I somehow thought the introductory sentence "A mystery wrapped in an enigma" was an allusion to "The Scary Door", turns out it was Churchill. In that context my bringing up Futurama is probably a bit out of place.
I dunno if I told you before, but the food / poop in your stomach also counts as "lean mass" in DEXA scans, as told to me by one of the technicians when I asked. So it's best to do them fasted. Skimming your 2023 linked article where you did 2 of the tests, it looks like you ate a lot of high protein food, and I think it was an atypical amount from what you usually eat, so I can easily see how it would swing like that in 24hrs.
I now don't eat for the day until I do the actual DEXA scan to make them more consistent.
Also did a quick perplexity search, and DLW and being in ketosis has 'issues', which you can dig in more with the studies it links. I also ran into a similar issue with the lumen, which is a RER device when I was in ketosis, and they have it on their support / FAQ page that it isn't accurate when you are in keto.
So as a guy who has been in long term ketosis, I'm not super surprised that DLW isn't potentially accurate since the model they probably use didn't account for being in a keto state.
I'm an empiricist, myself and prefer to just directly measure these things. There's an adaptive TDEE application for Android (not sure if for iPhone) which I use. I enter daily weight and calorie consumption and it converges on your TRUE TDEE over 3 weeks or so.
Sure, there are errors in calorie estimations but I'm thinking those will tend to average out over time. The macronutrient constituents will also impact this value, but I always eat the same macros, within 5% or so.
I've been using it for just under 3 weeks now. I'm 61, 6'2" 205. Lean mass is around 173lbs, body fat % around 15%. I lift weights 4X per week. Run sprints and hills 3X per week. Walk 7000 steps a day. It's reporting 3096 for me but is still climbing. I think it's going to end up around 3200, which is probably about right.
Unfortunately, I don't think that methodology is particularly valid. I've done it in the past and come out at about 4,200TEE and about 1,000. TEE simply is not independent of food intake, so these apps don't measure anything real.
I guess I don't follow you. I understand TEE is not independent of food intake. This app isn't doing magic, it's just math.
Consider the body as a machine. Food and the macro constituents are inputs. Activity is also an input. Weight is an output and a function of both.
If the inputs are measured daily, over a reasonable time and kept largely consistent (as mine are), the averaged inputs are going to yield a specific output (weight). To the extent the weight changes +/-, it's trivial to determine if the inputs exceed, meet or fail to meet the necessary energy expenditure.
Take it to the extreme. If a person ate exactly the same thing each day and performed the exact same activity each day, it would be easy to add food until weight achieves stability. That number of calories (or mass for that matter) plus the energy value of your activity would be your TDEE, by definition.
The point is to arrive at a reasonable value for how much you can expect to eat. And as I said before, this is empirical and is a direct measurement. How is that not be "real"?
The app is doing math, but it's trying to titrate in a number that doesn't exist.
I have used this methodology to arrive at 1,000kcal/day, 2900kcal/day, 3,500kcal/day, and 4,200kcal/day.
Which one is my "correct" TEE? All of them. The idea of TEE is largely misunderstood, I think. It isn't that there is The One True TEE and you have to find it, it's that your body can run weight-stable in a pretty large window (or, at least, mine apparently can haha).
> Take it to the extreme. If a person ate exactly the same thing each day and performed the exact same activity each day, it would be easy to add food until weight achieves stability. That number of calories (or mass for that matter) plus the energy value of your activity would be your TDEE, by definition.
But I have done exactly that, and gotten vastly different results. The mistake here is what "TEE" actually means. All you've done (at best, there are actually other issues) is measured the TEE that was burned over this period of time. This doesn't mean the exact same TEE is somehow hardcoded in your "machine." Since it's not independent of context like food intake, your TEE the next week could be 1,000kcal higher, or lower, irrespective of how much you worked out or walked or whatever.
So I'm skeptical that the number coming out of this method is anything useful.
Imagine I took a stopwatch and timed your car on the on-ramp to the highway. Every time you drove past me I'd measure you until I had a bunch of records. Then I say "This is a 45mph car, it drives 45mph." That would be empirical and a direct measurement, but it would be a misunderstanding of what was being measured and how "innate" it is to the thing being measured (the car).
Thank you for the update, which makes perfect sense (because it aligns neatly with my thinking, lol).
The more I look at the issue of weight and weight management, the more I am convinced that the path is simple, but we want to over-complicate things.
