I think you missed my point, or I threw it by you poorly. I don’t think they “should”, I think they sometimes can. I sometimes can, and though I know from LW that not all minds are alike, it’s safe to assume I’m also not wholly unique in my depression.
I agree that they sometimes can. I also agree people can sometimes lose weight. As far as I was concerned, our disagreement here (if one exists) isn’t about whether it’s possible in some cases.
Are you willing to agree to a statement like:
“Weight loss is possible in some cases, and in fact very easy in some cases. In other cases it is very hard, bordering in impossible given the marathon-analogy definition of impossible below. This can be negated by heroic measures like locking them in a room where excess food is unavailable and ignoring their appetite and distress, but in the real world you cannot do this. Because of these difficult cases, it is useful to explore the science behind weight loss and come up with more effective strategies.
If so, we agree, but then I’m confused why you were criticizing the Less Wrongers in your original statement. If you don’t agree, please let me know which part we disagree about.
To your analogy of the marathon: There is a right answer to whether you can run X miles in Y minutes and not physically injure yourself. I’d imagine the majority of people never come close to knowing that answer because they do not posses the ability to refrain from rationalizing themselves out of the optimal result as discomfort begins during their run. I’m aware that I’m personally really bad at this—my first .5 mile I’m telling myself I’m Usain Bolt; by mile 2 I’m coming up with manifold reasons to stop pushing. No doubt some are good and rational reasons, but others are bullshit that I need only train my mind to recognize as such in order to push through and be successful.
If we are debating the extremely academic point of whether someone with your muscular structure can complete a marathon in X hours, okay. But suppose we find that of a thousand people who in theory are anatomically capable of completing the marathon, zero actually finish the marathon, due to discomfort. If our goal is to get them to successfully complete marathons, what percent of our resources do you think should be invested in proving they are physically capable of doing so right now and exhorting them to do this, versus coming up with things like training schedules and better diets and better shoes that will make it easier for them?
I felt like your original point was a complaint that we are trying the equivalent of coming up with training schedules rather than the equivalent of telling people they should be able to just keep going 26.2 miles unless their legs collapse, whereas I think this is probably a better strategy. Am I interpreting your complaint correctly, and do you disagree that the former strategy is better?
Can you instead imagine a scenario where a controlled calorie deficit was administered to a person where they received a balanced diet with all the nutrients they needed? 300 kcal was arbitrary. Pick any number. Isn’t there some number that would be negligible in terms of the utility of its nutritional value and yet provide a calories deficient sufficient to lead to weight loss?
I think we’re definitely misunderstanding each other somewhere. I think we may be working off some different assumptions about how the biology here works.
I weigh 185 pounds—plugging this into a metabolism calculator, my weight will stay stable at 2200 calories per day. Suppose I weighed 500 pounds. My weight would stay stable at about 4500 calories per day.
If the 500 pound guy got only 4200 calories per day, it doesn’t matter how balanced the diet is or how many nutrients he has, his body has a caloric deficit and doesn’t have enough energy to live. Hopefully it takes care of that by burning some of his stored fat. If it can’t do that, he’s going to be in big trouble.
I may be wrong about this, but I don’t think the body can actually operate a a true caloric deficit. It WILL make up the deficit (or die, which also technically resolves the deficit). All it can do is do so in more or less problematic ways. The less problematic ways are things like burning fat. The more problematic ways are things like increasing appetite, decreasing exercise, and catabolizing organs.
I think your question corresponds to “But what if the body did just operate at a caloric deficit?”, and I am really getting out of my knowledge comfort zone here but I don’t think that’s possible. Our analogy to economics here fails—we’re not talking money where you can run a loss for a while and just have to worry about the bank coming after you, we’re talking thermodynamics where it’s physically impossible.
Weight loss is caused not by operating at a caloric deficit per se, but by the body avoiding caloric deficit by burning fat or other bodily tissues.
“Weight loss is possible in some cases, and in fact very easy in some cases. In other cases it is very hard, bordering in impossible given the marathon-analogy definition of impossible below. This can be negated by heroic measures like locking them in a room where excess food is unavailable and ignoring their appetite and distress, but in the real world you cannot do this. Because of these difficult cases, it is useful to explore the science behind weight loss and come up with more effective strategies.”
Yes, basically. Though I don’t know if I like the inclusion of “real” world. It isn’t possible to deprive people of excess calories in the practical world, but calories math and weight loss are, as far as I know, a physical law in the real universe.
