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

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

#241

Post by paulpauper » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 5:18 PM UTC

red-iron-pine wrote: post #237

inglor_cz wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The slimmest country on Earth is probably Viet Nam. Travelers from all around the world tend to remark that once they arrive to Viet Nam, they start losing weight effortlessly. Upon arrival to the US, the very opposite tends to happen. Adenovirus/population genetics must be a minor influence compared to cuisine.

could also be... the high humidity & heat, smaller portions of food (which are heavily fish and veg based), high rates of smoking, general poverty and simply eating less, etc. I lost weight in Thailand and later in Australia, and it was mostly because of the heat, sweating a lot, and generally smaller meals. No magic secret here. Plus the inevitable "Bali belly" that travelers get the first couple days there.

the South is humid and hot but very obese. I think it has to do with metabolism. The rice diet does not metabolize into fat as readily there among the natives.

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

#242

Post by HEmanZ » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 5:29 PM UTC

mrmlz wrote: post #177

paulpauper wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You will lose weight, in fact if you cut to 0 for long enough you are guaranteed to lose all soft tissue weight. Can I recommend you the “0 calories till you die” diet? The issue is that:

- many people can cut from a diet of 2200 calories per day to 1800 calories per day and pretty quickly and sustainably lose weight. This kind of calorie reduction is very manageable, and anyone who has lost weight this way starts saying “it’s just CICO man, so easy, just do it”

- meanwhile, in order to lose weight, some (probably not huge but very real) amount of people who maintain at 2200 calories need to drop to 1000 calories per day, or even lower, consistently, for months, in order to lose weight at a 0.5 lb/wk. This is miserable, not sustainable, and probably a net negative on your life (damage not worth the weight loss) unless you are morbidly obese.

The people in category 1 yell “you’re just coping, it’s not hard, just CICO” at group 2. Meanwhile they have never had to reduce calories in that way and have no idea how unsustainable it is. They are so sure their experience is universal, that they usually utterly deny the other groups existence, and smugly go about the world assuming people struggling with weight are just weak.

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

#243

Post by HEmanZ » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 5:46 PM 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.

This person didn’t say “everyone in America”, they said “people with shit genes”. Are you assuming this is the same set of people?

Amazingly, some people are different. Who knew. We shouldn’t gaslight them into thinking they aren’t different because they aren’t like the aggregate, and we get to feel so morally superior if every individual is like the aggregate.

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

#244

Post by ninkendo » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 6:33 PM 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

If CICO isn't practical, what is? If you're someone whose base metabolic rate plummets so much when dieting that you have to basically starve just to lose weight, you're probably screwed no matter what. Why single out CICO as not being practical for these people?

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

#245

Post by psd1 » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 6:39 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #116

notfed wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote: throughout my life, on many occasions, I've gone on multi-month binges of over-consuming massive quantities (1500+ cals) of desserts on a daily basis, while retaining a sedentary lifestyle. I always seem to weigh the same weight (skinny). I realized I've been doing this over the past month. I weighed myself yesterday. Same weight. Clearly something is different about my body, at least when it comes to sugar…

It really is that hard to believe. Have you ever had a resting metabolic rate test? Have you ever gone several weeks carefully tracking everything you consume using an accurate food scale? I am skeptical that even during binge periods you were really taking in as many calories as you claim. That said, there are limits to what the human digestive system can absorb from a single meal. Binge eaters do sometimes exceed t…

Lol. We exist.

I got the taste for raspberry ripple ice cream in my mid-20s, and ate 10 litres a week - that's 2000+ kcal a day just in dessert.

That's not binging. I put that on top of 500g dry weight of pasta with cheese and sauce, and kept it up for months. Plus breakfast, lunch, and several beers. And packets of chocolate biscuits. I was covering 10km a week or less, no marathons. No tapeworms, either.