We know pretty much with an acceptable degree of certainty that:
1. Body weight is regulated as a system, there is no pure mathematical CICO model that holds.
2. Our weight management system revs up and down to defend an upper and lower limit mostly determined by genetics. High carb, low carb, high fat, low fat, etc. It really does not matter.
3. Highly processed foods and lots of added sugars breaks over time, our self-regulating system (this one is debatable, but seems that rigorous science is pointing in that direction). Same goes with sleep deprivation.
4. Diets based on restricting a lot of calories also breaks the system and creates mental health problems (several studies dating back from the Minnesota starvation experiment confirm this).
5. On a standard western diet with lots of highly processed foods, we gain weight progressively. We don't gain it all at once, it creeps up over time. This is also proven by several studies on weight gain and most personal experiences. Unless, of course, you have a condition which can affect your weight.
6. Exercise is not meant to help with weight loss. But it is critical to help us reduce inflammation and keep our metabolism in a healthy state. Just go into it with the expectation of strength and health, not weight loss.
And that is why I like to challenge people, based on my personal experience. Why our determination to lose weight at a faster rate than we gained it? It makes no logical sense. It assumes our bodies will readily want to return to our genetic homeostatic state without regard for the effects of the weight gain. Really? The trip up the scale was free? Okay... See how the Big Loser contestants fared on average... I rest my case.
So if you take 2,950 calories and cut 15%; stop eating anything highly processed and sugary, and stay there for 8-12 months, you will start re-setting your homeostatic weight system. Then adjust down every 6 months by 10% until there is no more weight loss, in my case it was after 3.5 years... you are set for life. Don't go hungry or severely limit food intake (see the Minnesota starvation experiment to find out what happens). Make sure you exercise -I am biased towards two days of cardio and three days of strength- to reduce inflammation and help your body age well.
Of course this is my personal experience, 9 years in, which may not work for anyone else in the Universe. There may be a magic hack, I just have yet to find anyone who has succeeded long term doing so. What has succeeded and exceeded expectations is the weight loss industry, and all the stuff available to buy, test or try. Billions going into it, they can't be wrong, right?
Sorry for the rant. Take care, and thank you for a most excellent Substack.
SInce you're giving advice: How much fat have you lost using that method?
Do you think constant caloric restriction should be the way to go or should one cycle? I think that perhaps the bodybuilders have it figured out better by cycling between gaining, maintenance and cutting, as we saw in the Minnesota starvation experiment prolonged restriction can be quite detrimental - so what happens if instead of 1500carolies over 24 weeks you do 500 but over 72 weeks? Same effect?
I agree with most of your tenets, except I dislike the term "processed food" because it seems like a magic word to me. What about processed food breaks our fat management system? Is it the canning? The packaging? Cutting into pieces? The cooking?
I suspect it's much less "processed food" and much more a certain ingredient or maybe a small number of them, which break the system. You can probably guess what my #1 suspect ingredient is.
Re. "lose weight at a faster rate than we gained it," I kinda agree. That's why I'm not in a super huge rush. I'm ok doing this for the rest of my life, I'll probably do keto for the rest of my life anyway, and I'll probably have to do another 6 years to get down to normal linoleic acid levels no matter what I do. So I'm really in no rush.
That said, I don't think there's a benefit to "going slow on purpose" either. I want the fastest fat loss I can get without any downsides like loose skin, metabolic damage/downregulation, lean mass loss, excess discomfort..
I haven't eaten anything highly processed or sugary in almost 2 years. I'd argue I've been resetting this system for most of those 2 years, and that "resetting" means "depleting it of linoleic acid" which will take me another 2-6 years to finish.
Consciously reducing my caloric intake seems counter productive, and I see no reason to do it. So far, it has not been necessary.
I think this is everything, including food, cream, coffee, and so on. I don't think I actually drink that much. It might also be that this is all the "water turnaround" in the body, not pure water intake.
You should buy a decommissioned coal gasification retort and we can DIY a metabolic chamber.
With blackjack! And hookers! In fact, forget the metabolic chamber.
Episode 2, I believe?
Yes, also a callback in a more recent episode (the one with the book/wine club)
I haven't watched in decades :)
I somehow thought the introductory sentence "A mystery wrapped in an enigma" was an allusion to "The Scary Door", turns out it was Churchill. In that context my bringing up Futurama is probably a bit out of place.
