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Neuroscience Explains Why Dieters Rarely Lose Weight (nytimes.com)
HughPickens.com writes: According to a new study, the chance of an obese person attaining normal body weight is 1 in 210 for men and 1 in 124 for women, increasing to 1 in 1,290 for men and 1 in 677 for women with severe obesity, suggesting that current weight management programs focused on dieting and exercise are not effective in tackling obesity. Now neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt writes in the New York Times that "in the long run dieting is rarely effective, doesn't reliably improve health and does more harm than good". And according to Aamodt, the root of the problem is not willpower but neuroscience.
Metabolic suppression is one of several powerful tools that the brain uses to keep the body within a certain weight range, called the set point. The range, which varies from person to person, is determined by genes and life experience. When dieters' weight drops below it, they not only burn fewer calories but also produce more hunger-inducing hormones and find eating more rewarding. If someone starts at 120 pounds and drops to 80, her brain rightfully declares a starvation state of emergency, using every method available to get that weight back up to normal. This coordinated brain response is a major reason that dieters find weight loss so hard to achieve and maintain. According to Aamodt dieting can actually lead to weight gain because dieting is stressful. Calorie restriction produces stress hormones, which act on fat cells to increase the amount of abdominal fat. Such fat is associated with medical problems like diabetes and heart disease, regardless of overall weight.... Aamodt recommends mindful eating -- paying attention to signals of hunger and fullness, without judgment, to relearn how to eat only as much as the brain's weight-regulation system commands.
Metabolic suppression is one of several powerful tools that the brain uses to keep the body within a certain weight range, called the set point. The range, which varies from person to person, is determined by genes and life experience. When dieters' weight drops below it, they not only burn fewer calories but also produce more hunger-inducing hormones and find eating more rewarding. If someone starts at 120 pounds and drops to 80, her brain rightfully declares a starvation state of emergency, using every method available to get that weight back up to normal. This coordinated brain response is a major reason that dieters find weight loss so hard to achieve and maintain. According to Aamodt dieting can actually lead to weight gain because dieting is stressful. Calorie restriction produces stress hormones, which act on fat cells to increase the amount of abdominal fat. Such fat is associated with medical problems like diabetes and heart disease, regardless of overall weight.... Aamodt recommends mindful eating -- paying attention to signals of hunger and fullness, without judgment, to relearn how to eat only as much as the brain's weight-regulation system commands.
There are several whole industries devoted to convincing people that it's as simple as a bit of diet and exercise and if you or someone you know can't lose weight it's because they're fat and lazy. "Health" food, diet plans, pills and potions, exercise machines, surgery. All waiting to grab a dollar. And billions of people too scared or too stupid to know that if they're thin it's their good fortune, not a reason to put others down. Fat shaming is more socially accepted than any other form of discrimination on the planet.
It's trying to justify you're going to be stuck at your unhealthy weight whether you like it or not so you should just accept it fatty mclardbucket.
Worrying. Ms. Aamodt has links to the Healthy at Every Size (HAES) obesity apologists. HAES are as insane as anti-vaxxers, only they believe medical science is a worldwide racist conspiracy against fat people. Oh, and if you don't want to buy into their excuses, you're literally oppressing them.
In short, I'm worried that she appears to be peddling snake oil to people who are very, very desperate to avoid having to take personal responsibility for their unhealthy lifestyles. Diet and Exercise work -- as part of a lifestyle change. We know this, we have known this for years.
The problem is that humans are extremely, extremely poor at making judgements about food, and we have an entire industry ("Big Food") dedicated into manipulating people into overeating and eating cheaply produced unhealthy garbage.
Well, the picture is more complex than that, but gut flora is a very important factor, it seems. However, we are not talking about figuring out which single strain of bacteria is "beneficial"; it is probably a matter of finding out which combination(s) of strains produce what effect(s), and this will probably depend on the genetic and epi-genetic profile of the individual. And there are other factors as well, like life-style and habits - like, what do you eat, and do you eat until you're not hungry or until you are full? Do you start to eat when you are bored?
