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Would love to see what HN thinks about this. I recently picked up a book called Anti-Diet on this subject, at the suggestion of my physician, and I don't know w
by bckr 4y ago
Would love to see what HN thinks about this. I recently picked up a book called Anti-Diet on this subject, at the suggestion of my physician, and I don't know what I think yet. It seems almost dangerous, yet the arguments are very intuitive and apparently backed by overwhelming evidence.
Specifically, that weight loss in the long term is not only practically impossible but also actively harmful.
But what if I want to be more muscular? Is that impossible as well? Not sure.
- Ferrotin 4y agoIt’s a sad load of nonsense. Being fat sucks and the best thing that can happen to a fat guy is to lose weight. You can’t even sleep properly if you’re fat. You can’t keep up mentally. > But what if I want to be more muscular? Is that impossible as well? Not sure. That is impossible. There is no way to build muscle — gyms are scams. Read “The Muscle Myth” and “The Protein Delusion” by Ivana Tinkle.
- brad0 4y agoAnecdata here but I’ve built ~30lbs of muscle from when I was a skinny kid back in school. I’m curious what the core argument is from these books. Could you tell me more?
- uberman 4y agoIs that the same Ivana Tinkle who sometimes writes under the pseudonym I. P. Freely?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- scarmig 4y agoPeople likely overstate how dangerous being overweight and even to some extent obesity is. Excess weight usually comes with a whole raft of comorbidities, many of which can't be accounted for and which can play the actual causal role in bad health outcomes. I'll take my actuarial chances on a fat person who has good mental health, has a rich social circle, regularly exercises, and eats "healthy" (however you define it) foods any day over a depressive skinny person who sits on their couch all day eating potato chips. That said, many interventions for the obese would help all of those other things, even if hypothetically you could vary them independently. And those comorbidities are often the things making those anti-obesity interventions so ineffective. Muscle wise, lifting weights and eating a surplus is usually good enough to see significant gains for an untrained individual. There are "hard gainers," but their issue is having difficulty eating enough; that's not an issue for people who are overweight.
- cnasc 4y ago> Specifically, that weight loss in the long term is not only practically impossible but also actively harmful. Depends what you mean by “long-term” but now at 30 I am both lighter and more muscular than I was at 18. Based on the results of a recent physical exam I don’t see any harm having been done.
- Ferrotin 4y agoThere is a theory that repeated weight loss is harmful, because dying or shrinking fat cells release toxins that they’d been holding. That the obese are mainly harmed by having their fat cells cycle more as they gain and lose fat, voluntarily or not.
- Py-o7 4y agoa more persuasive theory imo is that yo-yo dieters that don't do serrious resistance training, have repeated cycles of sarcopenia and osteopenia -- i.e. lose 'good stuff' along with fat on the diet phase and gain back disproportionately fat after. The negative effects compound over time with each cycle.
- Ferrotin 4y agoThat sounds plausible to me.
- nonameiguess 4y agoThe idea is that either long-term fat loss or muscle gain are impossible is clearly ridiculous. There are simple existence proofs. How does the world have athletes? Go look at the master's division of a natural bodybuilding or tested powerlifting competition. Or the master's division in some 5k or 10k road race. Are the lifters bigger and stronger than they were 30 years ago? Of course they are. Are the runners fat? Of course not. What research shows, unfortunately, is that taking a bunch of people in some kind of shape they don't like, applying a point-in-time intervention that changes it, and then going back five years later usually results in finding they went back to how they were before. That doesn't mean changing your physical condition for the long-run is impossible. It means there is no such thing as a point-in-time intervention with permanent effects. You need to make a permanent lifestyle change to see a permanent effect. The overwhelming majority of people will never do that, but it absolutely does not mean you can't do it.