Why do some people gain a lot of weight, and others not so much?

Triathlon Forum
1

I linked this article in another thread, but thought I’d post it again more explicitly here. It’s old, but it’s surprisingly under-read despite being a seminal piece of literature in the field. I’m always shocked how poorly science is disseminated to the public, particularly when it’s translational and provides answers to such a relevant topic.

Briefly, the premise: 16 volunteers were housed in a research facility for 8 weeks and fed a 1,000kcal surplus for the duration of the study. Since 1lb of fat is ~3,500kcal, each person should have gained approximately 16lb of fat. As expected, subjects displayed dramatic variance in the amount of fat gained. They analyzed every conceivable mechanism that excess substrate could be processed, stored or excreted in an effort to explain the disparity. Read the paper for their conclusions.

Levine et al 1999

2

I didn’t RTFA but seems like the obvious conclusion is that different people have different resting caloric burn rates. some of that is genetic, some of it is how active they were prior to the study.

3

I didn’t RTFA but seems like the obvious conclusion is that different people have different resting caloric burn rates. some of that is genetic, some of it is how active they were prior to the study.

If the intuitive conclusions were always true, we wouldn’t need to do science, would we? Good thing they did here. As stated in the manuscript: “In our study, BMR increased by an average of 5% in response to overfeeding (Table 2), accounting for 8% of the excess ingested energy. Thus, the interindividual changes in BMR did not account for the variability in fat gain (Fig. 1A).”

Edit: Also, you’re misunderstanding the research question. The research question was: when a group of people are fed a fixed surplus over their daily expenditure, why do some people gain a lot of fat while others gain little or none?

4

There are so many variables to account for, it would be hard to glean anything from one random study. I think a really good one would be to get all your volunteers from the same height and weight, ones they have been at for at least a year. So a bunch of 5’9" guys that weigh 160.

Then go to a different group, guys that are 5’9" and 185…And on and on. From that kind of study you might get some good info. But you have to account for anyone that has gained or lost a bunch of weight in the past 6 months or so. If some guy went from 180 to 160 3 months before the study, pretty much guarantee he is going to gain more weight than the others.

I guess this was a sedentary study too? Adding exercise would just add a bunch more variables to the noise that is already there…Good stuff though, I love these sorts of things, and eventually they get include in some meta study where some of the noise gets cancelled by numbers…

5

There are so many variables to account for, it would be hard to glean anything from one random study. I think a really good one would be to get all your volunteers from the same height and weight, ones they have been at for at least a year. So a bunch of 5’9" guys that weigh 160.

Then go to a different group, guys that are 5’9" and 185…And on and on. From that kind of study you might get some good info. But you have to account for anyone that has gained or lost a bunch of weight in the past 6 months or so. If some guy went from 180 to 160 3 months before the study, pretty much guarantee he is going to gain more weight than the others.

I guess this was a sedentary study too? Adding exercise would just add a bunch more variables to the noise that is already there…Good stuff though, I love these sorts of things, and eventually they get include in some meta study where some of the noise gets cancelled by numbers…

What else should they have accounted for in order to answer this specific research question? It was a remarkably thorough study. I mean, they even measured calories in their shit. They controlled intake at exactly 1,000kcal abundance, monitored activity and expenditure and also measured every conceivable way that substrates can be handled in a mammalian organism. The reason I shared this paper is because it was the first to provide the preeminent answer to the question “why is there so much variability in weight gain from individual to individual”. So when your family is all together over the holidays and some of them are complaining about weight gain, while others are entirely unafflicted, this study provided the answer to that frustrating and puzzling question. They clearly demonstrated that NEAT accounted for this variability at r = -0.77; body size, sex, resting metabolic rate, lean mass, etc…none of it was related. This is still the current state of knowledge. Are there situations where you can upset this relation? Probably, but that’s out of the scope of this particular question.

6

Thanks for posting this article, this topic is fascinating to me. The conclusion that I drew from the article was that the people that didn’t gain weight were more active, end of story.

