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The biggest losers: Metabolic damage or constrained energy?

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

#121

Post by paulpauper »

ninkendo wrote: post #88
throwup238 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

Genes play a big role. Some people have a faster (I think the more appropriate word is inefficient) metabolism, and can lose weight or stay thin despite eating more calories compared to someone with a slower/efficient metabolism, controlling for body size, age, and other factors. There was a thread on Reddit a while back where formerly or current obese people shared their old diets, and many people were commenting that it did not seem like much food. Even though people are generally bad at self-reporting calorie intake, that's called having a crap metabolism.

Imagine two individuals who both both need 2,500 calories/day to feel satiated, but the second individual stores anything above 1,500/day as fat, and a second individual stores anything above 3,000 as fat. The first person will constantly be fighting his body to not overeat and will feel hungry constantly. The second individual can eat to fullness and not gain weight.

Some men , particularly the formerly obese, have such slow metabolisms that anything stored above 1,200-1,700/day is stored as fat despite weighing 170 pounds or so, from reading personal accounts here and on Reddit. This is also why bariatric surgery patients regain weight and become obese again despite only eating around 1,200-1,500 calories/day. These people basically got short-changed when it comes to metabolism genes. If there is a famine, they will outlive everyone. But in abundance they become fat very easily. This does not answer why there are more obese people today compared to in the past, but there is still probably a genetic component nonetheless.

And on the other extreme are people who can be very slim despite eating a normal amount of calories or only slightly less than 2,000. These people are much rarer, as it's disadvantageous from an evolutionary perspective to have an inefficient metabolism, but they exist in the same way very tall or short people exist by virtue of phenotypic variance.

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

#122

Post by com2kid »

nradov wrote: post #119
com2kid wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

I generally agree, but the weight loss seen during endurance sports events is mostly just dehydration. I can do an Olympic distance triathlon and burn fewer calories than are stored in 1 pound of fat tissue (and I'm taking in carb supplements throughout the race).

Marathon runners apparently lose about 1lb, 50% of which is water.

People doing those bike races lose tons of weight, both muscle and fat.

That is the flip side of going balls to the way hard, it is easy to start eating into muscle, which is fine now and then for an event, but as part of a regular training regime it isn't the best idea.

All of these factors are why the advice "you cannot outrun a fork" is true for the general population, but it scientific fact that no amount of exercise leads to weight loss.

A truer statement might be "at the level of efforts an untrained individual is able to maintain, and for the length of training sessions that are available to an average person with a job and a family, exercise does not contribute meaningfully to near term fat loss."

But people who've been lifting weights for 5 or 6 years hard core may very well have increased their BMR by 500 or so calories, at which point they can eat a, reasonably sized, cookie each day.

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

#123

Post by lliamander »

MostlyStable wrote: post #107
ninkendo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 phy…

I think of it this way: CICO is an axiom we have to assume in order to figure out why a diet isn't working.

E.g. if your input is 1200 calories and you work out, but you aren't losing weight? Maybe your NEAT is way down (or you have a thyroid issue). You are super active but can't lose weight? Maybe you aren't tracking food calories accurately, or you need to eat more satiating foods.

CICO isn't a strategy, it's part of the landscape and your diet is a strategy to navigate that landscape.

But no matter what your particular strategy, it is always going to involve eating less hyper-pallitable foods and getting more activity. That may not be all, but you cannot go from obesity to a healthy weight without those things.

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

#124

Post by ninkendo »

soulbadguy wrote: post #112
ninkendo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well if CICO is not a good idea, not really healthy not really applicable to most people, then why bring it up when we are talking about solution to obesity ? The main problem with CICO is that it is confusing the description of a process with an intervention designed to modify said process. Both things a very different. > I’m merely saying IF you do it right, THEN you will lose weight... > that it still works despit…

> Well if CICO is not a good idea, not really healthy not really applicable to most people, then why bring it up when we are talking about solution to obesity ?

You may want to read my first post again. I spend nearly the entire post agreeing about the problems with CICO. But in my last paragraph I explain that I still like it and that it works for me, and explain why. YMMV.

> That's the first part, the "works" include the IF... You mixing efficacy and effectiveness is here.

Right, that’s called propositional logic. It’s perfectly valid to make “CICO works” predicated upon whether you follow it correctly. This isn’t as trivial it sounds: there are diets for which this is not true!. I can totally stick to a low carb diet to the letter and still gain weight, because if you don’t include a calorie limit, you can still go way over your calorie expenditure even with low carbs. As trivial as my “definition 1” is for “works”, it’s still a bar that many diets don’t pass.

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

#125

Post by ninkendo »

whatshisface wrote: post #101
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…

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

No, I’m saying I’m making no claim on that because I very much don’t want to get into the (very) subjective and context-dependent argument about whether a diet is a good idea for someone or not. My claim is much narrower: CICO works if you follow it. Whether it’s right for you, I can’t say.

(For my part, CICO worked amazingly well for me, and I was able to follow it without much trouble. But that’s just me.)

