I have a roommate who drinks fat-free milk and eats lots of salad and pasta, who avoids meat like the plague. He's been struggling with his weight for as long as I've known him. I drink coconut milk -- which contains nothing but fat -- and a meal usually consists of some randomly selected fatty cut of meat and vegetables fried in the drippings. That, or cheap canned fish. I lost weight eating like this. I fit in skinny jeans. I may with luck convince my almost-girlfriend to peg me. :3
But the important thing -- I don't advertise. I am not a walking bulletin of the health benefits of coconut and sardines. How do you really know about the diets of the people around you? I would say there are maybe four or five people around me whose diets I actually know well enough to analyze in any reasonable way.
Case A is a twenty-two year old recent Caltech graduate who is obsessed with freerunning and eats nearly-strict paleo. He can do a backflip. No further comments. We grew up together.
Case B is my roommate. He follows all the conventional advice to a T -- chicken, fish, whole grain, salad. Lots of "health food" products. Y'know, healthiest potato chips on the shelf. There is bread, there is soybean oil mayonnaise. It... doesn't seem to be working.
Case C is another good friend of mine. Eats a lot of processed cheap stuff; he's the sort that'll buy three pounds of animal crackers. When I first met him he was rather obese and said he was try'na learn to eat vegetables. He lost a lot of weight after we introduced him to ecstasy... and he's been eating healthier too. He's sloowly coming around; one of his recent facebook statuses involved making hard-boiled eggs. He looks better and seems happy. Score 281,443 for MDMA.
Case D is me. I'm kind of a dick, judging people like this. People who I like. I don't really know any other way to be honest about how I make decisions, though.
When I was eleven my parents tried to force me to switch from whole milk to 2%. I responded by walking two miles to the gas station to buy milk. I'm the only kid in my family who never had weight problems growing up.
Eyes optional.
This really sounds to me like there are great differences in metabolism person to person.
I have always been skinny, and I eat a lot of whatever. I don't exercise much. I know people who are "big", but eat less than I do.
BBC did a documentary where two friends, one skinny and one fat, swore the difference was due to metabolism, that the skinny one ate a lot and the fat one didn't. They tested it and found out that the fat one used more calories than the thin one, but also took a lot more calories per day.
Your metabolism also slows noticeably as you get older. In my 20s I could eat anything (and lots of it) without being able to gain any weight. Now in my 40s I have to lift weights (to increase metabolism) and watch what I eat to stop putting on fat.
And the difference between the top 5% and bottom 5% of the outliers was around 30% (which means for a 2000kcal average BMR, the bottom needed only 1700 and top 2300). This, in my opinion, is not enough for people to tout slow/fast metabolism for weight gain/loss as most people won't fall into the top/bottom 5%.
Edit: for reference 300kcal is about what you'd burn off with a 4 kilometer run.
What I'm saying is that I really doubt the most of the people that are overweight/obese are eating according to what a BMR calculator says and because of slow metabolism they are getting fat. Also, body uses more kcals per day than BMR, you also have to take in account the activities per day.
Using Harris Benedict formula:
If you are sedentary (little or no exercise) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.2
If you are lightly active (light exercise/sports 1-3 days/week) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.375
If you are moderatetely active (moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days/week) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.55
If you are very active (hard exercise/sports 6-7 days a week) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.725
If you are extra active (very hard exercise/sports & physical job or 2x training) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.9
The thing is, most (and I know this is pure observational) people I know that are overweight/obese either underreport calories (they say they eat just a salad, but forget the 5 table spoons of dressing/olive oil they season it with) and over report activity levels (jogging is not moderate exercise!).
I know it isn't data, but my mother and my mother in law are some of the people that most annoys me related to this. They swear they don't eat treats (I see them eating on average 2-3 cake slices or ice creams per week) and they say they only dine salad (but include 2 loafs of bread and a lot of oil based seasonings) and complain they don't lose weight. And this is what I see in about 90% of the people I know that are overweight. Maybe it is cognitive dissonance/bias but some people just believe they can't lose weight, so they bend the truth to support that idea.
ps: sorry to be such a 'asshole' related to this. Fitness and nutrition is a passion of mine, and I hate when people use excuses for their lack of progress, or attribute 'genetics' or 'luck' to my progress (sure, they don't see me at the gym 1.5 hours every day working my ass off, or not eating bread for months at a time.)