Another interesting fact: recent research in Denmark has demonstrated that you can change your set-point: if you lose weight through dieting and, crucially, keep the weight off for about 1 year, then your will accept this as the set-point. And, of course, you push it upwards by over-eating, without doubt, which is why mindfulness is a very good suggestion.
Fat people aren't a "race"
Sure they are, they just don't race as fast as thin people unless you drop them from an airplane.
Just another day in Paradise
Yeah, like my high school science teacher. Gained 100 lbs in 3 years, got diagnosed with a thyroid problem. Went on medication, lost 100 lbs in 5 years. No changes to diet or habit in those 6 years. All her fault for being lazy.
Learn to love Alaska
I think the main issue here is that HEAS and fat acceptance people are overdoing it. Some people can be slightly overweight but everything can be fine health wise and try to force them to a normal weight is more likely to make things worse. There are also some complaints against "fat shaming" that are justified. Obesity is a significant lifestyle-based health issue, but there are many others such as smoking, lack of sleep, drug abuse, risky sexual behavior or being underweight. Shaming should to be fair: If people ignore smoking but are shaming slightly overweight people and claim that shaming is based on health concerns instead of aesthetics that is just bigotry or bad information.
A little big of overweight (BMI 25-27), especially with low levels of abdominal fat is not a big health issue, it might even be slightly more healthy than normal weight. Something like BMI 27 to 30 is unhealthy most of the time, but on average still causes smaller health issues than smoking. But many people are significantly fatter than that. They almost always have health issues caused by their weight and should really lose weight and could easily do so by swapping some high calorie count items in their diet with vegetables.
Jan
and Genetic predisposition, environmental stresses, social stresses, physical activity, food availability, income, self worth...
Many Many Factors. Like what is popular today if something is too complex we ignores the complexities and focus on one area and yell at scream at each other over why our simple solution which addresses one area is so much better than your simple solution which addresses and other area.
The tried and true "Diet and Exercise" does work, however it rarely ever get people down to a healthy BMI, But it usually gets their weight down where they have health benefits from it, however culture is fixated on fat shaming so even if someone does everything right they are still considered fat and not worthy to enter civilized society.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You cannot force yourself to lose weight.
You can will yourself to lose weight.
The two are distinct. The first is a method of control, which means that without changing your will, you put in place external methods of regulating yourself. The second is how most people lose weight, which is by regulating their desire by balancing it against their desire to be thinner. It's not a diet, it's a reduction.
All the people I know who lost weight and kept it off did so by focusing on their appetites and not rules for limiting consumption. They found ways to want less food, thus eat less, and if exercise played a role it was secondary.
Of course, none of them were obese by any realistic definition. Fifteen to fifty extra pounds is not out of the range of normal.
The doctors have adjusted the definition of "obese" (apparently) to include pot-bellies and thunder thighs. They are doing this in the War on Obesity, which like other Wars on Social Problems, is based in forcing people to do what is not natural for them. They think this will work because all humans are the same, identical and grey, without any context or surrounding needs. But as you point out, people vary. For some, a little extra weight is a good thing, especially in middle age.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to find some eclairs...
Eating fat doesn't make you fat.
Stuffing yourself and not exercising does.
AFAIK the jury is till out on gut bacteria.
Sure they are, they just don't race as fast as thin people unless you drop them from an airplane.
Idiocy is more of a problem than obesity will ever be - as evidenced by the fact that you think more weight would make someone fall faster.
Where did he say that? He said "as fast as", not "faster than".
When did they stop talking about how gravity works in public schools?
Ironic.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Whole fucking thread full of fat shaming.
I am currently up early and not sure if I can go into work today because you fat shamers have pushed somebody I care about to near suicide. I have literally no fucking clue if I can leave them alone in the house right now.
When somebody eats 300-600 calories per day and still gains weight, there is something else going on.
