Well, I'd say that the endocrine reason sounds like a valid one. I can at least be counted in that group.
Last December, I was diagnosed with T2 diabetes. After talking with a researcher about this (have worked with diabetes research school locally due to job), I came across a few things:
1. Damage is done to the pancreas at 140mg/dL
2. Too long at 140mg/dL or above can cause permanent damage to the pancreas.
3. Early estimates indicate that 110mg/dL is a lower limit of beginning damage to the pancreas
Ok. There's a lot of moving parts in food. Nutritionists will tell you all sorts of bunkum, other than mineral assays and tests have discovered. But there's a simple way here: keep blood sugar under 140mg/dL, no matter what.
Is that possible? To keep your blood sugar under 140mg/dL? Yes. The answer is "Don't eat foods that raise your blood sugar above 140mg/dL". That's interestingly easy. What it amounts to, is cutting out sugars and carbohydrates out of your diet, and extensively testing when you come across foods you're unsure of.
My research shows that all the standard sugars are bad for me (Sucrose, glucose, fructose, lactose). I spike, and then fall. It also depends on what I'm eating with them. In those cases the rise and fall are longer.
Some complex carbohydrates I can handle. Potatoes are a nope, as are bread products. But spaghetti squash works with me well. I can handle it nicely, with a very low rise and fall.
I also end up eating a lot of fats, protein, and veggies. But I don't crave sugar at all. I've always liked meats, and this gives me the ability to continue that.
^ This times 1000000. There is so much chicanery and malfeasance in the nutrition and fitness industry.
I was diagnosed with T2 diabetes a few years ago. I went to dietitian who prescribed a diet with 60% carbs (I believe its roughly the same as the ADA dietary guidelines). The standard treatment is medication, followed by more medication, then insulin shots.
Frustrated, I read everything I could get my hands on, and found two books that I'd highly recommend: 1) Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution, and 2) Think Like a Pancreas by Gary Scheiner. Dr. Bernstein is notable because he was diagnosed with T1 when it was a fatal condition. He survived, became an electrical engineer and ultimately went on to become an MD. He lobbied the AMA to allow patients to have blood glucose meters, when the AMA wanted them to be restricted to doctors offices.
I stopped listening to medical practitioners and starting experimenting with the foods I ate, using pairs testing with a glucose monitor. There is no question that a low carb diet is the way to go.
Buying a blood glucose meter is not an expensive investment (provided you don't really need it, ie. don't have diabetes) and it will pay dividends in terms of health. With a meter and about 200 strips and lancets, you can determine a big list of foods that raise your blood glucose and foods that don't.
I've been customizing my meals based on what my glucose meter tells me raises my blood glucose the least and I am losing weight. The weight loss is gradual, but the most important thing is I am doing it eating foods I will eat, setting up a diet I can stick to long term, and I know that this will be good for me because the numbers back it up. Like you, I've always liked meats and testing myself with the glucose meter shows that eating more meats and less carbs is good for me personally. I should note I am not diagnosed with diabetes, I just bought the glucose meter to guide me in what I eat.
I came here to say very similar to what you're saying. I'm down 50 pounds in a little over a year after being obese my entire life, with very minimal exercise (I walk to and from work, about 3 miles a day, but only walking) but weight-loss and slimming has accelerated greatly after cutting out carbs and sugars, which wasn't as painful as it seemed - replacing carb-rich noodles with Zucchini or Spaghetti Squash is amazing.
Lots of fats, proteins, and veggies, staying away from carbs and sugar, and I feel better than any other time in my entire life (at 34). I'm no longer eating simply to eat, and at this point I'm not craving the crap I used to. The sickness that now ensues after ingesting processed sugars or carbs, does make it easy to skip. While this story is anecdotal, it seemed worth a try because I kept stumbling on research supporting it.
I think the problem with most sugars is that most people don't understand that the bulk of it is stored as glycogen in the muscular system.
Sugars really only have several places to go once they are ingested: Held in the fiber of undigested food, blood stream, liver and muscles.
We do really well with vegetables even though they are carbs since veggies are mostly fiber and very low carb. The high glycemic foods are okay provided that muscle glycogen is going-to-be/has-been depleted in the form of physical exertion.
Building muscle would also increases ones capacity for storing said glucose, but it's not easy or popular since the rate of muscle growth at best is about 1-2lbs/month under ideal conditions of physical exertion, nutrition and rest.
However, exercise and low-glycemic diets do explain the efficacy of reveesing t2 diabetes.
The results of this study, while interesting, seem flawed to me because losing 200+lbs in only 8 months' time is ridiculously fast. I would be more interested in a study following people who lost weight very slowly and steadily over time, and curious about their metabolisms and recidivism rates.
I've lost 100lbs over the last three years and have had zero issue (so far, not saying I won't ever) with keeping at this weight. I maintained the same weight, +/- 3lbs, for most of 2015 without counting calories or following a diet. In December 2015, I decided I was ready to start intentionally losing more weight, so I tracked calories and lost an additional 15lbs over the course of three months. My experience with losing weight and maintaining weight loss are completely different than the results of the study in the OP, and I am curious how much of that difference can be chalked up to how long it took me to lose that weight.
Studies like the one in the OP are fascinating to me because no one seems to go "Hey, your body achieved homeostasis at 450lbs (maintaining that homeostasis for however many years the person was at that weight) and it probably royally screwed with everything dropping half your body weight in 8 month's time." It seems obvious to me that at that point the body is in full blown crisis mode trying to get back to the homeostasis it had developed previously. Eight months is not a long enough time to adapt to a new homeostasis, not to mention whether or not the body is freaking out because it's "starving" and dropping fat stores at such a high rate.
