I personally went through this journey where I was sedentary for about 10 years and in my late 20s I could not run, I could not walk long distances, by back was killing me, I had wrist issues. Seeing a physical therapist who could help rebuild my body while starting with light exercise and gradually building up worked for me. I spent 2 months just strengthening my ankles and feet before I could run because they were so atrophied.
Eventually I got past that local maxima and now I can run 25 km with 2km elevation gain up a mountain and back which would have killed me before.
Lastly I will say that exercise should be gradually eased into, a lot of people are put off by exercise because they start too hard and make themself miserable. For cardio you should try to keep your heart rate within a lower range (zone 2 cardio at around 70% of max heartrate). For most people this means your cardio starts with walking up a hill, and you won’t get to actually running until later.
And for muscle training, nothing beats a few kettle bells and a rubber mattress in the corner.
I think that's where I am at right now. I have always been exercising to some extent. But it feels like the older I get the less one kind of exercise focusing on some set of physical and physiological aspects transfers to another set. Meaning, to go biking a lot, doesn't mean you can run.
> strengthening my ankles and feet before I could run because they were so atrophied.
Even after years of semi-regular weighted calf raises and yoga I just recently noticed that I could barely do a few hundred rope skips cause of my feet. 15 years ago I remember cardiovascular obstacles and the usual DOMS but I don't remember that my feet hurt.
---
Currently my lower back / sciatica is giving me serious issues. I think I got it from some overexertion due to prolonged pelvic motion ... so that's yet another physical department to keep in mind.
Another thing to consider is that sciatica can manifest in your feet depending on how the nerve is being pinched. It can be very confusing when your feet hurt but the source of hurt is not actually in your feet.
I hope for the best on your journey.
100% this. Whenever I've had longer breaks from strength training, clocking in the kind of hours I do in a desk chair eventually gets me to back pain, Aeron chair be damned.
The only thing that works for me then is to hit the weights; squats and deadlifts to be specific. Obviously not doing 1 rep max, relatively high rep range (8-12).
- Week 1: muscle soreness is horrible.
- Week 2: muscle soreness is quite OK and the regular back pain is all but gone.
- Week 3 onwards: gravy.
This is really under-rated. People will happily keep pushing exercise as a health intervention (hidden implication: instead of other interventions?), and forget that quite a lot of people have health conditions that get in the way of their ability to exercise. Especially older people. Who have poor health outcomes.
I'm sort of in that local maxima now.
A good reminder that getting past the hump, it gets better.
Then our body instinctively hoards calories like a squirrel hoards nuts, because evolution takes thousands to millions of years and this era of abundant calories and sedentary lifestyles emerged in the last few decades.
It doesn't matter how potent it is if nobody wants to take it.
For being supposedly a website for smart, or at least above the average intelligence users.
No, semaglutide won't do the same for you. Fucking leave the house and move.
https://old.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/wiki/kb/recommend...
Also, embracing the suck helps a lot as well.
Greg Doucette's cookbook shows how you can add "bulky" food that are lower in calories. I'm not a fan of the propensity of artificial sweeteners, but the principles are the important thing.
As an aside, I also wonder if this fascination with having "quick fixes" (aka let's add GLP-1 agonists to reduce appetite) is a generational thing, or just that in HN we have a bio-hacking mindset?
It's quite a contrast to the other article in HN today, "An Unreasonable Amount of Time", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42557098
[edit] typos
American culture. We want maximum results with minimum effort.
Unsure if it has to be in some stomach-acid resistant packaging or slow release or something though.
> We knew from studies in the 1950s comparing London bus drivers and London bus conductors that lived in the same environment, but one — they had the bus drivers who were sitting, the conductors were standing, and the heart disease rate among the drivers was twice that of the conductors.
Yeah, uhhhh, driving a bus in an urban centre built before motor vehicles doesn’t sound like the most calming of careers.
