> my unconscious being (which is almost all of my being)
Story of my life!
> And I think the answer is "Because that's what it feels like".
I think this is also the foundation of why I don't believe in a lipostat. That just doesn't feel right. Or maybe mine is just so broken, and always has been, that it is essentially not a lipostat any more.
I am coming round to your point of view by the day. I still feel like there's a control mechanism operating, but if there is, the set point is rising fairly rapidly for some reason.
That seems a new thing, and I'm certainly not eating much in the way of PUFAs, and I don't think I've done anything different recently to cause it.
When I get back from home I think I'll check if ex150 still works for me and then reintroduce foods one by one to see if I can work out some more details.
I highly recommend the book Burn by Pontzer. Not everything he writes I agree with but there is a region in the brain trying to match hunger to how much energy you actually need. This mechanism seems to need exercise / movement to function properly. Also the high palability of modern food seems to bypass this as it is connected to our reward system.
So this feeling of something is there telling you to eat or not is correct.
Who knows what exactly goes on in that region and how this interplays with PUFAs, weight and temperature.
She didn’t include it in her summary sadly. Basicly it goes like this. You know the Hadza volks. They stay at the same weight their entire life. They move a lot but burn the same amount of energy as someone sedentary. So it’s not the calories out. Then what makes them stay the same weight? They have access to honey and I don’t believe that they couldn’t eat more.
Pontzer explains it’s the hypothalamus, which controls hormones for hunger, temperature and others. It seems to try to balance out energy in energy out. Like a budget.
So what i meant is that this mechanism of controlling these hormones for hunger and temperature may be what you feeling and referring to. Something automatic that budgets your hunger. Does it get broken by modern food or pufa? Don’t know.
Pontzer just mentions that it is affected by high reward foods and activity levels. Also seems to work best with more bland foods and meals. But they eat honey so i doubt this part.
> So what i meant is that this mechanism of controlling these hormones for hunger and temperature may be what you feeling and referring to. Something automatic that budgets your hunger.
Yes, just so, and from my days as an amateur endocrinologist I remember that these sorts of things usually go on in the hypothalamus, an ancient bit of shrew-brain buried deep in our brains that controls hormones and homeostases and the like.
> Does it get broken by modern food or pufa? Don’t know.
I'm pretty sure something's breaking it. Food of some sort probably, although it could be some nasty chemical or even some infectious disease. I'd put money on something in the food, but I'm fairly agnostic as to what.
I'm convinced PUFAs bad metabolically, but I'm not convinced PUFAs cause obesity. They're still high on my list of suspicions though.
I also believe there is a control mechanism, or several. But as previously explained, that doesn't require a "lipostat" which is an implementation detail.
Whatever it is, it is clearly "broken" if you can use that somewhat teleological term in the context of evolution/biology.
I *thought* we were mainly arguing about definitions. Control mechanism, homeostat, lipostat, ..... I mean of *course* it's going to be some hideous complicated pile of bodges, this is an evolved mechanism we're talking about.
But there's something that makes me hungry some times, and sometimes makes eating not at all interesting, and it used to keep me in the neighbourhood of 85kg without me ever needing to think about it, and if that's not my body/autonomic brain trying to control its energy reserves I can't think what else it could be.
The interesting question I think, is why dieters tend to go quickly back to their highest ever weight once they stop dieting (is that even true by the way? why does everyone believe that?).
That looks to me like you can starve yourself thin with frankly inhuman willpower, and once that fails, some mechanism puts you back to where it's wanted to be all along.
That's what I mean by set-point and homeostat, and recently I've started calling it a lipostat because that seems to be the standard term.
Our project is to find out why that set point's too high, and if it can be put back.
ex150 seems to drop it. I think that's how it must work, or how any no-willpower diet trick must work. (That's why I took you so seriously when I first read you.)
But as I currently seem to be finding out, after a long period of not intervening, even without PUFAs, my homeostat seems to be going back to its old ways.
Do any disagreements on matters of fact remain? Like you, I think semantics is important, in the sense of 'what do we predict?' and 'can we communicate accurately?'.
