Death of the Calorie (2019)
economist.com
economist.com
That said, I feel bad for anyone that struggles to lose weight and has to deal with all of the information and is trying to figure it all out. My recommendation is, calorie counting IS important (most people underestimate by 30% how many calories they eat in a day), but don't kill yourself over it. Focus on eating healthy foods, getting enough protein, and lift weights. Cardio is important for overall health, but you aren't going to burn enough calories for it to be a major source of weight loss. Lifting will make you feel better (fewer achy joints, easier to get up) and it's a lot more fun than cardio. If you are still gaining weight, cut your calories more. Weight gain is very personal and you'll need to spend time figuring out where your calorie intake needs to be. Age, genetics, etc. all play a role so there is no one-size-fits-all number to aim for. I used to be able to eat 3500 calories a day and not gain weight. Now in my 40's if I eat more than 2500 I put on weight.
Also, don't beat yourself up if you "have a bad day" and eat too much. Fitness is a lifelong goal, and eating a bag of chips one day isn't going to erase all of your work. Just try to have more good days than bad.
Like you said, exercise is important for overall health but is a horrible way to lose weight. We are going to eat cake at lunch because we claim we will workout later (but then don't). Exercising takes time to do, to change, to shower, to travel. People are likely to overeat after exercising because they feel famished even though they burned a fraction of the calories they think they did. I think people are probably better served with intermittent fasting and trying hard to control their grocery shopping to keep binge-able foods out of the house. The challenge here is if you are the only person in the house trying to lose weight.
We need a better life hack to lose weight in the 21st century. We are going to lie to ourselves about what we will do or why we didn't. This is actually the brilliance of the Planet Fitness pricing model. The majority of their customers barely go but for $10/month you can lie to yourself that you are "trying" and it is cheap enough to prevent cancellation. I think this is why people have initial success on WW or NutriSystem because it takes a lot of the mental load away. Don't think, just follow instructions.
Then of course it can be good for your overall health (in particularly your mental one) so that in turn might help you (and be good for you), but if your only goal is losing weight, I'm not sure this talk about exercising is so good.
If you want to lose weight, something less taxing that you can happily do for a longer time is a much better choice – work with your body and mind, not against them. Give your body time to hit those fat stores instead of putting it in overdrive and pulling energy from more direct sources of glycogen.
Considering the state of the obesity epidemic, maybe that prevailing advice is not working well?
I wish I understood the reason.
You need to build the stamina to keep it up. But assuming you can maintain a moderate to strenuous pace for 30 minutes you can burn off a small meal's worth of calories. An hour of moderate running can be around 600 calories for an adult male.
Doing cardio for weight loss is fighting against whatever you are doing in the kitchen. It doesn't make much sense, unless you have the time and stamina to do it for the required duration and intensity (for me, weight loss happens only with an hour a day lap swimming non-stop).
Also, YOU WILL BE HUNGRY at some points. That is normal. You will be hungrier if you eat a lot of sugar. (This is my experience and not medical advice)
I wonder if there have been 'good' studies into the human experience of hunger. It's extremely subjective, so I can't imagine it would be easy to do in the first place and near impossible to replicate.
I am sorry but this claim doesn't make a great deal of sense. For example, running expends about 1 kcal/kg/km [1,2].
On a personal note, I went from 105kg to 75kg body weight by doing endurance sports (for the avoidance of doubt, it was all fat loss with localised gain of muscle mass). I have a record of all workouts and almost-daily weigh-ins for 6+ years, and there's a very high degree of inverse correlation: during periods when I run/bike more, the weight goes down, and vice versa.
[1] https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/bjsports/11/3/116.full.pdf
[2] https://journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/jappl.1963.1...
Those who start running with high heart rates likely won’t see any weight loss and furthermore, the sugar burning of the anaerobic system will guide you towards eating more carbs and sugars.
I’m not an expert by any means but weight lifting is the opposite of what you need to do to lose weight as it always uses the anaerobic system.
