this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
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me_irl
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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
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. π€π§ͺβ¨
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.
Well inflammation is a bit overblown as to how bad it is, it is literally required for muscle gain, so those people doing cold plunges are literally killing their gains as they say.
But yeah interesting video, I do wonder if the prevalence of anxiety and depression is more due us having access to way more calories than needed and doing way less exercise than needed and our brains going into overdrive rather than due to mental health awareness
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.
But I want that can of Mountain Dew...
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?
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 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
I'm not sure I understand your point.
Each human has an amount of calories they burn even when they do nothing (the amount of calories you burn obviously goes up when doing things)
This basic calory burning or whatever it's called in English is influenced by a few factors, one of them is how much muscle mass you have, those muscles need energy to simply exist, even when not exercising.
So people who regularly do sports indeed can eat more - they not only can eat more, they have to eat more (even when they do the exact same things as someone with less muscles)
Yes. But this is talking about trying to lose weight. The video is saying there seems to be a hard limit on how much you can burn over what you eat as long as you're eating the minimum requirements for your body. Before burning fat your brain will make subconscious changes to your behaviour (and even automatic systems like your immune system) to use less energy.
Yeah the video talks about that. Compare two people with the same muscle mass, one has a sedentary lifestyle while the other has an active lifestyle. They both burn about the same calories in a day. Many people are only doing cardio training when they train to lose weight. Because they donβt want bigger muscles. Thus they donβt lose any fat anymore after the first few months since their muscles hardly get any bigger.
A really fat person who wants to lose fat in a reasonable amount of time needs to gain serious muscle mass to lose weight without reducing their caloric intake. While if they just adjust their diet they will lose fat much fast.
Cardio alone will allow you to lose weight for sure. If you have a net higher energy expenditure through a day, you will burn more calories and if the diet stays the same you will lose weight.
The argument is just about how you increase that expenditure. Having more muscle mass and just existing will burn more calories and regularly doing cardio will burn more calories.
Will you be more lazy and thus expend less 'base' energy on days that you do cardio? Probably. That just means that you have to do enough cardio to offset that difference.
You know what's even easier than both cardio and gaining muscle though? Not drinking calories, using lean ground beef instead of full fat, replacing some of the carbs in your meals by more veggies, eating fruits instead of sugary snacks, getting more protein in your diet, ... If you're consuming a fuckton of calories a day, there's no amount of muscle that'll allow you to lose weight.
The video is pulling from research which says you won't. Your body wants to hold onto fat badly. Your brain will make behavioural shifts to reduce energy expenditure when you're not doing cardio.
Again no. Your brain will just down shift your energy use more. It's going to win because it's had millions of years evolving to do exactly that.
Which is the exact point of the video. Exercise for other health benefits, diet control for loosing weight.
Anecdotally - I am a person who has not been fat (but have been pregnant). Cardio drops my weight faster than dieting and faster than lifting weights. My kid started sports at a place close to a Jazzercise so I started going while she trained. Couple months later I had to buy new clothes and couldn't figure out why, thought I'd lost 5 lb. Stepped on the scale and no, I'd lost 20 and was technically underweight.
When I got married, husband wanted me to gain some so I lifted and gained some weight.
I think maybe lifting weights is good for your appetite, and cardio is not, but in any event if I ever want to simply drop mass, aerobic dance is the fastest path. It's very possible diet is involved but I didn't control it at all, ate when hungry.
As far as I understood the video this is true but not right away, our body 'normally' wastes a ton of calories on things like excessive immune responses so at any level of fitness between modern office worker and hunter gatherer your calorie requirement is unchanged as its just shifting that calorie consumption back to where its supposed to be. Past that point yeh you need a higher baseline amount to keep going.
Building muscle raises your daily maintenance calorie requirement.
Raising your daily burn rate makes it easier to be in a calorie deficit.
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.
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 havenβt yet watched it either, but Iβll take a punt. Itβs very hard to apply the first law to bodies, because we ingest, burn, store, and excrete in very complicated ways. Itβs 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 π§π€ /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
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 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.
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.
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.