This is something under active research, and it might have some true behind, there are some cases in the hospital where you see people doing diet as they should and not lossing weight at all and at the same time they have some autoimmune condition.
It wouldn't surprise me to see a true connection found in a couple of years between autoimmune conditions and weight in a reciprocal way.
Since it's already been purported to work the other way (fecal transplant from overweight individual causes rapid weight gain [1]) it may become the next big diet fad. That would be a nice biohack.
Please don't get science news from BBC. This is a sample size of 1, in a person who was probably already eating a ton and not absorbing it much due to a massive infection. There's not a ton we can take from this.
I did say 'purported', and the BBC is basing their story on an case study from the Oxford Journal for infectious diseases, which was linked in the first paragraph of the article: http://ofid.oxfordjournals.org/content/2/1/ofv004.full.
Since you have an issue with the sample size, please point me to the nearest full-scale fecal transplant study done and I'll gladly use those results.
>in a person who was probably already eating a ton and not absorbing it much due to a massive infection.
Source? Let's not criticize others for their sources and then make unsupported drive-by claims.
There is some interesting stuff in that case study, but there is nothing we can generalize from it. That's the point.
There are no full scale fecal transplant studies looking into obesity to my knowledge.
> Source? Let's not criticize others for their sources and then make unsupported drive-by claims.
You're right, but upon digging deeper into the study it's even worse: neither her, nor the person she took the fecal sample from, were obese at the time of transplant. Both became obese after the treatment. The source of the transplant was her daughter, so I can imagine a lot of environmental factors effecting both of them. It's hard to imagine the donor becoming obese because of the transplant...
The point here is there are a TON of other obvious variables to examine, and gut flora may really play a role, but there is really not substantial evidence to think that's true.
Regardless of if it is true, it doesn't change much for outcomes: you still have to eat less, you still have to workout more.
There is some evidence to think that a fecal transplant could help treat obesity, but not a ton. There is no evidence of the existence of people who can eat whatever they want and stay skinny. The thing is, with all the tweaks etc. that we've discovered, like gut flora effecting how many calories you absorb, none of them are hugely impactful. None of them explain obesity by themselves. So far nothing outside of massively over eating explains obesity in any kind of useful way that could be turned into a medical intervention.
Right, I agree, the major thing we need to be studying when it comes to diet are the psychological aspects of it. But the difference is the important part is not "you absorb more food due to your gut makeup" because that part is real, but not hugely significant.
Put simply: obesity is a food addiction. There are a ton of things that go into it, like depression, the reward system etc. We aren't likely to find the solution to obesity in small dietary tweaks, or fecal transplants.
Your claim about obesity being psychologically caused ignores the growing amount of research indicating that gut flora may very well impact decisionmaking, stress response and anxiety/depression [1]. Gut bacteria can even create and dispatch their own neurotransmitters [2].
You're firmly claiming causal direction on something the current research no longer supports. Psychology may be a result of digestive biome (or at least influenced by), rather than the seminal cause as you seem to think.
Edit: none of the above is to claim causality in the other direction, but to point out that the absolute nature of the claims you are making is not necessarily borne out by the prevailing research.
I don't disagree with anything you wrote here. The "mind body connection" makes the line between physical and psychological issues hard to draw. I think the addiction framework is extremely apt.
But the point is that there is evidence that suggests certain factors cause you to eat more, but there is not really evidence to suggest that similar people do significantly different things with similar caloric loads and that it's just a matter of tweaking biology to make people process the same caloric load differently.
The problem with this study is that it's suggesting inflammation as a cause to obesity, but we know that the only long term cause for obesity is caloric surplus. Inflammation definitionally is not causing caloric surplus (in fact it's using more calories than one otherwise would) so it doesn't seem like a useful thing to be studying, and the fat gains from it don't immediately appear to be permanent. The most important thing to study is why people eat more than they should, not necessarily what happens in the body after they eat it (though, again, I agree with your larger point that those two could be connected).
I see - I think we disagree less than I originally thought.
However, I am not sure there is no gain to be had from a change in digestive bacteria in terms of caloric intake, because chemical changes in the digestive process could conceivably alter the efficiency of energy extraction.
In the case study linked above, the woman who received fecal transplant and gained weight was placed on a medically supervised liquid diet and exercise program, and still kept gaining. She had never been obese prior, so it's not as likely that she had the kind of dietary habits that would predispose her to obesity. Also strange: her weight gain closely tracked the weight gain experienced over the same time by the fecal donor, despite dietary and exercise differences between the two. It was enough of an effect that the researchers who presented the case study have since ensured they only use fecal donations from healthy-weight donors.
That all being said, I do think you're right that psychology of obesity is a very important aspect to consider, especially that of food addiction. I hope this is solved in our lifetimes, because it will be interesting to discover just how much gut influences brain and vice versa.
Yes, I think we are mostly on the same page, sorry if I was not clear before.
> However, I am not sure there is no gain to be had from a change in digestive bacteria in terms of caloric intake, because chemical changes in the digestive process could conceivably alter the efficiency of energy extraction.
The reason I react negatively so strongly to stuff like this is that I fear it overcomplicates an issue that is relatively simple. It gives people an idea that there is probably something really out of their control that's causing them to gain weight. We can argue about the specifics, but at the end of the day for the vast majority of people it is within their control, and it certainly isn't within anyone else's control so...
> was placed on a medically supervised liquid diet and exercise program, and still kept gaining
> She had never been obese prior
> Also strange: her weight gain closely tracked the weight gain experienced over the same time by the fecal donor, despite dietary and exercise differences between the two
> It was enough of an effect that the researchers who presented the case study have since ensured they only use fecal donations from healthy-weight donors.
There is enough wacky shit going on in this study that it warrants taking it with a heavy grain of salt. I'd argue the results give compelling evidence that the fecal transplant was not in fact related to the weight gain at all, and it seems odd that the conclusion taken was to stop taking fecal transplants from obese people when a sample from a non-obese (at the time) person might've caused someone to become obese.
All of this stuff would be interesting to study more, but without further science really doesn't mean a lot.
> That all being said, I do think you're right that psychology of obesity is a very important aspect to consider, especially that of food addiction. I hope this is solved in our lifetimes, because it will be interesting to discover just how much gut influences brain and vice versa.
Definitely. Meditation (among other things) seems to have had a significant positive impact on my digestive system, so I am certainly super interested in this connection.
> The reason I react negatively so strongly to stuff like this is that I fear it...gives people an idea that there is probably something really out of their control that's causing them to gain weight.
I totally get this. But to me, even if you accept completely that your digestive microbial environment can change how you lose/gain weight, that doesn't take it out of your control - after all, that particular bacterial milieu is a direct result of what the individual is putting into their body. There have been tons of studies already about this particular area, that digestive choices have a direct impact on digestive biome.
I do think it makes it more complicated, but I think obesity really is that complicated - our choices have effects we don't yet understand, and some of that may have to do with being poor stewards of our gut bacteria.
> Meditation (among other things) seems to have had a significant positive impact on my digestive system
Same, as well as other areas of my life. It's why the mind/body feedback loop fascinates me so much!
Yes, your metabolism declines as you age. It's not that 18-year-olds can eat whatever they want and not gain weight, it's that 18 is the age where most people settle into eating habits based on their equilibrium at that time. As their daily expenditure slows by roughly 150 calories per decade, they don't adjust their eating habits and slowly gain weight.
This is not impossible. In some people, reducing calories (edit: by a lot) leads their body to decide it's starving, lowering their basal metabolism. Humans are a complex system with feedback loops.
(edit: note that I'm responding to the 'impossible' comment.)
This is sort of true but not really usefully true. Yes, your metabolic rate will go down slightly when you eat less food, but the idea of "starvation mode" comes from a study done in the fifties on extremely underweight people, who were then put on extremely calorically restricted diets. If the person is within reasonable weight, or overweight, "starvation mode" simply does not apply. People who are in this condition cannot lead normal lives due to low energy, and will frequently have massive health issues due to their body having to give up on a ton of base functions it's doing every day. It's a very extreme thing, and does not happen to many people, especially in America.