"He said that he had been a tank-driver during the war and that a tank would have had no trouble getting on to the other side and decided to see if a double-decker could do the same.Some places in the UK are having problems retaining/recruiting drivers because of safety issues: attacks on bus drivers, either by angry passengers or random yobs :(
I also remember that London bus drivers had a very high mortality rate right at the start of the pandemic: https://www.instituteofhealthequity.org/resources-reports/lo...
[0] https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/where-should-my-priorit...
Quite often if you get into the habit of doing it often, how much you do increases in is own
"It doesn't matter whether you do it in the morning, at lunchtime, in the evenings. It's particularly good after meals, so the evening is a fine time to take a brisk walk"
Government TV goes MAHA!
That isn't saying exercise doesn't improve health it looks like it does, but compared to other pharmaceutical interventions its not very impressive.
There is no more potent stressor (in regards to the degree of adaptations that result---I guess getting shot in the face is a more potent stressor, but it's hard to recover from) than weightlifting. For example, you can radically change your physiology just doing a single (hard) set of 5 deadlifts a week. Spending just ~30 seconds a week under acute stress can take a human male who cannot lift 185 lbs to one who can lift 405 lbs in a number of months. It's radically, stupidly, unreasonably, and absurdly effective.
We have the most understanding and most effective tools to take advantage of the adaptive mechanisms of our bodies than ever before.
I think people think that "exercising" has to be this pervasive, incessant thing that invades every facit of life and requires constant discipline. Even the linked article hints at this---walk 45 minutes daily, stand all the time, etc. All that shit constitutes (for all but the most untrained) extremely small stressors that are rapidly adapted to (and hence no longer do anything but maintain your existing level of fitness) and that take a lot of time (and can be rather uncomfortable, like standing for hours). More is not better. If you disrupt homeostasis with one set of 5 deadlifts, you've disrupted homeostasis! The adaptation is in motion. It doesn't matter that it only took 30 seconds. And unlike standing or walking, it's easy to effectively increase the stress to reap more adaptations: add weight to the bar. (To be clear, I'm not discouraging walking/standing/Zumba/whatever---they're all better than doing nothing and they can complement weightlifting. I'm just pointing out that there are much more efficient ways to rapidly accrue useful stress (well, I'd argue the amount of useful stress you can accrue from walking or Zumba or whatever is limited because the activities themselves can't be effectively scaled to result in more stress) and if you were to choose only one, the choice should be weightlifting.)
Deadlifts are life's panacea. You should be doing them.
185 lbs is 83 kg; 405 lb is 183 kg.
As someone who has been doing a 5x5 deadlift set every week (plus other stuff) for about three years: this is a wild exaggeration that sounds like some sort of supplement marketing claim. Perhaps you forgot a few hidden variables? For example, I'm over 40.
(It was also very apparent when I had COVID and was out of the gym for over a month that I "lost" about 25kg from my working weight)
I have been lifting for 18 years now and it’s become like brushing my teeth: I just do it without thinking much about it. Just basic stuff - squats, bench, deadlift, few vanity additions. The older I get the more I see how much my peers physically suffer without it.
One can also do 10-20 seconds of cardio a few times per week and have real results.
Lots of overweight people have never been hungry in their whole life. They eat on a schedule, so have an appetite, but real hunger? Never more than the grumbles of an empty stomach.
But it would benefit them to not eat until they are hungry. Then have a small meal. Feel what it's like to be satiated, not full, just satiated. The notice how long it takes to feel hungry again.
Then try being really hungry. Like "I woke up from a deep sleep at 3am and felt a ravenous need to eat something".
I've found that my sense of hunger was reset by this process. I get hungry if I don't eat a meal, but it's not a big deal. I can ignore it. Another 6 hours and I'll start to be really hungry. Then I can have something small.
I don't find it hard to keep a healthy weight any more. It's not difficult to eat to a slight caloric deficit and lose weight if needed.
That is the way to begin the process of getting a little hungry and then appreciating it as it grows. Taking that extra time then makes finally eating more enjoyable, in my experience.
And your tip on fully chewing food is subtle but powerful. It's very much in the spirit of being more engaged in the moment, where gratitude settles us down and keeps our worries at bay, for at least some small moments.
