Reversing obesity != getting shredded

Don't put race tires on your car if the cylinders aren't all firing

AI art rules

When I tell people that I don’t think “just eat less and move more” is a great strategy for reversing obesity, I often get a reply that goes something like this: “But it works for bodybuilders!”

I’d suggest that bodybuilders are solving an entirely different problem when compared to obese people, although both are “fat loss.”

Bodybuilding diets are starvation diets

Bodybuilders starve themselves for a period of time, inducing severe hormonal and mental dysfunction, to get in shape for a contest or photo shoot.

The not-so-secret secret of bodybuilding and bikini contests is that getting to these crazy body fat levels takes a heavy toll. Even amateur-level bodybuilders, who will never be on the world stage, report symptoms that I’d call pretty crazy:

• Extreme irritability

• Inability to sleep (well)

• For women, loss of period (!)

• Inability to concentrate

• Constant hunger

• Anxiety

• Testosterone (and other hormones) crashing by 50% or more

• Thyroid function crashing

• Metabolic rate crashing as the body saves as much energy as possible

• Dysfunctional libido

These risks and downsides are well-known by bodybuilders, and expected. If you read bodybuilding literature, you will often encounter psychological or other tricks to force yourself to stick to the (starvation) diet and make it through the suffering until you hit The Day, when you can finally eat normally again.

Strategies include eating tons of calorie-free volume (e.g. fiber, sugar-free jello, drinking water) and distracting yourself.

Bodybuilders know this will happen, and they accept these downsides temporarily (a few weeks to several months) to get into contest/photo shape.

Starving yourself into a shredded state for one day of contest/photo shoot is like prepping a race car, taking out everything that isn’t nailed down, and tuning the engine and other parts to maximum performance, knowing they’ll only last a single race (or season).

This is absolutely NOT a good strategy to reverse obesity.

Reversing obesity is like fixing a broken Camry

I’m not against bodybuilders doing this. I’m sure their strategies work - for them.

All I’m saying is that most obese people aren’t prepping for a photo shoot, they’re trying to be healthy. They’d likely be fine walking around at 20% body fat (for men) or 30% (for women) in a normal BMI range.

That might mean they still have some love handles, a slightly round face, and their veins don’t have veins popping out of them.

It’s ok. Let’s get everybody to not be obese. Once there, they can decide if they want to get shredded on top of it.

Instead of a race car prep, I think of obesity more like fixing a broken Toyota Camry. It’s an old design that’s proven to be very reliably, so why is it suddenly giving you trouble on the highway? Maybe a cylinder is not firing?

You’re not trying to squeeze out the last bit of performance. You just want it to work again.

Clearly, the human body has feedback mechanisms to control body fat levels. And until about 100 years ago, those seem to have worked perfectly fine in 99% of all people.

Yet here we are with 74% of Americans overweight, and 43% obese.

Clearly, something’s broken in the regulatory systems. We’re trying to figure out why.

If you have a broken Camry and you hire a Formula 1 race mechanic to fix it, he might not have the correct set of strategies and tools for the job.

Putting slicks on the Camry, stiffening the suspension, increase power output, and adding a lightweight flywheel isn’t going to fix that broken cylinder.

Using the wrong strategy can be detrimental

And unlike in the Camry/race car metaphor, using the race car strategy to try and reverse your obesity might actually be much more detrimental.

If you’ve ever been obese, or if you know people who are, it’s quite clear from observation that you can get the bodybuilder “starvation symptoms” while carrying around hundreds of pounds of body fat.

A naive paradigm would suggest this is impossible: the “bucket of calories” theory says you’ve got hundreds of thousands of calories on you, so you couldn’t possibly be hungry or starving, or feeling any of the other symptoms of caloric restriction.

Yet, clearly, obese people do get these symptoms. They are biochemically starving while obese. Ignoring this plain fact will guarantee that your approach to reversing obesity will fail. How could you solve a problem that you won’t acknowledge exists?

Here’s a handful of reasons that starving yourself won’t help you reverse obesity:

• You don’t want your thyroid to crash as it dictates metabolic health

• You don’t want your metabolic rate to decrease, as it will make starvation even more difficult

• You don’t want your testosterone to crash, because it will inhibit muscle growth/maintenance and likely activity levels

• You don’t want to be anxious and irritable and unable to sleep, because these are all terrible for long-term health and your ability to stick to a diet

• I assume that women don’t want to lose their periods, although I have never had one and I feel fine so maybe it’s not a big deal

• You probably don’t want to lose your libido, or at least your significant other won’t want you to

Bodybuilding diets are temporary, reversing obesity is diamonds

Wait, 007, did I get that right?

Compared to the bodybuilders, an obese person reversing obesity might take much longer. If you’re a very serious bodybuilder, your contest prep might actually be 6 months. That’s very long for a “short-term starvation diet” but likely the upper end.

