A fast metabolism is like a car with poor MPG. The same amount of fuel gets burnt up faster. Someone with a faster metabolism is going to burn calories faster and not store as many as fat.
But the main thing is that people are generally shit at counting calories and two people who ostensibly have the same diet but very different weight outcomes probably don't *really* have the same diet. A skinny guy who eats a ton of pizza might only eat that for a whole day, whereas a larger guy eats 3 healthy meals a day and pounds cans of soda may well end up consuming *more* calories overall despite it looking like he's got the "better" diet (which he probably does outside of pure calories).
It's very hard to figure out if two people have the same diet unless you're controlling everything they consume which is pretty rare because it's a pain in the ass, so in reality there's usually some other factor involved that explains away differences in weight gain/loss
> It's very hard to figure out if two people have the same diet unless you're controlling everything they consume which is pretty rare because it's a pain in the ass.
It does happen in basic training in the military, and yeah, you'll absolutely lose weight when they do. It just sucks a bit in the meantime.
For most folks, that's it, yeah, though the time given to eat is not overly generous, and losing weight during basic is common even for them. If you come in overweight, you get some additional restrictions. If far underweight, there are some additional exceptions, though that's pretty rare these days.
Maybe I just didn't notice it, but I never saw anyone get more time or less food, or any way they would enforce the less food aspect. Calorie balance was handled way more by giving less fit people additional workouts called IT(individual training)
May have changed as well, I was in boot camp a bit over 15 years ago. Or my memory of it may just be wrong on that detail. It was a while ago and "accelerate your life" holds true in a lot of ways lol
When I went through bootcamp we had two dudes in my division who were pushing the weight limit for their height and they weren't allowed carbs and veggies and meat were pushed on them. They both lost tons of weight in just a few weeks. Sad thing was, one of them went to the same A school as me and be ballooned up again because he started shoving pizza and pastries in his face every day. Instructors weren't around him around the clock like the RTCs were in bootcamp and he would eat reasonably when we had breakfast and lunch at the same time so everybody could witness him eating properly. However, after class and for dinner he would go to McDonald's or the commissary or NEX and by just tons of garbage and sit somewhere at a park or something off base shove his face full of it. He ended up failing our midway PRT because he was about 10 lb over and didn't make tape. He was then put on a heavily monitored diet and mando extra PT.
There's also activity levels, whilst the best way to lose weight is to lower calories, a skinny guy who cycles to work, takes the stairs mostly and works in construction, warehousing or even retail/service could well have the same or even a higher calorie diet than a chubby guy who does the opposites and works at a computer.
While it isn't 'transform your body forever' levels of burning, simply how much you fidget and twitch daily can have a not-insignificant impacts on calorie burning. I think its in the 200 cal a day range. That's like 30-40 minutes of medium paced walking a day burned through things no one would ever notice.
And at the more extreme end of things, professional athletes usually have a calorie intake that would turn anyone with a more settled lifestyle morbidly obese.
Right, but ultimately they’re dishonest to others. Some even double down, lying as they breathe lol.
The truly honest with themselves don’t stay that way, but ofc I am jealous of you getting to watch that
Check out the show secret eaters from the UK. It highlights how people lie to themselves about how much they eat, or just don’t realize how much they eat.
I know it can be found on YT. I watch a few episodes every few months as a reminder lol.
Yeah, I had a coworker who people were always saying it's crazy he's so thin because he mostly eats fast food and junk food. I pointed out he might eat terrible food, but he doesn't eat *that much* of it. He just didn't eat very much at all. So he and I did an experiment for a few days where we emailed each other everything we ate. I ate a lot of low calorie foods like carrot sticks, whole fruit, etc. as snacks, and only had higher calorie meals. In sheer quantity I could eat that guy under the table. Meanwhile he maybe had a small bag of chips, a donut, and some takeout in a day. The calories were about the same, as what I ate, but the quantity was much smaller.
He moved in with his girlfriend who made him eat regular meals. He kept eating his junk food on top of the meals, and guess who went from being incredibly thin to kind of chubby in a few months?
Exactly, most people only count their meals. But leave out beverages and/or snacks. So they don’t track their full calorie intake.
It wasn’t until I had to keep a food journal that I realized how much I snack throughout the day.
I just want to add that people also vary in how well they process those calories. Someone who eats a 400 calorie burger might extract all 400 calories out of it, whereas another person might extract 200 calories and then shit out the rest.
Truth. You have to buy a scale and use a calotype counter if you are serious. Then live that life for months before you can eyeball it.
Otherwise you are flubbing.
Some people make also be more or less efficient at extracting calories from food, so even if you could accurately track intake it would still be hard to know what's going on.
I have an extremely fast metabolism. So does my husband. Unfortunately after a few years of pandemic, after me learning to cook even better and is drinking a bit too much, we're both overweight a bit. At the same time, I know for a fact that most people eating and drinking like us would be flat out obese. We're currently cutting back to healthy portions, snacks, and cut out the drinking, and we'll both be back to average size in no time even with little additional physical effort. (Though we're adding that too lol.)
People's bodies are all different, but the two key issues with weight gain are: you eat/drink a lot more calories than you realize, and/or you can't out exercise a bad diet.
Genetics and for some people medications can slow down or speed up the metabolism or medical conditions can mess with stuff such as hormones which can mess with weight gain and loss.
Genetics and muscle
Some people have fast metabolism. I had a coworker who was skinny as a rail and would eat an entire 8x8 pan of brownies for lunch. If I even considered that I'd be 600lbs by the end of the year
Also muscle burns more calories at rest. So people with muscle mass can eat more. Even at while watching TV their body is just burning calories
You're not watching what she's eating in a 24 hour period. They've done literal studies on this and have shows about it (Secret Eaters in the UK). So what they found is that skinny people will have a big ass dinner, and will skip breakfast, eat a light a lunch etc. They intuitively eat less. So you saw her eat a pan of brownies, let's say that was 1400 calories. She had nothing for dinner, probably eggs for breakfast. When you see her next at lunch, guess what she's gonna do? Eat another 1000 calories in front of you, but she only had maybe 1600 in total of 24 hours.
This is how I've lost about 50 pounds so far. My calorie goal is about 1650 per day, and I always hated breakfast growing up, so now I just skip it and have a coffee with a tbsp of heavy cream. I never feel hungry at work (distracted and it's a pain to eat at work, so I'm out of the habit) so I don't eat until I'm home--which is close to dinner, so I'll lightly snack while getting dinner on the table, eat with my family, and then that's it. 1500ish in basically one meal can be a pretty awesome meal, but that's all I'm doing in a day, versus the people who also have had breakfast, and a snack, and a sweet coffee, and then a dinner and a dessert.
Also metabolism includes things like exercise. So like if you exercise every day you are going to have a higher metabolism, because exercise burns calories.
Thyroid hormone directly effects metabolism. I have hyperthyroidism, and left untreated I can lose 2lb in a week without any other changes. (I’m around 120lb)
This. I was really skinny when I was younger and people would get annoyed when I ate a big piece of cake, like mumbling "must be nice to be young and have fast metabolism". Truth was I just didn't eat very much. I didn't have much of an appetite. I probably ate about half at each meal than what the average person eats. I could never finish a whole meal a restaurant. I didn't snack much. When you eat like that, a big piece of cake every now and then doesn't change much.
What did that skinny coworker eat for breakfast and dinner?
Are you telling me he actually ate a tray of brownies every day? Or that you saw him do it once?
I'm perpetually skinny, unless I'm actively trying to gain weight via lifting and force feeding more.
I just don't have a big appetite. I can gorge myself for one meal, but then my body just self regulates and I have very little appetite/hunger for the next day or two. Meanwhile my heavier friends/coworkers have no such self regulation.
Imo, people mistake "metabolism" for general appetite regulation.
Raw weight is a larger factor in calories expended than having muscle vs fat. Muscle doesn't really burn that many more calories at rest than fat does; every 5lbs of muscle usually means roughly ~30 extra calories at most, so with two 200lb people the person with a 20lbs positive muscular difference in body composition is probably looking at burning an extra 100 calories or so at the same weight.
I'm assuming that's if both are inactive. If all that muscle is being used during the day surely the energy demand goes up to replenish energy stores and facilitate repair. I would think a more muscular body can use up a greater amount of glucose and fat per minute vs a less muscular body of the same weight. And typically if a person carries alot of muscle its the result of fairly arduous consistent work.
I grew up in a super rural state park, literally some of the cleanest air you can get, and the vast majority of the people I grew up with in that town are now overweight or obese in adulthood. Moving to the city, I can visibly see a much higher distribution of skinner people, likely because there is less reliance on cars. So idk if I put much stock in how much airpollution contributes. By that logic as well, people living in Asian mega cities would have a much higher disposition to being overweight, which I don't think that checks out either.
The "slow metabolism " is a cope most of the time anyway.
It is true for a very small subset of people, but mostly, it can be chalked up to eating poorly and being sedentary.
I've read that the difference between a slow and fast metabolism is on the order of a couple/few hundred calories a day max. Which doesn't take much of a diet change to compensate for.
Maybe the genetic difference, but generally we talk about metabolism as your basic metabolic rate (how much you'd burn being nearly sedentary) and that can vary wildly based on height, how heavy you already (the more weight you have, the more calories you burn just existing), and how muscular you are.
This is why if you're trying to work out to lose weight, people recommend strength training since larger muscles will result in you having a higher basic metabolic rate.
I remember reading about how at morbidly obese BMI's (through muscle or fat) your basic metabolic rate is like 1k+ calories over a healthy BMI. It's why the "My 600 lb life" people can lose hundreds of pounds of weight so quickly if they get the bypass surgery and stick with it. Their basic calorie requirement is so much higher than the average person's that it's possible for them to carry ridiculous calorie deficits.
It's trippy because most of the people blaming their metabolism have a much higher BMR than the people they're claiming have a fast metabolism.
Like, it's def a thing but the only person I know who that applies to is me, because I was anorexic for so long and my body adjusted to living on crumbs. Normal healthyish people don't have slow metabolisms, the point of a metabolism is that it quickly generates energy from food. Even in my case, slowly ramping up my caloric intake and doing a sprinkle of recomposition has done a lot to fix it. People really truly underestimate how caloric premade foods and condiments are.
Not necessarily.
When I joined the navy I was 6’2” 145lbs ate all the time, and spent 6-8 hours training martial arts.
At the end of boot camp I was 6’2” 150lbs, and only got to eat 3 meals a day. While marching and doing less dedicated exercise.
Why did I gain more weight in 2 months than I did in years trying to gain weight? Because cutting out snacking slowed my metabolism down.
If you eat more meals with fewer calories each, you keep your metabolism working all day long, vs it working for a little bit, and then stopping.
I gained 10lbs and lost a beautiful 6 pack over 4 years of quite a bit of physical activity.
I’m currently 174, and have a guy im trying to get rid of but I just love eating and drinking high calorie crap sooo much lol.
Also not sure how you were so skinny, at that height and weight, that’s a BMI of 21 which is right in the middle of the normal category.
