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Comment by redis_mlc | Hacker News Reader

1) A lot of high-level chess players lift weights, so could be burning twice as many calories daily as an average person.

(Pro US bodybuilders average consuming over 10,000 calories per day, with the record being 20,000 per day. They all take insulin to burn it, which is the open secret inside that community.)

2) Most of the comments about CICO on the Sept. 2019 link miss the point. CICO works for young people with a normal metabolism. But a medical doctor and researcher on one of Joe Rogan's podcasts spent an hour explaining convincingly how that isn't true for others, mainly because fat cells are forever and interact with hormones. His advice on losing fat was, "Get lipo."

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> They all take insulin to burn it, which is the open secret inside that community.

Insulin is a hormone that puts the body into an anabolic (growth) state.

The reason body builders use insulin is partly the reason they consume so many calories, they are trying to eat at a surplus so they build mass…the insulin helps build that mass because it enlarges cells and allows them to store the excess calories. Body builders have notoriously gotten larger once they began using insulin. In particular their stomachs have changed significantly from the pre-insulin days, it’s because the insulin doesn’t just effect muscle growth it also enlarges the organs giving the cartoonishly distended stomach.

The second reason they use insulin is to promoted recovery (anabolism), after a strenuous workout you have broken down the muscle tissue and after a workout when amino acids/protein is consumed to begin repairing the muscle insulin is used with the idea the insulin will force the amino acids into the muscle tissue faster promoting a quicker anabolic effect (recovery).

I stick to John Berardis post workout drink, he did his Phd in Nutrition about it. He works as nutrional advisor for the canadian olympic team and other elite athletes.

50g of glucose to trigger the insulin response and 30g of whey protein.

I add frozen fruit (usually blueberries) to counter the acid buildup from the protein metabolism.

Since i turned vegan i use 20g of rice-, 10g of pea- and 12g of hemp protein powder. Amounts to ~30g of pure protein, magnesium + manganese from hemp is nice as well. Tastes worse, but costs half as much while being organic.

Very interesting.

I'm in a reddit forum called /r/progresspics about CICO/exercise weight loss and it massively skews young.

https://www.reddit.com/r/progresspics/

> CICO works for young people with a normal metabolism.

I assume by "young" you mean age 60 or under.

> The study, of 6,400 people, from eight days old up to age 95, in 29 countries, suggests the metabolism remains "rock solid" throughout mid-life.

> It peaks at the age of one, is stable from 20 to 60 and then inexorably declines.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58186710

Unless you have an actual medical condition, no, there's not an excuse for being fat before 60, you just eat too much. Look at how people eat nowadays and you'll see that it's the same for everybody else: ridiculous over-consumption. Eat less and you'd lose weight like any other normal person (without a medical condition)

So CICO works for young people, but older people can defy the laws of physics?

Yes, specifically the law of physics that says that whenever you want to exercise, the energy stored in your fat cells will magically teleport itself into your muscles.

Without this law of physics, CICO becomes quite useless as a weight loss advice. Yes, you want to burn the calories, but the calories are not moving to the muscles where they could be burned by exercising. What is your next step?

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