> Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament
Citation, please.
I see him making this claim in a number of articles and talks, but am having trouble finding an experiment verifying this.
It's a nonsensical number, comparing to measurements of Tour de France cyclists or ultramarathoners running 100kms per day, who can expect to hit that kind of figure.
The highest recorded expenditure is around 11,000kcals / day. Under truly absurd conditions: manhauling sleds weighing hundreds of kilos across ice so cold that it doesn't create a lubricating layer, from 60M above sea level to 3,000M above sea level, over 10 days[0].
Show me an isotape-labelled water measurement or a CO2 measurement and maybe I'll believe it.
Edit: found it.
The chess study does use a CO2 measurement[1]. The maximum figure given was 2.2kcals/minute. I don't know how you get from that to 6,000-7,000kcals, however, unless people are playing 40-50 hour matches.
Thanks for pointing this out. There is an old reddit thread [1] that calls this into question that links to a study that says the max calorie burn they found was 132 cal/hr [2]. (Don't have full access to the study so just going by the reddit comment)
I would love to see this as well. That's more than 2x what most people burn running a marathon. Hard to believe but would be really interesting if that's true.
I also doubt it, though it's not quite 2x. The number they cite is "6,000 calories a day", which presumably includes the ~2,000 calories one burns just by staying alive. A marathon runner burns ~2,600 calories on the race itself, totalling ~4,600 for the day. So it's about 1.3x rather than 2x.
The numbers all have very wide error bars, so it puts 1.3 in the range closer to 1 than to 2. Still hard to believe, but I'd consider "comparable to a marathon" far more likely than "twice as much".
If you’re going to be pedantic, you subtract out the baseline, and the alleged caloric burn from chess would be 1.5x the measured burn from running a marathon.
But in any case it still astounds me the human body can run that far on just 2,000 calories (2.3kWh).
It's more about how light the body is than how efficient it is. Consider: the Tesla Model 3 has a range of 350 km, and a battery capacity of 50 kWh. That's a little more than seven km per kWh. So, less efficient than the human body, right?
Well don't forget that its curb weight is 1,611 kg. If we assume that the marathoning human weighs 100 kg, then the Tesla weighs 16x as much. So to compare the performance pound for pound, we need to imagine the energy use of sixteen human runners (36kWh for 42km, or just a little more than 1kWh per km). Also, it would be travelling that range at a much higher velocity. Of course, its coefficient of drag is probably lower than that of sixteen human runners, but considering the humans are running at 15 km/h or so, and the Tesla would be travelling at closer to 100kmh, the velocity factor of the drag calculation would be 40x higher for the Tesla than the humans. So, even if you factor in the unfairness of having skin and hair and clothes, the humans are actually a good deal less energy efficient than the car.
I just found this analysis interesting. Our machines are after all quite a bit more efficient than our bodies (for certain tasks, of course). But that doesn't detract from your point that the body is definitely more efficient than you want it to be when it comes to losing weight!
It's about on par with what a farm hand would burn per work day at the beginning of the 20th century (unless I'm remembering that wrong). The human brain burns a lot of calories, but I'm pretty skeptical it can manage 6000kcal on its own.
It’s not true if you’re playing for fun. If I go to a pre-release it’s a walk in the park. When I was playing competitive MtG, it was draining and I would be eating power bars every hour or so and still lose weight.
I did tests for weight loss. I found that you don't lose weight until you sleep. (stay up all night and weigh your self repeatedly, in the morning, no loss, but after you sleep and wake, your weight goes back to "morning weight")
I found that if you don't sleep well, you don't lose as much. If you eat too late before going to bed, you don't lose as much.
If you adjust your diet (however you want is my experience) to always be hungry for around an hour before every meal, you will lose weight. (no exercise at all)
What these guys are doing seems to be actual "work", I don't think stress alone makes you lose weight. With the anecdotal data I have observed over the years "stress eating" is more common that "stress based weight loss".
Maybe the activity that causes the stress directly relates to it's effect? And not all stress is equal in this way? (tournament stress vs paying the bills stress)
The difference in the grandmaster situation is that their extreme focus on chess completely displaces their hunger, hunger which needs real estate in your attention to be effective, just like any other felt sensation. And this focus lasts for the majority of the tournament, months.
This is different to most people. When you have an immersive job you can get in the zone for many hours of the day, but you do stop working, and your hunger returns.
The closest thing I ever experienced to what they are describing was when I played the game Civilization for the first time in ‘93. I was so obsessed I played it for three days straight, night and day, before I took my first nap. The fluid drained from body, I looked like a skeleton with black holes for eyes. I also did not eat, I remember literally running to the store to get a single can of coke otherwise I just drank water from the bathroom faucet because it was next to my room. Within five days I had easily lost a couple of pounds of bodyfat.
Having played chess competitively throughout school, it’s no surprise chess Grandmasters have this total level of focus in tournaments.
I used to get this with programming. I still do sometimes but it just isn’t as immersive anymore (probably not enough of a challenge or too many parallel concerns)
Once upon a time video games did it. I’d fire up Empire Total War and 20 minutes later it was getting dark and I felt queasy. Oh wait it’s been 12 hours.
Nowadays I only get that on my motorcycle. Fire up the engine, find an open road, and you don’t even know you’re hungry until you come home 6 hours later and sit down for dinner.
You just described me and the progression of my exact hobbies as well as eating habits. Weird. Even when I stop to get gas, I rarely get hungry when riding, or I do- and I just forget I was hungry as I'm pre-occupied with the road.
You can quite easily if you're going at the right speed. I recently drove across Canada where the speed limits are absurdly slow and I was getting 8 hours on a tank easily.
I definitely remember losing 15 pounds in my freshman year of college because I preferred sitting in my dorm playing video games to going out for a bite. Actually quite a positive experience, as I'd been overweight previously.
I have had similar experiences when working on something I was driven to finish. Fat simply could not stay on me during those times. I had a ripped six pack without even trying during those times. (When I was younger of course, ha)
It is more of the effect of not eating or drinking for ~8 hours. 1 pint of water weighs around 500g. Also the average human exhales 1kg of CO2 a day which about a quarter of that is carbon weight. You will lose weight if you do not drink or eat for 8 hours awake. "Morning weight" == fasted and somewhat dehydrated weight.
>"Morning weight" == fasted and somewhat dehydrated weight.
I was tracking weight loss over time, so it's not just water loss. I tracked weight multiple times a day to see when weight loss actually happens.
If it was simple dehydration then sleeping would be irrelevant, but sleep is when something is processed, an action occurs that expels the waste/water.
I'm going to try to reiterate more clearly what your parent comment was saying:
Your experimental methodology is flawed because it fails to control for water loss. This isn't negligible: in the summer when it's hot and I sweat a lot, I can easily drink a 1 liter Nalgene bottle in the morning, about 2 pounds of water. It's likely that what you've measured is simply the slow loss of water through perspiration and exhalation throughout the night.
I guess technically this is weight loss because you do weigh less when dehydrated, but it's not loss of fat weight, which is what I think most people mean when they say weight loss.
Weight fluctuations throughout the day due to water/food intake and waste excretion/water loss dwarf any actual fat loss, so I don't think weighing yourself throughout the day is a viable method of determining when fat weight is lost during the day.
>Your experimental methodology is flawed because it fails to control for water loss.
I absolutely tested for water loss. What I found was that some extra (?) water retained until we sleep. And that something happens with fat or other processing that occurs during sleep.
Again, I charted my weight carefully multiple times a day over a month. Carefully testing when weight loss occured. I Recorded my diet as well as my exercise.
I lost .5 lbs of fat (on average) every day for a month.
The question I found interesting was "when/how do we actually lose weight?" It has to come out of our body somehow. And it's not through excrement, it's through urine. The reason I know this is because when doing my test I ate one meal a day, and I would sometimes not have a bowel movement for a few days, yet still have eaten a few meals and still lost weight.
No, you didn't. How do you think you tested for water loss?
Briefly, you'd need to separate out the water for your urine, weigh that, then separate out the water from your feces, and weigh that, and spend all your time in a sealed chamber and monitor the humidity of that chamber to see how much water you're exhaling and sweating out. I'm guessing you did exactly none of this.
Oh and after all that, there's the confounding fact that a small part of fat's mass is metabolized into water, so even measuring all your water excretion doesn't actually allow you to separate how much of that water is water you took in, and how much of that water is the result of fat metabolism.
> And it's not through excrement, it's through urine.
Given urine is mostly water and you didn't control for water loss, your result is exactly what I'd expect from water loss and not fat loss.
Look, do you really think you're the first person to research this? There's a whole subfield of biochemistry devoted to this, with more brains, equipment, and funding than you have. You're right that weight mostly doesn't come out through excrement: most of the mass of burned fat is exhaled as CO2[1][2][3].
Over time. I was not dehydrated at the end of the month, but I was 15+ 1bs lighter, and my neck, waist and limbs were slimmer.
>do you really think you're the first person to research this?
Nope, I have no such illusions. I find though that science _requires_ discussion to move forward. And I found a phenomenon. I can't explain the details, but the results are sound.
I think it's simple to test my theory. Stay up all night, don't drink anything, do what you normally do. In the morning, you will not have lost any weight (call it water weight if you want). During sleep, your body does something different. Go take a nap, when you wake you will urinate again, but it will be different.
But maybe you can only understand this difference if you are carefully monitoring your weight over an extended period of time?
The reason I don't think the carbon dioxide thing is the primary method of weight loss is because of my tests, where your body weight simply does not normalize until after sleeping. I think the majority of the fat (by weight) comes out in urine.
But I am just guessing based on my experiments over the past few years. Yep, I am an amateur scientist, but I control my weight now.
> Over time. I was not dehydrated at the end of the month, but I was 15+ 1bs lighter, and my neck, waist and limbs were slimmer.
That establishes what month you lost fat in. It does not establish what time of day you lost fat in. It does not establish that you lost fat through your urine.
I totally believe you that you lost weight in a month; I'm not objecting to to that claim. The claims you made that I am objecting to are:
1. That you know what time of day you lost weight in.
2. That you know you lost weight primarily through your urine.
You did not control for water weight when testing either of these hypotheses.
> I find though that science _requires_ discussion to move forward.
No it doesn't. Discussion is sometimes helpful to the scientific method, but it is not a part of it. Science requires sound experimentation, which you have not done.
> In the morning, you will not have lost any weight (call it water weight if you want).
I don't need to stay up all night to demonstrate that I can lose weight while awake. I just got back from a run and had to go, so I urinated and lost 1.6 lbs according to measuring before and after on my bathroom scale. Since you've given me permission, I'll go ahead and call that water weight.
> Go take a nap, when you wake you will urinate again, but it will be different.
How will it be different? You've literally provided no explanation whatsoever for why you think there's fat mass in your urine.
> But maybe you can only understand this difference if you are carefully monitoring your weight over an extended period of time?
I have gathered my weight data almost every day for the last few months, to correlate with a weight training routine.
Maybe I could understand the difference if you could explain it to me, but all you've done is just say there is a difference.
> The reason I don't think the carbon dioxide thing is the primary method of weight loss is because of my tests, where your body weight simply does not normalize until after sleeping.
What do you mean by normalize?
> I think the majority of the fat (by weight) comes out in urine.
Why do you think this?
> But I am just guessing based on my experiments over the past few years. Yep, I am an amateur scientist, but I control my weight now.
