It's NOT always as simple as a deficit
Replies
-
I'm not arguing against the tracking method, I know it works. I am saying it is not the only method and is not the method I want to use long term. I am also saying there is evidence to suggest that the human body is equipped with the ability to maintain a healthy weight without artificial control methods.
Calories count but you don't have to count calories. I don't think anyone would be idiotic enough to suggest that you must count calories to achieve a calorie deficit, surplus or maintenance state just that it is a rather good method of doing so.
Of course the body has the ability to maintain a healthy weight or lose weight without artificial controls or even conscious effort. Literally millions of people around the world do that. Our body has this natural ability just as it has the ability to perform many things on an autonomous level. You don't need to tell your heart to beat, your blood to flow or your eyes to see.
Your body actually does not want to routinely over eat or deal with the consequences of doing so. Your body does not wish to carry excess fat which poses a threat to its survival. Your body does not wish to keep losing and gaining significant amounts of weight which is a stressful process. Your body craves homeostasis.
The problem is we over ride what our bodies want routinely when it comes to eating. We eat more than we need for lots of reason. We eat to medicate our selves. We eat because we are happy, lonely, bored, out of pure habit, to share an experience, to shut off that critical voice in our heads saying "you are not good enough." We eat for pure pleasure. We live in an environment where access to cheap, incredibly tasty calories is abundant.
So, what to do? Count calories? Yes, you could do that and be very successful.
You could also try and reconnect with your body's natural ability to regulate weight if you have over ridden it in the past using other methods like intermittent fasting, intuitive eating, mindful eating or the like. Through conscious mastery you work towards unconscious mastery.
It can be done. It does take some work though...
^^ THIS ^^
A goal worth working towards. I am learning and pleased with the results so far.0 -
Paganstar:
re: your profile pic... Who do you identify with? The fit woman in the tshirt, or the person who made the caption?
I am interested in the answer to this myself.
Ha ha, how bizarre and creepy. What you wanna psychoanalyse me?
I searched diet meme, thought the woman looked OK if slightly too skinny and the caption made me laugh. I don't identify with either!
Edited to say she looks like she has a missing arm too! But the sea is a nice colour and makes me think of summer :happy:0 -
To further point out the flaws in this post...
Maybe YOUR body doesn't.Of course the body has the ability to maintain a healthy weight or lose weight without artificial controls or even conscious effort. Literally millions of people around the world do that. Our body has this natural ability just as it has the ability to perform many things on an autonomous level. You don't need to tell your heart to beat, your blood to flow or your eyes to see.
Your body actually does not want to routinely over eat or deal with the consequences of doing so. Your body does not wish to carry excess fat which poses a threat to its survival. Your body does not wish to keep losing and gaining significant amounts of weight which is a stressful process. Your body craves homeostasis.
But, I'll tell you what... mine and literally millions of others DO. That is why we are on this website - we like eating more calories than we need. There's very good arguments from evolution which explain why we might want to be like this.
If you're not - lucky for you, your body is more appropriate for current living in a western society.
But please don't suggest that my body (sic - we're talking about brain really, aren't we) doesn't "want" to eat.
The next lines then try to justify it as somehow things being 'seperate' - it's all part of the same thing with the body's natural attempts to 'regulate' calorie intake.
Remember that if you go back a good number of years the people that could stock up on food when it was available were also more likely to live through the times it wasn't.0 -
Paganstar:
re: your profile pic... Who do you identify with? The fit woman in the tshirt, or the person who made the caption?
I am interested in the answer to this myself.
Ha ha, how bizarre and creepy. What you wanna psychoanalyse me?
I searched diet meme, thought the woman looked OK if slightly too skinny and the caption made me laugh. I don't identify with either!
The whole point of an avatar is to represent something about you.
No need to psychoanalyze you... Your posts speak volumes.
BTW: Your avatar is perfectly suited. Good call.0 -
But please don't suggest that my body (sic - we're talking about brain really, aren't we) doesn't "want" to eat.
