, GOMAD, and related exist and continue to be parroted because of them. No, using a segway to move in between weight machines will not preserve your gains.

The amount of mental gymnastics performed by these guys to justify hilariously stupid physical decisions is simply colossal. I applaud folks like Chloe Ting (a "cardio bunny" aesthetic youtuber who specialize in Calistenics) who roast these guys by challenging them (bodybuilder roid bros) to keep up with her on her exercise routines. Watching these dudes collapse again and again because they have pathetic endurance and don't do meaningful cardio reminds is delicious to say the least.

If you get your diet advice from Zyzz, Rich Piana, or the rest of the memeloards of fitness, you deserve what's coming to you. Don't skip leg day.

Does she keep up with them on their lifts?

> The amount of mental gymnastics performed by these guys to justify hilariously stupid physical decisions is simply colossal.

This is a very ungenerous and incorrect take.

It is their prerogative to decide what outcome they want to maximize when it comes to their own body. I don't think any bodybuilder is under the delusion that they are particularly healthy when on the bodybuilding stage - they're not trying to be healthy, they're trying to win a specific competition with specific rules around it.

You might not like their goal or think it's stupid, but they are making the correct decisions for the outcomes they care about, and there's nothing wrong with caring about different things.

literally get on a tredmill, angle it, and walk for an hour or two

Can you clarify what your goal and outcomes are for that?

I don't wanna sound too daring, but going outside is also an option.

> I don't wanna sound too daring, but going outside is also an option.

Sure, but a treadmill is more comfortable when it's >30C outside.

People downplay how important consistency is when trying to make changes to their lifestyle. Walking is good but whatever the exercise, a sustainable plan is best.

Same reason behind having a list when you go to the grocery store and sticking to it rather then buying whatever looks good then and there.

This is why walkable cities are important!

This depends on what you consider "extensive".

About 10 years ago I started taking 45 minute daily walks with no other changes in my diet or activities and the extra weight (about 15 lbs overweight) melted away. I made absolutely no effort to eat less and didn't get any hungrier.

Walking is quite special in this regard, because it doesn't seem to result in the same compensatory eating that more intense exercise does.

That depends on your pace and your previous level of activity. If the pace is average and your previous level was ~0 then yes, you're expected to benefit a lot for not much effort.

But to answer your question, walking at average pace is not extensive exercise by any means. Walking at top possible speed would be closer but would probably still not meet the bar. You'd need to incorporate running at moderate pace with a few periods of all-out sprinting into your walking routine.

One could say that your eating habits were borderline enough to maintain your current weight.

After I started doing moderately long and fast bike rides (200+km/week, flat and hilly terrain, averaging 70km/ride during summer, 100+ if I have enough time), I have found that:

- compared to "not much exercise" (some periods during winter), it modulates my hunger. I do not eat more, or only proportionally.

- when the rides are longer than cca. 50km, I start losing weight (not just water, weight, sustained)

- after several days with no exercise, my hunger starts to increase again. In other words, I have to exercise to not overeat. I don't understand this effect, but it works for me, and it's been like this for many years.

>that you will up your calorie intake unless you take explicit and intentional effort not to.

Correct, and the "eat less, move more" crowd will tell you, "ignore your hunger. Control yourself. You're a failure because you can't ignore one of the most basic and fundamental biological signals."

> The sample dataset explicitly excluded 'athletes', so would exclude people that _are_ outrunning a bad diet.

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 very much can outrun a bad diet as far as weight loss/gain goes, which is the topic at hand (not general health).

I've lost 100 lbs twice. You absolutely can outrun a bad diet lol.

It's just a LOT of exercise and counting all of your calories. A 1600 calorie bag of chips is 4 hours of cardio :)

So you didn't outrun a bad diet. You counted calories and matched your diet to your exercise (or vice versa) to get the weight outcome you wanted.

I think some here are narrowly interpreting "bad diet" to mean "lots of junk food". While yes, that's not a great diet, what's really meant is a diet where calorie intake regularly exceeds expenditure, regardless of what you're eating.

Even if you eat only the healthiest of foods, if your intake is too much for what you're burning, that's still a "bad diet".

I don't think that's a reasonable way to define the phrase. If "bad diet" is defined in terms of how much exercise you do, then "you can't outrun a bad diet" is a tautology.

I would say that in practice 99% of people can't outrun a bad diet, but not because of any sort of physiological reason. You simply need to train so much that most people won't ever approach the level of running/cycling/lifting they would need to do so.

