People with low BMI aren't more active, they are just less hungry, 'run hotter'
sciencedaily.com
sciencedaily.com
The feeling of hunger is not comparable between people. Hunger is driven by multiple sensations (blood sugar, stomach stretch, hormone levels) and by cognitive behaviors (it's lunchtime, it's a feast day) and psychological conditioning (advertising). People have relationships with, and expectations about food. The response to hunger is learned. It is driven by culture - for instance it is 'manly' to eat a large steak and loaded baked potato where I'm from; many times the smaller cuts of steak have either a woman's name or some feminine aspect.
Scientists use Occam's Razor to find the most probable cause for some effect, and people in general want to find something simple to blame. I think the obesity epidemic has many causes, and it is particularly hard to understand because researchers have only lately begun to take hunger seriously. It is easy to say "Diet and Exercise" but losing body fat means that you must continuously make choices that decrease your comfort in some way - eating fewer highly rewarding foods, maintaining a state of hunger, increasing activity level. Those choices are difficult, and they are different for everyone.
I believe there are many consequences of the difficulty in measuring and tracking hunger. I think that many people (including doctors and researchers and HN users) want to be able to change one thing or add one drug and suddenly solve the obesity epidemic. I think it makes it hard for doctors to talk to patients. It makes it hard for people to understand what their body is doing.
Not necessarily! I've successfully lost a lot of body fat (~50 pounds over the last 18 months) by deliberately changing my diet to eat more foods (that I like) that are lower in energy density than what I was eating before -- fruits and veggies, lean meats, etc. I do end up eating fewer stereotypically highly rewarding foods, but that's because I'm already full of other highly rewarding-to-me foods and don't feel like having a treat or a huge fast food meal or whatever. And I'm certainly not tolerating frequent hunger!
So what exactly are you contradicting in their statement?
I don't deliberately avoid dessert, though I do tend to eat it less than I used to. I'll have the cheesecake if I really feel like it.
My sympathies to those who really just don't like any fruits or vegetables, but there are lots of other margins to operate on in lowering your dietary energy density. e.g., for a side with your steak, I assert most people will enjoy a baked potato with a bit of butter (~1 cal/gram) about as much as garlic bread (~3 to 4 cal/gram).
> I'll have the cheesecake if I really feel like it.
That tells me the writing on the wall, and let me be clear about this, the writing is what needs to be written and what people need to read - you're making the decision to NOT have cheesecake when you only kind of feel like it. It's a game of weighing the pros and cons and learning to be satisfied with what you know you should have instead of turning around one day and loving the healthy food more than the unhealthy.
Just as an aside: > I assert most people will enjoy a baked potato with a bit of butter (~1 cal/gram) about as much as garlic bread (~3 to 4 cal/gram).
You're discounting the calories / gram of butter in your first calculation and including it in the second.
Chiming in as someone whom the GP comment resonates with: the point here is that you literally come to enjoy it less. The natural amount that you would eat isn't constrained entirely by health choices. I find finishing a single slice of cheesecake to be overwhelming: a second one would be actively unpleasant.
If you were following your assumptions here to their conclusions, you would conclude that people who eat unhealthily would eat cheesecake 24/7 if it weren't for conscious health choices. This is trivially untrue, no?
The original claim was that losing weight requires constant extra discomfort, and GP's (and my) claim is that this is false: you can move yourself (with initial discomfort) to an equilibrium that's more comfortable _and_ healthier than the status quo.
I feel the discomfort of constraining myself much less often now than I did when I ate like you. This is again trivial: if your preferences are aligned with healthy eating, you need to push against them less.
Let me rephrase: since changing my diet to include more low-energy-density foods (and being deliberate about eating large portions of them), I find myself less frequently even considering having dessert after dinner.
> You're discounting the calories / gram of butter in your first calculation and including it in the second.
No? I'll put 7g of butter (50 calories) on a 300g potato (280 calories) and not at all feel like I needed more butter. Even if you double that amount of butter, it comes out to 1.2 cal/g.
See I'd assert the opposite, or at least the following more nuanced version, for myself:
If I make a baked potato, I'll eat it and be quite happy -- even delighted! -- with it. But! If I have to choose between a baked potato or garlic bread (say, on a restaurant menu) I'd choose the garlic bread virtually every time, unless I'm exerting Herculean levels of willpower to choose healthier options. And if I'm served a baked potato and garlic bread, I'd probably eat the potato, and then somehow find room to eat the garlic bread anyways.
I don't disagree that healthy food can be very tasty, but I mitigate my own struggles with healthy eating by "merely" never keeping unhealthy options around, so I can focus more on the joy of the healthy food, and not have to constantly choose to avoid the high-calorie treats.
A Big Mac menu goes for 10+ dollars where I live.
Sirloin steak, which is reasonably lean (you can go leaner and cheaper with something like London Broil, every 3 weeks it is sold at 2.50 t0 3 dollars per pound), when on sale (this is the planning I was referring to) can be bought for 3-4 dollars per pound. One can buy 20 pounds for 60-80 dollars. A big bag of frozen vegetables, enough for 10 meals, it's sold at Costco for 10 dollars.
A whole day of abundant eating (2 pounds of steak and vegetables) can cost less than a Big Mac menu. You can throw in some potatoes and eggs and pay per day what you would pay at MacDonalds or equivalent per meal.
She describes it as one of the tastiest meals she had the entire show. Literally half digested arctic vegetation.
Your body rewards you for eating those things which satisfy your needs. McDonalds will do that, but so will a salad.
One of the fad diets for a while was the "one thing" diet. You could have anything you wanted.. but you could only eat that single item that entire day. Cheesecake? You're having cheesecake for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Very quickly participants discover it is very easy to burn out on sweets and junk.
If you eat nutritious food that will actually give you that reward craving.
Also, nothing wrong with steak. Nothing really wrong with cheesecake either - but you only need a tiny bit of those things. There's a reason most people want tiny steaks and not big honking ones, especially people who eat steak with regularity.
That is, and this not medical advice, but something I have a done a few times while on vacation, you can do a 10-15-21 days of the above-mentioned McDonald's diet and easily get leaner without starving, looking for "healthy foods", counting calories or steps.
