Poll of the Day > you guys know that movie supersize me

(+) Yeah! (+)

im gonna do the same thing but with whiskey

---

Whitest Kids You Know?

IronBornCorps posted...

Whitest Kids You Know?

yeah, rip Trevor Moore :(

---

i think the last person who tried that died

sorry i dont know whats wrong with me

---

i hope people make hilarious jokes about me when i die

---

I didn't see it but I did see Super-High Me

---

Superthighs Me

---

What a dumb fucking documentary that was

OhhhJa posted...

What a dumb fucking documentary that was

is eating really unhealthy food every day really that bad for you???

yeah that question could have been answered without the documentary but it was still very interesting

---

Morgan Spurlock is a total piece of shit


---

I will say that he made an impact I guess. They stopped asking if you wanted to super-size your meal after that

@Mead what did he do

---

Hes a douchebag in general in a lot of ways and then he tried to get positive attention by publicly volunteering that he is part of the problem when the MeToo movement started

that was shortly before it was revealed that he has had multiple sexual assault and rape allegations that he has played off as him simply having a Ronald McDonald kink

---

DirtBasedSoap posted...

is eating really unhealthy food every day really that bad for you???

yeah that question could have been answered without the documentary but it was still very interesting

I think the more egregious part is almost a total lack of any real food science, and he basically set himself up for failure with his rules. Calories in, calories out is pretty much what it comes down to, but the movie doesn't tell you that. I haven't seen it but I heard someone did a rebuttal film where they also only ate McDonald's, except they controlled their portions and actually exercised, and were more or less healthy. And Spurlock had such a hard time choking some of the meals down it kinda disproved his angle that Americans stomach this kind of diet too easily... either that, or he should've gotten someone who is obese to do it.

OhhhJa posted...

I will say that he made an impact I guess. They stopped asking if you wanted to super-size your meal after that

I remember before that film it was rare to see calories openly on menus, chicken items/salads weren't very common, and "fast casual" wasn't really a big thing. Of course a lot of those things end up not really being all that healthy either, and it's probably more of a domino effect from the movie at best. I'm hesitant to give him too much credit, though that movie was pretty big at the time... seems like everyone around my age has a shared experience of seeing it in HS health class

CoorsLight posted...

Calories in, calories out is pretty much what it comes down to, but the movie doesn't tell you that.

Im drunk and stupid and Im gonna need a @Clench281 fact check on that one tbh

arent there good and bad calories? I guess if were talking strictly weight loss, maybe. But in terms of health I think its more complicated than just calories.

---

CoorsLight posted...

seeing it in HS health class

yeah dude 9th grade health lol

---

morgan spurlock has such a creepy little mustache

---

I miss the Supersize. If I wanted healthy food, I'd eat stuff that tastes bad. Like lettuce.

DirtBasedSoap posted...

is eating really unhealthy food every day really that bad for you???

yeah that question could have been answered without the documentary but it was still very interesting

It was also kind of full of shit, because he deliberately skewed the data to prove the point he'd already decided would sell the movie before he started.

There's a reason why multiple people did the same thing using slightly different methodology and actually lost weight doing so.
---

I think in the most literal sense, you gain weight if you have a caloric surplus and lose weight if you have a caloric deficit. I'm not an expert so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

There definitely is still a concept of good and bad calories. Obviously if you have mass nutrient deficiencies your body will respond in bad ways. Not all calories are equal and eating 100 calories of sugar water won't fill you up nearly as much as 100 of vegetables, so sugar water generally causes you to eat more calories. And in the long run what you eat can also affect your metabolism which affects what amounts you need to target for a surplus/deficit.

McDonald's has a lot of "bad" calories but he kind of biased that by IIRC always getting at least a large fries and soda, which are the emptiest kind of calories they have there.

WKUK one of the most underrated sketch shows of all time.

CoorsLight posted...

in the most literal sense, you gain weight if you have a caloric surplus and lose weight if you have a caloric deficit

DirtBasedSoap posted...

Im drunk and stupid and Im gonna need a @Clench281 fact check on that one tbh

arent there good and bad calories? I guess if were talking strictly weight loss, maybe. But in terms of health I think its more complicated than just calories.

Well, it's complicated.

This statement is technically true, but it's often misused. The way you said it is the least misleading, but some people flip it around to say "if you have a caloric deficit you will lose weight, and if you have a caloric surplus you will gain weight."

Energy use and storage depends on more than just total energy used (calories out, ) and energy consumed as food (calories in). Importantly, the body's metabolic state can be thought of as the environment that modifies both calories in AND calories out.

First, consider the topic of caloric timing. When we say "if calories out > calories in, you lose weight" what scale of time are we talking about? Calories over a day? Over a week? Over a month? We can demonstrate that it matters with a thought experiment:

Person A and Person B are genetically identical clones of each other with the exact same physical activity. They both do the exact same workout routine, and only differ in their eating habits over four weeks.

Person A eats three meals per day, with roughly equal calories per day. Say, 2400 calories per day, such that their weight is constant over the month of this experiment (67.2 k total calories).