That's true of otherwise healthy people, nothing says that system must work as you describe across all populations.
As an example in the other direction. I gained significant weight after getting a foot of my intestines removed while eating the same diet. In this case it was a very good thing as calories out balanced due to incomplete digestion.
PS: Albumin levels are not something you generally hear about, but it's very bad when they get low.
I found an article about the "biggest loser study" pretty interesting a few months ago, but didn't investige further.
Tldr: It has to do with resting metabolism, which determines how many calories a person burns when at rest. When the show began, the contestants, though hugely overweight, had normal metabolisms for their size, meaning they were burning a normal number of calories for people of their weight. When it ended, their metabolisms had slowed radically and their bodies were not burning enough calories to maintain their thinner sizes.
I'm not trying to be a dick, but I don't think there's a lot going on here that doesn't make sense. None of the contestants were particularly thin at the end of the study. Danny Cahill still weighed 191, which is actually pretty significantly overweight for someone not carrying a lot of muscle mass, which he wouldn't be at the end of a 7 month crash diet. If you get your body very very good at using its fat stores you will lower your BMR. The data doesn't suggest this is permanent or significantly impacted Danny's weight gain, the data suggests that Danny Cahill did not stick to the diet.
The Biggest Loser is frequently held up as the gold standard for how not to do things. The weight change is too fast, there is absolutely no support after its over and they frequently optimize for cardio and fat burning over muscle building, which in the short term is effective but in the long term contributes to lowering BMR and making the weight hard to keep off.
But ultimately you have to consider that Danny Cahill was still pretty unhealthy at the end of the show. None of this is starvation mode, in which major parts of your life are hugely effected (ie: you would not have the energy to leave the house).
I'm curious how you rationalize your comments with this:
> What shocked the researchers was what happened next: As the years went by and the numbers on the scale climbed, the contestants’ metabolisms did not recover. They became even slower, and the pounds kept piling on. It was as if their bodies were intensifying their effort to pull the contestants back to their original weight.
> Mr. Cahill was one of the worst off. As he regained more than 100 pounds, his metabolism slowed so much that, just to maintain his current weight of 295 pounds, he now has to eat 800 calories a day less than a typical man his size. Anything more turns to fat.
That does suggest there's something more than just "calories in < calories burned" - that our bodies are willing to adapt to keep metabolic rates low.
At 191 pounds Cahill was still significantly fatter than he should be, and had very minimal muscle mass. We know this is true because it is extremely difficult to not lose muscle on even a small cut, much more so 290lbs over 7 months.
It does not suggest there's something more complicated than calories in < calories burned, it suggests there's something that is causing him to burn fewer calories. My explanation is that Cahill had an inactive lifestyle, poor body composition and was overweight, even after the massive cut. On top of this, no one is claiming he stuck to the diet, so it makes sense he regained the weight.
I'm not disputing that your metabolism can down regulate. I am absolutely disputing that it's a mystery and unfixable. For Cahill he needed to stay on the diet longer, and he needed to build muscle mass.
I totally agree. Metabolism it's complex and not everything is well understood how is connected. It's difficult to measure and more those little contributions where in aggregate can have an effect.
> It's difficult to measure and more those little contributions
The little contributions don't matter. If you don't consume enough calories, you will not increase body fat and tissue mass. Full stop.
You can retain fluid because of certain conditions that you have (I lost 30 pounds in one hour! Ask me how) but you will not be increasing fatty body mass.
It's really difficult to consume just enough without your brain showing symptoms of deprivation, e.g. headaches or loss of concentration. Unless you sleep all day.
I think that's not how it works. People get headaches from lack of available calories even if they have stored energy. Eating "just enough" really requires both a skill and dedication.
Perhaps what you are explaining is how it works with people who have an efficient/non-defective metabolic system. But hey, those people are not overweight.
> People get headaches from lack of available calories even if they have stored energy.
Citation? Are you saying that some people are unable to turn fat into glycogen? Unless you're undergoing ketosis, or have a vanishingly rare metabolic disorder, that's just not true.
> Perhaps what you are explaining is how it works with people who have an efficient/non-defective metabolic system. But hey, those people are not overweight.
Most overweight people have efficient/non-defective metabolic systems, as evinced by the increase in obesity rates in the developed world over the past fifty years.
I've been on sloppy paleo for a while, but I only started doing intermittent fasting more recently at a buddy's repeated urgings. I have fairly vivid memories of getting headaches sometimes after missing a meal or two in succession. After being on a paleo-ish diet for a while, I only then narrowed my feeding window to between noon and 8 PM over a couple of weeks.
I've since gotten to the point where I can eat one meal a day most days if I want, but hunger headaches are a thing. (I'd still expect to get them if I were to do a multiday fast.)
“Obviously, one possible starting point in combatting obesity could be to inhibit the inflammatory response in abdominal fat while administering cGMP-stimulating active ingredients,” says Prof. Pfeifer to summarize the findings.
As someone with body fat predominantly in the torso I would love to benefit from this research.
Doesn't look good for the kind of weight-loss consumers would look for. From the article:
"While hardly any inflammation occurred in the subcutaneous fat of obese mice and cGMP signaling was largely intact, things were very different for the deeper-lying abdominal fat: through the significant weight increase, inflammation had spread and the fat-burning turbocharger cGMP largely came to a standstill."
I am not a doctor and you should probably speak to one before trying this but there is some information regarding cryolipolysis. Apparently you can get some benefit from bring temperature of body down a few degrees.
There has been increasing evidence of cold stress and fat loss. My understanding is that cold stress increases the BAT (brown fat) cells, which helps burn fat for energy source.
I have been reading the articles in this blog: http://hypothermics.com/. It is an excellent blog that chronicles many of the findings and the author performs a lot of these tests on himself.
People don't spend all that much time outside and when they do, they wrap up well enough that you don't get very cold.
These hypothetical cold fat burning technqiues, that I've seen, suggest inducing very mild hypothermia (shivering). That only happens rarely in the north.
> they wrap up well enough that you don't get very cold.
Are you certain of that? It gets really cold here and everyone wears jeans. Only children wear winter pants casually. Sometime the air itself is cold enough to get you shivering.
The only time I see people correctly dressed against the cold is when they do winter sports or go hiking in the woods.
I think it's the opposite, the colder it is the more people heat their homes / cars / dress very warmly. They probably get the least cold exposure naturally.
I grew up in Toronto but I was always much colder in winter when living in Sydney. No insulation, plus vents in the walls and single pane windows mean it's warmer outside but much colder in.
I take cold showers pretty regularly. Living in Colorado, my tap water is very cold, since it mainly comes from reservoirs filled with snow-melt runoff.
The question though is can this impact abdominal fat or not.
Or look into actual scientific studies on the issue, as opposed to the latest X fad person of the day?
Even if they used to be "ex scientists" themselves (lots of people that oversell some cure without verification usually are -- Heck, Linus Pauling had 2 Nobels).
I'm convinced that cold stress adds brown fat and/or regular fat cells to your body from personal experience: when I started caving about a decade ago I had way worse cold tolerance than I do now; as caves are formed by water most caving is a relatively wet and cold activity. My cold tolerance also got rapidly better, maybe in about two or three years worth of caving, without much weight change associated with it, so I'd guess it was mainly putting on brown fat with maybe some redistribution of the existing fat I had.
Of course, that's no magic bullet: I've probably put on something like 20lb in that timeframe. I definitely need to get more exercise and eat better.
cold tolerance is also influenced by the ability of the muscles to burn fat to create heat. Adaptation to colder environments takes about two weeks. Ray Cronise's blog discusses this also.
Ah, interesting! Does that "two weeks" of exposure mean two weeks total of cold exposure? Two weeks after cold exposure? Or something in between?
