The diet pretty obviously works because fat plays a huge role in satiety. If you can get a certain amount of fat in the lowest caloric form possible (olive oil, most likely), you won’t be have to eat massively caloric things like bacon cheeseburgers in order to slake your hunger.
Still, good diet and exercise are the keys to staying thin. Satisfy your hunger by filling up on vegetables and lean protein. Exercise harder, eat less.
It seems like you’re questioning the value of diet and exercise—almost as if they don’t work for all people, or they only work for limited amounts of time. This is, of course, untrue, and I know you know this. The real key is to put yourself into a virtuous cycle, where the rewards (or negative consequences) of diet and exercise make themselves apparent to you every day, rather than months down the line, effectively circumventing akrasia.
I am questioning the value of diet and exercise. Thermodynamics is technically true but useless, barring the application of physical constraint or inhuman willpower to artificially produce famine conditions and keep them in place permanently. You, clearly, are one of the metabolically privileged, so let me assure you that I could try exactly the same things you do to control your weight and fail. My fat cells would keep the energy that yours release; a skipped meal you wouldn’t notice would have me dizzy when I stand up; exercise that grows your muscle mass would do nothing for mine.
Eliezer, have you ever fasted on Yom Kippur? (or for any other 24 hour period)? I would be really interested to know if you have, and what sort of effects you felt.
Not for as far back as I can remember. One of the scarier parts of my childhood was having to hide food so that I could get something to eat on Yom Kippur, and hoping my parents never found out. I do remember at some point being too exhausted to walk either to or from the synagogue even with my father yelling at me—maybe that was when I was young enough to believe enough to actually fast?
I reasonably expect I would do better now, especially if I’d eaten all protein for a couple of days previous—my adult metabolism is not quite as bad as I remember it being in childhood, and my mind is a whole lot stronger. I’m not particularly inclined to test it, though.
When I was younger I would often consider buying a mini-fridge to put under my bed solely so that on Yom Kippur I would be able to eat without the fear of getting kicked out of the house and shunned because “you aren’t respecting our traditions.”
Thank you for your response, I have another question: Under normal circumstances, do you find yourself from time to time resisting the urge to consume superstimulus type foods?
To illustrate, consider your typical educated middle aged American man who is moderately overweight. He may not be actively dieting per se, but when he wakes up in the morning, he may have the urge to eat a plate of nachos or a slice of pie for breakfast. He might then tell himself “oh come on, don’t be such a fat slob” and have a bowl of cereal and fruit instead. Of course, he might have nachos and beer that night we he is hanging out with his buddies, but the point is that he makes some degree of effort to eat healthy.
So my question to you is do you exert some degree of mental effort to eat healthy (even if it’s not enough effort to make you thin)? Or do you just eat whatever you feel would be tastiest in the most satisfying quantities?
I don’t know what the hell your mental model of me is like, but I can’t eat the tasty things that normal people around me eat, on pain of blowing up like a balloon. If you go to the SIAI office, you’ll see a lot of thin people eating chocolate, candy bars, chocolate-coated nuts, and so on—just their normal way of getting energy for a workday—and me drinking protein-powder in water.
If you go to the SIAI office, you’ll see a lot of thin people eating chocolate, candy bars, chocolate-coated nuts, and so on—just their normal way of getting energy for a workday—and me drinking protein-powder in water.
I don’t know what the hell your mental model of me is like, but I can’t eat the tasty things that normal people around me eat, on pain of blowing up like a balloon. If you go to the SIAI office, you’ll see a lot of thin people eating chocolate, candy bars, chocolate-coated nuts, and so on—just their normal way of getting energy for a workday—and me drinking protein-powder in water.
Thank you for your response. Sorry if I insulted you, but a few posts back you seemed to be saying that you did not want to expend the mental energy to diet and get and stay thin. At the same time, I think it’s worth keeping in mind that you do (apparently) spend some amount of mental energy to keep your weight in check. Which I think is totally reasonable and normal.
I am trying to develop my own theory of diet, exercise and weight loss. One idea which I had today is that perhaps one can take the mental energy which a normal, non-dieting person expends on his food intake and focus it so as to get the most bang for the buck, so to speak.
Here’s what you said that I was thinking of (it’s in the companion thread):
The basic answer is that you can do the impossible but it comes with a price. Burn down every obstacle, sacrifice whatever it takes, devote any amount of time and any amount of energy required? You only get a few shots of that magnitude. Sure, if I made it the one priority in my life and gave up that FAI stuff, I could lose weight.
Perhaps I misinterpreted your words, but I understood you to be saying that you thought you could get thin and stay thin if you devoted the vast majority of your mental energy to the project. Which I think is probably true.
P.S. What do you make of the posters here and in related fora who claim to have achieved and maintained significant weight loss? Do you think they are lying?
P.P.S. Are you really that optimistic about Adipotide? My sense is that over the years, I have heard many reports about promising new drugs; usually the excitement fizzles out. Based on past history, it would seem to be a bit of a long-shot. Any reason to me more optimistic on this drug?
I solved my cravings issues. After developing a food intolerance, I planned a diet that included enough salt, fruit, vegetables, protein, fat, everything. Because I was ensuring that I got everything that I needed every day, my cravings went away. I stuck to that diet for years, with 20% less calories than I needed. I didn’t miss them. I discovered that counting calories for each meal was such a chore for me that it would ruin my willpower. So I made a meal plan that had everything already counted out, provided enough variety to keep me from getting bored, and was designed for fast cooking so I wouldn’t get tempted to snack instead of sticking to my meals. I stuck to that diet for years, and consistently lost weight.
From what I can tell, my entire problem with “lack of willpower” was actually imbalanced nutrition. I’d fail to eat enough salt one day and then find myself pigging out on pizza the next. I’d eat a lot of seeds one day and wouldn’t feel satisfied, so I’d keep eating them. I’ve stopped binges by adding salt and I’ve noticed that if I eat vegetables with my seeds, I feel satisfied much sooner.
Also, I think food additives cause me cravings. Sometimes there is a processed food item I can’t stop eating once I start, but a home made version doesn’t have the same effect. I make everything from scratch on my diet (not as time-consuming as it sounds because I maximize efficiency) and I think that was a large part of my success.
There are a lot of things that help. Here is a list with yours at the top. It definitely helped me. Perhaps part of the problem is that people are looking for a single thing that will solve the problem. For many people, myself included, you need to get a lot of things right.
Ensure no micro-nutrient deficiencies. And note that different people have very different needs.
Ecological issues—control over the accessibility of fattening foods. (No chocolate under the desk)
Avoid excessive stress. Including lack of sleep, pain, infections as well as the boss shouting at you a lot.
Optimum amount of exercise. Too much energy depleting hard “cardio” can cause
Build up lean body mass through strength training. The right strength training not some rubbish inflicted on you by a minimally trained instructor.
Optimum nutrition timing. Some people thrive on one meal a day, and find eating more often makes them hungry, others need to graze.
Sufficient bulkiness of food to stimulate the stomach’s stretch receptors.
Sufficient of the various macro-nutrients (glucose equivalents, proteins including correct amino acid mix, the various forms of fats (eg Omega 3s and Omega 6s).
Compensate for metabolic defects. Eg some people have trouble turning short chain Omega 3s into long chain Omega 3s. Similarly carotene / vitamin A. You may need to supplement the exact thing you need.
Avoid appetite stimulants (eg caffeols which are in coffee including decaf but not in caffeine tablets).
Avoid highly glycemic food in large quantities due to insulin spikes and rebound hunger (chinese restaurant effect).
You may have to deal with some psychological issues around food. This is very common. Food is a common tool used to make many forms of psychological pain go away for a while. None of the above will help with that.
I was 80kg with very low muscle mass so my body fat was probably around 30%. I lost weight to about 67kg and have put weight on back up to 74kg, mostly muscle*. My waist has overall gone from 104cm to about 90cm
The process took about 10 years with many ups and downs and setbacks. I want to get back under 70kg. The major outstanding problem is that I tend to gain weight in Fall when the days are getting shorter.
This at 165cm in height.
*I found at I have low Testosterone levels which probably contributed to my difficulties in losing fat in particular. The recent gains in weight are linked to increased muscle mass resulting from normalizing my Testosterone levels combined with HIIT and resistance training.
I like this list. I especially like the fact that it is very explicit about different things working for different people—there is no one magic pill/exercise/diet that works for everyone!!eleven!
12 You may have to deal with some psychological issues around food. This is very common. Food is a common tool used to make many forms of psychological pain go away for a while. None of the above will help with that.
And number 12 is a biggie. It receives very little research because it’s hard to quantify, measure, control for, it’s very diverse, etc. but my impression is that for many people it’s the real reason they have weight problems they can’t get a handle on.
Yes I agree . . . there is apparently a significant problem with alcoholism among people who get weight loss surgery and I suspect this is part of the reason.
I’m told there can be a physical component to that—weight loss surgery that involves changes to the intestinal layout means alcohol gets absorbed more quickly (most liquid is absorbed in the large intestine), meaning patients get drunker quicker. A quick Google supports this—apparently the higher alcoholism rates haven’t been found in association with lap band surgery, which doesn’t affect the intestines.
it is plausible that rate of absorbtion would affect the addictiveness of alcohol.
Doesn’t look too plausible to me. There are easy ways to increase the rate of absorption of alcohol, for example drink on an empty stomach, or drink carbonated alcoholic drinks. I haven’t heard of these behaviors being associated with alcoholism.
Doesn’t look too plausible to me. There are easy ways to increase the rate of absorption of alcohol, for example drink on an empty stomach, or drink carbonated alcoholic drinks. I haven’t heard of these behaviors being associated with alcoholism.
That’s an interesting point too. The basis for my reasoning above is Paul Graham’s idea that if you take something you like and make it more intense it increases the potential for addiction. I do agree that the examples you give go against this intuition. What are the drinks of choice for alcoholics? There is the stereotype of the wino but not the champagne-o.
I thought champagne referred to wine from the Champagne region of France.
It’s interesting, the use of the word “champagne” is somewhat controversial. I believe that it used to be that you could call carbonated wine “champagne” if it were prepared in the Champagne style. According to Wikipedia, they changed the law in 2006 but grandfathered wines which were sold before then.
