Reading his ebook now.
I think one of the pitfalls of his stuff is that he is on one hand intelligent enough to seem older than he is, while being young and smart-ass'd enough to seem younger, which has an odd effect in some respects (what is genuinely funny from a smart aleck young man sounds asinine or ridiculous from someone older, so you actually have to read it with his 'young enthusiasm' held in your attention up-front).
His life would be so much easier if he would quit publicly insulting leading well qualified medical doctors people love (particularly Low-Carb gurus) -- but probably he just wants to make sure that even if his metabolism works great, he will still have some social challenge in his life. ;-)
One sentence struck me as food for thought:
Quote:
The only way to improve health and make weight
management effortless is to understand the human metabolism as a
whole and follow the steps to optimize it. Creating a calorie deficit by
any means – appetite suppression, exercise, drugs, thyroid hormone
replacement, thermogenics (diet pills), or bariatric surgery, is not one
of the steps. It is metabolic suicide.
[p. 46]
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This got me thinking.
Let's say a person (not to name any names just because that person sounds amazingly like ME of course) gets to a certain level of fat storage.
On another thread in the research/media forum I think it is, some of us were recently talking about how it's a fast slope from 'getting fatter' to suddenly getting REALLY fatter as if there's some critical mass point of system failure or whatever. (We were having this conversation in part with Carne, and I really thought we were winning that debate, until she had to go post this stunningly gorgeous avatar, and we lost the entire event by then drooling- or envious- proxy. Fine then, dammit. Be that way.)
* Let us say that "under-calorie-ing" is a problem for sheer energy reasons if there's more body to energize.
* And let's say that under-nutrient-ing is a problem for nutrient reasons that are greater if there's more body to feed.
But the problem is that by then not only is the body storing nearly everything down to carrot stick calories in fat cells -- leaving the person with approximately enough energy to stagger in to pee in the morning and not a helluva lot else, since so much of their food is redirected into fat instead of energy (and since they now weigh twice as much which is Extra Hard, Ask Me How I Know) -- but in order to eat ENOUGH calories (let alone nutrients in those calories) to actually feed that body, it's
actually not possible. Why?
Because once someone is 200# overweight (or even less), if you were to eat sufficient calories (or 'close') to maintain that weight, the amount you'd have to ingest would be so large that there's simply no way that even a marathoner could burn all that off fast enough. Even if you were eating those calories/nutrients in nothing but fish and vegetables and washing it down with herbal tea, no sugar or carbs or anything, having enough nutrients and everything,
even if metabolism worked perfectly, still nearly all of that would have to store as fat simply because it would be WAY too much intake at once.
Of course since the metabolism is as active as a tree sloth by that point, it probably stores a great deal more of that than it would otherwise.
But, it is not altogether reasonable to eat that many calories most of the time anyway. So even if a person is 'overeating' by ordinary (200# less bodyweight) standards, they are still *chronically undereating* by their body standards, talking about calories (energy) here.
But it's not just undereating calories, because the natural inclination when one lacks energy in a big way is to aim for "energy food" -- carbs/sugars are pure energy. Perhaps there are people who, when they have no energy, crave carrots and chicken, but I'm here to tell you I crave pasta/breads, chocolate/sweets, and big sweet fizzy caffeinated drinks. In fact I can tell I am low on oxygen (from sleep apnea -- I can't wear the damn machine -- it feels like scuba gear and sounds like Darth Vader, I can't sleep!) because I specifically start *craving intense sugar* -- literally if I find myself thinking about candy like starburst and skittles I know it's time to stop right then and do some yoga deep breathing exercises, it is THAT predictable.
What that means is that the vitamins, minerals, AMINO ACIDS especially, etc. that the body now needs *even more of* due to its size, one is actually getting *far less of* due to the size-driving-gnoshing-driving-carbs aiming people for foods that are not nutritionally useful. So it's not merely that the need outstripped the supply, it's that the supply naturally reduced at the same time.
Worse, most of the food then has significant ANTI-nutrients of various kinds that attack liver, kidney, thyroid, digestion, etc. (e.g. fructose, grain and dairy proteins), which only create a whole 'nuther circle/cycle in the situation.
So most of the time someone super fat is undereating calories-for-body, undereating nutrients-for-body, overeating poison-for-everything, and yet overeating calories-for-usage on top of that. Constantly getting worse even if they are "not overeating" even compared to the person who weighs half what they do sitting next to them.
