So if the myth is simply "we are fat because we don't exercise more", agreed. But the effectiveness of the new drugs is already enough to underline that point pretty heavily.
It seems that the idea really getting flirted with here is that the kind of exercise you have to do to lose weight is hard. And we seem to make it harder by loading it in such a way that people that do a crap job out there running think they "must not be a runner." Statistically, nobody is a runner on their first few years. It takes time. And is hard. Just like a lot of other skills.
This is true for the self control it takes to not lay in bed with your phone scrolling. Once you have built that habit, it is flat out hard to kick for a lot of us. It isn't that you are just missing that one trick to make it work. It is a type of hard work.
A great point to expand on here is the challenge, and huge benefits of finding activities we love. Sometimes it might be an obscure sport that is hard to discover or awkward to find locally, but when we find the activity we love to do great things happen, not just weight loss.
colechristensen•2h ago
One, you absolutely can "outrun" a diet. If you've known anyone a little bit too much into fitness then you've known someone who has struggled to eat enough to maintain and build weight.
I had a friend who would drink a gallon of whole milk a day to maintain weight because he did so much at the gym.
I'm not saying it's healthy, but saying it isn't possible to exercise so much it's difficult to keep weight on is stupid.
Any beyond this, with tiny homes in dense neighborhoods and social norms that require parents to literally be watching their children 24/7 usually in their tiny home... yeah... the children are fat and depressed.
Lock kids in cages their entire lives and they have emotional problems and weight problems. Then you talk about physical activity like it's "training" and something that has to be scheduled and measured and doled out in just the right doses.
Normalize children having safe space to be by themselves outside in the world without constant surveillance and maybe they won't have so many dopamine addiction social media problems and obesity.
DangitBobby•2h ago
And in the US, a bunch of the food that's convenient to buy and eat is "hyperpalatable". You're going to be really hard pressed to lose and keep weight off without deliberately adjusting your diet to support it.
appreciatorBus•2h ago
As for your swipe at people in cities, I don’t know what to say - the fastest way to lower the amount of “diet outrunning” you and your kids do, is to move to a place where every daily activity requires a car and because everyone drives everywhere all the time, it’s not safe to let your kids roam.
colechristensen•1h ago
Let's not move goalposts and continue to argue.
I'm responding to the title and the article.
>Just because it’s possible
So I'm right and you'd like to change the stakes so you can continue to argue the incorrect point of the author. Just stop. It's possible, it's not a myth, the author's thesis being basically incorrect invalidates the rest of the rambling post, try again next time.
watwut•1h ago
nawgz•2h ago
I'm not trying to strawman here, but I've never met a person like that who was ever overweight at any point in their life.
It seems pretty obvious to me that saying "some people can't eat enough to put on weight / get fat" is a distinct thing from saying "someone who cannot stop putting on weight / getting fatter will almost never be able to lose the weight without adjusting their diet". Do you agree or am I missing something?
colechristensen•1h ago
More or less anyone can get to the point of being active enough where their body's ability to absorb calories is a limiting factor. It's not genetic or "some people" kind of thing, everybody has this limit and can hit it and people who are really excited about exercise and do a tremendous amount of it have to have strategies about how to get enough calories in their body on a day to day basis.
It's a lot of activity to get to this point, but some folks have magical thinking about eating.
Anyone absent a significant disability can be active enough to lose weight regardless of diet.
I'm not saying the "go insane and spend most of your free time exercising" is the best course of action, but far too many people have magical thoughts about changing diet or changing activity levels being ineffective for changing body composition.
Getting sat down in a doctors office and being told to do this isn't particularly effective, but that's different from actually doing it being effective.
dwohnitmok•1h ago
This is an extremely common story for anyone who does through hiking on the Appalachian Trail (or Pacific Crest Trail, Continental Divide Trail, etc.). Quite a lot of people start overweight (although I have no idea what the percentage looks like). Almost everyone ends up losing a very significant amount of weight along the way. It is very difficult to stay overweight on the trail. People are intentionally choosing the absolute most calorie-dense food they possibly can, gorging themselves at every opportunity, consistently eating integer multiples of the standard recommended caloric intake, and are still losing large amounts of weight.
This is definitely an outlier case though.
plorkyeran•1h ago
gopalv•1h ago
That honestly might be an absorption issue, not an intake issue - you can hit aerobic limits enough for your body to skip digesting stuff & just shove protein directly out of the stomach instead of bothering to break it down.
My experience with this was a brief high altitude climb above 5km in the sky, where eating eggs & ramen stopped working and only glucon-d kept me out of it.
The way I like to think of it is that the fat in your body can be eaten or drank, but needs to be breathed out as CO2 to leave it.
The rate at which you can put it in and the rate of letting it go are completely different.
preommr•1h ago
That's around 2.4k calories.
That's like three slices of costco pizza and a large coke. I can do that like 3-4 times and I am not even that fat.
And that's like half to a third of the absolute peak. Like the rock who basicaly works out all day, eats 5-7k calories.
The point is there are people that are eating large fries and triple thick milkshakes as snacks driving from place to place because it makes them feel happy instead of just eating to feel full. And you just can't outrun that.
lovich•1h ago
3-4 times that would be 7200-9600 calories a day, already more than your example of the Rock.
Regardless
> The point is there are people that are eating large fries and triple thick milkshakes as snacks driving from place to place because it makes them feel happy instead of just eating to feel full. And you just can't outrun that.
Yes, if you eat more calories than you expend, because you spend your time eating while driving, instead of exercising, you wont expend more calories than you consume.
That doesn't change the fact that a human can exercise enough that they have difficulty maintaining weight even after eating significantly more calories than necessary for normal maintenance weight.
Nothing about the human metabolism circumvents thermodynamics
weird-eye-issue•1h ago
You literally can. You just need to burn more calories than you take in. It would be difficult but not impossible and is simple math and thermodynamics.
solatic•1h ago
There's a big difference between someone who feels satiated too quickly and someone who has a lot of difficulty feeling satiated. It has nothing to do with how much exercise someone gets. It's also much more difficult to eat large quantities of clean calories (for putting on muscle) compared to eating large quantities of dirty calories (putting on fat).
watwut•1h ago
Calories are calories, neither dirty or clean.
esseph•1h ago
You can absolutely burn more calories that you take in, especially if stressed and not eating right. Or if simply... overtraining because of various psychological issues. Most people are not overtraining, nor are they in combat. Most.
sa46•1h ago
Anecdotally, I lost 26 lbs in Ranger School.
grebc•1h ago
paulddraper•58m ago
It’s not stupid. It’s true.
Simple math, exercise does not burn “that many” calories.
Diet, hormones, and genetics have far larger effects than exercise, relatively speaking.
(Exercise is A+ fantastic for a number of reasons. But a secondary mechanism for weight control.)
colechristensen•45m ago
Is it difficult for you to understand the phrase "not possible"?
No one in the world has ever exercised so much they struggled to keep weight on? Everyone in the world who has ever said that was the case was lying? The person in this thread who said they experienced the same was lying?
You should be ashamed of yourself.
EDIT:
God, you're a CTO. That's just absurd. Think before you write.