I exercise a fair bit, and I still struggle to lose weight, I'm doing about 500 calories of movement a day, which means my maintenance diet is about 2500 calories. Trust me, it's really easy to go over that. So yes if you want to lose weight, it's just a fact that you need to look at your diet primarily.
I'm naturally skinny and trying to gain weight (muscle mass) and also do around 500 calories a day of movement so aiming for 3000 calories.
It just goes to show what a big influence baseline appetite and food choices make because I find it really hard to eat that much and always wonder how people manage it in just three meals
I used to be naturally skinny and worked very hard to bulk up for years. At 41, I now regret that as I am heavier than I should be, though do not appear overweight. And I have osteoarthritis in my hips which the extra weight does not help.
Is 500 calories of movement a lot? Googling says that is running for about 45 minutes? Or walking for 90 minutes. Doing housework would only need about 2 hours to hit that.
That is just the run, though? My point in mentioning the other things is that it isn't that much, all told.
I also 100% think that your offset point is a big part of it. 90 minutes walking the dog outside is doubly beneficial because you are not snacking during the time.
500 calories excess is significant. Burning 500 calories in 2 hours doing housework is only an excess of ~300 calories, since you'd burn 100 calories an hour just sitting.
I only mentioned the housework because it was listed on the google result. And I'm fairly confident most of us have far more than 2 hours of house work that needs to be done.
When I exercise, I lose any feeling of "bored hunger", and even if I have a regularly scheduled meal soon after ("real hunger"), I feel satisfied after eating less of it than normal.
I suppose exercise would cause me to naturally eat more long term to make up for lost energy, but perhaps only if my body can't make up that energy from sugar stores.
As for why eating doesn't make me hungry short term - I suppose exercising doesn't empty your stomach, which is what triggers hunger?
Not always, not if your hunger is caused by hormonal issues. Also, drinking more decrease your hunger if caused by grahlin (that's my secret technique when I'm invited to a meal, I drink a lot of water).
< think of Maya, a sixteen-year-old who started running ...Or David ...when he joined his local cricket team
A great point to expand on here is the challenge, and huge benefits of finding activities we love. Sometimes it might be an obscure sport that is hard to discover or awkward to find locally, but when we find the activity we love to do great things happen, not just weight loss.
Almost all of the comments here seem to miss a point. Weight lods can be extremely difficult because : 1. your body metabolism will adapt really fast to caloric restrictions 2. losing weight is easy, not regaining it is a challenge in adapting your body set point 3. having enough time to exercise to the point where calories are a deficit is a luxury many can't afford 4.the psychological state of many people is a primary cause of their obesity, and fixing this is also a lot harder.
I don't understand the angle here? Go check out the cross country running team of your local high school. They will literally have to have carb loading parties for the kids so that they are able to do the run the next day. The article even largely acknowledges this with working with kids and exercise.
So if the myth is simply "we are fat because we don't exercise more", agreed. But the effectiveness of the new drugs is already enough to underline that point pretty heavily.
It seems that the idea really getting flirted with here is that the kind of exercise you have to do to lose weight is hard. And we seem to make it harder by loading it in such a way that people that do a crap job out there running think they "must not be a runner." Statistically, nobody is a runner on their first few years. It takes time. And is hard. Just like a lot of other skills.
This is true for the self control it takes to not lay in bed with your phone scrolling. Once you have built that habit, it is flat out hard to kick for a lot of us. It isn't that you are just missing that one trick to make it work. It is a type of hard work.
My thinking and experience went kind of the opposite way. We are focusing so much on making it effective and hard ... that we removed all pleasure from exercising and sport. Of course it takes a lot of self control to go do it, when the whole experience actually massively sux and no matter what you do, it is not enough. And of course then you will give up on that once you are under pressure or stressed or have a lot of work.
The people who I know personally who move physically a lot ... like it. They need additional self control to skip the sport session and go clean the house. They either found activity that they fall in love with, the sport doubles as social outlet for them or they made it pleasant by tweaking how it is done.
> Statistically, nobody is a runner on their first few years. It takes time. And is hard.
It does not have to be. The first beginner period of a sport if normally the most pleasant one - you are getting quick improvements at first. Unless of course you go all hard to yourself and let all the motivation being eaten by guilt that you can run only for 4km instead of 15km yet.
Or, you dont have to run which is indeed inherently boring for quite a lot of people. You can roller skate instead. You can go for very long walk spending 2h listening to podcasts and shows.
My experience is that liking something is basically unrelated to it being hard. Being good at it, on the other hand, requires putting in hard work. No matter what it is.
