[swat535]

> The sample dataset explicitly excluded 'athletes', so would exclude people that _are_ outrunning a bad diet.

You can't outrun a bad diet. This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from. Perhaps it's a nice lie one can tell himself to continue eating junk and not feel guilty about it.

Athletes, especially body builders require a lot of calories but their diet is surprisingly healthy. They eat plenty of protein, carbohydrates minerals, vitamins and healthy fats.

[nluken]

I would say that in practice 99% of people can't outrun a bad diet, but not because of any sort of physiological reason. You simply need to train so much that most people won't ever approach the level of running/cycling/lifting they would need to do so.

If you're training like an elite athlete (for me and my at the time roommate that was running 85, or in his case, 100+ miles a week with a few lift sessions) you can, and will, eat just about whatever you damn please and not gain weight. Most people can't fit that much training into their lives without making it their life's primary focus at the expense of everything else, and couldn't sustain that level of training if they did, so it becomes a practical impossibility.

I do miss that aspect of running so much mileage, though I appreciate the freedom that stepping back from competition has afforded me in other areas. To maintain weight now, I eat 1-2 meals a day, but back then? I ate whatever got put in front of me, sometimes 4 meals a day.

[appreciatorBus]

Sure but for the purposes of mass communication or creating helpful and memorable aphorisms "you can't out run a bad diet" is an appropriate summarization of the research.

If it's all ppl get out of it, the worst that might happen is that a handful of up & coming elite athletes might need their coaches to help them unlearn it, as opposed to the status quo where literal millions of ppl are trying & failing to outrun their diets.

[nluken]

Yes and I understand that. I was specifically replying to a comment about this phrase being a myth for athletes.

[kelnos]

Right, and that's fine. A saying that's true for 99% of people is a perfectly good saying. In the vast, vast majority of cases, "you can't outrun a bad diet" is completely true.

Your time running 85 miles a week is so outside the norm that your experience isn't even worth mentioning when evaluating that saying.

[JumpCrisscross]

> you can, and will, eat just about whatever you damn please and not gain weight

I don’t know if any athlete who can sustain themselves on a junk diet.

[tpm]

"somewhere between 60-120g carbs/hour" and that's on the flat stages (more in the mountains) of TdF would be considered junk food anywhere outside of sport.

Source: https://www.cyclingnews.com/features/mango-flavour-and-120g-...

[jdietrich]

Elite endurance athletes have awful diets by any normal standard, because the only way to fuel yourself adequately for a stage of the Tour de France or an ultramarathon is with nauseating amounts of refined carbohydrates. It's not even the fun kind of junk, just a constant effort to eat as much carbohydrate as your gut can possibly tolerate.

[milesvp]

I once worked a night shift stocking job just after college. I was in phenomenal shape without hitting the gym. I was at my lowest weight with a ton of lean muscle as a result of moving heavy loads and stocking paint every night. I also did the math at one point, and given the size of the warehouse I was probably walking quickly 8 miles during my shift. It became a chore to eat enough calories every day. Somewhere around 4000 calories/day, you may still be hungry, but you are generally full. Also food sort of becomes boring, and the desire to eat just isn't as strong.

That said, it was 4-6 hours 4 nights a week. That is a lot of time to spend to burn all those calories. It is really not hard to eat an extra 100 calories per day, but it takes a lot of effort to burn an extra 100 calories. It's the asymmetry here you absolutely have to respect. Further, at least for me, there is another asymmetry in terms of satiation vs hunger. It is much easier to be slightly satiated than it is to be slightly hungry. What this means, is that there is a tendency to be driven to eat slightly more than your body needs. This is partly why the GLP-1 drugs seem so effective, is that they seem to flip this asymmetry in the other direction, which means weight loss is the default, instead of weight gain.

[Sohcahtoa82]

Reminds me of when I got my first job at 17...I worked at a large department/grocery store. My job primarily consisted of pushing karts from the corrals back to the store.

