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Experimental Fat Loss's avatar

Slime Mold Time Mold have the theory that the rise in anorexia (mostly in young women) is an adverse reaction to whatever's causing the obesity epidemic. So basically same theory.

> Imagine your fat sensor is even more buggered than mine. Imagine it always reads 0%, whatever the true amount of fat you're carrying is.

I don't think the sensor measures absolute amounts. There is on system in the body that takes a census of "total fat cells and their current contents" and I don't think such a mechanism exists for anything else in the body.

I suspect the sensor measures fat flux, or even "available energy" flux. In a metabolically healthy person, fat flux corresponds to available fat, because lipolysis constantly causes FFA release from your adipose tissue unless you JUST stuffed yourself. A few hours later, glucose and FFAs from intake are put to good use (either to build stuff, to burn, or stored in adipose tissue) and lipolysis starts up again.

But if this fat flux from adipose tissue is somehow not sending the right signal, e.g. by not "burning cleanly" in the mitochondria...

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Leo Abstract's avatar

Ah, another trio of posts on one of my favorite topics. Couple of quibbles with this one:

Your second type invited recollection of the various men I've known who have complained of excessive appetite. None of us have ever been obese -- all unusually large and strong with a tendency to add some flab around the midsection during periods of depression.. Generally, people who see me eat are shocked that I'm not fat. Perhaps my thermostat wasn't really that off, given the PUFAs and emulsifiers in my diet,.

Your discussion of anorexia is a bit wide of the mark, though. It's an odd thing and is practically a field of study unto itself now that you can't be expected to know. Here are a couple of tidbits. One way to look at it is as an addiction to being hungry. Anorexics are, like addicts, notorious liars, and one saying she isn't hungry doesn't mean any more than an addict saying that no of course he isn't high. After recorvery, or in moments of clarity, they'll admit to enjoying the experience of being underfed - sometimes in a "yay, this feeling means I'm losing weight!" (a direct quote from an anorexic) or with a sense of energetic well-being (which I'll address momentarily). The first of these, studies show, is dopaminergic: minimizing food intake becomes more strongly the target for some rare few neural systems, bringing a feeling of success. It's a contest against the food, against the prying eyes of one's parents, against one's body, etc. It's exciting and motivating (but I already said dopamine, so I repeat myself). The second of these relates to an odd quirk of mammalian metabolism, where an animal that is approaching starvation suddenly experiences a burst of energy. The hypothesized purpose of this is to motivate the animal to leave whatever food-poor region it is in and seek out greener fields afar. The anorexic is one who learns to surf this wave of energy as long as it lasts (before suffering through a period of low-energy, usually marked by isolating and watching tiktok videos or whatever). Finally, for those adapted to fasting (as anorexics certainly are), eating anything at all is unpleasant. Especially if one were riding that starvation wave at the time. As a practitioner of intermittent fasting for approaching a decade, I find that I can cruise all day without food, feeling light and clear-headed and energetic. Eating triggers the rest-and-digest response. Anorexics are hit even harder by eating, especially since their stomachs have shrunk.

So far, I've just been regurgitating (something of a bulimia joke) the scientific consensus on anorexia. Here's an additional theory of my own: it's HPFs, too: highly processed foods. Anyone who wants to feel healthy would benefit from keeping (even quite informally) a food/energy journal, which tracks how various foods make you feel. You've done that, which is how you eliminated sulfites. Most people, especially most young people, don't. But some of us are more sensitive to changes in how we feel than others, especially food-related changes (a well-studied example of what they call one-trial learning is where you eat some food, get sick [coincidentally or not], and then can't eat that food again for years or perhaps ever). Anorexics often begin by eliminating specific foods from their diets, starting with heavy, rich, inflammatory, or hard-to-digest foods (for instance, good luck finding an anorexic teenage girl who has enjoyed a chicken-fried beef steak lately or indeed at all). Because in a standard household these days, a preponderance of calories come from processed foods, eliminating everything that makes a sensitive person feel bad when she eats it leaves only plain greek yogurt, leafy green vegetables without [sulfite-and-emulsifier-heavy] bottled dressings, and a little bit of fruit and almonds.

I'd dare say that nobody raised on a diet of abundant fish, fruit,' green vegetables, rice, and sweet potatoes would end up anorexic.

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