If you're training like an elite athlete (for me and my at the time roommate that was running 85, or in his case, 100+ miles a week with a few lift sessions) you can, and will, eat just about whatever you damn please and not gain weight. Most people can't fit that much training into their lives without making it their life's primary focus at the expense of everything else, and couldn't sustain that level of training if they did, so it becomes a practical impossibility.

I do miss that aspect of running so much mileage, though I appreciate the freedom that stepping back from competition has afforded me in other areas. To maintain weight now, I eat 1-2 meals a day, but back then? I ate whatever got put in front of me, sometimes 4 meals a day.

> you can, and will, eat just about whatever you damn please and not gain weight

I don’t know if any athlete who can sustain themselves on a junk diet.

Elite endurance athletes have awful diets by any normal standard, because the only way to fuel yourself adequately for a stage of the Tour de France or an ultramarathon is with nauseating amounts of refined carbohydrates. It's not even the fun kind of junk, just a constant effort to eat as much carbohydrate as your gut can possibly tolerate.

"somewhere between 60-120g carbs/hour" and that's on the flat stages (more in the mountains) of TdF would be considered junk food anywhere outside of sport.

Source: https://www.cyclingnews.com/features/mango-flavour-and-120g-...

Sure but for the purposes of mass communication or creating helpful and memorable aphorisms "you can't out run a bad diet" is an appropriate summarization of the research.

If it's all ppl get out of it, the worst that might happen is that a handful of up & coming elite athletes might need their coaches to help them unlearn it, as opposed to the status quo where literal millions of ppl are trying & failing to outrun their diets.

Yes and I understand that. I was specifically replying to a comment about this phrase being a myth for athletes.

Right, and that's fine. A saying that's true for 99% of people is a perfectly good saying. In the vast, vast majority of cases, "you can't outrun a bad diet" is completely true.

Your time running 85 miles a week is so outside the norm that your experience isn't even worth mentioning when evaluating that saying.

And then there's Michael Phelps, living proof you can outrun (or at least outswim) just about any diet you can imagine. He's obviously an extreme, but he's not the only example.

The point of the saying is to get most people to understand that the biggest factor in the average person's weight loss is their diet, not their exercise levels.

Pointing out that elite endurance athletes and olympic athletes can have high calorie requirements isn't helpful or the point. Yes, energy must come from somewhere, but even among the generally fit and active portion of the population, only a vanishingly small number of them exercise at the intensity and time requirements to burn so many calories as to not easily have all of that thwarted with a single meal.

> The point of the saying is to get most people to understand that the biggest factor in the average person's weight loss is their diet, not their exercise levels.

Just say that then.

Not disagreeing but I think it's worth adding, "but you can outrun a slightly bad diet".

I once worked a night shift stocking job just after college. I was in phenomenal shape without hitting the gym. I was at my lowest weight with a ton of lean muscle as a result of moving heavy loads and stocking paint every night. I also did the math at one point, and given the size of the warehouse I was probably walking quickly 8 miles during my shift. It became a chore to eat enough calories every day. Somewhere around 4000 calories/day, you may still be hungry, but you are generally full. Also food sort of becomes boring, and the desire to eat just isn't as strong.

That said, it was 4-6 hours 4 nights a week. That is a lot of time to spend to burn all those calories. It is really not hard to eat an extra 100 calories per day, but it takes a lot of effort to burn an extra 100 calories. It's the asymmetry here you absolutely have to respect. Further, at least for me, there is another asymmetry in terms of satiation vs hunger. It is much easier to be slightly satiated than it is to be slightly hungry. What this means, is that there is a tendency to be driven to eat slightly more than your body needs. This is partly why the GLP-1 drugs seem so effective, is that they seem to flip this asymmetry in the other direction, which means weight loss is the default, instead of weight gain.

Reminds me of when I got my first job at 17...I worked at a large department/grocery store. My job primarily consisted of pushing karts from the corrals back to the store.

In an 8 hour shift, I likely walked ~15 miles, with half of that time pushing up to a dozen karts. For lunch, I'd go to the McDonald's and get a Super Size (Since this was when that still existed) Double Quarter Pounder meal with a Coke. I'd chug the whole coke and then refill it. This meal was easily 3,000 calories, and I'd eat it 3 times a week.

After about two months on the job, I'd STILL lost about 5 lbs.

Polar explorers Fienes and Stroud were eating locks of butter and still losing weight on their sled pulling expedition. It was estimated that they were buring up to 11,000 calories a day.

Your McD's meal was probably closer to 2000 calories, even with the giant Coke. For a short period I ate one meal a day, even when I thought I went over maintenance with a massive fast food treat, I'd still be 4-500 cals under if I was active that day.

