NEW VIDEO: Why Losing Weight Is So Difficult – The Workout Paradox
Added 2024-07-16 14:00:15 +0000 UTCUPDATE - 12. September:
The updated version of The Workout Paradox video is now live: https://kgs.link/WorkoutUpdate
After hearing your feedback on our initial video, we consulted experts, revised the script, and added more information to the parts that were too simplified. All changes and the link to the original video (now unlisted) are listed in the infobox over on YouTube for full transparency.
This experience was uncomfortable, but ultimately encouraging for us. It reminded us that it is a challenge to make ten-minute videos on complex topics without cutting too much and that we need to be constantly aware of this. Thanks again for your honest feedback and for helping us get better. We truly appreciate it.
Special thanks to Ben Carpenter for his support on the rework!
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UPDATE - 23. July:
After reading your feedback and looking into it, we have to say you are right: our video on the Workout Paradox was too simplified and didn't explain things clearly enough. Scripts start out more detailed and then get shortened, and this time we obviously overdid it. This is exactly the kind of stuff we try to avoid, but we went too far, and this hurt the message and the science we wanted to explain. What now? We are editing the script, adding more information, including more expert feedback, and will update the video as soon as possible. After this is set and done, we’ll do a review to see how we can avoid this in the future. We’ll keep you posted!
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Losing weight is hard and unfortunately, your body is sabotaging you every step of the way.
Your body is a biological machine that follows the laws of thermodynamics and needs energy and raw materials to stay alive, which is why you eat. The energy from food is measured in calories and you need a certain amount to power your internal machines. Your brain thinks, your heart pumps, your gut digests, and your immune system immunes. And you contract your muscles to move around.
The harder a movement is, the more calories you burn. An hour of walking burns about 260 calories, moderate swimming 430, biking 600, running 700.
If you eat more calories than you burn, your body stores them mostly in the form of fat. One kilogram, or two pounds, of fat is about 7000 calories. Seems simple. To lose weight, you have to burn more than you eat, so fat is turned back into energy.
There are two ways to do this: Eating less – which we will cover in another video – and burning more, say by moving around aimlessly, also called working out. We also get told early on that exercising is healthy somehow, so working out should kill two birds with one stone.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t exactly work out. It is one of these frustrating experiences where you do what you think is right only to not see the results you deserve. In reality, exercising is a bad way to burn fat. And until recently we fundamentally misunderstood what moving around a lot does to our bodies.
Comments
I wanted to check out the sources for this video. When I clicked the sources link on YouTube, I got a message “Your Administrator has cancelled your subscription to Google Workspace.” Do you think that can be fixed?
Stewart Lawrence III
2024-08-01 09:21:27 +0000 UTCBut isn't the whole concept of Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) falsified by the video? I.e., independently of your activity levels, your TDEE is the same? I'm no expert in the science behind this, but that's how I understand the video.
prancer
2024-07-27 14:12:56 +0000 UTCThe long embedded commercial was a bit much and detracted from the point. Love the content and the quality, but would prefer a different way to make ends meet than a commercial that brings the content into question.
