A human body has very strong mechanisms that regulate your food intake, and you can’t oppose them short of persistently starving yourself (which ruins your health).
So in practice “how much you eat” is not a factor in weight loss, but “how much food your body is regulated to want” is.
you can’t oppose them short of persistently starving yourself (which ruins your health).
Citation needed. We’re not talking about anorexia, we’re talking about, say, naturally 300 lbs people “persistently starving” themselves to 200 lbs. Would that ruin their health?
As far as I know, yes it would. In “What You Can Change and What You Can’t” (which is not a perfect book, but it has some useful content), Seligman gives a reference to a study that actually found that losing weight in overweight middle-aged men made their health worse, not better.
Have you ever noticed that we have lots of evidence that slimmer people tend to be healthier, but not that losing weight makes you healthier? This is a subtle but very important difference.
I do not know any compelling evidence for the latter point. So my estimates are close to the prior, which is that starving yourself is going to at best change little, and at worst ruin your health.
Seligman gives a reference to a study that actually found that losing weight in overweight middle-aged men made their health worse, not better.
Three considerations:
weight in the form of muscle is good. As you lose that you get less healthy. If you lose both 5kg of fat and 5kg of muscle at once you will probably be less healthy at the end of that adventure.
Initially changing your bodyweight in large chunks is probably bad but in the long run, being 10kg closer to the ideal bodyweight for your size/age will be better for you. If nothing else - (from first principles) giving your heart less of a hard time pumping blood around.
Just losing weight might throw off ratios of things like cholesterol in the body, (again) causing initial unhealthyness but later when they stabilise again you will be generally healthier.
Having not seen the study, I can’t be too confident but these don’t seem like outrageous explanations.
Citation is still needed :-) Do you have a link to that study?
Have you ever noticed that we have lots of evidence that slimmer people tend to be healthier, but not that losing weight makes you healthier?
Let me see if I read your position correctly. We know that slim people are healthier than fat people, right? We know that getting fat worsens your health—I believe this is fairly uncontroversial—do you wish to contest that? But you are saying that this is a ratchet, losing fat will not make your health any better. In other words, once you gained weight there is no path back to health ever?
That seems a rather strong statement to me and I haven’t seem much support for that being true in reality. Why did you pick this position as your prior?
(referenced as note 30 on page 188 in chapter 12 on dieting (“overweight vs. Dieating: The Health Damage). There are actually multiple references given but I think if you are really interested you can now follow up.
You should read Seligman anyway. Selignman has been discussed on LW repeatedly e.g. here , here and here (disclaimer: the last is by me). A summary of the book can be found easily.
The paper is behind the paywall, but the abstract definitely does not say that losing weight in unhealthy. From what I can read, gaining and losing weight increases your CVD risk but lowers your cancer risk compared to just gaining. The abstract then coyly remarks that “risk of death from all causes combined was lowest in the no change group” but does not compare the all-cause mortality between the “gain and lose” and “just gain” groups.
But let me ask you the same question: do you believe that getting fat is a one-way trip to sickness: once you gained weight there is no path back to health ever?
I have not read all the referenced papers either. And even if I did: I’m not the expert with the context knowledge to be able to provide an educated (sic) summary. I do trust Segligman on this. His work appears to live up to very high scholarly standards. “What you can change and what you can’t” in particular has been updated multiple times. If he says (and I see all those varied references supporting this) that we have negative evidence that lowering weight works then I update strongly toward that.
I don’t want to answer your question because it appears to me to be a trap. Seligman doesn’t claim anything remotely that strong (“ever”) anyway.
Anecdotal point: I’m slim and have to do basically nothing to keep a healthy fitness level. In particular I can eat as much sweets and fat food as I want. I do have an advantage though: I’m an extremely picky eater and what I don’t like I do not eat. My sons seem to have inherited this mostly so I’m at ease regarding them too. It runs in the family. My personal observations might make it look as if people did something wrong when they get fat. But evidence like Seligman’s helps me feel compassion for those poor people who were not as lucky as I to develop some mutations (it has to look like that to me) that is more adaptive in our modern civilization.
