Jun 8, 2023·edited Jun 8, 2023Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
What happens if you agree and amplify? I haven't tried arguing with anyone about this so I don't know what happens next. If you say "yes of course calories in has to be lower than calories out, that's why satiety is so important for me on my whipping cream diet: so I don't eat more, because satiated. Now, as I was saying, the way to increase bioavailability of stored fat is [...]", how do they reply?
Sometimes I go that route. It really depends on the person, too. Some people are interested and actually engage, others just want to smash you with their CICO. If they seem bad faith, I just go bad faith back right at them :) If they seem genuine, I'll try a more explanatory route like you describe.
House-value analogy seems useful for capturing the indirectness, slowness, and uncertainty of the relationships here. But it feels like all the signs are reversed, sort of. It would be good if the end goal in the analogy were something that we want *less* of, like student-loan debt. Every lifestyle adjustment you make can harmfully widen your debt (e.g., leaving a window open in winter causes you to waste $ in heating costs) or helpfully narrow it (e.g., cancelling a useless subscription). Per our exchange on an earlier post about CGMs and whether glucose spikes really matter, this is about whether you can closely watch and manage some intermediate variable—like the temperature of your house relative to the air outside—and confidently predict how it will affect the end metric we really care about.
I think I just made everything more confusing. Carry on.
Being in Montréal I get ( partially ) the analogy. The causality, in this case, is really getting in very convoluted confounding factors, phenotypes, ( co)relations , and wide factors.
To keep it at my level of understanding, I definitely would like less student less debt.
And besides CICO we have the Murphy's famous GIGO ( garbage in and garbage out) RIRO for the imperial subjects ( rubbish in and rubbish out).
And life adjustments widening various gaps ( winter in Québec is brutal) or debts is scary, but tempting to explore. ?!
The fairly recent human intervention study with protein restriction vs caloric restriction (duration 27 days) noticed similar biomarkers improving with both diets. We're interested in the protein restriction here.
In the conclusion of the study the researchers are puzzled by the weight loss in PR group because the metabolic chamber showed no increase in REE, yet they ate more calories. Where does the lost fat go to? (discussion at the end of study https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/13/2670 )
You may remember that I mentioned a few days ago that when I was obesity resistant, I had increased sebum production and what I perceived as sweating, was at least partly grease excreted through the skin on my back and face. I was perpetually oily to the point of noticing how heavy my worn clothes were before laundering them)
Lastly, I ran into this study comparing the inflammatory markers of very low calorie ketogenic diet, low calorie diets and bariatric surgery. Markers include TSLP when you enlarge each figure and observe. Study indicates profound shift in cytokine profile during VLCKD.
The effect was observed in "maximum ketosis" ie it was not sufficient to just restrict calories and heaven knows if it was due to ketones or could it be the protein restriction - we don't know.
But the point is, TSLP had a 50% increase in the maximum ketosis -group. (The same TSLP that induced sebum hyperproduction in other studies)
I'm just throwing this out there, but it might be a fun hypothesis that the missing fat loss that was undetectable in the metabolic chamber, could've ended up in the laundry baskets of the study participants.
Interesting observation was also that SCD1 expression is necessary for fat loss through TSLP induced sebum hyperproduction.
"To determine whether sebum secretion was necessary for TSLP-mediated adipose loss, we used asebia mice, which lack the enzyme stearoyl–coenzyme A (CoA) desaturase-1 (Scd1) and have marked sebaceous gland hypoplasia (33, 34). Compared with WT mice, NC-fed asebia mice lost minimal amounts of WAT upon TSLP-AAV injection (Fig. 4K), indicating that sebum secretion is necessary for TSLP-driven adipose loss."
Yea I've read that the "calorie restriction is good for longevity" is actually entirely explained by low protein/BCAAs. Forget which study that was, but it seemed to be true, at least in mice.
The "vanishing calories" thing is exactly the sort of thing that CICO can't account for, nutrient partitioning and "non-burning fat loss." E.g. you can lose fat through urine as well, you don't have to "burn" it. I'll check out those studies, thanks.
As always, this is a good read and I totally get this whole thing. The last comment I made on your blog, I said I had lost a little bit by eating lots of cheese, butter etc. Well, I was away with pals last weekend and just ate and drank anything. I didn't quite get back onto the low carb yet, and I ate lots of bread, pasta and soup yesterday. I didn't note any calories until I realised that a pot of pesto pasta that I ate said 222 kcals. After I finished I realised that was for 1/4 pot. It wasn't even that big. I have just weighed myself and I lost 1/2 kg! How's that for a surprise.
