This is always a convo: are you fat because you're lazy or genetically fucked? Can you lose weight by working out harder/better/faster/stronger, or is it only and purely a diet story?

Michael Easter is this cool, interesting fitness author/journalist who seems balanced and interesting enough that I like to read/listen to him... put differently, he hasn't said anything yet that really, really tripped me up.

Today he's out talking about this study ("Energy expenditure and obesity across the economic spectrum") in PNAS

"Is 74% of the American adult population overweight or obese because we eat too much or because we move too little?"

Both our diet and movement have changed over the last hundred or so years—but one has changed far more than the other.

1. We eat 10-20% more food a day than in the past (estimate)
2. We move 14x less than our ancestors did.

= easy conclusion: it's the workout, fatty...?

if you want to determine the role of diet vs. exercise in obesity, you can’t just make assumptions. You’ve got to run a study. And you can’t just study a handful of college students in a lab. You need a massive, global snapshot of human life. Enter a truly giant group of researchers—68 in all from 60 different global institutions—and 4,200 people from every economic background and every continent but Antarctica.

RESULTS... drumrolls...

You’d expect that the people in traditional societies—who move on average 14 times more—burned far more calories than people who lived in industrial societies and worked desk jobs.
They didn’t. The total daily calorie burn was actually higher in the (much lazier) people who live in industrialized places.

This doesn't surprise you if you've read books like _Burn: ### The Misunderstood Science of Metabolism by Herman Pontzer (or his latest book Adaptable: The Surprising Science of Human Diversity that's sitting half-finished on my nightstand).

Americans are running a bigger machine, and it takes more energy to keep that machine alive and move it at all. And the size difference isn’t just fat: People in wealthier countries have more muscle, and bigger bones and organs. So the scientists adjusted the math and compared people of the same body size.
Final answer: After adjusting for body size, the calories burned through movement were about the same between the city-dwellers and traditional societies

Statistical outcome is that 90% of modernity's weight gain is food, 10% is changes in mobility -> energy burn.

research from Kevin Hall—who studied metabolism at the NIH and is arguably the most important nutrition scientist over the last two decades—suggests that our bodies are far more sensitive to small surpluses of food than we think. He found that overshooting what you burn by just 10 calories a day leads to about a pound of weight gain over a few years

Ultraprocessed food does correlated with a higher body fat percentage.

"Exercise might not be the best way to lose weight. But it’s probably the best move for health."

I feel so good right now. #1563572 #1558304

Even if you’re obese, exercise improves your heart and circulatory system and lowers your risk of heart and age-related brain diseases. It tends to boost mental health and mood. Overall, it drops the risk of all major diseases and extends lifespan.

...but it probably won't make you lose weight.

If your only goal is a smaller number on the scale, dedicating yourself to fixing what you eat rather than how you move is the smart bet. But if you also want to live better, live longer, and be less crazy, you should fix how you move, too.