Clojurians Log v2

I was told that whatever diet strategy I adopt has to be pleasant enough to be sustainable. Otherwise, the weight will return.

For sure, but I think now it's not even clear if that's enough, since even a "pleasant" diet, you'll still need to work harder to maintain it. If the body is trying to defend a higher weight, it will all at once make it that: • You're hungrier. • Food becomes more rewarding. • You move less without realizing it. • Your muscles become a bit more economical. • Your body produces less heat. • Hormones shift to encourage energy conservation. A good diet will try and trick your hunger in thinking you are full even though it was less calorie. But your body is not that dumb. And it will generally make the high calorie foods a lot more rewarding, so cravings will get harder to resist. And then the other changes mean you now burn less calories, so you have to diet even more to lose the same weight than someone whose body is not defending that higher weight.

GLP-1 drugs help make you feel less hungry and full faster, and also lowers the reward of eating, but they don't change the body's higher target weight, the so you still burn less calories than other people at the same weight as you, and if you stop, you regain the weight.

We don't know yet the mechanisms involved in why the body defends a higher weight, and how that weight is determined.

What I find interesting in this, is how much would the same apply to other things? Say working hard? Are there similar mechanisms that actually make the same amount of work harder for one person than another? Just as we know now the same attempt at "eating less" is biologically harder for some, with nothing to do with willpower.

Ok, I'll bite. This sounds like a boatload of poor excuses to me. It also sounds like a perfect way to victimize oneself, like it's impossible for me to control my body, so I might as well live on cheezedoodles and rot away on my couch. Sure, getting off the couch and go out for a 10k run is hard. As is not buying that extra chocolate when you're out grocery shopping. As is not having that pint. What you need to do is architect your life in such a way that you avoid having to spend all your will power. I have a hard time going out for a run in the afternoon, so I run to work in the morning If I see potato chips or candy lying around, I cannot stop eating it. So I don't have it lying around. This spring I've lost around 5kg, not a lot, but I've done that by eating less and exercising more. Fun? No. Have I been hungry? Yes? Did I want to go for all those runs? Not at all.

Keeping my mind and body busy doing things I value is the most important factor for me. I focus on my health, not just one aspect of it. Important guidelines for myself are: • Regular exercise is vital for basic health. • Good food choices are vital for long term health • Enjoying things done each day is vital for mental health

I think “enjoying things done” is an interesting one. Before I went on a run today, I was not looking forward to it, and I think I would have enjoyed reading my book more. And while I was running, I'd rather stop. But now after, I'm quite content. Most of the stuff that give me proper gratification involves quite a bit of struggle, pain or whatever. So for me to get true enjoyment, I need the non-enjoyment.

I’ll just add that it’s very easy for us to assess whether someone can or can’t do something based on externally observable conditions. If someone has climbed Mt. Everest, it’s not necessarily reasonable to assume that “therefore, anyone can climb Mt. Everest” without, for example, taking into account how many limbs a person has. When it comes to internal processes, it gets muddier. “There are happy people, so therefore depression is a choice” would be a strong claim for example. When it comes to weight, and weight loss, is the only arbiter strength of character? It seems unlikely.

Maybe it is? Like how many fat, wild animals do you see? We do see fat cats and dogs, right? My guess is that the wild animals have limited supplies of food, and as such don't need any will power at all - it's an eat as much as you possibly can thing. Pets however, also eat as much as they can, and I guess some owners just don't limit the available food. Basically, from nature we're conditioned to eat as much as we can, that's what made us survive. Now we have to use will power to not eat as much.

The example of wild animals highlights that the external conditions has an impact, which is trivially true, I think. I’m not sure how it slots in with will power. The concept of “will power” probably hides a much more complex picture. What if the amount of will power you have is genetic? To me, it sounds like it comes back to “I can do this, therefore you can do it as well” which may or may not be helpful for another person, to the degree their preconditions are similar or dissimilar to yours. External pressure, genetics, psychology.

Historically, what % of the population is overweight and how has that number moved? Maybe I'm wrong, but my surface level understanding is that the number today is radically larger than the number 100 years ago. Which, I'm not sure if that bodes well if we are trying to circumvent personal responsibility.

My wife was put on her first diet at the age of 12. She's 65 now, and has tried pretty much every diet and exercise regime possible over those decades. She goes to spin class three times a week and does weightlifting twice a week. By nearly all measures, she's a lot healthier than I am. Still's still fat. Over her life, when she's gone on extremely restrictive diets and high exercise regimes, she's managed to lose some weight, but she's utterly miserable living like that, and the weight always returns as soon as she backs off even a little. There are a lot of fat people in her family—some exercise a lot and are very careful what they eat, some aren't, but no matter what any of them do, their weight generally stays pretty constant. The science these days is pretty clear that, for a lot of people, their bodies do indeed "defend their weight" and it can be almost impossible to fight against that. That's why GLP-1 style drugs are being hailed as such a breakthrough—although we don't know yet what all the side effects are (and some people have had near-life-threatening side effects). And, yes, we are a lot bigger as a species than we used to be, because we used to have a much harsher life with much poorer nutrition, and we didn't just ride around in cars/buses/trains etc—and I'm sure all the hyperprocessed food we consume doesn't help. Those changes to our lifestyle have happened much faster than evolution could change how our bodies react to food.

