Well, yeah. Adipocytes multiply when you get fat. But when you lose weight, they don't apoptose, they just shrink in volume by giving up their lipid stores.
I kinda went down a rabbit hole a while back with certain treatments that can kill adipocytes, as there's actually some significant research backing both heat-generating and cold-generating treatments. They do kill fat cells, and they are flushed out of the body. But people who undergo such treatments do not lose fat. At best, these devices can reshape your fat, pulling it out of one area and distributing it more evenly in other areas.
The problem is that when you kill an adipocyte, it releases all of its triglycerides, which are then free to move around the blood stream. But when blood triglyceride levels are high and there isn't significant oxidation, other metabolic processes are triggered to start to store them. So you kill an adipocyte, release the triglycerides, which get reabsorbed into still living adipocytes, which now get engorged and then multiply again, replacing the fat cells that have been killed.
After learning quite a bit about these processes, I think these devices might actually be useful, not for losing fat, but by eliminating this sort of fat memory. In other words, they should be used after significant weight loss, because adipocytes are relatively empty and externally triggered apoptosis can kill the cells without releasing significant quantities of triglycerides which can be reabsorbed and trigger adipocyte mitosis. I think this would effectively reset that person to a state as if they had never been fat in the first place. Thoughts?
To answer your question, yes that is what ketosis is. Eliminate the non-fibrous carbs from your diet and after 48 hours or once the carbs are out of your blood stream your body will start to break down stored body fat. Through a process in the liver you get ketones. In the context of meal planning, meal timing, and other lifestyle choices it's extremely effective. For anyone with ADHD / ADD patterns do TRY IT for a month!
The study and the discussion here however are focused on reducing the quantity of those adipocyte cells in the body, which aren't reduced through ketosis. I think ketosis causes more of a volumetric reduction of each adipocyte cell but I'm really not sure.
Like a balloon filling with air, do adipocyte cells expand in volume while storing lipids?
It is. But it's hard to maintain. I was in ketosis for a month via diet (verified with urine strips twice a day) and it was a struggle to figure out what to eat. Camembert, bacon-wrapped chicken and eggs gets boring after a while. Our civilization runs on carbohydrates, for better or worse.
seems like it would be a good idea then to do a heavy strength based training session and fast before getting this done to maximize effectiveness. Those liberated triglycerides would be sucked up by muscle tissue to be used for repair.
Similar adaptions occur in muscle. The extent of new muscle fiber development (hyperplasia) is debated, so there are multiples factors influencing how muscle retains some memory of past strength ability.
Once you’ve reached a level of physical strength it’s easier to return to that level in the future. This has been a topic of debate in the sports world because past anabolic steroid use could therefore carry benefits into the future long after the athlete has stopped using the steroid. Non-professional athletes shouldn’t get too excited about using steroids, though, because the damage steroids do to the body’s own hormone systems also has lasting effects unless you plan on doing TRT for the rest of your life, which has its own downsides.
For average people this does show the importance of getting at least some exercise when you’re young. It’s much easier to get a little bit fit when you’re young which then makes it easier to stay fit in the future. Never too late too start.
I can't remember exactly what I was listening to, maybe some kind of NPR podcast.
But the doctor was mentioning that none of the influencers influencing young people to try T and Steroids (which is rampant right now) are ever mentioning that you are on a ticking clock to infertility as soon as you start this stuff. Some people can regain their fertility but it might take years, and some people are going to be permanently infertile even staying on HRT.
Plenty of those "alpha male" guys on social media are shooting blanks.
Testicular atrophy and HPT axis suppression is a thoroughly documented side effect of TRT and steroids. Even beginner bodybuilders know that taking steroids will crush their natural testosterone production. They can kind of bring it back by taking short courses and using certain medications after the cycle, but most discover that some permanent damage is being done with each cycle.
There are two problems with framing it as an infertility problem:
1 - It reduces fertility but many users retain some fertility. The bigger problem for most is that natural testosterone production won't come back to the same level if they ever discontinue, so they're on it for life. Managing testosterone injections every week or multiple times per week for the rest of your life is doable but a pain, especially if you have to travel or you're not the best at keeping up with prescriptions. There are also ups and downs and side effects that come from artificial testosterone dosing. Many people are surprised to discover that after the first year or two they don't feel "great" any more and it's just back to where they started, but with a lifetime dependency now. Others get serious side effects like Gynecomastia (breast growth in men, possibly requiring surgery) or secondary hormonal alterations that negatively impact mood, cognition, or libido.
2 - Many young men in their 20s or even teens see infertility as a positive rather than a negative. It's very common for people of this age to think they've made up their mind for life, but they have yet to even have a serious relationship or even know any peers with kids. People who work in fertility fields are starting to see a lot of men who went into TRT or steroids when they were young because they thought the consequences would never be a problem for them.
> Plenty of those "alpha male" guys on social media are shooting blanks.
Honestly, they don't care. I skim the testosterone subreddits occasionally and many people brag and joke about how small their testicles are.
It's crazy to me to see this shift happening. TRT clinics that advertise on the radio, TikTok, and everywhere else will entice people to come in for "free tests" but the trick is that it doesn't matter what your numbers come back as, they'll always find a way to prescribe you TRT because it's easy recurring revenue for them with lifelong dependence attached.
I am a data point of resuscitation of fertility. Confirmed to be shooting blanks after years of juice, and decided to see if I could reactivate by following the broscience (and all the pubmed papers) on the topic.
An aggressive protocol of HCG and HMG (analogues for FSH and LH in the pituitary) reactivated the testes to get back to spermatogenesis and T production after about 5 years of complete dormancy. It took about 4 months of daily needles and well-timed marital conception-attempts. The son I fathered as a result is anecdotally very strong and a voracious eater.
My urologist said it sounded like I knew everything I needed to do and was satisfied to let me self-treat.
To clarify, did you try to conceive approximately four times (four months)? Because from what I hear that isn't exactly unheard of in people that aren't on the juice.
>It's very common for people of this age to think they've made up their mind for life, but they have yet to even have a serious relationship or even know any peers with kids.
At least it is much less serious than people in the opposite situation, that think they want a child at 19 without understanding the implications.
> Even beginner bodybuilders know that taking steroids will crush their natural testosterone production.
Maybe beginner bodybuilders understand this. But I'd argue the average new steroid user is more likely the be un/mis-informed. The average person gets all their information from Instagram/Tiktok/Youtube/Reddit.
But my observation is a lot of people are jumping on gear for purely aesthetic reasons. They are ordering online from research chemical sites and they're almost always not working with a trainer/coach/doctor (vast majority of young people on gear are not doing it under any type of supervision, also means many skip basic necessities like regular bloodwork).
It's much more common for people to jump on gear, experience a negative effect, and then do research afterwards. Which is fine for substances that are relatively benign, but risky when you're messing with your hormones especially at a young age.
This is interesting because about 20 or so years ago when I was super into bodybuilding, you couldn't talk about a "cycle" on a bodybuilding forum without talking about a "post cycle protocol."
I know that's different than permanent TRT but I feel like you couldn't get very far researching that stuff without understanding that you natural test production (and sperm production) would get "shut down" as soon as you started adding exogenous androgens.
Yeah, it's well known that steroids shut you down. The problem with the broscience is that the PCT is talked about like it reverses everything like an antidote, but long-term bodybuilders often end up on TRT because eventually they can't get back to baseline.
That isn't true. Dedicated bodybuilders, starting more commonly ~5 years ago, decided that PCT wasn't worth it. Instead of typical 16-20 week cycles followed by 4-6 weeks of PCT, they adjust the dose between supraphysiological and (generally) top-of-normal, i.e.: blast and cruise.
It's not because they couldn't recover, it's because they don't want to or see the point.
> For average people this does show the importance of getting at least some exercise when you’re young.
They’ve known this for centuries. Quoting the great Socrates:
“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable."
> This has been a topic of debate in the sports world because past anabolic steroid use could therefore carry benefits into the future long after the athlete has stopped using the steroid.
Similar advantage is conveyed to athletes who had elevated (~male) testosterone levels in the past, even if they subsequently take blockers / go on HRT to ~female hormone levels.
Though that also comes with male-pattern skeletal growth. So unless your body still has elevated/male-level T levels, you're carrying around a disproportionately heavy skeleton which negates the advantage. If the net effect were actually an advantage, you'd expect the womens' sports which are allowing trans women to be dominated by them, but they really just aren't.
Additionally, trans women on HRT typically have their T suppressed below standard cis women levels, and thus well below the levels of cis women athletes (the top levels in any sport by definition tending to be outliers in performance).
> Though that also comes with male-pattern skeletal growth. So unless your body still has elevated/male-level T levels, you're carrying around a disproportionately heavy skeleton which negates the advantage.
The male-pattern skeletal growth isn't necessarily a disadvantage. E.g., narrower hips and stronger bones is likely an advantage in running.
> If the net effect were actually an advantage, you'd expect the womens' sports which are allowing trans women to be dominated by them, but they really just aren't.
My understanding is the opposite. In fact, if it wasn't the case, there is basically no reason to have separate mens and womens fields.
This is anecdotal evidence but I'm a trans woman who transitioned at 30. I ran cross country and track and was the fastest kid at my school in a relatively competitive program. I got depressed after college and gained a bunch of weight and only ran sporadically. I started HRT, I keep my T levels in the lowest range that's healthy for cis women. I got the urge to start exercising again. I now run more than twice as much as before, lost 40 pounds, and do roller derby on top of that. I'm still not as fast as I was when I was mostly sedentary, drinking beers every night in my apartment. I don't know if I'm faster or slower than I would have been if I was a cis woman but I did take a pretty big hit.
> The male-pattern skeletal growth isn't necessarily a disadvantage. E.g., narrower hips and stronger bones is likely an advantage in running.
It might or might not help, but if it were a net benefit then you'd expect trans women runners to perform more strongly than they actually do.
> My understanding is the opposite. In fact, if it wasn't the case, there is basically no reason to have separate mens and womens fields.
This sentence seems to presuppose that trans women are men. There are some womens' divisions which allow trans women (typically with stipulations requiring some duration of HRT), and they are not dominant there. To me, the sensible conclusion seems to be that trans women perform roughly on par with cis women, not that cis women perform roughly on par with cis men.
My last sentence wasn't particularly coherent; sorry. I have sort of two ideas here that were merged poorly: (1) setting aside trans entirely, cismen enjoy significant sport advantages over ciswomen in most sports, and this (fairness) is basically why we have women's sports instead of combined fields. (2) I believe transwomen have outsized performance in women's sports (contra your claim of no outperformance).
> There are some womens' divisions which allow trans women (typically with stipulations requiring some duration of HRT), and they are not dominant there.
I think there are maybe two things I'd poke at here. (1) Sports where transwomen enjoy greater advantage are more likely to have already excluded transwomen from womens' fields. And (2) the number of transwomen is tiny to begin with and AFAIK they have lower rates of participation in sports than ciswomen.
I think you can basically make a case for including or excluding transwomen in women's sports depending on whether you think inclusion or fairness is most important.
> I think you can basically make a case for including or excluding transwomen in women's sports depending on whether you think inclusion or fairness is most important.
A pretty wide spread of sports have allowed trans women*, and they have not dominated. If trans women did have an outsized performance in women's sports, there'd be examples to point to. I don't think you can make an evidence-based case for fairness and inclusion being at odds, given there aren't any unfair examples of inclusion to point to.
Some of the most notable examples include weightlifting and swimming. In weightlifting, probably the sport I'd expect an unfair advantage to make itself most apparent, Laurel Hubbard got a DNF in the Olympics, and did merely pretty good in several other events. Or in swimming, another sport I'd expect body proportions to have a significant impact in, Lia Thomas, who was the center of a ton of controversy, also did merely fine.
I'm not sure there are sports where trans women would have a bigger advantage than weightlifting, if such an advantage existed. And the tiny number of trans women interested in sports means that erring on the side of inclusion (if it does turn out to be an error) would also have a tiny negative impact,
* - Pedantic side note, combining "transwomen" and "ciswomen" into single words implies that we're different base nouns. It's similar to how "chinamen" is not acceptable, but generally there's nothing wrong with "Chinese men". "Trans" and "cis" are just adjectives modifying "men" or "women".
> In weightlifting, probably the sport I'd expect an unfair advantage to make itself most apparent, Laurel Hubbard got a DNF in the Olympics, and did merely pretty good in several other events.
On the contrary, Laurel Hubbard is a good example of how apparent this male physical advantage is when male athletes are allowed to compete in the female category.
Here's a chart showing ranked lifts for both men's and women's weightlifting in the World Masters Games, where Hubbard won a gold medal in the women's category in 2017: https:/i.ibb.co/WWf7CMQD/hubbard.jpg (the source of this graph is a developmental biologist who, amongst other things, studies sex differences in sport).
This shows that the set of lifts by female and male weightlifters are entirely distinct. Hubbard falls within the middle range of the male rankings and is a huge outlier compared to the female rankings.
For the Olympics, if Hubbard had been female, qualification for the competition would have been unprecedented. Hubbard was competing in the wake of an earlier elbow injury, had taken a years-long career break, and was considerably older than any female weightlifter ever to qualify for Olympic weightlifting: female weightlifters peak at around age 26 and Hubbard was 43 years old at the time.
Being male in the female category was sufficient to mitigate all the effects of older age, chronic injury, undertraining, and - compared to other males - lack of world class talent.
It's also worth noting that Hubbard came last at the Olympics due to being disqualified for improper technique, not because of being unable to physically manage the lifts.
I always hear this "TRT for life" thing but every bodybuilder I've known on gear has had no problem going on/off on a blast-and-cruise with post-cycle therapy.
Post-cycle therapy will take longer if you're taking exogenous testosterone for longer, but it's definitely not a 'for life'/'impossible' thing if you've been on TRT for a few years and decide to stop. It's just fearmongering.
> Once you’ve reached a level of physical strength it’s easier to return to that level in the future.
If you're reading this and you're < 30 and physically weak (not overweight, but lacking muscle mass) I cannot stress enough what a year or two hitting the gym could do for your permanent strength and muscle mass.
I was ridiculously skinny and physically weak going into my 20s and I just assumed that was the way I was built. But I got into fitness in my early 20s and packed on quite a bit of muscle and it's genuinely shocking to me how much base-level muscle mass and strength I've retained now 15 years on.
I always felt one of the most demotivating things about working out was that all the effort I was putting into the gym would eventually go to waste when I stopped, but that's not true. Had I known this I'd probably have started working out much earlier and for much longer than I did.
They tell your brain you have lots of food in your stomach, which triggers lots of behavioral and metabolic changes. This does not necessarily reverse every effect of obesity, maybe not gene expression changes described in this article. But enough to keep weight off with ongoing treatment.
Yea, this actually explains the transcriptional expression and weight gain very well. Strong than the methylation evidence imo. I didn’t see any causal analysis only correlated and the cells still being there makes sense.
Is this true? When I looked into this issue it seemed the medical consensus is that fat cells are mostly constant throughout life, and weight gain happens through adipocyte hypertrophy.
It seems fasting causes Adipocyte apoptosis. It makes sense, there is cell death.
I lost 100 lbs fasting over 1.5 years. I did gain some weight back after stopping, but not much. Strangely, where I saw fat return was not where most of it came off.
Even much shorter fasts help you to understand how unimportant and fleeting a lot of feelings of hunger are. You get hunger pangs and feel like you need to eat, but in a hour it has passed and you go another 8+ hours just fine. When I eat some crappy food, I know it is going to make me feel very hungry in a few hours, but when it happens, I know it isn’t a real need and it helps stop the cycle of bad eating/overeating.
I did that, and it helped to kickstart further weightloss. I was surprised how fast my body got rid of stored water, and how quickly I lost fat in the upper body region, primarily around my face, neck and shoulder.
Worse than that. Subcutaneous fat (which is the one you can trim off with liposuction) usually expands relying more in cell expansion and not in hyperplasia. Visceral fat on the other hand, is way more likely to involve hyperplasia and you cannot use liposuction against this type of fat. This is also the fat that is very hormonally active and increases the risks of diabetes, heart disease, cancers, strokes.
Visceral fat is literally enclosing the intestines, major blood vessels, organs, etc. of the abdomen.
Nevertheless, it is possible to surgically remove this sheet of fat that's covering your organs, it's called an omentectomy. But it's a big surgery, and done only in case of cancer, not for weight loss. That is, in humans: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29367725/
Right. A surgeon can't just stick a liposuction tube into the abdominal cavity and poke around. This would be major invasive surgery with a high risk of complications, far worse than leaving the adipose tissue in place.
Despite being looked down on, it's still very common. I know several people who have had liposuction. The results are only temporary. Everyone I know that has had this procedure has rebounded back to their original body weight within 2 years.
As someone who's struggled with weight loss, and have known others to struggle with it well, I think we colloquially called this "slow metabolism".
It always did feel like it was easier to gain weight than lose it, especially fat weight and not muscle weight for me.
I was recently sent a video about fat adaptation (basically teaching your body to be better at burning fat) by a very fit friend, but I wonder how much of that is bro science and how much of it is grounded in reality. Maybe worth looking into more deeply if it can counteract or balance out this.
For me, sugar was the reason I couldn't lose weight. I got a CGM (continuous glucose monitor) and got my blood sugar under control, and with very little effort I lost a lot of weight.
I use 90% cacao Lindt to control my sweet tooth. 1/2 the bar has 4g of sugar, and I consume it over hours. It also has the side effect of reducing my hunger. If you eat much of 90% chocolate, it makes you feel nausea. The trick is to put a small chip in your mouth and let it melt. It's quite delicious and I've not had any sweets in 80+ days.
This is actually great advice for any bad habit you're trying to break. In general, just thinking "Stop doing this thing" (or "do less of this thing"), doesn't really work. It's usually more effective to find something else that you do enjoy (and is better for you), and try to do more of that thing and have it "crowd out" your bad habit.
When it comes to eating, there is a nutritionist with a pretty sizable online following (Kylie Sakaida), and I love one of her mantras of "add, don't subtract". That is, don't think of abstaining from foods you like that might be unhealthy, but instead try to add more healthy things to that food to make it a balanced meal. For example, she gives the example of wanting a frozen waffle for breakfast. Instead of thinking "No, I can't have this frozen waffle", she instead makes a spread using Greek yogurt to add protein, then adds fresh fruit and nuts for more nutrients, fiber and healthy fats, so what started as an 'empty carbs' meal is turned into a pretty balanced, filling breakfast.
I'm a chocolate fan myself and it was something I used to buy often, but just as I started getting into the hard stuff (80% or higher) I learned about all the problems with heavy metals in dark chocolate and specifically in Lindt, and then later learned about the use of child slaves which is an industry wide issue and not exclusive to Lindt/Russell Stover/Ghirardelli/Lindor although Lindt and Hershey are reportedly worse than other brands.
You can find brands that claim to be more ethical in terms of sourcing their cocoa, but the smaller brands that do are also less likely to have been tested for heavy metals.
While it's unclear how harmful the heavy metals would be to me specifically at the amounts I was eating, the whole thing kind of put me off chocolate in general and dark chocolate in particular. I rarely have it anymore.
I thought a CGM would help me lose weight but it turned out my body is a hero at managing sugar spikes. A pint of ice cream? Back to baseline in under an hour. Big meal, no big spike, etc.
So it turns out you can still gain weight even if you don’t spike your blood sugar. At least for me.
The Stelo. 2 for $99. Oddly, it shipped from Amazon but Amazon doesn't sell them.
The app is subpar on iOS, but if you give Apple's Health app permission, you can get more data in there. Graphs that have absolute numbers. I think they reason their app doesn't give absolute values (for historical values, they give the current value only), is because it's not a calibrated device. It can't be used to control an insulin pump, for that reason.
No, this was a one-time thing for me, to work out how food impacts my blood sugar. I've used 1 of the 2 I bought, and I plan to use the other in 3-4 months, to see how I react then, after 6+ months with low sugar intake.