You may be right that I was shitting a lot of it out; the horrible shits are what turned me off the ice cream habit. Nonetheless, I ate well over 4000 kcal every day, for years, and never put on weight. 6000 was typical. And most of that was potatoes and wheat, which are very bio-available carbs. I've always been a black hole for food.

I suspect I radiate it as heat. Exes have told me I'm hot - in a caloric sense. I feel the cold more, now that I eat less.

To the overweight, if it helps at all, know that I have other struggles.

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

#246

Post by psd1 » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 6:42 PM UTC

soulbadguy wrote: post #118

nradov wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 CI…

They have been some studies where they showed that NEAT (Non-exercise activity thermogenesis) varies widely acros individual and even with the same individual at different time. I think variation as wide as 1500 have been observed. Enough to explain the people who eat a lot but don't gain weight .

That's me, and I have yet to discover any upper limit - I eat less now because I'm bored of chewing.

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

#247

Post by epups » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 6:56 PM UTC

thaanpaa wrote: post #227

epups wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you should read your own sources. From the abstract of the second study: "At the 3-year follow-up, 53% of the original sample (of 621 persons) maintained losses of 5% or more and 35% losses of 10% or more.". From the third study: "When successful weight maintenance was defined as maintaining a weight loss of 5% or 10% of initial (pre-treatment) body weight, 40% were maintaining a 5% weight loss at five years…

Perhaps you didn't read what I wrote. You really need to look at the parameters (as well as the data). A 5% weight loss for a 200-pound person equals 10 pounds. Anyone can achieve this by following a fad diet for a week or two.

Here is what you wrote:

> 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%.

Your sources indicate that your initial statement was wrong by a factor of ~100 at least.

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

#248

Post by at_compile_time » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 6:57 PM UTC

karmarepellent wrote: post #182

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…

I think BMI is a little confusing when it is applied to some categories of healthy individuals like endurance athletes and others. When I ran (a lot) in my early to mid-twenties my BMI was always "underweight". Yet I have never felt better. The same probably goes for climbers. Some of the climbers I know are inredibly lean and their BMI is certainly not in the "normal weight" range. Yet they are able to push their bo…

I've heard that waist-to-hip ratio is a better measure of overall health because it more directly measures the amount of visceral fat, but that wasn't wasn't what the study being quoted was measuring.

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

#249

Post by gilbetron » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 7:11 PM UTC

thefz wrote: post #76

voisin wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The problem is that it is overly simplistic. It is similar to saying "running a marathon is just a thermodynamic problem, expend 2500 calories in a single direction and you can do a marathon." Sure, that's true, but that's not the hard part. Existing at a caloric delta long enough to meet your goal is the problem!

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

#250

Post by terryf » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 7:42 PM UTC

tlow wrote: post #240

terryf wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a bit of cognitive dissonance in seeing a hugely fat person and trying to imagine that their nervous system is for some reason acting like they are starving. It's a lot easier to imagine that they just don't have the willpower to resist that extra snack, which is a situation a lot more familiar to most of us. But it seems likely that the further is more correct. yes, 100% this. Your analogy with scratching…

False premise. Fasting isn't forever, its for a set period of time. Running and fasting are very similar. When running you often feel the urge to stop and give up. You build up the strength over time to say no to that voice. Fasting is a method of short-term saying no to urges. As you learn to say no to that urge, you become better at saying no to that urge. A single prolonged fast can redefine ones relationship with…

Well, thank you for telling me that I have understood my life all wrong.

About 10 years ago I weighed 113kg. I decided to really tackle it hard and not give up. Threw out all the sugar at home and went on a weightwatchers diet.

Over a period of 1.5 years I got my weight down to 97kg. It was very hard. It was a constant battle with hunger and feeling like crap. But I made it! I reached my goal and it was awesome!

So I crossed the finish line, right? No more hunger?

Guess again. I was back to 110kg a few years later. Still hungry.

So yes, please do tell me about how the urges will go away.

No, they do not.

It's a chemical reaction somewhere that in my body is happening with different amounts of components than some other people's body's. It's not a thing that I can wish really hard to change.