You wouldn't know if you're in starvation mode or not because you haven't regularly conducted complete metabolic panels to determine your resting metabolism at regular intervals. Furthermore, if you are consistently staying below your body's set point then you would not expect your body's set point to change. However, if you regain more and more body fat after each dieting cycle then your metabolism probably is changing and your body is probably actively resisting your attempts to lose weight, sorry to say.

This article isn't meant to address why the population is gaining weight as a whole, its simply explaining why those who are trying very hard to lose weight often fail. The trend towards obesity and the failure of diet and exercise to reverse that trend are related topics, but not the same.

Thanks for posting these studies.

I have a couple of questions about the set point and I'm hoping that you or somebody else in the community might have some answers.

One: According to the study's cited by the author, two otherwise identical bodies will have very different metabolisms if one is below the set point and the other is at the set point. Regardless, we should have conservation of energy. Do we know what it is that the first body is doing with all those calories that the second body isn't doing?

Two: Similar to the way obese individuals have damaged metabolisms, users of anabolic steroids will wreck their body's natural production of testosterone. It used to be that testosterone shut-down was thought to be permanent, but now steroid users can use a series of drugs to kickstart testosterone production and reestablish a normal hormone balance. To your knowledge, is anybody investigating whether or not a similar intervention might be effective in restarting the body's set point?

Again, I appreciate your bringing relevant science into the conversation. People are getting very emotional in this discussion and its devolving into dumb insults like "Nice try, Fat ass, but you're still a Fat ass."

People have this deep-seated need to believe that the universe is a just world. They don't want to believe in a world where some people are arbitrarily's given great advantages while others suffer, so they will resort to all sorts of non-scientific nonsense: everything from bogus economic beliefs to karma. Apparently this also includes beliefs about dieting and exercise.

The article cites scientific evidence that the body's metabolism and hunger response will struggle to maintain body fat, which is why so few people can sustain weight loss through any method. Nature doesn't give a shit about your opinions about personal responsibility. It's not going to take a survey about what metabolic response would be the most fair.

So if you are aware of any actual, fucking science that contradictions the author's conclusions, by all means please post them so we can better understand this issue. But if all you have to offer are shitty, unvalidated, opinions stemming from your psychological need to believe that fat people are bad and lean people are good and thus they deserve what they get, then please STFU,

There's a lot of lip-service being paid to 'zero tolerance'... I haven't seen any actions.

"Zero tolerance" policies only serve to extend bullying. Practically speaking, there is intrinsically a huge amount of leeway granted to teachers and administrators to who is subjected to 'zero tolerance' policies under which circumstances. A black kid is suspended for waving to the camera in a photo. A girl is strip searched and suspended for allegedly sharing over-the-counter medication. A girl takes a razor from another student threatening self-harm and throws it directly in the trash and she gets suspended (and recommended for expulsion) for having a weapon when she reports the incident to the teachers. I guaran-fucking-tee you that if that girl had been rich and white and popular the school would have never tried to punish her. People are punished because they are disliked, punished because they are weak, and then ultimately punished for being punished.

I could list these stories all day long. Zero tolerance is just an excuse for administrators to come up with ridiculous bullshit charges against vulnerable students and then claim that their "hands are tied" to deflect public backlash. The reason the teachers and principle lost their shit during recording incident is because it exposed their complicity with bullying.

I hope this kid learned his lesson. Next time, don't go the teachers, don't go to your parents, go to YouTube. Make that shit go viral. And when they inevitably try to punish you just lie. You don't know who recorded the incident, you don't know where the video came from, you don't know who uploaded it, it probably the kids who have been relentlessly bullying you uploaded it so they could mock you online but you don't know. Stick to your guns no matter what.

I'm sorry kid. I wish I could recommend a course of action that didn't require you to lie. I wish I knew a morally pristine way to protect yourself, but the fact is that there isn't one. That's just the nature of the world you live in.

