alexandraerin | Read this and other stories in the pages of the medical journal Duh.

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Read this and other stories in the pages of the medical journal Duh.

So, there's this crazy study out that says that obese teenagers' metabolisms aren't affected by moderate amounts of aerobic exercise in the same way that thin teenagers' metabolisms are... that while the obese teenagers gain important health benefits from exercising, their metabolisms don't kick into high fat-burning gear and thus they don't tend to lose weight from it.

It's almost like two people could eat the same things, exercise the same, and have the same habits and yet have entirely differently shaped bodies based on uncontrollable inherited conditions! And to get even crazier, it's almost as though those habits have a bigger impact on one's health than what size and shape one's skin is in!

Crazy!

Usually when somebody brings up the immutability of obesity in a conversation like this, someone chimes in with "Maybe there are some people who are fat because of a gland problem or something but that's super rare and it doesn't account for most people who are fat." That's a Conversation We Won't Be Having Here, but just to be clear: I'm not saying that most fat people have a problem. I'm saying most fat people have a different metabolism than skinny people do.

Not a worse metabolism. A different one.

One that seems to be shared by a large proportion of the population, which suggests that it's not entirely inimical to the survival of individuals or the species as a whole.

What a world, what a world.

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I am very much liking 'conversations we won't be having'. I am totally going to use it next time I post something contentious on my journal. It's such an great way to indicate which topics are derailing for a given post. :)

Isn't it great? I'm actually kind of looking forward to the day when J. Random Internetroll accuses me of stifling discussion.

Yes! Exactly!

I am stifling discussions I don't want to entertain on my own blog.

Teh censorship! Teh first amendment! noez! you be stealing teh freedomz of spression!
*dies of snarky laughter*

Moar liek freedom of O-SPRESSION!

help help! I'm being o-spressed!

When my laptop crashed I lost my links to all the studies I had compiled that showed weight was pretty much as genetic as height.

I feel your pain. My blog posts about this would have a lot more links/citations if I still had my old bookmarks. I know I could find all of them by digging around on Kate Harding's site long enough, but... meh. People have Google, and most of them will believe what they want to believe regardless.

I don't know if this counts as part of the conversation we're not having, so if it is I have no problem with your censorship, as I too, very much appreciate that you keep your comments on topic.

I read about a study done during WWII (I don't have time to look for it tonight; lots of studying to do, but I will look and post a link later if you leave this comment up) on food consumption and metabolism. It wasn't about obesity, and it would violate safety and health guidelines if done today, but they weren't in place then. The gist of the study was about caloric intake and how restricting caloric intake affected one's body (I find it relevant to this post because most people just say that fat people just need to eat less to lose weight), and they did it during the war because there a food shortage. A group of soldiers volunteered for the experiment and were fully informed as to the nature of what would happen to them. They were completely healthy young adults. Half were given the normal 2,000 calorie diet that someone in that condition would normally require and the other half were given 4/5s of that, 1,600 calories. Both groups were allowed to eat whatever foods they wanted, and given a balanced diet; the only difference was the total number of calories. They were allowed to live normal lives and exercise as much or little as they wanted. In addition to the expected weight loss the following were also observed: loss of muscle tone, lethargy, decrease in strength and stamina, decrease in mental functions in both current activity and memory and an increase in agitation and arguments. All of these went away after a few weeks of resuming a 2,000 calorie diet, and eventually they gained back the lost weight.

My point in mentioning this study is that people need to shut up about how easy it is for other people to lose weight. You are right that everyone has a different metabolism, so someone who is skinny and someone who is fat may need a different number of calories, but you can't just tell the fat person to stop eating so much. Yeah, a fat person will lose weight if they cut back on how much they eat, but (s)he's also acquire all the symptoms of the above mentioned study; (s)he'll also probably gain back the weight if (s)he ever goes back to eating enough for a proper metabolism.

Being skinny doesn't mean being healthy either; I'm a perfect example of that. I'm 5'4" and 120 lbs and super unhealthy. I should weigh 15-20 lbs more. I'm currently taking a medication that severely curbs my appetite (which hopefully I'll be off of soon). It's 8:45pm in my time zone and all I've "eaten" today is a Frappaccino. I can't exercise; I get winded going up one flight of stairs. I sleep more hours in the day than I am awake. This is not a healthy body, but it sure looks better in a pair of jeans than the old one did. Do I prefer it? Hell no!

It doesn't matter what someone's weight is. What matters is how healthy that person is. Not how much someone eats but what they eat. Not how much someone exercises but that (s)he moves around during the day (the cultures with the most centenarians don't exercise like we do, they just move around a lot during their daily life). Being fat isn't bad, it's just not in vogue; 500 years ago it was super-hot. Natural fat accumulation is just another genetic variation like height, hair color, or intelligence.

No, no, this is all very on topic.

I know that study, it's one of the links I lost (see above commentversation)... I'm pretty sure it's discussed on the same site that I linked to.

If I recall correctly, not only did their weight bounce back when they started eating normally again but they gained more... their new "set points" were actually higher because their body adjusted to starvation.

One big problem is that doctors have bought into the myth of health = weight. How could they not? It's so much "everybody knows" crap... most of them heard it from their doctors growing up, even though it's not scientifically supported. So you get people (mostly women... even when the concerns are supposedly rooted in "health" women get more crap for weight) who are in recovery for eating disorders being told by their doctors that they could "still stand to lose a few pounds", you've got people who are below their body's natural weight and suffering for it being told they're doing great and to keep it up, etc.

Your point about skinniness not equalling healthiness, as well as the overall point about different people having different metabolisms, certainly is illustrated by myself - I'm 6'2" and weigh something like 130 lbs, which is hellishly underweight for my height. Unlike you, addiejd, my appetite isn't being curbed - I can pretty much eat constantly and still lose weight if I'm not careful - but like you I lack the energy to exercise or stay awake during normal daylight hours, which is a bit odd considering the weight I am not putting on is presumably being burnt as energy.

Anyhow, my point is that there is something intrinsic about my metabolism which means I find it almost impossible to gain weight even when I want to, so it only stands to reason that along the spectrum of body metabolism, some people will be the exact reverse and this will be an intrinsic part of them.

IIRC, you might not have metabolic issues in terms of burning through food- you might have a problem absorbing calories and nutrients from the food you eat. A while back there was a study showing that, surprise surprise, the ability to absorb nutrients from food as it passes through the intestine is variable. I can't recall if it's intrinsic to the person or a function of the bacteria, but regardless, the end result is that some people will absorb more than usual (and thus gain weight) and others will absorb less than usual (and thus lose weight) even when eating the same food.

So it may be that you need to eat more because your body simply is not making efficient use of what you eat.

Anyone with a Bullshit Magnet Index (like what I did there? Eh. Best I could do on short notice.) of 30 or above should be given a trout with which to smack the "you just need some exercise" camp.

Mine should be coming in the mail any. day. now.

I've got first hand experience of this kind of crap. My entire family is unfit and unhealthy; we don't exercise at all really and don't eat as well as we want to, much less should.

I am 5'11" and weigh 135 pounds. If I were healthy I would weigh at least 20 pounds more. My sisters are both "overweight", they both weigh more than me in fact, despite being a fair bit shorter. We have very similar lifestyles, spending most of our time on the computer. I actually get less exercise than one of my sisters who is worried about her weight.

My point is, even in the relatively narrow genetic variation of a single family, there are drastic enough differences in metabolism to create under and over weight individuals with essentially the same lifestyle.

Stress probably plays a large part of the difference, now that I think about it; I am much more mellow generally and also lacking their highly stressful mental diseases. Again, luck of the genetic draw.

I just wanted to give you heads up that I tried to get to Star Harbor Nights- it and all your story sites except "The 3 Seas" and "Tribe" tell me that they can't read address http://*.*.*.alias(i.e. http://more.talesofmu.com.alias/) because connection is being "reset by peer".

Thanks. Tech support already knows about it... nothing to do but wait for them to work it out.

Alexandra, I don't know how far you've dug into the molecular bio technicalities behind the correlational studies, but while it's true that persons with more body fat, particularly abdominal fat, have demonstrably different metabolisms, there are more than a few routes of arriving there.

The lipid (fat) homeostatis system communicates in a lot of ways with the glucose (sugar/eaten as carbs) and insulin system. You can change both by changing either, and among the things accomplished by insulin signaling is "pull fat out of the bloodstream where it circulates as LDL and HDL (regulated by the liver) and store it as adipose tissue."

I guess all I'm trying to say, and I don't know if this comment will make it through the new moderating or not, but: while a person's weight is definitely not as simple as "what you eat from day to day on a short time scale" and losing weight is definitely not as simple as "eat less now," the differences in metabolism among persons of different body composition is not Necessarily "genetic." If anything, the research that I've read seems to underscore how easy it is to push your system towards insulin resistance (rising prevalence of diabetes) and fat storage, and how hard to impossible it is to reverse that process, but that it can definitely be environmental (what you are in the habit of eating at some point in time or what you were fed) rather than having to be genetic.