In an 8 hour shift, I likely walked ~15 miles, with half of that time pushing up to a dozen karts. For lunch, I'd go to the McDonald's and get a Super Size (Since this was when that still existed) Double Quarter Pounder meal with a Coke. I'd chug the whole coke and then refill it. This meal was easily 3,000 calories, and I'd eat it 3 times a week.

After about two months on the job, I'd STILL lost about 5 lbs.

[hermitcrab]

Polar explorers Fienes and Stroud were eating locks of butter and still losing weight on their sled pulling expedition. It was estimated that they were buring up to 11,000 calories a day.

[raydev]

Your McD's meal was probably closer to 2000 calories, even with the giant Coke. For a short period I ate one meal a day, even when I thought I went over maintenance with a massive fast food treat, I'd still be 4-500 cals under if I was active that day.

[LorenPechtel]

Yup, we have a limit in our ability to take in and metabolize calories, although it is somewhat flexible in that if you do it enough you'll get better at it. Look at the people who do the long thru-hikes. Stuff like the Appalachian Trail (Georgia to the highest point in Maine), PCT or CDT (both run from the Mexican border to the Canadian border). They will hit saturation on the ability to take in calories, although enough time out there can increase the ability to metabolize fat (very useful in that it has about 2x the calories per pound of other food)

But you are right that it's very definitely about the balance.

[michaelhoney]

You make a good point about the time investment. You were able to do your exercise while working, but very few people will spend 16-24 hours a week working out.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from.

For people that are merely trying to lose weight, it's effectively true. When you're out of shape, you won't have the strength or endurance to exercise long and hard enough to actually burn significant calories.

For athletes that are running marathons or doing powerlifting, yes, it's certainly false. Massive bodybuilders that are already deadlifting hundreds of pounds will have massive diets because lifting that much weight takes significant energy.

But someone like me, with a BMI of 36, I can't outrun a bad diet. I go to the gym, set the treadmill at 5 mph, and I'm completely gassed after 3 minutes or 1/4 mile and have to slow down to 3 mph to recover. I'll go back and forth, but after about 20 minutes, I've gone about 1.3 miles, my legs are stiff and my ankles are sore because jogging at 240 lbs means high impact. Meanwhile, I've only burned probably ~100 calories. Not enough to offset the bad diet.

Given enough time of my routine, sure, my endurance might go up. Eventually I can do it longer, and maybe then I can start outrunning the bad diet. But that's going to take a long time.

Easier to just cut carbs.

[r_p4rk]

Powerlifting does not take as many calories as you'd think. In fact, lifting in general is surprisingly easy on the calorie requirement, so most powerlifters and bodybuilders incorporate cardio as part of their routine. You will burn a lot more calories by walking 10,000 steps a day for 1 month than you would doing an intense lifting session each day.

The reason you're probably thinking as to why lifters eat a huge amount is precisely because they're already large and muscular. Just 5% less bodyfat at the same weight results in roughly 200 more calories at maintenance for someone that is around 93kg.

[ch4s3]

A vigorous weightlifting workout for an hour will burn about 400kcal[1], which is roughly equivalent to walking 10k steps depending on your body weight. Another way to think of this is 100 minutes of brisk walking will round out to about 400kcal.

You don't really burn more calories walking, it's just easy to do and fit in around other things.

[1] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323922#calculating...

[r_p4rk]

Weird hill to die on - 400 is probably the top end for a super heavy day at a higher bodyweight - maybe deadlift primary and squat secondary day? Walking for 10,000 steps will every day will certainly burn more calories.

Regardless, people who lift aren’t eating more just because they burn a couple of hundred calories 2-5 times a week.

[jaco6]

You’re wrong about that, look up videos of strongmen and bodybuilder meals/eating routines. The 2 hour workouts at the top of these fields are very calorie intensive.

[cthalupa]

Bodybuilders eat a lot in the offseason because they're on tons of drugs and trying to maximize the amount of lean mass they can put on, and they eat more in general because when you have 100lb+ more muscle than the average person you have a significantly higher base metabolic rate. You can go on a variety of PED related forums and find IFBB pro's posting food logs, etc., and see that these crazy eating routines are limited to certain parts of the year, and even then have been falling out of favor - the 'lean bulk' for pros is more popular than ever.

