The fascinating thing about this situation is that Eliezer is about as high status here as it’s possible for a human being to be in a non-religious group, and it’s still extremely difficult for him to get people to take what he says about his experiences with food and exercise seriously.
It’s VERY hard to accept that your own anecdotal experience doesn’t apply to everyone. Especially in nutrition/diet/exercise, where basically the only information we have available is anecdotal. (Well, there are medical studies, but they tend to test only not-very-strenuous diets and exercise routines.) It takes a while before you notice that there are real physiological variations. There are people who can’t run without joint pain; there are people who can’t go three hours without eating or they’ll faint; etc. There really are constraints that we don’t set ourselves. It’s not always an easy thing to accept.
It’s VERY hard to accept that your own anecdotal experience doesn’t apply to everyone. Especially in nutrition/diet/exercise, where basically the only information we have available is anecdotal.
If only that were the situation.
There’s the generalizing from the one example which is your own experience, and then there’s the generalizing from the one example that everyone is telling you is the real truth.
There’s a complex, highly socially supported mind-blocking ideology which goes way beyond generalizing from one example. One is the common belief that “it’s just a matter of “calories in, calories out”, which eliminates a huge amount of biological detail. Another is “I didn’t say it was easy”, which is a way of blurring out the huge range of the amount of difficulty involved.
There seems to be an underlying belief that everyone is in some sense really fairly lean, so that any apparent health problems caused by (or causing!) weight loss can be ignored in favor of the Platonic truth of the ideal body.
It’s not just politics is the mind-killer—so are status markers.
it’s still extremely difficult for him to get people to take what he says about his experiences with food and exercise seriously.
For how many people was it extremely easy?
I maintain a healthy weight with zero effort, and I have a friend for whom The Hacker’s Diet worked perfectly. I thought losing weight was a matter of eating less than you burn.
Then I read Eliezer’s twoposts. Oops, I thought. There’s no reason intake reduction has to work without severe and continuing side-effects.
But seriously, if you are not metabolically privileged, what happens if you try this is that your body shuts down and goes into starvation mode instead of losing weight. Your fat cells do not release fat under any circumstances, though they’re happy to hoover up blood sugar so you always feel tired. We’re not talking “feeling hungry”, we’re talking that you stop feeling hungry and lie down, feeling very very cold and having a hard time moving. Literal starvation, instead of your fat cells releasing fat. I’ve never tried starving myself that much (I worry that it will cause my brain to cannibalize irreplaceable neurons or something, the way the rest of the body cannibalizes muscle) but I’ve just recently watched that happen to someone else who tried to lose weight by not eating and wasn’t metabolically privileged enough to get away with it.
A calorie is not a calorie. The thermodynamic theory of metabolism is a fucking lie. And it seriously does wear away on your nerves like sandpaper, after a while, to be blamed for it, when the exact same diet can make one person thin and cause the other to blow up like a balloon...
We’re not talking “feeling hungry”, we’re talking that you stop feeling hungry and lie down, feeling very very cold and having a hard time moving.
Have you had your thyroid hormone levels checked? Lethargy, feeling cold, and weight gain/inability to lose weight are ALL symptoms of hypothyroidism. Basically, without enough thyroid hormone telling your cells to be active, your metabolism shuts down. Just a thought.
The thermodynamic theory of metabolism is a fucking lie.
Not so much a lie as ‘inapplicable’. Energy balance and mass balance are still true. What happens so that that balance is maintained is highly variable.
I’m convinced that this is a science that doesn’t exist yet. (Or, at least, isn’t established yet.) Sharing information anecdotally is better than not sharing it, but we haven’t worked out the principles yet.
I’ve experienced “starvation mode” and I’m sure as hell not interested in eating that little for any longer than a day or two. I think (with low confidence, though I’ve seen some physiological just-so stories) that things like exercise and macronutrient breakdown affect whether or not you go into “starvation mode” on a given number of calories. But, regardless, it sucks and people are quite sensible to avoid doing things to their bodies that make them feel like dead dogs.
Edit: I am not a doctor, but the other standard thing to get checked is testosterone levels.
To generalize a bit: I believe that people’s bodies make choices about what to do when handed some calories-- the calories are allocated to heat, movement, immune system, fat, thinking, etc., and very little is known about how to affect how calories are allocated. Treatment for thyroid problems can help, I think—if that happens to be your problem and your doctor is more astute than most.
