Counting Calories Is Not the Key to Weight Loss, New Study Finds

Maybe I missed it in the article but this just seems like calorie restriction to me. Its much harder to eat a large amount of calories if its just meat and vegetables.

Your best bet is to focus on plants (fruits/veggies), nuts/seeds, legumes, whole grains, and animals (if you choose to eat them). If you love dairy, or chocolate, or cookies...have them. Better you have a little every day or every so often, knowing it, in moderation, will not lead to weight gain. What will lead to weight gain will be a masochistic devotion to avoiding those things, and then the eventual and complete eroding of your constitution which will bring a painful and guilt-ridden rebound that will take a psychological and physical toll on yourself.

I say this as someone who placed in a bodybuilding competition last year while eating pizza, cookies, cheesecake, and whatever "dirty" food you can imagine.

The title can easily be misread... It means that the act of counting calories is not key to weight loss - i.e. calories can also be reduced by a more tangible diet (like a low-fat or a low-carbohydrate diet) without explicitly counting calories... It does not say that caloric restriction isn't the most important part of a weight loss diet, it still is...

Considering that the paper itself isn't even meant to address the effectiveness of "counting calories" vs. "not counting calories", this title is extremely clickbait-y...

The title should be "Counting calories is not the key to sustaining motivation for weight loss".

My source, albeit biased, is my own experiences losing weight. I started counting calories 10 years ago and lost ~120 lbs. Over the last 10 years I've put on ~40 lb bringing my 6'4 frame to 200 lbs while going to the gym and counting calories.

https://idmprogram.com/biggest-loser-diet-explained/

After all, you can still end up feeling eternally hungry if 100% of your diet was high fructose corn syrup liquids.

Unfortunately this article and study will likely be misconstrued as calories not mattering to weight loss. This is a common misconception or delusion.

And even then, it would be easier to have a simpler AI that can do little more than recognize an item of junk food and shock the appetite out of me if it detects my hand reaching for it.

Not everyone can do bomb calorimetry at home. It's rare enough that someone can measure food portions to the nearest 10 grams. I think the entire basis of the Weight Watchers "points" system is that the calorie number is just too much math for most people. And then, psychologically, it isn't a matter of "things I can eat versus things I can't eat" but "things I don't have to worry about eating versus things I have to track in a stupid notebook". That bypasses the stubborn counterreaction where forbidding a food only makes the dieter want it more. You can still have it, if you really want it, but you have to do math and accounting, so it had better be worth the hassle.

This study mildly supports my buffet theory (actually a hypothesis). My theory is that you can avoid gaining excess weight at any buffet by following just one rule: you can eat anything you want, as long as every plate you bring back to the table is at least 50% filled with undressed/unsauced salad-bar vegetables, and you eat them first. It's hard to overeat when you're eating a half-plate of raw broccoli between each half-plate of other stuff. If you then replace the buffet with a grocery store, you have a lifestyle strategy: eat anything you want, as long as you have a proportional mass of salad first.

What the body does with one input versus a different input is much more important than the quantity (caloric) of each input. If you could manage to consume 2,000 kcal of lettuce in a day, you will almost certainly gain less weight (or lose more weight) than if you consumed only 1,500 kcal of modern processed American bread.

The problem we face in trying to eat better is that virtually everything you can buy is processed. When you go into a typical American grocery store, about 25% of the outer aisles are unprocessed foods - raw meat, raw vegetables and fruits, nuts, etc. _Everything_ in the inner aisles is processed. Even most of the outer aisle is processed - cheeses, sandwich meats, "fruit juices", etc.

Fiber is a key component to health (and weight loss for those who do not get enough). Raw fruits and vegetables are typically very high in fiber. Processed foods are usually not. Fruits and vegetables are also high in water content. Water and fiber help us feel fuller. It's a bit of an illusion, or rather it's quite temporary because it goes out of our systems more quickly than carbs. Fiber also aids in our gut and colon bacteria balance, and research is beginning to recognize the many roles that bacteria play in our health (including mental!)

The list of reasons for choosing unprocessed foods over processed foods is very long. About the only things really negative about unprocessed foods are their relative higher price and their lower convenience. But if you value quality, then the price argument goes away. Likewise, there are social and emotional benefits to food preparation and meal sharing. So "less convenient" really is just another way of saying "better priorities".

I find that fat, proteins, and carbs help me to feel full. I can eat four donuts and still feel like I barely ate something. But one egg and I'm good to go for another hour.

I'm doing a little better about portion control, but whenever I think about never eating dessert again, I just want more dessert... thanks brain.

Its sort of misleading, even though not counting calories the participants were still likely reducing them...

Here's a full in-depth analysis, including a Q&A with the lead author and graphing each individual's weight loss and gain: https://examine.com/nutrition/low-fat-vs-low-carb-for-weight...

Dr. Gardner said it is not that calories don’t matter. After all, both groups ultimately ended up consuming fewer calories on average by the end of the study, even though they weren’t conscious of it. The point is that they did this by focusing on nutritious whole foods that satisfied their hunger.

As long as insulin levels are kept in check, energy storage is as well. Avoiding sweets and simple carbs while having plenty of fiber in your diet is an effective means of achieving that. It's not necessarily calorie restricted, calories are somewhat orthogonal.

There's a story Gary Taubes tells about Oskar Minkowski's [1] discovery of the Pancreas' role in insulin production. I found it quite illuminating when trying to better understand nutrition and will paraphrase it here. The guy was experimenting with dogs and removed the pancreas from some dogs, buttoning them back up and letting them continue to live normally. He observed they lived normal lives as if nothing changed, but no matter how much food they ate - they kept losing weight. They would eventually die from the weight loss. He had noticed that flies were attracted to the urine of the pancreas-free dogs, and being a scientist, he tasted the urine and observed it was exceptionally sweet. Not having insulin in the blood, this stuff just came out in the urine rather than being stored in the fat, because fat cells need to be instructed to steal excess energy and store it, otherwise it just passes through.

