I gained about 50 lbs in my 20's by getting a sedentary job and eating poorly after moving out on my own. I spent a solid 2 years trying to lose weight by working out actively and lost nothing. When I changed my diet, I dropped it all over time and kept it off for the last 15+ years.
I tell people I know trying to lose weight to separate the ideas of exercise and diet, but few listen and most are quite resistant to the idea. To me, I think of exercise as maintaining a healthy heart, posture, etc. but keep it completely out of the picture for weight management.
The other side of this is motivation. If you don't see yourself losing weight from exercise, it demotivates you and that demotivation then carries into other areas like diet. So if you keep those separate, you won't make poor choices in your overall health as a result of feeling demotivated by the lack of results from exercise and you won't fall off the bandwagon so easily.
Strength and aerobic exercise has so many benefits (mood, sleep, longevity, energy levels, reduce chronic disease, etc.), but "weight loss" (really "fat loss") is barely one of them. This is one of the biggest misconceptions in general health understanding (along with exercises reducing fat in specific spots).
It is beneficial to both the exercise and food industries to perpetuate this myth. Exercise products are more attractive to people if they think it can make them look more attractive. Excessive calorie consumption is acceptable if you think you can "work it off later".
It feels like that a lot of people use exercise (and diets for that matter) as a kind of self-flagellation, working off the guilt of eating "bad". But do people really want to live in guilt like that? Is that what motivates them?
Thing is, I'm healthier now that I don't feel guilty about what I eat, and also don't feel like snacking / "cheating" nearly as much. A lot of people don't eat normal, they have no healthy baseline; they don't eat regularly, they eat reactively to "I am hungry" or "Oh shit I need to figure out something for dinner". This is especially an issue in the US where it seems that eating takeout is the norm (and what you have is decided on the spot instead of planned in advance), but please correct me if I'm wrong. This takeout culture is also growing in Europe, especially with apps and services that make it easier to just reach for it. For a good period we ended up having takeout once a week, often reactively / last minute, and it's nowhere near the healthiest choice (but a chips, cheese, kebab, sauce and salad lasagna is so good)
Weight, and weight loss, are not good measures of bodily appearance or health. It's bad to be frail, malnourished, and dehydrated (a significant amount of body weight is water). What really matters is the amount of muscle and fat in your body, and exercise is certainly a good way to build muscle. Moreover, exercise is great for cardiovascular health, which is also essential.
The Cochrane Collaboration found that exercising alone led to limited weight loss. In combination with diet, however, it resulted in a 1 kilogram weight loss over dieting alone. A 1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds) loss was observed with a greater degree of exercise.[29] Even though exercise as carried out in the general population has only modest effects, a dose response curve is found and very intense exercise can lead to substantial weight loss. During 20 weeks of basic military training with no dietary restriction, obese military recruits lost 12.5 kg (28 lb).[30] High levels of physical activity seem to be necessary to maintain weight loss.[31] A pedometer appears useful for motivation. Over an average of 18-weeks of use, physical activity increased by 27% resulting in a 0.38 decrease in BMI.[32]
At the very least, this article should be clarified (or maybe, the backing research is garbage, which is a possibility).
In the context of weight management, the concept of "weight loss" should never be considered. This is because two people with same weight may have wildly different body compositions; this also applied to the same people but in different conditions.
A person may have different body compositions, but same weight, in two different periods of their life, which can very well be before and after starting a physical activity regime.
Regardless, I'm extremely skeptical. When one has a sedentary lifestyle, and turns to consistent sport activity, it's very typical to quickly lose fat and gain muscles for some time, which is in conflict with the research.
> Regardless, I'm extremely skeptical. When one has a sedentary lifestyle, and turns to consistent sport activity, it's very typical to quickly lose fat and gain muscles for some time, which is in conflict with the research.
I have two thoughts on this. The first one is, I see more than a few chubby-or-more professional baseball players. Second, I see a TON of professional football players, specifically lineman, lose a hundred plus pounds because they're no longer trying to stay above a weight to remain competitive. The last one I read about just changed his diet. Had no desire to lift a weight or run a sprint ever again.
