Why the calorie is broken
arstechnica.co.uk
arstechnica.co.uk
One key thing to remember is: You cannot outrun a bad diet.
Meaning it isn't realistic to achieve substantial weight loss through exercise. Thirty minutes of jogging could be undone by one extra chocolate bar, a Big Mac, or a soda. If you already have control over your diet exercise can HELP with weight loss goals (e.g. extra pound of body weight a week) but a lot of people assume they can run off 20-30-40 pounds of excess body weight which is just totally unrealistic.
Base metabolic rate is the primary means of weight loss. As simplistic as this sounds, the goal remains to consume less than you burn through BMR, and the latest research on calorie's inherent inadequacies haven't yet changed that.
Another issue I think is extremely pervasive is moral licensing: apparently, doing something that helps to strengthen our positive self-image also makes us less worried about the consequences of bad behavior, and therefore more likely to make bad choices. This can translate to internal conversations like, "I did good by exercising today, I guess I'll order dessert." I think this error in thinking causes serious problems for a lot of people. There are no "good" or "bad" actions - only actions that add or detract from whatever the goal is.
That's not really true. When I ran 150km/week, I didn't have to worry much about what I ate. A couple of years after having some surgery, I'm only managing about 50km/week, and I have to be much more careful.
At an average walking speed of 2.8mph, that's 4.6 hours of walking. The average American adult walks around 2.5 miles per day, mostly indoors trips between rooms. The American knowledge-worker or automobile-dependent suburbanite will tend to have a lower average.
Jogging / long-distance-running tends to be about twice that fast, or 2.3 hours of activity. Per day. Ten percent of their lives, running. Most people don't come anywhere close.
What the grandparent's post is highlighting is the physics of this system is that the difference in weight is proportional to calories in - calories out. It's important for people to reduce calories in by modifying their diet. No one is disagreeing with this. However individuals committed to reducing weight can put in some time to increasing calories out (often by cardio activities such as jogging/running/cycling/swimming).
It just doesnt follow to say "you cannot outrun a bad diet" followed by "the base metabolic rate is the primary means of weight loss". There is tons of evidence that exercise is exactly what increases your base metabolic rate! Here is just one study:
"Resting metabolic rate (RMR) is the largest component of the daily energy budget in most human societies and, therefore, any increases in RMR in response to exercise interventions are potentially of great importance" [0]
If RMR is the most important thing to reducing weight, exercise is the most straightforward way to improve RMR and reducing weight. But I wont make this reductionist claim; clearly diet is also important.
Exercise can be very helpful in reducing weight; it's simple physics of increasing calories out. My most successful friend losing weight changed both his diet and increased exercising to about an hour a day. He not only shredded 30-40 pounds, but gained from the additional benefits of higher resting metabolic rate, increased cardio health benefits, reduced stress, and felt like he had more energy with fewer coffees. The quick weight loss he felt meant he didn't have to have a yearlong slog waiting to see results, making the process all the more rewarding which significantly helps for some people's psychology. Sure it sucked in the beginning, but his life was unbalanced and he committed to making big changes.
It's almost cheating to exercise with improved diets; imagine if you were keto eating salads and still able to remove "chocolate bar debt" from the past by 30 minutes to an hour of activity a day followed by increased RMR for the next 24 hours.
Bad diets are bad. Complemented with exercise you can improve your metabolic rate which will give you long term weight loss and health benefits.
Estimation is good enough as long as you monitor your progress and tweak it if it's not getting you results.
I'd rather be overweight than perpetually hungry.
After being on intermittent fasting 16/8 for half a year the notion of being "hungry" amuses me. Now being hungry means not eating for 24h or more. Sadly some think that if their stomach is a bit empthy, they have to eat. Or they need to eat because the device on the wall/hand/in the pocket displays a certain number which indicates food time, then wonder why they're fat.
But you're right, most of the 16 hour fast happens while you sleep.
EDIT: I wrote my comment in hurry, so I will now take some time to clarify my point.
Feeling hungry comes from the fact that eating foods rich in sugar and fat puts your insulin levels at a roller coaster, going up and down like crazy. With balanced diet, after initial few days of adjustment your insulin level stabilize making hunger go away.
Also, whole foods, vegetables, grains contain a lot of fiber, which stacks up in your bowels making you even likely to feel hungry.
No you can't. You can say that eating fewer calories doesn't mean feeling hungry for you. Apparently you're not in the fraction I was talking about. Good for you.
