fluiddruid: Well, of course if you change the preconditions you change the result. If someone reduces their activity level on a calorie restriction, of course they aren’t going to lose weight as effectively. That’s implied by what I said, which means it can’t be a counterexample to it.
My point is that it’s always possible to lose weight simply by the laws of physics. If you wish to dispute that, demonstrate how the human body is not subject to those laws.
Yes it does.
Let’s say I’m obese. I thus need to reduce my caloric intake in order to lose weight. Over a six month period I decide to reduce my caloric intake by 20%. I lose weight, but not as much as I wanted. Does this mean reducing my caloric intake did not work? No. It means I need to reduce my caloric intake even more. I need to gradually reduce my caloric intake (over the course of many months) until I reach my desired weight.
Once I reach my desired weight, I am in servo mode: if I see my weight go up, I cut back on calories. If I see my weight go down, I increase my caloric intake.
Yep.
From a physical viewpoint, anyone can lose weight. To argue otherwise is ridiculous.
The problem isn’t physical. It’s mental.
I think we’re talking past each other here. Of course it’s always physically possible to lose weight. I never argued otherwise.
However, the problem being mental rather than physical I don’t wholly agree with. Obviously there is a significant mental component – some people don’t know how to count calories well, how to weigh foods, measure portions, log foods and other methods to keep track of their intake. They may have unreasonably lofty goals that become unsustainable, they may have high expectations that they can’t possibly meet and get discouraged. They might not want to change because it’s too hard. They might have psychological dependencies on self-medicating emotional problems by overeating. Many issues can be there. However, there are physical problems involved with obesity. The extra fat cells in an obese person never go away when you lose weight; you can’t ever make a fat person into a person who’s always been skinny, they’ll always be ex-fat, they will always have physiological differences that affect things like hunger and metabolism. There are people with lower metabolisms than others, who have greater trouble losing weight. There are strong correlations with genetics, and with upbringing (obese youth generally become obese adults). There are clearly many factors that are not mental. Can all of these be overcome – are there success stories of people losing hundreds of pounds and keeping it off for life? Sure, there are outliers. A guy with no legs just climbed Kilimanjaro, but that really doesn’t speak to the needs or abilities of most people with disabilities, either.
This is all not to say that a person shouldn’t do what they can to eat healthy, exercise, and work to lose weight. Even if no weight is lost, these things have proven health benefits. I just object to the notion that it’s just a matter of putting your mind to it (which categorizes being overweight/obese as a purely personal/moral failing). As DSeid indicated, even losing 5% of your body weight has incredible improvements. Cutting out a ton of sugar in your diet, starting to exercise, getting in more fruits and vegetables, swapping for whole grains, these are all great ways to improve your health and wellness. All that said, there are significant problems with the Western diet and the Western lifestyle that are making people less successful at maintaining healthy weights, and as a society we haven’t really worked out how to fix obesity in a population of people. We haven’t really worked out a way for people who are very obese to lose all of the weight and keep it off sustainably indefinitely just through diet and exercise (again, as a population – obviously it has worked for some small number of individuals despite the difficulties involved). Those are things we should work on, I argue.
A useful analogy might be dealing with poverty. If you’re poor, the answer is to gain more money. That’s simple, but that doesn’t really deal with the actual issues. I can say, well, it’s simple: you either need to earn more money or spend less money. That’s true, for an individual, but it doesn’t tell you how to accomplish those things in the real world. It doesn’t deal with the real issues of poverty; it’s oversimplified. I find this a frustrating and dangerous attitude because it doesn’t encourage us to look at the big picture of why the problem exists.
These threads always run the same way.
It is difficult to lose weight and keep it off. It is not impossible. There are no metabolic disorders that mean that someone who takes in fewer calories than they burn up will not lose weight. None of the inmates in Dachau gained weight, no matter how slow their metabolism.
Obese people find it difficult to stop themselves from taking in more calories than they burn off. This is quite true.
What is equally frustrating is people who say “I eat right and exercise but I don’t lose weight” because, by definition, they are not eating right. Because “eating right” when your goal is to lose weight means “taking in fewer calories than you burn” by definition is “eating right”.
Because you cannot lose weight without taking in fewer calories than you burn off.
It is never a question as to “how can I lose weight?” The question is “how can I take in fewer calories than I burn off until I lose the weight I need, and especially how can I stop from taking in more calories than I burn off after that - for the rest of my life?”
