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shminux comments on Critiquing Gary Taubes, Part 1: Mainstream Nutrition Science on Obesity - Less Wrong
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Is that really the mainstream claim? Because it doesn't make sense from the engineering standpoint, given that no burner is 100% efficient. Or does "burn" misleadingly include "expelled without burning"? Are there discussions/measurements of the human burning efficiency and how it depends on metabolism and why?
I feel like the calorie issue is a red herring. Diets that require expenditure of willpower almost always fail, regardless of details. The new diet has to be the new normal, without being a source of stress.
You should separate out the need to spend willpower to limit superstimula foods, with that required to reduce your total caloric consumption to where you are always hungry. Any sane eating plan for humans requires the former, whereas a diet requiring the latter is probably doomed to fail.
{Edited in response to below.}
Reasonable, but a fair number of people seem to be able to eat at least some superstimulus foods in moderation, and it might be more sensible to include the possibility of limiting superstimuli rather than eliminating them.
Agreed and edited.
I've never had a problem with weight loss, but on reading on the issue, one insight I've gained is that if you are always hungry on a diet that maintains a healty weight, that is strong evidence that something is misaligned hormonally, be it due to food you are now eating, genetics, some past syndrome developed by diet or exercise, etc.
Perhaps it would help to have a clear definition of "willpower." Does getting up and going to work every day require "willpower"? Based on my understanding of "willpower," I would say it does, although perhaps not as much willpower as sticking to a diet.
Diets that require expenditure of willpower fail because the willpower expenditure indicates that something is going wrong with your body, which may well be shutting down or slowing down. Strangely enough, these same weak-willed dieters often seem to have little trouble exercising hard - for years on end, maybe - though often to no avail, of course.
Diets that "don't require willpower" are the diets that are not wrecking your metabolism, it may be as simple as that.
I seem to be able to come up with various willpower draining activities that are useful, so how should I proceed if I wanted to know a particular diet is such an activity instead? Evolutionarily speaking hunger is clearly an indicator that something is wrong, but I'm not sure how that translates to values of a modern obese human.
Well, exercise is known to have other benefits than weight loss, so I wouldn't encourage people to stop moving their bodies on those grounds. Also, this seems to be the kind of useful activity I was talking about.
It's probably more fair to say that diets which require willpower indicate that something may be going wrong with your body.
The body has a semi-reliable warning system.
I've often wondered, since first learning the little factoid that "the stomach has almost as much neural complexity as the brain", whether we've mis-located the source of the 'willpower' problem.
If our digestive tract is a fully-trainable neural net with direct two-way feedback to our brains (and it certainly seems like it is), then it might be fruitful to start figuring out how to re-train it directly, or short-circuit it. Concepts like "reward circuits" and "willpower" almost invariably focus on the brain in our heads; has anyone done any studies on what the stomach's internal reward circuits look like?
I'm not familiar with much of the rigorous science on gut stuff, a lot of it is fairly new. I will say that the Cue Action Reward model of habit formation works the best when you use the strongest cues and rewards, i.e. sex or food. I started training fasted a couple years ago. I didn't realize that I was reprogramming my cue action reward from
to
to the degree that when hungry my first thought is now to go exercise.
Also, many people who don't succeed at losing weight have notable professional accomplishments.
There are people who maintain weight loss through will power. I don't know whether it's actually good for them.
You only have one pot of willpower. If you use up all your willpower doing professional tasks, exercising, etc then you'll have less willpower to resist over eating. If you use up all your willpower for weight loss, then you'll have less willpower for other tasks.
This article (and other research done by the authors) talks about that sort of thing. This is why diets that work are ones that reduce the amount of willpower required, or shift the willpower requirements to situations where it is easier to control your decision making. For example, a low carb diet works because you simply don't buy carbs at the store, so when you're at home, you don't have to expend willpower when you're hungry and deciding what to eat. Intermittent fasting works because you simply don't eat breakfast.
I eat for pleasure and I have a hard time moderating my intake, so I've worked around this by reducing my breakfast to coffee, yohimbine (caffeine/yohimbine is great for energy and appetite reduction), and fish oil (~2g). Lunch is two cups of milk and two scoops of protein powder as these are all that I have at work, so it is the only option -- no willpower used. This puts my daily calories low enough that I can eat as much as I want for dinner and still lose weight consistently.
Maybe this is just a verbal quibble, but how can someone "consistently lose weight"? Losing weight, if successfully done, results in reaching some target, and then you don't lose weight any more.
I'm training for strength sports, and this involves cycles of gaining weight to add muscle and losing weight to cut fat. As such, I've done a number of weight loss diets in the past two years, and this is what I've found to work every time for me (or, consistently).
Of course for some people it seems to take heroic amounts of willpower not to go shopping for more unhealthy food or go to a restaurant during the lunch break.
I'm experimenting with VLCD right now, and it doesn't seem to take much willpower either. I think the calories are low enough that my body thinks it's starving although it gets everything it needs, so I'm not constantly receiving hunger signals.
Danger! The book the Perfect Health Diet has some very negative things to say about this. As I recall, this kind of diet greatly increases the risk of some diseases.
Danger noted. I'm doing this only a month or two, and don't recommend this to anyone else.
As a side note, will you agree to update everyone in 6 months or a year with how your experiment went?
I doubt I will do it longer than a month or two, but sure, success will be measured in a longer time span. I think losing weight is significantly harder than maintaining it, it's just that most people fail to include maintaining weight to their plans.
Starving for a year doesn't sound like a great dieting plan either.
This is not true. Willpower expenditure is required for all sorts of decision making activities, so that a diet requires willpower expenditure is not evidence that it is damaging your body. A diet that requires significant willpower is severely suboptimal, which is why very few people report success with intense calorie counting and moderation, and why very many people report success with "trick" diets like Shangri-La, paleo, keto, intermittent fasting, etc.
As I understand, outside pathological cases human digestion pretty consistently manages to absorb 95% of the calories we consume (excepting dietary fiber, which we can't digest at all). Calories lost as heat count as burned. There is one complication to this that I'll discus in the next post, but it turns out to be a minor factor.
I've seen a plausible claim that people with lactose intolerance get fewer calories out of dairy products.
The lactose is digested by gut bacteria, the byproducts of which are the problem. By Chris's definition, that counts as digested.
In this claim, "consume" means the number of calories absorbed by the body, and "burn" means the amount of calories used (or wasted).
You can measure you resting metabolic rate. Most people are close enough to what formulas report that actually measuring your caloric expenditure isn't terribly useful, but some people (myself included) have slower metabolisms than calculators and formulas predict.
Are you referring to the energy in chemicals expelled from the body? Once through the digestive system (absorbed in the intestine) there are actually remarkably few ways for chemicals to exit the body. The main route is through respiration, through which CO2 is released. Urine expels liquid-soluble wastes. The energy contained in these wastes (that is, the free energy available from reacting with oxygen) is very low, so it's usually ignored. There are other minor routes (such as sweat and milk), which, aside from special circumstances (lactation) don't expel much energy either.