Overweight and healthy is a big fat lie, obesity study finds
thetimes.co.uk
thetimes.co.uk
They have very high bmi’s, ~35. But they’re just barely obese by body fat, about 26%. Result is a life expectancy of 60-65, more than ten years shorter than the Japanese male.
“ The negative health effects of the sumo lifestyle can become apparent later in life. Sumo wrestlers have a life expectancy between 60 and 65, more than 10 years shorter than the average Japanese male, as the diet and sport take a toll on the wrestler's body. Many develop type 2 diabetes or high blood pressure, and they are prone to heart attacks due to the enormous amount of body mass and fat that they accumulate. The excessive intake of alcohol can lead to liver problems and the stress on their joints due to their excess weight can cause arthritis. Recently, the standards of weight gain are becoming less strict, in an effort to improve the overall health of the wrestlers.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumo
Source on bmi: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10195655/
Note: wiki’s own quote is not well sourced, but there were some paper noting short lifespan. This is the main one cited, but it is in japanese. If anyone wants to track down the actual life expectancy, let me know.
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jjh1946/50/3/50_3_730/_...
This one in English discusses bmi as a risk factor for sumo but doesn’t give an age: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3761530/#!po=50...
BMI for people with very high body mass and low fat percentage can be adjusted slightly usually within 10-15% but if you are morbidly obese it’s going to be a problem either way.
Going down from 96kg to 78kg while gaining some body fat from 9-10% to 12-13% reduced my RHR by about 10-15bpm.
And that initial mass gain was just with a decade of exercise not the gain and shred cycles that body builders are going through not to mention the extra “vitamins” they tend take...
Take NFL players. Yes, an obviously aggressive sport that lends itself to short careers…but even then, the average stint is 3.3 years. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/240102/average-player-ca...) You will do anything, no matter how deleterious, to keep yourself in the game, damn the consequences. And by anything, I mean a steady diet of uppers, downers, and steroids.
NFl players aren’t a great example. That much traumatic brain injury is seriously harmful to health. Among olympic athletes, those in contact sports did less well.
You do have a point as sumo is grueling and involves contact, but you wouldn’t expect hard playing to take off that much life expectancy all on its own. Sumo wrestlers surely lose some from adiposity.
https://theculturetrip.com/europe/united-kingdom/articles/at...
1. https://www.cyclingweekly.com/fitness/cyclists-live-longer-a...
One effect of testosterone is to increase red blood cells count, enhancing the oxygen transfer and thus endurance.
(BTW, red wine's quercetin blocks testosterone's drainage by kidneys and indirectly elevates red blood cells count)
The weightlifting also has positive effect on the longevity: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190412085247.h...
To counter your article about cycling: https://www.dw.com/en/michael-goolaerts-death-raises-questio...
And obligatory reference to Marko Pantani: https://crushingiron.com/cycling-is-the-toughest-sport/
He was so fit, he has to cycle several times at night to make his heart go faster and not to die.
The article of yours was not about professional cyclists, more about "cycling fitness" approach. I love cycling - it improves deadlift immensely. But professional cycling is different. Very different. And dangerous.
You don’t hear of cyclists dying in their sleep really of coagulated blood from EPO.
There are some legal pain killers like tramadol and excessive caffeine that you might not do if you are optimizing for health but not sure how detrimental that is long term.
That wasn’t because he was “so fit” was it, but rather from being in the middle of a powerful doping regimen (like all top cyclists were, you simply couldn’t compete otherwise) raising your hemocrit level to the point it could kill you?
Vid about it: https://youtu.be/hT8GZlBBv5k
Does anyone honestly think that international soccer, which is also a sport where athletes would richly benefit from both EPO and steroids, actually has less doping (at least as covered by the press) than cycling, when there is 10x-100x as much money?
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/chronic-traum...
Even better, if you know you’re going to be injured, you can just take PEDs and laugh right on through your suspension since you weren’t going to be playing anyway (see: Edelman, Branch, others).