I seem similar. I've lost 92 lbs over 8 months, and I don't seem to be having problems. In particular, I'm not having any feelings of hunger. I've pretty consistently been averaging a tad under 2000 calories/day, 35% carbs, 21% proteins, 44% fats.
One interesting thing is that if I go significantly over 2000 calories in a day, which happens maybe once every couple of weeks, I find myself automatically eating less the next day. For example, last Thursday I went over (2390), and then Friday I went way under (1150). I went over Saturday (2240), and under Sunday (1740).
I'm hoping the fact that I'm not feeling hungry eating this way, and the fact that if I go over my goal I automatically go under afterwards means that my body is adapting well to the way I'm eating and so I won't have trouble continuing to lose weight and keeping it off.
I've done similar twice before. Those ultimately failed, but I believe I know why. Both times I changed my eating habits, lost weight, and it was staying off. Then both times I had major career changes that threw my schedule into disarray. I didn't have time usually for home prepared meals or sit down restaurant meals. For instance in the first case I was working at a small consulting firm that specialized in taking contracts to step in on failing firmware projects for new hardware and redesign/rewrite the firmware--and these were fixed price contracts with hard deadlines and penalties for missing the deadlines. I'd often be in the office very late, and by the time I realized I needed food the only places open were fast food drive throughs, or the Dominos half a block down the street.
Next time I have a job change, I'm going to make sure that the new job won't mess up my eating habits even if it means taking lower pay.
How many times have you lost and regained? I ask because I am a little older and have done that cycle multiple times. This last time I am going on a decade without periods of large weight gain. The first time you lose a lot of weight you feel like you have it mastered and that is one of the ways your brain gets you. Eventually you figure you have it handled, relax and then two years goes by and you are heaver than when you started. I've done that at least 3 times
Maybe there's something different about the metabolism of people who manage to reach a weight of 450lbs in the first place. Without exercise and watching what you eat, almost everyone will gain weight, but most people never get anywhere close to the 300lbs+ range.
The article did also talk about people who lost 360 calories per day by urinating it out. They also unwittingly at 200 more calories per day. This amounts to losing something like 1.5 pounds per month. But they also note that this increase in calories eaten is what causes weight gain later -- so even slow approaches hit the same problem.
And while 3 years is good -- you really should watch for over 5-10 years. I previously lost about 40 pounds, and kept it off for about 6 years. Over the course of four years after that I gained most of it back. About 8 pounds per year like clockwork. I didn't even realize it was happening until I was 18 months or so into gaining the weight back. I did nothing different the first six years versus the last four. But something happened...
I managed to lose 40 pounds last year, using intermittent fasting. That impressed people, but what's impressed me is how easy it was to keep it off. I expected to have to do a lot more work than I have, I really seemed to have found a new 'set point', where I can simply let my body self-regulate eating and I won't gain weight. Sometimes it even goes down.
I think a person's state of mind plays a huge role. I used IF because it seemed the easiest way to incorporate a sustained caloric deficit into my lifestyle. The knob of "how many times a day I'm eating" was far easier to tweak than "what I'm eating" or "how much I eat when I'm eating." I'm just really fucking lazy and found that over time, skipping meals works with my laziness.
With IF, I can eat what I want, as much as I want, just only once a day. I used to be really strict about once a day, now I'll have a snack here and there, sometimes I'll even have what amounts to a light meal outside of my main one. Getting adjusted was a pain, but I'd alleviate it by eating small amounts outside of the 'window' and trust that I'd cheat less over time. Which I more or less did.
Ultimately I feel it's not really worth it to try to fight your body too hard. If your system perceives a shock, it will defend itself. But humans seem hard-wired for big, dramatic gestures, and so they'll do grievous damage to their metabolic systems like crash dieting simply because they can't trust themselves to maintain a safer, more sustainable course of action like simply "eating less and exercising more." I think a lot of people think of the idea of "sustained lifestyle change" and balk. Like they can never eat ice cream again or something.
Yeah, the actual mechanics of losing weight is pretty basic calories-in calories-out. The difficult part is engaging in behavior that consistently gives a caloric deficit without making unsustainable trade-offs against willpower or other things. Intermittent fasting is a very good way to remove "how much willpower do I spend while holding a fork and looking at food" out of the weight-loss equation. I lost about 60 pounds using keto, which basically moves all decision making over what to eat (and gives compelling reasons to stay on the wagon - restarting the ketogenic biochemistry is not a particularly fun process).
I'll concur with this. I have been practicing one meal/day for almost 3 years now. I think it took my body over a year to really adjust to all the benefits. Now I realize I have some big eating days, some small eating days, I mostly crave healthy stuff and I let the rest take care of itself.
I've never been overweight, but eating ~once per day works for me too.
Good point that laziness helps. Being busy helps. Eating only after exercising (I run ~3 miles daily) also helps.
Eating only once per day also helps to learn what food is good and bad for me. If hours after the meal I feel bad taste in my mouth - the food probably had a component that I should eat less. Sugar in big quantities is definitely once such bad component.
I think the message here is to listen to your body. Too often one finds themselves eating just because they were invited to lunch, or even because they are bored. If you listen to your body and just eat when you are hungry, magical things will happen.
