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

[Razgovory]

Okay legbiter, I'll be sure to get on that "brains and seaweed" diet soon now.

[Ed Anger]

I'm gonna eat an entire papa john's pizza tomorrow.

[merithyn]

I simply don't believe it.

Look, food is like fuel. You need to burn a certain amount of it to do X effort, assume X is the amount they do every day. Assuming two people are the same size and strength they will, in all likelihood, use much the same fuel to do X amount of effort. It is not the case that person A is substantially more efficient than person B, can do X effort for less.

That being the case, if you reduce fuel intake (that is, food) to persons A and B below the amount they need to burn to do X effort, while not reducing the amount of effort they do each day, both persons will need to burn the same amount; they can't get it from food, so they must get it from somewhere - and that somewhere is going to be the fat that they have stored. So they will lose weight.

I find it much, much easier to believe that some people are simply "misremembering" the amount they are restricting their caloric intake, than to believe in some suspension of the laws of physics that allows one person to do X amount of effort for substantially less "fuel" than another.

However, seems an easy thing to scientifically test. All you'd have to do is get one of these magic people and monitor them day and night for food intake. See if you calorie-restrict person A (who claims this 'difficulty') exactly the same as person B (who is the same size and strength, diets and loses weight no prob), have them do the same daily routine, and see if, indeed, person A can't lose weight.

I believe that they have done studies that show this to be the case. It showed something to do with the efficiency of the metabolism and the ability of the body to create the right amount of insulin to break down the energy properly. The insulin was the bigger reason for why some find it easier than others to lose weight, but there were other factors at work, like thyroid activity, hormone levels, etc. Leptin resistance is, I believe, one of the big issues for the morbidly obese.

Here's that study.

he mechanisms underlying leptin resistance in obese humans may include defective transport of leptin into the brain, and/or reduced hypothalamic leptin signaling, which is in part due to up-regulation of specific inhibitors of leptin signaling. The pathogenesis of leptin resistance is currently under intense investigation, and it is expected that elucidation of the mechanisms underlying leptin resistance may lead to the development of new therapeutic options for the treatment of obesity.

Weight-loss programs are well known to be ineffective long term, with most individuals regaining any weight lost within a short period of time, and it has been proposed that the corresponding decline in serum leptin levels due to the loss in fat mass may contribute to the inability of these subjects to maintain their weight loss. Exogenous leptin administration to replace leptin levels to preweight-loss levels prevented the regaining of weight and promoted loss of fat mass while preserving fat-free mass (11) in a small group of subjects participating in a weight loss program, but these findings have to be replicated by larger studies.

There's also the body-memory issue for those who have lost weight only to regain it later.

Here's the conclusion of that study:

The preponderance of evidence would suggest that the biological response to weight loss involves comprehensive, persistent, and redundant adaptations in energy homeostasis and that these adaptations underlie the high recidivism rate in obesity therapeutics. To be successful in the long term, our strategies for preventing weight regain may need to be just as comprehensive, persistent, and redundant, as the biological adaptations they are attempting to counter.

[OttoVonBismarck]

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.

Absolutely. My suggested weight loss plan for anyone who has trouble losing weight is "try everything until something works, and keep trying." I explained the physiology of weight loss an exact, rigorous method. My method doesn't care if you're one of those people with all the combinations of bad hormonal problems that make losing weight harder (note harder, if anyone thinks losing weight is impossible they are too stupid to live, if that were the case you'd be a perpetual motion machine.) My method is basically a counterpoint to anyone who says "nothing works" well, my method works. But to make it work you have to follow it exactly, because only by following it exactly can you really know how many calories you're consuming. Only by knowing how many calories you're consuming can you generate a first-month dataset to determine your real energy expenditure. You can have every hormonal or obesity linked gene in the species, and after one month once you know your real energy usage numbers you consume less than that and you will lose weight. Period. End of discussion on that front.

But weight loss is more than just science, the vast majority of weight problems have absolutely nothing to do with what are frankly rare metabolic problems, but instead is just the natural result of human evolution. When you eat to excess you're engaging in normal human behavior, designed to store away energy for famine. When you have trouble losing weight, lose your will to stick with the diet, sneak a candy bar, etc that's also the result of instinct and evolution. The body does not just deploy physiological responses to what it perceives (as much as your body "perceives" things), but psychological ones.

