The focus of the people you have linked is about exercise in the context of a gym and diet is about calories. I would like to argue that being healthy and fit is not about the gym, or investing time in tracking calories.
Instead we should focus on daily fun movements that we like to do. So it doesn't feel like a chore and easy to maintain within your lifestyle. This could fall under different categories such cardio (walking , cycling) and some resistance training like body weight exercises. These are called Micro workouts, and can be done during the day. A great (nerdy) guy who is quite far on that path is the bioneer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWuKIlbybqY
And for food we should try to focus on whole foods and not calories and almost no-one should try to diet like a body builder prepping for a show. They feel terrible and you are priming the body to store energy in the fat cells.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/stop-counting...
Humans have been healthy for very long without the gym or calorie counting. Both are large time investments that can be better spent elsewhere
Being healthy and being fit is mostly about being healthy and being fit. There are obviously countless ways to get closer to that goal, the gym and calorie counting being one way.
Saying stuff like 'we should try to focus on whole foods and not calories' is a pretty bad take if you ask me. Contrasting that immediately with 'a body builder prepping for a show' is just ridiculous. One is good advice to form part of a healthy lifestyle, the other is a way of life for a tiny group of professional athletes.
There goes more into a healthy diet than just eating lots of whole foods - although whole foods are obviously awesome and healthy. Notice that the linked article compares two groups eating processed and processed with the one eating the processed foods eating 500 more calories a day. They don't gain weight magically but because they ate the less satiating food and as a result ate more calories.
And simply saying 'Instead we should focus on daily fun movements that we like to do. So it doesn't feel like a chore and easy to maintain within your lifestyle.' is such a weird take. Have you ever considered that some people enjoy going to the gym? On the other hand I personally couldn't imagine anything more boring than body weight exercises. In the end it is up to the individual to chose the lifestyle that they enjoy, so please stop selling your personal favorite as if any other choices 'are large time investments that can be better spent elsewhere'. I very much enjoy my time spend at the gym, thank you very much.
Seems like you misread the thread. The comment is against the training schedules that have been provided that are only about gym and calorie tracking.
And that we "could" also do other things. Like in the video from the bioneer.
But it seems you read "should".
My comment is not against training of any kind. And if the gym is your place where you get it done great, but if you have busy life and your unable to find the time or are unable to commit regularily. Then there are other options that will fit anyone schedule.
This post contains some very odd gaslighting: your earlier post says "should"—twice—but you are claiming here that the person responding to you incorrectly read "should"?
Perhaps you meant to write could but wrote should instead?
If someone likes to go to gym, then that would fall under movements that they like.
We are currently in obesity epidemic. That's only getting worse[0]. Lets try some new ideas instead of calories which is based of steam engines in 1800. The human body is much more complex.
What research is showing is that daily excersice is great for the overall health and strength like as the article posted.
And that excersice can help the brain[1][2] with aging [3] and much more.
Is the body "much more complex" than calories in/calories out though? If you are overweight, shouldn't calories in/calories out come first, followed quickly by eating healthy to achieve that deficit?
A lot of people, economically, cannot afford the latter while still being able to perform the former. Seems like we should be encouraging people how to lose weight and then educate them on healthier ways to do it...but at the end of the day it's all thermodynamics.
I can recommend the book Burn by Herman Pontzer on this:
The human body can adjust the Basal Metabolic Resting Rate quite a lot in the face of exercise. Spending an extra 500 kcals on exercise can easily only lead to 200 kcals higher total energy expenditure. The body apparently will for instance reduce sex drive and immune functions when under regular exercise. So to achieve weight loss exercise alone is a very hard path unless diet is also modified.
On the other hand it has been shown that dieting alone without exercise also makes it very hard to maintain a lower weight because for instance exercise seems to curb feelings of hunger.
So yes: human bodies definitely are complex adaptable machines. CICO alone doesn't cut it.
Correct, and has to because the evolutionary time that we had at least 3 meals a day has been really short. The body is made for extreme conditions, conditions that it's no longer exposed to.
So it had to be smart with when to store energy and when to spend it.
Great question, because the latest science is pointing to that hormones determine the states of body. Example Insulin triggers storage in cells, and t3 from the thyroid has influence over the metabolism. Testerone has many influences and there many more
For feeling full and feeling tired there are different hormones. And they are finding out how little we actually know. Turns out for example the out understanding of cholesterol was incorrect[0] and like calories the wrong focus.
So research into the marvel that is human body is very basic at the moment.
thermodynamics is made for steam engines. Just like calories. Its science from 1800, a moment time where everything was powered by steam engines. So understanding how much we need of something to increase the heat of water by 1 Celsius is very important.
But cells are not like steam engines, they don't burn energy. They use atp, mitchondria create atp with the kreb cycle.
Our gut biome plays very important role in digesting food.
Turns out that its different for every person even twins.
The gut biome is one the readons everone reacts a bit different to food.
Calories are still used as a proxy. Eat less Calories within a given dieet also means eat less food.
Then the question what should we do to lose weight. Many people have been helped by low carb dieet or intermittent fasting and even prolonged fasting. So in the end you could say that's still Calories. And to that I would have to agree. But it's how we get to same point.
There was actually a study that forced the participants to adhere to low calorie dieet. Hint it turned out really bad for them.
the physics of weightloss is straightforward (CICO), the chemistry isn't as much, the biology is mind-numbingly complex, and that's before we get to the psychology.
> Lets try some new ideas instead of calories which is based of steam engines in 1800. The human body is much more complex.
Sorry but in terms of obesity and weight loss, it's really not more complex. The most surefire way to lose weight is to make sure calories in < calories out, and vice versa for gaining weight.
>Sorry but in terms of obesity and weight loss, it's really not more complex.
No, it is extremely complex. "Calories in < Calories out" isn't even stating the principle you think it is. You want to make a statement about fat balance depending on calorie deficit, independent of what type of food you eat, and even that is completely wrong. Different foods take completely different paths through the human digestive system (e.g., fructose vs. glucose) and thus have completely different effects independent of their "calorie" count. Most people on a calorie deficit are not also exercising, and their weight loss is 25% muscle loss, which is a disaster for their future health.
Peter Attia makes a careful statement about "calories in/calories out" in the first few minutes of this lecture: https://youtu.be/31g94p5J2gE
Doug McGuff covers med school biochemistry and metabolism in the last part of this presentation, and mentions "internal starvation" where obese people crave food at regular intervals, but the food goes directly into fat tissue. https://youtu.be/2PdJFbjWHEU
Hey, if it is just calories in < calories out, why is Bill Gates so much richer than me? All he did was spend less than he earned, right?
That sounds simple, but only one of the variables in that equation is readily knowable, and the other is a function of the first. Meaning, only by counting calories- and all the calories, including cooking oil, salad “toppings”, etc do you know what the calories in is but then how do you determine what they should be, knowing that if you eat too little, your body slows down to preserve homeostasis? It turns out to be a far more complex situation that involves exercise to preserve the calories out part despite the drop in calories in. There is an ideal deficit below which it is counterproductive to go, certainly if you’re interested in body composition and not just losing “weight”. That ideal depends on activity and a variety of other minutia.
Basically, control your calorie intake via calorie counting, measure your sliding weight average, and adjust your calorie intake up or down accordingly. It doesn’t matter how accurate your calorie counting is, as long as it’s consistent. That is, you can ballpark a lot of things as long as you’re repeatedly using the same estimates.
