this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
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me_irl
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Depends on how intense the exercise is, but it can easily be more than a factor of 3 times as much energy as sitting around (something like walking) to more than 10 times as much (things like vigorous cycling, running, etc). Would be really hard to maintain 20 times sitting output for any significant period of time though.
That's serious athlete level of performance, though. And a result of that rigorous of exercise is an increased appetite, for obvious reasons.
Yes, freakish athletes like Micheal Phelps do exist, and intaking enough calories to fuel their workout is actually difficult. But for the regular humans just trying to lose weight, it's far more effective to focus on calories than to focus on heavy exercise for 3+ hours a day.
What is serious athlete level of performance? 10x for at least 30 minutes/day seems pretty manageable for someone without significant medical conditions to work up to in a short period. Even if you eat back 80% of that, it can still lead to an equilibrium weight that's like 20lb less.
I can't believe the number of people on here who keep repeating that exercising can't replace eating less... If you eat the same amount of calories as before but increase the calories you burn by 500 the result is the same as reducing how much you eat by 500 calories while maintaining the same daily needs. Heck, long term doing it through exercising is better for you as well!
Burning 500 extra calories working out is an extremely intense workout, especially considering how sedentary most people are.
The benefits are also short lived, you can burn some extra calories for a bit but your body will adjust, and after a while the number of calories you burn during a workout tapers off and you return to about the same number you were burning before.
This is a well documented phenomenon. Human bodies are really good at conserving energy.
You lose weight in the kitchen, you tone up in the gym.
That's because your weight goes down so even at rest your daily needs are lower than they were before, you can still go a long way by just doing exercise you weren't doing before and keeping the same diet.
Also, 500 extra calories isn't that much if you're doing cardio intensive exercises, that's a 5 miles, jogging that's under an hour at a very conservative pace, walking that's two hours...
An estimated 1000 extra calories in about an hour for me is an extremely intense workout (the only time I estimated to have done that, my average heart rate during it was 173 - it was only based on HR and some basic data input like height and weight). I'm not a particularly active person and I'm overweight.
500 though? If you spread it out of 2 hours, its hardly anything at all. When I commuted by ebike daily, I was probably burning double that 6 days a week compared to driving and it felt very casual.
"probably". Like most people, you are severely over estimating what you burn. This morning I cycled 40km without assistance and climbed 500m along the way. It wasn't my hardest workout ever, but not "very casual" either. That was 850 kcal.
Roundtrip commute was 55-60kms. A bit hilly during parts and frequent slowing and speeding up during parts because part of the ride is on a hike & bike trail with frequent pedestrians. Assist does a lot of that work, but I also probably have a broken idea of what counts as casual because I get bored really easily. If I'm trying to exercise for an hour, I aim for an average HR above 160. Anything less and I consider it casual. On the way to work, I'm generally trying minimize sweat, so I probably aim to stay under 130bps (but I fail sometimes), so I'd call that very casual. Still 1 hour at 130bps is about 650-750 Calories/hr for someone of my size (about 210 lbs) according to various calculators vs about 110-120 Calories/hr mostly sitting and standing (if it was just sitting, probably under 100). On the way home, I don't have to worry about sweating, so I exert myself more (guess that was would only be casual instead of very casual?). So overall, the lower estimate of those calculators put it at like 1100 calories above mixed sitting/standing.
In general, I'm hesitant to believe those types of calculators and generally consider HR a mediocre estimator, which is why I express some doubt. Still, about 1000 calories above pure sitting seems quite reasonable.
People really don't want to be told that exercising isn't as hard as they think...
I've been at a BMI of nearly 40 just a few years ago. Fast walking to the car like 100 ft away left me out of breath (which is when I decided I was going to lose weight that time). It certainly can be hard when you get to the point like that. And any attempt at doing so just makes you feel embarrassed to be in the state you are in without actually burning a useful amount of calories. Exercising certainly is not how I started - I just stopped eating as much and that's also unpleasant when you start and it takes time to get your body to eating less (and it pretends its starving in the meantime). Also, not everyone is my size nor does everyone enjoy pushing themselves to their cardio limit (or at least, they don't know what activities they enjoy enough to do that or they aren't able to regularly do that).
For me, exercise has had mixed results for me. Sometimes, I've used it to justify eating so much more that I probably put on weight. This was particularly true when I started doing long-distance bike rides (like 100km rides); I tended to mistake being tired as needing calories, so I'd overeat just because I needed rest or sleep - the goal wasn't to lose weight though, I just liked riding. When I combined it with intermittent fasting, its been pretty effective because I'm more limited by stomach space when eating all my calories for the day at once. So I couldn't really eat any more. But its not a method for everyone.
Also, there's a time commitment. I haven't biked in a while because I'm at work like 70+ hours a week during the summer. Probably unsurprisingly, I've put on a fair bit of weight this summer. The only way I've been able to get consistent exercises is being a NEET or via a commute. Guess when I first got a VR headset, there was a few months where I was probably averaging an hour or more per day of at least moderate intensity exercise (and eventually intense exercise as I got better). For people who have other commitments like children, I'd hope they'd get at least a fair for of exercise playing with them during their younger years, but eventually that goes away for many and there's still the time that you need to spend with them.
That's an important distinction qualifier. Its really easy to at least consume more and at least partially offset some of the gains.