It wouldn't surprise me to see a true connection found in a couple of years between autoimmune conditions and weight in a reciprocal way.
would love a link if you have one handy. it seems impossible?
(edit: note that I'm responding to the 'impossible' comment.)
As an example in the other direction. I gained significant weight after getting a foot of my intestines removed while eating the same diet. In this case it was a very good thing as calories out balanced due to incomplete digestion.
PS: Albumin levels are not something you generally hear about, but it's very bad when they get low.
Tldr: It has to do with resting metabolism, which determines how many calories a person burns when at rest. When the show began, the contestants, though hugely overweight, had normal metabolisms for their size, meaning they were burning a normal number of calories for people of their weight. When it ended, their metabolisms had slowed radically and their bodies were not burning enough calories to maintain their thinner sizes.
First article about the study: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/health/biggest-loser-we...
Step 2: Lose a bunch of weight
Step 3: Go off diet
Step 4: Regain a bunch of weight.
I'm not trying to be a dick, but I don't think there's a lot going on here that doesn't make sense. None of the contestants were particularly thin at the end of the study. Danny Cahill still weighed 191, which is actually pretty significantly overweight for someone not carrying a lot of muscle mass, which he wouldn't be at the end of a 7 month crash diet. If you get your body very very good at using its fat stores you will lower your BMR. The data doesn't suggest this is permanent or significantly impacted Danny's weight gain, the data suggests that Danny Cahill did not stick to the diet.
The Biggest Loser is frequently held up as the gold standard for how not to do things. The weight change is too fast, there is absolutely no support after its over and they frequently optimize for cardio and fat burning over muscle building, which in the short term is effective but in the long term contributes to lowering BMR and making the weight hard to keep off.
But ultimately you have to consider that Danny Cahill was still pretty unhealthy at the end of the show. None of this is starvation mode, in which major parts of your life are hugely effected (ie: you would not have the energy to leave the house).
> What shocked the researchers was what happened next: As the years went by and the numbers on the scale climbed, the contestants’ metabolisms did not recover. They became even slower, and the pounds kept piling on. It was as if their bodies were intensifying their effort to pull the contestants back to their original weight.
> 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.
That does suggest there's something more than just "calories in < calories burned" - that our bodies are willing to adapt to keep metabolic rates low.
It does not suggest there's something more complicated than calories in < calories burned, it suggests there's something that is causing him to burn fewer calories. My explanation is that Cahill had an inactive lifestyle, poor body composition and was overweight, even after the massive cut. On top of this, no one is claiming he stuck to the diet, so it makes sense he regained the weight.
I'm not disputing that your metabolism can down regulate. I am absolutely disputing that it's a mystery and unfixable. For Cahill he needed to stay on the diet longer, and he needed to build muscle mass.
The little contributions don't matter. If you don't consume enough calories, you will not increase body fat and tissue mass. Full stop.
You can retain fluid because of certain conditions that you have (I lost 30 pounds in one hour! Ask me how) but you will not be increasing fatty body mass.
What? If you eat the amount of calories that you are expending every day, you'll operate just fine. That's the way your body was designed to work.
As long as your caloric intake sort of averages out to your calorie expenditure, you're fine. You don't have to balance every minute and every hour.
We're designed to operate at a caloric deficit for hours, if not days at a time. We obviously don't spend all of our time sleeping.
Perhaps what you are explaining is how it works with people who have an efficient/non-defective metabolic system. But hey, those people are not overweight.
Citation? Are you saying that some people are unable to turn fat into glycogen? Unless you're undergoing ketosis, or have a vanishingly rare metabolic disorder, that's just not true.
> Perhaps what you are explaining is how it works with people who have an efficient/non-defective metabolic system. But hey, those people are not overweight.
Most overweight people have efficient/non-defective metabolic systems, as evinced by the increase in obesity rates in the developed world over the past fifty years.
I've since gotten to the point where I can eat one meal a day most days if I want, but hunger headaches are a thing. (I'd still expect to get them if I were to do a multiday fast.)
Don't think it'll take that long. Both seem to be connected to messed up gut flora to some extent.
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Since you have an issue with the sample size, please point me to the nearest full-scale fecal transplant study done and I'll gladly use those results.
>in a person who was probably already eating a ton and not absorbing it much due to a massive infection.
Source? Let's not criticize others for their sources and then make unsupported drive-by claims.
edit: "article" --> "case study"
There are no full scale fecal transplant studies looking into obesity to my knowledge.
> Source? Let's not criticize others for their sources and then make unsupported drive-by claims.
You're right, but upon digging deeper into the study it's even worse: neither her, nor the person she took the fecal sample from, were obese at the time of transplant. Both became obese after the treatment. The source of the transplant was her daughter, so I can imagine a lot of environmental factors effecting both of them. It's hard to imagine the donor becoming obese because of the transplant...
