Tag: weight loss

About That Olly Murs Before-And-After Poll

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized2 Comments

I saw a bunch of commentary, back and forth, on a poll asking men and women whether Olly Murs (a British celebrity) looked better before or after he dieted down to very low bodyfat levels:

Twitter polls are hardly wonderful, but if we assume honesty, men voted 2:1 that he looked better after the transformation and women voted 3.8:1 that he looked better before the transformation. To be fair, neither is a wonderful picture of Mr. Murs; both could be done with more flattering lighting and posture.

The big problem is that neither of these photos is really the ideal body composition in the world in which we actually live. The body composition on the right shows off his musculature better, but he’s into levels of leanness which are sub-ideal for actual living. On the left, he is carrying a bit of fat more than the ideal. That said, I think he looks far more likely to be a good husband and father on the left, and I suspect that this is the question most women were answering (who would ask which photo looks better for selling underwear, or some other purpose?), and the reasons for this are interesting.

The first thing we need to consider is that the general preference people have for leanness in modern America (perhaps in the West more generally) is actually contextual. We live in a time of abundance and there are various types of being unhealthy that cause people to become fat, so not being fat is an excellent marker for generally good health (including a reasonable mental understanding of health and a general pattern of decent-enough food and exercise choices). However, in places where food is scarce, people tend to find bodyfat more attractive than leanness, and rightly so, because in a food-scarce context, bodyfat shows a lot of very good things about your health and ability to take care of a human being (you). In some studies in such cultures, men rate women with a BMI that technically makes them obese above women with a bodyfat level that we in modern America would call healthy.

So taking this into account, what does the extremely lean body composition on the right tell us in this context? Well, it’s hard to achieve and has no real benefits (unless you’re a rock climber or similar kind of athlete). Further, it’s bordering on (if not beyond) the level of leanness where health is severely impacted; it would not be surprising if his testosterone levels are depressed, for example. (If they aren’t, they will be if he gets a little leaner.) His body probably won’t like being this lean at his age, which means he’ll probably have a harder time dealing with stress and being cheerful. Also, he’s probably stronger in the photo on the left. It’s not understood why, but the typical experience of people who started out less than completely obese and lose fat is that they get weaker. I can speak to this from personal experience—I once trashed my performance at a powerlifting meet by losing around 20 pounds in 5 months (the meet was right after), and I wasn’t even lean at the end of that. The human body just really dislikes caloric deficits and really dislikes not having sufficient fat reserves. And since we are our bodies and aren’t a ghost in a machine, that affects our psyche, too.

There’s also the issue that human beings simply have limited time, effort, and willpower. We’re finite creatures. So if a man is spending a lot of his effort and willpower being extremely lean, he’ll have less left over for other things, like social interactions.

Plus there’s the issue that concern for appearance simply has different connotations in men and women. It can be taken to the point of vanity in either sex, but it takes a greater amount of concern in women to reach the level where it is the sin of vanity. There are complex reasons for this, but the easiest to understand is that since a woman directly uses her body in very intensive ways to care for her young children (especially when they’re inside of her), she needs to put more effort into ensuring that her body is in good condition. And care for appearance is a way of signaling this, including to herself. We human beings do not know ourselves perfectly and so having habits that require spare energy to do are useful signposts to ourselves that we’re taking care of all of the important stuff. If we let those things go, it might well be because there are bigger problems, warranting investigation. This is instinctual, of course, not conscious, but it’s none the less practical.

Males use their bodies to care for their wife and children too, of course, but less directly, which means that far more workarounds are possible (e.g. you can grow crops even if you have to hobble around on a wooden leg by making up for it with extra strength in your arms and cleverness in making tools). And we tend to use our bodies in fewer ways, meaning we can concentrate more energy and effort into those ways. This specialization and indirection mean that we can be tougher and also, within limits, substitute skill for health. And so we need to take less care of ourselves (not none), and consequently need to sign-post it less. Thus it takes less for males to cross the line into vanity.