You're arguing that people who eat bad things constantly only want a little of them when that is obviously not true. Plenty of people eat far too much steak far too often. People are keyed to like salt, fat, & sugar. It's a balancing act of moderation, it's not just a matter of finding that you love vegetables and you will always find them just as satisfying as Twizzlers.
Chicken breast with a little flour to help caramelize over high heat and some herbs (basil, oregano, thyme) tastes excellent and feels light and proper.
I am a person with a terrifying appetite if left to my own devices. And if at the beginning of a "diet" the scary appetite and intrusive food thoughts make themselves feel heard loud and clear, after a while, thanks to the physiological changes that occur as the food consumed changes and a mind that is now preoccupied with things and thoughts other than food, as time goes on it becomes much easier to eat fewer and more "healthy" (hard to define, but we know it when we see it) calories.
"Pushing through until it becomes easy" is not a social policy, and other kinds of interventions are needed to solve the large-scale obesity problem. But at the individual level, it works for me and millions of others.
E.g. do eat that steak. But without a BBQ sauce you bought. Just salt and pepper is great actually. But a butter and cream garlic sauce (no sugar) is also awesome. Maybe some blue cheese on top instead?
Skip the potato. Just that steak with some nice caramelized onions or veggies you like as a side. But that's not even needed.
Highly rewarding I can tell you. Yes it's not sweet and rewarding. It's not carb loaded rewarding but it's absolutely delicious, fills you up for a long time. Yes this is going in the Keto carnivore direction so might not be for you but having eaten Keto (with less than 20g of carbs a day) I can tell you it was absolutely great and rewarding taste wise as I could finally enjoy cream based sauces and bacon again instead of low fast sugary stuff that makes you hungry again after an hour.
That is, it doesn't have to be uncomfortable.
The pt is that the reward function isn't static, and you can move yourself to an equilibrium with as much utility/comfort that is much healthier.
This has been my experience too. Eg, I'm almost a little grossed out by the proportion of refined carbs on the plates of some of my friends: not only is it unhealthy, it's the most boring part of the meal (to my palate)! And my habituation to sugar has gotten low enough that things taste much sweeter to me than they do to most people.
If anything, this has _increased_ the reward I get from eating, since their unfettered preferences need to be consciously constrained by awareness of their health, while mine line up pretty well.
- Dairy: Greek yogurt or cottage cheese are usually part of my breakfast. I'll have a whey protein shake in milk most days, since I'm also trying to build muscle; liquids don't normally "count" toward satiety in the same way, though milk itself is complicated and contributes at least a little more toward satiety because the protein makes gastric emptying slower.
- Meats: Most unprocessed meats, as well as some deli meats (e.g. roast beef or ham but not salami), are great on satiety per calorie IMO, even if not usually considered "lean". I guess don't make a habit out of prime rib? I'd credit "plan to have a large amount of meat for most dinners" as the most important single change I made, perhaps in part because it makes me less likely to have something from a restaurant for dinner instead but also because meat is just so satisfying without being too energy-dense. Eggs count here too, ~2 cal/gram.
- Veggies: anything is great, but my favorites are brussels sprouts, sugar snap peas, spinach, asparagus, and corn. This won't be news to anyone but salads are usually a good choice if you're eating from a restaurant.
- Fruits: anything is great, but my favorites are strawberries, watermelon, bananas, and oranges (I prefer clementines because they're easy to eat)
- Junk food: I find ice cream sandwiches (~150 calories) are a convenient way to sate my sweet tooth in a way that isn't ridiculous, even if they're not really low energy density. Also, fancy dark chocolate is hard to overeat.
And a special mention to making my own coffee (with generous milk and sugar-free flavored syrup, ~60 calories per cup) rather than getting lattes from a coffee shop (~150 to 200 calories).
By that I mean, I would eat breakfast and then see how hungry I was at lunchtime. If I wasn’t very hungry for lunch, then I would still eat lunch, but I tried eating less at breakfast the next day. Same with lunch-to-dinner.
Over time my meal portion sizes came down, but I was not looking directly at that, I was just paying attention to the feeling of hunger.
What I realized was that I would eat a big breakfast and then a big lunch just because it was lunchtime. So I was overeating; basically taking in more calories than my body needed. It was a combination of habit and not thinking about what I was feeling. I realized that I should feel pretty hungry before a meal, but I wasn’t letting that happen.
I totally agree with you that hunger is subjective and hard to measure outside of our own perception. I’m not sure I could have or would have done this based on someone else’s coaching. It’s hard to calibrate my personal feeling of “hungry enough” based on what another person says. And it takes motivation, which has to come from within.
A few months you may be skinner. 1,2,3 years, you may have maintained the weight loss.
10 years later will probably be fatter. Those are the numbers.
But what I think we're having trouble in understanding what this means is that it doesn't mean obesity as a social problem can't be solved. It might mean some amount of people who are already obese will never be able to sustainably change that fact, but it's not like people are being born with naturally higher fat set points. That is a hormonal change that happens when you become obese and stay that way for a long time. Interventions that focus on younger people who have not yet become obese can still work. But this is contrary and different to how the entire obesity industrial complex works. It is focused on treating overweight and obese people, not on preventing new people from ever getting that way in the first place. Even with children, we focus the interventions on trying to help fat kids lose weight. We should probably expect that to work at least a little bit better than trying to intervene in adults, but even better still is to work with the kids who aren't obese, which at an early enough age is all of them, and figure out how to keep them that way.
It is interesting to see "increasing activity level" as being a decrease in comfort. But I suppose that's because "comfort" here isn't defined absolutely. I also am not sure that "comfort" is an attribute that should be optimized for in disregard for all others.
If this statement is read as "anything that does not have 100% positive feedback is undesirable" then I think it would be very challenging to make any improvements in a person's life.
But then I also don't think that "comfort" is necessarily an ideal target to optimize. I think a more holistic measure such as "satisfaction" is a more productive target. We can find "satisfaction" in things that are not 100% pleasant but which in turn result in greater happiness or feelings of contentment than doing only those things that have positive feedback.
