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Comment by randlet | Hacker News Reader

For the purpose of losing weight it really doesn't matter if the calorie counts are accurate or not: consistency is what is important.

If you want to lose weight reliably, track your weight and your caloric intake consistently. If you aren't losing weight, adjust your caloric intake until you are losing weight at a steady ~1-2lb per week.

Losing weight is simple...it's not easy, but it's very simple.

edit: You also should continually track this because as you lose weight, your body uses less energy and your maintenance level goes down meaning you may need to adjust your calories down a bit to compensate.

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Right, I fear that this is another article that, while interesting, will be used to needlessly complicate discussions about weight loss. Paying attention to the (inexact) reported calorie information on the food you eat is still the only reliable way to lose weight.

Yup. The same goes for gaining weight of course. I've heard people say "I can't gain weight no matter how hard I try or how much I eat!". Wrong. Again, track your calories and increase the number of calories you are eating until you begin to gain weight.

> reported calorie information on the food you eat is still the only reliable way to lose weight.

Carbohydrate and sugar reductions seem like a very reliable way too. There are many anecdotes about successful weight loss on diets that allowed the person to "eat as much as they want" but had to limit their daily intake of carbohydrates.

This is just a way to reduce calorie intake, indirectly.

There's a fundamental difference between these approaches which is not highlighted enough in discussions about weight loss. There is a physiological factor: weight loss is attributable to calories in vs calories out (despite those figures being difficult to obtain). Then there's the psychological factor: some diets are easier to stick to than others, and some will naturally cause you to eat fewer calories than others.

Using reported calorie information is a physiological method, and appeals to those who prefer quantifying and tracking their everyday life. Carbohydrate reduction is (in this sense) a psychological method, and appeals to those who struggle with cravings and a lack of structure.

Limiting the daily intake of carbs is a proxy for limiting the daily intake of calories.

1 bowl (2 cups of rice, about 330g, more or less 1 serving in areas where white rice is a staple food) have a 331 kcal [1] Even if one would ate a whole package of Canadian Bacon (6 oz, 139g) it would only be 257 kcal [2].

Carbs are very easy to gorge. A medium sized fast food cup of soda is 180kcal. Same cup for raw orange juice is 223kcal. For comparison 150g of beef is 274kcal and that would be a big serving (IMO).

When people cut carbs from their diets they end up cutting the most densely caloric food: pasta, rice, starch and sugar and that's a good thing too, even eating as much of the rest as they want they will hardly be able to overconsume calories.

[1] http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/6497?man=&lfacet=&cou...

[2] http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/2636?fgcd=&manu=&lfac...

I hear this a lot. I doubt it's sustainable. A lot of people who calorie count seem to regain eventually.

None of the long term fit people I know count calories. They tend to do a couple things:

1. Have well functioning hunger, which comes from 2. Eating whole foods and 3. Eating high satiety foods

I'm pretty steadily at my lean weight. But when I'm not, I just switch to higher satiety foods and the weight comes off.

This method is both easy and simple, but I rarely see it recommended. Are there people it doesn't work for?

(Of course, the hard part of this method is having a personal dietary culture that includes buying, cooking and eating whole foods.

Note that I'm not including cost, because in areas that aren't good deserts whole foods tend to cost less than processed foods)

Whether or not it's sustainable is a different topic though.

One of the reasons people regain is that they've gone on diets with a calorie intake that is too low (or lacking in protein) and experienced muscle atrophy rather than fat loss. A decrease in muscle mass also decreases their metabolism, which means their BMR is now lower, but because they don't know, when they return to their seemingly normal calorie intake, they'll quickly put the weight they lost back on.

That's a factor, but even if you just lose fat, you calorie expenditure from the same activity pattern, ceteris paribus, will be reduced (because you are carrying less weight), so if you return to the eating pattern which at which you were stable at the higher weight (assuming no other systemic/metabolic changes, just the fat loss) you will gain weight asymptotically approaching the the weight at which that "normal" calorie intake had you stable before.

Muscle loss from calorie restriction is much less than most believe (marginal until you get around sub 10% bodyfat). Same goes for metabolism slowdown. You will lose strength on a calorie deficit, but the muscle tissue remains.

Google "starvation mode myth"

See also this military study where men on extreme calorie deficits and high activity levels did not lose lean muscle tissue until hitting extremely low (sub 5%) bodyfat levels.

http://jap.physiology.org/content/88/5/1820

What about people who don't have much resistance activity? That's the more typical case.

> I'm pretty steadily at my lean weight. But when I'm not, I just switch to higher satiety foods and the weight comes off. > > This method is both easy and simple, but I rarely see it recommended. Are there people it doesn't work for?

