I'm going to speak anecdotally, but I suspect I can find the appropriate literature in the morning to justify most of the following, maybe not all. The video seems to draw some silly conclusions...
I'm going to speak anecdotally, but I suspect I can find the appropriate literature in the morning to justify most of the following, maybe not all.
The video seems to draw some silly conclusions based on conflating factors. Your body modulates its metabolism and resting metabolic rate based on your diet and the availability of energy, and your level of vigor in your activity makes a big difference in calories burned.
If you are eating a low calorie diet, your body will somewhat adjust to try and compensate. Not enough to prevent you from losing weight, but enough to notice if you are measuring such things. A slight caloric deficit with low intensity exercise won't lead to rapid weight loss.
Likewise, a hunter gatherer walking a steady pace might not burn much more active calories than someone who walks less but much more vigorously.
I wanted to personally test a number of fitness strategies and test my limits. From January 22 to January 23 I set myself a challenge to run 22km per day for a year, and I managed 367 days straight, in sun and snow, in Altra shoes and winter boots. I recorded all of that fitness data using my Garmin watches, calipers, food diary, scale, etc, and also had some light core and upper body training throughout.
Exercising properly, and in concert with your diet will 100%, unequivocally burn an appreciable amount of calories. Additionally, things like fasting cardio, such as running first thing in the morning before having any calories, seems to help accelerate fat breakdown based on my testing. During the months I tested fasting cardio, my weight dropped below where it had plateaued, and I had to up my calories to gain it back.
So while I think the video has a point that your body is complicated and balances many different things with respect to losing weight, intimating that exercise doesn't help is just wrong. That said, most people can't outrun a shitty diet, and those that can don't want to.
My personal recommendation to people struggling with weight and exercise is focus on what you can sustainably do, like walking. If you can make that a daily or multiple times a day activity, and slowly push the intensity, maybe do a fasting cardio walk first thing in the morning, with an appropriate diet, you will be better off than going for broke and burning yourself out running.
They did pretty good. I actually have some old knee injuries and have had knee surgery, so I'm very careful with them. On downhill and flat I stayed in my "fat burn" heartbeat range which...
They did pretty good. I actually have some old knee injuries and have had knee surgery, so I'm very careful with them.
On downhill and flat I stayed in my "fat burn" heartbeat range which translated to about 10-12 minute miles, and did higher intensity uphill. The incline minimized shocks to the legs when going hard and helped get me to my peak heart rate quickly, while going slower down hill let me control my form better.
But at the first hint of a twinge, I would stop and assess, and do some easier places until I felt solid.
I don't run that much anymore, maybe 3-5 miles a day, plus additional cardio and strength training. So I wouldn't consider myself a high intensity runner anymore.
Interestingly, when I started I had a VO2 max of 49, and at the end a VO2 max of 54. even after some time off the regime, but keeping my usual base activity, I've stayed at 51. So a few of those gains were sticky I suppose, which is nice.
As a runner currently on a break due to knee pain your friend should, if their insurance allows it, get some running focused PT. Improved my times and reduced my frequency of injuries while...
As a runner currently on a break due to knee pain your friend should, if their insurance allows it, get some running focused PT. Improved my times and reduced my frequency of injuries while increasing mileage.
It depended on season and whether I broke the run up or did it in one shot. But I'm an early riser, often starting my run at 4 am, and I worked hybrid and didn't have any commute most of the time....
It depended on season and whether I broke the run up or did it in one shot. But I'm an early riser, often starting my run at 4 am, and I worked hybrid and didn't have any commute most of the time. I could be up and done before the rest of the family woke up most days.
It's amazing what you can do when work doesn't make you spend two hours a day in a metal box on a freeway!
I don't know which is more amazing, getting up at 4am or running 13 mile a day, both kept up for a year. Left to my own devices, during my recently "adult"* vacation the bunch of us had only just...
I don't know which is more amazing, getting up at 4am or running 13 mile a day, both kept up for a year.
Left to my own devices, during my recently "adult"* vacation the bunch of us had only just gone to bed by 4am...... (* Adult in age, not in mentality. We're high school buddies)
Honestly, it was during a hard growth time in my career where I was wrapping up major initiatives and preparing to make a career leap. The running and schedule gave me the time I needed to think...
Honestly, it was during a hard growth time in my career where I was wrapping up major initiatives and preparing to make a career leap. The running and schedule gave me the time I needed to think and process difficult decisions and people and to stay centered. So it was as much a mental health thing as a physical thing.
But like I said, the challenge played to my strengths of being a morning person and having good endurance. I'm also very privileged to have a remote and flexible job, a good partner, and not living hand to mouth or crisis to crisis.
As someone who grew up poor but had been fortunate in my career, living in poverty is way harder and draining than running a half marathon a day.
I think they would have done better by just adding in a couple of rest days every week. Even elite bodybuilders don't lift every single day. Gotta give the body time to recover.
I think they would have done better by just adding in a couple of rest days every week. Even elite bodybuilders don't lift every single day. Gotta give the body time to recover.
I think the video is pretty good; the main problem with it is that it’s short and so it tends to miss the mark on accuracy, leading to some statements that can be a bit misleading. Their main...
I think the video is pretty good; the main problem with it is that it’s short and so it tends to miss the mark on accuracy, leading to some statements that can be a bit misleading. Their main point, though - that it is extremely difficult to lose weight via exercise - is well established. My experience with that approach was like self-torture. And no, that was not an exaggeration.
You are absolutely right about exercising after a fast. There have been studies showing that morning exercise routines burn more calories if done before breakfast than after.
There are many variables that determine what a persons weight will be. It just turns out the ones that are easiest to control are related to diet.
I suppose my concern is that absent their planned video on diet, what is the expected takeaway? Many people already have a high external locus of control when it comes to attitudes about their...
I suppose my concern is that absent their planned video on diet, what is the expected takeaway? Many people already have a high external locus of control when it comes to attitudes about their health. Feeding them information that is inaccurate that could leave them feeling further discouraged or disenpowered to effect change doesn't seem good to me.
I would much prefer a video that focused on how to sustainably use exercise in tandem with diet, rather than an infotainment half-take.
For people who have the time, regular to brisk walking every day will help with weight loss, with the appropriate diet. That's video I'd like to see for purposes of public health.
I prefer the title that DeArrow suggested, which is "Why Exercise Is Healthy but Doesn't Help You Lose Weight". It follows in line with the conclusion to the video:
I suppose my concern is that absent their planned video on diet, what is the expected takeaway?
I prefer the title that DeArrow suggested, which is "Why Exercise Is Healthy but Doesn't Help You Lose Weight". It follows in line with the conclusion to the video:
So to conclude: You'll probably not lose nearly as much fat by working out as you hoped, but you will [...] prevent or delay many of the diseases that will make your life miserable so you can enjoy a higher quality of life, for much longer.
If it helps, Kurzgesagt posts a list of sources for every claim in their videos. Diet and weight loss are incredibly personal and touchy subjects, which are often difficult to study due to the...
If it helps, Kurzgesagt posts a list of sources for every claim in their videos. Diet and weight loss are incredibly personal and touchy subjects, which are often difficult to study due to the requirement that they're longitudinal and hard to control, so a fair critique could be that results vary dramatically from person to person.
Thank you! I looked for sources but on Mobile only saw the link to their brilliant page. I was curious about one claim in particular and went looking for the source: However, the source they give...
