The New Generation is to be the fattest generation in history...

I don’t have my textbooks or notes from med school anymore, but they beat us over the head with this. But just to clarify, I’m talking dietary fat, not stored triglycerides.

Because people who need to lose weight usually already know more than the people talking to them about it, they’ve tried everything you’re saying already, and they’ve already recently heard the “great” opinions from many other people about what they need to lose weight.

It’s actually exhausting. If losing weight was easy, no one would be fat if for no other reason than listening to thin people tell you what you should be doing is shitsville.

I was at a science talk a few years ago where a bunch of doctors and geneticists were talking about weight management. One made the observation that telling a patient to lose weight is about as practical as telling the patient to “just breath more” when they are at extremely high altitude.

That’s a good one. I think the biggest piece is that people have to be willing to change. It’s one thing to want to lose weight. It’s another to be willing to make changes to your lifestyle to help make that happen. And, obviously, transforming those changes into life-long habits takes a lot of dedication.

I’m probably about 70-75 pounds below the most I’ve weighed. About 20 above my lowest (which was nearly 30 years ago). It’s been a lifelong thing for me. But I exercise more than I ever have in my life. I managed to get off cholesterol meds. I will say I live in mortal fear of my blood pressure creeping into the 130s, because as much as I’ve found ways to make changes to manage my weight, a salt restriction would create havoc I’m not sure how I’d deal with.

I’ve dropped 35 lbs over the past five months, and my blood panel results improved to the point where my Doctor took me off statins. The keto diet is pretty incredible. I don’t count calories, and I eat whenever I’m hungry, so it requires little willpower to maintain.

I know everyone ‘knows’ that you have to eat tons of fruits and grains, and that fat makes you fat and eggs raise your cholesterol. There are a large number of actual, published studies by real scientists that show that’s all bullshit.

If you’re interested, the best sources for info on the web are (no kidding) subreddits, /r/keto and /r/ketoscience.

Yes, the willpower part of doing a ketogenic diet is staying away from certain foods rather than portion control, though I’ve cut 25-50% on how much I eat or dinner as well (bec drinking so much fluids, I don’t need as much), combined with small meals during the day.

Is my layman’s interpretation correct- you won’t get energy directly from a consumed fat.

Instead it gets stored and then processed into ketones?

Seems there’s an obvious question to ask, if the above statement is held to be true, which is what happens to a carb?

Is that consumed by the body directly or is it processed?

Well, ymmv but I don’t think it’s actually all that difficult.

However I’m straying into preacher territory.

If anyone asks me I’ll check if it’s a serious inquiry, as in they actually want to know . It rarely is.

Then I’ll recount my experience and tell them what I’ve done.

There isn’t one size fits all but there are guiding/underlying principles.

I teach English to Spanish people and they all respond differently to stimuli, but the guiding principles work but the key ingredient is actually the same as losing weight -

Consistency in habits.

I tell them to expose themselves to English on a daily basis, via Netflix if nothing else, for 20 minutes a day, no subtitles no dubbing and no need to understand anything at first.

Just sit down and absorb the simpsons or whatever (one student likes breaking bad, another sex and the city…)

Sounds easy.

Most don’t bother.

And the difference is obvious in those that do.

Consistently eating when you’re not hungry E G. breakfast…

Eating sugar frosties for breakfast. …

Blah blah.

Phone typing on bus. Not fun. Ciao

I wish I could remember more of the details. It’s been twenty years, and trying to read this stuff now feels like trying to read a language you never studied. But yes, complex carbohydrates get broken down into their simpler parts, for instance, sucrose into glucose and fructose. Glucose is the major player here and can be metabolized (glycolysis) or stored as glycogen.

Fatty acids are stored attached to glycerol. They can be converted to glucose (gluconeogenesis) or when fasting, be used for ketogenesis.wish I could give you more.

I suspect one could get very very deep into this!

The takeaway for me is that my body has enough energy at any one time to not need an injection via carbs.

And fats I eat will not make me fat and will be converted into new energy.

I also read another book that says your gut bacteria plays a massive part in how your body processes foods.

Gorillas for example process plants into fats and then into ketones and we have much of the same bacteria.

This is apparently the pathway/method used to turn a carb into a fat.

Or something. I read it a whole ago and honestly I barely understood it. All I really got from it was to eat natural as much as possible, and traditionally fermented foods as opposed to factory produced, e.g. (posh voice on) organic raw milk yoghurt made this week.

It depends a lot on what you do all day as well. I went from a job where I was in a chair all day to a job in which I was on my feet all day, with no chances to sit down. From 2011-2014, I was on my feet every single day for work 10-14 hours a day. Then in 2015 onward, I’ve been in my current job where once again I’m in a chair in front of a computer all day. My after-work activity and diet are pretty much the same. I hardly ever eat out, only eat moderate amounts of home cooked food, and do the elliptical at the gym or walk around a track for about an hour every day. I used to do that before, and after. But from 2011-2014, i was really easy to lose weight. If I just made my portions a little smaller every day, I’d lose weight. If I worked out at the gym harder, I’d lose weight.

But 2015 onward, when my work switched me back to a sedentary lifestyle, smaller meal portions, working out extra hard, none of it seems to make a difference. Because it’s all small stuff compared to how many calories I used to burn in a day just at work, compared to how few I burn in a day at work now.

I did pretty strict keto to lose an initial 25 pounds or so. In the years since I’ve been trying to work myself down to a goal and have found that as the willpower for one method wanes, I’m better off picking up the slack with another technique rather than trying to double down on strictness of the thing I’m struggling with. At this point I’m generally low carb(but probably rarely dip into ketosis anymore) and just kind of mix-and-match strictness on that, intermittent fasting, exercise, and calorie counting.

Lately, tracking my calories while moderately exercising, being mostly low carb, and mild intermittent fasting(I don’t eat before 11-11:30am) has pushed me to the lowest I’ve been. I started doing the calorie counting because just being low carb wasn’t getting me anywhere anymore, and I was curious to see how many calories I was eating. Seeing the calories on everything quickly affected my behavior and I just kept going with that. That being said, it is SO much easier to hit a calorie target on days where I don’t eat something that will spike my blood sugar.

I have a little experience with this - I lost 150 pounds when I was 25 and have kept it off for 20 years now.

I literally did lose it, and keep it off, through consuming fewer calories than I burned. No particular focus on healthy eating, food groups or types, etc.

I just decided one day that I was fat, that it was going to cause health problems and kill me, and that I needed to lose the weight.

It is amazing to me that people always need to make it harder than that. They always need to tell me about exercise, or proteins, or not eating carbs, etc.

But those things all feel like gilding the lily to me. Sure, they’re nice, but they also over complicate the hell out of a fundamentally simple fact - you have to eat less than you burn.

And while I’m sure I could be even healthier still with better exercise, etc., the fact is that I was not going to do those things. It was additional time, work, etc., and I had no Interest in it. Trying to get everything “perfect” would have just prevented me from doing anything at all. And for all the niceties about better diet, exercise, etc., I’m willing to get that none of those things would have had remotely the impact on my health that weighing 150 lbs less does.

It’s all a question of what works for you. We are all different. We have different tastes, cravings, tolerances, etc.

From my reading, the Keto diet is similar to the Atkins, South Beach and Paleo diets – reduce your carb intake to a minimum and replace it with other calorie sources (protein and fats).

To put it into layman’s language (i.e., not getting into terms like “ketosis”), they all pretty much work off the idea that your body stores energy in two main ways – in you muscles (short-term, quick release energy) and in fat (long-term, harder to get-at). Since we’re all nerds here, we can think of these as RAM vis disk memory.

When you exercise, your body at first grabs the short-term energy packets that it has cached all around your body. When your body has a chance to recharge those caches of short-term energy, it grabs the first thing that’s on hand, which is what is currently being digested. Proteins and fats are preferentially grabbed and stored in the caches, and your body will use carbohydrates secondarily. After the short-term storage is filled up, your body will attempt to convert the rest of the incoming food to fat for long-term storage.

But here is the key point: It is very difficult for your body to convert dietary fat or proteins into long-term storage. While there is some evidence that this can happen in some rare circumstances, you can pretty much say that body fat is created ONLY from unused carbohydrates.

So all these low-carb diets bank on that basic idea. If you cut carbs out of your diet entirely, your body will use the proteins to recharge the short-term storage (which is finite) and then pretty much flush any unused calories out of your body. So you can’t realistically “gain” any weight no matter how much you stuff yourself with bacon.

Then, assuming you are exercising a little bit while on this diet, your body should be breaking down some of the body fat at a normal rate between meals and especially at night. Since you are not providing it with any carbs, that fat cannot be replaced so you’ll lose body fat at a pretty steady rate.

The problem - as always - is that these diets only work long-term if your treat them as lifestyle changes rather than as a short-term process. You might lose all that body fat during the six months you go low-carb, but if you declare victory and start eating pasta every night again, you’ll gain it all back again.

On metabolism and weight gain/loss, I used to scoff at that idea as well until about three years back when I was diagnosed with a thyroid imbalance. Basically, my thyroid gland is not producing the proper amount of whatever soup of hormones it’s supposed to be oozing – a condition known as hypothyroidism (as opposed to hyperthyroidism, where it’s producing too much).

One of the many things that your thyroid regulates is how your body stores and digests food. I dunno exactly how.

But after I was put on the medication that artificially introduces more of those same hormones, I saw a dramatic weight loss. No change to my diet, no change to my exercise routine, but I dropped about ten pounds in a month. Disclaimer - at 6’2" and neigh on 260 pounds, a ten-pound loss was not a radical change; the 30 pounds I lost doing the South Beach thing about 12 years back was much more radical.

I lost about a pound and a half this morning, right after my coffee.

I worked a seasonal second job last year. As part of it I was basically working 15 1/2 hours a day, and eating smaller portions of food each day for dinner. I also walked during my breaks (to wake me up if for no other reason). I lost about 10lbs over the 5 months. I have now put that back on, although the holidays always kill me. But I just started working again yesterday so here is hoping I can drop that weight again and this time keep it off.

I don’t think of myself as fat. I could drop 15 pounds though. But I tend to have back troubles and keeping the weight down is good for that.

More than 12 percent of the U.S. population will develop a thyroid condition during their lifetime.

https://www.thyroid.org/media-main/about-hypothyroidism/

Not all thyroid conditions are related to weight gain/loss and not all of those 12% have chronic symptoms. In other words, you’re an exception, your condition doesn’t even come close to explaining the current obesity levels.

My guess is the current problems have 3 main sources that created a snowball effect. Less physical activity on the job, cheaper food and more junk food (fast food + sugar):

1. Decline in physical activity on the job:

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2. Decreasing food costs:

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3: The rise of fast food and junk food:

To be clear, I wasn’t proposing that – I’m still over my target weight and will have to diet/change habits to achieve it. I was just pointing out that while “I have a slow metabolism” may be a BS excuse for weight gain, it’s not total BS.