Now, none of this is to say that Mr. Murs was at the peak of attractiveness in the “before” picture. In it, he’s carrying a little extra fat beyond the minimum necessary for optimal health. If he’d lost only about fifteen pounds, almost everyone would agree he looked better. But with the two options we have, he looks happy in the picture on the left and unhappy in the picture on the right. And that counts for a lot.

I think part of how to get at this is to ask the question: which guy looks like you would want him as a friend? I know that for myself, the guy on the left looks like he’d be a lot more fun to hang out with.

Science Is Only As Good As Its Instruments

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Science, Uncategorized2 Comments

There’s a popular myth that science progressed because of a revolution in the way people approach knowledge. This is a self-serving myth that arose in the 1600s by people who wanted to claim special authority. This is why they came up with the marketing term “The Enlightenment” for their philosophical movement. If you look into the actual history of science, scientific discoveries pretty much invariably arose a little while after the technology which enabled their discovery was invented.

There is a reason we did not get the heliocentric (really, Copernican) theory of the solar system until a little while after the invention of the telescope. There is a reason why we did not get cell biology until a little while after the invention of the microscope. If you dig into the history of specific scientific discoveries, it’s often the case that several people discovered the same thing within months of each other and the person we credit with the discovery is generally the one who published first.

This is not to say that there are never flashes of insight or brilliance. So far as I can tell Einstein’s theory that E=mc2 was not merely the obvious result of measuring things using new technology. That said, it would almost certainly never have happened had radioactivity not been discovered a decade earlier, which would not have been possible without certain kinds of photographic plates existing (radioactive decay was discovered by Henri Becquerel and Marie Curie in the 1890s as they were studying phosphorescence and exposed photographic plates wrapped in black paper, which showed that something else was going on besides phosphorescence, many further experiments clarified what was going on by the time Einstein was working on the mass-energy equivalence).

Which gets me to modern science: there are a lot of things that we want to know, for which the relevant technology does not seem to exist. Nutrition is a great example. What are the long-term health effects of eating a high carbohydrate diet? How can you find out? It’s not practical to run a double-blind study of one group of people eating a high carbohydrate diet and the other eating a low-carbohydrate diet for fifty years. The current approach follows the fundamental principle of science (assume anything necessary in order to publish): it studies people for a few weeks or months, and measures various things assumed to correlate perfectly to good long-term health. That works for publishing, but if you’re more concerned with accuracy to reality than you are with being able to publish (and if you’re reading the study, you have to be), that’s more than a little iffy. Then if you spend any effort digging into the actual specifics, let’s just say that the top ten best reasons to believe these assumptions are all related group-think and the unpleasantness of being in the out-group. (Please actually look into this for yourself; the only way you’ll know what happens if you don’t just take people’s word for something is by not taking their word for it, including mine.)

And the problem with science, at the moment, when it comes to things like long-term nutrition is that the technology to actually study it just isn’t there. (It’s different if you want to study things like acute stimulation of muscle protein synthesis related to protein intake timing or the effects on serum glucose in the six hours following a meal.) And when the technology to do good studies doesn’t exist, all that can exist are bad studies.

This is why we see so much of people turning to anecdotes and wild speculation. Anecdotes and wild speculation are at least as good as bad studies. And when the bad studies tend to cluster (for obvious reasons unrelated to truth) on answers that seem very likely to be wrong, anecdotes and wild speculation are better than bad studies.

That doesn’t mean that anecdotes and wild theories are good. It would be so much better to have good studies. But we can’t have good studies just because we want them, just as people before the microscope couldn’t have cell biology no matter how much they wanted it. The ancient Greeks would have loved to have known about bacteria and viruses, but without microscopes, x-ray crystallography, and PCR, they were never going to find out about them.

As, indeed, they didn’t.

Calories In vs. Calories Out

On By Christopher LansdownIn Science, Uncategorized1 Comment

When it comes to health and fitness, and in particular to reducing the amount of fat on one’s body, the dominant story within our culture, at least from the sort of people who present themselves as experts, is that fat gain or loss is just Calories-in-vs-Calories-out so just take however many Calories you burn and eat less than that until you’re thin.