It's hard for almost anyone to lose weight precisely because we're not designed to give up weight easily because it means we aren't getting enough food. If we aren't getting enough food, for most of human history that has meant we're in imminent danger of death. We all know we're a mixture of intellect and willpower and baser animal instincts. You may be happily married but an attractive woman is always going to catch your eye.

The real reason diets fail is almost never because someone strictly eats an appropriate amount of food and never loses weight. Diets almost always fail for these reasons:

1. "The fuck its." This is a situation where you've been on a diet for awhile, and something causes you to just say "fuck it--for today." Maybe you go to a party, so "what the hell" it's just one night of binge drinking and eating. Or maybe it's a big family dinner like Thanksgiving. The problem with the fuck its is they tend to cause you to enter a spiral. You went to a party last night where you said fuck it, so this morning you don't feel so good and you don't feel like eating that boring healthy food you've been eating for three weeks. You've already ruined your week with a binge night, so fuck it, I'll do the same today. It's fine, it's the weekend, come Monday I'll be back on the saddle. Come Monday, you eat a healthy breakfast and lunch, but then dinner time comes around, you're tired from work, you're cranky, a bit sad you blew your diet over the weekend and you think, well I've already said fuck it for two days, I'll just order a pizza tonight. Hell, in two weeks I have that big dinner I'm going to, so I'm going to have to go off my diet then anyway, I'll just forget this diet stuff until then. Once that's past, I'll get right back on the horse.

People can spend their entire lives on a diet and gain weight the whole time because of this.

Solution: Fuck its are mostly a result of stress from being on a diet, desire for comfort foods, and a spontaneous decision to leave the diet that is followed by continually making those same decisions. One of the best ways to avoid this is to have pre-planned cheat meals, where you get to eat some unhealthy comfort food. Pre-planned cheat meals won't make you feel guilty the next morning, instead it'll feel like an earned reward. They'll keep stress lower because you know they're coming, and they refresh your willpower. Unplanned deviations cause downward spirals, a properly followed schedule of pre-planned cheat meals can help you avoid this trap.

2. Excessive snacking. In the grand scheme of things, an occasional little unhealthy snack is a good thing. But some people take it to excess, instead of a handful of M&Ms they take one here and there over the day until they've downed one of those big economy size bags in a day sitting at their desk at work, in addition to all the other food they eat for the day. Basically you get it in your mind if you follow your diet most days, but just occasionally pepper it with a random unplanned snack, you'll be okay. But what happens is these random snacks happen more than you realize, multiple times a week. And they aren't small, they might be hundreds of calories, thousands in a month. Enough to totally derail a diet.

Solution: By far this is best resolved by keeping a food log / journal / diary (using Calorie Count, MyFitnessPal, Sparkpeople, Excel Spreadsheet etc), as it keeps you mindful of what you're doing and helps you avoid the illusion that these snacks are so little as to be unimportant.

3. Runaway bingeing. This is what happens if you have a binge eating problem. People who have binge problems, combine the stress and willpower requirements of a diet, and they're set up for a hard, hard fall. These people even do the right thing, they plan cheat meals to take off the stress. But their brain starts firing off chemicals like an alcoholic the moment that fatty lasagna or pizza is going into their mouth for their cheat meal. What was supposed to be a single unhealthy meal turns into 2-3 days of calories in a single afternoon, Ben & Jerry's ice cream pints disappearing, whole bags of chips, a sleeve of oreos etc. Binge eaters have a lot of behavioral similarities to alcoholics, and their binge on a "cheat meal" day can undue weeks of dieting. Sometimes they will diet successfully for many months, and at the end, destroy it all in a few weeks of persistent binge eating.

