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Comment by simonbarker87 | Hacker News Reader

Is there a chance that we are over thinking this in the hope for a complex golden bullet when in reality the problem is simply eating more calories that we burn.

I lead a very active lifestyle, I lift weights 4-5 times a week with a focus on progressive overload, I cycle commute and I mountain bike many weekends a year. When I want to gain weight (as is desirable when lifting) I eat more calories (aim for about 3,750 a day) and when I want to loose weight (like in the spring ready for the summer) I eat a lot less, around 2,500 a day. Doing this fluctuates my weight from my heaviest of 190 lbs to my lightest of 170 lbs.

My wife does the same, our other friends who lift also do the same and when we eat more we get heavier and when we eat less we get lighter.

What am I missing here? Because outside the body building world it seems everyone is hunting for a complex answer that from our perspective seems sort of solved.... unless you want to get silly lean, then it’s a different ball game.

I’m not being flippant, I am genuinely curious. Eat less calories, mainly plants, do more exercise and reduce alcohol consumption (it’s got lots of calories in it).

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I'm an amateur olympic-style weightlifter with a similar schedule to yours, and after trying every trick diet in the book I've come to the same conclusion. The only real advantage I can see from diets like paleo, keto, etc. is that they can make the average person feel satisfied with less calories. Also, processed high carb foods tend to be surprisingly high calorie bombs. But, it all comes down to cals in vs cals expended.

The discussion around _quality_ of calories, the mix of macronutrients for performance, etc is an entire separate can of worms.

Interesting to get your perspective - when people ask me for advice on a specific diet I view them all as a way to help them eat less calories overall while not requiring quite so much shear will.

On your latter point my wife opened that can of worms in the run up to her first competiton and it got complicated!

This rings incredibly true to me and I'm glad the idea is spreading. My diet philosophy pitch to people is this:

(Cribbed from my post above:)

THE BEST DIET to lose weight is about psychology 80% and nutrition 20%. Most of the value you're going to get by keeping your weekly calories low. You can try variations of macronutrients, meal timing and frequency, voodoo, etc. but the best one is the one you stick with, and can stick with long enough to reach your goals.

Maybe you'll need to think about essential minerals and nutrients if you're trying something really really extreme. But with even minimal variety you should be good.

There's distinctions to make here:

1) People who don't manage their nutrition and maintain a healthy weight

2) People who manage their nutrition and maintain a healthy weight

3) People who don't manage their nutrition and have uncontrollable weight gain

Yes, if everyone who is (3) started going to the gym and counting calories as (2) do, then they would have an easier time maintaining a healthy weight. But most people can't do that. I can't do that for more than like a week at a time, but it doesn't matter because I'm a (1).

Why are (1) and (3) different? This has nothing to do with self-control or willpower. There's something off in (3)'s biological systems that calibrate their intake of food. The slightest caloric surplus leads to substantial weight gain over time. This question could occupy an army of scientists for decades, but the stigma against fat people has done serious damage to this very important medical research.

I think to draw this conclusion you need a (4) People who manage their nutrition and have uncontrollable weight gain.

Then, we can say there is a difference between (3) and (4) and attribute it to biology instead of diet.

This might sound unintuitive but your brain is a biological system and it's attached to your gut in very interesting ways.

Perhaps then we are researching the wrong thing? Why is it that some people are able to subconsciously regulate their food intake just enough to stay healthy while others regularly eat (or drink) 100-200 calories a day more - which, over a number of weeks and months is enough to gain a decent amount of weight.

Exactly. That's the million-dollar question.

A friend explained this to me with an analogy.

"If you make more money than you spend, you will have a lot of money!"

That statement is tautological, and obvious. But it doesn't address how to become rich.

Now let's compare.

"If you eat more calories than you expend, you will gain weight"

Again, this is likely true, but just very very incomplete. It doesn't attempt to truly get at the why. There are a few hypotheses for why CICO often does such a poor job at explaining the obesity epidemic. The two pieces I find most convincing are (1) there is some metabolic advantage based on the types of foods you eat, and (2) some of the calories out are excreted via waste and not processed by the body, and therefore, the simple CICO equation isn't complex enough.