Ryan V
2024-07-19 02:30:23 +0000 UTC5) Last, but probably the most important of all: Diet without strength training sabotages weight loss, in the long run. If I had only one point to argue, it would be this one: If you just cut calories, your body will try to compensate countless ways. As the video mentioned, your activity levels will lower. In the fitness world, we call this “NEAT” - Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. Eat less, and your body will instinctively lower your NEAT. What’s more, if you start with diet and promise yourself you’ll get to the gym next, you’ll find the motivation to keep that promise very difficult! Your body is lowering your energy levels to try to correct for the reduced food you’re eating. Go to the gym? Maybe tomorrow .. or the day after .. or maybe never. People who build good exercise habits first, who learn to find the joy in exercise, have a much easier time keeping the habit up. This can be a critical difference, when you start cutting calories. Trying to add a new habit at the same time your instincts are telling you to do less is much harder than sticking to an established exercise habit. It’s much easier to find the joy of movement, of breaking your records, of challenging yourself, if you’re not doing it at the same time that you’re also trying to resist hunger. This matters, because it determines where the weight is lost from: If you keep exercising, keep challenging yourself in the gym, more weight will be cut from fat. If you don’t exercise, more weight will be lost from muscle. We can go back to an evolutionary scenario to understand why the body does this: When famine comes, if you can lower your caloric needs, you’re more likely to survive to the end of the famine. If you lose 5 kilos of muscle, lowering your daily caloric needs, the same number of calories might last you weeks longer. For your ancestors, who had to survive long winters, drought, famine, the ability to lower caloric needs by dropping muscle when a famine started was a survival reflex. Mega-famine years like 536 (aka “the year the sun disappeared”) or 1816 (aka “the year without a summer”) pruned the potential ancestors you might have had who couldn’t lower their caloric needs by dropping muscle. Losing muscle in response to constrained calories isn’t a curse: It’s a survival reflex. So we NEED to exercise, to keep our muscle, if we want to keep our metabolism going strong while cutting calories. If you want to lose weight without sabotaging your metabolism, you need to keep pushing yourself in the gym. Put in the work to maintain your strength. The upside is you get to keep eating delicious food: Less than you would be if you weren’t trying to cut fat, but more than you’d get to if you weren’t exercising! Eating (comparatively) more food shows your body you aren’t actually in a true famine; working out shows your body it needs to preserve the muscle. Do both while eating slightly less calories than you need, and almost all the weight comes off of fat, not muscle, keeping your metabolism strong. ...and done (for now). Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Thornhenge
2024-07-16 18:09:51 +0000 UTC4) It’s often easier to do something one time than it is to resist temptation all day. Feeling hunger, as one often does while dieting, is difficult. It brings the temptation to eat to the forefront of thought. Resisting this urge all day can be exhausting. Conversely, convincing yourself to hit the gym can happen in one moment: You grab your car keys, you step out the door, and you’re unlikely to turn around and go back. Resisting hunger is something you have to do all day, and giving into temptation even for a moment can spoil the whole day. Going to the gym takes just one moment of willpower, and then you just follow through, and get to feel good about it for the rest of the day.
Thornhenge
2024-07-16 18:09:24 +0000 UTC3) Your body is a homeostasis machine: It tries to keep the same weight, and cares less if that weight is composed of fat or muscle. Adding muscle means dropping fat becomes more instinctive. Or at least, recent evidence seems to show this: The studies I know that demonstrate this are both quite recent, and come from the same team. So they really need more confirmation. But since Kurzgesagt cited recent studies for the video, I’m following suit. Summary of the studies I’m referencing: Rats had weights surgically implanted in their trunks. They were given ad libitum access to food. Over the next few weeks, the rats ate less and lost fat, while preserving their muscle mass. When the weights were surgically removed, the rats ate more and regained the lost fat, while their muscle mass again remained constant. In a follow up study, the experiment was repeated, and the rats leptin levels were monitored. (Leptin is one of the primary “hunger hormones”.) No impact on leptin was seen, causing the researchers to speculate that ostecytes (i.e. living cells inside the skeletal system) were responsible for sensing load on the bones and regulating hunger & body composition. So far as I saw, they hadn’t investigated the other primary hunger hormone, ghrelin. So personally, I’m modestly skeptical of their proposal of a previously undiscussed weight regulation mechanism. I wish they’d look at ghrelin before speculating they’d found something entirely new. One human bodybuilder repeated the experiment with n=1, just himself, wearing a weighted vest during his leaning phase in the months leading up to a stage show, adding weight to the vest as he cut fat. He reported that it was his easiest contest prep ever, and won two shows back to back. By contrast, bodybuilders normally report feeling terrible for the final weeks leading up to their stage shows: The body normally suffers in countless ways as bodyfat % gets below a critical set point. These findings, though very preliminary, seem to support the notion that carrying weight in muscle may offset much of the body’s instinct to carry the same weight in fat. Gaining muscle may help your body feel healthy with less fat.