Yes, exactly. It is the brain / body connection and how our reliable natural cues get overridden making them fight against each other rather than work in tandem.
I didn't say that the body doesn't want to eat (of course it does) but rather that it doesn't want to over eat consistently (for a host of reasons including the energy cost of digestion.) That is driven more by our ingrained behaviour in the mid brain which ignores, amongst other things, PYY when we have eaten and signals to the brain "time to stop" especially when liver glycogen has been topped up. Our stomachs are not that large and to overfill them constantly is driven by something other than what the body is signalling to the brain unless your hunger hormones have become faulty.
Most of us are born with a perfectly functioning, reliable hunger feedback loops as children. We don't have to think about feeding. When we are hungry we cry to be feed. When full we stop We don't have to think about it or consciously be aware of it. As adults things change. Why is that? We move from internal cues to external cues which are not driven by the body.
Of course this is a massive simplification and I fully accept that...0 -
THANK YOU FOR RE-FOCUSSING THE DISCUSSION! SOMETIMES, IT REALLY IS MORE COMPLICATED. AND IT IS NICE TO HAVE SOMEONE ELSE SEE THAT, AND ENCOURAGE US TO KEEP TRYING.0
-
That and, IT'S TEN POUNDS. Its not a medical emergency. You aren't going to drop dead because it took a few months to lose those last ten pounds.
When you only have 10lbs to lose, the weight isn't going to "melt off" no matter what you do. For many people it takes months of eating at a small deficit. Unfortunately, when you only have 10lbs to lose, you need to have lots of patience while seeing very slow results. You could of course try to lower your calories to the point where you're under-eating, but that invites a whole host of issues, not the least of which are that the last 5 pounds are going to be even more difficult.But when somebody else who needs to loose 10lbs, weight just dosn't melt off.
Lets say I I start to eat at 1200 calories and I don't see weight fall off. My next thing would be to drop the calories to 1000. But I can't because everybody here says its a no no. so that means I have to in crease my burn, my exercise..0 -
borrowing from a post last week by rrstraats, thank you.
I love how people keep talking about the laws of Thermodynamics and use only the first law to apply it to humans.. The first law says that work, heat and changes in chemical composition will be constant. People are not like that. You have to use the second law which is a dissipation law which takes into account chemical reactions, changes in Gibbs free energy, ΔG, whose sign predicts the direction of reaction, and whose magnitude indicates the maximum amount of work realizable from the reaction.
Basically different things you eat are burned differently do to chemical composition and the way your body processes it. It will never be as simple as calories in/calories out no mater how many times people chant about it on here.
That being said.. you still need a calorie deficit to lose weight..
alsoLife as defined on this planet is cell based and self organizing. The means of self organization is regulated by the inheritance of genetic traits. Traits have variation between them. Therefore at any given time some combination of traits will tend to provide an advantageous difference in reproduction. Over time this will tend to increase the specific combination of traits in the population so they become more frequent.
Evolution is the change within a population of the frequency of the various alleles in the genome. Errors in crossover and duplication constantly add mutations plus there are mechanisms for lateral transmission of DNA. This makes evolution the basic response of life with imperfectly copied heritable traits inevitable.0 -
Plenty of kids can be seen crying because they want to eat MORE and hopefully being told they've had enough.
I would suggest, again, that for some a propensity to overeat is ingrained from evolution.
It can be seen in many animals too, when provided with a plentiful food supply.
(But not my dog, who's actually really hard to 'feed up' and still looks fairly skinny regardless.)0 -
That and a predisposition to overeating does not affect reproduction rates. If we had predators and being slow from overeating became a liability (or something similar) then there might be some reason for a mechanism to more closely regulate intake.Plenty of kids can be seen crying because they want to eat MORE and hopefully being told they've had enough.
I would suggest, again, that for some a propensity to overeat is ingrained from evolution.
It can be seen in many animals too, when provided with a plentiful food supply.