And you shouldn't use a slow metabolism as an excuse for accepting a certain state, maybe that's easy for you and me to say as we both seem to be lucky enough to be healthy.
But since you can alter your metabolism it can be a useful tool as part of weight loss. Do weights, increase muscle mass, increase metabolism, lose weight. In terms of time spent weights are very effective as well - 3-5 workouts of 45mins per week is plenty.
And not to try to be the naysayer, but the effect of muscle on calories burned at rest has been quite the myth floating around. Check the references at the bottom of http://www.lanimuelrath.com/blog/calories-burned-by-muscle-v... and you will see that 10 pounds of extra muscle will burn at most 60-70 more calories than fat at rest.
Apart from that, I agree, do weight training 3-5 days a week. move around, eat healthy. That should be enough to at least get you to the normal weight range.
Of course, anyone who has dieted long term knows that that's not the whole story. You might cut your calories in half and still plateau within a few months.
I don't think cutting your calories in half would result in a plateau within a few months in most cases. That's quite a major reduction, pretty much a starvation diet.
The initial claim was about 300 kcal more than you need, though.
My experience suggests plateau happens every time, without regard to the type of dieting done, unless it's quite literally a starvation diet. The only time I've manage to lose more than 100 pounds was on a diet of about 400 kcal a day. Reducing my diet from about 3500 kcal/day to half that (by the simple method of not eating every other day) worked really well for about two months, and then plateaued; total reduction, about 50 pounds. I've resigned myself to losing in bursts and concentrating on not putting much back on in between.
Of course, my sample size in number of people is low... :)
Losing in bursts doesn't sound like it would be a healthy option for the rest of your body as well.
Do you include exercise at all? From what I've researched, and what trainers have told me, weight training is the most effective way to lose weight - when combined with calorie monitoring and some cardio.
Losing in bursts is probably less healthy than losing steadily, but more healthy than not losing at all. :)
The reason: I avoid sugars and all kinds of flour.
With keto diets you lose weight faster the more you eat.
Yes, this: Thin people can be fat on the inside http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18594089/ns/health-fitness/t/thi...
Doesn't matter how thin you are. Inside, your cardiac arteries can be clogged as hell.
Oh yeah, and sometimes I buy a giant can of mixed fruit and eat the whole thing. It's like dessert.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium-chain_triglycerides
Oh and testosterone is synthesized from cholesterol so low intake of cholesterol may affect testosterone levels (and testosterone -> fat loss)
Vitamin-D (extremely important for your bones) is also a form of cholesterol.
I personally try to eat a paleo/keto-ish diet which mainly consists of eggs, meat, veggies and a bit of fruit and nuts. In general anything that doesn't contain sugars or things that get metabolized into sugars (carbs, starches, sugary stuff itself...)).
I lost 12 kg while eating tons of meat. For me the 'just don't eat a lot of carbohydrates' part of it really works.
Coconut is another food that's been demonised. Supposedly it actually encourages weight loss - and is a super food. I only wish it were cheaper here in the UK.
That makes its risky in society, but not by and of itself.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/feb/19/ecstasy-harm-b...
"Why is this building crowded?"
Your answer: "It's due to too many people inside. Simple as that."
Real answer: There is a popular band inside, which has caused more people to walk into the building in a given 3 hour period than leave it.
The "too many calories" people (you are one of them)all think that the effect of a bad diet (which is often bad caloric partitioning in the body, causing plummeting energy levels as fat cells steal nutrients from the rest of the body, causing a fat person to feel tired and hungry) is also the root cause.