I don't track why people think weight loss is mostly exercise, where it is in fact almost entirely diet. This topic really makes people mad, I've never understood why. If you want to lose weight you can do so, safely, without ever exercising.
> In the context of weight management, the concept of "weight loss" should never be considered. This is because two people with same weight may have wildly different body compositions; this also applied to the same people but in different conditions.
Weight loss should _never_ be considered? How does that follow? Lots of people definitely need to lose weight.
I took it to mean that the goal is a reduction in adiposity. For most cases, weight loss will mean that, but it is also possible to become sarcopenic or chronically dehydrated, be lighter, and be in worse health.
Most studies look at more than just weight, they minimally assess BMI and ideally estimate body fat percentage. Some go further, looking at relative risk of other endpoints such as heart attack, heart failure, stroke, diabetes, injury, hospitalization, death, etc.
Take a person that with X% body fat and Y% muscles.
They start going to the gym; after some time, they'll have (random numbers) (X-2)% body fat, and (Y+2)% muscles.
On a scale, their weight will be the same, but in reality, their body composition (and looks) will be considerably different.
This is a very important concept. Beside the obvious case where somebody just looks at the scale, and they don't realize their progress, body composition as opposed to weight is extremely important when doing diets, because an improper diet may lead to excessive muscle loss, which is accidentally perceived as a success (on the scale) rather than a failure (because the body composition hasn't changed as intended).
> This paradox challenges the common belief that more exercise equates to more calories burned and consequently, more weight loss.
This is pretty obvious if you have ever done strength training/tried to lose weight. Working out makes you really hungry. It is a lot easier to lose weight while not exercising just by only eating when you are hungry, and not eating garbage. I've heard it called "inuitive eating".
This is also why I personally don't believe in bulking. You should just hit your macros and try to progress naturally. If you do cycles of cutting and bulking you are really just making your progress inconsistent and fucking up your digestive tract. Controversial opinion I know.
This is one of the hardest lessons I learned. I used to think I could escape my consumption habits with enough exercise. It was fun to believe I could go on a multi-day bender and then work it all off with a heroic CrossFit session.
But, this is actually like bailing water out of a sinking cruise liner with a teaspoon. It is 1000x more effective to simply not consume the calories in the first place. The energy density of modern food is incomprehensible to our ancestry.
I focus about 80% of my willpower on the diet & meal prep aspects. The remainder is toward exercise. I find that when my diet slips, it is far more destructive than when I miss a few days on the rowing machine.
Generally humans are very efficient machines, even ignoring the effect discussed here. Just look up the numbers, very generally, an hour of intense exercise tends to burn the same amount as quite a frugal lunch. I find that it is much easier to reduce say 500 calories of daily intake than to burn the same amount.
Obviously, this is not a wise attitude to have, exercise has a lot of other benefits and it is critical to maintain good health. But yeah, if it's just about loosing weight the cost (time, willpower, money, fatigue...) to benefit ratio is surprisingly low.
My mental model of bodyweight is that my body can adapt to use less energy to some degree, probably a few thousand kJ at most. If I exercise or drop my caloric intake and it's still within that range, I won't have to dig into fat reserves much. If I do more than that, I absolutely will.
As you say, doing low to moderate intensity exercise for a long time -- like walking 20km a day for a week, which is double what the Hadza walk -- is enough to cause me to lose weight unless I'm eating more to make up for it.
Yeah, everyone’s different. My intake is around 10k kcal when cycling throughout the day, and it’s like nothing. How much I climb matters though, by a lot (at least 2 000 m). Strangely enough, hiking doesn’t cut it for me, it doesn’t go down much even after 50 km/day, which is wild (I still do it though).
So of those 2k calories the average human body needs to sustain itself, only a fraction of it, or none at all, is needed to perform many hours of physical labor. This means physical labor done by humans is cheap or free.
I don’t see how this can be true in the limit. If you are a women and burn > 2000 calories exercising then surely your total will be higher than the sedentary total of 1900 calories :).
The human body doesn’t indiscriminately burn its weight in calories as fuel. Energy intake and expenditure is complicated. If someone expends energy through using up their stored glycogen, as most of us do, that may not use energy from fat mass.
