Weight loss is sexy.
It's easy to attract someone's attention with a promise of a secret tip to lose weight, break a stall.
Yerba mate, weird illegal ephedrine decongestants, self starvation for weeks as a "therapeutic fast" (yes, this is now a thing), and of course there is the good old fashioned starvation water torture ELMM diets. The deal: attone for your gluttony and sloth. Wake earlier to corrupt essential, metabolic regulating, HPA inhibiting sleep, run on a knee destroying orthopedic surgery employing treadmill for no apparent reason. People have been known to actually get fatter, while trashing their bodies, training for "marathons". Why? Because it's all about neuroendocrine regulation, not CICO. Disrupting leptin and cortisol rhythms waking early so as to run from a threat that doesnt exist, while attempting to starve yourself, is more or less the recipe for ensuring you binge / over eat later. Trying to make yourself slim is rather like trying to evade death - you are fighting biology. You certainly can become slimmer, but not through punative "take control" self abusive behaviors. CICO is not an action - it is a result, a description of the disorder. CICO as advice is worse than meaningless, as it often inspires emotionally charged unscientific "corrective" actions which are long term obesigenic, if not frankly physically harmful. The weight loss highway is littered with the (fatter) corpses of valiant motivated "eat less move more" troopers. You will fail long term, unless what you are doing to be slimmer is a natural result of your physiology - sated, comfortable, eating naturally.
TBH, even if you could hypothetically "succeed" doing this, spending your life hungry, depleted, craving, tired and cold...who the fuck wants to live life eating 1400 calories and exercising just to be more aesthetically pleasing for others? What a miserable existence if I could ever think of one. Even your own body is not a home for you.
Some time ago i made the decision not to to do this to myself, at all. NEVER again prioritize some abstract concept of "thinness" over feeling well , enjoying food, eating naturally. My objective set to holistic wellbeing, I shall eat to satiety, eat plentifully, eat without neuroticism of wonderful deilcious things. The word "restriction" will just not be a thing at all that I do. I eat when i am hungry, eat so I am warm and contented, eat varied things for pleasure. Food will be as it is for all people , a part of my life not the primary focus in my life. I basically told CICO to go to fucking hell entirely. I allow my body to run the show.
Result of totally natural ad lib LC diet maintenance: Massive increases in happiness and wellbeing, while remaining healthfully slim.
I don't know what I weigh exactly, or my waist size. The clothes i've owned for years still fit, although from time to time they get a little snug and at other times, a little loose. On thanksgiving I stepped on a scale fully clothed and it said 128lbs. My weight has been between the mid 120s for years - all I do is eat like a normal person (mentally) and take some common sense supplements and leptin mimetic, insulin correcting medicines (metformin) . My body regulates my weight 100% naturally, as every persons body does.
CICO is basically a prescription to develop an eating disorder - which is why, every person who has dieted has an eating disorder, a dramatic struggle with eating normally. This develops after, not before, the self starvation is initiated. When I discovered the ketogenic diet at 20 yrs old, I felt I was cured. I had quite bad depression at the time which improved tremendously; from my baseline of inability to even function minimally. The diet allowed me to pick up the pieces of my life and begin functioning. I was quite well for one year, and as ignorant as I was then, still can recall remarking the placid peaceful calm of my mind. My life story at this time was "totally messed up, randomly found this diet which makes my pee purple, everything is getting better, even my brain, looks like I am cured".
At the time, Taubes and his articles and GCBC just was not a thing. mainstream health advice literally told people you would die of heart disease, renal failure, and will become brain damaged from glucose deficiency if you should follow it. As a 20 year old i literally thought i was harming myself with this diet in spite of all evidence it was quite good for me. I had episodes of palpitations in the summer, going to my GP was absolutely no help as they failed to educate me of basic electrolyte management. Instead, I was told to 'eat pasta, just not a lot" by a young physician. I look back at that experience now as a 34 year old registered nurse with almost 9 years experience in disbelief. How could a physician fail to educate a 20 year old on a weight loss diet of electrolyte management? ALL weight loss diets have the potential to lower insulin, waste electrolytes, coupled with reduced intake of potassium/sodium yielding foods. While this is benign, even if anxiety provoking for most people, in a minority of people it can precipitate a dangerous arrhythmia. The incompetence is astounding. Some chicken broth and a little potassium chloride in sugar free lemonade would have resolved the distressing feelings of mild hypokalemia rapidly.
