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When somebody loses weight, where does the fat go?

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Re: When somebody loses weight, where does the fat go?

#201

Post by mikeash »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #170
mikeash wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respectfully disagree. The only reason I didn't use the word "clickbait" is because it's apparently the actual title of a scholarly paper. A lot of the titles that turn up in your search are what I'd call clickbait.

It's part of HN's cultural fabric. It'd be a shame to lose it. A useful exercise: What's the difference between answering the title and writing a tl;dr? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7789697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13028168

I've been posting here for years and this is the first I've heard of it. It doesn't seem like a very important part of the site's culture. Or maybe I'm just oblivious, it's possible.

The difference between answering the title and writing a tl;dr is that the former doesn't use the character sequence "tl;dr." Apparently this is important. From your first link:

> PeterWhittaker's comment is fine without the "tl;dr". The concern is the symbol—symbols matter.

I'm a bit confused as to what happened in the second link. Going up the comment chain, apparently the original title spelled out what happened but was editorialized, so it got changed, and "There's a downside to spelling things out completely" was part of the explanation of why it was OK to switch to a less editorialized title with much less information in it. Yet the title of the post is the one they said they changed. Did they change it back later?

Re: When somebody loses weight, where does the fat go?

#203

Post by ac29 »

bo1024 wrote: post #135
Zanta wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the paper "Replacing one hour of rest with exercise that raises the metabolic rate to seven times that of resting by, for example, jogging, removes an additional 39 g of carbon from the body, raising the total by about 20% to 240 g. For comparison, a single 100 g muffin represents about 20% of an average person’s total daily energy requirement. Physical activity as a weight loss strategy is, therefore, easily fo…

That quote is deceptive. An hour's jogging will burn at least 500 calories even for quite small people going quite slow, perhaps 700-800 for larger or faster ones. That would be a massive muffin and significantly more than 20% of an average calorie consumption.

Muffins can have quite a lot of calories. The (admittedly fairly large) ones at Costco are over 600 calories: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/kirkland-costco-bl...

Re: When somebody loses weight, where does the fat go?

#204

Post by derefr »

trendia wrote: post #165
kazinator wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fat can break down into ketones which can be passed out via urine (i.e. leave the body without being oxidized to H2O and CO2). This is noted in the article, in the caption under the second figure.

There is a hard limit of ketogenesis: about 185g of ketone bodies per day [0]. (That's about 2 lbs every 3 days). [0] https://www.diapedia.org/metabolism-insulin-and-other-hormon...

That's a matter of liver health, right? So you could theoretically go higher (by combining antidiabetic drugs with beta-adrenergic agonists, and then sitting in a hospital in a cold water bath hooked up to a liver dialysis machine.)

Not a viable alternative to dieting and exercise, of course, but maybe an alternative to liposuction or gastric-bypass surgery.

Re: When somebody loses weight, where does the fat go?

#205

Post by sillysaurus3 »

mikeash wrote: post #201
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's part of HN's cultural fabric. It'd be a shame to lose it. A useful exercise: What's the difference between answering the title and writing a tl;dr? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7789697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13028168

I've been posting here for years and this is the first I've heard of it. It doesn't seem like a very important part of the site's culture. Or maybe I'm just oblivious, it's possible. The difference between answering the title and writing a tl;dr is that the former doesn't use the character sequence "tl;dr." Apparently this is important. From your first link: > PeterWhittaker's comment is fine without the "tl;dr". The…

My intent wasn't to call you out, but rather to persuade you.

If you're interested, have a look at https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20bookish&sort=byD... to get a sense of the reasoning.

It seems worthwhile to preserve the bookishness of HN. One of the best ways to do this is to make HN seem boring. Reading, writing, and good conversation take time and effort.

"For anyone coming straight to the comments looking for an answer to the question:" seems like a macroexpansion of "tl;dr:".

Re: When somebody loses weight, where does the fat go?

#206

Post by scotty79 »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #161
scotty79 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thunderf00t had a great take on this showing why excercise is pretty much useless for weight loss. You exhale same percentage of CO2 no matter how active you are so to burn more fat you have to make yourself breathe faster. You can do that with excercise which, if it's intense, can triple your rate of breathing. But if you do intensly excercise for an hour each day you just burn 26 hours of fat instead 24. Not much o…

Most people want to add some muscle mass too, not just remove fat stores.