Counting calories is the only way I personally manage to lose weight, and it works very well. A simplified version of the Hacker’s Diet I use is the following: First count your calorie intake for a week or two without changing your diet, to establish a baseline of your average calorie intake, and then reduce the intake to 80-85% of that baseline. You’ll slowly be losing weight.
You can go lower (e.g. 70%) if you are able to sustain it and are in a hurry. It helps to pick food that is easy to calorie-count, of course. Reducing carbs generally helps with sustaining the lowered intake, and increasing the ratio of protein (and doing resistance training) helps with not losing muscle (or even building up some).
The mechanics aren’t difficult. You only need to muster the motivation.
It would be a very long writing trying to explain it properly, so i’ll just use my experience as a long time gym rat. It takes a very heavy calorie deficit to enter “starvation mode” all bodies are different but counting calories is the easiest approach, lower your actual intake by 20% and monitor weight for 2 weeks once your curve starts flattening increase by 10% for one week then lower to the previous. I guarantee you that you’ll lose weight without losing muscle mass.
Despite the challenges in knowing calories in, much less calories out, agreed, just lowering your intake, and adjusting based on the outcome works, and is the only way to do sustainably do it. I was just challenging the assumption that calories out is fixed. In my case, I'm currently at a calorie deficit and losing weight (at 195, starting at 220), and at one point, I was at (or slightly below) 1000 calories a day for a month and did not lose a pound. (It was physically and emotionally miserable.) I went up to ~1500/day (and 2000 on gym days), and have lost 1.5 lbs/wk or so for months now. I don't think I "ruined" my metabolism, nad don't know if that was starvation mode or not, but I am convinced there's a calories "in" range in which your body will try its best to match calories "out", if only temporarily, and that I was in that range for a while.
Of course I only know my weight and that it wasn't changing for a while despite an extreme calories deficit (from my previous norm, if not my expenditure at the time). I'm assuming that my calorie expenditure dropped, and not, for example, that I wasn't just retaining water sufficient to match the weight I would otherwise lose at the time.
You would calculate your total daily energy expenditure, TDEE, and use that to figure out how much in excess or deficit you'd need to eat. That the body slows down homeostasis is not such a huge reason as to abandon the calories in calories out approach wholesale.
How do you account for the fact that people can lose weight by increasing the number of calories that they consume while reducing their exercise if they eat only ground beef and sardines?
2) Limiting what kind of food you eat usually leads to limiting how much you eat. Feel free to try this with eating only lentils, beans and broccoli, you can eat as much of it as you want.
Then why can't people lose weight by just drinking fewer calories of gasoline than the calories that they burn in a day through exercise? Is it possible that the kind of calories one consumes effects the burn rate of calories by the body's metabolic system? What if some calories are consumed but not burned because they are instead used for rebuilding bones or muscles -- how do you account for that?
This does seem like even more gaslighting, you said:
" I would like to argue that being healthy and fit is not about the gym, or investing time in tracking calories."
Instead we should focus on on daily fun movements that we like to do."
Now those daily fun movements include the gym if you like the gym? But you still are saying they should do something daily instead of periodic gym, not that they could.
Jesus Christ, why be so petty about him slightly confusing his point. I think the point he tried to make is that people often go to the gym and don't enjoy it, because they think it's the only or best option, but that those people should instead just look for a physical activity that's fun/enjoyable to them instead. HOWEVER if someone enjoys going to the gym, then that is perfectly fine. And that was the point they tried to make. Just use a little bit of empathy, people.
My fault - I started this whole thing, and wish I hadn't. The actual point is totally reasonable, but poorly communicated.
But the issue is not about the poster confusing their point, it's about them blaming the respondent for misunderstanding what the poster was saying, saying the respondent read "should" instead of "could", but the poster actually wrote "should".
"I wasn't being confusing, you just misunderstood!" is a pretty bad-faith argument to make in general, that's what I was trying to point out. But there must be some language barrier thing going on, because the original poster just doubled-down on the bad faith argumentation :shrug:
I think the post is arguing for a superset of the definition of exercise which includes the gym as opposed to a set definition of exercise defined by the gym exclusive of other activities. A superset definition would also include lifting my child for piggyback rides, a brisk walk with a friend, or practicing a flash mob.
There is allot research about daily exercise and the enormous health benefits. If we focus on trying to incoperate more movements throughout the the day.
It will be easier to maintain, and if we miss a day we will have the next day.
But if we would do both it will even be better:)
The bioneer in the youtube video explains it way better then this post.
Man that poster is trying gaslight us into healthy habits. Let's get him boys.
/s
What is going on with these comments. Going to gym could be part healthy lifestyle but it's not needed, when the lock downs happened many found out that it was single point of failure for them. And shouldn't have been that way.
Maybe the comment isnt written well enough to get the point across. We should focus on, doesnt exclude anything.
If anything my point is that both is even better.
Then the second should is about the latest science. I didn't elaborate on that.
The latest science is pointing towards daily exercise. Therfor we should ideally have some form of movement each day.
It's beneficial not only to overall health, and longevity. But also your brain health:)
In general, saying "I would like to argue that being X is not about doing Y. Instead we should do Z" is going to make people, quite reasonably think that you are arguing against Y, and that people should do Z instead of Y.
"We should focus on Z" does indeed suggest to most readers that you are excluding things that are not Z, whether you meant that or not.
Highly recommend going with "I'm sorry, I meant ..." rather than "You read it wrong, I didn't say ABC ..." to avoid confusion, especially when you do indeed use the phrase ABC.
Although that's great point about the confusion. But you could observe it as being only a logical statement, such as.
"
You should focus on your tie the next time instead of your shoes.
"
Doenst mean you should only have tie on the next time. That would be rather awkward.
Atleast that is what I meant, thanks for the explanation.
Sure, but “next time” isn’t what you said — you said, in effect, “to look sharp, focus on your tie instead of your shoes.”
That has a pretty different meaning, implying that the tie matters more and the shoes don’t matter as much.
It’s not a super reasonable read to then infer “oh, the shoes matter a lot, but the tie matters more”, because if that’s what you were trying to communicate, you’d say something more like “to look sharp, don’t just focus on your shoes, focus on your tie too” rather than using “instead of”. Instead of really communicates substitution, “do X instead of Y,” implies “don’t do Y.”
"""
"This idea of 'a calorie in and a calorie out' when it comes to weight loss is not only antiquated, it's just wrong," says Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity specialist and assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.
"""
edit:
| And simply saying 'Instead we should focus on daily fun movements that we like to do. So it doesn't feel like a chore and easy to maintain within your lifestyle.' is such a weird take
'Instead we should focus on daily fun movements that we like to do. So it doesn't feel like a chore and easy to maintain within your lifestyle.' Yep, I watched the beginning of the video and totally agree with the guy. I feel like my next sentence :
'Have you ever considered that some people enjoy going to the gym? On the other hand I personally couldn't imagine anything more boring than body weight exercises. In the end it is up to the individual to chose the lifestyle that they enjoy, so please stop selling your personal favorite as if any other choices 'are large time investments that can be better spent elsewhere'. I very much enjoy my time spend at the gym, thank you very much.'
basically sums up the guys take in the video. The guy who posted the video on the other hand seemed to think (Or at least seemed to imply) that going to the gym was a waste of time and that everybody should do these 'Micro workouts'. Which is the opposite of the video guy, who expressly said that some people love power-lifting, some other stuff. And that everybody should try to find their flavor and enjoy doing that kind of exercise because doing sport is great and it helps your health in many ways.
