Is alternate-day fasting superior to calorie restriction in lean adults?
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Calorie counting restricts calories (obviously).
Fasting restricts calories (and hopefully enough to lose weight).
Keto often ends up lowering calorie intake, because you feel more full on fewer calories.
Exercise burns calories, helping contribute to weight loss (or at minimum, slowing weight gain, all things the same).
etc. etc.
There's no magic in Keto or IF. It's mostly just calories in, calories out. Anything else that it's doing is minimal enough to not worry about it.
The only thing that matters is finding something that works for you. If that's Keto, great. If that's IF, great. If that's just old-fashioned calorie counting, great.
Calorie counting or IF works better for me (I've done both). Let's me eat anything I want, just less of it.
Eating high carb / junk food triggers cravings and overeating.
Eating protein, greens, etc... Makes eating the correct amount of calories much easier, as I actually feel full.
That said, my sister has the same experience as you. She can lose weight eating Pizza, as long as it's the correct amount of Pizza.
Is it? Not all calories are burnt equally by the human body, right? It seems that you are just trying to simplify something that it is easy to understand rather than scientifically sound.
Now, whether they are burned or passed is another story.
But your body will never store a calorie when it needs to burn and it will never burn when it should store.
Every calorie ingested needs to be accounted for, either through work, waste, or storage.
What people are arguing on here is that, depending on the type of food - for a given amount of work - will the remaining calories be converted to storage or waste ?
You can loose weight with a higher calories intake, even if your work stays the same, as long as your waste grows comparatively higher.
And their point is that, in that sense, there is a difference according to the type of food and the individual. Finding an efficient weight loss diet means finding a type of food that you enjoy eating, and gives a high satiety feeling and has a low storage/waste ratio. It's not always easy.
This is what is typically known as bulimia.
There is some difference, but not enough to matter. That's the point. You aren't a "lion", "bear", "lizard" or whatever animal. You aren't an "endomorph" or "ectomorph". Your metabolism isn't that much better or worse than anyone else's.
Watch your intake and everything else falls into place.
Take patient A in a control room and make him eat 2000K calories a day. Take patient B into the exact same environment, eating the same calories.
Apply insulin shots only to patient B
Patient B will get fat, and patient A won't, eating the exact same calories.
Sure there are metabolic outliers and everyone loves to bring them up. They are, however, outliers. Horrible diet and a sedentary lifestyle are the main culprits where calories in/out very much holds.
But sure, we can rephrase CICO in a way that's more precise. For any person with a given diet there exists a caloric intake where they will lose weight. Or as a one liner: "if you're not losing weight, you can always eat less until you do."
If a specific diet was able to mitigate the drop in BMR (unlikely to completely mitigate if you're losing weight), then it might be the difference between like 2000 calories burned a day and 2150 burned in a day, right?
Is that optimization worth considering? I don't think so. People should focus on a diet that they can stick to, not something that optimizes that much.
The "magic" that people refer to with keto, etc is that some things can have effects that cause our bodies to absorb less of the calories that were put into our mouths.
This is one of many reasons why some people lose weight more readily than others given identical diets and exercise regimens.
And yes, I do exercise a fair amount and all that, but I also seem to be quite efficient at extracting energy from food. I tend to joke that at least I'll survive longer after the apocalypse.
I think basal metabolic rate can vary significantly. This might explain what you're observing in a more biologically plausible way. My (imperfect) understanding is that it's partly genetics and partly in your control via strength training.
But I think you're doing yourself a disservice if you're discounting too easily the possibility that you're not comparing your eating and exercise with theirs accurately. How confident are you that you're actually eating no more calories than they are in a typical week? You might see them eat a huge amount when you're together, but maybe that's their "cheat" day, maybe they don't snack or drink alcohol as much as you do, etc. I think a lot of people are fooling themselves when comparing to others.
[1] not a recommended weight loss plan; side effects can include stress fractures, scurvy, IBS, and on and on.
Do you have a citation for this? Here's one saying almost the opposite:
> Carbohydrates, protein, fats, and alcohol—the dietary macrocomponents—are the sources of energy in the diet. Under normal circumstances, more than 95% of this food energy is digested and absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract to provide the body's energy needs. Studies of normal and overweight subjects have not shown any significant differences in the proportion of food energy absorbed. In some underweight subjects, however, malabsorption of nutrients is an important factor.
People do extract pretty much the same amount of effective calories form identical foods, it’s basic evolution as more efficient eaters would’ve outcompeted the rest a long time ago.
So unless you have celiacs, an onset of diabetes or some belly buddies you aren’t going to be absorbing less calories than someone else.
Because the body uses glucose for fuel, if you only give it Fat and Protein, those calories must be converted to glucose before they can be used, resulting in a higher caloric burn than you would normally see.
https://healthcare.utah.edu/the-scope/shows.php?shows=0_7frg...
That would mean the interaction of food choices and the hormonal system would be negligible, that the interaction between foods and the microbiome would be negligible, and the presence or lack of micronutrients is negligible.
Calorie count is definitely important, but to claim that any other components of the diet (food choice, timing, etc) are negligible is an incredibly strong claim with evidence building against it as metabolism is more thoroughly explored
Most research I'm finding says that your BMR may drop by like 10% with a classic calorie restricted diet (which itself accounts for about 75% of total calories burned in a day).
So what are we talking here at most? 150-200 calories a day if a diet is able to completely stop a decrease in BMR as you lose weight? Less if it's not?
What's the line that makes it worth it? A 100 calorie per day optimization is not worth it to me when I have to drop 500-1000 a day to have any real weight loss.