Very few IFBB pros are working out in 2 hour sessions, either. Coaches understand junk volume way better now and know that a lot of the work being done previously just wasn't providing much muscle growth stimulus after a certain point. Most are spending <8 hours in the gym each week in general.

The top of the bodybuilding field is not eating a ton of food because of their lifting routines burning a bunch of calories.

[audinobs]

I have lifted for 30+ years and something very un-intuitive with powerlifting is the optimal weight class for a height is extremely high.

If you are 5'10" you are pound for pound stronger at 240 than at 198. 198 will be dominated by someone who is shorter otherwise.

You are also much stronger the more you weigh, period. Strongman are eating so much to keep their weight up, not because they are burning so many calories while working out.

Even the most intense prowler workout that will make an untrained person puke their guts out is easy to out eat.

It is easiest to see with a contest bodybuilding diet. Even a 250lb bodybuilder who is doing a ton of working out is basically eating nothing. The body is incredibly efficient at holding on to weight. If it wasn't, humans would have starved to death a long time ago.

[theodric]

My anecdata:

- a year of busting my ass on the bike almost daily: -15kg

- a year of restricting calories to ~1200/day and not doing much else: -40kg

- 2 years of sitting in my apartment being afraid of COVID and drinking too much: +50kg

Conclusion: booze is a really great way to put on a lot of weight quickly

[reverendsteveii]

my anecdata aligns with yours. A year of cardio every day and resistance 6 days a week bought me no weight loss, 2 years of limiting myself to 1800 cals/day on top of that stripped me of 25% of my body weight.

[darkwater]

Cool, but being physically active is not just to lose weight but to gain health. Your heart works more, your lungs work more, they develop a bit more, putting more oxygen in your body and the effects compound over time. So if you can, do both: control calories intake and exercise.

[reverendsteveii]

I did exactly that, and I thought I made that clear in my original comment but maybe I was unclear. With that being said, this article is about drivers of obesity so weight control is sort of the topic du jour itt.

[brailsafe]

All impressive numbers, but it seems like the move would be to keep doing #1 while being slightly less restrictive about #2 and just as restrictive about #3, which will eventually leave you not just lighter, but with a good level of fitness if you aren't already there. It's way easier to keep excess weight off and feel great about it if you're practicing athletics of some sort regularly

[ch4s3]

If you're drinking beer or wine it is certainly very calorie dense. You're looking at 208 kcal per pint of beer or 123 kcal for a 5oz pour of wine. A pound of fat takes about 3,500 excess calories, or 16 pints of beer. So if you drink 2 a day all else equal you could gain nearly 1 lb a week.

[audinobs]

This is just pointless ceteris paribus because genetics are the biggest variable.

If someone has a predisposition to diabetes they can't drink alcohol and hold things ceteris paribus because of the way alcohol effects the liver and then effects insulin.

Insulin sensitivity gets worse, blood sugar is all over the place and then the person is on a rollover-coast of over consuming calories to try to stabilize blood sugar.

IMO your post is why almost all dieting advise is just complete oversimplified nonsense. Meaningless ceteris paribus linear combinations that mostly add up to a non-reality for a non-linear complex system. It is a way for people to pick and chose what they want to be true.

[ch4s3]

Did you mean to reply to me? I'm simply pointing out that beer is calorie dense.

[throwawaylaptop]

Another thing you can do is one day of regular calories, and one day of zero. You still average to 1200 a day, but I think it's better for you for several reasons you can look into if interested.

[nottorp]

This is why you should walk to the pub instead of drinking at home...

[arealaccount]

[ throws out the protein powder ]

[reverendsteveii]

I'm 5'6", 165lbs, I bike 6-8 miles every day and do resistance training 6 days/week. I also have limited myself to 1800 cals/day and at least 130g protein. For two years I was biking 6-8 miles every day, doing resistance training and maintaining 210lbs which, at my height, is bordering on clinical obesity. If you could be healthy just by training and eating what you want I would have done it twice.

