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?
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".
So really it's that they weren't losing weight because they were eating too much... exactly like most people in modern western society. And really the moderate amount of cycling was irrelevant.
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).
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.
I'm not bragging, there are serious downsides, but it's absolutely possible to sit at 10% year-round, just not while maintaining any serious level of elevated muscle mass.
WTF is going on with the hunger response being so messed up in a huge segment of the population?
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.
I've even heard the "thinness is a sign of godliness" folks get really angry at the suggestion of using GLP-1 agonists, because it's "lazy" and "cheating."
We have existence proofs that diet-only interventions work for some people. I literally know people who have lost large amounts of weight and kept it off for years that way. Medications have risks and side effects, so should only be prescribed if behavior modification has failed.
What I did say is that we are increasingly learning that overeating is a very complex and life-threatening medical concern that often cannot be solved through dietary intervention. Even people who may die if they don't adhere to a diet frequently have difficulty adhering to one. Saying that there are "existence proofs" that diets sometimes they work is a terrible response.
My view is that we should treat diet as one possible medical treatment, and evaluate it apples-to-apples (in terms of efficacy and side effects) against more recent FDA-approved treatments. And now that we've seen how much impact those treatments can have -- and particularly how critical the GLP-1 mechanism is to the sustainability of weight-loss interventions -- we should work our asses off to find more and better treatments that treat overeating as a health condition rather than a question of mind-over-matter.
You seem extremely attached to your position, to the point where defending your position required you to declare that my relatives "were eating a bunch of other stuff when you weren't looking."
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.
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?
"The unparalleled rise of obesity in China: a call to action"
International Journal of Obesity volume 45, pages 921–922 (2021)
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.