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Adipose tissue retains an epigenetic memory of obesity after weight loss

nature.com

71–80 of 343 posts

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

#71

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

Weigh yourself every day. Journal it. This sets up an objective metric to calibrate against.

Set medium term goals. Don't try to lose 20 kilos in six months. Lose the next kilo by this time in two weeks. Similarly, don't try to lose 0.1 kilos by tomorrow. Weight naturally fluctuates day to day based on water intake, sodium intake, muscle fatigue, and other things. But in the range of 2-3 weeks, you should be able to lose enough weight to see signal in the noise of day to day fluctuations.

If you aren't hitting your medium term goals, find a way to cut calories more. Starting the first month doing a comprehensive calorie log is valuable to help calibrate what foods and portion sizes are relatively problematic.

The rest is just finding eating patterns that work for you that help keep calorie levels low enough. There's a lot of advice about ways to do that, and most need to be taken with a grain of salt, but it's probably true that you can min/max at the margins by increasing fiber intake, increasing protein intake, drinking more water, eating more raw plants, intermittent fasting, and that sort of thing. But you'll mostly see fractional improvements on top of the bottom line math: calories burned need to exceed calories consumed.

As noted elsewhere here, it's a lot of exercise to burn off a few pieces of bacon. Exercise is good for weight loss, but again, it's mostly at the margins for the average person, especially if that person is not an athlete.

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

#72

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.

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.

Yeah, what you said is key - and I can also vouch that it's absolutely possible to keep it away for good, aside from small setbacks that almost everyone experiences, since we’re not robots.

The word diet is problematic because most people see it as something temporary. But you can't just eat healthy to lose weight and then go back to old habits, expecting the weight to stay off. That just doesn't make sense.

Also for many people, food isn’t just about pleasure - it’s also a way to deal with boredom, stress, depression, and so on. So even if someone sticks to a diet, if the psychological root causes are still there, it's going to be hard to stay away from junk food.

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

#73
I always used to think negatively about people that were severely overweight (still do unconsciously if I'm being honest) as I always attributed their obesity to lack of will power. I'm a huge proponent of better living through chemistry (steroids - with frequent blood work, nootropics, whatever) and recently I decided to get my abs back. I hopped on some compounded semiglutide and was blown away by the change in my attitude towards food. I had always snacked at night after the kids went to bed and had built up about 25 pounds over the past decade. I was able to drop it all in 3 months without any sort of dieting, I just ate when I was hungry. Decided to not eat after 6:30pm and just did it, no issues while on the semiglutide.

Really changed my attitude about food, and my body and minds interaction with it. A lot of this is subconscious and really hard to get control of. The fact a chemical compound was able to change my mental relationship with food also put an interesting spin on my ideas about consciousness and self control as a whole. We are just slaves to our biological processes.

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

#74
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I will as soon as I see any of them gobble up a smothered burrito or Chicago pizza on their run.

Do we really want to compare ultramarathon runners with couch potatoes?

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

#76

As this article shows, there are incredibly complex feedback mechanisms around weight and metabolism, but thermodynamics are still fundamentally a thing. After he died last year, I ran across this engineering and accounting approach to weight maintenance and loss written up by John Walker (one of the Autodesk founders). It worked very well for him and changed the way I thought about weight and eating. It is interesti…

The problem with diets based only on calories is that they don't take satiety into account, nor health.

Calories is what makes you gain/lose weight, it's basic physics. Satiety is what makes you want to eat more/less. Nutrients are what is making you healthy.

Fiber and protein tends to make you feel full. Lack of them allow you to eat large amount of calories without feeling full. You need to keep track of micro and macro nutrient to stay healthy.

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

#77

As this article shows, there are incredibly complex feedback mechanisms around weight and metabolism, but thermodynamics are still fundamentally a thing. After he died last year, I ran across this engineering and accounting approach to weight maintenance and loss written up by John Walker (one of the Autodesk founders). It worked very well for him and changed the way I thought about weight and eating. It is interesti…

https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/

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

#78

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.

1000 calories is already an unbelievable claim, absolutely no one is going to believe 200. That’s just absurd

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

#80

I always used to think negatively about people that were severely overweight (still do unconsciously if I'm being honest) as I always attributed their obesity to lack of will power. I'm a huge proponent of better living through chemistry (steroids - with frequent blood work, nootropics, whatever) and recently I decided to get my abs back. I hopped on some compounded semiglutide and was blown away by the change in my…

I had this same experience, but I have not continued to take the medication after a short experiment. I found I could get a similar outcome (subjective experience) through my food selection Today I’ve eaten around 2kg of vegetables today (zucchini, capsicum, eggplant, cauliflower, spinach) all of which was under 500 calories, and I’ve eaten fish. If I eat a massive amount of vegetables and get ~200g protein, I don’t feel I’m depriving myself and am satiated on under 2000 calories, previously I would typically eat over 3000 on a normal day.

As for people lacking willpower, the genetics of hunger mean all of us experience vastly different levels of hunger. You might be interested to read about the family in Pakistan who could not produce a relevant hormone leptin, and the toddlers driven to fighting by insatiable hunger to steal food from each other, and the dramatic change in their lives after medical intervention with leptin injections

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