> I *thought* we were mainly arguing about definitions. Control mechanism, homeostat, lipostat
All men are mortal, not all mortals are men. Definitions are important.
> That looks to me like you can starve yourself thin with frankly inhuman willpower, and once that fails, some mechanism puts you back to where it's wanted to be all along.
That could be explained merely by starvation causing your metabolism to shut down, and the second you stop starving yourself, it'll go back to where you started because nothing really changed fundamentally.
The more interesting question: how can somebody with lots of body fat ever be hungry? Shouldn't he be constantly "stuffed" and tired of eating due to all the body fat coming into his blood stream? (And we know it is coming into the bloodstream from serum fatty acid tests of obese people.)
I.e., how is obesity even possible?
> Our project is to find out why that set point's too high, and if it can be put back.
See that's the issue with "lipostat." With a lipostat, there are 2 possibilities: the set point is too high, or something else is broken. If there isn't a lipostat, we don't have to look for the "high set point" and we can just assume something's broken - e.g. a fire's been lit under the thermometer, or the window is open.
I don't think we disagree on any matters of fact right now. We just seem to have subtly different models of what's happening to cause those facts.
> The more interesting question: how can somebody with lots of body fat ever be hungry? Shouldn't he be constantly "stuffed" and tired of eating due to all the body fat coming into his blood stream? (And we know it is coming into the bloodstream from serum fatty acid tests of obese people.)
Yes indeed! If you're functioning correctly and there's food around you and you're free to eat it or not, you should be the right weight.
Exercise shouldn't make any difference to your fat stores at all (you might gain a bit of muscle and so get heavier, but body fat should not change).
Force-feeding could make you fat, but the minute it stops you should come back down.
Starvation should make you thin, but the minute there's food around you should come back up.
To you that's theoretical I think, but to me it's a literal description of the first forty years of my life. Honestly the only time my weight ever changed in adulthood was the time I accidentally starved myself while cycling across France. I got unpleasantly thin but the minute I was back home I just went back to normal in a few weeks. Nothing else ever made any difference.
In this light, Brad's evolutionary biology/torpor story actually makes more and more sense.
If you recall, not many other animal are "fat" like we are. Most animals cannot store body fat in vast amounts. E.g. I think the other great apes are extremely lean, they just look fat because their bellies are bloated from fermenting all that fiber. So it's probably a genetic adaptation that allows us to function for long amounts of time without eating, which enabled us to travel through inhospitable regions, survive winter, and so on.
> That could be explained merely by starvation causing your metabolism to shut down, and the second you stop starving yourself, it'll go back to where you started because nothing really changed fundamentally.
That would explain why you'd gain weight more rapidly than before, but not why you'd go back up to the fattest you'd ever been and then stop.
Something must be remembering something somewhere somehow.
> All men are mortal, not all mortals are men. Definitions are important.
All homeostats are control mechanisms. Not all control mechanisms are homeostats.
I suppose so @ steering wheel. Nobody has programmed in a little value of "0 degree rotation" that the steering wheel uses a PID controller (or other type) to get back to. It's merely that the force of the road on the tires forces the wheels back into the direction of travel.
I’ve already mentioned my theory. Weight gain IS what damages the lipostat.
It’s very good at maintaining its current weight except under exceptional circumstances.
Those exceptional circumstances are eating incredibly unhealthy as well as not exercising.
Even then many people’s lipostat can prevent weight gain.
Have you perhaps given the boring theory a shot. Namely that food that carbs without fiber mixed with fat and sugar is the bad guy and your only noticing it now as your body’s ability to prevent fat gain is slowing down?
> Namely that food that carbs without fiber mixed with fat and sugar is the bad guy and your only noticing it now as your body’s ability to prevent fat gain is slowing down?
That's not a boring theory, but I eat very little sugar, so it doesn't apply to me!
I think that the Irish pre-famine (my ancestors!) ate an awful lot of potatoes, and did very well on them. I assume that they ate them with the skins removed, since if they hadn't they'd have got solanine poisoning.
So would you predict lots of Irish fatties pre-famine?
I agree. Obesity isn’t caused by old age. Your lipostat gets weaker.
Obese children are people born with a weaker and more damagable lipostat. They would be fine if they are very healthy. But they don’t and unlike you they weren’t born with a military grade lipostat.
This explains why obesity is incredibly genetic despite the fact that it can’t be.
The power of the lipostat is genetic. But everyone eats so badly that this is the determining factor.
Then how could one gain 100lbs eating pretty strict keto, even while exercising some of that time (when not exercising was the norm)? Asking for a friend.
Because your lipostat was already damaged. Once you gain enough weight for long enough it will do its best to come back. Did you reach a new personal high on keto. Or did you return to a previous high.
I’m not even sure ex150 will work in the long term.
> my unconscious being (which is almost all of my being)
Story of my life!
> And I think the answer is "Because that's what it feels like".
I think this is also the foundation of why I don't believe in a lipostat. That just doesn't feel right. Or maybe mine is just so broken, and always has been, that it is essentially not a lipostat any more.
> I don't believe in a lipostat.
I am coming round to your point of view by the day. I still feel like there's a control mechanism operating, but if there is, the set point is rising fairly rapidly for some reason.
That seems a new thing, and I'm certainly not eating much in the way of PUFAs, and I don't think I've done anything different recently to cause it.
When I get back from home I think I'll check if ex150 still works for me and then reintroduce foods one by one to see if I can work out some more details.
I highly recommend the book Burn by Pontzer. Not everything he writes I agree with but there is a region in the brain trying to match hunger to how much energy you actually need. This mechanism seems to need exercise / movement to function properly. Also the high palability of modern food seems to bypass this as it is connected to our reward system.
So this feeling of something is there telling you to eat or not is correct.
Who knows what exactly goes on in that region and how this interplays with PUFAs, weight and temperature.
Nice, thanks! I read Jane Psmith's review here : https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-burn-by-herman-pontzer and it didn't seem that surprising, but you reckon that there are interesting things in there beyond what she mentions?
She didn’t include it in her summary sadly. Basicly it goes like this. You know the Hadza volks. They stay at the same weight their entire life. They move a lot but burn the same amount of energy as someone sedentary. So it’s not the calories out. Then what makes them stay the same weight? They have access to honey and I don’t believe that they couldn’t eat more.
Pontzer explains it’s the hypothalamus, which controls hormones for hunger, temperature and others. It seems to try to balance out energy in energy out. Like a budget.
So what i meant is that this mechanism of controlling these hormones for hunger and temperature may be what you feeling and referring to. Something automatic that budgets your hunger. Does it get broken by modern food or pufa? Don’t know.
Pontzer just mentions that it is affected by high reward foods and activity levels. Also seems to work best with more bland foods and meals. But they eat honey so i doubt this part.
> So what i meant is that this mechanism of controlling these hormones for hunger and temperature may be what you feeling and referring to. Something automatic that budgets your hunger.
Yes, just so, and from my days as an amateur endocrinologist I remember that these sorts of things usually go on in the hypothalamus, an ancient bit of shrew-brain buried deep in our brains that controls hormones and homeostases and the like.
> Does it get broken by modern food or pufa? Don’t know.
I'm pretty sure something's breaking it. Food of some sort probably, although it could be some nasty chemical or even some infectious disease. I'd put money on something in the food, but I'm fairly agnostic as to what.
I'm convinced PUFAs bad metabolically, but I'm not convinced PUFAs cause obesity. They're still high on my list of suspicions though.
I also believe there is a control mechanism, or several. But as previously explained, that doesn't require a "lipostat" which is an implementation detail.
Whatever it is, it is clearly "broken" if you can use that somewhat teleological term in the context of evolution/biology.
Sounds like a good plan, keep us up to date.
> I also believe there is a control mechanism
I *thought* we were mainly arguing about definitions. Control mechanism, homeostat, lipostat, ..... I mean of *course* it's going to be some hideous complicated pile of bodges, this is an evolved mechanism we're talking about.
But there's something that makes me hungry some times, and sometimes makes eating not at all interesting, and it used to keep me in the neighbourhood of 85kg without me ever needing to think about it, and if that's not my body/autonomic brain trying to control its energy reserves I can't think what else it could be.
The interesting question I think, is why dieters tend to go quickly back to their highest ever weight once they stop dieting (is that even true by the way? why does everyone believe that?).
That looks to me like you can starve yourself thin with frankly inhuman willpower, and once that fails, some mechanism puts you back to where it's wanted to be all along.
That's what I mean by set-point and homeostat, and recently I've started calling it a lipostat because that seems to be the standard term.
Our project is to find out why that set point's too high, and if it can be put back.
ex150 seems to drop it. I think that's how it must work, or how any no-willpower diet trick must work. (That's why I took you so seriously when I first read you.)
But as I currently seem to be finding out, after a long period of not intervening, even without PUFAs, my homeostat seems to be going back to its old ways.
Do any disagreements on matters of fact remain? Like you, I think semantics is important, in the sense of 'what do we predict?' and 'can we communicate accurately?'.
> I *thought* we were mainly arguing about definitions. Control mechanism, homeostat, lipostat
All men are mortal, not all mortals are men. Definitions are important.
> That looks to me like you can starve yourself thin with frankly inhuman willpower, and once that fails, some mechanism puts you back to where it's wanted to be all along.
That could be explained merely by starvation causing your metabolism to shut down, and the second you stop starving yourself, it'll go back to where you started because nothing really changed fundamentally.
The more interesting question: how can somebody with lots of body fat ever be hungry? Shouldn't he be constantly "stuffed" and tired of eating due to all the body fat coming into his blood stream? (And we know it is coming into the bloodstream from serum fatty acid tests of obese people.)
I.e., how is obesity even possible?
> Our project is to find out why that set point's too high, and if it can be put back.
See that's the issue with "lipostat." With a lipostat, there are 2 possibilities: the set point is too high, or something else is broken. If there isn't a lipostat, we don't have to look for the "high set point" and we can just assume something's broken - e.g. a fire's been lit under the thermometer, or the window is open.
I don't think we disagree on any matters of fact right now. We just seem to have subtly different models of what's happening to cause those facts.
> The more interesting question: how can somebody with lots of body fat ever be hungry? Shouldn't he be constantly "stuffed" and tired of eating due to all the body fat coming into his blood stream? (And we know it is coming into the bloodstream from serum fatty acid tests of obese people.)
Yes indeed! If you're functioning correctly and there's food around you and you're free to eat it or not, you should be the right weight.
Exercise shouldn't make any difference to your fat stores at all (you might gain a bit of muscle and so get heavier, but body fat should not change).
Force-feeding could make you fat, but the minute it stops you should come back down.
Starvation should make you thin, but the minute there's food around you should come back up.
To you that's theoretical I think, but to me it's a literal description of the first forty years of my life. Honestly the only time my weight ever changed in adulthood was the time I accidentally starved myself while cycling across France. I got unpleasantly thin but the minute I was back home I just went back to normal in a few weeks. Nothing else ever made any difference.
In this light, Brad's evolutionary biology/torpor story actually makes more and more sense.
If you recall, not many other animal are "fat" like we are. Most animals cannot store body fat in vast amounts. E.g. I think the other great apes are extremely lean, they just look fat because their bellies are bloated from fermenting all that fiber. So it's probably a genetic adaptation that allows us to function for long amounts of time without eating, which enabled us to travel through inhospitable regions, survive winter, and so on.
https://www.science.org/content/article/why-humans-are-fat-primate
"Female and male humans average 36% and 20% body fat, whereas female and male bonobos average 4% and close to 0% body fat, respectively."
We also know there's hibernation/torpor in some select animals and it causes them to store fat, like bears.
So Brad's story that this is an evolutionary survival mechanism, and our modern food environment has hijacked it, sounds better and better.
