Last year in march I started counting calories, recording my weight and all exercises I did and walking/biking every day.

I lost 30 kg, walked 2100 km, biked 1000 km, and the sum of calories burned by all exercise was about 160 000 which is about 20 kg of fat loss, so naively the remaining 10 kg was diet. Of course you cannot divide it like that - if I wasn't counting calories I would eat the 20 kg back easily. But if I wasn't walking I wouldn't be able to restrict the calories as much. I've been eating on average 2000 kcal and had average deficit of about 500 kcal. Without exercise I would have to eat 1500 on average which for me feels much worse than 2000. Also walking helps for a lot of unrelated things.

Write down what you eat for a while and its calories. Weigh yourself daily as well and write that down too. If after a week your weight went up: Your calories are above your TDEE. If it went down: Your calories are under your TDEE.

And that's basically it, once you know what your TDEE is, eat under it to create a caloric deficit and you will lose weight. Even if you don't exercise at all and just sit at home.

Sure exercise will help putting your caloric deficit lower by burning some, but in the end it's always calories vs TDEE. Understanding that makes it very easy to go in either direction (gain weight vs lose weight), no matter what your metabolism is

(The easy solution is of course to just eat less, like skipping a meal or reducing the amount. Since your average daily food is already what dictates your current weight, reducing it means you will lose weight)

Not necessarily. It is important to remember that water weighs ~1lb/pt and there are a lot of things that affect how much water your body is carrying at any given moment. Depending on your body mass, it is not unrealistic to see 5lbs of fluctuation in a single day. On a calorie restricted diet your body will tend to retain water (because it does this for pretty much any stressor), so you may actually see a slight increase in body weight at first even though your TDEE is above your caloric intake.

A more reliable approach, in my opinion, is to do the TDEE calculation for your target weight and set that as your calorie limit.

You can of course calculate the TDEE of your target weight but like you implied, unless you know your own, based on your own metabolism and intake, the data is never going to be accurate

For example I eat much less than my bodybuilder friends. When I went with the calories that they recommended to me I gained so much fat with a very active workout schedule and noone had a explanation why. Maybe it’s hormones, maybe medicine I take, maybe something else. I now eat much less than you’d expect from a person with my height and age, but I still gain weight, because my actual calculated TDEE is comparatively low

Having that data on hand as a reference is incredibly helpful to plan my weight progress

It's too bad that we can't just live on Soylent (the actual beverage, not the thing from the book)

On the low fat halloumi vs paneer thing... We also found that low-fat soft cheese (like Philadelphia light) are amazing in soups. Simmer lentils and cubed potatoes with some spices and a can of chopped tomatoes, and just before you serve, add a large dollop of light Philadelphia and stir it all the way in. Boosts the protein content and makes for a really creamy soup. Also works great in other soups.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0MpL1KfYEJg

Making the crust very thin is also an obvious way to reduce carbs, and using whole wheat crust also help, and using Khorasan wheat or similar whole grains.

For sweets, I adopted the snob diet: raise your standards so much the average supermarket chocolate bar just doesn't appeal any more, and you are less likely to snack casually :-)

I am going to experiment with low-flour dough with extra gluten and cauliflower to bulk it out. Might need xanthan gum and an egg.

> quality of eating habits within that period

To me this sounds like you aren't actually changing the amount of calories that you eat, just the quality of them. Eating 2000 calories of McDonalds or 2000 calories of high quality food does not matter (or barely matters) for losing/gaining weight. If 2000 calories is under your TDEE, you can eat 2000 calories of cheesecake and would still lose weight (but very unhealthy).

What I see often is people claiming stuff like "I can't lose weight" or "I have a slow metabolism", but they never actually bother counting how much they eat, and because of that have no understanding of what high-calorie and low-calorie food is. (For example if I'd ask how much calories an average hamburger or a glass of cola has, you'd likely have no idea if you haven't counted calories before).

It was the same for me, once I started counting I realized that I was not eating according to the goals I had set at that time, and that the food I ate was actually much much less in calories than I thought it was.

It’s a body recomp from an untrained person. Pretty common for new lifters.

You’re right though - if they lift better and eat better, that’ll change.

For example there are protein bars that are supposedly healthy, but they have 150-250 kcal per 50g bar.

On the other hand there are these watery ice creams that have about 65 kcal per piece and feel just as indulgent if not more.

Other things that are very much "not worth it" on the enjoyement/kcal scale is bread and other pastries.

2 buns with ham is 500 kcal and feels like nothing. A whole pan of hot vegetables with some meat is +- the same and feels like a proper dinner.

that shows why it’s easier for some than for others :)

Had the same problem. Then switched to intermittent fasting. First two months, nothing happened. Then within a month dropped 10 kg, which got me back to my pre-covid weight. I'm doing 8/16 IF by the way, and eating more than I did before, so I think the CICO theory is stupid :)

How much more are you eating exactly? Have you changed your exercise routine or physical habits? The problem with calling CICO stupid is that it’s two-thirds physics. The only way to gain mass is to eat it, and the only way to lose mass is to burn it off through RMR and exercise. There’s mountains of data demonstrating that humans gain weight when eating more than they burn, and lose it when burning more than they eat. The people who seem to lose/gain weight abnormally are just people who’s bodies burn calories in unusual ways. That’s rare and statistically unlikely, but even that still follows CICO.

Others have suggested 'writing it down' - not going to argue with that. I don't 'write down' every food I eat, but I do make mental notes every day. What's helped me more though...

2 years ago I bought a fitbit - basic model, nothing fancy, but got serious about tracking my movements. It helped create some easier external documentation about what I was doing. I then moved to an Apple Watch last May, and have been following the '3 circles'. It gave me a target 'move X calories per day' target, do X minutes of 'exercise' every day (exercise seemingly defined as 'get your heart rate above Xbpm').

I've hit those targets ALMOST every day (I missed one calorie target 1 day by 13!). I'm on day ... 206 of my movement streak.

For me, the visual reminders on my wrist help keep me motivated/focused. I 'compete' against a couple of friends with the watch now and then, but just being connected and getting a thumbs up from a friend now and then is motivating.

As others said, track weight daily - I track morning and night. I put it in my iphone. I look at the graphs. I see the downward trend. THIS HELPS A LOT when it bounces back up a bit now and then. I'm up ... around 1.5 lbs from earlier this week. JUST seeing that uptick used to demotivate me. But looking at the downward trend of the last 7 months, I can see the larger direction is down, and I don't stress as much about small upticks. I'm down 25lbs (11kg) from last June, and at this pace will probably be down another 15 or so by this year.

I used to go to a gym, but ... it's a 'process'. I now often just go outside and jog around. There's a run club once per week, and weather permitting, I'll do it, but... I hit those targets every day. Even if it's just running in place, or getting on an exercise bike, or jumping rope. I tell myself "every little bit helps", and tracking every one of those 'little bits' has been the motivating factor for me. May be different for others, but keep going till you find something that works for you.

Took me years to find some 'thing' that clicked for me, but I'm closing in on one year of losing weight based on 'more movement' and 'fewer snacks' and 'better eating'. But it took weeks before there was a trendline to see a downward line.

> There seems to be a hard limit on how many calories our bodies can burn per day, set by how fast we can digest food and turn it into energy. He calculates that the ceiling for an 85-kilogram man would be about 4650 calories per day.

Given that "regular" people clearly do not burn 4650 calories per day, and it is possible to burn 4650 calories per day, there must be a point at which exercise _does_ increase energy expenditure. I'm guessing it just doesn't happen for regular doses of exercise (including, evidently, walking 14km per day).

Perhaps the body down regulates calorie-consuming processes to a point where it's just the bare minimum, and calorie expenditure increases from there. Or perhaps we should take the opposite view and say that our bodies up regulate unwanted processes (like inflammation) to use the energy of an engine designed to keep running at a certain level?

Either way I find this incredibly interesting. And either way I'm probably also going to keep stuffing my face on a day I run 30km :).

That said, at the peak of my training (12 hours/week), I can definitely consume more calories without putting on weight. Like, a giant bowl of ice cream most nights. But, if I continue that diet during recovery periods, I'll put on a few pounds. So, it's not that exercise has zero impact, but possibly quite a bit smaller an impact that one might assume.

Cycling was always interesting to me in this context because it seems easier to burn energy on a bike than other forms of exercise.

I'm not sure this is true. Cycling isn't weight-bearing (you're sitting down) and only engages the large leg muscles. Running and rowing likely provide more calorie burn for a given RPE (rate of perceived exertion) over a fixed time period. Running because it's weight-bearing; rowing because it engages more muscle groups. That said, you can probably cycle for more hours total, if you have nothing else to do.

Contrast this with cycling which is pretty much all concentric contractions.

Of course there is. The problem is that it's much easier to eat than it is to exercise. You can eat a Big Mac in 5 minutes, and you'd have to run or bike for hours to burn those calories off. A 30 minute jog on a treadmill won't do it.

Most people eat more calories than they need, and would have to exercise much more than they realize to burn them off. So losing weight over a reasonably short period of time almost always requires cutting calories. Few people have enough free time to do it with exercise alone.

(i know your body starts compensating for it and burning less calories, but still)

Well, we probably need to look at the direct quote again.

> There seems to be a hard limit on how many calories our bodies can burn per day, set by how fast we can digest food and turn it into energy.

Maybe i'm reading this wrong, but if one's body were to burn calories at 100% of this supposed possible rate, then by the time you'd reach 4650, a new day would start.

If digestion would top out at 4650 calories at day, with 24 hours per day, it would come down to 193.75 calories per hour. Or, in other words, it'd be about 3.23 calories per minute.

There are loads of videos on YouTube of what happens. You may or may not want to watch them. Spoiler alert: you vomit when you eat too much.

