UKC

In reply to a post from Neil Williams in the now archived thread...

https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/walls+training/so_regular_exercise_doesnt...

For someone making a lot of fuss about how all claims should be well supported, this is a remarkably specific unsourced claim. Is it based on something you posted up thread that I missed or is it just something you intuited?

As far as I can tell, the claim is that the reduction of calorie burn after exercise is down to metabolic process changes and also unconscious reductions in other physical activity, rather than purely metabolic as you keep portraying it. In any case, I agree with you that this kind of compensation probably isn't going to be sufficient for your hypothetical marathon every couple of days. But you must recognise that isn't within the bounds of realism as a weight loss strategy (the question under discussion).

For some kinds of hypothesis, showing that it evidently can't be true in the extreme is a valid strategy for showing that it's probably not true at all. Things that someone is proposing as universal rules, perfectly applicable in all situations. Prove that Newton's laws must break down approaching light speed then you've proved they were only ever approximations at any speed. But nobody's proposing the calorie compensation as something that solid or universally applicable in the first place. For starters, biological systems are always going to be more complicated than that kind of simple rule.

As for Infinite Monkey Cage and how irresponsible it is for them to portray themselves as a science show whilst not being explicit about every little detail, you've completely missed the point of the show. It's very clearly a light entertainment/comedy show with science and scientists as the inspiration and it's wonderful at that job. They cover the entertaining highlights of a topic in broad strokes. It's not there for detailed scientific education or for weight loss advice. I'd still be critical if they spouted complete nonsense on a topic as important to people's health as this. But despite your protestations about basic laws of physics the fundamental premise (that the expected calorie deficits from reasonable amounts of exercise are typically more or less balanced out by various compensatory factors) seems to be well supported by the evidence people have posted here. The parts in italics are the bits you could maybe accuse them of having glossed over a bit. But that's what you should expect from a show that's aiming to entertain more than educate.

Certainly he seems to be muddling Physics with other school sciences here:

I think this is probably where the great schism lies.

Any time I've felt like I've needed to lose a bit of body fat (which is really what we should be talking about rather than weight), I've upped my exercise levels and lost that body fat - so when someone comes along and says "you can't do that", I say "bollocks".

If they came along and said "most people won't want to raise their exercise levels beyond the point where the body can make some adjustments to conserve body fat, and therefore diet is a better strategy for a large percentage of the population" we'd be having a different discussion.

That sums it up very nicely.

Read the transcript someone posted of the podcast on the other thread.  It is absolutely categorical in stating, to paraphrase, "you have a calorie burn budget each day and your body will not let you exceed it", and it's gross oversimplification to the point of being absolute rubbish, because if it wasn't then nobody would ever lose weight through exercise, and they do.  What is actually said is pretty much "if I normally burn 2500 calories per day that is all I will ever burn", and that is simply untrue.

The point I suspect he was *trying* to make is that when Mr Average takes an extra walk round the block each day in the hope of taking 5 stone off, he won't succeed.  And that *is* true, because the body *does* do a level of compensation.  But that is not what either the podcast or the poster of the original thread actually said.  They both said, categorically, that you CANNOT lose weight through exercise, and it just isn't true.  If you did want to lose weight that way you'd just need a level of exercise most average people can't achieve over a sustained period.

What I'm arguing against is this completely false absolute, not that most people won't lose weight through exercise (which I agree with, as adjusting calories in, i.e. changing diet, is far easier in mathematical terms because the numbers are higher).

That's literally what the podcast and starter of the original thread did do.  I did start discussing it prior to listening, and expected when I did listen that I'd find they would discuss it, suggest that's why losing weight solely through exercise is difficult and I'd accept I'd slightly missed the point.

But when I listened, I was quite shocked to find that no, the podcast actually *did* speak in the same absolutes as the original thread's poster.

I even thought I'd misunderstood that and was going to listen again, but then someone else posted a transcript of that bit of the show on the other thread - and they *actually did* say that.

We'll have to disagree there.  Yes, it's a science based entertainment show, but there's a difference between simplifying things and making statements that are, on a blanket basis, just untrue.

"You can't lose weight through exercise" is totally different from "Most people would do better moderating what they eat to lose weight than exercising, because it's difficult to lose weight through exercise".  The former is a gross oversimplification.  The latter is good advice.

I'm not arguing against the theory of compensation, just that it's some sort of absolute that if I normally burn 2500 calories in a day that is all I will ever burn in a day.  And like it or not, that IS what they said.

I've been reticent to post on this because I've talked to calorie fanatics about this before and it didn't go anywhere. For me the thing I really find difficult is that the "calories in, calories out, it's thermodynamics innit" argument is such a load of tosh in the sense that it misses any nuance in the way an individuals body works. Their usual response is that it's physics. I'll give an unrelated example. Fuel in an engine has the same calorific value. You can't break the amount of energy stored in that fuel source, that's thermodynamics. However there are a variety of ways in which the power which comes out of that fuel is affected, here are a few:
The efficiency of the engine.
The amount of oxygen in the burn

The pressure of the charge and the pressure of the exhaust

Any one of these will change how the fuel is metabolised into power and forward motion. Why would it be any different with a human body?