Thank you! I looked for sources but on Mobile only saw the link to their brilliant page.
I was curious about one claim in particular and went looking for the source:
In reality exercising is a bad way to burn fat. And until recently we fundamentally misunderstood what moving around a lot does to our bodies.
However, the source they give isn't substantiating the first sentence. They only back up the second. So they don't actually back up the claim "In reality exercising is a bad way to burn fat."
There were also a few more nuanced bits than the script would convey, including:
For some strange reason, the amount of calories you burn is pretty much unrelated to your lifestyle. Per kilo of body weight, your body has a fixed calorie budget it wants to burn per day.
IMO that is a fairly tortured translation of
Quote: “TEE measured during normal daily life reflects years or even decades of habituation to some customary level of physical activity. It follows that physical activity is a poor predictor of TEE among populations (19, 20, 58–64). The duration effect should also inform future tests of the Constrained TEE model, since compensation to increased physical activity is inconsistent before ~6 mo (FIGURE 2). Notably, metabolic compensation appears to be much faster in rodents and birds, apparent in weeks rather than months (56, 63), suggesting that the rate of compensation might be related to body size or mass-specific metabolic rate.”
Which (I think) is saying that our bodies base metabolic burn rate doesn't change immediately in response to changes in activity. So it takes sustained change to move the needle in the calories our bodies want to burn. So killing yourself at the gym for one day won't have much benefit beyond one small shot of increased active calories burned. It won't nudge your base rate higher unless you sustain it.
So I dunno. I like that they cite everything, but unless I'm reading things wrong, I don't think I concur with the message.
I have a really hard time buying a lot of the conclusions that are being subtlety pointed out in this video. There's no way that someone who just sits around all day only burns 100 less calories...
I have a really hard time buying a lot of the conclusions that are being subtlety pointed out in this video. There's no way that someone who just sits around all day only burns 100 less calories than someone with an active lifestyle or a physical job, that's just not possible.
Unless you have some serious underlying health issues, no, metabolism does not play a huge role. People have varying metabolic rates, sure, but it affects at most a couple hundred calories a day,...
Unless you have some serious underlying health issues, no, metabolism does not play a huge role. People have varying metabolic rates, sure, but it affects at most a couple hundred calories a day, and that's at the extreme. There are no human-jaguar hybrids that can lounge around all day and still be lean killing machines.
I have always been super skinny. 6'1 and 120 lbs. My uncle is this way, and so was my grandfather. Spent my whole life hearing "You must have a fast metabolism."
Decided to look into it, and it's just not true. It's a load of bull. A myth. In my teens I decided to actually measure my caloric intake. On average I ate 1,200 calories a day. Still do to this day.
Metabolism absolutely does play a huge role -- the majority of the calories we burn are due to it. What you're talking about in your comment is whether variation in metabolic rate between healthy...
Metabolism absolutely does play a huge role -- the majority of the calories we burn are due to it. What you're talking about in your comment is whether variation in metabolic rate between healthy individuals plays a huge role in differences in their ability to gain or lose weight, which afaik you are correct in identifying is not a huge factor. But that's not the same thing as metabolism not playing a huge role, because it absolutely does.
Also, the prevalence of hypothyroidism is 2-7% in the US for patients under 50, 10-11% in patients 50+, and 16-18% in patients 60+. These rates are also rising, especially in those older populations. About 15% of these people are untreated. (Source). I'm sure this is exactly what you meant by "serious underlying health issues", but it's worth noting that serious does not equal rare.
Yes, but that's not necessarily the thing that the person you responded to was talking about. My read of their comment is that they were referring to the absolute portion of the calories one burns...
Yes, but that's not necessarily the thing that the person you responded to was talking about. My read of their comment is that they were referring to the absolute portion of the calories one burns that is due to the metabolism, rather than how much differences between people can be accounted for by it.
The initial comment was talking about someone who sits around all day vs someone who exercises. My takeaway from that was an implication that personal metabolic rates are the deciding factor....
The initial comment was talking about someone who sits around all day vs someone who exercises. My takeaway from that was an implication that personal metabolic rates are the deciding factor.
My understanding was that the initial comment expressed disbelief that the difference in calories burnt could be so small between people with different levels of exercise, and then the next...
My understanding was that the initial comment expressed disbelief that the difference in calories burnt could be so small between people with different levels of exercise, and then the next comment said that, because metabolism is such a big part of how many calories you burn, they do believe the difference could be that small between individuals. Essentially agreeing with you on the low amount of variability there. Your comment does make more sense to me knowing that you read that differently, though!
You read mine correctly. I was always between 85-90kg my whole life (162cm). I skated 25 hours per week from 2020-2022 and … went down to 75kg. I stopped and over two years I’m now at 84kg again....
You read mine correctly.
I was always between 85-90kg my whole life (162cm). I skated 25 hours per week from 2020-2022 and … went down to 75kg. I stopped and over two years I’m now at 84kg again.
It’s absolutely depressing. Most of the weight I had lost then was because I had less time to eat so just ate less. Two years to lose 10kg is absurd, that’s 100g per week.
And @ACEMat your metabolism also does impact how much you will want to eat by default, so I wouldn’t call it a load of bull anyway.
The culprit is how it is phrased. The video states it can be as low as 100 calories, not average or median of. It's a little misleading since the average difference can be higher.
The culprit is how it is phrased. The video states it can be as low as 100 calories, not average or median of. It's a little misleading since the average difference can be higher.
If I run 5mph for one hour, I will burn about 600 calories, 500 of them active. In contrast, the nachos at the cheesecake factory are 2,700 calories. If I did my five mile run and that was my only...
If I run 5mph for one hour, I will burn about 600 calories, 500 of them active. In contrast, the nachos at the cheesecake factory are 2,700 calories. If I did my five mile run and that was my only real activity, and ate just the nacho meal, I would exceed my daily calorie need by 500 calories (1700 resting plus 500 active gives me 2200 burned and 2700 consumed).
I've been incredibly active at different times in my life, and have had those rare days where my active calories exceed my base, such as summit days on climbing trips. But even then, it is always so much easier to eat more calories than you burn.
That said... a guilty pleasure of mine is to, every once in a while, burn a huge amount of calories by climbing, hiking, or running first thing in the morning without eating, and then mid afternoon eat a splurge meal like the afformentioned nachos, and then going into a torpor like a snake.
I'm not sure about the numbers quoted, but it's certainly true that when considering weight loss in isolation, exercise just isn't that effective. That's been known for a long time. Here's a video...
I'm not sure about the numbers quoted, but it's certainly true that when considering weight loss in isolation, exercise just isn't that effective. That's been known for a long time. Here's a video on the topic from a reasonably reputable YouTube channel that focuses on medical news and studies -- the video's from 8 years ago but it's still solid. The other side of the coin, of course, is that exercise is still EXTREMELY good for your health in other ways. It's just not likely to actually help you lose weight all that much.
Health related videos and articles on the web are typically atrocious, but this one is actually a pretty good overall. My real criticism is that it’s arranged in the clickbait way to make it seem...
Health related videos and articles on the web are typically atrocious, but this one is actually a pretty good overall. My real criticism is that it’s arranged in the clickbait way to make it seem as if it’s trying to say that exercise is useless and you should give up. Sure, near the end, they talk about the benefits of exercise, but I will bet that a lot of people will watch this and will take away that exercise is useless to them.