I just completed two weeks with Lingo by Abbott. It was decent. I wish it had better integration of the data with Apple Health, but I liked the Lingo score as a way of "gamifying" it and the UX overall was decently done.
This worked for me for a while but I learned to love dark chocolate toooooo much.
I can now eat a 100g bar of 100% chocolate in a single sitting if I feel like it… And that’s 55g of fat, so more or less the fat I should be eating in a whole day.
Insulin sensitivity is a real thing. The less sensitive to insulin you are, the more of it is produced to process a given amount of glucose. And the more insulin (anabolic) is produced, the less glucagon (catabolic) is.
In other words, low insulin sensitivity means your body remains in the feeding (fat building) state more, as opposed to fasting (fat burning).
Insulin sensitivity decreases with age, and with excessive intake of particularly simple carbs. It can be improved through fasting, certain dietary supplements, and low carb diet.
All of this is, to the best of my knowledge, not disputed or 'bro science'.
A lot of people blame failure to lose fat on a "slow metabolism" but this is usually incorrect. Have you had an actual resting metabolic rate (RMR) test to quantity your baseline total daily energy expenditure?
Fat adaptation is a real thing. Endurance athletes focused on longer events will target some of their training around that energy system. This is more complex than can really be explained in an online comment but basically you want to do long training sessions below your lactate threshold in a glycogen depleted state.
There is also a conflation of a slowing metabolism and low energy availability, which can reduce the amount of energy expended during the day (because you feel tired and do less). It can be quite subtle but when I've done some extended periods in a calorie deficit I start to notice subtle things, like a propensity to sit a bit longer, or to reduce my overall body movements. My resting metabolism is the same (I've had it measured a few times) but my body looks for ways to expend less energy.
Anecdotally (but an experience shared at by at least some other long distance runners), when I get quite far into a calorie deficit via exercise, my brain will start suggesting shortcuts - urges to cut the corner on a trail, take a shorter path back etc. Its quite interesting!
Considering the amount of effort it traditionally took to get food it's a shame that our brains would want us to be less active when it could otherwise start suggesting that we be even more active to find/hunt food.
The suggestions generally still work towards my goal; this is a different phenomena to "holy shit the consciousness is trying to kill us again" panic switch. Maybe its some low level optimisation to reduce energy expenditure, so we can last longer, and find even more food!
They didn't mean it was literally a slow metabolism. They meant that what the article is about is often refered to as a "slow metabolism". It's a misnomer since that is not the mechanism but there is definitely a phenomenon at play, which is what the article is about, the actual phenomenon rather than the bro science.
It is well known that if you gain muscle then lose it, it is easier to regain it than the first time (IIRC, the cells store extra nucleii?). This could be a similar effect but with fat cells.
As well as the "cell memory", the total number of fat cells you have in your body is set during adolescence, then it remains constant for the rest of your adult life. (https://www.nature.com/articles/ncpgasthep1189).
During adolescence, if you gain weight, you create new fat cells. During adulthood, the fat cells themselves just get larger. Arguably the best thing you can do is avoid obesity during childhood and adolescence at all costs.
> During adulthood, the fat cells themselves just get larger.
While true, it's also important to note that the lifetime of a fat cell is around ten years. Maintaining a decent diet for around ten years (no mean feat!) should be sufficient to leave you bereft of the actual adipose cells.
I also wonder how this intersects with transgender stuff — there's a reason why HRT is referred to as "second puberty", as it resets and changes a lot of underlying biological mechanisms and produces a lot of interesting epigenetic effects (While it does boil down to "replacing the sex hormone", both estrogen and testosterone have major effects on the body's immune system, etc. — actually this is one of the reasons I suspect that there's such a high comorbidity of autoimmune diseases within transgender people pre-HRT — their immune system is all out of wack! Mine calmed down a lot after starting and a year in I no longer get seasonal allergies). There's a huge lack of data in this regard though because transgender bodies are generally not felt to be worth studying outside of "health risks", even though there's a huge amount of information we could glean about how everyone's* body functions from it. Personally, I wonder whether second-puberty "resets" what the body decides is the baseline for fat storage.
* — and for anyone in doubt, we have around 90 years of HRT now that shows it's essentially completely safe (outside of the mid-80s when the estrogen being given was synthetic and non-bio-identical, and outside of the health risks of various things for trans women changing to be roughly equivalent of cis women's health risks).
The physical mechanism is mitochondrial uncoupling proteins (UCP). They regulate how much energy is wasted as heat when converting ADP to ATP, determining how efficient one’s metabolism is. When you lose weight, your UCP proteins start wasting less and less energy when producing ATP, which is one of the things that makes dieting so hard.
Actually affecting that pathway is largely beyond us at the moment (that’s the bro science) but the mechanism is relatively well understood.
Yes, sort of. DNP doesn’t affect uncoupling proteins directly but it moves protons across the mitochondrial membrane, causing more of the energy to be lost as heat as the uncoupling proteins waste more energy to restore the proton gradient.
There are a bunch of such “protonophores” that move protons across membranes and they are universally toxic if they make it to the mitochondria. I don’t known of any compound that actually mediates the UCPs themselves.
I used to think the same. I would guess that you do not have a big breakfast. Without getting a real meal in for breakfast, hitting a huge calorie surplus is difficult. If you counted your calories and tried to get a 1000 calorie meal for breakfast, hit 3000 calories a day, you’d probably gain 10% in a few weeks. Weight training is good too… you don’t want to just gain fat.
1000 calorie breakfast = bagel with cream cheese, 3 eggs, banana, some berries, protein shake. It’s a whole lot more than a bowl of cereal.
It's hard for me to gain weight. But in my 30s, for a few months I was eating 3000 calories plus. My breakfast smoothie was about 800 calories - 2-3 scoops protein, a banana, almond butter. I gained about 5 pounds after 3 months. It was just too hard to eat that much while also eating healthy.
I had a friend who was trying to bulk up make that claim (he was 6', 140 lbs), and then when I finally convinced him to write down everything he ate in a day, it was like 1800 calories.
I drink a protein shake 2 times at least, and eat lunch (chicken & rice & broccoli casserole, so forth) 2-3 times a day. I do not eat small portions either.
That only looks like about 2000 calories a day, which is the recommended caloric intake for the average sedentary adult man.
If you're trying to bulk, you need to be looking at 2500 or more calories a day, plus additional for any calories burned by exercise. (With a surplus of 1000/calories a day you'll be gaining more fat than muscle unless you're still in puberty. Sometimes that may be what you want.)
I think part of this can be solved by "hacks" the primary one being throwing olive oil on random stuff you eat. Another one is "drinking your calories". Basically all the things people tell you to do to lose weight, do the opposite
Fat adaptation is not bro science, it is what happens when you do not consume enough carbohydrates to meet your TDEE so your mitochondria “learn” to become really efficient at burning fatty acids. It’s the whole premise behind keto/low carb. When used to our modern high-carb diets, the adaptation takes some time for genes to activate, since we eat a lot and never have long enough fasting periods to be able to quickly switch between glucose and fatty acid metabolism.
I have had a slow metabolism since I was a teenager. I don't think I've ever experienced a day in my life where I haven't thought about my weight, body composition, or felt guilty about eating food. And I'm not even that big. I've just never had the physique I wanted, and I always attributed it to having a slow metabolism.
I'm turning 40 in May, so since the start of February, I've finally pulled up my bootstraps and started taking my health seriously. I was likely 225 lbs at 5'10". Easily 32+% body fat.
The first thing I did was a deep extended fast, drinking only water, electrolytes, supplements, bone broth, and black coffee. I was able to shed a good amount of weight, fast. However, the longest I could fast for was 6 days; No matter what I tried, I could not figure out how to get good sleep. I tried once more for 4 days, and saw no improvement, so I stopped trying to fast. Mentally I could handle it, but without quality sleep, there was no way I could continue. This was mid-March, and I was at 204.5 lbs.
Also in mid-March, I did a VO2 max test, while fasted for 72 hours. It was very apparent that my metabolism was fat adapted. My VO2 max was very low at 33.8 ml/kg, which was to be expected. My RMR was found to be 1998 kcal/day, and my fat max HR was 161 bpm. Crossover to 100% carbs was at 179 bpm.
Since then, I've done a 180, and started eating about 1800-2000 kcal per day. My first goal is to ensure I eat 170-200g of protein per day, through as much whole food as possible, using whey or protein when needed. The rest of my diet is very clean, with no real restrictions on fats, and keeping carbs as low as possible. It's a fairly ketogenic diet, but I don't get worked up if my net carbs go to 50+g. Foods are usually Greek yogurt, flax, pumpkin seeds, nuts, eggs, berries, fish, poultry, and green vegetables/salads. If I ever add fat to anything, it's extra virgin olive oil first, then maybe butter/cream (i.e. in coffee). I take a number of supplements like Omega-3 fish oils, multivitamins, magnesium, and make my own electrolyte drink. Creatine as well.
I find that by the time I've done all of this, I have a very difficult time eating, and even trying to fit anything else in. I am never hungry, nor do I feel cravings for other foods. We just came back from Miami, and I had some ice cream with the kids, and some baked goods. I enjoyed them, but I was very excited to be back to my normal foods.
Since then, I've been running 3-4 times a week, focusing on Zone 2 training. I do 4 days a week of weightlifting, focusing on the big compound lifts. I have a 10K race on May 11, and a sprint distance triathlon on July 27 that I'm training for.
For this entire month, I have stayed at a constant 207.5 lbs +/- 0.5 lbs. I have been tracking other measurements like circumferences and body fat (using calibers and BIA scale), and it's apparent that I have gained strength, regained muscle mass, and improved my overall fitness. Running is still at a slow pace, but actually enjoyable now. My wearables estimate that my VO2 max is 37 ml/kg; they did show 33 ml/kg last month when I had the test, so they seem to be correlated.
I think the hardest part of the last month has been the sheer amount of work I've put in, only to watch the scale stay steady. I track my intake rigorously, weighing everything I can and using MyFitnessPal to track it all. How are people able to eat anything else? I couldn't add rice or grains to my diet even if I wanted to, I would easily hit 2500+ kcal per day.
People eat that much? Or rather, burn that much? I burn 2000 kcal per rest day, and maybe 2800-3200 kcal on workout days.
I will stick with this, since it is working to improve my health and fitness. It would just be nice to see the scale move without having to fast for multiple days. Cursed slow metabolism.
In terms of where carbs fit in, you're eating 200g of protein a day, which at a guess is 2x to 4x your lean body mass in kg. I'm not saying that it's wrong, it's probably very effective, but the average diet probably swaps that (historically very expensive) protein out for (historically very cheap) bread and rice.
You aren't cursed with a slow metabolism, you have just been having too many calories. If you are truly never hungry but still not losing weight, then why not reduce your calories by 200-300 a day?
How's your light environment/sunlight exposure? What's your waking body temperature (under arm for 10 minutes)? Have you had a thyroid panel done? (TSH, Free T3, Free T4, Reverse T3)
If there really was a gene that allowed you to survive on substantially less food than your peers, pretty much all humans would have said gene. The history of humanity is rife with famine, and that gene would be a game-changer for survival
It's all about tradeoffs. In this case, I wonder if there's an "efficient metabolism" gene that makes your body put a higher percentage of incoming nutrients into long-term storage (mostly in fat tissue). Carriers of this gene would be more likely to survive a famine, but less likely to outrun a predator or defend against an attack by another leaner human, who's genes allocate incoming nutrients to be utilized more effectively in the short-term.
Look into Polynesian peoples. They survived long sea voyages, and are known to be generally large people in modern day. Like the guy at my high school whose nickname was "Big Tonga"
Samoan have a high degree of a particular variant of gene CREBRF that's highly associated with high BMI (see https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3620). Pop-Sci says it's an adaptation to the life in an island (might also be a founder effect?)
...don't we? According to [0], the amount of food (by energy intake) people get is very diverse worldwide. People can survive famine situations for a long time, and people' problems with obesity is linked to exactly those survival genes.
Granted, some animals are much better at it, crocodiles and bears and stuff can go without food for months.
I think it’s quite the opposite because it would not be a gene that allows you to survive on less food - it would be a gene that favors replacing glycogen stores over lipid stores. That kind of mechanism would be pretty negative to survival until the modern era of sedentary civilization.
>but I wonder how much of that is bro science and how much of it is grounded in reality
It's probably bro science or contributing a small amount to any effort. The biggest problem is the food industry serving shit in large portions, which can be hard for populations to psychologically resist (see: America). Most things in the grocery store are shit too.
I don't think you can effectively teach people to resist it though, you'd have to get rid of the shit being there so it's not even an option.
That's how my brother lost weight finally. He just never bought any of the stuff - so it wasn't even in his house. But he lives alone right now so if you live in a group setting you might be, in weak moments, snacking on bad things that other people brought in. It's kind of also why I don't think companies should provide candy machines etc.
metabolism is orthogonal . It's possible to have a fast metabolism and still be obese if you're eating at a surplus. But it's also possible people with faster metabolisms may be more successful at weight loss if already obese. So a 300-lbs person who eats 10,000 calories/day to be weight stable will find it easier to lose weight compared to to a 300 lbs person who is stable at 4,000 cal/day. This can also explain how some people lose tons of weight on GLP-1 drugs, whereas others lose less. The guy eating 10,000 calories/day will lose much more weight more rapidly owning to having a much bigger metabolic furnace, as soon as he restricts eating and his body is no longer getting 10,000 calories/day. Unfortunately, there are no studies that investigate the link, if any, with metabolism and dieting success.
10k calories a day is what a black bear eats preparing for hibernation. And it is what Michael Phelps would eat daily when training in the pool for hours on end.
Obese people can remain obese eating 1000 calories a day. I recall one episode of My 600lb Life and the show's featured person that day was at 900 or 1200 calories a day and still didn't lose weight. Might have still been gaining.
It is a dynamic system. People tend to only consider the CI in CI/CO.
>Obese people can remain obese eating 1000 calories a day. I recall one episode of My 600lb Life and the show's featured person that day was at 900 or 1200 calories a day and still didn't lose weight. Might have still been gaining.
How is that possible? There is a lower bound on calories needed (on average across say six months) to maintain life. Adding to that the calories needed to maintain the weight, I don't see how an obese person could stay alive with "CO" significantly lower than 1200 kcal.
It happens because we act like calories are calories when it's clearly not true.
Calorie counts in nutrition data are generated by something like burning the food in a bomb calorimeter. Which is most definitely not what our bodies do. We have all kinds of different biochemical ways of metabolizing different types of foods.
So someone eating 1000 calories of day could be eating very healthy or they could be ingesting a whole bunch of garbage full of sweeteners. It doesn't seem like anyone really understands how it works but all those sweeteners are more likely to make you gain weight.
And yet it happens. A doctor in my family told the story of a patient they were treating in hospital who medically needed to lose weight, and who they found unable to get any reduction until they dropped below _200_ calories a day.
Metabolism is _significantly_ more complex than CI/CO, from experience.
- a food addicted person is lying about their consumption
200 kcal a day.. yeah sure. A human body needs more than that just to breathe and pump blood. Even comatose a skinny person needs 5 times as much.
Overweight people have a significantly higher metabolic base rate. Just breathing can easily be 1000kcal a day if your lungs have to move 30 kilos of upper body fat 10 times a minute. They also have more muscle mass compared to the average person their size, even when not physically active, which increases MBR as well.
Weight loss and gain is a solved problem, but self control and human behavior is not.
Perpetuating myths of impossible weight loss is not beneficial for our society and moves us further away from solving the underlying issues.
I can believe this as a human who fasts. I just don't eat every other day. I've fasted for multiple days. You would amazed at how much the scale doesn't move. I can lose zero weight after 36 hours of nothing but water entering me. The body is less CICO and more a system trying to maintain homeostasis as much as possible and pulling ever lever it can.
Yes, eventually eating every other day I did lose weight, but we're talking a steady glide of 1-2lbs a week nothing as severe as people would expect a severely overweight person who only ate half the week to lose.
If you treat humans as biological machines, signaling system (hormones, endocrine system) is very important. When signaling system is messed up, your CI/CO model with self-control doesn't work at all. Signals need to be fixed.
It's insane how arrogant people can be about this. You have not accounted for all of the variables and that is blatantly obvious. The phenomenon is well known and there are multi-variable equations for it, many different models. One popular model is that NEET can decrease below the caloric deficit, meaning you still gain weight by becoming subconsciously lazier despite everything feeling equally difficult subjectively. There are several other more advanced models adding other variables, some depending on insulin sensitivity, for example. Anyway, no physics is broken, laymen are just naive to the complexity abd adaptability of biology.
200kcal/day is less than 10W. Since all energy the body uses is released as heat this puts the maximum sustainable heat radiation with such a diet at 10W.
That's about the level of a typical household LED, which at most feels slightly warm to the touch.
At that energy level you could not sustain weight while maintaining body temperature let alone having a healthy metabolism. That's just a plain fact.
You will lose weight long before you reach 200kcal/day.
That's a good argument against what I said for this particular case. I didn't realize 200kcal was so little. Imagine my comment was written in reply to a higher number though because that criticism is definitely valid for a large number of posts people make in general. ;)
It is the amazing the hoops people will jump through and the lies they will tell themselves and others rather than facing the obvious truth that they are consuming too many calories.
But it is basic physics, which is in fact being violated. It's really very normal to require exceptional proof for this. Like literally any scientific study, not just an anecdote claiming magic.
You cant cheat thermodynamics, so something does not add up. Most likely the calorie estimates if they were self reported.
To illustrate a single 37.5g snickers is slightly below 200kcal. I probably get that number of calories just from the milk in my coffee in an average day.
For how long? Irregularities can persist for a small amount of time, no doubt; but for how long does one maintain weight and life on 300 calories a day?
I don't believe that people can gain weight while eating almost nothing, but I believe that their internal distribution of energy may be out of whack.
Proponents of naive thermodynamics model tend to assume that only "excessive" energy is stored into bodily fat, once all the other tissues have had their fair share.
That is not really true in insulin resistant people, whose storage may be excessive and leave the rest of the body unsatisfied and hungry, which drives them to eat more than a healthy person would.
To us, this looks like deliberate overeating, to them, it is a result of constant hunger caused by the fact that some part of the energy consumed is being immediately locked away in fat tissues by dysregulated metabolic processes.
Notably, it isn't easy to "correct" this situation by just eating less, because that will leave those people feeling really starved. Insulin sensitivity must be restored first, then the fat stores will give up their excess willingly and that person won't suffer.
I'm sure an obese person claiming to eat 1000kcal per day can still gain weight but that is largely due to selfreported calorie estimates being a bad measure. Put that person in a chamber where calorie intake is controlled and I'd bet the effect disappears.
Yeah, I don't know if it was that episode or from somewhere else, but there was a similar thing where they followed the person around for a day and it turned out they didn't count anything ate as a snack between meals. They were accurately counting their meals, but including the snacks went somewhere above 3000 a day.
Ate only 1000kcal in food. Added in 1400kcal in sugary drinks and 2000kcal in small bites of this and that (that don't need to be counted, because it's just one spoonful of peanut butter!)
As somebody who went through successful weight cuts at least 3 times I must notice that not losing weight on 200 calories a day is... a very unrealistic situation. Even a 1000 calories is starving.
(I do weightlifting, and controlling one's weight is basics of everything in the gym)
Jason Fung is probably the world's leading research expert on obesity. If you want videos to watch on it, it starts and ends with this guy. He has done a ton of lectures and blogposts going back over a decade, and also has the stereotypical clickbaity YouTube videos.
He has surely dedicated a significant portion of his life to his own pet theories on obesity, but to consider him a well-regarded expert is very misleading.
He has quite a few claims that are just...ridiculous, and his pop science books have some serious flaws (as reported by actual experts).
As this article shows, there are incredibly complex feedback mechanisms around weight and metabolism, but thermodynamics are still fundamentally a thing.