On the other hand, look at me! I'm only a few lbs overweight, and I eat like shit and drink all the time! I must be morally superior! I have no fucking clue how many calories I eat each day. My fucking body burns somewhere around 1500 calories at fucking rest last time I checked!
So what's my fucking secret? Nuclear hot wings? Is that what keeps my metabolism going while somebody I care about abso-fucking-lutely cannot control their weight? Eating McDonalds and Speedway shit every other day? Is that my fucking secret when somebody eating nothing but beans and rice in measured portions can't lose a single fucking pound?
Ah, it must be the smoking! Is 10-12 fucking cigarettes per day my fucking secret?! You tell me, asshole.
God, can we get past this period of history before science figures out what my fucking secret is and gives it to all the beautiful, talented people in the world whose body is their own worst enemy already?
If there is a hell, I hope you and all the other fat shaming ACs here burn in it. You have blood on your hands. If swear, if I fucking knew how to raise or lower somebody's metabolism, I'd set yours to fucking ZERO just to laugh at you while you ballooned up. Don't expect me to watch over you when you become suicidal. You deserve to feel anguish and total fucking despair.
I heard the Danish study on the radio (BBC R4) and it is similar to work I've heard of before, but I can't find links to the study.
The Danes claimed that you need to lose weight slowly, and then once you have lost the weight stick with the diet for at least a year so that your body learns to live with the new weight. From what I understand that the researcher was saying was that after about a year of being the weight you wanted to be, your body would stop fighting you, but that didn't mean you could go back to your old excess calorie diet.
I've managed to shift 25 kg over a year, so now I'm in my "stable zone", where I need to re-train my body to stay put at that weight - if you believe the Danes. If this report is to be believed then I can never reach stability and I'll have to force myself to starve indefinitely or I'll regain weight.
It wasn't that she was lazy, it's that you were. Students that stay in high school for eight years will do that to a teacher. :)
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
The issue is that it can be perfectly healthy to eat around 900,000 calories a year, but if you eat just around 15,000 calorie per year too much, people gain 5 pound a year. That is less than 2% over target, but a weight gain of 5 pound per year, will easily cause significant issues in the long term. 15,000 calories a year is just 41 calories a day or about an half an apple every day.
People do not have to eat significant amounts of food to become fat, even tiny amounts of extra food can easily add up to significant gains. Without a closed regulation loop it is basically impossible to eat just the right amount of food. If people have broken internal regulation loop, they build their own regulation loop and permanently count calories and watch their weight to adjust the amount of calories consumed. Unfortunately there is a lot of noise in weight measurements and a broken internal regulation loop often tries to counteract external regulation. It seems that an unhealthy diet can damage the internal regulation. Gastric bands seem to help because they help to readjust the internal regulation loop and not just make it harder to consume a lot of calories.
Jan
It's based on this scientific study: http://ajph.aphapublications.o...
Press release from the college here, a bit easier to read: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/newsevent...
A hungry person can procrastinate eating a long time, especially if he or she doesn't keep anything ready to eat in the house.
There is more to it than just that. Even if you switch to a carefully managed, calorie counted diet you can still gain weight or at least fail to keep it off. After the initial weight loss period your body goes into starvation mode, reducing the idle calorie burn significantly (500 kcal/day is not uncommon). So if you were on 2,200 kcal/day and drop to 1,800, you will be gaining weight. Going below 1,800 starts to get dangerous for other reasons and you need to be extremely careful to get enough nutrition. Meanwhile you feel tired and stressed and hungry, and you feel that way forever because your body never corrects even after many years of sticking to your extreme diet.
That's why the contestants on shows like The Biggest Loser mostly regain all the weight afterwards. Dieting works in the short term, but once the body's set-point is too high the only known way to lower currently is a faecal transplant.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Many of the contestants on The Biggest Loser kept the weight off for a year but then gained it all back at the six year mark. It seems to vary from person to person... One guy's body was burning 800 kcal/day less than when he started that show.
