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After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight

nytimes.com

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Re: After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight

#341

Post by gozur88 »

learc83 wrote: post #340
gozur88 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even close. It takes about six calories per day to maintain a pound of muscle. And it takes two calories per day to maintain a pound of fat. That's why people who think they're going to be able to eat radically more if they change ten pounds of fat to ten pounds of muscle are deluding themselves - it adds up to about forty calories a day, which is half a teaspoon of butter. Anyway, the thirty calorie figure doesn…

> Your average sedentary middle aged guy is going to gain weight if he eats more than about 1500 calories per day. That's not true. The average middle age man (say 50 years old, 5'9", 160lbs) has a BMR around 1600 calories, and unless he's bed ridden will burn around 2000 calories per day.

Bed ridden or has a desk job. From a calorie perspective it's probably not much different.

Re: After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight

#342

Post by taneq »

hourislate wrote: post #70
varelse wrote: post #15

Extreme diligence seems to be the only way to fight this. If I stop exercising, the pounds pack on within weeks. If I insure I burn at least 3000 calories a day (usually much more), I can maintain my weight indefinitely. But I walk to work and I exercise for 1-2 hours daily. Most people cannot or will not do this. Add in the extreme carbohydrate and fat-laden diets most readily available to America and it's a perfect…

Exercise has nothing to do with weight loss. Caloric restriction also doesn't work without consuming the correct fats to satiate your appetite. As you age there is no amount of exercise that will allow you to maintain the amount you weigh in you 20's or 30's. It will all depend on your diet of the correct foods. I would suggest probably the best book ever written about why people get fat. Why We Get Fat: And What to…

> Exercise has nothing to do with weight loss. Caloric restriction also doesn't work without consuming the correct fats to satiate your appetite. As you age there is no amount of exercise that will allow you to maintain the amount you weigh in you 20's or 30's. It will all depend on your diet of the correct foods.

What? Every one of those points are wrong.

* Exercise has a modest effect on your energy balance (assuming we're talking less than an hour a day - if you're running marathons then the effect is much bigger). You can out-eat any reasonable amount of exercise but it still has a significant effect.

* Caloric restriction works regardless of your macronutrient balance, if you eat fewer calories than you burn then you will lose weight, that's not just biology, it's the law of conservation of energy.

* Aging doesn't allow you to mysteriously break the law of conservation of energy either. You will find it harder to keep the weight off but by controlling your energy balance and engaging in regular exercise you can absolutely maintain the same weight you maintained in your 20s. (As a single data point, I weigh the same now as I weighed a decade ago, and 20kg less than I weighed 8 years ago.)

It's true that sticking to a reduced calorie diet is more difficult if you eat some diets than others, maybe that's what you meant?

Re: After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight

#343

Post by learc83 »

gozur88 wrote: post #341
learc83 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your average sedentary middle aged guy is going to gain weight if he eats more than about 1500 calories per day. That's not true. The average middle age man (say 50 years old, 5'9", 160lbs) has a BMR around 1600 calories, and unless he's bed ridden will burn around 2000 calories per day.

Bed ridden or has a desk job. From a calorie perspective it's probably not much different.

There is a big difference between bed ridden and has a desk job. We can calculate that difference to some degree of accuracy using this equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harris%E2%80%93Benedict_equati...

For a sedentary office worker with no exercise, to maintain weight he should consume 1.2xMBR. With a BMR of 1600 that means he should consume a bit under 2000 calories per day.

It takes a good bit of energy to move 160lbs around even if you're not purposely exercising.

Re: After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight

#344

Post by Godel_unicode »

atomical wrote: post #320
xriddle wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a scientific source for these claims? Dr. Peter Attia's personal research seems to claim otherwise. http://eatingacademy.com/how-a-low-carb-diet-affected-my-ath...

Most Olympians are going to be on a high carb diet. What records has Attia set in sports?

Very scientific.

Re: After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight

#345

Post by lstamour »

npsimons wrote: post #319
forgetsusername wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tracking calories would blow most people's minds about the quanta of food they're eating. I've been tracking for a while, and sometimes I'm still surprised. Scale and app. It's never been easier.

Truth! Most people just don't realize because they've never done it. Side note: it makes me very sad and disappointed to see comments like this downvoted. Do we not claim to value rationalism and the scientific method here? Take the challenge: weigh your food and yourself and log it, and see if you can disprove CICO. If you can, there's a Nobel prize in physics awaiting you!

