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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

But on the other hand, adding either muscle or fat burns more energy period, and we watch the average person's weight gain somewhere between 10 and 20 pounds over the first half of adulthood.

So we could easily expect the average person's metabolism to increase as well, simply to support the extra body mass regardless of composition.

Balancing out the two effects can only really be determined through careful statistics, and is going to be extremely variable per-person.

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There's good evidence that metabolic rate does vary, but not significantly.

https://examine.com/articles/does-metabolism-vary-between-tw...

The article states the difference is small, but also notes “ The majority of the population exists in a range of 200-300kcal from each other”.

All things being even 200kcal difference per day is about 20lbs per year attributed purely to metabolic difference. Now you can say to just eat 200kcal less per day, but those little differences on a daily basis add up.

Even better if you burn 200 more per day without feeling more hungry than someone who burns less than you

totally valid point. I would expect most people to be surprised that the variance is typically smaller than a spoonful of peanut butter, but the nature of gaining or losing weight is such that even a spoonful of peanut butter over years could be the difference between many pounds of body mass.

> All things being even 200kcal difference per day is about 20lbs per year attributed purely to metabolic difference.

As you gain weight, you burn more energy, even just being idle, so 200kcal doesn't means 20lbs per year (obviously so, as otherwise you'd gain 600lbs in 30 years).

An extra 200kcals per day implies gaining extra weight until the extra energy you burn cancels it out, and then stabilizing there. IIRC the rule of thumb is ~25kcal/day/kg so you'd just naturally balance out to being 8kg heavier than the baseline.

> As you gain weight, you burn more energy, even just being idle

Only if you gain mostly muscle. Which I'd bet most people at a calorie surplus aren't, and the extra fat is burning very little calories.

You might become more sedentary as you gain more weight.

Metabolic differences are why for a person of my height a weight of 68kg is normal but a weight of 86kg is also normal. Metabolic differences alone don't explain why many people of my height weigh 100kg and more.

200-300kcal seems like an awful lot. Would the higher end of that scale, 300, apply primarily to larger men who burn alot more calories?

In the case of two small women who burnt <=2100 a day, a 300kcal difference would be the difference between one of them fasting for an entire day every single week and the other not.

That seems like a massive difference not "small".

If they eat the same amount.

It def. adds up. To get an idea, consider cancer cachexia , which is involuntary weight loss due to cancer. Weight loss in the setting of cancer is not just due to appetite loss from side effects of treatment and sickness, but also from metabolic changes. It's such weight loss that brings the cancer to the attention of the doctor, and can be quite dramatic despite the patient not changing his or her appetite or other routine or feeling sick at all. How much of an energy deficit is this? it's believed that cachexia only causes a deficit of only 200 calories/day, but this enough to produce dramatic weight loss.

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