For example, one could drink one cup of olive oil daily and get ~2000 calories into your body. You would probably start suffering immediately on that type of "diet" because 1. your body isn't going to run on pure fat forever, and 2. your digestive system isn't going to process that amount of olive oil effectively.
Therefore it's not helpful to just say "Calories in, calories out" without actually looking at what you're eating.
What level of optimization are you getting by looking at macro nutrients and digestive absorption rates? More than 100 calories per day? I don't think it's worth the effort.
I think a big problem is that whenever dieting is brought up, people throw out the basics and try to be fancy, talking about insulin and macro nutrients and fat burning and digestive absorption rates. Why? It's unnecessary to complicate it that much and turns people away.
Then you have people starting Keto and being confused why they aren't losing weight, because they were told that ketosis is more important than keeping track of how many calories you're eating.
It’s way more complex than the simple equation of calories in = calories out.
It may be complex, but if you're only changing the calories burned by 100 calories a day, then it hardly changes anything. At some point it matters, and at some point it doesn't.
Similarly, when I'm bulking to gain muscle mass I just eat more calories than I usually feel comfortable eating. However that doesn't mean eating a ton of chips or soda or "empty" calories from alcohol, it means tons of actual food, whether it be chicken or pad thai or chocolate milk. IMO, it's much more important to be watching what you're eating when you're putting on weight.
Personally I don't like the idea of keto because it seems really hard on your liver and kidneys, and that doesn't seem worth it at all from a health tradeoff perspective.
So you can (and people do) use grams in/grams out to determine metabolic weight, but short of a lot of very specialized equipment, it's much easier for someone to have a rough measure of calorie burn at rest by choosing a standard value (or measuring it by the aforementioned metabolic test), and then approximating the amount of calories going in.
The psychology/physiology of weight loss is a complicated subject, but the thermodynamics isn't. It's very easy to just say "diet", but the hard part is the motivation, so while everyone is absolutely correct that counting calories is the "optimal" method of weight loss, it's not the strategy that optimizes results across the population.
More accurately: a calorie deficit is not "optimal" for weight loss so much as it is a necessary and sufficient condition for achieving weight loss. The problems are that accurate calorie accounting is harder than merely reading nutrition labels, and calorie counting on its own does not provide guidance on which foods to reduce or replace in your diet to achieve weight loss while staying otherwise healthy and sated.
If you lost weight you have burned more calories than you consumed. The other way unfortunately does not work.
Sometimes you restrict calorie intake, you feel ill, your body adapts and starts burning less with other repercussions.
If you want to lose fat you must restrict calories but also provide enough time for your body to use the stored fat, and it can not be used while the insulin levels are high. This is the reason that both IF and keto “work” (if calories are also somewhat restricted).
Ofcourse if you eat 1 meal a day it is more likely that you will consume less calories tahn eating 5 times a day (IF), also if you do keto you will not eat sugars (or other carbs) and again it is very likely this will lead to consuming less calories than otherwise.
Yes, but how many calories do you burn?
It's determined by your metabolism, which is influenced by what you eat. It's not a simple equation.
And, how many calories do you "take in" when consuming a unit of food? As another poster pointed out it depends on the unique characteristics of your body. Also influenced by what you eat.
The PRIMARY in human diets to adjust weight is psychological including both degrees of willpower and degrees of not needing willpower due to the feeling of satiety. Pretending "you could have just accomplished exactly the same thing by cutting calories" ignores completely the implied second half of that formulation: infinite willpower and endurance in the face of discomfort. People have to work and earn livings and lead lives, they cannot persist indefinitely in ego depletion.
It's about as ridiculous as saying anyone with the requisite genetics can be a world class body builder, if they just "worked out". Yeah. No, they can't, because there is a helluva lot more to it.
For that reason I'm most interested in interventions that work under free living conditions (ad libitum) and in the long run (2+ years), at least anecdotally.
This just kind of reads like "which of these diets leads to healthy individuals becoming even more healthy", and the answer was none of them. There's got to be diminishing returns on healthy practices.
1. try to eat healthy, mostly-natural foods (and you know what is healthy and what isn't)
2. don't eat too much
3. exercise every day. sweat is a good indication
it's not THAT hard folks, go look at pics from the 1910s, obesity was almost nonexistant
also:
1. there is no way to be in shape while eating crappy food all the time
2. there is no way to be in shape and never exercise at all
While I agree with most of what you said, that point is false.
The obscene Michael Phelps five hour swimming diet included, among the 10k-12k daily carb heavy calories, such things as:
"Three slices of sugar coated French toast."
"Three chocolate-chip pancakes."
"Half a kg of pasta."
"Two large ham and cheese sandwiches with mayonnaise on white bread"
"Energy drinks that supplied him with another 1,000 calories." (which means they were sugar heavy)
"Half a kg of pasta"
"An entire pizza"
The reason he could be in such amazing shape while eating that garbage, is because he was burning it off with the five hours of daily swimming.
https://www.aspirechannelswim.co.uk/blog/michael-phelps-12-0...
I'll start with the diet
4. Be born with genetics that avoid this common issue
Also, obesity used to be a status symbol, as a proxy for power, in many cultures. It wasn’t impossible before 1910, just likely more difficult to attain. And it seems unlikely that people in 1910 and before ate particularly “healthy,” as we define the term in 2010, since the modern abilities to produce and distribute food weren’t yet available. So perhaps remove point 1, if we want to be historically accurate?
Find that hard to believe. It's not like there were meaningful economic restrictions from eating enough calories to get fat prior to 1910.
More likely, people were just more active and food was less addictive.
No it isn't. It's very person and weather dependent.
Outside of physical jobs, I don't think people were exercising all that much in the 1910s. Working out for everyone seem like a recent thing.
Even the great arnold says in his interviews that he was mostly eating burgers while training for mr olymptia