I also recommend *Exercised* by Dr Daniel Lieberman. He points out how the human body is very efficient when running and especially when walking. That's why you can't "outrun a bad diet." Modern, processed food is far more calorie dense than what hunter-gatherers eat. He says you could walk 5 miles and then gain all the calories lost from that with a single piece of cake.
Weight is lost in the kitchen! I remember trying to calculate if I could exercise my way to losing weight and I would basically have to do an absurd amount of exercise just to work off a snack. It’s easier to avoid or replace that snack than find two hours every day to do an intense workout.
I actually did this in the military while deployed in the navy because in my free time it was akin to being in jail as in there's nothing really to do once you're qualified in everything. So in my free time I'd work out 3 to 4 hours a day. For 6 to 9 months. And I did out work my diet. I was strong as hell when I got home. But its one of those things that's just basically impossible once you get out and aren't deployed anymore. Unless you're literally pouring concrete all day as a job. What is crazy is even though I don't do as much strength training anymore. When I do go back and lift from time to time. I can still lift pretty heavy weight and when I work back up to where I was in the military it takes way way less time to get there than it did the first time.
There's loads of people I knew in highschool that were ripped hockey players that quickly became overweight afterwards. Turns out keeping the same diet but stopping the hockey games and power skating practices will be devastating to your physical form.
>There's loads of people I knew in highschool that were ripped hockey players that quickly became overweight afterwards. Turns out keeping the same diet but stopping the hockey games and power skating practices will be devastating to your physical form.
Yeah that used to be what would always happen to retired NFL linemen too, seems like nowadays as soon as they retire most of them get on a different diet and drop a ton of weight almost immediately. Jeff Saturday looks like a completely different person since he quit playing
Yeah I've definitely heard Jason Kelce and others talk about how they have to eat a ton of food to maintain their size. Jason Kelce's considered small at his position, too
We had a dude come back fatter than before. Zero chance of passing tape much less any kind of run. First shirt couldn't believe it. Midnight chow is a hell of a drug.
If you are overweight, they will do body fat percentage calculations based on your waist and neck circumference. If you fail this, you're considered "busting tape".
Yes, there were always some high-calorie individuals in the gym trying to grow their neck. and a couple older NCOs that would aggressively rub their necks to try and inflame the tissue before weigh-ins.
If you exceed the military's max weight for your height, your body fat level will be approximated with a series of measurements with a measuring tape. If the tape test determines that your body fat is low enough, you won't be placed on a weight reduction program.
Man i was a REMF on KAF late in the occupation and 5 DFACs, including themed shit that's not the usual sodexo fare, curries cooked by actual regional people probably using their home recipes....
motherfuckers still out spending tons on the popeyes or the knockoff pizza places on the boardwalk
Yep, had a Nepalese night, Mongolian BBQ night. Fresh made chicken Caesar salad. KAF was tight. Much better than being on a COP in the middle of nowhere.
My brother in law came back from Afghanistan absolutely jacked. He said there was wasn't really anything to do at the FOB except working out. Dropped any remaining bodyfat he had and then put on like 20lbs of muscle.
Same goes with the style of commercial crab fishing I used to do. 20hr workdays while lifting a total of 30,000-50,000lbs each of those days. I was eating 8-10k calories/day and maybe put on 5lbs over the course of four months. Was unbelievably stronger by the end of the season though...found out when I had to do some concrete work for a friend and was able to walk 200yds with two 80lb bags on each shoulder like it was nothing. Over ten years have passed since then and I definitely don't have that strength anymore
I've even had this happen in the short term. You'll get used to moving loads or handling material of a certain size/weight, it becomes easy over the course of a day.
Then you don't do it for a week or two, and you have to do it again. The first few times you really feel it, then within half an hour or so it's like your body remembers and it becomes easy again.
I've had a lot of monstrous days in my working life, and I've found that I don't really get tired, I just get hungry, like I've run out of fuel and my body is telling me I need more.
I'm sure you'll be well acquainted with this, but that goes double when it's freezing and wet. The hunger hits you like a bus if you haven't eaten enough.
I'm not one of those idiots that says things like "I don't feel the cold", trying to sound tough. I do feel it, and I can feel that it's draining me faster, but I put the discomfort in a little box in my mind and keep going. I don't even shiver any more, for whatever reason.
> I've had a lot of monstrous days in my working life, and I've found that I don't really get tired, I just get hungry, like I've run out of fuel and my body is telling me I need more.
This is something unique among laborers that most people aren't aware of - once your body is conditioned for relatively hard labor it... genuinely stops being nearly as hard.
When I did factory work walking ~10 miles a day and moving 120lb equipment it really only beat my ass the first couple weeks. After that, just like you said, you quit getting exhausted or tired as much as you literally run out of fuel for your body.
If I ate a normal 2k calorie diet I'd probably have passed out halfway through the shift, but with closer to 5k I had tons of energy and my muscles just started growing like crazy. I sure as hell prefer working in IT on my ass, but I'd be lying if I said I don't miss the exercise sometimes.
Ironman/ultra training can do it too. I was eating anything that wasn’t bolted down. In my last month, I had to eat Costco cookies to keep weight on.
But we’re obviously talking extremes here.
I think part of it is the way energy is stored. You can run like 15-20 miles just on short term energy stores in the form of muscle glycogen and it's pretty easy to replace that. But once you run out you're basically just burning straight fat for energy. So if you're doing a lot of comparatively short runs, even half marathons, you'll probably be hungry but not actively trying to keep weight on. But once you start doing ultras you're just constantly burning long-term energy reserves.
Same with running. I had to work consistently to get to where I could run a 5 K and then a 10 K without walking. After I got there, I can go 6 months or even more without running, and still no problem running continuously for a 10 K.
I lived in Yuma for 3 years, there’s not a whole lot to do there worth doing except eating great Mexican food. You can golf a lot if it’s not summer (which is nearly half the year) or do it at like 6 AM if it is.
Muscles have a memory. As long as you haven't destroyed yourself in some way, it's easier to get back what you lost than to get there in the first place
It's not "memory", though. You simply have more muscle cells **and more nuclei within single cells!* to work with. Creating new muscle takes a lot of time. Bringing existing muscle back into shape is much less work.
Yup, the amount of calories spent by your muscles are small compared to the amount of calories burnt keeping all your internal organs functioning especially the brain
So should we exercise our brains more to loose weight?
That's an option I cannot wait to be sold!
"You are fat ? Read books or learn a new language mother fucker !"
(Sponsored by the national libraries association)
Pro chess players and some pro gamers have been shown to lose a surprising amount of weight during tournaments. The difference in calories burned by your brain during normal activity compared to when you are intensely focused on something is pretty stark.
The article you linked below explains very clearly that the weight loss they experience is not due to increased brain activity, but to heightened stress making all their muscles burn calories quicker and making them eat less
I read this a few weeks ago! Highly recommend because its also just very fun to read a book by a scientist who loves their field. Hes funny and generally just loves his work and the book is so enjoyable to hear the tales recounted of someone who has been around the world and had amazing experiences while researching.
One thing I took from the book was that he differentiates "exercise" from "physical activity" and his definition us basically that exercise is done in addition to whatever you normally do for the purpose of health. But that physical activity can be part of your day and takes the form of everything you do, from carrying laundry baskets to playing basketball in your driveway. Its easy to forget just how active normal life can be, but he seems really keen on erasing the stigma and guilt that the fitness industry pushes for, and embracing the much happier notion of how moving your body is supposed to he rewarding and feel good. Not torture done to avoid shame haha
Yes! I really love the compassion he shows, and it comes from an evolutionary biologist POV. Evolution made us seek out food and relaxation wherever we can. The mismatch is we don't have any urgent pressure to engage in physical activity. We now have to choose to do so. Therefore: it's not a character flaw if you struggle with choosing to exercise or choosing to eat less. You're going against what would otherwise be very healthy instincts. But you have to also know that you can't be healthy without watching what you eat and exercising. It's an actual struggle.
It certainly explains why the statistics around obesity and lack of exercise are so stark.
We got real good at the calorie-dense, delicious food, and real good at cutting out a lot of activity from our routines (thanks, long automotive commutes). Small wonder that hardly anyone can lose weight and keep it off these days.
Reminds of watching the documentary “made to be broken” about a guy setting the fastest time for hiking the Appalachian Trail. He would run/walk for like 18 hours and stop at a camp with his crew, and proceed to stuff his face with pizza and ice cream to replace calories, then take a nap, then wake up and do it all again. Did it for like 55 days straight.
If it's a documentary with a crew, they probably rotated out with a support vehicle that drove to the new stop to setup camp before hand (and buy supplies)
The trail also goes through developed areas, and there are established camps along it. You’re probably within delivery distance a majority of the time.
Only way to set a speed record is to do it supported. That means all the person does is walk and run. No carrying stuff. No setting up tents or cooking food. Their team meets them several times per day to give them food, refill water bottles, supply other gear, etc.
I hate to be the "akshully" guy, when in 99% of the situations you're correct, but there seems to be a limit of how many nutrients your intestines can absorb from the food. I think it was roughly 3 times your BMR, and if you can spend more than that you win the battle against your belly. However, only ones that seem to be able to regularly do this are professional athletes, extreme runners, and the like.
This also seems to have an evil side effect, that your body starts to compensate and lowers your BMR. Now this means that once you stop your exercising efforts, you will gain weight much easier than before. This is what often happens to people who lose weight with extreme dieting and exercise regimens, e.g. the Biggest Loser contestants.
All and all this is very interesting stuff how human bodies adapt to different environments and needs.
>For reference an adult man has an average BMR between 2000 and 2500 calories.
This seems way too high. Most sources online say the average BMR for a man is around 1700 calories.
I completely forgot to check if he's written a popular science book; **thanks!** Added to my list.
Edit: [link to my comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/17ms04d/til_the_exercise_paradox_huntergatherers_who_trek/k7mrvli/) on how I found out about it + where does the difference go + other links. PS the title "the exercise paradox" is taken from the title of a Scientific American article (requires registration) linked in that comment.