Much more still than hunger, you have to fight the “I would like to eat something” feeling.
I recommend to be constructive and make actionable recommendations, and have a positive tone. I know it’s not easy in the current state of affairs though.
“ stop constructing a society where ….” really doesn’t tell anyone what you think we should do.
And I agree with you btw, I think the root cause is, we have anonymised too much, revenue is the only thing that matters, because before that, there were things like traditions, shame, ethic, etc. but they went all out the window when money making became possible anonymously via funds, VCs, etc. You can switch to child labor to save 0.1% margin because, guess what, no one is responsible anymore: the shareholders, these anonymous mass, want it.
I got a nice exercise bike, which I use for 30m most days. I got one for my parents too, but my mom refused to use it and promptly got a heart attack. Can't win them all. I do what I can, but I've stopped trying to lift mountains.
There is one more funny twist to the picture you've painted. What little physical labor we have left is piled onto as few people as possible while others are dying in cubicles.
As Dr Ashley says in the OP, if you can just walk 30-45 minutes five or six days a week, you're already doing your health a great service. The hard part isn't the walk itself, it's the motivation to start, and the discipline to make it part of a routine.
Once you have ingrained exercise into your routine, it becomes easy. Not exercising feels uncomfortable; feeding your body with things which do not support your more healthful state will feel more innately uncomfortable. Once you establish a routine of exercise, you have the basis for a virtuous cycle.
Getting used to exercise every day will in no way make you like McDonald's less.
Nobody? I can't agree, lots of people want to, and do "take" exercise. Most of my friends are super active and they look good and feel good and are living really healthy lives.
It's true that a lot of society is set up such that we can totally avoid exercising, but on the flip side we've probably never had more access to great ways to be fit that are tailored to personal interest, aptitudes, needs.
Sadly I agree that most (north Americans at least) are extremely under-exercised, but it is a choice.
Many people have to actively fight that default to overcome it, day in and day out, and it’s hard.
Psychologically manipulative gamification can address that.
Soon after I got an Apple Watch the reminders and rewards for the activity rings got me to make sure to close all three of them daily. That was 2063 days ago and I've not missed a day.
Before I got the watch I rarely deliberately exercised. I would choose stairs over elevators, and for a while I would do a 10 to 15 leisurely bike ride a couple times a week (but that stopped about a year before I got the watch due to problems with my bike that weren't worth fixing), but other than that it was mostly sitting at my desk or on my couch for me.
I'd get in about a mile of walking during normal daily activities and maybe 2500 steps. Those are both 2.5x to 3x as much after the watch.
What's interesting is that there were no days during that 2063 (and counting) streak where I had to force myself to continue. I got sick occasionally with a cold or a flu (or something flu like--I never got sick enough with flu like symptoms to actually go get tested to see what it was), but never bad enough that I just wanted to stay in bed until it was over.
In the several years before that I would maybe once a year get something that would leave me with no will or energy to get out of bed for a day or two. So something seems to have changed, and increased exercising seems like a decent candidate.
We completeely design our cities around cars. Just the act of walking 30 minutes a day makes a huge difference. If you can get that just going about your day, then it's kind of built into your life, almost "free". But walking (like every other form of exercise) has to be an intentional activity in a car-centric city.
Car-dependence didn't just happen. It was intentional and relates heavily to economic segregation.
So what about capitalism? Well, leisure time, from the perpsective of capitalism, is lost revenue. Where once you needed 1 full time job, now you need 2 plus 3 "side gigs". Housing costs, student loans, education costs, your cars and student loan debt are all designed to keep you working, creating wealth for someone else.
+1. Car-centric design stands 99.9% for US. In contrast, many cities in EU have grown organically over decades both with walkability, accessibility in mind and quite decent public transport. With business offices often still being pretty centric.
I've been moving around EU, working in different big cities and had a luck of renting flats within walkable 30-45 mins from the workplaces / client offices. If the weather sucks, I can count on public transport. It's always a bit of extra budget stretch to rent something more centric, but it's really worth it imho.
