Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Obesity Era

aeonmagazine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 96 posts

Re: The Obesity Era

#51

Post by nsxwolf »

enraged_camel wrote: post #49

The mechanics of weight gain and loss are fascinating. Every time I read an article like this it makes me appreciate the complexity of the human body even more. That said, the issue as a whole is not rocket science, and should not be treated as such. While it is very interesting to examine and discuss how the human body treats various types of calories, at the end of the day the closed system that is the human body i…

There's also skinny people who burn calories for no apparent reason, like in the Vermont Prison Overfeeding Study.

I do not lose weight on low calorie diets, period. I get hungry and sick and cold for weeks on end, and my weight does not budge. My most successful periods of weight loss have been on high fat, zero carb, very high calorie diets. I know what I was eating - I measured everything correctly, regardless of all the patronizing "fat people are unaware of how much they really eat" talk.

Re: The Obesity Era

#52

Post by nsxwolf »

gummify wrote: post #27

I saw on the news today that 70% of the US is a size 14 or larger now. Shocking. In addition to the need for sugar and starch reduction, a lot of grocery foods are not as natural as we think they are. Having lived in European and Asian countries I can say that the people there are less calorie conscious and sometimes eat more than Americans do but their food options and ingredients seem more wholesome and less proces…

What is a size 14? That's the size of a woman's dress in the United States, but certainly not anything for man (maybe very large shoes). What standard are you going by?

Also, sizes in the US are pretty much all over the map. Pants sizes in the US are measured in inches, and they can easily be 4 inches different than what a tailor will measure with a tape measure.

Re: The Obesity Era

#53

Post by NovemberWest »

gummify wrote: post #27

I saw on the news today that 70% of the US is a size 14 or larger now. Shocking. In addition to the need for sugar and starch reduction, a lot of grocery foods are not as natural as we think they are. Having lived in European and Asian countries I can say that the people there are less calorie conscious and sometimes eat more than Americans do but their food options and ingredients seem more wholesome and less proces…

You want to really be concerned: I have read some things that indicate "vanity sizing" means what used to be a 14 (say 20 years ago) is now labeled a 10.

Re: The Obesity Era

#54

Post by nsxwolf »

null_ptr wrote: post #19

People that lack analytical thinking are doomed. They are preyed on from every angle by unscrupulous companies peddling their processed garbage. No sandwich without mayo, no salad without dressing, no food marketed to children without loads of sugar and artificial ingredients. Entire aisles of frozen fatty foods, entire aisles of soda and chips. Shelves and shelves of sugar-laced yogurt. The key lies in the individua…

Who in their right mind would eat a sandwich without mayo, or a salad without dressing? Come on. Mayo and salad dressing predate big evil corporations, you know.

Re: The Obesity Era

#55

Post by enraged_camel »

nsxwolf wrote: post #51
enraged_camel wrote: post #49

The mechanics of weight gain and loss are fascinating. Every time I read an article like this it makes me appreciate the complexity of the human body even more. That said, the issue as a whole is not rocket science, and should not be treated as such. While it is very interesting to examine and discuss how the human body treats various types of calories, at the end of the day the closed system that is the human body i…

There's also skinny people who burn calories for no apparent reason, like in the Vermont Prison Overfeeding Study. I do not lose weight on low calorie diets, period. I get hungry and sick and cold for weeks on end, and my weight does not budge. My most successful periods of weight loss have been on high fat, zero carb, very high calorie diets. I know what I was eating - I measured everything correctly, regardless of…

The Vermont Prison Overfeeding Study actually perfectly explains what you experience on low calorie diets.

http://idealbodyweights.blogspot.com/2009/08/vermont-prison-...

"The rapid weight loss these prisoners experienced is the mirror image of what happens when overweight people try to lose weight. If your set point is too high and you try to lose weight quickly, your body will fight to defend that weight and slow down your metabolism. But if your set point is within a normal range, your metabolism will speed up when you gain weight quickly."

In other words, if you have been fat for a while, then drastically reducing calories will cause your body to fight the changes, which will make you feel sick and cold for a while. That said, adjustment is inevitable.

Low carb and zero carb diets are great for losing weight reliably though, because without carbs the pancreas does not secrete insulin, which means your body cannot store the excess calories in adipose tissue. So it either has to burn it or excrete it.

Re: The Obesity Era

#56

Post by aliston »

dublinben wrote: post #46
colomon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, if your algorithm worked on the first few test cases you threw at it but after that you kept on finding holes in it, you wouldn't say it had solved the problem, would you? 12 years ago, I lost 55 pounds in six months. All I had to do was carefully monitor everything I ate and burn 1000+ calories exercising six days a week. Thing is, that was a solution that worked very well for me when I was self-employed 3…

The long term solution to keeping your weight down is to eat at your maintenance level. If you do not eat more than your your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE), you simply will not gain weight. If you eat less than your TDEE, you will lose weight. This might not be easy, but it's pretty simple.

