"I literally can't lose weight, please help me"
Hello everyone, welcome back to the podcast. Today's podcast topic is an interesting one. So I came across this post online on reddit and it said I literally can't lose weight, please help me. I'm almost three hundred pounds, five foot four. I do cardio every day.
Speaker 1:I lift weights four times a week for at least an hour but normally I go for two hours. I have cut back on carbs and I primarily eat protein and veggies, about 1,600 calories a day. I track my food and exercise a lot. I even weigh my food, drinking water, no candy, no soda, the only medication was Adderall, which should help me lose weight. I don't have high blood sugar, Been on metformin to also help with weight loss drug, going to gain 20 more pounds.
Speaker 1:Okay, comments, seven ninety six comments on this post and I find it so crazy how people can give advice when it's completely wrong. So let's go through some of these comments and then the answer to her problem is revealed, I'll explain, which is one of the reasons we do something very specific in the app that other apps don't do. So this person comments, No one ever loses weight by counting calories. Just don't eat. And when you eat avoid carbs.
Speaker 1:You can eat up to 5,000 calories a day as long as you only eat once in twenty four hours to make your insulin levels low. This comment is unbelievable in many cases. So first of all, let's say no one ever loses weight by counting calories. They then say you can eat up to 5,000 calories in twenty four hours and lose weight. So they have counted calories there.
Speaker 1:The second thing is people confuse calories. Okay. Calories is a unit of measurement. Like what this measuring is energy. You are eating energy okay.
Speaker 1:Nutrients are providing you energy. Think of it this way, you can't be annoyed at the unit of measurement, you can't be annoyed at liters and milliliters, You can't go to the shop or go to the petrol station and go, oh my god I hate litres so much. Why are litres so problematic? I don't believe in litres. You don't have to believe in litres but litres is helping you put the right amount of energy into your car for you to have a certain amount of miles per gallon of energy.
Speaker 1:Do know I mean? That's how it's worked out. People are like, they hate calories. They think calories is a thing. Liters isn't really a thing like do know I mean?
Speaker 1:It's a measurement yes but the thing inside, the energy. Does that make sense? So there's a lot of people being really concerned and hate calories and they just don't understand what the hell it is. Says you, 5,000 calories in one day as long as your insulin levels are low. Right, there is this theory called the carb, the insulin model of obesity and it's been debunked many times.
Speaker 1:It's been popularised in books, people promote it because they think it sounds right. There's been many studies that prove that you can lose fat even when you spike your insulin throughout the day. So there's a difference between your body using fat as energy and then using carbs as energy and it goes back and forth all day, you lose fat, you lose carbs, you lose fat, you lose carbs. That's different to total fat burn through the day. Okay, just because when insulin rises fat burning turns off doesn't mean you stop burning fat in totality because your insulin level isn't raised every single minute of every hour of the day.
Speaker 1:It raises and goes down, raises go down. But what matters more is whether you have given your body enough energy that day and if you haven't it's gonna have to chop in to the storage of energy it has which is in the fat cells. So these people are misguided but again this person's getting this advice. Other people are saying, your cortisol is spiked, you need to stop exercising. Well I mean cortisol hormone can cause fluctuations in water retention.
Speaker 1:It can also cause you to sometimes overeat or get really hungry if it's spiked for a long period of time, but it doesn't directly cause fat to just pop out of nowhere. Okay there's one here, don't see a comment about the link between obesity and trauma. There actually is a link between obesity and trauma. I covered that on the podcast. Let's have a look at the other ones.
Speaker 1:Please count your college correctly, you're probably overestimating. Likely part of it. A lot of people are saying about taking different drugs. A lot more drugs. One word, keto.
Speaker 1:No. How's about nobody? Who wants to live that lifestyle? Let me tell you, I don't. Most of you listening don't.
Speaker 1:Imagine that, you can't Too restrictive, man. Intermittent fasting is a way. If it helps you get into a deficit, do it. Nothing magical about it. Many and many studies on that now.
Speaker 1:Food sensitivities. Jesus. No, it's not that. Have you tried fasting? Intermittent fasting.
