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100%. For example right now the meat and dairy lobby groups are pushing hard for everyone to eat for more protein than they need. Now, I have people who can’t tell the difference between a cytokine and a histone without using Google, even if it slapped them round the face, telling me they need 100g plus a day in Brotien. Its just a coincidence that this so called health advice makes those groups a lot more money.
I’ve heard that you cannot absorb (for lack of a better word) more that 30g of protein/day (adjust for your body weight).
Is that remotly true?
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It depends on what you mean by absorb. To make into muscle, it’s about right. Maybe a bit more for a man on a hard weight lifting regime. Like, 4 x 1-1.5 hours a week. The rest will be stored as fat, if it isn’t used for energy, the same as anything else. That could also be seen as absorbed but I think you mean the first one.
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Unless, those are microplastics, which are probably something that will always be there for us.
They’ve detected microplastics in breast milk. You know what that means? It’s time to start living up to our name as mammals.
We hormonally induce lactation for everyone. All the time. Just leech out those microplastics. Nips into 3d printers.
Sadly, the energy cost of making all that milk would require us to eat more, taking in more plastics.
The hucow revolution awaits!
Potential downside: For a while the world is gonna smell like curdled milk.
When life hands you curdled milk it’s time to make cheese
Microplaatic cheese
I walked into my break room at work a couple of years ago and overheard some of my female coworkers complaining about the formula shortage. I asked if they’d ever thought about breastfeeding and they looked at me like I’d just grown a second head. I get that some women here and there might need a supplement for this, but the idea that feeding babies canned formula should be the norm is completely insane.
Breast feeding is a huge amount of work, asking a person to do that and have a job is a big deal. Pumping breastmilk is incompatible with lots of jobs. If they have already stopped breastfeeding they may not be able to restart.
It would be great to live in a society where breastfeeding was normal and easy. Society is crazy and women shouldn’t be criticised for trying to exist within it.
We’re school bus drivers lol. We work four hours a day.
Hey son, just don’t eat for 4 hours…
It’s not that simple, like at all. There are loads of other things to take into account too.
It actually is that simple. The baby will either adjust or you’ll have pumped in preparation for those four hours.
That’s as dumb as them suggesting you take on a second job to cover the heightened cost of the formula, but the second job has to be donating blood, plasma, and bone marrow. The physical toll to make up that much extra nutrition, the (sometimes permanent) leaching of elements of your own body, the quantity of time to pump and properly clean and store and the cost of products, the emotional toll of sacrificing what used to be a fun part of your body to what for many is quite painful…
Sure boobs are made to make milk, but eyes are made to see. How many people do you know who wear glasses? It’s more complicated than just why not breast milk?
If women should be expected to breastfeed for 2 years, then society should be built that they can take two years off to do so. A year of breastfeeding equates to a conservative estimate of 1,800 hours, which is not far off from a full-time job that totals about 1,960 hours annually.
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That is not what I wanted those used for.
Plan B is blood letting. I don’t have the source but they have measured a decrease in PFAS blood levels for people who donate blood.
Don’t forget the heavy metals!
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Anyone talking about “toxins” and “waste products” as if they’re ‘stuck’ in your body is either very ignorant, or trying to sell you snake oil.
Some can be excreted by the human body, others can’t.
You contradicted yourself. The latter quote is true.
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Heavy metal is good for you. Gets you moving and can be cathartic. I prefer stoner, doom, or deathcore myself though. Load my body up with those types of metal.
Heavy metal is good for you.
Eh, the Moebius stuff was great but a lot of the material just pandered to adolescent boys.
Moebius and Giger and Jodorowsky!
Yeah, what do people mean “toxins are pseudoscience”?
What are microplastics, heavy metals, and PTFAs, then???
You should to regularly
letdonate blood to expell thebad humorsmicroplastics.That’s right, pass those microplastics along to the cancer babies! (Seriously though, DONATE BLOOD.)
In serious, most ways to loose blood and need blood infusions will loose the plastics too, so the donated blood just maintains the concentrations, the samw way it does for the other components.
Everyone has plastics in their blood.But then if you donate frequently your blood will have lower concentrations due to all the previous donations, so don’t just donate, donate often.
Yeah, valerian root ain’t getting rid of your microplastics buildup.
Yeah the dude is really wrong.
Your body is good at filtering out hydrophilic toxins. But for just about every other toxin… Not so much. Most hydrophobic toxins and other toxins, like heavy metals, VOCs, pesticides, micro plastics, etc., are man made and your body hasn’t had millions of years to evolve natural filters.
But what “cleanse” does anything for those? The MAHA Moms and podcast bros aren’t talking up chelation therapy.
I think the point still stands that anyone selling you a way to rid your body of “toxins” is a charlatan.
I’m an environmental engineer and environmental scientist and I specialize in industrial hazmat waste issues, but I recognize even I’m a bit out of my professional lane on this.
But if you were to identify specific “toxins” that you are interested in “cleansing” there are often methods to do that. But first, I would recommend talking to a health professional. And those cleanses are going to vary significantly based on the toxin of interest.
But your best general “cleanse” is to eat more green leafy vegetables and exercise regularly. And feel free to drink a 4oz glass of milk a couple times a week.
I think we’re talking past each other here.