One thing that presumably massively influences calory-allocation may be the the prevalence of brown fat in some adult humans. I found a lot of unusual observations about my (privileged) metabolism suddenly explained by the presumed presence of it. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_adipose_tissue#Presence_in_adults
There are some biases that make me favouring this explanation, and there is contradicting evidence, so I am not so sure anymore.
Several times I’ve attempted to study how the body metabolizes energy, how to lose weight, how to gain muscle, and so on. There does seem to be a huge amount of variability between persons, and I personally found it harder to get decently confident answers about such things than about other complex phenomena like procrastination and happiness.
I will not be writing about metabolism or weight loss or muscle gain anytime soon. Too complicated and not a field of my expertise.
I’ve never tried starving myself that much (I worry that it will cause my brain to cannibalize irreplaceable neurons or something, the way the rest of the body cannibalizes muscle) but I’ve just recently watched that happen to someone else who tried to lose weight by not eating and wasn’t metabolically privileged enough to get away with it.
I think she was probably on 1200cal/day or something like that? Maybe less? Naturally, eating more hadn’t produced weight loss, so she went lower, which naturally also failed to produce weight loss.
so she went lower, which naturally also failed to produce weight loss.
Now, you say “she”, and that’s important. For women, their weight fluctuates a lot more throughout the day simply due to water intake and excretion. I think it’s possible that she was losing weight in the form of body fat but it failed to show up on her scale. What is recommended is that one measures their weight as a weighted moving average. There’s an app on the hacker’s diet site that does just that.
1200 cal/day sounds extremely low unless this person is very small. However, that doesn’t really tell me anything unless you can also give me her height and weight at the time. The calorie deficit is what’s important. Also, was she exercising on top of this 1200 calorie diet?
There are a lot of people who assert that they cannot lose weight on 1200 calories per day. Normally such people assert that it is their metabolism.
When such people are metabolically tested, it is invariably discovered that their metabolisms are perfectly normal and they eat far more calories than they realize.
Of course the claim being made by Eliezer’s friend is a bit different. It’s that if she has enough of a calorie deficit to lose weight, her fat cells will not give up enough energy to make up the deficit. So that she will feel terrible but not lose any weight. While I concede that there may be people out there like that, it’s a pretty extraordinary claim for any individual to make. For one thing, even if your fat storage system is working perfectly normally, it will be uncomfortable to run a caloric deficit especially in the early days of a diet as your body adjusts. Such discomfort is widely reported among all dieter, successful or not. So how can the person possibly know that she isn’t experiencing the normal discomfort experienced by all dieters? I would want a medical diagnosis before concluding that something was so seriously wrong with a person’s fat storage system.
Here’s a question: Did the individual successfully lose weight in the past (even if they later regained)? If so, that’s a good indication that their fat storage system is working properly.
My suspicion is that she neither experienced ordinary discomfort nor does she have a faulty metabolism. Rather, it’s possible that her weight loss strategy was far too extreme. A caloric deficit of more than 25% is considered very dangerous. If she did cut her calories that far, then it’s little wonder why she went through hell. Add that to the random variation in her weight caused by water and then it’s obvious why she’d given up on trying to lose weight.
A caloric deficit of more than 25% is considered very dangerous
Is the caloric deficit inherently dangerous or is it that people usually cut the wrong things from their diet? Do you think there are significant dangers to an otherwise healthy person who gets all the micronutrients they need during the deficit and does it only for a month or two?
Yes, an extreme caloric deficit would be dangerous to anybody. If the body can’t make up the difference between the energy expended and energy eaten by burning fat, it will go into starvation mode, slow down, start eating muscle mass and eventually the internal organs.
I’m not sure I understand why the body would eat internal organs on a two month diet when there’s plenty of fat and muscle to burn, or why losing some muscle mass would be dangerous.
Look, dude. I’m not a doctor, and I can’t really tell you what exactly happens to your body if you have an extreme calorie deficit. Nonetheless, every medical professional will tell you that you shouldn’t do it.
My suspicion is that there she neither experienced ordinary discomfort nor does she have a faulty metabolism. Rather, it’s possible that her weight loss strategy was far too extreme.
Yes now that I think about it that’s the most likely explanation. I’ve been informally researching diet and weight loss for nearly two years now. One thing I’ve informally observed is that self-deception is a big problem in dieting. Thus when failed dieters report on their failure, they have a tendency to underestimate their caloric intake; they also have a tendency to assert that there is something wrong with their metabolism.
your body shuts down and goes into starvation mode instead of losing weight
How long did you endure that? I kind of get the same when I start a weight-loss diet, but it usually only lasts about three days for me (provided I don’t do anything drastic such as reducing my calorie intake by more than 25%).
cannibalize irreplaceable neurons
I don’t think that’s likely to happen. Neuroplasticity has been widely demonstrated even in adults, hasn’t it?
