Eating vegetables and whole foods without worrying about counting calories or limiting portion sizes doesn't feel like effort. You don't WANT to eat more. And your body becomes happier about burning fat rather than demanding that you eat.
Counting calories explicitly is a lot of work and a lot of self control. Few people can succeed at that.
Personally I follow the former strategy using http://www.weightgrapher.com/ to keep myself honest. About 15 years ago I decided to lose 20 pounds, and kept it off for close to a decade. Then I let my weight get away from me, because life got complicated. This time around I've decided to get back to that weight again, and I know it is sustainable. I'm not aiming for fast weight loss, I've been going at a comfortable pace for 3 months and expect to be dieting another 6 months to reach my target. But I know that I'll be able to get there and stay for years without a lot of willpower. Partly luck of genetics/gut biome. Partly because I'm doing it in a mentally easy way.
Eating vegetables and whole foods helps with the second and third, and somewhat with the first. By not eating highly processed foods, your blood sugar doesn't spike and then crash. (I think of it as the difference between using coal and jet fuel to make a fire.)
Do they? What exactly does it mean? I had the impression that eating a lot of calories doesn’t mean keeping them – that it depends on what source they come from (fats/proteins/carbs).
Now, your body might try to compensate and change metabolism in response to this, so that you unwittingly burn fewer calories than you consume. And yes, the types of food you're eating can affect this. But ultimately, our bodies are not perpetual motion machines, and cannot expend more energy than they take in as fuel, over the long term.
Of course the arguments to physics are true. But they are largely irrelevant. Its not the truth that's going to help people.
People eat too much, not because they don't know better (and physics! will teach them), but because they have some behavioral issue that prevents them from doing the good actions repeatedly.
It always ends up here: "Just don't put the calories in your mouth. That's all you need to do." Which would be true, if food and eating were entirely volitional. But its an emotional need, a very fundamental one.
Imagine saying "Just put the gun to your head and pull the trigger. That's all you need to do." While its undeniably easy, most of us, because of emotional needs to survive and avoid pain, would find it very, very hard to accomplish. (Not saying a gun-to-the-head loses weight; just comparing an easy instruction with the accompanying difficulty in performing it).
I agree that no one should use thermodynamics as an excuse to be judgmental or dismissive toward people who are having trouble managing their weight.
But I also think that when people directly ask about calories (as the GP zoul did), it's worth being clear and unambiguous about the basic science.
No one is going to track of how much mass they breathe in and out, how much mass they lose through sweat, excretion, urination, how much mass they eat and drink or how much energy they gain or lose through radiation. You would have to track all of those things to model weight loss based on laws of thermodynamics.
If you are trying to predict weight loss based on the calorie count on the back of your food boxes and based on your level of activity, the laws of thermodynamics aren't going to be very helpful. The calorie count on the box of food is only a very rough approximation of how much usable energy your body is able to extract from the food. That amount will not be consistent for every person or even for a single person in differing scenario.
"All models are wrong, but some are useful", so why be pedantic about one model being more right when it is also much less useful in the scenario and still is not a completely accurate model of reality?
Simple physics says one thing, simple engineering says another which is anything controlled that finely is under hormonally driven feedback control.
Frankly I think in the 20th century, particularly in the US and Britain there was a strong cultural imperative to assign psychological causes for conditions medical 'science' wasn't able to explain. So fat people are gluttons, erectile dysfunction is physiological, ulcers are caused by physiological stress. Heart disease is caused by a 'type A personality'.
However, barring inaccuracies in these numbers, once a calorie has been consumed into your body, generally the only way to get rid of it is using it. Until such a time, it will be stored as sugar or fat.
Diets designed to "cut" (loose weight), yes. Some people want to gain weight, their regimens are also called diets.
But technicalities don't define words, usage and context do, and, for the vast majority of people, including people here, diet means a change in your habitual pattern of eating designed to induce weight loss. That's how it's universally understood in this context.
Being more technical does not mean being more correct.
Dr. Gardner said it is not that calories don’t matter. After all, both groups ultimately ended up consuming fewer calories on average by the end of the study, even though they weren’t conscious of it. The point is that they did this by focusing on nutritious whole foods that satisfied their hunger.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/07/24/3549931.ht...
This observation is what led to me cutting soda out of my diet entirely almost a year ago (barring the rare treat).
