You see this often with middle class city people in their late 20s and 30s.
You go from being athletic in high school and walking all day in college to suddenly being in your prime dating age, regularly out eating and drinking with friends or dates, hitting 2-3 cocktails a few nights a week. You start investing more into your ultra-sedentary career, which you drive to, which constantly requires more of your time to get that next promotion. You are unable to have healthy home cooking, instead replacing it with restaurant work lunches and happy hours with your coworkers.
In addition, as you make more money, that enables even more convenience. Amazon delivers you products, no need to leave the house. Instacart delivers you groceries, no need to even go to the corner store. Doordash always at the ready to indulge every craving. Uber will happily save you every step you choose not to take.
All of that quickly adds up way before you even hit your 40s, and many will claim that it's their metabolism, when in reality it's 100% a result of a dramatic lifestyle change.
In a sense I am thankful I graduated into the covid lockdowns. It made this dramatic change obvious to me, and I made a similarly dramatic change in my diet. I went from literally having a buffet every meal in college to having a cup of coffee for breakfast, and what I would consider a normal sized meal for dinner. I realized after about 2 years of this that I was borderline under-weight, so I decided to start eating more. It was a struggle to gain weight, but now I am at a much healthier weight.
My extended family does not understand how I have not been gaining weight while I work from home. The truth is I simply do not eat more than I need to.
I dunno about this - at least here in the UK, London (jam-packed with that demographic, including me and most of my friends) is the fittest, least overweight part of the country, with among the highest life expectancy.
Do you and your friends in London all drive to work? Or do you walk/metro?
The lifestyle shift the grandparent poster was referring to is typical of suburban and rural areas, but not really urban areas. I suspect people in more rural parts of the UK are very different from your London cohort.
Nobody drives - they all either work from home (most), take public transport, or walk/cycle in. Parent comment explicitly called out "middle class city people" so I figure this is more than valid.
“City people” in the United States still often means people who drive anywhere more than a block away to avoid such extreme exertion. I think driving is really under-discussed in these discussions because once you raise the issue of so much sedentary time you realize we need to change so much of our culture and built environment.
The UK is obsessively into exercise. It might be because a trip to the doctors for anything short of a bullet to the head invariably involves being told to exercise more.
UK life expectancy is around 4-5 years higher than the US. I love the US and would absolutely move there given a working visa, but ya gotta be honest about this.
NHS problems notwithstanding, US healthcare is garbage unless you're getting paid $80k+ per year. The 37k per annum suckers, which is about half the country, don't have a lot of options and die earlier because of it.
You don’t have to stop maximizing income in order to get fit and healthy. I schedule time to work out in my calendar. My wife and I prioritize workouts as necessary time. You can eat at a restaurant and order healthy options and drink water.
People who blame their work for being unhealthy are making excuses. I’ve worked 60 - 70 hours a week for 2 decades and I’m in excellent physical condition.
The problem is that top-level competitive work takes a lot of mental and emotional effort. So even if I’m spending time on health, I can’t do it work 100% effort, and so result is still suboptimal.
I have trained myself to shut off work when I stop working. This took a lot of time. Very rarely nowadays is my sleep or time outside work disturbed by what is happening at work. It’s a meditative practice, but once you really get in the mindset of work being for work, family for family, sleep for sleep, etc. then you stop being bothered.
You answered your own question? It sound like everyone else was sleeping.
It's odd to suggest that people will have enough time to exercise if they just cut into their bedtime. Is the idea here that you sleep in the next morning, and then your wife wakes up earlier to take up your slack?
Is this your suggested solution for everyone? Increase your free time to exercise by reducing someone else's?
You don't exercise in your free time, just like you don't work in your free time.
edit: No, I do it in the time I set aside to exercise.
This might seem foreign to you but to me it's no different from someone saying "I need £100 to pay the rent" and so they make time and find a way to pay the bills (usually a job). They don't "work in their free time", they structure their life around it because income is important to them.
