[bennyelv]

I agree with running but not cycling - I’d say it’s merely a question of how hard you try.

Cycling is one of the very few sports (along with maybe swimming) that you can do for extreme amounts of time without acutely harming your body.

The issue that does affect people is that if you started with the bad diet, you probably don’t have the fitness to produce the required output that would overcome it.

If you manage to increase your fitness so that you sustain higher outputs however you absolutely can out-train your terrible diet!

[LRVNHQ]

"You can't outrun a bad diet" is just a bad take.

Even with running - especially with running - you can easily burn enormous amounts of calories.

There are two problems with this saying.

First, nobody knows what a bad diet is in the context of this saying. How many calories are we talking? How poorly balanced is the diet? Let's take a basic example: assume the perfect diet for a sedentary person, well balanced, exactly the right amount of calories, etc. Then on top of it, this person eats a 200g pack of Haribo 4 times a week. Surely this makes that diet insanely bad, right? Well, not really, it's only about 500 excess kcal/day which would be very easily compensated if this person had an active lifestyle. So how insanely bad does the diet need to be until the argument actually works? This saying is usually directed at people who want to lose weight, surely nobody is trying to lose weight in good faith if they drink soda daily, eat donuts left and right, and some haribos to top it off.

The second problem, is that people are scarily sedentary and view what should be a completely normal amount of physical activity as impossible. So what upper bound are we putting on the "running" part of the saying?

Doing 1-2 hours of sport 4 times during the work week, plus one longer physical activity on the week end (e.g., half a day hike or bike ride) is a completely normal amount of sport.

[elric]

4-10 hours of exercise a week, for starters, is a lot more than what most people achieve. And it burns a ridiculously low amount of calories. Maybe ~300kcal/hour of excess calories burnt. That's ~3000kcal/week. You can ruin that in one sitting at Pizza Hut in under an hour.

If your goal is weight loss, and you have a choice between an extra hour of exercise, or eating one less Mars bar a week, skipping the Mars bar will be better for your weight loss.