For most people, a 1 hour moderate run is only about 1-2 cookies worth (and only half a Crumbl cookie). Even a marathon run might only burn 2000 calories . a chipotle burrito is 1600 .

In other words, for 95% of people doing activity, they shouldn't eat any surplus if their goal is to maintain or lose weight.

It's actually best to do most of your activity undernourished, as it helps develop true intuitive nutrition feedback sensation. You'll start to sense how every macro and salt feels when you ingest it. Loss of this sensation is a major obesity driver. A numbness for nutrients.

Eating while actually being hungry is a great sensation. That's why I stopped snacking/sugar treats, it always spoil my hunger for when it's meal time. On the other hand, when I have having my meal, no restriction on veggies/meat/fish, open bar, I eat as much as I want.

I always welcome hunger knowing that I live in a society of calorie abundance. I generally tend to feel annoyed when people that are hungry start treating like an emergency.

> It's actually best to do most of your activity undernourished, as it helps develop true intuitive nutrition feedback sensation. You'll start to sense how every macro and salt feels when you ingest it.

Not exactly my experience.

My did a exercise schedule involves climbing a mountain every week. The mountain is about 400 meters (that's ~1312 feet, or more than four American football fields laid end-to-end) tall, and the exercise was usually done during afternoon (1 or 2 hours before dinner) without eating lunch.

After two mouths of that, I've noticed:

1. My weight or belly size don't really changed much. I also notice that some people who also frequented the mountain have big bellies.

2. I got very hungry after that, which triggers me to eat more during dinner, usually salty food.

3. The delight of salt becomes craving, probably due to the lost of liquid/electrolyte through sweat (and tears, probably).

4. For comparison, I stops craving salty thing the next day.

I guess you need to actively suppress some of your inner urges to really make the "nutrition feedback sensation" work. Otherwise, exercise more only leads to consume more.

P.S. Also, doctors really can't recommend doing heavy physical activity with empty stomach, as it might increase your heat rate or something (I might be hearing it wrong). I've since changed the schedule so I can eat something before start climbing, though my belly size still remained the same, and I'm still craving for salty food if uncontrolled.

But maybe it's just because I don't know how to do it correctly.

You're right that it's easy to out-eat the running you can sustain as a regularly fit person, but there's no "only" about 2000 calories

2000 calories is pretty near the daily calory requirement for a healthy weight human. If you are of healthy weight and eat appropriately, you pretty much have to eat twice as much to compensate for that marathon

I don't think a chipotle burrito is actually 1600 calories unless you do something non-standard. Probably 800-1100

Strava said I burned near 4k calories on my last marathon.

+1 for undernourishment.

Discovered that as a broken uni student, and has become my goto fix to lose weight. Lost 10-11kgs over the last year by means of that. The occasional “cheat” (mostly social events really) slows the process down but don’t really stop it. It’s not really a fast process though… but it strongly depends on how under nourished you are and how active you are. For me keeping myself between 8000 and 10’000 steps a day was sufficient.