"I hate that" people think calories and weight is the primary gauge of health.

It's true weight is very often a negative health indicator because of the toxic nature of the diet that results in weight gain. However, losing weight is not always a sign of being more healthy.

Shutting down your liver, clogging your arteries, and generally filling your soft tissue and fat storage with toxins is not healthy even if you appear to be losing weight.

While true, I think this sentiment is vastly overstated. For the typical American eating the typical American diet, obesity is one of the biggest risks. It's right up there with smoking, except smoking is getting less popular and obesity is getting more popular.

Let's clear one thing up first: aside from a few issues like joint stress, it's not weight in general that's the problem; it's body fat. If you're a power athlete with significant muscle mass, you're going to be able to carry a lot of weight and still be perfectly healthy as long as it's lean weight. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson shouldn't worry about his weight, despite having a BMI that's technically in the obese category. If you have a high weight for your height and you don't look like a professional wrestler, you should definitely be concerned about your weight.

Aside from the problems caused directly by excess body fat, carrying around excess body fat also makes it far more difficult and far riskier to exercise, which means all your other health indicators are going to go down south. Even mental health is pretty strongly influenced by exercise. Also, excess body fat is a far more difficult problem to solve.

> problems caused directly by excess body fat

I would say this is putting the cart before the horse. It's not excess body fat that is the source of health problems. It's the lifestyle (diet and movement) that leads to excess body fat (as one of the many symptoms of growing health problems) from choices.

In other words, baldness, obesity, sluggishness, headaches, etc... are not the source of health problems - they are the symptoms.

Visceral fat is a pretty significant source of health problems.

The Rock should absolutely be worried about his health, specifically his endocrine system as it is physiologically supranormal because of the cocktail of drugs he is undoubtedly on.

The doctor who does my physicals commented that he considers weight to be maybe the fourth or fifth thing he looks at when considering your basic health. Being overweight is bad, but because it's so overemphasized (and so easy to see), people ignore some things that should go in front of it.

(Though one imagines that if one is not willing to change one's diet or exercise habits to lose weight, the odds of them willing to do it to lower blood pressure or other such indicators seems low too.)

The McDouble/hamburger diet is a legitimate diet. You can dial in exactly how many calories you're eating.

To prove a point a few years back, I ate nothing but pizza and diet Pepsi for several weeks and lost weight. 2 supermarket pizzas was something like 1800 calories.

==To prove a point a few years back, I ate nothing but pizza and diet Pepsi for several weeks and lost weight.==

What point did this prove? Weight is hardly the sole determinant of health.

Pretty sure that was the point he was proving. You can eat only unhealthy foods and lose weight.

As someone who would like to lose about 50lbs I have a lot of questions. Mostly I'd like to know how you determined your resting metabolic rate. I've started working out a little and adjusted my diet a lot but I kinda feel like I'm fumbling around in the dark.

I lost about 60 lbs on Phentermine, then gained 10 lbs back, then lost about 15 lbs just dieting, and then gained about 10 lbs back.

Phentermine made it a lot easier because I didn't feel hungry, even when I was. But other than that, the same techniques applied: I used a calorie counter and tried to stick to the recommendation that it gave.

After using it a month or 2, I realized that its numbers were slightly high for me, and cut my max allowed calories a little further and started losing weight.

If you're wondering what your number is, the easiest way is probably just to follow what some tool tells you (I used Weight Watchers, then SparkPeople) and adjust the calories according to whether you are losing weight or not.

One caution: There is a rather large gap where you go from gaining weight to maintaining weight to losing weight. The area where you maintain weight is pretty broad. Finding that area is the first step, then slowly removing some calories until you start losing is the key, IMO. If you go too fast, you might remove too many calories and actually make it harder to lose weight than it should be. Your body will try to compensate for lack of calories.

I've lost weight many times without any exercise. The formula was pretty simple for me:

1) Eat on regular intervals. Don't starve yourself, but don't overeat. Typically you stop while you are a tiny bit hungry. The body is a bit slow on registering that you've had enough.

2) Cut out all sugary stuff, chocolate, ice cream, candy.

If you live in the US, it might be harder. My experience from living in the US was that it was hard to stay healthy there because 1) Almost all food contains some sugar 2) Served portions are usually way too large. And you buy things in too large quantities.

This means you might have to focus on cooking food from scratch at home to avoid the added sugar, and getting too large portions.

Don't cook larger portions to have left overs for later. You'll just eat more.

But if you are like me and can't be bothered to make food yourself, then buy EXPENSIVE food. This sounds silly but the thing is that when you buy cheap food, it doesn't taste well unless it is unhealthy.

Healthy food that tastes good is often expensive food. If you go to nice restaurants you tend to get smaller and healthier portions.

I waste a lot of money on food this way but it is just a trade off I've made. I rather waste money than get more unhealthy.

Don't worry about any of that. Do this diet: no sugar, no grains. That's it. Eat as much of everything else as you want. Watch the pounds melt.

That will definitely work, but there must be some other factor at play. There are plenty of populations in the world that consume a lot of grain but do not necessarily suffer from increased rates of obesity.

They probably have cultures of smaller portions, less processed food, and less added sugar (especially drinks). Example: compare the size of a Japanese mosburger with a burger & fries meal in the US:

http://www.thetraveltester.com/wp-content/uploads/mos-burger...

When you meet foreign travelers, ask them what they think about US serving sizes. Many of them find it shocking.

The more you can integrate moderate physical activity into your daily routine as a matter of getting things done rather than as a specific chore you have to do, the better. Cutting sugar consumption should also help. I'd start there and see what happens.

You can find online calculator to have an estimation of your metabolic rate. From there, subtract 500 kcal and count all the calories to eat everyday to make sure you're below your limite. A popular calories counting app is "fitness pal".