No, saying “I can’t lose weight” is not a moral failing - it is a mistake.
Regards,
Shodan
The First Law of Thermodynamics is relevant only for fat/muscle gain (not weight gain as it’s possible to gain water weight), not weight loss. It puts and upper limit on the amount of fat or muscle that one can accumulate for a given number calories ingested but tells us nothing about weight loss.
Conditions such as…what? Prader–Willi syndrome fits the bill but only 1 in 10,000 to 25,000 people have that.
The very next thing I said after the line you quoted: “Now, of course most fat people don’t have such conditions, but perhaps they lie somewhere else on the spectrum of hunger levels to you?”
My point was not that many fat people have a specific, known appetite disorder.
It’s that we know that satiety disorders exist and they generally cause morbid obesity when such people are not under care / supervision.
And further to this, given the genesassociated with obesity, it is probably the case that many more people without a known disorder are somewhere on the spectrum between the extreme of hunger always and always storing excess calories as fat and, say, your appetite levels and body type.
Point being, you shouldn’t just look at your own experiences and extrapolate “It’s not hard to stay slim” – it might be much more difficult for others than it is for you.
Everyone has a basal metabolism. In extremis, if you consume less than what your basal metabolism burns, your body has to dig into something to make up for it. Now, what your body does in this kind of starvation scenario isn’t healthy for you, and it isn’t something you want to provoke, but it will cause weight loss.
I think Surreal might have a disagreement here, if I read their post correctly.
Right. None of my posts addressed this. They were all focused on the immediate-term problem of diet modification to lose weight, and the fact it’s always possible to do that. Keeping it off is another topic, which delves into a much more complex interaction of psychology and physiology, even though the laws of physics still apply.
And here I think you’re putting words in my mouth. I never called obesity a personal failing; if anything, I only implied that spouting nonsense that contradicts basic physical laws is a personal failing. It’s entirely possible to be obese because you genuinely have bigger problems to work on than your weight, which is rarely an immediate concern for most of a person’s life. Frankly, the laws of physics work the other way, too: You can be fairly active (or, as I said above, “exercise like a fiend”) and still be fat if your diet is just a little bit worse, all told, than a thin person’s is, especially if you’re genetically more prone to being fat. And the fix might be psychologically difficult, but it is, as I keep stating, always possible.
I think this is rather sweeping, and neglects obesity in, say, Qatar, which has the highest incidence of Type II Diabetes.
No. Poverty isn’t ruled by the laws of physics. It’s ruled by sovereign and near-sovereign actors setting policy, which means it’s a bunch of variously-moral corporate entities (governments, NGOs, etc.) acting in an anarchic void only barely moderated by international agreements which only exist at the sufferance of those aforesaid actors.
You did not.
Can you tell me how to become one of those slim people who can eat whatever they want and never feel hungry? Because I’m a slim person who needs to actively make an effort to keep from gaining weight. My body is perfectly capable of packing on the pounds, and maintaining my target weight takes active effort every day to eat filling, healthy, appropriately portioned meals. For example, I recently gained about seven pounds from transitioning to a desk job, and so I’ve really had to strategize about how to make up for the energy I’m no longer expending at work.
Nobody can expect to never be hungry. Hunger is one of the many, many discomforts you can expect to encounter in a day. In the course of a normal day most people will feel tired, pressed to urinate, bored, too hot, too cold, sore-footed, and at times, hungry. It’s normal to spend parts of the day with an awareness of hunger, and it’s possible to manage those feelings, much like managing the wave of tiredness that hits me in the mornings at work. I am very uncomfortable and very unhappy, but I know that I can’t just go to sleep or I’ll lose my job. Likewise I get hungry in the afternoons, but I know that if I grab something unhealthy to eat I will gain weight.
There are people who seem to eat nothing but junk food, but usually these people are either young and still expending a lot of energy on brain development, or have weird eating habits that give the illusion that they overeat, such as eating one large junk-food meal rather than spreading out your calories over several small meals.
And most people do not know the difference between hunger and craving. Really our collective relationship with eating and food in general is so complex and involves many needs outside of the purely physical that trying to map out why a person may or may not have difficulty losing/gaining weight is a really difficult task.
Sigh.