Interesting point, I could imagine that in a truly terrible diet with little overall nitrtional value some of the primary drivers could break down enough to skew the CICO relationship, however even in those cases if you took 25% off the calorie intake and went for a long walk energy other day they would probably loose weight. It wouldn’t solve the other health issues caused by a terrible diet though.

CICO perfectly explains human obesity and has not been scientifically disproved yet - the body is surprisingly efficient at breaking down various types of macronutrients and storing them as fat, regardless of them being "bad" or "good" calories.

What CICO does not explain is why people are so different regarding their appetites, nor how can we teach ourselves impulse control. This is where various low-X diets become relevant, and it's how we get these diet holly wars with people swearing by the one diet that helped them get CI under control, without turning them into zombies incapable of CO.

(BTW, my weapon of choice is old school: low on fat except essential fats, balanced on slow release carbs, high on protein)

CICO doesn't explain the obesity epidemic? I thought it was pretty well-established that society's caloric surplus has risen pretty much in line with increasing obesity.

CICO doesn't explain why people are consuming so much more than they expend, but it does seem that CICO explain the obesity epidemic.

I've been ambivalent about this for some time, but given my personal experience and observations of others I am tending toward thinking that, yes, we are indeed overthinking this.

Eat less calories than you consume on a consistent basis and you will lose weight. And no, I don't think that's actually as hard to do as most people make it out to be.

What is hard to do is to resist the alluring promise of quick results.

Where most people seem to mess up is in getting lost in the noise and losing the signal. This causes them to pursue esoteric approaches to diet that are unlikely to work in the long-run. Part of this comes from our desire for quick results. Unfortunately, I don't think quick results work for weight loss.

I think sustainable weight loss takes so long to achieve that you're going to be unlikely to notice much difference, nor will anyone else. Maybe people who haven't seen you in the last year or two will notice, but not many others.

No, I don't think we are overthinking it.

I have a genetic disorder. The standard medical advice is to eat a high fat, high calorie, high salt diet to accommodate my disorder. They routinely recommend "junk food" to fit those parameters.

I went the opposite direction. I got really fanatical about what kind of fats I eat, the quality of the salt I consume and other details.

Over time, I shed a lot of weight without intending to and without counting calories. So I think, yes, for some portion of the population, it's absolutely more complicated than "calories in, calories out." And for those folks who have struggled with their weight and just can't seem to lose, they are very much in need of some new hypothesis that might solve their seemingly unsolvable conundrum.

I'm not an expert by any means, but one thing that's worth acknowledging here is that diseases like diabetes are a question of when, not if, with 100% of the population.

That is, if nothing else kills you first, you will get diabetes. At least, is the impression I've been led to believe from research and multiple physicians. If that's the case, then one must ask, "What's the most effective way of avoiding this?", and avoiding carbohydrates as much as possible sums that up well. It seems to completely drop the growth of diabetic symptoms to near-nonexistence, which seems to suggest that it might be superior for that range of diseases at least.

People are absolutely not guaranteed to get type 2 diabetes. Diabetes was basically unheard of > 150 years ago and has steadily increased in prevalence since then.

You're misunderstanding what I'm saying. 150 years ago people weren't taking in nearly as many carbs as we are now, nor were they living as long.

Diabetes, as a disease, is the breakdown of the process of your body using insulin. This happens naturally, in everyone, but happens at an increased rate when people have foods high in carbohydrates.

So the comment that people are guaranteed is to say, "If we all lived 300 years, you'd eventually have diabetes", not that everyone gets it, period.

I didn’t misunderstand you. My statement still stands.

People don’t live longer now, there are just more people who live to their full life span. Back when diabetes was unheard of, there were plenty of people who lived until 80. None of them died of complications related to diabetes.

I’m not sure what you’re saying. Couldn’t you say that about anything? “If nothing else kills you first, you WILL die in an auto accident.”

If the time horizon is over 100 years for some people then it’s not really meaningful.

Is there a chance that we are over thinking this in the hope for a complex golden bullet when in reality the problem is simply eating more calories that we burn

For this to be true, it would have to be true that the millions of people struggling with weight, and the tens of thousands of researchers in the field, are all simply idiots who are not as smart as you.