Yup, we have a limit in our ability to take in and metabolize calories, although it is somewhat flexible in that if you do it enough you'll get better at it. Look at the people who do the long thru-hikes. Stuff like the Appalachian Trail (Georgia to the highest point in Maine), PCT or CDT (both run from the Mexican border to the Canadian border). They will hit saturation on the ability to take in calories, although enough time out there can increase the ability to metabolize fat (very useful in that it has about 2x the calories per pound of other food)

But you are right that it's very definitely about the balance.

You make a good point about the time investment. You were able to do your exercise while working, but very few people will spend 16-24 hours a week working out.

> This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from.

For people that are merely trying to lose weight, it's effectively true. When you're out of shape, you won't have the strength or endurance to exercise long and hard enough to actually burn significant calories.

For athletes that are running marathons or doing powerlifting, yes, it's certainly false. Massive bodybuilders that are already deadlifting hundreds of pounds will have massive diets because lifting that much weight takes significant energy.

But someone like me, with a BMI of 36, I can't outrun a bad diet. I go to the gym, set the treadmill at 5 mph, and I'm completely gassed after 3 minutes or 1/4 mile and have to slow down to 3 mph to recover. I'll go back and forth, but after about 20 minutes, I've gone about 1.3 miles, my legs are stiff and my ankles are sore because jogging at 240 lbs means high impact. Meanwhile, I've only burned probably ~100 calories. Not enough to offset the bad diet.

Given enough time of my routine, sure, my endurance might go up. Eventually I can do it longer, and maybe then I can start outrunning the bad diet. But that's going to take a long time.

Easier to just cut carbs.

My anecdata:

- a year of busting my ass on the bike almost daily: -15kg

- a year of restricting calories to ~1200/day and not doing much else: -40kg

- 2 years of sitting in my apartment being afraid of COVID and drinking too much: +50kg

Conclusion: booze is a really great way to put on a lot of weight quickly

[ throws out the protein powder ]

my anecdata aligns with yours. A year of cardio every day and resistance 6 days a week bought me no weight loss, 2 years of limiting myself to 1800 cals/day on top of that stripped me of 25% of my body weight.

Cool, but being physically active is not just to lose weight but to gain health. Your heart works more, your lungs work more, they develop a bit more, putting more oxygen in your body and the effects compound over time. So if you can, do both: control calories intake and exercise.

I did exactly that, and I thought I made that clear in my original comment but maybe I was unclear. With that being said, this article is about drivers of obesity so weight control is sort of the topic du jour itt.

If you're drinking beer or wine it is certainly very calorie dense. You're looking at 208 kcal per pint of beer or 123 kcal for a 5oz pour of wine. A pound of fat takes about 3,500 excess calories, or 16 pints of beer. So if you drink 2 a day all else equal you could gain nearly 1 lb a week.

This is just pointless ceteris paribus because genetics are the biggest variable.

If someone has a predisposition to diabetes they can't drink alcohol and hold things ceteris paribus because of the way alcohol effects the liver and then effects insulin.

Insulin sensitivity gets worse, blood sugar is all over the place and then the person is on a rollover-coast of over consuming calories to try to stabilize blood sugar.

IMO your post is why almost all dieting advise is just complete oversimplified nonsense. Meaningless ceteris paribus linear combinations that mostly add up to a non-reality for a non-linear complex system. It is a way for people to pick and chose what they want to be true.

Did you mean to reply to me? I'm simply pointing out that beer is calorie dense.

All impressive numbers, but it seems like the move would be to keep doing #1 while being slightly less restrictive about #2 and just as restrictive about #3, which will eventually leave you not just lighter, but with a good level of fitness if you aren't already there. It's way easier to keep excess weight off and feel great about it if you're practicing athletics of some sort regularly

Another thing you can do is one day of regular calories, and one day of zero. You still average to 1200 a day, but I think it's better for you for several reasons you can look into if interested.

This is why you should walk to the pub instead of drinking at home...

Did you pause the the jogging until in better shape, to avoid causing lasting damage?

Maybe try an elliptical, rowing erg, bike, or swimming?

Powerlifting does not take as many calories as you'd think. In fact, lifting in general is surprisingly easy on the calorie requirement, so most powerlifters and bodybuilders incorporate cardio as part of their routine. You will burn a lot more calories by walking 10,000 steps a day for 1 month than you would doing an intense lifting session each day.

The reason you're probably thinking as to why lifters eat a huge amount is precisely because they're already large and muscular. Just 5% less bodyfat at the same weight results in roughly 200 more calories at maintenance for someone that is around 93kg.

A vigorous weightlifting workout for an hour will burn about 400kcal[1], which is roughly equivalent to walking 10k steps depending on your body weight. Another way to think of this is 100 minutes of brisk walking will round out to about 400kcal.

