"In 2023, 54 percent of adults said they had set aside money for three months of expenses in an emergency savings or “rainy day” fund."
First of all, I have some level of doubt about the survey methodology. Clearly, the socially acceptable answer to give is that you do have a three-month rainy-day fund—it's the answer that anyone would prefer to give to survey taker. Another question is whether the average American could calculate accurately 3 months of expenses in their head. Many probably just know that their income covers basic expenses but couldn't tell you exactly what that figure is.
Second, what you have just done at best is prove that the glass is 54% full. It's more important to recognize that 46% of Americans do not have a rainy-day fund. It's those who are in danger of familial disaster whom we need to focus on. One way to decrease the frightening number of 46% of American families without a rainy-day fund would to be to require a family budgeting class in high school that is mandatory for high school graduation. Although I am a great lover of classic literature, this might just be more important than reading Romeo and Juliet.
It's kind of like saying, 99% of Americans are not in the hospital. Clearly that is true, but we still need to make medical care more effective and more available to everyone who needs it, before they need a hospital stay.
"It's more important to recognize that 46% of Americans do not have a rainy-day fund."
That's a very far cry from declaring that 60% of Americans have no reserve of any kind and would be financially devastated by a $400 repair bill on their car. There are undoubtedly people for whom this is true, but A and B can not both be true. Perhaps we could say these establish (at a minimum) the outer possible boundaries of reality.
This is a quibble over semantics. One month versus a three month reserve...Seriously? The *truth* is that much of the lower economic half our society lives close to homelessness. The financial and techno elites who regularly post on this forum seem to have little understanding of what poverty in America actually looks like.
Yeh 3 months is nothing. If the times are good it’s not even that much savings, in bad times where getting a job takes months the house is on the line.
I don't have a specific rainy-day fund. I also don't have much money in my checking account--less than one month's worth of expenses, on average.
My general strategy is to dump every extra dollar into my 401k. Why would I want no growth for money in a checking account or taxable low-return growth in a rainy day fund like a HYSA? If I need to, I can borrow from my 401k. I have enough in my 401k to live on for many years, although with the practical limitation that I can't easily access it without penalty. I also have a HELOC that I can borrow from, and I could borrow more against my home equity, if needed.
Am I living paycheck-to-paycheck? Do I have three months of expenses in emergency savings? I really have no idea. It completely depends on what you mean by that.
When I had to withdraw some money from my IRA during a financial emergency I was charged a 10% penalty fee on top of any tax liability. I think your preference for a 401K over a rainy-day fund makes a lot of sense.
I agree. If the real number is 46% instead of 60%, that’s still a lot of people living in financial insecurity! My problem here is not the number itself but the lack of a clear policy idea to address the problem. “Fighting the billionaires” may sound romantic, but does not describe a solution to this specific situation. Aside from the financial education proposal, I would maybe suggest a Universal Basic Rainy Day Fund that every citizen could tap into once every five years or so and which got funded by a small slice of their income tax (progressively, that is, with higher earners contributing proportionally more than lower earners).
Sounds like a Social Security Extension for working age people. I would also be in favor of a easy term payback program through payroll deductions like student loans used to be when I was in school.
Copying Germany's education system might be a good idea: merit-based vocational & university education/training that reflects the current needs of industry, free of charge, for any young people who want it.
You really think the problem is the lack of a budgeting class? It’s not like the internet has a million resources available for anyone who wants to learn.
From my experience the main problem with budgeting is it means you have to tell yourself no and people really struggle with that.
Education does not work for everyone immediately. But unless people are exposed to the collective wisdom of humanity, every single one of them has to reinvent the wheel for themselves. Very few people think that is a viable path forward. One of the big problems of our high school curriculum is it does not address the challenges of adulthood head on. One of my favorite stories about an effective high school program is that young people in the health class were required to carry around a 10-pound baby doll for three days in high school to give them a small taste of what the challenges of parenting might be. BTW, that was guys too.
My Dad was a high school teacher and it drove him absolutely crazy that, once the personal finance class became mandatory, it became standard for guidance counselors to push kids to do it freshman year so that they had more room for advanced classes when in their Junior and Senior years. Giving to class to 15-year olds who will definitely forget everything by the time they graduate is pretty much pointless
I think it's far far far more likely that people underreport their "rainy day fund" than that overreport it. Like Iikely don't have enough in my checking account to cover 3 months without income. But I also have a chunk in a brokerage account and another chunk in a retirement account. The LendingTree survey wouldn't even release the wording of their question, claiming that it was "proprietary." That should set off many red flags.
And yes, the actual number does matter, regardless of whether it's 60% or 40% or (by far the most likely answer) a bit under 20%, which is the number that report that they have trouble paying their bills in that survey. And that matters a whole hell of a lot for policy. Because that LendingTree survey also found that 40% of those earning over $100K report "living paycheck to paycheck." And that's damn near certainly because of lifestyle choices that they make. If you drive a new car and buy a new iPhone and, depending on where you live, have a big house or a spacious apartment in a modern building with amenities, you're not struggling; you're making a choice to prioritize current consumption over saving to cover a rainy day fund.
And it matters a whole lot what that actual number is, and what the profile of people in these situations is, because you make good policy first and foremost by starting with an actual conception of the world as it is. Your policy design is going to look very different if the median household in a given metro area (or country) would need to use 50% of its income to pay the median rent than if the number is 25%. And we do have metro areas where that is the case! But it would be incoherent to apply San Francisco's policy solutions to aid the people of Detroit.
I agree that the Lending Tree “study” is far more problematic than the one that Noah referred to. According to bank note.com, 50% of Americans with credit cards are carrying a balance on those cards, which either indicates extreme economic naivete or a lack of a rainy day fund.
Damn near certain that that’s overwhelmingly naïveté, to the extent it’s true. There were some reforms a decade and a half ago that stopped credit card issuers from handing out the cards to college kids like candy. But for example, I think I recall Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner listing carried credit card debt on their disclosures when they went into government.
I think a lot of the people who said they had a rainy day fund were just giving the feel good answer. I have a hard time believing that high rates of credit card debt and high rates of rainy day funds coexist. However, for the truly rich like Ivanka and Jared not paying your credit cards is simply a convenience. The interest just doesn't matter.
I think so much writing about weight loss is about people don’t want to be told to eat their vegetables and exercise. I’ve lost somewhere between 90-120 pounds depending on your start/end dates and kept it off for several years. I’m frequently told this is impossible.
What’s more in real life I have this conversation often. How’d you do it?
“I radically changed my diet, became a vegan, and started exercising and kept it up till I now run 20 miles a week and lift weights to prevent injury after I got started I picked up other healthier anti-stress habits like meditation”.
Oh let’s talk about anything else. Back when I would lose weight on some fad diet we’d have a million questions about it. If I told them I lost weight by eating half a pineapple at every meal that would be something they want to hear about.
The weight one is not a good “myth” to include. You’ve carefully defined the statement so that it is false, but a very slightly modified statement is very clearly true. It’s false to say that exercise makes no difference. It’s true to say that changing exercise makes less difference than changing diet, and that doing either with willpower alone is ineffective for most people at maintaining significant changes in weight.
