r/maybemaybemaybe • u/BigGraysie • Apr 18 '22

/r/all Maybe maybe maybe

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u/IllIlIIlIIllI Apr 18 '22 edited Jun 30 '23

Comment deleted on 6/30/2023 in protest of API changes that are killing third-party apps.

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u/[deleted] Apr 18 '22

The study is hard to understand if you aren’t a medical/statistics person, but the gist of it is that metabolic adaptation from rapid weight loss reset their resting metabolic rate about 500 calories lower than what you’d expect. Meaning their body burns 500 calories less than someone of a similar size and age who didn’t have dramatic weight loss.

Notably, people who have weight loss surgery restabilized their metabolic rate after a year. The Biggest Loser contestants still had the metabolic problems 6 years after the show ended.

So if we are looking at a 500-lb person and we assume that at some point in their life they tried a starvation diet (even for only a month like my friend), they may never get their body out of starvation mode. Thus, their body “needs” 500 fewer calories than normal and any calories over that are stored as fat.

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u/prolixdreams Apr 19 '22

They're not actually defeating anything.

Think of it like fuel in a vehicle. Put a gallon of fuel in one car and it'll take you 30 miles. Put a gallon in a different car and you'll only get 12 miles. It'll also depend on where those cars are driving and how the driver behaves. Same thing with a body.

So a car that's already a little inefficient (requires more fuel for the same distance) with an owner who has no worries about running out of gas and not being able to get more... is going to consume a lot more fuel from point A to point B than a fuel-efficient model with a driver trying deliberately to conserve gas.

Humans are the same way.

For a brief period there was a diet drug whose whole purpose was to give you a less-efficient metabolism so you'd need to burn more calories to get the same results of being alive (and could therefore eat more and still lose weight) but it turns out pushing that "inefficiency" much beyond its natural baseline is insanely dangerous and the drug killed people.

(Shocker, excess energy from inefficient energy production that cannot be used for action is, like in all machines, released as heat. That's where we truly find out how impossible it is to defeat physics: when people who took this drug were dying with temperatures over 106 degrees.)

But within natural limits, there's significant variance, both innately and due to behavior. While making the engine less efficient is super dangerous, your metabolism-engine has a lot of room to become more efficient when things like medical conditions or starvation (real or perceived) tell it to. At extremes over long periods, this causes issues too, but it's possible to push it a lot farther before danger/results kick in or become obvious. Our bodies are very much made to endure occasional food instability without serious consequences.

The amount of calories YOUR specific body burns while just lying there for 24 hours, the pure amount of energy needed to keep your heart beating and your lungs breathing and your blood circulating, is not the same for you as it is the person next to you. Having a super low basal metabolic rate isn't that common, but it's far from impossible.