"The investigators acknowledge some limitations on this research, including the fact that although they measured food intake, *they didn't measure what the participants were actually eating or their feelings of satiation or satiety*."
This seems to directly contradict the title.
EDIT: What food they are eating and how satiating that food may be is irrelevant. They did not measure the participants feelings of satiation or satiety. The title can't claim that the lower BMI people feel less hungry if you don't measure how hungry they feel.
I think they are saying the caloric intake was measured, but they didn’t distinguish between what kind of food the calories were coming from:
> The participants were monitored for two weeks. Their food intake was measured with an isotope-based technique called the doubly-labeled water method, which assesses energy expenditure based on the difference between the turnover rates of hydrogen and oxygen in body water as a function of carbon dioxide production. Their physical activity was measured using an accelerometry-based motion detector.
Also regarding the specific food choices:
> The team is now expanding its research, including studies that include these measures. They also plan to look at genetic differences between normal weight and healthy underweight individuals. Preliminary analysis suggests single nucleotide polymorphisms in certain genes that might play a role.
Depending what you eat, it's possible to basically eat all you want and still lose weight. One example is learning to love non-carb foods - eat all the antipasto salad and steak you like (expensive AF yes).
OK, I see what you mean. However I would interpret the fact that people consistently ate less as strongly implying that they were less hungry in the first place. While one individual might go around hungry, in general people don’t experience hunger if they don’t have to.
I think if they had substituted “eat less” for “are less hungry” the title would be fair.
Caloric intake is a measure of the energy we receive from food accurately, i believe they are referring more-so to an idea in a recent popular HN post, potatoes,[1] and which foods are more filling. It could be that there is error in what the less-eating participants happen to eat more-filling food, but not that the entire hypothesis would be incorrect.
Totally agree with your point and find it really annoying. The original journal entry is titled: 'Higher than predicted resting energy expenditure and lower physical activity in healthy underweight Chinese adults.' and makes no such 'less hungry' claim. That appears to have been introduced from the 'cell press' journal/article promoting organization.
"We expected to find that these people are really active and to have high activity metabolic rates matched by high food intakes," says corresponding author John Speakman, a professor at the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology in China and the University of Aberdeen in the UK. "It turns out that something rather different is going on. They had lower food intakes and lower activity, as well as surprisingly higher-than-expected resting metabolic rates linked to elevated levels of their thyroid hormones."
I've been on and off thyroid medication since my early teens and bounced about 40 lbs up and down during it. My hormone issues were first found because I gained weight while being a competitive young athlete.
I think the same range is pretty common for people with certain other medications.
The whole dieting discussion, all nutrition advice, kcal in/out goes out the window when your metabolism is a black box.
Afaik there still isn't any study showing that any dieting works long term? So if we want to fight an obesity epidemic more needs to be done than to shift blame to affected individuals.
Common symptoms of thyroid disorders include obesity and/or excessive thinness (not anorexia per-se, but it can look like it), along with a cornocopia of other issues.
Certain mental disorders (depression and anxiety) also highly correlate with obesity and/or underweight.
A common treatment for ADHD (stimulants) often gets folks to a healthy weight that previously struggled on one side or the other.
It’s a complex problem, with a lot of ever changing variables we have little insight into.
Anecdotally, I know of several boomers that had serious thyroid issues likely tied to exposure to the Santa Susana Field Lab and Nevada nuclear testing. They were consuming milk and other products from areas contaminated by them at the right times.
All the various plastics we’ve all been exposed to and other various chemicals are also likely doing something too.
But also, the whole country has gotten dramatically more sedentary and media consumption focused, and the media keeps getting more and more anxiety inducing and alienating. As a country, we all need to ‘get out and touch some grass’ more too.
>All the various plastics we’ve all been exposed to and other various chemicals are also likely doing something too.
Is this based on a study or something, or is it more of a reaction to all the news stories about that lately? (news peddles fear without anything to back it up typically)
I don’t follow the news anymore, but there are boatloads of studies over the last several decades showing some plastics (and commonly used plasticizers) are Not Great in various ways, from hormone interference to cancers.
Most of the more obvious offenders got banned or voluntarily phased out awhile ago, but new variants of many plastics come out every year, and large swaths of existing ones are known bad but don’t commonly get used in good contact anymore so we don’t think about it.
One of those ‘we’ll probably figure out which one in the basket is causing what problems in a decade or two’ situations, and how bad a problem it actually is. Hopefully no thalidomide chirality level horrors, but who knows.
Does it matter? Many scientists in the know say that peer review is as good as a trashy spam filter these days. This isn't to say that it is absolutely useless, more that it is very overrated.
I like to think of "peer review" in the same way as "peer code review". Just because someone looked at it and approved it doesn't mean that it is free of shortcomings and defects.
Not just "peer code review" from a good friend or someone working on the same project as you - a review from somebody who has a ton of stuff to review at once, in many different areas, and very limited time to do it.
Not always. As academia becomes increasingly autocratic and contaminated by power, peer reviews become a marker for group-think, and placing relevance into peer review is a mechanism to empower the oligarchy and suppress technical dissidence, therefore anti-scientific.
I do peer review, and know colleagues that do as well. I'd say the median number of articles reviewed per person in a given year is 10. I don't claim to represent most reviewers, but I also don't think a presumption that reviewers primarily only have time to half-ass it is fair either.
I'm pointing out that the number of papers someone reviews in a year is not even distantly related to the amount of attention they have available to devote to the job.
That hasn't been my experience in academia. In peer review you can get very high quality feedback and critics. The system has been great for the overall quality.
With the volume of research being churned out of "publish or perish" institutions, I expect a peer review to inform me on the "Is this complete garbage" metric rather than give some assured level of quality / correctness. Ie: if its peer reviewed, it /probably/ isn't /complete/ garbage.
I think the other direction is more useful, if it isn't peer reviewed (and is written in this format) it almost certainly is complete garbage. Otherwise it would be peer reviewed.
The linked article is a press release referencing an article from a peer reviewed journal called Cell Metabolism. You can find this out by scrolling down to the citation at the bottom, which links to the article, and from there you can get to the journal website.
Yes - as mentioned in the article, the paper was published in Cell Metabolism, a high-quality peer-reviewed journal. You can see more about the journal here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_Metabolism
To be fully honest - I can relate to this. During my college years, I ate a full-size burger, potato fries, and soda every day for lunch for ~2 years. I never got fat and retained a healthy BMI, never crossing 200lbs despite being a 6'2" male - even though I almost never exercised and spent almost all day sitting working in the Math Lab. I did skip breakfast regularly so maybe that had something to do with it. My family on seeing the portion size (particularly the potato fries - think 3x a McDonalds large fries) thought it must be my brain consuming those calories or something.
What did you eat for the rest of the day? Even if that meal was 2k calories, if you walked around campus a bit and ate moderate breakfasts and dinners then it’s not that crazy.
It’s hard to get fat from one bad meal a day. What typically gets people is eating their daily needs via meals and then having high calorie snacks on top of that.
4k+ per day of junk food from ages ~15-20. Then I had to knock it off because I stopped being able to do that while staying trim (got fat fast, and I really was trim before). Which is probably just as well because that wasn't healthy anyway.
Dunno where it was all going. I wasn't really getting much bigger or taller for most of that span.
My family has Sami heritage, we run cold. My average body temp is 96.8 degrees. We also have trouble with hyperlipidemia, obesity, and early heart disease.
So the genetics of all of this will be interesting. I have managed to avoid my family curse by eating pretty much only fish and game meat, like a Sami. And I do not eat much. It was the only diet that would raise my HDL.
Yeah, we are all short stature as well. If fact, my older brother was given growth hormones as a young child because he was not "growing as expected". Idiots. All Inuit populations are shorter on average.
I'm surprised how little is said about traditional diets. It's like everyone has to have the same numbers, diet, etc. If they don't, then it's automatically statins or bust.
Yes, but "traditional diets" for who? An Inuit? A Mediterranean farmer? A Sri Lankin Indian?
Our traditional diets changes our genetics, so who you are will determine what is healthy for you.
I agree with the statin. They tried to force them on me. I took a look at my genetics, changes my diet accordingly, and LDL and HDL reversed in three weeks and I have the blood work to prove it.
What's really needed is a statistical analysis such that 23andme would do, where you can take a matrix of people and their SNPs via genotyping, and then compare that to measured BMRs (basal metabolic rates). The switch that controls this is either genetic, gut flora, or a combination of the two. This leads me to believe the treatment will be either CRISPR or gut flora protocols (similar to how fecal transplants have altered the BMI state of the recipient [1]).
Seems to line up with my experience, am always burning up (until I turn on the AC and freeze)
Especially at night though I have to to jack the temperature down or I won't sleep. Also less hungry aligns pretty well.
Unfortunately when I get hungry, it's normally "a little hungry) at akward spread out intervals. I probably feel most hungry after midnight but never eat then because well, I have to sleep soon.
I've tried to put on weight before, but I could never stomach massive calories dense meals, without horrific nausea and discomfort.
If you run hotter, wouldn't you feel less hot? Since your normal temperature would be that much higher than the ambient temperature. At least, when I have a fever I feel cold, even though I'm hot.
Speaking anecdotally, my body temperature tends to run above average and I have a body that is shit at throwing off heat. I have dark skin yet still managed to get sun stroke earlier this week in the Mediterranean because my biology prefers me lightheaded than sweating. Morning run in the snow and t-shirt, on the other hand? Easy peasy.
It seems like the study used metabolic rate (energy/time unit) and thyroid activity, not body temperature. That being said, metabolic rate probably correlates with body temperature, but that's not clear.
What's interesting is that these people kept a high metabolic rate while doing less activity. It's almost like, if you rest more, your body will have the energy to increase its metabolic rate, or it could be totally physiological and it depends on the person.
Feeling cold in a fever is a specific lie your brain tells your body, to trigger shivering, so that your skeletal muscle will help to heat you up even faster. Usually, when you're hot, you feel hot.
I am not sure that is true, at least from my experience.
As the GP I get hot during the night and my wife is freezing, and although I have never measured my body temp my wife always says that she can feel how my body can irradiate heat. At the beginning I thought she was joking but after many years and empirical testing (when she says she can feel heat I am hot) I feel it is true. And this always happens if I ingest carbs for dinner, always.
About what you say, I am not sure the brain processes that it feels hot because the temperature from outside of your body is higher than yours but because your body is actually hotter than usual and one of the reasons could be because the environment temp is actually heating up your body. But I am not a neurologist or even close so I may be completely wrong.
Not sure why, but the fever thing is special I think. A common symptom of the flu is chills even though your body is at scorching temps.
I "run hot" as my partner says. She'll touch my arm and it boggles her mind how hot I feel. I have to keep my room at 67F at night or I can't even use blankets. My sleep suffers from how hot I run.
I should try that, but I honestly don't mind running hot. I think it's partially sex-related too. I don't have any studies on hand, but from my personal experience, females tend to run colder than males. (Obviously this isn't for every case).
Why is that? I've always heard that you can eat a lot for breakfast and your body will somewhat adjust it's calorie needs down for the rest of the day. My grandfather needed to gain weight as he got older he would eat ice cream or drink a beer before bed and it helped him gain weight. My understanding is that metabolism drops during sleep, making it more likely that the calories are stored rather than used.
High end ice cream is something you would normally only eat about a scoop of. But yes most people just get the cheap 4L tubs and shovel a bowl full out.
I don't keep it in the house, I only eat it when we go to a dedicated ice cream place really. So one scoop+cone is enough for me, considering if I'm at an ice cream place it's usually before or after we're going somewhere else to eat, or otherwise it was a spur of the moment thing, and either case I'm not gonna be trying to eat a ton.
Depends on the scoop. I would guess an actual ice cream scoop is around 1/2-2/3 cup since that's the serving size for many brands. My point was that they don't need to eat a sundae, or pig out completely. A cup is on the larger side, but probably still fairly normal (medium size at a shop, or 2 scoops).
When I eat a lot of ice cream to gain weight I feel like I am burning up even at lower room temperatures. You have a lot of cells that are made to burn calories to generate heat all over your body under your skin, when they get active they consume a ton of calories. I guess they activate a bit easier for some, but everyone has them.
Interesting. I stay thin because I'm always watching what I eat and keep a mental note of how many calories I've had that day. If I'm trying to lose a few pounds I have to actually record my calories so I know when to stop eating.
I can eat pretty much non-stop. I could eat a large pizza myself, and 30 minutes later eat another.
The grass is always greener. Some people wish they could eat as much as me so they could gain some weight. I wish I couldn't eat so much so I didn't have to spend so much mental energy on ensuring I don't over-eat.
I'm the same. I stick to ~2000 calories a day and know that each pound is around ~3500 calories. If I gain some and want to take it off I'll work out a little more and know that any deficit contributes to taking away part of the ~3500 cals.
I don't obsess over this but it'll help me cut out some snacks or put in an extra mile or two on my runs (which is supposed to be around ~100 calories). Everyone is different but looking at weight loss/gain as an equation works for me if I notice my pants getting tighter.
Sure you could. But do you actually do that often? If you eat like me, you're eating two large pizzas a night two or three times a week.
If you stay thin, I guarantee you don't eat as much as me. At least not unless you have an activity level comparable to an actively training Olympic athlete.
I don't think the problem is as black and white and as you think. Some people can eat large amounts of food and not gain weight, even relative to their activity level. I do agree that those people won't be able to eat in the same quantity as people that generally struggle with weight and that their desire to eat seems to end quicker than some others.
I think most people 'eat until not hungry.' For me, my default is 'eat until full' which I'm not sure is the same at all. I think it's primal programming to eat until full for many of us, because 10k years ago that might have meant surviving or not.
