I appreciate you very much, but your tic of misspelling "calorie" and using mockery-case is becoming extremely grating. I have installed a script to munge your writing so I don't have to see it anymore, but just FYI that you may be annoying friendly readers more than you wish to.
> I have trouble imagining how your body can be more efficient than a combustion chamber at extracting energy from food.
Agreed, and if our host is getting rid of *anything* in significant quantities except water and carbon dioxide and various oxides of nitrogen, then it should be rather less efficient....
On the other hand, I really don't trust nutrition to have got their estimates of 'energy absorbed from foods' to be even ballpark correct, *or* the doubly-labelled water people to have calibrated everything correctly, or spotted all the ways the technique can be inaccurate. Nobody in this space is being even remotely careful.
So I wouldn't be surprised if the result comes back 'magic'.
What to do next? Ex150coconut obviously, with more doubly-labeled water. Bet Thermobolic $1000 that it doesn't work, so if it fails you break even and if it succeeds you spend $2k breaking through the plateau keeping you from your dreams of being shredded and irresistible to women. It's a win/win.
You'll find it wears off quick. I'm two days into testing it and am 100% sure the effects that can be directly introspected are due to the theobromine. Once you re-acclimate to it you won't notice.
I believe there are separate benefits to lauric acid, but that's systemic and slow, so it would take an autistic diet superhero like yourself running it for a whole month to be able to tell.
But the 100g coco/30g cocoa disc I mead, and ate half of... doesn't have that much cocoa? I ate a whole bar of 85% chocolate at my last refeed, which would've surely been more theobromine?
Ex, please give us a rundown on how you make the coconut-chocolate “discs” like you did for ganache. I love the ganache and am eager to try the cocoa-coconut discs too.
I'll explain it in the post in a week or so, but here's the idea:
1. Melt x amount of coconut oil (I used extra virgin, not sure if it matters) in microwave until liquid
2. Pour in 1/4x to 1/3x cocoa powder
3. Add dash of cream
4. Mix thoroughly
5. Pour into vessel of desired shape. Currently using ice cube tray for "chocolates" shape. The "disc" was just cause I poured it into a bowl and it happened to form a sort of cookie-shaped disc.
IMO I’m not surprised how precise your body is after seeing the results of studies with goats where they modified the nutrition of tasteless micronutrients of various foods (subtract one from one of them and add them to another) and the goats switched over to the food with the nutrient after a while, showing understandably that there are nutrient sensing mechanisms in the gut and body itself beyond taste and smell.
I think obesity and over eating cravings come from your energy partition issue. The body is eating energy, but cannot use it efficiently, so it induces demand for more to keep the organism functioning. It also has to store all the energy that is floating in the blood still and thus obesity.
Yea, we have to give evolution credit: everyone alive today has billions of years of evolution piled on top of evolution. With all the different substances we need, it'd be kinda silly to assume the body is just gonna let you willy nilly eat "what you want" whatever that even means in absence of such systems :)
I would literally bet my life on "carolies in carolies out".
But I would not necessarily bet on any of: accurate food-calorie measuring, accurate food-labelling, all eaten carolies making into metabolism correctly, *or* the doubly-labelled water technique accurately measuring carolies out!
However the doubly-labelled water thing is probably at least self-consistent, so I'd expect you to get the sorts of results that it gets. 75kg/2900 looks within the measured distribution but very low, especially since you're carrying quite a lot of fat still which I'd expect to put the BMR up.
Also I'd like to know where that distribution came from. Is that modern Americans, mostly presumably poisoned by their food, and thus probably both low BMR and overweight , or is it a collection of measurements from primitive tribes around the world eating nothing their ancestors haven't eaten for the last ten thousand years?
If that graph is modern US, then I'm going to guess you'll get about 3300kcal/day from your measurement, possibly higher. But there are so many variables here that I don't think I'll be too surprised *whatever* the answer that comes back.
Well maybe hold off on that bet, cause I'd hate to lose ya. Post incoming next few days.
I believe that graph is ALL people ever measured in the DLW database, hence it includes tribes. But also, as the book Burn details, tribespeople don't actually have a higher TDEE than fat, lazy Americans driving enormous gas-guzzling SUVs.
Eh, kinda maybe these things aren't necessarily granular enough for that. E.g. Pontzer DOES mention the slightly lower TDEE IIRC, but it's a relatively minor decrease so he says "basically the same." The hunter gatherers are also "basically the same." As in, it's not super dramatic as you'd expect. Not like lazy Americans are burning 1,500 and Chad Hazdas are burning 3,500. Plus there's enough individual variance that within populations that might well come from something like PUFAs... I think he said up to 500-700kcal variance in either direction, which is quite big.
