The brain has a ‘low-power mode’ that blunts our senses
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
it's called a refeed and bodybuilders have been doing it for decades to drop fat while maintaining muscle mass, you don't need leptin injections
some recent studies have backed up the bro science as well
>The researchers reported that 19 participants in the continuous diet group completed the study and lost an average of 9.1 kg furthermore, 17 participants in the intermittent diet group completed the study and lost an average of 14.1 kg (4).Hence, the authors concluded that greater weight and fat loss was achieved in the intermittent diet group (4)
Thanks.
> Perhaps providing more frequent diet breaks for athletes as they become leaner could improve fat loss efficiency, lean body mass retention, and mitigate fat loss plateaus. For example, beginning the initial phases of contest prep using a 4:1 ratio of diet: diet break, then moving to 3:1, then 2:1, and finally 1:1 may be more opti- mal than simply using a set ratio for the entire duration of the preparation; however, we can only speculate.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339949771_Effective...
Of course, at some point the leptin system breaks down, probably due to desensitized receptors. But in a negative calorie state, you can take advantage of your leptin sensitivity.
UD 2.0 by Lyle McDonald is a good basic program that is built off the premise of carb cycling (and the effects on leptin and insulin).
As far as I'm able to tell this is a myth. There isn't any scientific evidence supporting it, and quite a bit which implies it is impossible - if a body could run itself more efficiently then it would by default. Calorie consumption is necessary to sustain life.
This myth is usually perpetuated by people who believe they are on calorie restricted diets, but who are actually eating more than they think.
Absolutely. For instance only counting the calories of their scheduled meals, but "snacks don't count because its just a snack". Or counting a heaping plateful of spaghetti as a single serving because they put it on a single plate. Underestimating calorie counts is much more common than estimating it accurately.
Eat a few meals with a huge person who "just can't lose weight" and it will usually become obvious that they eat a huge amount of food.
Yes, some of it is willpower, and probably for lots of people it's entirely willpower, but there is definitely a metabolic component to it.
If you eat less than you expend you must lose weight, but it's naive to discount a decrease in the expenditure part as well. Keep in mind that just living requires the vast majority of your calories, and any exercise is a blip covered by a couple cookies.
Often on prolonged diets, your NEAT can unconsciously decrease from a series of small decisions like choosing to take the elevator when you usually take the stairs, parking nearer to your destination, etc. and even things like fidgeting less.
You can kinda get around this with things like step counters so you can track how many steps per day you normally walk, and then if you notice you're suddenly walking fewer steps, you can consciously choose to walk more to keep your activity level at your baseline.
For example, you might average 8,000 steps per day but after a few months on a diet, you find yourself walking 4,000 steps per day naturally so you can just choose to go out for a walk after dinner to maintain or increase your baseline level of activity.
When people talk about changes in metabolism, this is normally the culprit.
You’re not losing a meaningful amount of fat in the first week. You’re just getting dehydrated.
I’ve seen this process up close multiple times. It usually starts with a dramatic weight loss goal like “I’m going to lose 2kg/week for a month.” The first few days of crash dieting seem to be working, then the rapid progress stops and it becomes clear that the original target is impossible. This makes it easy to justify quitting the diet altogether to oneself, which was always subconsciously the goal of this approach.
But as others have noted, it often doesn't seem to be sustainable as your body will react to that kind of calorie deficit.
My max. sustainable weight loss rate seems to be about half a kilo a week. Any more and I start yoyo-ing.
I know I am losing weight when I am hungry between meals, most of the time I eat because it’s time to eat.
Down 10 pounds in two weeks. It’s nothing special just eating what I should be eating in terms of quantity. Eating sweets? Skip a meal, etc.
by switching antidepressants. the one I was on before caused weight gain and sugar cravings. I gained 40lbs when I started taking it and lost it when I stopped. I just suddenly found sugar and carbs unappetizing, whereas before I'd get intense cravings.
the experience further convinced me that weight regulation is metabolic or something. I used zero self-control, diet or exercise, and a chemical change brought me back to a healthy weight. my eating habits changed but it was subconscious, not willpower.
2 months is hard.
2 years is really hard
Yeah, loosing 2 kg/week for two years is physically impossible for almost all obese people.
At least for me, we're talking massive amounts of water, by the way. ~500ml every 2-3 hours, all day for the whole time.
