Wogster

What your saying, and this is hard for me to understand, if I run 500 calories short every day for six months, that my body will save up that deficit somewhere and suddenly it will pounce on me, and need to be made up all at once. Man, I wanna know what you've been smoking.... Because I built up a nice 50lb deficit in 2003 and it's still out there. The reason we store excess energy as fat, is that if we have a requirement to run a deficit, such as a major crop failure or serious illness, so that we have a short fall, then we can use up some of the balance. Fat is really like an energy bank, when you eat more then you burn, you make a deposit, when you eat less then you burn, you make a withdrawl. Now if the biological mechanism is designed to allow for a forced shortfall, then the same mechanism allows for a voluntary short fall. People who diet and fail, fail because they go on the latest supermarket rag diet, lose the weight they want to, then return to their former eating habits. People who succeed, do so by making a lifestyle change, that can be getting back on a bicycle, after years of sitting in the car. It can mean ordering a Greek Salad (dressing on the side please) instead of the fries, it can mean skipping the in flight nuts, maybe pack your own snack for the flight, and shopping in the fresh food section of the market.

The reason that so many Americans are overweight is that they spend all of their time on their donkey, they sit in the car, the sit behind a desk, they sit in front of the TV or the computer, stuffing their faces with the crap that passes for food in America.

icyclist 

"People who succeed, do so by making a lifestyle change, that can be getting back on a bicycle, after years of sitting in the car."

I don't think we're that far apart in our thinking. However, the part about getting back on the bicycle is where our thoughts diverge.

Riding a bike will make someone hungry. Just enough hungry to want to eat back the energy lost. If it's a long ride, that person will be very hungry. Put back less energy, and weight, at least for a while, will come off. But that means the same result could be had by skipping the bike ride and doing exactly the same thing: eating a little less food.

Exercising, therefore, as counterintuitive as it seems, won't help us lose weight. It just makes us hungrier. Of course, there are benefits to being in shape (one of which is I'll probably be able to finish the Solvang Century tomorrow).

As for some science, I enjoyed reading Good Calories, Bad Calories, by Gary Taubes. He presents a lot of evidence, and his bibliography stretches for many, many pages.

His own conclusion, which I find persuasive, is that we have to be careful about the foods we eat, in particular sweets and starches.

bruce19

FWIW, when I go out and do a short/hard ride or a long/mellow ride, I find my appetite somewhat depressed. I have read that this is not uncommon. I have also noticed that I have a very hard time losing weight in the off season when I'm not as active. Bear in mind that I do spinning classes 2-3 X wk. and lift 3 X wk. But, it's not the same as moving my weight up a hill on a bike. In season I find that my food intake, in terms of calories, is almost always way offset by my activities, as in calories burned. I tend to believe, although I can't prove it, that my metabolism also speeds up with cycling.

Last year I counted calories and tried to eat healthier food. I was surprised to discover that after doing this for a while, I found myself feeling full on less calories and some of the "bad" food I loved no longer appealed to me quite as much. I lost a few pounds but when cycling season was in full tilt I lost a bunch more. Ended up losing 12 lbs., down from 197 lbs. to 185 lbs. This year I will be starting the season at 190 lbs and hope to get down to my college football weight of approx. 180 lbs.

BluesDawg

icyclist,
Is there anything in your research that suggests that eating right combined with a sedentary lifestyle is better for weight control than eating right combined with an active lifestyle (e.g. riding bicycles)? That seems to be what you are suggesting.

alcanoe

[QUOTE=miss kenton;10516516]
Good info on the libraries. I go to Atlanta often. I just might see what they have there.


There are no crdible sources unfortunately. One has to judge each research paper on it's own meritt and check if the results have been repeated in other independent studies. There have been many articles in the media including some journals about the lack of credibility of even the journals in the areas of nutrition, medicine not to mention C)2 caused global warming.

There have been studies that show that some 90% of the papers that appear in these journals eventually are proven incorrect. This is largely, but not soley due to the money issue and the lack of full disclosure of who funded the research and the author's sources on income.

This came to a head for me and my physician several years ago when he suggested I take stains in sufficient quantity to drop my total cholesterol to 130 based on a journal article. He gave me a copy. I said I'd think about it. Six months later I wrote him a three page paper showing that the article was not credible and include a stack of papers from the web as my sources. He didn't comment for another 6 months. A year after he had given me the article he concluded that the medical journals had no scientific integrity.

Another motivating factor for the study physiology.

Al.