The vomit limit is probably higher than 4560 (which BTW has a suspicious number of significant digits), there might be a range between too many calories and vomiting where your body breaks down the food into waste without digesting any more nutrients/calories. Kinda like how if you eat too much vitamin C, you’ll just pee most of it out.

You don't need to be at the limit of human energy intake to see what happens to people when their energy expenditure greatly exceeds the energy available from food over a sustained time period; there is quite a lot of medical literature on the effects of such... er... malnutrition.

What's tricky is that in early 20s I was eating about as much and it was fine.

All else being equal, resting metabolic rate doesn't tend to slow down much as we age. The notion that people in their 20s can eat as they want without gaining weight is mostly a myth. It's more likely that you don't accurately remember what you consumed and your activity level in your early 20s.

Also that Phelps thing is highly questionable. He says he "probably" burns 8-10k, not 12k. Not the type of statement you want to rely on to dismiss all this work.

Clearly there are some details that matter here...

I'm pretty sure this doesn't apply to extreme cases like modern athletes, who explicitly push their bodies in many ways that normal fit people don't, and who have teams of doctors and coaches that can force them to keep up with exercise and diet even when their bodies are telling them to stop.

Maybe I should bring it up with a doctor, but I feel fine, I just also spend more on food than most.

BTW there are diseases that reduce calories absorbed, you might want to get checked for colitis ulcerosa and crohn's disease. They have nasty side effects so better to know earlier even if you don't have the worst symptoms.

I'm not sure how base metabolic rate relates to incidental energy expenditure. My gut feeling is that every body has its own limits on energy expenditure, and max TDEE doesn't need to correlate directly with base metabolic rate. That's why I mentioned the integral above. I tend to think of $TDEE_{max} \simeq MBR_{base} + E_{available}$ but $MBR_{base} \simeq \int_{t=-5}^0 TEE(t)$ -- and in my experience, weight loss correlates more with base metabolic rate than with caloric intake ($E_{available}$).

I used to eat a lot of candy, but I never considered eating more than a handful of anything a "snack".

That said, what do you call it when you eat something that isn't a meal? I don't think most people have any word other than "snack" without resorting to things that sound like insults, like "pig out". And it's really hard for most people to insult themselves.

Just try to lower the heating in your house in the winter and run around in a t-shirt iso a pullover.

I believe you meant kilocalories

No, you can't, you're showing hypercorrection and lack of fluency.

1) You become more efficient at repeated exercise, so the calories burned number on the machine is not accurate.

2) Your hunger will increase to compensate for the calories burned and you'll subconsciously eat more if not carefully tracking.

3) Excessive cardio and reduced calories can increase daytime cortisol levels and reduce resting metabolic rate.

4) Excessive cardio and reduced calories can cause muscle wasting and further reduce metabolic rate.

A better long term strategy is a strength training program with short cardio sessions. You'll build muscle which will increase the resting metabolism and avoid the over exertion stress that can lead to decreased metabolic rate.

Of course, at the end of the day it really is calories in calories out (despite the naysayers). But, the devil is in the details, because measuring calories out is extremely difficult unless you're willing to live in a sealed room that monitors your exhaled CO2 24/7. Diet (not how much but what you eat), sleep, and stress can have a large impact on the metabolic rate, and thus drastically change the CICO calculation.

This is also a oft-made claim that doesn't have much backing. Part of the point of the research described in TFA is that humans who face specific periods of energy expenditure during the day may often simply reduce energy expenditure during the rest of the day so that TEE remains roughly constant.

I know many endurance athletes (having been one) who would report that some levels of exercise actually result in appetite suppression.

My exercise is a game called Turf. Mostly played in Sweden where there are a lot of zones close by. I bike quite relaxed for 1-4 minuts and stand still for 20 seconds in the zone, then repeat until next zone. It's a bit harder during winter with all the snow though. I have done nothing to my diet and lost about 20 kilo the last year. The GPS says I traveled about 3500 km the last year at my slow pace.

I try to have a 500 calorie deficit. If I have more than about 500 (say 1000) Im fine that day, but the next day Im ravenous and tend to overeat.

Drank a few cans of seltzer and wound up staying up doing emails and chores until 2am. Woke up at 9am today and I'm feeling a bit hungry at 11:20am, but even if I eat something now, it will be a net negative compared to what I would have eaten last night.

If I ride a bike for 3 hours, I feel like I could eat a horse.

On my swim-days I have no problem with a late breakfast leading me to be able to skip lunch and enjoy my dinner.

But I have no other insight as my own experience.

There where plenty of old jokes about lumberjack breakfasts and people eating skills tall stacks of pancakes. These guys weren’t trying to gain or lose weight just keep going for another day of hard labor, but when you start talking 6-8,000 calories per day it’s an insane amount of food.

Also, some of the feedback mechanisms involved are quiet slow and can take weeks to kick in. Your body doesn’t need to balance things every day as gaining or losing significant weight takes time.

My 2 cents theory is that it suppress the "stress induced" appetite.

It's easy to experience, although it can take longer for lipolysis to start if you're not used to. Of course, eating sugar during or before exercise delays it.

And that additional eating is not a bad thing either. It is body needing supply to build muscles. For most beginners, that is a good thing.

Instead, eat a fairly standardized diet at least on a weekly basis, so roughly the same meals (doesn't have to be exact). Eat a quantity of food such that you neither gain nor lose weight over a period of time (a couple of weeks with daily weigh ins is sufficient to ensure a flat line on a chart). Adjust intake until the line is flat if you start seeing a trend up or down. Now, to lose weight simple subtract 500 calories per day from what you eat (if you eat packaged foods, assume an extra 20% from the calories on the label). You should now have near exactly 1 lbs. per week weight loss. The reverse also works if you want to put on some weight. I do each of these once per year as a "mini-bulk" and a "mini-cut". I track my weigh ins on my Fitbit - it is a near perfect diagonal trend line over the 2-3 month period I do this.

NOTE: It is important to weigh in daily (at same time - I recommend first thing in morning after flushing the system) precisely because your weight fluctuates on a day to day basis by 2-3lbs. It takes a few days of weigh ins to see a trend change on the graph and you need to be able to adjust your intake if you are off.

This is really the problem with CICO - it is definitely correct in an abstract sense (weight doesn't come from thin air, and neither does food you eat magically disappear), but the factors controlling calories in and calories out are far more complex. Human behavior is far from being entirely rationally determined. Our choices (particularly in regards to food, exercise, and other basic needs) are to a great extent controlled by our metabolism, even though it often doesn't seem that way.

This probably explains why people rarely lose weight on the long term - you can allow yourself to be forced to eat less than your body thinks it needs for a while, and obviously you'll lose weight; but you will go right back up to your "normal" weight as soon as the forcing stops (program ends, willpower exhausted etc).

The deficit cant be too large, for me 500 is ok, but 1000 has me ravenous the next day.

Lots of obese people easily lose 2 pounds/week but as you get closer to a healthy weight it gets harder.

CICO was the first time I was able to actively lose weight in my entire life.

This has generally been treated as a lifestyle issue, but another possibility gaining traction is that "obesity" is a disease in itself, one that tricks your organism is seeking to maintain excessive weight, by impacting your appetite, BMR, exercise habits etc; this will of course usually make people suffering from "obesity" (for lack of a better name) over-weight, but the weight can be controlled without curing the disease. Basically losing weight doesn't cure your "obesity", just like when you suffer of diabetes, controlling your diet keeps you healthy without curing your diabetes.

The possible causes of this "obesity" disease could well be diet related, and definitely refined sugars seem to be at least a major culprit.

NOTE: Before someone points it out, this is NOT incompatible with my parent comment. Going on a 500 cal/day cut and losing say 8 lbs will not lower your caloric baseline all that much, so temporary more or less works fine. If you use the same method to dump 40 lbs, you will need to readjust your baseline when done or you absolutely will gain it back as your caloric intake needs have been meaningfully reduced.

I wasn't sure what was causing it, so I hypothesized that I was low on muscle mass, and took up weight training. Then I gained ten pounds.

I'm not sure what the upshot is here, but my guess is that this approach indiscriminately consumes lean muscle mass if you don't pair it with muscle-building exercises.

Fat cells "remember" their metabolic environment when they were created--ie. they "remember" your weight and fight you when you try to reduce it. It's one of the problems with dieting to large weight losses.

It is somewhere around 3 years for a fat cell to die off and be replaced. You probably need to "hang out" at the plateau weight for a bit until the fat cells that remember you being heavier die off.

Sorry, medium link: https://prosetech.medium.com/what-nuclear-bombs-tell-us-abou...

> The carbon-14 fat-cell study also revealed that fat cells don’t last forever. Fat or thin, your body replaces roughly 10% of your fat cells every year. If you have more fat cells to begin with, you’ll have more fat cells to replace.

I can't seem to find the study talking about how fat cells remember the chemical environment when they are created.

On the other hand, the body also likes to get essential amino acids, if it does not get them from food, from the body's own muscle mass. This leads to a reduction of the own muscles and to a low basal metabolic rate.

I cannot judge whether one of the reasons is true, that would be the job of a good (!) nutritionist. Unfortunately, at least in Germany, the term is not protected and anyone, regardless of education, knowledge or experience may call himself so. Here there are really (especially on social networks) really many false claims.

I will say the whole time I have used this I have trained with weights extensively (5 days/week standard 3x sets per exercise body building routine). I do not know how much or little this plays into it, but definitely helps with the fat/muscle ratio (obviously).

I appreciate you are trying to be helpful. But most of what you said assumes a certain level or privilege (resources time/money/ableness) that the vast majority of people don't have. People working long hour jobs, or double jobs, or balancing kids/parent responsibilities. Often fast food is the only obvious option, and people aren't buying it until well into the throws of a low blood sugar event.