The original post is talking about people with “a systemized non-scientific theory of anatomy and nutrition.”
The comment that we’re responding to says,
Anyone talking about “toxins” and “waste products” as if they’re ‘stuck’ in your body is either very ignorant, or trying to sell you snake oil. Probably both."
The people who blog about “toxins,” as a generalized word without a specific meaning that could reasonably be replaced with “evil ghosts” in a sentence, are not interested in listening to doctors or scientists. They are “health” influencers on par with the current US secretary of Health and Human Services. I specifically called them “MAHA moms” in my previous comment for this reason.
I would hope that all reasonably educated people recognize that there are actual toxic substances that our bodies absorb that are harmful to us. But anyone who is identifying a specific toxin, much less a medically appropriate treatment plan for removing it, is leagues away from the snake-oil peddlers this post is talking about.
If you have not encountered these charlatans, more power to you. They used to be relegated to specific corners of the internet, but they’re becoming more mainstream with help from powerful figures in Washington.
I, unfortunately, had a loved one who followed some of these influencers with deadly effects. It turns out that juice cleanses and energy healing can’t cure cancer.
There are several problems with the charlatans.
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if you haven’t taken a science class since high school, then their advice often right. I’m amazed at how quickly the medical pseudo-science that flipped politically in my life time. I was raised in a deep red conservative Christian community and I don’t remember anti-vaccines ever being a thing for my community (we definitely had our issues, just not that one). The medical pseudo-science thing back then was firmly in the far left liberal sphere. The anti-vaxx movement was a hippy-liberal thing. (I’m not really sure when that flipped.)
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The medical industry -including academia- is very much at fault in burning trust. There are many instances of the medical industry intentionally withholding treatments because a different treatment made them more money. Or doctors over prescribing in order to charge insurance companies more money.
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A lot of what RFK jr says. Starts off good. He’s all like “Hey, we medicate too much. We should all focus on eating healthier and exercising. That’s what the government should encourage.” And even I’m like, “Yeah, okay. I agree.” Then he goes on to say “And that why you should shove a bowling ball up your butt.” That’s when he loses me.
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AFAIK, still no conclusive studies that show microplastics having an overly adverse affect on the human body. I’ve seen one linking it to lower sperm counts, but that’s not particularly bad to me. We don’t need more people.
The big scare with microplastics is that they are everywhere and that certainly isn’t good; and I think we’re all just waiting for the shoe to drop and some study to come out that shows something majorly negative with them. But for now, there’s nothing obvious sticking out that shows an immediate concern. Which makes sense. We use plastic for so much because it tends not to react to stuff.
AFAIK, still no conclusive studies that show microplastics having an overly adverse affect on the human body
The problem is that we’ll never know because there’s no control group. Everybody has them, even fetuses still in the womb. You would have to build bunkers with perfect air filtering, and then go through, like, four generations of humans to breed microplastics-free specimen, which you could then use a the control group for the rest… Only them never leaving the bunker would already invalidate the tests… So, yeah…
If micro plastics were a problem then we should expect to see rapid increases in cancers in younger adults.
Handed a note
Huh. No shit.
Though even that is complicated by 50 or so years of nuclear weapons testing, which likely also increased cancer rates. Not to mention all that lead everywhere. Produce gradually losing nutrients because farming mostly just focuses on the big three with fertilizer and the others are being mined out of the ground and sent to landfills, septic tanks, waste processing facilities, cemetaries, and crematoriums also doesn’t help (though I’m not sure waste processing and crematoriums remove those nutrients from the cycle like the others, since the one could produce fertilizer and the other might be sending it out into the atmosphere where it could eventually end up back in the soil).
There’s so much chaos that it’s hard to isolate causes, which then makes all the causes kinda “hide in plain sight” because they can perpetually blame the others and shit only gets worse over time.
Let’s not forget the industrial pesticides, which are also everywhere.
Yeah, microplastics, too. And “pollution” being still broader than the list either of us have given so far. A car goes by smelling like gas? They are running their motor too rich and you’re literally inhaling unburnt gasoline. A car whose exhaust stinks but not like gas? Running too lean and now you’re inhaling various nitrogen compounds that aren’t great for inhaling. Ratio is correct? Still inhaling more CO and CO2 than normal, but everyone is doing it so there might not even be a control population to compare the effects against.
Oh also all the food additives that get tested for acute safety but not so much chronic (as in “will it kill you or make you obviously sick if you eat it once or a few times?” gets studied but “will eating it twice a week for 30 years have any long term effects?” is ignored).
Because they are so ubiquitous that it is impossible to find a control group. Quite literally every single person on the planet has micro plastics in them.
We haven’t noticed much in the way of short term effects, but there’s no way to know what long term effects there will be except to wait.
In the meantime, since the effects are… unlikely to be beneficial, the best thing to do is reduce exposure as much as possible.
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There are bio-accumulative toxins that really do get stuck in your body. Lead is a good example. Not that the supposed cures being peddled by these people can actually do anything about those.
Also, for the normal kind of toxin, the biggest factor keeping the levels in your body high is continued intake. Reducing that totally makes sense. However, you need to first have a real, based on science, understanding of what those toxins are in the first place and not just randomly blame junk food or 5G radiation, and it needs to be a permanent life style change. A two week “cleanse” does nothing. A juice will not detoxify you. (Depending on the juice, especially how filtered and how sugary it is, it may be healthy for other reasons. Standard orange juice is not, it’s way too sugary.)