Wogster

I think it depends on the bicycle ride, I can do a 15km jaunt and not feel any hungrier then if I skip it, sure it's probably only 500 calories or so, but combine that with skipping desert worth another 500 calories, and I can run a 1000 calorie deficit from where I am, do that on a daily basis, and losing 2lbs a week, isn't that hard. It doesn't take all that long for that 2lbs to add up, for example, it's about 9lbs a month, so in 5 months I can lose the 40lbs I would like to.

The main reason that exercise is recommended, is that it forces the body to maintain muscle mass, cycling and swimming are cardiovascular exercises, they work the heart and lungs, probably a good thing as you get older, they also work the legs, so combining that with a decent upper body program, can maintain strength, something that tends to wain as you get older. Most thinking on diet keeps changing, we had the low carb diet, the low protein diet, the low-fat diet, and the named diets in the 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 diet books published in the last 20 years, however it's a balance that is required, and the way it gets balanced is different for someone who bikes 25 miles in the morning, and does 18 holes of golf in the afternoon and plays tennis in the evening, then it does for the guy who drives to work, spends his day sitting at a desk, then drives home to sit in front of the TV for the evening. This is where a professional dietitian or nutritionist can help tailor a diet for the individual, just like they do for gold medal winning athletes.

BluesDawg

Isn't the whole idea of having papers and studies published in scientific journals that they can then come under the scrutiny of peers? That has been my understanding, that it is part of a process through which the wheat is separated from the chaff. The fact that something that was published turns out to later be discredited is an example of the process working.

alcanoe

Unfortunately with the big $'s involved that's no longer the case. The journals have degenerated into marketing vehicles to influence doctors in the case of medical journals. The problem is well recognized to the point where it's been discussed in the journals as well the the media like the NY Times, WSJ and the Wash. Post. There is a move to require full financial disclosure.

There are many games played in the journals like hiding the negative results from the abstract and burying them in the details (or not reporting them at all) knowing that most doctors will only read the abstract. Peers are often from the special interest group.

I have a personal experience with this fraud in the New England Journal of Medicine some 10 years ago. I had been influenced by the constant promotion of low cholesterol and the effectiveness of statins. Having always been around 220 for total cholesterol, I asked my doctor if I should be on one. He put me on a low dose of Pravachol.

When I got home I did a search and strangely, I found the original study report in the NEJM on the West Scotland trials in the free literature. It showed that Pravachol was highly effective for primary intervention/prevention meaning to prevent illness before you are sick. So I took it a few years until my doctor wanted to up the dose based on another journal article already mentioned.

It turns out that statins helps prevent illness in only 1 out of a hundred who take it for like 10years as primary prevention. It's a scam. There was even a big article on the ineffectiveness of statins in Business Week some years back. So I go back to the web and find a follow-on Pravachol study where they followed the original study group or cohort for another ten years. Again, the results were really good. I could not figure out why the discrepancies.

My daughter sends me a book (Overdosed America) written by an MD who went to the original data of these statin studies and it became really clear how I was scammed. It turns out that West Scotland is a hot bed of heart issues and strokes. They tend to smoke and drink and be sedentary and I think overweight as well.

While they eliminated people from the trial that were out-right sick, they did include people who had symptoms of a cardio issues in their future like leg pains. In other words, they got good results because a large percentage of the study population was sick to begin with so it was as much secondary intervention as primary. Also, since the study population was biased to drinkers, smokers and sedentary it was not a group I belonged too so the results are not relevant to me anyhow.


The cholesterol and statin guidelines were developed by a government panel of 14 experts. Five had financial interests in the pharmaceutical industry who make the stains including the chairman. They based their recommendation on the Framingham study which is the mother of all statin studies. It turns out that the Framingham data shows that stains are ineffective for primary intervention.

The Framingham study does show that the most active third of the 5000 person cohort had 40% lower death rate than the least active third. It also shows that elevated total cholesterol correlates to significant increased death only to age 40 and gets zero correlation above 50.

These data were hidden for decades. The pharmaceuticals can't make money if you just exercise.

The really sad thing here other than the waste of $Billions is they are now prescribing stains to 10-year olds who are porky and sedentary and have high cholesterol.

Al

alcanoe

A few examples

Al

----------------------

Recent disclosures of fraudulent or flawed studies in medical and scientific journals have called into question as never before the merits of their peer-review system.

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/02/he...es+data&st=nyt

----------------------


Positive bias from 11 to 69%: a study compares raw data to journal
published data.



