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I've always been curious about my own metabolism. When I was a teenaeger / in university I ate pretty badly. Chocolate bars every day after lunch, loads of carb
by tails4e 3y ago
I've always been curious about my own metabolism. When I was a teenaeger / in university I ate pretty badly. Chocolate bars every day after lunch, loads of carbs, not to mention alcohol, etc etc. I was rail thin. I once got a body fat assesment when I joined a gym (I did no exercise at all and this was a brief attempt to get buff) and the person doing the test was shocked and couldn't pinch anything to measure. I had no fat. This lasted till I was 25 where seemingly overnight I then had to watch what I eat or I started to gain fat. So what explains this seeming inability to gain weight no matter what I ate, and in my mid twenties having a more normal response to junk food?
- valec 3y agoactivity levels almost certainly. uni it's not impossible you were walking over 12k steps a day. that's 3-400 calories over the average american's daily steps of 4000.
- missedthecue 3y agoThat's also completely canceled out by enjoying a single 32oz soda. Walking a lot and having a bad diet rarely even each other out. And it's so easy to cancel it out I don't think most people realize. A brisk 2km walk burns less calories than are consumed when eating two regular Oreos.
- mathgeek 3y agoWhile this is certainly an argument for “how do I lose weight” the relevant part here is that the asker wondered why they started gaining weight, which makes a reduction in daily calorie burn relevant if caloric intake remained roughly consistent. That is a lot of ifs, naturally.
- MattRix 3y agoI wouldn’t be surprised if most thin people who claim to eat lots of junk food actually just eat a lot less regular food. In other words, they don’t eat many calories, but the calories they do eat are junk.
- _Algernon_ 3y agoThis. Plenty of times I've been to lazy to make dinner and ate 200g of chocolate and a coke in a single sitting.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- glouwbug 3y agoThe American dream
- IsoldesKnight 3y agoPretty sure if it was the American dream, it would be 7oz of chocolate.
- _Algernon_ 3y agoI believe for this to be the American dream, you have to do this in addition to dinner.
- cykros 3y agoI assume you mean a bar mostly consisting of dairy and sugar with a bit of chocolate -- making a meal out of actual high quality dark chocolate adds up, but can hardly be considered junk food. <3 my 90% dark Lindt chocolate bars -- between those and all the bacon I've been eating this year the pounds are falling off.
- tails4e 3y agoI would say this was partially true in my case. While I ate badly, I didn't eat huge portions regularly. I also didn't eat breakfast regularly then (and often don't now either). In college we got fish and chips takeaway once it twice a week,and while it was definitely the worst kind of junk, I would be full quicker than others. That said, I regularly put away a quarter pointer, portion of chips, fizzy drink and a cheese and onion pie (deep fried cheese basically, and amazing). And not an ounce of fat on my body.
- Fricken 3y agoStrava tells me I burned 3,3000 calories this morning on my (4 hour)100km bike ride. About the equivalent of drinking 2 cups of melted butter, or eating 50 pounds of lettuce. When I'm doing exercise like that regularly it's hard to eat enough.
- ses1984 3y agoThat’s more than an order of magnitude more calories burned than walking 12k steps.
- lrem 3y ago25km/h is the regulatory max speed of e-bikes around here and you averaged that. Most people would take years of training to get to the point of being able to exercise like this.
- carstenhag 3y agoReally depends on the bike. It's way easier to achieve this on a racing bike than on a trekking/city/mtb
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tomjakubowski 3y agono, they wouldn't
- missedthecue 3y agoHumblebrag? Almost 100% of humans are incapable of doing a four hour 100km bike ride without a lot of prep and training. Nevermind doing this daily.
- jeffbee 3y agoWhile true, the energy expense doesn't really scale with speed, so if a couch potato got up and decided to do 100k in, say, 8 hours, that's around the same amount of energy. NB nobody would be able to do this without ingesting a substantial amount of food during. If you didn't start eating hourly after about 1-2 hours in, you'll "bonk" or run out of glycogen.