If so, we agree, but then I’m confused why you were criticizing the Less Wrongers in your original statement.
Since this thread became longer and more involved than I thought, I should go back and find a few examples from the discussion I mention in my original post.
Generally, the discussion seemed to be over-complicating a simple issue. Forgive me if I mentioned this to you already, but I see two distinct discussions in regard to weight loss:
1 - The causal mechanisms that lead to losing weight.
2 - Executing a rational plan with those causal mechanisms in mind.
In my view (I’ll look for examples), the issues were conflated, with 1 receiving the majority of debate. I don’t think 1 is in need of debate, and I now wonder if people were just looking for a way to hack the causal mechanisms because dieting via 2 is super hard.
I sincerely empathize. With depression, I feel sometimes like people try to suggest all sorts of 2-styled help to me, for instance. They sort of come across like, “Just choose these different behaviors and it will alleviate your depression”. In that way, they are telling folks with depression they believe it to be a choice.
Even though I hate it, they are kind of correct. I can’t currently do anything to change the causal mechanisms that lead to obesity or depression. I’d like to, but I can’t. I gotta do 2 to feel happy. If I can’t, I’m gonna be sad, no matter much I pretend I can change 1.
I do think there are hacks for 2. And I’m 100% in favor of exploring them. As I said before, I used many tricks to help my will and motivation while dieting.
But if you want to lose weight, you have to create a calorie deficit. As you go on to say, the body will used stored calories if you don’t eat enough. Living that calorie deficit (dieting) can blow. It blew for me. But it was a trade off in order that I could accomplish the task of losing weight. It was necessary to lose weight.
There seems to be a notion with some here at LW that experiencing some hunger or fatigue or less-than-perfect-happy-functionality is a dieting failure mode. It isn’t. It is like anything else in life. To your analogy, you don’t run faster times by rationalizing about why you can’t run faster times. It DOES hurt a bit—even when it is doing no damage to your body—to push through the rationalization. Of course, you can push too hard—in running or in dieting—but I’m not talking about exceeding what is healthy.
To sum up, somebody replied to me (somewhere on here) with an EY quote that said: “I can starve or I can think. I can’t do both” I assume it was in the context of dieting.
I think(?) it provides a good summary of the attitude I’m criticizing on LW in regard to dieting. You don’t have to starve to diet. But there may be no way in the physical universe to avoid losing some % of your comfort and/or capability during your diet (calorie deficit). You may lose some “think” as you do a little bit of “starve”. Just like you lose a little comfort when you do a little bit faster run… and I lose a little time and sleep when I type a little more. :)
I agree that trying to avoid all pain can be a failure mode. But insisting that pain needs to be plowed through can also be a failure mode.
The advice “You should run a marathon by continuing to run even if it hurts” might perhaps be useful as part of a package of different interventions to a runner who’s hit some kind of a motivational wall.
But in other situations it is completely inappropriate. For example, suppose a certain runner has a broken leg, but you don’t know this and he can’t communicate it to you. He just says “It really really hurts when I run!” And you just answer “Well, you need to run through the pain!”
This is an unreasonable request. If you were more clueful, you might make a suggestion like “You should go to a doctor, wait for your broken leg to heal, and then try running later.”
And if enough people have broken legs, then promoting the advice “You should run a marathon by continuing to run even when it hurts” is bad advice. Even if we assume that people are still capable of running on broken legs and will not collapse, you are generalizing from your own example to assume that the pain they suffer will be minimal and tolerable, rather than excruciating and intolerable.
If some people have metabolic problems—and right now I’m not claiming they do, just creating a possibility proof, and if you agree it’s possible but don’t think it’s real we can get into that later—then they’re like the broken legged people.
Working off Taubes and a few other of the low-carb people, some people’s fat cells do not release energy. If they suffer any caloric deficit at all, even 300 calories or whatever you consider a reasonable small amount, their bodies will immediately start starving and catabolizing muscles or, in the worst case, vital organs. There have been examples (though the implications and generalizability are still debated) of people starving to death while weighing three or four hundred pounds, because for some reason their bodies couldn’t get to their fat and so were forced to catabolize the liver or heart or something.
