In 1967, a medical researcher, Ethan Sims, carried out an experiment at Vermont state prison in the US. He recruited inmates to eat as much as they could to gain 25% of their body weight, in return for early release from prison.
Some of the volunteers could not reach the target however hard they tried, even though they were eating 10,000 calories a day. Sims's conclusion was that for some, obesity is nearly impossible.
Here the calories are tracked, and enough time passes for some people to become obese. There's some less-than-anecdotal data for you.
Their bodies freaked out and went full luxus consumption because they went from prison gruel to 10,000 calories. That's more than an Olympic athlete. It's the opposite of starvation mode, where the body retains more calories when there's a shortage of intake. Those are two ridiculous extremes that aren't naturally occurring if you don't do stupid shit to your body. Without going into extremes on either side, natural "metabolism" will never make a difference of more than like 100kcal unless you have some sort of serious medical condition.
On June 21 2013 08:13 Arghmyliver wrote:
On June 21 2013 08:00 RockIronrod wrote:
On June 21 2013 07:51 Arghmyliver wrote:
On June 21 2013 07:34 RockIronrod wrote:
On June 21 2013 07:12 Arghmyliver wrote:
On June 21 2013 06:58 Heavenlee wrote: [quote]
First link is about how different people get varying levels of increased maximum oxygen uptake from aerobic activity. Not really relevant to genetics of obesity except that some people who can get better maximum oxygen uptake might find running easier? I don't know.
Not sure what the second link is about. None of those are related to the subject.
Third is on HIIT training, which is a form of cardio meant for optimal fat burning. It's a temporary metabolic boost from a specific type of aerobic exercise. Nothing to do with genetic difference in weight gain.
[quote]
Being able to binge and not gain weight based on anecdotes isn't what I'm looking for. You can be easily overestimating how much you ate (which the majority of people who consider themselves hardgainers do), or you could easily have eaten that in one meal but you didn't eat like that consistently enough to cause weight gain. Eating a foot long sub, a bag of chips, and a pound of fudge in one sitting (what, 2500 calories max? Like 700 + 300 + whatever the fudge is), assuming the often-quoted figure of like 3500 calories to gain a pound of fat, assuming a BMR of around 2000, would gain you about 1/3rd of a pound of weight. Which could have easily been lost by not eating your maintenance for a couple days. Let me know if you happened to do that for multiple meals of the day on a consistent basis, that'd be interesting.
And still, assuming you could eat 5000 calories and not gain a pound, you could easily just be one in a million. Not enough for me to take any sympathy that the general non-obese public have some massive genetic leg-up.
Yeah I ate like that (maybe not quite that much every meal) for like a decade. Keep in mind that I also had breakfast and dinner that day too. I don't do it now just because I know my weight isn't necessarily indicitive of like my cholesterol and I don't want a massive heart attack. But imean, I could suck in and wrap my hands around my entire waist even while I was doing that.
If you truly ate highly above your calorie maintenance level and didn't gain weight, you either had worms or a black hole in your digestive tract. More than likely you didn't eat nearly as much as you thought you did, or you didn't eat consistently enough to gain weight (one day of 5000 calories and a week of 1200~). Genetics have little do to with this outside of actual medical problems like hyperthyroidism, and anyone who claims "muh metabolism" on either doesn't understand how metabolism actually works, or how energy works. It's a lot easier to blame genetics than it is to not drink a bottle of coke with every meal, and it feels better to say "I eat so much but never put on weight" than it is to say "I barely eat at sustainable levels every day but I splurged these few times in a month and didn't jump 30 kilos over night."
There were points where I was actively trying to gain weight because girls didn't want to go out with a guy who was skinnier than them with literally no effort. I was literally eating until I felt nauseous just to impress people or maybe gain weight faster than my 5 lbs per year of grade school average. Nowadays I eat when I'm hungry and try to stay on top of my Vits and essentials. If that's not enough calories or whatever I'm not really interested. If you think everyone is an identical machine that needs exactly X calories for Y weight gain maybe it's you who doesn't know how energy works.
Did you ever actually count your calories or did you just kind of assume they were a lot because you felt queasy? Do you think the energy just disappears or something? Either it goes to you and it's not enough maintenance level so it all gets stored and none gets stored as fat or it's going to a parasite. I'm in the exact same spot as you for some of the same reasons, but I actually did count my average calorie intake and it wasn't nearly as much as I thought it was, and what I do need to put on weight at a healthy pace sickens me because I'm not used to eating that much in a day.
Sorry I misread your post. You didn't specify a caloric intake, instead using the term "maintenance level" which is a bit loaded if you consider that obviously I wasn't consuming above my "maintenance level" assuming this is your threshold for weight gain. No one who isn't gaining weight would be right? But lets assume everyone's body consumes energy at different rate. What I'm saying is - the quantity and composition of the food I was eating would have made some people overweight. I knew people that couldn't drink milkshakes without working extra on the treadmill to burn it off. Consider that now, I eat considrably less in terms of quantity but I didn't lose any weight. Even without extra empty carbs. Does that mean I have a white hole in my intestine? Or did my tapeworm die?
Or you didn't count your calories back then and are grossly overestimating how much you ate.
Okay you must be right. Is a hamburger every day more than a cup of lentil salad? Who can tell! It would be a feat of human intelligence :D! Or maybe you think you know better than everyone and refuse to consider that my memory might be better than a goldfish.
Your memory is inconsequential. As you were never counting calories in the first place, there is nothing relevant for you to remember.
Your anecdotes add nothing to the thread. People like to think of themselves as special snowflakes so are naturally biased to, for example, overestimate their caloric intake and conclude they must be blessed because they didn't gain weight. The reality is probably much more mundane and the same thing that applies to all humans: people are very bad at estimating their caloric intake.
If you truly do make calories disappear like your stomach is another dimension, I suggest you get some hard data and publish it in a peer reviewed scientific journal. Until then, your posts add nothing to the conversation.