And don't be fooled by the promise of diet soda. Lots of studies recently have shown that drinking diet soda doesn't help with weight loss either. Apparently the artificial sweeteners do something to your body by tricking it into thinking it's getting sugar; I'm not really familiar with the details, but studies showed that people who swapped soda for diet soda didn't lose weight, but people who swapped soda for e.g. water did. This advice is what led to me cutting diet soda out of my diet 6 months ago (which I had switched to after cutting out regular soda), so now I drink almost exclusively water.
If you're interested in cutting out soda as well, and don't think you can just switch to water, I have a couple of suggestions:
1. Start with those crystal geyser flavored sparkling waters you can get at Costco. I drank those for a while, because the hint of flavor tricked my mouth into thinking I wasn't just drinking water. I eventually stopped though, in favor of
2. Get a SodaStream and just make your own sparkling water. You can add flavor packets to this if you want, but I never have. Once you get used to it, unflavored sparkling water is pretty great. The downside here is the refill tanks for the SodaStream aren't cheap, but if you're concerned about that, there are homebrew carbonation setups as well (they just take up a lot more space; SodaStream is pretty compact).
More recently I cut out diet soda entirely in favor of just water, but I've actually ended up gaining weight, mostly because in retrospect it seems like I've actually replaced a lot of the diet soda with beer (or at least there was a strong inverse correlation between my beer and diet soda consumption). So now I'm working on reducing my beer intake and filling in with the occasional diet soda when I really need some tasty carbonated beverage.
Personally I've never liked flavored sparkling water. When I'm thirsty I prefer plain old water (as long as it's properly filtered), and occasionally I'll drink some unflavored sparkling water. But there's something refreshing about a cold beer or a diet dr pepper that flavored sparkling water just doesn't provide, and it seems that between those two the beer is a lot worse weight wise.
Specifically what happens is that your brain is supposed to taste sugar, and learn to shut off your appetite when it has received enough. But artificial sweeteners teach your brain to ignore that signal because you get what tastes like sugar without getting sugar. So whatever sugary things you eat, you will eat more than you otherwise would without feeling satiated.
There is no scientific merit to this frequent claim. [1]
In fact, a comparative study on dieters using diet soda versus water shown that the water group lost less mass, hypothetically because they were feeling hungrier and less satisfied with their diet, thus more likely to succumb to sugary foods.
[1] Rogers, Peter J. "The role of low-calorie sweeteners in the prevention and management of overweight and obesity: evidence v. conjecture," Proceedings of the Nutrition Society
Thanks for the correction. I'll try not to repeat this one blindly in the future.
It sounds a little like gym-science.
I drink soda, mostly diet, love Ice Cream and sweets and usually have a cheat day on the weekend and probably overeat once or twice during the week.
I also enjoy exercising and workout about 5-7 hours a week. There is a balance. It's no different than earning more and spending more.
For me sodas sweetness lended well to making super salty foods taste better, by cutting out the sugar in the sodas I didn't have the same desire to eat salty fast food items.
But that's not how humans work. If you have to choose between two diets with equal caloric intake but one of them is easier to stick to, then that one will be in practice a much more effective form of weight loss. You see a lot of people go on diets in January, you see a lot of people in the gyms in January, all those new years resolutions. And a lot of those folks seem to be very serious about it, they spend a lot of time in the gym, they put in a lot of effort. But this is one of those tortoise/hare situations. A modest diet/exercise regime that you can stick to for the rest of your life is far more valuable than one which is more effective on paper but won't be adhered to in practice.
Additionally, the thermodynamic argument (calories in vs calories out) is only mostly true in broad strokes, as a trend. Sure, if you eat few enough calories and do enough exercise you'll lose weight, and if you eat too many calories and do too little exercise then you'll gain weight. But within the boundaries there is a lot of complexity. There are regions where what you eat, the composition of your diet, and the kind of exercise you do will tip the balance one way or the other in a region of maybe a few hundred calories or so a day, and that too can make a big difference in how easy it is to maintain a diet or exercise regime and how effective it is.
It's not "mostly true". It's literally the only concrete truth in this whole field. If you consume X calories more than you burn you are _guaranteed_ to gain Y weight.
Taken together, there is very strong evidence that diets which concentrate on what you eat versus those that concentrate on calorie counting are vastly more effective.
But, you don't have to take my word for it:
It's true only in the useless tautological sense, where your definition of "consume" and "burn" are so convoluted as to be useless.
