My extended family does not understand how I have not been gaining weight while I work from home. The truth is I simply do not eat more than I need to.

Edit: My family doesn't understand why I haven't gotten the family beer belly most males in my family and extended family have.

I'm fitter (can run further, lift more, more aesthetic figure) than I was in my late teens / early twenties and it was all down to one decision -

I stopped prioritising maximum income and started prioritising fitness and diet.

Not everyone wants to do that, and with pre existing health and lifestyle choices it can be much more challenging for some than for others.

But it's there as a choice, it's possible, and it's a hell of a lot easier than it seems once you start to see the results.

People who blame their work for being unhealthy are making excuses. I’ve worked 60 - 70 hours a week for 2 decades and I’m in excellent physical condition.

I find that a lot of people say "I can't do that because X". I see it more as, well, I have to do that, so I can't do X, then.

As you say, scheduling time.

What was everyone else doing? Watching Netflix?

People pretend there’s no time but it’s all illusionary.

It's odd to suggest that people will have enough time to exercise if they just cut into their bedtime. Is the idea here that you sleep in the next morning, and then your wife wakes up earlier to take up your slack?

Is this your suggested solution for everyone? Increase your free time to exercise by reducing someone else's?

edit: No, I do it in the time I set aside to exercise.

This might seem foreign to you but to me it's no different from someone saying "I need £100 to pay the rent" and so they make time and find a way to pay the bills (usually a job). They don't "work in their free time", they structure their life around it because income is important to them.

NOT doing a base level of exercise and body maintenance results in predictable mental issues (anxiety, depression, difficulty learning, etc.).

That's not a great flex. Don't be proud of working those hours mon ami. I'm glad youre healthy tho

Of course cardio and strength training are useful for building/preserving muscle mass and general fitness. But for weight loss looking at food seems more effective.

Not sure about this. Herman Pontzer's work shows that the body adapts by burning fewer calories later, so your energy expenditure is the same. Burning 600 calories with exercise means burning 600 fewer later, like burning fewer calories during sleep or fidgeting less.

Because it doesn’t ELI5 how body mass and composition and steady vs unsteady state actually play into it, people take away a meaningless self serving interpretation.

If you start running 4-5 times a week, I guarantee you’ll be eating significantly more and burning significantly more. Unless you’re intentional about restricting your eating, weight will most probably stay the same, but you’ll be burning far more calories.

But keen eyed reader perhaps you object with “but you’ll move less and nap on the couch more, it will balance out like Pontzer’s work seems to say!” Haha, but no. Well yes to napping, but no to balancing out. It’s literally impossible. There’s no amount of napping that makes up for 13+ miles runs. There’s a lot of people who regularly do 10 to 20 mi runs on weekends. They can literally burn more calories just in the run than a sedentary person does in an entire day. And that’s their regular routine. Take a look at Boston to see 30ish thousand examples of it.

As one example, My weight has been steady state for decades, but I started running marathons two years ago. I had to start eating an extra meal. And when I take it easy for a couple weeks after each marathon, my appetite ramps down.

And if you don’t start eating more you’ll just get injured and be forced to stop running.

Pontzers work is bad. Ask any endurance sport club and they’ll laugh at it.

The problem becomes when people do the naive calculation of exercise calories (Eg, I ran 2 miles so I burned 400cal, so I can eat 400 extra calories), and come to the wrong conclusion.

Over a hundred thousand endurance athletes in just the USA would have to literally defy the laws of thermodynamics for the naive reading to work.

I can see why the question ignored that and focused on the personal story that went along with the hard facts and stats.

Saying "burning 600 calories now means burning 600 less later" gets the point across. It's pretty much on the money for some people. For others compensation may not be total. I guess I'm not really sure where your beef is.

Handwaving away large numbers data points that disprove a theory is not how science is supposed to work.

And as we have seen in this thread, the lack of clarity on the nuance discourages people from making exercise.

Over simplifying it to 600 burned, 600 saved later is harmful and also inaccurate. (and yes More inaccurate than my loose choice of saying nap which you pointed out that led you to the wrong conclusions on my understanding, please consistently apply that critical standard)

I ran 21 km yesterday, in zone 2, in a fairly glycogen depleted state. That was about 4:30min/km for 21km, with 600m of elevation - about 1500kcal of energy. I didn't eat or drink anything throughout the run. I'm a big nerd, so I took a lactate sample at the end. I didn't hit the first ventilatory threshold for the whole run and that indicates I'm burning a large proportion of fat compared to a normal person (and probably a normal recreational runner).

Afterwards, I ate a banana and had a couple of spoons of peanut butter + honey. A few 100kcal. Fast forward to the evening. I didn't eat any more than I usually would do if I had a few days off running. I went on with my day as normal and recovered fine the next day. I didn't feel hungrier than usual. Fairly standard. My body is well adapted to this kind of exertion. I think my body is quite efficient at doing every day things. I don't get out of breath walking up stairs, for example. Maybe it's fair to say I'm more energy efficient than a regular person. Perhps, I don't need to eat any more than usual immediately after running because I'm burning a high proportion of fat and my metabolism is quite efficeint anyway.