This is really weird. If you're going to walk around all day you need to be powering that somehow, and it's going to take about 1000kcal of energy on top of the 3000kcal? that you need to run your body.
If Americans are sitting around all day and yet still actually burning the same amount of fuel then that extra energy has got to be going somewhere. The fuel is not being stored, it's turning into carbon dioxide and water, and the generated heat has to go somewhere.
I wonder where it's going? Futile decoupled oxphos that produces heat but no ATP etc? Running the metabolism of all the extra fat cells? Burning through some other pathway that doesn't result in ATP etc? Actual muscle work and repair because it costs so much more to walk around when you're carrying loads of fat?
A fascinating and surprising result, well done Mr Pontzer.
For one, I avoid walking at all costs. This is America, after all.
But yea, I suspect that CICO is just super naive in both directions. Kinda like "gasoline in, gasoline out." All sorts of things go wrong in engines that make this untrue.
OK, so he reckons that various levels of moderate exercise don't make nearly as much difference as they should (which surprises me, I would have thought they'd just be compensated for by extra eating, rather than by lowered basal metabolic rate, and certainly back when I was sporty I used to eat like a horse, the traditional rowers' "See Food" diet), but that still leaves us plenty of room in the error bars for Western metabolisms to have been screwed up to the tune of a couple of hundred calories a day?
Yea, pretty much. My understanding is that there are threshold effects for exercise. If you go from Wal-Mart cart level sedentary to "office worker who can walk a block & climb a flight of stairs" active, that's a big threshold. And then, eventually, there's one for "semi-professional athlete volume." But in between not necessarily much. And also all of this might be very individual, and we don't really know why again. I.e. maybe the "responders" are genetic freaks, or maybe they're just less PUFA'd, or who knows. His big study is from 2021 so this is all very recent stuff.
> Well maybe hold off on that bet, cause I'd hate to lose ya. Post incoming next few days.
How very exciting! I can't wait. I was *not* expecting our diet experiments to end up overturning the conservation of energy, it's always looked very solid up to now.
I don't think Newton actually had any concept of conservation of energy, but I'm amused by the idea of the corpses of Émilie du Châtelet and Emmy Noether coming together in shock to form a first-order perpetual motion machine. Electricity too cheap to meter! From Entirely Natural Sources!
Truly Hell hath no fury.....
If you want Newton to join in you're going to have to find a diet that violates conservation of momentum. And give us the stars!
Although come to think of it he'd probably want to use all that energy to turn lead into gold. Which wouldn't violate anything at all.
> What is surprising, to me, is how accurate my appetite is. I had kind of, vaguely, felt like I was always more hungry if I’d eaten less cream for 1-2 days, and less hungry the next if I overate.
> But for it to be so accurate and zig-zag so predictably is fascinating.
That's the intutition I've been working from from the start, and it's why I took you seriously in the first place while dismissing most other diet stuff as nonsense.
But of course I have the advantage that for the first forty years of my life my appetite kept my weight stable at the right level. Dead-reckoning just won't do that. There *has* to be a homeostat of some sort.
Even to gain weight at the terrifying rate of 1kg/year you'd need your appetite to be accurate to 20kcal/day (as you say, much more accurate than anything we can measure even under lab conditions, let alone in free living persons). Which implies that even if the mechanism's broken, it's only very slightly broken in most people.
"my day-to-day appetite is accurate in an uncanny way"
I typically vary my diet. When I do stick to a meal plan for a while, my appetite becomes very precise. I assumed it wasn't unique to me, there's more than 6 billion of us and little truly is. But still, good to see it.
I appreciate you very much, but your tic of misspelling "calorie" and using mockery-case is becoming extremely grating. I have installed a script to munge your writing so I don't have to see it anymore, but just FYI that you may be annoying friendly readers more than you wish to.
Haha very possible. But some ideas are so bad, they cannot be taken seriously, ever.
I find it simultaneously irritating and endearing, if you can imagine such a state of mind.
I will, for once, bet on CICO. I have trouble imagining how your body can be more efficient than a combustion chamber at extracting energy from food.
Spoiler: you're wrong. And I was wrong, too.
> I have trouble imagining how your body can be more efficient than a combustion chamber at extracting energy from food.
Agreed, and if our host is getting rid of *anything* in significant quantities except water and carbon dioxide and various oxides of nitrogen, then it should be rather less efficient....
