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Comment by sbenitoj | Hacker News Reader

As someone who helps people lose fat professionally, I can say with near 100% confidence this will have almost zero effect on the vast majority of people.

People were lean long before calorie counts were readily available, the problem people have is NOT lack of awareness of the number of calories in their food.

The problem is philosophical — if you think all edible substances qualify as “food,” you’re never going to lose weight and keep it off.

If you think you should only be consuming whole foods the VAST majority of the time, then you will lose weight and keep it off relatively effortlessly.

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As someone who has lost 20 pounds since the new year, I can say with near 100% confidence that it would not have happened for me without obsessive calorie tracking. Can't recommend MyFitnessPal enough.

It won’t last, calorie counts are not reliable indicators of how many calories you’re actually digesting (look up the thermic effect of food), and long term you will not keep it off if you focus solely on calories, quality whole foods come first.

That just makes no sense, unless you are suggesting that we magically generate matter, calorie counts are an upper bound on how many calories you are actually digesting.

That’s not what I’m suggesting.

Certain foods generate more heat while being digested (like protein) than others (like sugar and white flour).

Consuming 100 calories of protein results in fewer calories digested than consuming 100 calories of sugar.

Sure, but how does that in any way make calorie counting less effective? It's an upper bound. Sure, you could maybe eat a little more protein than you would otherwise budget for, but if you are aiming to lose weight, overestimating the count of an item a little isn't going to hurt.

The broader point I’m trying to make is that calorie counting DOES NOT work long term.

It’s exhausting. It’s monotonous. It’s inaccurate. It’s impossible to do unless you’re eating at chain restaurant all the time.

And we are not robots where ONLY calories matter.

In the short term people can willpower themselves to do almost anything.

In the long term WHAT we eat has a bigger affect than HOW MUCH we eat.

Different foods affect our hormones differently.

You can’t eat 1,200 calories of sugar a day and expect to feel satiated from your diet, you will feel starving all the time.

You can eat 1,200 calories of protein/veggies/healthy fat and feel satiated from your diet.

Hormones drive our long-term hunger levels, and foods affect our hormone levels.

People before the 1950s were almost all lean and they had no calorie counts.

People have all the calorie counts they can stand today and most people are overweight in the West.

The difference is people eat WAY more junk food now than they did before the 1950s, it wasn’t even available back then.

Dude, I can see what you're saying, but as somebody who apparently does this professionally you need to work on how you get your point across.

I've lost over 15KG/35 pounds since the start of the year doing nothing but CICO - it's not incorrect to say that Calories is the king when it comes to how to lose the weight.

For everything else you are saying, it's not wrong either - anybody who starts CICO pretty quickly discovers that "Yes I can eat anything, but my god I will be hungry at 7pm if I used all my Calories on KFC and Donuts" - but don't keep saying simply that "Counting calories is not going to work".

Edit to add: and my wife and I have done this all with cooking home made meals at least 5-6 nights a week. It only takes a minute to enter a recipe in a calculator app.

Appreciate your comment.

To be clear the population of people on HN is a self-selecting, techie group of ppl. Most people cannot do CICO long term. And even if you can you’ll realize it doesn’t work the leaner you get, quality becomes increasingly important at that point.

The GP said UPPER BOUND. Sure, protein and fibrous foods require more energy to digest. Great, that's a nice bonus. However, if your counting calories then you're not taking that into account, therefore you're over counting. That leads to _more_ weight loss, never less.

I’ve yet to see the caloric intake which cuts off 500-600 cals of your BMR which for most non bedridden people equates to about a 1000 calories daily deficit that wouldn’t result in weight loss regardless of the nutritional makeup of said calories.

Can you clarify your statement? I don’t understand what you’re saying.

What I’m saying is that while eating 1500 cals of pure sugar a day might not be good for your long term insulin sensitivity you’ll lose weight at about the same rate as eating 1500 “well balanced” cals of fat/protein/complex carbs a day.

This is a statement that’s technically true but misses the most important point — sourcing your foods from fat/protein/veggies will naturally take care of the calories piece.

All mammals, including humans, have the ability to naturally regulate their energy balance when they eat the foods they evolved to eat.

No it won’t if you eat a ribeye for lunch every day you’ll be hard pressed to lose weight unless you are The Rock.

If your goal is to lose weight tracking calories is by far the most important factor in achieving that goal.

You can’t just say eat meat and veggies and expect people to lose weight without enforcing a caloric restriction.

That is exactly how I get my many, many clients to lose weight — eating meat and veggies naturally causes people to reduce their calorie intake by increasing their feelings of satiety from the foods they’re eating.

No, how you make your clients lose weight is by restricting their caloric intake that’s it.

The fact that’s is more easily achieved by saying that you can eat 3 chicken breasts a potatoe and a bucket of kale a day than 5 large cookies, isn’t exactly ground breaking nor does it have anything to do with what humans evolved to eat because we’ve been eating processed sugar for far longer than we were eating meat.

In fact scratch my first comment that started this I would rather see a menue that is at or over your daily caloric requirement which magically makes you lose weight.

Are you claiming that ALL foods — whether they’re sugar or grass-fed beef — affect your hunger-related hormones the same?

Also, where’s the evidence for people consuming processed sugar longer than meat?

Never seen that claimed before.

Great job. Don’t listen to the haters. :)

I am not a hater, I do this professionally

And especially don’t listen to anyone who is overweight. They are like crabs in a bucket and will try to pull you back in.

Restaurants being required to show calories may change menus in a way that cannot help but have an effect for everybody. It incentivizes having lower calorie options, disincentives healthy sounding but not really items like some salads and disincentives really over the top items.

Even if that doesn't pan out, it certainly makes life easier for the millions who do count calories.

> the problem people have is NOT lack of awareness of the number of calories in their food

Maybe that's not the problem but it could be part of a solution. Don't underestimate gamification and feedback loops.

What type of awareness are we talking about? I imagine a progress bar telling you precisely where you are for the day and the week, now you have to consciously break the ceiling if you want to eat too much.

I’m all for anything that helps people, including gamification.

But if your focus is calories, and not the quality/source if your food, then you’re not solving the REAL problem which is distorted hormone levels affecting how full you feel. Junk food causes you to be hungrier than you should be.

Look around, no other mammal is overweight other than humans, and most humans weren’t overweight until junk food wasn’t invented.

You keep throwing out all of this talk of "hormones" and "look at people pre-1950!" Without providing any real evidence. Where's the data on hormones?

Check out the book Good Calories, Bad Calories which looks at the subject in depth (specifically the role of insulin)

Why just eat whole foods when you could mostly eat dank foods?

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