Someone who has a poor aerobic system wouldn't be capable of doing that. They'd likely be running at a much higher heart rate and bonk after 10km having not eaten any carbs the day before. They'd also likely need to eat a huge bowl of pasta afterwards just to feel OK. I suspect this person would feel like crap for the rest of the day (maybe even multiple days... Imagine.. they've likely just done a 10km at VO2max untrained) and I could completely imagine them having a nap or watching TV for the rest of the day as they'd have no energy to do anything else. Their bodies are not adapted to this kind of exertion. They are not efficient. Their body needs to rest to get back in equilibrium.

The energy requirement is the same in both cases but it comes from a different source. In my case the high fat oxidation is acting as a battery/buffer. In the average person, those fat stores are not really accessible when doing anything more than sitting or light walking. Both examples are in equilibrium but present in different ways.

After about a year of dancing, I had a moment where I needed to run after someone about a half kilometer away. It was incredible- I’d never felt so buoyant while running. After I passed the message on, I decided to do a measured run. I ran a six minute mile in my late twenties with zero warm-up after having not run in over a decade. I wasn’t even out of breath, it was fucking easy. Cardio is a life hack.

It’s pretty clear the effect of exercise is neither extreme. It is definitely not the naive 100% of calories burned in regular exercising are balanced out by metabolic reductions elsewhere compared to the same person not regularly exercising. And it’s definitely not 800 burned regularly means 800 mores than the person would if they didn’t exercise regularly.

It’s going to be in between, and I would wager it’s like backwards graduated tax brackets in terms of compensation percent.

It’s been a while since I read his paper, but if I recall right it actually did hand wave away the endurance athletes. But endurance athletes are not a binary yes no state andHand waving away obvious conflicting data isn’t logical or scientific. And so especially when people are on a graduated spectrum all the way up to the immediately obvious theory breakers running 60+ mi/week. Where would the cut off come? 15mi? 20mi? 25mi? Above what cut off should we ignore data to make the naive theory work.

he's being pedantic. no use bothering to argue

Moreover, they also showed that exercise beyond that upper limit of 2.5x the base metabolic rate is very possible for temporary durations, weeks even. The extra energy comes from stores like fat and obvious is not sustainable over years.

Even at minor increases of daily exercise for sedentary people, a regular 400 calories of exercise in one study, leads to increased total daily expenditure of around 225-250 after the body is fully adapted.

If that’s not your understanding of pontzer’s works then there is nothing pedantic about my comments. But it’s understandable if you’ve been confused because pontzer has almost willfully obfuscated the actual interpretation of his groups data. Their actual data & equations versus how they message them and explain their findings is shameful.

Most people need to supplement their activity with exercise nowadays because otherwise their lives are very sedentary. It's a forever thing, unfortunately for those that don't enjoy it.

If you stop exercising, but keep the same caloric intake as before, yes, it will rebound really fast, because the equilibrium point will stay the same. If you want to move the equilibrium, you either need to do the exercise regularly forever, or reduce your caloric intake, or build significant amounts of muscle (fat free body mass) to increase your baseline. expenditure

Athletes exist and are real. They are not all genetic anomalies. Most of us are normal people that got off our arse.

Literally every person who has ever tried to make a weight band is living proof.

Reduced fidgeting leading to 600 calories less in a day is not reasonable, either.

To drive this home, just look at professional cyclists : a lot of them have to eat 5000+ calories a day, because they burn 3500+ calories just training, on average, for years and years.

Additionally, if you work out more, you will increase your fat-free mass significantly.

In any case, Pontzer's work never seems to claim you somehow compensate against activity expenditure, it's actually a very strong independent variable in the model of the linked study?

As an example, say we are discussing someone whose average energy expenditure is 3000 kcal a day and they eat that much currently. Let’s say they start to exercise and their average expenditure rises to 3200 a day, and they start to diet, so their intake falls to 2500. The body wants to minimize that 700 kcal caloric deficit to maintain homeostasis. The person will lose weight, but by the time they’re down, say, 10 lbs, a normal person 10 lbs lighter than they started would expend maybe 2900 kcal, but they’ll be expending 2800, since their body will start to downregulate processes that expend energy to minimize the deficit. This is why when people are losing weight they might feel cold (thermogenesis has decreased), tired (mental processing has decreased), or any other number of negative effects. It’s the body going into self-defense mode.

Another factor is fat. Sadly, as weight is gained, fat cells grow, and split when they get too big. When weight is lost, they shrink, but they never re-combine. Fat is an endocrine tissue that releases numerous hormones that regulate energy balance, appetite, etc. This means that people who previously had more fat will never (without medical interventions) be “the same” as someone who is the same weight, but never carried extra fat to begin with.