After he died last year, I ran across this engineering and accounting approach to weight maintenance and loss written up by John Walker (one of the Autodesk founders). It worked very well for him and changed the way I thought about weight and eating. It is interesting reading because he is "one of us"
https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
Basically, he uses a first level approximation of the body as a control system with a feedback loop, and tries to pin down some techniques to bring the system to a known good state (target weight) and manage that loop for long term stability.
The problem with diets based only on calories is that they don't take satiety into account, nor health.
Calories is what makes you gain/lose weight, it's basic physics. Satiety is what makes you want to eat more/less. Nutrients are what is making you healthy.
Fiber and protein tends to make you feel full. Lack of them allow you to eat large amount of calories without feeling full. You need to keep track of micro and macro nutrient to stay healthy.
I would slightly tweak your last. Different nutrients (vitamins/whatever) also impact your body in specific ways. Not just "makes you healthy" but "causes you to do certain things." Caffeine is the easy example here.
This gets back to the "feedback loops" above. There are certainly feedback loops. But you are unlikely to be able to prime any of them by just increasing an input. And increasing output is something you have to train the body to do.
On that last, I think it is easy to model weight gain as something you train the body to do, as well? Certainly fits the model of the article.
There are also flywheel levels of energy use for some folks. Consider the amount of calories a professional athlete goes through. We can say exercise doesn't help weight loss at the population level with relative certainty. It is also relatively safe to say exercise burns an obscene amount of calories in athletes.
Beyond satiety, you also have to consider the role food is playing in the person's life. Is the person hooked on Dopamine, with food a (the?) main source of it? Can they introduce other enjoyable and meaningful activities that take their mind off food? Even if a person is not addicted per-se to the dopamine food provides, if their life is boring and seems to lack meaning, they will still turn to food as a major part of their daily routine.
You also have to consider that some people find daily planning and organization more difficult than others. Keeping to a good diet can require a great deal of planning on a daily basis.
So obesity is often only a symptom of more underlying issues like depression loneliness, a struggle for meaning and connection, ADHD, and more.
Sure; it's a layered system, each one taking more effort or thinking than the other.
Easy diets: drink this shake 3x a day. Don't eat $food_category. Limit calory intake to $amount / day.
More complex: The above, plus macronutrients.
More complex: The above, plus micronutrients.
Add dimensions like lifestyle choices (vegetarianism, veganism etc) or food sensitivities (celiac, lactose intolerance).
I'm no diet expert and need to lose some weight myself but the main advice I'd give is to get stable first. Plan your meals, eat regular meals at regular intervals, keep excess / luxuries / "rewards" to a minimum. Only when you have reached a stable and sustainable pattern should you start to make adjustments. The problem with diets or major lifestyle changes is that they're hard to keep up, simply because they are so different from your usual. The shake diets generally don't work long term because people suffer and go back to their old habits, if not overcompensate because their body signals a deprivation of some kind.
I think it depends on the shake contents. Fiber addition is absolutely crucial for the satiety. Most of your soylent and equivalents include it. Doing an only-shake diet is indeed difficult for most people that want novelty in their food, especially if they are addicted to the dopamine hit from food.
I had to rethink my relationship to food in order to lose weight. Eating a soylent clone for the majority of my meals helped me to do that. Getting a gram-accurate scale for measuring food helped. Building a database in my head of calorie estimates of various foods helped when I was not at home. Double checking nutrition facts for fast food helped too. Really, I was raised by an emotional eater. And I didn't have the natural intuition about food that most people acquire from their parents. I had to unlearn all of that shit, and learn about nutrition, calories, macros, etc
Food is not a treat or a reward, it is fuel to live. Taking a more ascetic approach to food has helped tremendously. And if I know I am going to an engagement with rich foods, I'll even lightly fast before hand so that my calorie intake stays reasonable for the day. And of course, if I have a craving for something calorie rich, I try to make an effort to justify that intake with additional activity that balances things out.
The thing about satiety is that we've conquered food scarcity in the developed world. Feeling hungry is practically taboo and is used as an excuse to consume more, the longer the feeling is felt. When in reality, hunger should be used as a signal of how soon to eat, rather than how much. Hunger is not a pleasant feeling, but the world is also not going to end if you skip a meal or two, especially for the overweight people. Having proper emotional regulation around this is important, too.
You just need to keep it simple. Every time you are hungry have an enormous glass of water, and eat all the vegetables you want, always. Snacks are carrots, cauliflower, snap peas, cucumber.
Avoid sugar and fat as much as possible.
Remain in calorie deficit and you will lose weight and get plenty of nutrients.
Quite so, and I think he does address that, but those are all second level factors, along with activity level, exercise, and their effect on your caloric requirements. He puts together a bunch of excel spreadsheets for tracking many factors, but I have found the simple discipline of accounting for what I eat in a little txt file on my phone sufficient to align my choices with my desired outcome.
One of life's great annoyances to me, is how incredibly effective "just doing something" tends to be. To that level, the act of tracking things is a strong something that almost always shows results. Be it lists on how often something has been cleaned, or procedural checklists on things that need to happen.
I'm convinced, at this point, that there is something mental on it, too. Getting you to think of something gets your body and mind to act differently towards it.
Part of this was obvious to me when I had kids. If they fell, they would immediately look to the reaction of others around them. If people looked scared, they would feel more hurt than if people didn't react at all. If people were encouraging what they were doing, they would sometimes not realize something might hurt.
But, back to my annoyance. As someone that hates tracking lists... why do they have to be so effective? :D
> ...it is plausible that epigenetic memory could also play a role in many other contexts, including addictive diseases. Recent advancements in targeted epigenetic editing global remodelling of the epigenome provide promising new approaches.
"Darn, I think I've contracted some alcoholism. Could you order me another bottle of the reset pills?"
More like "just take these GLP-1 agonists for the rest of your life". Those seem to have an effect on addictions etc. But at least when it comes to weight, people seem to put it back on once they quit. Perhaps the GLP-1 agonist is lacking an epigenetic reset button ...
Fat cells only turn over about 20% per year. You basically need to maintain a reduced weight for 5 years before the fat cells "forget" the higher weight.
If you come off it before that 5 years are up, yeah, you are probably expected to bounce back somewhat.
You might not need to be on GLP-1 forever, but you might need to be on it longer than people currently think.
Weight / obesity management is basically managing a chronic condition, that's why time-limited interventions (workout camps, fasting, dieting, drug injections for a few months) don't work - you have to continuously manage the issue. The idea that you have an issue (obesity) and then make an intervention (loose weight) and therefore the issue is resolved (you are no longer obese) is just wrong. It needs to be managed from either the demand side (regular GLP-1 agonist injections to suppress hunger) or the supply side (eating less / better food). Hence: Dieting = never works. Building sustainable habits or continuous administering of GLP-1 = always works.
(Or you're one of the 5% or so of people with a rare gene variation that basically prevents major fat build-up in the body and there's just nothing to manage for you about that — this would've been a pretty disadvantageous adaption in the past, but it's fair to say that the other 95% are maladpated to the last couple thousand years of human life).
Obviously, but the 'obesogenic memory' that this article is about is a real problem. Calories don't manifest out of thin air but for a plethora of reasons they're much much easier to overconsume as a formerly fat person.
For me weightloss worked over a long period of time with a couple of strategies.
1. One was not eating breakfast, this works well when I'm in the office. Then you have fasting built into your daily routine. This has many metabolic benefits.
2. Switching to a low carb diet (keto). I never thought I'd quit eating bread, but reducing carbonhydrates (esp. sugar) and eating more eggs & meat had the biggest effect on my weight. More so than doing sports. This is just a rough guideline, I don't follow this very strictly.
3. Sports + Fasting: Sometimes on the weekends I go on a hike or do some sports and only eat when I get home in the afternoon (e.g. steak). This forces my body to take the energy from the fat reserves.
The magic is that just counting calories basically leads to the same outcome: less carbs and sugary stuff, less fatty meats, more lean meat, more veggies, etc.
I don't understand why I get downvotes for that. Those are the things I did in the past two years to get to my dream weight and hold it without yoyo effect.
I'm not an expert on this topic, so take it with a grain of salt. The reason a low carb diet works for many people (not necessarily extreme keto) is that it reduces the volatility of blood sugar levels, and this results in fewer cravings and being less tired over the day. So taking in fewer calories becomes easier. And then I learned about gluconeogenesis. The body can create glucose on its own and perfectly regulates glucose levels in the brain, etc., once it switches to that mode.
In the end, these tips help to get into a different lifestyle and then reinforce the habits to stay there because it feels better.
Don't try to lose weight fast. Don't do a diet for a limited amount of time. Change your eating habits to something you can live with permanently. Avoid sugar in drinks, it's so easy to get a lot of calories without feeling full. Sugar in general will give you hunger attacks. For me personally I feel best if I have a big part of calories coming from protein, followed by less carbs and some fat. But removing sugar from drinks alone lost me 30kg, without changing any other habits. Better for the general health as well.
Going to the gym helped me immensely. Not so much in losing weight directly but in feeling better and fresher.
> Going to the gym helped me immensely. Not so much in losing weight directly but in feeling better and fresher.
This. I've found working out has changed the kinds of foods I crave, making it easier to adhere to a diet. I'd usually feel more like a steak with eggs and brocoli rather than a deep-fried burger.
Weigh yourself every day. Journal it. This sets up an objective metric to calibrate against.
Set medium term goals. Don't try to lose 20 kilos in six months. Lose the next kilo by this time in two weeks. Similarly, don't try to lose 0.1 kilos by tomorrow. Weight naturally fluctuates day to day based on water intake, sodium intake, muscle fatigue, and other things. But in the range of 2-3 weeks, you should be able to lose enough weight to see signal in the noise of day to day fluctuations.
If you aren't hitting your medium term goals, find a way to cut calories more. Starting the first month doing a comprehensive calorie log is valuable to help calibrate what foods and portion sizes are relatively problematic.
The rest is just finding eating patterns that work for you that help keep calorie levels low enough. There's a lot of advice about ways to do that, and most need to be taken with a grain of salt, but it's probably true that you can min/max at the margins by increasing fiber intake, increasing protein intake, drinking more water, eating more raw plants, intermittent fasting, and that sort of thing. But you'll mostly see fractional improvements on top of the bottom line math: calories burned need to exceed calories consumed.
As noted elsewhere here, it's a lot of exercise to burn off a few pieces of bacon. Exercise is good for weight loss, but again, it's mostly at the margins for the average person, especially if that person is not an athlete.
I agree with your point in general, but I think the paragraph below is the most important:
> The rest is just finding eating patterns that work for you that help keep calorie levels low enough. There's a lot of advice about ways to do that, and most need to be taken with a grain of salt, but it's probably true that you can min/max at the margins by increasing fiber intake, increasing protein intake, drinking more water, eating more raw plants, intermittent fasting, and that sort of thing. But you'll mostly see fractional improvements on top of the bottom line math: calories burned need to exceed calories consumed.
It's "easy" to lose a ton of weight if you don't eat anything at all. But that's obviously not sustainable. However, what I've found works, is that those things "at the margins" as you say actually have a huge effect on adherence to the "diet". Some foods require a tremendous amount of willpower to only consume in "reasonable" quantities. Think candy bars, chips, the like.
The point is to take note about how you feel after a given meal. Some foods, even though the meal would bring enough calories, leave you with a feeling of wanting more. Avoid these. Others leave you feeling full for hours. Go for those. What I've noticed is that sometimes, the effect may come from "secondary" ingredients, like the dressing on a salad, whereas the salad itself will leave you feeling full for the whole afternoon.
There are things you may enjoy quite a lot, so if they're of the "can't stop eating them sort", you'll have to forego them entirely. It's actually much easier to not eat them at all (and, ideally, not even have them in the house) than hoping you'll be reasonable. With time, these foods will lose their appeal, and you won't randomly crave them every day. Getting over this first step is what I find hardest.
I think you need to make it sustainable. I never had to do it consistently but even I know...
Nobody is going to live hungry all the time.
Nobody is going to grow old counting calories every damn day.
So rather than just eating less make sure to work out some. Consistently.
Id suggest strength training.
I did a full body strength training workout 2-3 times a week.
Some may suggest doing leg days, arm days, etc but going there takes time on itself and i have other places to be than the gym.
To match that strength training eat more protein.
Things like chicken are your friend. This tends to be higher on the satiety index so you'll feel full faster and you'll eat less without it being so painfull.
Eat a bit of protein with every meal
Really there's a whole lot of other stuff that you can fill yourself up with that won't be too bad for ya.
And when you go for a carb? Get the complex one if it's a choice. It'll dampen that peak in insulin.
Avoid the sugary stuff. It's addictive for sure but taper off.
Eat before going to the store. Make the hard decisions there not with the easy snack within reach in the evening.
Do a bit of everything that works until it becomes second nature.
Overfocusing on one silver bullet doesn't tend to work.
This is advice people often give, but unfortunately it's wrong. Exercise and working out are useful and healthy, but it's not a sufficient tool for losing weight in most situations. The core problem is that the amount of calories you eat is in the ballpark of thousands, while a workout will burn in the order of hundreds (excluding athletes and such). This along with metabolic adaptation means that it's always easier to out eat what you burn extra. In other words, you can't outrun your fork. Exercise is healthy for a wide array of reasons, but it's only a small part of losing weight. Nearly all of it has to come from your eating habits.
Oh for sure. But it helps to spread the effort and to have to fight hunger and cravings less.
If one fails there it makes sense to put at least minimum effort to alleviate that strain.
Also i mentioned strength training specifically since
other than what you burn at a workout resting metabolic rate also increases and helps. I assume the average person on this website is notably rather sedentary and would see above average results depending on age and such.[1]
(Even more so if he's a guy which I believed he was based on his name.)
You'll always need a base and you're reducing your intake anything so something like a 15% difference is gigantic when you're struggling and super helpfull (even just 5% is worthwile).
edit: and I'll acknowledge it would take a while before that increased resting metabolic rate starts to play more but again....it needs to be sustainable so whatever you're doing you need to be able to keep up anyway.
Yes. One summer my friends asked me to join in a running program with them. We went from basically sedentary to running 5k a day within several weeks. They hoped to lose weight. I didn't expect to, because we weren't eating any differently, but I did it because I wanted to get stronger and less out-of-breath.
I was right; we didn't lose any weight, but we did get much better at running without gasping to a stop within a couple minutes.
I might consider working with a cognitive behavioral therapist. Since you’ve already lost weight, you do know (in big picture terms) how to lose/not gain weight: eat a healthy diet consistently and get regular exercise. For most people who struggle with their weight, there are emotional eating patterns or even just bad habits that are just hard to break on their own.
Of course knowledge about diet and exercise is immensely valuable, but if there are psychological factors getting in the way, it’s going to be harder to adopt a consistently healthy lifestyle.
Probably my only good advice is to not take internet advice too seriously, which I'm sure you are aware of. The most epistemologically sound advice i can give is try everything and find what works for you. Lots of internet people advocate for low carb approaches for many apparently valid reasons. Recently, i tried eating whole food plant based and it's been an amazing 2 weeks (yes incredibly short time to report). I'm not trying that hard, i'm eating well, and feel amazing. If i keep going I'll probably supplement protein, vitamin b, omegas, fish, etc, but my weight is just falling off so far, unlike any other eating plan i've tried. Not super strict either. Eating whatever i want when i eat out, but i like how it makes me feel so i tend to stick with it when possible. Your mileage will vary. It's literally 2 weeks so far lol
There aren't any, statistically speaking. All strategies are about equally ineffective, long-term. Only really expensive, high-touch, long-term personal engagements by professionals achieve really significant results, and even there, less so than you might think.
The answers that actually work are "move to an environment where you will likely get and stay skinnier" (maybe a different, skinnier country) or (this one's new! There's finally a semi-reasonable answer to this question!) "take GLP-1 agonists". There's no strategy that'll do it (for outliers, yes, but over a population, no)
Its a lifestyle change not a diet. Don't stop the diet / exercise when you get to the "target" weight.
This idea sucks when you are looking at a plate of lettuce leaves - but you should also avoid extreme diets and extreme exercise as it is unsustainable.
in addition to this, start by making small, but permanent changes to your lifestyle over time, if you change everything at once then of course you'll revert pretty quickly
It's not about the weight, it's about the exercise.
Start with something easy and establish a rule that won't ever be broken. If you break a rule once, you'll lose the fight.
My rule, for example, when I started to train more:
- start with 10 crunches every morning and evening
- increase by 2 crunches every day
- no exceptions
When you are at ~2 months in, you can add weight training to it to get stronger.
Additionally, find a sport that you can do once or twice a week that is FUN to do. By FUN I really mean it. There's no point in doing sports if you don't enjoy it.
If you enjoy playing batminton, go for it! If you enjoy table tennis, go for it! If you enjoy Kung Fu, Krav Maga, or whatever ... go for it!
Sports isn't about reaching goals, it's about having fun while doing it. Otherwise, you will not overcome the struggles. Your brain needs a reward, and enjoying sports helps you keep wanting more of it.
Have you actually lost weight like that? I think exercise is a huge trap for weight loss. Cardio exercise makes you healthy, but it will also make you hungry. Especially if you are not used to it. Overweight people are usually already overeating. They can't deal with hunger and cravings well. If you make them do cardio, they will likely eat back whatever they burned and most likely much more. And even if they don't, they were already overeating, so chances are high you are not in a caloric deficit still. I have lost a lot of weight (30kg) three times now (gained some of it back every time unfortunately) and I think there is much truth to "You don’t lose weight at the gym, you lose weight in the kitchen.".
> Cardio exercise makes you healthy, but it will also make you hungry.
That's what I've noticed, too.
But I've also noticed that it makes me crave different foods than when I sit on my ass all day. So, on average, I tend to actually eat less, because I don't have random cravings in between meals.
I doubt that people who are overweight and sedentary only eat "healthy" meals, only too much.
I mean, the ranges of a European mentioning that they are overweight compared to the US are of course very different. What is overweight here counts as normal over there.
I am currently at around ~120kg and my "goal weight" was around that area. I still have a tummy that I am not satisfied with, but my legs are mostly muscles due to me cycling a lot. I sold my car on purpose to force me to cycle in bad weather.
Currently I am also trying out a more hardcore exercise program because I never gained a lot of muscles in the past, even when I was doing MMA training 6 times a week.
I'm probably stating the obvious here: muscles weigh more than fat, meaning you'll always gain weight before you can lose weight. I mentioned the 2-3 months time span because that's (for me) when it switched, and my body suddenly had it easier to get into calories burning mode.
Suffice it to say: I don't eat nor drink any sweets, not even in my muesli. No artificial sweeteners either. I replaced sweets with fruits in my muesli, for example. And I just drink water, because soft drinks are the human brain's enemy.
The decision to not eat nor drink anything sweet is important, I think, because it helps me go into calories burning mode much faster with much less calories.
Funnily enough, once you get decent enough I have a hard time eating after doing cardio. I need to force myself to eat something that isn't just a gatorade because my body is too busy recovering to spare any blood for my gut.
Tell that to all the skinny endurance weekend warriors who fuel their exercise with huge amounts of sugary drinks and gummy bears. If you are curious, read about the function of GLUT4 in the membrane of skeletal muscles.
Obviously professional athletes or people who otherwise have an extremely active lifestile can afford to eat more.
The obese people and sedentary office workers don't and would need to train for months to be able to out-run a single piece of cake on a regular basis without injury.
The phrase is good advice for that group of people.
Here's what the "The Renaissance Diet 2.0" book recommends:
1) Don't lose more than 10% of your bodyweight in the same weight loss period.
2) Don't lose more than 1% of body weight per week.
3) At the end of a weight loss period, transition to eating at maintenance calories for a while before starting a new weight loss period.
A common mistake is to completely stop dieting when you reach your goal weight. This is a bad idea because your body has adapted to the diet (e.g. decreased energy expenditure) and it's therefore easy to regain weight rapidly. What you should do is keep tracking what you eat while increasing calories to maintenance level, to give a chance to your body to slowly decrease hunger and increase energy expenditure.