Extreme diligence seems to be the only way to fight this. If I stop exercising, the pounds pack on within weeks. If I insure I burn at least 3000 calories a day (usually much more), I can maintain my weight indefinitely. But I walk to work and I exercise for 1-2 hours daily. Most people cannot or will not do this.
Add in the extreme carbohydrate and fat-laden diets most readily available to America and it's a perfect storm for our Wall-E future, no?
When I cook at home, I can avoid this by eating a little bit of meat/tofu/tempeh/etc with a pile of greens, but restaurant fare is a little bit of vegetables, a small slab of meat, and a super-size portion of some fancy grain of the week if not just white rice. Sigh...
> A study of Season 8’s contestants has yielded surprising new discoveries about the physiology of obesity
No it didn't. Just another example of junk science.
> Now burns 800 fewer calories a day than would be expected for a man his size.
"Expected for a man of his size" is a fiction. What they are insinuating here is that the rapid weight loss did long term damage to his metabolism. But to confirm that, you have to have data on what is burn rate was when he was previously at his current 295 weight. (Which he must have reached at some point in his life long before the participation of Biggest Loser, on his way to becoming 400-something). Comparing to what can be "expected" based on plugging 295 into some model is not adequate.
Maybe he previously also burned hundreds of calories less than what can be expected of someone of his weight. Maybe it's been like that most of his life!
Now, here's my opinion, and I know it might be wrong. Anyone, please feel free to correct me, but:
Everything I've read suggests that 1lb muscle requires about 50 calories a day to maintain.
The workout programs these contestants are using are focused solely on cardio, or very heavily focused on cardio.
If as part of the 239lb weight loss, Mr Cahill lost 8lbs-10lbs of muscle (and never regained it), there's your entire 400-500 calorie difference right there.
Like I said, I could totally be wrong, but over the last year I lost 93lbs (as of today), but my measured BMR is actually higher than it should be (and higher than it was when I started). I attribute that difference to my focus on lifting weights more than cardio.
1) How do you know biology hasn't changed? The human gut microbiome has changed wildly over the past 50 to 100 years due to changes in modern diet.
2) Another point, the article is talking about the biology of people who have already been obese and then lost the weight. Given that people have more disposable income and obesity trends have risen, the inability to lose weight only after you first become obese would help explain why things like childhood obesity have negative impacts for the rest of a person's life.
>Fifty years ago, two-thirds of the USA were not obese. Biology has not changed in that time. What has?
Other commentators have mentioned the food aspect, but there are significant lifestyle changes since the 50s. The rise of the suburbs greatly reduced the amount of walking for many Americans to basically just walking to a car in the morning and walking from a car in the evening, with maybe some walking back and forth to a bathroom or water cooler in between. Contrast that to the past where most American cities were laid out with public transit in mind (including LA; it used to boast a larger rail system than NYC). This meant burning more calories just to exist.
I myself moved from the land of sprawl to a walkable urban city and I lost quite a bit of weight since most, but not all, of my trips were on foot, bike, or public transit. Very few trips were undertaken in a car. I then moved to NYC and get even more activity, though that's counterbalanced by the delicious food everywhere.
You'll notice that most walkable urban areas tend to be slimmer than sprawling areas, all else being equal.
Fat cells never go away once you've got them. Fat cells also really don't want to be empty. When you loose weight the fat is broken up in to H2O and CO2 (you literally breath and pee fat away) but the fat cell generally holds onto the water for a while and then, along with a load of other fat cells, will expel that water in one go(which is why you tend to keep a stable weight for a few days and then find you've lost 1 or 2 lbs "overnight"). It's called the Woosh effect I think?
Problem is that the body doesn't want to get rid of that fat cell because "hey, it might be handy one day to store extra energy when we can't eat for a few days because the baboons ate everything" and so it's fairly easy to top that cell back up with fat in the future.
With regards to the slow metabolism refereced in the article (I skimmed it) this is tied to leptin levels which needs to be topped up with "refeed days" every now and then just to kick start you metabolism again. A refeed day is basically a day where you eat a lot of carbs and keep your protein and fat as they usually are on the normal diet days.
Very broadly speaking (and short cutting lots of science and variations), it is easier for a previously fat person to get fat again than it is for a skinny person to get fat in the first place.
Often forgotten is the incredible increase in drug consumption. Popular drugs like painkillers or antidepressants can have a significant effect on body weight. For the pharmaceutical industry it's like having a cake and eating it too: develop new drugs to fight weight gain, weight gain that can be caused by other drugs.
> Fifty years ago, two-thirds of the USA were not obese.
2/3 are not obese now.
(2/3 are overweight, including about 1/3 that are obese.)
> Biology has not changed in that time.
Assumes facts not in evidence, but lets assume that's true.
> What has?
Well, the sharp uptick in obesity (which pretty much drives the overweight including obese upward trend, the overweight-but-not-obese proportion has stayed pretty flat) starts in the late 1970s, immediately following the peak in real hourly wages. Given that (ironically, given that richer countries have higher rates of obesity than poor countries) individual obesity in the United States is correlated with poor economic status, its not entirely implausible that there's a significant economic contribution to the obesity epidemic.
> Fifty years ago, two-thirds of the USA were not obese. Biology has not changed in that time. What has?
I wish more people would ask this question. It's extremely innocent and straightforward, and replies to it are incredibly revealing of the respondents' understanding of biology . . .