This coupled with metabolic/genetic differences can really muck up any given diet. What works of you doesn't just not work for everyone, it isn't even possible for everyone to follow.

That said, I know you are being helpful - my words or more to help those that might read them and be saying: "I did all that and it didn't work!"

Unless you're talking about extremes (e.g. non first-world country, homeless, or disabled people etc) I'm going to call BS on this.

Everyone eats, and everyone has 24 hours in a day.

I don't know about the rest of the world, but in Australia you can buy a 800g can of tomatoes for $1.50, a 185g can of tuna for $1.60 and 1kg of rice for $1.40.

You could cook that up on a stove (with just a couple portions of rice) in about 30min, giving you two nutritious meals for (I'm going to be generous) let's say about $4. That's $2 per meal. 3 meals a day gives you a total of $42 for food per week.

So are you telling me that fast food costs less than $50 per week, that 23 hours isn't enough time left in the day to do everything else, or am I missing something here?

Based on nutritional value (taking into account to fulfill the base needs as well as potentially overshooting on salt, fat, sugar and other things like Vitamin A just to name an example) we found that industrial food is always the more expensive solution.

Yes you can feed people on a very cheap industrial diet but they will miss essential nutrients as well as overshoot on salt, sugar, and others to detrimental health effects.

If you want a balanced diet mostly locally and seasonally produce (with added stuff like olive oil and such) cooked by yourself was way more cost efficient per nutritional value.

The problem is, that it takes time to learn this, especially to learn this from experience. Also time to relearn how food really tastes without added aroma and stuff. Time to learn how to cook efficiently and with variation. And so on. We don't learn this anymore. Not from our parents, nor otherwise. But the advertising tells us how easy it is to just open a fully ready meal, pop it in the microwave and be done in 3 minutes.

Instead of enjoying the quality of preparing food together as a family/couple. Spending time, experiencing the smell of fresh cut food, herbs and so on. We nowadays equivalent cooking to a chore.

If it were as simple as you say, then why (in Australia) is your minimum wage so high? So 2 hours of work on minimum wage can cover a week of food? And you are calling BS on what I said? Okay.

I will say that what I said above is _relative_, so if you go out for fast food "more than you should" than that becomes your baseline. Anything can be a baseline, even if not a healthy one.

I also know at least one person who has tried it and swears up and down it just doesn't work for them.

Ironically fast food often has some of the most easily available calories and macronutrient ratio. Working out the calories and macro for a home-made meal can be much more time-consuming

Is even that sufficient? Like, would you be able to tell the difference between "oxidation done by the body to generate energy for human cells" and "oxidation done by bacteria that feast on calories your human cells didn't get"? Maybe you could tell by the mixture of other gases, but I suspect CO2 itself wouldn't suffice.

This study[0] says that measuring CO2 is not enough, and that indirect calorimetry is the gold standard for measuring energy expenditure (EE).

"Calculated EE based on CO2 measurement was not sufficiently accurate to consider the results as an alternative to measured EE by indirect calorimetry. Therefore, EE measured by indirect calorimetry remains as the gold standard to guide nutrition therapy."

Google says "Indirect calorimetry is the method by which measurements of respiratory gas exchange (oxygen consumption, V O 2 and carbon dioxide production, V CO 2 ) are used to estimate the type and amount of substrate oxidized and the amount of energy produced by biological oxidation."

So getting back to your point, if bacteria are feasting on part of the calories and producing CO2, it seems that it would throw off the results even using indirect calorimetry. At that point though are we kinda arguing semantics? While our microbiome isn't composed of human cells, you can still argue it's a part of our functioning organism. It seems it would be nearly impossible to measure human digested calories vs bacteria digested calories, so maybe the results are close enough. Also, many beneficial bacteria release calories that we can consume, like butyric acid, which further complicates things.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC5251283/

Thus, if Bob and Joe eat the exact same diet that has some milk products, and Bob is lactose intolerant while Joe isn't, then Bob's cells get fewer calories from that diet than Joe's. If Bob and Joe's bodies are otherwise identical and follow identical exercise routines, then I would assume that, like, if the diet is exactly enough to maintain Joe's weight, then Bob would lose weight; and if it's exactly enough to maintain Bob's weight, then Joe would gain weight. (Right? For sake of illustration, we could imagine that most of the diet's calories are from milk, and assume Bob can tolerate the nausea.) Yet "calories in" (measured as food entering stomach) are identical, and "calories out" (measured as CO2) might also be identical.

Lactose is a specific, well-understood example of some people absorbing nutrients much better than others. I think there are other examples, and I expect there's a lot of variation in absorption efficiency that's less known. When you hear about people who eat lots of food and remain thin, I suspect this is part of the explanation. And whether their bacteria get the calories instead, or whether it passes through untouched, might show up in CO2 measurements but I don't think it would be related to body fat accumulation.

In a conservation-of-energy sense, "calories in" certainly gives you an upper bound on how many observed "calories out" you can produce without losing weight. But I don't think there's a lower bound on how inefficient someone's digestive system can be (except "zero"), or a practical upper bound on how much their cells might burn energy without us noticing (without close observation). I think, if you wanted a complete accounting of calories-out that would actually match the input, you'd need to add up (a) the heat a person puts out (via contact with air and surfaces, also infrared emissions), (b) the work they do in a physics sense (e.g. lifting heavy objects), and (c) the amount of un-burned calories in their stool (or any other excreted substances).

Yeah, the blind assertions I have seen that people basically always absorb pretty much 100% of the calories of the food is weird. We already know that some forms of calories like fiber have very low absorption rate. The Atwater indirect system of calculating calories takes that into account, but is still just an estimation, since it uses average calorie values for protein, carbs, and fat.

And so I've just noted that calories on packaging is just an approximation. An individual food may actually have more above average proteins than below average, etc, which can skew the real calorie count. For example, nuts are known to have less calories than indicated on the label, with whole almonds having 20% fewer. (https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/138.9.1741S) This is also ignoring the fact that many foods, especially those prepared by people are not always super consistent in sizing. A subway sandwich prepared correctly should on average have the calories subway claims, but we all know that some locations will follow the correct procdure more closely than others. Etc.

The other issue with just blindly going with calorie counting (which is really on tracking calories in) is that the differences in the calories one takes in will cause changes in the calories one expends. Eating fairly substancially less than your body is used to will almost certainly cause one to feel bad, and avoid doing as much, meaning fewer calories out, at least partially offsetting the the calorie reduction. But people are generally not measuring the calories expended very closely, if they bother doing it at all.

Well, heat dissipation places a bound on that.

It's not semantics, because when more calories are used up by bacteria they only sustain the amount of bacteria inside you, which then die and leave your body on a relatively quick timescale.

It's like if your fat cells could only store fat for a month before it gets discarded.

So it's important to know how much is each, if they can both vary.

That would still be part of calories in.

This is a major education/communication issue. When I switched to weightlifting, I started seeing rapid and significant results. And I don't even really sweat from it (except on leg day)

It may be less effective for losing weight, but exercise, including and especially cardio, is a great and essential strategy for other health reasons.

This is another myth. Even if you put on a serious amount of muscle, the change to your daily calorie burn is insignificantly increased in the larger scale of things.

Don’t to strength training to lose weight, so Strength training to get strong.

This is anecdotal but the difference between what I can eat working on a farm with having lots of muscle mass and sitting around on a computer with that same muscle mass was not really significant. But the difference between sitting at a desk with a lot of muscle mass and sitting at a desk with noticeably less muscle mass is night and day in how much I have to eat. With small and inconsistent amounts of strength exercise to maintain a bit more muscle mass again, my caloric expenditure went back up, far beyond what is lost from the exercise itself.

HIIT workouts are great for cardiovascular fitness and melted the fat off of me that I gained from a sedentary lifestyle spanning the last 2-3 years for example.

You have to get into really long cardio sessions with no carbohydrate supplements before that has any significant catabolic effect. This is not a concern for casual athletes.

Strength training is great, but it should be combined with some form of cardio in a comprehensive fitness program.

I've heard claims of 30% inaccuracy. Not sure if that applies to the absolute latest generation but I'd be happy to know if my understanding is outdated

First of all, while a 3k run isn't going to do much to burn off that slice of cake you had with lunch, if you transition from a generally inactive lifestyle to a generally active one (eg, by getting into running as a hobby), you can cumulatively burn a decent amount of calories. Cardio as a hobby is not for everyone, but I thought it wasn't for me until I gave it a shot and found I really enjoyed it.

There are also psychological advantages of incorporating exercise into a weight loss regime. I started eating better after, and partially because, I started exercising. When you work out a lot, you start to enjoy feeling healthy (or at least, thinking of yourself as a healthy person), and you start to realise that junk food is working against that.

Finally, weight loss should not be your only goal if you are interested in getting healthier. It's true that you could lose weight by being very sedentary and eating very little, but I suspect that would bring its own health problems.

The results are unsurprising... I gained 15 pounds over the next 6 months, and am now overweight.

Exercise obviously plays a role in weight management. There's truth in the "you can't outrun your fork" meme, and it's good to remind people of the greater importance of diet for weight management to counter the widespread myths about exercise being some cure-all here. However, I do worry that overly reductive takes risk swinging the pendulum too far in the opposite direction.

Do you remember whether your diet changed at this time as well?

Some other anecdotes shared here seem to share a similar theme, that exercise helps in losing weight on a more meta-level by shifting yourself into a generally healthier mindset which, in turn, seems to help you eat "healthier" foods, which is probably a proxy for "low-calorie foods" like fruit and vegetables. Maybe when you're sedentary it's easier to reach for the bag of potato chips?