You don't get to call yourself even an amateur scientist if you refuse to even consider very obvious confounding factors. Science is about isolating phenomena, and if you haven't even measured the heaviest thing coming out of your body (water) then you can't claim to have isolated any information about lighter substances leaving your body. What you're doing is not science.
I'm happy for you that you're controlling your weight, though. Good job.
This is getting too long to respond to all of these. So I will just address your first points:
>1. That you know what time of day you lost weight in.
I have no idea when _fat_ was processed, never my point. I know _exactly_ when my weight diminished. (I feel like I did not make this point very clear before)
>2. That you know you lost weight primarily through your urine.
>You did not control for water weight when testing either of these hypotheses.
It is well understood method to weigh yourself every morning to ensure you aren't measuring water weight loss. Feel free to argue against this standard, it's not my personal belief. I do believe doctors and physical trainers, etc... all use this standard.
> I have no idea when _fat_ was processed, never my point. I know _exactly_ when my weight diminished. (I feel like I did not make this point very clear before)
I'm pretty sure you've been clear. Your idea is:
1. Fat is processed into fat waste at some point.
2. Fat waste comes out in urine in the morning.
2 is almost completely wrong, and you've provided no evidence for that assertion.
> It is well understood method to weigh yourself every morning to ensure you aren't measuring water weight loss. Feel free to argue against this standard, it's not my personal belief. I do believe doctors and physical trainers, etc... all use this standard.
In a scientific experiment, you control for a confounding factor by isolating the phenomena you are measuring from another phenomena that might screw up your measurements.
If you're measuring your weight every day, the confounding factor is the weight of things that aren't you: water/food/waste. So you separate out weighing you and weighing the water/food/waste by weighing yourself when there's the least water/food/waste in your system. So this is how you control the measurement of your weight for water weight.
If you're measuring the weight of waste products that come from processing fat, the confounding factors are still water/food/waste in your system, but the waste products that come from processing fat are mixed in with them, and there's no way to measure them separately. Measuring in the morning doesn't fix this problem. So this doesn't control the measurement of the waste products that come from processing fat's weight for water weight.
It is well understood that 85% of fat weight lost is exhaled as carbon dioxide, so if you're going to tell me what is well understood, you might actually want to find out more of what is well understood.
Imagine that fat gets burned at the exact moment when you eat or drink anything. On your chart, even if it is realtime, you would see weight gain, then later during the day and night you pee and exhale little more than if that fat burn didn't happen. But that burn is say 1% of intake and it gets spread over few hours.
Would your tracking method allow you to detect the moment of weight loss in this hypothetical scenario?
I don't think so, I can't say for sure when fat is burned or anything like that. I agree that it has to be done while you are using energy during the day.
Some people seem to be thinking that I am saying "fat only gets burned during sleep" which is just absurd, and I am not suggesting that at all.
I think if I was to make a theory it would be something like "fat used up during the day produces waste that is partly stored in the body after being used, but during sleep is when this waste is collected and expelled in the urine." Maybe poorly worded but sums up my thinking right now.
This is a rough guess, but since I haven't seen anything like this reported anywhere I figured it's worth sharing the experience.
> I think if I was to make a theory it would be something like "fat used up during the day produces waste that is partly stored in the body after being used, but during sleep is when this waste is collected and expelled in the urine."
And how did you detect the fat waste in your urine?
> This is a rough guess, but since I haven't seen anything like this reported anywhere I figured it's worth sharing the experience.
The reason you didn't see anything like this reported anywhere is that it's not true.
Experience is something I can't argue with. I can't argue, for example, that you lost weight. However, you've stepped well beyond just "reporting your experience" here. In what way did you "experience" expelling fat waste products through your urine? The answer is, you didn't--you experienced expelling water.
You're not adding to our collective knowledge by reporting your subjective interpretations here. You're propagating misinformation.
> And how did you detect the fat waste in your urine?
I didn't have a method to test for fat in urine. But I could measure the fat loss around my waist, neck and limbs over time. Lots of science works in this way where you can't measure something directly, so you must use the surrounding effects to measure it, it's totally valid measuring technique.
>expelling fat waste products through your urine? The answer is, you didn't--you experienced expelling water.
If you want to argue that fat turns into water, and then water goes out as urine, then I agree with you 100% (though I'd argue it's not pure water), and I would add that that process seems to be only be fully completed after sleeping. (experimental proof of this can be demonstrated by anyone with a scale that is able to stay up all night)
Mayo Clinic:
"These waste products — water and carbon dioxide — are excreted in your urine and sweat or exhaled from your lungs."
> If you want to argue that fat turns into water, and then water goes out as urine, then I agree with you 100% (though I'd argue it's not pure water)
I don't want to argue that.
> and I would add that that process seems to be only be fully completed after sleeping.
This is the nonsense that I would like to argue against.
> (experimental proof of this can be demonstrated by anyone with a scale that is able to stay up all night)
Okay, please tell me the numbers that you collected that you think prove this.
> Mayo Clinic: "These waste products — water and carbon dioxide — are excreted in your urine and sweat or exhaled from your lungs."
That link does not say when during the day it happens.
I'll also point out that I've been saying all along that fat waste is 15% water and 85% carbon dioxide, so if you think that disproves what I said, either you didn't read what I said, or you didn't read what you linked.
I'll also point out that you said:
"The reason I don't think the carbon dioxide thing is the primary method of weight loss is because of my tests, where your body weight simply does not normalize until after sleeping. I think the majority of the fat (by weight) comes out in urine."
Could you do some basic research please, and find a source which says the percentages of fat and water? I've conveniently linked one for you:
"So, for example, to burn 10 kilograms (22 lbs.) of fat, a person needs to inhale 29 kg (64 lbs.) of oxygen. And the chemical process of burning that fat will produce 28 kg (62 lbs.) of carbon dioxide and 11 kg (24 lbs.) of water, the researchers calculated."
A humorous conclusion we can draw from your posts is that if you're losing weight while you sleep and the weight comes out through urine, this must mean you urinate while you sleep. ;)
Well, people are taking my statements wrong. I didn't mean to imply you "lose weight while you sleep", I meant to more clearly state "the fat you've already used, doesn't get expelled until you sleep". Again, a working theory to explain an observed effect.
You can lose "true" weight during the day, while still gaining enough weight from food/water to offset the previous night's fasting and weight loss.
In other words, it's not that you don't lose weight until you sleep: it's that you can't differentiate whether you have net lost weight or gained weight until you have similar conditions of measurement.
Yes, thank you, this is a better way of describing the process that I observed.
But I would add to this, that it seems that you can lose some net lost weight from not having enough time sleeping for the process to finish.
Maybe like how a sceptic tank gets filled and drained repeatedly, but only gets drained at night (for an equal analogy). And if there's not enough night (sleep), it can't drain completely, therefore retaining waste.
It would explain also why you get sick if you don't get enough sleep... something else to ponder.
specialp and johnmaguire2013 are correct. 'real' weight loss occurs very slowly in comparison to the ways your body can shed or accumulate water. In a week you're not likely to lose more than a 'real' pound unless you're being pretty extreme about your calorie intake or expenditure, but you can fluctuate by easily 5 pounds of water/food weight in a day.
Source: tracking my calories and weight for the better part of a decade and having lost and kept off 150+lbs.
I wish people would use percentage of weight or BMI points instead of pounds. For one it would save others a conversion, and secondly it would make things comparable. 2.2 Kg in a day seems impossible to me, but for someone else it might be nothing. My max fluctuation is about 1.5%, it happens when there are several factors combined.
BMI is also flawed. According to my BMI, I’m “morbidly obese”. I’m 30 pounds overweight. However when I was 10 pounds less than I am now, I was objectively tone, muscular, and had a body fat percentage of around 10%. Even now, no one (including doctors) look at me and would say that I’m “obese” and need to lose that much weight. At 10 pounds lighter I was wearing 28 regular cut pants. Where would I lose the weight from? I’m 5’5.
>I was tracking weight loss over time, so it's not just water loss. I tracked weight multiple times a day to see when weight loss actually happens.
And what you saw was just repeated measurements of water loss each morning, plus some actual weight loss, when the real weight loss happened 24/7 but was too spread for you to notice.
>If it was simple dehydration then sleeping would be irrelevant
Sleeping is irrelevant (it is needed to be less stressed, but it's not the time you "actually lose weight" any more than any other time of the day) research has shown.
Right, but that's just regular metabolism. In the context of this thread, parent poster claimed it wasn't all that's happening and it certainly won't account for 0.5 lbs of mass lost during the night (mentioned elsewhere in this thread).
It seems I have to be careful about my statements. I lost .5 lbs of mass (on average it was over this like .57 lbs) every day for 30 days. Some days I lost more some less.
What I found was that during the day I gained weight consistently from morning till night. I drank water, ran (2 miles then later 3 miles around 4:30pm) ate food (one meal at around 5:30pm), sweated on my runs, bowel movements were every couple days, urinated multiple times a day.
But, consistently gained weight morning -> night. I measured my weight Morning > noon > evening (before meal) > night (before sleep). Only in the morning after urination did weight leave my body. Otherwise is consistent gains.
People want to claim "it's all water", but that is nonsense, as I lost 15+ lbs that month.
So, during a few days, I stayed up all night, no extra water in the night, no urination until morning to see if it was just that 8 hour period (approx) that caused the final loss of total weight to get me to my lowest measurement of the day.
Nope. I had not lost any (or negligible weight, I was still at or near night weight). After I slept, (I'd wake in the afternoon) urinate, and I was back to my expected morning weight - with the average loss of .5 lbs.
Sleep has an effect on the processing of urine related to the expulsion of waste and the metabolism of fat. That is my theory. A lot of people here are calling this asinine, so be it.
If you are up for experimenting, weigh yourself in the morning and night for a week. Then stay up all night and weigh yourself in the morning, then after you get a nap. Then tell me I am crazy and there's nothing to this effect.
>I found that you don't lose weight until you sleep.
You may just not notice it until you wake up, but you can certainly lose weight during the day if you aren't eating and you are exerting yourself physically.
I think I can "process fat" during the day, but I did not lose weight. I consistently gained weight from water and food in take from morning -> night. Only after a full night sleep did I go back to the previous morning weight - .5 lbs average loss.
I remember from high school wrestling that you could almost always count on losing 1 pound of weight between night time and early morning weigh-ins. A little less if you went to bed severely dehydrated.
> I found that you don't lose weight until you sleep.
Unless you stop breathing during the day, this is super absurd. All non-water non-food weight leaves the body as exhaled carbon (and I suppose also trivially as radiated heat energy). Or are you suggesting that people only exhale CO2 when they sleep?
I said "weight" not "mass". And yes, I consistently gained weight all day (water + food intake), and did not return to morning weight (minus actual fat used up, about .5 lbs a day on average) until after sleeping.
I think the amount of weight lost through exhaling is minimal compared to urinating and defecation. And defecation is almost none at all. (my tests showed that bowel movements have very little affect on weight)
Your body is metabolically active whether or not you're asleep. You can definitely lose weight during the day. It's possible to burn an entire pound of bodyfat in a single day with sustained aerobic activity. It's not even difficult to lose 5+ lbs throughout the course of a day from muscle glycogen and corresponding water loss. Even on rest days, I find that I am sometimes lighter before bed than I was when I woke up.
I agree completely that you "metabolise fat" all day long. I communicated this poorly in my original post.
In my experiments (using the widely understood concept of "morning weight = true weight") the fat I burned did not come off my body in a measurable way until after I slept. If I didn't sleep, my weight did not diminish until I did. The worse/less sleep I had effected the amount of weight I lost.
