New Keto Term: "Phinney" Weight

(Dustin Cade) #21

i started my towards this way of eating because I was 421lbs and making a change was soon to be life and death… i started low carb, in searching recipes and the mention of getting into ketosis by my GP, i found keto, being addicted to podcasts i typed in keto and well here we are… I have to remind my self daily that I have come a long way, its going to take a while till i settle at my true Phinney weight! i would really like to have abs…

(Elizabeth Mitchell) #22

Maybe a bit off topic, but this:

is something that really grinds my gears. Devhammer is so right. In so many other forums, I see loads of people asking, “Oh will a bit of sugar in my coffee break my fast?” “Can I have orange juice just for breakfast, you know it’s healthy”, etc.

I always reply in this vein “Look, you’re an adult. If you read the books, learn about the diet, and then still want to do those things, then DO THEM. Don’t come here asking for validation for your behavior. You are making your own choices.”

So achieving a Phinney weight is an adult choice as well. If someone wants to try, applies them self, and struggles to pass a certain point, they have options. Try a new behavior or stay where they are. I’ve been in a “stall” for two weeks at just over a 30lb loss. I’m not going to settle here as this is not a weight that I feel is necessary. I just think my body needed time to get going downward again. So I keep eating keto, behaving well (making adult choices) and the scale started moving again. I know I have a Phinney weight down around 300lbs, as that is where I’ve been stable for most of my “grown up” life. I won’t say adult, because I got there making poor choices. I also know I have a Fung weight that’s below 200 because I can make my body composition change though making significant behavioral choices. Those might be hard, struggling, and uncomfortable choices, but I think I want to make them. I feel the benefit will be worth the sacrifice.

/end rant and thesis :writing_hand:

#23

This is a good point. Don’t go in a forum looking for validation to wiggle out of a commitment.

However, something I’d like to point out is unfortunately, a lot of people find themselves diabetic or obese or with some other metabolic derangement - not because of a string of non-adult choices. The really unfortunate reality is that the SAD diet and low-fat dogma has led people off the cliff.

I grew up in a household without processed food. Everything made from scratch. I continued this way…making everything from scratch…and with “healthy whole grains”, “low in saturated fat”, “lots of healthy fruits”, etc. And it ruin my metabolism.

I was making “adult” choices…or at least I thought I was.

Now, we are in a period where the tide has to turn, and the real SCIENCE needs to come out.

GOOD SCIENCE + ADULT CHOICES = GOOD HEALTH

(Elizabeth Mitchell) #24

Just to clarify, I didn’t say in general that people got there (to the unhealthy situation) making poor adult choices, I only said that it was foolish not to make adult choices after you’ve learned about what has caused the unhealthy situation. I know I made a lot of poor choices that got me to my unhealthy (morbidly obese) situation. I knew at the time they were bad choices, and only I am to blame for my health. And I guess that’s why it bothers me so much to see people making the same excuses I made for decades.

#25

Oh yes. I am with you on that. It bugs me too when I see people trying to wiggle out of situations. :+1:

I want to balance that with giving emotional support to all of us who have been preached the wrong dogma, too.

(Barbara Greenwood) #26

I got here (peak weight of 308 and T2D diagnosis at age 34) through a whole load of bad choices. Some of them, I knew at the time were bad (chocolate, ice cream, pizza) but made them anyway. Some of them, I thought at the time were good (wholemeal bread and pasta, low fat everything, vegetable oils, loads of fruit).

Whatever. Now I know different. No use crying over spilt milk, it’s time to move on. I’m currently around 225 and have been stalled since January… although a policy of no evening snacking shows signs of getting me moving again.

(Richard Morris) #27

I believe Dr Phinney is reflecting on the imprecision of the concept of “correct weight” in humans.

The most commonly used metric is Body Mass Index, which was not designed for the purpose it is being used.

It was originally called “Social Physics” and was invented by a Belgian Mathematician in the 1800’s to data mine information about populations of people, but everyone since then has named it after him and called it the “Quetelet index”.

Adolphe Quetelet’s study was to do a statistical analysis of anthropometric facts about humans (like height, weight, age at death, and other vital statistics, as well as their behaviors like criminality) and fit them to probability curves to try to work out what was “the average man”.

