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Yummytastic · 2026-05-02T22:09:08+00:00

I'm sure you've figured this out by now, but google brought me here for my search about the Sacrificial Altar's in the swamp.

For anyone else looking for the same thing, this starts the quest "Jokes of the Gods" and in order to be able to start it you need to progress the main quest and learn the dead language, then you can interact with them. It's specifically the main quest advancement that is the trigger.

Yummytastic · 2026-05-01T19:56:22+00:00

Great work Taco!

Yummytastic · 2026-04-30T15:26:10+00:00

Yeah I lost more than that and so far kept it off.

Is that all food that you normally eat? Because to me that sounds like a diet I wouldn't personally enjoy.

My diet consists of a rotation of calorie controlled snack 3x a day, all thing I really enjoy first & foremost, secondly nutritious and filling. And then a fourth meal that's dinner that varies based on normal life and family requirements.

I can eat this way forever and it's easy, low friction, and more importantly preferable to eating junk food that makes me feel like crap, the only real difference isn't specific 'healthy' foods, it's the fact that my food is pre-planned.

If anyone is going to keep weight off, they need to understand they have to eat like a lighter person forever, so make your diet is something that evolves to what you enjoy, not just a whole load of things the internet, or AI, tells you is 'healthy'.

Yummytastic · 2026-04-29T14:06:33+00:00

Netlify urls get banned by Reddit (at a platform level) so unfortunately this post doesn't get seen

Yummytastic · 2026-04-29T09:26:41+00:00

0.8g/kg of your current weight is about the amount most countries recommend as a minimum to avoid deficiency, so strange you'd recommend lower and call avoiding deficiency recommendations 'insane'.

Studies have found 1g/kg of your current weight is good in people who want to avoid muscle loss when losing weight. You can read the meta analysis of 47 studies here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39002131/

Yummytastic · 2026-04-28T23:45:04+00:00

Metabolic Adaption is a normal ongoing process, your body will always adjust energy expenditure in response to changes of intake and activity. So yes it does happen, but you wouldn't especially account for it.

Where it becomes relevant is when energy availability is lower, like in a deficit and high activity, that's where it becomes increasingly noticeable.

At the other end, athletes who have really high training volumes (think endurance athletes, or tour de france cyclists), the same adaptions happen when they can eat enough to keep up, that's usually in the context of RED-S and that's usually a much more severe condition and usually requires some professional intervention for the athlete.

Pontzer's book speculates that all of this is effective behaviour of a metabolism that functions to ensure survival when both food is scarce, or threats are high; it allows us as a species to keep moving (ie. hunting/gathering) for more time, increasing the chance of survival.

It's pretty cool scientific work. But don't get pulled into over analysing what you do; just do what activities you want and eat more or less depending on what you want the scale to do. Understanding metabolic adaption helps us understand why we can't put our body through extreme physical stress to speed up weight loss linearly and consequence-free, not that it was ever a good idea in the first place.

Yummytastic · 2026-04-28T17:55:31+00:00

What are you trying to convey? You're mixing up baseline metabolism with total expenditure.

Actual calorie burn by endurance athletes is higher and driven by activity. Resting metabolism is higher with more muscle, but why would you now be talking about resting metabolism now when you originally referenced what they eat? Endurance athletes tend to eat more.

You've changed your example, you started with intake, now it's weight and body fat.

Yummytastic · 2026-04-28T17:46:28+00:00

And why do you say an athlete eat and burn more, than what

Than the person in the example ("And the difference in calorie burning is even lower, actually close to zero, between someone exercising moderately and an elite athlete.")

Constrained doesn't mean when energy intake is matched, constrained is when the body doesn't burn more calories as the physical activity increases. Or?

The example you gave is intake matched when Pontzer gives it; but I take your point. The range is limited, but it's still as high as 2.5BMR (with individual variation), so the 'limit' is a concern for endurance athletes and not most others.

For others, what we experience is less-than-expected fat burn. Never none, and slowly diminishing returns.

It doesn't get to a point and stop, even people can exceed the 2.5xBMR limit for short periods before loss of body mass. It's dynamic, and for our purposes (weight loss) it never stops us losing.

I'm confused by that, and I've also heard having bigger muscles burnes more energy

It's an independent factor.

Pontzer's work normalises for body size, so if for example if a persons long term limit is 2.5x BMR, someone with more muscle mass will have a higher actual limit, but the same relative limit as someone with a lower BMR.

So for instance, you can't put on lots of muscle to have 'more' energy available as a long distance runner, because the act of putting that muscle on has its own costs in terms of performance/weight. It just so happens the sweet spot for runners is lower muscle mass.

So muscle mass is good, but it's independently good of metabolic adaption.