The study compares the data raw data supplied the FDA to the selected data
published in journal articles. As expected, because the studies were done as
part of an overall strategy to market drugs, the results were manipulated
for that end. In all 37 studies the positive bias was 11 to 69%. In other
words every journal article based on clinical trials of psychiatric
medications overstates substantially their positive results. There of
course is no reason to believe that what motivates Pharma for psychiatric
drugs is not also operating for all their published studies.


https://jerrymondo.tripod.com/index/id9.html

---------------------------


BMJ 2006;332:1444-1447 (17 June), doi:10.1136/bmj.332.7555.1444

Analysis and comment
Commercial bias in medical journals
Commercial influence and the content of medical journals

https://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/332/7555/1444

------------------------------

Medical Journals See a Cost to Fighting Industry-Backed Research
By Paul Basken


https://chronicle.com/article/Medical...Cost-in/48393/
----------------------------------


Journal reveals plans to fight fraud
Meredith Wadman

Abstract
Science to select papers for extra-secure review process.

In a notable move aimed at curbing fraud in scientific publications, the journal Science said last week that it will probably begin targeting certain "high-risk" papers for extra scrutiny.The move comes in response to a report from an external committee convened by the journal to assess its handling of the papers behind the Woo Suk Hwang fraud scandal.

A new review of studies finds 29 percent of cancer research published in high-profile journals had disclosed a conflict of interest.

While it's a good thing that the conflicts were disclosed, the review also found conflicts affect the research outcomes. The results, announced today, will be published June 15 in the journal Cancer.

The findings add to a mountain of evidence suggesting you should be skeptical of health and medical advice.

https://www.livescience.com/health/09...-conflict.html

------



Newly unveiled court documents show that ghostwriters paid by a pharmaceutical company played a major role in producing 26 scientific papers backing the use of hormone replacement therapy in women, suggesting that the level of hidden industry influence on medical literature is broader than previously known.

The articles, published in medical journals between 1998 and 2005, emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the risks of taking hormones to protect against maladies like aging skin, heart disease and dementia. That supposed medical consensus benefited Wyeth, the pharmaceutical company that paid a medical communications firm to draft the papers, as sales of its hormone drugs, called Premarin and Prempro, soared to nearly $2 billion in 2001....

https://www.businessethics.ca/blog/20...nflict-of.html

----

https://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climate...aning-ninnies/

closetbiker

I've found this as well. Aren't there are a few books written on the subject too?

icyclist 

'What your saying, and this is hard for me to understand, if I run 500 calories short every day for six months, that my body will save up that deficit somewhere and suddenly it will pounce on me, and need to be made up all at once. Man, I wanna know what you've been smoking'

First, I object, mildly, to your suggestion I'm not thinking straight because I'm using recreational drugs.

Secondly, no, that's not what I'm saying. I've said, and I'm saying, that you CAN'T run 500 calories short everyday, at least not by riding your bike. On average, you'll eat the 500 calories back every time. There is no savings: you will eat back what you use up. If it's 500 calories in a day, your body will want to eat back those 500 calories.

Please note that I've said it's extremely DIFFICULT to lose weight. You are, with your admission you're at least 50 pounds overweight, living proof of my claim.

"It can mean ordering a Greek Salad (dressing on the side please) instead of the fries"

However, I say if the salad - or the fries - leaves someone hungry, they will keep eating until hunger is assuaged.

"stuffing their faces with the crap that passes for food in America"

I agree with you here. However, I don't think time spent behind a desk has anything to do with weight gain or loss, because I'm sticking with my original assertion that when we exercise, we become hungry enough to want to replace whatever it is we expended in energy.

Why did you gain 50 pounds? I'm guessing you were off the bike, but I'm also guessing you were eating more fries than you should have.

Road Fan

Yes, but evaluating it requires a baseline. I've had the alarming experience of "outgrowing" belts, about 6 years ago. Not since!

BluesDawg

icyclist, you keep telling us that exercise won't work for losing weight. Not that I buy your argument, but what do you say will work? Or should we all just surrender and enjoy eating ourselves into obesity?

tallard

Fat people CAN get the weight off temporarily, but as we all know fat cells don't die. They're just lying in wait. Even those who've belied me here have not contradicted that fat cells don't die. A fatter person's cellular structure is ALWAYS trying to gain back, which is different from a lean person.

It is why NO DIETS work in the long term. It is why "Bigest Losers" gain the weight back, eventually. It takes an obscene level of self-control to keep the weight off. We're not saying it's IMPOSSIBLE, NO. We're saying that BIGger people cannot maintain weight loss success by imitating people who've spent most of their life slender.

Bigger people will always have to fight, some years will be good, some years will be bad, because our bodies don't respond to food the same way as slender people's bodies. Slender people have it easy, calorie in calorie out, but it does not work for everyone.

alcanoe

It's not really a self control thing if done correctly. It's a matter of changing bad habits for good habits and it needs to be done very slowly. It takes years to put it on and it should be lost at a similar rate. It also takes education to learn how to reduce calories with out the hunger. And most importantly it takes exercise to get back to the human default condition of high activity.

