Ketosis sticks did not show my entering ketosis even with as close to zero carbs as I could get (admittedly counting things like 3g carbs in a serving of protein powder). I don’t recall how long I tried. Probably between 1 week and 2 weeks before giving up on almost-zero carb, then a month of very low carb before giving up entirely. Memory is fuzzy.
Upvoted for evidence. I’ve read your comments on how diets that ought to work don’t for you, and that it’s not as simple as calories-in-calories-out, but have been skeptical because my prior for “Eliezer is a metabolic mutant” vs. “Eliezer has the same trouble sticking to a diet (and being honest when they fail) that most people do” is low.
In local parlance, my assignment for “Eliezer is a mutant” and “net calories aren’t everything” have both risen.
I am not a metabolic mutant. There are plenty of people in the world who cannot seem to lose weight, and they aren’t all weak-willed scum, and it’s not because they just haven’t tried your favorite diet.
The world is full of metabolic diversity. The fortunate who do not appreciate this are the metabolically privileged. That they can lose weight with an effort causes them to be unfortunately deluded about what is going on.
I am not a metabolic mutant. There are plenty of people in the world who cannot seem to lose weight, and they aren’t all weak-willed scum, and it’s not because they just haven’t tried your favorite diet.
I’m not sure I deserved the heat here. I prescribed no particular diet and said nothing about weak willed scum. I’m of the tentative opinion that modern weight-control problems are just a case of human brains not being built for an environment of plenty. Even if it was simply that people on average can’t keep their hands out of the pastry box, that’s not a moral failing, just an outdated adaptation. It’s worth fixing ourselves because it’s now a maladaptation and evolution is too slow about fixing it.
The world is full of metabolic diversity. The fortunate who do not appreciate this are the metabolically privileged. That they can lose weight with an effort causes them to be unfortunately deluded about what is going on.
What is going on? Is there a thread around here that you think covers it in useful detail? It seems to me that there must be some lower bound on food intake beyond which one can’t help but lose weight—otherwise you could eat nothing and still not lose weight, which seems spectacularly unlikely to me barring the aforementioned metabolic mutation.
It’s not a rhetorical question; I have only mild difficulty controlling my weight, but my partner has a much harder time. (though both our weights respond to consistent food restriction) Useful information would be useful.
It seems to me that there must be some lower bound on food intake beyond which one can’t help but lose weight
It has been observed that no fat people emerged from Auschwitz. But if some people do not lose weight below that level of privation, they don’t stand much chance of doing so voluntarily.
Perhaps they all died because they couldn’t access their metabolic reserves? [/devilsadvocate]
All the worse for those with great difficulty losing weight. Apply enough determination and it might kill you!
People would probably object to using Nazi data, but it would be interesting if they ever kept logs of inmates’ body weight and non-deliberately-caused deaths.
I’m not sure I deserved the heat here. I prescribed no particular diet and said nothing about weak willed scum.
As you may have guessed, this isn’t the first time the subject has come up. Frustration builds.
I’m of the tentative opinion that modern weight-control problems are just a case of human brains not being built for an environment of plenty.
It is not just the brain but the entire human body that isn’t specialized for an environment of plenty. Lowered food intake changes metabolism and energy expenditure, it doesn’t just make you crave more food.
Even if it was simply that people on average can’t keep their hands out of the pastry box, that’s not a moral failing, just an outdated adaptation. It’s worth fixing ourselves because it’s now a maladaptation and evolution is too slow about fixing it.
That would indeed still be true.
It seems to me that there must be some lower bound on food intake beyond which one can’t help but lose weight—otherwise you could eat nothing and still not lose weight, which seems spectacularly unlikely to me barring the aforementioned metabolic mutation.
That seems technically inevitable. The question then becomes whether this happens before or after your body enters a coma. (Or, more practically, whether valuable muscle mass is lost before undesired fat and whether the effect on fatigue and energy levels is debilitating.)
A ridiculously charged topic, how could I miss it?
We’re probably among the last generations (as in so many things) that need to bother with the now counterproductive and out-of-place esterification making us fat. Just as we managed to separate the carrot from the stick (the stimulus we get from an action versus the original evolutionary incentivized purpose of that action) with sex/procreation, so will we eventually be able to indulge in feeling satiated without actually storing unwanted lipids.
If not for too strict pharmaceutical standards, some (more) drugs would probably already be available. Given the large impact of diabetes, CHD and other obesity related diseases, even severe side effects in animal trials could be outweighed by the benefits. If not for the fear of lawsuits and strict regulations that throw promising drugs out of the pipeline prematurely. It took a decade and untold needless deaths for gene therapy to recover from a few mishaps to where it can be pursued again.