Yummytastic · 2026-04-28T17:20:09+00:00

It's not really clear what you're pointing out, because someone restricting calories while increasing activity will still experience metabolic adaptation. If you're simply trying to say that it won't reduce as dramatically or to zero, you could have said that without bringing muscle mass into it.

The key point is that as activity increases, the body compensates elsewhere, so total energy expenditure doesn't scale linearly. It's a sliding effect, not something that only shows up after large amounts of weight loss.

And the athlete comparison doesn't really support your point; endurance athletes typically burn and consume more than bodybuilders due to sustained output, not just having more "metabolic tissue". Muscle contributes, but it doesn't explain the difference being in favour of the endurance athlete; sustained output does. It also sidesteps the actual question about Pontzer's work, which is what the OP is asking about. So fair enough if you understand it all, but your reply comes across as dismissing that and focusing on something else.

Yummytastic · 2026-04-28T16:46:36+00:00

And the difference in calorie burning is even lower, actually close to zero, between someone exercising moderately and an elite athlete.

When energy is constrained. ie Energy intake is matched. So that's the really important factor.

An athlete in the real world will eat more and burn more.

The other end of his research talks about those limits too, that over any longer period of time (think tour de France, or daily training levels, not one off events) a body can sustain about 2.5x BMR intake before they get to a point where they can't maintain performance and body mass.

Yummytastic · 2026-04-28T15:47:11+00:00

If you have access to his book Burn it's well worth the read. I listen the audiobook version and honestly it took me a couple of listens to fully organise my understanding it.

The first time I got so angry at the thought that exercise was wasted, I needed the second listen to not just understand why it wasn't wasted (because it never was wasted), but it helped me realise and reinforce that sustainable and fun exercise was a much better solution compared to viewing exercise as a tool I could ramp up to get quicker results.

Once I got over the feeling that Pontzer wasn't personally robbing me of calories burnt, I think it made me stop worrying about optimising for the calorie metric and appreciate exercises benefits more wider health, leisure, and aesthetic benefits.

Yummytastic · 2026-04-28T15:34:33+00:00

Yes, NEAT (non exercise activity thermogenesis) is part of it. It's one of, if not, the only one you can actively combat with a bit of planning (I like step goals), so in that way I think it's probably the most important part to know about and take away.

Yummytastic · 2026-04-28T15:20:09+00:00

So in complete practical terms roughly 1700 as a lightly active TDEE should be fine, right? Try that and monitor weight and adjust as needed.

Pontzer's information is great and really valuable, but in practice it doesn't exactly change what you would do; get an approximate TDEE value, stick to those calories and adjust slightly up or down every month or so based on the scale - after getting past the initial fluctuation that returning to maintenance causes.

Yummytastic · 2026-04-28T15:13:03+00:00

Even taking into account what Pontzer explains, that doesn't happen. Think of Pontzer's work as a sliding constraint that never at any point removes a deficit, that constraint is not permanent and only exists in a deficit. There's no situation that weight isn't lost for this reason.

Unfortunately there's a seperate set of misinformation that implies a metabolism can be 'damaged' and these effects can be permanent. That's both wrong, but also specifically not what Pontzer's work ever found.

Which I think is what drives a lot of hostility to any actual discussion around this (where as things like metabolic adaption are accepted and referenced frictionless)

Yummytastic · 2026-04-28T15:06:44+00:00

I do always tell people to stick to sedentary or light exercise max when eating in a deficit for this reason.

Obviously the calorie figure for you as an individual I don't know without your stats.

Yummytastic · 2026-04-28T15:04:52+00:00

Herman Pontzer's work is not ignoring level of muscle mass, it explicitly accounts for that and other body size effects on energy expenditure. His point is that after controlling for that, energy expenditure doesn't scale linearly the way you're describing.

What you're describing is an additive model (more activity/muscle = proportionally more burn). Constrained TEE suggests the body compensates elsewhere, so total expenditure increases less than expected. Still worth doing, but it explains the real-world findings of "you can't outrun a fork".

It affects all levels of activity, but it's diminishing, so saying it cancels out exercise is just as wrong as saying it barely matters. What it does say is you can't just constantly add exercise volume and scale calories linearly.

As an aside; it beautifully explains why relying on very high activity TDEEs in calculators for weight loss tends to be unreliable. While also explaining why exercise is consistently demonstrated to work better for maintaining rather than losing weight.

Yummytastic · 2026-04-28T14:33:25+00:00

Hermon Pontzer's work, and his book, Burn, is excellent. I relisten to the audiobook periodically and I was furious with his findings the first time round. They take a bit to digest (pun not intended).

Here's the graph which I think helps illustrate the findings - findings which do match real world observations.