I'm only a moderate caver, so the longest I've been exposed to cold in that context is something like 16hrs straight, or maybe 32hrs total in a 3-4 day period; most of my exposure caving is much less than that, more like a few hours at a time spaced apart by at least a week.
I've been taking cold showers since 2015 and have noticed a huge difference in my cold tolerance and also in how my body reacts to the food I've eaten. There is a point (around winter unsurprisingly) where it becomes too stressful because the water gets too cold to shower in.
Anecdotal but I noticed I did lose more weight when I was taking regular cold showers, plus it helped me take up more exercise as my body became a bit more resilient and enduring.
>I have been reading the articles in this blog: http://hypothermics.com/. It is an excellent blog that chronicles many of the findings and the author performs a lot of these tests on himself.
The problem with such blogs is that there's one for all kinds of kooky theories. The hypothermics, the epsom-salters, the music-therapies, the low-carbers, the paleos, the whatevers...
Some theories might turn out validated by scientific research with control groups and everything, but it's hardly worth it trusting such sources until that happens.
Eating a low carb diet is just a statement of fact (if one does eat few carbs).
But THE low-carb dies tons of people follow (from specific books, websites, etc.) are just fad diets based on kooky theories that selectively pick partial scientific results, add some cargo cult and personal opinion (e.g. from the late Atkins) as opposed to peer reviewed and agreed upon medical consensus, and promote it as the ultimate solution to weight loss.
Many promoters of dietary schemes would have us believe that a special substance or combination of foods will automatically result in weight reduction. That's simply not true. To lose weight, you must eat less, or exercise more, or do both.
(I follow a low carb diet myself, in the sense of avoiding sugar and white flour etc, but not with the proper scientific adjustments and balances -- e.g. fruit are fine--, not because some late 70s doctor said so, or because some health guru promotes a specific version of it).
It is a little more complex than calories in and calories out. It isnt kooky to suggest that some foods (liquid sugar) are absorbed more readily while other calories may pass through without absorbtion (plant fibers). What counts is calories in minus calories flushed away, something nobody really likes to measure.
Take orange juice with or without pulp. Same basic caloric values, but the pulp version carries much of the sugars away.
Liquid sugar also has more calories than plant fibers; it's a bit of a strange comparison.
Many of the details people focus on are second order effects, and I have yet evidence to see that calorie in minus calorie out is a bad model for estimating weight gain.
If you have evidence for the calories being missleading by more than 10% I'd love to see it!
I was talking abour two foods with the same calories but with different absorbtion rates resulting in greater or fewer calories passing through the gut undigested. 100cal of coke results in more weight than 100cal of grass clippings. One is easy to absorb and the other passes through almost untouched.
Sure there are plenty of undigested elements that inevitably become waste products, but if it's food that most people are eating, I'm very unconvinced that calories in minus calories out isn't the first order effect to model.
It's difficult for me to find nutritional data for grass clippings; but let's take your example and compare coke to alfalfa sprouts for grass clippings:
* 100g alfalfa sprouts is ~23 calories and would occupy a volume of ~3 cups [0]
* 100g of coke is ~38 calories and occupies a volume of ~.4 cup [1,2,3]
If you wanted to eat enough alpha sprouts to be equivalent to that .4 cup of coke, you would need to eat almost 5 cups worth, ~12x more volume! I can't imagine eating 5 cups of alfalfa sprouts, but half a cup of coke is trivial to guzzle.
Relative energy density seems to limit caloric consumption far before we need to model undigested bits.
>It is a little more complex than calories in and calories out. It isnt kooky to suggest that some foods (liquid sugar) are absorbed more readily while other calories may pass through without absorbtion (plant fibers)
No, but it is kooky to suggest it as a standalone diet, complete with various invalid assumptions, outside of scientific dietary consensus.
Isn't there research that shows that ketosis provides an anti-inflammatory response? Moving into ketosis for fat-loss may be the right thing to do (at least for a period)...
concur on a short term keto diet. I lost basically all my excess body fat. I struggled a little more with the brain fog, buy after doing it for about a month, I was able to get back into healthier habits. I wouldn't recommend it long term unless you have a medical condition that requires it. My nephew had seizures and he switched to ketogenic diet and his epilepsy calmed from multiple episodes a day to maybe one a day.
Wow. I also have a nephew with a seizure disorder who switched to a keto-like diet(!). Though, he's since changed medications and moved on to something else.
This is all interesting, and warrants more actual research, but it's on a rat study that did not control for calories, so it's not super useful because we also know that:
1. Rats metabolisms are very different from primate and specifically human metabolisms
2. Even if they are the same, we already know that eating a caloric surplus contributes to inflammation, so it's difficult to disambiguate the effects of eating keto vs. the effects of eat fewer calories (which people on keto tend to do).
Nothing against keto, if it allows you to comply to eating the right amount of food that's great, but controlling for calories there isn't a ton of evidence in its efficacy over carbohydrate inclusive diets.
I have a hypothesis that keto actually works just because the psychological effects of the ketone bodies result in less food consumption. Acetone (which accumulates in the brain on a ketogenic diet) is a sort of crude anaesthetic, and possibly, anaesthetics can reduce hunger.
If the (surprisingly large amount of) anecdotal evidence on /r/keto and similar messageboards is anything to go on, keto is very effective for losing a large amount of weight, possibly the best dietary strategy. But I don't think anyone really knows why.
I've always hypothesized that it's the fact that you can't eat most junk food. No chips, soda, candy, rice, bread, etc. Most fat people are eating too much of those things. I bet if they did a Keto + reasonable amounts of carbs in otherwise healthy dishes, they'd still be losing the weight.
The benefit of keto is more satiety than anything. All diets use calories deficits but on keto I'm not nearly has hungry as I am on sugars or starches. Chicken and rice vs chicken and broccoli and I'll take the latter.
That's generally what a keto diet turns into once you've lost your target weight. I eat carbs now but still try to keep them as low as possible and it's great to maintain my current weight.
There's a strong connection between weight gain and sleep apnea. Often its misunderstood as "Oh just go on a diet and your sleep apnea will go away!" That works in some cases but for many it doesn't. Turns out the SA caused the weight gain via unknown mechanisms. Perhaps inflammation, perhaps sugar/food cravings to make up for lost energy, fatigue, etc.
Simply (ok it's not so simple, actually) reducing intake of inflammatory food such sugar in any form, preservatives, coloring, glyphosate, animals treated with antibiotics, etc. would go a really long way.
I'd go even one step further: simply reducing intake of food period. Inflammation, short of a specific disease, is pretty rare in people who are not overweight.
Beyond what gtrubetskoy mentions (those are the basics which one should always follow), fish oil[1] and tumeric[2] have powerful anti-inflammatory effects.
Be careful with turmeric if you are prone to hypoglycaemia - I am, and had to stop supplementing with 1g of turmeric, since it was reliably dropping my baseline blood glucose levels by 1mmol/l (might be a good thing if you are diabetic though!)
1. This can be heavily mitigated by going to the gym, or doing some kind of resistance exercise. Yes, human beings are required to eat the right amount of food and also exercise in order to maintain health. There is no magic bullet.
2. You would only really be lethargic for a small amount of time as your body adjusts to blood sugar levels. It's important to note that people who are losing weight are not low on energy because they are lacking calories. They have a ton of calories, they just aren't very good at using the fat to maintain blood sugar (yet). This should be roughly a 1-4 week transition, and again exercise will help a lot with it.
I wish it was that simple. From the studies I've read and personal experience, the human body stops using fat as its source of energy once it goes below certain percentage (the lower the percentage, the harder it is to make it use fat). It's pure muscle catabolism and low levels of energy from there on, unless you use tricks like intermittent fasting and macro cycling (and resistance training).
Realistically you're talking about like 12% bodyfat for a male - which is something many of us would dream of. Sorry, but that's absolutely not what's happening with regular overweight people who lose weight, you're talking about micro-optimization for athletes.