I have read books in the past that say similar things regarding to TDEE, so I’m not terribly skeptical of that claim, but you may want to check out the citation since it’s not passing your sniff test.
I posted this elsewhere as well, but here's the citation list for all the claims made in the video. The section you're looking for is titled "The Myth of the Workout", in case you'd like to dig...
I posted this elsewhere as well, but here's the citation list for all the claims made in the video. The section you're looking for is titled "The Myth of the Workout", in case you'd like to dig into the sources.
I think your assumptions are true in a vacuum, but in real life, the more you exercise the hungrier you get and the more you eat. Along with the physiological changes in energy efficiency...
I think your assumptions are true in a vacuum, but in real life, the more you exercise the hungrier you get and the more you eat. Along with the physiological changes in energy efficiency described in the video, just expending more energy will generally not result in weight loss. There have been a studies showing that just doing steady state cardio is not associated with weight loss, so the data backs it up. The video's citation list has some good info. Controlling diet would be a different story, but that just means that weight change is more about diet than exercise. Even so, the video describes a number of benefits of exercise that are not weight loss.
I feel like they completely ignored the benefits of weight lifting and building muscle mass, and overlooked the fact that by calorie counting one can avoid eating more calories as a result of...
I feel like they completely ignored the benefits of weight lifting and building muscle mass, and overlooked the fact that by calorie counting one can avoid eating more calories as a result of one's body pining for more calories to counteract the calorie expenditure. This a pretty big deal since cutting and gaining phases are a big part of lifting. The whole point is to fight against the body's natural instinct to eat more after exerting more via caloric deficit (and also at times to willingly gain fat while also gaining muscle mass via caloric surplus).
They also seemed to have overlooked the fact that muscle burns more calories at rest than fat, so more muscle = more calories burned at rest. This is pretty important, as one of the advantages of lifting over cardio is the greater calories burned at rest from increased muscle mass (cardio still increases this, but not as much, primarily cardio is good for burning calories in the moment)...Or maybe they just hand waved it all away with the "your body adapts to energy expenditures" line. Additionally, there wasn't much in the video about quality of calories, Snickers ice cream bars != chicken-broccoli-rice.
Any which way, I think this video is fairly misleading. If you can eat the same, but start lifting you will evetually lose weight up to a point (assuming your eating habits aren't absurd). For further weight loss most people would probably have to start managing their nutrition and caloric intake, but to imply exercising won't make you lose weight, just be sendentary (as the video seems to imply), is an extreme simplification IMO.
Also, what's with all the naked female butts in the comments?
They mentioned that diet will be a separate video, which I hope would include mention of calorie deficits and type of food intake. Unfortunately, I feel like completely omitting basically anything...
They mentioned that diet will be a separate video, which I hope would include mention of calorie deficits and type of food intake. Unfortunately, I feel like completely omitting basically anything about diet in this video lost some supporting context. It feels like a movie that doesn't quite stand alone without its other half.
Yeah, I wasn't expecting details since they said there would be another video, but they kept mentioning how the body adapts to exertion and calorie intake without emphasizing just the tiny idea...
Yeah, I wasn't expecting details since they said there would be another video, but they kept mentioning how the body adapts to exertion and calorie intake without emphasizing just the tiny idea that maybe one could....count calories. 🤷♂️
Yeah, it's not highlighted very well :/ they dedicated an entire sentence (three seconds!) to this, though, so it's not completely ignored 😅 the section you're looking for is titled "you also need...
I feel like they completely ignored the benefits of weight lifting and building muscle mass
[...]
They also seemed to have overlooked the fact that muscle burns more calories at rest than fat, so more muscle = more calories burned at rest.
Yeah, it's not highlighted very well :/ they dedicated an entire sentence (three seconds!) to this, though, so it's not completely ignored 😅 the section you're looking for is titled "you also need to eat more to build and sustain them or your new muscles wither away" in the sources list.
Checked a couple out, they are empty channels with links to adult sites in their bio. Some of their profile pics are blatantly pornographic, I'm surprised youtube hasn't cracked down on them.
Also, what's with all the naked female butts in the comments?
Checked a couple out, they are empty channels with links to adult sites in their bio. Some of their profile pics are blatantly pornographic, I'm surprised youtube hasn't cracked down on them.
Yeah , I figured. I have seen a few scattered about comments throughout YT, but this seemed like way more than usual on a single video. I guess they just haven't been moderated out yet?
Yeah , I figured. I have seen a few scattered about comments throughout YT, but this seemed like way more than usual on a single video. I guess they just haven't been moderated out yet?
Bots. They copy other comments, sometimes from somewhere else, sometimes from a comment below. They're OnlyFans or porn funnels. You can often see a lot of people responding to them as if they're...
Also, what's with all the naked female butts in the comments?
Bots. They copy other comments, sometimes from somewhere else, sometimes from a comment below. They're OnlyFans or porn funnels.
You can often see a lot of people responding to them as if they're real people.
I feel like I watched a completely different video than everyone else commenting here. They did do a lot of simplification, but my takeaway wasn't that they are saying exercise is useless or...
I feel like I watched a completely different video than everyone else commenting here. They did do a lot of simplification, but my takeaway wasn't that they are saying exercise is useless or anything, it was that exercise alone (for the purpose of weight loss) isn't as big a factor as we once thought. Those calories get used by the body in other ways instead. They go into how it's indisputable that exercise has major health benefits overall, but just that it's not as efficient for losing weight as we once thought. I imagine once they get into video 2 about the diet portion and food intake it's going to paint a much bigger picture about how it all interacts.
Agreed. I may have spent too much time linking sources to people instead of going to work 😅 it's a totally reasonable reaction, though, imo. A lot of people either have: (1) a very personal...
I feel like I watched a completely different video than everyone else commenting here.
Agreed. I may have spent too much time linking sources to people instead of going to work 😅 it's a totally reasonable reaction, though, imo. A lot of people either have:
(1) a very personal connection to exercise, since it can be literally life changing, so having a video diminish that can feel like a personal attack,
(2) a very personal connection to weight loss, since (many?) modern societies put a disproportionate amount of importance on one's weight, and either gaining or losing weight would factor in strongly to peoples' identities and personal histories.
I haven't had either of those pressures in my life, though, so I just watched a neat video that summarized a bunch of research I had to slog through a year or two ago! I suppose that means I really did watch a different video than everyone else :)
My biggest issue was that it is well known that exercise is not the only factor in weight loss (or muscle gain) across lifting forums. There are plenty of versions of phrases thrown around lifting...
My biggest issue was that it is well known that exercise is not the only factor in weight loss (or muscle gain) across lifting forums. There are plenty of versions of phrases thrown around lifting forums like "you can't out train a bad diet", or "gains are made 10% in the gym, 90% in the kitchen". However, the video kinda insinuated that the diet thing was top secret, and everyone thinks exercise alone is good enough, which isn't really the case if one spends a small amount of time reading about fitness.
Another issue was the repeated emphasis on the idea that the body ~"adapts to everything". This is addressed in good training programs through periodization, and switching in/out various lifts.
My reaction to the video in steps was like this:
Exercise isn't as great as you might think! - Huh?
The body adapts. - No shit
You won't lose weight because adapting and calories! - But I can change exercises, perioditize, and calorie count?