In the other direction, see the documentary "Why Are Thin People Not Fat" where a group of thin volunteers are overfed by about double their normal calories for 4 weeks:
They all easily return to their starting weight, and at least one volunteer gains muscle but not fat. The body is amazing at maintaining homeostasis. Here's an nytimes article from 2011 that discusses much the same thing as the article submitted:
> Mr. Cahill was one of the worst off. As he regained more than 100 pounds, his metabolism slowed so much that, just to maintain his current weight of 295 pounds, he now has to eat 800 calories a day less than a typical man his size. Anything more turns to fat.
Presenting the numbers like this seems intentionally confusing. Casually reading this seems like he's eating 800 calories a day and still gaining weight.
What they're really saying is that he's eat $AVG_295_LB_MAN_CALORIES - 800 per day. That's probably around 4000 calories a day.
I really need to lose weight, my heaviness has started to lead to other health problems, but I find that whenever I try to eat significantly less, I have difficulty concentrating on heavy mental tasks (i.e. programming, my job).
The constant feeling of hunger distracts me, or my mind just drifts, until I get some food in me again.
I never see any of these articles even acknowledge this as an issue, either as if no one else has this problem, or no one else who is dieting has a job that requires so much brain power.
Since there's other programmers here, I was curious if other people have noticed something similar, and how they addressed it.
My current plan is not so much to limit my eating (beyond some mild calorie restriction) and instead force myself to exercise more often, but I'd like to be a bit more aggressive with my diet if possible.
May be a little uncomfortable, but way better than screwing up your metabolism via extreme dieting. I'm consistently perplexed as to why the ice-vest-under-the-clothes weight loss method hasn't taken off yet.
I can give personal, anecdotal experience as to why this happens and a chart from Withings will illustrate perfectly. I know what I have to do now, and I'm fighting like hell to make it happen.
Boxers and other people doing martial arts competitively have always known this. There has been a "walking around weight" concept since I can remember. Maintaining lower or, even more importantly in that context, higher weight takes concentrated effort.
BTW it's a really weird post-Christian belief that there is some you apart from your body and it can do things against your will.
"Soon the scale hit 265. Mr. Cahill started weighing and measuring his food again and stepped up his exercise. He got back down to 235 to 240 pounds. But his weight edged up again, to 275, then 295.
His slow metabolism is part of the problem, and so are his food cravings. He opens a bag of chips, thinking he will have just a few. “I’d eat five bites. Then I’d black out and eat the whole bag of chips and say, ‘What did I do?’”"
The article is light on the details post-TBL, but it sounds like recidivism in terms of diet is probably a major root cause of weight gain. Also, maybe it's hard to tell whether they're doing steady-state cardio or high-intensity interval training (steady-state cardio has been shown to paradoxically cause weight gain in people). In any case, it sounds like they need more guidance and check-ins post-show.
There was an article on /r/science 1 or 2 weeks ago which stated that the body needs about a year after the weight-loss to accept the new weight as normal. Before that normalization is done it is very easy to regain the initial weight, after the normalization it gets easier.
TLDR: Blood sugar spikes above certain level are toxic, so the body responds with an emergency action of stashing the sugar wherever possible, including muscle, liver, and fat tissue. The former two are rather limited in their capacity, while the latter is unlimited. Ongoing elevated levels of sugars in the bloodstream is an ongoing cleanup job for the fat cells, and they never get aground to release the accumulated energy back into circulation.
At the "hardware" level, that's all there is to obesity - overabundance of quick carbs (sugars, flour, starch).
I'm curious about how the metabolic rate of these former contestants is determined. Are they confined to a lab where their dietary intake and physical activity can be accurately measured for an extended period of time? Probably not. My best guess is that the subjects being studied are asked to keep food and activity journals and then these, plus their weight, is used to calculate their metabolic rate.
I've experimented with keeping a food journal in the past, and it's exceptionally difficult to keep track of everything you eat without this extra work impacting your food choices. e.g. The chore of writing stuff down might prevent me from casually snagging a handful of nuts on my way through the kitchen, and consciousness about how it will look in the journal might make me pass on those chips. Even ignoring these problems, it takes a lot of effort to produce even remotely useful data. e.g. "I ate a pear." is actually pretty vague. Breed, size, and ripeness all have a pretty big impact on the nutrients you'll get from that pear. You need to weigh everything as a bare minimum. Also, you need to keep the journal all of the time, because if you keep it for just a week or two that sample likely won't be very representative of your normal habits.
Likewise, activities are hard to keep track of. With a fairly standard ergometer (such as a Concept2 rower) you can get a reasonable measure of activity level in a workout. Lifting weights, running, walking, etc. are all much, much vaguer. 30 minutes of "moderate jogging" means different things to different people. Most people are likely to overestimate or habitually pad their activities.
So, you have a really vague, spitballed idea of what these people are eating and doing, combined with weight gain. Are their metabolisms really slower than expected, or is there a systematic error common to these people in that, after a period of extreme privation (i.e. the competition) in which some of them lost more than a pound a day, they are now underestimating their food intake and overestimating their activity levels?
How much can basal human metabolism really vary anyways? If humans can get by on substantially fewer calories, why don't we all typically do this? Where does all the extra energy normal people inefficiently burn off go?
It's worth noting that the amounts by which their metabolism was lowered are not as shocking as they seem at first.
The 300 calories a day difference in calories burned is very limiting if your BMR is 1800. But for some of these contestants their BMR, even at the lower weights, might be 2000 calories per day. And if they do moderate exercise, they can burn up to 1000 calories more than this. If you are expending 3000 calories per day then a 300 calorie difference is minimal.
Isolating a few of the variables would help clarify some of the questions this study raises:
1) Amount of excess weight / median weight. E.g. Does the effect of the bodies homeostasis change as a person gets more severely overweight?