Yes, unfortunately. I was a world class yo-yo dieter, bouncing over 100 pounds four times, with many many lesser yos. This is, officially, a type of bulimia. I binge and diet instead of vomit. After more than five decades of that I found stability via sufficient protein, but I've lost my previous knack for losing weight. So now I'm stuck right in the middle of one of my previous yo-yos. It's better here than at the top though.
Its all about long term habits, basic knowledge about nutrition and the 80/20 rule.
Hardcore diets and then falling back to the old habits are absolutely not the way to do it.
There are things like diet fatigue, the mentioned Yo-Yo effect you don't want to deal with.
Your "diet" should be generally healthy and long term sustainable.
It just does not work to replace one way of malnutrition with another one.
So here are the things i (BMI 22, bodyfat < 19% for now 20+ years, at age over 40) would recommend:
One is strength based exercise.
Find 1-3 days in your week where you can dependably (!) spend an hour or two to go to the gym.
It is better to go once every week reliably, than to go 3 times one week and then skipping the next.
Get a full body training plan consisting of multi joint exercises.
For example don't waste your time on biceps if you can do rows which trains your biceps and back at the same time.
You must do strength training order to gain muscle mass.
Muscles have a large influence on your hormones, which helps to suppress hunger and keeps you fit in general.
The hunger suppression is important if you lose weight.
It works this way: if you lose weight, you will usually lose muscle mass alongside fat. Losing muscles creates a huge hunger signal compared to fat.
Doing strength training keeps you from losing muscle (or even building it) so your hunger is lower while you lose weight.
And you don't want to end up skinny fat with issues like back pain (which i ended up with at age 20 without ever being overweight).
Don't overdo it. But be consistent, do the smallest amount necessary but every single week no exception.
Don't do cardio (at least not cardio only).
Cardio is fine if you do it for sporting reasons but since you seem to be overweight, i assume this is not the case ;)
So cardio would just waste your time because it burns surprisingly small amounts of calories while increasing hunger by a lot.
It also does not build muscles as much so why bother?
The most important part is to get your nutrition in check.
Basically do the following:
Close to every meal should, by volume, roughly consist of
1/4 protein, like chicken or other lean meat, or plant based alternatives
1/4 carbs, like rice, potatoes whatever (pasta has tons of calories so be careful here)
2/4 vegetables like carrots, broccoli... whatever just mix it up.
It is a ton of vegetables, which is good because it keeps your stomach full and is healthy in every conceivable way.
Do not skip fats, but skip pure sugars especially in liquid form like soda.
Don't do cheat days where you mindlessly eat thousands of calories, this messes with your psyche for no reason.
But eating out, or some junk food is fine from time to time you are not a robot.
Inform yourself about the calorie content of your meals and try to control the amount.
There are many ways to exert control, which are highly individual.
Some have no problem skipping breakfast, some make their meals smaller, some do keto or track calories.
Whatever floats your boat you have to find out. Remember it has to be sustainable.
Personally i try to get a good amount of protein into my meals and i keep an eye out for calories without counting.
Every single morning:
Use the toilet, step on a scale, check your weight.
It varies a bit from day to day but the average helps you track. You might want to use an app but its not really necessary.
This is your main way to keep track. Gain weight? Try to eat a bit less next week.
Keep in mind that you are in it for the long run.
There is no need to lose tons of weight in the short term. It is fine to be slow which is way more sustainable anyway.
You want to be fit for the rest of your life so you have to keep at it for the rest of your life.
Well, if the above paper is correct there is something you need to know. Epigenetic changes are caused my the methylation of DNA. So if there are epigentic chnages that are causing you to gain weight, what needs to be done is to Demethylate the DNA. This is done through Demethylase enzymes:
If all else fails, look into GLP-1 meds. At this point ,it's not even controversial anymore and some of the social stigma is gone. it's hard enough losing weight even with medical intervention.
it is, at best, a tautology, at worst, taunting the asker on the very thing they are struggling with. I think we can do better to help each other with something difficult
the fact that you were able to live with your level of hunger does not mean that for somebody else the level of hunger is the same or is as easy to manage as it was for you. this is not helpful
I always used to think negatively about people that were severely overweight (still do unconsciously if I'm being honest) as I always attributed their obesity to lack of will power. I'm a huge proponent of better living through chemistry (steroids - with frequent blood work, nootropics, whatever) and recently I decided to get my abs back. I hopped on some compounded semiglutide and was blown away by the change in my attitude towards food. I had always snacked at night after the kids went to bed and had built up about 25 pounds over the past decade. I was able to drop it all in 3 months without any sort of dieting, I just ate when I was hungry. Decided to not eat after 6:30pm and just did it, no issues while on the semiglutide.
Really changed my attitude about food, and my body and minds interaction with it. A lot of this is subconscious and really hard to get control of. The fact a chemical compound was able to change my mental relationship with food also put an interesting spin on my ideas about consciousness and self control as a whole. We are just slaves to our biological processes.
I had this same experience, but I have not continued to take the medication after a short experiment.
I found I could get a similar outcome (subjective experience) through my food selection
Today I’ve eaten around 2kg of vegetables today (zucchini, capsicum, eggplant, cauliflower, spinach) all of which was under 500 calories,
and I’ve eaten fish.
If I eat a massive amount of vegetables and get ~200g protein, I don’t feel I’m depriving myself and am satiated on under 2000 calories, previously I would typically eat over 3000 on a normal day.
As for people lacking willpower, the genetics of hunger mean all of us experience vastly different levels of hunger. You might be interested to read about the family in Pakistan who could not produce a relevant hormone leptin, and the toddlers driven to fighting by insatiable hunger to steal food from each other, and the dramatic change in their lives after medical intervention with leptin injections
My brother's family has done something similar although in a different direction. They have been strictly carnivore for several years now. Able to eat large amounts of food while keeping calories low and feeling satiated. It's worked well for them.
There is more information about the family involved out there, but I can't remember where I read about it.
A thing I found interesting about the genetics of hunger, is the concept of mongenetic, v polygenetic traits
Monogenetic traits - a variation in a single gene is has an observed often severe impact. Polygenetic traits - variations in a large number of genes and environmental are contributing
In reality these traits exist on a spectrum of severity. The more sublte the impact of a gene the more people you need to study to tease out the influence of the gene, so monogenetic traits tend to be discovered first.
The mechanism I've heard of (heard proposed?) for skeletal muscle is that muscle cells retain the additional nuclei (myonuclei) developed during strength training, even during detraining periods. Then subsequently re-developing strength is easier because you've still got all of those nuclei.
That sounds similar to the way the fat thing was described to me, in the past. Curious how all of that relates. If anyone has a good read to dive into this, I'd be grateful!
It really lends itself to the way I model "training" for stuff. Sucks, as we want to think there are differences from rote practice and learning. But it increasingly seems that any differences there are are much softer than is often taught.
> However, maintaining weight loss is a considerable challenge, especially as the body seems to retain an obesogenic memory that defends against body weight changes
This is validating as I’m very skeptical about this when looking for a partner that currently has a physiology I’m interested in but had one I wasn’t interested in at some point before, and this seems to be a shared experience
The more you research/learn about obesity, the worse it is, much like smoking. One of the most depressing stats is that dieting does not get easier with time. The probability of eventually regaining all the weight eventually converges to 100%. Even if you're successful for 2 years, people still regain by year 4, 5, etc. The body never resists trying to regain the weight. GLP-1 drugs are the best hope yet.
This is self-defeating and untrue. Many people, myself included, have kept weight off for decades. But you don’t get there by thinking of your new lifestyle as “dieting”. You need to learn to love eating healthy foods in a healthy amount, and getting exercise. Eventually you can get to a place where the old foods and habits are simply unappealing.
That's the crux! Constant hunger starts nagging me as soon as I try. I've tried several times for several months, with nice results from the weight's points of view, but I never got to the point where my quality of life globally increased, and that was always due to the constant hunger.
I'll only retry when I'll have found a way to stop the hunger now.
It doesn't help everyone but some people find it more useful to try and "enjoy" feeling hungry rather than spending as much mental effort trying to ignore it or not feel hungry. Sort of like how body builders learn to enjoy the muscle ache from heavy lifting.
That’s pretty useful info! If you were feeling uncomfortably hungry beyond a short adjustment period, that makes me question if your caloric deficit was too aggressive. And/or if your diet didn’t include enough fiber and protein for satiety. (It’s also possible to be confusing other signals for hunger, like thirst, boredom, or anxiety.)
Losing weight does not have to be so hard. You can lose a lot of weight gradually over time with a small, consistent deficit. Measurement accuracy is critical, though - you will absolutely fail if you aren’t logging your food like a lab scientist.
But it is definitely possible to succeed without that constant sense of privation. In fact, if you want to succeed long-term, you HAVE to find that balance because nobody can force themselves to feel deprived indefinitely.
I found that sugar free hard sweets/candies helped to try and satiate some of the pangs. It's still hard, and you might end up "chain eating" like 5 or 6 of the things in a row, but I figure better that than bingeing chocolate or whatever.
Its because people treat it as a DIET and not THE NEW NORMAL.
When you stop a diet, you go back to eating shit. The new normal just keeps you at the same place because you get used to the fact that you don't need to eat breakfast, and a 500 calorie lunch is perfectly satiating, hell maybe a bit too much.
I wonder how much of that is due to a sedentary lifestyle? If you're running and biking and strength training it makes a big difference vs trying to maintain a healthy weight with a low TDEE.
Yeah, what you said is key - and I can also vouch that it's absolutely possible to keep it away for good, aside from small setbacks that almost everyone experiences, since we’re not robots.
The word diet is problematic because most people see it as something temporary. But you can't just eat healthy to lose weight and then go back to old habits, expecting the weight to stay off. That just doesn't make sense.
Also for many people, food isn’t just about pleasure - it’s also a way to deal with boredom, stress, depression, and so on. So even if someone sticks to a diet, if the psychological root causes are still there, it's going to be hard to stay away from junk food.
> One of the most depressing stats is that dieting does not get easier with time.
Yeah, I've tried several times under medical control.
I kept asking my supervising doctor: "When is the constant hunger going to get better?" And the answer was always in the range of a few weeks to several months. But that moment never came... never!
And, in the end, all the kilograms I had lost along the route always found their way back home, and always with some new friends they had met while we had lost sight of each other.
Yeah I often think that I am addicted to food. They say men think about sex every 7 seconds - I think about eating every 7 seconds!
If I start eating badly, it is very very very hard to stop. I will crash off the rails into a spiral of binge-eating for the rest of the day until I feel physically sick (which takes a while).
You just can't start.
With alcoholism or smoking it is plausible (although hard) to go cold-turkey and just eliminate the things that lead you to the binges. You can make lifestyle changes to avoid them. But you still have to eat, so for me I am always one meal away from losing it and pigging out. I never feel full (the food challenges of "if you can finish this meal it's free" are a walk in the park for me - anyone for dessert?). It takes continuous and immense will power to stop - I am hovering around 95kgs at 1.85m which I know is "bad" but tell me something I don't know. It's hard.
the "just" is doing a lot of work, too much. Most people with an addiction or weight problem are very well aware of what they should be doing (or not doing), but they'll be fighting with their body telling them constantly that they really, really need to eat or smoke. This is the hard part and telling someone "just do it" is not helpful in the least
That depends on your definition of "reasonable". Every single person I have met who is struggling to lose weight is attempting to consume fewer calories. Telling them to "just eat less" provides no novel information or actionable strategies. At best it makes you sound like the kind of person who most people avoid because you prefer being right to being helpful.
In line with the book "Intuitive Eating", I'm trying to make peace with both food and my weight lately for this reason.
Given what effects stress, depression, anxiety, guilt, shame, etc. have on the psyche and body, I'm running an experiment, and betting that making peace and taking care of my body as it is right now will benefit me in the long run.
That's clearly not true. Calorie counting can work if you stick to it and aren't shit at estimating the calories in food. Almost any diet can work if you are able to stick with it. Appetite suppressants like amphetamines seen to work too. We've also seen that the new diabetes drugs actually work.
The only reliable way to lose weight is through a caloric deficit. And the only reliable way to be on a caloric deficit is through counting your calories. If you're dieting without actually counting your calories, then at best you are only hoping and guessing that your diet is sufficient enough to put you in a caloric deficit.
You don't have to count calories to eat in a caloric deficit. Counting is not the only reliable way to hit a deficit. Tons and tons of people on GLP-1 drugs are not counting calories but are in a deficit.
“Any diet” is still putting you at a net caloric deficit. There is no other principle that can explain weight loss that I know of. Whether you’re counting calories to achieve that deficit or following a “diet” it comes down to the exact same thing. Counting calories just demystifies the process of weight loss.
The only true reliable way is to burn more than you eat. Counting calories is a way to keep track of that, but it's only going to be so-so accurate unless you only eat labeled food. I will certainly not measure the weight of a banana I eat, and anything else is just a very rough estimate as a banana can be twice the size of another banana.
In general, when I was losing weight I did not really need to count calories, I just ate less than I did. And this worked because I was always hungry especially initially, until the body adapts. If you're always going to check "can I eat this one more thing dear calculator" I'd say you're not really ready to lose weight because tormenting yourself like this every day you will burn out before you can make a dent.
> I will certainly not measure the weight of a banana I eat, and anything else is just a very rough estimate as a banana can be twice the size of another banana.
This is the wrong way to look at it. Sometimes you'll have a larger banana, sometimes a smaller banana, but overall it'll average out. What you need is consistency to compare to your own previous measurements, not perfect accuracy.
For example: By counting my calories and keeping track of my weight, I've learned that I burn about 2200 calories per day. If I went over my foods and measured them perfectly it probably wouldn't be that number, but because I'm consistent in how I measure it I can know with certainty whether I'm above or below that limit. I've been able to reliably control my weight for a few years now because of this and I'm not even measuring, just eyeballing how much of things I use.
Well, yeah. Adipocytes multiply when you get fat. But when you lose weight, they don't apoptose, they just shrink in volume by giving up their lipid stores.
I kinda went down a rabbit hole a while back with certain treatments that can kill adipocytes, as there's actually some significant research backing both heat-generating and cold-generating treatments. They do kill fat cells, and they are flushed out of the body. But people who undergo such treatments do not lose fat. At best, these devices can reshape your fat, pulling it out of one area and distributing it more evenly in other areas.
The problem is that when you kill an adipocyte, it releases all of its triglycerides, which are then free to move around the blood stream. But when blood triglyceride levels are high and there isn't significant oxidation, other metabolic processes are triggered to start to store them. So you kill an adipocyte, release the triglycerides, which get reabsorbed into still living adipocytes, which now get engorged and then multiply again, replacing the fat cells that have been killed.
After learning quite a bit about these processes, I think these devices might actually be useful, not for losing fat, but by eliminating this sort of fat memory. In other words, they should be used after significant weight loss, because adipocytes are relatively empty and externally triggered apoptosis can kill the cells without releasing significant quantities of triglycerides which can be reabsorbed and trigger adipocyte mitosis. I think this would effectively reset that person to a state as if they had never been fat in the first place. Thoughts?
Interesting!
Why can't we just remove the triglycerids from the blood before they trigger adipogenesis? Basically we need a form of dialysis.
I have no real or deep knowledge, just some casual pop news reading.
Isn't ketosis the state, in which the body switches to fat as the primary fuel?
To answer your question, yes that is what ketosis is. Eliminate the non-fibrous carbs from your diet and after 48 hours or once the carbs are out of your blood stream your body will start to break down stored body fat. Through a process in the liver you get ketones. In the context of meal planning, meal timing, and other lifestyle choices it's extremely effective. For anyone with ADHD / ADD patterns do TRY IT for a month!
The study and the discussion here however are focused on reducing the quantity of those adipocyte cells in the body, which aren't reduced through ketosis. I think ketosis causes more of a volumetric reduction of each adipocyte cell but I'm really not sure.
Like a balloon filling with air, do adipocyte cells expand in volume while storing lipids?
It is. But it's hard to maintain. I was in ketosis for a month via diet (verified with urine strips twice a day) and it was a struggle to figure out what to eat. Camembert, bacon-wrapped chicken and eggs gets boring after a while. Our civilization runs on carbohydrates, for better or worse.
Do you not like meat?
seems like it would be a good idea then to do a heavy strength based training session and fast before getting this done to maximize effectiveness. Those liberated triglycerides would be sucked up by muscle tissue to be used for repair.
Similar adaptions occur in muscle. The extent of new muscle fiber development (hyperplasia) is debated, so there are multiples factors influencing how muscle retains some memory of past strength ability.
Once you’ve reached a level of physical strength it’s easier to return to that level in the future. This has been a topic of debate in the sports world because past anabolic steroid use could therefore carry benefits into the future long after the athlete has stopped using the steroid. Non-professional athletes shouldn’t get too excited about using steroids, though, because the damage steroids do to the body’s own hormone systems also has lasting effects unless you plan on doing TRT for the rest of your life, which has its own downsides.
For average people this does show the importance of getting at least some exercise when you’re young. It’s much easier to get a little bit fit when you’re young which then makes it easier to stay fit in the future. Never too late too start.
I can't remember exactly what I was listening to, maybe some kind of NPR podcast.
But the doctor was mentioning that none of the influencers influencing young people to try T and Steroids (which is rampant right now) are ever mentioning that you are on a ticking clock to infertility as soon as you start this stuff. Some people can regain their fertility but it might take years, and some people are going to be permanently infertile even staying on HRT.
Plenty of those "alpha male" guys on social media are shooting blanks.
Testicular atrophy and HPT axis suppression is a thoroughly documented side effect of TRT and steroids. Even beginner bodybuilders know that taking steroids will crush their natural testosterone production. They can kind of bring it back by taking short courses and using certain medications after the cycle, but most discover that some permanent damage is being done with each cycle.
There are two problems with framing it as an infertility problem:
1 - It reduces fertility but many users retain some fertility. The bigger problem for most is that natural testosterone production won't come back to the same level if they ever discontinue, so they're on it for life. Managing testosterone injections every week or multiple times per week for the rest of your life is doable but a pain, especially if you have to travel or you're not the best at keeping up with prescriptions. There are also ups and downs and side effects that come from artificial testosterone dosing. Many people are surprised to discover that after the first year or two they don't feel "great" any more and it's just back to where they started, but with a lifetime dependency now. Others get serious side effects like Gynecomastia (breast growth in men, possibly requiring surgery) or secondary hormonal alterations that negatively impact mood, cognition, or libido.
2 - Many young men in their 20s or even teens see infertility as a positive rather than a negative. It's very common for people of this age to think they've made up their mind for life, but they have yet to even have a serious relationship or even know any peers with kids. People who work in fertility fields are starting to see a lot of men who went into TRT or steroids when they were young because they thought the consequences would never be a problem for them.
> Plenty of those "alpha male" guys on social media are shooting blanks.
Honestly, they don't care. I skim the testosterone subreddits occasionally and many people brag and joke about how small their testicles are.
It's crazy to me to see this shift happening. TRT clinics that advertise on the radio, TikTok, and everywhere else will entice people to come in for "free tests" but the trick is that it doesn't matter what your numbers come back as, they'll always find a way to prescribe you TRT because it's easy recurring revenue for them with lifelong dependence attached.
I am a data point of resuscitation of fertility. Confirmed to be shooting blanks after years of juice, and decided to see if I could reactivate by following the broscience (and all the pubmed papers) on the topic.
An aggressive protocol of HCG and HMG (analogues for FSH and LH in the pituitary) reactivated the testes to get back to spermatogenesis and T production after about 5 years of complete dormancy. It took about 4 months of daily needles and well-timed marital conception-attempts. The son I fathered as a result is anecdotally very strong and a voracious eater. My urologist said it sounded like I knew everything I needed to do and was satisfied to let me self-treat.
To clarify, did you try to conceive approximately four times (four months)? Because from what I hear that isn't exactly unheard of in people that aren't on the juice.
No, it was about a year of multiple attempts per ovulation before I decided to get serious and bring my whole HTPA under control.