A scale with wifi was where I started. I downplayed it before but simply measuring kept me thinking about it and once I started losing weight the graphs served like nothing else as reinforcement. Well, not quite. Sites like Weilos helped me feel like even small steps were possible. The biggest jump so far was the combination of discovering MyFitnessPal, Apple Watch exercise calorie monitoring and joining a budget gym within walking distance. The app, and CICO turned it into a numbers game. I was amazed at how many calories were in movie theatre popcorn. But I did have a takeaway from this article, combined with seeing my own results slightly plateau -- it's key that MyFitnessPal is calibrated as much as possible to your resting calories. Or you might find yourself having banked exercise calories and wanting to "spend" them like a savings account. It doesn't actually work that way. Food qualities then play a role. Still figuring that one out for myself though...

Re: After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight

#346

Post by ceratopisan »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #236
vinceguidry wrote: post #69

I managed to lose 40 pounds last year, using intermittent fasting. That impressed people, but what's impressed me is how easy it was to keep it off. I expected to have to do a lot more work than I have, I really seemed to have found a new 'set point', where I can simply let my body self-regulate eating and I won't gain weight. Sometimes it even goes down. I think a person's state of mind plays a huge role. I used IF…

Yeah, the actual mechanics of losing weight is pretty basic calories-in calories-out. The difficult part is engaging in behavior that consistently gives a caloric deficit without making unsustainable trade-offs against willpower or other things. Intermittent fasting is a very good way to remove "how much willpower do I spend while holding a fork and looking at food" out of the weight-loss equation. I lost about 60 po…

I'm finding that most of the weight loss strategies people talk about are really calorie-reduction mechanisms. Intermittent fasting, keto, carb-free, paleo, all generally boil down to "eat less and maybe exercise".

The "eat less" part is caloric, really, not by volume, so vegetables are better than most for eating. I'm not saying those plans are bad - a scheme that works is a good scheme. It's interesting to see how they all come together.

Re: After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight

#347

Post by ceratopisan »

nicolas_t wrote: post #295
ck2 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what "Fast 5/2" is but if you are losing more than a pound a week (maybe two) it's going to be impossible maintain it because it won't feel natural and your calorie craving is going to rush right back. Those poor people were manipulated into losing a pound PER DAY which is insane. I cannot even fathom that. Take your time, schedule a year, and see what you can do. Be patient and persistent. Change your lifes…

Thanks for the encouragement! Very much appreciated! Fast 5/2 is basically intermittent fasting with two days/week below 600 calories (which I find surprisingly easy to do) and the rest eating normally (but I'm also refraining from eating chocolates/biscuits/cakes and anything overly sweet). So far, I've lost 3 pounds in a week and an half which I think is an healthy rate.

Getting out of the chocolate habit is probably the best part (most difficult part?) for making a difference.

Re: After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight

#348

Post by meric »

mhurron wrote: post #232

That sounds socialist and would just stifle the free market. The governments only place is in war and womens vaginas. I may have been in the US too long.

Government regulate women's vaginas when these "things"[1] are in them.

[1] http://www.dakotavoice.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/aborti...

Re: After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight

#349

Post by gozur88 »

learc83 wrote: post #343
gozur88 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bed ridden or has a desk job. From a calorie perspective it's probably not much different.

There is a big difference between bed ridden and has a desk job. We can calculate that difference to some degree of accuracy using this equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harris%E2%80%93Benedict_equati... For a sedentary office worker with no exercise, to maintain weight he should consume 1.2xMBR. With a BMR of 1600 that means he should consume a bit under 2000 calories per day. It takes a good bit of energy to m…

That seems far too high based on my own experience and that of my coworkers. Depending on their level of exercise, slender men at my office tend to fall somewhere between 1500 an 2000 daily calories, with 1500 being the 6' guy who doesn't do any exercise.

Yes, we compared notes.

Re: After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight

#350

Post by arkades »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #334
arkades wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The limiting factor on medical research isn't ethics: it's samples large and diverse enough to have a meaningful ability to distinguish between null and alternative hypotheses. We produce shit studies with small sample sizes and dodgy methodologies all the time. They just don't add to the pool of human knowledge.

> We produce shit studies with small sample sizes and dodgy methodologies all the time. They just don't add to the pool of human knowledge. They actually do. A crappy study with p=.70 isn't enough to justify changing the standard treatment for a disease but it is enough to justify doing the more comprehensive study to see if the result still holds. We have a choice between doing ten comprehensive studies only to prov…

You confuse p-value with methodology. P-value is entirely a product of sample size and effect size. For a given effect size, the cheaper I want the study to be, the smaller I make the sample, and the less likely I am to reach a significant p-value.

The problem is when the methodology itself is broken. For instance, using case-control methodologies on things with small-to-moderate effect sizes. Past studies comparing such studies with eventual RCTs showed that the case control studies gave absolutely no indication of what the RCTs would show as a consensus: it was entirely random.

There is no amount of money, small or large, worth throwing at studies that shift our prior probability to posterior by 0 units.

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