Why do people put on differing amounts of weight?

and how exactly do you know that the insulin response doesn't affect the psychology? that's begging the question, and that's exactly what i'm saying is erroneous about your mindset. the state of nutrition science is currently horseshit, any casual observer can see that - we need all the good science we can get.

That being said I agree that I hope there's more to come.

- Mammals that live near or with humans, from lab rats to pet pooches, have gotten fatter over recent decades.

- Fatter lab animals are the hardest to explain, since their diet is tightly controlled and well documented.

- Endocrine disruptors, pathogens or temperature changes might play a role and could also factor into human obesity

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-23970219

A study showed that transplanting gut bacteria from obese people into mice led to the animals gaining weight, while bacteria from lean people kept them slim. The findings were published in Science. Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine, Missouri, took gut bacteria from pairs of twins - one obese, one thin.

The bacteria were then put into mice which had grown up in completely sterile environments and had no gut bacteria of their own. Mice with the obese twin's bacteria became heavier and put on more fat than mice given bacteria from a lean twin - and it was not down to the amount of food being eaten.

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Ok, so you may need 1300 calories a day to maintain an "ideal" bodyweight but The Minnesota Starvation Experiment shows that amount of food intake causes severe emotional stress and depression. So yeah

So I can weigh a little less by becoming obsessed with what I eat and always being in a bad mood. And I get no credit from the smug thin people who still see me as a lazy obese person.

Or your mental state. Or working hours. Or illness and injury. Or depression. Or lifetime habits, possibly due to choices your parents made.

Yes, it is all our own faults. That doesn't mean it is easy to change. Nor does it make somebody a lesser person for having made poor choices.

BTW, It is also your own fault for everything else that is wrong in your life. Ever answered a question wrong, made a mistake, messed up a project, gotten a speeding ticket, injured yourself, or hurt anybody in any way? All your fault.

Perhaps throwing blame at problems just isn't a good approach to making things better?

Citation needed.

The ability of human beings to control their biology through willpower is limited (if you don't believe me, try holding your breath for 30 minutes, or not drinking anything for a few days). Willpower itself is limited, and motivation is itself influenced by mental health. And diseases like Prader-Willi and Emery-Dreifuss demonstrate situations in which motivation and willpower are irrelevant.

And that's only what we know.

Sometimes when I have dinner with friends, I'll observe a situation where two of them will order the same thing, the bigger one will wolf down the dinner and the thinner one will pick at it and eat maybe half. I don't see two people equally tempted, where one gives it to his cravings and other is morally strong. I see two people with two different drives.

Why do different people respond so differently the same meal? What is it our society that leads so many people to consume a calorie surplus? It's disappointing the number of people that don't even want to investigate the biological and psychological origins of such phenomenon, instead claiming (without evidence) that it's all about moral failure.

In the 19th century, when painkillers first started becoming available, physicians would refuse to give them to woman in childbirth, because the Bible says childbirth is supposed to be painful. Women had sinned, therefore they must suffer. That's nonsense, of course, but people really wanted to hold onto their moral judgements, even at the expense of biology, good medicine, and relief of suffering. I think we should be suspicious of any impulse to use moral judgement to avoid investigation into the causes of medical conditions. Like obesity.

Your statement is the equivalent of saying its a heroin junkies own fault: Technically true but useless. It also has many parallels in the way you grew up, differing genetics, etc.

If it were just a matter of willpower or simply eating less then I would already be my ideal weight. It isn't that simple. You can't detox off food and quit eating. At least a drug addict doesn't have to take just the /right/ amount of the drug every day to stay healthy!

The drive to eat is one of the most basic instincts. Evolution has created signals and feedback mechanisms far more powerful than our puny frontal lobes. The problem of too much food has simply never existed before. Fruit eventually falls to the ground and rots. During winter food becomes scarce. Excess food is consumed by other animals. For our entire evolutionary history the correct long-term survival move was to eat while the eatin' was good because there was definitely going to be some kind of lean time ahead.

The only simple or easy part of losing weight was cutting out sugared soda. That dropped 30 lbs. The rest was a slog and using various techniques to trick my body (like eating a large meal before going to the grocery store so I wouldn't buy anything outside my meal plan). It also involved lots of extremely strong urges to eat more and hunger pains. I have to think about what I eat every day and no matter what I do I will never be my ideal weight. Internal or external, this is a battle a lot of people just never face. They just eat when they are hungry and stop when they feel full. Of course their myopic view says it's just "calories in, calories out" (which the research has already proven is false... Some people gain more weight on the same calories).

