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
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.
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.
> And for food we should try to focus on
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?
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.
[0]https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/05/1117402 [1]https://neurosciencenews.com/walking-cognition-20876/ [2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4915811/#:~:tex... [3]https://scitechdaily.com/researchers-discover-how-nearly-eve...
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.
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.
So it had to be smart with when to store energy and when to spend it.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experimen...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6082688/#:~:tex....
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.
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?
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.
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.
What fact? Where is this shown?
" 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.
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:
This whole subthread is pointless.
For the love of god, saying something self-contradictory is not "gas lighting".
"Daily movements" is incredibly broad and includes working out in the gym, it also includes walking, playing sport.
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.
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.
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:)
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/08/220815085707.h...
"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.
Atleast that is what I meant, thanks for the explanation.
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.”
Hope this clears things up.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/stop-counting....
""" "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
Did you watched youtube link provided? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWuKIlbybqY
Because after watching it, it makes allot of sense. And your points are all addressed there.
'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.
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.
'"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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3830935/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4044302/
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:
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/calorie-count... (Explains how to count)
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/counting-on-c... (Describes how many you probably need)
https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/dont-count-calorie... (This one says exactly what I say - they aren't the only thing that counts, but you still better are aware of them.)
https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/counting-calorie... (This one for whatever reason claims it keeps your heart young. I don't care enough to research that one)
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/simple-math-e... (And this one is so badly written and claims the exact opposite as far as I can tell, that I very much doubt this is a 'reputable source').
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.
that is incorrect, and shows that your level of understanding doesn't warrant the certainty of your comments about weight loss.
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.
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4044302/ 2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3830935/ 3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21311363/
Here research on the gut biome and link with food. 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6950569/ 2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5385025/ 3. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/10/study-finds-g...
This is what the lastest science is pointing to. We are currently in obesity epidemic, how long have we counting calories? Calories are measurement for steam engines. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and...
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.
The issue is that the links provided by first poster are advocating for such weight loss strategies. While they themselves are on steroids.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
On top of that, if eating for long enough your gut biome will change and you'll start craving whole food.
"yes, plain broccoli for the win"
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8371446/ [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21771989/ [3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30155857/
I'm astonished how many commenters are desperately 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.
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".
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?
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.
People are indeed different and the scientist you quote is saying precisely that.
Taken literally calories in vs out is of course true.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Not necessarily. In this case I think she is referring to calories that are not absorbed but are excreted.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/336656/9789...
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.
You do what works for you, others should do what works for them.
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.
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.
like most chores, it's not that fun, but the results make it worth it
I get a lot better results at helping people when I show them that health can actually be fun and easy.
I even like to cook, but most days it is simply a chore and not something I particularly want to do that day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/stop-counting....
""" "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. """
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.
The shape of the car, as a variable effecting the vehicle speed, does not make horsepower plain wrong.
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.
what does this even mean?
Here is a link to the metrics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicular_metrics
Here is video explaining why horsepower doesn't really make that much sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gC2-JKO0c2I
Just like calories, horsepower doesn't explain much.
But I´ll give her the benefit of a doubt that the quote is pulled from a larger reasoning.
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 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.
Modern man so screwed even if everything is done right.
If you're going to eat processed junk food, you should at least eat less of it. That's step 1.
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.
> https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/stop-counting...
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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/Kbogea/videos?view=0&sort=da&fl...
For people who want to become especially strong, specialized weights and machines become more important, but as a percentage of the population this group must be vanishingly small. The "do a little each day" thing certainly lends itself better to calisthenics, which can be performed almost anywhere, than to a gym.
I expect a typical person would have better luck doing body weight squats 5 days a week at home than trying to stick to a gym schedule to do barbell squats regularly.
I would think so too, but in practice it seems that gyms work for people because it's a whole function that's easy to compartmentalize unlike doing push-ups next to your bed. I think it's less mentally taxing.
e.g. I would wager that going to the gym to use the chest press machine is more realistic for most people than suddenly being able to do push-ups in their living room during a TV commercial or whatever.
These reflections come from my own experience trying to get friends to do body-weight exercises with me, and my own journey from going from a gym guy to the guy who is doing push-ups while waiting for my HEB steamables bag of edamame to cook in the microwave. For various reasons due to, I think, our human nature, the latter is a lot harder and requires more personal transformation. Doesn't seem like it should be though.
I think one way to begin thinking about this is: to everyone in these comments who is supposedly very opinionated on exercise and health, what stopped you from doing 20 push-ups on your apartment floor today? We have all sorts of reasons.
exaggerated disfunctional super strength is not the only goal in fitness. That guy has good legs, and likely much better endurance than those who are focused on weighted squats.
Body-weight squats, lunges, and Bulgarian squats are part of any normal body-weight routine. On the other hand, "skipping leg day" is not a meme that targets calisthenics but all guys who work out in general because the legs aren't as visible/vain as arms.
As I said, still in Alpha, but I'm always happy for constructive feedback.
Corporate added a morning stretch routine on our factory signage and I had to point out we had to be SUPER conservative on the stretches we had people do because making it a corporate thing meant we took on a ton of liability.
As a new (but middle aged) CS student I think this could be a fun way to encourage my fellow students and myself to exercise more between study sessions.
It's a bit of a PR problem to say positive things about them, and it feels. The consensus, the one we get to hear, is pretty clear: they work very well, but they have side effects that make using them a bad idea. And I actually trust this consensus.
Unfortunately, what I don't see is obvious next steps like "ok, so how about we lower the dose and see if there's a useful dosage without long term side-effects". Or "how about we try to test if a certain person has risk factors to side effects" and so on. That kind of conversation is unfortunately... well, not verbotten, but at least self-censored.