Regarding losing weight, personally I like the volumetrics approach, it’s easily combinable with most diets:
Feeling satiated is—mostly—a combination of mechanoreceptors in the stomach being activated (which is how gastric lap band surgery works) and various hormones reacting to e.g. rising blood sugar (hunger-stimulating Ghrelin gets inhibited), presence of food in the intestinal tract (hunger-inhibiting PYY is released, NB: it’s released more effectively by high-protein intake which would help explain the effectiveness of some high-protein diets, such as variants of keto), and leptin (released by adipocytes, can be mostly ignored, since obese people apparently have high leptin levels and a corresponding high leptin resistence).
Now, there is of course a latency between food entering your stomach and the mechanoreceptors triggering and PYY being released.
Therefore, a sensible measure is the following: Drink a large-ish quantity of water (cold and tasty with lemon) before every meal (to pre-load the mechanoreceptors), eat slowly (so you don’t eat more when your satiation signal is already in the process of being triggered), add taste-neutral e.g. salad to your normal food (I just pack my sausage sandwiches with large quantities of unprepared salad = little extra effort, halves the amount of high-caloric food I require before feeling completely full, mixed in it doesn’t even taste any different*.) Don’t drink caloric beverages, they’re not as effective calorie-for-calorie in distending your stomach, since fluids aren’t bulky enough.
These changes do not inhibit my “food experience” in any meaningful way, yet nearly halved my daily caloric intake.
It seems irrational to give up on dieting merely because the process can be complicated. That’s not a good reason to give up on FAI, so why should it be for dieting? The impact in energy levels between being obese and normal is redunculous, even if losing weight is hard, it still promises the most bang-for-the-buck in increasing your productivity, your self-image and your quality of life. Sure some have it easier or harder than others. C’est la vie.
* The trick is that salad-diluted sausage still tastes just like sausage, and still causes the satiety inducing effects on the same order as double sausage.
Obesity is interesting because I regard it as a partially-solved problem. For example, dinitrophenol would solve much of it: it makes mitochondria less efficient and so effectively increases metabolism, but at the cost of emitting waste heat—which is potentially fatal and got it banned despite its apparent effectiveness. It could still be safely used; it’s 2013 so electronic thermometers are a dime a dozen. Take patients to a fat camp, dress them in clothes with thermometers constantly recording and now doses can be adjusted based on detailed data and the thermometers can warn the patient to jump into conveniently located ice baths. Voila. And I’m not clear on how dangerous it really is when not made illegally and used recklessly by young kids; Wikipedia cites a 1934 paper as estimating that there were ~100k users of DNP before it was banned, and those authors remark, after discussing the grand total of 4 deaths up to that point due to the drug’s use under medical supervision, that
When one considers that some one hundred thousand patients have been treated with this exceedingly potent therapeutic agent, it is a matter of some gratification to know that fatalities have not been more numerous. It might be added in this connection that fatalities from the fever of dinitrophenol can be largely prevented, in animals at least, by chilling the skin with ice packs and by giving oxygen inhalations.17
It would seem that like the War on Drugs in general, the attempt to reduce the harm from DNP has resulted in far more harm than was ever the case before.
It is frustrating to me that I want powerful cognitive enhancement, but instead of increasing metabolic efficiency, we’re decreasing it. Can’t we funnel those extra calories the the brain somehow?
I think most of the value in being thin is looking attractive and being able to be physically active. I think Eliezer doesn’t really need to be more attractive than he already is (4 girlfriends) and isn’t a huge fan of rock climbing or whatever. As far as I’ve heard, most of the health benefits of exercise can be gotten without needing to actually be thin.
I somehow doubt that all of this effect is due to thin people exercising more. ETA: looks like the ‘optimal’ BMI for women is larger than for men, BTW.
Considering the social import of being attractive and getting around to see people and the correlation between active social life and longevity I think it’s more than you might think, but I agree with you. On the other hand, the trade off is a lot more reasonable if you can be relatively healthy and happy while fat AND it’s particularly hard for you to lose weight.
Considering the social import of being attractive and getting around to see people and the correlation between active social life and longevity I think it’s more than you might think, but I agree with you.
Well, they did control for, among other things, marital status. (Also, I’d guess that the BMI that maximizes conventional attractiveness would be higher for men than for women, and wouldn’t depend much on smoking.)
On the other hand, the trade off is a lot more reasonable if you can be relatively healthy and happy while fat AND it’s particularly hard for you to lose weight.
Yes. ISTM that for certain people losing weight has become a lost purpose.
Remember that BMI is based on the total body mass, and that muscle is denser than fat. (OTOH, that study corrected for level of exercise, and it’s quite possible that the BMI that would maximize an average white American man’s attractiveness if he’s not allowed to vary his level of exercise would indeed be around 20.)
that curvy figures are considered (by many) to be attractive?
I am one of those “many”, too, but ISTM that in present-day Western cultures we’re a minority; “thin” seems to have become a compliment. (Last year, someone offered to set me up with her roommate who probably had BMI around 18, and when I told her that I didn’t fancy her, she retorted “but she’s so skinny!” as though it was a positive.)