> limiting screening at BMI ≥25 kg/m2 would miss 36% of Asian Americans with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes. In the same study, Araneta et al. (39) found that screening Asian Americans at a BMI cut point of ≥23.5 kg/m2 identified approximately 80% of those with undiagnosed type 2 diabetes. Among Japanese Americans, lowering the BMI screening cut point to ≥22.8 kg/m2 achieved 80% sensitivity.
https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/38/1/150
https://aadi.joslin.org/en/am-i-at-risk/asian-bmi-calculator
Subcutaneous fat is much less harmful than visceral fat.
There was a fair bit about this and sumo wrestlers on the excellent Nova episode "The Truth About Fat" last year [1]. Fat is much more complicated than most people realize, as is long term weight loss. It looks like the episode is available for free streaming [2] until the end of the month. It's worth it.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/video/the-truth-about-fat-xnqm4i/
[2] PBS shows go in and out of free streaming. They can usually be streamed for free for about a month after they first air, then most of them become restricted to people who donate to their local PBS station. The restricted ones do pop back to free streaming for a while now and then, and certain episodes become free for years.
You’d think entering old age with a large surplus of muscle could be beneficial.
Ha. Hahaahahahaaa. Haha. Wow. No. That’s the entire point of untested powerlifing federations. Have you ever been to a powerlifting gym? Those sharps disposal bins aren’t just there for the diabetics.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-powerlifting-tells...
https://theculturetrip.com/europe/united-kingdom/articles/at...
Edit: Fixed typo thanks. Also note that bodybuilders on steroids may not fall into the same group. One report found higher mortality below 50 this group.
(this is different than weightlifting)
I think from what I've seen in media restricting calories seems beneficial to longevity so bulking and packing muscle mass probably "burns you out" even without steroids.
Having said that I'd rather trade 10 years of the tail end of my life for being jacked and rested in my prime years (testosterone does wonders for energy and recovery), especially compared to being a fat slob.
Upwards 140 kg, there are fat people, but even Konstantinov (below 140kg)is not fat.
Take look at him doing 55 pullups: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boLl8rGhJvE
The "most people who lift weights is fat" myth comes from watching too much competition in open-ended weight category (which, for weightlifting, starts at 109kg, I believe).
3% of fat is death low (thanks to Nazis to find that). To keep anything less than 10% for prolonged time takes very calculated effort or young age and high activity. It is very hard to go lower than 15% for normal men.
i can tell you i have a desk job and do NOT have too much muscle :-P
It's extremely hard to eat and live healthy. It's getting harder every day. Why are low sugar alternatives to basic snacks (e.g. Keto friendly) like 3-10x more expensive?
Why does EVERYTHING have sugar in it? Why don't we have cheap and healthy fast food that seems to be common in so many other countries?
We could solve this problem if we actually subsidized and demanded better food standards. If we helped people make the right choices. But hey, we decided that fat is the enemy and everyone should have hundreds of grams of carbs per day.
When I lived in Iran it was so much easier to maintain a proper weight. After moving to the US it's become extremely difficult. I'm still the same person. But what's available to me has changed immensely.
Heinz sells ketchup without added sugar and it tastes almost exactly the same as normal, or even slightly better, half the calories though.
I didn't belive this before but we need a sugar tax. We also need to have strict dietary guidelines on how much sugar is acceptable per gram of food.
Really more of a "diet ketchup" in that case...
I really don't think tomatoes need to be sweeter than they are naturally to make decent ketchup. I'll be on the lookout for ketchup that is "sweetener free" in the future.
The typical person has no idea how big a meal should be to obtain the right quantities of nutrients, because they’ve never bothered to weigh their food. They also have no idea what their daily macro nutrient goals should be.
I think a more probable reason for the obesity epidemic is the rise of food as a self-soothing device. To me, the best indicator of whether you're likely to have a weight problem isn't your activity level or the sugar content of your groceries, it's whether you turn to food as a way to relax.