Note that you can build a ramp up process such that you don't immediately punish yourself for not being good at something. Essentially the early levels of any video game. But, that is the point. Later levels are harder. By definition. But early levels are probably hard for beginners, as well. The challenge is part of the point.
The exact same thing goes for the early periods of a sport. Just running across the field is surprisingly hard for beginners. In ways that you flat out don't remember once you are proficient at it.
One, you absolutely can "outrun" a diet. If you've known anyone a little bit too much into fitness then you've known someone who has struggled to eat enough to maintain and build weight.
I had a friend who would drink a gallon of whole milk a day to maintain weight because he did so much at the gym.
I'm not saying it's healthy, but saying it isn't possible to exercise so much it's difficult to keep weight on is stupid.
Any beyond this, with tiny homes in dense neighborhoods and social norms that require parents to literally be watching their children 24/7 usually in their tiny home... yeah... the children are fat and depressed.
Lock kids in cages their entire lives and they have emotional problems and weight problems. Then you talk about physical activity like it's "training" and something that has to be scheduled and measured and doled out in just the right doses.
Normalize children having safe space to be by themselves outside in the world without constant surveillance and maybe they won't have so many dopamine addiction social media problems and obesity.
> I had a friend who would drink a gallon of whole milk a day to maintain weight because he did so much at the gym.
That's around 2.4k calories.
That's like three slices of costco pizza and a large coke. I can do that like 3-4 times and I am not even that fat.
And that's like half to a third of the absolute peak. Like the rock who basicaly works out all day, eats 5-7k calories.
The point is there are people that are eating large fries and triple thick milkshakes as snacks driving from place to place because it makes them feel happy instead of just eating to feel full. And you just can't outrun that.
> The point is there are people that are eating large fries and triple thick milkshakes as snacks driving from place to place because it makes them feel happy instead of just eating to feel full. And you just can't outrun that.
You literally can. You just need to burn more calories than you take in. It would be difficult but not impossible and is simple math and thermodynamics.
The thermodynamics argument misses the fact that our body is not a single input, output engine. The body will use energy from several different sources, with different efficiencies. It will store energy in different forms, with different efficiencies, and it throws away a lot of energy that you put into it.
Yes, if you spend energy, it has to come from somewhere, but it's only in really specific scenarios that it comes from fat. No one is measuring how much they actually burn either, so we are all just theory crafting that someone burnt X and put in Y so they should be losing fat stores. Maybe they burned Y from blood sugar, super efficient, before it was stored into fat, great. Or maybe they stored it as fat overnight, and they are burning 98% of their breakfast from bloodsugar and only 2% from fat stores. Some people's bodies will have them completely tired out before they even hit their fat, that's a lack of fitness not a caloric deficit.
In general yeah, thermodynamics wins, but the details do matter.
You are completely wrong because over the long term, thermodynamics isn’t just a theory — it’s the governing principle. No matter how “inefficient” the body is at using or storing energy, it still obeys conservation of energy. If you consistently burn more calories than you consume, your body has to draw on stored energy (fat, muscle, glycogen, etc.) to make up the difference. That’s not up for debate — it’s been proven across thousands of controlled metabolic studies.
Yes, the short-term details can vary — sometimes you’re burning glycogen, sometimes fat — but over weeks and months, a sustained calorie deficit always results in weight loss. The body doesn’t magically create energy out of thin air because its “efficiency” fluctuates. You can argue that diet composition and hormones affect how easy it is to maintain that deficit, but not the fundamental physics behind it.
So while you’re right that biology is messy in the short term, thermodynamics still wins every single time when you zoom out.
It doesn't matter what source you are burning your energy from at any given time for long term weight. Let's say you eat a bunch of carbs and then you go for a run, well you're probably going to burn those carbs off first (depending on how hard you run and other factors). Which according to you doesn't matter since it's not burning stored fat. But if you didn't go for that run then those carbs would turn into fat later.... And if you go for a really long run (or you take it easier) then you will start burning the stored fat. But either way it doesn't actually matter because calories in / calories out still is the determining factor.
3-4 times that would be 7200-9600 calories a day, already more than your example of the Rock.
Regardless
> The point is there are people that are eating large fries and triple thick milkshakes as snacks driving from place to place because it makes them feel happy instead of just eating to feel full. And you just can't outrun that.
Yes, if you eat more calories than you expend, because you spend your time eating while driving, instead of exercising, you wont expend more calories than you consume.
That doesn't change the fact that a human can exercise enough that they have difficulty maintaining weight even after eating significantly more calories than necessary for normal maintenance weight.