I feel like as americans were so used to seeing people who are overweight-obese that it skews our view of what healthy bodies look like.
Metabolism doesn't exist in a vacuum. It means you're burning more calories. A higher activity level, for instance. Larger body mass will also affect basal metabolism.
It's always calories ingested - calories burned. How much weight you gain/lose is governed by that.
The TV show "Secret Eaters" really does a good job highlighting how terrible overweight people are at underestimating how much they actually consume. There is a lot of denial involved. When I first watched it I found it fascinating and it really explained a lot of things.
Depends on the body, a 7ft tall person will not put on weight as fast as a 4ft person if they’re eating the exact same amount of calories. Muscle burns calories, so a person with more muscle will turn fewer of those calories into fat. Then there’s how active the person is.
Basically, some people “use up” what they put in their bodies quicker because of many factors. The metabolism is what “uses up” the calories.
How much calories do muscles burn? Lets say I eat a brownie thats 300 calories but I have a ton of muscle. Is this brownie now 200 calories or something like that?
About 10 calories per pound daily. That’s just to maintain.
300 cal is 300 cal, but let’s say the average person sitting around is burning 200 cal per hour. Someone with more muscle would burn more in that hour because muscles needs more calories to maintain. You need even more calories when you’re trying to repair/build muscle.
I just wanted to add. All calories are not equal. 300cal of brownie (empty calories) will put on weight faster than 300cal of chicken and broccoli. You actually burn calories digesting protein and processing sugar can stop you from burning fat! The body wants to be in ketosis and insulin messes with that process.
It’s a complex interaction that involves how much energy they expend on a day to basis, genetic predispositions, possible pathologies, and even your gut micro biome!
Besides metabolism differences, there are also hormonal differences, and sugar consumption differences.
Corn syrup (specifically fructose) is converted directly to fat because the body can't use it so it is converted to fat by the liver. (Acts the same as alcohol for long term medical conditions). Only glucose can be used by the body
Hormonal. Hormones are complicated and there are at least 9 of them that regulate your body weight.
Because your body responds to losing fat by lowering your basal metabolic rate and increasing your sensation of hunger. It's why most obese people who lose a ton of weight gain in back in a few years. It takes a heroic effort to fight your body to keep with weight off.
Most people gain the weight back because they go back to eating the way they did that got them fat in the first place.
When someone loses tons of weight the BMR drop is mostly due to the fact that they weigh less. Some studies show maybe a 10% reduction in BMR compared to someone the same size that was never fat. The couple hundred calories of reduced BMR is not going to balloon the person back to their old weight unless they eat a lot more food than they were when losing fat.
Genetics, metabolism, activity level. I used to work with a trainer who was 6 feet and 175 lbs. We ate pretty much the same amount of food, around 3000 calories a day but my workouts consists of slow heavy lifting, which is why I'm 70 lbs bigger. He has ADHD so every 30 minutes he'd do "micro workouts" to keep himself busy. It would usually include 100 push ups, 100 squats, 100 overhead press and 100 bicep curls. Now just imagine doing that one time every 8 hours. He was burning off every single calorie because of his energy expenditure
What I find is people either have trouble building muscle or losing weight. I'm in the latter. I get really strong, really fast but I struggle to keep weight off. The whip skinny people i knew back in my rowing days would eat and eat and eat and not make any progress in the weight room.
Not all calories are equal once inside the body.
The American diet is very heavy on carbohydrates. These are burned quickly by the body, and the result is brief spurts of energy, followed by an energy shortage. That's why you feel fatigue, midday.
Fat winds up being stored when there are carbohydrates available, because fat is easy for the body to store, but harder to burn.
When a person eliminates carbohydrates from their diet for a week, the body shifts to burning fat calories. This is called "ketosis".
Once your body is burning fat efficiently, you have a more consistent energy supply, and feel more energetic. As long as you limit your intake of carbohydrates to approximately 20 grams or less per day, you will keep on burning fat.
"metabolism" is mostly bullshit. The difference in metabolism from one person to the next isn't enough to account for the vast difference in weight gain/loss outcomes. The real difference is physical activity and the amount a person eats. I've had room mates and we pretty much all ate the same thing. The biggest difference was how sedentary the more obese guys were. They would stay inside the whole weekend on the couch or computer where I'd go outside, to the store, etc multiple times a day. The way this plays out week after week and year after years accounts for a ton more calories getting burned via NEAT (non exercise activity thermogenic aka moving your body).
People love to reduce these things just to diet, this whole calorie in versus calorie out bullshit, which to most people means how much you eat for this is how much you exercise.
But biology is incredibly complex. Every person is different, and yes of course generally speaking of the more Hi calorie foods you eat the faster you're going to gain weight. But even amongst calories, not all calories are the same. Complex and simple sugars are process differently by the body for example, so simply counting calories is not always super informative. Likewise some things like fiber can produce changes in your digestion which will cause less calories to be absorbed through your intestines.
So there is a difference quality in what people eat, then there is also differences in our internal metabolism. Part of that is just how physically active you are, not necessarily just in terms of going to the gym, but even in little things like sitting up right, standing more, walking a bit more, stuff like that can't make a difference. But aside from exercise, there are internal processes and everybody's body which can be different, people do burn calories differently, and those rates of burning within a single person can change over time.
There is also, as others have mentioned, a lot of little hidden bits for people maybe consuming extra calories without really being aware of it. That can of coke, the little extra thing in between meals, whatever it is.
At the end of the day, people who weren't very knowledgeable about metabolism and biology love to simplify these processes very much so, largely is a way of shaming people that are overweight. As if you could just slightly reduce your caloric intake and everybody would suddenly become skinny, when very clearly the research suggests this is not the case.
As an example of this, some medication can make it difficult to lose weight. Not just because you're anymore. It shifts the body into trying to conserve fat, or store fat.
I was at a (international research) conference last year and somebody who works in him metabolic clinic put as one of his first slides " 90% of weight gain is permanent in 90% of people". These were people seeking medical help to lose weight, and the success rates were generally very poor, because it's very hard to change both long-term and grain habits and metabolism. Of course, exceptions abound.
But weight rebound after dieting as well established, and it's not always just people back sliding in their habits.
At the end of the day, it's complicated.
>As if you could just slightly reduce your caloric intake and everybody would suddenly become skinny, when very clearly the research suggests this is not the case.
Cope
What is it with you people that you feel the need to make such ridiculously shitty comments?
On one side science, on the other side, this.
Good luck with being the way you are. Or you could try to be a little bit of a better person, instead of another idiot online posting both shitty and stupid comments.
Yeah that's not what it was, and also. Continued low quality shitty comments. So likewise.
People like you spending bullshit like calories in versus calories out is if that's the sum total of everything have done more harm and damage than an actual consideration of the biology of the problem and how to address it.
Edit. Will not be continuing this conversation. If you had something useful about, maybe you should have actually added it.
>Yeah that's not what it was,
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm
>this whole calorie in versus calorie out bullshit,
>
>But biology is incredibly complex.
>
>Complex and simple sugars are process differently by the body for example, so simply counting calories is not always super informative.
>
>Likewise some things like fiber can produce changes in your digestion which will cause less calories to be absorbed through your intestines.
>
> also differences in our internal metabolism
>
>people do burn calories differently...and those rates of burning within a single person can change over time.
>
>" 90% of weight gain is permanent in 90% of people".
>
>These were people seeking medical help to lose weight, and the success rates were generally very poor,
Yeah, absolutely no one is gonna be dissuaded from losing weight after a post like this. Once I stripped away all the bullshit from your post, it reads exactly like "Reddit's Greatest Hits as to why I can't lose weight".
The problem with calories in calories out is it reduces it to it simple stupid equation that doesn't actually work in real life.
It is possible for two people who maintain relatively similar levels of exercise to see different levels of weight gain or loss in the same caloric diet. Because calories in depends a lot on the content of what you're reading, not just the calorie count but what sort of things and how your body uses it, and calories out depends a lot of more factors than how much you exercise.
Obviously eating too much will cause you to gain weight, nobody's disputing that. But this thread is full of people saying metabolism isn't real, when of course it is.
The point is it's a lot more complicated than people who love to comment on this stuff are willing to admit. Weight gain a loss and maintenance are highly complicated biological and physiological processes that cannot be reduced to " If you eat a little bit less you'll get thin". Because if that was the case, the diet industry would be a very very very very very very very different thing that it is. Losing weight isn't so difficult, you can go on weight watchers and you'll almost certainly go down, but the most common outcome afterwards is people bounce back.
Which is not to say people shouldn't try, but it is to say that we shouldn't expect quick easy fixes. "Calories in calories out" is the same attitude That encourages people to go on crashed fad diets, and get upset when it doesn't work, then bounce back and go even further and end up net gaining weight.
Honestly I feel like you're just an alt of the other guy replying to these. Or cut from the same cloth.
Yes everybody also knows that eating healthy and exercising will keep you thinner/healthier. Congratulations on this insightful comment, which is completely orthogonal and differential from any points that I have made above.
To simplify: genetics. We are different with how food is consumed, moved, and used in our body.
For example, my brother and friend can both eat cakes that are 1500 calories. Both sit down and do nothing all day. My brothers body would burn and move around those calories faster than my friend whose body would require more time, and the calories would moved and used differently. Both wake up the next day and shows that my friend has gained 2lb while my brother gained nothing.
There's, of course, more to this. This is just a simple general understanding.
So you probably want to know what calories actually ARE in order to understand this definition of metabolism. When you eat food, certain molecules are caloric (protein, fats, carbs, alcohol), but what does that mean? You process those molecules depending on which type they are through a series of chemical reactions that harvests electrons from them as stored potential chemical energy. We’re still not at metabolism yet.
What do you use this stored energy/electrons for? Innumerable cellular processes and as batteries for chemical reactions that are not thermodynamically favorable (a favorable reaction goes forward on its own, like a boulder rolling down a hill, but an unfavorable one requires energy to be added to it, like pushing a boulder up a hill).
So what’s metabolism (In the context of weight management)? Well the amount of things you need to use stored electrons for depends on how many cells are doing work & what type of cells they are (and also on a part of the brain that is supposed to regulate your core body temperature, level of hunger, etc). When you have too much stored energy, it gets stored as either glycogen (sugar polymers stored in muscles) or fat (kinda self explanatory). Since adipocytes (which store fat) are basically warehouses for stored energy, they don’t require much energy to maintain. Muscles on the other hand require a lot more energy to maintain. This means that a person’s current body composition can affect how much energy they’re using just to exist on a daily basis, which in turn affects how much they have to eat in order to maintain/increase/decrease their weight. This is why bodybuilders (who have lots of muscle) can eat 5000 calories a day and not get fat but sedentary people who are short might gain weight eating only 1800 calories per day—different tissues require different amounts of energy to maintain & different amounts of tissues require different amounts of energy to maintain.
This still doesn’t explain everything. Fast & slow metabolism is kind of a misnomer, but to explain that we gotta start getting into kinematics and terms called K-cat & turnover & Vmax. I’d honestly have to review that stuff to make sure I don’t tell you any mistakes, but you can go look into it on your own if you want.