You don't really burn more calories walking, it's just easy to do and fit in around other things.

[1] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323922#calculating...

Weird hill to die on - 400 is probably the top end for a super heavy day at a higher bodyweight - maybe deadlift primary and squat secondary day? Walking for 10,000 steps will every day will certainly burn more calories.

Regardless, people who lift aren’t eating more just because they burn a couple of hundred calories 2-5 times a week.

You’re wrong about that, look up videos of strongmen and bodybuilder meals/eating routines. The 2 hour workouts at the top of these fields are very calorie intensive.

Bodybuilders eat a lot in the offseason because they're on tons of drugs and trying to maximize the amount of lean mass they can put on, and they eat more in general because when you have 100lb+ more muscle than the average person you have a significantly higher base metabolic rate. You can go on a variety of PED related forums and find IFBB pro's posting food logs, etc., and see that these crazy eating routines are limited to certain parts of the year, and even then have been falling out of favor - the 'lean bulk' for pros is more popular than ever.

Very few IFBB pros are working out in 2 hour sessions, either. Coaches understand junk volume way better now and know that a lot of the work being done previously just wasn't providing much muscle growth stimulus after a certain point. Most are spending <8 hours in the gym each week in general.

The top of the bodybuilding field is not eating a ton of food because of their lifting routines burning a bunch of calories.

I have lifted for 30+ years and something very un-intuitive with powerlifting is the optimal weight class for a height is extremely high.

If you are 5'10" you are pound for pound stronger at 240 than at 198. 198 will be dominated by someone who is shorter otherwise.

You are also much stronger the more you weigh, period. Strongman are eating so much to keep their weight up, not because they are burning so many calories while working out.

Even the most intense prowler workout that will make an untrained person puke their guts out is easy to out eat.

It is easiest to see with a contest bodybuilding diet. Even a 250lb bodybuilder who is doing a ton of working out is basically eating nothing. The body is incredibly efficient at holding on to weight. If it wasn't, humans would have starved to death a long time ago.

I'm 5'6", 165lbs, I bike 6-8 miles every day and do resistance training 6 days/week. I also have limited myself to 1800 cals/day and at least 130g protein. For two years I was biking 6-8 miles every day, doing resistance training and maintaining 210lbs which, at my height, is bordering on clinical obesity. If you could be healthy just by training and eating what you want I would have done it twice.

I don't understand how you wouldn't lose weight. Are you sure the 1800 kcals is accurate. Are you including what you drink?

Oh no, I lost weight when I was on the 1800kcal. it was when I was working out what I intuitively feel like is a lot more than most people but still eating what I wanted that I didn't lose weight, which anecdotally fits with the premise of the article.

Your bike ride is too short to lose weight.

it's not though, because I lost 25% of my weight

"For two years I was biking 6-8 miles every day, doing resistance training and maintaining 210lbs"

"I'm 5'6", 165lbs, I bike 6-8 miles every day"

But he only lost weight after limiting caloric intake, even though he was biking every day before that too. My point was we shouldn't expect losing weight with such short rides, the body will use muscle and liver reserves for that and only with much longer rides start burning fat from adipose cells.

You can outrun a bad diet, but the average person won't. The average American diet is 3600 cals/day (https://www.businessinsider.com/daily-calories-americans-eat..., https://archive.is/IURse). The average person needs ~=2250 cals/day to maintain a healthy weight (https://www.webmd.com/diet/calories-chart, women need 1600-2400 averaging at 2000, men need 2000-3000 averaging at 2500). Jogging a sustained 5mph burns about 600 calories/hour (https://runrepeat.com/calories-burned-running#calories-burne...). Now it's just algebra, the average person takes in 1400 calories more than they need in a day, so while you could try to outrun that diet it keeps up a pace of 5mph for about 2.5 hours EVERY DAY. So the most accurate advice is "a person can out-train a bad diet but the vast majority of people won't" but the advice that's most likely to lead the most people to the goal they're actually pursuing is "you can't out-train a bad diet".

For high level endurance athletes, eating enough can be a difficult task. I wouldn’t quite categorize diets like the one described in https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/sports/olympics/cross-cou... as “a bad diet”, but it’s certainly a quantity and density of calories that would make it a bad diet for most people with a normal energy expenditure.

An anecdote from my experience with long trail hiking is that essentially everybody loses weight hiking long trails for months. Turns out when you’re hiking 25-30 miles / day, it’s awfully hard to not be in a calorie deficit (especially when you’re also trying to optimize for lightweight food)

For me, when I first started running, I thought going on a 5k run burnt scads of energy. At 100KG I was looking at about 400-500 cals-- Thats a fancy muffin basically. But when you start hitting 50k a week, you do have to start thinking about how to eat enough and enough of the right foods.