There are bioaccumulative toxins, but nothing over the counter sold in a plastic tub by some guy in a tank top will get rid of them. And some, like lead, have symptoms that are not reversible. Lead poisoning is a lifelong condition. So a magical “detoxifying” shoe insole or smoothie additive isn’t going to do much. I think @nightshade@piefed.social 's point remains that any toxins that stay in the body are either gone for good after a short time, or there to stay.
Chelators are sold over the counter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelation_therapy
https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-best-way-to-detox-from-heavy-metals/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen
In a plastic tub by a guy in a tank top at a store that sells more than 1 product with “swole” in the name?
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Wouldn’t the only really possible “cleanse” be something like water fasting or similar since you wouldn’t be taking in more of the so-called “toxins” (well I guess it does technically exist like alcohol but that gets metabolized)?
my boss does a “cleanse” once a month. IDK what she takes but she also believes ivermectin cures cancer, sooooo…
Its no coincidence that she is one of the sickest “healthy” people ive met. She has no health conditions or chronic illnesses. Shes in good physical shape and doesn’t smoke or drink. Exercises most days, etc. Yet, she “cant get out of bed” or has some mystery stomach flu or something like that about once a month. Funny how that seems to line up just after her cleanses. I suggested once that she was making it worse with the cleanses but she just doubled down.
Willfully ignorant and proud.Sounds like the chlorine dioxide nonsense, tbh. Dangerous stuff.
Firehouse in the USA: “right leaning straight white guys that watch FOX news” is over represented. We work 24 hour shifts and thus cook two meals a day at the station. Inevitably that means I get to experience whatever dumb-ass dietary advice the manosphere/RFK Jr. is pushing: keto, carnivore, MORE PROTEIN, etc.
They get hilariously defensive when I tell them “I don’t do fad diets”.
…I don’t think I’ve ever met a man in real life that ate a fad diet. They eat hamburger helper and take out.
Clearly you need to spend more time around Joe Rogan watching dude-bros. There’s also several of them on supplemental testosterone: “The doctor will tell you that your level is normal but they’ve been secretly lowering the ‘normal level’ over the past several decades. If you want I can give you my doctor’s information.”
My theory is reincarnation is real and I was a horrible person in my previous life.
Testosterone administration is more illegal pharmaceutical use then it is a fad diet. It’s also not particularly dangerous. The safety profile is similar to hormonal birth control.
as soon as you hear (X) cures cancer you know shes deep into pseudoscience, its one of the “gateway” into pseudoscience. those cleanses are likely messing up her gut microbiome causing “diarrhea, GI problems”. when i took antibiotics once he caused watery runs, and it never was the same.
i wonder if shes getting antibiotics from a shady ass doctor, i know if you take too much you will have chronic GI problems. there something called chronic lyme, where its usually midwestern woman believes its chronic so they go to a MD that is “specialized in Lyme” to be prescribed on antbiotics for months on end, and to convince themselves they have it, they take another shady test for lyme.
When I read “nutritional hexes” I assumed this would be honeycomb related.
Also: Replace “super” (as in “superfood”) with “sacred” and it works just as well.
Oh how I hate the whole idea of detox and clean as it relates to nutrition. I worked at a health food store when I was young and while there was good nutritious food there, plenty of good people, the whole idea of ‘clean’ comes from a very dark place. I remember the raw foods guys and the idea of breathetarians. Like the less physical and embodied you were, the better person you were, enlightened. The idea of the physical world being unclean and something you should try to be free of, I hate it.
It really is more of a religious idea than anything to do with physical health. I think you have to enjoy being embodied, love the physical plane of existence, to have a healthy body. Not perfect.
ETA: OMG another comment reminded me. Also the colonics people trying to get literally clean inside, horrified at the stuff that came out of them, convinced it was toxic. I’m sure they are all dead by now.
I worked at a vitamin store chain owned by the parents of a college friend of mine (who is now worth $34 million lol - that chain has turned into a miniature Whole Foods) for a few months. I remember one customer came in because she was going through a divorce, and the cashier said “oh, you need St. John’s Wort for that”. Nobody there thought this was unusual in any way.
Also knew a guy in college who claimed to be a Breathitarian. We caught him at the Ponderosa steak house in the next town over one night.
I remember one customer came in because she was going through a divorce, and the cashier said “oh, you need St. John’s Wort for that”.
Capitalist witch woman gives antidepressants
I read a thing recently that argued that “purity” is one of the most distinctive thematic motifs in fascistic thinking, and examined how that is a means by which people can slide into right wing ideologies from an initially left wing position.
It was striking because it made it clock for me why there seems to be a “crunchy eco-leftist turns right wing” pipeline. To attempt to summarise some of the article and my own thoughts following it: A purity oriented framework of health situates “toxins” and the like as the Big Bad Other. Many of us are aware of how dangerous the notion of a Big Bad Other is if we’re thinking about people, but it can creep up with us in contexts like this because it doesn’t seem harmful initially. However, by thinking about health in this way, we train ourselves to think in terms of the Big Bad Other, and condition ourselves towards thinking about things in a black and white manner.