It's the basic assumption that food is 100% metabolised, at the same rate as the next person, that you can even count the calories correctly to do so and furthermore it omits to look at any macronutrients within the food and the positive or negative effects those might have.

Yes calorie counting can work, but in my view it is a blunt tool. I know this because I wore a continuous blood glucose monitor and did insulin response tests and blood fat response tests, and then looked at how varying my diet changed my weight. In the end I was eating a higher fat, lower carbohydrate diet with increased fibre and the estimated calorie content was higher by several hundred calories but I was still losing weight. 

To me it's bleeding obvious that if you eat 2000 calories of food in which the calories are readily available (eg sugar) then those calories will be absorbed into your body quickly and cause a large insulin spike followed by a crash which will trigger feelings of hunger. A higher protein, fat and fibre diet will leave you feeling more satiated. It's just common knowledge that soon after eating an enormous bar of dairy milk, that you'll be ready to eat again, whereas the same calorific value of a balanced diet will last you longer. And I'm betting that someone who eats 2500 calories of greens vs someone who eats 2000 calories of high starch carbs is still going to be skinnier and healthier. The calorific availability is lower in the greens because the carbs are attached to fibre which slows insulin release and therefore you have a more modest bloodsugar spike  from the same amount of calories and the spike will be spread over a longer period of time. Everybody's insulin and blood fat responses are individual, so someone coming along and saying "well calorie counting works for me so you're just a fat lazy p***K" is so flipping ignorant it's untrue. We respond to food in different ways, that's biology.   

Advice given to the general public by the medical profession is never going to be provably true for absolutely everybody.  "A large percentage of the population" is invariably the best they can do.

Contrary to assumptions and assertions in the other thread it isn't GCSE physics - people and their bodies are varied and infinitely more complicated than that.  (And there is still a ton of stuff here not well understood by science.)

Maybe your n=1 experience is indeed outside the norm. Or outside what's described anyway.  Perhaps because you do more exercise than any of the subjects in the various academic studies.  Perhaps because you're considering your own experience over a different timescale to them.  Dunno.  (Also, nobody is seriously suggesting that exercise makes absolutely no difference whatsoever under any circumstances.)

If you don't monitor your calorie intake precisely perhaps it's also possible that you moderate what you eat while you're exercising more than usual, because that's when you're feeling particularly motivated by the desire to lose weight.

GPs giving advice to people in the hope of helping them to lose weight are *never* taking to people who are going to go out and run a marathon every day, so if you can't cut a doctor on a light hearted panel programme that prioritises entertainment over education a little bit of slack for not explicitly excluding serious athletes, polar explorers and Gary McKee, then I think you're being rather more dogmatic (and pedantic) than necessary.

People ranting at length about a well qualified speaker on such a show misrepresenting the science, while simultaneously making bold statements and sweeping generalisations of their own supported by nothing whatsoever are clearly being a tad hypocritical at best.

It said “roughly every day of your life”. To me that suggests we are talking about averages over an extended period of time. 

Your argument was based on sums over a single 24 hour period, as if all biological processes reset to a baseline state at midnight and there can be no effect outside of that which isn’t true. Most people running a marathon will taper before and rest after, dropping exercise levels to a point where your maths balances pretty easily over a couple of weeks even without appealing to any short term biological changes. Those that don’t rest sufficiently end up with enforced rest through injury anyway. We’re nowhere near breaking the laws of physics if you look at a more plausible timeframe.

So it’s possible but generally not achievable in reality? I think you’re getting lost in the weeds a bit with that particular point. 

However, I wonder if the more interesting aspect of all this is not what might get downregulated when we exercise, what but processes get upregulated when we are sedentary for extended periods. We evolved as pretty active creatures so I wonder if the roughly 2500 calories or whatever is actually a requirement that already accounts for a pretty active lifestyle. If so, the question isn’t “where does the extra energy come from?” but “how come we are still managing to use the same amount when we aren’t active?”

There is a huge difference between a GP consultation (where you obviously will be given advice applicable to you) and a general discussion on a show about science, even a light hearted one.

In even simpler terms you have to stress your body to change it

If you want to be taken seriously on science how about an apology for your highly misleading statement on GCSE Physics.

Well actually some ARE suggesting that. The largest clinical study which is funded by neither the food industry nor the exercise industry has found that across hundreds of studies which have been equalised for all sorts of controls, that exercise does not lead to significant weight loss, it's primarily your diet which does that. It does however lead to other benefits so you should be doing exercise for THOSE benefits, rather than as a way to lose weight. The reality is that your diet reduces your weight, and maintaining an exercise regime helps to keep weight off in the long term, i.e. control what you put in, making sure it's a good, well rounded diet with lots of variety and high in fibre, good fats and low in ultra processed foods , and the weight will come off. 

The calorie counting thing, well how do you actually achieve that other than by literally dropping your calorie count off a cliff? The reality is food is organic and grows in different ways. One piece of beef is going to have a different calorie count to another piece of beef from a cow grown in the same field. Furthermore, once you cook it, it's calorific availability changes dramatically as the cooking process starts the breakdown of cell walls etc. For example, a stick of celery which has 6 calories available raw, may have 25 cooked. 