I've been cycling several thousand miles a year for many, many years, and in my experience I can certainly "outrun" a bad diet. Go for a 40 mile bike ride 5 days a week and you'll have a difficult time eating enough food.

A couple years ago I added weight lifting to my regimen and I could never eat enough. Most days of the week I'd stop by mcdonalds to pick up a couple mcdoubles as a snack. I was easily consuming 4-5 thousand calories a day (150-175 grams of protein) and I was still losing weight while gaining muscle. At one point I was sub-10% body fat whilst eating a mix of healthy food and junk food. Every visit my personal trainer was telling me to eat more.

If you're interested in losing weight while eating whatever you want I suggest doing 10-15 hours of fairly intense cardio per week, and 2-3 very intense lifting sessions per week.

> This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from.

It's advice for people new to diet-and-exercise, not a law of the universe.

> it's a nice lie one can tell himself to continue eating junk and not feel guilty about it.

Exactly the opposite: it's saying that, in terms of weight loss, that eating the junk matters a lot more than going to the gym.

> You can't outrun a bad diet. This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from.

People tend to vastly overestimate the caloric expenditure of activity, probably because it feels strenuous.

4 hard minutes on an assault bike will leave you gasping, but means next to nothing for energy expenditure.

>You can't outrun a bad diet.

You certainly can. If you eat Mcdonald's every day, that's a bad diet, and if you just sit around all day, you will gain weight. But the same person that eats the same exact McDonald's meal every day but also walks for an hour a day is going to be thinner. The real myth being perpetrated on this thread is that if you start walking an hour every day that somehow you will started eating more and that the only way to lose weight is to change your diet. This may be true if you eat a giant box of oreos every few hours, but it is certainly not true just because you have a "bad" diet. Eating healthier food is a good idea and I certainly recommend it, but it seems to me that the refusal of so many to accept that daily exercise in itself can lead to a healthier weight is a sign of denial by the overweight.

A Big Mac is over 500 calories.

Running, not walking, only burns around 500 calories an hour.

You can eat a Big Mac in 5 minutes and it'll take you an hour of running to burn it off.

An athlete can outrun a sedentary person's bad diet, actually. It's all relative, of course, but the saying has exceptions.

I have personal experience outrunning a bad diet as a division 1 swimmer. I was on a 7000 calorie a day diet, which was actually difficult to pull off, and I specifically had to supplement my diet with things like snickers bars and peanut butter cups just to stop losing weight. In fact, my dietary habits formed during this period of my life, where I was consistently below 10% body fat, continue to cause me trouble today in my less active state. Only by eating dramatically healthier have I been able to approach 20% body fat today.

Even beyond myself, I think you’re romanticizing how healthy the diets of extreme athletes are. I’ve been coached by and trained alongside Olympic athletes and most of them (not all of them) don’t give a single shit about things like healthy fats or micronutrients. Protein definitely, but everything else is noise. When burning that many calories, you are getting more than enough micronutrients, and it doesn’t really matter if the energy you end up burning is from fats or carbs, because it’s in and out the same day and never has a chance to be stored in the first place.

Body builders aren’t judged on athletic performance but aesthetics. It would make sense they care a lot more about diet, but it should be noted that they aren’t athletes and their entire regime is about building muscle, not using energy. It’s a completely different type of optimization.

Counterpoint: that the kind of exercise most people engage in with a goal of weight loss isn't going to work, but the kind of dieting would do might work, is perfectly reasonably expressed with the phrase "You can't outrun a bad diet". I'm aware a more pedantic and literal reading gives lie to the phrase, but that is true of almost every single English true statement ever written.

Intensity of the workout matters. When I go wakeboarding with my wife I build up a nice big appetite. When I go to muay thai I get pretty severe appetite suppression and sometimes have to force myself to eat.

The other thing is that if you track >>performance<< you naturally start caring about diet and lifestyle. So for people just trying their first 5k - I highly recommend tracking and setting time goals.

Nothing keeps me honest about my diet like performance

That's the point of the study though.

If you workout harder than your baseline, you will burn more calories than your baseline.

But if you do that workout often enough, for various reasons you will return to baseline calorie expenditure.

This means that if you want to lose weight consistently, working out is useless in that sense. You might see benefits for 1 month or 3 months or 6 months, but eventually your body adjusts.

Working out is great for a plethora of reasons. And this calorie budget rebalancing is one of them, since it means inflammation or auto-immune responses get downregulated.

