Medical reasons for weight gain and what they mean

tomteboda

xmichaelyx wrote: »

First, your body pretty much always uses "every available calorie to create fat." That's why we eat less and move more, thus making fewer calories available.

Second, since the calories that are available are a direct result of the calories you take in, weight gain with this problem is absolutely directly related to your food intake.

Even the article you link to doesn't say what you think it says; it just says that people with this condition are more prone to obesity, and explains why.

Let me be more clear. With Cushing's, your body will preferentially make fat rather than shuttle glucose molecules to muscles and cells for use as an energy source. This does not happen in a healthy body, which prioritizes actually giving cells the energy they need. Rather than making ATP necessary for healthy cellular functions, a person who has Cushing's will experience lipid synthesis. This is the primary reason that Cushing's leads to problems in organs and tissues (bone, skin, muscle, neurological, etc).

This is why I said weight gain is only indirectly related to food intake on the first point; because the hormonal imbalance leads to weight gain that is disproportionate with the calories consumed.

not_a_runner

cwolfman13 wrote: »

CICO is just the mathematical equation...there are things that can effect the equation...but that doesn't invalidate the equation. Certain metabolic disorders like PCOS, etc effect metabolism...so someone in that situation would have a slower metabolism than average...but ultimately it still comes down to consuming fewer calories than required...that's all CICO is.

Most of the medications and whatnot either make one ravenous so they overeat or they cause water retention

I am hypothyroid, and this is exactly what I tell other people with hypo who say it is impossible for them to lose weight. Maybe it has slowed your metabolism, but it has not made it totally irrelevant.
I can still find my maintenance calories just like anyone else and manipulate them to lose weight.

Nikion901

FridayApril01st2016 wrote: »

tomteboda wrote: »

My mom has endogenous cushing's syndrome. It's absolutely awful. It went undiagnosed for many, many years after onset because her doctors dismissed her as a fat hypochondriac. When she was finally diagnosed (diagnosis confirmed at the Mayo Clinic) it was a relief.. but the untreated underlying disease had wrecked havoc with her body in so many ways.

Cushing's causes weight gain in more than one way. First, it imbalances your hormones in such a way that calories are preferentially shuttled into fat metabolism. I want people who read that to think again about that for a moment. If you have Cushing's, your body will use every available calorie to create fat. At the expense of body functions. Thus, weight gain with this problem is not directly related to your food intake.

Second, it upregulates hunger. So you have a one-two punch. There was a helpful review published recently on this topic.





Lee, Mi-Jeong, et al. "Deconstructing the roles of glucocorticoids in adipose tissue biology and the development of central obesity." Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA)-Molecular Basis of Disease 1842.3 (2014): 473-481.

nettiklive wrote: »

Need2Exerc1se wrote: »

CipherZero wrote: »

People overall seem to conflate weight gain and fat gain. Most medication weight gain is water retention. It's been my experience there's very few medications that cause fat gain, and those are ones that screw with satiation and/or cortisol.

So much this^^

Most people, especially on these forums, use "weight" and "fat" interchangeably as if they are the same thing. I saw this in a post on another thread just a few minutes ago. And we wonder why people are so confused.

The meds I'm talking about generally cause both water retention AND fat gain, as I mentioned, deposited in characteristic places.

What tomteboda said above about Cushing's.
The implications of this is that hormones can mess with metabolism to such degree that it is impossible to create a deficit even on extremely low intake. That defies the argument of some that everyone's metabolism is pretty much the same, give or take 200 calories or so, and that everyone can lose weight on a reasonable deficit (which is technically true but not achievable)

This is like saying, that it's impossible; to starve to death.

Well ... it is hard to starve to death .... it takes months and months of hunger and lack of food and in the end it's organ failure that does you in. My mom went through a man-made famine that the socialist communist Stalin caused back in the early 1930's. She litterally cooked rocks and roots from weeds and leaves into a tea to give her younger brothers something to put into their bellies. She didn't die, and neither did her brothers, but 4/5ths of the village she lived in did die. Her teas kept them alive even though they walked about with sunken faces and chest, visible bones in their arms and legs, ribs that looked like they could puncture the skin that covered them ... and bloated bellies ... because they all got huge bloat in their bellies.

Starvation is not a nice thing.