>It's very common for people of this age to think they've made up their mind for life, but they have yet to even have a serious relationship or even know any peers with kids.
At least it is much less serious than people in the opposite situation, that think they want a child at 19 without understanding the implications.
> Even beginner bodybuilders know that taking steroids will crush their natural testosterone production.
Maybe beginner bodybuilders understand this. But I'd argue the average new steroid user is more likely the be un/mis-informed. The average person gets all their information from Instagram/Tiktok/Youtube/Reddit.
But my observation is a lot of people are jumping on gear for purely aesthetic reasons. They are ordering online from research chemical sites and they're almost always not working with a trainer/coach/doctor (vast majority of young people on gear are not doing it under any type of supervision, also means many skip basic necessities like regular bloodwork).
It's much more common for people to jump on gear, experience a negative effect, and then do research afterwards. Which is fine for substances that are relatively benign, but risky when you're messing with your hormones especially at a young age.
> Honestly, they don't care. I skim the testosterone subreddits occasionally and many people brag and joke about how small their testicles are.
Wouldn't surprise me at all if most of that was coping behavior.
What is there to cope about? It's not a big deal, and arguably a benefit.
This is interesting because about 20 or so years ago when I was super into bodybuilding, you couldn't talk about a "cycle" on a bodybuilding forum without talking about a "post cycle protocol."
I know that's different than permanent TRT but I feel like you couldn't get very far researching that stuff without understanding that you natural test production (and sperm production) would get "shut down" as soon as you started adding exogenous androgens.
Yeah, it's well known that steroids shut you down. The problem with the broscience is that the PCT is talked about like it reverses everything like an antidote, but long-term bodybuilders often end up on TRT because eventually they can't get back to baseline.
That isn't true. Dedicated bodybuilders, starting more commonly ~5 years ago, decided that PCT wasn't worth it. Instead of typical 16-20 week cycles followed by 4-6 weeks of PCT, they adjust the dose between supraphysiological and (generally) top-of-normal, i.e.: blast and cruise.
It's not because they couldn't recover, it's because they don't want to or see the point.
The big, big problem is heart disease. Infertility might be bad for your family planning, but the high blood pressure will kill you.
> For average people this does show the importance of getting at least some exercise when you’re young.
They’ve known this for centuries. Quoting the great Socrates:
“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable."
> This has been a topic of debate in the sports world because past anabolic steroid use could therefore carry benefits into the future long after the athlete has stopped using the steroid.
Similar advantage is conveyed to athletes who had elevated (~male) testosterone levels in the past, even if they subsequently take blockers / go on HRT to ~female hormone levels.
Though that also comes with male-pattern skeletal growth. So unless your body still has elevated/male-level T levels, you're carrying around a disproportionately heavy skeleton which negates the advantage. If the net effect were actually an advantage, you'd expect the womens' sports which are allowing trans women to be dominated by them, but they really just aren't.
Additionally, trans women on HRT typically have their T suppressed below standard cis women levels, and thus well below the levels of cis women athletes (the top levels in any sport by definition tending to be outliers in performance).
> Though that also comes with male-pattern skeletal growth. So unless your body still has elevated/male-level T levels, you're carrying around a disproportionately heavy skeleton which negates the advantage.
The male-pattern skeletal growth isn't necessarily a disadvantage. E.g., narrower hips and stronger bones is likely an advantage in running.
> If the net effect were actually an advantage, you'd expect the womens' sports which are allowing trans women to be dominated by them, but they really just aren't.
My understanding is the opposite. In fact, if it wasn't the case, there is basically no reason to have separate mens and womens fields.
This is anecdotal evidence but I'm a trans woman who transitioned at 30. I ran cross country and track and was the fastest kid at my school in a relatively competitive program. I got depressed after college and gained a bunch of weight and only ran sporadically. I started HRT, I keep my T levels in the lowest range that's healthy for cis women. I got the urge to start exercising again. I now run more than twice as much as before, lost 40 pounds, and do roller derby on top of that. I'm still not as fast as I was when I was mostly sedentary, drinking beers every night in my apartment. I don't know if I'm faster or slower than I would have been if I was a cis woman but I did take a pretty big hit.
> The male-pattern skeletal growth isn't necessarily a disadvantage. E.g., narrower hips and stronger bones is likely an advantage in running.
It might or might not help, but if it were a net benefit then you'd expect trans women runners to perform more strongly than they actually do.
> My understanding is the opposite. In fact, if it wasn't the case, there is basically no reason to have separate mens and womens fields.
This sentence seems to presuppose that trans women are men. There are some womens' divisions which allow trans women (typically with stipulations requiring some duration of HRT), and they are not dominant there. To me, the sensible conclusion seems to be that trans women perform roughly on par with cis women, not that cis women perform roughly on par with cis men.
My last sentence wasn't particularly coherent; sorry. I have sort of two ideas here that were merged poorly: (1) setting aside trans entirely, cismen enjoy significant sport advantages over ciswomen in most sports, and this (fairness) is basically why we have women's sports instead of combined fields. (2) I believe transwomen have outsized performance in women's sports (contra your claim of no outperformance).
> There are some womens' divisions which allow trans women (typically with stipulations requiring some duration of HRT), and they are not dominant there.
I think there are maybe two things I'd poke at here. (1) Sports where transwomen enjoy greater advantage are more likely to have already excluded transwomen from womens' fields. And (2) the number of transwomen is tiny to begin with and AFAIK they have lower rates of participation in sports than ciswomen.
I think you can basically make a case for including or excluding transwomen in women's sports depending on whether you think inclusion or fairness is most important.
> I think you can basically make a case for including or excluding transwomen in women's sports depending on whether you think inclusion or fairness is most important.
A pretty wide spread of sports have allowed trans women*, and they have not dominated. If trans women did have an outsized performance in women's sports, there'd be examples to point to. I don't think you can make an evidence-based case for fairness and inclusion being at odds, given there aren't any unfair examples of inclusion to point to.
Some of the most notable examples include weightlifting and swimming. In weightlifting, probably the sport I'd expect an unfair advantage to make itself most apparent, Laurel Hubbard got a DNF in the Olympics, and did merely pretty good in several other events. Or in swimming, another sport I'd expect body proportions to have a significant impact in, Lia Thomas, who was the center of a ton of controversy, also did merely fine.
I'm not sure there are sports where trans women would have a bigger advantage than weightlifting, if such an advantage existed. And the tiny number of trans women interested in sports means that erring on the side of inclusion (if it does turn out to be an error) would also have a tiny negative impact,
* - Pedantic side note, combining "transwomen" and "ciswomen" into single words implies that we're different base nouns. It's similar to how "chinamen" is not acceptable, but generally there's nothing wrong with "Chinese men". "Trans" and "cis" are just adjectives modifying "men" or "women".
> In weightlifting, probably the sport I'd expect an unfair advantage to make itself most apparent, Laurel Hubbard got a DNF in the Olympics, and did merely pretty good in several other events.
On the contrary, Laurel Hubbard is a good example of how apparent this male physical advantage is when male athletes are allowed to compete in the female category.
Here's a chart showing ranked lifts for both men's and women's weightlifting in the World Masters Games, where Hubbard won a gold medal in the women's category in 2017: https:/i.ibb.co/WWf7CMQD/hubbard.jpg (the source of this graph is a developmental biologist who, amongst other things, studies sex differences in sport).
This shows that the set of lifts by female and male weightlifters are entirely distinct. Hubbard falls within the middle range of the male rankings and is a huge outlier compared to the female rankings.
For the Olympics, if Hubbard had been female, qualification for the competition would have been unprecedented. Hubbard was competing in the wake of an earlier elbow injury, had taken a years-long career break, and was considerably older than any female weightlifter ever to qualify for Olympic weightlifting: female weightlifters peak at around age 26 and Hubbard was 43 years old at the time.
Being male in the female category was sufficient to mitigate all the effects of older age, chronic injury, undertraining, and - compared to other males - lack of world class talent.
It's also worth noting that Hubbard came last at the Olympics due to being disqualified for improper technique, not because of being unable to physically manage the lifts.
Out of curiosity, do you have a link to the source of that graph or the name of the researcher?
I always hear this "TRT for life" thing but every bodybuilder I've known on gear has had no problem going on/off on a blast-and-cruise with post-cycle therapy.
Post-cycle therapy will take longer if you're taking exogenous testosterone for longer, but it's definitely not a 'for life'/'impossible' thing if you've been on TRT for a few years and decide to stop. It's just fearmongering.
> Once you’ve reached a level of physical strength it’s easier to return to that level in the future.
If you're reading this and you're < 30 and physically weak (not overweight, but lacking muscle mass) I cannot stress enough what a year or two hitting the gym could do for your permanent strength and muscle mass.
I was ridiculously skinny and physically weak going into my 20s and I just assumed that was the way I was built. But I got into fitness in my early 20s and packed on quite a bit of muscle and it's genuinely shocking to me how much base-level muscle mass and strength I've retained now 15 years on.
I always felt one of the most demotivating things about working out was that all the effort I was putting into the gym would eventually go to waste when I stopped, but that's not true. Had I known this I'd probably have started working out much earlier and for much longer than I did.
Same but I was in my 30s.
Two years and I was bigger than anyone I knew unless they also trained hard.
How do glp-1 drugs such as semaglutide, terzepatid and retatrutide impact apoptose?
"Tirzepatide promotes M1-type macrophage apoptosis and reduces inflammatory factor secretion by inhibiting ERK phosphorylation" [1]
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15675...
They tell your brain you have lots of food in your stomach, which triggers lots of behavioral and metabolic changes. This does not necessarily reverse every effect of obesity, maybe not gene expression changes described in this article. But enough to keep weight off with ongoing treatment.
Yea, this actually explains the transcriptional expression and weight gain very well. Strong than the methylation evidence imo. I didn’t see any causal analysis only correlated and the cells still being there makes sense.
Is this true? When I looked into this issue it seemed the medical consensus is that fat cells are mostly constant throughout life, and weight gain happens through adipocyte hypertrophy.
Look up adipogenesis.
>> But when you lose weight, they don't apoptose
Googled for "Adipocyte apoptosis" and oh boy... It does happen, but I don't trust the AI summary. This looks like a deep rabbit hole.
It seems fasting causes Adipocyte apoptosis. It makes sense, there is cell death.
I lost 100 lbs fasting over 1.5 years. I did gain some weight back after stopping, but not much. Strangely, where I saw fat return was not where most of it came off.
Yeah, but fasting is extremely unpleasant.
You get to know yourself well after about 5 days of zero food..... :))
Even much shorter fasts help you to understand how unimportant and fleeting a lot of feelings of hunger are. You get hunger pangs and feel like you need to eat, but in a hour it has passed and you go another 8+ hours just fine. When I eat some crappy food, I know it is going to make me feel very hungry in a few hours, but when it happens, I know it isn’t a real need and it helps stop the cycle of bad eating/overeating.
I did that, and it helped to kickstart further weightloss. I was surprised how fast my body got rid of stored water, and how quickly I lost fat in the upper body region, primarily around my face, neck and shoulder.
"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" continues to be an undefeated aphorism.
I am pretty sure the only way to reduce the number of cells is liposuction
Worse than that. Subcutaneous fat (which is the one you can trim off with liposuction) usually expands relying more in cell expansion and not in hyperplasia. Visceral fat on the other hand, is way more likely to involve hyperplasia and you cannot use liposuction against this type of fat. This is also the fat that is very hormonally active and increases the risks of diabetes, heart disease, cancers, strokes.
Is it unremovable because it's inside the core muscles and near internal organs?
See the second half of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bav_IBsuXEM
Visceral fat is literally enclosing the intestines, major blood vessels, organs, etc. of the abdomen.
Nevertheless, it is possible to surgically remove this sheet of fat that's covering your organs, it's called an omentectomy. But it's a big surgery, and done only in case of cancer, not for weight loss. That is, in humans: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29367725/
Right. A surgeon can't just stick a liposuction tube into the abdominal cavity and poke around. This would be major invasive surgery with a high risk of complications, far worse than leaving the adipose tissue in place.
I've been wondering about that. Like all cosmetic surgery liposuction is looked down upon.
But maybe it can also be a useful and healthy weight loss strategy?
Despite being looked down on, it's still very common. I know several people who have had liposuction. The results are only temporary. Everyone I know that has had this procedure has rebounded back to their original body weight within 2 years.
[dead]
As someone who's struggled with weight loss, and have known others to struggle with it well, I think we colloquially called this "slow metabolism".
It always did feel like it was easier to gain weight than lose it, especially fat weight and not muscle weight for me.
I was recently sent a video about fat adaptation (basically teaching your body to be better at burning fat) by a very fit friend, but I wonder how much of that is bro science and how much of it is grounded in reality. Maybe worth looking into more deeply if it can counteract or balance out this.
For me, sugar was the reason I couldn't lose weight. I got a CGM (continuous glucose monitor) and got my blood sugar under control, and with very little effort I lost a lot of weight.
I use 90% cacao Lindt to control my sweet tooth. 1/2 the bar has 4g of sugar, and I consume it over hours. It also has the side effect of reducing my hunger. If you eat much of 90% chocolate, it makes you feel nausea. The trick is to put a small chip in your mouth and let it melt. It's quite delicious and I've not had any sweets in 80+ days.
This also speaks to another point, when trying to lose weight: you must find new things to enjoy.
This is actually great advice for any bad habit you're trying to break. In general, just thinking "Stop doing this thing" (or "do less of this thing"), doesn't really work. It's usually more effective to find something else that you do enjoy (and is better for you), and try to do more of that thing and have it "crowd out" your bad habit.
When it comes to eating, there is a nutritionist with a pretty sizable online following (Kylie Sakaida), and I love one of her mantras of "add, don't subtract". That is, don't think of abstaining from foods you like that might be unhealthy, but instead try to add more healthy things to that food to make it a balanced meal. For example, she gives the example of wanting a frozen waffle for breakfast. Instead of thinking "No, I can't have this frozen waffle", she instead makes a spread using Greek yogurt to add protein, then adds fresh fruit and nuts for more nutrients, fiber and healthy fats, so what started as an 'empty carbs' meal is turned into a pretty balanced, filling breakfast.
So true. I've done this very often:
- See some goodies my wife bought (for herself or me).
- Thinks about having my 90% Lindt later/next day.
- Walks away.
I was realizing that spicy food can be that.
I'm a chocolate fan myself and it was something I used to buy often, but just as I started getting into the hard stuff (80% or higher) I learned about all the problems with heavy metals in dark chocolate and specifically in Lindt, and then later learned about the use of child slaves which is an industry wide issue and not exclusive to Lindt/Russell Stover/Ghirardelli/Lindor although Lindt and Hershey are reportedly worse than other brands.
You can find brands that claim to be more ethical in terms of sourcing their cocoa, but the smaller brands that do are also less likely to have been tested for heavy metals.
While it's unclear how harmful the heavy metals would be to me specifically at the amounts I was eating, the whole thing kind of put me off chocolate in general and dark chocolate in particular. I rarely have it anymore.
Isn't 90% Lindt the worst (of their chocolates) for Cadmium and other heavy metals though?
All I could find is this: https://www.snopes.com/news/2024/12/31/lindt-chocolate-heavy...
I am worried about it. Ugh.
Here's one (besides CR & asyousow tests) from 2022 from the ConsumerLab
https://www.ahealthylife.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/DarkC...
I thought a CGM would help me lose weight but it turned out my body is a hero at managing sugar spikes. A pint of ice cream? Back to baseline in under an hour. Big meal, no big spike, etc.
So it turns out you can still gain weight even if you don’t spike your blood sugar. At least for me.
If you don't spike your blood sugar and you eat fewer calories that you need, I don't know how you wouldn't lose weight.
For me, a small piece of pie after dinner impacted my BS for 6-12 hours, according to the sensor. That was shocking.
I was high calorie, low spike.
I had just assumed before the cgm that my blood sugar regulation would be terrible with how easily I put in fat. But it was extremely well run.
I’d be interested to hear more here - what CGM did you buy? What was your process for monitoring?
The Stelo. 2 for $99. Oddly, it shipped from Amazon but Amazon doesn't sell them.
The app is subpar on iOS, but if you give Apple's Health app permission, you can get more data in there. Graphs that have absolute numbers. I think they reason their app doesn't give absolute values (for historical values, they give the current value only), is because it's not a calibrated device. It can't be used to control an insulin pump, for that reason.
Does that imply you are paying $99 / month?
No, this was a one-time thing for me, to work out how food impacts my blood sugar. I've used 1 of the 2 I bought, and I plan to use the other in 3-4 months, to see how I react then, after 6+ months with low sugar intake.
I just completed two weeks with Lingo by Abbott. It was decent. I wish it had better integration of the data with Apple Health, but I liked the Lingo score as a way of "gamifying" it and the UX overall was decently done.
This worked for me for a while but I learned to love dark chocolate toooooo much.
I can now eat a 100g bar of 100% chocolate in a single sitting if I feel like it… And that’s 55g of fat, so more or less the fat I should be eating in a whole day.
Wow!! I feel queasy if I eat more than 1/2 a bar of the 90%. It also completely takes the edge off my hunger, which is great for me.
I think I started getting addicted to the caffeine
Insulin sensitivity is a real thing. The less sensitive to insulin you are, the more of it is produced to process a given amount of glucose. And the more insulin (anabolic) is produced, the less glucagon (catabolic) is.
In other words, low insulin sensitivity means your body remains in the feeding (fat building) state more, as opposed to fasting (fat burning).
Insulin sensitivity decreases with age, and with excessive intake of particularly simple carbs. It can be improved through fasting, certain dietary supplements, and low carb diet.
All of this is, to the best of my knowledge, not disputed or 'bro science'.
A lot of people blame failure to lose fat on a "slow metabolism" but this is usually incorrect. Have you had an actual resting metabolic rate (RMR) test to quantity your baseline total daily energy expenditure?
Fat adaptation is a real thing. Endurance athletes focused on longer events will target some of their training around that energy system. This is more complex than can really be explained in an online comment but basically you want to do long training sessions below your lactate threshold in a glycogen depleted state.
There is also a conflation of a slowing metabolism and low energy availability, which can reduce the amount of energy expended during the day (because you feel tired and do less). It can be quite subtle but when I've done some extended periods in a calorie deficit I start to notice subtle things, like a propensity to sit a bit longer, or to reduce my overall body movements. My resting metabolism is the same (I've had it measured a few times) but my body looks for ways to expend less energy.
Anecdotally (but an experience shared at by at least some other long distance runners), when I get quite far into a calorie deficit via exercise, my brain will start suggesting shortcuts - urges to cut the corner on a trail, take a shorter path back etc. Its quite interesting!
Considering the amount of effort it traditionally took to get food it's a shame that our brains would want us to be less active when it could otherwise start suggesting that we be even more active to find/hunt food.
The suggestions generally still work towards my goal; this is a different phenomena to "holy shit the consciousness is trying to kill us again" panic switch. Maybe its some low level optimisation to reduce energy expenditure, so we can last longer, and find even more food!
They didn't mean it was literally a slow metabolism. They meant that what the article is about is often refered to as a "slow metabolism". It's a misnomer since that is not the mechanism but there is definitely a phenomenon at play, which is what the article is about, the actual phenomenon rather than the bro science.
I think you missed the point that he said "slow metabolism" is just a colloquial term for something else.
them and the rest of society
It is well known that if you gain muscle then lose it, it is easier to regain it than the first time (IIRC, the cells store extra nucleii?). This could be a similar effect but with fat cells.
As well as the "cell memory", the total number of fat cells you have in your body is set during adolescence, then it remains constant for the rest of your adult life. (https://www.nature.com/articles/ncpgasthep1189).
During adolescence, if you gain weight, you create new fat cells. During adulthood, the fat cells themselves just get larger. Arguably the best thing you can do is avoid obesity during childhood and adolescence at all costs.
Interested parties may want to read the original article https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06902 in place of the highlight https://doi.org/10.1038/ncpgasthep1189.