I tracked weight loss for a month. Eating only one meal a day. I recorded multiple times a day my weight. Only in the morning did I actually record any "loss".
So, I did some tests for this. I stayed up all night to see if I lost weight in the morning like every other day, but I didn't.
I slept, woke up in the afternoon, and I had lost .5 pounds from the previous day.
Something special happens during sleep that is unrelated to a general concept of metabolism, but instead a specific process. It's like some kind of processing the bodies does that is related to weight loss/waste management that does not occur at all (or maybe only a little?) when you are awake. (my amateur assessment)
>Something special happens during sleep that is unrelated to a general concept of metabolism, but instead a specific process.
Sure a number of your systems are shut down while sleeping that otherwise are active as you are awake, and other become more active.
Just one example is the spike of human growth hormone (typically around 75% of HGH is released during sleep), HGH is directly related to metabolism and weight loss/gain. Also as You probably know actual fat loss (as opposed to water weight) is a function of breathing, as in fat isn't "burned" or you don't sweat out fat, but fat is metabolized a literally breathed out of the body, and during REM sleep breathing is increased.
By no means is this an exhaustive list, but beyond maybe sweating a little more than normal (again water weight not fat loss) while sleeping, any actual weight loss is all a function of hormones/metabolism.
Did you ever test exercise? Just yesterday, before my workout (squats and bench press, no cardio), I weighed 202. Just after my workout, I weighed 200.
I've seen myself lose up to 5lbs before and after a workout.
Yes, I weighed myself before and after exercising multiple times, and there was a slight shift, but a glass or two of water evened the weight back out immediately. So, I would chalk that up to simple water loss. (like you and other have as well)
Totally this. I kid you not, I fasted the entire day and somehow weighted the same, and when I slept for three to four hours I literally woke up 2 lbs. less. It almost defies reason the importance of sleep in weight loss.
Probably gives new hypothesis of “dad weight”, you gain weight because you don’t get good sleep after having a kid.
> “dad weight”, you gain weight because you don’t get good sleep after having a kid.
No this is because you've had a baby and don't need to be in good shape to keep or sleep with your partner, so you stop going to the gym, eating well, doing exercise etc. Applies to both sexes.
As a new dad who has put back on some weight, I'd say the biggest reason is not about "keeping my partner" but purely how I rate different things I need to spend my effort, time and energy on. Less time and more stress makes me more likely to make some poor health decision - for example heading out for a walk or a run would help but right now I'm knackered and just want to sit down because it's the first break I've had today. Or order in food because my plan to cook earlier failed due to an unexpected _something_ or just plain comfort eating.
Kids are great, but undeniably add time and stress. Maintaining good healthy habits is not impossible, but it's easier to let them slide.
a lot of that is water weight, I almost always have to average a weeks worth of weight to get a stable reading on the weight changes. I also, gain like +2lbs if I eat a salty meal the night before.
This is just not true. As a counterpoint, I have done 48 hour wakeful crunch time sessions before with very little eating (about 400-800 kcal/day). I typically lost 5 lbs over that time (which I mostly gained back as much of it was water, but also lost some fat and muscle). Don’t extrapolate your anecdotal personal data like that.
Your weight is mostly a function of how much stuff is in your bowels, glycogen, how hydrated you are (indirectly how much salt you have), your muscle mass, fat mass, and then a relatively static amount for the rest (organs, skeleton). Sleeping does not magically make you lose weight. You just lose a lot of water while you sleep due to breathing, and might lose a small amount of fat and/or glycogen
> I did tests for weight loss. I found that you don't lose weight until you sleep.
Your test lacked any semblance of science. Aside from your unblinded sample of 1, you obviously didn’t run a control.
Weigh yourself. Now don’t eat or drink anything for 8 hours. Now weigh yourself again. I bet the scale moves whether you’re sleeping for those 8 hours or not.
Gut contents were almost irrelevant in my tests. Logically I think this comes down to dehyrdated food weighs very, very little. So in general the weight of food is mostly from water. Therefore, gut contents don't contribute much to weight.
Hydration wasn't the issue, because I weighed myself consistently at regular intervals. And "true weight" (if that is right term) is supposed to be based on morning weight. Well I could compare morning, noon, even and night weight across all days for a month. So I could tell when I weighed at any particular time.
In my experiment I always was my lowest weight in the morning. The normal explanation is "because you pee'd and were dehydrated." Well, then if I stay up all night, don't drink anything extra, and pee in the morning as usual, then I should weigh the same as when I slept?
But that is not what happened. I didn't lose weight. Then i went to sleep, woke, urinated, and then I had lost the expected .5 pounds that afternoon instead.
Again, I only ate one meal a day (at the end of the day, 5pm, so this did not effect the sleep pattern), and I tested for water intake/urination.
I lost on average .5 lbs a day, and that day I didn't lose that weight until after sleeping until the afternoon.
I seem to have stirred up a hornets nest by making this claim, but I was careful about my testing, and it's not a crazy notion.
It is a crazy notion and you weren't careful about your testing. So far it sounds like you didn't actually measure the weight of your consumption and excretion. You just assumed they stayed constant. You also assume other things like that you pee the same volume after sleeping as after not sleeping.
Yep, what if you pee more after sleeping? I agree. But I found that it affected total weight loss, I didn't lose as much when my sleep was affected.
My assumption is that waste, fat, energy process is complicated, and that something happens during sleep that the body gets rid of stuff, and if it doesn't have enough time to do that, it will just leave some things in place.
This is a logical conclusion based on limited resources = limited outcome. The assumption I am challenging is simply that "diet + exercise" = weight control. But I have found that you need "diet + exercise + quality sleep" = weight control in my tests. But then later, I found that "diet + sleep" = weight control. (I have not exercised for over 2 years now testing this, weighing myself daily)
After this experiment a few years ago I gained almost all the weight lost in 6 months. But then lost _more_ weight without any exercise at all. (I stopped exercising entirely for more than a year to test this theory)
And I found that I could eat 2 meals a day, no exercise, good sleep and I could lose weight. And as soon as I break my good patterns (any of the ones I mentioned in my comments already), weight will come back on.
> My assumption is that waste, fat, energy process is complicated, and that something happens during sleep that the body gets rid of stuff, and if it doesn't have enough time to do that, it will just leave some things in place.
That sounds a lot to an outsider like you'd already made up your mind before you even started. That leads to terrible experimental hygiene, and you're missing a lot of important details in the naive experimentation procedure:
0. Nothing in the body happens at a constant rate. It's wildly inaccurate to assume that everything will happen at the same pace from day to day, even if you change nothing about your behavior.
1. When people talk about losing "weight", what they really mean is losing fat.
2. Without exercise, your muscles atrophy.
3. Muscles weigh something, but that's not the weight you want to lose. The reason that it's diet + exercise and not literally just diet is partly because people want an excuse to not put down the fork but mostly because exercise is critical for physical and mental health beyond weight loss.
4. Nobody says that sleeping isn't important for all kinds of things. Sleeping _is_ important. For one thing, sleeping well help you maintain your diet and exercise better. You will be happier, you may be satiated by eating less, and you will be able to push yourself harder while exercising. But none of those things mean that you're specifically losing weight while you sleep.
5. You don't immediately excrete everything that you took in the previous day when you get up in the morning. It takes a lot longer than one day to pee out your body's retained water unless you're plowing through intense diuretics (DO NOT DO THIS).
6. All of your poop is food that your body didn't absorb plus bacteria that live and die in your intestines. Your body doesn't clear cellular waste that way. You also don't immediately poop out everything from the day before when you get up in the morning unless you're plowing through intense laxatives (DO NOT DO THIS).
7. Your body does clear cellular waste through your urine, but by mass the waste that you pee out (as opposed to all the water) is just not very much.
8. By far the vast majority of weight lost is from carbon exhaled as CO2 [ref1], which you literally do all the time, not just when you sleep.
9. Sleep affects how often and how much you pee (kidney filtration rate) and poop (gut motility).
I hate to be blunt. But this is as much pseudoscience as the anti vaxers. Losing weight and gaining weight is simple physics. There is also a big difference between losing weight based on water weight and losing real body mass.
I sweat like a pig anytime I work out. I use to teach two hour fitness classes and even now after the end of a workout, I’ve “lost 5 pounds” but that’s pure water weight. I’m burning around 1000-1200 calories during that time. If I rehydrate and drink lots of water afterwards, I’ll “gain” 3 pounds.
If you are “losing weight” by being hungry or by limiting when you eat, you are losing weight because you are consuming less calories.
The same was cited in the article. The chess players are forgetting to eat.
Losing weight and gaining weight is simple physics.
Nothing about the body is simple.
- There is a virus that studies suggest (show correlation) increase weight gain [1]
- There is a study that shows water in != water out (unfortunately my googlefu is failing me though).
- Empirical: I've lost weight eating 900 calories/day and I've lost weight eating 3500 calories/day with the same level of exercise. The difference was the 900 were carbs, the 3500 was >90% protein.
I hate to use the old correlation is not causation....
But even if the virus does “cause” obesity, is it causing obesity by slowing down the host’s metabolism (decreasing the calories out) or increasing appetite (increasing calories in)?
CICO is a copout. Calories in is relatively simple. Calories out is hideously complex. When people describe weird things that metabolism does, real or fake, they're things that shift the Calories Out numbers way beyond the simple results you get from body composition and exercise level.
There are so many separate ways for calories to go "out", too.
So it gets used in this unfair double-standard way, where managing weight is "just CICO", as if it's a handful of inputs into a one-line equation, but if someone argues against that, saying it's more complex, then the natural response is "well actually CICO includes every single complication you've mentioned, so you're wrong to object".
It is just CICO, whether you won the genetic lottery that makes the calculation simpler or not doesn't mean it's any less of a cop out than saying that it would be simpler for me to be a great basketball player if I were 6 foot 8 instead of 5 foot 5.
Something can be both true and used in a misleading manner.
To use your same metaphor, there are people going around speaking as if height and total hours of training are the only things that matter for basketball skill.
Understand that there are necessary and sufficient conditions. A sufficient condition for obesity is too high chronic caloric intake.
A necessary condition is retention of this surplus.
Some people will feel correctly full when they overeat high calorie foods, others only if volume is too big, yet others have the distended stomach where even that does not work. Some have hormonal deficit that makes them retain more (e.g. hypothyroidism) or counters satiety signaling. Others have very wasteful metabolism or digestion where less is retained. Some really do highly strenuous activities that just demand more energy.
Ultimately you set a caloric target with a carefully constructed diet and watch the long term weight slope over months. That's the science of it. Even high fat ad lib diets ultimately resulted in caloric input restriction, stronger than other diets they tried. (see Cambridge study)
> Ultimately you set a caloric target with a carefully constructed diet and watch the long term weight slope over months. That's the science of it. Even high fat ad lib diets ultimately resulted in caloric input restriction, stronger than other diets they tried. (see Cambridge study)
Agreed, but I'd characterize all that as focusing on the "Calories In" part. That's complicated enough itself, and avoids implying that the entire situation is some trivial function.
You might try clicking the link I provided. The Wikipedia page details the virus and provides links to other sources one of which was conducted on chickens where they measure input/output and still saw positive weight gain.
I think all berdon is trying to say by "not simple physics" is that even though CICO is true, it's not helpful to people trying to lose weight because there are many other conditions (e.g. a virus) that can affect the body's metabolism - to a limited extent. This particular virus seems to make you fatter even on a precise calorie controlled diet, which implies it must reduce your metabolism.
