A lack of sleep means a lack of energy. You're body compensates by getting food energy.
Too much stigma around what should just be understood as a biological mechanism.
I saw this ironically during military basic training. Lots of exercise, but very little sleep. The body compensates by keeping blood sugar levels high. I was one of the many that actually gained weight during basic training. The eating routine of three solid meals eaten very quickly also was not healthy.
(for those asking what happened after 3.5 days, I basically started getting hysterical - literally just laughing at nothing - and when I was finally able to get to a bed, it took about 2 hours of staring at the ceiling before my body finally decided I was no longer under stress, and allowed me to fall asleep).
Being tired may cause you to eat more but being tired isn't making you gain weight, it's the overeating that is.
it's not something I have ever been made aware of, and I don't understand how it could be the case.
I don't have anything specific to link - it's just my own personal experience and what the doctor said.
In my own case, I had to eat much more than I theoretically should because my body wasn't able to process the food as well as it should (less than 50% of usual efficiency). And yet I was fat - not obese, but definitely not thin. The body redirected some of my food to storage even though I didn't have enough energy (glucose etc) as measured by blood screening. And it didn't use the reserves properly when I stopped eating.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7898726/
> Effects of moderate sleep restriction during 8-week calorie restriction on lipoprotein particles and glucose metabolism
Because the conclusion starts with,
> In this study, 8 weeks of calorie restriction with and without sleep restriction of less than 90 minutes per day on 5 days with 2 days of ad libitum sleep per week, resulted in similar degrees of weight loss
Let me be clear that sleep deprivation doesn’t seem to be good for your circulating lipoprotien levels or insulin sensitivity based on that study, but they didn’t gain weight.
Reducing getting fat to thermodynamics is like reducing computing to adding numbers. While that may be the basic building block, only a fool thinks that merely by comprehension of the add operator, one is also able to debug hugely complicated soft- and hardware stacks.
The root cause of weight gain is either overeating or lack of sufficient exertion in almost every case. Sleep apnea may absolutely cause someone to overeat in part because of those dozens of biological feedback loops you mention. But that doesn't mean that sleep apnea makes people gain weight. It's still too much food at the end of the day.
It's all four fundamental physical forces actually, if you want to go that route. Which isn't helpful.
I gather that you are unaware of how sleep apnea causes poor sleep, which in turn causes insulin resistance, which in turn causes an elevated production of insulin, which in turn forces glucose into your adipose tissue, which in turn makes the rest of your tissues starved for energy, which in turn causes you to be hungrier, overeat and gain weight.
This is an oversimplification, of course, as there are hormones other than insulin and cortisol involved in the complex process of insulin resistance, but it is at least a starting point that goes beyond the useless truism that "people gain weight because they overeat". Of course they do, but the mechanisms why they are hungrier than they need to be are crucial if you want to address the problem, because in the long run every human being with free access to food will eat precisely until they are no longer hungry, whether or not they are metabolically healthy or not.
There definitely is the issue of how to reliably maintain a caloric deficit when your body is screaming at you to eat more, but the underlying mechanism is much simpler.
At the most basic levels, food choice doesn’t even really matter (specifically for weight loss, not general health), but choosing satiating foods with low calories is going to help with implementation. Eating 2,000 calories of oranges (45) is going to be a lot harder than 2,000 calories of fast food hamburgers (2).
> Being hungry does not cause you to eat
Yes, it does. That's why people eat: to alleviate hunger. You may will power your way to a caloric deficit for some months, maybe a couple of years, but eventually hunger will win and you will eat until satiety.
Metabolically healthy people aren't slim by being hungry all the time. They eat to satiety, and they are lucky enough that their satiety signalling is still working well enough. If you make them chronically hyperinsulinemic, they will be hungrier and they will gain weight -- it happens in humans and in animal models when allowed to eat ad libitum.
> At the most basic levels, food choice doesn’t even really matter (specifically for weight loss, not general health), but choosing satiating foods with low calories is going to help with implementation
As long as you are hyperinsulinemic, you will store a portion of the energy you consume in your adipose tissue, because that is one of the major effects of insulin in the body. The remaining energy left in you will not be sufficient to supply the energy needs of your body, and as a result you will be cold, tired and hungry.*
If this is the premise of your argument, it is flawed.
You have no idea if “eventually” happens to everyone. You’re making a wildly strange assumption.
Have you tried? Are you willing to try? How many people do you know that intentionally remain hungry every day for more than a couple of years, while otherwise having free access to food?
Any weight loss advice that does not adequately address hunger and satiety is naive to the point of ridicule. And any person who advises others to address their weight by telling them to be hungry in perpetuity hasn't given much thought to what they are asking for.
> Yes, it does.
Nearly 1:10 people in the world are chronically hungry. Being hungry has no impact on their ability to eat. Likewise, those with access to food eat when not hungry and (believe it or not) may not eat when hungry.
I really think you’re missing the point, though. We have a host of signals in our body that can misfire due to various conditions and people cope with them. Hunger is no different and many of us have spent months ignoring it to our own benefit (and some to their own peril).
Caloric intake in excess of expense causes weight gain. What factors lead to that excess do not.