2) Speed of weight loss. Does loosing 1lb/day/week/month affect the bodies homeostasis differently?
3) Types of foods affect on homeostasis. Do substances like sugar have a worse effect than others? Does a diet high in something like vegetables tend towards a healthier homeostasis?
4) Amount of time for homeostatic change. Does being 100lbs overweight for a year or 5 years make a difference?
>> And with his report from Dr. Hall’s group showing just how much his metabolism had slowed, he stopped blaming himself for his weight gain.
Its critical to help people struggling with weight loss to deal not only with the nutritional challenges, but also psychological issues behind weight loss (guilt, depression, helplessness). However, presenting the problem as a binary (purely biological vs purely will) may actually not be the best approach. The individuals still played a part in their initial weight gain. The repeated dietary decisions leading to obesity are obviously complicated by family history, misinformation, failure to realize the full consequences, and other factors both within and outside the control of the person. And neither does the person's complicity, to whatever extent, in gaining weight mean they should receive any less sympathy or help. I say this because of the persistence of the myth that weight gain can be easily undone with just a few weeks/months of discipline, a myth perpetuated by shows like The Big Loser. Weight gain is an insidious danger that can have long lasting implications and be very difficult to extricate oneself from. That point seems quite clear from the research but never addressed in the article.
[+] [-] kefka|10 years ago|reply
Last December, I was diagnosed with T2 diabetes. After talking with a researcher about this (have worked with diabetes research school locally due to job), I came across a few things:
1. Damage is done to the pancreas at 140mg/dL 2. Too long at 140mg/dL or above can cause permanent damage to the pancreas. 3. Early estimates indicate that 110mg/dL is a lower limit of beginning damage to the pancreas
Ok. There's a lot of moving parts in food. Nutritionists will tell you all sorts of bunkum, other than mineral assays and tests have discovered. But there's a simple way here: keep blood sugar under 140mg/dL, no matter what.
Is that possible? To keep your blood sugar under 140mg/dL? Yes. The answer is "Don't eat foods that raise your blood sugar above 140mg/dL". That's interestingly easy. What it amounts to, is cutting out sugars and carbohydrates out of your diet, and extensively testing when you come across foods you're unsure of.
My research shows that all the standard sugars are bad for me (Sucrose, glucose, fructose, lactose). I spike, and then fall. It also depends on what I'm eating with them. In those cases the rise and fall are longer.
Some complex carbohydrates I can handle. Potatoes are a nope, as are bread products. But spaghetti squash works with me well. I can handle it nicely, with a very low rise and fall.
I also end up eating a lot of fats, protein, and veggies. But I don't crave sugar at all. I've always liked meats, and this gives me the ability to continue that.
[+] [-] atria|10 years ago|reply
I was diagnosed with T2 diabetes a few years ago. I went to dietitian who prescribed a diet with 60% carbs (I believe its roughly the same as the ADA dietary guidelines). The standard treatment is medication, followed by more medication, then insulin shots.
Frustrated, I read everything I could get my hands on, and found two books that I'd highly recommend: 1) Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution, and 2) Think Like a Pancreas by Gary Scheiner. Dr. Bernstein is notable because he was diagnosed with T1 when it was a fatal condition. He survived, became an electrical engineer and ultimately went on to become an MD. He lobbied the AMA to allow patients to have blood glucose meters, when the AMA wanted them to be restricted to doctors offices.
I stopped listening to medical practitioners and starting experimenting with the foods I ate, using pairs testing with a glucose monitor. There is no question that a low carb diet is the way to go.
[+] [-] xlm1717|10 years ago|reply
I've been customizing my meals based on what my glucose meter tells me raises my blood glucose the least and I am losing weight. The weight loss is gradual, but the most important thing is I am doing it eating foods I will eat, setting up a diet I can stick to long term, and I know that this will be good for me because the numbers back it up. Like you, I've always liked meats and testing myself with the glucose meter shows that eating more meats and less carbs is good for me personally. I should note I am not diagnosed with diabetes, I just bought the glucose meter to guide me in what I eat.
[+] [-] utternerd|10 years ago|reply
Lots of fats, proteins, and veggies, staying away from carbs and sugar, and I feel better than any other time in my entire life (at 34). I'm no longer eating simply to eat, and at this point I'm not craving the crap I used to. The sickness that now ensues after ingesting processed sugars or carbs, does make it easy to skip. While this story is anecdotal, it seemed worth a try because I kept stumbling on research supporting it.
[+] [-] itchyouch|10 years ago|reply
Sugars really only have several places to go once they are ingested: Held in the fiber of undigested food, blood stream, liver and muscles.
We do really well with vegetables even though they are carbs since veggies are mostly fiber and very low carb. The high glycemic foods are okay provided that muscle glycogen is going-to-be/has-been depleted in the form of physical exertion.
Building muscle would also increases ones capacity for storing said glucose, but it's not easy or popular since the rate of muscle growth at best is about 1-2lbs/month under ideal conditions of physical exertion, nutrition and rest.
However, exercise and low-glycemic diets do explain the efficacy of reveesing t2 diabetes.
[+] [-] criddell|10 years ago|reply
Is that related to glycemic index?
[+] [-] pitchka|10 years ago|reply
At first I was heavy on meat when I removed the carbs but it didn't help at all.
