This is the key point and it makes all the difference. You need to be able to stay on the diet for a sufficiently long time, and that's why different approaches are needed fro different people. If you eat carbs you need to measure carefully every meal and calculate the calories, which to many people very quickly gets extremely annoying. On low carb diets you don't have to. Also there are mood changes depending on the taste of the food that you eat. If you like eating meat and veggies, low-carb diets taste great, you enjoy every meal. It makes it much easier to abide the rules. Also general mental state is important, high stress and depression will sabotage your efforts.
Diets are not just about nutrition, that's one of the biggest misconceptions. Psychology and physical activities play equally, if not more important role in dieting.
Loose weight just by counting calories will not take in consideration toxicity (see my other comment in this thread). Many people burn fat this way, which release toxins they can't process. Hence their body is thin but saturated with poison. From here 2 things happens:
- the person gains weight again to protect him/herself. Happens very often.
- the person manage to not gain weight at this expense of his/her health, sometime with terrible consequences you only see months or years later.
One of my friends is currently in the later category. She lost a lot of weight and his very hot. But her skin is degrading at an alarming pace. It's a very bad symptom when your are 30.
All in all, it's important when you loose weight to:
- do it progressively so your body can process the toxins at the same rate they are released.
- help the body to eliminated say toxins by alternating rest and exercise, drinking and if needed, consuming.
- provide the body with a sane diet to not only avoid adding more toxins to the current ones, but also bring minerals than can be used to bring the PH up and vitamins to keep organs running smoothly.
Basically, "sleep well, eat well and exercise". Thank you grand ma :)
It's precisely this sort of magical thinking that the OP is trying to counter.
There most definitely are such things as "toxins". There are neurotoxins produced by black widows, most scorpions, box jellyfish, many algae and cyanobacteria, among others. There are necrotoxins produced by the brown recluse, rattlesnakes, puff adders for example.
Heck, if there were no such thing as toxins, the "Journal of Venomous Animals and Toxins including Tropical Diseases" would have long ago dropped "and Toxins" from its name to save costs on ink :-). The Toxin and Toxin-Target database [1] would also have about 3700 less entries if toxins did not exist.
The word toxin is widely used in "wellness" circles, but the concept so described does not exist. The fact that there is a correct, jargon-specific, scientific usage of the same term notwithstanding.
Some molecules are things that have nothing to do in the body (Maillard reaction output, antibiotic in the meat, pesticide in fruits, etc). Some are just regular things we can process but in a greater concentration that is healthy. Some are just natural waste of our regular body processes, but in a greater quantity than we can manage in our current health.
Basically nothing is a poison, it's a matter of quantity you absorb and can process. I just labeled it "toxin" because I don't have the vocabulary for it.
There is no magic thinking about it.
E.G: the blood PH must be at 7.40 PH. The body has mechanisms to ensure it stays that way. If the body is saturated with things bringing the PH down, it will try to get rid of it (through poop, urine and the like). I called them toxin, it was a bad choice. Fair enough. But the fact remains, if your blood PH goes down to 7.36, you are good for the hospital, and your body will try to avoid it. If it can't get rid of the responsible molecules, it will find a way to compensate. One way is to throw minerals at it since they are mostly basic. Another one is to dilute them by holding water. A last one is to wrap the molecule into fat, store it, so it can be processed later.
Again, no magic thinking. My wording may not be perfect, but I don't see anything unreasonable in what I'm saying.
However, I can't help but notice than 3 peoples opposed my explanation by blatantly rejecting it without arguments while I'm taking the time to respectfully demonstrate it. And give references to studies and books in another comment.
Please don't be aggressive. If you know I'm wrong, just make your point with arguments.
This. With the addition that psychology is hugely affected human bodys tendency to defend agains weight loss. One good recent paper on the subject how much weight loss increased hunger: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oby.21653/abstrac...
Absorption and digestion can greatly vary between humans. (A Common example are algae).
What kind of micro and macronutrients you eat will directly and indirectly affect your metabolism.
