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Adipose tissue retains an epigenetic memory of obesity after weight loss

nature.com

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Re: Adipose tissue retains an epigenetic memory of obesity after weight loss

#61

Post by krzat »

ManBeardPc wrote: post #8
john_minsk wrote: post #4

Just went trough Yo-Yo. Any good strategies on how to overcome it for good?

Don't try to lose weight fast. Don't do a diet for a limited amount of time. Change your eating habits to something you can live with permanently. Avoid sugar in drinks, it's so easy to get a lot of calories without feeling full. Sugar in general will give you hunger attacks. For me personally I feel best if I have a big part of calories coming from protein, followed by less carbs and some fat. But removing sugar fro…

Exactly, this is a lifestyle change first.

Re: Adipose tissue retains an epigenetic memory of obesity after weight loss

#62

Post by [deleted] »

skirmish wrote: post #3
spoiler wrote: post #2

As someone who's struggled with weight loss, and have known others to struggle with it well, I think we colloquially called this "slow metabolism". It always did feel like it was easier to gain weight than lose it, especially fat weight and not muscle weight for me. I was recently sent a video about fat adaptation (basically teaching your body to be better at burning fat) by a very fit friend, but I wonder how much o…

It is well known that if you gain muscle then lose it, it is easier to regain it than the first time (IIRC, the cells store extra nucleii?). This could be a similar effect but with fat cells.

[deleted]

Re: Adipose tissue retains an epigenetic memory of obesity after weight loss

#63

Post by beejiu »

skirmish wrote: post #3
spoiler wrote: post #2

As someone who's struggled with weight loss, and have known others to struggle with it well, I think we colloquially called this "slow metabolism". It always did feel like it was easier to gain weight than lose it, especially fat weight and not muscle weight for me. I was recently sent a video about fat adaptation (basically teaching your body to be better at burning fat) by a very fit friend, but I wonder how much o…

It is well known that if you gain muscle then lose it, it is easier to regain it than the first time (IIRC, the cells store extra nucleii?). This could be a similar effect but with fat cells.

As well as the "cell memory", the total number of fat cells you have in your body is set during adolescence, then it remains constant for the rest of your adult life. (https://www.nature.com/articles/ncpgasthep1189).

During adolescence, if you gain weight, you create new fat cells. During adulthood, the fat cells themselves just get larger. Arguably the best thing you can do is avoid obesity during childhood and adolescence at all costs.

Re: Adipose tissue retains an epigenetic memory of obesity after weight loss

#64

Post by olalonde »

john_minsk wrote: post #4

Just went trough Yo-Yo. Any good strategies on how to overcome it for good?

Here's what the "The Renaissance Diet 2.0" book recommends:

1) Don't lose more than 10% of your bodyweight in the same weight loss period.

2) Don't lose more than 1% of body weight per week.

3) At the end of a weight loss period, transition to eating at maintenance calories for a while before starting a new weight loss period.

A common mistake is to completely stop dieting when you reach your goal weight. This is a bad idea because your body has adapted to the diet (e.g. decreased energy expenditure) and it's therefore easy to regain weight rapidly. What you should do is keep tracking what you eat while increasing calories to maintenance level, to give a chance to your body to slowly decrease hunger and increase energy expenditure.

Re: Adipose tissue retains an epigenetic memory of obesity after weight loss

#65

Post by mattlondon »

pif wrote: post #32
anon373839 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is self-defeating and untrue. Many people, myself included, have kept weight off for decades. But you don’t get there by thinking of your new lifestyle as “dieting”. You need to learn to love eating healthy foods in a healthy amount, and getting exercise. Eventually you can get to a place where the old foods and habits are simply unappealing.

> in a healthy amount That's the crux! Constant hunger starts nagging me as soon as I try. I've tried several times for several months, with nice results from the weight's points of view, but I never got to the point where my quality of life globally increased, and that was always due to the constant hunger. I'll only retry when I'll have found a way to stop the hunger now .

I found that sugar free hard sweets/candies helped to try and satiate some of the pangs. It's still hard, and you might end up "chain eating" like 5 or 6 of the things in a row, but I figure better that than bingeing chocolate or whatever.

