Questions regarding body fat loss

[Quick Start Test Smith]

IMO, ausswe, paleo is great. Just don't get stuck in the "paleo" mindset. The rule is basically, "If man made it, don't eat it." but there quite a few exceptions (like my buckwheat waffles).

The main fault of paleo is that as an athlete, you need a LOT of carbs, and you have to eat a LOT of vegetables to get enough of them. Fruit are an option but the quality of carbs from fruit are (as far as I know) far inferior to that of vegetables. Vegetables > fruit. It's just not practical to eat just vegetables and a few fruit for carbs. I manage to get enough by eating sweet potatoes and buckwheat waffles. If I didn't, I'd be calorie deficient ALL THE TIME.

I suggest you follow the rule of "If man made it, don't eat it" and add sweet potatoes around your workout to help fill in some carbs. I don't think paleo "allows" sweet potatoes who gives a hat? It's just a set of guidelines for eating. It's not set in stone and lightening from heaven won't strike you down if you violate them sometimes

[Rik de Kort]

Either way it may be because of the way I wrote it but you seem to have missed my main point which was what slizzardman says is in contrast to the macronutrient distribution of paleo. I dont think anyone would agree that eating all of these processed foods is a good idea for great health.

I didn't address that because I have little knowledge in that area. I just misunderstood, so sorry about that.

I remember someone saying sweet potatoes were paleo.

[Joshua Naterman]

I didnt miss the point of paleo at all and it seems like common sense to avoid such un natural processed foods. If you look at what you are left with after not eating all the crappy processed food you pretty much are left with veggies, fruit, meat, nuts things like that with a focus on meat and veggies which is low carb higher fat/protein unless you are eating a lot of potatoes and fruit that I believe is not recommended by him. I am in the process of reading "the paleo solution" and he seems to stress the point of eating less carbs and more fat and protein saying that higher carb diets are more harmful than good this seems to be a big part of it. I wont say more until I have finished the book and feel free to fill me in on any misinterpretation I may have about this book so far but like I said I am only half way through so I could be missing some things.

Either way it may be because of the way I wrote it but you seem to have missed my main point which was what slizzardman says is in contrast to the macronutrient distribution of paleo. I dont think anyone would agree that eating all of these processed foods is a good idea for great health.

Rik is right though, and if you watch some Nat Geo specials about humans and cooking, or just do some research, there is mounting evidence that we have been cooking and eating roots for at least 100,000 years. We know for SURE that this has been happening for over 20,000 years.

Potatoes are a nightshade, but sweet potatoes are not. If you are worried about that, which there is seriously not any reason to be.

The main point is that we've been eating yams forever. Yams and roots like them are staples around the world, with flower seeds like buckwheat and pseudo-grains like quinoa and millet being fairly long-term dietary staples around the world as well, particularly in areas where these tubers and root vegetables don't grow in abundance.

So if you're worried about living a dead lifestyle, don't think that root vegetables are off limits. That's ridiculous, and if you are going by Cordain you should read his more recent writings. He is realizing that his initial approach A) isn't the healthiest way and B) doesn't actually reflect what people used to eat as closely as he thought.

If you're worried about being healthy, you're off to a good start. Just don't be afraid of the starchy carbs as long as they are coming from unprocessed sources. You will do better as you get your carb intake closer to what it really should be.

[Andrew Long]

isn't the whole Idea behind the Paleo solution not to consume too many carbs except from veggies (which isn't much) and focus more on fat and protein intake? It sounds like what you are saying is that The paleo solution isn't such a good idea? man there is just too much back and forth with nutrition I never know what to listen to! I am just going to do this....

eat every 2ish hours during the day

eat most Calories around my work out

eat around 1kg of a variety of veggies spread over the day maybe more..

eat somewhere around 200-400grams of meat or fish every day

eat a few pieces of fruit maybe around breakfast and around the workout

eat the occasional small handfull of nuts (I love nuts especially amlonds)

drink whey protein mostly around the workout with a small bit of meat with one of the meals after the work out

eat a couple eggs for breakie with that fruit and maybe some veggies or something else I feel like for brekkie (or left overs)

sleep at least 7-9 hours a night

workout gymnastics for 1-2 hours every other day with the in between days being a lite 30 mins of swimming or running with some ab work and rock climbing on weekends.

that seems like a healthy lifestyle to me but tbh I just dont know whats what any more so we will see what happens maybe I will lose weight, gain strength, feel better or not. I guess the best way is to see for myself if what I said above works or not!