A pack a day smoker only has a 13% chance of dying of lung cancer. Should we say that it is a myth to say that smoking causes cancer? For most people, it does not.... (I do not really disagree with what you said. I do, however, think that your statements are more problematic than you are conveying.)
I think there's an important difference between the two, namely that without an attempt at engaging in total lifestyle control, adding exercise tends to change one's diet and rest patterns and other things in ways that undo some of the effects of exercise. Whereas quitting smoking doesn't tend to lead people to compensate by picking up other habits that cause cancer. We shouldn't tell people exercise is irrelevant. But the better reasons to exercise are about fitness, not weight.
I agree with all of this. However, as Noah said, there are numerous studies showing that if you group people into two groups, "add exercise" and "don't add exercise," you see more reduction in weight in the "add exercise" group. So "on
average", there is an improvement. Most people may not benefit. Most people don't benefit (wrt cancer) from stopping smoking. They were never going to get cancer.
"Fitness", as per Kenny, above, includes a host of physiological benefits that accrue from exercise. Which, for example, includes elevated NK levels and other immune defense against carcinoma.
His conclusions in this regard are correct. What he doesn't acknowledge is the highly addictive nature of insulin in informing our dietary and emotional habits. Regarding willpower, for most Americans with obesity issues, insulin wins hands down.
It’s also misleading to use means; there’s likely a lot of variance in the results! Some people may be very responsive to exercise and lose 2 or 3 times the mean expectation while others may hardly lose any weight
Doesn't matter. The question was whether exercise impacts weight loss. Any time you're looking for the impact of a specific variable, you want to hold other things constant. Now, if you want to say that many people don't see results because they run for 15 minutes and think "whew, I'm famished, better eat a Snickers bar so I don't starve before brunch!", that's a different problem - at that point, you're measuring willpower and people's desire to actually make hard decisions. But it's not evidence that exercise doesn't work.
But then exercise isn’t impacting the problem. The problem is the difficulty of not eating when the body is crying out that it’s starving. If you can’t do that without exercise you’re not going to be able to do it with exercise either.
Appetite--the perception thereof--is largely a hormone-mediated phenomenon. That exercise effectively modulates; especially if wedded to a low-glycemic diet.
The real issue is that caloric intake is not a universal constant, because nervous tissue prefers glucose as a fuel source, while most other cell types prefer fatty acids. Even with an intense exercise schedule, a carb-heavy high-glycemic diet will make you fat.
Again, I'll refer you to the scientific method. Even if you're going to insist that it's not possible to eat normally while exercising (debatable, since people do it literally every day), saying "exercise doesn't help you lose weight" implies that exercise doesn't make any difference no matter what else happens, which simply isn't true. The authors should have just titled it "We Don't Have Willpower And We Wish No One Else Did Either So We Wouldn't Feel Bad About It".
Also, it's hilarious how this whole "it's impossible to eat a reasonable amount; my body is crying out that it's starving" is only a problem in countries like ours.
I often say exercise doesn't help with weight loss. When I say that, I'm not arguing that Calories In Calories Out is a myth. Exercising absolutely will burn more calories than sitting around, and burning calories leads to weight loss.
I'm saying that, for whatever reason, Americans (because I live in America and am talking to fellow Americans) will inevitably increase their diet to compensate for those calories. Your alternative title about willpower is pointless. It's not that the authors want people to not have willpower, it's that the authors acknowledge that people mostly don't, which is why America is suffering an obesity epidemic.
Basically, your body is good at getting you to eat maintenace, plus a bit more in case of emergency (which rarely comes if you are an American). If you exercise, your body just tells you to eat more to hit what is now a higher goal, so if you want to lose weight, you need to force yourself to eat fewer calories than you would naturally. You can do that through calorie counting or by some trick - cutting carbs, intermittent fasting, WW points - that makes you do it.
Obesity has a highly addictive cause. Which happens to be identical to that of grievance-obsessed FOX News junkies. It's the same physiological phenomenon, with different psychological components.
Grossly obese people quite regularly experience excruciating levels of hunger. What they eat is largely diverted to maintain their current adipose stores; leaving other cell types still hungry.
It's not a contest. If you want to fix a problem--like the US obesity epidemic--we need to first thoroughly understand the causality (etiology). This is an economics blog; most folks here have no training in medicine or biological sciences.
Lower glycemic index dietary intake. I.e., more vegetables; less sweets.
Insulin is what creates fat. Out of blood-sugar. Which can spike from alcohol, stress, anger--and carbohydrates. Or any combo thereof. A spike triggers an insulin event. Which turns excess blood sugar into fat.
This completely wrong. The issue is that the exercise itself is resulting in increased caloric consumption, it has nothing to do with "will power" whatever that is. Rigorous, long term, randomized studies do not show weight loss from exercise (the one caveat is that for obvious reasons these studies can't be blinded)..
Just because people eat through the calories they burn, it doesn't mean that exercise "doesn't work". It means that people are pulling in the opposite direction. People who say that it doesn't work are just looking for justification for not making the effort.
That doesn't make any sense. It has nothing to do with effort. Yes, you can exert effort to reduce calories while exercising, but you can also do so without exercising. The reality is if you randomize people to exercise for a year or more, they don't lose weight in comparison to controls. Since these are randomized studies, it would be absurd to say there is a difference in effort in the two groups that is cancelling out the difference in exercise. The issue is homeostasis, not effort. Exercise illicits a response form the body that maintains homeostasis.
While Noah may have defined that as the question, it’s not what most people are talking about. Everyone agrees that exercise impacts weight gain and loss. What they contest is the claim that exercise alone can be effective for most people at losing the amounts of weight they want to lose.
Exercise not paired with a low-glycemic index diet--or one of the new $1k/month drugs that physiologically mimics such a diet--is insufficient to reduce the insulin-secreting events that create body fat in the first place. Physiology 101.
Tell that to the billions of people in the world who stay thin without expensive drugs. You'll have to leave America to find them, but they're out there. It's crazy how in just a few generations people have convinced themselves that it's simply impossible to not become grossly overweight.
"What happens, on average, is that they lose weight!"
You buried the lede of that study in this context. It says, in the summary, "No significant effect of exercise was found on weight maintenance [i.e., long term weight loss] (1 SR‐MA)."
Generally, if you burn 10% more calories by exercise, your appetite increases by 10%. So if you want to lose weight, you still need to eat less than your appetite. And you can do that with or without exercise--and the exercise really doesn't help much.
Oh, I'm afraid you've misinterpreted that sentence. "No effect on weight maintenance" means that people who exercise are no more likely to gain weight than people who don't -- in other words, people who lose weight by exercising don't tend to bounce back to their old weight.
"'No effect on weight maintenance' means that people who exercise are no more likely to gain weight than people who don't."
Yes, I agree with that.
"[I]n other words, people who lose weight by exercising don't tend to bounce back to their old weight."
I'm not sure how you're coming to that conclusion. The study reported "no significant effect of either aerobic (n = 2 studies) or resistance training (n = 2 studies) on the amount of weight regain after a low‐calorie diet." That doesn't mean people don't regain the weight. In fact, given that we know that people that don't exercise tend to regain weight that was previously lost, we can infer that people who lost weight through a low-calorie diet and try to keep it off through exercise tend to regain that weight! I suppose the study doesn't address losing weight through exercise and keeping it off through exercise, but I don't see anything in there that suggests the opposite.