(this is what “starving to death” tends to mean in real life; you are so starved that your body breaks down important tissues it can’t afford to lose, or builds up too many tissue-breakdown waste products)
Imagine that you are literally starving to death—let’s say you’ve been without food for three months and you’re down to the bone like those heart-wrenching photos out of some African countries. You have no energy and can barely move out of your bed. In theory it is possible for you to use willpower to force yourself to continue going on with your daily activities, and not have complaints like “I can’t starve and think at the same time”. In practice, this seems like a pretty poor plan if you have any other options.
If Taubes et al are correct, fat people who can’t mobilize their body’s energy reserves are in exactly this situation. Any caloric deficit and they’re literally starving, their bodies are trying to figure out whether they should cannibalize the heart or the liver first, and they’re not in the mood for continuing to go about daily activities with a smile on their face any more than that African in the famine is.
If your body has fully functional fat metabolism, and you’re operating at a caloric deficit by successfully burning off fat, and you tell them “Hey, I feel moderately hungry but really this isn’t so hard”, you’re comparing apples to oranges, the same way as the healthy runner to the runner with the broken leg.
A better solution would be to come up with some way to fix the thing where the body can’t mobilize its fat reserves and so either has to stay fat or starve to death. I think this is the project the paleo people are working on: figuring out how to make the body say “Okay, caloric deficit, better burn some fat cells” instead of “Oh no, caloric deficit, better assume I’m starving to death and jack appetite up to eleven while catabolizing all of my muscles”.
So is our disagreement that you don’t think even Taubes’ picture provides a situation in which one should privilege bodyhacking-type solutions over willpower-based solutions, or just that you don’t think Taubes’ picture is correct?
If some people have metabolic problems—and right now I’m not claiming they do, just creating a possibility proof, and if you agree it’s possible but don’t think it’s real we can get into that later—then they’re like the broken legged people.
In that case the interesting question is whether these people who will literally starve to death before losing fat are exceedingly rare metabolic freaks, nothing more than medical curiosities? If their prevalence is in single digits per million they are just a red herring in the discussion of obesity. I suspect that for pretty much any generally accepted and valid health advice there is some exotic medical condition which makes following this advice a horribly wrong thing for that particular individual.
In general, I think it’s highly useful to state that being in energy deficit through (usually) eating less or (less usually) spending more is the only way to lose weight outside of surgery. That’s not the final word on the topic, but it should be the first. Otherwise you get equivalents of alcoholics who believe they’ll fix their dependency by avoiding one particular kind of alcohol and drinking some other kind.
Yes, there are different ways to maintain energy deficit. In some cases you can just bulldoze through on willpower (or sufficient motivation). In some cases your personal biochemistry will be cooperative and in other cases it will not. Sometimes adjusting your hormonal and metabolic balance will do wonders, sometimes it will do nothing.
In that case the interesting question is whether these people who will literally starve to death before losing fat are exceedingly rare metabolic freaks, nothing more than medical curiosities? If their prevalence is in single digits per million they are just a red herring in the discussion of obesity. I suspect that for pretty much any generally accepted and valid health advice there is some exotic medical condition which makes following this advice a horribly wrong thing for that particular individual.
People have literally died of that mistake, so there might be some reason to want to avoid making it—like tracking what’ actually happening to people’s bodies when they’re trying to lose weight.
Also, disorders tend to exist in a range of intensity, so that’s another reason to keep track of the effects of dieting—even if people whose bodies don’t release energy from fat enough to avoid death are very rare, people who who have a lot of difficulty with losing fat shouldn’t be assumed to be lying, and may be losing more muscle mass than is good for them.
Of that mistake? Links, please, to cases where people actually bothered to control their electrolytes, vitamins, minerals, and other essentials—they just denied themselves calories and died from starvation still weighting a few hundred pounds.
people who who have a lot of difficulty with losing fat shouldn’t be assumed to be lying
“Have a lot of difficulty with” and “biochemically cannot” are very different things. A lot of people have difficulty with losing fat—this does not imply that they cannot do it, only that they are unwilling or incapable of paying the price to do it.
may be losing more muscle mass than is good for them
Alternatively they may be accumulating more fat than is good for them.
As a practical matter I am not a big fan of using weight as the target variable. I much prefer either the body fat % or getting naked in front of a full-length mirror.
For example, suppose a certain runner has a broken leg, but you don’t know this and he can’t communicate it to you. He just says “It really really hurts when I run!” And you just answer “Well, you need to run through the pain!” This is an unreasonable request.
