Except the mystery of why fat cells that ought to be pouring out at high pressure aren't. Reducing insulin reduces one major problem with 'keeping them in more, and more often'. But even that can't seem to solve or explain why more of them, and faster (if at all), don't depart when it is clearly appropriate for them to do so. At that point it is not homeostasis if insulin has reduced and intake is not gigantic.



Suddenly I just had this memory of that Orwellian-like short story of this young man they made wear chains, his mother a headache brain-clearing thing, etc. to "make all people more equal" -- wish I could remember the name of that. All the craziness was to 'make things equal'. Maybe the craziness of hundreds of pounds of fat cells really IS just about homeostasis -- to make things equal. But what IS it on the other side of the equation that needs equalized? If it were merely high insulin in question, then eating even moderate carb (and not eating 4000+ calories a day) should result in someone my size losing ridiculous amounts of weight ridiculously fast.

Got it. Thx.

Well, the pressure of incoming fatty acids might be so huge or the flow going out so low, that there is no end in sight. You could get to 600 pounds and still have not reached it.

Also, if too many fat cells reaches their maximum size, then you will create some more. And since the pressure is just too strong, there is no end in sight.

So in this case, I guess that the person, will want to do something about it at some point. And will take actions that might reduce some of the issues, thus stopping this infernal loop.

Patrick

I think his balloon analogy didn't mean that fat stores are under literally under pressure. It's more like the fat stores are like those round doors in the department stores in the movies of the 30s. How much fat is coming in, how much is going out, how full is the inside, how full is the outside.

Did you read that part of GCBC yet?

If a person is not fat adapted I think its like there aren't as many doors (not as many enzymes) and not much demand outside (not as much tissue utilization of fat, easily running on dietary fat). So even if insulin is low, the flow of fat out of fat stores can be slow at first. Then the better I get at using fat everywhere, and the better I get at setting up conditions to release, the more the fat stores empty out.

Patrick I don't really understand your post above. I suspect you're trying not to say something you're trying to say, perhaps for diplomacy reasons, but it just didn't really make sense to me in the end (sorry). Maybe I'm fundamentally misunderstanding the original point of how all of this is supposed to work.

Oh. Maybe Seejay's sorta explains it.

Like Pennington, I think it is.

The way I understand it....

The body wants homeostasis in its ability to store fat and then get it out.
This is because I need to manage energy.

Someone used the analogy of a debit card -
I need be able to put 100 in, and be able to get 100 out.
If storage is simple and direct, I'd need storage for 100=
100 in and 100 out.

But what if storage is such that I can only take out 10% at a time.
Now I need storage of 1000, so I could still take out 100 at a time.
What if withdrawal rate drops down to 2%. Now I need storage of 5000.

Answering your question about insulin, it is not just the insulin.
There are all kinds of factors that say how high your storage has to be,
and how fast you can release X energy.
I think the whole HPA axis can stop the flow (fight flight freeze feed).
There is the thyroid complexities. All the stuff you have been working on.
It's related to healthy LBM too, look what advantage the guys have when they have so much more of it.

LOL. Sorry about that. I was trying not to get into the actual possible causes. Seejay, I really do believe Pennington meant it for real. In the sense that there will be more surface on the cell. The area is larger, so more molecules can get out but the incoming pressure is the same. That said, this was more than 50 years ago. But I'm not saying that is exactly how it actually works. Just that the general hypothesis is still sound and useful.

I will dive into the possible causes. I just don't have any time left right now.

Patrick

This is a digression, I'll warn ahead of time.. please take it just as free-verse ruminations.



While I may be grossly misunderstanding this, the simplest way that I can put what I think I understand is that:

Some of us have a $%^&* fat-outflow problem. The rate of outflow should get higher as more fat comes in, allowing us to produce better energy. But, fundamentally, we have crappy fat-outflow mechanisms in the first place.

It really gets into the chemistry and physics of how cells works, and things like osmolarity, ion exchange, the barely scrutable scientific (or other) magic of life and energy.

The issue of having a crappy fat-outflow mechanism all leads into:
- Why is that?
- What triggered it in the first place?
- How the heck do you change it?

The bag of likely and unlikely suspects for why it happens could include anything from an inborn trait to switching on some gene to a nutrient deficiency to xenohormone pollutants to modern-food allergies (to unfavorable modern diet nutrient percentages) to autoimmune conditions that arise for any number of reasons or past exposures. I wouldn't rule out (at this point) even airborne pollutant or allergen triggers or much of anything else.

