idk if you saw that the first line of the thread is me asking you in particular to not interact with it but that's a thing posting your takes to a forum-wide debate thread would be more than the complete opposite of not interacting with it
My bad, I thought you just didn't want my responses there for some odd reason. Glad I asked before just sticking it under a spoiler. (Still confused, but it's not counter-intuitive enough to worry about.)
Crohn's. There are several medications that target a protein in the pathway that causes the type of inflammation that is the root cause of rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease (Crohn's is a type of IBD).
I would have to actually double check that, I just remember salmon and tuna off the top of my head bc it's the only two fishes my ma and bro will reliably eat so it's what I know how to cook :P The class was mainly about helpful dietary adjustments for people with auto-immune diseases but these specific guidelines are more or less applicable across the board and the baseline we are supposed to work from! The specific things I'm supposed to cut out are much more complicated and arcane and also frankly boring probably, so I'm not gonna get into it here given you don't need it if your arthritis levelled off again. THANKS!
Just popping in to say that arthritis in the chest as a young teenager probably actually means costochondritis -- just for warding off any confusion.
Herring is definitely omega-3 high - that's the one I'm working on introducing into my diet right now.
Um. First of all, how is "just eat[ing] vegetables with vinegar" going crazy? That sounds like a perfectly reasonable meal, as long as you're getting enough protein and fat elsewhere. Heck, sliced cucumber in vinegar with a bit of pepper and salt is a really tasty snack. Spoiler: spoiler-cut for calorie discussion Second, your calorie estimates are...dodgy. One fried egg would be around 90 calories; two slices of toast would be at least 100 calories each - 130 if you use a teaspoon of margarine per slice to butter them with. So two eggs, overeasy, with toast takes you to around 440 calories; "high 200 range" is only possible if you're having a single slice of dry toast with those eggs. A single soft-boiled large egg is 70 calories if you don't add any margarine or butter. One cup of Cheerios is 100 calories, and one cup of whole milk is 146 calories - so your breakfast wasn't "almost" 300 calories, it was nearly 350 calories. Which isn't an unreasonable amount to eat, for one meal! This is part of why people are telling you to focus more on what you're eating, not just on the pure calorie count. Does whole milk taste better? Maybe! But it's also got way more fat than 2% or skim milk does. If you're trying to lose weight, then switching to a lower-fat milk will help even if you're using the same amount. Third, part of why you're being side-eyed for the whole "I limit myself to 1200 kcals per day, plus snacks and nibbles if I'm still hungry, and I don't count the alcohol I drink as part of that" is because 1) if you were strictly holding to that 1200 kcal limit? You would not be getting anywhere near enough to sustain an adult afab human, and 2) it reads (to me, at least) as similar to "well, calories don't count if you're standing / if you're eating off someone else's plate / if it's a holiday" - it still counts, even if you're not acknowledging it.
I'd like to mention that the fat content of milk is what makes micronutrient apsorption effective (hell, fat aids with nutrient apsorption in all scenarios, which is why you should have creamy dressings on your veggies) so skim or semi skim is not a good choice in most cases. Source: multiple GPs and dieticians.
Vinegared vegetables are a healthy snack, but I was talking about having 2 bags a days and calling it enough food. Spoiler: Happyforks recipe analyses Ingredient description Matched product Check products whether they are correct Edit 2 cups cheerios Cereals · ready-to-eat · GENERAL MILLS · CHEERIOS - 2 cup Edit 211 kcal 3/4 cup milk Milk · whole · 3.25% milkfat · without added vitamin A and vitamin D - 0.75 cup Edit 112 kcal 2 eggs fried Egg · whole · raw · fresh - 2 extra large Edit 160 kcal 1 slice store-brand bread Bread · whole-wheat · commercially prepared - 1 slice Edit 81 kcal I was a little off because the only thing I "looked up" was Cheerios with skim milk. Whole milk has twice the calories, TIL, but it looks like it doesn't matter too much if I drink a cup or less. I'm not going to mess with how we buy milk. We get 2 quart bottles because it's the same price as 1 quart, and end up throwing half a quart away unless I make a cheese sauce. He won't use skim on his museli. I'd have to get the calorie-per slice directly off of the bread I'm using, but it is one slice covered in egg yolk. If I were only 5 feet tall and not overweight, 1200 would be about maintenance. I do need to mess with a couple of calculators and my stats, but this one said that I need 1400 if I were my goal weight. And I know that if I mess with calorie-counting while still drinking, I'm not going to make any progress beyond making all of the teachable moment mistakes and getting used to the whole process.
Oh, neat! I saw some reporting on how there was substantial evidence suggesting that skim milk was associated with higher cancer risk, but whole milk wasn't, and various other stuff about fat being not nearly as bad for people as scientists had once believed, but that one's new.
@Athol Magarac What exactly would you have to "change [about] how we buy milk", other than picking up a different bottle at the same store?