The deal is whenever you lose weight you lose muscle and fat. All you can do is shift the ratio. Resistance exercise helps shift that ratio. Proper diet (ie: enough protein) helps shift that ratio.
> Losing weight is actually pretty simple. But I won't argue that it is hard.
It depends on the genetics, but yes, if you're really overweight, losing lots of weight is generally pretty simple. At some point, though, you'll hit a roadblock and that's when those nuances can become important.
Yea, there are lots of studies actually looking at the effect of various foods have on fat burning and obesity. There is definitely more at play than simply calories in calories out. Yes, if you want to lose weight, you need to have a calorie deficit, but certain foods promote fat burning, while others do the opposite.
Here are just 3 studies, but there are many many more.
There are at least two issues with the calories in/ calories burned idea.
1) The method used to measure calories (combustion) is not a proper representation of how calories are metabolized in the human body. We don't have a fire burning inside us.
2) There are different metabolic cycles which determine whether body fat is utilized for energy or whether energy from food is stored as fat.
A good reference for this is "Why We Get Fat" by Gary Taubes.
While 1) is true, it's not significantly true. If we are measuring calories consistently, even if we are wrong about it, we can continue to trend downwards until we are losing weight. There isn't such a massive difference that caloric measurement error is to blame.
And for 2) this is really not true at all. Yes, you might store fat temporarily etc., but if you are eating a caloric balance, guess what: that fat has to be used at some point.
Taubes is not wrong, but he really overemphasizes a lot of things. People who are obese are not eating just a little over caloric balance but eating the wrong things. They are eating massively over caloric balance. Cutting sugar out might be a good way to get them to comply to a diet that requires them to eat fewer calories, but ultimately for the obese it's really just the calories that are an issue. Imo this warrants more research into the psychological aspects of obesity (the food dopamine reward system etc.)
My major point, which I don't think you disagree with, is that none of this research is telling us anything useful. What we know is that people need to eat a reasonable amount of calories and they need to exercise. That amount is different for different people in different situations, but it's not due to inflammation, or any of the other tiny factors that vary person to person.
If you are eating 2000 calories a day and consistently maintaining weight, and inflammation causes you to store some more of your energy intake as fat at some point, you will also burn that fat off at some point. There's no reason to think that small temporary metabolic shifts within a calorically consistent environment cause long term fat gain.
I mention Taubes because I find he's approachable. There's plenty of other material out there supporting similar ideas independent of him. I think you're too quick to dismiss the effects of metabolism and it's affects on fat utilization/deposition.
I agree that the psychology around eating should be studied more.
I don't dismiss them, I just don't think they tell us anything we don't already know. You have to eat a reasonable amount of calories and you have to exercise. No one gets a pass. All the research in the world is not going to change this.
"As the researchers have shown in various studies on mice, the widespread active ingredient sildenafil or a medication against pulmonary hypertension, for instance, can be used to reduce the number of white fat cells to the benefit of the brown fat cells and thus accelerate fat burning like a turbocharger."
According to Wikipedia, it was developed to treat hypertension and angina, then the researchers discovered a happy (and very marketable) side effect during trials.
The problem here is what happens when the inflammation goes down? All that fat that's been stored is still going to be burned as energy assuming one is eating within a caloric balance.
It's frustrating to read all this research into the mechanism of what causes fat to be stored short term, because we already know what really causes fat to be stored long term: eating too much.
We need to be researching the reward systems associated with eating, and we need to start treating obesity as the mental health issue it is. It's a food addiction, and what we don't need to understand more deeply is how fat is stored. What we do need to understand more deeply is why people eat too much and how to get them to comply to healthier lifestyles. The answers are going to look a lot like drug addiction (ie: people are self-medicating depression, anxiety, etc. with food).
> All that fat that's been stored is still going to be burned as energy assuming one is eating within a caloric balance.
No, if you are eating within caloric balance, the fat will not be burned for energy.
> we need to start treating obesity as the mental health issue it is.
Obesity is not a "mental health issue". It's a symptom. There may (or may not) be mental health issues underlying it.
> It's a food addiction
Food addictions are a real thing, and obviously where they exist they can contribute to obesity. It's also clearly the case that obesity is not simply food addiction.
> What we do need to understand more deeply is why people eat too much
There's a lot of work that has been done on this.
> The answers are going to look a lot like drug addiction
If you mean "they are going to be very complex sets of environmental, genetic, and physical and mental health factors that combine differently in different people, and that often the most effective interventions will be more indicated by the current state than the root causes in individual history", I'd agree that it will look a lot like drug addiction. In fact, we already know that obesity is, in that respect, like drug addiction, so that's just predicting the present, not future results.
There are not obese people who do not eat too much. They simply do not exist. Then the question becomes: why do they eat too much? Yes, you are right, it's a complex answer involving a ton of things. But my point in framing it as a food addiction is that the issue here is not that there is some kind of underlying metabolic damage or difference that accounts for obesity, unless that damage/difference somehow contributes to increasing the desire to eat more.
If we could somehow get them to simply eat less, the condition would go away. There are arguments to be made about the mind body connection, and I think they are real, but the issues here are not that obese people are eating the same amount of food as non-obese people and that inflammation is causing some of that energy to be stored as fat. It's ridiculous and misleading for people who are genuinely trying to change their lives to suggest that small effects like this are the cause.
Also:
> No, if you are eating within caloric balance, the fat will not be burned for energy.
Fat is constantly being stored and burned as energy even within a caloric balance. You cannot store fat longterm without at some point eating at a caloric surplus.
It's not so "simple"; the body fights back. Hunger kicks in overdrive, the body becomes sleepy, lethargic, you get "fog brain" (for programmers this is death).
Exercise leads to an amplification of these symptoms.
It's not so easy as to "just put down the fork" or journal your feelings. The body doesn't want to change.
And it's not like the body stops these signals after a while. I have dropped 30+ pounds, always to gain it back.
Your framing of an addiction fails, especially when the participant still has to interact with food. It fails when the self-preservation acts in spite of the intent. It's a plan of perpetual feelings of starvation and less than ideal living quality.
Gastric Bypass/Roux-en-Y appears to be the only long-term successful intervention.
> It's not so "simple"; the body fights back. Hunger kicks in overdrive, the body becomes sleepy, lethargic, you get "fog brain" (for programmers this is death).
For about two weeks, maybe. This is all the result of low blood sugar. Your body gets better at using fat to keep blood sugar high, and these symptoms subside.
> Exercise leads to an amplification of these symptoms.
I have literally never heard anyone else claim this, and what little science there is suggests the opposite.
> It's not so easy as to "just put down the fork" or journal your feelings. The body doesn't want to change.
Right, I'm not suggesting it is easy, I'm suggesting it is simple.
> And it's not like the body stops these signals after a while. I have dropped 30+ pounds, always to gain it back.
If you are still having the symptoms of low blood sugar that lasts for a significant period of time (> 2 weeks), this is absolutely something your doctor should look into.
Regardless: the meta point here is that the body is not literally starving, it just feels like it is. Which sounds a lot like addiction: the body doesn't literally need those drugs, but brain chemistry makes it feel like it does.
The study you linked to does not seem like a glowing endorsement for gastric bypass to me.
Also, not that it matters, but you're talking to someone who has lost 35lbs more than a year ago, so I do have direct experience.
>The study you linked to does not seem like a glowing endorsement for gastric bypass to me.
Why is that? 71 Morbidly obese patients that maintain 50%+ loss of their excess weight for over 9 years? No other diet and/or treatment rivals that.
>Also, not that it matters, but you're talking to someone who has lost 35lbs more than a year ago, so I do have direct experience.
Talk to us in 10 years (seriously). Something always happens; the diet becomes mundane, physical and/or mental issues, stress, you have a family that wants to eat something other than eggs and salad, simply not giving a shit anymore or just general aging & slowly of metabolism.
