Obesity is not eating too much, it's eating bad, highly processed foods. I doubt somebody can get obese by eating too much salad or chicken. It's not as simple as forcing everybody to higher prices or starving them.
Obesity derives from calorie intake, not from the quality of the food. But I guess there is a strong correlation between people eating junk food and the ones eating too much food. Probably, if you don't care about what you're eating you also don't check the calories count.
Not only. First, some people, eating the same excess calories than you, won't store it as fast. Genetics play a role. Also, you may store more fat or not depending of:
- the time of the day you eat it (you will more likely store things if you eat it late than early in the morning due to your homonal cycle)
- the duration on which you eat it (the infamous 9 hours popularized by dr rhonda patrick)
- what you mix. Eating the same amount of calories in pure fat, or in a mix of 50% fat and sugar will not result in the same process by the liver.
- insulin sensibility. Which is influence by the quality of your food. E.G: how much sugar it contains.
- ability to process said food, again influenced by the state of irritation of your intestine and your microbiome, and hence influenced by the quality of your food. E.G: adult can get irritated intestines by intaking dairy product after they lost their childhood ability to proess it as well.
I know it's a convenient shortcut to say "calories in, calories out", especially since it's easy to demonstrate (the anecdotal Twinkie diet made us all think). But if we keep repeating that, we are not helping people to lose weight. Dieting has a very low success rate because of the solely focus on the calorie count, while using the informations above as well lead to less rebound and frustration in my experience.
I agree that dieting is hard, but it's largely not because of different calories being stored differently. The big nutritional study [1] sponsored by Gary Taubes (the main proponent of "not every calorie is created equal") show that low-carb and low-fat diets result in same weight loss.
I'm also not aware of any study (though I haven't looked very hard) that shows intermittent fasting results in greater energy consumption (and hence lower fat gain / greater fat loss) except by making it somewhat easier to eat less.
That’s what I meant. By ‘much’ I meant that by eating a lot whole foods it’s really hard to be obese, you’ll get full faster or they are just not caloric enough. I guess I should improve my English writing skills ;)
Isn’t their a strong argument out there that hormones play a bigger role in why people become obese? E.g., insulin resistance from too much sugar, which makes the body store fat.
It's simply eating more calories than a person needs in a day. Of course, that's often easier to do with "highly processed foods", but the 33% of the U.S. population that's a healthy weight eat all sorts of things (as do I).
> It's simply eating more calories than a person needs in a day.
This is true but without explaining the issue. Gary Taubes compared it to asking why a theater is over capacity, and getting the answer "because more people entered than exited." Well, yes, but why?
You're at a healthy weight because you don't eat more calories than you need in a day. I'm obese because I do. But those facts don't explain why you don't and I do. It probably isn't because you count calories more diligently.
I've actually personally proven calorie counting makes zero sense in the context that healthcare has tried to phrase it.
It isn't that you eat too many calories, its that your body hoards to many. Chronic exercise "helps" in the short term, but just causes long term damage, and your body just makes you want to eat more in response.
The trick is not how much you eat, but what you eat. Same with carbs, not how much, but what. Stick with nutrient dense foods (which pretty much means whole, fresh, goods, despite how much that is associated with a certain crowd), and your body just finally lets go and lets you lose weight.
For me, I went strictly Paleo for a year, not even low carb. Over a year and a half, I went from 340 to 183. I made sure I didn't decrease caloric intake (~2000 calories a day), nor increase caloric burn. According to common (but woefully incorrect) knowledge, I'm clearly lying, and I still weigh 340, yet, I don't.
Stripping out grains, refined sugars, dairy, legumes, refined oils, other refined products, and replacing it with fresh meat, vegs, moderate fruit, coconut and olive oil, while not decreasing calories, still helped me lose weight.
Healthcare sets people up to fail and then blames the victim. Its nuts.
I'm sorry, but your claim is simply not believable. A 340 pound man cannot maintain that weight with only 2000 calories a day. That would equate to a metabolism that burns less than 6 calories per pound. MAYBE if you were bedridden your metabolism could drop that low.
It is true that metabolism varies by individual, and it's also an unfortunate truth that people who were obese and get their weight down to a level that the medical community deems healthy will have a slower metabolism than most naturally skinny people. But there is no chance that you were maintaining a 2000 calorie diet before you started losing weight.
What is also true is that most people do not properly estimate the number of calories they consume each day. I certainly have a hard time doing it - the only real way is to prepare all of your food yourself, or buy prepackaged food that you can measure accurately. I guarantee you were eating much more than you thought you were.
> What is also true is that most people do not properly estimate the number of calories they consume each day.
I don't have a reference handy, but I have read studies that show that when people self-report calorie consumption from memory they tend to underestimate by a large margin, reporting in the vicinity of 50-70% of actual consumption.
You can't get closer than 10% accuracy given that nutritional labels can be off by that much, and you aren't getting that unless you are making all your own food and weighing everything with a food scale.
A restaurant meal can vary by hundreds of calories based on how much dense fat like oil or butter is in it, and look identical each time.
It wouldn't surprise me to find out that the average person really does underestimate calorie consumption by that much.
Beverages alone are one of the major sources underestimated calories. A 20oz bottle of soda with sugar is multiple servings, but people don't think about it as such. The same goes for fruit juice and a lot of the fancy coffee beverages. Alcohol is also easy to underestimate, especially if a glass of wine with dinner can turn into half a bottle or more, or a nightcap turns into a double.
Thank you for proving my point, people are quick to just repeat what they've been told and ignore new information. It is certainly a strange phenomenon on the internet nowadays.
You did not present any new information. You made a claim that is not supported by the science.
Nobody is arguing that we aren't learning more about weight and nutrition, but that doesn't mean we ignore science for personal anecdotes that are likely untrue.
Except you're still further proving my point. Instead of expressing that you wish to learn about the science, you just quote decades old bad science that never really was true.
In a way, its sorta like how flat earthers and anti-vaxers work, you're just part of a third type that denies nutrition science. I did exactly what I said I did, and so have many other people, and what you're engaging in is an odd form of fat shaming (seeing as I'm not fat anymore, but used to be; and lost my weight entirely by following the science where it lead me).