(But not my dog, who's actually really hard to 'feed up' and still looks fairly skinny regardless.)
While selection pressure tends to reduce genetic diversity at relevant loci, the absence of selection pressure results in an increase in diversity because novel alleles are not eliminated.0 -
Why people here are so aggressive on what is the superb true and they have to have it and anybody that poses a question is an idiot or against them?
Is clear that deficit matters the most, but for people that are obese or very overweight with virtual infamous muscular mass respective of fat mass the macros matter a lot and exercise/strenght building too, mainly because having increase in lean mass and/or change in %muscle/%fat will change their metabolic rate and consequently make it easier and change the numbers of the caloric deficit equation needed to shed the kgs.
Why the fight? Everybody is agreeing and gave contributions, is clear enough and OP should be happy.
Deviations from the deficit/change in macros/composition of body can be due to bad reporting of calories or unexpected/unknown condition, medications to treat depression, etc.
I think some people here discriminate and judge people who post questions since they see OP and others in the light of "oh those overweight liars that think only through their bellies".0 -
Not quite sure what you're getting at - for me the issue is the very subject of the thread.
It absolutely IS as simple as a deficit.
I'll happily concede that a deficit may not be simple.0 -
Paganstar:
re: your profile pic... Who do you identify with? The fit woman in the tshirt, or the person who made the caption?
I am interested in the answer to this myself.
Ha ha, how bizarre and creepy. What you wanna psychoanalyse me?
I searched diet meme, thought the woman looked OK if slightly too skinny and the caption made me laugh. I don't identify with either!
Edited to say she looks like she has a missing arm too! But the sea is a nice colour and makes me think of summer :happy:
What I find bizarre and creepy is 1. That you like that meme (it's a pretty angry one). 2. That you felt the need to screen cap my post and then fuzz out my username (for no reason, because none of it had changed - not my photo, my username, nor my original post on the subject, and I never said it had) and 3. That you went on for pages skirting an issue until someone else spelled it out for you. :huh:0 -
Not quite sure what you're getting at - for me the issue is the very subject of the thread.
It absolutely IS as simple as a deficit.
I'll happily concede that a deficit may not be simple.
Not targeting you necessarily, but always when those discussions come up is such a war of egos, and I dont understand why. Is clearly needed a deficit, but sometimes is not simple to know how to achieve or how is the best to tackle/most efficient.
Also some conditions do exist, my mom has COPD (lungs chronic issues) measured by dozen exams and she would love to put weight but even when she does eat a lot is not easy to know how much and what to eat to make her body stick with what she eat and not burn everything.
My other relative has really a thyroid issue, she treats with pills and she had a huge weight gain before and diet didnt do as much as you would expect by the very simple deficit equation.
Is easy to say the equation is the main point, but the practical aspects can get complicated in individual cases. But for most people, yes deficit and correct accounting is the biggest thing (I know a relative that eats only super healthy no carb week days than go on weekend to other people house eat 10000 calories and get frustrated not losing weight because she was good during the week, lol).0 -
Again, the problem, I would suggest, is calculating the deficit there.My other relative has really a thyroid issue, she treats with pills and she had a huge weight gain before and diet didnt do as much as you would expect by the very simple deficit equation.
I forget the circumstances, but a friend with Thyroid issues I think was on a bit too much medicine or whatever - and basically got the opposite. Burning a hell of a lot of calories; I believe she was gently chastised for not making a fuss about it and the way it was keeping her slim.
Again, either way, it is 'calories in' vs 'calories out' and while working both out can be quite difficult, I think people that trying to find reasons it's not is a misdirected effort and for most people it would be better to understand the how it IS for them.
I don't see these as arguing about methodology; I see it as, say, insisting the sun is a Giant fireball we orbit which is around 8-light seconds away, rather than a mystic light-bringing being from an ancient tale.0 -
Again, the problem, I would suggest, is calculating the deficit there.My other relative has really a thyroid issue, she treats with pills and she had a huge weight gain before and diet didnt do as much as you would expect by the very simple deficit equation.