+1
One of my past flatmates literally self-diagnosed himself with diabetes out of nowhere and started extreme dieting - made all sugar and high-carb foods haram and even started mixing his own flour to make it “multigrain”. Since we were sharing kitchen expenses all of our meals then started involving coarse bread and either chicken or tofu at all times. Made me constipated for a while.
I think all he really wanted was an excuse for that diet and it does seem to have worked well in him; shame it didn’t do so on me and just made me eat outside more instead.
Eat ourside? First response is what are you a dog?
Second response is: so is eating outside a way to say going out to eat in British English?
Pseudo-dermatology is also not very far away. The gap between what dermatologists and influencers say would be hilarious if gullible teenagers weren’t spending ridiculous amounts of money ruining their own skin.
The one that had me cry-laughing was the “sun your genitals” fad that lasted what, a week?
I lost a ton of weight and that gave me the courage to go to the nude beach. That day I got exactly 30 seconds of sun on my cock and that was enough to sunburn my knob. Itch/burn for days. There’s a reason it’s known as *where the sun don’t shine". Can’t imagine what it was like for the dopes that gave themselves 15 minutes under the Cali sun.
A lot of people go to nude beaches often and don’t have that problem. Did you use sunscreen?
No I’m saying it was the 1st time my cock had seen direct sun.
I mean come on… Try to read and understand
The funny thing, the truly funny thing, Is that many people reading this will assume their assumptions about nutrition are fact based and everybody else’s is pseudoscience. Examining the data on your own biases is critical for any standing in science.
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what’s a common assumption about nutrition that’s not true?
That you need fibre; that you need carbohydrates
Neither are true, both will be told to you by doctors
i think I’ll listen to doctors
Its less commonly assumed now, but “eating fatty foods makes you fat” is really not true. The “fat free” food craze of the 90s-mid 00s took the fat out of everything and added sugar to make it taste good again. And everyone got fatter. Exactly as the sugar industry planned.
alot of people buy into the “flouride-free” gluten free, and inflammation, lysine diet apparently.
Nah bro I’m a Paleolithic human so I eat my burger without a bun.
Someone has to repackage the low carb diet in a new way every decade.
You still cooking your patties? Amateur. 🥱
You still make patties?? Poser, just bite the cow
Shout out to “alkaline water”.
I loved it when Gwyneth Paltrow said she drinks alkaline water for the health benefits… with a slice of lemon.
With a squeeze of lemon!
The number of people that don’t believe that taking in fewer calories than you put out will cause you to lose weight still astounds me. Your body isn’t some magic device that doesn’t have to obey the laws of physics.
Whilst this is true; your body does have some pretty neat tricks to maintain homeostasis; it can shift the energy budget around quite a bit to where it is needed.
Your body will down regulate some systems to try to keep your total energy balance within what is “normal” for each person.
Digestion uses quite a bit of energy; this is why sometimes you feel sleepy after eating; your brain has been down regulated to enable digestion.
Another common example is when runners get into “the zone”; this is your brain prioritising the required processes and reducing the energy of other parts, putting you into a semi trance…this is so your body can maintain an energy balance.
It is also why we sometimes feel sick if exercising hard and then eat quickly afterward; your gut is not ready for that job.
High energy process that can be “switched off” or at least significantly reduced:
- Brain processes (up to 25% of your energy budget)
- Immune system (~20% when fighting infection)
- Digestion (dependent on food 3[sugar] - 30[protein]% of food energy)
Just because you have done some exercise; doesn’t mean you have used more total energy that day…it seems counter intuitive; but your body likely shifted energy from one thing (immune system, brain) to muscles, for the time your were exercising.
In saying that exercising is so good for other things; physical and mental health are enhanced by exercise, there are so many good things about exercise, just don’t rely on it for weight loss.
As the old saying goes “you can’t out run a bad diet”; you are correct, if over the long term you eat fewer calories than your body requires, you will see an effect. But your body is a tricksy beast, it will do all it can to prevent this; it is why dieting is so hard in an age of abundant food.
Also people tend to focus too much on the “losing weight” part, as in getting the numbers down. Muscle weights more than fat, and having more muscles uses more energy; if you diet the wrong way and don’t exercise, it’s possible you lose weight but you also lose muscle mass, making it even harder to lose more weight and possibly making yourself unhealthier. Getting “thinner” and/or “healthier” might mean you don’t actually lose that much weight, or even gain some
I try to focus on outcomes.
E.g. it takes me 28 minutes to bike too work, next month I want it to be around 25…in a few months it would need nice to be at 20 minutes.
if people are so concerned , they should have thier routine blood test from the doctor every year. usually its covered as a preventative. tryglycerides, LDL/HDL, cholesterol, HBA1C, glucose average. also thyroid.
Some people mistake healthier with less calories.
I switched from a box of Little Debbie’s a day to a bag of trail mix! Why can’t I lose weight?
That olive oil you’re using is good for you, sure, but it’s not a freebee. It has calories. Things like this are often not even noticed or counted.
Tracking calories accurately is a balance between good data and time investment.
I didn’t usually count oils and fats when I made food because I use so little. But I also wouldn’t worry much about very low calorie vegetables either.
To be fair though my goal was to gain weight and meet macros, not to lose weight.