Due to ongoing fear/ ignorance I was killing myself eating a low carb diet, I began trying to "CICO" as is the well respected, evidenced based thing to do, you know.
Long story short i went down the tubes. I sorta went crazy again, emotional angst returned intensely, and also now had a new problem of compulsively being unable to eat. It's interesting to contemplate the transition: Calm, happy, uneventful, putting my life back together ---> mental wreck, unable to eat, miserable, depressed, reduced fat milk and cereal in a tiny bowl, wondering how this happened to me again.
Thats what CICO does, though. It forces you to starve yourself, and you go insane. It is the most sick, antithetical and unnatural thing in the world to stand before food and refuse to eat it, while weak and hungry. It always produces mental disorders, its never a positive, affirming thing. Perhaps i am more prone to deal with emotional issues, but EVERYONE goes crazy on it. No one walks out of that diet abuse war well adjusted and normal; even if the cost is as mild as never being able to eat normally without risk of binging. Every diet victim has, at least, a binge eating problem. Binge eating is not a disorder, it is the natural result of exposing yourself to self abusive self inflicted starvation. Every professional dieter is so fucked up , so trained to ignore their bodies, they cant even eat normally. This is just their lives, and they live that way even into their 50s and 60s, still obsessively starving , restricting, hoping they don't binge. How tragic and miserable.
I've become accustomed to the insanity of others. Plainly seeing for myself obesity is a result of body machinery working imperfectly, not a character flaw or behavioral disorder... it requires a measure of tolerance for constant insanity from others. With some amusement we can observe others who might attack Gary Taubes, while they themselves are victims of the same calorie balance hypothesis / ELMM advice he is trying to correct. For someone who has spent every day from their late teen years starving, binging out and spirling into rebound greater adiposit while cheerleading for ELMM? This is like an oxycontin addict getting a job defending opiate pushing. It makes no sense: you are a victim of this poison.
Some of us can garner greater insight and perspective, gain appreciation for the fact attempting to starve yourself ("restrict calories") usually ends poorly. As a worst case outcome you may end up frankly mentally ill, with an eating disorder; best case, you're a bit neurotic, obsessive, preoccupied, fighting your body all the time. In my early 20s, I fell down this rabbit hole, and at the bottom i was crazier, obsessive, totally unable to eat or feel normally anymore. I got out of it by returning to a proper corrective diet and honoring my body vs trying to control it.
You cannot control your body.
Eventually it controls you.
CICO / ELMM is almost like a religious myth; its proportions are illogical, but we have faith in its righteousness to save us. Restrict the food on your plate, feel hunger, weakness, numbing hollow coldness, lack of energy. As hunger grows, you musnt binge; you must somehow eat "moderately" while your primitive brain yearns for food. Oh, and dont starve TOO much; if others view your habits to be extreme, your body too wan and gaunt, guess what? You've fucked up. As obsessive ritualistic thoughts and compulsions and fears tinged with dopamine highs drive you, you have failed again.
Why are you so weak and undisciplined, that you cannot eat moderately ? We've been so good to lay out this common sense protocol, to eat less and move more, to eat all things in moderation, and you cant do it. With your hunger, your failure of your body to produce energy on a meager intake, binging behaviors, or the obsessive ritualistic behavior even when doing it correctly... success is impossible.