A cheap, portable meal/snack that removes the need for fast food or "Keto snacks". Enough protein and fibre to fill you up.
Eating low calorie is not expensive, it's just not very exciting.
Until recently you could also get something like this at mcdonalds (grilled chicken burger or wrap).
Added sugar is not good, but fat free products are a great choice for dieters who want more variety. You get the same volume of food with a similar taste for much less calories.
Fast food takes advantage of this, and it would not be too much of an issue if not for preservatives (find a French fry under your car seat from 5 years ago and it looks the same as it did the day you bought it - we should want to eat things that will rot within a week of room temperature).
I sop up all the grease of my homemade dishes ( "Food what nearly all people eat, to me it is harmful and dangerous. Sometimes I visualize that chefs in the world are all in conspiracy against me …" Nikola Tesla thought chefs were conspiring against him [1]) because I refuse to let anything to go to waste, and I welcome all the energy I can get (fuel for the tractor). I also do not clean dishes after every meal (blender included) because I want to see what nature can throw at me tomorrow. So far so good, although my stool once smelt like sulfur after cooking with boiled/stored creek water - duckduckgo tells me giardiasis, waterborne pathogen, which my gut promptly destroyed after one digestive cycle (well rehearsed and diversified, daily probiotic reinforcements).
At this point I have an iron stomach, and I was inspired by quite the lean healthy "homeless" girl I met who was eating out of dumpsters. I refused to partake in the dripping salad offering she presented me, but I could understand that because of this lifestyle - she would be far less of a liability to the healthcare system. Meanwhile, the "housed" people are stuffing themselves with their Precious TV Dinners (Tom Green, Stealing Harvard), sanitizing every surface they can think of, and finding it acceptable and even preferable to sit in their favorite chair with their "free" time to fawn over streaming media that depicts other people living their lives.
We want to blame it on the food, but the propaganda on phones and public wall-mounted screens is orchestrated by those who themselves are fearful of the world around them. The ones that follow suite are going to acquire a gut, high blood pressure (Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers), and dulled senses.
[1] https://garylite.com/2019/08/21/everything-is-the-light-an-i...
But more generally - we can't ask everyone in the US to move out of the country, can we? So it seems worth figuring out how to get the US to be healthier.
(And in any case, the linked study happened in Spain.)
I lived 6 years in Switzerland and a guy who moved from London to Zurich told me that he lost 10kg in a year just because people don’t let him eat crappy food, and on the weekends people go hiking and skiing, not to pubs.
Sometimes changing the situation is the easiest way to change someone’s lifestyle.
I suspect that added sugar increases sales.
Taste, mainly, because all the fat has been removed.
To your last point, I live in the US and have a healthy diet and lifestyle and waistline. So don't be so quick to blame your environment.
Joint association of physical activity and body mass index with cardiovascular risk: a nationwide population-based cross-sectional study
More importantly, I don't think the "active" category is sufficiently discerning, ie it's a pretty low bar to exercise 150 minutes in a week. I know several hardcore endurance athletes who are likely overweight if not obese, who exercise obsessively and achieve those weekly exercise figures every day. If anyone was "fat but fit" it would be them, but this study doesn't measure that kind of person.
The chart below is pretty clear as to their findings if anyone wants the summary.
https://academic.oup.com/view-large/figure/225496940/zwaa151...
Cut back on the ice cream and hit the rack. Your body will thank you, even if your politically minded “friends” don’t.
How much of that selection is due to voluntary lifestyle choices, how much is due to genetics or other involuntary factors? The answer has a pretty big influence on how appropriate it is to look down your nose at others for not fitting your ideal.
The formula worked and keeps working very well.
[1] httpss://www.medicaldaily.com/health-every-size-obesity-weight-loss-science-383008
Even without that, though, I'm sympathetic to HAES because it seems quite likely that, even if absolutely nothing else, focusing on body weight rather than lifestyle factors ultimately does more to discourage than encourage making healthier choices.
