> Both books emphasize that a calorie deficit is key to weight loss, and that “all diets work because they induce caloric deficit.”
Very disappointing :( Seems they can't quite shake this idea.
> Ryan Andrews argues that the brain is programmed to feel satiety with 3–4 pounds of food
Lol, this is curious. My own diet (ex150) has me consume extremely energy-dense foods, and so the total mass of food I eat in a day is extremely low: 150g meat + 60g vegetables + 80g sauce + 500g cream (approximate) - and that's all before cooking, which boils out a significant amount of water. Plus, about 2/3 or 3/4 of this total weight IS water.
I wonder if some people really do get "satiety" from volume and therefore the fiber/whole food stuff works for them, or if it's some myth that just needs to die haha. It's certainly the opposite of true for me. False doesn't even begin to describe it.
> Burn also quotes the book The Hungry Brain which emphasizes that body weight regulation is hormone-driven and originates in the hypothalamus part of the brain.
I just finished Hungry Brain and I think he's largely wrong. The book is more like a Malcolm Gladwell coffee table book, no actionable/useful insights. Its actionable advice could be summarized as "don't eat tasty food, only bland/boring food." Which is not very helpful diet advice, and in my experience also just wrong.
I believe the brain plays a role, but I don't think it's the root cause in most obese people. There might be some that have a tumor or some other thing going on in the brain, but I think the root cause is cellular (mitochondrial) in nature. The brain is downstream of that.
I have yet to read Burn (it's on my shelf) but from what I've heard, and what you describe, it sounds like it mainly invalidates the "move more" part of "eat less & exercise more." It tells us that the body has a somewhat limited energy budget, and you can't push that forever and just "make up" for it by eating more. Just like you can't eat nothing and just lose fat until you have abs. (At least almost nobody can, fasting seems to work for practically nobody.) If you add exercise to "burn calories" the body will simply take the majority of that energy from another budget, not add it on top.
The poverty/genetic thing is kind of bizarre to me. Clearly, the poor people of 1940 were lean as heck. And they were underprivileged as heck, too, and probably had the same genetics we do. This proves too much, it proves that we've always had an obesity epidemic :) Which is not true.
I think "is obesity a choice?" is interesting. Imagine you're locked in a room, and there's a passcode hidden in the room, but you don't know where it is. Is being locked a "choice?" You COULD leave the room, if you just had the correct knowledge of the code.
In a sense it's not a choice, because you can't type in a code you don't know. In another sense, it's a choice to keep searching for the code or give up and just sit there and accept that you're locked in the room. It's tricky because you don't even know 100% if there's a code in the room (=you COULD lose the weight), and you know most people who keep searching for codes never find them and remain locked.
But there are anecdotes of people finding codes and leaving their rooms.
So a highly complex question.
I basically think that almost everybody CAN lose the weight and sustain a normal weight, but that almost nobody knows how, including 99% of the professionals dedicated to this. I think this because I've accidentally done it once, without any willpower or effort, not even being that strict.
Thanks for sharing these perspectives! I 100% agree with you on all points, especially the last bit about how nobody knows how to maintain a normal weight. Part of me thinks that all YouTube/influencer success stories are simply survivorship bias. And then there are the people like Mark Sisson who just say, "primal people weren't fat, so I'm going to do exactly what they did" but this misses the point as well.
Yea the difficult part is: what about "being primal" made people not fat? Mark Sisson wouldn't know, he's never been fat. At least not first hand. Maybe he ran some studies. But given how Paleo wasn't a smash hit that solved obesity for everybody who tried it (I never lost weight on it), I don't think it's that easy to tell how Grok stayed lean & mean.
> Both books emphasize that a calorie deficit is key to weight loss, and that “all diets work because they induce caloric deficit.”
Very disappointing :( Seems they can't quite shake this idea.
> Ryan Andrews argues that the brain is programmed to feel satiety with 3–4 pounds of food
Lol, this is curious. My own diet (ex150) has me consume extremely energy-dense foods, and so the total mass of food I eat in a day is extremely low: 150g meat + 60g vegetables + 80g sauce + 500g cream (approximate) - and that's all before cooking, which boils out a significant amount of water. Plus, about 2/3 or 3/4 of this total weight IS water.
I wonder if some people really do get "satiety" from volume and therefore the fiber/whole food stuff works for them, or if it's some myth that just needs to die haha. It's certainly the opposite of true for me. False doesn't even begin to describe it.
> Burn also quotes the book The Hungry Brain which emphasizes that body weight regulation is hormone-driven and originates in the hypothalamus part of the brain.
I just finished Hungry Brain and I think he's largely wrong. The book is more like a Malcolm Gladwell coffee table book, no actionable/useful insights. Its actionable advice could be summarized as "don't eat tasty food, only bland/boring food." Which is not very helpful diet advice, and in my experience also just wrong.
I believe the brain plays a role, but I don't think it's the root cause in most obese people. There might be some that have a tumor or some other thing going on in the brain, but I think the root cause is cellular (mitochondrial) in nature. The brain is downstream of that.
I have yet to read Burn (it's on my shelf) but from what I've heard, and what you describe, it sounds like it mainly invalidates the "move more" part of "eat less & exercise more." It tells us that the body has a somewhat limited energy budget, and you can't push that forever and just "make up" for it by eating more. Just like you can't eat nothing and just lose fat until you have abs. (At least almost nobody can, fasting seems to work for practically nobody.) If you add exercise to "burn calories" the body will simply take the majority of that energy from another budget, not add it on top.
The poverty/genetic thing is kind of bizarre to me. Clearly, the poor people of 1940 were lean as heck. And they were underprivileged as heck, too, and probably had the same genetics we do. This proves too much, it proves that we've always had an obesity epidemic :) Which is not true.
I think "is obesity a choice?" is interesting. Imagine you're locked in a room, and there's a passcode hidden in the room, but you don't know where it is. Is being locked a "choice?" You COULD leave the room, if you just had the correct knowledge of the code.
In a sense it's not a choice, because you can't type in a code you don't know. In another sense, it's a choice to keep searching for the code or give up and just sit there and accept that you're locked in the room. It's tricky because you don't even know 100% if there's a code in the room (=you COULD lose the weight), and you know most people who keep searching for codes never find them and remain locked.
But there are anecdotes of people finding codes and leaving their rooms.
So a highly complex question.
I basically think that almost everybody CAN lose the weight and sustain a normal weight, but that almost nobody knows how, including 99% of the professionals dedicated to this. I think this because I've accidentally done it once, without any willpower or effort, not even being that strict.
Thanks for sharing these perspectives! I 100% agree with you on all points, especially the last bit about how nobody knows how to maintain a normal weight. Part of me thinks that all YouTube/influencer success stories are simply survivorship bias. And then there are the people like Mark Sisson who just say, "primal people weren't fat, so I'm going to do exactly what they did" but this misses the point as well.
Yea the difficult part is: what about "being primal" made people not fat? Mark Sisson wouldn't know, he's never been fat. At least not first hand. Maybe he ran some studies. But given how Paleo wasn't a smash hit that solved obesity for everybody who tried it (I never lost weight on it), I don't think it's that easy to tell how Grok stayed lean & mean.
It’s all CICO