Interesting that you mention surgery. I believe that much of the benefit of stomach surgery can be achieved without the actual surgery.
The surgery costs on the order of $20,000 and is typically not covered by insurance—people are actually coughing up those amounts.
What it accomplishes is to make you feel physically ill when you eat too much.
That’s all. There’s no other magic going on. It just makes you eat less. Or, more specifically, makes you want to eat less, since otherwise you’ll be nauseated.
So, what if you put the $20,000 in escrow and had a yellow brick road to follow such that
if you ever went off the road, even for just a day, the $20,000 would be gone?
You would first starve yourself for a while to make sure you were safely below the road.
Then you would be cautious for a while.
If you ever got close to the edge of the road then you’d really be nervous.
That piece of pie would not look so appetizing. It could possibly be enough to put you over the edge.
It might be a $20k piece of pie. You would really not want to eat it.
Finally, to respond to your point about weight loss vs fat loss, we don’t disagree, just that if you’re well outside your ideal weight range then scale weight is a perfectly good proxy for what you really care about and has the advantage of being much simpler to measure.
I never done surgery, I just know all papers show it’s by a huge margin the most effective way of long term weight loss without least rebouncing of all. It beats all drug and diet based solutions ever tested by a huge margin. So diet would be no substitute for it. But I don’t know anything more than pubmed and Wikipedia now, so I will shut up about it.
What I do know is that scale weight is a horrible proxy during dieting, because there are so many trivial ways to make very good progress by losing water (in so many different ways), and by losing muscles with any kind of shitty diet with serious calorie restriction. Actual fat lose only happens very slowly, and it’s even possible to lose a lot of fat while on calorie deficit and building up weight—muscles are mostly water, so their scale weight per calorie is very high compared to fat.
I would even risk the suggestion that it’s one of the main reasons why dieting fails—people still use this unbelievably wrong proxy to track their progress. Unfortunately body fat % as returned by cheap resistance based meters is extremely unreliable too. I found navel circumference to be the best free method—fat gets reduced equally over entire body, and navel is where there’s a lot of fat, and very little muscle or anything else there, so changes in navel circumference are very good indicator of progress. But that’s just a personal benchmark.
all papers show it’s [surgery] by a huge margin the most effective way of long term weight loss
I don’t have any evidence yet, but I claim that we can engineer a better way.
Thanks for the points about the problems with scale weight and the sensible alternative of navel circumference. I do think, though, that scale weight is not a crazy proxy, with some precautions (such as gradual loss). After all, if you’re far from your bodyfat goal (and you’re not a bodybuilder) then you know with certainty that the scale will say a smaller number when you’re done. What I tell people is to first “kibotz” down to an upper bound on their ideal weight and then switch to a better metric.
You will have significant amount of muscles that you might loss even if you don’t have anything to do with bodybuilding. Most seriously restricted diets put you on insufficient proteins (if you scale everything by the same %, you have insufficient proteins, and vitamins etc.), plus there’s no reserve storage mechanism like with carbs and fats so you cannot just average them weekly, so your muscles are the only reserve source your body can use. So you will lose a lot of muscle, and all associated water, what will result in much faster weight loss than just losing fat on responsible diet.
The main difference is that normal people will rebounce back to normal amount of muscle, regaining all the water too etc. (that’s part but not all of the whole after-diet rebounce) Bodybuilders cannot really do that, as they have much more muscles than they’re supposed to.
Anyway if kibotzer works for you, go for it. I’m just guessing it won’t work for most people, for the same reasons mainstream dieting doesn’t.
My “unless you’re a bodybuilder” caveat was just to point out that if you have, say, over a third bodyfat then you surely want your scale weight to go down as a side effect of losing the bodyfat, unless you also want to add massive amounts of muscle.
But we do mostly agree about the physiology and you definitely should add muscle as part of “weight loss”. Muscle pretty much burns calories just sitting there, so it’s a huge help. I definitely recommend some weight training as part of any fitness plan. Losing weight by just eating less can often be a death spiral where you have to keep eating less and less as your metabolism adapts to the fewer calories. The human body is impressively adept at maintaining its weight. Another thing I recommend is having occasional flat spots on your “yellow brick road”. If it’s hard to keep from gaining, let alone losing, then you’re doing it wrong.
I guess we’re getting far afield from the anti-akrasia aspects though. Again, kibotzer is agnostic about what metric you use to measure your progress, though the simpler it is to measure the better. (And we’ve put thought into the case of scale weight as a metric, figuring out how to adjust for random fluctuations and how to avoid losing weight the wrong way, like you’re talking about.)
So I think we agree, “seriously restricted diets” are bad news and muscle gain should be part of any “weight loss” plan. But for most people that still means a gradually decreasing scale weight so I stand by it as a useful metric.
