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The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

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Re: The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

#221

Post by magna7 »

partialrecall wrote: post #119
berdon wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to expand a little bit more: The body can be simplified down into an input/output black-box - almost like a thevenin equivalent. But most people unaccount for lost energy in the output. No two bodies are alike and no two bodies share the same efficiency in breaking down food, absorption, conversion, and excretion. Yes, you can collect the excrement and analyze the output. But that analysis doesn't tell you muc…

You're describing difficulties with precise measurement of inputs and outputs, but I don't think the difficulty of making those measurements refutes the core idea of CICO at all. The difficulty of actually implementing CICO suggests we should have sympathy for those who fail. This doesn't refute CICO.

I don't think anyone disputes the laws of thermodynamics, just how the body processes different macronutrients in the presence of certain levels of hormones. By changing those hormones, you change the balance of the total energy equation. For example, I know someone with crohns disease, and her body just doesn't metabolize nutrients the same way mine does. I burn a donut more efficiently than she does. In this case it isn't about hormones, but about inflammation, but it's generally the same concept just on a more apparent scale.

Re: The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

#222

Post by mudmanc4 »

The author is in my opinion and (whatever little it may be) experience spot on. More people, have a starvation issue, they are eating carbohydrates, where the body makes them on it's own. Before we had 'food' on every corner at each gas station, we hunted, (being physical) until we scored that game. Not three or six meals a day, not chemically processed 'food stuffs' that shock the endocrine system and break the very nature of how our systems function. I say starvation as in , when food is scarce, the body somehow knows, and stores what is taken in, for future use. Yea, were all horders by nature.

Re: The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

#223

Post by glogla »

dpark wrote: post #219
glogla wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be true in thermodynamic sense but it is a useless and trite statement. It's like saying "people are in debt because they borrowed money" - true, but banal and trivial, and pretending it's the whole story and saying nothing of medical debt, student loans or living from paycheck to paycheck and payday loans dayloans is only good for feeling better than someone, most likely while pretending that all people i…

If you want to discuss the socioeconomic reasons for the rise in obesity, I think there’s plenty of meat there to discuss meaningfully. That’s very different from discussing gut flora or gut neural connections or metabolism. Indeed, all the ways that “people are different” are irrelevant because the rise in obesity is a societal problem . It’s not about the individuals and their differences. If you’re an individual w…

> focus on calories in and calories out because those are the biggest factor

A lot of people tried that, and it didn't work, but we never got to "why doesn't it work for so many people" because people like you keep parroting "CICO! You're just weak! CICO! CICO!!" even though it helps nobody.

Of course, calories in and calories out are mostly out of your control, but we're past that, since this has now become about moral judgment of obese people.

Re: The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

#224

Post by UnFleshedOne »

RandallBrown wrote: post #113
trophycase wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that the body adapts to burn more or fewer calories depending on how much you eat. Restricting calories can possibly have the side effect of just lowering your metabolism, rather than just losing weight.

Yeah, that's true, but it doesn't change the calories in calories out equation. If your metabolism goes down, so do the calories out. That's one of many reasons that counting the calories out is extremely difficult.

That's also one of the reasons this equation is not very useful in practice.

Re: The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

#225

Post by lurquer »

omginternets wrote: post #114
RandallBrown wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you eat 500 calories and burn 600 calories, the energy has to come from somewhere . So in a sense it is actually a pretty simple physics problem. It gets tricky because calculating calorie consumption is really hard (how much of what you ate was actually turned into energy) and calculating calorie expenditure is probably even harder.

>If you eat 500 calories and burn 600 calories, the energy has to come from somewhere. Yes, hence "you have to balance your chemical equations", but we need to agree on what we're calling "eat" and "burn", here. Burning 600 calories can just as well "work up an appetite" as it can "draw upon fat reserves". We're used to thinking of weight loss as a behavioral problem withy metabolic symptoms ("he eats too much, so he…

I've yet to meet a fat person who didn't eat large portions and sugary foods.

"It's a glandular problem," you'd often hear a few decades back. Now, there is other mumbo-jumbo. But, at the end of the day, fat people eat too much. Period. Mass is not created out of thin air. (Unless you're a plant.)

Whether this fact is "helpful" to people trying to lose weight, I'll leave to the psychologists. But, it's true. And, there are some fat people that do change their behavior when presented with the truth; namely, quit eating foods with so many carbs, starches, and sugars.