- BobbyJo 3y ago32oz is a ton of soda tho.. Even when I was a teen at 6'4", 32oz of soda would be a sickening addition to a meal.
- missedthecue 3y agoPerhaps you're not American, but Gallup reports that among those who drink soda in the USA the average daily amount is 31.2 oz
- TeMPOraL 3y ago32 oz, if I'm converting correctly, is a little shy of 1 liter. If so, that isn't a big amount really, especially daily.
- BobbyJo 3y ago> among those who drink soda > average Two factors in your statement that lead me to believe 32oz is still a boat load. What's median and 75th percentile? I imagine the distribution here is non linear across the soda drinking population.
- idontpost 3y ago[dead]
- antisthenes 3y agoDepends how it's measured. 16oz of store-bought soda is not the same as 16oz of restaurant soda, at least 30% of which would be ice. I wouldn't trust Gallup to report with nuance.
- username135 3y agoThats so gross
- paulpauper 3y agoIt is even worse than that. The conversion rate of activity to net calorie loss is not 1 to 1 . It can be zero or even negative, at least based on my own experience and other people. You see people on Reddit subs do 10k steps and tons of walking, hardly lose any weight. It's all about not overeating.
- nradov 3y agoWalking is great for many reasons, but 10K steps isn't much. It would be silly to expect much weight loss from that. And most people significantly understand their caloric intake.
- tonyedgecombe 3y agoOne of the problems is people naturally adjust their activity levels after exercise. After a two hour bike ride they will spend the evening on the sofa. It seems we naturally adjust without consciously thinking about it.
- jabradoodle 3y agoIf you think drinking a litre of soda is no big deal I would encourage you to rethink. 400 calories with no nutrition is a lot.
- Viliam1234 3y agoAs a student, I used a bus to get to school. As an adult, I walk by foot, more than an hour a day. Also, I didn't exercise in my youth, and I do now. Yet, it is now that I am fat.
- riazrizvi 3y agoI understand that as a healthy body sustains lifestyle damage, the effects begin to stack up, and then the effects become more noticeable, but it's not age based because it's reversible. So look to your unhealthy lifestyle's accumulated effects in your body, atherosclerosis, obesity, pre-diabetes, hypertension, specific nutritional deficiencies, physiological mental health... And make a robust effort to improve your lifestyle, and you'll start to feel like you did, 10, 20 years ago. Speaking from personal experience, I'm 50ish and after getting a health scare which triggered me into aggressive corrective action a few years back, I've overcorrected. My allergies have ameliorated back to old levels, I can drink beer again, and I can recover from a night out like I used to be able to in my 20's, I'm able to maintain a serious athletic schedule. Obviously most of the time I now eat really well, but my body's youthful tolerance to harm has been recovered.
- djtango 3y agoWould love to hear what sort of things you did as part of your intervention? Def noticing amongst my friends a few new allergies/intolerences manifesting as we get older For some context am reasonably healthy and actually had to increase my sodium intake because I had over corrected on reducing salt consumption and was getting hyponatremic after training
- riazrizvi 3y agoA good story is Rich Roll’s Finding Ultra. Or a good technical read on nutrition is Julia Ross’s The Mood Cure. But I read about 50 non fiction books cover to cover each year, and learning about your health is a big area, made harder by the reality that for every good book on the topic there are 19 others that are bad. There are lots of bad fads and actors, and they can include pill pushing doctors, sadly. The only real way to figure out how to get healthy is to experiment until you succeed at it. I guess one piece of specific advice I’d give, is if you have long term high cholesterol, and high blood pressure, take your doctor’s advice and take a statin if they recommend it. I think that was a huge boost. Also, when you want online advice on health, add ‘site:.gov’ to your search so that you get good sources and not health blogs. Ultimately I think you’ve got to come up with a good model of your physiology based on uncontroversial science. So in the case of your training, you’d figure out you are draining yourself of more than sodium chloride but rather the broad spectrum of minerals that you typically sweat out, so your ‘salt intake’ is a multi mineral supplement and not actual salt. Which is what I imagine you figured out.
