I dislike articles like this as they continue to perpetuate the belief that there are secrets to weight loss. There are no secrets to weight loss. Eat fewer calories than you burn. It doesn't matter if that involves keto, or vegan, or one meal a day. Thyroid problems also don't change physics.
The problem is made worse because overweight people typically greatly underestimate how much they eat, while underweight people (me most of my life) typically greatly overestimate how much we eat. It's nearly impossible to accurately gauge calorie intake without strict calorie counting.
When talking nutrition with people, I'll often bring up the examine.com piece on "does metabolism vary between two people?"(1) And I am always amazed to find at least one person in any conversation that will flat out deny the information presented there. they are positive that if they ate one single slice of pizza a day and nothing else, they would still be fat.
> There are no secrets to weight loss. Eat fewer calories than you burn. It doesn't matter if that involves keto, or vegan, or one meal a day. Thyroid problems also don't change physics.
That's like saying "There are no secrets to space flight: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It doesn't matter if that involves Hydrogen, Hydrazine, or just big tubs of water -- throw them one way, and you'll move the opposite. Your choice of fuel doesn't change physics."
Of course fundamental physics laws hold. But some fuels and systems of using those fuels are more effective than others.
When it comes to diet, different foods and eating patterns do have different effects on our endocrine system, and that does affect how viably we can sustain ourselves on less calories. Different foods will also have different proportions that are retained vs passed the same day.
Unless you also capture ALL your own human waste, and measure it in a 'bomb calorimeter', counting calories (intake only) is not nearly as useful as you seem to think. If you disagree, drink 2000 calories of olive oil every day and eat nothing else, then come back after a year and tell me that calories are all that matter :) Disclaimer: Don't actually do that, because you would starve to death.
I always see this response in these threads and get a little frustrated. I feel like it purposefully misses the forest for the trees a bit.
Sure, at a super granular level, different foods affect you differently, trigger different biological responses, etc.. etc.. but if you zoom out, the details just don't matter. If you're under calories, the weight will come off.
Nobody is suggesting to "drink olive oil." you can keep you normal diet, just eat less of it, and magic will happen.
If you eat a 16 to 20 oz ribeye (1200 calories) in the morning you won't want to eat until at least dinner time. If you eat 3 donuts (1200 calories), you'll be ravenous by noon. What you eat effects when you want to eat and how much dramatically. Why run against a headwind?
I feel like people keep either inventing things to argue against (olive oil) or bringing up scenarios that are purposefully missing the overall point of what people are actually saying.
Again, sure, if you zoom in, eating donuts is probably a bad strategy because you'll be hungry again, and thus eat more calories. But in the grand scheme of things, you CAN eat a donut if you remain below you calories. That is all people are saying. Nothing more. Nothing less.
fwiw, we weight lifters regularly put this into practice. Bulking? add more food. Cutting? less food.
Yes, there are details (gotta hit those macros!), but overall, the strategy boils down to calories in/out.
This is basically the equivalent of the "why does it matter what programming language you pick as long as it's Turing complete, which means you can do anything with it" argument. Losing weight by eating a donut and starving yourself is like writing a web application in brainfuck.
Not at all. It's like saying "it doesn't matter what programming language you pick, the computer is still only going to execute the code you told it to".
Neither the GP, nor the original root of this thread are proposing that food choices are automatic, obvious, or don't have bearing on your weight/happiness/whatever; they're saying that food quantities (in calories) are the primary determinant of how much you weigh.
That's it. Narrow ruling, specific point; no "why don't you just"-ism or anything of the sort--or if it's there, I'm not seeing it.
OK, OK, you're just better than us mere humans. We still experience hunger. And we don't like it. And being dumb animals, our behavior is influenced by that.