I also note that you're talking about changing your diet, while the post I was replying to specifically said you didn't have to do that.
I read that post as saying that losing weight does require a change in diet. Reducing calories is a significant change to make.
I think one of the easiest ways to reduce calories is to change the composition of the diet, there are a lot of calorie dense foods that provide little nutrition and not much satiety. Eliminating (or simply reducing) them can be an easier way to shift calorie consumption in the right direction.
I agree with you that changing your diet seems like generally a much better idea.
at the end of the day, losing weight is work. there's no way around it. work is generally slightly uncomfortable, and if you're not at least a little bit willing to endure that, you aren't going to see results. i treat gym time and kitchen time like office time. it's just work i have to do. it's not a big deal. after i get this work done, i can relax and chill out and do something mindless.
and really, in the end it's an individual decision. you have to decide, do i give a shit about this? you don't have to give a shit about it. if you don't, that's fine. if you do, then get to work.
maybe in 20 years things will be different, but that's how it is now.
I counted my calories with MyFitnessPal last spring and dropped 25 pounds. Consistent, long-term caloric deficit is the answer, except no substitutes.
I'll also add that you can't undo a bad diet over x years in much less time.
Obese people are shocked that changing the course and loosing fat takes time. Of course, they didn't also get obese in a year.
When you're getting fatter and fatter you don't even register couple extra kilograms, compared to if you have a healthy habit of measuring weight/lean body mass/body fat weekly (this is crucial, because measuring JUST weight is just half-assing yourself) and staying in shape. One who's doing that will notice the weight change even without measuring, your more attune to your body and you "know". It's ironic that more better you're in shape, easier it is to stay in good shape, but hey that's how law of fittest works.
You can certainly lose massive amounts of weight in a relatively (compared to how long it took to put on) short period of time.
It isn't just varying the food that makes the difference: there is variation by individual as to how certain foods affect the body. There is evidence that it can vary somewhat not just by age and gender, but the results are noisy enough within tightly controlled test groups that it varies per individual. Where there isn't an obvious cause for this such as diabetes, differences in gut microbiome are suspected to be key.
Everything you said is still correct of course. This variation just adds wrinkle to it, but a small enough one that "calories in" against "calories out" is accurate enough for the vast majority of the population (i.e. those without significant medical issues).
If you are aware of this there is nothing wrong with exercising more so you can eat more, just be careful not to bias your diet by making the extra all "bad food" or you risk being the right weight but unhealthy in a number of other ways. These days I run for three reasons (roughly in order):
* Cardiovascular fitness. It is nice to feel healthier than old me ever did.
* Stress. A 30 minutes jogging with good music or a podcast and/or around some nice scenery is a great way to break away from hassle long enough to relax so you can deal with it better when you get back (burning 250 calories while you are doing it is almost a "freebie"). Don't speed run while stressed though, you'll not concentrate and damage yourself via putting your feet in the wrong places, bad posture, or literally running into things.
* Helping to get rid of the extra I've put on if I had a bit of a food bender last week (over the festive week for example) a little faster then I otherwise would.
Supposedly, some people lose weight on low-fat diets, and some on low-carb diets. A few can lose weight on either. And most people need high-intensity exercise to lose weight, while a few only need low-intensity.
(I have both forms of genetic privilege, and have never had to worry about my weight.)
I'm also bullish on microbiome transplant for weight loss.
The problem with articles like this is that it sends the signal: 'losing weight is hard, don't bother trying'. Or 'nobody knows how this works! What we've thought for decades is completely wrong!'. Which is a poisonous message. It doesn't matter that we don't know the exact details, or that we can't measure to the last 25 Cals. The higher-level principle (i.e.: yes, you body obeys the laws of thermodynamics) is still valid.
Food doesn't get in a person's stomach by accident, a decision is made with every meal, especially when a person is aware of being overweight. So why do people continuously keep making wrong decisions for many months and years?
My case was simple - I was depressed and food made me happy. Making a decision not to eat something was mentally painful. Fixing things that were wrong with my life eliminated both my depression and my issues with overeating.
Really interesting read on why it's so damn hard to figure out how to lose weight, or why it's so hard to control our eating sometimes. Is it genetics, gut microbes, insulin, existing fat cells? All of the above? More and more the science seems to agree stop eating sugar/carbs/whatever and that seems to help most people. BUT not everyone responds to sugar/carbs/whatever the same way if you measure blood sugar after you eat. AND it's hard to actually measure calories. Sure was much easier when all we had to do was "avoid fats", but apparently that was just wrong.
http://mosaicscience.com/story/why-calorie-broken
https://soundcloud.com/gastropodcast/the-end-of-the-calorie
https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-end-of-the-calor...
