Biggestloser,
I'm not sure if it's intentional or not, but you're building a strawman of massive proportions here. I get good vibes from you based on other posts I've seen you make so I like to think it's unintentional.
I'm all for a good debate. Hell, I might even learn something and I'm always down for that. To this point though, you're debating points I'm not making and that's the very definition of a strawman argument.
If it's intentional, I'll kindly bow out of this discussion after this post. I've no interest in that sort of stuff.
You're making the argument that I'm claiming somehow the OP is "magically" not burning energy and thus violating the energy dynamics. If you've read the stickies here, you know well that I'm well aware of thermodynamics and the energy balance equation.
I've not once claimed that the OP is behaving like a "perpetual motion machine."
I've not once claimed that the body doesn't or won't use energy in certain instances.
Yet, this is what you're building your entire point on.
Either you're missing what I'm saying or your purposefully shifting goalposts.
If it's the former... I'm hoping I can express my ideas better going forward so this isn't drawn out needlessly. If it's the latter, again, just say the word and the stage is yours.
Specifically to your points...
It's pretty hard to burn 800-1000 calories.
Can you provide some context here? I'm not familiar with you enough to know your experience working with folks. Are you basing this statement on your own experience as a "weight lossee" or as a professional in administering plans and tracking caloric expenditures across populations?
I'd agree that most folks aren't burning anywhere near the level of energy they believe they're burning. They're either too wrapped up in what inaccurate machines are claiming or they're way overestimating their level of intensity and effort.
But that's the general case... not specific to this particular case. With the OP... we're not exactly sure what she's expending. But as a relatively light female with a lengthy diet history and text book characteristics of women I've dealt with, I'd say it's fairly reasonable that she's burning more calories than you think.
2 hours of reasonably intense activity would do that, but if you're doing something like Pilates with breaks and while laying down I would doubt you can burn that much.
Can you show me where she said she's primarily doing Pilates with breaks?
Admittedly I'm skimming some stuff as it's the weekend, I've a newborn here, and am very busy. But from what I gathered, she said:
I exercise 2 or so hrs 6 days a week doing various workouts. Step aerobics, stairmaster, weight lifting, swimming, running, pilates, circuit training w/ body weight.
Elsewhere she mentioned that she has done some marathon training as well, which is also textbook with the sort of cases I'm referring to.
This list isn't screaming "low intensity exercise with breaks" to me. But maybe I'm missing something.
If you were eating 1800 and burning 2500 you would be losing 1.5 lbs per week, since you're not losing it, you're either counting wrong or you're burning a lot less.
(It's possible, but unlikely, that you're continuously retaining massive amounts of water that just keeps building to make up for your loss).
The vast majority of the times someone comes onto this forum screaming PLATEAU I'm the first to boldly tell them they're eating more than they believe and expending less than they believe. GENERALLY that is very much the case.
However, this is a select instance where my hunch is things are different. My hunch comes from quite a lot of experience dealing with anal women who aren't overly fat going overboard on the diet and exercise front. This is a game changer in relation to the norm and more times than not requires a set of recommendations that are different than the stock standard.
The point is, in these cases, they can be burning significantly less than what would be expected given age, weight, body comp, etc. They can be holding onto substantial amounts of water for prolonged periods of time making it near impossible to track progress with a scale.
Except since she's not losing weight, she is obviously not in a caloric deficit.
You can gain weight while being in a calorie deficit.
That's part of the point.
Weight is comprised of many things that aren't energy dependent.
There is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine.
Yeah, strawman.
Yes it's possible for the metabolism to slow down, but only by so much (40% as far as I recall).
You keep dancing around "soundbites" from what seems to be Ancel Keys classic Minnesota Experiment. I'm not sure if you've read the full paper or simply heard regurgitations of it.
Definitely a classic and definitely a very telling bit of research.
However, it's one of the few that really looked at the issue. There's not an enormous body of research out there on this front and there's likely never going to be due to the ethics imposed on research today. Starving folks generally doesn't go over so well.
That said, not everything can be neatly explained via peer-reviewed academic data unfortunately. And there's nothing out there showing prolonged dieting and heavy stress load on women. Women have quite a bit of "voodoo" that goes on due to their biological hardwiring to ensure baby carrying.
Enough objective, well-educated, and experienced trainers/researchers are coming forth with experiences of this "new class" of women who have the same characteristics and experiencing the same sort of symptoms. You're not going to find that in Ancel Keys paper.
The body still simply has to run itself to remain alive, and that requires energy.
Strawman. Never claimed otherwise and this is common knowledge.
If you exercise too much, you're doing work, your body needs energy for that work, and if you're not eating that energy the body is going to use its own tissue.
Strawman. Never claimed otherwise and this is common knowledge.
You can't do work without energy, it's physically impossible. Believing that is like believing in magic.
Strawman. I've been one of the sole posters here for nearly 5 years to push the education of thermodynamics. I CERTAINLY never claimed what you're saying and CERTAINLY don't believe in magic.
I think it's far more likely that people count calories wrong, or cheating on their diets, or that as they lose weight their bodies start requiring less but they keep eating the amount needed by a much larger body.
Preaching to the choir. You're dead right. The vast majority of the time this is the exact issue at hand. In select cases however, you've issues at play that don't negate the energy balance equation. They simply screw up the energy out side of the equation.
You're speaking generalities that make sense. But my whole reason for saying the things I've said in this thread is because there's instances that the generalities aren't what's happening.
That would be a far more likely reason for plateaus than mysterious "stress" that somehow enables the body to exercise for 2 hours and not use any energy.
"Mysterious stress"?
Since when is stress and how our body deals with it a mystery?
Also, we're beginning to see clear links between the various systems and how they interplay with stress. Leptin, cortisol, insulin, peptide YY, Cholecystokinin, ghrelin, endocannabanoid system, etc, etc.
If you start looking into neuroimmunoendocrinology there's some seriously interesting things at play that make a lot of sense.
This is not a diet example, but Soviet Communists exiled people into Siberia and had them cutting down trees and doing other heavy work in the cold while eating a regular diet. You know what happened to those people? They died in 6 months. Those who survived were the lucky people who got desk jobs. The body needs energy to do work, you can't keep doing work without using energy.
Strawman.