1) it stresses the body too much which releases cortisol and other hormones which don’t play well with weight loss 2) uses only the anaerobic system, so burns sugar, not fat 3) burning of sugar makes the body crave more sugar and refined carbs making it harder to eat healthier
They would be better off running at a slower pace for weight loss and eating a diet mostly comprising fat and protein (whilst keep in calories less then out calories). If you build up the aerobic system well, you’ll be super healthy, fit and find it difficult to put on weight!!
People who say running is too hard are not doing it right. Running is easy when doing it below aerobic threshold. We are literally designed to be able to run long distances. Your body has enough fat stores to run for tens of hours (providing you don’t deplete your glycogen stores!)
> and it's a lot more fun than cardio.
I, too, try to lift weights regularly, and acknowledge that it's important for health. But I detest doing it. Running, on the other hand, is incredibly rewarding for me and gives my brain a wonderful "reset" that I sorely miss without it.
Is this hyperbole? Putting some numbers in a TDEE calculator, if you were about 60 cm tall and weighted 15 kg (2 feet, 33 lbs), you would still have a maintenance at more than 400 cal.
> I wish I could eat even a 1000 !
Unless you have dwarfism it would be very hard for anyone to eat 1000 cal/day and not be severely underweight.
Maybe you mean per meal and you have 3 meals/day?
I beg to differ. I started running 10 km a day, and it made a world of difference!
Could it be that chronic calorie reduction has made your body adapt?
Even with special efforts, it’s only slowing/delaying the process, so progressively eating less is natural anyway.
https://www.everydayhealth.com/diet-nutrition/metabolism-may...
Body composition changes gradually over time. Going from healthy and fit at 20 to overweight and unfit at 40 can be reversed, it's not an inevitable decline.
Eventually aging catches up, but it may not be until 60s or 70s when metabolism takes a noticeable hit.
As with so much science, they got it wrong, but knowledge is getting better.
To lose weight exercise is a 20-30%, and not even necessary under caloric restriction.
At the end it's all thermodynamics.
- The continuous glucometer has been very helpful. I've made a big effort to keep glucose down around 100 most of the time. For me, anyhow, this will almost automatically cause weight loss -- I just don't find it possible to eat enough of non-sugary foods not to lose weight.
- Fiber makes a huge difference. Fruit results in much slower glucose rises than, say, bread.
- Walking about an hour a day, on average, also helps. I don't think it's primarily because of the calories used (modest) so much as it keeps blood glucose in control, and that reduces the insulin spikes that create hunger.
All of this makes me think it might be controlling insulin spikes that really matters. It's not a "keto" diet, per se, but controlling blood glucose has somewhat of that effect.
I don't make a special effort to "diet" in the sense of eating less food, I just watch my carb intake. It's like I'm back in high school, in the sense that I don't put on weight even if I overeat (as long as I keep the carbs reasonable).
I don't necessarily think it's the diet for everyone, but it is certainly the right diet for my body.
Calories are therefore at least a necessary consideration in diet and a healthy weight, but calorie consumption alone is by no means a sufficient measure of a healthy diet.
This is totally wrong. The body can also slow down your metabolism, twitch less, think slower (if you had read the article you'd see this is addressed), decrease the effectiveness of your organs, not to mention "eat" some of your nonfat muscle mass.
The people advancing the CICO idea have obviously never struggled with their weight. It is super clear to me as a person who has bounced back and forth between fit to overweight for my entire adult life that there is nothing I could ever do to be as "skinny" as the skinny people I know, all of whom eat and drink way more than me, and usually don't exercise at all.
CICO is not real advice, it's telling people to develop eating disorders, i.e. starve themselves. And for what? To bolster the ego of you and the ~60% of people who are naturally less likely to accumulate body fat, who like to believe they are just smarter or know something about nutrition that people like me don't. But it's exactly the opposite. I know more about nutrition than any of my skinny friends. Social pressure has demanded that I do so. It doesn't actually help, and the smugness of commenters on HN doesn't either.