10 years is a long time to stick to the straight and narrow and keep the diet in check. Best of luck, maybe you have the mentality of a Navy Seal and will make it but most others do not.
Temporarily increased hunger is natural. Temporarily increased fatigue is natural. What you were describing, being significantly mentally impaired over a long period of time, is not.
This article says a lot of things about exercise, some of them good some of them bad. Unfortunately it basically only takes into account cardio, which yes, is not the ideal form of exercise for losing weight. The reason is contained in the article: it helps train your body to do more with less. If that's the case, then how would we do the opposite? By training our bodies to be inefficient machines, rather than efficient ones. The best way to do that is to put on muscle mass. The best way to do that is to lift heavy things.
> Why is that? 71 Morbidly obese patients that maintain 50%+ loss of their excess weight for over 9 years? No other diet and/or treatment rivals that.
> > Some 9 % of the patients suffered from internal herniation, despite the closure of potential hernia sites
> > LRYGB was effective for diabetes control in 85.7 % of the affected patients, but, surprisingly, 27.9 % developed new-onset diabetes
> > four patients [5%] required hospitalization for hypoglycemic syndrome...two [2.5%] patients underwent reversal of their bypass for problems linked to glucose metabolism
> Talk to us in 10 years (seriously).
Get your squat up to 315, and then come talk to me about how hard it is to keep weight off. Seriously, it will make a huge difference in your life.
> Something always happens; the diet becomes mundane, physical and/or mental issues, stress, you have a family that wants to eat something other than eggs and salad, simply not giving a shit anymore or just general aging & slowly of metabolism.
All of this is in my control with the exception of slowing metabolism and while aging metabolism can account for some amount of weight gain we are absolutely not talking healthy weight -> obesity levels. I definitely don't subsist on eggs and salad. Today I had a few glasses of whole milk for breakfast, a steak burrito for lunch and a bacon cheeseburger for dinner, and I'll probably have one more square meal before passing out in a few hours. I weigh about 185lbs at 6ft. I'm lifting shit in the gym 3x a week and I rock climb a 4th day most weeks. Re: stress and mental issues, meditation and mindfulness are awesome and free, and if you can afford it I highly recommend talk therapy.
> 10 years is a long time to stick to the straight and narrow and keep the diet in check. Best of luck, maybe you have the mentality of a Navy Seal and will make it but most others do not.
I'm glad you are happy with weight lifting 3x a week and have a healthy lifestyle; but it's not a reason to diss other types of exercise like cardio just based on personal anecdotes. Unless you have a meta-analysis study with high evidence that proves this :)
Well, it's more like your body gets better at using fat, which leaves room for the smaller amount of carbs being used to keep blood sugar high. But many keto proponents argue you in fact can convert fats to glucose:
I honestly don't know enough about it to know if this makes sense, but it seems like it is significantly more complicated than "lipids cannot turn into glucose."
The meta point is: yes you will feel like shit for a little bit on a diet, your body has to adjust. If you feel like shit longer term, you may have an actual issue a doctor can diagnose and treat.
So I was always very thin. Never cared about what I ate. Kept a very, very steady weight for a decade naturally without conscious effort on my part. I then went on a medication that has weight gain as a known side effect. When my doctor gave it to me she said "just don't eat extra."
My diet did not change a bit. I didn't feel extra hungry.
I gained a massive amount of fat and I gained it extremely fast. Three months later I was clinically obese. I then paid extra attention to my diet. Started micromanaging my calories, weighing food, gave up 99% of junk food and all alcohol.
I gained more weight.
I dropped my calories down to 1000 calories a day and started losing weight. But it was basically an uphill battle to keep that up. That's not living, you try it. I thought about food all day. If I started eating even a little more I'd gain again.
I gave up and went off the drug. My weight is going down now but it's extremely slow going. I don't know if I am capable of being my former weight.
I certainly am not not ever was addicted to food. The doctor assumed weight gain had to be caused by extra food intake. It was not.
Sure you can say "rah, rah, 99% of obesity cases aren't drug induced." That is true, but my experience shows that people can be physiologically different. Or there may be something in the environment that is triggering abnormal fat storage. Who knows? But it can't be as simple as "food addiction." Food addiction can be a cause or maybe even a symptom but it's not the be all end all. Humans are much more complicated than that.
I can't really respond to an anecdote in any kind of useful way. There are simply too many factors that could effect this. What I can say is that the data does not support what you are claiming. This doesn't mean what you are claiming is incorrect, it means nutritional science is very very difficult and we don't have good evidence that supports your claim.
Right now there is not reason to think obesity happens outside of a caloric surplus, and there is a fair amount of basic science that supports that view. If that view were not true, it would invalidate many things that we think are true about the physical world.
That being said, while calories-in/calories-out is basically inarguable, there are many things going on that can effect calories-out even if calories-in remain the same. Body composition is one thing. I could definitely imagine medications that are catabolic leading to decreased muscle mass and increased fat storage. But I still don't think this would account for a massive change in bodyweight, not one that would make the difference between obese and not obese.
I wonder how effective it would be from a diet perspective if you were to add things that are anti-inflamitory to your diet. (I.e. Green Tea extract suppliments)
Before anyone gets the idea of supplementing NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatories such as aspirin), please know that the chronic use of NSAIDs has been found to be related to renal cancer (which is not curable).
131 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadIt wouldn't surprise me to see a true connection found in a couple of years between autoimmune conditions and weight in a reciprocal way.
Don't think it'll take that long. Both seem to be connected to messed up gut flora to some extent.
--
[1]: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-31168511
Since you have an issue with the sample size, please point me to the nearest full-scale fecal transplant study done and I'll gladly use those results.
>in a person who was probably already eating a ton and not absorbing it much due to a massive infection.
Source? Let's not criticize others for their sources and then make unsupported drive-by claims.
edit: "article" --> "case study"
There are no full scale fecal transplant studies looking into obesity to my knowledge.
> Source? Let's not criticize others for their sources and then make unsupported drive-by claims.
You're right, but upon digging deeper into the study it's even worse: neither her, nor the person she took the fecal sample from, were obese at the time of transplant. Both became obese after the treatment. The source of the transplant was her daughter, so I can imagine a lot of environmental factors effecting both of them. It's hard to imagine the donor becoming obese because of the transplant...
The point here is there are a TON of other obvious variables to examine, and gut flora may really play a role, but there is really not substantial evidence to think that's true.
Regardless of if it is true, it doesn't change much for outcomes: you still have to eat less, you still have to workout more.
Put simply: obesity is a food addiction. There are a ton of things that go into it, like depression, the reward system etc. We aren't likely to find the solution to obesity in small dietary tweaks, or fecal transplants.
You're firmly claiming causal direction on something the current research no longer supports. Psychology may be a result of digestive biome (or at least influenced by), rather than the seminal cause as you seem to think.
Edit: none of the above is to claim causality in the other direction, but to point out that the absolute nature of the claims you are making is not necessarily borne out by the prevailing research.
--
[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/108/38/16050
[2] http://www.journalofpsychiatricresearch.com/article/S0022-39...
But the point is that there is evidence that suggests certain factors cause you to eat more, but there is not really evidence to suggest that similar people do significantly different things with similar caloric loads and that it's just a matter of tweaking biology to make people process the same caloric load differently.
The problem with this study is that it's suggesting inflammation as a cause to obesity, but we know that the only long term cause for obesity is caloric surplus. Inflammation definitionally is not causing caloric surplus (in fact it's using more calories than one otherwise would) so it doesn't seem like a useful thing to be studying, and the fat gains from it don't immediately appear to be permanent. The most important thing to study is why people eat more than they should, not necessarily what happens in the body after they eat it (though, again, I agree with your larger point that those two could be connected).
However, I am not sure there is no gain to be had from a change in digestive bacteria in terms of caloric intake, because chemical changes in the digestive process could conceivably alter the efficiency of energy extraction.