Person B spends the first three weeks eating 1000 calories per day (21 k calories over 21 days) and the remaining 46.2 k calories over the last week of the experiment (6.6 k calories per day).

Even though their genetics, activity, and total calories consumed would be identical over the month, would we expect the same outcomes for person A and B?

No. Person B had 3 weeks with a very large caloric deficit and one week with a very large caloric surplus. The deficit portion would not only include fat loss, but loss of protein-based tissue such as muscle. Not only that, the extreme deficit would decrease the body's basal metabolic rate, resulting in a lower amount of calories needed. Could the week of caloric surplus balance this out?

No. The body can only assimilate nutrients to replace or build protein-based tissue up to a point, beyond which it can't keep up. But the body is extremely efficient at storing excess calories as fat. As a result, only some muscle tissue would be replaced during the surplus, with any leftover nutrients being stored as fat.

Person B would end up with more fat and less muscle than person A, despite consuming the same calories over the experiment. Person B would also end up with a lower metabolic rate as a result of the modified body composition (because it requires more calories to maintain muscle compared to fat tissue, by weight).

You could make this experiment even more extreme if you imagine they go through 3 weeks of starvation and one week of binging.

So, this thought experiment demonstrates one way that the time scale of CICO (calories in, calories out) matters: because of metabolic limitations in assimilating nutrients as fat vs protein.

Again, the body's metabolic state is an environment that determines how many calories you need and what happens to the food you eat.

This brings us to another food timing issue that's important to metabolism, and that's how much time is spent in a fasted vs fed state. You didn't think I would avoid an opportunity to talk about intermittent fasting, did you?

For this thought experiment, consider persons C and D. Assume they both have identical genetics and identical levels of physical activity.

Person C eats a meal or snack every 3 hours from 6 am until 9 pm, for 2400 total calories. Person D consumes only lunch (noon, 1200 calories) and dinner (6pm, 1200 calories) with no snacks. Assume their total calories consumed throughout a 24 hour period is identical.

If we could put both of these people in a large cage that measures oxygen use, like we can for lab mice or rats, we would observe something interesting. The snacker, person C, would consume less oxygen than person D. The intermittent fasting person D would be burning more calories per day despite having identical activity and caloric intake over a 24 hour period.

By going 12+ hours without eating, person D will enter a fasted state where glycogen stores are running low. Their body will turn to long-term storage, fat stores, for energy. And while your body is extremely efficient at using glycogen for fuel, it's less efficient at converting fat to fuel. But don't think "less efficient" is bad. In this sense, converting fat to fuel takes some metabolic investment: you will have a higher metabolic rate (higher calories out) when using fat for fuel compared to glycogen (so long as you are still feeding daily to avoid long term metabolic drops).

But it's silly to assume these two people truly eat the exact same number of calories per day. In truth, having two large meals means person D starts to feel full during lunch and dinner. And this feeling of satiety often means they would stop eating before reaching the full 1200 calories in their meal. Effectively, the timing of their eating is a manner of indirectly ensuring they reduce their calories in.

So just by changing the timing of when you eat, you can change the CICO equation. Behaviorally, intermittent fasting makes it easier to reduce caloric intake (reducing calories in). But even without that taken into consideration, intermittent fasting increases calories out by nature of the metabolic changes fasting provides.

The type of food you eat alters both the metabolic and behavioral environment as well.

More fiber, less carbs and more fat provides greater satiety and can make it easier to consume fewer calories. The latter two are important in ketogenic diets. Metabolically, ketogenic diets simulate fasting by drastically limiting carbs such that the body is forced to burn fat for fuel. And again, this less-efficient process means a relatively higher metabolic rate (greater calories out) compared to someone eating an identical amount of calories from carb-rich sources.

This isn't even getting into nutrient deficiencies, which would also impact the metabolic environment.

So, in conclusion, CICO is only technically true because it can be defined in a way that makes it necessarily so. But in truth, metabolism and behavior make it more nuanced. I didn't even go into the other benefits of intermittent fasting, which seems to match our "optimal" eating pattern, both on a cellular and organismal level.


---

Thank you for coming to my TED talk

(Spent my whole morning fasted walk on that wall of text)

---

CoorsLight posted...

Calories in, calories out is pretty much what it comes down to, but the movie doesn't tell you that. I haven't seen it but I heard someone did a rebuttal film where they also only ate McDonald's, except they controlled their portions and actually exercised, and were more or less healthy.

Yes, I remember that as well. And calories in calories out is only weight. You can be skinny and be unhealthy just like you can be 'fat' and be healthy. (Not obese)

Saying "you can be fat and healthy" might mean, to me, that one can harbor excess fat that by itself is not yet contributing measurably significant detriments to one's health. But this entirely depends on our definition of healthy. What are we comparing to? Average people? Or what your health and longevity could be, most optimally? Most often in this context it's only referring to "not developing any disease/syndrome."

And I think that's a shitty definition. If some kind of lifestyle influences longevity in such a way that slows aging and improves your lifespan, even without any effect on specific diseases, I'd say that lifestyle is more healthy than alternatives. Periods of caloric restriction / intermittent fasting demonstrably increase lifespan and longevity in model organisms and there's no reason to assume it's not true for humans.

---