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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

From the article (emphasis mine):

> Mr. Cahill was one of the worst off. As he regained more than 100 pounds, his metabolism slowed so much that, just to maintain his current weight of 295 pounds, he now has to eat 800 calories a day less than a typical man his size. Anything more turns to fat.

Presenting the numbers like this seems intentionally confusing. Casually reading this seems like he's eating 800 calories a day and still gaining weight.

What they're really saying is that he's eat $AVG_295_LB_MAN_CALORIES - 800 per day. That's probably around 4000 calories a day.

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Using the USDA supertracker here (https://www.supertracker.usda.gov/bwp/) with the following data/assumptions:

Weight: 295 lbs Age: 46 Height: 5 feet 10 inches (average height for US male) Work activity: sedentary Leisure activity: sedentary

The normal maintenance calories come out at 3117. Less 800 is 2317.

That is still enough to eat well and feel full, in my experience.

>That is still enough to eat well and feel full, in my experience.

That's because your hormone levels aren't crazily out of whack like the individual you reference. If your hormone levels were changed to reflect the person that lost weight, I doubt you'd say that.

Perhaps that is true.

I have also experienced that if I eat total shit, my hunger is boundless. Whereas if I eat well, my hunger tops out at around where it needs to be to maintain a healthy weight. It is not obvious why this should be the case.

I've had the same experience. My family has a history of heart disease, and for a long while I tried to follow a heart healthy diet. I was always starving, and I had difficulty concentrating. I actually managed to gain weight as well.

A year into this experiment I gave up and started eating foods that I felt help me concentrate the best: red meat, dairy, potatoes, butter, starchy vegetables, deli meats, etc. I suddenly felt much better. I found it much easier to maintain a healthy weight, and I had much more energy throughout the day.

I spoke with my internist and a cardiologist, and they were more than ok with the change. My BMI is exactly where it should be, my cholesterol and blood pressure are incredibly low, and I exercise all the time. I don't want to give the impression that everyone should start eating "unhealthy" foods, but at the very least the foods I'm eating are much healthier than the sugar-laden foods that are prevalent in the average diet.

For what it's worth, my cardiologist, believes "bad" cholesterol is damaging in the absence of "good" cholesterol. His wife, who is a dietitian, disagrees with him entirely.

Even with hormone imbalance, I wonder what exactly Cahill eats day to day. I'd guess he's not eating satiating, nutritious, whole foods. I'm almost certain he'd be eating high-GI, insulin-spiking foods, which are driving his hormones further out of whack.

I had no such confusion. It's strange you would blame others and not your own reading comprehension when it was written pretty clearly.

Let's keep it civil.

I just checked what you're saying here: https://news.ycombinator.com. The amount of calories you need to maintain weight does go up enormously as you weight more. And I didn't know that while reading the article, so I thought the guy who needed 800 fewer calories was needing 800 less than a non-overweight person. Not true. A moderately-active 6'0" male needs 3386 to maintain weight as a baseline. Subtracting 800 gives 2586. Which is about what a person of the same build and activity level who weights 175 needs to maintain his weight. So it doesn't seem like it should be so hard to maintain 295.

But the problem would seem to be that if he does get down to 175, then does he need to take in no more than about 1800 calories to keep from gaining, because the 800-calorie difference remains constant? That seems very difficult but also seems unlikely. Or is the 800 calorie difference reduced proportionally or according to some more complicated formula? In any case, it sounds like it would be hard to maintain a weight of 175 once you've had Mr. Cahill's history.

Nowhere near that.

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