I didn't know it was Churchill until recently. I think it's just "in the water" now haha.
I dunno if I told you before, but the food / poop in your stomach also counts as "lean mass" in DEXA scans, as told to me by one of the technicians when I asked. So it's best to do them fasted. Skimming your 2023 linked article where you did 2 of the tests, it looks like you ate a lot of high protein food, and I think it was an atypical amount from what you usually eat, so I can easily see how it would swing like that in 24hrs.
I now don't eat for the day until I do the actual DEXA scan to make them more consistent.
I typically only drink coffee w/ cream before the DEXA, so the only skew would be the water / fat in there.
Also did a quick perplexity search, and DLW and being in ketosis has 'issues', which you can dig in more with the studies it links. I also ran into a similar issue with the lumen, which is a RER device when I was in ketosis, and they have it on their support / FAQ page that it isn't accurate when you are in keto.
So as a guy who has been in long term ketosis, I'm not super surprised that DLW isn't potentially accurate since the model they probably use didn't account for being in a keto state.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/doubly-labeled-water-calorie-e-3jJbyyv7TJOf4vdPt.ZoNA
Yea, I saw that. But also we don't have ANY gold standard, so who knows if everything doesn't "have issues?"
The DLW guys claim to test ketoers all the time with no issues, but who knows, maybe you can be an outlier.
Might be linked to your hard caseness. Now I wonder what is different in your urine or genetics.
I'm an empiricist, myself and prefer to just directly measure these things. There's an adaptive TDEE application for Android (not sure if for iPhone) which I use. I enter daily weight and calorie consumption and it converges on your TRUE TDEE over 3 weeks or so.
Sure, there are errors in calorie estimations but I'm thinking those will tend to average out over time. The macronutrient constituents will also impact this value, but I always eat the same macros, within 5% or so.
I've been using it for just under 3 weeks now. I'm 61, 6'2" 205. Lean mass is around 173lbs, body fat % around 15%. I lift weights 4X per week. Run sprints and hills 3X per week. Walk 7000 steps a day. It's reporting 3096 for me but is still climbing. I think it's going to end up around 3200, which is probably about right.
Unfortunately, I don't think that methodology is particularly valid. I've done it in the past and come out at about 4,200TEE and about 1,000. TEE simply is not independent of food intake, so these apps don't measure anything real.
I guess I don't follow you. I understand TEE is not independent of food intake. This app isn't doing magic, it's just math.
Consider the body as a machine. Food and the macro constituents are inputs. Activity is also an input. Weight is an output and a function of both.
If the inputs are measured daily, over a reasonable time and kept largely consistent (as mine are), the averaged inputs are going to yield a specific output (weight). To the extent the weight changes +/-, it's trivial to determine if the inputs exceed, meet or fail to meet the necessary energy expenditure.
Take it to the extreme. If a person ate exactly the same thing each day and performed the exact same activity each day, it would be easy to add food until weight achieves stability. That number of calories (or mass for that matter) plus the energy value of your activity would be your TDEE, by definition.
The point is to arrive at a reasonable value for how much you can expect to eat. And as I said before, this is empirical and is a direct measurement. How is that not be "real"?
The app is doing math, but it's trying to titrate in a number that doesn't exist.
I have used this methodology to arrive at 1,000kcal/day, 2900kcal/day, 3,500kcal/day, and 4,200kcal/day.
Which one is my "correct" TEE? All of them. The idea of TEE is largely misunderstood, I think. It isn't that there is The One True TEE and you have to find it, it's that your body can run weight-stable in a pretty large window (or, at least, mine apparently can haha).
> Take it to the extreme. If a person ate exactly the same thing each day and performed the exact same activity each day, it would be easy to add food until weight achieves stability. That number of calories (or mass for that matter) plus the energy value of your activity would be your TDEE, by definition.
But I have done exactly that, and gotten vastly different results. The mistake here is what "TEE" actually means. All you've done (at best, there are actually other issues) is measured the TEE that was burned over this period of time. This doesn't mean the exact same TEE is somehow hardcoded in your "machine." Since it's not independent of context like food intake, your TEE the next week could be 1,000kcal higher, or lower, irrespective of how much you worked out or walked or whatever.
So I'm skeptical that the number coming out of this method is anything useful.