> The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that weight loss is achieved through caloric restriction.

@slipset I wouldn't say that exactly. Willpower still has a role. If you put no effort into your health, it would probably get worse even faster. Not everyone's body is defending a higher weight either, or defending as high a weight as they currently are, so effort to lose it can still work. And exercise has benefits even if you don't lose weight. I think it's almost better to think of willpower as a way to avoid gaining more fat rather than primarily as a way to lose it. It can also help you stop eating inflammatory crappy foods, eat healthier foods instead, exercise, and so on. What we know now, though, is that someone whose body is defending a higher weight will often burn around 100 to 300 fewer calories per day than expected. They'll also tend to be hungrier, with the increased appetite roughly estimated at the equivalent of 200 to 400 calories per day. Those effects combine. So you could need to eat 200 fewer calories than another person of the same weight just to maintain it, while also feeling hungrier than they do and wanting to eat 300 calories more. That's a pretty significant additional challenge. And it doesn't appear to be temporary either. The body can keep defending that higher weight for years afterward.

we understand now that calorie-in/calorie-out was only a small part of the puzzle

Definition of beauty changes as well, this is a 15th century painting by Rubens:

My wife’s mother couldn’t put on weight, no matter how much she ate. This became a a problem of the same character, just at the other end of the weight scale.

In the time of Reubens, folks living in poverty were usually very thin, and people of wealth and power could afford to eat well—so heavier weight meant wealth, power, and therefore desirability.

I know this question is a couple degrees removed now, and I'm not sure where to look for sources, but I wonder if that "target weight" is the same regardless of muscle-mass, or if its closer to a target bodyfat %?

From what I gathered, we still know very little about this "target weight". We don't know if it's a set weight, a range, etc. But it appears to be defending the amount of stored energy in fat tissue, not the actual body weight of percentage of fat, so more muscle helps in that you'll burn more because of it, but also sometimes it makes you even hungrier, because you now burn more but your body is still pushing you to regain all the lost fat, which now would require even more intake.

Are you by any chance active on X regarding this subject, @didibus?

Is anyone still active on Twitter these days? 🤣

You must avoid the "For You" tab at all costs. Once you do, it's pretty nice, assuming you are following high-signal accounts.

I thought all the high-signal accounts left for Threads and BlueSky? Certainly, everyone I was following left years ago (when Musk took over)

Part of the problem for me was the hate replies those folks were getting, so I couldn't even just read posts by folks I followed, unless I completely ignored all replies which... well, that kinda defeats the purpose of a social media platform 😞

Twitter really isn't a safe platform for queer people (to pick just one group that I followed).

I use X solely for following the greatest people regarding nutrition/diet/chronic disease. I believe X is the only place these people are active. I couldn't tell you how it is for anything else.

No I'm not. Don't really post about it, just have been doing a lot of reading and watching regarding the topic over the years. And recently realized there's really been like a mounting amount of knowledge about all this that has yet to reach publicly known facts.

If it's the case that food is less nutritious than it once was, I wonder if that's one of the environmental effects causing rising obesity, perhaps we're needing to eat more calories to meet our bodies other needs https://www.foodfacts.org/articles/is-food-less-nutritious-today

I was reading https://physiqonomics.com/slow-metabolism/ out of curiosity today and there was this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KA9AdlhB18o

The weird thing is that even if she's cooperating and videoing/writing the taken food, she takes more food without her knowledge and doesn't realise to report it or reports an unknowingly lower number. And if she can't show it to others she can't show it to herself too. It's a habit, I guess.

Something that I considered for myself a long time ago was that to change my own behavior for the better, for the long term, was to not think of eating differently as a diet, but rather a lifestyle change. I think there is an underlying mental model around the idea of a diet that implies temporary. For me this was first a decision to stop drinking sugary drinks, and later to become vegan as well as other nutrition decisions I made for myself.

I happen to land among the people who can apply force of will to myself (though I’m still unsure if that’s hallucination or actually a description of reality; it might as well be that it happens, and then I tell myself that it was due to willpower). I’ve noticed some limitations: I can do one thing at a time. I can’t both start going to the gym and start eating brussel sprouts. I can do one or the other, until it takes no effort at all, and then I can do the other. Furthermore, there’s no point in doing any of it if I’m dealing with something like grief, regardless how tempting it might be to make respond to big events with behaviour alteration. All processing power goes to emotions and occupies my seemingly single-threaded scheduler.