Wood pulp is carbohydrates, which you can confirm in a bomb caloriemeter releases ~4kcal/g when burnt. But when people consume it, they derive ~0kcal/g. If you think people don't consume wood pulp, you might want to look at [0] and at the wikipedia entry for microcrystalline cellulose. Gasoline is even denser at ~12kcal/g, but still provides only ~0kcal/g.
There are much subtler examples, where at atwater factors have been shown to be ~30% different in in different measurements (between population and even for the same individual in different times). Which means that the difference between "what you consume" and "the energy you derive" is actually a random variable, with very significant variance.
And that's just the food intake; just sitting in a cold room requires much more energy than sitting in a warm room; And consuming a liter of ice cold water actually costs you ~36 kcal after your body temperature renormalizes.
So, really, it's very broad strokes.
[0] https://qz.com/223742/there-is-a-secret-ingredient-in-your-b...
"Whole Food, Plant Based", for those who had to look it up like me.
I'm more of a "eat food, not too much, mostly plants" kind of guy, I'm not willing to give up meat, eggs and dairy. Which people have also been eating since forever.
But I agree that a lot of people are way over-complicating nutrition.
High fat / low carb foods are very hard to eat in large quantities, unless you pair them with sources of carbs (put the butter on bread, add BBQ sauce to fatty meat, etc). It's not just the caloric density, it's how much of it you can eat before you feel full.
And dieting is by definition a temporary thing to fix an issue, rather than actually changing eating patterns and content permanently.
People just generally don't want to do the hard slog (i.e. in permanently avoiding sugar and carbs), they want the short term 'fix,' hence 'dieting.'
So all the article is really saying is don't bother with the math, just eat mostly vegetables and you'll lose weight.
I found the combination of things I cut back on reduced cravings and overeating. I cooked a lot more, especially bean soups to take to work for lunch. That has other benefits since I work in the land of $11 sandwiches. I tracked my weight every few days with a fitness app, which, for me, helped prevent backsliding because seeing that trend line go in the wrong direction is very irritating.
I don't have experimental evidence but anecdata indicates cutting sugar and alcohol are are the low-hanging fruit (cut way back on fruit juice, too).
I did something very similar, then also dropped dairy and whoops some more pounds of body fat melted in the 6 months that followed.
I still put sour cream on roasted potatoes, though.
When people talk about a calorie-restriction diet, what they mean is you count the calories in every food, and then keep caloric intake below a certain level by intentionally eating less than your appetite desires.
In contrast, in this diet, people focused on eating the right foods, and ate as much as they wanted, and the reduction of calories was a consequence.
Exception: freshly baked baguette or ciabatta.
The danger with this approach is that the average Joe hears the message as "weight is not related to how much you eat (energy/quantity), but what you eat (quality)". That message is a public health danger, yet is becoming the prevailing sentiment for health magazines, supplement marketing, popular lifestyle shows etc.
Appetite and satiation are far more complex than just "eat until your full and then stop", for instance amensiac patients have been observed to eat waaay more than they should have just because they did remember eating (Rozin et al. (1998)), even they should have by all rights been physically full. There's whole layers of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral patterns with excess food consumption.
Personally, I have been able to effectively lose and keep off weight while still enjoying all manner of unnatural foods (Ice cream, McDonald's and candy, oh my).
Food choices became about avoiding "spending" my calories on "bad deals", avoiding foods which didn't promise enjoyment commensurate to their cost.
It's a clear public safety danger to imply the above are healthier than their processed counterparts, and my main beef is with the sensationalist title, that aims right at the "calories are a myth" bandwagon. The study itself is good, if it works, it works.
This page:
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...
has this sentence:
> There are many natural things that are better than unnatural, but they must be evaluated based on other criteria besides the “naturalness”.
which sums up the whole thing nicely.
Freezing and preservatives don't significantly alter nutritional value, and there exist low calorie frozen meals specifically formulated for dieters. Highly processed, but much healthier than some very natural wholesome steaks.
This is like saying the solution to addiction is to just stop doing drugs, but people are too incompetent and need magical solutions like rehab and maintenance drugs.
That a WFPB diet works better than calorie counting is old news (good to have yet another study confirming it).
http://www.wholefoodplantbasedrd.com/2014/04/with-wfpb-there...
https://nutritionfacts.org/2016/07/14/caloric-restriction-vs...
Maybe I missed it in the article but this just seems like calorie restriction to me. Its much harder to eat a large amount of calories if its just meat and vegetables.