Not saying this particularly directed at you, more just trying to point out the flaws in that way of thinking which is absolutely prevalent in society...

Literally the first thing I was told in the first session of A-level physics was basically "Right, forget what we told you at GCSE, that was just a simplification."

So no, I absolutely won't "apologise"* for anything.  You can blame poor teaching at my school for that I suppose, but that's hardly my error.

* I do not apologise for any discussion post of any description unless I've got personal which I aim not to do, and with all due respect if you've taken any post on this or the associated thread personally that's your error, not mine, because it's a discussion about "stuff" not the people discussing it.

Not least the podcast and the opening post and subject line of the original thread.  So round we go.

With regard to the rest of your posting I'd completely agree the sustainable way to sustain a healthy weight is to change your diet and take moderate exercise, and that running an ultramarathon purely to lose weight would be more than a little extreme, but throughout this all I've been arguing against is the categorical statement that your body adjusts for any additional calorie burn from exercise, which it can't because there's only so much adjustment available to it.

Ukc (maybe climbing?) seems to attract a disproportionately high number of physicists, engineers, technocrats etc. The threads are full of them. Time for a survey perhaps?

I am fairly well inclined to believe them as this is a whole group of university Nutritionists conducting the biggest research project into it in the world, led by an epidemiologist who is looking at causation and effect. 

I have no doubt that exercise can cause weight loss. What I am more sceptical about is that that weight loss will be permanent as your body will, over time normalise that exercise and resume business as normal, i.e. your metabolism will slow down and your body will just be able to cope with the extra work load. So far, my moderate weight loss has remained over the course of 4 months just by changing what I eat and the combinations I seek to put together, and what I snack on inbetween. I certainly haven't either deprived myself of whole food groups or flogged myself with exercise (any more than I normally would).

<gulps> Guilty as charged...

That again I think is a slightly different aspect - that of why "plateauing" happens when losing weight.  It does seem the body adjusts in that sense unless you're doing silly levels of exercise or eating almost nothing at all.

Again, all I'm arguing against is the statements of absolutes made in the other thread and the podcast.

Being brutally honest I lost the will to live reading the other thread and stopped...

The key word in my post there is 'absolutely'.  I would certainly agree with you that they're suggesting (well - more than just suggesting) that exercise makes little difference to calorie consumption.  And that exercise alone is therefore effectively useless purely in terms of trying to lose weight. (In spiteof the many other benefits.)  But nobody is saying it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever regardless of how much exercise you're talking about and regardless of the timescale you're looking at. 

A few on the other thread are arguing against the former, but most of the wrangling is people arguing against the latter.

Agree completely.  (Real food anyway, I guess the ultra-processed stuff is more quantified.) 

Obviously it's impossible to count every calorie (and even if you could it'd be impossible to know for a given item of food how many will be "calories in" and how many will be calories through.

But it's a question of precision I guess.  Just because you can't count one, maybe knowing to the nearest ten, or fifty, or hundred is good enough to be useful.  Dunno really, I'm not an advocate of calorie counting.

Understood. 

Did you listen to the programme the op posted in the other thread?  All the wrangling is about a single comment made by one panelist towards the end of a 40 minute programme, and a very rigid interpretation of that comment at that.  I thought the programme as a whole was v good, well worth a listen in it's entirety.

I think the interesting question is how much exercise these studies are based on. In many cases it seems to be very small, often 90-150 minutes a week. Personally I think anyone with a moderately active lifestyle is going to blow those numbers out of the water.

We did that to death on the other thread.

Not had a chance to yet. Will give it a listen. 

This is the leader scientist on the study I'm talking about:

youtube.com/watch?v=66hWntvp0_4&

This is also really worth a listen...

youtube.com/watch?v=Gy_vcL1cpP8&

https://www.vox.com/2016/4/28/11518804/weight-loss-exercise-myth-burn-calor... 

The one involving several hundred mildly overweight American women was about that, maybe a bit more in the most active group.  Thats plenty to be relevant to the people 'medical science' is worried about though. 

Nobody trying to deal with the epidemic of obesity that's threatening to become a huge crisis is overly concerned with serious athletes.  Three hour-long sessions, exercise classes, 5-10km runs, whatever, is quite a lot to most people.

That said, some of the studies aren't.  One concerns an entire lifestyle - hunter gatherers doing way *way* more exercise daily than the largely sedentary westerners they were being compared to.

The link I posted in the other thread contains links in turn to lots of those studies:

https://www.vox.com/2016/4/28/11518804/weight-loss-exercise-myth-burn-calor...

Here is my actual direct experience. 

During summer I stick to very carefully controlled diet which I vary very little. If I do this my weight will be stable (very stable). Some weeks I cycle to work 2 -3 days (1.5 to 2hrs each day). On those weeks I can lose up to 2lbs (I still think in Stones and lbs not Kilos) 

Interesting.

Do those 2lbs stay off during subsequent weeks so that you cumulatively lose weight as the summer progresses?