An example is the rural Chinese compared to a typical America. A 143 lb Chinese male burns some 600 calories/day more than a 143 lb American. The rural Chinese still farms and have no machinery. A fat person upping his calorie expenditure by 600 calories will not only lose weight, but will suppress his appetite and build muscle mass which will further increase his calorie expenditure at rest.

Al

miss kenton

You are correct It is not about "going on a diet". It is about changing bad habits for good habits. It is a permanent life style change. E.M.E.L

tallard

You sell it as something so RELIABLE, but it isn't really. My weight got put on very quickly, without increased eating, without decreased sport. The reason, I moved to the far North where daylight cycle affects women's weight more than men's.

In 2.5 yrs I went from 185 (University end-weight) to 225. That's 40 lbs in 2.5 years. X-country skied 40-50 km per weekend and cycling or jogging to work 5d/wk. I've bounced around 200-225 since 1996 with varying degrees of negative calorie intake per "required" (base+activity). It does not come off that way. Last year I was swimming 1mile on Saturdays and Sundays, cycling to work 32 mile round trip in Miami 5d/wk, still not an ounce of weight came off, still I was maintaining calorie deficits. I've been restricting red meats and processed starches for over 10 years. I've cycled/walked everywhere most of my life (in 43 yrs, I have 4 yrs of car ownership). No amount of calorie reduction, not even fasting three weeks, has ever made me lose weight.

Once it did come off however, and I dropped to 180 for 6 months, without diet, without daily sport, car driving to work... you know how? working the evening shift and sleeping-in EVERY SINGLE morning, that year I ate chips, sausages, it was a crazy fun year, living in the city, drinking 3 days a week and eating movie popcorn drenched in topping 4 days/wk!

The weight at which we're stable is very much a case by case subject. In grade 12, I figure skated 40 hrs/wk and weighed 155 lbs at 5'7", it was almost all muscle. I'd been figure skating for 10 years and using slight calorie deficits for the last 5 of those years to please coaches. NOTHING prevented weight gain in those years either, I usually gained 10lbs/yr back then. We lived in the country, we ate all fresh fruit and vegetables from our large garden, there was no fake meats, sodas, sweets in our house, no processed foods. We had good eating habits then, and all my family has maintained these good eating habits since. My entire family is a little health obsessed! We are all athletic, and our ancestors have all had long disease-free lives.

I am not alone in this regard, female teenagers who are beefy athletes tend to have weight issues later in life, this is true even of olympians such as gymnasts. The high bulk/low fat eventually progresses to a more normal fat ratio as the years go by, but since the starting mass is so much more, the fat is also more.

And then there are newly understood metabolic issues. Since my body was TRAINED at that pace, no small amounts of exercise can "impress" my metabolism anymore. Nothing will ever come close to those 40+ hours of athleticism a week, unless I took up a career in fitness! So my metabolism is in low gear ever since. An hr/day just doesn't cut it.

The interesting aspect about that year when I did temporarily lose weight while sleeping more and NO morning ALARM, is the newly researched impact of sleep on metabolism. It has been demonstrated that lack of sleep changes the body's response to food, inducing low-level diabetic type reactions, increasing fat storage. The reverse also being valid.

The point is the standard "fitness mantra" (calories in calories out) works for some people, some of the time, and temporarily. It is very important to not swallow the "fitness mantra" hook line and sinker, it does not work for everyone.

But if it works for you, that's great

But please, stop saying (not just you) we can't achieve/maintain weight loss because we eat wrong and don't do sports, it's insulting and degrading.

DnvrFox

I think there is MUCH about weight loss and weight/fat retention that we don't yet know or understand. I agree it is not as simple as calories in <> calories expended.

bykemike 

+1 for Icyclist. Weight control is tied to the types of Carbs we ingest. Beer, fries, baked potatos, breads, etc..anything that goes rapidly into our systems makes and keeps body fat. (way different from dietary fat, BTW) Lettuce, peppers, cruciferous vegetables, oatmeal, black beans, olive oil, etc....anything with a low glycemic index heads us in the right direction.

I know...not an fun way to eat but facts are facts guys..most of us know this but who wants to do it?

Mike

tallard

-1, Not fun? It's a great way to eat! I've been doing it for over 15 years and it does not make you lose weight, unless it is a drastic change from a junk food lifestyle!

The solution to obesity does not reside in any single catch phrase.

