Upwind
Total Posts: 404
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02-24-21 01:15 PM - Post#908089
I just read this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/well/move/ weight-gain-amazon.html?action=click&alg o=bandit-al...
Researchers studied Amazonian kids who were genetically similar. One group had a hunter-gatherer lifestyle; the other had moved to a town and was now eating processed foods. Not surprisingly, the townies were heavier, but what the author concludes might be of interest here.
Here're a few quotes:
"The urban kids also generally were more sedentary. But all of the children, rural or urban, active or not, burned about the same number of calories every day."
"Dr. Pontzer concluded that, during evolution, we humans must have developed an innate, unconscious ability to reallocate our body’s energy usage. If we burn lots of calories with, for instance, physical activity, we burn fewer with some other biological system, such as reproduction or immune responses. The result is that our average, daily energy expenditure remains within a narrow band of total calories, helpful for avoiding starvation among active hunter-gatherers, but disheartening for those of us in the modern world who find that more exercise does not equate to much, if any, weight loss."
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Jordan D
Total Posts: 771
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02-24-21 01:34 PM - Post#908090
Imagine that.
Fat people who move less burn roughly the same calories as skinny people who move more.
It's almost as if they were carrying extra weight around or something.
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Matt_T
Total Posts: 379
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02-24-21 01:53 PM - Post#908091
These were kids right? So, completely different adaptive response to activity compared to adults. Not sure he can make that hypothesis general to adults can he?
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Dan John
Total Posts: 12292
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02-24-21 02:23 PM - Post#908095
I'm more confused than I was a minute ago...
Daniel John
Just handing down what I was handed down...
Make a Difference.
Live. Love. Laugh.
Balance work, rest, play and pray (enjoy beauty and solitude)
Sleep soundly. Drink Water. Eat veggies and protein. Walk.
Wear your seat belt. Don’t smoke. Floss your teeth.
Put weights overhead. Pick weights off the floor. Carry weights.
Reread great books. Say thank you |
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Neander
Total Posts: 7755
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Ditto . . .
but I now realize that "researchers" love to take paid trips to this Amazon place.
I have trouble wading through a lot of this stuff.
What would the practical, useful and hands-on takeaway from something like this be?
The types who want to lean out and lose some weight might find that diet control and manipulation works very well. They may also find that coupling that diet with exercise works even better. That's the plan, no? What am I missing here?
Life's too short to worry about longevity.
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Edited by Neander on 02-24-21 03:11 PM. Reason for edit: No reason given.
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DanMartin
Total Posts: 20705
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02-24-21 04:07 PM - Post#908099
I'm more confused than I was a minute ago...
How can that be?
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Jordan D
Total Posts: 771
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02-24-21 04:29 PM - Post#908100
Take a look at the study. His “burned about the same number of calories every day” (measured in highly convoluted fashion) is a 50-calorie difference on average. That equates to 350 excess calories per week, 1,400 a month, or roughly 5lbs of fat per year. By age ten, that’s 30 extra pounds. By age 20, another 50. The only thing it actually concludes is that fat children burn more calories when lying on their backs doing nothing.
I swear the NYT has less journalistic integrity than the National Enquirer.
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Upwind
Total Posts: 404
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02-25-21 07:45 PM - Post#908128
I guess the second quote I included is a bit wordy. The researcher studies evolutionary anthropology and “focuses on how evolution may have shaped our metabolisms and vice versa.”
Here’s another line from the story:”But all of the children, rural or urban, active or not, burned about the same number of calories every day.” I think the researcher is trying to determine if we’re hardwired to burn a set amount of calories regardless of how active we are.
In my early 20s, I did the 6-8,000 calorie a day thing and gained 13 pounds in a week, 7 the next. I got to 196. I lifted 6 days a week. One day of upper body push, one of upper body pull, one legs, repeat. I also also felt like crap. Since then, my weight has stabilized and hasn’t really changed regardless of what I eat or what I do. Fasting, too much beer and barbecue visiting North Carolina, sedentary, hours of hiking or bike riding—whenever I step on the scale, I’m between 170-177.
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Kyle Aaron
Total Posts: 1911
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If you consume X calories and expend Y calories and find that this maintains your Z bodyweight, then
if X goes up and Y stays the same, Z will go up;
if X goes down and Y stays the same, Z will go down;
if X stays the same and Y goes up, Z will go down;
if X stays the same and Y goes down, Z will go up.