I'd like to see the science on organ damage as a result of going under your BMR, please. I mean, that's literally what fat and glycogen are for; dipping into your savings when your income dries up. I'm pretty sure that there have been studies to show that given adequate nutrients, a person can live off their body fat with pretty much no ill effects at all. Psychologically it's unsustainable, of course - it would represent a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad relationship with food, and be worse than useless at training you into good habits and recognizing hunger as opposed to wanting-food, and people would generally do a horribly shitty job of managing their nutrient intake unsupervised (which really would be a disaster, so don't fucking try this at home, kids...) but if you have fat reserves to fall back on, I'm not aware of any specific minimum calorie intake. By all means educate me if this is not the case.
There have actually been studies that show... not that. There are definitely ill effects of not taking in enough calories to meet those basal metabolic needs.
I keep bringing up the brain's need for sugar and/or keton bodies and I will keep harping on it. In the absence of the external sugar/starch input, your body needs to get synthesize it from somewhere to keep your brain going. The metabolical pathways cannot cover it all from fat, meaning it cuts into the body's protein mass. The muscles. This means that it's perfectly possible to die of starvation mediated organ (esp heart) damage LONG before you run through your fat stores. Additionally: your BMR does include what your brain needs. The think jelly needs about 20% of your energy needs, going below BMR DIRECTLY cuts into the nutrients your brain gets. That's where we get the mental impacts of starvation. It's literally hurting the brain. Additionally, hunger metabolism and ketosis are stressful for the body. The maintenance of ketosis is no fun at all for the liver where most of the relevant metabolism takes place.
Protein requirements, granted. You need a certain amount of protein for maintenance, but I'd like to see specifics on the limits on caloric needs that can be fulfilled by burning fat. What's the cap, and how is it implemented? And the brain's requirements being baked into the BMR sounds a bit non-sequitur if the body is able to make up the caloric shortfall by using up fat reserves.
My kidneys were failing. My fat reserves were not being used in calorific shortfalls. My muscles and organs were.
the logic is as follows: your BMR includes the energy your brain needs to keep operating at ideal capacity. Going below your BMR cuts into your brain's energy because it makes up a significant chunk of your BMR (about 20%). If you take energy away from your brain you're hurting its ability to function as intended and thus everything else. you wouldn't need that protein 'for maintenance' you need it because the pathways to make sugar/keton bodies from fat are limited and the difference has to come out of protein-to-sugar/keton bodies metabolism. That's not considering stuff like amino acid input etc, this is purely an energy equation at that point. Your body, once its run out its gylcogen stores, WILL cut into its own protein mass because it has to. I'm not sure if you saw it earlier in the thread, but I did mention how the brain does actually contain a lot of fat, too. The myelin around the nerves is mostly fat and it needs to be mainted, or the nerve cells ability to transduct signals takes an absolute nosedive, to the point of non-functionality. Every other cell in your body also needs maintenance. Your organs do. The body isn't 100% effective in resorbing it all, meaning that every cell that dies simply due to age is a net loss. Those net losses add up because without external input your body cannot adequately restore itself. ETA: i don't like waving it around, but i do have a biology degree.
What are the limits on the pathways to make sugars/keton bodies from fat? Where's the bottleneck? Is there a shortage of the required enzymes? Which ones? By how much? Without establishing this (and I'm not saying it's false, just that I haven't seen a mechanism for it), your argument around brain function lacks the required premise: P1: The amount of money you can withdraw from your savings is limited to 80% of your weekly budget P2: Your heating bill is 20% of your weekly budget C: If you attempt to live off your savings, you will freeze to death. Obviously you can safely consume some number of calories below your total expenditure, or else you could never burn fat without dying of it. What is the cap on that shortfall, and what's the basis for it? Also, many mammals pack on fat to survive a winter or dry season with fuckall food available; how do they manage this without their organs failing on them?
Mammals that pack on fat and hibernate don't just eat a ton of food ahead of time. Hibernation is a specific thing, where their bodies switch over to running the metabolism as slow as possible. It's the difference between your laptop running on its battery without being plugged in, and your laptop being switched into power saver mode before it's put into sleep mode. Also, you're arguing with someone who's got a biology degree and asking them to ELI5 how the human body works at the same time, this is not necessarily a good look.
I don't know if this is exactly what you're looking for (I Am Not A Scientist) but this paper suggests that the brain cannot use anything produced by fatty acids based on how they're processed in the bloodstream; in time of starvation, when the glucose necessary for brain function is not available, ketone bodies can be a stop-gap measure, but from what I'm reading it seems like as a long term solution, the liver isn't capable of cannibalizing adipose fatty acids into the necessary energy chunks without glucose to supplement. So, from what I can tell as a layman with no experience, once the amount of glucose in your body drops below the brain's usage rate, the body goes into starvation mode to create keton bodies. Once it's in starvation mode for an extended period of time, it can no longer create keton bodies from adipose tissue alone (fat) and needs to burn organ and muscle tissue for the protein chains necessary to make that transition--all the while, adipose continues to store up as much energy as it can for the rest of the body being currently cannibalized, because storage is less costly energy wise than muscle and organ maintenance. I might be reading this wrong, so I'm more than happy to concede that point to anyone with relevant medical/biology knowledge that can interpret the paper more accurately. Best guess: their brains aren't as large or energy intensive as ours. Cats require taurine to live while dogs don't, which is why vegetarian diets for dogs can work while they almost always end up with dead cats. Both being mammals doesn't mean that their metabolic and dietary processes are identical.