Because following that logic, exercise supposedly does not work if you want to lose weight. But if every study around aerobic exercise arrives at that conclusion, why aren't the majority of athletes overweight? Where are the fat runners?

Is this a survivor bias? (Fat people even with great aerobic capacity end up hurting their joints so they stop running)

Is it because the addition of exercise generates other kind of changes in the body, like less insulin resistance, and overall more signals in the body to burn fat rather than store it?

Do runners spontaneously change their diets once they get used to their new lifestyle? Maybe the food they used to eat, both in amount and in composition, makes them uncomfortable so they start making lasting changes?

Yes, it does look like running a static amount every time has diminishing results. But, overall, people who run tend to be less overweight. And a lot of overweight people who start doing exercise and stick to it, tend to lose the weight, or at least they lose fat and gain muscle.

The "much" is carrying a lot of weight, so to speak, in your comment. As a reference I went from running ~25 miles a week to just walking a fraction of that as I've recovered. I did keep up my other non-cardio calisthenics throughout, though.

Some napkin math suggests I was over my calorie target by just shy of 300 calories per day over the course of this time period.

If we assume 3500 additional calories is 1 lb of fat stored on your body, then 3500/300 = 11.6 days you gained 1lb

Assuming 6 months is 180 days, then 180/11.6 = 15.5 lbs over 6 months

I’m my experience people severely underestimate the effects of having more muscles mass and the changes it can cause when you lose some from lack of training.

It also bleeds into peoples thinking. People view exercise as a way to lose weight. And eating less is, rightly, a more efficient way of losing weight. But body composition really matters not just for losing weight, but just life in general.

But I've had no problem keeping weight off by just adjusting the amount that I eat. However, if I upped the cardio, I'd be able to (and want) to eat an extra 500-600 calories to compensate, and still lose weight.

I swear I can maintain weight eating more than what I supposedly burn while active, which could make sense if you buy into the whole "your metabolic rate can be work-hardened" concept.

It's easy to calculate how much energy it takes to propel a given weight 5 miles. It's hard to tell how many calories a person burns to produce that energy. Your ratios of aerobic to anaerobic respiration are going to impact that wildly, which will depend on how much oxygen your body can absorb and how quickly you're burning through oxygen. There's a huge gap in the amount of energy cells get from each. Aerobic respiration produces up to 38 ATP per glucose, while anaerobic produces only 2 ATP per glucose.

Running form probably plays into that as well, if you've got some kind of suboptimal gait or you're swinging your arms a lot or something like that.

Yep, my form is atrocious and inefficient due to bunions and Morton's toe which has evolved into hammer toe.

I'd argue that I burn calories more efficiently, however :)

I am not intending to dispute the fact that you ate more to compensate - you say you did, and I don't doubt it. Nor am I doubting that weight gain is a function of net caloric intake; it is just a suggestion of another way exercise may affect this.

FWIW most of my exercise is running, hiking or kayaking. I am not sure (or perhaps that should be 'even more doubtful') that kayaking has the same effect.

There’s no doubt that appetite and everything around dieting and weight loss has a huge range of variation in behavior and what works. In addition to learning to separate exercise from food, the other thing that took me too long to learn is that weight loss is more mental exercise than physical. Figuring out how to trick myself into calorie tracking and habit forming isn’t easy, and my tricks on myself clearly don’t work for everyone.

The result was that I wasn't superhungry when I started eating. I also tried to eat high protein, high fiber meals so I'd stay full for longer.

Vegans live on average 10 year longer!

The hunger you feel the first day btw is not "real" hunger, it's just your stomach growling and you being used to eat. After you ignore hunger for 3 days, your body stops wanting food. That's if you want to do a cleanse. (I've never done one though)

That being said 'clesnding' has been disproven scientifically so many times, I think there must be a Necromancer for bad nutritional myths out there. I just can't understand why this myth (together with others) always comes back from the grave.

Regarding vegans. Yes a primarily plant-based diet has been shown in studies to be beneficial to health. Depending on the environment of the test subjects. For practical purposes in western/northern societies that holds true.

The important word is plant based. Because without either taking extreme care of the (especially) micro nutrients as a vegan you either need to substitute or be extra cautious. And of omnivores with a primarily plant based diet also look at their nutritional balance, caloric intake and such, the difference between diets in the studied groups vanished.

So one could say if eating primarily plant based and being mindful of our diet and nutritional needs, there is no difference scientifically.

The only remaining difference is one of personal values and believes. The question of how (or if) do we want to have animals treated to firm our diet. Personally I would add to look at how do we want the humans in the food production chain treated as well and how do we want our diets to have an ecological impact.

But as said - these are existential because deeply personal value questions that can't be scientifically discussed.

I feel like a non-lethal poison like a flea killer or something would cause a 10 year lifespan drop, so it would be surprising if meat were as deadly as flea killer poison.

But better way for regular people is just do OMAD. You get used to it after first three days, which are brutal. So, strong motivation is required, but still easier than real cut for bodybuilders or fighters.

Interesting if it's actually true. I doubt there are any good studies about that, though.

This is my experience as well. I also had a trainer confirm this.

I used to eat before and after a workout because I bought into the idea of the body needing fuel to power the workout and fuel to recover. I ended up eating when I wasn’t hungry and feeling heavy or sluggish.

She said the appetite suppression after a workout could last 30-120min and to only eat when I felt hungry. I felt much better after adjusting my eating habits.

I think moderate exercise can help with getting used to not over-eating. More strenuous exercise seems to make the body crave larger meals often negating any calories burned.

It doesn't really suppress the urge to eat though. Unfortunately I had to learn the hard way that I must count my calories, I have been counting them for 15+ years now and it has become part of my life.

Whether any one in particular subscribed to that school of though or not, marathon running is an outlier event, and isn't what most people would consider as part of a regular, healthy, exercise regime that one might do many times a week.

And while it is not for most people (and definitely not me), there are people I know who thrive on running marathons and the training for it, while otherwise living perfectly normal lives. There is a hypothesis that cursorial / persistence / endurance hunting was a a stage in our ancestors' evolution, and that we have inherited some of the traits of that lifestyle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis

But it's mostly a hand-wavy assertion too, and there's other evidence against it. There are cultures around the world (low populations, to be sure) where repeatedly traversing 26.2 miles a day would not be considered particularly abnormal.

Even marathon runners run marathons only on competitions. The chance of injury or sickness after is too high in order to make it worthy. And after, you are supposed to rest for multiple days even if not injured. Again, 26.2 miles is 8 hours of hiking and you are pretty much guaranteed to be ok after it.

It is still worth mentioning - because it is so easy to overlook.

Some simple math: if I go all out on a row machine for 30 minutes, I'll burn 300 calories.

If I eat 2 extra slices of pizza, it is easiely 300 calories

If I swap a turkey sandwich with healthy options, I can reduce my linch calories by 300 - and I can save even more during dinner (which is typically bigger than lunch)

So a good diet: takes less time than exercise, reduces calories more, and can save money

A stationary bike at a steady 20mph pace is about 500 calories in 30 minutes. That's really significant. An hour will erase about a third of a normal person's diet.

When I used to do heavy training (long distance running, weight training) I would eat close to 8k calories a day and I was in fantastic shape. Eating more was necessary to survive, given how much energy I was expending.

That assumes a “normal person” will not compensate for the effort with a snack.

A “reward” pint of ice cream will re-add more calories than the hour of cycling. A “standard serving” will nearly match your half hour.

And that’s an hour at 20mph, which really isn’t in any way the norm.

You're also assuming the same normal person will not compensate for their healthy lunch with a snack.

Measuring stationary bike workouts in terms of mph is kind of meaningless. What actually matters is the measured power output based on the resistance setting.

It took me about three months to get up to that speed, cycling every other day. I started out doing 10 miles, at 10mph.

Three months isn't all that long for an exercise program.

There are certainly plenty of trained cyclists who can maintain that power output, but I've never seen anyone reach that level after only 3 months. If you really did that then you're an extreme genetic outlier with an unusually fast training response.

I did a lot of cycling in my 20s and while I'm at least a decade out of shape I'm sure I'm relying a lot on past training.

Absolute heart rate doesn't tell us much about calorie consumption because there's a huge variation between individuals. If we know the athlete's size, sex, and threshold heart rate then we can start to make some kind of estimate. But to get an accurate number it really takes a properly calibrated power meter (or more complex lab tests involving exhaled gas measurement).

What is the actual power output in watts? Has it been properly calibrated? If not then you're just fooling yourself.

These statements are rather extreme and seem impossible to support. Energy output per mile with real world cycling has enormous variance as well. Why so much concern for precision regarding one and not the other?

I don't think there's much point in continuing here.

You can get an accurate calculation of real world cycling calories with a power meter. Everyone's cycling efficiency in terms of power output per calorie burned falls within a fairly narrow range so converting from time and watts to calories is simple. A good power meter accurate to within a couple percent can be added to any bike for about $700.

Smart trainers like a Tacx Neo or Wahoo Kickr also have accurate power meters built in. Those are substantially different from typical stationary bikes.

I understand the translation between power and mph is somewhat approximated, but I think you could be more generous. It's not unreasonable to make this kind of approximation and the numbers aren't meaningless.

I cycle on and off for ~8 years (35yo) and going at 20mph in the real world for an hour or more became possible only after a few years for me.

As a point of comparison, an average size man would have to run at a speed of at least 11 mph (18 km/h) in order to burn that many calories in 30 minutes. Not impossible, but well beyond what most of us can manage.

It is also something at most a tiny minority of the obese population can do.

Fats are the secret to obesity, hands down. I have a remarkably small appetite and I can easily down 1000 calories of ice cream in a single sitting (a single pint of Ben and Jerry's. You can row like crazy for 30 minutes, but if you have two extra candy bars, it's meaningless.

