Dammit! Foiled again.
I’ll get you one of these times CICO! You’ll rue the day!
2 Likes
What about poop? It stands to reason that some people might be more efficient and get more calories from their food, while others might poop out more calories. Does poop count as CO in CICO?
1 Like
Unfortunately the body is pretty damn efficient at absorbing what’s absorbable. Probably like hotdog-eating-contest levels of binge would be an exception but mostly people are gonna be in a pretty tight range here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/fatlogic/comments/5janzj/does_poop_have_caloric_value_and_if_so_does_that/
Yeah, this comes up every once in a while, especially when we get the fatlogic of “different absorption rates”, “gut biome” or the plain stupid one of “calories on packages don’t even take into account how much you absorb!”.
All of them are not true. Nobody puts things in a bomb calorimeter, burns it to ash and says that’s how many calories your body will get from it. These days it’s based on the Atwater sytem, which TL;DR is based on research that found excretion to be less than 10% of usable intake.
Maybe it’s roughly 90% efficient if this is accurate.
I’m curious as to what goes into the body’s decision to burn fat vs. just slow down. It’s annoying if I don’t eat and have no energy. It’s like - you stupid body - I have stored energy everywhere. Use it!
It really does seem surprising that we haven’t found a pill yet that triggers the body to burn its fat reserves.
Well we kinda do, Ephedra-based stuff and Yohimbine and that kind of thing work pretty well, and they also make your heart race and often make you feel like you may die (and/or want to). There’s kind of a tradeoff there, lol.
Medication for obesity is coming, probably. There was a cannabinoid antagonist drug in Europe for a little while, but there were, uh, a few kinks to work out:
Data from clinical trials submitted to regulatory authorities showed that rimonabant caused depressive disorders or mood alterations in up to 10% of subjects and suicidal ideation in around 1%, and in Europe it was contraindicated for people with any psychiatric disorder, including depressed or suicidal individuals.[7]
Additionally, nausea and upper respiratory tract infections were very common adverse effects (occurring in more than 10% of people); common adverse effects (occurring in between 1% and 10% of people) included gastroenteritis, anxiety, irritability, insomnia and other sleep disorders, hot flushes, diarrhea, vomiting, dry or itchy skin, tendonitis, muscle cramps and spasms, fatigue, flu-like symptoms, and increased risk of falling.
The FDA’s advisory committee raised concerns that based on animal data, it appeared that the therapeutic window with regard to CNS toxicity, and specifically seizures was almost nonexistent; the therapeutic dose and the dose that caused seizures in animals appeared to be the same.[2][14][15]
When the EMA reviewed postmarketing surveillance data, it found that the risk of psychiatric disorders in people taking rimonabant was doubled.[2]
I wonder if I get the same effect from Ritalin - which is like speed basically. I definitely wouldn’t want to combine those and ritalin.
I used to do ephedrine a lot. It’s pretty similar. But I don’t get as cranky on ritalin.
Interesting article from NYT showing that “normal” diet mice with induced high blood sugar were more resistant to fitness gains. On autopsy, their muscles developed differently from control mice, with more collagen. If you haven’t had an A1C test in a while perhaps schedule a physical with your doctor. High blood sugar is bad mojo.
Is Your Blood Sugar Undermining Your Workouts? - The New York Times
So, for the new study, which was published this month in Nature Metabolism, researchers at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston and other institutions decided to raise blood sugar levels in mice and see what happened when they exercised.
They started with adult mice, switching some from normal chow to a diet high in sugar and saturated fat, similar to what many of us in the developed world eat nowadays. These mice rapidly gained weight and developed habitually high blood sugar.
They injected other mice with a substance that reduces their ability to produce insulin, a hormone that helps to control blood sugar, similar to when people have certain forms of diabetes. Those animals did not get fatter, but their blood sugar levels rose to the same extent as among the mice in the sugary diet group.
Other animals remained on their normal chow, as a control group.
After four months, the scientists checked each mouse’s fitness by measuring how long it could run on a treadmill before exhaustion. They then put a running wheel in each animal’s cage and let them jog at will for the next six weeks, which they did. On average, each mouse ran about 300 miles during that month and a half.