You have once again completely missed my point here. I don't think I'm some kind of energy wormhole. I'm saying ny diet would have been invalid for other individuals in terms of weight gain. I ate as much if not more than others some of whom were unfortunately obese. If you want to come to where I live and try to make me fat I invite you to do so hut I promise you will find it more challenging than a similiar experiment performed on other individuals. Bodies do not consume energy at the same rate. I don't know what I am doing, but I am able to eat whenever I want without fear of weight gain. I use more calories than other people I guess in myy daily activity, which is interesting considering I am pretty much a couch potatoe. My brother is the same way. Seems genetic to me
dem delusions. If you want actual proof, record all of your calories and macronutrients and look at the totals of what you eat. Since it's too much of a hassle to settle an internet argument, you won't do it. And I'll still remain completely unconvinced of your anecdote. Taubes may state things like hormones are more to blame than just pure calories, but he will also say you will gain weight from excessive consumption of things like carbs due to things like insulin sensitivity increasing. And if you think you eating a surplus of calories of hamburgers, fudge, and chips won't make you gain weight, you really do live in some fantasy world.
edit: by the way, if anyone cares about my anecdote, I was always underweight for my age. Then I started eating a lot more than I normally did (my maintenance of around 2.3ishk) and I gained weight (with 3-4k) . Because I ate in a somewhat healthy fashion and watched my calories, I gained muscle and small amounts of fat. Now that I am no longer trying to gain, and am too lazy to forcefeed myself, I am currently maintaining my weight. Gasp, turns out despite thinking when I was young that I was eating quite a bit, I actually wasn't---and when I bumped my calories up by around 500-1000, I started to gain weight in a linear fashion. Real mindblowing stuff you discover when you start counting your calories and weighing out your food.
Just trying to sum my understanding of it all, cause it's getting messy...
So, fat is energy stored due to different factors, but the one you can modify is carb intake if you want to lose weight. You can also reduce your overall calories intake under your outtake to lose fat, because it makes you burn the stored energy.
People with trouble for gaining weight most likely don't want fat, but muscles. This recquires enough calories of any kind, but most importantly to just work out. If you want weight no matter what, you need excess calories and carbs ? Does that sound about right ?
On June 21 2013 08:52 Cynry wrote: Just trying to sum my understanding of it all, cause it's getting messy... So, fat is energy stored due to different factors, but the one you can modify is carb intake. You can also reduce your overall calories intake under your outtake to lose fat, because it makes you burn the stored energy. People with trouble for gaining weight most likely don't want fat, but muscles. This recquires enough calories of any kind, but most importantly to just work out. If you want weight no matter what, you need excess calories and carbs ? Does that sound about right ?
Pretty much. You don't necessarily need many carbs to gain muscle, though it's probably much easier for a lot of people if they introduce carbs. Or if they cycle them on the weekends. Most people who do things like keto or low-carb diets are doing it for weightloss though.
On June 21 2013 07:39 On_Slaught wrote: Gary Taubes gives a VERY strong argument for why the calories equation has literally nothing to do with weight gain. He says that relying on the law of thermodynamics (which is what people are doing when they argue this) is making an 8th grade level math mistake. This law has no more impact on weight gain than the law of relativity does.
Rather his argument, for those who don't have the patience to watch the whole video, is that the common view is backwards (he goes into the history of how this was lost). Fat people don't get fatter because they eat more, they eat more because they are fat. Basic biology tells us that it has everything to do with how our hormones are influenced by our food (he goes into a lot of detail about how big genetics is to weight gain. Anybody who says it is a minor issue is completely un-grounded). The ultimate conclusion is that the specific substance which causes ALL fat creation in cells is insulin. Insulin is caused by carbohydrate intake. Therefore carbohydrate intake directly leads to fat increases. He argues that you can literally eat as much non-carbohydrated food as you want and you couldn't gain weight gain weight.
However this does not free people from personal responsibility. It happens to be that many of the best tasting food happens to create insulin so personal discipline is still a huge factor.
It's nice to actually listen to somebody who at least gives sound scientific basis for his arguments rather than the pure shit being dredged up in this thread. And even for the people not spouting pure shit, there is no basis other than the ubiquity of their stance upon which they base it.
Currently 25 mins into that video, thanks for posting it- very informative and clears up a lot of misinformation! Some points really hitting home for me- like how incredibly skinny I was as a kid while my parents were overweight etc. :D
Everyone in this thread should watch it. Reposting for the link-paranoid.
I'll give this video a fair chance later, but On_Slaught's description makes it sound quite silly.
"Fat people don't get fatter because they eat more, they eat more because they are fat. "
We're talking about humans here, not plankton. There is a human brain actively taking every bite of food that goes down their throat. Human beings are responsible for their own food intake, not hormones, not the weather, not discrimination, etc.
He does a good job of explaining why that idea is ridiculous.
I liked this part (not necessarily definitive of above- there's more to it than just this). From the video: (paraphrasing) "if you were invited to a dinner with really tasty food and told to bring your appetite, what would you do?"
In 1967, a medical researcher, Ethan Sims, carried out an experiment at Vermont state prison in the US. He recruited inmates to eat as much as they could to gain 25% of their body weight, in return for early release from prison.
Some of the volunteers could not reach the target however hard they tried, even though they were eating 10,000 calories a day. Sims's conclusion was that for some, obesity is nearly impossible.
Here the calories are tracked, and enough time passes for some people to become obese. There's some less-than-anecdotal data for you.
Their bodies freaked out and went full luxus consumption because they went from prison gruel to 10,000 calories. That's more than an Olympic athlete. It's the opposite of starvation mode, where the body retains more calories when there's a shortage of intake. Those are two ridiculous extremes that aren't naturally occurring if you don't do stupid shit to your body. Without going into extremes on either side, natural "metabolism" will never make a difference of more than like 100kcal unless you have some sort of serious medical condition.
On June 21 2013 08:13 Arghmyliver wrote:
On June 21 2013 08:00 RockIronrod wrote:
On June 21 2013 07:51 Arghmyliver wrote:
On June 21 2013 07:34 RockIronrod wrote:
On June 21 2013 07:12 Arghmyliver wrote:
On June 21 2013 06:58 Heavenlee wrote: [quote]
First link is about how different people get varying levels of increased maximum oxygen uptake from aerobic activity. Not really relevant to genetics of obesity except that some people who can get better maximum oxygen uptake might find running easier? I don't know.
Not sure what the second link is about. None of those are related to the subject.
Third is on HIIT training, which is a form of cardio meant for optimal fat burning. It's a temporary metabolic boost from a specific type of aerobic exercise. Nothing to do with genetic difference in weight gain.
