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NancyLebovitz comments on How I Lost 100 Pounds Using TDT - Less Wrong
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Bleah. Still not used to this high status thing.
But seriously, if you are not metabolically privileged, what happens if you try this is that your body shuts down and goes into starvation mode instead of losing weight. Your fat cells do not release fat under any circumstances, though they're happy to hoover up blood sugar so you always feel tired. We're not talking "feeling hungry", we're talking that you stop feeling hungry and lie down, feeling very very cold and having a hard time moving. Literal starvation, instead of your fat cells releasing fat. I've never tried starving myself that much (I worry that it will cause my brain to cannibalize irreplaceable neurons or something, the way the rest of the body cannibalizes muscle) but I've just recently watched that happen to someone else who tried to lose weight by not eating and wasn't metabolically privileged enough to get away with it.
A calorie is not a calorie. The thermodynamic theory of metabolism is a fucking lie. And it seriously does wear away on your nerves like sandpaper, after a while, to be blamed for it, when the exact same diet can make one person thin and cause the other to blow up like a balloon...
Eh, just read "Beware of Other-Optimizing."
To generalize a bit: I believe that people's bodies make choices about what to do when handed some calories-- the calories are allocated to heat, movement, immune system, fat, thinking, etc., and very little is known about how to affect how calories are allocated. Treatment for thyroid problems can help, I think-- if that happens to be your problem and your doctor is more astute than most.
One thing that presumably massively influences calory-allocation may be the the prevalence of brown fat in some adult humans. I found a lot of unusual observations about my (privileged) metabolism suddenly explained by the presumed presence of it. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_adipose_tissue#Presence_in_adults
There are some biases that make me favouring this explanation, and there is contradicting evidence, so I am not so sure anymore.