You also curiously omitted the fact that an exercise routine replaces adipose tissue with muscle tissue. Which also weighs more, btw. And brings with it a spectrum of other health benefits that body fat does not. Fun physiology facts.
No, your "appetite" doesn't increase by 10%. You're making that up. That's not how "appetite" (however you want to quantify that) even works. If your logic were true, "appetite" for sedentary people wouldn't ever increase above a desire to match their base metabolic rate and no one would be fat.
From personal experience (and pretty much every weightlifter I've ever watched with a YouTube channel), I can say I absolutely get hungrier after heavy lifting. I'm currently on Mounjaro, and my weight loss definitely plateaued when I started lifting heavy. I was OK with that because while I stopped losing significant weight, my body has been doing a lot of reshaping and I'm still losing inches on my stomach.
Which is why lifters are much more conscious than the average American regarding exercise physiology, and what exactly they eat to satisfy post-workout hunger. Hint: it's not snickers bars.
If you take two groups of people, an experimental and a control, and you tell one group to exercise without limiting calories, and tell the other group not to exercise also without limiting calories, would you exepct much weight loss in the exercise group? Studies have pretty conclusively shown that you don't get much in the exercise arm. One study (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14718319/) found running *20 miles a week* led to a weight loss of...about one pound a month. Just run the math on the calories used, and you can see it's much higher than one pound worth of calories per month.
False equivalencies. Exercise essentially replaces fat with muscle. Which also weighs more, btw. Look instead to studies that compare BMI outcomes; not body weight.
A quirk of the "you can't lose weight through exercise" thing is that I hear a lot of people claiming that, rather than exercise, you should focus on your Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT), which is stuff like parking further from stores to get in extra walking, taking the stairs, or ensuring that you hit a step goal.
While not an awful idea, this advice seems to be based on the fact most people burn more calories through NEAT than through exercise, which is true, but it's because you just do more NEAT throughout the day, not because NEAT is somehow a better way to burn calories. In fact, the only difference between NEAT and exercise is your intention - if you are intending to exercise, it's exercise, if you are intending to do something else, it's NEAT. This raises real philosophical questions regarding whether, if you increase your NEAT to burn calories, you're actually increasing your NEAT or just exercising. It reminds me of the people who want to limit imports to increase GDP because they've spent too long looking at the math equation and too little time thinking about it.
As an aside, I always thought the idea behind not losing weight through exercise is just that it's hard to make much of a dent in your weight just through exercise, particularly exercise alone. A typical cut is 500-1000 calories below maintenance. It's hard to burn that many calories through exercise, and if you aren't also calorie restricting (or at least tracking), it's going to be real easy to just eat back whatever calories you burn. Exercise makes you hungry and can help excuse eating more. You don't want to say, "I can eat this pint of Ben & Jerry's because I just ran a mile" because your run probably burnt ~100 calories, while the pint has ~1000 calories in it.
On the other hand, done right, exercise can help you lose weight and keep it off, not just because it does burn some calories but because it builds (or at least helps maintain) muscle, which keeps your basal metabolic rate up. The higher your BMR, the more you can eat while losing/not gaining weight.
Appetite--rather the perception thereof--is a hormonally mediated experience. Exercise followed by a high-glycemic-index meal will result in a strong insulin event, that will both generate body fat and create the hunger for more of same. Exercise followed by a low-glycemic meal will not.
Like that chart is technically wrong because of XYZ, but the myth isn't really about productivity per se. It's about "The owner class rigged the game to hoard most of the gains from the last 50 years of technological/industrial/service development.." That's what a debunking of that chart actually needs to target.
That's much harder to do.." In 2021, the ratio of CEO-to-typical-worker compensation was 399-to-1 under the realized measure of CEO pay; that is up from 366-to-1 in 2020 and a big increase from 20-to-1 in 1965 and 59-to-1 in 1989." https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2021/
Do you, Noah Smith, really believe that our 21st century "Super ceos" are so much more productive than their primitive 1965 counterparts? Or perhaps did it become easier to pay people at the top increasing amounts relative to other workers? And is that compensation actually reflective of their actual added value?
"[I]s that compensation actually reflective of their actual added value?"
Yes, of course it is. If anything, super CEOs are paid far too little. When Starbucks appointed its new CEO, the value of the company went up $15 billion dollars. That's the expected value the new CEO is bringing to the company.
The trend since the 1960s has been for small and medium size companies to merge or be outcompeted, and for there to be a handful of dominant companies in a lot of sectors. That means that, instead of a lot of executives who can only add so much value relative to their companies' market cap, there's a much smaller number of CEOs who can add enormous value by slightly increasing the market cap.
If you want to complain about the overall structure of the economy that leads to these huge companies, fine. But the fact is that being slightly-better-than-replacement CEO is really valuable, and being one of a small number of super elite CEOs is extremely valuable.
> Yes, of course it is. If anything, super CEOs are paid far too little. When Starbucks appointed its new CEO, the value of the company went up $15 billion dollars. That's the expected value the new CEO is bringing to the company.
Great. Now do CEOs who do nothing to enhance their stock and the CEOs whose companies stock vanishes. I assume they are negatively paid.
Also despite capitalism becoming evermore monopolistic the rate of the growth of the economy has significantly slowed since the 50s, while CEO pay has increased multiple times. The size of the companies they run isn’t significant to this.
The “expected value” of Starbuck’s new CEO merely returned the company’s shares to its recent trading range but well off its highs of the last 2 years. The market move thus said more about the outgoing CEO than the incoming one.
From 1978 to 2021, realized CEO compensation increased 37% more than the share price of their companies, while compensation since 2021 has increased even faster than share prices. In other words, public companies have drastically increased CEO pay relative to stock performance.
And acceptable levels of market concentration. Oligopolies & Duopolies are the new normal, which increase costs and lowers compensation for every American family. Which was also a characteristic of our last Gilded Age.
Great article. Thank you for your research. As far as exercise and weight loss, no. Exercise by running an hour a day is not realistic for 99 out of 100 people. And you truly don’t lose weight exercising. It causes your appetite to increase. Tough conundrum. Not kind to reductionist thinking.
The exercise study you quote actually says that you'll lose 5 lbs per month if you exercise even 4 days per week, not even every day!
Also RE "The majority of these immigrants come from Vietnam and the Philippines, which is why if you go to Japan you might not visually recognize them." - I had this experience in Malaysia. I would go to a touristy spot and think "wow, I picked a really good place, look how many locals are here!". It took embarrassingly long to dawn on me that I was actually surrounded by tourists, just not western tourists.
Myth #2 is not a myth. Yes, if you do more exercise and do not eat more calories then you will lose weight, BUT! Exercising makes people want to eat more food. Your body wants to make up for the lost calories, so most people who exercise but do not change their diet have minimal effect. When you exercise you get hungrier and you eat more, UNLESS! Unless you change your diet. I've found (and studies seem to agree) that low carb and high protein diets are satiating and help lower weight, regardless of exercise. Having said that, I'm a big proponent of exercise for many other reasons.