Anyway, this is a bit of a side issue. If you don’t want to call it “champagne,” you can call it “sparkling wine” and the same argument applies.
Differences in the rate of absorption can definitely be important to addiction; oral amphetamines are not particularly addictive, but amphetamines taken in other ways that increase absorption rate are very addictive. And the last I checked the research on that, there wasn’t much understanding of exactly why the line there is where it is. Perhaps alcohol just works completely differently, but it is also possible that drinking on an empty stomach, or drinking carbonated drinks, doesn’t increase absorption enough to make a difference. Or perhaps it does make a difference, but not enough to have turned up in any research yet; this isn’t an area where small effects would be easy to detect.
I would add as EY says some people just have it tough. There are some populations with a legacy of severe famine who are tremendously prone to weight gain. Epigenetic effects from childhood illness, hunger, neglect or abuse seem also to be a factor in some people.
Various illnesses also cause weight gain eg Cushing’s syndrome.
Have you tried weightlifting? I can well believe that it doesn’t work for you—just want to check :). It is the most time-efficient way of affecting your weight through exercise, way better than cardio. It has the biggest endocrinological effects so I would think it would work the best against a stubborn body.
I’m currently trying it. If it works at all, it’s working at the rate of something like 1 pound per two weeks, and I’m not sure it’s working at all. (A two-week Clenbuterol cycle is enough for metabolically privileged people to lose 10 pounds of fat, apparently.)
EDIT Nov 2012: It didn’t really work at all so far as I can tell.
I have the same problem you do (am clinically obese despite a relatively active daily schedule—I walk three miles a day, don’t drink soft drinks, don’t eat junk food, eat lots of fresh fruits & vegetables etc). I’ve come to a lot of the same conclusions, especially that insulin resistance probably has a lot to do with my problem. I switched to whole grains years ago (brown rice, whole wheat pasta, whole grain bread etc.) but my weight continued to creep up. These grains (along with others like bulgur and couscous) do make up the bulk of my diet, and my recent reading has led me to believe that the glycemic load of these foods combined with my own insulin resistance is probably what’s making me fat.
I know you tried a low carb diet in the past, but you mentioned mostly eating turkey and bananas—bananas are a relatively high glycemic load food (http://www.lowglycemicload.com/index.cfm?ID=69) so that could explain why you didn’t see much progress low-carbing it. (Low carb diets do work for me, but like the vast majority of people, I’m not able to maintain a diet based on such sweeping restrictions in the long term: and when I go off the diet, I quickly gain back the lost weight plus extra pounds.)
I’m taking the glycemic load approach now, which is a lot more flexible in terms of what it allows you to eat. (It’s worth noting that there’s a distinction between the “glycemic index” and the “glycemic load” charts, and that the glycemic load charts are much more useful for practical purposes.) I’m also supplementing with cinnamon and apple cider vinegar, both of which seem to have a beneficial effect on insulin resistance.
I’ll try to put up another post in six weeks to report the results.
Updated results: I got pregnant, which pretty much kiboshes the experiment. I don’t think the pregnancy is attributable to a low-glycemic-load diet, however!
Newer research has revealed that certain chronic conditions seem much more common than is thought. It could be that a relatively large portion of the population is suffering from certain conditions which don’t exhibit severe enough symptoms to be diagnosed with anything or that symptoms are ignored by harmful social paradigms, e.g. someone with a mitochonodrial disorder is labelled as “lazy” despite inability to properly metabolize energy.
Lyme Disease is one disease which could be extremely prevalent but be underdiagnosed because of the difficulty in which it is diagnosed and the lack of reliable tests. There are plenty of other candidates as well. If one has any persevering health problems, it bears that one should try to objectively judge one’s physical& mental abilities for the possibility of physiological abnormalities.
My experience is years of frustration with my health, being overweight, low energy all the time, and it turns out that the lyme disease I had been treated for back in high school had survived and continued to plague me beyond my immune system’s capacity to completely eradicate. It returned periodically for years, and only during periods of extremely low stress when I was out of school was I able to live comfortably at all. What tipped me off to getting treatment was comparing my physical abilities during high school as an athlete to my abilities up to this point in which I can barely engage in anaerobic exercise.
Do you think Clenbuterol is more effective or has fewer side-effects than Ephedrine or Amphetamine?
More effective (for weight loss) and less side effects than amphetamine (at weight loss dosages of the latter).
More effective but with more sides than ephedrine (Clen isn’t a toy!). But at doses needed for ephedrine to compete with Clen in desired effects ephedrine has more sides. Essentially both substances work via the same mechanism (beta adrenergic receptor agonists) but Clen is much more specific to beta-2.
Clenbuterol really comes into its own when used for cutting (losing weight after already gaining a lot of muscle). In this situation losing weight is already easy enough—aside from the energy use by the muscle tissue the bulking cycle has probably already involved force feeding—eating less is the default. The trick is to lose the fat quickly while minimising the loss of muscle. The mild anabolic effects of clenbuterol (through mechanisms completely unrelated to that of androgenic substances) partially offset the overall muscle catabolism.
Clenbuterol is also rather handy for cardiovascular and endurance performance—it’s an asthma drug after all. If a cyclist is banned for doping and it isn’t for EPO it is probably for clenbuterol.
Such developments are hard to notice in someone you see every day e.g. yourself. Did you ask someone who hadn’t seen you in a while (or maybe look at a picture of yourself from before you had started weightlifting)?
[weightlifting] is the most time-efficient way of affecting your weight through exercise
Affecting it upwards, you mean. The goal of body builders wasn’t exactly to become skinnier last time I checked. (The caveat is that muscle is denser than fat, so if you gain muscle while keeping your total weight constant you’ll look skinnier.)
Affecting it upwards, you mean. The goal of body builders wasn’t exactly to become skinnier last time I checked.
Bodybuilders generally aim to build muscular mass through a cycle of high-intensity workouts under high-calorie conditions alternating with near-fasting (along with some even sketchier practices), but that doesn’t say much about weight training in general; modern bodybuilding is incredibly specialized and has little to do with any kind of athletics.
By varying diet and the conditions of training, it’s possible to use weights to increase endurance, build muscle mass, burn fat, or build strength, and while these all overlap to a certain degree they’re not really all that strongly linked. An exclusive focus on one will tend to improve that one much faster than the others.
I don’t understand how eliminating fat in this scenario merely makes me merely “look skinnier” rather than actually being skinnier. Constant mass + increased density = reduced volume = (in this case) skinnier… doesn’t it?
I was using skinnier as a one-word shorthand for ‘less heavy’, but you’re right that a volume-based definition is closer to the common understanding than a mass-based one. (Cf massive which is also about mass in technical speech but about size in colloquial speech, though for a different reason.)
(Plus, in most cases of people trying to lose weight, they would actually care more about fat mass than total mass if they fully understood the difference and could measure both.)
(In Italian we have a phrase falso magro lit. ‘false lean [person]’ for people who weigh more than one would guess by looking at them.)
Also, a person with lots of muscle definition won’t look “fat” even if they weigh much more than average. They won’t look skinny either, but large-and-muscular is generally considered healthier and more attractive than large-and-flabby.
I don’t understand how eliminating fat in this scenario merely makes me merely “look skinnier” rather than actually being skinnier. Constant mass + increased density = reduced volume = (in this case) skinnier… doesn’t it?
The parenthetical distinction was between ‘losing weight’ and looking (and even being) skinnier. ie. Gained weight, lost volume and subjectively appear to have lost even more volume.
Imagine a counterfactual organism that always preferentially stores X number of calories per day as fat, where X is equivalent to the calorie expenditure of running at top speed for over 24 hours, and does not increase muscle mass.
If the organism eats more than X calories, it gains weight. If it eats less than X calories, it will experience crippling lethargy and eventually die.
Obviously no such organism would be produced by natural selection, but assume the Least Convenient Possible World. Would advising such an organism “eat less, exercise more” enable it to lose weight?
Oh come on. If Eliezer eats fewer calories than he expends, he’s not going to die of hunger. I fully buy that will-power is a legitimate issue, but bringing up extreme cases like this to make your point doesn’t enhance the conversation.
If Eliezer eats fewer calories than he expends, he’s not going to die of hunger.
But he may spend large amounts of time in a state where physiological and psychological responses are screaming “eat more food!”. This state is not conducive to a happy, productive life.
I won’t dispute this. For some people, a calculated decision to remain overweight in today’s world in order to focus on other things may be the best course of action.
Alternatively, if losing weight is that important to you, you can alter your environment so “today’s world” doesn’t make it so tempting to eat crappy foods. Your body can be screaming out “eat more food!” all it wants, but if you’re living in a cabin in some remote corner of Alaska, there’s only so much damage that can do.
if losing weight is that important to you, you can alter your environment so “today’s world” doesn’t make it so tempting to eat crappy foods
What part of “None of the simple cute little solutions that seem like they really ought to work and do work for the metabolically privileged actually work for me” do you not understand? I’ve lived in a carefully crappy-food-free apartment and gained weight, and back when I was “losing weight thanks to willpower and exercise!” I ate Little Debbie’s poison nuggets and lost weight.
You are ignorant of the governing laws. I don’t know how to make it any clearer. Your mind is full of things that sound like good and virtuous truths of a fair and sensible universe where diligence is rewarded and laziness punished. These things are lies.
So, maybe staying thin requires Herculean effort for some. Why turn your back on that particular challenge? Elsewhere you seem to take a lot of pride in your determination to “save the world,” which seems like no small feat. Don’t try to lose weight—lose weight!
I had the same experience. In my case I actually tested this and I found to my great surprise that I was more productive at tough (for me) intellectual tasks when dieting (500 calorie deficit).
It might be worth testing if not actually done yet.
I do accept that some people have terrible problems mobilizing body fat for fuel. This can drive appetite.
Weight loss is a wicked problem. There can be many reasons for overeating. Psychology (i found IFS therapy best here), high insulin from excess glycemic carbs, genetic ungiftedness, hormonal issues often driven by excess fructose and/or Omega 6 fats.
What is frustrating is you have to get it all right before you lose weight sustainably.
I love this comment. It reminds me how some days my brain is working like a champ and I can tackle any complex programming job with ease. Other days I’m simply aware that my brain is pretending to be a much less smart person’s brain, and I should stick to more menial projects. If my job required me to be smart every day, I’d have to pay much more attention to the food / sleep / whatever combination that determines how my brain works the next morning.
