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Comment by zanellato19 | Hacker News Reader

Eeeh. Exercise doesn't spend enough energy for high calories foods to be worth it. If you want to lose weight that is. A donut is a lot of exercise and muscle building leads to a small but not sufficient calorie spend. The majority of calorie spend still comes from the organs and general body maintenance

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> Exercise doesn't spend enough energy for high calories foods to be worth it. If you want to lose weight that is.

Tell that to all the lean 150 pound / 68kg runners stuffing their faces with high calorie foods all the time.

_Athletes_ are completely different from the normal people looking to exercise. Can you spend 4 hours of your day exercising?

If you are single and short commute, it is doable. People spend hours watching TV, looking at phone.

I don't think it's reasonable. That becomes basically the only thing to do outside of work. Highly unlikely at the very least.

If most people really wanted to I think they could. Split it into multiple blocks

Even most professional endurance athletes rarely hit 28 hours per week of actual training time. That would be like a peak week in a training plan before tapering leading up to a race.

Even more contrary to GP's claim, the top American marathoners are only doing ~13 hour weeks of running before their races. It's public data on Strava.

Try only 4 hours a week of exercise. Most lean runners are only getting that amount of time running in and still eating high calories, because 4 hours of running is ~2,500 extra calories burned every single week.

You're replying to a person saying "exercise doesn't spend enough energy [...] if you want to lose weight" by referencing "lean 68kg runners".

Do you think they want to lose weight?

I wanted to lose weight. I ran a lot (only 5 hours out of the week), ate the same high caloric foods, and lost a lot of weight. Clearly GP's assertion isn't correct, because enough exercise does lose weight.

endurance athletes are laughing

plenty of endurance athletes are pudgy, not lean at all . Usain Bolt is leaner than many endurance athletes. Training for endurance and being lean are different. Some runners get a nice toned body, but this far from the norm.

Athletes are not the same as normal people, who have 1h or so a day to exercise.

You can't outrun a bad diet is a common saying around my parts.

Yes, the literature on this bad. It's even worse than that. Metabolic adaptation means you may think you burned 400 kcal with a long run according to the tracking app, but maybe your body, on net, only burns 100-200 kcal, so this throws off the math.

Now you're just making things up. On any training plan, a long run would be a minimum of 6 mi / 10 km. No adult is going burn less than 400 kcal over that distance, it isn't physiologically possible. And any metabolic adaptation will only be a few percent at most: running economy only improves slightly with training.

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