The biggest losers: Metabolic damage or constrained energy?

> If you establish a baseline that your metabolic rate is (say) 2000 calories a day, then eating 1600 calories a day will cause you to lose roughly a half-pound to a pound per week.

At this point it's pretty safe to say that's likely untrue at the population level. This is a cutting edge area of research but the UCP1 adaptations seems to happen really fast, for some people on the order of weeks. On the order of months for the vast majority of the population. It doesn't take long for the basal rate to fall to whatever your intake is because the system evolved to naturally have a lot of room to spare. The human body always adapts and if I were a gambling man, I'd say this is largely why most people fail at dieting: after a month or two the results stop and they have to further decrease their intake which interferes with other pathways and tanks motivation.

If it works for you, that's great! You're one of the lucky ones, maybe because you've hit your floor for uncoupling proteins. But given just how hard dieting is for most people and how bad the obesity epidemic has gotten, it's probably not useful for the majority of people. A far more holistic approach that tackles macro- and micronutrient deficiency, motivation, lifestyle, and not just net calories is required.

All this is accounted for in this sentence of my post:

> your base metabolic rate also changes as your weight does, so re-baselining by continually measuring caloric intake and your weight to recalibrate is always going to be necessary

If you’re actually measuring yourself at the scale to get the ground truth of your actual metabolic rate, and you’re doing this every single day, then there isn’t a single thing that can change this: UCP1 adaptations, fat viruses, leptin changes, hormones, stress… all of this is covered by the actual weight on the scale. If I ate X calories and gained Y lbs, I need to adjust my calories by Z, no matter the reason I gained those pounds.

You can argue that such a diet is too hard, and that for some people the adjustment to your calories is going to leave you essentially starving, but it doesn’t change the truth of the matter that it will work if you do it right. Now, whether it’s worth it for people, and whether the process is going to leave you utterly miserable or even extremely unhealthy as a result, I’m making no claim on.

Yes, but as I read it, they all lastingly changed the level of exercise they were getting, and the extent of the "bad" metabolic adaptation seemed to correlate strongly with how big of a lasting change they made in exercise.

> In other studies (alluded to here as those where participants don't undergo anything so extreme), exercise is both a strong predictor of long-term weight-loss success, and can dampen metabolic adaptation (since more muscle and good cardiovascular shape boosts metabolism, usually).

Yes, trading fat for muscle increases your baseline caloric consumption, but that's not the same as long-term weight-loss.

I'm curious about what studies you've seen, because I've seen several other studies that suggest the opposite: that diet is a stronger predictor than exercise of long-term weight-loss success, and this analysis suggests that the more exercise the more likely it is that it will feed in to metabolic adaptation.

> I'm not sure what the lesson is yet, but I would hazard that, in the long-term, it's more important to sustain tracking energy balance (sustainability of your diet is #1). Moderate exercise can probably help, but perhaps it should also be sustainable, and in that capacity there are rapidly diminishing returns to intensity of exercise (and perhaps going hard and then quitting is a risk factor for weight regain).

My speculation is that the lesson is that in general there are diminishing returns from having a caloric deficit, regardless of the means to achieve it. Which fits with the idea that it is easier succeed with small, lasting changes than to create a more significant deficit for a shorter period of time. It would explain the insane failure rate of the weight loss industry, which for obvious reasons needs to show significant short-term results.

>With this system I am guaranteed to lose weight so long as I don’t cheat.

Unfortunately, that's just not true. Here's some great quotes from the book "The Obesity Code" (which I've just recently found and find an excellent book):

>The abrupt increase in obesity began exactly with the officially sanctioned move toward a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet.

>A 30 percent reduction in caloric intake results in a 30 percent decrease in caloric expenditure.

>Total energy expenditure is the sum of basal metabolic rate, thermogenic effect of food, nonexercise activity thermogenesis, excess post-exercise oxygen consumption and exercise.

>Since hormones control both Calories In and Calories Out, obesity is a hormonal, not a caloric, disorder.

>If hormones regulate fat growth, then obesity is a hormonal, not a caloric disorder.

>Sugar will increase the blood glucose level and provoke an insulin response from the pancreas. Olive oil will not...[cause] significant increase in blood glucose or insulin. The two different foods evoke vastly different metabolic and hormonal responses."

All of this is to say that it's not enough to simply adjust calories. Yes, calories matter to a point, and everyone knows that starvation (e.g., 0 calories for an extended period of time) is effective in the long-term, but starvation will also harm your body, and no reasonably-minded person can suggest it as a viable approach to weight loss.

The best available scientific evidence shows that continuing to decrease caloric intake can make weight loss more difficult for an obese person.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/030646...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/(SICI)1098-1...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07315724.1999.10...

https://europepmc.org/article/med/2663745