Still find it hilarious how so many people still don't understand that a caloric deficit or surplus is the #1 thing to do when trying to cut or bulk.
Eating 1800kcal of white bread, salad and skinless chicken breast will leave you with a raging hunger. Sure, you have a caloric deficit but how sustainable is that going to be? On the other hand eating 1800kcal of salmon, bacon, vegetables and eggs is the same caloric deficit but (for most of us) with way less hunger involved.
But it is far from the only thing, which I think is the point being made by the post you replied to. If you take in your exact calorific requirement each day bot solely in the form of bacon and chips, you are going to be rather unhealthy. You may even gain weight partly because feeling bad makes you do less activity (so you should be eating less to account for that) and partly because the lack of certain nutrients in the balance (and over abundance of others) causes hormone and digestive changes which change the way your body uses those calories.
As you rightly point out the opposite is true too: more in than out will result in weight gain even if everything coming in is in a healthy balance, but there is more to being healthy than being in the recommended weight band for your height.
FYI: I'm no nutritionist, but I have completely changed my form in the last 18 months (dropping from ~15.5 stone to ~10.25 and now running 5K in the real world in ~24.5 minutes (22m27s is my PB on the treadmill, one of my regular routes in the great outdoors is 8K) from previously not being able to jog to the corner shop without being out of breath for the afternoon). All this change was achieved in a large part by monitoring and controlling my intake against activity, but I'm pretty sure changing diet balance and exercise has helped greatly.
I think people who work purely on calorie counting and ignore other factors are as deluded as those who think they can eat too much simply because what they are eating is in healthy ratios.
The "3000kcal" is just a placeholder, it means "1.5 times what you need".
It's a lot more complicated than that. Even if is caloric accounting is true in the sense that you could control weight gain/loss via caloric surpluses/deficits (pretty hard to deny) this does not account for why caloric surpluses are so common.
A daily surplus of just 100 calories per day (~4% of daily total) will earn you an extra kg every couple of months (7000 calories per kg), 5-6 per year. Being off by in your "calculations" by this much will take you from underweight to obese in a few years. How then, do the many people who don't fluctuate their weight wildly manage to balance out their caloric input/output without precisely measuring their food. In fact, even highly disciplined people who weigh and record every bite could be off by 100 calories just because of inaccuracies in labeling. If your lemons are more caloric than the average lemon, you're screwed.
In the context of intentional and highly disciplined rapid changes in body size (like dieters or body builders) the caloric accounting method works. Add/remove 500 calories per day to add/remove about a pound per week, all else equal.
It's obviously "true," but just as obviously is not a complete picture. The relevance is contextual and practical. IE, body builders and crash dieters should and do reference it. A parent trying to make sure their kids are healthy does not.
We don't really understand metabolism enough to have real science based answers to our questions. That's why I think all these accusations of "bro science" are silly. There is no alternative. Referencing caloric accounting is attractive because it can be lab tested and it works in a lab, but labs control for other factors (like apetite). That doesn't mean it's a complete picture. It's relevant only to the extent that you can mimic lab conditions in your life.
Just like caloric deficit is true when isolated, so are other ideas that get thrown around. Hyper-palatable processed foods. Sugar addiction. Carbs. Insulin responses and appetite. Glycemic indexes. Gut flora. The carb/insulin people are interested in how food affects appetite.
I'll give you an example just to demonstrate how little we know. Say you take a morbidly obese individual and have them lose 100kg of weight, they have a capacity to regain that weight in a very short period much faster than anyone who has never been obese. A regular person usually cannot gain 25kg in a year. Biggest losers do it regularly
The same is true of body builders (power lifters, rugby players, etc). If they lose their 25 kg of "excess" muscle, they will often be able to regain much faster than anyone starting from scratch. IE take two 75kg guys with 15% body fat. One was 90kg with 10% body fat 5 years ago. Have them both exercise and diet hard, racing to put on 10kg of muscle. Use trainers to "control" for experience as much as possible. The ex body builder will leave the other guy in the dust.
I've heard this called "cellular memory," "muscle memory" (which is already takes, so rude) and such. But naming it does not mean we understand it. We don't have any kind of understanding of how or why this works. We just don't know.
This is why diet debates, especially among HN-like intellectual crowds can be annoying. Everyone has their tidbit of "scientifically proven" knowledge, but the truth is that we're in the dark ages. It's like geology before plate tectonics or biology before darwinian evolution.
However, eating 3000kcal of "healthy food" is a lot harder than eating the same amount of "junk food", because "junk food" has a higher caloric density -- that is the very thing that makes the food "bad".
A person can easily eat 3000kcal of junk food in a day and still not be satisfied, while a person who eats as much healthy food as they can may still fall shy of 3000kcal.
If you do control for activity (incredibly hard), then there's no reason why it would be different. If you don't, there are plenty of reasons why it would.