I have just started with the ZOE study https://joinzoe.com/ and I am intrigued to see the results of that.
I joined a few months ago, but had to wait until now to get my testing kit which arrived yesterday. So, I applied my CGM yesterday and am suprised to see that my blood glucose levels are actually ok. I applied the CGM about 2-3 hours after eating and once the sensor had calibrated (Libre 3) it showed 6.9/7 mmol/L and this morning it is 5.8 mmol/L. I think that's ok considering how much bread and pasta I ate yesterday.
Today is testing day, and I have to eat 3 rather large looking muffins for breakfast, then another 2 4 hours later for lunch.
I also have to get a poo sample to send, and some finger prick bloods as well.
They will test all the biomarkers they have gathered from previous studies and also analyse my microbiome. They personalise the results to inform you about which foods you burn best, and give you food scores based on those results. I think it takes about 3 weeks to get those results in, but meantime I have 2 weeks of CGM to 'experiment' with different foods to see how they affect my blood glucose.
Oh interesting, I hadn't heard of that. 6.9 (~125 in US units) after a carb meal is pretty good. 5.8 in the morning is a tad high, but could be the Dawn effect. Does it go up when you wake up, and then quickly drop down on its own? If so, consider the level it drops to after the "Dawn spike" your real fasting morning glucose. The spike is just from the cortisol that wakes you up, increasing your energy (=glucose) for the day.
Let me know what comes out of the study, I'm always a bit skeptical cause I don't expect they'll recommend I eat 88% calories from fat and eat super low protein ;) But you never know.
Jun 8, 2023·edited Jun 8, 2023Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
Yeah, it dropped a bit then up again but hovered around the 6 ish mark until I ate the muffins. It went up to around 9.2 over about 90 minutes and steadily dropped after that. The 2nd round of muffins for lunch was 4 hours later and I had a biphasic response to those. The spike was slightly higher this time but still dropped fairly well in under 2 hours to below 8.
Interestingly, there is a log of 3.8 this morning at 3.30 while I was alseep!
I also get suuuper low during what I assume is slow-wave sleep. Sometimes the CGM wakes me up because my glucose drops into the low 50s then haha. Often times I assume it beeped, but I sleep right through :) I think 50mg/dL is like 4mmol? So yours is even lower!
Well, it's all new to me as I have never worn one before. It will be super interesting though, to see how I react to different foods and different food combinations. One of the reasons I went on keto before was because of weight gain around the middle and was assuming that I would be insulin resistent!
Jul 6, 2023·edited Jul 6, 2023Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
I have an update from ZOE. I would DM you but not finding how to do it on here (aka r/sillyhaggis).
However, my results were in a couple of days ago.
It seems that I have poor blood glucose response, also poor lipid clearance and my gut microbiome is devoid of all but 2 of their 15 good gut bactera, and not much there at all. I had quite a few of the bad ones.
I was quite upset by this tbh. Other than being too fat these days, at the age of 64, I am on no meds; BP is ok.
All is not lost though, because they score all your food so that if you really want to eat a low scoring food, you combine it with a higher scoring food with the goal of getting to a scare of 50 in the first month, 60 in the secnd and ultimately 75.
As I say I was devastated a couple of days ago thinking that I would only be able to eat vegetables. Not so.
Today, I went to Sainsburys and did my whole shopping using the ZOE app to score what I was buying. I have felt so full today, and have had lots of fibre and chicken, and bread! Who knew that barley could be so tasty!
Everyone is unique in their response to what they eat. Even identical twins react differently to the same food (Tim Spector).
This may help to explain why some people do well on TCD and some (me) don't. It is still a learning curve and early as far as weight loss is concerned. I have lost about 2kg this week, but I typically lose and regain the same weight over time. I also have a lot more fibre to deal with than I have in many years. There is a lot to consider, I woud say.
What happens if you agree and amplify? I haven't tried arguing with anyone about this so I don't know what happens next. If you say "yes of course calories in has to be lower than calories out, that's why satiety is so important for me on my whipping cream diet: so I don't eat more, because satiated. Now, as I was saying, the way to increase bioavailability of stored fat is [...]", how do they reply?
Sometimes I go that route. It really depends on the person, too. Some people are interested and actually engage, others just want to smash you with their CICO. If they seem bad faith, I just go bad faith back right at them :) If they seem genuine, I'll try a more explanatory route like you describe.