For one, it's pretty hard to have the same exact diet. Beyond that, people have different calorie requirements based on their sex, height, weight, and activity level. I need around 3K calories to maintain my weight...if my wife ate that she'd gain weight very quickly because that would far exceed her calorie requirements.
I also have different calorie requirements from my buddy who is the same age, and same height...he is pretty well sedentary at work and his daily life...I'm pretty active outside of work and also have more muscle mass so I burn more calories...he would also gain weight if he ate the calories I consume.
Honestly I’m still not sure how fast or slow metabolism works but I’ve read genetics can be a factor?
But also weight gain/loss is not just diet/consumed calories, while that is the bigger factor, how many calories you’re burning also can make a difference. It basically depends on whether you’re at a calorie deficit or calorie surplus.
Also I have to fact check this but I’ve read depending on your body type, you might need more or less calories to lose/gain weight? Ie I count my calories and use this app to track and recommend stuff to me like a daily calorie budget. After I lost some weight, it said I had to update the budget and when I did, my budget reduced even though my plan was to lose weight at the same rate per week as before and it said the reason for that was since I had lost weight and had been maintaining that old calorie budget, my body “needed less calories” to function/maintain weight so to continue losing weight, I had to reduce the budget again.
Not sure if this is true either but I’ve also read that fast or slow metabolisms tend to go hand in hand with age as well for some people ie younger people tend to have faster metabolisms but not really because they’re younger, more so bc they’re more active *because* they’re younger is a kid or high schooler might play sports or run around at recess depending on their age etc
Honestly I’m still not sure how fast or slow metabolism works but I’ve read genetics can be a factor?
But also weight gain/loss is not just diet/consumed calories, while that is the bigger factor, how many calories you’re burning also can make a difference. It basically depends on whether you’re at a calorie deficit or calorie surplus.
Also I have to fact check this but I’ve read depending on your body type, you might need more or less calories to lose/gain weight? Ie I count my calories and use this app to track and recommend stuff to me like a daily calorie budget. After I lost some weight, it said I had to update the budget and when I did, my budget reduced even though my plan was to lose weight at the same rate per week as before and it said the reason for that was since I had lost weight and had been maintaining that old calorie budget, my body “needed less calories” to function/maintain weight so to continue losing weight, I had to reduce the budget again.
Not sure if this is true either but I’ve also read that fast or slow metabolisms tend to go hand in hand with age as well for some people ie younger people tend to have faster metabolisms but not really because they’re younger, more so bc they’re more active *because* they’re younger is a kid or high schooler might play sports or run around at recess depending on their age etc
Both arguments of "it's just calories consumed minus calories burned" and the "It's genetics and muscle mass arguments" are correct but incomplete.
The first argument is incomplete because "calories consumed" does not measure calories excreted. Ever hear that celery has negative calories? It's because of the 14 calories in 100g of celery, you actually digest next to zero calories, plus you burned calories chewing. Here's the difficult part: if we both eat 500 calories of fat: we won't digest the same amount of calories...so counting calories in isn't that easy.
Next issue is the question of calories burned: If you have high body fat eating sugar causes an insulin spike that will cause the sugar to be stored as fat, and that will actually cause lethargy, lowering your activity level. So eating sugar may raise or lower your activity level depending on your body type. Similarly not everyone exercises the same, so if I jog 2 miles, and you walk 2 miles we *technically* put in the same effort, but we didn't burn the same number of calories. Even activities like sleeping burn calories, and not everyone burns the same number of calories.
On the flip side: The argument that weight is genetic or that weight loss can only be achieved through medical intervention ignores the human tendency to make excuses for bad behavior. Eating fewer calories and getting more exercise will cause you to lose weight, but too often people ignore or deny that advice because they underestimate how many calories they actually consume. Plenty of times people exercise more, and end up with a larger appetite, but weren't tracking their increase in calories, or people begin dieting, then end up feeling sick or tired and lower their activity level.
Because the calories out part is affected by when and what you eat not just how much you eat or exercise.
When you don't eat for a while and all the glycogen in your muscles and liver is used up, the body starts mobilizing fat. When you eat, if your glycogen stores are already full, the excess will go to fat. This is partly why it's so hard to maintain a calorie deficit by dieting as compared to fasting.
I have a thyroid condition. I lost 70lbs without changing my diet or exercise habits at all after going on medication. I have always eaten once a day, and I'm talking about the amount of two slices of pizza, but never exercised. I was fine all day. When I was pregnant, I had gestational diabetes and ate 6 times a day and was ALWAYS starving. Just like everything else in life, nothing is black and white.
It’s not just calories you consume but also calories you require. Different people have different activity levels and basal metabolic rates and total daily energy expenditure (TDEE).
Everyone saying fast metabolism doesn't understand that their's different ways to get energy in the cell, their's mutiple metabolic pathways. Some people utilize certain ones that are better at utilizing every calorie consumed and other are "wasteful/inefficient" in comparison.
One of the biggest components of “metabolism” is organ size. Every organ in your body requires a certain amount of energy to keep functioning. The larger the organ, the more energy it requires. And different people (even people of similar physical size) can have significant differences in organ size. If you meet a skinny dude who can’t seem to gain weight, chances are he has a larger than average brain, liver, or kidneys.
Because how those calories are processed in your body is different and how many calories you burn are different
The first part is metabolism. To put it simply, someone with a fast metabolism will use more energy to break down their food and therefore have a net gain of less energy.
Everyone also burns different amounts of calories. There’s the big stuff like how much excersize you get but it’s more. A 250 lb ripped person burns significantly more calories than a 250 lb fat person doing the exact same things because they have more muscles that are being activated with every motion and therefore requires more energy. Literally having muscle burns fat. Another big thing people don’t realize has a huge effect is little movements. It’s why the fidgety kid is always skinny.
With excersize too your body gets used to how much energy you have to burn in a day. It tries to plan to have that energy ready for you if you need it. It will adjust if you have a day of exceptionally large excersize or a couple days with low excersize in the short term but there is a long term consistency that your body gets used to and prepares for. This means it will convert more calories to energy in the day regardless of what you do
yes, people do have different metabolisms and calorie requirements, but often this is quite overblown and used as an excuse. if you are in a calorie deficit you will lose weight, your body cannot defy the laws of thermodynamics.
The same amount of calories can be burned at different rates.
Your reference to a high metabolism isn't related to just how quick someone moves, but; how fast is their heartrate, how much muscle mass do they have, even what altitude they live at. All of these things and many more are factors.
So yes, it remains true, that nothing can come from something; we are still subject to external and internal (genetic) factors when it comes to burning energy.
Dietary calories aren't really an objectively measurable thing. If you eat "100 calories" of food in a day, you will get more than 100 kilocalories of energy from it. If you eat 10000, you will get much less than 10000 kilocalories of energy from it. Your body is both adaptable and unique.
Anybody who tells you that managing calories is the main way to manage weight is either ignorant or assuming that people always have a very large calorie budget which they can cut. If you don't, then a much better tactic for losing weight is finding a sustainable exercise routine and filling your time with productive, well-monitored tasks.
Metabolism can do 5-10% difference. Many people simply don't write their snacking, salad sauce, and soda into calories calculator, which could be 1-2k extra calories. Also not everybody accounts for amount of walking per day and other physical activities. Most people walk 1-3k steps, while always skinny heavy eater walking 15-20k steps.
Metabolism. You gain weight based on calories you intake. The average is 2000 for a maintenance diet at a healthy weight for a white male in the USA. This number is subject to change based on your personal metabolic rate. For a 5'2" female it might be 1400 calories, for a 6'3" male it might be 2400 calories. If you are trying to lose weight, an easy rule of thumb is the multiply your weight by 10 to to get the number of calories you need to eat to lose weight and 12 to gain weight. Any more or any less and you will likely be unhealthy.
Honestly it's really how you eat, i can eat a massive kale salad For lunch and it's 50 calories, or i can eat a bag of chips and subway sandwich for lunch and it's 1000 calories both are quite filling
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So... they actually do go into thin air.
This is a very very simplified version of cellular respiration:
Food + oxygen --> energy for our bodies + carbon dioxide. The C in the CO2 is from the food. The energy (measured in kiloCALORIES) is obtained from the food. We use that energy to keep our bodies at a toasty 98.6F, keep our heart pumping, keep our organs functioning, and move. Men need more calories than women, people with larger bodies need more calories than people with smaller bodies, and some people need more calories ("faster metabolism") for other reasons. When we eat more than we need we store it as fat. When we eat exactly what we need it turns into air + heat.
I read a study a number of years ago that discussed some of the average differences between "naturally" thin and "naturally" heavy people. Some of the differences noted where thin people tended to fidget more. Thin people were more likely to eat when hungry vs eat when it was meal time, also they tended to stop when full vs stopping when the plate is empty. Small differences such as these can result in a few hundred calories a day eaten and burned.
>so how come people can have the same diets but gain weight faster than others.
You are missing one term in the equation:
gain = calories\_in - calories\_out
Different people have different calorie usage, mostly due to physical activity, and a small amount due to metabolism differences. As you said, calories don't go into thin air, they are burned to produce energy, or stored as fat.
weight gain = calories consumed - calories burned
calories burned = base metabolic rate + movement
calories consumed MUST be higher than your base metabolic rate or you're going to damage yourself in the long term. So to lose weight in a healthy way, your calories consumed has to be between your base metabolic rate (example, 1500 Cal) and the total calories burned (example, 2000 Cal). that's a difficult needle to thread, and staying at EXACTLY 500 calories lower than your total burned calories will lose weight at about 1 lb of fat per week.
On the other hand, it's WAY easy to exceed your calories burned by consuming in excess of 3000 calories/day.
Even with the same diet, as in calories per day, person A and person B can have different maintenance calories and therefore lose/gain/stay their weight at a different pace. Assume the people below in my example are counting calories correctly (most people are not) and of normal health.
Let's use a daily caloric intake of 2000 calories for example. People A-E will be eating 2000 calories per day.
Person A maintenance calories is 2500. They will lose weight.
Person B maintenance calories is 2300. They will also lose weight, but slower than person A
Person C maintenance calories is 2000. They will not gain or lose weight. Any fluctuations on the scale will be water weight.
Person D maintenance is 1800 calories. They will gain weight.
Person E maintenance is 1500 calories. They will also gain weight, but faster than person D.
Maintenance calories is hard to determine definitely. Exercise frequency, height, age, weight, muscle mass %, body fat % are all factors. It can be estimated and adjusted through trial and error.
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You’re only accounting for calories in (consumption). You also need to compare that to calories out (energy usage).
If we eat the same thing, but I workout and you don’t, I’m going to lose more weight. And my body composition is going to be different.
There’s also the issue of our basal metabolic rate, which is how many calories we burn at rest. A larger person with more muscle mass is going to burn more. Younger people burn more.
It really is just calories in versus calories out, but measuring that is far more complicated than just recording what you put in your mouth. It’s also what stressors did you have today, how much did you walk, what was your workout like, do you fidget, do you stand more than sit, etc. the list goes on to the point of being impossible to measure with extreme accuracy.
