It is thought that our bodies compensate to regain calories expended via exercise in other mechanisms (through hunger, metabolism adjustments, and other mechanisms.)
But monitoring calorie intake vs expenditure really does make a difference. I went through multiple cycles of controlled 10kg+ weight gain and loss, and I must say that just by walking extra couple miles a day while enforcing the calorie limit can make all the difference.
What doesn't work for weight control is just doing more sports - this is easily compensated by hunger.
It is biggest trap for people who want to exercise to lose weight.
Because their bodies compensate by eating more and they are surprised they are not losing weight and they think that exercising does not work.
Which is completely wrong way to look at it. You want to get healthier to lose weight not lose weight to get healthier. And exercise is one of the best ways to help you get healthier even if it does not directly and immediately lead to losing weight.
Absolutely true but only to an extent.
Losing weight has long term health benefits.
Despite sustained exercise, if you are overweight you remain at higher risk of things like heart disease.
It also makes exercise more difficult decreasing the amount of exercise you'll get over the longer term.
As a counter, if you lose weight without exercising the body tends to prioritise getting rid of muscle and connective tissue before it even reaches fat stores. It then makes the rest of the process more difficult leading to higher chance of failure.
If you combine calorie deficit, a body that is in dire need of energy, high fasting insulin leading to inability to reach into fat stores, underdeveloped mitochondria making burning fat even more difficult, your result is body that prioritises burning protein for fuel.
If you exercise not only the body gets signal to preserve the tissue and muscles that are being loaded, but also keeps building mitochondria that are necessary to effectively burn more fat.
I would hope people exercise to a limited extent anyway, to the extent their bodies will try retain a baseline level of muscle-stength needed day to day.
As you've read on my other comment, I lost 20kg over 6 months on a low carb, low sugar, higher protein diet.
I started gyming about 4/5 months in and I personally attribute this gyming with a chain-reaction that led to me putting the weight back on and am now in a much worse position health wise, even muscle wise. This all due to practical reasons, such as increased appetite which upset the hard-fought dietary and hunger equilibrium I reached.
Exercising too is I'm sure definitely better but I feel is way more difficult and sets many, on the weightloss journey, up to fail.
I am running daily, about 70km a week. And I have still some extra fat that I want to get rid of that is very hard to do.
Regular exercise causes people to be hungry and compensate for the additional activity. That's normal.
But I probably am feeling and healthier than I would if I wasn't running.
As an example, my body got rid of all the skin folds. I should have flappy loose skin around my belly and I should have old looking skin on my face. Instead my body, being much healthier than if I was just restricting calories, is able to break up and use that extra tissue and got rid of all that skin naturally.
I learned that a doctors evaluating people who lost significant amount of fat can guess pretty correctly at the method the person used to lose the weight just based on how their skin looks like.
I went down from 93kg to 78 and then from 90kg to 78. I didn't go for low carb or sugar, just ensured enough protein and overall calorie deficit. Right now I am just carefully float around 80 kg.
This, and moderate excercise (kettlebells, some weightlifting, walking) made things relatively easy as I just made sure I stayed in an overall deficit.
One more point: it's the running weight average matters, not daily measurements.
people consistently overestimate how many calories they're burning and underestimate how many they're eating.
i don't know where you pulled the data about 10k steps, but even if it was accurate, it would depend a great deal on how much weight. At my weight, running (!) for 30 minutes burns a mere 200 calories.
My estimate is coming from a research done 15-20 years ago and implemented in a calculator[1]. It is not precise but works well enough based on my personal history of walking more to lose extra weight.
I switched to weight lifting, walking a lot and some kettlebell training for weight control after running for many years. Running is great but in my case resulted in joint and back problems.
One surprising thing about walking vs running is that running doesn't burn all that much calories compared to the effort it requires. While I can integrate walking into my daily routine (15-30 minutes in the morning, at lunch time and in the evening), running needs at least 1.5-2 hours per day.
> most of the calories burnt are just so the body can maintain itself (basal metabolism), not from the exercise!
When reporting how many calories are burned through exercise, people usually count what is in addition to being at rest/sedentary. But the total reported by this calculator includes the basal rate. That's why it's so high.
That sounds way too high. Calories burned are equal to co2 exhaled. If you walk two hour a day breathing twice as fast as when you are resting you are burning 26 units of calories daily instead of 24. That's not 30% increase.
No, it can't. Percentage of CO2 in exhaled air is pretty much constant because it's a result of the physical process body uses to get rid of it which can't really be scaled up to higher concentrations of co2 as there's really no reason to scale it down from peek efficiency.
Your lungs can take "deeper" - i.e. more voluminous breathes. A person sleeping lightly can breathe quite shallowly just fine, a person up and walking about (in decent shape) will breathe more deeply - professional athletes for example don't breathe as quickly as an unfit person.
Which is to say, it's too simplistic a model to talk about "breathing twice as fast" as explaining what's going on.
Ah, yes, volume matters. I probably should have said "breath twice as much" not "twice as fast" but the rest still stands. And you probably breathe twice as much when you are walking than when you are at rest because moderate excercise (stationary bike) makes you breathe about thrice as much.
I'm curious about nighttime vs daytime breathing. I was under the impression that sleeping person breaths deeper than resting person. At least you can tell the exact moment somebody falls asleep because they start to breath deeply and loudly.
Note that this is the least traumatic way of calorie usage.