I don't think it's a s simple as inactivity. IF this were true, then being active would reverse the weight gains, but it does not, at least not for me and others. I was still as active in my 30s as I was in my late teens and 20s but still gained weight. Likewise, gyms are full of people in their 30s and 40s who are not losing weight despite regular attendance. Despite the popularity of fitness apps, people keep getting fatter. It is only GLP-1 drugs that has put some dent in obesity rates. I think metabolism or some other biological, non-environmental variable plays some role. Or some reduction of NEAT that cannot be explained by careers.
On average man burns ca. 2500 kcal per day, mostly in rest. One hour of reasonably intensive cardio burns 500~600 kcal. If you have two such workouts a week it comes down to an increased energy use of 2*600/(7*2500) = 7%. Or a large meal. Just looking at the numbers it seems spending some time at the gym is not going to do much for loosing weight. Or said differently: eating 7% less is easier.
Of course cardio and strength training are useful for building/preserving muscle mass and general fitness. But for weight loss looking at food seems more effective.
One hour of reasonably intensive cardio burns 500~600 kcal. If you have two such workouts a week it comes down to an increased energy use of 2600/(72500) = 7%. Or a large meal. Just looking at the numbers it seems spending some time at the gym is not going to do much for loosing weight. Or said differently: eating 7% less is easier.
Not sure about this. Herman Pontzer's work shows that the body adapts by burning fewer calories later, so your energy expenditure is the same. Burning 600 calories with exercise means burning 600 fewer later, like burning fewer calories during sleep or fidgeting less.
Not this again: “Burning 600 calories with exercise means burning 600 fewer later.” No it doesn’t. That work is highly misinterpreted.
Because it doesn’t ELI5 how body mass and composition and steady vs unsteady state actually play into it, people take away a meaningless self serving interpretation.
If you start running 4-5 times a week, I guarantee you’ll be eating significantly more and burning significantly more. Unless you’re intentional about restricting your eating, weight will most probably stay the same, but you’ll be burning far more calories.
But keen eyed reader perhaps you object with “but you’ll move less and nap on the couch more, it will balance out like Pontzer’s work seems to say!” Haha, but no. Well yes to napping, but no to balancing out. It’s literally impossible. There’s no amount of napping that makes up for 13+ miles runs. There’s a lot of people who regularly do 10 to 20 mi runs on weekends. They can literally burn more calories just in the run than a sedentary person does in an entire day. And that’s their regular routine. Take a look at Boston to see 30ish thousand examples of it.
As one example, My weight has been steady state for decades, but I started running marathons two years ago. I had to start eating an extra meal. And when I take it easy for a couple weeks after each marathon, my appetite ramps down.
And if you don’t start eating more you’ll just get injured and be forced to stop running.
Pontzers work is bad. Ask any endurance sport club and they’ll laugh at it.
I don’t think most people (besides some naive readings of that research) should come to that conclusion. The proper conclusion is that it will offset some of the calories burned by exercise through reduction in NEAT (non exercise activity thermogenesis), but not all of it. So a 600cal exercise may only have an effective net calorie addition of say, 400cal, due to reduction in NEAT.
The problem becomes when people do the naive calculation of exercise calories (Eg, I ran 2 miles so I burned 400cal, so I can eat 400 extra calories), and come to the wrong conclusion.
So we’re focusing on the anecdotal part to ignore the part where I point out the naive reading of his conjecture literally defies thermodynamics? I pointed out it’s literally impossible for it to work for a subset of the population.
Over a hundred thousand endurance athletes in just the USA would have to literally defy the laws of thermodynamics for the naive reading to work.
I can see why the question ignored that and focused on the personal story that went along with the hard facts and stats.
Pontzer's work isn't about napping. It's about your body having a set point for how many calories it burns, independent (up to a factor of +/- a few hundred calories) of how much exercise you do. For most people this is true, as their work shows. It may not be true for extreme athletes. I don't think Pontzer's team of dozens of people working over ten years misunderstood basic thermodynamics. Their work clearly points to "compensation" -- the body making up for energy it burned during the day by gently lowering the metabolism later on.
