The myth of outrunning your diet

> 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.

> 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).

Your one anecdote definitely invalidates the article. Lol.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> ... 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?