[quote]
Being able to binge and not gain weight based on anecdotes isn't what I'm looking for. You can be easily overestimating how much you ate (which the majority of people who consider themselves hardgainers do), or you could easily have eaten that in one meal but you didn't eat like that consistently enough to cause weight gain. Eating a foot long sub, a bag of chips, and a pound of fudge in one sitting (what, 2500 calories max? Like 700 + 300 + whatever the fudge is), assuming the often-quoted figure of like 3500 calories to gain a pound of fat, assuming a BMR of around 2000, would gain you about 1/3rd of a pound of weight. Which could have easily been lost by not eating your maintenance for a couple days. Let me know if you happened to do that for multiple meals of the day on a consistent basis, that'd be interesting.
And still, assuming you could eat 5000 calories and not gain a pound, you could easily just be one in a million. Not enough for me to take any sympathy that the general non-obese public have some massive genetic leg-up.
Yeah I ate like that (maybe not quite that much every meal) for like a decade. Keep in mind that I also had breakfast and dinner that day too. I don't do it now just because I know my weight isn't necessarily indicitive of like my cholesterol and I don't want a massive heart attack. But imean, I could suck in and wrap my hands around my entire waist even while I was doing that.
If you truly ate highly above your calorie maintenance level and didn't gain weight, you either had worms or a black hole in your digestive tract. More than likely you didn't eat nearly as much as you thought you did, or you didn't eat consistently enough to gain weight (one day of 5000 calories and a week of 1200~). Genetics have little do to with this outside of actual medical problems like hyperthyroidism, and anyone who claims "muh metabolism" on either doesn't understand how metabolism actually works, or how energy works. It's a lot easier to blame genetics than it is to not drink a bottle of coke with every meal, and it feels better to say "I eat so much but never put on weight" than it is to say "I barely eat at sustainable levels every day but I splurged these few times in a month and didn't jump 30 kilos over night."
There were points where I was actively trying to gain weight because girls didn't want to go out with a guy who was skinnier than them with literally no effort. I was literally eating until I felt nauseous just to impress people or maybe gain weight faster than my 5 lbs per year of grade school average. Nowadays I eat when I'm hungry and try to stay on top of my Vits and essentials. If that's not enough calories or whatever I'm not really interested. If you think everyone is an identical machine that needs exactly X calories for Y weight gain maybe it's you who doesn't know how energy works.
Did you ever actually count your calories or did you just kind of assume they were a lot because you felt queasy? Do you think the energy just disappears or something? Either it goes to you and it's not enough maintenance level so it all gets stored and none gets stored as fat or it's going to a parasite. I'm in the exact same spot as you for some of the same reasons, but I actually did count my average calorie intake and it wasn't nearly as much as I thought it was, and what I do need to put on weight at a healthy pace sickens me because I'm not used to eating that much in a day.
Sorry I misread your post. You didn't specify a caloric intake, instead using the term "maintenance level" which is a bit loaded if you consider that obviously I wasn't consuming above my "maintenance level" assuming this is your threshold for weight gain. No one who isn't gaining weight would be right? But lets assume everyone's body consumes energy at different rate. What I'm saying is - the quantity and composition of the food I was eating would have made some people overweight. I knew people that couldn't drink milkshakes without working extra on the treadmill to burn it off. Consider that now, I eat considrably less in terms of quantity but I didn't lose any weight. Even without extra empty carbs. Does that mean I have a white hole in my intestine? Or did my tapeworm die?
Or you didn't count your calories back then and are grossly overestimating how much you ate.
Okay you must be right. Is a hamburger every day more than a cup of lentil salad? Who can tell! It would be a feat of human intelligence :D! Or maybe you think you know better than everyone and refuse to consider that my memory might be better than a goldfish.
Your memory is inconsequential. As you were never counting calories in the first place, there is nothing relevant for you to remember.
Your anecdotes add nothing to the thread. People like to think of themselves as special snowflakes so are naturally biased to, for example, overestimate their caloric intake and conclude they must be blessed because they didn't gain weight. The reality is probably much more mundane and the same thing that applies to all humans: people are very bad at estimating their caloric intake.
If you truly do make calories disappear like your stomach is another dimension, I suggest you get some hard data and publish it in a peer reviewed scientific journal. Until then, your posts add nothing to the conversation.
You have once again completely missed my point here. I don't think I'm some kind of energy wormhole. I'm saying ny diet would have been invalid for other individuals in terms of weight gain. I ate as much if not more than others some of whom were unfortunately obese. If you want to come to where I live and try to make me fat I invite you to do so hut I promise you will find it more challenging than a similiar experiment performed on other individuals. Bodies do not consume energy at the same rate. I don't know what I am doing, but I am able to eat whenever I want without fear of weight gain. I use more calories than other people I guess in myy daily activity, which is interesting considering I am pretty much a couch potatoe. My brother is the same way. Seems genetic to me
You are the one missing his point. He's saying you need to start counting the calories and that your estimates of how much you were eating are plain wrong.
Short of a few very rare medical conditions, your metabolism is determined by your weight, body fat percentage and activity level. Bodies consume energy at the nearly the exact same rate when you adjust for those three factors.
On June 21 2013 08:52 Cynry wrote: Just trying to sum my understanding of it all, cause it's getting messy... So, fat is energy stored due to different factors, but the one you can modify is carb intake. You can also reduce your overall calories intake under your outtake to lose fat, because it makes you burn the stored energy. People with trouble for gaining weight most likely don't want fat, but muscles. This recquires enough calories of any kind, but most importantly to just work out. If you want weight no matter what, you need excess calories and carbs ? Does that sound about right ?
About right. I didn't gain a pound for around 5 years, but working out finally made me gain about 10 pounds fairly quickly. Unfortunately I quit working out and lost it all haha. When it comes to losing weight that isn't muscle, diet counts for far more than exercise.
That's very true. Go look up at how much exercise you need to burn off 1000 calories worth of junk food. It's something ridiculous like jogging 15 miles.
On June 21 2013 09:00 SnipedSoul wrote: That's very true. Go look up at how much exercise you need to burn off 1000 calories worth of junk food. It's something ridiculous like jogging 15 miles.
