Reddit mentions of The Lean Muscle Diet: A Customized Nutrition and Workout Plan--Eat the Foods You Love to Build the Body You Want and Keep It for Life! (Men's Health)

Your body is going to regulate its blood volume, etc, so it's all good. Blood pressure typically drops to improved levels when body fat is brought down to healthier levels. Your body is fantastic at adapting and regulating itself. There are some aspects like excess skin does take a long time to go away but it's not going to hurt you.

> obese people generally are not short on glycogen, which means their muscles are insulin resistant. so they most common way to deal with excess serum glucose, is to store it as body fat.

You may be interested in some of the info from Alan Aragon and Brad Schoenfeld regarding insulin resistance and sensitivity of muscle cells and compared to fat cells and the things that affect them (sometimes independently). Remember that lean, muscular people also carry lots of glycogen. The mechanisms you're mentioning are very, very broad and work through many different pathways so be careful of people who would cherry pick particular observations to suggest that the body works a certain way (which might indeed be true) while neglecting the countless other ways the body can accomplish the same thing.

When it comes to body composition, you can set your clock by the facts that total energy balance determine changes in mass and resistance training is the largest factor in influencing any given person's body fat vs muscle level for any given mass (barring a medical condition, of course). If you ever read something scienc-ey that doesn't jibe perfectly with those two facts take a long, skeptical look at it.

> i've been fat, nearly all my life, and 300+ pounds for the last 15. it sounds like my body will have a predisposition to be fat. cool :/.

I wouldn't conclude that from the facts you've given. It sounds like you've lost a substantial amount of weight already. Are the changes you've made sustainable? If so, you're fine. If you're saying that your body will always have a predisposition to be fat when you overeat, then yes that is true of you and 100% of other people.

> i dont ever think i NOT want to sit down and eat a whole detroit style pizza with a half gallon of chocolate milk

This is a great example of a habit everyone's body is "predisposed to getting fat" from. If you could consume that much for regular meals without getting fat I would worry there was something seriously wrong with you endocrinologically or something. The fact that you gain weight when you do this and lose weight when you eat better is an indication that you'll be a-okay.

On the side of psychological adherence, I'd assume even more strongly now that you'll function better in the long-term staying off bulk/cut cycles. If you don't already have a yard high stack of reading material you've been meaning to get to, I recommend checking out this book too which is written by nutrition and exercise professionals and gets a bit into this aspect of long-term health. Their conclusion, based on their expertise of available science, is that the general population's best bet is probably to figure out what the diet of their target body would be and then just eat that. As you approach your target weight your weight will change more slowly but who cares? This is the long game. If you figure, for instance, you want to land at 180 pounds and estimate that maintaining that will be 2,700 calories a day (as an example, the book walks you through how to get a better estimate for any given individual rather than just equating any given weight with a particular calorie intake) then eat 2,700 calories a day for 6 months and see what happens. You can enjoy the day to day better than trying to pursue weight loss more aggressively, you can make better progress in the gym, and best of all you're establishing habits that can be automatic which will make them easier to maintain than cut/bulk cycles and therefore less likely to have days where you say fuck it and eat a bucket of chicken. So anyway- after 6 months you're closer than where you started to your target, you're enjoying life, and you're probably able to eat much more intuitively. Your relationship with food can continue to improve over time and you're avoiding metabolic adaptations that may be setting you up for discomfort in trying to maintain adherence down the road.

Their recommendations involve macronutrient targets, soft food quality targets (as in targets are soft / have wiggle room, not soft food), advice about "cheating" urges, and so on. It's all very well grounded, practical, and yet still consistent with pretty much every nutrition paper that has come up here in AF. They talk about how there are so many different diets that can work (whether keto, paleo, IIFYM, etc) because there are certain core attributes they share so they're all right, not because any particular one is magical. The author asks you to build your diet around your own favorite foods in a way that is consistent with those core attributes to get yourself on a sustainable plan that, in the long run, also happens to get you to your goals.

Anyway - that books seems like something that might be helpful to you so that's my description as to why.

> and incredible accomplishment!!!

> i had honestly never thought of it that way..................

Don't ever forget it, dude. Every healthy person is predisposed to getting fat with the food intake you've described. The better questions about obesity aren't why people get fat (it's because they eat too much) but rather how are habits to eat an appropriate amount of appropriate foods best established. People overeat for so many different reasons, though! If your reasons are being addressed in therapy then that's awesome and I'm not in any way qualified to second guess that. I'd just urge you to get plugged into the other half of this "rehabilitation" which is establishing sustainable, long-term, healthy eating (and exercise) habits. I don't think the conclusion people often make from study OP linked has any relevance to you at all.

Something else you may not have considered: You are going to have the pleasure of finding out how naturally lean your body is once you put enough time into feeding it the way your body wants to be fed instead of the way your anxiety was overfeeding it. It's probably going to be average because that's what average is, but it might be better too, and it's almost guaranteed not the "naturally fat" you've been under the impression of because of the non-physiological overfeeding tendencies that you're dealing with. Stick with it because every 6 months or so you're going to realize that your body is a whole hell of a lot better than you ever realized which is pretty exciting.