The Weight I Carry (2019) | Hacker News Reader

The Weight I Carry (2019)

theatlantic.com

47 pointsTomte38 comments

> What I want you to understand, more than anything else, is that telling a fat person “Eat less and exercise” is like telling a boxer “Don’t get hit.”

Actually, that's most of what my coach would tell me. In fact, 75% of my training was for not getting hit.

I was the worst performing boxer in the place for almost a year, known as "the bleeder" for the number of times I'd finish a match with a river of blood running down my shirt (which was about 90% of the time). At one point the coach threatened to ban me if I didn't shape up, because I was scaring away his clients. I remember many an hour balancing on a tire, trying to defend while he whacked me with a stick from all sides, berating me every fucking time he got a blow in.

But at some point SOMETHING starts to sink in; some kind of ... instinct maybe? I stopped bleeding. I got hit a LOT less. I even started winning. Lesser skilled opponents looked like they were punching in slow motion.

I have no idea how this would help someone fighting obesity. My experience living in the USA for a few years was being shocked at how SWEET everything is. American bread was like eating cake. Balsamic vinegar was like eating soft drink syrup. I always look at the label to see what's in the food, but something's really wrong in America because there's no way the food can be so sweet with what they say is in it.

I understand your point, except for you every match is new. My BJJ coach has similar lessons when I ask 'how do I get out of this position?' and the response is 'don't get in that position'.

For an overweight person though, they are not showing up to the gym every day skinny where they can try not to get overweight again. They are starting from the worst position when they decide to start, and that can be very demoralizing.

With that said, it does take a certain amount of accepting change will suck and embracing it.

What they say is in it . . . is written by experts at obfuscation. Sugar is hidden in multiple ingredients. Sucrose, Fructose, Corn Syrup, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Dextrose, Lactose. All sugar.

A talented writer. It was really eye opening and easy to read obese person's account of how he feels. I'm not such, never was, though middle age is catching up with me and my BMI is creeping up.

We are same height, not the same weight. For what is worth , not obese are also not happy with how their body looks. Frankly, I think I stopped worrying what others think of how I look. It's the same as what others think of what I think. They can have their opinion, but it's me who's living my life, not them. And why would I want to care what they think about it?

Health, quality of life and its length is what counts though. What you described was partly unknown to me. I wish you could improve that for yourself, feel that joy of accomplishment.

Ps: I also often catch myself daydreaming about shooting threes or twos. But I only see the shape of my arm, that hand motion which makes the ball spin after releasing it.. it's beautiful. Probably, I'm just getting older reminiscing the young days...

Excellent points

> why would I care what others think about

Because you're a social creature and evolution cursed us with self awareness. There are things not worth concerning yourself over, but this is like telling someone to just not be depressed: it doesn't work (generically) like that.

Also, if I may, why must I pick up the medical bill (in any form) because someone can't choose to not eat a double big Mac with extra fries, regardless of the sugar free drink?

I don't think it's as easy as "shame these people until they fall in line" (I did have this view) because there are other, surprising factors involved (poverty being the one that surprised me the most).

But we can, and should, extoll the benefits of a healthy lifestyle. One of them is a greater self satisfaction [0]

0: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7789197/

I have mentioned this before, but I have a rare metabolic disorder where the prescribed diet is very high in carbohydrates. A drop of as little as ten percent in caloric consumption can send me to the ER. And there's a lot of rolling the dice if I skip a meal (or don't eat enough, or sleep enough, or get a cold, or have alcohol, or ...): pain will come. I have a window where I have to make a decision: do I take medications, which work just fine but also leave me non-functional? Or do I just carb up? If I roll the dice and get too sick, it is off to the ER, where along with the industrial painkillers, they want to drop a full pound of sucrose (not a volume, a weight) into my IV over twenty-four hours. And exercise triggers the same metabolic pathways set off by dieting. Exercise is not a great way to lose weight, abs are made in the kitchen, but I had hoped that at least that was available.

Consequently, if I want to get my weight back down, I have to just keep at a minimal level of misery, keep the pills at hand, and hope my luck holds. Prior to all of this, I could just ... eat very little, or fast if I felt like it. Now, I am being trained via negative reinforcement to just ... chow down on the carbs.

Wow, mind if I ask what the disease is? It sounds horrific.

I very humanizing account. I've had the blessing of having a very fast metabolism, even in my thirties I'm in the "underweight" BMI category despite eating whatever I want. I'm petrified it'll slow down at some point, and I'll get fat because I have no self control, as I've never needed it before.

