exfatloss

Unfortunately I'm with the other guy here.

I think reducing excess sugar consumption is necessary but not sufficient to get lean for some obese individuals like myself.

When I started keto 7 years ago I lost 100lbs. Then I gained it all back - staying pretty strict keto the entire time. I haven't had what you'd call "processed food" or "sugary food" in nearly a decade if you exclude a small % of keto-style things like dark chocolate (85%).

Now back down 45-50lbs (depends on how you count) and hopefully going to continue. But this time I cut out protein, too. It could be that both carbs and protein raise insulin enough to cause obesity in some people. Or maybe seed oils in even the tiniest doses. Those are my two main hypotheses: https://exfatloss.substack.com/p/hypotheses

I think starch only breaks into glucose, not fructose.

From tasting food?

Ha, ok. On the other hand I'd argue "evidence it's genetic" is also clearly false.

There are certainly genetic factors that make some people vulnerable but our genetics haven't changed that much in the last 30 years. Obesity has.

The combination of genetics with our lifestyle and dietary context is where it's at IMO.

I'd argue "less activity than what's consumed" is not causal but an accounting of what's already happened. Just like "more money in your bank account" is a mere measurement, whereas "getting paid for your job" is what was causal.

Do you have an example? Besides banning big gulps and ineffectual ad campaigns I don't recall much policy on the topic.

The three-day meeting was infused with an implicit understanding of what obesity is not: a personal failing.

This weird push that "it's not a moral personal failing" is so strange. Is anybody serious claiming it is? Sure, your weird uncle might.

But I'd hope the actual scientists would focus on finding the causes instead of whatever this is.

I gave up on fasting for weight loss as well. It's just another form of caloric restriction and that just doesn't work for me. My body is just too efficient: it immediately turns down the metabolic rate to adjust.

I've done 5 days fast, 2 days feeding for a month straight and didn't lose any weight that I didn't immediately regain upon the 2 feeding days.

I stopped because I wasn't seeing any effects. Also makes it more difficult to eat enough in a day (I was doing OMAD for a while).

That said my natural eating rhythm is not to eat breakfast so if you discount cream in coffee I'm doing a natural 16:8 anyway.

Oh, I see. Hope you succeed. If this technology makes its way into the Apple watch or AirPod we'll reduce T2D by 100 million over night.

Very cool! I'm currently wearing a CGM. I already love these and find them super non-invasive (Freestyle Libre 3). It's a penny that sits on your arm and every 14 days you change it for 1 minute.

But this would probably be even cooler.

Do you think there would be other locations that lend themselves to this, besides ear canal? People already use their ears for headphones a lot, so it might be difficult to use for some.

Yea for sure. I think another major benefit would be that it wouldn't just be available for T1Ds or curious/severe T2Ds or nerds like me. Getting an Rx and paying $200/mo is a huge opt-in hurdle.

If this was on by default in every Apple watch we'd have 20 million fewer T2Ds the next week.

The problem is that the FDA is basically forbidding anything that could even remotely be "accidentally abused" by T1Ds. To even a consumer-focused fitness CGM/watch function would have to comply by the most stringent FDA regulations like medical devices marketed specifically to T1Ds, unless you somehow modify it in a way that would prevent T1Ds from "accidentally using it." I've heard you'd need to e.g. delay the feedback by 24h, which makes it pointless.

Interesting.

But yea, it seems our digestive systems can adapt to it pretty well, given that we've been doing this since long before doctors were around. I suppose the acid kills all the bacteria in the rotten meat unless you're super weak immune wise.

Current CGMs (Continuous Glucose Monitors) are amazingly non-invasive and easy to use. I'm wearing one right now and I can't feel it.

I'm using the Freestyle Libre 3. It's the size of a penny on my upper arm. I don't have to replace it for 14 days, so I'm only really aware of it 2x per month.

It transmits the signal to my phone via bluetooth. So essentially it's like your phone reads your blood glucose live but every 14 days you need to wipe your upper arm with an alcohol wipe and stick a new one in. The process is completely painless and takes 1 minute or so once you've done it a few times.

Any doctor can prescribe you a CGM and they're like $70-100 per 14 day period, depending on brand/location/insurance. If you're diabetic your insurance will likely pay for it.

Should you be on the fence I absolutely recommend you just get one. Pay it out of pocket just to learn how you respond to the things you eat and drink.

The book The Fat of the Land by Vilhjalmur Stefansson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilhjalmur_Stefansson) describes how the Eskimos he lived with ate rotten fish all the time. It was a delicacy for them.

Kind of like we eat "rotten/spoiled" blue cheese and dry-aged beef.

