I have slowly gained 30kgs over 20 years. That's 1.5kg a year, or about 4g per day.
4g per day is almost insignificant amount and yet it is enough to make you fat over long periods of time.
I challenge anybody to accurately measure their daily calories intage to within 4g of a target (forgetting for a moment that the target can't be measured accurately either).
This suggests that while I was technically overeating -- by just couple of grams per day -- the problem lies entirely somewhere else -- in our ability to self regulate.
Except it isn’t really 4g per day in a vacuum. As you gain weight every kg needs an additional ~20 calories per day to sustain its basic processes. So by year 20 you are eating an extra 600 calories per day to sustain that weight plus an extra 4g (~36 calories) to continue to gain weight which is a quite noticeable amount of food.
At this point cutting the equivalent of 50+ oz of coke or a little more than a Big Mac per day would leave you feeling hungry, but that food slowly crept in over time.
Poker has the same vibe. You need to consistently made good decisions, even in the face of adversity, with the hope that the long run is long enough for those decisions to pay off.
600 kcal in other terms is: a sandwich and 2 small pieces of chocolate
2 sausages and two eggs
Coke isnt really more energy dense than orange juice but getts a worse rep, my point being is that if you dont pay attention to the actual energy contained in your food 600 kcal can be inhaled in a whim.
> Nah bugger off, literally no one is drinking 1.5 litres of Coke a day, absolute madness.
I know people who have done that in the past - it's one bottle or 5 cans or 3 medium bottles or 2.6 pints (easily done if you're spending 8 hours a day in the pub as we did at uni.)
(I'm pretty sure I've had periods where I've drunk the daily equivalent in coke, coffee, redbull, etc.)
I think as you age you want to eat more food not less, certainly with the standard American diet. I really haven’t yet found a solution apart from doing up a house myself, 8 solid hours of DIY per day and you’ll lose weight no problem. I lost about 10kg during that time without even thinking about it.
One part of that is higher caloric demand, but the other part is your capacity to burn calories. As you become more fit, your body can draw on more calories in a given moment. Fit people can burn more calories per hour, usually by a large margin
> the problem lies entirely somewhere else -- in our ability to self regulate.
Of course we have a problem with self-regulation. A billion-dollar industry exists whose main goal is to make certain foods more addictive, and yet as a society, the onus always falls on individuals to figure out how to overcome millions upon millions of dollars in research into chemically perfected food that we can't say "no" to.
Yes we can say "no", no matter the billions of dollars some companies may invest in their product.
I can relate to this kind of excuse in case of fat children who don't fully control their eating habits and rely on whatever food their parents make available to them. For self—sufficient adults, it's a pathetic opinion to have about your own level of control.
This is the exact same kind of moralistic thinking that created the opioid crisis. 40% of adults in the US are obese. Not overweight, obese.[0] Not to mention, that study was conducted before the pandemic, it would be interesting to see where the figures are now. At what percentage of aggregate obesity would you consider the issue to no longer be about self-control? And what makes you think we aren't going to hit that figure in the future?
Products are being developed to intentionally surpass our ability to self-regulate, whether they be food, medication, etc. People get paid really good money to sit in labs and figure out how to make their product more addictive, and we're just expected to just be able to say "no" because free will?
I think that’s just a political question with no “right” answer. Some people will believe the government should intervene and control some of these foods, and some people will believe it shouldn’t, that people should be free to make their own choices.
There’s very good arguments to be made on either side, and neither side is the “right” side, it just depends on what your values are.
Personally, I like being strict with my own diet and fitness, but being free to take a break and pig out on whatever junk food I feel like. A world without Coke and McDonald’s would be sad to me, even if it is ultimately healthier for the population in general.
Well, the other conversation to have that doesn’t just cash out into personal consumer choice is who a society lets line their coffers with the vices of others.
I find it harder to argue for why you should be able to enrich yourself at the expense of others while singing “But personal choice!” to wash your hands of it all.
I think the problem is the conflict between the two isn't symmetrical. Those who are trying to convince you to eat Coke and McDonalds aren't playing fair or accurately portraying what they're selling. and will promote research that indicates that lack of exercise[1] or fat[2], and will specifically advertise to children.
