The whole premise of that "You can’t exercise your way out of obesity" is that you burn more calories when you start running than later on as you continue. What's so controversial about it? It's normal that body optimizes for energy expenditure that's why we develop strength, endurance etc. And that's why when you're truly doing sports you're running more, faster, lifting more, etc. you increase the challenge to give your body greater burden to carry.
If I start lifting 20lbs and 3 years later I still lift that of course I won't lose weight.
You have that same thing in other disciplines - "historians" who can't make any meaningful contribution yet want to make name for themselves go on claiming "that or that king was gay" or "vikings were trans" or whatever fits the trending topics of the day and they get media exposure.
Your body burns incredibly more energy just "being there" than you burn moving about.
Exercise certainly increases your calorific expenditure, but it's much easier to ingest less fuel than to run 5 more miles because you had a portion of fries.
There are benefits in exercise, apart from the obvious ones the raising of the baseline metabolic expenditure, because muscles are expensive to maintain, but again, if you want to lose weight eating one less portion of fries is easier and takes less time than going for a 5 mile run.
> body optimizes for energy expenditure
No that's wrong, it optimises for energy maintenance. Genetically it's better to maintain fat and survive the next famine, than burning all the energy today. Which is why the body is so efficient at _not_ losing weight unless it has no other choice to maintain homeostasis. And thus to lose fat, we need to preferably eat less, not run more. Do both, and you'll do great.
When I run consistently I need to eat what feels like a lot more food to maintain my weight. Running burns about 700-800 kcal per hour for me (I have a quite small build) which ends up quite a bit over a week (I run 5-8 hours per week).
So if every day you train for an hour so that your breathing is 3 times faster, then you have additional two hours of burning in a day. 23 usual hours plus one worth 3. So you have 26 instead of 24 hours in a day.
It's way easier to put 15% less on your plate every day than to intensly train for an hour each day while keeping portions the same.
Lungs can't put in more CO2 in breathed out air.
If you breath only slightly faster when you are running than when you are sitting that must mean you ran quite a lot and optimized your stride so that you don't burn much more calories running than sitting.
But more likely explanation is that you are not aware how fast exactly you are breathing when sitting and running. Try to measure it. Also take into account that you might be taking shallower breaths when you are sitting.
Just blow up a balloon when you are sitting and when you are running with your normal exhaled breath for few seconds to test it.
That's estimated and probably impossible.
1000 kcal is 4184000 joules, divided by 3600 it gives you around 1100W
Human at rest burns about 100W. Pro-cyclist can do additional 400W. There's no way you can burn energy at the rate of 1.1kW consistently for an hour unless you literally set yourself on fire.
EDIT:
I was wrong.
Apparently 700kcal burned per hour of cycling is a pretty realistic number. https://www.welovecycling.com/wide/2020/05/14/how-to-convert...
Also resting kcal burn might be around 1800 per day. So 40% increase in of calories burned by hour of cycling per day every day is achievable.
The question is how can you breathe out additional ~10h of CO2 within an hour?
3 times deeper breathes 3 times faster? Because that carbon has to go somewhere.
> They averaged 91 g of carbs every hour across all of the stages.
That's nearly 400 calories worth of sugar simply while riding the bike. In fact, I would say cycling is a clear counterproof of this article. Their equations are literally (calories in)*efficiency = power and they know exactly how much to feed. I don't disagree that 99% of people are better served eating less, but doing cardio for 2 hours a day + diet management will lead to very quick weight loss. "Very quick" here is 2lbs/week but people have some insane expectations.
[1] - https://www.welovecycling.com/wide/2021/07/01/how-much-do-th...
https://www.welovecycling.com/wide/2020/05/14/how-to-convert...
Also resting kcal burn might be around 1800 per day. So 40% increase in of calories burned by hour of cycling per day every day is achievable.
The question is how can you breathe out additional ~10h of CO2 within an hour?
3 times deeper breathes 3 times faster? Because that carbon has to go somewhere.
