> The sample dataset explicitly excluded 'athletes', so would exclude people that _are_ outrunning a bad diet.

You can't outrun a bad diet. This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from. Perhaps it's a nice lie one can tell himself to continue eating junk and not feel guilty about it.

Athletes, especially body builders require a lot of calories but their diet is surprisingly healthy. They eat plenty of protein, carbohydrates minerals, vitamins and healthy fats.

I once worked a night shift stocking job just after college. I was in phenomenal shape without hitting the gym. I was at my lowest weight with a ton of lean muscle as a result of moving heavy loads and stocking paint every night. I also did the math at one point, and given the size of the warehouse I was probably walking quickly 8 miles during my shift. It became a chore to eat enough calories every day. Somewhere around 4000 calories/day, you may still be hungry, but you are generally full. Also food sort of becomes boring, and the desire to eat just isn't as strong.

That said, it was 4-6 hours 4 nights a week. That is a lot of time to spend to burn all those calories. It is really not hard to eat an extra 100 calories per day, but it takes a lot of effort to burn an extra 100 calories. It's the asymmetry here you absolutely have to respect. Further, at least for me, there is another asymmetry in terms of satiation vs hunger. It is much easier to be slightly satiated than it is to be slightly hungry. What this means, is that there is a tendency to be driven to eat slightly more than your body needs. This is partly why the GLP-1 drugs seem so effective, is that they seem to flip this asymmetry in the other direction, which means weight loss is the default, instead of weight gain.

I would say that in practice 99% of people can't outrun a bad diet, but not because of any sort of physiological reason. You simply need to train so much that most people won't ever approach the level of running/cycling/lifting they would need to do so.

If you're training like an elite athlete (for me and my at the time roommate that was running 85, or in his case, 100+ miles a week with a few lift sessions) you can, and will, eat just about whatever you damn please and not gain weight. Most people can't fit that much training into their lives without making it their life's primary focus at the expense of everything else, and couldn't sustain that level of training if they did, so it becomes a practical impossibility.

I do miss that aspect of running so much mileage, though I appreciate the freedom that stepping back from competition has afforded me in other areas. To maintain weight now, I eat 1-2 meals a day, but back then? I ate whatever got put in front of me, sometimes 4 meals a day.

> This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from.

For people that are merely trying to lose weight, it's effectively true. When you're out of shape, you won't have the strength or endurance to exercise long and hard enough to actually burn significant calories.

For athletes that are running marathons or doing powerlifting, yes, it's certainly false. Massive bodybuilders that are already deadlifting hundreds of pounds will have massive diets because lifting that much weight takes significant energy.

But someone like me, with a BMI of 36, I can't outrun a bad diet. I go to the gym, set the treadmill at 5 mph, and I'm completely gassed after 3 minutes or 1/4 mile and have to slow down to 3 mph to recover. I'll go back and forth, but after about 20 minutes, I've gone about 1.3 miles, my legs are stiff and my ankles are sore because jogging at 240 lbs means high impact. Meanwhile, I've only burned probably ~100 calories. Not enough to offset the bad diet.

Given enough time of my routine, sure, my endurance might go up. Eventually I can do it longer, and maybe then I can start outrunning the bad diet. But that's going to take a long time.

Easier to just cut carbs.

For high level endurance athletes, eating enough can be a difficult task. I wouldn’t quite categorize diets like the one described in https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/sports/olympics/cross-cou... as “a bad diet”, but it’s certainly a quantity and density of calories that would make it a bad diet for most people with a normal energy expenditure.

An anecdote from my experience with long trail hiking is that essentially everybody loses weight hiking long trails for months. Turns out when you’re hiking 25-30 miles / day, it’s awfully hard to not be in a calorie deficit (especially when you’re also trying to optimize for lightweight food)

I've lost 100 lbs twice. You absolutely can outrun a bad diet lol.

It's just a LOT of exercise and counting all of your calories. A 1600 calorie bag of chips is 4 hours of cardio :)

I have personal experience outrunning a bad diet as a division 1 swimmer. I was on a 7000 calorie a day diet, which was actually difficult to pull off, and I specifically had to supplement my diet with things like snickers bars and peanut butter cups just to stop losing weight. In fact, my dietary habits formed during this period of my life, where I was consistently below 10% body fat, continue to cause me trouble today in my less active state. Only by eating dramatically healthier have I been able to approach 20% body fat today.

