Didn’t want to hijack the other thread, so I will start this one. Is this really true? Can a person have an 800 calorie per day diet and still not be able to lose weight? How common is this condition?
Yes, if you want people with medical conditions included in your answer, thyroid conditions will cause someone to never lose weight, no matter how hard they try.
Aside from that, yes, there are other people who do have harder times losing weight. Particularly women for some reason.
No even with a thyroid condition you will LOSE weight. Look at the starving people in Africa or the holocaust survivors.
My mother had an overactive thyroid and this made it somewhat easier to lose weight, but the fact is most people simply do not realize how much they eat.
In one poll by USA Today they found nutritionists UNDER-estimated the amount by 25% - 60%. So nutritionist people who study food for a living, the best got it wrong by 25% some were off by more than half.
You cannot live on 900 calories a day unless you’re in a coma and this means you’d be skin and bones.
People get calories from coffee creamer, from Metamucil, from cough drops all sorts of things they fail to take in account for. It doesn’t make for the best of diets but it quickly adds up.
To cut it short, people that claim this in an absolute sense are claiming the laws of physics are false. We have gone over this many times before but all organisms burn energy and you can’t get something from nothing. If you take in fewer calories than you are burning, you are going to lose weight. Some may burn less than others but everyone can lose weight by taking in fewer calories than they burn.
Whatever complications are relevant to the person are secondary. I find the very idea that this is a plausible idea to many people to be frightening. What if your overweight relative was air-dropped into an area of pure poverty that required extreme physical activity just to survive the day. Would they lose weight? Of course they would. It is just harder for some people rather than others. You cannot claim your fat little body is its own little (huge) perpetual motion machine without being a crackpot of the highest order when it comes down to it.
It seems just about every obese person claims their condition is no fault of their own, that they have some kind of medical problem, etc. etc. But based on my observations of obese people in my extended family, I am convinced my fat relatives are fat because they eat too much. I am also convinced they are in denial as to the reason they’re fat.
So I have to wonder… what percentage of obese people are obese because of a true thyroid problem? And what percentage of obese people are obese only because they eat too much?
My friend L is obese, and at least part of her problem is that she has an extremely mild case of cerebral palsy – her right foot doesn’t work right, and she can’t run, and can climb stairs only with great difficulty. If I started gaining weight, I could sign up for ballet or start jogging – L can’t. She physically cannot do a lot of the things I can do. Besides that, she doesn’t eat enough to keep a cat alive, and has been talking about getting her thyroid checked. I encourage her to.
Couple things:
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While exercise is always a plus, it is not necessary to exercise in order to lose weight. Anyone can lose weight through dieting alone. It’s not easy, but it can be done.
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You may think your friend eats like a bird. But you probably have no idea what she eats when no one else is around.
I have an aunt who is morbidly obese. She claims it’s no fault of her own, that she has a “disease,” that she eats like a bird, etc. etc. Her husband (my uncle) also says she eats like a bird and only eats the right kinds of food. A few years ago I was at their house. I opened the refrigerator, and guess what I saw? Cake, tubs of butter, more cake, pudding, fried foods, gallons of ice cream, fudge, chocolate, more cake, another tub of butter, etc. I know my uncle doesn’t eat that stuff; he’s of normal weight, and he hates sweets. Obviously the food was my aunt’s. It was then I realized she was delusional, and he (my uncle) was in denial.
Everyone can lose weight, it’s not a physical impossibility.
However, some people would need to be imprisoned and their diet strictly controlled for it to actually happen.
As other people have stated, many people are much better at convincing themselves that all the crap they eat “doesn’t count” than they are at exercising the necessary amount of self-discipline.
Put these people in a position where they can’t get at any food other than a bare minimum that will keep them alive, and every single one of them will lose weight.
I agree that psychologically some folks just can’t make themselves stop eating, even if it’s obviously killing them. But physically, I do not believe that there is anyone who couldn’t lose weight on a restricted diet that was actually enforced.
And as comes up virtually every time this flamewar starts, and people start saying things like “they just need to have self-discipline:”
Holding your breath until you pass out is a matter of discipline/willpower alone, and only requires maintaining that discipline for a couple of minutes. Almost no one (fewer than three percent of the population, supposedly) can do it. Dieting requires maintaining it for a lifetime.
Diet and exercise, clinically speaking, do not cause weight loss: if they were a drug, they would not meet FDA standards for effectiveness (95% of dieters end up heavier than when they started, and the average effect of a diet is worse overall health). You can argue that it’s noncompliance all you want – it still doesn’t work for the vast majority of the population. Were there a safe and effective medical treatment that had the same effect as SUCCESSFUL diet/excercise, most doctors would almost immediately stop suggesting the diet/excercise combo – there just isn’t one yet.
Cite please. And what you’ve effectively just said is that there is no way to lose weight that works even known to the medical community (and I can think of two surgical efforts off the top of my head). This is horse shit. Doctors prescribe diet and exercise BECAUSE THEY WORK. They only work, however, when people actually do them. As people in this thread have made clear through their own experiences people will lie to other people and themselves about the efforts they’re taking to lose weight, even when that weight is life threatening.
As Shagnasty said, even with the most bizarre and rare form of disorder you still can’t live on no calories, and if the amount you eat is brought down to a certain level you would lose weight no matter how lazy your thyroid was. Just go in the monthly threads about people trying to lose weight, no-one in there is saying “I’ve dieted and exercised my arse off for months and I’ve not lost a single pound”.
So, are you saying that there is a medical condition that causes people to gain weight whatever their diet is? If so, cite it, with particular reference to how common this condition is in the general population.
