Can someone be obese without overeating?

Discussion in 'Health and Fitness' started by CrowZer0, May 12, 2016.

  1. CrowZer0

    CrowZer0 Assume formlessness.

    "What medical conditions cause people to gain adipose tissue/increase body fat ratio when they are in a caloric deficit. How do these conditions reconfigure a person's metabolic system, and how prevalent are these conditions?" (TY Ero)

    I keep hearing excuses from fat people that they have a thyroid problem or glandular problem or other medical problem and even if they ate only 500 calories a day they would still be fat. I understand different metabolisms but find this a little hard to believe.

    If your body is using 2000 calories a day and you only claim to be taking 1500 and Still getting fat can someone please explain where this magical fat is coming from.

    Because every time someone mentions medical. Issues for being fat I just think to myself liar, deluded, mentally weak and or stupid.

    Am I wrong? Or are there. Medical conditions out there where someone would be fat no matter what they ate?
     
    Last edited: May 13, 2016
  2. PointyShinyBurn

    PointyShinyBurn Valued Member

    There are some conditions like that, however they're pretty rare.

    Your judgmental attitude doesn't help anyone, though. Presumably you exist in a perfect state of rational clarity about everything wrong in your life?
     
    Last edited: May 12, 2016
  3. philosoraptor

    philosoraptor carnivore in a top hat Supporter

    Interestingly, there was a study recently that found that concurrent with the rise in obesity of human beings, we are seeing a rise in obesity of wild, laboratory and zoo animals. The rise in obesity of wild animals could be due to access to human foodstuffs, but what would explain the rise in obesity of animals whose food is controlled absolutely for calorie content and nutrition?

    http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/11/19/rspb.2010.1890

    My favored explanation has to do with endocrine disruptors - chemicals that mimic the body's natural hormones that control things like sex determination, reproductive activity, fight or flight responses and how we store and expend energy.
     
  4. Dean Winchester

    Dean Winchester Valued Member

    I've known people with thyroid problems and their weight has been to the extremes, depending on what type of thyroid problem they have. The same for MS.

    Personally I've had my weight balloon due to meds, that's a right pain.

    Also look at things like Prader Willi Syndrome, with that obesity can be a problem unless strict calorie control is in place.
     
  5. CrowZer0

    CrowZer0 Assume formlessness.

    What sort of conditions?
    I'm not sure if I'm judgemental just honest and more vocal about my thoughts. I never claimed to help anyone, my thoughts also don't harm anyone.
     
  6. CrowZer0

    CrowZer0 Assume formlessness.

    I understand their weight has been to the extreme due to thyroid or glandular problems, what I'm trying to figure out is is this because of overeating or undereating due the medical issue, or because even if they took in 1000 calories a day they would still get fatter and fatter.

    I have heard of a lot of meds that hugely increase appetite and slow metabolism while retaining A LOT more water so people baloon up.

    But still does not answer my question of, is it still a case of calories in vs calories out or something else? When someone says "medical condition".
     
  7. Dean Winchester

    Dean Winchester Valued Member

    As far as the Thyroid goes, iirc, the hormones it produces are linked to regulation of the metabolism.

    As far as meds go yeah some do simply increase appetite but couple that with a condition that leaves you house bound or in someway unable to do any real exercise then you will get weight gain.

    Something like risperdone can cause weight gain rather quickly, it messes with your prolactin levels.

    I'm not a medical professional, I've just had the bad luck to have to deal with various meds.
     
  8. Smitfire

    Smitfire Cactus Schlong

    My missus has low thyroid (which came on after pregnancy) and struggles with weight regulation as a result.
    It can cause obesity through several routes. It drops metabolic rate so the same amount of food gets stored rather than burnt because the body is just ticking over rather than motoring. It also causes low energy and lethargy which saps motivation and ability to stay active. And this lack of energy isn't laziness. The bodily systems just aren't firing on all cylinders.
    That said a thyroid condition needs to be diagnosed properly (my wife's only coming to light through being diagnosed with depression) and I think many people cover up being inactive and overweight with some sort of self diagnosis of it's my thyroid.
     