> That could be explained merely by starvation causing your metabolism to shut down, and the second you stop starving yourself, it'll go back to where you started because nothing really changed fundamentally.
That would explain why you'd gain weight more rapidly than before, but not why you'd go back up to the fattest you'd ever been and then stop.
Something must be remembering something somewhere somehow.
You hit your previous equilibrium?
> Definitions are important.
I agree. Tell me why 'control mechanism' and 'lipostat' and 'homeostat' sound different to you.
The minute I say that out loud I think: well, a steering wheel is a control mechanism but not a homeostat. Something like that?
> All men are mortal, not all mortals are men. Definitions are important.
All homeostats are control mechanisms. Not all control mechanisms are homeostats.
I suppose so @ steering wheel. Nobody has programmed in a little value of "0 degree rotation" that the steering wheel uses a PID controller (or other type) to get back to. It's merely that the force of the road on the tires forces the wheels back into the direction of travel.
I’ve already mentioned my theory. Weight gain IS what damages the lipostat.
It’s very good at maintaining its current weight except under exceptional circumstances.
Those exceptional circumstances are eating incredibly unhealthy as well as not exercising.
Even then many people’s lipostat can prevent weight gain.
Have you perhaps given the boring theory a shot. Namely that food that carbs without fiber mixed with fat and sugar is the bad guy and your only noticing it now as your body’s ability to prevent fat gain is slowing down?
> Namely that food that carbs without fiber mixed with fat and sugar is the bad guy and your only noticing it now as your body’s ability to prevent fat gain is slowing down?
That's not a boring theory, but I eat very little sugar, so it doesn't apply to me!
Sure but you do eat carbs mixed with fat with low fibre.
Right, so your new theory is that carbs+fat cause obesity? Or is the fibre part load-bearing?
Each part contributes a little. As you get older your bodies ability to prevent weight gain weakens.
I think there are four main causes.
Lack of exercise.
Carbs with fat.
Sugar.
Carbs without fibre.
But your body is really good at fighting them until you go over a certain threshold of badness.
Additionally as you grow older your body gets worse at managing it.
If you think about it non of the four things existed in our evolutionary environment.
It’s a testament to how strong the lipostat is that it takes so much to break it.
> Carbs without fibre.
I think that the Irish pre-famine (my ancestors!) ate an awful lot of potatoes, and did very well on them. I assume that they ate them with the skins removed, since if they hadn't they'd have got solanine poisoning.
So would you predict lots of Irish fatties pre-famine?
No of course not.
They got a lot of exercise and likely didn’t have too much fat to mix in.
Realistically if your getting more then 2 hours of exercise a day your fine. Unless you’re pounding French fried and cookies.
> Additionally as you grow older your body gets worse at managing it.
This is possible, everything goes wrong as you age, but I think (but don't know), that people used to get lighter as they got older.
And there are horribly obese kids these days.
I agree. Obesity isn’t caused by old age. Your lipostat gets weaker.
Obese children are people born with a weaker and more damagable lipostat. They would be fine if they are very healthy. But they don’t and unlike you they weren’t born with a military grade lipostat.
This explains why obesity is incredibly genetic despite the fact that it can’t be.
The power of the lipostat is genetic. But everyone eats so badly that this is the determining factor.
> If you think about it non of the four things existed in our evolutionary environment.
Hang on, carbs with fat didn't exist? Or are you saying that it's the actual mixing that's the problem? If we eat them separately they're fine?
My intuition is that the mixing is the problem.
I’m not sure if it’s in the same food or if it’s in the same meal.
Or even how intertwined it needs to be. For example is eating buttered bread healthier then eating fried potatoes.
Then how could one gain 100lbs eating pretty strict keto, even while exercising some of that time (when not exercising was the norm)? Asking for a friend.
Because your lipostat was already damaged. Once you gain enough weight for long enough it will do its best to come back. Did you reach a new personal high on keto. Or did you return to a previous high.
I’m not even sure ex150 will work in the long term.