I’ve been shocked at how aggressive people get when the idea is even brought up that there might be more to weight gain/loss than simple calories in, calories out. I tend to avoid discussing the topic in general because of how unpleasant it can become.
This.
It’s like people forget the word “metabolism” altogether.
Well, part of the problem is that calories can be grossly misleading, depending on the context. But it’s hard to figure out how to approach the problem in a way that people will actually be able to effectively follow.
I think the best thing we could do would be to change food labeling to list only calories from carbohydrates and change the recommendations on daily caloric intake to focus on just calories from carbs, and take protein and fat out of the equation, but politically, there’s no way in hell that will ever happen.
We have built our lives, homes, and cities around using cars/SUVs for every trip, including going for a bike ride or going to the park. Millennials weren’t even allowed to walk to school.
Spend a day in Manhattan or downtown Chicago or San Francisco, people are skinny.
It’s unpleasant because it’s wrong. I mean, usually. People talk about “metabolism” and almost always this is nonsense (no offense to people here). But ruthlessly honest here, almost every time without exception the arguments about “metabolism” are given to me by overweight people in defense of their inability to lose weight. Everytime i hear about metabolism it’s from someone who is overweight and doesn’t… really really really doesn’t… want to reduce the amount of food they eat. They want to get the volume but find some formula about the type of food that their body magically processes better so that they can eat the same but still lose weight.
There’s nothing magical about anyone’s metabolism or special foods (unless you’re doing very strict dietary tricks like keto). What people (imo) are mistaking is their hunger level for their metabolism. You cut calories, you lose weight. You don’t cut calories, you don’t add excersise, you gain weight. Once you’ve gained too much weight, you start to develop insulin resistance and that opens a whole new can of dietary worms.
OTOH i’ve done what people are calling “intermittent fasting” for … 25 years? without having got a name to it. I just don’t eat breakfast… ever. Just never hungry enough for it. I’d have to be living a farmhand lifestyle and eat bacon and eggs at 5:30am sharp to burn enough calories to need a big breakfast. In fact in general i never get hungry; i’d have to skip food for probably 24+ hours before i actually experienced hunger and maybe 36-48hours until i was hungry enough to actually be compelled to eat. And intermittent fasting is a bunch of blah blah blah today - all it is just calorie deficit. If you eat 1-2 meals a day, you eat less calories than if you’d eaten 2-3 meals a day. Same with diet drinks. I may be melting my brain but all those diet sodas, each saving me 100-300 calories from sugar, starting adding up to hundreds of thousands of calories over the year that you have to get rid of. The only thing I’ve started doing more recently is adding a decent amount of milk to my black coffee - i’ve finally reached the point where the bitterness is no longer enjoyable.
The interesting point about rats gaining more weight on Snickers bars leads me to believe that what’s actually happening there is the calorie density of the candy bar is being misreported. IE, it’s far more likely that a 260 calorie candy bar is really 350 calories than it’s being processed differently by the body of the animal.
Not to drag this out into a fight - really, everyone is going to do what they want anyway and i’ve learned nothing i say to people about their diets has the slightest effect whatsoever on their behavior, such is the compulsion of hunger - but there is almost no science behind the idea of “differential metabolism” being a real thing. Over and over concepts like “metabolism” and “cheat days” and are things told to me over and over by people who really , really like to eat and hate, hate not eating. And that’s probably (as i linked above) due to the kind of diet causing people’s internal “ideal weight set point” being changed and their hunger levels adjusting to compensate. One big boy I knew loved his cheat days like Lotharios loved their women, it was his almost favorite thing of the week, he’d come back from the weekend and gush about the food he’d had.
To be clear, metabolism is a “thing” but it’s not what most people imagine.
Apparently not eating destroys your ability to assemble paragraphs.
Nah, i just type fast and not too worried about style. I take my posts to be conversational.
One thing that’s funny about Discourse is that i can see when people are responding to threads or posts i’ve made and it will take them like a 1/4 of an hour what i seem to hammer out in like two minutes.