But either way at the end of the day even with really good apps making counting calories way easier than it used to be, there’s still a line that needs to be drawn somewhere as to what your time is worth. If you’re in the ballpark you’re good unless you have very explicit needs to get more detailed data.
Tracking calories accurately is a balance between good data and time investment.
Absolutely true, and getting good data is really, really hard. In fact, the nutritional content on food labels (in the USA) is allowed to be over by as much as 20% by the FDA.
In addition to that the processes and formulas used to calculate those numbers are also far from precise .
The most accurate method to measure energy and calories in food is called a bomb calorimeter, Li said. The process works on the theory that when one thing releases heat — in this case, food — it’s absorbed by another, in this case whoever is digesting that food, as energy.
To make this calculation, food scientists seal a piece of food in a pressurized, oxygen-filled steel container — the “bomb.” That container is encased in an insulated box filled with water.
The scientists light the food on fire and let it burn completely. Then, they take the temperature of the water. They use an equation to tell them how much energy — and therefore calories — are in that piece of food, based on how much the burning piece of food raised the temperature of the water surrounding it.
However, this is only an estimate because not everything that burns and releases energy to heat the water can be digested by a person eating it. Fiber, for example, burns in the calorimeter but will just pass through your digestive system without giving up its energy.
Many food companies don’t even test food like this. They simply estimate the calorie content based on the number of grams of fat, carbs, and proteins in the food. Still, unless and until someone comes up with a better way to determine the calories in a given measure of food, it’s the best system we’ve got.
I’d also be willing to bet that the actual amount of calories someone gets from different kinds of food is dependent on their gut biome, and thus variable between people. Ime you really need to experiment on yourself to get a good idea of what will make you lose weight. Same probably applies if you’re underweight and trying to gain.
I’ll just keep repeating this, but your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) is not scientifically set in stone.
While it’s accurate for I would say 90% of the population, rough estimate, there are many things that can cause your BMR to not be accurate, like thyroid issues or lack of musculature due to sedentary lifestyle or due to hormone imbalances or any number of myriad things.
I went and had mine tested and it cost me I believe $70 at a sports medicine place, and I burn approximately 200 calories less than my BMR chart says that I should.
So if I wanted to maintain my weight, and I ate the calories the internet says that I should every day, I would actually gain almost 20 lbs a year (a nice rough estimate is every 10 calories a day you cut from your diet you lose one pound a year).
And as I am working on losing weight, and I’m eating 500 calories under my BMR, I’m actually only eating 300 calories under my true BMR, which means my weight loss is incredibly slow.
So yes, while calories and calories out is true, there are external factors that make it difficult to get accurate numbers to compare against.
Therefore calories in calories out is much simpler to say than it is to do for some percentage of the population.
Not only is it not set in stone, it appears that your BMR is affected by what you do. If not provided with sufficient nutrition, the body seems to adapt and lowers BMR.
Getting the numbers in practice can be difficult but that’s not the same as saying that CI/CO is bullshit, as many people do who don’t understand that it’s simple thermodynamics. If your fire isn’t producing enough heat, you add more wood. You don’t start to doubt that burning is exothermic.
The body isn’t a fire and food isn’t wood, so the analogy isn’t a very good one.
And even if it was, wood in a fire pit does not burn uniformly.
The type of wood, the quality of the wood, the contents of the wood all affect how fast it burns and how hot it burns.
Very dry pine wood burns incredibly hot and very fast, whereas damp maple may self-extinguish. It may not be capable of maintaining its own fire due to its moisture content and the density of the fibers in the wood.
And while you can look at the whole and say this amount of wood emitted this many BTUs of heat energy, you can’t say “this amount of wood being burned should emit this amount of heat in this period of time” when you’re not taking into consideration the type of wood, the quality of wood, and even how the logs are arranged.
Science is about controlling variables, and when you have too many variables that are not being taken account of, you cannot get an accurate scientific measurement of the results of your experiment.
And that’s not even taking into consideration the fact that the raw nutritional quality of foods grown in the western world at least has dropped precipitously, inducing people to eat more food to get the raw nutrition they need that’s not just calories.
We know that calories are comprised of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, and we can generally account for those, but the nutrition, the selenium, the zinc, the iron, the calcium, the phosphates, the everything else that makes up the food that we eat. If it’s not there in sufficient qualities to meet what our bodies are calling for, then it’s natural for us to overeat to attempt to fill in those nutritional deficiencies.
And when your brain has been fucked by not getting the nutrition it needs, and your body has been fucked by not getting the nutrition it needs, and your food has been fucked by not delivering the nutrition you need, then once you’re in that situation, it’s not as simple as, oh, just don’t eat that Twinkie.
So calories in, calories out is the truth.
Just like gravity is the truth.
But knowing the math, 9.8 meters a second squared, is not enough to go to the moon.
We literally burn sugar as fuel. Fires are just fast oxidation.
“The compared things are different therefore the analogy is bad” this is literally exactly what analogy is and exists for
Yet, cico works.
You have completely missed the point of my entire rant.
Cico works, but “o” is a variable that can vary wildly from person to person, day to day based on environmental, genetic, and nutritional factors.
I’m confused. Your original comment was worded as if it stood in contradiction to cico.
Does not what you said just boil down to cico works, but knowing how much energy your body uses on a daily average (o in cico) is difficult to know and to not trust random values on the internet?