Oh also slizz can you fill me in on the deal with the anabolic window you talk about? or maybe send me to somewhere I can read about the research behind it?

Yea in this post above when I said veggies I probably should have been more specific and mentioned that I planned on eating things like yams and potatoes I guess as they are vegetables... Mostly around the work out because from 8am-3 or 4 pm its hard for me to eat much so it'll be quick bites of meat and salad type stuff although I am considering sipping some sort of whey during that time as it will just be easier while at work not sure I will have to see how it works.

Also slizzardman I was wondering if you could fill me in more on this anabolic window of 3 or 4 hours pwo you always talk about or send me some links so I can read about it more? do you still follow your perfect pre post workout nutirtion advice thread?

[Joshua Naterman]

I do follow that thread, or I should. I've been lazy with my nutrition and exercise until recently, largely due to forced rehab and very busy school schedule.

After the initial 20g of protein PWO, I would just have 10-15g per hour for the next two hours. Other than that, I would follow as written.

The anabolic window is based on hormonal and genetic changes that happen due to buildup of ADP, presence of amino acids, etc.

This has all been measured and is reasonably well understood.

I don't have any links for you, some of this is from private dialogues with PhDs, some is from textbooks which of course have large piles of references, and some is from lecture which is given by PhDs.

A recent, used textbook or googling on the anabolic window are your two best options.

[FREDERIC DUPONT]

It works in real life. All random error like that evens out. Stop whining and start giving it a shot.

hahaha... whining? that was unwarranted!

no doubt it works in real life, but maybe not for the reasons you think, and certainly not via "evening out" of "random errors"!

It works because everything that you measure improves... more so when the frequency of measure increases; real time the limit. Being in a range of +/- 400Kcal is practical and easy; why not 267.38Kcal? if absolute precision was so important, it would be that precise, but then nobody would do it! Nutritiming is designed to harvest the efficiency resulting from the frequency of measure and adjustments, no more!

The "evening out" comes in time with adjustments done per the feedback that results give (adjustments to the uncertainty of the target, and to the measuring errors); it is not immediate. Build in errors are not random!

[edit] In fact, after thinking about this a bit,I think we need to distinguish between the accuracy of the measure, and its precision.

For nutrition, it is easier to be precise than accurate... the accuracy is adjusted in time via the feedback of the results.

This doesn't change my take that Nutritiming is harvesting the direct results created by the frequency of measure, but may reconcile our different points of view.

Accuracy measures the bias whereas precision measures the spread:

Whoops! this drawing format sucks! :roll:

The same distinction could be made for different methods of BF% measures.

[Joshua Naterman]

You're being an ass, and you sound ridiculous.

All you're doing is saying "it doesn't work like that" when it does, with clinical peer-reviewed data as well as thousands of clients to support this method. It's good enough that the Navy SEALs and the rest of DOD are interested, because they see the practical value. It's good enough that the agencies concerned with nationwide obesity are looking into ways to implement this on a broadscale basis, chosen over a number of competing ideas because real-time thermodynamics is simple and effective. This is as of the recent national convention in Las Vegas for exercise science, nutrition and related fields. This isn't even my product, this just happens to be the facts about a good program (that could be better) that lets us take advantage of how our bodies actually work.

It's easy to get precise measurements, and everything is labeled when you buy it. Buckwheat, oatmeal, rice, everything. Need calories for other stuff? It's on the internet. Once you know about how much you need to eat, you don't have to be ridiculously accurate. I don't know why you ever went down the road of "it's impossible to be that accurate", but that has me a little bit hot.