If you still think that I wrote something that videoguy would disagree with please write again and I'll check the part of the video you mean. Because he seems like a pretty cool dude, and I certainly don't feel like I disagree with him.
The poster didn't imply that from what I understand.
It's response to links training methodologies that solely focus on the gym and calories. As such is saying "there is more then the gym and calories". and you seem to agree with that statement. that was the context of the comment, and looks like you missed it.
Yes? And even in that article there is the following paragraph which implies that the number of calories consumed is important:
'"People who ate the ultra-processed food gained weight," says Dr. Stanford. Each group was given meals with the same number of calories and instructed to eat as much as they wanted, but when participants ate the processed foods, they ate 500 calories more each day on average. The same people's calorie intake decreased when they ate the unprocessed foods.'
I am *not* saying that 'losing weight is a matter of simple math' by counting calories as the article suggests. That is a a stupid thing to say and kind of a strawman. I am saying that 'investing time in tracking calories' (A thing the other guy implied being a waste of time) is a great tool in a tool-kit. I am also saying that eating whole foods is a great idea, but - by itself - not the ultimate solution either. I'd further say that eating healthy isn't just about losing weight, it is about a number of things for different people - some need to gain weight for example.
In addition to that, I think the article does a disservice to counting calories and is just generally written in a sloppy way. While obviously nothing it says is wrong, it also doesn't tell you a lot of other true things. For example that it can be quite easy for some people to eat enough healthy whole food to grow quite fat or at least to not lose weight (If that is the goal). It also doesn't mention that counting calories helped countless people lose a lot of weight.
But the most important flaw is that it doesn't tell you the intended target audience of the information.
Do I need to eat tons of McDonalds and be way overweight? Or do pasta and pesto twice a week count while eating lots of vegetables on the other days? Will I magically lose weight if I don't eat those two meals a week? What about if I lead a very active lifestyle and work in construction? What if I am a hobby athlete and just want to lose 10kg while already eating healthy whole foods? Depending on you personally the information in this article is probably useless.
I mean for gods sake, they use The biggest loser as an example, hardly relevant for most people (Outside the US? I don't know).
Also note that in the 3 reasons they list, only *1* is something you are actually able to control, and that one reason breaks down to *people eat less calories*. If they want to convince me that counting calories is a bad idea they should really find better arguments.
'putting the emphasis on improving diet quality and making sustainable lifestyle improvements to achieve a healthy weight.' as described in the article is such a non-committal take. No surprise, eating good food and making livestyle improvements (Whatever that is) is a good idea.
Reality is obviously way more complicated than a small essay on the internet can do justice. As such I personally kind of despise these articles, whether they be from Harvard Medical or Mens Healthy. Especially if they don't acknowledge this and instead write the article in a way that seems to imply that it contains all the information you need.
Losing weight isn’t even particularly desirable in itself. It’s a reduction in fat mass, especially visceral fat, that’s going to improve health. Gaining muscular and skeletal weight is going to improve most persons’ well-being.
The metric to target is body composition, not weight. And for that metric, there is a whole lot more than calories in or even nutrients in. Endocrine profile has a huge effect on nutrient partitioning, just to name one thing.
If experts from reputable sources won't change your mind, I don't think any post on HN will either.
The points in the article are pretty clear.
The gut biome, your metabolism, sleep, exercise , and stress all play role.
Calories in / calories out is a model. To paraphrase a famous quote: all models are bad, some are useful. You won’t find a a much simpler discipline than calorie logging. It /generally/ works, teaches people about their food habits and lets them start understanding things like macros. If you are doing it (weight loss) on your own it is an amazing starting point.
Except that body is unable to sense calories, but it's capable of sensing protein and blood sugar levels.
but calories can works as a proxy, "more calories" == "more food" but calories are not all the same.
A calorie derived from a carbohydrate is the exact same as a calorie derived from protein. Are you talking about more caloric densities of different macronutrients? Aka, there's more caloric density in fatty foods vs proteins, for instance?
Kinda like with running. Our hearts have no pedometer. It just works however hard it needs to for however long. The numbers, paces and such are things we add to gain insight into what that performance means. Calorie counting is often also the first introduction many people have to what their macros are like. And there is some wisdom here, around individuals and “calorie quality”, but you can ultimately still use calorie and macro counting as a baseline measurement to start understanding your body. I should caveat, when I say calorie counting I mean, tracking key macros too: protein, carbs, fat, fiber, etc.
FWIW the calorie counting model has worked well for me where others have failed. Anecdata, of course. But counting calories, as well as making some general, loosely-held shifts of what I eat (near zero liquid calories, minimize sugar, more fruits and veggies, max one fist-sized portion of meat per meal) have gotten my weight down significantly, and it feels easier than other methods I've tried.
He's got a valid criticism though. The article says one thing and then contradicts itself. Most of the advice is of the nature "This causes people to eat more".
Being stressed causes you to eat more. Poor sleep causes you to eat more.
There is some variance, but it's nowhere near significant enough to really matter in the face of the largest contributor: the number of calories you consume.
The criticism comes from someone who not a expert or even basic knowlegde of role of hormones in the body. Such as insulin on cells or thyriod t3 hormone on metabolism.
Maybe I didn't explain myself very well, if so I am very sorry. English is obviously not my first language.
The gut biome, your metabolism, sleep, exercise , and stress all play role.
Yep. You can't control your gut biome and your metabolism as far as I know so while interesting, those are irrelevant for most people. Everybody will tell you that no stress, sleep and exercise are great. Combine all of these if you want to live a good, healthy life - great, but you probably didn't need an article for that. But wait, there are lots of people who do all those things (Whole food, no/little stress, sleep, exercise) and still don't lose weight.
There are tons of reasons for that. Maybe they still eat way more than they should - people are horrible at estimating how many calories a meal has. Maybe they are sick, either in mind or body. Maybe they don't train as well as they think (A lot of people think that jogging for half an hour equals a whole meal, instead of one slice of bread). Maybe there is another reason out of the myriad of reasons that exist.
But this article makes it seem like the most important thing is Put the focus on food quality and healthy lifestyle practices to attain a healthy weight. By the way, here are other 'experts from reputable sources' (The same journal) who pretty much say the same thing I do:
Don't always believe what a single, hastily written and completely non-sourced (Not a single source/quotation in that article!!! How is that reputable??) in a weird online magazine claims. Even if the print Harvard on the top.
Oh please. To quote your much loved Harvard Medical Journal (https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/do-gut-bacter...): 'We are just beginning to understand the role of gut bacteria in obesity, and the science hasn't led yet to treatments that will make it easier to lose weight. However, I believe that day is coming.'
And to quote it again (https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/the-truth-abo...): 'How fast your metabolism works is determined mostly by your genes.' and also saying: 'But you can't entirely blame a sluggish metabolism for weight gain, says Dr. Lee. "The reality is that metabolism often plays a minor role," he says. "The greatest factors as you age are often poor diet and inactivity."'. Sure, they then list a number of ways to 'boost it', but they all come back to the exact same tune I have been talking about. Exercise and food (And apparently Green tea. Huh, a 100 cal a day isn't great but isn't horrible either).
So if you know of some great way to control either of them, please link me a journal or paper, I would love to learn more.
Yeah, I'll give up. It is quite obvious we won't come to an agreement, though I am still not sure what you actually take issue with. Especially since we obviously both agree that obesity is a big problem and should be tackled.