I take it as fat mass being transformed into muscle mass. It's not too much weird since bodybuilders or strongmen need high calories to maintain / build their mass.
I've commonly heard this as "you can't outrun a bad diet".
As more I learn about weight loss the more I harden in my belief that obesity is more like having a medical condition than it is a personality flaw. Maybe if we had more epidemiologists examining chemical/environmental/etc causal factors to the sharp uptick in obesity and less culture war/shame/"just have more discipline" about it we could've avoided a ton of medical expenditure on the medical needs of obese patients (not just diabetes but I mean larger beds/equipment, nurse injuries in moving obese patients, etc).
What I don't understand is: how does the exercise paradox exist but it's also super common for an athlete to put on tons of weight immediately after stopping their exercise due to an injury or similar?
> commonly heard this as "you can't outrun a bad diet"
It’s worse than that. If your metabolism is fucked your body could literally reduce critical functions to starvation levels before conceding and letting you burn more calories than you consume.
Because exercising is actually burning calories. And if you exercise a lot, you will need to eat more and in a way that would make someone sedentary gain weight. People who exercise more, need to eat more and are spending more calories per day.
Otherwise said "you can't outrun a bad diet" is oversimplification, exercise paradox is something that happens in some conditions and is oversimplification. And likewise, calories in calories out is oversimplification.
This is trivially observable as untrue to anyone with an athlete level of physical activity. Eating enough food to sustain training for a marathon is work.
Consuming enough calories every day during peak training for a marathon is exhausting, disgusting, and you’re always hungry. Food loses all connection to enjoyment and you’re just shoveling calories in your face all day. You could stop but then good luck training the next day.
I have so far not gained any weight during these cycles. Usually I end up losing some. So the calories gotta be going somewhere.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Maybe, but so what? Exercise has so many positive second order effects, and then those may help with weight loss indirectly.
- Improved mood, focus, calm, etc, make it easier and more pleasant to adhere to a better diet
- Can improve sleep quality. Low sleep quality is linked to overeating and obesity and other problems. In fact, poor diet, poor sleep, and poor exercise are all interlinked. So start anywhere and expect the others to get easier to deal with over time too.
- So what if weight doesn't change, but it's due to fat decreasing and muscle increasing? That's a good thing -- weight is an imperfect measure of obesity. Muscle, just by existing, burns more calories. And unlike abdominal fat, is not linked to organ problems.
- And on and on and on. Just do anything to get healthier. Every healthy action will synergestically reinforce every other healthy action. Don't be a narrow beancounter looking at just one component, because your body is not just a handful of components narrowly linked together via thin black box abstraction layers; it's a big spaghetti code system that cannot be seperated cleanly out into pieces. Not exercising is really, really unhealthy, contrary to modern customary belief, so you might as well, rather than fixating on fixing only some other component while keeping this important component broken.
- Moderate exercise seems to actually moderate appetite a little. And heavier exercise seems to make hunger less cravingy and more indiscriminate, making it easier to adhere to a diet (eg, a couch potato might really crave a specific candy or chips, but someone who just ran some miles will ecstatically and happily devour some beans and cabbage and oatmeal and whatever)
- Improves digestion quality and gut motility!
- Besides, isn't the goal of weight loss to get healthier in general, anyway? Focus on the overall goal and start anywhere, anywhere that is easiest. If getting better sleep is easier, do that. If cutting toxins like alcohol and nicotine is easier, start there. If improving diet is easier, start there. If improving positive human relationships and sense of purpose is easier, start there. If exercise is easier, start there. Start anywhere, and keep improving anywhere the wins are most easily found, and gradually everything else will become easier.
One more tip: It's easier to change what you eat than how much. Also, calories in calories out is bunk. It's true to some degree in that they are related, but ignores the fact that (1) how much your body is spending is highly variable, even somewhat independent of movement -- imagine how much energy your body has to spend to fight an infection for example (2) why would anyone imagine every calorie consumed will actually be absorbed? the gut is highly complex and depending on many factors calories could be absorbed or go right out the other end unused, and the gut flora interacts complexly with all this. Focus on eating healthy things first above healthy amounts. It's easier, and will have a positive impact all its own, creating another stepping stone towards other goals.