Here is an article that was cited in the original article and this quote was helpful; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6058072/

“NEAT is the energy expenditure that we do not typically consider and it includes the energy expended maintaining and changing posture (laying, standing, walking, stair climbing, spontaneous muscle contraction, fidgeting, cleaning), singing, and other activities of daily living. These activities do not involve moderate- to vigorous- intensity exercise and occur at a trivial or a low energy workload for minutes to hours.33,34. These somewhat unplanned and unstructured low grade physical activities can have a remarkable effect on metabolic rate and, as a result, stimulate greater energy expenditure over time.”

It’s the little things we do that add up over the course of day, weeks, months and years. Taking the stairs, getting up from your desk a work, parking in the back of the parking lot. These may seem like small things but they can have a huge impact on calories burnt in a lifetime.

7

There are so many variables to account for, it would be hard to glean anything from one random study. I think a really good one would be to get all your volunteers from the same height and weight, ones they have been at for at least a year. So a bunch of 5’9" guys that weigh 160.

Then go to a different group, guys that are 5’9" and 185…And on and on. From that kind of study you might get some good info. But you have to account for anyone that has gained or lost a bunch of weight in the past 6 months or so. If some guy went from 180 to 160 3 months before the study, pretty much guarantee he is going to gain more weight than the others.

I guess this was a sedentary study too? Adding exercise would just add a bunch more variables to the noise that is already there…Good stuff though, I love these sorts of things, and eventually they get include in some meta study where some of the noise gets cancelled by numbers…

What else should they have accounted for in order to answer this specific research question? It was a remarkably thorough study. I mean, they even measured calories in their shit. They controlled intake at exactly 1,000kcal abundance, monitored activity and expenditure and also measured every conceivable way that substrates can be handled in a mammalian organism. The reason I shared this paper is because it was the first to provide the preeminent answer to the question “why is there so much variability in weight gain from individual to individual”. So when your family is all together over the holidays and some of them are complaining about weight gain, while others are entirely unafflicted, this study provided the answer to that frustrating and puzzling question. They clearly demonstrated that NEAT accounted for this variability at r = -0.77; body size, sex, resting metabolic rate, lean mass, etc…none of it was related. This is still the current state of knowledge. Are there situations where you can upset this relation? Probably, but that’s out of the scope of this particular question.

The bold is the variable here. How do they KNOW they were fed an extra 1000kcal? How do they know, to the kcal, how many calories any one person expends on a day to day basis? The answer is they cannot know that.

You can’t cheat physics here. Thermodynamics works. Now, could some people have been fed the extra and “used” it by twitching more? By shaking their legs uncontrollably? By feeling the need to get up and walk around more? Certainly. Adding extra food to your diet gives you more energy to do stuff, or some people bleed off excess energy by fidgeting. We triathletes purposely overfeed ourselves in order to expend that energy training. And it’s certainly possible for some of it to be accounted for by an increase in basal metabolic rate.

However, it is IMPOSSIBLE to control for that 1000kcal exactly.

8

There are so many variables to account for, it would be hard to glean anything from one random study. I think a really good one would be to get all your volunteers from the same height and weight, ones they have been at for at least a year. So a bunch of 5’9" guys that weigh 160.

Then go to a different group, guys that are 5’9" and 185…And on and on. From that kind of study you might get some good info. But you have to account for anyone that has gained or lost a bunch of weight in the past 6 months or so. If some guy went from 180 to 160 3 months before the study, pretty much guarantee he is going to gain more weight than the others.

I guess this was a sedentary study too? Adding exercise would just add a bunch more variables to the noise that is already there…Good stuff though, I love these sorts of things, and eventually they get include in some meta study where some of the noise gets cancelled by numbers…

What else should they have accounted for in order to answer this specific research question? It was a remarkably thorough study. I mean, they even measured calories in their shit. They controlled intake at exactly 1,000kcal abundance, monitored activity and expenditure and also measured every conceivable way that substrates can be handled in a mammalian organism. The reason I shared this paper is because it was the first to provide the preeminent answer to the question “why is there so much variability in weight gain from individual to individual”. So when your family is all together over the holidays and some of them are complaining about weight gain, while others are entirely unafflicted, this study provided the answer to that frustrating and puzzling question. They clearly demonstrated that NEAT accounted for this variability at r = -0.77; body size, sex, resting metabolic rate, lean mass, etc…none of it was related. This is still the current state of knowledge. Are there situations where you can upset this relation? Probably, but that’s out of the scope of this particular question.