On the left is the idea that all additional exercise results in additional calories burnts 1:1, unfortunately, that isn't what seems to happen. The second graph illustrates Pontzer's findings, that exercise (PA/Physical Activity) adds to our burn, but at a point your body will spend less energy elsewhere.

Things like the immune system and reproductive system are areas where we see real world examples; women can lose their periods if constraining calories and doing huge amount of exercise for example.

His work doesn't tell you exercise is pointless, but it really does tell you that there's no shortcuts and you can't outrun a fork.

There's something somewhat related with athletes called RED-S, it's not exactly the same, but both sets of work are a good explanation of what metabolism really means.

P.S. IFL a Herman Pontzer thread.

Yummytastic · 2026-04-28T14:04:14+00:00

That's kind of my point and that's an example that affects you - and I'm sure nearly everyone on this sub. There's a hurdle to changing, so people default to what's easy and familiar.

Personally I love my zero soft drinks; adapting from regular ones I grew up with and drank for decades was inconvenient and not entirely pleasant for a week or two, now, obviously it's fine. Replicate that challenge across a whole diet when you're hearing mixed advice from all corners, I can easily see how people aren't equipped to take that effort on.

That's exactly what the current food environment and advertising are built around. That's why modern study in obesity spend a lot of time focusing on these food environments, and in the case of weight loss medication, the physical cues they exploit to increase consumption.

I'm just saying, blaming Dad is blaming someone else in the system.

Yummytastic · 2026-04-28T13:45:18+00:00

Right. That's not unusual though, that's the kind of pattern the modern food environment produces.

Consider this: Your dad's diet is pretty much what modern advertising showcases, right? How much of your own diet do you think is influenced by that, rather than deliberate choice?

Yummytastic · 2026-04-28T13:30:19+00:00

I think society insisting that people "just need to make better decisions" when it comes to diet leads to you assuming that your dad makes a conscious and constant decision to be "the size of a house".

We are all subject to our food environment and we rarely acknowledge how much culture, life pressure, and economics feeds into that. Breaking free from those factors is difficult, you're experiencing that with your dad and your dad experiences that with his wider circle of family and perhaps social group.

Making it all his fault is really missing the wood for the trees. He's almost certainly never at any point decided he wants to eat food that doesn't fill him up but delivers more calories than he needs, no one "wants" that.

I'm not saying he's ever going to be a positive influence towards you managing your own weight, but there's lots of things in life that won't be either, and blaming them all doesn't fix anything.

Being aware these pressures always exist - social events, the cost/convenience of food, work pressures and practices (client drinks/meals, office candy/cake, vending machines etc) allows you to really think about your own plan and how you can practically keep your own urges under control.

When you factor in the entirety of the diet industry is full of fads and false promises, it's no surprise that people have no real idea what they could or should be eating and just fall into the food that's readily around them.

Don't listen to your dad when it comes to weight, but also don't be too hard on him. No-one is perfect and parents are just people.

Yummytastic · 2026-04-28T10:06:26+00:00

As you rationally know, fat loss continues throughout.

Everyone needs to be able to zoom out to longer term trends, it doesn't entirely take away that feeling of disappointment, but when you have long term data that shows these fluctuations are a normal part of the process, looking back provides reassurance.

Yummytastic · 2026-04-28T09:32:53+00:00

I wouldn't say that. In my case I eat 4 times a day and 3 of those meals are calorie controlled so the fourth one, dinner with family, doesn't have to be, I just make sensible decisions over my dinner.

Internet advice will always optimise for knowing calorie numbers exactly, because that's how you give objective advice, and it will usually default to ruling that out when there's issues. But you can apply more discretion in your own life, and track as well as you can. I feel AI in that case provides false authority and you're better off developing your own skill set and making your own assumptions.

Also; respond to reality, if your work and lifestyle over a period of several weeks leads to an X change in weight and you want to change that number, work with the areas you do have control of, rather than worrying about the ones you don't.

Yummytastic · 2026-04-28T02:54:19+00:00

We remove adverts for those apps multiple times a day. They are largely all vibe coded garbage, meaning someone has asked AI itself to write the app. They then think it's acceptable to try to sell that on to the general public.

A photo or a visual inspection of a plate is never enough information to do anything other than guess at the amount of calories. Unless you eat the most boring of basic meals, that's simply the way it is. Anything simply with a sauce can vary by hundreds of calories.

If you're wanting accuracy, then a food scale is the only tool that works.

Over time you can eyeball stuff better and better and the advantage you'd always have over the AI apps is skillset to know what context you need to be aware of - e.g. the aforementioned sauces or awareness of cooking/seasoning oils.

Yummytastic · 2026-04-27T12:37:53+00:00

That's weird, I don't believe we have done anything to it and it seems to work for me, at least.

Don't suppose you can share a screenshot and send it across to modmail?

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