On metabolism: 1. & 2. seem to indicate that you want to do hormone therapy with triiodothyronine? I don't know how we got to hormone therapy from 'eating healthy food' but sure. If you want to go that far I obviously was wrong in saying you can't change your metabolism. I assumed you meant by doing something that didn't involve something as extreme. Like: 3. Exercise increases metabolic rate. Which I thought was obvious. But yes, I should have expressed myself more clearly by saying 'besides the things we are doing anyways because we are in a fitness thread'. That is my fault and you are right here.
On gut biome: 2. 'Overall, further research on long-term diets that include health and microbiome measures is required before clinical recommendations can be made for dietary modulation of the gut microbiota for health.' 3. is on mice but interesting. 1. Is pretty interesting as well. Still, none of those papers have actual recommendations for the common individual.
I mean I readily admit that there might be some amazing cutting edge academic research that already points to a great new way to lose weight by either increasing your metabolism or changing your gut biome. But I haven't seen it yet and your linked stuff doesn't convince me that it is there yet. Sure, I have never heard about triiodothyronine therapy, but that honestly sounds very, very experimental to me.
That isn't true, though. Neither the article nor the comment you're referring to say anything at all about weight loss. In fact, while most of the links in the top comment are guys who care somewhat about staying lean, Mike Israetel explicitly does not. His goal is just to get as big as humanly possible given his genetic constraints (but also while doing steroids). That is entirely legitimate when the topic of the study being discussed here is whether infrequent or more frequent lifting builds more muscle.
Your comment is non-sequitur. Perhaps weight loss is the majority fitness goal in industrialized nations of the world today, but it is still a legitimate and separate topic worth discussing for people who succeed or were never fat in the first place, but still aren't necessarily all that "fit," to think about what they can do to achieve some goal beyond just not being obese.
You'd think Hacker News of all places would understand this. For the majority of the world, simple tech literacy is a goal and presumably a whole lot of research and think pieces discuss that kind of thing, how to best promote it and what not. But everybody here is already tech literate. We want to be technically excellent, not literate. That is a different goal and the tools you need to get there are different.
The above resources are not promoting how to not be obese. They're promoting how to be athletically excellent.
The links provided themselves point to programs, the information is to sell courses.
If you take steroids your body will respond different then normal people. Using steroids and then to promote your programs that act like it's possible to achieve them without is dangerous.
The strain they will be able to put on their bodies are not the same as without. Even with steroids the strain is so high it can lead to serious life changing injuries like at least one the some of the linked have found out.
There many young people that have used steroids and have completely worn out joints.
> On the other hand I personally couldn't imagine anything more boring than body weight exercises.
I’m with you here. I can push and pull a respectable amount for my age and body weight on a barbell, but with the exception of pull ups and dips I also find body weight exercises to be boring.
I do wish though I’d trained as a gymnast in my youth. Somehow I don’t think I’d find ring planche push ups boring. But sadly the progression from where I’m at to there is way too much without a daily coach.
> And for food we should try to focus on whole foods and not calories …
This is just plain false. You can “focus” on eating whole foods and if you consume more calories than you burn you will gain weight. If you consume less calories than you burn you will lose weight. The science has not changed on this point. No one giving honest diet advice should tell people not to worry about the calories they consume if the individual has the goal to increase, lower or maintain their weight.
"No one giving honest diet advice should tell people not to worry about the calories they consume if the individual has the goal to increase, lower or maintain their weight."
That's not realistically true. If I watch actual calories, I wind up hungry all the time because I spend so much time thinking about food. On the other hand: I can do things like make sure I eat enough vegetables. Replace some meat with veggies or legumes. With some things, I can use less fat than my mother would have. Eat slightly smaller servings, change the items I eat for food during the day, or wait just a little bit before having the snack so I don't wind up eating two snacks instead of one.
The end result is that I'm changing out higher calorie stuff with lower calorie stuff without actually worrying about the calories I take in. You simply need to know that some things are lower in calories than other, and that's not exactly "worrying" - and it definitely isn't counting. And this was based on honest advice from folks. It also means that this is a way to actually change a diet: Few folks want to count calories for the next few decades of their life, after all.
these arguments aren't at odds. In fact, your strategy is an excellent way to diet with calorie counting. One of the best ways to improve satiety in a hypocaloric setting is by replacing high calorie density foods with low calorie density foods (such as vegetables and fruits, as you mentioned).
You still need to count calories for maximum accuracy and efficiency of weight loss, but it doesn't have to be as painful as eating one big mac and fried a day and starving the rest of the day since you hit your calorie limit
> for maximum accuracy and efficiency of weight loss
That's the point though... "ain't nobody got time for that" is the reason most of us fail at high performance diets. We need the simplest, most minimal first step which can become habit (and which also likely leads to _some_ weight loss, even if not maximum). Once that very significant behavior is changed (choosing better foods), then it can be refined.
If you focus on eating whole foods (instead of focusing on calories), you're more likely to consume fewer calories simply because whole foods are less calorie dense than packaged/processed foods. Plus you'll be getting less sugar and salt (although salt's harm is up for debate).
It's also likely that the body behaves differently depending on the quality of food consumed. Consuming less than 2000 calories of processed food may cause the body to operate less efficiently for any number of reasons (not the least of which involves your gut bacterial balance). So the end result might be less weight loss than a 2200 "whole food" diet would result in.
People are busy in modern times. Perfecting and managing a diet is hard work, so "hacks" like just choosing whole foods are a pretty great way to make positive progress.
If you religiously limit yourself to only eating beef, eggs, and sardines, then you will consume the fewest calories with the greatest return in terms of nutrition of any possible diet plan.
And if you min/max in that way, you're likely going to be introducing some other problem (perhaps one that takes a long time to recognize) into your complex biological system which is accustomed to having a variety of inputs.
Granted, for non-plant protein, small/young sardines are probably the best. Not only do you get fish oil, but you get load of calcium which is difficult to get elsewhere unless you consume a lot of dairy.
Beef and eggs are trickier, because their downsides tend to be related to how they are produced/raised. Also there's the animals in captivity factor which does not scale well (or humanely).
Pumpkin seeds are an amazing source of protein (and some other minerals which we don't normally get much of). Dried, I think they taste horrible. But roasted with a little seasoning, they are quite nice. And they can be added to other dishes to give extra texture.
Chickpeas are good. Peas are good. Cashews and peanuts are good.
And if you consume a variety of vegetables, you can get the complete assortment of amino acids (so usable protein).
There is virtually no way someone could get fat from eating the foods I have listed. If they do, then they have some other underlying health issue or a gut biome that's way out of whack (which most of ours are pretty far out).
Way too much fiber in that diet -- you'll end up pooping a lot more and you'll probably also fart. If you stick to a meat-only diet then you will literally never fart.
Also, you might be able to get protein from plants, but you won't get protein with all the amino acids in the appropriate ratios unless you combine different plant sources, thereby increasing your overall calorie consumption because those additional amino acids will be accompanied with carbs if they are plant-based.
So you'll just end up under-nourished if you try to follow a plant-based diet. You may not end up obese, but you're not going be as strong and healthy as you would be if you ate only red meat.
The reason it's so difficult, to almost impossible to get fat on those foods you have listed. Is because you'll become too full to overeat. Not only is it healthier for plethora of reasons. But you'll eat less.
On top of that, if eating for long enough your gut biome will change and you'll start craving whole food.
