> I have extremely lucky genes and have managed to stay just within the green BMI range despite eating all the carbs and fats you can imagine and at times consuming 200-300g of milk chocolate a day.

You’d be surprised just how little you eat. I’m also like that, thinking that I eat shitton and don’t get fat at all while my friends can’t lose 5 kilo. When I’ve started counting, even with all the junk food, I’ve been barely pushing above 1,5k.

Yeah this is correct. I eat whatever I want, snack a lot, etc. Never been fat because I just don't eat that much in aggregate.

I averaged 4,000+ calories per day in high school through the first couple years of college. Almost all junk food—pizza, chips, crackers, eggo waffles, french fries, that kind of thing. Enormous amounts of soda. Milk shakes. Cappuchinos and mochas, in the later years.

All I did for activity was ride bikes some and lift weights a little, plus usual kid stuff, no serious sports or training.

I had visible ab muscles and would get a full-on six pack if I did e.g. a lot of swimming in a week. During those times I'd have relatives concerned I was sick or something, my face would get so gaunt.

Metabolisms are weird. HGH and T are basically magic I guess? I truly have no idea where all that energy was going. Must have been mostly coming out the other end unprocessed, I suppose, or else somehow used up by my gut biome. Can't figure any other way.

> I truly have no idea where all that energy was going.

Growing your body. I was the same in my late teens and early 20's. Family called it the POW Aesthetic. 6'1" & 150lbs, couldn't put an lb more on. I was strong as shit though, in a practical sense. No issue throwing 100lb feed bags over a shoulder and walking it up some stairs into storage, things like that. I was both doing active things all the time, and finishing growing my body. The summer I got my last growth spurt was agony, my bones hurt every night and I was a bottomless void of hunger.

Also, do not underestimate this bit:

> All I did for activity was ride bikes some and lift weights a little, plus usual kid stuff, no serious sports or training.

Specifically I believe the "usual kid stuff" part was doing a lot for you, I know it was for me. Looking back I now realize that my "usual kid stuff" was me being very, very active. I was pounding out 20k+ steps a day just moving around the family farm, miles on a bike (often on grass too), and then maybe an hour of pick-up soccer in the evening. This was just normal activity for me back then, I would not have considered any of it Intentional Exercise. Today I'd have to intentionally train for an ironman to even start approaching that level of activity.

I gained 15lbs the _summer_ I got my first desk job, that was entirely because I replaced 8 hours of walking around and doing things with 8 hours of sitting in a chair, and about 30 minutes of walking for breaks and lunch.

Right, me too, which lead me to one conclusion: the root cause of obesity isn't overeating, it's a propensity to overeat. I don't have that propensity so I'm not obese, and probably won't be, unless that changes.

It's the same way I kind of view alcohol. Alcoholics are always alcoholics, even if they don't drink. Because drinking isn't alcoholism, having the desire to drink to the point of self-destruction is alcoholism.

Counter-anecdote: I have a smallish build and have well-tuned satiety, but a consistent measured TDEE of 2400~2500 kCal, and would go hungry and waste away at 1.5k.

I agree there’s no substitute for measuring your numbers. But meticulous calorie and weight tracking is probably a big ask for the average person, even though it’s imo absolutely necessary for controlling your weight one way or another.

Spending some months with a TDEE spreadsheet can be helpful but requires logging a lot of CI and weights -- if you go to any online TDEE calc you might overestimate your activity level.

I was surprised that running 6h/week and 15k/steps a day gave me an TDEE activity level at barely above "Light Exercise" and I need about 2460/day.

The "Moderate" activity level is if you actually work construction and haul bricks all day!

Yep. I have IBD and have to track calories to keep my intake _up_. It's shocking how much food you have to eat to get much more than 2k a day.

It's not at all difficult if you are eating junk food. For example a single Medium Pizza alone is enough to fill your entire day's worth of calories.

I know because I've experimented with this when I started measuring my weight, heck sometimes having a single Wendy's Baconator will not only fill your entire calories but even make you gain weight.

Your activity levels of course also matter but I'm assuming sedentary lifestyle.

This is much more different for healthy foods however.

I get sick of junk food quickly (and sometimes sick from junk food).

People don't realize how wildly appetite varies between individuals. Thinner people tend to think they eat a lot, because they're fulfilling their appetite. Fatter people often think they don't eat that much, because they're rarely full. IME, that's the thing that varies far more than actual metabolism stuff.

>Some of my friends are obese despite exercising heavily every day.

Exercise -- even heavily -- will never compensate a bad diet; that focus we have on exercise as weight control is detrimental.

What it does do is improve your metabolism and health, both physical and mental. This can improve lots of your processes. Neglecting exercise is absolutely destructive and restricting calories does not get you those things, in fact it can work against them. Building muscle also helps burn calories and improves insulin response. Obviously, it is not enough on its own without a healthy lifestyle as a whole.

I think focusing on anything solely is detrimental but focusing on exercise as an aspect is good.

- eat a bit less food

- eat food that is higher on the satiety index

- eat food that has less easily absorbed calories/less processed/etc

- build muscle to raise your resting metabolic rate slightly

- sleep well

etc

I think a bit of everything with mostly a focus on less calories will be easier to adopt than just telling people to track calories into perpetuity and feel like they're starving for a good while.