Speaker 1:Sounds hormonal to me. Look, hormones play a role and if you can Hormones will play a role in terms of like fat storage, know that's why men and women store fats in different areas. It can play a role in how hungry you feel, it can play a role in how satisfied you feel for meals and stuff like that. Of course it has this like indirect impact on if you're gonna eat more food or if you're gonna move your body throughout the day, okay. But it doesn't outpower a deficit, it is impossible to do so.
Speaker 1:Hormones don't contain the calories, like your hormones will be up and down different things and they can impact how you feel, how you move, how you eat or how much you want to eat. For sure they have an impact and you can make it hard yourself. That's why when you do lose weight there's a few hormones that cause your hunger to go up because your body wants to eat more calories, eat more energy I should say, be more specific. So there is that fact and hormones can make it hard. When it comes to satiety for meals, if you're overweight, for sure if you're obese, your appetite regulation system is for sure dysregulated.
Speaker 1:So when you start eating food, it doesn't really feel full, you don't feel full from it or it takes a while for you to feel full from food or you do feel full from food but it doesn't last long. It doesn't last a long time, so you want to you have a push to eat again. And this is where these GLP-one drugs come in, they essentially give you a chance to quiet down this food noise they call it and give you a chance to implement lifestyle interventions, lifestyle changes. You don't take GLP-one drugs just to take it and think it's going to magically melt fat, it doesn't work that way. It reduces your appetite and it can also reduce your food noise or food thoughts and stuff like that and give you the chance to take control of your life.
Speaker 1:So of course that works and these things work that way, but the mechanism of how they work is you eat less food, you get into a deficit and you lose fat. That's always the mechanism that ends up being the end influence. Now I said I was gonna tell you actually what this poster figured out. So what was happening was so she was saying she was eating 1,006. Let's just assume she's eating 2,000 or 2,200.
Speaker 1:What she was doing was her wearable was telling her that she was burning like 2,000 calories a day. So what she was doing was she was having her calorie target to 2,000 and then the energy she burned, she was eating that as well. So she was likely eating 4,000 calories just off that and even more and it makes sense why to be three hundred pounds you're gonna have to be consuming a decent amount of calories probably. I mean, you're probably looking at 4,000 calories a day to kind of maintain that type of weight. This is why, like I said, she was doing cardio every day, weightlifting four times a week for at least an hour.
Speaker 1:So her wearable was And because she weighed three hundred pounds, the wearable would take under count and be like, wow, you're burning a lot of calories every day because you're doing the cardio and the weight lifting and it would well overestimated the calories she burned from these sessions and she would have seen it because in these apps like MyFitnessPal, all of them, they all I don't know why they do it. They give you these calories back, you eat them back. They all do this mistake, it's like they've just copied each other and gone yeah yeah well they did that, haven't actually looked though. That's not what the research says that happens. And we know that wearables are way off in terms of calories, terms of estimation.
Speaker 1:So why are we not Not only are they just taking in calories burned as just the definitive factor number, they're not even like adjusting it down. It would actually help if they just said, you know what, these overestimate the loss, we're gonna half the calories burned on exercise. The aware will say we're just gonna half it just to be trying to be safe side, even then it still will be overestimated probably. They don't even do that. They just say, hey, you can eat 2,000 calories today but you've also burned 18 or you've burned 900, you've burned 700, you've burned 1,000, you can eat that back now.
Speaker 1:No, that's not how it works because you're then consuming way more energy than you've actually burned that day from any exercise. I've mentioned many studies in the past. Energy compensation. If you do workouts, there was a study, they told them to burn and they literally used the best machinery possible to ensure they were burning 1,500 calories from exercise. They used medical grade stuff, okay, not just these wearables.
Speaker 1:So they made sure the group burned 1,500 calories a week from exercise and another group burned 3,000 calories. The net calories burned over the week was less than 500. So you compensated a thousand calories. Your body went, workout was tough, let's down regulate a bit. Let's move less.
Speaker 1:Let's reduce some things. We burned a lot of energy. Let's come down. So the net burn is never what you've actually burned in the exercise. So if you go from that number, 1,005 actually net just under 500, I mean that's like 97 calories a day.
