[Delphiza]

Unsurprisingly, the title is sensationalist and not representative of the study. The study compares energy expenditure across different economic groups i.e. western people sitting in offices versus hunter-gatherers in Africa, and found that difference in energy expenditure does not account for differences in obesity, so points to consumption as the likely reason.

The sample dataset explicitly excluded 'athletes', so would exclude people that _are_ outrunning a bad diet. We know that a little weekly jog around the park doesn't mean you can eat a cheesecake every day, but anyone who has done extensive 'athletic' physical activity knows that if you don't up your calorie intake that you will lose weight. The study does not conclude, at all, that you cannot outrun a bad diet. Instead, it suggests "that dietary intake plays a far greater role than reduced energy expenditure in obesity related to economic development."

Edit: My point is specifically not about running. I am merely pointing out that if you read the study you will find that it is more of a study on economic development, and not really useful for personal or localised health advice. It observes that economically developed population groups may be more sedentary, but do not expend significantly more energy - so a hunter-gatherer picking berries all day does not burn significantly more energy than an office worker (at least not enough to explain why the office worker is obese). Therefore, the link between economic development and obesity is likely related to food (dietary intake) than daily activity.

[stouset]

> anyone who has done extensive 'athletic' physical activity knows that if you don't up your calorie intake that you will lose weight.

Anyone who has done extensive athletic physical activity knows that you will up your calorie intake unless you take explicit and intentional effort not to.

[kelnos]

This doesn't even require you to be an athlete, or do extensive physical activity. Add even a half-hour jog three days a week to your otherwise-mostly-sedentary routine and you'll tend to engage in "compensatory eating" even if you don't realize it.

This is why exercise alone often doesn't cause you to lose weight, or at least not as much as you'd expect given the extra calories you're burning: you're probably eating more (or the same amount, but foods with higher calorie density) than you were before, even if you didn't consciously choose to do so.

[42772827]

>that you will up your calorie intake unless you take explicit and intentional effort not to.

Correct, and the "eat less, move more" crowd will tell you, "ignore your hunger. Control yourself. You're a failure because you can't ignore one of the most basic and fundamental biological signals."

[paulddraper]

Absolutely.

This is one reason bodybuilders (the closest thing to professional dieters) will only do low intensity cardio -- walking etc -- when cutting weight.

High intensity cardio burns calories but increases appetite disproportionately. Albeit otherwise excellent for overall health.

[Natsu]

> Anyone who has done extensive athletic physical activity knows that you will up your calorie intake unless you take explicit and intentional effort not to.

It also seems to be harder to dial your dietary intake back down if you cease that extra activity.

[tpm]

After I started doing moderately long and fast bike rides (200+km/week, flat and hilly terrain, averaging 70km/ride during summer, 100+ if I have enough time), I have found that:

- compared to "not much exercise" (some periods during winter), it modulates my hunger. I do not eat more, or only proportionally.

- when the rides are longer than cca. 50km, I start losing weight (not just water, weight, sustained)

- after several days with no exercise, my hunger starts to increase again. In other words, I have to exercise to not overeat. I don't understand this effect, but it works for me, and it's been like this for many years.

[StanislavPetrov]

This depends on what you consider "extensive".

About 10 years ago I started taking 45 minute daily walks with no other changes in my diet or activities and the extra weight (about 15 lbs overweight) melted away. I made absolutely no effort to eat less and didn't get any hungrier.

[swat535]

> The sample dataset explicitly excluded 'athletes', so would exclude people that _are_ outrunning a bad diet.

You can't outrun a bad diet. This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from. Perhaps it's a nice lie one can tell himself to continue eating junk and not feel guilty about it.

Athletes, especially body builders require a lot of calories but their diet is surprisingly healthy. They eat plenty of protein, carbohydrates minerals, vitamins and healthy fats.

[nluken]

I would say that in practice 99% of people can't outrun a bad diet, but not because of any sort of physiological reason. You simply need to train so much that most people won't ever approach the level of running/cycling/lifting they would need to do so.

If you're training like an elite athlete (for me and my at the time roommate that was running 85, or in his case, 100+ miles a week with a few lift sessions) you can, and will, eat just about whatever you damn please and not gain weight. Most people can't fit that much training into their lives without making it their life's primary focus at the expense of everything else, and couldn't sustain that level of training if they did, so it becomes a practical impossibility.