Of course. I use the broken leg while trying to run analogy to describe people’s advice to “just keep functioning” during deep depressive bouts.
Working off Taubes and a few other of the low-carb people, some people’s fat cells do not release energy.
Can you provide an estimate to the % of the population this applies to?
So is our disagreement that you don’t think even Taubes’ picture provides a situation in which one should privilege bodyhacking-type solutions over willpower-based solutions, or just that you don’t think Taubes’ picture is correct?
My understanding is that individual metabolism varies pretty significantly from person to person. From my recall, something like 25%-30% of BMR is derived from some unknown variable, probably just genetic pre-disposition.
If that is the case, then it is true that some people are much better—no credit to them or their will—at losing weight. Person A and B could live identical lives from a caloric balance standpoint, one ending up obese while the other is trim and fit.
This is a very useful thing for people to know. Skinny people and obese people might not be doing anything differently in terms of lifestyl, willpower, motivation, etc. I like spreading that idea, because skinny people can act superior and shame obese people for “failing”, and the data suggest that can be bullshit.
However, if you are pre-disposed according to the 25-30% mystery BMR to not have a fast enough metabolism to stay skinny in a culture that so cherishes it, then there is not necessarily much you can do about it other than just (a) eat less or (b) exercise more. Come up with smart 2 ideas, sure. But there is no escaping the reality of 1, and nature has put you at a X% disatvantage in the “staying skinny” dept. (Nature does the same to those with depression in the “staying happy” dept. or those with OCD in the “staying calm and avoiding obsessive thinking” dept. I know first hand.)
I don’t think low carb diets work for the pseudo-scientific reasons that propenents say they do. I think it is nothing more than calorie control.
Look at Atkins. Consider it in light of the average, carb-loaded American diet. If you quit carbs, you create a calorie deficit for very practical reasons. Pretending something mystical is taking place is silly and leads to bad ideas about the nature of weight loss.
I could say, “If you want to increase you chest strength, do 3 sets of bench press 3 times per week PLUS touch your nose 22 times while you are lying in bed waiting to fall asleep.”
If my audience was eager enough for increased chest strength and I presented myself as an expert, they’d follow my instructions, benching and nose-touching themselves to bigger, stronger chests. Likely, someone would branch off my successful work, claiming that 44 nose touches and 2X2 bench presses was a better method. Then 66 and 2X4. Or 51 and 5x1.
Soon a whole market of nose-touching techniques would be created… Books written, seminars seminared.
I sense this is something like what has happened with low-carb diets. It does work. But not for the stated reasons. Low fat diet was a simple heuristic that looked at which macro-nutrient source (fat) was most calorie dense and then demonized it. Low carb diet is a heuristic that identified the macro-nutrient source that made up the highest % of our caloirc intake and then demonized it.
Other diets, like the No-S diet, work for similar reasons. There are just simple #2 hacks that give easy to follow heuristics.
I feel Atkins and other diets are often presented as something more scientificky than that. I expected LWers to recognize the ruse. My views started to change when they seemed to sincerely believe in some stuff I thought was nonsense. I was deferring to higher intelligence as that usually works pretty well for me.
Then I dieted. And it worked exactly how the simple calorie math said it would work. I limited my carbs some. And my fats. I took multivitimans. Ate fruits and vegis. Drank plenty of water. I quit drinking alcohol/soda and eating fast food/dessert. It sucked for about 4-5 weeks. I “starved” a little and limited my ability to “think” a little, I suppose. But then you get used to the new lifestyle. Curb the calorie deficit a bit… then back to equilibrium once you are at your desired weight.
I know my single experience doesn’t prove anything for the general population. Maybe there are factors at play that I’m not accounting for? I herniated a cervical disc and haven’t been able to lift weight. I’ve lost a good amount of muscle I’d suspect. I took a lot of NSAIDS after my injury, maybe that factored in?
My sense, however, is that it is simpler than that. And some LWers were just overcomplicating a simple thing in such a way that I almost listend and missed out on what appears to be, at least in the short term, a positive outcome for me.
(Again, I’m aware some people have a MUCH more difficult time dieting due to factors they cannot control. I hate fat-shaming and I’m a huge advocate of destroying the smugness of skinny punks with hard science.)
“I am pretty sure when the average person argues for or against ketosis having a “metabolic advantage” what they are really arguing is whether or not, calorie-for-calorie, a person in ketosis has a higher resting energy expenditure. In other words, does a person in ketosis expend more energy than a person not in ketosis because of the caloric composition of what they consume/ingest?