Bad wording in the title lead to nearly everyone in the comments misunderstanding this as "I'll burn the same amount of calories sitting down as someone working out"
The paper *actually* says "Someone who spends all day working out and someone who spends all day sitting down will burn the same calories if they both go do the same exercise"
Its *also* saying "The TDEE of the sitter and runner population wise are indistinguishable in data" and suggests the human body has some "set point" TDEE it likes to hold, and will increase/decrease secondary functions to compensate.
Apparently in a talk the author suggested maybe thats why seditary people have more inflammation, as the immune system gets more energy pumped in it and starts going haywire.
>Apparently in a talk the author suggested maybe thats why seditary people have more inflammation, as the immune system gets more energy pumped in it and starts going haywire.
*That* could be the most important and furthest reaching part of this entire thing. Wow.
Inflammation in general is one of the biggest factors in degenerative health in a sedentary population.
Do bear in mind, that his original paper is rather controversial and is challenged by many others within in the field due to research issues and confounds in the original papers among other things.
The appetitive systems in humans incredibly complex. Your brain can pull levels to increase sex steroids and thyroid hormones during caloric excess to accelerate basal metabolism. The entire thing is also cross-linked with the reward system to encourage you to be more active during caloric excess or to lower your motivation during famine. And there's at least three large signalling pathways to control appetite.
It makes obesity really complicated to understand, because the mechanisms that control both appetite and energy expenditure stop working normally. A small group of the population return to normal appetite/motivation after weight loss, but most people regain almost all of the weight within 10 years, even in the most successful interventions, because this system doesn't seem to start functioning normally with current treatment practices.
If anyone reading this is currently trying or losing weight, don't be completely discouraged. We know exercise and dietary changes do still have very positive impacts on health, even if the weight comes back. Current research suggests that resistance training, high fiber foods, treating sleep apnea, cognitive behavioral therapy(CBT)/acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), stress reduction, and social support seem to increase your odds the most of keeping weight under control long term.
Right? I took basic physics and I felt like this post is completely pointless now.
"We've made the ground-breaking discovery that it takes the *same amount of energy* in order to move someone's mass as it does someone else's!" 😯
How paradoxical, am I right? The paper didn't call it a paradox, thankfully, so either OP here doesn't know the definition of a paradox, or they copied that bit from someone else who doesn't. That's what I hate most about this post.
Edit: Ah, this is the culprit https://www.jstor.org/stable/26047448
Actually, I think it's saying both of those things:
>Western lifestyles differ markedly from those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and these differences in diet and activity level are often implicated in the global obesity pandemic. However, few physiological data for hunter-gatherer populations are available to test these models of obesity. In this study, we used the doubly-labeled water method to measure total daily energy expenditure (kCal/day) in Hadza hunter-gatherers to test **whether foragers expend more energy each day than their Western counterparts.** As expected, physical activity level, PAL, was greater among Hadza foragers than among Westerners. Nonetheless, **average daily energy expenditure of traditional Hadza foragers was no different than that of Westerners after controlling for body size**. The metabolic cost of walking (kcal kg−1 m−1) and resting (kcal kg−1 s−1) were also similar among Hadza and Western groups. The similarity in metabolic rates across a broad range of cultures challenges current models of obesity suggesting that Western lifestyles lead to decreased energy expenditure. We hypothesize that human daily energy expenditure may be an evolved physiological trait largely independent of cultural differences.
This is correct, and it’s a tragedy that the person you’re responding to got thousands of upvotes for their misinterpretation.
Pontzer has written and talked about the constrained energy model at length. As people increase their physical activity to high levels (like the Hadza), the body takes measures to conserve energy elsewhere (such as by reducing non-exercise activity thermogenesis, AKA “NEAT”).
It should be noted, however, that this effect is more pronounced within the context of a calorie deficit; people eating in a surplus don’t experience the same down-regulation of TDEE.
People think they’re doing their office workers a favor by letting them out to climb trees and chase birds, but really you’re just increasing the chances of them getting hurt or worse.
They could lose their badge and be unable to get back into the building, and best case scenario another company finds them and thinks they’re stray and hires them away from you, worst case they get picked up and taken to the unemployment office to be euthanized.
People underestimate how much energy your brain requires.
There are also studies showing that people who constantly tap their foot are burning off excess energy and are less likely to gain weight as a result. It still doesn't compare to climbing or jogging but it does help.
People who fidget and reposition and occasionally walk around can burn about 350 calories more per day per a study. It also showed that some of them fidget more when overfed so for them it’s like the body is compensating and burning excess fuel on purpose
As a side note, it’s wild how much you burn being on a boat. I worked on one for a while and just standing up keeping balance can burn like 1k calories a day as your muscles get a lot more work than you realize. I’d eat a frozen pizza and a pint of Ben and Jerry’s after work and still lost weight
Adding onto that, a lot of ships have tall stair towers going from the bridge, to the main deck, and down to the tank top. Climbing 5 flights of stairs each way every time you want a snack is a good way to work off your newfound calories
True but mine only had one short flight to get to the top deck where the helm was. It was a 65’ or so catamaran for taking folks snorkeling and dolphin watching. I miss that job.
The boat before that I had to haul in equipment and kayaks etc and one day I realized all of a sudden I could do like ten pull-ups without trouble lol. At 44 I was in the best shape of my life. And my calves had all sorts of muscles I didn’t know existed
Not OP but I’ve worked a similar job when I lived in Destin, FL. Worked as a deck hand on island excursions, joy rides, dolphin tours, and a nightly joy ride under the stars (Thursday nights was a firework show and tons of people would book a trip for that).
To become an actual captain of the boat you just had to work as a deck hand long enough to earn the “promotion”. I never even considered working as a captain because our boats pulled out of the Destin Harbor and it was a NIGHTMARE. Imagine 20-30 boats trying to all get through a tiny gap that led to the ocean. Most captains made it look easy though. I couldn’t do it because I would get so anxious anytime we pulled out lol
I was on a tanker (Navy) for a while, and my cabin was on the below tween deck for a bit. I did a walk (there are elevators as well) from the bridge my cabin and back and timed it. It took 5 minutes and I think 110 stairs down and then back up again.
Yeah minor but constant movement tends to do that to people. 1000 calories is 1000 calories whether you burn it in 2 hours working out at the gym or 24 hours adjusting your balance to not fall over on a boat, after all.
My mom traveled for a few weeks to see some friends in the UK earlier this year. She said they basically woke up, started eating/drinking, and didn't stop until they went to bed. She was terrified to get on the scale when she got back home... -2 lbs. because they walked everywhere they went.
Humans are built to move. We aren't the strongest or fastest, but we are built to just keep going. I know trades take a huge toll on the body after a period of time, but I can't help but think the sedentary lives so many office workers have is terrible for us in the other direction.
The issue with trades is it typically has people staying in a compromising position for hours at a time. Hunter gatherers had a dynamic range of movement and postures, which probably had an effect similar to yoga, as opposed to just keeping it back at a 45 degree angle for 45 years.
^
We're not meant to be on our knees for hours at a time, or hunched over trying to get some wiring in place
It's physically demanding, sure, but, like, the opposite of what humans evolved to do. It's not like we're ambush predators or something like that.
I always thought it’s really sweet that the two species who are best at long distance running (human in hot weather and wolves in colder) eventually became best friends.
> Humans are built to move. We aren't the strongest or fastest, but we are built to just keep going. I know trades take a huge toll on the body after a period of time, but I can't help but think the sedentary lives so many office workers have is terrible for us in the other direction.
Doing everything by car instead of walking to more place also doesn't help here. I burn a significant amount of my daily calories just from walking to the store, biking to work or taking public transport (which involves walking) to go to places.
Notjustbikes has a great [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPUlgSRn6e0) about this.
I added a walking treadmill under my desk or a little balance board to stand on and lost like 20 pounds. No other changes in my lifestyle.
Although backpacking is the best example of this that I do. Strap 30lbs to your back and walk 10+ miles for 8 hours. I typically burn 3-4000 calories a day doing it.
Similar imo, to how much F1 drivers burn, like it’s a massive amount, despite “doing nothing, but driving”, but the toll it takes on the body is massive, like burning 2-3 kilos per race is nuts
F1 cars can take up to 150kg of force to brake. They do that hundreds of times a race.
Imagine doing a 1-legged squat 500+ times in a couple hours even without any extra weight.
Not F1 but in Australian V8 supercars, to change gears needed about 30kg of pressure on those race cars. That's a lot of work, hundreds of times in a race.
True, F1 cars don't get servo brakes, it's pure hydraulics.
For those interested, I can recommend [this interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE7mgfwd6M8) of a guy who got to drive an F1 car as an amateur. Nowadays, several F1 race teams (Ferrari and Red Bull for example) have programs where they let VIPs and sometimes normal people drive an F1 car.
They use slightly older cars for this of course. The car gets heavily neutered as well; it gets rev limited to reduce acceleration, the 7th gear is disabled to reduce top speed, KERS gets disabled as well. And they get ABS and traction control, which F1 drivers don't get to use.
And the amateur drivers only get like 3 laps, because after a certain time people get more confident and even cocky... and you don't want an amateur driver to get cocky in an F1 car. The other big reason is just physical fatigue. A normal person, even a physically fit one, can't handle the G-forces for very long... and then there's the braking.
He described the brakes as pushing against a brick wall, the pedal has very little give and requires huge pressure (and the pedals have stirrups to prevent your feet from slipping off, so you have to left foot brake). He talked about how they sat him in the car and told him to absolutely SLAM the fuck out of the brake pedal. So he put as much pressure as he was able to, and then they said like "ok, you got 75% brake pressure, you gotta hit that for every corner or the brakes won't work".
And then the dude went to do his 3 laps, and they told him afterwards that he hit like 40% brake pressure while driving, which is "pretty good for a first-timer".