For the record I disagree with this - I think CICO is a helpful way to think about weight loss, because it implies that if you aren't losing weight on a calorie controlled diet, you simply haven't cut enough. (Though serious problems might be indicative of some medical condition, in which case you should consult a doctor to see if it can be alleviated to make CICO easier.)
CO may be difficult for a person to manipulate, and raising CI to put on weight may be physically difficult, expensive, or ineffective. However, reducing CI takes willpower but will make you lose weight. If you reduce it enough. Somebody may have a CO so low that the reduction in CI required to lose weight might require medical supervision (e.g. to prevent malnutrition.) That's probably not the case for most people though; certainly not people like myself. If I mustered the willpower to eat less, I would doubtlessly lose weight.
If I were to fall for some of the new-age mumble jumble about weight being some innate genetic trait like iris color, I'd think myself helpless. If I were such a person, being informed of CICO would doubtlessly improve my life.
> However, reducing CI takes willpower but will make you lose weight. If you reduce it enough. Somebody may have a CO so low that the reduction in CI required to lose weight might require medical supervision (e.g. to prevent malnutrition.) That's probably not the case for most people though; certainly not people like myself.
Yes, this is exactly my point. I'm simply giving a measured defense of what berdon has been saying further up this thread: CO is not a known constant and may vary based on certain medical conditions. Because of this, CICO can sometimes (I think berdon would say frequently) be unhelpful advice to someone trying to lose weight, because they struggle with cutting CI far enough to lose weight, which may be due to a person's health and biological makeup.
Then I think berdon's concerns are misprioritized. It's very rare for the necessary reduction in CI to require medical supervision. The overwhelming majority of obese people in America are eating more than is reasonable to eat, and a reduction in consumption would improve their lives considerably with no real risk of malnutrition occurring.
By focusing on obscure edge-cases, all we're really doing is to make it easier for people in the common case to rationalize away their situation. That's very common. There are more voluntary overeaters who claim they have an involuntary obesity-inducing disorder than there are people who actually have such disorders. I've got a whole family full of them. A big bowl of ice cream after every meal is a choice, not a genetic condition.
Partialrecall - my concerns are my own but the point I was attempting to make has nothing to do with what you're talking about. All of which I agree.
My point is the body is very complex and any attempt to simplify it is doing a disservice to anyone listening to you.
I was overweight for 20 years and lost the weight by calorie reduction. It works - clearly. But in a forum reserved for educational discussion I'm not OK glossing over the complexity of the body because it's true in the general case. That'd be as sinful as saying quantum physics is wrong because newtonian is generally the deciding set of rules.
Nobody is glossing over it, it is subject of active research. Until that research produces any generally useful results (drugs, tests, treatments), the advice stays the same.
We know exactly one applicable test: thyroid hormone levels. This one is worth checking.
Eat less everything but more fresh vegetables, especially greens, exercise more. How much depends on how fat you are - not necessarily just overweight, body composition and fat percentage is more important and still reliably measurable.
"Toffee" kind of fat is a thing, where a thin looking and not very heavy person is actually fat inside, just lost muscle so weight stayed similar.
On the other hand, nobody wants people with big muscle mass to always cut diet to levels expected of show body builders.
I think the word you’re looking for is “anecdotal”.
No one here knows anything about your TDEE so it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that you could lose weight on 3500 calories/day. If your TDEE is >3500, then yeah, weight loss. Especially since the thermic effect of food is quite high for protein, and that people suck at accurately recording or even measuring their actual intake.
I addressed your concerns over my TDEE by stating both instances occurred under the same level of activity and general conditions. In both instances, I lost about the same amount of weight weekly as well. I've also been counting calories for longer than 10 years and at that time I had a spreadsheet with such granular detail I could track the average duration and quantity of protein still within my gut based on average timing, etc.
...
Actually...empirical works as well. I think anecdotal is just the latest trend.
Empirical
based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic.
"they provided considerable empirical evidence to support their argument"
You didn’t originally say that you lost weight at the same rate, making your statement almost meaningless. Now that you’ve added that statement, I honestly just don’t believe your assessment. This isn’t a judgement call and I’m not questioning your truthfulness. I simply think your observation was either biased, incomplete, or insufficient.
My gut says you did this for too short of a period of time for the results to be meaningful, or else that you’ve left out something meaningful, or that you simply didn’t accurately measure your caloric intake. If you were losing weight on 3500 calories/day, then your TDEE was north of 3500. If you dropped to 900 calories, you’d be in a 2600 calorie/day deficit without even accounting for whatever deficit you were in initially. I don’t care if that was all HFCS, you’d be losing over 5 pounds a week. That’s major weight loss and I don’t believe you saw the same weight loss at 3500 calories and 900 calories for an extended period of time. It simply doesn’t work from a physical standpoint.
“Empirical” to me implies a level of data that you don’t get from a singular anecdote.
You're right, I didn't say I lost weight at the same rate. Oh well.
Cool? It seems you're mostly interested in your own opinions - both with regards to my empirical evidence and your connotation of the word. I'm not interested in either.
Also, your analysis of my losing weight on 3500 calories requiring my TDEE to be >3500 is drastically marred by your clear assumption that a calorie = a calorie. You're incapable of accepting anything that doesn't fall into line with that assumption. Strong bias.
Please provide any evidence that a carb calorie counts for nearly 4 protein calories and I’ll take your anecdote a lot more seriously. You’re making an extraordinary claim with no evidence. Why would I accept your anecdote over my “assumption” that dietary scientists weren’t all completely incompetent when they agreed that a calorie is roughly a calorie? How is it that you calculated a 4:1 conversion and everyone with an actual lab doesn’t?
If you told me that one time your car got 120 mpg because you switched to premium fuel, I’d likewise not believe you. I’m much more likely to think your gauge is faulty or you misread your actual results.
As much as you might want your personal anecdote to be compelling, it just isn’t. I’m not going to give your anecdote the same weight that I give the broad scientific consensus.
I want to expand a little bit more: The body can be simplified down into an input/output black-box - almost like a thevenin equivalent. But most people unaccount for lost energy in the output. No two bodies are alike and no two bodies share the same efficiency in breaking down food, absorption, conversion, and excretion.
Yes, you can collect the excrement and analyze the output. But that analysis doesn't tell you much. You don't know how efficient the black body is so you don't know how much of the waste could have been utilized or not. Not only that, you don't know if the body's efficiency is static or dynamic based on inputs and outputs.
You're describing difficulties with precise measurement of inputs and outputs, but I don't think the difficulty of making those measurements refutes the core idea of CICO at all.
The difficulty of actually implementing CICO suggests we should have sympathy for those who fail. This doesn't refute CICO.
I don't think anyone disputes the laws of thermodynamics, just how the body processes different macronutrients in the presence of certain levels of hormones. By changing those hormones, you change the balance of the total energy equation. For example, I know someone with crohns disease, and her body just doesn't metabolize nutrients the same way mine does. I burn a donut more efficiently than she does. In this case it isn't about hormones, but about inflammation, but it's generally the same concept just on a more apparent scale.
Don't apologize. Regardless of his intent, he claimed
"I've lost weight eating 900 calories/day and I've lost weight eating 3500 calories/day with the same level of exercise. The difference was the 900 were carbs, the 3500 was >90% protein"
And if you're not trying to refute CICO, you better make damn clear that even though you're ingesting 3500 calories, you're essentially just crapping out most of it because our bodies can't process that much protein at once.
I've tracked calories for >10 years and macros for >5 years. And, at the time I spoke about, I was taking in protein continuously and meticulously tracking ingestion rate and time and estimating digested and excreted protein levels. But, even still, obviously I was shitting out most of it.
I actually do believe and advocate for CICO for most people. But I reject notions that anything related to the body is black, white, or simple and hold strongly to them as convictions. I tried to provide examples to those points with the last as an example that the C in CICO is a sneaky misnomer and better served as being an E. It's just that in the general case for most people E averages into C.
I do agree with you on the apology - it's the internet, no one expects an apology and if you do you're insane. Furthermore, I wasn't offended and was only pointing out the rhetorical tactic being employed.
It's super rare though that anyone in the world not on a special diet consumes this much protein. That's really hard, volumetrically, as protein is calorie sparse. Which is why it's useful for dieting, to keep volume and water in while keeping caloric content low. (With potential side benefits for satiety.)
CICO is mostly nonsense, because you can't control neither CI no CO.
CI is based what people eat, but how much and how often people eat (if you don't expect perfect and infinite willpower) is based on how hungry they are, and that is hormonally controlled, based on complex feedback loop that includes insulin levels (so what you eat and how often) and activity levels.
CO includes many things you have no conscious control over, like heating (ever stopped being cold after a meal?), muscle repair and buildup, brain, etc. Only small fraction of that is exercise.
People saying "it's just CICO" are as disgusting as millionaires saying "just stop being poor, it's easy, you have to make more than you use" while knowing nothing (and not caring) about student loans, healthcare costs for non-insured people, housing crisis or anti-labor practices that suppress wages.
> CICO is mostly nonsense, because you can't control neither CI no CO.
This is a wholesale abdication of responsibility and an embrace of victimhood.
Yes, there are elements of calories out that aren’t fully in your control. However these place a lower bound on calories out. You can absolutely increase your exercise and activity level.
On the other side, you are very much in control of your calories in. You can choose to eat a better diet (e.g. whole foods) that makes it easier to maintain a caloric deficit. You can choose to stop eating before full satiety. You can even go so far as to fast, cutting your calories in to 0. Obviously hunger matters but this idea that you can’t control your eating at all because you’re hungry is ridiculous.
You are very much in control of these factors. Yes, there are broad issues contributing to obesity but individuals are not relieved of their responsibility just because society also has problems.
This is both scientifically untrue and longitudinally true.
Of course if you use exercise to help create a calorie deficit you will lose weight. However, every single study shows that most people won’t lose weight by exercising. They overestimate how much they burn and underestimate how much they lose eat. Exercise also tends to make you hungrier and it makes it harder to not eat more. Also, hardly anyone has the discipline to work out consistently over a long period of time or the fitness level to work out long enough and have enough to use exercise as a weight loss tool.
I’m saying it’s more nuanced. Anecdotally, I spent a decade keeping weight off by exercising 10+ hours a week as a part time fitness instructor and training for runs. Even now I lose weight by exercising. But most people aren’t going to work out at the consistency and intensity that I do. It takes more discipline for me not to workout too much.
Gaining weight even when calorie controlled due to exercise is possible, but you will lose fat percentage while gaining muscle mass thus increasing base metabolic rate. Doubly good.
Which is why you should get one of the approximate fat percentage meters. (Clamp better than electric but less convenient.)
And maybe run a DEXA or volumetric body composition scan sometimes.
Another good easy measure is the belt size, for obese people. Smaller is better. Or waist/hip ratio. Requires a tape measure, that's it.
If you exercise and weight stays the same but belt size goes down, you're on the right track.
Exercise can absolutely contribute to weight loss. It does not guarantee weight loss because an individual can always eat more than they burn (and indeed many do). That doesn’t mean it’s not a very useful tool for weight loss in a continued caloric deficit.
Maintain your caloric intake level “at maintenance” and add 5 miles of running per day and you’ll lose weight.
You’re clearly speaking in generalities because the evidence is absolutely there that people can lose weight by exercising. But if you’re speaking in generalities then people basically don’t lose weight at all. The studies indicate that nearly no one keeps weight off long term.