I don’t want to speculate about EY other than saying my model of him didn’t expect to ever see “too complex” brought up as a reason not to try anything. Maybe there’s too much overlap with HPMOR:Harry. It is possible that there are individuals whose akrasia levels / mental energy and self-image are unaffected by being overweight compared to not being overweight. Just unlikely.
As far as I’ve heard, most of the health benefits of exercise can be gotten without needing to actually be thin.
That’s true, but doesn’t change that ceteris paribus given little exercise, you’ll still live longer not being obese. Note that I’ve not even mentioned exercise. It’s certainly better being overweight and exercising (while still being overweight), than being overweight and not exercising.
It seems irrational to give up on dieting merely because the process can be complicated.
Expected value calculation > your ‘seeming’.
That’s not a good reason to give up on FAI, so why should it be for dieting?
Because creating an FAI has (strictly!) greater expected benefits than one person successfully losing weight? To the extent that the rhetorical question is ridiculous.
it still promises the most bang-for-the-buck in increasing your productivity, your self-image and your quality of life.
I’d wager you’ve never been overweight. Strap a few dozen lbs around your waist or don them as a vest, see what it does to your daily routine. We’ve done that once in some class or other, and I’ve bordered the 30 myself as well, from time to time. You’re affected constantly, we’re as of yet embodied agents, not free floating minds. What’s the likelier explanation for a lack of action, expected value calculations or—here it comes - ‘akrasia’.
Because creating an FAI has (strictly!) greater expected benefits than one person successfully losing weight?
Depends from whose point of view. E.g. passing away in the knowledge that you’ve contributed to the eventual creation of FAI (which gives you fuzzies, or at least utilons) can be outweighed by living decades with more mental energy (which also contributes to your development efforts) and a better self-image.
That aside, that a task is a complicated problem/puzzle to be solved can be an incentive to solve it in and of itself, especially for certain kinds of people.
This seems false.
Assuming the increase in productivity, self image and quality of life (consider the metabolic syndrome, preventing decades of injecting insuline can have quite the impact on your QALY) to be fixed/constant for an individual, “true” or “false” does depend on how easy/hard it would be for that individual to efficiently attain and keep a lower BMI. For metabolically priviledged people, or just those with an easy to fix problem such as hypothyreodism, the statement is probably true. For someone who for whatever reason cannot lose any weight whatever he tries (within his motivational reach given his current energy levels … there’s a catch-22 present), it would be false.
Eliezer has mentioned many of the things he has tried to lose weight (including ketogenic diets and even clenbuterol). I’ve tried all those he has mentioned. The difference is for me they work (I call it ‘cutting’ and can merrily play around with my body composition all sorts of ways). But if, like Eliezer, I had expended huge amounts of effort and my body did not respond significantly then I would update my expectations.
What’s the likelier explanation for a lack of action, expected value calculations or—here it comes - ‘akrasia’.
Expected value calculations. Unless you are making accusations of lies—outright fabrication of self reports.
Depends from whose point of view. E.g. passing away in the knowledge that you’ve contributed to the eventual creation of FAI (which gives you fuzzies, or at least utilons) can be outweighed by living decades with more mental energy (which also contributes to your development efforts) and a better self-image.
For the purpose of declaring an accusation of irrationality false the relevant point of view is Eliezer’s. If Eliezer had someone else’s values then it would make sense to evaluate the rationality of a given choice for him according to those other values.
For metabolically priviledged people, or just those with an easy to fix problem such as hypothyreodism, the statement is probably true.
Yes (or at least it would be up there on the list). It just isn’t true in this case.
Depends from whose point of view. E.g. passing away in the knowledge that you’ve contributed to the eventual creation of FAI (which gives you fuzzies, or at least utilons) can be outweighed by living decades with more mental energy (which also contributes to your development efforts) and a better self-image.
Pretty sure most people involved in FAI efforts are fatoring in more than warm fuzzies in their EU calculations.
A ridiculously charged topic, how could I miss it?
Well, I missed it; I kind of wish the LW inbox included replies-to-replies. In any case I find myself thinking this shouldn’t be a charged topic, even though it clearly is. As a culture we’re still hung up on the whole self-indulgence-as-moral-failure absurdity.
Just as we managed to separate the carrot from the stick (the stimulus we get from an action versus the original evolutionary incentivized purpose of that action) with sex/procreation, so will we eventually be able to indulge in feeling satiated without actually storing unwanted lipids.
A thousand times yes. Sex without babies is a nearly-solved problem, lacking only a male equivalent of the IUD. Weight control should be just as solved, and no, self-control in food intake is not a solution even if it does work. Like condoms, it’s a badly suboptimal necessary evil. I should be able to eat whatever I feel like while maintaining whatever weight I damn well please.
That this has failed to happen despite the massive amount of money thrown at weight-control products says something, but I’m not sure what. Has anyone made a serious, prolonged attempt not at “getting people to ‘stay good’ around food” but at “decoupling food from fat entirely”? If not, why not?