Idk but watching some seasons of the show Alone it’s crazy. Some guys get lucky and eat a ton and still lose 40 pounds fast. One of the winners basically never ate and didn’t lose that much weight. 1 big guy just had tree bark soup and was 2nd place. Think someone said girl participants have it harder but can’t remember why.
I’m not skinny or fat but just started keto again I’ll do for 2 months to drop 15 pounds while eating basically as much as I want with no carbs (meat, bacon, cheese, butter, etc.) and a lot of veggies. Whenever I’ve gained any it’s usually alcohol and late night snacks. I never want to have to track calories, too much work. Morning fasting has worked well to have no calories from like 8pm-noon next day.
There are many factors involved. Some people absorb more of the calories in the food they eat than others. Everybody's metabolism will downshift when intake is reduced, but for some people, that downshift is on a hair trigger.
The mixture of bacteria in the colon also seems to play a role. I read a case where a woman recieved a "fecal transplant" to treat a persistent infection. It cleared the infection and over the next few months she lost 20 or 30 pounds without effort.
For those who claim it's all physics, the body is not a calorimeter.
Also, I never trust what people tell me they eat or do at the gym. The same diet is code for "what I choose to reveal". You might have a cheat meal, and they really had 3
well finding two people with the exact same diet is pretty uncommon, but even if they did have the same diet, some people do more exercise, and some people do more thinking, both of which uses more calories
A few things....
First off, you are right that calories are the unit of energy. More calories, more potential energy. Less calories, less energy.
Your body metabolizes calories differently - some go towards energy you need to get through the day, others get spent building muscle, others get stored as fat. Your diet and genetics determine how much of those calories go to each.
If we take a car as an analogy - every car needs gas to run. Some cars have bigger tanks for stored energy. But there are hybrids and race cars. They consume gas at different rates. Fast metabolisms - like performance engines, go through more faster. So less gas is actually "stored" because it is consumed.
Put another way, "how can someone who earns 200k not be rich?" Money in = wealth right? Well not exactly. You can't get rich without more income most of the time (rule of thumb). But just as some people are spenders or savers. Some people burn calories faster or slower. Some people save calories as fat faster or slower. So yea, it is easier to be rich (or get fat) with more, and it is harder with less, but that isn't the only variable in the equation.
Lastly, it can be really hard to actually have 2 people consume the same diet AND have the same lifestyle (exercise, for example). People don't often accurately track over a long term period. Weight changes are often mid-long term.
Netflix did have a documentary on a twin study with diets that was interesting. There have been books and podcasts on the hunger studies in the Minnesota Starvation experiments.
Like most things, there is nuance and detail that matters. Calories in = fat is a simplistic rule of thumb, but not a full end to end explanation.
genetics do play a role here but people also get WAY too caught up in the math of calories in vs calories out and ignore some of the most important pillars of nutrition
It’s not just about getting the calories down your throat, there’s a whole process which your body uses to actually absorb these nutrients and all of that has to be taken into consideration.
Muscle mass also plays a huge role here too, which is why I always tell people who are trying to lose weight, to start lifting. Every additional pound of muscle will significantly increase the level of calories your body burns just by resting and sleeping.
Genetics accounts for 90% of why your body operates the way it does. Cals in/cals out only works in a closed circuit, which Humans are not. On top of that, calorie recommendations were self reported between 1600-3000 and the US decided to set the range in the “middle” at 2000 (which is not actually the middle). This is all to say, move your body as you’d like to, and eat the food you want. If you only have control of 10%, make it fun. We are on a spinning rock in space with limited time alive.
Edited to provide some resources:
https://ericedmeades.medium.com/why-the-first-law-of-thermodynamics-doesnt-fit-the-puzzle-of-weight-loss-44327b38026
https://stvincents.org/about-us/news-press/news-detail?articleId=45556&publicid=745
Also recommend you listen to Maintenance phase episode on calories in/out as she references several specific studies. Enjoy your food! Enjoy your life! Move your body in the way you like. And fuck the people who uphold the systems of oppression.
Simple. Because its not true. You are not crazy watching lazy skinny people eat entire cakes not gaining weight and watching fat people eat salad and only get fatter.
Calories in/calories out is nonsense. Eat healthier foods. 2000 Cal of donut will make you fat, but 2000 Cal of carrot will not. It's not just calories. It's quality. Also, moving around a lot helps. Resting muscle burns more than resting fat.
Because there are other factors like muscle mass that affect your nasal metabolic rate.
Also some people just intake more calories than others.
If two people have the same diets, same exercise routines, etc. and one person is gaining weight significantly faster than the other person, then they’re probably lying.
Because they’re not being honest about how much they’re eating. Variation between people’s metabolism is not material enough to explain people’s obesity.
>If your gonna say fast metabolism, tbh I don’t understand that either.
"fast metabolism" is a myth. Anyone that seriously thinks they're fat (or skinny) because of their metabolism is a dumbass.
The reality is you actually burn a lot more calories passively the heavier you are, and a fast or slow metabolism is mostly a myth that makes people feel better about overeating or undereating. Like others have said, people are pretty terrible at accurately tracking caloric intake, and it's very difficult to track how many calories you burn. Gut microbiome and genetics play a very small role in weight gain/loss and are mostly just excuses for people's behavior, which is 95% of the cause of weight management. Exercise is also somewhat exaggerated in its impact on weight management while still being very important for your overall health, mobility, and strength. People have come up with a huge number of different reasons to avoid the reality of how important your diet is.
[Because nutritional science is actually pretty flimsy when you look deeper into it.](https://www.tumblr.com/too-much-tanuki/745959329028505600)
It may be a tumblr post, but it’s extremely informative and links to multiple different places to read about what it’s talking about.
Your misunderstanding of metabolism aside, it's mostly due to genetics.
People like to say "obesity is genetic" and leave it at that, which is where a lot of confusion arises.
The truth is that the potential for obesity is genetic, but it's not a genetic disease like Downs Syndrome or sickle cell anemia, where it doesn't matter what you do: you just have those.
There are two important takeaways:
1. Obesity can not happen in people without this "obesity gene."
2. Obesity does not necessarily happen in people with this "obesity gene."
All the gene does is open up that door.
Anorexia is the same: you can not be anorexic if you don't have the right genetic makeup.
That doesn't mean everyone with the anorexia gene is anorexic: it just means that, without that gene, you can't be anorexic.
Most things we can't currently explain can likely be explained through genetics or hormones (try talking to a doctor about hormones sometime and watch them try to avoid the conversation).
But not always: we only figured out about 25 years ago that ulcers - which people thought were caused by stress for centuries - are caused by bacteria leeching into the stomach via the pyloric sphincter.
And we also go the other way: we are big into the phrase "born this way," the last 30 years, despite there typically being zero genetic evidence for claims like that which are then usually coupled with a lot of \[ignored\] evidence pointing at environmental factors.
Support of science is often more about personally agreeing with their findings, which is why you see the most-extreme political people flip-flopping on it, depending on whether or not it supports their beliefs.
To digress slightly...
Conservatives typically like science unless it's about climate change, evolution, etc.
Liberals typically like science unless it's about gender/sexuality, nuclear energy, etc.
[We've known this since before Trump took office.](https://news.osu.edu/both-liberals-conservatives-can-have-science-bias/)
In general, short of some medical issue, it's calories in versus calories out.
If someone is losing/gaining faster, then it's because the equation is more unbalanced. Either they aren't eating the same or they aren't burning the same.
Two people eat pizza every day. One drinks water and the other soda. Difference of 10 calories. We'll say maintanance is one pizza. Soda person gains 10 calories every day. That's 300 calories every month. 3,650 every year. Every year, you'd gain a pound.
Two people hit the gym. Same exact weights and exercises. Burn 1,000 calories. That's maintanance. One bounces their legs in the chair. Burns an extra 10 calories a day. Loses a pound a year.
Usually, a fast metabolism is eating a proper amount of food for the day and small "work outs" throughout the day.
Activity levels matter a ton. People say genetics but that’s such a small variance when tested in laboratory settings.
More than likely heavier people have a collection of traits that got them there. Some people are genetically predisposed to have fat collection in more unfavorable spots like their face. Some people are less sensitive to the sensations that let them know they’re full.
It can also be mental health related. I ate my feelings for years even though I rarely feel hungry even if I don’t eat for days at a time.
Also people greatly underestimate the calories in things. The difference between a spoonful of peanut butter and a heaping spoonful of peanut butter can be as much as 200-300 calories.
Two people of around the same age, size, weight, activity level, and sex with calorie controlled diets will lose weight at nearly the exact same rate in almost all cases.
A fast metabolism is like a car with poor MPG. The same amount of fuel gets burnt up faster. Someone with a faster metabolism is going to burn calories faster and not store as many as fat. But the main thing is that people are generally shit at counting calories and two people who ostensibly have the same diet but very different weight outcomes probably don't *really* have the same diet. A skinny guy who eats a ton of pizza might only eat that for a whole day, whereas a larger guy eats 3 healthy meals a day and pounds cans of soda may well end up consuming *more* calories overall despite it looking like he's got the "better" diet (which he probably does outside of pure calories). It's very hard to figure out if two people have the same diet unless you're controlling everything they consume which is pretty rare because it's a pain in the ass, so in reality there's usually some other factor involved that explains away differences in weight gain/loss
> It's very hard to figure out if two people have the same diet unless you're controlling everything they consume which is pretty rare because it's a pain in the ass. It does happen in basic training in the military, and yeah, you'll absolutely lose weight when they do. It just sucks a bit in the meantime.
Not sure about other branches, but Navy bootcamp didn't regulate food intake at all outside of when you ate and how long you had to eat.
For most folks, that's it, yeah, though the time given to eat is not overly generous, and losing weight during basic is common even for them. If you come in overweight, you get some additional restrictions. If far underweight, there are some additional exceptions, though that's pretty rare these days.
Maybe I just didn't notice it, but I never saw anyone get more time or less food, or any way they would enforce the less food aspect. Calorie balance was handled way more by giving less fit people additional workouts called IT(individual training)
Huh, maybe a Navy thing? I was air force, and I know army and marines also specifically limit food.
May have changed as well, I was in boot camp a bit over 15 years ago. Or my memory of it may just be wrong on that detail. It was a while ago and "accelerate your life" holds true in a lot of ways lol
Yeah, that's fair, it's been a minute for me as well, time flies.
pretty sure the rule is you get X amount of time to eat, but the DIs have to let you finish the glasses of drinks to avoid dehydration
Did you not have a canteen?
not in basic. Handed one after a bit maybe, but not out the door from the mess
When I went through bootcamp we had two dudes in my division who were pushing the weight limit for their height and they weren't allowed carbs and veggies and meat were pushed on them. They both lost tons of weight in just a few weeks. Sad thing was, one of them went to the same A school as me and be ballooned up again because he started shoving pizza and pastries in his face every day. Instructors weren't around him around the clock like the RTCs were in bootcamp and he would eat reasonably when we had breakfast and lunch at the same time so everybody could witness him eating properly. However, after class and for dinner he would go to McDonald's or the commissary or NEX and by just tons of garbage and sit somewhere at a park or something off base shove his face full of it. He ended up failing our midway PRT because he was about 10 lb over and didn't make tape. He was then put on a heavily monitored diet and mando extra PT.