This measure of "comfortable" also does not seem to account for the secondary effects of "comfortable" choices. E.g., if we eat only "highly rewarding foods" and become obese we see discomfort in other parts of life (loss of mobility, health issues, difficulty performing mundane physical tasks, etc)
I'm not saying that is good, I'm saying that is a strong value statement that I made when I was younger. It's hard to change values, even in the face of evidence.
I think people should find exercise that they enjoy. I have struggled with this due to other physical limitations (in addition to my weight) and my attitude and cognitive behaviors. I now enjoy riding my bike, hiking, and swimming.
The goal was to change my cholesterol (it worked), not lose weight, and I ate however much I wanted.
But at the same time I lost 30 pounds over about three months. I didn’t even notice the change for the first month. I wasn’t fat to start, and by the end I was startlingly thin. Anecdotal, obviously.
We don’t eat because we’re hungry, we eat because we’re bored.
And because we're stressed. And because we expect to eat. And because our stomachs are empty. And because we have our thirst signal confused for hunger. And ...
I bet there are at least 20 distinct sensations that people feel as 'hunger'
And most people with high BMIs didn't get that way eating steak and baked potatoes. In fact, if you live entirely on that diet it's quite difficult to get fat.
I believe that for myself, being able to eat like a king from many different culinary traditions has been a major factor in my fat gain.
"Obesity is a major health risk, with junk food consumption playing a central role in weight gain, because of its high palatability and high-energy nutrients. The Cafeteria (CAF) diet model for animal experiments consists of the same tasty but unhealthy food products that people eat (e.g. hot dogs and muffins), and considers variety, novelty and secondary food features, such as smell and texture. This model, therefore, mimics human eating patterns better than other models." - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33309818/#:~:text=The%20Cafe....
I wish this were the baseline understanding everyone shared! Even as one person, as my mental health has been differently treated over time, I've been shocked at how different the subjective experience of hunger at various calorie deficits has been.
They fed pigs four different diets that had the same amount of calories, but varying ratios of n3/n6 fats.
The pigs with high n6/n3 ratio ended up much fatter and less muscular than the pigs eating a 1-1 ratio diet. It's a very neat demonstration that "all that matters is calories" is not true; your metabolism, and thus how you use the calories, is influenced by the kinds of calories you are eating.
Well, at least if you are a pig. But it seems likely the same holds true in humans, though AFAIK no one has yet tried to do a similar controlled trial in humans.
But there's lots of assocational evidence that lines up in the same direction -- e.g., in America we've been getting fatter pretty much in-lock step with increasing consumption of n6 fats & there is a correlation between body-fat composition (which itself follows fat composition from the diet) and obesity.
So, in the light of the above, my #1 weight loss tip is: eat fewer n6 fats. (In practice, this means avoiding most prepared processed foodes and being extremely selective if eating out (since restaurants tend to go crazy using vegetable oil as a cooking fat, which is super high in n6 fats).)
The pigs study:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...
So my diet is usually very strict. I will mostly only eat salmon, mackerel, oysters and mussels, and a lot of berries with some breads and rice. No plant oils at all and very low carb, but not no carb.
I only resorted to this diet because I had a series of metabolic disorders in my self and in my family and I also know my genetics. I have the changes to FADS1, FADS2, and CPT1A which make me much more sensitive to Omega 6 fats that most European Caucasians. See it turns out I have more Sami blood in me than I thought and so I am in reality more Inuit when it comes to what I need from my diet.
I most certainly feel most satiated and loose weight even when eating the same amount of calories when I am following this diet. I was a low fat vegan for five years in an attempt to correct my cholesterol, and I was a good vegan too, no junk food. But all it did was lower my HDL and barely reduce by LDL. (I was diagnosed with mild hyperlipidemia). After seeing my geteicss and changing my diet, my HDL rose over 35 for the first time in my life. Now it stays steady at between 50 and 55
Now I am only more sensitive to these fats. Meaning that anyone, even with non-Inuit genetics, will succumb to the higher levels of Omega 6 that course through the modern food industry if they over do it.
(FWIW, Dave Feldman (cholesterolcode.com) has me pretty convinced that high LDL is not bad in all contexts. High HDL does always seem to be good, though.)
tmjdev wrote:
> If it was the ratio being studied, could you instead increase your n3 fat consumption?
Some articles suggest exactly that: "To improve the ratio of omega-3 fats to omega-6 fats, eat more omega-3s, not fewer omega-6s." [1]
If you're looking for sources other than fish, consider chia. Two tablespoons of chia give 4.3 g of omega-3 fat, as well as 10 g of fiber for no net carbs. [2] Don't eat chia seeds dry; [3, 4] mix into 1.25 cups of water and leave them for at least 30 minutes. I also combine with oats. (I used to eat 0.5 cups of oats every morning. When trying to lower carbs, I went down to 0.25 cups of oats and the chia. The omega-3 fat was a nice surprise.)
On the other hand, minimizing processed and restaurant foods is probably a good idea in general. And of course if your goal is to lose weight, removing something from your diet makes more intuitive sense than adding something.
[1] https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/no-need-to...
[2] https://cronometer.com/printfood.html?name=Bob%27s%2BRed%2BM...
[3] https://www.wbur.org/news/2014/10/24/chia-seed-alert-superfo...
It depends on your genetics. the genes FADS1 and FADS2 will dictate how much of those short chain omega 3 you can turn into the long chain omega 3, like EPA and DHA, which ate the reason for the metabolic reversal.
Also since Omega 6 and Omega 3 compete for the FADS1 and FADS2 activity, eating less Omega 6 will always help.
|All the pigs had ad libitum access to diets and water and consumed the diets for 2 months.
So they could eat as much as they wanted to, it seems.
However, coincidentally, the same conclusions still hold, since it turns out the pigs ate very similar amounts of food on all the diets, except the 5:1 n6:n3 diet, where they ate a bit less. (And that was the diet where the pigs gained the most weight.)
Sorry about the error!
In fact, n6 fats may also promote hunger, via increasing endocannabinoid production.
