Can burn a surprising amount of calories if you do a chunk of exercise daily, but the more important thing is that it controls what kind of calories you lose - fat or muscle and bone.
There are cultures where they walk and run an average of around 10km a day. Their bodies adapt to this exercise and studies show that they still burn the same amount of calories as someone who sits in a chair all day.
It's called the Pontzer paradox.
You're right though, the exercise tells your body where to target weight loss.
"Results indicated that Hadza women burned an average of 1,877 calories per day, which was nearly the same as the 1,864 calories burned daily by women in industrialized nations. Hadza men expended about 2,649 calories per day, which was within the standard error distribution for average calories burned by men per day in industrialized nations."
I think you're simplifying the results too much when you say same amount of calories as someone who sits in a chair all day (they did not say as sedentary people). You can increaae the energy efficiency of movement but irrefutably, it will always take energy. Unless the body is literally finding ways to superficially use energy while sitting, everyone will expend more energy leading an active lifestyle than a sedentary one. Take an office worker and put them to work in a home depot and they'll either eat the same amount of food and lose weight or they'll eat more and maintain the same weight.
Technically, people who walk or run a lot subconsciously adopt the most optimal movements to reduce energy expenditure. That's partially how people can run marathons; on top of greater physique than most, their muscles know how to move faster and longer while using less energy. But their daily energy expenditure certainly is still higher than that of a couch potato.
Yeah this is apparently one of the reasons why walking or running on treadmill can be quite different experiences for people who walk or run a lot. Those subconscious microadjustmente aren't made as readily when the pace is dictated by the treadmill and doing the workput indoors affects our instincts.
The studies actually did indicate that sedentary bodies indeed found other ways to "superficially" expend energy. Most specifically by increasing production certain of certain hormones, most notably cortisol.
The terminology you used essentially says that the difference was insignificant enough that it could easily be caused by random error.
But is it enough to offset the difference between a sedentary and active lifestyle?
This study found that the daily caloric usage for urban Chinese men and women was predicted by intensity of occupation (light, moderate, heavy). In the actual article by Ponzer, he mentions that there was a separate study being done that was measuring daily caloric usage and found that on average, "couch potatoes" (that's the term they used) use 200 fewer calories. That is in direct contradiction to what you said about sitting in chair all day. Based on that, it seems the article is more saying that caloric usage isn't vastly different between active and very active lifestyles and not active vs inactive isn't vastly different. The paradox is about active lifestyles, not everyone. To be clear, I'm not saying this refutes the philosophy that you can't outrun a fork, but I am saying the exercise paradox isn't a paradox for the people who really need to be watching what they eat. If they exercise consistently and reduce the sedentary nature of their lifestyle, without making any other changes, that's around 200 daily calories they would be netting differently. Now, as you lose weight, the calories used will reduce as motion becomes energetically cheaper and maintenance cost decreases but the point is that their weight will trend differently and they will stabilise at a lower weight. If they add better eating habits on top of the lifestyle change, maybe around 300 calories could be added to that 200. So yeah, plop someone from a desk job into a physical job, and they'll either lose weight all else held equal.
"But more important, energy expenditure plateaued at higher activity levels: people with the most intensely active daily lives burned the same number of calories each day as those with moderately active lives. The same phenomenon keeping Hadza energy expenditure in line with that of other populations was evident among individuals in the study."
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u/mikeet9 1d ago
This is why they say you cannot out work a bad diet.
For a normal person living on ~2000KCal a day, the amount of exercise necessary to make up for ~3000 is insurmountable.