No one is suggesting that you can out run an increasing calorie surplus. You can however keep your diet the same and add two hours of running to your week and lose weight.
Ask anyone who has been obese and subsequently lost weight and they'll tell you the same thing. Eating less is both a sufficient and necessary condition to losing weight. Exercise is neither sufficient nor necessary because the caloric surplus these people are on significantly exceeds the amount that you can practically burn through exercise. While you're right that exercise can help on the margin, it's just not a useful intervention that moves the needle much as far as weight loss goes.
I don't know why anyone here has the idea that I'm arguing that exercise alone is key for weight loss. I have very clearly only claimed that all else equal increasing exertion will lead to a calorie deficit.
> While you're right that exercise can help on the margin, it's just not a useful intervention that moves the needle much as far as weight loss goes.
There's more to exercise than just the thermodynamic effects of calorie expenditure. Building muscle and/or cardiovascular capacity will improve your quality of life and will complement any weight loss. You can improve your mental health by becoming more physically active, and this is well established. Those mental health gains and physical health improvements make it easier to maintain a better diet. Beyond the marginal, but significant calorie expenditures you can create a positive feedback loop.
At one stage, I started walking home from work at my fastest pace. 5 miles, 5 days a week. No other lifestyle changes. No significant weight loss.
A few years later, I started tracking calories with myfitnesspal and keeping to a limit (1600 initially, 1400 when it became easier). No exercise, but steady and impressive weight loss. I seem to have kept most of it off. I think a lot of it becomes psychological - not being afraid to feel appetite or skip meals if already satiated from earlier.
Only assuming you have a steady body weight and diet, which is a very bad assumption for most overweight and obese people.
Not to mention, the processes in your body are way more complex than all this makes them out to be. For moderate exercise, after an adaptation period of a few weeks to months, there is almost no calorie impact from the exercise itself on your total calorie expenditure: your metabolism adjusts and various internal processes are deprioritized to prioritize the exercise.
This is in fact a major component of why exercise is so healthy: it doesn't do much for weight loss, but it stops/slows down all sorts of unnecessary processes in the body that are actively harming your overall health.
> almost no calorie impact from the exercise itself on your total calorie expenditure
This is categorically false. You don’t have a magical metabolic adjustment, you simply become more efficient in performing an exercise but the calorie use never drops to effectively zero like you’re claiming. Think about this for a second, it makes no sense to think that running could ever consume zero calories, basic physics still apply.
I explained this very clearly. The exercise of course has to consume calories. But that doesn't mean they have to be calories in excess of your base metabolic rate. What happens is that your base metabolic rate decreases more or less commensurately with the amount of extra calories you're consuming through excercise. If your BMR was 2000 Cal/day when doing 0 calories from excercise per day, and then you start exercising for 300 Cal/day, your BMR will decrease to about 1700 Cal after some time of maintaining this routine.
And the newer work is starting to find the limits that I mentioned. There are several caveats that I didn't mention for brevity:
- no exercise vs moderate exercise vs athlete-level exercise are very different cases. Doing some exercise does increase total energy expenditure vs no exercise, but the amount doesn't change significantly until you get to pro-athlete levels. That is, going from 2000/0 Cal (BMR/exercise) to 200 Cal of exercise might take you to, say, 2100/200 Cal; but moving from 200 Cal of daily exercise to 400 Cal of daily exercise will not take you to a higher TEE; unless you reach the stage where you are doing, say, 1000+ Cal worth of daily exercise (specific numbers pulled from thin air, just trying to illustrate the concept).
- Muscle mass is a confounder for what I was claiming - more exercise leads to increased muscle mass normally, and that does lead to an increase in BMR very directly.
Overall the more correct claim I should have made would be "exercising more, assuming you are not very sedentary, will not lead to increases in total energy expenditure beyond those gained from muscle mass increase, unless you get to pro athlete levels of exercise".
I'm taking all of these links from the Kurzgesagt sources for their video on exercise: https://sites.google.com/view/sources-workoutparadox. They link to more specific claims from each paper, and to a bunch of other papers.