No, I am not saying the human body is exempt from physics. I am saying that invoking “The First Law …” as if that was all there was to the physics of complex machines, let alone biological systems is hugely ignorant. And I do not mean to say that in a snarky way - just that it comes from a lack of knowledge.
Let us start off with a relatively simple machine - a car.
Is “a calorie a calorie” to a car? Does it matter if a fuel that contains a certain number of calories is in the form of gasoline of one octane or another or in diesel or ethanol or wood? Machines, even static ones that do not alter themselves and their function in response to changes, utilize different calorie sources to differing degrees of inefficiency.
Does a car use the fuel differently depending on whether it is tuned up one way or the other or is warmed up or not? Even cars are dynamic in how many calories it takes to produce a certain amount of work.
Now enter the world of biological machines. Think of a car that is designed to function dynamically in a way that preserves very little less than a certain amount of gas in the tank. As it gets close to that level it self tunes to run much more efficiently and maybe starts turning itself off instead of idling at stops. Go below and it runs even more efficiently and triggers a system that refuses to let the driver accelerate quickly at all or to exceed 45. As it approaches that point it does not just flash a warning light to the driver to get more gas, it starts dinging and then as it hits the point and goes below a siren starts going off going off, louder and more high pitched as the gas tank goes lower yet, that does not stop until the gas tank is filled back beyond that set point.
That car can still run out of gas. It is possible to still run it hard enough and long enough and to ignore that siren and make it run out of gas. But it will likely not happen too often, not while there are gas stations nearby.
Biologic systems work pretty much just like that. An obese adult has a very well defended set point and like that hypothetical car it defends that amount of gas in the tank. It tunes itself to burn less. It sets off that siren. A host of messengers are involved both peripherally and in the brain. And the biologic version of a gas station on every block. Offering cheap gas.
Nothing about how biologic systems work break the laws of physics, they just need a lot more than a simplistic understanding of the First Law of Thermodynamics to apply the physics.
Yes it is literally possible for someone to ignore that set point by strength of will, to lower the calories in below the new efficiency and to suffer through a louder and louder siren forever and ever. Literally possible but not practically possible for most. Those who do succeed in becoming thin (or at least “normal” BMI) from a long standing obese point mainly do so by all of extreme effort, great discipline, wonderful support systems, and by doing things that have been shown to change the set point, such as large amounts of exercise. It can be done.
And kudos to those who have done that. But once again, if the concern is health then a tactic that has the obese losing a more modest amount of weight and maintaining a healthy diet and regular exercise will succeed much more often and garner the vast majority of the health benefits.
And that was the op’s GQ. IF one defines “eating right” as the amount that will cause weight loss, as does Shodan, then as a simple tautology “eating right” will cause weight loss. A trivial statement at best. If one defines eating right as eating an amount of calories that leaves one no longer hungry but not full and that consists of the food balance associated with good health outcomes (argue amongst yourselves what that woud be) then “eating right” will lead to improved health outcomes and modest weight loss for most which will leave most still “fat.”
The fact that reality is more complex than the sound bite of “Physics!” is unfortunate.
It doesn’t MATTER if your hypothetical car tunes itself to near perfect fuel economy. You’d STILL run out of gas if you never put any in. (all bells ,whistles, sirens and interlocks aside). The car would have to COMPLETELY shut down to not burn any fuel and I highly doubt anyones bodys metabolism EVER shuts down! You’re still burning calories(Fuel) sitting in a chair breathing. Physics DO apply… to EVERYTHING.
The Bells and whistles you describe are analogies to hunger pangs, I’m assuming. The gas stations with cheap gas on every corner are fast food restaurants, correct? That ain’t physics…it’s willpower.
DSeid: If my simplistic understanding is so wrong, how does anyone lose weight?
Rich G7,
Yes. Explicitly stated. It is physically possible to still ignore a hugely amplified warning siren and keep driving long and hard enough to push that increasingly gas efficient car to empty even. That statement is true, and it is very very trite.
The op has been answered long back. “Is it possible to eat right and exercise sufficiently, and still be fat?” Defining “eating right” and “exercising sufficiently” as most guidelines would define them, yes it is possible to be fat while doing both. Such does not violate any rules of physics.
The alternative question not actually asked in the op that some seem to insist on answering: “Is it literally impossible for a fat person to lose weight, no matter how little they ate and how much they exercised?” is “no.” And what a boring question.