If so, as you lose weight, do you find you continue to lose weight at the same rate as you get lighter, or do you find that you've lost less weight at the end of a cycling week late in the summer than you did at the beginning?

Obviously, part of the problem is that this is being discussed on forum full of “athletes” of various degrees of seriousness.

I speak as someone who put on a bit of weight due to reduced levels of exercise and is losing it again through increasing that level of exercise. Some degree of calorific restriction would speed up that process, but I’m happy and not in a rush.

They do (providing I don't compensate by eating more) Since I'm only losing 5-10% of my body weight I don't think the difference in weight loss due to lower work would be noticeable (also, cycling on mostly flat terrain is more about wind resistance than weight movement)

You didn't blame poor teaching though. The great thing about Physics syllabi is they build properly. If your experience was actually different in concrete terms please tell us anything major that you had to 'unlearn' that was in the earlier syllabus. It's galling that you pick on Physics when the situation in say Chemistry or Biology has always, by the nature of those subjects at GCSE and A level, been problematic.

This is UKC there are no rules on what stuff we can and can't discuss as long as the discussion is within the site rules.

I just had a quick look. Long! Can't watch those now, but it looks interesting, I'll have another look later.

The snippet of that first one that I watched just now reminded me of this - very much chimes with what you've been saying I think.

https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/49/15/967.full

Cool.

I wasn't thinking about the workload going down as you get lighter, more about 'compensatory metabolic effects' I was reading about down a bit of a rabbit hole earlier on.  (IE: that a given calorie deficiency doesn't necessarily always correspond to the same weight loss for the same person.)

I was meaning to say something about that, but re-reading it again just now I realised I don't understand it nearly as well as I thought I did, so better not. D'Oh!

More staying power than me then! I gave up just after reading the thread title.

I thought this one might be better...

Perhaps we could agree that:

1. All else being equal, increased exercise results in weight loss;

2. All else being equal, decreased food quantity (same mix) results in weight loss;;

3. All else is never equal.

Can we agree on that? I could live with:

1 All else being equal, increased exercise may result in temporary weightloss. This may or may not last.

2 All else being equal, decreased food quantity (same mix) results in a temporary loss in weight until your body adapts to the new lower calorie intake and the loss plateaus or reverses as your body tries to retain fat for harder times

3 All else is never equal.

Yes it's a lot of content and not all of it will be interesting, but these are two people saying things which actually make sense...

The human body is fundamentally different. A car uses no fuel sitting in a garage. The claim under discussion is that the human body uses the same energy, more or less, whether sitting in a chair or exercising.

That isn't obvious to me. 

Do you have any evidence for that claim? 

Chocolate is also very high in fat.

I expect I am considering it on a different timescale - the body likes homeostasis, so losing body fat quickly is fighting your body. I've always looked to lose fat very slowly so that it never feels like it's out of balance.

And yes, my point was that you need to do a fair amount of exercise to get this effect. 

Perhaps, but I can't really see it. I've changed my diet to be more healthy over the years, but I've always eaten till I'm full. When I start exercising more, my appetite goes through the roof and I eat way more at meal times as well as fueling the training, but once I'm up to a good level of CV training (bike, run, swim) I start losing body fat. A mixture of HIIT and endurance seems to work very well.

At the extreme end, when I was training for half ironman distance I was finding it difficult to keep my body fat up to a healthy range and was having to force feed myself way more than I felt like eating. This caused some jealousy for my colleagues -  most days I would start with around 3000 kCal on my desk, and graze on lunch through the day, aiming to finish by mid afternoon so I could create some space for dinner. Stopping the fat loss was the only time in my life I have calorie counted.

Or, it may instead reduce weight gain.

If someone is exercising regularly and not losing weight, that is one thing. But, perhaps if they stopped exercising, they would gain weight.

If someone has been steadily putting on weight and reached 100kg, say, then even maintaining that weight may be a relative success. Either by diet or exercise. Otherwise, a year later they may be 110kg or more!

Well as you get lighter your BMR drops till you’re in equilibrium again.

1) I never said the comparison was perfect. My point was more that energy can be converted at different rates, in different ways depending on the "motor" which is burning on the fuel. The human body is no different. Or are you suggesting something else?

2) Why is that claim no obvious to you? That's not up for debate, it's simply true. Otherwise diabetics wouldn't be diabetic would they? Diabetics don't get Hypoglycima if they eat a load of fat. I.e. we are susceptible to the type of food we are eating.

3) Yes, please watch the video I posted above. They have conducted studies. I can anecdotally confirm it because I changed my diet in a somewhat controlled way and noticed the difference. Sure you could explain it away, but it worked.

4) are you seriously trying to suggest that you don't know that? You feel full after eating a chocolate bar compared to the same amount of calories from a more balanced diet? I think you might just be trying to score points...

Anecdotally again, I know this to be false. I went from exercising hard several times a week to not in a matter of weeks because I broke my ankle. I didn't change the way I ate, but my exercise dropped off a cliff. I barely moved from 93kg.

Same happened to me in 2020 and I gained several stone very quickly.