Losing weight is not one of those benefits. Whereas it is often held up as such which leads to intense disappointment and relapse with overweight people, because they think "oh, if I just go for six intense two-hour jogs a week, I can keep eating sumptuously."

How exactly can your body adjust that much though? There is some minimum baseline level of calorie burn to stay alive and keep your body temp etc.

If you workout enough calories that exceeds the minimum baseline to keep you alive, the body can't adapt below that or adapt into the negative.

For a 200 lb man, jogging for 2 hours burns like 2000 calories, so that's 12,000 a week for 6 times a week.

What's the lowest a body will adapt to slow it's baseline metabolic rate? I am reading that the BMR can only reduce by like maybe 15-20% due to body adaptation.

This would put their baseline calorie burn at around 1500, and then if they are burning ~1700 a day from their jogging, they can eat 3200 a day to maintain or 3000 to even slowly lose weight over time, which is a decent amount that you can have a pretty fun "diet" of what you consume IMO.

> For a 200 lb man, jogging for 2 hours burns like 2000 calories

ogging a mile will burn around 100kcal, a bit more if you're decently overweight, let's be generous and say 150kcal. Someone who isn't in good shape and is overweight (the kind of person we're likely talking about) isn't going to be running that fast, maybe 3mph. So that's 6 miles in 2 hours. Even if I'm incredibly generous and say they'll burn 200kcal/mi, that's only 1200kcal. But in reality it's probably more like 900kcal.

But let's be real here. Your average (even above-average) overweight person with a not-so-great diet is not going to be jogging for 2 hours. Maybe they'll jog for an hour. So 450-600kcal. And maybe they'll do that 2-3 times a week.

1350-1800kcal extra burned every week is great! Except that still probably won't be what happens, exactly. Unless this person is also counting calories, or consciously working hard to keep their exact same diet, they will probably unconsciously eat more. Adding a 9mi/week jogging regimen to your life, especially if you're overweight, is going to make you more hungry than usual, so you will eat more. How much? Well, hard to say. Maybe enough so that you still end up with a calorie deficit, but in many (most, I'd guess) cases you'll still have a surplus, even if less than before.

This is all still a good thing! A 500kcal surplus per week when you're running 9 miles is much better than a 1500kcal surplus every week with no exercise. But this (hopefully) demonstrates that it's not as simple as "I'll just add some exercise and that'll get my weight under control". You need to change your diet, and take in fewer calories. It's hard. But it's the only way -- for the vast majority of people -- that this will work.

I never really found the eating more when exercising more that compelling personally. I mainly meal prep and eat the same amount whether or not I work out and how hard I work out.

I feel like saying that someone is going to eat more because they are start exercising a lot is a separate topic. But I would think that someone who has the willpower to start exercising drastically more also has the willpower to control what they physically put in their mouth. I have personally found that stopping putting things in my mouth to eat is easier than getting myself to exercise as much as I would like to, so I don't think it's a guarantee that someone choosing to exercise more will automatically eat more.

For a 200 lb man, just jogging doesn't burn 1000 kcal/hr. You have to actually run at a pace of about 8:30 min/mi. People who can sustain that for 2 hours per day every day are not overweight in the first place.

I lost between 50-70 pounds in a year, and I used a Garmin smartwatch which I wear all hours to track my calorie expenditure, which is pretty accurate. I think this effectively allows you to ignore the kind of exercise. You just keep track of your calorie burn. If your workout doesn't burn enough calories, you do more.

Your examples sound like fairly short-term biological responses to intense activity, which are likely different than long-term biological response to a significant increase in daily calorie expenditure.

I've done a fair amount of wilderness backpacking. It's common to lose your appetite for the first few days due to the change in environment, schedule, activity, etc. But pretty quickly your body will realize this is going to keep happening and it's going to need to make up the extra 1000+ calories you're burning every day.

I've been doing muay thai for the best part of a decade now, the appetite suppression is always there

Totally agree with you here. The phrase "rounds to true".

Caveats for the pedantic:

If you've found yourself overweight and sedentary, you are unlikely to adopt a level of exercise needed to outrun your bad diet.

All else being equal, the person with the better diet will have a better body comp (or achieve a goal body comp easier).

I wondered how these things work out in practice, as the difficulty of adhering to a diet or exercise plan is a real factor

I found this https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3339766/

TL;DR; in that study of 4k people:

"A substantial proportion of obese U.S. adults who attempted to lose weight reported weight loss, at least in the short term. Obese adults were more likely to report achieving meaningful weight loss if they ate less fat, exercised more, used prescription weight loss medications, or participated in commercial weight loss programs."