Case in point: I’ve not met a single person who (in addition to measuring calorie intake) captures all the content deposited in their toilet, and measures it all every day in a bomb calorimeter :)
I've found my body feels hungry simply based on when its used to eating, not what I've eaten earlier in the day. So if I eat breakfast every day, I start feeling hungry at breakfast time, if I eat lunch every day I start feeling hungry at lunch time. Prior food consumption doesn't matter, at least in my case.
I never ate breakfast as a kid, so I carried that habit into adulthood. I started eating breakfast once in a while at some point and that caused me to start feeling hungry in the morning. I shut that shit down right away, I don't need to add more food to my diet. Years later I gave up lunch, which I thought would be really difficult, since I always felt hungry at lunch time, but now I don't feel hungry at all during lunch time, because I'm used to not eating lunch.
YMMV, of course, that just has been my experience.
As somebody who has eaten three normal-sized donuts in the morning (even early morning) a few times, I can tell you I've never been ravenous by noon, or even hungry. Maybe I'd start getting hungry around 3 or 4, which proves your point some, but certainly not by noon.
Eating fewer calories is a function of two things:
1. Reducing the number of points in the day in which you eat.
2. Changing the kind of food you eat at each of those points.
3. Changing the quantity of food you eat at each of those points.
From the amount of emotional energy or willpower necessary to do that, it seems like an intermittent fasting regimen is a technique that helps people do that.
>Sure, at a super granular level, different foods affect you differently, trigger different biological responses, etc.. etc.. but if you zoom out, the details just don't matter. If you're under calories, the weight will come off.
Not true at all.
A gallon of gasoline has over 30,000 calories, yet you won't gain weight from drinking it,
People had stable weight without any special knowledge for most of human history. It's something we generally should know how to do automatically. It's very strange to compare it to spaceflight, as if we're only just now discovering how to do it. This just goes back to OP's point. There's a lot of energy being spent on making weight gain and loss be some mysterious, inscrutable thing. Now we're comparing it to space flight?
The human body as a machine is actually quite a lot more complex than any current human invention. We're not even close to fully understanding everything. So, the analogy to space flight serves to show that it's as naive to imply there's no subtlety beyond "it doesn't matter what you eat, just the calorie count" as it would be to imply "it doesn't matter what rocket fuel you use".
> People had stable weight without any special knowledge for most of human history.
A lot of food products highly available today would be rather foreign to most of human history: artificially high sugar, high cab, low fat, snacks everywhere, etc.
These trick our taste and hunger systems into eating more of less quality foods than we would "naturally" if exposed only to less "engineered" foods, like pure meat and vegetables.
> It's something we generally should know how to do automatically.
Maybe we should, but clearly we do not. At least with modern processed foods that are optimized and designed to maximally stimulate our flavor response while compromising nutrition/health (generally).
People, especially kids, have routinely died of hunger and gastrointestinal diseases for most of history. Availability of calories was the limiting factor on human numbers until the industrial revolution. Most people did manual labour of some sort and walked everywhere. And when a few people had enough status to get all the calories they wanted and didn't exercise .. they got fat.
Really the problem goes in the other direction: now we have food from the "space age", and labour-saving automation, we can accidentally eat far more calories than we need.
Yes, you are right. And humans commonly engaged in a feasting/fasting cycle of having too much/too little food. But we've pretty much stopped doing the fasting stage. Look up "autophagy". It's a beneficial bodily process that only seems to happen within a long-enough fast.
I believe research has shown that humans have been malnourished throughout most of human history, which would indicate that we haven’t had a stable weight throughout history.
No you wouldn't starve to death. If you didn't take a decent multivitamin you might develop life-threatening nutrient deficiencies, yes.
Also it's not as if we have a great understanding of how different foods influence our food consumption patterns.
I totally agree with ops point. Almost anytime the topic of nutrition comes up people are either unaware of the basic mechanics or have been convinced they're somehow fake [0].
[0] as in that there are huge differences in metabolic efficiency between foods or that people's BMRs usually differ greatly.
I'm so confused why people are posting this. I agree fasting is viable until you run out of fat reserves (that's what this study is showing).