I personally know too many people who believe this shit. You can't say anything about it though or you're called scum and toxic. That too is healthy to them.
> “Fighting obesity and inactivity is equally important; it should be a joint battle. Weight loss should remain a primary target for health policies together with promoting active lifestyles.”
For a lot of people, increasing activity is something they can manage even when weight loss is a struggle. Obviously being skinny and active is the ideal, but being heavy and active is vastly better than being heavy and sedentary.
The title seems accurate. If you’re overweight and active, you’re less healthy than normal weight and sedentary, on average. Most people would find this surprising.
The title doesn’t mention activity, so I would not say it gives the impression that “being active is pointless”.
Really? I don't understand how people would come to the conclusion of fat + active > normal + sedentary unless they're willfully ignorant.
It’s possible the movement is simply loud however and most people think weight matters more than activity. Can’t be sure. I should have edited that to “many”.
> I would not say it gives the impression that “being active is pointless”.
If the only way to be healthy is to be skinny, what is the point of being active at all?
Being healthy is a sliding scale, not an on/ off toggle. Being active and overweight is significantly better than being sedentary and overweight. Being skinny is an even bigger jump.
The full argument would be “it is pointless to try to undo the health effects of excess weight through activity alone, as an active overweight person is less healthy than a sedentary normal weight person”
Literally everyone does. I don't know what world you live in. If you're obese its the ONLY thing you hear your doctor say. This has caused hundreds of missed diagnosis for serious issues because it's just "lose some weight".
Thanks. I'm trying. It's not working. And now you've missed an issue that's going to end up being life threatening for me.
You don't believe that obesity could be an underlying problem that relates to your life threatening issue, plus many other possible issues?
Put another way, if you weren't obese do you think there'd be a good chance your possible life threatening issue would be less life threatening, or not exist in the first place?
Yea because it will kill you early. Do you want your doctor not to talk about your health problems?
Are you missing this? Not everything is related to weight.
Again this is what I mean about being dismissive about other health issues when someone is obese.
> Again this is what I mean about being dismissive about other health issues when someone is obese.
Doctors see the excuses all the time - in most cases it's diet and exercise. You can be mad all you want that someone called you fat and a doctor misdiagnosed you but at the end of the day it's your body and your life, he won't be the one dying from complications due to obesity or your other health problems.
I've never heard anyone comment on anyone else's weight. It's just a taboo in my part of America.
in literal face-to-face conversation probably. But beauty ideals are communicated to you on every bill board. In the US probably more so than in many other countries.
Why do you think there's a billion dollars weight loss market? If obesity was actually normalised, there'd probably more obese news anchors.
This taboo doesn't exist. People keep saying it does. But, as an obese person, it absolutely doesn't.
I've never seen that happen. It sucks that it happens to you, though. We must live in really different social circles.
It really is just a ratio of weight to height, after all. Of course that's going to have its limitations.
Very often actually it's unrelated to eating to much and doing no physical activity (at least wrt. most obese people I ended up knowing, context: Germany/Berlin).
Most obese people I ended up knowing did had a rather controlled diet and did more sport/physical activity then your average person.
So why where they obese? Some combination of:
- They had problems with their metabolism, potential had to take medicament too.
- In their childhood they ended up getting fat due to a varity of aspects and even with strict diet and sport had a hard time of losing their weight (once you where fat enough for long enough time your body gets used to it and as such is much much more prone to add fat to your body when you eat etc.)
- there are other reasons too for other people but not people I did know close enough.
Either-way I don't know about the US but in Germany/Berlin "minimal to no physical activity" is not often the case and neither is missing discipline or laziness.
For many obese people telling them to just do more sport and eat proper is like telling a depressed person to just stand up in the morning and go out or a person with social anxiety to just leave the house. I.e. impolite, discriminatory, mean and far of reality.
They need to cut calories and therefore must first be able to control their intake (counting calories). Then they can cut 400cals per day, If that does not work, cut 600-800cals. 200cal steps. This always works.