> Also, calories in calories out is bunk. It's true to some degree in that they are related, but ignores the fact that (1) how much your body is spending is highly variable, even somewhat independent of movement -- imagine how much energy your body has to spend to fight an infection for example
The human body is not that variant. Sure, during illness you may burn more calories from the illness and potential fever… but you’re also usually extremely low on movement since your body physically makes you exhausted. The rest of the time though? No way. Humans generally are not that variant in expenditure.
> (2) why would anyone imagine every calorie consumed will actually be absorbed? the gut is highly complex and depending on many factors calories could be absorbed or go right out the other end unused, and the gut flora interacts complexly with all this. Focus on eating healthy things first above healthy amounts. It's easier, and will have a positive impact all its own, creating another stepping stone towards other goals.
What evidence do you have to the contrary? The human body is extremely efficient at absorbing calories, and outside of extremes (eating 10kcal a day, or having some sort of deficiency such as celiacs that doesn’t let you digest certain things), I see no reason why you don’t absorb the vast, vast majority of all calories consumed.
> Besides, isn't the goal of weight loss to get healthier in general, anyway?
In my opinion, "get healthy" is more a moral judgement than it is an objective assessment. I've definitely seen fat women be shamed even while they're exercising as "not being healthy" or "glorifying being unhealthy" [yes, just for exercising in public, an objectively healthy behavior, except they're doing it while fat].
I gained about 50 lbs in my 20's by getting a sedentary job and eating poorly after moving out on my own. I spent a solid 2 years trying to lose weight by working out actively and lost nothing. When I changed my diet, I dropped it all over time and kept it off for the last 15+ years.
I tell people I know trying to lose weight to separate the ideas of exercise and diet, but few listen and most are quite resistant to the idea. To me, I think of exercise as maintaining a healthy heart, posture, etc. but keep it completely out of the picture for weight management.
The other side of this is motivation. If you don't see yourself losing weight from exercise, it demotivates you and that demotivation then carries into other areas like diet. So if you keep those separate, you won't make poor choices in your overall health as a result of feeling demotivated by the lack of results from exercise and you won't fall off the bandwagon so easily.
Strength and aerobic exercise has so many benefits (mood, sleep, longevity, energy levels, reduce chronic disease, etc.), but "weight loss" (really "fat loss") is barely one of them. This is one of the biggest misconceptions in general health understanding (along with exercises reducing fat in specific spots).
It is beneficial to both the exercise and food industries to perpetuate this myth. Exercise products are more attractive to people if they think it can make them look more attractive. Excessive calorie consumption is acceptable if you think you can "work it off later".
It feels like that a lot of people use exercise (and diets for that matter) as a kind of self-flagellation, working off the guilt of eating "bad". But do people really want to live in guilt like that? Is that what motivates them?
Thing is, I'm healthier now that I don't feel guilty about what I eat, and also don't feel like snacking / "cheating" nearly as much. A lot of people don't eat normal, they have no healthy baseline; they don't eat regularly, they eat reactively to "I am hungry" or "Oh shit I need to figure out something for dinner". This is especially an issue in the US where it seems that eating takeout is the norm (and what you have is decided on the spot instead of planned in advance), but please correct me if I'm wrong. This takeout culture is also growing in Europe, especially with apps and services that make it easier to just reach for it. For a good period we ended up having takeout once a week, often reactively / last minute, and it's nowhere near the healthiest choice (but a chips, cheese, kebab, sauce and salad lasagna is so good)
Weight, and weight loss, are not good measures of bodily appearance or health. It's bad to be frail, malnourished, and dehydrated (a significant amount of body weight is water). What really matters is the amount of muscle and fat in your body, and exercise is certainly a good way to build muscle. Moreover, exercise is great for cardiovascular health, which is also essential.