The people who say "Calories In < Calories Out, it's simple" are about as helpful as the client or exec who says "It's just code, change the code and don't write as many bugs. It's simple"

> For this to be true, it would have to be true that the millions of people struggling with weight, and the tens of thousands of researchers in the field, are all simply idiots who are not as smart as you.

There's no need to leap to 'idiocy', it could mean the people struggling with weight have either poor willpower, or honestly don't know how to eat well. You can see this by watching shows like 'Secret Eaters' and seeing how incredibly common it is that people are over-eating and just don't realise it.

And researchers will research wherever there's funding/academic opportunity.

So the big difference between 100 years ago and now is people have less knowledge and less willpower?

Well I didn't say anything about 'between 100 years ago and now', so no.

Clearly a lot of factors have changed in 100 years, like our now abundant, convenient sources of calorie-dense food, and sedentary lifestyles, which mean our knowledge and willpower are now more significant than they were then.

Completely agree. Calories in/out is a gross oversimplification. It's not wrong, it's just not particularly relevant.

One thing I thought Taubes did a good job of was illustrating the relationship between calories in and calories out: your body will burn more calories when it has them, and less when it doesn't. You will be hungrier when you burn more calories, and less hungry when you don't. Calories in isn't just a knob you can adjust without consequence, your body is complicated.

>it would have to be true that (they) ... are all simply idiots who are not as smart as you.

Peer pressure and advertising allow for many other possible explanations.

You are extremely active over 3500 calories a day is the region for professional athletes you exercise daily with a lengthy mix of both endurance and strength training so what exactly do you expect to be other than extremely fit? 2500 kcal for most people would be at or even above their daily limit for you it’s starvation so here you got a pat on the back for being awesome but you are not the norm.

If you are a tall male 3500 kcal is not professional athlete region. Hell, if you are a young male < 25 thats not a huge amount.

Yeah, a couple of my taller buddies gave up on the gym as they saw no results. In hindsight it was clear they just weren’t eating anywhere near enough, if you are tall and active 4K+ is not insane

Outside of exteeme cases it is: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/07/24/157317262/ho...

People also tend to overestimate how much calories they consume a day when you average it out over a period of time.

You can have days with 4500 kcal and days with 2500 kcal.

Yup I am 170lbs and 3500 Calories a day is just enough for me to play an hour of basketball a few times a week and be able to gain a little bit of muscle.

I’m not looking for a “pat on the back” and I apologise if I come across as supercilious but it should be possible to normalise for calorie requirement based on a persons activity level, an elite cyclist will burn 6000 calories a day, a middle of the road gym goer burns 3000 and a sedentary office worker who walks the last half mile to work burns just under 2000. If any of them consume more than what they burn they will gain weight, only it is easier to eat 2500 when you are the office worker and gain weight without realising why than it is to eat 3500 while going to the gym a lot and not realise why.

My concern is that while the obesity problem is getting worse we are looking for more and more complex reasons when in reality most people consume more calories than they require.

1000 times yes. We don't need to make this complicated.

It's just extremely hard to properly track what you're eating if you're unwilling to pay attention to it, which I don't blame people for.

There's so many calorie dense foods because we wind up adding sugar and oil to so many things when we process them and you don't even realize how many calories you're bringing in.

It ain't easy out there!

Oil is a killer for calorie control. Amazingly so many people just don’t factor it in, even when they are tracking calories they forget about the tablespoon of oil in the pan at the start or in the dressing on the salad.

I’m keen not to blame people for their weight, I’m keen to make sure we are researching the right problem. I think the “how to control weight” is solved, the harder problem, as I mentioned in a previous comment above, is how do me help people control the appetite and impulses to stand a fighting chance.

I think you are missing the point. If you are active you don’t need to worry that much about it.

However if you are not then nutrition plays a key role and not all calories are equal on a macro level, and more importantly more and more it seems that there are better and worse combinations of calories.

People that cut out carbs experience a lowered appetite, more stable blood sugar levels and are less likely to accumulate fat as their main energy cycle will be either ketogenesis or glucogensis depending on the fat to protein ratio they consume on a low carb diet, with Keto seem to be the most effective at maintaining lean body mass.

