The discussion around _quality_ of calories, the mix of macronutrients for performance, etc is an entire separate can of worms.

(Cribbed from my post above:)

THE BEST DIET to lose weight is about psychology 80% and nutrition 20%. Most of the value you're going to get by keeping your weekly calories low. You can try variations of macronutrients, meal timing and frequency, voodoo, etc. but the best one is the one you stick with, and can stick with long enough to reach your goals.

Maybe you'll need to think about essential minerals and nutrients if you're trying something really really extreme. But with even minimal variety you should be good.

On your latter point my wife opened that can of worms in the run up to her first competiton and it got complicated!

1) People who don't manage their nutrition and maintain a healthy weight

2) People who manage their nutrition and maintain a healthy weight

3) People who don't manage their nutrition and have uncontrollable weight gain

Yes, if everyone who is (3) started going to the gym and counting calories as (2) do, then they would have an easier time maintaining a healthy weight. But most people can't do that. I can't do that for more than like a week at a time, but it doesn't matter because I'm a (1).

Why are (1) and (3) different? This has nothing to do with self-control or willpower. There's something off in (3)'s biological systems that calibrate their intake of food. The slightest caloric surplus leads to substantial weight gain over time. This question could occupy an army of scientists for decades, but the stigma against fat people has done serious damage to this very important medical research.

Then, we can say there is a difference between (3) and (4) and attribute it to biology instead of diet.

"If you make more money than you spend, you will have a lot of money!"

That statement is tautological, and obvious. But it doesn't address how to become rich.

Now let's compare.

"If you eat more calories than you expend, you will gain weight"

Again, this is likely true, but just very very incomplete. It doesn't attempt to truly get at the why. There are a few hypotheses for why CICO often does such a poor job at explaining the obesity epidemic. The two pieces I find most convincing are (1) there is some metabolic advantage based on the types of foods you eat, and (2) some of the calories out are excreted via waste and not processed by the body, and therefore, the simple CICO equation isn't complex enough.

What CICO does not explain is why people are so different regarding their appetites, nor how can we teach ourselves impulse control. This is where various low-X diets become relevant, and it's how we get these diet holly wars with people swearing by the one diet that helped them get CI under control, without turning them into zombies incapable of CO.

(BTW, my weapon of choice is old school: low on fat except essential fats, balanced on slow release carbs, high on protein)

CICO doesn't explain why people are consuming so much more than they expend, but it does seem that CICO explain the obesity epidemic.

Eat less calories than you consume on a consistent basis and you will lose weight. And no, I don't think that's actually as hard to do as most people make it out to be.

What is hard to do is to resist the alluring promise of quick results.

Where most people seem to mess up is in getting lost in the noise and losing the signal. This causes them to pursue esoteric approaches to diet that are unlikely to work in the long-run. Part of this comes from our desire for quick results. Unfortunately, I don't think quick results work for weight loss.

I think sustainable weight loss takes so long to achieve that you're going to be unlikely to notice much difference, nor will anyone else. Maybe people who haven't seen you in the last year or two will notice, but not many others.

I have a genetic disorder. The standard medical advice is to eat a high fat, high calorie, high salt diet to accommodate my disorder. They routinely recommend "junk food" to fit those parameters.

I went the opposite direction. I got really fanatical about what kind of fats I eat, the quality of the salt I consume and other details.

Over time, I shed a lot of weight without intending to and without counting calories. So I think, yes, for some portion of the population, it's absolutely more complicated than "calories in, calories out." And for those folks who have struggled with their weight and just can't seem to lose, they are very much in need of some new hypothesis that might solve their seemingly unsolvable conundrum.

That is, if nothing else kills you first, you will get diabetes. At least, is the impression I've been led to believe from research and multiple physicians. If that's the case, then one must ask, "What's the most effective way of avoiding this?", and avoiding carbohydrates as much as possible sums that up well. It seems to completely drop the growth of diabetic symptoms to near-nonexistence, which seems to suggest that it might be superior for that range of diseases at least.

Diabetes, as a disease, is the breakdown of the process of your body using insulin. This happens naturally, in everyone, but happens at an increased rate when people have foods high in carbohydrates.

So the comment that people are guaranteed is to say, "If we all lived 300 years, you'd eventually have diabetes", not that everyone gets it, period.