Saying "burning 600 calories now means burning 600 less later" gets the point across. It's pretty much on the money for some people. For others compensation may not be total. I guess I'm not really sure where your beef is.
For hundreds of thousands of people it’s not true. That is not an exaggeration in numbers.
Handwaving away large numbers data points that disprove a theory is not how science is supposed to work.
And as we have seen in this thread, the lack of clarity on the nuance discourages people from making exercise.
Over simplifying it to 600 burned, 600 saved later is harmful and also inaccurate. (and yes More inaccurate than my loose choice of saying nap which you pointed out that led you to the wrong conclusions on my understanding, please consistently apply that critical standard)
Also an endurance runner and read Pontzer's book. I do enough running for my wife to get pissed off! I agree with you that there's definitely more work which needs doing to understand metabolism in the context of endurance athletes. I don't think his work is outright nonsense though. Here's something to think about...
I ran 21 km yesterday, in zone 2, in a fairly glycogen depleted state. That was about 4:30min/km for 21km, with 600m of elevation - about 1500kcal of energy. I didn't eat or drink anything throughout the run. I'm a big nerd, so I took a lactate sample at the end. I didn't hit the first ventilatory threshold for the whole run and that indicates I'm burning a large proportion of fat compared to a normal person (and probably a normal recreational runner).
Afterwards, I ate a banana and had a couple of spoons of peanut butter + honey. A few 100kcal. Fast forward to the evening. I didn't eat any more than I usually would do if I had a few days off running. I went on with my day as normal and recovered fine the next day. I didn't feel hungrier than usual. Fairly standard. My body is well adapted to this kind of exertion. I think my body is quite efficient at doing every day things. I don't get out of breath walking up stairs, for example. Maybe it's fair to say I'm more energy efficient than a regular person. Perhps, I don't need to eat any more than usual immediately after running because I'm burning a high proportion of fat and my metabolism is quite efficeint anyway.
Someone who has a poor aerobic system wouldn't be capable of doing that. They'd likely be running at a much higher heart rate and bonk after 10km having not eaten any carbs the day before. They'd also likely need to eat a huge bowl of pasta afterwards just to feel OK. I suspect this person would feel like crap for the rest of the day (maybe even multiple days... Imagine.. they've likely just done a 10km at VO2max untrained) and I could completely imagine them having a nap or watching TV for the rest of the day as they'd have no energy to do anything else. Their bodies are not adapted to this kind of exertion. They are not efficient. Their body needs to rest to get back in equilibrium.
The energy requirement is the same in both cases but it comes from a different source. In my case the high fat oxidation is acting as a battery/buffer. In the average person, those fat stores are not really accessible when doing anything more than sitting or light walking. Both examples are in equilibrium but present in different ways.
This is mostly unrelated to the current point, but you’re unquestionably fitter than the average person. I used to dance for about 15 hours a week, and I have no idea what I actually burned calorie-wise, but it was plenty of cardio.
After about a year of dancing, I had a moment where I needed to run after someone about a half kilometer away. It was incredible- I’d never felt so buoyant while running. After I passed the message on, I decided to do a measured run. I ran a six minute mile in my late twenties with zero warm-up after having not run in over a decade. I wasn’t even out of breath, it was fucking easy. Cardio is a life hack.
First, note that my biggest point is that the way his group presented the work has led to gross over simplifications that actually cause harm when they help deter people from making changes, and the group has not gotten the word out that those interpretations are incorrect.
It’s pretty clear the effect of exercise is neither extreme. It is definitely not the naive 100% of calories burned in regular exercising are balanced out by metabolic reductions elsewhere compared to the same person not regularly exercising. And it’s definitely not 800 burned regularly means 800 mores than the person would if they didn’t exercise regularly.
