twaddle, that is me! (well, let's say divided in 1/2):
During the three months of presurgical study, the dietitian on the research team calculated how many calories it should take for a 5-foot-6-inch woman like Janet to maintain a weight of 348. They fed her exactly that many calories — no more, no less. She dutifully ate what she was told, and she gained 12 pounds in two weeks — almost a pound a day.
“I don’t think I’d ever gained that much weight that quickly,” recalled Janet, who asked me not to use her full name because she didn’t want people to know how fat she had once been. The doctors accused her of sneaking snacks into the hospital. “But I told them, ‘I’m gaining weight because you’re feeding me a tremendous amount of food!’ ”
However as you gain more weight, you also expend more energy and you'll need to consume even more calories to keep up with that pace.
vvsonikvv: You need to expend more calories to tote yourself around.. but you will find yourself (consciously or not) expending less in other activites. I remember reading somewhere about different metabolism "types".. and I realized how in a million micro-activities I try to conserve energy (unconsciously) where others don't.
I'm pretty sure my calorie intake is much closer to average than is my weight.
Just a bunch of random and perhaps silly examples:
-I'd rather buy an extra sponge and bottle of cleaner for each bathroom than run to get them from a central location. Same with scissors, staplers, pencils, etc.
-I've taken to wearing comfy clothes and just sleeping in them, rather than having separate PJs. So I only change once a day instead of 2x.
-I like to prepare batches of food that can last for 2-3 meals so I don't "waste" time in preparation every day.
I could go on and on.. Every little whittling down "saves" energy (calories) but my tendencies hardly developed with weight gain in mind!! I wish it were the opposite!
But you'll see other people who in their daily lives are just unconsciously restless, pacing, busy, duplicating effort, and so forth. They're not conscious of burning a lot more than 50 calories more than I do a day (more like 500). This doesn't have to be overt exercise, whether they like exercising or not. It could be running around shopping or other dithering.
My predisposition COULD be chalked up to "laziness".. but I wonder what is the true nature of "laziness". Some people give themselves tasks that have to be done: making the bed (why?), ironing sheets (why?), using a tablecloth at every meal (why?), that they then have to clean. Is foregoing those things "lazy" or sensible? Cutting out this extra work is certainly more efficient and (for better or worse) calorie-saving.
There's also a "procrastination = efficiency" factor: putting off a trip to the store because it could be combined with some other errand the next day. Save time, gas and (unconsciously) calories. Like with cash.. it's almost like I have an irrepressible sense of "why expend now?" if that expense can be postponed to the future. When it comes to planned exertions ("expenditures") like an evening's dancing or a morning's gardening, though.. I get through it without difficulty because I've decided consciously or not that it's a valid "expense" in that moment.
vvsonikvv, I understand you are looking at the "50 calories here, 50 calories there" as discrete episodes and not a linear continuum. But through ups and downs over 30 years I am at square one with ZERO net change. What are the odds of that happening casually? Despite some junk-food years. Despite a couple of week-long juice fasts (to see what would happen health-wise, not in particular to lose weight). Despite periods of working a lot vs. periods of couch-potato-hood. Despite university years of living on Tab. Despite periods of traveling and walking a lot. Magically, the gains and losses have always exactly cancelled each other out. And I am not a person who tracks these things, obviously, nor have I yo-yo-ed drastically.
The juice fasts were interesting. Beyond a little bit the second day I really felt no hunger at all. In fact, I rarely have definite hunger. I can wake up in the am, have a cup of coffee, and be good until 5-6pm. I have had to
work to include breakfast (piece of toast w/cheese or ham for protein - I really don't do well with cereal, muffin, or anything sweet). That has lasted recently about a year or two, but I've once again fallen off the breakfast "wagon". Even on days when I skip breakfast, when DH comes home for lunch, it always seems "too early" for me! I have no problem passing up desserts, cookies and the like; they don't interest me; I do tend to prefer savory foods. I could go a month without a single sweet and not notice.
I enjoy food per se, but also feel imposed mealtimes are often a kind of tyranny, and sometimes have the sensation of the lady in the NYT article. [Other times I like to be left free to graze.] I'm also a person who left to their own devices would probably run on a 25-/26-/27-hour daily clock. I've always the tendency to go to bed ever later and wake up ever later. I could easily "lose" (or "gain", depending how you look at it) a day every couple of weeks with no trouble.
The focus on microbes is interesting given the relatively recent discovery of ulcers being caused not by diet or stress but by bacteria.. and I think I have read cholesterol studies in which the premise is no longer that excess cholesterol itself is some kind of disease, but a symptom of cardiovascular damage/infection that the body is trying to repair
using cholesterol. Reducing cholesterol alone may allow the damage to continue nontheless.
(Sorry for the long post but) I'm convinced there's a lot of study that remains to be done beyond the simplistic "calories in - calories expended = fat retained" equation.
