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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

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.

k__ 4y ago
Get a fitness tracker. Seriously. People always use these online calories calculators. And they can be off my more than 500kcal a day. That's more than the recommended calorie deficit.
- 0xcde4c3db 4y ago
  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.
bigDinosaur 4y ago
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.
adamgordonbell 4y ago
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.
thr0wawayf00 4y ago
> 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.
- dlkmp 4y ago
  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.
  - thr0wawayf00 4y ago
    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? 0: https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2020-02-27/us-obesity-rate-passes-40-percent https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/...
    - pocketarc 4y ago
      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.
sva_ 4y ago
The way you say it makes it sound like you only just noticed that you've become fat over 20 years. I usually force myself to start counting calories again once I go off a weight I'm happy with (readjust my intuition.) And that means counting calories going in (food) and out (normal resting use per day + potential exercise)
- twawaaay 4y ago
  That was a long time ago. I lost most of it about decade ago and turned most of the rest into muscle. Running daily. Don't count calories. Read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Mini-Habits-Weight-Loss-Suffering/dp/0996435441 https://www.amazon.com/Mini-Habits-Weight-Loss-Suffering/dp/... 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.
  - sva_ 4y ago
    > Calorie counting does not work Works for me. And yes, you shouldn't eat garbage. In other news, water is wet.
  - TheCapn 4y ago
    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.
    - twawaaay 4y ago
      How is trying to build right habits trying to blame external source? It literally starts with observation that current habits are wrong and need to change.
    - 4y ago
sedeki 4y ago
I lost 35 kgs since February this year, up until now in October. I want to lose 10 kgs more, then I'll have 10% body fat and will look fit. Yes, it's all about ability to self-regulate.
- gilbetron 4y ago
  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.
  - algoatecorn 4y ago
    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
    - skeeter2020 4y ago
      >> 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.
      - algoatecorn 4y ago
        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.
Retric 4y ago
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.
- vsareto 4y ago
  An extra 600/day is incredibly easy to get with American food and habits
  - NoBreakfirst 4y ago
    I was about to pick up some frozen bar for 550 calorie yesterday. I used to eat two on a whim. Never realized that it’s basically lunch.
    - checkyoursudo 4y ago
      I think this is a key point. Not just for weight control but for so many things. It is agonizingly simple to destroy near constant mindfulness with a few moments of mindlessness.
      - isthisthingon99 4y ago
        This is why I love trading. You cannot falter. It has changed my personality as well.
        angrais 4y ago
        Do you mean training or trading as in stock trading?
        4y ago
FartyMcFarter 4y ago
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.
- FooBarWidget 4y ago
  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.
  - FartyMcFarter 4y ago
    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.
    - checkyoursudo 4y ago
      How does this work? I have way more muscle than my wife, but she can eat way more than me without gaining weight. It can't be just muscle mass? How many calories does extra muscle mass burn daily?
      - FartyMcFarter 4y ago
        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.
freemrkt8 4y ago
ravenstine 4y ago
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.
m12k 4y ago
Gaining 4g of fat requires an intake of quite a bit more than 4g of food.
- twawaaay 4y ago
  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.
  - nonameiguess 4y ago
    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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
skeeter2020 4y ago
>> 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.
11235813213455 4y ago
The problem is people eat by habbit, or by social rules, not by hunger. Naturally we tend more to 2 or 1 meal a day
dirtyid 4y ago
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.

k__ 4y ago

Get a fitness tracker. Seriously. People always use these online calories calculators. And they can be off my more than 500kcal a day. That's more than the recommended calorie deficit.

0xcde4c3db 4y ago
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.

bigDinosaur 4y ago

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.

adamgordonbell 4y ago

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.

thr0wawayf00 4y ago

> 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.

dlkmp 4y ago
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.
- thr0wawayf00 4y ago
  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? 0: https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2020-02-27/us-obesity-rate-passes-40-percent https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/...
  - pocketarc 4y ago
    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.

sva_ 4y ago

The way you say it makes it sound like you only just noticed that you've become fat over 20 years. I usually force myself to start counting calories again once I go off a weight I'm happy with (readjust my intuition.) And that means counting calories going in (food) and out (normal resting use per day + potential exercise)

twawaaay 4y ago
That was a long time ago. I lost most of it about decade ago and turned most of the rest into muscle. Running daily. Don't count calories. Read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Mini-Habits-Weight-Loss-Suffering/dp/0996435441 https://www.amazon.com/Mini-Habits-Weight-Loss-Suffering/dp/... 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.
- sva_ 4y ago
  > Calorie counting does not work Works for me. And yes, you shouldn't eat garbage. In other news, water is wet.
- TheCapn 4y ago
  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.
  - twawaaay 4y ago
    How is trying to build right habits trying to blame external source? It literally starts with observation that current habits are wrong and need to change.
  - 4y ago

sedeki 4y ago

I lost 35 kgs since February this year, up until now in October. I want to lose 10 kgs more, then I'll have 10% body fat and will look fit. Yes, it's all about ability to self-regulate.

gilbetron 4y ago
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.
- algoatecorn 4y ago
  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
  - skeeter2020 4y ago
    >> 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.
    - algoatecorn 4y ago
      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.

Retric 4y ago

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.

vsareto 4y ago
An extra 600/day is incredibly easy to get with American food and habits
- NoBreakfirst 4y ago
  I was about to pick up some frozen bar for 550 calorie yesterday. I used to eat two on a whim. Never realized that it’s basically lunch.
  - checkyoursudo 4y ago
    I think this is a key point. Not just for weight control but for so many things. It is agonizingly simple to destroy near constant mindfulness with a few moments of mindlessness.
    - isthisthingon99 4y ago
      This is why I love trading. You cannot falter. It has changed my personality as well.
      - angrais 4y ago
        Do you mean training or trading as in stock trading?
        4y ago

FartyMcFarter 4y ago

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.

FooBarWidget 4y ago
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.
- FartyMcFarter 4y ago
  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.
  - checkyoursudo 4y ago
    How does this work? I have way more muscle than my wife, but she can eat way more than me without gaining weight. It can't be just muscle mass? How many calories does extra muscle mass burn daily?
    - FartyMcFarter 4y ago
      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.

freemrkt8 4y ago

ravenstine 4y ago

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.

m12k 4y ago

Gaining 4g of fat requires an intake of quite a bit more than 4g of food.

twawaaay 4y ago
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.
- nonameiguess 4y ago
  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.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

skeeter2020 4y ago

>> 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.

11235813213455 4y ago

The problem is people eat by habbit, or by social rules, not by hunger. Naturally we tend more to 2 or 1 meal a day

dirtyid 4y ago

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.