Daily energy expenditure through the human life course(research.brighton.ac.uk) |
Daily energy expenditure through the human life course(research.brighton.ac.uk) |
So as a teenager, I was carrying 5-10kg of books and walking back and forth between classes every 40 mins.
As an undergrad I was travelling across campus multiple times a day, spent hours on my feet in labs, did multiple heavy grocery shuttles and also spent a lot of time partying.
In my first job, I was still getting up 5-6 times a day for meetings and had a decent walk/cycle built into the commute. but in my first remote job, I could be sat in the same spot for 8-10 hours without moving. And because I wasn't drinking water I wouldn't need to go to the bathroom... /facepalm I'd also be so engrossed that sometimes I'd forget to turn on the lights...
So even though I do more than an hour of intense exercise a day, my activity outside of those exercise hours has cratered from when I was a teenager and was constantly running around.
As an undergrad I was travelling across campus multiple times a day, spent hours on my feet in labs, did multiple heavy grocery shuttles and also spent a lot of time partying.
In my first job, I could be sat in the same spot for 8-10 hours without moving.
A year in to my first job I had added 15kg (~30lbs ~2stone) - while consuming way less food and alcohol than my university days.
So look to your unhealthy lifestyle's accumulated effects in your body, atherosclerosis, obesity, pre-diabetes, hypertension, specific nutritional deficiencies, physiological mental health... And make a robust effort to improve your lifestyle, and you'll start to feel like you did, 10, 20 years ago.
Speaking from personal experience, I'm 50ish and after getting a health scare which triggered me into aggressive corrective action a few years back, I've overcorrected. My allergies have ameliorated back to old levels, I can drink beer again, and I can recover from a night out like I used to be able to in my 20's, I'm able to maintain a serious athletic schedule. Obviously most of the time I now eat really well, but my body's youthful tolerance to harm has been recovered.
Def noticing amongst my friends a few new allergies/intolerences manifesting as we get older
For some context am reasonably healthy and actually had to increase my sodium intake because I had over corrected on reducing salt consumption and was getting hyponatremic after training
Then we went away to University and in his mid-20s the poor guy suddenly, almost overnight, put on a ton of weight.
Surely there is a correlation to the causation?
The head-bone is connected to the neck-bone etc...
You cannot study figures in isolation and expect them to yield some meaningful results while ignoring the influence of other figures upon those results.
- Kids move around a lot, and they're still growing/developing
- Teenagers move more constructively i.e. sports, and they're still growing/developing
- Adults move a bit less, and have almost stopped growing/developing
- Older adults try do keep moving, but with other life responsibilities it gets hard to put the same time in
- Older adults become less and less bothered about moving
- Even older adults have acquired illness and injuries and can't move as much
Seems quite simple and obvious no? - Maybe...
Those that don't fit the mould have some other reason that makes then more of an outlier to the norm.
If life today didn't offer as much assistance as the past, we would all be a lot more healthy - not to mention more active, you know walking and manual work etc...
Not to forget that the abundance of food (good and bad) will have a bearing on the results. Maybe the older people that can't afford as much food are the outliers - and better benchmark.
Unless you are suffering from malnutrition, or you are overeating the wrong sort of food (good and bad) then your metabolism, unless affected by biological factors should be pretty stable.
Isn't this what being in homeostasis means?
Doesn't the body adapt to effects of S.A.I.D. - Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands.
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/U1RxtW9oglcck-2g2X_SrKzIA44=...
It seems that others don't fully support their findings either.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abe5017#eletters...
These critics don’t seem to disagree with the core claim about average metabolism across the lifespan.
"We compiled measurements of total energy expenditure (TEE) and basal metabolic rate (BMR) from human endurance events and added new data from adults running ~250 km/week for 20 weeks in a transcontinental race. For events lasting 0.5 to 250+ days, SusMS decreases curvilinearly with event duration, plateauing below 3× BMR. This relationship differs from that of shorter events (e.g., marathons). Incorporating data from overfeeding studies, we find evidence for an alimentary energy supply limit in humans of ~2.5× BMR; greater expenditure requires drawing down the body’s energy stores. Transcontinental race data suggest that humans can partially reduce TEE during long events to extend endurance."
And still weigh much more than when younger.
