And yet folks who exercise also end up having acute compensatory eating. [1] Your body is designed to maintain homeostasis.
Exercise is not how you lose weight, changing your diet up to and including fasting is. Exercise is good for you in a whole lot of other ways, but the idea you can outrun a bad diet is pretty thoroughly debunked at this point.
I’d heard this for years and was quite the skeptic. I’d hit the gym pretty consistently in my late teens and cycled a lot and kept a pretty consistent weight irrespective of what I ate. Over the better part of 20 years the only real fluctuations were during extended travel periods where both diet was bad and exercise non-existent. But multiple marathons, extended focus on weight training, picking up various sports again, and I’d oscillate in about a 3kg range.
And then my wife had to go on an extended elimination diet to deal with gastrointestinal issues and I joined as moral support. In the space of a month, with absolutely no exercise happening, I dropped 10kgs. And I don’t think I’d ever felt healthier. As soon as I got back to running I was as quick as I’d ever been, no great surprise I guess given how much lighter I was.
Turns out the biggest impact I could have on my health was being more conscious of what I was eating. I couldn’t out run what I was putting in my mouth, no matter the distances I was putting in.
Anecdata warning - you actually can! The problem with trying to outrun a cheeseburger is that you probably need to be quite fit to do it.
It works like this:
If you're unfit, your capacity for output during exercise is less. If you're fitter, your capacity for output during exercise is higher.
An unfit person doing exercise, will therefore burn significantly fewer calories than someone who is fit if they exercise for the same duration at the same perceived effort.
If I go for a hard 1 hour bike ride, I burn 3 cheeseburgers. An unfit person will struggle to burn much more than 1 despite working as hard as they can.
This seems to run counter to what I see in data based on heart rate at least.
As you get more fit, your cardio conditioning level goes up, which means you are substantially more efficient in exercise.
When you're not efficient, you'll burn more calories doing the same work.
That’s true if you keep exercising at the same absolute output, but that’s not what you’ll naturally do. Your speedometer is how hard it feels.
What getting fitter enables you to do is increase the output without it feeling harder, either through increased duration or increased speed/power/etc.
Be wary of using heart rate as an indicator of this - it varies massively between people, and approximating energy output from it is not much better than using math.rand(). If you’re training to the same heart rate but your speed is going up, you can say you’re improving, but you can’t apply an absolute measure to it with any accuracy.
It’s funny, they way I describe the relationship I have with weight loss is exercise is that the exercise is giving you the reason to eat clean. You won’t want to make that effort worth nothing. It’s not the same for everyone but I certainly notice it
Sorry, but the term dirty bulking, and the existence of "eat big to get big" videos among the body builder community shows that many in the high end to elite strata of weight training not only just don't eat clean, but they also get their enjoyment and muscle from the absolutely nasty food they eat as part of it (... Yes and roids)
For me personally I have noticed that exercising helps me by modulating my food cravings.
I'll get hungry of course, but in a way where I'm more happy just eating some reasonable amount of actual food instead of stuffing myself with a bag of crisps or worse.
This might also be psychological; it feels good after exercising so I feel more inclined to stay on the path.
The result, either way, is that while I know from experience that just changing my diet works to lose weight, it becomes a lot easier to keep it up when also exercising.
This is another one of those fun little half-truths.
> 10 pounds of muscle would burn 50 calories in a day spent at rest, while 10 pounds of fat would burn 20 calories [1]
50 pounds of fat burns 100 calories per day.
10 pounds of muscle burns 50 calories per day.
If you lose 50 pounds of fat and replace it with 10 pounds of muscle, you're net 50 calories per day. About 1/10th of a Starbucks muffin.
Not eating a Starbucks muffin is the same as having 90 extra pounds of muscle. You'd have to look like John Cena for this to make any difference whatsoever. But you're never going to look like John Cena unless you adjust your diet.