I don’t want to answer your question because it appears to me to be a trap.
It’s not a trap, it’s a bullet :-) which you can attempt to bite or dodge :/
For palatability I can express it in the ‘expected’ form: for someone who is currently overweight (and so, in expectation, is less healthy than a similar slim person), will losing weight, in expectation, worsen his health? If so, what avenues are open to an overweight person who would like to get healthier?
Apparently I’m least qualified to give advice. All I could do amounts to repeating only minimally educated guesses. Seligman advises acceptance and adaptation to it. Maybe you can be overweight and make the best out of it? I feel intimidated by size combined with some minimum amount of strength. Get a clearer picture of what the weight does with your body. Where your feel-good point really is. For changing that sheer will-power will apparently not work. So if I were overweight I’d follow another strategy. I think about it like the procrastination equation. What equation can you change most easily? Calories in? Calories out? Motivation to change calories in/out? It is not easy to change peer group late in life but I hear that peer conformance does help. Are there things that you enjoy that as a side effect involve ‘exercise’? For example I traveled thru Europe with my for boys with heavy backpacks. I imagine if you do that often it builds some strength. And there is basically no way out. And there are the rewards of the sites seen. Ibet you can come up with better ideas for yourself.
for someone who is currently overweight (and so, in expectation, is less healthy than a similar slim person), will losing weight, in expectation, worsen his health?
You mean in the short run (during the period the person is losing weight) or in the long run (during the period the person stays at the new, lower weight)? It doesn’t sound implausible to me that the person would be less healthy than before starting to lose weight in the former but healthier in the latter.
I mean in the long run. The paper which got linked upthread was a 25-year followup study. In the short run losing weight is certainly biologically stressful.
I’m perfectly willing to concede that a “typical” fat person will not sustainably lose much fat until s/he gets really old and maybe not even then. But then “typical” people aren’t very capable in general.
The interesting question is what percentage of fat people can sustainably lose weight and what makes them special.
A human body has very strong mechanisms that regulate your food intake, and you can’t oppose them short of persistently starving yourself (which ruins your health).
So in practice “how much you eat” is not a factor in weight loss, but “how much food your body is regulated to want” is.
Citation needed. We’re not talking about anorexia, we’re talking about, say, naturally 300 lbs people “persistently starving” themselves to 200 lbs. Would that ruin their health?
As far as I know, yes it would. In “What You Can Change and What You Can’t” (which is not a perfect book, but it has some useful content), Seligman gives a reference to a study that actually found that losing weight in overweight middle-aged men made their health worse, not better.
Have you ever noticed that we have lots of evidence that slimmer people tend to be healthier, but not that losing weight makes you healthier? This is a subtle but very important difference.
I do not know any compelling evidence for the latter point. So my estimates are close to the prior, which is that starving yourself is going to at best change little, and at worst ruin your health.
Three considerations:
weight in the form of muscle is good. As you lose that you get less healthy. If you lose both 5kg of fat and 5kg of muscle at once you will probably be less healthy at the end of that adventure.
Initially changing your bodyweight in large chunks is probably bad but in the long run, being 10kg closer to the ideal bodyweight for your size/age will be better for you. If nothing else - (from first principles) giving your heart less of a hard time pumping blood around.
Just losing weight might throw off ratios of things like cholesterol in the body, (again) causing initial unhealthyness but later when they stabilise again you will be generally healthier.
Having not seen the study, I can’t be too confident but these don’t seem like outrageous explanations.
Citation is still needed :-) Do you have a link to that study?
Let me see if I read your position correctly. We know that slim people are healthier than fat people, right? We know that getting fat worsens your health—I believe this is fairly uncontroversial—do you wish to contest that? But you are saying that this is a ratchet, losing fat will not make your health any better. In other words, once you gained weight there is no path back to health ever?