FWIW, I've never been really fat because of my extreme lifting routine, but I've probably lost more weight than anyone on this forum because part of building muscle involves bulking up sometimes, and you have to cut at times to get some excess fat off. There's been times I've gotten a bit heavier in a bulk than I wanted, and it's because I definitely have some of the tendencies of a binge eater. I have serious weaknesses for cheap junk food, I can easily down a full bag of chips, a large pizza is no challenge for me, half a gallon of ice cream etc. I know this about myself, and thus anytime I eat food like that I take specific actions to make sure it doesn't happen. Make sure you eat ice cream out of a bowl, not the container. The moment you finish run water over spoon/bowl so you have to dry it off etc to get more. Pour some chips into a bowl, put the rest somewhere not easily reachable so it's an annoyance to get them. When I overeat this stuff, it's almost like the part of me that controls food intake is turned off. It's not a pleasure response so much as it's just...a continuous desire to keep eating, and I don't get full at all. The only way to break this sort of thing is to recognize when it is happening and have things set up so you can turn it off.

[Josquius]

Something I often like to bring up is this "starvation mode" that a lot of diet experts talk about. Starvation mode is basically when you're starving, you enter a "low energy state" where your body uses less energy. Diet advisers always say you have to avoid this, because it lowers metabolism and makes it very hard to lose weight. I've always found that to be false, and a few years ago a study came out saying the same thing: that it takes 60 hours of fasting to truly enter "starvation mode." There is little evidence "extreme" diets like VLCDs (physician supervised diets where you eat 3-4 prescription meal-shakes each day, totaling usually under 800 calories) put your body into "starvation mode" and make you unable to lose weight, and the whole concept defies certain basic facts about physics and human biology. The truth is, 800 calories/day on a physician supervised VLCD is one of the most effective non-surgical methods for the morbidly obese to lose weight rapidly.

That's starvation mode though. Your metabolism does alter to smaller degrees based on how much you eat right?
Most I've read on healthy eating seems to suggest a few lean days and one normal eating/perhaps even slightly excessive eating day to keep your metabolism used to such stuff.
This is wrong?

They're doing it wrong.

I certainly feel pretty well....errr......buggered doesn't work here....nor does fucked.....knackered after the act.

[Ideologue]

I burned 42 calories today.

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

All twelve minutes of it.

[katmai]

Ide gains weight as he's made food integral to his sex.

[Ed Anger]

I burned 42 calories today.

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

All twelve minutes of it.

Amatuer.

[Malthus]

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.

You thought wrong. The purely phyisical symptoms of nicotine withdrawal are mild and disappear completely after a couple of weeks or so if one goes cold turkey. What makes smoking so hard to shake is the psychological aspects of addiction.

http://www.quitsmokingstartnow.com/ArticleSideEffectsOfQuitingSmoking.asp

This is why so many people cycle through quitting and going back to smoking.

[Malthus]

I simply don't believe it.

Look, food is like fuel. You need to burn a certain amount of it to do X effort, assume X is the amount they do every day. Assuming two people are the same size and strength they will, in all likelihood, use much the same fuel to do X amount of effort. It is not the case that person A is substantially more efficient than person B, can do X effort for less.

That being the case, if you reduce fuel intake (that is, food) to persons A and B below the amount they need to burn to do X effort, while not reducing the amount of effort they do each day, both persons will need to burn the same amount; they can't get it from food, so they must get it from somewhere - and that somewhere is going to be the fat that they have stored. So they will lose weight.

I find it much, much easier to believe that some people are simply "misremembering" the amount they are restricting their caloric intake, than to believe in some suspension of the laws of physics that allows one person to do X amount of effort for substantially less "fuel" than another.

However, seems an easy thing to scientifically test. All you'd have to do is get one of these magic people and monitor them day and night for food intake. See if you calorie-restrict person A (who claims this 'difficulty') exactly the same as person B (who is the same size and strength, diets and loses weight no prob), have them do the same daily routine, and see if, indeed, person A can't lose weight.

I believe that they have done studies that show this to be the case. It showed something to do with the efficiency of the metabolism and the ability of the body to create the right amount of insulin to break down the energy properly. The insulin was the bigger reason for why some find it easier than others to lose weight, but there were other factors at work, like thyroid activity, hormone levels, etc. Leptin resistance is, I believe, one of the big issues for the morbidly obese.