Nothing about the human metabolism circumvents thermodynamics
His point is that it's significantly easier to go way over the maintenance calories compared to making up with exercise if you just eat whatever you feel like. Essentially that you can consume X calories much easier than you can exercise it out.
With proper diet I'm pretty sure the limit would be like 160kg for a healthy (TBD) body. Strongmen, when I watched regularly, were 160-185kg, with somewhat unhealthy bodies. If you eat junk, that limit comes lower since you can't exercise as efficiently. If you work 40hrs a week, that limit goes down further, since you can't live in the gym and hospital/sport clinic.
Of course, realistically, the sweet spot is IMO in the middle. Don't replace water with blended ice cream but also don't live in the gym or focus too much on it. Dry scooping teacups of some sketchy preworkout called "eXTREME PsYcHo SUPREME ViOlEnCe" with a bunch of other sketchy pills that make your third leg point at people all day and make your skin itch probably isn't worth it.
> I had a friend who would drink a gallon of whole milk a day to maintain weight because he did so much at the gym.
That honestly might be an absorption issue, not an intake issue - you can hit aerobic limits enough for your body to skip digesting stuff & just shove protein directly out of the stomach instead of bothering to break it down.
My experience with this was a brief high altitude climb above 5km in the sky, where eating eggs & ramen stopped working and only glucon-d kept me out of it.
The way I like to think of it is that the fat in your body can be eaten or drank, but needs to be breathed out as CO2 to leave it.
The rate at which you can put it in and the rate of letting it go are completely different.
> someone who has struggled to eat enough to maintain and build weight
There's a big difference between someone who feels satiated too quickly and someone who has a lot of difficulty feeling satiated. It has nothing to do with how much exercise someone gets. It's also much more difficult to eat large quantities of clean calories (for putting on muscle) compared to eating large quantities of dirty calories (putting on fat).
Calories are not calories, because they're a unit of energy, and humans aren't batteries. We "use" energy in the form of countless chemicals and reactions, so things get complicated fast.
It's far easier to instead talk about mass, because one gram is indeed one gram, until humans evolve anti-matter producing organs. If you eat X and excrete Y, your body mass will change by X-Y. If you want to lose 1 kg, you will have to exhale 0.8 kg [1] of carbon atoms (you breath in O2 and exhale CO2).
[1]: There are a lot of different "calorie" molecules in your body, but generally all of them are some combination of C, H, O, which turns into CO2 and H2O at roughly 4:1 ratio by mass. So 80% is lost via exhaling C, and the H2O gets processed by your body normally, and is generally lost as urine or sweat, unless you're dehydrated.
Yes, but we measure calories by burning food items in oxygen in calorimeters. Burning fat gives X amount of heat, burning fiber gives Y amount of heat. Fat and fiber both have calories when you burn them in a furnace. But body does not use fiber for calories, you won't get fat on fiber. That is the distinction between dirty and clean calories, not everything burnable will be usable for energy in body and not everything that body actually digests will be stored in fat tissue.
Just because it’s possible to outrun a diet it doesn’t mean it’s an accurate or helpful description of what most people are struggling with. If you look at the population of the United States as a whole, and the percentage of people who meet the criteria for obesity, it seems obvious that for the vast majority of people today, the problem is food, both quality and quantity.
As for your swipe at people in cities, I don’t know what to say - the fastest way to lower the amount of “diet outrunning” you and your kids do, is to move to a place where every daily activity requires a car and because everyone drives everywhere all the time, it’s not safe to let your kids roam.
If you look at united states you find awful lot of people who are extremely sedentiary. Not just in the "sport", but they drive everywhere and sont have that baseline physical movement you get if you walk or kids go to playground.
So I'm right and you'd like to change the stakes so you can continue to argue the incorrect point of the author. Just stop. It's possible, it's not a myth, the author's thesis being basically incorrect invalidates the rest of the rambling post, try again next time.
It's expected the US Army soldier expends somewhere around 5400 cal in high intensity environments like Combat or even Ranger School. 6,000 calories a day or beyond for the same level of exertion in a cold weather, high stress, high intensity environment.
You can absolutely burn more calories that you take in, especially if stressed and not eating right. Or if simply... overtraining because of various psychological issues. Most people are not overtraining, nor are they in combat. Most.
Some people maybe can but most cannot. Even running like 5 miles a day is completely undone by a large frapachino. The difference in an active adult's normal day, like a teacher walking around, and a completely sedentary worker at their computer can be undone with a cream cheese bagel.
