"Why you shouldn't /rely/ on exercise to lose weight" would be a less controversial title. Instead they chose a provocative, click-baity title and tone to the article.

The most accurate title would be "Don't exercise in order to earn the right to eat junk food later". Which is the meager point they're actually making.

The article deserves all the criticism - it has been designed specifically to provoke it. Journalists love to divide ho-hum issues into polarized opposing sides.

> The most accurate title would be "Don't exercise in order to earn the right to eat junk food later". Which is the meager point they're actually making.

Except that's not the only point the article makes. You might disagree with the title, but the article does attempt to back it up.

Many paragraphs are dedicated to explaining why for many people, exercising might actually be harmful to their weight loss goals, due to how we tend to overestimate how many calories were burned and other factors (such as studies showing that the body may attempt to balance energy output in other areas).

In that sense "Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight" is precisely the thesis that the article is trying to support. You might disagree with it, but I don't really think its egregious clickbait. Even if the title is meant to be catchy and provocative. They clearly state why exercising could be detrimental to weight loss goals for some people.

Things that the article title doesn't say:

- You should never exercise to lose weight

- Exercise is bad for you

- You can only lose weight by dieting

> exercising might actually be harmful to their weight loss goals, due to how we tend to overestimate how many calories were burned

The actual number of calories burned exercising is unaffected by our mental estimates. Thinking you earned the right to eat junk food is the problem, not exercise.

Exercise makes me ravenous, I'm certainly not the only person for which that is true. Swimming is the worst offender, IME. I can be vigilant, but even knowing that I didn't burn enough calories to counterbalance that meatball sub I want to get after my workout, doesn't help all that much in keeping me from actually buying it anyway.

This is similar to the problem of calories in = calories out. Dieting isn't a chemistry equation where you just need the numbers to balance it, it's psychology and in some cases physiology (leptin levels, etc), and that part of it is tricky.

It's really important to stay hydrated, because your body often mistakes thirst for hunger. Drink water every 10m in the pool. Also, I often take a small amount of heavy protein immediately after the workout (~1/2 of one of those 33g protein bars is typical), then jump in the shower.

Between these two habits, I've killed the post-swim binge. Hope it works for you too!

> Drink water every 10m in the pool

That means you'd need 5 drinks to complete just one length of an olympic-size swimming pool! :)

You can drink as you go so it's no problem.

there are people that actually drink that water in public pools?

eww

Don't worry, any germs or other organic nastiness are completely neutralized by the vast quantities of chlorine, which is what you should actually be going "eww" about.

(I once drank a mouthful of pool water as a kid and got a really awful headache shortly thereafter. I suppose I'm lucky that's all I got.)

Seems like the m here means minutes

thank you. (i actually needed this advice, I experience this)

you can put your hunger to work for you, but you need to remind yourself that, if you carry extra pounds, hunger is what weight loss feels like. That ravenous feeling if you can keep it going, that right there is the success. celebrate it, and stop killing it.

No, it's not. Learning how to eat and hydrate properly (both in terms of what and when) with your exercise pattern so that you don't feel ravenous while maintaining a calorie deficit is success. Feeling ravenous isn't success, and generally isn't sustainable.

The feeling of hunger itself is not the thing that's causing you to want to eat more. The aversion to the sensation is what's doing that, but you have control over the aversion.

it's interesting reading the hunger vs. no hunger debate. Personally I can't imagine losing weight without feeling hungry. Of course not constantly, of course not to the point of crashing, but you have to moderate the feeling. For some people it can pass in about a week, and you adjust to just eating less, and you hopefully stop feeling hungry. But I think almost everyone goes through at least an adjustment period.

I think this is true. I've never been very overweight so I admit it was easier for me to do this than it would be if I had to do it for longer, but I dropped ten pounds primarily just by drastically cutting the amount of food I ate for lunch. This led to feeling hungry at work, but when I'm working I'm very focused and able to ignore what my body is telling me. I suspect many other people here are the same way - if you find you're able to work for long periods of time without a break and you can drop into "flow", you may be able to lose weight by just eating less during those periods.

The reason high protein / low carb diets work so well for people is it removes this feeling. The protein tricks us into thinking we're sated even under a heavy calorie deficit

My experience is that really high protein/low carb diets (e.g. Atkins initiation phase) produce, for me, an uncomfortably full feeling without satiety. But there's pretty extreme variation in response person to person.

There is "I'm hungry" and then there is "If I don't eat something, I'm going to crash." It is not success, it means something is really imbalanced in your diet, and if you have the mental power to successfully ignore it, well, isn't that just an eating disorder?

That's no more of an eating disorder than the inverse: not having the mental power to acknowledge and respond to it appropriately.