Ayran/yoghurt with more salt and water works better, likely because of the salt, but I've gotten too many small kidney stones that way - 100% sure, because I had to painfully piss them out and cut my urethra several times. And, well, yeah, bring a portaloo everywhere.
The hunger gets to me every week, though, in which case I found it's OK to eat a lot of protein/fat (eggs, cheese, meat) for a day. Well, by a lot I mean maybe 3 times the normal food intake.
I drink more water than most and I usually go through 4-5 litres in a regular work day.
As your body sheds fat, it no longer needs to expend energy building, preserving, and keeping your fatty tissue warm. JIT energy use instead of lossy battery storage. It doesn't further slow your metabolism beyond what you are genetically predisposed towards, but metabolism does slow (a little bit). Another way to think of this is, when you consume in excess of what you need for healthy living, your body begins consuming additional calories in order to build and support the additional long-term reserves you are creating and maintaining. We have decades of research supporting this notion (as well as common sense).
There may also be an aspect of "hibernation" that kicks in when dramatic caloric restriction is suddenly introduced. That is, you are further inclined to be less active as you lose weight quickly. I'm less certain of that, though.
This is not something you want happening in a well-nourished individual. Beyond making you more likely to die to predation or accidents from severe muscle wasting, it also just feels horrible. There's a reason why people with untreated hypothyroidism (unrelated to starvation) struggle with exercise and weight loss.
I've also personally observed some people on... inadvisable extreme crash diets getting some weird bloodwork numbers. Like TSH spiking by a factor of 10- which, unlike the above starvation case which typically suppresses TSH, may imply malnutrition and inability to produce sufficient thyroid hormone. Their empirically derived caloric burn rate dropped by more than 30% over the duration of the diet, and a substantial amount of that was from dramatic muscle wasting. Not exactly ideal!
So the body has definitely way to sense and adjust in some areas.
Nobody suggested that the body "run itself more efficiently". They suggested that the body _do less_.
This would be like if someone suggested that you could reduce gas consumption by not driving across the state, and for you to dismiss their argument as impossible because you just can't simply increase the MPG of the car.
Of course, your statement is probably factually correct, but it's a non sequitur!
This is another way of saying the exact same thing. Increased efficiency is doing less work.
"Of course, your statement is probably factually correct, but it's a non sequitur! "
It's a synonym! We are saying the same thing.
That's just not the definition of efficiency that I use.
Efficiency is a ratio of how much _useful_ work something does over how much energy it consumes. If you change the numerator _and the denominator_ in the same proportions the efficiency doesn't change. Therefore, we cannot use "how much work changes" as a short-hand to speak to a chance in efficiency, _unless_ we also note how the denominator is or isn't changing.
So, back to my analogy, the efficiency is the MPG and the "work" is the number of miles driven. Those are different things. You can reduce the number of miles you drive _without_ changing the MPG.
> We are saying the same thing.
From my definitions of words we are absolutely, categorically, not saying the same thing.
Have a good one!
I disagree. The reason I disagree is the impact of the different definitions on the original statement I was challenging:
> if a body could run itself more efficiently then it would by default.
Using my definition of "efficiency", this statement strikes me as self-evidently true.
Using your definition of "efficiency", this statement strikes me as probably false and strongly contradicts my priors. After all, every system in the face of input energy restrictions must do less total work.
So, if I accept your definition (which I'm happy to do for the conversation, since it's just a semantic difference), I think this statement is much less likely to be accurate, and certainly isn't self-evident.
Output / energy is the consensus definition of what it means to be efficient. The commenter you are replying to is being kind, but I guess I’m a little more callous…
Are you comfortable continuing with such a confusing definition of efficiency?
My opinion is that you are not recognizing the value of operating in a less-efficient (lower MPG, more power) mode. We can all spend more or less energy in a day as a function of the things we do. To me, it seems like you’re not recognizing this fact.
As I said above, the bulk of calories consumed in a day for a typical person are upkeep, not exercise related. You do not need to factor it into the overall equation. The changes are not significant enough.
"Starvation mode" theory is that the upkeep of the body changes significantly when calories are lower, preventing the body from losing weight. It's just not true. There are secondary effects (lethargy, no energy for increased exercise for athletes) but the vast majority of obese people do not exercise significantly to begin with so these effects can likewise be ignored. The baseline caloric upkeep -- which is something like 70+% of calorie burn for almost all fat people -- will never significantly change in terms of its efficiency. This is why you will always lose weight on a calorie restricted diet, even without exercise.