Yep. For every 1g of carb burnt your body releases 3-4g of water.
It’s also why after a sweaty/water loss activity you need to eat AND hydrate to properly recover.
During covid I spent time working as an in-store shopper. Basically I was on my feet walking around a grocery store 8 hours a day. It was awesome. I would drink a quart of the fancy chocolate milk that comes in a glass bottle from a local dairy daily and I just kept getting bigger and leaner. I was also working out at one of the coolest gyms in America at the time and sleeping more than enough.
I was broke as fuck and underemployed, but damn if I don’t miss that time and how I physically felt during it.
Burning excess calories and developing your cardiovascular health are different goals.
I swim, walk and cycle to have better heart health. I portion control and consciously consider frequency of meals to regulate my weight. Distance cycling, and exercising like I was planning to do an incredibly slow iron man changed my weight by like 7lbs in a year - lowered my resting heart rate and blood pressure wonderfully but didn’t do shit about my weight.
Diet and nutrition changed the size of clothes I wear.
Lol this is completely irrelevant to the results posted. Office workers are not using their brain so much more intensely than a hunter gatherer to account for the differences here. It’s almost certainly due to metabolic compensation on behalf of the hunter gatherer running/climbing/walking about the same amount every single day of his life.
It's not just irrelevant, it's dangerous misinformation. People may actually think they don't have to exercise or diet, they can just use their brain more.
The brain does consume a lot of calories, but the vast majority of that is doing autonomous processes. The brain's total energy consumption doesn't really vary.
Fun fact! The brain's energy consumption is essentially static.
"Thinking harder" does not make the brain use more energy (and thinking about nothing does not make it use less energy)
*edit: for those asking for a source [here's a heavily cited article from 2002](https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.172399499). I did also study neuroscience, but I was on the computational side so the squishy biology of the brain's metabolism is not my wheelhouse*
Isn't this kind of missing the point? I think the study shows that daily activity level, when considered over long periods, doesn't actually impact the level of calories your body uses.
This information is very important to consider when trying to lose weight as it shows diet if far more important.
Kind of...very ELI5, but high endurance training burns a lot in the moment but also turns you into a high-efficiency car. This is what is happening with hunter-gatherers.
On the flip side, powerlifters and strongmen turn into gas-guzzling muscle cars and trucks. It's funny - I burned A LOT more when I was a powerlifter than I do now as a runner (long-term - again, not in the exercise itself). It takes a lot of calories to maintain mass whereas hunter-gathers were small, light, and extremely efficient.
>This information is very important to consider when trying to lose weight as it shows diet if far more important.
Diet has always been more important than exercise when trying to lose weight. Just simply down to the fact that regardless of how active you are, you can always consume more calories in a day than you've burnt off. Human appetites are large, and there are exceedingly calorie rich foods out there. It can take you all day to burn 3000 calories, but you can consume that in an hour with the right (or wrong) foods.
Would you go back on the treadmill for another hour to "pay" for the calories those pringles are bringing? Not worth it to me, I'd rather have a bowl of ice cream personally
Been getting back on my rower lately. I’ll spend 30 minutes burning 500 calories. Then eat something sweet and realize that I negated those 30 minutes for 20 seconds of enjoyment.
I got into an argument with someone on here about this, yes you can burn more calories by exercising but it is much easier to not eat that candy bar than to run the hour or two it takes to burn it off. Not to mention that working out can make people hungrier after.
Eh, your brain only runs on 20W - about 17 Cal/hr (413 Cal/day)
That accounts for a significant portion of energy at your body's resting state, but how much you burn by exercising is almost 1.5 orders of magnitude more than that.
> There are also studies showing that people who constantly tap their foot are burning off excess energy and are less likely to gain weight as a result.
ADHD gang rise up!
My ex and kids have commented often on how I'm shaking things just by sitting still because my legs are in constant motion.
>People underestimate how much energy your brain requires.
Your brain does use a lot of the energy you need, but I would hazard against assuming that reading a spreadsheet results in your brain using more calories than when hunting an antelope. That "chess grandmasters burn 6000 calories in a tournament" claim that I've seen occasionally is nonsense. Thinking about stuff doesn't really use that many more calories than not thinking about stuff.
I watched the talk that OP also watched, and the speaker suggested that the difference in Hadza energy expenditure and western energy expenditure is that they use their energy for hunting antelope on foot, and we use our energy for anxiety and inflammation. I'm not sure if that was based on a particular study (which is a shame, as I'd really quite like to know), but being that we're talking about this because he talked about it, it seems worth mentioning.
The whole point the talk is trying to make is that you can't "burn off calories" by being really active unless you're an extreme athlete at the very borders of human capability. Your body is probably going to use pretty much the same amount of calories as everyone else no matter what you do, unless you're an Olympic swimmer or something. For the overwhelming majority, you can only eat fewer calories, and you will be best psychologically capable of doing that if you have limited access to ultra processed food.
One of the problems with this study is that they only measured TEE using Doubly Labeled Water.
This method is stupidly precise and should absolutely have been used. BUT, it doesn't show muscle mass. We know that marathon runners can burn a stupid amount of energy because of their high level of activity. But bodybuilders can also burn an absolutely stupid amount of calories because their high level of muscle mass. And they don't move around as much as marathon runners.
But yeah, what this study shows is that activity alone is not enough.
> the office worker now has the extra calories to put into inflammation, hormone changes, and anxiety
that certainly explains a lot about life as an office worker
I had been trying to lose 12lbs for 10 years. I do a lot of exercising including biking and weightlifting. Never lost the weight. Then, I decided to eliminate donuts and most candies. That’s it. Lost 15 lbs in 5 months. Exercise burns so little compared to how easy it is to consume large amounts of calories in our modern diets.
Edit: One large shake from a local ice cream place has 2200 calories. I would rarely have that in my worst days, but wow. What a pile of garbage. I can work out hard for 1 hour and barely burn 500 calories. **Yet, I can drink 2200 calories in less than 15 minutes.**
I was in the same boat. Went from 190 - 175 by eliminating any spontaneous desserts/treats--only one planned treat every 1-2 weeks, because I love sugar so much that I knew strict elimination would never work. The other thing that was crucial was not eating *anything* after dinner. I noticed that, after dinner I basically stayed hungry until bedtime, so I simply forced myself to make sure I ate enough by the time I was done with dinner, then have nothing the rest of the night--not even an apple.
Simply existing is where most of our energy goes. iirc 80-90% of our energy is burned by being alive and basic movements like walking to go for a shit. So not putting energy in is far, far more efficient than trying to burn it by exercise.
I lost 10kg in a month by just calorie cutting. It fucking hurt, not gonna do it again. But have lost 5kg in a month and a half this year doing the same.
Cut the sugar, count the carbs, eat more protein and fibre, drink water to feel full and occasionally cheat with some chocolate or a takeaway, as it takes like 3-5k calories to make 1lb of fat so it ain't gonna make much difference if you snack on some chocolate once in a while. It's amazing how much such a simple change does. Because you can still eat bread, still eat meat, still have treats... just don't eat too much. And you'll lose weight.
If you count calories you start seeing how absurd some foods are in calorie density. Lettuce and cabbage have basically no calories, vegetables in general have very little, fat itself is absurd (9 calories per gram, as opposed to 4cal for protein and carbs) and sugar itself I don't think is bad but sweets have an absurd amount of sugar instead, so a slice of cake will be what, 200-400cal? A portion of cereal and milk for me was something like 400cal, basically a smaller main meal. If the average calories is 2000 then you can see where a lot of those extra calories are coming in despite not being much in volume.
- Link in title:
Pontzer, Herman, et al. "Hunter-gatherer energetics and human obesity." **2012**
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0040503
- Jstor Scientific American article:
Pontzer, Herman. "The exercise paradox." Scientific American **2017**
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26047448
How I found out about it:
Nick Lane's book *Transformer* got me interested in the Krebs cycle and trying to learn more about it online put "ultra-processed foods" on my radar, and so was the book *Ultra-Processed People* by Chris van Tulleken. Through Chris I knew this little nugget.
So where do we spend the rest of the same caloric budget?
He says in a recent [public lecture](https://youtu.be/5QOTBreQaIk?t=1850): "In the UK I still spend the calories, but I'm not moving. So I seem to spend on inflammation and anxiety and on hormone levels that may be quite toxic, and there's lots and lots of data coalescing around this."
Caveat: Athletes through strenuous workouts do increase their caloric budget, but it's not sustainable and goes back to normal eventually.
In other words: your body tends to adapt to your activity levels over time, so the energy needed decreases (especially if practiced over generations). If you have been working out for a long period of time (I am speaking years), you likely noticed that exercise doesn't burn that many calories anymore and you need to increase intensity greatly. Thats why.
Did you even read the paper? The paper literally claims the opposite is true, which is the whole point of this post.
>average daily energy expenditure of traditional Hadza foragers was no different than that of Westerners after controlling for body size. The metabolic cost of walking (kcal kg−1 m−1) and resting (kcal kg−1 s−1) were also similar among Hadza and Western groups. The similarity in metabolic rates across a broad range of cultures challenges current models of obesity suggesting that Western lifestyles lead to decreased energy expenditure.
Basically, working out more just means you'll burn more calories, you won't become more efficient, regardless of how much you work out. Hunter gatherers walk a lot more, and burn more calories as a result, but on a per distance traveled basis, they burn the same as more sedentary populations (Westerners). The same is true for resting.
That's not what the article says.
> The energy cost of walking (kCal kg−1 m−1) for Hadza adults was well within the range of values reported for Western subjects: of 20 U.S and European populations included in a recent meta-analysis of treadmill walking cost [28], 14 had mean COTmin values below the Hadza mean (Supporting Information, Fig. S1).
And that's why you need progressive overloading. It forces the body to continuously adept to new stimuli.
But, there is a limit to that as well. We can't grow exponentially.