I am usually in 'want to eat' mode. If I eat something, I might put that mode on pause for a few minutes, depending on how much, but I'll be there before the next meal. Then, I convince myself I'm going hungry, so the next meal I'll over eat. This cycle increases my stress level, which leads to more eating.
I find that doing any physical activity outdoors reduces my desire to eat immensely. I don't mean a 5-15 minute walk, I mean being outside for a couple hours or more. My body seems to have two modes, eat mode and work mode. Sitting at a computer is what's causing my problems IMO. I have a low-stress job, but I think the very nature of a computer job creates some kind of primal-stress.
Same for me. Even as Ive tried to gain weight, my weight barely budged. 150-155 for at least the last 10 years. I have obese (300lb+) friends and they insist they don’t eat that much more than me. Except they do. We go out to eat, we stop eating after about 5-10 min. I’m full and done. They burp a couple times, then proceed to keep eating, smothering everything in Mayo and bbq sauce. Then they get insane desserts. And maybe 3-4 sodas in one meal on top of that. I do feel bad for them though, since it looks like that’s really what it takes to satiate their hunger. I could not physically eat that much even if I wanted to though.
Another strange thing about my body (if anyone cares, curious if anyone else has the same thing) is that I don’t burp, ever. I think the air I swallow while eating forms a bubble in my stomach that makes me feel full sooner and prevents overeating.
Overeating is the root of it. It's popular to deny this and come up with other excuses; normally when I'm with somebody making those excuses for themselves I don't dispute any of it (because it's not worth the social capital I'd expend in doing so.) But what really ticks me off is when somebody offers those lame excuses up for my obesity. I'm not big boned, there's not something wrong with my metabolism, I don't have a glandular disorder. They think they're doing me some sort of favor, telling me that my obesity is not my fault. But none of that stuff is true and encouraging me to lie to myself is cruel, not kind. I have a binge eating problem. It's that simple. If I examine my own diet with a dispassionate eye, it's obvious that I eat enough for two men and weigh as much as two men. There is no mystery to obesity, only ego-clouded judgement and denial.
It’s good you are honest with yourself about it. Unfortunately I don’t know what the solution is, if you find one let me know so I can pass on to my friends. I binge eat too; it’s just doesn’t take that much to get me full. If I had to eat more to feel full, I’d be fat too. Very few people have the willpower to stop eating while still hungry and with food in front of them.
Similar to substance abuse problems, people with overeating issues often have to "hit rock bottom" in order to gain sufficient motivation and discipline to sustain a permanent behavior change. This often takes the form of a serious medical crisis, or losing a valued personal relationship.
Why people develop an addiction? The way to overcome is to understand why you became addicted. Every obese person I know has a cause that triggered them into overeating.
Alternatively you could go on an FDA-approved medication like Wegovy that completely changes your appetite. That would at least tell if you if this is a physical issue or an emotional one.
Medication can be a good option for some patients. SGLT2 inhibitors have also been shown to work pretty well. But all medicines have risks and side effects so they should be used only if behavior modification has consistently failed. And someone who relies on medicine to lose weight will likely have to stay on as least a low dose permanently for maintenance.
The 'it's all my fault' attitude isn't really helpful for you to solve those problems however. Binge eating can be driven by a myriad of factors, mostly psychological. I'm fat too, and I'm comfortable with that word, I dont like medicalizing it with term obesity.
While my weight is at least partially my own fault, its at least influenced by factors outside of my control - upbringing, genetics, societal factors, and an endocrine disorder too. I've concluded that being fat is a result of Type II diabetes rather than a cause - and there is growing science to back me up - a good example of this, my liver dumps glucose into my system, without meds I can fast for a nearly indefinite period of time without my blood sugar falling off.
Whether or not the realization that overeating is my problem helps me solve the problem is orthogonal to whether or not it's true. It is objectively true that I overeat.
In my case, I believe I overeat because I have poor impulse control and I enjoy both the act of eating and the sensation of being stuffed with food. Furthermore I particularly enjoy greasy and carby foods, pizza particularly. If I ate less (or stuffed myself with plant fiber instead of pizza grease) I am certain that I would lose weight. Do I have the motivation and conviction to follow through with that? Past performance says no. But that doesn't change the fact that I'm overeating. It's not an attitude, it's reality.
The additional shame I suspect you feel about your eating habits, likely leads you to binge eat more however - thats my larger point, it creates a negative feelings cycle that makes the problem worse.
You probably binge eat to plug an emotional or stress hole, its literally a form of self medicating. Thats not something that willpower or blaming yourself can solve.
Yeah at some point it doesn't matter who's at fault. It matters who will make the change. We tend to think the entity at fault is the entity that needs to remedy the situation. Whoever or whatever you believe is at fault, the person who is responsible for the change is always you. It's easy to blame something and then also mentally picture that thing / or person as the one in charge of fixing the problem.
So maybe the motto is:
It's not your fault but it IS your responsibility.
I'm fat (I see no shame in this word), my partner is not - she and I will order the same food, I clean my plate (starving children in africa related childhood trauma, I guess), she will often eat half of hers and leave the rest - she drinks the regular soda, and I have water, diet soda or unsweet iced tea.
I can't speak to your friends, but there is no universal truth here - I know a bunch of fat people, and none of them 'drown them in bbq sauce and mayo' - most of the thin people in my life and fat people in my life end up eating 'around' the same amount of food, but the thin people are physically often much more active.
They do. Working from home and working from office can easily make 3-500 calories of difference. Walking, calling, standing up, more energy expended in general.
But also calories from modern food add up quickly.
Say two men weighing 200 pounds, same activity levels.
If man A eats "at maintenance" and man B eats at maintenance + small fries + small cookie + non-diet soda + apple, at the end of the day man A and B may not feel any difference in terms of "fullness" and "hunger", but man B is easily eating 800+ kcal a day than man A.
Over months, I expect man B to get north of 20 pounds on man A. But I can see man B say to A, "I am not eating much more than you, just a little cookie here and there".
Yea, I’ve been told I have a “fast metabolism” but I’m inclined to not eating for 15-20hr stretches and but (different from yourself) when eating out I’ll can sometimes eat thousands of calories. People will say it’s not fair but the part they don’t see is that I could easily be in a caloric deficit for a week or two
Same for me with the burping. I don't even know how to force one. Instead I just feel bloated and miserable for an hour or two, so it's an incentive to not eat much or drink anything carbonated.
I can only have a couple of beers/sodas at once otherwise I get too bloated. I consider it a feature not a bug, better to not be pounding the beers and sodas anyway.
Do you run cold or feel cold? Because those are opposite. If you run hot, temperatures should feel relatively chilly. Like when you run a fever you feel cold.
Fever is the immune system fighting infection. The better comparison is to light exercise which increases temperature and perceived temperature. Perceived internal temperature is in general most closely related to movement.
Feeling cold and having a low body temperature are not equivalent. Take your temperature as soon as you wake up for a week to know your normal resting temperature.
The study was underweight bmi vs healthy bmi. Nothing about overweight bmi, which I would assume is the trifecta of overeating, little activity, and slower metabolism. At least that is my personal experience in going from overweight to healthy bmi.
Really not surprising that people that eat less have lower bmi and higher metabolism than people that eat more with a slower metabolism but who are more active.
Of course it's no surprise that people who eat less weigh less. The surprise, I think, is that people who are underweight are relatively sedentary.
Maybe this is not that much of a surprise either though? I wonder how much of this has to do with muscle. BMI infamously ignores muscle mass. An interesting followup would be whether people with low body fat % are sedentary. My guess is that they aren't.
Side note: maybe there is a disparate importance of "Calories In" vs "Calories Out" for people who are under/over weight. Maybe underweight people should focus on exercise more, and overweight people should focus on eating less?
and on top of that, it looks like there's other factors of diet than just choosing what to eat - it sounds like some people are just less hungry for indefinite reasons. genetics, gut biome, etc all probably play a part.
Sub-10% body fat is underwear model territory. At that low level of fat, every muscle is well-defined, no matter how small.
A lot of guys severely underestimate their body fat %. Sub 10% generally isn't possible without heavy dieting unless you're still going through puberty; genetics has nothing to do with it.
I'm aware of what it looks like, and I've been up at 12-15% before. It's absolutely genetic, most of my family runs very skinny. I have generally decent muscle definition, although the fat I have tends to sit in my hips and shoulders. My doctor suggested I might have less interstitial fat than most people, which explains a few other health effects.
I'm not bragging, there are serious downsides, but it's absolutely possible to sit at 10% year-round, just not while maintaining any serious level of elevated muscle mass.
I've known very active cyclists that couldn't lose weight despite riding hundred mile rides weekly. In my youth, I could eat anything and do nothing and not suffer the consequences. I definitely fit the "run hot" part but I was the plate-cleaner in my family and didn't really stop eating like that until I was in my late 30s and suddenly started gaining weight.
> I've known very active cyclists that couldn't lose weight despite riding hundred mile rides weekly.
Isn’t this against the laws of physics? If you’re burning a ton of energy and not eating excessively, where are their bodies getting mass from to maintain weight?
No because they were also eating a lot, the lower bound on this established by physics.
I've known a lot of roadies who sort-of-correctly believed they could eat as much as they could physically manage, as they were expending enough (3+ hour intense riding daily) that it was a chore to keep up. At least when they were 20-something and racing. Many struggle a bit when the a) get a bit older/metabolically slower and b) life gets in the way and they ride a lot less. All of a sudden a guy who was rail thin gains 30lb that "sticks".
> couldn't lose weight ... they were also eating a lot
So really it's that they weren't losing weight because they were eating too much... exactly like most people in modern western society. And really the moderate amount of cycling was irrelevant.
100 miles weekly isn't THAT much in terms of kcal. 10 miles is about 600 kcal. 100 miles is 6000 kcal, let's say 7000 to round that to 1000 kcal a day.
Eating 1000 kcal more a day is pretty easy to do without noticing. Especially when you eat a lot on the day that you biked (cause "you earned it").
For example 2 liter bottle of coke is 800 kcal and 1 protein bar is about 250 kcal and you're already over the budget (assuming you also eat your "regular" food).
Paradoxically, pushing a larger body through wind resistance should burn even more calories! The people I knew weren't explicitly trying to lose weight, they were cycling for their cardiovascular health and on that front their doctors were happy. But, yeah, distance cyclists tend to eat their fill.
I agree with your point. In fact I think it's even stronger as I don't think 10 miles on a bike is anywhere close to 600kcal unless we are talking very serious hills on a MTB. 10 miles on a flattish road is usually half an hour of moderate effort.
Doing tons of endurance cardio gives you massive carb cravings and catabolizes muscle mass, slowing your metabolism. Especially when none of it is max effort. To keep your body fat percentage low and metabolism up you really need to combine endurance cardio with high intensity cardio and strength training. This is why things like Crossfit and HIIT are so popular.
Sorry I just don't agree with this. I run 50 miles a week and mix in some cycling too, and I actively have to make an effort to eat enough to maintain weight. Endurance cardio doesn't trigger hunger or cravings for me unless it's a long (90 mins plus) effort.
I think this is pretty common for people who exercise intensely. If you don’t increase your eating, you’re going to 1) feel hungry all the time and 2) negatively impact your performance. I trained for a marathon two years ago after only doing half marathons. I basically couldn’t lose weight unless I trained less.
you missed the important point, IMO: being hungry. it's bizarre that we can be mechanically and nutritionally full yet still be hungry. These low BMI individuals were not hungry.
WTF is going on with the hunger response being so messed up in a huge segment of the population?
IMO this is one of the biggest and most interesting questions of the last century with the widest and most frightening implications.
If literally a majority of people in wealthy nations are what we define as overweight, and we keep finding new ways that is at least somewhat out of our control or difficult to perfectly control, why do we keep framing it as solely a matter of individual discipline or virtue? I have my own guesses about why of course, but pretty much all of the possibilities are unsettling.
It fits into a mode of thought where fat people are fat because of character flaws, and thin people are thin because of superior moral character. Thus, it justifies the better treatment of thin people over fat people.
I've even heard the "thinness is a sign of godliness" folks get really angry at the suggestion of using GLP-1 agonists, because it's "lazy" and "cheating."
Having seen friends and relatives succumb to cardiovascular disease, it's really heartbreaking. I've watched people starve themselves on brown rice and broccoli for years (with only modest results, followed by total failure) because diet-only interventions are completely unrealistic and don't work long term.
Those friends and relatives weren't really starving themselves brown rice and broccoli. They were eating a bunch of other stuff when you weren't looking.
We have existence proofs that diet-only interventions work for some people. I literally know people who have lost large amounts of weight and kept it off for years that way. Medications have risks and side effects, so should only be prescribed if behavior modification has failed.
We have many unsuccessful treatments that work for a small percentage of patients. That's why we measure treatments by effectiveness rather than identifying existence proofs that it worked for someone.
You're really missing the point. Every patient is unique. That's why competent healthcare providers take a step therapy approach and try cheaper, lower-risk treatments first before moving on to more expensive and riskier medication or bariatric surgery.
You seem to have misread my posts as saying that healthcare providers should immediately move to medication rather than try dietary intervention. I didn't say that, I didn't imply that, I didn't even think it.
What I did say is that we are increasingly learning that overeating is a very complex and life-threatening medical concern that often cannot be solved through dietary intervention. Even people who may die if they don't adhere to a diet frequently have difficulty adhering to one. Saying that there are "existence proofs" that diets sometimes they work is a terrible response.
My view is that we should treat diet as one possible medical treatment, and evaluate it apples-to-apples (in terms of efficacy and side effects) against more recent FDA-approved treatments. And now that we've seen how much impact those treatments can have -- and particularly how critical the GLP-1 mechanism is to the sustainability of weight-loss interventions -- we should work our asses off to find more and better treatments that treat overeating as a health condition rather than a question of mind-over-matter.