The nice thing about our bodies is that they adapt in real time. If you match your food to your energy expenditure, and eat slow-releasing foods when you're sedentary and somewhat faster-absorbing foods when you need more energy in a period of time, your body evens out on a more or less isocaloric diet. Eating 200kcal per day too much because your metabolism is slower than the equation thinks? You're going to have 3-4 lbs of extra muscle pretty soon that you didn't intend to have. Want to lose it? You can. Just adjust the calories downward a little bit and keep matching the energy expenditure fairly closely, but run a small deficit. You'll lose primarily fat, but eventually you'll lose muscle as well if that is your goal and you want to intentionally run a bigger deficit than you should for a little while.

This is about embracing the concept that you don't want excess in your life. You don't want scarcity either. You want the right amount, no more and no less.

There is truth to the body fat measurement comparison in the precision vs accuracy, but unlike subcutaneous vs intamuscular, intra-abdominal, blah blah etc. body fat distributions one's body composition and weight will shift to match the diet.

As you get leaner, everything but DEXA, 8 way bioimpedance, and from what I hear the newest revision of bod pod are all increasingly inaccurate, especially calipers. They still help you see progress, but they mean less and less in absolute terms. DEXA is really the only way to know "for sure."

With your diet it's different. If you're eating a little too much but doing so in close proximity to your real time energy balance needs you will simply be very lean and a few pounds heavier with muscle than you meant to be. Not a mistake too many people are worried about making, and one that is incredibly easy to "fix." By nature we are self-correcting in this way... we cannot escape the visible representation of what we are doing right and what we are doing wrong in terms of our nutrition.

[FREDERIC DUPONT]

I'll leave it at that Joshua because name calling is over the line!

(...) the agencies concerned with nationwide obesity are looking into ways to implement this on a broad scale basis (...)

That got me ROFLMFAO... at best these agencies should be closed, but in view of their overwhelming results, probably the people in charge should be summarily executed!

[Rik de Kort]

The "evening out" comes in time with adjustments done per the feedback that results give (adjustments to the uncertainty of the target, and to the measuring errors); it is not immediate. Build in errors are not random!

Measuring errors will always be there and, for all intents and purposes, are random. They are also 'built-in'.

The reason that this doesn't throw off the complete system is that the outcomes of a random experiment will always tend to a normal distribution as the number of experiments increases. That is a mathematical theorem. A nice property about the normal distribution is that it is symmetrical around the average, which will be 0 in case of the measurement error. What that means is that over time the errors WILL in fact even out.

[Joachim Nagler]

Hey Joshua, i love this board because of its atmosphere and because there are discussions without the harsh tone usually found on the Internet, but if the moderators start calling names this will change pretty soon... just saying...

Fred, you are right that built-in errors are not random. But what you describe here

Outside of a lab, the cumulative errors in estimating your basal metabolism, the variance in your food energy content, the errors in measure, the temperature difference of the food you ingest (that your body has to heat), your energy expenditure variations according to your mood, external temperature

are not built-in errors but random errors and those WILL even out over time! A built-in error would be eating a teaspoon of something every time you should be eating a tablespoon.

PLUS, what Joshua said will work even if you are not down to the exact calorie.

[FREDERIC DUPONT]

I've never said that the system did not work!

I said that

(1) - the pretense of adjusting it to 10-20 Kcal per hour is idiotic because both measure errors and baseline (target) errors account for more than that.

(2) I suggested a reason why the system worked... I appreciate everyone's opinion about my suggestion, but so far, outside of being called an ass and presented with another suggestion, there is no proof of either one.

(...) the outcomes of a random experiment will always tend to a normal distribution as the number of experiments increases. (...)

No, it won't!

Normal distribution is a special case and every 1st year student in statistics will tell you that step numero uno is always to verify if the distributions under study are normal or otherwise.

If they are not, the tools to use are different!

Hey Joshua, i love this board because of its atmosphere and because there are discussions without the harsh tone usually found on the Internet, and if the moderators start calling names this will change pretty soon... just saying...

Yes, thank you for your support, I was a little bit surprised by the emotional response too!

(...) random errors and those WILL even out over time! A built-in error would be eating a teaspoon of something every time you should be eating a tablespoon.

PLUS, what Joshua said will work even if you are not down to the exact calorie.

Yes, I completely agree, over time, adjustments will be made that will narrow the actual response to the desired one... it was not the object of my post.

The key is "OVER TIME"! Once again, over time and an hourly hypothetic accuracy of 10-20 Kcal are two different things; I must have made a very poor job of making my point.