I’m sure you’ve seen the psych research suggesting people have a finite amount of “willpower” they can exercise at a given time. It probably does make sense for some people to worry about hard-thinking (or other endeavors) than staying in top shape.
It’s not just that you only have so much “will power” that you ration, it’s that your brain doesn’t work when you’re starving.
I had to cut weight for wrestling in high school (from a healthy 185 down to 160) and the will power to not eat wasn’t even that difficult (though it did suck), but I still couldn’t think well.
I’ve had your symptoms, too. Skipping a meal would cause my blood sugar to crash (causing irritability and brain fog, for me) and I stopped losing weight temporarily even on the meal plan that worked for me (other comment). The problems that caused this for me were getting a new food intolerance and microbial imbalance (caused by eating things I was intolerant of while I was still trying to figure out the source of the problem). I was hungrier and I stopped losing weight. You’ve wondered about your metabolism, but have you thought about whether your digestion could be improved?
I’m not sure what kinds of conditions might cause this problem and whether they might be hidden (or even whether the problem is more of an absorption issue, some result of the immune system response, or something else), and it’s definitely not my business whether you have symptoms or not, but I’ll tell you a few things in case they could be useful:
I’ve heard that food intolerance tests are unreliable. If I wanted to know if I had a food intolerance, I’d do an elimination diet to be sure.
Probiotic supplements (heck, supplements in general) tend to be poor quality. I won’t buy supplements by brands that aren’t verified to meet quality standards when independently tested. I use ConsumerLab.com for this, because the government doesn’t test them for you. This related link may be of interest.
“exercise that grows your muscle mass would do nothing for mine.”
Bullshit.
The rational thing to do here is to replace ‘goal: loose weigth’ with ‘goal: become fit’. Lift weights or do bodyweight-exercises (pushups, lunges etc.) + walk/run/bike.
Tried it. Didn’t work. Welcome to the unfair universe.
Good thing you don’t have that attitude about FAI.
Mind you, aerobic exercise does put me in better aerobic condition, sorta. It just doesn’t have anything to do with weight loss.
Have you considered the possibility that you just did something wrong? Common knowledge says that you need to exercise for 20 minutes or more to do any fat burning, but I’ve read an interesting book that says aerobics don’t actually improve your fitness or burn fat.
Specifically, the author claims that, yes, exercising for more than 20 minutes will cause you to burn fat because your sugar stores are exhausted. However, he says, this tells your body that it needs to keep fat around, since clearly you’re doing things that need it. Thus, the long-term effect of long-duration aerobics is that you adapt to store fat more… which is why runners who stop running, quickly get fat.
What he suggests needs to happen instead is that you exercise in a way that rapidly consumes sugar, but doesn’t dip into the fat stores, so that the adaptation response is to make the body lean towards storing food as sugar, and to convert stored fat to sugar.
His theory is that in the ancestral environment, we needed to do a lot of sprinting to catch things or avoid being caught, with relatively less long/slow exercise. (Also, that training for recovery after short bursts of exercises increases lung capacity and heart health more quickly.)
Anyway, I’m currently experimenting with one of his simpler “beginner” routines: 10 minutes, consisting of alternating one minute of anaerobic sprinting with one minute of slow walking recovery. I’m only in the first week, but my speed and ability to recover have increased a good bit, even though I’ve not done it every day this week. I’ll have to see what effect it has over a longer term.
I just mention this to point out that there could easily be minor changes to exercise that could make big differences to one’s results, and that “tried it, didn’t work” isn’t a helpful approach to investigating them. In my own case, the only part of my life that I wasn’t overweight was the time where I didn’t have a car, had to walk or bicycle everywhere, and had moderately long distances to go.
What I’ve observed since then, though, as I slowly drop the 100 pounds that I put on when I started working at home (got about 30lbs left to go), is that losing fat is a lot more about what I put into my body than what I take out.
This may or may not be true for you. What may be true, however, is that you’re not considering this as a constraint-solving problem. Your ability to lose weight or put on muscle are going to be constrained by a wide variety of factors including what nutrition you’re getting, how much water, how much sleep, what intensity of exercise at what heart rate… even frequency of meals. Hell, you might even be eating too little food, or the wrong food for your metabolism or pH. I’ve had to tweak ALL of these things in order to lose weight. How many have you tried tweaking?
There are tons of variables that could act as constraints on your ability to lose weight, and until you make sure they’re all simultaneously satisfied, you’re not going to get a result.
Simply labeling yourself “metabolically challenged” is not rational. How, specifically, are you challenged? What is the mechanism by which this challenge operates? Which nutritional theories and exercise theories have you tested? What variables have you measured and tracked?
Perhaps a crisis of belief would be appropriate here as well.
His theory is that in the ancestral environment, we needed to do a lot of sprinting to catch things or avoid being caught, with relatively less long/slow exercise. (Also, that training for recovery after short bursts of exercises increases lung capacity and heart health more quickly.)
This strikes me as very unlikely, given that humans have lower sprinting speeds than most prey and predator animals, but better endurance capabilities, enabling us to catch them through persistence hunting. Humans have adaptations that make us quite good at steady long distance running, such as an energy-conserving bipedal gait and highly efficient cooling through sweat, but compared to other animals our size we’re quite bad at covering short distances quickly. The idea that our ancestral environment demanded a lot of sprinting relative to long distance running sounds downright implausible.
That sounds like the theory Christopher McDougall presents in Born To Run. As far as I know, he doesn’t have any credentials in the relevant fields (not that that has too much impact on whether the theory is likely or not) so maybe he is relying on previous work? If you don’t mind me asking, where have you gotten your information from?
Crisis of belief? Definitely maybe. I don’t know EY’s full situation, but I’m still having a hard time digesting the idea that he just can’t do it.
I believe you’re just describing high-intensity interval training (HIIT) above. When I started learning about diet and fitness, that was a big one.
I agree with the poster who said to ask the bodybuilders. I got into reading bodybuilding information sites and they really do have it down to a fine art. There are many subtleties beyond “good diet and exercise.” Screw up a few little things and you won’t lose weight.
Diet: low carb, and only unrefined, high good fats, high protein (“low carb” here just means not the 80% carbs people normally consume—it doesn’t have to be ridiculous like Atkins). Tons of vegetables and fruit (slightly more controversial). Lots of small meals. Eat less calories than you burn [Edit: though obviously this is wishy-washy. Still, count calories in general. Sometimes you have to eat more to boost your metabolism, etc]. There are degrees of strictness, and much more specific ratios and timing and cycles, but those are the basics.
Exercise: Do heavy weightlifting. Do full-body lifts like chin ups, push ups/bench press, squats, deadlifts, military press, etc. And do HIIT. And continuously switch your routine around in some way.
If this is exactly what you’ve done, then I underestimate the severity of a slow metabolism.
And of course, this doesn’t address the willpower issue at all.
I just have to say it anyway though, because if you’re eating well and exercising regularly and not losing weight, just missing a few things like:
-eating 5-6 meals a day, not 3
-pounding a spoonful of fish oil a day
-doing 15 min. HIIT 3-4 times a week and not slow cardio
-doing squats and deadlifts
can make the difference between losing a pound or two a week and actually gaining weight.
Yeah, in my case it’s omega 3s or 6s, deadlifts, HIIT, pull-ups, side presses, lots of minimally-processed or unprocessed foods, raw meats and eggs, and the occasional tomato/lemon puree for alkalinization. My achilles’ heel has been not being spectacularly regular about any of this, in that I’ll also eat out or eat junk when pressed for time or otherwise stressed. And sometimes my exercise will make me sore all over for days, causing me to skip some exercise.
When I have ALL of this stuff lined up just so, I lose weight and have more energy. Drop even one piece, and it’s flatline or gain.
Weight loss efforts provide much opportunity for magical thinking and drawing false conclusions about causality. You mention a half-dozen factors you had to “tweak” in order to lose weight. So suppose I tweak factor A with no affect. Then I tweak B, then C, then D, and eventually I get up to tweak F and then… I start losing weight for a while! What can I usefully conclude from this? Nearly nothing! Most people conclude that Tweak F must have been an important factor. But perhaps Tweak C was what mattered and it merely took a long time for results to become apparent. Or perhaps the timing is purely coincidental—I lose weight at random intervals or in response to stress at work or changes in my personal life and the latest downturn merely coincided with Tweak F. Or perhaps it’s an observer affect, such as the fact that I’m paying attention to my weight in order to evaluate which tweak is working, is what made me lose weight.
In short, if there are really tons of variables that all have to be simultaneously satisfied for weight loss to work, there’s a decent chance than any conclusion you draw from your personal observations will be useless or counterproductive for anyone else.
In short, if there are really tons of variables that all have to be simultaneously satisfied for weight loss to work, there’s a decent chance than any conclusion you draw from your personal observations will be useless or counterproductive for anyone else.
Hell, some of them are probably useless or counterproductive for me! ;-)
Your ability to lose weight or put on muscle are going to be constrained by a wide variety of factors including what nutrition you’re getting, how much water, how much sleep, what intensity of exercise at what heart rate… even frequency of meals. Hell, you might even be eating too little food, or the wrong food for your metabolism or pH. I’ve had to tweak ALL of these things in order to lose weight. How many have you tried tweaking? There are tons of variables that could act as constraints on your ability to lose weight, and until you make sure they’re all simultaneously satisfied, you’re not going to get a result.
I don’t know you, but I’d guess that you’re deluded about how much productive tweaking you’ve done. People are useless at figuring out what causes what when there’s a large time-lag between cause and observed effect, especially when there’s lots of noise too.
Basically this is something the body cannot do. The fat is stored with some glycerides that can be converted to glucose but the rest cannot.
So this theory sounds like broscience to me.
What you are actually doing may work though, 10 minutes of HIIT will not burn much glucose (this is good—if you burn glucose it has to be replaced—you want to burn fat) and will add a fair bit of fat-burning muscle.
Mr. Eby, I am doing some informal research on diet, weight loss, exercise etc. I am curious:
What was your highest weight; lowest weight in the last 10 years; and current weight? What do you do to maintain your weight? Are you happy with your current weight and level of physical fitness?