[+] [-] sageabilly|10 years ago|reply
I've lost 100lbs over the last three years and have had zero issue (so far, not saying I won't ever) with keeping at this weight. I maintained the same weight, +/- 3lbs, for most of 2015 without counting calories or following a diet. In December 2015, I decided I was ready to start intentionally losing more weight, so I tracked calories and lost an additional 15lbs over the course of three months. My experience with losing weight and maintaining weight loss are completely different than the results of the study in the OP, and I am curious how much of that difference can be chalked up to how long it took me to lose that weight.
Studies like the one in the OP are fascinating to me because no one seems to go "Hey, your body achieved homeostasis at 450lbs (maintaining that homeostasis for however many years the person was at that weight) and it probably royally screwed with everything dropping half your body weight in 8 month's time." It seems obvious to me that at that point the body is in full blown crisis mode trying to get back to the homeostasis it had developed previously. Eight months is not a long enough time to adapt to a new homeostasis, not to mention whether or not the body is freaking out because it's "starving" and dropping fat stores at such a high rate.
[+] [-] tzs|10 years ago|reply
One interesting thing is that if I go significantly over 2000 calories in a day, which happens maybe once every couple of weeks, I find myself automatically eating less the next day. For example, last Thursday I went over (2390), and then Friday I went way under (1150). I went over Saturday (2240), and under Sunday (1740).
I'm hoping the fact that I'm not feeling hungry eating this way, and the fact that if I go over my goal I automatically go under afterwards means that my body is adapting well to the way I'm eating and so I won't have trouble continuing to lose weight and keeping it off.
I've done similar twice before. Those ultimately failed, but I believe I know why. Both times I changed my eating habits, lost weight, and it was staying off. Then both times I had major career changes that threw my schedule into disarray. I didn't have time usually for home prepared meals or sit down restaurant meals. For instance in the first case I was working at a small consulting firm that specialized in taking contracts to step in on failing firmware projects for new hardware and redesign/rewrite the firmware--and these were fixed price contracts with hard deadlines and penalties for missing the deadlines. I'd often be in the office very late, and by the time I realized I needed food the only places open were fast food drive throughs, or the Dominos half a block down the street.
Next time I have a job change, I'm going to make sure that the new job won't mess up my eating habits even if it means taking lower pay.
[+] [-] gmarx|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wobbleblob|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kenjackson|10 years ago|reply
And while 3 years is good -- you really should watch for over 5-10 years. I previously lost about 40 pounds, and kept it off for about 6 years. Over the course of four years after that I gained most of it back. About 8 pounds per year like clockwork. I didn't even realize it was happening until I was 18 months or so into gaining the weight back. I did nothing different the first six years versus the last four. But something happened...
[+] [-] cowardlydragon|10 years ago|reply
Of course the problem is that people drop back into their same lifestyles, and American lifestyles are pathetically nonactive.
Hint: 20 minutes 3 times a week is not "active". It's just better than pathetic.
[+] [-] jschwartzi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vinceguidry|10 years ago|reply
I think a person's state of mind plays a huge role. I used IF because it seemed the easiest way to incorporate a sustained caloric deficit into my lifestyle. The knob of "how many times a day I'm eating" was far easier to tweak than "what I'm eating" or "how much I eat when I'm eating." I'm just really fucking lazy and found that over time, skipping meals works with my laziness.
With IF, I can eat what I want, as much as I want, just only once a day. I used to be really strict about once a day, now I'll have a snack here and there, sometimes I'll even have what amounts to a light meal outside of my main one. Getting adjusted was a pain, but I'd alleviate it by eating small amounts outside of the 'window' and trust that I'd cheat less over time. Which I more or less did.
Ultimately I feel it's not really worth it to try to fight your body too hard. If your system perceives a shock, it will defend itself. But humans seem hard-wired for big, dramatic gestures, and so they'll do grievous damage to their metabolic systems like crash dieting simply because they can't trust themselves to maintain a safer, more sustainable course of action like simply "eating less and exercising more." I think a lot of people think of the idea of "sustained lifestyle change" and balk. Like they can never eat ice cream again or something.
[+] [-] ThrustVectoring|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emodendroket|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rickdale|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dennisgorelik|10 years ago|reply
Good point that laziness helps. Being busy helps. Eating only after exercising (I run ~3 miles daily) also helps.
Eating only once per day also helps to learn what food is good and bad for me. If hours after the meal I feel bad taste in my mouth - the food probably had a component that I should eat less. Sugar in big quantities is definitely once such bad component.
[+] [-] humbleMouse|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] varelse|10 years ago|reply
Add in the extreme carbohydrate and fat-laden diets most readily available to America and it's a perfect storm for our Wall-E future, no?
When I cook at home, I can avoid this by eating a little bit of meat/tofu/tempeh/etc with a pile of greens, but restaurant fare is a little bit of vegetables, a small slab of meat, and a super-size portion of some fancy grain of the week if not just white rice. Sigh...
[+] [-] kazinator|10 years ago|reply
No it didn't. Just another example of junk science.
> Now burns 800 fewer calories a day than would be expected for a man his size.
"Expected for a man of his size" is a fiction. What they are insinuating here is that the rapid weight loss did long term damage to his metabolism. But to confirm that, you have to have data on what is burn rate was when he was previously at his current 295 weight. (Which he must have reached at some point in his life long before the participation of Biggest Loser, on his way to becoming 400-something). Comparing to what can be "expected" based on plugging 295 into some model is not adequate.
Maybe he previously also burned hundreds of calories less than what can be expected of someone of his weight. Maybe it's been like that most of his life!
