5 ms·
Yes, your instinct is correct, you have vastly oversimplified it in an unhelpful way. The body is not an energy equation to be balanced. The desire to eat is d
by dougmwne 4y ago
Yes, your instinct is correct, you have vastly oversimplified it in an unhelpful way. The body is not an energy equation to be balanced.
The desire to eat is driven by our hormones and these are not easily overridden by willpower. In fact, study after study shows that willpower is insufficient for most people. Hunger is produced by a complex set of factors that we do not fully understand. What we eat and how we live plays a big part in how hungry we feel.
Calories should not be counted like some fungible currency. Each food is a complex and poorly understood cocktail of organic chemistry. Food is not processed by the body in the same way or at the same speed. In the most simple sense, unprocessed whole foods digest the slowest and provide the most even energy to the body, while highly processed food is digested quickly and leaves you hungry again soon. And above all else, fiber is the most amazing thing that can be in your food to regulate your digestion and make you feel more full.
And the consumption of energy is also not a matter of willpower to go to the gym. The body regulates is caloric burn to suit its environment, again, based on a complex and poorly understood web of signals. But in simple terms, trying to eat less can also caus your body to go into a "low power mode" where you burn less energy, ultimately being counterproductive.
The magic of this drug is that is hijacks one of the important hormone pathways involved in hunger and causes you to eat less calories without a single conscious thought. If proven out as safe and effective, it could be the silver bullet in an obesity epidemic that has never had any easy solutions before.
- joe_the_user 4y agoIt's very important to consider "metabolic rate" in these considerations. I have been nearly under-weight my entire life (I'm in my 60s) and I've eaten as much high-calorie food I've felt similarly, usually a large amount (generally consuming the most any gathering I'm at, etc, eating three meal a day, etc). The one thing I've always done is avoid foods with added sugar and in general processed food. There's good evidence that the consumption of "ultra-processed" food is associated with the obesity epidemic and that these food are what people weight-maintenance processes out of balance. Given this, adding a drug to solve that problem might not be a panacea. What other bad effects could result from a strong drug plus a crap diet? We'll start another mass experiment to find, I suppose.
- hungryforcodes 4y agoThe body is an energy equation to be balanced. Physics defines that. What you are talking about substantially in your post is about willpower with regards to eating and exercise which is totally different.
- dougmwne 4y agoI am very much not talking about willpower. I am saying it is NOT about willpower. And sure, there is an energy equation here thermodynamically, but it is unhelpful. It would be something like: Calories in * X = Calories consumed * Y + Fat stored * Z Where X, Y and Z are unknown and barely controllable factors related to hunger, type of food, digestion, microbiome, hormones, genetics, metabolism, environment, society and so on.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pixl97 4y agoEvolution had no care about the understanding of applied physics when we came up the evolutionary tree. Understanding physics here almost has no effect on our behavior. Instead look at the evolutionary incentives. If you starve you are going to die and it is going to fucking hurt the entire time you are dying. With that one line of information you now understand not only humans but the vast majority of animal life on this planet and why almost all animals get fat if you leave a full food dish around. We are optimized to avoid starving at all costs. When winter comes you could die. When the summer drought comes you could die. Your animal brain is yelling at you to pack on the pounds now that the eating is good because the lean times are coming. Our animal brain has no understanding or concept that times are good, we need to slow down. It has never been a primary evolutionary driver.
- kemayo 4y agoNotably, this is (presumably) why our bodies often think it's a very good trade-off to turn everything down instead of burning fat. Fat is important long-term storage that might be what gets us through the winter starvation, and storing/burning it is a lossy process -- turning down the tap on our energy usage for a little while, however, might be all we need to get through a lean few weeks.