You seem extremely attached to your position, to the point where defending your position required you to declare that my relatives "were eating a bunch of other stuff when you weren't looking."
It makes sense evolutionarily: if there's lots of food available now, you should eat it, because there might not be enough in winter.
We live in a society where there's always lots of food available for most people in developed countries (who are mainly the people who are overweight), so it makes sense that you will instinctively eat more than you need to.
It’s not messed up. It’s just maladapted to our food environment where there is high calorie, highly rewarding, cheap food available to us at all times. Countries where traditional diets predominate don’t have widespread obesity, and we can see obesity rise in developing nations as they adopt Western diets.
Some people, including the Chinese-resident subjects of this study, have hunger responses that are not susceptible to the temptations of our food system.
While Chinese people may have a low obesity rate, they aren’t significantly healthier in other respects. High cholesterol, blood pressure, and type 2 diabetes (white rice) are a big problem.
> It’s just maladapted to our food environment where there is high calorie, highly rewarding, cheap food available to us at all times.
I visited China and they seemed to have plenty of access to high-calorie, highly-rewarding food. What's special about the temptations of our food system?
"Being hungry" has different definitions and corresponds to two very different body sensations. If you eat at a regular time every day, you'll get "hungry" around that time, whether your body really needs it or not. But if you skip that meal at some point the cravings disappear… so it wasn't really physiological then, just a mind trick from hormones. The other "hungry" you can feel it like a vacuum in your stomach and is painful.
When I was 16, I was playing varsity basketball, baseball, track and was working on a farm doing heavy work all summer.
Per the doctor, I was obese. My wife was obese because breasts. BMI is bullshit imo, it has some general value but creates a lot of distress for people, especially women.
If you are standing in front of your doctor and he or she is telling you that you are obese because of your BMI score and not actually measuring you (like with calipers), I’d probably look for a new doctor.
Calipers are not the proper medical standard of care for measuring body composition. They don't produce accurate, repeatable results. The current best practice for most patients is a DXA scan.
How many physicians can do a DXA scan in their office? Calipers give you ballpark numbers and often that's good enough for a physician. It's certainly better than BMI.
BMI is useful for screening and population studies, but it's (mostly) bullshit for individuals. For most people it's body composition that really matters. Excess adipose tissue, especially visceral fat, has a wide range of negative health effects. Anyone who cares about their health should get a DXA scan at least every few years; it will give a highly accurate reading on body composition including fat distribution.
When I was 16 I waffled between the top edge of healthy and the bottom edge of overweight, according to BMI. When I dropped into the top edge of healthy I had a 6-pack. I wasn't even that muscular, just broad-shouldered.
Does this breakdown when you gain weight? Like when I was 20 I weighed 180lbs of solid muscle and was always like a furnace. Then I slipped a disk and now at 28 I'm lucky if I hover around 240 (I've actually been back lifting for the last 2.5 months and feel pretty good) but I definitely feel like I run colder in general now that I'm overweight.
Yes but this looks more like habit disruption more than "biologically gaining weight somehow".
People that lift often eat more. But mostly protein, and stimulating muscle every day makes sure it will get developed and consume more calories to maintain itself.
If you stop lifting altogether, not only muscle mass stops growing but also starts to shrink. If you eat the same, you will gain weight faster and with less food than before.
What I mean is, the fact that you have muscle mass and stop lifting is not what's going to lead to "a quick onset of obesity." What leads to weight gain is still eating like you're lifting when you're not.
If you adjust your caloric intake to account for your new level of caloric expenditure, you will not gain weight, although you will likely see unfavorable body composition changes.
If I were playing a game of trying to extrapolate HN titles by the comment sections, my guess for this one would be "Ask HN: What's your BMI and what does that say about you"
Right? I was hoping more people would be thinking about the genetic aspect of this and how we need to stop telling people there is that "one diet" everyone should follow.
To be fair, the "CICO isn't the whole story" vs. "how can there be anything more to dieting than the diet you choose" debate is also a stereotypical HN favorite.
I'm only myself of course but to me, "why did so many people read this as an invitation to share personal health details with strangers in public" is actually a pretty interesting question. Sorry it was boring to you.
Lots of thin people look good and thin wearing clothes, but if you could see their body you'd find they are mostly made of flab anyway. Colloquially referred to as skinny fat. Very little muscle.
I know a girl who weighs about 100 lbs soaking wet. Very slim, elfish type. She also has very hot hands and she says that after eating a big meal, she feels super hot. I asked her if it was measurable and it actually was, she can go to almost 38 degrees Celsius while completely healthy.
Hunger is mediated by a bunch of hormones and you can test for some of those, but there is no test for the feeling of hunger. As a comparison, it is famously very hard for doctors to understand pain; it is also difficult for patients to communicate about pain.
The feeling of hunger is not comparable between people. Hunger is driven by multiple sensations (blood sugar, stomach stretch, hormone levels) and by cognitive behaviors (it's lunchtime, it's a feast day) and psychological conditioning (advertising). People have relationships with, and expectations about food. The response to hunger is learned. It is driven by culture - for instance it is 'manly' to eat a large steak and loaded baked potato where I'm from; many times the smaller cuts of steak have either a woman's name or some feminine aspect.
Scientists use Occam's Razor to find the most probable cause for some effect, and people in general want to find something simple to blame. I think the obesity epidemic has many causes, and it is particularly hard to understand because researchers have only lately begun to take hunger seriously. It is easy to say "Diet and Exercise" but losing body fat means that you must continuously make choices that decrease your comfort in some way - eating fewer highly rewarding foods, maintaining a state of hunger, increasing activity level. Those choices are difficult, and they are different for everyone.
I believe there are many consequences of the difficulty in measuring and tracking hunger. I think that many people (including doctors and researchers and HN users) want to be able to change one thing or add one drug and suddenly solve the obesity epidemic. I think it makes it hard for doctors to talk to patients. It makes it hard for people to understand what their body is doing.
> losing body fat means that you must continuously make choices that decrease your comfort in some way - eating fewer highly rewarding foods, maintaining a state of hunger, increasing activity level
Not necessarily! I've successfully lost a lot of body fat (~50 pounds over the last 18 months) by deliberately changing my diet to eat more foods (that I like) that are lower in energy density than what I was eating before -- fruits and veggies, lean meats, etc. I do end up eating fewer stereotypically highly rewarding foods, but that's because I'm already full of other highly rewarding-to-me foods and don't feel like having a treat or a huge fast food meal or whatever. And I'm certainly not tolerating frequent hunger!
You just restated what the OP said, but tried to paint it somehow in a more positive light. You yourself stated you are "eating fewer ... highly rewarding foods".
So what exactly are you contradicting in their statement?
That one word you elided, "stereotypically", was doing a lot of work! I'm not actually eating fewer highly rewarding-to-me foods, just less junk food, and I'm not constantly hungry.
They are trying to convince everyone that the fruit & veg & lean meats is every bit as enjoyable as a steak and piece of cheesecake. It may be for them, but as a rule I have my doubts.
There are some fruits and vegetables and lean meats (which absolutely includes "leaner cuts of steak with the fat trimmed off") that I quite sincerely like as much as junk food, if not more. Two pan-fried salmon fillets and a big bowl of brussels sprouts with butter beats the pants off even a pretty good burger-and-fries, the main downside being the prep (and, well, the cost for most people). A pound of fresh strawberries is damn good and not something I have to force myself to eat, etcera.
I don't deliberately avoid dessert, though I do tend to eat it less than I used to. I'll have the cheesecake if I really feel like it.
My sympathies to those who really just don't like any fruits or vegetables, but there are lots of other margins to operate on in lowering your dietary energy density. e.g., for a side with your steak, I assert most people will enjoy a baked potato with a bit of butter (~1 cal/gram) about as much as garlic bread (~3 to 4 cal/gram).
> I assert most people will enjoy a baked potato ... about as much as garlic bread
See I'd assert the opposite, or at least the following more nuanced version, for myself:
If I make a baked potato, I'll eat it and be quite happy -- even delighted! -- with it. But! If I have to choose between a baked potato or garlic bread (say, on a restaurant menu) I'd choose the garlic bread virtually every time, unless I'm exerting Herculean levels of willpower to choose healthier options. And if I'm served a baked potato and garlic bread, I'd probably eat the potato, and then somehow find room to eat the garlic bread anyways.
I don't disagree that healthy food can be very tasty, but I mitigate my own struggles with healthy eating by "merely" never keeping unhealthy options around, so I can focus more on the joy of the healthy food, and not have to constantly choose to avoid the high-calorie treats.
I agree that a salmon filet is tasty. I don't often eat a pound of strawberries though. Both of those are too expensive to eat regularly, and like you said a salmon filet is a lot of effort compared to a burger.
> I'll have the cheesecake if I really feel like it.
That tells me the writing on the wall, and let me be clear about this, the writing is what needs to be written and what people need to read - you're making the decision to NOT have cheesecake when you only kind of feel like it. It's a game of weighing the pros and cons and learning to be satisfied with what you know you should have instead of turning around one day and loving the healthy food more than the unhealthy.
Just as an aside:
> I assert most people will enjoy a baked potato with a bit of butter (~1 cal/gram) about as much as garlic bread (~3 to 4 cal/gram).
You're discounting the calories / gram of butter in your first calculation and including it in the second.
> you're making the decision to NOT have cheesecake when you only kind of feel like it.
Chiming in as someone whom the GP comment resonates with: the point here is that you literally come to enjoy it less. The natural amount that you would eat isn't constrained entirely by health choices. I find finishing a single slice of cheesecake to be overwhelming: a second one would be actively unpleasant.
If you were following your assumptions here to their conclusions, you would conclude that people who eat unhealthily would eat cheesecake 24/7 if it weren't for conscious health choices. This is trivially untrue, no?
The original claim was that losing weight requires constant extra discomfort, and GP's (and my) claim is that this is false: you can move yourself (with initial discomfort) to an equilibrium that's more comfortable _and_ healthier than the status quo.
I feel the discomfort of constraining myself much less often now than I did when I ate like you. This is again trivial: if your preferences are aligned with healthy eating, you need to push against them less.
That's a weird judgement to throw in the midst. I haven't laid claim to my eating habits. I've had great success in losing weight in the past as well as recently by changing my eating habits for the positive. I just wanted people to realize that it's not always just a matter of learning to love yummy veggies and forgetting about icky cheesecake.
> if your preferences are aligned with healthy eating, you need to push against them less.
Agreed - but people have to accept that their preferences aren't always and possibly not ever going to align with healthy eating.
Sorry, I wasn't implying anything by this. Just absent-minded phrasing.
> people have to accept that their preferences aren't always and possibly not ever going to align with healthy eating.
Sure, I think it's possible some people can't make it through the transition to healthier preferences. That doesn't suggest that the original claim in the thread is correct.
The comment you originally responded to claimed that convexfunction was "restating" the claim that weight loss is pure effortful discomfort (from the top of the thread). Your response was that you doubt that healthy food can taste as good as junk food[1]. In the comment I responded directly to, you say that having cheesecake occasionally is evidence that a healthy person eating less cheesecake comes from conscious healthy effort.
These claims are what I'm pushing back against. I use way less willpower on food now than when I was a junkier eater[2].
[1] Note that the issue here might be that your definition of weight-loss-promoting foods is askew. Steak is a pretty reasonable part of a weight-loss diet, as long as you're not mindless about the quantity. As with the cheesecake example, eating the right amount of steak is a way more pleasant experience than eating too much.
[2] though thankfully never as bad as the avg US upper-middle-class diet
For whatever it's worth, I don't feel like I actually had to adapt my tastes at all in order to eat healthier. The main hurdle was figuring out how to prep in a way that's easy enough that I'll actually bother.
I wouldn't describe myself as actively adapting my tastes: I just ate better and eventually noticed my preferences shifting. I assume it's some combination of my brain getting more sensitive to the stimulus (of eg sugar), my gut changing, and my better diet reducing cravings.
> That tells me the writing on the wall, and let me be clear about this, the writing is what needs to be written and what people need to read - you're making the decision to NOT have cheesecake when you only kind of feel like it. It's a game of weighing the pros and cons and learning to be satisfied with what you know you should have instead of turning around one day and loving the healthy food more than the unhealthy.
Let me rephrase: since changing my diet to include more low-energy-density foods (and being deliberate about eating large portions of them), I find myself less frequently even considering having dessert after dinner.
> You're discounting the calories / gram of butter in your first calculation and including it in the second.
No? I'll put 7g of butter (50 calories) on a 300g potato (280 calories) and not at all feel like I needed more butter. Even if you double that amount of butter, it comes out to 1.2 cal/g.
Not quite everything, but outside of rare social eating situations I do weigh my food when I'd otherwise have to make a bad estimate for caloric content (i.e. not single-serving packaged food or food from a restaurant that publishes nutrition facts). I also track my calories, though I'll willfully go over my daily calorie target whenever I feel like it with approximately no guilt.
I'm sure this has contributed to the success of my "diet" -- I also started lifting weights again in this period -- but the comment I was originally replying to was about how weight loss requires discomfort, and the energy density thing has been the key insight for me on how to make it not require discomfort. I see now it reads like I was solely attributing my weight loss to this one weird trick (though I do think it's been the most important factor), so, mea culpa.
Fair enough. I've had excellent success with just calorie tracking / weighing without massively changing my diet - by setting a small caloric deficit I was able to consistently slowly weight over months without massively changing things and enjoying all my usual foods.
"the cost for most people". -- I disagree, it just takes some planning.
A Big Mac menu goes for 10+ dollars where I live.
