this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
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me_irl
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No shit. That's not some great revelation and I'm kinda tired of seeing it posted as if it is.
You don't burn a great deal more calories exercising than you do just sitting on the couch. Your body is very good at conserving energy. Not to say exercise isn't beneficial, it is, it's just not a great weight loss tool. Not at last as good as common wisdom might suggest.
The caveman in your skull is also very persuasive, and wants you to eat far more than you need, because it thinks you might not be able to find food again for a while. The caveman really likes carbs, and foods high in sugar and fat, and will ask for more the second you have any.
Ignoring the caveman is hard, harder for some than others. It's also taxing and after a while the caveman will wear you down.
Effective weight loss isn't just about putting less food on your plate. Fucking anybody can do that and it's exceedingly obvious to those trying that that's what they need to do.
Losing weight is about beating back the caveman in your skull, convincing him that he's had enough, and feeding him in a way that also nourishes the body you both live in.
There's a reason most people fail, and fail repeatedly to lose weight. It's as simple as eating less but it turns out, eating less for people who eat a lot isn't actually that simple. There are psychological and physiological drivers causing them to keep going back for more, to lie to themselves about how they're doing, and to ignore the obvious cues that something isn't working.
It really is the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" or "just don't take any drugs, duh" of weight loss. Like, you can't just ignore all the social, systemic issues in our health and food industries, reduce it all to cals in vs cals out, and expect that to work. It's reductive and unproductive.
People aren't having trouble with math or willpower, they're having trouble with the fact that most (emphasis on "most") readily available, cheap food is bad for you. Most people in poverty grew up with processed, heavily advertised junk and have literal addictions to this shit.
It's almost identical to saying "just stop taking drugs." Or "just stop drinking."
The reasons people turn to drugs and alcohol are not entirely different from the reasons people turn to food, but you have to keep eating something, and changing your diet from a very unhealthy one to a healthy one is a lot of work. You can keep going to the drive through, but a, they're literally designed to get you to buy more than you want, and b, would you tell an alcoholic to go in to a liquor store for soda on day 1 of recovery?
It’s also misleading as hell, because calorie absorption and basal metabolic rates differ so widely among people. My husband and I live similarly active lifestyles and eat about the same amount of food. I’m slightly taller than he is, but half his weight. I don’t know how that happens, but it does.
Not really, evidence suggests that between average people you will see at most 4% difference in BMR
If it’s not a big difference, how does it lead to such divergent results? I’d suggest that a 4% difference is in fact pretty big, as that’s the equivalent of over 500 calories a week.
Do you have a link for the evidence? I’d be interested to see what it says about calorie absorption, as I suspect that has an even greater effect. Unfortunately, everyone just seems to repeat CICO as though it’s easy or simple to measure either of those inputs with accuracy. People just hope they’re average and that it will work normally for them. Most people are average, so that works for a lot of people, but not everyone.
I personally don’t digest animal fat well, so anything other than white meat chicken will give me the shits. I don’t eat animal products anymore, but when I did, I obviously wasn’t receiving 200 calories from 200 calories worth of beef. My sister has celiac’s, and when she realized it and stopped eating gluten, she gained a bunch of weight, because she was finally absorbing calories from her diet.
That's literally exactly how it has worked for me. Obviously it takes some will power and discipline, but so does basically everything.
Our individual stories do not always translate to the bigger picture, gmtom. You might have grown up in a household where you were insulated from the predations of the processed food industry. You might have had better habits instilled in you as a child. You might have had a positive body image at one point in your life, to serve as inspiration for your weight loss journey. Maybe none of those are true and you truly are one of the lucky (and hard working!) ones who escaped this situation just like the addicts who recover through willpower alone. Regardless, we cannot all rely on being gmtom.
My final paragraph is not focused on the individual but on the epidemic of obesity. We cannot solve this through brow beating about CICO just like Republicans aren't going to solve the drug addiction crisis through jailing everyone with an addiction. People are using food to fill a hole in their lives, just like drugs, and we have to do the hard work of figuring that root out. Otherwise, we are doomed to become ineffective and unhelpful, leaving people to suffer.
Also my outlook changed a lot when I saw the stats on how many people with supermorbid obesity were chronically molested as children, as in over an extended period of time. It usually stems from wanting to become undesirable to the abuser, then snowballs into a literal addiction (opiate blockers have even proven successful with some patients). To be clear, I'm also not talking about people with a little extra fluff, I'm talking TLC "My 600lb Life" obesity to the extent they can't even walk.