Imagine I took a stopwatch and timed your car on the on-ramp to the highway. Every time you drove past me I'd measure you until I had a bunch of records. Then I say "This is a 45mph car, it drives 45mph." That would be empirical and a direct measurement, but it would be a misunderstanding of what was being measured and how "innate" it is to the thing being measured (the car).
Thank you for the update, which makes perfect sense (because it aligns neatly with my thinking, lol).
The more I look at the issue of weight and weight management, the more I am convinced that the path is simple, but we want to over-complicate things.
We know pretty much with an acceptable degree of certainty that:
1. Body weight is regulated as a system, there is no pure mathematical CICO model that holds.
2. Our weight management system revs up and down to defend an upper and lower limit mostly determined by genetics. High carb, low carb, high fat, low fat, etc. It really does not matter.
3. Highly processed foods and lots of added sugars breaks over time, our self-regulating system (this one is debatable, but seems that rigorous science is pointing in that direction). Same goes with sleep deprivation.
4. Diets based on restricting a lot of calories also breaks the system and creates mental health problems (several studies dating back from the Minnesota starvation experiment confirm this).
5. On a standard western diet with lots of highly processed foods, we gain weight progressively. We don't gain it all at once, it creeps up over time. This is also proven by several studies on weight gain and most personal experiences. Unless, of course, you have a condition which can affect your weight.
6. Exercise is not meant to help with weight loss. But it is critical to help us reduce inflammation and keep our metabolism in a healthy state. Just go into it with the expectation of strength and health, not weight loss.
And that is why I like to challenge people, based on my personal experience. Why our determination to lose weight at a faster rate than we gained it? It makes no logical sense. It assumes our bodies will readily want to return to our genetic homeostatic state without regard for the effects of the weight gain. Really? The trip up the scale was free? Okay... See how the Big Loser contestants fared on average... I rest my case.
So if you take 2,950 calories and cut 15%; stop eating anything highly processed and sugary, and stay there for 8-12 months, you will start re-setting your homeostatic weight system. Then adjust down every 6 months by 10% until there is no more weight loss, in my case it was after 3.5 years... you are set for life. Don't go hungry or severely limit food intake (see the Minnesota starvation experiment to find out what happens). Make sure you exercise -I am biased towards two days of cardio and three days of strength- to reduce inflammation and help your body age well.
Of course this is my personal experience, 9 years in, which may not work for anyone else in the Universe. There may be a magic hack, I just have yet to find anyone who has succeeded long term doing so. What has succeeded and exceeded expectations is the weight loss industry, and all the stuff available to buy, test or try. Billions going into it, they can't be wrong, right?
Sorry for the rant. Take care, and thank you for a most excellent Substack.
SInce you're giving advice: How much fat have you lost using that method?
Do you think constant caloric restriction should be the way to go or should one cycle? I think that perhaps the bodybuilders have it figured out better by cycling between gaining, maintenance and cutting, as we saw in the Minnesota starvation experiment prolonged restriction can be quite detrimental - so what happens if instead of 1500carolies over 24 weeks you do 500 but over 72 weeks? Same effect?
I agree with most of your tenets, except I dislike the term "processed food" because it seems like a magic word to me. What about processed food breaks our fat management system? Is it the canning? The packaging? Cutting into pieces? The cooking?
I suspect it's much less "processed food" and much more a certain ingredient or maybe a small number of them, which break the system. You can probably guess what my #1 suspect ingredient is.
Re. "lose weight at a faster rate than we gained it," I kinda agree. That's why I'm not in a super huge rush. I'm ok doing this for the rest of my life, I'll probably do keto for the rest of my life anyway, and I'll probably have to do another 6 years to get down to normal linoleic acid levels no matter what I do. So I'm really in no rush.
That said, I don't think there's a benefit to "going slow on purpose" either. I want the fastest fat loss I can get without any downsides like loose skin, metabolic damage/downregulation, lean mass loss, excess discomfort..
I haven't eaten anything highly processed or sugary in almost 2 years. I'd argue I've been resetting this system for most of those 2 years, and that "resetting" means "depleting it of linoleic acid" which will take me another 2-6 years to finish.
Consciously reducing my caloric intake seems counter productive, and I see no reason to do it. So far, it has not been necessary.
2 gallons of water seems excessive. Is that included in your coffee intake or separate?
I think this is everything, including food, cream, coffee, and so on. I don't think I actually drink that much. It might also be that this is all the "water turnaround" in the body, not pure water intake.