Interesting that you mention surgery.
I believe that much of the benefit of stomach surgery can be achieved without the actual surgery. The surgery costs on the order of $20,000 and is typically not covered by insurance—people are actually coughing up those amounts. What it accomplishes is to make you feel physically ill when you eat too much. That’s all. There’s no other magic going on. It just makes you eat less.
Or, more specifically, makes you want to eat less, since otherwise you’ll be nauseated. So, what if you put the $20,000 in escrow and had a yellow brick road to follow such that if you ever went off the road, even for just a day, the $20,000 would be gone? You would first starve yourself for a while to make sure you were safely below the road. Then you would be cautious for a while. If you ever got close to the edge of the road then you’d really be nervous. That piece of pie would not look so appetizing. It could possibly be enough to put you over the edge. It might be a $20k piece of pie. You would really not want to eat it.
Finally, to respond to your point about weight loss vs fat loss, we don’t disagree, just that if you’re well outside your ideal weight range then scale weight is a perfectly good proxy for what you really care about and has the advantage of being much simpler to measure.
I never done surgery, I just know all papers show it’s by a huge margin the most effective way of long term weight loss without least rebouncing of all. It beats all drug and diet based solutions ever tested by a huge margin. So diet would be no substitute for it. But I don’t know anything more than pubmed and Wikipedia now, so I will shut up about it.
What I do know is that scale weight is a horrible proxy during dieting, because there are so many trivial ways to make very good progress by losing water (in so many different ways), and by losing muscles with any kind of shitty diet with serious calorie restriction. Actual fat lose only happens very slowly, and it’s even possible to lose a lot of fat while on calorie deficit and building up weight—muscles are mostly water, so their scale weight per calorie is very high compared to fat.
I would even risk the suggestion that it’s one of the main reasons why dieting fails—people still use this unbelievably wrong proxy to track their progress. Unfortunately body fat % as returned by cheap resistance based meters is extremely unreliable too. I found navel circumference to be the best free method—fat gets reduced equally over entire body, and navel is where there’s a lot of fat, and very little muscle or anything else there, so changes in navel circumference are very good indicator of progress. But that’s just a personal benchmark.
I don’t have any evidence yet, but I claim that we can engineer a better way.
Thanks for the points about the problems with scale weight and the sensible alternative of navel circumference. I do think, though, that scale weight is not a crazy proxy, with some precautions (such as gradual loss). After all, if you’re far from your bodyfat goal (and you’re not a bodybuilder) then you know with certainty that the scale will say a smaller number when you’re done. What I tell people is to first “kibotz” down to an upper bound on their ideal weight and then switch to a better metric.
In any case, Kibotzer is largely metric-agnostic.
You will have significant amount of muscles that you might loss even if you don’t have anything to do with bodybuilding. Most seriously restricted diets put you on insufficient proteins (if you scale everything by the same %, you have insufficient proteins, and vitamins etc.), plus there’s no reserve storage mechanism like with carbs and fats so you cannot just average them weekly, so your muscles are the only reserve source your body can use. So you will lose a lot of muscle, and all associated water, what will result in much faster weight loss than just losing fat on responsible diet.
The main difference is that normal people will rebounce back to normal amount of muscle, regaining all the water too etc. (that’s part but not all of the whole after-diet rebounce) Bodybuilders cannot really do that, as they have much more muscles than they’re supposed to.
Anyway if kibotzer works for you, go for it. I’m just guessing it won’t work for most people, for the same reasons mainstream dieting doesn’t.
My “unless you’re a bodybuilder” caveat was just to point out that if you have, say, over a third bodyfat then you surely want your scale weight to go down as a side effect of losing the bodyfat, unless you also want to add massive amounts of muscle.
But we do mostly agree about the physiology and you definitely should add muscle as part of “weight loss”. Muscle pretty much burns calories just sitting there, so it’s a huge help. I definitely recommend some weight training as part of any fitness plan. Losing weight by just eating less can often be a death spiral where you have to keep eating less and less as your metabolism adapts to the fewer calories. The human body is impressively adept at maintaining its weight. Another thing I recommend is having occasional flat spots on your “yellow brick road”. If it’s hard to keep from gaining, let alone losing, then you’re doing it wrong.
I guess we’re getting far afield from the anti-akrasia aspects though. Again, kibotzer is agnostic about what metric you use to measure your progress, though the simpler it is to measure the better. (And we’ve put thought into the case of scale weight as a metric, figuring out how to adjust for random fluctuations and how to avoid losing weight the wrong way, like you’re talking about.)
So I think we agree, “seriously restricted diets” are bad news and muscle gain should be part of any “weight loss” plan. But for most people that still means a gradually decreasing scale weight so I stand by it as a useful metric.