If you restrict your sample to the select few that do keep off the weight, some do it with diet alone. Some do it with diet and exercise. Some very few do it with exercise alone. Any of these strategies can work. But in general, none of them do.
Sorry, is there something specific in that article that supports your claim, because I’m skimming over it and seeing lots of stuff that supports the assertion that people do indeed lose weight from exercise, that it generally requires a relatively high amount of exercise, but that it varies a lot between individuals.
> Overall, the changes in weight in response to ET without caloric restriction are highly heterogeneous and individual differences can span weight gain to clinically significant weight loss.
> Supervised ET studies which have demonstrated clinically significant weight loss with aerobic ET (without caloric restriction) have far exceeded the minimum levels of physical activity according to public health definitions. Ross et al. observed an 8% weight loss in obese men after 12 weeks of aerobic ET with no alterations in dietary habits(daily exercise sessions of 700 kcals). In a different study, Ross et al. observed an 6.8% weight loss in premenopausal women (BMI>27) following 14 weeks of aerobic ET with an energy expenditure of 500 kcals per session. In the Midwest Exercise Trial, Donnelly et al. (n=131) observed a 5.3% weight loss in men after 16 weeks of aerobic ET at approximately 2,000 kcals per week. In contrast, the women in the exercise group did not have a significant change in weight (0.7 kg) following the intervention, but the exercise program prevented the weight gain observed in the control group (2.9 kg.) Thus, clinically significant weight loss is possible with aerobic ET without caloric restriction, but it requires a high ET volume. For the general population, these ET volumes may not be practical or sustainable.
In general, weight loss intervention doesn’t work well. Most people fail to lose significant weight, to adhere for an extended time, or to keep the weight off for years. This is the case no matter how the weight loss is achieved. Even gastric bypass patients often manage to gain back enough weight to get back to the obese mark. That doesn’t mean weight loss is impossible, but it is definitely hard. Exercise is absolutely a way to lose weight, but you have to be serious about it and do considerably more than the minimum recommendation, or you have to restrict calories, or preferably both. And you have to somehow maintain long term if you don’t want to immediately gain it back.
The evidence doesn’t say it’s not possible. If we were all homo logicus exercised consistently and kept our caloric intake in equilibrium to our BMR and added exercise on top of it, it can be done. But it doesn’t work in practice for most people.
Yes you can both control what you eat and how much you burn. In my heyday when between teaching fitness classes and training for runs, I was burning conservatively 5000 to 7000 calories a week, eating like a horse, and not gaining weight for over a decade.
After I stopped working out but didn’t cut back what I was eating enough, I gained 40 pounds over the next three years - and that’s a lot when you’re short.
The last two years, I’ve adjusted my calories in (brought them down) and my calories out - about 3000-4000 a week and I’m back down to about 5 pounds above my fitness heyday weight.
But, I would never tell anyone else the best way to lose weight is via exercise. Studies show that hardly ever works because people overestimate how much they burn exercising and underestimate how much they eat. Also in my experience, people statistically never get to the point where they exercise long enough, hard enough or consistently enough to lose weight. I would always tell people to focus on their diet and tell them to talk to a dietitian if they wanted to lose weight.
Wow, that's extremely judgemental. When I was on the swim team in highschool, I was fit as a fiddle. When I went to university I chose to stop swimming but also chose to continue eating the same (because I like food.) Predictably, I started to get fat. I'm certainly capable of eating less, and I am also capable of increasing my activity. Your rant denies that I have any agency in this matter, which is somewhat offensive.
And even if it were the case that I had no agency, it would still be the case that my weight loss was due to a CICO imbalance. CICO is a matter of physics, not ethics or morality.
>Losing weight and gaining weight is simple physics
I assume you're referring to the "energy in" vs "energy out" meme in weight-loss.
The body is not a closed system. While you _do_ have to balance your chemical equations for glucose catabolysis (or whatever), weight loss is far from a "simple physics" problem.
If you eat 500 calories and burn 600 calories, the energy has to come from somewhere. So in a sense it is actually a pretty simple physics problem.
It gets tricky because calculating calorie consumption is really hard (how much of what you ate was actually turned into energy) and calculating calorie expenditure is probably even harder.
>If you eat 500 calories and burn 600 calories, the energy has to come from somewhere.
Yes, hence "you have to balance your chemical equations", but we need to agree on what we're calling "eat" and "burn", here.
Burning 600 calories can just as well "work up an appetite" as it can "draw upon fat reserves".
We're used to thinking of weight loss as a behavioral problem withy metabolic symptoms ("he eats too much, so he got fat") whereas there's reason to consider it as a metabolic problem with behavioral symptoms ("the kind of food he eats signals to the body that fat should be created, so his body signals for him to eat more").
I've yet to meet a fat person who didn't eat large portions and sugary foods.
"It's a glandular problem," you'd often hear a few decades back. Now, there is other mumbo-jumbo. But, at the end of the day, fat people eat too much. Period. Mass is not created out of thin air. (Unless you're a plant.)
Whether this fact is "helpful" to people trying to lose weight, I'll leave to the psychologists. But, it's true. And, there are some fat people that do change their behavior when presented with the truth; namely, quit eating foods with so many carbs, starches, and sugars.
Of course they eat too much. The question is why? Taubes has a good example. If I asked you why that restaurant was so full, and you responded "because more people entered than exited," I would think you were an asshole. But CICO is the same kind of platitude. It doesn't actually tell you anything. Taubes and many others assert that the kind of food you put in your body dictates your drive to put more food in your body. Eat sugary foods, and you'll drive insulin, pack glucose away in adipose tissue, move less, and want to eat more. Sugar drives energy into adipose tissue AND slows your BMR AND drives hunger. That's a far more useful observation than CICO.
I’m always hungry. There is hardly ever a time that I feel completely satiated. In other words, there is never a time that I don’t have a drive to eat too much. It takes constant discipline to keep my calorie balance in check. As humans, we all have the mental capacity to not give in to our lizard brain.
I think the fundamental mistake of the last three decades of health advice is overestimating that capacity in the face of declining insulin sensitivity due to persistently high glycemic loads.
Well... sort of. There's a major difference in that restaurants usually don't have the ability to directly control how many people enter and how many people leave. So pointing out that there's an in/out inbalance is useless, as you say, since there's nothing that can be easily done about it, and that's obvious, so the person asking the question probably didn't want to know that.
In the case of eating, you can control directly how many calories are coming in, and you have at least a little control over how many calories are going out. So in fact CICO is very often useful: it's a kind of promise that if you cut your intake sufficiently you will lose weight.
It's true that certain diets will make you want to eat more calories: but the promise of CICO is that if you ignore what you are inclined to do, and simply focus on your intake, you will lose weight.
Obviously you are better off adjusting your diet too, but that's because doing so makes it easier by burning slightly more calories and making you slightly less hungry. What you're doing is a sort of sociological analysis: figuring out why people eat too much. Sure, if you can come up with tricks to eat less that help dieters, that's great, but people who want to diet fundamentally have to learn to ignore the instinct to eat and limit their intake.
Your body of course doesn't use energy it doesn't have. But it can balance the equation by restricting the output - lowering muscle repair (so post-workout recovery is slower), lowering brain supply (lowering concentration), lowering heating (so you fell cold), etc.
Whether the body decides to use stored energy or lowers output (while signalling hunger) is mostly hormonally controlled, by insulin and glucagon - this is why insulin resistance is such a problem.
Some research seems to show that portion restriction leads to lowered output while increasing time between meals (i.e. not snacking) lead to use of reserves, but I don't have a nice article to link.
Your bodies absorbsion of nutrients and yes calories is not a system in a vacuum. Nor it’s decision to store excess calories as fat. There’s a wide range of how much different types of foods affect different people. I had a friend who would eat (we counted) 4000 calories a day and couldn’t get over 120lb. Turns out they had a soy allergy and their bodies didn’t absorb the food.
Simplifying it to calories in calories out is a generalism of a generalism.
So your friend was unable to digest at least a thousand calories a day, likely more, and didn’t see fit to mention the endless diarrhea they must have been experiencing? If you’re spewing a thousand undigested calories out of your ass every day, you should know something isn’t right.
Yes, nobody is disagreeing with physics. But a discussion about weight gain/loss that always has people saying "calories in = calories out" is like a discussion of every business saying "well profit = revenue - expenses". Obvious but not helpful. The interesting thing is discussing how to modify those variables.
The flipside of this is that people generally want to argue endlessly about what are essentially micro optimizations instead of addressing the core issue. Maybe your gut flora are “out of balance”. Maybe your metabolism is a little lower than average. Sure, there are factors that can matter. But if you’re not losing weight you’re not in a caloric deficit. If you’re not gaining weight, you’re not in a caloric surplus (or you’re spewing diarrhea and should talk to a doctor).
Address the core issue first before arguing about minutiae. The emphasis on relatively low impact factors is especially unhelpful and unhealthy because people latch onto all these discussions as justification for why they can’t lose weight. Sure, an obese person might have a low metabolism[1], but if they eat 3500 daily calories and live an entirely sedentary lifestyle, those are probably the major causes.
[1] But they don’t. Study after study have shown that obese individuals have high metabolism because metabolism is tightly correlated with total body mass.
Most people aren't fat because they're lazy. Most people are fat because they eat too much. We have a culture that glorifies food, junkfood more than the rest. Overeating when eating junkfood is absurdly easy. Teaching people how to eat healthier and eat less is the best known way to help people lose weight.
Constantly talking about genetic predispositions, obscure metabolism suppressing viruses or gut flora does about jack shit to help people lose weight.
The minor difference between the weekly calorie expenditure of the average person and the morbidly obese is mostly meaningless. It’s much more about how much they eat.
That’s because waste generally doesn’t contain any significant usable calories. If you’re passing undigested food then obviously it starts to matter, as abusers of laxatives know. It’s not typically discussed because it’s not typically a meaningful factor and if it is you should already know.
Yeah, crapping out calories is a time-honored tradition among people with eating disorders who don't like to vomit.
Your body doesn't care how the calories go out. If they're gone, they're gone. If you eat 3000, but crap out 2000, your body doesn't say "Yeah, well, that's not how you usually get rid of calories, so get fat."
Just because our methods of recording aren't perfect doesn't mean that the core idea is wrong.
The point is that the body adapts to burn more or fewer calories depending on how much you eat. Restricting calories can possibly have the side effect of just lowering your metabolism, rather than just losing weight.
Restricting your calories and causing lower metabolism only works for so long. Otherwise a person would not be able to starve to death, which is obviously not the case.
Why are you bringing extreme cases when they're not relevant?
Reduced metabolism when dieting is a thing, and it's also correlated to weight loss. Less weight, less base metabolic rate. Down to a point which is irrelevant.
I think you're missing the point of the "meme". The point of the meme is that human bodies are not closed systems, and that the way to regulate the state of the system is to regulate what goes into and out of the system (if bodies were closed systems, there wouldn't be inputs or outputs to regulate.)
Some[1] will never drop the "simple physics" line because they don't care about learning about the biology of body weight, but rather reaffirming their aesthetic judgement that people they decide are overweight are also morally weak.
[1] Emphatically not judging anyone posting here; that's not my goal. I'm simply bluntly stating what has become painfully clear after having this discussion multiple times.
And some will endlessly argue against “simple physics” because magical thinking about metabolism avoids any hint of personal agency.
In a sense, the body isn’t “simple” because so many things can affect your total energy burn. But all of that really doesn’t matter much. If you continually decrease your caloric intake, eventually it will fall below your calorie burn and you will lose weight. Conversely if you continually increase your caloric intake, you will eventually gain weight (assuming you aren’t literally shitting out undigested food).
