Adipose tissue retains an epigenetic memory of obesity after weight loss
nature.com
nature.com
Visceral fat is literally enclosing the intestines, major blood vessels, organs, etc. of the abdomen.
Nevertheless, it is possible to surgically remove this sheet of fat that's covering your organs, it's called an omentectomy. But it's a big surgery, and done only in case of cancer, not for weight loss. That is, in humans: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29367725/
But maybe it can also be a useful and healthy weight loss strategy?
If I had to advise a patient on whether they should consider liposuction vs gastric bypass vs GLP1R agonists, I would tell them to not consider liposuction in that equation at all.
As with most cosmetic surgery, risks like these are downplayed by practitioners (willfully and otherwise) as well as by people in these social media circles.
This doesn't mean liposuction shouldn't ever be used, however. It can have good uses in reconstructive surgery, for example, where fat is sucked up to be used in reconstructing a different area. In this case, the potential reduction in morbidity and restoration of function to the patient, or increasing their autonomy, might make the risks associated with lipo worth it.
Googled for "Adipocyte apoptosis" and oh boy... It does happen, but I don't trust the AI summary. This looks like a deep rabbit hole.
I lost 100 lbs fasting over 1.5 years. I did gain some weight back after stopping, but not much. Strangely, where I saw fat return was not where most of it came off.
If you have the time, I would really appreciate it if you reached out to me. You can find my contact info on my profile page, there's also a link to an anonymous contact form, if you'd prefer that. Thank you!
"Tirzepatide promotes M1-type macrophage apoptosis and reduces inflammatory factor secretion by inhibiting ERK phosphorylation" [1]
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15675...
Once you’ve reached a level of physical strength it’s easier to return to that level in the future. This has been a topic of debate in the sports world because past anabolic steroid use could therefore carry benefits into the future long after the athlete has stopped using the steroid. Non-professional athletes shouldn’t get too excited about using steroids, though, because the damage steroids do to the body’s own hormone systems also has lasting effects unless you plan on doing TRT for the rest of your life, which has its own downsides.
For average people this does show the importance of getting at least some exercise when you’re young. It’s much easier to get a little bit fit when you’re young which then makes it easier to stay fit in the future. Never too late too start.
But the doctor was mentioning that none of the influencers influencing young people to try T and Steroids (which is rampant right now) are ever mentioning that you are on a ticking clock to infertility as soon as you start this stuff. Some people can regain their fertility but it might take years, and some people are going to be permanently infertile even staying on HRT.
Plenty of those "alpha male" guys on social media are shooting blanks.
I know that's different than permanent TRT but I feel like you couldn't get very far researching that stuff without understanding that you natural test production (and sperm production) would get "shut down" as soon as you started adding exogenous androgens.
It's not because they couldn't recover, it's because they don't want to or see the point.
There are two problems with framing it as an infertility problem:
1 - It reduces fertility but many users retain some fertility. The bigger problem for most is that natural testosterone production won't come back to the same level if they ever discontinue, so they're on it for life. Managing testosterone injections every week or multiple times per week for the rest of your life is doable but a pain, especially if you have to travel or you're not the best at keeping up with prescriptions. There are also ups and downs and side effects that come from artificial testosterone dosing. Many people are surprised to discover that after the first year or two they don't feel "great" any more and it's just back to where they started, but with a lifetime dependency now. Others get serious side effects like Gynecomastia (breast growth in men, possibly requiring surgery) or secondary hormonal alterations that negatively impact mood, cognition, or libido.
2 - Many young men in their 20s or even teens see infertility as a positive rather than a negative. It's very common for people of this age to think they've made up their mind for life, but they have yet to even have a serious relationship or even know any peers with kids. People who work in fertility fields are starting to see a lot of men who went into TRT or steroids when they were young because they thought the consequences would never be a problem for them.
> Plenty of those "alpha male" guys on social media are shooting blanks.
Honestly, they don't care. I skim the testosterone subreddits occasionally and many people brag and joke about how small their testicles are.
It's crazy to me to see this shift happening. TRT clinics that advertise on the radio, TikTok, and everywhere else will entice people to come in for "free tests" but the trick is that it doesn't matter what your numbers come back as, they'll always find a way to prescribe you TRT because it's easy recurring revenue for them with lifelong dependence attached.
Wouldn't surprise me at all if most of that was coping behavior.
An aggressive protocol of HCG and HMG (analogues for FSH and LH in the pituitary) reactivated the testes to get back to spermatogenesis and T production after about 5 years of complete dormancy. It took about 4 months of daily needles and well-timed marital conception-attempts. The son I fathered as a result is anecdotally very strong and a voracious eater. My urologist said it sounded like I knew everything I needed to do and was satisfied to let me self-treat.
Maybe beginner bodybuilders understand this. But I'd argue the average new steroid user is more likely the be un/mis-informed. The average person gets all their information from Instagram/Tiktok/Youtube/Reddit.
But my observation is a lot of people are jumping on gear for purely aesthetic reasons. They are ordering online from research chemical sites and they're almost always not working with a trainer/coach/doctor (vast majority of young people on gear are not doing it under any type of supervision, also means many skip basic necessities like regular bloodwork).
It's much more common for people to jump on gear, experience a negative effect, and then do research afterwards. Which is fine for substances that are relatively benign, but risky when you're messing with your hormones especially at a young age.
At least it is much less serious than people in the opposite situation, that think they want a child at 19 without understanding the implications.
Similar advantage is conveyed to athletes who had elevated (~male) testosterone levels in the past, even if they subsequently take blockers / go on HRT to ~female hormone levels.
Additionally, trans women on HRT typically have their T suppressed below standard cis women levels, and thus well below the levels of cis women athletes (the top levels in any sport by definition tending to be outliers in performance).
The male-pattern skeletal growth isn't necessarily a disadvantage. E.g., narrower hips and stronger bones is likely an advantage in running.
> If the net effect were actually an advantage, you'd expect the womens' sports which are allowing trans women to be dominated by them, but they really just aren't.
My understanding is the opposite. In fact, if it wasn't the case, there is basically no reason to have separate mens and womens fields.
It might or might not help, but if it were a net benefit then you'd expect trans women runners to perform more strongly than they actually do.