P.S. I am sorry to invade your privacy but it does seem like you have held yourself out to the world as something of a guru.
If you’re still reading, I’m definitely interested in your research. I’ve done some myself.
The survey I recommend reading both the livejournal and the dreamwidth comments. They don’t trend in the same direction.
My conclusions Short version: people can hurt themselves badly by trying to lose weight. “Roll your own” moderate low carb and exercise regimes work safely for some people.
Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes also claims aerobics doesn’t work to lose weight and refers to a bunch of studies to that effect. Though he doesn’t go so far as to deny there are cardiovascular benefits.
Incorrect, at least from my experience. I lost ~30 pounds, a little more, when I was 16 and doing aerobics one summer. The only diet element I had was eating slightly less. Mind, it was an hour, sometimes an hour and half of intense great aerobics with no breather pause and I was sweating a great deal by the end of each session.
I did gain that weight back in less than a month, so fast that my classmates didn’t even notice I had lost a lot of weight in the first place, so the end effect was that it didn’t work, but the idea of aerobics not leading to weight loss at all is not true.
You cannot counterbalance the evidence behind a claim that “refers to a bunch of studies” by citing anecdotal evidence.
You can most certainly give people a cause to actually look at the “referred to studies” to see what they actually say rather than third hand impressions given in a one sentence comment about a book. ie. To see whether the actual studies are incompatible with the prediction “If someone does intense cardio for one and a half hours (every day) AND actually ate less rather than more energy from food while maintaining this schedule they will probably lose weight”.
As far as I know the “doesn’t work” means something far more specific, practical and psychological that isn’t particularly incompatible with the highly unnatural circumstances mentioned in Kiraly’s experience. It is also something rather closely relevant to the “I did gain that weight back in less than a month” observation.
I took off about fifteen pounds in seven weeks with nothing but cardio, and dropped another twenty after that in a few more months, still with more cardio (it probably would have taken less if I hadn’t had to recover from getting hit by a car in the middle of it,) and I was still losing weight at the time that I seriously altered my workout regimen, because I’d lost too much weight. I put weight back on afterwards, but it was almost all muscle, so that people actually commented that I was looking leaner after I put twenty back on than before I gained the weight (some people even thought I was losing weight while I was gaining it.) I still weigh less today than when I started working out, and have more muscle as well.
On the other hand, I have a predisposition to eating disorders (suffered anorexia as a kid,) and my approach to exercise for someone who was not a competitive athlete at the time could fairly be described as fanatical, so it’s reasonable to expect that most people who start working out with the intention of taking weight off would not achieve similar results.
Apart from aesthetic preferences, replacing “loose weight” with “continually increase my fitness” (which is not something you’ll ever be done with) is a far more constructive goal (and it will eliminate the diet-mindset-rollercoaster).
I suspect that lack of will power often means impatience. And impatience comes from unrealistic expectations regarding what you “should” be able to do in time n.
Daily moderate (will-power-) exercise will give positive results on a whole range of parameters, but it might take a year before the effects (including the habit of exercising) really show.
Wow, so let me guess you tried exercising for a couple months and did not see much and then gave up… Well try following your own advice and instead of assuming the art failed you, assume you failed the art.
Mind you, aerobic exercise does put me in better aerobic condition, sorta. It just doesn’t have anything to do with weight loss.
Bullshit aerobics with proper dieting will make you lose weight or do you think you’re somehow special? I would bet you either were not doing it right or gave up to quickly. You seem like a very sedintary person so it will take you a while to lose the weight. My personal guess is that working out is just not that important to you so grow up and admit it.
I have plenty of friends who do not have good metabolism but they have all suceeded in losing weight and keeping it off. Its only impossible if you do it wrong or you expect magic results...
I have to second Eliezer on this one. Saying “good diet and exercise” is just a disguised way of saying “be more disciplined”. While it is true that being more disciplined would cause someone to lose weight, telling someone to be more disciplined does not cause them to actually /be/ more disciplined. The value of advice is properly judged by its effect, and actual observation shows that the “be more disciplined” advice has no effect or even the opposite effect, so it’s simply bad advice. The part which is true is already known by the person receiving the advice, so truth is no defense.
In a world where everyone is sort of a jerk and says “Just shut up and exercise, you fatso!” there may be such a strong drive to avoid condemnation and low social status that you actually do shut up and exercise.
In the alternate world where everyone understands that it’s not really your fault and you can’t shout people into having more willpower and willpower is a sketchy concept anyway and accepts you for who you are—you will have no incentive to get better.
So occasionally I do tell people the equivalent of “shut up and exercise” for certain things, even though I know it doesn’t work directly. It’s a case by case basis, depending on how many opportunities the person is missing and how likely I think my advice is to seriously affect them.
In a world where everyone is sort of a jerk and says “Just shut up and exercise, you fatso!” there may be such a strong drive to avoid condemnation and low social status that you actually do shut up and exercise.
I did shut up and exercise. It didn’t work. That’s the point at which you have a problem.
And for years I felt guilty and that I must be doing something wrong; and then I read about the Shangri-La diet and all these people losing 50 pounds with ease; and then it didn’t work for me; and that was when I figured out that yes, I actually had put in a really serious try, and that what was really going on was that the laws just didn’t work the good and virtuous and just way that everyone said they did.
Now maybe for other things… if willpower really does work… then telling people “Shut up and expend willpower” might be helpful. I’ve just gotten a lot more skeptical, now.
Wasn’t talking about your case in particular. Of would-be-dieters I know, the majority try to go to the gym a few times and then flake out. So although it may apply to you, I don’t think “You can’t just tell people to try harder” is always good advice.
You have it completely backward. In my experience, to a first approximation we already live in the “everyone is a jerk” world, and the steaming piles of moralism serve to make it very hard for people to even think about this issue because of the waves of low self-esteem it brings on.
If a thin person is in state S1, and a fat person is in a state S2, then a thin person who got that way by dieting is in state S3 and despite looking identical, S1 != S3. S1 has no particular tendency to change. S3 has a strong tendency to become S2. Diets don’t work. You just don’t have the super-senses to distinguish S1 from S3 at a glance.
No… it… DOESN’T. I tried that. I ate a simple Paleo diet which consists of nothing except healthy foods; my staples were home-cooked turkey and bananas. I did it for months. I lost not a single pound.
You CANNOT BEGIN TO IMAGINE how much stuff that really truly seems like it ought to work simply DOES NOT WORK when you are metabolically disprivileged.
Bananas are flagged as a risky item by a number of paleo-type diet authors, though not by ‘The Paleo Diet’. They have a fairly high glycemic index. Not that it invalidates your point.
I lost 45lbs on the Paleo Diet and have kept most of it off 2 years later (I’ve crept up by about 8-10lbs and I’m trying to be a bit stricter to bring that back down). I didn’t avoid bananas completely but I’d read enough to be wary of them. I’m sure it doesn’t work for everybody but I find it persuasive and effective.
IF the theory that sugar and refined carbohydrates are the biggest risk factors for weight gain is true THEN learning enough to become convinced of just how bad they are, to the point that you develop a strong negative emotional response to foods containing them, is an effective technique of applying initially conscious rationality to create new habits. Of course it may not work for everybody. Variations in individual metabolism seem to be an understudied aspect of diet research.
Are you saying it didn’t work because it didn’t curb your hunger or your desire for other, less healthy foods? Or it didn’t work because you stuck to the diet of healthy foods and gained weight nonetheless? The latter seems hard to believe, though I suppose it’s technically possible to accumulate an excess of calories via turkey and bananas...
I can honestly say, I actually have healthy tastes—I actually like salad (I have a salad garden for exactly that reason), and do work on a small (3 acres) property when I’m not at my day job.
Although I do like most traditional deserts, they are not a typical portion of the meal, barring holidays. I do tend to eat ‘candy’ when it’s around . . . which is one reason I don’t keep it around.
So I sympathize entirely with the original poster when he says eating nothing but healthy foods doesn’t help. My ‘Vitamin Pill’ version of the Shangra-la diet lost me 30 pounds straight through the holidays when I was eating deserts . . . and stopped.
So there are definitely other factors that are being missed.
Assuming unlimited willpower, burning more calories than you consume will reduce body weight (c.f. thermodynamics, &c.). Easy!
The issue is not how to reduce weight, per se, it’s about how to do so while also suppressing hunger pangs and other physiological and psychological effects of wanting more food than you’re getting.
As an aside, exercise itself isn’t actually particularly useful unless you devote a lot of time to it, as the calorie burn rate is fairly low. Raising the basal metabolic rate via anaerobic exercise may have value, though.
Another issue is how to reduce fat weight per se. One of the eye-opening parts of Gary Taubes’ talk was the fact that somebody can be simultaneously emaciated and obese. Fat cells want to survive and sometimes will do so to the detriment of their host.
Another Taubes insight: when it comes to vertical growth, we posit one causal direction. We say that a teenager eats a lot because he’s a growing boy; we do not say he’s growing taller because he eats a lot. It’s accepted that the body of a teenager has somehow decided for itself that it wants to get taller and appetite/metabolism will accommodate that need.
Perhaps horizontal growth isn’t all that different.
Could you explain that without the metaphor of intentionality? Fat cells don’t have their own germ line, so I can’t reason about what they “want” the way I can reason about what a virus “wants”. Thanks!
Could you explain that without the metaphor of intentionality? Fat cells don’t have their own germ line, so I can’t reason about what they “want” the way I can reason about what a virus “wants”. Thanks!
I think that was just a colorful way of saying what the rest of the post elaborated on—that the body may prioritize fat storage higher than other energy uses that the person associated with the body may prefer.
Also, fat cells are biologically active. Obesity is caused by hormone activity and fat cells provide inputs into that biological process as well as being part of the outcome of it.
Rats that overproduce insulin can die of starvation despite being obese—the body gets energy by breaking down muscle—including heart muscle—in order to preserve the fat.
Rats that overproduce insulin can die of starvation despite being obese—the body gets energy by breaking down muscle—including heart muscle—in order to preserve the fat.
Yeah, and I realize that simply recommending “diet and exercise” is a bit too pat. Getting oneself into virtuous cycles, with extremely short-term rewards and consequences, is the most effective meta-tactic I know. There are various ways to do this; the key is just to render willpower moot.
