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I'm about as serious a high-quality protein advocate as probably exists in the leaderboard for this site (neither "organic" nor "grassfed" are particularly important adjectives for me, so much as "local" and "humane"), and I do not understand what this has to do with diet and weight loss.

Do you actually believe you're more likely to lose weight eating organic protein?

"""Do you actually believe you're more likely to lose weight eating organic protein?"""

You are more likely to remain healthy while losing weight eating organic protein.

Do you really believe that? Maybe the antibiotics in the chicken --- although truly healthy chicken is spectacularly expensive, and even products labeled "organic" can still be flooded with antibiotics "to prevent disease outbreaks" which are inevitable in factory farms.

Other than antibiotics, I generally call BS on the health benefits of "organic" and "grass fed" protein. You should eat organic --- or, VERY preferably, local --- but you should do it (a) because it tastes better, (b) to support local family farming, and (c) because it's more humane. Not because of some supposed health benefit.

Do you think

a) chicken fed not with grass/organic food but with whatever's cheaper and convenient (in Europe there were several scandals where they even found that they used machine oil in chicken feed),

b) packed by the thousands in small cages,

c) full off antibiotics and hormones to grow them fatter,

are totally as healthy as organic chicken?

(I used to have a chicken den (sp?), with 10-15 chickens in my backyard (in Europe, that is), raising them organic style. I have also visited a couple of huge chicken "factories". I'd never even begin to compare the two methods, much less the quality of their output.)

I believe antibiotics are a real human health issue.

But otherwise, no, I don't believe there's a real human health difference between Purdue chicken and the Gunthorp Farms chicken I get from my butcher.

I certainly don't believe you're going to lose weight faster eating the better chicken. You might even lose weight slower, since authenticatically humane chicken is extraordinarily expensive, and chicken (that you cook at home) is probably going to tend to be a better dietary option than the alternative.

Sorry.

a) Your wording is weird, but yes, they are just as healthy. All scientific research on the topic has shown no health benefits to organic plants. What makes you think organic chicken is grass fed?

b) Why do you think organic chickens are any different? USDA organic cert is a joke. It doesn't mean the chickens spend their days frolicking in fields. IIRC they can be kept in cages if they have some exposure to outdoors.

c) In the US, hormone use in chickens is illegal. Antibiotics are used in all animals, organic or not.

Chickens are omnivores, not ruminants like cows. They'll eat grass but can't subsist on it. There's no such thing as "grass-fed chicken"; people who say "grass-fed", when they know what they're talking about, mean cows.

Small farms do not flood their livestock with antibiotics to increase yield. It's a bit of a straw man to suggest that people are saying antibiotics should never be used on animals; it's their routinized use in factory farms that's the issue.

Otherwise, I agree: "organic" isn't meaningful, and even the "real" good chicken isn't more healthful (apart, again, from the antibiotic issue), just better tasting.

I'll happily slice up and saute kosher (conventional) chicken breast for a salad or pasta dish. But if I'm serving roast chicken, I use the good stuff.

"""Chickens are omnivores, not ruminants like cows. They'll eat grass but can't subsist on it. There's no such thing as "grass-fed chicken"; people who say "grass-fed", when they know what they're talking about, mean cows."""

Well, re: wording, no native english speaker. With "grass fed" I mean naturally fed, not necessarily grass or solely grass. In my chicken hen I used wheet, corn, wild grass, and something that I don't know it's name in english, but I found a translation here as: " small seed of any of various annual cereal grasses especially Setaria italica millet"

http://www.lexvo.org/uwn/entity/ell/%CE%BA%CE%B5%CF%87%CF%81...

The translation you're probably looking for is "millet". :)

Fats are shown to be qualitatively different in animals which are afforded range space and fed their natural feed than which are fed in CAFO's.

Uh huh. In what way meaningful to human health is the fat from conventional beef better for you than the fat from "organic" beef?

The fat in local protein is way, way better than factory-farmed meat. By which I mean, it tastes much better. The fat from the pork chop of a responsibly raised pig tastes like bacon; the fat from a supermarket pork chop tastes like melting plastic.