> During adulthood, the fat cells themselves just get larger.
While true, it's also important to note that the lifetime of a fat cell is around ten years. Maintaining a decent diet for around ten years (no mean feat!) should be sufficient to leave you bereft of the actual adipose cells.
I also wonder how this intersects with transgender stuff — there's a reason why HRT is referred to as "second puberty", as it resets and changes a lot of underlying biological mechanisms and produces a lot of interesting epigenetic effects (While it does boil down to "replacing the sex hormone", both estrogen and testosterone have major effects on the body's immune system, etc. — actually this is one of the reasons I suspect that there's such a high comorbidity of autoimmune diseases within transgender people pre-HRT — their immune system is all out of wack! Mine calmed down a lot after starting and a year in I no longer get seasonal allergies). There's a huge lack of data in this regard though because transgender bodies are generally not felt to be worth studying outside of "health risks", even though there's a huge amount of information we could glean about how everyone's* body functions from it. Personally, I wonder whether second-puberty "resets" what the body decides is the baseline for fat storage.
* — and for anyone in doubt, we have around 90 years of HRT now that shows it's essentially completely safe (outside of the mid-80s when the estrogen being given was synthetic and non-bio-identical, and outside of the health risks of various things for trans women changing to be roughly equivalent of cis women's health risks).
I believe that is the latest theory regarding the mechanism, yes.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3892465/
The physical mechanism is mitochondrial uncoupling proteins (UCP). They regulate how much energy is wasted as heat when converting ADP to ATP, determining how efficient one’s metabolism is. When you lose weight, your UCP proteins start wasting less and less energy when producing ATP, which is one of the things that makes dieting so hard.
Actually affecting that pathway is largely beyond us at the moment (that’s the bro science) but the mechanism is relatively well understood.
Is this similar to what 2, 4 dinitrophenol affects?
Yes, sort of. DNP doesn’t affect uncoupling proteins directly but it moves protons across the mitochondrial membrane, causing more of the energy to be lost as heat as the uncoupling proteins waste more energy to restore the proton gradient.
There are a bunch of such “protonophores” that move protons across membranes and they are universally toxic if they make it to the mitochondria. I don’t known of any compound that actually mediates the UCPs themselves.
> It always did feel like it was easier to gain weight than lose it, especially fat weight and not muscle weight for me.
It is the exact, polar opposite for me. I cannot gain even if I eat junk all day.
I used to think the same. I would guess that you do not have a big breakfast. Without getting a real meal in for breakfast, hitting a huge calorie surplus is difficult. If you counted your calories and tried to get a 1000 calorie meal for breakfast, hit 3000 calories a day, you’d probably gain 10% in a few weeks. Weight training is good too… you don’t want to just gain fat.
1000 calorie breakfast = bagel with cream cheese, 3 eggs, banana, some berries, protein shake. It’s a whole lot more than a bowl of cereal.
Or go get some fast food. Plenty of them in the US can easily top out at around your daily requirement.
In college, I used to treat myself with a Hardee's sourdough Frisco burger because, for some reason, it was really damn good to me. Then I saw the calorie count: https://www.hardees.com/menu/charbroiled-burgers/hardees-fri...
Add on some fries, regular soda if that's your thing, and you are pretty much at the daily recommendation.
I tried eating all that, not just for breakfast, but 3-4 times a day, give or take, sans berries and banana.
It's hard for me to gain weight. But in my 30s, for a few months I was eating 3000 calories plus. My breakfast smoothie was about 800 calories - 2-3 scoops protein, a banana, almond butter. I gained about 5 pounds after 3 months. It was just too hard to eat that much while also eating healthy.
I had a friend who was trying to bulk up make that claim (he was 6', 140 lbs), and then when I finally convinced him to write down everything he ate in a day, it was like 1800 calories.
I should do that, too, TBH.
drink milkshakes
I drink a protein shake 2 times at least, and eat lunch (chicken & rice & broccoli casserole, so forth) 2-3 times a day. I do not eat small portions either.
That only looks like about 2000 calories a day, which is the recommended caloric intake for the average sedentary adult man.
If you're trying to bulk, you need to be looking at 2500 or more calories a day, plus additional for any calories burned by exercise. (With a surplus of 1000/calories a day you'll be gaining more fat than muscle unless you're still in puberty. Sometimes that may be what you want.)
It just seems like I have to spend most of my day eating. :/
I think part of this can be solved by "hacks" the primary one being throwing olive oil on random stuff you eat. Another one is "drinking your calories". Basically all the things people tell you to do to lose weight, do the opposite
I get what you mean, sounds reasonable. :D
Fat adaptation is not bro science, it is what happens when you do not consume enough carbohydrates to meet your TDEE so your mitochondria “learn” to become really efficient at burning fatty acids. It’s the whole premise behind keto/low carb. When used to our modern high-carb diets, the adaptation takes some time for genes to activate, since we eat a lot and never have long enough fasting periods to be able to quickly switch between glucose and fatty acid metabolism.
I have had a slow metabolism since I was a teenager. I don't think I've ever experienced a day in my life where I haven't thought about my weight, body composition, or felt guilty about eating food. And I'm not even that big. I've just never had the physique I wanted, and I always attributed it to having a slow metabolism.
I'm turning 40 in May, so since the start of February, I've finally pulled up my bootstraps and started taking my health seriously. I was likely 225 lbs at 5'10". Easily 32+% body fat.
The first thing I did was a deep extended fast, drinking only water, electrolytes, supplements, bone broth, and black coffee. I was able to shed a good amount of weight, fast. However, the longest I could fast for was 6 days; No matter what I tried, I could not figure out how to get good sleep. I tried once more for 4 days, and saw no improvement, so I stopped trying to fast. Mentally I could handle it, but without quality sleep, there was no way I could continue. This was mid-March, and I was at 204.5 lbs.
Also in mid-March, I did a VO2 max test, while fasted for 72 hours. It was very apparent that my metabolism was fat adapted. My VO2 max was very low at 33.8 ml/kg, which was to be expected. My RMR was found to be 1998 kcal/day, and my fat max HR was 161 bpm. Crossover to 100% carbs was at 179 bpm.
Since then, I've done a 180, and started eating about 1800-2000 kcal per day. My first goal is to ensure I eat 170-200g of protein per day, through as much whole food as possible, using whey or protein when needed. The rest of my diet is very clean, with no real restrictions on fats, and keeping carbs as low as possible. It's a fairly ketogenic diet, but I don't get worked up if my net carbs go to 50+g. Foods are usually Greek yogurt, flax, pumpkin seeds, nuts, eggs, berries, fish, poultry, and green vegetables/salads. If I ever add fat to anything, it's extra virgin olive oil first, then maybe butter/cream (i.e. in coffee). I take a number of supplements like Omega-3 fish oils, multivitamins, magnesium, and make my own electrolyte drink. Creatine as well.
I find that by the time I've done all of this, I have a very difficult time eating, and even trying to fit anything else in. I am never hungry, nor do I feel cravings for other foods. We just came back from Miami, and I had some ice cream with the kids, and some baked goods. I enjoyed them, but I was very excited to be back to my normal foods.
Since then, I've been running 3-4 times a week, focusing on Zone 2 training. I do 4 days a week of weightlifting, focusing on the big compound lifts. I have a 10K race on May 11, and a sprint distance triathlon on July 27 that I'm training for.
For this entire month, I have stayed at a constant 207.5 lbs +/- 0.5 lbs. I have been tracking other measurements like circumferences and body fat (using calibers and BIA scale), and it's apparent that I have gained strength, regained muscle mass, and improved my overall fitness. Running is still at a slow pace, but actually enjoyable now. My wearables estimate that my VO2 max is 37 ml/kg; they did show 33 ml/kg last month when I had the test, so they seem to be correlated.
I think the hardest part of the last month has been the sheer amount of work I've put in, only to watch the scale stay steady. I track my intake rigorously, weighing everything I can and using MyFitnessPal to track it all. How are people able to eat anything else? I couldn't add rice or grains to my diet even if I wanted to, I would easily hit 2500+ kcal per day.
People eat that much? Or rather, burn that much? I burn 2000 kcal per rest day, and maybe 2800-3200 kcal on workout days.
I will stick with this, since it is working to improve my health and fitness. It would just be nice to see the scale move without having to fast for multiple days. Cursed slow metabolism.
In terms of where carbs fit in, you're eating 200g of protein a day, which at a guess is 2x to 4x your lean body mass in kg. I'm not saying that it's wrong, it's probably very effective, but the average diet probably swaps that (historically very expensive) protein out for (historically very cheap) bread and rice.
You aren't cursed with a slow metabolism, you have just been having too many calories. If you are truly never hungry but still not losing weight, then why not reduce your calories by 200-300 a day?
How's your light environment/sunlight exposure? What's your waking body temperature (under arm for 10 minutes)? Have you had a thyroid panel done? (TSH, Free T3, Free T4, Reverse T3)
Muscles are heavier than fat which makes weight an unreliable indicator for progress.
If there really was a gene that allowed you to survive on substantially less food than your peers, pretty much all humans would have said gene. The history of humanity is rife with famine, and that gene would be a game-changer for survival
It's all about tradeoffs. In this case, I wonder if there's an "efficient metabolism" gene that makes your body put a higher percentage of incoming nutrients into long-term storage (mostly in fat tissue). Carriers of this gene would be more likely to survive a famine, but less likely to outrun a predator or defend against an attack by another leaner human, who's genes allocate incoming nutrients to be utilized more effectively in the short-term.
Look into Polynesian peoples. They survived long sea voyages, and are known to be generally large people in modern day. Like the guy at my high school whose nickname was "Big Tonga"
Samoan have a high degree of a particular variant of gene CREBRF that's highly associated with high BMI (see https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3620). Pop-Sci says it's an adaptation to the life in an island (might also be a founder effect?)
...don't we? According to [0], the amount of food (by energy intake) people get is very diverse worldwide. People can survive famine situations for a long time, and people' problems with obesity is linked to exactly those survival genes.
Granted, some animals are much better at it, crocodiles and bears and stuff can go without food for months.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_food_ener...
I think it’s quite the opposite because it would not be a gene that allows you to survive on less food - it would be a gene that favors replacing glycogen stores over lipid stores. That kind of mechanism would be pretty negative to survival until the modern era of sedentary civilization.
>but I wonder how much of that is bro science and how much of it is grounded in reality
It's probably bro science or contributing a small amount to any effort. The biggest problem is the food industry serving shit in large portions, which can be hard for populations to psychologically resist (see: America). Most things in the grocery store are shit too.
I don't think you can effectively teach people to resist it though, you'd have to get rid of the shit being there so it's not even an option.
That's how my brother lost weight finally. He just never bought any of the stuff - so it wasn't even in his house. But he lives alone right now so if you live in a group setting you might be, in weak moments, snacking on bad things that other people brought in. It's kind of also why I don't think companies should provide candy machines etc.
Please share your bro science video. I need it :)
If you want the serious science about low carb/keto, I recommend the “Low Carb Down Under” channel on Youtube.
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metabolism is orthogonal . It's possible to have a fast metabolism and still be obese if you're eating at a surplus. But it's also possible people with faster metabolisms may be more successful at weight loss if already obese. So a 300-lbs person who eats 10,000 calories/day to be weight stable will find it easier to lose weight compared to to a 300 lbs person who is stable at 4,000 cal/day. This can also explain how some people lose tons of weight on GLP-1 drugs, whereas others lose less. The guy eating 10,000 calories/day will lose much more weight more rapidly owning to having a much bigger metabolic furnace, as soon as he restricts eating and his body is no longer getting 10,000 calories/day. Unfortunately, there are no studies that investigate the link, if any, with metabolism and dieting success.
10k calories a day is what a black bear eats preparing for hibernation. And it is what Michael Phelps would eat daily when training in the pool for hours on end.
Obese people can remain obese eating 1000 calories a day. I recall one episode of My 600lb Life and the show's featured person that day was at 900 or 1200 calories a day and still didn't lose weight. Might have still been gaining.
It is a dynamic system. People tend to only consider the CI in CI/CO.
>Obese people can remain obese eating 1000 calories a day. I recall one episode of My 600lb Life and the show's featured person that day was at 900 or 1200 calories a day and still didn't lose weight. Might have still been gaining.
How is that possible? There is a lower bound on calories needed (on average across say six months) to maintain life. Adding to that the calories needed to maintain the weight, I don't see how an obese person could stay alive with "CO" significantly lower than 1200 kcal.
It happens because we act like calories are calories when it's clearly not true.
Calorie counts in nutrition data are generated by something like burning the food in a bomb calorimeter. Which is most definitely not what our bodies do. We have all kinds of different biochemical ways of metabolizing different types of foods.
So someone eating 1000 calories of day could be eating very healthy or they could be ingesting a whole bunch of garbage full of sweeteners. It doesn't seem like anyone really understands how it works but all those sweeteners are more likely to make you gain weight.
Why is it that people claim the laws of thermodynamics do not apply to humans?
Obviously the laws of thermodynamics apply, but the most naive application of the laws of thermodynamics doesn't.
A human body isn't a bomb calorimeter and it doesn't perfectly combust everything you eat.
No one is claiming that the laws of thermodynamics do not apply to humans.
Because our metabolisation mechanisms are extremely complex and many things, like genetics, decide how we metabolise food; we are not petrol engines.
> "How is that possible?"
Eat 1200 Calories per day, drink 5Kg of water, water retention, body mass and scale weight goes up with increasing water weight?
And yet it happens. A doctor in my family told the story of a patient they were treating in hospital who medically needed to lose weight, and who they found unable to get any reduction until they dropped below _200_ calories a day.
Metabolism is _significantly_ more complex than CI/CO, from experience.
What is more likely:
- a physics-breaking thermodynamic anomaly
- a food addicted person is lying about their consumption
200 kcal a day.. yeah sure. A human body needs more than that just to breathe and pump blood. Even comatose a skinny person needs 5 times as much.
Overweight people have a significantly higher metabolic base rate. Just breathing can easily be 1000kcal a day if your lungs have to move 30 kilos of upper body fat 10 times a minute. They also have more muscle mass compared to the average person their size, even when not physically active, which increases MBR as well.
Weight loss and gain is a solved problem, but self control and human behavior is not.
Perpetuating myths of impossible weight loss is not beneficial for our society and moves us further away from solving the underlying issues.
I can believe this as a human who fasts. I just don't eat every other day. I've fasted for multiple days. You would amazed at how much the scale doesn't move. I can lose zero weight after 36 hours of nothing but water entering me. The body is less CICO and more a system trying to maintain homeostasis as much as possible and pulling ever lever it can.
Yes, eventually eating every other day I did lose weight, but we're talking a steady glide of 1-2lbs a week nothing as severe as people would expect a severely overweight person who only ate half the week to lose.
If you treat humans as biological machines, signaling system (hormones, endocrine system) is very important. When signaling system is messed up, your CI/CO model with self-control doesn't work at all. Signals need to be fixed.
So? That doesn't disprove the premise of CI/CO. CI/CO is the notion that humans exist in the physical world and thus obey the laws of thermodynamics.
> Weight loss and gain is a solved problem, but self control and human behavior is not.
Semaglutide and tirzepatide address the self control and human behavior problems. They stop you from wanting to eat more.
https://www.diabetes.co.uk/blog/2018/02/story-angus-barbieri...
It's insane how arrogant people can be about this. You have not accounted for all of the variables and that is blatantly obvious. The phenomenon is well known and there are multi-variable equations for it, many different models. One popular model is that NEET can decrease below the caloric deficit, meaning you still gain weight by becoming subconsciously lazier despite everything feeling equally difficult subjectively. There are several other more advanced models adding other variables, some depending on insulin sensitivity, for example. Anyway, no physics is broken, laymen are just naive to the complexity abd adaptability of biology.
200kcal/day is less than 10W. Since all energy the body uses is released as heat this puts the maximum sustainable heat radiation with such a diet at 10W.
That's about the level of a typical household LED, which at most feels slightly warm to the touch.
At that energy level you could not sustain weight while maintaining body temperature let alone having a healthy metabolism. That's just a plain fact.
You will lose weight long before you reach 200kcal/day.
That's a good argument against what I said for this particular case. I didn't realize 200kcal was so little. Imagine my comment was written in reply to a higher number though because that criticism is definitely valid for a large number of posts people make in general. ;)
It is the amazing the hoops people will jump through and the lies they will tell themselves and others rather than facing the obvious truth that they are consuming too many calories.
But it is basic physics, which is in fact being violated. It's really very normal to require exceptional proof for this. Like literally any scientific study, not just an anecdote claiming magic.
Basic physics says CI/CO applies to a closed system. Show me a closed system human and then it will be applicable.
E=MC^2 is basic physics too. So eat a pea and have enough calories for the rest of your life and then some?
Nutritional science is pseudo science at best. I had rather continue to believe in thermodynamics lmao
You cant cheat thermodynamics, so something does not add up. Most likely the calorie estimates if they were self reported.
To illustrate a single 37.5g snickers is slightly below 200kcal. I probably get that number of calories just from the milk in my coffee in an average day.
For how long? Irregularities can persist for a small amount of time, no doubt; but for how long does one maintain weight and life on 300 calories a day?
1000 calories is already an unbelievable claim, absolutely no one is going to believe 200. That’s just absurd
Come on, this is ridiculous.
CI/CO is a thing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamics
Agreeing and I found it interesting to learn more about caloric availability to the body.
I.e. calories on the label vs what the body can actually access.
Like drinking smoothies (high availability) vs raw fruit (lower availability)
Dr. Greger (Nutrition focused) discusses some of this on calorie density and some referenced studies here if interested:
https://nutritionfacts.org/blog/how-to-lose-weight-eating-mo...
I don't believe that people can gain weight while eating almost nothing, but I believe that their internal distribution of energy may be out of whack.
Proponents of naive thermodynamics model tend to assume that only "excessive" energy is stored into bodily fat, once all the other tissues have had their fair share.
That is not really true in insulin resistant people, whose storage may be excessive and leave the rest of the body unsatisfied and hungry, which drives them to eat more than a healthy person would.
To us, this looks like deliberate overeating, to them, it is a result of constant hunger caused by the fact that some part of the energy consumed is being immediately locked away in fat tissues by dysregulated metabolic processes.
Notably, it isn't easy to "correct" this situation by just eating less, because that will leave those people feeling really starved. Insulin sensitivity must be restored first, then the fat stores will give up their excess willingly and that person won't suffer.
I'm sure an obese person claiming to eat 1000kcal per day can still gain weight but that is largely due to selfreported calorie estimates being a bad measure. Put that person in a chamber where calorie intake is controlled and I'd bet the effect disappears.
Yeah, I don't know if it was that episode or from somewhere else, but there was a similar thing where they followed the person around for a day and it turned out they didn't count anything ate as a snack between meals. They were accurately counting their meals, but including the snacks went somewhere above 3000 a day.
Secret eaters, a British show.
Ate only 1000kcal in food. Added in 1400kcal in sugary drinks and 2000kcal in small bites of this and that (that don't need to be counted, because it's just one spoonful of peanut butter!)
The small bites have doomed me in the past until I charted and realized the impact.
As somebody who went through successful weight cuts at least 3 times I must notice that not losing weight on 200 calories a day is... a very unrealistic situation. Even a 1000 calories is starving.
(I do weightlifting, and controlling one's weight is basics of everything in the gym)
This is completely and obviously untrue.
Jason Fung is probably the world's leading research expert on obesity. If you want videos to watch on it, it starts and ends with this guy. He has done a ton of lectures and blogposts going back over a decade, and also has the stereotypical clickbaity YouTube videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpllomiDMX0
He has surely dedicated a significant portion of his life to his own pet theories on obesity, but to consider him a well-regarded expert is very misleading.
He has quite a few claims that are just...ridiculous, and his pop science books have some serious flaws (as reported by actual experts).
While I don't doubt you, it would be helpful if you cited these experts, so people can learn.
As this article shows, there are incredibly complex feedback mechanisms around weight and metabolism, but thermodynamics are still fundamentally a thing.
