Since the original article is a bit long I have excerpted -- I believe fairly in context, whole sentences and in linear order -- one of Lyle's articles.
As mentioned above, he has the fabulous tendency of insisting 99.9% of the time that calories are what matters and anyone who says otherwise is full of it, and anyone who says their "metabolism" is different is full of it, then the .1% caveat is "except people whose metabolisms . . . " which makes it look more like a religious belief with some contradiction as failsafe than anything else. However even then his 'variance' belief appears to be very little, e.g. he believes people would still lose except "more slowly" for example.
I really like his exercise stuff which is why I was reading his site in the first place. (I bought and read Tom Venuto's stuff as well.)
The excerpts below are from here:
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fa...-different.html
ellipses mean I'm skipping a bunch and just hitting what seem the salient/summary points.
Quote:
All over the internet, on forums dedicated to everything from weight loss to muscle gain, people will loudly argue that they are different. “My metabolism is different.”, “My nervous system is different”, “My muscles are different”, things of that sort. Everyone is a unique and delicate flower, just like their mom told them.
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Individuals who have a lot of fat to lose either think that they can magically gain weight eating only a few hundred calories per day, or that they can lose weight just by rearranging their food in some special way. Because their metabolism is different.
Diets play on this of course, hiding the simple fact that they are causing you to eat less in a complicated pseudoscience of macronutrient ratios and such. But there is never any magic to be had when you look at these books critically: it all comes down to making the person eat less, exercise more, or both. It’s just hidden in complex schemes and pseudo-physiology.
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In short: you can’t beat thermodynamics anymore than anything else in the universe. You. Are. Not. Different.
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People all want desparately to believe that the fundamental law of weight loss (or weight gain) really isn’t as simple as calories in vs. calories out. I assure you, I wish it weren’t really the case. I really do. I’m mentioning that so you don’t just think I’m peeing on your parade.
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As a buddy of mine once asked: “Why don’t you ever see a fat person come out of a concentration camp?” But that’s essentially what a fat person claiming they can’t lose weight on 500 calories per day is suggesting can happen. Because in the face of low enough calories and sufficient activity, weight has to be lost. Or the person dies. Nothing else can happen. Yet folks seem intent on believing that somehow the basic laws of the universe apply to everyone but them.
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This is why, although it’s a huge pain in the ass (at least initially), meticulously tracking food intake for a few days (and by this I mean getting a food scale and measuring cups/spoons) can be exceedingly informative (or depressing depending on how you look at it). When people who swear up and down that they “Just don’t eat that much” sit down and track it, they invariably find that they are eating two to three times as much as they though. Without fail.
Anyhow, and putting it rather bluntly: if there were truly an exception to this simple thermodynamic rule, the government would need to study it because that person would be a living breathing fusion reactor, able to make calories out of thin air ; or able to burn them off to an unlimited degree.
They could use that person’s body to develop free energy machines to provide unlimited energy for the world if one of these people truly existed. They don’t, end of story. But there is a rather big ‘however’ to all of this…keep reading.
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The research, however, is very clear: not everybody has it as easy as some folks do. Some people’s bodies are, in fact, demonstrably more resistant to weight loss (or gain) than others. Not that they can’t lose (or gain) weight but it comes off or on more slowly. More accurately, their bodies fight back harder.
Researchers call these folks Diet Resistant and the reasons behind this resistance is just starting to be determined.
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So there is no doubt that there are individual differences and efficiencies between people, that probably explains why you can find one person who reports near-magical results with nearly every diet out there: they happened to hit the one that just ‘fit’ their individual metabolism and chemistry. It would be silly to ignore all of that and I do hate being silly.
But that doesn’t change the fundamental rules of thermodynamics which apply to everybody and everything.
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So when a 300 pound individual, who probably has a maintenance intake of 4000+ calories, says that they gained weight on 1400 calories I have to be very leery of how true that is. Either they are that 1 in 100,000 person with a metabolic rate below 1400 at that bodyweight (who has never been found to exist in any study on the topic over a span of about 5+ decades), or they aren’t being accurate in how much food they are eating or how many calories they are burning each day. You can probably guess which one I think it is.
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Summing up:
You.
Are.
Not.
Different.
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Now I'd like to comment on one part of this from personal experience, and that's that last part:
Quote:
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So when a 300 pound individual, who probably has a maintenance intake of 4000+ calories, says that they gained weight on 1400 calories I have to be very leery of how true that is.
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I am not claiming to have gained weight on minimal calories. I am however claiming to have NOT LOST IT on minimal calories, and to have gained every possible stored-as-fat-calorie possible during any time when I was eating plenty -- or simply eating more than my nearly-turned-off metabolism seemed to 'require'.