[hermitcrab]

I don't understand how you wouldn't lose weight. Are you sure the 1800 kcals is accurate. Are you including what you drink?

[reverendsteveii]

Oh no, I lost weight when I was on the 1800kcal. it was when I was working out what I intuitively feel like is a lot more than most people but still eating what I wanted that I didn't lose weight, which anecdotally fits with the premise of the article.

[tpm]

Your bike ride is too short to lose weight.

[reverendsteveii]

it's not though, because I lost 25% of my weight

[tpm]

"For two years I was biking 6-8 miles every day, doing resistance training and maintaining 210lbs"

[9rx]

"I'm 5'6", 165lbs, I bike 6-8 miles every day"

[neilv]

Did you pause the the jogging until in better shape, to avoid causing lasting damage?

Maybe try an elliptical, rowing erg, bike, or swimming?

[reverendsteveii]

You can outrun a bad diet, but the average person won't. The average American diet is 3600 cals/day (https://www.businessinsider.com/daily-calories-americans-eat..., https://archive.is/IURse). The average person needs ~=2250 cals/day to maintain a healthy weight (https://www.webmd.com/diet/calories-chart, women need 1600-2400 averaging at 2000, men need 2000-3000 averaging at 2500). Jogging a sustained 5mph burns about 600 calories/hour (https://runrepeat.com/calories-burned-running#calories-burne...). Now it's just algebra, the average person takes in 1400 calories more than they need in a day, so while you could try to outrun that diet it keeps up a pace of 5mph for about 2.5 hours EVERY DAY. So the most accurate advice is "a person can out-train a bad diet but the vast majority of people won't" but the advice that's most likely to lead the most people to the goal they're actually pursuing is "you can't out-train a bad diet".

[mwest217]

For high level endurance athletes, eating enough can be a difficult task. I wouldn’t quite categorize diets like the one described in https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/sports/olympics/cross-cou... as “a bad diet”, but it’s certainly a quantity and density of calories that would make it a bad diet for most people with a normal energy expenditure.

An anecdote from my experience with long trail hiking is that essentially everybody loses weight hiking long trails for months. Turns out when you’re hiking 25-30 miles / day, it’s awfully hard to not be in a calorie deficit (especially when you’re also trying to optimize for lightweight food)

[3acctforcom]

I've lost 100 lbs twice. You absolutely can outrun a bad diet lol.

It's just a LOT of exercise and counting all of your calories. A 1600 calorie bag of chips is 4 hours of cardio :)

[kelnos]

So you didn't outrun a bad diet. You counted calories and matched your diet to your exercise (or vice versa) to get the weight outcome you wanted.

I think some here are narrowly interpreting "bad diet" to mean "lots of junk food". While yes, that's not a great diet, what's really meant is a diet where calorie intake regularly exceeds expenditure, regardless of what you're eating.

Even if you eat only the healthiest of foods, if your intake is too much for what you're burning, that's still a "bad diet".

[lukeschlather]

I don't think that's a reasonable way to define the phrase. If "bad diet" is defined in terms of how much exercise you do, then "you can't outrun a bad diet" is a tautology.

[fknorangesite]

> This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from.

It's advice for people new to diet-and-exercise, not a law of the universe.

> it's a nice lie one can tell himself to continue eating junk and not feel guilty about it.

Exactly the opposite: it's saying that, in terms of weight loss, that eating the junk matters a lot more than going to the gym.

[mdtancsa]

For me, when I first started running, I thought going on a 5k run burnt scads of energy. At 100KG I was looking at about 400-500 cals-- Thats a fancy muffin basically. But when you start hitting 50k a week, you do have to start thinking about how to eat enough and enough of the right foods.

