Sex only burns about 21 calories, according to new university study

[Ed Anger]

Please, for the love of god, no more circumcision threads.

[mongers]

I burned 42 calories today.

Finally, The Answer to life, the universe and everything is a threesome.   

[Legbiter]

I think the confusion about certain people having different "metabolism" is an indication that a calorie is not just a calorie is a calorie. Your "calories" will do vastly different things metabolically speaking depending on where they come from. Calories from meat, eggs and fat will impact you very much differently than calories from soda, candy, wheat and potatoes.

The problem with the standard western diet is that it is loaded with carbohydrates that just spike your insulin and hence get transported right into your fat cells. Everybody is eating shit out of box that comes with rancid estrogen-acting vegetable oils (like soy) and/or HFCS, sugar and trans fats.

90% of the obesity epidemic would be solved if people ate like this.


 

[dps]

But it's much, much more complicated than that.  Calories aren't fuel the same way that, say, gasoline is.

Different kinds of calories get converted into body energy at different rates.  Lots of different factors on how body energy gets stored as fat, and when and how fat stores get converted back into energy.

Anyways - I just find it is a bit much when people who have had no significant issues with their weight try and tell people who have how easy it is to lose weight.  And I say that as a skinny guy.

Actually, no it isn't. Or at least, in scientific studies when they have actually controlled access to food, this mysterious metabolism factor seemingly doesn't occur.

The thing is, though, if I'm reading the links you posted correctly (which I may not be, as I just skimmed them), the studies compared people who were of roughly equal size to begin with.  I understand why that would be done, but I'm not sure it's appropriate--you're starting out by excluding the very people who would have differing metabolisms.  It's as if you were studing the fuel economy of automobiles, and the cars you selected for your study were all 2010 model 4-door sedans with curb weights of about 2400 lbs with automatic transmissions and powered by 3.1 liter V-6 engines.  You'd probably find that they all get about the same mileage, but you can't conclude from that that all automobiles will get the about the same mileage--we know that if you had included subcompacts with 1.2 liter 3-cyclinder engines, full-size pickups with 6.0 liter V-8s and sports cars with V-12s, you'd find that all automobiles, in fact, don't get about the same mileage.

[mongers]

I think the confusion about certain people having different "metabolism" is an indication that a calorie is not just a calorie is a calorie. Your "calories" will do vastly different things metabolically speaking depending on where they come from. Calories from meat, eggs and fat will impact you very much differently than calories from soda, candy, wheat and potatoes.

The problem with the standard western diet is that it is loaded with carbohydrates that just spike your insulin and hence get transported right into your fat cells. Everybody is eating shit out of box that comes with rancid estrogen-acting vegetable oils (like soy) and/or HFCS, sugar and trans fats.

90% of the obesity epidemic would be solved if people ate like this.

In some way this is as much a diet fad as any other 'here to day gone tomorrow diet.

Something suggesting that the calories from wheat or many of the other grains are 'bad' is somewhat odd, when those are in part why we are here today ie those sustained much of our western European ancestors. 

So I'll take that with a pinch of salt. 

[MadImmortalMan]

I think it comes down to how easily/quickly digestible they are as opposed to how many calories are in there. That's why wheat and sugar are "worse" than fish or nuts.

[Legbiter]

In some way this is as much a diet fad as any other 'here to day gone tomorrow diet.

Something suggesting that the calories from wheat or many of the other grains are 'bad' is somewhat odd, when those are in part why we are here today ie those sustained much of our western European ancestors. 

So I'll take that with a pinch of salt. 

Nutrionally speaking, grains are pretty damn devoid of minerals and vitamins. Meat and vegetables will contain much more of what a human needs to thrive. Plus, a good grilled steak & salad will keep you full for half a day unlike, say, cheerios with skim milk. We were hunters/gatherers for much, much longer than we've been sickly agriculturalists. Yes, you can technically survive on just porridge with some herbs but you won't thrive, far from it, in fact.

Also, meat and vegetables, a fad diet? You serious? 

[Warspite]

Take smoking for example - quitting smoking is extremely "easy" physically - you just stop doing it. No-one claims that some mysterious physiological force over which they have no control *makes* them smoke. But of course, actually quitting isn't easy at all.

I thought what made nicotine so nasty was the intense physical addiction it created that is not just psychological, but the result of real physiological processes.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I somehow knew this thread would take this direction. I just thought back to when I first got serious into weight lifting, probably 1997, and in that time I've probably studied more scientific papers, discussed the issue with people, actually followed many different techniques etc such that I'd say in the past I've spent on the conservative end 100 hours a year just studying this very topic. That's around 1,500 hours of my life I've devoted to this. I'm not a professional, but I can honestly say half the people I've ever known who have degrees in any type of athletic training or exercise physiology are easily drawn down the path of urban legend and myth.