Now are there long term negative effects of such diets? maybe, are there better diets? also maybe.. I was also very skeptical about this until I tried both a ketogenic and carnivore style diets and despite consuming 2800 kcal a day (I’m only 181cm) I’ve seen very impressive results. And don’t get me wrong I was and am still active mainly running and with the exclusion of a 2 week set back when I tried Keto in both cases my running performance was better at the end than on a balanced diet with pre-run carb loading.

His point still stands.

Yes, he can handle a 3500 Cal/day diet with his activity level. Maybe you only need 1500-2000 (like most people in the first world not working manual labor jobs). Okay, so if you're gaining weight, it's because of metabolic processes adding to your body mass. This is one of two things: building muscle, or storing fat (adding bone is pretty minimal, and likely going to be strongly correlated with activity that builds muscle, so we'll just ignore it)

If you're building muscle, it's because your body is taking in more materials (especially proteins) and using them to repair tears to your muscular system due to activity/damage than it is eliminating through use. If you're storing fat, it's because your body is taking in more materials (typically carbs/fats) and storing them in your body in case you need them later than it is eliminating through use.

It's always because you take in more than you use. And weight loss is the opposite.

It's that simple. Whether you eat all carbs or 0 carbs, weigh 100LB or 400 LB, lay in bed 24 hours a day or move constantly, it's a very simple mechanism for what causes obesity. Calorie surplus = storage. Calorie defect = weight loss.

The point is that effective nutrition is still the best way to lose weight and as I’ve seen more than a few people going going on ketogenic diets while consuming a normal caloric intake and losing weight at a rate greater than any deficiency there is something to this.

We also need to understand if there are reasons for far occumulation other than simply excess calories. Fat is an organ it is connected to the nervous system and it stores a lot of crap in it, now does your body accumulate fat to protect it self from junk you eat I’m not sure it’s that simple but obesity is a real problem and we need to find a solution for it which is more nuanced than eat less and excercise because at least to me it seems like a far more complicated issue.

I studied nutrition in college. If the question is "why am I gaining weight" then the answer is ONLY "you're eating more calories than you need".

"Health" and "wellness" and "obesity" are all 3 completely different things. You can lose weight in healthy and unhealthy ways. You can gain weight in healthy and unhealthy ways.

Without getting into fad diets' actual biological effects(keto, atkins, whatever the flavor of the week "high fat/protien low carb" diet is) people who are on diets are paying more attention to how they eat than people who aren't on a diet. There's so many confounding factors, plus just people saying "I feel like i'm healthier!" just because they're on a diet. It's a mix of "doing better things than you were doing", your body adapting to a new mix of macros, and placebo affect more often than not.

I am and was keeping a record of what I eat and I tried multiple diets while maintaining the same level of activity and I went into that just as sceptical as you.

I run about 80KM a week, I used to have a very well balanced diet with carb loading before long runs.

I first tried a carnivore diet as a joke to tease a friend that was going vegan because of his then new boyfriend and while I’ve seen good results I had blood sugar spikes because of the high protien intake and my lean body mass flactuated quite a bit.

I’ve then tried Keto and for me it worked, my performance and overall endurance improved my blood sugar is now constantly in the range of 4.3-4.7 mol with the lower being just after excercise which is honestly very good for me considering that while eating carbs it did jump to above 7 after a carb loading meal.

Lean body mass has also increased considerably I’ve dropped from 21% body fat to 13% over a period of 14 months while maintaining the same level of activity as I have had for the past decade.

Again n=1 but I’ve seen enough anecdotal evidence and more importantly actual research to think that there is something there.

And that is the whole point it isn’t that simple and there needs to be much more research into this hopefully without commercial interests butting in.

Of course there's differences in how the body metabolizes different macros, and I'n not saying that certain diets aren't going to "work" for certain people.

Here's my specific points

1- In many parts of the developed world where food scarcity has been minimized/eliminated, we see increased rates of obesity across all demographics. This is a messy knot of factors that covers everything from social behaviors to availability of nutritious food to education and wealth. If you're going to tackle "why are people so much more likely to be obese than before?" you have a TON of factors to attempt to control for in the decision making. 2- If you're not trying to figure out why people are making their choices, and looking at it from a strictly "how does the body work and is that contributing" the simple answer is: your body more readily converts various carbs into body fat than any other macros (Protein, Lipids, Alcohol), people eat a lot of carbs, and finally most people tend to overeat if presented with more food than they actually need. This is the basic scientific consensus, and explains why your experience with a keto diet was positive. The issue is, as you said, that people are interested in selling meal packages and books and lifestyles and generally getting rich off other people's body image issues/health problems. Carbs play a part of in the obesity spike in recent years, but WHY people eat the way they do is what we need to figure out if we want to solve things.