Do kids grow because they eat more? No. They eat more because they are in a growth spurt. Obesity works the same way. A bad diet wreaks havoc on the endocrine system, mainly with insulin levels, causing excessive fat accumulation due to calories being partitioned to fat cells at the expense of the rest of the body. If a person with this kind of caloric partitioning doesn't eat excessive amounts of calories, they will feel tired. If they continue to eat the wrong kinds of foods (foods which continue the bad endocrine reaction) they will continue getting fatter in a feedback loop.
But hey, with advice like yours, you should really go and help others. Go to an insomnia board, and when someone complains of being tired, just say "Insomnia is because you don't get enough sleep. Simple as that."
What a dumb ass.
yea, there may be reasons why they eat too many calories (they eat the wrong foods so eating less leaves them tired), but they gain weight because they are eating too many calories. it truly is that simple, however as i think you pointed out, truly fixing the issue is going to be more work than simply saying "eat less" and requires a lot of (re)education
I bet you that if eat 5000 calories of "healthy" food and your daily requirement is 3000 you will gain weight, and if you eat 2000 calories of "bad" food you will lose weight.
You should read the parent again, more carefully. The point is not that that is not a true statement, the point is that is a vacuous statement, and therefore, the wrong question. It is not controversial that things that cause weight gain cause you to gain weight, but it's not a useful statement for either science or engineering, and we have collectively wasted an awful lot of time and research while laboring under the delusion that this was some sort of actual explanation, rather than a mere restatement of the problem.
All of these are fairly high calorie foods, even if you buy them in a health food shop. You'd need to have a fast metabolism and be pretty active to get through all these.
If you eat more calories than you burn you will put on fat.
Also, the big guy that takes loads of pills (e's) and eats what he wants... I don't think this is a good example at all and it sounds like you also take them too (perhaps an explanation for you and your skinny jeans?).
On a side note, the link is throwing a 403 :(
My grandfather was eating between 5 and 10 eggs per day, every day. He also drank at least 1 liter of home-made red whine per day, while being a big consumer of dairy products (also made in-house).
Of course, because my grandparents lived on a farm and consumed what they produced or traded with neighbors, half of a normal week would go by without them consuming any meat. However my grandfather was also a big fan of raw and untreated pig bacon, the kind you never find in stores. It was one of his pleasures that he indulged whenever he could.
My grandfather died at 99 years old, 3 months before his 100 years anniversary. He died out of old age, never having any problems with his heart. He was able to work his land until 98 years old. And in his village, even though people live a really rough life, it's pretty common to see people past the age of 90 with no serious health problems.
So really, your own two eyes are biased by the culture you live in ;-)
Nowadays it's a common belief that living a healthy life means preferring fruits and vegetables ... however, be careful when sampling because it's possible that people taking more care of their health are healthy because they care more about their health, not necessarily because they consume less meat.
And to make the story even more crazy; my grandfather used jigsaw to saw asbestos for all his life, even far after it was forbidden. Real men don't care about that kind of stuff :)
Anecdotal 'evidence' is wonderful he :)
But now we have 2 cases (actually more; my grandfathers brother + sister are the same age and do the same things; no problem); maybe smoking (I know bad_user his grandfather didn't), drinking and eating fat actually prolongs life if you manage not to have stress and eat from the land. Because that's at least one major difference I saw; my grandparents didn't have stress. Things just happened to them and they didn't think twice about it.
Sometimes I believe the office style of work that many celebrate; because it freed them from the fields and such; probably is the least beneficial change we have made.
We are not designed to be idle.
Look towards your grandfather's daily activities
and not just his diet
The point I tried making is that we cannot pinpoint yet the exact cause for the trends in heart-disease, obesity and diabetes. You simply cannot blame it all on meat, or on eggs, or on carbohydrates.
In fact it's quite the opposite ... by making changes to the diet of our grandfathers, we risk a ton of negative side-effects. People nowadays drink low-fat milk, but our grandfathers were drinking whole milk straight from their own cows without problems. And our metabolism is a complex mechanism - we forget that homo sapiens were unable to digest milk, but now we digest it just fine, so it's definitely a mater of context, like culture and genetics.
