> The same thing happens if you force someone to overeat even if they're not hungry. They will gain weight -- for up to 6 months. Then, the body increases its base metabolic rate and adjusts to the new food intake level.
This is pseudoscientific garbage. There is some amount of adaptation that the body experiences in response to a caloric deficit or surplus. It varies by person but is generally not a major effect. A few hundred calories is typical and is largely attributable to changes in NEAT.
This is also not an unbounded effect. It won’t prevent continued weight loss if the starting deficit is greater than the adaptation nor will it prevent continued weight gain if the surplus exceeds the adaptation. The many obese people in the world are proof that the “natural set point” does not place a cap on weight gain.
There is also definitely nothing magic that happens at the 6 month mark and the absurdity of this should be enough to make it clear that this is garbage.
This seems unnecessary. The rest of your comment does not support this assertion. And it's inflammatory, which is contrary to the HN guidelines.
To this point:
> There is also definitely nothing magic that happens at the 6 month mark and the absurdity of this should be enough to make it clear that this is garbage.
There doesn't have to be anything magical. I would have to read the book to be sure, but pretty sure 6 months describes the general point at which the continuous process fades into noise. Nothing about the body has an on/off switch, but that doesn't mean we can't describe biological processes in general terms.
Would you be so kind as to elaborate? You are literally stating that something is 'utterly untrue' without supporting rationale. I'm not expecting you to do a peer-reviewed study. Just to explain why you feel this way.
The statement is essentially that calories consumed are unrelated to weight gain and loss except in the short term after which the body will return to its normal weight no matter what you do. This simply doesn’t make any sense. If this were true people couldn’t starve to death and obesity wouldn’t be a thing. And also the conservation of mass would not be an actual physical law.
I am avoiding the normal urge to go out and buy the book to verify and share the references to you. But it is something you could easily verify and find for yourself.
A few hundred calories is ~10-16% of the daily necessary caloric intake of many people, I daresay most? It is most certainly a major effect and considering that people become obese most often by consuming a small daily surplus, a few hundred calories extra, over many years, a swing of 100-300 calories can easily make the gaining weight much easier or much harder.
As for obesity happening due to 100-300 extra calories per day, yes, but also not really. If a person’s intake is 300 calories per day over what’s necessary to maintain a healthy weight, then they will put on weight until TDEE (which increases with body mass) catches up with their intake and they land somewhere above their healthy weight. It’s not an unbounded growth unless caloric intake is also growing continuously. I would imagine it’s quite common to see obese people eating 300 calories over their current TDEE but also to be 1300 calories over their healthy-weight TDEE.
Also don’t forget that the 300 extra calories is after the metabolic adaptation from eating a surplus. So if an individual will increase TDEE by 200 calories in response to a surplus, then they’ll need to eat 500 calories above “real” TDEE to see a 300 calorie effective weight gain.
All this is to say that obese people are generally eating quite a bit more than just 100-300 calories too much per day.
I'm not the OP, but I'm also not convinced that the set point exists. Regardless, fasting is a better way of losing weight than caloric restriction IMO since it lowers insulin, but to each their own. Either way, the laws of thermodynamics haven't changed, it's just how your body responds, and we're all unique in that sense. Whatever works for people, so long as they're losing weight if they're obese or overweight.
There is no panacea for weight loss - everyone is different.
A book is not a source. Providing a book and then cavalierly saying people should read it because it's backed by science is pretty rude.
You described the panacea: Eat less. If you eat less than you burn, you will lose weight. This effect is so predictable and reliable that taken to its logical conclusion it results in death. We call this starvation.
And everyone really isn’t different. The only thing different for most people is what sort of diet they find more tolerable. The fundamentals don’t change though.
It's like saying "people are in debt because they borrowed money" - true, but banal and trivial, and pretending it's the whole story and saying nothing of medical debt, student loans or living from paycheck to paycheck and payday loans dayloans is only good for feeling better than someone, most likely while pretending that all people in debt are stupid because they buy too many cars and TVs or whatever.
The whole area (both nutrition and debt/poverty) is very complex, especially when looking at whole society. Thinking in simple caricatures, and dismissing people as stupid is helping nobody.
If you’re an individual who wants to lose weight, focus on calories in and calories out because those are the biggest factors by far and they are also largely within your control. If you want to talk about social problems then ignore individuals and discuss the broader problems that are leading to such a large and consistent calories in discrepancy. In either case gut flora is probably not the major factor and probably not where the solution will be found.
I also didn’t dismiss anyone as stupid and your accusation is out of place.
A lot of people tried that, and it didn't work, but we never got to "why doesn't it work for so many people" because people like you keep parroting "CICO! You're just weak! CICO! CICO!!" even though it helps nobody.