And in the US, a bunch of the food that's convenient to buy and eat is "hyperpalatable". You're going to be really hard pressed to lose and keep weight off without deliberately adjusting your diet to support it.
> ... then you've known someone who has struggled to eat enough to maintain and build weight.
I'm not trying to strawman here, but I've never met a person like that who was ever overweight at any point in their life.
It seems pretty obvious to me that saying "some people can't eat enough to put on weight / get fat" is a distinct thing from saying "someone who cannot stop putting on weight / getting fatter will almost never be able to lose the weight without adjusting their diet". Do you agree or am I missing something?
I peaked at about 200 pounds, got really into cycling, and then had to put a lot of work into my diet to get back up to 160. I think there’s a bunch of obvious reasons why this is uncommon even if you pretend there’s zero metabolic differences between people, so it’s very hard to say how much it’s something that can’t happen for people versus merely being something that could but doesn’t.
> I'm not trying to strawman here, but I've never met a person like that who was ever overweight at any point in their life.
This is an extremely common story for anyone who does through hiking on the Appalachian Trail (or Pacific Crest Trail, Continental Divide Trail, etc.). Quite a lot of people start overweight (although I have no idea what the percentage looks like). Almost everyone ends up losing a very significant amount of weight along the way. It is very difficult to stay overweight on the trail. People are intentionally choosing the absolute most calorie-dense food they possibly can, gorging themselves at every opportunity, consistently eating integer multiples of the standard recommended caloric intake, and are still losing large amounts of weight.
More or less anyone can get to the point of being active enough where their body's ability to absorb calories is a limiting factor. It's not genetic or "some people" kind of thing, everybody has this limit and can hit it and people who are really excited about exercise and do a tremendous amount of it have to have strategies about how to get enough calories in their body on a day to day basis.
It's a lot of activity to get to this point, but some folks have magical thinking about eating.
Anyone absent a significant disability can be active enough to lose weight regardless of diet.
I'm not saying the "go insane and spend most of your free time exercising" is the best course of action, but far too many people have magical thoughts about changing diet or changing activity levels being ineffective for changing body composition.
Getting sat down in a doctors office and being told to do this isn't particularly effective, but that's different from actually doing it being effective.
Yes. Like multiple hours a day lot. That's why it's a "myth". It takes an amount of time, effort, and focus, that isn't particularly reasonable for I'd say almost all people.
Fundamentally, I agree with you that it's possible: I pretty much did it myself with ~12 hours of hard cycling a week, but I just think your take is wrong because it basically boils down to nitpicking "myth".
> their body's ability to absorb calories is a limiting factor
That depends on what "calories" you're consuming (as I responded to another comment, calories are not just calories). If you're getting calories through animal fat, then indeed absorption is a limiting factor. If you're chugging pure glucose/sucrose dissolved in water, then that limit is significantly higher, and you start hitting the physical limit of how much liquid volume can physically move through your body without it being a torture method.
Which actually leads to the primary cause of the obesity epidemic: the prevalence of sugar, and particularly in forms that get directly absorbed into the body.
I also know runners that purposely eat at severe deficit to lose muscle mass and be lighter. Which is idiotic, like wanting to lose brain cells to win a chess competition.
I exercise a fair bit, and I still struggle to lose weight, I'm doing about 500 calories of movement a day, which means my maintenance diet is about 2500 calories. Trust me, it's really easy to go over that. So yes if you want to lose weight, it's just a fact that you need to look at your diet primarily.
I'm naturally skinny and trying to gain weight (muscle mass) and also do around 500 calories a day of movement so aiming for 3000 calories.
It just goes to show what a big influence baseline appetite and food choices make because I find it really hard to eat that much and always wonder how people manage it in just three meals
The average American snacks on calorie-dense foods one or two times per day
I used to be naturally skinny and worked very hard to bulk up for years. At 41, I now regret that as I am heavier than I should be, though do not appear overweight. And I have osteoarthritis in my hips which the extra weight does not help.
Is 500 calories of movement a lot? Googling says that is running for about 45 minutes? Or walking for 90 minutes. Doing housework would only need about 2 hours to hit that.
That's running 5 miles a day. Everyday. That takes months of training for an already fit young person to build up to.
90 minutes of extra walking is a lot of time to offset a snack that could be eaten in 1 minute.
That is just the run, though? My point in mentioning the other things is that it isn't that much, all told.
I also 100% think that your offset point is a big part of it. 90 minutes walking the dog outside is doubly beneficial because you are not snacking during the time.
500 calories excess is significant. Burning 500 calories in 2 hours doing housework is only an excess of ~300 calories, since you'd burn 100 calories an hour just sitting.