It’s not about aesthetic judgement. If you won the genetics lottery and have a high metabolism, you will have more calories out. If you won the genetic lottery and grow to be 7 feet as oppose to be 5 foot 5, you will burn more calories and find it easier to be slim.
I didn’t win the height genetic lottery or the higher than average metabolism genetic lottery, but I did win the mesomorph one. I naturally look muscular whether I lift or not and I pack on muscle quickly. That isn’t due to any moral strength.
Are you really saying that different people don’t naturally have different body types? I’m 5 foot 5 and 175 pounds. Based on BMI, I am “morbidly obese”. But I have a 32 inch waist, muscular looking legs and an objectively toned upper body with little body fat measured with calipers - 6 points. It’s not because I am a body builder. I’ve had this same basic shape whether or not I was lifting and I only occasionally been to the point where I lifted heavy.
I’ve seen other people my same height and weight with large stomachs and no tone and with a completely different waist to hip ratio.
That’s exactly what a somatype is. Some people also naturally gain muscle easier. Do you think that if your average person and a top tier athlete train the same amount of time they will have similarly outcomes?
While this is probably mostly true, there is good science indicating that certain hormonal portfolios "hold" onto calories better than others. There is a reason power lifters are spiking insulin post workout, people are taking steroids, and medical conditions can make you fat.
If my mother wants to cut weight, I'm telling her this. If an athlete has to make weight for a fight, this is a stupid way of thinking. At the end of the day, calories in calories out is an objectively good rule of thumb. It's not the be all end all rule though.
Medical conditions don’t cause mass to appear from nowhere that goes against the laws of physics. Yes medical conditions can cause your metabolism to slow down - decreasing calories out.
> While this is probably mostly true, there is good science indicating that certain hormonal portfolios "hold" onto calories better than others.
Yes, that's true, but too many people believe that hormones have a whole number multiplier effect when in fact they probably just nudge TDEE by, what, (off the cuff here) ten percent plus or minus? Maybe less?
Is that enough to significantly reduce a person's margin of error when they're doing CICO, particularly as they get closer to their ideal weight?
Absolutely.
Does that mean they'll get fat eating less than a thousand calories a day because hormones?
I never understood this point of view. It’s like people who didn’t believe in washing hands until bacteria were discovered.
Yes sure calories in calories out. But metabolism has so many variables. It can be revved up and burn a lot of calories. It can become quiescent when you are in starvation mode. What causes it to start using the fat reserves is definitely more than a univariate analysis. If there is a catalyst that starts breaking down fats faster it won’t matter that you are eating more.
Some people are naturally skinny and others put on weight quickly. This is already well known and shows that there are complex genetic inputs as well as other ones. We have to discover what those are. So saying it’s just calories in/out, stupid... nope!
It is still just calories in and calories out. Some people naturally have a higher metabolism and a higher basal metabolic rate. It still doesn’t change the equation.
Yes, it’s a well known fact that if you eat too few calories, that your metabolism slows down - and you burn less calories. That doesn’t make anything that the original poster said scientifically valid.
I saw all sorts of crazy crap that people believed would help them lose weight and tone when I was a part time fitness instructor like excercises that would help them spot reduce (no such thing) to people who tried to come into my classes wearing those plastic bags because they thought it would help them lose weight. They reported me to management plenty of times for not allowing them to come to my class like that and I would budge.
The problem with this line of thinking is the "just".
Sure, physics says it's calories in and out, and we all agree that mostly makes sense.
But -- how do you measure how many calories are going out? Sleep is known to have an impact on weight. How does one translate their sleep quality or sleep issues into a better "out" measure? How do you know how many calories are going out during all of the other things you do during the day? What about the thousands of assorted complex processes going on in your body that you aren't really aware of?
For the "in"... ok, so you studiously track everything you eat. What's the efficiency that your body absorbs all of the calories from the food you ate? How many of those calories pass through and aren't actually consumed? Is eating 1000 calories of lettuce really the same thing as eating 1000 calories of pork?
If fixing this for people was just about "the equation", weight loss would be a lot easier to solve.
"Calories in, calories out" is one of those things that sounds great, but is not nearly as practical for people to actually implement as people like to imagine.
Sleep only has a second order effect on weight. Almost all of the reasons that lack of sleep affect weight loss is due to overeating (calories in) and lack of exercise (calories in).
This is just like all of the studies showing diet soda causes weight gain.Diet soda doesn’t actually cause weight gain. Diet soda gives people the license to overeat and it may cause some people to crave real sugar more. I’m sure we’ve all seen people order a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, a large fry and a Diet Coke.
> Some people are naturally skinny and others put on weight quickly. This is already well known and shows that there are complex genetic inputs as well as other ones. We have to discover what those are. So saying it’s just calories in/out, stupid... nope!
I never really understood why this was always a catch-all trump card. So you can't gain/lose weight as easily as others. In my mind that just means you need to work harder rather than shrug your shoulders and say "nothing to be done". Specifically its people doing this that never look into their diet or are willing to change any of their habits.
Slightly related but Carol Dweck's growth mindset for education is literally this, but the difference is in people who believe they can't get in better shape and people that can.
Or people who are naturally fit with no effort vs. people who aren't willing to massively restrict their diet and live in discomfort for the rest of their lives since the body permanently adapts to expecting a certain amount of food: https://www.thecut.com/2016/05/weight-loss-metabolism-slows-...
First, I take issue with the cited article because the study referenced in the opening paragraph because they do not provide any discussion over limitations of their study. In particular, that members of the "Biggest Loser" show may have also been more extrinsically motivated by money and fame than intrinsically motivated to become healthy. Thus, when they failed to earn said money/fame, they returned to their normal behaviors.
> people who aren't willing to massively restrict their diet and live in discomfort for the rest of their lives
I also take issue with this statement. Many fitness motivation images on the Internet talk about rejecting temptation to work towards your goals. As I was thinking about this comment, I was reminded of Ben Stiller's pizza scene in the movie Dodgeball [1]. Jokes aside, the scene is a hyperbole to how even fit people are susceptible to temptation and take actions to not giving in. Not to Stiller's degree, but I can distinctly remember times where I just stare at the ice cream aisle with grocery shopping. It is my own mental discipline to not buy it. Quitting World of Warcraft to get in better shape is also a part of my past. Shifting to an active lifestyle is hard, it has a difficult initial start, but persevering through it has helped me become the healthier person I am. I also recall Jesse Shand's transformation [2], where I believe one of the phases of his weight loss was simply reducing the number of fast food meals he'd consume in a single sitting (instead of 8, only eat 7, etc).
There's a big difference willpowering yourself to stay at your natural state of skinnyness and willpowering through hunger-regulating systems in your body being permanently broken. Here's another reference if you didn't like the other study. https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-weight-...
You still seem to confound skinniness and willpower and again, the second link I showed someone well into 40+ BMI changing. Secondly, this article has a few issues as well. The participants are older, which we know is difficult to lose weight at (which does support your claim, but not for the same reasons). The article also does not appear to compare the participant's appetite increases to those of "healthy" individuals. What does an "8" represent, and would any person show the same signs?
I will assume that formerly obese people have higher cravings. No doubt a former heroin addict has cravings. I will accept that it is harder for these individuals. But again, that does not mean you shrug your shoulders and say "that's the way it is".
I’ve never known anyone who was “naturally fit”, defining fitness as the ability to work out at a certain level of intensity for a given amount of time.
I’ve known people to be naturally skinny or even tone but not “fit”.
This still boils down to calories in/out though. Metabolism goes under the 'out' column. It fluctuates, sure, but it's just as much an 'out' variable as exercise is.
The body has a choice: burn the stuff now or lower metabolism and store the stuff for later. You can lower your intake, and the system can decide to lower metabolism to store some more. Obviously this can't go on forever, but maybe it can go on enough to impact other factors, like availability of glucose to run willpower.
Or not. Figuring out how and if those adjustments are made and how to control them is the next step after you say "calories in = calories out", which is only a first and smallest step in figuring it out.
It kind of is actually. Nobody escapes the law of universal conservation of energy. Sure some people due to genetics will store more of the energy they consume as fat than others. But if you have an energy deficit the body will consume itself to the tune of that exact deficit, period, end of. It will be a mixture of fat and muscle, but the body does try to maintain muscle to the extent you are utilizing it given there is sufficient protein to maintain it. So lift weights or do resistance training enough to keep the muscle you wish to retain and maintain a good amount of protein intake to support this as well, and the bulk of your body mass consumed will be fat. Other than that it is just maintaining an energy deficit, and the best technique is the one you personally can adhere to consistently.
This is a very false assumption, genetics absolutely do play a role in how much fat from dietary intake will be stored vs expelled as waste. Burning fat on the other hand, is universal and follows the law of conservation referred to in my other comment.
While I'm sure genetics makes a difference (as it does with everything), I doubt it's that significant. I'd be shocked if there's more than a 10% difference, if even that much.
Would love to see a source that backs up your claim.
This surprises me. I find that being hungry dulls my edge and makes me noticeably less clever. It's easy for me to forget to eat if I'm doing something mindless, but when I'm actively problem solving I find that I become more aware of my hunger (and other forms of general discomfort.)
Elsethread another poster was downvoted for saying it[0], but amphetamines make it much easier to get so focused on a task you forget to eat. I experimented with it for a while and even I, a food addict, forgot to eat if I was truly engaged in something.
[0] Probably because his tone was accusational, though anyone who thinks chess grandmasters are any less willing to use performance drugs than any other high-end athlete is kidding themselves.
Chess players are drug tested by WADA for major tournaments. Amphetamines would not necessarily help those without ADHD because they would slow down their thought process. Time management is an important part of the game and simply remaining focused is not difficult for top players.
Also amphetamines don't "make you so focused that you forget to eat." Amphetamines directly inhibit appetite.
My own anecdata supports the idea that amphetamines can cause me to forget to eat. If I take two of my dextroamphetamine pills, eating becomes a chore.
One form of discomfort that sharpens me is the sensation of sleep deprivation kept at bay by caffeine. It has a dissociative effect that I find helps me concentrate. Reaching that state probably takes a toll on my body though.
Perhaps the effects of discomfort on concentration are malleable, not inherit traits of the individual. Maybe, with the right kind of expectations and mindset, I could make the sensation of hunger work for me instead of against me.
For me at least I feel its more like I'm dealing with unmedicated ADHD and need to slow my brain with tiredness and then jolt it just enough with some Diet Dr Pepper to get the sharpness back.
Interesting. For a lot of gamers and programmers it's the opposite. Intense focus and engagement often results in forgetting to eat and/or sleep. This is well known in the gaming community.
Gaming is an activity that I filed under mindless, I don't play many games these days but I have in the past and generally noticed myself eating less. Typically when I play games these days I listen to an audiobook or podcast at the same time and my attention is on the audio more than the game, for which I'm basically on autopilot.
I never been big on puzzle games though, I prefer games like doom or quake. Fast games that focus on reaction time and spatial awareness, rather than problem solving. If I were playing something slow and complex (chess, minesweeper, etc), I expect I'd probably be more aware of my hunger.
I find that there's a window where being hungry makes me mentally lethargic, but past that window, hunger tends to disappear and I find my focus and energy renewed
It may be the case that timing of meals affects how your body stores the resources from them. Anecdotally, I've also felt that if I eat the same amount of food earlier in the day, not right before bed, that it doesn't stick as easily.