What you eat will affect your hunger.
Those and other complex interplays lead to things that are counterintuitive. For instance there recently was some study that drinking soda with artificial sweetener also leads to obesity, if I remember correctly.
This mantra annoys me, because it's like saying that to go to space, all you need to do is to burn rocket fuel and keep the nozzle pointed down (and then to the side).
It's technically true, but every single sane person know that it's true, and it doesn't really help you get to where you want.
It ignores how food affects motivation, digestion, metabolism etc. You can technically loose weight eating only sugar, but you'd find it impossibly hard due to the way the body is wired.
Generalizing to the obvious/trivial is not useful.
It's a fundamental part of our physiology that we have to consume a certain quantity of macronutrients to support our metabolic processes. If we don't, then our bodies utilize existing stores of macronutrients like fat and muscles, breaking them down and converting them to usable energy to meet the deficit. This causes you to lose weight, as you drink water, metabolize your fat and muscle tissue, and then exhale carbon dioxide, and excrete waste products. You're literally breathing the weight out.
You find motivation so that there's something preventing you from stuffing your face with cake every day. Then you spend a few months iterating while you figure out what you can build a diet out of that will leave you sated and allow you to cut calories. This is where your metabolism, psychology, etc. come in. Once you have that dialed in, and you may arrive at it without counting calories if you're careful, then you will start losing weight.
Weight loss requires a lot of self-awareness and attention to what you enjoy or don't enjoy about a variety of foods. Somehow, through some series of test meals, you figure out that you really like raw bell peppers, but only with salt, or that the only thing trail mix is actually good for is making you hungrier(this is something I struggle with).
This greatly describes why so many people have a problem with the blanket statement "Eat less calories than you burn and lose weight.", because it implicitly contains the crux of the matter.
There is no such thing as a single, straightforward "calorie goal that lets you lose weight without feeling like crap". It varies wildly depending on the composition of your diet (which is even different from person to person) and accompanying factors like amount of physical excercise, sleep patterns etc.
And those are the deciding factors. The calorie deficit is a prerequisite, but the difficult part is in finding a way to sustain it. (I mean, you go there yourself in the following paragraphs.)
But the statement alone is borderline useless and actually quite condescending to anyone with a modicum of diet expierience. It's like saying "Answer enough questions correctly and you'll pass the test." Duh, No shit, sherlock.
For some people, their body will try to burn the extra calories - this in part may be due to the amount of brown fat, which is one of the mechanisms the body uses to generate heat. For others, their body will store as much energy as possible as fat, and they need to increase their activity level to compensate.
In addition, your body can become more efficient, using less energy based on the calories you consume. This is one reason that it can be very hard to keep weight off after you lose it.
Metabolism is an incredibly complex process, and while we understand a lot of the pieces, we do not yet have a full understanding of how those pieces fit together, and how to use that information to help people change their metabolism beyond more than very general advice (build muscle, be more active), and some things were sort of taken for granted - such as how it used to be thought that lactic acid was responsible for muscle soreness in the days after workouts, when more recent research has shown this isn't the case: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/16/health/nutrition/16run.htm....
Maybe in another 50 years we'll have people who can really understand this stuff.
I tested that on myself. The body does not blindnessly store excess in absorbed energy. It stores fat for many other reasons. One of them is to regulate the blood PH: if you saturate your organism with too much toxic food, you won't process it fast enough. To avoid crossing the unfamous 7.40 PH threshold, one strategy is to use fat to wrap toxic molecules and put them aside on your belly so you can deal with it later. Unfortunately with our current life style, this "later" never comes.
This my friend, is not true. Not true in like...completely false.
(source: Bodybuilding for a long long time...dieting 6 months every year...bulking up the other 6 months of the year...been counting every calorie for years)
- full prot diet;
- mono-diet;
- fasting;
- raw food diet;
- veggie;
- vegan;
- classic 'balanced diet';
- body-building diet where you weight your chicken;
- and of course the good old "student-fast-food" diet.