Inactivity alone does not explain it. Consider for example Bill Gate...according to his resume, in which he lists his precise height and weight, in his 20s he weighed just 125 pounds. It's evident he has put on a lot of weight, all in his mid-section, well before he turned 60. His job literally entailed sitting at a computer all day coding. If anything, given his philanthropy efforts and retirement, he is more active now than he was in his 20s when working full-time at Microsoft. Is he eating more? I doubt it.
For so many people, celebrities for example, a switch is flipped in which there is sudden weight gain after the age of 30 or so, like John Travolta, Stevie Wonder and others. Because celebrities are photographed, you can see the weight progression and the abrupt jump in weight. Even with money for personal chefs and trainers, not gaining weight is hard.
I can personally attest that if I ate the same quantity of food now as I did at 20 I would gain weight, and no I'm not 60. And I am just as active , maybe more so. So yeah not buying this study.
So, four paragraphs all based on this assumption.
Why couldn't it be the case that a 20yo obsessive computer nerd eats less than a lavish billionaire?
I assume they don't help much when you're young, because you're already healthy as a youth.
Presumably waiting until you're on your deathbed to start high-intensity intervals is not the best idea either.
Supposing a person had a limited budget of "anti-aging firepower" in the form of pills, exercise, etc. -- what age would be most impactful to apply it?
https://peterattiamd.com/outlive/
I wouldn't think of this from a limited budget perspective. Much of what you can do is cheap or free. It doesn't cost anything to go to sleep earlier.
The first outlier I see is female health and PCOS, starting in mid 20s for women.
The next outlier I see is insulin resistance and pre and diabetes based metabolism decline.
From a hormone perspective, nose, ear, chin (femalr), and head hair seem to be going under significant change.
You go from a more active young person that eats just enough to get back to hanging with friends to binge drinking in an instant. Then you go from that to a much lazier, snackier lifestyle of 9-5.
Yeah, people on the whole do get fatter in their 30s, but that’s very easily linkable to lifestyle.
That by our early 20s our metabolism has already slowed (sugary food, alcohol, precipitous drop in activity)
I did notice a decline in metabolism/muscle mass in the past several years, so I took to walking rather than driving in the city/neighbourhood and eating more and regularly which seems to have brought my levels back up somewhat. Now I look like someone who only goes to the gym on leg days.
That we maintain a baseline temperature doesn't tell you that metabolism alone is all that regulates it, there are other factors.
Therefore all their data is based only on fat-free mass, i.e. total body mass minus fat mass.
So all their conclusions are not influenced by the amount of fat vs. muscle.
So we could easily expect the average person's metabolism to increase as well, simply to support the extra body mass regardless of composition.
Balancing out the two effects can only really be determined through careful statistics, and is going to be extremely variable per-person.
https://examine.com/articles/does-metabolism-vary-between-tw...
https://www.brainfacts.org/brain-anatomy-and-function/anatom...
Does this change over time also?
My ex-gf was one of these people and would routinely tell people about how she could eat anything and not gain weight. But when I would go on a severely calorie-restricted diet I was still eating more than she did on a normal day. I don’t think she was lying about being able to eat anything, I think she just didn’t realize how little she actually ate.
In every case I guarantee they eat a normal amount of calories but feel like they eat a lot because they eat slightly more calories than normal in a single meal.
Like me eating two entrees at dinner at 16 and wowing everyone even though I skipped breakfast before school to play Runescape and had a tiny school lunch.
Their mitochondria use UCP1 [1][2] to generate more heat when producing ATP, thus wasting energy that would otherwise be converted to fat.
So to answer you question, hormones
However, after the honeymoon period the experience made him realize that not everything is explained and fixed by testosterone. He still had some mental health issues, he still had to work for gains at the gym, wasn’t suddenly full of boundless motivation. All this despite being put toward the upper end of the range for a long time.
This seems to be playing out with a lot of young people going to TRT clinics: The TRT clinics are prescription writing factories that will find an excuse to give almost anyone TRT. They make claims that the normal ranges are wrong and the only correct result is to be at the top of, or above, the reference range. They start people on insane beginning doses like 250mg/week because it gives them a rush to feel like it’s “working”, especially before their natural production shuts down.
The clinics also try to lock people into getting their prescriptions from the clinic in a subscription model. They basically get people hooked, literally dependent on testosterone because their endogenous production has shut down, and then require them to order the testosterone through their pharmacy to continue receiving the prescriptions. If they go to a family doctor, the family doctor will probably decline to continue writing such high dose prescriptions because high doses generate significant side effects, so the person returns to the TRT clinic.
