Agree 100%. The data on this is pretty depressing. There isn't much you can do but eat less. Even huge bodybuilders quickly get fat when they go off season. All that muscle evidently doesn't work enough to offset the appetite.

Gaining 20lbs of muscle, which would be quite a visual change, would only burn about an extra candy bar.

Men with a lot of muscles in fact can and have to eat more to maintain their weight then men with less muscles.

That extra food in fact does include cakes and treats.

> Exercise doesn't spend enough energy for high calories foods to be worth it. If you want to lose weight that is.

Tell that to all the lean 150 pound / 68kg runners stuffing their faces with high calorie foods all the time.

endurance athletes are laughing

Yes, the literature on this bad. It's even worse than that. Metabolic adaptation means you may think you burned 400 kcal with a long run according to the tracking app, but maybe your body, on net, only burns 100-200 kcal, so this throws off the math.

In my experience, full body sports (krav maga in my case) are the exception here. It's super easy to stay lean if you eat normally and do this kind of thing. My explanation for this is that the body adapts very well to using a single set of muscles because it expects to have to do it for a long time, like when hunting or gathering, but full body means you are fighting for your life. I think this is also why lifting heavy works so well too. (I have no credentials or training in this area, just my own xp, so treat this as wild speculation of course.)

That's a common misunderstanding but efficiency doesn't actually change much based on exercise. You can verify this with metabolic tests that measure inhaled and exhaled gases.