Yeah, I know people trying to lose weight, and they just don't want to hear it. I tell them, "would you rather run 8 miles, or not eat that cupcake?" They think they can splurge if they just do twenty more sit ups. The food intake is the major problem, not the sedentary lifestyle.
In 1967, a medical researcher, Ethan Sims, carried out an experiment at Vermont state prison in the US. He recruited inmates to eat as much as they could to gain 25% of their body weight, in return for early release from prison.
Some of the volunteers could not reach the target however hard they tried, even though they were eating 10,000 calories a day. Sims's conclusion was that for some, obesity is nearly impossible.
Here the calories are tracked, and enough time passes for some people to become obese. There's some less-than-anecdotal data for you.
Their bodies freaked out and went full luxus consumption because they went from prison gruel to 10,000 calories. That's more than an Olympic athlete. It's the opposite of starvation mode, where the body retains more calories when there's a shortage of intake. Those are two ridiculous extremes that aren't naturally occurring if you don't do stupid shit to your body. Without going into extremes on either side, natural "metabolism" will never make a difference of more than like 100kcal unless you have some sort of serious medical condition.
On June 21 2013 08:13 Arghmyliver wrote:
On June 21 2013 08:00 RockIronrod wrote:
On June 21 2013 07:51 Arghmyliver wrote:
On June 21 2013 07:34 RockIronrod wrote:
On June 21 2013 07:12 Arghmyliver wrote: [quote]
Yeah I ate like that (maybe not quite that much every meal) for like a decade. Keep in mind that I also had breakfast and dinner that day too. I don't do it now just because I know my weight isn't necessarily indicitive of like my cholesterol and I don't want a massive heart attack. But imean, I could suck in and wrap my hands around my entire waist even while I was doing that.
If you truly ate highly above your calorie maintenance level and didn't gain weight, you either had worms or a black hole in your digestive tract. More than likely you didn't eat nearly as much as you thought you did, or you didn't eat consistently enough to gain weight (one day of 5000 calories and a week of 1200~). Genetics have little do to with this outside of actual medical problems like hyperthyroidism, and anyone who claims "muh metabolism" on either doesn't understand how metabolism actually works, or how energy works. It's a lot easier to blame genetics than it is to not drink a bottle of coke with every meal, and it feels better to say "I eat so much but never put on weight" than it is to say "I barely eat at sustainable levels every day but I splurged these few times in a month and didn't jump 30 kilos over night."
There were points where I was actively trying to gain weight because girls didn't want to go out with a guy who was skinnier than them with literally no effort. I was literally eating until I felt nauseous just to impress people or maybe gain weight faster than my 5 lbs per year of grade school average. Nowadays I eat when I'm hungry and try to stay on top of my Vits and essentials. If that's not enough calories or whatever I'm not really interested. If you think everyone is an identical machine that needs exactly X calories for Y weight gain maybe it's you who doesn't know how energy works.
Did you ever actually count your calories or did you just kind of assume they were a lot because you felt queasy? Do you think the energy just disappears or something? Either it goes to you and it's not enough maintenance level so it all gets stored and none gets stored as fat or it's going to a parasite. I'm in the exact same spot as you for some of the same reasons, but I actually did count my average calorie intake and it wasn't nearly as much as I thought it was, and what I do need to put on weight at a healthy pace sickens me because I'm not used to eating that much in a day.
Sorry I misread your post. You didn't specify a caloric intake, instead using the term "maintenance level" which is a bit loaded if you consider that obviously I wasn't consuming above my "maintenance level" assuming this is your threshold for weight gain. No one who isn't gaining weight would be right? But lets assume everyone's body consumes energy at different rate. What I'm saying is - the quantity and composition of the food I was eating would have made some people overweight. I knew people that couldn't drink milkshakes without working extra on the treadmill to burn it off. Consider that now, I eat considrably less in terms of quantity but I didn't lose any weight. Even without extra empty carbs. Does that mean I have a white hole in my intestine? Or did my tapeworm die?
Or you didn't count your calories back then and are grossly overestimating how much you ate.
Okay you must be right. Is a hamburger every day more than a cup of lentil salad? Who can tell! It would be a feat of human intelligence :D! Or maybe you think you know better than everyone and refuse to consider that my memory might be better than a goldfish.
Your memory is inconsequential. As you were never counting calories in the first place, there is nothing relevant for you to remember.
Your anecdotes add nothing to the thread. People like to think of themselves as special snowflakes so are naturally biased to, for example, overestimate their caloric intake and conclude they must be blessed because they didn't gain weight. The reality is probably much more mundane and the same thing that applies to all humans: people are very bad at estimating their caloric intake.
If you truly do make calories disappear like your stomach is another dimension, I suggest you get some hard data and publish it in a peer reviewed scientific journal. Until then, your posts add nothing to the conversation.
You have once again completely missed my point here. I don't think I'm some kind of energy wormhole. I'm saying ny diet would have been invalid for other individuals in terms of weight gain. I ate as much if not more than others some of whom were unfortunately obese. If you want to come to where I live and try to make me fat I invite you to do so hut I promise you will find it more challenging than a similiar experiment performed on other individuals. Bodies do not consume energy at the same rate. I don't know what I am doing, but I am able to eat whenever I want without fear of weight gain. I use more calories than other people I guess in myy daily activity, which is interesting considering I am pretty much a couch potatoe. My brother is the same way. Seems genetic to me
dem delusions. If you want actual proof, record all of your calories and macronutrients and look at the totals of what you eat. Since it's too much of a hassle to settle an internet argument, you won't do it. And I'll still remain completely unconvinced of your anecdote.
Look, I don't know how to say this any more clearly. Even if you fed everyone on earth the exact same diet every day for their entire lives people would still have different weights and the reason, like most human differences, would be genetic. If you don't understand that I'm not sure what else I can do to clarify.
In 1967, a medical researcher, Ethan Sims, carried out an experiment at Vermont state prison in the US. He recruited inmates to eat as much as they could to gain 25% of their body weight, in return for early release from prison.
Some of the volunteers could not reach the target however hard they tried, even though they were eating 10,000 calories a day. Sims's conclusion was that for some, obesity is nearly impossible.
Here the calories are tracked, and enough time passes for some people to become obese. There's some less-than-anecdotal data for you.