> My understanding is the opposite. In fact, if it wasn't the case, there is basically no reason to have separate mens and womens fields.
This sentence seems to presuppose that trans women are men. There are some womens' divisions which allow trans women (typically with stipulations requiring some duration of HRT), and they are not dominant there. To me, the sensible conclusion seems to be that trans women perform roughly on par with cis women, not that cis women perform roughly on par with cis men.
> There are some womens' divisions which allow trans women (typically with stipulations requiring some duration of HRT), and they are not dominant there.
I think there are maybe two things I'd poke at here. (1) Sports where transwomen enjoy greater advantage are more likely to have already excluded transwomen from womens' fields. And (2) the number of transwomen is tiny to begin with and AFAIK they have lower rates of participation in sports than ciswomen.
I think you can basically make a case for including or excluding transwomen in women's sports depending on whether you think inclusion or fairness is most important.
A pretty wide spread of sports have allowed trans women*, and they have not dominated. If trans women did have an outsized performance in women's sports, there'd be examples to point to. I don't think you can make an evidence-based case for fairness and inclusion being at odds, given there aren't any unfair examples of inclusion to point to.
Some of the most notable examples include weightlifting and swimming. In weightlifting, probably the sport I'd expect an unfair advantage to make itself most apparent, Laurel Hubbard got a DNF in the Olympics, and did merely pretty good in several other events. Or in swimming, another sport I'd expect body proportions to have a significant impact in, Lia Thomas, who was the center of a ton of controversy, also did merely fine.
I'm not sure there are sports where trans women would have a bigger advantage than weightlifting, if such an advantage existed. And the tiny number of trans women interested in sports means that erring on the side of inclusion (if it does turn out to be an error) would also have a tiny negative impact,
* - Pedantic side note, combining "transwomen" and "ciswomen" into single words implies that we're different base nouns. It's similar to how "chinamen" is not acceptable, but generally there's nothing wrong with "Chinese men". "Trans" and "cis" are just adjectives modifying "men" or "women".
On the contrary, Laurel Hubbard is a good example of how apparent this male physical advantage is when male athletes are allowed to compete in the female category.
Here's a chart showing ranked lifts for both men's and women's weightlifting in the World Masters Games, where Hubbard won a gold medal in the women's category in 2017: https:/i.ibb.co/WWf7CMQD/hubbard.jpg (the source of this graph is a developmental biologist who, amongst other things, studies sex differences in sport).
This shows that the set of lifts by female and male weightlifters are entirely distinct. Hubbard falls within the middle range of the male rankings and is a huge outlier compared to the female rankings.
For the Olympics, if Hubbard had been female, qualification for the competition would have been unprecedented. Hubbard was competing in the wake of an earlier elbow injury, had taken a years-long career break, and was considerably older than any female weightlifter ever to qualify for Olympic weightlifting: female weightlifters peak at around age 26 and Hubbard was 43 years old at the time.
Being male in the female category was sufficient to mitigate all the effects of older age, chronic injury, undertraining, and - compared to other males - lack of world class talent.
It's also worth noting that Hubbard came last at the Olympics due to being disqualified for improper technique, not because of being unable to physically manage the lifts.
If you're reading this and you're < 30 and physically weak (not overweight, but lacking muscle mass) I cannot stress enough what a year or two hitting the gym could do for your permanent strength and muscle mass.
I was ridiculously skinny and physically weak going into my 20s and I just assumed that was the way I was built. But I got into fitness in my early 20s and packed on quite a bit of muscle and it's genuinely shocking to me how much base-level muscle mass and strength I've retained now 15 years on.
I always felt one of the most demotivating things about working out was that all the effort I was putting into the gym would eventually go to waste when I stopped, but that's not true. Had I known this I'd probably have started working out much earlier and for much longer than I did.
Two years and I was bigger than anyone I knew unless they also trained hard.
They’ve known this for centuries. Quoting the great Socrates:
“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable."
The problem is that when you kill an adipocyte, it releases all of its triglycerides, which are then free to move around the blood stream. But when blood triglyceride levels are high and there isn't significant oxidation, other metabolic processes are triggered to start to store them. So you kill an adipocyte, release the triglycerides, which get reabsorbed into still living adipocytes, which now get engorged and then multiply again, replacing the fat cells that have been killed.
After learning quite a bit about these processes, I think these devices might actually be useful, not for losing fat, but by eliminating this sort of fat memory. In other words, they should be used after significant weight loss, because adipocytes are relatively empty and externally triggered apoptosis can kill the cells without releasing significant quantities of triglycerides which can be reabsorbed and trigger adipocyte mitosis. I think this would effectively reset that person to a state as if they had never been fat in the first place. Thoughts?
Why can't we just remove the triglycerids from the blood before they trigger adipogenesis? Basically we need a form of dialysis.
Isn't ketosis the state, in which the body switches to fat as the primary fuel?
The study and the discussion here however are focused on reducing the quantity of those adipocyte cells in the body, which aren't reduced through ketosis. I think ketosis causes more of a volumetric reduction of each adipocyte cell but I'm really not sure.
Like a balloon filling with air, do adipocyte cells expand in volume while storing lipids?
Bear in mind, dialysis does work, however it certainly does not work as well as we hope it should. Dialysis, in all of its different forms, takes a huge toll on the body, and dialysis itself significantly increases mortality; it is also an invasive intervention.
All that being said, we certainly should be doing more research on this.
It always did feel like it was easier to gain weight than lose it, especially fat weight and not muscle weight for me.
I was recently sent a video about fat adaptation (basically teaching your body to be better at burning fat) by a very fit friend, but I wonder how much of that is bro science and how much of it is grounded in reality. Maybe worth looking into more deeply if it can counteract or balance out this.
During adolescence, if you gain weight, you create new fat cells. During adulthood, the fat cells themselves just get larger. Arguably the best thing you can do is avoid obesity during childhood and adolescence at all costs.
While true, it's also important to note that the lifetime of a fat cell is around ten years. Maintaining a decent diet for around ten years (no mean feat!) should be sufficient to leave you bereft of the actual adipose cells.
