[sva_]

> debunk the popular myth for my friends that exercise burns a lot of calories

Depends on your level of exercise. I often cycle 100km per day and can tell you if I ate only the 2000 kcal I hypothetically need I would go into a strong deficit.

[PleasureBot]

There's been metabolic studies that show that this isn't true. Comparisons of total caloric usage of completely sedentary people and people who have high exercise load are indistinguishable. There is a large difference among individuals, but not correlated to exercise levels. Sedentary people who start training hard will have a spike in caloric usage for a few months, but their body adapts and calorie burn returns to the same level that it was when they were sedentary. This was new research, so there wasn't an explanation for it. The authors hypothesized that it could be that the body reduces caloric spend on other things, like stress responses, when it is adapted to high exercise levels/ They did note that some extremely elite athletes can temporarily increase their caloric burn (think Michael Phelps eating 10k calories per at some points when training for the Olympics) but its not something most people can achieve or sustain.

[soared]

Absolute nonsense. The claim is that if I produce 2.5watts per kg in body weight for 2 hours, I’m not going to burn any extra calories? So when I “bonk” and exhaust glycogen stores due to underfueling that’s actually not true?

[BobaFloutist]

I think that the claim is that what you're experiencing absolutely does happen, and your body responds by cutting corners on your baseline when you're sleeping or sitting around on the couch to avoid you starving to death (because it doesn't know that you can trivially increase your food intake if needs must).

[Izkata]

Yes, it's in what they're responding to:

> The authors hypothesized that it could be that the body reduces caloric spend on other things, like stress responses

[cobalt]

100km is a lot of exercising...

[sva_]

Try doing 300km in one day, and 100km will seem like cake

[sdfhbdf]

> if I ate only the 2000 kcal I hypothetically need I would go into a strong deficit

Right, and that's kind of my point - the "2000 kcal" figure is itself part of the problem. It's a rough global average that doesn't account for your sex, age, weight, body composition, activity level, or even climate. It's a number on a food label, not a physiological reality for any specific person.

And even if you could nail down your actual total daily energy expenditure, calorie counting treats all calories as equal, which they aren't. Your body spends 20-30% of the energy in protein just to digest and metabolize it, compared to 5-10% for carbohydrates and 0-5% for fat. So 100 kcal of chicken breast and 100 kcal of butter are not metabolically equivalent - your body nets significantly less usable energy from the protein. This is the thermic effect of food, and it alone accounts for roughly 10% of your total daily energy expenditure.

Speaking of which - basal metabolic rate (just keeping your organs running, blood circulating, cells maintained) accounts for about 60-70% of total daily energy expenditure. Add the thermic effect of food on top and you're at roughly 70-80% of your energy budget spent before you even stand up from bed [1]. Physical activity - including your 100km rides - typically makes up the remaining 20-30%, though obviously that range is wide and shifts dramatically for endurance athletes.

So yes, of course people who cycle 100km need more fuel. Nobody is disputing that. My point is that most people vastly overestimate how many calories exercise burns relative to what their body spends just existing, and they use kcal as a universal unit of nutritional value when the body's actual energy extraction varies significantly by macronutrient composition. People optimizing purely on calorie numbers are working with a model that's far rougher than they think.

And this whole picture gets worse with wearables pushing calorie counts front and center. You see it all the time - "my wearable shows that i burned 300 kcal with that activity so it zero outs that sweet thing I ate earlier that was also 300 kcal" That's wrong on multiple levels - the device estimate is inaccurate to begin with, the thermic processing of that pastry isn't equivalent to the "300 kcal" on its label, and your body doesn't do neat arithmetic like that anyway. But with every fitness app and smartwatch plastering a big kcal number on your workout summary, it's becoming the default way people think about food and exercise, and it's reinforcing exactly the wrong mental model.

[1]: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/basal-metabolic-r...

[Terr_]

> doesn't account for [...] activity level

That specific aspect might end up irrelevant for dieting, which is exciting since it flies in the face of intuition. It seems that when it comes to long-term modes of existence (as opposed to, say, the one day of the marathon) the "activity level" doesn't really affect how much energy your body uses.

> In this study, we used the doubly-labeled water method to measure total daily energy expenditure (kCal/day) in Hadza hunter-gatherers to test whether foragers expend more energy each day than their Western counterparts. As expected, physical activity level, PAL, was greater among Hadza foragers than among Westerners. Nonetheless, average daily energy expenditure of traditional Hadza foragers was no different than that of Westerners after controlling for body size.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[tuesdaynight]

Thank you for your comment. I didn't know about protein and carbs and fat calories not being metabolically equal. I'm hoping that calories counting apps would account that in, but I know that it's probably not the case