Anyways, parent comment didn't say to starve yourself. It said to learn to be okay with being a bit hungry. Instead of learning to be okay with the feeling of hunger, people learn to be okay with the equally unpleasant feeling of being stuffed.

Grand parent's comment was about feeling ravenous during swimming, not just "hungry." Diet is not as simple as eating less food, since you are eating less, you need to make an extra effort to ensure your body is still getting what it needs.

I've heard people say "I'm famished!" and I don't for a second think that they've been through a literal famine and are starving to death. Maybe GP used "ravenous" literally, or maybe it's just a figure of speech to indicate having built up a good appetite.

I've totally had points where my work out crashed because my body was out of something. It could be water, protein, or even sugar or salt. There is a huge difference between "hungry" and body is shaking, weak feeling.

I meant that I was ravenous after swimming, not typically during. I used that word because it's different than the usual "I'm a bit peckish" that happens in the morning or after a few hours of not eating. I like the comment about thirst, it could easily be that.

I did bodybuilding for ~5 years and did the whole bulk/cut cycle every 3-4 months so I had quite a few cutting session and a few times I let myself go (30-40lbs overweight) and had to lose more than 10-15lbs; in those instances I did IF (Intermittent Fasting) and ate in 6-7 hour windows (evening). The first week or so you get pretty hungry in the morning, but after that it's pretty easy.

I only say this because I want to express that I'm familiar with just being a bit hungry vs much more than that. When I was 19 I lived with a friend and we were both broke, I dropped from 180lbs to 145lbs (on my frame that was skeletal) in a few months from not eating much at all. That was pretty severe hunger, but even my ravenous after swimming isn't as bad as that was.

FWIW, and if it matters at all, I'll be 39 in a month.

No, it really isn't. I dropped 15kg with diet moderation over several months a couple of years ago, and I wasn't left feeling hungry apart from the first week (where I was adjusting to reducing the volume of my meals).

Yes.. dear lord when I was a competitive runner every post-workout made me binge eat. Of course, to be competitive that means you workout very hard 3-4 times a week.

I can't count the number of times my teammates and I would eat a party pack of tacos each afterwards. That's not healthy.

Exercise actually promotes the intake of Glucose into body cells by stimulating the opening of pumps on the cell wall, similarly to the way Insulin promotes the intake of Glucose into body cells.

Indeed. Something like "You can't outrun your fork" would have been succinct and to the point.

The running joke in reddit fitness communities is that the best workout for losing weight is Fork Putdowns

I think to accurately display the relative effectiveness of diet and exercise for weight loss is something like this:

diet & exercise >> diet >>>>>>>> exercise

I like this quote: "You work hard on that machine for an hour, and that work can be erased with five minutes of eating afterward"

even easier (as weightlifters, powerlifters, bodybuilders all know):

weight comes from your mouth, not from the gym

abs are made in the kitchen

80% diet, 20% training

80% diet, 10% training, 10% sleep is the one I like. A lot of people overlook how important sleep is.

Abs are made in the kitchen, but as someone who went from 22% bodyfat to 11% they are pretty puny abs if you don't pair it with some pretty frequent exercise.

Abs are made in the gym and revealed in the kitchen.

Can't outrun a fork!

While that's true in isolation, if you do the birth control thing of success rate with average usage, I imagine diet alone will massively win out. Diet and exercise, to someone who does not enjoy the exercise, is significantly harder to do than just dieting. People who struggle to lose weight generally struggle to achieve just one of dieting or exercising, so advising them to focus on the easier and more effective option is best.

Obviously, it varies person to person - if someone enjoys a team sport enough to exercise and still combine it with good diet, great. Those people don't tend to be the ones struggling with weight loss, however.

It's all interrelated. Exercise may (it did to me) shift your brain into seeking other kinds of food and drinks. I'm much more willing to drink simple water after a long soccer match. Exception being swimming, which makes me wanna eat all cakes in sight.

It also leads to a different lifestyle if I may say so. Being sedentary means low amount of sensation, leading to the eating for pleasure reflex, all this without a way to consume. Sport will keep you busy, probably make you feel weird, sore then not sore = good feeling. Hinting your mind that you can have good times this way.

Oh, definitely. I've lost upwards of 30 pounds over the past year and a half. Much of it is related to changes in my diet, but exercising regularly has definitely helped my diet. Personally, I'm much less likely to eat in excess after exercising because I don't want to "waste" my efforts.

I felt this way too, but often I ended up eating bad food because after a while I didn't value exercises as much (went back into a OK zone).