Are these compensatory mechanisms better in some than others perhaps?

Unless you weighed the portions out, before breaking your ankle and after, as well as recording those weights, there is no way of proving that. You maybe ate til you were full, but only consumed the amount you needed?

I've never eaten enough chocolate at one sitting to compare to a full meal. I find chocolate just as filling as a cereal bar. Which is a fairer comparison. 

On your other point, I have no specific knowledge of diabetes. 

We're all trying to score points on these threads! We're just a bunch of climbers who like to pretend we know about everything.

I have this image of you with a broken ankle, precariously trying to weight yourself every day on the bathroom scales while balancing on a crutch.

Precisely. Unless you do a scientific study of what you are eating, there are too many unknowns. 

That's why I'm sceptical about these scientific studies. Unless you have a fully controlled environment, you don't know what's going on. Or, what people are really doing re exercise and calorie intake.

I am sure they are. I have over many years barely budged from 93-95kg, no matter what I ate or did, somewhat frustratingly as it's slightly too much for me. After doing the programme I've done which as I explained earlier involved higher fibre in particular, I feel better in general, and am now finding it easy to maintain 88-90 kg. I feel like that's due to the diet as I've really not varied what I was doing much...

I did say anecdotally, I'm aware it's hardly scientific.

Only if you're getting lighter by reducing muscle mass. 

If you're getting lighter by reducing body fat, you might use less energy to move around but you won't affect your BMR.

Usually, increased exercise results in increased muscle mass and therefore higher BMR.

Which is also why talking about losing weight rather than losing body fat can be very misleading - if your exercise results in as much (or more) muscle mass gain as fat loss, then you'll be improving your body composition but won't lose (or will even gain) weight.

Classic UKC logic there.  The more complicated the situation, the more likely you are to get the right answer (for everyone!) by ignoring the science and just going with your 'feels'.

He specifically said “a controlled environment” in terms of reliability I.e. if you allow people to self report their intake/ exercise the chances are they are fibbing. So you’re taking his quote out of context. The only controlled study linked in both these threads suggested exercise + calorie restriction was more effective than just calorie restriction and nobody bothered responding to that poster, which I think says a lot. People here too invested on their own diet strategies and exercise routines I think. 

But you are adamant that you ate the exact same amount...

Being sceptical is different from having an answer. I have no idea how the average person could best lose weight, nor how the body manages the daily burning of calories. I don't pretend to have your or beardy Mike's expertise in these matters, nor on insulin production and diabetes.

I've made no claims, except that many overweight people find it difficult to maintain their weight  let alone lose weight. That view was disproved by Beardy Mike, because he broke his ankle and didn't put on weight. The logic of that escapes me!

True, though your total energy expenditure will drop as you get lighter even if loss is fat from fat cells. It takes less energy to move about due to being lighter and your body being more efficient etc.

Or people in general. Especially ones that don't fit what they want to hear or believe......

Climate change etc

Obviously you're just being snarky there, beardy mike makes no claim to have proved or disproved anything.  (And neither he nor I are claiming any particular expertise.)

The logic of what he's saying though is that his own anecdotal experience bears out what the scientific consensus appears to be - that exercise alone is not a significant factor as far as bodyweight is concerned.

What am I missing here?  As far as I can make out the only person who has posted links to studies in this thread was me*.  (Unless you count beardy mike's youtube links to interviews on the 'Diary of a CEO' podcast.)

*Can't be arsed to trawl through the other thread, soz.

It was in the other thread, sorry, should have said. I only glanced at it but it seemed to support the ‘common sense’ view that if you increase energy output whilst cutting input you reduce weight/ improve body comp compared to just regulating nutrition intake. Seemed pretty solid but I didn’t read the whole thing. Everyone just seemed to ignore the guy to carry on arguing about paleo/ cardio etc. I guess if the study was not longitudinal (long term) enough it might not reflect long term outcomes but I think it’s the best evidence I’ve seen that the argument that the body just self regulates at a certain level so exercise makes little odds doesn’t stack up. Of course nutrition counts, but I don’t think the body has a magic mechanism for ‘inflammation’ to account for several hundred calories a day if you’re boshing out regular cardio/ HIIT. Anyway, now I’m getting dragged in…

 I‘ve avoided commenting because nutrition is such a complex and I think as climbers we have a tendency to fixate on weight, it can be unhealthy especially when there is so little consensus and more complexity emerging the further we study. Anyway, will continue reading with interest. 

Ah, I misunderstood you - I thought you meant a link that had been posted in both threads.

That wasn't the only link to a study posted in either thread, there have been several others and I've posted a few myself.  (Also a vox.com article several times, which in turn contains links to dozens of them.)

But I struggle to understand studies written in very technical language, not being an expert and all.  Other than what Chris Van Tulleken seems to have said as a more or less throwaway comment on a panel discussion (which, imo, is being taken far too literally by some), there seems to be very little suggestion that exercise is entirely irrelevant, merely that upping your exercise is an ineffective method of weight control.  And there's certainly no suggestion that exercise is pointless - Van Tulleken takes pains even as he makes those comments to stress the many benefits of being more active.