For a person whose body is pumping full of cortisol, thus pumping also with raised glucose and insulin levels, gradually cutting calories can results in even higher stress response, lethargy, disrupted sleep patterns, reduce satiety triggers, changed apatite towards fat and sugar, and a bunch of other problems that all contribute to the opposite desired effect of loosing weight. A body in panic mode will do about everything except loosing weight unless it is actually medically starving.
Edit: I also realized that there are major environmental differences, like where I grow up most people which where obese did try to eat less and do sport and as such the ones which are still obese are often not so because they don't eat proper and don't do sport but because they have other health issues.
Go on a low carb / ketogenic diet instead. You get to eat lots of protein and fat. You will automatically feel less hungry but also, once ketosis sets in you will have a surplus of power that you can uses for physical activity. Added bonus, your body will react to insulin again.
> Go on a low carb / ketogenic diet instead
Agree, it's the easiest way to lose weight. Cut out processed food, added sugars and rice/potato/bread, and the weight will drop off very easily. No need to count calories because it'll be very hard to eat too much as long as we cut out the above.
As often understood, the latter. Two factors (there are others): metabolism of fat, sugar, and protein are hormonally (such as insulin) and differentially dependent, as well as the storage of excess calories.
Yes, what I can say it will be harder for some persons than others. The hormonal environment in the body can not be disregarded and can be either disrupted or genetically different. STILL, restricting your eating habit (caloric deficit), will.always.work.
... but it's the truth. I guess that would qualify as "hate-facts". Sometime, you need a good kick in the butt to get your shit together, it just happen the US is now a country of mentality inept people.
I think non obese people really look down on people who are obese and have absolutely no idea what we put ourselves through to lose weight.
It's honestly disgusting and extremely damaging to mental health. You can see examples of this in the comment section here.
So if you continue to do it, fine, but be aware you’re being an ass, and not a helpful one.
What's even more sad is seeing so many of these comments directed by people who proudly announce where they work and what they do. Not even an ounce of shame to not do this from their identity attached accounts.
Stop worrying so much about what other people think and do what you think is best to take care of yourself. Get help if you need it - there are a lot of real clinical options these days. These are internet commenters who don't know you and won't ever know you, and won't care when you die. That's just life. Don't sweat it.
We shouldn't be intentionally mean (and I agree there's too much of that), but they're literally killing themselves with their lifestyle. It's something that they should be strongly dissuaded from by their peers and by society, for their own sake and society's sake. It must be the leading health crisis in rich countries right now, now that smoking is unpopular.
It's not 100% the obese person's fault: food companies have hacked their dopamine systems with added sugar/salt/MSG/etc (similar to social media companies hacking attention mechanisms), obesity is largely genetic (in terms of the tendency to overeat and ability to satiate hunger), obesity is likely triggered by some underlying mental health issue (e.g. depression), and evolution programmed us to eat us much as we can get our hands on. It's hard to fight biology. But it's not accurate that obesity is just a metabolism issue. Obese people take in too many calories, usually from added sugars and carbohydrates. They may take in 2400 calories a day when their BMR is 1600, and the chronic impact is obesity.
I.e. in the environment I grew up obesity was not very common and general seen as unhealthy and not good looking. In turn many of the people which are still obese are people where just eating less and doing more sport doesn't really work and in turn telling them to just do so is problematic.
But on the other side going just to a different part of Germany some degree of obesity caused by drinking to much beer, unhealthy food and maybe to little sport is quite common in the idk. 50+ generation.
I can understand it not working because it's hard to eat less when attempting to lose weight (something I've struggled with for a long time), but I know if I eat less calories, then I reliably lose weight. I can drop 2lb a week very easily by maintaining a deficit, but I regularly fail in my long-term objective and bounce back when I get stressed and overeat back over 2000 calories/day. So at least for me (most/all people?), it's not that eating less doesn't work, it's the inability to do that (genes/depression/stress/environment/whatever) which is the root cause.