... - Oh, they aren't going to address any of this. Bad video is bad.
(1) a very personal connection to exercise, since it can be literally life changing, so having a video diminish that can feel like a personal attack,
You nailed it. Lifting has gotten me through a lot of depressing times. It has also drastically improved my life physically due to lower back pain since my 20s before I started lifting (pretty much gone now thanks to ignoring doctors, and deadlifting).
I also believe it is one of the few safe physical activities one can continue into old age (how many grampas do you see playing football (soccer)?) that provides massive benefits. It's also easier to maintain as all you need to do is find a gym, or buy some weights. Team sports are harder to organize and require more of a social commitment. If you do like team sports (or tennis) lifting will improve your performance, lower your chance of injury, and most likely increase your recovery speed from minor injuries.
Finally, I think many people are shy about going to the gym for the first time, and this video is kind of just another excuse not to go, when people should generally be encouraged to go. My opinion is that weightlifting (not general physical education) should be a required course the last year of high school, PE for the first year or two is fine, but the last year should have weightlifting so that if students want to they can really take advantage of the quality equipment available in university, or have a healthy hobby if they go straight into the work force (rather than blowing those first "big" pay checks on consumer electronics).
I believe they post their sources in the video description or their website. I haven’t verified if I like their sources, but I believe they do put a lot of research into each video.
I believe they post their sources in the video description or their website. I haven’t verified if I like their sources, but I believe they do put a lot of research into each video.
I believe they do very good research, as they take months to research a topic before working on the video. Also, I think they've posted correction videos before when they found out they were wrong...
I believe they do very good research, as they take months to research a topic before working on the video. Also, I think they've posted correction videos before when they found out they were wrong on some things.
They do a tremendous amount of research. However, it's important to remember that they are pursuing a narrative, in service of an engaging story. This is not a knock, or a snide snipe. They're...
They do a tremendous amount of research. However, it's important to remember that they are pursuing a narrative, in service of an engaging story. This is not a knock, or a snide snipe. They're trying to distill very complex topics down to very brief amounts of time, and the way you get things to stick is to tell people a story.
I think they did a very good job on their immune system series, even though there were plenty of simplifications they made that aren't really accurate in the larger context. But, for giving you the overall shape of the thing, again, genuinely excellent job.
All that being said... I do feel that this one is more of a miss than a hit. I am trying to decide if this is a murray-gell-man event, where I'm just noticing it because it relates to a subject I've actually studied, or if it is an actual slip.
Still worth watching, and their sources are excellent. But. Grain of salt, read the primary sources.
I was wondering if that was the take away as well, but the video makes such big simplifications I'm not sure that's a fair take away. There's such little nuance in such a short video I hesitate to...
I was wondering if that was the take away as well, but the video makes such big simplifications I'm not sure that's a fair take away. There's such little nuance in such a short video I hesitate to take more away than "the way out bodies process food is complicated and changes based on complicated environmental factors and routine."
A run is very different energy expenditure than walking the same distance and any exercise is going to drop your blood glucose. And while not "healthy" food maybe, a slice of pizza is going to do a great job of boosting blood sugar back which is going to be critical for deeper decision making post exertion/exercise. And if pizza is a great motivator for you to exercise, then I'd argue that you damn well earned it by getting out and doing something good for you but that isn't always fun or enjoyable.
That is the nature of health advice on the internet. That is why nobody should take it seriously. Talk to your doctors, folks. This is the kind of thing we pay them for.
That is the nature of health advice on the internet. That is why nobody should take it seriously.
Talk to your doctors, folks. This is the kind of thing we pay them for.
This video is pretty ridiculous. I think they're trying to say "if you want to lose weight, the most efficient and likely way to achieve that is ingesting fewer calories." More on that in a...
This video is pretty ridiculous.
I think they're trying to say "if you want to lose weight, the most efficient and likely way to achieve that is ingesting fewer calories." More on that in a moment. What they seem to be saying instead though, is "as you push your body with high activity levels, it will gradually adjust in ways that result in fewer calories being burned, meaning you'll find you lose less weight even though you're still at the same activity level."
I'm not aware of any serious, reviewed, accepted research that disputes the two universal facts about human weight. Namely, (1) calories in and (2) calories out primarily dictate your weight. The bottom line of ingesting calories means they get used by the body, and if in excess are stored for future use. Activity uses energy, either freshly ingested or stored from past ingestion. The way to lose weight is to eat less and be more active; in tandem.
Of course the body has evolved to maintain itself. It's called homeostasis, and that seems to be what they're dancing around in their "you can't work out to lose weight" crap.
Which is why I consider the video so ridiculous. You could have someone who decides to maintain a harshly restricted diet as a weight loss plan. As their sole change in pursuit of that goal.
The body, as it detects a persistent caloric deficit, will attempt to stave off starvation by lowering energy output in all sorts of ways. Lowering the calorie level required to maintain your weight, your body. This is a natural reflex, a result of an evolutionary process that saw sometimes humans would not have enough food.
Rather than dying within the first few missed meals, evolution created bodies that can store energy (fat, muscle, etc...) and bodies that can manage how much energy might be used both from moment to moment (e.g., the famous flight-or-flight reflex versus moments when you're just chilling casually) and from day to day (such as when your starvation responses kick in and try to make do with fewer incoming daily calories.)
The bottom line is modern humans and modern human society are at odds with the evolution that created humans and the society humans have created for themselves. We're designed by evolution to have a chance to survive across a wide range of conditions, including those where there's not enough food. Lack of water will kill us in days, typically three. Lack of food though, can take a lot longer.
You won't enjoy it, but most humans can skip meals for weeks without dying. They'll be very unhappy, very low energy, and the longer it goes on the more likely it is they could have any number of conditions and problems and bodily failures occur as a result, but it is biologically possible to survive periods measured in weeks where you have no food.
Because of those lean times evolution learned might happen to humans sometimes, we evolved cravings to seek out calorically dense foods (such as fat) to encourage us to support our bodies. Similar cravings often surface when you have nutrient deficiencies; you'll sometimes find you start wanting "weird" or "specific" foods if you're low on certain nutrients.
Most of those evolutionary impulses aren't needed by humans living in a modern society. We have agriculture and industrialization now. Food is wildly abundant and doesn't require the same kind of effort to obtain compared to our hunter-gatherer origins. We have bodies that evolved to support an organism that would usually spend four to eight very active hours a day, every day, gathering and consuming calories just to make it to the next day where it all starts over again.
Now we mostly live in societies where food is just available (economics as a separate discussion) and we rarely have to be active at all to obtain and consume it.
The economics of food production and sale encourages food suppliers to focus on foods that are often calorie dense. If humans craved rice cakes that are ten calories each and two or three would fill your stomach all the way up so you feel sated, that's what food suppliers would push. Instead, because we crave fats and sugars, out of profit motive (yea capitalism!) suppliers focus on foods that feed those cravings.
That fucks us today, when you just pop down to the store and buy a box of cookies that is half or two thirds of your daily required calorie count. A box you'll eat as a snack, in a day where you probably have another snack at some point, plus two or three whole meals, and further might be drinking not zero-calorie water but beverages that across the the entire day could add up to most of your needed calories just by themselves. All while you sit at a desk or on your couch twelve to fourteen hours a day, each day, week after week.
