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The biggest losers: Metabolic damage or constrained energy?

physiqonomics.com

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Re: The biggest losers: Metabolic damage or constrained energy?

#71

Post by voisin »

waterheater wrote: post #58

A shift in understanding the metabolism has been gradually occurring since the 1990s with the isolation of leptin. What is leptin? Discovered in 1994, leptin is a hormone that signals the availability of energy reserves in the body. "High leptin levels are interpreted by the brain that energy reserves are high, whereas low leptin levels indicate that energy reserves are low", the latter causing the body to enter a re…

> However, low leptin levels causes the body to enter starvation mode, and hardcore dieting causes leptin levels to drop further.

What about fasting? Dr Jason Fung wrote a book about fasting that IIRC says that it does not cause starvation mode.

Re: The biggest losers: Metabolic damage or constrained energy?

#72

Post by thefz »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #3
paulpauper wrote: post #2

But most contestants regained a lot of weight and metabolisms slowed relative to bodyweight and stayed slow long after regaining weight. The adaptation explains why they regained weight so fast. It's incontrovertible that the show was a failure for the majority of the contestants. this also agrees with the high failure rates of diets overall and why formerly fat people regain so fast . Biology screws you over and has…

I don’t understand how this needs anything beyond surface level complexity… you have fat people who for show reasons were tightly controlled on exercise and food intake - which works for well understood reasons - then they took that away and left the people to their lifelong established habits. Of course they regain the weight. These people didn’t magically create mass from nothing. They ate too much for their activi…

Welcome to weight loss discussion on HN, where any rational point like "eat less" or "calories in, calories out" gets downvoted and discussed to death.

Apparently for this crowd taking medicines is better than stopping stuffing yourself, because you know, if you take a medicine you can keep stuffing yourself.

Oh, and also "it's more complicated than that" is always a nice escape from the harsh reality of thermodynamics.

Re: The biggest losers: Metabolic damage or constrained energy?

#73

Post by thefz »

bodiekane wrote: post #53
thaanpaa wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It requires that complexity because a metric shit ton of scientific research shows that it is more complicated than that. Permanent weight loss of more than ten pounds is nearly impossible from a scientific standpoint. The success rate after 5 years of weight loss is somewhere around 0.1%. You'd think that if it was as easy as everyone claims, more people would succeed. Heck, many people who have had gastric bypass s…

My weight floats in a range that's 40-50 pounds lighter today than I was a decade ago. It's because I eat less and move more. Physically, weight-loss is utterly trivial. Literally everything that people say works, does. Eat less calories, eat less sugar, cut out snacking, cut out liquid calories, cut out processed food, reduce carbs, literally any and all of those work, choose whichever is most appealing to the indiv…

> Physically, weight-loss is utterly trivial. Literally everything that people say works, does.

You can't say this on HN, where weight loss is a myth and the only way out is to take a crazy life-altering medicine. Exercise? PFFT. I walked a flight of stairs once, and did not lose a single gram.

Re: The biggest losers: Metabolic damage or constrained energy?

#74

Post by thefz »

vkazanov wrote: post #66
bodiekane wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My weight floats in a range that's 40-50 pounds lighter today than I was a decade ago. It's because I eat less and move more. Physically, weight-loss is utterly trivial. Literally everything that people say works, does. Eat less calories, eat less sugar, cut out snacking, cut out liquid calories, cut out processed food, reduce carbs, literally any and all of those work, choose whichever is most appealing to the indiv…

Fully agree. The science of body metabolism is hard. But the rules for weight loss are simple: move more, eat less. For some people it's just "Move more, eat the same". "Eat less" means "less calories", volume can be the same - really helps. PS chips are a crime against humanity

Not even that, if you change what you eat, you can have a dramatic effect as well. Try cutting out carbs and sugar as much as possible, results in two weeks.

Changing when you eat is a factor too.

Re: The biggest losers: Metabolic damage or constrained energy?

#75

Post by thefz »

belltaco wrote: post #10
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand how this needs anything beyond surface level complexity… you have fat people who for show reasons were tightly controlled on exercise and food intake - which works for well understood reasons - then they took that away and left the people to their lifelong established habits. Of course they regain the weight. These people didn’t magically create mass from nothing. They ate too much for their activi…

> These people didn’t magically create mass from nothing. They ate too much for their activity. Done. Stop doing that if you don’t want to gain weight Not true. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/science-reveals-w... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5082693/ > discovered that certain Russian populations had large intestines that were about 57 centimeters longer on average than those of certain Pol…

You just proved the point you want to disprove. Those that absorb more calories gain more weight, thus CICO.