I forget the circumstances, but a friend with Thyroid issues I think was on a bit too much medicine or whatever - and basically got the opposite. Burning a hell of a lot of calories; I believe she was gently chastised for not making a fuss about it and the way it was keeping her slim.
Again, either way, it is 'calories in' vs 'calories out' and while working both out can be quite difficult, I think people that trying to find reasons it's not is a misdirected effort and for most people it would be better to understand the how it IS for them.
I don't see these as arguing about methodology; I see it as, say, insisting the sun is a Giant fireball we orbit which is around 8-light seconds away, rather than a mystic light-bringing being from an ancient tale.
I, for one, welcome our mystic light-bringing overlord.0 -
Ha ha, how bizarre and creepy. What you wanna psychoanalyse me?
I searched diet meme, thought the woman looked OK if slightly too skinny and the caption made me laugh. I don't identify with either!
Edited to say she looks like she has a missing arm too! But the sea is a nice colour and makes me think of summer :happy:
What I find bizarre and creepy is 1. That you like that meme (it's a pretty angry one). 2. That you felt the need to screen cap my post and then fuzz out my username (for no reason, because none of it had changed - not my photo, my username, nor my original post on the subject, and I never said it had) and 3. That you went on for pages skirting an issue until someone else spelled it out for you. :huh:
1. I didn't make the meme and I consider it no more angry than the words expressed on this thread. Some posters have suggested that only posts made by the 'fit' and successful profile pictures should be acknowledged as valid comment. That sort of turns intelligent discussion into a bit of a dumbed down vanity contest.
2. I blurred your identity out of courtesy as the screenshot was being hosted on another website, which you might not have wanted. The screenshot captured your original post which showed you did not clearly state the importance of macros. You had already accused me of misquoting you, hence the screenshot so I could not be accused again.
3. So you decide to resurrect a thread that I had considered finished to take a delayed swipe at me? You said macros didn't matter in weight loss. I pointed out macros can affect fat loss, which is what people actually want when they refer to weight loss. That proportionate loss of muscle would negatively affect metabolism making the calorie deficit harder to achieve, thus slowing down weight and fat loss. Now, unless you really want this thread to continue further, despite your protestation above, I would suggest it best for us to agree to disagree and to move on with your life as I intend to.
:flowerforyou:0 -
snip.
3. So you decide to resurrect a thread that I had considered finished to take a delayed swipe at me? You said macros didn't matter in weight loss. I pointed out macros can affect fat loss, which is what people actually want when they refer to weight loss. That proportionate loss of muscle would negatively affect metabolism making the calorie deficit harder to achieve, thus slowing down weight and fat loss. Now, unless you really want this thread to continue further, despite your protestation above, I would suggest it best for us to agree to disagree and to move on with your life as I intend to.
:flowerforyou:
on the first bolded part They don't matter for weight loss calorie deficet does...
2nd bolded part how do you know what people mean...before I learned from the "mean people" here I said I wanted to lose weight...never thought about if it was muscle or fat...didn't care...I just wanted it gone.
Don't assume anything for anybody....0
Categories
- All Categories
- 1.4M Health, Wellness and Goals
- 393.6K Introduce Yourself
- 43.8K Getting Started
- 260.3K Health and Weight Loss
- 176K Food and Nutrition
- 47.5K Recipes
- 232.6K Fitness and Exercise
- 431 Sleep, Mindfulness and Overall Wellness
- 6.5K Goal: Maintaining Weight
- 8.6K Goal: Gaining Weight and Body Building
- 153K Motivation and Support
- 8K Challenges
- 1.3K Debate Club
- 96.4K Chit-Chat
- 2.5K Fun and Games
- 3.8K MyFitnessPal Information
- 24 News and Announcements
- 1.1K Feature Suggestions and Ideas
- 2.6K MyFitnessPal Tech Support Questions