It’s going to be in between, and I would wager it’s like backwards graduated tax brackets in terms of compensation percent.
It’s been a while since I read his paper, but if I recall right it actually did hand wave away the endurance athletes. But endurance athletes are not a binary yes no state andHand waving away obvious conflicting data isn’t logical or scientific. And so especially when people are on a graduated spectrum all the way up to the immediately obvious theory breakers running 60+ mi/week. Where would the cut off come? 15mi? 20mi? 25mi? Above what cut off should we ignore data to make the naive theory work.
Pontzers work shows that a 150lb male, dependent on their activity they can burn anywhere between 2000 to 3750 calories on average per day in a maintainable fashion that can go on for years. I.e activity is highly impactful to total daily caloric expenditure.
Moreover, they also showed that exercise beyond that upper limit of 2.5x the base metabolic rate is very possible for temporary durations, weeks even. The extra energy comes from stores like fat and obvious is not sustainable over years.
Even at minor increases of daily exercise for sedentary people, a regular 400 calories of exercise in one study, leads to increased total daily expenditure of around 225-250 after the body is fully adapted.
If that’s not your understanding of pontzer’s works then there is nothing pedantic about my comments. But it’s understandable if you’ve been confused because pontzer has almost willfully obfuscated the actual interpretation of his groups data. Their actual data & equations versus how they message them and explain their findings is shameful.
My own experience matches closer to Potzner's work. I see some initial loss on the after exercising but the rebound is really fast. Perhaps if you keep it up everyday there can be some long-term weight loss but it will not be continuous, and if you stop the weight will come back fast.
Isn't that kind of like saying that the tooth decay will come back real quick if you stop brushing your teeth?
Most people need to supplement their activity with exercise nowadays because otherwise their lives are very sedentary. It's a forever thing, unfortunately for those that don't enjoy it.
Your weight is an equilibrium between calorie intake and caloric expenditure. Increased weight increases baseline expenditure, hence the equilibrium.
If you stop exercising, but keep the same caloric intake as before, yes, it will rebound really fast, because the equilibrium point will stay the same. If you want to move the equilibrium, you either need to do the exercise regularly forever, or reduce your caloric intake, or build significant amounts of muscle (fat free body mass) to increase your baseline. expenditure
That's just not possible. You aren't going to be burning less calories during sleep after a workout, you're going to be burning more due to increased protein synthesis as your body recovers (unless the workout was very light).
Reduced fidgeting leading to 600 calories less in a day is not reasonable, either.
To drive this home, just look at professional cyclists : a lot of them have to eat 5000+ calories a day, because they burn 3500+ calories just training, on average, for years and years.
Additionally, if you work out more, you will increase your fat-free mass significantly.
In any case, Pontzer's work never seems to claim you somehow compensate against activity expenditure, it's actually a very strong independent variable in the model of the linked study?
As a counter-anecdote, I dramatically increased my exercise at 29, and reversed the weight gain I'd had slowly creeping over my 20s, and now in my 30s am at my lowest weight ans best physical shape since at least my mid-teens, possibly ever.
Counterpoint - everyone I know who counts calories is able to either lose or gain weight roughly according to their plan.
This is borne out in essentially every sport which has weight classes at both the amateur and professional level.
Part of becoming healthy is calibrating yourself against other healthy individuals. No, not genetic freaks, just that neighbour who actually looks after themselves.
My wife always says that her sister must have some type of "condition" that explains her obesity. PCOS, undiagnosed diabetes, etc. And I keep telling her that it's calories in vs calories out. Recently her sister got drunk with us and admitted candidly that she basically binge eats trash food, regularly eats McDonald's for dinner, and if she ever gets stomach cramps and bloating from overeating, the best "cure" is a litre of ice cream because it "helps settle her stomach". So yeah, no magic physics is happening here.