It’s really bad out there. I think we’re headed for tighter regulation of these clinics soon, or at least I hope so. Every time I listen to the radio I get several ads for different clinics every hour promising men they will lose weight, be better in bed, have more energy, conquer the world.
That said, permanently messing with your hormones as a younger person for no good reason is insane and I would try to talk anyone I knew out of it.
Fun fact: I had an endocrinologist at the University of Minnesota medical clinic tell me that going on TRT wouldn’t affect my fertility. Cue IVF 8 years later…
For some it's not really convincing. They look at it like doctor perscribed steroids.
Everyone has a different point, but they typically recognize somewhere in their 20s that 'oh wow, we keep changing and maturing'. And the first, most basic way to express this observation is with a pretty crude 'oh wow I'm old'. I think eventually, most people can move beyond that first reflexive observation.
Now, that's a pretty small drop, so definitely the other life transition (probably starting an office job, living alone) will probably play an even larger part to any weight related changes. But even given a hypothetical case where someone kept the exact same activity level, the amount of metabolism decline over that period is probably small enough to delay the onset of any noticeable body composition change (like order of 10 pounds) for a few years, adding to the mid to late 20s experience.
Around age 21 or so, I decided to try to drop a couple pounds and make it a really cut six-pack. I ate a strict 1400 calorie diet (packaged food to make it easy, no cheating at all) for about three months. I started running a couple times a week. I’d reckoned this would only take a month or so. Found the calorie deficit pretty easy, actually. Three months in, the scale showed one pound of loss.
Discouraged, I returned to my old eating habits.
I immediately gained about 15lb. Had to drop soda completely to stabilize it (i didn’t drink much alcohol then). Slowly got worse through my 20s. By 30, not turning into a blimp required a careful diet. No more 4k+ calories of pizza, soda, and potato chips without (visible) consequence.
My metabolism 100% for-sure changed in my 20s, a ton, not gradually. But I may have killed it, and perhaps I would have been able to keep doing what I was doing another couple decades otherwise (I would bet zero dollars on it, but hey, I guess the science disagrees, I just find it literally incredible)
Those are the figures people always estimate. Always the same story: 4000 calories when they were skinny, and now they can't lose weight on 1500 calories when their maintenance intake is 2600.
Then you make them log their food for a week and they are eating 3000 calories when they swore they ate no more than 2000. In my 20s I worked at a personal trainer in a gym that made people log their food and 100% of people said the same thing you just did.
If you couldn't lose weight on 1400 calories then where exactly was the energy coming from? Cue the "starvation mode" meme where people claim their body becomes so efficient that it only needs 1400 calories to maintain their 270lb body.
I started gaining weight/fat in my mid 20s and had to adjust my eating habits from what was normal in the preceding 8-10 years
this seems to agree with a lot of people's personal accounts. A switch is flipped in which the body for whatever reasons starts hording energy. maybe it is stress from family life or work related... who knows...The weight comes on so fast... it's nuts how much weight some people gain starting at 25 or so. Guys who were 130-180 lbs lean in college now 240+ lbs all a sudden at 30+.
Proving that its not metabolism would imply that our weight gain in later life is a combination of other factors. I would bet good money on the increase in sedentary leisure activities, the reliance on motorised vehicles and a lack of energy to be active.
I would bet on those long before anything as nebulous as diet or intake volume.
We can reverse that, like we can revere many ways we slowly decline, just need a right mindset. Spend a really active vacation or start a new sport and lack of energy of yesterday will be gone, to certain extent. One can always do some dramatic change in lifestyle to see a dramatic change in body, weight, strength, stamina etc.
I see as people get older their mental model of how they behave and think often mimics somebody much older than their actual age, acting as if they are completely powerless to greater evil forces of muscle atrophy and weight gain. It simply ain't true but going against it is certainly harder than just complain.
1. We eat out more as adults. Our skinny kid/teen selves didn't even have the money/vehicle/norm to eat out much less do it daily like we can as adults. This also includes eating out during our lunch break. Every time we eat out that's an easy 1000+ calories.
2. When you live with a partner, every time they ask "wanna eat something?" and you say "yes", that's a moment you wouldn't have eaten had you been a bachelor. We'll even say yes when we aren't hungry.
