I think it’s more than just losing calorie burning tissue - as has been discussed itt. Energy levels drop and burn rate drops with them.
It’s in that Biggest Loser study you linked. Their metabolic rates got wrecked beyond what could be explained by weight loss and was still suppressed six years later. Even scarier, their leptin production seemed to drop permanently as well. That is the 1-2 combo of being absolutely fucked.
I still don’t understand what you find so surprising. By “I’m convinced BMR goes down” what you actually meant was “Obviously I knew BMR goes down with dieting, I just think it goes down more than one would expect”?
If that’s what you meant, that wasn’t clear to me based on how you wrote your post.
Also your point about dieting leading to lethargy, which leads to less activity, which leads to to fewer calories burned, (if that’s what you’re saying) is completely reasonable. I suspect that this effect happens to many people but certainly not all. Some people can power through force of will or just aren’t affected in that way by caloric deficits.
The answer is quite obviously “drinking alcohol” and any disagreement would stem from the ambiguity of my “at it’s simplest level”. This is ridiculous.
Does that remotely sound like something I’d say? Have you read, not just what I’ve posted on this topic, but, anything I’ve posted on any topic?
Like, it’s going on a decade now of me mocking conservatives/RWNJ/etc for sophomorically describing existence as a series of absolute choices.
If the answer were “drinking alcohol” then everyone who drank alcohol would be alcohol dependent. Since the majority are not, drinking alcohol is only a minor factor in developing alcohol dependence. It’s a necessary condition, sure, but it doesn’t “lead to” alcohol dependence, not by itself.
I feel like we’ve descended into hair-splitting here and I’m not sure why. If you ask me what causes death by suicide and I say, you know, social isolation, mental illness etc and you say “wrong, it’s actually the rope around the neck” then I’m not going to be sure what point you’re trying to make. That’s technically correct from one point of view but it’s a totally pointless answer. As far as I’m concerned “drinking too much alcohol” is just a redescription of “being alcohol dependent”, it’s not a cause.
I mean, it was confusing to me, but I don’t know where else you’re going with this.
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I dunno how much I buy this part though. It’s true that cortisol is the stress hormone, but the term has a different meaning than being “stressed out.” I think that idea is mostly from snake oil salesmen pitching adrenal fatigue which isn’t a real thing. The states of stress that are known to cause biochemically-apparent hypercortisolism are alcoholism, extreme psychiatric illness, and admission to ICU. People who have confirmed cortisol-producing tumors will often not test high on lab assays. So like, maybe you’re right, but there’s no evidence that the increase is happening, at least not at a level that would matter.
Lawnmower Man’s post above yours lays it out pretty clearly.
If there’s one takeaway from reading about covid 4 hours a day that would apply to this - it’s that biological systems run on of dozens inter-related variables that all move around constantly on a sliding scale. Nothing seems to be fixed or binary.
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It has been demonstrated that dieting increases cortisol levels, for example:
Check out that first sentence, by the way. They don’t even cite that, because it’s such a well-established fact.
Whether this increase in cortisol is enough to do anything significant physiologically is not known, as far as I’m aware.
I can tell you for sure that when I’m dieting, and something stresses me out - like boss or gf (sorry partner) issues - I go into a different psychological state. I call it the hamster wheel - because I can’t stop it spinning in my head. It’s as obvious to me as a different mental state as flow state is. You know you’re in it when you’re in it.
It only happens when I’m dieting. I even got a prescription for lorazepam for it to try to keep from snapping at my coworkers. But if I don’t diet hardcore, I’ve never needed it.
Why don’t you join a crossfit or some other HIIT class? Post-pandemic of course.
Crossfit people like to drink and socialize also.
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I did a circuit training class for years that is the same intensity as crossfit but w/o all the dumb stuff. I even got addicted and worked up to 6 days in a row. But then my back said nope. I could do 3 days a week though. It built muscle and I felt great afterwards, and I liked the people. There were a few parties but I didn’t make any new friends. I also didn’t lose tons of weight.
Yea I think anything that motivates you to go regularly + pushes you hard when you’re there is a good option for people (like me) who struggle to have a consistent routine.
It’s hiking now. I do a pretty major hike (8-10 hours, 4-5k vertical feet) about every other week. My legs are in the best shape of my life. I just spent $1500 on weights and a rack and started working my upper body out again. I got tired having soldier legs and a torso of goo. Pushups and situps weren’t cutting it.
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Question for the thread.
Thoughts on bariatric surgery? Is it a useful tool that has improved by leaps and bounds for years and should be suggested to the obese who cannot for the life of them get out of their own way? Or is it a quick fix for quitters who csnt be arsed to try?
Or somewhere in between?
That’s a Traci Mann paper. She runs one of the best known eating behavior labs:
http://mannlab.psych.umn.edu/index.html
I can easily believe that depriving yourself of food leads to a measurable increase in cortisol. After all, that’s a direct manipulation of physiological circuits affecting appetite. It’s not clear at all to me from this study how big the effect is. They give Cohen’s D but I want the actual units in like ug/dL and I’m not seeing that anywhere.
I think it’s tougher to get from psychological stress to cortisol. If I’m reading this right, they didn’t find the effect for people who thought they were stressed in this study. Cortisol research is tough because it’s difficult to measure in a meaningful way; there are a lot of different assays and they’ve changed significantly over time. The one used here (salivary measured by ELISA it appears) is even starting to fall out of favor now.