Buy local/humane protein. Just do it for real reasons.

Fat is where many toxins accumulate. If the animal you eat has been fed with pesticide-ridden, fattening-rather-than-nutritious crap and pumped up with hormones and antibiotics, I bet its fat is not as good for you.

As an heuristic, taste is supposed to be a measure of nutritional quality. Sure it can be cheated, but when something natural tastes better than something adulterated, I'm pretty confident you can rely on that hint.

Two reasons why this comment might get downvoted (it was light grey when I saw it):

(1) Supplies your intuition about whether organic food is healthier than conventional but no facts to back that up. The world is usually counterintuitive.

(2) Suggests with a straight face that palatability is a good proxy for healthfulness, a measure that suggests health food stores should stock up on Doritos.

(1) having no facts to back the opposite assertion either, I'll take intuition as an heuristic.

(2) I explicitly noted the caveat that taste may be cheated. Now, taste was developed by evolution, and is cheated by the food industry, not (normally) nature. So I wouldn't trust taste of Doritos (artificial) over natural foods, but if I actually like vegetable soup better, I'm not going to look up what's the latest trend on nutrition to assume my choice is healthier.

"Uh huh. In what way meaningful to human health is the fat from conventional beef better for you than the fat from "organic" beef?'

It's the ratio of Omega 3 to Omega 6 fatty acids that's different. Grass-fed beef is well documented to have a higher Omega 3:6 ratio than grain-fed beef.

Have you ever observed a ruminant's behavior even if it has acres and acres of free range?

It will spend the day milling around in the same area with its friends and then lay down in its own excrement for a nap. How is this qualitatively different from a CAFO operation?

Grass-fed beef is leaner than fattier corn-fed beef.

And? Higher-fat proteins create satiety faster. Eating more fat doesn't make you fat.

If it it's lean beef that you're after, specify "lean beef", not "grass fed beef". There are plenty of retail cuts on a corn-fed cow that are plenty lean. A corn-fed tri-tip is going to be less fatty than a grass-fed chuck. If you're aiming for lean protein, your cut selection is way more important than which cow the cut comes from.

(Incidentally: I eat almost all grass-fed beef these days, since thats what my butcher sources --- but unlike pig and chicken, for which the local versions are clearly superior --- I can go back and forth on whether corn-fed beef is better or worse than grass-fed. Grass-fed is tougher and always seems to have that aged beef funk, which is sometimes welcome and sometimes not.)

It's hard to find reliable sources, but there's evidence that the difference between grass-fed and corn-fed beef goes beyond just having lower or higher fat content to things like fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid. I don't know how much these things matters, if at all.

(Incidentally: I prefer to eat the beef of an animal that is free-range and grass-fed, then finished with some healthy corn feed without drugs.)

Here is an article summarizing research on the nutrition benefits of grass feed vs. grain feed beef http://www.bulletproofexec.com/grass-fed-meat-part-1/

Omega-3's? That's the whole benefit?

That's a huge benefit however, there are few other sources of Omega-3s in our daily diet.

It's 30mg/100g. That's an order of magnitude lower than most fish, two orders of magnitude less than the best fish, and about what you'd get from a turkey sandwich.

Which is unsurprising, because mammals suck at making omega-3s, and plants are a bad source of healthful omega-3s.

Let's not get too excited.

But I bet it has less mercury than fish, especially big fish.

Skip organic, save your money, eat purified mercury free fish oil softgels? I have 3-5 1200mg pills of it a day.

You're probably better off getting the theraputic grade stuff... my dad with Parkinsons has this drop shipped: https://omega-cure.com/

If you have a freezer, you store a 2 month supply for less than 2 months of softgels.

I looked at the pricing, it costs $34 for the '2 month supply'. 100 Softgels are $5 each and last a month, so I can get at least 6 months for the same price as your boutique 2 month version.