Sirloin steak, which is reasonably lean (you can go leaner and cheaper with something like London Broil, every 3 weeks it is sold at 2.50 t0 3 dollars per pound), when on sale (this is the planning I was referring to) can be bought for 3-4 dollars per pound. One can buy 20 pounds for 60-80 dollars.
A big bag of frozen vegetables, enough for 10 meals, it's sold at Costco for 10 dollars.
A whole day of abundant eating (2 pounds of steak and vegetables) can cost less than a Big Mac menu.
You can throw in some potatoes and eggs and pay per day what you would pay at MacDonalds or equivalent per meal.
I've had this weird obsession with that Alone show, but there was an episode where one of the contestants decides her nutrition is messed up and she's going to eat the stomach contents of some wild hares she's trapped.
She describes it as one of the tastiest meals she had the entire show. Literally half digested arctic vegetation.
Your body rewards you for eating those things which satisfy your needs. McDonalds will do that, but so will a salad.
One of the fad diets for a while was the "one thing" diet. You could have anything you wanted.. but you could only eat that single item that entire day. Cheesecake? You're having cheesecake for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Very quickly participants discover it is very easy to burn out on sweets and junk.
If you eat nutritious food that will actually give you that reward craving.
Also, nothing wrong with steak. Nothing really wrong with cheesecake either - but you only need a tiny bit of those things. There's a reason most people want tiny steaks and not big honking ones, especially people who eat steak with regularity.
I mean, the Alone people are literally starving. Levels of hunger play a huge part in how much you enjoy your food. I really enjoy a fresh bell pepper at times, but not right after desert.
You're arguing that people who eat bad things constantly only want a little of them when that is obviously not true. Plenty of people eat far too much steak far too often. People are keyed to like salt, fat, & sugar. It's a balancing act of moderation, it's not just a matter of finding that you love vegetables and you will always find them just as satisfying as Twizzlers.
One can and will lose weight (say, a 220 pound man) by eating two medium McDonald's Big Mac Menu a day (no sauce, diet soda option). It amounts to 1800 kcal per day.
Being lean trumps quality of food and "healthy" whatever for health short-term. That's a set result at this point.
That is, and this not medical advice, but something I have a done a few times while on vacation, you can do a 10-15-21 days of the above-mentioned McDonald's diet and easily get leaner without starving, looking for "healthy foods", counting calories or steps.
The McRib is 550 cals. I'm now wondering if one could do a weight maintenance program by simply eating 3 McRib's a day whenever they come back on the menu.
Eating sometimes is okay, I guess. Don't forget to take supplements for the micros you're missing. Eating the same thing every day though, requires discipline. I'd get fed up eating the same thing again and again even if it's some kind of a gorgeous meal.
They do it that way. It does not have to be. You just gotta eat different highly rewarding foods.
E.g. do eat that steak. But without a BBQ sauce you bought. Just salt and pepper is great actually. But a butter and cream garlic sauce (no sugar) is also awesome. Maybe some blue cheese on top instead?
Skip the potato. Just that steak with some nice caramelized onions or veggies you like as a side. But that's not even needed.
Highly rewarding I can tell you. Yes it's not sweet and rewarding. It's not carb loaded rewarding but it's absolutely delicious, fills you up for a long time. Yes this is going in the Keto carnivore direction so might not be for you but having eaten Keto (with less than 20g of carbs a day) I can tell you it was absolutely great and rewarding taste wise as I could finally enjoy cream based sauces and bacon again instead of low fast sugary stuff that makes you hungry again after an hour.
My success has always come without a real gimmick and simply calorie counting. Have what you want, but be aware what you're eating and work towards a goal. I set a slow weight loss goal so I'm not hungry due to extreme of a deficit. I can still eat my ice cream if I've made sure that I still have caloric room at the end of the day. After a while off counting I find my proportions are getting too big, I realign with some tracking again, and carry on.
I'd actually advocate for potatoes as a "weight loss food". They're quite low in caloric density relative to most other "carbs" since they have so much water; there's even a meme "potato diet" (just eat potatoes and almost nothing else for a few weeks or months, basically) with lots of glowing anecdotal success stories.
And, well, I failed horribly at conveying my actual strategy (I guess we're getting hung up on "fruits, vegetables, and lean meats are supposedly not very rewarding"?) because I would describe what I'm doing as "eat different highly rewarding foods".
It depends, I have a really big sweet tooth, but it is a self-reinforcing craving. There are people that really do not enjoy sweet things, and a lot of that has to do with those people not consuming sweets as a part of a regular diet, so there is not the rise/crash cycle, which is ultimately what makes it hard to get away from sugars.
The "taste" changes when you change your diet for a long enough period, which means no more than a few weeks/months.
It is like drinking coffee with sugar, as I used to do two decades ago. After getting used to the bitter, hot reality of black coffee, the absurdly sweet nature of coffee + sugar or those concoctions served at Starbucks and the like tastes terrible, as well as giving the wrong "feel".
Chicken breast with a little flour to help caramelize over high heat and some herbs (basil, oregano, thyme) tastes excellent and feels light and proper.
I am a person with a terrifying appetite if left to my own devices. And if at the beginning of a "diet" the scary appetite and intrusive food thoughts make themselves feel heard loud and clear, after a while, thanks to the physiological changes that occur as the food consumed changes and a mind that is now preoccupied with things and thoughts other than food, as time goes on it becomes much easier to eat fewer and more "healthy" (hard to define, but we know it when we see it) calories.
"Pushing through until it becomes easy" is not a social policy, and other kinds of interventions are needed to solve the large-scale obesity problem.
But at the individual level, it works for me and millions of others.
He said that he eats fewer _stereotypically_ high-reward foods because he eats other high-reward foods. How do you interpret that as equivalent to "continually decreasing comfort"?
The pt is that the reward function isn't static, and you can move yourself to an equilibrium with as much utility/comfort that is much healthier.
This has been my experience too. Eg, I'm almost a little grossed out by the proportion of refined carbs on the plates of some of my friends: not only is it unhealthy, it's the most boring part of the meal (to my palate)! And my habituation to sugar has gotten low enough that things taste much sweeter to me than they do to most people.
If anything, this has _increased_ the reward I get from eating, since their unfettered preferences need to be consciously constrained by awareness of their health, while mine line up pretty well.
By "stereotypically" highly rewarding, I think they are saying that they were able, over time, to increase their enjoyment of less calorie dense food.
One non-traditional diet book I read basically said, "many people have to eat more vegetables to successfully diet. So spend a month experimenting with preparing different vegetables all different ways until you find ways to prepare vegetable meals that you find delicious."
I think you opportunistically left out the "stereotypically" in your quote. OP is not saying they are eating less rewarding foods for them but less foods that others might find rewarding.
Reward ≠ comfort. GP is saying that they reduced their calorie intake while actually eating more, and not incurring extra hunger. Which is absolutely plausible.
- Carbs: potatoes, rice, pasta (yes really, the common element here is high
water content; the other stuff you put on these can of course make a big difference)
- Dairy: Greek yogurt or cottage cheese are usually part of my breakfast. I'll have a whey protein shake in milk most days, since I'm also trying to build muscle; liquids don't normally "count" toward satiety in the same way, though milk itself is complicated and contributes at least a little more toward satiety because the protein makes gastric emptying slower.
- Meats: Most unprocessed meats, as well as some deli meats (e.g. roast beef or ham but not salami), are great on satiety per calorie IMO, even if not usually considered "lean". I guess don't make a habit out of prime rib? I'd credit "plan to have a large amount of meat for most dinners" as the most important single change I made, perhaps in part because it makes me less likely to have something from a restaurant for dinner instead but also because meat is just so satisfying without being too energy-dense. Eggs count here too, ~2 cal/gram.
- Veggies: anything is great, but my favorites are brussels sprouts, sugar snap peas, spinach, asparagus, and corn. This won't be news to anyone but salads are usually a good choice if you're eating from a restaurant.
- Fruits: anything is great, but my favorites are strawberries, watermelon, bananas, and oranges (I prefer clementines because they're easy to eat)
- Junk food: I find ice cream sandwiches (~150 calories) are a convenient way to sate my sweet tooth in a way that isn't ridiculous, even if they're not really low energy density. Also, fancy dark chocolate is hard to overeat.
And a special mention to making my own coffee (with generous milk and sugar-free flavored syrup, ~60 calories per cup) rather than getting lattes from a coffee shop (~150 to 200 calories).
About 15 years ago I adopted an informal low-carb diet: I started by skipping instant breakfast for breakfast and ended by adopting the Carl’s Jr. lettuce-wrapped burgers for lunch.
The goal was to change my cholesterol (it worked), not lose weight, and I ate however much I wanted.
But at the same time I lost 30 pounds over about three months. I didn’t even notice the change for the first month. I wasn’t fat to start, and by the end I was startlingly thin. Anecdotal, obviously.
> The feeling of hunger is not comparable between people.
I wish this were the baseline understanding everyone shared! Even as one person, as my mental health has been differently treated over time, I've been shocked at how different the subjective experience of hunger at various calorie deficits has been.
I lost weight during the pandemic by just trying to make sure I was hungry by the next meal time.
By that I mean, I would eat breakfast and then see how hungry I was at lunchtime. If I wasn’t very hungry for lunch, then I would still eat lunch, but I tried eating less at breakfast the next day. Same with lunch-to-dinner.
Over time my meal portion sizes came down, but I was not looking directly at that, I was just paying attention to the feeling of hunger.
What I realized was that I would eat a big breakfast and then a big lunch just because it was lunchtime. So I was overeating; basically taking in more calories than my body needed. It was a combination of habit and not thinking about what I was feeling. I realized that I should feel pretty hungry before a meal, but I wasn’t letting that happen.
I totally agree with you that hunger is subjective and hard to measure outside of our own perception. I’m not sure I could have or would have done this based on someone else’s coaching. It’s hard to calibrate my personal feeling of “hungry enough” based on what another person says. And it takes motivation, which has to come from within.
People in developed countries have become too accustomed to comfort. We need be accept a certain level of discomfort and pain. Embrace the suck.
And most people with high BMIs didn't get that way eating steak and baked potatoes. In fact, if you live entirely on that diet it's quite difficult to get fat.
> if you live entirely on that diet it's quite difficult to get fat
I believe that for myself, being able to eat like a king from many different culinary traditions has been a major factor in my fat gain.
"Obesity is a major health risk, with junk food consumption playing a central role in weight gain, because of its high palatability and high-energy nutrients. The Cafeteria (CAF) diet model for animal experiments consists of the same tasty but unhealthy food products that people eat (e.g. hot dogs and muffins), and considers variety, novelty and secondary food features, such as smell and texture. This model, therefore, mimics human eating patterns better than other models." - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33309818/#:~:text=The%20Cafe....
I think, as a society, we're having trouble grappling with the implications of the hormonal changes that happen due to fat set points increasing over time. It seems to make it nearly impossible for some people to lose weight over a long run of time. Whatever they lose, their body will try very hard, apparently for the rest of their lives, to put it back on.
But what I think we're having trouble in understanding what this means is that it doesn't mean obesity as a social problem can't be solved. It might mean some amount of people who are already obese will never be able to sustainably change that fact, but it's not like people are being born with naturally higher fat set points. That is a hormonal change that happens when you become obese and stay that way for a long time. Interventions that focus on younger people who have not yet become obese can still work. But this is contrary and different to how the entire obesity industrial complex works. It is focused on treating overweight and obese people, not on preventing new people from ever getting that way in the first place. Even with children, we focus the interventions on trying to help fat kids lose weight. We should probably expect that to work at least a little bit better than trying to intervene in adults, but even better still is to work with the kids who aren't obese, which at an early enough age is all of them, and figure out how to keep them that way.
> losing body fat means that you must continuously make choices that decrease your comfort in some way - eating fewer highly rewarding foods, maintaining a state of hunger, increasing activity level
It is interesting to see "increasing activity level" as being a decrease in comfort. But I suppose that's because "comfort" here isn't defined absolutely. I also am not sure that "comfort" is an attribute that should be optimized for in disregard for all others.
If this statement is read as "anything that does not have 100% positive feedback is undesirable" then I think it would be very challenging to make any improvements in a person's life.
But then I also don't think that "comfort" is necessarily an ideal target to optimize. I think a more holistic measure such as "satisfaction" is a more productive target. We can find "satisfaction" in things that are not 100% pleasant but which in turn result in greater happiness or feelings of contentment than doing only those things that have positive feedback.
This measure of "comfortable" also does not seem to account for the secondary effects of "comfortable" choices. E.g., if we eat only "highly rewarding foods" and become obese we see discomfort in other parts of life (loss of mobility, health issues, difficulty performing mundane physical tasks, etc)
I don't like to sweat. I did construction work with my dad in the Texas heat. When I looked at careers, I chose one that I can do indoors.
I'm not saying that is good, I'm saying that is a strong value statement that I made when I was younger. It's hard to change values, even in the face of evidence.
I think people should find exercise that they enjoy. I have struggled with this due to other physical limitations (in addition to my weight) and my attitude and cognitive behaviors. I now enjoy riding my bike, hiking, and swimming.
I feel like anybody, including scientists, that speaks about hunger when it relates to being overweight, has never been overweight, or is lying to themselves.
We don’t eat because we’re hungry, we eat because we’re bored.
And because we're stressed. And because we expect to eat. And because our stomachs are empty. And because we have our thirst signal confused for hunger. And ...
I bet there are at least 20 distinct sensations that people feel as 'hunger'
There's a really interesting study they did with pigs.
They fed pigs four different diets that had the same amount of calories, but varying ratios of n3/n6 fats.