There have been many times that I justified gaining weight via alcoholism because I thought maybe if I was disgusting no one would assault me again. Turns that that's not only not true, I've become disgusted with and hate my own body. So now I have a crippling alcohol addiction in addition to hating myself, and being afraid of interacting with certain people.
I've done a lot of therapy. And I will continue to do a lot of therapy. I almost graduated from therapy this spring, and had curbed my alcohol intake. But, then I had to get a restraining order and my brain fell right back into it's old habits. It shouldn't be this hard to feel safe as a middle aged adult lol
Hey friend. I'm on your team here. I can't help you but I'm rooting for you so hard.
It's hard. Fuckin hardest thing you'll ever do. You don't have to succeed in one try, or all at once. Every day is another chance to succeed just a little bit more, even if you stumbled yesterday.
Shit’s hard, it sounds like you have come a long way. I’m rooting for you ❤️
Thank you 💜
Depends on how intense the exercise is, but it can easily be more than a factor of 3 times as much energy as sitting around (something like walking) to more than 10 times as much (things like vigorous cycling, running, etc). Would be really hard to maintain 20 times sitting output for any significant period of time though.
That's serious athlete level of performance, though. And a result of that rigorous of exercise is an increased appetite, for obvious reasons.
Yes, freakish athletes like Micheal Phelps do exist, and intaking enough calories to fuel their workout is actually difficult. But for the regular humans just trying to lose weight, it's far more effective to focus on calories than to focus on heavy exercise for 3+ hours a day.
What is serious athlete level of performance? 10x for at least 30 minutes/day seems pretty manageable for someone without significant medical conditions to work up to in a short period. Even if you eat back 80% of that, it can still lead to an equilibrium weight that's like 20lb less.
I can't believe the number of people on here who keep repeating that exercising can't replace eating less... If you eat the same amount of calories as before but increase the calories you burn by 500 the result is the same as reducing how much you eat by 500 calories while maintaining the same daily needs. Heck, long term doing it through exercising is better for you as well!
Burning 500 extra calories working out is an extremely intense workout, especially considering how sedentary most people are.
The benefits are also short lived, you can burn some extra calories for a bit but your body will adjust, and after a while the number of calories you burn during a workout tapers off and you return to about the same number you were burning before.
This is a well documented phenomenon. Human bodies are really good at conserving energy.
You lose weight in the kitchen, you tone up in the gym.
An estimated 1000 extra calories in about an hour for me is an extremely intense workout (the only time I estimated to have done that, my average heart rate during it was 173 - it was only based on HR and some basic data input like height and weight). I'm not a particularly active person and I'm overweight.
500 though? If you spread it out of 2 hours, its hardly anything at all. When I commuted by ebike daily, I was probably burning double that 6 days a week compared to driving and it felt very casual.
"probably". Like most people, you are severely over estimating what you burn. This morning I cycled 40km without assistance and climbed 500m along the way. It wasn't my hardest workout ever, but not "very casual" either. That was 850 kcal.
Roundtrip commute was 55-60kms. A bit hilly during parts and frequent slowing and speeding up during parts because part of the ride is on a hike & bike trail with frequent pedestrians. Assist does a lot of that work, but I also probably have a broken idea of what counts as casual because I get bored really easily. If I'm trying to exercise for an hour, I aim for an average HR above 160. Anything less and I consider it casual. On the way to work, I'm generally trying minimize sweat, so I probably aim to stay under 130bps (but I fail sometimes), so I'd call that very casual. Still 1 hour at 130bps is about 650-750 Calories/hr for someone of my size (about 210 lbs) according to various calculators vs about 110-120 Calories/hr mostly sitting and standing (if it was just sitting, probably under 100). On the way home, I don't have to worry about sweating, so I exert myself more (guess that was would only be casual instead of very casual?). So overall, the lower estimate of those calculators put it at like 1100 calories above mixed sitting/standing.
In general, I'm hesitant to believe those types of calculators and generally consider HR a mediocre estimator, which is why I express some doubt. Still, about 1000 calories above pure sitting seems quite reasonable.
People really don't want to be told that exercising isn't as hard as they think...
I've been at a BMI of nearly 40 just a few years ago. Fast walking to the car like 100 ft away left me out of breath (which is when I decided I was going to lose weight that time). It certainly can be hard when you get to the point like that. And any attempt at doing so just makes you feel embarrassed to be in the state you are in without actually burning a useful amount of calories. Exercising certainly is not how I started - I just stopped eating as much and that's also unpleasant when you start and it takes time to get your body to eating less (and it pretends its starving in the meantime). Also, not everyone is my size nor does everyone enjoy pushing themselves to their cardio limit (or at least, they don't know what activities they enjoy enough to do that or they aren't able to regularly do that).