  9. Dead_pool

    Dead_pool Spes mea in nihil Deus MAP 2017 Moi Award

    Yes meds and uncontrolled conditions can really effect the base line metabolic rate, as well as the ability to exercise, and the appetite.

    Most overly judgemental people tend to delude themselves that its all willpower, its not, but it is a part of it.
     
  10. Dean Winchester

    Dean Winchester Valued Member

    I can relate to the lack of energy.

    I have genetic haemochromatosis and all the will in the world won't work at times.

    On the plus side I often have a nice tan from it. :D
     
  11. philosoraptor

    philosoraptor carnivore in a top hat Supporter

    The question isn't whether people can become obese by violating thermodynamics it's "What causes some people to be hungrier than others and store more food in the form of fat?" Like, yeah, your body can get so metabolically screwed that it won't process weight gain like another body. Anyone who thinks it's a matter of willpower should see how long they can fight their physiological desire to breathe.
     
  12. CrowZer0

    CrowZer0 Assume formlessness.

    Again still not answering my question.

    I get medical conditions can effect the BMR, I get that someone with Thyroid issues may still have the hunger and intake 2000 calories, but the slowing of their metabolism only actually uses say 1800, 1700 so this in turn = more fat.

    My question still is other than consuming more calories than one can burn, are there medical conditions that will make you fat even on a caloric deficit. Or is that as I believe impossible?
     
  13. CrowZer0

    CrowZer0 Assume formlessness.

    Sounds good but wrong.

    You need to breathe, most breaths are the same maybe changed by location and length.

    Willpower over calories and hunger isn;t the same thing. You could eat yto your hearts content 5-10 bowls of green leaf salad, and be full. Or you could eat 1 Large pizza. Where eating the 10 bowls of salad is less or around the same as one slice of pizza.

    That is willpower. There isn't a physiological desire to eat pizza the same as breathing, to satiate hunger yes.
     
  14. Dead_pool

    Dead_pool Spes mea in nihil Deus MAP 2017 Moi Award

    The metabolism works vis homeostasis, if you eat less calories, your metabolism gets turned even lower.

    Like everything, the answer is a little bit more complicated then it first seems.

    Think of it like panic attacks, why dont peoole just breathe less...
     
  15. philosoraptor

    philosoraptor carnivore in a top hat Supporter

    Physiological drives cause you to do both, heck, even willpower itself is a physiological thing.

    Nope, sorry you're wrong. We do have physiological urges to consume carbs, fats, proteins, even micronutrients that are separate and distinct. Go low carb for a while, tell me how sweet an onion tastes. Now do the same thing two hours after eating ice cream. People get endorphin spikes from certain foods and do not get them from others. There's a real illusion that we have conscious will and conscious control over our decisions, but at the end of the day we're basically doing what we're programmed to and have a super neato brain that convinces itself that it was responsible.
     
    Last edited: May 12, 2016
  16. philosoraptor

    philosoraptor carnivore in a top hat Supporter

    Here's a good paper:
    http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1400613

    "In the 1950s, for instance, the work of Rockefeller University's Jules Hirsch showed that for obese people, long-term weight loss is a lifelong struggle. Hirsch found that although obese subjects could shed a substantial amount of weight through drastic calorie restriction, their metabolic rates would dip in response to calorie reductions. This effect meant, for example, that if an obese woman dropped down from 200 lb to 130 lb, she would have to consume fewer calories to remain at 130 lb than would a 130-lb counterpart whose weight had always held steady. The previously obese woman, then, required more “willpower” to maintain her reduced weight than someone who had never been obese. Decades later, in 1995, Hirsch and his former Rockefeller colleagues Rudolph Leibel and Michael Rosenbaum observed that just as the metabolism of subjects who had lost 10% of their body weight decelerated, the metabolism of those who had gained 10% of their body weight revved up (1995). These findings suggested that the body has built-in mechanisms that resist attempts to resize it for the long term."

    Confirming Dead Pool's point.