The pigs with high n6/n3 ratio ended up much fatter and less muscular than the pigs eating a 1-1 ratio diet. It's a very neat demonstration that "all that matters is calories" is not true; your metabolism, and thus how you use the calories, is influenced by the kinds of calories you are eating.
Well, at least if you are a pig. But it seems likely the same holds true in humans, though AFAIK no one has yet tried to do a similar controlled trial in humans.
But there's lots of assocational evidence that lines up in the same direction -- e.g., in America we've been getting fatter pretty much in-lock step with increasing consumption of n6 fats & there is a correlation between body-fat composition (which itself follows fat composition from the diet) and obesity.
So, in the light of the above, my #1 weight loss tip is: eat fewer n6 fats. (In practice, this means avoiding most prepared processed foodes and being extremely selective if eating out (since restaurants tend to go crazy using vegetable oil as a cooking fat, which is super high in n6 fats).)
That’s very interesting. I’m curious how it could relate to humans. Not to say it can’t be 1:1, but there are mental aspects that can effect human hunger and I’d be interested in research around that. For example someone who eats a lot but falls into a depression might slow eating considerably (or eat more depending on the person) it’s not to far fetched to consider the possibility of mind state altering medication that could stimulate the brain causing less or more hungry.
Absolutely, the mental aspects of hunger are huge, as anyone who has ever had the munchies (super hungry) or taken adderall (super not hungry) can attest.
In fact, n6 fats may also promote hunger, via increasing endocannabinoid production.
AEA and 2-AG are synthesized from omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA), arachidonic acid (AA), and are hydrolyzed by fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH) and monoacylglycerol lipase (MAGL),
Herein, we review the discovery and physiological role of omega-3 eCBs that are derived from DHA and EPA (Figure 1A). We illustrate that the derivatization of carboxylic acid end of the omega-3 fatty acid with ethanolamide, glycerol or other groups, such as neurotransmitters, leads to substantial changes in their biological activity and receptor interactions. We also review the discovery, mechanism and activity of the following omega-3 eCBs- DHA-ethanolamide (DHA-EA), 2-docosahexaenoyl-glycerol (2-DHG) and eCB-like- DHA-serotonin (DHA-5HT), DHA-dopamine (DHA-DA) and the EPA analogs.
Very interesting! Thanks. From briefly searching, it looks like 2-AG more specifically may be responsible for increased appetite? I am unsure of the effects of n3 derived eCBs...
> it looks like 2-AG more specifically may be responsible for increased appetite?
That would be my thinking.
These n3 derived eCBs are pretty new so no one knows. But I can tell you, I have found I get "dry mouth" on occasion when I over do the Omega 3. It used to happen more when I took fish oil capsules which I no longer take.
I am also unable to smoke pot becasue it triggers intense anxiety and panic and I think this is becasue I am more sensitive to the THC. And I think this might be a clue how CBD and THC have different psychological effects. THC = Omega 6 and inflammatory and CBD = Omega 3 and anti-inflammatory in a sense.
> It appears of utmost importance in medical and nutritional practice to formulate and handle n-3 PUFA-rich foods or supplements with the greatest care to avoid any PUFA oxidation. This can be particularly relevant in patients suffering from acute or chronic diseases who increase their n-3 PUFA intake because of their reported health benefits.
Very interesting! I've been reading up on nutrition recently and saw articles talking about this ratio, but they were focused on inflammation, not on body composition or hunger.
tmjdev wrote:
> If it was the ratio being studied, could you instead increase your n3 fat consumption?
Some articles suggest exactly that: "To improve the ratio of omega-3 fats to omega-6 fats, eat more omega-3s, not fewer omega-6s." [1]
If you're looking for sources other than fish, consider chia. Two tablespoons of chia give 4.3 g of omega-3 fat, as well as 10 g of fiber for no net carbs. [2] Don't eat chia seeds dry; [3, 4] mix into 1.25 cups of water and leave them for at least 30 minutes. I also combine with oats. (I used to eat 0.5 cups of oats every morning. When trying to lower carbs, I went down to 0.25 cups of oats and the chia. The omega-3 fat was a nice surprise.)
On the other hand, minimizing processed and restaurant foods is probably a good idea in general. And of course if your goal is to lose weight, removing something from your diet makes more intuitive sense than adding something.
This. It's a lot easier to increase n3's through consumption of chia seeds and nuts than it is to cut out n6's, because those are in most factory farmed meat and fat sources.
> It's a lot easier to increase n3's through consumption of chia seeds
It depends on your genetics. the genes FADS1 and FADS2 will dictate how much of those short chain omega 3 you can turn into the long chain omega 3, like EPA and DHA, which ate the reason for the metabolic reversal.
Also since Omega 6 and Omega 3 compete for the FADS1 and FADS2 activity, eating less Omega 6 will always help.
You are right, my mistake! I was mixing it up with another study. Unfortunately, it is too late to edit my comment.
However, coincidentally, the same conclusions still hold, since it turns out the pigs ate very similar amounts of food on all the diets, except the 5:1 n6:n3 diet, where they ate a bit less. (And that was the diet where the pigs gained the most weight.)
So my diet is usually very strict. I will mostly only eat salmon, mackerel, oysters and mussels, and a lot of berries with some breads and rice. No plant oils at all and very low carb, but not no carb.
I only resorted to this diet because I had a series of metabolic disorders in my self and in my family and I also know my genetics. I have the changes to FADS1, FADS2, and CPT1A which make me much more sensitive to Omega 6 fats that most European Caucasians. See it turns out I have more Sami blood in me than I thought and so I am in reality more Inuit when it comes to what I need from my diet.
I most certainly feel most satiated and loose weight even when eating the same amount of calories when I am following this diet. I was a low fat vegan for five years in an attempt to correct my cholesterol, and I was a good vegan too, no junk food. But all it did was lower my HDL and barely reduce by LDL. (I was diagnosed with mild hyperlipidemia). After seeing my geteicss and changing my diet, my HDL rose over 35 for the first time in my life. Now it stays steady at between 50 and 55
Now I am only more sensitive to these fats. Meaning that anyone, even with non-Inuit genetics, will succumb to the higher levels of Omega 6 that course through the modern food industry if they over do it.
(FWIW, Dave Feldman (cholesterolcode.com) has me pretty convinced that high LDL is not bad in all contexts. High HDL does always seem to be good, though.)
Yes I agree! HDL Carrie’s with it a lot of antioxidant capacity that protects the LDL from being oxidized. I have not worried about my high LDL ever since I understood this.
"people with low BMI" seems like it refers to a large group of healthy people, but it actually refers to folks who are underweight.
In China, that's like 1 in 10 people. In the USA it's closer to 1 in 50. I wonder what kind of genetics and behavior you have to have to be underweight in the USA.
Also note that the subjects of this study were found to have subclinical hyperthyroidism. It’s an interesting study for what it tells us about metabolism, but the study subjects are probably not a model for health.
Yes, and, about 8 minutes of true HIIT* at least 3 days a week for 6 weeks is proven to adjust your metabolic run level.
Graph your weight. After 6 weeks of HIIT, you'll see weight really shed because you're not burning calories during exercise but 24/7, and because of that metabolic shift, the weight will continue to shed for months even if you stop HIIT.
* HIIT is High Intensity Interval Training. It's a technical term, doesn't mean "oooh, that was intense". It means exercise at level that forces your body into using different metabolic mechanisms to fuel your effort. Initially it will probably make you feel ill. If you aren't used to it, and are doing it right, you will probably feel nauseous after the effort.
Your aim is expending energy about 4 minutes above your VO2Max, doing anaerobic exercise.
In a 4 - 8 minute routine called Tabata intervals** you can do:
- 2 minute warmup to hit your second highest heart rate band (probably 125 - 135), then
- 4 one minute intervals at max heart rate, generally 30 - 45 seconds "on" and 15 - 30 seconds recovery, four times in a row, followed by
- 2 minutes cooldown.
You can probably not hit these heart rates on foot or on normal exercise machines, you probably need a climber, rower, or elliptical (in that order of 'kicks your ass').
** For iOS, try the app "Seconds Pro" which offers brilliant timer routines for loops within loops.
EDIT TO ADD ANECDATA GRAPH:
Here is my personal graph in 2015 and 2016 when I tried this in my mid-40s to get rid of the 30 lbs gain that happened after I hit 40 with a corresponding metabolic slowdown:
Haven't done HIIT since 2017, no purposeful exercise except for a few weeks of swimming in 2018. The three rounds of HIIT seem to have adjusted me back to my high school weight/metabolism balance.
WARNING: These heart rate numbers are examples, see your doctor. Anerobic exercise and heart rate in your max heart rate band are potentially dangerous.
The research I've seen "debunking" this have failed to start with people capable of HIIT, failed to prove they are going anaerobic, or failed to strictly follow the "Tabata interval" regime that was originally proven to work.
When I originally came across Tabata in mid 2000s, nobody said it worked for BMI adjustment. The research was around whether you had to exercise for hours to build endurance. It was reasonably conclusive you could build endurance using this mechanism. The contemporary research suggested the endurance came from different metabolic processes becoming accessible, and that Tabata style HIIT kicked that in.
The vast majority of so-called "HIIT" style training classes and protocols fall far short of Tabata intervals. That doesn't undermine Tabata, but you also can't no-true-Scotsman all the protocols that claim to be HIIT and don't offer the same results.
Weight loss is like 80% from the kitchen, maybe 20% from the gym. Point being, if you just work out a little bit more you're probably also eating more as well.
Weightloss is made in the kitchen, not the gym. It's really really hard to burn more calories than you eat.
That extra donut or candy bar you had? That's an hour or so on a treadmill.
The good news is that almost all diets work, find one you can stick to and stick to it. You should see results. It's not a fast process though. It didn't take a week or a month to put on that weight, it's not going to take a week or a month to get rid of it.
Me personally, the weight watchers tier with the weekly call with a coach was immensely helpful for me, but there's all kinds of other diets you can try.
Yes, this is the conventional wisdom, and 100% also works. Put simply, "to lose weight, eat less."
Cutting out something specific without replacing it can work wonders. For instance, cut out sugar water (soda) and do not replace it with anything. You don't need to count calories, you will take in fewer of them, and you will lose weight.
> "it's really hard to burn more than you eat"
Yes, flip side is "or burn more" which, 100% agree, is incredibly difficult. As I noted, most people don't have the will to make themselves feel sick from anaerobic effort.
It's really quite amazing how quickly it affects aerobic endurance as well. I had a knee injury, waited 9 months for surgery, recovered, did a self-planned physio routine, and started feeling ready to get back into aerobic exercise.
There was a 5km fun run in town that I figured I'd use as motivation. I did a slightly modified HIIT routine: walking warm up to the football field a few blocks away from my house, 8x flat out sprints from end to end with 15-30s recovery, and then cool down by walking back home.
I went from probably 15 months of completely sedentary life to running a 23min 5km race in about 6 weeks. I ended up finishing somewhere around 15th in the race, and every person who did better than me was listed as "M (18-23)"... and I don't even pretend that I can compete with testosterone-soaked young men :D
This is real and scientifically validated. The first person who ran the 4 minute mile changed the game by using intervals. Prior to that everyone trained for the mile by running the mile.
Athletes who train for the mile have to have intervals as the majority of their regiment. This is by far more effective then running long distances for increasing vo2 max.
Oh, yeah, that’s a detail I forgot! I didn’t actually try running a 5k before the race! (I had done a bunch of 5s and 10s before the injury though) I went into it not knowing, even a little bit, what my overall time might be. Mostly that was because I didn’t particularly care at that point, I was just happy to be back running again.
HIIT is great for cardiovascular development, but be aware that this develops your carb oxidation, and doesn't do much for fat oxidation. So many health problems are tied to poor metabolic flexibility, where your body favors carbs over fat. You develop fat oxidation, and metabolic flexibility, with long endurance, low-intensity exercise. Pro cyclists racing every day in the Tour de France right now are going mostly on fat oxidation at incredible power levels. They got there with mostly low intensity training (but lots of it, and some degree of HIIT). Here is a timely publication that goes over variables tied to fat oxidation (and points out how intensity deactivates fat oxidation): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-022-01727-7
I wish the "running hot" part was true for me. I feel cold so easily, to the point that I had to get myself checked out this year since my toes would go numb at the slightest chill.
The hunger thing rings true, though. I often just forget to eat and end up eating one meal a day or maybe a meal and a snack. Then again, on other days I might snack through the whole day. It seems to balance out though; after a day of frequent eating usually come a couple of those totally-forgetting-to-eat days.
Nope; they didn't find anything wrong at all luckily (aside from slightly lower blood flow in my right leg that didn't lead to any cause for concern after more investigation). Just said it happens for some people, especially at lower bf%.
I think that was one of the avenues they considered, but ultimately they didn't come up with any particular diagnosis and told me not to worry about it since they ruled out the obvious dangerous causes.
I have currently exactly 20.0 BMI (1-3kg under what I consider my optimal weight), I don't really think I'm less hungry, more like I have better self control, obviously if I ate everything I like all the time I could easily gain 10 or more kg (I'm right now 11 kg away from my record weight), but my approach is when I reach certain weight I start limiting my intake to not go over and stay on my optimal target range.
Also you can get used to feel hunger, I think most of the people in developed countries eat so much and so often they don't even experience feeling of hunger.
Plus if you get used to smaller portions it's also easier to fill your shrunk stomach with smaller portions, it's about what your body is used to, it's all about self control.
When I started to travel around Asia I weighted 88kg (my max), after year of traveling, lot of walking/hiking when I found new job in China I had 68kg when I liked like skeleton from concentration camp, now I am on my optimal weight exactly in middle between.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 279 ms ] threadThis seems to directly contradict the title.