One of his studies that was commercialized was a mortality table by obesity for actuaries. He didn’t really have a measurement for obesity so he had to invent one from what he had. What he really wanted was a measurement of the persons girth factored by how large they were. Those measurements weren’t in the data, but he did have weight and height.

So he developed some assumptions

  1. All people are equally dense
  2. Tall people are large framed, short people are small framed

If all persons were of equal density then the weight will be proportional to their volume.
If you divide volume by height you will get the approximate cross sectional area of the person
If you divide that by height again you will get a rough approximation of that area for their frame

To really screw things up takes Ancel Keys

That was hidden for 120 years until the “Quetelet index” was resurrected as BMI in 1974. Frankly I’m surprised it wasn’t renamed the “Keys Index” cos it was resurrected by Ancel Keys and he was known to put his name on things.

Keys used it to model obesity in populations. He knew that it was useless for individuals. Look at those assumptions … any of them seem reasonable? Want your insurance premium to be calculated based on that math?

But of course Keys being the great man that he was, everyone took his formula without looking at it.

BMI is remedial math for doctors.

What good Doctors do is put a tape measure around a patients girth and dividing that by the patients height. That is much more accurate but even that makes a lot of assumptions (including the uniform density one).

BMI doesn’t work for me

For my height, the normal BMI range should be a weight from 59kg to 79kg.
I know from the DEXA that my lean Mass is 80.38 kg
If I were lose all body fat, even assuming that were not fatal, I would still be 1.38 kgs overweight.

As @brenda keeps telling me I’m just dense.

Weight is not really a good proxy for Obesity, and Obesity is not a good proxy for Health once you disassociate Obesity from the Diseases it usually travels with like Diabetes, Cardiovascular disease, Hyper Tension.

Perhaps a better explanation of the “Phinney weight” is the point that your body homeostatically settles upon when you stabilize blood glucose and prevent dietary carbs from deranging you.

(8 year Ketogenic Veteran) #28

You are the most lovely dense person I know. I am rather dense myself…

…with all the muscle I carry and am grateful for it.

Thank you so much for writing this up @richard. I have read this before, and now I will always have it to refer to when I am trying to explain the worthless BMI chart.

I am certain I previously read this online, years ago, and no doubt on facebook. And so, it was lost, as information on facebook is. :nofb:

The forum is a static library of science gold, and I am relieved to now have it in my life (and you!) :blue_heart:

(Dustin Cade) #29

When I met my lady she was halfway through nursing school… she told me two things that have stuck with me that allowed me to understand that Dr’s and medicine are not always the best source of health advice… 1st she said BMI is a joke, they know it, but they continue to use it… 2nd they still have no idea why acetaminophen (Tylenol) acts as a fever reducer… I never even questioned why…

So I think these things among others allowed me to open my mind to keto, fully understand that I won’t understand everything… I don’t have to know what my ideal weight is, just gotta know what feels right!

A bit long winded there… just gotta keto on and enjoy life!

(Barbara Greenwood) #30

Interesting…

A few things I wonder about that:-

  • if one has historically been deranged by dietary carbs and become diabetic, how long after reaching normoglycemia might it take to reach that homeostatic weight?

  • what do you do if you reach a weight that you’re not happy with?

  • does this mean that we shouldn’t try extra things to bust through a plateau (e.g. more fasting) - just KCKO and learn to accept where the body goes?

Having just denied myself some bacon and avo followed by a keto mug cake in the interests of finally doing a fast > 24 hours… I do hope I’ll get benefit from it.

(G. Andrew Duthie) #31

NO, no, no! :slight_smile:

I called out “Phinney weight” to relieve people from the burden of beating up on themselves for not getting to a “perfect” weight. That doesn’t mean there won’t be plateaus, and it doesn’t mean that folks shouldn’t push through them. I have a feeling that most people will have a pretty good idea when it’s a plateau vs. getting to your “Phinney weight”. There’s a big difference, for example, between wanting to drop the last 10 or 15 pounds to get back to what one weighed in high school vs. being 50 or 100 lbs heavier than you were hoping for.