Uh, you appreciate that even if the Sun, Earth, Mars, and Pluto are all neatly aligned, you will barely be any closer to Pluto when you get to Mars than you were here?
On the other hand, maybe Dr Manhattan can give you a lift...
The diet pretty obviously works because fat plays a huge role in satiety. If you can get a certain amount of fat in the lowest caloric form possible (olive oil, most likely), you won’t be have to eat massively caloric things like bacon cheeseburgers in order to slake your hunger.
Still, good diet and exercise are the keys to staying thin. Satisfy your hunger by filling up on vegetables and lean protein. Exercise harder, eat less.
See Akrasia and Shangri-La, the sequel, for the reason why I wish there were some way I could strangle you over the Internet.
It seems like you’re questioning the value of diet and exercise—almost as if they don’t work for all people, or they only work for limited amounts of time. This is, of course, untrue, and I know you know this. The real key is to put yourself into a virtuous cycle, where the rewards (or negative consequences) of diet and exercise make themselves apparent to you every day, rather than months down the line, effectively circumventing akrasia.
I am questioning the value of diet and exercise. Thermodynamics is technically true but useless, barring the application of physical constraint or inhuman willpower to artificially produce famine conditions and keep them in place permanently. You, clearly, are one of the metabolically privileged, so let me assure you that I could try exactly the same things you do to control your weight and fail. My fat cells would keep the energy that yours release; a skipped meal you wouldn’t notice would have me dizzy when I stand up; exercise that grows your muscle mass would do nothing for mine.
Eliezer, have you ever fasted on Yom Kippur? (or for any other 24 hour period)? I would be really interested to know if you have, and what sort of effects you felt.
Not for as far back as I can remember. One of the scarier parts of my childhood was having to hide food so that I could get something to eat on Yom Kippur, and hoping my parents never found out. I do remember at some point being too exhausted to walk either to or from the synagogue even with my father yelling at me—maybe that was when I was young enough to believe enough to actually fast?
I reasonably expect I would do better now, especially if I’d eaten all protein for a couple of days previous—my adult metabolism is not quite as bad as I remember it being in childhood, and my mind is a whole lot stronger. I’m not particularly inclined to test it, though.
When I was younger I would often consider buying a mini-fridge to put under my bed solely so that on Yom Kippur I would be able to eat without the fear of getting kicked out of the house and shunned because “you aren’t respecting our traditions.”
Good times...
Thank you for your response, I have another question: Under normal circumstances, do you find yourself from time to time resisting the urge to consume superstimulus type foods?
To illustrate, consider your typical educated middle aged American man who is moderately overweight. He may not be actively dieting per se, but when he wakes up in the morning, he may have the urge to eat a plate of nachos or a slice of pie for breakfast. He might then tell himself “oh come on, don’t be such a fat slob” and have a bowl of cereal and fruit instead. Of course, he might have nachos and beer that night we he is hanging out with his buddies, but the point is that he makes some degree of effort to eat healthy.
So my question to you is do you exert some degree of mental effort to eat healthy (even if it’s not enough effort to make you thin)? Or do you just eat whatever you feel would be tastiest in the most satisfying quantities?
I don’t know what the hell your mental model of me is like, but I can’t eat the tasty things that normal people around me eat, on pain of blowing up like a balloon. If you go to the SIAI office, you’ll see a lot of thin people eating chocolate, candy bars, chocolate-coated nuts, and so on—just their normal way of getting energy for a workday—and me drinking protein-powder in water.
I can confirm this. :)
Thank you for your response. Sorry if I insulted you, but a few posts back you seemed to be saying that you did not want to expend the mental energy to diet and get and stay thin. At the same time, I think it’s worth keeping in mind that you do (apparently) spend some amount of mental energy to keep your weight in check. Which I think is totally reasonable and normal.
I am trying to develop my own theory of diet, exercise and weight loss. One idea which I had today is that perhaps one can take the mental energy which a normal, non-dieting person expends on his food intake and focus it so as to get the most bang for the buck, so to speak.
Thank you again for responding to my question.
Reread. I was and am saying that mental energy doesn’t work to do that. There is no known procedure for “become thin” except Adipotide.
Here’s what you said that I was thinking of (it’s in the companion thread):
Perhaps I misinterpreted your words, but I understood you to be saying that you thought you could get thin and stay thin if you devoted the vast majority of your mental energy to the project. Which I think is probably true.
P.S. What do you make of the posters here and in related fora who claim to have achieved and maintained significant weight loss? Do you think they are lying?
P.P.S. Are you really that optimistic about Adipotide? My sense is that over the years, I have heard many reports about promising new drugs; usually the excitement fizzles out. Based on past history, it would seem to be a bit of a long-shot. Any reason to me more optimistic on this drug?
Thank you again for responding to my comments.
I solved my cravings issues. After developing a food intolerance, I planned a diet that included enough salt, fruit, vegetables, protein, fat, everything. Because I was ensuring that I got everything that I needed every day, my cravings went away. I stuck to that diet for years, with 20% less calories than I needed. I didn’t miss them. I discovered that counting calories for each meal was such a chore for me that it would ruin my willpower. So I made a meal plan that had everything already counted out, provided enough variety to keep me from getting bored, and was designed for fast cooking so I wouldn’t get tempted to snack instead of sticking to my meals. I stuck to that diet for years, and consistently lost weight.
From what I can tell, my entire problem with “lack of willpower” was actually imbalanced nutrition. I’d fail to eat enough salt one day and then find myself pigging out on pizza the next. I’d eat a lot of seeds one day and wouldn’t feel satisfied, so I’d keep eating them. I’ve stopped binges by adding salt and I’ve noticed that if I eat vegetables with my seeds, I feel satisfied much sooner.
Also, I think food additives cause me cravings. Sometimes there is a processed food item I can’t stop eating once I start, but a home made version doesn’t have the same effect. I make everything from scratch on my diet (not as time-consuming as it sounds because I maximize efficiency) and I think that was a large part of my success.
There are a lot of things that help. Here is a list with yours at the top. It definitely helped me. Perhaps part of the problem is that people are looking for a single thing that will solve the problem. For many people, myself included, you need to get a lot of things right.
Ensure no micro-nutrient deficiencies. And note that different people have very different needs.
Ecological issues—control over the accessibility of fattening foods. (No chocolate under the desk)
Avoid excessive stress. Including lack of sleep, pain, infections as well as the boss shouting at you a lot.
Optimum amount of exercise. Too much energy depleting hard “cardio” can cause
Build up lean body mass through strength training. The right strength training not some rubbish inflicted on you by a minimally trained instructor.
Optimum nutrition timing. Some people thrive on one meal a day, and find eating more often makes them hungry, others need to graze.
Sufficient bulkiness of food to stimulate the stomach’s stretch receptors.
Sufficient of the various macro-nutrients (glucose equivalents, proteins including correct amino acid mix, the various forms of fats (eg Omega 3s and Omega 6s).
Compensate for metabolic defects. Eg some people have trouble turning short chain Omega 3s into long chain Omega 3s. Similarly carotene / vitamin A. You may need to supplement the exact thing you need.
Avoid appetite stimulants (eg caffeols which are in coffee including decaf but not in caffeine tablets).
Avoid highly glycemic food in large quantities due to insulin spikes and rebound hunger (chinese restaurant effect).
You may have to deal with some psychological issues around food. This is very common. Food is a common tool used to make many forms of psychological pain go away for a while. None of the above will help with that.
Many more.
Would you mind sharing your weight loss history and current status?
I was 80kg with very low muscle mass so my body fat was probably around 30%. I lost weight to about 67kg and have put weight on back up to 74kg, mostly muscle*. My waist has overall gone from 104cm to about 90cm
The process took about 10 years with many ups and downs and setbacks. I want to get back under 70kg. The major outstanding problem is that I tend to gain weight in Fall when the days are getting shorter.
This at 165cm in height.
*I found at I have low Testosterone levels which probably contributed to my difficulties in losing fat in particular. The recent gains in weight are linked to increased muscle mass resulting from normalizing my Testosterone levels combined with HIIT and resistance training.
I like this list. I especially like the fact that it is very explicit about different things working for different people—there is no one magic pill/exercise/diet that works for everyone!!eleven!
And number 12 is a biggie. It receives very little research because it’s hard to quantify, measure, control for, it’s very diverse, etc. but my impression is that for many people it’s the real reason they have weight problems they can’t get a handle on.
Yes I agree . . . there is apparently a significant problem with alcoholism among people who get weight loss surgery and I suspect this is part of the reason.
I’m told there can be a physical component to that—weight loss surgery that involves changes to the intestinal layout means alcohol gets absorbed more quickly (most liquid is absorbed in the large intestine), meaning patients get drunker quicker. A quick Google supports this—apparently the higher alcoholism rates haven’t been found in association with lap band surgery, which doesn’t affect the intestines.
That’s really interesting. When I think about it, it is plausible that rate of absorbtion would affect the addictiveness of alcohol.
Doesn’t look too plausible to me. There are easy ways to increase the rate of absorption of alcohol, for example drink on an empty stomach, or drink carbonated alcoholic drinks. I haven’t heard of these behaviors being associated with alcoholism.
That’s an interesting point too. The basis for my reasoning above is Paul Graham’s idea that if you take something you like and make it more intense it increases the potential for addiction. I do agree that the examples you give go against this intuition. What are the drinks of choice for alcoholics? There is the stereotype of the wino but not the champagne-o.
That’s because alcoholics generally can’t afford champagne on a regular basis.
A SodaStream and a bottle of vodka leads to… interesting results quickly and cheaply.
I don’t see why not . . . it doesn’t cost much to carbonate liquids, agreed?
I thought champagne referred to wine from the Champagne region of France.
It’s interesting, the use of the word “champagne” is somewhat controversial. I believe that it used to be that you could call carbonated wine “champagne” if it were prepared in the Champagne style. According to Wikipedia, they changed the law in 2006 but grandfathered wines which were sold before then.
Anyway, this is a bit of a side issue. If you don’t want to call it “champagne,” you can call it “sparkling wine” and the same argument applies.
Differences in the rate of absorption can definitely be important to addiction; oral amphetamines are not particularly addictive, but amphetamines taken in other ways that increase absorption rate are very addictive. And the last I checked the research on that, there wasn’t much understanding of exactly why the line there is where it is. Perhaps alcohol just works completely differently, but it is also possible that drinking on an empty stomach, or drinking carbonated drinks, doesn’t increase absorption enough to make a difference. Or perhaps it does make a difference, but not enough to have turned up in any research yet; this isn’t an area where small effects would be easy to detect.