Even beyond myself, I think you’re romanticizing how healthy the diets of extreme athletes are. I’ve been coached by and trained alongside Olympic athletes and most of them (not all of them) don’t give a single shit about things like healthy fats or micronutrients. Protein definitely, but everything else is noise. When burning that many calories, you are getting more than enough micronutrients, and it doesn’t really matter if the energy you end up burning is from fats or carbs, because it’s in and out the same day and never has a chance to be stored in the first place.

Body builders aren’t judged on athletic performance but aesthetics. It would make sense they care a lot more about diet, but it should be noted that they aren’t athletes and their entire regime is about building muscle, not using energy. It’s a completely different type of optimization.

For me, when I first started running, I thought going on a 5k run burnt scads of energy. At 100KG I was looking at about 400-500 cals-- Thats a fancy muffin basically. But when you start hitting 50k a week, you do have to start thinking about how to eat enough and enough of the right foods.

You very much can outrun a bad diet as far as weight loss/gain goes, which is the topic at hand (not general health).

I've been cycling several thousand miles a year for many, many years, and in my experience I can certainly "outrun" a bad diet. Go for a 40 mile bike ride 5 days a week and you'll have a difficult time eating enough food.

A couple years ago I added weight lifting to my regimen and I could never eat enough. Most days of the week I'd stop by mcdonalds to pick up a couple mcdoubles as a snack. I was easily consuming 4-5 thousand calories a day (150-175 grams of protein) and I was still losing weight while gaining muscle. At one point I was sub-10% body fat whilst eating a mix of healthy food and junk food. Every visit my personal trainer was telling me to eat more.

If you're interested in losing weight while eating whatever you want I suggest doing 10-15 hours of fairly intense cardio per week, and 2-3 very intense lifting sessions per week.

And then there's Michael Phelps, living proof you can outrun (or at least outswim) just about any diet you can imagine. He's obviously an extreme, but he's not the only example.

An athlete can outrun a sedentary person's bad diet, actually. It's all relative, of course, but the saying has exceptions.

You can outrun a bad diet, but the average person won't. The average American diet is 3600 cals/day (https://www.businessinsider.com/daily-calories-americans-eat..., https://archive.is/IURse). The average person needs ~=2250 cals/day to maintain a healthy weight (https://www.webmd.com/diet/calories-chart, women need 1600-2400 averaging at 2000, men need 2000-3000 averaging at 2500). Jogging a sustained 5mph burns about 600 calories/hour (https://runrepeat.com/calories-burned-running#calories-burne...). Now it's just algebra, the average person takes in 1400 calories more than they need in a day, so while you could try to outrun that diet it keeps up a pace of 5mph for about 2.5 hours EVERY DAY. So the most accurate advice is "a person can out-train a bad diet but the vast majority of people won't" but the advice that's most likely to lead the most people to the goal they're actually pursuing is "you can't out-train a bad diet".

Not disagreeing but I think it's worth adding, "but you can outrun a slightly bad diet".

> This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from.

It's advice for people new to diet-and-exercise, not a law of the universe.

> it's a nice lie one can tell himself to continue eating junk and not feel guilty about it.

Exactly the opposite: it's saying that, in terms of weight loss, that eating the junk matters a lot more than going to the gym.

>You can't outrun a bad diet.

You certainly can. If you eat Mcdonald's every day, that's a bad diet, and if you just sit around all day, you will gain weight. But the same person that eats the same exact McDonald's meal every day but also walks for an hour a day is going to be thinner. The real myth being perpetrated on this thread is that if you start walking an hour every day that somehow you will started eating more and that the only way to lose weight is to change your diet. This may be true if you eat a giant box of oreos every few hours, but it is certainly not true just because you have a "bad" diet. Eating healthier food is a good idea and I certainly recommend it, but it seems to me that the refusal of so many to accept that daily exercise in itself can lead to a healthier weight is a sign of denial by the overweight.

> You can't outrun a bad diet. This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from.

People tend to vastly overestimate the caloric expenditure of activity, probably because it feels strenuous.

4 hard minutes on an assault bike will leave you gasping, but means next to nothing for energy expenditure.