In other words, the so-called "paradox" is largely irrelevant, and avoiding exercise is ill-advised. A link in the same Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefits_of_physical_activity
Also on Wikipedia:
The Cochrane Collaboration found that exercising alone led to limited weight loss. In combination with diet, however, it resulted in a 1 kilogram weight loss over dieting alone. A 1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds) loss was observed with a greater degree of exercise.[29] Even though exercise as carried out in the general population has only modest effects, a dose response curve is found and very intense exercise can lead to substantial weight loss. During 20 weeks of basic military training with no dietary restriction, obese military recruits lost 12.5 kg (28 lb).[30] High levels of physical activity seem to be necessary to maintain weight loss.[31] A pedometer appears useful for motivation. Over an average of 18-weeks of use, physical activity increased by 27% resulting in a 0.38 decrease in BMI.[32]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_of_obesity#Exercise
[29-32] endnotes in Wikipedia
Also interesting, a meta-analysis:
Effects of Different Exercises Combined with Different Dietary Interventions on Body Composition: A Systematic Review and Network Meta-Analysis
Yongchao Xie, Yu Gu, Zhen Li, Bingchen He, Lei Zhang
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11397086/
Kurzgesagt did a good video on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSSkDos2hzo
"You lose weight in the kitchen; you gain health in the gym" is the adage that has served me well.
Just like keeping one's house organized, the best thing is to reduce Junk In rather than trying to get Junk Out.
At the very least, this article should be clarified (or maybe, the backing research is garbage, which is a possibility).
In the context of weight management, the concept of "weight loss" should never be considered. This is because two people with same weight may have wildly different body compositions; this also applied to the same people but in different conditions.
A person may have different body compositions, but same weight, in two different periods of their life, which can very well be before and after starting a physical activity regime.
Regardless, I'm extremely skeptical. When one has a sedentary lifestyle, and turns to consistent sport activity, it's very typical to quickly lose fat and gain muscles for some time, which is in conflict with the research.
> Regardless, I'm extremely skeptical. When one has a sedentary lifestyle, and turns to consistent sport activity, it's very typical to quickly lose fat and gain muscles for some time, which is in conflict with the research.
I have two thoughts on this. The first one is, I see more than a few chubby-or-more professional baseball players. Second, I see a TON of professional football players, specifically lineman, lose a hundred plus pounds because they're no longer trying to stay above a weight to remain competitive. The last one I read about just changed his diet. Had no desire to lift a weight or run a sprint ever again.
I don't track why people think weight loss is mostly exercise, where it is in fact almost entirely diet. This topic really makes people mad, I've never understood why. If you want to lose weight you can do so, safely, without ever exercising.
> In the context of weight management, the concept of "weight loss" should never be considered. This is because two people with same weight may have wildly different body compositions; this also applied to the same people but in different conditions.
Weight loss should _never_ be considered? How does that follow? Lots of people definitely need to lose weight.
I took it to mean that the goal is a reduction in adiposity. For most cases, weight loss will mean that, but it is also possible to become sarcopenic or chronically dehydrated, be lighter, and be in worse health.
Most studies look at more than just weight, they minimally assess BMI and ideally estimate body fat percentage. Some go further, looking at relative risk of other endpoints such as heart attack, heart failure, stroke, diabetes, injury, hospitalization, death, etc.
Take a person that with X% body fat and Y% muscles.
They start going to the gym; after some time, they'll have (random numbers) (X-2)% body fat, and (Y+2)% muscles.
On a scale, their weight will be the same, but in reality, their body composition (and looks) will be considerably different.
This is a very important concept. Beside the obvious case where somebody just looks at the scale, and they don't realize their progress, body composition as opposed to weight is extremely important when doing diets, because an improper diet may lead to excessive muscle loss, which is accidentally perceived as a success (on the scale) rather than a failure (because the body composition hasn't changed as intended).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_point_theory
> This paradox challenges the common belief that more exercise equates to more calories burned and consequently, more weight loss.
This is pretty obvious if you have ever done strength training/tried to lose weight. Working out makes you really hungry. It is a lot easier to lose weight while not exercising just by only eating when you are hungry, and not eating garbage. I've heard it called "inuitive eating".
This is also why I personally don't believe in bulking. You should just hit your macros and try to progress naturally. If you do cycles of cutting and bulking you are really just making your progress inconsistent and fucking up your digestive tract. Controversial opinion I know.
Maybe the issue is that how much you weigh is a terrible metric for how fit you are.