The bold is the variable here. How do they KNOW they were fed an extra 1000kcal? How do they know, to the kcal, how many calories any one person expends on a day to day basis? The answer is they cannot know that.

You can’t cheat physics here. Thermodynamics works. Now, could some people have been fed the extra and “used” it by twitching more? By shaking their legs uncontrollably? By feeling the need to get up and walk around more? Certainly. Adding extra food to your diet gives you more energy to do stuff, or some people bleed off excess energy by fidgeting. We triathletes purposely overfeed ourselves in order to expend that energy training. And it’s certainly possible for some of it to be accounted for by an increase in basal metabolic rate.

However, it is IMPOSSIBLE to control for that 1000kcal exactly.

I think all of that would be more clear to you if you read the paper. In fact, you’re describing their exact finding in your second to last paragraph.

9

Thanks for posting this article, this topic is fascinating to me. The conclusion that I drew from the article was that the people that didn’t gain weight were more active, end of story.

Here is an article that was cited in the original article and this quote was helpful; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...articles/PMC6058072/

“NEAT is the energy expenditure that we do not typically consider and it includes the energy expended maintaining and changing posture (laying, standing, walking, stair climbing, spontaneous muscle contraction, fidgeting, cleaning), singing, and other activities of daily living. These activities do not involve moderate- to vigorous- intensity exercise and occur at a trivial or a low energy workload for minutes to hours.33,34. These somewhat unplanned and unstructured low grade physical activities can have a remarkable effect on metabolic rate and, as a result, stimulate greater energy expenditure over time.”

It’s the little things we do that add up over the course of day, weeks, months and years. Taking the stairs, getting up from your desk a work, parking in the back of the parking lot. These may seem like small things but they can have a huge impact on calories burnt in a lifetime.

That’s EXACTLY right. Pacing, fidgeting, tapping your foot, messing with your hair: all of these things cost ATP. And in the presence of caloric surplus, some people do this WAY more than others.

10

Thanks for posting this article, this topic is fascinating to me. The conclusion that I drew from the article was that the people that didn’t gain weight were more active, end of story.

Here is an article that was cited in the original article and this quote was helpful; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...articles/PMC6058072/

“NEAT is the energy expenditure that we do not typically consider and it includes the energy expended maintaining and changing posture (laying, standing, walking, stair climbing, spontaneous muscle contraction, fidgeting, cleaning), singing, and other activities of daily living. These activities do not involve moderate- to vigorous- intensity exercise and occur at a trivial or a low energy workload for minutes to hours.33,34. These somewhat unplanned and unstructured low grade physical activities can have a remarkable effect on metabolic rate and, as a result, stimulate greater energy expenditure over time.”

It’s the little things we do that add up over the course of day, weeks, months and years. Taking the stairs, getting up from your desk a work, parking in the back of the parking lot. These may seem like small things but they can have a huge impact on calories burnt in a lifetime.

Yeah, it wasn’t a long paper but your last paragraph summed it up clearly. Calories out > Calories will still make you lose weight in all cases because weight doesn’t just appear out of nothing. This study didn’t say people magically gained more weight than others for no inexplicable reason (it accounted for weight/activity level/BMR). All it did was explain that there are very small ways you burn calories that you don’t even think about, and those make up the differences between people with similar activity and eating habits. Using a standing desk will burn a few more calories than sitting in a chair, fidgeting will burn a few more calories than sitting completely still, taking the stairs will burn a few more than taking the elevator. We don’t usually keep track of these, but even if all these activities only burn 100 more calories (1 banana’s worth) each day that’s almost a two pounds less weight gain over that 8 weeks this study was conducted.

11

I have not read the article, but plan to. But after reading the OP, I was betting on differential calories among participants in their dumps. Glad that the output calories were measured…but my hypothesis, apparently, wasn’t correct…

12

My question is, how much would someone have to pay you in order to do this for 8 weeks with the potential to gain 16 lbs!

I have a hard time finding an amount that a research team could afford to have me hang around for 8 weeks gaining weight.