On some level, it’s the difference between shooting for something that’s healthy and can be maintained readily vs. obsessing about abs and single-digit body fat percentages. Maybe it would be possible for me to achieve the latter if I was willing to put myself through a good bit of pain, but the weight I’m at currently is reasonable, and certainly more healthy than where I was a few years ago.

I do think that if we focus on what we eat, rather than how much, and try to listen to our bodies in the process, it’s likely that over time we’ll push through the plateaus naturally. But by all means, try new things if you don’t think you’ve landed on your “Phinney weight”. Notwithstanding weight loss, there are plenty of benefits to be had from various forms of fasting, and if it helps you bust through a plateau, all the better. :smiley:

#32

BMI is not as big of a joke as people like to call it. If you show people on the street underwear photos of 100 random people with BMI’s over 30, I bet most of those people would be described as fat.

(G. Andrew Duthie) #33

That would depend on whether you included athletes in the photo lineup. The fact remains that even someone with a low or average BF% can have a BMI that puts them in the obese category, because BMI does not take lean body mass or body fat into account, just height and weight. The fact that, for some people, BMI corresponds with true obesity does not prove that it is a useful metric. Here’s one sample of nearly-obese people according to BMI:

I’d be happy to be in their company, in terms of fitness.

And, to bring this back to the original topic, I suspect most of the folks featured in that gallery are at, or near, their “Phinney weight”. :smiley:

(matt ) #34

Yes!!! Exactly this.

#35

That’s why I said 100 random people. Olympic athletes are in the, what, top .0001% of people?
It’s easy for internet armchair scientists to poo-poo the BMI once they see, “oh look, XYZ bodybuilder is obese per the BMI, therefore the BMI is trash!”
It’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater. For most people, for most heights and weights, if the BMI says they’re overweight, it’s probably true.

(Crow T. Robot) #36

I would agree if throwing it out meant that nothing better took its place. However, we have better metrics, i.e. waist/height ratio, which are not just better correlated with health but simpler.

#37

I’m not convinced, really. Personally, I observe a wide variation of body shapes. The difference between geographic regions, for instance, is quite remarkable. Some body shapes store added adipose in areas that is not as obvious as other body shapes. A photo lacks so much data, and teeters on the side of personal physical appeal, as opposed to collection of empirical data for analysis.

(G. Andrew Duthie) #38

Trying to understand why it’s so important to defend BMI. As with most things, if you find it useful, feel free to keep using it. But why insist that others share your belief? There’s nothing particularly scientific about BMI. It happens to correspond, in some cases, to obesity. But it wasn’t created to measure obesity in the first place…that’s just how it ended up being used:

http://www.cutthewaist.com/bmi.html

There’s also the issue of where fat is deposited (i.e. visceral or subcutaneous) and again, BMI has no answer for that. Visceral fat (fat surrounding the organs) is a far riskier proposition than subcutaneous fat. But relying on BMI won’t tell you which you’re dealing with.

Oh, and the fact that the World Health Organization are the ones who popularized BMI as a means of tracking/measuring obesity doesn’t inspire any additional trust, to my mind. Of course, they didn’t coin the term BMI. No, that was our old friend Ancel Keys. Another strike against BMI, in my book. But even Keys didn’t claim that BMI was useful for individual diagnosis, but rather for population studies:

Again, if BMI is useful to you, by all means, go with it. But I don’t find it useful, and I don’t think it’s particularly relevant to the topic at hand.

#39

Not insisting that others share my belief, but I just feel like in these types of forums it’s easy to make BMI a whipping boy. Many people come to the keto diet looking for a way to lose excess weight, and I think it does those people a disservice to say that BMI is useless. And it’s relevant to this thread because I can see this Phinney weight thing having the potential to trend the same direction.

(G. Andrew Duthie) #40

Well, people say that BMI is useless because it is useless…for diagnosing individuals. When both the creator of the original statistical model and the person who coined the term BMI say that it isn’t appropriate for diagnosing individuals, perhaps we should listen to them. There are FAR better tools for those for whom weight loss is a primary goal to use to gauge progress.

I’m sorry that you think that “Phinney weight” is doing anyone a disservice. I think it’s a fun and light-hearted way of taking ourselves a bit less seriously. Seems like most folks like the idea…but not everyone has to agree.