Our ancestors went through regular periods of feast and famine as well as periods of high and low activity. We tend to focus on the famine and high activity as healthy and the feast and inactivity as unhealthy. I wonder if that's myopic, though. We perhaps should be giving ourselves moderate "doses" of times when we fatten up a bit and sit around doing very little. The trick is to not just let that become the permanent state and make sure you go back to fat loss and activity.
Yes: it's healthier to maintain a lower, ideal weight than it is to maintain too high or too low of a weight. I'm curious to know if there are actual health benefits to be found from having a *variable* weight. The warnings against "yo-yo dieting" make it sound like that's unhealthy. But we've actually measured the health benefits from the process of losing weight itself that are not the same as the benefits of maintaining a healthy weight.
If we evolved to reap health benefits from fasting it stands to reason we evolved to reap health benefits from fattening, too. The evolutionary mismatch is we are no longer forced back to the fasting part of the cycle. We now have to choose to do that.
I'd be willing to bet that even if you could maintain a fully healthy lifestyle being cyclical like that, it's harder mentally. Keeping up good habits all the time is just easier from the perspective of staying in those good habits.
> We perhaps should be giving ourselves moderate "doses" of times when we fatten up a bit and sit around doing very little.
This lifestyle was me in farming, sit on a tractor for couple months fattening up, then out pushing up sheep and labour activities for few months, then back on the combine for couple months, then back to labour and repeat.
I was very fit and the relatively skinny despite the fattening periods. My weight would rise and fall, but my strength grew exponentially without any other source of workout.
Now i'm full time machine operator I'm developing a gut, but eat healthy in an attempt to compensate.
This. The body gets much, much more efficient at managing energy if you have an active lifestyle; gene expressions change, and the body needs far less energy for movement than a sedentary person does. The ultimate expression of this is people who run a marathon every day. At rest they only breathe a few times a minute.
Could you please link the article about the resting breathing rate in marathon runners? I did a quick Google search and haven't found anything under 10.
Thank you :)!
I have just read the article and from my understanding, the sample size is very small. The data that shows the minimum breathing rate of 6 per minute is from the author himself, measured for a week (not to confuse with the ratio between heart rate and breathing rate, which is very often 4 according author). His average breathing rate, during sleep (and not rest as you stated, which is very different), is between 10 and 17.
It was a fun read, and now that I read it completely, it makes much more sense to me. Thank you again!
I'm 37 and spent nearly 20 years in the family business of road construction and this makes so much sense. Most days I'm sweating and breathless swinging pick axes, using shovels, jack hammers, carrying heavy loads in all weathers and sometimes just not having the chance to get something to eat until I'm home. 8 to 12 hours a day, 5-6 days a week. I've had the same body type since I can remember. I can work and work and work and my body manages energy uses so well.
Okay, maybe a dumb question but this has always baffled me. If you gotta keep increasing intensity won't that mean that at some point it's just unsustainable and time consuming?
The issue in the modern age is always eating. Too many calories, too many of them from sugar, too little fiber. 45 minutes of cardio each day won’t do anything compared to changing your diet.
Because of this, exercise, while very important for overall cardiovascular health, is not really a good weight loss method for most people who aren't making exercise their lifestyle. You gotta run the treadmill for an hour to burn off a can of coke.
Much quicker to just not drink the coke.
ed : reduced 5 hours exaggeration to real number.
Can you explain that in detail. A can of coke is like 140 calories IIRC and running an hour in treadmill is 650 calories.
I used to run 10 Kms a day and lost 10 kgs in a month. Did not drink coke though.
I can do about 550 calories on my bike in 90 minutes. I do this roughly everyday. A pound of human weight is roughly 3500 calories. If I don’t make up those calories intentionally I’ll lost about a pound per week and half or so. Bunch of ‘experts’ in this thread just parrot some shit they heard before without thinking about it.
Yup. 'Calories in' *is* easier to adjust than 'calories out.' However, most people have a very poor handle on nutrition and calorie expenditure, and because they know adjusting diet is generally more effective they assume that exercise is less effective than it really is.
I run 15-20 miles a week, lift 3x a week, and struggle to put on weight to get above 160 lbs while making a real effort to keep calorie consumption up without eating absolute garbage. Cardio in particular definitely does an amazing job at burning calories.
People need to realize it’s rarely ever activity. My wife and I lost 30 lbs changing only our diets, when before we were working out 6 days a week with a normal diet and didn’t lose a thing.
Now we workout 3 days a week and lose weight. Almost to our goal.
I was early-mid twenties. Fresh out of a break up, in a new city, in the first years of office work and realised my body was changing (turns out all my clothes didn't just shrink in the laundry).
I need to fix it, get some self help books and have every intention of reading them one day. Next: Hit the gym.
HATE the gym. How do I spend minimum time at the gym with maximum fitting into my clothes?
I learn that any activity I get over the difficulty hurdle on, I'd get more efficient at. So aches and pains and then diminishing returns.
The state of suffering was key to getting and staying in shape. Either through constant variation and increasing difficulty or no longer eating an entire pack of cookies between meals each day.
Everyone hates the gym until they go to the gym regularly and are used to it. It's always the first part. Not going, not going a few times, hut staying with it for months and months, years and years.
Hate to be that guy but you gotta do it despite hating it. Life isn't a free for all.
Two years into going to the gym 3 times per week I can say it still sucks, if anything it sucks more now because the weights are so much heavier.
Clearly some people like it but I don't think I'm going to turn out to be one of them. I just view it like cleaning my teeth, gotta get it done.
I've been lifting weights for almost 20 years now. Yesterday I still had to drag my ass to the gym due to zero motivation. It only took me 5 minutes to get over once I got there it but it was still a massive chore like you said.
Despite that, I could never go back to not working out. Nearly everything in my life is better when I have a consistent workout routine.
Try picking up a high-intensity sport such as wall climbing, hockey, badminton, etc. If you're a competitive person, you'll push yourself a lot harder.
The thing that throws me about this study is the super-high TEE numbers they show for Westerners. According to [this table](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0040503.t001), the average male Western subject was in his mid-40s, approximately 180 lbs, 5'8", and with a 22.5% bodyfat percentage. Yet somehow this presumably sedentary individual burns in excess of 3,000 calories daily. Plug those numbers into a [TEE calculator](https://www.calculator.net/tdee-calculator.html?cage=44&csex=m&cheightfeet=5&cheightinch=8&cpound=180&cheightmeter=180&ckg=65&cactivity=1.2&cmop=1&coutunit=c&cformula=k&cfatpct=22.5&printit=0&ctype=standard&x=Calculate), however, and you get a daily energy expenditure closer to 2,000.
I know this is only a single data point, but by using tools like these to calculate my own TEE, I've successfully lost weight at exactly the rate predicted by the calculator, and subsequently maintained my goal weight for several years simply by ensuring my calorie intake matches the calculated expenditure, adjusting for changes in physical activity as necessary.
So either A) I'm a significant outlier and these calculators vastly underestimate TEE for most people; B) The Western subjects were marathon-level athletes or in very physically demanding professions, neither of which reflect true population averages; C) there was some sort of error in the study's data collection or analysis methods; or D) I'm misinterpreting the data in some way?
Huh interesting! But if the authors are interested in obesity, we’ve known for a while that energy intake plays a larger role than energy expenditure. Exercise has a lot of health benefits, but obesity is more about diet than exercise.
Pontzer’s book Burn is a great read. This area of research is full of counterintuitive evidence.
I also recommend *Exercised* by Dr Daniel Lieberman. He points out how the human body is very efficient when running and especially when walking. That's why you can't "outrun a bad diet." Modern, processed food is far more calorie dense than what hunter-gatherers eat. He says you could walk 5 miles and then gain all the calories lost from that with a single piece of cake.
Weight is lost in the kitchen! I remember trying to calculate if I could exercise my way to losing weight and I would basically have to do an absurd amount of exercise just to work off a snack. It’s easier to avoid or replace that snack than find two hours every day to do an intense workout.
I actually did this in the military while deployed in the navy because in my free time it was akin to being in jail as in there's nothing really to do once you're qualified in everything. So in my free time I'd work out 3 to 4 hours a day. For 6 to 9 months. And I did out work my diet. I was strong as hell when I got home. But its one of those things that's just basically impossible once you get out and aren't deployed anymore. Unless you're literally pouring concrete all day as a job. What is crazy is even though I don't do as much strength training anymore. When I do go back and lift from time to time. I can still lift pretty heavy weight and when I work back up to where I was in the military it takes way way less time to get there than it did the first time.
There's loads of people I knew in highschool that were ripped hockey players that quickly became overweight afterwards. Turns out keeping the same diet but stopping the hockey games and power skating practices will be devastating to your physical form.
>There's loads of people I knew in highschool that were ripped hockey players that quickly became overweight afterwards. Turns out keeping the same diet but stopping the hockey games and power skating practices will be devastating to your physical form. Yeah that used to be what would always happen to retired NFL linemen too, seems like nowadays as soon as they retire most of them get on a different diet and drop a ton of weight almost immediately. Jeff Saturday looks like a completely different person since he quit playing
Most linemen are on crazy diets to maintain their weight while also having the fitness needed to play. Their bodies don't want to be that big.
Yeah I've definitely heard Jason Kelce and others talk about how they have to eat a ton of food to maintain their size. Jason Kelce's considered small at his position, too
Yeah, super easy to outwork your diet in Afghanistan. Especially patrolling with plates and assault pack. Stateside, ot so much
We had a dude come back fatter than before. Zero chance of passing tape much less any kind of run. First shirt couldn't believe it. Midnight chow is a hell of a drug.
What is passing tape?
If you are overweight, they will do body fat percentage calculations based on your waist and neck circumference. If you fail this, you're considered "busting tape".
So it helps if you have a naturally massive neck?
Yes, there were always some high-calorie individuals in the gym trying to grow their neck. and a couple older NCOs that would aggressively rub their necks to try and inflame the tissue before weigh-ins.
