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Oh lord yes
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2026
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genetics determines how much nutrients you absorb from things you eat, it determines how easily you feel hunger, it determines your baseline energy consumption.
genetics can absolutely make you more likely to gain weight.
Yes and regardless of any of those factors if your energy intake is below your energy usage you'll lose weight.
Unfortunately people respond differently to hunger.
Someone I know is trying to lose weight. Problem is, if they go ~100 kcal below maintenance they turn into a stress eater. ~200 below and they are unable to stop themselves from eating 400 kcal worth of food straight or of the fridge at night. All that on top of being hangry all day.
So losing weight means balancing the diet very carefully because that's not much space between eating enough to maintain the weight and eating so little that hunger overrides reason and overcompensates.
For other people going below maintenance is just kinda uncomfortable but easily doable for a couple days. Advice like "just eat less" actually works for them without having to make a whole science out of it.
Yeah but that is how you lose weight. It's one thing to be unwilling to do it because of a mental block. It's another thing entirely to impart that mental block on others as a way of feeling better about their own shortcomings.
It's quite important that you do not make the mistake of thinking that if you tell someone it is easy to do, because you find it easy to do, that does not make it easy for them to do.
With a kid, for example, you can tell them this and they will believe that it's easy for everyone, then try it and fail, and suddenly believe they are fucking stupid and it must be their fault entirely. Which makes them feel bad. Which might make them eat more, or become anorexic, or any one of a number of eating disorders.
So instead, realise that there are many factors here beyond energy in and activity out. Those are important, but not the whole story. Be kind, and take your time.
Yeah and I haven't said it was easy I just said it's how you do it
It's true. I remember when I could go most of the day without eating and feel nothing but minor hunger, which was easy to ignore.
But now I'm in my 30s, and if I try to skip lunch it's like my entire body goes into revolt. Lethargy, headaches, mood changes, the works. My metabolism has changed with age and now the effects of blood sugar actually pack a punch.
People always underestimate the endocrine system. Your frontal cortex and everything that you are is basically just a tool for your endocrine system to use to get food and sex.
It's why eating less is so hard for some people. If the endocrine system is being pushy, it can just make you not care about your goal, and not many people can do something uncomfortable that they don't want to do in furtherance of a goal they don't care about.
Healthy, stable eating habits need to come before weight loss eating habits, and that needs to be paired with light excercise as you build up.
Like taming a wild animal. Some people just have a capybara, and others have some sort of ocelot that's addicted to meth. Most people have dogs. Gotta ease in, but once you get started it's fine as long as you don't traumatize the poor beastie.
True. Also don't underestimate your gut microbiome. Those bacteria and fungi can have a distressing amount of control over you and if your microbiome is out of whack it can make it much more difficult to develop decent eating habits.
No s"t Sherlock. Doesn't really change the fact that this is much easier to achieve than for others, before we are even talking about will power. Some people can eat much more at the same workout level as others, without gaining weight. No contradiction with thermodynamics needed.
By all means keep spreading the doomer mentality of "I can't do anything to lose weight it's my genetics"
Strawman. I was saying no such thing, merely that for some it is harder than for others. Just like some would starve to dewth in a famine sooner than others at identical feed intake and rate of activity.
This is no excuse for anything, just a fact. People can gave an influence on that, no matter the genes.
I was such an asshole after I dropped 100 pounds in my 20s. I did it, you can too!
I was such a dick. I had actual anger towards fat folks for a few years.
Its like being mad folks are poor, just, knock it off. None of these comments actually help people lose weight. It actually scares them off further into the downward spiral. Lest not forget age gets us all, and you dont know what these people have been through, or are going through. You dont know.
My country, the shit stain one, they dont allow citizens to walk anywhere. Start there. I stayed fit when I could walk/bike places. Once I moved somewhere carcentric, guess what happened. Im not a dick to fat folks anymore.
Its not so black and white. The older I get, the more I realize its systemic, at least here in the god forsaken states.
remain positive, internal work is internal, and you cant make choicss for others. I wanted to give fitness to everyone when I was younger. But not everyone is brave enough to ride a bike in car city. I still get mad when I see parents giving their fat children candy. Sets them up for a lifetine of failure. I used to have my gaurdian lock me in a room, call me fat bitch, and literally throw a bag of mcdonalds at me in my teens.
you never know what someone has been through. Always kindness.
Telling people they need to eat less to lose weight isn't unkind. These truths only push people who already are unwilling to accept reality further into delusion. I'm not sympathetic to those people.
Do you honestly, seriously believe anyone trying to lose weight doesn't know that you need to eat less to achieve that?
Really??
Well, one of the factors makes it hard to know what your actual caloric intake is. You are right, but it's not quite as simple as you make it sound.
Simple does not mean easy.
Our bodies have evolved to protect against weight loss. We like to think we're modern, enlightened creatures, but we're still a collection of biological processes that are centred around survival in an unforgiving world. Most of us no longer live in that world.
As a result, when we diet our bodies trigger processes that limit the effects of nutritional deficit. And sure, we'll lose weight to start with, but that hits a plateau surprisingly quickly as our metabolism catches up.
