Originally Posted by
wolfchild
If it was as simple as you say then we wouldn't have so many overweight people out there including overweight cyclists and other physically active people who are overweight despite being physically active. It's a little bit more complicated than just CICO.
Actually, it is that simple. If you eat a surplus of calories you will gain. Fat cyclists and fat joggers eat more than they need. If they ate less than was required to power their bodies each day they would lose weight. It could be a surplus of celery but if you only required say 1000 calories a day and ate 10K calories of celery you would gain weight. I'm not a nutritionist or doctor so there may be very rare cases where a deficit of calories will result in weight gain or no weight lost but it would be very rare and caused by a medical condition.
We have obese people in this country because people eat more calories than they need to exist. as a being. If you require 2K calories a day and you ate 2K of Snickers bar you would not gain weight. You would be unhealthy and since that is very simplistic you would probably not live very long on Snickers alone due to nutritional deficiencies.
I only say this to make it easy to understand and there are many posts above that delve into detailed strategies and science etc. but boiled down to its most basic element .... people in this country eat way way more than is required and exercise way way less than they should. That is where the obesity epidemic in this country comes from. There is plenty of wiggle room but when people struggle to lose weight it almost always boils down to diet.
We have 250K plus years of evolution that have programed our bodies to store every surplus calorie for lean times. Those lean times do not exist any longer.