Me: “I’ve tried everything I am physically capable of trying short of anorexia. Ive tried to walk. Ive tried lifting weights. I’ve even starved myself. 200 calories every other day for 3 months. Nothing works. I think I may have a legitimate medical issue”
You would be stufied because it’s impressive that your body can just grab calories out of thin air. Obese people lie about what they eat, it’s really simple. That’s why doctors don’t take these people serios.
the thing is, people SEVERELY underestimate how many calories are in what they’re eating. Ask any fat how much calories a chocolate bar has, and they’ll say something like “50?”
This. 200 calories is not very much food. That’s like 1 tablespoon of peanut butter, a little over 1 banana, a little less than 3 eggs, about 30 individual almonds, or little over half an avocado.
A single Hershey’s chocolate bar, mountain dew, or the smallest size of my favorite star bucks drinks are all over 200 calories too.
It’s important to notice that while an underlying medical issue is certainly likely in your situation, and that’s hard to work against… There’s no physical way you were actually ingesting 200 daily calories and didn’t lose weight.
This is beyond biology, it’s physical. You were either consuming way more than that, or you were actually losing weight and just didn’t notice. There’s no alternative.
Are they doing that or is this just a “stupid idiot is clearly just cheating” blanket retort?
Had a friend who was overweight and got into long distance running. He went from 300 lbs to a lean, mean 140. Then he injured his knee and had to give up his sport. Simple diet didn’t work, he steadily put on 100 lbs over the next two years.
Another girl I know cleans straight through 3000+ calories a day easy. Never went above 120. In fact, if she’s not housing down food she gets weak and anemic.
That’s got nothing to do with intake and everything to do with metabolism
I’m not an expert but I believe that everyone needs different intakes, depending on metabolism and activity, but if you go lower you lose weight. I went through a diet where the only thing I did was count the calories, and it worked really well.
Completely anecdotal, but I have to assume that is incorrect, or that I have a fundamental misunderstanding. I have done tests and found that my body processes(in one hole->out another) food in about an hour. Which is absolutely insane and results in most of my evacuate being unprocessed. I’ve read that for other people in similar tests, they tend to average around 12 hours. Im guessing that means my understanding of what contitutes metabolism is incorrect?
You’re confusing solid food in my mouth with calories ingested.
If for whatever physiological reason your claim is correct, and your digestive system is indeed so fast food goes through unprocessed, you didn’t actually eat. You’ve eaten in the social, pleasurable or psychological sense, but these are not ingested calories, and therefore also completely irrelevant to your metabolism or diet.
If you could take a 1000 calorie burguer, cover it in plastic, swallow it and have it pass through intact… You just ingested zero calories. So you can’t later say “oh I regularly eat 1000 calories per meal and lose weight, but my partner chews a 300 calorie steak and gains weight!”
Yeah, fair. The difficulty comes in because i’ve never been diagnosed with any digestive issues somehow, so historically ive always just attributed it to the “fast metabolism” everyone tells me about. Honestly this conversation is about the first time ive ever put that sort of thought into it
I’m not sure what you’re getting at with the diet question. That neither invalidates nor supports what I said.
If someone wants to be fat, they can be fat. I don’t care what other people do with their lives. I’m just pointing out that the reason why a person becomes fat is well-known, proven science. Denying that is akin to vaccine skepticism; it’s actively harmful to society. The past 8 years are a great example of what happens when we allow misinformation and pseudoscience to propagate, even if it seems silly/fringe/nobody-actually-believes-that.
Fad diets are the height of pseudo-science and routinely harm their practitioners.
It’s not a coincidence that vaccine skeptics are regularly peddling weight lose programs and other quack remedies that don’t work. Guys like Dr Oz and RJK Jr are at the forefront of both grifts.
I didn’t say being fat “is a binary choice”, and I never mentioned anything about fad diets.
I get the impression that I’ve struck a nerve, and you just want to lash out. Sorry if I upset you, but this is unproductive. Your comments aren’t addressing anything I’m saying, you’re just throwing stuff out to vent.
I have loved ones who are obese. If you’re struggling with your weight, fwiw, I don’t believe you’re worth less because of it. But please don’t spread misinformation, and instead take the time to learn more about the topic. If not for your own sake, for the sake of others who might be lured away from the path to recovery by misinfo you may unintentionally spread.
That may be the case, however the percentage of overweight individuals that almost certianly (as in the misreporting, not the percentage) misreport their caloric intake to their doctors is high enough that many doctors will just assume that they all lie.If they wanted to be believed they would either need actual evidence for their claims or to lose weight.
