Eeeh. Exercise doesn't spend enough energy for high calories foods to be worth it. If you want to lose weight that is. A donut is a lot of exercise and muscle building leads to a small but not sufficient calorie spend. The majority of calorie spend still comes from the organs and general body maintenance
I wanted to lose weight. I ran a lot (only 5 hours out of the week), ate the same high caloric foods, and lost a lot of weight. Clearly GP's assertion isn't correct, because enough exercise does lose weight.
Try only 4 hours a week of exercise. Most lean runners are only getting that amount of time running in and still eating high calories, because 4 hours of running is ~2,500 extra calories burned every single week.
Even most professional endurance athletes rarely hit 28 hours per week of actual training time. That would be like a peak week in a training plan before tapering leading up to a race.
Even more contrary to GP's claim, the top American marathoners are only doing ~13 hour weeks of running before their races. It's public data on Strava.
plenty of endurance athletes are pudgy, not lean at all . Usain Bolt is leaner than many endurance athletes. Training for endurance and being lean are different. Some runners get a nice toned body, but this far from the norm.
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.
Now you're just making things up. On any training plan, a long run would be a minimum of 6 mi / 10 km. No adult is going burn less than 400 kcal over that distance, it isn't physiologically possible. And any metabolic adaptation will only be a few percent at most: running economy only improves slightly with training.
