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Comment by bscphil | Hacker News Reader

> Modern nutrition science has found that each person, at any given time, has a "metabolic setpoint". This is basically a target weight that their endocrine system is trying to keep them at.

Citation? This goes against everything I've heard from credentialed experts and against my own experience as well. For one thing, it's unclear how you'd explain the weight gain of the median person in the western world over the last 30 years. For another, it's very strange that people like me (previously) gained 5-10 pounds a year, if our bodies were supposedly trying to keep us at a particular set point.

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Metabolic set points can and will drift over time. So if somebody starts out with a setpoint at 22 BMI, they might naturally be anywhere from 21-24 BMI at any given time. As food in the environment becomes more hyper-palatable and calorically dense, people are more likely to "settle" at the upper end of this range. Over time spending more time at the upper end of one's range will "nudge" up the setpoint gradually and continuously.

But the point is this is a slow and continuous process that occurs over years or even decades. Discontinuously making a big shift in weight, up or down, is basically impossible. Which is why despite very high rates of obesity, it's basically unheard of for someone to gain 50 lbs in a short period of time. Almost all weight gain takes the form of 5 lbs one year, 5 lbs another year, and so on.

I would look for studies on ghrelin (the hunger hormone) - lose weight it goes up, gain weight it goes down - that's the set point behaviour.

The phenomena of an ever increasing set point I believe is down to periods of willful over-indulgence that overruns the power of our hormonal homeostasis to recover from so it settles higher than it started when pushed too hard.

Christmas, holidays, times of stress, home-baking passions (my downfall), liquid calories and ultra calorie dense eating-for-leisure that don't stimulate our sense of fullness early enough to stop.

The cruelty is that it's a hell of a lot easier to eat when not hungry than to push a plate away when jonesing for it, so it keeps going up.

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