Spot on! Animals prove it, with sufficient food, in the wild, they live at their intended BMI. Domesticated animals tend to be fat.
It has been working for me. Humans are hunters, not grazers, stop having snacks all day. Two or max three meals a day are more than enough. When I go for a long walk mid morning I only eat twice a day. When not, I get hungry earlier and wind up eating three meals.
Before coming to Portugal I had lost over 50 pounds and was stable at around 72 KG. I gained some back in Portugal with the excellent supply of all sorts of great foods. Once I lowered fruit (fructose) and wine, and adopted intermittent fasting, the weight started coming back down, this morning for the first time a hair under 71 KG. My belt tells me the belly has also gotten smaller.
From what I have read, the first fat loss comes from the inside, from the liver, pancreas and other visceral fat. That is the bad fat, good riddance, better health.
The problem with the set point idea (to call it a theory in scientific terms implies that there is near irrefutable evidence supporting it…there is not) is that it tends to be believed mostly as a physiological phenomenon by folk who’re fat/have been fat/struggle a bit with weight management. The article you cited (as if it supports totally the idea…especially the opening sentence) actually does a pretty good job of suggesting the psychological aspect too.
Although short articles are attractive for quick bites of information, they usually lack the nuance behind the complexity of weight management (I’m sure someone mentioned that already) In regards to “metabolic slowdown” with dieting. This is well recognised with successful weight loss…big bodies require greater amounts of energy just to be (I think someone said that too) and, given all the technological whistles and flashing lights can be measured pretty darn accurately. This is the case even if a diet were to have the unlikely result of near 100% fat loss, as fat is a metabolically active organ…just not quite as much as muscle at rest.
One of the things I guess I “believe” is that, over an extended period of overeating and increasing adiposity, a person tends to get used to the unrestriced food consumption so, when they attempt to cut back, after the initial honeymoon period of accountability, a sort of willpower burnout kicks in. So, a 300lb individual used to consuming, say 3000 Cals or more of groceries cuts back to 2500 Cals, the feeling of deprivation can become a bit of a bear to cope with. Add to that the formerly overstuffed adipocytes start sending out FEED ME messages as they’re emptied out and you have a perfect storm. Which actually gets harder to handle the leaner one gets. Probably why I…and some of my leaner fitness instructor cyber cronies…had such a hard time when test driving a weight loss diet.
It’s a multifaceted problem for sure…and getting to grips with it isn’t for the seeker of easy fixes.
I realise I haven’t mentioned adaptive thermogenesis …which I am happy to if someone insists
This is one of those terrible things that affects nearly everyone who loses weight too rapidly. The body begins to use less energy which starts a kind of negative feedback loop that rarely ends well. I suspect, but I have zero evidence, that human adaptability in general, will confound any attempt to do pretty much anything to the human body too quickly. For example, even people who have had bariatric surgery sometimes experience that their body finds a way around it and they grow obese again.
I never saw it and know nothing about it. How are those people 21 weeks later? or 21 months later? The point is that it’s “easy” to lose 30 pounds, even quickly, but it’s VERY difficult to keep the 30 pounds off for months and years and decades thereafter.
And the secondary point is that after starving yourself for some period (let’s say 21 days), your body begins to adapt to use less energy, so by the end, your use of energy is lower (let’s say it’s 100 calories lower per day) than what it was at the beginning. Then, when you go back to normal eating then you now have a 100 calorie surplus per day, that means that if that keeps up (no large changes in activity) then you will slowly put on roughly an extra pound per month. After two years, you have about an extra 25 pounds and you are back where you started. And that’s despite changing nothing at all in your lifestyle other than 21 days of starvation. Why go through 21 days of starvation for now long-term result? And that is without mentioning any other damage that may have been done to the body due to lack of sufficient nutrients. Starvation diets are absurd.
Well after 21 weeks they are no longer afraid. But I agree that is extreme, but being in calorie deficit is not a bad thing and it isn’t to hard to get the nutrients you need on a daily basis in the “real” world.
Eating less may lengthen your life. Researchers have increased life-spans in yeast and mice by having them consume fewer calories per day, and ongoing studies suggest that a strict low-calorie diet may slow aging in primates, too.
That belief is a way to kill a fat person. It is demoralizing. It is false.
My BIL is a complete pessimist. My sister and I proved him wrong. He is an endocrinologist that believed that over ten years ago. Today he does not believe it.
I know you read a lot of crap and know it all.
Meanwhile, I am down 45 pounds now for over 3 years. My sister is down 25 pounds for three years now as well.
Make believe you will be correct.
That is exactly, utterly, and completely wrong.
I use the Noom app to count calories. With the psych lessons, it is a piece of cake.
Understanding what you are eating and counting it out in advance as the day progresses gives the dieter huge amounts of manageability over their eating habits.
I agree with this. Being in calorie deficit if fine, perhaps (and very likely) even healthy over the long-term. But being in starvation for weeks (the example you referred to was under 1000 calories over 21 days) is not good over the long-term.
