Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The biggest losers: Metabolic damage or constrained energy?

physiqonomics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 284 posts

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

#101

Post by whatshisface »

ninkendo wrote: post #93
throwup238 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the dogma that I'm talking about. > 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…

> 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 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 a…

Uhh... Isn't the whole thing pointless because of your last sentence?

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

#102

Post by nradov »

throwup238 wrote: post #83
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…

> This approach is generally referred to the calorie-in/calorie-out (CICO) model. While true to an extent, this perspective is too simplistic, given one key fact: leptin is primarily produced in adipose tissue [1]. This fact means body fat is actually an endocrine system organ. This part I think needs more explanation. The reason calories-in/calories-out model is too simplistic (I would call it almost useless if not…

I am skeptical about reports of people who don't seem to gain much weight despite reading a lot of food. Most of those reports are merely anecdotes, or at best observational studies, and we know that most people are terrible at accurately tracking their caloric intake. More rigorous studies that involved putting subjects into locked environments and carefully measuring their intake have consistently found that the CICO model is accurate.

However, as a practical matter for people who want to lose adipose tissue there are likely more effective approaches than CICO.

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

#103

Post by com2kid »

waterheater wrote: post #90
ninkendo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CICO doesn’t work across individuals for reason you outline (just because I lose weight with a certain level of calories, doesn’t mean you will, etc.) But for a single individual, working to establish your base metabolic rate by counting every calorie and weighing yourself regularly, you can always find a way to be successful with the CICO model. If you establish a baseline that your metabolic rate is (say) 2000 calo…

Knowledge of leptin changes this because what you eat does actually matter. The goal should be intermittent fasting, where you eat little-to-no carbs about five consecutive days/week and then plenty of carbs two consecutive days/week. This approach ensures leptin levels in the obese body remain high enough to prevent onset of starvation mode while minimizing glucose levels to promote catabolic action on body fat [1].…

> Knowledge of leptin changes this because what you eat does actually matter. The goal should be intermittent fasting, where you eat little-to-no carbs about five consecutive days/week and then plenty of carbs two consecutive days/week. This approach ensures leptin levels in the obese body remain high enough to prevent onset of starvation mode while minimizing glucose levels to promote catabolic action on body fat [1].

I hate to post the same video in the same thread twice, but this video dives into carb cycling, and explains that actually it is calorie cycling that makes the difference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwZfryrVddY

FWIW, and I'm a big keto proponent, the goal should be whatever works. Keto is super effective for some people, and completely useless for others. Research has started to figure out why some people respond to keto better than others, but low carb fails really hard for a certain % of the population, works obscenely well for another % of the population, and works as well as any other dieting system for the majority of the population.

As someone for whom keto works really well (I was on keto for 5 years, training 12hrs+ a week in the gym!), I totally spent time promoting low carb to everyone, until I tried to help some people for whom it just didn't work at all.

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

#104

Post by rustcleaner »

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…

Ah, moralism.

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

#105

Post by com2kid »

Toutouxc wrote: post #85
thefz wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There’s the issue of not being able to decide what gets burnt. I’ve read that under certain circumstances, the body can actually burn the muscles faster than it burns the fat. Which obviously makes exercise harder.

When losing weight, about 75% fat and 25% muscle is lost, with a ton of variables being in there (exercise routine, how much muscle you have, what your diet looks like, etc).

Lots of arguments about what diets maintain the most muscle (e.g. fasting people say they keep the most muscle, and as much as I love fasting, plenty of studies say that is probably not true.)

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

#106

Post by chiefalchemist »

awfulneutral wrote: post #48
chiefalchemist wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "certain Russian populations" Yes, of course. There are always outliers. But 50+% of the American population doesn't fall into this bucket, do they? Nor did they suddenly become that after they were born (i.e., obesity is a relatively new problem and not so much driven by DNA else why didn't it exist so much even just 50 yrs ago?). We keep looking for all kinds of "answers" to obesity but we already have the one th…

It might be that simple from a high level conceptual standpoint, but when the amount of calories you burn passively adjusts up or down as your body fights to maintain its weight, it is much more complex.

Agreed. But that's a weight *loss* issue.

The more basic "Why has there been a rise in obesity?" keeps being asked, and that's already answered.

The idea that people are falling asleep next to a pod and waking up with too much weight for some mysterious reason is a false narrative. It's not making anyone any more aware or any healthier.