But they did not all gain the same level of fitness. The control group now ran for a much longer period of time on the treadmill before exhaustion; they were much fitter. But the animals with high blood sugar showed little improvement. Their aerobic fitness had barely budged.
Interestingly, their exercise resistance was the same, whether their blood sugar problems stemmed from poor diet or lack of insulin, and whether they were overweight or slimmer. If they had high blood sugar, they resisted the benefits of exercise.
To better understand why, the scientists next looked inside muscles. And conditions there were telling. The muscles of the control animals teemed with healthy, new muscle fibers and a network of new blood vessels ferrying extra oxygen and fuel to them. But the muscle tissues of the animals with high blood sugar displayed mostly new deposits of collagen, a rigid substance that seems to have crowded out new blood vessels and prevented the muscles from adapting to the exercise and contributing to better fitness.
Finally, since rodents are not people, the scientists checked blood sugar levels and endurance in a group of 24 young adults. None had diabetes, although some had blood-sugar levels that could be considered prediabetic. During treadmill fitness testing, those volunteers with the worst blood-sugar control also had the lowest endurance, and when the scientists later microscopically examined their muscle tissues after the exercise, they found high activation of proteins that can inhibit improvements to aerobic fitness.
Taken as a whole, these results in mice and people suggest that “constantly bathing your tissues in sugar is just not a good idea” and could undercut any subsequent benefits from exercise, says Sarah Lessard, an assistant professor at the Joslin Diabetes Center and Harvard Medical School, who oversaw the new study.
In practical terms, the findings suggest that, for those of us whose blood-sugar levels depend on our diets, we might want to “cut back on sugar” and the highly processed, fatty foods that also can raise blood sugar and blunt exercise effects, she says. (The control mice ate a high-carbohydrate chow, so carbohydrates, per se, are not necessarily the issue, she says; diet quality is.)
More fundamentally, the study intimates that “diet and exercise should be considered together” when we start thinking about how to improve our health, Dr. Lessard says. They affect each other and they influence how each affects us more than we might expect, she says.
But perhaps most important, the study contains some encouraging data, Dr. Lessard points out. The hyperglycemic mice gained little endurance from their weeks of working out, but they were beginning to show early signs of better blood-sugar control, she says. So, it might require time and gritty determination, but exercise eventually could help people with hyperglycemia to stabilize their blood sugar, she says, and then start feeling their fitness rise.
1 Like
This is the one of the main focuses of gut microbiome research. What you are suggesting has already been shown experimentally in rats. The term of art for efficiency is energy harvest in case you want to search this.
An obesity-associated gut microbiome with increased capacity for energy harvest appearing in Nature.
Comparisons of the distal gut microbiota of genetically obese mice and their lean littermates, as well as those of obese and lean human volunteers have revealed that obesity is associated with changes in the relative abundance of the two dominant bacterial divisions, the Bacteroidetes and the Firmicutes. Here we demonstrate through metagenomic and biochemical analyses that these changes affect the metabolic potential of the mouse gut microbiota. Our results indicate that the obese microbiome has an increased capacity to harvest energy from the diet. Furthermore, this trait is transmissible: colonization of germ-free mice with an ‘obese microbiota’ results in a significantly greater increase in total body fat than colonization with a ‘lean microbiota’.
http://www.cbcb.umd.edu/confcour/CMSC828G-materials/Turnbaugh-etal-2006-Nature.pdf
This is getting uncomfortably complex, luckily “just eat EVEN LESS calories” is a panacea here. It just always functions as an answer, that’s the great thing about it.
I think abstinence-only education is a pretty good analogy actually. An answer that undeniably “works” unless by “works” you mean you want to use it as a tool to solve real-world problems, the result of which is invariably hopeless.
2 Likes
cause psychosis, etc
How tall are you and how muscular are your legs?
The best answer imo is don’t get fat. I joke about it, but it’s been a source of misery my whole life. I’ve never been comfortable in my own skin. Losing weight is almost always my #1 goal which takes a huge % of my available energy - except for those rare times when I’m not trying to lose weight. During those I always gain ~5 lbs/month. My default state is beating myself up trying to stick to a diet - while maintaining my current weight or slightly gaining.
My friends, my therapist, everyone is just like - maybe you should just learn to live with yourself. Which of course I should. I’m doing the same thing and expecting different results - hundreds of times - and somehow I expect it to work this time. But I can’t seem to manage it. I’ve been skinny(er). It was glorious. I got laid.