My point was that the type of food your calories consist of does matter. If you do nothing but drink olive oil and multivitamins, you will lose a lot of weight and eventually starve to death, no matter how many calories you consume. The point is that the type of food you eat does matter to weight gain/loss (not only the calorie count), because the type of food affects how many of those calories you actually retain.
As far as I can see, this study provides no evidence (nor attempts to) that a diet consisting of nothing but olive oil can sustain your weight. I think it's quite well accepted that different kinds of food will be retained to differing degrees in your body (or put another way, different types of food will end up being passed through your system in differing percentages -- as well as with differing degrees of nutritional satisfaction per calorie ingested).
Human fat is substantially more complex than olive oil. Also he survived on more than his fat. He also survived on his skin, some muscle tissue, organ tissues, etc. Research shows increased autophagy during fasts like the one described at your link. During a fast whole organ systems shrink as old senescent cells are destroyed and their nutrients recycled.
The oddest thing about reading the comments here is that people are dismissing the words of someone who has spent the better part of a decade in formal education in medicine, and a large part of his professional career focusing on weight management.
The subject in that study lost 276 pounds over the year! If anything, doesn't that confirm what I'm claiming?
I'm not sure how you think this corroborates your claim that you can sustain your weight by drinking olive oil and water (+ multivitamin). In fact, I don't see anything remotely relevant to this in the study.
I think we're misunderstanding each other. What I don't get is where you're getting the evidence for this claim:
> If he were to eat that well calculated amount of olive oil everyday his weight would stay constant.
A source for this is needed. The study you provided, as far as I can see, says nothing of this. You're just assuming it's true, and I don't understand how/why.
That a gram of fat is roughly 9 calories? You seem to believe that at some amount of regular ingestion it will start getting processed differently? I'm not sure what kind of a paper you'd like, I don't think anyone will come up with specifically olive oil.
As per your other reply to the same link
differing degrees of nutritional satisfaction per calorie ingested
Yes it's commonly thought to work that way, there are indeed differences - but they're tiny. I might try to dig up relevant papers, but as far as my memory goes, the difference was at best around 3% with certain kind of protein.
Wow! Interesting paper. It appears to be saying that he went over a year without any "essential" amino acid intake. I would not have thought that possible.
> If I eat 500 calories surplus a day, i'll gain ~1 pound a week.
Not if you expel an excess 500 calories per day on the toilet. This is what would happen if you chug a glass of olive oil, for example -- your body won't digest it all, and the vast majority of it will pass straight through.
This is an extreme example, but I make it to demonstrate a point 'calorie couters' always seem to forget: You keep assuming that you retain 100% of the calories you ingest, minus what you burn. This is demonstrably incorrect.
Like, "calorie count is the primary determinant of weight gain, given nearly all typical human eating habits"?
Or "calorie count is the primary determinant of weight gain assuming you don't deliberately bypass your digestive system (likely inflicting discomfort and/or harm on yourself in the process) by consuming diuretics or indigestible food combinations"?
Even in both of those cases, it seems like the general point is still pretty much intact.
> When it comes to diet, different foods and eating patterns do have different effects on our endocrine system, and that does affect how viably we can sustain ourselves on less calories. Different foods will also have different proportions that are retained vs passed the same day.
People who care about this aren't interested in the secrets of the endocrine system. They are interested in how they can remain trim while eating rich food like meat and dairy. These folks like fasting because they can eat one large meal and get more stimulation from the food.
The premise you've presented fascinates me. I wonder what would be the impacts of a 2000 calorie olive oil diet. Is it truly a starvation diet (due to inability of the body to process those calories)? I generally agree with the "calories in, calories out" principles of weight management, but I could see this being a useful counterexample.
If you break it down into carbs, fats and protein, calorie in calorie out model does wonders. OP is right, weight loss is hard work. Frankly, people want to believe that there is an alternate method because a lot of them are just lazy.