There are certainly those with a variety of issues that make caloric deficit difficult. Fortunately, that’s not most people.
That meant measuring calories until I could generally estimate what I was taking in each day. 1000-1500 calories a day sucks at first, but seeing the scale drop is motivating. I dropped 30lbs in about 6 months.
You can’t gain weight if you are taking in less calories than you expend. That’s pretty simple. Not eating that cheesecake, on the other hand, not so easy.
The problem with that is you can reach a point were trying to reduce calories further will only further sabotage your metabolism and makes you feel like shit. Which is why treating the symptom repeatedly fails to work long term.
I’m a 5’11” male who gained weight up to ~220 pounds on ~1800 calories eating a very consistent meal rotation. I now maintain ~190 pounds at ~2100 calories. My problem was likely a combination of my food acting as a chemical signal to gain weight (high in branch chain amino acids, polyunsaturated fats from fatty pork and chicken), work stress, bad sleep, and possibly even chronically elevated blood sugar or thyroid effects from essentially what was an almost carnivore one meal a day sort of diet. My body temperature was hitting lows of 96.3 degrees F. It’s now roughly two degrees higher, which seems small, but feels so much better.
If someone is eating healthy foods and making a genuine effort to get good exercise, then we can talk about other factors. But too many people use “this is so complex” to avoid the very basics of healthy living.
I'm on mobile and don't have time to link, but a quick google search should give medical studies on this.
The "energy" thing is a simplification, but as a description of how this feels, it is apt in my view.
This is not about thermodynamics.
Potato pot-ah-to.
Bringing up thermodynamics as a generalization for biological systems is pseudo-intellectual. We aren't all equal machines that take in a fuel stock and output work. How do you account for differences in peoples' resting metabolic rates? How do you account for the difference in available energy in the foods you chose to eat, and in the differences in peoples' biological processes that extract that energy? Stress is a common hormonal modifier that impacts how the body stores fat; no where near a "rare" condition that many people experience nowadays, and yeah caused by things like sleep apnea. You betray your own argument anyway by adding an the "hormonal condition" exception (I don't see any exceptions referenced in the laws of thermodynamics, lol).
Biology has more dimensions than you are choosing to look at, and using thermodynamics as a "gotcha" when it comes to others' bodies reveals your lack of understanding and intuition.
There is no need to get into the weeds of various details of how that breaks down; the main problem is that calories are way too cheap in the modern day and age, and people's habits and instincts developed in far different eras lead to easily ingesting more than is expended. Yes the OP is not wrong, but it's not a very useful argument unless we're going to roll back the modern civilization.
It's entirely possible to eat less food and have your body decide that food is more scarce and choose to strip more calories from your food than it was when you were eating more.
Thermodynamics is an asinine thing to bring up in a system that can reconfigure its efficiency on the fly to optimize for different environments.
I don't think many people disagree with "If you starve yourself enough your body will eventually start burning fat", they disagree that it's as simple as "anyone gaining weight is necessarily doing it to themselves by eating more than other people".
And starving yourself isn't easy. It's one of the top like five things your body is designed not to let you do. So how on earth is it helpful when people are talking about factors that can influence your appetite and can literally influence the number of calories your body chooses to extract from the exact same food to say "just eat less lol"?
I might add that overwhelming research suggests that social pressure on people's weight causes people to gain weight. So even if you were right, bringing it up would be counterproductive.
That's part of the "calories out" side of the equation, that few people put in the effort to find (if they even know how). And I've found online estimators aren't very useful here, you need to find it for yourself - they say mine is around 1600 when it's actually more like 2200.
Ignoring half of CICO just because people only like talking about CI doesn't make it false.
No one said not eating is easy, especially when there's a lot of food around! I struggle with it. The laws of physics are not kind.
What I will say though, is if I exercise moderate amounts, it makes appetite control easier, at least for me. YMMV. I believe this is because insulin is more level throughout the day.
You could do a little experiment: set up an alarm to wake you up 15-30 times every hour while you try to sleep. That is what moderate sleep apnea does to you. Try this for, say, a year. See what happens to your overall health and your weight in particular. Don't forget to "eat less or move more".
I am one of those that stayed skinny as a rake throughout my childhood and mid-adulthood (in my mid-40s I'm starting to become more normal sized). I wasn't particularly active, and I ate voraciously -- third or fourth helpings of pasta bowls. But the food never stuck to my ribs. (And it wasn't a worm or anything -- the whole side of my mother's family is the same, while my dad's side is the opposite.)
No one should look at my body and say "clearly he is exercising more than he is eating" because it wouldn't have been true at all, and yet that's what the simplistic energy-in and energy-out conclusion would say.
If calories-in/calories-out didn't work, then it would be impossible to starve to death.
Where people get confused is that the number of calories changes as your metabolism speeds up or slows down.
If you are ingesting fewer calories than your body requires, you will lose some combination of fat and muscle. There is no possible way for this to be false.
Further, you could be burning more calories without doing more exercise or otherwise doing anything "useful" with the energy -- i.e. having a higher basal metabolic rate. These calories can be burned doing all sorts of things that the person has no control over: you could have a higher core body temperature, you could be spending more energy on cellular repair and other cellular processes, you could be synthesizing more hormones, you could be spending more energy metabolizing foods, etc etc.