I would add as EY says some people just have it tough. There are some populations with a legacy of severe famine who are tremendously prone to weight gain. Epigenetic effects from childhood illness, hunger, neglect or abuse seem also to be a factor in some people.
Various illnesses also cause weight gain eg Cushing’s syndrome.
Have you tried weightlifting? I can well believe that it doesn’t work for you—just want to check :). It is the most time-efficient way of affecting your weight through exercise, way better than cardio. It has the biggest endocrinological effects so I would think it would work the best against a stubborn body.
Yup. I didn’t notice any muscle development; I did seem able to lift somewhat larger weights over time, but that could have been placebo or skill.
Since the thread has been resurrected already… have you tried Clenbuterol? That’s something that can bipass pesky genetic inconveniences.
I’m currently trying it. If it works at all, it’s working at the rate of something like 1 pound per two weeks, and I’m not sure it’s working at all. (A two-week Clenbuterol cycle is enough for metabolically privileged people to lose 10 pounds of fat, apparently.)
EDIT Nov 2012: It didn’t really work at all so far as I can tell.
Wow. I was not expecting that answer. It’s the sort of suggestion I throw around expecting people to be far too squeamish to consider it seriously.
I have the same problem you do (am clinically obese despite a relatively active daily schedule—I walk three miles a day, don’t drink soft drinks, don’t eat junk food, eat lots of fresh fruits & vegetables etc). I’ve come to a lot of the same conclusions, especially that insulin resistance probably has a lot to do with my problem. I switched to whole grains years ago (brown rice, whole wheat pasta, whole grain bread etc.) but my weight continued to creep up. These grains (along with others like bulgur and couscous) do make up the bulk of my diet, and my recent reading has led me to believe that the glycemic load of these foods combined with my own insulin resistance is probably what’s making me fat.
I know you tried a low carb diet in the past, but you mentioned mostly eating turkey and bananas—bananas are a relatively high glycemic load food (http://www.lowglycemicload.com/index.cfm?ID=69) so that could explain why you didn’t see much progress low-carbing it. (Low carb diets do work for me, but like the vast majority of people, I’m not able to maintain a diet based on such sweeping restrictions in the long term: and when I go off the diet, I quickly gain back the lost weight plus extra pounds.)
I’m taking the glycemic load approach now, which is a lot more flexible in terms of what it allows you to eat. (It’s worth noting that there’s a distinction between the “glycemic index” and the “glycemic load” charts, and that the glycemic load charts are much more useful for practical purposes.) I’m also supplementing with cinnamon and apple cider vinegar, both of which seem to have a beneficial effect on insulin resistance.
I’ll try to put up another post in six weeks to report the results.
Updated results: I got pregnant, which pretty much kiboshes the experiment. I don’t think the pregnancy is attributable to a low-glycemic-load diet, however!
Newer research has revealed that certain chronic conditions seem much more common than is thought. It could be that a relatively large portion of the population is suffering from certain conditions which don’t exhibit severe enough symptoms to be diagnosed with anything or that symptoms are ignored by harmful social paradigms, e.g. someone with a mitochonodrial disorder is labelled as “lazy” despite inability to properly metabolize energy.
Lyme Disease is one disease which could be extremely prevalent but be underdiagnosed because of the difficulty in which it is diagnosed and the lack of reliable tests. There are plenty of other candidates as well. If one has any persevering health problems, it bears that one should try to objectively judge one’s physical& mental abilities for the possibility of physiological abnormalities.
My experience is years of frustration with my health, being overweight, low energy all the time, and it turns out that the lyme disease I had been treated for back in high school had survived and continued to plague me beyond my immune system’s capacity to completely eradicate. It returned periodically for years, and only during periods of extremely low stress when I was out of school was I able to live comfortably at all. What tipped me off to getting treatment was comparing my physical abilities during high school as an athlete to my abilities up to this point in which I can barely engage in anaerobic exercise.
Do you think Clenbuterol is more effective or has fewer side-effects than Ephedrine or Amphetamine?
More effective (for weight loss) and less side effects than amphetamine (at weight loss dosages of the latter).
More effective but with more sides than ephedrine (Clen isn’t a toy!). But at doses needed for ephedrine to compete with Clen in desired effects ephedrine has more sides. Essentially both substances work via the same mechanism (beta adrenergic receptor agonists) but Clen is much more specific to beta-2.
Clenbuterol really comes into its own when used for cutting (losing weight after already gaining a lot of muscle). In this situation losing weight is already easy enough—aside from the energy use by the muscle tissue the bulking cycle has probably already involved force feeding—eating less is the default. The trick is to lose the fat quickly while minimising the loss of muscle. The mild anabolic effects of clenbuterol (through mechanisms completely unrelated to that of androgenic substances) partially offset the overall muscle catabolism.
Clenbuterol is also rather handy for cardiovascular and endurance performance—it’s an asthma drug after all. If a cyclist is banned for doping and it isn’t for EPO it is probably for clenbuterol.
Such developments are hard to notice in someone you see every day e.g. yourself. Did you ask someone who hadn’t seen you in a while (or maybe look at a picture of yourself from before you had started weightlifting)?
Affecting it upwards, you mean. The goal of body builders wasn’t exactly to become skinnier last time I checked. (The caveat is that muscle is denser than fat, so if you gain muscle while keeping your total weight constant you’ll look skinnier.)
No, downwards. For anyone with a significant amount of fat and underdeveloped muscles.
It usually isn’t. Yet this is not incompatible with body building being an efficient form of weight loss.
Bodybuilders generally aim to build muscular mass through a cycle of high-intensity workouts under high-calorie conditions alternating with near-fasting (along with some even sketchier practices), but that doesn’t say much about weight training in general; modern bodybuilding is incredibly specialized and has little to do with any kind of athletics.
By varying diet and the conditions of training, it’s possible to use weights to increase endurance, build muscle mass, burn fat, or build strength, and while these all overlap to a certain degree they’re not really all that strongly linked. An exclusive focus on one will tend to improve that one much faster than the others.
I don’t understand how eliminating fat in this scenario merely makes me merely “look skinnier” rather than actually being skinnier. Constant mass + increased density = reduced volume = (in this case) skinnier… doesn’t it?
I was using skinnier as a one-word shorthand for ‘less heavy’, but you’re right that a volume-based definition is closer to the common understanding than a mass-based one. (Cf massive which is also about mass in technical speech but about size in colloquial speech, though for a different reason.)
(Plus, in most cases of people trying to lose weight, they would actually care more about fat mass than total mass if they fully understood the difference and could measure both.)
(In Italian we have a phrase falso magro lit. ‘false lean [person]’ for people who weigh more than one would guess by looking at them.)
But… wouldn’t that make them truly lean? Or falsely fat?
Dammit… I meant “more than one would guess”. Fixed.
Also, a person with lots of muscle definition won’t look “fat” even if they weigh much more than average. They won’t look skinny either, but large-and-muscular is generally considered healthier and more attractive than large-and-flabby.
The parenthetical distinction was between ‘losing weight’ and looking (and even being) skinnier. ie. Gained weight, lost volume and subjectively appear to have lost even more volume.
To expand on this:
Imagine a counterfactual organism that always preferentially stores X number of calories per day as fat, where X is equivalent to the calorie expenditure of running at top speed for over 24 hours, and does not increase muscle mass.
If the organism eats more than X calories, it gains weight. If it eats less than X calories, it will experience crippling lethargy and eventually die.
Obviously no such organism would be produced by natural selection, but assume the Least Convenient Possible World. Would advising such an organism “eat less, exercise more” enable it to lose weight?
Of course not, but you’ve contrived an odd corner-case that, in fact, doesn’t exist in reality. I’m not sure what that goes to show.
Except that my counterfactual organism seems to more strongly resemble Eliezer Yudkowsky than does whatever model you’re working from.
Oh come on. If Eliezer eats fewer calories than he expends, he’s not going to die of hunger. I fully buy that will-power is a legitimate issue, but bringing up extreme cases like this to make your point doesn’t enhance the conversation.
But he may spend large amounts of time in a state where physiological and psychological responses are screaming “eat more food!”. This state is not conducive to a happy, productive life.
I won’t dispute this. For some people, a calculated decision to remain overweight in today’s world in order to focus on other things may be the best course of action.
Alternatively, if losing weight is that important to you, you can alter your environment so “today’s world” doesn’t make it so tempting to eat crappy foods. Your body can be screaming out “eat more food!” all it wants, but if you’re living in a cabin in some remote corner of Alaska, there’s only so much damage that can do.
What part of “None of the simple cute little solutions that seem like they really ought to work and do work for the metabolically privileged actually work for me” do you not understand? I’ve lived in a carefully crappy-food-free apartment and gained weight, and back when I was “losing weight thanks to willpower and exercise!” I ate Little Debbie’s poison nuggets and lost weight.
You are ignorant of the governing laws. I don’t know how to make it any clearer. Your mind is full of things that sound like good and virtuous truths of a fair and sensible universe where diligence is rewarded and laziness punished. These things are lies.
This reminds me of diabetics that I know. Do you have any problems with insulin?
So, maybe staying thin requires Herculean effort for some. Why turn your back on that particular challenge? Elsewhere you seem to take a lot of pride in your determination to “save the world,” which seems like no small feat. Don’t try to lose weight—lose weight!
I can starve or think, not both at the same time.
I had the same experience. In my case I actually tested this and I found to my great surprise that I was more productive at tough (for me) intellectual tasks when dieting (500 calorie deficit).
It might be worth testing if not actually done yet.
I do accept that some people have terrible problems mobilizing body fat for fuel. This can drive appetite.
Weight loss is a wicked problem. There can be many reasons for overeating. Psychology (i found IFS therapy best here), high insulin from excess glycemic carbs, genetic ungiftedness, hormonal issues often driven by excess fructose and/or Omega 6 fats.
What is frustrating is you have to get it all right before you lose weight sustainably.