Also, it's easier to maintain weight than to loose/gain weight. So once you have lost that weight, it's much easier to be at that weight. Of course you lost a huge amount of weight in a short span, this won't be true.
The calories in/out model is technically true, it's just not very useful. It's like saying "there's no secret to how a jet plane works, you just need to have enough lift to counter gravity, it's basic physics." Well, sure, but there are a lot of other variables to consider that will dictate how hard/expensive it is to build a working aircraft.
Playing with other variables besides calories, like the specific foods you pick and the timing of meals, can produce dramatic, measurable health changes and make a huge difference in how hungry you will feel at different times of day.
EDIT: I just saw the other reply someone wrote that used a rocket analogy instead of a jet plane analogy, funny how we both independently came up with such a similar response.
> Playing with other variables besides calories, like the specific foods you pick and the timing of meals, can produce dramatic, measurable health changes and make a huge difference in how hungry you will feel at different times of day.
It is true that the kinds of foods you eat may help you with maintaining a caloric deficit -- for example, eating high-volume foods such as vegetables, or low-GI whole-grain carbs may help you feel "full" longer than low-volume foods with high caloric densities (candy, snacks, sodas). But the most important thing is still calories. See a recent meta-analysis on this: https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-017-...
Also, timing of meals is actually not that important for weight loss. It is somewhat important for sports performance (e.g., timing carb intake around sports activities). There was a meta-analysis a few years ago that gave more specific recommendations: https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-017-...
> The calories in/out model is technically true, it's just not very useful.
It's plenty useful. The biggest barrier I've seen so far in people trying to lose weight is that they just plain don't believe it, and think it won't work. They think they need some complicated specially tailored diet where they need to pick out specific foods, eat foods they don't like, eat at special intervals, and so on.
> Playing with other variables besides calories, like the specific foods you pick and the timing of meals, can produce dramatic, measurable health changes and make a huge difference in how hungry you will feel at different times of day.
That may be true, but various tricks you might choose to apply to your diet should come /after/ you know how many calories you're consuming. It's a question of where your attention is directed. The purpose is still to reduce calories, and preventing hunger in whatever way works for you or distracting yourself or maintaining a schedule are all just means to the same end: to reduce how much you're consuming.
The problem I see is that people seem to not agree on that /end/ and think they're trying to accomplish something else, but I'm not sure how that's supposed to be measurable or reliable.
I disagree with that end. The purpose is not to reduce calories, the point is to be, feel, and look better. Counting calories is tedious and inaccurate. "Don't eat outside of X window" is much less effort, and anecdotally, has given me better results.
I don't need to know my calories at all, my metabolic system can be a complete black box, and as long as I'm able to do stuff I enjoy without feeling groggy, eat almost whatever I want, and just sacrifice the timing, I'm happy.
> Playing with other variables besides calories, like the specific foods you pick and the timing of meals, can produce dramatic, measurable health changes and make a huge difference in how hungry you will feel at different times of day.
Exactly. Try to stay under your daily calorie quota eating just processed carbs/sugar and you're gonna have a bad time. Will you still lose weight? Sure, if you can actually withstand feeling hungry constantly. Compare that to the same # of calories from veggies and fat and most people will tend to feel much more satisfied overall. I've been doing keto for 12 weeks along with intermittent fasting and this has been the case for me. I can easily get a sizable daily calorie deficit without really trying and rarely feel hungry.
> There are no secrets to weight loss. Eat fewer calories than you burn. It doesn't matter if that involves keto, or vegan, or one meal a day. Thyroid problems also don't change physics.
You seem focused on the physics and materialist viewpoint, but it seems like you are taking that line of reasoning just far enough where we can be judgmental and snarky about "secrets."
What if we take your thinking a little farther and think about the brain chemistry and drives that affect behavior. We are just materialistic machines, right?
Ever seen a sick person who just doesn't want to eat? Or a skinny person with little interest in food? Ever try to hold your breath for 3 minutes? This should, in theory, for the average person be possible. But for some reason it is really really hard.
