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Re:A flawed paradigm has derailed the science of obesity by lkey on Monday September 13, 2021 @11:55PM (#28520025)
I apologize, I didn't divide that number by 9, so it's a bit less than a lb a year, but that was meant to illustrate what you ended up pointing out.

BMR is variable.

It's why when we talk about deficits and surpluses we are actually doing hand-waving around something critical, on any given day, how do you even know what your BMR/RMR is?

Contestants that starved themselves on the biggest loser showed a 500kcal reduction in RMR 6 years later. If they'd just plugged themselves into a calculator and eaten the prescribed allotment daily, they'd be gaining the weight back quite rapidly. And that's exactly what happened to most of them as it turns out.

Re:A flawed paradigm has derailed the science of obesity by josephcsible on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @12:06AM (#28520087)
> it's a bit less than a lb a year

My whole point was that some amount of weight "a year" isn't how that would work. The only way you keep gaining weight every year is that if every year, you eat more and/or exercise less than you did the prior year. If you eat too much, but the same too much, every year, you'll be overweight, but you won't keep gaining weight every year forever.

> Contestants that starved themselves on the biggest loser showed a 500kcal reduction in RMR 6 years later.

That makes sense, since they lost a bunch of weight and RMR is tied to weight.

Re:A flawed paradigm has derailed the science of obesity by lkey on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @04:54PM (#28530995)
You misunderstand me: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4989512/ After 6 years, 41.0±31.3 kg of the lost weight was regained (p=0.0002) while RMR was 704±427 kcal/d below baseline (p<0.0001) and metabolic adaptation was −499±207 kcal/d (p<0.0001)

The lower RMR remained and sometimes continued to drop after they regained the weight.

Any normal person cannot assume that their RMR is something they get off of a website calculator, or that it will behave like linearly. Speaking as someone formerly fat, the metabolic adaptation did persist for years after I lost all the weight, putting me around 400 below where I should have been on the chart. It is still quite annoying, though it has lessened.