Not having read the article provided, grass-fed beef has a much better fatty-acid profile, and that does not necessarily mean "more O-3!" but rather more likely, a lot less Omega-6, so the O-6 to O-3 ratio is closer to 2:1 which is what we're (theoretically) better adapted to, rather than the ratio in grain-fed beef, which can be as high as 14:1. Both types are "essential" as far as we need to consume them, but they way our diet has been distorted of late, with seed-oils and the "war" on saturated fats, the amount of O-6 we as a population get of late is way out of proportion. In general PUFA are easier to oxidize and possibly result in long-term degradation of health. Or you could (over)simplify and just say, hey, I need to eat what I'm better adapted to, and I would similarly insist that my food (the cow) also ate what it's supposed to eat, and they are supposed to eat grass, not grains.

You're kind of restating the premise of the comment that cited the research paper.

In what appears to have been a carefully run study, under the best circumstances, grass-fed beef provides a tiny fraction of the fatty acid benefits of fish.

In other words: even if grass-fed beef has a better fatty acid profile, "better than corn-fed beef" still doesn't mean "good source of healthful fatty acids"; both grass-fed and corn-fed are poor sources. If you believe you need a better fatty acid profile in your diet, take fish oil tablets or eat fish.

I see you've left a multitude of comments in this post going on around the same, yet it seems to my the angle you've taken is that you need more omega 3s, and not for example that, compared to grain-fed beef, if you are going to eat beef, it's qualitatively better, and to me it seems more important that this way you'll get a lot less omega 6 fatty acids, thus eating food with a better fatty acid profile. To supplement O-3 for the purpose of fixing or improving _your_ fatty acid profile (vs. that of the food) well, sure, but it's orthogonal to the quality of grass vs. grain-fed beef. (Edited last sentence)

This is generally good advice, but avoiding carbs is unnecessary. There is basically no compelling evidence that avoiding carbs causes people to lose weight faster than other diets, and there is quite a bit of evidence that properly consumed carbs help muscle growth. Carbs before heavy weightlifting make sure your glycogen stores are replenished, i.e. you are more likely to hit your reps.

For some people, compliance with a low carb diet may be easier. I.e., it may take less willpower to stick to a low carb diet than a low fat diet. But that's the only benefit, and that benefit depends strongly on your personal tastes in food.

Making sure that calorie in < calories out is the main thing you need to do to lose weight. Calories in > calories out + sufficient protein is the thing to do to gain muscle. Everything else is small change, only worth thinking about if you are a bodybuilder or boxer.

The fact of the matter is that we were far thinner than today when we had an extremely high carb diet.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnpp.usd...

I presume it's a matter of complex vs. simple carbs. Also there is a great factor in the amount of fiber in the food.

Unless you are actually exercising, foods that take long to digest and slowly release energy are better for your mood and concentration. A spike in the blood sugar is followed by a drop in the blood sugar which leads to cravings. I guess the blood sugar analysis in the body is a based on calculus.

Do you have a response to Gary Taubes et al. who have observed in recent years that the "calories in vs. calories out" hypothesis has no basis in the science of human metabolism, and that insulin, the hormone secreted in response to consumption of carbohydrates, has a very well-understood and primary role in fat storage?

You might want to read the conclusion (last paragraph) here, then go back and read how Stephan arrived at it:

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/08/carbohydrate-h...

Thanks for the link! It's cool to see real discussion happening. I'm actually coming more from Robert Lustig's attack on fructose, which I know is much more specific than carb intake in general. I was aware there was controversy about it-- obviously I shouldn't be so quick to name Taubes.

Really, as someone who very easily went from overweight to fit purely by replacing carbs with fats, I'm just very reluctant to accept the thermodynamic hypothesis.

Yes, my response is that Gary Taubes is dishonest, and his criticisms of Calories in/Calories out are misleading and sometimes false.

For example, one of his criticisms of the calories in/calories out theory is that it fails to explain bodyweight stability. Simple calculus shows this to be false.

http://crazybear.posterous.com/the-calories-incalories-out-m...

Another one of his tricks is to focus on calories above maintenance, while completely ignoring differences in maintenance needs, in an attempt at reducto-ad-absurdum. People unfamiliar with the model don't realize he can write 3000 words and never mention the actual caloric gap between fat and thin people.

http://crazybear.posterous.com/how-1-graph-reveals-what-3000...