What if, these diets don't affect the physics of weight loss, they affect the hunger drive--the chemicals in the brain? Do we still get to ride our moral high-horse then?
Or what if there are drives and chemicals in the brain and even the metabolism itself fights back.
> Or a skinny person with little interest in food?
And yes, that's me all the time.
What i'm saying is, everyone has a resting metabolic rate. That rate is relatively stable among the entire human population. If you eat more than your metabolic rate, you gain weight. Less, and you lose weight.
Most readers on hacker news are saying "duh ngngngng, but you're oversimplifying". Correct, I am. But the reason for that is I believe most Americans (maybe other countries too), do not believe the information I just presented. Most Americans think if they are fat that their resting metabolic rate must be 1500 calories different from most skinny people.
I think this creates a sense of hopelessness. "No matter what I eat, i'll be fat. But no matter what ngngngng eats, he stays skinny!" Even though the reality is my metabolism is average, and the referenced overweight person probably has a similar metabolism as me.
Sorry, but you're not helping. There is not a lack of people, media, and doctors who repeat the calories in calories out mantra. People have this hammered into them all the time. And it's obviously not working.
"No matter what I eat, i'll be fat. But no matter what ngngngng eats, he stays skinny!"
This is plain denial, and is not the view expressed in the article. Anyone who reads and understands the article, and the purported benefits isn't likely to simultaneously hold that inane view.
> What i'm saying is, everyone has a resting metabolic rate. That rate is relatively stable among the entire human population.
You are probably confusing BMR and RMR; Basal Metabolic Rate is a reasonably constant function of age, weight, body composition, and gender for healthy, non-pregnant adults.
RMR varies considerably even for an individual based on a wide range of factors, including emotional state.
> Most Americans think if they are fat that their resting metabolic rate must be 1500 calories different from most skinny people.
And they are quite possibly right; fitness lowers RMR with the same BMR, and a 300 lb 6’0” man has a ~900 kcal higher BMR than a 150 lb man of the same height under te adultos used in simple BMR calculators. And there are a number of other ways that being overweight contributes to or is correlated with factors than contribute to different RMR (and in some cases BMR).
Telling people to eat fewer calories than they burn is useless without telling them how.
As you yourself acknowledge, it’s not that simple. You use calorie counting to stay on track — but that’s another secret to weight loss, isn’t it? You may not think of it that way because it works for you (which is great by the way), but that’s what it is.
But now we’re getting to the meat of the issue. Eating fewer calories than you burn results in weight loss, but how? We should be focusing on the methods that work for many people. If we know what they are, we can advise people attempting to lose weight to try them and hopefully most wont have to try too many before they find one that works for them.
As far as I can tell, the three methonds that work well for many people are: (1) strict calorie counting (usually app + food scale), (2) intermittent fasting — which is what this article is about — and (3) keto.
Of course, it’s fair to scoff at and criticize the methods that usually don’t work well especially when results are oversold especially in money-making schemes. But this guy is just promoting IF in a fair and reasonable way.
Also, there is a reasonable chance IF has health benefits beyond weight loss, which is potentially a reason to prefer it over calorie counting (although I found that when calorie counting I was effectively doing a mild IF anyway)
> The problem is made worse because overweight people typically greatly underestimate how much they eat, while underweight people (me most of my life) typically greatly overestimate how much we eat. It's nearly impossible to accurately gauge calorie intake without strict calorie counting.
This suggests that you might be able to take pairs of people, one who is overweight and one who is underweight, and help both of them by simply arranging for them to eat every meal together and do all their snacking together.
For each meal or snack, each buys or prepares what they normally would, but before they actually consume the food, they
each exchange half of their food with the other.
There...an easy to follow diet, without strict calorie counting, that should move the overweight person to a lower weight and put some weight on the underweight person.