My flatmate, who's dieting with me, is appaled by the amount of fat I'm eating, constantly asking me if it's healthy or whether I'm just going to get fat even if I am well below my TDEE. My response is basically "a calorie is a calorie", i.e. I'm below my TDEE => I'm losing weight.
I know that the reality is more complicated, and the article does explain that very well; satiety is more important for dieters, and there's also the unknown factor of gut microbes: am I comfortable low carbing because of satiety or just because my gut flora is different? Nobody knows actually.
This is a fascinating subject and there are far too many experts and anecdata that everybody's right and wrong at the same time. Experiment, if you feel physically good and are not overeating (by counting calories) you're on the right track. Take dieting advices with tons of salt. Make them your own.
Personally I struggle having more than two meals a day and eating more than 1800 cals (I'm 1.86m and 88 kg). If I were high carbing I'd go over the limit just to keep my hunger at bay. I once binged (on processed crap I was craving) and ate around 4K cals. I honestly don't know how to do that on low carb, and especially eating healty. Unless I eat nuts: can eat over 1K cals in nuts in a single sitting.
And whoever said you NEED to eat n times a day: shut up, you're wrong.
My advice: eat when you are hungry, eat real food, forget about macros.
I wonder how much of the fear of fat comes from people believing the saying "you are what you eat"?
Fat is 9 calories per gram, while carbs and proteins are 4. If you have a budget and you're counting calories, fat is more expensive per gram, so you might naturally develop an aversion to spending your budget on what appears to be less food (even if it's only appearance).
Too much fat is also unhealthy. How much is too much is still being debated, but there is a difference between a weight loss diet and a healthy diet. All things being equal, a 2000 calorie diet of buttered bacon doughnuts is still likely to cause more problems than a 2000 calorie diet of vegetables, fruits and nuts.
Not to pick on you, but there's this idea that fat must come from processed crap.
What about a 2000 calorie diet of meat, (real) butter, (good) oils, cheese, nuts and vegetables? Is that unhealthy?
The jury's still out.
Okay, I'll bite. What is a "good oil"? All oil is fat, and consuming fat causes serious health problems. The only "oil" you need are polyunsaturated fatty acids which occur naturally in whole vegetables and nuts.
The only oil I consume, apart from naturally occuring ones, is extra virgin olive oil, which the consensus from both sides of the fence is "it's good for you".
I think whatever sources you are leaning on for your claims would have the same issues that all the sources demonstrating good things about olive oil have, there is no central consensus for any of it, making that a pretty weak argument.
You said Olive oil is NOT healthy. Can you explain how pouring saturated fat on a meal is supposed to improve it?, don't come back at me like I'm trying to mix things up.
Well, where are they? I find it laughable how no one ever seems to be able to cite evidence exonerating unhealthy olive oil in these types of discussions.
http://www.aboutoliveoil.org/oohealthbenefits.pdf
(Now that I've pointed you to an easily found resource, will you read the cited works?)
Okay, now I'm convinced you really are kidding.
(the citations of scientific papers are on the bottom of each page...)
Note the in industry material in my comment above. I anticipated this response, I didn't have to edit it to put that in.
Anyway, have fun.
Your example is one of a healthy diet, IMO, and fats are part of a healthy diet.
My one and only point is that too much fat, even from natural sources, is unhealthy, and the jury is not out on that, it is a known, proven fact.
That's probably because a diet with 70% fat is extremely unhealthy and will likely lead to coronary atherosclerosis. Also, 5% carbs? How are you getting any nutrition in, since fruit and vegetables are almost all carbs?
Greens, nuts and non-sweet fruits (olives, tomatoes, avocadoes, peppers) have negligible amount of carbs.
Who said? It's not very scientific, but if this supposedly "good for me" food makes me crave more, makes me bloated, tired, and crash after 3 hours and gives me stomach discomfort, is it really good for me?
Oh, I went through it for years, my body probably knows best.
Every single civilization which has eaten predominantly carbohydrates, like root vegetables and rice, for all of human history.
Stomach discomfort is caused by fiber, is common if you're coming off a meat-heavy diet, does go away once you return to eating healthy.