Their bodies freaked out and went full luxus consumption because they went from prison gruel to 10,000 calories. That's more than an Olympic athlete. It's the opposite of starvation mode, where the body retains more calories when there's a shortage of intake. Those are two ridiculous extremes that aren't naturally occurring if you don't do stupid shit to your body. Without going into extremes on either side, natural "metabolism" will never make a difference of more than like 100kcal unless you have some sort of serious medical condition.
On June 21 2013 08:13 Arghmyliver wrote:
On June 21 2013 08:00 RockIronrod wrote:
On June 21 2013 07:51 Arghmyliver wrote:
On June 21 2013 07:34 RockIronrod wrote: [quote] If you truly ate highly above your calorie maintenance level and didn't gain weight, you either had worms or a black hole in your digestive tract. More than likely you didn't eat nearly as much as you thought you did, or you didn't eat consistently enough to gain weight (one day of 5000 calories and a week of 1200~). Genetics have little do to with this outside of actual medical problems like hyperthyroidism, and anyone who claims "muh metabolism" on either doesn't understand how metabolism actually works, or how energy works. It's a lot easier to blame genetics than it is to not drink a bottle of coke with every meal, and it feels better to say "I eat so much but never put on weight" than it is to say "I barely eat at sustainable levels every day but I splurged these few times in a month and didn't jump 30 kilos over night."
There were points where I was actively trying to gain weight because girls didn't want to go out with a guy who was skinnier than them with literally no effort. I was literally eating until I felt nauseous just to impress people or maybe gain weight faster than my 5 lbs per year of grade school average. Nowadays I eat when I'm hungry and try to stay on top of my Vits and essentials. If that's not enough calories or whatever I'm not really interested. If you think everyone is an identical machine that needs exactly X calories for Y weight gain maybe it's you who doesn't know how energy works.
Did you ever actually count your calories or did you just kind of assume they were a lot because you felt queasy? Do you think the energy just disappears or something? Either it goes to you and it's not enough maintenance level so it all gets stored and none gets stored as fat or it's going to a parasite. I'm in the exact same spot as you for some of the same reasons, but I actually did count my average calorie intake and it wasn't nearly as much as I thought it was, and what I do need to put on weight at a healthy pace sickens me because I'm not used to eating that much in a day.
Sorry I misread your post. You didn't specify a caloric intake, instead using the term "maintenance level" which is a bit loaded if you consider that obviously I wasn't consuming above my "maintenance level" assuming this is your threshold for weight gain. No one who isn't gaining weight would be right? But lets assume everyone's body consumes energy at different rate. What I'm saying is - the quantity and composition of the food I was eating would have made some people overweight. I knew people that couldn't drink milkshakes without working extra on the treadmill to burn it off. Consider that now, I eat considrably less in terms of quantity but I didn't lose any weight. Even without extra empty carbs. Does that mean I have a white hole in my intestine? Or did my tapeworm die?
Or you didn't count your calories back then and are grossly overestimating how much you ate.
Okay you must be right. Is a hamburger every day more than a cup of lentil salad? Who can tell! It would be a feat of human intelligence :D! Or maybe you think you know better than everyone and refuse to consider that my memory might be better than a goldfish.
Your memory is inconsequential. As you were never counting calories in the first place, there is nothing relevant for you to remember.
Your anecdotes add nothing to the thread. People like to think of themselves as special snowflakes so are naturally biased to, for example, overestimate their caloric intake and conclude they must be blessed because they didn't gain weight. The reality is probably much more mundane and the same thing that applies to all humans: people are very bad at estimating their caloric intake.
If you truly do make calories disappear like your stomach is another dimension, I suggest you get some hard data and publish it in a peer reviewed scientific journal. Until then, your posts add nothing to the conversation.
You have once again completely missed my point here. I don't think I'm some kind of energy wormhole. I'm saying ny diet would have been invalid for other individuals in terms of weight gain. I ate as much if not more than others some of whom were unfortunately obese. If you want to come to where I live and try to make me fat I invite you to do so hut I promise you will find it more challenging than a similiar experiment performed on other individuals. Bodies do not consume energy at the same rate. I don't know what I am doing, but I am able to eat whenever I want without fear of weight gain. I use more calories than other people I guess in myy daily activity, which is interesting considering I am pretty much a couch potatoe. My brother is the same way. Seems genetic to me
dem delusions. If you want actual proof, record all of your calories and macronutrients and look at the totals of what you eat. Since it's too much of a hassle to settle an internet argument, you won't do it. And I'll still remain completely unconvinced of your anecdote.
Look, I don't know how to say this any more clearly. Even if you fed everyone on earth the exact same diet every day for their entire lives people would still have different weights and the reason, like most human differences, would be genetic. If you don't understand that I'm not sure what else I can do to clarify.
Look, I don't know how to say this any more clearly. I know EXACTLY what your argument is and I'm calling you delusional. For some reason you keep thinking me and others aren't understanding what you're saying. We are. It's just dumb. The difference is hormonal and neurological/psychological, with a SMALL genetic component. If you don't understand that I'm not sure what else I can do to clarify.
EDIT: By the way, you may in fact have some weird thing where you can eat 5000 calories and not gain weight (you don't) but that doesn't mean it's genetic either. Because there's this thing you've lived called a life, and various things you've done and chosen in that life can affect your metabolic rate.
We're not really going on about Taube are we? There's so many things wrong with so many things he's ever said and done, and the only reason he's considered at all relevant is because his "research" is seen as a get out of being blamed for being fat free card. Look up any criticism of his work and you'll quickly find he's both a hypocrite and only telling half-truths. Lyle McDonald surmised it best on his website in the comment section of a piece he did about insulin and fat.