You don't necessarily need to exchange 10 times the volume of air to deal with the additional CO2.
So it looks like it could be 25% difference at most.
If there's already 4% of CO2 in the air around you it's an immediate danger. While you can spend 10 minutes in 3%. If your body could bump up CO2 in exhaled air from 4% to 8% then you'd probably have bo problem surviving in air thay contains 4%.
But you'll need to get energy eventually from normal beathing to recycle lactic acid back into glucose in the liver.
So probably after an hour of intense exercise you'll be breathing out more CO2 in the following hours as your body clears up lactic acid.
What's interesting is you get 2ATP from making lactate, but you need 6ATP to recycle lactate back into glucose.
Would that mean that for burning more calories you should have as much of anerobic excercises as possible because it's really ineficient use of glucose?
And to that question as said I am nonexpert. Imho sport after a certain (1h or so) time is a mix of both and should burn most calories in a healthy way. As far as I know there was a downside to having too much lactat. And burning calories aint synonym with burning body fat. Short intensity anerobic training is not atacking bodyfat in my opinion. It only uses the reserv in carbs we have anyway ( around 2000kcal) Biking is the best exercise for bodyfatburning in my opinion. If it is more than 2h.
Again, more speculation, but i would imagine that metabolic disorders involve digestive regulation issues, not just lack of exercise and overeating.
@1_player said: > Your body burns incredibly more energy just "being there" than you burn moving about.
When I was at my heaviest weight, I could only do a normal-speed walk, which burned relatively little calories.
At my lightest, I was also having to go out of my way to eat extra calories, as I was cycling so much, and a fast 90 minute cycle would leave me light-headed if I didn't eat some extra calories.
Bullshit. My body goes through 1600-ish kcal on an idle day.
If I go out on a 4h steady bicycle ride (= 100km), I go through 2000 kcal on ride alone. That’s much more than my body burns just being there.
Cutting empty calories is the easiest to remove calories from daily total.
Exercise further decreases the ratio of calories in calories out.
Bottom line is: calories in - calories out.
There are caveats there for sure, like increasing muscle mass increases idle caloric burn. Different types of food have different effect promoting or impeding metabolism.
For an extreme example compare 100 calories of glucose to 100 calories of fibre, both are types of sugar. The fibre contains an extra electron that acts like a shell, and the body has to expend energy breaking that bond to make it digestible. So most fibre passes through you without affecting your weight.
The most useful measure of food is the Glycemic Load. Not Glycemic Index which is a measure of the net glucose in the food. Glycemic Load is a measure of how the body responds to the food. E.g. cold potatoes have the same calories and GI as hot potatoes, but their measured GL is actually lower, so cold potatoes are better for controlling weight.
Not really, it's just that calories-in is worst-case that's what's on the foods box, you cannot magically produce more energy but it's well known that not everything can be processed by the metabolism with the same efficiency.
So with extremes like your example the difference is naturally huge, but that doesn't matter in practice if one balances their consumption just somewhat it averages out and approaches something between upper (100%) and lower (0%) of efficiency, and in reality it rather close to the upper bound (averaged) as our metabolisms are quite efficient with the food most humans actually put into them.
Your glycemic index rule holds does not violate the calories in calories out rule, it's just more precise regarding the actual upper bound.
I dont have the link to hand, but there is a GL database maintained by Harvard, I think, that demonstrates this. I will look it up later for you.
Likewise "calories out" is not literally calculated by adding up your movement & exercise. We know that things like hormonal levels, etc can all impact how much energy your body is expending.
No, it wasn't. It's the generally accepted model of human weight gain. It's what most scientists who study this topic believe to be true. (And really, it's the only model that makes any sense, and is incredibly easy to test)
They only people who disagree with this model are considered to be outside the mainstream of science. They might be right (I don't think so though) - but it's certainly not debunked.
I'm not a nutritional expert, but...this sounds like bro science. Do you have a source for this, or can someone who knows this better speak to it?
