The biggest losers: Metabolic damage or constrained energy? • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by mark38848 » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 7:16 AM UTC

paulpauper wrote: post #136

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…

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. Yes this is it. People with shit genes simply do not burn enough calories , so these people need to diet to absurdly low levels of calories to merely not be overweight, way lower than predicted by formulas/tables. Which…

This is all so obviously refutable if you look at the fact that this affects the USA so much more than other countries and even there if you go back three generations, peolr with essentially the same genes just at fewer calories and - surprise - were less fat.

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

#172

Post by at_compile_time » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 7:19 AM UTC

I can't remember the source, but I remember hearing that the two demographics in society who average at a healthy BMI were endurance athletes and vegans.

I struggled through my 20s to keep my weight under 200 lbs at 6ft tall. Then I went vegan 4 years ago, and started running during the pandemic. Nothing crazy, just 5-8 km once or twice per week when it's nice out, and lots of beans and tofu in place of meat and dairy. I haven't weighed in over 185 since, and that's without fasting or counting calories.

I'm sure that viruses and environmental toxins and whatever else contribute some amount at the margin, but I'm convinced that it's diet and exercise, in that order, that are primarily to blame.

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

#173

Post by waterheater » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 7:24 AM UTC

com2kid wrote: post #169

waterheater wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for asking. I'll first explain the process (because I want to highlight why IF matters), and then I'll answer your question directly. It's going to take a little bit to properly elaborate, but I believe it's worth your time to read. We first need to choose which of the following macronutrients contribute most to weight gain: protein, fat, or carbohydrates. Proteins (or, rather, amino acids) are not known for c…

> Intermittent fasting should work as long as the specific protocol doesn't decrease leptin levels such that the obese body enters starvation mode. In my opinion, the most workable approach for people is to try their best to completely eliminate carbs Monday-Friday, eat all the carbs they want on the weekends, and do the bare minimum of a 10-minutes HIIT routine every other day. This is just calorie cycling with extr…

>This is just calorie cycling with extra steps.

That's almost right, but it's carb cycling, not calorie cycling. The difference does matter.

>TKD, CKD, intermittent fasting, dirty keto, keto with a once a month weekend pizza binge, whatever, almost any combo of "eat less for awhile, then eat normal for little bit, then eat less again".

I believe that the best approaches, for a given period, will be 2/3 of the time on minimal-to-no carbs, then 1/3 on carbs (which, for seven days, rounds to 5-off / 2-on). The leptin information also suggests that an obese person shouldn't be off carbs for long periods of time, and one week is a nice time frame for people (go low-carb during the work week, have carbs on the weekend).

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

#174

Post by ramino » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 7:29 AM UTC

at_compile_time wrote: post #172

I can't remember the source, but I remember hearing that the two demographics in society who average at a healthy BMI were endurance athletes and vegans. I struggled through my 20s to keep my weight under 200 lbs at 6ft tall. Then I went vegan 4 years ago, and started running during the pandemic. Nothing crazy, just 5-8 km once or twice per week when it's nice out, and lots of beans and tofu in place of meat and dair…

Same experience here.

I‘m also vegan, but I would say cutting back on sugar and highly processed wheat products helped me the most to stay at a healthy weight.

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

#175

Post by mrmlz » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 7:29 AM UTC

at_compile_time wrote: post #172

I can't remember the source, but I remember hearing that the two demographics in society who average at a healthy BMI were endurance athletes and vegans. I struggled through my 20s to keep my weight under 200 lbs at 6ft tall. Then I went vegan 4 years ago, and started running during the pandemic. Nothing crazy, just 5-8 km once or twice per week when it's nice out, and lots of beans and tofu in place of meat and dair…

That is really shocking - that a diet change that resulted in less calories and an increase in physical exercise led to weight loss! :)

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

#176

Post by waterheater » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 7:31 AM UTC

mark38848 wrote: post #171

paulpauper wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Yes this is it. People with shit genes simply do not burn enough calories , so these people need to diet to absurdly low levels of calories to merely not be overweight, way lower than predicted by formulas/tables. Which…

This is all so obviously refutable if you look at the fact that this affects the USA so much more than other countries and even there if you go back three generations, peolr with essentially the same genes just at fewer calories and - surprise - were less fat.

It's not the calories, it's the carbs (aka sugar). The modern Westernized diet is carb-heavy, and carbs are the main macronutrient contributing to obesity (see the clear increase in obesity following the creation of the food pyramid).