Here's that study.

he mechanisms underlying leptin resistance in obese humans may include defective transport of leptin into the brain, and/or reduced hypothalamic leptin signaling, which is in part due to up-regulation of specific inhibitors of leptin signaling. The pathogenesis of leptin resistance is currently under intense investigation, and it is expected that elucidation of the mechanisms underlying leptin resistance may lead to the development of new therapeutic options for the treatment of obesity.

Weight-loss programs are well known to be ineffective long term, with most individuals regaining any weight lost within a short period of time, and it has been proposed that the corresponding decline in serum leptin levels due to the loss in fat mass may contribute to the inability of these subjects to maintain their weight loss. Exogenous leptin administration to replace leptin levels to preweight-loss levels prevented the regaining of weight and promoted loss of fat mass while preserving fat-free mass (11) in a small group of subjects participating in a weight loss program, but these findings have to be replicated by larger studies.

There's also the body-memory issue for those who have lost weight only to regain it later.

Here's the conclusion of that study:

The preponderance of evidence would suggest that the biological response to weight loss involves comprehensive, persistent, and redundant adaptations in energy homeostasis and that these adaptations underlie the high recidivism rate in obesity therapeutics. To be successful in the long term, our strategies for preventing weight regain may need to be just as comprehensive, persistent, and redundant, as the biological adaptations they are attempting to counter.

Your studies are looking at a different factor - the role of various substances in triggering feeling of satiety or the reverese; in short, that the body responds to certain stimuli by making one hungry and eat more; and that these processes explain why people who diet to lose weight have to keep control of their diet or they will regain all they lost.

It isn't saying that if one were locked away and forced to eat less, one would not lose weight. For one, that would rather defy the laws of physics.

In the early 1950s, it was first postulated that food intake is closely linked to the amount of stored energy (fat mass) in the body. During the 1970s and 80s, gut peptide cholecystokinin, bombesin, gastrin-releasing peptide, neuromedin B (1) and glucagon (2) were identified as "immediate" satiety signals released from the gastrointestinal tract in response to the presence of food. During the 1990s, leptin was recognized as a longer-term adiposity signal, secreted in proportion to body fat stores. Moreover, in addition to modulating immediate peripheral satiety signals, insulin and leptin were shown to directly target the central nervous system and inhibit food intake (3). The currently accepted model of energy homeostasis proposes that peripheral signals become integrated with other regulators of food intake, such as the presence of food, habits or social behavior. Similarly, meal termination may be governed by extrinsic factors and intrinsic factors, the latter including signals generated in the organism in response to the consumption of food.

[mongers]

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.

You thought wrong. The purely phyisical symptoms of nicotine withdrawal are mild and disappear completely after a couple of weeks or so if one goes cold turkey. What makes smoking so hard to shake is the psychological aspects of addiction.

http://www.quitsmokingstartnow.com/ArticleSideEffectsOfQuitingSmoking.asp

This is why so many people cycle through quitting and going back to smoking.

I think it's social aspects and rituals have also played a part in the 'addiction'

[MadImmortalMan]

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).

Wow, 80 pounds? That's great. You'd have to chop me in half to lose that much.

[PDH]

Wow, 80 pounds? That's great. You'd have to chop me in half to lose that much.

In my late 30s I weighed in at close to 330lbs.  That 80 was just the first 2 years, then I stayed put for a while.  Now I am around 220.

[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.

You thought wrong. The purely phyisical symptoms of nicotine withdrawal are mild and disappear completely after a couple of weeks or so if one goes cold turkey. What makes smoking so hard to shake is the psychological aspects of addiction.

http://www.quitsmokingstartnow.com/ArticleSideEffectsOfQuitingSmoking.asp

This is why so many people cycle through quitting and going back to smoking.

This link suggests more long lasting and deeper effects:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/emotional_health/addictions/nicotine.shtml

[Malthus]

I think it's social aspects and rituals have also played a part in the 'addiction'

Indeed; one has to change one's way of life not to include "smoke breaks" or smoking while drinking with your smoking buddies. Not easy to do.

I'm classifying all that under "psychological" addiction.