I only mentioned the housework because it was listed on the google result. And I'm fairly confident most of us have far more than 2 hours of house work that needs to be done.
Physical activity also makes me less hungry.
The problem is that physical activity is unnatural and not intuitive. Biology is about saving energy, not spending it to keep everything healthy.
Bad mental health leads me to do less physical activity. Bad mental health also makes physical activity more difficult and painful.
> physical activity is unnatural
Very wrong way to put it
I mean spending energy for nothing
I thought physical activity will increase your hunger.
When I exercise, I lose any feeling of "bored hunger", and even if I have a regularly scheduled meal soon after ("real hunger"), I feel satisfied after eating less of it than normal.
I suppose exercise would cause me to naturally eat more long term to make up for lost energy, but perhaps only if my body can't make up that energy from sugar stores.
As for why eating doesn't make me hungry short term - I suppose exercising doesn't empty your stomach, which is what triggers hunger?
This is a ton of speculation.
Not always, not if your hunger is caused by hormonal issues. Also, drinking more decrease your hunger if caused by grahlin (that's my secret technique when I'm invited to a meal, I drink a lot of water).
2016: https://physiqonomics.com/eating-too-much/
< think of Maya, a sixteen-year-old who started running ...Or David ...when he joined his local cricket team
A great point to expand on here is the challenge, and huge benefits of finding activities we love. Sometimes it might be an obscure sport that is hard to discover or awkward to find locally, but when we find the activity we love to do great things happen, not just weight loss.
The real point we've learned recently is: "not weight loss". Exercise has a minimal impact on weight without a controlled diet.
Almost all of the comments here seem to miss a point. Weight lods can be extremely difficult because : 1. your body metabolism will adapt really fast to caloric restrictions 2. losing weight is easy, not regaining it is a challenge in adapting your body set point 3. having enough time to exercise to the point where calories are a deficit is a luxury many can't afford 4.the psychological state of many people is a primary cause of their obesity, and fixing this is also a lot harder.
> your body metabolism will adapt really fast to caloric restrictions
Not if you exercise
> osing weight is easy, not regaining it is a challenge in adapting your body set point
Body set points are BS, its hard because people mostly just lose water weight and/or go back to old habits
> your body set point
... is a pseudoscientific myth.
Easy to ballpark that, to burn 1500Kcal it's an hour and a half run on top of the local hill, or... don't eat that pizza. Which one is easier?
Similar discussion 3 months ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44670590
I don't understand the angle here? Go check out the cross country running team of your local high school. They will literally have to have carb loading parties for the kids so that they are able to do the run the next day. The article even largely acknowledges this with working with kids and exercise.
So if the myth is simply "we are fat because we don't exercise more", agreed. But the effectiveness of the new drugs is already enough to underline that point pretty heavily.
It seems that the idea really getting flirted with here is that the kind of exercise you have to do to lose weight is hard. And we seem to make it harder by loading it in such a way that people that do a crap job out there running think they "must not be a runner." Statistically, nobody is a runner on their first few years. It takes time. And is hard. Just like a lot of other skills.
This is true for the self control it takes to not lay in bed with your phone scrolling. Once you have built that habit, it is flat out hard to kick for a lot of us. It isn't that you are just missing that one trick to make it work. It is a type of hard work.
My thinking and experience went kind of the opposite way. We are focusing so much on making it effective and hard ... that we removed all pleasure from exercising and sport. Of course it takes a lot of self control to go do it, when the whole experience actually massively sux and no matter what you do, it is not enough. And of course then you will give up on that once you are under pressure or stressed or have a lot of work.
The people who I know personally who move physically a lot ... like it. They need additional self control to skip the sport session and go clean the house. They either found activity that they fall in love with, the sport doubles as social outlet for them or they made it pleasant by tweaking how it is done.
> Statistically, nobody is a runner on their first few years. It takes time. And is hard.
It does not have to be. The first beginner period of a sport if normally the most pleasant one - you are getting quick improvements at first. Unless of course you go all hard to yourself and let all the motivation being eaten by guilt that you can run only for 4km instead of 15km yet.
Or, you dont have to run which is indeed inherently boring for quite a lot of people. You can roller skate instead. You can go for very long walk spending 2h listening to podcasts and shows.
My experience is that liking something is basically unrelated to it being hard. Being good at it, on the other hand, requires putting in hard work. No matter what it is.
Note that you can build a ramp up process such that you don't immediately punish yourself for not being good at something. Essentially the early levels of any video game. But, that is the point. Later levels are harder. By definition. But early levels are probably hard for beginners, as well. The challenge is part of the point.