...I've lost over 150lbs and am a staunch advocate of CICO as really the only thing that matters for weight loss.
> there is nothing I could ever do to be as "skinny" as the skinny people I know, all of whom eat and drink way more than me, and usually don't exercise at all.
Let's be fair here: you can be as skinny as them, it'll just be extremely hard and very unpleasant. I get where you're coming from though, it is difficult not to harbor an extreme amount of resentment for these people and the universe that didn't favor you in the same way. I have literally said to some people like this that, if I thought it would work, I would eat them to gain their power. For people like us, it is incredibly difficult to pull off.
> CICO is not real advice, it's telling people to develop eating disorders, i.e. starve themselves. And for what? To bolster the ego of you and the ~60% of people who are naturally less likely to accumulate body fat, who like to believe they are just smarter or know something about nutrition that people like me don't. But it's exactly the opposite. I know more about nutrition than any of my skinny friends. Social pressure has demanded that I do so. It doesn't actually help, and the smugness of commenters on HN doesn't either.
CICO works, and yeah I'd definitely say that for people like us it amounts to developing an eating disorder[0]. I'm also continually frustrated by my skinny unable-to-gain weight friends and workout collogues who, mistakenly, believe they know something I don't. Some of them have hyperthyroidism, their experience of food and weight gain is a completely different reality from minie.
[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
The crux of these discussion on diet is that there is no universally reproductible method (CICO in isolation is just a principle and not a method) and starving he body will have different consequences for different people. Advocating any practice as “the only thing that matters” is a recipe for disaster.
Imagine if the actual solution for that person is to change jobs, or that starvation lead them to worse health issues than where they are now, stuffing CICO down their throat would just be cruel.
In both the finance and nutrition examples you have two variables that you can adjust. In both cases they are not independent and changing one may affect the other or may affect other parts of your life that make it unsustainable. Eat less and do more is the correct advice for most people who want to lose weight.
I also don't think this is anywhere near as "unhealthy" as people want to believe it is. I think that largely arises from our discomfort with being hungry, and our general intuition about which foods are "healthy" and which aren't. However, consider the case of nutrition professor Mark Haub, who ate nothing but garbage convenience store snacks for 10 weeks at a caloric deficit and not only lost 27lbs, but had all of his health metrics improve: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...
Focusing on numbers (calorie counting etc.) can help people who like numbers and need to focus on something. But these people don’t need any push to go find numbers to follow. The same way I fundamentally like sport, I needed nobody’s advice to go do hours of sports when I felt my body was getting rusty.
If interested, check out "The science of fasting" documentary.
I used CICO effectively to reduce my weight considerably. Indeed it is not a real advice, however for me it was a very good guiding principle that I feel was essential to help me achieve my goals.
By focusing on CICO it became clear that I had to find foods that I enjoyed eating and that made me feel fuller per calorie. I spent a fair bit of time thinking about meal compositions before starting due to this. I found ways to adapt my favorite dishes, both in portion size and ingredients.
Using CICO I only had the goal that my meals had to fit my calorie budget, had to be enjoyable to eat and had to keep me full till the next meal.
The principle also helped me stay on track, as it effectively means that it doesn't really matter what you do any given day, rather what you do each day. This made me avoid getting depressed and feeling hopless if I couldn't follow my plan for a day. My finish line got pushed ahead a day or two, no worries, just get back on track the next day.
I think the key though is that people are different. What worked for me will not work for everyone. For me, CICO was great.
But all of those factors are included under "body uses less energy", no?
UPDATE: But I do understand what you're saying. Exercise can lower your BMR as the body tries to conserve energy. If that reduction is not met by a reduction in calories consumed, it stands to reason that you can actually gain weight after starting exercising. So gotta watch out for those lethargic days after lots of exercise.
> not to mention "eat" some of your nonfat muscle mass.