All of this is basically known. Has been known for a long, long time. People are just horrible at self-discipline. Even if they hate it, most people know why they're fat; we all eat too much and aren't active enough. Bottom line, period. That's just the truth.
So this video is just annoying. I'm not sure what their point is. Because my takeaway was them saying "exercise won't help you lose weight" which is just wrong. It will. It'll just happen on a curve as your body adjusts to a new paradigm you'd be creating as you established a higher activity level as your daily norm.
But if that's your goal, losing weight and becoming more healthy, the best way is to pay much more attention to your activity and your diet. Which most of us very much don't want to do. Especially the diet part.
For a lot of people, especially poor people who can't afford expertly crafted food with carefully calibrated ingredients alongside a full and rich life full of distracting and fulfilling activities (all of which cost lots of money), those basic biological dopamine hits that come from cramming a sugary fatty snack into their mouth is often one of the only joys they might get on a daily basis. When you have someone who's working ten hours a day (at a desk) but not being paid enough to go out and live some as a distraction, going through Twinkies and Cake and fatty hamburgers is the distraction. Is the life.
So while it's correct to say people usually lack self-discipline, it's not entirely their fault. A lot of people don't have much of a chance when you consider the societies they live in, the habits of those societies, and how those societies do or don't encourage them to manage their diet and activity.
Basically this video is shit. But they rolled it out because that's what they do; make videos to garner clicks to get paid from advertisers and sponsors. What do they care if it's wrong? That actually helps them. A "bad video" gets shared as people rise up in outrage. Then the channel gets to post another video explaining it, and another still where they might "try again" and present some other alternative. Each of which garners more clicks and more advertising and more payment.
Just like food suppliers, they have no incentive to care about you or what their product might do to you. So long as you're paying (clicking, same thing) they're content to roll with it.
I'm going to copy paste my previous comment on this because I think you completely missed the point of the video. My comment: I feel like your comment is raging over the calories and diet portion...
Because my takeaway was them saying "exercise won't help you lose weight"
I'm going to copy paste my previous comment on this because I think you completely missed the point of the video.
My comment:
"I feel like I watched a completely different video than everyone else commenting here. They did do a lot of simplification, but my takeaway wasn't that they are saying exercise is useless or anything, it was that exercise alone (for the purpose of weight loss) isn't as big a factor as we once thought. Those calories get used by the body in other ways instead. They go into how it's indisputable that exercise has major health benefits overall, but just that it's not as efficient for losing weight as we once thought. I imagine once they get into video 2 about the diet portion and food intake it's going to paint a much bigger picture about how it all interacts."
I feel like your comment is raging over the calories and diet portion of weight loss when this video wasn't even addressing diet. They said they would address diet portion in another video. . Diet is likely the biggest factor in how the body gains/loses weight. This video was simply stating that exercise may not be as big of a factor as we originally thought when it comes to strictly losing weight.
Kurzgesagt heavily researches their videos. They post their sources. Their videos take months to put together because of the amount of research they typically do. They absolutely care if their videos are factual. They will follow up and correct if they make mistakes. While I agree the title is a bit click-baity, generally speaking, them trying to "manufacture outrage" for clicks is NOT what their goal is. There's lots of channels that do that. Kurzgesagt isn't one of them. I encourage you to review their sources that they post. This isn't to say Kurzgesagt can't make mistakes (they absolutely can), but it's disheartening to see such a false caricature of what their channel is in your comment.
I really liked the style of a narrator with a British accent and a cutesy cartoon to illustrate a subject. Good combination, but it is starting to get old.
I really liked the style of a narrator with a British accent and a cutesy cartoon to illustrate a subject. Good combination, but it is starting to get old.
I'm going to speak anecdotally, but I suspect I can find the appropriate literature in the morning to justify most of the following, maybe not all.
The video seems to draw some silly conclusions based on conflating factors. Your body modulates its metabolism and resting metabolic rate based on your diet and the availability of energy, and your level of vigor in your activity makes a big difference in calories burned.
If you are eating a low calorie diet, your body will somewhat adjust to try and compensate. Not enough to prevent you from losing weight, but enough to notice if you are measuring such things. A slight caloric deficit with low intensity exercise won't lead to rapid weight loss.
Likewise, a hunter gatherer walking a steady pace might not burn much more active calories than someone who walks less but much more vigorously.
I wanted to personally test a number of fitness strategies and test my limits. From January 22 to January 23 I set myself a challenge to run 22km per day for a year, and I managed 367 days straight, in sun and snow, in Altra shoes and winter boots. I recorded all of that fitness data using my Garmin watches, calipers, food diary, scale, etc, and also had some light core and upper body training throughout.
Exercising properly, and in concert with your diet will 100%, unequivocally burn an appreciable amount of calories. Additionally, things like fasting cardio, such as running first thing in the morning before having any calories, seems to help accelerate fat breakdown based on my testing. During the months I tested fasting cardio, my weight dropped below where it had plateaued, and I had to up my calories to gain it back.
So while I think the video has a point that your body is complicated and balances many different things with respect to losing weight, intimating that exercise doesn't help is just wrong. That said, most people can't outrun a shitty diet, and those that can don't want to.
My personal recommendation to people struggling with weight and exercise is focus on what you can sustainably do, like walking. If you can make that a daily or multiple times a day activity, and slowly push the intensity, maybe do a fasting cardio walk first thing in the morning, with an appropriate diet, you will be better off than going for broke and burning yourself out running.
Just my two cents before bed.
Jesus Christ you ran 13 miles a day for a year straight? You're probably the fittest person on Tildes
It cost about $1,500 in running shoes, lol. Each pair lasted about a month. I just really like being outside.
How'd your knees handle it? I had a friend that ran intensely like that and now has serious knee pain.
They did pretty good. I actually have some old knee injuries and have had knee surgery, so I'm very careful with them.
On downhill and flat I stayed in my "fat burn" heartbeat range which translated to about 10-12 minute miles, and did higher intensity uphill. The incline minimized shocks to the legs when going hard and helped get me to my peak heart rate quickly, while going slower down hill let me control my form better.
But at the first hint of a twinge, I would stop and assess, and do some easier places until I felt solid.
I don't run that much anymore, maybe 3-5 miles a day, plus additional cardio and strength training. So I wouldn't consider myself a high intensity runner anymore.
Interestingly, when I started I had a VO2 max of 49, and at the end a VO2 max of 54. even after some time off the regime, but keeping my usual base activity, I've stayed at 51. So a few of those gains were sticky I suppose, which is nice.
As a runner currently on a break due to knee pain your friend should, if their insurance allows it, get some running focused PT. Improved my times and reduced my frequency of injuries while increasing mileage.
I just want to know how they had the time for this, it's likely faster if you're used to it but it still took me two hours to run the same length.
It depended on season and whether I broke the run up or did it in one shot. But I'm an early riser, often starting my run at 4 am, and I worked hybrid and didn't have any commute most of the time. I could be up and done before the rest of the family woke up most days.
It's amazing what you can do when work doesn't make you spend two hours a day in a metal box on a freeway!
I don't know which is more amazing, getting up at 4am or running 13 mile a day, both kept up for a year.
Left to my own devices, during my recently "adult"* vacation the bunch of us had only just gone to bed by 4am...... (* Adult in age, not in mentality. We're high school buddies)
Honestly, it was during a hard growth time in my career where I was wrapping up major initiatives and preparing to make a career leap. The running and schedule gave me the time I needed to think and process difficult decisions and people and to stay centered. So it was as much a mental health thing as a physical thing.