And then once in awhile, following the body-is-starving-for-nutrients cycle, the body completely freaks out and wants to go eat, say, most of a pizza and ben&jerry's, because on some level the body thinks if you eat ENOUGH, it may give you at least a couple milligrams more of a couple nutrients the body's totally deprived of. I imagine in some evolutionary sense that was midnight-noshing on every grub, root, nut, berry, insect, and small animal foolish enough to cross someone's path. Anyway that amounts to some kind of binge or at least "serious eating-fest" which, being insanely high in calories, also stores at the speed of light.
So whether a person is eating enough for their body and storing it instantly because their body can't possibly burn that off (even with normal metabolism let alone theirs); or whether they are over-eating in compensation for the body's sense of starvation, and storing it instantly for the same reason times ten; or whether the person is UNDEReating for their actual size because they are 'matching food' with the thin people around them to intentionally 'not overeat'; no matter WHAT they do, it is going to store food as fat, not give it as energy, and worsen the metabolic problem in about six different ways.
That's a metabolic blind alley is what this leads me to think.
That once someone reaches *a certain point* of obesity, there is not a way to lose more than a certain % or poundage of it without (intentionally) doing your metabolism *even more harm*.
Because you can't just eat enough calories and nutrients to repair your metabolism when your size is large enough that doing so would require so much food you'd die of 800# obesity-induced enlarged heart failure before your metabolism was cured and you'd create even much worse problems as a result of that eating that might not be curable or stoppable -- because fat cells have their own effect on the body, not just as inert stored things, and the greater the quantity, the greater the problems.
You can use carbohydrate restriction. Or caloric restriction. You can lose some weight. But if the feeding-theory is correct, then while this does take weight off you (yay), it also further-taxes thyroid, adrenals, digestion, overall metabolic rate, and more.
You know, maybe this is why it is so difficult for most 'supersized' people (150++# overweight) to ever get anywhere near a normal weight, especially women. They can 'diet' down 100-180# depending on the person and timeframe, but if that isn't enough to make them close-to-normal, getting beyond that's another story -- because at that point, on top of EVERYTHING ELSE, the body has then lost so much body weight that it's slamming the brakes on further loss even MORE as a survival instinct.
This is a depressing thought, but I'm trying to just be objective about it and not base theory or consideration on what I emotionally would like to be the case (since "magic pills" and "fairies" failed to manifest to solve it long ago ;-)).
It does make me think though that Matt's theory, even if TOTALLY VALID, may not be particularly practical beyond a certain "range" of extra body weight. What might be the answer for someone 170# might be doom for someone 400# simply because "scaling up" when it comes to calories and insulin in particular doesn't necessarily work.
My eating two big steaks instead of one for dinner, to up my aminos and calories so I'm not as deficient, is not likely to do much besides giving me more calories and protein/aminos than my body can even use at that time and it might well either store the rest as fat or in the case of aminos just waste them (burn them off). If I only ate meat, according to Matt that would have its own problems, but everything that isn't meat/eggs would only make the root problem much worse for insulin reasons, and insulin resistance is already a huge part of the problem. And while the theory that one just needs to "eat-till-nutritionally-satiated" is a good theory I think I agree with, people over a given size or with an advanced degree of IR, could very well end up diabetic, trashing their pancreas for LIFE and be on to losing limbs, by the time their metabolism even began to 'heal' enough to matter at which point it can't heal at all because you BROKE the pancreas altogether. You see the problem here.
I'm looking for a logical 'solution' for someone in that situation (say, 250# overweight, having lost 100-150# already). I just don't see one.
I'm suddenly reminded of that scene in THE ABYSS where Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio looks at Ed Harris, who is waiting for her brilliant mind to figure out how to get both of them through freezing water to safety with only one wetsuit as the water raises around them, and she says, "I drown." LOL! That was her brilliant plan. That she had to totally drown and he had to bring her back once he got inside, IF he could.
Maybe that's not-quite-I-hope what it amounts to for metabolism. Maybe even if lowcarbing or lowcaloring or both DO essentially further-wreck your thyroid, adrenals, digestion, and your overall metabolism, maybe using one of those methods to try and lose enough body weight -- even lean body weight -- to get down to a bodyweight that will ALLOW a person to "eat nutritionally complete for their size" to rehydrate-cellular-nutrition -- is what is necessary.
Just thinking on paper.
As a last note it brings me back to where I was a couple months ago when I started collecting supplements though. That I think a sort of mass supplementation for 3 months may be helpful. I can't possibly eat enough food, especially the nutrient value in today's foods, to deal with that issue but maybe supplementing *everything*, while eating a lot of animal protein and coconut oil, will help.
PJ