From my unscientific experience, for most people that should be accompanied by reduction in fat, too.
A good analogy might be fuel consumption in a car. Some savings can be made through efficient driving techniques, but ultimately there is a core amount of energy needed to transport the car across a given distance.
The converse isn't necessarily true: if you eat less than you burn, you might not lose weight but instead your body adjusts how much you burn.
Calories are amount of energy... released as heat when the food is burned. Or rather, the numbers you see on food products is some value derived from food composition. Anyhow, this is no way directly related to how much of resources your particular body will extract from food.
Counting calories has a benefit of making you aware of your habits, but dietology is not as simple as arithmetic.
Depends how you read "eat less than you burn" One way you can interpret the quoted section is that you haven't even eaten less than you burn, you're still eating more or equal to, since the amount you burn has gone down.
And also you're not directly measuring the output, which is different for everyone, and adjusts based on the input.
It's useful for making you think about everything you eat though, shall I eat this thing? Well, I'd have to record it in my spreadsheet, won't bother.
The real problem with calorie counting is that it is difficult.
Same way you might be eating the same amount of tofu everyday, assuming you have a steady calorie intake, while your actual ingestion rate will be all over the board. If/when you’ll be decreasing quantities your ingestion rate might go up enough to effectively increase the energy you take from it, creating weird states that don’t make any sense looking at the numbers from outside.
The lowering the upper bound only start to make sense when the body is really starving, in that your daily life has become hell, and you start lacking elements other than calorie. Some see that as a success, I see it as dangerous for most people.
The people dropping out of these diet don’t do so because they don’t have the guts, but because they end up worse that where they were at the beginning. It’s not everyone ending up there, so we’ll still hear the success stories of course.
"Calories in calories out" is a rule of thumb that is as true as "what goes up must come down". Which is to say that it's not true on the extreme margins, but it's true for virtually all of the cases anyone is likely to encounter in their lives.
So yes, a calorie is not just a calorie, but the maximum variation between individuals is such that the refrain, "they eat twice as much as me and don't gain weight while I do" is just not possible.
Just the differences between men and women alone account for 500cal/day, so it would likely be substantially more at the 5th and 95th percentiles.
"they eat twice as much as me and don't gain weight while I do" seems 100% possible if you compare a 100 pound woman with a 300 pound man.
https://examine.com/nutrition/does-metabolism-vary-between-t...
> Just the differences between men and women alone
> if you compare a 100 pound woman with a 300 pound man
I assumed it was understood that I meant while holding all other conditions constant.
Except you and the article are drawing the complete opposite conclusion of the paper they cite. They literally say resting metabolic rate doesn't really matter.
"Total daily energy expenditure varies several-fold in humans, not due to variation in resting metabolic rate, diet-induced thermogenesis, or exercise thermogenesis, but rather, due to variations in nonexercise activity. A variety of factors impact nonexercise activity, including occupation, environment, education, genetics, age, gender, and body composition"
Was really easy except having to say no to your desires to eat some more of that tasssssty food or sweeten your daily cup of tea with a chocolate bar. But I overcame myself because I have willpower.
As I understand the the calorie issue, unless the laws of Thermodynamics are proven wrong, titles like 'death of the calorie' are nothing but attention grabbing attempts. If the amount of your inbound energy (in the form of food) is smaller than your energy expenditure, the deficit energy is taken from storage, and there is NO way around it AT ALL.
I went from fat to lean by counting calories and exercising. An hour of hard cycling burns 1,200 calories for me. So assuming my body needs 2,400 cals per day to maintain itself, I can have a 1,200-calorie defecit by eating 2,400 and burning 1,200, or by being sedentary and only eating 1,200. The former is fairly easy to do, is compatible with family meals and a social life and makes me fit. The latter is just miserable.
This sounds like a huge over-estimate by your fitness tracker. If cardio used that many calories our species would be extinct.