You could probably build a reality TV show around this. Half the contestants would be people wanting to lose weight, and half would be people trying to gain, with the lowest weight person in the first group being substantially heavier than the highest weight person in the second group.
Each week, there would be challenges and contests which determine priority for picking who your eating partner will be for the next week.
Pick the contestants from a wide range of culinary cultures and ethnic and religious backgrounds so that some potential pairings would be difficult for the participants, and so doing well in the challenges is important.
I've actually had this idea for years. When I was a teenager, I was constantly told by classmates or family members, "I wish I was like you and could eat anything I want and stay so skinny!"
I didn't understand the information in my original comment at the time, but it occurred to me it might make a fun documentary to have me live with someone morbidly obese for a month and eat everything they eat when they eat it and see if I gained weight.
Unfortunately the human body is quite a bit more complicated than that and a single article on examine.com is woefully inadequate at capturing the complexities. While people's metabolism doesn't seem to vary too much from person to person, it does tend to vary a lot within the same individual based on lifestyle choices. Whether I choose to eat or not, or choose how much to eat, my metabolism can vary.
When you consider your glycogen reserves, carb vs fat metabolism, insulin, ghrelin and other hormones, you get a rather complex machine. And what's really frustrating is that you are technically correct, in a sense. Eat fewer calories than you burn and you will lose weight. But that simplification borders on the dangerous. What's missing is that your body is not some passive observer, but an active participant, trying its best to help you survive.
Your body is amazingly good at adjusting how much you burn. When you cut calories, say 500 a day, your body will tend to compensate by burning a little less by reducing its temperature, by reducing fidgeting, by reducing your mood even! You'd need to cut 500 calories ABOVE that difference. So you end up having to cut closer to 750-1000 calories per day to get the same effect. Whereas when you fast, your metabolism rather obnoxiously tends to rise.
It ends up being healthier (and much easier) to eat 3500 calories less in one go, rather than splitting the difference across 7 days.
I don't think many people believe there are "secrets" involved, but there are many factors which make sticking to a diet easier for people.
The linked page talks about this quite a bit - Trying to control for hunger, fullness, desire to eat, etc.
"This was a randomized crossover, isocaloric and eucaloric study. That is, all patients did both arms of the study eating the same foods and the same calories and then compared against themselves. ... Those who restricted late-night eating had less desire to eat, but also less capacity to eat. They couldn’t eat more at night even if they wanted to. That’s amazing, because now we are working with our body to lose weight instead of constantly fighting it. "
Respectfully, I'm not really sure I understand how your critique applies to this article?
There are no secrets to weight loss. Eat fewer calories than you burn. It doesn't matter if that involves keto, or vegan, or one meal a day. Thyroid problems also don't change physics.
The point of the article is, the timing of feeding vs fasting leads to differences in fat storage.
The work of Dr Fung, among others, suggests that concentrating eating into a few (4-8) hour period per day causes better outcomes than feeding during the entire waking period.
Same thing with the balance of macronutrients. Tuning the ratio of fat:protein:carbohydrate can make a diet more filling and more sustainable on fewer calories. This enables that "calories in / calories out" rule to actually work and cause reduction in stored body fat.
> It's nearly impossible to accurately gauge calorie intake without strict calorie counting.
Yes, but you can get most of the way there just by counting for a while, so that you build a model in your head for how many calories different foods have. Unless you've counted before, the results can be surprising. Stopping at Starbucks for a snack and deciding between a cake pop [0] and the chocolate chip cookie [1]? The cookie has 380 more calories.
Thinking about grabbing a quick lunch and trying to decide between a burger from Shake Shack or a burrito at Chipotle? That burrito could easily have 1200+ calories [2]. The burger has 530. [3] (A bowl without rice at Chipotle, on the other hand, can have as few calories as the burger. So, again, knowing that difference can help you make better choices.)
These are just random examples from my own life, recently. Knowing these differences makes a difference (especially over the course of many meals).
Of course things are not so simple. Calories in/calories out partially applies to weight gain/weight loss, but it's not the complete story. Hormones also play a role.