Speaker 1:It works out as. But what people are doing is they're eating and that's from the medical if you think about this now, that's from a medical equipment 1,005. A Apple watch or any of these wearables might have claimed you've burned 3,000, maybe 4,000. Let's go with 4,000. So instead of 1,005, the actual, you've been 4,000 according to these wearables.
Speaker 1:Now your actual net burn was 500. It's just shy of 500, but let's call it five And let's say your watcher said you burned 4,000. That's a 3,500 calorie difference. A lot of people would have consumed those calories because they think they've burned it off and they can eat it. Can you see where it's going wrong?
Speaker 1:That's a pound, equivalent to a pound of fat and energy. So people who are like, Oh, I can't Why am I not eating back my calories from Don't do it. It's foolish. The research is too clear now. It's like, you're a fool to do that.
Speaker 1:You're a fool to do it. Your maintenance calories are figured out by looking at your weight trend, your energy intake, we look at your protein and steps, your activity, we look at those factors and if your weight is stable for a certain amount of time, you are at maintenance. Whatever you're doing, your exercise, your movement, your general day to day movement and your energy in, they are matching. Right? That's the fact.
Speaker 1:You're at maintenance. That's the way to figure it out. And then you have to decide if you're going to be a bit more active, more steps. Because if you do more steps, it doesn't have the energy compensation element. If you burn 500 calories in steps, your body's not compensating down because the steps is something we do day to day.
Speaker 1:It's not something that is like overloading on the body for it to compensate. So steps is why steps is powerful. So yeah, don't be fooled. Don't fall into this trap in this poor seven ninety comments. Most of them are way off, way wrong.
Speaker 1:I figured out the problem was that and you know what, most of the apps normalize that and it's one of the problems they have and I just don't know why they don't change it. Well, have a theory why they don't change it. The theory why they don't change it is when so building PowerPal for example. Focused on calories, protein, and steps, right. Ask how many workers you do a week and then we baked in the energy compensation stuff and we're like, they're doing about three workouts a week, weight training, we can assume like literally 50 calories extra a day if that, you know nothing.
Speaker 1:But their watches would give them a much different number so we don't want to pull that stuff in. Now what happens is you build an app with what the fundamentals are and remove the noise and as you get more users who are coming from other apps they tend to bring their viewpoint from the other apps in and they say, Why don't you have this? We're gonna leave. This sucks. And other people read the comment and go, Yeah, why don't you bring calories burned from exercise in?
Speaker 1:I want that, this is terrible app. And there's like an ambush on these certain topics and because they're used to it in other apps they want it here. And you really have to be steadfast and be like, no no, there's reasons behind this if you just give us a moment to explain but you know what they run off and they don't wanna know and then they're gonna leave one star comments on Apple reviews and stuff and you have to be like wow you know this really is a problem because the noise sometimes is loud on these things and other apps just they cave to the pressure and they say do you know what, we'll just give them what they want. But just because this is what they want doesn't mean it's what's right, Our behaviours are modelled around kind of the fundamental building blocks of the original apps. So like the way we work with technology today is an offshoot from the start, does that make sense?
Speaker 1:So the barcode scanning, the searching of databases, the eating calories back, all of these things come from the original apps that did them and because of the apps built upon those they didn't really change those things, do know I mean? The most crazy example of this is that the I have to verify this because I read it a long time ago but the train tracks, the width of a train track is that width because that's the width of a horse and carriage. And the horse and carriage width is based on the width of like the Roman roads when they had those like slits in the sides, which is based on something else. So you can essentially track back the width of the trains today is linked back all the way to the Romans building roads based on the width of a horse and carriage and because it's how we've always done things that's width, it's kind of led to how to train tracks with that. That's kind of what this guy was saying when he was doing all this, he did like a big post about it.
Speaker 1:I'll have to verify that but I think it's true. That's just an example you know, it's like we don't even think about why we do things today but it really is just coming from the origin and just no one has the guts to change it because it's maybe a bit too disruptive. So there's a few things we do have to change and the reasons to change are for your own benefit, whether you want to take it on or not it's up to you but don't be like this poster on Reddit who figured out a bit too late maybe after all those comments what was going on, but glad they've actually solved it right now. So yeah, cautionary tale I think, but have a good day guys, back tomorrow.