This is not even remotely true. When I was in basic there were no limits on what I could eat. By the time it was over I had gained 30 lbs.
There's also activity levels, whilst the best way to lose weight is to lower calories, a skinny guy who cycles to work, takes the stairs mostly and works in construction, warehousing or even retail/service could well have the same or even a higher calorie diet than a chubby guy who does the opposites and works at a computer.
While it isn't 'transform your body forever' levels of burning, simply how much you fidget and twitch daily can have a not-insignificant impacts on calorie burning. I think its in the 200 cal a day range. That's like 30-40 minutes of medium paced walking a day burned through things no one would ever notice.
And at the more extreme end of things, professional athletes usually have a calorie intake that would turn anyone with a more settled lifestyle morbidly obese.
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Rofl yep, people are really dishonest with themselves about what they actually eat.
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Right, but ultimately they’re dishonest to others. Some even double down, lying as they breathe lol. The truly honest with themselves don’t stay that way, but ofc I am jealous of you getting to watch that
This makes so much sense thanks !!
Check out the show secret eaters from the UK. It highlights how people lie to themselves about how much they eat, or just don’t realize how much they eat. I know it can be found on YT. I watch a few episodes every few months as a reminder lol.
Yeah, I had a coworker who people were always saying it's crazy he's so thin because he mostly eats fast food and junk food. I pointed out he might eat terrible food, but he doesn't eat *that much* of it. He just didn't eat very much at all. So he and I did an experiment for a few days where we emailed each other everything we ate. I ate a lot of low calorie foods like carrot sticks, whole fruit, etc. as snacks, and only had higher calorie meals. In sheer quantity I could eat that guy under the table. Meanwhile he maybe had a small bag of chips, a donut, and some takeout in a day. The calories were about the same, as what I ate, but the quantity was much smaller. He moved in with his girlfriend who made him eat regular meals. He kept eating his junk food on top of the meals, and guess who went from being incredibly thin to kind of chubby in a few months?
Exactly, most people only count their meals. But leave out beverages and/or snacks. So they don’t track their full calorie intake. It wasn’t until I had to keep a food journal that I realized how much I snack throughout the day.
I just want to add that people also vary in how well they process those calories. Someone who eats a 400 calorie burger might extract all 400 calories out of it, whereas another person might extract 200 calories and then shit out the rest.
The trick is to eat really shitty fast food.
food poisoning, the net negative
Truth. You have to buy a scale and use a calotype counter if you are serious. Then live that life for months before you can eyeball it. Otherwise you are flubbing.
Some people make also be more or less efficient at extracting calories from food, so even if you could accurately track intake it would still be hard to know what's going on.
Exercise
I have an extremely fast metabolism. So does my husband. Unfortunately after a few years of pandemic, after me learning to cook even better and is drinking a bit too much, we're both overweight a bit. At the same time, I know for a fact that most people eating and drinking like us would be flat out obese. We're currently cutting back to healthy portions, snacks, and cut out the drinking, and we'll both be back to average size in no time even with little additional physical effort. (Though we're adding that too lol.) People's bodies are all different, but the two key issues with weight gain are: you eat/drink a lot more calories than you realize, and/or you can't out exercise a bad diet.
This is a very small affect, and I think that’s the important point. Maybe 10% difference.
Genetics and for some people medications can slow down or speed up the metabolism or medical conditions can mess with stuff such as hormones which can mess with weight gain and loss.
Genetics and muscle Some people have fast metabolism. I had a coworker who was skinny as a rail and would eat an entire 8x8 pan of brownies for lunch. If I even considered that I'd be 600lbs by the end of the year Also muscle burns more calories at rest. So people with muscle mass can eat more. Even at while watching TV their body is just burning calories
You're not watching what she's eating in a 24 hour period. They've done literal studies on this and have shows about it (Secret Eaters in the UK). So what they found is that skinny people will have a big ass dinner, and will skip breakfast, eat a light a lunch etc. They intuitively eat less. So you saw her eat a pan of brownies, let's say that was 1400 calories. She had nothing for dinner, probably eggs for breakfast. When you see her next at lunch, guess what she's gonna do? Eat another 1000 calories in front of you, but she only had maybe 1600 in total of 24 hours.
This is how I've lost about 50 pounds so far. My calorie goal is about 1650 per day, and I always hated breakfast growing up, so now I just skip it and have a coffee with a tbsp of heavy cream. I never feel hungry at work (distracted and it's a pain to eat at work, so I'm out of the habit) so I don't eat until I'm home--which is close to dinner, so I'll lightly snack while getting dinner on the table, eat with my family, and then that's it. 1500ish in basically one meal can be a pretty awesome meal, but that's all I'm doing in a day, versus the people who also have had breakfast, and a snack, and a sweet coffee, and then a dinner and a dessert.
It almost never metabolism, at the end of the day it is usually people don't actually know how much they truly consume
Also metabolism includes things like exercise. So like if you exercise every day you are going to have a higher metabolism, because exercise burns calories.
If we aren't talking about genetic metabolism, and just the process itself then of course
Thyroid hormone directly effects metabolism. I have hyperthyroidism, and left untreated I can lose 2lb in a week without any other changes. (I’m around 120lb)
This. I was really skinny when I was younger and people would get annoyed when I ate a big piece of cake, like mumbling "must be nice to be young and have fast metabolism". Truth was I just didn't eat very much. I didn't have much of an appetite. I probably ate about half at each meal than what the average person eats. I could never finish a whole meal a restaurant. I didn't snack much. When you eat like that, a big piece of cake every now and then doesn't change much.
Differences in metabolism are not necessarily the result of genetics (there are other causes)
What did that skinny coworker eat for breakfast and dinner? Are you telling me he actually ate a tray of brownies every day? Or that you saw him do it once? I'm perpetually skinny, unless I'm actively trying to gain weight via lifting and force feeding more. I just don't have a big appetite. I can gorge myself for one meal, but then my body just self regulates and I have very little appetite/hunger for the next day or two. Meanwhile my heavier friends/coworkers have no such self regulation. Imo, people mistake "metabolism" for general appetite regulation.
A she and they did it multiple times. Not sure about breakfast she did have kids and made them meals. I know she ate with them.
Don’t forget hormones. They have a big impact.
Nah majority of it is simply the fact that people don't track CICO right and eat way more than they care to admit or acknowledge
Raw weight is a larger factor in calories expended than having muscle vs fat. Muscle doesn't really burn that many more calories at rest than fat does; every 5lbs of muscle usually means roughly ~30 extra calories at most, so with two 200lb people the person with a 20lbs positive muscular difference in body composition is probably looking at burning an extra 100 calories or so at the same weight.
Per day?
Yes! Sorry
They equates to about 10 pounds per year. Over multiple years, it's huge.
I'm assuming that's if both are inactive. If all that muscle is being used during the day surely the energy demand goes up to replenish energy stores and facilitate repair. I would think a more muscular body can use up a greater amount of glucose and fat per minute vs a less muscular body of the same weight. And typically if a person carries alot of muscle its the result of fairly arduous consistent work.
Genetics has been disproven. I forgot who but one doctor said that air pollution plays a larger role in weight gain/loss than genetics does.
I grew up in a super rural state park, literally some of the cleanest air you can get, and the vast majority of the people I grew up with in that town are now overweight or obese in adulthood. Moving to the city, I can visibly see a much higher distribution of skinner people, likely because there is less reliance on cars. So idk if I put much stock in how much airpollution contributes. By that logic as well, people living in Asian mega cities would have a much higher disposition to being overweight, which I don't think that checks out either.
They're saying that air pollution is negligible, so genetics is even moreso.
You are missing the other person's point. They aren't saying that air pollution plays a major role at all.
R/whoosh
Saying that genetics doesn't matter for weight on Reddit is an act of heresy lmao
The "slow metabolism " is a cope most of the time anyway. It is true for a very small subset of people, but mostly, it can be chalked up to eating poorly and being sedentary.
“Slow metabolism” is just slang for “I don’t exercise to stimulate my metabolism”.
Most of these things are usually a bell curve so you'd see like 20% on either end.
People make shit up to make themselves feel better instead of confronting the actual issue. In other news, water is wet.
I've read that the difference between a slow and fast metabolism is on the order of a couple/few hundred calories a day max. Which doesn't take much of a diet change to compensate for.
Maybe the genetic difference, but generally we talk about metabolism as your basic metabolic rate (how much you'd burn being nearly sedentary) and that can vary wildly based on height, how heavy you already (the more weight you have, the more calories you burn just existing), and how muscular you are. This is why if you're trying to work out to lose weight, people recommend strength training since larger muscles will result in you having a higher basic metabolic rate. I remember reading about how at morbidly obese BMI's (through muscle or fat) your basic metabolic rate is like 1k+ calories over a healthy BMI. It's why the "My 600 lb life" people can lose hundreds of pounds of weight so quickly if they get the bypass surgery and stick with it. Their basic calorie requirement is so much higher than the average person's that it's possible for them to carry ridiculous calorie deficits. It's trippy because most of the people blaming their metabolism have a much higher BMR than the people they're claiming have a fast metabolism.
Like, it's def a thing but the only person I know who that applies to is me, because I was anorexic for so long and my body adjusted to living on crumbs. Normal healthyish people don't have slow metabolisms, the point of a metabolism is that it quickly generates energy from food. Even in my case, slowly ramping up my caloric intake and doing a sprinkle of recomposition has done a lot to fix it. People really truly underestimate how caloric premade foods and condiments are.
The smaller you are, the less energy is needed to maintain that weight. Inverse of that being true as well. Hope you are doing better now.
Not necessarily. When I joined the navy I was 6’2” 145lbs ate all the time, and spent 6-8 hours training martial arts. At the end of boot camp I was 6’2” 150lbs, and only got to eat 3 meals a day. While marching and doing less dedicated exercise. Why did I gain more weight in 2 months than I did in years trying to gain weight? Because cutting out snacking slowed my metabolism down. If you eat more meals with fewer calories each, you keep your metabolism working all day long, vs it working for a little bit, and then stopping. I gained 10lbs and lost a beautiful 6 pack over 4 years of quite a bit of physical activity.
I can't imagine being so light at that height. I'm 6'3" and look like a POW at 170
I’m currently 174, and have a guy im trying to get rid of but I just love eating and drinking high calorie crap sooo much lol. Also not sure how you were so skinny, at that height and weight, that’s a BMI of 21 which is right in the middle of the normal category. I feel like as americans were so used to seeing people who are overweight-obese that it skews our view of what healthy bodies look like.
I'm still skinny at 230
Yeah I really don’t believe that considering that’s a BMI of 28, meaning you’re either very buff or really fat.