On the other hand, I really don't trust nutrition to have got their estimates of 'energy absorbed from foods' to be even ballpark correct, *or* the doubly-labelled water people to have calibrated everything correctly, or spotted all the ways the technique can be inaccurate. Nobody in this space is being even remotely careful.
So I wouldn't be surprised if the result comes back 'magic'.
Magic confirmed. And by magic I mean hellfire.
What to do next? Ex150coconut obviously, with more doubly-labeled water. Bet Thermobolic $1000 that it doesn't work, so if it fails you break even and if it succeeds you spend $2k breaking through the plateau keeping you from your dreams of being shredded and irresistible to women. It's a win/win.
Yea +1kkcal of coconut chocolates is gonna start in 2 days. But probably only for a week lol it sounds intense.
You'll find it wears off quick. I'm two days into testing it and am 100% sure the effects that can be directly introspected are due to the theobromine. Once you re-acclimate to it you won't notice.
I believe there are separate benefits to lauric acid, but that's systemic and slow, so it would take an autistic diet superhero like yourself running it for a whole month to be able to tell.
But the 100g coco/30g cocoa disc I mead, and ate half of... doesn't have that much cocoa? I ate a whole bar of 85% chocolate at my last refeed, which would've surely been more theobromine?
Ex, please give us a rundown on how you make the coconut-chocolate “discs” like you did for ganache. I love the ganache and am eager to try the cocoa-coconut discs too.
I'll explain it in the post in a week or so, but here's the idea:
1. Melt x amount of coconut oil (I used extra virgin, not sure if it matters) in microwave until liquid
2. Pour in 1/4x to 1/3x cocoa powder
3. Add dash of cream
4. Mix thoroughly
5. Pour into vessel of desired shape. Currently using ice cube tray for "chocolates" shape. The "disc" was just cause I poured it into a bowl and it happened to form a sort of cookie-shaped disc.
6. Put in fridge until solid
Awesome. Thanks Ex!
The madman did it! Christmas carolies incoming
IMO I’m not surprised how precise your body is after seeing the results of studies with goats where they modified the nutrition of tasteless micronutrients of various foods (subtract one from one of them and add them to another) and the goats switched over to the food with the nutrient after a while, showing understandably that there are nutrient sensing mechanisms in the gut and body itself beyond taste and smell.
I think obesity and over eating cravings come from your energy partition issue. The body is eating energy, but cannot use it efficiently, so it induces demand for more to keep the organism functioning. It also has to store all the energy that is floating in the blood still and thus obesity.
Yea, we have to give evolution credit: everyone alive today has billions of years of evolution piled on top of evolution. With all the different substances we need, it'd be kinda silly to assume the body is just gonna let you willy nilly eat "what you want" whatever that even means in absence of such systems :)
I would literally bet my life on "carolies in carolies out".
But I would not necessarily bet on any of: accurate food-calorie measuring, accurate food-labelling, all eaten carolies making into metabolism correctly, *or* the doubly-labelled water technique accurately measuring carolies out!
However the doubly-labelled water thing is probably at least self-consistent, so I'd expect you to get the sorts of results that it gets. 75kg/2900 looks within the measured distribution but very low, especially since you're carrying quite a lot of fat still which I'd expect to put the BMR up.
Also I'd like to know where that distribution came from. Is that modern Americans, mostly presumably poisoned by their food, and thus probably both low BMR and overweight , or is it a collection of measurements from primitive tribes around the world eating nothing their ancestors haven't eaten for the last ten thousand years?
If that graph is modern US, then I'm going to guess you'll get about 3300kcal/day from your measurement, possibly higher. But there are so many variables here that I don't think I'll be too surprised *whatever* the answer that comes back.
Well maybe hold off on that bet, cause I'd hate to lose ya. Post incoming next few days.
I believe that graph is ALL people ever measured in the DLW database, hence it includes tribes. But also, as the book Burn details, tribespeople don't actually have a higher TDEE than fat, lazy Americans driving enormous gas-guzzling SUVs.
> But also, as the book Burn details, tribespeople don't actually have a higher TDEE than fat, lazy Americans driving enormous gas-guzzling SUVs.
Hmmm, that rather opposes our whole 'lowered metabolic rate from PUFAs' thing, doesn't it?
Eh, kinda maybe these things aren't necessarily granular enough for that. E.g. Pontzer DOES mention the slightly lower TDEE IIRC, but it's a relatively minor decrease so he says "basically the same." The hunter gatherers are also "basically the same." As in, it's not super dramatic as you'd expect. Not like lazy Americans are burning 1,500 and Chad Hazdas are burning 3,500. Plus there's enough individual variance that within populations that might well come from something like PUFAs... I think he said up to 500-700kcal variance in either direction, which is quite big.
