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The biggest losers: Metabolic damage or constrained energy?

physiqonomics.com

131–140 of 284 posts

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

#131
post #77

Thoughts on Adenoviruses as being a root cause of obesity? https://www.geneticlifehacks.com/weight-loss-genetics-obesit... "Interestingly, animal studies show that the gain in fat mass is not due to eating more or moving less… Animals ate the same amount of chow, but those infected with adenovirus 36 increased fat tissue by 60-80%." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17135605/ "A 2004 twin study showed that the Ad-36 an…

So why is obesity getting worse recently when Adenoviruses has always existed?

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

#132

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 ? 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 exa…

Your understanding of CICO (or at least the point I am making about it) is wrong in your “B” paragraph.

My argument boils down to the following:

For every individual, at any given time, there is a metabolic rate M for which, if their calorie intake was larger than that, they’d gain weight, and if their calorie intake was smaller, they’d lose weight. Crucially, M changes over time.

But going CICO properly means using the scale to measure M, every day, by diffing your expected value of your weight loss given how much you’re eaten, with the actual value on the scale. You now have an updated value for M to use in calorie counting.

Since M is determined by empirical observations of your weight loss/gain in response to the calories you have consumed, you will by definition lose weight if you consume less than M calories. This is the argument that CICO must work by definition. It’s a logical contradiction for it not to work.

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

#133
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…

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 dieti…

That's not insane at all. At ~183cm, his BMR at 135lb would be 1600 cal/day using a standard formula, so he would only need to expend 300 calories through activity in order to breakeven, which is something many people do with just their daily routine walking around. There's nothing even slightly unusual here.

The key is that very small changes in calorie intake, over a long time, have a large impact on equilibrium weight, and that height factors a lot more into BMR than people think.

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

#134
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.

Just looked up his book "The Obesity Code"; not sure if that's the one you're thinking of. Dr. Fung says obesity is a basically a hormonal issue, not a caloric issue. He discusses a "causality test": "If we inject this hormone into people, they must gain weight". According to Dr. Fung, leptin and ghrelin don't pass this test, but insulin and cortisol do. Still, leptin and insulin appear to have a close relationship.…

Then why are so many people who are insulin resistant overweight? Yet people with type 1 diabetes tend to be thin. I don't think the connection between insulin and weight is well known, assuming one even exists. It's a basic CICO problem. Whether there is insulin resistance or sensitivity does not change this much. IF his theories actually worked, they would work on general population at fixing obesity, but there is scant evidence it does. Like Tabues and others, he built a career on some theory that falls short when applied to real people in controlled setting.

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

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand how this needs anything beyond surface level complexity… you have fat people who for show reasons were tightly controlled on exercise and food intake - which works for well understood reasons - then they took that away and left the people to their lifelong established habits. Of course they regain the weight. These people didn’t magically create mass from nothing. They ate too much for their activi…

The bad food habits are only going to get worse as meat+dairy is forcibly taken away from us by the powers that be. Fewer options for an appealing 'proper meal', more temptation to eat sugar-laden junk.

I agree 100%. (though I don't think there are any particular "powers" at play)

The sentiment still stands though, all the cogs in play seem to spin to make real food inaccessible and expensive.

(by real I mean animal products and good produce) (raw milk is straight up illegal in Australia, most of the world would laugh at that)

====

Side note: Judging health questions off a game show is ridiculous

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

#136

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…

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 is not sustainable , hence regain.

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

#137

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…

> 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

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

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dieti…

That's not insane at all. At ~183cm, his BMR at 135lb would be 1600 cal/day using a standard formula, so he would only need to expend 300 calories through activity in order to breakeven, which is something many people do with just their daily routine walking around. There's nothing even slightly unusual here. The key is that very small changes in calorie intake, over a long time, have a large impact on equilibrium we…

A BMI of 16 is very rare. It's unlikely it was always that low for him. Assuming someone starts with a BMI of 22-24 and then diets to get it to 16, this would likely would req. fewer than 1900 even if the calculator says so, due to metabolic adaption and the breakdown of the calculations at extremes .

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

#139

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…

> 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…

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

#140

In the last few months I read two books on this topic, and both (if I recalled correctly) mentioned The Biggest Loser (or similar). Exercised - Daniel E Lieberman https://www.npr.org/2021/01/05/953249677/exercised-explains-... Burn - Herman Pontzer (who I believe was a student of Lieberman's) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-human-metabol... Both a fairly dry and academic, but do get into the weeds if t…

I've managed to keep a good amount of weight off for years, but only with vigilance, because even a couple weeks of unrestrained eating can be disastrous. I'm not at my lowest ever weight, that was during COVID, when I got hit with a nice Δ-variant, and lost my appetite for a month before force-feeding myself back to normal. That was the my first experience with truly unhealthy weight loss, and made me realize that w…

Encountering someone with a serious anorexic eating disorder, or watching a loved one with cancer -- who was formerly slim and healthy -- whither away their insufficient fat reserves while under treatment... can put things in an entirely different perspective. My mild obesity doesn't seem so bad now. I'd rather have a little too much and be fine with it... than be psychologically tortured by it, or not have enough in case of health emergency.
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