My original, original comment was that your BMR is not as sure as everyone claims it is on the internet.
If you go look up your BMR, it’ll ask you your height and weight and age and gender and give you a number of calories you’re going to automatically burn every single day, like it’s gospel truth.
And if I stuck to that number, I would gain roughly 20 pounds a year, at least until the increase in weight and my metabolism and my calories actually balanced out.
Which means that finding out the O in CICO can be much more difficult for some people than other people.
And once your metabolism is fucked, there’s not exactly a whole lot of information out there on how to unfuck it, other than “stay on a diet”, which, as you’ve just seen, isn’t necessarily easy, there’s not hard numbers to follow, and “exercise”, which is fine, but probably what I actually need to do is put on muscle, which means eating calories above how many I’m burning so that my body has the fuel to create more muscle.
So if I want to fix my body and lose the last 30 pounds I’m trying to lose, what I actually need to do is overeat until I put on like 10 pounds of muscle and then eat a high protein diet to maintain that muscle while I’m eating low carbs and low calories overall so that I can burn off as much of the fat as possible.
The problem is to put on 10 pounds of muscle can take 6 months to a year, and any time you’re gaining weight, it’s difficult to control what goes to muscle and what goes to fat. So even if I use a DEXA scan and measure until I’ve got 10 additional pounds of muscle, I might put on 20 pounds in the process, the rest of which would be fat.
This means all of the discipline I’ve had in maintaining my diet now has to change in order to fix my body, which now has to change in order to fix my metabolism, so that I can then go back to doing what I’m doing now and have it actually work the way it’s supposed to, and if I fuck up along the way, and my body goes back to burning 200 calories a day under my BMR, then I just have to live on a fucking starvation diet which will get more and more strict and more and more extreme the closer I get to my goal.
And the worst part is that’s just a theory. I don’t have any way of proving that. I do know that a pound of muscle burns like four calories more per day than a pound of fat does, so that will improve my daily fat burn by 40 calories, which isn’t exactly the 200 calories I’m under, but there’s no fucking way in hell I’m gonna put on 50 pounds of muscle unless I start taking steroids.
So, going back to your original thing, I was never saying CICO did not work. I was saying that, once again, you have to actually know what the O is, and it’s not the same for everyone, and it’s not always easy to find out, and if it’s fucked, it’s not easy to fix.
The people that love going “CICO! CICO!”, always overlook the actual complexity of the argument.
Yes. And you can carefully select the value for your case.
The only way to find it is to eat less and less until you lose weight tbh. Cico is vacuously true.
Cico is vacuously true.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vacuously
Showing a lack of thought or intelligence; vacant.
Surprisingly, I agree with you! CICO is lacking in thought and intelligence when applied to human metabolism.
The second law of thermodynamics requires a closed system, humans are famously open what with their breathing, eating, pooping, and peeing.
CICO is like saying cars without fuel don’t move, so if overfill the tank you should park your car. It misses the point, and that is the hormonal drivers in human fat mobilization.
Sugar/Carbs drive blood glucose, which drives blood insulin, which shuts down fat mobilization. Yes, you can lose weight eating only sugar, but it’s making the entire process more difficult then it needs to be. For more details please see The Carbohydrate-Insulin Model of Obesity - Beyond “Calories In, Calories Out” - 2018
I absolutely agree that cico could be very difficult psychologically and could demand health monitoring.
Eating a tapeworm also makes you lose weight, doesn’t mean it’s healthy. Not everyone can starve themselves thin in a healthy way.
You don’t need to “starve” yourself. That journey can be milder (though longer).
This is what you’re not getting. Some people do. Just getting to the point of not feeling like they’re starving puts them over their calories out.
Can you monitor your health while cico?
What do you think about keto?
Basically it’s “ditch all sugar”, and the idea is that when you eat sugar, as it’s toxic, the body tries to use up the energy from sugar, storing the rest for later. And vice versa, if you have no fastburning sugar, the bidy have to start to rely on breaking down that stored fat.
Of course, you cannot overcome physics, but it’s not like we don’t store everything we eat either (the body is fantastic but not like 100% efficient).
Some say you just eat less, and it’s true that it’s harder to cook without potatoes, rice, pasta… And sugar makes you want to eat more.
It’s fascinating because we don’t know more than around 10-15% of how metabolism works.
++ Keto works because its keeps insulin levels from going high, when insulin is high the body simply cannot metabolize stored fat (at all).
Doing low calorie works by itself, but its hard mode, eating a bunch of insulin spiking meals throughout the day makes it much harder to burn through that sugar, lower the insulin, and eventually metabolize stored fat.
Keto also works because the homogeneity of the meals induces many people to eat less.
If you were literally forced to only eat chicken and broccoli for every single meal, eventually you would become so disgusted you would eat enough to survive, and probably not anymore.
It’s not just chicken and broccoli, a entire world of food is available!
you can build real food using all the proteins, all the veggies, and spices!
With every diet, named or not, the weight loss aspect always comes from “calories in vs calories out”.
Some of them, like keto, change the way the body accesses the calories in food, but the math still holds. If your body can’t access the calories in what you eat, they literally become “calories out” when you go to the bathroom later.
Other diets help with mentally being able to track calories better, or to just help you deal with how hard it is to eat fewer calories.