I also wonder how this intersects with transgender stuff — there's a reason why HRT is referred to as "second puberty", as it resets and changes a lot of underlying biological mechanisms and produces a lot of interesting epigenetic effects (While it does boil down to "replacing the sex hormone", both estrogen and testosterone have major effects on the body's immune system, etc. — actually this is one of the reasons I suspect that there's such a high comorbidity of autoimmune diseases within transgender people pre-HRT — their immune system is all out of wack! Mine calmed down a lot after starting and a year in I no longer get seasonal allergies). There's a huge lack of data in this regard though because transgender bodies are generally not felt to be worth studying outside of "health risks", even though there's a huge amount of information we could glean about how everyone's* body functions from it. Personally, I wonder whether second-puberty "resets" what the body decides is the baseline for fat storage.
* — and for anyone in doubt, we have around 90 years of HRT now that shows it's essentially completely safe (outside of the mid-80s when the estrogen being given was synthetic and non-bio-identical, and outside of the health risks of various things for trans women changing to be roughly equivalent of cis women's health risks).
Obese people can remain obese eating 1000 calories a day. I recall one episode of My 600lb Life and the show's featured person that day was at 900 or 1200 calories a day and still didn't lose weight. Might have still been gaining.
It is a dynamic system. People tend to only consider the CI in CI/CO.
How is that possible? There is a lower bound on calories needed (on average across say six months) to maintain life. Adding to that the calories needed to maintain the weight, I don't see how an obese person could stay alive with "CO" significantly lower than 1200 kcal.
Metabolism is _significantly_ more complex than CI/CO, from experience.
CI/CO is a thing.
I.e. calories on the label vs what the body can actually access.
Like drinking smoothies (high availability) vs raw fruit (lower availability)
Dr. Greger (Nutrition focused) discusses some of this on calorie density and some referenced studies here if interested:
https://nutritionfacts.org/blog/how-to-lose-weight-eating-mo...
Proponents of naive thermodynamics model tend to assume that only "excessive" energy is stored into bodily fat, once all the other tissues have had their fair share.
That is not really true in insulin resistant people, whose storage may be excessive and leave the rest of the body unsatisfied and hungry, which drives them to eat more than a healthy person would.
To us, this looks like deliberate overeating, to them, it is a result of constant hunger caused by the fact that some part of the energy consumed is being immediately locked away in fat tissues by dysregulated metabolic processes.
Notably, it isn't easy to "correct" this situation by just eating less, because that will leave those people feeling really starved. Insulin sensitivity must be restored first, then the fat stores will give up their excess willingly and that person won't suffer.
To illustrate a single 37.5g snickers is slightly below 200kcal. I probably get that number of calories just from the milk in my coffee in an average day.
- a physics-breaking thermodynamic anomaly
- a food addicted person is lying about their consumption
200 kcal a day.. yeah sure. A human body needs more than that just to breathe and pump blood. Even comatose a skinny person needs 5 times as much.
Overweight people have a significantly higher metabolic base rate. Just breathing can easily be 1000kcal a day if your lungs have to move 30 kilos of upper body fat 10 times a minute. They also have more muscle mass compared to the average person their size, even when not physically active, which increases MBR as well.
Weight loss and gain is a solved problem, but self control and human behavior is not.
Perpetuating myths of impossible weight loss is not beneficial for our society and moves us further away from solving the underlying issues.
That's about the level of a typical household LED, which at most feels slightly warm to the touch.
At that energy level you could not sustain weight while maintaining body temperature let alone having a healthy metabolism. That's just a plain fact.
You will lose weight long before you reach 200kcal/day.
E=MC^2 is basic physics too. So eat a pea and have enough calories for the rest of your life and then some?
CI + hormones --> CO (that's an alternative hypothesis)
Semaglutide and tirzepatide address the self control and human behavior problems. They stop you from wanting to eat more.
Yes, eventually eating every other day I did lose weight, but we're talking a steady glide of 1-2lbs a week nothing as severe as people would expect a severely overweight person who only ate half the week to lose.
Eat 1200 Calories per day, drink 5Kg of water, water retention, body mass and scale weight goes up with increasing water weight?
Calorie counts in nutrition data are generated by something like burning the food in a bomb calorimeter. Which is most definitely not what our bodies do. We have all kinds of different biochemical ways of metabolizing different types of foods.
So someone eating 1000 calories of day could be eating very healthy or they could be ingesting a whole bunch of garbage full of sweeteners. It doesn't seem like anyone really understands how it works but all those sweeteners are more likely to make you gain weight.
A human body isn't a bomb calorimeter and it doesn't perfectly combust everything you eat.
(I do weightlifting, and controlling one's weight is basics of everything in the gym)
Fat adaptation is a real thing. Endurance athletes focused on longer events will target some of their training around that energy system. This is more complex than can really be explained in an online comment but basically you want to do long training sessions below your lactate threshold in a glycogen depleted state.
In other words, low insulin sensitivity means your body remains in the feeding (fat building) state more, as opposed to fasting (fat burning).
Insulin sensitivity decreases with age, and with excessive intake of particularly simple carbs. It can be improved through fasting, certain dietary supplements, and low carb diet.
All of this is, to the best of my knowledge, not disputed or 'bro science'.
Granted, some animals are much better at it, crocodiles and bears and stuff can go without food for months.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_food_ener...
Actually affecting that pathway is largely beyond us at the moment (that’s the bro science) but the mechanism is relatively well understood.
There are a bunch of such “protonophores” that move protons across membranes and they are universally toxic if they make it to the mitochondria. I don’t known of any compound that actually mediates the UCPs themselves.
It's probably bro science or contributing a small amount to any effort. The biggest problem is the food industry serving shit in large portions, which can be hard for populations to psychologically resist (see: America). Most things in the grocery store are shit too.
I don't think you can effectively teach people to resist it though, you'd have to get rid of the shit being there so it's not even an option.
I use 90% cacao Lindt to control my sweet tooth. 1/2 the bar has 4g of sugar, and I consume it over hours. It also has the side effect of reducing my hunger. If you eat much of 90% chocolate, it makes you feel nausea. The trick is to put a small chip in your mouth and let it melt. It's quite delicious and I've not had any sweets in 80+ days.