Yeah, unfortunately this kinda only goes one way. No matter your metabolism, if you starve yourself you will lose weight. It’s literally physically impossible for you to not. It’s just difficult and wildly unhealthy to lose weight that way.
Whereas the opposite is not neccassarily true, depending on your metabolism you very well might be able to eat as nuch as you want. You might even have to eat more than you are comfortable with just to maintain your weight, which is what I deal with. With the right metabolism, there could be a situation where there is no upper limit on how much you could eat without gaining weight.
Caveats include: obviously if you eat a pound of food your weight goes up by a pound, but assuming you are similar to me, after that passes through you your weight goes back down to effectively the exact same as it was before you ate. Im not glorifying a fast metabolism here, in fact my metabolism is no fast that I don’t get most of the nutients i eat and am therefore perpetually malnourished no matter what or how much I eat. I spend more on food to maintain my weight than i do on literally everything else combined, excluding rent, and maybe gas.
Oddly, although scaling my food does not seem to scale nutrients from my food, scaling my caloric burn does seem to impact my appetite. When I was working a physical job, i was consuming about 4000 calories/day and most of the time i felt like I was on the edge of passing out from never ending fatigue. I’d wake up and spend every moment of the day starving. Now, i work a very relaxed job and my appetite has vanished. I often go days without eating and dont seem to be losing a significant amount of weight, unlike back when. Although when I do eat I tend to eat multiple huge meals in a day, often about once/twice a week, and my weight afterwards doesnt seem to go up, it just stops going down for a day or two. The only way for me to gain weight seems to be to lose it first, I literally cannot get above 160lb at 6"2’
None of that is what you should be doing. I mean yes you should be exercising. But not the way you are going about it. For context, I just lost 50 pounds, and have another 20 to go. I got a scary liver diagnosis due to a lifetime of overeating.
Download a calorie tracker and be super honest with it. At first don’t be as concerned with staying within your calories as you are about building the habit to ALWAYS log everything. Seeing it laid out has more impact than anything else in changing your daily habits. Don’t be tempted to skip little tastes, licks, and bites.
Additionally, do not starve yourself! Slowly change your habits and your body will do the rest. Starving yourself will only trigger your body into gaining weight by holding onto everything it gets. It will also make just about everyone quit within a few weeks. If you are finding yourself constantly starving (as opposed to occasionally hungry) then you need to make adjustments to what you are eating. Swap foods for better options. I swapped my late night chips, which kept me awake while driving trains at 3 am with no sleep for two days, with baby carrots I bought at the gas station. I found potatoes helpful in keeping full in the past, but had to avoid them for the liver. Potatoes aren’t super high in calories, but sour cream, bacon, cheese, and/or deep frying them is.
Remember that your body adapts to the foods you regularly eat in about 4-6 weeks. So if you start eating healthy foods you hate, like a salad with tuna and sliced beets, you will start to crave it in about a month and a half. (Tuna has fish oils and beets are chock full of antioxidants). I have hated oatmeal for 40+ years, and now that is my preferred breakfast. I tried to make myself like it over and over but this time I stuck with it long enough to actually get my body hooked on that particular set of nutrients.
Oh, and if you set your home address to Europe in My Fitness Pal, it gives you some of the premium features, like the barcode scanner.
Absolutely quit soda and energy drinks. That one is just hard and there really isn’t an easy answer for it. Sparkling water helps a bit, but really just plain water is the best at satisfying those cravings. Oh, and you will develop a massive sweet tooth when you quit soda. But if you try to stay within calories and drink a Mt Dew you will be starving by the end of the day. Diet soda is NOT better just because it doesn’t have calories. It messes with the way your body processes and stores everything else it gets making it just as bad (worse) than the regular stuff. Stevia is ok for a lot of things, but getting your tastes used to less sugar is a huge step in losing weight and getting healthier.
Me: “I’ve tried everything I am physically capable of trying short of anorexia. Ive tried to walk. Ive tried lifting weights. I’ve even starved myself. 200 calories every other day for 3 months. Nothing works. I think I may have a legitimate medical issue”
Doctor: “Drink water and walk. Thatll be $250.”
Me:
You would be stufied because it’s impressive that your body can just grab calories out of thin air. Obese people lie about what they eat, it’s really simple. That’s why doctors don’t take these people serios.
the thing is, people SEVERELY underestimate how many calories are in what they’re eating. Ask any fat how much calories a chocolate bar has, and they’ll say something like “50?”
This. 200 calories is not very much food. That’s like 1 tablespoon of peanut butter, a little over 1 banana, a little less than 3 eggs, about 30 individual almonds, or little over half an avocado.