Let me save you a lot of time and concern by offering you the answer: The question has not been addressed sufficiently in a properly controlled trial and, at best, we can look to lesser controlled trials and clinical observations to a make a best guess.
Do you have a guess as to what the overall effect ketosis has on weight loss? If I maximize the effect, what % can I increase the efficiency of my diet?
Do you have a guess as to what the overall effect ketosis has on weight loss?
I don’t have proper data, just anecdata—suitable for WAGs (wild-ass guesses) but not much more.
the efficiency of my diet
What do you mean by that?
Besides, being in long-term ketosis tends to lead to many consequences unconnected with weight loss or gain. See e.g. here for some discussion. Anecdotally many people who’s been on VLC diets for a year or so tend to develop problems that go away when they add a bit of glucose (=carbs) to their intake.
I did something of a similar simple nature a couple years back.
I removed soda, alcohol, fast food and anything resembling dessert for 1 year.
I also I added 1 liter of water, 1 raw fruit and 1 raw vegetable to my diet, following this very strictly. (I ate a lot of roma tomatos like apples over the sink late at night before bed to honor the diet...)
I wish I would have tracked my body fat% because I believe it was very effective… and relatively easy to keep the diet.
I agree that they sometimes can. I also agree people can sometimes lose weight. As far as I was concerned, our disagreement here (if one exists) isn’t about whether it’s possible in some cases.
Are you willing to agree to a statement like:
“Weight loss is possible in some cases, and in fact very easy in some cases. In other cases it is very hard, bordering in impossible given the marathon-analogy definition of impossible below. This can be negated by heroic measures like locking them in a room where excess food is unavailable and ignoring their appetite and distress, but in the real world you cannot do this. Because of these difficult cases, it is useful to explore the science behind weight loss and come up with more effective strategies.
If so, we agree, but then I’m confused why you were criticizing the Less Wrongers in your original statement. If you don’t agree, please let me know which part we disagree about.
If we are debating the extremely academic point of whether someone with your muscular structure can complete a marathon in X hours, okay. But suppose we find that of a thousand people who in theory are anatomically capable of completing the marathon, zero actually finish the marathon, due to discomfort. If our goal is to get them to successfully complete marathons, what percent of our resources do you think should be invested in proving they are physically capable of doing so right now and exhorting them to do this, versus coming up with things like training schedules and better diets and better shoes that will make it easier for them?
I felt like your original point was a complaint that we are trying the equivalent of coming up with training schedules rather than the equivalent of telling people they should be able to just keep going 26.2 miles unless their legs collapse, whereas I think this is probably a better strategy. Am I interpreting your complaint correctly, and do you disagree that the former strategy is better?
I think we’re definitely misunderstanding each other somewhere. I think we may be working off some different assumptions about how the biology here works.
I weigh 185 pounds—plugging this into a metabolism calculator, my weight will stay stable at 2200 calories per day. Suppose I weighed 500 pounds. My weight would stay stable at about 4500 calories per day.
If the 500 pound guy got only 4200 calories per day, it doesn’t matter how balanced the diet is or how many nutrients he has, his body has a caloric deficit and doesn’t have enough energy to live. Hopefully it takes care of that by burning some of his stored fat. If it can’t do that, he’s going to be in big trouble.
I may be wrong about this, but I don’t think the body can actually operate a a true caloric deficit. It WILL make up the deficit (or die, which also technically resolves the deficit). All it can do is do so in more or less problematic ways. The less problematic ways are things like burning fat. The more problematic ways are things like increasing appetite, decreasing exercise, and catabolizing organs.
I think your question corresponds to “But what if the body did just operate at a caloric deficit?”, and I am really getting out of my knowledge comfort zone here but I don’t think that’s possible. Our analogy to economics here fails—we’re not talking money where you can run a loss for a while and just have to worry about the bank coming after you, we’re talking thermodynamics where it’s physically impossible.
Weight loss is caused not by operating at a caloric deficit per se, but by the body avoiding caloric deficit by burning fat or other bodily tissues.
I could be totally wrong about this.
Yes, basically. Though I don’t know if I like the inclusion of “real” world. It isn’t possible to deprive people of excess calories in the practical world, but calories math and weight loss are, as far as I know, a physical law in the real universe.