When it comes to eating, there is a nutritionist with a pretty sizable online following (Kylie Sakaida), and I love one of her mantras of "add, don't subtract". That is, don't think of abstaining from foods you like that might be unhealthy, but instead try to add more healthy things to that food to make it a balanced meal. For example, she gives the example of wanting a frozen waffle for breakfast. Instead of thinking "No, I can't have this frozen waffle", she instead makes a spread using Greek yogurt to add protein, then adds fresh fruit and nuts for more nutrients, fiber and healthy fats, so what started as an 'empty carbs' meal is turned into a pretty balanced, filling breakfast.
- See some goodies my wife bought (for herself or me).
- Thinks about having my 90% Lindt later/next day.
- Walks away.
The app is subpar on iOS, but if you give Apple's Health app permission, you can get more data in there. Graphs that have absolute numbers. I think they reason their app doesn't give absolute values (for historical values, they give the current value only), is because it's not a calibrated device. It can't be used to control an insulin pump, for that reason.
I can now eat a 100g bar of 100% chocolate in a single sitting if I feel like it… And that’s 55g of fat, so more or less the fat I should be eating in a whole day.
In the end I just accepted I wanted to have caffeine and started drinking coffee instead.
That’s made it easier to have a few squares here and there and enjoy them properly. Which is good because chocolate good enough to eat at 100% is not cheap! Eating a whole bar a day was an expensive habbit.
So it turns out you can still gain weight even if you don’t spike your blood sugar. At least for me.
For me, a small piece of pie after dinner impacted my BS for 6-12 hours, according to the sensor. That was shocking.
I had just assumed before the cgm that my blood sugar regulation would be terrible with how easily I put in fat. But it was extremely well run.
I am worried about it. Ugh.
https://www.ahealthylife.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/DarkC...
You can find brands that claim to be more ethical in terms of sourcing their cocoa, but the smaller brands that do are also less likely to have been tested for heavy metals.
While it's unclear how harmful the heavy metals would be to me specifically at the amounts I was eating, the whole thing kind of put me off chocolate in general and dark chocolate in particular. I rarely have it anymore.
It is the exact, polar opposite for me. I cannot gain even if I eat junk all day.
If you're trying to bulk, you need to be looking at 2500 or more calories a day, plus additional for any calories burned by exercise. (With a surplus of 1000/calories a day you'll be gaining more fat than muscle unless you're still in puberty. Sometimes that may be what you want.)
1000 calorie breakfast = bagel with cream cheese, 3 eggs, banana, some berries, protein shake. It’s a whole lot more than a bowl of cereal.
In college, I used to treat myself with a Hardee's sourdough Frisco burger because, for some reason, it was really damn good to me. Then I saw the calorie count: https://www.hardees.com/menu/charbroiled-burgers/hardees-fri...
Add on some fries, regular soda if that's your thing, and you are pretty much at the daily recommendation.
He has quite a few claims that are just...ridiculous, and his pop science books have some serious flaws (as reported by actual experts).
I'm turning 40 in May, so since the start of February, I've finally pulled up my bootstraps and started taking my health seriously. I was likely 225 lbs at 5'10". Easily 32+% body fat.
The first thing I did was a deep extended fast, drinking only water, electrolytes, supplements, bone broth, and black coffee. I was able to shed a good amount of weight, fast. However, the longest I could fast for was 6 days; No matter what I tried, I could not figure out how to get good sleep. I tried once more for 4 days, and saw no improvement, so I stopped trying to fast. Mentally I could handle it, but without quality sleep, there was no way I could continue. This was mid-March, and I was at 204.5 lbs.
Also in mid-March, I did a VO2 max test, while fasted for 72 hours. It was very apparent that my metabolism was fat adapted. My VO2 max was very low at 33.8 ml/kg, which was to be expected. My RMR was found to be 1998 kcal/day, and my fat max HR was 161 bpm. Crossover to 100% carbs was at 179 bpm.
Since then, I've done a 180, and started eating about 1800-2000 kcal per day. My first goal is to ensure I eat 170-200g of protein per day, through as much whole food as possible, using whey or protein when needed. The rest of my diet is very clean, with no real restrictions on fats, and keeping carbs as low as possible. It's a fairly ketogenic diet, but I don't get worked up if my net carbs go to 50+g. Foods are usually Greek yogurt, flax, pumpkin seeds, nuts, eggs, berries, fish, poultry, and green vegetables/salads. If I ever add fat to anything, it's extra virgin olive oil first, then maybe butter/cream (i.e. in coffee). I take a number of supplements like Omega-3 fish oils, multivitamins, magnesium, and make my own electrolyte drink. Creatine as well.
I find that by the time I've done all of this, I have a very difficult time eating, and even trying to fit anything else in. I am never hungry, nor do I feel cravings for other foods. We just came back from Miami, and I had some ice cream with the kids, and some baked goods. I enjoyed them, but I was very excited to be back to my normal foods.
Since then, I've been running 3-4 times a week, focusing on Zone 2 training. I do 4 days a week of weightlifting, focusing on the big compound lifts. I have a 10K race on May 11, and a sprint distance triathlon on July 27 that I'm training for.
For this entire month, I have stayed at a constant 207.5 lbs +/- 0.5 lbs. I have been tracking other measurements like circumferences and body fat (using calibers and BIA scale), and it's apparent that I have gained strength, regained muscle mass, and improved my overall fitness. Running is still at a slow pace, but actually enjoyable now. My wearables estimate that my VO2 max is 37 ml/kg; they did show 33 ml/kg last month when I had the test, so they seem to be correlated.
I think the hardest part of the last month has been the sheer amount of work I've put in, only to watch the scale stay steady. I track my intake rigorously, weighing everything I can and using MyFitnessPal to track it all. How are people able to eat anything else? I couldn't add rice or grains to my diet even if I wanted to, I would easily hit 2500+ kcal per day.
People eat that much? Or rather, burn that much? I burn 2000 kcal per rest day, and maybe 2800-3200 kcal on workout days.
I will stick with this, since it is working to improve my health and fitness. It would just be nice to see the scale move without having to fast for multiple days. Cursed slow metabolism.
I’ve never measured body temperature. I’ll check tomorrow.
