Well the issue here is that food companies have been pushing the calorie balance mantra, you can eat more as long as you exercise more, except studies have shown you cant, the mantra “you can’t outrun your diet” exists for a reason.
Kurzgesagt has a good video on the workout paradox https://youtu.be/lPrjP4A_X4s?si=KQUibk9D3Cj8sYyi
Renesaince Periodization is a good youtube channel for science backed methods for losing weight if you are interested, but spoiler alert, it takes a long time and you need to eat less for periods of up to 3 months then stay at that weight for the same amount of time before continuing your weight loss to avoid bounce backs and excessively diet fatigue
Kurzgesagt vid goes into some specific and recent research about how our body uses calories, but the idea that exercise can’t help much with weight loss seemed obvious to me just by looking at the numbers.
A brisk pace on a treadmill will burn 260 calories per hour. At a fast pace–which most people wouldn’t be able to keep up for an hour when starting out–it’s 680 calories. Meanwhile, a single 12oz can of Mountain Dew is 170 calories; simply cutting one can of soda out gets you more than halfway to a decent hour’s workout.
As the vid also states (and is supposedly to be covered more in an upcoming part 2), there are other benefits to exercise, but burning more calories that way is a fool’s errand.
Ah, good. Yes. I haven’t been completely ignoring my weight loss goals and just managing to not get any fatter over the last several months… I’ve been using SCIENCE. BITCHES. 😤🧪✨
Well actually Dr Mike from RP does talk about that, sometimes you need time to reset and not to think about your diet to help to clear your mind and then you get back to weight loss when you can, when you are feeling like, you know what, I am feeling good, I want to eat healthier and lose weight.
It is an interesting video. My main takeaway was that we burn the same amount of calories regardless of activity, but when we are sedentary our body uses the calories for evil (inflammatory) purposes.
I admit to not watching that video, at least not yet. But the idea that a person can’t eat more while exercising seems to conflict with the first law of thermodynamics.
I cordially invite you or anyone else to sell the lazy among us on watching the video above. Dispel our concerns… if you dare.
Edit: I gotta say. At -22 currently (sure to increase after this), and with a ton of really great, informative responses below… What are we doing here?
I asked an open question encouraging discussion if anyone is interested in doing that. So why all the down votes? Was it the “if you dare”? Didn’t think a /s would have been necessary but maybe it wasn’t clear?
And look. This isn’t about my imaginary comment score. It’s about community. The comment section is for discussion. Feels like once a comment gets one or two down votes everyone else just adds to them without considering the content. Do we want Lemmy to be a place for interaction or not?
So I have not watched the video, but I have read the book Burn by herman pontzer. And it seems that the body makes up for it in other ways as described in other comments. But your body can and will burn more calories than your normal amount if you do lots of exercise.
The example used in the book is a study the author did where he tracked the calorie usage of people running across the US. They were burning a ton of calories every day (and eating a bunch too). And somehow over the course of this ultra marathon thing, people actually started burn less calories as their body adjusted to the load.
But yeah, do lots of exercise and you’ll feel tired and conserve energy. Do a ton of exercise and your body will burn lots of fat.
I thought the same thing, but turns out the body is really damn complicated. Worth skimming the papers they link in the video - basically your body adapts over the course of ~6 months or less if you become more active by saving energy elsewhere. Things like inflation and basic metabolic functions can burn way more energy than they need to.
The gist of the video is that the brain is a really powerful regulator of how much energy you use. Do a ton of exercise and it’ll find energy savings elsewhere.
But as you build up muscles you constantly need more, even when not doing anything
Core issue is that physical exercise might move the needle 5 or so percent in terms of your total energy consumption in short term, a tad more longer term if the exercise builds some nice energy hungry muscle mass.
Though exercise helps on a lot of other fronts (insulin resistance, cardio vascular health, joint health, its not enough change in activity to counteract much extra food intake.
it likely doesnt violate thermodynamics since caloric intake isn’t likely to be super representative of actual converted energy. Likewise, an individuals energy consumption is also likely to vary as well, even in the case of certain consumed foods. Wouldn’t suprise me if there was data suggesting asian people consumed food in a marginally different manner to american people, for example. There are just certain things the body adapts to, and over time engages with biased selection for.
The problem is that practical advice is often misinterpreted or misconstrued.
“the idea that a person can’t eat more while exercising”
You can, of course, eat more while exercising.
But you can’t eat much more while exercising, because running while eating is a choking hazard.
I’m kidding, but that is the nature of what I’m getting at.
But really–you can’t eat much more during the day because exercising just doesn’t burn much more calories. And eating a lot more calories is relatively trivial.
The video says your immune systems and glands go into hyperdrive when you’re not working out, and give you chronic inflammation and stress. When you work out, your body’s other systems chill the fuck out and stop killing you, and in total you burn the same amount of energy.
I would posit if you are lazy, you aren’t doing the kind of work that would be required to out eat a bad diet. There are plenty of skinny people who have organs that look more like force fed geese than human, and there are fat people than finish the Ironman.
The people who can “out eat” a bad diet probably don’t eat like you think they do, or even they say they do. Even when Michael Phelps said he ate 10,000 calories of junk food, he was getting likev maybe 2,000 of the 10,000 calories he ate a day from pizza at night.
Most people won’t out work out a bad diet cause they don’t actually know how many calories they are taking in and they aren’t training 8-12 hours a day 50-52 weeks of the year.
I haven’t yet watched it either, but I’ll take a punt. It’s very hard to apply the first law to bodies, because we ingest, burn, store, and excrete in very complicated ways. It’s not as simple as calories in vs calories burned.
In the end, it is though. Over time, If you create a calorie deficit, you lose weight and if you create a surplus, you gain weight.
However, how much you lose or gain depends on a lot of factors. And most importantly, when we lose weight, we are fighting millions of years of evolution to not eat. So the diet fatigue is real.
But if you take your current weight, measure your daily calorie intake for a week or two and then slightly reduce your daily calories below that intake, you will lose weight.
but- my doctor told me that although i’m bedridden, if i just start fasting, i’ll be able to walk without pain again 🧐🤌 /s
edit: this is a joke about the american healthcare system frequently deciding that overweight patients would not have a problem if they weren’t overweight, and many doctors also preaching the CICO (calories in, calories out) method, it is a joke agreeing with the poster
