People seem to desperately want some trick to losing weight that isn’t “eat less food.” It won’t be forthcoming. You can’t trick your body into losing weight. We are adapted to scarcity, but food is not scarce.
"good advice" - Advice that actually works, and makes the person like you more
"bad advice" - Advice that doesn't help the person and makes the person like you less.
"Eat less food" would fall in the latter category, pretty obviously.
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"Everybody should have infinite self control" is an obscenely naive starting point that erases the whole practical problem. The practical problem is "What habits require the minimum amount of self-control/unpleasantness to get the results I desire"?
If I were asked, i’d say that all diets that produce a calorie deficit are similarly effective and to try different things until you hit on the plan you can see yourself following for the rest of your life (at maintenance calories). Lots of people lose weight, maintaining is the biggest challenge.
Until they do they are susceptible to many get rich (or slim) quick schemes and dreaming they can eat their cake and have it too.
You may go into details once you firmly internalize the base. Not before.
As an advice, it is most common and there are no promissing long term weight loss results of it.
I suspect that this is largely because for the average person, the majority of their physical activity is a response to the physical organization of their environment rather than a specific lifestyle choice. We've spent the past ~70 years filling America with places where not only does one need to deliberately seek out excuses to physically move, economic and infrastructure factors might also demand that one spend upwards of an hour per day sitting in a motor vehicle.
Not many understand what causes weight gain and weight loss. As evidenced by my massive amount of downvotes.
When I began Keto, several intelligent and well-meaning friend made that exact same comment. A year later they are asking me what is the best way to start and stay on keto ;)
Genetics and medication might affect your appetite, metabolism, water retention levels, fat storage areas, ect., but at the end of the day one only needs to know one number and follow one rule to lose fat:
Number: Daily caloric expenditure
Rule: Consume items with fewer total calories than the above number
Measure weekly for best results.
Daily caloric expenditure can be approximated with heart rate data over a day and your height & weight.
The exact weight lost if it's only fat will be 1lb per 3500 kcal deficit.
You must consume 2g of protein daily per lb of muscle (approximating this requires calipers) to not lose muscle mass.
Water weight will vary, but over a week the number ought to go down if you're eating at an actual deficit.
You'll see the results in the mirror after a month if you actually do the above.
Of course. And your body is a dynamic system that changes how and where it uses and stores energy based on the source of the energy. Your body responds differently to 100 calories of table sugar compared to 100 calories of nuts.
I _lost_ weight by increasing the amount of food I was eating. Obviously this means that I had to start burning or otherwise shedding more calories otherwise we broke physics. It is important to note that "losing weight is just consuming fewer calories than you burn" is not the same as "eat less and you'll lose weight" since eating less can cause your dynamic system to require less calories.
A lot of people consumed more calories in their 20s and 30s than later in life. Yet in their 40s and 50s they gain weight, with the same sedentary lifestyle or even after taking up a sport.
Something is missing in your equation ...
... Then all changed very abruptly (there was little transition, on the order of weeks). Basically had to get used to being hungry most of the time, to keep from shooting toward obese territory. Sucks. I mean, the stuff I was eating as a teenager was going to kill me early in life anyway so it's good I don't do that anymore (so much pizza, snack food, fried food, and soda) but I'm not sure I appreciated, at the time, how special it was to be able to down a large pizza, a couple orders of fries, a couple liters of soda, a bag of chips [edit: and not a single-serve bag...], a snickers, plus a pile of toast or eggo waffles, day after day after day, and still look quite good at the swimming pool.
But we apparently pretend this isn't true because it's unscientific, 3500 calories in a pound, and all that.
There are a large number of factors that go into some people seeming to be able to eat large numbers of calories while others can't despite similar expenditures that we're still figuring out, but if you want a 100% guaranteed way to lose weight it is this: track your calories and make sure you eat fewer than you expend. If you want to keep it off, don't eat more than you expend.
Source: lost >150lbs and kept it off until this pandemic fiasco where I put about 30 of it back on.
As noted by others, this is simple. It is not necessarily easy. We're still working on figuring out why some people find it easy and others don't. Gut microbiome science seems promising.
Also, metabolic rate slows down with age.
But the equation is the same: calories in - calories out = calories kept.
Calories in vs calories out is nothing more than the second law of thermodynamics.
Satiation is how you feel... It might change your ability to regulate how much you consume, but it doesn't change how much you gain or lose weight, because all calories are equal. 900 satiating calories add up just the same as 900 empty calories.
It is rather like saying E=MC^2 is good diet advice.
That's not to say CICO isn't true, but trying to link it to base physics is a red herring.
"As much"? Are you joking? This is why America is overly obese. So many people like you make weight loss seem so complicated when it's not.
