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Comment by cercatrova | Hacker News Reader

> Lets try some new ideas instead of calories which is based of steam engines in 1800. The human body is much more complex.

Sorry but in terms of obesity and weight loss, it's really not more complex. The most surefire way to lose weight is to make sure calories in < calories out, and vice versa for gaining weight.

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>Sorry but in terms of obesity and weight loss, it's really not more complex.

No, it is extremely complex. "Calories in < Calories out" isn't even stating the principle you think it is. You want to make a statement about fat balance depending on calorie deficit, independent of what type of food you eat, and even that is completely wrong. Different foods take completely different paths through the human digestive system (e.g., fructose vs. glucose) and thus have completely different effects independent of their "calorie" count. Most people on a calorie deficit are not also exercising, and their weight loss is 25% muscle loss, which is a disaster for their future health.

Peter Attia makes a careful statement about "calories in/calories out" in the first few minutes of this lecture: https://youtu.be/31g94p5J2gE

Doug McGuff covers med school biochemistry and metabolism in the last part of this presentation, and mentions "internal starvation" where obese people crave food at regular intervals, but the food goes directly into fat tissue. https://youtu.be/2PdJFbjWHEU

Hey, if it is just calories in < calories out, why is Bill Gates so much richer than me? All he did was spend less than he earned, right?

That sounds simple, but only one of the variables in that equation is readily knowable, and the other is a function of the first. Meaning, only by counting calories- and all the calories, including cooking oil, salad “toppings”, etc do you know what the calories in is but then how do you determine what they should be, knowing that if you eat too little, your body slows down to preserve homeostasis? It turns out to be a far more complex situation that involves exercise to preserve the calories out part despite the drop in calories in. There is an ideal deficit below which it is counterproductive to go, certainly if you’re interested in body composition and not just losing “weight”. That ideal depends on activity and a variety of other minutia.

You would calculate your total daily energy expenditure, TDEE, and use that to figure out how much in excess or deficit you'd need to eat. That the body slows down homeostasis is not such a huge reason as to abandon the calories in calories out approach wholesale.

How do you account for the fact that people can lose weight by increasing the number of calories that they consume while reducing their exercise if they eat only ground beef and sardines?

> for the fact

What fact? Where is this shown?

Just try it -- eat ground beef and sardines for a week and see if you lose weight. Eat as much of it as you want.

That's not really any sort of study on its effects, it's just anecdotal. Maybe it works for you but it's not generalizable.

What if I guaranteed your results? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGDbpg1nG8Y

That video is in r/conspiracy so it already tells me it's not as "guaranteed" as you think.

me: do an experiment. you: no, that's not science!

How do people holding such reasoning find their way here ? What's the incentive to stay ?

1) [citation needed]

2) Limiting what kind of food you eat usually leads to limiting how much you eat. Feel free to try this with eating only lentils, beans and broccoli, you can eat as much of it as you want.

Easy, see the Hacker’s Diet: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/

Basically, control your calorie intake via calorie counting, measure your sliding weight average, and adjust your calorie intake up or down accordingly. It doesn’t matter how accurate your calorie counting is, as long as it’s consistent. That is, you can ballpark a lot of things as long as you’re repeatedly using the same estimates.

Counting calories is the only way I personally manage to lose weight, and it works very well. A simplified version of the Hacker’s Diet I use is the following: First count your calorie intake for a week or two without changing your diet, to establish a baseline of your average calorie intake, and then reduce the intake to 80-85% of that baseline. You’ll slowly be losing weight.

You can go lower (e.g. 70%) if you are able to sustain it and are in a hurry. It helps to pick food that is easy to calorie-count, of course. Reducing carbs generally helps with sustaining the lowered intake, and increasing the ratio of protein (and doing resistance training) helps with not losing muscle (or even building up some).

The mechanics aren’t difficult. You only need to muster the motivation.

It would be a very long writing trying to explain it properly, so i’ll just use my experience as a long time gym rat. It takes a very heavy calorie deficit to enter “starvation mode” all bodies are different but counting calories is the easiest approach, lower your actual intake by 20% and monitor weight for 2 weeks once your curve starts flattening increase by 10% for one week then lower to the previous. I guarantee you that you’ll lose weight without losing muscle mass.

Despite the challenges in knowing calories in, much less calories out, agreed, just lowering your intake, and adjusting based on the outcome works, and is the only way to do sustainably do it. I was just challenging the assumption that calories out is fixed. In my case, I'm currently at a calorie deficit and losing weight (at 195, starting at 220), and at one point, I was at (or slightly below) 1000 calories a day for a month and did not lose a pound. (It was physically and emotionally miserable.) I went up to ~1500/day (and 2000 on gym days), and have lost 1.5 lbs/wk or so for months now. I don't think I "ruined" my metabolism, nad don't know if that was starvation mode or not, but I am convinced there's a calories "in" range in which your body will try its best to match calories "out", if only temporarily, and that I was in that range for a while.

Of course I only know my weight and that it wasn't changing for a while despite an extreme calories deficit (from my previous norm, if not my expenditure at the time). I'm assuming that my calorie expenditure dropped, and not, for example, that I wasn't just retaining water sufficient to match the weight I would otherwise lose at the time.

Then why can't people lose weight by just drinking fewer calories of gasoline than the calories that they burn in a day through exercise? Is it possible that the kind of calories one consumes effects the burn rate of calories by the body's metabolic system? What if some calories are consumed but not burned because they are instead used for rebuilding bones or muscles -- how do you account for that?

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