Except that the entire point of the article is that it is not "pretty simple," but quite a bit more nuanced...

Re: The Obesity Era

#57

Post by glenra »

enraged_camel wrote: post #47
colomon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, if your algorithm worked on the first few test cases you threw at it but after that you kept on finding holes in it, you wouldn't say it had solved the problem, would you? 12 years ago, I lost 55 pounds in six months. All I had to do was carefully monitor everything I ate and burn 1000+ calories exercising six days a week. Thing is, that was a solution that worked very well for me when I was self-employed 3…

>>You know, if your algorithm worked on the first few test cases you threw at it but after that you kept on finding holes in it, you wouldn't say it had solved the problem, would you? The parent said he lost 30 pounds over 6 months. This is not a "test case." He implemented the solution effectively. What he ended up doing however was to change the input variables (literally) by increasing the amount he was eating. Th…

It wasn't sustainable. Maintaining enough of a calorie deficit to lose that much weight made me depressed and made it hard to do my job - I think better with more calorie consumption. So I stopped dieting for much the same reason other people stop smoking - it was having negative effects I didn't like.

(Also, the system I was following (hacker's diet) incorrectly claimed after losing the weight you wouldn't gain it back from simply returning to prior eating habits. Because it didn't account for the now well-known metabolism-lowering effect of dieting.)

Re: The Obesity Era

#58

Post by glenra »

dublinben wrote: post #46
colomon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, if your algorithm worked on the first few test cases you threw at it but after that you kept on finding holes in it, you wouldn't say it had solved the problem, would you? 12 years ago, I lost 55 pounds in six months. All I had to do was carefully monitor everything I ate and burn 1000+ calories exercising six days a week. Thing is, that was a solution that worked very well for me when I was self-employed 3…

The long term solution to keeping your weight down is to eat at your maintenance level. If you do not eat more than your your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE), you simply will not gain weight. If you eat less than your TDEE, you will lose weight. This might not be easy, but it's pretty simple.

That implies TDEE doesn't change. But we know that TDEE does change when people diet. (One study found that a group of people who lost 10% of their weight through dieting had their resting metabolism decline by an average of 15%.) We don't actually know how TDEE reacts to weight loss in general - how much it declines or for how long it declines in response to a particular level of loss. We also don't know how subjective hunger levels react to weight loss.

...Other than that whatever the formulas are, they seem to make long-term loss nearly impossible for most people.

Re: The Obesity Era

#59

Post by glenra »

jacques_chester wrote: post #29

The preponderance of evidence is that net caloric balance predicts weight. http://examine.com/faq/what-should-i-eat-for-weight-loss.htm... Given the choice between "astonishing phenomenon never before detected in history" and "record-keeping errors", I know which horse Occam is telling me to bet on. And it's not that HFCS has more Higgs bosons.

What, exactly, are you calling an "astonishing phenomenon never before detected in history"?

Are you saying that chickens and monkeys got fatter over time due to "record-keeping errors"? Are you claiming the "fat virus" effect - that if you give chickens or monkeys or rats or mice a certain human cold viruse, they get fatter - is due to "record-keeping errors"?

Have you read anything of Gary Taubes? He argues that the phenomenon of some local culture getting unusually fat in spite of the usual suspects not being present, is something that has been seen a great many times in history...but has been ignored or misinterpreted until recently.

> The preponderance of evidence is that net caloric balance predicts weight.

An equally valid way to put that is "the preponderance of evidence is that weight predicts net caloric balance." You can't derive the direction of causality from that relationship.

Re: The Obesity Era

#60

Post by foxylad »

Dewie wrote: post #41
foxylad wrote: post #37

My friends, I have discovered a miracle cure for weight gain. It's simple, painless, and you don't have to cut out whole food groups. Best of all, I'll tell you what it is - here and now - at no charge! Here it is... A SMALL PLATE. That simple. Go out and buy a really individual side-plate, and make that what you always eat off. If you need seconds, OK - but after a few days you'll find that you can actually get by q…

> I started putting on weight when I was 40, A late bloomer, huh... did you stay active your whole youth and then stopped for some reason? Or did you have an I-can-eat-anything-I-want metabolism in your youth which then petered out a little? I do wonder...

A little of both, I think. It coincided with a more sedentary job, but I've noticed a lot of small aging-related changes in my body (nostril hair going crazy, fingernails getting rougher, that sort of thing) at about the same time, and I don't think they are related to the job.
Post reply on HN