But if you eat more to compensate for the exercise, aren’t you changing your diet? How is eating as much as you were before changing your diet? Also can you not mitigate the impact of being hungrier through calorie-counting and willpower?
No, calorie counting and will power are 100% proven to fail in the long term. Anyone who says you can simply burn more calories and not change your diet is not being serious about this topic. There are decades of studies proving this. But! Changing your diet is much easier. There are delicious ways to eat what you like and lose weight :)
I've previously made this claim to people who had just lost a bunch of weight by joining a sports club and had made no other changes, and I felt like an idiot.
The explanation is just that there's loads of individual variation in both the diet and exercise variables:
- Some people can switch to a low-calorie diet and barely notice, other people feel like they're going to die, others need a bit of a hack (e.g. I'm fine skipping meals but not strict calorie counting per meal).
- With exercise, some people adapt their diet rapidly to meet their exercise expenditures (me), some actually find it physically difficult to eat any more than they usually do (my wife), so lose weight reliably. This article (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3696411/) finds very high variability, and tries to pinpoint why this is; it's pretty interesting actually - homeostatic reactions and "hedonic eating" sensitivity etc..
- Some people are so attached to their current diet-type (e.g. high carb), or have such strict physical/environmental/social limitations on what they can eat, that changing diet is incredibly hard (often socially or psychologically); others can switch effortlessly (e.g. I can go low carb in my current lifestyle in Europe, but couldn't realistically when I lived in Asia).
I think one reason we misunderstand this is that people who find it easy to lose weight, either through diet (quantity or type) or exercise, aren't usually involved in the conversation about weight loss - they just adjust either variable and their weight drops. The people who find it difficult are overrepresented in the conversation.
The answer is insulin. Which stimulates the brain's pleasure centers in a big way. It's extremely addictive; but unlike heroin has a very short half-life and virtually no physiological withdrawal effects.
Switching from a high- to low-glycemic diet tailored to a particular lifestyle entails roughly 48 hours of physiological struggle. After which there's fairly smooth sailing. Psychological habituation is another matter altogether.
There are many ways to lose weight out there but all of them boil down to "maintain a caloric deficit". Dieting is about finding the type of way in which maintaining a caloric deficit can fit your lifestyle. It might be exercising more, reducing snacks via IF, stopping to drink alcohol, go vegetarian, etc. Everyone is different and no solution will work for everyone.
Saying CICO is 100% proven to fail is false as it does work for many people, even if it doesn't work for the average person participating in these studies.
Nonsense. There are plenty of studies, including from the NIH showing that different foods with equal calories have very different results for weight management.
You're kind of talking past each other. At the end of the day CICO is the answer, but things can impact both sides of that equation. Notably, you are going to have a lot harder time limiting your "CI" if you eat nothing but jelly beans than if you eat actual beans as they are much less filling. Exercise can also impact "CO," in ways beyond burning calories, as muscle does more for your basal metabolic rate than fat. But if CI<CO, you will lose weight.
No, he's right. Caloric deficit with a high-glycemic index diet will create more and stronger insulin events, that not only generate fat, also produce much more extreme food cravings.
In short, fats & proteins reduce caloric craving; while carbs increase them.
I don't see how any of this contradicts what I said? Different diets do have different results, of course they do, but it's mechanically impossible to eat at a surplus and expect to lose weight.
Saying CICO works for outliers but not the average person feels like not an especially persuasive argument to me.
With that said, I do think combining CICO with one of these new weight loss drugs is especially effective, since then you get the benefit of using the math while ensuring your diet doesn't increase.
I'm sure low GI diets work well for some people, targeting certain eating patterns and removing problematic foods. But they produce little to no weight loss in RCTs. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10313499/
"Low GI/GL diets probably result in little to no difference in change in body weight compared to higher GI/GL diets (mean difference (MD) ‐0.82 kg, 95% confidence interval (CI) ‐1.92 to 0.28; I2 = 52%; 7 studies, 403 participants; moderate‐certainty evidence)."
Because they're fighting not only habit and psychology, but also the addictive power of insulin. A low-glycemic diet--e.g., the Mediterranean Diet--takes insulin off the table, leaving only the first two.
But seriously, the real villain here is the pro-inflammatory, high-glycemic-index American diet. That places us at the mercy of insulin. And in any insulin-versus-willpower fight, there's only one odds-on favorite.
It's funny how so many false assertions come from a place of "I don't want it to be true, so let's all pretend it's not". See, for example, "I don't want to exercise, so let's pretend it doesn't help".
I already replied to you elsewhere, but to reiterate, no one saying exercise doesn't lead to weight loss is arguing against the physics of CICO. They're arguing the messy reality that people who eat a lot and are otherwise sedentary are going to almost certainly use the mile or two they just ran as an excuse to eat an extra snickers bar, which carries roughly the same calories as a mile jog.
Agree. Most reputable weight loss sources will recommend diet and exercise, but will also tell you to ignore the calories burned in calculating your calorie budget.
I am one, skinny now but it takes all medical science can do (bariatric surgery AND Wegovy). Long-term success rates without either are around 5%.
I think Noah's mistake is viewing 10% of daily calories (150-200 for dieters) as significant.
If you want to lose a pound a week that's a 500 calorie a day deficit. A half hour of intense cardio will burn 2-300. One post-workout Premier Protein will add half of that (160).
If you don't count calories or some equivalent, your exercise will get lost in the noise. If you do, even with the constant hunger that results, it's easier to reduce intake than increase burn.
RE: Japan and immigration, the myth that Japan has no immigration also conveniently skates over why the policy change happened, and why this might be relevant to other developed countries
I still refute the "mass immigration" claim for Japan. Increasing the # of foreign workers by 1% of population (to reach.... 1.5%) over 15 years is underwhelming. Although their available path to citizenship is laudable.
It's not even impressive in absolute numbers - more is achieved by far smaller countries. However, if foreign workers reach 5% of the population in Japan in the next 5 years, that would be quite notable.
This is another topic, but what does Japan actually need to stabilize its population? About 2.5% of population arriving in their 20s for the next 30 years, every year.
"In 2023, 54 percent of adults said they had set aside money for three months of expenses in an emergency savings or “rainy day” fund."
First of all, I have some level of doubt about the survey methodology. Clearly, the socially acceptable answer to give is that you do have a three-month rainy-day fund—it's the answer that anyone would prefer to give to survey taker. Another question is whether the average American could calculate accurately 3 months of expenses in their head. Many probably just know that their income covers basic expenses but couldn't tell you exactly what that figure is.
Second, what you have just done at best is prove that the glass is 54% full. It's more important to recognize that 46% of Americans do not have a rainy-day fund. It's those who are in danger of familial disaster whom we need to focus on. One way to decrease the frightening number of 46% of American families without a rainy-day fund would to be to require a family budgeting class in high school that is mandatory for high school graduation. Although I am a great lover of classic literature, this might just be more important than reading Romeo and Juliet.
It's kind of like saying, 99% of Americans are not in the hospital. Clearly that is true, but we still need to make medical care more effective and more available to everyone who needs it, before they need a hospital stay.
"It's more important to recognize that 46% of Americans do not have a rainy-day fund."
