Yeah, unfortunately this kinda only goes one way. No matter your metabolism, if you starve yourself you will lose weight. It’s literally physically impossible for you to not. It’s just difficult and wildly unhealthy to lose weight that way.
Whereas the opposite is not neccassarily true, depending on your metabolism you very well might be able to eat as nuch as you want. You might even have to eat more than you are comfortable with just to maintain your weight, which is what I deal with. With the right metabolism, there could be a situation where there is no upper limit on how much you could eat without gaining weight.
Caveats include: obviously if you eat a pound of food your weight goes up by a pound, but assuming you are similar to me, after that passes through you your weight goes back down to effectively the exact same as it was before you ate. Im not glorifying a fast metabolism here, in fact my metabolism is no fast that I don’t get most of the nutients i eat and am therefore perpetually malnourished no matter what or how much I eat. I spend more on food to maintain my weight than i do on literally everything else combined, excluding rent, and maybe gas.
Oddly, although scaling my food does not seem to scale nutrients from my food, scaling my caloric burn does seem to impact my appetite. When I was working a physical job, i was consuming about 4000 calories/day and most of the time i felt like I was on the edge of passing out from never ending fatigue. I’d wake up and spend every moment of the day starving. Now, i work a very relaxed job and my appetite has vanished. I often go days without eating and dont seem to be losing a significant amount of weight, unlike back when. Although when I do eat I tend to eat multiple huge meals in a day, often about once/twice a week, and my weight afterwards doesnt seem to go up, it just stops going down for a day or two. The only way for me to gain weight seems to be to lose it first, I literally cannot get above 160lb at 6"2’
gamer@lemm.ee 2 days ago
This is like vaccine skepticism.
Fat people are fat because they eat too much.
If Bob has a “slow metabolism”, then Bob should stop eating desert after dinner if he doesn’t want to be fat.
Speculater@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Plus, there relatively little variation between all humans in their resting metabolism. We’re talking 600 calories from the slowest metabolisms to the fastest.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
i hear the metabolism also adjusts to your weight. you actually need a deficit compared to your baseline.
Scubus@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Completely anecdotal, but I have to assume that is incorrect, or that I have a fundamental misunderstanding. I have done tests and found that my body processes(in one hole->out another) food in about an hour. Which is absolutely insane and results in most of my evacuate being unprocessed. I’ve read that for other people in similar tests, they tend to average around 12 hours. Im guessing that means my understanding of what contitutes metabolism is incorrect?
kadup@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You’re confusing solid food in my mouth with calories ingested.
If for whatever physiological reason your claim is correct, and your digestive system is indeed so fast food goes through unprocessed, you didn’t actually eat. You’ve eaten in the social, pleasurable or psychological sense, but these are not ingested calories, and therefore also completely irrelevant to your metabolism or diet.
If you could take a 1000 calorie burguer, cover it in plastic, swallow it and have it pass through intact… You just ingested zero calories. So you can’t later say “oh I regularly eat 1000 calories per meal and lose weight, but my partner chews a 300 calorie steak and gains weight!”
If you see what I mean.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You can have the same diet your entire life and fluctuate in weight significantly.
Anything else? Breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Is your singular goal your weight or do you have any other considerations?
gamer@lemm.ee 1 day ago
I’m not sure what you’re getting at with the diet question. That neither invalidates nor supports what I said.
If someone wants to be fat, they can be fat. I don’t care what other people do with their lives. I’m just pointing out that the reason why a person becomes fat is well-known, proven science. Denying that is akin to vaccine skepticism; it’s actively harmful to society. The past 8 years are a great example of what happens when we allow misinformation and pseudoscience to propagate, even if it seems silly/fringe/nobody-actually-believes-that.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This isn’t a binary choice.
Fad diets are the height of pseudo-science and routinely harm their practitioners.
It’s not a coincidence that vaccine skeptics are regularly peddling weight lose programs and other quack remedies that don’t work. Guys like Dr Oz and RJK Jr are at the forefront of both grifts.
hissingmeerkat@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
People “eat too much” because there’s something that’s already wrong with them that causes them to eat too much.
desktop_user@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
That may be the case, however the percentage of overweight individuals that almost certianly (as in the misreporting, not the percentage) misreport their caloric intake to their doctors is high enough that many doctors will just assume that they all lie.If they wanted to be believed they would either need actual evidence for their claims or to lose weight.