BTW, the system works, I am using it!

BUT, there is NO WAY to pin it down to 10-20 Kcal per hour... You can think otherwise, after all you live in a free country, but it is an illusion!

[Joachim Nagler]

You can only adjust systematic errors. Random errors (that you described) are by definition random and follow the Gaussian distribution, so they even out automatically. But i think this discussion is getting way off topic and isn't going to help

Joshua said you need to get 10-20-ISH every hour. I don't think he intended to say you need exactly 14,678 calorie deficit every hour but he wanted to get the idea across.

I also don't think its possible to say: "hey, that exact meal that I'm eating right now puts me into a 10 calorie deficit", but that's not important, because what's important is the average deficit, which can be accounted.

[FREDERIC DUPONT]

(...) Random errors (...) follow the Gaussian distribution (...)

D'oh!

You don't know that! They could be, but they don't have to be, even if it is convenient to assume they are!

You also likely don't know for sure where the error comes from... you'll be able to see your results drifting towards or away from your desired outcome; you'll be able to adjust by increasing or decreasing food intake, but it will be hard to determine if the error came from a misestimation of your basal energy expenditure, or the measurement of your food intake, or some nutriment absorption genetic or pathologic difference... but at that moment it will not matter much.

The adjustment I am talking about, is not an adjustment of the errors, but an adjustment of the protocol according to the response you get. This is not going to happen on an hourly basis... maybe twice a month, if you are very, very aware of your body.

I agree, this has drifted way off topic - you can adjust to the last 10-20Kcal if you wish, you just need to know it won't make much of a difference ===>> that is why the nutritiming is calibrated at +/- 400 Kcal and not +/- 50 Kcal, and every hour and not continuous time. These are reasonable approximations that make the system realistic and able to work in real life.

[Joachim Nagler]

Answered via PM

[Larry Roseman]

Studies have shown that people self reporting intake routinely under-estimate calories eaten.

People are multi-tasking and stuff is just plain forgotten to be logged.

On top of that nutrition labels are routinely wrong - consumer reports showed the actual values of many products were off.

Partly it's because companies are allowed to use estimates that are published, but may not reflect the actual value

of the sources for their product.

So errors on the calorie in side are likely to be lower than actual.

On the calorie out side, I suspect that people tend to over-estimate their activity burn.

Machines typically do report higher than actual values.

So given that you're probably eating more and burning less than you're reporting, there error distribution is bound

to be skewed. I would suggest 5% adjustment downwards is advisable for this.

However, there are so many factors including the weather that account for caloric burn. One can't take

them all into account.

That said the attempt is useful, for a time anyway.

[Rik de Kort]

(...) the outcomes of a random experiment will always tend to a normal distribution as the number of experiments increases. (...)

No, it won't!

Normal distribution is a special case and every 1st year student in statistics will tell you that step numero uno is always to verify if the distributions under study are normal or otherwise.

If they are not, the tools to use are different!

(...) Random errors (...) follow the Gaussian distribution (...)

That is precisely the point of the 'normal' (or Gaussian) distribution. Because a random experiment will ALWAYS have a normal distribution otherwise it is not random. You use the normal distribution in hypothesis testing (calculating the chance that the hypothesis is false given the number of experiments. This is where the p-value comes from) because you can't know what type of error you made.

This is a Mathematical Theorem called the Central Limit Theorem.

If your outcomes are not normally distributed and you have done a large number of experiments, there's a big chance there's something systematic going on). That is what any 1st year statistics student will tell you (seriously, is that even a major because that sounds like the easiest major ever) and that is in fact what a 1st year math student with solid grades and good grounding in statistics is telling you. The Poisson distribution and related stuff are for other purposes (poisson is for when something will arrive) and don't have bearing on the type of experiment were discussing here.

Let me reiterate the main point:

RANDOM ERRORS WILL ALWAYS FOLLOW THE NORMAL DISTRIBUTION AND THUS EVEN OUT, OTHERWISE THEY ARE NOT RANDOM BUT SYSTEMATIC. THIS IS A MATHEMATICAL THEOREM AND THE BASIS OF ALL EXPERIMENTAL STATISTICS.