That's a very far cry from declaring that 60% of Americans have no reserve of any kind and would be financially devastated by a $400 repair bill on their car. There are undoubtedly people for whom this is true, but A and B can not both be true. Perhaps we could say these establish (at a minimum) the outer possible boundaries of reality.
This is a quibble over semantics. One month versus a three month reserve...Seriously? The *truth* is that much of the lower economic half our society lives close to homelessness. The financial and techno elites who regularly post on this forum seem to have little understanding of what poverty in America actually looks like.
Yeh 3 months is nothing. If the times are good it’s not even that much savings, in bad times where getting a job takes months the house is on the line.
I don't have a specific rainy-day fund. I also don't have much money in my checking account--less than one month's worth of expenses, on average.
My general strategy is to dump every extra dollar into my 401k. Why would I want no growth for money in a checking account or taxable low-return growth in a rainy day fund like a HYSA? If I need to, I can borrow from my 401k. I have enough in my 401k to live on for many years, although with the practical limitation that I can't easily access it without penalty. I also have a HELOC that I can borrow from, and I could borrow more against my home equity, if needed.
Am I living paycheck-to-paycheck? Do I have three months of expenses in emergency savings? I really have no idea. It completely depends on what you mean by that.
When I had to withdraw some money from my IRA during a financial emergency I was charged a 10% penalty fee on top of any tax liability. I think your preference for a 401K over a rainy-day fund makes a lot of sense.
A Roth IRA is a good compromise. You can withdraw the principal without any penalty or tax.
Thank you for the expert advice, but none of those applied in my case.
What if you change jobs? You don’t keep the 401k a lot of the time. You have to roll it over into an IRA
I agree. If the real number is 46% instead of 60%, that’s still a lot of people living in financial insecurity! My problem here is not the number itself but the lack of a clear policy idea to address the problem. “Fighting the billionaires” may sound romantic, but does not describe a solution to this specific situation. Aside from the financial education proposal, I would maybe suggest a Universal Basic Rainy Day Fund that every citizen could tap into once every five years or so and which got funded by a small slice of their income tax (progressively, that is, with higher earners contributing proportionally more than lower earners).
Sounds like a Social Security Extension for working age people. I would also be in favor of a easy term payback program through payroll deductions like student loans used to be when I was in school.
Copying Germany's education system might be a good idea: merit-based vocational & university education/training that reflects the current needs of industry, free of charge, for any young people who want it.
You really think the problem is the lack of a budgeting class? It’s not like the internet has a million resources available for anyone who wants to learn.
From my experience the main problem with budgeting is it means you have to tell yourself no and people really struggle with that.
Education does not work for everyone immediately. But unless people are exposed to the collective wisdom of humanity, every single one of them has to reinvent the wheel for themselves. Very few people think that is a viable path forward. One of the big problems of our high school curriculum is it does not address the challenges of adulthood head on. One of my favorite stories about an effective high school program is that young people in the health class were required to carry around a 10-pound baby doll for three days in high school to give them a small taste of what the challenges of parenting might be. BTW, that was guys too.
I’m sure you can find a decent YouTube video that explains it all in less than an hour. I’m not sure you need a whole class.
Schoolkids need this knowledge in a solid pedagogical format that can be replicated nationwide.
My Dad was a high school teacher and it drove him absolutely crazy that, once the personal finance class became mandatory, it became standard for guidance counselors to push kids to do it freshman year so that they had more room for advanced classes when in their Junior and Senior years. Giving to class to 15-year olds who will definitely forget everything by the time they graduate is pretty much pointless
Agreed. Needs to be 11th grade, before age 18 when a kid can drop out.
I think it's far far far more likely that people underreport their "rainy day fund" than that overreport it. Like Iikely don't have enough in my checking account to cover 3 months without income. But I also have a chunk in a brokerage account and another chunk in a retirement account. The LendingTree survey wouldn't even release the wording of their question, claiming that it was "proprietary." That should set off many red flags.
And yes, the actual number does matter, regardless of whether it's 60% or 40% or (by far the most likely answer) a bit under 20%, which is the number that report that they have trouble paying their bills in that survey. And that matters a whole hell of a lot for policy. Because that LendingTree survey also found that 40% of those earning over $100K report "living paycheck to paycheck." And that's damn near certainly because of lifestyle choices that they make. If you drive a new car and buy a new iPhone and, depending on where you live, have a big house or a spacious apartment in a modern building with amenities, you're not struggling; you're making a choice to prioritize current consumption over saving to cover a rainy day fund.
And it matters a whole lot what that actual number is, and what the profile of people in these situations is, because you make good policy first and foremost by starting with an actual conception of the world as it is. Your policy design is going to look very different if the median household in a given metro area (or country) would need to use 50% of its income to pay the median rent than if the number is 25%. And we do have metro areas where that is the case! But it would be incoherent to apply San Francisco's policy solutions to aid the people of Detroit.
I agree that the Lending Tree “study” is far more problematic than the one that Noah referred to. According to bank note.com, 50% of Americans with credit cards are carrying a balance on those cards, which either indicates extreme economic naivete or a lack of a rainy day fund.
https://www.bankrate.com/credit-cards/news/credit-card-debt-survey/
Damn near certain that that’s overwhelmingly naïveté, to the extent it’s true. There were some reforms a decade and a half ago that stopped credit card issuers from handing out the cards to college kids like candy. But for example, I think I recall Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner listing carried credit card debt on their disclosures when they went into government.
I think a lot of the people who said they had a rainy day fund were just giving the feel good answer. I have a hard time believing that high rates of credit card debt and high rates of rainy day funds coexist. However, for the truly rich like Ivanka and Jared not paying your credit cards is simply a convenience. The interest just doesn't matter.
I think so much writing about weight loss is about people don’t want to be told to eat their vegetables and exercise. I’ve lost somewhere between 90-120 pounds depending on your start/end dates and kept it off for several years. I’m frequently told this is impossible.
What’s more in real life I have this conversation often. How’d you do it?
“I radically changed my diet, became a vegan, and started exercising and kept it up till I now run 20 miles a week and lift weights to prevent injury after I got started I picked up other healthier anti-stress habits like meditation”.
Oh let’s talk about anything else. Back when I would lose weight on some fad diet we’d have a million questions about it. If I told them I lost weight by eating half a pineapple at every meal that would be something they want to hear about.
Losing weight that way isn't impossible. It's just unlikely.
The weight one is not a good “myth” to include. You’ve carefully defined the statement so that it is false, but a very slightly modified statement is very clearly true. It’s false to say that exercise makes no difference. It’s true to say that changing exercise makes less difference than changing diet, and that doing either with willpower alone is ineffective for most people at maintaining significant changes in weight.
A pack a day smoker only has a 13% chance of dying of lung cancer. Should we say that it is a myth to say that smoking causes cancer? For most people, it does not.... (I do not really disagree with what you said. I do, however, think that your statements are more problematic than you are conveying.)
I think there's an important difference between the two, namely that without an attempt at engaging in total lifestyle control, adding exercise tends to change one's diet and rest patterns and other things in ways that undo some of the effects of exercise. Whereas quitting smoking doesn't tend to lead people to compensate by picking up other habits that cause cancer. We shouldn't tell people exercise is irrelevant. But the better reasons to exercise are about fitness, not weight.