Here's a study I just found in mice:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24081493/
Again just an animal model, but certainly suggestive...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6685292/
AEA and 2-AG are synthesized from omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA), arachidonic acid (AA), and are hydrolyzed by fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH) and monoacylglycerol lipase (MAGL),
Herein, we review the discovery and physiological role of omega-3 eCBs that are derived from DHA and EPA (Figure 1A). We illustrate that the derivatization of carboxylic acid end of the omega-3 fatty acid with ethanolamide, glycerol or other groups, such as neurotransmitters, leads to substantial changes in their biological activity and receptor interactions. We also review the discovery, mechanism and activity of the following omega-3 eCBs- DHA-ethanolamide (DHA-EA), 2-docosahexaenoyl-glycerol (2-DHG) and eCB-like- DHA-serotonin (DHA-5HT), DHA-dopamine (DHA-DA) and the EPA analogs.
That would be my thinking.
These n3 derived eCBs are pretty new so no one knows. But I can tell you, I have found I get "dry mouth" on occasion when I over do the Omega 3. It used to happen more when I took fish oil capsules which I no longer take.
I am also unable to smoke pot becasue it triggers intense anxiety and panic and I think this is becasue I am more sensitive to the THC. And I think this might be a clue how CBD and THC have different psychological effects. THC = Omega 6 and inflammatory and CBD = Omega 3 and anti-inflammatory in a sense.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170718142909.h...
I would be cautious though -- it's a novel dietary regime, and seems likely to induce a lot of oxidative stress...
Certainly in mice it seems to.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3435540/
From that study:
> It appears of utmost importance in medical and nutritional practice to formulate and handle n-3 PUFA-rich foods or supplements with the greatest care to avoid any PUFA oxidation. This can be particularly relevant in patients suffering from acute or chronic diseases who increase their n-3 PUFA intake because of their reported health benefits.
Especially at night though I have to to jack the temperature down or I won't sleep. Also less hungry aligns pretty well.
Unfortunately when I get hungry, it's normally "a little hungry) at akward spread out intervals. I probably feel most hungry after midnight but never eat then because well, I have to sleep soon.
I've tried to put on weight before, but I could never stomach massive calories dense meals, without horrific nausea and discomfort.
Another strange thing about my body (if anyone cares, curious if anyone else has the same thing) is that I don’t burp, ever. I think the air I swallow while eating forms a bubble in my stomach that makes me feel full sooner and prevents overeating.
While my weight is at least partially my own fault, its at least influenced by factors outside of my control - upbringing, genetics, societal factors, and an endocrine disorder too. I've concluded that being fat is a result of Type II diabetes rather than a cause - and there is growing science to back me up - a good example of this, my liver dumps glucose into my system, without meds I can fast for a nearly indefinite period of time without my blood sugar falling off.
I can't speak to your friends, but there is no universal truth here - I know a bunch of fat people, and none of them 'drown them in bbq sauce and mayo' - most of the thin people in my life and fat people in my life end up eating 'around' the same amount of food, but the thin people are physically often much more active.
But if I eat a small small amount, wait 30 minutes the hunger fades and I will feel full.
So basically a 30 minute delay between being full and feeling full.
That’s a huge window for a lot of calories.
I couldn't burp for most of my life until I taught myself.
I can eat pretty much non-stop. I could eat a large pizza myself, and 30 minutes later eat another.
The grass is always greener. Some people wish they could eat as much as me so they could gain some weight. I wish I couldn't eat so much so I didn't have to spend so much mental energy on ensuring I don't over-eat.
Sure you could. But do you actually do that often? If you eat like me, you're eating two large pizzas a night two or three times a week.
If you stay thin, I guarantee you don't eat as much as me. At least not unless you have an activity level comparable to an actively training Olympic athlete.
I think most people 'eat until not hungry.' For me, my default is 'eat until full' which I'm not sure is the same at all. I think it's primal programming to eat until full for many of us, because 10k years ago that might have meant surviving or not.
I am usually in 'want to eat' mode. If I eat something, I might put that mode on pause for a few minutes, depending on how much, but I'll be there before the next meal. Then, I convince myself I'm going hungry, so the next meal I'll over eat. This cycle increases my stress level, which leads to more eating.
I find that doing any physical activity outdoors reduces my desire to eat immensely. I don't mean a 5-15 minute walk, I mean being outside for a couple hours or more. My body seems to have two modes, eat mode and work mode. Sitting at a computer is what's causing my problems IMO. I have a low-stress job, but I think the very nature of a computer job creates some kind of primal-stress.
I don't obsess over this but it'll help me cut out some snacks or put in an extra mile or two on my runs (which is supposed to be around ~100 calories). Everyone is different but looking at weight loss/gain as an equation works for me if I notice my pants getting tighter.
As the GP I get hot during the night and my wife is freezing, and although I have never measured my body temp my wife always says that she can feel how my body can irradiate heat. At the beginning I thought she was joking but after many years and empirical testing (when she says she can feel heat I am hot) I feel it is true. And this always happens if I ingest carbs for dinner, always.
About what you say, I am not sure the brain processes that it feels hot because the temperature from outside of your body is higher than yours but because your body is actually hotter than usual and one of the reasons could be because the environment temp is actually heating up your body. But I am not a neurologist or even close so I may be completely wrong.
What's interesting is that these people kept a high metabolic rate while doing less activity. It's almost like, if you rest more, your body will have the energy to increase its metabolic rate, or it could be totally physiological and it depends on the person.
I "run hot" as my partner says. She'll touch my arm and it boggles her mind how hot I feel. I have to keep my room at 67F at night or I can't even use blankets. My sleep suffers from how hot I run.
I don't feel cold in the least.
Eventually diagnosed with an autoimmune condition. Food is one of the primary ways I keep it under control.
I can't gain weight but I also love the heat... I don't have the A/C on right now and it's 84F inside.
I lost 75kg over 3 years, then put exactly 75kg back on over the 4 years after that.