Of course, calories in and calories out are mostly out of your control, but we're past that, since this has now become about moral judgment of obese people.
More to the point, you haven’t said anything meaningful about society’s obesity problem except to assert that everyone with a weight problem is a victim completely lacking in agency.
If a person doesn't eat enough food, the carbon comes from stored fat cells.
We're also learning more about genetics:
> Schmidt’s latest study found an enormous difference in weight gain between two test groups: conventional mice and mice whose RAGE ["receptor for advanced glycation end"] pathway had been deleted. The latter group gained 70 percent less weight than conventional mice, had lower glucose levels, and expended more energy while eating the same high-fat diet and doing the same amount of physical activity.
* https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/07/weight-lo...
This is a fairly pernicious half-truth, even among fitness types, which is used to explain away much more than it should. It has some truth to it, but people use it way too easily to handwave away differences in intake. It's true that the metabolism adjusts, but that adjustment is slow and limited. The gap between "slow metabolism" and "fast metabolism" people is only a few hundred calories/day at the extremes. Your body isn't going to suddenly start burning an extra 1k calories/day.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4535334/
In this study, they found that the RMR for women varied between 0.721-0.926 kcal/kg/hr (1730-2222 kcal/day @ 100kg), men varied between 0.791-0.969 kcal/kg/hr (1898-2325 kcal/day @100kg).
That is, if you're the slowest of "slow metabolism" people, you pretty much just need to deny yourself a single box of M&Ms to match the net energy expenditure of the fastest of the "fast metabolism" people. Hitting average is even easier.
While I'm not a proponent of Jason Fung or his book, I have read it. From what I recall, where your as-long-as-I-could-control-my-portions diverges from Fung's book is that he believes its nearly impossible for people generally to ignore their appetite in the long run, without correcting the issues that are continually increasing their "set point" and appetite.
He defines your "set point" as your level of secretion and resistance to insulin, which is continually, but slowly, increased by frequent meals, snacking, sweeteners, poor sleep, stress and consumption of mostly processed foods.
He believes insulin levels strongly influence appetite and metabolism. Inject a thin person with insulin, and they will invariably gain weight. Suppress insulin, and people lose weight. He lists studies to that effect.
He rejects calories-in-calories-out, not because it's false, but because it ignores people's inability to ignore their appetite in the long run.
His solution is both correcting the frequent meals, snacking, sweeteners, poor sleep, stress and processed foods. He also advocates fasting, which he claims is safe and reduces chronically high insulin levels better than any other (non-drug) intervention. He provides more studies supporting those assertions.
As to the 6 months, I vaguely remember him mentioning "6 months, or a year" in the contexts of most diet's plateauing effectiveness, but his general thrust was, most diet's don't work in the long run, because they ignore insulin.
To clarify, I am not Jason Fung, the author of the book that I summarized, and I specifically said I don't endorse the content. I only recounted it because ancestor comments seemed confused about the book's central tenant, which I happen to have read.
Strength training is one way to do that for example -- more muscles, more food burned just by sitting there.
Getting back to the perfect analogy with debt -- you can spend more or less money and control your debt that way, or you could make more, or a combination of the two. Which way is likely more effective in your case is what varies.
Saying that controlling debt is as simple as spending less than you make is both true and too general to be useful.
> Losing weight and gaining weight is simple physics. > you are losing weight because you are consuming less calories.
This is only true in the first up to 6 months of a calorie-restriction diet. Then, body adjusts its metabolism (lower body temperature, making you feel more lethargic to keep you from exercising, etc) and your weight begins to slowly climb back up, sans any further calorie restriction. At this point, it's easy for a dieter to blame himself of lacking willpower: "it worked, and it stopped working now, I must've been not strict enough!".
The same thing happens if you force someone to overeat even if they're not hungry. They will gain weight -- for up to 6 months. Then, the body increases its base metabolic rate and adjusts to the new food intake level.
As Dr. Jason Fung meticulously explains in his book Obesity Code, there seems to be a weight set point. He then argues that the root cause of obesity, and the body's set weight point, is insulin resistance.
The books hails your grandma's advice: "Cut back sugars and starchy foods. No snacking."
This is from the last part (The Solution):
1. Reduce your consumption of added sugars. 2. Reduce your consumption of refined grains. 3. Moderate your protein intake. 4. Increase your consumption of natural fats. 5. Increase your consumption of fiber and vinegar.
The author also stresses the importance of fasting.
Everything the book asserts seems to be pretty well backed by science, go check for yourself.
Source: Obesity Code by Dr. Jason Fung. Read it, it's not only a brilliant weight loss book, but also a wonderful book about how the wrong incentives for companies have led to the obesity epidemic in the US.