> New research in humans suggests our bodies and metabolic rates can behave differently when given identical calories in different contexts.
I wonder what the "a calorie is a calorie" zealots would say about this?
I wonder what the "a calorie is a calorie" zealots would say about this?
Yes, we can talk about the thermic effect of food, about how absorption of food differs depending on quality of food, stress, gut health, etc, but on average the effect was measured and is ... negligible.
There’s also another misunderstanding ... just because calories are what matters in weight loss or weight gain, it does not follow that counting calories is the best strategy for achieving your goals. It’s a logical fallacy basically, used by alt-truth proponents as evidence that the theory is unsound.
For all practical purposes however a calorie is a calorie.
For example, "calories in" and "calories out" are not independent variables. A reduction of calories in will normally result in the body lowering metabolic rate, resulting in a reduction of calories out.
Similarly, humans aren't robots. Any "solution" that basically tells people to ignore their hunger, one of the body's most basic physiological responses, is not a viable society-wide solution.
This is a really good point, IMO, because part of the problem is our food itself, with unnaturally and unnecessary high amounts of processed carbohydrates. That kind of food causes hunger to increase.
> A reduction of calories will normally result in the body lowering metabolic rate
This is totally true, but is so commonly stated as somehow proving that calories shouldn’t be counted. Sure, the body adapts, sure calories aren’t perfect or absolutely constant, but if you need to lose weight, what is the alternative? You have to eat less, so slightly lower metabolic rate may be a natural part of the process. BTW, how much lower is my metabolic rate if I reduce my caloric intake by 10%? How much lower can my metabolic rate go? If you’re going to point at metabolic variability, those questions need to be answered. The answer can’t be to ignore calories and not eat less, right? That would be far less effective than counting calories imperfectly. So what other action should someone take?
And yes there are exceptions. Hypothyroidism for example can yield a bigger reduction, but no more than 300-400 kcal. This is why people suffering from hypothyroidism should get treatment first.
Maintain an average 500 kcal deficit (from the baseline calculated for your sex, age, height and current weight) and you will lose weight. Conversely if you don't lose weight fact of the matter is you still eat too much.
And yes, counting calories might not be the best strategy for that 500 kcal daily deficit, but if what you're doing doesn't work, then you know why and can take measures.
But people have lost track of what hunger is!
They tell you they're hungry but really they're bored / depressed / just used to eating constantly even when not actually hungry.
They need to ignore being bored, which they think of as 'hunger' so you need to tell them to ignore their 'hunger' for them to understand.
This is exactly right, and also why I highly encourage people to experiment with fasting (for at least 24 hours) to reset your baseline for what real hunger actually feels like.
What we normally associate with "hunger" is actually a hormonal response from the body's release of ghrelin. It's not real hunger. You're not going to die if you don't eat. Moreover, we also experience "boredom" hunger, which isn't even a hormonal response, it's simply a mental addiction to the feeling of something tasty in your mouth.
It's absurd that we've conditioned society to believe that stuffing our faces with food upwards of three times a day is "normal". It's not. That's why obesity rates are through the roof and CVD is the number one killer.
That being said, I'm doubtful that telling the average person this will have any effect on their eating habits. So OP may be right that it's no solution to tell people to "ignore that feeling you think is hunger". You can lead a horse, but you can't make it drink.
Since nutritional science deals with a lot of macroscopic behaviors that are just stupidly complex and often individually specific with lots of variance, it at least gives you some ballpark bounds to work with, assuming of course businesses are able to give accurate caloric estimates (which they often don't--even more difficult if you're eating at a local restaurant).
The issue is the other side of the envelop: energy expenditure. It's quite difficult for any one person to estimate and your body will often compensate in ways you aren't quite aware of to save those precious energy calories. All you can really do is play with your caloric intake since you have some control and combine it with some information from certain exercises (use lower estimates for exercise caloric expenditures--round down every opportunity to also give reasonable upper bounds on expenditures).
So all in all, a calorie is a calorie but it just provides a starting point for you to work with in your own personal diet. You'll start observing other obvious macroscopic behaviors like "empty" vs "filling" calories that I find are, at least for me, significantly more valuable for weight management. They not only provide an upper bound for energy consumption relation, they provide a ground truth to tie back to my own body: how full or hungry I am after I consume said energy, how groggy I feel, etc. This ultimately, for me, leads to valuable dietary changes that give effective guidelines to proven end results.