I think the main source he was drawing on there was Herman Pontzer's work studying the Hadza people in Tanzania.  Here's a link to an interesting interview with Pontzer.  I'm not trying to prove a point with this link, just find it interesting.  (And considerably easier to understand than a study full of technical jargon.)

https://dupri.duke.edu/news-events/news/herman-pontzer-explains-where-our-c...

Flipping Norah, exactly as deepsoup says, I'm not making some kind of scientific claim, I'm saying what I have read about it has been borne out by that experience. If you want to pick holes in it, crack on. Or you could watch either of the videos I linked to people who can explain it far better than I and HAVE done the science.

That was the impression on infinite monkey cage - whatever you do (effectively) - your body will maintain its BMR I.e you do a bunch of cardio so your body will not then ‘inflame’/ be anxious/ raise hormone levels, but if you don’t expend the calories on exercise it use them elsewhere. So calorie use stays the same. I’m not convinced as they seemed to mix up metabolic and behavioural processes.
 

The other argument - we tend to overestimate our calorie expenditure through exercise and underestimate our intake, so upping exercise tends to be ineffective - seems more persuasive to me. I’m not in any way an expert and I think as long as we’re generally healthy and active it’s nothing to fixate on tbf. Most of the studies I’ve seen in relation to climbing - there’s a recent podcast from ‘the nugget’ climbing show actually - seems to suggest weight is rarely the limiting factor for performance anyway. 

It’s definitely calories in calories out: I’ve put on a kilo just eating popcorn and reading through these nutrition threads. 

Yeah but that could be accounted for your out of control downward spiralling gut flora.

A bit like self reporting willy size, people are always going to err on the positive side.

Would you describe yourself as a scientist Neil? It's interesting that you seem to be refusing to believe the headline from a study, referring to a universal law of physics that doesn't seem to be particularly relevant. 

I'd say it's pretty disingenuous to completely dismiss what seems like a fairly reputable bunch of researchers are saying without you telling us either 

A) what issues you have with their methodology

Or 

B) what issues you have woth their data interpretation.

Otherwise you just sound a bit silly. 

I am questioning statements made in the first post of the original thread and on a podcast.

To which study are you referring precisely?

The studies that the people on said podcast refer to. I don't think they were just making it up! 

Google Tim Spector, there will I'm sure be quite a bit.

Here, I found an excert of the video I posted above which is particularly relevant. He's a King's college professor of epidemiology and works with leading nutrionists. Far more of an expert than anyone on either of the threads...

youtube.com/watch?v=Tjha8mUydks&

Of course you WILL lose body fat (more an faster) if you increase exercise but over time your body will adjust to the "new normal" and seek to reach that 2500 (ish) calorie-burn sweet spot. Your body is in it for the long term - so you may think you have achieved your goal but Inner-Ciro is quietly & subtly adjusting long after you think your period of diet & exercise was over. That's the argument of the Hadza study.

Thanks for that.  (I still haven't got around to watching the full thing from earlier - but I will, honest.)

That bit at the end about how "Calories In -vs- Calories Out" has been co-opted essentially as propaganda by the corporations selling ultra-processed foods, sugary drinks etc. to focus attention on a perceived lack of exercise as the cause of obesity and divert it away from their products was particularly key I thought.  (I posted a link somewhere upthread to the same thing expressed in an opinion piece in the BMJ.)

It's always bothered me that someone inevitably bangs that drum whenever this stuff is discussed.  "It's just calories in -vs- calories out innit, obvious!"  I mean of course it's true, and it is obvious, it's just the first law of thermodynamics - but it always gave me the eebie jeebies because it's invariably presented as some kind of revelation while it's so simplistic as to be profoundly unhelpful.  From now on it'll also give me the eebie jeebies because it's playing right into the hands of corporations who are using their vast resources very much not in our best interests.  Coca Cola et al.  In time I think we'll come to regard them in a very similar light to the tobacco companies as far as public health is concerned.

Bit of a diversion there, but back on track..  can I just repeat myself from a few posts further up and add this link again:
https://dupri.duke.edu/news-events/news/herman-pontzer-explains-where-our-c...

Chris Van Tulleken specifically references work done studying the Hadza people in his comments on the Infinite Monkey Cage.  He's talking there about research done by Herman Pontzer and his colleagues which has produced several scientific papers, but this article sums it up in a much more accessible way for non-experts. (Like me.)

Something I am curious about though, is the claim I've often heard that working-class mid-Victorian Britons consumed twice as many calories as we, or the Hadza, do now on account of their physically arduous lifestyle*. 

I'm not sure how you square that circle and reconcile those claims with the research done by Pontzer and others - perhaps it just comes down to those papers being written by historians not scientists, and containing some unfounded assumptions.  Dunno.  Scope, as the last paragraph often says, for further research perhaps.

*eg. this:  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672390/

He is claiming that the Hadza do many times the amount of exercise that the rest of us do. Helpfully, he has provided an amount of exercise - 16,000 steps a day. Given the claims, I’m surprised how little it is. To me that sits in, or maybe on the edge of the level where your body can compensate by reducing energy use in other activities.

