[icegreentea]

Obviously, if you had a 6' fat sedentary person suddenly start walking 3 miles a day, they would lose weight. That's actually -not- the claim of the paper. The paper claim is that total energy expenditure is largely uncoupled with physical activity levels. For example, within the Hadza they found no real difference in energy use compared to different amounts activity. They also found no relation between body fat percentage and total energy use.

What this points to is that if you give the human body time to adapt to any set of conditions, you'll likely end up burning roughly the same amount of calories.

Here's the actual paper by the way: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi/10.1371/journal.po...