The implied question: “Could someone who is obese be thin if they had the same willpower as those with ‘normal’ BMI have?” is also answerable as a matter of GQ: “No.” Once obese for a prolonged period of time as an adult the body has set points that it defends by altering its metabolism and by setting off drives. To become thin from there requires much more than a typical normal BMI individual’s willpower and discipline, so much more that relatively few accomplish the goal and fewer still maintain that level of weight loss once achieved. Few is not zero, Derleth.
And then there is the subject of what, given that circumstance and the fact that the lion’s share of the health benefits of weight loss are gained with only a modest weight loss coupled with maintained healthy habits, should be the goal for someone who is obese? That is perhaps more a subject for debate and I’ve expressed my thoughts on it already.
It’s not wrong to state that at some fundamental level calories in v calories out must be the controlling factor - it’s just not a particularly interesting or helpful viewpoint to the weight loss question.
I mean, say two identical people want to lose weight and you give them 1500 calories a day to play with. Do you think that they would lose the same amount of weight if they rigorously stuck to the 1500, but distributed it across wildly differing food groups. Like one person ate 1000 fat and 250 protein and 250 carbs, whilst the other did 1000 carbohydrate and 250 protein and 250 fat?
I would say that they would not lose the same amount of weight, as the complexities of how each energy source is metabolised result in differing amounts of energy being harnessed for living / storage etc. The body is not a simple furnace where you burn things, it’s a highly complex organism with distinct pathways for processing the various primary metabolites we eat - (DSeid and fluiddruid have already made this point).
So there’s calories in v calories out as far as the laws of physics go, yes. How the calories on your dinner plate translate to this basic calorific balance, though, is a big question and the crux of current good calorie / bad calorie thinking in nutrition.
That’s very true but of course people aren’t identical, and in practice even two people with the same height and weight, eating the same things and doing the same exercise might get very different results. One person might lose much more weight than the other, or one person may lose just fat while the other loses a little fat and a little muscle mass.
Or one person might find the programme no problem and only rarely have hunger pangs, while the other might describe themselves as always extremely hungry.
This is an important statement, and it touches on the common misunderstanding (displayed in this thread as well as previous threads on the topic) that losing weight boils down to eating less and exercising frequently, and that it’s impossible* not* to lose weight under those conditions.
The human body doesn’t function like that, though. It’s not a simple matter of eating less (= giving your body less fuel) and exercising (= burning fat to create energy). The equation that governs how the body stores, maintains, and uses food as energy is complex and manifold.
I mean, it’s important to understand that fat exists for a reason. It’s not this horrid, blubbery thing – a sign of our appetites and our weaknesses, there to make us look unflattering, or whatever. The body isn’t carrying it without a purpose. It’s there for a reason, and the body isn’t going to give it up unless the correct circumstances present themselves in a purposeful way. And those circumstances are myriad, and they vary from person to person, and indeed, it can be nearly impossible for some people to lose weight because of them. When those people start to exercise and eat less, their body responds with a resounding, “Oh fuck no, you are not spending this hard-earned fat so that you can run on a treadmill. This shit is a matter of life and death.”
Hunger pangs are an obvious sign that the body is unwilling to part with this source of energy. A swollen appetite. An almost overwhelming craving for certain kinds of food. No joke, I was cutting last month and my carbohydrate intake was severely limited. I had a throbbing desire for carbs, especially sugar. And when I ate carbohydrates, I could actually sense the carbs themselves,and it was a sensation beyond recognizing their smell or taste. It was an acute feeling, eating a meal with a higher concentration of carbs, some part of my interior self saying, “This has carbs, and they are fucking good.”
The body can also outright refuse to derive energy from fat. It’s very easy for the body to enter a state of torpor when it’s going through a diet; people may exercise and eat less, but the body will compensate for this loss of fuel by causing the person to become slow and sluggish, unreasonably tired. They may sleep longer, stay stationary more often than they had in the past. Those moments of minor sloth will compound over time, so that at the end of the week, the person may find that they’re eating less but actually gaining weight. And they don’t realize that although they’re ingesting less and hitting the gym for an hour or so, they’re more inactive than they were before they started their regimen.
The body has hundreds of ways to sabotage a diet, and it can use them to amazing effect. For some people, it really is “possible to eat right and exercise and still be fat.” Not because they’re lying to themselves about how many calories they need, how much they eat, or how often and rigorously they exercise, but because their body has grown accustomed to a certain level of fat.