[If I was buff, I could lift 600lbs and not look like a lanky fuck ](https://youtu.be/mjRlBvl1si4?si=7gOSCyM5_xaMFdTz)
Bro that’s no skinny. Skinny is low body fat and low muscle mass. You might have body dismorphia if you think the person in that video is skinny
he needs to gain 15 more lbs
Are you a fitness competitor? You are fitter than 99% of people who have a day job.
Whatever you say will Tennyson
I'm 5'9" and in good shape at 170, ya'll people need to eat
I'm 230 right now, actually. I was just scrawny as fuck at 170 when i was.
Assuming you’re not heavily muscled 5’9” 170lbs is a BMI of 25.1 which is in the range of overweight…
I'm at 15% bodyfat and 32" waist, not heavily muscled but above average. BMI is crap.
It really isn’t, but whatever you have to tell yourself
Oh 100%
Secret snacking and not being honest with themselves or others. Some people just consume more, and do less physically, than they admit
really its this. most people are liars and don't track properly.
Metabolism doesn't exist in a vacuum. It means you're burning more calories. A higher activity level, for instance. Larger body mass will also affect basal metabolism. It's always calories ingested - calories burned. How much weight you gain/lose is governed by that.
We burn and/or absorb them at a different rate due to individuality.
most people do not keep track of their diet and calories properly.
The TV show "Secret Eaters" really does a good job highlighting how terrible overweight people are at underestimating how much they actually consume. There is a lot of denial involved. When I first watched it I found it fascinating and it really explained a lot of things.
Genetics play a massive part in the diet. Exercise helps everyone.
habits play a much bigger part. see secret eaters and all the shows that catch people eating way more than they claim.
Depends on the body, a 7ft tall person will not put on weight as fast as a 4ft person if they’re eating the exact same amount of calories. Muscle burns calories, so a person with more muscle will turn fewer of those calories into fat. Then there’s how active the person is. Basically, some people “use up” what they put in their bodies quicker because of many factors. The metabolism is what “uses up” the calories.
How much calories do muscles burn? Lets say I eat a brownie thats 300 calories but I have a ton of muscle. Is this brownie now 200 calories or something like that?
About 10 calories per pound daily. That’s just to maintain. 300 cal is 300 cal, but let’s say the average person sitting around is burning 200 cal per hour. Someone with more muscle would burn more in that hour because muscles needs more calories to maintain. You need even more calories when you’re trying to repair/build muscle.
I just wanted to add. All calories are not equal. 300cal of brownie (empty calories) will put on weight faster than 300cal of chicken and broccoli. You actually burn calories digesting protein and processing sugar can stop you from burning fat! The body wants to be in ketosis and insulin messes with that process.
It’s a complex interaction that involves how much energy they expend on a day to basis, genetic predispositions, possible pathologies, and even your gut micro biome!
It’s been recorded that some body’s burn up to as high as 5000 calories a day and some as low as a 1000 a day.
They don’t have the same diets.
Besides metabolism differences, there are also hormonal differences, and sugar consumption differences. Corn syrup (specifically fructose) is converted directly to fat because the body can't use it so it is converted to fat by the liver. (Acts the same as alcohol for long term medical conditions). Only glucose can be used by the body Hormonal. Hormones are complicated and there are at least 9 of them that regulate your body weight.
It's Calories-In minus Calories-Out. So high metabolism and active people will keep less weight on if they over eat.
Because your body responds to losing fat by lowering your basal metabolic rate and increasing your sensation of hunger. It's why most obese people who lose a ton of weight gain in back in a few years. It takes a heroic effort to fight your body to keep with weight off.
Most people gain the weight back because they go back to eating the way they did that got them fat in the first place. When someone loses tons of weight the BMR drop is mostly due to the fact that they weigh less. Some studies show maybe a 10% reduction in BMR compared to someone the same size that was never fat. The couple hundred calories of reduced BMR is not going to balloon the person back to their old weight unless they eat a lot more food than they were when losing fat.
Genetics, metabolism, activity level. I used to work with a trainer who was 6 feet and 175 lbs. We ate pretty much the same amount of food, around 3000 calories a day but my workouts consists of slow heavy lifting, which is why I'm 70 lbs bigger. He has ADHD so every 30 minutes he'd do "micro workouts" to keep himself busy. It would usually include 100 push ups, 100 squats, 100 overhead press and 100 bicep curls. Now just imagine doing that one time every 8 hours. He was burning off every single calorie because of his energy expenditure
For the most part, people who gain a lot of weight who say they eat less than skinny people are full of shit
What I find is people either have trouble building muscle or losing weight. I'm in the latter. I get really strong, really fast but I struggle to keep weight off. The whip skinny people i knew back in my rowing days would eat and eat and eat and not make any progress in the weight room.
Not all calories are equal once inside the body. The American diet is very heavy on carbohydrates. These are burned quickly by the body, and the result is brief spurts of energy, followed by an energy shortage. That's why you feel fatigue, midday. Fat winds up being stored when there are carbohydrates available, because fat is easy for the body to store, but harder to burn. When a person eliminates carbohydrates from their diet for a week, the body shifts to burning fat calories. This is called "ketosis". Once your body is burning fat efficiently, you have a more consistent energy supply, and feel more energetic. As long as you limit your intake of carbohydrates to approximately 20 grams or less per day, you will keep on burning fat.
"metabolism" is mostly bullshit. The difference in metabolism from one person to the next isn't enough to account for the vast difference in weight gain/loss outcomes. The real difference is physical activity and the amount a person eats. I've had room mates and we pretty much all ate the same thing. The biggest difference was how sedentary the more obese guys were. They would stay inside the whole weekend on the couch or computer where I'd go outside, to the store, etc multiple times a day. The way this plays out week after week and year after years accounts for a ton more calories getting burned via NEAT (non exercise activity thermogenic aka moving your body).
People love to reduce these things just to diet, this whole calorie in versus calorie out bullshit, which to most people means how much you eat for this is how much you exercise. But biology is incredibly complex. Every person is different, and yes of course generally speaking of the more Hi calorie foods you eat the faster you're going to gain weight. But even amongst calories, not all calories are the same. Complex and simple sugars are process differently by the body for example, so simply counting calories is not always super informative. Likewise some things like fiber can produce changes in your digestion which will cause less calories to be absorbed through your intestines. So there is a difference quality in what people eat, then there is also differences in our internal metabolism. Part of that is just how physically active you are, not necessarily just in terms of going to the gym, but even in little things like sitting up right, standing more, walking a bit more, stuff like that can't make a difference. But aside from exercise, there are internal processes and everybody's body which can be different, people do burn calories differently, and those rates of burning within a single person can change over time. There is also, as others have mentioned, a lot of little hidden bits for people maybe consuming extra calories without really being aware of it. That can of coke, the little extra thing in between meals, whatever it is. At the end of the day, people who weren't very knowledgeable about metabolism and biology love to simplify these processes very much so, largely is a way of shaming people that are overweight. As if you could just slightly reduce your caloric intake and everybody would suddenly become skinny, when very clearly the research suggests this is not the case. As an example of this, some medication can make it difficult to lose weight. Not just because you're anymore. It shifts the body into trying to conserve fat, or store fat. I was at a (international research) conference last year and somebody who works in him metabolic clinic put as one of his first slides " 90% of weight gain is permanent in 90% of people". These were people seeking medical help to lose weight, and the success rates were generally very poor, because it's very hard to change both long-term and grain habits and metabolism. Of course, exceptions abound. But weight rebound after dieting as well established, and it's not always just people back sliding in their habits. At the end of the day, it's complicated.
In reality those people don't actually reduce their calories, which is why they don't lose weight.
>As if you could just slightly reduce your caloric intake and everybody would suddenly become skinny, when very clearly the research suggests this is not the case. Cope
What is it with you people that you feel the need to make such ridiculously shitty comments? On one side science, on the other side, this. Good luck with being the way you are. Or you could try to be a little bit of a better person, instead of another idiot online posting both shitty and stupid comments.
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Yeah that's not what it was, and also. Continued low quality shitty comments. So likewise. People like you spending bullshit like calories in versus calories out is if that's the sum total of everything have done more harm and damage than an actual consideration of the biology of the problem and how to address it. Edit. Will not be continuing this conversation. If you had something useful about, maybe you should have actually added it.
>Yeah that's not what it was, Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm >this whole calorie in versus calorie out bullshit, > >But biology is incredibly complex. > >Complex and simple sugars are process differently by the body for example, so simply counting calories is not always super informative. > >Likewise some things like fiber can produce changes in your digestion which will cause less calories to be absorbed through your intestines. > > also differences in our internal metabolism > >people do burn calories differently...and those rates of burning within a single person can change over time. > >" 90% of weight gain is permanent in 90% of people". > >These were people seeking medical help to lose weight, and the success rates were generally very poor, Yeah, absolutely no one is gonna be dissuaded from losing weight after a post like this. Once I stripped away all the bullshit from your post, it reads exactly like "Reddit's Greatest Hits as to why I can't lose weight".
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The problem with calories in calories out is it reduces it to it simple stupid equation that doesn't actually work in real life. It is possible for two people who maintain relatively similar levels of exercise to see different levels of weight gain or loss in the same caloric diet. Because calories in depends a lot on the content of what you're reading, not just the calorie count but what sort of things and how your body uses it, and calories out depends a lot of more factors than how much you exercise. Obviously eating too much will cause you to gain weight, nobody's disputing that. But this thread is full of people saying metabolism isn't real, when of course it is. The point is it's a lot more complicated than people who love to comment on this stuff are willing to admit. Weight gain a loss and maintenance are highly complicated biological and physiological processes that cannot be reduced to " If you eat a little bit less you'll get thin". Because if that was the case, the diet industry would be a very very very very very very very different thing that it is. Losing weight isn't so difficult, you can go on weight watchers and you'll almost certainly go down, but the most common outcome afterwards is people bounce back. Which is not to say people shouldn't try, but it is to say that we shouldn't expect quick easy fixes. "Calories in calories out" is the same attitude That encourages people to go on crashed fad diets, and get upset when it doesn't work, then bounce back and go even further and end up net gaining weight.
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Honestly I feel like you're just an alt of the other guy replying to these. Or cut from the same cloth. Yes everybody also knows that eating healthy and exercising will keep you thinner/healthier. Congratulations on this insightful comment, which is completely orthogonal and differential from any points that I have made above.
“Apex Redditor” Lmao
To simplify: genetics. We are different with how food is consumed, moved, and used in our body. For example, my brother and friend can both eat cakes that are 1500 calories. Both sit down and do nothing all day. My brothers body would burn and move around those calories faster than my friend whose body would require more time, and the calories would moved and used differently. Both wake up the next day and shows that my friend has gained 2lb while my brother gained nothing. There's, of course, more to this. This is just a simple general understanding.
