3 ms·

Not all CI are stored as fat. Not all CO are burned from fat. Obesity specifically, is about excess fat, not bioavailable calories. Imagine, as the article men

by lkey 5y ago

Not all CI are stored as fat. Not all CO are burned from fat. Obesity specifically, is about excess fat, not bioavailable calories. Imagine, as the article mentions, a person that has a daily calorie excess of exactly 10kcal per day from a potato chip. CICO with a 100% fat conversion dictates that person will gain 8lbs of pure fat every year. Yet this isn't how it works in practice, so we need a better understanding of fat accumulation and loss if we want to address the crisis. Any sufficiently drastic calorie deficit will result in weight loss, and eventually that loss will get to your fat stores. This is how the Twinkie diets works. Most folks, myself included, would like to just stay at a healthy weight without thinking too much about 100 calories plus or minus their perceived BMR. And for lots of folks that works, but clearly for an increasing majority, the 100kcal are stored as fat immediately, and the small 100kcal deficit doesn't burn the fat that was stored. Death by 1000 cuts. Wouldn't it be interesting to discover why that might be and address it directly?

josephcsible 5y ago
> Imagine, as the article mentions, a person that has a daily calorie excess of exactly 10kcal per day from a potato chip. CICO with a 100% fat conversion dictates that person will gain 8lbs of pure fat every year. No it doesn't. One of the factors that determines your BMR is your weight, so adding any constant amount of calories every day only affects your weight by a constant amount. Eating an extra 10kcal every day might give you 2lbs, total, ever in your life.
- lkey 5y ago
  I apologize, I didn't divide that number by 9, so it's a bit less than a lb a year, but that was meant to illustrate what you ended up pointing out. BMR is variable. It's why when we talk about deficits and surpluses we are actually doing hand-waving around something critical, on any given day, how do you even know what your BMR/RMR is? Contestants that starved themselves on the biggest loser showed a 500kcal reduction in RMR 6 years later. If they'd just plugged themselves into a calculator and eaten the prescribed allotment daily, they'd be gaining the weight back quite rapidly. And that's exactly what happened to most of them as it turns out.
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    > it's a bit less than a lb a year My whole point was that some amount of weight "a year" isn't how that would work. The only way you keep gaining weight every year is that if every year, you eat more and/or exercise less than you did the prior year. If you eat too much, but the same too much, every year, you'll be overweight, but you won't keep gaining weight every year forever. > Contestants that starved themselves on the biggest loser showed a 500kcal reduction in RMR 6 years later. That makes sense, since they lost a bunch of weight and RMR is tied to weight.
    - lkey 5y ago
      You misunderstand me: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4989512/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4989512/ After 6 years, 41.0±31.3 kg of the lost weight was regained (p=0.0002) while RMR was 704±427 kcal/d below baseline (p<0.0001) and metabolic adaptation was −499±207 kcal/d (p<0.0001) The lower RMR remained and sometimes continued to drop after they regained the weight. Any normal person cannot assume that their RMR is something they get off of a website calculator, or that it will behave like linearly. Speaking as someone formerly fat, the metabolic adaptation did persist for years after I lost all the weight, putting me around 400 below where I should have been on the chart. It is still quite annoying, though it has lessened.
- belltaco 5y ago
  If you read the article it says 10kcal over the energy expenditure per day. So BMR going up or down doesn't matter, the 10kcal is on top of whatever it is.
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    But then you're not just adding one potato chip per day to your diet, as GP said. You're increasing your daily caloric intake every day. Obviously that will make you fat without bound.

by lkey 5y ago

josephcsible 5y ago

> Imagine, as the article mentions, a person that has a daily calorie excess of exactly 10kcal per day from a potato chip. CICO with a 100% fat conversion dictates that person will gain 8lbs of pure fat every year. No it doesn't. One of the factors that determines your BMR is your weight, so adding any constant amount of calories every day only affects your weight by a constant amount. Eating an extra 10kcal every day might give you 2lbs, total, ever in your life.

lkey 5y ago
I apologize, I didn't divide that number by 9, so it's a bit less than a lb a year, but that was meant to illustrate what you ended up pointing out. BMR is variable. It's why when we talk about deficits and surpluses we are actually doing hand-waving around something critical, on any given day, how do you even know what your BMR/RMR is? Contestants that starved themselves on the biggest loser showed a 500kcal reduction in RMR 6 years later. If they'd just plugged themselves into a calculator and eaten the prescribed allotment daily, they'd be gaining the weight back quite rapidly. And that's exactly what happened to most of them as it turns out.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  > it's a bit less than a lb a year My whole point was that some amount of weight "a year" isn't how that would work. The only way you keep gaining weight every year is that if every year, you eat more and/or exercise less than you did the prior year. If you eat too much, but the same too much, every year, you'll be overweight, but you won't keep gaining weight every year forever. > Contestants that starved themselves on the biggest loser showed a 500kcal reduction in RMR 6 years later. That makes sense, since they lost a bunch of weight and RMR is tied to weight.
  - lkey 5y ago
    You misunderstand me: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4989512/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4989512/ After 6 years, 41.0±31.3 kg of the lost weight was regained (p=0.0002) while RMR was 704±427 kcal/d below baseline (p<0.0001) and metabolic adaptation was −499±207 kcal/d (p<0.0001) The lower RMR remained and sometimes continued to drop after they regained the weight. Any normal person cannot assume that their RMR is something they get off of a website calculator, or that it will behave like linearly. Speaking as someone formerly fat, the metabolic adaptation did persist for years after I lost all the weight, putting me around 400 below where I should have been on the chart. It is still quite annoying, though it has lessened.
belltaco 5y ago
If you read the article it says 10kcal over the energy expenditure per day. So BMR going up or down doesn't matter, the 10kcal is on top of whatever it is.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  But then you're not just adding one potato chip per day to your diet, as GP said. You're increasing your daily caloric intake every day. Obviously that will make you fat without bound.