Since this thread became longer and more involved than I thought, I should go back and find a few examples from the discussion I mention in my original post.
Generally, the discussion seemed to be over-complicating a simple issue. Forgive me if I mentioned this to you already, but I see two distinct discussions in regard to weight loss:
1 - The causal mechanisms that lead to losing weight.
2 - Executing a rational plan with those causal mechanisms in mind.
In my view (I’ll look for examples), the issues were conflated, with 1 receiving the majority of debate. I don’t think 1 is in need of debate, and I now wonder if people were just looking for a way to hack the causal mechanisms because dieting via 2 is super hard.
I sincerely empathize. With depression, I feel sometimes like people try to suggest all sorts of 2-styled help to me, for instance. They sort of come across like, “Just choose these different behaviors and it will alleviate your depression”. In that way, they are telling folks with depression they believe it to be a choice.
Even though I hate it, they are kind of correct. I can’t currently do anything to change the causal mechanisms that lead to obesity or depression. I’d like to, but I can’t. I gotta do 2 to feel happy. If I can’t, I’m gonna be sad, no matter much I pretend I can change 1.
I do think there are hacks for 2. And I’m 100% in favor of exploring them. As I said before, I used many tricks to help my will and motivation while dieting.
But if you want to lose weight, you have to create a calorie deficit. As you go on to say, the body will used stored calories if you don’t eat enough. Living that calorie deficit (dieting) can blow. It blew for me. But it was a trade off in order that I could accomplish the task of losing weight. It was necessary to lose weight.
There seems to be a notion with some here at LW that experiencing some hunger or fatigue or less-than-perfect-happy-functionality is a dieting failure mode. It isn’t. It is like anything else in life. To your analogy, you don’t run faster times by rationalizing about why you can’t run faster times. It DOES hurt a bit—even when it is doing no damage to your body—to push through the rationalization. Of course, you can push too hard—in running or in dieting—but I’m not talking about exceeding what is healthy.
To sum up, somebody replied to me (somewhere on here) with an EY quote that said: “I can starve or I can think. I can’t do both” I assume it was in the context of dieting.
I think(?) it provides a good summary of the attitude I’m criticizing on LW in regard to dieting. You don’t have to starve to diet. But there may be no way in the physical universe to avoid losing some % of your comfort and/or capability during your diet (calorie deficit). You may lose some “think” as you do a little bit of “starve”. Just like you lose a little comfort when you do a little bit faster run… and I lose a little time and sleep when I type a little more. :)
I’ll look for examples.
I agree that trying to avoid all pain can be a failure mode. But insisting that pain needs to be plowed through can also be a failure mode.
The advice “You should run a marathon by continuing to run even if it hurts” might perhaps be useful as part of a package of different interventions to a runner who’s hit some kind of a motivational wall.
But in other situations it is completely inappropriate. For example, suppose a certain runner has a broken leg, but you don’t know this and he can’t communicate it to you. He just says “It really really hurts when I run!” And you just answer “Well, you need to run through the pain!”
This is an unreasonable request. If you were more clueful, you might make a suggestion like “You should go to a doctor, wait for your broken leg to heal, and then try running later.”
And if enough people have broken legs, then promoting the advice “You should run a marathon by continuing to run even when it hurts” is bad advice. Even if we assume that people are still capable of running on broken legs and will not collapse, you are generalizing from your own example to assume that the pain they suffer will be minimal and tolerable, rather than excruciating and intolerable.
If some people have metabolic problems—and right now I’m not claiming they do, just creating a possibility proof, and if you agree it’s possible but don’t think it’s real we can get into that later—then they’re like the broken legged people.
Working off Taubes and a few other of the low-carb people, some people’s fat cells do not release energy. If they suffer any caloric deficit at all, even 300 calories or whatever you consider a reasonable small amount, their bodies will immediately start starving and catabolizing muscles or, in the worst case, vital organs. There have been examples (though the implications and generalizability are still debated) of people starving to death while weighing three or four hundred pounds, because for some reason their bodies couldn’t get to their fat and so were forced to catabolize the liver or heart or something.
(this is what “starving to death” tends to mean in real life; you are so starved that your body breaks down important tissues it can’t afford to lose, or builds up too many tissue-breakdown waste products)
Imagine that you are literally starving to death—let’s say you’ve been without food for three months and you’re down to the bone like those heart-wrenching photos out of some African countries. You have no energy and can barely move out of your bed. In theory it is possible for you to use willpower to force yourself to continue going on with your daily activities, and not have complaints like “I can’t starve and think at the same time”. In practice, this seems like a pretty poor plan if you have any other options.