I didn’t say it was easy, but I do say that ANYONE can lose weight by the very simple method of eating less. I don’t say it’s easy to achieve, but I do say that anyone who says it’s impossible is wrong. If there are any genuine exceptions, it hasn’t been proven to me.
It is certainly much harder for many people. After my wife had our child, she has had a devil of a time losing the weight. She is the healthiest eater I have ever known. After we got married, she changed her lifestyle, lost 70 lbs by eating healthy, small portions, and exercising. Since having our child, she has continued eating the same as before (she’s been on weight watchers and follows it to the letter…even counting the 3 doritos she snags from me, etc.) And she exercises for one hour a day, 5 days a week (biking, swiming, etc).
She’s lost 15 pounds of the pregnancy weight in 7 months (she gained 40 during the pregnancy…and ate pretty balanced during it). Needless to say, she’s very upset. (I still think she looks great, but she’s mad). Went to the doctor…ran some tests, and sure enough, there are thyroid issues. She just started medication to increase thyroid activity, but we’ll see.
Where do the calorie figures come from? There are all sorts of calculators on the net that have you put in age, sex, activity level, etc. and it will tell you the approximate number of calories needed to maintain/lose weight. I’ve heard that 3500 calories is approximately one pound of loss/gain.
Where do those numbers come from? Are they theoretical averages? Clinically determined? I get that there is a definition out there that equates a calorie to change in temperature of water (divided by a thousand, I think, to get to food calories), but where does that translate into biology?
If I had the resources, could I go to a nutritionist or doctor, run a battery of tests, and find the exact number of calories I need day to day? The number that equals a pound?
Same thing with calories burned – how did they calculate how many calories were burned after an hour of walking? Is that something that can be individually determined via a stress test or other method?
If all the above are averages, then is there a source out there that has the bell curve? Doesn’t the shape of it make a huge difference? That is, if the center is on 1 lb. = 3500 calories, how far out does it go before the percentages drop off? I’m clearly way over my head statistics-wise, so my terminology is off, but I hope you get the picture – if the average is 3500, is it possible that eighty percent of people out there fall into either 4500 or 2500?
I believe calories are determined by literally burning food, and then making measurements in the temperature change of water above the burning chamber. Using this, 1 gram of fat yields 9 calories. What I don’t understand exactly is how this becomes one pound of fat is 3500 calories. A pound of fat would contain 9*454=4,086 calories. What accounts for the missing 586 calories, or am I thinking about this wrong?
Right – finding the calories in food is one thing. But there are a lot of steps between a fat cell being an inert blob and it giving up its energy to the body for use.
As another poster indicated we’ve beat this to death in various threads. Calorie needs per lb of body weight for all people lie along a bell curve determined by personal metabolism as function of genetics, sex, age, exercise level, body type, current body composition, and finally health/disease issues.
For the vast majority of people daily calorie needs are between 10-14 calories per lb of maintained body weight per day. At the upper end the needs of extreme athletes and people with diseases that cause extremely active metabolisms or poor nutritional uptake might be well beyond 14 cals per lb of body weight per day.
At the very low end extremely obese and sedentary people often have depressed metabolic levels which lowers calorie per lb of body weight maintenance needs even further, and some people have diseases like PCOS which will clutch down metabolic levels to bare minimums.
Here is that discussion which takes on the subject in some detail.
How can hormonal disorders affect weight as they do?
I’m pretty sure it’s actually a matter of an automatic nervous system response. Saying it takes willpower alone to pass out from holding your breath is like saying through willpower alone you can change your heart rate. It’s silly to compare it to people who claim they are addicted to fast food or cake or whatever.
You cannot, no matter your medical condition, get past basic thermodynamics. If calories in are more than calories out, you gain weight. If calories in are less than calories out, you lose weight.
I agree that the problem comes from the fact that the amount of calories that are burned by different people doing the same activity can be different. Thyroid problems are one of the factors that can affect this, but even they can’t break the laws of physics.
And AFAIK, there isn’t a reliable way to measure how many calories a given person burns doing an activity. I think there are some tests you can run that hook you up to a machine that measures your CO2 output, and from there they can determine how many calories you burn, but unless they have you on it all day, resting, exercising, sleeping, etc… they can never know for sure that you burn less calories than me doing the same thing.
Thanks. Tons of links in that thread.
One pound = 3500 Calories applies to everyone. However, it is an approximate number, based on the fact that a pound of fat contains roughly 3500 Calories. A pound of butter might have slightly more calories in it, but butter isn’t stored in fat cells with all the attendant cellular machinery. Also, no matter how hard you try, you’re also going to burn some calories from protein in your body, too, which will lower the ‘amount of calories in a pound’ number. The bell curve certainly does not apply in this case.
The amount of calories burned per activity is highly variable, and probably is normally distributed. I have no idea how they measure this, but all those ‘calories burned per mile walking/running’ estimates are averages. The thing is though, that the heavier you are, the more calories you burn (on average) for a particular activity. It is simple physics; it takes more energy to move a 300lb person object a mile than a 150lb person. Also, at least among runners, the more experienced folks burn fewer calories due to having a more efficient stride in addition to generally being lighter.
As far as I can tell, when it comes to exercise, the fatter you are, the more calories you burn. Based on that criteria, it should be easy to lose weight. However, we’re ignoring diet, which among the obese has a huge amount of inertia. It is difficult to consciously change one’s eating habits, whether to gain weight or lose it. My guess is 800 cal/day is what the person thinks they are eating, while continuing to eat as before in a bunch of little ways that “don’t count” in their analysis.
Sure, the base calories needed varies from person to person, but it seems to be set in stone that an approximately 3500 calorie excess or shortage will translate to a one pound gain or loss in body fat. Where does this number come from and why isn’t it 4000?
edit: I see DrCube addresses this portion of the question.