On the other hand me and the wife weigh out things like potatoes, rice, pasta and bread, eat all the fruit and veg we want and don't own a car. So we do minimum 25k steps per day, because we walk the dogs and then walk almost everywhere else we need to go, including buying groceries (which involves back-packing food about half a mile). I also run 3 to 4 times a week. Essentially, this is the same lifestyle I had when I was 18. And guess what? At 47 I'm wearing the same jeans size I wore at 18. It really is that simple.
What's hard? Trying to convince an obese lady who drives to the office, sits on her ass for 8 hours, eats chocolate bars and McDonald's for lunch and is too tired to use the gym, that her weight is 100% down to her life choices, and not magic.
I hear you. When I was younger I used to try and convert everyone around me (if you want X, do Y). Back then it was personal finance stuff.
Now I just don't bother. My conclusion is that it's just some form of depression, learned helplessness, whatever. There are an infinite number of reasons why you or they are a special case. I don't let it get me down any more.
For what it's worth I don't think my lifestyle is at all "hardcore". I have a number for calories and protein that I try to hit, and I have numbers for lifts and cardio that I try to increase. That's it. I have a car, I eat fast food, I drink on nights out etc.
It is asymmetrically difficult to lose weight compared to gaining weight. The body wants to maintain homeostasis, but tries way harder when it perceives the threat to be starvation. This makes a lot of sense considering historically that conserving energy rather than expending it would probably have been a massive survival advantage.
As an example, say we are discussing someone whose average energy expenditure is 3000 kcal a day and they eat that much currently. Let’s say they start to exercise and their average expenditure rises to 3200 a day, and they start to diet, so their intake falls to 2500. The body wants to minimize that 700 kcal caloric deficit to maintain homeostasis. The person will lose weight, but by the time they’re down, say, 10 lbs, a normal person 10 lbs lighter than they started would expend maybe 2900 kcal, but they’ll be expending 2800, since their body will start to downregulate processes that expend energy to minimize the deficit. This is why when people are losing weight they might feel cold (thermogenesis has decreased), tired (mental processing has decreased), or any other number of negative effects. It’s the body going into self-defense mode.
Another factor is fat. Sadly, as weight is gained, fat cells grow, and split when they get too big. When weight is lost, they shrink, but they never re-combine. Fat is an endocrine tissue that releases numerous hormones that regulate energy balance, appetite, etc. This means that people who previously had more fat will never (without medical interventions) be “the same” as someone who is the same weight, but never carried extra fat to begin with.
This might sound like “why bother trying when there are so many things stacked against you?” but I couldn’t disagree more. Despite the propaganda masquerading as science that says “diet and exercise don’t work”, they do. Nobody is immune to the laws of thermodynamics - if more energy is consumed than is expended, weight gain results, and if more is expended than is consumed, weight loss results. The main reason all these studies are able to say “diet and exercise are a bust” is because people don’t maintain the lifestyle that reduced their weight to begin with, and usually return to familiar habits.
Luckily, our habits are mutable, and just like our body can play tricks like making us more hungry when losing weight, we can fight back if we know what we are up against. For example, caffeine is a commonly consumed substance that suppresses appetite. Staying busy rather than being idle also suppresses appetite. Not having junk food in your house/office/etc. reduces temptations to help aid healthy decisions. Having healthy food available and prepared makes making healthy decisions easier. Scheduling diet breaks or planning free meals (and calling them free meals, not cheat meals) improve diet adherence.
In my opinion, the way to sustainable weight loss is slight modifications to the environment and behaviors to nudge the system in the desired direction. Our culture is too focused on motivation and discipline and toughing out situations no matter what to achieve our ends. Meanwhile tiny differences compound and do not feel like an immense burden. It’s also worth mentioning the power of a self-fulfilling prophecy: have you ever known anyone who lost weight via diet and exercise, and said it is impossible to lose weight via diet and exercise? On the flip side of the same coin, there are a lot of people who think diet and exercise will not cause weight loss, and they’re disproportionately overweight. Believing something is possible is nearly always a precondition for achieving it. Thoughts become things.