To quote from the Hazda study article:

"What this means, Pontzer says, is you can walk 16,000 steps each day like the Hadza and you won’t lose weight."

That's *walking* about 7 miles a day.

That might sound like a lot of exercise to a completely sedentary person, but it is going to be pretty normal if you are a postie, a nurse, or many other western occupations where you spend a lot of time on your feet, and probably a lot less exercise than many tradesmen and labourers will get.

I'm no expert on hunter-gatherer tribes, but I would imagine that when they're not out hunting and gathering they're getting a lot of proper downtime.

They're not going to be running around town getting the shopping, taking kids places, stressing about finances and job prospects, etc., they will be conserving energy for the next hunt.

You can't extrapolate from that lifestyle to what happens if you take up an exercise regime as part of your western lifestyle.

Michael Phelps ate around 12000 cKal a day as a professional athlete. It didn't magically adjust back down to hit that "2500 (ish) calorie-burn sweet spot" over time, he carried on burning what his training load required.

Your body is a complex machine that adapts to the stimulus it gets. 

If you sit around eating high sugar content processed foods and doing little exercise, your hormones will signal that it is the time of year when the fruit is ripe and plentiful, that will probably be followed by winter, so a good time to convert the meal to fat and signal hunger again.

If you do several hours of cardio a day, your body will assume it has to continue being ready for hunting/escaping/fighting and will prioritise fuelling, growth and repair over fat storage, and will in fact want to avoid excess fat storage to make hunting/escaping/fighting easier.

That's also what bugs me. How the IOC can hold their heads high whilst promoting Coke I really don't know. I mean don't get me wrong, after a long hard day of climbing I might indulge but a sport drink it ain't. To my mind at least, this obesity crisis we face is because of work pressure, the reduction of available time, the requirement for convenience and all of that playing into the hands of people who don't care for anything or anyone other than themselves and their own back pocket. Slowing down to cook properly and eat at leisure like the French and Italians do is important. And you know what you're putting in your food, and it's not bags of sugar and salt, it has texture to make you chew and digest properly and you're not going to be pooing bricks afterwards...

Yes, looking a little deeper he reports Hadza men typically walking 12.2 ± 2.7km, and doing about 135mins of moderate-vigorous physical activity daily.  That is many times the amount of exercise the rest of us do, at least double, being in mind that "the rest of us" in this context means westerners in general and specifically the population of the USA, not you personally.

Yes, maybe.  Dunno.  Have you found some evidence of where that 'level' is, assuming it does exist, or is that just a guess? 

Perhaps that alone would explain the apparent mismatch between working-class Victorian England and essentially timeless Tanzania - clearly a Victorian navvy digging a canal by hand would be doing a lot more activity again than a Hadza hunter-gatherer.  Based on what it seems they were eating, perhaps a comparable amount to an elite athlete in training and getting through 5000 odd calories a day.

But again, I don't think that's a 'gotcha'.  (I'm not clear whether you do either.) 

Nobody is saying it won't make a difference to your weight to go out and run a marathon every day.  The very next sentence after Pantzer mentions those 16000 steps in that article reads: "Sure, if you run a marathon tomorrow you’ll burn more energy than you did today."

When Van Tulleken (and others) say increasing your exercise alone won't help with weight loss, they're talking about normal people - the vast majority of people living western lifestyles, listening to podcasts and doing relatively normal western people things.  16000 steps (or 12.2km) every single day is clearly right up at the top end of that, they're not talking about a couch potato turning into Gary McKee overnight.

There are always going to be exceptions, because this is not GCSE physics.  But honestly, I don't think people chipping in to discussions like this one to point out that they do loads more exercise than a mere 12.2km per day are honestly engaging with the ideas being expressed.  I think they're basically just willy-waving.

I think the obvious short answer to that is KER-CHING! 

All of that, but also - and perhaps more relevant than ever - poverty.  (Especially during the current, ongoing and deepening 'cost of living' crisis.)  Eating well is expensive.  Good quality ingredients are pricey, and so is the gas/electricity you need to cook them. Obesity is overwhelmingly a disease of the poor.

I'd go further than that, I'd say the advice is obviously aimed at people who are overweight, who do need to diet. It's obviously correct, the amount of exercise needed to burn calories is probably unwise and unfeasible for somebody overweight. In the majority of cases it's going to be a bad diet that doesn't lend itself to the individual significantly increasing their activity levels.

I think people with unhealthy diets see active people with a healthy weight and assume it's the exercise not good eating. I've noticed this in everyday life from comments people make. I assume they are the people this is aimed at.

I certainly don't think it was meant to lead to the sort of detailed discussion we have here, on a site with many active people who eat well. Different individuals seem to have different metabolisms and dietary needs to fuel their activities so there's people talking about their anecdotal reasoning for a message that isn't really relevant to them.

I agree.