Not you, BloodyBattleBrain. I can only imagine what he was munching on between sentences.
Yes this is true, and cutting sugary drinks was a huge component to getting my weight under control.
However… aside from the possible increased risk of dementia, diet drinks seem to increase appetite. When I finally cut even diet drinks my appetite lessened somewhat and it fixed a few other issues I was having (may have been caffeine related though). I was surprised to find that when i quit drinking diet drinks after about two days I no longer craved them, so that transition has been one of the easiest of my life.
That said if people really want their daily soft drinks, then diet is deifnitely the way to go. Whatever the danger of aspartame may be, it pales in comparison to the absolutely known danger of excessive sugar consumption.
One thing I started doing a while back was drinking more volume. I drink about a gallon a day, not including a couple of mugs of coffee in the morning. I brew tazo passion fruit tea and add water and various water enhancers like mio. So, it’s not diet soda, but they do have Splenda in them.
When I started, the thing that really surprised me is that I was feeling full after dinner, which is a foreign concept to me.
Yea, diet works for me, but then i’m used to the taste of chemical factory and think it pleasant because i’m an addict to aspartame. Because honestly, warm Diet Coke tastes like angry battery acid. Cold fountain Diet Cokes from restaurants taste sweet; fountain Diet Cokes from convenience stores taste weird; bottled/canned Diet Cokes are various kinds of I’m Getting my Hit but Wow This Tastes Old and Unnatural.
All that said, after i wrote that stuff above is a reflection of the intense frustration i’ve felt over the years trying to help people lose weight and failing over and over and over, and now i’ve given up. Every person who has failed simply needs to eat more than me, and they can’t stop. Even going two days on a reduced calorie diet caused them to squirm and moan like those poor kids in the marshmallow experiments. Understanding that - possibly - it is the kinds of foods they eat and enjoy that are changing their body’s ideal weight “goal” and thereby causing their bodies’ hunger levels to adjust accordingly is a theory that seems very much to reflect the experiences i’ve had with other people and the difficulties they face. But, and if this theory is correct, because they love their calorie dense foods so much and are more willing to cut portions rather than change their diet entirely, they can never affect permanent changes to their weight.
Diet sodas have never been shown to contribute to weight loss. This is puzzling, but newer research has shown that the sweetness in the sweetner functions as a metabolic trigger; it changes how any carbs you eat along with your diet soda are metabolized.
People are aggressive because it’s wrong. It is generally nearly impossible to lose weight by exercising more, which belies the simple calories-in<calories-out formulation, not least because food calories and exercise calories aren’t measured using the same sorts of standards, and they weren’t ever meant to be compared to each other, but rather food to food or exercise to exercise. They function well as general guides to nutrition and exercise, but not as a simplistic guide to weight loss.
If you want to lose weight, you need to eat less. Counting food calories is a useful tool for tracking this. I, like Endigm and BBB, find it easier to just do intermittent fasting. (I choose 3 days per week, usually MWF, and only eat one small meal, usually lunch, on those days.)
On the other hand, if your goal is to live longer and healthier, you’re better off exercising than trying to lose weight (if you can do only one.)
Also, limit your sugar intake. That shit is bad for you. Don’t worry too much about everything else.
Really. In my experience regularly working out (without a change in diet) was worth about a 10lb weight loss. But that is as far as it went. At that point things leveled off.
I tend to smile politely and oh so subtly steer the conversation in different directions when anything to do with diet comes up.
People feel it’s their duty to tell you what you’re doing “wrong,” when it comes to diet, and even though I did indeed post a ridiculous wall of text :( I tend to shy away from that, especially when it is from people demonising animal products…
This bit I am not so sure about.
I think you would starve to death eventually because of a lack of nutrients and proteins, but not from a lack of energy. My understanding of how the body works is that it is infact extremely smart about surviving in conditions of, by our standards (by which I mean western) deprivation.
There is a thing called pemmican which has been touted as a more or less perfect survival food, and it is meat and rendered fat. Apparently a pound of that a day was enough for arctic and frontier explorers during very arduous work.
fat is supremely energy dense, but also has lots of good things for your body, other than energy. The thing is it can’t be processed quite as fast as carbs can.