If Taubes et al are correct, fat people who can’t mobilize their body’s energy reserves are in exactly this situation. Any caloric deficit and they’re literally starving, their bodies are trying to figure out whether they should cannibalize the heart or the liver first, and they’re not in the mood for continuing to go about daily activities with a smile on their face any more than that African in the famine is.
If your body has fully functional fat metabolism, and you’re operating at a caloric deficit by successfully burning off fat, and you tell them “Hey, I feel moderately hungry but really this isn’t so hard”, you’re comparing apples to oranges, the same way as the healthy runner to the runner with the broken leg.
A better solution would be to come up with some way to fix the thing where the body can’t mobilize its fat reserves and so either has to stay fat or starve to death. I think this is the project the paleo people are working on: figuring out how to make the body say “Okay, caloric deficit, better burn some fat cells” instead of “Oh no, caloric deficit, better assume I’m starving to death and jack appetite up to eleven while catabolizing all of my muscles”.
So is our disagreement that you don’t think even Taubes’ picture provides a situation in which one should privilege bodyhacking-type solutions over willpower-based solutions, or just that you don’t think Taubes’ picture is correct?
I think some of the fat people who starved to death were suffering from mineral deficiencies.
In that case the interesting question is whether these people who will literally starve to death before losing fat are exceedingly rare metabolic freaks, nothing more than medical curiosities? If their prevalence is in single digits per million they are just a red herring in the discussion of obesity. I suspect that for pretty much any generally accepted and valid health advice there is some exotic medical condition which makes following this advice a horribly wrong thing for that particular individual.
In general, I think it’s highly useful to state that being in energy deficit through (usually) eating less or (less usually) spending more is the only way to lose weight outside of surgery. That’s not the final word on the topic, but it should be the first. Otherwise you get equivalents of alcoholics who believe they’ll fix their dependency by avoiding one particular kind of alcohol and drinking some other kind.
Yes, there are different ways to maintain energy deficit. In some cases you can just bulldoze through on willpower (or sufficient motivation). In some cases your personal biochemistry will be cooperative and in other cases it will not. Sometimes adjusting your hormonal and metabolic balance will do wonders, sometimes it will do nothing.
People are different. It’s complicated :-/
People have literally died of that mistake, so there might be some reason to want to avoid making it—like tracking what’ actually happening to people’s bodies when they’re trying to lose weight.
Also, disorders tend to exist in a range of intensity, so that’s another reason to keep track of the effects of dieting—even if people whose bodies don’t release energy from fat enough to avoid death are very rare, people who who have a lot of difficulty with losing fat shouldn’t be assumed to be lying, and may be losing more muscle mass than is good for them.
Of that mistake? Links, please, to cases where people actually bothered to control their electrolytes, vitamins, minerals, and other essentials—they just denied themselves calories and died from starvation still weighting a few hundred pounds.
“Have a lot of difficulty with” and “biochemically cannot” are very different things. A lot of people have difficulty with losing fat—this does not imply that they cannot do it, only that they are unwilling or incapable of paying the price to do it.
Alternatively they may be accumulating more fat than is good for them.
As a practical matter I am not a big fan of using weight as the target variable. I much prefer either the body fat % or getting naked in front of a full-length mirror.
Of course. I use the broken leg while trying to run analogy to describe people’s advice to “just keep functioning” during deep depressive bouts.
Can you provide an estimate to the % of the population this applies to?
My understanding is that individual metabolism varies pretty significantly from person to person. From my recall, something like 25%-30% of BMR is derived from some unknown variable, probably just genetic pre-disposition.
If that is the case, then it is true that some people are much better—no credit to them or their will—at losing weight. Person A and B could live identical lives from a caloric balance standpoint, one ending up obese while the other is trim and fit.
This is a very useful thing for people to know. Skinny people and obese people might not be doing anything differently in terms of lifestyl, willpower, motivation, etc. I like spreading that idea, because skinny people can act superior and shame obese people for “failing”, and the data suggest that can be bullshit.
