horizon wrote: ↑28 Apr 2022, 1:10pm
I think it is generally known and agreed that you cannot work/cycle weight off. AIUI, those people in the past who did manual jobs were thin because food was scarce and expensive.
"Analysis of the mid-Victorian period in the U.K. reveals that....their levels of physical activity and hence calorific intakes were approximately twice ours."
"Due to the high levels of physical activity routinely undertaken by the Victorian working classes, calorific requirements ranged between 150 and 200% of today’s historically low values....calorific expenditure ranges during the working week of between 3,000 to 4,500 calories /day (men) and 2,750 to 3,500 (women)."
"At the top end of the physical activity range were the ‘navigators’, the labourers who built (largely without machinery) the roads and railways that enabled the expansion of the British economy. These men were expending 5,000 calories or more per day."
"In short, the mid-Victorians ate twice as much as we do, but due to their high levels of physical activity remained slim"
Clayton & Rowbotham
How the Mid-Victorians Worked, Ate and Died
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
thelawnet wrote: ↑28 Apr 2022, 8:18pm
Probably running burns slightly more calories per hour, but otoh you can cycle all day much easier than you can run.
Have a look at the ACSM Compendium of Physical Activities I linked above, it lists the energy consumption for just about every conceivable activity: walking, cycling, running, washing the pots, having sex........
thelawnet wrote: ↑28 Apr 2022, 8:18pm
I have cycled every day for 1-2 hours and not seen in any weight loss, and also cycled much less and lost weight. latter due to lack of food, former while eating lots of it
Firstly, an hours exercise would use ~400kcal, and the calorific value of bodyfat is 7800 kcal/kg, so that's about 50g of fat. That's far too small to measure over the course of one day, because the confounding variables affecting your weight are far bigger than what you're trying to measure. Hydration, stomach contents, bowel contents, and bladder contents can all contribute to a weight change of a kilogram or more.
The point is that weight change due to fat loss is small in the short term, but cumulative over the long run if exercise is sustained, whereas weight change due to the confounding variables is large over the short term, but it's non-cumulative because if your bladder goes from full to empty on consecutive days it can't be twice as empty a day later for example. This means that over a long enough time period, your average weight change due to confounding variables gets closer and closer to zero.
The secret to getting accurate measurements of your metabolic rate is to keep records of your calorie intake, exercise hours, and weight every day for months and months, preferably years. I've been doing it for 20 years, and you can see from my results plotted above that there are still quite substantial confounding variations around the underlying trend.
It also helps if you understand how to get the best weight measurement accuracy. You need to weigh naked first thing in the morning, after you've been to the loo, and before you eat. Bathroom scales are cheap consumer products not lab instruments, they give a different reading as you shift your weight left-right, forward-backward, so you need to practice the art of distributing your weight evenly and reliably. As you get different readings each time you step on them, you also need to step on the scale multiple times and average the readings. When you come to calculate metabolic rate, you need to do it over periods of at least three months, and the weights you use at the beginning and end of those periods need to be the averages of about 7 consecutive days.
Lastly, you could burn 2500kcal on a non-exercise day, and say 2900kcal on a day with an hours exercise, and if you do that on alternate days your overall average calorie use would be 2700/day, so if you eat that each day your weight will be maintained. However, the fact that you're eating the same calories each day doesn't alter the fact that if you were to cease exercise your consumption would fall to 2500/day.