A morning walk to the workplace, while grabbing a coffee / breakfast on the way or a walk back home while disconnecting from the virtual world is a routine that can highly recommend. It gives also more motivation for either passing by the office or marking the work/leisure boundary when working in hybrid/remote mode. No need to live in a constant hustle mode.
It’s hard to overstate how poisonous cars are to your physical and mental health.
That sounds like a problem with modern life rather than a problem with exercise.
Our bodies are insanely efficient at using and saving energy.
They fact that I can walk for an hour or more on the calories from a single snickers bar is depressing. Ha.
And the body is convinced a calorie shortage is around the corner, but in modern society calorie shortages never occur.
I think GLP-1 medications, and other medications that attack hunger signals at the source are the only viable long term solution.
Exercise is much more than weight loss; it is heart health, bone health, immune health, etc.
You can walk an hour on the calories of a candy bar, but you’ll get malnutrition relying solely on candy bars.
Healthy nutrition requires more than eating less.
If someone develops an injection that makes you want to cook yourself some whole foods then we’ll be talking.
I go to the gym regularly and when I look around and see other women who have been working out for a long time, they are pretty much the same body shape I’ve always seen them.
Once you reach a new weight, that’s just your body’s new normal. I stress to people now that they should aim to never gain weight in the first place unless it’s muscle.
It seems that it will be easier than ever to get back to a healthy weight.
I found it very funny that I spent about 2 years eating less so I could get better at cycling, then suddenly had to start eating more, once I was down 50kg, because I was getting faint on very long cycles.
Only that it's a minor contributor and I would argue that's the case.
One of your examples, swimming, will put on weight as it will builds muscle mass which obviously is heavier. But one of the side effects of this is that your appetite will increase. And without careful diet management it's very easy for this exercise to be a net negative.
People tend to offset that energy expenditure elsewhere in their life, often without being conscious of it. The body is really good at balancing out your energy consumption.
If I go for a 40 mile bike ride today then I'm pretty sure I'll zombie out in front of the TV tonight.
If you simply cut back on calories by 20% - 30%, your body will adjust to the new norm within a couple months, and you just expend 20% - 30% less energy. You have maintain some baseline activity levels in order to continue burning fat.
So, people don't necessarily need to diet. They need to train their appetite just like they train their body.
If you intake X calories, your body will use them to provide you energy for exercise. If you don’t exercise, you won’t always just turn it into fat - your body will find another find other uses of the calories such as producing stress hormones.
Exercise is important but will not make you lose weight alone.
The saying is you can't outrun a bad diet.
For something smaller or cheaper (or if you just prefer cycling movements) they also have some 'peddler' options as well, but I don't have any personal experience with those. Enjoy!
I chose that one because it folds together when stored, goes to a decent speed (at the max I can have a brisk walk), my stride fits in it (I'm 194cm tall) and it can carry my weight (~90kg).
> Healthy nutrition requires more than eating less.
Except in specific cases, this is mostly not true. Food in the modern era is very nutrient dense. This is why vitamin pills are mostly a placebo; you're getting an overabundance of nutrients in your diet already.
The first principal component of healthy nutrition is simply _eating less_. Eating less reduces your risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, injury when you are older, and on and on.
Calories in calories out as they say.
Also, I think many people don't think we are headed in the wrong direction, or are generally uneducated about the topic. Blissful ignorance... during which they continue being good consumers to keep the hamster wheel spinning. We are sleepwalking into some sort of societal disaster. You're probably right that people need to be addressed with a positive tone. But it's hard.
What is the logical connection between the first part of that sentence and the second?!
5x5 deadlifts is generally too much volume and probably constitutes overtraining for you if they're sufficiently heavy. Admittedly, when you're not particularly strong it's less stress and more recoverable (because they can't be that heavy).
Not being able to deadlift 405 after three years is generally indicative of poor programming (if you're trying to get stronger, at least) and/or poor recovery. You have to eat, you have to sleep, and you have to increase the weight each time.
Being 40 isn't really an excuse. You're 40, not 80.