Salvador Camacho, the subject of the Economist article, has written a significant technical article on the subject. [0]
I'll comment that this point of view is completely in agreement with my personal experience over five decades. Low fat, "low calorie", and "lite" products are the exact opposite of what you want to eat, especially if you want to lose weight.
I first learned of these theories from Michel Montignac, whose advice became very popular in Europe in the '80s. [1] He was followed by many "low-glycemic" diets, e.g. Sugar Busters, "keto", and Paleo.
Gary Taubes has written two books on the subject, one popular and one directed at MDs and other professionals. [2]
The idea is to eat mostly fat and protein, with a limited amount of low glycemic carbs. Avoid high glycemic carbs like refined flour, sugar, and fruit.
I've found over the years that following such a diet while limiting food intake so you stay slightly hungry will result in fat loss. Eating a high fat diet to lose fat is counterintuitive, but it works.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28485680/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Montignac [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25818875
You would never guess that: We know now that saturated fat is not just absolutely fine, but necessary for good health, particularly brain health; that the heart disease epidemic of the last century was caused not by "sat fat" but by trans fat -- margarine, Crisco, "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil" -- and sugar.
You would never guess that: Half of all the sugar you are probably encounter is fructose, which your liver treats as a toxin it must neutralize; and that if blasted with more than it can, by eating (drinking!) it without enough fiber mixed in, it gets cirrhosis and you get sick and, probably, fat too; and that your body does not count the fructose when it decides whether you have eaten enough.
1. Come up with a post-meal target weight goal, like say 5 pounds over your current weight, decreasing by 0.1 pounds per day. 2. Before each (significant) meal, weigh yourself. 3. Limit the weight of what you consume to the difference between the target weight at the moment to your current weight.
If the target is sufficiently above your current weight initially and the rate of decrease is realistic, it should glide you into the correct portion sizes for your weight loss goal. Your measurements of the food could even include some of the packaging; as long as that's typical, it'll calibrate accordingly.
Cooking for yourself? Rather than trying to estimate calories from ingredients, just break out your kitchen scale! Eating at a restaurant that doesn't list the calories on menu items? Just pack a scale!
My own personal journey just took a turn as I had been trying to lose weight for rock climbing for years and could not cut through a certain weight. It turned out I needed to way reduce my protein intake for a time so I could shed some useless chest/arm/leg muscles, but it took a year or two of super low calorie fatiguing diets to make an adjustment and figure it out.
1. BMI is a good measurement of health. Some of the fittest people I know are classed as 'morbidly obese'.
2. Fat and salt are bad.
3. You need lots of carbohydrates in your diet.
4. All calories are the same. Even that all carbohydrates are the same. Checkout how your body processes glucose vs fructose and how much gets converted to fat.
5. Assuming alcohol has no effect on the processing of food.
6. 'Low-carb' or 'low-sugar' food is definitely good for you. They tend to use Maltitol - you may as well consume sugar [1].
The list goes on. No wonder there is an obesity crisis when 'experts' giving dietary advice don't understand this stuff themselves.
[1] https://www.healthline.com/health/food-nutrition/is-maltitol...
If you want a true dive-in-the-deep-end strategy that will work, try fasting. No, not intermittent fasting where you still eat every day, but alternate day fasting. Or eating every 3rd/4th/5th day. It will suck, but it will dissolve your addiction to food and give you control you never thought you had. Check out Snake Diet (https://www.youtube.com/c/SnakeDiet). Cole is extreme, but he gets results (I think he does consulting via a Facebook group and he frequently talks about successes with clients).
That is the main problem. Obsessing over something makes you tired, it is like obsessing over an ex. It is hard to break a social habit, since you will constantly remind yourself of the good old days when you still did it, and depression/low energy etc kicks in. That has nothing to do with the food, it is just in your head. Doesn't make it easy to fix, but thinking that it is your body going into starvation mode will make it even harder to get over.
He ditched his heavily processed low-calorie products and focused on the quality of his food rather than quantity.