Yes, our bodies are built to take in more calories than we can burn (thankfully!), but if you keep your eating habits constant the exercise will make a huge difference.

Pretty sure most people shouldn't be eating 3000 calories/day.

The thing is, the 300 calories from rowing shouldn't be compared to the absolute calorific requirement (say 2500 calories) but the surplus. So Maybe I'm overweight because I need 2500 and I eat 3000. Thats 500 too much, but take out 300 and that's 60% of what I need to at least reach equilibrium. It makes a huge difference to how much I need to sacrifice out of my diet.

"You can't exercise your way out of a bad diet" - literally not true for a fuckton of endurance-sport athletes for whom the challenge is eating enough calories.

It's 100% true for people who think exercising for 30 min means license to eat whatever.

> So a good diet: takes less time than exercise, reduces calories more, and can save money

Yes, but endurance exercise over an hour or two brings its own advantages health-wise.

The real takeaway is that there are no absolutes.

While I do agree with you that sustained, high level activity requires and burns more calories, I think that the advice coming out of there, exercise is less efficient than diet for weight loss, is going to absolutely be true for the majority of gym goers who quite frankly are phoning it in whenever they work out.

Like, for example, an olympic swimmer may eat 5000-10,000 calories in a day, but they are spending around 4-6 hours a day in a cold pool training at a world class level (body needs to keep warm somehow regardless of effort.) But a normal person may only swim for 20 minutes at a much gentler pace. This person should still be eating in line with calorie guidelines and macros for age/sex.

The reality is that diet needs to be flexible based on results. Not losing weight? Eat fewer carbs or calories. Feeling tired and worn out? Eat more or exercise less based on your physique and goals.

I don't know how things are for anyone else, but it worked for me, shrug.

Attempts to loose weight by diet only all failed. To make it worst, there is also aspect of most common diet advice being plain wrong. It focuses on calories too much. It completely ignores what your body needs, so you end up in nutritional deficiency - this kind or that kind. And that will affect a lot and eventually you will stop diet and start to feel so much better and healthier after stopping it.

The calorie stuff is from both oxygen and deuterated water studies. You burn the same amount of calories and your system just shunts them around. The science on this is one of the few things in nutrition that is quite solid.

This has the effect, for example, that if you exercise a lot, this actually suppresses your immune system making you more likely to get sick.

Are you sure? 2000 kcal in 3 hours is 770 watts of power output.

Edit: Wikipedia [0] says "During a bicycle race, an elite cyclist can produce close to 400 watts of mechanical power over an hour and in short bursts over double that - 1000 to 1100 watts; modern racing bicycles have greater than 95% mechanical efficiency. An adult of good fitness is more likely to average between 50 and 150 watts for an hour of vigorous exercise."

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_power

I'm not, because the parent poster explicitly said "That's not based on made-up calories but actual work from a power meter on the bike."

Which seems absurd, hence my comment.

Hello old friend, we meet again.

The article is taking this one step further though and saying those 300 calories burned by exercise are simply conserved elsewhere throughout the day automatically by your body.

The claim then is that if you exercise and burn 300 calories, but eat an extra 300 to offset it you won't end up at a neutral state and instead will gain weight as if you hadn't exercised at all.

Rough math: 3 * 300 * 4 = 3600 calories surplus/month. A pound of adipose tissue has ~3500 calories IIRC. So you're now gaining a pound of fat a month, and you're not even indulging yourself, really.

In reality, physical activity and diet aren't so steady, so some months you maintain weight, some you lose, and some you gain a lot. But over time it averages out, and you've put on 12lbs in a year.

Don't get me wrong, I know that the easiest way to lose weight is to limit calorie consumption. I also know that a buffet of 1800 calories going to a bike ride helps a ton.

I was in the best shape of my life, felt great and ate whatever I wanted without thinking about it. BUT I was spending 4 hours per day exercising.

Now I have a 6 week old baby and WFH... I manage a 30 minute Peloton a few times a week. Maybe. Even though I try to pay attention the pounds have crept on because there's so little margin for error on 1500 calories/day.

Calorie counting is no way to live, IMO. I miss the days of a long run and guilt-free cheese and beer after :)

But most people cycling 50 miles are not generating 300W continuously, and most people running for 2 hours are not doing a sub-7min pace for the duration.

ps. I have run for 2 hours at a sub-7 min pace, and cycled 50 miles at about 280W.

Also have lost a bunch of weight (or at least replaced fat with muscle) from just doing 10-15 minutes of PT exercises (strength training, stretching, and yoga) plus walking an extra mile or two per day.

I lost 80 pounds over the last couple years with riding average of 12 miles a day.

In my experience I'm not so sure about that either. I can't repeat centuries day after day when I am out of shape and need to lose weight. If one can, it's very unlikely he/she needs to lose weight.

For sure. But the discussion going on here (and in TFA) is the balance between weight loss via exercise and weight loss via lower calorie consumption.

Thinking on it, if food is,I eat it. Any pizza is a personal pizza, if you like pizza. :)

Still. Guessing most folks that can ride fifty miles are not overweight.

The details might differ some but the overall advice is the same.

If you want to lose weight, eat less.

If you want to be in better shape, exercise.

If you want to improve your health, change your diet (and probably exercise).

A big issue is that people conflate those three objectives.

Being skinny doesn't mean you're healthy and exercising doesn't mean you'll lose weight.

I exercise quite a bit and have always had an extra 10-15 lbs up until semi-recently when I put those three things together and quit eating so much. I still eat plenty of junk food and I've lost about 20 lbs and kept it off.

If you're unhappy with your weight, eat less. If that doesn't work, eat less. Some people might have an easier or harder time with that because we're all different but the advice is the same.

Exercise does much more, and does have some impact on weight, according to the next paragraphs of the article:

But Thyfault warns that message may do more harm than good. People who exercise are less likely to gain weight in the first place, and those who exercise while they diet tend to keep weight off better, he says. Exercise also can impact where fat is stored on the body and the risk of diabetes and heart disease, he says.

Pontzer agrees that exercise is essential for good health: The Hadza, who are active and fit into their 70s and 80s, don’t get diabetes and heart disease. And, he adds, “If exercise is tamping down the stress response, that compensation is a good thing.” But he says it’s not fair to mislead dieters: “Exercise prevents you from getting sick, but diet is your best tool for weight management.”

People who exercise are inherently more health conscious in the first place, so that's not surprising. That doesn't mean the exercise is responsible for that.

They didn’t have a treadmill or did keto diets.

My take away was fitness should be a lifestyle and to avoid lots of western food (sugar, processed, empty calories, I drink only water, etc).

I don’t count calories and can eat twice in the morning. If I counted, both morning meals are less than 600 calories.

I don’t go to a gym, but have maintained a <10% body fat (and 86kg at 190cm height) over the years (without feeling hungry all the time because I eat well). I just do body weight training and make my entire day active (even tho I’m a programmer).

For me, being in shape doesn’t need to be complicated.

There's only one way this actually happens for a majority of the population: exercise being built into daily habits, in a way that's so natural that it almost seems unavoidable.

The Netherlands seems to have the right of it: their urban design strongly supports walking and biking, and indeed, their rates of 'active transportation' are very high.

As a bonus, walk and bike infrastructure is quite cheap to build and maintain compared to car infrastructure.

With that in mind the flat landscape of the Netherlands might be giving us a slight disadvantage ;)

Anyway, search for "blue zones" to learn more, aging healthily is an ongoing topic of research

As a developer my self, I find this part the hardest.

When I’m coding I’m obviously sitting at my desk. At some point I get tired of that or hit a wall, then stop, and have to think about that to do next.

Instead of sitting at my desk thinking I’ll go for a walk, go outside and work on a project around the house, go for a swim, hike somewhere. During that time I’m mulling in the problem in my head coming up with solutions.

Once I finish with that activity, I’ll set back down and try a few if the ideas I came up with while doing those activities.

According to my Apple Watch, I get between 25-55 min of activity on a given day.

Ido Portal, for all his eccentric weirdness, knows things:

> The body will become better at whatever you do, or don’t do. If you don’t move, your body will make you better at not moving. If you move, your body will allow more movement.

I’m personally thinking in terms of micro-habits that eventually form a lifestyle, and it’s all about total lifetime reps, if you will.

For example, I have a height adjustable desk, and have replaced the chair with a pilates ball. I still stand, or sit on my knees, more than sitting down on it.

I believe there’s a problem with some of the ergonomic setups we use - if you keep moving, and shift around you shouldn’t need it. If you do, you’re already “losing it” and should probably be changing things up more frequently during the days. Now this is easy to say, and for some people, probably not true.

I’m basically continuously fighting the path of least resistance. I’m in war with the comfy a* brain!

Reasonably tiring exercise on a bike could burn 10 Cal per minute, so maybe 600 an hour. But swallowing a few packs of crisps or a few chocolate bars could fill that right back up in a couple of minutes. If you were speed eating you could swallow it in under a minute.

Think about if your weight is steady, how long you spend eating and how long you spend using energy. It can easily be the case that you spent all your calories in 23.5 hours and were eating for just half an hour.

The time ratio is so lopsided it's hard to come up with a plan where exercise carries most of the weight loss vs just eating less.

If you think of your energy use as base rate plus exercise rate, because your base rate is sustained for the whole day you'd have to exercise like crazy for a long time to make up any difference to what you eat.

The wild thing is he’s saying that’s not true either. He’s saying you never burned the extra calories in the first place.

This in particular feels really hand wavy: “After weeks of training, they barely burned more energy per day when they were running 40 kilometers per week than before they started to train.”