Hopefully this clears things up for you.
Of course, this is no way to live long term, but in a starvation situation it makes sense to reduce energy demand to the absolute minimum
Those effects I believe are also correlated with extremely low bodyfat moreso than a calorie deficit diet. In most cases a healthy person's body will simply consume fat to account for a deficit in the diet.
We unfortunately have a lot of data about starvation. The effects on the body are very clear. Body fat will go first. Most americans are in absolutely no danger.
I'll just quote the article:
> The correct part: When you reduce calories, more specifically as you begin to get leaner, there is, in fact, some slowing of metabolic rate.
> The incorrect part: Due to this low-calorie consumption your body decides fuck you and proceeds to enter this phantom zone of otherworldliness where the laws of thermodynamics cease to exist, resulting in no fat loss, or worse, gaining fat on some absurdly low number of calories.
This 'low-power mode' seems consistent with the idea your metabolic rate can slow a bit.
I read elsewhere that base metabolism varies between people by (iirc) ~15% even for a given weight/build due to genetics, weight training (as in its after effects, not the calories exerted during the workout itself), diet, etc. That's enough to be noticeable: 375 calories difference from a 2,500-calorie diet. It's not enough to back up "no matter how much I eat, I can't lose weight".
Maybe, but for the folks most in need of weight loss, how active are they to begin with? Even for a fit person, it's often impractical to be active enough to make up for overeating. So while it'd be ideal to decrease intake without further decreasing activity, they'd still probably lose more weight by decreasing intake even if that brings activity to near-0.
> Walking 20k steps per day is no problem for most healthy adults, at such a deficit it becomes really hard.
Google Fit on my phone says I don't get 20k steps in, even though I run/jog four miles most mornings. I'm physically capable of moving more, but I have a full-time desk job, family responsibilities, etc.
Then that stops, and suddenly your scale isn't showing you the same drastic win as the first few days. You might reasonably think "I guess my body has adjusted".
That isn't to say that your body doesn't change how it functions in order to save energy, obviously a lot changes when you've exhausted your glycogen stores. But I think a lot of the "drastic" results for people hitting a wall after a few days of fasting is based on that initial huge win.
Nonsense, the only places I've seen it are in popular scientific literature and in official recommendations, from dieticians and physical therapists. I don't know whether it's true or not, but my guess is you're probably wrong. The less someone eats, the more tired and weaker they feel, so they less they'd do, so the less energy they'd use. All kinds of feedback loops like that could happen. So it's definitely plausible.
If you believe this is wrong then I suggest trying to articulate why you believe it is wrong, rather than appealing to cherry-picked non-authority opinions.
The vast majority of calories our bodies burn are upkeep related and this upkeep does not change significantly based on our diet.
Exercise is certainly a factor, but it is orthogonal to the question of whether our bodies somehow stop burning calories while continuing to operate itself. Most people in these extreme circumstances do not significantly exercise at all.
Calorie restricted diets in a clinical setting where calorie inputs are strictly controlled will reduce weight 100% of the time.
I don't think people really appreciate this. Running only burns about 100 calories per mile. So if you run 5 miles, you've only burned the calories you would get from eating one muffin.
Many people will go for a walk around the block and feel like their getting into shape, but restricting calories is the only practical way to lose weight.
That’s only true for people who are both light and efficient runners.
A better rule of thumb, at least for men, is 1kCal/hour for zone 2 or light zone 3 training.
Only an approximation but seems to roughly fit many "measurements" by smart watches for both males and females of different weight ranges.
North Americans typically just use Calories for food and excerise contexts. Small c calories is really just used for science.
Apparently it does if you went on too many yoyo diets. Look up reverse dieting to increase your sustaining calorie level again, it works in both directions. Its more or less the efficiency with which your metabolism functions
I liked Jeff Nippards Video with Eric Trexler on the topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiYJW9pViaM https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eric-Trexler
From 2019
They're certainly far better sources than unqualified randos on the Internet being that they're educated in specifically this. If you don't agree with that, then you're epistemology is completely broken. Of course, it doesn't mean they're right, but it does mean they're the best first approximation for someone who isn't themselves an expert.
The claim was about where this information is propagated, so don't start fighting with me about whether it's true or not, which I specifically did not make a claim on. Your original claim about who is propagating this information is just false. You're disagreeing with experts, not just "people who believe they are on calorie restricted diets, but who are actually eating more than they think." It doesn't mean you're wrong, but it means you think you know better than people trained in this specifically, which you may or may not, throwaway09223.