Now, obviously there is something truth to this because if you stop eating you will waste away until you die, and you will be very thin shortly before your death. (Though, interestingly, if you autopsy the corpses of people who’ve starved to death you will find tiny amounts of fat still remaining.) Of course, the problem with just not eating until you’re thin is that starvation makes you unfit for pretty much any responsibilities and it’s also bad for your health. (Among many problems, if you literally stop eating your muscles will substantially atrophy, including your heart.)

So the big question is: is there a way to eat fewer Calories than you burn while remaining a functioning adult who can do what the people you have responsibilities to need you to do, which doesn’t wreck your health?

The good news is that there are methods that accomplish this balance. The bad news is that (at least as far as I can tell) there’s no one method that works for everyone.

Since this post is about the Calories-in-vs-Calories-out mantra (from here on out, Ci-Co), I’m only going to discuss moderate Calorie restriction—oversimplifying, aiming for a deficit that results in about a half a percent of bodyweight reduction per week, for a period of 6-12 weeks, before returning to maintenance for an approximately equal length of time. (This is a version of what bodybuilders do and they’re probably the experts at losing fat because bodybuilding can be described, not entirely inaccurately, as competitive dieting.)

Now, at first glance, this isn’t too far off what the Ci-Co people seems to be saying. However, it’s very different in practice, and those differences will be illuminating, because they’re all things that the Ci-Co people get wrong.

The first big problem with trying to implement Ci-Co is: what on earth is your daily Calorie expenditure? There are highly accurate ways of measuring this which are extremely expensive with most being infeasible outside of a laboratory. Apart from that, there’s no good short term way. The best way—which is what bodybuilders do—is to carefully measure your Calorie intake and your weight over a period of time, then see what your weight does, and calculate your Calorie expenditure from your intake plus what your weight did. For example: suppose you take 3000Cal/day and over 14 days lost a pound. A pound of fat contains roughly 3600 Calories, so your actual expenditure was 3000 + (3600/14) = 3257. From there you can refine your intake to achieve what you want. (Bodybuilders also have phases where they put on muscle, which means gaining weight, so they will have to eat at a surplus to provide energy for building the extra muscle tissue.)

This looks nothing like what the Ci-Co people suggest, which usually amounts to either taking the USDA random-number of 2000 or else using an online tool which estimates your Calorie expenditure from your height, weight, and some description of how active you are. These are generally accurate to +/- 50%, which is not obviously distinguishable from useless. Using myself as an example, entering 6′ and 215 pounds with high activity, it estimated my maintenance Calories as 2900 and a weight loss target of 2450. I’ve actually been using the MacroFactor app to track approximately 100% of what I eat and weighing myself every morning when I wake up. It estimates my maintenance Calories as about 3900 Cal/day and I’m losing a little over a pound a week with a target Calories of 3200 Cal/day. On days when I eat about 2800 Calories I go to bed hungry and am very hungry the next day. If I tried to lose weight at 2400 Cal/day in a week or two I’d be constantly ravenous, unable to concentrate, barely able to do my job (I’m a programmer), and miserable to be around.

Because here’s the thing: the human body can tolerate small (consistent) Calorie deficits without worrying, but if they become too large the body freaks out and concludes that something very, very bad is going on and the top priority for the foreseeable future is getting through it. That means two things, both very bad for losing fat:

  1. Spending all your waking hours trying to find enough food
  2. Reducing your Calorie expenditures as much as possible to conserve what energy we do have until the bad times have past.

The second point is probably the bigger deal. What the CiCo people don’t realize is that your Calorie expenditure is nowhere near fixed. If your body thinks it’s a good idea, you can maintain on a surprisingly large number of Calories. If your body thinks it’s a good idea, you can maintain on a surprisingly small number of Calories. The former looks like having a lot of energy and feeling good. The latter looks like being tired and cold all the time.