The set point definitely seems to be the key, but there also seems to be more too resetting it than just maintaining a lower weight for a year.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
i've never bought into any of the dieting fads nor tried them because they blamed random things without the science to back it up. one fateful day last summer i watched a documentary that claimed sugars in our food were to blame but it actually had the science to back it up.
Sugar is a drug, addictive and causes food cravings. This begs the question of why we aren't going through withdraw and the answer is that sugar has been added to all your foods specifically so you do not go through withdraw. Look at your raw pasta which has zero reason to have sugar added, it has about 3g of sugar added for every 56g (2 oz).
To make matters worse, food makers started using High Fructose Corn Syrup in products because it's inexpensive because corn is subsidized. Fructose is processed by your liver and it gets stored as fat unless you have low blood sugar. so products with High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) are most likely to make you fat.
After removing sugar from my diet (not easy to find products without sugar!) I went through a few days of withdraw. After that, I actually felt like I more energy to do things, so much so that I wanted to exercise (that was never my goal). I started walking regularly and losing weight without any crazy diet, just not eating things with sugar added. Apples are a great source of sugar that have the fiber to balance it out so that it's absorbed slowly avoiding a traffic jam in your liver.
In the last year I have lost 65 lbs of fat and gained 15 lbs of muscle without ever having to go hungry or restrain myself from eating. I'm still overweight (for now) but I'm no longer obese.
The food supply is being drugged to increase profits.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Seriously: You fat? Eat less. It's that simple.
Science says you;re wrong.
Your experience of being a few pounds overweight is not the same experience as someone who is seriously obese.
As a neuroscientist, I always feel a bit bad when I see headlines like "neuroscience explains X". It usually doesn't and here also it doesn't really (although that's not say the work is without merit, the blurb in the summary seems reasonable). However, neuroscience obviously doesn't tell us why people are getting so fat in the first place. This matters because it affects how to handle weight loss. I accept that different people may have different "natural weights", but this doesn't explain the steadily increasing obesity levels. Something is clearly changing with our relationship to food. Maybe it's increasing sugar levels. Maybe it's that fewer people cook and that encourages over-eating. Maybe it's increasing portion sizes. Perhaps all of those. The point is that there is a driving force to increasing obesity in the population at large, and as an overweight individual you are fighting against it (whatever it is). So if you want people to start losing weight then I reckon you need to understand very well why they're gaining it at such unprecedented levels. The food industry is, in general, not helping to clarify the issue.
soylentnews.org
I wasn't sure if I saw that story posted here or on the other site. Must have been the other site. It was a fascinating read at the very least.
I also found that it seemed to be somewhat fatalistic and depressing. Humans want to fight against nature and remake the world as they think it should be. It seems like in the ultimate "joke's on you" moment, the very nature of people's bodies has started turning against them all over the developed world. At least this human still wants to fight against nature, to figure out what the answer must be, confident there must be an answer to be had. I don't have funding, and I doubt I'd have the first clue of what to do to figure it out. Debuggers are my thing, not microscopes.
I'm one of the lucky ones--that person everybody seems to know who can eat whatever they want and never gain a pound. Well, not so much as when I was younger and every weekend meant a trip to the arcade to play DDR. I wish I knew why or even how. There are better people in the world who deserve whatever it is about my body that would make gaining a hundred lbs or so if I need to for some reason seem as daunting to me as losing a hundred lbs and keeping it off is for many people I know. One person in particular whose struggles with their weight has turned into a full blown mental illness and utter despair, compounding the problem by wrecking the best tool they have to work through the problem: their brain. Damn shame. And here I am helplessly posting to Slashdot and cussing out ACs like that'll make a difference.
It's not to say that exercise isn't a factor, but I begin to wonder if the mentality of "head to the gym, stress the body to its breaking point for an hour or two, then back in the chair" isn't part of the larger problem. Maybe that works for cheetahs, just not so well for humans.