The point here is there are a TON of other obvious variables to examine, and gut flora may really play a role, but there is really not substantial evidence to think that's true.
Regardless of if it is true, it doesn't change much for outcomes: you still have to eat less, you still have to workout more.
Put simply: obesity is a food addiction. There are a ton of things that go into it, like depression, the reward system etc. We aren't likely to find the solution to obesity in small dietary tweaks, or fecal transplants.
You're firmly claiming causal direction on something the current research no longer supports. Psychology may be a result of digestive biome (or at least influenced by), rather than the seminal cause as you seem to think.
Edit: none of the above is to claim causality in the other direction, but to point out that the absolute nature of the claims you are making is not necessarily borne out by the prevailing research.
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[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/108/38/16050
[2] http://www.journalofpsychiatricresearch.com/article/S0022-39...
But the point is that there is evidence that suggests certain factors cause you to eat more, but there is not really evidence to suggest that similar people do significantly different things with similar caloric loads and that it's just a matter of tweaking biology to make people process the same caloric load differently.
The problem with this study is that it's suggesting inflammation as a cause to obesity, but we know that the only long term cause for obesity is caloric surplus. Inflammation definitionally is not causing caloric surplus (in fact it's using more calories than one otherwise would) so it doesn't seem like a useful thing to be studying, and the fat gains from it don't immediately appear to be permanent. The most important thing to study is why people eat more than they should, not necessarily what happens in the body after they eat it (though, again, I agree with your larger point that those two could be connected).
However, I am not sure there is no gain to be had from a change in digestive bacteria in terms of caloric intake, because chemical changes in the digestive process could conceivably alter the efficiency of energy extraction.
In the case study linked above, the woman who received fecal transplant and gained weight was placed on a medically supervised liquid diet and exercise program, and still kept gaining. She had never been obese prior, so it's not as likely that she had the kind of dietary habits that would predispose her to obesity. Also strange: her weight gain closely tracked the weight gain experienced over the same time by the fecal donor, despite dietary and exercise differences between the two. It was enough of an effect that the researchers who presented the case study have since ensured they only use fecal donations from healthy-weight donors.
That all being said, I do think you're right that psychology of obesity is a very important aspect to consider, especially that of food addiction. I hope this is solved in our lifetimes, because it will be interesting to discover just how much gut influences brain and vice versa.
> However, I am not sure there is no gain to be had from a change in digestive bacteria in terms of caloric intake, because chemical changes in the digestive process could conceivably alter the efficiency of energy extraction.
The reason I react negatively so strongly to stuff like this is that I fear it overcomplicates an issue that is relatively simple. It gives people an idea that there is probably something really out of their control that's causing them to gain weight. We can argue about the specifics, but at the end of the day for the vast majority of people it is within their control, and it certainly isn't within anyone else's control so...
> was placed on a medically supervised liquid diet and exercise program, and still kept gaining
> She had never been obese prior
> Also strange: her weight gain closely tracked the weight gain experienced over the same time by the fecal donor, despite dietary and exercise differences between the two
> It was enough of an effect that the researchers who presented the case study have since ensured they only use fecal donations from healthy-weight donors.
There is enough wacky shit going on in this study that it warrants taking it with a heavy grain of salt. I'd argue the results give compelling evidence that the fecal transplant was not in fact related to the weight gain at all, and it seems odd that the conclusion taken was to stop taking fecal transplants from obese people when a sample from a non-obese (at the time) person might've caused someone to become obese.
All of this stuff would be interesting to study more, but without further science really doesn't mean a lot.
> That all being said, I do think you're right that psychology of obesity is a very important aspect to consider, especially that of food addiction. I hope this is solved in our lifetimes, because it will be interesting to discover just how much gut influences brain and vice versa.
Definitely. Meditation (among other things) seems to have had a significant positive impact on my digestive system, so I am certainly super interested in this connection.
I totally get this. But to me, even if you accept completely that your digestive microbial environment can change how you lose/gain weight, that doesn't take it out of your control - after all, that particular bacterial milieu is a direct result of what the individual is putting into their body. There have been tons of studies already about this particular area, that digestive choices have a direct impact on digestive biome.
I do think it makes it more complicated, but I think obesity really is that complicated - our choices have effects we don't yet understand, and some of that may have to do with being poor stewards of our gut bacteria.
> Meditation (among other things) seems to have had a significant positive impact on my digestive system
Same, as well as other areas of my life. It's why the mind/body feedback loop fascinates me so much!
Great chat, thanks much. Have a good 2017!
Sure there is. They're called 18 year olds. Sadly the effect fades at round 25.
That means that they're retaining water. That does not mean that they're accumulating fat stores, which is thermodynamically impossible.