People don’t live longer now, there are just more people who live to their full life span. Back when diabetes was unheard of, there were plenty of people who lived until 80. None of them died of complications related to diabetes.

If the time horizon is over 100 years for some people then it’s not really meaningful.

For this to be true, it would have to be true that the millions of people struggling with weight, and the tens of thousands of researchers in the field, are all simply idiots who are not as smart as you.

The people who say "Calories In < Calories Out, it's simple" are about as helpful as the client or exec who says "It's just code, change the code and don't write as many bugs. It's simple"

There's no need to leap to 'idiocy', it could mean the people struggling with weight have either poor willpower, or honestly don't know how to eat well. You can see this by watching shows like 'Secret Eaters' and seeing how incredibly common it is that people are over-eating and just don't realise it.

And researchers will research wherever there's funding/academic opportunity.

Clearly a lot of factors have changed in 100 years, like our now abundant, convenient sources of calorie-dense food, and sedentary lifestyles, which mean our knowledge and willpower are now more significant than they were then.

Peer pressure and advertising allow for many other possible explanations.

One thing I thought Taubes did a good job of was illustrating the relationship between calories in and calories out: your body will burn more calories when it has them, and less when it doesn't. You will be hungrier when you burn more calories, and less hungry when you don't. Calories in isn't just a knob you can adjust without consequence, your body is complicated.

My concern is that while the obesity problem is getting worse we are looking for more and more complex reasons when in reality most people consume more calories than they require.

However if you are not then nutrition plays a key role and not all calories are equal on a macro level, and more importantly more and more it seems that there are better and worse combinations of calories.

People that cut out carbs experience a lowered appetite, more stable blood sugar levels and are less likely to accumulate fat as their main energy cycle will be either ketogenesis or glucogensis depending on the fat to protein ratio they consume on a low carb diet, with Keto seem to be the most effective at maintaining lean body mass.

Now are there long term negative effects of such diets? maybe, are there better diets? also maybe.. I was also very skeptical about this until I tried both a ketogenic and carnivore style diets and despite consuming 2800 kcal a day (I’m only 181cm) I’ve seen very impressive results. And don’t get me wrong I was and am still active mainly running and with the exclusion of a 2 week set back when I tried Keto in both cases my running performance was better at the end than on a balanced diet with pre-run carb loading.

It's just extremely hard to properly track what you're eating if you're unwilling to pay attention to it, which I don't blame people for.

There's so many calorie dense foods because we wind up adding sugar and oil to so many things when we process them and you don't even realize how many calories you're bringing in.

It ain't easy out there!

I’m keen not to blame people for their weight, I’m keen to make sure we are researching the right problem. I think the “how to control weight” is solved, the harder problem, as I mentioned in a previous comment above, is how do me help people control the appetite and impulses to stand a fighting chance.

Yes, he can handle a 3500 Cal/day diet with his activity level. Maybe you only need 1500-2000 (like most people in the first world not working manual labor jobs). Okay, so if you're gaining weight, it's because of metabolic processes adding to your body mass. This is one of two things: building muscle, or storing fat (adding bone is pretty minimal, and likely going to be strongly correlated with activity that builds muscle, so we'll just ignore it)

If you're building muscle, it's because your body is taking in more materials (especially proteins) and using them to repair tears to your muscular system due to activity/damage than it is eliminating through use. If you're storing fat, it's because your body is taking in more materials (typically carbs/fats) and storing them in your body in case you need them later than it is eliminating through use.

It's always because you take in more than you use. And weight loss is the opposite.

It's that simple. Whether you eat all carbs or 0 carbs, weigh 100LB or 400 LB, lay in bed 24 hours a day or move constantly, it's a very simple mechanism for what causes obesity. Calorie surplus = storage. Calorie defect = weight loss.

We also need to understand if there are reasons for far occumulation other than simply excess calories. Fat is an organ it is connected to the nervous system and it stores a lot of crap in it, now does your body accumulate fat to protect it self from junk you eat I’m not sure it’s that simple but obesity is a real problem and we need to find a solution for it which is more nuanced than eat less and excercise because at least to me it seems like a far more complicated issue.

"Health" and "wellness" and "obesity" are all 3 completely different things. You can lose weight in healthy and unhealthy ways. You can gain weight in healthy and unhealthy ways.