Gary Taubes is willing to mislead people to sell books.

Also, the calories in/calories out model has been empirically verified on a number of occasions. This is the first of many studies on the topic:

http://openlibrary.org/books/OL6617921M/A_biometric_study_of...

Any textbook on sports medicine will give you a whole lot more references, including specific details on various corrections and second order terms. I'd love to quote a few more, but unfortunately my textbook is in a storage compartment 50 blocks away.

This is exactly the kind of situation where a little advice can be dangerous. Going from a sedentary lifestyle to sprinting, deadlifts, kettlebell exercises or other intense activities is a recipe for disaster.

I agree with most of your advice and the implicit part that carbohydrates are the enemy and fat/protein your friend. However, the part that's dangerously missing is that your body takes a lot longer to recover from exercise than you think and that overtraining can set you back weeks or even lead to permanent injuries.

You ramp it up then, and go see a doctor first if your really bad/old. Instead of 150 kettlebell swings, you do 20 and add 10 every few days, etc.

"Oh, I'll just ramp up slowly". That's what everybody thinks. It's common sense. But it's terrible advice. Nobody is stupid enough to start on day one with the biggest kettlebell. The point is you have to warn people, over and over again, in order to drive the point home about the dangers of overtraining. Why? Because the first time you start exercising again it feels good and you start full of energy and so forth. So the day after you feel like exercising again, you got that itch, even though you "know" your body hasn't recovered yet and you're still sore in a few spots. This is where it really takes discipline to stick to the plan. Sometimes you'll go to the gym and realize you're still sore from 2 days ago. If you start lifting weights anyway the odds are you're either going to outright injure yourself or you're going to lift in a lopsided pose to compensate for a sore shoulder or something.

It takes discipline to go home and skip a workout just after you've decided to get (back) into shape. If you tell people to just ramp it up and add a couple of swings every couple of days they're still going to make predictable and preventable mistakes and injure themselves.

As someone who managed to lose over 100lbs through trying various techniques and adjusting by trial and error, I largely agree with your advice.

I rely on a diet of yogurt in the morning to get my day going, then one large meal for dinner. As long as you don't go overboard on the dinner, that generally leaves enough room for a "cheat day" each week.

Also, the "sprinting" technique worked wonders for me. I used a stationary bicycle and would do ~5min sprints/~2min breaks while watching TV or listening to music. If you live in an apt building and want to do that on the cheap, I've found running stairs works well too.

[edit: One last thing. The water fasting technique works quite well. If you are trying to drop some weight, get one of those filtered water jugs that fit in the refrigerator. Every time you feel hungry but know that you shouldn't be eating, drink a glass of cold water. ]

Your advice to workout hard and short instead of cardio is wrong. Working out at all is better than not working out. But cardio exercise (e.g. running and/or biking) for sustained periods of time will burn much more calories.

And that's what weight loss is all about. Calories in vs. calories out.

I speak from not only the obvious facts but also experience, I lost over 100lbs from January 2009 to July 2010 and got healthy in the process.

http://www.t-nation.com/readArticle.do?id=1526539

Summary: resistance training is most effective, then interval training (high intensity and lower intensity), and then steady state high intensity cardio training, and finally least effective steady state low intensity cardio training.

What a shock that a body building website would say that. I can't believe it. Let me ask Microsoft if I should use Linux for my servers or not, hold on BRB.

The reality is that an hour of cardio is going to burn many, many more calories than 15 minutes of lifting. Now, if you hate cardio and can't stand to do it for an hour, but you love lifting, then obviously you're better off lifting. But if you can learn to enjoy cardio, or if you want to do the workout that's the most effective for burning calories, you should be biking/running.

Keep in mind secondary and tertiary effects.

1. How many calories used to rebuild and strengthen the muscles?

2. How many more calories do your bigger and stronger muscles burn even when not in use?

This goes for both cardio and weight lifting.

re. 2: Not many, according to the sources I can find on that. Example: "[M]uscle tissue has been observed to burn roughly seven to 10 calories per pound per day, compared to two to three calories per pound per day for fat. Therefore, if you replace a pound of fat with a pound of muscle, you can expect to burn only approximately four to six more calories a day."