However, if you are pre-disposed according to the 25-30% mystery BMR to not have a fast enough metabolism to stay skinny in a culture that so cherishes it, then there is not necessarily much you can do about it other than just (a) eat less or (b) exercise more. Come up with smart 2 ideas, sure. But there is no escaping the reality of 1, and nature has put you at a X% disatvantage in the “staying skinny” dept. (Nature does the same to those with depression in the “staying happy” dept. or those with OCD in the “staying calm and avoiding obsessive thinking” dept. I know first hand.)
I don’t think low carb diets work for the pseudo-scientific reasons that propenents say they do. I think it is nothing more than calorie control.
Look at Atkins. Consider it in light of the average, carb-loaded American diet. If you quit carbs, you create a calorie deficit for very practical reasons. Pretending something mystical is taking place is silly and leads to bad ideas about the nature of weight loss.
I could say, “If you want to increase you chest strength, do 3 sets of bench press 3 times per week PLUS touch your nose 22 times while you are lying in bed waiting to fall asleep.”
If my audience was eager enough for increased chest strength and I presented myself as an expert, they’d follow my instructions, benching and nose-touching themselves to bigger, stronger chests. Likely, someone would branch off my successful work, claiming that 44 nose touches and 2X2 bench presses was a better method. Then 66 and 2X4. Or 51 and 5x1.
Soon a whole market of nose-touching techniques would be created… Books written, seminars seminared.
I sense this is something like what has happened with low-carb diets. It does work. But not for the stated reasons. Low fat diet was a simple heuristic that looked at which macro-nutrient source (fat) was most calorie dense and then demonized it. Low carb diet is a heuristic that identified the macro-nutrient source that made up the highest % of our caloirc intake and then demonized it.
Other diets, like the No-S diet, work for similar reasons. There are just simple #2 hacks that give easy to follow heuristics.
I feel Atkins and other diets are often presented as something more scientificky than that. I expected LWers to recognize the ruse. My views started to change when they seemed to sincerely believe in some stuff I thought was nonsense. I was deferring to higher intelligence as that usually works pretty well for me.
Then I dieted. And it worked exactly how the simple calorie math said it would work. I limited my carbs some. And my fats. I took multivitimans. Ate fruits and vegis. Drank plenty of water. I quit drinking alcohol/soda and eating fast food/dessert. It sucked for about 4-5 weeks. I “starved” a little and limited my ability to “think” a little, I suppose. But then you get used to the new lifestyle. Curb the calorie deficit a bit… then back to equilibrium once you are at your desired weight.
I know my single experience doesn’t prove anything for the general population. Maybe there are factors at play that I’m not accounting for? I herniated a cervical disc and haven’t been able to lift weight. I’ve lost a good amount of muscle I’d suspect. I took a lot of NSAIDS after my injury, maybe that factored in?
My sense, however, is that it is simpler than that. And some LWers were just overcomplicating a simple thing in such a way that I almost listend and missed out on what appears to be, at least in the short term, a positive outcome for me.
(Again, I’m aware some people have a MUCH more difficult time dieting due to factors they cannot control. I hate fat-shaming and I’m a huge advocate of destroying the smugness of skinny punks with hard science.)
I feel you’re underappreciating the changes ketosis forces upon your body. See, for example, this and this.
From the second article:
Do you have a guess as to what the overall effect ketosis has on weight loss? If I maximize the effect, what % can I increase the efficiency of my diet?
I don’t have proper data, just anecdata—suitable for WAGs (wild-ass guesses) but not much more.
What do you mean by that?
Besides, being in long-term ketosis tends to lead to many consequences unconnected with weight loss or gain. See e.g. here for some discussion. Anecdotally many people who’s been on VLC diets for a year or so tend to develop problems that go away when they add a bit of glucose (=carbs) to their intake.
*googles*
For the first couple seconds that sounded very silly to me, then I realized it’s pretty much the same as what I’m doing right now.
I did something of a similar simple nature a couple years back.
I removed soda, alcohol, fast food and anything resembling dessert for 1 year.
I also I added 1 liter of water, 1 raw fruit and 1 raw vegetable to my diet, following this very strictly. (I ate a lot of roma tomatos like apples over the sink late at night before bed to honor the diet...)
I wish I would have tracked my body fat% because I believe it was very effective… and relatively easy to keep the diet.
http://skepchick.org/2014/02/the-female-athlete-triad-not-as-fun-as-it-sounds/
Women trying to do the right thing by underfeeding themselves, and being more vulnerable to injury as a result.