From what I can understand, we’re evolved to basically have a glut of carbs seasonally, read seasonal fruits, for a couple of months a year wherein we get rather fat (apparently natural fructose is extremely fattening, but you’d never eat too much from just eating fruit. You can, and frequently do, eat too much from modern processed foods) and then be in essentially starvation mode for part of the year.
there are loads of details I’m misunderstanding, but I think that one could live on a mostly fat diet, for example eating just offal like kidneys and sweetmeats, which are very fat dense. Incidentally, that’s where the “good” stuff lies, not in steaks…
To a degree and at first. hence “all diets work, and then don’t.”
My understanding is that the body, on low calorie diets, thinks it’s in a period of scarcity, so shuts down whatever it can to avoid losing weight. This is where the ‘body set weight’ idea comes in, because your body will naturally want to maintain that, and if all you’re doing is cutting calories eventually you’ll plateau and then rebound.
The solution is to reset the body set weight, and you do that by flushing out the insulin , from what I understand.
Yes there’s an element of charlatanism about it. However, the book i referenced, by jason fung, specifically mentions that fasting is nothing new and maintains it is infact the natural way to do things.
I follow simple rules:
eat when hungry
stop when full
cook my own food where/when ever possible.
You’re right though that it isn’t rocket science.
hahaha I am this guy, just controlled.
I look forward to weekends because that is when I allow myself “treats.” I don’t get too stupid about it, I just like knowing I have the option and I can adjust myself to compensate if need be.
There’s a thing here called churros, I like them. I’ll have a portion.
Then I will reach a point where they don’t taste nice anymore.
And this further muddies the water, because, again a far as i can tell, you’re both right.
Boosting your energy expenditure, and reducing your incoming energy, does work…somewhat, caveated, blah blah.
And that is what is causing the confusion.
So, I won’t eat processed wheat and other grains, except on weekends etc.
and you know what, I absolutely enjoy that pastry when I have it because I feel i’ve earned it.
edit: oh dear god another wall of text, and I don;t even have the excuse of using a mobile phone.
Sorry.
I’ll go back to my hole now.
Haha, I was really scratching my head about that one.
I just want to call this out.
I know quite a few people (my 35 year old brother in law for example) who eat MUCH worse than me, exercise much less than me (doesn’t work out at all really), and eat as a whole more than me, and yet he is skinny as a twig. He never eats vegetables, doesn’t skimp on desserts and a normal dinner is a box of Kraft mac and cheese and other foods containing nothing but mass of carbs and calories.
So while yes, some people try to use metabolism differences as an excuse to try and say that there’s no difference in how the body breaks down and stores the calories and carbohydrates consumed is just wrong.
The body is physically incapable of processing dietary fat for a net gain in energy.
The problem with working out and weight loss is that I think you’re measuring the wrong thing - your total weight isn’t what’s important (muscle good!) but instead your % body fat, which is harder to measure.
You could stay at the exact same weight and slowly replace fat with muscle. You’d be more healthy, but your BMI would be the same. This is why researchers often look at your waist hip ratio as well, as it’s a far better proxy for how “fat” you are.
I’d like your citation on that please. Here’s mine.
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Principles_of_Biochemistry/Gluconeogenesis_and_Glycogenesis
Gluconeogenesis (abbreviated GNG) is a metabolic pathway that results in the generation of glucose from non-carbohydrate carbon substrates such as lactate, glycerol, and glucogenic amino acids. It is one of the two main mechanisms humans and many other animals use to keep blood glucose levels from dropping too low (hypoglycemia). The other means of maintaining blood glucose levels is through the degradation of glycogen (glycogenolysis). Gluconeogenesis is a ubiquitous process, present in plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, and other microorganisms. In animals, gluconeogenesis takes place mainly in the liver and, to a lesser extent, in the cortex of kidneys. This process occurs during periods of fasting, starvation, low-carbohydrate diets, or intense exercise and is highly endergonic.