But like I said, the challenge played to my strengths of being a morning person and having good endurance. I'm also very privileged to have a remote and flexible job, a good partner, and not living hand to mouth or crisis to crisis.
As someone who grew up poor but had been fortunate in my career, living in poverty is way harder and draining than running a half marathon a day.
I think they would have done better by just adding in a couple of rest days every week. Even elite bodybuilders don't lift every single day. Gotta give the body time to recover.
I think the video is pretty good; the main problem with it is that it’s short and so it tends to miss the mark on accuracy, leading to some statements that can be a bit misleading. Their main point, though - that it is extremely difficult to lose weight via exercise - is well established. My experience with that approach was like self-torture. And no, that was not an exaggeration.
You are absolutely right about exercising after a fast. There have been studies showing that morning exercise routines burn more calories if done before breakfast than after.
There are many variables that determine what a persons weight will be. It just turns out the ones that are easiest to control are related to diet.
I suppose my concern is that absent their planned video on diet, what is the expected takeaway? Many people already have a high external locus of control when it comes to attitudes about their health. Feeding them information that is inaccurate that could leave them feeling further discouraged or disenpowered to effect change doesn't seem good to me.
I would much prefer a video that focused on how to sustainably use exercise in tandem with diet, rather than an infotainment half-take.
For people who have the time, regular to brisk walking every day will help with weight loss, with the appropriate diet. That's video I'd like to see for purposes of public health.
I prefer the title that DeArrow suggested, which is "Why Exercise Is Healthy but Doesn't Help You Lose Weight". It follows in line with the conclusion to the video:
That's very fair.
I wholeheartedly agree with that.
If it helps, Kurzgesagt posts a list of sources for every claim in their videos. Diet and weight loss are incredibly personal and touchy subjects, which are often difficult to study due to the requirement that they're longitudinal and hard to control, so a fair critique could be that results vary dramatically from person to person.
Thank you! I looked for sources but on Mobile only saw the link to their brilliant page.
I was curious about one claim in particular and went looking for the source:
However, the source they give isn't substantiating the first sentence. They only back up the second. So they don't actually back up the claim "In reality exercising is a bad way to burn fat."
There were also a few more nuanced bits than the script would convey, including:
IMO that is a fairly tortured translation of
Which (I think) is saying that our bodies base metabolic burn rate doesn't change immediately in response to changes in activity. So it takes sustained change to move the needle in the calories our bodies want to burn. So killing yourself at the gym for one day won't have much benefit beyond one small shot of increased active calories burned. It won't nudge your base rate higher unless you sustain it.
So I dunno. I like that they cite everything, but unless I'm reading things wrong, I don't think I concur with the message.
I have a really hard time buying a lot of the conclusions that are being subtlety pointed out in this video. There's no way that someone who just sits around all day only burns 100 less calories than someone with an active lifestyle or a physical job, that's just not possible.
Metabolism is such a huge part of the burn that I do buy it. But I’m also not entirely convinced by all of the conclusions.
Unless you have some serious underlying health issues, no, metabolism does not play a huge role. People have varying metabolic rates, sure, but it affects at most a couple hundred calories a day, and that's at the extreme. There are no human-jaguar hybrids that can lounge around all day and still be lean killing machines.
I have always been super skinny. 6'1 and 120 lbs. My uncle is this way, and so was my grandfather. Spent my whole life hearing "You must have a fast metabolism."
Decided to look into it, and it's just not true. It's a load of bull. A myth. In my teens I decided to actually measure my caloric intake. On average I ate 1,200 calories a day. Still do to this day.
Metabolism absolutely does play a huge role -- the majority of the calories we burn are due to it. What you're talking about in your comment is whether variation in metabolic rate between healthy individuals plays a huge role in differences in their ability to gain or lose weight, which afaik you are correct in identifying is not a huge factor. But that's not the same thing as metabolism not playing a huge role, because it absolutely does.
Also, the prevalence of hypothyroidism is 2-7% in the US for patients under 50, 10-11% in patients 50+, and 16-18% in patients 60+. These rates are also rising, especially in those older populations. About 15% of these people are untreated. (Source). I'm sure this is exactly what you meant by "serious underlying health issues", but it's worth noting that serious does not equal rare.
I did say varying metabolic rates, yes.
Yes, but that's not necessarily the thing that the person you responded to was talking about. My read of their comment is that they were referring to the absolute portion of the calories one burns that is due to the metabolism, rather than how much differences between people can be accounted for by it.
The initial comment was talking about someone who sits around all day vs someone who exercises. My takeaway from that was an implication that personal metabolic rates are the deciding factor.
Could be wrong, that's just how I interpreted it.
My understanding was that the initial comment expressed disbelief that the difference in calories burnt could be so small between people with different levels of exercise, and then the next comment said that, because metabolism is such a big part of how many calories you burn, they do believe the difference could be that small between individuals. Essentially agreeing with you on the low amount of variability there. Your comment does make more sense to me knowing that you read that differently, though!
You read mine correctly.
I was always between 85-90kg my whole life (162cm). I skated 25 hours per week from 2020-2022 and … went down to 75kg. I stopped and over two years I’m now at 84kg again.
It’s absolutely depressing. Most of the weight I had lost then was because I had less time to eat so just ate less. Two years to lose 10kg is absurd, that’s 100g per week.
And @ACEMat your metabolism also does impact how much you will want to eat by default, so I wouldn’t call it a load of bull anyway.
The culprit is how it is phrased. The video states it can be as low as 100 calories, not average or median of. It's a little misleading since the average difference can be higher.
This matches what many personal trainers say though... "90% of weight loss happens in the Kitchen"
It also matches what Giles Yeo have been saying.
If I run 5mph for one hour, I will burn about 600 calories, 500 of them active. In contrast, the nachos at the cheesecake factory are 2,700 calories. If I did my five mile run and that was my only real activity, and ate just the nacho meal, I would exceed my daily calorie need by 500 calories (1700 resting plus 500 active gives me 2200 burned and 2700 consumed).
I've been incredibly active at different times in my life, and have had those rare days where my active calories exceed my base, such as summit days on climbing trips. But even then, it is always so much easier to eat more calories than you burn.
That said... a guilty pleasure of mine is to, every once in a while, burn a huge amount of calories by climbing, hiking, or running first thing in the morning without eating, and then mid afternoon eat a splurge meal like the afformentioned nachos, and then going into a torpor like a snake.
🥐🥑🌮🐍🐍🐍💤💤💤
I'm not sure about the numbers quoted, but it's certainly true that when considering weight loss in isolation, exercise just isn't that effective. That's been known for a long time. Here's a video on the topic from a reasonably reputable YouTube channel that focuses on medical news and studies -- the video's from 8 years ago but it's still solid. The other side of the coin, of course, is that exercise is still EXTREMELY good for your health in other ways. It's just not likely to actually help you lose weight all that much.
Health related videos and articles on the web are typically atrocious, but this one is actually a pretty good overall. My real criticism is that it’s arranged in the clickbait way to make it seem as if it’s trying to say that exercise is useless and you should give up. Sure, near the end, they talk about the benefits of exercise, but I will bet that a lot of people will watch this and will take away that exercise is useless to them.