Best of luck on your weight loss journey. You can do it.
2 to 3 hours in a gym, (especially casual weights) does not even come close to scratching the surface of all the reduced activity that comes with office jobs, commutes and screen oriented amusement.
A lot of people put minimal possible effort in at the gym or other kinds of exercising.
I often see people "jogging" that are basically just walking with a bit of a skip, for example.
I believe this is correlated with diet, which most people think is just nutrition, but it's a lot more complex now. There are petrochemicals and toxins in basically everything, avoiding them is expensive and incredibly difficult and you will still inevitably be exposed. There are many of these chemicals that have been shown to have a direct correlation to slow metabolism, so it can make it seem to make everything more difficult if you are consuming large quantities of say, glyphosate.
Most people also don't realize that the bioavailability of food is important. Probiotics, enzymes, etc are usually completely dead or stripped by the time they reach your mouth after the highly processed pipeline.
Another note, there are literally thousands of micronutrients that we barely know anything, so that's also another variable. This is also just not looked at often, so you have to actually know to look to even understand their are natural compounds that may be useful, and then you have to deal with the quality control problem in the industry, and find a reliable, preferably third party tested supplier.
And also just discipline, which is harder when you don't have good nutrition, or your body is constantly processing mass amounts of toxic material. It also just requires willpower though, and applying it will build will to wade through the complex landscape of not poisoning yourself constantly. If you want to get ahead, you are gonna have to push yourself to an uncomfortable position.
Most folks would rather walk for 2 hours than do sprints for 5 minutes, even the the later has been shown to have significantly more effect on your metabolism, and requires much less time.
So in a way I agree, it's not as simple as just activity, it is moreso intentional activity at a level that is just above your comfort zone enough to make consistent progress, and hopefully you can do that without constantly consuming mass amounts of toxins that makes that whole process harder.
Your version is a little low on the drinking calories in my opinion. I was skinny as a rail until my wife and I got together when I was 23 and started going to reverse happy hour at TGIFridays, Applebees, etc pretty much every night. Add drinking roughly another six pack most nights after the reverse happy hour along with smoking weed + more munchies and I never had a chance no matter how much exercise I did. I probably put on around 30-40 lbs in my first year of that lifestyle.
If it is true that frequent, brief, moderately intense exercise is that beneficial, I can see several ways that office workers can fit that into their workday.
If you work in a multi-floor office building: when going to the restroom, walk up stairs to a restroom on a floor above the one you work on; if you go out for lunch, walk to lunch, then walk up the stairs when you get back; if you are going to a meeting, leave you desk a couple of minutes early and walk up and down the stairs before going to the meeting room.
All of these ideas have something in common: walking up stairs is as close to HIIT that most people get during their day.
I do wonder if this study is confusing, at some level, cause and effect. Yes, I definitely understand the argument that people blame things on "my slowing metabolism", but then don't seem to notice that the requirements of middle age (e.g. full time job and especially folks with kids) can make it harder to get exercise.
At the same time, I don't have kids, and while I've stayed relatively active into middle age I've definitely noticed that it takes me much longer to recover after strenuous exercise than it did when I was younger. And so it's simply harder to stay as active, because my body is basically telling me "stop!" more often. It's already well documented that testosterone levels in men begin to decline starting in your thirties at about 1% a year, so I think skepticism is in order if researchers would claim that this reduction in testosterone levels would have no impact on activity level and metabolic rate.
I wonder if employers will be more receptive to regular breaks for knowledge workers who are mostly sedentary. One befits of working from home before being mandated back to the office was being able to go on a walk during lunch and less-critical meetings.
My understanding is, unless the employer is paying you during lunch, they can’t mandate what you
do. The only problems are 1) it’s not good socially if everyone else is eating lunch and you’re doing something else, and 2) your employer may not give or allow a long break during work hours, but I don’t how common that is (or how it would be justified, considering you’re not working for less hours).
