Comment by tails4e
1 year ago
I've always been curious about my own metabolism. When I was a teenaeger / in university I ate pretty badly. Chocolate bars every day after lunch, loads of carbs, not to mention alcohol, etc etc. I was rail thin. I once got a body fat assesment when I joined a gym (I did no exercise at all and this was a brief attempt to get buff) and the person doing the test was shocked and couldn't pinch anything to measure. I had no fat. This lasted till I was 25 where seemingly overnight I then had to watch what I eat or I started to gain fat. So what explains this seeming inability to gain weight no matter what I ate, and in my mid twenties having a more normal response to junk food?
How much "passive activity" were we doing back in the day?
So as a teenager, I was carrying 5-10kg of books and walking back and forth between classes every 40 mins.
As an undergrad I was travelling across campus multiple times a day, spent hours on my feet in labs, did multiple heavy grocery shuttles and also spent a lot of time partying.
In my first job, I was still getting up 5-6 times a day for meetings and had a decent walk/cycle built into the commute. but in my first remote job, I could be sat in the same spot for 8-10 hours without moving. And because I wasn't drinking water I wouldn't need to go to the bathroom... /facepalm I'd also be so engrossed that sometimes I'd forget to turn on the lights...
So even though I do more than an hour of intense exercise a day, my activity outside of those exercise hours has cratered from when I was a teenager and was constantly running around.
So as a teenager, I was carrying 5-10kg of books and walking back and forth between classes every 40 mins.
As an undergrad I was travelling across campus multiple times a day, spent hours on my feet in labs, did multiple heavy grocery shuttles and also spent a lot of time partying.
In my first job, I could be sat in the same spot for 8-10 hours without moving.
A year in to my first job I had added 15kg (~30lbs ~2stone) - while consuming way less food and alcohol than my university days.
I actually lost weight upon entering college because my campus was so large that my physical activity increased from when I was in high school.
I understand that as a healthy body sustains lifestyle damage, the effects begin to stack up, and then the effects become more noticeable, but it's not age based because it's reversible.
So look to your unhealthy lifestyle's accumulated effects in your body, atherosclerosis, obesity, pre-diabetes, hypertension, specific nutritional deficiencies, physiological mental health... And make a robust effort to improve your lifestyle, and you'll start to feel like you did, 10, 20 years ago.
Speaking from personal experience, I'm 50ish and after getting a health scare which triggered me into aggressive corrective action a few years back, I've overcorrected. My allergies have ameliorated back to old levels, I can drink beer again, and I can recover from a night out like I used to be able to in my 20's, I'm able to maintain a serious athletic schedule. Obviously most of the time I now eat really well, but my body's youthful tolerance to harm has been recovered.
Would love to hear what sort of things you did as part of your intervention?
Def noticing amongst my friends a few new allergies/intolerences manifesting as we get older
For some context am reasonably healthy and actually had to increase my sodium intake because I had over corrected on reducing salt consumption and was getting hyponatremic after training
A good story is Rich Roll’s Finding Ultra. Or a good technical read on nutrition is Julia Ross’s The Mood Cure. But I read about 50 non fiction books cover to cover each year, and learning about your health is a big area, made harder by the reality that for every good book on the topic there are 19 others that are bad. There are lots of bad fads and actors, and they can include pill pushing doctors, sadly. The only real way to figure out how to get healthy is to experiment until you succeed at it. I guess one piece of specific advice I’d give, is if you have long term high cholesterol, and high blood pressure, take your doctor’s advice and take a statin if they recommend it. I think that was a huge boost. Also, when you want online advice on health, add ‘site:.gov’ to your search so that you get good sources and not health blogs.
Ultimately I think you’ve got to come up with a good model of your physiology based on uncontroversial science. So in the case of your training, you’d figure out you are draining yourself of more than sodium chloride but rather the broad spectrum of minerals that you typically sweat out, so your ‘salt intake’ is a multi mineral supplement and not actual salt. Which is what I imagine you figured out.
In addition to activity levels, you probably just weren't eating that much food. It was similar for me when I was a teenager: some days I would binge on a ton of junk food, but other days I would forget to eat breakfast, and the latter happened often enough that I stayed skinny.
No I legit ate way much much more in my 20s. I'm not misremembering. I ate more
I had to supplement with calorie shakes for workout guys in my 20's, just to maintain weight. I ate trash, and a shit load of it. And that's not considering the amazing levels of calories I would've consumed from alcohol.
Same activity level now as then. But now if I think too hard about a candy bar I gain weight that never goes away.
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>I'm not misremembering
It's the easiest explanation. As a gym bro that regularly cycles weight, it's is remarkably easy over/under estimate intake just going off recollection. I always think I'm dialed in until I write things down (I'm almost always eating way fewer calories than I think).
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I was rake thin until I started lifting weights with a buddy of mine at university. However it wasn't until I started GOMAD that I noticed any muscle and weight gain.
Before that I was eating crap. Lots of things that I that were high in calories but not enough of them throughout the day to exceed my metabolism or get close to the amount of protein I needed.
I think if you could go back in time and count the calories you probably were eating as much as you think.
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Yeah, but likely you walked more. Cycled more. Ran more. Stuff like that.
activity levels almost certainly. uni it's not impossible you were walking over 12k steps a day. that's 3-400 calories over the average american's daily steps of 4000.
That's also completely canceled out by enjoying a single 32oz soda. Walking a lot and having a bad diet rarely even each other out. And it's so easy to cancel it out I don't think most people realize. A brisk 2km walk burns less calories than are consumed when eating two regular Oreos.
I wouldn’t be surprised if most thin people who claim to eat lots of junk food actually just eat a lot less regular food. In other words, they don’t eat many calories, but the calories they do eat are junk.
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Strava tells me I burned 3,3000 calories this morning on my (4 hour)100km bike ride. About the equivalent of drinking 2 cups of melted butter, or eating 50 pounds of lettuce. When I'm doing exercise like that regularly it's hard to eat enough.
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While this is certainly an argument for “how do I lose weight” the relevant part here is that the asker wondered why they started gaining weight, which makes a reduction in daily calorie burn relevant if caloric intake remained roughly consistent. That is a lot of ifs, naturally.
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32oz is a ton of soda tho.. Even when I was a teen at 6'4", 32oz of soda would be a sickening addition to a meal.
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If you think drinking a litre of soda is no big deal I would encourage you to rethink. 400 calories with no nutrition is a lot.
It is even worse than that. The conversion rate of activity to net calorie loss is not 1 to 1 . It can be zero or even negative, at least based on my own experience and other people. You see people on Reddit subs do 10k steps and tons of walking, hardly lose any weight. It's all about not overeating.
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As a student, I used a bus to get to school. As an adult, I walk by foot, more than an hour a day. Also, I didn't exercise in my youth, and I do now. Yet, it is now that I am fat.
I wonder about the same thing. I was a fat kid, but my best friend was so skinny. We would walk down town and he would stop several times to stuff chocolate bars in his mouth, and then buy two McDonald's meals. I would do none of this and our physical exercise was the same.
Then we went away to University and in his mid-20s the poor guy suddenly, almost overnight, put on a ton of weight.
25 is about the age you’ve worked a year two after an undergrad. More money means more desk work and more access (speaking funds) to eat out
I had a similar trajectory. The transition from one to the other was a long course of antibiotics.