I have read books in the past that say similar things regarding to TDEE, so I’m not terribly skeptical of that claim, but you may want to check out the citation since it’s not passing your sniff test.
I posted this elsewhere as well, but here's the citation list for all the claims made in the video. The section you're looking for is titled "The Myth of the Workout", in case you'd like to dig into the sources.
I think your assumptions are true in a vacuum, but in real life, the more you exercise the hungrier you get and the more you eat. Along with the physiological changes in energy efficiency described in the video, just expending more energy will generally not result in weight loss. There have been a studies showing that just doing steady state cardio is not associated with weight loss, so the data backs it up. The video's citation list has some good info. Controlling diet would be a different story, but that just means that weight change is more about diet than exercise. Even so, the video describes a number of benefits of exercise that are not weight loss.
I feel like they completely ignored the benefits of weight lifting and building muscle mass, and overlooked the fact that by calorie counting one can avoid eating more calories as a result of one's body pining for more calories to counteract the calorie expenditure. This a pretty big deal since cutting and gaining phases are a big part of lifting. The whole point is to fight against the body's natural instinct to eat more after exerting more via caloric deficit (and also at times to willingly gain fat while also gaining muscle mass via caloric surplus).
They also seemed to have overlooked the fact that muscle burns more calories at rest than fat, so more muscle = more calories burned at rest. This is pretty important, as one of the advantages of lifting over cardio is the greater calories burned at rest from increased muscle mass (cardio still increases this, but not as much, primarily cardio is good for burning calories in the moment)...Or maybe they just hand waved it all away with the "your body adapts to energy expenditures" line. Additionally, there wasn't much in the video about quality of calories, Snickers ice cream bars != chicken-broccoli-rice.
Any which way, I think this video is fairly misleading. If you can eat the same, but start lifting you will evetually lose weight up to a point (assuming your eating habits aren't absurd). For further weight loss most people would probably have to start managing their nutrition and caloric intake, but to imply exercising won't make you lose weight, just be sendentary (as the video seems to imply), is an extreme simplification IMO.
Also, what's with all the naked female butts in the comments?
They mentioned that diet will be a separate video, which I hope would include mention of calorie deficits and type of food intake. Unfortunately, I feel like completely omitting basically anything about diet in this video lost some supporting context. It feels like a movie that doesn't quite stand alone without its other half.
Yeah, I wasn't expecting details since they said there would be another video, but they kept mentioning how the body adapts to exertion and calorie intake without emphasizing just the tiny idea that maybe one could....count calories. 🤷♂️
Yeah, it's not highlighted very well :/ they dedicated an entire sentence (three seconds!) to this, though, so it's not completely ignored 😅 the section you're looking for is titled "you also need to eat more to build and sustain them or your new muscles wither away" in the sources list.
Ah, thanks I will read the sources tomorrow. Probably make me more upset when I see how much they glossed over 🤣
Checked a couple out, they are empty channels with links to adult sites in their bio. Some of their profile pics are blatantly pornographic, I'm surprised youtube hasn't cracked down on them.
Yeah , I figured. I have seen a few scattered about comments throughout YT, but this seemed like way more than usual on a single video. I guess they just haven't been moderated out yet?
Bots. They copy other comments, sometimes from somewhere else, sometimes from a comment below. They're OnlyFans or porn funnels.
You can often see a lot of people responding to them as if they're real people.
I feel like I watched a completely different video than everyone else commenting here. They did do a lot of simplification, but my takeaway wasn't that they are saying exercise is useless or anything, it was that exercise alone (for the purpose of weight loss) isn't as big a factor as we once thought. Those calories get used by the body in other ways instead. They go into how it's indisputable that exercise has major health benefits overall, but just that it's not as efficient for losing weight as we once thought. I imagine once they get into video 2 about the diet portion and food intake it's going to paint a much bigger picture about how it all interacts.
Agreed. I may have spent too much time linking sources to people instead of going to work 😅 it's a totally reasonable reaction, though, imo. A lot of people either have:
(1) a very personal connection to exercise, since it can be literally life changing, so having a video diminish that can feel like a personal attack,
(2) a very personal connection to weight loss, since (many?) modern societies put a disproportionate amount of importance on one's weight, and either gaining or losing weight would factor in strongly to peoples' identities and personal histories.
I haven't had either of those pressures in my life, though, so I just watched a neat video that summarized a bunch of research I had to slog through a year or two ago! I suppose that means I really did watch a different video than everyone else :)
My biggest issue was that it is well known that exercise is not the only factor in weight loss (or muscle gain) across lifting forums. There are plenty of versions of phrases thrown around lifting forums like "you can't out train a bad diet", or "gains are made 10% in the gym, 90% in the kitchen". However, the video kinda insinuated that the diet thing was top secret, and everyone thinks exercise alone is good enough, which isn't really the case if one spends a small amount of time reading about fitness.
Another issue was the repeated emphasis on the idea that the body ~"adapts to everything". This is addressed in good training programs through periodization, and switching in/out various lifts.
My reaction to the video in steps was like this:
You nailed it. Lifting has gotten me through a lot of depressing times. It has also drastically improved my life physically due to lower back pain since my 20s before I started lifting (pretty much gone now thanks to ignoring doctors, and deadlifting).
I also believe it is one of the few safe physical activities one can continue into old age (how many grampas do you see playing football (soccer)?) that provides massive benefits. It's also easier to maintain as all you need to do is find a gym, or buy some weights. Team sports are harder to organize and require more of a social commitment. If you do like team sports (or tennis) lifting will improve your performance, lower your chance of injury, and most likely increase your recovery speed from minor injuries.
Finally, I think many people are shy about going to the gym for the first time, and this video is kind of just another excuse not to go, when people should generally be encouraged to go. My opinion is that weightlifting (not general physical education) should be a required course the last year of high school, PE for the first year or two is fine, but the last year should have weightlifting so that if students want to they can really take advantage of the quality equipment available in university, or have a healthy hobby if they go straight into the work force (rather than blowing those first "big" pay checks on consumer electronics).
Is kurzgesagt considered well researched? I saw one a while back but otherwise not too familiar with their channel
I believe they post their sources in the video description or their website. I haven’t verified if I like their sources, but I believe they do put a lot of research into each video.
I believe they do very good research, as they take months to research a topic before working on the video. Also, I think they've posted correction videos before when they found out they were wrong on some things.
Link to their sources if you want to take a look.
They do a tremendous amount of research. However, it's important to remember that they are pursuing a narrative, in service of an engaging story. This is not a knock, or a snide snipe. They're trying to distill very complex topics down to very brief amounts of time, and the way you get things to stick is to tell people a story.
I think they did a very good job on their immune system series, even though there were plenty of simplifications they made that aren't really accurate in the larger context. But, for giving you the overall shape of the thing, again, genuinely excellent job.
All that being said... I do feel that this one is more of a miss than a hit. I am trying to decide if this is a murray-gell-man event, where I'm just noticing it because it relates to a subject I've actually studied, or if it is an actual slip.
Still worth watching, and their sources are excellent. But. Grain of salt, read the primary sources.
Dang. That means I don't get to eat that slice of pizza after a long workout because I haven't "earned" it calorie-wise.
I was wondering if that was the take away as well, but the video makes such big simplifications I'm not sure that's a fair take away. There's such little nuance in such a short video I hesitate to take more away than "the way out bodies process food is complicated and changes based on complicated environmental factors and routine."