Thornhenge
2024-07-16 18:09:05 +0000 UTC2) Higher caloric flux makes correcting after a calorie overdose easier. We all eat more calories than we need, sometimes. Nothing wrong with it! P.S. Shame and guilt have been shown to destroy motivation to exercise. The healthiest folks I know don’t beat themselves up after a big, rich meal. Weddings happen. Family feasts happen. It’s near impossible to stick to a diet if the diet doesn’t allow real life to happen. Say you overeat one day by 1,500 calories: One giant holiday dinner, or whatever. If your TDEE is 3,000, correcting for that is trivial. You drop 500 calories a day for the next three days, and you’re maintaining your weight. It feels pretty instinctive. Giving up 500 calories a day when your TDEE is 1,500 is a MUCH bigger share of your daily calories: You’re giving up an entire meal a day for the next three days. The 3,000 calorie-a-day person is just cutting the size of one of their meals in half. Proportionally, it’s a much smaller change. This argument also goes hand in hand with the nutritional deficiency argument: (#1) If you have a calorie overage because you dig into something that corrects for a micronutrient deficiency, you can correct for it in the coming days more easily. Going back to our magnesium deficiency example from the discussion above, imagine our two subjects solved the deficiency by chowing down on two full sized dark chocolate bars. Again, about 1,500 extra calories. The end result is the same as the holiday meal example, above: It feels a lot easier to cut out 1/6th of your calories for the next three days than to cut 1/3rd. Serious lifters who bust their calorie goals one day just eat less the next day, when they feel less hungry. Or they take it as a challenge to use that meal to fuel a new personal record the next time they hit the gym. In the end, many of the fittest folks DO count calories, but they DON’T try to motivate themselves with guilt or shame: They’ve built up faith after tracking their progress for years that a one-day overage is barely a blip in their fitness routine. They know they’re going to correct for it over the next 2-4 days. They’ve done it countless times before.
Thornhenge
2024-07-16 18:08:40 +0000 UTC1) Higher caloric flux reduces micronutrient cravings. Going back to the evolutionary argument the video made: Your ancestors walked around gathering different foods not just for their caloric content, but also to satisfy their micronutrient cravings. Human bodies need more than 30 other nutrients besides calories: More than a dozen vitamins, more than a dozen minerals. This wasn't understood scientifically until the 19th century. Your great^8-grandparents in the 18th century and every generation before that didn't know they needed iodine, selenium, or vitamin c. And yet still they ate a variety of foods, to cover all their nutrient needs. Subsistence farmers don't just grow the most calorically dense crops: They also grow other crops that add variety and flavor to their diet. You naturally crave micronutrients and think they taste good. Experiments have shown that even uneducated children will eat a naturally balanced diet, so long as they're presented with varied options, and not offered desserts. We instinctively crave the foods that satisfy our micronutrient needs, and seek them out. So how does this tie back to the claim that more muscle mass helps control fat? What happens when you have a micronutrient deficiency? Your body instinctively starts craving more of the foods that contain that micronutrient. Imagine that for the last week, by chance, your diet has been low in magnesium, and your instincts are starting to rev up your cravings for magnesium-rich foods to keep you healthy. You might notice that certain foods taste especially good: Spinach, chocolate, whole grains, beans and seeds all taste really good to you. Maybe you go back for seconds when they show up in a meal. Later in the week, you think back to how good that palak paneer tasted, and put an extra container of it on your dinner order. So how does having more muscle help keep you lean in this regard? Say you’re the bodybuilder in our example: You’re literally eating twice as much to maintain your body, compared to the runway model. If you put in that extra order of Palak Paneer to satisfy your subconscious magnesium cravings, even with all the cheese and cream in the dish, it isn’t busting your calorie budget for the day. You were already eating that much. The runway model, on the other hand, has a tough time eating a restaurant meal without blowing her calorie budget for the day. Adding a whole second entree or rich side without going over calories? Not happening. Also note that many of your micronutrient needs DON’T scale with your muscle mass, unlike your caloric needs. Vitamin A is famously needed for healthy vision. But you don’t have larger, hungrier eyes after working on your max deadlift. Adding skeletal muscle leaves most of your micronutrient needs the same as before.