I think the best thing that people could work towards is a slower, more relaxed pace of life. Everybody is so tense and constantly on edge. Every little problem that comes up is the zomg sky is falling end of the damned world. We seem so completely detached from the essence of living, at least in an agricultural sense: preparing for the growing season, working the earth when plants will grow, harvesting in fall (along with the requisite fall feast), and spending the time of year when little if anything grows with loved ones, safe and confident that enough wood has been gathered and chopped and enough food has been stored away to last until the cycle is complete when spring returns.
In a hunter-gatherer sense: the Earth provides. There will always be enough. Don't horde and don't be greedy. Don't take more than you need.
I feel we've created a culture where everybody is driven like they're being chased down by a lion day after day after day after day. It's not really about the act of eating--that's not what I mean by don't take more than you need--, but it's about the endless 24/7 life-and-death brink-of-the-edge reality that is life in the "developed" world.
First world problems. Literally.
The types of foods you eat make a difference as well. Calories aren't just calories. Insulin tells your body to store extra calories as fat, so foods that spike insulin levels help make you fat. Well, guess what foods overweight people love to eat? Carbs, and piles of them. Guess what carbs do. They spike your insulin levels. Get a copy of a book called Why We Get Fat. Excellent book.
This is being written by someone that just dropped between 85 and 100 pounds and I've kept it off for going on a couple of years now. I devised some simple rules and eat a reasonable amount of healthy foods. One of my rules is, watch what fat people eat ... and don't eat that . You would be surprised how well that one simple rule works. :) The other thing I did was give up 1 to 2 sitcoms a day and get off my ass and exercise. Yes, I'm a database admin at work, so guess what I did a lot of. Sitting. I can do a 5K and smoke people half my age or more now. Three - Four years ago, I could hardly walk.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Well, I'll certainly trust an anecdote of 1 versus this:
"Methods. We drew a sample of individuals aged 20 years and older from the United Kingdom's Clinical Practice Research Datalink from 2004 to 2014. We analyzed data for 76,704 obese men and 99,791 obese women. We excluded participants who received bariatric surgery. We estimated the probability of attaining normal weight or 5% reduction in body weight."
You didn't even read the article, did you? Nevermind the fact that the summary's first link is to the scientific study in question.
The first link is a scientific study that looks at long term weight trends after an initial weight loss. Not "hunger" or "appetite." Food consumption over as much as 10 year is "actual eating." It doesn't even take much "will power" to locate the study and read it, versus cherry-picking a mass media commentary that itself cites seven studies and a metaanalysis.
Apply a version of your own philosophy. It doesn't even take much "will power." Just don't spew an "opinion" without reading each of the hyperlinked articles to check that little things like "it cites self-help books, not scientific studies" are not so egregiously incorrect that you appear to be a complete moron.
Proliferation of fast food and over processed calorie dense prepackaged garbage passed off as food.
There is typically nothing wrong with those foods from a nutritional value. Sure, they may not always taste as good, and often they may be heavy on sugar, fat, and salt, but there is nothing inherently wrong with them if you are eating a relatively balanced diet.
The real problem is they make eating too easy which can affect how some people eat. Eating foods you prepare yourself wastes so much time and effort that it makes it physically harder to eat, which in turn helps remove the choice of eating more. For countless thousands of years, humans spent the majority of thier time and activities trying to get enough to eat. Food was scarce and many people starved much of the time as a result. Now we have extremely cheap and plentiful food every where you turn and people actually complain it is too easy to consume.
The problem is people need to know they will have enough tomorrow too. Most hunter gathered and early farmers were on the brink of starvation constantly. Only in the last few centuries has that begun to change.
There isn't always enough so humans had to be greedy to be certian that they would make it.
That said people like to stress about things that won't affect them, or make a big deal out of the mundane. I don't know if it is cultural or genetic or both. ( it tends to run in families)
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
This article is a load of crap that contradicts the study's conclusion:
"those subjects maintaining greater weight loss at 6 years also experienced greater concurrent metabolic slowing." ...
"Metabolic adaptation persists over time and is likely a proportional, but incomplete, response to contemporaneous efforts to reduce body weight."
