The part about how 12 states have averages above 35%... didn't make sense to me if the national average is 42. Maybe I missed something.
The first line states: "The U.S. adult obesity rate passed the 40 percent mark for the first time, standing at 42.4 percent"
Then just a couple of paragraphs later: "Mississippi has the highest adult obesity rate in the country at 40.8 percent and Colorado has the lowest at 23.8 percent. Twelve states have adult rates above 35 percent."
It is impossible for the national obesity rate to be 42.4 percent if no state has an obesity rate above 40.8 percent.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/05/the-messy...
[0] https://www.helgilibrary.com/indicators/rice-consumption-per...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_r...
Also, a note: not everyone can eat a meat-heavy diet. I cannot. I don't have a gall bladder - like many others - and cannot digest the fats well. Eggs are too much sometimes.
Not only that, but you can eat perfectly healthy without actual meat. Low quality foods - meatless or not - generally have a lot of empty calories and aren't very filling, making it easier to gain weight.
I would argue that the answer is the nutrient to calorie ratio. Many nutrients for few calories is good, but few nutrients for many calories is bad. By this analysis, plant-based food is "low quality" and animal-based food is "high quality".
So if calories are what make you gain weight then it makes sense that people following a plant-based diet would gain weight compared to people following an animal-based diet because they will need to consume more calories to acquire the same amount of nutrients.
The main reason folks lose weight on meat-heavy diets is because they tend to eat less and therefore eat fewer calories. But there is more than one path to eating fewer calories. Lentils and beans tend and some vegetables tend to be rich in fiber, which keep you full longer and tend to mean you eat less. Not to mention that a plate full of vegetables and beans tends to have fewer calories than a plate of meat - and hold a variety of nutrients as well.
You are correct when you state at the beginning of your second paragraph that people on meat-heavy diets tend to eat fewer calories. But you are incorrect when you state at the end of that paragraph that a plate full of plant food will have fewer calories than a plate of meat. If this were true, then people on meat-heavy diets must not be finishing their plates of food, since they end up consuming fewer calories.
As for your own diet, it's a good thing you have the eggs and cheese in there! That's where your vital nutrition is coming from. The rice and beans and veggies are just keeping you alive with calories but not carrying their weight in terms of nutrition. You could be doing worse, such as eating a bunch of bread and pasta, or even worse than that, soda and candy, but you could also be doing much better by eating mostly steak and sardines.
* Not being sure that the next meal is coming means you have to pack on some lbs to reach the point where you can go a few days without a square meal.
* The not actually getting the next meal makes you ravenously hungry when it comes even if on average you're overeating. It's why people with EDs aren't automatically skinny -- if you restrict and then binge you can/will gain weight.
https://www.strongerbyscience.com has an article somewhere on this, and it's not well tested yet, but we're starting to see some scientific evidence to back this up.
The question is whether the effect is large enough to actually matter. And maybe it does, maybe there is a magic diet that allows you to eat well above your TDEE without gaining weight but nobody has found it yet.
This is a very bad meme. There's many factors that influence how much weight you may gain besides calories consumed. At the more obvious end of the spectrum, if you eat corn, and poop out undigested corn, that's definitely not a calorie nor a calorie nor a calorie.
Every diet that’s effective is CACO. Use whatever structure you need to actually accomplish it. If it means no carbs, vegetarianism, Atkins, WeightWatchers then good on you. Calorie tracking is a bitch and if you have a rule of thumb that works for you then enjoy it.
For what it's worth, here are two peer-reviewed articles that contradict that idea. The thermodynamic truism that "a calorie is a calorie" is true because it's a tautology, but misses the point almost entirely.
EDIT: "a calorie is a calorie" is about as useful and relevant as saying "the key is to earn more than you spend" in the context of trying to save money, or raise yourself out of poverty. Technically absolutely true, but woefully unhelpful.
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1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5639963/
"Diets high in protein and/or low in carbohydrate produced an ≈2.5-kg greater weight loss after 12 wk of treatment. Neither macronutrient-specific differences in the availability of dietary energy nor changes in energy expenditure could explain these differences in weight loss."
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2. https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/79/5/899S/4690223
"Over a million calories are consumed a year yet weight changes to only a small extent; there must be mechanisms that balance energy intake and expenditure. As obesity reflects only a small malfunctioning of these mechanisms, there is a need to understand the control of energy balance and how to prevent the regaining of weight after it has been lost. By itself, decreasing calorie intake will have a limited short-term influence."
#1 agrees with me!
Their entire theory is that different macro balances lead people to eat less because they're more satiating. Which is true but doesn't contradict the point that the actual thing that matters is CICO. Certain diets may make it easier or harder in terms of willpower but it doesn't change the underlying forces.