This is one of the hardest lessons I learned. I used to think I could escape my consumption habits with enough exercise. It was fun to believe I could go on a multi-day bender and then work it all off with a heroic CrossFit session.
But, this is actually like bailing water out of a sinking cruise liner with a teaspoon. It is 1000x more effective to simply not consume the calories in the first place. The energy density of modern food is incomprehensible to our ancestry.
I focus about 80% of my willpower on the diet & meal prep aspects. The remainder is toward exercise. I find that when my diet slips, it is far more destructive than when I miss a few days on the rowing machine.
Generally humans are very efficient machines, even ignoring the effect discussed here. Just look up the numbers, very generally, an hour of intense exercise tends to burn the same amount as quite a frugal lunch. I find that it is much easier to reduce say 500 calories of daily intake than to burn the same amount.
Obviously, this is not a wise attitude to have, exercise has a lot of other benefits and it is critical to maintain good health. But yeah, if it's just about loosing weight the cost (time, willpower, money, fatigue...) to benefit ratio is surprisingly low.
When he was competing, Michael Phelps famously ate something like 8,000 calories a day. How do we square this with the Exercise Paradox?
I generally lose 1 kilo a day on bikepacking trips (or 100 km every three or four days). No yo-yo effect.
My mental model of bodyweight is that my body can adapt to use less energy to some degree, probably a few thousand kJ at most. If I exercise or drop my caloric intake and it's still within that range, I won't have to dig into fat reserves much. If I do more than that, I absolutely will.
As you say, doing low to moderate intensity exercise for a long time -- like walking 20km a day for a week, which is double what the Hadza walk -- is enough to cause me to lose weight unless I'm eating more to make up for it.
Yeah, everyone’s different. My intake is around 10k kcal when cycling throughout the day, and it’s like nothing. How much I climb matters though, by a lot (at least 2 000 m). Strangely enough, hiking doesn’t cut it for me, it doesn’t go down much even after 50 km/day, which is wild (I still do it though).
Link to paper (PDF): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3405064/pdf/pone.00...
So of those 2k calories the average human body needs to sustain itself, only a fraction of it, or none at all, is needed to perform many hours of physical labor. This means physical labor done by humans is cheap or free.
I don’t see how this can be true in the limit. If you are a women and burn > 2000 calories exercising then surely your total will be higher than the sedentary total of 1900 calories :).
The human body doesn’t indiscriminately burn its weight in calories as fuel. Energy intake and expenditure is complicated. If someone expends energy through using up their stored glycogen, as most of us do, that may not use energy from fat mass.
I take it as fat mass being transformed into muscle mass. It's not too much weird since bodybuilders or strongmen need high calories to maintain / build their mass.
I've commonly heard this as "you can't outrun a bad diet".
As more I learn about weight loss the more I harden in my belief that obesity is more like having a medical condition than it is a personality flaw. Maybe if we had more epidemiologists examining chemical/environmental/etc causal factors to the sharp uptick in obesity and less culture war/shame/"just have more discipline" about it we could've avoided a ton of medical expenditure on the medical needs of obese patients (not just diabetes but I mean larger beds/equipment, nurse injuries in moving obese patients, etc).
What I don't understand is: how does the exercise paradox exist but it's also super common for an athlete to put on tons of weight immediately after stopping their exercise due to an injury or similar?
> commonly heard this as "you can't outrun a bad diet"
It’s worse than that. If your metabolism is fucked your body could literally reduce critical functions to starvation levels before conceding and letting you burn more calories than you consume.
> how does the exercise paradox exist
Because exercising is actually burning calories. And if you exercise a lot, you will need to eat more and in a way that would make someone sedentary gain weight. People who exercise more, need to eat more and are spending more calories per day.
Otherwise said "you can't outrun a bad diet" is oversimplification, exercise paradox is something that happens in some conditions and is oversimplification. And likewise, calories in calories out is oversimplification.
This is trivially observable as untrue to anyone with an athlete level of physical activity. Eating enough food to sustain training for a marathon is work.
Consuming enough calories every day during peak training for a marathon is exhausting, disgusting, and you’re always hungry. Food loses all connection to enjoyment and you’re just shoveling calories in your face all day. You could stop but then good luck training the next day.