A single Hershey’s chocolate bar, mountain dew, or the smallest size of my favorite star bucks drinks are all over 200 calories too.
It’s important to notice that while an underlying medical issue is certainly likely in your situation, and that’s hard to work against… There’s no physical way you were actually ingesting 200 daily calories and didn’t lose weight.
This is beyond biology, it’s physical. You were either consuming way more than that, or you were actually losing weight and just didn’t notice. There’s no alternative.
I mean they said every other day, if one day they get 200 and the next they get 5000 they ain’t losing weight…
Are they doing that or is this just a “stupid idiot is clearly just cheating” blanket retort?
Had a friend who was overweight and got into long distance running. He went from 300 lbs to a lean, mean 140. Then he injured his knee and had to give up his sport. Simple diet didn’t work, he steadily put on 100 lbs over the next two years.
Another girl I know cleans straight through 3000+ calories a day easy. Never went above 120. In fact, if she’s not housing down food she gets weak and anemic.
That’s got nothing to do with intake and everything to do with metabolism
I’m not an expert but I believe that everyone needs different intakes, depending on metabolism and activity, but if you go lower you lose weight. I went through a diet where the only thing I did was count the calories, and it worked really well.
This is like vaccine skepticism.
Fat people are fat because they eat too much.
If Bob has a “slow metabolism”, then Bob should stop eating desert after dinner if he doesn’t want to be fat.
Plus, there is relatively little variation between all humans in their resting metabolism. We’re talking 600 calories from the slowest metabolisms to the fastest.
i hear the metabolism also stays the same regardless of weight. you actually need a deficit compared to your baseline.
anedoctally though, my parner eats much less than me, but is heavier somehow.
Completely anecdotal, but I have to assume that is incorrect, or that I have a fundamental misunderstanding. I have done tests and found that my body processes(in one hole->out another) food in about an hour. Which is absolutely insane and results in most of my evacuate being unprocessed. I’ve read that for other people in similar tests, they tend to average around 12 hours. Im guessing that means my understanding of what contitutes metabolism is incorrect?
You’re confusing solid food in my mouth with calories ingested.
If for whatever physiological reason your claim is correct, and your digestive system is indeed so fast food goes through unprocessed, you didn’t actually eat. You’ve eaten in the social, pleasurable or psychological sense, but these are not ingested calories, and therefore also completely irrelevant to your metabolism or diet.
If you could take a 1000 calorie burguer, cover it in plastic, swallow it and have it pass through intact… You just ingested zero calories. So you can’t later say “oh I regularly eat 1000 calories per meal and lose weight, but my partner chews a 300 calorie steak and gains weight!”
If you see what I mean.
Yeah, fair. The difficulty comes in because i’ve never been diagnosed with any digestive issues somehow, so historically ive always just attributed it to the “fast metabolism” everyone tells me about. Honestly this conversation is about the first time ive ever put that sort of thought into it
You can have the same diet your entire life and fluctuate in weight significantly.
Anything else? Breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Is your singular goal your weight or do you have any other considerations?
I’m not sure what you’re getting at with the diet question. That neither invalidates nor supports what I said.
If someone wants to be fat, they can be fat. I don’t care what other people do with their lives. I’m just pointing out that the reason why a person becomes fat is well-known, proven science. Denying that is akin to vaccine skepticism; it’s actively harmful to society. The past 8 years are a great example of what happens when we allow misinformation and pseudoscience to propagate, even if it seems silly/fringe/nobody-actually-believes-that.
This isn’t a binary choice.
Fad diets are the height of pseudo-science and routinely harm their practitioners.
It’s not a coincidence that vaccine skeptics are regularly peddling weight lose programs and other quack remedies that don’t work. Guys like Dr Oz and RJK Jr are at the forefront of both grifts.
I didn’t say being fat “is a binary choice”, and I never mentioned anything about fad diets.
I get the impression that I’ve struck a nerve, and you just want to lash out. Sorry if I upset you, but this is unproductive. Your comments aren’t addressing anything I’m saying, you’re just throwing stuff out to vent.
I have loved ones who are obese. If you’re struggling with your weight, fwiw, I don’t believe you’re worth less because of it. But please don’t spread misinformation, and instead take the time to learn more about the topic. If not for your own sake, for the sake of others who might be lured away from the path to recovery by misinfo you may unintentionally spread.
People “eat too much” because there’s something that’s already wrong with them that causes them to eat too much.