The exact same thing goes for the early periods of a sport. Just running across the field is surprisingly hard for beginners. In ways that you flat out don't remember once you are proficient at it.
God, that's a lot of writing.
One, you absolutely can "outrun" a diet. If you've known anyone a little bit too much into fitness then you've known someone who has struggled to eat enough to maintain and build weight.
I had a friend who would drink a gallon of whole milk a day to maintain weight because he did so much at the gym.
I'm not saying it's healthy, but saying it isn't possible to exercise so much it's difficult to keep weight on is stupid.
Any beyond this, with tiny homes in dense neighborhoods and social norms that require parents to literally be watching their children 24/7 usually in their tiny home... yeah... the children are fat and depressed.
Lock kids in cages their entire lives and they have emotional problems and weight problems. Then you talk about physical activity like it's "training" and something that has to be scheduled and measured and doled out in just the right doses.
Normalize children having safe space to be by themselves outside in the world without constant surveillance and maybe they won't have so many dopamine addiction social media problems and obesity.
> I had a friend who would drink a gallon of whole milk a day to maintain weight because he did so much at the gym.
That's around 2.4k calories.
That's like three slices of costco pizza and a large coke. I can do that like 3-4 times and I am not even that fat.
And that's like half to a third of the absolute peak. Like the rock who basicaly works out all day, eats 5-7k calories.
The point is there are people that are eating large fries and triple thick milkshakes as snacks driving from place to place because it makes them feel happy instead of just eating to feel full. And you just can't outrun that.
> The point is there are people that are eating large fries and triple thick milkshakes as snacks driving from place to place because it makes them feel happy instead of just eating to feel full. And you just can't outrun that.
You literally can. You just need to burn more calories than you take in. It would be difficult but not impossible and is simple math and thermodynamics.
The thermodynamics argument misses the fact that our body is not a single input, output engine. The body will use energy from several different sources, with different efficiencies. It will store energy in different forms, with different efficiencies, and it throws away a lot of energy that you put into it.
Yes, if you spend energy, it has to come from somewhere, but it's only in really specific scenarios that it comes from fat. No one is measuring how much they actually burn either, so we are all just theory crafting that someone burnt X and put in Y so they should be losing fat stores. Maybe they burned Y from blood sugar, super efficient, before it was stored into fat, great. Or maybe they stored it as fat overnight, and they are burning 98% of their breakfast from bloodsugar and only 2% from fat stores. Some people's bodies will have them completely tired out before they even hit their fat, that's a lack of fitness not a caloric deficit.
In general yeah, thermodynamics wins, but the details do matter.
You are completely wrong because over the long term, thermodynamics isn’t just a theory — it’s the governing principle. No matter how “inefficient” the body is at using or storing energy, it still obeys conservation of energy. If you consistently burn more calories than you consume, your body has to draw on stored energy (fat, muscle, glycogen, etc.) to make up the difference. That’s not up for debate — it’s been proven across thousands of controlled metabolic studies.
Yes, the short-term details can vary — sometimes you’re burning glycogen, sometimes fat — but over weeks and months, a sustained calorie deficit always results in weight loss. The body doesn’t magically create energy out of thin air because its “efficiency” fluctuates. You can argue that diet composition and hormones affect how easy it is to maintain that deficit, but not the fundamental physics behind it.
So while you’re right that biology is messy in the short term, thermodynamics still wins every single time when you zoom out.
It doesn't matter what source you are burning your energy from at any given time for long term weight. Let's say you eat a bunch of carbs and then you go for a run, well you're probably going to burn those carbs off first (depending on how hard you run and other factors). Which according to you doesn't matter since it's not burning stored fat. But if you didn't go for that run then those carbs would turn into fat later.... And if you go for a really long run (or you take it easier) then you will start burning the stored fat. But either way it doesn't actually matter because calories in / calories out still is the determining factor.
I'm not understanding your math?
3-4 times that would be 7200-9600 calories a day, already more than your example of the Rock.
Regardless
> The point is there are people that are eating large fries and triple thick milkshakes as snacks driving from place to place because it makes them feel happy instead of just eating to feel full. And you just can't outrun that.
Yes, if you eat more calories than you expend, because you spend your time eating while driving, instead of exercising, you wont expend more calories than you consume.
That doesn't change the fact that a human can exercise enough that they have difficulty maintaining weight even after eating significantly more calories than necessary for normal maintenance weight.