EDIT: What food they are eating and how satiating that food may be is irrelevant. They did not measure the participants feelings of satiation or satiety. The title can't claim that the lower BMI people feel less hungry if you don't measure how hungry they feel.
> The participants were monitored for two weeks. Their food intake was measured with an isotope-based technique called the doubly-labeled water method, which assesses energy expenditure based on the difference between the turnover rates of hydrogen and oxygen in body water as a function of carbon dioxide production. Their physical activity was measured using an accelerometry-based motion detector.
Also regarding the specific food choices:
> The team is now expanding its research, including studies that include these measures. They also plan to look at genetic differences between normal weight and healthy underweight individuals. Preliminary analysis suggests single nucleotide polymorphisms in certain genes that might play a role.
title: "People with low BMI aren't more active, *they are just less hungry*, 'run hotter'"
quotation: "they didn't measure what the participants were actually eating or *their feelings of satiation or satiety*"
The title is factually untrue. You can't claim that people with lower BMI "are just less hungry" if you don't measure how hungry they feel.
This could be true for some people, but not for everyone, which is where this research will lead.
With all the love of science here why does no one think genetics matters when it comes to diet and health?
I think if they had substituted “eat less” for “are less hungry” the title would be fair.
[1] https://dynomight.net/potato-diet/
I think the same range is pretty common for people with certain other medications.
The whole dieting discussion, all nutrition advice, kcal in/out goes out the window when your metabolism is a black box.
Afaik there still isn't any study showing that any dieting works long term? So if we want to fight an obesity epidemic more needs to be done than to shift blame to affected individuals.
Certain mental disorders (depression and anxiety) also highly correlate with obesity and/or underweight.
A common treatment for ADHD (stimulants) often gets folks to a healthy weight that previously struggled on one side or the other.
It’s a complex problem, with a lot of ever changing variables we have little insight into.
Anecdotally, I know of several boomers that had serious thyroid issues likely tied to exposure to the Santa Susana Field Lab and Nevada nuclear testing. They were consuming milk and other products from areas contaminated by them at the right times.
All the various plastics we’ve all been exposed to and other various chemicals are also likely doing something too.
But also, the whole country has gotten dramatically more sedentary and media consumption focused, and the media keeps getting more and more anxiety inducing and alienating. As a country, we all need to ‘get out and touch some grass’ more too.
Is this based on a study or something, or is it more of a reaction to all the news stories about that lately? (news peddles fear without anything to back it up typically)
Most of the more obvious offenders got banned or voluntarily phased out awhile ago, but new variants of many plastics come out every year, and large swaths of existing ones are known bad but don’t commonly get used in good contact anymore so we don’t think about it.
One of those ‘we’ll probably figure out which one in the basket is causing what problems in a decade or two’ situations, and how bad a problem it actually is. Hopefully no thalidomide chirality level horrors, but who knows.
That's a pretty light annual workload. How do you get to be one of those people?
Or do those people have other work to do?
Yes, they have other work to do.
I'm pointing out that the number of papers someone reviews in a year is not even distantly related to the amount of attention they have available to devote to the job.
What I tell people is that my powerful brain needs a lot of calories.
It’s hard to get fat from one bad meal a day. What typically gets people is eating their daily needs via meals and then having high calorie snacks on top of that.
Then I noticed, that despite looking like a large meal, the calories weren't that high.
Dunno where it was all going. I wasn't really getting much bigger or taller for most of that span.
So the genetics of all of this will be interesting. I have managed to avoid my family curse by eating pretty much only fish and game meat, like a Sami. And I do not eat much. It was the only diet that would raise my HDL.
Our traditional diets changes our genetics, so who you are will determine what is healthy for you.
I agree with the statin. They tried to force them on me. I took a look at my genetics, changes my diet accordingly, and LDL and HDL reversed in three weeks and I have the blood work to prove it.
That's my point - traditional for the individual based on their ancestry.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=fecal+transplant+bmi
Regarding the gut, should probably take a peek at FUT2 genetics:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352345X2...
Especially at night though I have to to jack the temperature down or I won't sleep. Also less hungry aligns pretty well.
Unfortunately when I get hungry, it's normally "a little hungry) at akward spread out intervals. I probably feel most hungry after midnight but never eat then because well, I have to sleep soon.
I've tried to put on weight before, but I could never stomach massive calories dense meals, without horrific nausea and discomfort.
What's interesting is that these people kept a high metabolic rate while doing less activity. It's almost like, if you rest more, your body will have the energy to increase its metabolic rate, or it could be totally physiological and it depends on the person.
As the GP I get hot during the night and my wife is freezing, and although I have never measured my body temp my wife always says that she can feel how my body can irradiate heat. At the beginning I thought she was joking but after many years and empirical testing (when she says she can feel heat I am hot) I feel it is true. And this always happens if I ingest carbs for dinner, always.
About what you say, I am not sure the brain processes that it feels hot because the temperature from outside of your body is higher than yours but because your body is actually hotter than usual and one of the reasons could be because the environment temp is actually heating up your body. But I am not a neurologist or even close so I may be completely wrong.
I "run hot" as my partner says. She'll touch my arm and it boggles her mind how hot I feel. I have to keep my room at 67F at night or I can't even use blankets. My sleep suffers from how hot I run.
I don't feel cold in the least.
Eventually diagnosed with an autoimmune condition. Food is one of the primary ways I keep it under control.
I can eat pretty much non-stop. I could eat a large pizza myself, and 30 minutes later eat another.
The grass is always greener. Some people wish they could eat as much as me so they could gain some weight. I wish I couldn't eat so much so I didn't have to spend so much mental energy on ensuring I don't over-eat.
I don't obsess over this but it'll help me cut out some snacks or put in an extra mile or two on my runs (which is supposed to be around ~100 calories). Everyone is different but looking at weight loss/gain as an equation works for me if I notice my pants getting tighter.
Sure you could. But do you actually do that often? If you eat like me, you're eating two large pizzas a night two or three times a week.
If you stay thin, I guarantee you don't eat as much as me. At least not unless you have an activity level comparable to an actively training Olympic athlete.
I think most people 'eat until not hungry.' For me, my default is 'eat until full' which I'm not sure is the same at all. I think it's primal programming to eat until full for many of us, because 10k years ago that might have meant surviving or not.
I am usually in 'want to eat' mode. If I eat something, I might put that mode on pause for a few minutes, depending on how much, but I'll be there before the next meal. Then, I convince myself I'm going hungry, so the next meal I'll over eat. This cycle increases my stress level, which leads to more eating.
I find that doing any physical activity outdoors reduces my desire to eat immensely. I don't mean a 5-15 minute walk, I mean being outside for a couple hours or more. My body seems to have two modes, eat mode and work mode. Sitting at a computer is what's causing my problems IMO. I have a low-stress job, but I think the very nature of a computer job creates some kind of primal-stress.
Another strange thing about my body (if anyone cares, curious if anyone else has the same thing) is that I don’t burp, ever. I think the air I swallow while eating forms a bubble in my stomach that makes me feel full sooner and prevents overeating.
While my weight is at least partially my own fault, its at least influenced by factors outside of my control - upbringing, genetics, societal factors, and an endocrine disorder too. I've concluded that being fat is a result of Type II diabetes rather than a cause - and there is growing science to back me up - a good example of this, my liver dumps glucose into my system, without meds I can fast for a nearly indefinite period of time without my blood sugar falling off.
In my case, I believe I overeat because I have poor impulse control and I enjoy both the act of eating and the sensation of being stuffed with food. Furthermore I particularly enjoy greasy and carby foods, pizza particularly. If I ate less (or stuffed myself with plant fiber instead of pizza grease) I am certain that I would lose weight. Do I have the motivation and conviction to follow through with that? Past performance says no. But that doesn't change the fact that I'm overeating. It's not an attitude, it's reality.
You probably binge eat to plug an emotional or stress hole, its literally a form of self medicating. Thats not something that willpower or blaming yourself can solve.
So maybe the motto is: It's not your fault but it IS your responsibility.
I can't speak to your friends, but there is no universal truth here - I know a bunch of fat people, and none of them 'drown them in bbq sauce and mayo' - most of the thin people in my life and fat people in my life end up eating 'around' the same amount of food, but the thin people are physically often much more active.
But also calories from modern food add up quickly.
Say two men weighing 200 pounds, same activity levels.
If man A eats "at maintenance" and man B eats at maintenance + small fries + small cookie + non-diet soda + apple, at the end of the day man A and B may not feel any difference in terms of "fullness" and "hunger", but man B is easily eating 800+ kcal a day than man A.
Over months, I expect man B to get north of 20 pounds on man A. But I can see man B say to A, "I am not eating much more than you, just a little cookie here and there".
I couldn't burp for most of my life until I taught myself.
But if I eat a small small amount, wait 30 minutes the hunger fades and I will feel full.
So basically a 30 minute delay between being full and feeling full.
That’s a huge window for a lot of calories.
I can't gain weight but I also love the heat... I don't have the A/C on right now and it's 84F inside.
Really not surprising that people that eat less have lower bmi and higher metabolism than people that eat more with a slower metabolism but who are more active.
Maybe this is not that much of a surprise either though? I wonder how much of this has to do with muscle. BMI infamously ignores muscle mass. An interesting followup would be whether people with low body fat % are sedentary. My guess is that they aren't.
Side note: maybe there is a disparate importance of "Calories In" vs "Calories Out" for people who are under/over weight. Maybe underweight people should focus on exercise more, and overweight people should focus on eating less?
A lot of guys severely underestimate their body fat %. Sub 10% generally isn't possible without heavy dieting unless you're still going through puberty; genetics has nothing to do with it.
I'm not bragging, there are serious downsides, but it's absolutely possible to sit at 10% year-round, just not while maintaining any serious level of elevated muscle mass.
Isn’t this against the laws of physics? If you’re burning a ton of energy and not eating excessively, where are their bodies getting mass from to maintain weight?
No because they were also eating a lot, the lower bound on this established by physics.
I've known a lot of roadies who sort-of-correctly believed they could eat as much as they could physically manage, as they were expending enough (3+ hour intense riding daily) that it was a chore to keep up. At least when they were 20-something and racing. Many struggle a bit when the a) get a bit older/metabolically slower and b) life gets in the way and they ride a lot less. All of a sudden a guy who was rail thin gains 30lb that "sticks".
So really it's that they weren't losing weight because they were eating too much... exactly like most people in modern western society. And really the moderate amount of cycling was irrelevant.
Eating 1000 kcal more a day is pretty easy to do without noticing. Especially when you eat a lot on the day that you biked (cause "you earned it").
For example 2 liter bottle of coke is 800 kcal and 1 protein bar is about 250 kcal and you're already over the budget (assuming you also eat your "regular" food).
WTF is going on with the hunger response being so messed up in a huge segment of the population?
If literally a majority of people in wealthy nations are what we define as overweight, and we keep finding new ways that is at least somewhat out of our control or difficult to perfectly control, why do we keep framing it as solely a matter of individual discipline or virtue? I have my own guesses about why of course, but pretty much all of the possibilities are unsettling.
It's like arguing that pneumonia can be cured through "healthy living" even after you've established the mechanism and effectiveness of penicillin.
I've even heard the "thinness is a sign of godliness" folks get really angry at the suggestion of using GLP-1 agonists, because it's "lazy" and "cheating."
We have existence proofs that diet-only interventions work for some people. I literally know people who have lost large amounts of weight and kept it off for years that way. Medications have risks and side effects, so should only be prescribed if behavior modification has failed.
What I did say is that we are increasingly learning that overeating is a very complex and life-threatening medical concern that often cannot be solved through dietary intervention. Even people who may die if they don't adhere to a diet frequently have difficulty adhering to one. Saying that there are "existence proofs" that diets sometimes they work is a terrible response.
My view is that we should treat diet as one possible medical treatment, and evaluate it apples-to-apples (in terms of efficacy and side effects) against more recent FDA-approved treatments. And now that we've seen how much impact those treatments can have -- and particularly how critical the GLP-1 mechanism is to the sustainability of weight-loss interventions -- we should work our asses off to find more and better treatments that treat overeating as a health condition rather than a question of mind-over-matter.
You seem extremely attached to your position, to the point where defending your position required you to declare that my relatives "were eating a bunch of other stuff when you weren't looking."
We live in a society where there's always lots of food available for most people in developed countries (who are mainly the people who are overweight), so it makes sense that you will instinctively eat more than you need to.
Some people, including the Chinese-resident subjects of this study, have hunger responses that are not susceptible to the temptations of our food system.
I visited China and they seemed to have plenty of access to high-calorie, highly-rewarding food. What's special about the temptations of our food system?
"The unparalleled rise of obesity in China: a call to action"
International Journal of Obesity volume 45, pages 921–922 (2021)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41366-021-00774-w
Per the doctor, I was obese. My wife was obese because breasts. BMI is bullshit imo, it has some general value but creates a lot of distress for people, especially women.
If you are standing in front of your doctor and he or she is telling you that you are obese because of your BMI score and not actually measuring you (like with calipers), I’d probably look for a new doctor.
People that lift often eat more. But mostly protein, and stimulating muscle every day makes sure it will get developed and consume more calories to maintain itself.
If you stop lifting altogether, not only muscle mass stops growing but also starts to shrink. If you eat the same, you will gain weight faster and with less food than before.
What I mean is, the fact that you have muscle mass and stop lifting is not what's going to lead to "a quick onset of obesity." What leads to weight gain is still eating like you're lifting when you're not.
If you adjust your caloric intake to account for your new level of caloric expenditure, you will not gain weight, although you will likely see unfavorable body composition changes.
Yeah, that's what I meant. So it is not nonsense.
Gaining a lot of muscle and putting a lot of effort into gaining the muscle (bulking + workout) is where the troubles maybe appear.
