Weight reductio ad absurdum
Apr. 12th, 2015 15:43![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
torquillI've come to the conclusion that conventional wisdom around weight loss is fiction.
It's a convenient fiction, to be sure. And for some people it does approach reality... but I suspect it comes close only because factors which are not described make it possible for the supposed models to behave like they're expected to. I think that for large numbers of people, that is not the case.
Take "Calories in - calories out = gain/loss", for example. In more nuanced circles, you can get people to admit that the kind of calories they are, and what you're doing to burn them, play into the equation. But most people pretty much figure that if you're overweight and you want to lose some, you just cut your calories in and increase your calories out, and you're good to go.
Except it's been shown, over and over again, that it doesn't work for a lot of people. This is why diets stall. This is why desperate people end up on crash diets that (sometimes) don't let them lose more than a little weight even on starvation rations. The equation is fiction. What's missing? Metabolism. And human metabolism varies widely, and adapts in ways we may not predict.
A friend of mine in high school was overweight. She tried exercising heavily, to no avail. She finally went to Weight Watchers when she was about 20 to see what they could do. What she discovered was that she was not eating *enough*. Her calorie intake was shockingly low, a legacy of being brought up by a junkie mom who only sometimes remembered to bring groceries home. Weight Watchers put her on a reasonable diet plan, and suddenly she lost weight like gangbusters. All she had to do was make sure she hit her targets (from below) and stayed active, and that was it. How does *that* fit the calorie equation?
Metabolism is an enormous wild card. Imagine, for a moment, you live in a house powered by a hydroelectric dam, with a pretty large battery backup. Life is pretty good when the water's flowing, but then a drought comes along, and there's less juice to go around. You could use the batteries, but it's a pain to switch over, and they're less effective at powering what you want, so you decide to conserve. Turn off some lights, turn up the temp on the AC, maybe take shorter showers to spare the electric water heater. Then the drought gets worse. You turn off a bunch of lights, turn off the AC entirely, make do with a fan maybe. As the power gets more scarce, how much do you rely on conservation before switching over to batteries?
Our bodies are capable of throttling, in the computer processor sense. They can decide to spend less energy on certain things to preserve it for other functions. It's why you feel lousy when getting used to a low-carb diet, before your body switches to burning fat -- your body is trying to turn off lights and get by with a fan rather than tap the batteries of your fat reserve. Eventually, it hits the point where it sighs and flips the switch, and you start losing fat. Where that point is varies for individual people.
My body ends up sweltering in the dark with a single 40-watt bulb and the refrigerator only on half the time before it even starts to consider tapping the batteries. It's a past master at throttling. Body heat? The first to go. Higher brain function can come down to 80%, I'll never notice, right? Oh, and neurotransmitters are expensive to make, we'll just reduce the stocks on those. Healing time can be doubled, no problem. Anti-oxidants are expensive too, those will have to be reduced. Tissue regeneration is up there with healing except less urgent, we'll get to that when we have the resources... Oops, hormone regulation gets tough with all those cutbacks, that's just the way it is.
This is is why I never suspected that my calorie requirements were as high as they actually are. I just naturally ran cold all the time. I got kind of tired easily, and foggy, and my muscles ached, but that was all part of having CFS. I slept so lightly a gnat could wake me up, but that wasn't unusual. I had trouble with emotional equilibrium, but I had strong emotions and a lot of junk to deal with. I accepted that.
All of those things were symptoms of metabolic throttling. Even the light sleep -- with adequate food, I sleep like a rock. The proof, beyond all those symptoms vanishing when I ate more, is that I can eat over 3,000 calories on a regular basis and not gain a pound. Where's all that going? I'm not running marathons, I'm just living a normal life. If I hadn't been losing weight at 2,200 calories, surely I should gain weight at 3,000, right?
I am a physiological outlier, but I am not an alien. Human metabolism is capable of this phenomenon, and I think a hell of a lot of people experience it, all while being told that all you have to do is eat less and exercise more. It's easy, say the skinny people telling us how to look like them. If you're fat you're eating too much, so just cut down! And then the dieters end up feeling like crap and *still* not losing anything. It's one more reason to dislike the body-image mess in this society.
I'm not looking to lose weight, which is fortunate, considering how much my body seems to hate doing it. But a lot of other people are, and they're struggling and feel like they're failing, when what's failing is the model they're trying to apply to the situation. We need better models. We need better advice. We need better definitions of "healthy" and "fit". And we need better encouragement to work with the bodies we have, even when they don't match what anybody else around us has.
The health-care industry has really failed us on this one, and I hope somebody in the medical profession figures it out soon. It's time we acknowledged that body composition is more complex than a one-line equation, whether it's the BMI or calories in/out.
