April 2, 2026
Science Says Working Out Won't Help You Lose Weight | The Energy Paradox | Ep 27
Who burns more calories in a day: a sedentary office worker in an average American city, or a highly active African hunter-gatherer who walks 7 miles a day foraging and tracking game?
The answer seems obvious, but science tells a completely different—and shocking—story.
Welcome back to another mind-blowing episode of Unconditional with Norbie Schickel. This week, we are diving deep into the fascinating phenomenon known as The Exercise Paradox. When researchers compared the daily energy expenditure of these two vastly different groups, they found that they consumed and burned almost exactly the same amount of calories.
But what does this mean for you? If exercise doesn't significantly increase our daily calorie burn, is it actually useless for weight loss? Have our fundamental beliefs about metabolism, fitness, and calories been completely turned upside down?
In this episode, we explore:
- The Hunter-Gatherer vs. Office Worker Study: Breaking down the shocking scientific observations that defy common sense.
- The Truth About Calorie Burn: Why highly active lifestyles don't necessarily equate to higher daily energy expenditure.
- Exercise and Weight Loss: Unpacking the claim that working out builds muscle and reduces stress, but might not actually help you lose weight.
- The Consumption Equation: Are our issues with weight management primarily on the consumption side rather than the exercise side?
- Rethinking Calories: Why we may need to question our most basic ideas regarding human metabolism and energy.
Whether you are a fitness enthusiast, someone trying to lose weight, or just curious about human biology, this episode will completely change the way you look at your next workout.
Listen now to uncover the truth behind the Exercise Paradox.
Links To Sources Discussed
The Energy Paradox - Scientific American
Hunter-Gatherer Energetics and Human Obesity
Keywords
Exercise paradox, calorie burn, weight loss myths, metabolism, hunter-gatherer vs sedentary, does exercise burn calories, fitness science, energy expenditure, Unconditional Podcast, Norbie Schickel, health and wellness.
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Suppose I give you two groups of people.
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The first is a group of sedentary office workers in an average American city.
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The second group is a tribe of highly active hunter gatherers in Africa who survive by foraging off the land and tracking game like baboons and giraffes and hunting for their meat with handmade bows and arrows.
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And if I were to ask you, which of these two groups of people likely burns more calories in a day, which group would you pick?
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Oh, and before you guess, let me add one more thing.
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The men in the African tribe, they walk around seven miles on average per day.
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Well, the answer is obvious, isn't it?
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It should be the hunter-gatherers.
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They are objectively more active, they lead much more physical lives, and are much more exposed to the elements.
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All factors that we know burn calories, right?
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But here's what's wild.
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When researchers actually tested the two groups to actually determine which group burned more calories, the results, not as expected.
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It turns out each group consumed and burned almost exactly the same.
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This shocking observation is what some refer to as the exercise paradox.
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And this study and studies like this are often what serves as the scientific backing for some to claim confidently that while exercise may be good for many things, increased muscle mass, strength, cardiovascular benefits, stress reduction, weight loss isn't one of them.
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But as compelling as a sounding as these results are, is that what's really going on here?
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Has one of our fundamental beliefs about exercise truly been turned on its head?
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Or is something else at stake here?
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Have we really stumbled upon a paradox with respect to exercise or the calorie burn side of the calories in, calories out equation?
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Or are we really seeing an issue on the consumption side?
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That quite possibly we're seeing evidence that may cause us to question some of our most basic ideas regarding calories as a whole.
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With that, I'd like to welcome you to another episode of Unconditional with Norby Schickle.
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It is great to be back and to be back with you.
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If you are new to the show, as always, welcome, welcome to you too.
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Okay, we are in luck because we've got an awesome mind-blowing, okay, mind-blowing.
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I think I could promise that.
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So yeah, mind-blowing episode as we go into one of the most fascinating studies and concepts that I've ever heard about with respect to human health and nutrition.
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Okay, full stop.
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Now we've talked about a few studies in the past few weeks, and I think it's fair to say that today we're gonna just nerd out a little bit more.
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Okay.
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Maybe you can give me one more week of nerding, and then I have a change in direction planned for next week.
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Okay.
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But even though I think one should tread very carefully when it comes to a reliance on studies to inform individual health and fitness decisions, I do think that they can be very, very illuminating at times.
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And of course, we should always warn that the contrast between what the study says versus what people talking about it says, that the study says, is always important to keep in mind.
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Okay, and that includes me.
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So I'm definitely going to link to both sources that we're going to discuss today, and you can take a look for yourself.
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Highly recommend doing that.
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But this is one of those studies that has really informed my thinking.
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I guess you could say what's probably my bias at this point against the completion and the correctness of the idea of energy balance, right?
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I think there's some things that are incomplete about it.