It's funny how much we want to believe in factors out of our control.
Actually the main thing that changed for me is I started compressing all my eating into 1-2 meals per day. That way I could track it. Before I couldn't tell you if "I haven't changed my diet" because it was a continuum of eating from morning till night. I have no idea what changed over time, couldn't even tell you for one week. Once I "bounded" it I was able to bring my weight down quickly.
Btw, sorry if this sounds snarky, it seemed like flagging this as anecdotal was the right way to start so I copied it.
A diet that contains a high nutritional content will prevent you from over-eating due to satiety signals (unless you have a hormone issue) rather than eating to the point of feeling "stuffed" - if someone is eating to the point of feeling "stuffed" then it would suggest that they are not eating food with a high nutritional content, or that they have some disorder that is interfering with their normal eating process.
If you look to the animal kingdom, the lion kills the zebra, feeds then walks away, the next in line feeds, then walks away, etc, etc... no animal eats until they are "stuffed" - if they did then they would become another animals prey because they are too "stuffed" to move!
No wonder some countries consider it rude to clear your plate of food. (too bad the Brits do this the other way around!) lol
if this were true it would be possible to create a diet full of foods with such satiety signals and the obesity crisis could be fixed. way easier said than done. 7-grain bread is very nutritious yet a loaf is easily 1000+ calories. Easy to overeat on it given it's just mostly air.
If you are eating 3000 calories of healthy food and you used to eat 2400 calories of junk food, why would you weigh less now?
Ultimately I think you’ve got to come up with a good model of your physiology based on uncontroversial science. So in the case of your training, you’d figure out you are draining yourself of more than sodium chloride but rather the broad spectrum of minerals that you typically sweat out, so your ‘salt intake’ is a multi mineral supplement and not actual salt. Which is what I imagine you figured out.
It never ceases to amaze me that we think that we know better, and yet the human body, as with other animals etc, have been around for quite some time now. Even if we had all the data from the past that we think is important now, we still wouldn't know better.
There was a post the other day regarding "The prosecutors fallacy" that might fit well with this sort of subject matter.
The rest is likely to be due to slower rates of protein synthesis for the renewal of various body parts.
The satiety after a few hours since a meal is mainly determined by the amount of proteins and of fat contained in it, not by the amount of calories.
For instance, after a meal including 50 g of proteins and 50 g of fat, most people would not be hungry for at least a half of day, or even for an entire day.
If you remove from your 1000 kcal loaf of bread 500 kcal of starch, which can be done by washing the dough before baking the bread, and you eat the result (i.e. a bread greatly enriched in proteins) together with 50 mL (46 g) of olive oil, you will eat less calories, but you will be satiated for many more hours.
A better example would be something like sprouted whole grain bread, like Ezequiel brand, which is hard to eat plain. If everyone replaced their wonderbread with whole grains I would absolutely expect better body weight outcomes.
Multiply the lb/week you were supposed to gain by 450. Your TDEE calculation was incorrect by that amount.
When I was 15, I thought I had grown up quite a lot and looked back on my 10-year old self as someone who was just getting started.
When I was 20, I thought I had grown up quite a lot and looked back on my 15-year old self as someone who was just getting started.
When I was 25, I thought I had grown up quite a lot and looked back on my 20-year old self as someone who was just getting started.
When I was 30, I thought I had grown up quite a lot and looked back on my 25-year old self as someone who was just getting started.
Now that I'm 37, I think I have finally grown up and my 30-year old self was just getting started. But I recognize that my 42-year old self will probably look back on me and still see the same pattern.
6 months ago I was an idiot.
Last week I was an idiot.
...
Glad I'm smarter now.
4000 is a conservative estimate. Four pop tarts, an entire large pizza (all you can eat buffets FTW), two liters of soda, and an entire large bag of chips was, like… a totally normal day for me. There’s probably also be some cookies or hostess donuts in there, too.
> If you couldn't lose weight on 1400 calories then where exactly was the energy coming from?
No clue, but I didn’t cheat once and ate fixed meals of pre-measured calories every day. So.
All things being even 200kcal difference per day is about 20lbs per year attributed purely to metabolic difference. Now you can say to just eat 200kcal less per day, but those little differences on a daily basis add up.