Blood work in February came back fine for everything, including thyroid, except lipids and slightly elevated alanine aminotransferase.
Your waking body temperature should be around >= 97.8 and raise to 98.6 or higher by midday. Low waking body temperature can be indicative of low thyroid function even with normal labs.
TSH range is too high, you want it under 2. T4 is converted to either T3 or rT3. You want the majority going to T3. So if you have low normal T3 and high normal rT3, your thyroid is not working well. Low T4 means less to convert to T3.
I can find the calories to cut, it just makes it difficult to sustain for longer than 2 weeks due to the mental load. Plus, I would bet my lifts in the gym would suffer after a while too.
Frankly, it’s probably easier to just go for an extra 20 minutes run.
I aim for 1g per lbs of weight. There’s so many numbers out there for what’s the right amount, based on lean mass vs total mass, so I figure my number is close enough.
Really changed my attitude about food, and my body and minds interaction with it. A lot of this is subconscious and really hard to get control of. The fact a chemical compound was able to change my mental relationship with food also put an interesting spin on my ideas about consciousness and self control as a whole. We are just slaves to our biological processes.
As for people lacking willpower, the genetics of hunger mean all of us experience vastly different levels of hunger. You might be interested to read about the family in Pakistan who could not produce a relevant hormone leptin, and the toddlers driven to fighting by insatiable hunger to steal food from each other, and the dramatic change in their lives after medical intervention with leptin injections
I'll look at that study you mentioned, thank you.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199909163411204
There is more information about the family involved out there, but I can't remember where I read about it.
A thing I found interesting about the genetics of hunger, is the concept of mongenetic, v polygenetic traits Monogenetic traits - a variation in a single gene is has an observed often severe impact. Polygenetic traits - variations in a large number of genes and environmental are contributing In reality these traits exist on a spectrum of severity. The more sublte the impact of a gene the more people you need to study to tease out the influence of the gene, so monogenetic traits tend to be discovered first.
After he died last year, I ran across this engineering and accounting approach to weight maintenance and loss written up by John Walker (one of the Autodesk founders). It worked very well for him and changed the way I thought about weight and eating. It is interesting reading because he is "one of us"
https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
Calories is what makes you gain/lose weight, it's basic physics. Satiety is what makes you want to eat more/less. Nutrients are what is making you healthy.
Fiber and protein tends to make you feel full. Lack of them allow you to eat large amount of calories without feeling full. You need to keep track of micro and macro nutrient to stay healthy.
I'm convinced, at this point, that there is something mental on it, too. Getting you to think of something gets your body and mind to act differently towards it.
Part of this was obvious to me when I had kids. If they fell, they would immediately look to the reaction of others around them. If people looked scared, they would feel more hurt than if people didn't react at all. If people were encouraging what they were doing, they would sometimes not realize something might hurt.
But, back to my annoyance. As someone that hates tracking lists... why do they have to be so effective? :D
Easy diets: drink this shake 3x a day. Don't eat $food_category. Limit calory intake to $amount / day.
More complex: The above, plus macronutrients.
More complex: The above, plus micronutrients.
Add dimensions like lifestyle choices (vegetarianism, veganism etc) or food sensitivities (celiac, lactose intolerance).
I'm no diet expert and need to lose some weight myself but the main advice I'd give is to get stable first. Plan your meals, eat regular meals at regular intervals, keep excess / luxuries / "rewards" to a minimum. Only when you have reached a stable and sustainable pattern should you start to make adjustments. The problem with diets or major lifestyle changes is that they're hard to keep up, simply because they are so different from your usual. The shake diets generally don't work long term because people suffer and go back to their old habits, if not overcompensate because their body signals a deprivation of some kind.
I had to rethink my relationship to food in order to lose weight. Eating a soylent clone for the majority of my meals helped me to do that. Getting a gram-accurate scale for measuring food helped. Building a database in my head of calorie estimates of various foods helped when I was not at home. Double checking nutrition facts for fast food helped too. Really, I was raised by an emotional eater. And I didn't have the natural intuition about food that most people acquire from their parents. I had to unlearn all of that shit, and learn about nutrition, calories, macros, etc
Food is not a treat or a reward, it is fuel to live. Taking a more ascetic approach to food has helped tremendously. And if I know I am going to an engagement with rich foods, I'll even lightly fast before hand so that my calorie intake stays reasonable for the day. And of course, if I have a craving for something calorie rich, I try to make an effort to justify that intake with additional activity that balances things out.
The thing about satiety is that we've conquered food scarcity in the developed world. Feeling hungry is practically taboo and is used as an excuse to consume more, the longer the feeling is felt. When in reality, hunger should be used as a signal of how soon to eat, rather than how much. Hunger is not a pleasant feeling, but the world is also not going to end if you skip a meal or two, especially for the overweight people. Having proper emotional regulation around this is important, too.
This gets back to the "feedback loops" above. There are certainly feedback loops. But you are unlikely to be able to prime any of them by just increasing an input. And increasing output is something you have to train the body to do.
On that last, I think it is easy to model weight gain as something you train the body to do, as well? Certainly fits the model of the article.
There are also flywheel levels of energy use for some folks. Consider the amount of calories a professional athlete goes through. We can say exercise doesn't help weight loss at the population level with relative certainty. It is also relatively safe to say exercise burns an obscene amount of calories in athletes.
Beyond satiety, you also have to consider the role food is playing in the person's life. Is the person hooked on Dopamine, with food a (the?) main source of it? Can they introduce other enjoyable and meaningful activities that take their mind off food? Even if a person is not addicted per-se to the dopamine food provides, if their life is boring and seems to lack meaning, they will still turn to food as a major part of their daily routine.
You also have to consider that some people find daily planning and organization more difficult than others. Keeping to a good diet can require a great deal of planning on a daily basis.
So obesity is often only a symptom of more underlying issues like depression loneliness, a struggle for meaning and connection, ADHD, and more.
Avoid sugar and fat as much as possible.
Remain in calorie deficit and you will lose weight and get plenty of nutrients.
And fat. Primarily fat is what will satisfy you (I mean eating it, not listening to Lizzo or Meghan Trainor.)
Put some butter in those eggs as you fry them. Use olive oil and coconut oil while cooking. Drink whole milk and have some raw eggs with the yolks.