[+] [-] bmh_ca|10 years ago|reply
1. the hunger cycle - the hormones emitted during hunger
2. the metabolic cycle - the neuropeptide y's and other such unmemorable names, near the decision making part of the brain
3. the hydrocarbon cycle – the hormones emitted as a result of fat cells that are not flush with hydrocarbons
Diets address number 1. Number 2 and 3 are the more relevant for long-term success, but not enough is understood about them.
Here's a TED talk with some illumination:
https://www.ted.com/talks/sandra_aamodt_why_dieting_doesn_t_...
Research about weight control and loss is further conflated by profit-oriented companies that derive their primary income from "diet cycles".
That said, the failure of dieting is not new information: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/Dieting-Does-Not-Work-UCLA...
The only known sure way to achieve substantial long-term weight loss is hyper-diligence in portion control and metabolic stimulation. Few can do it.
One of the unknowns is whether fasting survives long-term trends, such as the "5-2 fast" https://thefastdiet.co.uk/
All to say, the long-term results of the biggest loser accord with the latest research in weight control and loss.
[+] [-] rnovak|10 years ago|reply
Everything I've read suggests that 1lb muscle requires about 50 calories a day to maintain.
The workout programs these contestants are using are focused solely on cardio, or very heavily focused on cardio.
If as part of the 239lb weight loss, Mr Cahill lost 8lbs-10lbs of muscle (and never regained it), there's your entire 400-500 calorie difference right there.
Like I said, I could totally be wrong, but over the last year I lost 93lbs (as of today), but my measured BMR is actually higher than it should be (and higher than it was when I started). I attribute that difference to my focus on lifting weights more than cardio.
[+] [-] dempseye|10 years ago|reply
Fifty years ago, two-thirds of the USA were not obese. Biology has not changed in that time. What has?
[+] [-] scld|10 years ago|reply
2) Another point, the article is talking about the biology of people who have already been obese and then lost the weight. Given that people have more disposable income and obesity trends have risen, the inability to lose weight only after you first become obese would help explain why things like childhood obesity have negative impacts for the rest of a person's life.
[+] [-] Zach_the_Lizard|10 years ago|reply
Other commentators have mentioned the food aspect, but there are significant lifestyle changes since the 50s. The rise of the suburbs greatly reduced the amount of walking for many Americans to basically just walking to a car in the morning and walking from a car in the evening, with maybe some walking back and forth to a bathroom or water cooler in between. Contrast that to the past where most American cities were laid out with public transit in mind (including LA; it used to boast a larger rail system than NYC). This meant burning more calories just to exist.
I myself moved from the land of sprawl to a walkable urban city and I lost quite a bit of weight since most, but not all, of my trips were on foot, bike, or public transit. Very few trips were undertaken in a car. I then moved to NYC and get even more activity, though that's counterbalanced by the delicious food everywhere.
You'll notice that most walkable urban areas tend to be slimmer than sprawling areas, all else being equal.
[+] [-] simonbarker87|10 years ago|reply
Problem is that the body doesn't want to get rid of that fat cell because "hey, it might be handy one day to store extra energy when we can't eat for a few days because the baboons ate everything" and so it's fairly easy to top that cell back up with fat in the future.
With regards to the slow metabolism refereced in the article (I skimmed it) this is tied to leptin levels which needs to be topped up with "refeed days" every now and then just to kick start you metabolism again. A refeed day is basically a day where you eat a lot of carbs and keep your protein and fat as they usually are on the normal diet days.
Very broadly speaking (and short cutting lots of science and variations), it is easier for a previously fat person to get fat again than it is for a skinny person to get fat in the first place.
[+] [-] wmeredith|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yabatopia|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] padobson|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|10 years ago|reply
2/3 are not obese now.
(2/3 are overweight, including about 1/3 that are obese.)
> Biology has not changed in that time.
Assumes facts not in evidence, but lets assume that's true.
> What has?
Well, the sharp uptick in obesity (which pretty much drives the overweight including obese upward trend, the overweight-but-not-obese proportion has stayed pretty flat) starts in the late 1970s, immediately following the peak in real hourly wages. Given that (ironically, given that richer countries have higher rates of obesity than poor countries) individual obesity in the United States is correlated with poor economic status, its not entirely implausible that there's a significant economic contribution to the obesity epidemic.
[+] [-] jazzyk|10 years ago|reply
But our lifestyles have changed a lot, too.
Most people in sub/urban areas spend 1-2 mins walking to/from their cars and the rest of their waking hours (12+ hours) sitting/eating.
[+] [-] gnur|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] npsimons|10 years ago|reply
I wish more people would ask this question. It's extremely innocent and straightforward, and replies to it are incredibly revealing of the respondents' understanding of biology . . .
[+] [-] pjc50|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] js2|10 years ago|reply
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7838668.stm
http://youtu.be/U1hbPXooB1U
They all easily return to their starting weight, and at least one volunteer gains muscle but not fat. The body is amazing at maintaining homeostasis. Here's an nytimes article from 2011 that discusses much the same thing as the article submitted:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/tara-parker-pope-...
[+] [-] koolba|10 years ago|reply
> Mr. Cahill was one of the worst off. As he regained more than 100 pounds, his metabolism slowed so much that, just to maintain his current weight of 295 pounds, he now has to eat 800 calories a day less than a typical man his size. Anything more turns to fat.
Presenting the numbers like this seems intentionally confusing. Casually reading this seems like he's eating 800 calories a day and still gaining weight.
What they're really saying is that he's eat $AVG_295_LB_MAN_CALORIES - 800 per day. That's probably around 4000 calories a day.