What they're saying is that the body will adapt to the change in calorie intake such that the person can maintain the weight loss. The NYT article makes wild and incompatible conclusions based on this very simple and narrow study.
Is it just too fucking hard for you to use your imagination a little bit and imagine what it must be like to be somebody who can't stop gaining weight even while eating 300-600 calories per day?
Ok. Once more.
That is not possible. You may not understand why, but it's as if you told me that some people can move objects with their mind alone, or levitate, or cast spells. Not possible. As in "never going to happen". As in "magic". Just impossible. Really. I'm not trying to lie to you. It is truly completely and absolutely impossible. Everything we know about basic chemistry would have to be false for that to happen.
Calories are not an invented unit for you to play with. Calories have a meaning. A human brain alone consumes that many calories per day even in a comma.
For someone to gain weight on such a diet, he would have to be paralyzed, inside an artificial lung, kept at 37C, and have no brain.
I must admit that, after reading your posts, that last condition seems to be possible.
Keep in mind that at the point he was burning 800 calories a day less, he also weighed more than he did when the show ended. He was continuing to maintain his diet, so his body was in extreme starvation mode where it burned the absolute minimum calories possible, and on top of that he was feeling tired and lethargic all the time due to the low calorie diet.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Very well said. Be careful though .. I used to be able to eat whatever I wanted. Then I got married and had kids, and it all changed.
I've taken a different approach to losing weight that is slowly working, averaging 2 1/2 pounds a month over the last 2 years. And no set point in sight. Rather than waster hours at the gym or the idiotic exercise of jogging, I do what came naturally a hundreds years ago ... work. It's amazing how much weight I have lost doing simple things like watching what I eat (i.e. stop buying chips, and eating Oreos in moderation), and laying pavers. Or mixing and pouring concrete by hand. Or using an ax and saw to cut down a tree and cut it to length instead of a chain saw. Installing my own flooring and kitchen cabinets instead of paying someone to do it.
And instead of a huge gym bill or bad feet or large payments to contractors, I have a beautiful house and yard. That I can point to with pride and say 'Yes .. I did that. No, I didn't have any training, I just googled it.;
It's been quite interesting to watch as my wife and I continue to eat less and less .. and realize, we are still satisfied. By listening to what our body tells us instead of some fad on the Internet, we have both reduced both our food intake and what we spend on food. We don't shun fast food restaurants, but we eat there less and less. And, to your point, enjoy what we do eat more and more.
I just bought a used sail boat that will need a fair amount of work. That should keep me busy for the rest of my life, it takes a bit of work to sail a boat instead of motoring around.
I may never reach the weight I was in high school, but that's a ridiculous goal. As long as I can get rid of the pills, I'll be fine.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Maybe. Maybe not:
http://science.sciencemag.org/...
There have been several studies to date transplanting gut flora from "skinny" rats and mice into "obese" rats and mice resulting in weight loss with the same diet composition. They have also showed the reverse to be true.
Furthermore there seems to be some evidence that sugar-alcohols and artificial sweeteners may be better food for the growth of bacteria that favors an obese phenotype.
http://www.omicsonline.org/bac... http://www.scientificamerican.... http://www.nature.com/nature/j... http://www.nature.com/news/sug...
(FWIW - I am a doctor (MD) but I am not an endocrinologist/obesity researcher)
Argh. The laws of science be a harsh mistress.
You're an AC, so I don't expect too much here. But, you're apparently the kind of idiot that cannot grasp that humans are a complex biological organism. To say people have a choice in their diet is all well and good. To ignore the fact that physiological processes in the body will affect the choices made is just willful idiocy. The point of these studies isn't to remove blame from fat people that just like to eat. It's to help understand the why and how of the way the body does its thing. With that information, people can take steps to improve their gains when trying to lose weight.
Not sure if it helps you, dude, but those things can change and I'm pretty sure it's not genetics alone.
I used to have no problem with weight and it felt natural, I simply didn't want to eat that much, I wasn't too thin either, just normal.
