This is true and contributes to poor health, but I don't think it is the primary factor for weight. It is very hard to excersize yourself out of a high calorie diet.
It's really pretty shocking how much added sugar there is in anything with more than 1 ingredient, and getting more sweetness in is basically a race with every other element of someone's diet. The 1980s had it junk food, but there was still other food.
> It is very hard to excersize yourself out of a high calorie diet.
Is it? Glancing around, it seems to me that the stark difference is between places where nobody walks or bikes anywhere — Tulsa, Little Rock, etc — and places where everyone walks and bikes — NY, DC, SF.
Exercise powerfully contributes to your overall health but it isn't the primary mean by which calories are kept in equilbrium. Worse, your body compensate by reducing basal metabolic rate and other mechanism. So it's an uphill struggle.
Changing your diet will have much greater bang for your bucks and much 'easier' to do.
I'm no expert but don't you have that backwards? Dieting will lower your basal metabolic rate, whereas exercise will increase it. So you burn energy exercising, and you burn more energy when resting, and if you gain muscle that also raises your BML. From my own experience it's just way easier to exercise my way into the shape I want than it is to think about my diet. I get a little fatter in the winter and I lean out again in the spring as I get back on my bike. Just easier to modulate that side of the equation, for me.
I can't see the logic in declaring one side of an equilibrium equation to be secondary. Both sides are obviously of the same importance.
Execise is health hygiene, its not a diet plan. This is obvious when you look at how hard it is to not eat a snickers bar vs how hard it is to burn off a snickers bar worth of calories via exercise. What you are talking about above is maybe a twenty pound seasonal discrepancy, it's not what most fat people are dealing with (also a quarter of that twenty pounds is just excess water you probably shed in the first week of adding back increased activity in the summer)
That one large Baskin Robbins Chocolate Oreo Shake has 2600 kcal and to burn that amount of calories, you'll probably need to go for a 3-hour run. And I imagine not a lot of adults have the time to go run for hours to keep up with their high-calorie diets.
I've heard that keeping a calorie intake diary is an effective way to lose weight. I also had pretty good results with it personally by setting a calorie target in an app and sticking to it.
A donut is about a half hour of jogging. If a Little Rock breakfast is like the rest of that neighborhood most of the sedentary thin thin state people I know wouldn't be able to keep it down.
Talking about "activity" is like identifying an organism as "a plant". There is huge diversity.
Walk uphill 400 metres altitude gain every day, and you will lose weight, yes. Run uphill 400m every day and you will lose even more. Carry a backpack, and ... you will put on muscle.
There's been an approx 80% decline in US infant mortality from 1963 to 2023 according to [0]. I know when comparing against pre-industrial society this is a big driver of increased life expectancy. There's another metric that adjusts for this that only looks at the life expectancy of individuals who survive to the age of (iirc) 15, but I don't have time to look it up right now. Perhaps comparing the change in that versus the one that includes the drop in infant mortality would be interesting though.
This exists in a system. We have obesity (caused by several factors, diet and activity levels of course and then the factors into those) along with improved medical care. It's like inflating a balloon with a slow leak. The medical care is propping up our life expectancy numbers while our individual behavior is bringing it down. It'll level out or decline at some point as our obese population continues to become a larger percentage and medical improvements stop happening so regularly.
Because we can all afford to go to the doctor regularly. If treated early, you can live with type 2 diabetes and other obesity related diseases for decades.
Infant mortality, smoking levels, alcohol consumption, social acceptance of driving while intoxicated, car collision safety, etc have all changed significantly in that same time frame.
Yes exercise is very healthy, that has been proven, but loosing weight is mostly a matter of eating less, at least according to this (reputable) meta source. Apparently, over eating but not getting fat (which holds true for me), leads to other problems (also true for me, I have an autoimmune disorder).
Eat less to lose weight. Exercise more to be healthy.
(nice, got my first downvotes in less time it takes to watch 1/10th of my source ;))
I don't know if OP was strictly on topic or was generalizing to health in general. It’s not like there’s a point to neatly delineate obesity from overall health on this topic since the overall topic is health.
There are a lot of pathological things we do regularly, not just overeat/eat the wrong things. They all contribute. Last I saw less exercise is more caused by obesity than the other way around. And sitting a lot can cause biomechanical maladoptions which makes movement (and in turn exercise) more inconvenient.
Well if you'd watch the movie and read the sources, you'd see that there is not much difference in the amount of calories you burn exercising or sitting at a desk. Consequently you won't loose weight one way or another.
Weight seems to be almost exclusively about the calories you ingest. It has little to do with obesity causing less exercise or the other way around. There is not a swathe of pathological things we do that contribute. We eat too much.
I also found that surprising. You can exercise without changing your diet, but you won't loose (much) weight. You can sit at a desk and start eating less and loose a lot of weight.
> You can exercise without changing your diet, but you won't loose (much) weight.
Exercising without changing your diet is seriously nontrivial for most people, due to compensatory eating - if you burn an extra 400 kCal, you will likely experience commensurate increase in appetite & eat an extra 400 kCal. It takes a lot of vigilance & discipline to avoid that.
IMO that's the 'real' reason diet is a more effective lever for weight loss than exercise. In theory, burning those extra 400 kCal thru exercise is just as effective for creating a caloric deficit as reducing daily consumption by 400 kCal, but in practice it still requires you to eat less than what feels normal/adequate.
That probably stacks up there in the bro science hall of fame for being wrong while sounding plausible. What's next, recommending an all meat diet because we were carnivores 10,000 years ago?
> You burn roughly as many calories walking as you do sleeping.
> Sleeping burns 40-80 calories per hour, walking 200-350.
We must have different definitions of "roughly", that's an order of magnitude difference!
> You're not gonna burn off any calories by walking.
That's a very different claim (but still not true).
To be clear: walking is great exercise. No, you're not going to walk off a 10,000 calorie/day diet with it; you need to not eat that much. Nor are you going to look like you spend 3 hrs/day doing crossfit just by walking. But 10,000 steps per day is miles better than 500.
It's really pretty shocking how much added sugar there is in anything with more than 1 ingredient, and getting more sweetness in is basically a race with every other element of someone's diet. The 1980s had it junk food, but there was still other food.