Without getting into fad diets' actual biological effects(keto, atkins, whatever the flavor of the week "high fat/protien low carb" diet is) people who are on diets are paying more attention to how they eat than people who aren't on a diet. There's so many confounding factors, plus just people saying "I feel like i'm healthier!" just because they're on a diet. It's a mix of "doing better things than you were doing", your body adapting to a new mix of macros, and placebo affect more often than not.

I run about 80KM a week, I used to have a very well balanced diet with carb loading before long runs.

I first tried a carnivore diet as a joke to tease a friend that was going vegan because of his then new boyfriend and while I’ve seen good results I had blood sugar spikes because of the high protien intake and my lean body mass flactuated quite a bit.

I’ve then tried Keto and for me it worked, my performance and overall endurance improved my blood sugar is now constantly in the range of 4.3-4.7 mol with the lower being just after excercise which is honestly very good for me considering that while eating carbs it did jump to above 7 after a carb loading meal.

Lean body mass has also increased considerably I’ve dropped from 21% body fat to 13% over a period of 14 months while maintaining the same level of activity as I have had for the past decade.

Again n=1 but I’ve seen enough anecdotal evidence and more importantly actual research to think that there is something there.

And that is the whole point it isn’t that simple and there needs to be much more research into this hopefully without commercial interests butting in.

Here's my specific points

1- In many parts of the developed world where food scarcity has been minimized/eliminated, we see increased rates of obesity across all demographics. This is a messy knot of factors that covers everything from social behaviors to availability of nutritious food to education and wealth. If you're going to tackle "why are people so much more likely to be obese than before?" you have a TON of factors to attempt to control for in the decision making. 2- If you're not trying to figure out why people are making their choices, and looking at it from a strictly "how does the body work and is that contributing" the simple answer is: your body more readily converts various carbs into body fat than any other macros (Protein, Lipids, Alcohol), people eat a lot of carbs, and finally most people tend to overeat if presented with more food than they actually need. This is the basic scientific consensus, and explains why your experience with a keto diet was positive. The issue is, as you said, that people are interested in selling meal packages and books and lifestyles and generally getting rich off other people's body image issues/health problems. Carbs play a part of in the obesity spike in recent years, but WHY people eat the way they do is what we need to figure out if we want to solve things.

People also tend to overestimate how much calories they consume a day when you average it out over a period of time.

You can have days with 4500 kcal and days with 2500 kcal.

So if you reduce your caloric intake but your body reacts with a reduction in basic metabolism or more aggressive storage of fat, then total weight may not go down. In addition this response mechanism is different for different people.

I think calories in calories out affects weight, the macro breakdown affects the type of weight lost (as in muscle vs fat)

The conversation is about translating "less calories" into a list of foods to eat and schedule to eat them. When you design such a schedule you must address things such as the person's health and well being, energy levels, feasibility and convenience, cost, and difficulty of commitment.

So when you say just eat "less calories" you've stated the obvious and left the actual question as an exercise to the reader. Nutrition is trying to answer that question.

What's not OK is to then proclaim "Calorie counting does not work". The nutrition gurus might understand that figuratively, "calorie counting is an impractical weight loss method for most people that lack the self discipline it requires long term".

But when the general public is exposed to these ideas, the takeaway is magical thinking, "bad" calories you cannot touch versus "good" calories that you can gorge on. It's something very satisfying to believe, it's a shortcut. It's not my fault and my choices, it's industry X that is making all of us fat. It's an "epidemic".

When someone is overweight and they say calorie counting doesn't work that mean it really doesn't work. They're not saying they do it perfectly with no results. They're saying that they can't stick with it. Then they try a "fad diet" and suddenly they are eating less calories but they no longer get overwhelming cravings or feel drained.

I think we need more fad diets to get people to try different things because so far we haven't made any progress on the perfect weight loss "just eat less" plan. The more diets we have the more likely someone is to try something and find something that works for them.

It's literally true in the way intervention effectiveness is usually measured, as imperfect execution is included as a source of failure.

Ultimately it’s a question of my body. I am hyper sensitive to sugar. If I eat sugar I build fat with it. Good for not starving during European winters, bad for American summers for a geek in front of a computer all day.