Indeed they do.  The thing that's really come as a bit of a revelation to me, as I've been reading up on this stuff (reinforced by beardy mike's youtube clip above), is the extent to which the manufacturers of highly processed foods and drinks have been spending a lot of money to promote and encourage that assumption.  Corporations spend millions of dollars for one reason and one reason only - the same reason that tobacco companies spent millions suppressing, diverting and undermining research into the causes of cancer back in the day, and the same reason that fossil fuel companies have done likewise with climate change.

Thanks all, this has been interesting.
I need to get on with some work now, so I'm going to try quite hard to check out of UKC for a bit..

I made a point of reading the link you posted, particularly the interview with Pantzer. Unfortunately it is full of hyperbole. Things like suggesting that the Hadza do more exercise in a day than the average American or European does in a week, when in fact the inadequate amount of exercise that the average American or European does in a week is about three times the daily Hadza step count. Why make this obviously incorrect statement?

Presumably that refers to the claim they are doing 135mins of moderate-vigorous physical, activity daily rather than the number of steps. If that’s true it’s over 6 times WHOs recommended weekly minimum, which most westerners don’t manage to meet. 

I believe the consensus is that step count is a poor predictor of any health outcomes, while moderate-vigorous exercise shows pretty robust effects. Getting your heart rate up matters more than moving your feet. 

135 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise is much more than 16,000 steps. Which is it?

No idea, not my research. Although a sustained brisk walk/slow jog would typically get someone into the moderate range, particularly in a very hot climate and if carrying a heavy load for some of it (e.g. the animal you were hunting). 16,000 steps in 2.25 hours at say 8km/hr sounds near enough right to me. Especially factoring in that their daily exercise often included activities such as digging tubers and chopping trees which won’t add to figures for distance/steps but will add to exercise totals. So I wouldn’t expect the same ratio of steps to exercise duration as a typical westerner who might be fairly sedentary most of the day and then go for a run.

Don’t have a proper answer for you, but I don’t think the numbers are incompatible. 

Edit: it looks like the actual research measured exercise levels using metabolic byproducts and travel distances using GPS, so both the 135 minutes and 16000 steps seem to be transformations of the data to make it more accessible to the general public. I’ve no idea how reliably one can make those transformations so one or other of those numbers could also just be a bit off in the pop science version.  

Is this the guy who did the study referenced in the podcast and original thread?  It's that one that I'd like to read to see if it does say the same thing the OP of the original thread and the podcast did or, as I suspect, not quite (i.e. that TIMC simplified it to the point of removing some of the important distinctions).

It's that study that was at the root of the discussion on the other thread.

He seems to have done quite a lot (and in the case of the ZOE stuff, like with their COVID stuff, it's rather hard to find the science among the marketing) so finding the exact study under discussion isn't very easy...

Don't know, I suppose I posted that as much for the others as well who were saying I am just making stuff up (I know you're not doing that). But it gave a fairly succinct and layman's version of what he has been studying. I think the opacity of the Zoe stuff is partly because his research means he has to read lots and lots of studies, reanalysing the data to see what new conclusions can be drawn from it. That said, the other chap I linked who is not involved with Zoe came at it from a very similar stance and also extremely knowledgeable on these things.  

You both seem to be assuming that the 'steps' and the 'minutes' are referring to the same data.  I'm not sure that's a safe assumption.  My guess would be that the minutes are based on the metabolic analysis, and the steps are a direct translation of the travel distances off the GPS tracking.

I doubt the steps all count towards the minutes, because we're talking about extremely fit people who walk everywhere, so if they're not in a hurry walking might not elevate the heart rate enough to be 'moderate exercise'.  And if they were in a hurry, there's no way it'd take them 135mins to cover 12km ish.  ('Moderate exercise' requires you to be slightly out of breath but still able to hold a conversation doesn't it?  I doubt the Hadza equivalent of popping down to the shops does that.)

Conversely they might get a bit of a dab on doing some physical activity each day that doesn't involve walking/running.

Seeing as we're talking about Hadza, there was also a study conducted on their microbiome, here's a link to tell you about it briefly: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/08/24/545631521/is-the-secre...

Again, anecdotal, but my guts were constantly in turmoil after I had chemotherapy when I was 25. To the point I wondered whether I had something wrong with me. I ate lots of high starch carbs and a reasonable amount of processed food plus a dose of beer on top. Turns out it was a lack of fibre. <warning, to much information approaching> now going for a poo is sweet as... I feel less bloated. 

Thing about the microbiome is it has been completely neglected by science and they are currently learning lots of new things. The most interesting to me is that certain strains are after the same bad foods and send messages of craving to your brain...

As much as anything I was just curious as to the face validity of Nick’s critique taken in isolation before looking at the actual methodology.

Yup, I said the same in the bit you quoted in your reply.

Yup, that’s why I said about factoring in exercise from digging, chopping trees etc (examples taken from the research paper) and why walking distance alone is going to be a poor comparison with e.g. a recreational runner in the UK. 

D'Oh! Not paying attention, soz. 🤦

More info about the Hadza... 

https://www.painscience.com/blog/hungry-hungry-humans-balance-the-energy-bu...

The interesting thing is that the balance of calories is maintained by the body cutting down inflammation. Which correlates with why fasting is good for you (less calories suppresses inflammation response).