Don't you think that there's more to human nutrition than "cut" or "bulk"?
I workout, I do my best to keep my nutrition in order, but I think cut/maintain/bulk are the wrong priorities. It's just the Internet fitness community thing; it's not wrong per se but implies a focus on what is less relevant.
The priority should be your health, and I always saw nutrition and health professionals advocating diversity. Focusing on calorie balance almost always overlooks this.
> 500 calories from Macdonalds is not the same as 500
> calories of fresh vegetables
>> It is a microsecond of thought experiment to find 500 McDonald's calories that are better for you than a specific 500 fresh vegetable calories.
Go for it. Take a whole second if you must.
> Go for it. Take a whole second if you must.
I give you the Ranch Snack Wrap® (Grilled), Artisan Grilled Chicken Filet, mostly because if you eat two of them, you're near the 500kcal (580) mark, macronutrient ratio breakdown by calorie being 25% protein, 33% carbs, 41% fat, which ain't bad at all. Sugar by weight is 2%, by macronutrient calorie breakdown is 6%.
Let's say you ate 7 of them(!?!?) to hit your daily intake, which would be dumb, but whatever: your salt intake is 2x RDA, and you're probably shorter than you'd like to be of fibre.
If you ate exclusively this item for your calorific intake for a month, you might find you were passing your poop a little uncomfortably towards the end, but you'd find yourself significantly more healthy than most of the Western world. Take a multivitamin once a week, and if you eat exclusively this for the rest of your natural life, your only real concern is going to be potentially raised blood pressure and you'll probably get haemorrhoids.
Now let us consider the humble rutabaga (or swede), a root vegetable, allowed by the NHS to count towards your five vegetables a day. At 86% carbs, and 10% protein, it's pretty unbalanced, but whatever. Oh, did I mention? It's 64% (SIXTY FOUR) sugar by calories. Try living off that for a week.
> How is that No True Scotsman in any way? Seriously?!
I should have said "500 calories of sugar-rich junk food will not affect your weight and health in the same way as 500 calories of protein. Doing calorie maths is pointless for any relevant overview of your diet."
It seems a bit pedantic to be bothered by me bashing MacDonalds.
Well, depending on your size, activity level and metabolism - maybe. Maybe not.
> Insulin is essential for muscle building.
Sure - post workout. If you get a massive insulin spike first thing in the morning (juice plus bagels and cereal), at the exact time where your body's hormone levels are optimal, you're not doing yourself any favors.
I'm not vilifying any hormones - but there are optimal times to take advantages of the benefits of specific ones (and optimal times to make sure they're not spiking all over the place).
Nutrient timing is completely irrelevant for normal people who want to lose weight, and only becomes relevant for bodybuilders with extremely low body fat levels, as well as athletes who train or compete multiple times a day, and even for them it is not one of the most important factors.
I'd love to see what sources you have that say otherwise.
I just said nutrient timing is not important; i.e. the exact moment when you eat things, or don't eat things, is not important, for most normal people.
And they are not "my sources"; I'm refering to the available scientific evidence, they are everyone's sources.
And, lastly, the idea that you need to "break down" muscle in order to build it up is not really correct, either. Muscle breakdown happens yes, but it happens whether you workout or not, working out just elevates muscle protein synthesis, thus both the breakdown and build up of muscle protein. But it's not like the breakdown causes the build up, and it's not like there can't be buildup without breakdown, it's not a very good analogy and it's not a really good illustration of the mechanics at work.
Eating 3000 kcal every day would make me shrivel away to skin and bones.
"thing to do when trying to cut or bulk"
Most adult males who lift enough weights to care about cutting and bulking are burning 3000+ kcals daily.
I very much doubt that. Most adult males that combine lifting 1 hour+ a day with a physically demanding job and who is otherwise highly active, maybe. That includes a very small proportion of people who "lift enough weights to care about cutting and bulking".
I've done power lifting for ten years. I'm 108kg, carry around far more muscle than the average man. I exercise hard 3+ times a week. That's enough that my lifts according to strstd.com are all in the "advanced" range - much more than that is a waste when doing power lifting unless you're aiming to compete internationally. Yet my daily calorie need is on average ~2300kcal because I have a sedentary office job.
Most guys I see that worry about cutting and bulking have no clue what they're doing, and end up getting fat and bloated when bulking, so I tend to discount what people think they need quite heavily. I gained most of my muscle early on with a diet that saw me on 1600kcal-1800kcal. It's just the last few years I've been able to increase my intake above that without adding too much fat (and if you think I'm super defined and low body fat, think again)
Yet you are much larger, and fitter, but only need 2300 to maintain. I used to have more than 25% of your total daily intake in my coffees! And I've never been fat fat.
It would be daft to assume the same thing couldn't happen with people.