These latter causes are obviously on the "energy out" side of the equation, but they do not relate to things under our control. Further, they can change with age, stress, and (relevant to TFA) sleep.
So a body that has been coasting by eating 2200 calories per day and never gaining a pound could suddenly change and start putting on weight, even though the person's diet and activities haven't changed.
The point is that two people could eat the exact same calories, and do the exact same exercise, and one of them go up in weight and the other go down. The "calories in vs calories out" idea usually simplistically makes people think this couldn't be true, because "calories out" is simplistically taken as "exercise."
The reason I shared my story is that so many people just quote "calories in vs calories out" as if both sides of the equation were perfectly under control, and those people are also often like me: they find it easy to keep the pounds off (because of a high metabolic rate) and so they look down on people who have trouble shedding weight and figure that those people could live just like them. But those heavier people could well be eating less and doing more exercise than them.
Is the flip-side really debated that much tho? I feel like when people talk about CICO they're primarily talking about reducing CI to lower than your CO. No?
The complexity in CICO of course is measuring your CO. Ie you could estimate your CO, reduce your CI to what you believe your CO is - and still not lose weight. But does that undermine CICO? Because as the other commenters mentioned, it's "impossible" for you to burn more than you take in without losing mass, so our issue in this example is incorrectly asserting the output (assuming of course we're not also underestimating the input).
Note my questions here are generally questions. I am not an expert here, so please correct me if i'm wrong.
> The reason I shared my story is that so many people just quote "calories in vs calories out" as if both sides of the equation were perfectly under control, and those people are also often like me: they find it easy to keep the pounds off (because of a high metabolic rate) and so they look down on people who have trouble shedding weight and figure that those people could live just like them. But those heavier people could well be eating less and doing more exercise than them.
Fwiw, i don't dispute that some people have the wrong ideas with CICO. Perhaps frequently even. But i thought it still stood as a foundational truth nonetheless; that you have to "simply" burn more than you take in. If you gain weight (ignoring water weight for simplicity), then you have ate more then you burned, always.
My takeaway with CICO is that the hardest question seems to be correctly figuring out how much you're burning. Which i feel like usually, especially for overweight people, it's much less than they think. You can't outrun a bad diet, as they say. Rarely do people actually want to exercise enough to truly compensate for the thing they want to eat. Hence why i like CICO, as to me it signals the only effective action is in restricting your CI, since increasing CO is so difficult.
If you have a 500cal deficit per day, you lose a pound of weight (fat) per week. It’s literally that simple.
There’s some auto regulation of caloric burn rate, but it’s not some impossible problem to solve.
I've manipulated my body weight a few times and the real world is vastly different from a simple model of CI/CO.
Also, if you’re trying to aim to a specific deficit, you should be calorie counting your food. If you got fatty dressing, you should be counting that. Even estimating is relatively easy once you do it for awhile. And if you don’t get it quite right, being a little off shouldn’t impact your overall average too much. It keeps you honest, which I think is by and large the main reason people don’t think they can lose weight: dishonest assessments of food consumption.
Week to week weight has extra fluctuations that make it difficult to tell what's going on, but after around 6 months of data it stabilizes, and has been consistent for any 6-month period over the last year and a half: I burn around 2200 - 2300 calories per day on average (way higher than the online estimator tools think I burn, 1600 - 1700).
Knowing this I've also been reliably able to control my weight up or down at the rate I want as long as I'm looking at it for over a month span - because as above, week to week there's too much fluctuation (fullness of stomach and bowels mostly).
A counter example to disprove this would be somebody gaining more weight in fat than the weight of fat needed to store energy from consumed food. Of course, this would have been broken pretty fundamental laws of nature and would have caused some kind of revolution in physics.
The idea that everyone is fat because we’re somehow more sinful (gluttonous, slothful) than in the past has repeatedly failed to resolve any problem except for the need for smug people to pat themselves on the back for using thermodynamics in a sentence.
That said, there is the point that calories ingested doesn't necessarily equal calories absorbed, and sleep apnea could indeed affect that. But if you're relying on that thin margin for the difference between staying at a healthy weight or not, that's a fragile state of affairs, and you could fix your diet more to be more comfortably on the right side of it.
(My own, unscientific, hypothesis: far too many people are indeed unknowingly relying on that. I think a ton of people cram in 3k calories a day while absorbing 2k because there's just too much mass for the body to process, and then when they do cut ingestion to 2k, that doesn't change absorption and that's why they don't lose weight. (Numbers here are approximate.) It's actually pretty amazing how little food the human body actually needs and how little mass 1500 calories is.)
Or how much, depending on what you’re eating. It would be physically impossible for me to eat 1500 calories of lettuce in a day (10kg worth) but it definitely aids in “feeling full” when added to a meal.
In that case you didn't change how much you ate or how many calories passed your lips, but you did change your CI by way of changing your sleep.
Is this a real example or a contrived edge case from a software dev? No clue. I'll let better minds decide that hah.