What does “barely” mean? 40km/week isn’t that much in terms of calorie burn. The 100 calories/mile rule of thumb says this would imply ~350 calories/day. And this article says a woman would have a daily calorie expenditure of 2400 already (seems high, though). So this is only 15%. But anyway, this drops after adaptation seemingly, so does “barely more” mean 50 calories/day? Or does it mean 300? Because those are very different. And to where is the difference attributable? Because someone going from sedentary to trained runner is going to get a lot more efficient at running. “Less energy on inflammation” is really hard to swallow as the primary source of adaptation, especially when this is presented as conjecture.

At some point, there’s just physics. Running a mile isn’t free, benching 100kg isn’t free. These things take work and we can calculate the minimum energy requirement that adaptation can’t escape. Our bodies do not adapt so far that exercise becomes pointless, it only shifts the balance a little (which might be enough to be demotivating for some people, but it’s still relatively minor.) I was under the impression that the total range of metabolic adaptivity for a given person might be on the order of 25%-30% maybe. That might be an over-estimate. I googled a little and found this paper mentioning adaptations of like 8%-15% for severe calorie restriction diets (depending on how RMR is measured).

https://academic.oup.com/fampra/article/16/2/196/480196

It’s not that much in terms of calories. It is a lot of physical activity for a modern human in a developed nation.

The real kicker is that an unchecked diet will offset virtually any amount of exercise. An unchecked diet means people will feel hungrier after exercise and thus eat more. It takes a lot of exercise to reach the point that it manages to outrun appetite and bad eating habits. There are a lot of fat people who work physically demanding jobs.

The issue is the uptick in energy burn is unintuitive especially in the world energy dense high-processed food

As an ex once put "you have to run 5 miles to earn a cupcake - totally not worth it!"

We're glad you're here to poke fun at the research of at least two people with PhD's centered on this topic.

> when you start considering the extremes

When you start considering the extremes, you often find that they can't tell you much about the middle ground.

> As the athletes’ ran more and more over weeks or months, their metabolic engines cut back elsewhere to make room for the extra exercise costs

You clearly burn extra calories when exercising, but the thesis of the article is that it doesn't matter in terms of weight loss because your body will adjust to burn the mean level of calories. The obvious exception are athletes whose energy expenditures simply can't be averaged away.

This leads to the conclusion that it's not just exercise that drives weight loss, but diet and exercise (shocking!) that makes a difference, as you have to run at a net loss over the day.

Most people who want to lose weight (aka mostly unfit/untrained) are not going to be able to exercise the amount would take to truly force a calorie deficit.

This is well known and true even if the claims made better happened to be entirely false. I’m not dismissing your point, here. I agree fully.

Exercise just doesn’t burn enough calories to really matter. Especially in the face of a poor diet. Running burns ~100 calories per mile (yes, varying based on weight and a little bit based on speed but it’s a close enough rule). A can of soda has ~150 calories. There’s just no competition. Someone trying to lose weight can skip a soda or a candy bar and it’s more effective than running an extra mile.

I think you are missing the fundamental part of the article about the calorie expenditures being adjusted based on non-fat body mass.

So, yes Michael Phelps eats a lot of calories, but him (and other pro athletes) have spent their lives building muscle and keeping fat reserves down. Michael Phelps I think is at a 5% body fat, while the average American is 18%+. He needs more calories for that extra body mass that most people the same height don't have.

No way. 5% is well below optimal for athletic performance. At 5% you’re looking at developing health problems. This is the range bodybuilders aim for on stage because they care about looking shredded more than they care about having joints that work.

Phelps was reportedly 8% when he won all those medals in Beijing.

Exercise obviously must burn calories because work is being done. The body can’t overcome physics.

The nuance, and the surprising thing, is that other parts of the body seem to adjust their energy levels to compensate. If you don’t do a lot of exercise, something else burns calories. If you do exercise, the “something else” burns less.

What is the something else? That’s the mystery that still needs to be solved. And by extension, what are the limits of the something else? After all, there are well-documented examples of extreme athletes who consume lots of calories without gaining mass.

In hindsight, it’s much easier on one’s knees to adjust your diet.

"Fun" fact: they also shit themselves on the bike. When you eat that much it's inevitable you're gonna have to poop it out, and it's a race -- you can't stop.

Edit: here

"It’s related to the fact that during periods of physical stress, the body shunts blood away from organs that are not necessarily critical at that moment,” Michael Dobson, D.O., a colon and rectal surgeon with Novant Health in Charlotte, North Carolina, tells Mental Floss.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/648541/why-marathon-runn...

Might not be the typical thing an athlete eats, but it certainly keeps the weight on a lot of people.

That's true of course, but the problem for most people is sticking to the plan, not whether that plan would actually work.

We see athletes sticking to their plans but they are pretty special in terms of what they can get themselves to do.

I'm not American, but in my part of the world people tend to have gradual trends to weight, not sudden swings.

I can see this happening given such behavior, as well as in the "heavier" portion of the population. definitely not a common occurrence across the population though.

When I do weight loss, I can plot it daily and it's going down on average but there are large swings on most days.

Your fat because you consume to many caloiries for what you put out. Pretty simple.

I went week on/off vego, from being a meat eater near daily, dropped weight without adjusting anything else.

You are what you ate. You cant hide from it. If you look down and see some rolls, thats not cause you didnt exercise enough!

I went from doing gym weekly in my 20s, to my 30s where i dont touch consciously exercise at all yet im bigger, leaner, and have my abs back. My uncle, who at my ate became a fat bastard and never stopped; used to be a body builder on the roids. He had a sweet phsyic for about 1 year.

The easier way to make money in this world, is to fool fat people into thinking your product will let them have their cake, and eat it to. I say fat people the say way people refer to a drug addict. Its the same thing, cept your comfort blanket is legal and readyly accessible, 24/7/7, being pushed at you constantly whenever you look.

I say this as a child of a mother who was/is fat due to being in an abusive relationship with my father. She cheated through every diet she every did. Until she got her stomach stapled; when overnight she SHED weight, was no longer diabetic, and is currently 66yrs old and going strong (stapled around 49).

For example, with marathon training, once you start to hit the 6 plus mile your daily run eats up over 1,000 calories.

Near the end of your training your long run days become over 2,000 calories, and even your easy runs becomes 1000+.

That's essentially an entire extra meal, and you're running 5-6 days a week.

If you're just going to the gym for 30-45 minutes, 3-4 days a week, diet will be essential to losing weight. But if you're running 1 hr + a day and 2+ hrs at least once a week it's hard to get enough calories.

Something went wrong when very moderate volume of exercise (1 hour per day) is seen as a huge time commitment.

I certainly get that less eating is more effective than exercise but in my head I think as long as you burn more calories than you take in you should lose weight. So if you eat 1800 calories a day, assuming you need 2000 a day, you'll lose weight (-200). If you do some exercise that uses 500 calories and eat 2300 calories you're still at (-200)

Like many people I consciously and unconsciously resisted the idea of tracking calories and using calories-in/calories-out (CICO) as my primary tool for both weight loss and exercise. It’s not perfect, as many people here are pointing out. However, it doesn’t need to be perfect, and there are scant alternatives that are demonstrably better. I changed my mind and now I see calorie tracking as a way to be better at both exercise and weight loss. Good exercise training, especially weight lifting, requires eating a bit more than expenditure, and good weight loss requires eating a bit less. Either way, I agree with you that exercise can play a valuable part in weight loss, and I think it has many other physical and mental health benefits.

> it never really worked because I’d unconsciously eat to compensate

Your body is actually building muscles after exercising. It is also repairing damage caused by exercising. You actually should eat more, but more of the right stuff.

I did… the problem with me (and with, I dunno, half of humanity? ;)) was I overcompensated, I ate more than I needed to build muscles and recover from exercise. So I gained weight slowly, or for long periods of time, just failed to lose the extra weigh I had through exercise alone. My problem is that exercise without calorie tracking doesn’t help me lose weight, I have to do both. And once I learned to do both, I automatically figured out at the same time how to lose weight without exercising at all. I still exercise, but now I get to use exercise as a way not just to get strong, but also to eat extra snacks. :)

Protein like cottage cheese or something like that helps a lot. Figuring out what it is your body needs helps a lot.

It’s definitely possible to lose weight and become less healthy by eating the wrong balance of macros. It’s also possible to become more healthy and/or stronger without losing weight. This is about deciding which goals you want, and figuring out how to get there. It’s easier to do one goal at a time (and all of these goals are extremely difficult to meet individually) but it’s also possible to work on several or all of them a little bit at a time too.

This narrative is pushed by the fast and highly-processed food industry. MacDonalds is sponsoring sport events with that very narrative : "morbidly-obese children of 8 should just do a bit more sport"

The public health benefits are unparalleled.

To note, when they refer to "diet" it's probably not about "eating less" or popular "on a diet" interpretation.

Good and bad diets also aren't as simple as the "CICO" myth

If you had an accurate & sophisticated model for how the foods one eats contribute to their fitness / health / appearance, it probably would be too unwieldy to apply. A daily sum of calories, however, is simple enough to keep in your head or paper or an app.

Basically, it's way harder to make people accept it's complex and highly variable when they've already internalized a shiny theory of everything.

Say the word “toxins” around me and I will fight you in the streets.

I couldn’t agree more that CICO is a super blunt instrument, but it actually does work, because the alternative we’re comparing to is not tracking input & output at all. You can be a lot wrong, and it’s still better than completely wrong, right? :P Like the amount of noise in my calories estimates is probably at a minimum 10%-15% wrong at all times, same goes for expenditure (maybe even worse) but it seems like the important part isn’t actually the number, it’s the act of establishing and sticking to a budget. For me, mentally, it was the realization that my feelings on hunger and satiety were actually mis-calibrated. This helped me get over the idea of being hungry, and helped me realize the goal wasn’t to overcome hunger, it was to get used to something closer to the correct amount of food.

