Ignoramus5574 said:As for setpoints, how would one answer a simple question: what is my
"setpoint weight"?
I don't know if you can answer that for real. Genetically everyone is
different so no one can look at you and say. What did your grandma eat
during pregnancy? That seems to matter, as does what your mom ate. What
mutations do you have in systems we haven't even discovered yet? Are you
leptin resistant? Do you produce more ghrelin? Leptin was only
discovered in 1994. We know very little about how hunger works in a
human. What we do know says there are multiple overlapping systems to
keep us eating. Eating isn't optional.
Everyone has pretty much given up on people preventing obesity on their
own and there is a mad gold rush on to find new drugs. Though it isn't
easy. All the time they learn about new hormones and peptides, etc but
the body finds a way to adapt and still keep you eating.
Our bodies want us to eat so for a lot of people there's no natural
limit to the system. For a lot of us, if not most, listening to our body
is a big mistake.
Quoted message said:And if setpoint weight cannot be determined, then how is this concept
useful?
It's useful to understand the hunger you feel is truly friggin real.
It's not some freud made up [censored] in your mind. Your body is making you
hungry to get back up to a weight after you lose weight. Expecting
people to deny this hunger in the face of constant stimulation is
unreasonable. Your body is making you hungry when you are stressed, see
food, think about food, or smell food. Hunger is the 6th force of nature.
Quoted message said:There is good evidence that normally slim people (of which I am not
one), do have great difficulties gaining weight (google this newsgroup
for "vermont prisoner feeding"😉.
I suspect most of those people aren't interested in groups like this :-)
How they ever survived all those famines is anyones guess.
Quoted message said:I am not sure that there is as good evidence that fat people have such
a stable weight.
And from an evolution POV why would there be? When food is available you
need to eat it. If you are full that doesn't matter a bit. Clear the
full feeling, new food is comming in. New foods reset the hunger level
so we'll eat more foods and have a better chance of getting all our
nutrients. Makes sense, doesn't it?
When grog got a buck or gralinda got a big basket of tubers you need to
eat it. There is no fridge. You can go days without food so you need to
build up fat stores. Humans store fat and don't have fur so keeping our
tempterature stable takes constant calories. Your big brain needs a
constant supply of energy to work, as you do protein and other
nutrients. You are exercising all the time to get food anyway so there's
little risk of ever getting fat. Fat and sugar are rare and indicate
excellent food sources so your brain is addicted to them so you'll eat
them. Women at a low fat percentage won't get pregnant. Reproduction,
food, and weight are all tied together. Outlasting any sort of illness
requires energy reserves, which is why so many underweight elderly die.
There is zero reason at all to expect anything like a normal weight in
beings who lived in the environment humans grew up in. Searching for it
and hoping for it is cruel.
We weren't fat before simply because energy expenditure in the form of
exercise was directly linked to energy consumption. It took a lot of
work to get food. Now it doesn't. Plus the food that now is cheap and
available is exactly the type we are addicted to: fat and sugar. There
are no systems in our body saying get more exercise. Just the reverse.
Conserving energy was allways important.
So we now have to consciously balance our weight. Something that was
done naturally for us by our environment in the past. Is it any wonder
it is the hardest thing in the world for us to do?