That seems a rather strong statement to me and I haven’t seem much support for that being true in reality. Why did you pick this position as your prior?
I think this is an uncheritable request but I bite:
Large fluctuations in body weight during young adulthood and twenty-five-year risk of coronary death in men. Hamm P1, Shekelle RB, Stamler J.
(referenced as note 30 on page 188 in chapter 12 on dieting (“overweight vs. Dieating: The Health Damage). There are actually multiple references given but I think if you are really interested you can now follow up.
You should read Seligman anyway. Selignman has been discussed on LW repeatedly e.g. here , here and here (disclaimer: the last is by me). A summary of the book can be found easily.
The paper is behind the paywall, but the abstract definitely does not say that losing weight in unhealthy. From what I can read, gaining and losing weight increases your CVD risk but lowers your cancer risk compared to just gaining. The abstract then coyly remarks that “risk of death from all causes combined was lowest in the no change group” but does not compare the all-cause mortality between the “gain and lose” and “just gain” groups.
But let me ask you the same question: do you believe that getting fat is a one-way trip to sickness: once you gained weight there is no path back to health ever?
I have not read all the referenced papers either. And even if I did: I’m not the expert with the context knowledge to be able to provide an educated (sic) summary. I do trust Segligman on this. His work appears to live up to very high scholarly standards. “What you can change and what you can’t” in particular has been updated multiple times. If he says (and I see all those varied references supporting this) that we have negative evidence that lowering weight works then I update strongly toward that.
I don’t want to answer your question because it appears to me to be a trap. Seligman doesn’t claim anything remotely that strong (“ever”) anyway.
Anecdotal point: I’m slim and have to do basically nothing to keep a healthy fitness level. In particular I can eat as much sweets and fat food as I want. I do have an advantage though: I’m an extremely picky eater and what I don’t like I do not eat. My sons seem to have inherited this mostly so I’m at ease regarding them too. It runs in the family. My personal observations might make it look as if people did something wrong when they get fat. But evidence like Seligman’s helps me feel compassion for those poor people who were not as lucky as I to develop some mutations (it has to look like that to me) that is more adaptive in our modern civilization.
It’s not a trap, it’s a bullet :-) which you can attempt to bite or dodge :/
For palatability I can express it in the ‘expected’ form: for someone who is currently overweight (and so, in expectation, is less healthy than a similar slim person), will losing weight, in expectation, worsen his health? If so, what avenues are open to an overweight person who would like to get healthier?
My sympathies.
Apparently I’m least qualified to give advice. All I could do amounts to repeating only minimally educated guesses. Seligman advises acceptance and adaptation to it. Maybe you can be overweight and make the best out of it? I feel intimidated by size combined with some minimum amount of strength. Get a clearer picture of what the weight does with your body. Where your feel-good point really is. For changing that sheer will-power will apparently not work. So if I were overweight I’d follow another strategy. I think about it like the procrastination equation. What equation can you change most easily? Calories in? Calories out? Motivation to change calories in/out? It is not easy to change peer group late in life but I hear that peer conformance does help. Are there things that you enjoy that as a side effect involve ‘exercise’? For example I traveled thru Europe with my for boys with heavy backpacks. I imagine if you do that often it builds some strength. And there is basically no way out. And there are the rewards of the sites seen. Ibet you can come up with better ideas for yourself.
Perhaps slow and steady weight loss is not as damaging to health as sudden weight loss?
You mean in the short run (during the period the person is losing weight) or in the long run (during the period the person stays at the new, lower weight)? It doesn’t sound implausible to me that the person would be less healthy than before starting to lose weight in the former but healthier in the latter.
I mean in the long run. The paper which got linked upthread was a 25-year followup study. In the short run losing weight is certainly biologically stressful.
Ahem.
I’m perfectly willing to concede that a “typical” fat person will not sustainably lose much fat until s/he gets really old and maybe not even then. But then “typical” people aren’t very capable in general.
The interesting question is what percentage of fat people can sustainably lose weight and what makes them special.