I would hazard a guess at: most people with weight issues. The problem is not how simple the method is, but how psychologically easy it is to adhere to.

4. Willpower and discipline.

Less than you'd think. On the plan I described you pretty much just eat when hungry, until you're full.

You do need to say "potato chips and candy bars are not things I eat", or have some other mechanism for limiting those without willpower (dessert used to fill this function).

But I hardly need willpower to eat this way, because the body's system handle telling me when to eat.

Well, anecdotally, as someone who lost 100 pounds and kept it off for several years, the mechanisms in place don't work for everyone. I can easily eat a whole "American-sized" restaurant meal without thinking, whereas lean people tend to feel completely stuffed after eating, say, half a sandwich and a few fries.

Also, I get hunger sensations pretty much all the time, no matter how much I eat or how satiating the food is. The worst is that I actually get hunger sensations for quite a while after I eat. I suspect this can be the case for many obese people. For me, I need to use my eyes to regulate my eating rather than my hormones.

The amount of willpower necessary can vary considerably from one person to another, and for people like me just 'eating when hungry until I'm full' is not an option.

But you're definitely right about focusing on better food quality rather than simply eating less. It's far too easy to go overboard eating plates of spaghetti and meatballs than it is grilled-chicken atop salad. After I lost weight and cleaned up my diet, I now perfer the latter to the former. When my diet is consistently clean, it's easier to maintain the cleanliness. There's a lot of inertia when it comes to eating and controlling the velocity is far more valuable than just changing the speed.

Very interesting, thank you for your comment. I'd like to know more about hunger disregulation: does it cause initial weight gain, or is it the result of carrying extra adipose tissue, and does it reverse under any conditions.

Also I agree with your point about consistent cleanliness. I find it very easy to avoid eating something if it's a habit. I find it very hard to "limit" a food except by hunger. And hunger doesn't work well with junk, even when hunger is functioning normally.

"This method is both easy and simple, but I rarely see it recommended."

It's hard to make money marketing this method. I'm not being cynical it's just fact. If you look at weight loss "solutions" they are based around products that interact well with a supply chain. They are highly processed, loaded with preservatives, and individually packaged. As a result, these solutions tend to be based on methods of calorie restriction that don't provide satiety. Additionally companies are incentivized to create a solution that helps people maintain lost weight _only_ when they are on the company plan.

I don't know, if losing weight is so simple, I'd assume obesity rates won't be as high as 80% in USA during the "diet/health" craze phase we have going on. Theres gotta be other factors that we just don't know about, like metabolization, which will be ultimately what drives obesity down.

obesity rates are high because people don't try hard and consistently to lose weight. people lead busy lives, diets are not fun, and its very easy to eat a high calorie diet. diets don't work because people don't stick to them, not because diets don't work.

"Simple, not easy".

You track your calories, you track your weight. If you're not losing weight you reduce your calories until you are. This method compensates for peoples differing metabolism and activity levels.

It's key in how he summarizes it at the end: "it's not easy, but it's very simple."

Losing weight isn't complicated. Eat less, move more. That's it.

Losing weight is extremely difficult. The drive to eat is a fundamental instinct. That instinct isn't calibrated for constant easy availability of food. We inherently want to eat more than is good for us in an environment of abundance. Fighting that requires a great deal of willpower, which is a limited resource.

Successful weight loss comes down to figuring out how to reduce your intake and increase your movement without requiring more willpower than you can actually muster. This is really hard. But losing weight is still simple.

I think "other factors" could well include the reluctance of the average human mind to undergo consistent discipline, and the reluctance of health food corporations to concede that it pays off if successful.

Exercise is good for you and it seems to be pretty damn simple, but we are way too sedentary. Would you similarly suggest that exercise therefore must in fact be a lot more complicate than it appears?

I would suggest people are overweight because the steps to lose weight are unpleasant, or require willpower, rather than being too complicated and mysterious.

One of the most insightful studies I've read on dieting is that people trying to lose weight underestimate how many calories are in the food they're eating. It's not surprising once you start logging everything you eat -- you'll see that a lot of common foods are extremely calorific.

I can't find the exact study but here are two on the matter

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16954358

http://www.bmj.com/content/346/bmj.f2907

To give it a car analogy, it feels like the weight loss discussion is asking: "Why are there so many automobile accidents?" Then come a lot of replies in that say "When you hit the brake, the car will slow down!" I feel like there are multiple things going on at different levels that so many people don't/can't hit the brake at the right time. That doesn't make the calorie-in-out statement false, and any solution will certainly involve reducing calories in. But, it suggests to actually get the weight of the overall population down, we need to look a bit more broadly.