The problem I have with Taube’s book is this: after criticizing folks for cherry picking their data, he does the exact same damn thing. He starts with an incorrect/out of date 1980 paper (suggesting that the obese eat the same as the lean) and then goes looking for reasons why this is the case, concluding that it’s insulin. He then carefully ignores all data that doesn’t agree with him including an enormous amount of data showing that the obese under-report their true food intake (which is why the 1980 survey is garbage For someone who ‘spent 5 years raiding the research’, he mainly just selected data that agreed with his pre-formed conclusion, ignoring a tremendous amount of current research that did not. And that a lot of people keep insisting on a metabolic advantage that NO study has ever been able to measure doesn’t change the fact that NO study has ever been able to measure it. I’d point you to the study by Brehm for example: “The role of energy expenditure in the differential weight loss in obese women on low-fat and low-carbohydrate diets. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2005 Mar;90(3):1475-82.” Which directly measured both resting energy expenditure and thermic effect of food after a low- and high-carb meal. Results? No difference in resting energy expenditure and a higher TEF after the carb-based test meal. If the metabolic advantage exists, it should be measurable with current technology. And no study has been able to find it EVER (it’s always inferred by changes in weight). And bodybuilders have gotten to sub 10% for a couple of decades with carb-based diets so what Poliquin says doesn’t seem to be that relevant here. Which isn’t to say that lowcarb diets don’t work for a lot of people. But they work because people eat less, not because of any metabolic magic. Understand? I’m not anti-lowcarb diets (my first book is about nothing but them), but I am against people preaching magic voodoo that doesn’t exist.
In 1967, a medical researcher, Ethan Sims, carried out an experiment at Vermont state prison in the US. He recruited inmates to eat as much as they could to gain 25% of their body weight, in return for early release from prison.
Some of the volunteers could not reach the target however hard they tried, even though they were eating 10,000 calories a day. Sims's conclusion was that for some, obesity is nearly impossible.
Here the calories are tracked, and enough time passes for some people to become obese. There's some less-than-anecdotal data for you.
Their bodies freaked out and went full luxus consumption because they went from prison gruel to 10,000 calories. That's more than an Olympic athlete. It's the opposite of starvation mode, where the body retains more calories when there's a shortage of intake. Those are two ridiculous extremes that aren't naturally occurring if you don't do stupid shit to your body. Without going into extremes on either side, natural "metabolism" will never make a difference of more than like 100kcal unless you have some sort of serious medical condition.
On June 21 2013 08:13 Arghmyliver wrote:
On June 21 2013 08:00 RockIronrod wrote:
On June 21 2013 07:51 Arghmyliver wrote:
On June 21 2013 07:34 RockIronrod wrote: [quote] If you truly ate highly above your calorie maintenance level and didn't gain weight, you either had worms or a black hole in your digestive tract. More than likely you didn't eat nearly as much as you thought you did, or you didn't eat consistently enough to gain weight (one day of 5000 calories and a week of 1200~). Genetics have little do to with this outside of actual medical problems like hyperthyroidism, and anyone who claims "muh metabolism" on either doesn't understand how metabolism actually works, or how energy works. It's a lot easier to blame genetics than it is to not drink a bottle of coke with every meal, and it feels better to say "I eat so much but never put on weight" than it is to say "I barely eat at sustainable levels every day but I splurged these few times in a month and didn't jump 30 kilos over night."
There were points where I was actively trying to gain weight because girls didn't want to go out with a guy who was skinnier than them with literally no effort. I was literally eating until I felt nauseous just to impress people or maybe gain weight faster than my 5 lbs per year of grade school average. Nowadays I eat when I'm hungry and try to stay on top of my Vits and essentials. If that's not enough calories or whatever I'm not really interested. If you think everyone is an identical machine that needs exactly X calories for Y weight gain maybe it's you who doesn't know how energy works.
Did you ever actually count your calories or did you just kind of assume they were a lot because you felt queasy? Do you think the energy just disappears or something? Either it goes to you and it's not enough maintenance level so it all gets stored and none gets stored as fat or it's going to a parasite. I'm in the exact same spot as you for some of the same reasons, but I actually did count my average calorie intake and it wasn't nearly as much as I thought it was, and what I do need to put on weight at a healthy pace sickens me because I'm not used to eating that much in a day.
Sorry I misread your post. You didn't specify a caloric intake, instead using the term "maintenance level" which is a bit loaded if you consider that obviously I wasn't consuming above my "maintenance level" assuming this is your threshold for weight gain. No one who isn't gaining weight would be right? But lets assume everyone's body consumes energy at different rate. What I'm saying is - the quantity and composition of the food I was eating would have made some people overweight. I knew people that couldn't drink milkshakes without working extra on the treadmill to burn it off. Consider that now, I eat considrably less in terms of quantity but I didn't lose any weight. Even without extra empty carbs. Does that mean I have a white hole in my intestine? Or did my tapeworm die?
Or you didn't count your calories back then and are grossly overestimating how much you ate.
Okay you must be right. Is a hamburger every day more than a cup of lentil salad? Who can tell! It would be a feat of human intelligence :D! Or maybe you think you know better than everyone and refuse to consider that my memory might be better than a goldfish.
Your memory is inconsequential. As you were never counting calories in the first place, there is nothing relevant for you to remember.
Your anecdotes add nothing to the thread. People like to think of themselves as special snowflakes so are naturally biased to, for example, overestimate their caloric intake and conclude they must be blessed because they didn't gain weight. The reality is probably much more mundane and the same thing that applies to all humans: people are very bad at estimating their caloric intake.
If you truly do make calories disappear like your stomach is another dimension, I suggest you get some hard data and publish it in a peer reviewed scientific journal. Until then, your posts add nothing to the conversation.
You have once again completely missed my point here. I don't think I'm some kind of energy wormhole. I'm saying ny diet would have been invalid for other individuals in terms of weight gain. I ate as much if not more than others some of whom were unfortunately obese. If you want to come to where I live and try to make me fat I invite you to do so hut I promise you will find it more challenging than a similiar experiment performed on other individuals. Bodies do not consume energy at the same rate. I don't know what I am doing, but I am able to eat whenever I want without fear of weight gain. I use more calories than other people I guess in myy daily activity, which is interesting considering I am pretty much a couch potatoe. My brother is the same way. Seems genetic to me
dem delusions. If you want actual proof, record all of your calories and macronutrients and look at the totals of what you eat. Since it's too much of a hassle to settle an internet argument, you won't do it. And I'll still remain completely unconvinced of your anecdote.
Look, I don't know how to say this any more clearly. Even if you fed everyone on earth the exact same diet every day for their entire lives people would still have different weights and the reason, like most human differences, would be genetic. If you don't understand that I'm not sure what else I can do to clarify.
Some people have to work harder to lose weight just like some people have to work harder to graduate from university.
