I understand what you meant, but a trip to the grocery store can also be a perfect way to get their energy out if the kids are particularly bananas that day. So, some parents relish that trip.
Exactly. For my toddlers I also view it as training in some level of obedience (not running to the other side of the store), social interaction, dealing with disappointment (no you can't have the batman matchbox car set), learning about money (goes in hand with the disappointment factor!), helping me to pick out food, learning what stuff is called, a little hide and seek fun within the obedience bounds...it's like a little slice of life learning all in one place.
Overall it is a challenge for a parent though, so I'm not convinced that many won't just stay at home and order food from an app with the kids watching TV.
This. In my parenting life, I feel there are so many decision where you have to choose between optimizing the short term or the long term. I tend to favor the long term and my philosophy is roughly: the difficult path becomes easier and the easy path becomes more difficult.
At the individual level, some very good research on what works for weight loss comes from the National Weight Control Registry, a study that has parsed the traits, habits, and behaviors of adults who have lost at least 30 pounds and kept it off for a minimum of one year. They currently have more than 10,000 members enrolled in the study, and these folks respond to annual questionnaires about how they've managed to keep their weight down.
The researchers behind the study found that people who have had success losing weight share a few things in common: They weigh themselves at least once a week. They restrict their calorie intake, stay away from high-fat foods, and watch their portion sizes. They also exercise regularly.
But note: These folks use physical activity in addition to calorie counting and other behavioral changes. Every reliable expert I've ever spoken to on weight loss says the most important thing a person can do is to limit calories in a way they like and can sustain, and focus on eating more healthfully.
In general, diet with exercise can work better than calorie cutting alone, but with only marginal additional weight-loss benefits. "
It doesn't upend it, it basically just says "Don't count calorie expenditures as part of your caloric deficit", which has been standard advice for every resource I've used for quite some time.
The theory says that as you do additional exercise, you get diminishing returns in terms of the number of calories you burn. As your exercise level increases, you have to do ever more exercise to burn the same number of calories, because the body has various compensatory mechanisms designed to avoid weight loss.
The traditional model proposes a much simpler linear relationship: do an additional unit of exercise and you will burn X more calories, forever. He says that is incorrect and you actually get diminishing returns, where additional units of exercise burn ever fewer calories rather than just a constant.
I understand that. My point was that I've never seen a plan where people tell you to eat as much as you want as long as you do x hours of activity per day. The only plans I've seen like that are for strong men competitors or where the Rock ate like $300 worth of food every day and worked out for six hours daily.
That is exactly the nutrition advice that has been promoted in various government and school health programs for decades: eat what you like, just do X amount of exercise and you'll be fine. Calories in, calories out.
The article goes into some detail about this, mentioning that a great deal of that research was funded by companies that make sugary drinks and other high-calorie food.
It's just a bad title. The title should have been "Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight without changing your diet". If you eat the same amount as you did before, assuming that was maintenance calories, you will lose weight if you begin exercising. The problem is when you're intaking 1500 more calories than necessary before you start exercising. You can't burn that off to the point of a deficit with exercise alone.
The problem with your line of reasoning is the counterintuitive results mentioned in the article that came from examining primitive cultures that lead a much more active lifestyle. Despite engaging in activities that were far more active, they didn't burn more calories.
This is one of the many problems with the calorie in, calorie out line of reasoning that seeks to treat the human body like an automobile that uses fuel solely based on pressing the accelerator. What we're finding is that this isn't the case. For one, the body isn't 100% efficient, so a lot of calories in are lost in ways that aren't "burned." It's also likely that the body of a sedentary person is burning calories fairly inefficiently, so a change to being more active without altering diet will just cause that body to be more efficient in how it burns calories rather that burning fat or muscle reserves.
Calories in, calories out is an attractive concept, especially to scientifically-minded people who love the simplicity of deriving the answer by applying a fundamental law of thermodynamics. But the more we dig into the subject, the more we're realizing that it's a wrong-headed approach. The body is much more complex than that. We need a much more nuanced approach to nutrition, though "carbs are bad" seems to be a pretty good approximation of it.
No, it's not that much. But they were very high intensity miles. My typical routine was to do a half mile walking warmup, then over the course of 5-8 minutes of running, gradually adjust my pace so my breathing was very close to my sustainable max. Then I'd continue adjusting my speed to keep my breathing there for the rest of the run. (All those running guides that say you should be able to carry on a conversation while you're running? Yeah, that wasn't me at all. I was huffing and puffing like mad the entire time.) I accumulated that mileage over 3 runs/week, no more than one hour total each time, so that distance was done in a 3 hour period.
And about the food? Umm, it wasn't even close. Before the running, my idea of a snack was a little piece of cheese or a yogurt. After I started running, a snack was a Carl's Jr. Famous Star cheeseburger. Sometimes I'd order two. I became notable among my football player brothers-in-law for my capacity, regularly demonstrated, for out-eating them. My wife still talks about a particularly memorable restaurant visit where I basically ate 3 large, complete entrees. My calorie intake was ridiiiiiculous. Eating like that was both enjoyable and entertaining, and it didn't seem to interfere with my fitness, so I did it all the time.
And still I lost weight. Crazy. The body is a strange machine.