You must fart a lot with all that fiber in your diet. One of the blessings of switching to a diet that is appropriate for human beings is that your digestive system will operate a lot more smoothly and you'll stop farting so much. You basically never fart on a diet of only red meat. Also, a red-meat-only diet has far more vitamins and other micronutrients than a plant-based diet.
> "This idea of 'a calorie in and a calorie out' when it comes to weight loss is not only antiquated, it's just wrong," says Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity specialist and assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. The truth is that even careful calorie calculations don't always yield uniform results. How your body burns calories depends on a number of factors, including the type of food you eat, your body's metabolism, and even the type of organisms living in your gut. You can eat the exact same number of calories as someone else, yet have very different outcomes when it comes to your weight.
This is just plain dishonest writing. Just because there are other variables, or that different people burn different amount of calories, does not make 'calorie in and calorie out' wrong. If John burns 2000 calories a day and has different organisms in his gut from Sarah who burns 1500 calories a day, in no way disproves calories in / calorie out. All it proves is that people are different, a premise that the modern science community seems to find a challenging notion.
The theoretical concept of CICO is thermodynamics and indisputable, but the point that the data demonstrates and that these Harvard scientists are discussing is that all of the parts of the equation are so error-ridden and faulty that to combine them together in practice is not effective. Everything from the faulty results of burning food in a calorimeter, to users guesstimating the ingredients in food they cook, to the wide amount of false data inputted to calorie tracking apps, to the extremely complex and still not well understood G.I. tract, to measuring how much each individual can absorb, to how much cooking effects it, to how much the personal biomes between gut and colon play an effect, etc all add up to the reality that there is too much error to pretend the system is useful.
If using the system got you to eat differently, and eating different made you lose weight, then congratulations, but that doesn't prove that the food you ate was actually X calories or that you actually burned Y calories, and that that deficit is why you lost weight, nor does it mean that someone else who ate as much as you did would have their body change in that way.
Note the caveat in your quote. It's not that calorie in/out is theoretically wrong, it's that it is an unhelpful/antiquated strategy "whenitcomestoweightloss".
First, note that the calorie estimates on food packaging can be off, sometimes by as much as 25%.[1] Restaurant foods have an even wider discrepancy. [2] And as you point out, different people will digest them and absorb different nutrients from the same food making comparisons difficult. For example, I absorb a small fraction of the calories from dairy products because they unfortunately pass through my digestive system quickly and remain largely undigested.
And as others have noted, accurately estimating calorie expenditure can also be difficult without professional equipment, so in practice measurements of calories expenditure can be off by a significant margin as well.
Combining all of these sources of error can result in excessively wide error bars. Someone who relies on calorie in/out estimates to dictate their consumption may end up eating significantly more or less than is optimal.
Of course, even if counting calories in/out is wildly inaccurate it might still have a positive effect if it causes people to be more aware of the food they eat. Unfortunately I'm not aware of research that teaching people to count calories results in better health outcomes than other diet strategies. (Though it does seem to increase people's odds of developing eating disorders. [3])
It's one of those cases where the theory may be correct in theory but that doesn't make it particularly useful in practice.
The fact that counting calories is difficult, or that some food labels might be wrong, is not evidence that CICO is incorrect. Just as the fact that different people burn different amounts of energy does not disprove CICO.
I'm astonished how many commenters are desperately trying to find loopholes in simple laws of physics.
I said above, it's not that CICO is wrong. No point I have raised could possibly disprove CICO because CICO is obviously correct from a physics perspective, and I'm not sure if anyone here is trying to find loopholes in simple laws of physics.
I (and most of the other commenters here it seems) keep trying to communicate that it is possible to be both technically correct and simultaneously not useful as a weight loss strategy.
CICO isn't about counting calories, all you have to do is to gradually eat less until you start losing or maintaining the weight you want. CICO guarantees that to work, and lots of people have used that strategy to lose weight, it works 100% of the time if you follow it properly.
It wont work for everyone though, since many people can't make themselves eat less without following some rituals, the problem there isn't CICO but that those people can't implement a CICO diet properly. But that doesn't mean that CICO is a useless concept for losing weight, it just means that those people needs more help to keep their psychology in check.
Saying that CICO isn't useful when CICO is the basis for every single weightless diet in existence is just ignorance or a lie. All weightless diets either makes you absorb less calories by some method, or make you burn more calories, so the first thing when looking at a diet is asking how it relates to CICO. Trying to sweep that under the rug as some old school nonsense principle that has proven to not work just proves how much nonsense there is in nutritional "science".
CICO has limited use. Boiling everything down to a single physics based metric doesn't give us all the information we need.
Knowing what mechanisms and processees go into losing weight can make the journey much more intellectually stimulating, satsifying for the participant and smooth out incredibly rough bumps in the road to losing weight. CICO can't fill this need for tailoring weight loss to smooth out the efficiency losses you get with brutal cuts into one's life and psyche.
Pumping out a single metric and hammering flat all the differences in personal process with psychology and ritual screams of unnecessary suffering. It's probably wrong to use oneself like that.
Very few people live according to the physics based description of what their life should be... However one would derive that idea without hiding or ignoring personal presuppositions?
The "CICO diet" most here are referring to is when people attempt to estimate their "calories in" and their "calories out" and keep the former slightly lower than the latter. To my knowledge this has not been demonstrated to be generally effective, possibly due to the challenges with estimating these values with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
If you're simply referring to the physics of CICO that underpin most diets then I have already acknowledged it is correct.
But being correct does not make it necessary knowledge for people looking to lose weight any more than Hamiltonian mechanics is necessary knowledge to play tennis.
If I still haven't managed to convey the distinction between technical correctness and practical utility yet then I have to conclude this is a gap I cannot bridge and I wish you luck.
I think you are missing their point. Calories in and out is a piece of the puzzle and net calories is often not enough to make a good prediction. Two similar people can consume precisely the same number of calories and have the same level of physical fitness and physical activity and have different outcomes.
People are indeed different and the scientist you quote is saying precisely that.
Calories in vs out is wrong because those who tote it assumes that only physical exercise has an effect on calories "out". New research shows that the human body is keenly aware of the amount of energy available and adjusts many bodily functions (tissue repair, heat, hair growth, immune defense, etc) accordingly. This is why just restricting calories in and exercising more won't necessarily mean you loose weight.
Taken literally calories in vs out is of course true.
> Calories in vs out is wrong because those who tote it assumes that only physical exercise has an effect on calories "out".
No, they actually dont assume that only physical exercise has an effect on calories burned. In fact, CICO is agnostic to the means by which calories are burned.
> This is why just restricting calories in and exercising more won't necessarily mean you loose weight.
Actually, so long as you burn more energy than you consume, you will lose weight. Again this is agnostic to how the energy is burned. What the body does to adjust is merely effecting the amount of energy burned. It does not effect the formula concerning CICO.
> Two similar people can consume precisely the same number of calories and have the same level of physical fitness and physical activity and have different outcomes.
You are trying to find a loophole here that doesn't exist. If two people burn the same amount of energy E_O ("out") and take in the same amount of energy E_I ("in") with E_I < E_O, then both of them must take those calories from somewhere else in their body and must therefore undergo weight loss. There is no way around that.
Now, notably you didn't specify E_O, you only said
> the same level of physical fitness and physical activity
which can mean a lot of things.