It's a convenient fiction, to be sure. And for some people it does approach reality... but I suspect it comes close only because factors which are not described make it possible for the supposed models to behave like they're expected to. I think that for large numbers of people, that is not the case.
Take "Calories in - calories out = gain/loss", for example. In more nuanced circles, you can get people to admit that the kind of calories they are, and what you're doing to burn them, play into the equation. But most people pretty much figure that if you're overweight and you want to lose some, you just cut your calories in and increase your calories out, and you're good to go.
Except it's been shown, over and over again, that it doesn't work for a lot of people. This is why diets stall. This is why desperate people end up on crash diets that (sometimes) don't let them lose more than a little weight even on starvation rations. The equation is fiction. What's missing? Metabolism. And human metabolism varies widely, and adapts in ways we may not predict.
A friend of mine in high school was overweight. She tried exercising heavily, to no avail. She finally went to Weight Watchers when she was about 20 to see what they could do. What she discovered was that she was not eating *enough*. Her calorie intake was shockingly low, a legacy of being brought up by a junkie mom who only sometimes remembered to bring groceries home. Weight Watchers put her on a reasonable diet plan, and suddenly she lost weight like gangbusters. All she had to do was make sure she hit her targets (from below) and stayed active, and that was it. How does *that* fit the calorie equation?
Metabolism is an enormous wild card. Imagine, for a moment, you live in a house powered by a hydroelectric dam, with a pretty large battery backup. Life is pretty good when the water's flowing, but then a drought comes along, and there's less juice to go around. You could use the batteries, but it's a pain to switch over, and they're less effective at powering what you want, so you decide to conserve. Turn off some lights, turn up the temp on the AC, maybe take shorter showers to spare the electric water heater. Then the drought gets worse. You turn off a bunch of lights, turn off the AC entirely, make do with a fan maybe. As the power gets more scarce, how much do you rely on conservation before switching over to batteries?
Our bodies are capable of throttling, in the computer processor sense. They can decide to spend less energy on certain things to preserve it for other functions. It's why you feel lousy when getting used to a low-carb diet, before your body switches to burning fat -- your body is trying to turn off lights and get by with a fan rather than tap the batteries of your fat reserve. Eventually, it hits the point where it sighs and flips the switch, and you start losing fat. Where that point is varies for individual people.
My body ends up sweltering in the dark with a single 40-watt bulb and the refrigerator only on half the time before it even starts to consider tapping the batteries. It's a past master at throttling. Body heat? The first to go. Higher brain function can come down to 80%, I'll never notice, right? Oh, and neurotransmitters are expensive to make, we'll just reduce the stocks on those. Healing time can be doubled, no problem. Anti-oxidants are expensive too, those will have to be reduced. Tissue regeneration is up there with healing except less urgent, we'll get to that when we have the resources... Oops, hormone regulation gets tough with all those cutbacks, that's just the way it is.
This is is why I never suspected that my calorie requirements were as high as they actually are. I just naturally ran cold all the time. I got kind of tired easily, and foggy, and my muscles ached, but that was all part of having CFS. I slept so lightly a gnat could wake me up, but that wasn't unusual. I had trouble with emotional equilibrium, but I had strong emotions and a lot of junk to deal with. I accepted that.
All of those things were symptoms of metabolic throttling. Even the light sleep -- with adequate food, I sleep like a rock. The proof, beyond all those symptoms vanishing when I ate more, is that I can eat over 3,000 calories on a regular basis and not gain a pound. Where's all that going? I'm not running marathons, I'm just living a normal life. If I hadn't been losing weight at 2,200 calories, surely I should gain weight at 3,000, right?
I am a physiological outlier, but I am not an alien. Human metabolism is capable of this phenomenon, and I think a hell of a lot of people experience it, all while being told that all you have to do is eat less and exercise more. It's easy, say the skinny people telling us how to look like them. If you're fat you're eating too much, so just cut down! And then the dieters end up feeling like crap and *still* not losing anything. It's one more reason to dislike the body-image mess in this society.
I'm not looking to lose weight, which is fortunate, considering how much my body seems to hate doing it. But a lot of other people are, and they're struggling and feel like they're failing, when what's failing is the model they're trying to apply to the situation. We need better models. We need better advice. We need better definitions of "healthy" and "fit". And we need better encouragement to work with the bodies we have, even when they don't match what anybody else around us has.
The health-care industry has really failed us on this one, and I hope somebody in the medical profession figures it out soon. It's time we acknowledged that body composition is more complex than a one-line equation, whether it's the BMI or calories in/out.