"when you lose weight in this mode your body begins to break down fat and eventually muscle. This is not a desired state for your body. "
For the average american this is a highly desirable state. Almost all of us would be much healthier with a reduced calorie diet, with our bodies breaking down our excess fat.
The effect of muscle loss is overstated. There are many obese and out of shape people who paradoxically point to "muscle loss" as a reason for not eating healthy, but people who actually understand muscle -- bodybuilders -- are very familiar with bulking and cutting cycles. This is a very well understood dynamic.
Poster means from an evolutionary point of view, not a societal/modern individual point of view.
His recommendation is that fat loss phases are kept at 6-12 weeks with a few weeks of maintenance to dump both physical and psychological fatigue and to resensitize for the next day loss phase.
So "decreased metabolism" is bunk, but as a model[1] it does a decent job of suggesting the correct action to take. Assuming calories are in fact under control: you're definitely right that a lot of people have essentially no idea how much they're eating.
[1][eta: after enough time on a deficit, or just a great enough deficit, calorie expenditure spontaneously decreases without much recourse other than going back to calorie balance for a while]
Don't suppose you see the article you're commenting on.
One issue is that people go overboard with dieting, then any excess hits double. The other issue is that they go from one diet to the next, without ever establishing a stable baseline. You shouldn't try to lose weight if you don't even have a stable baseline yet.
TIL that underclocking is apparently not a real thing, and also that the results that the scientists are seeing in the linked study are impossible.
From personal experience nothing made as much difference. I counted calories but switching to high satiety foods made it quite a lot easier.
High fiber foods take a lot longer to digest so make you full longer. Warm oats and pears are a great example.
https://www.fortitudenutritioncoaching.com.au/blog/satiety-h... is a reasonable overview.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7498104/ is a satiety index of common foods which is really useful.
Surely this is exaggeration?
I make a three egg omelette a few times a week, and it's quite filling. I could probably do six eggs without making myself sick, but not a dozen and definitely not 20.
No, this is not an exaggeration. For reference, I am 1.73m and 65kg. When I eat eggs, in whatever form, boiled, fried, etc, I can keep eating them until my stomach is physically full, which takes about 20 eggs, but even then I still feel hungry and non satiated.
I've been trying to replace other things I eat with eggs, for the supposed health benefits, but I can't, eggs simply don't provide any satiation to me. And no, I don't eat massive quantities of other foods, it's mostly eggs I have this problem with. I can eat a single slice of home-made sourdough bread with a simple pate, and I feel much more satiated than after 20 eggs.
(for lazy americans, this person is 5'8" / 143lb)
She was a doctor and had an obese patient who was struggling to lose weight, he complained that he had changed his diet to be very healthy but it still didn't help
gm: "ok let's start with breakfast, what do you usually eat?"
patient: "oh, just a plain omelette - I don't even use butter or oil!"
gm: "ok that sounds good, tell me exactly how you prepare it"
patient: "well, I crack 12 eggs into a pan..."
Apparently they saw they were sold by the dozen and thought that was the suggested serving size
I've been fasting here and there and I'm down from 130Kg to 98Kg in about 5 months. Apparently your body handles that sense of deficiency better if you fast vs multiple small meals. Something about that large meal letting you experience the "I'm so full" feeling.
There's a study in the NEJM where they tested 3 meals a day vs one. The participants ended up at the same weight at the end, but with smaller waists and less belly fat for one meal a day.
It's all interesting albeit frustrating stuff...
Edit: https://sa1s3.patientpop.com/assets/docs/151222.pdf
I might be remembering the results wrong as I can't find the details in that study, I'm going off this video mainly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thgVz3837l0
If I'm wrong about the results it seems the other benefits make it worthwhile anyway, preventing diabetes etc
Morbidly obsese can just water fast. /r/fasting on Reddit is full of success stories.
(Rybelsus is a version of semaglutide available in tablet form, but it hasn't officially been approved for obesity yet.)
You shouldn't go under 1 cheat day a week. See 4 hours body book for sources.
Otherwise, I will crave those foods. But if I just create a wall in my brain where I no longer consider such things food, it's way easier for me to stick to with way less willpower. It's like my brain recalibrates and shifts the whole baseline to a healthier level, rather than having to use willpower alone to keep my eating where it needs to be.