[Joshua Naterman]

That's true in many cases, but not all.

When results are not in a normal distribution you do have to go back and really double-check the math, but you do sometimes get numbers that are skewed, and that leaves you with at least two things that have to happen.

1) You definitely have to have someone else replicate the results.

2) You have to figure out what you missed, because there was clearly something going on that might even be completely undiscovered as of yet.

It's been too long now, I've forgotten a lot since I took statistics... but there are cases when there is no error and you still have an abnormal distribution. Sometimes this is how new phenomena are discovered...

It is definitely true that in all cases an abnormal distribution bears close scrutiny.

Distributions depend entirely on definitions, which is why statistics are so useful to politicians. They can say what you want them to say, and sometimes making things conform to a normal distribution gives you an abnormal view of real life.

Case in point: We do not have a normal distribution for opportunity, wealth, or happiness when you look at American population surveys. That doesn't make these survey results incorrect.

Granted, this doesn't happen very often, but it does happen and is good to be aware of.

I have no idea what my original post was about, perhaps I was off-base with my response?

[Joshua Naterman]

Studies have shown that people self reporting intake routinely under-estimate calories eaten.

People are multi-tasking and stuff is just plain forgotten to be logged.

On top of that nutrition labels are routinely wrong - consumer reports showed the actual values of many products were off.

Partly it's because companies are allowed to use estimates that are published, but may not reflect the actual value

of the sources for their product.

So errors on the calorie in side are likely to be lower than actual.

On the calorie out side, I suspect that people tend to over-estimate their activity burn.

Machines typically do report higher than actual values.

So given that you're probably eating more and burning less than you're reporting, there error distribution is bound

to be skewed. I would suggest 5% adjustment downwards is advisable for this.

However, there are so many factors including the weather that account for caloric burn. One can't take

them all into account.

That said the attempt is useful, for a time anyway.

yes, very true! It is nearly always better to start off a little low, you can always add a little food if you notice a slowdown in mass gain. Just distributing protein more evenly through the day will make a big difference if you haven't done that yet.

However, if good food choices are being made it won't matter much because what will happen is that you will put on more lean mass, your metabolism goes up, and you end up flattening out at whatever bf% your body's genetics + your food choices leave you at. Not very many of us will flatten out below 7%, unless we are really eating all the right things at the right times, but 7-9% seems to be pretty normal to achieve without a ridiculous effort put into food. That's where I hover, and I am just one guy but I see this range a lot. Dropping below it seems to be bad for performance, probably because of the dietary methods used to do this.

There is a point where looks and performance diverge, but I don't think any of us will complain about how we look when we're in the single digits, right?

The nice thing about being in the ball park is that your body will recompose to make things right as long as the absorption of your food closely matches your body's relative energy expenditure in real time.

[Joshua Naterman]

(...) Random errors (...) follow the Gaussian distribution (...)

I agree, this has drifted way off topic - you can adjust to the last 10-20Kcal if you wish, you just need to know it won't make much of a difference ===>> that is why the nutritiming is calibrated at +/- 400 Kcal and not +/- 50 Kcal, and every hour and not continuous time. These are reasonable approximations that make the system realistic and able to work in real life.

That's not really accurate. Nutritiming is set up the way it is because they decided it was good enough that way, but this is because unless you are really eating poorly your absorption rates for meals of 400-600 kcal, which the majority will be eating, match normal metabolism fairly closely. Not perfect, but fairly close.

Those instantaneous deficit/surplus 'limits' are simply where you start seeing statistically significant lean mass loss and/or fat mass gain according to the research done with the program. It's a good idea, and does produce better results, if you are able to stay within +/- 200, but Nutritiming is not set up to show the true absorption curve of the food, which many have pointed out and rightfully so. The slower your food digests the better it will work for you outside of the workout window.

You will want to take care of the actual calories burned beyond basal metabolism in the moment, as much as you can, and that will require faster absorbing foods.

The program isn't meant to be a perfect model of your absorption, though I wish it was closer. It's just meant to be good enough, like you say, to let you see where your big problems are. After that it's all fine-tuning.

I think there might be a mis-communication as far as what I meant with the 20 kcal. You aren't going to be able to keep your graph at -20 the whole time, and that's not the idea. The idea is that your entire graph is shifted downwards 10-20kcal. Same shape, just 10-20kcal lower. There will still be surpluses and that's fine, there are supposed to be.That gives you a reasonable relative daily deficit and excellent results.

The more we delve into this the more it will come back to this: You just need to match your nutrient absorption with your caloric needs. You're only going to have two real modes: Keeping pace with the daily workout, and normal eating. Am I not making sense? It seems like I am to me, but maybe people don't get it. I don't know. Comments welcome.

[FREDERIC DUPONT]

(...) Let me reiterate the main point:

RANDOM ERRORS WILL ALWAYS FOLLOW THE NORMAL DISTRIBUTION AND THUS EVEN OUT, OTHERWISE THEY ARE NOT RANDOM BUT SYSTEMATIC. THIS IS A MATHEMATICAL THEOREM AND THE BASIS OF ALL EXPERIMENTAL STATISTICS.

This could prove useful to others in the future (or detrimental if they ignore it), here goes:

Although random errors are often assumed to follow a normal distribution in the underlying of a process, they can also follow other types of distribution:

random errors from different types of processes could be described by any one of a wide range of different probability distributions in general, including the uniform, triangular, double exponential, binomial and Poisson distributions. With most process modeling methods, however, inferences about the process are based on the idea that the random errors are drawn from a normal distribution

http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook ... pmd214.htm

http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook ... pmd445.htm

and:

One of the most used assumption of normality is in error analysis. We usually assume that the random errors follow a normal distribution. This assumption can break down when there are multiple sources of errors and they are correlated. In addition, if the errors are not truly random, then too this assumption might not be valid. If the error distribution is not normal and the assumption of normality is made, then there could lead to an incorrect statistical analysis and thus erroneous conclusions

Read more: http://www.experiment-resources.com/nor ... z1ypGGfmmz

In the case in reference, the errors are likely correlated and likely not truly random... it is rather prudent to question their normality and that they will not not cancel out properly.

Not keeping this in the back of your head can cause some interesting problems:

Look at the banks and financial crisis; you've heard that some derivatives have behaved strangely and have not performed their role as hedge negatively correlated to the portfolio they were supposed to protect?

Behind every single case of it (all 600,000,000,000,000 USD worth of contracts!) is a PHD or Rocket scientist that forgot to verify his distribution assumptions, forgot that his linear (or curved) model had limits beyond which it did no longer work, ignored the effect of the size of his own position in the total market!

This is why "6 sigma" events happen every other week now! Fractal distributions behave differently than normal plain vanilla ones.

[FREDERIC DUPONT]

(...) The program isn't meant to be a perfect model of your absorption, though I wish it was closer. It's just meant to be good enough, like you say, to let you see where your big problems are. After that it's all fine-tuning.

I think there might be a mis-communication as far as what I meant with the 20 kcal. You aren't going to be able to keep your graph at -20 the whole time, and that's not the idea. The idea is that your entire graph is shifted downwards 10-20kcal. Same shape, just 10-20kcal lower. There will still be surpluses and that's fine, there are supposed to be.That gives you a reasonable relative daily deficit and excellent results.

The more we delve into this the more it will come back to this: You just need to match your nutrient absorption with your caloric needs. You're only going to have two real modes: Keeping pace with the daily workout, and normal eating. Am I not making sense? It seems like I am to me, but maybe people don't get it. I don't know. Comments welcome.

Apologies accepted Mr Naterman

As I mentioned a few pages ago, we are just looking at the same thing from a different angle; that doesn't make either of us right or wrong.

Fear not, you are doing a great job at expressing your ideas

(A better job that I do, apparently... but I have the ultimate excuse for my failings...

[Joshua Naterman]

I've never said that the system did not work!

I said that

(1) - the pretense of adjusting it to 10-20 Kcal per hour is idiotic because both measure errors and baseline (target) errors account for more than that.

(2) I suggested a reason why the system worked... I appreciate everyone's opinion about my suggestion, but so far, outside of being called an ass and presented with another suggestion, there is no proof of either one.