That this has failed to happen despite the massive amount of money thrown at weight-control products says something, but I’m not sure what. Has anyone made a serious, prolonged attempt not at “getting people to ‘stay good’ around food” but at “decoupling food from fat entirely”? If not, why not?
May I direct you to the subsequent paragraph in the grandparent? :)
Sort-of-valid point. But all drugs I’ve seen or heard of have been essentally appetite suppressants plus varying levels of bullshit. I wouldn’t expect metabolic decouplers to be disproportionately cut out by regulation; if there was substantial research in that area, I would expect some of them to be on the market.
Corrected. Although, it’s somewhat hard replacing carbohydrates without also increasing the overall protein intake. There are probably variants of keto that fit, and variants that don’t. There’s apparently no catchy phrase for the overall “high protein diet” reference class.
Yeah, most people who do keto or other low-carb variants tend to eat a high-protein diet. But for fat-loss something like twice as much weight of dietary fat as protein is recommended along with sub-30 grams of non-fiber carbohydrates. And the medical keto diet, iirc, was something like 4:1 fat:protein. It’s a lot easier to hit the protein macros than the fat macros.
As you may have guessed, this isn’t the first time the subject has come up. Frustration builds.
Fair. I’d seen some of the previous conversations or I wouldn’t have responded as I did; but I’m guessing I missed occasions on which Eliezer demonstrated that his body chemistry was provably not doing what theory would predict it should (with regard to ketosis), which I find much more convincing than “I tried X, Y, and Z and none of them worked.”
If such occasions exist, then I just plain missed them and I’ve stepped on toes unnecessarily, and I apologize.
That seems technically inevitable. The question then becomes whether this happens before or after your body enters a coma. (Or, more practically, whether valuable muscle mass is lost before undesired fat and whether the effect on fatigue and energy levels is debilitating.)
I’m going to guess “before muscle loss or coma”, on the grounds that fat is supposedly for long-term energy storage, and I would expect “break down muscle and/or go into coma in preference to using stored energy” to be maladaptive even in the EEA. I have no controlled study to support that guess, however.
I could see “after excessive fatigue,” I suppose; that might be physically necessary (fat burning is slow, IIRC) but not so maladaptive as to defeat the purpose of storing fat.
it’s not because they just haven’t tried your favorite diet.
This seems somewhat unfair. There are a handful of diets that work on a broad variety of people, such that the prior any one will work for a particular person is higher than a novel diet like Shangri-La. And so unless you’ve tried slow carb/ketogenic, intermittent fasting, 30g of protein for breakfast, and ECA stacks and none of them worked, it seems like you’re updating too far in the direction of “all diets don’t work for me” from the evidence that “diet X didn’t work for me.”
(The only one of those I’ve tried is IF. It worked for me.)
The world is full of metabolic diversity. The fortunate who do not appreciate this are the metabolically privileged. That they can lose weight with an effort causes them to be unfortunately deluded about what is going on.
What’s the difference between this and the claim that you are a metabolic mutant?
It might be worth going to a sleep doctor; sleep apnea can really fuck up your metabolism, not to mention causing unbelievable akrasia. I would say sleep tests are a GOOD THING, something everyone should do. I had sleep apnea for years. It was like some eldritch monster was sucking away my willpower and I wasn’t even aware. Within a few months of getting my mouth guard, which keeps my tongue from blocking my airway while in REM, I lost thirty pounds and gained an enormous well of mental stamina. A small minority of the “metabolically challenged” may just have undiagnosed sleep problems.
Well, there’s your problem right there—it sounds like you didn’t really especially “do” a ketogenic diet, if you never once reached ketosis (as I understand, you typically need to deplete glycogen stores before entering ketosis, and so you might have 3,000~6,000+ kcal to burn through first, and then there’s an interim period of glycogen depletion before it actually begins. Which is where the magnitude of your caloric deficit becomes relevant; was it large enough to get through your stored glycogen in the 1-2 weeks you ate no-carb? I think recently consumed food is generally metabolized first, before dipping into glycogen stores, though that’s likely a huge oversimplification), any more than someone eating an egg for breakfast can be said to have “tried” keto.
And even with weight as your metric you should have seen some noticeable reduction after a month and a half of “dieting” on a >300 kcal deficit if you were consistent in your measurement conditions (eg, every day after waking/bathroom and before breakfast). Maybe you just overestimated how many calories you needed for maintenance each day? Which is quite common among “dieters”. Like I mentioned, the usual advice for muscle preservation is to eat 300-500 kcal below maintenance each day, and if after a month you fail to note any weight loss or note weight gain to reduce your consumption by an additional 300 kcal, rinse and repeat. It might take several months to note any reduction in weight if you had a shoddy initial estimate (or if your metabolism is exceptionally sensitive to intake, though that can only account for so much. Eventually as you progressively reduce consumption [or increase activity!] you will lose weight).
