https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2024-03-...

Then I got serious about rehab and corrected the issues in my leg, started cycling again, and I was back to my desired weight in about 6 weeks, and without putting any particular effort into controlling my calories. Everyone else in my immediate family is obese and sedentary excepting my uncle who is also a cyclist.

Someone in r/cycling the other week tried to suggest that "abs are made in the kitchen" and they were laughed out of the thread. In most forums, however, exercise is a 4 letter word, and Dr. pontzer is very popular.

After following the subject for years, I've come to believe rising sedentarism is the primary culprit in the obesity epidemic.

Exercise also has benefits beyond weight management, so you should also probably find something that works for you.

It might not be easy to do, but it's not really much more complicated than that.

"Might not be easy to do" is an extreme underestimate of the difficulty in fixing this by willpower alone. It is very hard to do for the long term. I was a chronic yo-yo dieter that did it over and over again ... until I couldn't. After enough of that my body just demanded to eat, and I could no more refuse than I could refuse to breathe. I became a bulimic binge eater.

If I could have just said no, forever, I assume you're right and it would have worked, uncomplicated. But having lost 100+ pounds multiple times, dude, I tried really fucking hard, and failed. Nothing worked until I gave my body the nutrition that it was trying to get by binging on junk. Then it became easy to do with my hormones no longer working against me.

Diets fail 95% of the time. Calories in/calories out isn't wrong, obviously. From a physics perspective it is clearly less effort to sit still and not eat than it is to go do physical work of some sort. Once you introduce human psychology into the equation, however, everything changes.

Or maybe there are calories that do not turn into get but muscle? You still getting weight, but good weight?

Of course, if you need x calories and get less that x, your body will need to burn something. Maybe brain or muscles and not fat?

Again, I do not know much about that but it just may be more complicated than just cals in vs cals out.

Understatement of the year. Which is why people who preach CICO and “just eat less” can set off those folks who have been down the diet rabbit holes.

I can only relay my own experience. It’s not CICO that is important, that’s just a formula. The important thing is satiety. You need to get to a point of eating less by activating your satiety center with less calories than before. If you are constantly hungry on any diet trying to eat less calories, you will ultimately fail without an external factor preventing you from eating more.

(I say this as someone who rides a lot, somewhat competitively, and has directly observed that weight loss comes in the kitchen, not from riding. And if you try to cut back on nutrition during the ride, you'll feel so awful you won't be able to ride.)

But I must admit that you could be right. Maybe it was just age or something. I guess I'll find out when I make my glorious return.

Since then I've backed off riding a bit, and am definitely not as aware of what I eat (snacking because of stress, mostly) and am up maybe 5-10 pounds from that time.

ADDENDUM: this is because a drop in carb consumption causes a decline in glycogen, and a corresponding decline in water

Only thing I've ever found that works is fasting. Especially since my base metabolic rate has been about 1500 calories after hitting 35 years old.

I wonder if people swapped their foods with non-sugar/non-oiled foods, and they ate like nature would direct them, if they'd actually become obese.

Can a sane person eat enough carrots to become overweight?

The best way to lose weight is to reduce insulin levels. This involves changing what you eat and when you eat.

You even basically had to use carrot extract to make it unhealthy.

I'm not sure I'm okay with blenders/food processors for vegetables/fruits as they artifically make it too easy to consume food. (liquid calories)

Our food is just way too palatable right now. Even the fruits and veggies have been bred to be full of sugar.

That doesn't mean that your point about them not being satisfying is wrong, but you probably aren't going to persuade people with ludicrous relative comparisons.

People act like they can just use their mind to overpower their endocrinology. But you can't. You have to focus on low insulin index foods. Carrots are okay for this, but not great. They have a medium insulin index on the order of corn or milk.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3127522/#:~:tex...

Edit: Please disregard, my reading comprehension skills failed me today. I read 6 hours a day but it was actually 6 hours a week

The OP said 6 hours a week (1 a day), not 6 a day.

6 hours of running is 4000-8000 calories / 1-2lb week depending on body size. That's your basic 1-2% of BW deficit for weight loss. Except it's a much harder behaviour change to adopt.

You know, if you can go beyond the headline.

Last year I was running for 60 minutes per day + weight lifting. I was likely spending 3500-4000 calories per day. On long runs it could be 5000 calories per day.