#2 agrees with me too! That abstract is criminally misleading.
> We conclude that a calorie is a calorie. From a purely thermodynamic point of view, this is clear because the human body or, indeed, any living organism cannot create or destroy energy but can only convert energy from one form to another. In comparing energy balance between dietary treatments, however, it must be remembered that the units of dietary energy are metabolizable energy and not gross energy. This is perhaps unfortunate because metabolizable energy is much more difficult to determine than is gross energy.
and
> Of course, the increased energy expenditure associated with increased protein intake also does not violate the laws of thermodynamics, because the energy is conserved. It does, however, come close to the spirit of the argument that a calorie is not a calorie, because feeding diets that induce a difference in energy expenditure can introduce a difference in energy balance and thus a difference in weight loss. Of the macronutrients, only protein has been found to have this effect, but the magnitude of this effect is small and perhaps accounts for a 0.8-kg difference in weight loss between diet treatments over 12 wk
If this is your argument then we're just arguing semantics. The only thing that matters is energy expenditure and total metabolized energy intake (which is CICO!). Like people already understand that our bodies metabolize foods differently (like the meme about celery being negative calories) but broadly following the standard nutrition info is a damn good proxy on average for metabolized energy.
> is true because it's a tautology, but misses the point almost entirely.
I think it's meant to drive home the point is the only thing that actually matters is total energy expenditure and calorie intake. If you're not losing weight you need to eat less and exercise more and vice versa if you want to gain weight. There's really nothing else to it. Every diet just provides some structure that makes the process easier since our bodies don't like it.
It's not though. That's not what the papers are saying. They're saying a calorie is a calorie. But calories turned into long term fat reserves are not equal to calories put in mouth - calories used in exercise. You can change the outcome of your diet by changing the composition of your diet while holding total calories the same.
* total energy intake and expenditure are the only things that really matter for weight loss
* for some foods, there is a difference between the nutrition info listed calories and the metabolized calories
Which implies what you're saying. If you play with your diet you can potentially keep the nutrition info listed calories constant while reducing your "real" energy intake.
This feels like semantics because all you're really saying is that commonly understood nutrition info is inaccurate (which is true -- hell nutrition labels are allowed by the FDA to be off by 20%). In a perfect world with perfect information counting calories would be counting metabolized calories. But unless you're raising cattle on narrow diets the problem ranges from hard to impossible for real food. So the normal calorie counts that dieters use acts as a proxy and if done right, a rough upper bound.
This is the crux of what I think misses the point so entirely that you might not see it: "the point" is to figure out how to lose weight (and keep it off while being healthy). Beating on the dead horse of thermodynamic laws is utterly irrelevant to the question of which macronutrients have what effect on body fat and bodyweight.
As I wrote in my edit, "a calorie is a calorie" is exactly as useful as dieting advice as "just spend less and earn more" is useful budgeting advice. The advice-giver can feel satisfied that they've emphasized a physical-mathematical truth, without realizing that they haven't actually done anything to help.
Well yeah, and finding a good macro balance is huge positive for your overall health. But beating the dead horse of technicalities about how our bodies metabolize different foods a little differently is utterly irrelevant to the question of how much energy am I intaking (and metabolizing) and how much am I expending which is the only thing that has any meaningful effect on body fat and body weight unless your already fit and doing athletic training.
There's lots of good advice on dieting: eating high-volume foods, keeping track of satiation, staying hydrated, eating slower, staving off cravings by not quitting foods cold turkey, focusing on exercises that have a good kcal/time ratio, understanding the process model for self-control and managing your willpower. But all of it has the singular goal and of making net calorie expenditure positive and what tricks and rules of thumb that work for people is personal and situation dependent.
Telling someone to adjust their macros as dieting advice is setting them up for failure unless you happen to already know that the result of their adjustments will put them in a deficit. It's really hard to help people who are doing some diet like keto, aren't losing weight, and end up frustrated because "it's supposed to work." But when you estimate their TDEE and count their calories the problem becomes super obvious.
In the dietary sense, calories are NOT equal. It's easy to change a person's body mass by changing their diet while keeping calories the same. Mixing simple carbohydrates with fat is an effective way to get our metabolism to generate body fat. Simple carbohydrates in general, really, since our body is forced to process them into fat quickly or else our blood pH reaches harmful levels.
Repeating "a calorie is a calorie" is harmful for people considering their diet, and a truism if you're speaking to a physicist. In either case, not helpful.
I do not deny that it is probably possible to min max your diet and exploit some of our bodies weirdness. But on a macro scale none of that shit matters. If you run a caloric deficit it literally does not matter in the slightest what your body does to the food: it can store in fat, it can burn it immediately no matter what your body is still going to have to burn all of its reserves to operate.