I think this is the sad truth of the matter (at least for now). People tend to fall into one of two camps: 1) Those who believe that obesity is largely (if not entirely) the obese person's fault; 2) Those who believe that obesity is heavily influenced by factors outside of conscious control, and therefore, there's nothing to be done about it.

The truth is somewhere in the middle. Some people are luckier than others, genetically or epigenetically. The unlucky ones will put on fat more easily, and they will have a much harder time losing it. So that means they need to work twice as hard (if not 100x as hard) to keep it off. It's a shitty break, but it's the truth.

I grew up fat. Losing that fat took nothing short of a Herculean (and borderline unsustainable) dietary effort. I mean, I lived like an ascetic monk, depriving myself of any and all pleasurable food, for the better part of a decade. I worked out like a crazy person. And even today, keeping off the fat requires a constant vigil over everything I eat, and the amount of exercise I do. I wasn't responsible for getting fat in the first place -- I lost a prenatal dice roll -- but I did take responsibility for battling the bulge.

"Continually reiterating the thermodynamic dietary hypothesis to me (energy eaten minus energy expended) does not help. I doubt it helps anyone except possibly those who do not already know what a kilocalorie is."

Agreed. It's also willfully reductionist, and it smacks of passive-aggressive moralizing. To me, rattling off the calories-in-calories-out line is no more helpful than calling obese people lazy, stupid, irresponsible, or sinful. (And in basically 90% of the contexts in which someone says it, that's the subtextual insinuation.) It's unproductive. It's an attempt to close the case summarily, and this case needs to stay open.

There are those who would deny it, unto their dying breath. You do not appear to be one of them, and that's the first step. The saying I like is that weight loss is simple (subtext: simple to understand), but not easy (subtext: not easy to execute). Sure, there are tonnes of factors that go into what causes someone to overeat. And fad diets, or even the whole concept of "dieting" need to DIAF (it's lifestyle changes or nothing). And shaming people for being fat might actually be counterproductive. But being at a healthy weight is there for the taking, if you want it. If you choose not to be a healthy weight, fair enough. Just don't complain when you have to (rightfully) pay for two airplane tickets because you take up that much space.

And just for the record, there are many of us for whom weight loss had nothing to do with good fortune. We were fat, we had bad eating habits (snacking unconsciously, bingeing on soda, etc, etc). We've been there, we recognized what caused us to be fat, and we turned it around through hard work and perseverence. Didn't even have to get a gut biome implant or exercise like a fiend, just simple reduction of intake.

This is spot on. So you have a slow metabolism/bad genetics/conditions/etc? Sucks to be you. Sorry. It's like that saying by Schneier about copy protection and the speed of light. If you want to lose weight, adjust your intake downwards. That's all it takes. Hungry/craving something? Try substituting something more filling (less calorie dense), or eating a little bit to see if that makes the craving go away.

Or your body is skipping the usable energy stage completely for some foods and storing them as fat directly without it ever having the chance to be used. Then some of the food you eat makes you gain weight regardless of the amount of activity you do - you just run out of energy and get fat.

The mistake you're making is assuming that humans are perfect machines for turning food in to energy, and simple mechanics means extra energy is stored as fat. It's far more complex than that.

Sure, if A and B sit still for 8 hours there is no difference. But, many people are constantly in motion.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2163173/Toddlers-d...

Physics.

> There's plenty of anecdotal evidence indicating significant variance among individuals.

However, research evidence disagrees. So, the most likely culprit in the variance reported anecdotally isn't different BMR or efficiency of digestion, but different (even delusional) calorie-counting approximations.

If you put 100g of broccoli in a bomb calorimeter and burn it in pure oxygen, you heat it up by 34 kilocalories.

If you put it in a human digestive tract instead , the human can absorb anywhere from 0 to 34 kilocalories of food energy from it. We already have ample evidence that the food energy absorbed may be affected by the microbiome in the intestines, the preparation method used, the time of day, the time of year, and other foods that may have been eaten at around the same time.

But the calorimetry does establish a hard upper limit on absorbable food energy.

This is why non-ruminant herbivores with shorter digestive tracts--like the arctic hare--will engage in coprophagy. They will eat their "first-through" turds, because there is still some food energy in them. Ruminants do essentially the same thing with multiple stomachs and regurgitation.

If you aren't weighing your food and burning your poop in a calorimeter, you are inaccurately reporting your caloric intake. Even then, you can't really know for sure how much of that energy was absorbed for use by human cells, and how much was used to sustain your microbiome.