> Doing research on what people eat is VERY hard, it's very hard to get accurate data.
AKA, don't bother with any studies with self-reported data. No one wants to admit it's their fault they got fat, but it always is.
AKA, don't bother with any studies with self-reported data. No one wants to admit it's their fault they got fat, but it always is.
If that were the case then studies to find out why two people can eat the same thing and do the same amount of exercise yet one of them can end up fatter than the other wouldn't be necessary. It seems to be the case that, all external factors being equal, how fat you are can be determined by something outside of your control (genetics, gut microbes, etc). To that end, someone could be fat without it being their fault.
edit: not picking on you Onion2k...I end up commenting a lot on these stories because it really irks me when so many articles and people are looking for something external to blame for their weight problem. You may or may not be able to change your metabolism but you absolutely can change the number of calories you're consuming.
- 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
I used to exercise 3-4 days a week. Lifting weights, cardio, and yoga. I wasn't losing weight. I started gradually counting and cutting calories and when it didn't help I cut more. The only way I was at a good weight was on 1400 calories/day. This made me completely miserable and anti social (I wouldn't eat outside my house). This may be sustainable for some, but it wasn't for me, eventually I just had to eat more. I kept it up for a couple years though. I didn't have a body image problem either, my weight was a couple pounds below "overweight" BMI.
On the other hand a decade before that I ate junk food every single day and was very thin. Something seems to have changed in my body, but I don't know what. When I was thin my diet was truly horrible!
Even when I was a kid - Every single Halloween I would eat an entire pillow case worth of candy over the course of around 3 weeks, but I never gained a pound.
There is SO MUCH we don't know on this topic!
Yes, one can cut back on food, but willpower and the ability to control are limited to some degree.
Then I decided I wanted to cut down to the six-pack bodyfat level and stay there, so for the initial "cut" phase of that plan I dieted at ~1400 calories a day, every single day (no cheating) for ~2-3 months, and started doing way more cardio. Only lost a couple pounds, little or no visible difference, so, confused and frustrated, I gave up. Makes no damn sense according to any "weight loss calculator" I've ever seen (which all claim that my BMR should sit in the low 2000s), but that's what happened.
Packed on fat immediately when I went back to my usual eating patterns, took me years to get that under control. To this day I seem to easily hit a plateau a bit over what I'd call my healthy range when dieting at any reasonable (not near or under starvation level) caloric intake.
OTOH I've found that strength training's more effective for me than it "ought" to be but requires time, which sucks. I'd love to be able to diet my way to a trim waist, since maintaining an intake under what weight loss tables/calculators say should work for me is something I find easy to do. Too bad it doesn't.
Don't know what the explanation is, but something weirder than the "calories in/calories out, and calories out is fairly easy to guesstimate with useful accurately" orthodoxy is going on.
1. Was the skinny individual monitored the entire time? He could have regurgitated his food.
2. Was the skinny person's poop analyzed for complete digestion of the 4000 calories?The premise of the show is they bring in two people - one superfat and one superskinny. They weight them and each person tells what a typical day's food intake is for them. Then they switch diets for a couple weeks and are weighed again at the end.
Yes, its possible he lied about eating all that chocolate. Yes, he could be throwing up every day. This isn't a controlled experiment, its a TV show. It seems odd someone would do that though.
Yes. If there's anything reading diet studies has taught me, it's that people lie, to themselves even, and people are very bad at estimating calories. Things like MyFitnessPal have been a boon to countless people trying to lose weight because they can actually get a handle on what their intake really is. Bonus, they can compare across food choices to see what will fit in their caloric budget but still be filling or satisfying.
I'll issue you a counter-challenge: watch "Secret Eaters".
Your answer, of course, is "no". So just to move the conversation forwards: do you think if 3 random people consumed a bottle of olive oil, they would necessarily gain an equivalent amount of weight? Why or why not?
Second, I don't think three random people would gain the equivalent amount of weight; that's one of my points I've made elsewhere. TDEE for different people is different, based on height, weight (heavier people have higher TDEEs, which is ironic because it makes it easier for them to lose weight), and activity level. If you're talking three people of the same height, weight, strictly controlled activity level and strictly controlled intake, then I would expect their weight gain to be as close to identical as to make no difference. There's always some variance (within 200-300 Kcal: http://examine.com/faq/does-metabolism-vary-between-two-peop...)
Since we're cherry picking completely unrealistic intakes, I'll pose back to you: if three random people consumed 3500 calories worth of refined sugar, and that exceeded their TDEE by 3500 calories, then yes, each and every one of them would gain 1lb of adipose tissue. Seeing that many in the US easily approach an intake of this much refined sugar in the form of soda, the results (of the population, 2/3 is overweight, and 1/3 is obese) should not be surprising.
I just think the "thermodynamics" argument oversimplifies immensely. Even the variance in resting metabolic rate is unlikely to capture the whole difference between multiple subjects consuming 3500 calories of oil (or, for that matter, bacon or butter), because resting metabolic rate captures the variance you'd see between people consuming refined sugar, and there are more variables involved in metabolizing fat.
