30 kcal per minute would be very difficult to sustain except for a very short burst of time (like 2-5 minutes) in a peak performance scenario (such as an end-of-season race that the athlete is very well tapered and rested for).

My personal numbers for my regular training runs are about 11-12 kcal per minute. I can exceed 15 kcal per minute for very hard workouts or racing but I cannot train appropriately while doing that regularly. I'm a relatively seasoned runner but I don't focus on 800m-1500m which is where it might be possible to see numbers exceeding 20 kcal per minute.

In order for this to make sense for the purposes of lifestyle modification, you also have to subtract the calories that you would have burned had you not been exercising. IE if you had not run for that 30 minutes, you would still have been burning calories, either completely sedentary BMR or some other NEAT. This makes it even a worse deal to exercise for the sake of burning calories.

I dont think they are ignoring input. Of course, when soda and lots of sugar is still part of your diet all bets are off - those are the basics that have to be fixed first. This has been repeated and emphasized over and over. However, in addition you can‘t just ignore the benefits of exercise and the extra budget of a few hundred calories it provides daily.

I recommend to get an Apple Watch (or any good fitness tracker) and a smart scale. After some time you can pretty easily and reliably predict your daily weight development simply based on your most recent diet and exercise.

Having an extra negative 400 to 500 calorie offset on a daily basis can be incredibly helpful considering a lot of creeping weight gain is caused by a caloric surplus of only a couple hundred per day.

From the looks of many Americans I’ve seen, their problem is a lot more than a couple hundred kcal per day.

A couple hundred kcal per day for 10 years is about 200lb.

Thank you for putting some perspective on this! It's a huge aggregate in the long run.

It doesn't work like he says. You can't just sum up the number of calories and convert it to pounds of fat. If you eat a few hundred calories too many you will rise in weight. But increasing your weight means your metabolism will increase. In the end you will reach an equilibrium were your weight is high enough that your metabolism equals your intake, and you will stop gaining weight.

Let's take a 5"10 male aged 25 weight 170 pounds. According to some calculator they will have a basal metabolism (how much you use if you stay in bed all day) of 1850 kcal / day. Lets say they eat 450 kcal / day too much. i.e. 2300 kcal / day. By running the metabolism calculator backwards we find that they stabilize on a weight of 245 pounds.

Thats a seriously overweight, to be sure, but it is also well below 200 pounds of extra weight.

Yes, there are 2nd order effects, and there are also a bunch of assumptions in basal rate calculations, and conversion efficiency etc. Your assumption that the current day surplus doesn't carry forward (i.e. that as someone gets heavier they done increase intake to account for increased basal metabolism) is also a pretty strong one.

Anyway I could have been clearer, but my point wasn't to suggest that you would end up exactly 200lb heavier, but that your calorie surplus adds up to roughly 200lb - exactly what happens to it depends on a lot of things.

This is response to someone who suggested they hadd seen a lot of clearly obese people who couldn't have got there on a few hundred extra kcal per day - however that doesn't seem accurate.

650 calories a day is easily the difference for a lot of people's freedom of diet choices/ eating what they want. And this is a very moderate level of activity/exercise. Why are you so intent on discounting it?

I’m claiming that number of excess calories consumed easily surpasses a realistic level of exercise, based on eating habits I see.