As you gain weight, you burn more energy, even just being idle, so 200kcal doesn't means 20lbs per year (obviously so, as otherwise you'd gain 600lbs in 30 years).
An extra 200kcals per day implies gaining extra weight until the extra energy you burn cancels it out, and then stabilizing there. IIRC the rule of thumb is ~25kcal/day/kg so you'd just naturally balance out to being 8kg heavier than the baseline.
Only if you gain mostly muscle. Which I'd bet most people at a calorie surplus aren't, and the extra fat is burning very little calories.
In the case of two small women who burnt <=2100 a day, a 300kcal difference would be the difference between one of them fasting for an entire day every single week and the other not.
That seems like a massive difference not "small".
It’s a study on men with low testosterone and fatty liver disease. They already have damaged livers.
I am highly into fitness myself, but I know plenty of either friends or people I've met who are already getting TRT mostly because they want it to help them, but many of them have so many other issues that its just masking when it comes to things like diet, training, consistency, etc.
Additionally in the fitness world many go on TRT even when they already have normal test levels partly because they don't see it quite as "cheating" as other performance enhancing drugs are seen.
With TRT you would have systemic androgen but not high enough in your testes locally for spermatogenesis. So with or without TRT you would be infertile (if you have hypogonadotropic hypogonadism)
From what I remember my FSH and LH were normal. I don't recall GNRH being tested.
The FSH and LH being normal with low testosterone means there’s some kind of dysfunction. There’s an inverse relationship and if T is low LH should be higher to induce synthesis.
Sort of like in women’s menopause - when the ovaries run out of oocytes the ability to produce estrogen is gone and FSH/LH increase.
Anyways, obesity could be another issue. Adipose cells produce estrin and estrin has promiscuity with the estrogen receptor which reduces testosterone production. Another is elevated prolactin which has multiple causes and can reduce T production.
Anyways, my caffeine ranting is at an end. Good luck
No idea how accurate it is, but an extra 350 calories burned is a pretty big improvement over _not_ having those burned.
I doubt fidgeting alone is sufficient to keep most people skinny. There’s a lot that impacts our weight. But if somebody’s automatically burning calories because they have a hard time stopping fidgeting, that might ease the load a bit so they could eat a bit more or walk a little less than would be the case without it.
EDIT: it feels worth mentioning that fidgeting can be an all day activity for some people, 8+ hours. Walking 10k steps takes maybe 1.5 hours, more or less depending on the persons speed. It wouldn’t be as much of a workout replacement as a whole lifestyle change.
Often those who fidget a lot will fidget less on days where they have used significant energy intentionally. Or will fidget less if they are restricting calories.
It would be hard to purposefully fidget a significant amount, but I suppose it could be trained with the right monitoring and stimulus. It would probably be better to train some other behavior though.
Fidgeting is a non conscious act performed throughout the day, it is not exercise. Exercise can actually reduce fidgeting and this shows up in athletes lower BMR that needs to be taken into account for meal programmes.
It is easy to eat more calories than are used in taking 10.000 steps.
And on the negative side, non-fidgety people might be more depressed or anxious mentally, more physically drained or fatigued or lethargic physically, may have had upbringings where movement drew negative attention from adults telling them to sit still, may have social upbringings where fidgeting was seen as 'acting out', may have been part a band or group where being still was trained into them, may find their own movements distracting or annoying...
In order to really, truly, get a handle on your weight - you need to increase muscle mass, operate at a slight caloric deficit, eliminate excess calories, and forgive yourself. The easiest way to distract you from excess calories is by doing something that keeps you busy (and hopefully works those muscles). Bikes rides, hikes, climbing gym, treadmills, skating, skiing, walking at a faster than moderate pace, running, weightlifting, tree cutting, brick laying.
People often get demotivated when they call it “working out”. Instead, just call it “working”.
* full episodes on Youtube
Food tracking is completely useless unless you also have a food scale, which, for whatever reason, is not terribly common in American kitchens. At least I never had one growing up and my Mother fancied herself a serious baker. Volume measurements are terrible if you are trying to track caloric consumption.
And I have not used a food tracking app but they appear to depend on honest inputs. I can just imagine someone telling their friends, "I don't know why I'm gaining weight $FOOD_APP says I'm only eating 1400 calories a day", somehow forgetting to put the 3 glasses of wine they are consuming into the app.