There's quite a bit of clinical data suggesting it does work. You're right that without access to direct calorimetry you can't know exactly what you're body is doing, but the formulas that nutritiming uses are within 5%. The exception is obese people who have previously or currently are undergoing low calorie diet phases. They tend to be something crazy like 25% lower.

I think that we already figured out we're pretty much looking at the same thing from a different angle, and probably have much the same concept in our heads but are using different words to express it.

With the food issue you brought up, it's true. All we can do is the best we can do. The nice thing about the labeling errors is that as long as we consume the same brands, which most of us do, we will easily self-correct on this as we add more calories to our meals when we see that we aren't gaining the mass we expect. If we're slightly high we'll end up with a little more muscle than we bargained for, but not really any fat. % will probably stay the same for a few weeks as the lean mass piles on, and then you're briefly at equilibrium. After that, you're going to go through a period where you still put on lean mass but you lose body fat as you put it on until you hit your set point as dictated by your food choices and your genetics. At that point nothing will put on more mass but drugs or more food.

Hey Joshua, i love this board because of its atmosphere and because there are discussions without the harsh tone usually found on the Internet, and if the moderators start calling names this will change pretty soon... just saying...

Yes, thank you for your support, I was a little bit surprised by the emotional response too!

(...) random errors and those WILL even out over time! A built-in error would be eating a teaspoon of something every time you should be eating a tablespoon.

PLUS, what Joshua said will work even if you are not down to the exact calorie.

Yes, I completely agree, over time, adjustments will be made that will narrow the actual response to the desired one... it was not the object of my post.

The key is "OVER TIME"! Once again, over time and an hourly hypothetic accuracy of 10-20 Kcal are two different things; I must have made a very poor job of making my point.

BTW, the system works, I am using it!

Just to clarify, because name calling is completely inappropriate here:

I didn't say "Fred, you're an ass." That would be name calling.

My words were that you were being an ass, which means acting like an ass. That's not name-calling. Asses are stubborn creatures that do what they want whether it's useful or helpful or painfully inconvenient, or provocative, or confusing, or just plain wrong. In my eyes, at that moment, your recent posts made me feel like you were intentionally being an ass because they were making it hard to help the OP and talking about how things couldn't be done as I was suggesting, which they can.

That's how I felt, but it was clearly a case of miscommunication. I can see with our recent conversation that you weren't being an ass. You just weren't being clear enough with what you meant, just as I apparently wasn't clear enough in defining my response. I need to get in the habit of waiting a day and looking at the response when I feel like that. I would then notice that I should have said something like "Fred, it seems like you are simply being difficult. If so, it's getting on my nerves and making it hard to help the OP."

I can't really apologize for defining actions by what they appeared to be at the time, but I am perfectly capable of saying that this was simply miscommunication, and that I can see you were not trying to be an ass. You have my sincere apologies for my mis-interpretation of the last few days' discourse.

I prefer to be wrong about things like this, which I clearly was today, and I will try to be more clear in the future, and to do so via PM at first.

Anyhow, back to business! Seems like we're back on topic for the most part.

[FREDERIC DUPONT]

Yeah, obviously my first posts were not very clear... good communication & clarity is an art!

I am glad we eventually found common ground Joshua.

[Rik de Kort]

It's been too long now, I've forgotten a lot since I took statistics... but there are cases when there is no error and you still have an abnormal distribution. Sometimes this is how new phenomena are discovered...

Like I said, a non-normal distribution points to a confounding factor, a systematic error. On which we all agree.

In the case in reference, the errors are likely correlated and likely not truly random... it is rather prudent to question their normality and that they will not not cancel out properly.

A solid argument, appealing to the premises and not the proof, as it were. You talked about measuring errors. Which I don't think would correlate with eachother since measuring equipment that's inaccurate will go both ways. If today you measure one gram too many, how would that influence how many grams you're off the next day? Unless you have very shitty measuring equipment that just overestimates all the things on a regular basis, not many. And that's a systematic thing.

If something isn't normally distributed, there are confounding factors. Which you have been saying the other way around: if there are confouding factors, it isn't normally distributed. We're agreeing here.

[FREDERIC DUPONT]

(...) you have been saying the other way around (...)

LOL... I think you've nicely summed up the whole enchilada :D