Even worse, there is reason to believe—though this is nowhere nearly as well established—that if you make your body freak out and think it needs to survive a famine too many times, it will start to prepare for the next famine as soon as food becomes readily available again, much as people who’ve been broke a few times and also had good times tend to live like misers and save money the next time things go well. (In the the case of your body, this means gaining the fat you will need to survive the next famine, just like bears put on a ton of fat in summertime in order to get through the coming winter.)

This is why the other critical part of how bodybuilders diet is that they only do it for 6-12 weeks at a time, then take long maintenance breaks at their new weight. (The variability because they pay attention to how their body reacts and if it seems to be starting to freak out, they stop losing weight and start maintaining so it doesn’t have to adapt to the diet—there are many factors which go into how long it’s possible to diet before the body starts to freak out.) This relatively short fat-loss window ensures that the body never goes into surviving-famine mode. And the maintenance Calories are not a fixed number, either. They can easily increase for a few weeks as your body gets used to the extra food and raises your metabolism because it seems safe to do so.

When you put this all together, it’s why the Ci-Co people give the laws of thermodynamics a bad name. It may be perfectly true that losing weight is the result of one number that’s not easy to measure being lower than another number that’s impractically expensive to measure and impossible to usefully estimate, but knowing that that’s true has no practical value.

For a much more entertaining take on a closely related subject, check out Tom Naughton’s post Toilet Humor And The HOW vs. WHY Of Getting Fat.

This post was about the problems with Calories In vs Calories Out, but I would be remiss to point out that everything I said up above about how bodybuilders reduce fat is predicated on having a reasonably well-regulated metabolism to begin with. There are all sorts of ways for the human metabolism to become disregulated and if yours is disregulated your odds of successfully reducing fat are much lower until you figure out what’s wrong and fix it. In my own case, I’m about 99% certain that at times in my life I’ve induced insulin insensitivity in my body through excessive fructose consumption. (I can eat a pound of chocolate for lunch if I let myself and there was a period back when I was in grad school when I was drinking full-sugar Mountain Dew and eating cake mix out of the box with a spoon. That stuff has more sugar and flour in it. This is during a period when I was unemployed and depressed as well as young and dumb, and I had yet shaken off being raised during the low-fat craze of the 1980s and 1990s.) I believe some extensive low-carb eating has allowed my body to mostly reset its relationship with insulin and at this point I’m only willing to eat candy/ice cream/etc. on Christmas, Easter, and my birthday. That said, when I’m cutting (reducing fat), I find it much easier and more successful if I go back to eating low carb or even keto.

That’s me; I suspect that many people are in a similar boat because fructose is way more common in processed food than people normally realize and it’s reasonably well established that extremely high fructose consumption (much higher than anything you’d get from any reasonable intake of fresh fruit, btw) can induce non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which seems to have a causative relationship with insulin resistance/metabolic syndrome. That said, this is not everyone who’s got excess fat. There are tons of things that can go wrong to disregulate one’s metabolism/appetite, some of them dietary, some of them endocrine, and some I don’t even begin to have an idea. The human body is unbelievably complex and there are a lot of ways it can malfunction. There’s really no substitute for trying things and seeing what works. And at least we know that it’s a good idea to get regular exercise no matter how much excess fat you’re carrying. It may not make you lean, but it will certainly make you healthier and happier than if you don’t do it. After the first few months.

Oh yeah—and I’m no expert, so please do your own research and don’t take my word for it.

I Became Medically Obese By Drinking a Glass of Water

On By Christopher LansdownIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

A while ago the medical definition of obesity became a certain Body Mass Index (BMI). Thirty or higher, to be specific. And the body mass index is a remarkably crude formula. It’s just the mass (in kilograms) divided by the height (in meters) squared. Since I’m six feet tall (that’s 1.8288 meters), the cutoff for a BMI of 30 is (depending on how you round the inputs) 100 kilograms even. This morning, when I woke up, I weighted 99.9kg, classifying me as “overweight.” Then I drank a glass of water and was 100.1kg, classifying me as obese. The moral of the story is, of course: don’t drink water because it will make you fat.