I do miss that aspect of running so much mileage, though I appreciate the freedom that stepping back from competition has afforded me in other areas. To maintain weight now, I eat 1-2 meals a day, but back then? I ate whatever got put in front of me, sometimes 4 meals a day.

[milesvp]

I once worked a night shift stocking job just after college. I was in phenomenal shape without hitting the gym. I was at my lowest weight with a ton of lean muscle as a result of moving heavy loads and stocking paint every night. I also did the math at one point, and given the size of the warehouse I was probably walking quickly 8 miles during my shift. It became a chore to eat enough calories every day. Somewhere around 4000 calories/day, you may still be hungry, but you are generally full. Also food sort of becomes boring, and the desire to eat just isn't as strong.

That said, it was 4-6 hours 4 nights a week. That is a lot of time to spend to burn all those calories. It is really not hard to eat an extra 100 calories per day, but it takes a lot of effort to burn an extra 100 calories. It's the asymmetry here you absolutely have to respect. Further, at least for me, there is another asymmetry in terms of satiation vs hunger. It is much easier to be slightly satiated than it is to be slightly hungry. What this means, is that there is a tendency to be driven to eat slightly more than your body needs. This is partly why the GLP-1 drugs seem so effective, is that they seem to flip this asymmetry in the other direction, which means weight loss is the default, instead of weight gain.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from.

For people that are merely trying to lose weight, it's effectively true. When you're out of shape, you won't have the strength or endurance to exercise long and hard enough to actually burn significant calories.

For athletes that are running marathons or doing powerlifting, yes, it's certainly false. Massive bodybuilders that are already deadlifting hundreds of pounds will have massive diets because lifting that much weight takes significant energy.

But someone like me, with a BMI of 36, I can't outrun a bad diet. I go to the gym, set the treadmill at 5 mph, and I'm completely gassed after 3 minutes or 1/4 mile and have to slow down to 3 mph to recover. I'll go back and forth, but after about 20 minutes, I've gone about 1.3 miles, my legs are stiff and my ankles are sore because jogging at 240 lbs means high impact. Meanwhile, I've only burned probably ~100 calories. Not enough to offset the bad diet.

Given enough time of my routine, sure, my endurance might go up. Eventually I can do it longer, and maybe then I can start outrunning the bad diet. But that's going to take a long time.

Easier to just cut carbs.

[reverendsteveii]

You can outrun a bad diet, but the average person won't. The average American diet is 3600 cals/day (https://www.businessinsider.com/daily-calories-americans-eat..., https://archive.is/IURse). The average person needs ~=2250 cals/day to maintain a healthy weight (https://www.webmd.com/diet/calories-chart, women need 1600-2400 averaging at 2000, men need 2000-3000 averaging at 2500). Jogging a sustained 5mph burns about 600 calories/hour (https://runrepeat.com/calories-burned-running#calories-burne...). Now it's just algebra, the average person takes in 1400 calories more than they need in a day, so while you could try to outrun that diet it keeps up a pace of 5mph for about 2.5 hours EVERY DAY. So the most accurate advice is "a person can out-train a bad diet but the vast majority of people won't" but the advice that's most likely to lead the most people to the goal they're actually pursuing is "you can't out-train a bad diet".

[mwest217]

For high level endurance athletes, eating enough can be a difficult task. I wouldn’t quite categorize diets like the one described in https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/sports/olympics/cross-cou... as “a bad diet”, but it’s certainly a quantity and density of calories that would make it a bad diet for most people with a normal energy expenditure.

An anecdote from my experience with long trail hiking is that essentially everybody loses weight hiking long trails for months. Turns out when you’re hiking 25-30 miles / day, it’s awfully hard to not be in a calorie deficit (especially when you’re also trying to optimize for lightweight food)

[3acctforcom]

I've lost 100 lbs twice. You absolutely can outrun a bad diet lol.

It's just a LOT of exercise and counting all of your calories. A 1600 calorie bag of chips is 4 hours of cardio :)

[fknorangesite]

> This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from.

It's advice for people new to diet-and-exercise, not a law of the universe.

> it's a nice lie one can tell himself to continue eating junk and not feel guilty about it.

Exactly the opposite: it's saying that, in terms of weight loss, that eating the junk matters a lot more than going to the gym.

[mdtancsa]

For me, when I first started running, I thought going on a 5k run burnt scads of energy. At 100KG I was looking at about 400-500 cals-- Thats a fancy muffin basically. But when you start hitting 50k a week, you do have to start thinking about how to eat enough and enough of the right foods.