Yes, I know that Cheesecake Factory & such have some high calorie foods on the menu as a sibling comment mentions. I also know that I avoid that place like the plague because I hate wasting food and I can't even eat half of most of their dishes. The few times I have gone, I literally looked at the calories listed on the menu to find suitable items that I wouldn't end up wasting.
I can't quite tell how strong each and every paper in the field is, nor would this be the place to do it, but what I recognize as their foundational observation that Holocaust survivors brains were roughly the same size as of normally fed people, while other organs shrunk, is quite striking.
But also, no one should be fasting and eating nothing - they should make sure they're getting the necessary vitamins and minerals. Taking more leptin could make sense.
BMR is a very real thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basal_metabolic_rate
> It is reported in energy units per unit time ranging from watt (joule/second) to ml O2/min or joule per hour per kg body mass J/(h·kg).
There has been plenty of research into this, see this study into the variance among people for example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15534426/
If you do the math, you'll find that the resting number of calories people burn will vary by a few hundred per day based on their metabolism.
I agree that there is too much woo around the science of weight loss but at the same time we don't need to act like there aren't real facts that we do know.
Thanks, this looks like a good starting point.
Note : i absolutely loved the book of "Tom Venuto - Burn the fat, feed the muscle".
If you were to "run out of fat" entirely, you'd simply die with fairly significant caloric reserves in the form of muscle. This is not what is observed.
While it's not a controlled study, History Channel's "Alone" (reality survivalist show) always touches on lack of food and its affects.
They're technically correct, the best kind of correct (?)
You can remove all advertising for candy and fast food and most people will still not lose any weight. At best you'll prevent new obesity cases by a tiny margin.
When actively trying to lose weight, the body and mind resist. Partially because change is hard, partially because you're running your bodies on fewer calories on purpose. There is the ever present feeling of "I could go for a quick snack but I really really shouldn't".
I don't believe there will ever be this One Secret Trick That Doctors Hate to losing weight (except for getting dangerously ill, perhaps). However, if research like this can lead to ways to reduce some of the symptoms of cutting calories, I think the world might become a lot healthier.
There is also always the risk of this being exploited, of course; I'd imagine some less than humane leaders would be all to pleased if their working populace wouldn't be complaining about hunger all the time. The brain exhibits this behaviour for a reason, probably a good one, and surpressing it willy-nilly can only end in disaster.
Well, people who lack willpower still want to solve their weight problem. They can't use willpower because they don't have it. This is why they look for secret tricks.
Not so complicated.
The problem isn't usually quantity of food, but quality. Having 5 pre-packaged, healthy, low GI meals delivered makes it quite easy to follow the diet. Also, you don't even have to reduce calorie intake in the beginning: feel free to order 2500-3000 calorie option, if you so wish. You won't be losing any weight on that, but at least your metabolism, your glucose levels will stabilize. Then, after 2-3 weeks adjustment period, change your calorie intake to 1500 calories and continue for another month or two - the results are almost magical.
I imagine it would be expensive, but only as expensive as food and delivery of it, and would reduce much more expensive health care costs, right?
And it's definitely easier to feel satisfied off low cal food if it's nutritious - smoothies with protein powder and greens? Filling and diet friendly (esp if no milk). Water? Low cal, but you'll definitely still feel cravings.
Another big issue is condiments. It's really easy to add a few tbsp of dressing to an otherwise healthy meal, which can add a few hundred "hidden" calories.
Looking for easy solutions is very understandable, re: the original topic.
2. Why is it wrong to solve problems the easy way? Why should people have to follow the "difficult" path of dieting if an easier method exists? That's not being lazy, it's being smart by avoiding unnecessary effort.
3. Many diets also have side effects (e.g. hunger, fatigue). But regardless, if people would rather experience side effects from medication than go through the difficult experience of dieting, why is that wrong?
2. It isn’t wrong in every situation, just in this particular one the motivating factor is lack of willpower, prioritization and education. There isn’t an “easy way” as of right now. If one comes along it will also likely carry side effects
3. Its usually ill-informed because the difficulty of dieting is a known one and steps can be taken to alleviate or bypass these issues. Usually medication with outsized effects have proportional side-effects. And we don’t always know what they are. I don’t leave out the possibility that someone could invent a pill that causes huge weight loss with little side-effects, but I would bet a lot of money against it
I encourage you to examine the implicit judgement and bias within this statement. When you say "self inflicted," are you suggesting that people should simply exercise willpower and change their behaviors? What if they cannot, either because they do not know how, or because there are related psychological problems intersecting with their weight issues?