So totally IME but the best way to lose or maintain a healthy weight (whatever that means to you - the world really doesn't care) is to have an honest, internal drive to get it done. No one, no app, is going to do it for you. Do the cookies in the break room look good? They sure do, but I like my body far more than those cookies.
No amount of leg work will reverse putting garbage in your body.
When I learned how to swim last year that dropped to 175 ish and would’ve probably kept dropping if I spent more than 3 months going to the pool for an hour a day twice a week.
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/U1RxtW9oglcck-2g2X_SrKzIA44=...
exercise not help at all. the body compensates in many ways
400 calories burned from a run does not magically offset a donut. The conversion rate may be flat or even negative.
source: https://www.vox.com/2016/4/28/11518804/weight-loss-exercise-...
Estimates vary but 50 lbs of lean muscle mass is generally considered the natural maximum for men.
I increased my calorific needs by 1000 a day by doing a 10K run (1hr) before breakfast.
Still a 160lb weakling :)
The amount of extra food I needed to start eating!
I know people (mainly Asian guys that are trying to build muscle) that seriously struggle to eat at a calorie surplus. So maybe it's not "metabolism" (which there are significant differences between humans) but also differing levels of hunger.
My little brother is about 50lbs lighter than me at the same height and we have very different builds and all his attempts to bulk fail for the same reason: no appetite. Meanwhile I’m overshooting my bulks and have to cut harder because I love eating too much.
[0] https://nymag.com/news/features/23169/
Michael’s regimen of 1,913 calories a day is exactly that: 1,913 calories every single day, 30 percent of them derived from fat, 30 percent from protein, and 40 percent from carbohydrates. Cooking for him is the same elaborate exercise in dietary Sudoku it is for all CR die-hards, only more so.
This is more impressive than even Terrance Tao in terms of outliers...nuts. Unless you tried to lose weight of study this stuff, this is no small feat. Pro bodybuilders have to eat less than 1200/day to get super-lean and this is with tons of muscle helping. This guy does it at 1900. If there were a Tiger Woods of metabolism, this guy would be it if Tiger Woods could play better golf.
Maybe metabolism doesn't change, but my ability to convert what I put into my mouth into weight gain has definitely changed for me. As a young man, I used to eat way much more and poop way much more. It was like the food was just passing through, without really getting in my body. No matter how much i ate Just came right out
This is 3 miles/day. not that much. Minnesota starvation experiment subjects had to walk 22 miles/week.
Those Minnesota starvation study guys you're referencing had to use an extreme deficit to get down to concentration camp weights like that over the course of a year. It doesn't say in there, but that article with Michael Rea was written in 2006, and finding other stuff on him, he seemed to have been doing calorie restriction since at least 1999. A small calorie deficit can add up when you keep at it for a very long time. Even if his TDEE was 2200 or so, that would drop 30 pounds or so in a year eating 1900.
For whatever it's worth, I've been that size, and it was not on purpose. I grew very quickly in middle school and was extremely active. By 8th grade, I was 6'2" 120 lbs and it took many years before I got much bigger than that, and I used to buy entire boxes of donuts, Little Debbie snacks, and family-size bags of potato chips on the way home from school and eat them in addition to the pizza and cheeseburgers they served at the school. And when I got a car and started driving all my friends home, we'd usually go by McDonald's every day, and in addition to just the actual food, I'd get a McFlurry, pretty much every single day.
But unlike everyone else who seems to be wondering how that was possible and what happened when they were skinny in youth, it's not a mystery to me at all. I sometimes played basketball for 18 hours in a day. When I was driving my friends home, that was usually after cross-country practice, running for up to three hours after school. I walked or rode my bike everywhere. I almost never sat down. I rarely even slept. I could eat basically anything because it may as well have been the Michael Phelps Olympics diet. I was insanely active and using a ton of energy every day.
And yeah, when life normalized in my mid-20s, I too gained a bit for a short while, then I adjusted and ate less, and now I'm very lean again, but also bigger because I started lifting and learned to eat on purpose, in an intentional, measured way calibrated to actually meet my energy needs, not just ad hoc having whatever I crave at any given minute and not thinking about it. I understand why people don't want to do this. Even though I'm not restricting like him, at least not permanently, my diet habits are basically like Michael Rea's. I weigh everything, prepare all my own food, and eat pretty much exactly the same thing every day. It probably sounds like a slog and people want to just free graze and wonder why we can't live like humans must have lived for most of the past 300,000 years, when diets and hunger levels seemed to calibrate to energy needs automatically, nobody thought about it, yet almost nobody was fat except a tiny number of super rich idle nobility. But that isn't the environment we live in any more. People are extremely sedentary and randomly selected food from anywhere is utter trash loaded with extra calories in every possible form for no good reason. Unless you have the activity level of a middle schooler from the 90s or an Olympian, you need to actually try.
