Elo comments on People who lie about how much they eat are jerks - Less Wrong

-10 Post author: Elo 08 August 2016 03:45AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (37)
Tags: iterate test solving problem noticing habits loss weight

Comments (37)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: SquirrelInHell 10 August 2016 02:39:46AM 3 points [-]

As far as I know, yes it would. In "What You Can Change and What You Can't" (which is not a perfect book, but it has some useful content), Seligman gives a reference to a study that actually found that losing weight in overweight middle-aged men made their health worse, not better.

Have you ever noticed that we have lots of evidence that slimmer people tend to be healthier, but not that losing weight makes you healthier? This is a subtle but very important difference.

I do not know any compelling evidence for the latter point. So my estimates are close to the prior, which is that starving yourself is going to at best change little, and at worst ruin your health.

Comment author: Elo 11 August 2016 04:30:34AM -2 points [-]

Seligman gives a reference to a study that actually found that losing weight in overweight middle-aged men made their health worse, not better.

Three considerations:

  • weight in the form of muscle is good. As you lose that you get less healthy. If you lose both 5kg of fat and 5kg of muscle at once you will probably be less healthy at the end of that adventure.
  • Initially changing your bodyweight in large chunks is probably bad but in the long run, being 10kg closer to the ideal bodyweight for your size/age will be better for you. If nothing else - (from first principles) giving your heart less of a hard time pumping blood around.
  • Just losing weight might throw off ratios of things like cholesterol in the body, (again) causing initial unhealthyness but later when they stabilise again you will be generally healthier.

Having not seen the study, I can't be too confident but these don't seem like outrageous explanations.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit