[tlow]

I'm a participant in runner groups. I was surprised to meet several exceptional runners with stories of moving from very unhealthy/overweight to their current level of marathoner+. Several of them had success not just with intermittent fasting, but prolonged fasting. Humans can run when they feel like you have no energy.

It's hard to believe that this isn't a psychological and behavioral issue: >A 30 percent reduction in caloric intake results in a 30 percent decrease in caloric expenditure.

Often times I find it difficult to run or exercise, a lot of times I don't feel like I have the energy. Especially when fasting. I've fasted 7 days and run 3+ miles every day until I had no glucose left in my body. I've never met anybody doing prolonged fasting, distance running and a 100% commitment who couldn't transform their bodies. There may be some rare cases out there of individuals with severe disease/diagnosed health disorders, that's between someone and their doctor. For the rest, are they 100% committed? If you feel like this is you, please reach out, would love to talk and connect with you.

[ajb]

With obesity there is a constant refrain that people should be able to deal with it by willpower alone. Here is an analogy to explain why this is unrealistic:

A while back I had a massive immune reaction in my skin, which brought with it the constant urge to scratch. A lot of people idly comment that the solution is to just not scratch, but it turned out that I had a skin infection, and under those circumstances the instinct to scratch is incredibly strong; you do it as soon as your mental attention is turned elsewhere. Once the skin infection was cured, and a bit of steroid cream applied the urge to scratch went away.

Now imagine how strong is the instinct to eat. Eating is essential for life, the instinct to eat when hungry has been reinforced by evolution constantly since the nervous system developed. Have you read a description of what it's like to starve? The brain can think of nothing but eating, peoples behaviour becomes quite extreme. Some people do overcome it - those who starve themselves to try to save their children, for example. But that's an enormous external motivation.

There's a bit of cognitive dissonance in seeing a hugely fat person and trying to imagine that their nervous system is for some reason acting like they are starving. It's a lot easier to imagine that they just don't have the willpower to resist that extra snack, which is a situation a lot more familiar to most of us. But it seems likely that the further is more correct.

[inglor_cz]

In December, I experimented with the potato diet from Slime Mold, Time Mold, and I actually lost some weight effortlessly. Not only I was way more satiated, I also noticed that I was losing appetite for meat etc.

I am inclined to believe that the root cause for the obesity epidemic is our satiety signals being out of whack. In which case "just eat less" is about as useful piece of advice as "just breathe less". In both cases you would be struggling against enormously strong, primordial bodily mechanisms.

[terryf]

> There's a bit of cognitive dissonance in seeing a hugely fat person and trying to imagine that their nervous system is for some reason acting like they are starving. It's a lot easier to imagine that they just don't have the willpower to resist that extra snack, which is a situation a lot more familiar to most of us. But it seems likely that the further is more correct.

yes, 100% this. Your analogy with scratching the itch is spot on. And you know that the itch that you can't scratch will continue forever until the end of your life. How depressing is that? It's not like running a marathon - with a marathon, it's long and hard, but there is a finish and you can rest after that. With being hungry all the time, there is never a finish. You just gotta keep on running. And running's kinda hard - and if you stop resisting and eat a few big meals, you offset weeks of weight-loss. Losing 100 calories a day for 20 days is hard, but gaining 2000 calories a day is real damn easy, and also feels great!

[tlow]

False premise. Fasting isn't forever, its for a set period of time. Running and fasting are very similar. When running you often feel the urge to stop and give up. You build up the strength over time to say no to that voice. Fasting is a method of short-term saying no to urges. As you learn to say no to that urge, you become better at saying no to that urge. A single prolonged fast can redefine ones relationship with eating. There are lots of reasons to eat, not all of them are the need for nutrition. There are lots of reasons to grab a phone, not all of them are necessary to function/social/work, yet many people feel the urge to pick up there phone 50+ times a day.

[terryf]

Well, thank you for telling me that I have understood my life all wrong.

About 10 years ago I weighed 113kg. I decided to really tackle it hard and not give up. Threw out all the sugar at home and went on a weightwatchers diet.

Over a period of 1.5 years I got my weight down to 97kg. It was very hard. It was a constant battle with hunger and feeling like crap. But I made it! I reached my goal and it was awesome!

So I crossed the finish line, right? No more hunger?

Guess again. I was back to 110kg a few years later. Still hungry.

So yes, please do tell me about how the urges will go away.

No, they do not.

It's a chemical reaction somewhere that in my body is happening with different amounts of components than some other people's body's. It's not a thing that I can wish really hard to change.

[tlow]

Your toxic attitude illustrates your counter argument rather than you argument.

I am not giving you or anyone else advice. But the electro-chemical reaction is also happening in your mind and the software you choose to run there.

There is no finish line. Life is suffering.

[tlow]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=_fjTdiTLWjMGvdQb&v=84dYijIp...

further evidence refuting your claims

[tlow]

You've missed my point entirely and moved to a different discussion. I am not arguing about will power. What do you think instinct is? Are we simply slaves to our desires? No. Yet many still feel this way.

Have you ever tried meditating? Is it easy to just sit?

TikTok users have a strong urge to watch more TikTok. Should they just give into their urge for a short term dopamine rush? Will it feel difficult to not listen to this urge? Can they overcome it or are they trapped forever?

"Now imagine how strong is the instinct to eat." Fasting is a methodology to reset your metabolism. Dopamine fasting is a way to reset your urge to doom scroll. Meditation is a way to clear your mind.

Metabolically fasting dramatically increases insulin sensitivity, has profound benefits and helps one to become a master of their urges. It is a practice, like dopamine fasting, meditation, anything else...

[Llamamoe]

> For the rest, are they 100% committed?

In poor health, willpower often fails long before physical performance, and there are many different possible barriers, like struggle to eat properly, poor nasal breathing, general fatigue, poor posture and running form, etc.

Personally, I can run for a longer time, but between having to push through mental fatigue and very poor nasal breathing, it's an extremely unpleasant, aversive experience. Even when I can do it, it's really harsh on me.

[terryf]

For the first 43 years of my life I was kind of always overweight. Not always obese but there were periods. I've also always known that it would be healthier to have less fat, so it was always a thing on my mind.

But, I was also always hungry. Mostly not starving, but just hungry. I could eat a big meal, that made my stomach feel physically full, even painfully so and still have the feeling of hunger.

Of course, I also understood that on pure physics terms it really is calories out vs calories in that makes the difference. So I did try to eat less.

Also, you read and see people eating a salad and at the end saying, "oh, I feel so full". I always tyhought they were lying, because that never happened to me, so I kind of dismissed it as bragging or something.

Now, could I eat less food? Yes, of course, but it's always a struggle. Every day, all day. And if you fail once, that's that week's gains gone. Imagine there's a fly that's buzzing around your face 24/7 and you can't swat it away, you just have to live with it and if you have a bad day and swat it away for just a bit, you get fat.

Some time ago I took ozempic for the first time and that's when I realized that yes, in fact, it is possible to eat a salad and feel satisified and full after that. Even after more than a year on semaglutide I'm still amazed at how little food I actually need. It kind of feels like I should have died by now due to lack of input calories. But I'm feeling great and almost to normal weight now!

For me the change of how I felt was really something I could not even have imagined before, that you could actually not think about food all the time and kindof ignore it and not really get hungry. And eat just a little and feel full. Amazing. But two years ago I could not have imagined that this is possible, as it had never been before.

This of course led to the realization that the opposite is true for some people, who have better regulation of whatever chemical makes you hungry. Apparently there are lots of people for whom feeling hungry after eating a large meal seems impossible. And since this is something they have never experienced, it's not really reasonable to expect them to understand or be able to imagine it. I wasn't able to imagine the reverse!

So yes, it is possible for everyone to lose weight just by commiting. But it is much harder to commit in a specific area for some people than others. Commiting to a lifetime of always being hungry is very very hard over the long term.

[faeriechangling]

>the opposite is true for some people, who have better regulation of whatever chemical makes you hungry. Apparently there are lots of people for whom feeling hungry after eating a large meal seems impossible. And since this is something they have never experienced, it's not really reasonable to expect them to understand or be able to imagine it.

I don't know, I found the idea of "what if I was hungry, but too much instead of too little" pretty easy to wrap my head around I think. I also wouldn't call feeling full necessarily as being the same thing as being well regulated, anorexics can feel full but they're hardly well regulated.

I once knew this fairly average weight bodybuilder that hated fat people with a passion and practiced a strict diet. During one of his many anti fat people rants, he started ranting about how fat people have no discipline, I sort of snapped back at him and pointed out my many struggles with eating and asked him "why it is that you complain that fat people are undisciplined but don't criticise me in the same way when you know I don't have a good diet and struggle to put on weight?" He didn't have a response to that and the conversation awkwardly ended.