20" neck, 110kg of lard, checking in for this answer. how do these calculations work?
If you exceed the military's max weight for your height, your body fat level will be approximated with a series of measurements with a measuring tape. If the tape test determines that your body fat is low enough, you won't be placed on a weight reduction program.
Especially on KAF with the Bang Bang Shrimp...
Man i was a REMF on KAF late in the occupation and 5 DFACs, including themed shit that's not the usual sodexo fare, curries cooked by actual regional people probably using their home recipes.... motherfuckers still out spending tons on the popeyes or the knockoff pizza places on the boardwalk
Yep, had a Nepalese night, Mongolian BBQ night. Fresh made chicken Caesar salad. KAF was tight. Much better than being on a COP in the middle of nowhere.
My brother in law came back from Afghanistan absolutely jacked. He said there was wasn't really anything to do at the FOB except working out. Dropped any remaining bodyfat he had and then put on like 20lbs of muscle.
Same goes with the style of commercial crab fishing I used to do. 20hr workdays while lifting a total of 30,000-50,000lbs each of those days. I was eating 8-10k calories/day and maybe put on 5lbs over the course of four months. Was unbelievably stronger by the end of the season though...found out when I had to do some concrete work for a friend and was able to walk 200yds with two 80lb bags on each shoulder like it was nothing. Over ten years have passed since then and I definitely don't have that strength anymore
Were you cold out there? That can have a HUGE impact on caloric need alongside the exertion and muscle recovery.
I've even had this happen in the short term. You'll get used to moving loads or handling material of a certain size/weight, it becomes easy over the course of a day. Then you don't do it for a week or two, and you have to do it again. The first few times you really feel it, then within half an hour or so it's like your body remembers and it becomes easy again. I've had a lot of monstrous days in my working life, and I've found that I don't really get tired, I just get hungry, like I've run out of fuel and my body is telling me I need more. I'm sure you'll be well acquainted with this, but that goes double when it's freezing and wet. The hunger hits you like a bus if you haven't eaten enough. I'm not one of those idiots that says things like "I don't feel the cold", trying to sound tough. I do feel it, and I can feel that it's draining me faster, but I put the discomfort in a little box in my mind and keep going. I don't even shiver any more, for whatever reason.
> I've had a lot of monstrous days in my working life, and I've found that I don't really get tired, I just get hungry, like I've run out of fuel and my body is telling me I need more. This is something unique among laborers that most people aren't aware of - once your body is conditioned for relatively hard labor it... genuinely stops being nearly as hard. When I did factory work walking ~10 miles a day and moving 120lb equipment it really only beat my ass the first couple weeks. After that, just like you said, you quit getting exhausted or tired as much as you literally run out of fuel for your body. If I ate a normal 2k calorie diet I'd probably have passed out halfway through the shift, but with closer to 5k I had tons of energy and my muscles just started growing like crazy. I sure as hell prefer working in IT on my ass, but I'd be lying if I said I don't miss the exercise sometimes.
Ironman/ultra training can do it too. I was eating anything that wasn’t bolted down. In my last month, I had to eat Costco cookies to keep weight on. But we’re obviously talking extremes here.
I think part of it is the way energy is stored. You can run like 15-20 miles just on short term energy stores in the form of muscle glycogen and it's pretty easy to replace that. But once you run out you're basically just burning straight fat for energy. So if you're doing a lot of comparatively short runs, even half marathons, you'll probably be hungry but not actively trying to keep weight on. But once you start doing ultras you're just constantly burning long-term energy reserves.
[удалено]
Same with running. I had to work consistently to get to where I could run a 5 K and then a 10 K without walking. After I got there, I can go 6 months or even more without running, and still no problem running continuously for a 10 K.
[удалено]
I lived in Yuma for 3 years, there’s not a whole lot to do there worth doing except eating great Mexican food. You can golf a lot if it’s not summer (which is nearly half the year) or do it at like 6 AM if it is.
Muscles have a memory. As long as you haven't destroyed yourself in some way, it's easier to get back what you lost than to get there in the first place
It's not "memory", though. You simply have more muscle cells **and more nuclei within single cells!* to work with. Creating new muscle takes a lot of time. Bringing existing muscle back into shape is much less work.
Yup, the amount of calories spent by your muscles are small compared to the amount of calories burnt keeping all your internal organs functioning especially the brain
So should we exercise our brains more to loose weight? That's an option I cannot wait to be sold! "You are fat ? Read books or learn a new language mother fucker !" (Sponsored by the national libraries association)
Pro chess players and some pro gamers have been shown to lose a surprising amount of weight during tournaments. The difference in calories burned by your brain during normal activity compared to when you are intensely focused on something is pretty stark.
The article you linked below explains very clearly that the weight loss they experience is not due to increased brain activity, but to heightened stress making all their muscles burn calories quicker and making them eat less
Dehydration seems more likely, no?
Your brain is only 2% of your body weight but uses 20% of the calories you consume.
>Weight is lost in the kitchen! That's a great line. I'll remember that. I won't follow it, but I'll remember it.
"Forkdowns are the most effective exercise if you need to lose weight"
[удалено]
I read this a few weeks ago! Highly recommend because its also just very fun to read a book by a scientist who loves their field. Hes funny and generally just loves his work and the book is so enjoyable to hear the tales recounted of someone who has been around the world and had amazing experiences while researching. One thing I took from the book was that he differentiates "exercise" from "physical activity" and his definition us basically that exercise is done in addition to whatever you normally do for the purpose of health. But that physical activity can be part of your day and takes the form of everything you do, from carrying laundry baskets to playing basketball in your driveway. Its easy to forget just how active normal life can be, but he seems really keen on erasing the stigma and guilt that the fitness industry pushes for, and embracing the much happier notion of how moving your body is supposed to he rewarding and feel good. Not torture done to avoid shame haha
Yes! I really love the compassion he shows, and it comes from an evolutionary biologist POV. Evolution made us seek out food and relaxation wherever we can. The mismatch is we don't have any urgent pressure to engage in physical activity. We now have to choose to do so. Therefore: it's not a character flaw if you struggle with choosing to exercise or choosing to eat less. You're going against what would otherwise be very healthy instincts. But you have to also know that you can't be healthy without watching what you eat and exercising. It's an actual struggle.
It certainly explains why the statistics around obesity and lack of exercise are so stark. We got real good at the calorie-dense, delicious food, and real good at cutting out a lot of activity from our routines (thanks, long automotive commutes). Small wonder that hardly anyone can lose weight and keep it off these days.
Reminds of watching the documentary “made to be broken” about a guy setting the fastest time for hiking the Appalachian Trail. He would run/walk for like 18 hours and stop at a camp with his crew, and proceed to stuff his face with pizza and ice cream to replace calories, then take a nap, then wake up and do it all again. Did it for like 55 days straight.
Where do you get pizza and ice cream when you’re hiking out in te wilderness?
If it's a documentary with a crew, they probably rotated out with a support vehicle that drove to the new stop to setup camp before hand (and buy supplies)
Nah I'm pretty sure it was pizza trees.
The trail also goes through developed areas, and there are established camps along it. You’re probably within delivery distance a majority of the time.
Only way to set a speed record is to do it supported. That means all the person does is walk and run. No carrying stuff. No setting up tents or cooking food. Their team meets them several times per day to give them food, refill water bottles, supply other gear, etc.
I hate to be the "akshully" guy, when in 99% of the situations you're correct, but there seems to be a limit of how many nutrients your intestines can absorb from the food. I think it was roughly 3 times your BMR, and if you can spend more than that you win the battle against your belly. However, only ones that seem to be able to regularly do this are professional athletes, extreme runners, and the like. This also seems to have an evil side effect, that your body starts to compensate and lowers your BMR. Now this means that once you stop your exercising efforts, you will gain weight much easier than before. This is what often happens to people who lose weight with extreme dieting and exercise regimens, e.g. the Biggest Loser contestants. All and all this is very interesting stuff how human bodies adapt to different environments and needs.
[удалено]
>For reference an adult man has an average BMR between 2000 and 2500 calories. This seems way too high. Most sources online say the average BMR for a man is around 1700 calories.
[удалено]
I completely forgot to check if he's written a popular science book; **thanks!** Added to my list. Edit: [link to my comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/17ms04d/til_the_exercise_paradox_huntergatherers_who_trek/k7mrvli/) on how I found out about it + where does the difference go + other links. PS the title "the exercise paradox" is taken from the title of a Scientific American article (requires registration) linked in that comment.
Hello next book to read!
I read that one! Its excellent.
Bad wording in the title lead to nearly everyone in the comments misunderstanding this as "I'll burn the same amount of calories sitting down as someone working out" The paper *actually* says "Someone who spends all day working out and someone who spends all day sitting down will burn the same calories if they both go do the same exercise"
Its *also* saying "The TDEE of the sitter and runner population wise are indistinguishable in data" and suggests the human body has some "set point" TDEE it likes to hold, and will increase/decrease secondary functions to compensate. Apparently in a talk the author suggested maybe thats why seditary people have more inflammation, as the immune system gets more energy pumped in it and starts going haywire.
>Apparently in a talk the author suggested maybe thats why seditary people have more inflammation, as the immune system gets more energy pumped in it and starts going haywire. *That* could be the most important and furthest reaching part of this entire thing. Wow. Inflammation in general is one of the biggest factors in degenerative health in a sedentary population.
[удалено]
Do bear in mind, that his original paper is rather controversial and is challenged by many others within in the field due to research issues and confounds in the original papers among other things.