Re: The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

#226

Post by partialrecall »

glogla wrote: post #211
partialrecall wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're describing difficulties with precise measurement of inputs and outputs, but I don't think the difficulty of making those measurements refutes the core idea of CICO at all. The difficulty of actually implementing CICO suggests we should have sympathy for those who fail. This doesn't refute CICO.

CICO is mostly nonsense, because you can't control neither CI no CO. CI is based what people eat, but how much and how often people eat (if you don't expect perfect and infinite willpower) is based on how hungry they are, and that is hormonally controlled, based on complex feedback loop that includes insulin levels (so what you eat and how often) and activity levels. CO includes many things you have no conscious cont…

Wow, that's extremely judgemental. When I was on the swim team in highschool, I was fit as a fiddle. When I went to university I chose to stop swimming but also chose to continue eating the same (because I like food.) Predictably, I started to get fat. I'm certainly capable of eating less, and I am also capable of increasing my activity. Your rant denies that I have any agency in this matter, which is somewhat offensive.

And even if it were the case that I had no agency, it would still be the case that my weight loss was due to a CICO imbalance. CICO is a matter of physics, not ethics or morality.

Re: The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

#227

Post by dpark »

glogla wrote: post #211
partialrecall wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're describing difficulties with precise measurement of inputs and outputs, but I don't think the difficulty of making those measurements refutes the core idea of CICO at all. The difficulty of actually implementing CICO suggests we should have sympathy for those who fail. This doesn't refute CICO.

CICO is mostly nonsense, because you can't control neither CI no CO. CI is based what people eat, but how much and how often people eat (if you don't expect perfect and infinite willpower) is based on how hungry they are, and that is hormonally controlled, based on complex feedback loop that includes insulin levels (so what you eat and how often) and activity levels. CO includes many things you have no conscious cont…

> CICO is mostly nonsense, because you can't control neither CI no CO.

This is a wholesale abdication of responsibility and an embrace of victimhood.

Yes, there are elements of calories out that aren’t fully in your control. However these place a lower bound on calories out. You can absolutely increase your exercise and activity level.

On the other side, you are very much in control of your calories in. You can choose to eat a better diet (e.g. whole foods) that makes it easier to maintain a caloric deficit. You can choose to stop eating before full satiety. You can even go so far as to fast, cutting your calories in to 0. Obviously hunger matters but this idea that you can’t control your eating at all because you’re hungry is ridiculous.

You are very much in control of these factors. Yes, there are broad issues contributing to obesity but individuals are not relieved of their responsibility just because society also has problems.

Re: The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

#228

Post by loco5niner »

hoschicz wrote: post #177
scarface74 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn’t gain 600 pounds plus by overeating up to six months. They have spent years overeating and gaining weight.

They way to look at this from a insulin resistance perspective is that years overeating caused them to develop insulin resistance, which in turn caused them to become obese.

I'm sure they were quite obese before insulin resistance kicked in.

Re: The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

#229

Post by glogla »

RandallBrown wrote: post #101
omginternets wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Losing weight and gaining weight is simple physics I assume you're referring to the "energy in" vs "energy out" meme in weight-loss. The body is not a closed system. While you _do_ have to balance your chemical equations for glucose catabolysis (or whatever), weight loss is far from a "simple physics" problem.

If you eat 500 calories and burn 600 calories, the energy has to come from somewhere . So in a sense it is actually a pretty simple physics problem. It gets tricky because calculating calorie consumption is really hard (how much of what you ate was actually turned into energy) and calculating calorie expenditure is probably even harder.

Your body of course doesn't use energy it doesn't have. But it can balance the equation by restricting the output - lowering muscle repair (so post-workout recovery is slower), lowering brain supply (lowering concentration), lowering heating (so you fell cold), etc.

Whether the body decides to use stored energy or lowers output (while signalling hunger) is mostly hormonally controlled, by insulin and glucagon - this is why insulin resistance is such a problem.

Some research seems to show that portion restriction leads to lowered output while increasing time between meals (i.e. not snacking) lead to use of reserves, but I don't have a nice article to link.

Re: The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

#230

Post by bena »

partialrecall wrote: post #165
berdon wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your strawman is implying I was trying to refute CICO. I never said that - I said people don't count all the outputs.

It was not my intention to strawman you. I apologize for misreading your intent.

Don't apologize. Regardless of his intent, he claimed

"I've lost weight eating 900 calories/day and I've lost weight eating 3500 calories/day with the same level of exercise. The difference was the 900 were carbs, the 3500 was >90% protein"

And if you're not trying to refute CICO, you better make damn clear that even though you're ingesting 3500 calories, you're essentially just crapping out most of it because our bodies can't process that much protein at once.

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