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

#126

Post by paulpauper »

nradov wrote: post #102
throwup238 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 CI…

There is one individual Michael Rae who is able to do just this. He stays at 115 pounds despite eating 1,900 calories/day with a BMI of 15.6, which is insane. Most men would probably need to eat 1000-1500/day to get to that lean, as the infamous Minnesota starvation study showed, and even then many of those participants did not get that thin.

Here is a profile of him, among other individuals who are part of his dieting cult/group https://nymag.com/news/features/23169/

Michael’s regimen of 1,913 calories a day is exactly that: 1,913 calories every single day, 30 percent of them derived from fat, 30 percent from protein, and 40 percent from carbohydrates. Cooking for him is the same elaborate exercise in dietary Sudoku it is for all CR die-hards, only more so.

There is no evolutionary justification to have such an wasteful metabolism (for all of history until now it's a a disadvantage), so people like him are rare, but they exist.

Another is ‎Roy Walford who got to a similar weight during Biosphere2 on a similar 1900/day diet when the artificial habitat began running out of food.

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

#127

Post by arcticbull »

com2kid wrote: post #122
nradov wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree, but the weight loss seen during endurance sports events is mostly just dehydration. I can do an Olympic distance triathlon and burn fewer calories than are stored in 1 pound of fat tissue (and I'm taking in carb supplements throughout the race).

Marathon runners apparently lose about 1lb, 50% of which is water. People doing those bike races lose tons of weight, both muscle and fat. That is the flip side of going balls to the way hard, it is easy to start eating into muscle, which is fine now and then for an event, but as part of a regular training regime it isn't the best idea. All of these factors are why the advice "you cannot outrun a fork" is true for th…

> Marathon runners apparently lose about 1lb, 50% of which is water.

Yeah, you use about 100kcal running a mile, so 26mi gets you around 2/3 of a pound of fat.

This is why I said to lose 10lbs you'd have to run from SF to LA, which is about 400mi. Without eating more than baseline.

The problem isn't the micro. Yes, if you exercise a ton without compensatory eating and in excess of the expected drop in BMR that produces, you will lose weight in the near-term. The problem is your homeostatic mechanisms kick in and work against you making it extremely hard to maintain. Your body has a weight set point like it has a temperature set point. The follow-up study on the Biggest Loser showed basically every single one of them put on all the weight they lost. In some cases more. Here's the PubMed link. [1]

The evidence seems to point to the opposite of your conclusion - a lot of exercise reduces your BMR, it doesn't increase it. Makes sense doesn't it? A lower BMR means you're more efficient. While your TEE might be higher, your BMR is probably lower.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27136388/

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

#128

Post by soulbadguy »

ninkendo wrote: post #124
soulbadguy wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if CICO is not a good idea, not really healthy not really applicable to most people, then why bring it up when we are talking about solution to obesity ? The main problem with CICO is that it is confusing the description of a process with an intervention designed to modify said process. Both things a very different. > I’m merely saying IF you do it right, THEN you will lose weight... > that it still works despit…

> Well if CICO is not a good idea, not really healthy not really applicable to most people, then why bring it up when we are talking about solution to obesity ? You may want to read my first post again. I spend nearly the entire post agreeing about the problems with CICO. But in my last paragraph I explain that I still like it and that it works for me, and explain why. YMMV. > That's the first part, the "works" inclu…

Well the point i am trying to make is that your explanation on why it work for you is probably wrong, and even more the advice you generate from your theory can be dangerous and counter productive.

> Right, that’s called propositional logic. It’s perfectly valid to make “CICO works” predicated upon whether you follow it correctly.

Well no. And that really the core of the issue. I see that you didn't answer to the example i gave you.

But if we want to be pedantic :

1 - There is no definition of "works" in propositional logic.

2 - Here what i understand from your logic deductions :

  A - CICO can be rephrase as : For a given individual , for every time duration t : delta_weight(t) = CI(t) - CO(t)


  B - What you are saying is  : for a given individual , for every time duration t : delta_weight(t) = CI(t) - CO(t), THEREFORE, for every delta_weight, there is a time duration T, and CI(t) and CO(t) such that delta_weight = CI(t) and CO(t);
And my point is that B is false (empirically), and does NOT follow from A (logically). And to repeat myself you can try this game with room temperature and thermometer readings.

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

#129

Post by awfulneutral »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #106
awfulneutral wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree that would be a false narrative to some extent, but in this thread I don't see a better explanation. Just the idea that in e.g. parts of the USA they have been told it's impossible to control their weight, so they then go on to eat too much and exercise less than in other places and other times in history, doesn't make any sense to me as an explanation. Apologies if that's not what you're saying.

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

#130

Post by sudosysgen »

whatshisface wrote: post #101
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…

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

Empirically it's really quite rare that eating less than your caloric expenditure is going to make you unhealthy for obese people. It's a rare caveat, not ground for blanket dismissal.

Feeling hungry or being unhappy with such a diet is more common, but it's generally also fixable, and it doesn't defeat the point either.

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