Haha, and many people report a “mental fog” when first trying ketogenic diets. Maybe that’s why you can’t remember :D
disclaimer: this isn’t my field of study and it’s been several years since I tried keto and my research then was cursory, at best, which is why I used less-than-confident language in the above. In the three months that I ran a cyclic ketogenic diet I think it took 2-3 weeks to make the ketostik turn purple (or whatever) the first time, then a weekish after that, ulitmately down to 2-4 days after each weekly recarb.
edit: also, I’ve heard it might be useful to think of diets less in the “dieting” sense (a temporary change in eating behavior that will end once you reach a predefined goal) and more in a “biological” sense (the typical assortment of food that an organism habitually consumes). Less temporary, more permanent or semi-permanent lifestyle change.
After numerous previous failures, if it’s that complicated I’m not going to bother. Complicated things seem even less likely to work than simple things, and simple things almost never work in the first place.
In my experience, no matter what you try, there’s always an excuse when it doesn’t work. Then when it still doesn’t work there’s something else you’re not doing exactly right that they forgot to mention earlier. Oddly enough, when something does work for someone, nobody bothers to check to see if they were doing everything exactly right by way of confirming that all these extra frills are actually required as opposed to just being excuses that are only invoked when it doesn’t work because, in reality, metabolisms are different.
Do you have any data on your eating and exercising habits? I’d love to know what or how your eating now. If you’re eating the standard american diet, then you’re definitely doing something wrong, and there are a few simple things you could do to at least eliminate deleterious factors. Do you drink Coca Cola everyday for example? What’s your baseline diet? Before ever trying a new one, find out what’s wrong with the baseline and tweak it.
Ketosis sticks did not show my entering ketosis even with as close to zero carbs as I could get (admittedly counting things like 3g carbs in a serving of protein powder). I don’t recall how long I tried. Probably between 1 week and 2 weeks before giving up on almost-zero carb, then a month of very low carb before giving up entirely. Memory is fuzzy.
Upvoted for evidence. I’ve read your comments on how diets that ought to work don’t for you, and that it’s not as simple as calories-in-calories-out, but have been skeptical because my prior for “Eliezer is a metabolic mutant” vs. “Eliezer has the same trouble sticking to a diet (and being honest when they fail) that most people do” is low.
In local parlance, my assignment for “Eliezer is a mutant” and “net calories aren’t everything” have both risen.
I am not a metabolic mutant. There are plenty of people in the world who cannot seem to lose weight, and they aren’t all weak-willed scum, and it’s not because they just haven’t tried your favorite diet.
The world is full of metabolic diversity. The fortunate who do not appreciate this are the metabolically privileged. That they can lose weight with an effort causes them to be unfortunately deluded about what is going on.
I’m not sure I deserved the heat here. I prescribed no particular diet and said nothing about weak willed scum. I’m of the tentative opinion that modern weight-control problems are just a case of human brains not being built for an environment of plenty. Even if it was simply that people on average can’t keep their hands out of the pastry box, that’s not a moral failing, just an outdated adaptation. It’s worth fixing ourselves because it’s now a maladaptation and evolution is too slow about fixing it.
What is going on? Is there a thread around here that you think covers it in useful detail? It seems to me that there must be some lower bound on food intake beyond which one can’t help but lose weight—otherwise you could eat nothing and still not lose weight, which seems spectacularly unlikely to me barring the aforementioned metabolic mutation.
It’s not a rhetorical question; I have only mild difficulty controlling my weight, but my partner has a much harder time. (though both our weights respond to consistent food restriction) Useful information would be useful.
It has been observed that no fat people emerged from Auschwitz. But if some people do not lose weight below that level of privation, they don’t stand much chance of doing so voluntarily.
Perhaps they all died because they couldn’t access their metabolic reserves? [/devilsadvocate]
All the worse for those with great difficulty losing weight. Apply enough determination and it might kill you!
People would probably object to using Nazi data, but it would be interesting if they ever kept logs of inmates’ body weight and non-deliberately-caused deaths.
As you may have guessed, this isn’t the first time the subject has come up. Frustration builds.
It is not just the brain but the entire human body that isn’t specialized for an environment of plenty. Lowered food intake changes metabolism and energy expenditure, it doesn’t just make you crave more food.
That would indeed still be true.
That seems technically inevitable. The question then becomes whether this happens before or after your body enters a coma. (Or, more practically, whether valuable muscle mass is lost before undesired fat and whether the effect on fatigue and energy levels is debilitating.)
A ridiculously charged topic, how could I miss it?
We’re probably among the last generations (as in so many things) that need to bother with the now counterproductive and out-of-place esterification making us fat. Just as we managed to separate the carrot from the stick (the stimulus we get from an action versus the original evolutionary incentivized purpose of that action) with sex/procreation, so will we eventually be able to indulge in feeling satiated without actually storing unwanted lipids.
If not for too strict pharmaceutical standards, some (more) drugs would probably already be available. Given the large impact of diabetes, CHD and other obesity related diseases, even severe side effects in animal trials could be outweighed by the benefits. If not for the fear of lawsuits and strict regulations that throw promising drugs out of the pipeline prematurely. It took a decade and untold needless deaths for gene therapy to recover from a few mishaps to where it can be pursued again.
