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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28131 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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I'd like to drop a link this thoroughly researched and footnoted article about metabolic adaptation.

https://www.strongerbyscience.com/metabolic-adaptation/

This doesn't immediately support or refute the 300 calorie a day delta here…but it's within the realm of plausibility that when an obese person loses a lot of weight, their system down-regulates non-exercise activity thermogenesis by somewhere in that range.

Trex is great. Love his podcast; glad he keeps inviting that guest co-host on. I am 100% confident that, were he a Mottizen, he would absolutely be binned as a CICO-guy. Literally everything he's saying in that article is starting from the premise of CICO. He would not start a sentence, as @jeroboam did, with, "When it comes to CICO, the problem is..." Like, no. Full stop. He would say, "CICO is absolutely true. Now, there is a question about metabolic adaptation as you're going through a cut. Let's dive in."

So, let's start from your comment, not the article:

it's within the realm of plausibility that when an obese person loses a lot of weight, their system down-regulates non-exercise activity thermogenesis by somewhere in that range.

Notice that the premise is "when an obese person loses a lot of weight". @jeroboam didn't grant that. To him, it seems like as soon as you start eating less, your body drops its metabolic rate through the floor, and you never ever get around to losing the weight. That's why I asked him to specify the assumptions he was working with. If he was going to sneak back in a qualifier of, "...after you lose a bunch of weight..." then I wanted that to be clear. In fact, Trex gives even huger sounding numbers:

When a person loses 10% or more of their body weight, their total daily energy expenditure drops by around 20-25%.

But notice, that's after someone loses 10% or more of their body weight. I mean, obviously, there's some progression down to it along the way, but you actually do lose the weight! It's not just from the diet change, it's from actually losing weight. This is a standard piece of the standard understanding. If you lose a bunch of weight, your energy expenditure goes down. If you need to lose even more weight after that, then you're going to need to revise your calorie intake further downward. This is pretty straightforward.

It's something that, if you're trying to coach someone through weight loss, you need to understand from both sides, because you're going to have both types. You're going to have the person who is just trying to lose ten pounds, and you set them up with targets, but as they get into it a little bit, they're convinced that metabolic adaptation is super duper huge, and they suddenly need to eat, like 700 fewer calories a day than the target you already set for them. You need to reel them back and be like, "No dawg. It ain't gonna be that big for you. It might be there a little bit. Might push your timeline out a little bit, but just don't even think about it." And you're going to have the other person who legit needs to lose 100lbs, and they're absolutely going to need shifting targets on the way down, but that's going to be over the course of months. You will need to prep them for this at some point. And you'll need to prep them for the idea that they're probably never going back to the maintenance level they had before. That they're going to end up eating less forever, but after they've lost the weight, it will in fact be easier to do so, because it will be their new maintenance.

EDIT: I just want to quote Trex's concluding paragraph from Part 1:

The scientific literature has rigorously and repeatedly shown downregulation of energy expenditure, and the long list of physiological changes that accompany it, in response to weight loss. The controversy comes from how some of this information has been discussed, such as implausible anecdotes of fat gain despite remarkably low caloric intake, or the use of less rigorous terms like starvation mode. Rest assured, there is not a single member of our species that can elude the inescapable grasp of starvation; our caloric needs for weight loss may fluctuate from person to person, but we all have a number. Furthermore, nobody is failing to lose fat because they are eating too few calories. Metabolic adaptation places speed bumps in our path to fat loss, no more and no less. But this raises the next important question: Can we do anything to circumvent these speed bumps?

This is not a man who is going to say, "CICO is a problem," or "CICO doesn't work", or whatever.

Love his podcast; glad he keeps inviting that guest co-host on.

Anon, I...

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