That may be the case, however the percentage of overweight individuals that almost certianly (as in the misreporting, not the percentage) misreport their caloric intake to their doctors is high enough that many doctors will just assume that they all lie.If they wanted to be believed they would either need actual evidence for their claims or to lose weight.
Yeah, unfortunately this kinda only goes one way. No matter your metabolism, if you starve yourself you will lose weight. It’s literally physically impossible for you to not. It’s just difficult and wildly unhealthy to lose weight that way.
Whereas the opposite is not neccassarily true, depending on your metabolism you very well might be able to eat as nuch as you want. You might even have to eat more than you are comfortable with just to maintain your weight, which is what I deal with. With the right metabolism, there could be a situation where there is no upper limit on how much you could eat without gaining weight.
Caveats include: obviously if you eat a pound of food your weight goes up by a pound, but assuming you are similar to me, after that passes through you your weight goes back down to effectively the exact same as it was before you ate. Im not glorifying a fast metabolism here, in fact my metabolism is no fast that I don’t get most of the nutients i eat and am therefore perpetually malnourished no matter what or how much I eat. I spend more on food to maintain my weight than i do on literally everything else combined, excluding rent, and maybe gas.
Oddly, although scaling my food does not seem to scale nutrients from my food, scaling my caloric burn does seem to impact my appetite. When I was working a physical job, i was consuming about 4000 calories/day and most of the time i felt like I was on the edge of passing out from never ending fatigue. I’d wake up and spend every moment of the day starving. Now, i work a very relaxed job and my appetite has vanished. I often go days without eating and dont seem to be losing a significant amount of weight, unlike back when. Although when I do eat I tend to eat multiple huge meals in a day, often about once/twice a week, and my weight afterwards doesnt seem to go up, it just stops going down for a day or two. The only way for me to gain weight seems to be to lose it first, I literally cannot get above 160lb at 6"2’
I think the alternative is that it was a joke
It’s not funny anymore as to many think it’s a legitimate response.
I think it was a legitimate response but just exaggerated for the purposes of comedy
Huh? Joke? On the Internet? No way.
Forgot to mention the 8000 calories on the alternating days but I’m sure that’s fine
Yeah, they tend to forget about those.
Mans thinks he broke the laws of conservation of mass and that’s why he’s still fat
Thermodynamics are bullshit
None of that is what you should be doing. I mean yes you should be exercising. But not the way you are going about it. For context, I just lost 50 pounds, and have another 20 to go. I got a scary liver diagnosis due to a lifetime of overeating.
Download a calorie tracker and be super honest with it. At first don’t be as concerned with staying within your calories as you are about building the habit to ALWAYS log everything. Seeing it laid out has more impact than anything else in changing your daily habits. Don’t be tempted to skip little tastes, licks, and bites.
Additionally, do not starve yourself! Slowly change your habits and your body will do the rest. Starving yourself will only trigger your body into gaining weight by holding onto everything it gets. It will also make just about everyone quit within a few weeks. If you are finding yourself constantly starving (as opposed to occasionally hungry) then you need to make adjustments to what you are eating. Swap foods for better options. I swapped my late night chips, which kept me awake while driving trains at 3 am with no sleep for two days, with baby carrots I bought at the gas station. I found potatoes helpful in keeping full in the past, but had to avoid them for the liver. Potatoes aren’t super high in calories, but sour cream, bacon, cheese, and/or deep frying them is.
Remember that your body adapts to the foods you regularly eat in about 4-6 weeks. So if you start eating healthy foods you hate, like a salad with tuna and sliced beets, you will start to crave it in about a month and a half. (Tuna has fish oils and beets are chock full of antioxidants). I have hated oatmeal for 40+ years, and now that is my preferred breakfast. I tried to make myself like it over and over but this time I stuck with it long enough to actually get my body hooked on that particular set of nutrients.
Oh, and if you set your home address to Europe in My Fitness Pal, it gives you some of the premium features, like the barcode scanner.
Absolutely quit soda and energy drinks. That one is just hard and there really isn’t an easy answer for it. Sparkling water helps a bit, but really just plain water is the best at satisfying those cravings. Oh, and you will develop a massive sweet tooth when you quit soda. But if you try to stay within calories and drink a Mt Dew you will be starving by the end of the day. Diet soda is NOT better just because it doesn’t have calories. It messes with the way your body processes and stores everything else it gets making it just as bad (worse) than the regular stuff. Stevia is ok for a lot of things, but getting your tastes used to less sugar is a huge step in losing weight and getting healthier.
What were you eating 6000 calories every other day too? No wonder doctors don’t believe their patients.
Nothing you said makes any sense at all