[darksaints]

I have personal experience outrunning a bad diet as a division 1 swimmer. I was on a 7000 calorie a day diet, which was actually difficult to pull off, and I specifically had to supplement my diet with things like snickers bars and peanut butter cups just to stop losing weight. In fact, my dietary habits formed during this period of my life, where I was consistently below 10% body fat, continue to cause me trouble today in my less active state. Only by eating dramatically healthier have I been able to approach 20% body fat today.

Even beyond myself, I think you’re romanticizing how healthy the diets of extreme athletes are. I’ve been coached by and trained alongside Olympic athletes and most of them (not all of them) don’t give a single shit about things like healthy fats or micronutrients. Protein definitely, but everything else is noise. When burning that many calories, you are getting more than enough micronutrients, and it doesn’t really matter if the energy you end up burning is from fats or carbs, because it’s in and out the same day and never has a chance to be stored in the first place.

Body builders aren’t judged on athletic performance but aesthetics. It would make sense they care a lot more about diet, but it should be noted that they aren’t athletes and their entire regime is about building muscle, not using energy. It’s a completely different type of optimization.

[filleduchaos]

You very much can outrun a bad diet as far as weight loss/gain goes, which is the topic at hand (not general health).

[StanislavPetrov]

>You can't outrun a bad diet.

You certainly can. If you eat Mcdonald's every day, that's a bad diet, and if you just sit around all day, you will gain weight. But the same person that eats the same exact McDonald's meal every day but also walks for an hour a day is going to be thinner. The real myth being perpetrated on this thread is that if you start walking an hour every day that somehow you will started eating more and that the only way to lose weight is to change your diet. This may be true if you eat a giant box of oreos every few hours, but it is certainly not true just because you have a "bad" diet. Eating healthier food is a good idea and I certainly recommend it, but it seems to me that the refusal of so many to accept that daily exercise in itself can lead to a healthier weight is a sign of denial by the overweight.

[kccoder]

I've been cycling several thousand miles a year for many, many years, and in my experience I can certainly "outrun" a bad diet. Go for a 40 mile bike ride 5 days a week and you'll have a difficult time eating enough food.

A couple years ago I added weight lifting to my regimen and I could never eat enough. Most days of the week I'd stop by mcdonalds to pick up a couple mcdoubles as a snack. I was easily consuming 4-5 thousand calories a day (150-175 grams of protein) and I was still losing weight while gaining muscle. At one point I was sub-10% body fat whilst eating a mix of healthy food and junk food. Every visit my personal trainer was telling me to eat more.

If you're interested in losing weight while eating whatever you want I suggest doing 10-15 hours of fairly intense cardio per week, and 2-3 very intense lifting sessions per week.

[standardUser]

And then there's Michael Phelps, living proof you can outrun (or at least outswim) just about any diet you can imagine. He's obviously an extreme, but he's not the only example.

[paulddraper]

> You can't outrun a bad diet. This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from.

People tend to vastly overestimate the caloric expenditure of activity, probably because it feels strenuous.

4 hard minutes on an assault bike will leave you gasping, but means next to nothing for energy expenditure.

[castlecrasher2]

An athlete can outrun a sedentary person's bad diet, actually. It's all relative, of course, but the saying has exceptions.

[meroes]

Not disagreeing but I think it's worth adding, "but you can outrun a slightly bad diet".

[savanaly]

Counterpoint: that the kind of exercise most people engage in with a goal of weight loss isn't going to work, but the kind of dieting would do might work, is perfectly reasonably expressed with the phrase "You can't outrun a bad diet". I'm aware a more pedantic and literal reading gives lie to the phrase, but that is true of almost every single English true statement ever written.

[djtango]

Intensity of the workout matters. When I go wakeboarding with my wife I build up a nice big appetite. When I go to muay thai I get pretty severe appetite suppression and sometimes have to force myself to eat.

The other thing is that if you track >>performance<< you naturally start caring about diet and lifestyle. So for people just trying their first 5k - I highly recommend tracking and setting time goals.

Nothing keeps me honest about my diet like performance

[ahmeneeroe-v2]

Totally agree with you here. The phrase "rounds to true".

Caveats for the pedantic:

If you've found yourself overweight and sedentary, you are unlikely to adopt a level of exercise needed to outrun your bad diet.

All else being equal, the person with the better diet will have a better body comp (or achieve a goal body comp easier).

