I used to exercise 3-4 days a week. Lifting weights, cardio, and yoga. I wasn't losing weight. I started gradually counting and cutting calories and when it didn't help I cut more. The only way I was at a good weight was on 1400 calories/day. This made me completely miserable and anti social (I wouldn't eat outside my house). This may be sustainable for some, but it wasn't for me, eventually I just had to eat more. I kept it up for a couple years though. I didn't have a body image problem either, my weight was a couple pounds below "overweight" BMI.
On the other hand a decade before that I ate junk food every single day and was very thin. Something seems to have changed in my body, but I don't know what. When I was thin my diet was truly horrible!
Even when I was a kid - Every single Halloween I would eat an entire pillow case worth of candy over the course of around 3 weeks, but I never gained a pound.
There is SO MUCH we don't know on this topic!
Yes, one can cut back on food, but willpower and the ability to control are limited to some degree.
Then I decided I wanted to cut down to the six-pack bodyfat level and stay there, so for the initial "cut" phase of that plan I dieted at ~1400 calories a day, every single day (no cheating) for ~2-3 months, and started doing way more cardio. Only lost a couple pounds, little or no visible difference, so, confused and frustrated, I gave up. Makes no damn sense according to any "weight loss calculator" I've ever seen (which all claim that my BMR should sit in the low 2000s), but that's what happened.
Packed on fat immediately when I went back to my usual eating patterns, took me years to get that under control. To this day I seem to easily hit a plateau a bit over what I'd call my healthy range when dieting at any reasonable (not near or under starvation level) caloric intake.
OTOH I've found that strength training's more effective for me than it "ought" to be but requires time, which sucks. I'd love to be able to diet my way to a trim waist, since maintaining an intake under what weight loss tables/calculators say should work for me is something I find easy to do. Too bad it doesn't.
Don't know what the explanation is, but something weirder than the "calories in/calories out, and calories out is fairly easy to guesstimate with useful accurately" orthodoxy is going on.
Yes. If there's anything reading diet studies has taught me, it's that people lie, to themselves even, and people are very bad at estimating calories. Things like MyFitnessPal have been a boon to countless people trying to lose weight because they can actually get a handle on what their intake really is. Bonus, they can compare across food choices to see what will fit in their caloric budget but still be filling or satisfying.
I'll issue you a counter-challenge: watch "Secret Eaters".
1. Was the skinny individual monitored the entire time? He could have regurgitated his food.
2. Was the skinny person's poop analyzed for complete digestion of the 4000 calories?The premise of the show is they bring in two people - one superfat and one superskinny. They weight them and each person tells what a typical day's food intake is for them. Then they switch diets for a couple weeks and are weighed again at the end.
Yes, its possible he lied about eating all that chocolate. Yes, he could be throwing up every day. This isn't a controlled experiment, its a TV show. It seems odd someone would do that though.
Your answer, of course, is "no". So just to move the conversation forwards: do you think if 3 random people consumed a bottle of olive oil, they would necessarily gain an equivalent amount of weight? Why or why not?
Second, I don't think three random people would gain the equivalent amount of weight; that's one of my points I've made elsewhere. TDEE for different people is different, based on height, weight (heavier people have higher TDEEs, which is ironic because it makes it easier for them to lose weight), and activity level. If you're talking three people of the same height, weight, strictly controlled activity level and strictly controlled intake, then I would expect their weight gain to be as close to identical as to make no difference. There's always some variance (within 200-300 Kcal: http://examine.com/faq/does-metabolism-vary-between-two-peop...)
Since we're cherry picking completely unrealistic intakes, I'll pose back to you: if three random people consumed 3500 calories worth of refined sugar, and that exceeded their TDEE by 3500 calories, then yes, each and every one of them would gain 1lb of adipose tissue. Seeing that many in the US easily approach an intake of this much refined sugar in the form of soda, the results (of the population, 2/3 is overweight, and 1/3 is obese) should not be surprising.
I just think the "thermodynamics" argument oversimplifies immensely. Even the variance in resting metabolic rate is unlikely to capture the whole difference between multiple subjects consuming 3500 calories of oil (or, for that matter, bacon or butter), because resting metabolic rate captures the variance you'd see between people consuming refined sugar, and there are more variables involved in metabolizing fat.
Later, because this is bugging me a bit
And that's all before we get into satiety, which is a hormonal response. I had some cheese and rillettes for lunch. I'm not going to be hungry for the rest of the day. If I'd had the equivalent calories in carbohydrates, I'd be hungry in an hour. Upthread, the term "willpower" is being bandied about as if people can simply will themselves to eat a fixed number of calories. That's true only if you eat carefully, and if you don't have any hormonal dysfunction; it's as true as saying I could will myself into coding for 48 hours straight, if I just focussed my "will" on it.
- Mammals that live near or with humans, from lab rats to pet pooches, have gotten fatter over recent decades.
- Fatter lab animals are the hardest to explain, since their diet is tightly controlled and well documented.
- Endocrine disruptors, pathogens or temperature changes might play a role and could also factor into human obesity
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-23970219
A study showed that transplanting gut bacteria from obese people into mice led to the animals gaining weight, while bacteria from lean people kept them slim. The findings were published in Science. Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine, Missouri, took gut bacteria from pairs of twins - one obese, one thin.
The bacteria were then put into mice which had grown up in completely sterile environments and had no gut bacteria of their own. Mice with the obese twin's bacteria became heavier and put on more fat than mice given bacteria from a lean twin - and it was not down to the amount of food being eaten.
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Ok, so you may need 1300 calories a day to maintain an "ideal" bodyweight but The Minnesota Starvation Experiment shows that amount of food intake causes severe emotional stress and depression. So yeah