That's why people start to gain weight as they grow old, even though they eat the same. It involves testosterone/estrogen and an enzyme called lipoprotein lipase.
> It involves testosterone/estrogen and an enzyme called lipoprotein lipase.
This is just a variation of the thyroid problem reasoning. Hormone changes with age or thyroid issues might change your resting metabolic rate over time by 100-200 calories per day (a single candy bar of calories). But that doesn't curse you to be fat, which is what I am trying to disprove. You will then need to adjust your intake/exercise level accordingly to the new resting metabolic rate.
I didn't say that hormone changes lower your resting metabolic rate. They simply make your body be more inclined to store fat. The enzyme that I mentioned LPL, becomes more active and stores more fat.
Have you ever wondered why men and women tend to put on weight differently? The same enzyme is involved. For men it's more active around the waist. For women, around the thighs.
For a thorough treatment of this topic, I recommend the book Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes. It goes into the biology of why we get fat. Note that it's pretty strong against carbs, so depending on your beliefs, you might not like it. Although, I have to say, it makes a pretty convincing case on why we should lower carbs intake.
> There are no secrets to weight loss. Eat fewer calories than you burn. It doesn't matter if that involves keto, or vegan, or one meal a day. Thyroid problems also don't change physics.
Unfortunately that is not true. Different foods are metabolised differently. It is not just "calories in, calories out".
It's like saying there are no secrets to computing and to just imagine a computer as a Turing machine, forget about stuff like pipelining and caches and whatever. On the other hand, I do believe the supposed "secrets" have actually been known for a long time. Here's my favorite article about it: http://www.grubstreet.com/2018/03/ultimate-conversation-on-h...
There are plenty of ways to optimize fat burning/weight loss beyond eating fewer calories. When you eat matters. Working out in a fasted state will accelerate fat burner vs working out after eating a meal. Eating a similar number of calories in a keto diet vs a carb-heavy one while maintaining a calorie-deficit will also accelerate fat burning/weight loss.
Calories in/calories out is a simple pipe dream that conveniently ignores the deleterious effects that hormones can have on your metabolism.
There are tons of people out there intaking less calories than their BMR and not losing weight because they have thyroid issues, are insulin resistant, etc.
Totally. I'm not convinced that keto is any more efficient at burning fat, but eating my normal meat-starch-vegetable meals without the starches probably cuts 1000 calories per day out, so there's the calorie restriction. The magic comes in where I'm not ready to gnaw my arm off or murderously hangry on that amount of calories, versus trying to just eat less of the full blend.
Insulin will cause your body to store more fat and is released when you intake carbohydrates.
Macro content does matter and not all calories are created equal.
Calories are actually an incredibly crude measurement of metabolism energy, as our stomachs are not furnaces. Gasoline and wood have tons of calories, but no usable energy for humans.
As others mentioned there’s an aspect of efficiency there but I think there’s something more important.
The whole discussion revolves around losing weight while diet and nutrition is not really about that. It’s about how to eat to stay healthy. Not being obese is just a part of that.
If you consider the bigger scope you’ll realize that despite the fact it came out from Neil deGrasse Tyson mouth, in this context it’s just a stupid thing to say.
If I eat 5 burgers a day and reduce it to 2 a day, I will lose weight. However, no amount of burgers is good.
For more than a decade I had been fasting intermittently. I ate one very huge meal everyday. Typical Indian meal with fair bit of non-veg included. I was not in the best health possible.
A year ago, I got rid of non-veg from my diet. Things improved a bit, but I wanted better results. One month ago, I went fully raw - only raw fruits and no vegetables. I lost many pounds and everybody notices, my sinus troubles have vanished, I feel and look good overall.
Burgers have between 20-40 grams of protein, from optimal sources of protein (i.e., beef). A serving or two of vegetables in the form of lettuce, tomatoes, and onions. Maybe vitamin D if mushrooms are included. Fiber, in the form of bread, and possible trace vitamins and minerals if using wheat bread.