I usually take blood samples before and after and graph my weight and IMC.
It doesn't matter, it's still not true. And there are tons of ways the measuring can go wrong or be misleading.
Would you provide the resources to counter examples ? It's only fair to have literature to compare the 2 point of views.
You just provided general resources about food and nutrition (based on the links I'm familiar with -- others could be pseudo-science). Give some specific excerpts about "toxins" and we can discuss them.
All food has side effects (e.g. too much sugar and diabetes, micro-allergies, cured meat and cancer, etc). This is not the same as some unspecified BS "toxins".
It also has nothing to do with "I eat less calories and I get fatter compared to eating more" which was the original claim we disputed -- which is absolutely incorrect.
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-detox-scam/
http://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/colon...
https://sciencebasedpharmacy.wordpress.com/2013/01/04/the-de...
http://firstwefeast.com/eat/2014/12/sorry-but-theres-no-such...
http://www.livescience.com/34845-detox-cleansing-facts-falla...
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-detox-scam-how-to-spot-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detoxification_(alternative_me...
Well of course, why would I not ? They include the knowledge I'm using right now.
However I can't help but notice you provide blog posts with opinions, not studies or books.
Again I agree that using the word "toxin" was not a good choice. I'm not a native English speaker, I don't know any proper term for "things the body can't process, and that harms it".
> I eat less calories and I get fatter compared to eating more
Yes it has. A calorie is always in a context. It's extracted it and from this context. During this process, molecules that can harm the body can enter it, or be produced in it. Since using fat to wrap molecules is one of the ways the body cope with it, it has an impact on it.
I'm not saying eating only banana is healthy, but it has few chances of triggering the late mechanism.
No, the context only applies to health. You will always lose weight if you eat less calories, period.
>During this process, molecules that can harm the body can enter it, or be produced in it. Since using fat to wrap molecules is one of the ways the body cope with it, it has an impact on it.
That's not what happens. There is no such procedure that uses fat to "cope with it". Some substances just get accumulated in fat, with no bearing as to wether you can lose that weight by eating less calories. That's a common pseudo-scientific misconception on the "detox" circles.
- eat a little protein and lots of fructose from an apple from your garden;
- eat the same amount of calories as proteins + fat in industrial meat.
The second amount will create vastly more waste, such as urea, to be processed by the body. It will also require more energy to processed because the fructose is almost usable as-is. Because the second source of calories brings less minerals, it will also bring your PH down, forcing the body to deal with it. Because it's industrial meat, it will contains synthetic products such as antibiotic than will make your livers works a lot more and impact your digestive system flora.
But will not trigger the same insulin response.
Same amount of calories, very different context, and impact on the body.
Again, I notice a trend in those responses: you are just saying I'm wrong harshly but don't make demonstrations. If you know I'm wrong, please use arguments.
You're being deliberately obtuse and omitting half of the facts to suit your narrative.
- The classic "Samson Wright's Applied Physiology, Thirteenth Edition". It's very broad, but a strong base is always nice : https://www.amazon.com/Wrights-Physiology-Thirteenth-Medicin...
- How not to die. A good balanced between scientific references and averge joe explanations: https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Die-Discover-Scientifically/d...
- The China Study. Live study on millions of people to correlate quality of food and health instead of just quantity : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study)
- "Constitution des organismes animaux et végétaux Causes des maladies qui les atteignent" is a fantastic complement but I don't know if it exists in english. Careful though, it has a controversial point of view on vaccines. Still worth it: https://www.amazon.fr/Constitution-organismes-bact%C3%A9rien...
If I eat high calorie food, why does that cause me to retain more of the mass of that food in my body, compared to the same quantity of low calorie food?
This is a genuine question which I've never found a good answer for.
It would make much more sense to me if you said "Eat fewer kg of food than you excrete, and loose weight".
1kg of ice cream has a much greater potential to change your long-term mass than 1kg of broccoli because your body has the ability to extract more energy from it, and thus build more fat or muscle.