Source: http://www.acefitness.org/fitnessqanda/fitnessqanda_display....

Both are better than doing nothing.

It's generally much easier to find time for 15 minutes of X than 60 minutes of Y.

In HN terms, you are arguing about which type of balanced tree is better but are ignoring the fact the data is only 100 items long and you're much better off just pushing out your MVP than agonizing over the inefficiency of one over the other.

You are right that either is better than nothing. But the bad advice that "lifting is the way to go, cardio doesn't work" is very common and it needs to be corrected.

> What a shock that a body building website would say that. I can't believe it. Let me ask Microsoft if I should use Linux for my servers or not, hold on BRB.

The source of the argument does not take away from the validity of the argument itself. You should be able to evaluate an argument on it's points alone.

You are correct that sustained aerobic exercise burns more calories than an anaerobic activity such as weightlifting. The benefit of weightlifting in particular is that, by building more muscle, you are increasing your body's BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) because more muscles == more energy necessary to run them. This translates to your body burning more calories while at rest.

While this is true it also applies to cardio workouts as well. They also build muscle and increase your metabolism. It's a myth that this is an advantage of weight lifting over cardio.

It really comes down to personal preference. Do the workout you're going to be able to keep doing.

Personal experience, I was running for miles for the last couple of years and still piling it on. Back to weights now 2 days per week and running one, and am burning it off surprisingly rapidly. Note, though, that I wouldn't be exactly beginner level when it comes to weights.

I don't know what your pace was or whether "for miles" means 2 miles or 10. But there are plenty of apps for iOS and Android that will tell you how many calories you burned on your runs, and if it was multiple miles and you were maintaining a decent pace, you probably burned many more calories on those runs than you do lifting.

The likely reasons you kept gaining weight while running, pick one or multiple:

- Not running as often as you lift, so the total calories burned per week (or month) was lower.

- Running too slowly so that your heart rate didn't get up to the point where you were really working.

- Ramping up your carb intake, whether consciously or subconsciously this is really common when people start running -- your body starts craving carbs. Which then results in a calorie increase, which is the real problem (not carbs themselves.)

- Policing your eating better while lifting.

Ultimately if you want to lose weight you have to not only exercise but also keep your daily calorie budget at a deficit. People who have trouble losing weight usually fail at the latter one.

I lost a lot of muscle mass, and I just wasn't running 'enough' to be burning all the fat off. I think the main problem was the muscle mass, which eats food even when I am sitting on the couch.

True also, but you won't build muscle anywhere near as quickly because you need a caloric surplus to fuel the recovery from exercise (recovery in this context means "build muscle").

The body is a complex machine, and "calories in, calories out" is an over-simplified way of looking at energy usage and storage. I hope you didn't write off the T-Nation article just because it's a bodybuilding/musclehead website. There are actually some very good tidbits on why things that don't burn tons of calories themselves end up having a significant effect on weight loss. Of particular interest may be the effects that HIIT regimens have on EPOC.

For context, I have done both steady-state cardio and HIIT before and saw good results from both, even though I have always been of slight stature. Currently, I do Mark Rippetoe's "Starting Strength" barbell program, and, despite eating absurd amounts of food to fuel the increases in strength I'm making (generally eating at a 700-1000 calorie surplus), I have gained very little fat. It's like the T-Nation article says: the most effective weapon against fat loss is correct nutrition.

to be clear, traditional cardio activities DO NOT build muscle. In fact, they do the exact opposite.

I didn't say exercises, I said activities. Sprinting will actually build muscle, jogging 20 miles will not. It is a difference in how your body adapts to the stimulus.

So, with that in mind, no, cardio typically is not a good choice for people with what 80% of people are hoping to achieve. Put plainly, the time/reward tradeoff is just too low. Sprint, bike sprint, row, swimming, they are all better than the elliptical, typical running and the like.

http://www.drkehres.com/2009/06/sprinters-versus-marathon-ru...