Death of the Calorie - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403762 - March 2019 (74 comments)
But the body is actually a complex system, and the core quality of a complex system is adaptation.
This means you can cut calroies below your current burn rate and still gain weight, because your burn rate will change.
To illustrate: suppose you consume 4000 calories a day, with your body burning 3000 of them and storing 1000. Does cutting to 2500 guarantee you will be burning 500 extra calories from your fat storage? Not at all. Your body can easily adapt by burning 2000 calories and storing 500.
Obviously the numbers are just for illustration purposes and I'm not claiming they are realistic by any means.
What you really want is to inroduce changes that make your body adapt into accessing your fat storage for energy.
So if we go back to the above (obviously flawed) example: what you want is to make your body burn all the input you are giving it (even if it remains at 4000) AND on top of that burn, say, 500 calories from its fat storage.
How do you do that?
I can't claim to have the answer, but two things come to mind:
1. Walking.
I've personally lost weight by just walking a lot - with no changes to deit. By a lot I mean several hours a day.
Needless to say, I was single then. It's not really easy to do when you have family and children.
But the point is: exercise. Exercise that requires energy.
The good thing about walking is it's generally relaxing. You can actually walk for 2~3 hours and genuinely be enjoying yourself.
For exercising: I'm find exercise-band based workouts at home to have a similar effect: they use energy but I'm generally enjoying myself when I'm doing them. It's a bit different from weight lifting in that you can easily adjsut the resistance to be just right for your skill/experience/strength level, so that you do get a real workout, but don't feel like your muscles and bones are dying.
2. Hormones.
Cortisol and Insulin.
By eating during a short window (intermittent fasting) you can limit the amount and duration in which your body uses the energy from the food (regulated by insulin).
Working out while fasted (say, after you wake up and before you eat) will teach your body to access its fat storage for energy. And apparently it also increases your metabolic rate for several hours after.
By sleeping well, removing stress, and avoiding coffee, you can reduce the amount and duration in which cortisol is circulating in your body.
The thing about low-calories diets is they feel like stress and increase cortisol, thus sabotaging the whole thing.
Being stressed and not having enough sleep is the surest way to absolutely oblitirate your "will power" and make you want to eat for comform.
Incrase the amount of protein in your food is another thing that apparently helps regulat your hormones in a desireable way. And anyway it's needed if you workout (which you should, if you want to lose fat).
The mathematics of weight loss is laid out clearly in 20 minutes here:
Is that amount even sufficient to stay alive every day? Maybe your body can reduce some organ function for some amount of time, but it can't keep it shutdown forever.
ok, let's assume we're talking about the minimal burn rate that can sustain your body without shutting down any organ function what so ever.
Does that mean your body is burning exactly that amount of calories every day like a clock?
Certainly not. It's probably burning a lot more to help you move and think and deal with the daily stressors.
When you cut calories what generally happens is you feel lethargic. As if you can't muster the energy to do what you want to do and which you could previously do without problems.
I'm not into "studies" but I'm pretty sure there are some studies that show people who cut calories after a while their body adapts and lowers their base metabolic rate.
Furthermore, a mass M needing energy E is too simplistic because it neglects environmental factors. A mass M in sub-Saharan Africa or a tropical jungle will require considerably more than E for maintenance than the same mass M in a relatively mild climate. This is because your body expends energy to regulate homeostasis (sweating and increased heart rate to cool the body in hot and humid conditions), so more difficult environments require more energy.
That said, "calories in vs. calories out" is still true, you just have to consider that your "calories out" responds to the number of calories in. Drop them too low too quickly, and your NEAT drops to maintain energy balance. But, you can force your body to expend more of that energy by requiring yourself to walk (increasing NEAT), or putting yourself in uncomfortable environments (like saunas), or my forcing yourself into strenuous exercise regimes (weight lifting, HITT, etc).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4803033/
Total energy expenditure is constrained not additive.