This might sound like “why bother trying when there are so many things stacked against you?” but I couldn’t disagree more. Despite the propaganda masquerading as science that says “diet and exercise don’t work”, they do. Nobody is immune to the laws of thermodynamics - if more energy is consumed than is expended, weight gain results, and if more is expended than is consumed, weight loss results. The main reason all these studies are able to say “diet and exercise are a bust” is because people don’t maintain the lifestyle that reduced their weight to begin with, and usually return to familiar habits.

Luckily, our habits are mutable, and just like our body can play tricks like making us more hungry when losing weight, we can fight back if we know what we are up against. For example, caffeine is a commonly consumed substance that suppresses appetite. Staying busy rather than being idle also suppresses appetite. Not having junk food in your house/office/etc. reduces temptations to help aid healthy decisions. Having healthy food available and prepared makes making healthy decisions easier. Scheduling diet breaks or planning free meals (and calling them free meals, not cheat meals) improve diet adherence.

In my opinion, the way to sustainable weight loss is slight modifications to the environment and behaviors to nudge the system in the desired direction. Our culture is too focused on motivation and discipline and toughing out situations no matter what to achieve our ends. Meanwhile tiny differences compound and do not feel like an immense burden. It’s also worth mentioning the power of a self-fulfilling prophecy: have you ever known anyone who lost weight via diet and exercise, and said it is impossible to lose weight via diet and exercise? On the flip side of the same coin, there are a lot of people who think diet and exercise will not cause weight loss, and they’re disproportionately overweight. Believing something is possible is nearly always a precondition for achieving it. Thoughts become things.

Best of luck on your weight loss journey. You can do it.

Because they do shit exercises, then drive home, gorge on high-carb trash, and sit on their asses until their next gym appointment.

This is borne out in essentially every sport which has weight classes at both the amateur and professional level.

Part of becoming healthy is calibrating yourself against other healthy individuals. No, not genetic freaks, just that neighbour who actually looks after themselves.

On the other hand me and the wife weigh out things like potatoes, rice, pasta and bread, eat all the fruit and veg we want and don't own a car. So we do minimum 25k steps per day, because we walk the dogs and then walk almost everywhere else we need to go, including buying groceries (which involves back-packing food about half a mile). I also run 3 to 4 times a week. Essentially, this is the same lifestyle I had when I was 18. And guess what? At 47 I'm wearing the same jeans size I wore at 18. It really is that simple.

What's hard? Trying to convince an obese lady who drives to the office, sits on her ass for 8 hours, eats chocolate bars and McDonald's for lunch and is too tired to use the gym, that her weight is 100% down to her life choices, and not magic.

Now I just don't bother. My conclusion is that it's just some form of depression, learned helplessness, whatever. There are an infinite number of reasons why you or they are a special case. I don't let it get me down any more.

For what it's worth I don't think my lifestyle is at all "hardcore". I have a number for calories and protein that I try to hit, and I have numbers for lifts and cardio that I try to increase. That's it. I have a car, I eat fast food, I drink on nights out etc.

I often see people "jogging" that are basically just walking with a bit of a skip, for example.

I believe this is correlated with diet, which most people think is just nutrition, but it's a lot more complex now. There are petrochemicals and toxins in basically everything, avoiding them is expensive and incredibly difficult and you will still inevitably be exposed. There are many of these chemicals that have been shown to have a direct correlation to slow metabolism, so it can make it seem to make everything more difficult if you are consuming large quantities of say, glyphosate.

Most people also don't realize that the bioavailability of food is important. Probiotics, enzymes, etc are usually completely dead or stripped by the time they reach your mouth after the highly processed pipeline.

Another note, there are literally thousands of micronutrients that we barely know anything, so that's also another variable. This is also just not looked at often, so you have to actually know to look to even understand their are natural compounds that may be useful, and then you have to deal with the quality control problem in the industry, and find a reliable, preferably third party tested supplier.

And also just discipline, which is harder when you don't have good nutrition, or your body is constantly processing mass amounts of toxic material. It also just requires willpower though, and applying it will build will to wade through the complex landscape of not poisoning yourself constantly. If you want to get ahead, you are gonna have to push yourself to an uncomfortable position.

Most folks would rather walk for 2 hours than do sprints for 5 minutes, even the the later has been shown to have significantly more effect on your metabolism, and requires much less time.

So in a way I agree, it's not as simple as just activity, it is moreso intentional activity at a level that is just above your comfort zone enough to make consistent progress, and hopefully you can do that without constantly consuming mass amounts of toxins that makes that whole process harder.

The lifestyle shift the grandparent poster was referring to is typical of suburban and rural areas, but not really urban areas. I suspect people in more rural parts of the UK are very different from your London cohort.