All the supposed loopholes work in exactly the same way: It might not be entirely clear what the values of E_I and E_O are, so "calories in, calories out must be wrong". (Which, again, is impossible because it's just conservation of energy, i.e. a law of physics.)
In any case, just like you can bound E_I from above by counting calories, there are ways to constrain E_O from below: If both people have the same mass (say 100kg) and walk up the staircase in one of the towers of Cologne cathedral (~150m), then they will both have spent at least E_O >= 100kg * 150m * 10m/s² = 150,000 J.
How can you possibly read GP's comment and think they don't realize this? Stop nitpicking. Calories In vs Calories Out is correct. Period. It doesn't matter if Calories out is hard to calculate.
Calories In vs Calories Out is mediated by a factor, usually labeled S, which accounts for the individuals own metabolic factor.
Meaning if you are naively doing calories in vs calories out, or doing desired estimated calories out based on a table, you have an error factor significant enough to skew your results.
What we call it doesn't matter, but what GP said is actually incorrect as written.
> What we call it doesn't matter, but what GP said is actually incorrect as written.
Please do point out which part of my comment is incorrect.
> Meaning if you are naively doing calories in vs calories out, or doing desired estimated calories out based on a table, you have an error factor significant enough to skew your results.
What does "naively doing calories in vs calories out" mean exactly? I agree that some people do it naively but where exactly was my comment naive?
> Calories In vs Calories Out is mediated by a factor, usually labeled S, which accounts for the individuals own metabolic factor.
Yes, the metabolic factor affects the numeric value of E_I and E_O (I never disputed that), but once you have determined their value (or bounded them as in my comment – which, as demonstrated, is orders of magnitude easier), the statement "weight loss occurs if E_O > E_I" remains correct.
"Calories In vs Calories Out is correct". Maybe it’s correct but I doubt it’s useful. How do you explain that people who do not count calories maintain their weight ?
Maybe, but in this case I don't think it's fallacious. She publishes, is cited all over the place, teaches at a well regarded school, and has explicitly and plainly said CICO is wrong when it comes to weight loss.
This[1] is a good summary of a talk she gave about a year ago and in it she talks a bit about the non-CICO factors in weight gain or loss. Here's one example:
“The gut microbiota of those that are lean versus those that have obesity are quite different, so much so that we can often take the gut microbiota out of individuals that are lean and place it in those that have obesity and see weight shifts with no other modifications."
> She is the director of diversity and inclusion for the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at Harvard (NORCH)
Why did I know this before I even looked?
>“The gut microbiota of those that are lean versus those that have obesity are quite different, so much so that we can often take the gut microbiota out of individuals that are lean and place it in those that have obesity and see weight shifts with no other modifications."
Yeah, so all that effects is CO (calories burned). This does not disprove CICO. I see Fatima has a limited grasp of logic.
Where in my comment did I use or refer to the resting burn rate? This is precisely the point: If you can bound the total calories burned (E_O) from below (by means of the laws of physics), individual variations of metabolism don't matter – the calories must have been burnt by the person in question no matter what.
it's not that the values E_I and E_O might not be clear, it's most certainly not clear and surely not easy to estimate for people trying to lose weight
CICO is a great model for 3rd parties in your diet. If you have someone watching your dietary intake, they can count calories for you and you will succeed at losing weight nearly 100% of the time if they can monitor everything you eat. Most individuals cannot count calories even reasonably close to what they are consuming due to a number of factors.
The model is also an abject failure when it comes to the individual psychology of overeating. This is where people like the above doctor says it's "just wrong". CICO as the only method of weight loss is about as effective as quitting smoking cold turkey (3 to 5% success rate). In general getting people to stop eating high caloric density / high glycemic index foods and replacing them with something else is a good starting point. You're effectively lowering the CI but not requiring a cutoff point for the individual.
when they said CICO is "just wrong" they should have said "just different for every person". My wife listens to a pretty entertaining podcast called Maintenance Phase and they did an episode on CICO where they basically call it BS because of all the other variables. I have a hard time dealing with CICO being wrong because I just don't see getting around the physics. In my mind, what's missed in CICO is the numbers and measurements are different for each person. A calorie limit for one person that results in weightloss may not work for someone else. It seems pretty obvious to me that calorie counting has to be done on an individual level and has to be done accurately ( a whole other problem ) but that seems to be missed on a lot of people.
EDIT: i wanted to mention something someone downthread hit on and that was also in the Maintenance Phase episode. Calorie burn is not constant and your body will adjust, so for you to effectively count calories and stay below some threshold you have to track what your body is burning as it adjusts which is probably very difficult.
I actually suspect CICO being wrong or right is actually bikeshedding technicality. The question is "Is CICO helpful to yell at a fat person?" and not in the technically if you can control every facet of a person's life they will lose weight under CICO, but whether or not a regular busy obese person potentially with health barriers, children, a full time job, and whatever other issues would find statistical use in it or is it just something that makes sense for thin people to yell about because its technically correct.
Lots of people just need to think in terms of CICO and no dumb diets to lose weight, they just eat less. Other people need to create arbitrary rules to eat less calories since they are addicted to some foods, so they need to cut out all the foods they are addicted to in order to reduce calories in. For example, people addicted to carbs do low carb diets to curb their calories in, people addicted to desserts do a no dessert diet and they will lose weight etc.
The only thin that makes this complicated at scale is that different people are addicted to different foods, so need to cut out different things to start losing weight. But CICO is the basis for all of those.
The duo on that podcast asserts gems like: we don't actually know if being fat is bad for you. Worth a chuckle.
I can imagine the podcast took off because people are hungry (pun unintentional) for something that validates inaction on improving their bodies. That show treats any sort of ambition about one's body as an eating disorder or unrealistic goal.
I know this is late but I was going back through my comments and found yours. Yeah , i have problems with the podcast on those terms too. I get their point that fat-shaming is harmful and I totally agree however, if someone is overweight then it's very much a good idea to try and reduce weight and not just consider it normal and healthy like the podcast sometimes implies. Granted, overweight people are a favorite prey for every charlatan out there and i feel like the podcast does an acceptable (but not perfect) job of calling them out.
oh and we (my wife and I) found the Maintenance Phase podcast by following Michael Hobbes from You're Wrong About which is another entertaining podcast. I don't always agree with his politics but if I ever met him i'd shake his hand, he does a really good job.
Every single piece of advice listed can and should be done in addition to counting calories.
The single best heuristic we have for weight loss continues to be “calories in - calories out” simply because you cannot escape thermodynamics.
Yes, your base metabolic rate may be different than others and may change over time. Yes different foods are processed differently by your body. This changes the variables, but again, does not change the calorie arithmetic.
I recently learned that the science has changed and I can recommend the book Burn by Herman Pontzer on this:
The human body can adjust the Basal Metabolic Resting Rate quite a lot in the face of exercise. Spending an extra 500 kcals on exercise can easily only lead to 200 kcals higher total energy expenditure. The body apparently will for instance reduce sex drive and immune functions when under regular exercise. So to achieve weight loss exercise alone is a very hard path unless diet is also modified.
In other words the mechanistic model of "calories in minus exercise calories minus resting calories" doesn't work well or at least it is harder to assess "calories out" than it seems at first hand.
It saddens me that it is not universally understood that the way to get in shape is not to exercise but to stick religiously to a diet of only fatty beef, eggs, and sardines.
Not sure if properly highlighted, though the science is uncertain about calorie absorption. In other words, not all food-source calories are equal, further a persons metabolism and their GI tract play a role as well. These additional variables have sparked my interest quite a bit, I'm very interested to learn more if others have more information/links about these variables to calorie intake.