Or just 1,000 cram rice cakes into your mouth all day until you choke
"Darn, I think I've contracted some alcoholism. Could you order me another bottle of the reset pills?"
If you come off it before that 5 years are up, yeah, you are probably expected to bounce back somewhat.
You might not need to be on GLP-1 forever, but you might need to be on it longer than people currently think.
(Or you're one of the 5% or so of people with a rare gene variation that basically prevents major fat build-up in the body and there's just nothing to manage for you about that — this would've been a pretty disadvantageous adaption in the past, but it's fair to say that the other 95% are maladpated to the last couple thousand years of human life).
It would only be possible to bounce back if you eat excess calories once off the GLP-1.
"Adipose tissue" means "fat tissue".
This is validating as I’m very skeptical about this when looking for a partner that currently has a physiology I’m interested in but had one I wasn’t interested in at some point before, and this seems to be a shared experience
This idea sucks when you are looking at a plate of lettuce leaves - but you should also avoid extreme diets and extreme exercise as it is unsustainable.
Going to the gym helped me immensely. Not so much in losing weight directly but in feeling better and fresher.
This. I've found working out has changed the kinds of foods I crave, making it easier to adhere to a diet. I'd usually feel more like a steak with eggs and brocoli rather than a deep-fried burger.
food is no longer a reward for anything
fin.
No idea why you are so dismissive.
Just stop overeating. That's the magic bullet. Always has been.
What's not helpful is looking for weird workarounds all the time. Just stop eating so much.
Start with something easy and establish a rule that won't ever be broken. If you break a rule once, you'll lose the fight.
My rule, for example, when I started to train more:
- start with 10 crunches every morning and evening
- increase by 2 crunches every day
- no exceptions
When you are at ~2 months in, you can add weight training to it to get stronger.
Additionally, find a sport that you can do once or twice a week that is FUN to do. By FUN I really mean it. There's no point in doing sports if you don't enjoy it.
If you enjoy playing batminton, go for it! If you enjoy table tennis, go for it! If you enjoy Kung Fu, Krav Maga, or whatever ... go for it!
Sports isn't about reaching goals, it's about having fun while doing it. Otherwise, you will not overcome the struggles. Your brain needs a reward, and enjoying sports helps you keep wanting more of it.
I am currently at around ~120kg and my "goal weight" was around that area. I still have a tummy that I am not satisfied with, but my legs are mostly muscles due to me cycling a lot. I sold my car on purpose to force me to cycle in bad weather.
Currently I am also trying out a more hardcore exercise program because I never gained a lot of muscles in the past, even when I was doing MMA training 6 times a week.
I'm probably stating the obvious here: muscles weigh more than fat, meaning you'll always gain weight before you can lose weight. I mentioned the 2-3 months time span because that's (for me) when it switched, and my body suddenly had it easier to get into calories burning mode.
Suffice it to say: I don't eat nor drink any sweets, not even in my muesli. No artificial sweeteners either. I replaced sweets with fruits in my muesli, for example. And I just drink water, because soft drinks are the human brain's enemy.
The decision to not eat nor drink anything sweet is important, I think, because it helps me go into calories burning mode much faster with much less calories.
> Currently I am also trying out a more hardcore exercise program because I never gained a lot of muscles in the past, even when I was doing MMA training 6 times a week.
That's what I've noticed, too.
But I've also noticed that it makes me crave different foods than when I sit on my ass all day. So, on average, I tend to actually eat less, because I don't have random cravings in between meals.
I doubt that people who are overweight and sedentary only eat "healthy" meals, only too much.
Since you said you went through three weight loss cycles (bravo, it is hard to do!), is exercise an important part of the effort? Example: Did you ever try cardio vs weight training? It seems like weight training is the more likely of the two to change body composition (more muscle, same or less fat). And higher muscle weight almost always leads to higher resting calorie burn rate.
Last thing that almost no one is talking about in this discussion: Once you start doing exercise, something changes in your brain. I cannot precisely explain it, but a huge number of men experience a drop is depressing thoughts after starting regular exercise. My guess: Exercise helps to de-stress which has all kinds of other positive impacts in your life.
You cannot outrun a fork.
Reality is more complex than memetic one-liners.
Do we really want to compare ultramarathon runners with couch potatoes?
I gather that you have never met an endurance cyclist. Randonneurs are notorious for devouring whatever they can find when they stop for lunch.
The obese people and sedentary office workers don't and would need to train for months to be able to out-run a single piece of cake on a regular basis without injury.
The phrase is good advice for that group of people.
To quantify this, on a weekly long ride they may consume 300g of refined sugar, far far beyond the often recommended limit of 20g of sugar per day.
So perhaps the sedentary person would benefit from walking or leisurely cycling to work a whole more than by trying to restrict their diet
Maybe that meme needs to die for good, instead.
>> So perhaps the sedentary person would benefit from walking or leisurely cycling to work a whole more than by trying to restrict their diet
1. One was not eating breakfast, this works well when I'm in the office. Then you have fasting built into your daily routine. This has many metabolic benefits.
2. Switching to a low carb diet (keto). I never thought I'd quit eating bread, but reducing carbonhydrates (esp. sugar) and eating more eggs & meat had the biggest effect on my weight. More so than doing sports. This is just a rough guideline, I don't follow this very strictly.
3. Sports + Fasting: Sometimes on the weekends I go on a hike or do some sports and only eat when I get home in the afternoon (e.g. steak). This forces my body to take the energy from the fat reserves.
In the end, these tips help to get into a different lifestyle and then reinforce the habits to stay there because it feels better.
The magic is that just counting calories basically leads to the same outcome: less carbs and sugary stuff, less fatty meats, more lean meat, more veggies, etc.
Of course knowledge about diet and exercise is immensely valuable, but if there are psychological factors getting in the way, it’s going to be harder to adopt a consistently healthy lifestyle.
So rather than just eating less make sure to work out some. Consistently. Id suggest strength training. I did a full body strength training workout 2-3 times a week. Some may suggest doing leg days, arm days, etc but going there takes time on itself and i have other places to be than the gym.