Also, the metabolism of a 20yo is a completely different story frok the metabolism of a 40yo.
So to sum up: working out and staying in shape == good. Don't worry about gaining muscle. That's just nonsense
If you were truly interested in the question you posted, You could have just explicitly asked.
He was sweating after eating mounds of food.
And he had ripped abs.
The feeling of hunger is not comparable between people. Hunger is driven by multiple sensations (blood sugar, stomach stretch, hormone levels) and by cognitive behaviors (it's lunchtime, it's a feast day) and psychological conditioning (advertising). People have relationships with, and expectations about food. The response to hunger is learned. It is driven by culture - for instance it is 'manly' to eat a large steak and loaded baked potato where I'm from; many times the smaller cuts of steak have either a woman's name or some feminine aspect.
Scientists use Occam's Razor to find the most probable cause for some effect, and people in general want to find something simple to blame. I think the obesity epidemic has many causes, and it is particularly hard to understand because researchers have only lately begun to take hunger seriously. It is easy to say "Diet and Exercise" but losing body fat means that you must continuously make choices that decrease your comfort in some way - eating fewer highly rewarding foods, maintaining a state of hunger, increasing activity level. Those choices are difficult, and they are different for everyone.
I believe there are many consequences of the difficulty in measuring and tracking hunger. I think that many people (including doctors and researchers and HN users) want to be able to change one thing or add one drug and suddenly solve the obesity epidemic. I think it makes it hard for doctors to talk to patients. It makes it hard for people to understand what their body is doing.
Not necessarily! I've successfully lost a lot of body fat (~50 pounds over the last 18 months) by deliberately changing my diet to eat more foods (that I like) that are lower in energy density than what I was eating before -- fruits and veggies, lean meats, etc. I do end up eating fewer stereotypically highly rewarding foods, but that's because I'm already full of other highly rewarding-to-me foods and don't feel like having a treat or a huge fast food meal or whatever. And I'm certainly not tolerating frequent hunger!
So what exactly are you contradicting in their statement?
That is, it doesn't have to be uncomfortable.
I don't deliberately avoid dessert, though I do tend to eat it less than I used to. I'll have the cheesecake if I really feel like it.
My sympathies to those who really just don't like any fruits or vegetables, but there are lots of other margins to operate on in lowering your dietary energy density. e.g., for a side with your steak, I assert most people will enjoy a baked potato with a bit of butter (~1 cal/gram) about as much as garlic bread (~3 to 4 cal/gram).
See I'd assert the opposite, or at least the following more nuanced version, for myself:
If I make a baked potato, I'll eat it and be quite happy -- even delighted! -- with it. But! If I have to choose between a baked potato or garlic bread (say, on a restaurant menu) I'd choose the garlic bread virtually every time, unless I'm exerting Herculean levels of willpower to choose healthier options. And if I'm served a baked potato and garlic bread, I'd probably eat the potato, and then somehow find room to eat the garlic bread anyways.
I don't disagree that healthy food can be very tasty, but I mitigate my own struggles with healthy eating by "merely" never keeping unhealthy options around, so I can focus more on the joy of the healthy food, and not have to constantly choose to avoid the high-calorie treats.
> I'll have the cheesecake if I really feel like it.
That tells me the writing on the wall, and let me be clear about this, the writing is what needs to be written and what people need to read - you're making the decision to NOT have cheesecake when you only kind of feel like it. It's a game of weighing the pros and cons and learning to be satisfied with what you know you should have instead of turning around one day and loving the healthy food more than the unhealthy.
Just as an aside: > I assert most people will enjoy a baked potato with a bit of butter (~1 cal/gram) about as much as garlic bread (~3 to 4 cal/gram).
You're discounting the calories / gram of butter in your first calculation and including it in the second.
Chiming in as someone whom the GP comment resonates with: the point here is that you literally come to enjoy it less. The natural amount that you would eat isn't constrained entirely by health choices. I find finishing a single slice of cheesecake to be overwhelming: a second one would be actively unpleasant.
If you were following your assumptions here to their conclusions, you would conclude that people who eat unhealthily would eat cheesecake 24/7 if it weren't for conscious health choices. This is trivially untrue, no?
The original claim was that losing weight requires constant extra discomfort, and GP's (and my) claim is that this is false: you can move yourself (with initial discomfort) to an equilibrium that's more comfortable _and_ healthier than the status quo.
I feel the discomfort of constraining myself much less often now than I did when I ate like you. This is again trivial: if your preferences are aligned with healthy eating, you need to push against them less.
That's a weird judgement to throw in the midst. I haven't laid claim to my eating habits. I've had great success in losing weight in the past as well as recently by changing my eating habits for the positive. I just wanted people to realize that it's not always just a matter of learning to love yummy veggies and forgetting about icky cheesecake.
> if your preferences are aligned with healthy eating, you need to push against them less.
Agreed - but people have to accept that their preferences aren't always and possibly not ever going to align with healthy eating.
Sorry, I wasn't implying anything by this. Just absent-minded phrasing.
> people have to accept that their preferences aren't always and possibly not ever going to align with healthy eating.
Sure, I think it's possible some people can't make it through the transition to healthier preferences. That doesn't suggest that the original claim in the thread is correct.
The comment you originally responded to claimed that convexfunction was "restating" the claim that weight loss is pure effortful discomfort (from the top of the thread). Your response was that you doubt that healthy food can taste as good as junk food[1]. In the comment I responded directly to, you say that having cheesecake occasionally is evidence that a healthy person eating less cheesecake comes from conscious healthy effort.
These claims are what I'm pushing back against. I use way less willpower on food now than when I was a junkier eater[2].
[1] Note that the issue here might be that your definition of weight-loss-promoting foods is askew. Steak is a pretty reasonable part of a weight-loss diet, as long as you're not mindless about the quantity. As with the cheesecake example, eating the right amount of steak is a way more pleasant experience than eating too much.
[2] though thankfully never as bad as the avg US upper-middle-class diet
Let me rephrase: since changing my diet to include more low-energy-density foods (and being deliberate about eating large portions of them), I find myself less frequently even considering having dessert after dinner.
> You're discounting the calories / gram of butter in your first calculation and including it in the second.
No? I'll put 7g of butter (50 calories) on a 300g potato (280 calories) and not at all feel like I needed more butter. Even if you double that amount of butter, it comes out to 1.2 cal/g.
I'm sure this has contributed to the success of my "diet" -- I also started lifting weights again in this period -- but the comment I was originally replying to was about how weight loss requires discomfort, and the energy density thing has been the key insight for me on how to make it not require discomfort. I see now it reads like I was solely attributing my weight loss to this one weird trick (though I do think it's been the most important factor), so, mea culpa.
I'm glad your system has worked for you.
A Big Mac menu goes for 10+ dollars where I live.
Sirloin steak, which is reasonably lean (you can go leaner and cheaper with something like London Broil, every 3 weeks it is sold at 2.50 t0 3 dollars per pound), when on sale (this is the planning I was referring to) can be bought for 3-4 dollars per pound. One can buy 20 pounds for 60-80 dollars. A big bag of frozen vegetables, enough for 10 meals, it's sold at Costco for 10 dollars.
A whole day of abundant eating (2 pounds of steak and vegetables) can cost less than a Big Mac menu. You can throw in some potatoes and eggs and pay per day what you would pay at MacDonalds or equivalent per meal.
She describes it as one of the tastiest meals she had the entire show. Literally half digested arctic vegetation.
Your body rewards you for eating those things which satisfy your needs. McDonalds will do that, but so will a salad.
One of the fad diets for a while was the "one thing" diet. You could have anything you wanted.. but you could only eat that single item that entire day. Cheesecake? You're having cheesecake for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Very quickly participants discover it is very easy to burn out on sweets and junk.
If you eat nutritious food that will actually give you that reward craving.
Also, nothing wrong with steak. Nothing really wrong with cheesecake either - but you only need a tiny bit of those things. There's a reason most people want tiny steaks and not big honking ones, especially people who eat steak with regularity.
You're arguing that people who eat bad things constantly only want a little of them when that is obviously not true. Plenty of people eat far too much steak far too often. People are keyed to like salt, fat, & sugar. It's a balancing act of moderation, it's not just a matter of finding that you love vegetables and you will always find them just as satisfying as Twizzlers.
That is, and this not medical advice, but something I have a done a few times while on vacation, you can do a 10-15-21 days of the above-mentioned McDonald's diet and easily get leaner without starving, looking for "healthy foods", counting calories or steps.
E.g. do eat that steak. But without a BBQ sauce you bought. Just salt and pepper is great actually. But a butter and cream garlic sauce (no sugar) is also awesome. Maybe some blue cheese on top instead?
Skip the potato. Just that steak with some nice caramelized onions or veggies you like as a side. But that's not even needed.
Highly rewarding I can tell you. Yes it's not sweet and rewarding. It's not carb loaded rewarding but it's absolutely delicious, fills you up for a long time. Yes this is going in the Keto carnivore direction so might not be for you but having eaten Keto (with less than 20g of carbs a day) I can tell you it was absolutely great and rewarding taste wise as I could finally enjoy cream based sauces and bacon again instead of low fast sugary stuff that makes you hungry again after an hour.
Chicken breast with a little flour to help caramelize over high heat and some herbs (basil, oregano, thyme) tastes excellent and feels light and proper.
I am a person with a terrifying appetite if left to my own devices. And if at the beginning of a "diet" the scary appetite and intrusive food thoughts make themselves feel heard loud and clear, after a while, thanks to the physiological changes that occur as the food consumed changes and a mind that is now preoccupied with things and thoughts other than food, as time goes on it becomes much easier to eat fewer and more "healthy" (hard to define, but we know it when we see it) calories.
"Pushing through until it becomes easy" is not a social policy, and other kinds of interventions are needed to solve the large-scale obesity problem. But at the individual level, it works for me and millions of others.
The pt is that the reward function isn't static, and you can move yourself to an equilibrium with as much utility/comfort that is much healthier.
This has been my experience too. Eg, I'm almost a little grossed out by the proportion of refined carbs on the plates of some of my friends: not only is it unhealthy, it's the most boring part of the meal (to my palate)! And my habituation to sugar has gotten low enough that things taste much sweeter to me than they do to most people.
If anything, this has _increased_ the reward I get from eating, since their unfettered preferences need to be consciously constrained by awareness of their health, while mine line up pretty well.
https://optimisingnutrition.com/calculating-satiety/amp/
- Dairy: Greek yogurt or cottage cheese are usually part of my breakfast. I'll have a whey protein shake in milk most days, since I'm also trying to build muscle; liquids don't normally "count" toward satiety in the same way, though milk itself is complicated and contributes at least a little more toward satiety because the protein makes gastric emptying slower.
- Meats: Most unprocessed meats, as well as some deli meats (e.g. roast beef or ham but not salami), are great on satiety per calorie IMO, even if not usually considered "lean". I guess don't make a habit out of prime rib? I'd credit "plan to have a large amount of meat for most dinners" as the most important single change I made, perhaps in part because it makes me less likely to have something from a restaurant for dinner instead but also because meat is just so satisfying without being too energy-dense. Eggs count here too, ~2 cal/gram.
- Veggies: anything is great, but my favorites are brussels sprouts, sugar snap peas, spinach, asparagus, and corn. This won't be news to anyone but salads are usually a good choice if you're eating from a restaurant.
- Fruits: anything is great, but my favorites are strawberries, watermelon, bananas, and oranges (I prefer clementines because they're easy to eat)
- Junk food: I find ice cream sandwiches (~150 calories) are a convenient way to sate my sweet tooth in a way that isn't ridiculous, even if they're not really low energy density. Also, fancy dark chocolate is hard to overeat.
And a special mention to making my own coffee (with generous milk and sugar-free flavored syrup, ~60 calories per cup) rather than getting lattes from a coffee shop (~150 to 200 calories).
The goal was to change my cholesterol (it worked), not lose weight, and I ate however much I wanted.
But at the same time I lost 30 pounds over about three months. I didn’t even notice the change for the first month. I wasn’t fat to start, and by the end I was startlingly thin. Anecdotal, obviously.
I wish this were the baseline understanding everyone shared! Even as one person, as my mental health has been differently treated over time, I've been shocked at how different the subjective experience of hunger at various calorie deficits has been.
By that I mean, I would eat breakfast and then see how hungry I was at lunchtime. If I wasn’t very hungry for lunch, then I would still eat lunch, but I tried eating less at breakfast the next day. Same with lunch-to-dinner.
Over time my meal portion sizes came down, but I was not looking directly at that, I was just paying attention to the feeling of hunger.
What I realized was that I would eat a big breakfast and then a big lunch just because it was lunchtime. So I was overeating; basically taking in more calories than my body needed. It was a combination of habit and not thinking about what I was feeling. I realized that I should feel pretty hungry before a meal, but I wasn’t letting that happen.
I totally agree with you that hunger is subjective and hard to measure outside of our own perception. I’m not sure I could have or would have done this based on someone else’s coaching. It’s hard to calibrate my personal feeling of “hungry enough” based on what another person says. And it takes motivation, which has to come from within.
A few months you may be skinner. 1,2,3 years, you may have maintained the weight loss.
10 years later will probably be fatter. Those are the numbers.
And most people with high BMIs didn't get that way eating steak and baked potatoes. In fact, if you live entirely on that diet it's quite difficult to get fat.
I believe that for myself, being able to eat like a king from many different culinary traditions has been a major factor in my fat gain.
"Obesity is a major health risk, with junk food consumption playing a central role in weight gain, because of its high palatability and high-energy nutrients. The Cafeteria (CAF) diet model for animal experiments consists of the same tasty but unhealthy food products that people eat (e.g. hot dogs and muffins), and considers variety, novelty and secondary food features, such as smell and texture. This model, therefore, mimics human eating patterns better than other models." - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33309818/#:~:text=The%20Cafe....