I lost a ton of weight, and I was feeding myself too. Once I lost the weight, I have basically kept it off.

I'm not sure what the point of these bad scientific studies are when you can look out your window and see clear contradictions everywhere.

In general, weight is not really a great measure. You can lose weight by losing muscle. I "measure" my own body by looking at it in a mirror.

The thing to bear in mind is, most discussions of diet are in the context of weight loss - and the kind of exercise regime that allows eating loads of food is generally only accessible to people who are already extremely fit.

If you're running a 4 hour marathon every weekend, you can pretty much eat whatever you like and not gain weight.

But if my 240 lbs buddy wants to lose weight? Dude would be doing well to jog 5km. He's not going to be running any marathons.

So the fact he could maintain his current diet if he burned an extra 2500 calories every weekend doesn't help him, because he can't.

Of course. And I'm not suggesting that people ignore or go crazy with their diet. I'm personally very strict with mine, though I'm not counting calories at all but rather trying to mimimize salt, saturated fat, and added sugar (which perhaps naturally restricts calories somewhat, since the highest calorie foods also tend to have high salt, saturated fat, and added sugar).

> But if my 240 lbs buddy wants to lose weight? Dude would be doing well to jog 5km. He's not going to be running any marathons.

Of course. What I would say is that in fact it's a (metaphorical) marathon, not a sprint. The goal, I think, should be health, not simply weight loss, which is only one aspect of health. You shouldn't be afraid to exercise strenuously just because it might make you a little hungrier. In the long run, you want to control your diet and also get your body into shape, which requires investment in exercise.

My dispute is with the idea that "we burn calories within a very narrow range: nearly 3,000 calories per day, no matter our activity level." That's simpy not true in general. It may be true for a relatively sedentary activity level, but it's not true for people who are at higher levels of vigorous activity, and I don't mean just elite athletes. A normal person can build up to becoming quite physically active if they commit to it long term. Of course nobody can just run a marathon right away, but almost anybody could run a marathon eventually. The author was examining people who walk all day, but I don't think that's a good baseline for measurement of "maximum" physical activity, because walking is generally not very strenous.

True.

> Low intensity cardio like walking doesn't have the same effect.

That's short-term thinking though. Long term, higher intensity cardio builds muscle and endurance. The more strenuously you exercise now, the more strenuously you'll be able to exercise in the future. If you're not pushing yourself, then you'll remain stuck at the lower level forever. The extra calories now are an investment in your future body.

Where? It's understood in the fitness community that you have to load a muscle within a particular range in order to build muscle. It won't happen through repetitive motions, such as the ones that occur in cardio (running, cycling, etc). The load isn't great enough.

I believe cardio benefits the heart. But nobody does cardio to build muscle.

The heart is a muscle. ;-)

Cardio certainly isn't the best way to bulk up muscles; ideally you want to combine cardio with strength training. Nonetheless, it does build some muscle, and there are various ways to add resistance to cardio, such as with machines, carrying weights, running uphill, etc. In any case, cardio does increase your endurance.

How so?

Of course if you're exercising regularly and strenuously, there are some athletic metrics: how long you can run until exhaustion, how much weight you can lift, etc.

Please read and respect the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Do you really not know, or think it's debatable, that how people subjectively view themselves is influenced by their mental state / feelings / emotions?

I'm talking about looking at yourself over a period of time, and not just on any given day. You can look at yourself in the mirror every day for months or years, over the course of many different mental states / feelings / emotions.

Moreover, the fit of your clothes is pretty good objective measure. If your pants start falling down, you can be pretty sure that your stomach has become smaller. (This is actually one of the few annoying aspects of getting into shape, having to buy new clothes.)

By the way, your previous comment was flagged dead. You might want to reconsider the way you reply in light of that.

Why in the world would I want to track that? It's not a good measure; it's a dumb measure. Nobody sane measures their hair in 24 hour increments. I don't know anybody who measures their hair at all. Even hair stylists eyeball it!

> The beauty of a true good measure (ie, a scale or other measuring device) is that you can track actual discrete progress over a very short time span.