There have been times, one in particular when I was getting frustrated about my previously-rapid weight loss slowing or ceasing so paying special attention, when I have used USDA and labels, a gram scale, measuring everything to the second decimal, obsessively. In one month in particular, and I weighed around ~400 pounds then, I ate 1200 calories or less EVERY day that month except one day when I ate about 2000. Now mind you this was not a brag, I have notoriously had a hard time eating enough just personally let alone on lowcarb's ketogenic appetite reduction and protein+fat intake, I was screwing up, it's just all I had time and energy to deal with at that point in time. I often go off lowcarb, and onto the 'see-food' diet as I call it -- I am not ashamed to talk about that plainly. When I'm not tracking let alone not on plan at all, all bets are off, especially since I'm usually eating "trigger foods" in a big way. But when I am ON plan -- and I am TRACKING my food *in detail* with an obsessive detail only a Virgo times 4 can muster no less -- that's different. I totally bet everyone skinny OR fat major mis-guesses their intake numbers. I do not have the slightest sympathy for anybody who wants to imply that I am either a fraud or a moron because I cannot put a piece of simple food (eg MEAT or CHEESE) on a scale and write it down accurately.
At the end of that month, I was one (1) uno singular pound lighter. The next day that poind returned. (Just fooling me apparently!) This was a ketogenic diet, lowcarb. Which, I might add, I had lost a LOT of weight on in the months prior. So I was not claiming the diet didn't work, or didn't work for my body, or wasn't good. I love lowcarb, I love meat, and I lost a bunch of weight on it. If I were eating crapfood I wouldn't be "on plan" let alone tracking things in detail. If I were eating lowcarb but more calories I would be tracking them. My goal is usually 2000-2400 -- surely if I were going to lie about it I would meat my OWN stated goals and hide the rest, vs. track something in detail to 982 calories (yes. Barely eating then. Nothing but meat mostly.) and then make some ridiculous claim like 'I weigh 400# and ate 1200 calories or less for a month and didn't lose weight', a claim only likely to make most people disbelieve me, lowcarbers suspect I was dissing their plan, and everyone else to think I must be hiding 3 boxes of toffee and ice cream bon-bons in my purse and somehow "not mentioning them" by accident or design.
Now, because I am not profoundly incompetent--and in fact, in any other area of my life where people know me, they would not question me on much let alone something so ridiculously easy--and frankly, I wasn't anywhere near the kitchen or food most the time and when I was, I was weighing everything exactingly--I do not believe for a moment that the month of time was anything from fraud to "honest mistake".
If, as Lyle implies, my "maintenance intake" *at 100# less than I weighed* would have been 4000+ calories (!! imagine his estimate for 400#!...), do you have ANY IDEA how totally IMPOSSIBLE it is that this could be an "accident" or "oversight" or "misunderstanding" in my daily tracking? I am not running all over town and in and out of restaurants during this (or most) eras, even. I work from home. I have only lowcarb in the house, mostly just meat and a few cans and jars of stuff. I seldom even GO in the kitchen, if something is not bugging me to do so (like my 13 year old), and for most of two decades was quite happy to eat usually once, at night.
Now understand that I think that month was a special circumstance. I had lost a lot of weight not long before. I think it's possible that my body was 'reacting' to the weight loss and desperately trying for homeostasis. I think right now if I ate 1200 calories a day for a month out of almost nothing but meat I would probably lose 10-15 pounds. (You may ask, "Why don't you?" Well I was until eating VLC made me feel like crap instead of good all the sudden, and upping carbs only resulted in everything I tried triggering me offplan entirely. But currently I am back to eating VLC (mostly. Once a week I will have something like a few corn tortillas that will put my carbs probably up around 40-50 for that day. Mostly I'm <30 and even often <10.) and supplementing like CRAZY, for the last 2.5 weeks. (Yes. I am losing weight.) So I am not saying that I currently make this claim or that this is normal.
What I'm saying is that IT HAPPENED. For a measured period of time, someone that big, ate that little, and most certainly did NOT lose weight. According to Lyle's numbers, given my weight and his estimate of intake for 'maintenance', I should have been losing about a pound a day. I don't know the answer to why I didn't, ok, and I think Lyle is really smart and well studied and sincere and I respect him and grant him infinitely more knowledge and expertise than I have on anything. I'm just saying that this was not a lie, or an error or oversight, but IT HAPPENED. There is a saying that you only need ONE white crow to prove white crows exist. Well, this is my one white crow. As long as people are vehemently insisting not only that such things would be impossible and make me moronic/dishonest, I simply have a hard time taking them seriously anymore because I know, from measurable, carefully-measured, carefully recorded experience, that "dismissiveness" is wrong. It might be right for them, or even for me before or now or later, but it was not right for me at that point in time. And until I have that explained to my satisfaction, I'm going to remain a believer that metabolism DOES vary widely enough -- not just a little (so people lose it "more slowly" in his model) but a LOT -- that the "calories hypothesis", while on the surface adequate, is based on math not chemistry, and hence unsuitable to apply to the human body.
Linear Mode