Fat people usually have plenty of muscles. They need them to lug the fat around.

I'm not saying you shouldn't excercise to get healthier or build some muscle but don't expect to loose weight from excercise.

Re: When somebody loses weight, where does the fat go?

#207

Post by rconti »

nradov wrote: post #199
rconti wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly recommend a meal tracker app for anyone who's looking to lose. I avoided it for ages. I didn't want to be "one of those people". I felt like I ate fairly well and was working hard enough, I shouldn't have to stoop to that level. I started bike commuting over 3 months ago now, but my weight was only increasing, and I was pretty sure my diet was the same as ever -- healthy breakfast, fairly healthy lunch, heal…

This is great advice but just be aware that calorie calculations in Strava are often way off: too high for walking / running and too low for cycling. So you can't reliably use their numbers to see if you're ahead or behind.

Good information. I'm pretty happy with the consistency of the calorie counts on Strava (Apple Watch has HRM built in) vs Peloton bike (with chest HRM strap), so I'm assuming you're referring to Strava's estimates without HRM (not sure if they even take into account gender/age/weight).

Re: When somebody loses weight, where does the fat go?

#208

Post by sulam »

StevePerkins wrote: post #79
beardbandit wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I can't help but groan at some of the "obvious" health and weight loss platitudes that get smugly thrown around." On the flip side, the people that are told this are the ones that are annoyingly attempting to maintain their bad eating habits while just adding exercise, or adding fab foods, or anything really to delude themselves into thinking they can continue to eat the same way.

I have never in my life met someone who has the physical and mental discipline to exercise regularly, yet also still sits around eating candy and pizza the other 23-hours of the day. MAYBE if you're still in school, or a new grad in your 20's, you might know people who are physically active but also like to drink heavy / party. But by the time you're 30 or so, exercise and decent eating habits tend to correlate one w…

FWIW, basic habits like you're describing will get you pretty far. Then something changes. For me, it was kids. Because of kids I couldn't get outside for the 5-10 hours I used to, and I started putting on weight. That forced me to rework how I approach eating and nutrition from the ground up.

Re: When somebody loses weight, where does the fat go?

#209

Post by mikeash »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #205
mikeash wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been posting here for years and this is the first I've heard of it. It doesn't seem like a very important part of the site's culture. Or maybe I'm just oblivious, it's possible. The difference between answering the title and writing a tl;dr is that the former doesn't use the character sequence "tl;dr." Apparently this is important. From your first link: > PeterWhittaker's comment is fine without the "tl;dr". The…

My intent wasn't to call you out, but rather to persuade you. If you're interested, have a look at https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20bookish&sort=byD... to get a sense of the reasoning. It seems worthwhile to preserve the bookishness of HN. One of the best ways to do this is to make HN seem boring. Reading, writing, and good conversation take time and effort. "For anyone coming straight to the comments look…

Of those four results, the first one is explaining why they don't want author names in titles, the second one explains why they like minimal design, the third one was a false positive on "attention-grabbing Unicode glyphs," and finally the fourth one actually talks about the topic at hand. Why not just link to that one?

The fourth one places a lot of emphasis on the specific implications of "tl;dr" as opposed to other terms like "summary." Given such precision, I'd say the macroexpansion of "tl;dr" would be "too long; didn't read" since that's what it actually stands for.

I'm persuaded that "tl;dr" is best avoided. I'm not persuaded that my comment would or should fall under this guideline.

Re: When somebody loses weight, where does the fat go?

#210

Post by smeyer »

garmaine wrote: post #188
smeyer wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like the previous commenter mentioned, that's mostly water. I've seen various numbers between 100 and 150 calories burned per mile for runners, which at the high end is just a bit over one pound's worth of calories for a marathon.

I’ve read about people who do things like swim the channel, and bulk up (10’s of lbs) before doing so. Given that they lose this weight in the process, how does that happen?

I think that's mostly independent. A swimmer bulking up for a channel swim is probably putting on a mix of water, fat, and muscle in the slow lead up to the swim (and maybe extra water in the days before) and then losing water during the swim. Here's [0] a discussion of swimmers strategizing about weight gain, and you can see that it's largely about issues like insulation from cold, buoyancy, and strength, and not because they're worried about losing the weight during the swim itself.

[0] http://marathonswimmers.org/forum/discussion/90/when-to-gain...

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