It's been so fundamentally thought of that how fat people are must have to do with what they eat vs. how many calories they expend exercising that one thing not looked at too closely (except in just a few research circles) is metabolic efficiency and effectiveness in terms of breathing, and the physics of the fuel-burning process. (In an engine, you fix fuel with air for combustion and the engine's efficiency and output is all tied to how well that process works.)



You guys must be sick of hearing it by now but I'm gonna reiterate one more time, to that HPA-axis point you're making, I couldn't agree more... the last times I had notable effortless weight loss, completely unlike usual, of 10-15 lbs. in a short time were:

-in the days and weeks right after having had mega-epinephrine doses at the dentist and adrenally crashing (basically, in bed, wiped out) for the next few days.
-after traveling across several time zones, wreaking havoc with circadian rhythm and energy.
-years ago, for awhile, while trying phentermine (alone) ... behaved a lot like epinephrine on me.

Hmmn. Well I suppose that being unreasonable and unrealistic, I really only have one question, and I am actually pretty happy to let the scientists and metaphysicists work out the rest:

How do you fix it, even a little at a time?

Of course that's what led me to low carb. Which so far has been kind of like wanting a car for your 24th birthday, and getting one for your 40th birthday, slightly too late for approximately everything you wanted to do of course, but still, it's totally exciting until you're about two cities away on your cross-country trip and this digital voice pipes up with, "Your door is a-jar. You will only be able to use the gear Neutral from this point forward." Except the door is closed. So now you're stuck in Lodi (again LOL).

The 1 trillion dollars question.

Unfortunately, it's a personal quest. You have to find what caused your body to become deregulated in the first place. And part of it could be genetics too. It could be a specific food, because of intolerance.

But if I believe the most up to date information about how our nutrients is metabolized, here would be the causes for 80% of the people with weight problems.

(copied from another post)

- Fructose is an hepatic toxin (ref, ref, ref, ref). Only your liver can metabolize fructose and what it does there is very similar to what ethanol does (not good, if chronic). Over consumption of fructose directly causes insulin resistance. By the way, most fruits are not that high in fructose and are also packaged with the antidote. But sucrose (table sugar) is 50% fructose, so anything with added sugar is out. This video is really great on the subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

- (PUFA) Polyunsaturated vegetable oils (read margarine and most frying oils) are a great contributors to chronic subclinical inflammation (ref). Chronic inflammation means chronic production of cortisone by your body to lessen the inflammation. And we know that cortisone promotes fat gain.

Patrick

This is a little O.T. but to a question of why the body may not want to release fat stores, or why when it does soon the fat problem returns... this was an interesting post (search the thread for the word "mycotoxin" to reach the post...
http://forum.lowcarber.org/archive/...p/t-280055.html

... in that thread someone noticed that they'd get rashes when they lost weight at a fast rate but not a slow one; someone else postulated that based on their own experience, it *might've* been because mycotoxins or other metabolically troubling pollutants are sequestered by the body in the fat cells, and when one loses weight they're released back into the system agaqin.

This is not a new theory, but just ran across that good illustrative reference.

Hmmmn. Yeah I've read a few things about how allegedly the body takes toxins and stores them in fat cells to 'protect' you from them (note: I was reading about bone (fascinating!) last night and even IT does that! -- to a lesser degree of course) and that's why we call it induction "flu" and not just induction "got-no-energy," because toxins are dumping into the blood stream as fat is used, and it's probably FIFO and GIGO both, so the worst stuff when you FIRST go lowcarb dumps first (a theory).

Sometimes when I've seen people losing a lot of weight fast they have said that they're drinking crazy amounts of water and drinking nothing else. I wonder if maybe the body on some level has to 'feel safe' that it can dispose of toxins and only when a consistent rapid-venting flow is going on for a little bit does it think that's in place. Possibly crediting the body with vastly more, or vastly less, intelligence than it has got, here -- I suspect less, but it starts kinda delving into metaphysics at some point down that road.

That's interesting about the rapid-venting flow (AKA burn baby burn). That also fits with my experience... it's so frustrating because at times... like after that infernal dental appt. ... my body clearly knows how to lose weight and does rapidly and I have tons of good energy. And then... the loss just stops and the old energy issues reappear.

I know there are tons of theories bouncing around, but I think these forums have touched on more possible useful ones than anyplace I've seen, so would encourage even the research-weary-by-this-point to keep inquiring.

Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut.

That's it! Thank you!!