Wait what? Dude say exercise doesn't help you lose weight

What?

Idk seems like kind of bullshit…

“The person who has a sedentary lifestyle and the person who has the active lifestyle will burn the same number of calories.”

Yea I don’t need to read any further to know this is some scam/ waste of time

7 Likes

If you want to hear what Pontzer has to say about his research & opinions you can listen to a fairly comprehensive podcast here:

Herman Pontzer, PhD: Burn — SCIENCE OF ULTRA

One of the things that he said that really rang true with me…people’s metabolism can adjust and ‘absorb’ about 600 calories expended per day. That’s consistent with one thing I’ve observed…you kinda need to be doing more than an hour a day (on average) cycling to consistently drop lbs. An hour of cycling typically works out to about 600cal.

2 Likes

without taking time reading the article and giving them click-revenue… isnt that technically kinda true? Calories-in, calories out?

Sure… Body adaptation…

Same as people who cut down calories.if they don’t do anything else body will learn how to live with that amount of calories and eventually gain weight

Even 600 is optimistic for the noob crowd. I’m what I guess can be considered pretty “good” and Pettit for me is 650 calories based on a 290w ftp, I think for the average person it’s more in the 300 cal/hr range

editing to add, I am certain if you ask a new person what they think their caloric expenditure is in an hour, they would say 600, which is why power meters are great and think they’d benefit a wide variety of folks

2 Likes

No. Just no. Metabolism itself does drop a bit with weight loss, just from being lighter, but its not that great of an amount. Other than that, metabolism is what it is to maintain basic functionally, pump blood, maintain body heat, think, breathe, grow hair… .Yes, if you severely starve yourself to the point of near death, your body will start shutting down basic functions, but other than that no. If you eat at amount of calories that would maintain a certain weight, you will maintain that weight at that calorie intake basically forever, at least until the aging part of metabolism take effect, which is a very slow process. Your body doesn’t just slow down its metabolism to the new baseline so that you gain weight.

4 Likes

I read somewhere that if a person cut calories to say 1500 calories to lose weight, that the body eventually learn how to use the 1500 calories effectively and eventually that become your baseline and if you try to go back to the normal 2k calories you will gain weight quick… Could be a debunked study or something… It was a while ago…

That’s a common myth. But a myth non the less.

3 Likes

Ah… Good to know. Thanks!

I actually think there is some merit to this. IME I found the same. Only when I was injured and off the bike for 1 year was I able to really get lean and lose almost 20lbs from 165 to 147 at 5’9". It’s just a long story but, the more you ride the more you want to eat. Just have to be super disciplined and employ strategies that are proven to work.

1 Like

I did not read it but it can help motivate you to lose weight but ultimately it is all about what you put eat and how much.

This exactly. Working out often makes one hungrier. One must be careful to monitor calories “in” during training because it’s so easy to overdo the carbs and fats and Twizzlers during Netflix.

1 Like

The thing is that we have an abundance of food around and normally eat following our appetite. That means that any calories burned extra with a workout will just be compensated by eating more.

Loosing weight always requires an effort to stop eating while still a bit hungry, regardless of exercise.

I have found that exercise does have a good mental effect and makes it easier to choose “healthy” foods that tend to fill you up more with less calories, making it easier to stay in a calorie deficit.

I think Today.com is probably talking to “most people”. A 20min cardio something isn’t going to make a calorie dent. The vast majority of exercise most people do doesn’t burn enough calories to become a weight management strategy.

For most people, calorie reduction only comes through diet.

This is sorta true. If you loose weight too quickly, your body will go in sorta emergency mode and ramp down the metabolism somewhat, so your basic metabolic expenditure is lower. Your brain is also gonna tell you to eat more.
In general our bodies are build to preserve as much energy as possible. So losing weight is always an uphill battle.

It’s true.

He is selling a book so of course has a spin but I listened to him on a podcast last week (Deliciously Ella) and he explained his theories better in that 45 minutes than the article does. My take away was: metabolism is pretty complicated and individual, we are working with a mixture of genetic limitations and lifestyle choices so control the controllables. I was pretty interested in what he had to say about how hormones, inflammation, sleep and cortisol affect weight gain/loss.

Reviving an old thread as it seems Pontzer is getting some exposure recently. From what I have read and listened to on his work, he is saying that a very active hunter and gatherer or an active endurance athlete will burn the same amount of calories on a daily basis as a typical, sedentary individual. He maintains that the body simply adjusts to the expenditure and reallocates the available energy. So an experienced endurance athlete may spend less on daily bodily functions (reproductive, immune, etc) and use those calories for exercise.

I can’t wrap my head around this though. If one spends 2000kcal on a ride, there is no way this can be made up with a reallocation! How does he does he explain a bonk? By my understanding of his theory, we wouldn’t need to fuel rides?? I know that’s not correct, but please help me understand!

2 Likes

it’s been a long time since you posted but take the following examples:

a 100g bag of crisps contains around 530 kcal, how fast can you eat that bag and how long does it take you to cycle off those 530 kcal ?

and a kg of body fat contains around 7000 kcal, how long do you have spend on the trainer to burn that off?