Comparing it to tobacco or alcohol for example, I don't think it's wrong to let people chose to consume them, but I don't think it's a bad idea to restrict them being sold to young people or restrict their ability to advertise. Imagine for example a cigarette ad for children. The tactics used are fairly similar.[3]
I would like to point out that the deep marketing/priming is what drives you to the product to begin with. The ability to self-regulate our minds and inherently our decision processes is closer to the root of the issue. That requires a fundamental shift in our education which doesn't see any incentives on the horizon to reform itself as long as low attention mindless caffeine/sugar driven zombies are needed to buy all the stuff we are presented with. We already have a deep seated bias towards comfort in our mental architecture. It's quite easy to piggy back on that for marketers to condition our minds. For someone to constantly be aware of this before making a decision is a bit of a stretch especially in our GO culture. The incentives are simply not there yet, the churn of getting fat and losing weight is too profitable to go away. Just like oil derivatives and other friction profiting cycle products.
T2 Diabetic that keeps a fairly strict keto diet here.
Food is terrible these days. It's hard to get stuff that isn't loaded down with sweeteners, never mind salts and fats. All to make food taste better and to get you to eat it more.
The insidious part about this food though, you can't directly taste the part that makes it addicting. If you stay away from it for long enough you can feel it. You'll eat something seemingly mundane, and suddenly you'll notice, not only does this food taste really good, it tastes absolutely wonderful in every way. If you pay close attention you can feel some deep parts of your monkey brain light up informing you that you best eat as much of this splendid food as possible. Weirdly the food itself doesn't actually taste that good, but some of those deep sections of your poor old monkey brain believes it does.
I hear you, well just eat fresh food, plenty of veggies and fruit. That is the where food science has gotten down right diabolical. Over the past bunch of generations we have modified our own produce, apples are sweeter and tastier, so are pears and watermelon, and things like corn, carrots, tomatoes, onions even potatoes and lettuce.
There is no escape from the things that tells your stupid monkey brain, hey eat this you fool!
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Before you dog pile on me, I'm diabetic thanks to the genetic lottery, not for a lifetime of bad eating habits. But thank you for your concern.
You've staked out some pretty high moral ground, and a position that can be argued against any personal challenge, so I really hope you're perfect in every way or else karma is coming back hard!
Calorie counting does not work (that's exact point of my post). What you need to do is to teach yourself to eat and behave as if you were healthy and this gets down to building right habits and displacing bad food with good food. Notice I am not saying dieting -- removing food you like and leaving void in your diet is a recipe for frustration and breaking your promise. Instead, learn to embrace healthy food and slowly include more of it in your diet and you will naturally start eating less of the bad ones.
As someone who has maintained his weight for roughly 15 years... calorie counting works fine. You're looking for an external source to blame for your internal shortcomings.
I don't think 10% body fat is going to be achieved through self-regulation/calorie cutting alone.
10% body fat is an EXTREMELY low %. I don't think that is realistic for most people outside very athletic folks. Reducing to 10% body fat requires a significant change in diet, not just reducing consumption, but actively changing your macro mix AND keeping a fairly strict regimen of strength training and cardio to keep the fat off.
I think losing weight as most folks (including yourself I think) agree with is reduction of calories. Then optimization of calories / lifestyle / workout regimen seem to be the next areas.
How do you self-regulate? My wife is able to, I'm not very able to. She can just decide to lose weight and does it. I've only successfully lost weight during times when I was so stressed I couldn't eat.
You are not hungry. You are bored. Purge snacks from your house. Purge sodas from your house. Purge sugary anything from your house. Never buy treats in sized over one serving. Only buy one treat at a time.
This isn't meant to sound to flippant, but try to increase physicality to the point where you don't have to think as hard about calorie intake. A brisk one hour walk on hills can easily burn 600cal. At the same time, your BMR will go up due to increased fitness
>> A brisk one hour walk on hills can easily burn 600cal
This is optimistic to the point of being close to a lie. Most people walking for an hour are going to burn closer to 250-300 cal. At the pace and terrain to double this you're not really "walking" anymore, and it's certainly not "easy". The idea of "exercising your way out of overconsumption" is entirely flawed and disproven.
A 250-300cal/hr walk is a casual stroll. Don't move goalposts here. Perceived effort will change from person to person. Besides, I meant the number goal is easy, not the effort. But you knew that and wanted to twist my statement to fit your view.
A quick google search results in a range from 400-600cal/hr for brisk, hilly walks. You could also use the word "hike" but that requires nature which some people don't have access to.
>The idea of "exercising your way out of overconsumption" is entirely flawed and disproven.
Obvious one would still be attempting to reduce calorie intake throughout this scenario. But for the people who say "exercise just doesn't make a difference in my weight loss" - that is indeed flawed. You can absolutely exercise your way into a deficit. Perhaps you haven't had that experience. To that, I would say your workload is probably not high enough to experience it.
