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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

Obesity has been an annoyingly difficult problem to "solve". I say "solve" because in most cases the solution is simply to eat sensibly and not be sedentary (ignoring people with genuine physiological problems such as thyroid conditions).

But there is unquestionably a desire for people to be able to eat essentially what they want and to stay slimmer older. At some point someone will figure out a pharmaceutical solution to that problem and make a fortune (probably eclipsing what Viagra did for Pfizer). Current drugs that block appetite and/or fat absorption tend to have nasty side effects and questionable utility.

Killing fat cells is certainly a novel approach, especially considering that relationship between fat cells and weight changes (eg fat cells will increase in size to a certain point before growing new fat cells), one that may even be relevant for people who have lost a lot of weight.

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And solving lung cancer is simply a matter of getting people to not smoke. Having tried and failed for 15 years to just "eat sensibly", I can promise you there is a whole lot more than just wanting to be able to have your cake and eat it, too.

And lest you think it's just a will-power thing, I spent years on narcotics for pain management and had few problems getting off those.

The deck is stacked incredibly against obese people. To wave it off like that is to vastly underestimate the root causes.

It is a lifelong marathon. If you are serious about solving the weight problem, let me suggest a viable long term solution.

Gain muscle mass. Let's say you are 250 pounds and extremely weak. You may hit the gym and burn 200 calories. Gain a large amount of strength, and you suddenly burn 400 calories in the same session.

I haven't encountered a physically fit individual who has struggled to lose weight. However many fit individuals have a hard time maintaining a comfortable weight due to eating habits/will power.

Also a huge problem with the "eat sensibly" concept is the deck is stacked against you in the US. Portions are huge and calorie dense. I would bet you could not maintain your current weight living in Asia.

Typical diets are to blame too. I can not completely back this up, but it is well known in body building:-

Person begins to diet, they actually do lose weight (rather than just the usual water weight), but up to 25% of the weight they lose is actually lean mass, that is muscle. Your body devours itself when it is lacking caloric input, via fat reserves, and muscle tissue. In order to minimise the muscle loss and maximise fat loss, you need to be doing an appropriate amount of strength training, as well as eating enough protein.

The worst possible outcome is that you do a number of cycles of a diet, with zero strength training, and every time you gain weight after a diet, you've gained more fat, and are now the proud owner of a body with even less lean mass.

Muscle burns energy even when idle, fat does not. So you are spot on, the easiest way to lose fat is to gain muscle mass. Most of us are physically piss weak and shouldn't be.

Quoted from Lyle McDonald, one of the most respected individuals on the topics of exercise, diet, and nutrition :

Q: Does adding muscle burn more calories?

A: "Some of this also comes from the still gross misconception that ‘muscle burns a ton of calories’ (a myth I took apart in Dissecting the Energy Needs of the Body – Research Review). That is, they hope to jack up metabolic rate by increasing muscle mass. Which is a futile activity because the effect is minimal (on top of the fact that the obese are already carrying extra muscle mass). A pound of muscle burns about 6 calories at rest, you have to add a ton to impact on metabolic rate (see also the next issue I discuss, low metabolic rate isn’t a problem). And that takes a lot of time, time better spent focusing on active fat loss."

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/training-the-obese...

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/research-review/dissecting-...

the claim is not that muscle sitting still burns more calories but that a very high weight exercise session burns more calories than a low weight exercise session. if you don't lift heavy things regularly you aren't weak because your muscles can't lift that weight. you are weak because your CNS is not used to firing in a coordinated manner needed to activate all the muscle at once. this is where "newbie gains" come from, you aren't changing anything just learning to use what you already have. until you build up this coordination you are literally incapable of actual strenuous exercise.

If you manage your heart rate properly, you can burn a lot of calories when lifting, close to par with traditional cardio activities. Most people don't lift this way, but doing so can help you reach your fitness goals more efficiently.

"A pound of muscle burns about 6 calories at rest"

Is that per hour or per day?

I haven't encountered a physically fit individual who has struggled to lose weight

I do daily exercise, have done strength training for years, and am careful of what I eat and how much of it — even with this scheme it’s not easy to keep my weight at its present level, so while I’m definitely physically fit, it is a big struggle to avoid gaining weight.

If I compare my activities, food intake, etc. to those of my slim peers, it’s clear that the cards are just stacked differently.

>I do daily exercise, have done strength training for years

Mixing those two is a bad sign, because strength training takes a while to recover from. You might be doing something wrong -- how much do you squat?

You might be doing something wrong

I am aware of restoration period for muscle tissue rebuilding — I have struggled with this for 10+ years (getting my BMI down from above 28 to around 22 in that period) and have of course read plenty related to weight loss (metabolism, calories, strength-training) hoping to find the silver bullet, but there is none (for me), it’s just a lot of hard work, hence why I felt mrtron’s comment deserved a reply.

Well I don't know any of that unless you post your back squat. If youre doing strength trainng correctly, the absolute lowest you should be lifting is 250lb for the back squat after at most 6 months. You might get better results with less work if you do it correctly.

I do think it's a will power thing, or maybe a planning thing. Losing weight is simple - weigh your food, track the calories, and don't exceed your daily calorie limits. People often refuse to do this or cheat when they do, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.

Of course, I don't think there is anything wrong with using technology to have your cake, eat it too, and not get fat.

It is simple like walking from New York to Florida and back, over and over, is simple. You just put one foot in front of the other.

And if you did that, you'd probably lose weight, too :-)

It's more complicated than that. Dieting itself saps your willpower (related to glucose in the brain). Letpin issues plague for at least a year after you lose the weight (making you overly hungry), making it extremely likely you'll gain the weight back and more.

Willpower can stop you from originally gaining the weight, but once on, it's a different story, and one that society doesn't really solve yet in a repeatable fashion.

Letpin issues plague for at least a year after you lose the weight (making you overly hungry), making it extremely likely [that you will choose to eat more food than you need to maintain a healthy bodyweight and] you'll gain the weight back and more.

Fixed that for you.

And a calorie is just a calorie, right? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15588283

To a first approximation, yes it is. Your paper provides chemical mechanisms which explain some of the second order corrections.

If you are a bodybuilder aiming for muscle + visible 6-pack, or a fighter aiming for a specific weight class, you care about the second order corrections. If you are a fattie, the second order corrections means you might approach a healthy weight slightly faster or slower than the HB equation predicts.

Many people have lung cancer even if they don't smoke, and many also died old without lung cancer despite smoking all day.

cletus, there's tons of research to suggest that simply being overweight perpetuates being overweight because in the vast majority of individuals, being overweight in the first place triggers all kind of "physiological problems" -- such as insulin problems (Syndrome X), liver problems (non-alcoholic enlargement), hormonal problems, uterine problems (PCOS), etc., which all conspire to make you hungrier, fatter and actively prevent you from losing weight (BEYOND just making you hungrier). And that is without even considering "set point theory" as described by the research of Seth Roberts.

Once you gain weight, you are basically screwed.

We're not meant to live in such abundance.

Actually, the standard theories ("scientific consensus", if you go for that sort of thing) suggest that as you gain weight, the rate at which you burn calories increases. I.e., fat takes calories to maintain.

This causes bodyweight to be a mean-reverting random walk and explains why most individuals maintain a stable weight which increases slowly through their lives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harris-Benedict_equation

It's not by any means perfect, but it's a good approximation for most individuals.

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