Obesity Journal study: It's not just CICO

When I plug my stats and goals into MFP, weigh and log my food, and eat back some, but not all, of my exercise calories, over the course of a month I lose as expected.

No BMR or TDEE calculations needed.

NotSoPerfectPam wrote: »

The study shows that their metabolism is PERMANENTLY altered. They didn't study regular dieters, but the implication is that any type of diet screws with your metabolism. I know a lot of folks (myself included) struggle to lose weight on my TDEE based on MFP calculations.

Fortunately most CICO supporters will remind people that the number a TDEE calculator spits out is always just an estimate based on averages. Everyone should adjust their diet based on their real world results instead of blindly trusting the number.

I don't see how this invalidates CICO.

This only appears to cover crash dieters like those on The Biggest Loser or the 550 calories a day study. I'm curious about what happens to leptin levels when people lose weight gradually. I've been doing so for a year, and am LESS hungry than I was when I started, rather than more.

I'm only hungry right before meals and have eliminated my afternoon snack.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/health/biggest-loser-weight-loss.html?_r=0

Losing a Key Hormone

Slower metabolisms were not the only reason the contestants regained weight, though. They constantly battled hunger, cravings and binges. The investigators found at least one reason: plummeting levels of leptin. The contestants started out with normal levels of leptin. By the season’s finale, they had almost no leptin at all, which would have made them ravenous all the time. As their weight returned, their leptin levels drifted up again, but only to about half of what they had been when the season began, the researchers found, thus helping to explain their urges to eat.

Leptin is just one of a cluster of hormones that control hunger, and although Dr. Hall and his colleagues did not measure the rest of them, another group of researchers, in a different project, did. In a one-year study funded by Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council, Dr. Joseph Proietto of the University of Melbourne and his colleagues recruited 50 overweight people who agreed to consume just 550 calories a day for eight or nine weeks. They lost an average of nearly 30 pounds, but over the next year, the pounds started coming back.

Dr. Proietto and his colleagues looked at leptin and four other hormones that satiate people. Levels of most of them fell in their study subjects. They also looked at a hormone that makes people want to eat. Its level rose.

“What was surprising was what a coordinated effect it is,” Dr. Proietto said. “The body puts multiple mechanisms in place to get you back to your weight. The only way to maintain weight loss is to be hungry all the time. We desperately need agents that will suppress hunger and that are safe with long-term use.”

It would be interesting to compare the Biggest Loser folks' BMRs to those who lost similar amounts of weight using less extreme deficits. It says that one person had a daily goal deficit of 3500. How does his BMR compare to a person who lost using much more moderate (or even low) deficit and who took diet breaks, etc?

NotSoPerfectPam wrote: »

The study shows that their metabolism is PERMANENTLY altered. They didn't study regular dieters, but the implication is that any type of diet screws with your metabolism. I know a lot of folks (myself included) struggle to lose weight on my TDEE based on MFP calculations.

How is that implied scientifically? What part of this study suggests that this result can be extrapolated to those that didn't lose 200 pounds in seven months? That's not how science works.

What does this have to do with CICO?
CICO means that you lose weight if you eat less than you burn and you gain weight if you eat more than you burn. How much you're going to burn has nothing to do with this principle.

Also this is the only way a person can lose weight - eat less than you burn - more out than in. This is not disputable. So it is just CICO.

ETA: Now if you want to lose them pounds super fast and decide to eat like a mouse and then screw your metabolism as a result, well then I guess we always have natural selection at work

To your question - how do we get our TDEE/BMR tested - EASY
I do that for the last few month. I put all my data - the calories in, the calories out through exercise if any, and my weight in excel tables and calculate what my TDEE is as a result of that. This is my actual TDEE and it can't lie Fortunately for me it is very close to what the online formulas suggest it is (my calculation is experimental fitting of data, theirs is based on thermodynamics). This method can only work though if you are extra careful with your food measuring and logging.

kshama2001 wrote: »

When I plug my stats and goals into MFP, weigh and log my food, and eat back some, but not all, of my exercise calories, over the course of a month I lose as expected.

No BMR or TDEE calculations needed.

+1

Like clockwork.

NotSoPerfectPam wrote: »

The study shows that their metabolism is PERMANENTLY altered. They didn't study regular dieters, but the implication is that any type of diet screws with your metabolism. I know a lot of folks (myself included) struggle to lose weight on my TDEE based on MFP calculations.

Permanently? How could they possibly know this? The people have not died. They have not gotten the statistics from the rest of their lives. Nothing is permanent, except death.

To lose weight, no matter how you track it, or how long it takes, you have to eat less calories than you burn. The rate of loss, can be different for everyone, for whatever reason, but you are not going to lose weight by eating more calories than you are burning. Simple fact.

NotSoPerfectPam wrote: »

The study shows that their metabolism is PERMANENTLY altered. They didn't study regular dieters, but the implication is that any type of diet screws with your metabolism. I know a lot of folks (myself included) struggle to lose weight on my TDEE based on MFP calculations.

As per the bolded, it doesn't really, does it? Metabolic adaptation is not a new concept. If you force your body to run on way too few calories for too long, it will adapt to run on less calories. That's one of the reasons why MFP won't let you set your goal to more than 2 lbs per week, and why "diet breaks" are often recommended to folks with a lot of weight to lose. And honestly, most people set to lose 1/2 lb or 1 lb per week are probably eating awfully close to what their TDEE would be at their goal weight anyway.

Unless I'm reading it wrong, this article is supporting something else that gets said around here - slow and steady. Don't set your goal too high and squeak by on the bare minimum calories. Eat as much as you can while still losing weight.

Edited to add: And as far as PERMANENTLY, how exactly do they know that?

ANother thought I just had.

They didn't know what their BMR was before they gained weight. THis study ASSUMED the contestants were at the average before hand and when they lost weight and were below the average they ASSUMED it was a decline. All of these contestants were morbidly obese. It is very likely they already had lower resting metabolic rates than the average population which is probably why with poor eating habits they were able to get that large.

To do this properly you would really need to measure someones BMR at their low weight. Have them gain a crap ton of weight and probably live like that for an appreciable amount of time, then lose back to their original weight and measure.

It would also be wise to account for differences in BF% because I'm guessing all these contestants have higher than average BF% at a given weight due to how much muscle they likely lost from following the extreme protocol.