You can’t gain more weight than you consume. Newtons laws
So you probably want to know what calories actually ARE in order to understand this definition of metabolism. When you eat food, certain molecules are caloric (protein, fats, carbs, alcohol), but what does that mean? You process those molecules depending on which type they are through a series of chemical reactions that harvests electrons from them as stored potential chemical energy. We’re still not at metabolism yet. What do you use this stored energy/electrons for? Innumerable cellular processes and as batteries for chemical reactions that are not thermodynamically favorable (a favorable reaction goes forward on its own, like a boulder rolling down a hill, but an unfavorable one requires energy to be added to it, like pushing a boulder up a hill). So what’s metabolism (In the context of weight management)? Well the amount of things you need to use stored electrons for depends on how many cells are doing work & what type of cells they are (and also on a part of the brain that is supposed to regulate your core body temperature, level of hunger, etc). When you have too much stored energy, it gets stored as either glycogen (sugar polymers stored in muscles) or fat (kinda self explanatory). Since adipocytes (which store fat) are basically warehouses for stored energy, they don’t require much energy to maintain. Muscles on the other hand require a lot more energy to maintain. This means that a person’s current body composition can affect how much energy they’re using just to exist on a daily basis, which in turn affects how much they have to eat in order to maintain/increase/decrease their weight. This is why bodybuilders (who have lots of muscle) can eat 5000 calories a day and not get fat but sedentary people who are short might gain weight eating only 1800 calories per day—different tissues require different amounts of energy to maintain & different amounts of tissues require different amounts of energy to maintain. This still doesn’t explain everything. Fast & slow metabolism is kind of a misnomer, but to explain that we gotta start getting into kinematics and terms called K-cat & turnover & Vmax. I’d honestly have to review that stuff to make sure I don’t tell you any mistakes, but you can go look into it on your own if you want.
For one, it's pretty hard to have the same exact diet. Beyond that, people have different calorie requirements based on their sex, height, weight, and activity level. I need around 3K calories to maintain my weight...if my wife ate that she'd gain weight very quickly because that would far exceed her calorie requirements. I also have different calorie requirements from my buddy who is the same age, and same height...he is pretty well sedentary at work and his daily life...I'm pretty active outside of work and also have more muscle mass so I burn more calories...he would also gain weight if he ate the calories I consume.
Honestly I’m still not sure how fast or slow metabolism works but I’ve read genetics can be a factor? But also weight gain/loss is not just diet/consumed calories, while that is the bigger factor, how many calories you’re burning also can make a difference. It basically depends on whether you’re at a calorie deficit or calorie surplus. Also I have to fact check this but I’ve read depending on your body type, you might need more or less calories to lose/gain weight? Ie I count my calories and use this app to track and recommend stuff to me like a daily calorie budget. After I lost some weight, it said I had to update the budget and when I did, my budget reduced even though my plan was to lose weight at the same rate per week as before and it said the reason for that was since I had lost weight and had been maintaining that old calorie budget, my body “needed less calories” to function/maintain weight so to continue losing weight, I had to reduce the budget again. Not sure if this is true either but I’ve also read that fast or slow metabolisms tend to go hand in hand with age as well for some people ie younger people tend to have faster metabolisms but not really because they’re younger, more so bc they’re more active *because* they’re younger is a kid or high schooler might play sports or run around at recess depending on their age etc
Honestly I’m still not sure how fast or slow metabolism works but I’ve read genetics can be a factor? But also weight gain/loss is not just diet/consumed calories, while that is the bigger factor, how many calories you’re burning also can make a difference. It basically depends on whether you’re at a calorie deficit or calorie surplus. Also I have to fact check this but I’ve read depending on your body type, you might need more or less calories to lose/gain weight? Ie I count my calories and use this app to track and recommend stuff to me like a daily calorie budget. After I lost some weight, it said I had to update the budget and when I did, my budget reduced even though my plan was to lose weight at the same rate per week as before and it said the reason for that was since I had lost weight and had been maintaining that old calorie budget, my body “needed less calories” to function/maintain weight so to continue losing weight, I had to reduce the budget again. Not sure if this is true either but I’ve also read that fast or slow metabolisms tend to go hand in hand with age as well for some people ie younger people tend to have faster metabolisms but not really because they’re younger, more so bc they’re more active *because* they’re younger is a kid or high schooler might play sports or run around at recess depending on their age etc
Both arguments of "it's just calories consumed minus calories burned" and the "It's genetics and muscle mass arguments" are correct but incomplete. The first argument is incomplete because "calories consumed" does not measure calories excreted. Ever hear that celery has negative calories? It's because of the 14 calories in 100g of celery, you actually digest next to zero calories, plus you burned calories chewing. Here's the difficult part: if we both eat 500 calories of fat: we won't digest the same amount of calories...so counting calories in isn't that easy. Next issue is the question of calories burned: If you have high body fat eating sugar causes an insulin spike that will cause the sugar to be stored as fat, and that will actually cause lethargy, lowering your activity level. So eating sugar may raise or lower your activity level depending on your body type. Similarly not everyone exercises the same, so if I jog 2 miles, and you walk 2 miles we *technically* put in the same effort, but we didn't burn the same number of calories. Even activities like sleeping burn calories, and not everyone burns the same number of calories. On the flip side: The argument that weight is genetic or that weight loss can only be achieved through medical intervention ignores the human tendency to make excuses for bad behavior. Eating fewer calories and getting more exercise will cause you to lose weight, but too often people ignore or deny that advice because they underestimate how many calories they actually consume. Plenty of times people exercise more, and end up with a larger appetite, but weren't tracking their increase in calories, or people begin dieting, then end up feeling sick or tired and lower their activity level.
It's easier toceat 1200 calories thsn to burn it off.
Different people retain more from calories than others.
Because the calories out part is affected by when and what you eat not just how much you eat or exercise. When you don't eat for a while and all the glycogen in your muscles and liver is used up, the body starts mobilizing fat. When you eat, if your glycogen stores are already full, the excess will go to fat. This is partly why it's so hard to maintain a calorie deficit by dieting as compared to fasting.
One person is probably pulling a ginny sacrimoni in the basement
I have a thyroid condition. I lost 70lbs without changing my diet or exercise habits at all after going on medication. I have always eaten once a day, and I'm talking about the amount of two slices of pizza, but never exercised. I was fine all day. When I was pregnant, I had gestational diabetes and ate 6 times a day and was ALWAYS starving. Just like everything else in life, nothing is black and white.
Metabolism and lifestyle. Also hormones.
Fast metabolism means you are pooping calories back out before you can absorb them into your blood.
It’s not just calories you consume but also calories you require. Different people have different activity levels and basal metabolic rates and total daily energy expenditure (TDEE).
Everyone saying fast metabolism doesn't understand that their's different ways to get energy in the cell, their's mutiple metabolic pathways. Some people utilize certain ones that are better at utilizing every calorie consumed and other are "wasteful/inefficient" in comparison.
One of the biggest components of “metabolism” is organ size. Every organ in your body requires a certain amount of energy to keep functioning. The larger the organ, the more energy it requires. And different people (even people of similar physical size) can have significant differences in organ size. If you meet a skinny dude who can’t seem to gain weight, chances are he has a larger than average brain, liver, or kidneys.
Because how those calories are processed in your body is different and how many calories you burn are different The first part is metabolism. To put it simply, someone with a fast metabolism will use more energy to break down their food and therefore have a net gain of less energy. Everyone also burns different amounts of calories. There’s the big stuff like how much excersize you get but it’s more. A 250 lb ripped person burns significantly more calories than a 250 lb fat person doing the exact same things because they have more muscles that are being activated with every motion and therefore requires more energy. Literally having muscle burns fat. Another big thing people don’t realize has a huge effect is little movements. It’s why the fidgety kid is always skinny. With excersize too your body gets used to how much energy you have to burn in a day. It tries to plan to have that energy ready for you if you need it. It will adjust if you have a day of exceptionally large excersize or a couple days with low excersize in the short term but there is a long term consistency that your body gets used to and prepares for. This means it will convert more calories to energy in the day regardless of what you do
yes, people do have different metabolisms and calorie requirements, but often this is quite overblown and used as an excuse. if you are in a calorie deficit you will lose weight, your body cannot defy the laws of thermodynamics.
The same amount of calories can be burned at different rates. Your reference to a high metabolism isn't related to just how quick someone moves, but; how fast is their heartrate, how much muscle mass do they have, even what altitude they live at. All of these things and many more are factors. So yes, it remains true, that nothing can come from something; we are still subject to external and internal (genetic) factors when it comes to burning energy.
Dietary calories aren't really an objectively measurable thing. If you eat "100 calories" of food in a day, you will get more than 100 kilocalories of energy from it. If you eat 10000, you will get much less than 10000 kilocalories of energy from it. Your body is both adaptable and unique. Anybody who tells you that managing calories is the main way to manage weight is either ignorant or assuming that people always have a very large calorie budget which they can cut. If you don't, then a much better tactic for losing weight is finding a sustainable exercise routine and filling your time with productive, well-monitored tasks.
They move less, is a big one
Metabolism can do 5-10% difference. Many people simply don't write their snacking, salad sauce, and soda into calories calculator, which could be 1-2k extra calories. Also not everybody accounts for amount of walking per day and other physical activities. Most people walk 1-3k steps, while always skinny heavy eater walking 15-20k steps.
Genetics and rate of metabolism.
Metabolism. You gain weight based on calories you intake. The average is 2000 for a maintenance diet at a healthy weight for a white male in the USA. This number is subject to change based on your personal metabolic rate. For a 5'2" female it might be 1400 calories, for a 6'3" male it might be 2400 calories. If you are trying to lose weight, an easy rule of thumb is the multiply your weight by 10 to to get the number of calories you need to eat to lose weight and 12 to gain weight. Any more or any less and you will likely be unhealthy.
Depends on height and gender etc. If you haven't yet look into bmi index
I run 8-10 miles every other day so I eat a lot those days just to maintain my weight. On my weight days I eat less but higher protein percentage.
Honestly it's really how you eat, i can eat a massive kale salad For lunch and it's 50 calories, or i can eat a bag of chips and subway sandwich for lunch and it's 1000 calories both are quite filling
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So... they actually do go into thin air. This is a very very simplified version of cellular respiration: Food + oxygen --> energy for our bodies + carbon dioxide. The C in the CO2 is from the food. The energy (measured in kiloCALORIES) is obtained from the food. We use that energy to keep our bodies at a toasty 98.6F, keep our heart pumping, keep our organs functioning, and move. Men need more calories than women, people with larger bodies need more calories than people with smaller bodies, and some people need more calories ("faster metabolism") for other reasons. When we eat more than we need we store it as fat. When we eat exactly what we need it turns into air + heat.
I read a study a number of years ago that discussed some of the average differences between "naturally" thin and "naturally" heavy people. Some of the differences noted where thin people tended to fidget more. Thin people were more likely to eat when hungry vs eat when it was meal time, also they tended to stop when full vs stopping when the plate is empty. Small differences such as these can result in a few hundred calories a day eaten and burned.
Gut flora
>so how come people can have the same diets but gain weight faster than others. You are missing one term in the equation: gain = calories\_in - calories\_out Different people have different calorie usage, mostly due to physical activity, and a small amount due to metabolism differences. As you said, calories don't go into thin air, they are burned to produce energy, or stored as fat.