Are you so naive as to think this was the first time a pork producer illegally disposed massive quantities of waste into public waterways? Do you think it was just some random coincidence that an activist group happened upon this pollution? Everybody who paid any attention to the problem already knew do this was going on regularly and on a massive scale. When you dump a river of pig blood into a public waterway you leave plenty of evidence. Neighbors have been trying for over a decade to stop this, but the authorities never listen to them. Pork producers just bullshit the public claiming, assault the science, and write checks behind the scenes to keep business as usual.

Yes, it was very much the case that public officials were actively trying to protect industrial pig farmers and they succeeded for years. If it wasn't for the activists galvanizing the public and shaming the government then nothing would have happened and everybody would still be drinking hormone-injected pig's blood.

You have no evidence. Your purported weather-lose claims evidence merely shows that people are building in more vulnerable areas now. We already knew that.

No, read the article. Perhaps you can start with the title: "North America most affected by increase in weather related natural catastrophes" and "Nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America". Development patterns are cited as one reason that weather-loss costs are up, but the article clearly and prominently discusses the role of climate change.

Oh it's easy. It's the same as "Microsoft Windows will make your life better". You may be skeptical about this and expect proof. Which should be easy to explain; complaining about the question doesn't cut it.

Skepticism in science if good. It either reinforces a good theory or disproves a bad one. There's no point in getting mad at the process.

Skepticism where people can't be bothered to look up basic facts is "good"? Somebody gravely mischaracterizing the position of the scientific community is "part of the process"?

Wrong. That isn't science. That's being lazy and irresponsible at best and if somebody pulled that bullshit at the laboratory where I work he/she'd be shitcanned overnight.

China and India don't depend upon Greenhouse gas emissions to develop their economy. They depend upon trade to the West. They also have hundreds of millions of people living in flood prone areas that will be submerged under the rising oceans. That is why China and India will respond to collective action on greenhouse gas emissions.

The entirety of your evidence that Montreal was "wiped out" was some random friend's recollection? I rest my case.

Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmosphere

The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in Earth's atmosphere has reached 395 ppm (parts per million) as of June 2012[1][2] and rose by 2.0 ppm/yr during 2000–2009. [2][3] This current concentration is substantially higher than the 280 ppm concentration present in pre-industrial times, with the increase largely attributed to anthropogenic sources.[4]

In the eons past, CO2 has drifted up and down over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. But natural shifts in CO2 concentration occur very slowly. That's why it CO2 concentration hardly varied in the 10,000 years that preceded the industrial revolution. CO2 concentration has never increased as rapidly as it has been in the last 50 years. And it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the reason CO2 is increasing so rapidly right now is that we're releasing 32 billion metric tons of CO2 into the air every year.

The report doesn't specify how we add numbers either, but that doesn't mean it's not true because it's not mentioned

In other words, you don't like the report's conclusions so you're going to reject them and rely on a bullshit alternate explanation that you just pulled out of your ass with zero justification whatsoever.

What has been clearly explained is a broken hypothesis that no government in the world accepts and gets weaker with each new discovery.

Every major scientific organization in the USA, both governmental and non-governmental, accept the realities of global warming. This is true from NASA to the Office of Naval Research, to Los Alamos National Laboratory. This is true in countries across the globe. You can get a huge list here. You are a bullshitter that enjoys making false statements that anybody can debunk within seconds.

I am not the one claiming that weight is relevant. The grandparent, the person I replied to, is clearly making the claim that weight is relevant and in fact relies on the premise when he brought up the weight of CO2, an attempt to play the number itself ("billions") to be relevant evidence in the discourse.

There is nothing objectionable with stating our annual global CO2 emissions. It doesn't matter if that person quantifies the emissions by weight or mass or moles. They are all valid.

It is a flagrant distortion to compare annual CO2 emissions with the total atmosphere as you did. That's a crime.

That article contains no mention of Montreal. Your claim that Hazel "wiped out" Montreal is total bullshit.