CICO is the vast vast vast vast vast majority of the situation. You can completely ignore hormones and such and JUST pay attention to CICO and you'll lose weight 99.9% of the time.
Here’s an article on keto from a medical journal https://www.atherosclerosis-journal.com/article/S0021-9150(1...
Even the experts debating here aren’t contesting the role of insulin in weight loss, but rather the secondary effects like those on LDL. Here in turn is a talk by a doctor from UC Berkeley explaining more about that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gZt9DQqtZI&t=217s
From what I can tell, the sole focus on calories is the result of early misunderstandings and oversimplification of biochemistry in 1980s nutritional science.
Anecdotally, I did a 3 month experiment where I increased my calories (lots of olive oil, avocado, nuts, butter, etc) but consuming almost no carbs (and mostly carbs from vegetables) and I lost 8 notches off my belt.
LDL cholesterol levels have nothing to do with weight loss. They have everything to do with how healthy you are.
Separating the two is extremely important when educating the masses, and most people, like you, refuse to do so. That is why I used capital letters. Not because I'm close minded.
When you separate the two, you are able to have people understand why certain diets work, and why they might not work. You can't just do Keto, for example, and expect to lose weight if you eat 3000 calories of chicken a day. (I'm just using Keto as an example, regardless of it's health benefits).
Then diets are easily understood. You have two parts:
Part 1: How do I lose weight? Consume fewer calories than I burn.
Part 2: How do I be healthy while losing weight and beyond? [insert whatever research you have]
Right now, people advocate mostly for Part 2. Then people trying to lose weight are confused when they don't and give up.
> Anecdotally, I did a 3 month experiment where I increased my calories (lots of olive oil, avocado, nuts, butter, etc) but consuming almost no carbs (and mostly carbs from vegetables) and I lost 8 notches off my belt.
Congrats, you consumed fewer calories than you burned.
No you didn't, unless you increased exercise or were already losing weight. You can not lose weight without being at a calorie deficit. Did you even count those calories before and after?
> Keto is explicitly not a calorie-based approach.
Neither are most diets. They all try to do the same thing: hope the person ends up eating fewer calories than they burn.
Keto helps people stay full with fewer calories. Intermittent fasting hopes that the person doesn't eat more calories in the short period of time they're allowed to eat.
Remaining fully sedentary and running a 1000 calorie deficit isn't maintaining a diet, it's starving yourself. You'll get the weight back as soon as you call the diet a success and go back to your 'default' lifestyle.
(This of course doesn't apply to everyone: medical reasons, disability, etc.)
Calories are calories. There are other mechanisms involved as far as general health and satiety, but at the end of the day CICO is king.
So I think they'd have the same effect for weight loss, but maybe not health, and probably not quality of life (I think the person eating candy bars would feel pretty lousy).
You can look up stories of people losing weight by counting calories and eating nothing but candy bars.
I'm not and have never said that if two people eat the same amount, it'll impact them the same.
I said that you need to burn more calories than you consume.
I don't know if either is false/true, but its interesting to consider. Maybe someone from that domain can shed some light. Happy to look at anything you or others link to.
What I'm trying to say is that trying to change your BMR through some diet is a fool's errand. Just figure out your BMR and consume fewer calories than that. It's very very simple (though I won't say it's easy).
That's basically how low-carb works for me, if I eat fewer carbs I'm less hungry and miserable all the time so I eat less calories too.
I CLEARLY meant, all activities the same, 2000 calories is 2000 calories. I even mentioned that you'll feel like shit just eating chocolate. What more do you people want from me?
> It's easy to see how drinking more water falls into all of this.
If you are 800 calories, and burnt 1100, you would lose weight slower than if you ate 900 and burnt 1300.
Any diet advice or strategies are just ways to achieve that. Keto, low carb, intermittent fasting, whatever. It's all just getting you to consume fewer calories than you burn. Often it gets you to feel full with fewer calories so you don't overeat. It's easy to see how drinking more water falls into all of this.
However, anything claiming to switch around body chemistry or change your metabolism is either wrong or micro optimizing.
Edit: People are getting very hyped up about my comment. To be clear:
- I'm not hating on the article. I said in my post that it's easy to see how drinking water helps when you understand what causes weight changes.
- I'm not hating on Keto and Intermittent fasting or whatever. They work, and they largely work because you end up consuming fewer calories than you burn. It's not largely because of some change in your body's chemistry.
- It's harder to lose weight eating shittier food because it often doesn't make you full, causing you to eat more. Eating 1200 calories of chocolate bars a day will (often for most people) make you lose weight, it just won't feel very good doing it. That's why what you eat is just as important as how many calories you consume.