While losing weight, and keeping it off (for about 6 months), I was hungry all the time, every day. I hoped that my body would eventually "get used" to the new standard, but in the end (not conciously), I gave up -- it was too mentally tiring to be hungry whenever I was awake.
I'm sure lots of it was a combination of physical and psycological -- I could eat lots of raw vegetables and not want to eat another carrot -- that wouldn't stop me eating something fatty/sugary.
I do remember reading before that the fat cells that get created when you gain weight never really go away, they just “deflate”. So after you lose weight, you are more likely to gain the weight back than someone who is at the same weight now but who has never been bigger than that.
I also recall seeing a study that your body sends you extra hunger pangs to gain the weight that you lost back, because it assumes that losing weight means you’re in fight-or-flight mode, so it wants to make sure you survive. That’s why a weight loss drug where an extra 300-400 calories per day were excreted via urine did not show significant results.
I couldn’t find the exact study for the second part. So I’ll just leave a general reference from Northwestern alluding to the same results.
1. https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/your-fat-cells-never...
2. https://www.nm.org/healthbeat/healthy-tips/how-your-body-fig...
I definately give up at some point, then lived in denial for 6 months or so, by which point a lot of the damage was done (certainly psycologically). I don't know if I would have controlled it better if I saw the weight coming back on, but at least I wouldn't have been pretending otherwise.
I'm not losing weight again, and I've set a reminder to weigh myself (I've set it to weekly, I know some people do daily or whatever). I'm planning on that being active forever.
I was worried about all that stuff about the body never adapting back after being used to eating a certain amount but it just hasn't come up. Maybe that's more likely to happen if you go too fast. I've been keeping a steady pace of ~1.3lbs/week which is slow but easily sustainable.
It also helps hunger to eat more protein, not avoid fat too much, and avoid simple carbs.
I also run very hot and have a normal BMI now.
Notwithstanding that there's more to a healthy diet than vegetables. According to research, high protein intake can improve satiety on a caloric deficit. Some level of fat intake goes a ways too; some vitamins are fat-soluble. Potato is the most satiating vegetable there is, gram per gram.
It's not well understood how nutrient deficiency influences hunger, but it's possible your diet didn't hit nutrient targets.
I've struggled with the same issue as you and started really digging into the science of food and nutrition because I've had enough of yo-yo'ing.
Fat storage is regulated by various hormones. The most significant are insulin, cortisol, testosterone, estrogen and hormone-sensitive lipase. Hunger is caused by the release of the hormone gherelin.
The way to lose weight and keep it off permanently is to make permanent lifestyle changes that hack these hormones.
The first part is to drastically lower the production of hormones that trigger fat storage. Insulin seems to be by far the most significant. The best way to drastically lower insulin is to not eat, but the next best thing you can do (because not eating isn't really all that practical for most people) is to severely restrict carbohydrates. This means all carbohydrates, including those from fruits and vegetables. You mentioned lots of vegetables, including carrots - well, carrots are an extremely high-carbohydrate vegetable, they're almost like eating sugar. They'll give you an insulin boost and you'll feel hungry again very shortly after eating them. We've been duped by being told that "fruits and vegetables are good for us." The reality is way more complicated than that.
Cortisol is the stress hormone. While I don't buy claims that exercise results in weight loss (because I used to jog for an hour every single day, never ate junk food and was on a "well balanced" diet recommended by all the leading authorities and was still obese and couldn't lose weight) but exercise is great at reducing stress, and so it can help with weight loss ... just not as much as diet. Other ways to keep cortisol low are to make sure you're getting enough sleep and obviously reduce stressors in your life.
Testosterone and estrogen can also be regulated somewhat by exercise, as well as nutrition.
As for gherelin, there's good news and bad news. The bad news is that gherlin is released by your fat cells when they start to deplete. It's your body's way of saying "I'm using stored energy, we better find some more." But the good news is that it seems to be temporary and insulin seems to be a factor here too.
When you eat, your body releases insulin to moderate the influx of new blood sugar. Your fat cells get a boost of new fat storage and the release of gherelin is suppressed. But as soon as your blood sugar levels come down and those fat cells start to empty rather than fill you get a new release of gherelin which makes you want to eat so you rinse and repeat. And people who get into a cycle of weight gain become resistant to both insulin and gherelin ... so your pancreas and your fat cells keep releasing more and more just to produce the same effect and a vicious cycle ensues and this is how people become morbidly obese.
So by drastically reducing your insulin levels by cutting carbs, intermittent fasting and filling up healthy fats ("unhealthy fats" like poly-unsaturated fatty acids; PUFAs have their own health problems associated with them) you cut off the production fat-storing hormones and you limit hunger hormone. Then you can restrict calories and not torture yourself. This doesn't mean that you won't ever feel hungry, gherelin production won't stop ... but it will lower and become temporary. You'll find yourself feeling hungry at certain points in the day but it goes away after a few minutes without eating anything.
Long term, once you've cut the weight, you can go back to eating more calories, but by changing your diet to consume very few carbs and to eat less in general (typically by eating once or twice per day) you keep insulin levels very low. The result is that you get the energy your body requires but it's using it rather than storing it as fat and you're not feeling hungry all the time. And you're much more likely to make a change permanently if it's comfortable and not torturing you.
Really not surprising that people that eat less have lower bmi and higher metabolism than people that eat more with a slower metabolism but who are more active.
Isn’t this against the laws of physics? If you’re burning a ton of energy and not eating excessively, where are their bodies getting mass from to maintain weight?
Eating 1000 kcal more a day is pretty easy to do without noticing. Especially when you eat a lot on the day that you biked (cause "you earned it").
For example 2 liter bottle of coke is 800 kcal and 1 protein bar is about 250 kcal and you're already over the budget (assuming you also eat your "regular" food).
No because they were also eating a lot, the lower bound on this established by physics.
I've known a lot of roadies who sort-of-correctly believed they could eat as much as they could physically manage, as they were expending enough (3+ hour intense riding daily) that it was a chore to keep up. At least when they were 20-something and racing. Many struggle a bit when the a) get a bit older/metabolically slower and b) life gets in the way and they ride a lot less. All of a sudden a guy who was rail thin gains 30lb that "sticks".