This is a mistake, in my opinion. People are too obsessed with measuring their weight weekly, or even daily. That's not a good measure. Health is a marathon, not a sprint. The key is persistence: stick with the exercise, stick with the diet, and the results will come in time. A week is nothing. Even a month is practically nothing. Progress is never magically uniform. Plateaus and even setbacks are inevitable. Impatience just leads to premature doubt and failure. It's really about changing your lifestyle permanently rather than some temporary weight loss gimmick. I've never thought in terms of losing N pounds. I think in terms of becoming a healthier, fitter person, and losing N pounds is simply a side effect of that.

Also, you seem to have missed the point of me mentioning measuring hair, which wasn't to say it was a good idea, but to say how you could do it if you wanted to. You're getting hung up on why anyone would want to do that, which misses the point.

I'm not changing the subject now. Rather, I changed the subject 4 hours ago, in my original post, a comment on the submitted article, which said: In general, weight is not really a great measure. You can lose weight by losing muscle. I "measure" my own body by looking at it in a mirror. [Note that measure was in quotes, implying imprecision.]

> A good measure of weight is different from a good measure of health. I'm not interested in discussing the latter.

Then you shouldn't have replied to me in the first place, because I had already clearly rejected measuring weight.

In any case, scales can lie too. I was actually stunned recently to discover that there was a full 20 pound discrepancy between the scale in my building's exercise room and the scale in my doctor's office. It's fine, though, because I was always a little surprised by how little I weighed according to the exercise room's scale. I just didn't imagine that it could be so far off. I only step on the dumb thing because it's right by the door evilly tempting people to use it.

>In any case, scales can lie too.

Can you stop with low effort bait please? Is it really worth our combined time to draw people in with silly statements about miscalibrated scales?

No, it was "weight is not really a great measure" followed by saying "You can lose weight by losing muscle."

Body weight is everything, the good stuff (such as the aforementioned muscle) as well as the bad. And 50-60% of body weight is water, which you can gain or lose rapidly in various ways.

When people say they want to lose weight, often what they actually mean is that they want to lose their gut. Or maybe their butt. For health, for superficial reasons—i.e., looking good—or both. On men at least, the gut tends to be the last to go, so it's a pretty good indicator of how far you've gone, and how far you have left to go. As far as I'm concerned, body weight is "just a number", and it's unclear what the ultimate goal should be, whereas the appearance of your body is clearer to evaluate in terms of an end point. Moreover, it tends to change more slowly than weight, which is actually a good thing, because it's less random and arbitrary than total body weight.

> you've made a few other confusing statements, like "Long term, higher intensity cardio builds muscle"

I actually said "Long term, higher intensity cardio builds muscle and endurance", but for some reason people keep cutting off an essential part of my statement. It was followed by, "The more strenuously you exercise now, the more strenuously you'll be able to exercise in the future." In other words, building muscle and endurance now helps you to burn even more calories later. I'm not sure why that's confusing.

> Can you stop with low effort bait please? Is it really worth our combined time to draw people in with silly statements about miscalibrated scales?

This whole thread has been a waste of my time, and I should have just let your flagged reply die silently, but I'm kind of a glutton for punishment. I don't know why it's silly, though, to mention the imprecision of scales when you seem to be so focused on instantaneous, scientific precision.

Are you sure it wasn't because you were younger then? Despite not doing any exercise other than walking I could eat any amount of anything until I was over forty when the weight started creeping up.

Yes, because my weight—or visible body fat, anyway—has fluctuated over my entire life, including then and now, depending on how much exercise I get.

No amount of gym time can counteract a terrible diet. But you can easily lose weight by simply eating fewer calories than your body burns day to day.

As an analogue - When water evaporates, it expands 1600 times larger in volume to become steam.

That's a LOT of breathing.

Good to see the meme being validated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1cqNDDG4aA&pp=ygUdcGxhbnRzI...

I would have thought it was totally crazy. In the space of a year:

* one friend went carnivore, and their apple devices stopped recognizing them since they had lost so much weight

* another friend went carnivore who was high normal bmi, and is now ideal bmi, off of blood pressure meds, no longer has fibromyalgia, no longer has arthritis pain, and has had so many other medical issues resolve and much better quality of life. a walking, talking ad for that video.

* I went carnivore and feel 10 years younger

It's not an easy diet to transition to, but is easy to maintain. If you're interested, here's advice on how to start:

https://youtu.be/r3wzDWW1MdI?si=5aC8gd_sbDRLmrNC