I love this comment. It reminds me how some days my brain is working like a champ and I can tackle any complex programming job with ease. Other days I’m simply aware that my brain is pretending to be a much less smart person’s brain, and I should stick to more menial projects. If my job required me to be smart every day, I’d have to pay much more attention to the food / sleep / whatever combination that determines how my brain works the next morning.
I’m sure you’ve seen the psych research suggesting people have a finite amount of “willpower” they can exercise at a given time. It probably does make sense for some people to worry about hard-thinking (or other endeavors) than staying in top shape.
It’s not just that you only have so much “will power” that you ration, it’s that your brain doesn’t work when you’re starving.
I had to cut weight for wrestling in high school (from a healthy 185 down to 160) and the will power to not eat wasn’t even that difficult (though it did suck), but I still couldn’t think well.
I’ve had your symptoms, too. Skipping a meal would cause my blood sugar to crash (causing irritability and brain fog, for me) and I stopped losing weight temporarily even on the meal plan that worked for me (other comment). The problems that caused this for me were getting a new food intolerance and microbial imbalance (caused by eating things I was intolerant of while I was still trying to figure out the source of the problem). I was hungrier and I stopped losing weight. You’ve wondered about your metabolism, but have you thought about whether your digestion could be improved?
I’m not sure what kinds of conditions might cause this problem and whether they might be hidden (or even whether the problem is more of an absorption issue, some result of the immune system response, or something else), and it’s definitely not my business whether you have symptoms or not, but I’ll tell you a few things in case they could be useful:
I’ve heard that food intolerance tests are unreliable. If I wanted to know if I had a food intolerance, I’d do an elimination diet to be sure.
Probiotic supplements (heck, supplements in general) tend to be poor quality. I won’t buy supplements by brands that aren’t verified to meet quality standards when independently tested. I use ConsumerLab.com for this, because the government doesn’t test them for you. This related link may be of interest.
“exercise that grows your muscle mass would do nothing for mine.”
Bullshit.
The rational thing to do here is to replace ‘goal: loose weigth’ with ‘goal: become fit’. Lift weights or do bodyweight-exercises (pushups, lunges etc.) + walk/run/bike.
Tried it. Didn’t work. Welcome to the unfair universe.
Mind you, aerobic exercise does put me in better aerobic condition, sorta. It just doesn’t have anything to do with weight loss.
Good thing you don’t have that attitude about FAI.
Have you considered the possibility that you just did something wrong? Common knowledge says that you need to exercise for 20 minutes or more to do any fat burning, but I’ve read an interesting book that says aerobics don’t actually improve your fitness or burn fat.
Specifically, the author claims that, yes, exercising for more than 20 minutes will cause you to burn fat because your sugar stores are exhausted. However, he says, this tells your body that it needs to keep fat around, since clearly you’re doing things that need it. Thus, the long-term effect of long-duration aerobics is that you adapt to store fat more… which is why runners who stop running, quickly get fat.
What he suggests needs to happen instead is that you exercise in a way that rapidly consumes sugar, but doesn’t dip into the fat stores, so that the adaptation response is to make the body lean towards storing food as sugar, and to convert stored fat to sugar.
His theory is that in the ancestral environment, we needed to do a lot of sprinting to catch things or avoid being caught, with relatively less long/slow exercise. (Also, that training for recovery after short bursts of exercises increases lung capacity and heart health more quickly.)
Anyway, I’m currently experimenting with one of his simpler “beginner” routines: 10 minutes, consisting of alternating one minute of anaerobic sprinting with one minute of slow walking recovery. I’m only in the first week, but my speed and ability to recover have increased a good bit, even though I’ve not done it every day this week. I’ll have to see what effect it has over a longer term.
I just mention this to point out that there could easily be minor changes to exercise that could make big differences to one’s results, and that “tried it, didn’t work” isn’t a helpful approach to investigating them. In my own case, the only part of my life that I wasn’t overweight was the time where I didn’t have a car, had to walk or bicycle everywhere, and had moderately long distances to go.
What I’ve observed since then, though, as I slowly drop the 100 pounds that I put on when I started working at home (got about 30lbs left to go), is that losing fat is a lot more about what I put into my body than what I take out.
This may or may not be true for you. What may be true, however, is that you’re not considering this as a constraint-solving problem. Your ability to lose weight or put on muscle are going to be constrained by a wide variety of factors including what nutrition you’re getting, how much water, how much sleep, what intensity of exercise at what heart rate… even frequency of meals. Hell, you might even be eating too little food, or the wrong food for your metabolism or pH. I’ve had to tweak ALL of these things in order to lose weight. How many have you tried tweaking?
There are tons of variables that could act as constraints on your ability to lose weight, and until you make sure they’re all simultaneously satisfied, you’re not going to get a result.
Simply labeling yourself “metabolically challenged” is not rational. How, specifically, are you challenged? What is the mechanism by which this challenge operates? Which nutritional theories and exercise theories have you tested? What variables have you measured and tracked?
Perhaps a crisis of belief would be appropriate here as well.
This strikes me as very unlikely, given that humans have lower sprinting speeds than most prey and predator animals, but better endurance capabilities, enabling us to catch them through persistence hunting. Humans have adaptations that make us quite good at steady long distance running, such as an energy-conserving bipedal gait and highly efficient cooling through sweat, but compared to other animals our size we’re quite bad at covering short distances quickly. The idea that our ancestral environment demanded a lot of sprinting relative to long distance running sounds downright implausible.
That sounds like the theory Christopher McDougall presents in Born To Run. As far as I know, he doesn’t have any credentials in the relevant fields (not that that has too much impact on whether the theory is likely or not) so maybe he is relying on previous work? If you don’t mind me asking, where have you gotten your information from?
EDIT: Nevermind, I followed your link to persistence hunting and from there to Endurance Running Hypothesis.
Crisis of belief? Definitely maybe. I don’t know EY’s full situation, but I’m still having a hard time digesting the idea that he just can’t do it.
I believe you’re just describing high-intensity interval training (HIIT) above. When I started learning about diet and fitness, that was a big one.
I agree with the poster who said to ask the bodybuilders. I got into reading bodybuilding information sites and they really do have it down to a fine art. There are many subtleties beyond “good diet and exercise.” Screw up a few little things and you won’t lose weight.
Diet: low carb, and only unrefined, high good fats, high protein (“low carb” here just means not the 80% carbs people normally consume—it doesn’t have to be ridiculous like Atkins). Tons of vegetables and fruit (slightly more controversial). Lots of small meals. Eat less calories than you burn [Edit: though obviously this is wishy-washy. Still, count calories in general. Sometimes you have to eat more to boost your metabolism, etc]. There are degrees of strictness, and much more specific ratios and timing and cycles, but those are the basics.
Exercise: Do heavy weightlifting. Do full-body lifts like chin ups, push ups/bench press, squats, deadlifts, military press, etc. And do HIIT. And continuously switch your routine around in some way.
If this is exactly what you’ve done, then I underestimate the severity of a slow metabolism.
And of course, this doesn’t address the willpower issue at all.
I just have to say it anyway though, because if you’re eating well and exercising regularly and not losing weight, just missing a few things like:
-eating 5-6 meals a day, not 3
-pounding a spoonful of fish oil a day
-doing 15 min. HIIT 3-4 times a week and not slow cardio
-doing squats and deadlifts
can make the difference between losing a pound or two a week and actually gaining weight.
Yeah, in my case it’s omega 3s or 6s, deadlifts, HIIT, pull-ups, side presses, lots of minimally-processed or unprocessed foods, raw meats and eggs, and the occasional tomato/lemon puree for alkalinization. My achilles’ heel has been not being spectacularly regular about any of this, in that I’ll also eat out or eat junk when pressed for time or otherwise stressed. And sometimes my exercise will make me sore all over for days, causing me to skip some exercise.
When I have ALL of this stuff lined up just so, I lose weight and have more energy. Drop even one piece, and it’s flatline or gain.
Weight loss efforts provide much opportunity for magical thinking and drawing false conclusions about causality. You mention a half-dozen factors you had to “tweak” in order to lose weight. So suppose I tweak factor A with no affect. Then I tweak B, then C, then D, and eventually I get up to tweak F and then… I start losing weight for a while! What can I usefully conclude from this? Nearly nothing! Most people conclude that Tweak F must have been an important factor. But perhaps Tweak C was what mattered and it merely took a long time for results to become apparent. Or perhaps the timing is purely coincidental—I lose weight at random intervals or in response to stress at work or changes in my personal life and the latest downturn merely coincided with Tweak F. Or perhaps it’s an observer affect, such as the fact that I’m paying attention to my weight in order to evaluate which tweak is working, is what made me lose weight.
In short, if there are really tons of variables that all have to be simultaneously satisfied for weight loss to work, there’s a decent chance than any conclusion you draw from your personal observations will be useless or counterproductive for anyone else.
Hell, some of them are probably useless or counterproductive for me! ;-)
(Hence the admonition to try different things.)
I don’t know you, but I’d guess that you’re deluded about how much productive tweaking you’ve done. People are useless at figuring out what causes what when there’s a large time-lag between cause and observed effect, especially when there’s lots of noise too.
Basically this is something the body cannot do. The fat is stored with some glycerides that can be converted to glucose but the rest cannot.
So this theory sounds like broscience to me.
What you are actually doing may work though, 10 minutes of HIIT will not burn much glucose (this is good—if you burn glucose it has to be replaced—you want to burn fat) and will add a fair bit of fat-burning muscle.
Mr. Eby, I am doing some informal research on diet, weight loss, exercise etc. I am curious:
What was your highest weight; lowest weight in the last 10 years; and current weight? What do you do to maintain your weight? Are you happy with your current weight and level of physical fitness?
P.S. I am sorry to invade your privacy but it does seem like you have held yourself out to the world as something of a guru.
If you’re still reading, I’m definitely interested in your research. I’ve done some myself.
The survey I recommend reading both the livejournal and the dreamwidth comments. They don’t trend in the same direction.
My conclusions Short version: people can hurt themselves badly by trying to lose weight. “Roll your own” moderate low carb and exercise regimes work safely for some people.
One more thought
Title?
Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes also claims aerobics doesn’t work to lose weight and refers to a bunch of studies to that effect. Though he doesn’t go so far as to deny there are cardiovascular benefits.