Try looking into 5/3/1, Hepburn style programming, or Tactical Barbell.
Everyone will have their own methods here, but after years of having marginal growth per year I changed it up.
I now only do 1 set per exercise, 3-4 exercises per day. For arm focused exercises I do 15 reps in 1 set. For everything else, I do 20 reps for a set.
If I succeed, then I up the weight for the next exercise (2.5lbs for arms, 5lbs for everything else).
If I fail, I do a drop set and shave off 20% per set taking just 30 seconds per drop.
I use the drop set as both the thing to help the growth, and the thing to punish me for failing to increase the initial set. If I get my 20 reps, I get to move on, so I push really hard because the drop set totally sucks.
If I fail 3 weeks in a row, I drop the weight.
Been doing this for the last two years and I am 47, and each year I have increased my strength by 20-40% depending on the exercise.
I also keep the number of exercises per day to be minimal. With 5 days in the week, I do just 3-4 exercises per day. M, W, R are 1-2 from the 5x5 program (squats, deadlifts, bench, should-to-overhead, rows) along with some extras that I want to focus on. Tues, Thur are more extras, and ones that I am willing to sacrifice if I have a busy week. This means I can still hit the gym just 3 days a week, and hit the core exercises. Also, the core exercises are rough, so Tue/Thur are almost like easy days.
Here is my schedule:
M: Bench, 20degree lying dumbell curl, Squat
Tues: Lat Raises, Hip Thrusts, Neck exercises (put a plate on your head and do lifts from 4 different angles while lying down)
Wed: Overhead press, Deadlift, Cable Row
Thur: Tricep Rope Kettlebell swing Lat Pull down
Fri: Dumbbell Bench Dumbbell Shoulder Barbell Row Front Squat
You'll notice their are some repeats in there with cables and dumbbells. This is helps hit the muscle groups twice a week, but with some variation and some different stabilization. I chart all this in a google spreadsheet with each column being a week so I can see my progress, and so I can see if I missed anything from the core days in the week, and I happily change up days so I ALWAYS hit the core 3 day exercises.
GLP-1 agonists are not exercise and thus using them would not change the calculus on how common it is to lose “significant weight and actually [keep] it off permanently through exercise.”
Nor does their availability change the validity of GP’s advice.
> Once you reach a new weight, that’s just your body’s new normal.
I only see that study cited by people who are looking for excuses to not exercise.
At the same time, I keep up with the latest science and understand the limitations of exercise as a means of sustainable weight loss for the general population.
Please stop talking about simple arithmetic - the body is not a simple machine and trying to conceptualize it as such is willfully ignorant.
if you are already meeting that baseline, and still have issues, then you should look at tweaking other variables in the equation, whether diet, stress, etc.
What I find worrying is the cherry picking some people do, e.g. "aha your body will get used to exercise, so I might as well not bother", then wonder why at their next visit to the doctor, they are now told to go on a steady diet of statins etc.
That doesn't mean exercise isn't extremely important for your health. It is, in a myriad ways. Even the mechanisms that make it not help with weight loss are some of the reasons why it is so healthy - it's taking away calories from metabolic processes that are more harmful than helpful.
When I used to live in the suburbs it would take me 15 minutes to drive to the supermarket. Now I can walk there in 5 minutes. Walking is faster and healthier than driving.
You're equivocating. In some vague, general sense, over a long period of time, cars might make it harder to access things. For any given person at any given moment, having a car gives greater access to more things in less time.
Most people waste a shocking number of hours out of every day scrolling, watching TV etc, and just take it for granted as part of a "modern lifestyle", but it's just an optional way to spend time, and not very productive.
I have full time employment, a relationship, children, and manage to get our for 1hr of running almost every day. (And find time to debate with strangers on HN XD)
Sure, but what you want is more muscle mass and less visceral fat so that's exactly what your want. Raw mass is too coarse grained to tell you much.
I don't know what the science says, but from personal experience, this is false. I've lost weight without feeling hungry.