But no matter what, conservation of mass and energy always applies.
Mass is not conserved. And while CICO may be true in the same sense that spherical cows can be used as an approximation, the devil’s in the details.
I didn’t say just mass was conserved. I said that mass and energy, when taken together, are conserved. Mass is just another form of energy.
I assure you, ci/co is not a “spherical cow”. Every single joule of energy is accounted for.
You forgot that we don’t use 100% of the energy intake, like at all. That invalidates your assumptions IMO.
Huh? No I didn’t, it’s all accounted for.
Unused energy is stored, or passed out as waste (literally calories down the toilet).
So to follow a diet you should calculate not just caloric intake but also caloric euh, well, disposal 😅?
You can do whatever you want. All I’m saying is that you will lose weight if your calorie intake from all sources is less than your calorie output from all sources.
I can’t digest pork well (it runs right through me and frequently causes vomiting), so I don’t l eat it, but if I were to follow a diet with 500 calories of pork in it, I might get 100 from it. On the other hand, I digest beans and lentils incredibly well, with no noticeable gas. I can imagine that I might actually get 110 calories from a “100 calorie serving.” It is possible to determine your caloric intake despite this variation, but because people aren’t well educated about it, they see a mismatch in the math and reality and think it’s pointless to calculate it at all instead of realizing they need to adjust it for their specific digestive system.
i lost ~50 lb last year just by intermittent fasting and walking more. actually i stopped eating processed junk too
Almost like the only “scientific knowledge” you need is to burn more and take in less.
“Just stop being depressed and enjoy life”.
People are overweight because something in their diet, psychology or physiology overrides the natural desire to stop eating when they’ve had enough calories. As long as that thing isn’t addressed, trying to use willpower to overcome it can easily lead to burnout and disappointment. Sometimes raw willpower works, but most people who are overweight have tried that and found it doesn’t work for them.
Those people aren’t failures, they just happened to have a problem that didn’t eliminate itself when using willpower. If your problem is the chemicals in fast food, then stopping fast food by willpower can solve things, but if your problem is pica for some vitamin deficiency than stopping fast food by willpower will not solve things. People that stop by willpower alone are lucky, nothing more.
So most people who are overweight do in fact need more scientific knowledge, or better environments, or both. A pedestrian-murdering hellscape isn’t great for getting enough exercise. Micronutrients, letting your stomach rest, avoiding blood sugar spikes and dips, metabolism-affecting drugs like caffeine, stress eating, etc can all affect things.
And because people can’t just get up and move to a pedestrian-friendly area, or because vegetables are twice as expensive as meat per calorie, or because their job requires them to sit still for eight hours, they want to try the messy imperfect solutions that do as much as possible in their limited environment.
I can well believe that intermittent fasting works better than “burn more eat less” for someone with the unnatural lifestyle of sitting in an office chair for hours straight. The traditional 3 meal structure was built on a society where people did lots of physical labor throughout the day every day, so just trying to eat less in those 3 meals doesn’t change the fact that your body needs far fewer calories at certain times than that diet frees up, and the same goes for exercising outside of work hours.
Just addressing one part of this.
Veggies aren’t a primary source of calories, when trying to reduce calorie intake and eating healthy. Veggies are there for other important reasons. You focus on beans, lentils, and other legums for calories. Meat doesn’t even come close to their value. Rice, while having it’s own problems, is also more calories per dollar by far.
You should consider looking into the bioavailability of nutrients from meat vs legumes when factoring in value for money, also.
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You seem to be conflating 2 different things.
There’s the mechanism which is excess calorie intake v expenditure, and then there’s the reasons for the excess calorie intake. It’s dangerous to blend these because doing so mostly platforms excuses and denial of personal responsibility among obesity sufferers.
Oh no, reducing people with eating disorders’ sense of personal responsibility for their disorder. What a nightmare that would be.
Next up, let’s yell at someone with anorexia for throwing up in the bathroom!
Your comment is so accusatory and disingenuous.
You’re clearly missing my point intentionally.
And I have an eating disorder, so don’t start, bud.
That’s a bit like saying “In order to run faster, you need to make longer steps and more steps per minute”. It’s obviously true, but the hard part is how to do that.
Measuring how many calories you eat in a day is literally the simplest form of managing your own nutrition.
Tracking how many calories you burn is likewise something so accessible a child can (and frequently does) do it.
What is so difficult to figure out, again?
What’s difficult is keeping with it.
My weight has fluctuated from a low of 180lbs to a high of 450lbs throughout my entire adult life.
I know what to do. I know it’s easy to do it.
The hard part is knowing that the second I stop counting, it all comes piling back on.
It’s incredibly discouraging to know that most people can just…live. They eat when they’re hungry. They don’t constantly have a voice in their head telling them to eat when they aren’t. They don’t use sweets for emotional support or stress relief. They can leave food on a plate when they’re full. And they feel full with reasonable portions of food.
Moreso, they aren’t riddled with anxiety whenever their fat ass is on display out in public doing exercise.
I had an elderly woman at physical therapy tell me I’m the biggest man she’s ever seen. You know how upsetting that is? Like, no shit, I know I’m fat. And sure she likely has no filter because of dementia but man it still burns.