Also somewhat interesting that eating diet products negatively correlated with weight loss

One could read that as exercising more or eating less both work.

This is precisely it.

Consuming a bunch of calories is super easy and quick. That tiny snack bag of chips that you can scarf down in three bites in less than a minute? Yep, 200 calories.

Burning that 200 calories off? Basically a 30-60 minute workout.

Not eating those chips is WAY easier than trying to burn them off after the fact.

> Instead, it suggests "that dietary intake plays a far greater role than reduced energy expenditure in obesity related to economic development."

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'm going to push back on this a bit, though I agree with some of the sentiment.; to the average person wanting to lose weight, I think the best advice is obviously to eat less via whatever diet works for them (I personally recommend counting calories, but it's not for everyone).

That said, you write:

> Yes, and there are few such people. Extensive athletic physical activity, becoming an athlete, are at odds with working an office job.

First of all, office jobs are probably dominant in the industry, but there are still lots of jobs that aren't office jobs, and you seem to be excluding all of those.

Secondly, I know plenty of people with demanding careers (e.g. doctors), with kids, who nevertheless train for marathons and run almost every day. There absolutely are people who exercise enough to make a meaningful difference to their caloric expenditure.

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

I'll reiterate that I agree with this and this is the correct advice for someone who wants to start losing weight. I just wouldn't discount the many people who do also exercise to the point of it making a difference.

> 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.

> Becoming an athlete or doing extensive athletics takes a huge time commitment. Eating less does not.

Yet perhaps taking a huge time commitment during which you won't be able to eat much is exactly what is needed.

I don't think the existence of elite athletes alters the central point: it is vastly to go into calorific deficit by altering diet than increasing exercise.

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 don't think the existence of elite athletes alters the central point: it is vastly to go into calorific deficit by altering diet than increasing exercise.

You left out the key word in that sentence, which should have appeared after “vastly”. I assume you mean easier, but in fact that’s not true for a lot of people.

> You get to 600+ pounds and you actually need like 20,000 calories just to maintain that weight.

That's wildly inaccurate. It’s more like 5k than 20k. Maintenace calorie requirements are basically linear with weight given similar activity patterns.

Also, most people who need to lose weight haven't already gotten to 600+ lbs.

> You left out the key word in that sentence, which should have appeared after “vastly”. I assume you mean easier, but in fact that’s not true for a lot of people.

Not sure I agree with that. I think it's probably true that adopting even a minimal exercise regimen is easier than adjusting diet, for most people.

But actually turning that new exercise regimen into a calorie deficit is significantly harder. Not only do you have to exercise probably quite a bit per week to get you into a deficit, you have to actively work to not eat more. If you start an exercise regimen, I guarantee you're going to be hungrier, and unless you're very strict with yourself, you can easily eat enough extra to wipe out most or all of the new calorie "savings".

This isn't the first study to show that our bodies adjust to fairly set caloric expenditure - the constrained total energy expenditure model isn't new, and Ponztner and his team aren't the first to advocate for it, but we should be clear that he is an advocate for it, and has been for a while.

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.

My understanding is that the research shows that a highly active hunter gathering and an inactive office worker burn roughly the same number of calories per day. But I find that hard to believe. What is the office worker's body doing to make up the difference for all the movement and muscle contraction?

Human bodies are highly efficient at certain movements, e.g. walking. There's also a complicated part of hunter gatherer life style where you don't know if you'll find something if you walk another mile, so often the response is to just... not do that.

Being able to have a life style where you're constantly expending energy, like training athletes do, really only works if you're guaranteed food, which is generally not how hunter gathering works.

Lots and lots (and lots) of small subconscious movements throughout the day. Many thousands of them. Moving your heard around, tilting it a bit, wiggling your toes, rolling your shoulders, scratching an itch, etc.

Anecdotally, I believe I have a personal example of the sort of thing that changes. I went from being ultra-sedentary to exercising 5+ days a week over the past year. My body had enough of these tics that they had long since passed over the subconscious and unnoticed level into "why the fuck do I keep bouncing my legs around all the time when sitting or in bed." Now, I never do. After years of trying, I stopped making any sort of intentional effort to stop - and even things like weighted blankets, etc., in the past did nothing.

Now, I just don't do it. I fidget less at my desk while working. I make a whole lot less 'random' movements for no discernible reason.

Add up enough of all these tiny things over the course of a day, things you probably don't even realize you're doing, and each tiny fraction of a calorie expended eventually pushes you to the levels you see with more regular exercise.

(Now, of course, exercise is hugely important for a variety of other health factors)

Glad to hear that exercize has worked for you.

