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"As a cyclist, you claim to care about the environment, yet you consume food. Checkmate libs!"
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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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Not OP but I'll bite, the absurdly long and wordy article you linked vaguely summarizes some studies, then actually cites a study of 300 people that wore a fitbit for a week. It says nothing about how they calculated the calories burnt other than what a fitbit estimates. If you burn an extra 200 calories a day with exercise you are not going to make that up by sleeping harder or whatever unexplained mechanism the author fails to produce, you will either lose weight or consume more calories.
Well, the "vaguely summarised studies" were the answer to the exact issue you are raising. If that article was too long, then here's the paper itself:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0040503
As it is even longer and even less approachable than the article, I will condense it even further: A group of Hanza, who are hunter-gatherers, had their metabolism measured. Under the commonly held assumption, group of people who spend their whole day travelling on foot, foraging and hunting, would consume more calories.
However, the study found they used and consumed the same amount of calories as any other group. They weren't more "efficient", they burned the same amount of energy walking as any other group. Even through the average distance the men travelled daily was 11km.
So yes, they do burn hundreds of calories every day walking, with a total daily calorie expenditure no different than somebody in the western world that has a 30 minute jog in the morning.
I also think you can get to a similar conclusion by a totally different route. The conclusion being "more exercise is not a weight loss plan".
This is a chart of calories burned in an hour for a given activity: https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/publications/p4/p40109.pdf
Some of the highest are things like "biking, >20mph" (1380 calories burned if you weigh 190lbs) or "rowing, >6 mph" (1035 burned). You have to be in good shape already to sustain that rate for an hour.
More likely, you're going to be doing activities closer to 300-500 calories an hour. How much does that translate on the intake side? Roughly a 20oz bottle of Mountain Dew or two. So if you're drinking a lot of soda, simply cutting it out will do more for you than exercise. (Well, in terms of weight loss, anyway. Lots of other reasons to exercise.)
This seemed obvious to me years ago just by looking at the numbers. The Exercise Paradox paper makes an even stronger conclusion by another route. Not only is the calorie input/output comparison impractical for any reasonable level of exercise, your body doesn't even work that way.
Which also suggests to me that weight loss drugs are the only path for the majority of the population. No amount of lifestyle changes in adulthood are going to do it unless they're very drastic.
Oh yes, absolutely, that's another conclusion to draw from this paper. Exercise is still good for you, but it's not a means of losing weight.