Maybe this is not that much of a surprise either though? I wonder how much of this has to do with muscle. BMI infamously ignores muscle mass. An interesting followup would be whether people with low body fat % are sedentary. My guess is that they aren't.
Side note: maybe there is a disparate importance of "Calories In" vs "Calories Out" for people who are under/over weight. Maybe underweight people should focus on exercise more, and overweight people should focus on eating less?
A lot of guys severely underestimate their body fat %. Sub 10% generally isn't possible without heavy dieting unless you're still going through puberty; genetics has nothing to do with it.
WTF is going on with the hunger response being so messed up in a huge segment of the population?
Some people, including the Chinese-resident subjects of this study, have hunger responses that are not susceptible to the temptations of our food system.
I visited China and they seemed to have plenty of access to high-calorie, highly-rewarding food. What's special about the temptations of our food system?
If literally a majority of people in wealthy nations are what we define as overweight, and we keep finding new ways that is at least somewhat out of our control or difficult to perfectly control, why do we keep framing it as solely a matter of individual discipline or virtue? I have my own guesses about why of course, but pretty much all of the possibilities are unsettling.
It's like arguing that pneumonia can be cured through "healthy living" even after you've established the mechanism and effectiveness of penicillin.
We live in a society where there's always lots of food available for most people in developed countries (who are mainly the people who are overweight), so it makes sense that you will instinctively eat more than you need to.
Per the doctor, I was obese. My wife was obese because breasts. BMI is bullshit imo, it has some general value but creates a lot of distress for people, especially women.
If you are standing in front of your doctor and he or she is telling you that you are obese because of your BMI score and not actually measuring you (like with calipers), I’d probably look for a new doctor.
He was sweating after eating mounds of food.
And he had ripped abs.
I would often go entire days without eating. My family says as a kid or teen I would always cover my food with a napkin to hide what I had not eaten. Even as an adult I would rarely eat a fast food combo there would be half the burger and fries left over. I ate what I need even pop and chips but I ate a bit and when I wasn't hungry I stopped.
In my mid 40s I felt lethargic bad and my face was puffy. Stranger still I was gaining weight and eating more than I ever did. I'd eat when I wasn't hungry which was a bizarre feeling. At the worst I was 190lbs the heaviest in my life. I was not a coffee or tea drinker but I got into energy drinks they made me feel normal.
I went to the doctor and found out it was my thyroid I had hypothyroidism (under active). My Dad had it and now I did rare for men hypothyroidism more common in middle-aged women. My first synthroid pill felt like I'd drank ten energy drinks my skin was warm I felt clear of thought. But now it's stabilized and I think I'm on the downward slide again.
And their results, crush anything before them.
Once the price point of these medications come down, you're going to see a massive movement towards these solutions for long term weight loss.
It's clear that motivation, accountability, peer pressure simply aren't enough for long term success in keeping weight off.
By long term success, I mean decades of keeping the weight off.
The abysmal dieting numbers prove this.
The Neuroscience of Obesity | Peter Attia, M.D. & Stephan Guyenet, Ph.D.
We saw it with generic Viagra and Hims and Roman.
Calibrate is the early mover in GLP-1 medications coupled with nutritional coaching, but there's a ton of room for competitors.
There's zero transparency to the medication approval process.
If you ask a question, you will 1) receive an email 3-5 days later and 2) told that they generally don't provide status updates on medication.
No transparency to the medication approval process, even though obtaining access to a GLP-1 medications for their patients, is a pillar of their business.
Not even a simple "waiting to hear from insurance" on their dashboard.
Super long delays and a snarky support staff to get basic medical questions answered.
Here's their site. https://www.joincalibrate.com/
There's room for competitors.
In China, that's like 1 in 10 people. In the USA it's closer to 1 in 50. I wonder what kind of genetics and behavior you have to have to be underweight in the USA.
I also suspect (although I'm not an expert) the reason some people find it easier to lose weight while doing OMAD or keto isn't just because they're eating less, but because they're far more insulin sensitive and two of the best ways to increase insulin sensitivity is to fast or to eat less carbs.
Another reason I believe this to be the case is because as I've aged I've noticed my friends are holding more weight despite little change their diets or physical activity. I'm sure some of this is related to a slowdown in their resting metabolic rate, but I also suspect it's got something to do with the fact that as people age they become less insulin sensitive on average -- especially if they don't eat well or eat too often. This is probably why as a kid you can eat a tub of icecream without putting on any weight, but as adult you would. It's not just that kids have higher metabolisms, but that they're more insulin sensitive and less likely to be diabetic or pre-diabetic.
A question to ask here is why are people with low BMI's are less hungry? Could that be because they're metabolic healthier and their bodies are therefore better able to enter ketosis during periods without food? From personal experience with fasting and low carb diets I've experienced how significant it is when the body adjusts to burning fat as a primary fuel source. Although, you still feel hungry you don't feel like you need food. Similarly, you know when someone isn't metabolically adapted when they go too long without food because they become irritable and physically feel week.
Although our physiology is adaptable and we don't see daily or weekly wild weight swings with a few hundred calories up or down from maintenance, over weeks and months, 4-800 kcals of average daily surplus have very noticeable effects.
And those are differences that can be had by working 2 days from office instead of 5 and getting into the habit of eating a cookie in the morning, while previously we just grabbed a black coffee and that was it.
It is very easy to get into the "plus calories" territory. At the start of the pandemic, after a few weeks of working from home, many of my colleagues were 5-8 pounds heavier than they were before. And those pounds were not of muscle tissue.
But a lot of the doctors that are well known in the keto world (and yes, be very careful and try to verify anything you hear when it comes from someone who has "specialized" in something like keto) is that it has a ton to do with the insulin sensitivity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubly_labeled_water#Mechanism...
It's like plugging yourself into a power meter, except for cellular respiration
There's certainly some truth to "running hotter" as well, at least in some of those subjects, but I'll bet that many of them are habitually eating a less energy-dense diet than heavier people, rather than feeling less hungry for any more innate reason. Dietary energy density has been investigated in lots of experimental and observational studies and found to do an overall very good job of predicting current BMI, long-term weight loss, and in metabolic ward experiments, ad libitum caloric intake.