    "In the 1960s, prisoner feeding experiments by University of Vermont physician–researcher Ethan Sims also pointed toward metabolic homeostasis. In 1967, Sims fed inmates at the Vermont State Prison upwards of 10,000 kcal per day. Over 200 days on this overfeeding regimen, 20 inmates gained an average of 20 to 25 lb.3 The metabolic rates of these previously normal-weight subjects sped up in response to their increased caloric consumption, as if to defend their initial, lower weights. The men had difficulty maintaining weight gain, and most shed all the weight they had gained relatively easily once their calorie intake returned to normal. The exceptions were two inmates who gained weight swiftly and effortlessly but then struggled to lose that weight even after caloric consumption was reduced. That both these men had family histories of obesity added empirical support to the notion that overweight could be heritable."

    And finally the twin study:

    "In 1986, the University of Pennsylvania's Albert Stunkard offered the most compelling evidence yet that one's weight could be largely determined by one's parentage (1986). Stunkard and colleagues used a Danish adoption registry of 540 adults, the majority of whom had been adopted by the age of 1 between 1927 and 1947. The adoption records included the heights and weights of the adoptees' biologic and adoptive parents. Stunkard et al. used those data to compare the body-mass indexes of both sets of parents with those of the adoptees, most of whom had reached middle age by the time of their study. They found that, despite having shared an environment with their adoptive parents, the adoptees' body-mass indexes approximated those of their biologic parents rather than their adoptive parents. Accordingly, most adoptees inherited their biologic parents' obesity: four fifths of those with two obese biologic parents were obese, as compared with one seventh of those with normal-weight biologic parents.

    Four years later, Stunkard and another team of researchers used another twin registry, this time from Sweden, to find more support for the genetics of weight regulation (1990b). The Swedish twin registry included 247 pairs of identical twins — 154 pairs that had been raised together and 93 pairs that had been adopted by different parents. The identical twins, it turned out, had virtually the same weight regardless of whether they had grown up together or separately. As reported in another article in the same issue of the Journal, Claude Bouchard and colleagues at Laval University in Quebec had followed the effects of overfeeding on 12 pairs of adult, male identical twins over a period of 100 days (1990a). All the twins consumed the same number of calories — a total of 84,000 excess kilocalories over the course of the experiment. The subjects' resulting weight gain ranged from 4.3 kg to 13.3 kg, with considerable variation in body-fat percentage, fat mass, fat distribution, and deposition of both subcutaneous and visceral fat among the pairs of twins. But although the responses to overfeeding varied widely among the twin pairs, within each pair of twins there was little difference in weight gain and even less difference in body-fat distribution and visceral-fat accumulation."

    It matters more to obesity how your body operates than it does how you are raised. There's more going on here.
     
  17. Ero-Sennin

    Ero-Sennin Well-Known Member Supporter

    There are so many factors missing in this discussion, as well as the scientific data being presented.

    For the science, no data on what the observed were eating. What you eat contributes tremendously to your metabolic rate, if your body believes it's full or still hungry, what it breaks down for energy, etc.. Where's the data representing activity levels? Muscle mass? Height even?
     
  18. philosoraptor

    philosoraptor carnivore in a top hat Supporter

    Yeah, I think that all of those could explain the variation within those sample groups, but I don't think any of them can account for the variation between the sample groups. If what we're seeing is that 1) adopted children's weights more closely resemble their biological parents' and 2) identical twins' weight is tightly correlated despite different circumstances. I can't think of anything explaining that besides genetics… Maybe some gene x environment interaction.
     
  19. Ero-Sennin

    Ero-Sennin Well-Known Member Supporter


    For the people who get a little antsy over words not considered, I feel like this should be rephrased since it's a good question.

    "What medical conditions cause people to gain adipose tissue/increase body fat ratio when they are in a caloric deficit. How do these conditions reconfigure a person's metabolic system, and how prevalent are these conditions?"
     
  20. philosoraptor

    philosoraptor carnivore in a top hat Supporter

    Well articulated! :golf clap:
     

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