Also, told this already, massive health failure forced me out of sugar coated, processed food and beverage. Our life styles is way too easy onto eating to satisfy our tongues and not our body. When stuck in this corner, eating raw veggies, you'll start to notice a lot of enjoyable tastes, and drop in fat aftertaste and overall a realization that how much sugar 'drugs' your brain. It's very hard to not want to take a big bite of cake or chocolate, hamburger etc etc, and inside the comfy zone of our culture, if your health allows it, you'll never have a way to sense that.

It helps you keep your choices in perspective for sure. Also, for me, if I'm getting a lot of exercise, I actually just don't feel like I need the junk food, so I mostly just do without it.

I'm going to continue to posit that weight is a factor of genetics / epigenetics and / or body function first and foremost.

Why is it that some people, regardless of how much they eat and how little they exercise, never put on weight? That, to me, is the elephant in the room.

What is going on in these peoples bodies that is kept out of popular science with regard to weight loss? We know that thyroid hormone function affects weight and metabolism. In women reproductive hormones also affect weight, oestrogen is a hormone present in both males and females, so there's some crossover there. We know that adrenal function can affect weight. We know that insulin resistance can affect weight.

There has to be more to it that calories in - calories out = weigh gain or loss.

If you have an unaddressed thyroid, reproductive hormone, insulin, or adrenal issue you're going to be working hard to address your weight.

It is my suspicion that fixing the diet first improves weight control better than exercise because food is medicine. Anything you put in your body on a daily basis can be medicinal in that it can act to help your body restore homoeostasis or move further away from it.

> regardless of how much they eat and how little they exercise, never put on weight?

If I had to choose between thermodynamics and medicine being wrong, and people not being able to accurately estimate how "much" they eat and how "little" they exercise, I'd bet all my money on the latter.

The simple reality is, people have vastly different appetites. I eat fast and am always hungry. I have two coworkers, one eats quite a bit less than me (often struggles to finish a standard portion), the other eats mich more but quite slowly.

3 different people, 3 vastly different eating habits. The reason people gain different amounts of weight most likely isn't in the differences between our bodies, but the differences between our minds.

I never understand the thermodynamics argument in terms of weight gain. Surely you acknowledge that some solar cells and mechanical engines are more efficient than others?

Additionally, do you acknowledge that some drives are more irresistible than others? Can you hold your breath until you pass out?

Is it so hard to imagine these drives might differ from person to person? I fully acknowledge that, irrespective of your body's efficiency, if you could ignore your drive magically, you would lose weight with no problem, but that is far from a useful endpoint because the drive matters.

Some people's bodies just burn more calories in resting than others. Or their resting isn't as resting as they think - look at people who sit but their leg twitches up and down.

Ultimately it's still calories in vs out. But the out isn't just burning 500 calories running. It's what you burn doing your day to day too.

My point is exactly that it's drive that differs, not metabolism. For the latter, see e.g.:

https://examine.com/faq/does-metabolism-vary-between-two-peo...

Metabolic rate does vary, and technically there could be large variance. However, statistically speaking it is unlikely the variance would apply to you. The majority of the population exists in a range of 200-300kcal from each other and do not possess hugely different metabolic rates.

Your body is not a bomb calorimeter. If you're looking to thermodynamics to explain weight loss or gain you'll be disappointed.

It's not that far off. If you're not looking at calories in and calories out first, you'll be disappointed. Thermodynamics doesn't cease to operate inside the human body.

Sure, if you're tracking your food intake closely, maintaining a significant deficit, and not losing weight, talk to a doctor about your thyroid. If you're putting in hours in the gym and eating a lot and not gaining any muscle, talk to your doctor about your testosterone level. But if you're looking to hormones and whatnot first, you're probably just deluding yourself.

Are you suggesting that lowering daily caloric intake to 0 would not result in weight loss? Why bother eating then?

>There has to be more to it that calories in - calories out = weigh gain or loss.

There is. Read the "physiology" chapter at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adipose_tissue

TLDR: Blood sugar spikes above certain level are toxic, so the body responds with an emergency action of stashing the sugar wherever possible, including muscle, liver, and fat tissue. The former two are rather limited in their capacity, while the latter is unlimited. At the "hardware" level, that's all there is to obesity.

At the higher levels there are other emerging phenomena:

- This process is prone to overshooting the sugar egress, creating a "sugar crash", which has to lead to another sugar binge. This becomes an unhealthy see-saw. Note that the fat cells are consuming sugar but they can't release it back, they can only release fatty acids, hence sugar deficit must be replenished through food.

- The see-saw may end up messing the appetite and the balance of hormones that partake in regulating the metabolism. This yields the so-called "metabolic syndrome" with all its co-morbid factors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_syndrome

- The hormonal imbalance changes the person's appetite, creating a vicious cycle.