Re: Adipose tissue retains an epigenetic memory of obesity after weight loss

#66

Post by mattlondon »

agos wrote: post #20
paulpauper wrote: post #9

The more you research/learn about obesity, the worse it is, much like smoking. One of the most depressing stats is that dieting does not get easier with time. The probability of eventually regaining all the weight eventually converges to 100%. Even if you're successful for 2 years, people still regain by year 4, 5, etc. The body never resists trying to regain the weight. GLP-1 drugs are the best hope yet.

absolutely. and yet people will still say "just eat less"! Imagine telling a person who smokes "just smoke less"

Yeah I often think that I am addicted to food. They say men think about sex every 7 seconds - I think about eating every 7 seconds!

If I start eating badly, it is very very very hard to stop. I will crash off the rails into a spiral of binge-eating for the rest of the day until I feel physically sick (which takes a while).

You just can't start.

With alcoholism or smoking it is plausible (although hard) to go cold-turkey and just eliminate the things that lead you to the binges. You can make lifestyle changes to avoid them. But you still have to eat, so for me I am always one meal away from losing it and pigging out. I never feel full (the food challenges of "if you can finish this meal it's free" are a walk in the park for me - anyone for dessert?). It takes continuous and immense will power to stop - I am hovering around 95kgs at 1.85m which I know is "bad" but tell me something I don't know. It's hard.

Re: Adipose tissue retains an epigenetic memory of obesity after weight loss

#67

Post by nom »

eftpotrm wrote: post #40
ykonstant wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Obese people can remain obese eating 1000 calories a day. I recall one episode of My 600lb Life and the show's featured person that day was at 900 or 1200 calories a day and still didn't lose weight. Might have still been gaining. How is that possible? There is a lower bound on calories needed (on average across say six months) to maintain life. Adding to that the calories needed to maintain the weight, I don't see…

And yet it happens. A doctor in my family told the story of a patient they were treating in hospital who medically needed to lose weight, and who they found unable to get any reduction until they dropped below _200_ calories a day. Metabolism is _significantly_ more complex than CI/CO, from experience.

What is more likely:

- a physics-breaking thermodynamic anomaly

- a food addicted person is lying about their consumption

200 kcal a day.. yeah sure. A human body needs more than that just to breathe and pump blood. Even comatose a skinny person needs 5 times as much.

Overweight people have a significantly higher metabolic base rate. Just breathing can easily be 1000kcal a day if your lungs have to move 30 kilos of upper body fat 10 times a minute. They also have more muscle mass compared to the average person their size, even when not physically active, which increases MBR as well.

Weight loss and gain is a solved problem, but self control and human behavior is not.

Perpetuating myths of impossible weight loss is not beneficial for our society and moves us further away from solving the underlying issues.

Re: Adipose tissue retains an epigenetic memory of obesity after weight loss

#68

Post by david-gpu »

senko wrote: post #37
cookiengineer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about the weight, it's about the exercise. Start with something easy and establish a rule that won't ever be broken. If you break a rule once, you'll lose the fight. My rule, for example, when I started to train more: - start with 10 crunches every morning and evening - increase by 2 crunches every day - no exceptions When you are at ~2 months in, you can add weight training to it to get stronger. Additional…

> It's not about the weight, it's about the exercise. You cannot outrun a fork.

Tell that to all the skinny endurance weekend warriors who fuel their exercise with huge amounts of sugary drinks and gummy bears. If you are curious, read about the function of GLUT4 in the membrane of skeletal muscles.

Reality is more complex than memetic one-liners.

Re: Adipose tissue retains an epigenetic memory of obesity after weight loss

#69

Post by FollowingTheDao »

john_minsk wrote: post #4

Just went trough Yo-Yo. Any good strategies on how to overcome it for good?

Well, if the above paper is correct there is something you need to know. Epigenetic changes are caused my the methylation of DNA. So if there are epigentic chnages that are causing you to gain weight, what needs to be done is to Demethylate the DNA. This is done through Demethylase enzymes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demethylase

some of which have vitamin cofactors like zinc[1] and riboflavin[2].

So nutrition is important. I will let you investigate the link between zinc, riboflavin and diabetes...

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7191051/ [2] https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/O60341/entry

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