In the case study linked above, the woman who received fecal transplant and gained weight was placed on a medically supervised liquid diet and exercise program, and still kept gaining. She had never been obese prior, so it's not as likely that she had the kind of dietary habits that would predispose her to obesity. Also strange: her weight gain closely tracked the weight gain experienced over the same time by the fecal donor, despite dietary and exercise differences between the two. It was enough of an effect that the researchers who presented the case study have since ensured they only use fecal donations from healthy-weight donors.
That all being said, I do think you're right that psychology of obesity is a very important aspect to consider, especially that of food addiction. I hope this is solved in our lifetimes, because it will be interesting to discover just how much gut influences brain and vice versa.
> However, I am not sure there is no gain to be had from a change in digestive bacteria in terms of caloric intake, because chemical changes in the digestive process could conceivably alter the efficiency of energy extraction.
The reason I react negatively so strongly to stuff like this is that I fear it overcomplicates an issue that is relatively simple. It gives people an idea that there is probably something really out of their control that's causing them to gain weight. We can argue about the specifics, but at the end of the day for the vast majority of people it is within their control, and it certainly isn't within anyone else's control so...
> was placed on a medically supervised liquid diet and exercise program, and still kept gaining
> She had never been obese prior
> Also strange: her weight gain closely tracked the weight gain experienced over the same time by the fecal donor, despite dietary and exercise differences between the two
> It was enough of an effect that the researchers who presented the case study have since ensured they only use fecal donations from healthy-weight donors.
There is enough wacky shit going on in this study that it warrants taking it with a heavy grain of salt. I'd argue the results give compelling evidence that the fecal transplant was not in fact related to the weight gain at all, and it seems odd that the conclusion taken was to stop taking fecal transplants from obese people when a sample from a non-obese (at the time) person might've caused someone to become obese.
All of this stuff would be interesting to study more, but without further science really doesn't mean a lot.
> That all being said, I do think you're right that psychology of obesity is a very important aspect to consider, especially that of food addiction. I hope this is solved in our lifetimes, because it will be interesting to discover just how much gut influences brain and vice versa.
Definitely. Meditation (among other things) seems to have had a significant positive impact on my digestive system, so I am certainly super interested in this connection.
I totally get this. But to me, even if you accept completely that your digestive microbial environment can change how you lose/gain weight, that doesn't take it out of your control - after all, that particular bacterial milieu is a direct result of what the individual is putting into their body. There have been tons of studies already about this particular area, that digestive choices have a direct impact on digestive biome.
I do think it makes it more complicated, but I think obesity really is that complicated - our choices have effects we don't yet understand, and some of that may have to do with being poor stewards of our gut bacteria.
> Meditation (among other things) seems to have had a significant positive impact on my digestive system
Same, as well as other areas of my life. It's why the mind/body feedback loop fascinates me so much!
Great chat, thanks much. Have a good 2017!
Sure there is. They're called 18 year olds. Sadly the effect fades at round 25.
would love a link if you have one handy. it seems impossible?
(edit: note that I'm responding to the 'impossible' comment.)
As an example in the other direction. I gained significant weight after getting a foot of my intestines removed while eating the same diet. In this case it was a very good thing as calories out balanced due to incomplete digestion.
PS: Albumin levels are not something you generally hear about, but it's very bad when they get low.
Tldr: It has to do with resting metabolism, which determines how many calories a person burns when at rest. When the show began, the contestants, though hugely overweight, had normal metabolisms for their size, meaning they were burning a normal number of calories for people of their weight. When it ended, their metabolisms had slowed radically and their bodies were not burning enough calories to maintain their thinner sizes.
First article about the study: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/health/biggest-loser-we...
Step 2: Lose a bunch of weight
Step 3: Go off diet
Step 4: Regain a bunch of weight.
I'm not trying to be a dick, but I don't think there's a lot going on here that doesn't make sense. None of the contestants were particularly thin at the end of the study. Danny Cahill still weighed 191, which is actually pretty significantly overweight for someone not carrying a lot of muscle mass, which he wouldn't be at the end of a 7 month crash diet. If you get your body very very good at using its fat stores you will lower your BMR. The data doesn't suggest this is permanent or significantly impacted Danny's weight gain, the data suggests that Danny Cahill did not stick to the diet.
The Biggest Loser is frequently held up as the gold standard for how not to do things. The weight change is too fast, there is absolutely no support after its over and they frequently optimize for cardio and fat burning over muscle building, which in the short term is effective but in the long term contributes to lowering BMR and making the weight hard to keep off.
But ultimately you have to consider that Danny Cahill was still pretty unhealthy at the end of the show. None of this is starvation mode, in which major parts of your life are hugely effected (ie: you would not have the energy to leave the house).
> What shocked the researchers was what happened next: As the years went by and the numbers on the scale climbed, the contestants’ metabolisms did not recover. They became even slower, and the pounds kept piling on. It was as if their bodies were intensifying their effort to pull the contestants back to their original weight.
> Mr. Cahill was one of the worst off. As he regained more than 100 pounds, his metabolism slowed so much that, just to maintain his current weight of 295 pounds, he now has to eat 800 calories a day less than a typical man his size. Anything more turns to fat.
That does suggest there's something more than just "calories in < calories burned" - that our bodies are willing to adapt to keep metabolic rates low.
It does not suggest there's something more complicated than calories in < calories burned, it suggests there's something that is causing him to burn fewer calories. My explanation is that Cahill had an inactive lifestyle, poor body composition and was overweight, even after the massive cut. On top of this, no one is claiming he stuck to the diet, so it makes sense he regained the weight.
I'm not disputing that your metabolism can down regulate. I am absolutely disputing that it's a mystery and unfixable. For Cahill he needed to stay on the diet longer, and he needed to build muscle mass.
The little contributions don't matter. If you don't consume enough calories, you will not increase body fat and tissue mass. Full stop.
You can retain fluid because of certain conditions that you have (I lost 30 pounds in one hour! Ask me how) but you will not be increasing fatty body mass.
What? If you eat the amount of calories that you are expending every day, you'll operate just fine. That's the way your body was designed to work.
As long as your caloric intake sort of averages out to your calorie expenditure, you're fine. You don't have to balance every minute and every hour.
We're designed to operate at a caloric deficit for hours, if not days at a time. We obviously don't spend all of our time sleeping.
Perhaps what you are explaining is how it works with people who have an efficient/non-defective metabolic system. But hey, those people are not overweight.
Citation? Are you saying that some people are unable to turn fat into glycogen? Unless you're undergoing ketosis, or have a vanishingly rare metabolic disorder, that's just not true.
> Perhaps what you are explaining is how it works with people who have an efficient/non-defective metabolic system. But hey, those people are not overweight.
Most overweight people have efficient/non-defective metabolic systems, as evinced by the increase in obesity rates in the developed world over the past fifty years.
I've since gotten to the point where I can eat one meal a day most days if I want, but hunger headaches are a thing. (I'd still expect to get them if I were to do a multiday fast.)
That means that they're retaining water. That does not mean that they're accumulating fat stores, which is thermodynamically impossible.
As someone with body fat predominantly in the torso I would love to benefit from this research.
"While hardly any inflammation occurred in the subcutaneous fat of obese mice and cGMP signaling was largely intact, things were very different for the deeper-lying abdominal fat: through the significant weight increase, inflammation had spread and the fat-burning turbocharger cGMP largely came to a standstill."
http://theweek.com/articles/597862/truth-about-freezing-fat
I have been reading the articles in this blog: http://hypothermics.com/. It is an excellent blog that chronicles many of the findings and the author performs a lot of these tests on himself.
These hypothetical cold fat burning technqiues, that I've seen, suggest inducing very mild hypothermia (shivering). That only happens rarely in the north.
Are you certain of that? It gets really cold here and everyone wears jeans. Only children wear winter pants casually. Sometime the air itself is cold enough to get you shivering.
The only time I see people correctly dressed against the cold is when they do winter sports or go hiking in the woods.
You seem to have never visited warm and cold climates...