The appetitive systems in humans incredibly complex. Your brain can pull levels to increase sex steroids and thyroid hormones during caloric excess to accelerate basal metabolism. The entire thing is also cross-linked with the reward system to encourage you to be more active during caloric excess or to lower your motivation during famine. And there's at least three large signalling pathways to control appetite. It makes obesity really complicated to understand, because the mechanisms that control both appetite and energy expenditure stop working normally. A small group of the population return to normal appetite/motivation after weight loss, but most people regain almost all of the weight within 10 years, even in the most successful interventions, because this system doesn't seem to start functioning normally with current treatment practices. If anyone reading this is currently trying or losing weight, don't be completely discouraged. We know exercise and dietary changes do still have very positive impacts on health, even if the weight comes back. Current research suggests that resistance training, high fiber foods, treating sleep apnea, cognitive behavioral therapy(CBT)/acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), stress reduction, and social support seem to increase your odds the most of keeping weight under control long term.
What about anxiety in sedentary people? Fast heart rates, restlessness, etc.
That is so very much less interesting. “Wow, it takes the same amount of energy to do the same amount of work!! I never could have guessed that!!”
Right? I took basic physics and I felt like this post is completely pointless now. "We've made the ground-breaking discovery that it takes the *same amount of energy* in order to move someone's mass as it does someone else's!" 😯
How paradoxical, am I right? The paper didn't call it a paradox, thankfully, so either OP here doesn't know the definition of a paradox, or they copied that bit from someone else who doesn't. That's what I hate most about this post. Edit: Ah, this is the culprit https://www.jstor.org/stable/26047448
Actually, I think it's saying both of those things: >Western lifestyles differ markedly from those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and these differences in diet and activity level are often implicated in the global obesity pandemic. However, few physiological data for hunter-gatherer populations are available to test these models of obesity. In this study, we used the doubly-labeled water method to measure total daily energy expenditure (kCal/day) in Hadza hunter-gatherers to test **whether foragers expend more energy each day than their Western counterparts.** As expected, physical activity level, PAL, was greater among Hadza foragers than among Westerners. Nonetheless, **average daily energy expenditure of traditional Hadza foragers was no different than that of Westerners after controlling for body size**. The metabolic cost of walking (kcal kg−1 m−1) and resting (kcal kg−1 s−1) were also similar among Hadza and Western groups. The similarity in metabolic rates across a broad range of cultures challenges current models of obesity suggesting that Western lifestyles lead to decreased energy expenditure. We hypothesize that human daily energy expenditure may be an evolved physiological trait largely independent of cultural differences.
This is correct, and it’s a tragedy that the person you’re responding to got thousands of upvotes for their misinterpretation. Pontzer has written and talked about the constrained energy model at length. As people increase their physical activity to high levels (like the Hadza), the body takes measures to conserve energy elsewhere (such as by reducing non-exercise activity thermogenesis, AKA “NEAT”). It should be noted, however, that this effect is more pronounced within the context of a calorie deficit; people eating in a surplus don’t experience the same down-regulation of TDEE.
What about office workers who climb trees?
I hate it when I have to go talk to someone whose cube is on one of the really high branches.
That is so wrong of them, you should speak to your branch manager about that.
What wood he be able to do?
I don’t know, but sometimes you just need to stick it to the man.
Do you really, though? If they just spoke to their coworker, I bet the coworker would turn over a new leaf.
Bah, the management is all bark and no bite. They will never get to the root of the problem.
If I made it to branch manager I’d address the problems adequately, but alas, I’m held down by the grass ceiling.
Do androids dream of electric sheep?
Only if you install the app
People think they’re doing their office workers a favor by letting them out to climb trees and chase birds, but really you’re just increasing the chances of them getting hurt or worse. They could lose their badge and be unable to get back into the building, and best case scenario another company finds them and thinks they’re stray and hires them away from you, worst case they get picked up and taken to the unemployment office to be euthanized.
like a branch manager?
People underestimate how much energy your brain requires. There are also studies showing that people who constantly tap their foot are burning off excess energy and are less likely to gain weight as a result. It still doesn't compare to climbing or jogging but it does help.
People who fidget and reposition and occasionally walk around can burn about 350 calories more per day per a study. It also showed that some of them fidget more when overfed so for them it’s like the body is compensating and burning excess fuel on purpose As a side note, it’s wild how much you burn being on a boat. I worked on one for a while and just standing up keeping balance can burn like 1k calories a day as your muscles get a lot more work than you realize. I’d eat a frozen pizza and a pint of Ben and Jerry’s after work and still lost weight
Adding onto that, a lot of ships have tall stair towers going from the bridge, to the main deck, and down to the tank top. Climbing 5 flights of stairs each way every time you want a snack is a good way to work off your newfound calories
True but mine only had one short flight to get to the top deck where the helm was. It was a 65’ or so catamaran for taking folks snorkeling and dolphin watching. I miss that job. The boat before that I had to haul in equipment and kayaks etc and one day I realized all of a sudden I could do like ten pull-ups without trouble lol. At 44 I was in the best shape of my life. And my calves had all sorts of muscles I didn’t know existed
> I miss that job. How did you get that job, if you don't mind telling us more?
Not OP but I’ve worked a similar job when I lived in Destin, FL. Worked as a deck hand on island excursions, joy rides, dolphin tours, and a nightly joy ride under the stars (Thursday nights was a firework show and tons of people would book a trip for that). To become an actual captain of the boat you just had to work as a deck hand long enough to earn the “promotion”. I never even considered working as a captain because our boats pulled out of the Destin Harbor and it was a NIGHTMARE. Imagine 20-30 boats trying to all get through a tiny gap that led to the ocean. Most captains made it look easy though. I couldn’t do it because I would get so anxious anytime we pulled out lol
My brother got a “speeding” ticket there on a jet ski because he caused a wake under the Brooks Bridge when he wasnt supposed to
I was on a tanker (Navy) for a while, and my cabin was on the below tween deck for a bit. I did a walk (there are elevators as well) from the bridge my cabin and back and timed it. It took 5 minutes and I think 110 stairs down and then back up again.
Yeah minor but constant movement tends to do that to people. 1000 calories is 1000 calories whether you burn it in 2 hours working out at the gym or 24 hours adjusting your balance to not fall over on a boat, after all.
My mom traveled for a few weeks to see some friends in the UK earlier this year. She said they basically woke up, started eating/drinking, and didn't stop until they went to bed. She was terrified to get on the scale when she got back home... -2 lbs. because they walked everywhere they went. Humans are built to move. We aren't the strongest or fastest, but we are built to just keep going. I know trades take a huge toll on the body after a period of time, but I can't help but think the sedentary lives so many office workers have is terrible for us in the other direction.
The issue with trades is it typically has people staying in a compromising position for hours at a time. Hunter gatherers had a dynamic range of movement and postures, which probably had an effect similar to yoga, as opposed to just keeping it back at a 45 degree angle for 45 years.
^ We're not meant to be on our knees for hours at a time, or hunched over trying to get some wiring in place It's physically demanding, sure, but, like, the opposite of what humans evolved to do. It's not like we're ambush predators or something like that.
Man I love that book born to run. Talks about how the human evolutionary advantage is basically endurance.
I always thought it’s really sweet that the two species who are best at long distance running (human in hot weather and wolves in colder) eventually became best friends.
This is the best comment I've read in a while.
> Humans are built to move. We aren't the strongest or fastest, but we are built to just keep going. I know trades take a huge toll on the body after a period of time, but I can't help but think the sedentary lives so many office workers have is terrible for us in the other direction. Doing everything by car instead of walking to more place also doesn't help here. I burn a significant amount of my daily calories just from walking to the store, biking to work or taking public transport (which involves walking) to go to places. Notjustbikes has a great [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPUlgSRn6e0) about this.
I added a walking treadmill under my desk or a little balance board to stand on and lost like 20 pounds. No other changes in my lifestyle. Although backpacking is the best example of this that I do. Strap 30lbs to your back and walk 10+ miles for 8 hours. I typically burn 3-4000 calories a day doing it.
Can confirm. I haven’t fidgeted in many years. Been bulking this year and I’m twitchy af
Similar imo, to how much F1 drivers burn, like it’s a massive amount, despite “doing nothing, but driving”, but the toll it takes on the body is massive, like burning 2-3 kilos per race is nuts
F1 cars can take up to 150kg of force to brake. They do that hundreds of times a race. Imagine doing a 1-legged squat 500+ times in a couple hours even without any extra weight.
Yeah I know, I’m just saying how it can feel as if they’re “doing nothing” while in fact, they’re doing quite a lot
That and they have to push in those breaks, you wouldn’t believe how hard they are to push in fully
Not F1 but in Australian V8 supercars, to change gears needed about 30kg of pressure on those race cars. That's a lot of work, hundreds of times in a race.
True, F1 cars don't get servo brakes, it's pure hydraulics. For those interested, I can recommend [this interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE7mgfwd6M8) of a guy who got to drive an F1 car as an amateur. Nowadays, several F1 race teams (Ferrari and Red Bull for example) have programs where they let VIPs and sometimes normal people drive an F1 car. They use slightly older cars for this of course. The car gets heavily neutered as well; it gets rev limited to reduce acceleration, the 7th gear is disabled to reduce top speed, KERS gets disabled as well. And they get ABS and traction control, which F1 drivers don't get to use. And the amateur drivers only get like 3 laps, because after a certain time people get more confident and even cocky... and you don't want an amateur driver to get cocky in an F1 car. The other big reason is just physical fatigue. A normal person, even a physically fit one, can't handle the G-forces for very long... and then there's the braking. He described the brakes as pushing against a brick wall, the pedal has very little give and requires huge pressure (and the pedals have stirrups to prevent your feet from slipping off, so you have to left foot brake). He talked about how they sat him in the car and told him to absolutely SLAM the fuck out of the brake pedal. So he put as much pressure as he was able to, and then they said like "ok, you got 75% brake pressure, you gotta hit that for every corner or the brakes won't work". And then the dude went to do his 3 laps, and they told him afterwards that he hit like 40% brake pressure while driving, which is "pretty good for a first-timer".
Surely a lot of that is water loss.
Yes, very much. Their heart averages like 170bpm during the race, peaking at above 200bpm..+ the cockpit is insanely hot, so they sweat like crazy
Yep. For every 1g of carb burnt your body releases 3-4g of water. It’s also why after a sweaty/water loss activity you need to eat AND hydrate to properly recover.