Is depression self-inflicted? What about depressive eating patterns, resulting in weight gain? We know that being overweight is almost universally disliked. We know that most people expend great amounts of time and money on ineffective solutions.
Saying "it's self inflicted" ignores that most overweight people are not able to solve their eating disorder. It's inaccurate, in exactly the same way that it would be inaccurate to dismiss depression as "self-inflicted." Food is tied to very deep motivators within the human brain. Empirically we can very clearly see that most people are not capable of resolving these issues on their own. Generally speaking, it's a symptom of a psychological disorder.
I still think it’s helpful for people to know that their weight issues are usually fixable as long as they have the determination and desire, there’s people that do this every day and share their journey
Hey, have a good one!
I doubt very many people make a deliberate conscious decision to gain excessive amounts of weight, especially if they're dieting. You can argue that people should be making a conscious decision to navigate the labyrinth of data, misinformation, scammers, etc to try to learn what they actually need to do to lose weight successfully but I think most people just eat what they like best from what's available when they feel like eating and are more often than not surprised at the weight they gain. Even animals in research labs on strictly controlled diets who have had the same food intake and lifestyle for decades have been unexpectedly gaining weight.
I think it's safe to say that there's a lot more going on with weight gain than lazy people making a conscious decision to be fat and a lot more involved in losing that weight. Anyone can starve themselves, but loosing weight while staying healthy isn't always so simple. Changing a person's habits and lifestyles aren't always simple either. If medications can help, people should absolutely use them.
Both cancer and weight loss are filled to the brim with pills that do absolutely nothing.
Thousands of expensive treatments, no cure (for cancer at least, I believe the weight loss pill industry os 100% fraudulent).
Saw some pill adverts the other day at a restaurant as the tv played. The pill promised to help lose weight without diet or exercise.
At the end of the commercial it was explicitly stated it workwd if used in conjunction with diet and exercise.
This is what the US has become.
Immunotherapy is pretty damn close to a cure, with very few side-effects. It costs a couple of hundred quid a session to administer, which of course costs the patient nothing.
Right now this is what's going on. My best friend John lives with his grandmother Connie who raised him. Last November, so 7+months now, she found out she has lung cancer. Doesn't smoke, but that doesn't matter.
Connie is the sweetest woman and reminds me of my Grandma. Not a mean bone in her body, would do anything for you.
She had to wait ~4 months to get the referral from her doctor. Once she had that she could begin oncology.
3 months later she still can't get an appointment. Connie has tried and called repeatedly, as has John and his other family members.
They are broken watching her waste away, and she can't even get in to begin assessment much less treatment.
So tired of people with statistics which can be and are gamed, or people with money and insurance assuming everyone does.
Connie is going to die, she knows this, and her last few months are nothing but terror and frustration and sadness all around.
Original comment+My 3 family members who died to cancer. Being in the cancer wards and oncology centers and getting to know lots of patients.
This is the reality. If you have money and insurance cancer will break you. If you have nothing it is almost a guaranteed death sentence.
But hey, you've got a statistic!
Yeah that sucks, but your experience doesn't define the broader landscape.
I had a sister with cancer, and we were very, very poor when she was diagnosed. She still managed to get treatment and make a full recovery, albeit we did end up with a good deal of medical debt. Nonetheless, she lived.
Why does your anecdote carry more weight than mine? It doesn't. I understand you're going through a very difficult time but the solution is not to deny statistics and established facts in favor of your poor experience. People die, it sounds like your family is genetically predisposed to lethal cancers.
Cancer isn't trivial to treat, people are going to die from it. Just, less people in America compared to other countries.
You're basically saying "Well I know people that died from this very lethal disease here in the US, therefore other countries must be so much further ahead". Which isn't really logically coherent.
Like, most people in this discussion would not think of mental-health therapy as a diet plan, but if you're thinking in terms of the systems involved then that seems more likely to generate more weight loss than any fad diet over a long run.
It's just really tempting to be reductive.
Absolutely.
"Just eat less" is not a viable strategy for a parent working 60-70 hours per week who needs to eat a high calorie diet, among other unhealthy practices, just to stay barely functional to support their family.
Or someone who is so exhausted by their work just to keep a roof over their head that they have no mental energy to think about shopping for different food, preparing it, and so on.
I think it's probably the other way around: you fix your diet first, and mental health will improve as a result.