The question though is can this impact abdominal fat or not.
Even if they used to be "ex scientists" themselves (lots of people that oversell some cure without verification usually are -- Heck, Linus Pauling had 2 Nobels).
Of course, that's no magic bullet: I've probably put on something like 20lb in that timeframe. I definitely need to get more exercise and eat better.
I'm only a moderate caver, so the longest I've been exposed to cold in that context is something like 16hrs straight, or maybe 32hrs total in a 3-4 day period; most of my exposure caving is much less than that, more like a few hours at a time spaced apart by at least a week.
The problem with such blogs is that there's one for all kinds of kooky theories. The hypothermics, the epsom-salters, the music-therapies, the low-carbers, the paleos, the whatevers...
Some theories might turn out validated by scientific research with control groups and everything, but it's hardly worth it trusting such sources until that happens.
But THE low-carb dies tons of people follow (from specific books, websites, etc.) are just fad diets based on kooky theories that selectively pick partial scientific results, add some cargo cult and personal opinion (e.g. from the late Atkins) as opposed to peer reviewed and agreed upon medical consensus, and promote it as the ultimate solution to weight loss.
Many promoters of dietary schemes would have us believe that a special substance or combination of foods will automatically result in weight reduction. That's simply not true. To lose weight, you must eat less, or exercise more, or do both.
http://www.quackwatch.com/06ResearchProjects/lcd.html
(I follow a low carb diet myself, in the sense of avoiding sugar and white flour etc, but not with the proper scientific adjustments and balances -- e.g. fruit are fine--, not because some late 70s doctor said so, or because some health guru promotes a specific version of it).
Take orange juice with or without pulp. Same basic caloric values, but the pulp version carries much of the sugars away.
Many of the details people focus on are second order effects, and I have yet evidence to see that calorie in minus calorie out is a bad model for estimating weight gain.
If you have evidence for the calories being missleading by more than 10% I'd love to see it!
It's difficult for me to find nutritional data for grass clippings; but let's take your example and compare coke to alfalfa sprouts for grass clippings:
* 100g alfalfa sprouts is ~23 calories and would occupy a volume of ~3 cups [0]
* 100g of coke is ~38 calories and occupies a volume of ~.4 cup [1,2,3]
If you wanted to eat enough alpha sprouts to be equivalent to that .4 cup of coke, you would need to eat almost 5 cups worth, ~12x more volume! I can't imagine eating 5 cups of alfalfa sprouts, but half a cup of coke is trivial to guzzle.
Relative energy density seems to limit caloric consumption far before we need to model undigested bits.
[0] https://g.co/kgs/8aUo7E
[1] http://www.coca-colaproductfacts.com/en/coca-cola-products/c...
[2] http://chemistry.elmhurst.edu/vchembook/121Adensitycoke.html
[3] http://depts.washington.edu/chem/facilserv/lecturedemo/Densi...
No, but it is kooky to suggest it as a standalone diet, complete with various invalid assumptions, outside of scientific dietary consensus.
Plus, you'd be surprised how far the "calories in/out" goes: http://www.fitmole.org/twinkie-diet/
Ive had pretty good success with Keto. Lost weight, have good energy. Check out the keto reddit if you want to try it out. Great resource.
1. Rats metabolisms are very different from primate and specifically human metabolisms
2. Even if they are the same, we already know that eating a caloric surplus contributes to inflammation, so it's difficult to disambiguate the effects of eating keto vs. the effects of eat fewer calories (which people on keto tend to do).
Nothing against keto, if it allows you to comply to eating the right amount of food that's great, but controlling for calories there isn't a ton of evidence in its efficacy over carbohydrate inclusive diets.
If the (surprisingly large amount of) anecdotal evidence on /r/keto and similar messageboards is anything to go on, keto is very effective for losing a large amount of weight, possibly the best dietary strategy. But I don't think anyone really knows why.
Are there any more good ways to treat inflammation that would be a good supplement to exercise?
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21112025
[1] http://umm.edu/health/medical/altmed/supplement/omega3-fatty... [2] http://umm.edu/health/medical/altmed/herb/turmeric
Hard to believe this kind of fantasy is still being promoted.
Burn more calories than you take in. That's it, that's the secret to losing body fat. It's simple thermodynamics.
1) You'll be losing muscle before you lose fat
2) You'll be lethargic which can result in no weigth loss because your calorie expenditure will match your (reduced) intake
Overcoming these two issues is what most slimming/fitness regiments are about.
2. You would only really be lethargic for a small amount of time as your body adjusts to blood sugar levels. It's important to note that people who are losing weight are not low on energy because they are lacking calories. They have a ton of calories, they just aren't very good at using the fat to maintain blood sugar (yet). This should be roughly a 1-4 week transition, and again exercise will help a lot with it.
I wish it was that simple. From the studies I've read and personal experience, the human body stops using fat as its source of energy once it goes below certain percentage (the lower the percentage, the harder it is to make it use fat). It's pure muscle catabolism and low levels of energy from there on, unless you use tricks like intermittent fasting and macro cycling (and resistance training).
The deal is whenever you lose weight you lose muscle and fat. All you can do is shift the ratio. Resistance exercise helps shift that ratio. Proper diet (ie: enough protein) helps shift that ratio.
Lost 50 kg doing CICO. To keep your muscle, watch your macros and exercise.
Losing weight is actually pretty simple. But I won't argue that it is hard.
It depends on the genetics, but yes, if you're really overweight, losing lots of weight is generally pretty simple. At some point, though, you'll hit a roadblock and that's when those nuances can become important.
2) is one of the reasons that coffee exists on this earth :-)
Here are just 3 studies, but there are many many more.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24065788
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21621801
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22854401
1) The method used to measure calories (combustion) is not a proper representation of how calories are metabolized in the human body. We don't have a fire burning inside us.
2) There are different metabolic cycles which determine whether body fat is utilized for energy or whether energy from food is stored as fat.
A good reference for this is "Why We Get Fat" by Gary Taubes.
And for 2) this is really not true at all. Yes, you might store fat temporarily etc., but if you are eating a caloric balance, guess what: that fat has to be used at some point.
Taubes is not wrong, but he really overemphasizes a lot of things. People who are obese are not eating just a little over caloric balance but eating the wrong things. They are eating massively over caloric balance. Cutting sugar out might be a good way to get them to comply to a diet that requires them to eat fewer calories, but ultimately for the obese it's really just the calories that are an issue. Imo this warrants more research into the psychological aspects of obesity (the food dopamine reward system etc.)
Obviously, people who are obese and stable in both weight and fat/lean distribution are eating in caloric balance.
You seem to be confusing "obese" with "rapid fat gain", which are two different things.
If you are eating 2000 calories a day and consistently maintaining weight, and inflammation causes you to store some more of your energy intake as fat at some point, you will also burn that fat off at some point. There's no reason to think that small temporary metabolic shifts within a calorically consistent environment cause long term fat gain.
I agree that the psychology around eating should be studied more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4-Dinitrophenol
isn't Sildenafil Viagra??
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sildenafil#History
It's frustrating to read all this research into the mechanism of what causes fat to be stored short term, because we already know what really causes fat to be stored long term: eating too much.
We need to be researching the reward systems associated with eating, and we need to start treating obesity as the mental health issue it is. It's a food addiction, and what we don't need to understand more deeply is how fat is stored. What we do need to understand more deeply is why people eat too much and how to get them to comply to healthier lifestyles. The answers are going to look a lot like drug addiction (ie: people are self-medicating depression, anxiety, etc. with food).
No, if you are eating within caloric balance, the fat will not be burned for energy.
> we need to start treating obesity as the mental health issue it is.
Obesity is not a "mental health issue". It's a symptom. There may (or may not) be mental health issues underlying it.
> It's a food addiction
Food addictions are a real thing, and obviously where they exist they can contribute to obesity. It's also clearly the case that obesity is not simply food addiction.