Who said anything about resting? I'm talking about exercise. The more you exercise, the more muscle you build, which makes you spend more energy while exercising.
Do you have any idea how much bodybuilders eat, without gaining any significant fat?
> The only way to lose fat is to change your diet.
False. You can lose fat by exercising, without changing your diet whatsoever.
> Who said anything about resting? I'm talking about exercise. The more you exercise, the more muscle you build, which makes you spend more energy while exercising.
Again muscle vs fat don't change significantly that quantity of calories burned, unless you have some citations.
> False. You can lose fat by exercising, without changing your diet whatsoever.
Not in any practical sense. Most folks don't have the time to run a five-miler for each muffin they eat in a given day.
This advice is just not useful. It's technically correct but totally unhelpful. It's basically the tautology: 'once you've lost weight you've lost weight.'
Why would I need citations for simple physics equation? A person with stronger muscles will lift more weight more times than a person with weaker muscles. Since more energy is needed to lift more weight, more energy will be expanded.
Can you point out the mistake in my reasoning, please?
> Most folks don't have the time to run a five-miler for each muffin they eat in a given day.
You are completely missing my argument. I am not saying that your average Joe can spend all the energy he eats through running. I am saying that your average Joe can start going to the gym, develop muscles, and eventually gain enough muscles to be able to expand as much energy as he eats. At that point, he will start losing weight, even if he's eating the same amount of food that he was eating before developing muscles.
> It's technically correct but totally unhelpful
That's totally your opinion, unless you have some citations.
As I said elsewhere here, it is not the case for me - I quite often experience food aversion after exercise (weight training).
I exercise in fasted state, 14-18 hours of fast. If exercise is especially hard, I found food not attractive at all, neither how it looks or how it smells. I have to force myself to eat when this happen and usually eat less.
On bright side, I've found that I recover faster after exercise bouts when I'm in fasted state.
I also have to note that was not the case when I was younger and performed my training routines after being fed. When I exercised being fed I experienced hunger and wanted to eat.
People doubting the power of caloric deficit need to watch Alone. People scarcely bringing in one squirrels-worth of calories a day while laboring around camp are just sloughing off the weight on that show. Some have gotten pulled for medical because they were losing it too fast and stressing their heart. One guy lost 86 pounds in 67 days.
That is not a good rate to lose weight. A rate of ~1% per week for 3-4 months followed by 1-2 months of maintenance before the next weight loss phase is much more sustainable and you are more likely to not gain back the weight after the target weight is achieved.
Yeah its a terrible way to lose weight, that's why stickies on places like bodybuilding forums encourage a moderate deficit plus exercise to maintain bone and organ health (1). But it goes to show that with a deficit you will shed weight. There is no special sauce in individual metabolism that makes energy from nothing at the end of the day. Losing weight is a matter of thermodynamics.
You sound knowledgeable about this: I personally find that even when I’m having trouble controlling caloric intake as well as I’d like that sharp reductions in simple carbohydrates and sugars seem to help with weight loss even if my envelope math seems to indicate comparable total calories?
Is this just bad measurement or is there anything to that?
Sounds to me like it's due to the ease of digesting simple carbs vs complex carbs, which require more digestion to process. I think with complex carbs your net calories gained are actually lower than what the nutrition label says since they require some amount of calories to digest.
research show that people are apparently terrible at evaluating how many calories they take, even dieticians. by cutting more addictive food, it's possible that you're actually eating less than your otherwise would, even if the numbers don't seem to add up
Agreed on all points, but just want to point out that it would be ideal if you could supplement dieting with effective hunger suppression though —- their work towards isolating lactate and phenylalanine as signals towards hunger suppression is pretty impressive if it can give a foothold in that area.
Exercise is not how you lose weight, changing your diet up to and including fasting is. Exercise is good for you in a whole lot of other ways, but the idea you can outrun a bad diet is pretty thoroughly debunked at this point.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19419671/