On June 21 2013 07:39 On_Slaught wrote: Gary Taubes gives a VERY strong argument for why the calories equation has literally nothing to do with weight gain. He says that relying on the law of thermodynamics (which is what people are doing when they argue this) is making an 8th grade level math mistake. This law has no more impact on weight gain than the law of relativity does.
Rather his argument, for those who don't have the patience to watch the whole video, is that the common view is backwards (he goes into the history of how this was lost). Fat people don't get fatter because they eat more, they eat more because they are fat. Basic biology tells us that it has everything to do with how our hormones are influenced by our food (he goes into a lot of detail about how big genetics is to weight gain. Anybody who says it is a minor issue is completely un-grounded). The ultimate conclusion is that the specific substance which causes ALL fat creation in cells is insulin. Insulin is caused by carbohydrate intake. Therefore carbohydrate intake directly leads to fat increases. He argues that you can literally eat as much non-carbohydrated food as you want and you couldn't gain weight gain weight.
However this does not free people from personal responsibility. It happens to be that many of the best tasting food happens to create insulin so personal discipline is still a huge factor.
It's nice to actually listen to somebody who at least gives sound scientific basis for his arguments rather than the pure shit being dredged up in this thread. And even for the people not spouting pure shit, there is no basis other than the ubiquity of their stance upon which they base it.
Currently 25 mins into that video, thanks for posting it- very informative and clears up a lot of misinformation! Some points really hitting home for me- like how incredibly skinny I was as a kid while my parents were overweight etc. :D
Everyone in this thread should watch it. Reposting for the link-paranoid.
For the people who don't want to listen through a 1.5 hour video, the University of California network made a series of short videos that describe the issue at hand.
I'll put the full playlist of 6 videos in a spoiler below, but it agrees with the information provided by Gary Taubes specifically about an insulin heavy diet being the great problem with obesity. + Show Spoiler +
On June 21 2013 09:16 RockIronrod wrote: We're not really going on about Taube are we? There's so many things wrong with so many things he's ever said and done, and the only reason he's considered at all relevant is because his "research" is seen as a get out of being blamed for being fat free card. Look up any criticism of his work and you'll quickly find he's both a hypocrite and only telling half-truths. Lyle McDonald surmised it best on his website in the comment section of a piece he did about insulin and fat.
The problem I have with Taube’s book is this: after criticizing folks for cherry picking their data, he does the exact same damn thing. He starts with an incorrect/out of date 1980 paper (suggesting that the obese eat the same as the lean) and then goes looking for reasons why this is the case, concluding that it’s insulin. He then carefully ignores all data that doesn’t agree with him including an enormous amount of data showing that the obese under-report their true food intake (which is why the 1980 survey is garbage For someone who ‘spent 5 years raiding the research’, he mainly just selected data that agreed with his pre-formed conclusion, ignoring a tremendous amount of current research that did not. And that a lot of people keep insisting on a metabolic advantage that NO study has ever been able to measure doesn’t change the fact that NO study has ever been able to measure it. I’d point you to the study by Brehm for example: “The role of energy expenditure in the differential weight loss in obese women on low-fat and low-carbohydrate diets. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2005 Mar;90(3):1475-82.” Which directly measured both resting energy expenditure and thermic effect of food after a low- and high-carb meal. Results? No difference in resting energy expenditure and a higher TEF after the carb-based test meal. If the metabolic advantage exists, it should be measurable with current technology. And no study has been able to find it EVER (it’s always inferred by changes in weight). And bodybuilders have gotten to sub 10% for a couple of decades with carb-based diets so what Poliquin says doesn’t seem to be that relevant here. Which isn’t to say that lowcarb diets don’t work for a lot of people. But they work because people eat less, not because of any metabolic magic. Understand? I’m not anti-lowcarb diets (my first book is about nothing but them), but I am against people preaching magic voodoo that doesn’t exist.
This is why, like I said earlier, I find any definite claims on nutrition and biochemistry to be pretty stupid most of the time. It's almost impossible to actually study the process in its natural setting.
On June 21 2013 09:00 SnipedSoul wrote: That's very true. Go look up at how much exercise you need to burn off 1000 calories worth of junk food. It's something ridiculous like jogging 15 miles.
Depends what kind of exercise you're doing. 1000 calories can be burned in a little over an hour of intensive mixed martial arts training. Both diet and exercise are key for managing calories, and I say this as an amateur combat athlete who has to make weight for tournaments and fights.
On June 21 2013 08:07 SnipedSoul wrote: Obesity is a disease and the cure is healthy diet, exercise, and a heaping tablespoon of willpower!
Declaring obesity a disease probably won't do anything except let obese people say "It has nothing to do with the choices I make, it's a disease!"
I'm not trying to rag on overweight people, but I really don't see how this is going to be beneficial in any way.
It's beneficial to the political correctness industry, which now has a new victim group to profit from.
'Political correctness industry', as you put it is creating the conditions of 'tolerance' that cultural shifts towards an abdication of personal responsibility.
Big pharma and the food industry are going to love it.
Of course people who choose fast food and unhealthy/overeating will benefit the food industry and pharmaceuticals. It's a choice. Now when government comes in and says, "We're gonna choose for you!" -- that's the abdication of personal responsibility. You've got it all backwards.
It's real fun for politicians to scream big pharma and the rest, as you do, to reap votes by portraying themselves as defenders of a victim class. It's been done with race, sexual orientation, income level, and the rest. Obesity will be no different.
In 1967, a medical researcher, Ethan Sims, carried out an experiment at Vermont state prison in the US. He recruited inmates to eat as much as they could to gain 25% of their body weight, in return for early release from prison.
Some of the volunteers could not reach the target however hard they tried, even though they were eating 10,000 calories a day. Sims's conclusion was that for some, obesity is nearly impossible.
Here the calories are tracked, and enough time passes for some people to become obese. There's some less-than-anecdotal data for you.
Their bodies freaked out and went full luxus consumption because they went from prison gruel to 10,000 calories. That's more than an Olympic athlete. It's the opposite of starvation mode, where the body retains more calories when there's a shortage of intake. Those are two ridiculous extremes that aren't naturally occurring if you don't do stupid shit to your body. Without going into extremes on either side, natural "metabolism" will never make a difference of more than like 100kcal unless you have some sort of serious medical condition.