> Losing weight and gaining weight is simple physics.
> you are losing weight because you are consuming less calories.
This is only true in the first up to 6 months of a calorie-restriction diet. Then, body adjusts its metabolism (lower body temperature, making you feel more lethargic to keep you from exercising, etc) and your weight begins to slowly climb back up, sans any further calorie restriction. At this point, it's easy for a dieter to blame himself of lacking willpower: "it worked, and it stopped working now, I must've been not strict enough!".
The same thing happens if you force someone to overeat even if they're not hungry. They will gain weight -- for up to 6 months. Then, the body increases its base metabolic rate and adjusts to the new food intake level.
As Dr. Jason Fung meticulously explains in his book Obesity Code, there seems to be a weight set point. He then argues that the root cause of obesity, and the body's set weight point, is insulin resistance.
The books hails your grandma's advice: "Cut back sugars and starchy foods. No snacking."
This is from the last part (The Solution):
1. Reduce your consumption of added sugars.
2. Reduce your consumption of refined grains.
3. Moderate your protein intake.
4. Increase your consumption of natural fats.
5. Increase your consumption of fiber and vinegar.
The author also stresses the importance of fasting.
Everything the book asserts seems to be pretty well backed by science, go check for yourself.
Source: Obesity Code by Dr. Jason Fung. Read it, it's not only a brilliant weight loss book, but also a wonderful book about how the wrong incentives for companies have led to the obesity epidemic in the US.
This is absolutely false. Having lost 160 lbs over the course of two years I can say it is absolutely possible to continue losing weight from calorie restriction. Does it get harder to lose the same amount of weight? Absolutely. You are getting lighter and your base metabolic rate diminishes. You have to eat less food or do more exercise to maintain the same deficit. In reality, your burn rate just goes down. I was initially losing 3.5 lbs a week not even trying, in the end it was down to maybe half a pound a week in the final weeks. Your body doesn't enter some magical mode at 6 mos though, of course if you don't change what you're doing you will plateau in line with your decreasing BMR, but it just means you have to keep tweaking the formula of energy in vs out or accept a slower rate of fat loss. The exercise in itself though is pretty much entirely psychological.
I'm not saying it's impossible to keep losing weight by calorie restriction beyond 6 months, I'm saying that _sans further calorie restriction_ you don't lose weight.
> Yes, it gets harder to continuously lose weight
This is your body adjusting its basal metabolic rate and you having to implement further calorie restriction to achieve the same benefit.
People aren’t misunderstanding what you’re saying; what you’re saying is just wrong. It may be accurate within a limited range - a few hundred calories/day, perhaps - but is obviously wrong in the limit.
Yeah. To weigh 300 pounds you need to consume so many calories a day.
To weigh 200 pounds, you need to consume a different number of calories.
If you weigh 300 and start eating the 200 pound amount, you will lose weight. Slower over time as the difference between your weight and your consumption becomes less.
Once you reach 200 pounds, you won't continue to lose weight.
The same thing happens if you force someone to overeat even if they're not hungry. They will gain weight -- for up to 6 months. Then, the body increases its base metabolic rate and adjusts to the new food intake level.
There is an existence proof that this isn’t true - watch “My 600lb Life”.
They way to look at this from a insulin resistance perspective is that years overeating caused them to develop insulin resistance, which in turn caused them to become obese.
And when they are given tools to help them not to overeat like a gastric bypass did their insulin level resistance decrease?
Also on the same show, when they were put under medical supervision where they had to consume only 1200 calories a day they would drop around 30-50 pounds. There was one guy who would lose 20 pounds in a week (he weighed over 800 pounds) when his mom couldn't sneak food to him.
That depends, in some people it's resistance first (essentially prediabetes), in others it's obesity first.
Some others develop insulin resistance when even moderately obese, there are a few who never develop it despite being extremely overweight.
The lower insulin resistance, the better the effect of diet, usually.
If that were true, weight loss surgery wouldn’t help. It takes away their ability to eat too much at once by reducing the size of their stomach. - it doesn’t change their insulin levels.
If you watch the show, most of them overeat as a coping mechanism and part of the treatment is psychological help.
CICO implies equal weight to all foods, it's moronic. White sugar has less calories, 407 calories per 100 grams than peanuts have for example, 567 calories per 100 grams. Let's do an experiment, I'll eat 502 grams of peanuts per day (2835 calories) while you eat 700 grams of white sugar per day (2835 calories). Surely it will have the same effect according to CICO.
I am just reporting on real data I collected and asked a question. What are you suggesting is "pseudoscience" that I said?
I agree that not eating is what caused weight loss more than anything else. But, I have found that solid waste is not where I lost weight, but through urine. And I mean weight loss as in fat, not water.
I understand that it's on me to prove my methodology, not expect you to assume I did it right. That is fair.
The data is multiple points of weight recorded every day (4 times a day) over a month, with a follow up a few years continued observance based on the results. Also, daily exercise and daily diet were documented as well (during the month of testing).
Granted, I did not measure "fat" with calipers or other methods, but I measured my waist (though I did not document this, my failure), where I lost my fat from. Sure, not perfect. But it's enough to prove _something_ was happening. I went from 202 down to 185 lbs. And my pants didn't fit properly half way through, and were baggy by the end.
I think it's fair that "explained phenomena" here, with one meal a day, 2 miles (up to 3 by the end) of running (8 minute miles avg. by the end) and slimming waist, limbs and neck was evidence of 15+ lbs of fat loss, not dehydration.
Science doesn't have to be perfect to demonstrate worth or value in a concept.
Aren’t you arguing against your point? You cut down the amount of calories in and you increased calorie expenditure. You probably also gained lean muscle mass that helped to increase your basal metabolic rate.
This goes more to show what everyone knows based on accepted science.
I'd put it at 90%, because keeping BMR higher helps. It's very hard to run even close to half of the BMR extra for most obese people as that's very strenuous, many hours of exercise.
Except it's not. The body is not a closed system. The law of conservation of mass & energy just means you have to balance your chemical equations. It doesn't necessarily mean eating more will make you fat. (Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't ... it's just not necessarily the case.)
Appeal to intuition: you can eat 10k calories of straight lard, and you will crap most of it out. You can do other things to "burn off" that excess energy, too, like build muscle, raise your body temperature, etc.
To be clear: I don't know to what extent (if any) the body does any of the above things. My point is that the "calories in vs calories out" meme is so inaccurate that it borders on dead-wrong.
In any case where someone is mentioning CICO seriously, it's meant in the sense of a regular human diet (not necessarily balanced and healthy). Making a point from a fallacious example is a waste of time.
> I found that you don't lose weight until you sleep.
Hilariously, this implies that if you never sleep you don't need to eat. All we need to do now is figure out a way to put people on enough drugs that they never sleep, run them on treadmills, and voilà, FREE ENERGY!
I track my vital metrics religiously. Last week, I interviewed at three companies who have intensive technical interviews (Dropbox, Google, Apple).
The morning after the second interview, at Google which was intensive, I was my lowest weight ever in several years (dropped three to four pounds from five days before)
I gained the weight back after a week. But it was interesting to observe the physiological effects from interviewing. I'm not surprised to read about such physiological effects from long, mentally intensive activities.
(I thought I did well enough in my interviews but I didn't make it past the hiring committee at Google, or Dropbox)
I was going to ask: actual weight or water weight? Because I do tend to dehydrate myself in new/unfamiliar places, especially when forced to do things to someone else's schedule and without my favorite things to drink on hand.
But a week seems too long to gain it back unless you weren't measuring very often.
I'd love to track blood pressure, pulse, and weight religiously but it's hard to remember to do any more than highly irregularly, and the app I use for bp and weight can't track pulse.
This included water weight. My body's water weight during that time, if my scale is to be trusted, was between 52.0-53.0% during that week of interviews. It is consistent with levels before my interviews.
I was wearing a HRM tracker for two of the interviews, but I didn't turn it on any activities to track frequent metrics. Heart rate was elevated for the entire interview, like I was briskly walking. In my hardest Google interview, my heart rate was at its peak.
Let's say you had 5 interviews over the course of five days, each lasting 5 hours. You presumably lost 1800 grams (around 4 lbs) of fat during that time, which would require energy expenditure of 37000 joules. Let's also assume you ate the same as you usually do for weight maintenance.
If you spent all that energy during the interviews, it would require sustained power output of 740 watts over your usual energy expenditure.
If you spent all that energy during waking hours (let's say 16 hours a day), it would require power output of 230 watts over usual energy expenditure.
And finally, if you spent that energy during entire day, it would require power output of 155 watts over usual energy expenditure.
For reference, energy expenditure that would amount to 2000 kcal/day turns out to be around 100 watts. Losing 1800 grams over 5 days would require additional 3240 kcals on top of that.
This agrees with my experience during particularly stressful days at work. I weigh myself every morning and can see a significant drop in weight during days where I am stressed/mentally taxed.
Most people don't realize that a huge amount of their basal metabolism goes into operating the brain. Just "keeping the lights on" in the average person accounts for around 20% of your total daily energy expenditure! 6k cals/day is highly suspect, but anyone who has spent all day thinking hard can attest to how tiring it can be. That big brain of ours eats a lot of calories.
The other thing is that stress causes the body to produce cortisol - the catabolic hormone which makes it easier for your body to break down tissue into energy. Naturally, this causes our body to respond with an instinct to take in energy. In many folks, this prompts overeating, which is why stress is often blamed for increases in fat, but if you don't adjust your diet at all, it can accelerate energy expenditure.
I first wrote this as a reply in this thread and now I'm looking at it, I think it's relevant to the article as a whole -- sugar, insulin, calorie reduction, stress, fitness in general. I believe that the "diet" mentioned in the article is in effect a calorie-restriction one.
> Losing weight and gaining weight is simple physics.
> you are losing weight because you are consuming less calories.
This is only true in the first up to 6 months of a calorie-restriction diet. Then, body adjusts its metabolism (lower body temperature, making you feel more lethargic to keep you from exercising, etc) and your weight begins to slowly climb back up, sans any further calorie restriction. At this point, it's easy for a dieter to blame himself of lacking willpower: "it worked, and it stopped working now, I must've been not strict enough!".
The same thing happens if you force someone to overeat even if they're not hungry. They will gain weight -- for up to 6 months. Then, the body increases its base metabolic rate and adjusts to the new food intake level.
As Dr. Jason Fung meticulously explains in his book Obesity Code, there seems to be a weight set point. He then argues that the root cause of obesity, and the body's set weight point, is insulin resistance.
The books hails your grandma's advice: "Cut back sugars and starchy foods. No snacking."
This is from the last part (The Solution):
1. Reduce your consumption of added sugars. 2. Reduce your consumption of refined grains. 3. Moderate your protein intake. 4. Increase your consumption of natural fats. 5. Increase your consumption of fiber and vinegar.
The author also stresses the importance of fasting.
Everything the book asserts seems to be pretty well backed by science, go check for yourself.
Source: Obesity Code by Dr. Jason Fung. Read it, it's not only a brilliant weight loss book, but also a wonderful book about how the wrong incentives for companies have led to the obesity epidemic in the US.
> This is only true in the first up to 6 months of a calorie-restriction diet. Then, body adjusts its metabolism (lower body temperature, making you feel more lethargic to keep you from exercising, etc) and your weight begins to slowly climb back up, sans any further calorie restriction. At this point, it's easy for a dieter to blame himself of lacking willpower: "it worked, and it stopped working now, I must've been not strict enough!".