I have so far not gained any weight during these cycles. Usually I end up losing some. So the calories gotta be going somewhere.
Exercise and work up an appetite.
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_...
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.
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.
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.
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
Maybe, but so what? Exercise has so many positive second order effects, and then those may help with weight loss indirectly.
- Improved mood, focus, calm, etc, make it easier and more pleasant to adhere to a better diet
- Can improve sleep quality. Low sleep quality is linked to overeating and obesity and other problems. In fact, poor diet, poor sleep, and poor exercise are all interlinked. So start anywhere and expect the others to get easier to deal with over time too.
- So what if weight doesn't change, but it's due to fat decreasing and muscle increasing? That's a good thing -- weight is an imperfect measure of obesity. Muscle, just by existing, burns more calories. And unlike abdominal fat, is not linked to organ problems.
- And on and on and on. Just do anything to get healthier. Every healthy action will synergestically reinforce every other healthy action. Don't be a narrow beancounter looking at just one component, because your body is not just a handful of components narrowly linked together via thin black box abstraction layers; it's a big spaghetti code system that cannot be seperated cleanly out into pieces. Not exercising is really, really unhealthy, contrary to modern customary belief, so you might as well, rather than fixating on fixing only some other component while keeping this important component broken.
- Moderate exercise seems to actually moderate appetite a little. And heavier exercise seems to make hunger less cravingy and more indiscriminate, making it easier to adhere to a diet (eg, a couch potato might really crave a specific candy or chips, but someone who just ran some miles will ecstatically and happily devour some beans and cabbage and oatmeal and whatever)
- Improves digestion quality and gut motility!
- Besides, isn't the goal of weight loss to get healthier in general, anyway? Focus on the overall goal and start anywhere, anywhere that is easiest. If getting better sleep is easier, do that. If cutting toxins like alcohol and nicotine is easier, start there. If improving diet is easier, start there. If improving positive human relationships and sense of purpose is easier, start there. If exercise is easier, start there. Start anywhere, and keep improving anywhere the wins are most easily found, and gradually everything else will become easier.
One more tip: It's easier to change what you eat than how much. Also, calories in calories out is bunk. It's true to some degree in that they are related, but ignores the fact that (1) how much your body is spending is highly variable, even somewhat independent of movement -- imagine how much energy your body has to spend to fight an infection for example (2) why would anyone imagine every calorie consumed will actually be absorbed? the gut is highly complex and depending on many factors calories could be absorbed or go right out the other end unused, and the gut flora interacts complexly with all this. Focus on eating healthy things first above healthy amounts. It's easier, and will have a positive impact all its own, creating another stepping stone towards other goals.
> Also, calories in calories out is bunk. It's true to some degree in that they are related, but ignores the fact that (1) how much your body is spending is highly variable, even somewhat independent of movement -- imagine how much energy your body has to spend to fight an infection for example
The human body is not that variant. Sure, during illness you may burn more calories from the illness and potential fever… but you’re also usually extremely low on movement since your body physically makes you exhausted. The rest of the time though? No way. Humans generally are not that variant in expenditure.
> (2) why would anyone imagine every calorie consumed will actually be absorbed? the gut is highly complex and depending on many factors calories could be absorbed or go right out the other end unused, and the gut flora interacts complexly with all this. Focus on eating healthy things first above healthy amounts. It's easier, and will have a positive impact all its own, creating another stepping stone towards other goals.
What evidence do you have to the contrary? The human body is extremely efficient at absorbing calories, and outside of extremes (eating 10kcal a day, or having some sort of deficiency such as celiacs that doesn’t let you digest certain things), I see no reason why you don’t absorb the vast, vast majority of all calories consumed.
> Besides, isn't the goal of weight loss to get healthier in general, anyway?
In my opinion, "get healthy" is more a moral judgement than it is an objective assessment. I've definitely seen fat women be shamed even while they're exercising as "not being healthy" or "glorifying being unhealthy" [yes, just for exercising in public, an objectively healthy behavior, except they're doing it while fat].
> Besides, isn't the goal of weight loss to get healthier in general, anyway?
I would argue that for majority of the people who talk about it does not. The goal is aesthetic and moral.