Sounds like adrenal insufficiency. Do you carry an IM?
That’s the same paper ChrisV posted that I commented on. Cortisol is a critical component of lipid metabolism. I can believe that a statistically significant increase can be shown in diet studies, I’m just not sure if it’s physiologically significant. Exercise increases cortisol, but only transiently and it’s rather meaningless overall. PTSD, surprisingly, is often associated with lower levels of cortisol.
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IM = intramuscular injection. You must be making some ACTH if you aren’t on hydro. If you were completely adrenal insufficient and taking hydro they’d give you sick day rules for extra dosing. So sounds like you are somewhere in between that state and full recovery of pituitary function. I dunno what 465 is but that sounds like an ACTH value.
Edit: Oh I forgot you all use Eurograms. So that’s a cortisol value in nmol/L:
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I was looking for something that actually estimated the decrease in energy expenditure between the MAGA era and today. We can’t only look at occupation change because leisure activity has increased to offset it to some degree, but it’s a starting point. What else might be influencing it though? It would be a scientific blunder to only include explanations that easily come to mind over ones that are lurking or not yet known. Like what if we could rent the hot tub time machine and recruit people from 1950 into our doubly labeled water experiment? It would be a huge blow to the occupational theory if energy expenditure was the same.
By chance I stumbled upon one paper that solely estimates the change in occupational energy expenditure:
For example from 1960–62 to 2003–06 we estimated that the occupation-related daily energy expenditure decreased by 142 calories in men.
Seems totally reasonable.
Given a baseline weight of 76.9 kg in 1960–02, we estimated that a 142 calories reduction would result in an increase in mean weight to 89.7 kg, which closely matched the mean NHANES weight of 91.8 kg in 2003–06. The results were similar for women.
Over the last 50 years in the U.S. we estimate that daily occupation-related energy expenditure has decreased by more than 100 calories, and this reduction in energy expenditure accounts for a significant portion of the increase in mean U.S. body weights for women and men.
But here they lose me and imply that delta energy expenditure can explain most of the difference. They have not actually demonstrated that total energy expenditure is different, they simply assume it. Here’s a meta-analysis of 98 doubly labeled water studies on energy expenditure across populations from countries of varying economic development status:
Although it is indisputable that patterns of physical activity are different between countries at differing levels of industrialization, we could not detect differences in TEE or PAL, as measured by using DLW, between subjects from low- or middle-HDI and high-HDI countries.
Once adjusted for age and weight, TEE and PAL did not differ by HDI status. This result conflicts with reports that implicated decreased levels of TEE (including PAEE) as a driver of the obesity epidemic (6, 7).
The findings of the current meta-analysis support the conclusions of Westerterp and Speakman (11), who collected data from multiple sources (some included in this meta-analysis) and examined TEE and PAL trends in industrialized societies and compared these to data from developing countries by using generalized linear regression models. The focus of their study was the change in energy expenditure over the 20-y period during which there was a marked increase in the prevalence of obesity in the US and most European countries (122). Interestingly, their analysis showed a slight increase in PAEE between 1988 and 2006 in industrialized countries, whereas PAL remained stable.
A recent anthropologic review of farmers in developing countries reported considerable variation in PAL between groups of farmers, an, although the data generally supported the hypothesis that energy expenditure was high among farmers in developing countries, it was not as high as anticipated by the investigators (121).
For differences in energy expenditure between populations to be considered important for differences in obesity prevalence, some association between expenditure and excess weight gain must be shown. To our knowledge, this has not occurred.
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While we’re questioning whether being more active leads to more calorie expenditure, let’s also look at whether eating more leads to weight gain. This is generally true, but not universally so. For example, cannabis users. Here’s a 2018 meta-analysis:
Results: The present meta-analysis reveals significantly reduced body mass index and rates of obesity in Cannabis users, in conjunction with increased caloric intake.
Here’s what they mean by “increased caloric intake”:
Rodondi et al.70 found that users who had consumed Cannabis for more than 1800 days over 15 years consumed on average 619 more calories/day than nonusers, yet showed no difference in BMI (Table 1).
Smit and Crespo71 reported lower BMI in users (24.7±0.3) than nonusers (26.6±0.1), despite users consuming 564 additional calories relative to nonusers ( p <0.0001).
Ngueta et al.72 also observed higher values for caloric intake in Cannabis users relative to nonusers; although this was not statistically significant (2375 kcal/day vs. 2210 kcal/day; p =0.07). Despite this, the users had lower BMI ( p <0.001).
Foltin et al.73 found Cannabis users to have a substantial increase (1095 kcal/day) in daily caloric intake, although this was a short-term experimental study rather than a comparison between free-range Cannabis users and nonusers.
Across these studies, on average, Cannabis users consumed an additional 834 kcal/day relative to nonusers. As BMI of Cannabis users is lower than nonusers, this suggests that Cannabis users must have increased metabolic rates.
Proposed explanation:
Theoretical explanation: We provide for the first time a causative explanation for this paradox, in which rapid and long-lasting downregulation of CB1R following acute Cannabis consumption reduces energy storage and increases metabolic rates, thus reversing the impact on body mass index of elevated dietary omega-6/omega-3 ratios.
You guys should really call up these researchers and explain how “it’s just calories in calories out”.