Also, various workouts have a lot of other important effects. Increasing bone strength, improving body resistance to inflammatory processes, developing micro vascular system… simply managing calorie in/out ratio won’t get you any of this. And dropping weight in a dumb way may do more harm than good.
What do you mean 'on that ride alone', are you doing more than 4 hours of excersise a day, every day? Because that's like 0.1% of the population, most can't even fit that in their diary, let alone have the stamina/etc.
Average bloke goes to the gym for an hour couple times a week, at that level you calorie consumption is basically unchanged - its withing an error margin of natural variability of food you eat.
From what I observed myself, cutting calories is very difficult and result is miniscule. Adding some cardio (2h/week? 5h/week?) helps so much more and allows more flexibility with food. Also cutting calories does not help to increased overall immunity. Cutting calories is hard on mood (as in, no sugar high and tasty foods are limited) yet exercising allows to keep tasty foods AND gives runner's high. Win-win...
As for tight schedule, I don't believe in gyms. People waste so much time driving to/from favourite/affordable gyms... Running right out home and doing body-weight exercises at home would be both more beneficial to one's health and cheaper.
P.S. I mean regular non-exercise day is 1600kcal. 4 hours ride would be 2000kcal. So exercise day would be ~ 3400. Obviously it long-ride is weekend affair. Then one or two run 10k runs or quick 1h ride (another 1k kcal each). So ideally it adds +500kcal/day. And a lot of cardiovascular health. Well, it was 2 years ago before kid was born... Now it has a loooooot of variation.
tl;dr: your body burns roughly the same amount of calories regardless of exercise. However, it allocates those calories differently: if you don't spend them on exercise then it will spend them on stress (and presumably other stuff).
Which totally makes sense as to why my depression & anxiety fade if I run or work hard.
Can you explain how this makes sense?
Different physical activities (running vs. sitting, for example) require different amounts of energy to perform. Calories are a unit of measurement for this energy. It sounds like you (via referencing the article) are claiming that a human will expend the same amount of energy in a given period of time regardless of their physical activity.
Yes, that's exactly what the article is saying. If you burn calories doing exercise, the body will spend less on stress response. But if you burn less (or none) on exercise, then it will spend more on other things, eventually coming to roughly the same calorie expenditure (as they measured). Which is why exercise helps with depression - your brain has less calories available to spend on stress responses and generally messing with your mood.
You really should read the article.
And yes, it allocates calories towards building fat. Which is a weeeee different from burning them.
This example is kind of bad :-)
You don't lose weight by lifting weights, in general.
And amusingly, if you did want to lose weight by lifting weights, your example is precisely how you <<would>> lose weight. You lift 10kgs over and over and over again, or even better, incorporate the extra weight into some sort of cardio routine.
Instead of increasing the weight, you'd increase the reps or the motion you use for lifting weights.
But as far as I know it's wrong.
A one hour session of strength training will involve some amount of work, and a lot of rest. Compared to doing cardio, where an hour of work is an entire hour of elevated energy expenditure, you're effectively burning a lot less during strength training.
In addition, the "after burn" effect is very minor (in the extra tens of calories only range).
It wont make you loose weight however. It will likely make you gain weight as your muscles will grow. Which is explicit goal of many guys who start lifting weights.
When the gyms closed for the pandemic, I lost 5 kg of muscle. After coming back, I started doing fewer sets and have not regained the muscle mass. But my strength (the amount of weight I can lift) is now very close to pre-pandemic levels.
Most "standard adults" (e.g no injuries, obesity or illnesses) would not consider 20 lbs "difficult", to start with. And especially not after 6 months of regular practice.
I don't understand, your body optimizes, and uses 20% less energy. However, you are still using the 80% which is more than not doing anything at all don't you?
I think this is quite the claim, maybe you should provide some evidence. I think it sounds reasonable to assume that those that lack the scientific basis will use storytelling to convince, because they have nothing else. But I'm not sure about the reverse.
Here we have storytelling, but the story is peppered with some data from experiments that support the claim. So how does storytelling imply lack of evidence?