I always went on walks in the middle of the day at my office job. A quarter of the time I would bring a colleague, particularly from a different group but whom I would still interface with.
This is from 2021 and was widely reported at the time.
I see a lot of know-it-all comments, but the reality is they do not yet know why people gain weight in their middle age. No - the data doesn't show that it's merely due to being sedentary or changing diets.
If you want to reduce weight, then lower your caloric intake. You don’t even need to workout. Just measure your calories and keep decreasing them until the weight falls off.
If you want to add in exercise, that’s great too, and then you can eat more calories. But if you studiously count calories and reduce them, you will lose weight - it’s guaranteed.
If I put you on a desert island and starved you, you would lose weight. It’s the same principle. Trying to imagine that there is a mystery here to explain weight gain is a coping mechanism. There is no mystery.
It's not a mystery, but it also sort of pretends that humans are robots. That is, the human body has developed homeostatic mechanisms over billions of years, and a big part of that is that if your body thinks it's starving, it will try its hardest to (a) make you hungry so that you will do whatever you can to eat more, and (b) slow your metabolic rate so you don't die.
Yes you will be hungry but we are sentient beings who can ignore the urge to eat, just as we can control other base urges. You don’t see an attractive person and assault them, or someone with a desirable object and immediately steal from them. It’s called self control.
Agree with this. It's such a strange mindset to me.
I don't like getting up in the morning and going to work. I don't like selling things I no longer use. I don't like economising at the supermarket, and although I enjoy cooking sometimes, doing it all of the time just to survive gets quite tiresome. Etc.
Yet we just have to do those things, because we need money, we need to eat, etc.
Part of being a mature, successful adult is doing things that you might not immediately want to do.
This website is such a fascinating place. Some of the most hyper logical and driven technologists on earth, who then wrap themselves in knots to explain away their lack of physical fitness, when the obvious solution is staring them in the face. People can’t bring themselves to hear the truth
The most productive way to lose weight is to cut out the soda, juice, cookies, ice cream, donuts, Captain Crunch, pie, cake, candy bars, pastries, etc.
That's very true, but if you have healthy hormone levels and so long as your body fat percentage is high, you will lose way more fat than muscle, even without exercise. In bariatric surgery patients, for example >70% of weight loss is fat on average, and for 2/3rds of patients in some study there is less than 15% loss in fat-free mass.
On the other hand, if you're a man, then going to a reasonable body fat percentage is likely to make it easier for you to gain muscle.
So, as long as you make sure to eat a lot of protein, unless you have a large caloric deficit, you can expect muscle loss to be minimal (studies show that for extended moderate caloric deficits, muscle protein synthesis doesn't really decrease)
So yes, but if you're overweight, it's still a very good change on the balance, and you'll be way more fit in the end even if you do lose a bit of muscle.
Mostly bullshit as fat is the primary source for energy in the body and hard to earn protein are not. It's a myth mostly, do fast, do exercise, you will not lose muscle.
Fat is only the primary energy source at lower output levels. As power output increases, metabolism shifts increasingly away from fat and towards glycogen. The shape of that curve is different for everyone, but ironically the people who most need to lose fat typically have the least ability to metabolize fat (not fat adapted) and so with any exercise they're mostly running on carbs. Once the glycogen stores run low then their bodies start burning protein as well, even though it's less efficient.
Muscles will also just atrophy if not used, regardless of diet.
The article failed to mention another huge benefit of protein - it makes you feel full for longer. Eating 2000 calories of carbs is super easy. Eating 2000 calories of chicken breast is painfully hard.
I think OP's statement was cutting corners. Protein and fat both help you stay full for longer. Carbs/sugar do not. Even this statement cuts corners, but overall science supports the general sentiment.
Is it? That’s about 10 cups of cooked plain boiled rice.
I think carbs only hit the “easy to hit 2k” mark when it’s sugar (maybe?) or when it’s added with fat, especially fried foods.
> Eating 2000 calories of chicken breast is painfully hard.
