Weight Loss and You

Anyone who knows me in real life knows a few things about me:

1)  The cocaine is hidden in a secret cache, behind the loose brick three places from the top left corner
2)  I am one of the worst people in exsistence to give dieting/weight loss advice.

It's not that I'm in shape.  It's that I'm a thin, waifish thing, more akin to a piece of paper than a fellow human being.  And what makes it better/worse isn't that I have some kind of freak metabolism.  Although, I can eat a box of doughnuts for dinner and gain absolutely no weight, but I make up for it self-loathing.  No, it's better/worse because I also regularly only get one and a half legit meals a day.  I straight up do not eat food.

 The cocaine habit also helps with the whole weight loss thing 

So, not only can I eat a lot and get nothing for the trade, but I often don't eat.  I'm not trying to loose weight, I'd kill for an extra 20 lbs or so.  I just only eat when I'm hungry, and stop the moment I get full.  And due to the fact that I burn about 10 calories a day, my body has adjusted my food intake to pretty much nothing.

So, now that all of you with self-esteem problems hate me, I'm about to dump even more craptastic news on you.  Sometimes, when it rains, it pours and sometimes chocolate rain is just goddamn gross.

 Lock and load, I have some days to ruin

I have a question for you: where do you think fat comes from?  I'll wait for you to shout the answers at your monitors.  Never fear, I will hear you.  I always hear you.  I know what you've been doing late at night.  Yes,  you.  No, not that.  The other thing.  Yeah.  That one.  You really should just burn your rug, it's really not fit to be in a house anymore.  Pro tip.

Where was I.... oh, yeah, fat.  Most of you probably blame extra pounds on fast food, or lack of exercise.  So, by dieting and getting more exercise, you should be able to loose weight.  It can't be that hard.

I'm here to tell you that there is a good chance science says you're royally fucked.  The numbers have been run... and you can loose a small amount of weight.  Something along the lines of 10-15 lbs.  Anymore than that, though, and you'll have to face a very unfortunate truth.

There is no hard, statistical evidence that you can loose weight and not gain it back.  Read that as: statistically, the number of people who have lost weight and kept it off rounds down to 0.  Oh, its easy to loose weight- but so few people manage to actually keep the weight off that you might as well say that they're about as rare as unicorns.

So then, how much weight on average do people need to loose?  Well, a third (more or less) of the over 20 US population is obese.  And there is no goddamn way they will ever get to a healthy weight.  Look at some of the tables there-- if we make a small assumption that people are evenly distributed in each weight category, than over half the people that are only "overweight" will never get back to a healthy weight.

See, it works like this-  you want to get to sexy abs castle (or maybe "take up only one seat on an airplane" castle, whatever).  But the only way to get there is to swim through an inconceivably massive moat, one not measured in months, but in years, because you have to reprogram your body to deal with a lower intake of food and your body sucks at patches.

Oh, and the moat is filled with paranas.  Because you better believe your base survival instincts are thinking that you're constantly starving yourself to death every second you loose a pound.  Your own body resists your attempts to loose weight.  Its like when Harry Potter found out that the last part of Voldemort's soul was part of him, and the only way to get rid of it was to kill himself.

Shit, that metaphor turned dark on me.  Sorry about that.

Aww, way to ruin it, asshole!

Interestingly enough, it would seem some factors that make you end up being the size of whale aren't even really your fault.  Even the Center for Disease Control is aware that part of the reason why you're a fatass is your genetic makeup.  But before you go crying about how you rolled snake eyes in the genetic lottery, science, like always, has your back.

It all comes down to type of genetic molecule called a microRNA.  MicroRNAs were considered more or less scrap DNA that your body just had lying around, like the can of beans in your pantry.  You don't remember ever buying it, but it has always been there.  You'll be damned if you eat it, and yet you can't bring yourself to throw it out.

MicroRNAs are that, but with your genetic makeup.  Or so scientists thought.

It turns out that microRNAs are several kinds of important.  A particular pair of them- which both have long, neigh unspellable names- control how well cells burn through energy.  Which means that if your body has a lot of fat because your genetic makeup makes you store calories as fat like a walrus preparing for winter, by removing these two microRNA molecules from your cells, you'll burn more energy at rest.  And if your burning more energy doing nothing means that, by default, you must loose weight.

So, the future is basically a cross between The Biggest Looser and Gattica.