Vegetables are often relatively high in carbs but low in total calories, and so the contribution of their carbs to your total calories can be low even if you have a lot of vegetables in your diet.
For instance, I recently had a steak and corn for dinner. The corn was 80 calories per serving, 15 g of carb, so 75% of calories from carbs. The steak was 600 calories, 3 g of carb (from the steak sauce I used, not the steak itself), with is 2% calories from carbs. I had two servings of corn with my steak, so the total meal was 760 calories, 33 g carbs, which is 17% calories from carbs.
If I had not chosen corn I probably would have chosen a can of green beans (70 calories, 7 g of carbs, which is 40% calories from carbs) which would have made the total meal 6% calories from carbs. Heck, double the green beans...two full 14.5 oz cans (almost a kilogram of green beans!), and the total for the meal would only rise to 9% calories from carbs.
Or consider salads. I use a pre-made salad mix [1] (I'm lazy). One bowl of this is 20 calories, 3 g carbs. That's 60% of calories from carbs. I use a dressing on this that is 240 calories, 4 g of carbs, so 7% calories from carbs. The salad mix combined with the dressing gives me 26 calories, 7 g carbs, so 11% calories from carbs. Recently I add some chopped up ham to this that added 200 calories, 0 g carbs, making the total salad 6% calories from carbs.
[1] http://www.freshexpress.com/product/refreshing-mixes/iceberg... and yes, the nutrition values I gave above do not match what they give on the site. I'm going by what is printed on the actual package rather than the web site, although it is a little disturbing that they are different.
Exactly, which is why you're supposed to be eating a lot of them.
> I had two servings of corn with my steak, so the total meal was 760 calories, 33 g carbs, which is 17% calories from carbs.
760 calories and not a whole lot of nutrition. For the same caloric price, you could have several salads packed with vegetables, legumes and whole grains, packed with antioxidants, vitamins, minerals and fiber.
Well, I do eat more than just a single meal a day. I also had a salad that day, and a sandwich on whole grain bread. It's not like every meal is a big slab of meat and a couple servings of one vegetable.
My main dietary planning since early September has been around carbs, because my glucose levels have been creeping up, even though I had not made any dietary changes. My HA1c hit 8.9 early in 2015 [1]. I cut back a bit on sugary drinks, and it dropped to 8.1 by early September. Then I started aiming for no more than 40% of calories from carbs, and by my next test 3 months later it was down to 5.9. I hadn't actually intended to cut calories, but as a completely accidental side effect my daily calories ended up half what they were before, so over that 3 months I lost 45 pounds, and have lost another 15 since then. My blood pressure is down noticeably, too.
For my 2016 food tracking spreadsheet I added a column specifically for sugar, and am thinking of modifying my "40% from carbs" goal to allow a higher percentage from carbs as long as the percentage specifically from sugar stays down. That will flip a lot more fruits and vegetables and grain-based products into the "go ahead and eat a lot of these" category.
From blood tests and food tracking, as far as I can see the only nutrient I'm low on is protein. I'm getting on average about 75-80% of what is recommended (based on the 0.36 g of protein per pound you weigh guideline). So, I like to toss in a delicious slab of meat now and then to boost the protein, like I did in my steak and corn dinner the other day.
As long as I feel fine, and my blood tests continue showing no problems, I'm just going to keep on doing what I'm doing, because it is leading to good steady weight loss and is almost effortless and should be sustainable indefinitely.
[1] And yes, this is with medication.
This is always my go-to response when people ask me about my diet. If you simply eat only when hungry, and only eat real food, you're going to be in decent shape on average. There is a lot of detail and difficulty hiding behind those two simple requirements though.
For example, eating only when hungry implies that we stop eating when we are no longer hungry. Avoiding binge sessions is sometimes very challenging. And accepting a simple definition of "real food" can be surprisingly challenging. Things that don't make the cut: Frozen pizzas, almost all fast food, even orange juice.
"forget about macros" - > be conscious of the starch and sugars you intake. if you have the choice between potatoes and nuts, eat nuts. choose green before white. getting all your calories a day from starch isnt ideal.
While I would tend to agree with you, apparently there's many people that thrive on starchy food (potatoes, rice). There's some unknown mechanism at work here, most probably it's the gut flora diversity.