I’m ~75kg. Schwarzenegger was ~120kg in his prime. 45kg difference is (2.2lbs to the kg) 100lbs (differences between UK and USA imperial notwithstanding).
The chances of me going from where I am to a AS physique is zero!
Same activity level now as then. But now if I think too hard about a candy bar I gain weight that never goes away.
As you go from untrained to trained you burn less calories doing the same activity.
Moving your body from one location to another at a particular speed results in a fairly static amount of work done (in the basic physics sense). So if the same you hops on a bicycle and cycles up the same hill in the same conditions with the only difference being that one of you has trained hard for the last 5 years and the other hasn't (but somehow your body mass has stayed the same) then you'll burn exactly the same amount of energy. Untrained you will find it much harder, but the energy burn will be roughly the same.
There are some things that can be different as you go from "untrained" to "trained", for example lighter people burn less energy moving themselves around than heavier people. Trained people tend to do activities harder/faster so the "same activity" could actually be a much harder activity despite it not feeling that way. Although if the activity involves travelling a set distance some of the extra effort involved in doing it faster is offset by the fact that it takes less time, so the difference between the two is not as large as you'd think.
It's the easiest explanation. As a gym bro that regularly cycles weight, it's is remarkably easy over/under estimate intake just going off recollection. I always think I'm dialed in until I write things down (I'm almost always eating way fewer calories than I think).
Do you have any evidence for this bizarre dismissal?
1: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejm199212313272701
2: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08870446.2019.16...
I'll just say the same thing I always say in these kinds of "who are you to deny science!?" replies. For everyone championing how hard, complex, and subtle weight loss is, there's a "dumb" gym bro just weighing him self every day and dialing back calories until the scale starts going in the right direction. It works every single time. 100% of the time.
Before that I was eating crap. Lots of things that I that were high in calories but not enough of them throughout the day to exceed my metabolism or get close to the amount of protein I needed.
I think if you could go back in time and count the calories you probably were eating as much as you think.
It would seem like it is intentional, going by the article. They are trying to lose weight to maximize lifespan.
Sitting down and eating 6 plates of pasta at Fazolis all-you-can-eat for $4 (or $6) + 12 breadsticks every wednesday evening, is not something you can misremember. i was a broke student, and it was most economic meal i used to have. Working at mcdonalds and eating double quarter pounder meal + extra quarter pounder + shake is not something i can misremember. clearing a tub (not a pint) of ice-cream at a sitting is not something i can misremember. setting timer to dliberately eat 6 times a day all summer in order to forcefully gain wait, is not something i misremember. emptying an entire box of cereal in a sitting is not something i misremember. Eating 25 big wings to the bone at a sitting is not something i misremember. And i was all of 130lbs max. It really is insulting to suggest that the likely explanation is that I am misremembering.
In my 40s now, eating a lot is day like today when all I ate was jamaican takeout that i ate most of it. and that's on the high end of what i usually eat. i strictly drink water and black coffee, nothing else. my entire 20s was pop and juice. thats easily another 400 calories daily. I am 150lbs now.
Posts like Jenda's are depressingly unimaginative.
I wish HNers, and people in general, would learn some biology, and use some critical thinking to imagine that when something doesn't fit their very basic mental model, that's probably because there's exponentially more to know/learn(!). Maybe then they would stop thoughtlessly regurgitating such basic misconceptions.
Biology has so much complexity, but so many people want to insist calories in MUST balance calories out, without any exceptions. As if humans are just burning our foods at 100% efficiency in a bomb calorimiter. Biology isn't this boring.
Forgetting digestion and a host of other variably efficient processes, Mitochondria produce ATP from various possible substrates. These substrates are not equally efficient at producing ATP. So just here, in the simplest form, you have a mechanism by which input energy can be wasted or conserved.
