I'm naturally skinny and trying to gain weight (muscle mass) and also do around 500 calories a day of movement so aiming for 3000 calories.

It just goes to show what a big influence baseline appetite and food choices make because I find it really hard to eat that much and always wonder how people manage it in just three meals

Is 500 calories of movement a lot? Googling says that is running for about 45 minutes? Or walking for 90 minutes. Doing housework would only need about 2 hours to hit that.

i have a very simple technique.

i don't eat one day a week when i want to lose weight. the next day i pay attention to eat slowly.

and i do moderate exercise simply to keep the fluids pumping in my body.

(precondition being that when you eat all days of the week your weight remains more or less stable, including exercise)

If you’re a hobbyist runner who finds it challenging to eat an extra 5000 calories in a weekend, you’re in the socio-physiological upper 0.1%. It’s great for you, but not a very relevant anecdote to the majority of people seeking help with weight management.

> physical activity is unnatural

Very wrong way to put it

I thought physical activity will increase your hunger.

my weekly exercise consists in walking/biking to the game bar 9km away, play games, eat snacks and joke around, then get back home.

it's pretty fun.

just gotta bring a change of clothes

The real point we've learned recently is: "not weight loss". Exercise has a minimal impact on weight without a controlled diet.

> 4.the psychological state of many people is a primary cause of their obesity, and fixing this is also a lot harder.

when you're miserable and need a dopamine hit, food is often the only option.

made worse by highly addictive, heavily marketed, "bliss point" sorts of foods.

Most of these conversations boil down to disconnect between

1) weight managemennt is 100% solved process

2) that process is trivial for some or borderline impossible for some depending on genetic of enviroment factors IN BOTH DIRECTIONs, most of attention is just fixated on weight loss

> your body metabolism will adapt really fast to caloric restrictions

Not if you exercise

> osing weight is easy, not regaining it is a challenge in adapting your body set point

Body set points are BS, its hard because people mostly just lose water weight and/or go back to old habits

> your body set point

... is a pseudoscientific myth.

My thinking and experience went kind of the opposite way. We are focusing so much on making it effective and hard ... that we removed all pleasure from exercising and sport. Of course it takes a lot of self control to go do it, when the whole experience actually massively sux and no matter what you do, it is not enough. And of course then you will give up on that once you are under pressure or stressed or have a lot of work.

The people who I know personally who move physically a lot ... like it. They need additional self control to skip the sport session and go clean the house. They either found activity that they fall in love with, the sport doubles as social outlet for them or they made it pleasant by tweaking how it is done.

> Statistically, nobody is a runner on their first few years. It takes time. And is hard.

It does not have to be. The first beginner period of a sport if normally the most pleasant one - you are getting quick improvements at first. Unless of course you go all hard to yourself and let all the motivation being eaten by guilt that you can run only for 4km instead of 15km yet.

Or, you dont have to run which is indeed inherently boring for quite a lot of people. You can roller skate instead. You can go for very long walk spending 2h listening to podcasts and shows.

> I had a friend who would drink a gallon of whole milk a day to maintain weight because he did so much at the gym.

That's around 2.4k calories.

That's like three slices of costco pizza and a large coke. I can do that like 3-4 times and I am not even that fat.

And that's like half to a third of the absolute peak. Like the rock who basicaly works out all day, eats 5-7k calories.

The point is there are people that are eating large fries and triple thick milkshakes as snacks driving from place to place because it makes them feel happy instead of just eating to feel full. And you just can't outrun that.

> I had a friend who would drink a gallon of whole milk a day to maintain weight because he did so much at the gym.

That honestly might be an absorption issue, not an intake issue - you can hit aerobic limits enough for your body to skip digesting stuff & just shove protein directly out of the stomach instead of bothering to break it down.

My experience with this was a brief high altitude climb above 5km in the sky, where eating eggs & ramen stopped working and only glucon-d kept me out of it.

The way I like to think of it is that the fat in your body can be eaten or drank, but needs to be breathed out as CO2 to leave it.

The rate at which you can put it in and the rate of letting it go are completely different.

It's expected the US Army soldier expends somewhere around 5400 cal in high intensity environments like Combat or even Ranger School. 6,000 calories a day or beyond for the same level of exertion in a cold weather, high stress, high intensity environment.

You can absolutely burn more calories that you take in, especially if stressed and not eating right. Or if simply... overtraining because of various psychological issues. Most people are not overtraining, nor are they in combat. Most.

> someone who has struggled to eat enough to maintain and build weight

There's a big difference between someone who feels satiated too quickly and someone who has a lot of difficulty feeling satiated. It has nothing to do with how much exercise someone gets. It's also much more difficult to eat large quantities of clean calories (for putting on muscle) compared to eating large quantities of dirty calories (putting on fat).

> but saying it isn't possible to exercise so much it's difficult to keep weight on is stupid

It’s not stupid. It’s true.

Simple math, exercise does not burn “that many” calories.

Diet, hormones, and genetics have far larger effects than exercise, relatively speaking.

(Exercise is A+ fantastic for a number of reasons. But a secondary mechanism for weight control.)

Just because it’s possible to outrun a diet it doesn’t mean it’s an accurate or helpful description of what most people are struggling with. If you look at the population of the United States as a whole, and the percentage of people who meet the criteria for obesity, it seems obvious that for the vast majority of people today, the problem is food, both quality and quantity.

As for your swipe at people in cities, I don’t know what to say - the fastest way to lower the amount of “diet outrunning” you and your kids do, is to move to a place where every daily activity requires a car and because everyone drives everywhere all the time, it’s not safe to let your kids roam.

> ... then you've known someone who has struggled to eat enough to maintain and build weight.

I'm not trying to strawman here, but I've never met a person like that who was ever overweight at any point in their life.

It seems pretty obvious to me that saying "some people can't eat enough to put on weight / get fat" is a distinct thing from saying "someone who cannot stop putting on weight / getting fatter will almost never be able to lose the weight without adjusting their diet". Do you agree or am I missing something?

Some people maybe can but most cannot. Even running like 5 miles a day is completely undone by a large frapachino. The difference in an active adult's normal day, like a teacher walking around, and a completely sedentary worker at their computer can be undone with a cream cheese bagel.

And in the US, a bunch of the food that's convenient to buy and eat is "hyperpalatable". You're going to be really hard pressed to lose and keep weight off without deliberately adjusting your diet to support it.

Yes, outliers gonna outlie.

I also know runners that purposely eat at severe deficit to lose muscle mass and be lighter. Which is idiotic, like wanting to lose brain cells to win a chess competition.

Your one anecdote definitely invalidates the article. Lol.