It's literally just calories in vs. calories out.
If 400 calories/day meets your weight loss goals, all you have to do is make sure that the calories you expend + the calories you no longer intake = 400.
The ratio of those two factors completely varies from person to person on what their motivation levels are going to be, but as long as it works for you it will result in the same amount of weight loss as any other ratio
The whole point of the article is that the traditional "calories in/calories out" model is wrong.
"Based on the research, Pontzer has proposed a new model that upends the the old "calories in, calories out" approach to exercise... He calls this the "constrained model" of energy expenditure, which shows that the effect of more physical activity on the human body is not linear."
Followed by a paragraph describing that it's just a hypothesis and they'll have to reconcile with studies that show that you burn more energy with exercise. I didn't say that doing 400 calories of exercise in a day was easy, or that it wouldn't make you way more hungry and prone to eating more, which are the main points of this article.
That's why I said that you have to find some compromise that works for yourself, I didn't say where that balance lay for most people.
The constrained model doesn't contradict cals in/cals out. All it says that the calories out will be sublinear in the amount of exercise added.
Furthermore, the graph of energy expenditure over time (in section 10) directly agrees with what calories in/calories out predicts. See, for example, how perfectly the "very low calorie diet" agrees with the exponential decay predicted by theory.
At the individual level, some very good research on what works for weight loss comes from the National Weight Control Registry, a study that has parsed the traits, habits, and behaviors of adults who have lost at least 30 pounds and kept it off for a minimum of one year. They currently have more than 10,000 members enrolled in the study, and these folks respond to annual questionnaires about how they've managed to keep their weight down.
The researchers behind the study found that people who have had success losing weight share a few things in common: They weigh themselves at least once a week. They restrict their calorie intake, stay away from high-fat foods, and watch their portion sizes. They also exercise regularly.
But note: These folks use physical activity in addition to calorie counting and other behavioral changes. Every reliable expert I've ever spoken to on weight loss says the most important thing a person can do is to limit calories in a way they like and can sustain, and focus on eating more healthfully.
In general, diet with exercise can work better than calorie cutting alone, but with only marginal additional weight-loss benefits. "
It doesn't upend it, it basically just says "Don't count calorie expenditures as part of your caloric deficit", which has been standard advice for every resource I've used for quite some time.
The theory says that as you do additional exercise, you get diminishing returns in terms of the number of calories you burn. As your exercise level increases, you have to do ever more exercise to burn the same number of calories, because the body has various compensatory mechanisms designed to avoid weight loss.
The traditional model proposes a much simpler linear relationship: do an additional unit of exercise and you will burn X more calories, forever. He says that is incorrect and you actually get diminishing returns, where additional units of exercise burn ever fewer calories rather than just a constant.
I understand that. My point was that I've never seen a plan where people tell you to eat as much as you want as long as you do x hours of activity per day. The only plans I've seen like that are for strong men competitors or where the Rock ate like $300 worth of food every day and worked out for six hours daily.
That is exactly the nutrition advice that has been promoted in various government and school health programs for decades: eat what you like, just do X amount of exercise and you'll be fine. Calories in, calories out.
The article goes into some detail about this, mentioning that a great deal of that research was funded by companies that make sugary drinks and other high-calorie food.
> The whole point of the article is that the traditional "calories in/calories out" model is wrong.
I think what they mean by this is that the "calories out" portion is what is mostly wrong (or at least, misunderstood ), not that "calories in" are probably the most significant factor when it comes to fat loss. They don't seem to dispute this.
I (despite the article) am mostly in agreement with you, but I think that calories out is a very complex subject. For example, when I calculated how many calories I was burning on my longer runs, it ended up being around 3000 calories/week. However, as I said before, my intake went up. Way up. I ate like an idiot. Donuts? Yeah. Cheeseburgers? Sometimes ordered two. Dr. Pepper? Bring the two liter! I absolutely added more than 3000 calories to my diet after I started running. And yet despite all that, I just kept dropping weight.
The human body is a very complex, non-linear thing. Discerning operating principles by looking solely at inputs and outputs is a hard problem.