Eating a high-calorie diet is not unhealthy.
I developed a healthy diet and healthy habits, and was able to get down to a healthy weight.. but staying there required a constant influx of willpower. If I only ate enough food to stay at a low weight, I was hungry all the time. (Eventually I ballooned back out, although now I'm losing weight again since I've realized that Morbid Obesity is no place for old men)
I think there is a systems issue at work. My body is just calibrated to hog food until it gets pretty fat, and then it'll stay there unless I do something out of the ordinary.
Telling fat people to get their shit together can work, the same way telling poor people to learn to code works. (I don't think that thin people are thin because they're hungry all the time and they overpower those urges, the same way poor people aren't necessarily all bad people who piss away all their money)
However, I don't think it is genetics can explain why the obesity rate has exploded in recent decades.
Seeing friends and family members that are overweight, they tend to have some similar habits. They consume a lot of liquid calories, ie sodas, fruit juice, sugar in coffee etc. They also eat calorie dense foods, ie ranch dressing, fast food, cookies while consuming fewer fruits and vegetables. They also tend to not consume as much protein and are usually fairly sedentary.
I don't think blaming individuals does much good, but at the same time I don't think some people are just doomed to be fat. If everyone around you is eating healthy non calorie dense food and walking a lot you probably will too. Conversely if everyone around you is eating high quantities of processed food while being sedentary you probably will too.
There's a lot we don't know. But it definitely does appear that a lot of obese people have some sort of homeostatic miscalibration on where their body's set point is for weight. The mechanisms involved there are numerous and complex. It's quite possible that there's something simple going on that could be adjusted in the future to get a person's weight set point down, and from there it's quite likely that they will be able to autoregulate. Conversely, it's really hard for any intervention to succeed long-term when a person's weight doesn't match this internal set point.
Possibly leftovers of a highly adaptive mechanism that let some of their ancestors survive times of extreme famine?
You just need to eat nutritiously dense, high fiber foods that have low caloric density to fill you up.
So a diet heavy in vegetables and whole foods would keep you full without keeping you at a heavier weight.
This would allow you to maintain a caloric deficit to get to your goal weight without going hungry, and once you get to your goal weight you can just reintroduce other foods that are more calorically dense if you'd like.
There's a subreddit filled with examples of this kinda thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/Volumeeating/
I'll check that out for sure.. right now I'm in the honeymoon phase of dieting, where I can lose weight by just switching from sugary soda to sparkling water and staying away from American restaurants
Properly balancing caloric efficiency at a young age is probably far more effective long term and honestly likely more pragmatic.
Fastest orange juice i ever drank.
Also, if you're running low enough on nutrition that your eyes aren't working right, you're also likely to be dehydrated, which can also affect vision.
What is this called?
It’s sort of like when you play a lot of Tetris and you can’t stop seeing the falling bricks as you fall asleep.
Never noticed this from any single-threaded activity. But once I played two games in parallel for a few hours (two instances of wow) that had a direct impact on trying to fall asleep. The task-switching tried to check my other self, but there was no other instance to switch to.
Apparently it's a known sleep disorder and has the terrifying name "exploding head syndrome"
https://www.sleepassociation.org/sleep-disorders/more-sleep-...
It might be a survival mechanism, now you mention it.
Going back as far as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment it appears in certain survival instances calorie restriction is worse than no calories. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experimen...
I heard you can go without food for 30 days. My longest fast was 3 days and while I liked it, I function much better with food.
Longer thread on the subject: https://twitter.com/pmg/status/1463309372793057285
tldr; We store fat to get us through periods of lack of food. Bears do this too. We literally have a "machine" inside us that we evolved at great expense that gets us through periods of no food. Fat storage is an "extra" feature - not the default. Chimps and gorillas don't have it for instance - if you've seen one, they're basically ripped, no real fat storage - probably because we evolved on the savannas (or similar environment with seasonal food scarcity) and they evolved in the jungle where food was always present.
Simple (not easy) fat loss guide: drink water, supplement with essential vitamins and minerals that you don't store naturally in fat (i.e. sodium, potassium, magnesium, b vitamins, and vitamin c). As I understand it, most other vitamins are fat soluble and thus...stored in fat. No, you don't lose much muscle (I lost 0.1%) - I believe because the body makes an exogenous amount of HGH when fasting (but not during calorie restriction). Currently of the mindset short term fasting (less than 7 days) is better than calorie restriction for weight loss. Long term fasting (15+ days) has mild negative outcomes but is an appropriate option when the alternative is death by "X" - included co-morbidities caused by long term obesity. Sustained vitamin deficiency over months or years (anorexia) can cause worse outcomes than obesity. A "one and done" fast is not that.