It’s an entire lifetime of learned experiences, eating habits, and psychological trauma. That elderly woman may as well have been one of the bullies in grade school or a douche in a pickup jeering at me on a walk. That’s the hard part.
It’s one thing to cut calories for a few months and lose weight. It’s another to look at the entire rest of your life and know, from experience, that as soon as you fall off the wagon, it’s back to square one. That you now have to change what’s essentially been hard-coding itself into your brain since some of your earliest thoughts. That you will, forever, have to continue counting calories and tracking food.
That’s the daily struggle. Resisting what you’ve known your entire life. And worse, needing it. Because you still have to eat, right? So you’ve got to eat, but you have to control it.
You have to control what, and how much, you eat while the food industry keeps on shoveling chemically-addictive foods in front of your face everywhere you go. Piping delicious smells out their exhaust vents as you drive by.
I don’t expect you to understand. People who never struggled with weight really don’t get it. Good for you.
On paper it’s easy. But our brains and bodies aren’t made of paper.
Imagine telling an alcoholic they need exactly one beer a day for the rest of their life. I would wager that’s harder than completely quitting alcohol, or even developing a healthier relationship with it. It has to be in the house. Eventually they have to go to the bar or the liquor store. And every day, for the rest of their life, they have to maintain that restraint.
That’s what obesity is like.
It’s miserable. Eat less and move more!
But the everything is screaming at me to eat. You’re hungry. And the voices from childhood! Don’t waste food! That’s a fucking sin! Don’t throw anything away, it’s better to treat your own body like a trashcan than to actually throw anything away!
And when you do eat, how do you stop? Because my brain knows there’s more food in the kitchen. It also knows how to make more food. And it’s going to go in there. It’s exhausting to have to say no every second of every day to a brain that’s a toddler.
Hate it.
Seriously those starving children in Africa owe me a little bit of thanks for always finishing my plate. Or something.
And when you do eat, how do you stop? Because my brain knows there’s more food in the kitchen. It also knows how to make more food. And it’s going to go in there. It’s exhausting to have to say no every second of every day to a brain that’s a toddler.
Going keto can remove the food noise, which could make it easier to make sustainable changes to your nutrition.
It is complex. There’s a mix of biology & psychology. Some people eat because they’d die if they didn’t. Others, for pleasure. Still others, it’s the only pleasure they experience in a day.
What do you do when the dopamine hit only occurs when you eat?
Some people drown anxiety in alcohol or xanax addictions. Others do it with food. The problem there is you can’t detox from food and remove it from your life.
Dig into some of the research nuggets, in this area, it’s wild stuff.
In addition there’s work to try to parse out some answers by studying cats. Why is one of your cats a behemoth while the other is a normal weight, both eating the same food from the same bowl?
Totally agree with you. And also the effect of drugs like antipsychotics. Even the skinniest people gain weight and have trouble keeping it off.
So the people struggling to lose weight just don’t actually want to lose weight? There are no psychological factors involved at all, no hormones, genetics, environmental factors, education - nothing to figure out?
Are you not aware of what “simplest” means?
Did I say that measuring calories is the end-all, be-all of nutrition and dietary knowledge?
Don’t put words in my mouth.
You did say CICO is the only thing you need.
Please point to another mechanism by which weight is lost.
Proper intake of vitamins, minerals, and essential nutrients is above the scope of what we’re discussing.
Proper nutrition absolutely able to be maintained at a caloric level that would facilitate weight loss.
Stop arguing in bad faith.
Actually, your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) can change.
What you see online is based off of your age and your height and your weight, you should burn approximately x number of calories per day.
But people with thyroid issues and hormone issues and metabolic irregularities can actually burn less or more than the standard BMR listed on the internet.
To find out your true BMR, you have to go and get tested.
That being said, what you should do, ideally, is trust what the internet says about it, and then, if you find yourself having problems losing weight, then go and get your BMR tested. There are many sports medicine places that have the testing equipment that will do it for fifty to a hundred dollars, and you can find out that if you deviate from the norm. For instance, I burn about 200 calories less than my BMR says I should.
So if I’m eating 500 calories under that on my diet, I’m only burning 300 calories a day.
And if I eat specifically the number of calories my BMR says I should be allowed to eat and maintain my weight, I’m actually putting on 200 calories every day.
Intermittent fasting is a framework for how to organise that. If you don’t need a framework, good for you.
That’s just being healthy. I’d hardly call that a fad diet
some people look at me in horror if i say i’m skipping dinner tonight and breakfast tomorrow, or god forbid, not eating until day after tomorrow-- they absolutely think it’s a “fad” and that i’m going to die immediately if i don’t eat burgers and fries ASAP
i don’t know where you are, but where i live, skipping a meal or two is like… spitting on jesus or something
My body is an engine that turns food into lifting a hundred pounds of machinery. I dead lifted a generator about a week ago, yet it was the tree I felled a month ago that fucked up my shoulder.
did you figure out which underworked muscle group you have to work out next because of that
also this jam might suit you. https://youtu.be/Ux0iKbz_-yo
Yeah not my thing more of a listen to Tyr and Hulkoff while doing yardwork type of guy. As for why my arm got messed up, it was my offhand and I used it to push a ten year old orange tree the exact opposite way it was falling, because I didn’t want to risk the chainsaw sputtering and jumping into me.