They are not that effective. the weight loss is often not enough or the weight returns. Gastric bypass, which is a major operation, will seldom make a very obese person thin and the weight tends to slowly return.
As summarized by Wikipedia, "median life-expectancy was 9.3 years longer for obese adults with diabetes who received bariatric surgery as compared to routine (non-surgical) care, whereas the life expectancy gain was 5.1 years longer for obese adults without diabetes", citing this meta-analysis: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33965067/
source: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/alcohol-abuse-linked-to-...
That is interesting ja. "generally(red-hearing word when speaking about science)" men I see don't get as cold as females in 'general' (PC/Wokeness be dammed - we talking about proper bro-science here) even though it's not unusual for females to carry more fat (waiting for internet gods to smite me), which is associated with with better heat isolation.
With that in mind, I've noticed I am unusually immune to cold, like my fellow country folks will usually ask me if I know its winter (or some smart comment like that) cause I will be in shorts + t-shirts + sandals most of winter (South African Winters on average about (-2 To 8 Celsius)
For anyone noticing this pattern of fashion (short+ sandals) yes I"m a white-male-Afrikaans-South-African. In winter when it's really really cold (Ragnarok levels) we will consider wearing socks with said sandals :)
PS. As a interesting side note. I did do a 23andMe test and nothing out of the ordinary. Yes my ancestors are from Europe 91.2% I'm French-German decent.
What I mean is, the fact that you have muscle mass and stop lifting is not what's going to lead to "a quick onset of obesity." What leads to weight gain is still eating like you're lifting when you're not.
If you adjust your caloric intake to account for your new level of caloric expenditure, you will not gain weight, although you will likely see unfavorable body composition changes.
Yeah, that's what I meant. So it is not nonsense.
Gaining a lot of muscle and putting a lot of effort into gaining the muscle (bulking + workout) is where the troubles maybe appear.
Also, the metabolism of a 20yo is a completely different story frok the metabolism of a 40yo.
So to sum up: working out and staying in shape == good. Don't worry about gaining muscle. That's just nonsense
People that lift often eat more. But mostly protein, and stimulating muscle every day makes sure it will get developed and consume more calories to maintain itself.
If you stop lifting altogether, not only muscle mass stops growing but also starts to shrink. If you eat the same, you will gain weight faster and with less food than before.
So the genetics of all of this will be interesting. I have managed to avoid my family curse by eating pretty much only fish and game meat, like a Sami. And I do not eat much. It was the only diet that would raise my HDL.
Our traditional diets changes our genetics, so who you are will determine what is healthy for you.
I agree with the statin. They tried to force them on me. I took a look at my genetics, changes my diet accordingly, and LDL and HDL reversed in three weeks and I have the blood work to prove it.
That's my point - traditional for the individual based on their ancestry.
It’s hard to get fat from one bad meal a day. What typically gets people is eating their daily needs via meals and then having high calorie snacks on top of that.
Then I noticed, that despite looking like a large meal, the calories weren't that high.
Dunno where it was all going. I wasn't really getting much bigger or taller for most of that span.
What I tell people is that my powerful brain needs a lot of calories.
The hunger thing rings true, though. I often just forget to eat and end up eating one meal a day or maybe a meal and a snack. Then again, on other days I might snack through the whole day. It seems to balance out though; after a day of frequent eating usually come a couple of those totally-forgetting-to-eat days.
Also you can get used to feel hunger, I think most of the people in developed countries eat so much and so often they don't even experience feeling of hunger.
Plus if you get used to smaller portions it's also easier to fill your shrunk stomach with smaller portions, it's about what your body is used to, it's all about self control.
When I started to travel around Asia I weighted 88kg (my max), after year of traveling, lot of walking/hiking when I found new job in China I had 68kg when I liked like skeleton from concentration camp, now I am on my optimal weight exactly in middle between.
Anecdote vs anecdote, my wife is always cold, but she's the naturally-thin-never-exercises one, whereas I am the ever-sweaty always-hot one that exercises regularly, and I'm usually overweight.
Or, for example, patients with fever have an objectively elevated temperature by definition, and usually report chills (and ask for extra blankets).
I also almost always wake up covered in sweat and have to change cloths. So not all roses.
Graph your weight. After 6 weeks of HIIT, you'll see weight really shed because you're not burning calories during exercise but 24/7, and because of that metabolic shift, the weight will continue to shed for months even if you stop HIIT.
* HIIT is High Intensity Interval Training. It's a technical term, doesn't mean "oooh, that was intense". It means exercise at level that forces your body into using different metabolic mechanisms to fuel your effort. Initially it will probably make you feel ill. If you aren't used to it, and are doing it right, you will probably feel nauseous after the effort.
Your aim is expending energy about 4 minutes above your VO2Max, doing anaerobic exercise.
In a 4 - 8 minute routine called Tabata intervals** you can do:
- 2 minute warmup to hit your second highest heart rate band (probably 125 - 135), then
- 4 one minute intervals at max heart rate, generally 30 - 45 seconds "on" and 15 - 30 seconds recovery, four times in a row, followed by
- 2 minutes cooldown.
You can probably not hit these heart rates on foot or on normal exercise machines, you probably need a climber, rower, or elliptical (in that order of 'kicks your ass').
** For iOS, try the app "Seconds Pro" which offers brilliant timer routines for loops within loops.
EDIT TO ADD ANECDATA GRAPH:
Here is my personal graph in 2015 and 2016 when I tried this in my mid-40s to get rid of the 30 lbs gain that happened after I hit 40 with a corresponding metabolic slowdown:
https://i.imgur.com/pvbvoMy.jpg
I bought a Nokia scale about a month into HIIT in late spring, and stopped HIIT a couple weeks later.
After stopping, dropped 10 lbs from early summer through the fall. Over winter, began to gain.
Did HIIT again in spring of 2016 for six more weeks.
Stopped when weight started shedding, dropped another 10 lbs.
Finally, did one last cycle in 2017, dropped another 10 lbs.