After he died last year, I ran across this engineering and accounting approach to weight maintenance and loss written up by John Walker (one of the Autodesk founders). It worked very well for him and changed the way I thought about weight and eating. It is interesting reading because he is "one of us"
Basically, he uses a first level approximation of the body as a control system with a feedback loop, and tries to pin down some techniques to bring the system to a known good state (target weight) and manage that loop for long term stability.The problem with diets based only on calories is that they don't take satiety into account, nor health.
Calories is what makes you gain/lose weight, it's basic physics. Satiety is what makes you want to eat more/less. Nutrients are what is making you healthy.
Fiber and protein tends to make you feel full. Lack of them allow you to eat large amount of calories without feeling full. You need to keep track of micro and macro nutrient to stay healthy.
I would slightly tweak your last. Different nutrients (vitamins/whatever) also impact your body in specific ways. Not just "makes you healthy" but "causes you to do certain things." Caffeine is the easy example here.
This gets back to the "feedback loops" above. There are certainly feedback loops. But you are unlikely to be able to prime any of them by just increasing an input. And increasing output is something you have to train the body to do.
On that last, I think it is easy to model weight gain as something you train the body to do, as well? Certainly fits the model of the article.
There are also flywheel levels of energy use for some folks. Consider the amount of calories a professional athlete goes through. We can say exercise doesn't help weight loss at the population level with relative certainty. It is also relatively safe to say exercise burns an obscene amount of calories in athletes.
We cannot make that claim with relative certainty. We cannot make the opposite claim either, but it is more likely.
Apologies, I see I used the wrong word. I meant to use confidence, not certainty. :(
The context is even more broad than this.
Beyond satiety, you also have to consider the role food is playing in the person's life. Is the person hooked on Dopamine, with food a (the?) main source of it? Can they introduce other enjoyable and meaningful activities that take their mind off food? Even if a person is not addicted per-se to the dopamine food provides, if their life is boring and seems to lack meaning, they will still turn to food as a major part of their daily routine.
You also have to consider that some people find daily planning and organization more difficult than others. Keeping to a good diet can require a great deal of planning on a daily basis.
So obesity is often only a symptom of more underlying issues like depression loneliness, a struggle for meaning and connection, ADHD, and more.
Sure; it's a layered system, each one taking more effort or thinking than the other.
Easy diets: drink this shake 3x a day. Don't eat $food_category. Limit calory intake to $amount / day.
More complex: The above, plus macronutrients.
More complex: The above, plus micronutrients.
Add dimensions like lifestyle choices (vegetarianism, veganism etc) or food sensitivities (celiac, lactose intolerance).
I'm no diet expert and need to lose some weight myself but the main advice I'd give is to get stable first. Plan your meals, eat regular meals at regular intervals, keep excess / luxuries / "rewards" to a minimum. Only when you have reached a stable and sustainable pattern should you start to make adjustments. The problem with diets or major lifestyle changes is that they're hard to keep up, simply because they are so different from your usual. The shake diets generally don't work long term because people suffer and go back to their old habits, if not overcompensate because their body signals a deprivation of some kind.
Shakes don't provide satiety, most people will hate this and start eating something else within a few days.
I think it depends on the shake contents. Fiber addition is absolutely crucial for the satiety. Most of your soylent and equivalents include it. Doing an only-shake diet is indeed difficult for most people that want novelty in their food, especially if they are addicted to the dopamine hit from food.
I had to rethink my relationship to food in order to lose weight. Eating a soylent clone for the majority of my meals helped me to do that. Getting a gram-accurate scale for measuring food helped. Building a database in my head of calorie estimates of various foods helped when I was not at home. Double checking nutrition facts for fast food helped too. Really, I was raised by an emotional eater. And I didn't have the natural intuition about food that most people acquire from their parents. I had to unlearn all of that shit, and learn about nutrition, calories, macros, etc
Food is not a treat or a reward, it is fuel to live. Taking a more ascetic approach to food has helped tremendously. And if I know I am going to an engagement with rich foods, I'll even lightly fast before hand so that my calorie intake stays reasonable for the day. And of course, if I have a craving for something calorie rich, I try to make an effort to justify that intake with additional activity that balances things out.
The thing about satiety is that we've conquered food scarcity in the developed world. Feeling hungry is practically taboo and is used as an excuse to consume more, the longer the feeling is felt. When in reality, hunger should be used as a signal of how soon to eat, rather than how much. Hunger is not a pleasant feeling, but the world is also not going to end if you skip a meal or two, especially for the overweight people. Having proper emotional regulation around this is important, too.
You just need to keep it simple. Every time you are hungry have an enormous glass of water, and eat all the vegetables you want, always. Snacks are carrots, cauliflower, snap peas, cucumber.
Avoid sugar and fat as much as possible.
Remain in calorie deficit and you will lose weight and get plenty of nutrients.
Quite so, and I think he does address that, but those are all second level factors, along with activity level, exercise, and their effect on your caloric requirements. He puts together a bunch of excel spreadsheets for tracking many factors, but I have found the simple discipline of accounting for what I eat in a little txt file on my phone sufficient to align my choices with my desired outcome.
One of life's great annoyances to me, is how incredibly effective "just doing something" tends to be. To that level, the act of tracking things is a strong something that almost always shows results. Be it lists on how often something has been cleaned, or procedural checklists on things that need to happen.
I'm convinced, at this point, that there is something mental on it, too. Getting you to think of something gets your body and mind to act differently towards it.
Part of this was obvious to me when I had kids. If they fell, they would immediately look to the reaction of others around them. If people looked scared, they would feel more hurt than if people didn't react at all. If people were encouraging what they were doing, they would sometimes not realize something might hurt.
But, back to my annoyance. As someone that hates tracking lists... why do they have to be so effective? :D
Exercise and activity are contributing to calories (calories out). These days there are apps that make it easy to track calories, macro and nutrients.
> Fiber and protein tends to make you feel full
And fat. Primarily fat is what will satisfy you (I mean eating it, not listening to Lizzo or Meghan Trainor.)
Put some butter in those eggs as you fry them. Use olive oil and coconut oil while cooking. Drink whole milk and have some raw eggs with the yolks.
Or just 1,000 cram rice cakes into your mouth all day until you choke
https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
Thank you for sharing, I'd never seen this before. It's an incredibly good read (and relevant for me) so far.
> ...it is plausible that epigenetic memory could also play a role in many other contexts, including addictive diseases. Recent advancements in targeted epigenetic editing global remodelling of the epigenome provide promising new approaches.
"Darn, I think I've contracted some alcoholism. Could you order me another bottle of the reset pills?"
More like "just take these GLP-1 agonists for the rest of your life". Those seem to have an effect on addictions etc. But at least when it comes to weight, people seem to put it back on once they quit. Perhaps the GLP-1 agonist is lacking an epigenetic reset button ...
Fat cells only turn over about 20% per year. You basically need to maintain a reduced weight for 5 years before the fat cells "forget" the higher weight.
If you come off it before that 5 years are up, yeah, you are probably expected to bounce back somewhat.
You might not need to be on GLP-1 forever, but you might need to be on it longer than people currently think.
Do you happen to have a reference for that or a specific link to learn more? That sounds oddly specific.
Was also interested and a quick search for "human fat cells turnover time years" returned a few research papers that quote 10% a year.
Not offhand, but it was an article talking about how they use background radiation to estimate cellular lifetimes.
That's a much rosier picture than requiring GLP-1s for your entire lifetime.
Weight / obesity management is basically managing a chronic condition, that's why time-limited interventions (workout camps, fasting, dieting, drug injections for a few months) don't work - you have to continuously manage the issue. The idea that you have an issue (obesity) and then make an intervention (loose weight) and therefore the issue is resolved (you are no longer obese) is just wrong. It needs to be managed from either the demand side (regular GLP-1 agonist injections to suppress hunger) or the supply side (eating less / better food). Hence: Dieting = never works. Building sustainable habits or continuous administering of GLP-1 = always works.
(Or you're one of the 5% or so of people with a rare gene variation that basically prevents major fat build-up in the body and there's just nothing to manage for you about that — this would've been a pretty disadvantageous adaption in the past, but it's fair to say that the other 95% are maladpated to the last couple thousand years of human life).
It's semantics but 'changing your diet' is more apt.
Oh thanks, that 20% is a super useful statistic to keep in mind.
> If you come off it before that 5 years are up, yeah, you are probably expected to bounce back somewhat.
It would only be possible to bounce back if you eat excess calories once off the GLP-1.
Obviously, but the 'obesogenic memory' that this article is about is a real problem. Calories don't manifest out of thin air but for a plethora of reasons they're much much easier to overconsume as a formerly fat person.
Over consuming calories is always easy for everyone. Sugar and fat instead of vegetables.
Since I had to look it up:
"Adipose tissue" means "fat tissue".
You should definitely watch the Doctor Who episode Partners in Crime.
This was how I learned this word... It's insane that was almost 20 years ago.
Just went trough Yo-Yo. Any good strategies on how to overcome it for good?
For me weightloss worked over a long period of time with a couple of strategies.
1. One was not eating breakfast, this works well when I'm in the office. Then you have fasting built into your daily routine. This has many metabolic benefits.
2. Switching to a low carb diet (keto). I never thought I'd quit eating bread, but reducing carbonhydrates (esp. sugar) and eating more eggs & meat had the biggest effect on my weight. More so than doing sports. This is just a rough guideline, I don't follow this very strictly.
3. Sports + Fasting: Sometimes on the weekends I go on a hike or do some sports and only eat when I get home in the afternoon (e.g. steak). This forces my body to take the energy from the fat reserves.
This is pretty extreme. :-)
The magic is that just counting calories basically leads to the same outcome: less carbs and sugary stuff, less fatty meats, more lean meat, more veggies, etc.
I don't understand why I get downvotes for that. Those are the things I did in the past two years to get to my dream weight and hold it without yoyo effect.
because "this worked for me" is a poor premise, especially if you're talking about an extreme diet (keto)
I'm not an expert on this topic, so take it with a grain of salt. The reason a low carb diet works for many people (not necessarily extreme keto) is that it reduces the volatility of blood sugar levels, and this results in fewer cravings and being less tired over the day. So taking in fewer calories becomes easier. And then I learned about gluconeogenesis. The body can create glucose on its own and perfectly regulates glucose levels in the brain, etc., once it switches to that mode.
In the end, these tips help to get into a different lifestyle and then reinforce the habits to stay there because it feels better.
Don't try to lose weight fast. Don't do a diet for a limited amount of time. Change your eating habits to something you can live with permanently. Avoid sugar in drinks, it's so easy to get a lot of calories without feeling full. Sugar in general will give you hunger attacks. For me personally I feel best if I have a big part of calories coming from protein, followed by less carbs and some fat. But removing sugar from drinks alone lost me 30kg, without changing any other habits. Better for the general health as well.
Going to the gym helped me immensely. Not so much in losing weight directly but in feeling better and fresher.
> Going to the gym helped me immensely. Not so much in losing weight directly but in feeling better and fresher.
This. I've found working out has changed the kinds of foods I crave, making it easier to adhere to a diet. I'd usually feel more like a steak with eggs and brocoli rather than a deep-fried burger.
Exactly, this is a lifestyle change first.
Weigh yourself every day. Journal it. This sets up an objective metric to calibrate against.
Set medium term goals. Don't try to lose 20 kilos in six months. Lose the next kilo by this time in two weeks. Similarly, don't try to lose 0.1 kilos by tomorrow. Weight naturally fluctuates day to day based on water intake, sodium intake, muscle fatigue, and other things. But in the range of 2-3 weeks, you should be able to lose enough weight to see signal in the noise of day to day fluctuations.
If you aren't hitting your medium term goals, find a way to cut calories more. Starting the first month doing a comprehensive calorie log is valuable to help calibrate what foods and portion sizes are relatively problematic.
The rest is just finding eating patterns that work for you that help keep calorie levels low enough. There's a lot of advice about ways to do that, and most need to be taken with a grain of salt, but it's probably true that you can min/max at the margins by increasing fiber intake, increasing protein intake, drinking more water, eating more raw plants, intermittent fasting, and that sort of thing. But you'll mostly see fractional improvements on top of the bottom line math: calories burned need to exceed calories consumed.
As noted elsewhere here, it's a lot of exercise to burn off a few pieces of bacon. Exercise is good for weight loss, but again, it's mostly at the margins for the average person, especially if that person is not an athlete.
I agree with your point in general, but I think the paragraph below is the most important:
> The rest is just finding eating patterns that work for you that help keep calorie levels low enough. There's a lot of advice about ways to do that, and most need to be taken with a grain of salt, but it's probably true that you can min/max at the margins by increasing fiber intake, increasing protein intake, drinking more water, eating more raw plants, intermittent fasting, and that sort of thing. But you'll mostly see fractional improvements on top of the bottom line math: calories burned need to exceed calories consumed.
It's "easy" to lose a ton of weight if you don't eat anything at all. But that's obviously not sustainable. However, what I've found works, is that those things "at the margins" as you say actually have a huge effect on adherence to the "diet". Some foods require a tremendous amount of willpower to only consume in "reasonable" quantities. Think candy bars, chips, the like.
The point is to take note about how you feel after a given meal. Some foods, even though the meal would bring enough calories, leave you with a feeling of wanting more. Avoid these. Others leave you feeling full for hours. Go for those. What I've noticed is that sometimes, the effect may come from "secondary" ingredients, like the dressing on a salad, whereas the salad itself will leave you feeling full for the whole afternoon.
There are things you may enjoy quite a lot, so if they're of the "can't stop eating them sort", you'll have to forego them entirely. It's actually much easier to not eat them at all (and, ideally, not even have them in the house) than hoping you'll be reasonable. With time, these foods will lose their appeal, and you won't randomly crave them every day. Getting over this first step is what I find hardest.
I think you need to make it sustainable. I never had to do it consistently but even I know... Nobody is going to live hungry all the time. Nobody is going to grow old counting calories every damn day.
So rather than just eating less make sure to work out some. Consistently. Id suggest strength training. I did a full body strength training workout 2-3 times a week. Some may suggest doing leg days, arm days, etc but going there takes time on itself and i have other places to be than the gym.
To match that strength training eat more protein. Things like chicken are your friend. This tends to be higher on the satiety index so you'll feel full faster and you'll eat less without it being so painfull. Eat a bit of protein with every meal Really there's a whole lot of other stuff that you can fill yourself up with that won't be too bad for ya. And when you go for a carb? Get the complex one if it's a choice. It'll dampen that peak in insulin.
Avoid the sugary stuff. It's addictive for sure but taper off. Eat before going to the store. Make the hard decisions there not with the easy snack within reach in the evening.
Do a bit of everything that works until it becomes second nature. Overfocusing on one silver bullet doesn't tend to work.
This is advice people often give, but unfortunately it's wrong. Exercise and working out are useful and healthy, but it's not a sufficient tool for losing weight in most situations. The core problem is that the amount of calories you eat is in the ballpark of thousands, while a workout will burn in the order of hundreds (excluding athletes and such). This along with metabolic adaptation means that it's always easier to out eat what you burn extra. In other words, you can't outrun your fork. Exercise is healthy for a wide array of reasons, but it's only a small part of losing weight. Nearly all of it has to come from your eating habits.
Oh for sure. But it helps to spread the effort and to have to fight hunger and cravings less. If one fails there it makes sense to put at least minimum effort to alleviate that strain.
Also i mentioned strength training specifically since other than what you burn at a workout resting metabolic rate also increases and helps. I assume the average person on this website is notably rather sedentary and would see above average results depending on age and such.[1] (Even more so if he's a guy which I believed he was based on his name.) You'll always need a base and you're reducing your intake anything so something like a 15% difference is gigantic when you're struggling and super helpfull (even just 5% is worthwile).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8030593/
edit: and I'll acknowledge it would take a while before that increased resting metabolic rate starts to play more but again....it needs to be sustainable so whatever you're doing you need to be able to keep up anyway.
Yes. One summer my friends asked me to join in a running program with them. We went from basically sedentary to running 5k a day within several weeks. They hoped to lose weight. I didn't expect to, because we weren't eating any differently, but I did it because I wanted to get stronger and less out-of-breath.
I was right; we didn't lose any weight, but we did get much better at running without gasping to a stop within a couple minutes.
You can’t outrun a bad diet but you can outrun a mediocre one.
I might consider working with a cognitive behavioral therapist. Since you’ve already lost weight, you do know (in big picture terms) how to lose/not gain weight: eat a healthy diet consistently and get regular exercise. For most people who struggle with their weight, there are emotional eating patterns or even just bad habits that are just hard to break on their own.
Of course knowledge about diet and exercise is immensely valuable, but if there are psychological factors getting in the way, it’s going to be harder to adopt a consistently healthy lifestyle.
I totally see this is myself. If I'm feeling blue, nothing makes me feel better like a cinnamon roll.
Probably my only good advice is to not take internet advice too seriously, which I'm sure you are aware of. The most epistemologically sound advice i can give is try everything and find what works for you. Lots of internet people advocate for low carb approaches for many apparently valid reasons. Recently, i tried eating whole food plant based and it's been an amazing 2 weeks (yes incredibly short time to report). I'm not trying that hard, i'm eating well, and feel amazing. If i keep going I'll probably supplement protein, vitamin b, omegas, fish, etc, but my weight is just falling off so far, unlike any other eating plan i've tried. Not super strict either. Eating whatever i want when i eat out, but i like how it makes me feel so i tend to stick with it when possible. Your mileage will vary. It's literally 2 weeks so far lol
There aren't any, statistically speaking. All strategies are about equally ineffective, long-term. Only really expensive, high-touch, long-term personal engagements by professionals achieve really significant results, and even there, less so than you might think.
The answers that actually work are "move to an environment where you will likely get and stay skinnier" (maybe a different, skinnier country) or (this one's new! There's finally a semi-reasonable answer to this question!) "take GLP-1 agonists". There's no strategy that'll do it (for outliers, yes, but over a population, no)
Its a lifestyle change not a diet. Don't stop the diet / exercise when you get to the "target" weight.
This idea sucks when you are looking at a plate of lettuce leaves - but you should also avoid extreme diets and extreme exercise as it is unsustainable.
in addition to this, start by making small, but permanent changes to your lifestyle over time, if you change everything at once then of course you'll revert pretty quickly
Ozempic is an effective, safe, and proven tool.
It's not about the weight, it's about the exercise.
Start with something easy and establish a rule that won't ever be broken. If you break a rule once, you'll lose the fight.
My rule, for example, when I started to train more:
- start with 10 crunches every morning and evening
- increase by 2 crunches every day
- no exceptions
When you are at ~2 months in, you can add weight training to it to get stronger.
Additionally, find a sport that you can do once or twice a week that is FUN to do. By FUN I really mean it. There's no point in doing sports if you don't enjoy it.
If you enjoy playing batminton, go for it! If you enjoy table tennis, go for it! If you enjoy Kung Fu, Krav Maga, or whatever ... go for it!
Sports isn't about reaching goals, it's about having fun while doing it. Otherwise, you will not overcome the struggles. Your brain needs a reward, and enjoying sports helps you keep wanting more of it.
Have you actually lost weight like that? I think exercise is a huge trap for weight loss. Cardio exercise makes you healthy, but it will also make you hungry. Especially if you are not used to it. Overweight people are usually already overeating. They can't deal with hunger and cravings well. If you make them do cardio, they will likely eat back whatever they burned and most likely much more. And even if they don't, they were already overeating, so chances are high you are not in a caloric deficit still. I have lost a lot of weight (30kg) three times now (gained some of it back every time unfortunately) and I think there is much truth to "You don’t lose weight at the gym, you lose weight in the kitchen.".
> Cardio exercise makes you healthy, but it will also make you hungry.
That's what I've noticed, too.
But I've also noticed that it makes me crave different foods than when I sit on my ass all day. So, on average, I tend to actually eat less, because I don't have random cravings in between meals.
I doubt that people who are overweight and sedentary only eat "healthy" meals, only too much.