A run is very different energy expenditure than walking the same distance and any exercise is going to drop your blood glucose. And while not "healthy" food maybe, a slice of pizza is going to do a great job of boosting blood sugar back which is going to be critical for deeper decision making post exertion/exercise. And if pizza is a great motivator for you to exercise, then I'd argue that you damn well earned it by getting out and doing something good for you but that isn't always fun or enjoyable.
That is the nature of health advice on the internet. That is why nobody should take it seriously.
Talk to your doctors, folks. This is the kind of thing we pay them for.
One reason I lift is so I can eat pizza and not feel bad 😁
Precisely! You turn pizza into muscle mass! 😄
This video is pretty ridiculous.
I think they're trying to say "if you want to lose weight, the most efficient and likely way to achieve that is ingesting fewer calories." More on that in a moment. What they seem to be saying instead though, is "as you push your body with high activity levels, it will gradually adjust in ways that result in fewer calories being burned, meaning you'll find you lose less weight even though you're still at the same activity level."
I'm not aware of any serious, reviewed, accepted research that disputes the two universal facts about human weight. Namely, (1) calories in and (2) calories out primarily dictate your weight. The bottom line of ingesting calories means they get used by the body, and if in excess are stored for future use. Activity uses energy, either freshly ingested or stored from past ingestion. The way to lose weight is to eat less and be more active; in tandem.
Of course the body has evolved to maintain itself. It's called homeostasis, and that seems to be what they're dancing around in their "you can't work out to lose weight" crap.
Which is why I consider the video so ridiculous. You could have someone who decides to maintain a harshly restricted diet as a weight loss plan. As their sole change in pursuit of that goal.
The body, as it detects a persistent caloric deficit, will attempt to stave off starvation by lowering energy output in all sorts of ways. Lowering the calorie level required to maintain your weight, your body. This is a natural reflex, a result of an evolutionary process that saw sometimes humans would not have enough food.
Rather than dying within the first few missed meals, evolution created bodies that can store energy (fat, muscle, etc...) and bodies that can manage how much energy might be used both from moment to moment (e.g., the famous flight-or-flight reflex versus moments when you're just chilling casually) and from day to day (such as when your starvation responses kick in and try to make do with fewer incoming daily calories.)
The bottom line is modern humans and modern human society are at odds with the evolution that created humans and the society humans have created for themselves. We're designed by evolution to have a chance to survive across a wide range of conditions, including those where there's not enough food. Lack of water will kill us in days, typically three. Lack of food though, can take a lot longer.
You won't enjoy it, but most humans can skip meals for weeks without dying. They'll be very unhappy, very low energy, and the longer it goes on the more likely it is they could have any number of conditions and problems and bodily failures occur as a result, but it is biologically possible to survive periods measured in weeks where you have no food.
Because of those lean times evolution learned might happen to humans sometimes, we evolved cravings to seek out calorically dense foods (such as fat) to encourage us to support our bodies. Similar cravings often surface when you have nutrient deficiencies; you'll sometimes find you start wanting "weird" or "specific" foods if you're low on certain nutrients.
Most of those evolutionary impulses aren't needed by humans living in a modern society. We have agriculture and industrialization now. Food is wildly abundant and doesn't require the same kind of effort to obtain compared to our hunter-gatherer origins. We have bodies that evolved to support an organism that would usually spend four to eight very active hours a day, every day, gathering and consuming calories just to make it to the next day where it all starts over again.
Now we mostly live in societies where food is just available (economics as a separate discussion) and we rarely have to be active at all to obtain and consume it.
The economics of food production and sale encourages food suppliers to focus on foods that are often calorie dense. If humans craved rice cakes that are ten calories each and two or three would fill your stomach all the way up so you feel sated, that's what food suppliers would push. Instead, because we crave fats and sugars, out of profit motive (yea capitalism!) suppliers focus on foods that feed those cravings.
That fucks us today, when you just pop down to the store and buy a box of cookies that is half or two thirds of your daily required calorie count. A box you'll eat as a snack, in a day where you probably have another snack at some point, plus two or three whole meals, and further might be drinking not zero-calorie water but beverages that across the the entire day could add up to most of your needed calories just by themselves. All while you sit at a desk or on your couch twelve to fourteen hours a day, each day, week after week.
All of this is basically known. Has been known for a long, long time. People are just horrible at self-discipline. Even if they hate it, most people know why they're fat; we all eat too much and aren't active enough. Bottom line, period. That's just the truth.
So this video is just annoying. I'm not sure what their point is. Because my takeaway was them saying "exercise won't help you lose weight" which is just wrong. It will. It'll just happen on a curve as your body adjusts to a new paradigm you'd be creating as you established a higher activity level as your daily norm.
But if that's your goal, losing weight and becoming more healthy, the best way is to pay much more attention to your activity and your diet. Which most of us very much don't want to do. Especially the diet part.
For a lot of people, especially poor people who can't afford expertly crafted food with carefully calibrated ingredients alongside a full and rich life full of distracting and fulfilling activities (all of which cost lots of money), those basic biological dopamine hits that come from cramming a sugary fatty snack into their mouth is often one of the only joys they might get on a daily basis. When you have someone who's working ten hours a day (at a desk) but not being paid enough to go out and live some as a distraction, going through Twinkies and Cake and fatty hamburgers is the distraction. Is the life.
So while it's correct to say people usually lack self-discipline, it's not entirely their fault. A lot of people don't have much of a chance when you consider the societies they live in, the habits of those societies, and how those societies do or don't encourage them to manage their diet and activity.
Basically this video is shit. But they rolled it out because that's what they do; make videos to garner clicks to get paid from advertisers and sponsors. What do they care if it's wrong? That actually helps them. A "bad video" gets shared as people rise up in outrage. Then the channel gets to post another video explaining it, and another still where they might "try again" and present some other alternative. Each of which garners more clicks and more advertising and more payment.
Just like food suppliers, they have no incentive to care about you or what their product might do to you. So long as you're paying (clicking, same thing) they're content to roll with it.
I'm going to copy paste my previous comment on this because I think you completely missed the point of the video.
My comment:
I feel like your comment is raging over the calories and diet portion of weight loss when this video wasn't even addressing diet. They said they would address diet portion in another video. . Diet is likely the biggest factor in how the body gains/loses weight. This video was simply stating that exercise may not be as big of a factor as we originally thought when it comes to strictly losing weight.
Kurzgesagt heavily researches their videos. They post their sources. Their videos take months to put together because of the amount of research they typically do. They absolutely care if their videos are factual. They will follow up and correct if they make mistakes. While I agree the title is a bit click-baity, generally speaking, them trying to "manufacture outrage" for clicks is NOT what their goal is. There's lots of channels that do that. Kurzgesagt isn't one of them. I encourage you to review their sources that they post. This isn't to say Kurzgesagt can't make mistakes (they absolutely can), but it's disheartening to see such a false caricature of what their channel is in your comment.
Divorcing diet from exercise in terms of weight loss (even if they stated there will be a second video on diet) was not a good decision though.
I really liked the style of a narrator with a British accent and a cutesy cartoon to illustrate a subject. Good combination, but it is starting to get old.
To be fair, Kurzgesagt is one of the oldest channels in the science video making game. They're the channel that other folks imitate.