Eating too much is probably true. Healthy natural food though doesn't make you want to eat often or too much. People eat too much because they eat highly processed food with lots of sugar, salt, and artificial flavoring. Unfortunately, eating good food in North America is not possible without making a special effort. Learning how to cook is part of this effort.
This book[0] goes through how the metabolic system works, how it is supposed to self regulate, and how it can miss-regulate. It also talks about what it is about our food since the late 1970's that has changed to cause this to happen more frequently.
[0] https://www.amazon.ca/Hungry-Brain-Outsmarting-Instincts-Ove...
EDIT: I want to add a bit. This book goes through how the metabolic system of humans is supposed to work, and it can get technical at times. It also goes over the specific traits that certain foods have that can be problematic, which gives enough info to make a self-improved diet. It backs up everything it can with specific citations of scientific experiments.
In the study, the bottom group by activity contains 63% of the population, while the bottom group by obesity contains only 18% of the population. So shifting from bottom to middle by obesity is a bigger move than shifting from bottom to middle by activity level. Not sure the author is comparing apples with apples here.
In reality, we need to be aware of what lifestyle changes we can sustainably make given our particular circumstances, whatever the whole-population results might look like. To quote the author, “Fighting obesity and inactivity is equally important; it should be a joint battle. Weight loss should remain a primary target for health policies together with promoting active lifestyles".
I ask because newspaper summaries of nutrition and exercise research studies are, to put it generously, utter horseshit.
> The researchers investigated the associations between each BMI and activity group and the three risk factors. At all BMI levels, any activity (whether it met the WHO minimum or not) was linked with a lower likelihood of diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol compared to no exercise at all. Dr. Lucia said: “This tells us that everyone, irrespective of their body weight, should be physically active to safeguard their health.”
> However, overweight and obese participants were at greater cardiovascular risk than their peers with normal weight, irrespective of activity levels. As an example, compared to inactive normal weight individuals, active obese people were approximately twice as likely to have high cholesterol, four times more likely to have diabetes, and five times more likely to have high blood pressure. Dr. Lucia said: “Exercise does not seem to compensate for the negative effects of excess weight. This finding was also observed overall in both men and women when they were analysed separately.”
> He concluded: “Fighting obesity and inactivity is equally important; it should be a joint battle. Weight loss should remain a primary target for health policies together with promoting active lifestyles.”
I don't totally follow the establishment of causation here - in particular, it would seem to me like the arrow of causation is likely to go from diabetes to inability to lose weight, instead of vice versa? That is, equally active people with diabetes probably weigh more than people without, and the underlying cause is not their weight, it's their diabetes. So the conclusion in the press release that they should lose weight to get rid of their diabetes doesn't obviously make sense to me.
> We retrieved information from medical examinations on the prevalence of diabetes (medicated or glycaemia > 125 mg/dL), hypercholesterolaemia (medicated or total blood cholesterol ≥ 240 mg/dL), and hypertension (medicated or systolic/diastolic blood pressure ≥ 140/90 mmHg).
> Data from 527 662 participants [32% female; age (mean ± SD): 42.3 ± 9.4 years; BMI: 26.2 ± 4.3 kg/m2] were analysed. About 42%, 41%, and 18% of the participants had normal weight, overweight, or obesity, respectively; 63.5%, 12.3%, and 24.2% were inactive, insufficiently active, and regularly active; and 30%, 15%, and 3% had hypercholesterolaemia, hypertension, and diabetes. Being either regularly or insufficiently active conferred protection compared to inactivity against all the studied risk factors within each BMI category, which was evident in a PA dose-response manner for diabetes and hypertension (Figure 1). However, regular/insufficient PA did not compensate for the negative effects of overweight/obesity, as individuals with overweight/obesity were at greater CVD risk than their peers with normal weight, irrespective of PA levels.