Supporting this are the stark facts that while the body composition of our population is a LOT different now than it was 50 years ago, our genetics have not changed appreciably in that time scale.

Again, this post is not meant to be like "omg it's all the fatties fault." but rather to say that not all uncontrollable things are "genetic"

I'll just as carefully point out that the word "genetic" doesn't appear in my post. I don't believe that sexual orientation or most foundational aspects of a personality are exclusively genetic, either, but I don't believe they're controllable.

I used the word "inherited", though, and I'll stick with it. And twin studies and adoption studies and studies of fat mothers who change their own dietary habits before having children and then make sure their children get off to the right start suggest that unless there are voodoo lipids being inserted into voodoo bloodstreams than "not necessarily genetic" looks quite a bit like "not only genetic".

I apologize, I'd link to some but as mentioned in comments above, I'm still rebuilding my bookmarks. I wish I had them, because you can get an interesting education by reading the news articles reporting these results. The press reporting on science usually distills things down to sound bytes and loses some resolution in doing so, but never so much as when they need to make Science! fit our preconceptions. And it doesn't help when the researchers encourage them with caveats about "THIS DOESN'T LET THE FAT PEOPLE OFF THE HOOK!" An article pointing out that overweight people statistically outlive thin people will end with "BUT THEY SHOULD LOSE WEIGHT BECAUSE SERIOUSLY IT'S NOT HEALTHY AND THEIR LIVES ARE AT RISK".

Bwah?

If anything, the research that I've read seems to underscore how easy it is to push your system towards insulin resistance (rising prevalence of diabetes) and fat storage, and how hard to impossible it is to reverse that process,

This is one reason why fat acceptance is of tantamount importance, because one of the easiest and hardest-to-retract ways to push your body towards fat storage we know of is to try to alter your weight downwards. the kid with the "fast metabolism" who can eat whatever she wants and be rail-skinny one day decides her belly sticks out just a tad too much and decides to diet and exercise it away... and not only does she fail but she goes from being a skinny teenager to a chubby adult.

Though our society typically blames it on weak-willed fatties breaking down and binging, the vast majority of people who do get their bodies to lose appreciable weight (below the natural variation their metabolism indicates) end up gaining back more and finding the next weight loss attempt is all the more difficult.

Even people who risk their lives altering their GUI tract surgically hit the same plateau as people who diet conventionally, and eventually for many of them the plateau becomes a wall and they end up bouncing back, too.

Changes in our collective diet might account for some of the collective changes in our body composition, but the rise in obesity corresponds suspiciously well to the rise in "health consciousness", with "health" understood to mean exercising and dieting enough to fit an ever-shrinking definition of thin.

and losing weight is definitely not as simple as "eat less now,

What is it as simple as? If you can answer that question you can go print your own money. You can advertise the only weight loss solution that could scream in big bold letters "RESULTS TYPICAL! THIS WORKS FOR ANYONE WHO TRIES IT AND IT WILL WORK FOR YOU!" You could get Oprah to sign over the keys to her kingdom.

Edited 2010-02-20 17:24 (UTC)

and, crap, i forgot to add stress. and lack of sleep. and, well, lots of things that aren't in a person's dna.

Now Alex, let's not get caught up by the "hindsight bias." The phenomenon that whenever someone reads a new study they are like "gee everyone knew that already." What everyone knows must still be proven. :) The example being: everyone knows opposites attract, but everyone knows birds of a feather fly together. Lol, just saying don't be so mean to science, it's a long tedious process.

I'm not aiming this at science, I'm aiming this at "everyone", because in this case what "everyone knows" seems to be that "losing or gaining weight is just a matter of calories in, calories out, all fat people overeat, all skinny people are healthy, and anyone could lose weight if they'd just suck it up and try."

Link

Wired's got an article up about a new study that noticed mice with certain traits favored a high-fat diet. When they moved bacteria from those mice to other mice, the new mice got fat as well. Which suggests that it isn't just 'your eating patterns alter your bacteria,' but instead the possibility that the change in bacteria can cause you to eat differently- causing cravings and influencing the food you choose.

And one fun thing- they mention large amounts of antibiotics being a potential cause for this change.

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Read this and other stories in the pages of the medical journal Duh.

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Totally OT

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oh so carefully...

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