Doesn't sound at all like empty calories to me. Considering that most raw vegetables have poor bioavailability (so most of the nutrients you eat from raw foods don't get absorbed), I would posit that a good burger is healthier than 90% of raw food meals...And moreover, than you could simply add the raw food to a burger to make it instantly superior to any equivalent raw food meal of the same weight/mass or calorie count.
Bread is bad. Refined wheat flour baked; full of acrylamide. Beef is as bad. And what about all the cheese? Vegetables are better, but still not the best as far as human digestive system is concerned.
Look around you. If these things were so healthy, why is the population getting sicker by the day?
If you're just going to spread unsupported lies, I'm not going to keep this conversation going. People have been eating meat, bread, and vegetables for thousands of years without issue. If any of these were the problem, the human race would be dead by now.
Hell, the Eskimos ate a diet almost entirely meat-based for hundreds of years. It wasn't until they were introduced to fruits that they began developing diseases like diabetes. Steve Jobs' health nose-dived once he switch to the fruitarian diet; research now shows that the fructose and glucose in fruits is in fact the number one preferred fuel source for cancer cells, which is why the current dietary advice is for cancer patients to go on low carb or ketogenic diets.
The greatest athletes in history eat omnivorous diets; during his record-setting Olympics run, Michael Phelps ate thousands of calories of fast food each day. Few professional athletes are vegetarians, and no elite athletes are fruitarians. All of our most famous scientists, including Einstein and Hawking, ate balanced diets that included substantial amounts of meat. The evidence, and thousands of years of human history, speaks for itself.
> People have been eating meat, bread, and vegetables for thousands of years without issue. If any of these were the problem, the human race would be dead by now.
People have been smoking for thousands of years. Smoking causes cancer was proved just 50-60 years ago. Is our species dead? Baked, fried, grilled food have heavy amounts of acrylamide, a carcinogen. Read the Swedish study.
> Eskimos ate a diet almost entirely meat-based for hundreds of years
This is a myth. Do some research.
> research now shows that the fructose and glucose in fruits is in fact the number one preferred fuel source for cancer cells
If one already has cancer, sure. They are the preferred fuel source for all cells because they are so easy to process. Cancer cells too use them. Credit cards are great for us, fraudsters too like them...
Research shows everything except the root-cause and cure for cancer.
> Michael Phelps ate thousands of calories of fast food each day.
That is moronic in the long-term. Short-term benefits of steroids in muscle-building are well documented too.
> Few professional athletes are vegetarians, and no elite athletes are fruitarians
Indian wrestlers are vegetarians. Some of them world famous.
You are absolutely wrong.
> All of our most famous scientists, including Einstein and Hawking, ate balanced diets that included substantial amounts of meat.
Ramanujan, one of the greatest Mathematicians, was a vegetarian. So are most Indian Brahmin scientists and mathematicians of today and of all eras. You are absolutely wrong.
Only eat raw vegetables and you'll lose even more. Reason: they're mostly water anyway and less sugary that fruits, so less carbs. You can fill your belly with them and you'll get very little calories.
Another possibility: only eat naturally blue foods. Or only eat foods beginning by 'K' (a different one each day of the week).
Your claim and your supporting argument do not align. Fruitarianism can have been preached about for thousands of years and also be the diet associated with Steve Jobs.
The problem is made worse because overweight people typically greatly underestimate how much they eat, while underweight people (me most of my life) typically greatly overestimate how much we eat. It's nearly impossible to accurately gauge calorie intake without strict calorie counting.
When talking nutrition with people, I'll often bring up the examine.com piece on "does metabolism vary between two people?"(1) And I am always amazed to find at least one person in any conversation that will flat out deny the information presented there. they are positive that if they ate one single slice of pizza a day and nothing else, they would still be fat.
1: https://examine.com/nutrition/does-metabolism-vary-between-t...