Regarding losing weight, personally I like the volumetrics approach, it’s easily combinable with most diets:
Feeling satiated is—mostly—a combination of mechanoreceptors in the stomach being activated (which is how gastric lap band surgery works) and various hormones reacting to e.g. rising blood sugar (hunger-stimulating Ghrelin gets inhibited), presence of food in the intestinal tract (hunger-inhibiting PYY is released, NB: it’s released more effectively by high-protein intake which would help explain the effectiveness of some high-protein diets, such as variants of keto), and leptin (released by adipocytes, can be mostly ignored, since obese people apparently have high leptin levels and a corresponding high leptin resistence).
Now, there is of course a latency between food entering your stomach and the mechanoreceptors triggering and PYY being released.
Therefore, a sensible measure is the following: Drink a large-ish quantity of water (cold and tasty with lemon) before every meal (to pre-load the mechanoreceptors), eat slowly (so you don’t eat more when your satiation signal is already in the process of being triggered), add taste-neutral e.g. salad to your normal food (I just pack my sausage sandwiches with large quantities of unprepared salad = little extra effort, halves the amount of high-caloric food I require before feeling completely full, mixed in it doesn’t even taste any different*.) Don’t drink caloric beverages, they’re not as effective calorie-for-calorie in distending your stomach, since fluids aren’t bulky enough.
These changes do not inhibit my “food experience” in any meaningful way, yet nearly halved my daily caloric intake.
It seems irrational to give up on dieting merely because the process can be complicated. That’s not a good reason to give up on FAI, so why should it be for dieting? The impact in energy levels between being obese and normal is redunculous, even if losing weight is hard, it still promises the most bang-for-the-buck in increasing your productivity, your self-image and your quality of life. Sure some have it easier or harder than others. C’est la vie.
* The trick is that salad-diluted sausage still tastes just like sausage, and still causes the satiety inducing effects on the same order as double sausage.
Obesity is interesting because I regard it as a partially-solved problem. For example, dinitrophenol would solve much of it: it makes mitochondria less efficient and so effectively increases metabolism, but at the cost of emitting waste heat—which is potentially fatal and got it banned despite its apparent effectiveness. It could still be safely used; it’s 2013 so electronic thermometers are a dime a dozen. Take patients to a fat camp, dress them in clothes with thermometers constantly recording and now doses can be adjusted based on detailed data and the thermometers can warn the patient to jump into conveniently located ice baths. Voila. And I’m not clear on how dangerous it really is when not made illegally and used recklessly by young kids; Wikipedia cites a 1934 paper as estimating that there were ~100k users of DNP before it was banned, and those authors remark, after discussing the grand total of 4 deaths up to that point due to the drug’s use under medical supervision, that
It would seem that like the War on Drugs in general, the attempt to reduce the harm from DNP has resulted in far more harm than was ever the case before.
It is frustrating to me that I want powerful cognitive enhancement, but instead of increasing metabolic efficiency, we’re decreasing it. Can’t we funnel those extra calories the the brain somehow?
I think most of the value in being thin is looking attractive and being able to be physically active. I think Eliezer doesn’t really need to be more attractive than he already is (4 girlfriends) and isn’t a huge fan of rock climbing or whatever. As far as I’ve heard, most of the health benefits of exercise can be gotten without needing to actually be thin.
I somehow doubt that all of this effect is due to thin people exercising more. ETA: looks like the ‘optimal’ BMI for women is larger than for men, BTW.
Considering the social import of being attractive and getting around to see people and the correlation between active social life and longevity I think it’s more than you might think, but I agree with you. On the other hand, the trade off is a lot more reasonable if you can be relatively healthy and happy while fat AND it’s particularly hard for you to lose weight.
Well, they did control for, among other things, marital status. (Also, I’d guess that the BMI that maximizes conventional attractiveness would be higher for men than for women, and wouldn’t depend much on smoking.)
Yes. ISTM that for certain people losing weight has become a lost purpose.
Higher for men? Despite the fact that women have higher BMI on average and that curvy figures are considered (by many) to be attractive?
Remember that BMI is based on the total body mass, and that muscle is denser than fat. (OTOH, that study corrected for level of exercise, and it’s quite possible that the BMI that would maximize an average white American man’s attractiveness if he’s not allowed to vary his level of exercise would indeed be around 20.)
I am one of those “many”, too, but ISTM that in present-day Western cultures we’re a minority; “thin” seems to have become a compliment. (Last year, someone offered to set me up with her roommate who probably had BMI around 18, and when I told her that I didn’t fancy her, she retorted “but she’s so skinny!” as though it was a positive.)
Ah, good points.
I don’t want to speculate about EY other than saying my model of him didn’t expect to ever see “too complex” brought up as a reason not to try anything. Maybe there’s too much overlap with HPMOR:Harry. It is possible that there are individuals whose akrasia levels / mental energy and self-image are unaffected by being overweight compared to not being overweight. Just unlikely.