[darksaints]

I have personal experience outrunning a bad diet as a division 1 swimmer. I was on a 7000 calorie a day diet, which was actually difficult to pull off, and I specifically had to supplement my diet with things like snickers bars and peanut butter cups just to stop losing weight. In fact, my dietary habits formed during this period of my life, where I was consistently below 10% body fat, continue to cause me trouble today in my less active state. Only by eating dramatically healthier have I been able to approach 20% body fat today.

Even beyond myself, I think you’re romanticizing how healthy the diets of extreme athletes are. I’ve been coached by and trained alongside Olympic athletes and most of them (not all of them) don’t give a single shit about things like healthy fats or micronutrients. Protein definitely, but everything else is noise. When burning that many calories, you are getting more than enough micronutrients, and it doesn’t really matter if the energy you end up burning is from fats or carbs, because it’s in and out the same day and never has a chance to be stored in the first place.

Body builders aren’t judged on athletic performance but aesthetics. It would make sense they care a lot more about diet, but it should be noted that they aren’t athletes and their entire regime is about building muscle, not using energy. It’s a completely different type of optimization.

[filleduchaos]

You very much can outrun a bad diet as far as weight loss/gain goes, which is the topic at hand (not general health).

[StanislavPetrov]

>You can't outrun a bad diet.

You certainly can. If you eat Mcdonald's every day, that's a bad diet, and if you just sit around all day, you will gain weight. But the same person that eats the same exact McDonald's meal every day but also walks for an hour a day is going to be thinner. The real myth being perpetrated on this thread is that if you start walking an hour every day that somehow you will started eating more and that the only way to lose weight is to change your diet. This may be true if you eat a giant box of oreos every few hours, but it is certainly not true just because you have a "bad" diet. Eating healthier food is a good idea and I certainly recommend it, but it seems to me that the refusal of so many to accept that daily exercise in itself can lead to a healthier weight is a sign of denial by the overweight.

[throw29373829]

A Big Mac is over 500 calories.

Running, not walking, only burns around 500 calories an hour.

You can eat a Big Mac in 5 minutes and it'll take you an hour of running to burn it off.

[kccoder]

I've been cycling several thousand miles a year for many, many years, and in my experience I can certainly "outrun" a bad diet. Go for a 40 mile bike ride 5 days a week and you'll have a difficult time eating enough food.

A couple years ago I added weight lifting to my regimen and I could never eat enough. Most days of the week I'd stop by mcdonalds to pick up a couple mcdoubles as a snack. I was easily consuming 4-5 thousand calories a day (150-175 grams of protein) and I was still losing weight while gaining muscle. At one point I was sub-10% body fat whilst eating a mix of healthy food and junk food. Every visit my personal trainer was telling me to eat more.

If you're interested in losing weight while eating whatever you want I suggest doing 10-15 hours of fairly intense cardio per week, and 2-3 very intense lifting sessions per week.

[standardUser]

And then there's Michael Phelps, living proof you can outrun (or at least outswim) just about any diet you can imagine. He's obviously an extreme, but he's not the only example.

[cthalupa]

The point of the saying is to get most people to understand that the biggest factor in the average person's weight loss is their diet, not their exercise levels.

Pointing out that elite endurance athletes and olympic athletes can have high calorie requirements isn't helpful or the point. Yes, energy must come from somewhere, but even among the generally fit and active portion of the population, only a vanishingly small number of them exercise at the intensity and time requirements to burn so many calories as to not easily have all of that thwarted with a single meal.

[standardUser]

> The point of the saying is to get most people to understand that the biggest factor in the average person's weight loss is their diet, not their exercise levels.

Just say that then.

[paulddraper]

> You can't outrun a bad diet. This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from.

People tend to vastly overestimate the caloric expenditure of activity, probably because it feels strenuous.

4 hard minutes on an assault bike will leave you gasping, but means next to nothing for energy expenditure.

[castlecrasher2]

An athlete can outrun a sedentary person's bad diet, actually. It's all relative, of course, but the saying has exceptions.

[meroes]

Not disagreeing but I think it's worth adding, "but you can outrun a slightly bad diet".