Meeeeep D: covers from the higher status individual and tries to look harmless
Then remembers Eliezer is probably on crockers rules
… Sorry, I just had a really low prior for how someone not eating and using lost of energy could not lose weight given thermodynamics.
The fascinating thing about this situation is that Eliezer is about as high status here as it’s possible for a human being to be in a non-religious group, and it’s still extremely difficult for him to get people to take what he says about his experiences with food and exercise seriously.
It’s VERY hard to accept that your own anecdotal experience doesn’t apply to everyone. Especially in nutrition/diet/exercise, where basically the only information we have available is anecdotal. (Well, there are medical studies, but they tend to test only not-very-strenuous diets and exercise routines.) It takes a while before you notice that there are real physiological variations. There are people who can’t run without joint pain; there are people who can’t go three hours without eating or they’ll faint; etc. There really are constraints that we don’t set ourselves. It’s not always an easy thing to accept.
If only that were the situation.
There’s the generalizing from the one example which is your own experience, and then there’s the generalizing from the one example that everyone is telling you is the real truth.
There’s a complex, highly socially supported mind-blocking ideology which goes way beyond generalizing from one example. One is the common belief that “it’s just a matter of “calories in, calories out”, which eliminates a huge amount of biological detail. Another is “I didn’t say it was easy”, which is a way of blurring out the huge range of the amount of difficulty involved.
There seems to be an underlying belief that everyone is in some sense really fairly lean, so that any apparent health problems caused by (or causing!) weight loss can be ignored in favor of the Platonic truth of the ideal body.
It’s not just politics is the mind-killer—so are status markers.
For how many people was it extremely easy?
I maintain a healthy weight with zero effort, and I have a friend for whom The Hacker’s Diet worked perfectly. I thought losing weight was a matter of eating less than you burn.
Then I read Eliezer’s two posts. Oops, I thought. There’s no reason intake reduction has to work without severe and continuing side-effects.
Bleah. Still not used to this high status thing.
But seriously, if you are not metabolically privileged, what happens if you try this is that your body shuts down and goes into starvation mode instead of losing weight. Your fat cells do not release fat under any circumstances, though they’re happy to hoover up blood sugar so you always feel tired. We’re not talking “feeling hungry”, we’re talking that you stop feeling hungry and lie down, feeling very very cold and having a hard time moving. Literal starvation, instead of your fat cells releasing fat. I’ve never tried starving myself that much (I worry that it will cause my brain to cannibalize irreplaceable neurons or something, the way the rest of the body cannibalizes muscle) but I’ve just recently watched that happen to someone else who tried to lose weight by not eating and wasn’t metabolically privileged enough to get away with it.
A calorie is not a calorie. The thermodynamic theory of metabolism is a fucking lie. And it seriously does wear away on your nerves like sandpaper, after a while, to be blamed for it, when the exact same diet can make one person thin and cause the other to blow up like a balloon...
Eh, just read “Beware of Other-Optimizing.”
Have you had your thyroid hormone levels checked? Lethargy, feeling cold, and weight gain/inability to lose weight are ALL symptoms of hypothyroidism. Basically, without enough thyroid hormone telling your cells to be active, your metabolism shuts down. Just a thought.
Not so much a lie as ‘inapplicable’. Energy balance and mass balance are still true. What happens so that that balance is maintained is highly variable.
I’m convinced that this is a science that doesn’t exist yet. (Or, at least, isn’t established yet.) Sharing information anecdotally is better than not sharing it, but we haven’t worked out the principles yet.
I’ve experienced “starvation mode” and I’m sure as hell not interested in eating that little for any longer than a day or two. I think (with low confidence, though I’ve seen some physiological just-so stories) that things like exercise and macronutrient breakdown affect whether or not you go into “starvation mode” on a given number of calories. But, regardless, it sucks and people are quite sensible to avoid doing things to their bodies that make them feel like dead dogs.
Edit: I am not a doctor, but the other standard thing to get checked is testosterone levels.
To generalize a bit: I believe that people’s bodies make choices about what to do when handed some calories-- the calories are allocated to heat, movement, immune system, fat, thinking, etc., and very little is known about how to affect how calories are allocated. Treatment for thyroid problems can help, I think—if that happens to be your problem and your doctor is more astute than most.