Thornhenge
2024-07-16 18:08:25 +0000 UTCConcept 1) Your base daily caloric burn is mostly determined by your lean mass. Stated more formally: Your BMR (basal metabolic rate) can be calculated to within 20% accuracy with a 95% confidence interval knowing only one variable: Your lean body mass. That is, if I know nothing else about you other than how many kilos of your weight is neither fat nor bone, I can get pretty close to knowing your Basal Metabolic Rate with just that one variable, nothing else. All the other variables: Your age, sex, etc., count for only about a 20% variance, once your Lean Body Mass is known. Your BMR is the calories you would need to burn to stay alive without dipping into your reserves (i.e. fat and glycogen) if you did no exercise at all; If you suddenly were on 100% bedrest, and you were doing no exercise at all, not even walking to the bathroom. More often, we think about our TDEE, our Total Daily Energy Expenditure. Athletes will often get a first guess at their TDEE by calculating their BMR, than multiplying it by a constant depending on their level of activity. (e.g. Rigorous training, multiple times a week: estimate TDEE as 1.5x BMR.) From there, tracking weight relative to caloric intake lets them fine tune their understanding of their TDEE. For our purposes, it's enough to acknowledge that TDEE is always higher than BMR, unless you're actually on true full bedrest. So, all good? We know that putting on muscle will raise your BMR, and with it, your daily caloric needs. But the video already acknowledged this! Why am I making a big production out of it? Let me get one more note out there before I dig into the Why. Let me present two example people: One has been an amateur weight lifter for more than a decade. He's not an elite athlete, he's just a guy who makes time to hit the gym 3+ times a week, most weeks. He challenges his limits, eats whole foods most of the time, and gets 7+ hours of sleep most nights. He's following the basic bodybuilding approach with decent, not excellent, compliance. This guy has a TDEE of 3,000 calories. If he eats less, he loses weight. If he eats more, he gains weight. Our contrasting human for performing thought experiments with was a runway model for many years. She's done some other jobs along the way that got her strong, but staying very lean via diet has always been her go-to approach. Decades later, she has very little muscle mass: Dieting without exercise to preserve muscle has resulted in the weight coming off her muscles first, and fat second. You'd never call her fat, but she has a difficult challenge staying lean, as we'll explore below. For now, it's enough to know that her TDEE is less than 1,500 calories. These may sound like extreme examples, but they come from real life: The casual weight lifter is my real world numbers. The former runway model is a friend I recently met back up with. A useful term for discussing this difference in TDEE and why it can make things easier is “Caloric Flux”. The guy who’s eating 3,000 calories a day without gaining or losing weight has double the “caloric flux” of the former-model with the 1,500 calorie TDEE. And the main variable you can control to increase your caloric flux is muscle mass: More muscle => higher caloric flux. OK, we've got our big concept down, and our example humans, NOW we're ready to dig into Several Reasons Why Putting on Muscle Helps Control Fat.
Thornhenge
2024-07-16 18:08:03 +0000 UTCThis video raises many good points, but it understates the value of gaining muscle to control fat. Allow me to point out a few ways more muscle can help lower fat. Before I get into the specifics, it'll be helpful to introduce a few concepts, and a couple people for performing thought gedankenexperiments with. (Continued in the comments, 'cause this is going to get long.)
Thornhenge
2024-07-16 18:07:39 +0000 UTC