(oh, and most "grandma"s around me were worried I eat so little, not that it was little)
Then, for about 3 month or so, I ate more than I wanted (for whatever the reason was). Then things went... wrong, I got to 109kg (normall weight for me is about 85, I think).
I went on quite harsh diet (about 1000 calories deficit for 4 weeks) and got to about 95kg, it bounced back but not to the old levels, to about 102.
Then I lost 5 kg doing physical work (bough a house).
I'm now quite stable in 95-97 range for two years (actually plan to go down to 90 during 2 month =))
about twelve years ago I lost 30 lbs just by deciding to. I don't know how I did it, but I decided to lose weight, decided it was going to happen, didn't change my diet or activity and 30lbs was gone in a very short period of time.
I have been unable to do it again since gaining it back.
I've found that when I'm stressed, mentally exhausted regularly and feel like I'm carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders I gain weight easily. When I feel unburdened and things are going great I lose weight easily. Some of it is that I'm more likely to do recreational exercise when I'm less stressed, and indeed the last time I got down to a good weight that was the case, but I can't contribute it to that every yo-yo.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
He was continuing to maintain his diet, so his body was in extreme starvation mode where it burned the absolute minimum calories possible, and on top of that he was feeling tired and lethargic all the time due to the low calorie diet.
No. That is not extreme starvation mode. I've researched this a lot recently--as I'm actually currently seven days into a water fast. I'm down 15 lbs, feel no hunger, no fatigue, my mind is actually sharper, and I feel great. "water fast" is your search term here.
The body can withstand extreme caloric deficits. It doesn't actually enter extreme starvation mode *at all* until you hit very low single digits of body fat %--around 4% *combined with* an extreme caloric deficit. The US military did a grueling study about this on some of their soldiers--and the soldiers fared well--even gained strength while not eating for a month--and did fine up until they hit their lowest limits.
There's a really good write-up about the benefits of water fasting in Harper's titled "Starving Your Way to Vigor" by Steve Hendricks. Benefits include not just weight (fat) loss but also increased longevity, and wrt cancer both reduced symptoms from chemotherapy and increased effectiveness of chemotherapy.
Hunger pangs is your stomach wanting to do its thing. Hunger thoughts are psychological. A lot of our natural food sources contain forms of opiate-like substances that trigger a dopamine response in our brains--that's how we learn what foods to seek out and enjoy. It also works against us because some things that we eat that we shouldn't actually present an even stronger response in our brains. These associations make us psychologically attracted to food--which is usually fine. It's also why breast feeding increases a child's bond to its mother--opiate-like triggers from mothers milk.
Extreme starvation mode only sets in once the body has depleted all the easy, normal battery reserves--first the glycogen stored for easiest access in muscle and tissue. Then the big, long-term battery of fat reserves. Once those are gone it will begin to break down organ tissues--protein that was structure--a more expensive, and a last-resort process. This is when you start to wither away and become in danger.
tl;dr;
There's really 3 modes the body enters:
1) fed state--fed within the last 12 hours--the hormone response to food lasts about that long
2) fasted state--begins about 12 hours after last meal, continues so long as there are easy-to-access energy reserves in the body. HGH actually *increases* during this state.
This state actually has 2 sub-states:
-non ketosis--the body still has plentiful glycogen reserves--this state lasts 24-48 hrs depending on body mass
-ketosis--the body has used up the glycogen stores and is now powered nearly entirely off fat stores
3) starvation state--the body has ran out of both glycogen stores and fat stores--now it must break down organ structure--protein--to meet energy needs--
this only occurs at very low body fat percentages--around 4%--while also in a Caloric deficit.
Article about the military study: http://fitnessblackbook.com/ma...
It is true we understand so little about how the whole thing works. My experience has been exercise is not a very big factor. I exercised a LOT and never lost a pound. Then I got a leg injury and lost 40 pounds (~18 kg) while having no exercise at all. It was all diet. My diet wasn't bad before, but perhaps I was eating too much to try to sustain all the exercise. That's speculation. I did eat a lot fewer calories with the injury. Then I have known other people with a very different experience. So now my best advice is simply, keep trying and be honest with yourself. And always bear in mind that your body weight is not the only reason you are alive.