[bsder]

This is precisely it.

Consuming a bunch of calories is super easy and quick. That tiny snack bag of chips that you can scarf down in three bites in less than a minute? Yep, 200 calories.

Burning that 200 calories off? Basically a 30-60 minute workout.

Not eating those chips is WAY easier than trying to burn them off after the fact.

[rendaw]

> Instead, it suggests "that dietary intake plays a far greater role than reduced energy expenditure in obesity related to economic development."

That sounds like more or less exactly what the title says to me.

> anyone who has done extensive 'athletic' physical activity

Yes, and there are few such people. Extensive athletic physical activity, becoming an athlete, are at odds with working an office job. You can get out of work and go play soccer for 2-3 hours every day instead of doing household chores, pursuing other hobbies, etc, but most people won't - it's a huge ask.

> not really useful for personal or localised health advice

It absolutely is useful. Becoming an athlete or doing extensive athletics takes a huge time commitment. Eating less does not.

I'm not claiming that there's zero issues with eating less, or that people shouldn't exercise, just that the arguments seem to be off base.

[edanm]

I'm going to push back on this a bit, though I agree with some of the sentiment.; to the average person wanting to lose weight, I think the best advice is obviously to eat less via whatever diet works for them (I personally recommend counting calories, but it's not for everyone).

That said, you write:

> Yes, and there are few such people. Extensive athletic physical activity, becoming an athlete, are at odds with working an office job.

First of all, office jobs are probably dominant in the industry, but there are still lots of jobs that aren't office jobs, and you seem to be excluding all of those.

Secondly, I know plenty of people with demanding careers (e.g. doctors), with kids, who nevertheless train for marathons and run almost every day. There absolutely are people who exercise enough to make a meaningful difference to their caloric expenditure.

> It absolutely is useful. Becoming an athlete or doing extensive athletics takes a huge time commitment. Eating less does not.

I'll reiterate that I agree with this and this is the correct advice for someone who wants to start losing weight. I just wouldn't discount the many people who do also exercise to the point of it making a difference.

[tpm]

> Extensive athletic physical activity, becoming an athlete, are at odds with working an office job. You can get out of work and go play soccer for 2-3 hours every day instead of doing household chores, pursuing other hobbies, etc, but most people won't - it's a huge ask.

> Becoming an athlete or doing extensive athletics takes a huge time commitment. Eating less does not.

Yet perhaps taking a huge time commitment during which you won't be able to eat much is exactly what is needed.

[jmyeet]

I don't think the existence of elite athletes alters the central point: it is vastly to go into calorific deficit by altering diet than increasing exercise.

Running is around 600 calories per hour [1]. A large fries from McDonald's is 480 calories. A can of Coke is 140 calories.

What's easier? Not eating the fries and drinking the Coke or running vigorously for an hour?

When you look at the group who have become morbidly obese, you see diets that reach 10, 20 or 30+ thousand calories a day. You get to 600+ pounds and you actually need like 20,000 calories just to maintain that weight. When such people decide to change, they're often put on a medical diet of ~2400 calories. There is no way they could exercise down to this kind of calorie deficit.

Peple should think of food in terms of how much exercise it is because it becomes impossible to ignore just how much easier it is to alter diet than it is to increase calorie expenditure.

[1]: https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/in-...

[dragonwriter]

> I don't think the existence of elite athletes alters the central point: it is vastly to go into calorific deficit by altering diet than increasing exercise.

You left out the key word in that sentence, which should have appeared after “vastly”. I assume you mean easier, but in fact that’s not true for a lot of people.

> You get to 600+ pounds and you actually need like 20,000 calories just to maintain that weight.

That's wildly inaccurate. It’s more like 5k than 20k. Maintenace calorie requirements are basically linear with weight given similar activity patterns.

Also, most people who need to lose weight haven't already gotten to 600+ lbs.

[cthalupa]

This isn't the first study to show that our bodies adjust to fairly set caloric expenditure - the constrained total energy expenditure model isn't new, and Ponztner and his team aren't the first to advocate for it, but we should be clear that he is an advocate for it, and has been for a while.

Obviously, energy has to come from somewhere, so enough exercise will overcome any adaptations your body makes, but the current evidence seems to suggest that there is a lot of wiggle room for your body to cut energy expenditure to make up for any exercising you do. The evidence suggests this takes time, but it does also suggest that the 20 minutes on the bike daily that helped you drop some pounds at the start will not do much for your weight a year in.