The simple physiology is, if the body cannot metabolize enough energy from incoming food stores, it will break down fat through a process that changes the continuous flow of free fatty acids into adipose tissue the other direction and starts drawing down the reserve. Various biological processes are at play here, when blood sugar is high fat stores will automatically accumulate and the flow of fatty acids into the adipocytes is primarily weighted towards an overall inward flow and thus accumulation of fat. When blood sugar is low this flow is reversed more or less (the reality is more complex) at the end of the day there are indeed physiological diseases or disorders that can cause wide variations in how this happens, in some people, in some circumstances. For the overwhelming majority of people, the reason they are accumulating large amounts of lipids in their adipocytes is simple persistent overeating.

Where fat accumulates has been proven to be highly influenced by hormonal imbalances and other disorders, with certain types of disorders causing the body to have a stronger proclivity to create excess visceral fat stores as opposed to a more even (based on sex) distribution of fat. But at the end of the day, no human on earth over a sustained period of time can increase their amount of total stored fat in adipocytes if they are operating at a caloric deficit. It is simply impossible, a sustained caloric deficit requires that energy is coming in from outside sources, or eventually you would suffer organ failure and eventually death in various different systems. Basically, you'd starve to death despite eating a decent amount of food and having tons of stored fat.

In my opinion there are a few common sources of grave misunderstanding about calories and fat accumulation / loss

1. A calorie is a calorie is a calorie. This is both true and false, by and large nutritional calories in food are calculated in labs, in a process where they basically burn the food to see how much raw energy is in it. This method does have genuine flaws in terms of how the body actually uses this energy, I can burn a cup of gasoline and it shows a certain amount of energy in that fuel, but a human who drank the cup of gasoline would not obviously be able to use that fuel. Likewise, all meats, vegetables etc have different amounts of energy that can be achieved through burning in a lab versus breakdown in the human body. Some foods are genuinely more efficiently stored in the average human, that is true. However, people can't use this as an excuse as to why they are not losing weight in a sustained period of dieting. Simply because, any effective diet will at minimum cut intake down to 20% less than your total daily energy expenditure, and realistically unless you're a weight lifter who is super concerned about minimizing muscle loss you should probably go 30% or even more below your total daily energy expenditure. TDEE, in this case, being "calculated TDEE" which is going to not be perfectly accurate. If you're at a 30% deficit, then any variations in efficiency of the food you happen to eat, your personal energy level or etc are washed away, all this stuff about highly efficiently processed foods and people with low metabolic rates is simply never enough to overcome a deficit of 30% below a calculated expenditure.

2. People are lead to believe they should lose weight at X calories, and don't. There are several reasons this can happen. One, is the formula may be wrong for you. Two, you may be misreporting your caloric intake. Many nutrition fact box labels are not 100% accurate, and unless you weigh every piece of food you eat (I weigh my food on an expensive, highly accurate scale btw) then you're basically full of shit if you think you know how much you're eating--unless every thing you eat is prepackaged in single portion sizes. But even then, you're susceptible to inaccuracies in reporting and random variation in manufactured food.

3. People don't understand weight versus fat loss. The human body has massive variations in weight on a daily basis and typically less than 10% of that variation has anything at all to do with body fat. It's mostly water retention variability, semi-digested food weight and etc. Many people don't understand normal weight variations can make it look like you've gained a pound in two weeks when you've actually lost fat.

Common ways to throw the above myths away and successfully lose weight, as recommended by me:

1. Get a much more accurate idea how much energy your body is using. Let's use the Harris-Benedict formula. Say you're a 250 lb man, 5'10" tall. That puts you firmly in the obese BMI, and under Harris-Benedict your BMR (this is the amount of energy you'd need if you were laying in bed all day) is: 2308 for a 30 year old. Let's say you are sedentary, which gives you a multiplier of 1.2, so that suggests your daily energy expenditure is around 2770. But here's the thing, Harris-Benedict is based on good science but modern day practice misuses it. It is based on a normal human back when it was developed and does not take into account obese individuals.

But it can be fixed. The reality is, as countless scientific studies have shown, different bodies burn energy at different rates based on that body's composition. Lean body weight is pretty firmly shown to use a certain amount of energy. But fat, is almost (not entirely, but almost) just "dead weight." Generally the bigger you are, the more energy you burn. But two 5'10", 30 year old men, one 250 lbs with 140 lbs of lean body weight and the other 160 lbs with 145 lbs of lean body weight, it is highly likely the 160 lbs man will burn slightly more in a sedentary lifestyle than the 250 lbs man. This is because the best, most accurate way to get your real BMR under Harris-Benedict is to not use your current weight but your lean body weight. To do this you have to calculate your body fat percentage, which is not easy, and I suggest using calipers and not one of those scales that uses electrical induction. It's genuinely the case, a 5'10", medium framed man who is 30 years old and has always been a sedentary person will only have 140 lbs of lean body weight at 250 lbs. That means to get his real BMR and daily energy expenditure he should be using his lean weight, not his weight with all that fat. Put in 145 into the formula, and you get a BMR of 1650 and a total expenditure of 1985. All these numbers, as I mentioned, will vary a bit from person to person in "real" life, but these formulas were not done on the back of a napkin and are a strong and good guideline.