To match that strength training eat more protein. Things like chicken are your friend. This tends to be higher on the satiety index so you'll feel full faster and you'll eat less without it being so painfull. Eat a bit of protein with every meal Really there's a whole lot of other stuff that you can fill yourself up with that won't be too bad for ya. And when you go for a carb? Get the complex one if it's a choice. It'll dampen that peak in insulin.
Avoid the sugary stuff. It's addictive for sure but taper off. Eat before going to the store. Make the hard decisions there not with the easy snack within reach in the evening.
Do a bit of everything that works until it becomes second nature. Overfocusing on one silver bullet doesn't tend to work.
Also i mentioned strength training specifically since other than what you burn at a workout resting metabolic rate also increases and helps. I assume the average person on this website is notably rather sedentary and would see above average results depending on age and such.[1] (Even more so if he's a guy which I believed he was based on his name.) You'll always need a base and you're reducing your intake anything so something like a 15% difference is gigantic when you're struggling and super helpfull (even just 5% is worthwile).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8030593/
edit: and I'll acknowledge it would take a while before that increased resting metabolic rate starts to play more but again....it needs to be sustainable so whatever you're doing you need to be able to keep up anyway.
I was right; we didn't lose any weight, but we did get much better at running without gasping to a stop within a couple minutes.
Hardcore diets and then falling back to the old habits are absolutely not the way to do it. There are things like diet fatigue, the mentioned Yo-Yo effect you don't want to deal with.
Your "diet" should be generally healthy and long term sustainable. It just does not work to replace one way of malnutrition with another one.
So here are the things i (BMI 22, bodyfat < 19% for now 20+ years, at age over 40) would recommend:
One is strength based exercise. Find 1-3 days in your week where you can dependably (!) spend an hour or two to go to the gym. It is better to go once every week reliably, than to go 3 times one week and then skipping the next.
Get a full body training plan consisting of multi joint exercises. For example don't waste your time on biceps if you can do rows which trains your biceps and back at the same time.
You must do strength training order to gain muscle mass. Muscles have a large influence on your hormones, which helps to suppress hunger and keeps you fit in general. The hunger suppression is important if you lose weight. It works this way: if you lose weight, you will usually lose muscle mass alongside fat. Losing muscles creates a huge hunger signal compared to fat. Doing strength training keeps you from losing muscle (or even building it) so your hunger is lower while you lose weight.
And you don't want to end up skinny fat with issues like back pain (which i ended up with at age 20 without ever being overweight).
Don't overdo it. But be consistent, do the smallest amount necessary but every single week no exception.
Don't do cardio (at least not cardio only). Cardio is fine if you do it for sporting reasons but since you seem to be overweight, i assume this is not the case ;) So cardio would just waste your time because it burns surprisingly small amounts of calories while increasing hunger by a lot. It also does not build muscles as much so why bother?
The most important part is to get your nutrition in check.
Basically do the following:
Close to every meal should, by volume, roughly consist of 1/4 protein, like chicken or other lean meat, or plant based alternatives 1/4 carbs, like rice, potatoes whatever (pasta has tons of calories so be careful here) 2/4 vegetables like carrots, broccoli... whatever just mix it up.
It is a ton of vegetables, which is good because it keeps your stomach full and is healthy in every conceivable way.
Do not skip fats, but skip pure sugars especially in liquid form like soda.
Don't do cheat days where you mindlessly eat thousands of calories, this messes with your psyche for no reason. But eating out, or some junk food is fine from time to time you are not a robot.
Inform yourself about the calorie content of your meals and try to control the amount.
There are many ways to exert control, which are highly individual. Some have no problem skipping breakfast, some make their meals smaller, some do keto or track calories. Whatever floats your boat you have to find out. Remember it has to be sustainable. Personally i try to get a good amount of protein into my meals and i keep an eye out for calories without counting.
Every single morning: Use the toilet, step on a scale, check your weight. It varies a bit from day to day but the average helps you track. You might want to use an app but its not really necessary. This is your main way to keep track. Gain weight? Try to eat a bit less next week.
Keep in mind that you are in it for the long run. There is no need to lose tons of weight in the short term. It is fine to be slow which is way more sustainable anyway.
You want to be fit for the rest of your life so you have to keep at it for the rest of your life.
1) Don't lose more than 10% of your bodyweight in the same weight loss period.
2) Don't lose more than 1% of body weight per week.
3) At the end of a weight loss period, transition to eating at maintenance calories for a while before starting a new weight loss period.
A common mistake is to completely stop dieting when you reach your goal weight. This is a bad idea because your body has adapted to the diet (e.g. decreased energy expenditure) and it's therefore easy to regain weight rapidly. What you should do is keep tracking what you eat while increasing calories to maintenance level, to give a chance to your body to slowly decrease hunger and increase energy expenditure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demethylase
some of which have vitamin cofactors like zinc[1] and riboflavin[2].
So nutrition is important. I will let you investigate the link between zinc, riboflavin and diabetes...
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7191051/ [2] https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/O60341/entry
Set medium term goals. Don't try to lose 20 kilos in six months. Lose the next kilo by this time in two weeks. Similarly, don't try to lose 0.1 kilos by tomorrow. Weight naturally fluctuates day to day based on water intake, sodium intake, muscle fatigue, and other things. But in the range of 2-3 weeks, you should be able to lose enough weight to see signal in the noise of day to day fluctuations.
If you aren't hitting your medium term goals, find a way to cut calories more. Starting the first month doing a comprehensive calorie log is valuable to help calibrate what foods and portion sizes are relatively problematic.
The rest is just finding eating patterns that work for you that help keep calorie levels low enough. There's a lot of advice about ways to do that, and most need to be taken with a grain of salt, but it's probably true that you can min/max at the margins by increasing fiber intake, increasing protein intake, drinking more water, eating more raw plants, intermittent fasting, and that sort of thing. But you'll mostly see fractional improvements on top of the bottom line math: calories burned need to exceed calories consumed.
As noted elsewhere here, it's a lot of exercise to burn off a few pieces of bacon. Exercise is good for weight loss, but again, it's mostly at the margins for the average person, especially if that person is not an athlete.