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But this idea of calories in, calories out, or what some people often refer to as the law of thermodynamics when it comes to human health and nutrition.
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Now, the study we're going to talk about today is titled Hunter-Gatherer Energetics and Human Obesity, and it's by a guy named Herman Poncer.
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Now, Herman Ponzer, he's been on a number of big podcasts.
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I think I saw that he was on Andy Galpin's podcast.
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So there's been a few of these.
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So he's made the rounds in sort of the podcast and YouTube circuit.
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And I will say he's an incredibly funny guy.
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Um, I watched a lecture that he gave years ago on YouTube, and uh he's very funny.
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So worth worth watching, worth checking out some of his content uh if you haven't seen it.
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But he's an American evolutionary anthropologist and biologist.
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He's a faculty member at Duke.
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And the paper that we're going to discuss today was initially published all the way back in 2012.
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Now there's another piece by Ponzer that was published for a late audience in Scientific American in 2017.
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And the title of that piece is called The Energy Paradox.
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Okay, much better title.
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I like that a whole lot more.
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And it covers Ponzer's work uh with the Hadza as well, right?
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Sort of references his work from the earlier academic study.
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Now, as much as I love this study, and there is a lot to like about it, okay.
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We've got hunter-gatherers, we've got comparisons to farmers, we've got measurements on the caloric burn of gorillas, okay, and just hell yeah, right?
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Gorillas, they are my favorite animal.
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Okay.
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My kids know this, my wife knows this, but I love gorillas.
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And I love the fact that they thought to add gorillas to the study, because that's always where my head goes.
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Whenever anyone's making comparisons to an animal and they're saying, Yeah, we did this, we saw it in a rat study, et cetera.
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I'm always like, yeah, but what about gorillas?
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Okay.
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That could be like, I don't know, the subtitle to every single episode is what about gorillas?
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And certainly it could be the name of this episode.
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But that's where my head always goes.
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And here's the thing: even if you don't love gorillas, and I can just set aside for a second that if you don't like gorillas, you are probably a sociopath.
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Okay.
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Not medical advice, but it's probably true.
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There is a lot to love about this study.
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Even if, spoiler, I'm ultimately going to disagree with its conclusions.
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Now, I always talk stakes and context before getting into the details.
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So let's zoom up a bit.
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Let's look at the big picture of why this is important.
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Now, of course, the answer is pretty obvious, right?
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We are currently in the middle of an unprecedented rise in obesity and metabolic dysfunction in the United States and most of the developed world.
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At the time of this recording, and you guys know this, 40% of the adult American population is obese, not overweight, not holiday chubby, obese.
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And as I've said before, I'm not judging.
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Okay, as many of you know, at one point in my adult life, I was nearly 50 pounds heavier, officially obese.
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Okay, so never any judgment from my perspective.
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Being overweight, normal weight, underweight, it's not a moral thing.
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Okay, there's just no moral connotation one way or the other.
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It's super important to say that and to just keep banging that drum.
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Now, that said, aside from the fat pride movement for like a hot second, this dramatic rise in the rate of obesity in diet-related diseases, like type 2 diabetes, this is not a welcome change for most people.
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Okay, I don't think that's controversial to say.
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Given that the estimates place the number of deaths from obesity and diet-related disease at somewhere between 112,000 and 600,000 Americans every year, the stakes are very, very real.
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And what is causing this dramatic shift?
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A 40% obesity rate?
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That's nearly 3x the rate from 50 years ago.
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How did this happen?
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You know, you can look at photos of people that have posted online of Americans in like the 1960s and 70s out on the beach, and you won't find a single overweight person.
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You know, what happened?
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And any amount of change in this amount of time, it's not genetic, right?
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There clearly is some other factor at play here.
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And I would argue, and I will argue, that it's not willpower either.
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Okay, I've made this point before.
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Now, of course, the conventional wisdom here, the scientific consensus, is that this is fundamentally an issue of energy balance.
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We overconsume calories, and due to our modern sedentary lifestyle, we don't burn enough calories through movement, right?
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Physical work and exercise that we did historically.
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And therefore, we get fat.
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It's neat, it's clean, it's simple.
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Unfortunate because it's your fault.
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You lack willpower, you lack discipline.
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But the explanation?
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No, that's definitely not the issue.
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But how often have we seen the conventional science flipped completely on its head?
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We literally just saw that happen with the food pyramid.
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When I was a kid, you were a complete nut if you thought eating fat didn't make you fat, if you thought saturated fats were anything other than just a heart attack waiting to happen.
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And now a whole lot of that has changed.
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And here's the thing: I wouldn't be surprised at all if I saw that flip again in my lifetime.
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But if the conclusions in this study are correct, then at a minimum, we've got at least half of the explanation of the eat less and move more explanation for the obesity crisis, completely wrong.