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

#107

Post by MostlyStable »

ninkendo wrote: post #98
waterheater wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If my diet jacks up my leptin levels such that I don’t lose weight, that will show up on the scale, and I have to adjust my calories down to compensate. >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 beg…

whoosh That was the sound of you zooming right past my argument and pretending I was saying something I wasn’t. I’m not saying CICO is a good idea. I’m not saying it’s healthy. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying it will have a high chance of success vis a vis people actually being able to stick with it. I’m merely saying IF you do it right, THEN you will lose weight. This is trivially and tautologically true (t…

This is something I've said repeatedly in other places and this is a certain segment of people who can't understand it.

CICO is, especially at the population level, terrible dieting advice. We have decades of experience and oodles of research showing that, as advice it does not work.

However, it is, as you point out, basically tautologically true/correct. For CICO to _not_ be correct would essentially be breaking physics and generating mass/energy from nothing.

Yes, your body can change it's energy expenditure in response to dieting, but this is accounted for in the CO part of CICO. If you consume fewer calories than your body expends (in all the myriad of ways that your body can/does expend calories), then you _must_ lose weight.

The fact that CICO is true does not make it good advice but the fact that it's bad advice doesn't make it false.

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

#108

Post by chiefalchemist »

SirMaster wrote: post #43
chiefalchemist wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "certain Russian populations" Yes, of course. There are always outliers. But 50+% of the American population doesn't fall into this bucket, do they? Nor did they suddenly become that after they were born (i.e., obesity is a relatively new problem and not so much driven by DNA else why didn't it exist so much even just 50 yrs ago?). We keep looking for all kinds of "answers" to obesity but we already have the one th…

But what if consuming as low amount of calories as needed to be equal to or less than energy expended leaves you constantly feeling tired and with headaches and such from eating so little? Is this not something that actually happens? It seems like a spiral of doom. Eat less, so now I have even less energy for activity and thus now I am burning less energy, so I need to eat even less...

Sure. That sucks. But so does diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, and premature death.

The ultimate solution is prevention. But bring that up and you're accessed of being insensitive, fat shaming, etc. We've normalized the abnormal, and too few what to see that reversed.

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

#109

Post by rustcleaner »

louwrentius wrote: post #17
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…

Sure, blame the people. Fat shame all you want. Problem solved. Done. It's so easy, just stop eating so much. As if fat people haven't heard that one a bilion times over. As if fat people havent tried time and time again. Personal responsibility! you put that stuff in your mouth, rah! rah! Personally I'm actually sick of people having no eye for the bigger picture, for many systemic reasons and larger society, and ju…

Too bad bootstrappers can't be barred from welfare. They can never dogfood their own philosophy when on the wrong side of it!

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

#110

Post by com2kid »

arcticbull wrote: post #51
slothtrop wrote: post #30

The more frequent the dieting and steeper the caloric deficit, the worse metabolic adaptation gets, and the longer it takes to return to normal. As I understand it that's the result discerned from more than just one paper. Layne Norton explores this at length in his book Fat Loss Forever and yt channel. The interesting thing in this link was the impact of change in exercise regimen. We know that exercise in itself ca…

> It's possible to lose weight sustainably even without exercise, so perhaps it's fair to say that if you're going to exercise, you best sustain it. Exercise is for muscle gain and general health, not for weight loss. You have to exercise a truly absurd about to burn enough calories to lose any meaningful amount of weight. You'd have to run from SF to LA to lose 10lbs, and that's assuming you eat nothing else to comp…

> You have to exercise a truly absurd about to burn enough calories to lose any meaningful amount of weight.

I mean, kinda, sorta?

I can go to the gym and burn 1000 kcals, as measured by a chest strap.

I used to do this 3x a week. That is nearly 1lb of fat burned through just exercise.

In the context of someone who needs to lose 50 pounds, 1 pound seems small, but in reality 1-2lb of weight loss a week through diet is considered "healthy", adding another 1lb of weight loss via exercise is absurdly impactful.

Now, do most people, especially beginners, have the willpower to burn 1000 calories at the gym? Hell no. A 1000 calorie workout sucks.

> There's no studies or evidence whatsoever that shows it has a meaningful impact on weight loss.

The obvious counter example is any endurance sporting event, where by the end of the event athletes weight a lot less than when they started.

30 minute workout 3x a week? Of course no weight will be lost.

Now, instead go train boxing or MMA for 3 hours a day 5 days a week. If you track calories and don't increase your intake, I promise you'll lose some weight.

Post reply on HN