We have, but most of it seriously flawed because of many issues.

For instance this pretty serious study on diets (http://www.dishlab.org/pubs/MannTomiyamaAmPsy2007.pdf) had to rely on BMI for segmenting the subjects because the whole field had standardized on BMI. Yet we know for decades that BMI based segmentation is meaningless, BMI itself being a clunky relic of the past. Then you can come down on the subject of the studies, repeatability, no possible control group most of the time etc.

We can say that's the best we can do, but we should also accept it's far from being reliable info most of the time.

> it actually does work

well, it doesn't work or not, it's just a concept, an observation like a law of physics. It's like saying gravity works, that's not the info you'd give people having difficulties to build a self balancing robot.

> it doesn’t work or not, it’s just a concept, an observation like a law of physics.

It works as a tool for weight loss. It works for exactly the reason you state, because it’s primarily an observation of physics. The only way I gain mass is via my mouth, and the only way I lose mass is via energy expenditure. If I want to control mass, therefore, tracking and controlling my input and output is more or less guaranteed to work. For sure the input output responses might not be perfectly linear, but that’s expected and not a ‘flaw’. The weight response to calories also can’t be reversed or flat, due to physics, it must be highly correlated, right?

It's wonderful that your physiology is aligned with your goal of doing this. But in this control pathway there are billions of neurons, trillions of bacteria, I don't know how many biochemical signals, all feeding back into each other. Reducing all of this to "controlling input" is one of the most harmful ideas in public health. For people who struggle with weight it is just setting them up to fail and blame themselves for it. Repeated over, and over, and over.

FWIW, my personal philosophy on tracking and controlling my inputs is almost completely focused on figuring out how to turn this away from a “self-control” or willpower problem into a better understanding of what I want. Personally, I think trying to willpower control over eating is absolutely doomed to fail. It’s nearly impossible to meet a budget when you’re expectation is based on being strong enough to overcome hunger. For me, solving this was a mental problem of convincing myself it’s not about willpower at all. I say that like I solved something, but in reality it’s still hard.

I was only referring to the accepted fundamental truths about all human physiology, for instance that food is necessary to live, and that exercising uses some of the food. Even for outliers who’s bodies put on pounds when they merely smell food, measuring calories in and out still works reliably. The number of calories might be abnormal for some people, but they can still reliably calibrate their maintenance input and see effects when increasing or reducing it. I don’t mean for it to sound easy to do, because it’s not easy, I only mean to clarify the goals. The high number of neurons and bacteria and signals actually make this a more stable and predictable system, generally speaking.

CICO is fundamental to human physiology in the same way that "people become indebted because they spend more money than they earn" is fundamental to economics: true, but utterly useless for actually addressing poverty or obesity. An attractive red herring and a dangerous one.

(It's even worse than that: at least we can measure income and expenses. Yet we can't measure caloric intake / expenditure properly.)

Moreover, poverty and obesity are related. Poverty is affecting people’s food choices, and the cheap food and fast food we have is a lot of high fat, high sugar, high calorie, and huge portions.

CICO is more useful for people who are stable and fine, not under the poverty line and not obese, but just a little unhappy with their weight. CICO is what bodybuilders and athletes and models use, among many others, people mostly fine-tuning. (Just like how financial budgets are mostly helpful for rich people, and people optimizing their savings, but not particularly helpful for a single parent on minimum wage who’s unable to meet basic necessities.)

For someone who’s not suffering from either poverty or obesity, the difference between money/debt and calories/weight is you can only get money from other people, where you only get calories from yourself.

It doesn’t actually matter that calorie metrics are approximate and not perfect. The reason is because CICO enables a personal science experiment, and a process that can adjust and adapt to imperfect information. What it enables you to do is to calibrate your measurement first. Then, second, either reduce caloric inputs or increase caloric outputs to lose weight while making sure the other one doesn’t change, or do both. For average non-poor and non-obese people, CICO isn’t a prescription, nor is it a dangerous red herring, it’s basic consumer information that is, some say, dangerous to not know, which is why part of the important response to the obesity crisis is to demand accurate caloric labeling on food, to enable consumers to make healthier choices long before obesity. This is only the tip of the iceberg, we need better sugar and portion control and all kinds of things, but it’s a start.

CICO is like a PID controller but even simpler than that, it’s only the wires of a P controller where you are the controller. The only thing CICO says is which input to connect to, and that’s all. A PID controller doesn’t know a thing about the system it controls, it doesn’t have to. All that matters is that the inputs affect the outputs and the outputs can be measured. As long as the system output changes over time with it’s inputs, this P controller setup works. It still works when the underlying system has defects and bugs or differences in manufacturing from other systems, as long as the underlying system is responding to changes in input.

To nitpick, bodybuilders and athletes usually control their diet at a level where calorie counting is not relevant.

An example of that: https://youtu.be/PBfDWstg3Hc It’s interesting that the overlays always show calorie intake, but you hear the guy and at no point he mentions calories, ever.

He specifically mentions fat, proteins, vitamins, minerals, nutrients and overall quantity. He weights his food at each meal and he probably adjust all of these try and error style, looking at the results. I think calorie estimates are probably meaningless at this point.

To further nitpick, all of bodybuilding is based on a routine of bulking and cutting, where the cutting phase is intentional calorie deficit before competition. Whether or not they track calories per se, all of them are using CICO and proving that it works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodybuilding#Bulking_and_cutti...

Yeah. Calorie counting can be useful for normal weight people, like budgeting can be for financially secure people.

Looks like we are in violent agreement. :)

As you say ignoring the inner workings would be fine if we had consistent, culture independent widely reproduced results. Thing is, we don’t.

For anything beyond a clinical trials on specific subjects that stay there for days/weeks to be fully studied, we might not even have valid control groups.

This is why I see comments on us having a vast body of studies to look to be more or less a “look a my library, there’s a lot of books” kind of statement that doesn’t really point at us having actual vast knowledge about the subject.

> It works as a tool for weight loss.

Does it ? to get back to the above point, do you see any consistently reproduced studies on large cohorts of people pointing at it working in the long term?

If you’re asking whether calorie counting has been studied and controlled enough to know if it works as a weight loss tool in practice, the answer is yes. You don’t need a study for this part; it’s physics. If you are maintaining weight and then stop eating you will die. If you are maintaining weight and then cut your diet in half you will lose weight. I posted a link to one survey on this somewhere in this thread that should be easy to find that demonstrates the rate of metabolic adaptation to caloric restriction (it’s about 15%). But you can Google this and find out for yourself, there are many many papers in many many languages, and you looking for your own sources will be better than being skeptical of anything I suggest. The health agencies of every developed country in the world publish caloric recommendations and have resources and research information available.

Literally millions and millions of people globally have successfully used CICO to manage weight, and the primary complaint is not that it doesn’t work, the primary complaint is that it’s difficult to implement and make habitual, it requires too much work and/or control. When most people say “it doesn’t work”, what they mean is “it doesn’t work for me because I couldn’t establish a working routine, the habit doesn’t stick easily.” There are no studies showing normal people reducing their caloric intake significantly and failing to lose weight.

This is the shortcut I am pointing at.

You're bringing in a pure assumption. I need an actual, well designed study that shows that your inntuition is in fact correct (to reiterate we're talking weight loss, and in particular stable loss, not some blimp in a three weeks trial)

Can you point to a rock solid study on it? There are countless studies on the most obvious things. Take any of what you call "physics" and you'll have large studies from reputable research labs analysing the long term impact on stricly controlled groups. CICO is not some hippy unknown strategy, the press turns around "obesity crisis" headlines year long, there is no shortage of funding for research."It's obvious so nobody tested it" isn't a valid argument.

I’m trying to understand, but I don’t yet understand your objection to the physics. Do you disagree that failing to eat enough will cause death? That’s not an assumption, right?

Here’s the study I mentioned elsewhere in the thread. I have no idea if this meets your bar for size or quality. It feels like you’re trying to set the burden of proof as to be so high that you are ensuring it can’t be met.

https://academic.oup.com/fampra/article/16/2/196/480196?logi...

This argument feels to me like demanding rock solid study of a large cohort of multicultural evidence for gravity. Are there countless valid long terms studies demonstrating the existence of gravity? No, not really, because nobody anywhere denies that gravity exists.

CICO isn’t a specific methodology, nor is it a belief or a surprising theory. Calories-in, calories-out is a completely generic statement about the causes of mass gain and mass loss in the human body. It doesn’t make any claims about the amount of gain or loss. It doesn’t claim that eating a pound makes you gain a pound, it’s simply an observation that eating is the sole mass input of the human body, and energy expenditure is the only controllable output, the only way mass is lost. There are no other alternatives, right? Calories are an approximate measure of what you eat & burn. This is tautological, there is practically nothing to argue there, and there is nothing to debate. A study isn’t necessary because this is an already proven fundamental truth about the human body (and incidentally all life): there are no other sources of weight gain or loss. CICO doesn’t prescribe specific actions either. The way you use this information is up to you. The scientific among us might reasonably start measuring calories first to calibrate their steady state, and then slowly make changes to their inputs and outputs to see what happens.

Anyway, I also don’t need a study personally because it worked for me and it suddenly became clear what everyone who knows this was talking about. I had resisted trying it for a looong time, perhaps on the same grounds you’re resisting the idea. Better than papers might be to experiment on yourself, if you really want to know. First hand knowledge will certainly be more valuable to you than assurances from academics.

Yes, there are. There’s actually periodic assesments of gravity at most places to get an idea of the trends and detect underground movements. An exemple of this: https://earth-planets-space.springeropen.com/articles/10.118...

Surveying gravity is one of the many measures that are done pretty frequently and very seriously around the globe.