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Maybe "mindful eating" is a viable solution. But why would anyone claim that without science to back it up? If dietary modification succeeds less than 1% of the time, why just pull some new thing out of your ass and claim that, oh hey, THIS must be the thing that works? Is there some study where 80% of people lost ALL their obese-weight, got down to normal weight, and stayed there for life? "Monks teach you this one weird trick" seems like the sort of thing that would get pretty fast purchase on the internet, were it validated to be better than all the million diets that all work, but rarely stick.
In Asia only people are "fat" that want to be fat. Because it is a sign of success and luck. Or they don't care for their body.
That's not going to be true for much longer.
Someone had to do it.
Rather than waster hours at the gym or the idiotic exercise of jogging, I do what came naturally a hundreds years ago ... work. It's amazing how much weight I have lost doing simple things like watching what I eat (i.e. stop buying chips, and eating Oreos in moderation), and laying pavers. Or mixing and pouring concrete by hand. Or using an ax and saw to cut down a tree and cut it to length instead of a chain saw. Installing my own flooring and kitchen cabinets instead of paying someone to do it.
THIS!
I really think in all of the discussions of the "obesity epidemic," the role of everyday exercise that happened in the context of chores and normal housework is underestimated. Yes, I think the rising levels of sugar, portion sizes, and the absence of as many "manual labor" jobs all have impacts -- but so does modern "convenience" in avoiding exercise.
I got to watch my father gradually succumb to this problem over the years. When I was young, I can remember him doing mostly manual work outside to keep up things: mowing the lawn with a push-mower, trimming the hedges with manual shears, digging up the garden each spring to turn over the soil with a shovel, raking leaves in the fall, shoveling snow off the driveway in the winter, cutting wood with manual saws and axes, etc.
And he was relatively trim. I recall helping him with many of these tasks. But over the years, riding mowers became more popular and affordable, the rototiller replaced the shovel to turn over soil, the leaf blower replaced the rake, the snowblower replaced the shovel, the wood was cut with a chain saw. And with each "convenience" it seems he put on a little weight.
I noticed this myself a few years back after I had put on a little more weight than I would like. But I bought a lot of manual tools for doing work around the house, rather than "convenient" ways to get stuff done faster. I never really liked "exercising" at the gym much -- an hour on a treadmill or exercise bike or whatever just seemed boring... and a complete waste of time.
But if you actually have to push a mower around the yard for an hour, that's good aerobic exercise. And turning over soil in the spring before planting the garden is a REAL workout with a shovel (if you have a garden of any size). And you feel like you've accomplished something.
And this is only just normal "maintenance" on your property. Add in more do-it-yourself projects, as most homeowners would do themselves decades ago, and you have a full "training program" covering all sorts of muscle groups, often combinations of aerobic exercise with weight training, etc... all just keeping up your house.
I understand some people may not enjoy this sort of thing as much as others -- some may just like spending hours at the gym or whatever. To each his own. My larger point, however, is that our "obesity epidemic" may also just be related to convenience -- both in terms of food and in avoiding the "normal" exercise that people a generation or two ago just had to do.
Yhea, it's a funny thing, the body...so complex. My own experience confirms those recent findings. After a change of diet I found out that I simply need less food overall [the decreased burn rate] but it did not feel like being underpowered; quite the contrary, I could do way more than before [walking, running, stairs, cycling, etc.]
But now, if I indulge even a little bit the weight gain is very fast indeed....recently put 8 kilos just from 2 weeks poor diet...mindfulness is crucial, indeed.
Also, the gut flora thing is a smoking gun as well...I'll never forget the crazy craving for sugar when I had it [the flora] severely imbalanced and how it had NOTHING to do with willpower or greed...once the bugs were in balance the craving disappeared like magic.