I agree with all of this. However, as Noah said, there are numerous studies showing that if you group people into two groups, "add exercise" and "don't add exercise," you see more reduction in weight in the "add exercise" group. So "on
average", there is an improvement. Most people may not benefit. Most people don't benefit (wrt cancer) from stopping smoking. They were never going to get cancer.
"Fitness", as per Kenny, above, includes a host of physiological benefits that accrue from exercise. Which, for example, includes elevated NK levels and other immune defense against carcinoma.
His conclusions in this regard are correct. What he doesn't acknowledge is the highly addictive nature of insulin in informing our dietary and emotional habits. Regarding willpower, for most Americans with obesity issues, insulin wins hands down.
It’s also misleading to use means; there’s likely a lot of variance in the results! Some people may be very responsive to exercise and lose 2 or 3 times the mean expectation while others may hardly lose any weight
“ while keeping his calorie intake the same”
Isn’t that the main issue? Exercise is great for many reasons but it will make you more hungry so the weight loss impact is muted.
Doesn't matter. The question was whether exercise impacts weight loss. Any time you're looking for the impact of a specific variable, you want to hold other things constant. Now, if you want to say that many people don't see results because they run for 15 minutes and think "whew, I'm famished, better eat a Snickers bar so I don't starve before brunch!", that's a different problem - at that point, you're measuring willpower and people's desire to actually make hard decisions. But it's not evidence that exercise doesn't work.
But then exercise isn’t impacting the problem. The problem is the difficulty of not eating when the body is crying out that it’s starving. If you can’t do that without exercise you’re not going to be able to do it with exercise either.
Appetite--the perception thereof--is largely a hormone-mediated phenomenon. That exercise effectively modulates; especially if wedded to a low-glycemic diet.
The real issue is that caloric intake is not a universal constant, because nervous tissue prefers glucose as a fuel source, while most other cell types prefer fatty acids. Even with an intense exercise schedule, a carb-heavy high-glycemic diet will make you fat.
Again, I'll refer you to the scientific method. Even if you're going to insist that it's not possible to eat normally while exercising (debatable, since people do it literally every day), saying "exercise doesn't help you lose weight" implies that exercise doesn't make any difference no matter what else happens, which simply isn't true. The authors should have just titled it "We Don't Have Willpower And We Wish No One Else Did Either So We Wouldn't Feel Bad About It".
Also, it's hilarious how this whole "it's impossible to eat a reasonable amount; my body is crying out that it's starving" is only a problem in countries like ours.
I often say exercise doesn't help with weight loss. When I say that, I'm not arguing that Calories In Calories Out is a myth. Exercising absolutely will burn more calories than sitting around, and burning calories leads to weight loss.
I'm saying that, for whatever reason, Americans (because I live in America and am talking to fellow Americans) will inevitably increase their diet to compensate for those calories. Your alternative title about willpower is pointless. It's not that the authors want people to not have willpower, it's that the authors acknowledge that people mostly don't, which is why America is suffering an obesity epidemic.
Basically, your body is good at getting you to eat maintenace, plus a bit more in case of emergency (which rarely comes if you are an American). If you exercise, your body just tells you to eat more to hit what is now a higher goal, so if you want to lose weight, you need to force yourself to eat fewer calories than you would naturally. You can do that through calorie counting or by some trick - cutting carbs, intermittent fasting, WW points - that makes you do it.
Obesity has a highly addictive cause. Which happens to be identical to that of grievance-obsessed FOX News junkies. It's the same physiological phenomenon, with different psychological components.
Can you guess what it is?
Grossly obese people quite regularly experience excruciating levels of hunger. What they eat is largely diverted to maintain their current adipose stores; leaving other cell types still hungry.
Yeah, OK. Tell them to talk to an actual starving person and let's compare the experience.
It's not a contest. If you want to fix a problem--like the US obesity epidemic--we need to first thoroughly understand the causality (etiology). This is an economics blog; most folks here have no training in medicine or biological sciences.
Countries like ours? It’s a worldwide problem. Indeed many countries even fatter than we are.
Anyone got any theories as to why East Asians are so much slimmer on average than people in the Americas, Europe or the Middle East?
Lower glycemic index dietary intake. I.e., more vegetables; less sweets.
Insulin is what creates fat. Out of blood-sugar. Which can spike from alcohol, stress, anger--and carbohydrates. Or any combo thereof. A spike triggers an insulin event. Which turns excess blood sugar into fat.
The US is 10th in obesity. So no, there are not "many" countries fatter than the US. We're in the top ~5% of fattest countries.
This completely wrong. The issue is that the exercise itself is resulting in increased caloric consumption, it has nothing to do with "will power" whatever that is. Rigorous, long term, randomized studies do not show weight loss from exercise (the one caveat is that for obvious reasons these studies can't be blinded)..
Just because people eat through the calories they burn, it doesn't mean that exercise "doesn't work". It means that people are pulling in the opposite direction. People who say that it doesn't work are just looking for justification for not making the effort.
That doesn't make any sense. It has nothing to do with effort. Yes, you can exert effort to reduce calories while exercising, but you can also do so without exercising. The reality is if you randomize people to exercise for a year or more, they don't lose weight in comparison to controls. Since these are randomized studies, it would be absurd to say there is a difference in effort in the two groups that is cancelling out the difference in exercise. The issue is homeostasis, not effort. Exercise illicits a response form the body that maintains homeostasis.
While Noah may have defined that as the question, it’s not what most people are talking about. Everyone agrees that exercise impacts weight gain and loss. What they contest is the claim that exercise alone can be effective for most people at losing the amounts of weight they want to lose.
Exercise not paired with a low-glycemic index diet--or one of the new $1k/month drugs that physiologically mimics such a diet--is insufficient to reduce the insulin-secreting events that create body fat in the first place. Physiology 101.
Tell that to the billions of people in the world who stay thin without expensive drugs. You'll have to leave America to find them, but they're out there. It's crazy how in just a few generations people have convinced themselves that it's simply impossible to not become grossly overweight.
"What happens, on average, is that they lose weight!"
You buried the lede of that study in this context. It says, in the summary, "No significant effect of exercise was found on weight maintenance [i.e., long term weight loss] (1 SR‐MA)."
Generally, if you burn 10% more calories by exercise, your appetite increases by 10%. So if you want to lose weight, you still need to eat less than your appetite. And you can do that with or without exercise--and the exercise really doesn't help much.
Oh, I'm afraid you've misinterpreted that sentence. "No effect on weight maintenance" means that people who exercise are no more likely to gain weight than people who don't -- in other words, people who lose weight by exercising don't tend to bounce back to their old weight.
"'No effect on weight maintenance' means that people who exercise are no more likely to gain weight than people who don't."
Yes, I agree with that.
"[I]n other words, people who lose weight by exercising don't tend to bounce back to their old weight."
I'm not sure how you're coming to that conclusion. The study reported "no significant effect of either aerobic (n = 2 studies) or resistance training (n = 2 studies) on the amount of weight regain after a low‐calorie diet." That doesn't mean people don't regain the weight. In fact, given that we know that people that don't exercise tend to regain weight that was previously lost, we can infer that people who lost weight through a low-calorie diet and try to keep it off through exercise tend to regain that weight! I suppose the study doesn't address losing weight through exercise and keeping it off through exercise, but I don't see anything in there that suggests the opposite.
