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Comment by dbspin | Hacker News Reader

That's reductive to the point out outright inaccuracy.

The calories you consume affect your weight differently depending on your level of metabolic activity. So the key mediator here is how your body processes the calories you consume.

But talking about calories is wrong in any case. All calories are not the same. For example increasing glycemic index by consuming sugars and carbohydrates will lead to greater and more prolonged weight gain than consuming the same calorific load in protein - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12081852/

It's simple misinformation to focus on calories rather than carbohydrate levels, physical activity, healthy gut bacteria etc.

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Sorry but you are not correct. If you find the number of calories you burn daily with your current diet, and you eat 500 calories below that, I will bet you $1000 that you can't find any combination of foods, whether its pure corn syrup or pure hog fat or anything else that cause you to gain weight as long as you keep the calories below that threshold. I'll bet another $1000 that there are no foods you can find where you don't gain weight eating 500 above that threshold.

Show me the study that says otherwise. The "complex interaction" theory is just an excuse used by people for failing to cut calories enough to lose weight. Notice that people taking GLP1 drugs don't have to adjust for all these complexities at all.

So certain are you? How are we measuring the calories for this bet, by what's on the package?

How does that number on the package get measured?

When I eat nuts, cashews, etc., did 100% of the food get digested and absorbed? A day later or so, there seems to be counterevidence of that plainly visible in the bathroom.

You are mixing up 2 issues here. We're not debating what % of food gets digested, so it's off topic.

We are talking about the theory that if you eat fructose, or if you eat 'highly processed foods' there is some complex hormone response that causes those calories to be preferentially stored as fat or to slow the metabolism down so they aren't burned.

For sure you are correct when you say that the calories on the label of a food is just an estimate, and not a very good one.

> You are mixing up 2 issues here.

When people talk about "restricting your caloric intake", they are very obviously talking about what's written on the package and not after making calculations based on whether it's fat, protein or carbohydrates. So I think both issues are very tightly related.

I was hoping I gave myself plenty of buffer by making it 500 calories of deficit (which is pretty large), but maybe you can teach me something new.

What's the diet you would eat every day to get into a calorie surplus even though you are in >500 calorie deficit according to the labels?

Unfortunately I never look at the calories on the label as I only look out for salt and proteins.

However, you can make the calculations based on the numbers I gave in my other comment - which are taken from Why Calories Don't Count from Dr Giles Yeo.

I think you still can't overcome 500 calories of deficit. If you ate pure protein you will still be in 150 calories of deficit using the most conservative numbers (30% overhead to process protein).

But this is assuming you calculate your daily calorie burn with one diet that is pure protein and then convert to one that has 100% calorie availability, you still can't overcome 500 calories of deficit on paper!

Realistically you would change diets, then find your baseline based on the new diet, and then calculate a calorie deficit from there. In that case you would be very close to a 500 calorie deficit, and you would unavoidably lose about 1lb of fat per week. A 500 calorie deficit sucks but you will adapt to it in a few months if you stick to it. I've managed to lose over 50lbs in the last year, probably close to 75lbs of fat mass. (I did use a GLP1, dieting is hard)

It's worth noting that our metabolisms slow down when we start losing weight so it gets harder and harder to lose fat.

Our metabolism slows down primarily because it takes more energy to keep a fat person alive than it does to keep a healthy person alive. After you lose 20% or more of your body weight you might start to notice this, it isn't a real concern. The effect is negligible and again notice that people taking drugs thet let them comply with a calorie deficit diet don't have to resort to excuses like this to explain a failure to lose weight.

The cause of a failure to lose weight with moderate calorie restriction is always a failure to maintain the calorie restriction aka cheating on the diet (because it is incredibly hard to do when you aren't used to it).

I think you know more than me on the subject. I have never cared about calories in my life and never really cared about my weight.

I lived abroad for a year and, when coming back home, started eating healthily (i.e. more greens and less reds, avoiding added salt). In about 3 months, I managed to reduce my weight by 10% - about 6kg. Although I have to admit, if anything, I wanted to keep those kilograms because it was helping me for weight-training lol. My objective was never to lose weight.

> I'll bet another $1000 that there are no foods you can find where you don't gain weight eating 500 above that threshold

oh well, you lost money then. It is not even difficult to understand, some types of food/digestion/absorption will hold more or less water weight to the body so it’s possible to lose total weight even eating above the daily needs, for example a nocarb diet

It's not reasonable to account for water weight gains in talking about weight loss. Water weight is transient in that it will reach some maximal state, and often times it is only at the onset of a diet change (i.e., the first day or two) and then it comes right back off. Weight in general flucuates a LOT more than people think. My weight can flucuate by as much as 1-2 lbs per day, even while eating the same exact meals. The only appropriate way to look at weight gain/loss is on a weekly sliding average... and at a 500cal deficit per day, you almost certainly would see that weekly average change downwards.

I don’t disagree with you just replied that by logic it is indeed possible to gain or lose weight depending on the type of calories you ingest

But it’s not when we’re talking about this in the context of weight loss/gain. When people colloquially say “gain weight” or “lose weight” they almost always mean gain/lose fat and/or muscle. Water weight is neither of those, and is generally bounded (unlike fat loss/gain).

Whether you gain or lose weight through water weight has little to do with calories at all. If you take creatine, for example, it’s pretty normal to gain a few pounds of water weight until your creatine levels equalize in your body. That doesn’t mean that your body’s “metabolism” changes or something based on the calories you ingest. You’ve just got another pathway to gain/lose apparent weight, albeit temporarily.

I'm going to guess people find you overly pedantic?

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