Anyways, this is just intellectual curiosity. I'm not into bodybuilding enough to try, and tbh I actually doubt they're using it either. It'd be too much like cheating - the whole point is to find out what works, and everybody knows steroids work so there's nothing to find out there.
But selling programs based on pictures that have been achieved with steroids is not helpful for getting people to optimal health.
Some of the people behind linked programs even have life altering injuries from the strain of working out with steroids.
The original article is about daily exercise.
The issue with steroids is that they can alter your body organs permanently.
https://nida.nih.gov/publications/research-reports/steroids-...
" Cardiovascular system
high blood pressure
blood clots
heart attacks
stroke
artery damageMen
decreased sperm production
enlarged breasts
shrinking of the testicles
male-pattern baldness
testicular cancer
voice deepening
decreased breast size
coarse skin
excessive body hair growth
male-pattern baldness
"But since you changed the topic, just for fun and the sake of the conversation. From your link:
> A variety of side effects can occur when anabolic steroids are misused, ranging from mild effects to ones that are harmful or even life-threatening. Most are reversible if the user stops taking the drugs. However, others may be permanent or semi-permanent.
This can actually apply to a wide variety of things. Remember all the drug scare about "drug abuse"? It's technically true - you can abuse most recreational drugs, including cannabis, and you can definitely fuck up your life on meth. And yet now, 10-20 years later, we have cannabis cookies free for sale, and quite a lot of ADHD people medicating themselves quite successfully with Adderall. There's a big difference between use, misuse and abuse.
Part of my (very idle and intellectual) curiosity is if steroids can be used safely. My instincts say "yes, probably, but no idea how". The people in the list above pretty uniformly say "no". Which is why I was hoping you'd point me to different opinions.
That is great example you found, there way more. Because creatine is one of most research supplement. It is safe with clear benefits[0]. Since they are using steroids they might miss the clear effects of creatine and are giving information that is incorrect and therefor harmful. What science is actually saying that creatine is safe and can not only help with muscles it can also help with brain performance[1].
> Creatine is one of the most popular nutritional ergogenic aids for athletes. Studies have consistently shown that creatine supplementation increases intramuscular creatine concentrations which may help explain the observed improvements in high intensity exercise performance leading to greater training adaptations. In addition to athletic and exercise improvement, research has shown that creatine supplementation may enhance post-exercise recovery, injury prevention, thermoregulation, rehabilitation, and concussion and/or spinal cord neuroprotection. Additionally, a number of clinical applications of creatine supplementation have been studied involving neurodegenerative diseases (e.g., muscular dystrophy, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s disease), diabetes, osteoarthritis, fibromyalgia, aging, brain and heart ischemia, adolescent depression, and pregnancy. These studies provide a large body of evidence that creatine can not only improve exercise performance, but can play a role in preventing and/or reducing the severity of injury, enhancing rehabilitation from injuries, and helping athletes tolerate heavy training loads. Additionally, researchers have identified a number of potentially beneficial clinical uses of creatine supplementation.
For almost anyone that is not training hard their body is still in what is called the nooby phase, where incredible growth in power, size, endurance can happen. After 1 of 2 years of training this will stop however and gains will be become more difficult. Within that period anyone can get the feeling as if they are taking steroids.
unto your question: > Part of my (very idle and intellectual) curiosity is if steroids can be used safely If you are able to source Medical grade steroids, from reputable sellers. And you have health professionals, and doing regular blood work. Then yes it can be safely done. And you'll need good sporting coach to make sure you won't strain your joints too much.
Many athletes take them without the above, because their livelihood depends on it. But there are young people dying because they buy programs that only work for enhanced people. And they are failing to progress with that program and start using weird pills from the internet that are containing many weird substances. You don't know what you are going to get. And with drugs you can at least feel the effects, but can't feel the difference between different steroids or other molecules interacting with your organs.
[0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5469049/ [1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1691485/
Steroids a fact of life in strength sports and not even really considered cheating, as long as you compete in "untested" divisions. Training for a top-level competition is not the same as exercising for health, even if you don't take PEDs. The people doing it consider it an acceptable tradeoff.
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.
Which one of the linked resources is doing that? The deception part, I mean.
naturals shouldn't take advice from people that juiced up. The amount of volume they can do bizarre, and way more then naturals can do. The wear and tear on the ligaments, joints and spine is dangerous.
It's even dangerous for them, at least one of them got very badly hurt.
The result is that as far as I can tell, the last 20 years of research has given us most of the results we know. It's really a burgeoning field.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC68TLK0mAEzUyHx5x5k-S1Q
He's a bodybuilder/powerlifter/coach with a focus on evidence-based exercise and diet advice. I've heard him cite people like Mike Israetel and the MASS report at https://www.strongerbyscience.com/mass/
I like that his videos tend to be concise, and he does a good job of being clear about which of his recommendations are backed up by research and which are opinions based on his personal experience/preferences.
Mind Pump: https://youtube.com/c/MindPumpClips Jeremy Ethier: https://youtube.com/c/JeremyEthier
This video on counteracting the myriad harms from excessive sitting is particularly relevant to the HN audience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqcOCBb4arc
For a few bucks a month you get articles by several of the people you mentioned, Alan, and others that evaluate public research on nutrition and training.
just remember to stretch too :)
A few names/links, pick and mix as you will - they're all good:
https://mennohenselmans.com/high-resistance-training-frequen...
http://www.lookgreatnaked.com/fitness_articles_by_brad_schoe...
https://macrofactorapp.com/articles/
https://rpstrength.com/team-member/mike-israetel-phd
Probably not the best links for each, but it's morning and I got work to do. Should be enough to get you started tho.