> Some of my friends are obese despite exercising heavily every day.

I’ve been chubby despite heavy exercise most of my life. It took me at least 30 years to come to what now seems like the dumbest most obvious realization:

Exercise makes me strong. Food makes me fat.

Now I think of them separately, to a first approximation, as the high order bit. To affect change to my strength, I first need to modify my exercise habits, and to affect change to my weight, I fist need to modify my eating habits. Of course I’m not saying you can’t burn calories exercising, but it’s actually been extremely helpful in my weight loss goals to mentally separate exercise from eating. Instead of thinking of exercise as _the_ way to lose weight, I think of diet as the primary tool, and exercise as something that is primarily for strength and activity and only secondarily for weight control.

The reason I’ve been fat despite exercise is, of course, because I naturally compensate for exercise by eating more. For me, I was eating until I feel a certain level of fullness, and that level seems to be slightly too much regardless of how much physical activity I do. Finally realizing that I don’t need to exercise harder, I ‘just’ need to track what I eat, is what finally actually worked. But like the article says, simple is not easy; I air-quoted the ‘just’ in that last sentence because successful food tracking is mentally difficult.

One of the fun side effects of tracking my eating instead of thinking of exercise as the primary weight loss tool is that with respect to food, exercise sort-of reversed it’s function for me, in a way. Instead of thinking of it as my weight loss tool and relying on it to compensate for what I ate, I sometimes use exercise to allow me to eat more when I’m hungry or want a treat. It’s funny, I know I said the same thing two ways, but my mindset changed almost 180 degrees. When I’m in a calorie deficit, I’ve noticed that days I don’t exercise I get more tired and hungry than days I do exercise.

To support what you said, there has been exactly one time in my life where I was exercising enough that it affected my weight, and that was when I was playing water polo for 3 hours a day, every day. That is a level of exercise that just about no one will put themselves through, where even your down time is spent treading water. And all that working out? Equivalent to pretty much one meal you'll get at a restaurant. And makes you ravenous, so the real reason it worked was that it capped out my availability of food, not my appetite for it.

I’ve come to understand “getting in shape” is literally that. Food just gives your body energy and nutrients, how you use your body decides what shape it’ll take (how it directs that energy and nutrients).

As the saying goes, weight is lost in the kitchen.

Exercise is absolutely invaluable for general health but its not effective alone for weight loss for most people.

I doubt it. There is no real evidence for genetics playing a major role here. You are probably underestimating your friends' energy intake. Exercise is great for many reasons but you can't outrun a bad diet. They're probably eating a lot more than you think, especially when you're not around.

The new drugs work; just not for everyone. Some folks won't react well to the drugs. For others, there's no reaction, but they don't affect their cravings.

I have several friends that have had miraculous weight loss, as a result of Ozempic.

>I have extremely lucky genes and have managed to stay just within the green BMI range despite eating all the carbs and fats you can imagine and at times consuming 200-300g of milk chocolate a day.

>Some of my friends are obese despite exercising heavily every day.

An often overlooked factor is how much snacking is done. If you eat "all the carbs and fats", but they're contained to a single meal a few times a week, and the portions are reasonable (ie. you're not stuffing yourself every meal), that has far less caloric impact than someone eating "salad" everyday, but loaded with dressing and snacking voraciously on the side.

Oh no I snack all day every day. Can still taste those cashews from a few minutes ago.

I had an overweight BMI when I could run a sub 3-hour marathon, I’ve concluded my body just doesn’t match the normal range.

Since BMI can't differentiate between fat and muscle, it breaks down for people who are very muscular. That said, most people are sedentary and hardly even exercise, so BMI is a good approximation. The people who are very muscular are probably well informed about this caveat that no buff bodybuilder thinks they're the same as an overweight person just because their BMI is the same.

Great point. This comment reminds me of Mary Cain, who was fast and dominant until she joined Nike and Salazar tried to get her to lose weight. It became clear the lower weight impaired her health and performance.

It bears repeating that BMI at an individual level is at best a hint that something is wrong (and never that someone is healthy).

Another point is that you can be good athletically speaking and yet have too much body fat to be considered healthy. An extreme example is that of professional fighters in open-weight categories.

Or BMI is a bullshit health metric. Ask any bodybuilder or powerlifter.

It is bullshit, but for most average people with average levels of exercise (or no exercise at all, sedentary lifestyle is pretty common) it's good enough to tell if something is wrong.

It's not A1C or something that's actively tracking your success and management in the long term, it's just the kind of thing where you look at it, look at the person, and say "is this a problem?" and usually it's clear.

Visceral fats leading to diabetes can be present without someone being visibly overweight.

Similarly people who appear overweight may have low volumes of visceral fat. Health is hard to determine without analysis and testing.

> I have extremely lucky genes and have managed to stay just within the green BMI range despite eating all the carbs and fats you can imagine and at times consuming 200-300g of milk chocolate a day.

> Some of my friends are obese despite exercising heavily every day.

Whether that's a boon or a bane not depends on which body fat and especially visceral body fat you end up with. Looking fit (which is somewhat captured by BMI) but actually being unhealthy (body fat) makes it easier to ignore in the short-term.