On CICO, the issue is it’s a model that is true at a very low level view of the body mechanism. You are right that it’s very generic, and in theory it makes sense. The disconnect is between that extremely low level view, and what you do with it in practice.

There was this excelent discussion on type 1 disabetes (https://maori.geek.nz/the-unreasonable-math-of-type-1-diabet...). These people have their life on the line and actually monitor their blood levels, and it’s still tough to manage a good guess of the inputs and when/how much sugar will get in the blood. Reading the labels doesn’t give enough info on what will be actually processed, and the real solution becomes real time constant monitoring of the actual blood levels, without relying on a model of how it’s supposed to work.

When you advocate counting calories for a random person on the street, they won’t monitor their blood, they actually are in a worse position as what they care about is not sugar levels but their whole body intake, which there is no way to monitor. And you also won’t be hooking CO2 masks on them everyday to monitor their out, so it’s also a random guess. At this point CI has crazy large variations, and CO is basically unknown, especially as it will change as they change their CI. This is why applying a CICO thinking for someone who’ll change their diet for the rest of their life makes no sense.

An argument I’ve often seen is to just lower CI to the ground until seeing effects. Which basically means obliterating the subjects social and professional life and ask them to keep it that way or it will be their fault if they rebound. That’s not what I call a weight loss strategy.

On the linked study:

It’s a meta study based on three prior papers, one of them is “ Decrease in fat oxidation following a meal in weight-reduced individuals: a possible mechanism for weight recidivism. ” https://europepmc.org/article/MED/8596485

From the abstract: > Twenty older (age:mean +/- SE, 61 +/- 1 years; range, 56 to 70 y) obese (body mass index > 32 kg/m2) subjects (12 women, eight men) completed an 11-week dietary restriction program in which they lost 9 +/- l kg.

So the research is on 20 “obese” people. Aside from the low number of participants, there’s not even a “healthy” control group here. They’re “obese” by their BMI but they might as well be gym trainees, who knows ? It only lasted 11-weeks, there is no mention of the social conditions of the study ([EDIT: I didn’t realize at first look that all participants where elderly. Which brings in more questions IMO, but I don’t know where to stand on that). So this study is aimed at bringing a single piece of information, but we don’t have enough context to extrapolate that info’s validity in any other context it does it apply to any population at large? are the effects permanent ? do we even get the same effect after 1 month ? was it random fluke from the limited test subjects ? who knows). The title is about weight recidivism but there is 0 follow up on the subjects outside of that 5 hour post meal check.

And that’s just the first study. We could go on and on, my point is we don’t have the “science” on the subject, just a ton of questionnable data points and random intuitive theories, everyone with their beliefs and prejudices.

Athletes have the means to control a lot better what they do, including adjusting everything to their actual body without having to care for grand theories. And many people succeed in getting healthier in many different ways, including by going to different diets that actually increase calories as counted and little change in their daily life.

That’s why I feel it’s a disservice to preach a “one true theory” when it doesn’t help much really.

I think it’s fine for us to not know much about something. We don’t have all the answers in the universe, we’re just hairless monkeys after all. I just wish more people would be accepting of a “that’s complicated, nobody really knows and you’ll have to try a bunch of stuff to see what works for you specifically” approach.

To your question, I am slightly above the prescribed line in a lot of metrics and don’t really do anything special, I am lucky enough it doesn’t have any impact on my life in general.

I like the way you put it, it’s okay that we don’t know everything, and you’ll have to try a bunch of stuff. That really is at the core of what I was trying and failing to say. :) We don’t actually know how gravity works, but we use it anyway. I made an analogy to PID controllers in another comment, maybe that’s a better way to describe calorie I/O; PID controllers know nothing about the thing they control other than it’s output, and yet they are an extremely useful tool.

My wife reminded me of a book that might interest you and might have pointers to some of the research you’re looking for. “The Secret Life of Fat: The Science Behind the Body's Least Understood Organ and What It Means for You“ by Sylvia Tara.

If you metabolize less or more doesn’t really matter as it gives you a hard maximum of what you could potentially ingest (both in the TDEE calculation and the restricted diet)

And you will probably either have severe health problems, either have a reduced metabolism to the point you can’t properly function on a day to day basis.

You’ll either give up, the pendulum will swing the other way and rebound your weight, and people will blame you for being too weak.

Or you’ll push through, lose your job and/or continue develop eating disorders, hopefully you’ll realize you can’t go on and give up, or you’ll get medicated, with side effects affecting your appetite and weight ingestion, might still end up rebouncing and get blamed for it.

You’ve got a snow ball’s chance in hell that you can keep your intake very low and be fine with it for the rest of your life, but then you’re probably already healthy and pretty normal weighted, because I don’t think anyone who can just stop eating extra would stay overweight for long with the pressure we apply on obese people as a society.

All of the above is really just par for the course for people who get told “just do CICO”. People for which it actually kinda works don’t usually need to be told anything in the first place.

I absolutely unconsciously eat more when I exercise. I know because I measured it. And once I measured it and focused on exercising while also eating a constant amount, surprise surprise, I actually lost weight. This is well known to many many people, well studied and understood, and has a metric ton of actual data to back it up. If this article is claiming to challenge that, then this article is wrong. (But IMO it’s not actually challenging known physics, it’s just written in a misleading way.)

I have problems with doing deliberate intentional exercise (though I am very 'active' just in my usual day to day activities) so do absolutely zero gym, zero running, etc. Yet when I started simply counting my calories and limiting myself to 1800-1900 a day, the weight dropped off. I'm down 8% body weight so far and set to have a BMI under 25 in the next couple of months, and it hasn't been a struggle at all despite a total lack of deliberate exercise.

And that's the thing: Once you start changing your diet - the stuff you eat or the timing of your food - to do the exercise, you can't really say it is the exercise affecting your weight.

- Calories over TDEE: You gain weight

- Calories under TDEE: You lose weight

It's that simple

People talk a lot about reducing caloric intake but there's little talk on how a normal person can hope to achieve that. The key Noom offers is calorie density. If you eat lots of food that has a low calorie density per unit of volume (eg cabbage, cauliflower) you can reduce your calories and still feel very full. Just go easy on the extremely high calorie density foods (eg olive oil) and you'll be more likely to hit your goals.

Also, it's really really hard to do calorie restrictions AND have intense exercise. From what I've seen in the Noom community people have a lot more success when they first focus on losing pounds then focus on building strength and fitness; many people at that point find they have to increase calories in order to continue seeing results when they're working out a lot. I suppose it takes a lot of calories to build muscle. I wonder what your body does to those injured muscles if it doesn't have the calories available to repair them?

https://www.noom.com/

That really depends on the exercise you’re doing and what “shape” you’re going for. Putting tons of time into running won’t make someone look like they lift weights. Aerobic exercise is great for health but it mostly doesn’t change anyone’s “shape” except to the extent that it helps them lose weight.

This just isn't true. It generally won't take away fat, but lifting weights won't remove the fat either (it doesn't matter how strong your stomach is, you aren't seeing it if you have a layer of fat on top). But if you are already thin - or thinner in places - most of the aerobic exercise will build appropriate muscle. Walking makes for changes in the lower half of the body, for example. It still won't make you look like you lift weights, true, but there is still change.

Then a few years ago my wife was having what seemed to be some food intolerance issues. As morale support I joined her on a very strict diet. I lost over 10kg in 6 weeks. That was without much training. When I started running again I was suddenly back to setting new personal pace records, unsurprising given I was 10ths lighter.

It’s not that I’d been eating especially poorly before. The biggest change was probably a complete elimination of wheat. I definitely felt much healthier than I had in a long time. And a diet change had a much bigger impact than years of exercise in making that happen.

When I'm not working out regularly, I'm able to eat far less in a day and feel totally full. By not working out, I'm able to eat far fewer calories and actually lose more weight. Drinking lots of water (64 - 96 oz) a day also helps a lot.

I have a friend from high school who struggled with his weight and he hikes and runs extreme amounts to keep the weight off. As in ultra-marathons extreme amounts.

Maybe the average person's knees can't keep up with this, but it's an existence proof at least.

If your BMR is say... 1,800 calories a day and you exercise 300 calories worth... do you just get 300 calories hungrier to offset the exercise?

And to add a little color, my exercise routines have usually involved more than 300 cals of workout, probably closer to 700-1000. This is important, because when not tracking the extra food, it’s really easy to overshoot 1000 calories by 300. The exercises have varied a lot over the years, from running and biking to weight lifting and sports like soccer & ultimate frisbee. I’ve been aiming for around 3 days/week workouts for like 10-20 years. I have periods of less, and occasionally more (especially in the summer) and have managed to keep it up more or less consistently. I eat more when exercising, but never lost weight consistently until I learned the open secret, that for me monitoring intake is what makes exercise work as a weight loss tool.

This simply isn't true at all, and you don't have to count calories per se. I lost quite a bit simply changing my diet. I kept most of it off for years: I gained some back when I quit nicotine, though (Quitting smoking changed my sense of hunger, and Im still upset about that). It wasn't quick weight loss and it came in stages, but I didn't count calories nor spend too much time thinking about food. I simply focused on getting more fruits, vegetables, and legumes when I could. (I completely dropped meat outside of fish, but it isn't necessary and was losing weight before that). I also rarely eat out, even when I've had work/school (I just brought something). This meant I could pretty well eat what I wanted and would just choose lower calorie things by default. As long as I ate fairly well most of the time*, I was OK. I didn't have to suffer the PMS hunger I get either: I would just eat something.

You can eat the same thing every day, mind you, and I've met a lot of folks that do. Generally, however, it is a lifestyle choice and you have to be careful to make sure you have enough vitamins and things. One of the three folks I'm thinking of made themselves sick by not including enough vegetables.

Eating is incredibly efficient.