Simple sugars are addictive. Just try going without to see how bad it can get - keep eating the fats, the meats, the complex carbs, just cut out the sugars, starches, and flours.

> Why is it that some people, regardless of how much they eat and how little they exercise, never put on weight? That, to me, is the elephant in the room.

This is another problem that people can and have solved. You simply aren't eating as much as you think, so you take meticulous track of your caloric intake, and once you realize you eat a lot less than you thought, force yourself to eat X 100s of calories over normal intake per day. This is likely a quantity of food that causes physical discomfort initially, but it works.

Ignoring issues like Crohn's, "I can't gain weight" is just as much an excuse as "I can't lose weight", although perhaps more socially accepted due to body type voodoo.

> Why is it that some people, regardless of how much they eat and how little they exercise, never put on weight? That, to me, is the elephant in the room.

I disagree that qualifies as an elephant. Some of those people could have some sort of known genetic defect that makes them unable to properly digest food. Some of them do not eat as much as you think that they eat. For instance, I had plenty of snacks yesterday at a neighbor's house. They were 1 peanut and two pieces of a jerky-like thing the size of my fingernail. Without that additional information, you would have thought that I ate far more.

not saying that these people don't exist, I've just never seen a controlled study to investigate whether they really can eat more and not gain weight. anecdotally I know these people as well, I just don't trust anecdotal evidence.

This is purely anecdotal...

I'm now almost 40 years old and have never been overweight a day in my life. Over the past 20 years my weight has always stayed within about a 15 pound range no matter how much/little I ate and/or exercised.

I participated in a caloric intake study at one point in time and I had a higher caloric intake than anyone in the study group. I was not trying to eat more; it was just that until I hit my mid 20s I had to consume excessive quantities of food just to keep from losing weight.

Try reproducing the "supersize me" documentary results. If you cannot reproduce the results, then there is something strange in your genetics.

Supersize me fails replication: https://www.sott.net/article/126285-Supersize-me-revisited-u...

Yes, healthy people gain weight on 5,000 calorie per day diets. No, they don't develop all the metabolic and psychological maladies described in the documentary.

At this point (didn't know then) we already know there are some strange genetics. Over the past 10 both myself and all of my siblings have been diagnosed with various immune diseases.

Indeed, I've known a few people in my life who say "I can eat as much as I want and I never seem to gain any weight". But then when I actually accompany them, it's mostly that they don't overeat. "As much as they want" is a portion that is aligned with their body.

"The education in popular culture around exercising presents it as a magic pill, as being a major driving force behind weight loss. You see this on magazine covers and on tv, "belly fat exercises", "toning exercises""

There's def some of that going on, but there's also a fair amount of fad diets - atkins, south beach, paleo etc etc popping up here and there.

The fact that you get the 6 pack by dieting and not by doing crunches is common knowledge in the "lifting community", on the flip side - lifting when dieting is also important to maintain body comp.

And then of course there's the obvious fact that "losing weight" != "losing fat" which makes articles like this not only click-baity but also bordering on being misinformative.

> "losing weight" != "losing fat"

Does the article say so? And your so called "fad diets" that are low on processed carbohydrates out perform other traditional diets. I doubt that staying away from processed carbohydrates will go away any time soon.

Of course a healthy dose of exercise is not harmful and the article reiterates this point many times. However, it also says that exercising may make your body more efficient, which lowers the overall energy that's used to keep us alive, which in turn may "hurt", to a certain extent, the weight loss rate.

When I was running regularly, I could see my heart rate go down day after day when I measured it right after I woke up.

Don't exercise to lose weight. Exercise to keep healthy. If you want to lose weight, you need to keep an eye on your calorie intake more than you keep an eye on the calories you burn. Not everybody can perform a 2000-calorie workout in one go.

I went from 260 pounds to 199 pounds in about a year or so simply by eating less food and cutting out junk food. Only eating fast food when in a hurry and then only a small sandwich like the McDouble which only had one slice of cheese and the Double Cheeseburger had two slices of cheese.

I didn't exercise much just did some walking.

I took in less calories by eating less food for the tl:dr people.

I think you make a lot of good points but I would contend that the title of the article is click-bait. It's all well and good that the article itself is well reasoned but people read the title and hold on to that.

The issue sadly, is that a lot of people online just respond to the headline, not the content of the article.

That doesnt make it "the issue".

I'll be sure to add, "To me" next time, so that my harmless comment better meets with your approval.

everything in the article is true because they use technical terms, when you consider the overall effect of exercise and the overall goal of 'weight loss' being body fat reduction and improved fitness, exercise is an excellent way to achieve that