Then add into that things like ADHD (which is something affects me personally), whereby when weight loss slows to a crawl after a few weeks I get frustrated and lose interest in keeping it up. So I'm 140kg with no sign of that going anywhere any time soon.
This is textbook cope. "I won't do the thing because it's technically not the most 100% efficient way so imma be 140 forever" I've got ADHD too bud. It's possible to fast for 3 days a week.
It's not cope, it's biology.
Yes... biology you are using as an excuse to not do something, hence cope.
Youre so mean
The metabolic effect you're describing is called "starvation mode" by a lot of people and while its technically real its actually quite a bit smaller than most people think, and can easily be countered by adding a work out to your routine. If you think youre not losing weight because of it, (or gaining weight, as some people claim) I would bet you're actually not counting all your calories throughout the day.
You might lose weight just not in the region where you want it. Genetics might make you lose muscle mass, bone quality long before you lose fat. Also it might make you at the same time store everything as fat when you take an energy defecit diet.
Muscle mass is directly tied to how much you use the muscle. You can eat 100 protein bars and you won't gain any muscle mass. Likewise if you continue your current level of exercise while fasting you are gonna keep the muscle and lose the fat.
I'd describe it more as a loose correlation rather than "directly tied." There's the obvious example of sex differences, where a typical untrained woman will not respond as quickly to weight training as a typical untrained man of similar size. There's a lot of individual variation, too, and more recent research is revealing new insights into high and low responders to resistance training. See, for example, this review.
I learned to be less of a dick to others about this stuff when I learned I was an outlier high responder in muscle strength and growth, getting much better results from near identical workouts with some of my friends. Realizing that I was lucky helped me extend some more grace to others.
you just missed the entire point i was making... yes, energy in < energy out means losing weight. BUT reducing energy intake is more difficult for some people than for others due to their genetics.
Water has weight... Not eating as much causes stress which causes water retention. Nothing is guaranteed.
Feeling hunger is completely different than needing nutrients and energy.
Ehhhh sorta kinda. If you eat a more "natural" diet (read: not super processed) then the two are pretty closely linked. But we've invented entirely new foods that basically gives you zero satiety, but also has hundreds and hundreds of calories.
You can eat to satiety on carrots and spinach, and literally starve to death from lack of calories. You can also feel hungry all day and gain weight from drinking soda and eating cookies.
Genetics are a factor, but outside of extreme cases they are going to play a small role. Obesity is a modern epidemic, and we didn't all suddenly mutate. Environmental factors are much more impactful.
The last time I saw this come up there were approx. 500 calorie difference between the top and the bottom for similar fitness/build of the genetics curve.
500 calories is a pretty big workout, but its at the opposite ends of the curve, most people will be around 250 calories of the middle.
What is far more important is the genetic and learned response to feeling full and hunger. Saying its easy for people to just switch track on that is frankly an awful take, the current weight loss drugs work for a reason, while you carry on taking them. People rebound from often impressive weight loss in huge numbers for a reason, and its not because they forget how to calorie count or exercise.
Yeah a couple friends of mine REALLY struggled to lose weight until they got on one of those ozembic drugs. They'd doet for a while but it got to the point where they literally couldn't stop thinking about food and they'd fall off the wagon. Whatever they're taking kills those food cravings and they're both at good weight now.
Yeah this "thermodynamics" thing is so stupid, there's enough energy in a sugar cube to power my home for months.
I also probably have the genetics to "keep warm" which helps if you want to lose weight, and as a male I don't get the hormonal changes at a certain age that makes you gain weight, etc. etc. etc.
Then we have those who just expertly state "eat less", yeah man who would have thought eh.
On a more reasonable scale, things like ditching sugar (including fruit, corn, cooked carrots etc) make wonders, probably because dropping that addiction (which is hard) makes it easier to eat less.
Sport in itself cannot outrun the spoon,but it might fire up desires to be in good shape, and lose weight might be part of that, and that's really something, IMO.
Good luck with your long term goals everyone!
…what? If that were close to true we’d be burning sugar instead of coal
No no no you see some people have the E=mc^2 gene which lets them metabolise mass directly into energy and so scientifically can never be held accountable for their weight.
I know you're sort of joking, but metabolism is extremely badly understood (most is not understood at all), and different people extract different amounts of ATP from food than others, that's just a verifiable fact. And eating less will make you lose weight, but how much less depends on, you guessed it, metabolism... So just saying "eat less" isn't very helpful IMO.
And it has not really anything close to do with thermodynamic laws, or you Had to have the emc2-gene for it to matter, thats all.
It's like relativity physics and car driving, it does intersect, but really not in any meaningful way.
Nope, there's just even more energy in a lump of coal.
I believe their point is that it's a bit silly to sit around focusing too much in thermodynamics beyond the raw limits, when there's a lot of factors that weigh in to how much of the theoretical maximum is available or used. Beyond just the basic chemistry involved, there's hormones that influence how it's used, and peoples urges to consume.
I think it's a lot of conditioning around eating. What you write is a factor but behavior is an easy thing to fix.
There are terribly fat parents who teach their kids how to be terrible fat by example. Our DNA did not change to ultra fat mode since the 1950s.