Re: The biggest losers: Metabolic damage or constrained energy?

#76

Post by thefz »

voisin wrote: post #71
waterheater wrote: post #58

A shift in understanding the metabolism has been gradually occurring since the 1990s with the isolation of leptin. What is leptin? Discovered in 1994, leptin is a hormone that signals the availability of energy reserves in the body. "High leptin levels are interpreted by the brain that energy reserves are high, whereas low leptin levels indicate that energy reserves are low", the latter causing the body to enter a re…

> However, low leptin levels causes the body to enter starvation mode, and hardcore dieting causes leptin levels to drop further. What about fasting? Dr Jason Fung wrote a book about fasting that IIRC says that it does not cause starvation mode.

Agree, straying from thermodynamics is wrong. Human fat holds around 8000Kcal per Kg. Stop eating altogether. Every the 8000th Kcal more or less you would have lost 1Kg of fat.

Re: The biggest losers: Metabolic damage or constrained energy?

#77

Post by aantix »

Thoughts on Adenoviruses as being a root cause of obesity?

https://www.geneticlifehacks.com/weight-loss-genetics-obesit...

"Interestingly, animal studies show that the gain in fat mass is not due to eating more or moving less… Animals ate the same amount of chow, but those infected with adenovirus 36 increased fat tissue by 60-80%."

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17135605/

"A 2004 twin study showed that the Ad-36 antibody-positive twins were “significantly heavier and fatter as compared with their antibody-negative counterparts”. This was a groundbreaking study indicating that the Ad-36 virus was likely causing obesity."

Re: The biggest losers: Metabolic damage or constrained energy?

#78

Post by heyoni »

renewiltord wrote: post #28
belltaco wrote: post #6

> In 2016, Pontzer and colleagues published a study putting forward the constrained energy model: Energy expenditure does increase with more activity, but only to a point. Once physical activity gets really high, the body will adjust other components of the metabolism to keep your daily energy expenditure within a narrow range How do people who constantly repeat the mantra of thermodynamics in such threads explain th…

The straightforward hypothesis would be "by reducing other body functions". For the duration of a Barry's Bootcamp class, my watch (probably over-)estimates my calorific expenditure at 1000 kcal. I know that right after that, I could probably not do too much Mathematics. Frequently, I encounter visual snow. But most of the time, I can do Mathematics. And then there's healing, and saliva generation, and digestion, etc…

I’m like that too sometimes after a particularly difficult workout. I can’t make conversation or make sense of things I would normally have no trouble with (programming related).

Re: The biggest losers: Metabolic damage or constrained energy?

#79

Post by Swizec »

belltaco wrote: post #6

> In 2016, Pontzer and colleagues published a study putting forward the constrained energy model: Energy expenditure does increase with more activity, but only to a point. Once physical activity gets really high, the body will adjust other components of the metabolism to keep your daily energy expenditure within a narrow range How do people who constantly repeat the mantra of thermodynamics in such threads explain th…

> How is the body burning the same calories with increased physical activity?

As someone who runs marathons, the answer to “how does the body burn the same calories with increased activity” is: It doesn’t. You will feel a marathon metabolically no matter what. And if you don’t eat like an absolute monster that day, you’re literally going to feel insatiable hunger for multiple days until you get those calories back.

Feeling hungry when your stomach is so full that you can’t take another bite is quite an experience I’ll tell you that.

And yes, your grocery bill does get higher when training for a marathon. It's very noticeable.

Re: The biggest losers: Metabolic damage or constrained energy?

#80

Post by CooCooCaCha »

paulpauper wrote: post #32
CooCooCaCha wrote: post #5

Metabolic damage is mostly a myth. Fat, muscle, and activity burn calories. If you lose weight you’re probably burning fewer calories unless you replace it with muscle. Activity levels also vary over our lives. We tend to be more active when we’re younger.

an extra 10 pounds of muscle, which is average for someone who has never trained, maybe burns only 100 extra calories. The problem also is that muscle hypertrophy also entails gaining some fat too.

Depends on how you bulk. You’ll gain some fat sure, but you can limit this by eating healthier and not too much over your caloric needs.

But my point is, if someone loses a bunch of fat their bmr is going to take a hit. Could be pretty significant on the order of hundreds of calories a day.

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