The headline is inappropriate and I'm not convinced the study is as useful as it could be. Though large, the study only demonstrates that being overweight or obese is linked to high cholesterol, diabetes, and high blood pressure; all risks for cardio vascular disease (CVD). I'd prefer more direct measures of CVD like the Ankle-Brachial Index (ABI). Regardless, the data has to explain the U-Shaped BMI mortality curve [4] and it does not. There are also well established mortality tables [5] for blood pressure based on age and gender; 140/90 is not reflective of risk.
[1] https://www.escardio.org/The-ESC/Press-Office/Press-releases...
[2] https://academic.oup.com/eurjpc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankle–brachial_pressure_index
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity#Mortality
[5] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067369...
The basic reason is that your body can increase or decreased its energy expenditure drastically in response to increased or decrease consumption of calories.
I'm reading The Obesity Code by Dr. Jason Fung right now and he presents a very strong argument that the cause of obesity is insulin resistance.
In the book he cites both overfeeding studies where subjects were fed very large numbers of calories but did not gain weight, as well underfeeding studies where subjects ate only 500 calories a day but didn't lose weight.
After reading this I'm pretty damn convinced that the diet problems facing us are: highly refined carbohydrates, sugar and sugar substitutes, and alcohol (I haven't come across this in his work, but if you look at the stuff by Dr. Lustig you'll see sugar and alcohol are incredibly similar metabolically)
Think about this: for most of human history we did not count calories and yet we were not obese.
It's the highly processed western diet of breads, cakes, cereals, soda, etc that are the culprit.
Then a few months ago I started following some fitness YouTuber's advice, which mostly boils down to "count calories and consume less calories than your body uses". I started a basic course of counting calories and eating at a deficit, and dropped ~7kg in a few months (and hopefully am still going).
It wasn't even that hard - mostly counting everything and cutting out some of the stuff that is really high in calories. I still ate fairly well, e.g. I'd eat my favorite hamburger - just would skip the fries to be under the calorie count.
Of course I've only done this for a few months and it's hard to say if my body will eventually force me to expend less energy.
I take comfort in the fact that a lot of bodybuilders go to extreme lengths to drop down in body fat, so they've done anecdotal research on this area a lot. And most of them are not following intermittent fasting, or keto, or anything like that - they're just reducing calorie intake when needed, and going up and down in weight fairly consistently.
congratulations on your cut
I see he's written a book. I don't see any peer reviewed papers or actual scientific studies that have been reproduced by others.
I think I saw somewhere on hackernews a calculation that for only maintaining you body temp it takes 800-900 kcal. That is not even taking into account breathing, blood circulation, etc.
I can't find the exact part of the book where he mentions the guy who ate 500 cal/day and didn't lose weight, but when I find it again I'll note it. This person did have serious hormonal issues, though. Most people of course, 500 cal a day and also exercise weight will come off, how permanently is another question.
This is coping, losing weight to a target healthy weight is always good,
Being underweight is highly correlated with poor health outcomes in seniors. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16886095/) Obesity is obviously bad there, but being underweight is just as dangerous.
Pretty decent chunk of the world is seniors these days.
Studies on actual cause has shown the opposite (eating to the point of being underweight raising lifespan).
I have since gained weight and now have life insurance.
Excluding the fact that average height has increased gradually over time.
It was lowered in July 1998 ("overweight" was reduced to 25 from men: 27 and women: 28)
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/04/us/us-to-widen-its-defini...
https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/14/a-number-that-may-...
If he's jacked, then yes of course he doesn't need to lose weight. That is a tiny proportion of the population though.
Obviously "always" is wrong. Almost nothing is absolute.
Bingo.
Anorexic is not healthy. Underweight within reason is. In fact the best way we currently know to live more is to eat much less...
https://gizmodo.com/how-living-near-the-starvation-point-can...
* Most layman diet advice is awful. There is scientifically backed advice. I think most people could understand it. It seems to not be common knowledge.
* A lot of people "backseat drive" other people's diets. Since most people carry awful advice, this is extremely unhelpful in practice.
* Some people have a crab bucket mentality towards others losing weight, and almost go out of their way to sabotage.