Separately, when demand for ATP has suddenly ceased, Mitochondria can change modes to deterministically waste huge amounts of energy to avoid over-producing ROS. So even in the same cell, even provided the same substrates, efficiently can be dialed up and down rapidly.
And we haven't dug deeply into anything. There are so incredibly many processes with highly variable efficiency.
There's much more that we have yet to learn than that we know. Don't underestimate the complexity of biology.
That's why I was not disputing the premise (like previous commenters did), but asking for possible explanations!
If we're just looking at energy in and energy out, it could partly be less thorough digestion. I wonder if there are poop studies that find more leftover fat or carbs in faeces of children.
Depends on the elevation gains in your 100km ride but I think that 3,300kcal for a 100km/4h ride is generous.
800kcal/hr is hard work and keeping that up for 4h is even harder. 25kph does not sound like 800kcal/hr unless there was some reasonable elevation gains. I’d expect at least 1000m elevation gain over that 100km for those numbers to at least approach something sensible. If it was a flatter ride than that then Strava is just lying to you.
But, yes, long distance cycling is an awesome way of burning calories. When I used to do Brevet/Audax riding I was the closest to my old teenage weight as I have been in the last ~30 years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_performance#Total_powe..., https://www.road-bike.co.uk/articles/cycling-power.php [2] https://www.quora.com/How-efficient-is-the-human-body-at-con...
Being someone who has a power meter, I can say that strava's estimates over a long time period aren't that terrible, but if you're riding in a group, or there was a some wind, or a million other reasons they can be absolutely miles out.
That's hardly strava's fault, it's more about what's actually possible with an estimate.
What is completely made up and should be ignored is the calorie burn estimates you get from gym equipment.
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Strava’s calorie estimation is awful.
> I’d expect at least 1000m elevation gain over that 100km
1% average grade is pretty mild. I'd bet OP did at least 3000m to get those numbers
And one doesn't have to do 100km all at once. A 10km commute each way over a 5 day workweek is a much less intimidating prospect.
Now I live in America need a car :(
It could depend on how you define "almost 100%" of course. There's a big difference between 5% and 0.001%.
NB nobody would be able to do this without ingesting a substantial amount of food during. If you didn't start eating hourly after about 1-2 hours in, you'll "bonk" or run out of glycogen.
Cycling at 15mph on flat ground is pretty easy. If you can do that for an hour, and can progress at 10% increase in riding time week over week (pretty reasonable for someone who is still gaining fitness from "nothing"), you'll be doing four hour rides after just 16 weeks.
Two factors in your statement that lead me to believe 32oz is still a boat load. What's median and 75th percentile? I imagine the distribution here is non linear across the soda drinking population.
16oz of store-bought soda is not the same as 16oz of restaurant soda, at least 30% of which would be ice.
I wouldn't trust Gallup to report with nuance.
There's definitely a heat-loss phenomenon - look for skinny kids in shorts in 40 degree weather - but it's also the case that a variable amount of input calories can be discarded without full digestion by the body - energy not even extracted for use. The religiously calories in : calories out folks assume a linear digestion efficiency relationship between total calories consumed and that this holds unifomally across the population. Given the complexity of biology, they should be unsurprised that there will be myriad outliers
People also forget "metabolism doesn't change with age" narrative is a based on a paper that used population-wide statistical model. That approach measures "average treatment effect" and is directionally useful in general but incredibly unhelpful in addressing individual differences and nuances. Something is true on average does not mean it is true "for every" or even "for any"
After a few years of regular (monthly) 200km rides I could do a 200km ride (~10h elapsed) without eating anything on the way round.
that said, ok, 15mph is not that easy -- maybe starting more like 10mph on a road bike for an hour would be more reasonable.
I still think most able bodied people could get to OP's fitness in much less than a year.
One data point - I was horribly out of shape in my mid 20s and got to riding 4 hour/15mph about four months after I bought my bike. But I was also unemployed for about a month of that!
> Now I live in America need a car :(
Why? Are there even longer distances?
I was doing it on a roadbike and could comfortably average 27km which got me there 3h. Driving was about 1.2h.
In the summer, I would start pedalling at 5am and get to a local cafe at 8. The first hour was amazing, broad daylight and you basically had the whole road network to myself.
Yeah, unfortunately, for me, even after some training, it's still hard for me to average over 22 km/h (entire travel including stops; the moving average is about 25km/h, e.g. https://www.strava.com/activities/9688833121).