Energy in vs energy out - we can argue about exactly how much of each, but basically if one of those changes and the other doesn't, or changes in the opposite direction, then your body will change. If they both change in the same direction, or both stay the same, your body will probably stay the same.
My intake remained about the same, but I increased my physical activity. So my weight trended down. You don't need to travel to the Amazon to figure this out. People like to make this more complicated than it is.
Edited by Kyle Aaron on 02-26-21 12:59 AM. Reason for edit: No reason given.
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BrianBinVA
Total Posts: 5140
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People like to make this more complicated than it is.
Making things more complicated than they are is a human specialty.
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Arsenio Billingham
Total Posts: 159
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02-26-21 10:56 AM - Post#908159
"When children gain excess weight, the culprit is more likely to be eating too much than moving too little, according to a fascinating new study of children in Ecuador."
So basically you can't out work a poor diet? I do agree that in general humans are bad at estimating how many calories they've burned.
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read the bread book
Total Posts: 92
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02-26-21 11:45 AM - Post#908165
people seem to be attributing a lot of different positions to the authors of this study, which was about verifying a widely accepted hypothesis that the sudden increase in the developing world of diseases like diabetes was about lifestyle change primarily (less energy expenditure). (disclaimer: I didn't read the NYT article, I just read the study)
What the study actually says is that increase in caloric consumption is the most likely culprit for these diseases, rather than decreased activity levels, and that caloric expenditure stays basically the same. The interesting takeaway piece here is that caloric expenditure as a measurement between different subjects (rather than what Kyle is pointing to, which is "I work more but eat the same" types of shifts) doesn't actually tell you much.
There's probably something to the commonsense notion that people who "do" more will have different metabolic responses from people who "do less," but caloric expenditure doesn't seem to be the best way to measure that.
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Pepper
Total Posts: 296
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02-26-21 02:58 PM - Post#908175
Of course you can outwork a poor diet. It just sucks really, really hard. Ranulph Fiennes and Mike Stroud proved that: Link to article here.
The article is a fascinating read and Stroud's book Survival Of The Fittest: The Anatomy of Peak Physical Performance is a fascinating read.
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BrianBinVA
Total Posts: 5140
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02-26-21 04:26 PM - Post#908181
Of course you can outwork a poor diet. It just sucks really, really hard. Ranulph Fiennes and Mike Stroud proved that: Link to article here.
The article is a fascinating read and Stroud's book Survival Of The Fittest: The Anatomy of Peak Physical Performance is a fascinating read.
Somewhat off-topic, "Fit for Life" by Ranulph Fiennes was the first training book I ever bought. I came late to this game, relatively speaking, and I was maybe 21 or 22 at the time. That book was not nearly hardcore enough for me at the time, but just flipping through it, it has, shall we say, aged pretty well...
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Old Miler
Total Posts: 1744
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02-26-21 06:00 PM - Post#908189
Of course you can outwork a poor diet. It just sucks really, really hard. Ranulph Fiennes and Mike Stroud proved that: Link to article here.
The article is a fascinating read and Stroud's book Survival Of The Fittest: The Anatomy of Peak Physical Performance is a fascinating read.
I remember an interview with Mike Stroud a few years after that feat. He was asked what qualities you needed to cross the Antarctic. He thought hard for a minute and said something like "you've got to be stupid to attempt it".
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AusDaz
Total Posts: 3611
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I just read this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/well/move/ weight-gain-amazon.html?action=click&alg o=bandit-al...
Researchers studied Amazonian kids who were genetically similar. One group had a hunter-gatherer lifestyle; the other had moved to a town and was now eating processed foods. Not surprisingly, the townies were heavier, but what the author concludes might be of interest here.
Here're a few quotes:
"The urban kids also generally were more sedentary. But all of the children, rural or urban, active or not, burned about the same number of calories every day."
"Dr. Pontzer concluded that, during evolution, we humans must have developed an innate, unconscious ability to reallocate our body’s energy usage. If we burn lots of calories with, for instance, physical activity, we burn fewer with some other biological system, such as reproduction or immune responses. The result is that our average, daily energy expenditure remains within a narrow band of total calories, helpful for avoiding starvation among active hunter-gatherers, but disheartening for those of us in the modern world who find that more exercise does not equate to much, if any, weight loss."