Nothing about the human metabolism circumvents thermodynamics
His point is that it's significantly easier to go way over the maintenance calories compared to making up with exercise if you just eat whatever you feel like. Essentially that you can consume X calories much easier than you can exercise it out.
With proper diet I'm pretty sure the limit would be like 160kg for a healthy (TBD) body. Strongmen, when I watched regularly, were 160-185kg, with somewhat unhealthy bodies. If you eat junk, that limit comes lower since you can't exercise as efficiently. If you work 40hrs a week, that limit goes down further, since you can't live in the gym and hospital/sport clinic.
Of course, realistically, the sweet spot is IMO in the middle. Don't replace water with blended ice cream but also don't live in the gym or focus too much on it. Dry scooping teacups of some sketchy preworkout called "eXTREME PsYcHo SUPREME ViOlEnCe" with a bunch of other sketchy pills that make your third leg point at people all day and make your skin itch probably isn't worth it.
> I had a friend who would drink a gallon of whole milk a day to maintain weight because he did so much at the gym.
That honestly might be an absorption issue, not an intake issue - you can hit aerobic limits enough for your body to skip digesting stuff & just shove protein directly out of the stomach instead of bothering to break it down.
My experience with this was a brief high altitude climb above 5km in the sky, where eating eggs & ramen stopped working and only glucon-d kept me out of it.
The way I like to think of it is that the fat in your body can be eaten or drank, but needs to be breathed out as CO2 to leave it.
The rate at which you can put it in and the rate of letting it go are completely different.
GOMAD (Gallon of milk a day) has been a standard weight gain diet for decades
> someone who has struggled to eat enough to maintain and build weight
There's a big difference between someone who feels satiated too quickly and someone who has a lot of difficulty feeling satiated. It has nothing to do with how much exercise someone gets. It's also much more difficult to eat large quantities of clean calories (for putting on muscle) compared to eating large quantities of dirty calories (putting on fat).
Exercise definitely affects apetite and in both ways - it can make you eat more or less.
Calories are calories, neither dirty or clean.
Calories are not calories, because they're a unit of energy, and humans aren't batteries. We "use" energy in the form of countless chemicals and reactions, so things get complicated fast.
It's far easier to instead talk about mass, because one gram is indeed one gram, until humans evolve anti-matter producing organs. If you eat X and excrete Y, your body mass will change by X-Y. If you want to lose 1 kg, you will have to exhale 0.8 kg [1] of carbon atoms (you breath in O2 and exhale CO2).
[1]: There are a lot of different "calorie" molecules in your body, but generally all of them are some combination of C, H, O, which turns into CO2 and H2O at roughly 4:1 ratio by mass. So 80% is lost via exhaling C, and the H2O gets processed by your body normally, and is generally lost as urine or sweat, unless you're dehydrated.
Yes, but we measure calories by burning food items in oxygen in calorimeters. Burning fat gives X amount of heat, burning fiber gives Y amount of heat. Fat and fiber both have calories when you burn them in a furnace. But body does not use fiber for calories, you won't get fat on fiber. That is the distinction between dirty and clean calories, not everything burnable will be usable for energy in body and not everything that body actually digests will be stored in fat tissue.
Just because it’s possible to outrun a diet it doesn’t mean it’s an accurate or helpful description of what most people are struggling with. If you look at the population of the United States as a whole, and the percentage of people who meet the criteria for obesity, it seems obvious that for the vast majority of people today, the problem is food, both quality and quantity.
As for your swipe at people in cities, I don’t know what to say - the fastest way to lower the amount of “diet outrunning” you and your kids do, is to move to a place where every daily activity requires a car and because everyone drives everywhere all the time, it’s not safe to let your kids roam.
If you look at united states you find awful lot of people who are extremely sedentiary. Not just in the "sport", but they drive everywhere and sont have that baseline physical movement you get if you walk or kids go to playground.
>The myth of outrunning your diet
Let's not move goalposts and continue to argue.
I'm responding to the title and the article.
>Just because it’s possible
So I'm right and you'd like to change the stakes so you can continue to argue the incorrect point of the author. Just stop. It's possible, it's not a myth, the author's thesis being basically incorrect invalidates the rest of the rambling post, try again next time.
It's expected the US Army soldier expends somewhere around 5400 cal in high intensity environments like Combat or even Ranger School. 6,000 calories a day or beyond for the same level of exertion in a cold weather, high stress, high intensity environment.
You can absolutely burn more calories that you take in, especially if stressed and not eating right. Or if simply... overtraining because of various psychological issues. Most people are not overtraining, nor are they in combat. Most.