I completely agree with this, yet people have a hard time accepting it because hunger evokes so much emotion.
Eating food with a focus on satiation helps with this. It's normal to feel hungry, but you can offset it to a degree with proper food choice. Hell, I'm hungry right now
I found trendweight.com super helpful. It would be able to show you the trend overtime. It does something like a moving average overtime of your weight and calls it 'actual weight' whereas day to day fluctuations it treats a bit like noise it's extracting a signal from.
How much exercise were you doing during that period? I ask because the same thing happened to me and I wasn't doing any exercise most months.
Overeating becomes much less of an issue if you're doing exercise (as an extreme example look at how much strongmen need to eat to maintain their weight).
A key insight is that muscle requires more calories to maintain than fat reserves, even if they weigh the same.
If you're fat you're probably building decent muscle on your legs just by carrying more weight around all day, but the upper body is a different story and requires training no matter what.
I don't find exercise very helpful. They burn too little calories compared to the effort. I find it way easier to eat less: not doing something is easier to spend effort, and the effect multiplier is bigger.
I should still exercise for other reasons, but not for losing weight.
I suggest not focusing on what calories it appears the exercise is burning. My experience is that something else is occurring which helps to lose weight and keep it off - I suspect something to do with the microbiome and increasing basal metabolic rate to feed an exercise-trained microbiome (more active? Different makeup for sure).
I struggled for years to get my weight down. Then just walking every day to ensure I was at 10,000 steps managed to move the needle in a meaningful way. Over a few years that turned into running a few times a week, which turned into running daily. In the beginning I had already been counting calories and the calories I was burning walking whatever it took to get from my normal amount to 10k (varied each day) was not enough to justify the weight being lost when compared to calories consumed. It should have been much slower.
> I struggled for years to get my weight down. Then just walking every day to ensure I was at 10,000 steps managed to move the needle in a meaningful way.
Part of this might also be about how exercise generally leaves you feeling pretty good, usually better than after a day that is spent entirely sedentary in my experience. A lot of people crave the instant satiating feeling of eating. Eating often feels good. The exercise might then help by replacing the "make me feel better" feeling that food might give you, leading to you swapping out "unnecessary" feeding and lowering your caloric intake in the process.
I would agree with this thought generally as it certainly happened when I started running, but in the days of just getting my steps in, my use of MyFitnessPal showed that I was eating the same diet with essentially no change to the average daily caloric intake. I did increase my water intake.
I've observed that moderate aerobic exercise often tends to temporarily suppress appetite for some people, myself included. Doesn't work for everyone, though.
My partner swears their caloric cravings increase disproportionately after workouts and feels strongly that reducing food intake has helped them maintain weight far more than exercise. There are probably some genetic components to this (according to our 23andme data, we have very different genomes).
Exercise is key. The problem is people expect exercise to directly burn your fat which is completely false and broken way to look at it.
Then what happens when they don't see results is they proclaim it does not work and drop exercising altogether. What they did not do is stick long enough to actually see the results.
Exercise is to keep your healthy and to improve your internal regulation. It is to keep you feel well so that you don't feel compulsion to eat more just to feel well.
The calories burned during the exercise matter less than the higher metabolism resulting from having more muscle mass. Especially if we're talking about strength and hypertrophy exercise and not just cardio.
It's definitely not just about muscle mass. But you should compare yourself to yourself only when it comes to self-improvement, since you can't borrow someone else's metabolism. Having more muscle mass is better than not having it for both health and appearance.
When we're talking about slowly gaining weight over time as the OP did, even if muscle only burns a little more energy than fat that could be enough to tip the balance.
There could be a lot of factors: your body size, muscle to fat ratio and body comp, total exercise in a day, the actual caloric amount of the food you are eating (you can eat a lot of low calorie food compared to a single high calorie item for instance), mitochondrial function in your muscles and your ability to clear lactate from your bloodstream. Controlling for all of the variables is actually very difficult.
Most people that eat a lot and don't seem to gain weight are simply not eating that much calorically or exercising a lot. When a more sedentary lifestyle kicks in they generally begin to align more with the general population.
There are two only tangentially related issues here. One is, given you're already overweight or obese, can exercise help you change that? The answer seems to be yes, it definitely can, but it seems empirically that it very rarely works over any appreciable long-term, other than in people who find they enjoy it sufficiently to become at least recreationally serious endurance athletes or at least very active people for the rest of their lives. If your only motivation for exercising at all is to lose weight, it very likely isn't going to work over any meaningfully long span of time.