But what I think we're having trouble in understanding what this means is that it doesn't mean obesity as a social problem can't be solved. It might mean some amount of people who are already obese will never be able to sustainably change that fact, but it's not like people are being born with naturally higher fat set points. That is a hormonal change that happens when you become obese and stay that way for a long time. Interventions that focus on younger people who have not yet become obese can still work. But this is contrary and different to how the entire obesity industrial complex works. It is focused on treating overweight and obese people, not on preventing new people from ever getting that way in the first place. Even with children, we focus the interventions on trying to help fat kids lose weight. We should probably expect that to work at least a little bit better than trying to intervene in adults, but even better still is to work with the kids who aren't obese, which at an early enough age is all of them, and figure out how to keep them that way.
It is interesting to see "increasing activity level" as being a decrease in comfort. But I suppose that's because "comfort" here isn't defined absolutely. I also am not sure that "comfort" is an attribute that should be optimized for in disregard for all others.
If this statement is read as "anything that does not have 100% positive feedback is undesirable" then I think it would be very challenging to make any improvements in a person's life.
But then I also don't think that "comfort" is necessarily an ideal target to optimize. I think a more holistic measure such as "satisfaction" is a more productive target. We can find "satisfaction" in things that are not 100% pleasant but which in turn result in greater happiness or feelings of contentment than doing only those things that have positive feedback.
This measure of "comfortable" also does not seem to account for the secondary effects of "comfortable" choices. E.g., if we eat only "highly rewarding foods" and become obese we see discomfort in other parts of life (loss of mobility, health issues, difficulty performing mundane physical tasks, etc)
I'm not saying that is good, I'm saying that is a strong value statement that I made when I was younger. It's hard to change values, even in the face of evidence.
I think people should find exercise that they enjoy. I have struggled with this due to other physical limitations (in addition to my weight) and my attitude and cognitive behaviors. I now enjoy riding my bike, hiking, and swimming.
We don’t eat because we’re hungry, we eat because we’re bored.
And because we're stressed. And because we expect to eat. And because our stomachs are empty. And because we have our thirst signal confused for hunger. And ...
I bet there are at least 20 distinct sensations that people feel as 'hunger'
They fed pigs four different diets that had the same amount of calories, but varying ratios of n3/n6 fats.
The pigs with high n6/n3 ratio ended up much fatter and less muscular than the pigs eating a 1-1 ratio diet. It's a very neat demonstration that "all that matters is calories" is not true; your metabolism, and thus how you use the calories, is influenced by the kinds of calories you are eating.
Well, at least if you are a pig. But it seems likely the same holds true in humans, though AFAIK no one has yet tried to do a similar controlled trial in humans.
But there's lots of assocational evidence that lines up in the same direction -- e.g., in America we've been getting fatter pretty much in-lock step with increasing consumption of n6 fats & there is a correlation between body-fat composition (which itself follows fat composition from the diet) and obesity.
So, in the light of the above, my #1 weight loss tip is: eat fewer n6 fats. (In practice, this means avoiding most prepared processed foodes and being extremely selective if eating out (since restaurants tend to go crazy using vegetable oil as a cooking fat, which is super high in n6 fats).)
The pigs study:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...
In fact, n6 fats may also promote hunger, via increasing endocannabinoid production.
Here's a study I just found in mice:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24081493/
Again just an animal model, but certainly suggestive...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6685292/
AEA and 2-AG are synthesized from omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA), arachidonic acid (AA), and are hydrolyzed by fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH) and monoacylglycerol lipase (MAGL),
Herein, we review the discovery and physiological role of omega-3 eCBs that are derived from DHA and EPA (Figure 1A). We illustrate that the derivatization of carboxylic acid end of the omega-3 fatty acid with ethanolamide, glycerol or other groups, such as neurotransmitters, leads to substantial changes in their biological activity and receptor interactions. We also review the discovery, mechanism and activity of the following omega-3 eCBs- DHA-ethanolamide (DHA-EA), 2-docosahexaenoyl-glycerol (2-DHG) and eCB-like- DHA-serotonin (DHA-5HT), DHA-dopamine (DHA-DA) and the EPA analogs.
That would be my thinking.
These n3 derived eCBs are pretty new so no one knows. But I can tell you, I have found I get "dry mouth" on occasion when I over do the Omega 3. It used to happen more when I took fish oil capsules which I no longer take.
I am also unable to smoke pot becasue it triggers intense anxiety and panic and I think this is becasue I am more sensitive to the THC. And I think this might be a clue how CBD and THC have different psychological effects. THC = Omega 6 and inflammatory and CBD = Omega 3 and anti-inflammatory in a sense.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170718142909.h...
I would be cautious though -- it's a novel dietary regime, and seems likely to induce a lot of oxidative stress...
Certainly in mice it seems to.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3435540/
From that study:
> It appears of utmost importance in medical and nutritional practice to formulate and handle n-3 PUFA-rich foods or supplements with the greatest care to avoid any PUFA oxidation. This can be particularly relevant in patients suffering from acute or chronic diseases who increase their n-3 PUFA intake because of their reported health benefits.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25373089/
tmjdev wrote:
> If it was the ratio being studied, could you instead increase your n3 fat consumption?
Some articles suggest exactly that: "To improve the ratio of omega-3 fats to omega-6 fats, eat more omega-3s, not fewer omega-6s." [1]
If you're looking for sources other than fish, consider chia. Two tablespoons of chia give 4.3 g of omega-3 fat, as well as 10 g of fiber for no net carbs. [2] Don't eat chia seeds dry; [3, 4] mix into 1.25 cups of water and leave them for at least 30 minutes. I also combine with oats. (I used to eat 0.5 cups of oats every morning. When trying to lower carbs, I went down to 0.25 cups of oats and the chia. The omega-3 fat was a nice surprise.)
On the other hand, minimizing processed and restaurant foods is probably a good idea in general. And of course if your goal is to lose weight, removing something from your diet makes more intuitive sense than adding something.
[1] https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/no-need-to...
[2] https://cronometer.com/printfood.html?name=Bob%27s%2BRed%2BM...
[3] https://www.wbur.org/news/2014/10/24/chia-seed-alert-superfo...
[4] https://draxe.com/nutrition/how-to-eat-chia-seeds/
It depends on your genetics. the genes FADS1 and FADS2 will dictate how much of those short chain omega 3 you can turn into the long chain omega 3, like EPA and DHA, which ate the reason for the metabolic reversal.
Also since Omega 6 and Omega 3 compete for the FADS1 and FADS2 activity, eating less Omega 6 will always help.
|All the pigs had ad libitum access to diets and water and consumed the diets for 2 months.
So they could eat as much as they wanted to, it seems.
However, coincidentally, the same conclusions still hold, since it turns out the pigs ate very similar amounts of food on all the diets, except the 5:1 n6:n3 diet, where they ate a bit less. (And that was the diet where the pigs gained the most weight.)
Sorry about the error!
So my diet is usually very strict. I will mostly only eat salmon, mackerel, oysters and mussels, and a lot of berries with some breads and rice. No plant oils at all and very low carb, but not no carb.
I only resorted to this diet because I had a series of metabolic disorders in my self and in my family and I also know my genetics. I have the changes to FADS1, FADS2, and CPT1A which make me much more sensitive to Omega 6 fats that most European Caucasians. See it turns out I have more Sami blood in me than I thought and so I am in reality more Inuit when it comes to what I need from my diet.
I most certainly feel most satiated and loose weight even when eating the same amount of calories when I am following this diet. I was a low fat vegan for five years in an attempt to correct my cholesterol, and I was a good vegan too, no junk food. But all it did was lower my HDL and barely reduce by LDL. (I was diagnosed with mild hyperlipidemia). After seeing my geteicss and changing my diet, my HDL rose over 35 for the first time in my life. Now it stays steady at between 50 and 55
Now I am only more sensitive to these fats. Meaning that anyone, even with non-Inuit genetics, will succumb to the higher levels of Omega 6 that course through the modern food industry if they over do it.
(FWIW, Dave Feldman (cholesterolcode.com) has me pretty convinced that high LDL is not bad in all contexts. High HDL does always seem to be good, though.)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4607861/
In China, that's like 1 in 10 people. In the USA it's closer to 1 in 50. I wonder what kind of genetics and behavior you have to have to be underweight in the USA.
Graph your weight. After 6 weeks of HIIT, you'll see weight really shed because you're not burning calories during exercise but 24/7, and because of that metabolic shift, the weight will continue to shed for months even if you stop HIIT.
* HIIT is High Intensity Interval Training. It's a technical term, doesn't mean "oooh, that was intense". It means exercise at level that forces your body into using different metabolic mechanisms to fuel your effort. Initially it will probably make you feel ill. If you aren't used to it, and are doing it right, you will probably feel nauseous after the effort.
Your aim is expending energy about 4 minutes above your VO2Max, doing anaerobic exercise.
In a 4 - 8 minute routine called Tabata intervals** you can do:
- 2 minute warmup to hit your second highest heart rate band (probably 125 - 135), then
- 4 one minute intervals at max heart rate, generally 30 - 45 seconds "on" and 15 - 30 seconds recovery, four times in a row, followed by
- 2 minutes cooldown.
You can probably not hit these heart rates on foot or on normal exercise machines, you probably need a climber, rower, or elliptical (in that order of 'kicks your ass').
** For iOS, try the app "Seconds Pro" which offers brilliant timer routines for loops within loops.
EDIT TO ADD ANECDATA GRAPH:
Here is my personal graph in 2015 and 2016 when I tried this in my mid-40s to get rid of the 30 lbs gain that happened after I hit 40 with a corresponding metabolic slowdown:
https://i.imgur.com/pvbvoMy.jpg
I bought a Nokia scale about a month into HIIT in late spring, and stopped HIIT a couple weeks later.
After stopping, dropped 10 lbs from early summer through the fall. Over winter, began to gain.
Did HIIT again in spring of 2016 for six more weeks.
Stopped when weight started shedding, dropped another 10 lbs.
Finally, did one last cycle in 2017, dropped another 10 lbs.
Overall graph from 2015 to 2021 (stopped bothering with the scale because was steady state):
https://i.imgur.com/U6U7HrH.jpg
Haven't done HIIT since 2017, no purposeful exercise except for a few weeks of swimming in 2018. The three rounds of HIIT seem to have adjusted me back to my high school weight/metabolism balance.
WARNING: These heart rate numbers are examples, see your doctor. Anerobic exercise and heart rate in your max heart rate band are potentially dangerous.
Is there actual evidence that this is generally effective?
That said, I do hit for the cardio benefits of improving myself instead of thinking it's a weight loss miracle.
Almost always I've found the key to weight loss is eat less, nothing to do with working out (so long as you do actually work out a bit).
https://www.elevaterope.com/tabata-intervals/
When I originally came across Tabata in mid 2000s, nobody said it worked for BMI adjustment. The research was around whether you had to exercise for hours to build endurance. It was reasonably conclusive you could build endurance using this mechanism. The contemporary research suggested the endurance came from different metabolic processes becoming accessible, and that Tabata style HIIT kicked that in.
* +40% - weight loss from burning more calories
* -20% - weight gain from eating more due to doing more sport
* +40% - less snacking from being away from food sources for more hours
* +20% - being more conscious of fitness and weight and being more disciplined about food
That extra donut or candy bar you had? That's an hour or so on a treadmill.
The good news is that almost all diets work, find one you can stick to and stick to it. You should see results. It's not a fast process though. It didn't take a week or a month to put on that weight, it's not going to take a week or a month to get rid of it.
Me personally, the weight watchers tier with the weekly call with a coach was immensely helpful for me, but there's all kinds of other diets you can try.
Cutting out something specific without replacing it can work wonders. For instance, cut out sugar water (soda) and do not replace it with anything. You don't need to count calories, you will take in fewer of them, and you will lose weight.
> "it's really hard to burn more than you eat"
Yes, flip side is "or burn more" which, 100% agree, is incredibly difficult. As I noted, most people don't have the will to make themselves feel sick from anaerobic effort.
There was a 5km fun run in town that I figured I'd use as motivation. I did a slightly modified HIIT routine: walking warm up to the football field a few blocks away from my house, 8x flat out sprints from end to end with 15-30s recovery, and then cool down by walking back home.
I went from probably 15 months of completely sedentary life to running a 23min 5km race in about 6 weeks. I ended up finishing somewhere around 15th in the race, and every person who did better than me was listed as "M (18-23)"... and I don't even pretend that I can compete with testosterone-soaked young men :D
Absolutely correct. After HIIT, brisk walking blocks of Manhattan wouldn't make me sweat even if it had before.
Athletes who train for the mile have to have intervals as the majority of their regiment. This is by far more effective then running long distances for increasing vo2 max.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-013-0039-8
High levels of serotonin will make most people nauseous.
Using this study for general weight loss advice doesn't make sense because they are looking at outliers.
The hunger thing rings true, though. I often just forget to eat and end up eating one meal a day or maybe a meal and a snack. Then again, on other days I might snack through the whole day. It seems to balance out though; after a day of frequent eating usually come a couple of those totally-forgetting-to-eat days.
Also you can get used to feel hunger, I think most of the people in developed countries eat so much and so often they don't even experience feeling of hunger.
Plus if you get used to smaller portions it's also easier to fill your shrunk stomach with smaller portions, it's about what your body is used to, it's all about self control.
When I started to travel around Asia I weighted 88kg (my max), after year of traveling, lot of walking/hiking when I found new job in China I had 68kg when I liked like skeleton from concentration camp, now I am on my optimal weight exactly in middle between.