Incorrect, at least from my experience. I lost ~30 pounds, a little more, when I was 16 and doing aerobics one summer. The only diet element I had was eating slightly less. Mind, it was an hour, sometimes an hour and half of intense great aerobics with no breather pause and I was sweating a great deal by the end of each session.
I did gain that weight back in less than a month, so fast that my classmates didn’t even notice I had lost a lot of weight in the first place, so the end effect was that it didn’t work, but the idea of aerobics not leading to weight loss at all is not true.
You cannot counterbalance the evidence behind a claim that “refers to a bunch of studies” by citing anecdotal evidence.
You can most certainly give people a cause to actually look at the “referred to studies” to see what they actually say rather than third hand impressions given in a one sentence comment about a book. ie. To see whether the actual studies are incompatible with the prediction “If someone does intense cardio for one and a half hours (every day) AND actually ate less rather than more energy from food while maintaining this schedule they will probably lose weight”.
As far as I know the “doesn’t work” means something far more specific, practical and psychological that isn’t particularly incompatible with the highly unnatural circumstances mentioned in Kiraly’s experience. It is also something rather closely relevant to the “I did gain that weight back in less than a month” observation.
This is exactly what pjeby’s description of the book you’re calling “incorrect” suggested would happen.
I took off about fifteen pounds in seven weeks with nothing but cardio, and dropped another twenty after that in a few more months, still with more cardio (it probably would have taken less if I hadn’t had to recover from getting hit by a car in the middle of it,) and I was still losing weight at the time that I seriously altered my workout regimen, because I’d lost too much weight. I put weight back on afterwards, but it was almost all muscle, so that people actually commented that I was looking leaner after I put twenty back on than before I gained the weight (some people even thought I was losing weight while I was gaining it.) I still weigh less today than when I started working out, and have more muscle as well.
On the other hand, I have a predisposition to eating disorders (suffered anorexia as a kid,) and my approach to exercise for someone who was not a competitive athlete at the time could fairly be described as fanatical, so it’s reasonable to expect that most people who start working out with the intention of taking weight off would not achieve similar results.
PACE: Rediscover Your Native Fitness, by Al Sears, MD.
Thanks.
Apart from aesthetic preferences, replacing “loose weight” with “continually increase my fitness” (which is not something you’ll ever be done with) is a far more constructive goal (and it will eliminate the diet-mindset-rollercoaster).
I suspect that lack of will power often means impatience. And impatience comes from unrealistic expectations regarding what you “should” be able to do in time n.
Daily moderate (will-power-) exercise will give positive results on a whole range of parameters, but it might take a year before the effects (including the habit of exercising) really show.
Off course you could be an exception.
Wow, so let me guess you tried exercising for a couple months and did not see much and then gave up… Well try following your own advice and instead of assuming the art failed you, assume you failed the art.
Bullshit aerobics with proper dieting will make you lose weight or do you think you’re somehow special? I would bet you either were not doing it right or gave up to quickly. You seem like a very sedintary person so it will take you a while to lose the weight. My personal guess is that working out is just not that important to you so grow up and admit it.
I have plenty of friends who do not have good metabolism but they have all suceeded in losing weight and keeping it off. Its only impossible if you do it wrong or you expect magic results...
I have to second Eliezer on this one. Saying “good diet and exercise” is just a disguised way of saying “be more disciplined”. While it is true that being more disciplined would cause someone to lose weight, telling someone to be more disciplined does not cause them to actually /be/ more disciplined. The value of advice is properly judged by its effect, and actual observation shows that the “be more disciplined” advice has no effect or even the opposite effect, so it’s simply bad advice. The part which is true is already known by the person receiving the advice, so truth is no defense.
This touches on a general issue about free will.
In a world where everyone is sort of a jerk and says “Just shut up and exercise, you fatso!” there may be such a strong drive to avoid condemnation and low social status that you actually do shut up and exercise.
In the alternate world where everyone understands that it’s not really your fault and you can’t shout people into having more willpower and willpower is a sketchy concept anyway and accepts you for who you are—you will have no incentive to get better.
So occasionally I do tell people the equivalent of “shut up and exercise” for certain things, even though I know it doesn’t work directly. It’s a case by case basis, depending on how many opportunities the person is missing and how likely I think my advice is to seriously affect them.
I did shut up and exercise. It didn’t work. That’s the point at which you have a problem.
And for years I felt guilty and that I must be doing something wrong; and then I read about the Shangri-La diet and all these people losing 50 pounds with ease; and then it didn’t work for me; and that was when I figured out that yes, I actually had put in a really serious try, and that what was really going on was that the laws just didn’t work the good and virtuous and just way that everyone said they did.
Now maybe for other things… if willpower really does work… then telling people “Shut up and expend willpower” might be helpful. I’ve just gotten a lot more skeptical, now.
Wasn’t talking about your case in particular. Of would-be-dieters I know, the majority try to go to the gym a few times and then flake out. So although it may apply to you, I don’t think “You can’t just tell people to try harder” is always good advice.
You have it completely backward. In my experience, to a first approximation we already live in the “everyone is a jerk” world, and the steaming piles of moralism serve to make it very hard for people to even think about this issue because of the waves of low self-esteem it brings on.
If a thin person is in state S1, and a fat person is in a state S2, then a thin person who got that way by dieting is in state S3 and despite looking identical, S1 != S3. S1 has no particular tendency to change. S3 has a strong tendency to become S2. Diets don’t work. You just don’t have the super-senses to distinguish S1 from S3 at a glance.
Diet (singular) does work in the sense of consistently, indefinitely eating healthier foods.
No… it… DOESN’T. I tried that. I ate a simple Paleo diet which consists of nothing except healthy foods; my staples were home-cooked turkey and bananas. I did it for months. I lost not a single pound.
You CANNOT BEGIN TO IMAGINE how much stuff that really truly seems like it ought to work simply DOES NOT WORK when you are metabolically disprivileged.
Bananas are flagged as a risky item by a number of paleo-type diet authors, though not by ‘The Paleo Diet’. They have a fairly high glycemic index. Not that it invalidates your point.
I lost 45lbs on the Paleo Diet and have kept most of it off 2 years later (I’ve crept up by about 8-10lbs and I’m trying to be a bit stricter to bring that back down). I didn’t avoid bananas completely but I’d read enough to be wary of them. I’m sure it doesn’t work for everybody but I find it persuasive and effective.
IF the theory that sugar and refined carbohydrates are the biggest risk factors for weight gain is true THEN learning enough to become convinced of just how bad they are, to the point that you develop a strong negative emotional response to foods containing them, is an effective technique of applying initially conscious rationality to create new habits. Of course it may not work for everybody. Variations in individual metabolism seem to be an understudied aspect of diet research.
Are you saying it didn’t work because it didn’t curb your hunger or your desire for other, less healthy foods? Or it didn’t work because you stuck to the diet of healthy foods and gained weight nonetheless? The latter seems hard to believe, though I suppose it’s technically possible to accumulate an excess of calories via turkey and bananas...
The latter.
So are you claiming to be a counterexample to ‘weight change=calories in—calories out’?
I can honestly say, I actually have healthy tastes—I actually like salad (I have a salad garden for exactly that reason), and do work on a small (3 acres) property when I’m not at my day job.
Although I do like most traditional deserts, they are not a typical portion of the meal, barring holidays. I do tend to eat ‘candy’ when it’s around . . . which is one reason I don’t keep it around.
So I sympathize entirely with the original poster when he says eating nothing but healthy foods doesn’t help. My ‘Vitamin Pill’ version of the Shangra-la diet lost me 30 pounds straight through the holidays when I was eating deserts . . . and stopped.
So there are definitely other factors that are being missed.
Jonnan
The above is equivalent to saying “being in state S1 works”.
S3 is characterized by not being able to consistently, indefinitely eat healthier foods.
IOW: the above is a dodge.
Assuming unlimited willpower, burning more calories than you consume will reduce body weight (c.f. thermodynamics, &c.). Easy!
The issue is not how to reduce weight, per se, it’s about how to do so while also suppressing hunger pangs and other physiological and psychological effects of wanting more food than you’re getting.
As an aside, exercise itself isn’t actually particularly useful unless you devote a lot of time to it, as the calorie burn rate is fairly low. Raising the basal metabolic rate via anaerobic exercise may have value, though.
Another issue is how to reduce fat weight per se. One of the eye-opening parts of Gary Taubes’ talk was the fact that somebody can be simultaneously emaciated and obese. Fat cells want to survive and sometimes will do so to the detriment of their host.
Another Taubes insight: when it comes to vertical growth, we posit one causal direction. We say that a teenager eats a lot because he’s a growing boy; we do not say he’s growing taller because he eats a lot. It’s accepted that the body of a teenager has somehow decided for itself that it wants to get taller and appetite/metabolism will accommodate that need.
Perhaps horizontal growth isn’t all that different.
Could you explain that without the metaphor of intentionality? Fat cells don’t have their own germ line, so I can’t reason about what they “want” the way I can reason about what a virus “wants”. Thanks!
I think that was just a colorful way of saying what the rest of the post elaborated on—that the body may prioritize fat storage higher than other energy uses that the person associated with the body may prefer.
Also, fat cells are biologically active. Obesity is caused by hormone activity and fat cells provide inputs into that biological process as well as being part of the outcome of it.
Rats that overproduce insulin can die of starvation despite being obese—the body gets energy by breaking down muscle—including heart muscle—in order to preserve the fat.
Source?
Yeah, and I realize that simply recommending “diet and exercise” is a bit too pat. Getting oneself into virtuous cycles, with extremely short-term rewards and consequences, is the most effective meta-tactic I know. There are various ways to do this; the key is just to render willpower moot.
I find decapitation works the best—you take about 5kg off right at the start, and continue losing gradually (but not as drastically) from then on.
I find that when I’m trying to teleport to Pluto, the first step is to scrunch up my forehead really hard and teleport to Mars.
Uh, you appreciate that even if the Sun, Earth, Mars, and Pluto are all neatly aligned, you will barely be any closer to Pluto when you get to Mars than you were here?
On the other hand, maybe Dr Manhattan can give you a lift...
I wonder why these comments are being voted down; I got a good chuckle out of both.
You do realize, I hope, that comments now start with a score of 0?
Maybe people didn’t realize they were jokes?
I don’t know, I’ve made some dumb jokes and they got voted up, so I’m confused.