If it’s a field I already have a strong personal interest/background in, then I generally just want to get straight to the findings, so in that case I wouldn’t read a long form popsci article like this one. But calories/diet/exercise stuff? For me that’s not very exciting, yet I do want to understand it better (for practical benefit), so anything that helps pique my curiosity in it is good.
I have read that book multiple times, first when I was 10. It left a huge impression on me. I heartily recommend it.
Bill Bryson in general is a great author. One of my favorites.
Anyways, that's all to say, I do enjoy articles like this that give context and explain not just the research but the people behind it. Let people enjoy things.
science.org is like a good quality popsci magazine. People read it for the science, but also for entertainment. The aim is to make science engaging to non-scientists. If you just want the science then you should be heading to Nature or Arxiv.
Arxiv needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt because much of the content is not peer-reviewed.
Seriously, yeah, some of this stuff may be fluff, but it does matter. Two scientists can be doing equally good work on a similar topic, but one's work makes headlines and the other's gets buried in some obscure journal and forgotten. Why? What can I do to be more like the former rather than the later? One popular magazine article may not give me that insight, but after a bunch of them patterns emerge.
"Look how bad I am at reading people."
"I'm worse than you at..."
"I'm so bad that..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE
> Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us
Would you agree at least that there’s a balance to be made, and articles could lean either on the too-dry side (all facts and no color) or too-fluffy (facts buried in an avalanche of color)?
I don’t want no color, but I agree with others here that many pop science articles seem to lean very heavily towards fluff these days. Online recipes are a more extreme example -- it’s increasingly hard to find the actual recipe these days.
Titles matter. A title like “A Short History of Nearly Everything” pretty clearly tells you that there’s going to be a lot of storytelling. But if you have a clickbait title like “Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories”, you ought to deliver on those promised myth-busting new facts!
I think it’s interesting to consider a) is this a real change; b) if so, is it driven more by culture or by technology? (i.e. by ads)
At what point it becomes "too much fluff" or "padding for extra ads", I couldn't tell you, probably sites have article minimum word requirements to account for the second part.
I doubt what colour dog they had and their preference for cornflakes instead of oatmeal at buffets is going to let you enter their scientific mind as such.
Many of these articles are written to increase volume, but its my take that no one really cares about who ate what this morning. Scientific papers often do the same thing
No, it's written that way to turn the person into a) a character, b) a relatable character.
Regular people like stories, not dry facts piled up.
I also like the way they’ve broken my browser’s reader mode too.
I was once advised to read the opening and the last 2 paragraphs of articles like this. If there’s no actual content there then move on without reading.
I would say "live and let live". There is enough written content on the Web for everyone to find their niche.
I have developed a habit of skipping to the end of the whole page, and reading towards the beginning, paragraph-by-paragraph. Works..sometimes :D
The article is essentially a summation of Pontzer’s past decade or so of work (and I do find the work to be really interesting), so if you want just the meaty bits you can probably try reading the original papers.
If you want this to change, change the source, don't patch cargo cult on top.
It's not even hard to do, you mostly have to count token frequencies which is hardly machine learning. Although you could also do it with BERT.
I'm not a fan of this style of reporting. It can be interesting to learn about a person's life if the subject is especially notable, but given the headline it feels a little like a bait and switch.
At best it should be seen as a warning for possible biases in the science due to the person's background or upbringing, or random life anecdote.
You can train yourself to skim for maximal extraction per minute. I burned through the article in about 3-4 minutes. I tend to get bogged down by my software developer's close-reading instincts.
This type of journalism works well if the backstories are tied well together to the main story, and is done by a good writer. But when average writers do it, the stories are tedious, and hard to read.
It's not that. It also happens in written media. It's not just as filler either. They have the dellusion that this makes the story better...
You know that sentence. So many articles have that sentence. The one where it veers off course to talk about the (usually uninteresting) person who found the thing the article is ostensibly and nominally about. Am I alone in being perfectly happy reading about science for the duration of an article, and not particularly caring about the scientist and what breed of dog he has etc.?