> What we do need to understand more deeply is why people eat too much
There's a lot of work that has been done on this.
> The answers are going to look a lot like drug addiction
If you mean "they are going to be very complex sets of environmental, genetic, and physical and mental health factors that combine differently in different people, and that often the most effective interventions will be more indicated by the current state than the root causes in individual history", I'd agree that it will look a lot like drug addiction. In fact, we already know that obesity is, in that respect, like drug addiction, so that's just predicting the present, not future results.
If we could somehow get them to simply eat less, the condition would go away. There are arguments to be made about the mind body connection, and I think they are real, but the issues here are not that obese people are eating the same amount of food as non-obese people and that inflammation is causing some of that energy to be stored as fat. It's ridiculous and misleading for people who are genuinely trying to change their lives to suggest that small effects like this are the cause.
Also:
> No, if you are eating within caloric balance, the fat will not be burned for energy.
Fat is constantly being stored and burned as energy even within a caloric balance. You cannot store fat longterm without at some point eating at a caloric surplus.
Sure, but (barring lean/fat changes due to exercise level), thats no net change in stored fat.
> You cannot store fat longterm without at some point eating at a caloric surplus.
Right, that's how it got stored in the first place. Once it's stored, though, you can keep the same quantity indefinitely without a surplus.
It's not so "simple"; the body fights back. Hunger kicks in overdrive, the body becomes sleepy, lethargic, you get "fog brain" (for programmers this is death).
Exercise leads to an amplification of these symptoms.
It's not so easy as to "just put down the fork" or journal your feelings. The body doesn't want to change.
And it's not like the body stops these signals after a while. I have dropped 30+ pounds, always to gain it back.
Your framing of an addiction fails, especially when the participant still has to interact with food. It fails when the self-preservation acts in spite of the intent. It's a plan of perpetual feelings of starvation and less than ideal living quality.
Gastric Bypass/Roux-en-Y appears to be the only long-term successful intervention.
Weight loss is maintained https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22865194
For about two weeks, maybe. This is all the result of low blood sugar. Your body gets better at using fat to keep blood sugar high, and these symptoms subside.
> Exercise leads to an amplification of these symptoms.
I have literally never heard anyone else claim this, and what little science there is suggests the opposite.
> It's not so easy as to "just put down the fork" or journal your feelings. The body doesn't want to change.
Right, I'm not suggesting it is easy, I'm suggesting it is simple.
> And it's not like the body stops these signals after a while. I have dropped 30+ pounds, always to gain it back.
If you are still having the symptoms of low blood sugar that lasts for a significant period of time (> 2 weeks), this is absolutely something your doctor should look into.
Regardless: the meta point here is that the body is not literally starving, it just feels like it is. Which sounds a lot like addiction: the body doesn't literally need those drugs, but brain chemistry makes it feel like it does.
The study you linked to does not seem like a glowing endorsement for gastric bypass to me.
Also, not that it matters, but you're talking to someone who has lost 35lbs more than a year ago, so I do have direct experience.
You haven't experienced increased hunger or increase fatigue/sleepiness after exercise? The Vox writeup has a link to some of the research regarding exercise for weight-loss. http://www.vox.com/2016/4/28/11518804/weight-loss-exercise-m...
>The study you linked to does not seem like a glowing endorsement for gastric bypass to me.
Why is that? 71 Morbidly obese patients that maintain 50%+ loss of their excess weight for over 9 years? No other diet and/or treatment rivals that.
>Also, not that it matters, but you're talking to someone who has lost 35lbs more than a year ago, so I do have direct experience.
Talk to us in 10 years (seriously). Something always happens; the diet becomes mundane, physical and/or mental issues, stress, you have a family that wants to eat something other than eggs and salad, simply not giving a shit anymore or just general aging & slowly of metabolism.
10 years is a long time to stick to the straight and narrow and keep the diet in check. Best of luck, maybe you have the mentality of a Navy Seal and will make it but most others do not.
Temporarily increased hunger is natural. Temporarily increased fatigue is natural. What you were describing, being significantly mentally impaired over a long period of time, is not.
This article says a lot of things about exercise, some of them good some of them bad. Unfortunately it basically only takes into account cardio, which yes, is not the ideal form of exercise for losing weight. The reason is contained in the article: it helps train your body to do more with less. If that's the case, then how would we do the opposite? By training our bodies to be inefficient machines, rather than efficient ones. The best way to do that is to put on muscle mass. The best way to do that is to lift heavy things.
> Why is that? 71 Morbidly obese patients that maintain 50%+ loss of their excess weight for over 9 years? No other diet and/or treatment rivals that.
> > Some 9 % of the patients suffered from internal herniation, despite the closure of potential hernia sites
> > LRYGB was effective for diabetes control in 85.7 % of the affected patients, but, surprisingly, 27.9 % developed new-onset diabetes
> > four patients [5%] required hospitalization for hypoglycemic syndrome...two [2.5%] patients underwent reversal of their bypass for problems linked to glucose metabolism
> Talk to us in 10 years (seriously).
Get your squat up to 315, and then come talk to me about how hard it is to keep weight off. Seriously, it will make a huge difference in your life.
> Something always happens; the diet becomes mundane, physical and/or mental issues, stress, you have a family that wants to eat something other than eggs and salad, simply not giving a shit anymore or just general aging & slowly of metabolism.
All of this is in my control with the exception of slowing metabolism and while aging metabolism can account for some amount of weight gain we are absolutely not talking healthy weight -> obesity levels. I definitely don't subsist on eggs and salad. Today I had a few glasses of whole milk for breakfast, a steak burrito for lunch and a bacon cheeseburger for dinner, and I'll probably have one more square meal before passing out in a few hours. I weigh about 185lbs at 6ft. I'm lifting shit in the gym 3x a week and I rock climb a 4th day most weeks. Re: stress and mental issues, meditation and mindfulness are awesome and free, and if you can afford it I highly recommend talk therapy.
> 10 years is a long time to stick to the straight and narrow and keep the diet in check. Best of luck, maybe you have the mentality of a Navy Seal and will make it but most others do not.
I look forward to our check in :)
https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/2012/01/07/we-really-can-make...
I honestly don't know enough about it to know if this makes sense, but it seems like it is significantly more complicated than "lipids cannot turn into glucose."
The meta point is: yes you will feel like shit for a little bit on a diet, your body has to adjust. If you feel like shit longer term, you may have an actual issue a doctor can diagnose and treat.
My diet did not change a bit. I didn't feel extra hungry.
I gained a massive amount of fat and I gained it extremely fast. Three months later I was clinically obese. I then paid extra attention to my diet. Started micromanaging my calories, weighing food, gave up 99% of junk food and all alcohol.
I gained more weight.
I dropped my calories down to 1000 calories a day and started losing weight. But it was basically an uphill battle to keep that up. That's not living, you try it. I thought about food all day. If I started eating even a little more I'd gain again.
I gave up and went off the drug. My weight is going down now but it's extremely slow going. I don't know if I am capable of being my former weight.
I certainly am not not ever was addicted to food. The doctor assumed weight gain had to be caused by extra food intake. It was not.
Sure you can say "rah, rah, 99% of obesity cases aren't drug induced." That is true, but my experience shows that people can be physiologically different. Or there may be something in the environment that is triggering abnormal fat storage. Who knows? But it can't be as simple as "food addiction." Food addiction can be a cause or maybe even a symptom but it's not the be all end all. Humans are much more complicated than that.
Right now there is not reason to think obesity happens outside of a caloric surplus, and there is a fair amount of basic science that supports that view. If that view were not true, it would invalidate many things that we think are true about the physical world.
That being said, while calories-in/calories-out is basically inarguable, there are many things going on that can effect calories-out even if calories-in remain the same. Body composition is one thing. I could definitely imagine medications that are catabolic leading to decreased muscle mass and increased fat storage. But I still don't think this would account for a massive change in bodyweight, not one that would make the difference between obese and not obese.