This is a valid fear. I was in the same boat. Getting into great shape at 30 and having an extremely active life did me little favors when I simultaneously turned 40, went to school, and spent a lot more time in front of the computer. At this point, maintaining a healthy weight means eating less than half of the amount of food I ate at a healthy weight at 38, and it needs to be much more healthy. I'm fortunate in that I learned to cook and eat whole, healthy food early in life but despite being delicious and feasible, my diet is much, much more limited.

Basal metabolic rate changes only a few percent with age (unless there's an actual disease involved). Most people who blame their weight on a "slow metabolism" actually have a perfectly normal metabolism. They just consume too many calories.

If anyone wants to actually measure their metabolism it's cheap and easy to get a resting metabolic rate (RMR) test in most any sports medicine lab. You just sit in a chair for a few minutes while they measure your inhaled and exhaled gasses.

You are technically correct in that your metabolic rate only varies by a few percentage points. But where you are way off is how much of a difference "a few percentage points" can make.

If you used to burn 2500 calories at rest and then that drops 3% to 2425, that is 75 calories a day. Which amounts to around a pound of excess weight every 5-6 weeks. Or 10 lbs a year. After a quick 5 years you look up and you are suddenly 50 lbs over weight just because your BMR dropped 3% and you kept eating the exact same number of calories.

This is correct. Resting metabolic rate doesn't vary by more than a couple hundred calories per day among humans of the same weight. And even that difference can be predicted by things like muscle vs fat composition.

Nobody has a metabolism that is defying thermodynamics and creating mass that you didn't intake as food.

That is incorrect. Many things can cause the human body to burn fewer calories than height, weight, and activity would suggest, and one of the easiest ways to determine if someone is affected by one of those metabolic dysregulations is to take their temperature.

If their temperature isn't 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit or very close to it, they are metabolically compromised (note, of course, that people will practically never have a resting body temperature of greater than 98.6)

I had a full dexa scan and calorimetric exam done and my body was burning approximately 300 calories a day under what it was supposed to. My resting body temperature was 97.3. If I ate what my TDEE should have been I would have been putting on half a pound a week or more.

Eating more and exercising to rebuild muscle lost to over dieting has corrected that issue.

But saying that it doesn't exist is completely wrong. The math is still "calories in, calories out" but you can't assume that "calories out" is static and inflexible. There are many variables at play in the human body.

You say that as if "a couple hundred calories a day" is not much!

Have you ever done the math?

200 calories can mean the difference of two people eating the exact same calories every day where one maintains the same weight, and the other gains 2 lbs a month, or 24 lbs a year...nearly 100 lbs in just 4 years!

You are proving the point that variance in metabolism can be a HUGE factor.

Resting metabolic rate increases along with weight. Just keeping adipose tissue alive takes a significant amount of energy. People don't keep gaining weight indefinitely unless they also keep continuously increasing intake. Most people eventually reach an equilibrium, although that equilibrium is often much heavier than optimal.

(I have done the math.)

You will reach an equilibrium after gaining a not insignificant amount of weight, but of course hunger hormones tend to increase as well.

But my point stands that a few percentage points difference in metabolic rate makes a big difference. And likely could lead to one person becoming overweight while another person with identical habits maintains a healthy weight.

This is untrue, you have to take into account the environment. If you used to live in a cold area like Quebec and move to let's say LA or Houston, without changing your diet, your metabolism will change a lot.

If you compare two neighbors, you're right.

No that's not how it works. Unless you're running around naked in the snow like Wim Hof, your environment has very little impact on daily energy expenditure. People in Quebec and Houston both spend most of their time indoors.

Body composition has a rather large effect on BMR (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3661116).

There's no such thing as a "fast metabolism." How much energy you burn is strictly a function of how much energy your body needs to keep itself at ~98.6 degrees and how much work your body has to do.

Right. So two furnaces run at 98.6. Is it not possible that one is more efficient at maintaining that temp (slow metabolism) versus one that is inefficient(fast metabolism). That’s why people suggest finding your basal metabolic rate (BMR) and from there everything is CI<CO.

Expenditure will adapt to your average daily burn though — I ran a half-marathon every single day for two years and would still consume calories of a comparatively sedentary person. No big swings in either direction.

Maybe this is a little unempathetic, but isn’t weight pretty much something that’s entirely in your control? As opposed to something like your height for example.

Incel culture focuses a lot on height / unalterable genetics, which I can at least somewhat understand, but weight just doesn’t seem to have the same level of impact.

I don’t know, I could be totally wrong here. Would love to hear differing opinions.

It depends on what you mean by "in your control".

Obviously (1) you choose what to eat and (2) if you eat little enough then you will get thin, and if you eat enough then you will get fat.

(But also: (a') you choose what to do and (2') if you never do anything that violates your values then you will be some sort of saint. But most people are not any sort of saint: we sometimes do hurtful things even though we think we shouldn't, or stay up later than is good for us, etc.)