That’s true, but doesn’t change that ceteris paribus given little exercise, you’ll still live longer not being obese. Note that I’ve not even mentioned exercise. It’s certainly better being overweight and exercising (while still being overweight), than being overweight and not exercising.
You’re reading “too complex” as “difficult” but eliezer means it as “something with inherently low priors for working”.
Pretty sure he meant “since this has inherently low priors for working, it’s too difficult to be worth it” ie expected utility is too low.
Expected value calculation > your ‘seeming’.
Because creating an FAI has (strictly!) greater expected benefits than one person successfully losing weight? To the extent that the rhetorical question is ridiculous.
This seems false.
I’d wager you’ve never been overweight. Strap a few dozen lbs around your waist or don them as a vest, see what it does to your daily routine. We’ve done that once in some class or other, and I’ve bordered the 30 myself as well, from time to time. You’re affected constantly, we’re as of yet embodied agents, not free floating minds. What’s the likelier explanation for a lack of action, expected value calculations or—here it comes - ‘akrasia’.
Depends from whose point of view. E.g. passing away in the knowledge that you’ve contributed to the eventual creation of FAI (which gives you fuzzies, or at least utilons) can be outweighed by living decades with more mental energy (which also contributes to your development efforts) and a better self-image.
That aside, that a task is a complicated problem/puzzle to be solved can be an incentive to solve it in and of itself, especially for certain kinds of people.
Assuming the increase in productivity, self image and quality of life (consider the metabolic syndrome, preventing decades of injecting insuline can have quite the impact on your QALY) to be fixed/constant for an individual, “true” or “false” does depend on how easy/hard it would be for that individual to efficiently attain and keep a lower BMI. For metabolically priviledged people, or just those with an easy to fix problem such as hypothyreodism, the statement is probably true. For someone who for whatever reason cannot lose any weight whatever he tries (within his motivational reach given his current energy levels … there’s a catch-22 present), it would be false.
Eliezer has mentioned many of the things he has tried to lose weight (including ketogenic diets and even clenbuterol). I’ve tried all those he has mentioned. The difference is for me they work (I call it ‘cutting’ and can merrily play around with my body composition all sorts of ways). But if, like Eliezer, I had expended huge amounts of effort and my body did not respond significantly then I would update my expectations.
Things that are expected to fail have low expected value. Sometimes you need to shut up and multiply instead of shut up and do the impossible.
Expected value calculations. Unless you are making accusations of lies—outright fabrication of self reports.
For the purpose of declaring an accusation of irrationality false the relevant point of view is Eliezer’s. If Eliezer had someone else’s values then it would make sense to evaluate the rationality of a given choice for him according to those other values.
Yes (or at least it would be up there on the list). It just isn’t true in this case.
Pretty sure most people involved in FAI efforts are fatoring in more than warm fuzzies in their EU calculations.
Well, I missed it; I kind of wish the LW inbox included replies-to-replies. In any case I find myself thinking this shouldn’t be a charged topic, even though it clearly is. As a culture we’re still hung up on the whole self-indulgence-as-moral-failure absurdity.
A thousand times yes. Sex without babies is a nearly-solved problem, lacking only a male equivalent of the IUD. Weight control should be just as solved, and no, self-control in food intake is not a solution even if it does work. Like condoms, it’s a badly suboptimal necessary evil. I should be able to eat whatever I feel like while maintaining whatever weight I damn well please.
That this has failed to happen despite the massive amount of money thrown at weight-control products says something, but I’m not sure what. Has anyone made a serious, prolonged attempt not at “getting people to ‘stay good’ around food” but at “decoupling food from fat entirely”? If not, why not?
May I direct you to the subsequent paragraph in the grandparent? :)
Sort-of-valid point. But all drugs I’ve seen or heard of have been essentally appetite suppressants plus varying levels of bullshit. I wouldn’t expect metabolic decouplers to be disproportionately cut out by regulation; if there was substantial research in that area, I would expect some of them to be on the market.
(it is possible some are that I’m unaware of.)
Keto isn’t a particularly high-protein diet. It’s generally a high dietary fat diet. I mean, it can be high protein, but the general idea is high fat.
Corrected. Although, it’s somewhat hard replacing carbohydrates without also increasing the overall protein intake. There are probably variants of keto that fit, and variants that don’t. There’s apparently no catchy phrase for the overall “high protein diet” reference class.
Yeah, most people who do keto or other low-carb variants tend to eat a high-protein diet. But for fat-loss something like twice as much weight of dietary fat as protein is recommended along with sub-30 grams of non-fiber carbohydrates. And the medical keto diet, iirc, was something like 4:1 fat:protein. It’s a lot easier to hit the protein macros than the fat macros.
Fair. I’d seen some of the previous conversations or I wouldn’t have responded as I did; but I’m guessing I missed occasions on which Eliezer demonstrated that his body chemistry was provably not doing what theory would predict it should (with regard to ketosis), which I find much more convincing than “I tried X, Y, and Z and none of them worked.”