If it were that easy, there would be very few obese people left in Australia, USA and Canada. Your view of weight loss/maintenance is simply not true for a great deal of humans. You are retweeting pop culture, not science. Low glycemic index is a great foundational cornerstone of weight management, like I said, I've been on that bandwagon for over 15 years. Yet it has never caused my to lose weight.

alcanoe

I read an article some years back which I believe was written by the guy who developed the glycemic index and developed the initial data as well. He stated that the index applies only to that one food in the digestive system at a time. The glycemic index for more than one food in the digestive system at one time is unknown and can't be calculated. You would have to measure the glycemic index for that exact combination. That's not done. Therefore, the usefulness of the index or it's derivative "glycemic load" for developing a diet is somewhat limited. But it gets good press and probably helps keep the grant money flowing.

You'll see many authors/"researchers" average glycemic indices of several foods, but it appears that doing so is scientifically unsound. The issue of insulin response is way over blown and that's especially true for non-sedentary folks.


Insulin response is a function of activity level. During and up to 36 to 48 hours after intense activity, the body does not use insulin to get the glucose through the cell walls to replenish the glycogen. The activity changes the muscle cell structure so that insulin is effectively no longer required. The blood insulin level drops to near fasting levels. It can stay ultra low for a day or more depending on the exercise intensity and the duration.

In other words, exercise of sufficient intensity and duration increases insulin sensitivity and prevents diabetes. That's why inactivity is always listed as a major cause of type-2 (along with age, obesity and family history) and it's precursor which I think they call the Metabolic Syndrome or the development of insulin insensitivity. Insensitivity is exacerbated by being over weight. But, you can be over weight and have good insulin sensitivity with sufficient exercise.

I can provide several references if there's interest. Another way of looking at insulin insensitivity is that if you don't use some glycogen in exercise on a frequent basis, the body's mechanism (insulin control) to replinish glycogen breaks down due to lack of use/exercise. That argues for exercising at higher heart rates or in the glycogen burning zone instead of the lower blood-fat burning zone. A good reason for a heart rate monitor and measuring ones max heart rate.

There are volumes of studies and data showing how activity reduces the risk of death from all causes by an order of magnitude or more depending on intensity/duration. You won't find anything like that for manipulation of the diet. The only numbers I've ever come across is the claim the the Med diet (only the Cretan diet ='s the Med diet)) causes a 30% reduction. No references or data was given.

Al

tallard

Indeed Al
Which is why any single catch phrase is inefficient when discussing weight. Insulin sensitivity is quite variable.
In practical terms, a bowl of barely rolled whole oats will have a different glycemic index depending on it's level of cooking, temperature, time of day, what is eaten before and after, and the amount of sleep one has gotten in the previous weeks, cuz sleep also affects insulin. Of course science is still discovering the convoluted mechanisms of insulin. That's why we are still seeing conflicting studies. My biological dad, which I only met once informed me that type II diabetes was in that side of the family. Luckily, even tho I'm technically overweight, all my bloodwork is in the correct values. By choosing my diet carefully I've staved off diabetes, but my body type is still indicative of this predisposition.

alcanoe

QUOTE=tallard;10561122].My biological dad, which I only met once informed me that type II diabetes was in that side of the family. Luckily, even tho I'm technically overweight, all my bloodwork is in the correct values. By choosing my diet carefully I've staved off diabetes, but my body type is still indicative of this predisposition.[/QUOTE]


Good strategy as it's well established that the effects of genetics can be minimized with lifestyle choices. That includes the effects blamed on ageing and some cancers as well. The biggest impact however is activity and not diet, but it's best to do both. I do the same.

I've never come across a predisposed body type for type-2 unless one includes the obese as the result of predisposition. It's not or there would not have been a recent "epidemic" of obesity.

Carbs are promoted as a cause of type-2 by the media. Not true. No serious reference makes that claim. If anything saturated fat is considered a cause, but it's not a settled issue yet. Trans Fats seem to be linked and it appears to be non-debatable at the present.

The key thing is that even diabetes risk is over blown. It's claimed that 7.6 to 8% of the population have it, but it's also claimed that 75% of those are obese (https://arjournals.annualreviews.org/...urnalCode=nutr) . So it's not much of a risk (2%) if you are not obese. I would wager that 90% of that 2% are inactive.


Some carb/fat/diabetes studies:

https://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/9/342

https://www.cababstractsplus.org/abst...No=20053028990

https://www.mjpath.org.my/past_issue/...20Diabetes.pdf


https://cme.medscape.com/viewarticle/513885?rss


https://journals.cambridge.org/action...=1a&aid=569860

Al