Mind to give more insight in how to loose weight without ever feeling the need to eat at all? There are thousands of books that claim that, but no one delivers… ask me how I know.
None of that is true, but particularly the first part.
Hunger is what you feel when your ghrelin levels rise.
Ghrelin is one of many ways to feel hungry, and also has many other functions: also participates in regulation of reward cognition, learning and memory, the sleep-wake cycle, taste sensation, reward behavior, and glucose metabolism, for example. The exact mechanics of hormones in the body is far from being completely understood.
Independent of that, the fact that you know the name of an hormone, does not even remotely make my claim false. The question is “what triggers the ghrelin?”. Part of the answer is circadian timing (what I mean with “I would like to eat”) but also the body need for energy (start using reserves).
So yes ghrelin is involved. So what?
Which is fine(?), but usually these go to reddit.
More extreme example: hunger typically subsides after approximately three days during a water fast (you eat nothing and no hunger)
At some point you have to control your diet. But, if you can control your diet, the exersize clearly isn't a requirement.
Once you can run frequently without gorging afterwards, the extra 300-500 calorie buffer makes dieting a million times easier.
(Lost 35 pounds in 2024, 90% of it during weeks in which I ran consistently)
When you increase activity, over the course of weeks, the body adjusts and does everything it can to not touch those fat stores.
Case in point: women who exercise intensely experience a reduction in the production of sex hormones, as that is energy intensive.
Your body doesn't adjust endlessly. The technique to continue to shift body composition is called progressive overload, this isn't outdated and is the basis of most athletic training regimens.
Again I want to reiterate that no one is suggesting that diet isn't the foundation of fitness and controlling body composition. I am simply and factually stating that you can use exercise as a lever to achieve a calorie deficit. Arguing otherwise is to argue against thermodynamics, moving your body consumes energy and you body simple cannot achieve perfect efficiency.
> TT and FT began to decrease starting 12 weeks in both moderate and high intensity exercise groups. Most significant decrease was at 12 weeks in high intensity exercise group
Even more: He made a reasonable reply. You answered with an ad hominem. When you don't actually answer, it makes it look like you can't actually answer.
Everything in his first message is objectively false, specifically that hunger means your body is eating fat. That is wrong, wishful thinking, and made up. How can I be more clear?
And everything in the follow up response seems irrelevant, rambling, moving the goalpost. (Hence the LLM observation.)
> When you don't actually answer
When I don't answer what?
Regardless of whether you are factually correct, "I'm guessing that you are a bot, powered by someone's home-trained LLM", the likes of which "usually... go to reddit" is a personal attack. Don't do that here.
When did you not answer that? In the post I replied to, when you said exactly none of the things you said in this post to justify your position and argue against his.
It's not that hard. Give real argument. Don't give drive-by insults, no matter how appropriate you think they are.
what I’m saying, is that one of many reasons (some of them even not even related to the digestive tract, you can also google that) influence the leves of that hormone, one of them, happens to be the triggering of fat reserves, AND/OR there are another paths from which you also can feel the urge to eat when the body starts using reserves.
I say A implies B, B implies C therefore A implies C (or maybe A implies C directly).
Where A is “body uses reserves”, B “hormone rises“, C “feel hunger”. You say B implies C, therefore A does not imply C. You are rambling and not being able to follow basic logic. Sorry. I’m not moving any posts here. You want to show you are right, please illuminate me: show me a serious article where it clearly states that there is absolutely no relation between the body using fat reserves and the sense of hunger. That would be new for me, and I can forward that to the MD specialist in diets that told me wrong.
I’m not claiming I’m expert, I could be wrong, I cleared say “I know it from somebody I trust“. But telling me, that because some hormone has a role in it, what I say is false, is an absolutely trivial falacy.
The insane efficiency of the body is the problem.
30 minutes of agony -- the jog -- can be thrown out the window with literally one minute (60 seconds) of overeating.
That's why I think exercise plus GLP-1 medications once a year might be the future gold standard for weight loss and maintenance.
Any thoughts on GLP-1 meds being the game changer we need?
GLP-1 are crutches and if you need it once a year.