Complete nonsense. Cholesterol = animal products, which contain estrogen, which lower testosterone. You don't need cholesterol in a healthy diet, in fact it's completely antithetical to healthy eating.
http://www.peertrainer.com/gfx/en_us/nut_density.jpg is an example chart i found after 10sec of googling
you might say potato is higher than chicken. but im not going to turn potato into muscle, i will turn chicken into muscle.
at the end of the day, fat and protein are necessary to survive, starch is optional.
Erm .. so? One can't survive on spinach alone, so I don't see this as a reason not to eat potatoes, or other starches.
> im not going to turn potato into muscle, i will turn chicken into muscle.
Well, why not? Every single whole plant food has a complete amino acid profile and sufficient protein (5-10% of calories).
i am talking about being mindful. saying "dont worry about macros" is the antithesis of paying attention to what you eat. for the most part, starches are fillers.
If you cut out starches, you need to replace those calories with other food. If it isn't vegetables, it'll probably be animal products, which are way less healthy than the innocent potato.
> for the most part, starches are fillers
I don't think so.
"THE potato is a very important constituent of the diet of many civilised nations, and it may be considered to furnish, with bread, the bulk of the food of the rural population of such countries as Poland and Russia. There is little doubt that the Polish or Russian peasant is nevertheless very healthy and able to do extremely hard work under trying conditions. Deficiency diseases such as beriberi, pellagra or scurvy are practically unknown in Poland."
The value of whole potato in human nutrition
if the goal is to lose weight, the calories should NOT be replaced, by meat or otherwise.
There is simply not a good way to measure human calorie expenditure. Fitbits and their ilk are, to put it bluntly, useless. They measure the number of movements, not the work expended for each movement. They cannot distinguish between a step taken on flat ground or an incline (or decline) or even the difference between an arm movement and a body movement.
It wouldn't be impossible to measure total calorie expenditure, but it would be pretty impractical. You'd basically need to isolate the person from the external environment and measure the total heat produced by that person's body.
But, like other commenters have pointed out, you don't even need to measure calorie expenditure to lose weight. You just need a running average of calorie intake and of weight loss. If weight loss is too low or too high, adjust your calorie intake and wait for more data. Repeat as needed.
Some people, I believe, are insulin resistant and some are insulin sensitive. The sensitive ones tend to be skinny and have to really overeat to gain weight, while the resistant ones find it easy to gain weight.
I have dieted for years attempting to lose weight, but cutting out carbs was a game changer. Suddenly losing weight became easy. And who doesn't like an all BBQ diet?? (ok, well, even BBQ gets tiring after awhile, but I eat a variety of stuff, and even have managed to work out how to make a low carb pizza (almond meal+cheese for the crust, tastes like whole wheat).)
I do not believe all calories are the same. I eat a high fat, high calorie diet, I never worry about calories. If I'm hungry I eat. I only ever budget for carbs. So long as I'm eating meat and cheese, say, for a snack, I can eat as much as I want- and I do. (Though one of the side effects of low carb / high fat, is as your body becomes fat adapted, you find yourself hungry less often. I have on occasions simply forgotten to eat for an entire 36 hour period.)
OF course this is anecdote, and I do think that in regards to insulin sensitivity there are at least two types of people.
And in fact, that's part of my point. The monotonous "just cut out fats and eat all the pasta you want and you'll lose weight" Official Government Propaganda Diet is not working- it presumes that everyone is the same too.
Low carb may not work for everybody, I dunno. But it worked for me, spectacularly.
For the first time in my life I'm confronting the prospect of being normal sized. Skinny even.
That's going to be weird!
There may indeed be differences in "normal" insulin response, but it probably doesn't make sense to label one end of that range as insulin resistant, insulin is a hormone that is deeply involved in energy metabolism. The failure to respond to it is a dysfunction.
> Umgangssprachlich werden oft Nährwertangaben in Kilokalorien fälschlich > als „Kalorien“ bezeichnet. In den USA ist bei Nährwertangaben > die Bezeichnung calorie für Kilokalorien auch offiziell zulässig.
In English: Informally, kilocalories in food are often referred to simply as "calories". In the USA, using "calories" instead of "kilocalories" in nutritional information is officially allowed.
Here it's not allowed to label them as calories, they have to be labelled as kilocalories. They're still called "calories" informally though.
In short, for most of us, our fat tissue is regulated primarily through our response to insulin.
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Zebras-Dont-Get-Ulcers/dp/07167321...
Pissed?
My "point" was that getting pissed at a community won't get things done. She's a science journalist so she can be qualified enough to work on alternatives herself.
in american english, it means mildly angry