If such occasions exist, then I just plain missed them and I’ve stepped on toes unnecessarily, and I apologize.
I’m going to guess “before muscle loss or coma”, on the grounds that fat is supposedly for long-term energy storage, and I would expect “break down muscle and/or go into coma in preference to using stored energy” to be maladaptive even in the EEA. I have no controlled study to support that guess, however.
I could see “after excessive fatigue,” I suppose; that might be physically necessary (fat burning is slow, IIRC) but not so maladaptive as to defeat the purpose of storing fat.
This seems somewhat unfair. There are a handful of diets that work on a broad variety of people, such that the prior any one will work for a particular person is higher than a novel diet like Shangri-La. And so unless you’ve tried slow carb/ketogenic, intermittent fasting, 30g of protein for breakfast, and ECA stacks and none of them worked, it seems like you’re updating too far in the direction of “all diets don’t work for me” from the evidence that “diet X didn’t work for me.”
(The only one of those I’ve tried is IF. It worked for me.)
What’s the difference between this and the claim that you are a metabolic mutant?
It might be worth going to a sleep doctor; sleep apnea can really fuck up your metabolism, not to mention causing unbelievable akrasia. I would say sleep tests are a GOOD THING, something everyone should do. I had sleep apnea for years. It was like some eldritch monster was sucking away my willpower and I wasn’t even aware. Within a few months of getting my mouth guard, which keeps my tongue from blocking my airway while in REM, I lost thirty pounds and gained an enormous well of mental stamina. A small minority of the “metabolically challenged” may just have undiagnosed sleep problems.
Since it was cheaper than a sleep study, I bought a self-adjusting CPAP on Craigslist and just tried it. Nothing miraculous occurred.
A history of diets—please note the repetition of ideas and lack of effectiveness for people in general.
Well, there’s your problem right there—it sounds like you didn’t really especially “do” a ketogenic diet, if you never once reached ketosis (as I understand, you typically need to deplete glycogen stores before entering ketosis, and so you might have 3,000~6,000+ kcal to burn through first, and then there’s an interim period of glycogen depletion before it actually begins. Which is where the magnitude of your caloric deficit becomes relevant; was it large enough to get through your stored glycogen in the 1-2 weeks you ate no-carb? I think recently consumed food is generally metabolized first, before dipping into glycogen stores, though that’s likely a huge oversimplification), any more than someone eating an egg for breakfast can be said to have “tried” keto.
And even with weight as your metric you should have seen some noticeable reduction after a month and a half of “dieting” on a >300 kcal deficit if you were consistent in your measurement conditions (eg, every day after waking/bathroom and before breakfast). Maybe you just overestimated how many calories you needed for maintenance each day? Which is quite common among “dieters”. Like I mentioned, the usual advice for muscle preservation is to eat 300-500 kcal below maintenance each day, and if after a month you fail to note any weight loss or note weight gain to reduce your consumption by an additional 300 kcal, rinse and repeat. It might take several months to note any reduction in weight if you had a shoddy initial estimate (or if your metabolism is exceptionally sensitive to intake, though that can only account for so much. Eventually as you progressively reduce consumption [or increase activity!] you will lose weight).
Haha, and many people report a “mental fog” when first trying ketogenic diets. Maybe that’s why you can’t remember :D
disclaimer: this isn’t my field of study and it’s been several years since I tried keto and my research then was cursory, at best, which is why I used less-than-confident language in the above. In the three months that I ran a cyclic ketogenic diet I think it took 2-3 weeks to make the ketostik turn purple (or whatever) the first time, then a weekish after that, ulitmately down to 2-4 days after each weekly recarb.
edit: also, I’ve heard it might be useful to think of diets less in the “dieting” sense (a temporary change in eating behavior that will end once you reach a predefined goal) and more in a “biological” sense (the typical assortment of food that an organism habitually consumes). Less temporary, more permanent or semi-permanent lifestyle change.
After numerous previous failures, if it’s that complicated I’m not going to bother. Complicated things seem even less likely to work than simple things, and simple things almost never work in the first place.
In my experience, no matter what you try, there’s always an excuse when it doesn’t work. Then when it still doesn’t work there’s something else you’re not doing exactly right that they forgot to mention earlier. Oddly enough, when something does work for someone, nobody bothers to check to see if they were doing everything exactly right by way of confirming that all these extra frills are actually required as opposed to just being excuses that are only invoked when it doesn’t work because, in reality, metabolisms are different.
Anyway, not interested. Thanks for trying.
Do you have any data on your eating and exercising habits? I’d love to know what or how your eating now. If you’re eating the standard american diet, then you’re definitely doing something wrong, and there are a few simple things you could do to at least eliminate deleterious factors. Do you drink Coca Cola everyday for example? What’s your baseline diet? Before ever trying a new one, find out what’s wrong with the baseline and tweak it.