My view is that insofar as the task is done due to it becoming easier, it is not due to willpower/discipline. Even David Goggins—the incarnation of "discipline"—talks mostly about mental tricks that make the task easier. I thus currently believe that discipline is an illusion.

Back in UK, I had become a pack-a-day smoker. It was a habit that developed over a few years, hanging out with friends who smoked, drinking in bars where people had a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I lit my first cigarette as soon as I woke up. I smoked in my car on my way to work. I took smoke breaks at work with the other smokers, around the back of the office building. All habit, often in a social context. Then I emigrated to California. My routine completely changed and my environment completely changed. I no longer smoked. The woman I moved in with hated smoking anyway, I took public transit to work. No one at work seemed to smoke—I certainly didn't know anyone there who smoked. When we went out socially, it was always to places that smoking was prohibited. So, I went from 20-a-day to zero, not through willpower or any particular desire to quit—but because the move broke all my habits. So, yeah, I think developing new habits—even if they're forced on you initially—is more effective than outright "willpower".

Right. The impulse must come from somewhere. That makes it sound like it was external pressure, but originally there was an impulse that got you to California in the first place, and the effect splashed across other things. If the environment remained mostly intact, and you stopped smoking, we’d colloquially call that “willpower”, I think.

Or, at least be more inclined to (mis)attribute it as such.

Agreed, yes. And we can claim that developing new habits is "just willpower" but I think it's more nuanced than that.

I think of it more like trajectory. I’m in a place, and I’m pointed in some direction. I imagine all kinds of goals etc. that I might want for myself. They may or may not happen, but regardless, it remains true that I have velocity in experiential space, so to speak. You could call that trajectory “willpower” or whatever, but I’m almost certain that any description of that nature is at best a lossy compression of the true nature of things, and at worst actively misinformative.

Not everyone’s body defends a higher weight. But once it does, losing weight becomes an arms race with your biology. Your metabolism slows, movement drops and hunger rises. Willpower can beat that for a while. Some people even keep weight off for years. But most eventually regain it because sustaining that level of effort forever is extremely difficult. That means in reality, easy and hard are relative to your biology. Someone whose body is defending a higher weight needs to work way harder to sustain a lower weight than someone whose body isn't, the latter just has to not gain weight, the former just needs to not eat when they're full, watch out they don't eat too much calorie dense foods, and so on. You need willpower for the latter as well, and willpower is what makes you successful in not gaining weight above your body's defended weight, but the latter might need more than willpower alone.

I did read that environmental factors are possible as well, definitely gaining the weight initially, but even for the body defending the weight, but it's all hypothesis for now as the mechanisms remain unknown. But I'd believe that the subconscious is not stupid and it's aware that the food is there to easily consume, and if truly your environment was that the food was suddenly scarce, or of a different nature (less greasy and sugary and what not), I could imagine the subconscious would also adapt knowing that.

And I guess, a different environment could make continuing to diet and exercise at the level needed to maintain the lost weight way easier. So definitely all these things are a lot more nuanced. That's why I kind of hate the concept of "hard work" and "willpower". It's hard because you're fighting against your nature and environment. And I'm not sure that's key to success, you need to work within your parameters and create or seek the environment that will make it easy to succeed. It often seems successful people don't acknowledge that, their success actually wasn't that hard because it likely relied on an environment and a nature/nurture that was conductive to it.

Enduring hunger to lose weight is absolutely misguided, and can even be detrimental. I am happy to see people here acknowledging the central role of basal metabolism and that amount of food intake is far from the whole story. Severe caloric restriction can result in a detrimental long-term reduction of metabolic rate, which might not be restored even after regaining the original weight. Here is a great 18-minute presentation on precisely this phenomenon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCREVI2H4FA The referenced study is available for free here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4989512/ > We found that despite substantial weight regain in the 6 years following participation in The Biggest Loser, RMR remained suppressed at the same average level as at the end of the weight loss competition. Mean RMR after 6 years was ~500 kcal/d lower than expected based on the measured body composition changes and the increased age of the subjects. It all makes sense, of course, once one stops seeing everything through the eat-less-to-lose-weight-lenses.

The GLP-1 idea of addressing hunger as such is not a bad idea. I’ve read accounts of it also curbing other types of “hunger”, like drug use.

Reduced hunger is (normally) a sign of increased energy availability, which is the goal (we want a high metabolic rate). Insofar as GLP-1 receptor agonists achieve hunger suppression via increased endogenous energy availability rather than hijacking the feedback loop directly, it seems fine, although I wouldn't put my trust in any form of bio-engineering.