this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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This is a weird article, because it feels like something that was 5 years out of date 5 years ago.
"You can't outrun a donut" has been a truism for decades, and it didnt take this study to figure it out. It is literally true that if you eat a donut, you would have to run for an unreasonable amount of time before you became calorie-neutral again.
However, we still all know those people who talk about how they eat organic vegan toast every morning (or whatever) and are still grossly overweight. Most of us have tried counting calories at some point, only to fail to meet our goal and rebound to the same weight - if not heavier. And at the same time - if exercise doesnt make you skinny, then how come all the skinny people I know exercise?
The answer is this. While various factors influence individuals differently, on the whole, obesity is driven by overall poor physical and mental health.
Bodyfat exists for a reason - to keep us fed during hard times. Modern people eat lots of processed foods which are bad for their overall health. They drink alcohol. They smoke. They dont sleep enough. They don't exercise enough. They dont spend much time outside in sunshine, or enjoying nature. They dont spend much time with friends, and dont have many strong relationships. They often find their lives lack meaning, and are stressed out by work, bills, family obligations, commuting, social media, politics, and all the rest.
All this signals to the body that hard times are coming, so it should pack away as many calories in reserve as possible. So it increases feeling of hunger, increases cravings for calorie-dense foods, and decreased involuntary energy expenditure.
Take an obese person from the city. Put them in a nice villiage in the middle of a forest. Villiage has no electricity - so no electronics, and no lights other than candles after dark. Villiage had no food delivery - all food is hunted or foraged in the forest, or grown as crops or livestock. The villiage gets one newspaper per month about the goings-on of the world, which is delivered via bicycle. The villiagers spend their time ensuring they have enough food, building or repairing their homes, and talking to each other. Once per season, the brewer opens a few barrels of beer for the villiage festival, but otherwise everyone is pretty sober. That obese person will soon be of normal bodyweight. And I think we all intuitively know that.
Counting calories is inherently inaccurate, since the margin of error for measurement on food labels is 20%. Calories are a unit of heat energy and aren't all that useful for the management of ones diet.
If calorie counting isn't working, and there is a rebound, then perhaps there is something else in our bodies that underlie the condition of being overweight that isn't just how much you eat, which I think you described well in the paragraph after.
Unfortunately most of us are unable to go live in one of these, but in that scenario you described I do agree that the obese person would get a lot healthier. The removal of all processed foods would have done a lot of good by itself. Better sleep, good circadian rhythms, etc, would all contribute considerably too.
I mean, you arent wrong. But at the same time, you can get a rough estimate and adjust up or down to suit your needs. We don't need six sigma accuracy to figure out that we shouldnt eat 12 donuts.
There are a few ways our bodies might adapt and rebound even with calorie restriction. But I was referring to the most common reason why calorie counting fails - which is that it sucks to do, so you stop doing it, and return to your previous eating habits.
I'm not saying this is a realistic, or even desireable, solution for most people. Just illustrating how we all already intrinsically know that living a wholistically healthy life would lead to a healthy bodyweight (for most people, assuming no significant medical conditions). And so in the lives that we are living, we should aim to live wholistically healthy lives if we want to maintain a healthy bodyweight.