This thing , the LIE that we can control our bodies is like a distorted looking glass, perceptual vortex. You are thrust into it by society and its expectations; even well meaning medical professionals mindlessly advise us to 'eat less and move more". The idea we can "take control" and eat less/ move more and have a positive happy healthful result is unscientific nonsense. A well functioning biological machine eats, and moves, as is necessary. YOU are not in control, your brain and its hormonal regulation is in control. Eating and moving are products of long term neuroendocrine regulation functions . Perhaps we take up a hobby and lose weight, or perhaps we eat a lot of a particularly delicious food if it is in front of us, but over the months and the years your weight , your flesh, is not an accident. It is actively regulated by your brain, through leptin. Leptin is profoundly influenced by numerous hormones, primarily insulin (hyperinsulinemia inducing leptin resistance) but also estrogen (thus post menopausal weight loss resistance) and numerous other factors. It is not an accident over the years my mass stays in the mid 120 ranges. This weight is now comfortable for my body, because I have elected a paradigm that dials my adipostat quite low. I can maintain this size, through no conscious effort.
In the summer, i developed a pokemon go addiction and dropped a little weight quickly.
In the fall, I moved less, and put it back on.
The shifts in my weight are always quite small, because my brain is regulating my fat mass. It may shift slightly up or down, as activity and food modulate leptin sensitivity : insulin levels. This means to say, when i start eating more and gaining, I do not gain ENDLESSLY; eventually the greater leptin signal from fat mass and hyperphagia trigger a compensatory action of movement, energy waste and decreased eating. Similarly, if I adopt a new athletic hobby, like the time i was walking several thousand kilometers playing pokemon go, i will definitely drop weight quickly - but soon I will experience rebound hunger, and that will taper off. My fat mass is being actively controlled by my brain dancing with hormonal signals, and I have dialed my adipostat to a low level through insulin suppression primarily. Maintaining consistently low insulin levels (fasting = 2) with mild postprandial jumps, my brain is leptin supersensitive, and tiny increases of leptin produce much more hypophagia and energy waste than they would in a hyperinsulinemic state. As stated, I use other interventions such as metformin (which I've written about as a weight loss maintenance tool if you are curious), as well as BAIBA (which I intend to write about soon).
The bottom line is, I do not control my body. I modify my hormonal, nervous system milieu, and my body simply is what it is. How am I thin? By controlling insulin, and by using supplemental interventions to boost leptin function directly or indirectly. If your approach to long term weight loss is to starve and move around, to fight yourself, you're probably not going to succeed and there is a good chance you'll harm yourself mentally.
Weight loss is meaningless; weight that is maintained without neuroticism , living naturally, is all that has value. Dialing down the adipostat so your weight settles at a lower zone is our real goal. Jimmy Moore can follow Jason Fung, starve himself for weeks, then binge it all back on vacation in a few days. This accomplishes nothing, and fighting your body does not work.
It's frustrating to me to witness others struggle, obsessively whittling their bodies, blowing sleep to hell, piling in coffee/stimulants always on some new diet in an attempt to be less contemptible. I wish I could imbue others with my perspective - albeit, hard earned through struggle. Happiness and wellbeing, being at peace with our body is the real goal. From a functional living and physical health perspective, reducing your adipostat is your REAL GOAL. If you aren't eating like a normal person, if your body is not directing you to fuel it properly, you are wasting your time at best, psychologically harming yourself at worst.
In the coming days i wish to write more of little things I've learned that have helped me maintain a lower weight effortlessly. I've obviously written a lot over the years, but I would like to more specifically focus not on lowering weight per se but driving the body's weight regulation to a lower level. For now, I just wish to write this broad message:
CICO is a meaningless statement, a description of the system flaw.
Eat less move more is harmful at worst, or useless advice at best.
The endocrine mechanics controlling our metabolism, eating behavior and weight regulation can be addressed by several low risk interventions, so we may actually acheive a naturally lower weight.
It is not hopeless, but hope lies in biological understanding, problems solving, reasonable thinking. This means turning away from the emotional religion of ELMM, "taking control" of your bad behavior and going on a diet. You wouldn't tell a broken car to take control and "start more, breakdown less". You shouldn't expect pathological progressive fat gain to have the same emotional nonsense solution, either.