Overall graph from 2015 to 2021 (stopped bothering with the scale because was steady state):
https://i.imgur.com/U6U7HrH.jpg
Haven't done HIIT since 2017, no purposeful exercise except for a few weeks of swimming in 2018. The three rounds of HIIT seem to have adjusted me back to my high school weight/metabolism balance.
WARNING: These heart rate numbers are examples, see your doctor. Anerobic exercise and heart rate in your max heart rate band are potentially dangerous.
There was a 5km fun run in town that I figured I'd use as motivation. I did a slightly modified HIIT routine: walking warm up to the football field a few blocks away from my house, 8x flat out sprints from end to end with 15-30s recovery, and then cool down by walking back home.
I went from probably 15 months of completely sedentary life to running a 23min 5km race in about 6 weeks. I ended up finishing somewhere around 15th in the race, and every person who did better than me was listed as "M (18-23)"... and I don't even pretend that I can compete with testosterone-soaked young men :D
Absolutely correct. After HIIT, brisk walking blocks of Manhattan wouldn't make me sweat even if it had before.
Athletes who train for the mile have to have intervals as the majority of their regiment. This is by far more effective then running long distances for increasing vo2 max.
Is there actual evidence that this is generally effective?
That said, I do hit for the cardio benefits of improving myself instead of thinking it's a weight loss miracle.
Almost always I've found the key to weight loss is eat less, nothing to do with working out (so long as you do actually work out a bit).
https://www.elevaterope.com/tabata-intervals/
When I originally came across Tabata in mid 2000s, nobody said it worked for BMI adjustment. The research was around whether you had to exercise for hours to build endurance. It was reasonably conclusive you could build endurance using this mechanism. The contemporary research suggested the endurance came from different metabolic processes becoming accessible, and that Tabata style HIIT kicked that in.
That extra donut or candy bar you had? That's an hour or so on a treadmill.
The good news is that almost all diets work, find one you can stick to and stick to it. You should see results. It's not a fast process though. It didn't take a week or a month to put on that weight, it's not going to take a week or a month to get rid of it.
Me personally, the weight watchers tier with the weekly call with a coach was immensely helpful for me, but there's all kinds of other diets you can try.
Cutting out something specific without replacing it can work wonders. For instance, cut out sugar water (soda) and do not replace it with anything. You don't need to count calories, you will take in fewer of them, and you will lose weight.
> "it's really hard to burn more than you eat"
Yes, flip side is "or burn more" which, 100% agree, is incredibly difficult. As I noted, most people don't have the will to make themselves feel sick from anaerobic effort.
* +40% - weight loss from burning more calories
* -20% - weight gain from eating more due to doing more sport
* +40% - less snacking from being away from food sources for more hours
* +20% - being more conscious of fitness and weight and being more disciplined about food
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-013-0039-8
High levels of serotonin will make most people nauseous.
Regarding the gut, should probably take a peek at FUT2 genetics:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352345X2...
Winter/sprain made her seditary again then her body re-equilibriums right back in about 3 months.
I also think BMI is not a good measurement, not just because it says I'm morbidly obese, but also because it skews in favor of those with smaller frames for their height.
(I'm sure there are parallels to things in the software world - SQL comes quickly to mind - but that's a bit OT so I'll resist the temptation to explore that idea further.)
BSA (DuBois method, usually) is more common (and considered a better measurement) outside of the states and is more accurate for folks outside of the "average" range. BMI is probably so popular because of how simple the formula is, compared to something like BSA
(1) “We all have two lives, the second life begins when we realize we only have one.”
― Confucius
If you're an engineer, you should be smart enough to notice when you're making such a gross oversimplification
100 HN brownie points
Using this study for general weight loss advice doesn't make sense because they are looking at outliers.
I found that really funny... did anyone really expected thin people do not eat less?
This seems to directly contradict the title.
EDIT: What food they are eating and how satiating that food may be is irrelevant. They did not measure the participants feelings of satiation or satiety. The title can't claim that the lower BMI people feel less hungry if you don't measure how hungry they feel.
> The participants were monitored for two weeks. Their food intake was measured with an isotope-based technique called the doubly-labeled water method, which assesses energy expenditure based on the difference between the turnover rates of hydrogen and oxygen in body water as a function of carbon dioxide production. Their physical activity was measured using an accelerometry-based motion detector.
Also regarding the specific food choices:
> The team is now expanding its research, including studies that include these measures. They also plan to look at genetic differences between normal weight and healthy underweight individuals. Preliminary analysis suggests single nucleotide polymorphisms in certain genes that might play a role.
title: "People with low BMI aren't more active, *they are just less hungry*, 'run hotter'"
quotation: "they didn't measure what the participants were actually eating or *their feelings of satiation or satiety*"
The title is factually untrue. You can't claim that people with lower BMI "are just less hungry" if you don't measure how hungry they feel.
I think if they had substituted “eat less” for “are less hungry” the title would be fair.
I think the same range is pretty common for people with certain other medications.
The whole dieting discussion, all nutrition advice, kcal in/out goes out the window when your metabolism is a black box.
Afaik there still isn't any study showing that any dieting works long term? So if we want to fight an obesity epidemic more needs to be done than to shift blame to affected individuals.
Certain mental disorders (depression and anxiety) also highly correlate with obesity and/or underweight.
A common treatment for ADHD (stimulants) often gets folks to a healthy weight that previously struggled on one side or the other.
It’s a complex problem, with a lot of ever changing variables we have little insight into.
Anecdotally, I know of several boomers that had serious thyroid issues likely tied to exposure to the Santa Susana Field Lab and Nevada nuclear testing. They were consuming milk and other products from areas contaminated by them at the right times.
All the various plastics we’ve all been exposed to and other various chemicals are also likely doing something too.
But also, the whole country has gotten dramatically more sedentary and media consumption focused, and the media keeps getting more and more anxiety inducing and alienating. As a country, we all need to ‘get out and touch some grass’ more too.
Is this based on a study or something, or is it more of a reaction to all the news stories about that lately? (news peddles fear without anything to back it up typically)