You also curiously omitted the fact that an exercise routine replaces adipose tissue with muscle tissue. Which also weighs more, btw. And brings with it a spectrum of other health benefits that body fat does not. Fun physiology facts.
No, your "appetite" doesn't increase by 10%. You're making that up. That's not how "appetite" (however you want to quantify that) even works. If your logic were true, "appetite" for sedentary people wouldn't ever increase above a desire to match their base metabolic rate and no one would be fat.
From personal experience (and pretty much every weightlifter I've ever watched with a YouTube channel), I can say I absolutely get hungrier after heavy lifting. I'm currently on Mounjaro, and my weight loss definitely plateaued when I started lifting heavy. I was OK with that because while I stopped losing significant weight, my body has been doing a lot of reshaping and I'm still losing inches on my stomach.
Did you know that muscle is twice as dense as fat tissue? That is why you will lose twice as much fat for every unit of muscle you build.
Which is why lifters are much more conscious than the average American regarding exercise physiology, and what exactly they eat to satisfy post-workout hunger. Hint: it's not snickers bars.
If you take two groups of people, an experimental and a control, and you tell one group to exercise without limiting calories, and tell the other group not to exercise also without limiting calories, would you exepct much weight loss in the exercise group? Studies have pretty conclusively shown that you don't get much in the exercise arm. One study (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14718319/) found running *20 miles a week* led to a weight loss of...about one pound a month. Just run the math on the calories used, and you can see it's much higher than one pound worth of calories per month.
False equivalencies. Exercise essentially replaces fat with muscle. Which also weighs more, btw. Look instead to studies that compare BMI outcomes; not body weight.
A quirk of the "you can't lose weight through exercise" thing is that I hear a lot of people claiming that, rather than exercise, you should focus on your Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT), which is stuff like parking further from stores to get in extra walking, taking the stairs, or ensuring that you hit a step goal.
While not an awful idea, this advice seems to be based on the fact most people burn more calories through NEAT than through exercise, which is true, but it's because you just do more NEAT throughout the day, not because NEAT is somehow a better way to burn calories. In fact, the only difference between NEAT and exercise is your intention - if you are intending to exercise, it's exercise, if you are intending to do something else, it's NEAT. This raises real philosophical questions regarding whether, if you increase your NEAT to burn calories, you're actually increasing your NEAT or just exercising. It reminds me of the people who want to limit imports to increase GDP because they've spent too long looking at the math equation and too little time thinking about it.
As an aside, I always thought the idea behind not losing weight through exercise is just that it's hard to make much of a dent in your weight just through exercise, particularly exercise alone. A typical cut is 500-1000 calories below maintenance. It's hard to burn that many calories through exercise, and if you aren't also calorie restricting (or at least tracking), it's going to be real easy to just eat back whatever calories you burn. Exercise makes you hungry and can help excuse eating more. You don't want to say, "I can eat this pint of Ben & Jerry's because I just ran a mile" because your run probably burnt ~100 calories, while the pint has ~1000 calories in it.
On the other hand, done right, exercise can help you lose weight and keep it off, not just because it does burn some calories but because it builds (or at least helps maintain) muscle, which keeps your basal metabolic rate up. The higher your BMR, the more you can eat while losing/not gaining weight.
Appetite--rather the perception thereof--is a hormonally mediated experience. Exercise followed by a high-glycemic-index meal will result in a strong insulin event, that will both generate body fat and create the hunger for more of same. Exercise followed by a low-glycemic meal will not.
Myth #3 seems to be avoiding the question.
Like that chart is technically wrong because of XYZ, but the myth isn't really about productivity per se. It's about "The owner class rigged the game to hoard most of the gains from the last 50 years of technological/industrial/service development.." That's what a debunking of that chart actually needs to target.
That's much harder to do.." In 2021, the ratio of CEO-to-typical-worker compensation was 399-to-1 under the realized measure of CEO pay; that is up from 366-to-1 in 2020 and a big increase from 20-to-1 in 1965 and 59-to-1 in 1989." https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2021/
Do you, Noah Smith, really believe that our 21st century "Super ceos" are so much more productive than their primitive 1965 counterparts? Or perhaps did it become easier to pay people at the top increasing amounts relative to other workers? And is that compensation actually reflective of their actual added value?
"[I]s that compensation actually reflective of their actual added value?"
Yes, of course it is. If anything, super CEOs are paid far too little. When Starbucks appointed its new CEO, the value of the company went up $15 billion dollars. That's the expected value the new CEO is bringing to the company.
The trend since the 1960s has been for small and medium size companies to merge or be outcompeted, and for there to be a handful of dominant companies in a lot of sectors. That means that, instead of a lot of executives who can only add so much value relative to their companies' market cap, there's a much smaller number of CEOs who can add enormous value by slightly increasing the market cap.
If you want to complain about the overall structure of the economy that leads to these huge companies, fine. But the fact is that being slightly-better-than-replacement CEO is really valuable, and being one of a small number of super elite CEOs is extremely valuable.
> Yes, of course it is. If anything, super CEOs are paid far too little. When Starbucks appointed its new CEO, the value of the company went up $15 billion dollars. That's the expected value the new CEO is bringing to the company.
Great. Now do CEOs who do nothing to enhance their stock and the CEOs whose companies stock vanishes. I assume they are negatively paid.
Also despite capitalism becoming evermore monopolistic the rate of the growth of the economy has significantly slowed since the 50s, while CEO pay has increased multiple times. The size of the companies they run isn’t significant to this.
The “expected value” of Starbuck’s new CEO merely returned the company’s shares to its recent trading range but well off its highs of the last 2 years. The market move thus said more about the outgoing CEO than the incoming one.
From 1978 to 2021, realized CEO compensation increased 37% more than the share price of their companies, while compensation since 2021 has increased even faster than share prices. In other words, public companies have drastically increased CEO pay relative to stock performance.
Why doesn't that just prove the American CEOs in 1978 were dramatically underpaid relative to the value they were delivering?
Well that’s a point of view but it would need more explanation.
The Overton window has definitely moved re acceptable CEO pay.
And acceptable levels of market concentration. Oligopolies & Duopolies are the new normal, which increase costs and lowers compensation for every American family. Which was also a characteristic of our last Gilded Age.
Surely, that can't be a coincidence?
Great article. Thank you for your research. As far as exercise and weight loss, no. Exercise by running an hour a day is not realistic for 99 out of 100 people. And you truly don’t lose weight exercising. It causes your appetite to increase. Tough conundrum. Not kind to reductionist thinking.
The exercise study you quote actually says that you'll lose 5 lbs per month if you exercise even 4 days per week, not even every day!
Also RE "The majority of these immigrants come from Vietnam and the Philippines, which is why if you go to Japan you might not visually recognize them." - I had this experience in Malaysia. I would go to a touristy spot and think "wow, I picked a really good place, look how many locals are here!". It took embarrassingly long to dawn on me that I was actually surrounded by tourists, just not western tourists.