This refusal to accept is probably a sign of other major issues other than just being fat. One of them is looking at too much porn I’m sure. The class of woman I can get like this doesn’t move my porn-damaged needle. But also it’s not healthy. I don’t want to go into my 60s weighing over 250. That just seems like a recipe for all kinds of health issues. I feel so much better just having lost the 25 lbs. recently.
I see fat kids and I just feel terrible for them. I think it’s a form of child abuse to let your kids get fat, and I have no qualms with parents who are strict with their kids when they start to get a little fat - w/o shaming them of course, which I’m sure is tricky.
Still if my Mom or Dad had shamed me a little, I’d forgive them for it. I had an Aunt and Uncle who would call out of I was getting fat, and give me a lot of praise when I lost weight. I don’t begrudge them for it. Being overweight your whole life really really sucks.
Actually I can’t be hard on my mom and dad. I always lived in a house with pretty healthy foods. I was a little chubby but I didn’t get fat until I got my own car and job, then I rebelled against all the health food I grew up with and went crazy. Somehow my friends and cousins who grew up with jars of M&Ms everywhere and McDonalds 5x/week stayed rail-skinny. Can’t explain that.
1 Like
You guys are getting increasingly faster and looser with your analogy game.
And you only want it to go one way. At it’s simplest level, we know what leads to alcohol-dependence, right?
1 Like
Yes but I’m not sure why bodybuilders would “watch” cortisol because there’s nothing they can do to lower it. Exercise increases cortisol acutely but ephemerally and lowers cortisol chronically. There’s very scant evidence that the supplement phosphatidylserine lowers cortisol but it seems more like a junk science finding than a real thing. They would not be able to acquire cortisol-blocking medications (at least not legally) without suspicion of disease, and all of those medications have bad side effects and would not be justified in healthy people.
I’ve been on one such medication (oral ketoconazole) which is an antifungal with nasty side effects (it comes with a sweet FDA black box warning). If it sounds familiar to anyone, it’s because it’s the active ingredient in the shampoo Nizoral, but that’s topical 2% ketoconazole–no worries there, it’s safe. I was only on it for a few weeks but lost 5 pounds of scale weight relatively quickly and my chronic insomnia + daytime fatigue vanished after about three days. I tried phosphatidylserine over a considerably longer period and didn’t notice anything.
We know for a fact that cortisol moderates lipid metabolism, specifically through lipoprotein lipase activity. LPL is increased in certain fat depots which basically “traps” the fat there. That’s what’s happening in Cushing’s syndrome and people who are given exogenous steroids like Prednisone. It’s also possible to overproduce or overexpress 11beta-hsd1, the enzyme that converts inactive cortisone into cortisol, in fat cells. So even if your adrenals are producing a perfectly normal level of cortisol, too much 11b-hsd1 can alter the cortisone:cortisol balance specifically in those fat depots and deliver the same effect.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925443913001919
1 Like
I have to disagree. There are to prevent pregnancies and STDs that do not involve abstinence. We have yet to find any weight loss method that is not based on CI<CO.
My grandma chewed tobacco, Bull of the Woods brand. She’d spit into a Folger’s can right by her chair there, lived to 102. Not even sure how she did it, she didn’t have many teeth to speak of. Tough old lady, Ozark mountain folk ftw.
1 Like
I’m a bit confused that you need convincing. This should be self-evident.
As you diet, you will lose muscle and fat. Muscle tissue burns a lot of calories. Fat burns very few (but nonzero amount). So when you diet and lose weight you lose calorie burning tissue and hence your basal metabolic rate goes down (all else being equal).
Why would you expect anything else?
No? Of course not. We have little idea. It’s certainly not drinking alcohol, as the vast majority of people who drink alcohol do not have an issue with alcohol dependence.
Also if you’re going to say that it’s people “making a choice” to drink alcohol, then I am once again going to disagree that “making a choice” is something with any causative power in the world. Not only is it totally useless in terms of treating alcohol dependence (that is, exhorting people to “make a different choice” works extremely poorly as a treatment) but you can’t tell me what you mean by this in terms of brain function or even theoretically describe what such causative power is or how it would function.