Many Pacific Island nations also saw massive obesity rates. The reason was carbs, not calories. Soda contributes to obesity because of sugar, not the calories.

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

#177

Post by mrmlz » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 7:33 AM UTC

paulpauper wrote: post #137

ninkendo wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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. then CICO is not practical for weight loss. the "CO" becomes so small that you're screwed

The cope.

What normal human reduces its CO so that you wont lose weight? Are you talking about someone in a coma?

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

#178

Post by crdrost » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 7:51 AM UTC

tlow wrote: post #159

I'm a participant in runner groups. I was surprised to meet several exceptional runners with stories of moving from very unhealthy/overweight to their current level of marathoner+. Several of them had success not just with intermittent fasting, but prolonged fasting. Humans can run when they feel like you have no energy. It's hard to believe that this isn't a psychological and behavioral issue: >A 30 percent reductio…

It's kind of shouting into the void but I always wanted to try to teach high school physics starting from energies rather than forces/velocities/other vectors... And the easiest places where people run into energies are light bulb wattages and nutrition facts, and the latter always seemed more interesting than the former, so the idea was “The Biophysics of Weight Loss” as a first physics course.

As an example of how this looks a bit different to a physicist, most people go to an online calculator to get their TDEE or RMR, some measure of how much energy per day passes out of their body. If you're a physicist, you can't help but measure this at two different weights, current and target. So that gives you a slope, a delta: kilocalories per day per kilogram of fat lost. Except there is also a rough measure of how many kilocalories to lose to lose a kg of fat, so in dimensional analysis terms, this is really just a time constant. I forget the exact amount but it works out to something like nine months or a year or so.

And then you realize that that's a half life. You choose a lifestyle, you start living as if your weight were W, then after a year you will get halfway there, after another year you'll get halfway closer, and so on, and so on.

But that's not how anybody thinks on a diet. They are thinking, I'm going to intervene, get my life under control, then I can return to the lifestyle I had before but without the weight. But what you are describing is a severe lifestyle shift, “I became a marathon runner and my friends are all marathon runners and that is our new lifestyle.” Polar opposite of intervention.

But it's also, there's a selection bias. If the actual cause is depression related, and marathoning worked because it gave a new sense of purpose and self, how would you notice? You spend all this time on caloric output, that's trying to treat it like a linear system. When the circuit has transistors and op amps, that's not how you analyze it.

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

#179

Post by chestertn » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 7:53 AM UTC

at_compile_time wrote: post #172

I can't remember the source, but I remember hearing that the two demographics in society who average at a healthy BMI were endurance athletes and vegans. I struggled through my 20s to keep my weight under 200 lbs at 6ft tall. Then I went vegan 4 years ago, and started running during the pandemic. Nothing crazy, just 5-8 km once or twice per week when it's nice out, and lots of beans and tofu in place of meat and dair…

Could it be muscle loss?

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

#180

Post by crdrost » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 8:05 AM UTC

magicalhippo wrote: post #148

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…

I found CICO very helpful in losing weight (from 120kg to 90kg). It was a relatively easy metric to track, and using it alone meant that I could still eat all the things I wanted, though I needed to balance what I wanted to eat with portion size. CICO also meant I started out slow, making small cuts. So it wasn't bad in the beginning. Over time I had to find ways to adapt so I wouldn't go feeling hungry (mostly incre…

CICO is very nice if you put it into the proper context, which is,

1. The scale lies. Liar liar pants on fire it lies. (We could go into this in detail, my wife never seems convinced, but it is to my mind a basic fact of the physics of the system that the scale lies in multiple orthogonal ways.)

2. So you want multiple different probes into the same phenomenon so that you get a better insight into what is going on.

3. So, track calories as a second piece of data to try and check whether the scale is lying to you or not.

4. As part of that, they give you greater insight into the choices that you make. For instance you realize that it is functionally impossible to jog off a Krispy Kreme donut but very easy to replace half a meal with it. Or you discover that you can cut fruit juice for water with no dissatisfaction.

Regrettably this is not peoples’ usual relationship with food and the scale, which is exemplified by the Cheat Day phenomenon. The calories are viewed not as a separate data stream but as a morality judgment, which is then turned off for brief periods because constant judgment is hard on us, and these periods contain a lot of very relevant data such that if you turn the metric off selectively for them, the metric is no longer useful.