As you gain weight, your base metabolic rate also increases. Having fat means you inherently burn more calories, even if you don’t exercise any more.
Take one person, say they eat 2000 calories to maintain bodyweight. If they start eating 2500 calories a day, they won’t gain 1lb of fat a week forever. As they gain fat, their body naturally burns more calories due to the increased body weight, and eventually a stable weight (higher than their original weight) will be reached.
So yeah if you’re eating 500 calories above your metabolic weight, you’ll theoretically gain weight forever. But in this case your metabolic rate is rising over time, so you would be eating more and more calories per day.
Fat does not raise your metabolism by a lot (relatively), and tiny changes in diet lead to massive swings in the equilibrium implied by basal metabolic rate formulas. In fact, some formulas do not include weight due to body fat. If you think about it, that fact touches on the idea that your natural weight is being maintained by another body system, one related to GLP-1.
By the way... if humans had to count calories to not accidentally starve or die from overeating, we would not have made it long enough as a species to invent a scientific way to do that. Even the diets of obese or overweight individuals are being naturally regulated, because anyone could physically eat even more.
The potential for overeating chronically has not been possible for most people, in most societies, throughout most of human history. Our current caloric abundance being available to literally everyone in Western society is something unique to the past century.
If you eat 1% fewer calories than you burn every day you will die. You will also die if you eat 1% more calories than you burn every day. Is it possible, really, to suggest that the availability of calories was 100% of the daily requirement of our ancestors, and not 99%, or 101%? That is a level of accident that exceeds belief.
It is incredible to think this precise balance could be maintained by anything other than a closed loop of biological control. How would the wheat on a medieval farm know how much to grow each season? If it was off by 1% consistently, everyone would have died... unless they had a mechanism for satiation.
How do you think our microbial ancestors maintained internal salinity, through the limited availability of salt in the ancient ocean?
You will also die if you eat precisely the amount of calories you burn every day.
There exists something called a "feedback loop", something common in biology. You would probably find it interesting, you should look it up.
Basically, it means that if you try to chronically eat, say, 1% more calories than are burned, your body will try to burn more calories to compensate.
I'm not sure I grasp the rest of your comment, could you try again to explain? The wheat farm your ancestors worked did not provide the excess of cheap calories available to the present day American.
That is the intended conclusion of my post, that body fat is obviously regulated biologically, and suggestions that changes in obesity rates are due to the increased availability of food (implying that it was regulated by some sort of precise cycle of starvation in the past) or individual choices (implying that most people are measuring portions and keeping a running tally) are in conflict with that.
In reality there were times of excess and times of shortages far more often in past times. In times where there were plenty of items that didn't last you over consumed. By late winter you were getting lean.
>If it was off by 1% consistently, everyone would have died...
You do realize that starvation was a massive killer in the past. Everyone didn't die, but the young, the old, and the weak sure did.
It ends up being the opposite. Rather than the body having a satiation response, it controls the metabolism.
If you've ever fasted, you've experienced this. You just don't have the energy to do much other than sit around when you are hungry.
Ancient societies realized this, it's why they'd give out calorie dense meals to their farm labor. For a serf in England, harvest time was often met with a very calorie dense meal. For roman soldiers, they had a diet of meats and cheeses.
I'd also point out that you don't need to have exactly 100% daily calorie intake. You can go a week with just 99% and catch up with 101% the next week just fine.
It's not necessarily about BMR - if you maintain a similar activity level as you gain weight, you consume more active calories as well, in almost every activity, particularly the most common ones such as walking.
This hits on something that seems to get lost in most of these "obese people are lazy fat slobs" circle jerks. A typical American gains 1 or 2 pounds per year as they age. This is not a candy problem, or a binge eating problem, this is way more subtle than that.
Let's take a pound of fat as 3500 calories. To gain one pound in a year is an average of 9.59 excess calories per day. Or about 0.5% of the typical total daily intake.
Yeah, managing a system within 0.5% is subtle.
Especially when biologically and psychologically the pressure is towards over consuming rather than under. If you consistently eat a deficit you will very obviously feel hungry. If you consistently eat a small excess the effects that would lead you to regulate are much more... subtle.
Meanwhile, tracking consumption involves error bars that span a factor of 2. Go figure out how many calories are in an avocado. Is that per gram figure amortized for the weight of the pit, or is this just for the flesh?
Counting calories precisely was invented by the processed food industry.
Judging from the downvotes my observation got, you're not the only person who skipped math class. I couldn't say it any better than the comment below this one that already replied to you. 10 calories a day, expressed in candy, is two M&Ms.
Bose's QC/QC Ultra lines continue to receive praise for comfort, durability, sound quality, noise cancellation, etc. They make pretty great consumer quality headphones.
Until quite recently, they were widely one of if not the most recommended wireless headphones. The new Sennheiser's that come with a USB-C dongle might have finally stepped past what Bose has been delivering, but at a higher price.
I had the new QC Ultra and gave it away. The sound was mediocre at best and you can't turn NC off - a dealbreaker for me (no, passthru is not the same as off). Hope it helps someone make my mistake aa they are quite pricey.
Now if I could change the firmware to turn NC off, that would be something entirely different...
Is it auto-adjusted NC? I'm thinking of the Sony equivalents that reduce or increase the strength of the NC depending on the environment, but do not allow you to just choose the strength.
I love my QCII earbuds, comfort and noise cancellation blow the airpodpro3's out of the water. But sadly the new hearing aid features of the airpodpros are very handy to me, so I have both. I wear the QC2's when I'm at home alone, and the app3s when I'm out and about and expect to have to have some conversations. My ears aren't so bad yet that I need hearing aids, but they are bad enough that I'm forced to lean in more than I used to. Aging is the worst.
My wife normally isn’t one to splurge but after her Bose headphones died, we tried a couple other brands, returned them, and went with the QC-35 II despite them being more expensive. The “comfort” part is key, she’s on the spectrum and has a hard time with headphones irritating her, and these are hands down the most comfortable.
We also like the Bose soundbar as it has a mode that makes dialogue more intelligible on our TV.
My only experience is BMW EV, but my i4 aggressively prioritizes regeneration over using the brakes. It even has an energy meter that shows negative/positive energy flow. The positive flow is blue until the actual brakes engage where it changes to black. And this is in two pedal mode, one pedal driving is even more aggressive about regen.
I would not doubt I use my breaks 1/20th of the amount that our X5 or Silverado use theirs.
I have an Equinox EV and the brakes do not get used often. They did a great job with blending kinetic regeneration with friction activation, but you can still feel the difference when it kicks in.
They are active in reverse, to ensure that they are used and so that any rust gets cleared from the rotors. They also activate if you slam on the brakes or if the battery is at 100% charge and the kinetic energy can not be used.
I have about 12,000 miles on the car over the last year and the rotors and pads look the same as when I got them. The first annual inspection showed no measurable wear.
I've rented a Chevy Bolt before and in the normal drive mode (D) the brakes almost always get used in addition to light regen. In the single-peddle mode (P) regen is prioritized a lot more but passengers complained about not liking the feel versus standard braking.
68lbs over 9 months for me on Tirzepatide. No exercise (I should, but I'm traveling an absolute ton right so consistent exercise hasn't been prioritized).
What percentage of people reading HN do you think are actively contributing to WINE source? I'm going to go out on a limb and claim less than a tenth of a percent. And that, to me, is probably 10-100x too high of a threshold.
1lb of fat is roughly 3500 calories. Given 500 calories a day of excess, that would lead to 1lb of fat gain per week. 52 pound average gain per year?