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So let's discuss the study, the design, the results, and conclusions.
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And then I'll go ahead and give you my thoughts.
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So as I said, there are two sources that I'm gonna make reference to here: both the 2012 study, the academic paper, as well as the piece published in Scientific American.
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I'm gonna make reference to both.
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Okay, and again, both well worth the read.
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And not only is the information written, and not only is the information presented written for either an academic audience or a lay audience, but we get different details and insights from the study in one source versus the other.
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And both fascinating.
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Again, recommend both.
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Ponzer also wrote a book called Burn.
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New research blows the lid off of how we really burn calories.
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And I will confess, I haven't read the book yet.
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Okay, so it's possible that the book, which was written nine years after this initial article, may represent a difference in his thinking.
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So I'll just put that caveat out there.
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All right.
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So as we discussed in the intros, uh the study, in the study, researchers measured the caloric burn, the energy expenditure of 30 Hadza tribesmen and women, okay, 17 women and 13 men.
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And they used a method called doubly labeled water, which involves each subject drinking water that has essentially been tagged with a marker, which can be measured in the urine, right?
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And then from there, a delta calculation can be made.
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So what was in the urine versus what they drank, and voila, massively oversimplifying here, but we have a measure of caloric burn, which is considered the gold standard in this case.
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Now they also took other measurements, such as body weight, uh BMI, uh, body fat, as well as they tracked how much the men and women in the Hadza tribe walked each day.
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And let me just go ahead and say when you're looking at this chart, yeah, I knew that the Hadza were not big people, but I hadn't realized just how small these guys and girls are.
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Okay, keep in mind, these are all adults, but the average man weighed 112 pounds, as an average man, 112 pounds.
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The average woman, 95 pounds.
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Okay, and they don't give us heights here, but they do give us BMI, which is 20 for both men and women.
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So at those weights and that BMI, it would translate to an average height of 4'10 for women and an average height of 5'3 for men.
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Okay, obviously not saying this in a negative way, but these are much, much smaller people, both in terms of height and weight, than the average Westerner.
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I was also surprised to learn that while women tend to forage for tubers and berries and groups, the men hunt alone with homemade bows.
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And again, just surprising because I had heard about the Hadza before, I've read some things about the Hadza, but for some reason I had in my head that these guys go out and hunting parties, right?
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They hunt together.
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Uh, but no, according to Ponzer, they typically hunt alone.
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Now, of course, they are master trackers.
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They hunt with a handmade bow, which if you get a second, you know, just pull up a picture of a Hadza bow.
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Hadza is H-A-D-Z-A.
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Incredible.
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Okay.
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Just again, it seems almost impossible to take down the kind of game that they go after, you know, but they do.
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But of course, you'd have to be a master tracker, right, with significant ability to get in close to bring down, say, a 3,000-pound giraffe with one of these bows.
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But I guess they do.
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In fact, the piece in Scientific American starts with Poncer, and I think it was maybe one other fellow researcher going along with a couple of Haza guys to find a giraffe that one of them had shot with an arrow dipped in homemade poison.
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Which of course leads to all kinds of questions.
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Like A, there's something just incredible about that.
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But then B, like what the hell are they using for poison?
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I mean, it has to be something small enough to lace the tip of an arrow, but powerful enough to take down a giraffe.
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And yet still not sufficiently powerful as to render the animal useless for meat.
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I don't know, that just strikes me as incredible.
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It's probably fair to say the hunting of the Hadza could be an entire podcast in and of itself, but clearly there's a lot of traditional wisdom here.
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But back to the study itself.
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After spending some time with the Hadza, having them drink the special water, collecting urine samples, Ponzer and his team are able to bring those urine samples back stateside and have it analyzed to assess caloric burn.
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And what they found was shocking.
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Caloric burn of Hadza men and women was essentially identical to their Western sedentary counterparts.
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Now, of course, this is a complete shock.
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And Ponzer says, quote, we looked at the data every way imaginable, accounting for effects of body size, fat percentage, age, and sex.
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No difference.
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How is that possible?
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End quote.
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Yeah, that's an odd one.
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And it reminds me of a quote which has been attributed to the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, the writer of books like iRobot, which is something to the effect of the most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka, but rather that's funny.
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And I'm sure for Ponzer and his team, getting the results back on the caloric burn of the Hadza would have been a that's funny kind of a moment.
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Because the results seem to violate everything that we know about energy balance and metabolism.
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Clearly, the Hadza are more active than the typical sedentary Westerner.
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I mean, let's hear it from Ponzer directly, how he describes Hadza life, and oh, you tell me.
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Quote, life for the Hadza is physically demanding.
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Wild tubers are a staple of the Hadza diet.
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Men cover miles each day, hunting with bows and arrows they make themselves.