This is really weird. If you're going to walk around all day you need to be powering that somehow, and it's going to take about 1000kcal of energy on top of the 3000kcal? that you need to run your body.
If Americans are sitting around all day and yet still actually burning the same amount of fuel then that extra energy has got to be going somewhere. The fuel is not being stored, it's turning into carbon dioxide and water, and the generated heat has to go somewhere.
I wonder where it's going? Futile decoupled oxphos that produces heat but no ATP etc? Running the metabolism of all the extra fat cells? Burning through some other pathway that doesn't result in ATP etc? Actual muscle work and repair because it costs so much more to walk around when you're carrying loads of fat?
A fascinating and surprising result, well done Mr Pontzer.
For one, I avoid walking at all costs. This is America, after all.
But yea, I suspect that CICO is just super naive in both directions. Kinda like "gasoline in, gasoline out." All sorts of things go wrong in engines that make this untrue.
OK, so he reckons that various levels of moderate exercise don't make nearly as much difference as they should (which surprises me, I would have thought they'd just be compensated for by extra eating, rather than by lowered basal metabolic rate, and certainly back when I was sporty I used to eat like a horse, the traditional rowers' "See Food" diet), but that still leaves us plenty of room in the error bars for Western metabolisms to have been screwed up to the tune of a couple of hundred calories a day?
Yea, pretty much. My understanding is that there are threshold effects for exercise. If you go from Wal-Mart cart level sedentary to "office worker who can walk a block & climb a flight of stairs" active, that's a big threshold. And then, eventually, there's one for "semi-professional athlete volume." But in between not necessarily much. And also all of this might be very individual, and we don't really know why again. I.e. maybe the "responders" are genetic freaks, or maybe they're just less PUFA'd, or who knows. His big study is from 2021 so this is all very recent stuff.
I might have to actually read this book. Neither you nor the PSmiths review makes me particularly enthusiastic about it though. Is it fun to read?
> Wal-Mart cart level sedentary
I don't understand, USUK language barrier again?
> semi-professional athlete volume
OK fine, that accounts for me eating a load when in "serious" training.
> Well maybe hold off on that bet, cause I'd hate to lose ya. Post incoming next few days.
How very exciting! I can't wait. I was *not* expecting our diet experiments to end up overturning the conservation of energy, it's always looked very solid up to now.
Yea physics is basically hosed. I bet Newton is turning in his grave as we speak.
I don't think Newton actually had any concept of conservation of energy, but I'm amused by the idea of the corpses of Émilie du Châtelet and Emmy Noether coming together in shock to form a first-order perpetual motion machine. Electricity too cheap to meter! From Entirely Natural Sources!
Truly Hell hath no fury.....
If you want Newton to join in you're going to have to find a diet that violates conservation of momentum. And give us the stars!
Although come to think of it he'd probably want to use all that energy to turn lead into gold. Which wouldn't violate anything at all.
> I bet Newton is turning in his grave as we speak.
How many carolies does that produce?
Turning in your grave actually consumes calories, breaking another law of physics..
As many as we like!
> What is surprising, to me, is how accurate my appetite is. I had kind of, vaguely, felt like I was always more hungry if I’d eaten less cream for 1-2 days, and less hungry the next if I overate.
> But for it to be so accurate and zig-zag so predictably is fascinating.
That's the intutition I've been working from from the start, and it's why I took you seriously in the first place while dismissing most other diet stuff as nonsense.
But of course I have the advantage that for the first forty years of my life my appetite kept my weight stable at the right level. Dead-reckoning just won't do that. There *has* to be a homeostat of some sort.
Even to gain weight at the terrifying rate of 1kg/year you'd need your appetite to be accurate to 20kcal/day (as you say, much more accurate than anything we can measure even under lab conditions, let alone in free living persons). Which implies that even if the mechanism's broken, it's only very slightly broken in most people.
"my day-to-day appetite is accurate in an uncanny way"
I typically vary my diet. When I do stick to a meal plan for a while, my appetite becomes very precise. I assumed it wasn't unique to me, there's more than 6 billion of us and little truly is. But still, good to see it.
Yea, I guess I shouldn't be surprised :)
Yes you should! When you see something funny, it is *important* to be surprised.
Something that you knew was true is wrong. That changes everything, you shouldn't just go 'Oh OK' and ignore it.
The scientific method depends on fear and surprise!
“Or maybe CICO is just nonsense and counting heat units is useless”. This!