Some bodybuilders don’t take part in more than 1 show per year because of this, because it also takes them several months after the prep to get back to a healthy baseline. If you did 2-3 of these per year, you’d never get out of starvation, and your health would deteriorate quickly.

But if you’re severely obese, you likely have 50lbs, 100lbs, maybe even more to lose. I’ve lost over 100lbs myself in the past (and then gained it all back). Currently, I’m over 50lbs down again, and I’m just about halfway done.

This will likely take you at least a year, if not several. I lost the 100lbs over approximately 2 years, with months of entirely flat plateaus in there. Right now, I’m just over 1 year in, which pretty much exactly matches the pace last time: 100lbs in 2 years, 50lbs in 1 year.

And then, you want to stay non-obese, right? You can’t just quit and go back to whatever it was that made you obese in the first place. So if you’re reversing your obesity by starving yourself (assuming that even works, which I don’t think it does), are you going to starve yourself forever? Forever ever?

Let’s not forget the poor people from The Biggest Loser, one of whom has to keep starving himself at 800kcal/day to prevent weight gain now.

For the record, I think this sort of metabolic downshifting is entirely unnecessary and likely easily reversible, possibly even without too much accompanying weight gain. But it definitely will happen if you achieve fat loss through starvation.

For reference, my own Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) was measured slightly above average for my height/lean mass/age several times after losing over 50lbs. It typically sits between 2,300 and 2,450kcal. The RMR is what your body would burn if you were in a coma, not moving at all. With activities and other energy expenditure on top, my TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) is estimated to be 3,300-3,400kcal/day.

Hence, despite losing 55lbs, my metabolism is just as you’d expect it. No signs of downshifting at all.

Definition of success: reverse obesity, DO NOT trash your metabolism

Fat loss through starvation doesn’t actually solve the problem obese people have.

Reversing obesity doesn’t just mean reducing fat mass to normal levels,
it means doing so with our metabolism intact.

Even if we succeeded at willpowering our way through 2 years of starvation, we’d trash our metabolism so badly that we’d have to walk around on 800kcal/day like the Biggest Loser contestant. That’s not a win, that’s delaying the problem and will likely lead to rebound and/or disaster. It’s also extremely unhealthy.

I’ve written about my definition of dietary success before.

Metabolic differences between healthy and “broken” people

A lot of “common knowledge” from “science” is clearly flat-out wrong when we talk about obese vs. non-obese people, and sometimes it’s even stratified within the obese.

Brotein

It’s common “knowledge” that more protein is always better, there’s no amount of protein that’s too high, you can’t overeat protein, and protein is the most, and, in fact, only satiating macronutrient.

This is of course all nonsense, but it is true that protein metabolism works very differently in some people than others.

In a metabolically healthy person, excess protein (defined as more than can be used for body maintenance and muscle protein synthesis, typically around 0.5-0.64g/lb of lean mass), will simply be turned into sugar and other substrate products.

And since the metabolically healthy person has no problem whatsoever metabolizing sugar while maintaining healthy blood glucose levels, the protein just turns into expensive sugar and nothing bad happens. Thermogenesis might be increased, burning off that little bit of excess energy.

For some reason, that’s not what happens in (some) obese. There’s some state the body can get into where even “normal” amounts of protein have detrimental effects, leading to all sorts of trouble and preventing fat loss.

Brad from Fire in a Bottle has done several videos on the topic, and I’ve written about restricting protein/BCAAs and the mechanisms and research behind it previously.

He calls this “torpor,” a metabolic state some people are in that changes how foods work in your body, including how the BCAAs isoleucine and valine send signals to your body. I’m curious why some obese people seem to be in “torpor” and other are not.

Curiously, some obese people can just eat infinite protein and be dandy. High-meat keto and carnivore does work to reverse obesity for many people I know.

I don’t know if I could put an exact number on it, but it seems that about 30% of people who go on a typical beef-to-satiety carnivore diet just effortlessly get down to lean/normal levels of weight and body fat.

But another maybe 30% don’t see any success whatsoever, and it can in fact cause them to gain weight. The remainder seems to see some, but not spectacular success, or stick to it more or less because they see other benefits/just enjoy doing it.

(These numbers are not very scientific, that’s just my impression from hanging out in keto and carnivore forums and groups for a decade.)

Fix your Camry, then start the race prep

Let’s just not confuse the two different problems, since we’ll only end up using the wrong strategy.

Lack of starvation is not the reason we have an obesity epidemic on our hands. In fact, most obese people are constantly biochemically starved - despite having a lot of body fat on hand. They just can’t seem to get at it.

It’s all fine and dandy to get shredded six-pack abs. I’d love to have them myself, if I’m honest.

But that’s something to think about once I get my Camry firing on all cylinders again. Until then, putting on those race slicks and pumping up the turbo is just going to do more harm than good.