Later, because this is bugging me a bit
And that's all before we get into satiety, which is a hormonal response. I had some cheese and rillettes for lunch. I'm not going to be hungry for the rest of the day. If I'd had the equivalent calories in carbohydrates, I'd be hungry in an hour. Upthread, the term "willpower" is being bandied about as if people can simply will themselves to eat a fixed number of calories. That's true only if you eat carefully, and if you don't have any hormonal dysfunction; it's as true as saying I could will myself into coding for 48 hours straight, if I just focussed my "will" on it.
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.
This is a great analogy. "It's your fault" is not a public health policy, it's a cop-out. And it doesn't even make sense. Obesity is rising dramatically in developed countries. Is the current generation just morally inferior to the ones that came before?
Obesity is peoples' fault in the same way car accidents are. That doesn't mean the proper response is to simply blame people, instead of using science to devise solutions.
But if obesity is primarily the fault of the person who is obese lacking will power then shouldn't we start by doing things directly addressing this.
For example, I snack late at night - except when there are no snacks in the house. Sometimes I'll still make food, but mainly I'll just wander around feeling tetchy and eventually get distracted enough to not think about it. For me it absolutely is lack of willpower (which is much better recently probably due to antidepressant meds) to avoid eating things I know aren't healthy for me; or indeed just to eat less in general.
If we're looking to prime cause then for me willpower seemingly fits the bill, as you say that revelation may not help to fix things for me - if I can do outdoor pursuits for a week then I can lose weight no problems! - but healthcare workers looking to help me should perhaps seek ways to enforce diet that don't rely on my willpower so much rather than just ignore willpower deficiency altogether?
Yes, we should. The average weight has gone up far faster than humans can change genetically, so people start looking for things like gut flora or epigenetics. Occam's razor would point to the average supermarket and restaurant selection of today versus a few generations ago to explain the obesity epidemic. Cheaper, faster, tastier food (capitalism optimizes for these three qualities in food), and more riveting, less active indoor pursuits can easily explain it. That's not to say the research is worthless, but gut biome most likely influences subconscious cravings, not BMR, and epigenetics is still young enough that many biologists think that pulling conclusions from research into it is premature at best.
A cop-out from what, exactly? Does society have a responsibility to make everyone thin?
Even if you say it does, how would you propose it goes about doing that? There's no scalable, organizable effort you can take that will make fat people thin.
If you say we have to throw more money at research, I say, sure, we should! Along with every other worthy cause. Where we're going to get the money, I've no idea. If you do, that's a completely different kind of argument.
Isn't that likely, though, that this research pays for itself?
Yet we don't tax sugar, processed food is the cheapest and non-processed are the most expensive.
The entire food industry is designed to sell more of 'their' product, and the addictiveness is developed more than the health value. Lobbyists ensure the governments keep the status quo.
While the libertarians might have a point that most such decisions turn out to be deleterious, it's certainly not the case that policy can't make you fat, and so can presumably avoid making you fatter.
Fail.
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).
spoken like someone with no experience with drug addiction. ever heard of a maintenance program?
But with food is it impossible to go to rehab and stop eating over a period of a couple weeks.
If lifelong drug maintenance programs were the only option to quit abusing, there would be a lot more relapses.
Yes, buy only to a degree.
It's easy to posit so that some people's responses may be more intense than others.
I know I am at least partially at fault for being fat. I sit on ass all day and rarely exercise. That certainly doesn't help.
But I also know that several of the reasons for obesity do not originate in the frontal lobe of the brain, and are therefore not the result of conscious decision-making. And that absolves me from some fraction of the burden of culpability.
But not the whole thing. I could make conscious choices to make my body healthier. But I don't, and therefore I can accept at least a little bit of the blame.
It's more important to me that I don't care one little bit about how strangers feel about my obesity. The only one I am answerable to for the condition of my body is myself. So if you choose to view me as a slothful glutton, you may. If you choose to view me as the unlucky product of genes, microbiome, and advertising, you may. I only care to the extent that you can help me achieve my own health goals.
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.
That's why I like that research in this vein is being pursued. Even if no one loses even a single gram of white adipose tissue as a result, it could at least help kill off the multitude of fad diets that do not work for anyone, regardless of their individual physiology. And it might instill a bit of humility and understanding in those who never quite grasped that their fit bodies are the result of hard work and good fortune, not just the former.
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.
There are psychological issues, to be sure, but except for rare exceptions (like Crohn's and extreme outliers, ie, not common) people of the same height and weight are within 200-300Kcal of each other BMR wise (source: http://examine.com/faq/does-metabolism-vary-between-two-peop...)
While it's true that people's metabolisms vary widely, and the amount of calories for one individual to maintain weight might make another gain, it's not true that the weight gain is outside of their control. They have control over how much food they eat.
If you're gaining weight, it means you're eating more than your body can burn, so you need to eat less.
This is not as attractive an answer as "i just have the wrong gut microbiota" but it's far more accurate.
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.
But we know this is not the case. Starving populations are very skinny.
This is not to say that starvation is healthy, only that starvation is a reliable, affordable, and obvious way to lose weight.