Diet is and always will be the key to weight loss.
And likely already at a low body fat otherwise it would be crippling for your joints.
Aging is rough.
And the high calorie to nutrient ratio in this country makes it really hard to avoid adding pounds.
This country is calorie and diet obsessed, and yet average weight seems to keep increasing.
- one, your body may crave more food because of the energy loss - the Lipostat model suggests that your body has a target weight (well, fat level, more precisley), and will adjust hunger up if calory expenditure goes up
- your internal processes use way more energy than you can consume through exercise in a modern lifestyle (2000+ calories a day just from sitting still, for many adult males), and there is a lot of room for the body to adjust those up and down to make up for the extra exercise to keep up your current weight. So if you consume 2000 Cal a day with 0 Cal from exercise, with moderate exercise you will end up conauming 1600 Cal a day from internal processes + 400 Cal a day from exercise after some time (a one time run will absolutely consume extra, if your run every day, you'll get less and less extra Cal from your runs, until you reach about net 0, assuming you're not increasing the amount of exercise constantly).
Most people can walk 30 mins but I would doubt if most can run a marathon.
Nitpick: a marathon is 42 kilometers (by definition). Most people would struggle to even walk that.
> While you're right that exercise can help on the margin, it's just not a useful intervention that moves the needle much as far as weight loss goes.
There's more to exercise than just the thermodynamic effects of calorie expenditure. Building muscle and/or cardiovascular capacity will improve your quality of life and will complement any weight loss. You can improve your mental health by becoming more physically active, and this is well established. Those mental health gains and physical health improvements make it easier to maintain a better diet. Beyond the marginal, but significant calorie expenditures you can create a positive feedback loop.
At one stage, I started walking home from work at my fastest pace. 5 miles, 5 days a week. No other lifestyle changes. No significant weight loss.
A few years later, I started tracking calories with myfitnesspal and keeping to a limit (1600 initially, 1400 when it became easier). No exercise, but steady and impressive weight loss. I seem to have kept most of it off. I think a lot of it becomes psychological - not being afraid to feel appetite or skip meals if already satiated from earlier.
Not to mention, the processes in your body are way more complex than all this makes them out to be. For moderate exercise, after an adaptation period of a few weeks to months, there is almost no calorie impact from the exercise itself on your total calorie expenditure: your metabolism adjusts and various internal processes are deprioritized to prioritize the exercise.
This is in fact a major component of why exercise is so healthy: it doesn't do much for weight loss, but it stops/slows down all sorts of unnecessary processes in the body that are actively harming your overall health.
This is categorically false. You don’t have a magical metabolic adjustment, you simply become more efficient in performing an exercise but the calorie use never drops to effectively zero like you’re claiming. Think about this for a second, it makes no sense to think that running could ever consume zero calories, basic physics still apply.
- no exercise vs moderate exercise vs athlete-level exercise are very different cases. Doing some exercise does increase total energy expenditure vs no exercise, but the amount doesn't change significantly until you get to pro-athlete levels. That is, going from 2000/0 Cal (BMR/exercise) to 200 Cal of exercise might take you to, say, 2100/200 Cal; but moving from 200 Cal of daily exercise to 400 Cal of daily exercise will not take you to a higher TEE; unless you reach the stage where you are doing, say, 1000+ Cal worth of daily exercise (specific numbers pulled from thin air, just trying to illustrate the concept).
- Muscle mass is a confounder for what I was claiming - more exercise leads to increased muscle mass normally, and that does lead to an increase in BMR very directly.
Overall the more correct claim I should have made would be "exercising more, assuming you are not very sedentary, will not lead to increases in total energy expenditure beyond those gained from muscle mass increase, unless you get to pro athlete levels of exercise".
Here are some studies backing me up:
- https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/physiol.000...
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajhb.22711
- https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0960-9822(15)01577-8
I'm taking all of these links from the Kurzgesagt sources for their video on exercise: https://sites.google.com/view/sources-workoutparadox. They link to more specific claims from each paper, and to a bunch of other papers.