For me, it was pretty easy to come to essentially the same conclusion you did from the opposite starting point. That it's possible for everybody to change their weight by committing, but for some people like this bodybuilder they're going to be able to maintain a healthy weight without struggling, and for others it's going to be a slog.

It's those who seemed to control their weight at will I couldn't empathise with, fat people were relatively relatable.

[terryf]

Thanks for sharing your perspective!

Usually in debates around weight, people focus on the message of counting calories and metabolism, but the psychological aspects are not usually discussed and based on how I felt and what you said, it is a super imprtant important aspect of the puzzle. After all, the feeling of hunger only exists in your head, not in the cells of your stomach.

[Viliam1234]

> Some time ago I took ozempic for the first time and that's when I realized that yes, in fact, it is possible to eat a salad and feel satisified and full after that.

I am currently taking semaglutide, and it's exactly the same.

Previously I suffered a lot with little effect. And everyone was giving me advice how I simply need to stop being lazy. Now I am losing almost 1 kg a week with zero suffering. The difference is not that I suddenly have more willpower; the difference is that I no longer have to spend all of it on fighting my hunger.

(By the way, it is also possible to have an opposite problem. I know a guy who is thin and wants to gain a little more weight, but he can't, because after he eats a little he feels so full that he is unable to eat more.)

[throwaway346434]

This is a really weird gate keeping comment re "commitment".

As someone who was an ultra endurance rider (IE audax rides of 200/300/400/600/1200 km, where you stop only to sleep for the shortest sustainable time on the longer events), you are very much wrong. Your statements around .

There are plenty who complete these events who are skinny, and plenty who complete these events who are fat. The training load to maintain this level of fitness/endurance is high. The mental commitment is high. The sheer amount of energy required both during the event and to repair muscle damage after is huge. The next level down is the physical discomfort (I don't like the taste of water but I know I need it); the hallucinations, fear or depression that can kick in... But you still have 25% of event to go. Let's not forget those who get injured or have equipment failure and either wisely decide to DNF or drag themselves over the line.

Pray tell me how your jogging for what, two hours a day? Makes you more committed and enlightened.

[crdrost]

It's kind of shouting into the void but I always wanted to try to teach high school physics starting from energies rather than forces/velocities/other vectors... And the easiest places where people run into energies are light bulb wattages and nutrition facts, and the latter always seemed more interesting than the former, so the idea was “The Biophysics of Weight Loss” as a first physics course.

As an example of how this looks a bit different to a physicist, most people go to an online calculator to get their TDEE or RMR, some measure of how much energy per day passes out of their body. If you're a physicist, you can't help but measure this at two different weights, current and target. So that gives you a slope, a delta: kilocalories per day per kilogram of fat lost. Except there is also a rough measure of how many kilocalories to lose to lose a kg of fat, so in dimensional analysis terms, this is really just a time constant. I forget the exact amount but it works out to something like nine months or a year or so.

And then you realize that that's a half life. You choose a lifestyle, you start living as if your weight were W, then after a year you will get halfway there, after another year you'll get halfway closer, and so on, and so on.

But that's not how anybody thinks on a diet. They are thinking, I'm going to intervene, get my life under control, then I can return to the lifestyle I had before but without the weight. But what you are describing is a severe lifestyle shift, “I became a marathon runner and my friends are all marathon runners and that is our new lifestyle.” Polar opposite of intervention.

But it's also, there's a selection bias. If the actual cause is depression related, and marathoning worked because it gave a new sense of purpose and self, how would you notice? You spend all this time on caloric output, that's trying to treat it like a linear system. When the circuit has transistors and op amps, that's not how you analyze it.

[lucas_membrane]

However, when you look at the physics, you have to admit that the human body is just about never an isolated system. Human bodies contain more microbes than they contain cells. The microbes, share the food supply, have their own energy consumption, multiply, sometimes die, are excreted from the body dead or alive, and may influence metabolism and/or appetite and food preferences.

[karmarepellent]

It is truly remarkable what some humans can do when they commit. There was a person in my former runner group who weighed approx. 130 kg when he started running. He only started when he was in his mid-forties. Never really exercised previously in his life (as far as I know). It is also worth mentioning that he is a farmer, so his day job is not exactly energy conserving.

Ten years after starting to run in this group he was set to run a marathon under 2:50. Unfortunately a cramp around the 30 km mark made it impossible to continue and actually achieve it. But his grit certainly motivated everyone around him, marathoners and short-distance runners alike.

I would love to share his eating habits but I do not remember them in detail and I do not know enough about nutrition to confidently share any presumptions on this part. Your first paragraph simply reminded me of this great individual.