> The rest is just finding eating patterns that work for you that help keep calorie levels low enough. There's a lot of advice about ways to do that, and most need to be taken with a grain of salt, but it's probably true that you can min/max at the margins by increasing fiber intake, increasing protein intake, drinking more water, eating more raw plants, intermittent fasting, and that sort of thing. But you'll mostly see fractional improvements on top of the bottom line math: calories burned need to exceed calories consumed.
It's "easy" to lose a ton of weight if you don't eat anything at all. But that's obviously not sustainable. However, what I've found works, is that those things "at the margins" as you say actually have a huge effect on adherence to the "diet". Some foods require a tremendous amount of willpower to only consume in "reasonable" quantities. Think candy bars, chips, the like.
The point is to take note about how you feel after a given meal. Some foods, even though the meal would bring enough calories, leave you with a feeling of wanting more. Avoid these. Others leave you feeling full for hours. Go for those. What I've noticed is that sometimes, the effect may come from "secondary" ingredients, like the dressing on a salad, whereas the salad itself will leave you feeling full for the whole afternoon.
There are things you may enjoy quite a lot, so if they're of the "can't stop eating them sort", you'll have to forego them entirely. It's actually much easier to not eat them at all (and, ideally, not even have them in the house) than hoping you'll be reasonable. With time, these foods will lose their appeal, and you won't randomly crave them every day. Getting over this first step is what I find hardest.
The answers that actually work are "move to an environment where you will likely get and stay skinnier" (maybe a different, skinnier country) or (this one's new! There's finally a semi-reasonable answer to this question!) "take GLP-1 agonists". There's no strategy that'll do it (for outliers, yes, but over a population, no)
The comment elsewhere about HAVING to eat was eye opening to me. For some reason I never made that connection - the cocaine addict doesn't have to do just a tiny line a few times a day. They can kick it permanently. A food addict has to face their temptations every meal...
If I start eating badly, it is very very very hard to stop. I will crash off the rails into a spiral of binge-eating for the rest of the day until I feel physically sick (which takes a while).
You just can't start.
With alcoholism or smoking it is plausible (although hard) to go cold-turkey and just eliminate the things that lead you to the binges. You can make lifestyle changes to avoid them. But you still have to eat, so for me I am always one meal away from losing it and pigging out. I never feel full (the food challenges of "if you can finish this meal it's free" are a walk in the park for me - anyone for dessert?). It takes continuous and immense will power to stop - I am hovering around 95kgs at 1.85m which I know is "bad" but tell me something I don't know. It's hard.
Telling them they can't possibly smoke less through willpower is incredibly harmful. Same with eating.
That's the crux! Constant hunger starts nagging me as soon as I try. I've tried several times for several months, with nice results from the weight's points of view, but I never got to the point where my quality of life globally increased, and that was always due to the constant hunger.
I'll only retry when I'll have found a way to stop the hunger now.
Losing weight does not have to be so hard. You can lose a lot of weight gradually over time with a small, consistent deficit. Measurement accuracy is critical, though - you will absolutely fail if you aren’t logging your food like a lab scientist.
But it is definitely possible to succeed without that constant sense of privation. In fact, if you want to succeed long-term, you HAVE to find that balance because nobody can force themselves to feel deprived indefinitely.
The word diet is problematic because most people see it as something temporary. But you can't just eat healthy to lose weight and then go back to old habits, expecting the weight to stay off. That just doesn't make sense.
Also for many people, food isn’t just about pleasure - it’s also a way to deal with boredom, stress, depression, and so on. So even if someone sticks to a diet, if the psychological root causes are still there, it's going to be hard to stay away from junk food.
Look at the long term numbers for successfully keeping weight off, 5, 10 years out.
They’re abysmal.
When you stop a diet, you go back to eating shit. The new normal just keeps you at the same place because you get used to the fact that you don't need to eat breakfast, and a 500 calorie lunch is perfectly satiating, hell maybe a bit too much.
> Many people, myself included, have kept weight off for decades.
No. This is wrong.
Keeping weight off requires retraining your habits and relationship with food so that it becomes natural and even enjoyable to stay healthy. It also may require addressing some emotional and psychological issues that are keeping you stuck.
The path to that point may be challenging (not always!), but it is simply false that you must exert “superhuman control” forever to keep your progress. In fact, the opposite is true: if you view yourself in an adversarial posture with your diet, and are relying on willpower to “win”, then you are likely to fail because nobody can deprive themselves forever.
Circling back to that 80/20 statistic: I think it’s evidence that most people are not approaching this problem in the right way. And part of the problem, in my opinion, is defeatist beliefs like the ones I am criticizing here.
Yeah, I've tried several times under medical control.
I kept asking my supervising doctor: "When is the constant hunger going to get better?" And the answer was always in the range of a few weeks to several months. But that moment never came... never!
And, in the end, all the kilograms I had lost along the route always found their way back home, and always with some new friends they had met while we had lost sight of each other.
Given what effects stress, depression, anxiety, guilt, shame, etc. have on the psyche and body, I'm running an experiment, and betting that making peace and taking care of my body as it is right now will benefit me in the long run.
Yes, although I don't know whether that's epigenetic.
It really lends itself to the way I model "training" for stuff. Sucks, as we want to think there are differences from rote practice and learning. But it increasingly seems that any differences there are are much softer than is often taught.
> If you're not counting calories you could be cutting calories too aggressively or not aggressively enough
This, too, can be monitored without calorie counting (e.g., periodic scale measurements will tell you this).
In general, when I was losing weight I did not really need to count calories, I just ate less than I did. And this worked because I was always hungry especially initially, until the body adapts. If you're always going to check "can I eat this one more thing dear calculator" I'd say you're not really ready to lose weight because tormenting yourself like this every day you will burn out before you can make a dent.
This is the wrong way to look at it. Sometimes you'll have a larger banana, sometimes a smaller banana, but overall it'll average out. What you need is consistency to compare to your own previous measurements, not perfect accuracy.
For example: By counting my calories and keeping track of my weight, I've learned that I burn about 2200 calories per day. If I went over my foods and measured them perfectly it probably wouldn't be that number, but because I'm consistent in how I measure it I can know with certainty whether I'm above or below that limit. I've been able to reliably control my weight for a few years now because of this and I'm not even measuring, just eyeballing how much of things I use.