[ I am skinny, so haven’t given a lot of processing to these issues, please bear with me. ]
I understand there is a controversy surrounding the “just reduce incoming calories” advice. This is obviously true via physics, but people do not seem to find this a satisfying/effective advice. Is the idea that reducing calorie intake enough for physics to take over from biology is too difficult (e.g. you make yourself sick reducing that much, or it is not possible to use that much willpower consistently, or etc.) (?)
edit : in case it’s not obvious, I am not trying to stealthily give nutrition advice. I don’t know anything about nutrition (although I am sometimes unhappy with statistical analysis I find in nutrition papers).
Yes. Constant hunger is extremely distracting, and overall more unpleasant than being fat. The trick is to find a way to avoid hunger while maintaining a calorie deficit. I’ve seen plenty of claims that fat and protein are more satiating per calorie than starch, but I don’t know whether they’re valid.
Have a stored rant that I was thinking about posting to this thread.
I believe that “calories in, calories out” is fair-to-middling literally true, but a connotative disaster. It ignores quality of life, health, and life itself. That last refers to very fat people who were put on very low calorie diets and died of heart failure.
It is reliably dumped on people who have trouble losing weight.
As far as I can tell, not losing weight is at least both people getting sick from pushing their weight too low—ordinary illnesses, which I assume is the body not sending enough calories to the immune system—and that it’s more willpower than people want to put into the project.
I’ve also got a little evidence that there may be an emotional piece—I lowered my anxiety level, found I had much less desire to eat when I wasn’t hungry, and lost about fifteen pounds without putting a lot of effort into it. Since then I’ve cycled back into wanting to eat when I wasn’t hungry and seem to be heading out of it again, but I haven’t been checking my weight.
On the research side, there’s the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) Study00017-8/abstract), which found a correlation with the number of very bad childhood experiences and obesity.
I’m a lot less sure about what’s going on with health, diet, and weight than most people seem to be, and a lot more sure that a lot of what’s going on is status issues.
[ I am skinny, so haven’t given a lot of processing to these issues, please bear with me. ]
I understand there is a controversy surrounding the “just reduce incoming calories” advice. This is obviously true via physics, but people do not seem to find this a satisfying/effective advice. Is the idea that reducing calorie intake enough for physics to take over from biology is too difficult (e.g. you make yourself sick reducing that much, or it is not possible to use that much willpower consistently, or etc.) (?)
edit : in case it’s not obvious, I am not trying to stealthily give nutrition advice. I don’t know anything about nutrition (although I am sometimes unhappy with statistical analysis I find in nutrition papers).
Yes. Constant hunger is extremely distracting, and overall more unpleasant than being fat. The trick is to find a way to avoid hunger while maintaining a calorie deficit. I’ve seen plenty of claims that fat and protein are more satiating per calorie than starch, but I don’t know whether they’re valid.
both. And also that if you use methods that aren’t just based on spherical cows you’ll get better results.
Have a stored rant that I was thinking about posting to this thread.
I believe that “calories in, calories out” is fair-to-middling literally true, but a connotative disaster. It ignores quality of life, health, and life itself. That last refers to very fat people who were put on very low calorie diets and died of heart failure.
It is reliably dumped on people who have trouble losing weight.
As far as I can tell, not losing weight is at least both people getting sick from pushing their weight too low—ordinary illnesses, which I assume is the body not sending enough calories to the immune system—and that it’s more willpower than people want to put into the project.
I’ve also got a little evidence that there may be an emotional piece—I lowered my anxiety level, found I had much less desire to eat when I wasn’t hungry, and lost about fifteen pounds without putting a lot of effort into it. Since then I’ve cycled back into wanting to eat when I wasn’t hungry and seem to be heading out of it again, but I haven’t been checking my weight.
On the research side, there’s the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) Study00017-8/abstract), which found a correlation with the number of very bad childhood experiences and obesity.
I’m a lot less sure about what’s going on with health, diet, and weight than most people seem to be, and a lot more sure that a lot of what’s going on is status issues.