I think this is about 7 cups of boiled, skinless breast of chicken.
I think this gets back to fat, or lack thereof.
For me personally, lean proteins don’t really fill me up — I have knocked back a pound of chicken breast with fresh veggies and I was hungry a few hours later. It’s mainly fats that do the trick for me for feeling sated — nuts, fat in meat, cheese, oil (esp. for roasting vegetables), etc.
> Or two large milkshakes, or about 7 doughnuts or chocolate bars
Plenty of fat contributing to the calorie count in all of those.
I did mention sugar is probably the easiest carb to consume large quantities of, but 2000 calories of even something carb heavy like frosted cake would be challenging for many people. You have to get back into heavy fat “cakes” like cheesecake before the quantity becomes less of an issue.
A lot of people claim they have trouble losing weight because of a "slow metabolism". In most cases their metabolism is normal and they haven't even had a resting metabolic rate (RMR) test. Those tests are easy, inexpensive, and non-invasive. It's worth getting one just to understand your baseline energy expenditure.
Best way to stay in shape in my opinion is to play a sport, especially in some sort of league/club.
If you genuinely enjoy playing, it doesn't feel like a chore! Now into my mid 30s, I do not regularly go to the gym, I do not have any special dietary habits, and I weigh the same as 18.
I’m at the point where my peers complain about getting older.[1] And I’ve started wondering how much of that is really about age and how much is the cumulative effects of “lifestyle”. I mean if you sit in a chair for ten years for 12 hours a day you’ve probably become “too old” for doing cartwheels. But it could be reversed, maybe.
[1] Am I 25 or 50? Impossible to say in this climate of complaining.
Yeah, late 30’s with a bad hip from childhood illness and I still managed to shed 50 pounds and get stronger than ever after being very sedentary for years. Diet and exercise and no drugs (I’d for sure take Ozempic if it was affordable too). Just me, but I spent way too much time thinking I was getting old and I was wrong.
That doesn't seem to be what the study they cited said though.
Basically the common model was that metabolism steadily declines with age (for adults). The study cited[1] says that doesn't match their data.
What they found was that metabolism was higher than expected for kids 1-20, stable for adults 21-60, and lower than expected for senior adults 60+. [2]
I don't want to say thresholds but you can look at the figures and see the rapid increase (0-1), decline (1-20), stability (21-60), and decline again (60+).
So age probably matters more to metabolism (than we thought) for some age groups but not for other age groups.
And I don't think there was really anything about lifestyle other than this bit:
> consistent with the hypothesis that energy intake is coupled to expenditure
But obviously that won't help anyone lose weight (which is usually what people are complaining about when they complain about an assumed slowing metabolism) cause it's saying people take in more calories when they burn more calories.
Except for really old age, they mostly atrophy because of sedentarism. Even then, I've seen excellent climbers and alpinists past 70. Keep moving and your body will keep working.
Your muscles atrophy if you don't use them. A 60 year old power lifter is stronger than a 30 year old who never lifts. On average people lose around 5% of their muscle mass per decade after 30; someone with twice as much muscle mass at 30 is still going to have more muscle mass at 60 than the person who started at 30 with half as much muscle mass.
You go from being athletic in high school and walking all day in college to suddenly being in your prime dating age, regularly out eating and drinking with friends or dates, hitting 2-3 cocktails a few nights a week. You start investing more into your ultra-sedentary career, which you drive to, which constantly requires more of your time to get that next promotion. You are unable to have healthy home cooking, instead replacing it with restaurant work lunches and happy hours with your coworkers.
In addition, as you make more money, that enables even more convenience. Amazon delivers you products, no need to leave the house. Instacart delivers you groceries, no need to even go to the corner store. Doordash always at the ready to indulge every craving. Uber will happily save you every step you choose not to take.
All of that quickly adds up way before you even hit your 40s, and many will claim that it's their metabolism, when in reality it's 100% a result of a dramatic lifestyle change.