"For the purpose of losing weight it really doesn't matter if the calorie counts are accurate or not"

Pretty basic math tells you even a very small percent wrong (1-2) would affect weight gain/loss over the course of a year :)

I'm also not sure what you mean by "consistency". You say " If you aren't losing weight, adjust your caloric intake until you are losing weight at a steady ~1-2lb per week."

How can you adjust your caloric intake if you don't know the real numbers? I guess you are assuming you eat literally the same thing every week, and drop stuff on the floor until you have a set of foods you know make you lose weight, and then only eat that for the rest of your life? That seems a bad strategy to keep weight off. Most people would probably be willing to eat less of something (which they sanely could if they knew the real calorie counts), but probably not change their entire diet and keep it steady forever.

Even if you just reduce the number of calories to try to account for all the inaccuracies, you are still in a situation where you actually have no idea what you can or can't eat. IE i you say "well, 1500 calories a day didn't work, i'll try 1000", in practice, some days you will have eaten 1500, some days, 900. Your claim this will just average out magically is patently false (it only averages out over time if the numbers are less than a certain percentage away from right, and that percent is very small).

If you are eating different combinations of things, the likelihood you will ever find which are wrong/right, so you know to eat less/more of it, seems really slim. You still have zero idea what you can eat for real, and you'll still find if you swap what foods you eat, you may start gaining/losing weight. So "consistency" or whatever you want to call it, doesn't make any sense.

Now, i'll grant there may be no other way to accomplish your goal right now, but suggesting this is a good method is wrong. It's a horrible method. This is like trying to optimize a multivariable constraint problem through random guessing.

as long as the calories on the labels are correlated with the real numbers it works. plus, its not like you're going to adjust your calorie consumption by 1% to gain/lose weight. if you're altering your consumption by 20-30%, you can tolerate small amounts of errors.

also, counting calories works. anyone that has actually done it can tell you that.

> also, counting calories works. anyone that has actually done it can tell you that.

We have years of experience to show that across a population simple calorie counting does not work.

It depends on how you measure whether or not it works. In the short term, it is absolutely successful in causing weight loss. I've done it, I know others who have done it, there are people who make their livelihood helping others do it.

On the other hand, the problem with calorie counting is that most people only do it for a very short time, because it sucks. It's totally unsustainable for most people because they don't have the time or aren't willing to change their lifestyle to include hours per day spent focusing on nutrition. So they lose some weight over the course of several months, then let their nutrition lapse and gain it all back in a few weeks. So in the long term you're right, across a population calorie counting doesn't work. But only because across a population people are lazy.

We know that other approaches work better, and many of those approaches avoid counting calories. They work better because they focus on life-long behaviour changes; and on being maintainable.

You don't need to know the real numbers...the estimates on foods are "good enough". You don't have to eat the same thing everyday, just be consistent about logging every calorie you eat and stop worrying if the estimates on the package are 5-10% off or your body is 2% less efficient than mine...that all gets lost in the noise. If you track your calories for a month and find your weight stays exactly the same while you are eating 2500 calories per day of whatever foods you normally eat, then reduce your calories to 2000 without changing your diet you will lose weight at roughly 1 pound a week. Simple, not easy.

That doesn't make any sense, unless you're consistently eating the same foods prepared the same way.

As I've said elsewhere, calorie estimates on packages are close enough that it doesn't really matter what you eat as long as you estimate consistently.

That still doesn't make sense. One example cited in the article says that for almonds, 129 calories were absorbed out of the 170 listed on the label. That's a 25% difference. The article unfortunately doesn't give a whole lot more info on how this tracks across various foods under various methods of preparation, but it would seem to me that if this difference is highly variable, it basically defeats the idea of fungibility of "label calories", which seems to me to be the entire point of listing them in the first place. Granted, if you're basically eating the same stuff, but just increasing or decreasing helpings, that's not such an issue.

People might disagree with my reasoning here, but I'm not really seeing how I deserve downvotes.

That 25% difference is for a single serving of food and only translates into a ~2.5% error in your daily food total. People eat a varied enough diet that a 25% difference in a single food item really won't make a huge difference.

Lets take a man who needs ~2500kCal per day to maintain his current weight. A nice steady loss of 1lb per week would require this guy to eat at roughly a 500kCal/day deficit (a total deficit of 3500kCal translates to a fat loss of 1 lb). Even underestimating his total caloric intake by 10% (he eats 2200kCal instead of 2000kCal) every single day will still see him losing weight at .6lb per week.

After 4 weeks of this he can see that he's only lost 2.4 lbs and can therefore reduce his intake by another 200kCal/day to achieve the desired 1lb/week loss. Tracking your weight/calories like this makes it fairly trivial to lose weight. It really doesn't matter if all the individual food items have perfectly assessed caloric content...as I say, they're close enough.

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