If you are a world class marathoner and are running 6 minute miles for a marathon, you will probably have some muscle and look pretty lean. That being said, 99% of the world is not this and are basically working out for hours with very, very little benefit to the time. However, even a recreational sprinter is going to see huge benefits from sprinting in both muscle building and fat reduction.

I was just thinking about this, will give the Warrior diet a try (never did a diet, at 211 lbs 5'9") but mostly because I've been eating really little (fish+rice+lettuce salad) in the past 3 months without much effect.

The idea of only eating a nice meal at night is great to me since I hate the food around work (from fast to fancy), and dislike bringing it everyday from home even tho I absolutely love the wife's cooking skills, anyway thanks for the ideas!

Did you already lose your water weight? If not, drink 10 8-ounce glasses of water a day, and you'll lose 10-15 in less than a month.

I don't know about this "one big meal a day" stuff. I used to do that as my normal diet in my early to mid 20s (not trying to lose weight) and it did not keep me in shape. I lost weight when I started eating more, normal sized meals (yogurt or granola for breakfast, sandwich and apple for lunch, fish and rice for dinner).

Thanks Matthew, will pay more attention to the water.

Also, I'm in Brazil and our culture is to eat the big 1000+ calorie meal at lunch and very little in the morning or at night, I eat pretty much what you described but the rice/fish is for lunch and sandwich/apple for dinner, I do go a little off on weekends with the eventual pizza/pasta/barbecue (the Brazilian type, which I think is rather unique) in rational portions.

The one thing I have the most trouble is that I usually drink a can of soda everyday day (10 ounces I think?) and have been trying to move that to weekends only -- this is the thing I have been struggling the most, I don't drink/smoke so it probably counts as my only addiction.

And to everyone trying to hack their diet, internet hugs to them.

Yeah, my experience has always been that it's the seemingly little things that get you. I used to be addicted to ice tea. I'd drink a pitcher a day by myself. It's a liquid after all, you don't get fat from liquids, right? 5 ice-cream scoops of sugar per pitcher. Now I have no desire for it, ever.

Where did you get this idea from? Drinking water isn't going to help you lose much weight, especially not 10-15 lbs in a month.

1-3 lbs a week is a normal rate for people dieting, water alone isn't going to come close to that. It will help keep you satiated but not enough to cut 500 kcal out of your diet a day.

Water retention is definitely a cause of extra weight. We are used to/trained to not drink as much water as our bodies actually need. Fixing that by drinking a lot of water is a quick way to lose some pounds. Of course it doesn't work if you're already properly hydrated and it only works until the problem is remedied; you will hit a plateau early in your diet. And it doesn't work if your consuming more calories than your burning. But if you're already dieting (which the grandparent was), it's absolutely a good way to kick start your diet.

mark rippetoe of starting strength fame did an AMA on r/fitness yesterday. http://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/n13d8/i_am_mark_rip...

Awesome. Thanks for the link!

The diet you describe appears to be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_diet

(figured a label and link would be good for people who wish to research further)

  every meal has protein

Contrary to popular belief, meat doesn't need to be eaten with every meal. The idea that humans require huge amounts of protein is a popular day myth. Vegetables do contain protein, even an average potato has 3g protein. Almost universally, everyone who is overweight eats entirely too much meat and dairy.

Agreed. You don't need huge amounts of protein if your main goal is weight loss or health (as opposed to muscle gain).... There are way too many of these 'fitness' people out there who think that everyone should eat as much protein as possible and aim their body towards being a mountain of underutilised muscle (apparently this counts as 'fitness' in some circles).....

Protein is fine, but you don't need an awful lot of it to lose weight. A little muscle gain can be helpful to make sure you can exercise more, but you can achieve this on a pretty low-protein diet anyway.

On the other hand, protein and fat increase satiety better than carbohydrates, so if you want to feel fuller on fewer calories, protein is a good bet.

Not exactly. Meat isn't the only thing that causes satiation. A full stomach causes satiation too. Vegetables, especially green, leafy ones with lots of fiber and water them will fill your stomach faster than a fatty piece of meat. The carbohydrates in green beans and lettuce for example are largely fiber which doesn't even get absorbed by your body.