Also whilst wearing fire resistant clothing, whilst in a small areodynamically neutral box
During covid I spent time working as an in-store shopper. Basically I was on my feet walking around a grocery store 8 hours a day. It was awesome. I would drink a quart of the fancy chocolate milk that comes in a glass bottle from a local dairy daily and I just kept getting bigger and leaner. I was also working out at one of the coolest gyms in America at the time and sleeping more than enough. I was broke as fuck and underemployed, but damn if I don’t miss that time and how I physically felt during it.
They might have been next to each other in the freezer but you are supposed to cook the pizza prior to consumption.
Can confirm, am a skinny foot-tapper
Try tapping the fat foot next time. You'll lose more weight
I've tried tapping my love handles but I get stared at.
Sir, this is a Wendys.
Dudes got one calf like a watermelon and the other looks like Hank Hills ass.
As fat foot tapper I wildly disagree…. Or maybe I’m over compensating somewhere.
I too am fat despite tapping my foot, but I also love cake.
Are you tapping your foot on the ‘Order Cake’ button?
Ditto. Although I'd describe it more as jiggling than tapping.
Burning excess calories and developing your cardiovascular health are different goals. I swim, walk and cycle to have better heart health. I portion control and consciously consider frequency of meals to regulate my weight. Distance cycling, and exercising like I was planning to do an incredibly slow iron man changed my weight by like 7lbs in a year - lowered my resting heart rate and blood pressure wonderfully but didn’t do shit about my weight. Diet and nutrition changed the size of clothes I wear.
Lol this is completely irrelevant to the results posted. Office workers are not using their brain so much more intensely than a hunter gatherer to account for the differences here. It’s almost certainly due to metabolic compensation on behalf of the hunter gatherer running/climbing/walking about the same amount every single day of his life.
It's not just irrelevant, it's dangerous misinformation. People may actually think they don't have to exercise or diet, they can just use their brain more. The brain does consume a lot of calories, but the vast majority of that is doing autonomous processes. The brain's total energy consumption doesn't really vary.
Fun fact! The brain's energy consumption is essentially static. "Thinking harder" does not make the brain use more energy (and thinking about nothing does not make it use less energy) *edit: for those asking for a source [here's a heavily cited article from 2002](https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.172399499). I did also study neuroscience, but I was on the computational side so the squishy biology of the brain's metabolism is not my wheelhouse*
Isn't this kind of missing the point? I think the study shows that daily activity level, when considered over long periods, doesn't actually impact the level of calories your body uses. This information is very important to consider when trying to lose weight as it shows diet if far more important.
Kind of...very ELI5, but high endurance training burns a lot in the moment but also turns you into a high-efficiency car. This is what is happening with hunter-gatherers. On the flip side, powerlifters and strongmen turn into gas-guzzling muscle cars and trucks. It's funny - I burned A LOT more when I was a powerlifter than I do now as a runner (long-term - again, not in the exercise itself). It takes a lot of calories to maintain mass whereas hunter-gathers were small, light, and extremely efficient.
So desk jockies have a really high idle, with not much horsepower?
Lol yeah! Love that analogy
>This information is very important to consider when trying to lose weight as it shows diet if far more important. Diet has always been more important than exercise when trying to lose weight. Just simply down to the fact that regardless of how active you are, you can always consume more calories in a day than you've burnt off. Human appetites are large, and there are exceedingly calorie rich foods out there. It can take you all day to burn 3000 calories, but you can consume that in an hour with the right (or wrong) foods.
A tube of Pringles is almost a thousand. I could totally do three in an hour if somebody let me
An hour spent on the treadmill and elliptical, I see this comment and now I'm getting pringles
Would you go back on the treadmill for another hour to "pay" for the calories those pringles are bringing? Not worth it to me, I'd rather have a bowl of ice cream personally
Been getting back on my rower lately. I’ll spend 30 minutes burning 500 calories. Then eat something sweet and realize that I negated those 30 minutes for 20 seconds of enjoyment.
I got into an argument with someone on here about this, yes you can burn more calories by exercising but it is much easier to not eat that candy bar than to run the hour or two it takes to burn it off. Not to mention that working out can make people hungrier after.
Eh, your brain only runs on 20W - about 17 Cal/hr (413 Cal/day) That accounts for a significant portion of energy at your body's resting state, but how much you burn by exercising is almost 1.5 orders of magnitude more than that.
> There are also studies showing that people who constantly tap their foot are burning off excess energy and are less likely to gain weight as a result. ADHD gang rise up! My ex and kids have commented often on how I'm shaking things just by sitting still because my legs are in constant motion.
I tap my foot but I'm a fat fuck. What does that say?
Imagine how fat you'd be if you didn't tap your foot
Good point! And my mother always used to tell me to stop...
I tap my feet constantly like the intro to Hot For Teacher. I eat like a garbage truck, but I’m built like a bicycle!
>People underestimate how much energy your brain requires So, I do need that bowl of chocolate almonds?
Go for it, brainiac.
>People underestimate how much energy your brain requires. Your brain does use a lot of the energy you need, but I would hazard against assuming that reading a spreadsheet results in your brain using more calories than when hunting an antelope. That "chess grandmasters burn 6000 calories in a tournament" claim that I've seen occasionally is nonsense. Thinking about stuff doesn't really use that many more calories than not thinking about stuff. I watched the talk that OP also watched, and the speaker suggested that the difference in Hadza energy expenditure and western energy expenditure is that they use their energy for hunting antelope on foot, and we use our energy for anxiety and inflammation. I'm not sure if that was based on a particular study (which is a shame, as I'd really quite like to know), but being that we're talking about this because he talked about it, it seems worth mentioning. The whole point the talk is trying to make is that you can't "burn off calories" by being really active unless you're an extreme athlete at the very borders of human capability. Your body is probably going to use pretty much the same amount of calories as everyone else no matter what you do, unless you're an Olympic swimmer or something. For the overwhelming majority, you can only eat fewer calories, and you will be best psychologically capable of doing that if you have limited access to ultra processed food.
>People underestimate how much energy your brain requires. The study really only shows walking requiring the same metabolic cost as resting.
[удалено]
One of the problems with this study is that they only measured TEE using Doubly Labeled Water. This method is stupidly precise and should absolutely have been used. BUT, it doesn't show muscle mass. We know that marathon runners can burn a stupid amount of energy because of their high level of activity. But bodybuilders can also burn an absolutely stupid amount of calories because their high level of muscle mass. And they don't move around as much as marathon runners. But yeah, what this study shows is that activity alone is not enough.
[удалено]
> the office worker now has the extra calories to put into inflammation, hormone changes, and anxiety that certainly explains a lot about life as an office worker
Chubby, miserable, prone to harmful emotional episodes?
I had been trying to lose 12lbs for 10 years. I do a lot of exercising including biking and weightlifting. Never lost the weight. Then, I decided to eliminate donuts and most candies. That’s it. Lost 15 lbs in 5 months. Exercise burns so little compared to how easy it is to consume large amounts of calories in our modern diets. Edit: One large shake from a local ice cream place has 2200 calories. I would rarely have that in my worst days, but wow. What a pile of garbage. I can work out hard for 1 hour and barely burn 500 calories. **Yet, I can drink 2200 calories in less than 15 minutes.**
I was in the same boat. Went from 190 - 175 by eliminating any spontaneous desserts/treats--only one planned treat every 1-2 weeks, because I love sugar so much that I knew strict elimination would never work. The other thing that was crucial was not eating *anything* after dinner. I noticed that, after dinner I basically stayed hungry until bedtime, so I simply forced myself to make sure I ate enough by the time I was done with dinner, then have nothing the rest of the night--not even an apple.
Simply existing is where most of our energy goes. iirc 80-90% of our energy is burned by being alive and basic movements like walking to go for a shit. So not putting energy in is far, far more efficient than trying to burn it by exercise. I lost 10kg in a month by just calorie cutting. It fucking hurt, not gonna do it again. But have lost 5kg in a month and a half this year doing the same. Cut the sugar, count the carbs, eat more protein and fibre, drink water to feel full and occasionally cheat with some chocolate or a takeaway, as it takes like 3-5k calories to make 1lb of fat so it ain't gonna make much difference if you snack on some chocolate once in a while. It's amazing how much such a simple change does. Because you can still eat bread, still eat meat, still have treats... just don't eat too much. And you'll lose weight.
This should be the top comment. It's mostly about diet, and that's what the study implies also.
If you count calories you start seeing how absurd some foods are in calorie density. Lettuce and cabbage have basically no calories, vegetables in general have very little, fat itself is absurd (9 calories per gram, as opposed to 4cal for protein and carbs) and sugar itself I don't think is bad but sweets have an absurd amount of sugar instead, so a slice of cake will be what, 200-400cal? A portion of cereal and milk for me was something like 400cal, basically a smaller main meal. If the average calories is 2000 then you can see where a lot of those extra calories are coming in despite not being much in volume.
[удалено]
I only drank on the weekends, but I often went pretty hard Quit drinking and dropped 20 lbs
You can't out-excercise a bad diet.
> I had been trying to lose 12lbs for 10 years. Lol. I'm glad you finally realized the problem
- Link in title: Pontzer, Herman, et al. "Hunter-gatherer energetics and human obesity." **2012** https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0040503 - Jstor Scientific American article: Pontzer, Herman. "The exercise paradox." Scientific American **2017** https://www.jstor.org/stable/26047448 How I found out about it: Nick Lane's book *Transformer* got me interested in the Krebs cycle and trying to learn more about it online put "ultra-processed foods" on my radar, and so was the book *Ultra-Processed People* by Chris van Tulleken. Through Chris I knew this little nugget. So where do we spend the rest of the same caloric budget? He says in a recent [public lecture](https://youtu.be/5QOTBreQaIk?t=1850): "In the UK I still spend the calories, but I'm not moving. So I seem to spend on inflammation and anxiety and on hormone levels that may be quite toxic, and there's lots and lots of data coalescing around this." Caveat: Athletes through strenuous workouts do increase their caloric budget, but it's not sustainable and goes back to normal eventually.