But the other issue is, given you're a normal-sized, metabolically healthy 10 year-old, will developing a lifelong habit of regular exercise and a generally active lifestyle keep you from ever getting fat in the first place? I don't know that we have any kind of long-horizon, longitudinal research to demonstrate one way or another empirically, but mechanistically, it sure seems like that should be the case, and you can look at manual laborers in developing countries, the Amish, any serious lifelong athletes in sports where being maximally large is not advantageous on its own, as existence proofs that this should help.
I think the comment you're responding to was really asking about the latter scenario. It's not, okay, you spent the last 20 years gaining 30kg, well how active are you now? The question is how active were you over the entire course of the last 20 years? Because it's likely that if you were sufficiently active, you wouldn't need to lose weight at all, and the question of exercising for losing weight would be irrelevant.
> I don't find exercise very helpful. They burn too little calories compared to the effort.
Exercise help in much broader ways than just the amount of calories burned on the spot. Take weight lifting for examples, it increases your lean mass, which means it increases your metabolic rate, which means you can eat more and not gain fat. You also spend more calories on your resting days to rebuild your muscles, &c. exercising also tend to curb appetite
I agree that moderate amounts of exercise are not helpful in losing weight at all. I fluctuate all year between 73kg and 80kg (with a brief stint at 84kg the other year while I wasn't doing any cardio for 6mo and eating way too much takeaway).
In school I used to go to the gym every day for 45mins at lunch, and box 5/6hrs a week, from 14y/o. The last 3/4yrs I climbed 3/4x a week and the last 2 of those I also ran 3/4x a week up to ~40km/wk, albeit inconsistently around my 9-5 and part time uni course.
Every time I cut out one of the sports I enjoy, I am drastically less hungry. Yes, a 5km run might burn ~300cals, but if I'm so hungry I eat a whole extra meal, I'm generally more likely to gain weight. Same for lifting weights, but even moreso - if I go and hit a 200kg deadlift PR I'm going to be hungry the next day, but that 1-2hr gym session maybe burned 100 calories at most. Exercise for weight loss is only useful if "calories in" stays the exact same, and even then it would be way less effort to reduce "calories in" and not exercise (if weight loss is the only goal).
The point at which this stops applying is excessive cardio, ie running 40km+ in a week. That will pretty much always result in a caloric deficit for me, because at that point I'm forcing myself to eat enough food to recover (rather than having to force myself not to overeat). Most people exercising to lose weight (rather than for enjoyment, to push themselves/prove something, or to win a race) don't want to exercise. If you have to commit 6hrs a week to cardio to see any effect, 99% of people aren't interested, so I'd imagine they fit into the "not excessive" category where exercise might make them want to eat disproportionately more than they burned.
Controlling "calories in" (which will guarantee weight loss, as far as the laws of physics are concerned) is always going to be the easiest path to weight loss.
Yes exercise helps, and has benefits besides burning more calories. But unless your calorie surplus is small, it's not going to be possible to "burn off" overeating by exercising.
If you need to burn 3,500 excess calories to lose a pound of fat, that means you need a 500 calories per day deficit for a week. A single fast-food burger such as a Big Mac is more than that.
Generalized, you can't make up for bad diet with more exercise.
And, you need a calorie surplus to build muscle. So if you are trying to get strong, you need to eat.
>> This suggests that while I was technically overeating -- by just couple of grams per day
I doubt you've hit this average, as it's unlikely you live in a completely controlled vacuum. It's more likely you've had far more noticable and extreme periods of change in both directions, while trending upward as you age and change your lifestyle.
To put it another way: I've gained 6g per day over my entire life. That's not much more than your 20 year example but there's a pretty obvious difference between me as a newborn and present day me.
Well, not necessarily true. Your body is not composed of 100% fat. Actually it is composed mostly of water and when you gain 4g of mass most of this gain is from water, too.
I unfortunately can't tell you how efficient body is at digesting various types of foods including digesting pure fat.
Very short-term fluctuations in weight are usually caused by retention and flushing of water. Gaining 30kg over the course of 20 years is not water weight. If you were retaining that much water, you'd be so arthritic feeling I'm not sure you'd able to stand up. Unless you've been very serious and consistent about weight training that entire time, that 30kg is virtually all fat.
Fitness trackers, while sometimes useful, are considerably overhyped IMO. They're mostly about gamification and the UX inspiring (often inflated) confidence in the results they report, not about yielding fundamentally higher-quality information than online calculators or your bathroom scale or how well your pants fit.