>Add up enough of all these tiny things over the course of a day, things you probably don't even realize you're doing, and each tiny fraction of a calorie expended eventually pushes you to the levels you see with more regular exercise.

Fidgeting will obviously burn some calories. But I find it hard to believe that fidgeting will burn the same amount of calories as sustained exersize.

I have heard some suggestion that the extra energy is being burned at a cellular level (causing inflammation). But would be office work get hot if that was the case?

I think the current default knowledge you could expect a random average person to understand is limited to approximately the following single sentence: “A balance of diet and exercise is the key to losing weight.”

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.”

Would you say Luka, Neymar and others are outrunning their diets? Did Shaq, too? You don't automatically get a good physique by being an athlete, you still have to earn it. People just see that all of the top athletes have earned it and take it for granted, like they don't have world class dieticians and a huge financial incentive to maintain a strict diet

Michael Phelps did outswim his diet. He famously ate a lot of junk food and pizza, and yet remained fit because of his huge daily calorie expenditure. A direct quote from an interview with him, where he states: "I just sort of try to cram whatever I can into my body. It’s pretty much whatever I feel like eating, I’m going to eat".

I think the challenge with swimming is that there is thermodynamics of swimming through water to also contend with. So your body is also having to keep warm whilst losing heat to better heat conducting fluid (water vs air). But I still agree, if Phelps was running or even walking with the same effort he could eat similarly.

How many hours per day was he swimming?

A lot. But a possible amount.

Clearly a possibly amount since he did it.

Would it be possible for someone who was not supporting themselves that way? I.e. for someone with a 40 hr / week job?

I don't know about possible, but I'm sure the Michael Phelps regimen is wildly impractical for everyone, including Michael Phelps.

My personal experience is that "outrunning" a poor diet is absolutely possible, and I kind of did it unintentionally. I started biking to work out of necessity. I wasn't planning to lose weight, but it happened. I had no weight loss ambitions or plans, but it was probably a good thing.

The problem is comparing the average person to one of the greatest Olympic athletes is completely pointless because of genetics.

Shaq could easily dunk a basketball weighing 300lbs. You can't infer from that then that any person can weigh 300lbs and dunk a basketball.

I'm not the one who brought up Michael Phelps. Much less extreme cases have worked too. It's probably easier than dunking a basketball.

Sure, but I think we can still safely say you can't outrun a bad diet when only less than 1% of people who try are successful at it.

I can't take this Luka slander. The guy carried the ungrateful Mavericks team for 6 seasons averaging 35mpg. He's not out of shape. Same thing with Jokic, 10 seasons of 32mpg average. Their mpg also go up in the playoffs.

People need to stop thinking about <10% body fat as the "athletic standard". Some players are super skinny, some players have more mass to them and use it to their advantage.

I do agree with regards to Shaq, the guy coasted in his talent later in his career and let himself go. Had he a better work ethic he could have been in the conversation for one of the greatest players ever.

I'm a Luka fan, but he does look a (hehe) little chubby these past 2 seasons and it has impacted his game noticeably. Just compare the explosiveness from his first seasons to now

Doesn't matter how you look, if you can play those kind of minutes and perform like they do you're in athletic shape. Luka and Jokic don't need to be super slim like Edwards, Morant and Westbrook because they don't rely on supernatural athleticism - they rely on other facets of their game where having a bit more mass is advantageous or at the very least not detrimental.

In any case, Doncic got bullied and embarrassed by Mavs FO's comments about his weight and work ethic(complete lies to try and save face for their terrible and shady trade) so you can look forward to a slimmer Luka next season.

When I did my first two fights in muay thai I wasn't watching my weight neither changing my diet during fight camp and came in 6kg underweight.

I was absolutely shredded and still ate stuff like katsu curry weekly

Magnus Midtbo has Kristian Blummrnfelt on his show, who is the Olympic gold medalist for triathlon.

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.

Nitpick but Alex Yee won gold in 2024, Blummenfelt was 12th!

I feel you are precisely making the opposite point. Athletes eat more because of their energy expenditure. The same happens with people trying to lose weight. It dramatically increases your hunger making a cut that much harder.

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.

> The study compares energy expenditure across different economic groups i.e. western people sitting in offices versus hunter-gatherers in Africa, and found that difference in energy expenditure does not account for differences in obesity, so points to consumption as the likely reason.

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.

I think if the goal is to find out what strategies help average people lose weight - who are mostly not athletes or bodybuilders - then excluding athletes is exactly the right thing to do.

>the link between economic development and obesity is likely related to food (dietary intake) [rather] than daily activity.

--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.

Why unsurprisingly?

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