But our bodies and brains are evolution-designed to make very sure we don't accidentally starve to death. So we feel hunger, and hunger is very difficult for us to ignore. And if something is miscalibrated so that the level of calorie intake at which you stop feeling hungry is enough to make you fat, then you will either get fat or feel constantly hungry.

And even if nothing is miscalibrated in that particular way, human brains are annoyingly good at acquiring habits that are difficult to break even when they are bad for us.

All of which means that while anyone can in principle keep themselves neither too thin nor too fat, according to whatever standards they find appropriate for that, doing so is much much more difficult for some people than for others, and if a thing is difficult enough to do and requires doing all the time I think it is no longer reasonable to say that doing or not doing it is "entirely in your control".

I would read/watch about the fitness coaches who volunteered to eat poorly and gain weight to experience what their clients went through. They were all very surprised that despite knowing how to eat and exercise well and effectively how much their willpower flagged, how difficult hunger was to address, and how much more difficult it was to lose the weight than they expected.

Calories in/calories out is simple, but not easy. People who feel hungry fail at maintaining their diets long term. We do not have less willpower or discipline than people in the 1970s, yet so many people are overweight now. Even wealthy people with serious resources remain overweight. This points to a systemic problem, not merely personal failing.

> I would read/watch about the fitness coaches who volunteered to eat poorly and gain weight to experience what their clients went through.

Hmm this is a fair point. Anecdotally, do you know the percentage of fitness coaches that weren’t able to get rid of their increased weight?

I have the unreasonable inclination to try this for myself in order to experience what it’s like.

All the ones I read about were. It was just much more difficult than they expected. And they are generally in great positions to do so. Most of their clients, and those who can't afford to be their clients, not so much.

Define "in your control". Research finds over and over again that genetics plays a major role in BMI and that upbringing plays little or no role.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fendo.2012.0002...

One way to think about it is that certain behaviors are more controllable in the short term than in the long term. An extreme example would be breathing, which, like eating behavior, the brain subconsciously regulates by default. You can override the default and intake substantially more or less oxygen for a while. In the end, though, you will revert to to subconscious regulation and your blood oxygen level will revert to the level where your brain wants it to be.

Eating behavior seems to work in a similar way, although the timeline is much longer and the cues are more subtle.

it's one of those it's complicated answers. For example preventing the initial weight gain is mostly in one's control but once already overweight it's closer to doing physical therapy for an injury. The hormonal and Neurochemical sensors/pathways are out of sync (insulin resistance, high inflamation, leptin resistance to name a few), and in mice models those changes never go away even after having lost the weight, so I don't want to go so far as say that being fat causes brain damage, but there are negative changes that come from having ever been overweight. We are finding out more about this every year, less than 10 years ago we discovered that fat cells produce hormones and aren't just storage containers, since then we have found about 5 other hormones of which some act as neurotransmitters that are also produced by fat cells, which would have been unbelievable pre 2010.

Most weight loss has more to do with hormone triggering than calories, but the main way to trigger those hormones is in fact diet and exercise, but it begs the questions; what kinds of diets and what kinds of exercise and what other things can affect this (things like time of day, fasted state, timing of exercise to eating, macro nutrients etc).

Also most people who are overweight or who overeat it's hard to tell how much is due to something like poverty and how much is due to poor emotional regulation, as it's been shown those are higher leading causes of obesity than merely overreating or being lazy.

I’m learning to become more empathetic to people with naturally low metabolisms and thyroid issues. I know a young girl that went from being very slim to noticeably overweight once she developed a thyroid issue. Feed two people a standard American diet and you could end up with substantially different weight outcomes.

It’s “in your control” the same way that a heroin user is “in control” of the needle they inject into their veins.

Interestingly, many of the same neurological pathways are overactive in drug users and in obese people.

All specific discussion of obesity aside, this was extraordinarily well written. Bravo to the author if he should ever see this comment thread..

I liked the “deep bench of friends”. Paints a vivid picture and I haven’t heard that phrase before

>I’m 6 foot 1, or 73 inches tall. My waist is 60 inches around. I’m nearly a sphere.

That sounds like a math error. Height would be diameter. Inches around waist would be circumference. He needs to be pi times wider to be a sphere (plus more to make up the 60 vs 73).

To be nitpicky, I assume he's just talking about his torso. The head and legs aren't part of the sphere.

Hmm, the way the 3 sentences were combined, it seemed to me the 3rd was a conclusion derived from the first 2. If he was talking about his torso, no such conclusion can be derived from the first 2 sentences.

Discussed at the time:

The Weight I Carry - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18874086 - Jan 2019 (135 comments)

If it's not inappropriate to ask, has there been an update on his progress since the book was written?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com