Those studies have been debunked. Current state of science is that there is no indication that reduction of red meat consumption would bring any health benefits.

I think quite the opposite - a beef-only diet, very high in fat, is probably the evolutionary diet we're most adapted too. After all we only started cultivating grains about 10,000 years ago. It was large, fatty megafauna for hundreds of thousands of years before that.

I think animal foods are very healthy and the CO2 emissions/environmental effects of cattle are usually overblown.

One "study" I saw claimed cattle used 1000000x more water than grains. But they counted the rainfall on the entire grazing area as consumed by the cattle, which is obviously nonsense. It goes back into the cycle. (As does the water the cattle consume, of course.)

2012, but still interesting. Thanks for posting.

Thanks, that means a lot :)

Wow, ok, 3-4h a day is a ton of course.

Hm, not sure how long my walk is. Probably 2 miles or so? Maybe I need to walk faster :)

I love how science is finding this out. Everybody who's ever dieted has known this. Hilarious.

Walking doesn't help much with weight loss either, I suspect. Didn't seem to make a difference for me if I walked 0 minutes or 45-60 minutes every day (over a couple months).

I think the metabolism's feedback system just incorporates all that. You move more, you get more hungry. If you resist that hunger temporarily, the body signals low energy and sets the burn rate of something other lower (brain, fidgeting, body heat, immune system).

Lol what? The graph in the article clearly shows that low-carb leads to nearly 2x the initial weight loss than low-fat and that this difference stays present as people "normalize" back to a more normal weight.

Clearly the low-carb diet is the obvious winner by a massive effect size here?!

I had no idea about Starting Strength being famous for that. I did notice that Rippetoe is very nonchalant about obesity lol, like it doesn't matter as long as you can lift stuff.

Thanks!

I find "unwilling to not be useful.

I am perfectly willing to make a lot of sacrifices to lose weight. It's just that none of the sacrifices you list have an effect. Why would I continue to sacrifice it it doesn't work?

So I prefer "unable" in the sense that "we haven't figured out the way and thus they can't just do it harder."

Instead of the wheelchair, think of paralyzed people before wheelchairs. They "couldn't" walk because they were paralyzed and wanting it harder didn't work. What worked was inventing the wheelchair.

My argument is we haven't invented an effective fat loss diet or intervention that works even in a minority of obese people by any reasonable definition of "works." (I.e. long-term, sustainable w/o leading to ramped down metabolism, doesn't lead to massive lean tissue loss, doable "at large" in their normal lives not while literally being locked in a camp.)

Well, agree to disagree then. I think I'm not a major outlier. I'm pretty representative of an obese person who's been trying to lose weight his entire life and none of the mainstream advice has ever made a dent.

That's why I'm searching for a strategy that works and is falsifiable, not religious dogma that there is "no disproving whatsoever" for.

I've lost 100lbs before w/o ever restricting my eating or exercising much, so I just know you're wrong on this from personal experience.

In a sense I agree that it's philosophical. But I think in a practical sense it matters because you'd recommend different modes of action.

You seem to think that the obese are "unwilling" (whatever that means) to eat less and exercise more and thus lose weight. You basically recommend that they try harder, if I understand you correctly.

I think that there is another reason why they can't eat less and work out more and why the internal feedback systems of their bodies are "misleading" them in a way, making them overeat and have increased appetite and lethargy despite all the energy they're carrying in their body fat.

My course of action would be to identify what causes this "breakage" in the metabolism that'll fix the feedback loop and therefore allow them to naturally and spontaneously eat less and move more.

Thanks, I'm quite familiar with Lyle McDonald's work. One of the first to introduce keto to the mainstream, IIRC.

- Starvation experiments are not relevant to a normal person trying to lose fat. Ancel Keys' subjects were military deserters who had no rights and were literally locked up in a prison camp. They also lost tons of lean body mass. Clearly this isn't what anybody wants.

- There is actually a ton of literature out there disproving the "people used to burn more calories and that's they were leaner." E.g. 1940s New York City white collar workers ate more than most people do today and working out was not very popular, yet they were much leaner. There are some populations that used to do heavy manual labor (like farmers) but the correlation isn't really there.

- Bodybuilders/gym enthusiasts, even PED-free, aren't very relevant to the obese. You don't get to 300lbs by slightly overeating and slightly underexercising. Something's severely broken in your body and has been for years.

- Of course thin people eat less. But correlation doesn't prove causation. My argument is that something's broken in obese people's metabolism which causes the to overeat, maybe because they don't achieve satiety from the food they eat. Of course they have to eat more to put on fat, that's just physics.