It does not say you lose five pounds per month! It says you lose five pounds in the *first* month, which is very different!
Myth #2 is not a myth. Yes, if you do more exercise and do not eat more calories then you will lose weight, BUT! Exercising makes people want to eat more food. Your body wants to make up for the lost calories, so most people who exercise but do not change their diet have minimal effect. When you exercise you get hungrier and you eat more, UNLESS! Unless you change your diet. I've found (and studies seem to agree) that low carb and high protein diets are satiating and help lower weight, regardless of exercise. Having said that, I'm a big proponent of exercise for many other reasons.
But if you eat more to compensate for the exercise, aren’t you changing your diet? How is eating as much as you were before changing your diet? Also can you not mitigate the impact of being hungrier through calorie-counting and willpower?
No, calorie counting and will power are 100% proven to fail in the long term. Anyone who says you can simply burn more calories and not change your diet is not being serious about this topic. There are decades of studies proving this. But! Changing your diet is much easier. There are delicious ways to eat what you like and lose weight :)
I've previously made this claim to people who had just lost a bunch of weight by joining a sports club and had made no other changes, and I felt like an idiot.
The explanation is just that there's loads of individual variation in both the diet and exercise variables:
- Some people can switch to a low-calorie diet and barely notice, other people feel like they're going to die, others need a bit of a hack (e.g. I'm fine skipping meals but not strict calorie counting per meal).
- With exercise, some people adapt their diet rapidly to meet their exercise expenditures (me), some actually find it physically difficult to eat any more than they usually do (my wife), so lose weight reliably. This article (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3696411/) finds very high variability, and tries to pinpoint why this is; it's pretty interesting actually - homeostatic reactions and "hedonic eating" sensitivity etc..
- Some people are so attached to their current diet-type (e.g. high carb), or have such strict physical/environmental/social limitations on what they can eat, that changing diet is incredibly hard (often socially or psychologically); others can switch effortlessly (e.g. I can go low carb in my current lifestyle in Europe, but couldn't realistically when I lived in Asia).
I think one reason we misunderstand this is that people who find it easy to lose weight, either through diet (quantity or type) or exercise, aren't usually involved in the conversation about weight loss - they just adjust either variable and their weight drops. The people who find it difficult are overrepresented in the conversation.
The answer is insulin. Which stimulates the brain's pleasure centers in a big way. It's extremely addictive; but unlike heroin has a very short half-life and virtually no physiological withdrawal effects.
Switching from a high- to low-glycemic diet tailored to a particular lifestyle entails roughly 48 hours of physiological struggle. After which there's fairly smooth sailing. Psychological habituation is another matter altogether.
There are many ways to lose weight out there but all of them boil down to "maintain a caloric deficit". Dieting is about finding the type of way in which maintaining a caloric deficit can fit your lifestyle. It might be exercising more, reducing snacks via IF, stopping to drink alcohol, go vegetarian, etc. Everyone is different and no solution will work for everyone.
Saying CICO is 100% proven to fail is false as it does work for many people, even if it doesn't work for the average person participating in these studies.
Nonsense. There are plenty of studies, including from the NIH showing that different foods with equal calories have very different results for weight management.
You're kind of talking past each other. At the end of the day CICO is the answer, but things can impact both sides of that equation. Notably, you are going to have a lot harder time limiting your "CI" if you eat nothing but jelly beans than if you eat actual beans as they are much less filling. Exercise can also impact "CO," in ways beyond burning calories, as muscle does more for your basal metabolic rate than fat. But if CI<CO, you will lose weight.
No, he's right. Caloric deficit with a high-glycemic index diet will create more and stronger insulin events, that not only generate fat, also produce much more extreme food cravings.
In short, fats & proteins reduce caloric craving; while carbs increase them.
I don't see how any of this contradicts what I said? Different diets do have different results, of course they do, but it's mechanically impossible to eat at a surplus and expect to lose weight.
Saying CICO works for outliers but not the average person feels like not an especially persuasive argument to me.
With that said, I do think combining CICO with one of these new weight loss drugs is especially effective, since then you get the benefit of using the math while ensuring your diet doesn't increase.
Or save yourself $1,000/month and eat a low glycemic-index diet with a high Omega-3 to -6 ratio.
I'm sure low GI diets work well for some people, targeting certain eating patterns and removing problematic foods. But they produce little to no weight loss in RCTs. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10313499/
"Low GI/GL diets probably result in little to no difference in change in body weight compared to higher GI/GL diets (mean difference (MD) ‐0.82 kg, 95% confidence interval (CI) ‐1.92 to 0.28; I2 = 52%; 7 studies, 403 participants; moderate‐certainty evidence)."
Maybe *you* can use pure willpower to set what you eat. But *most* people don’t succeed when they try.
Because they're fighting not only habit and psychology, but also the addictive power of insulin. A low-glycemic diet--e.g., the Mediterranean Diet--takes insulin off the table, leaving only the first two.
Noah, with that Myth #2 you've really activated the "people who are fat are just lazy and lacking in willpower" crowd.
Hey, I resemble that remark!
But seriously, the real villain here is the pro-inflammatory, high-glycemic-index American diet. That places us at the mercy of insulin. And in any insulin-versus-willpower fight, there's only one odds-on favorite.
It's funny how so many false assertions come from a place of "I don't want it to be true, so let's all pretend it's not". See, for example, "I don't want to exercise, so let's pretend it doesn't help".
I already replied to you elsewhere, but to reiterate, no one saying exercise doesn't lead to weight loss is arguing against the physics of CICO. They're arguing the messy reality that people who eat a lot and are otherwise sedentary are going to almost certainly use the mile or two they just ran as an excuse to eat an extra snickers bar, which carries roughly the same calories as a mile jog.
Agree. Most reputable weight loss sources will recommend diet and exercise, but will also tell you to ignore the calories burned in calculating your calorie budget.
Orrrr... they might be experienced fat people.
I am one, skinny now but it takes all medical science can do (bariatric surgery AND Wegovy). Long-term success rates without either are around 5%.
I think Noah's mistake is viewing 10% of daily calories (150-200 for dieters) as significant.
If you want to lose a pound a week that's a 500 calorie a day deficit. A half hour of intense cardio will burn 2-300. One post-workout Premier Protein will add half of that (160).
If you don't count calories or some equivalent, your exercise will get lost in the noise. If you do, even with the constant hunger that results, it's easier to reduce intake than increase burn.
Congratulations on your success. Not an easy accomplishment to be sure.
Why does your point about China's off-the-books military spending remind me of Nazi Germany's Mefo bills?
Your writing is the touchstone of truth and objectivity.
RE: Japan and immigration, the myth that Japan has no immigration also conveniently skates over why the policy change happened, and why this might be relevant to other developed countries
I still refute the "mass immigration" claim for Japan. Increasing the # of foreign workers by 1% of population (to reach.... 1.5%) over 15 years is underwhelming. Although their available path to citizenship is laudable.
It's not even impressive in absolute numbers - more is achieved by far smaller countries. However, if foreign workers reach 5% of the population in Japan in the next 5 years, that would be quite notable.
This is another topic, but what does Japan actually need to stabilize its population? About 2.5% of population arriving in their 20s for the next 30 years, every year.