I mean, the ranges of a European mentioning that they are overweight compared to the US are of course very different. What is overweight here counts as normal over there.
I am currently at around ~120kg and my "goal weight" was around that area. I still have a tummy that I am not satisfied with, but my legs are mostly muscles due to me cycling a lot. I sold my car on purpose to force me to cycle in bad weather.
Currently I am also trying out a more hardcore exercise program because I never gained a lot of muscles in the past, even when I was doing MMA training 6 times a week.
I'm probably stating the obvious here: muscles weigh more than fat, meaning you'll always gain weight before you can lose weight. I mentioned the 2-3 months time span because that's (for me) when it switched, and my body suddenly had it easier to get into calories burning mode.
Suffice it to say: I don't eat nor drink any sweets, not even in my muesli. No artificial sweeteners either. I replaced sweets with fruits in my muesli, for example. And I just drink water, because soft drinks are the human brain's enemy.
The decision to not eat nor drink anything sweet is important, I think, because it helps me go into calories burning mode much faster with much less calories.
Funnily enough, once you get decent enough I have a hard time eating after doing cardio. I need to force myself to eat something that isn't just a gatorade because my body is too busy recovering to spare any blood for my gut.
> It's not about the weight, it's about the exercise.
You cannot outrun a fork.
Tell that to all the skinny endurance weekend warriors who fuel their exercise with huge amounts of sugary drinks and gummy bears. If you are curious, read about the function of GLUT4 in the membrane of skeletal muscles.
Reality is more complex than memetic one-liners.
Obviously professional athletes or people who otherwise have an extremely active lifestile can afford to eat more.
The obese people and sedentary office workers don't and would need to train for months to be able to out-run a single piece of cake on a regular basis without injury.
The phrase is good advice for that group of people.
The point is not that they can eat more. It's that they can gobble large quantities of straight up sugar without developing metabolic disease.
To quantify this, on a weekly long ride they may consume 300g of refined sugar, far far beyond the often recommended limit of 20g of sugar per day.
So perhaps the sedentary person would benefit from walking or leisurely cycling to work a whole more than by trying to restrict their diet
I will as soon as I see any of them gobble up a smothered burrito or Chicago pizza on their run.
Do we really want to compare ultramarathon runners with couch potatoes?
> I will as soon as I see any of them gobble up a smothered burrito or Chicago pizza on their run.
I gather that you have never met an endurance cyclist. Randonneurs are notorious for devouring whatever they can find when they stop for lunch.
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Dedicated athletes are obviously not who we're talking about so why bring it up?
So you can't run away from a bad diet... Except when you can, but that is "obviously not who we are talking about".
Maybe that meme needs to die for good, instead.
Here's what the "The Renaissance Diet 2.0" book recommends:
1) Don't lose more than 10% of your bodyweight in the same weight loss period.
2) Don't lose more than 1% of body weight per week.
3) At the end of a weight loss period, transition to eating at maintenance calories for a while before starting a new weight loss period.
A common mistake is to completely stop dieting when you reach your goal weight. This is a bad idea because your body has adapted to the diet (e.g. decreased energy expenditure) and it's therefore easy to regain weight rapidly. What you should do is keep tracking what you eat while increasing calories to maintenance level, to give a chance to your body to slowly decrease hunger and increase energy expenditure.
That book was written by a bodybuilder who has consistently showed up on stage way too fat. Then he claims it is all water weight.
So 8% body fat? :) Regardless, he his first and foremost a PhD in sports physiology.
Yes, unfortunately. I was a world class yo-yo dieter, bouncing over 100 pounds four times, with many many lesser yos. This is, officially, a type of bulimia. I binge and diet instead of vomit. After more than five decades of that I found stability via sufficient protein, but I've lost my previous knack for losing weight. So now I'm stuck right in the middle of one of my previous yo-yos. It's better here than at the top though.
I've gone through stuff like this too. Not sure if it helps, but I believe in you and hope you find strength and peace in your journey. :)
Its all about long term habits, basic knowledge about nutrition and the 80/20 rule.
Hardcore diets and then falling back to the old habits are absolutely not the way to do it. There are things like diet fatigue, the mentioned Yo-Yo effect you don't want to deal with.
Your "diet" should be generally healthy and long term sustainable. It just does not work to replace one way of malnutrition with another one.
So here are the things i (BMI 22, bodyfat < 19% for now 20+ years, at age over 40) would recommend:
One is strength based exercise. Find 1-3 days in your week where you can dependably (!) spend an hour or two to go to the gym. It is better to go once every week reliably, than to go 3 times one week and then skipping the next.
Get a full body training plan consisting of multi joint exercises. For example don't waste your time on biceps if you can do rows which trains your biceps and back at the same time.
You must do strength training order to gain muscle mass. Muscles have a large influence on your hormones, which helps to suppress hunger and keeps you fit in general. The hunger suppression is important if you lose weight. It works this way: if you lose weight, you will usually lose muscle mass alongside fat. Losing muscles creates a huge hunger signal compared to fat. Doing strength training keeps you from losing muscle (or even building it) so your hunger is lower while you lose weight.
And you don't want to end up skinny fat with issues like back pain (which i ended up with at age 20 without ever being overweight).
Don't overdo it. But be consistent, do the smallest amount necessary but every single week no exception.
Don't do cardio (at least not cardio only). Cardio is fine if you do it for sporting reasons but since you seem to be overweight, i assume this is not the case ;) So cardio would just waste your time because it burns surprisingly small amounts of calories while increasing hunger by a lot. It also does not build muscles as much so why bother?
The most important part is to get your nutrition in check.
Basically do the following:
Close to every meal should, by volume, roughly consist of 1/4 protein, like chicken or other lean meat, or plant based alternatives 1/4 carbs, like rice, potatoes whatever (pasta has tons of calories so be careful here) 2/4 vegetables like carrots, broccoli... whatever just mix it up.
It is a ton of vegetables, which is good because it keeps your stomach full and is healthy in every conceivable way.
Do not skip fats, but skip pure sugars especially in liquid form like soda.
Don't do cheat days where you mindlessly eat thousands of calories, this messes with your psyche for no reason. But eating out, or some junk food is fine from time to time you are not a robot.
Inform yourself about the calorie content of your meals and try to control the amount.
There are many ways to exert control, which are highly individual. Some have no problem skipping breakfast, some make their meals smaller, some do keto or track calories. Whatever floats your boat you have to find out. Remember it has to be sustainable. Personally i try to get a good amount of protein into my meals and i keep an eye out for calories without counting.
Every single morning: Use the toilet, step on a scale, check your weight. It varies a bit from day to day but the average helps you track. You might want to use an app but its not really necessary. This is your main way to keep track. Gain weight? Try to eat a bit less next week.
Keep in mind that you are in it for the long run. There is no need to lose tons of weight in the short term. It is fine to be slow which is way more sustainable anyway.
You want to be fit for the rest of your life so you have to keep at it for the rest of your life.
Find a sport or physical activity (something physical, golf is probably not going to do it) you love. Keep doing it.
Well, if the above paper is correct there is something you need to know. Epigenetic changes are caused my the methylation of DNA. So if there are epigentic chnages that are causing you to gain weight, what needs to be done is to Demethylate the DNA. This is done through Demethylase enzymes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demethylase
some of which have vitamin cofactors like zinc[1] and riboflavin[2].
So nutrition is important. I will let you investigate the link between zinc, riboflavin and diabetes...
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7191051/ [2] https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/O60341/entry
If all else fails, look into GLP-1 meds. At this point ,it's not even controversial anymore and some of the social stigma is gone. it's hard enough losing weight even with medical intervention.
eat less permanently
food is no longer a reward for anything
fin.
this is not helpful nor insightful
its literally the answer unless parent has solved famine
it is, at best, a tautology, at worst, taunting the asker on the very thing they are struggling with. I think we can do better to help each other with something difficult
It is what i did. Learn to live with hunger for a while instead of going to "fix it" instantly.
No idea why you are so dismissive.
the fact that you were able to live with your level of hunger does not mean that for somebody else the level of hunger is the same or is as easy to manage as it was for you. this is not helpful
Fasting is a natural state. Food addiction is real, as is lack of discipline.
Just stop overeating. That's the magic bullet. Always has been.
What's not helpful is looking for weird workarounds all the time. Just stop eating so much.
It is not easy, it took me time and effort. Sorry if thats too difficult for some of ya'll. There is no easier way without meds.
It's very easy to fast for a few days once you get used to it. Your hunger is food addiction, not your body actually needing those calories.
I'm surprised the paper doesn't mention "settling point theory" which was suggested decades ago. This seems to be evidence in favor of the theory.
There is not good evidence in favor of that theory.
there is quite a lot of evidence supporting the existence of homeostatic mechanisms involved in weight regulation
eg https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1105816
I always used to think negatively about people that were severely overweight (still do unconsciously if I'm being honest) as I always attributed their obesity to lack of will power. I'm a huge proponent of better living through chemistry (steroids - with frequent blood work, nootropics, whatever) and recently I decided to get my abs back. I hopped on some compounded semiglutide and was blown away by the change in my attitude towards food. I had always snacked at night after the kids went to bed and had built up about 25 pounds over the past decade. I was able to drop it all in 3 months without any sort of dieting, I just ate when I was hungry. Decided to not eat after 6:30pm and just did it, no issues while on the semiglutide.
Really changed my attitude about food, and my body and minds interaction with it. A lot of this is subconscious and really hard to get control of. The fact a chemical compound was able to change my mental relationship with food also put an interesting spin on my ideas about consciousness and self control as a whole. We are just slaves to our biological processes.
I had this same experience, but I have not continued to take the medication after a short experiment. I found I could get a similar outcome (subjective experience) through my food selection Today I’ve eaten around 2kg of vegetables today (zucchini, capsicum, eggplant, cauliflower, spinach) all of which was under 500 calories, and I’ve eaten fish. If I eat a massive amount of vegetables and get ~200g protein, I don’t feel I’m depriving myself and am satiated on under 2000 calories, previously I would typically eat over 3000 on a normal day.
As for people lacking willpower, the genetics of hunger mean all of us experience vastly different levels of hunger. You might be interested to read about the family in Pakistan who could not produce a relevant hormone leptin, and the toddlers driven to fighting by insatiable hunger to steal food from each other, and the dramatic change in their lives after medical intervention with leptin injections
My brother's family has done something similar although in a different direction. They have been strictly carnivore for several years now. Able to eat large amounts of food while keeping calories low and feeling satiated. It's worked well for them.
I'll look at that study you mentioned, thank you.
leptin deficiency is rare, so supplementation does not produce an effect in most people.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199909163411204
There is more information about the family involved out there, but I can't remember where I read about it.
A thing I found interesting about the genetics of hunger, is the concept of mongenetic, v polygenetic traits Monogenetic traits - a variation in a single gene is has an observed often severe impact. Polygenetic traits - variations in a large number of genes and environmental are contributing In reality these traits exist on a spectrum of severity. The more sublte the impact of a gene the more people you need to study to tease out the influence of the gene, so monogenetic traits tend to be discovered first.
I think you mean semaglutide.
right
I wonder if fasting of some sort is able to reset these effects somehow - shoot any material on that if you know of it!
The idea is that fasting does encourage aptopsis of cells.
Doesn't similar happen for strength gain? People that have had larger muscles tend to have an easier time building them back up, as well.
> People that have had larger muscles tend to have an easier time building them back up, as well.
Yes, although I don't know whether that's epigenetic.
Fair. I'm now curious to know what the different forms of memory things can have. I confess I assumed they were all inter-related.
The mechanism I've heard of (heard proposed?) for skeletal muscle is that muscle cells retain the additional nuclei (myonuclei) developed during strength training, even during detraining periods. Then subsequently re-developing strength is easier because you've still got all of those nuclei.
That sounds similar to the way the fat thing was described to me, in the past. Curious how all of that relates. If anyone has a good read to dive into this, I'd be grateful!
It really lends itself to the way I model "training" for stuff. Sucks, as we want to think there are differences from rote practice and learning. But it increasingly seems that any differences there are are much softer than is often taught.
> However, maintaining weight loss is a considerable challenge, especially as the body seems to retain an obesogenic memory that defends against body weight changes
This is validating as I’m very skeptical about this when looking for a partner that currently has a physiology I’m interested in but had one I wasn’t interested in at some point before, and this seems to be a shared experience
Can anyone share tips/insights to loose body fat so as to not gain it back?
The more you research/learn about obesity, the worse it is, much like smoking. One of the most depressing stats is that dieting does not get easier with time. The probability of eventually regaining all the weight eventually converges to 100%. Even if you're successful for 2 years, people still regain by year 4, 5, etc. The body never resists trying to regain the weight. GLP-1 drugs are the best hope yet.
This is self-defeating and untrue. Many people, myself included, have kept weight off for decades. But you don’t get there by thinking of your new lifestyle as “dieting”. You need to learn to love eating healthy foods in a healthy amount, and getting exercise. Eventually you can get to a place where the old foods and habits are simply unappealing.
> in a healthy amount
That's the crux! Constant hunger starts nagging me as soon as I try. I've tried several times for several months, with nice results from the weight's points of view, but I never got to the point where my quality of life globally increased, and that was always due to the constant hunger.
I'll only retry when I'll have found a way to stop the hunger now.
It doesn't help everyone but some people find it more useful to try and "enjoy" feeling hungry rather than spending as much mental effort trying to ignore it or not feel hungry. Sort of like how body builders learn to enjoy the muscle ache from heavy lifting.
That’s pretty useful info! If you were feeling uncomfortably hungry beyond a short adjustment period, that makes me question if your caloric deficit was too aggressive. And/or if your diet didn’t include enough fiber and protein for satiety. (It’s also possible to be confusing other signals for hunger, like thirst, boredom, or anxiety.)
Losing weight does not have to be so hard. You can lose a lot of weight gradually over time with a small, consistent deficit. Measurement accuracy is critical, though - you will absolutely fail if you aren’t logging your food like a lab scientist.
But it is definitely possible to succeed without that constant sense of privation. In fact, if you want to succeed long-term, you HAVE to find that balance because nobody can force themselves to feel deprived indefinitely.
I found that sugar free hard sweets/candies helped to try and satiate some of the pangs. It's still hard, and you might end up "chain eating" like 5 or 6 of the things in a row, but I figure better that than bingeing chocolate or whatever.
Just live with the hunger? Been starving for last 3 hours but idc really. Thats how i never went above 75kg all my life
This is not untrue.
Look at the long term numbers for successfully keeping weight off, 5, 10 years out.
They’re abysmal.
Its because people treat it as a DIET and not THE NEW NORMAL.
When you stop a diet, you go back to eating shit. The new normal just keeps you at the same place because you get used to the fact that you don't need to eat breakfast, and a 500 calorie lunch is perfectly satiating, hell maybe a bit too much.
I wonder how much of that is due to a sedentary lifestyle? If you're running and biking and strength training it makes a big difference vs trying to maintain a healthy weight with a low TDEE.
Yeah, what you said is key - and I can also vouch that it's absolutely possible to keep it away for good, aside from small setbacks that almost everyone experiences, since we’re not robots.
The word diet is problematic because most people see it as something temporary. But you can't just eat healthy to lose weight and then go back to old habits, expecting the weight to stay off. That just doesn't make sense.
Also for many people, food isn’t just about pleasure - it’s also a way to deal with boredom, stress, depression, and so on. So even if someone sticks to a diet, if the psychological root causes are still there, it's going to be hard to stay away from junk food.
> One of the most depressing stats is that dieting does not get easier with time.
Yeah, I've tried several times under medical control.
I kept asking my supervising doctor: "When is the constant hunger going to get better?" And the answer was always in the range of a few weeks to several months. But that moment never came... never!
And, in the end, all the kilograms I had lost along the route always found their way back home, and always with some new friends they had met while we had lost sight of each other.
Embrace the suck.
absolutely. and yet people will still say "just eat less"! Imagine telling a person who smokes "just smoke less"
Yeah I often think that I am addicted to food. They say men think about sex every 7 seconds - I think about eating every 7 seconds!
If I start eating badly, it is very very very hard to stop. I will crash off the rails into a spiral of binge-eating for the rest of the day until I feel physically sick (which takes a while).
You just can't start.
With alcoholism or smoking it is plausible (although hard) to go cold-turkey and just eliminate the things that lead you to the binges. You can make lifestyle changes to avoid them. But you still have to eat, so for me I am always one meal away from losing it and pigging out. I never feel full (the food challenges of "if you can finish this meal it's free" are a walk in the park for me - anyone for dessert?). It takes continuous and immense will power to stop - I am hovering around 95kgs at 1.85m which I know is "bad" but tell me something I don't know. It's hard.
That is the key to stopping smoking.
Telling them they can't possibly smoke less through willpower is incredibly harmful. Same with eating.
Ultimately this is true though right? If you want to quit smoking at some point you need to smoke less.
That's... A completely reasonable thing to say..
the "just" is doing a lot of work, too much. Most people with an addiction or weight problem are very well aware of what they should be doing (or not doing), but they'll be fighting with their body telling them constantly that they really, really need to eat or smoke. This is the hard part and telling someone "just do it" is not helpful in the least
That depends on your definition of "reasonable". Every single person I have met who is struggling to lose weight is attempting to consume fewer calories. Telling them to "just eat less" provides no novel information or actionable strategies. At best it makes you sound like the kind of person who most people avoid because you prefer being right to being helpful.
In line with the book "Intuitive Eating", I'm trying to make peace with both food and my weight lately for this reason.
Given what effects stress, depression, anxiety, guilt, shame, etc. have on the psyche and body, I'm running an experiment, and betting that making peace and taking care of my body as it is right now will benefit me in the long run.
That just isn’t true.
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> How about MAGA? What if it can be treated with some pills, too?
I often wonder if anti-psychotics might do the trick. They often seem captivated by paranoid delusions.
Calorie counting is the only truly reliable way to lose weight
That's clearly not true. Calorie counting can work if you stick to it and aren't shit at estimating the calories in food. Almost any diet can work if you are able to stick with it. Appetite suppressants like amphetamines seen to work too. We've also seen that the new diabetes drugs actually work.
The only reliable way to lose weight is through a caloric deficit. And the only reliable way to be on a caloric deficit is through counting your calories. If you're dieting without actually counting your calories, then at best you are only hoping and guessing that your diet is sufficient enough to put you in a caloric deficit.
You don't have to count calories to eat in a caloric deficit. Counting is not the only reliable way to hit a deficit. Tons and tons of people on GLP-1 drugs are not counting calories but are in a deficit.
“Any diet” is still putting you at a net caloric deficit. There is no other principle that can explain weight loss that I know of. Whether you’re counting calories to achieve that deficit or following a “diet” it comes down to the exact same thing. Counting calories just demystifies the process of weight loss.
The only true reliable way is to burn more than you eat. Counting calories is a way to keep track of that, but it's only going to be so-so accurate unless you only eat labeled food. I will certainly not measure the weight of a banana I eat, and anything else is just a very rough estimate as a banana can be twice the size of another banana.
In general, when I was losing weight I did not really need to count calories, I just ate less than I did. And this worked because I was always hungry especially initially, until the body adapts. If you're always going to check "can I eat this one more thing dear calculator" I'd say you're not really ready to lose weight because tormenting yourself like this every day you will burn out before you can make a dent.
> I will certainly not measure the weight of a banana I eat, and anything else is just a very rough estimate as a banana can be twice the size of another banana.
This is the wrong way to look at it. Sometimes you'll have a larger banana, sometimes a smaller banana, but overall it'll average out. What you need is consistency to compare to your own previous measurements, not perfect accuracy.
For example: By counting my calories and keeping track of my weight, I've learned that I burn about 2200 calories per day. If I went over my foods and measured them perfectly it probably wouldn't be that number, but because I'm consistent in how I measure it I can know with certainty whether I'm above or below that limit. I've been able to reliably control my weight for a few years now because of this and I'm not even measuring, just eyeballing how much of things I use.