Look at the difference though, made by using lean body weight. An obese person in the above scenario, might have been dieting at 2200 calories a day, based on his misunderstanding of how much energy his 250 lb body would use. In reality, at 2200 calories a day he'd probably be gaining small amounts of weight or just breaking even (I'm assuming as a dieter he might be upping his energy level to slightly more than sedentary, so he'd probably be using more calories than the Harris-Benedict would suggest for a sedentary person.)

2. After you've calculated using the revised Harris-Benedict based on your lean body weight, go ahead and find out how much energy you really use in a day. This is done through a method the founder of AutoDesk made me aware of in the mid-90s in a book he wrote. Basically, he came up with a simple method for separating signal and noise in terms of weight. His hypothesis (and this has proven highly accurate for myself and anyone I've ever known who tries it), is that if you weigh yourself every single day, naked, in the morning (after purging if you go at that time of a day) and chart your weight for one month, you will be able to very accurately come to understand your body's energy expenditure. For this to work, you must focus very hard on accurately recording your caloric intake, that means weighing food and using accepted norms of calorie values for those foods. Everything matters, you need to know the difference between 4 oz of raw chicken and 4 oz of cooked chicken. Weigh yourself every day, each data point is worthless because it's based on water weight variation, but a month of readings will allow you to calculate a real trend. This will allow you to calculate what your weight "trend" is at the end of the month. Let's say you consume 2200 calories exactly every day for 30 days. At the end, your weight loss not as calculated by a single or weekly reading but by a trendline derived from a moving average of daily weigh-ins, is 7 pounds. That's a 24,500 deficit for the month, you consumed 66,000 calories in the month, and that means to have a 24.5k deficit your total usage in the month must be around 90,500 calories. That's 3,016 a day (my number is over 3,000 so this isn't that unrealistic, but an actual obese person needing to lose weight will probably be more in the 2300-2600 range for males, lower for females), I've never met someone who was a lifelong struggler with losing weight who wasn't at least a little surprised by the outcome of this exercise. Almost always they find their actual burn is far less than it "should" be.

For women out there, especially short ones who carry a lot of fat, you might use as little as 1400 calories in a sedentary life, and even smaller framed women with even less lean body weight could very realistically use even less. That means you might seriously need to eat only 1100-1200 calories a day to lose weight, which is below what some fitness experts who teach you to be afraid of "starvation mode" will tell you.

3. Once you've rigorously determined your actual average daily energy usage, you need to make sure you consistently over time eat about 30% less. That 30% deficit, combined with accurate calorie reporting and the rigorous system above for determining actual is as close to a death and taxes type of certainty as you can get with weight loss, because it will account for pretty much all personal/food/etc variations and result in genuine, absolute loss of fat and weight.

[garbon]

Oh God...

[MadImmortalMan]

A science smackdown. 

[Legbiter]

Slight problem Otto. Most people don't want to apply the mathematical rigor I did as an AD&D DM in junior high to their food intake, month in and month out.

It is much easier to just kindly suggest eating 2 large meals a day consisting of meat and veg with no snacking inbetween, with plenty of fat to accompany each meal. Fat and protein are very satiating unlike the carb-heavy wholehearthealthygrain idiocy that's current. Throw in light excercise like walking to start with, while getting your bearings and the results are often quite respectable. 

Your method WILL work if strictly applied, it's unfortunatly just about as fun as plucking your nosehairs out one by one.

[PDH]

Usually, after football season is done, I eat less and lose a bit of weight.  Then in summer I start biking and lose more. Then, when football season starts I eat a bit more and gain a bit.

Weird.

[Legbiter]

Usually, after football season is done, I eat less and lose a bit of weight.  Then in summer I start biking and lose more. Then, when football season starts I eat a bit more and gain a bit.

Weird.

I lose weight on the fatty meat holiday fare of my Norwegian in-laws during Christmas, gain it back with bananas and sweet potatoes once I start lifting and sprinting again with Crossfit. 

[PDH]

Usually, after football season is done, I eat less and lose a bit of weight.  Then in summer I start biking and lose more. Then, when football season starts I eat a bit more and gain a bit.

Weird.

I lose weight on the fatty meat holiday fare of my Norwegian in-laws during Christmas, gain it back with bananas and sweet potatoes once I start lifting and sprinting again with Crossfit.

I have to admit that when I eat less I consciously eat more proteins and fats, less carbs.  I lost about 80 pounds by doing a modified South Beach about 7 years ago...plus I read a lot about the paleo diets (mostly from the anthropologists who talked about it).