[+] [-] cableshaft|10 years ago|reply
The constant feeling of hunger distracts me, or my mind just drifts, until I get some food in me again.
I never see any of these articles even acknowledge this as an issue, either as if no one else has this problem, or no one else who is dieting has a job that requires so much brain power.
Since there's other programmers here, I was curious if other people have noticed something similar, and how they addressed it.
My current plan is not so much to limit my eating (beyond some mild calorie restriction) and instead force myself to exercise more often, but I'd like to be a bit more aggressive with my diet if possible.
[+] [-] proglodyte|10 years ago|reply
May be a little uncomfortable, but way better than screwing up your metabolism via extreme dieting. I'm consistently perplexed as to why the ice-vest-under-the-clothes weight loss method hasn't taken off yet.
[+] [-] cheez|10 years ago|reply
http://i.imgur.com/LR1wbH8.png
[+] [-] blfr|10 years ago|reply
BTW it's a really weird post-Christian belief that there is some you apart from your body and it can do things against your will.
[+] [-] SovietDissident|10 years ago|reply
His slow metabolism is part of the problem, and so are his food cravings. He opens a bag of chips, thinking he will have just a few. “I’d eat five bites. Then I’d black out and eat the whole bag of chips and say, ‘What did I do?’”"
The article is light on the details post-TBL, but it sounds like recidivism in terms of diet is probably a major root cause of weight gain. Also, maybe it's hard to tell whether they're doing steady-state cardio or high-intensity interval training (steady-state cardio has been shown to paradoxically cause weight gain in people). In any case, it sounds like they need more guidance and check-ins post-show.
[+] [-] yoodenvranx|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DenisM|10 years ago|reply
TLDR: Blood sugar spikes above certain level are toxic, so the body responds with an emergency action of stashing the sugar wherever possible, including muscle, liver, and fat tissue. The former two are rather limited in their capacity, while the latter is unlimited. Ongoing elevated levels of sugars in the bloodstream is an ongoing cleanup job for the fat cells, and they never get aground to release the accumulated energy back into circulation.
At the "hardware" level, that's all there is to obesity - overabundance of quick carbs (sugars, flour, starch).
[+] [-] beloch|10 years ago|reply
I've experimented with keeping a food journal in the past, and it's exceptionally difficult to keep track of everything you eat without this extra work impacting your food choices. e.g. The chore of writing stuff down might prevent me from casually snagging a handful of nuts on my way through the kitchen, and consciousness about how it will look in the journal might make me pass on those chips. Even ignoring these problems, it takes a lot of effort to produce even remotely useful data. e.g. "I ate a pear." is actually pretty vague. Breed, size, and ripeness all have a pretty big impact on the nutrients you'll get from that pear. You need to weigh everything as a bare minimum. Also, you need to keep the journal all of the time, because if you keep it for just a week or two that sample likely won't be very representative of your normal habits.
Likewise, activities are hard to keep track of. With a fairly standard ergometer (such as a Concept2 rower) you can get a reasonable measure of activity level in a workout. Lifting weights, running, walking, etc. are all much, much vaguer. 30 minutes of "moderate jogging" means different things to different people. Most people are likely to overestimate or habitually pad their activities.
So, you have a really vague, spitballed idea of what these people are eating and doing, combined with weight gain. Are their metabolisms really slower than expected, or is there a systematic error common to these people in that, after a period of extreme privation (i.e. the competition) in which some of them lost more than a pound a day, they are now underestimating their food intake and overestimating their activity levels?
How much can basal human metabolism really vary anyways? If humans can get by on substantially fewer calories, why don't we all typically do this? Where does all the extra energy normal people inefficiently burn off go?
[+] [-] parsnipsumthing|10 years ago|reply
The 300 calories a day difference in calories burned is very limiting if your BMR is 1800. But for some of these contestants their BMR, even at the lower weights, might be 2000 calories per day. And if they do moderate exercise, they can burn up to 1000 calories more than this. If you are expending 3000 calories per day then a 300 calorie difference is minimal.
[+] [-] jlos|10 years ago|reply
1) Amount of excess weight / median weight. E.g. Does the effect of the bodies homeostasis change as a person gets more severely overweight?
2) Speed of weight loss. Does loosing 1lb/day/week/month affect the bodies homeostasis differently?
3) Types of foods affect on homeostasis. Do substances like sugar have a worse effect than others? Does a diet high in something like vegetables tend towards a healthier homeostasis?
4) Amount of time for homeostatic change. Does being 100lbs overweight for a year or 5 years make a difference?
>> And with his report from Dr. Hall’s group showing just how much his metabolism had slowed, he stopped blaming himself for his weight gain.
Its critical to help people struggling with weight loss to deal not only with the nutritional challenges, but also psychological issues behind weight loss (guilt, depression, helplessness). However, presenting the problem as a binary (purely biological vs purely will) may actually not be the best approach. The individuals still played a part in their initial weight gain. The repeated dietary decisions leading to obesity are obviously complicated by family history, misinformation, failure to realize the full consequences, and other factors both within and outside the control of the person. And neither does the person's complicity, to whatever extent, in gaining weight mean they should receive any less sympathy or help. I say this because of the persistence of the myth that weight gain can be easily undone with just a few weeks/months of discipline, a myth perpetuated by shows like The Big Loser. Weight gain is an insidious danger that can have long lasting implications and be very difficult to extricate oneself from. That point seems quite clear from the research but never addressed in the article.