I don't know if it's true or not, but when I first read one of the studies, it did make some intuitive sense to me - humans have spent much of their evolutionary history having to expend significant energy to procure food. If you had to walk 30,000 steps in a day to forage or hunt, it makes sense that limiting other movements while idle, etc., to help preserve energy stores would be beneficial.

[hermitcrab]

My understanding is that the research shows that a highly active hunter gathering and an inactive office worker burn roughly the same number of calories per day. But I find that hard to believe. What is the office worker's body doing to make up the difference for all the movement and muscle contraction?

[bgro]

I think the current default knowledge you could expect a random average person to understand is limited to approximately the following single sentence: “A balance of diet and exercise is the key to losing weight.”

This is technically correct, but is so misleading that I classify it as incorrect.

That statement is exploitative of how the English language is understood, even if not intentionally so, that the lack of any other key points or instructions is itself used as contextual information.

In other words, the sentence likely translates something similar to the following incorrect statement: “A perfectly level 50-50 effort balance of both lowering daily calories to the [2000] calorie limit for [your demographic], because this is the stated necessary calories to support a healthy [demographic] for 1 day, as well as achieving the minimum daily recommended exercise limit of [1 hour for your demographic] plus [1 hour per 100 calories] consumed over [2000 calories] are both of equal value in the goal of losing weight, and are equal requirement to support the other such that one holds no value without the other.”

[mvieira38]

Would you say Luka, Neymar and others are outrunning their diets? Did Shaq, too? You don't automatically get a good physique by being an athlete, you still have to earn it. People just see that all of the top athletes have earned it and take it for granted, like they don't have world class dieticians and a huge financial incentive to maintain a strict diet

[bsoles]

Michael Phelps did outswim his diet. He famously ate a lot of junk food and pizza, and yet remained fit because of his huge daily calorie expenditure. A direct quote from an interview with him, where he states: "I just sort of try to cram whatever I can into my body. It’s pretty much whatever I feel like eating, I’m going to eat".

[0x737368]

I can't take this Luka slander. The guy carried the ungrateful Mavericks team for 6 seasons averaging 35mpg. He's not out of shape. Same thing with Jokic, 10 seasons of 32mpg average. Their mpg also go up in the playoffs.

People need to stop thinking about <10% body fat as the "athletic standard". Some players are super skinny, some players have more mass to them and use it to their advantage.

I do agree with regards to Shaq, the guy coasted in his talent later in his career and let himself go. Had he a better work ethic he could have been in the conversation for one of the greatest players ever.

[djtango]

When I did my first two fights in muay thai I wasn't watching my weight neither changing my diet during fight camp and came in 6kg underweight.

I was absolutely shredded and still ate stuff like katsu curry weekly

[drooby]

Magnus Midtbo has Kristian Blummrnfelt on his show, who is the Olympic gold medalist for triathlon.

Kristian essentially eats pasta and Nutella and bread all day.

So technically, yes, you can outrun a bad diet..

Though me thinks this article is aimed at the average person.

[rojeee]

Nitpick but Alex Yee won gold in 2024, Blummenfelt was 12th!

[nightski]

I feel you are precisely making the opposite point. Athletes eat more because of their energy expenditure. The same happens with people trying to lose weight. It dramatically increases your hunger making a cut that much harder.

I've found that engaging in simple activities like walking is a sweet spot for weight loss. Anything more rigorous and I just can't do it. But that is very anecdotal and may not apply to many people. I would not say I have the strongest willpower when it comes to hunger, especially when stressed due to work or life.

[bawolff]

> The study compares energy expenditure across different economic groups i.e. western people sitting in offices versus hunter-gatherers in Africa, and found that difference in energy expenditure does not account for differences in obesity, so points to consumption as the likely reason.

That seems like a kind of large assumption to make. Obviously it seems like it has to be either diet or exercise, but if the obvious answer was always right we wouldn't need to do studies in the first place.

[xg15]

I think if the goal is to find out what strategies help average people lose weight - who are mostly not athletes or bodybuilders - then excluding athletes is exactly the right thing to do.

[reverendsteveii]

>the link between economic development and obesity is likely related to food (dietary intake) [rather] than daily activity.

--you

>Food — not lack of exercise — fuels obesity

--the article headline

I'm being genuine and not at all snarky when I say I'm having a hard time seeing daylight between these two positions. I would love for someone to help me understand better please.

[smhenderson]

Why unsurprisingly?