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When game is scarce, they use simple hatchets to chop into tree lines, often forty feet up in the canopy to harvest wild honey.
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Even the children contribute, hauling buckets of water back from the nearest watering hole, sometimes a mile or more from camp.
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End quote.
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And yet somehow, even when making adjustments for differences in relative size and other factors, the Hadza consume and burn the same number of calories as their Western counterparts, or say traditional farming populations, which were also part of the study.
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Another group that you would assume with higher caloric burn due to increased physical activity.
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And of course, there are the gorillas, my favorite.
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What about gorillas?
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You know, what did they what did they find?
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And in fact, the paper cites research performed by other scientists who compared the energy expenditure of active wild primates versus those sedentary primates in zoos.
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And they found, incredibly, that each group earned about and consumed about the same number of calories.
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Which leads Ponzer and his team to describe the significance of the study by saying, quote, our data indicate that contrary to perceived wisdom, humans tend to burn the same number of calories regardless of how physically active they are.
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End quote.
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And that the results of the study help explain why exercise generally fails to aid in weight loss.
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End quote.
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Yeah.
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That's funny.
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These results would seem to indicate that there is something fundamentally broken about our energy balance idea of weight gain.
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If calories consumed and calories burned are the same, then why are Westerners getting fat yet the Hadza are staying lean?
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Something is off.
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And Ponzer and his team have some possible ideas about what might explain this, but these are just preliminary ideas.
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Clearly the body has some sort of balancing mechanism, some way to adapt to the higher physical demands of the Hadza lifestyle without necessarily burning more calories.
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But the thing is, they calculated the Hadza burn, just as many calories per mile walked as their Western counterparts.
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So what is it?
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It's got to be something other than physical work.
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Given how consistent caloric burn is across populations, and the researchers acknowledge that they don't really know, but they do offer up some potential explanations.
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First, maybe active people adjust their behavior in subtle ways.
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The researchers offer up like sitting rather than standing or sleeping more soundly, but they're quick to add, quote, but our analysis of the data suggests that although these behavior changes might contribute, they are not sufficient to account for the constancy seen in daily energy expenditure.
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End quote.
00:18:48.960 --> 00:19:05.759
Another possibility is quote, that the body makes room for the cost of additional activity by reducing the calories spent on many unseen tasks that take up most of our daily energy budget, the housekeeping work that our cells and organs do to keep us alive.
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End quote.
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Things which might be metabolically costly, like, say ovulation or mounting an inflammatory response.
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Now, are either of these two possible explanations correct?
00:19:20.240 --> 00:19:21.440
It's hard to say.
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More investigation would clearly be required.
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But what Ponzer is willing to say is that, quote, all of the evidence points toward obesity being a disease of gluttony rather than sloth.
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People gain weight when the calories they eat exceed the calories they expend.
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If daily energy expenditure has not changed over the course of human history, the primary culprit in the modern obesity epidemic must be the calories consumed.
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End quote.
00:19:52.480 --> 00:19:56.240
So that's the study in a nutshell, pretty strong conclusions.
00:19:56.480 --> 00:20:02.000
And again, you get why people are confident in saying exercise doesn't help you lose weight.
00:20:02.319 --> 00:20:11.440
And I will give you some of my thoughts on the study, both on the results and on the broader considerations with respect to what exactly this means, or at least what I think it means.
00:20:12.000 --> 00:20:15.599
But before I do, I just got to pause and say, I really do love this study.
00:20:15.680 --> 00:20:17.440
Okay, I think you can see why.
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I'm very glad that Ponser and his team thought to do this study, right?
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And then actually did it, because the results are so unexpected and so shocking.
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You can see somebody easily overlooking the need or the benefit of performing a study like this.
00:20:34.559 --> 00:20:43.680
Whatever else that you ultimately conclude, it's just a great reminder that sometimes even our most fundamental ideas and assumptions aren't quite right.
00:20:44.880 --> 00:20:47.599
But I do have some thoughts, so let's get into them.
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So, first, as incredible as these results are, I'm not sure that the results from the study alone are enough to conclude that exercise does not assist with weight loss.
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Because this is not exercise.
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Now, I don't mean that the Hadza are not physically active.
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Clearly they are.
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And I'm also not suggesting a sort of like a, I don't know, bougie gym bro that you know it's not exercise because there are no weights involved.
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What I'm saying is that as incredible as this is, this is not exercise for the Hadza.
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This is life.
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Now, this might seem like a minor point, but this is significant here.
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And let me explain.
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In my view, and again, I don't think this is controversial when you think about it, exercise represents an increase relative to some baseline activity rate, even if that baseline is very low or very high.
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In order for it to count as exercise, for us to categorize it as exercise, it has to be an increase versus a baseline.
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The seven miles a day walked by the average Hadza man, well, this is his Baseline rate.
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