The World Health Organization recommends (for adults) 150 to 300 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic physical activity OR 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity a week. They also recommend at least two days a week of "muscle-strengthening" activities at moderate or greater intensity that involve all major muscle groups. [1] If anyone can meet or exceed these guidelines solely through things they enjoy then absolutely go for that. However, most of us tend to enjoy one thing more than another, I've noticed. We might be highly into rock climbing and less-so willing to go for walks or bike rides. We might be a 10k runner who neglects to do their pushups. My point is it is likely you're going to need to do some stuff you're not thrilled about. If you don't do them then fine, but don't make the argument that just doing things you like doing is enough because it very well might not be.
As for the calories debate, all i can say here is that evidence is needed for some of these claims you and your article have made. I'm seeing links to quotes and videos but no real evidence that a calorie is not a calorie. If the point they're clumsily trying to make is that practically speaking you cannot track every single calorie in your day-to-day existence then yes i would agree with that but no one who tracks calories would tell you their goal is 100% accuracy. It all comes out in the wash over averages.
That said, I do not think most people need to track their calories if they just want to be at a healthy bodyweight. Merely eating whole foods and adhering to the guidelines above should get them there just fine. This is not the same thing as saying a calorie isn't a calorie.
Not all of those blogs are about being healthy. Some of them are just about reaching and maintaining the popular societal understanding of appearing "fit". I mean damn, one of the blogs is literally called Look Great Naked!
I totally agree, for the record. For the majority of people counting calories and recording reps isn't something they'll be interested in doing their entire lives, any more than they'd be interested in updating new device drivers and reflashing their OS if an easier, brainless alternative existed. And it does! Walk, bike, or run a little bit every day; eat less carbs than you'd prefer, and try to eat more vegetables than you would otherwise. I'm no expert whatsoever, but I've travelled all over the world and that advice seems to be the only constant amongst all the healthiest people I've seen.
The point of the article on which we are commenting is that training each day is more beneficial than once a week.
It's a huge time investment to go to the gym each day. But you could do some pushups or squats right now, and the great thing is. The time investment is small, and short term and long term is great investment. you'll immediately get a small dopamine boost and in the long run your health and appearance will improve.
And according to the article it's better than once heroic day in the gym, that will leave you feeling sluggish.
But everyone can benefit from even simple body exercises, and maybe buy some dumbbells and lift them up each day for 5 minutes, if they become light, increase the weight or reps. Its that simple.
The point I'm trying to make is that exercise doesn't have to take place in a gym, it could. The bioneer link above can expain it much better then me.
My understanding is that training every day is good for hypertrophy and perhaps endurance, but that it is not the best way to gain strength. The underlying notion is that the more work you do, the more capacity for work you can do. And that recovery time is nonlinear to the amount of work done, so that more but less intense excercise leads to ablarger capacity for work. However, if you are double fast-twitch and you want to play to your strengths (pun intended), you are going for peak power, not average capacity for work over time. In that case you get stronger by doing things that require more strength. That is going to still require recovery time that will not typically allow work every day. In fact, for strength training, best practice is still to avoid getting out of breath on recovery days.
Hypertrophy is a different goal entirely, and always had more volume than strength or power workouts, this data simply takes that to the logical conclusion. Whether its bro-splits or lots of compound work. You want to maximize average volume over any interval you could pick.
I've found that few adults think this way. A lot of them avoid exercise and healthy eating because they perceive these as hard and complicated, and they are afraid of doing the work and likely failing anyway. Mainstream advice doesn't help this situation at all.
I get a lot better results at helping people when I show them that health can actually be fun and easy.
I mind doing most chores, and I don't think I'm alone: How many people would choose to do dishes for a family of four if they have a dishwasher to do it for them?
I even like to cook, but most days it is simply a chore and not something I particularly want to do that day.
> Instead we should focus on daily fun movements that we like to do. So it doesn't feel like a chore and easy to maintain within your lifestyle.
The people I know on that list would absolutely agree with this. E.g. Mike Israetel from Renaissance Periodization; he'll often say that one of the best ways to lose weight is to try to get your step count up, e.g. move around more in the day, without necessarily doing formal exercise. The best thing is that you can be running around doing "chores" or whatever, and this will help with your weight loss goals and get more stuff done during the day.
That said, the question is, as always, what are your goals. If your goals are to be healthier, that requires a very different approach than if your goal is to, e.g., look more muscly, bodybuilder style. They're not completely incompatible goals, at least for novices, but they are different goals. Some strength training and cardio, with an emphasis on maintaining a body fat percentage <20%, is probably the best for maximizing long term health.
"So it doesn't feel like a chore and easy to maintain within your lifestyle."
This is it for me, absolutely. I've always been a bike commuter, so that was my cardio for decades— 10x 20min bike ride to and from work each week, year round. When I lost the commute with pandemic WFH, I fairly quickly shot up 15lbs.
The journey back was in finding ways that I could recreationally get that same experience, which for me has been a combination of walks, distance cycling, and lane swimming. All of these are things I enjoy for their own sake, and are great mental health resets. They're also things I can do with others, so there's that little bit of accountability woven into it as well. I'm not really watching what I eat, though I did cut out a bunch of snacking (especially at bedtime), and I switched my breakfast to a protein smoothie.
Now I'm down 30lbs+ from my pandemic high, and probably the best shape I've been in since my early twenties.
How do we know if we are moving enough or eating the right amount if we do not use some quantifiable basis? Moving for fun is all well and good, and exercise should be fun as opposed to a chore, but the dose dependency needs to be accounted for.
Whole foods work well because they tend to hit the calorie and nutrient milestones without much tracking being necessary, but we only know that because other people have done the tracking for us.
I think the information these people put out should be used to inform a lifestyle that one constructs, not to construct it directly.
>"And for food we should try to focus on whole foods and not calories"
People get obese on "whole foods" just fine if they do not count calories. For some it is not needed since they live physically active life and naturally do not eat all that much. Yet others can barely fit in their cars on the same food.
"""
"This idea of 'a calorie in and a calorie out' when it comes to weight loss is not only antiquated, it's just wrong," says Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity specialist and assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.
"""
An absurd statement. If you put someone on a calorie deficit they will lose weight, period. If I work you 12 hours a day at a gruelling physical job and don’t increase the amount you eat then you will lose weight, end of story. All this faffing around about with metabolism and gut bacteria is only applicable when people have the absolute luxury of sitting all day with their only physical activity being walking to the kitchen to get another bowl of pasta. The human body was designed for long distance running and a fast/feast diet of mostly fruit and meat, of course you’re going to get fat if you don’t move and just eat pure carbs for every meal.
It's not absurd, quite the opposite. "Calores-in, calories-out" on the other hand is laughably reductive.
If the body was an actual furnace, calories in calories out would be an excellent mantra.
But it is not. It's a complex chemical machine with complex feedback loops. You do not ingest pure energy, you ingest matter that might be processed into food and stored using a ton of different chemical pathways, some more efficient than others.
If I ingest 2000 kcal of cellulose, I indeed get 2000 kcal of cellulose out, not as energy but as undigested faeces. If I ingest 2000 kcal of fat, my body behaves completely differently than if I ingest 2000 kcal of pure carbohydrates, than if I ingest 2000 kcal of pasta.