Men need over 1400 calories per day, women over 1200. If we go under those numbers our metabolisms slow down.
My biggest calorie deficits in a given week are about 1000 calories. I do that once or twice a week. I have 800-calorie deficits once or twice a week. I have 400 to 500 calorie deficits the rest of the time. And a 300-calorie deficit once or twice a month.
I eat between 1600 and 2100 calories per day. If the deficit is going to be wider I get towards 2100 calories that day.
1600 is very doable if you watch your calorie intake. You can have that many calories and not even worry about being hungry as long as you keep off processed foods and drink only coffee and water.
Yes, under 1000 calories TOTAL over 21 days! According to the article, at least. Could be total BS.
By day 20 it was reported that he and his partner of the show had a combined intake of 100 calories. They then were fortunate to find a snake to eat prior to extraction day on Day 21. Considering nutrition of a raw snake (they did cook it) is about 93 calories per 100 grams (3.5 ounces) at best I would guess he was able to consume an additional 500 calories to give him a grand total of 550 calories over 21 days which should be considered “STARVATION.”
By the way, the show sounds insane. Why would anyone do that? Also, what’s with the whole naked thing? They seem to blur it all anyway, no?
Yes it is insane and they go all over the world but it seems to be who can starve and still make it out. I don’t get why people do it either because they do not get paid. But with Naked and afraid they have someone with a gun watching over them off camera so they don’t get eaten. I like Alone much better, at least with that show they make money and people seem to really survive. One guy on Alone even killed a Musk ox with a knife, it was wild.
There is actually a fair amount of evidence and animal models supporting the set point theory. It is after all simply an aspect of homeostasis, the body’s tendency to maintain physiological constancy. You could say that all the observations of how difficult it is to maintain weight loss is evidence of a set point for weight. And while there is certainly a psychological aspect, that is not incompatible with a physiological mechanism. It is all run by the brain.
The idea is that for whatever reason the brain in an obese person is set to maintain a certain BMI and adiposity level. When the person diets and loses weight and fat cells, the brain identifies this as a calorie deficit and triggers the hunger response and also sets the stage for slowing metabolism. The only way out is will power, periodic returns to weight loss strategies (dieting, Noom, intermittent fasting, appetite suppressing drugs), OR finding a way to reset the set point for BMI and adiposity.
But let me be clear, I don’t see set point theory as an explanation for the obesity epidemic. It doesn’t explain why in a single generation the obesity rate has double in America. What I think set point does explain is why it is diets and virtually all other weight loss strategies rarely result in permanent weight loss. Why we gain the weight in the first place is a different story.
My guess is that the American processed and supersized diet combined with an increasingly sedentary lifestyle applied from an early age has set the BMI set point at the obesity level for most Americans. That means the set point responds to the environment, which if so is good news because it suggests it can be changed. The bad news is that a set point determined by 40 years of Big Macs, Budweiser, Barbecues and desk jobs is probably going to be hard to reset.
@MarkR …any diet that induces weight loss (a successful diet ifvweight loss is the goal) will result in a reduced BMR due to loss of metabolically active tissue…usually muscle and fat. Theoretically, it should take a dieter down to roughly the BMR that they would’ve had if they hadn’t gotten fat in the first place. Theoretically.
But theory isn’t practice and most strictly controlled dietary studies show a drop that’s more than can be accounted for by the loss of metabolically active tissue. Granted, by a relatively small amount…generally not much more than 5-10% or so of the total reduction. That’s the adaptive thermogenesis phenomenon.
This was studied pretty extensively in the years following The Biggest Loser series. Here’s just one paper containing a decent description of the ways these contestants were followed and a little bit on the underlying changes that are speculated to be responsible. There are plenty of others on this but Kevin Hall (senior author) has written extensively on this topic from the early days of these studies. The full document is also available.
In actuality, although this phenom is accepted as a real thing, all it does is make maintaining a post diet /starvation weight loss a bit more difficult to maintain…but not to the extent that it can’t be compensated for.
Humans live in an artificial world in which they get fat by eating industrial garbage and follow absurd guidelines like eating a dozen snacks a day. Animals in the wild mostly keep their natural and proper weight. I see these animals in the wild as the evidence for set point theory. Animals in the wild don’t get ‘treats’ humans use to train pets.
I AM an animal who was brought up/trained to live upon a rapidly disappearing but still existing wild of trad foods that, as my grannies admonished long ago, my great grannies would have as recognized as food and had in their kitchens. I almost always eat everything on my plate (training, habit, morality), but that strongly inhibits what I have allowed to be put upon my plate.
I am a smallish guy (173 cms 5’8") and my weight has varied strongly with my physical activities, is currently 61 kg - 134 lbs, was only slightly less when I was long distance running and bike racing at age 18, and peaked at 67 kg - 150 lbs when I was surfing weightlifting competitive skiing in my late 20s into 30s). Getting those extra 6 kilos required some focused intent both at the gym and at meals.