- MichaelDickens 3y agoIn addition to activity levels, you probably just weren't eating that much food. It was similar for me when I was a teenager: some days I would binge on a ton of junk food, but other days I would forget to eat breakfast, and the latter happened often enough that I stayed skinny.
- naijaboiler 3y agoNo I legit ate way much much more in my 20s. I'm not misremembering. I ate more
- Loughla 3y agoI had to supplement with calorie shakes for workout guys in my 20's, just to maintain weight. I ate trash, and a shit load of it. And that's not considering the amazing levels of calories I would've consumed from alcohol. Same activity level now as then. But now if I think too hard about a candy bar I gain weight that never goes away.
- paulpauper 3y agosame here. the hockey-stick or v-shaped weight rebound if I even deviate a tiny bit. amazing how fast weight comes back on.
- willcipriano 3y ago> Same activity level now as then. As you go from untrained to trained you burn less calories doing the same activity.
- bennyelv 3y agoIt's actually nowhere near as simple as that, and it depends on how you define the "same activity". Moving your body from one location to another at a particular speed results in a fairly static amount of work done (in the basic physics sense). So if the same you hops on a bicycle and cycles up the same hill in the same conditions with the only difference being that one of you has trained hard for the last 5 years and the other hasn't (but somehow your body mass has stayed the same) then you'll burn exactly the same amount of energy. Untrained you will find it much harder, but the energy burn will be roughly the same. There are some things that can be different as you go from "untrained" to "trained", for example lighter people burn less energy moving themselves around than heavier people. Trained people tend to do activities harder/faster so the "same activity" could actually be a much harder activity despite it not feeling that way. Although if the activity involves travelling a set distance some of the extra effort involved in doing it faster is offset by the fact that it takes less time, so the difference between the two is not as large as you'd think.
- ianlevesque 3y agoI had a similar trajectory. The transition from one to the other was a long course of antibiotics.
- glouwbug 3y ago25 is about the age you’ve worked a year two after an undergrad. More money means more desk work and more access (speaking funds) to eat out
- qingcharles 3y agoI wonder about the same thing. I was a fat kid, but my best friend was so skinny. We would walk down town and he would stop several times to stuff chocolate bars in his mouth, and then buy two McDonald's meals. I would do none of this and our physical exercise was the same. Then we went away to University and in his mid-20s the poor guy suddenly, almost overnight, put on a ton of weight.
- djtango 3y agoHow much "passive activity" were we doing back in the day? So as a teenager, I was carrying 5-10kg of books and walking back and forth between classes every 40 mins. As an undergrad I was travelling across campus multiple times a day, spent hours on my feet in labs, did multiple heavy grocery shuttles and also spent a lot of time partying. In my first job, I was still getting up 5-6 times a day for meetings and had a decent walk/cycle built into the commute. but in my first remote job, I could be sat in the same spot for 8-10 hours without moving. And because I wasn't drinking water I wouldn't need to go to the bathroom... /facepalm I'd also be so engrossed that sometimes I'd forget to turn on the lights... So even though I do more than an hour of intense exercise a day, my activity outside of those exercise hours has cratered from when I was a teenager and was constantly running around.
- sn9 3y agoI actually lost weight upon entering college because my campus was so large that my physical activity increased from when I was in high school.
- shapefrog 3y agoSo as a teenager, I was carrying 5-10kg of books and walking back and forth between classes every 40 mins. As an undergrad I was travelling across campus multiple times a day, spent hours on my feet in labs, did multiple heavy grocery shuttles and also spent a lot of time partying. In my first job, I could be sat in the same spot for 8-10 hours without moving. A year in to my first job I had added 15kg (~30lbs ~2stone) - while consuming way less food and alcohol than my university days.