This has implications for training as well as weight loss. If we don’t have an infinite capacity for energy expenditure then you can’t outrun the dinner table for weight loss and you can’t always eat your way out of overtraining. It also explains why “fit” is not necessarily the same as fertile.
Also referred to as the constrained model of energy expenditure: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC48030 33/#!po=1.85185
Edited by AusDaz on 02-27-21 12:32 AM. Reason for edit: No reason given.
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Pepper
Total Posts: 296
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Of course you can outwork a poor diet. It just sucks really, really hard. Ranulph Fiennes and Mike Stroud proved that: Link to article here.
The article is a fascinating read and Stroud's book Survival Of The Fittest: The Anatomy of Peak Physical Performance is a fascinating read.
I remember an interview with Mike Stroud a few years after that feat. He was asked what qualities you needed to cross the Antarctic. He thought hard for a minute and said something like "you've got to be stupid to attempt it".
So here is a cool tidbit: I emailed him a few years ago with a question about his book and he was kind enough to reply -- really, that was very cool. In Survival of the Fittest he writes that he climbed stairs with a heavy backpack to prepare for expeditions (Why does that seem familiar?). I asked how heavy the backpacks were and what his other training looked like. His wrote back that the backpack was around 30 kilograms (66 pounds) and that he still trained with the same weight on stairs or outside on hills whenever he was off to do a climb or so. He also cycled a few hours a day on hilly roads before crossing Antarctica. Seems so... reasonable? But seriously, what a cool guy.
Edited by Pepper on 02-27-21 05:08 AM. Reason for edit: No reason given.
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GeoffreyLevens
Total Posts: 357
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GeoffreyLevens
Total Posts: 357
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02-27-21 09:54 AM - Post#908232
- read the bread book Said:
What the study actually says is that increase in caloric consumption is the most likely culprit for these diseases, rather than decreased activity levels, and that caloric expenditure stays basically the same.
+1 on that.
A few years ago I saw docu from England about how the giant junk food corps have hijacked peoples' taste buds and health. In it, they referenced a study (which I unfortunately can no longer find) that demonstrated that people tended to stop moving/exercising because they were overweight and not the reverse. When they lost weight, without prompting or coaching, most spontaneously started to move and exercise more.
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read the bread book
Total Posts: 92
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- read the bread book Said:
What the study actually says is that increase in caloric consumption is the most likely culprit for these diseases, rather than decreased activity levels, and that caloric expenditure stays basically the same.
+1 on that.
A few years ago I saw docu from England about how the giant junk food corps have hijacked peoples' taste buds and health. In it, they referenced a study (which I unfortunately can no longer find) that demonstrated that people tended to stop moving/exercising because they were overweight and not the reverse. When they lost weight, without prompting or coaching, most spontaneously started to move and exercise more.
exactly! it's crazy to me that it is still so hard for people to understand that you're less likely to do something if you don't feel good. anyone with an injury can attest to this; you don't just avoid "the one thing that hurt you" (does this exist?), it becomes harder to do everything.
If you're heavier and have all kinds of other metabolic things going on a lot of exercise isn't going to feel good. the things that get marketed to people aren't "do this, it's enough to get you started," they're "the perfect thing that will solve all your problems." That's why I'm consistently impressed with the folks who are trainers in this forum, you actually have strategies for meeting people where they're at.
Edited by read the bread book on 02-27-21 12:24 PM. Reason for edit: No reason given.
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Old Miler
Total Posts: 1744
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In Survival of the Fittest he writes that he climbed stairs with a heavy backpack to prepare for expeditions (Why does that seem familiar?). I asked how heavy the backpacks were and what his other training looked like. His wrote back that the backpack was around 30 kilograms (66 pounds) and that he still trained with the same weight on stairs or outside on hills whenever he was off to do a climb or so...
Pepper, that is cool. Incidentally back in the 90s I knew a few big wall mountaineers and a guy preparing for an Everest attempt (without oxygen). These guys would typically work a day-job for 9 months, and it had to be a good one to pay the trip fees. So living in a London apartment block and climbing stairs with a pack every day was basic conditioning and the best they could fit in. Plus evenings at the climbing wall.
Edited by Old Miler on 02-27-21 05:02 PM. Reason for edit: No reason given.
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