> The same thing happens if you force someone to overeat even if they're not hungry. They will gain weight -- for up to 6 months. Then, the body increases its base metabolic rate and adjusts to the new food intake level.
This is pseudoscientific garbage. There is some amount of adaptation that the body experiences in response to a caloric deficit or surplus. It varies by person but is generally not a major effect. A few hundred calories is typical and is largely attributable to changes in NEAT.
This is also not an unbounded effect. It won’t prevent continued weight loss if the starting deficit is greater than the adaptation nor will it prevent continued weight gain if the surplus exceeds the adaptation. The many obese people in the world are proof that the “natural set point” does not place a cap on weight gain.
There is also definitely nothing magic that happens at the 6 month mark and the absurdity of this should be enough to make it clear that this is garbage.
This seems unnecessary. The rest of your comment does not support this assertion. And it's inflammatory, which is contrary to the HN guidelines.
To this point:
> There is also definitely nothing magic that happens at the 6 month mark and the absurdity of this should be enough to make it clear that this is garbage.
There doesn't have to be anything magical. I would have to read the book to be sure, but pretty sure 6 months describes the general point at which the continuous process fades into noise. Nothing about the body has an on/off switch, but that doesn't mean we can't describe biological processes in general terms.
Perhaps it was unnecessary. The rest of my absolutely supports it, though. The claim is that within 6 months the body will adapt to a change in caloric intake, completely canceling it out. Indeed, the claim is that the body will adapt so well that it will begin gaining weight from the same caloric intake that was previously a weight-loss-inducing deficit. This is utterly untrue. Not just an incomplete picture or misleading, but an utter falsehood.
> This is utterly untrue. Not just an incomplete picture or misleading, but an utter falsehood.
Would you be so kind as to elaborate? You are literally stating that something is 'utterly untrue' without supporting rationale. I'm not expecting you to do a peer-reviewed study. Just to explain why you feel this way.
Because there’s absolutely no scientific evidence for this claim. Please share any evidence you have for the claim that a human body will “adapt” to a caloric deficit so well that it will regain the lost weight without calories increasing again.
The statement is essentially that calories consumed are unrelated to weight gain and loss except in the short term after which the body will return to its normal weight no matter what you do. This simply doesn’t make any sense. If this were true people couldn’t starve to death and obesity wouldn’t be a thing. And also the conservation of mass would not be an actual physical law.
The author claimed this was legitimate science, in which case there will be references in the book.
I am avoiding the normal urge to go out and buy the book to verify and share the references to you. But it is something you could easily verify and find for yourself.
Then it should be easy for the thread originator to provide a citation. I’m not willing to buy the book to look for citations I don’t expect to be there. My bet is that the book doesn’t really say what was presented and that it gives a rather more reserved statement about metabolic adaptation.
>It varies by person but is generally not a major effect. A few hundred calories is typical and is largely attributable to changes in NEAT.
A few hundred calories is ~10-16% of the daily necessary caloric intake of many people, I daresay most? It is most certainly a major effect and considering that people become obese most often by consuming a small daily surplus, a few hundred calories extra, over many years, a swing of 100-300 calories can easily make the gaining weight much easier or much harder.
I wouldn’t consider 200ish calories “major”, in part because the typical weight loss plan includes a deficit of at least 500 calories/day, but mostly because it’s straightforward to turn a 500 calorie deficit into a 700 calorie deficit to accommodate the adaptation. Adaptation isn’t meaningless but it’s also not offsetting large deficits the way many people think it is.
As for obesity happening due to 100-300 extra calories per day, yes, but also not really. If a person’s intake is 300 calories per day over what’s necessary to maintain a healthy weight, then they will put on weight until TDEE (which increases with body mass) catches up with their intake and they land somewhere above their healthy weight. It’s not an unbounded growth unless caloric intake is also growing continuously. I would imagine it’s quite common to see obese people eating 300 calories over their current TDEE but also to be 1300 calories over their healthy-weight TDEE.
Also don’t forget that the 300 extra calories is after the metabolic adaptation from eating a surplus. So if an individual will increase TDEE by 200 calories in response to a surplus, then they’ll need to eat 500 calories above “real” TDEE to see a 300 calorie effective weight gain.
All this is to say that obese people are generally eating quite a bit more than just 100-300 calories too much per day.
I'm not the OP, but I'm also not convinced that the set point exists. Regardless, fasting is a better way of losing weight than caloric restriction IMO since it lowers insulin, but to each their own. Either way, the laws of thermodynamics haven't changed, it's just how your body responds, and we're all unique in that sense. Whatever works for people, so long as they're losing weight if they're obese or overweight.
> There is no panacea for weight loss - everyone is different.
You described the panacea: Eat less. If you eat less than you burn, you will lose weight. This effect is so predictable and reliable that taken to its logical conclusion it results in death. We call this starvation.
And everyone really isn’t different. The only thing different for most people is what sort of diet they find more tolerable. The fundamentals don’t change though.
Everyone really is different. Vastly different gut flora, vastly different neural connections in the brain, vastly different neural connections in the gut. In fact, the only things that are similar across bodies are their macroscopic qualities and those are arguably the least important.
This might be true in thermodynamic sense but it is a useless and trite statement.
It's like saying "people are in debt because they borrowed money" - true, but banal and trivial, and pretending it's the whole story and saying nothing of medical debt, student loans or living from paycheck to paycheck and payday loans dayloans is only good for feeling better than someone, most likely while pretending that all people in debt are stupid because they buy too many cars and TVs or whatever.
The whole area (both nutrition and debt/poverty) is very complex, especially when looking at whole society. Thinking in simple caricatures, and dismissing people as stupid is helping nobody.
If you want to discuss the socioeconomic reasons for the rise in obesity, I think there’s plenty of meat there to discuss meaningfully. That’s very different from discussing gut flora or gut neural connections or metabolism. Indeed, all the ways that “people are different” are irrelevant because the rise in obesity is a societal problem. It’s not about the individuals and their differences.
If you’re an individual who wants to lose weight, focus on calories in and calories out because those are the biggest factors by far and they are also largely within your control. If you want to talk about social problems then ignore individuals and discuss the broader problems that are leading to such a large and consistent calories in discrepancy. In either case gut flora is probably not the major factor and probably not where the solution will be found.
I also didn’t dismiss anyone as stupid and your accusation is out of place.
> focus on calories in and calories out because those are the biggest factor
A lot of people tried that, and it didn't work, but we never got to "why doesn't it work for so many people" because people like you keep parroting "CICO! You're just weak! CICO! CICO!!" even though it helps nobody.
Of course, calories in and calories out are mostly out of your control, but we're past that, since this has now become about moral judgment of obese people.
You’ve now accused me of calling people both stupid and weak, when I’ve done neither of those. You’re not even trying to have an actual constructive conversation. If your goal is to have mutually beneficial discussions or even just to educate those you disagree with, you might try not being so hostile.
More to the point, you haven’t said anything meaningful about society’s obesity problem except to assert that everyone with a weight problem is a victim completely lacking in agency.
No one debates any of this stuff when it comes to animals. No one thinks their dog has a slow metabolism or different gut flora or different neural connections. They think their dog is fat because he’s eating too much and the cure is to feed him less. Amazingly it always works, assuming the dog’s owners actually follow through with feed him less.
> Then, body adjusts its metabolism (lower body temperature, making you feel more lethargic to keep you from exercising, etc) and your weight begins to slowly climb back up, sans any further calorie restriction.
We're also learning more about genetics:
> Schmidt’s latest study found an enormous difference in weight gain between two test groups: conventional mice and mice whose RAGE ["receptor for advanced glycation end"] pathway had been deleted. The latter group gained 70 percent less weight than conventional mice, had lower glucose levels, and expended more energy while eating the same high-fat diet and doing the same amount of physical activity.
> Then, the body increases its base metabolic rate and adjusts to the new food intake level.
This is a fairly pernicious half-truth, even among fitness types, which is used to explain away much more than it should. It has some truth to it, but people use it way too easily to handwave away differences in intake. It's true that the metabolism adjusts, but that adjustment is slow and limited. The gap between "slow metabolism" and "fast metabolism" people is only a few hundred calories/day at the extremes. Your body isn't going to suddenly start burning an extra 1k calories/day.
In this study, they found that the RMR for women varied between 0.721-0.926 kcal/kg/hr (1730-2222 kcal/day @ 100kg), men varied between 0.791-0.969 kcal/kg/hr (1898-2325 kcal/day @100kg).
That is, if you're the slowest of "slow metabolism" people, you pretty much just need to deny yourself a single box of M&Ms to match the net energy expenditure of the fastest of the "fast metabolism" people. Hitting average is even easier.
Excuse me, but this does not make any sense. If somebody stopped losing weight after making progress for six months on the exact same diet, it would only mean that their body is now burning as much as it is consuming, so their intake would need to be reduced again. This is basic thermodynamic stuff. I promise I could lose weight eating nothing but ice cream sprinkled with powdered starch, as long as I could control my portions.
Yes, what you said is correct. If you could control your appetite, or response to it, you could lose weight on a calorie restricted diet of "fattening" foods.
While I'm not a proponent of Jason Fung or his book, I have read it. From what I recall, where your as-long-as-I-could-control-my-portions diverges from Fung's book is that he believes its nearly impossible for people generally to ignore their appetite in the long run, without correcting the issues that are continually increasing their "set point" and appetite.
He defines your "set point" as your level of secretion and resistance to insulin, which is continually, but slowly, increased by frequent meals, snacking, sweeteners, poor sleep, stress and consumption of mostly processed foods.
He believes insulin levels strongly influence appetite and metabolism. Inject a thin person with insulin, and they will invariably gain weight. Suppress insulin, and people lose weight. He lists studies to that effect.
He rejects calories-in-calories-out, not because it's false, but because it ignores people's inability to ignore their appetite in the long run.
His solution is both correcting the frequent meals, snacking, sweeteners, poor sleep, stress and processed foods. He also advocates fasting, which he claims is safe and reduces chronically high insulin levels better than any other (non-drug) intervention. He provides more studies supporting those assertions.
As to the 6 months, I vaguely remember him mentioning "6 months, or a year" in the contexts of most diet's plateauing effectiveness, but his general thrust was, most diet's don't work in the long run, because they ignore insulin.
Oh, it's not that I find it controversial, favor an alternative or object to any of it. It seemed quite compelling, and I'm open to it. It's just that I've only read a single book on the topic, and health and physiology are fiendishly complex, and I long ago discovered that a single book, even if compelling and seemingly supported, may still not represent the whole picture.
I am sure for a claim of this magnitude, there would be plenty of references other than the book which shows our bodies somehow magically adopt and regain the lost weight. The burden of proof is on you to support this false claim
The burden of proof is on me to support what "false" claim? That I read the book? That I summarized my recollections accurately? That it's the only book on the topic I've read?
To clarify, I am not Jason Fung, the author of the book that I summarized, and I specifically said I don't endorse the content. I only recounted it because ancestor comments seemed confused about the book's central tenant, which I happen to have read.
That works the other way too -- if you can increase your metabolism you can lose weight without eating less.
Strength training is one way to do that for example -- more muscles, more food burned just by sitting there.
Getting back to the perfect analogy with debt -- you can spend more or less money and control your debt that way, or you could make more, or a combination of the two. Which way is likely more effective in your case is what varies.
Saying that controlling debt is as simple as spending less than you make is both true and too general to be useful.
Citation, please.
I see him making this claim in a number of articles and talks, but am having trouble finding an experiment verifying this.