My husband has been following The Fast Diet and it’s been very effective for him. The book has good explanations of “starvation mode” and other questions in the OP.
This hypothesis has been gaining currency lately, but I am skeptical. If the gut bacteria hypothesis were correct, you could control obesity simply by tweaking your diet to change your gut bacteria (perhaps by eating Greek yogurt for breakfast every morning) but otherwise eating whatever you want.
For over a hundred years, people have been searching for a nutritionism solution to obesity, i.e the idea is that there is some critical component which should be included in or excluded from one’s diet and that if you only make that critical change, you can otherwise eat food ad libitum and stay thin.
To me this seems like the latest among dozens, if not hundreds, of nutritionism fads.
Well what do you mean by “gluttony”? A conscious decision to consume too much food? If so, I would agree with you. It seems pretty clear that there is an internal, subconscious process at work which constantly pulls some people towards eating too much.
Probably the “calories in/calories out” crowd would say that this subconscious process needs to be mastered by the conscious mind in order to get and stay thin.
How long has he been on it? Since the book only came out this year, probably not that long.
Will you commit to following up in a year or two and let everyone know how it is going?
The reason I ask is that there is a huge problem with diets in which people have initial success followed by failure down the road. My impression is that the early successes tend to get overreported compared to the later failures, leaving evidence which is overly optimist.
No, the hypothesis would not predict that.
The microbiome is pretty damn stable and “tweaking the diet” does not change it. Major changes have an impact only if very prolonged.
Which is not to say that the fad seekers won’t take what is known (confusing and complicated as the story is so far, but clearly very very real) about the gut microbiome and its role in obesity and disease states and twist and distort it to serve some quick fix headline and book sales. Or products.
I’d say it’s 6 months or more, he started soon after the book came out. The book is interesting and my husband finds the plan pretty easy to follow.
Will you commit to updating your post in a year from now?
I’m not so interested in my own waistline which is about 33 inches. I’m more concerned about the woman who has a waistline of 46 inches. The main reason I might try to lose stubborn belly fat is to be a role model to her. In the past I walked a lot but at the moment I feel that I’ve got more important things to do with my time.
Hormones and such certainly do affect weight gain and weight loss to some extent. I knew a chick who REALLY DID have a glandular problem. Took some pills and went from obese to fit very quickly. Of course even the doctors went “yeah, right” until her swollen glands were popping out of her neck. Many medications can affect weight gain without any changes in diet. Something you have to watch out for with some meds. And there really is starvation mode, too. The body has kind of evolved over time to deal with that sort of thing - a real threat to our ancestors and to large numbers of people today. In fact, I have heard of (perhaps apocryphally) people being rescued after being lost in the wilderness or at sea - consuming very large meals, and then dying from overeating.
Me personally, I find I lose more weight when I consume tons of calories, but exercise my ass off on the elliptical. I weight train consistently and I don’t think the increases in weight loss can be easily attributed just to muscle gains from my experience of how much muscle matters. When I diet I think of myself as a raging furnace that burns off massive amounts of delicious, delicious food.
But the primary reason I space my food out when I diet is because it makes me less hungry. Skip breakfast to lose weight and you’ll be starving all day long. But snack all day long instead of meals and it becomes so much easier. I actually feel energized when I diet this way, rather than weak and dizzy like if I try to exercise on an empty stomach.
As for this belly fat nonsense, this one really won’t go away will it? I blame it on that crank Dr. Oz. I actually had to take a gym class in college this semester and the students were arguing that the textbook was wrong about spot reduction, because Dr. Oz (a Docotor!) said you can burn belly fat by blah blah blah. They actually got the teacher to agree that spot reduction is real because she wasn’t a doctor after all (she also doesn’t seem to know anything about fitness, but that’s another story).
Sorry, but fat just isn’t distributed around the body evenly. More of it’s gonna be in the waist for guys and in the hips and thighs for women (evolution would prefer women look fertile and ready to mate with wide hips rather than preggo as us guys get). Fat is metabolized into the BLOOD STREAM, muscle doesn’t suck up and burn surrounding fat like a candle anything.
The calories in/calories out crowd, aka the physical reality crowd, understand a subtle point, It’s not enough to eat less.
You have to eat less than you expend in work, and that’s hard without professional help.
Eating less today than you did yesterday may reduce your rate of growth, but weight reduction requires expending more calories than you consume.
But if you can do that, you will lose weight. You have to, the energy has to come from somewhere.
Do you have any response at all to the scientific research suggesting that exercise; stress; and alcohol all may affect belly fat? Besides summarily dismissing it as “nonsense,” I mean.
Well why is it that men and women tend to have noticeably different distributions of fat, with men tending to have proportionately more belly fat? The obvious answer is “hormones.” So it’s reasonable to hypothesize that things which affect hormones, such as stress and exercise, might also have an impact on fat distribution.
That’s all true. (Actually it’s evidently hard even with professional help.) But it’s a different issue from the point I was making.
Sure, and you can expect to have a constant subconscious pull towards overconsumtion. Agreed?
I’m not sure you read my post very thoroughly. I was debunking spot reduction. Notice I started my post by suggesting the plausibility of non-caloric factors in weight gain and loss.
As per the second part of your question, the obvious answer is genetics, though we know from hormone replacement therapy that hormones are extremely important, though once those hormones have had their time to set the body as male or female, the hormones themselves have little effect. Transgendered individuals transition much better if they start around puberty, rather than in their later years. A 50 year old man is just never going to have a feminine distribution of fat even if there isn’t an iota of testosterone left in his body.
This what I happen to know. I’m not a doctor. Small meals matter, in my experience. As does genetics. Hormones, diet, etc. With severe hormonal disturbances - such as the girl I had mentioned previously - no amount of reasonable diet and exercise helped. But for most people you really only need the standard advice: eat less food, do cardio with some weights in between and eat smaller, more frequent meals and - of course - don’t try to fool yourself when calculating calories. If none of that works, then maybe you should see a doctor.
Insulin resistance has a lot to do with where and how your fat is stored. (JFGI)
Leaky gut syndrome also has an influence on a big belly appearance. Clean up the diet, address the intestinal/digestive problems and the gut goes.
So you agree then, that there is evidence that factors like stress, alcohol, and exercise can affect fat distribution in terms of the relative proportion of belly fat?
So do you agree it’s reasonable to hypothesize that things which affect hormones may have an impact on fat distribution?
Yeah.
But like I said in the fourth post:
But is there any difference to stubborn belly fat loss if you had six meals of 200 calories per day vs one meal with 1200 calories?
Does snacking all day long instead of meals just make people less hungry? Or are there any other differences?
BTW if you go out socially they might want you to eat large meals with them rather than turn it into a small snack.
BTW when I started on an intermittent fasting diet I was fasting from about 10pm to 2pm and the first day I was very hungry so I drank a lot. After a while my stomach rumbled a lot. But my stomach got used to it.
Probably, but not so significantly that it’s going to be easy to distinguish from placebo in normal conditions (people who aren’t emaciated). The PRIMARY 90%+ way you’re gonna lose weight is by running calorie deficits over a long period of time.
Oh and if you mean belly fat in particular and not overall fat, absolutely 100% categorically NO. And if that is your position, I’d rather argue with a truther to be honest.
So what were you referring to with the phrase “belly fat nonsense.”?
I don’t mean to be snarky but I think you are going to regret that line of thinking when you get older.