When I gained weight during college, this was the trick that, for me, has lead to the most valuable lifelong weight management. YMMV.
I read a book about pigs a few years back, and it said there are certain breeds of pig that are easier to fatten up than others. It sounded like main factor was how long their intestines were. The longer the intestines, the more time to extract energy from the food. Thought that was interesting.
Fructose malabsorption is a concrete example of this, although I'm sure there are many others.
Most of the effect of these diets (intermittent fasting, low/no-carb, etc) is due to spontaneous reduction of intake; I haven't seen credible reports of large effects due to metabolic rate change. Granted, I've stopped looking some years ago.
Worrying about "some calories increase metabolism" is majoring in the minors. "Some calories make me less hungry (therefore I eat less)", "some calories make me feel more energetic (therefore I move more)", "some calories come with more micronutrients", "some calories don't come along with poisonous crap" is what most of us should be worrying about.
[1] I know this sounds like a strawman, but this is the actual claim being made.
This argument is often used not to say you can literally eat an arbitrarily large amount of food and still lose weight but to say if you eat this diet you’ll most likely lose weight without having to feel hungry.
How much differently? What contexts? What is the distribution of different metabolic behaviors? What is the range of different rates? Those questions are far more important than whether, if you actually want to understand how calories behave.
The reasoning behind the phrase “a calorie is a calorie” is to summarize the primary metric one should watch when trying to lose weight. It doesn’t say that all calories are the same. You might have already noticed that the words are a tautology. A calorie literally is a calorie, it’s not saying that all calories are the same for all people in all contexts.
An important question to ask here is what action should someone take, armed with the knowledge that metabolic rates have some variability? Does that mean you should not use calories? Do we have a better metric? I’m not aware of one, so believing that variability means you shouldn’t use calories as a metric would be the wrong conclusion, IMO. Calories have always been imperfect estimates, but we have no better estimate. Eating & drinking is the only way we add mass to our bodies, so calories merely attempt to quantify that mass. Knowing that metabolic rates have variability means only that someone who believes their rate to be very different from the average should work to calibrate their measurements. That takes effort and is difficult to do on top of an already difficult activity of monitoring and/or restricting calories, so I wouldn’t recommend trying to calibrate calorie measurements to someone who’s struggling to track calories. The estimates we have aren’t that bad, and they will work for the average person.
for most people that want to deal with any number of health issues focusing on reducing calories is usually a good thing to do. But human health is very complicated, so just about every recommendation should come with asterisks
The article goes on to talk about how at a societal level we tend to fixate on calories only, and then outlines several problems with that. Namely that all calories are not created equal, because health is more than just body weight.
"A calorie is a calorie" is a great way to control your weight. Really!
I like to go through "cutting" and "bulking" stages. I go from the bottom of the weight range for my height (around 145 for 5'10") to the top (170 for 5"10). And when it's time to cut, I reduce 3,200 Kcal/week from my diet and I lose a pound a week. It works _exactly_ every time. It doesn't matter what calories I cut. The math just works.
Now, sure, you can optimize this a bit. SUgar/carb calories are bad because they tend not to keep you from feeling hungry again and fat/protein calories are better because you feel full. But that's just an optimization.
Every person will lose weight at a calorie deficit. Every single one. Period.
Calorie counting is obviously a very coarse way to do weight management, but it's coarseness is it's strength in this context.
I don't think any serious person ever meant this literally. You're misrepresenting them by saying this.
There are a lot of calories in coal but I can't digest it so they aren't the same as the calories in sugar. That's obvious, nobody serious is disputing that.
What everyone I know means when they say this is that if you're eating a massive cheese burger or a huge bag of nuts or a kilo of jerky then don't try to kid yourself that for some elaborate reason (I've worked hard today, they're healthy, I deserve a treat, I walked 100m today, I took the stairs instead of the elevator) that the calories in it don't matter. The calories in it are still calories. That's what they mean.
In practice, for me, in my experience, limiting my calorie intake is the only way to control weight to where I want to be. And that means not kidding yourself that a cheese burger doesn't matter for whatever crazy reason.
I believe sibling comments do pretty much say that.
> In practice, for me, in my experience, limiting my calorie intake is the only way to control weight to where I want to be.
Aren't you doing that by choosing what you eat and not eat, mostly? E.g. "I'm not going eat some carrots instead of that bag of chips while watching TV" instead of "I'm going to only eat 80% of that bag of chips"?
I don't think I am. Maybe there are two groups of thought on this though.