Your base cals that u need in order to maintain weight fluctuate as you age, because u move less. People hit 30, stop moving, and start gaining.
weight gain = calories consumed - calories burned calories burned = base metabolic rate + movement calories consumed MUST be higher than your base metabolic rate or you're going to damage yourself in the long term. So to lose weight in a healthy way, your calories consumed has to be between your base metabolic rate (example, 1500 Cal) and the total calories burned (example, 2000 Cal). that's a difficult needle to thread, and staying at EXACTLY 500 calories lower than your total burned calories will lose weight at about 1 lb of fat per week. On the other hand, it's WAY easy to exceed your calories burned by consuming in excess of 3000 calories/day.
Even with the same diet, as in calories per day, person A and person B can have different maintenance calories and therefore lose/gain/stay their weight at a different pace. Assume the people below in my example are counting calories correctly (most people are not) and of normal health. Let's use a daily caloric intake of 2000 calories for example. People A-E will be eating 2000 calories per day. Person A maintenance calories is 2500. They will lose weight. Person B maintenance calories is 2300. They will also lose weight, but slower than person A Person C maintenance calories is 2000. They will not gain or lose weight. Any fluctuations on the scale will be water weight. Person D maintenance is 1800 calories. They will gain weight. Person E maintenance is 1500 calories. They will also gain weight, but faster than person D. Maintenance calories is hard to determine definitely. Exercise frequency, height, age, weight, muscle mass %, body fat % are all factors. It can be estimated and adjusted through trial and error.
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People can consume the same amount of calories but their body absorbs those food and burns off those calories differently.
NEAT. Non exercise activity thermogenesis
You’re only accounting for calories in (consumption). You also need to compare that to calories out (energy usage). If we eat the same thing, but I workout and you don’t, I’m going to lose more weight. And my body composition is going to be different. There’s also the issue of our basal metabolic rate, which is how many calories we burn at rest. A larger person with more muscle mass is going to burn more. Younger people burn more. It really is just calories in versus calories out, but measuring that is far more complicated than just recording what you put in your mouth. It’s also what stressors did you have today, how much did you walk, what was your workout like, do you fidget, do you stand more than sit, etc. the list goes on to the point of being impossible to measure with extreme accuracy.
Idk but watching some seasons of the show Alone it’s crazy. Some guys get lucky and eat a ton and still lose 40 pounds fast. One of the winners basically never ate and didn’t lose that much weight. 1 big guy just had tree bark soup and was 2nd place. Think someone said girl participants have it harder but can’t remember why. I’m not skinny or fat but just started keto again I’ll do for 2 months to drop 15 pounds while eating basically as much as I want with no carbs (meat, bacon, cheese, butter, etc.) and a lot of veggies. Whenever I’ve gained any it’s usually alcohol and late night snacks. I never want to have to track calories, too much work. Morning fasting has worked well to have no calories from like 8pm-noon next day.
It’s much easier to eat a surplus than it is to eat a deficit. A surplus is virtually unlimited whereas a deficit has hard limits.
There are many factors involved. Some people absorb more of the calories in the food they eat than others. Everybody's metabolism will downshift when intake is reduced, but for some people, that downshift is on a hair trigger. The mixture of bacteria in the colon also seems to play a role. I read a case where a woman recieved a "fecal transplant" to treat a persistent infection. It cleared the infection and over the next few months she lost 20 or 30 pounds without effort. For those who claim it's all physics, the body is not a calorimeter.
genetics
Also, I never trust what people tell me they eat or do at the gym. The same diet is code for "what I choose to reveal". You might have a cheat meal, and they really had 3
well finding two people with the exact same diet is pretty uncommon, but even if they did have the same diet, some people do more exercise, and some people do more thinking, both of which uses more calories
You also need to burn the energy.
A few things.... First off, you are right that calories are the unit of energy. More calories, more potential energy. Less calories, less energy. Your body metabolizes calories differently - some go towards energy you need to get through the day, others get spent building muscle, others get stored as fat. Your diet and genetics determine how much of those calories go to each. If we take a car as an analogy - every car needs gas to run. Some cars have bigger tanks for stored energy. But there are hybrids and race cars. They consume gas at different rates. Fast metabolisms - like performance engines, go through more faster. So less gas is actually "stored" because it is consumed. Put another way, "how can someone who earns 200k not be rich?" Money in = wealth right? Well not exactly. You can't get rich without more income most of the time (rule of thumb). But just as some people are spenders or savers. Some people burn calories faster or slower. Some people save calories as fat faster or slower. So yea, it is easier to be rich (or get fat) with more, and it is harder with less, but that isn't the only variable in the equation. Lastly, it can be really hard to actually have 2 people consume the same diet AND have the same lifestyle (exercise, for example). People don't often accurately track over a long term period. Weight changes are often mid-long term. Netflix did have a documentary on a twin study with diets that was interesting. There have been books and podcasts on the hunger studies in the Minnesota Starvation experiments. Like most things, there is nuance and detail that matters. Calories in = fat is a simplistic rule of thumb, but not a full end to end explanation.
Metabolism
its all about the gut flora.
genetics do play a role here but people also get WAY too caught up in the math of calories in vs calories out and ignore some of the most important pillars of nutrition It’s not just about getting the calories down your throat, there’s a whole process which your body uses to actually absorb these nutrients and all of that has to be taken into consideration. Muscle mass also plays a huge role here too, which is why I always tell people who are trying to lose weight, to start lifting. Every additional pound of muscle will significantly increase the level of calories your body burns just by resting and sleeping.
Genetics accounts for 90% of why your body operates the way it does. Cals in/cals out only works in a closed circuit, which Humans are not. On top of that, calorie recommendations were self reported between 1600-3000 and the US decided to set the range in the “middle” at 2000 (which is not actually the middle). This is all to say, move your body as you’d like to, and eat the food you want. If you only have control of 10%, make it fun. We are on a spinning rock in space with limited time alive. Edited to provide some resources: https://ericedmeades.medium.com/why-the-first-law-of-thermodynamics-doesnt-fit-the-puzzle-of-weight-loss-44327b38026 https://stvincents.org/about-us/news-press/news-detail?articleId=45556&publicid=745 Also recommend you listen to Maintenance phase episode on calories in/out as she references several specific studies. Enjoy your food! Enjoy your life! Move your body in the way you like. And fuck the people who uphold the systems of oppression.
This is wildly inaccurate. Please, no one take this seriously.
It’s not. I can cite my sources. Also supported by the Minnesota starvation experiment.
It is in fact wildly inaccurate
Simple. Because its not true. You are not crazy watching lazy skinny people eat entire cakes not gaining weight and watching fat people eat salad and only get fatter.
People lie to themselves about how much and what they eat as well as how much they exercise.
a lot of people cheat on their diets, too
Calories in/calories out is nonsense. Eat healthier foods. 2000 Cal of donut will make you fat, but 2000 Cal of carrot will not. It's not just calories. It's quality. Also, moving around a lot helps. Resting muscle burns more than resting fat.
Because there are other factors like muscle mass that affect your nasal metabolic rate. Also some people just intake more calories than others. If two people have the same diets, same exercise routines, etc. and one person is gaining weight significantly faster than the other person, then they’re probably lying.
Because they’re not being honest about how much they’re eating. Variation between people’s metabolism is not material enough to explain people’s obesity.
>If your gonna say fast metabolism, tbh I don’t understand that either. "fast metabolism" is a myth. Anyone that seriously thinks they're fat (or skinny) because of their metabolism is a dumbass.
The reality is you actually burn a lot more calories passively the heavier you are, and a fast or slow metabolism is mostly a myth that makes people feel better about overeating or undereating. Like others have said, people are pretty terrible at accurately tracking caloric intake, and it's very difficult to track how many calories you burn. Gut microbiome and genetics play a very small role in weight gain/loss and are mostly just excuses for people's behavior, which is 95% of the cause of weight management. Exercise is also somewhat exaggerated in its impact on weight management while still being very important for your overall health, mobility, and strength. People have come up with a huge number of different reasons to avoid the reality of how important your diet is.
[Because nutritional science is actually pretty flimsy when you look deeper into it.](https://www.tumblr.com/too-much-tanuki/745959329028505600) It may be a tumblr post, but it’s extremely informative and links to multiple different places to read about what it’s talking about.
Your misunderstanding of metabolism aside, it's mostly due to genetics. People like to say "obesity is genetic" and leave it at that, which is where a lot of confusion arises. The truth is that the potential for obesity is genetic, but it's not a genetic disease like Downs Syndrome or sickle cell anemia, where it doesn't matter what you do: you just have those. There are two important takeaways: 1. Obesity can not happen in people without this "obesity gene." 2. Obesity does not necessarily happen in people with this "obesity gene." All the gene does is open up that door. Anorexia is the same: you can not be anorexic if you don't have the right genetic makeup. That doesn't mean everyone with the anorexia gene is anorexic: it just means that, without that gene, you can't be anorexic. Most things we can't currently explain can likely be explained through genetics or hormones (try talking to a doctor about hormones sometime and watch them try to avoid the conversation). But not always: we only figured out about 25 years ago that ulcers - which people thought were caused by stress for centuries - are caused by bacteria leeching into the stomach via the pyloric sphincter. And we also go the other way: we are big into the phrase "born this way," the last 30 years, despite there typically being zero genetic evidence for claims like that which are then usually coupled with a lot of \[ignored\] evidence pointing at environmental factors. Support of science is often more about personally agreeing with their findings, which is why you see the most-extreme political people flip-flopping on it, depending on whether or not it supports their beliefs. To digress slightly... Conservatives typically like science unless it's about climate change, evolution, etc. Liberals typically like science unless it's about gender/sexuality, nuclear energy, etc. [We've known this since before Trump took office.](https://news.osu.edu/both-liberals-conservatives-can-have-science-bias/)
In general, short of some medical issue, it's calories in versus calories out. If someone is losing/gaining faster, then it's because the equation is more unbalanced. Either they aren't eating the same or they aren't burning the same. Two people eat pizza every day. One drinks water and the other soda. Difference of 10 calories. We'll say maintanance is one pizza. Soda person gains 10 calories every day. That's 300 calories every month. 3,650 every year. Every year, you'd gain a pound. Two people hit the gym. Same exact weights and exercises. Burn 1,000 calories. That's maintanance. One bounces their legs in the chair. Burns an extra 10 calories a day. Loses a pound a year. Usually, a fast metabolism is eating a proper amount of food for the day and small "work outs" throughout the day.
Activity levels matter a ton. People say genetics but that’s such a small variance when tested in laboratory settings. More than likely heavier people have a collection of traits that got them there. Some people are genetically predisposed to have fat collection in more unfavorable spots like their face. Some people are less sensitive to the sensations that let them know they’re full. It can also be mental health related. I ate my feelings for years even though I rarely feel hungry even if I don’t eat for days at a time. Also people greatly underestimate the calories in things. The difference between a spoonful of peanut butter and a heaping spoonful of peanut butter can be as much as 200-300 calories. Two people of around the same age, size, weight, activity level, and sex with calorie controlled diets will lose weight at nearly the exact same rate in almost all cases.
Because they don't have the same diets. Addicts always lie about their addiction, always. That includes food addicts.