I'm not claiming special knowledge here but I think the hypothesis is that there is a complex relationship between caloric intake/composition and metabolism.

So if you reduce your caloric intake but your body reacts with a reduction in basic metabolism or more aggressive storage of fat, then total weight may not go down. In addition this response mechanism is different for different people.

Are your high- and low-calorie diets both just different quantities of roughly the same proportion of foods/nutrients? If so, then it seems like you aren’t really testing the calorie count independently. A better comparison might be a high-calorie diet of “healthy” foods versus a low-calorie diet of “unhealthy” foods.

I’ve tried two approaches. The first was just to reduce calories in all three macros proportionally and I lost weight, but I lost noticeable amounts of muscle. The second time I reduced just the carbs (still not “low carb” though) I lost the same amount of weight but retained more muscle.

I think calories in calories out affects weight, the macro breakdown affects the type of weight lost (as in muscle vs fat)

What you're proposing is testing two different variables in the same experiment. To dial in nutrition research, it's more traditional to control kcal count and test different nutritional quality, or control quality and vary kcal content.

Not exactly, because the hypothesis is that calories is the only (or at least primary) thing that affects body weight.

You are answering different, irrelevant problem. "Why is an individual obese and how to fix it?" is different from "why is the population obese and how to fix it?".

No reasonable person has ever argued against eating less calories. It's just that "less calories" is not a meal you can eat.

The conversation is about translating "less calories" into a list of foods to eat and schedule to eat them. When you design such a schedule you must address things such as the person's health and well being, energy levels, feasibility and convenience, cost, and difficulty of commitment.

So when you say just eat "less calories" you've stated the obvious and left the actual question as an exercise to the reader. Nutrition is trying to answer that question.

No, not a reasonable person, but a person inclined to fall for diet fads, i.e 90% of the general population. Counting calories is hard, and it's OK to come up with methods to make the effect of calorie restriction easier obtain by the general public.

What's not OK is to then proclaim "Calorie counting does not work". The nutrition gurus might understand that figuratively, "calorie counting is an impractical weight loss method for most people that lack the self discipline it requires long term".

But when the general public is exposed to these ideas, the takeaway is magical thinking, "bad" calories you cannot touch versus "good" calories that you can gorge on. It's something very satisfying to believe, it's a shortcut. It's not my fault and my choices, it's industry X that is making all of us fat. It's an "epidemic".

> What's not ok is to then proclaim "Calorie counting does not work".

It's literally true in the way intervention effectiveness is usually measured, as imperfect execution is included as a source of failure.

You have created a strawman and attacked a nonexistent demographic. You might be underestimating the vast majority of people.

When someone is overweight and they say calorie counting doesn't work that mean it really doesn't work. They're not saying they do it perfectly with no results. They're saying that they can't stick with it. Then they try a "fad diet" and suddenly they are eating less calories but they no longer get overwhelming cravings or feel drained.

I think we need more fad diets to get people to try different things because so far we haven't made any progress on the perfect weight loss "just eat less" plan. The more diets we have the more likely someone is to try something and find something that works for them.

Everyone’s metabolism - the efficiency and particular chemical make up of their body and microbes is different. I run 5k twice a week and 10k once a week. I also have bradycardia (my resting heart rate is In the 40s). I’m also overweight. For me, it’s like magic. If I am on a ketogenoc diet I lose weight. If I am not, I do not.

Ultimately it’s a question of my body. I am hyper sensitive to sugar. If I eat sugar I build fat with it. Good for not starving during European winters, bad for American summers for a geek in front of a computer all day.

You should consider the possibility that people who lift weights, carefully monitor their caloric intake, and can successfully resist tempting food are not at all typical of the population at large. And I don't just mean that you possess additional knowledge that most people don't possess, but that there is something fundamental about your personality that makes you different.

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