On June 21 2013 08:13 Arghmyliver wrote:
On June 21 2013 08:00 RockIronrod wrote:
On June 21 2013 07:51 Arghmyliver wrote: [quote]
There were points where I was actively trying to gain weight because girls didn't want to go out with a guy who was skinnier than them with literally no effort. I was literally eating until I felt nauseous just to impress people or maybe gain weight faster than my 5 lbs per year of grade school average. Nowadays I eat when I'm hungry and try to stay on top of my Vits and essentials. If that's not enough calories or whatever I'm not really interested. If you think everyone is an identical machine that needs exactly X calories for Y weight gain maybe it's you who doesn't know how energy works.
Did you ever actually count your calories or did you just kind of assume they were a lot because you felt queasy? Do you think the energy just disappears or something? Either it goes to you and it's not enough maintenance level so it all gets stored and none gets stored as fat or it's going to a parasite. I'm in the exact same spot as you for some of the same reasons, but I actually did count my average calorie intake and it wasn't nearly as much as I thought it was, and what I do need to put on weight at a healthy pace sickens me because I'm not used to eating that much in a day.
Sorry I misread your post. You didn't specify a caloric intake, instead using the term "maintenance level" which is a bit loaded if you consider that obviously I wasn't consuming above my "maintenance level" assuming this is your threshold for weight gain. No one who isn't gaining weight would be right? But lets assume everyone's body consumes energy at different rate. What I'm saying is - the quantity and composition of the food I was eating would have made some people overweight. I knew people that couldn't drink milkshakes without working extra on the treadmill to burn it off. Consider that now, I eat considrably less in terms of quantity but I didn't lose any weight. Even without extra empty carbs. Does that mean I have a white hole in my intestine? Or did my tapeworm die?
Or you didn't count your calories back then and are grossly overestimating how much you ate.
Okay you must be right. Is a hamburger every day more than a cup of lentil salad? Who can tell! It would be a feat of human intelligence :D! Or maybe you think you know better than everyone and refuse to consider that my memory might be better than a goldfish.
Your memory is inconsequential. As you were never counting calories in the first place, there is nothing relevant for you to remember.
Your anecdotes add nothing to the thread. People like to think of themselves as special snowflakes so are naturally biased to, for example, overestimate their caloric intake and conclude they must be blessed because they didn't gain weight. The reality is probably much more mundane and the same thing that applies to all humans: people are very bad at estimating their caloric intake.
If you truly do make calories disappear like your stomach is another dimension, I suggest you get some hard data and publish it in a peer reviewed scientific journal. Until then, your posts add nothing to the conversation.
You have once again completely missed my point here. I don't think I'm some kind of energy wormhole. I'm saying ny diet would have been invalid for other individuals in terms of weight gain. I ate as much if not more than others some of whom were unfortunately obese. If you want to come to where I live and try to make me fat I invite you to do so hut I promise you will find it more challenging than a similiar experiment performed on other individuals. Bodies do not consume energy at the same rate. I don't know what I am doing, but I am able to eat whenever I want without fear of weight gain. I use more calories than other people I guess in myy daily activity, which is interesting considering I am pretty much a couch potatoe. My brother is the same way. Seems genetic to me
dem delusions. If you want actual proof, record all of your calories and macronutrients and look at the totals of what you eat. Since it's too much of a hassle to settle an internet argument, you won't do it. And I'll still remain completely unconvinced of your anecdote.
Look, I don't know how to say this any more clearly. Even if you fed everyone on earth the exact same diet every day for their entire lives people would still have different weights and the reason, like most human differences, would be genetic. If you don't understand that I'm not sure what else I can do to clarify.
Look, I don't know how to say this any more clearly. I know EXACTLY what your argument is and I'm calling you delusional. For some reason you keep thinking me and others aren't understanding what you're saying. We are. It's just dumb. The difference is hormonal and neurological/psychological, with a SMALL genetic component. If you don't understand that I'm not sure what else I can do to clarify.
EDIT: By the way, you may in fact have some weird thing where you can eat 5000 calories and not gain weight (you don't) but that doesn't mean it's genetic either. Because there's this thing you've lived called a life, and various things you've done and chosen in that life can affect your metabolic rate.
Your ad hominem isn't very flattering. The fact that you think humans in different areas of the world never adapted to the nutrition that was locally available is interesting to say the least. If you don't want to debate that's fine, but don't call me an idiot or delusional. Especially since you have failed to provide evidence for your claim that genetics have nothing to do with diversity. I don't really have time to argue Darwin here, nor the means to link you to anything on what he did. I guess I'll just say - evolution is cool.
On June 21 2013 07:39 On_Slaught wrote: Gary Taubes gives a VERY strong argument for why the calories equation has literally nothing to do with weight gain. He says that relying on the law of thermodynamics (which is what people are doing when they argue this) is making an 8th grade level math mistake. This law has no more impact on weight gain than the law of relativity does.
Rather his argument, for those who don't have the patience to watch the whole video, is that the common view is backwards (he goes into the history of how this was lost). Fat people don't get fatter because they eat more, they eat more because they are fat. Basic biology tells us that it has everything to do with how our hormones are influenced by our food (he goes into a lot of detail about how big genetics is to weight gain. Anybody who says it is a minor issue is completely un-grounded). The ultimate conclusion is that the specific substance which causes ALL fat creation in cells is insulin. Insulin is caused by carbohydrate intake. Therefore carbohydrate intake directly leads to fat increases. He argues that you can literally eat as much non-carbohydrated food as you want and you couldn't gain weight gain weight.
However this does not free people from personal responsibility. It happens to be that many of the best tasting food happens to create insulin so personal discipline is still a huge factor.
It's nice to actually listen to somebody who at least gives sound scientific basis for his arguments rather than the pure shit being dredged up in this thread. And even for the people not spouting pure shit, there is no basis other than the ubiquity of their stance upon which they base it.
Currently 25 mins into that video, thanks for posting it- very informative and clears up a lot of misinformation! Some points really hitting home for me- like how incredibly skinny I was as a kid while my parents were overweight etc. :D
Everyone in this thread should watch it. Reposting for the link-paranoid.
Hmm just wondering, did anyone ever do a comparison study looking at obesity in Japan vs America? I'm sure genetics is one component, but diet must be a core component as well right?
EPT