One thing that presumably massively influences calory-allocation may be the the prevalence of brown fat in some adult humans. I found a lot of unusual observations about my (privileged) metabolism suddenly explained by the presumed presence of it. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_adipose_tissue#Presence_in_adults
There are some biases that make me favouring this explanation, and there is contradicting evidence, so I am not so sure anymore.
Agree.
Several times I’ve attempted to study how the body metabolizes energy, how to lose weight, how to gain muscle, and so on. There does seem to be a huge amount of variability between persons, and I personally found it harder to get decently confident answers about such things than about other complex phenomena like procrastination and happiness.
I will not be writing about metabolism or weight loss or muscle gain anytime soon. Too complicated and not a field of my expertise.
Just what kind of a calorie deficit were you running when you experienced this?
I think she was probably on 1200cal/day or something like that? Maybe less? Naturally, eating more hadn’t produced weight loss, so she went lower, which naturally also failed to produce weight loss.
Now, you say “she”, and that’s important. For women, their weight fluctuates a lot more throughout the day simply due to water intake and excretion. I think it’s possible that she was losing weight in the form of body fat but it failed to show up on her scale. What is recommended is that one measures their weight as a weighted moving average. There’s an app on the hacker’s diet site that does just that.
1200 cal/day sounds extremely low unless this person is very small. However, that doesn’t really tell me anything unless you can also give me her height and weight at the time. The calorie deficit is what’s important. Also, was she exercising on top of this 1200 calorie diet?
There are a lot of people who assert that they cannot lose weight on 1200 calories per day. Normally such people assert that it is their metabolism.
When such people are metabolically tested, it is invariably discovered that their metabolisms are perfectly normal and they eat far more calories than they realize.
Of course the claim being made by Eliezer’s friend is a bit different. It’s that if she has enough of a calorie deficit to lose weight, her fat cells will not give up enough energy to make up the deficit. So that she will feel terrible but not lose any weight. While I concede that there may be people out there like that, it’s a pretty extraordinary claim for any individual to make. For one thing, even if your fat storage system is working perfectly normally, it will be uncomfortable to run a caloric deficit especially in the early days of a diet as your body adjusts. Such discomfort is widely reported among all dieter, successful or not. So how can the person possibly know that she isn’t experiencing the normal discomfort experienced by all dieters? I would want a medical diagnosis before concluding that something was so seriously wrong with a person’s fat storage system.
Here’s a question: Did the individual successfully lose weight in the past (even if they later regained)? If so, that’s a good indication that their fat storage system is working properly.
My suspicion is that she neither experienced ordinary discomfort nor does she have a faulty metabolism. Rather, it’s possible that her weight loss strategy was far too extreme. A caloric deficit of more than 25% is considered very dangerous. If she did cut her calories that far, then it’s little wonder why she went through hell. Add that to the random variation in her weight caused by water and then it’s obvious why she’d given up on trying to lose weight.
Is the caloric deficit inherently dangerous or is it that people usually cut the wrong things from their diet? Do you think there are significant dangers to an otherwise healthy person who gets all the micronutrients they need during the deficit and does it only for a month or two?
Yes, an extreme caloric deficit would be dangerous to anybody. If the body can’t make up the difference between the energy expended and energy eaten by burning fat, it will go into starvation mode, slow down, start eating muscle mass and eventually the internal organs.
I’m not sure I understand why the body would eat internal organs on a two month diet when there’s plenty of fat and muscle to burn, or why losing some muscle mass would be dangerous.
The heart is made of muscle tissue, and the digestive system is lined with it.
Yeah, smooth muscle and heart muscle, different kinds of tissues from skeletal muscle. I doubt the body has trouble differentiating them.
Look, dude. I’m not a doctor, and I can’t really tell you what exactly happens to your body if you have an extreme calorie deficit. Nonetheless, every medical professional will tell you that you shouldn’t do it.
Yes now that I think about it that’s the most likely explanation. I’ve been informally researching diet and weight loss for nearly two years now. One thing I’ve informally observed is that self-deception is a big problem in dieting. Thus when failed dieters report on their failure, they have a tendency to underestimate their caloric intake; they also have a tendency to assert that there is something wrong with their metabolism.
How long did you endure that? I kind of get the same when I start a weight-loss diet, but it usually only lasts about three days for me (provided I don’t do anything drastic such as reducing my calorie intake by more than 25%).
I don’t think that’s likely to happen. Neuroplasticity has been widely demonstrated even in adults, hasn’t it?