For me, exercise has had mixed results for me. Sometimes, I've used it to justify eating so much more that I probably put on weight. This was particularly true when I started doing long-distance bike rides (like 100km rides); I tended to mistake being tired as needing calories, so I'd overeat just because I needed rest or sleep - the goal wasn't to lose weight though, I just liked riding. When I combined it with intermittent fasting, its been pretty effective because I'm more limited by stomach space when eating all my calories for the day at once. So I couldn't really eat any more. But its not a method for everyone.
Also, there's a time commitment. I haven't biked in a while because I'm at work like 70+ hours a week during the summer. Probably unsurprisingly, I've put on a fair bit of weight this summer. The only way I've been able to get consistent exercises is being a NEET or via a commute. Guess when I first got a VR headset, there was a few months where I was probably averaging an hour or more per day of at least moderate intensity exercise (and eventually intense exercise as I got better). For people who have other commitments like children, I'd hope they'd get at least a fair for of exercise playing with them during their younger years, but eventually that goes away for many and there's still the time that you need to spend with them.
That's because your weight goes down so even at rest your daily needs are lower than they were before, you can still go a long way by just doing exercise you weren't doing before and keeping the same diet.
Also, 500 extra calories isn't that much if you're doing cardio intensive exercises, that's a 5 miles, jogging that's under an hour at a very conservative pace, walking that's two hours...
That's an important distinction qualifier. Its really easy to at least consume more and at least partially offset some of the gains.
Relevant Kurzgezagt
A kind of 'side benefit' to muscle-building exercise, is that it increases the amount of calories your body burns 'by default', because by weight, muscle takes much more energy to maintain than fat.
So on top of eating less (fewer calories going into your body), you can 'attack' it from the other side at the same time by increasing your body's 'consumption' of the calories/energy stored in it.
This is a commonly repeated myth. One I believe myself until talking to my doctor about it.
https://www.latimes.com/health/la-xpm-2011-may-16-la-he-fitness-muscle-myth-20110516-story.html
Seems like its a "technically true" but in practice irrelevant because muscle and fat only make up a tiny percent of total energy usage (because things like the brain, heart and liver are so energy intensive):
And that's why I referred to it as a 'side benefit'. It doesn't do much more, but it's not nothing, you know?
Not to mention all of the other more overt health benefits from exercise in general.
I wasn't posting it like some revelation, it's literally the most easy to understand concept ever. You cannot create mass from nothing. Stop taking in more mass than you expel. It's dead simple. The only counterpoint to this is examples of extreme medical anomalies.
They explained it to you on a level a four year old could understand.
It's about as simple as telling an alcoholic to just stop drinking or a depressed person to maybe just be happy.
Everything in your body is built against losing weight. If it wouldn't be that way, we would not exist right now.
What about the shape of the calories. Surely that matters.
Tbh I think the importance of shape is overstated. It's much more important that they pass a vibe check
So what's the point of posting it? If it's so obvious and all that you really need to know, why are so many people still fat?
The unsaid part of "it's simple, it's just calories in calories out" is the implied "and people who don't get this are just lazy/dumb/it's a moral failing." Maybe this isn't what you are intending, but it is kinda at the root of a lot of hate that fat people get.
The discussion around weight is changing because we're starting to look into and understand the psychological components of weight, IN ADDITION TO the actual phsysiological processes of weight loss. Lots of "normal" day to day tips and "common sense" is being investigated and debunked. Shit is hard and complicated. Food is being engineered to be addictive. Some people literally don't have easy access to healthy food.
Because the tweet they're commenting on is blatantly false and proposes a literal magical situation where exercising will somehow cause one to gain weight.
If people stop proposing actual fucking magic then maybe people won't feel the need to state the obvious...
Doesn't seem like it
Anecdotal, and I agree with you overall, but I hit the gym hard (2-3 hour jiu jitsu/MMA sessions) 4 times a week for 3 months and lost 18 lbs. I didn't change my diet at all, though I will admit it's possible I ended up eating less overall. But my point is I think exercise can definitely be a pretty good weight loss tool if you're working your ass off. Just depends on the amount of exercise and the intensity etc.
Yeah, massive amounts of exercise without a massive increase in consumption will work. But people act as if you can go for a jog 3 times a week and that will take care of it.
(also your last sentence is mangled)