Right. The tough part about “advertising” is that you’d have to test or manipulate a very specific theoretical pathway or construct. Simply showing that print ad for food → normal ghrelin response wouldn’t get very far without an interesting modifier or something. What kind of stimuli do you feel like you’re most susceptible to?
It’s not that it’s known, it’s that you couldn’t submit it as a straightforward empirical paper. Obviously you have to frame it some particular way, otherwise you aren’t really making any exacting claims. The top journals would desk reject it if not couched in an elaborate theoretical framework. Psychology especially has a really tough time with practical findings. They are more easily wooed by a novel theory where a meaningless effect size is demonstrated and may not even be replicable. They prefer dudes like this who pump out articles designed to “go virally big time” and mostly aren’t replicable:
I actually do know someone that does some work similar to that. He’s a psychologist who would never take your blood to see what’s actually happening though.
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But it doesn’t count “where the money goes.” It only counts how many dollars are coming in and assumes the rest from regression coefficients derived from healthy businesses in studies that are at least 30 years old.
Can we get a title change if this is gonna be the de facto thread for discussing scientific and medical aspects of obesity?
I vote keep the name!
The problem is measuring BMR, which can vary.
3) Metabolism can vary a lot between people, and researchers don’t understand why
It’s true that two people with the same size and body composition can have different metabolic rates. One can consume a huge meal and gain no weight, while the other has to carefully count calories to not gain weight.
But why this is remains a “black box,” said Will Wong, a researcher and professor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Metabolism and Obesity Research. “We don’t understand the mechanism that controls a person’s metabolism.”
Researchers have found some predictors of how fast a person’s metabolism will be. These include: the amount of lean muscle and fat tissue in the body, age, and genetics (though researchers don’t know why some families have higher or lower metabolic rates).
Sex also matters, since women with any given body composition and age burn fewer calories than comparable men. For women, Jensen added, “There’s a bit of an effect of menstrual cycle: Some women have a higher metabolic rate during the last half of menstrual cycle (during the luteal phase) when the resting metabolic rate in some women is up to 10 percent higher.”
You can’t easily measure your resting metabolic rate in a precise way (there are some commercially available tests, but the best measurements come from research studies that use expensive equipment like a metabolic chamber). But you can get a rough estimate of your resting metabolic rate by plugging some basic variables into online calculators (like this one). It’ll tell you how many calories you’re expected to burn each day, and if you eat that many and your weight stays the same, it’s probably correct.
So in the money analogy it’s very easy to track expenditures. In the human body the basic underlying burn rate is hard to know.
It’s just a really slow feedback loop with a large margin of uncertainty. And BMR isn’t guaranteed to stay constant throughout.
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Fooled by randomness. You are really underestimating the psychological aspects of weight loss. 3,500 cal/wk deficit is basically just noise after a few weeks. There isn’t much positive reinforcement. An untimely water weight gain will derail a bunch of people who start off on the right track. How are you keeping track of calories?
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YTF succeeded at this method–for a while. Then he blew up again and stopped posting. Why do you think that is?
I think you’re right. Dieting by just monitoring CICO is like trying to run a business by just asking accounting if the revenues and expenses are going up or down. Its useful information but all it can do is inform decisions.
Everywhere I’ve worked there’s a core group of programmers who eat lunch every day at the most unhealthy places. If I tagged along and ate like they do I’d weigh 400 lbs. And that’s not including donuts and bagels in the office twice/week - which I don’t touch either - at least not since like 2012 or so.
I have friends who go out to dinner and/or drinks 5 nights/week. I have no idea how they do it. I got out once every two weeks and I’m pretty sure I do enough damage to wreck an entire two weeks’ worth of being good.
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A good approach is to use an online tool to estimate your calorie expenditure and have a sense of how much you eat per day. But very few people will track their calories accurately day after day, and its really hard to accurately measure your calorie expenditure for even one day. So CICO has limits.
What’s really frustrating is when you track your calories diligently for a month before anything happens. It’s hard to maintain that.
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There’s clearly a genetic component too. What body shape does your dad have?
Mom’s side pudgy but not fat. My Dad was chunky in his 30s and 40s but has been pretty lean ever since. He eats healthy and walks a lot.
I have no doubt that I got fat by eating stupidly in high school and first two years of college. As soon as I got a job and a car in HS I ate like shit. Then in college I ate Taco Bell once a day for 2 years. That’ll do it.
I also think I screwed up my metabolism pretty bad by crash dieting in college. I basically became anorexic and lost 50 lbs in one semester. I’d eat nothing, or one small piece of pizza in a day - and be so proud of myself lol. But I got the instant feedback of losing weight and by the end I somehow got a hot gf out of it. Ever since then I seem to gain very easily and lose very very difficultly.
I’ve lost 30 lbs-ish about 5 times since and lost 60 lbs once - but I was on testosterone. Took a few years to gain it back. I always gain it back when I start a new job. Stress of trying to prove myself, and I want to make a good impression and not be grumpy = I eat like crap.
I lost freaking 35 lbs traveling through Mexico and Central America - then gained it all back in like 6 months at my new job. Horrible. The office had no snacks and I was hiking a ton and trying to eat at least semi-healthy - which I thought would at least mitigate my usual weight gain. Didn’t matter.
I’ve lost almost 30 lbs since the beginning of the year. My plan is no more new office jobs ever. I’m not gaining this shit back.
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I’m a slim guy with my uncle’s body shape but with a beer gut that’s all my own work that refuses to change. I think the fat self inflicted from 20s on might be nigh impossible to remove.
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I’m not seeing what it is about office jobs that makes you gain weight if you’re not snacking and are getting exercise by hiking to compensate for the sedentary work.
I don’t want to lose fat from elsewhere because I’m smack bang in the middle of the BMI and don’t want to go underweight.
Drinking FAR less than before and exercising regularly makes no difference to my beer gut.
Even this level of detail is going to be frustrating for most people. Trying to formulate a behavioral habit in a spreadsheet is really tough. People generally need to get big picture stuff lined up before trying to fine tune with spreadsheets. If you’re trying to lose weight my advice is usually:
Find exercise that feels like play, not exercise. No one sustains an exercise routine where they have to force themselves to go every day.
Drink fewer calories. Alcoholic beverages, coffee and tea that is sweetened with milk or sugar, and of course sodas are huge leaks in a diet. This seems like common sense but it’s a simple heuristic that works.
Stock your fridge and prep your food. Needless to say convenient on the go food is a problem.
These seem “obvious” but a lot of overweight people are failing on these dimensions.
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This is mostly right, but one trap that people fall in is not exercising as they age into their 30s and 40s and their waist expands with fat AND from slackening abdominal muscles. So as your body fat goes down you may think your belly fat is stubborn because your lean body tissue is a bit rounder in the middle.
Same thing happened to me when I got my first car, albeit 10 years later in life. I went from walking and cycling everywhere to driving half a mile to the drugstore or whatever. Being suddenly sedentary led to a much worse diet. Cars can just wreck your health.