Hence if there are foods we can eat which cause the pancreas to behave anomalously for extended periods, our energy storage will follow suit.

There's another story Taubes tells, I think these were from Good Calorie, Bad Calorie but I've read so many things on the topic it's a blur. It's about a woman who had a small tumor removed from her brain, the tumor was next to I believe it was the Pituitary gland. After the succcessful removal, she began gaining weight uncontrollably. Her diet/lifestyle was unchanged from before the surgery, and no matter what they did to her diet to try fix this, she gained more weight, eventually becoming obese. It turned out a part of the brain affected by the surgery controlled the hormones related to energy storage. This woman's body was internally starving itself by erroneously instructing the fat to continuously store energy. If memory serves this story had a good ending though, they discovered a medication to get the hormone production back to normal levels and her weight normalized.

These two anecdotes are important. Any engineering-minded person who has done troubleshooting of comple systems, root-causing of difficult problems, understands the tremendous value in observing how systems fail.

The stories demonstrate a total decoupling of Caloric intake/physical activity to energy storage. Stop fixating on calories, we need to eat foods that keep the energy system functioning properly in the first place.

I don't think it's surprising that we find the more a diet is composed of intact, naturally-occurring foods, having little processing/preparation (including cooking), the more health tends to generally improve. Unless you're steeped in religious beliefs to the contrary, you probably understand and accept humans evolved over a long period of time. Our bodies are still suited to the foods we evolved around, so when we eat things like refined carbohydrates, stuff that requires machinations and technology to create, we're exposing the body to essentially unexpected inputs. So we should at least expect bad results to be more likely when consuming such things.

Of course calories matter. The weight loss problem is twofold:

1. Calories. Counting calories is solution to this. You can lose weight by eating junk food if you count calories.

2. Feeling hungry and self discipline problems. Quality and composition of the food and different ways of consuming food affects how easy it is to consume less calories in the long term.

What's the point where your resting metabolism burns enough calories so that you're losing weight instead of gaining or maintaining weight? There's no way to easily figure that out without calorie counting. Further, that changes as you age, so doing rare calorie counts is extremely valuable anyway.

My resting burn rate is substantially different from my brother's resting burn rate. Growing up I could live off of pizza and not gain a single pound. I was 6'2" and 155 pounds at 26 years old, living off of the worst carb-heavy diet you can imagine with zero exercise. It simply didn't matter to my weight, my metablism was very high. My brother on the other hand, will carry dozens of pounds more at a similar diet & calorie intake.

As I've gotten older, my metabolism has changed. At an identical diet to ten years ago, I will now carry 20 to 25 more pounds. I have to be more careful with what I eat now. How do you know where that calorie metabolism baseline is if you don't occasionally count? And this is just a routine life example, rather than a serious weight loss context (in which case calorie counting is radically more useful).

After you establish your calorie baseline, then make adjustments to your routine / diet / lifestyle, then you can certainly get rid of the counting. The calorie counting is extremely useful in helping to inform and establish a new lifestyle.

Step one is to figure out how many calories you're really taking in on a daily and weekly basis. In my opinion, most people with serious weight problems will significantly underestimate their calorie intake and will be surprised at how high it is.

Calorie counting also helps to rapidly identify the primary problems in your diet over time. For most people, they don't have 37 problems in their diet, they have only a few (eg cutting out all soda and making pasta/pizza a rare consumption). And if those few items are removed and replaced with superior options, that will take care of 3/4 of the problem. While some may say that the problem areas should be obvious, one of the reasons that people become so overweight in the first place is that it isn't obvious to them, because their lives become routines filled with blank spaces around what they're stuffing into their mouths in a hurry. They literally lose track of lots of the bad things they've consumed in a given week - the calorie counting acts as a powerful mental enforcer, you have to write all of that shit down.

> Anyone who has ever been on a diet knows that the standard prescription for weight loss is to reduce the amount of calories you consume.

> But a new study, published Tuesday in JAMA, may turn that advice on its head. It found that people who cut back on added sugar, refined grains and highly processed foods while concentrating on eating plenty of vegetables and whole foods — without worrying about counting calories or limiting portion sizes — lost significant amounts of weight over the course of a year.

People who switch to plenty of vegetables and whole foods may not be counting calories, but they're still consuming far fewer calories. Have you ever looked at how few calories are in vegetables? Most of the calories in any vegetable dish you consume are probably coming from added oil. And eating "whole foods" also means avoiding the heavily-processed caloric foods you would be eating otherwise.

Weight loss comes from calorie reduction. Exercise is really important too of course, in particular to maintaining your weight post-loss, but all you really need to lose weight is to reduce your calorie intake. I can personally attest to that, having lost 75lbs in 4 months now using nothing more than calorie restriction¹, and the program I'm doing this through has a very high success rate (which is to say, as long as you actually stick to the program, you're guaranteed to lose a significant amount of weight).

The overall point of the article is still fine, which is that you really don't need to calorie-count in order to lose weight, and focusing on that can make people unhappy. In general it's more effective to simply tailor your diet so the foods you're eating are less caloric (and probably healthier in other ways too). But I am disappointed that the article led with the completely incorrect implication that weight loss does not come from reducing the calories you consume.

¹It's a medically-managed weight loss program through Kaiser Permanente, 960 calories per day (using meal replacements) for 16 weeks with regular bloodwork and doctor visits, then 1200 calories per day (with partial meal replacements) for another 16 weeks (assuming you don't hit your weight goal). I'm currently in the 1200 calorie portion.