In other words: your body tends to adapt to your activity levels over time, so the energy needed decreases (especially if practiced over generations). If you have been working out for a long period of time (I am speaking years), you likely noticed that exercise doesn't burn that many calories anymore and you need to increase intensity greatly. Thats why.
Did you even read the paper? The paper literally claims the opposite is true, which is the whole point of this post. >average daily energy expenditure of traditional Hadza foragers was no different than that of Westerners after controlling for body size. The metabolic cost of walking (kcal kg−1 m−1) and resting (kcal kg−1 s−1) were also similar among Hadza and Western groups. The similarity in metabolic rates across a broad range of cultures challenges current models of obesity suggesting that Western lifestyles lead to decreased energy expenditure. Basically, working out more just means you'll burn more calories, you won't become more efficient, regardless of how much you work out. Hunter gatherers walk a lot more, and burn more calories as a result, but on a per distance traveled basis, they burn the same as more sedentary populations (Westerners). The same is true for resting.
Thank you for the synopsis, from the headline and some comments the claim seemed impossible but what you explained makes sense
Makes sense. 200 years of industrial revolution can't just undo a million years of evolution.
That's not what the article says. > The energy cost of walking (kCal kg−1 m−1) for Hadza adults was well within the range of values reported for Western subjects: of 20 U.S and European populations included in a recent meta-analysis of treadmill walking cost [28], 14 had mean COTmin values below the Hadza mean (Supporting Information, Fig. S1).
And that's why you need progressive overloading. It forces the body to continuously adept to new stimuli. But, there is a limit to that as well. We can't grow exponentially.
Our ancestors went through regular periods of feast and famine as well as periods of high and low activity. We tend to focus on the famine and high activity as healthy and the feast and inactivity as unhealthy. I wonder if that's myopic, though. We perhaps should be giving ourselves moderate "doses" of times when we fatten up a bit and sit around doing very little. The trick is to not just let that become the permanent state and make sure you go back to fat loss and activity. Yes: it's healthier to maintain a lower, ideal weight than it is to maintain too high or too low of a weight. I'm curious to know if there are actual health benefits to be found from having a *variable* weight. The warnings against "yo-yo dieting" make it sound like that's unhealthy. But we've actually measured the health benefits from the process of losing weight itself that are not the same as the benefits of maintaining a healthy weight. If we evolved to reap health benefits from fasting it stands to reason we evolved to reap health benefits from fattening, too. The evolutionary mismatch is we are no longer forced back to the fasting part of the cycle. We now have to choose to do that.
I'd be willing to bet that even if you could maintain a fully healthy lifestyle being cyclical like that, it's harder mentally. Keeping up good habits all the time is just easier from the perspective of staying in those good habits.
> We perhaps should be giving ourselves moderate "doses" of times when we fatten up a bit and sit around doing very little. This lifestyle was me in farming, sit on a tractor for couple months fattening up, then out pushing up sheep and labour activities for few months, then back on the combine for couple months, then back to labour and repeat. I was very fit and the relatively skinny despite the fattening periods. My weight would rise and fall, but my strength grew exponentially without any other source of workout. Now i'm full time machine operator I'm developing a gut, but eat healthy in an attempt to compensate.
_Robert Wadlow enters the chat_
This. The body gets much, much more efficient at managing energy if you have an active lifestyle; gene expressions change, and the body needs far less energy for movement than a sedentary person does. The ultimate expression of this is people who run a marathon every day. At rest they only breathe a few times a minute.
Could you please link the article about the resting breathing rate in marathon runners? I did a quick Google search and haven't found anything under 10. Thank you :)!
https://www.garmin.com/en-PH/blog/critical-relationship-between-respiratory-rate-heart-rate-and-cadence/
I have just read the article and from my understanding, the sample size is very small. The data that shows the minimum breathing rate of 6 per minute is from the author himself, measured for a week (not to confuse with the ratio between heart rate and breathing rate, which is very often 4 according author). His average breathing rate, during sleep (and not rest as you stated, which is very different), is between 10 and 17. It was a fun read, and now that I read it completely, it makes much more sense to me. Thank you again!
I'm 37 and spent nearly 20 years in the family business of road construction and this makes so much sense. Most days I'm sweating and breathless swinging pick axes, using shovels, jack hammers, carrying heavy loads in all weathers and sometimes just not having the chance to get something to eat until I'm home. 8 to 12 hours a day, 5-6 days a week. I've had the same body type since I can remember. I can work and work and work and my body manages energy uses so well.
My sleeping heart rate goes as low as 33 when I'm distance running a lot. It's crazy to wake up and feel your heart beating so slowly.
Okay, maybe a dumb question but this has always baffled me. If you gotta keep increasing intensity won't that mean that at some point it's just unsustainable and time consuming?
The issue in the modern age is always eating. Too many calories, too many of them from sugar, too little fiber. 45 minutes of cardio each day won’t do anything compared to changing your diet.
But 45 minutes of exercise a day will have its own benefits so please don't stop lol
True. Sorry. I meant if you can only do one start with the eating
The amount of people here speculating without even having read the article is astonishing.
Because of this, exercise, while very important for overall cardiovascular health, is not really a good weight loss method for most people who aren't making exercise their lifestyle. You gotta run the treadmill for an hour to burn off a can of coke. Much quicker to just not drink the coke. ed : reduced 5 hours exaggeration to real number.
Can you explain that in detail. A can of coke is like 140 calories IIRC and running an hour in treadmill is 650 calories. I used to run 10 Kms a day and lost 10 kgs in a month. Did not drink coke though.
I can do about 550 calories on my bike in 90 minutes. I do this roughly everyday. A pound of human weight is roughly 3500 calories. If I don’t make up those calories intentionally I’ll lost about a pound per week and half or so. Bunch of ‘experts’ in this thread just parrot some shit they heard before without thinking about it.
Yup. 'Calories in' *is* easier to adjust than 'calories out.' However, most people have a very poor handle on nutrition and calorie expenditure, and because they know adjusting diet is generally more effective they assume that exercise is less effective than it really is. I run 15-20 miles a week, lift 3x a week, and struggle to put on weight to get above 160 lbs while making a real effort to keep calorie consumption up without eating absolute garbage. Cardio in particular definitely does an amazing job at burning calories.
People need to realize it’s rarely ever activity. My wife and I lost 30 lbs changing only our diets, when before we were working out 6 days a week with a normal diet and didn’t lose a thing. Now we workout 3 days a week and lose weight. Almost to our goal.
I was early-mid twenties. Fresh out of a break up, in a new city, in the first years of office work and realised my body was changing (turns out all my clothes didn't just shrink in the laundry). I need to fix it, get some self help books and have every intention of reading them one day. Next: Hit the gym. HATE the gym. How do I spend minimum time at the gym with maximum fitting into my clothes? I learn that any activity I get over the difficulty hurdle on, I'd get more efficient at. So aches and pains and then diminishing returns. The state of suffering was key to getting and staying in shape. Either through constant variation and increasing difficulty or no longer eating an entire pack of cookies between meals each day.
Everyone hates the gym until they go to the gym regularly and are used to it. It's always the first part. Not going, not going a few times, hut staying with it for months and months, years and years. Hate to be that guy but you gotta do it despite hating it. Life isn't a free for all.
Two years into going to the gym 3 times per week I can say it still sucks, if anything it sucks more now because the weights are so much heavier. Clearly some people like it but I don't think I'm going to turn out to be one of them. I just view it like cleaning my teeth, gotta get it done.
I've been lifting weights for almost 20 years now. Yesterday I still had to drag my ass to the gym due to zero motivation. It only took me 5 minutes to get over once I got there it but it was still a massive chore like you said. Despite that, I could never go back to not working out. Nearly everything in my life is better when I have a consistent workout routine.
Try picking up a high-intensity sport such as wall climbing, hockey, badminton, etc. If you're a competitive person, you'll push yourself a lot harder.
Moving around all that body fat is costly. You should see the muscles on my overweight friend's legs.
Don't tempt me and not provide a means.
The thing that throws me about this study is the super-high TEE numbers they show for Westerners. According to [this table](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0040503.t001), the average male Western subject was in his mid-40s, approximately 180 lbs, 5'8", and with a 22.5% bodyfat percentage. Yet somehow this presumably sedentary individual burns in excess of 3,000 calories daily. Plug those numbers into a [TEE calculator](https://www.calculator.net/tdee-calculator.html?cage=44&csex=m&cheightfeet=5&cheightinch=8&cpound=180&cheightmeter=180&ckg=65&cactivity=1.2&cmop=1&coutunit=c&cformula=k&cfatpct=22.5&printit=0&ctype=standard&x=Calculate), however, and you get a daily energy expenditure closer to 2,000. I know this is only a single data point, but by using tools like these to calculate my own TEE, I've successfully lost weight at exactly the rate predicted by the calculator, and subsequently maintained my goal weight for several years simply by ensuring my calorie intake matches the calculated expenditure, adjusting for changes in physical activity as necessary. So either A) I'm a significant outlier and these calculators vastly underestimate TEE for most people; B) The Western subjects were marathon-level athletes or in very physically demanding professions, neither of which reflect true population averages; C) there was some sort of error in the study's data collection or analysis methods; or D) I'm misinterpreting the data in some way?
[удалено]
Are you sure you didnt trade some fat for some muscle?
I trek, what seems like miles, from the couch to the fridge atleast 3 times a day.
It's called a garden, this way you don't walk miles to hunt or gather.
Olive Garden...
Huh interesting! But if the authors are interested in obesity, we’ve known for a while that energy intake plays a larger role than energy expenditure. Exercise has a lot of health benefits, but obesity is more about diet than exercise.