I have a BMI of 28.5 (6'0, 210 lbs) and I'm pretty lean, active, and healthy. I have denser bones and a bit more muscle than average, but my body isn't _that_ unusual.
Good for you on using covid as motivation to get healthier.
Much happier at BMI ~21 and if I knew this path was viable I would have done it 5 years ago.
How did you measure this number? Unless you were on some kind of drug, this seems impossible.
I did not supplement with any drugs but your body does produce up to 1,250% more HGH in a long-term fasted state(!). You're also completely deprived of glycogens so your ability to perform anaerobic work to gain muscle is probably not going to happen without some more bio-hackery.
I heard second hand that Tim Ferris did two long term fasts. One under medical supervision where he was confined to a hospital and lost significant muscle mass; another where he went about his normal routines and (surprisingly) didn't lose any notable mass. Which matches what we know about muscle atrophy in ICU patients for instance - confine someone to a bed and they're going to waste away.
But at a high level.
You BOTH look at recommended daily values AND listen to your body. NIH has a decent starting point. I.e. potassium is 4,700mg: https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Potassium-HealthProfession...
There's also a fair amount of margin for error. A low effort is a salt supplement like this: https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Forza-Electrolytes-Flavoring-Un... + B complex + C vitamins like this: https://www.amazon.com/Natures-Bounty-B-Complex-Vitamin-Cell... - I don't particularly endorse any one supplement - just look up what are the essential vitamins and minerals on NIH (https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/vitamins-and-minerals) and supplement the recommended daily amounts for the non-fat soluble ones. You can probably do without the vitamins on a short fast but you will feel miserable without the salts.
Your body is still "eating" - you're still having bowel movements for instance - but it's just eating your own fat stores which include some fat soluable vitamins. NB I did not look to see if I was getting enough from this - but when I did my blood work a few times the only thing I was consistently low on was sodium and potassium because I was under supplementing on those because drinking salt water is gross (like I said, I did this imperfectly.)
One shouldn't eat salt in pill form. I didn't try. But supposedly it burns your intestinal lining. Rather I'd mix a scoop of that into my black coffee, 4 times a day. If I had muscle fatigue I'd have more potassium. If I couldn't sleep, more magnesium. Light headed when standing? More sodium. This is the listening to your body part and if you're short on salts after two weeks you absolutely will know it. But, mixing salt in water is gross and drinking too much salt in too short of time period will give you the runs. Getting enough salt is the only "hard" part. You're still doing what one normally does as a human, just less.
I think I got it down to 2L of water. Some casual cups of decaffeinated black coffee or tea. 4 thimble sized supplements of various salts.
Was food delivery not an option, or were you worried about that being a vector of transmission?
Three days is the longest people should go for if they haven't tried fasting before and don't have experience with gradual refeeding. Any longer than five days and you risk running into the refeeding syndrome.
If you’re anorexic, fast for 40 days, and don’t supplement with salts (particularly potassium) you’re going to have refeeding syndrome.
If one’s worried about it, just get ones blood work done before one starts eating again. It takes about an hour and will show you exactly what you are low on what to supplement to get to baseline. To the extent people are advising one not to do an extended fast without medical supervision - eh - basically the extent of the medical supervision is "let's run a panel every few days and see if anything is dangerously out of whack" - and maybe confine you to a hospital for the duration - but if you're not outside and walking a normal amount and say confined to a room you absolutely will lose a large amount of muscle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Irish_hunger_strike 45-73 days till death with most lasting 60 days.
Holger Meins lasted 58 days despite forced feeding. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holger_Meins
List is obviously a lot longer but they offer a great dataset
But yeah, they need to make a new edition and cut out a lot of the “scientific” bits the crumbled after the replication crisis gained purchase
It’s a hard book to suggest when topics about careful thought are backed up my junk science
It's also one of the pop sci books that has been most intensively scrutinized for errors or failures to reproduce study effects. Probably in part because it's so popular.
I hate to be cynical, but that is usually not a good sign. There are sites collecting the most appreciated books of HN and the ones that are not about technology are too simplistic.
What happens inside the brain of a child who's subject to chronic under-nourishment, and what are the long-term impacts of this?