Weight loss in Ranger School is additionally “aided” by limiting students to 2 MREs per patrol day (2400 calories) to increase stress.
Anecdotally, I lost 26 lbs in Ranger School.
> but saying it isn't possible to exercise so much it's difficult to keep weight on is stupid
It’s not stupid. It’s true.
Simple math, exercise does not burn “that many” calories.
Diet, hormones, and genetics have far larger effects than exercise, relatively speaking.
(Exercise is A+ fantastic for a number of reasons. But a secondary mechanism for weight control.)
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You're seriously out of line here. Go review the site guidelines.
Some people maybe can but most cannot. Even running like 5 miles a day is completely undone by a large frapachino. The difference in an active adult's normal day, like a teacher walking around, and a completely sedentary worker at their computer can be undone with a cream cheese bagel.
And in the US, a bunch of the food that's convenient to buy and eat is "hyperpalatable". You're going to be really hard pressed to lose and keep weight off without deliberately adjusting your diet to support it.
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> ... then you've known someone who has struggled to eat enough to maintain and build weight.
I'm not trying to strawman here, but I've never met a person like that who was ever overweight at any point in their life.
It seems pretty obvious to me that saying "some people can't eat enough to put on weight / get fat" is a distinct thing from saying "someone who cannot stop putting on weight / getting fatter will almost never be able to lose the weight without adjusting their diet". Do you agree or am I missing something?
I peaked at about 200 pounds, got really into cycling, and then had to put a lot of work into my diet to get back up to 160. I think there’s a bunch of obvious reasons why this is uncommon even if you pretend there’s zero metabolic differences between people, so it’s very hard to say how much it’s something that can’t happen for people versus merely being something that could but doesn’t.
> I'm not trying to strawman here, but I've never met a person like that who was ever overweight at any point in their life.
This is an extremely common story for anyone who does through hiking on the Appalachian Trail (or Pacific Crest Trail, Continental Divide Trail, etc.). Quite a lot of people start overweight (although I have no idea what the percentage looks like). Almost everyone ends up losing a very significant amount of weight along the way. It is very difficult to stay overweight on the trail. People are intentionally choosing the absolute most calorie-dense food they possibly can, gorging themselves at every opportunity, consistently eating integer multiples of the standard recommended caloric intake, and are still losing large amounts of weight.
This is definitely an outlier case though.
That's definitely an outlier case.
And despite their choices of calorie-dense foods,
> gorging themselves at every opportunity
is a meaningful qualifier. Carrying your food will lead to restriction, naturally.
You're missing something.
More or less anyone can get to the point of being active enough where their body's ability to absorb calories is a limiting factor. It's not genetic or "some people" kind of thing, everybody has this limit and can hit it and people who are really excited about exercise and do a tremendous amount of it have to have strategies about how to get enough calories in their body on a day to day basis.
It's a lot of activity to get to this point, but some folks have magical thinking about eating.
Anyone absent a significant disability can be active enough to lose weight regardless of diet.
I'm not saying the "go insane and spend most of your free time exercising" is the best course of action, but far too many people have magical thoughts about changing diet or changing activity levels being ineffective for changing body composition.
Getting sat down in a doctors office and being told to do this isn't particularly effective, but that's different from actually doing it being effective.
> It's a lot of activity to get to this point
Yes. Like multiple hours a day lot. That's why it's a "myth". It takes an amount of time, effort, and focus, that isn't particularly reasonable for I'd say almost all people.
Fundamentally, I agree with you that it's possible: I pretty much did it myself with ~12 hours of hard cycling a week, but I just think your take is wrong because it basically boils down to nitpicking "myth".
> It's a lot of activity to get to this point
Like a lot. Like professional athlete level.
Running 50 miles per week is a ton, easily top 1% activity level.
And all you incrementally need is a large slice of pizza, a coke, and a couple scoops of ice cream to make up for it.
> their body's ability to absorb calories is a limiting factor
That depends on what "calories" you're consuming (as I responded to another comment, calories are not just calories). If you're getting calories through animal fat, then indeed absorption is a limiting factor. If you're chugging pure glucose/sucrose dissolved in water, then that limit is significantly higher, and you start hitting the physical limit of how much liquid volume can physically move through your body without it being a torture method.
Which actually leads to the primary cause of the obesity epidemic: the prevalence of sugar, and particularly in forms that get directly absorbed into the body.
Yes, outliers gonna outlie.
I also know runners that purposely eat at severe deficit to lose muscle mass and be lighter. Which is idiotic, like wanting to lose brain cells to win a chess competition.
Your one anecdote definitely invalidates the article. Lol.