Also, people put too much stock in the 500 kcal/day thing. It's more an example that makes the math work out neatly than it is necessarily something any given person should adopt as a target.
You can't accurately measure "calorie" intake. Calories are units of heat, and don't represent how the human body utilizes energy from food. The number of calories you'll find attributed to a given food are determined by how much heat is emitted by the available macronutrients if they were set on fire in a bomb calorimeter. Humans don't work like bomb calorimeters. This is why calories as a measure of nutrition are nearly useless.
I'm not exactly speaking as an armchair scientist, though I don't have a Phd. I spent over 9 months this last year developing my own tech to measure human metabolic activity and did extensive research into the broader subject, and quit my job in part to focus on it.
Whether you were overeating or not hardly has anything to do exclusively with eating a couple of extra grams. What you were eating and your individual physiology is primarily what dictates how your body will ultimately respond to your food. The vast majority of people in our industrial societies are eating diets that our species barely or never adapted to, and the prevalent macronutrients of said eating creates this illusion that the problem is calories. Our bodies are actually extremely good at self regulating. Problems enter when we get the fuel mix wrong, which is what we're doing when we're eating carbohydrates 3+ times every day.
A good (though imperfect) analogy is the fuel you put in your car. Modern fuel injected cars can actually start on different fuels. You can, for instance, put E85 ethanol fuel in a non flex-fuel car and it will probably start, and there's a chance it will be able to continuously run on it, albeit poorly. The reason for this is a standard car isn't configured to run on ethanol. While it probably can run on it, it's specialized for one particular fuel, which is gasoline. Maybe you can run your gasoline car on E85, but you'll have to step hard on the gas pedal and you will eventually suffer the consequences of poor engine performance. (Ironically, many modern cars can run fine on E85 with a mere software update, but that's a different story)
I would challenge you to gain any meaningful amount of fat mass on a diet of pure animal protein, let alone hold on to existing fat. It's a lot more difficult than most people believe. The satiety signal that follows eating meat, which is a hormonal response, is more powerful and sustaining than a diet based on carbohydrates. Glucose, what most carbs ultimately become, is poisonous to cells, while protein isn't. A diet based on protein means the body doesn't need to use or store the supply of glucose because the necessary glucose can be generated from protein on demand. The way your body responds to these different macronutrients is very different. People counterintuitively lose a lot of weight eating lots of fat because, unlike carbohydrates, fat has little to no insulin response on its own.
Things also get messier when fat and carbs are eaten simultaneously, but I feel like I've mentioned this on HN a bajillion times already.
All this to say that the calorie model for human nutrition should no longer be taken seriously.
Calories might only mean anything as a measure of energy expenditure, but even that measure has little utility to anyone who isn't in the process of dying. Some people succeed in losing weight by restricting the amount of "calories" they are consuming and offsetting the "calories" they eat by performing exercise. Where this falls apart is taking the same exact energy intake and activity level, replicate it in another person, and fail to see the same fat loss results. Below a certain point, yes, you'll see every participant lose weight, but you may also find them to be wasting muscle. Eventually, the effects of "calorie" restriction and carbohydrate intake will catch up with a person and they will suffer for it because neither "calorie" restriction or frequent carbohydrate intake are things that humans are adapted for.
Oh, one thing I forgot to mention is that even if intake of "calories" meant something from a physiological standpoint, the calorie counts on food packaging can be wrong by a significant margin. They're allowed to be as wrong as 20%, which can mean hundreds of calories.
Glucose is toxic. Granted, even water is toxic at some level, but that threshold for toxicity is much higher than that of glucose. Glucose is a fundamental part of the Krebs cycle, yes, and is not a problem if that glucose is managed and regulated. By default, the human body manages glucose very well. When that system is disrupted either by consuming exogenous carbohydrates as well as consuming carbs and fats together simultaneously, said system begins to fail and that's what can lead to all sorts of problems involving blood sugar.
But that's an average. You may have gained much more in one year vs the others. Plus you don't need to notice 4g a day even if that is the level, once you have gained about 1Kg then you know that on average you need to decrease.
Additional 30kg increases your resting metabolic rate, and likely activity calorie surplus, sometimes solution is also as simple as fasting a day / skipping a meal once a week to maintain.
4g per day is almost insignificant amount and yet it is enough to make you fat over long periods of time.
I challenge anybody to accurately measure their daily calories intage to within 4g of a target (forgetting for a moment that the target can't be measured accurately either).
This suggests that while I was technically overeating -- by just couple of grams per day -- the problem lies entirely somewhere else -- in our ability to self regulate.