House-value analogy seems useful for capturing the indirectness, slowness, and uncertainty of the relationships here. But it feels like all the signs are reversed, sort of. It would be good if the end goal in the analogy were something that we want *less* of, like student-loan debt. Every lifestyle adjustment you make can harmfully widen your debt (e.g., leaving a window open in winter causes you to waste $ in heating costs) or helpfully narrow it (e.g., cancelling a useless subscription). Per our exchange on an earlier post about CGMs and whether glucose spikes really matter, this is about whether you can closely watch and manage some intermediate variable—like the temperature of your house relative to the air outside—and confidently predict how it will affect the end metric we really care about.
I think I just made everything more confusing. Carry on.
Being in Montréal I get ( partially ) the analogy. The causality, in this case, is really getting in very convoluted confounding factors, phenotypes, ( co)relations , and wide factors.
To keep it at my level of understanding, I definitely would like less student less debt.
And besides CICO we have the Murphy's famous GIGO ( garbage in and garbage out) RIRO for the imperial subjects ( rubbish in and rubbish out).
And life adjustments widening various gaps ( winter in Québec is brutal) or debts is scary, but tempting to explore. ?!
Carrying on otherwise.
wide INTERVAL factors ( add ADHD to limitations of comments)
I have something of possible interest;
The fairly recent human intervention study with protein restriction vs caloric restriction (duration 27 days) noticed similar biomarkers improving with both diets. We're interested in the protein restriction here.
In the conclusion of the study the researchers are puzzled by the weight loss in PR group because the metabolic chamber showed no increase in REE, yet they ate more calories. Where does the lost fat go to? (discussion at the end of study https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/13/2670 )
You may remember that I mentioned a few days ago that when I was obesity resistant, I had increased sebum production and what I perceived as sweating, was at least partly grease excreted through the skin on my back and face. I was perpetually oily to the point of noticing how heavy my worn clothes were before laundering them)
Now, hypersecretion of sebum and subsequent weight loss can be induced by inflammatory/proinflammatory cytokines, namely TSLP (thymic stromal lymphopoietin). https://jrnlclub.org/research-films/tslp-adipose-sebum
Lastly, I ran into this study comparing the inflammatory markers of very low calorie ketogenic diet, low calorie diets and bariatric surgery. Markers include TSLP when you enlarge each figure and observe. Study indicates profound shift in cytokine profile during VLCKD.
The effect was observed in "maximum ketosis" ie it was not sufficient to just restrict calories and heaven knows if it was due to ketones or could it be the protein restriction - we don't know.
But the point is, TSLP had a 50% increase in the maximum ketosis -group. (The same TSLP that induced sebum hyperproduction in other studies)
https://www.clinicalnutritionjournal.com/article/S0261-5614(22)00157-1/fulltext
I'm just throwing this out there, but it might be a fun hypothesis that the missing fat loss that was undetectable in the metabolic chamber, could've ended up in the laundry baskets of the study participants.
Interesting observation was also that SCD1 expression is necessary for fat loss through TSLP induced sebum hyperproduction.
"To determine whether sebum secretion was necessary for TSLP-mediated adipose loss, we used asebia mice, which lack the enzyme stearoyl–coenzyme A (CoA) desaturase-1 (Scd1) and have marked sebaceous gland hypoplasia (33, 34). Compared with WT mice, NC-fed asebia mice lost minimal amounts of WAT upon TSLP-AAV injection (Fig. 4K), indicating that sebum secretion is necessary for TSLP-driven adipose loss."
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abd2893
The table showing the cytokine profile trajectory with each intervention is here
https://www.clinicalnutritionjournal.com/action/showFullTableHTML?isHtml=true&tableId=tbl3&pii=S0261-5614%2822%2900157-1
Yea I've read that the "calorie restriction is good for longevity" is actually entirely explained by low protein/BCAAs. Forget which study that was, but it seemed to be true, at least in mice.
The "vanishing calories" thing is exactly the sort of thing that CICO can't account for, nutrient partitioning and "non-burning fat loss." E.g. you can lose fat through urine as well, you don't have to "burn" it. I'll check out those studies, thanks.
As always, this is a good read and I totally get this whole thing. The last comment I made on your blog, I said I had lost a little bit by eating lots of cheese, butter etc. Well, I was away with pals last weekend and just ate and drank anything. I didn't quite get back onto the low carb yet, and I ate lots of bread, pasta and soup yesterday. I didn't note any calories until I realised that a pot of pesto pasta that I ate said 222 kcals. After I finished I realised that was for 1/4 pot. It wasn't even that big. I have just weighed myself and I lost 1/2 kg! How's that for a surprise.
I have just started with the ZOE study https://joinzoe.com/ and I am intrigued to see the results of that.
I joined a few months ago, but had to wait until now to get my testing kit which arrived yesterday. So, I applied my CGM yesterday and am suprised to see that my blood glucose levels are actually ok. I applied the CGM about 2-3 hours after eating and once the sensor had calibrated (Libre 3) it showed 6.9/7 mmol/L and this morning it is 5.8 mmol/L. I think that's ok considering how much bread and pasta I ate yesterday.
Today is testing day, and I have to eat 3 rather large looking muffins for breakfast, then another 2 4 hours later for lunch.
I also have to get a poo sample to send, and some finger prick bloods as well.
They will test all the biomarkers they have gathered from previous studies and also analyse my microbiome. They personalise the results to inform you about which foods you burn best, and give you food scores based on those results. I think it takes about 3 weeks to get those results in, but meantime I have 2 weeks of CGM to 'experiment' with different foods to see how they affect my blood glucose.
Exciting :)
Oh interesting, I hadn't heard of that. 6.9 (~125 in US units) after a carb meal is pretty good. 5.8 in the morning is a tad high, but could be the Dawn effect. Does it go up when you wake up, and then quickly drop down on its own? If so, consider the level it drops to after the "Dawn spike" your real fasting morning glucose. The spike is just from the cortisol that wakes you up, increasing your energy (=glucose) for the day.
Let me know what comes out of the study, I'm always a bit skeptical cause I don't expect they'll recommend I eat 88% calories from fat and eat super low protein ;) But you never know.
Yeah, it dropped a bit then up again but hovered around the 6 ish mark until I ate the muffins. It went up to around 9.2 over about 90 minutes and steadily dropped after that. The 2nd round of muffins for lunch was 4 hours later and I had a biphasic response to those. The spike was slightly higher this time but still dropped fairly well in under 2 hours to below 8.
Interestingly, there is a log of 3.8 this morning at 3.30 while I was alseep!
I also get suuuper low during what I assume is slow-wave sleep. Sometimes the CGM wakes me up because my glucose drops into the low 50s then haha. Often times I assume it beeped, but I sleep right through :) I think 50mg/dL is like 4mmol? So yours is even lower!
Well, it's all new to me as I have never worn one before. It will be super interesting though, to see how I react to different foods and different food combinations. One of the reasons I went on keto before was because of weight gain around the middle and was assuming that I would be insulin resistent!
I will update on any interesting developments!
I have an update from ZOE. I would DM you but not finding how to do it on here (aka r/sillyhaggis).
However, my results were in a couple of days ago.
It seems that I have poor blood glucose response, also poor lipid clearance and my gut microbiome is devoid of all but 2 of their 15 good gut bactera, and not much there at all. I had quite a few of the bad ones.
I was quite upset by this tbh. Other than being too fat these days, at the age of 64, I am on no meds; BP is ok.
All is not lost though, because they score all your food so that if you really want to eat a low scoring food, you combine it with a higher scoring food with the goal of getting to a scare of 50 in the first month, 60 in the secnd and ultimately 75.
As I say I was devastated a couple of days ago thinking that I would only be able to eat vegetables. Not so.
Today, I went to Sainsburys and did my whole shopping using the ZOE app to score what I was buying. I have felt so full today, and have had lots of fibre and chicken, and bread! Who knew that barley could be so tasty!
Everyone is unique in their response to what they eat. Even identical twins react differently to the same food (Tim Spector).
This may help to explain why some people do well on TCD and some (me) don't. It is still a learning curve and early as far as weight loss is concerned. I have lost about 2kg this week, but I typically lose and regain the same weight over time. I also have a lot more fibre to deal with than I have in many years. There is a lot to consider, I woud say.
Edit: spelling
Wow, interesting findings. Good that you tested, I guess! Keep me updated on your progress with their app and program.
You can email me at hello@exfatloss.com instead of DM, I don't think they have DM on here. Or DM me on reddit, u/exfatloss.
Great, thanks! I will update you when I have some more to share :)
OMG my typing leaves a lot to be desired! Apologies lol