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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

A couple of years ago, in a show of solidarity with my wife, I did a Whole 30. It's a 30 day elimination diet that cuts out all sugar (except for naturally occurring in whole fruit). I'm in my thirties and very slim.

The Whole 30 lets you have as much fat, meat and calories as you want. I plowed through eggs, homemade mayo, meat, and other calorie dense food. I'm skinny enough that I don't have much weight to lose. Even so, I dropped ten pounds effortlessly.

I don't know if this generalizes to other people and their physiques, but it was enough to convince me that sugar/simple carbs really do correlate more directly to my waistline than just counting calories does. I'm sure what the right metric to pay attention to is. My hunch is that it's glycemic load.

Either way, I cut down on my sugar and carbs since then, and I've lost of a lot of the middle-aged Dad belly I was starting to develop. I don't count calories at all. It seems to work for me.

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Honestly, I think it's just calories in vs calories out. There's all kinds of things to consider like glycemic load and digestion speeds and all that, but at the end of the day, you lose fat when you eat less than you burn (see: the Twinkie diet). I think way too many people focus on things like glycemic load and the "kinds" of calories they're eating as some kind of magical weight loss/gain formula, and lose track of the overall quantity. I've lost more weight just counting calories and ignoring micronutrients, glycemic load, etc than I ever did trying to micromanage glycemic load and micronutrients.

Fats are a lot more satiating than carbohydrates (ie, sugars) - I could easily put away 4000 calories of goldfish crackers in an evening, but I would be insanely full, uncomfortable, and possibly even sick if I tried to eat 4000 calories of proteins or fats. My go-to craving-killer snack is peanuts - they're high calorie on the label, but a handful of them takes the edge off my craving in a way that chips and crackers and candy don't.

I'm in my thirties and I don't want to lose weight. I also ate several hundred grams of sugar every day in December. Didn't gain a single pound. This is because my calories were still about the same, only the composition changed.

If you didn't count your calories, there's no way to tell where you were eating relative to your TDEE. People think they're eating more than they are all the time, it's an incredibly common thread on any fitness forum.

Isn't that still a point in favor of the diet, though? That it's much harder to overeat on it?

Of course, but it's pretty well accepted that fibrous and fatty foods are typically more filling that sugary foods, with fewer calories (especially for fibrous foods). It doesn't invalidate intake with respect to TDEE being the primary cause of weight gain and loss.

That's OK. I'm not claiming that I was eating equivalent or fewer calories by controlling sugar.

I'm claiming that the set of dietary rules I chose which are based around limiting sugar and simple carbs have an end result of some weight loss. Whether that's a direct property of lowering sugar, or an emergent property caused by that is a good question, but one I don't need to have an answer for if the rules happen to work.

For what it's worth, my rules are roughly:

* No sweets unless I am socializing or it is a dessert I prepared from scratch. "Sweet" means roughly candy or dessert.

* No beer unless socializing.

* Minimize carb-heavy snacks like crackers and chips.

The last rule is fuzzier than I'd like, but I'm still dialing it in.

These rules may seem a little arbitrary, but they work for me and I find they do a good job of improving my overall diet without subjecting me to the real annoyances of rigid diets that make you do things like ask a waiter to bring you a burger without a bun, or not eat a curry that has a teaspoon of sugar in it.

That's good to cut out unneeded sugars but I'd say it's risky jumping into a strictly fat, meat diet. I tried it and it definitely changed my blood cholesterol levels. Given that nobody can agree on what is actually "good" for you, I think the balanced diet is still the way to go. Of course, do whatever makes you happy, though. I'm cooking a steak now ;)

> into a strictly fat, meat diet.

Oh, I'm definitely not trying to do that. I try to have a good amount of fruits, vegetables, nuts and dairy. Basically your classic "balanced" diet, just lower on sugar and highly-processed grains.

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