So, please let's stop with his reductive CICO meme. We all know thermodynamics, but it's a very bad model for explaining how the body handles food, hunger and long term energy storage. Focusing on calories is like comparing vehicle speeds by solely focusing on their horse power. There's a relation, but it conveniently ignores hundred of other variables that might show an opposite outcome.
No, it is also absurd. To carry your example forward, it would be like someone saying "the idea of horsepower when it comes to vehicle speed is not just antiquated, it is just plain wrong!'
The shape of the car, as a variable effecting the vehicle speed, does not make horsepower plain wrong.
I'm not saying thermodynamics is wrong, and I've never said CICO is wrong, please re-read my comment. I'm saying it oversimplifies.
An RC car with 10 bhp is faster than a truck with 20 bhp.
Putting 1000 kcal of kerosene in your engine has a completely different effect than 1000 kcal of diesel.
A 2000 kcal diet is not like another 2000 kcal diet, unless it is composed of the same foods, and the two subjects have a similar genetic makeup and gut flora.
Right, and my comments are not about your POV. They are addressing the claim of the doctor from the Harvard article who is saying that CICO is wrong, and then responding to your comments about whether or not her claim is absurd. In truth, we cannot prove or disprove whether the claim is absurd as this is a subjective claim. And so I suggest we focus instead on the validity of the claim rather than our subjective opinion of it. To that end, it seems we are in agreement that the doctor's claim is not true.
Actually that is right. Horsepower is quite meaningless, engines of today with same horsepower will out perform 40 years old engines in all metrics that are important to us.
Agreed. The proof of the claim in the article is effectively that people are different. John and Sarah burn calories differently, which means that calorie-in/calorie-out is wrong! You heard it here here first - soon Harvard will decry calorie counting as a form of white supremacy. Joking aside, the Harvard article is hardly more than clickbait. It appeals to people who refuse to put in the work to maintain an effective diet. They merely need to label what they eat as "whole" and can then eat as much of it as they want.
This post strikes me as weird because it clearly glanced at the article but it misses a major point which is ensuring a healthy diet and regular exercise which this post is criticizing as if that entire section of the article isn’t there
I don't understand this post. "CICO is wrong", they say. "We put people on two different diets, one group ate 500kcal more and gained weight". So, CICO is wrong? How does it make any sense? Nobody has ever said that food with the same amount of calories gives you the same feeling of satiety.
It is like saying that Newtonian mechanics is wrong because we now have smart bombs.
Everyone who reduces their caloric intake below their expenditure will lose weight.
Those that try to eat their daily intake in pure sugar will 1) feel like absolute garbage and lie in a comatose state further reducing their expenditure 2) overeat.
Those that eat something at least close to being actual food. Like.. a potato that hasn't been fried in palmoil will feel full and less like a bag of shit.
I do not give a flying fuck about what she says. I can see how "Calorie in calorie out" works on my own example and with some tolerances it is definitely a case. I keep myself in a nice shape and am physically active but since I have very healthy appetite I have to curtail it. Otherwise I just gain weight. And yes since I can afford it I do eat "whole foods".
> we should focus on daily fun movements that we like to do
I fully agree. If some of that fun actually involves going to the gym, then great. But there are a lot of "play" activities which are compelling and fun while also making you healthier. Sports is an obvious one, and dancing is a less obvious one.
One hour of salsa dancing (with breaks and partner changes) is a good cardio exercise which is also lots of fun. And as or more importantly, the mental and emotional boost is something many of us need more than bigger muscles. I like both.
One of the person I was following was basically saying “don’t diet to lose weight, create muscles and your body will naturally need to consume more calories”
While it’s true that more muscle mass requires more calories it also has an impact on your appetite so if you aren’t conscious of what you’re eating you can also gain a lot of fat while gaining muscle. There’s no way around it if you want to look lean you need to balance your diet and eat an appropriate number of calories for your weight and activity level.
The thing is if you get lean without having put on plenty of muscle first, you'll look like a bag of bones, which is neither healthy nor aesthetically pleasing.
You wont look like a bag of bones unless you start to literally starve yourself into underweight levels, like BMI less than 17. Healthy weight people at around BMI 22 don't look like bags of bones, they either have significant amounts of muscle or fat, that is roughly the level where most athletes are so you either have that amount of muscle or the equivalent in fat or somewhere in between.
I think what you're describing is the best case, the world we should shoot for. But getting there for most people will take a generation of social change.
Meanwhile, most of us find ourselves in a shitty current situation where a healthy diet and a healthy level of activity feel weird and counterintuitive to us, and we have to trust reason and evidence to guide us to a healthy way of living, despite deeply engrained aversions, deeply engrained compulsions to engage in unhealthy behavior, and powerful external forces arrayed against us.
For people who are unhappy with where they're at and are looking for answers, telling them that there's an easy healthy way to live that caters to their current desires and aversions sends them on a lifelong journey of being disappointed by one set of false promises after another.
A more honest thing to tell them is that their life up to this point, their experiences, the norms they grew up with, the food ecology of the world around them, has warped their perceptions to the point that what is actually good for their body will feel unpleasant and psychologically unsettling. The unvarnished truth, which you might not want to dump on them right at the beginning, is that at times it will be fucking miserable. It's analogous to having a substance abuse disorder. Many, many times the only choice that feels comfortable and natural is the one that physically harms you, and resisting the compulsion to harm yourself feels awful. It can feel sad and scary not to eat every single donut in the break room, even if you've already had a generous healthy breakfast. At times like that, the "if it isn't easy, you're doing it wrong" message comes off like an unfeeling flex, like telling a depressed person to just snap out of it.
People may stigmatize difficult lifestyle changes as "restrictive" or "joyless" or "unrealistic," but it's not the fault of the lifestyle itself. It's the fault of what you've been fed your whole life and what the world continues to shove in your face and dangle in front of you every day. It doesn't kill joy not to eat cake. It kills joy to say no to cake eight times a day while a billion dollar industry wages war against your efforts to care for yourself by constantly reminding you of the momentary pleasure and relief you will feel if you give in, and people who care about you unwittingly act as their accomplices in all the spaces that are supposed to be safe for you.
People who work in public health are not giving advice to help you make a significant change in your life. They are giving advice that will do the most good for the most people, which realistically means moving the needle a tiny bit. That's what they're shooting for. They don't expect you to succeed at living a healthy life. They expect you to be overweight and to live a lifestyle that makes metabolic disease a likelihood, because the societal context is stacked against us. They've accepted that their power to help people currently struggling with their health is limited to changing a fraction of a percent here and there, and to achieve significant results we need to focus on changing the context for the next generation. Which we do need to do, but meanwhile, if you don't want to write yourself off as a victim of the times, don't let people tell you that easy is the only healthy way. You won't regret doing your best to take care of yourself, even if it's a struggle and you can't pretend it's easy like everyone tells you it's supposed to be.
Instead we should focus on daily fun movements that we like to do. So it doesn't feel like a chore and easy to maintain within your lifestyle. This could fall under different categories such cardio (walking , cycling) and some resistance training like body weight exercises. These are called Micro workouts, and can be done during the day. A great (nerdy) guy who is quite far on that path is the bioneer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWuKIlbybqY
And for food we should try to focus on whole foods and not calories and almost no-one should try to diet like a body builder prepping for a show. They feel terrible and you are priming the body to store energy in the fat cells. https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/stop-counting...
Humans have been healthy for very long without the gym or calorie counting. Both are large time investments that can be better spent elsewhere