And personally I tend to blame this all on three things - sedentary lifestyles, stress and preprocessed crap that contains sugar, with sugar being the only common compound that is partly carbohydrate, partly lipid, while also being a nutrient that our grandfathers had little access to.
Over the last few decades, much fuss has been made over the societal switch from whole foods to processed foods. But people have been getting less and less healthy every decade, obesity rates have been increasing each decade, and food hasn't grown all that substantially more processed in the last few decades. (People in the 70s and 80s ate nearly as much processed junk as we do, and they were healthier on average. People in, say, Japan eat a metric fuckton of foods processed beyond our recognition, and they're healthier than we are).
Processed foods are probably to blame for our obesity crisis in some respect, but they're not the single issue. We should be taking a closer look at lifestyle factors, especially sleep and stress. Americans don't sleep enough, and lead more stressful work lives, than the citizens of almost any other developed country on the planet. (It's actually debatable if we're more or less sedentary than other nations, too. Pretty much everyone in white-collar work is sedentary these days, by the clinical definition of the term, and working out even an hour a day is not going to completely mitigate the effects of sitting on one's ass for the following 10 hours).
People in the 70s and 80s ate nearly as much
processed junk as we do
For instance in Romania we had no McDonalds until the early 1990s and they were amongst the first to enter, before other junk food providers like KFC, Burger King and such. One friend from the US visiting me was surprised that we only have 2 or 3 Starbucks joints in our capital that has a population of more than 2 million people.
And regarding preprocessed junk, the trend is very recent here. People used to laugh at such things as low-fat milk, or frozen French-fries / Pizza.
The result: I've never seen so many obese people in my life as I've seen in the US, but we're catching up.
And I don't deny that processed foods are major factors in the obesity problem, and probably necessary factors. But I'm saying that they don't seem entirely sufficient to account for the increased obesity rates within the US, which has been gorging itself on processed junk for 30+ years now.
Maybe, but there are trade-offs. For example, would you rather live to 100 but bust your ass every day, or live to 90 doing a desk job? Many people would pick the latter.
It's also in the context of the comment I replied to, which also contains conclusions based on personal experience. And when speaking about nutrition these days, most known facts are based on flawed studies or anecdotes.
And HN itself is filled with anecdotes. It's actually in this community's culture to talk in anecdotes.
So I don't get your call for refraining.
Also what is mentioned has been observed multiple times in several countries.
"Anecdote is not data waa waa waa" or in your example, " No. They don’t die. Mick Jagger. Keith Richard" it certainly does not condone drug usage, but it certainly shows there are exception to "drugs are bad and you will die early" (especially given the amount consumed)
But please let us know if eggs are good or bad for people this week.
I agree that we should all rely more on actual facts and studies and that we tend to perpetuate myths heard from a friend of a friend, which is just bad, especially for us since we should think like scientists. However it is not our job to do studies on nutrition and the available studies on nutrition are either biased or not conclusive of anything - listening to your gut feeling about what is right is actually the better path to take at this point in time.
Also, I could have added details, such as race (Caucasian), geography (Europe, temperate climate, hills), family history (war veterans, poverty after communism came, rough life), etc... but I usually don't because these are personal details and I like my privacy on the Internet, even though you could probably find plenty about me or my family if you wanted to, but that doesn't mean I have to make that info easy to find.
You also misunderstood me. I actually think that genetics, lifestyle, local culture are all factors that play a role, so I don't disagree with you. I also haven't said that my grandfather's diet would be healthy for everybody, I only said that it was healthy for him personally, so you have to be careful about making generalizations based on limited data and biases.
For the record, I'm not crash hot about this anonymous anecdotal evidence either. I think that eating unhealthily is bad no matter whether you are on a farm or not. But to tell someone to be quiet? That's a losing argument - refute it, don't silence anyone.
But "lived until 99" was not useless until very recently (in history terms)
So, there is something which we do called "observation." This is when we want to know the truth of something, so we set up some sort of meaningful experiment which we can do in the world, and find out. We go out and observe.
The reason that an anecdote is not an observation is because it comes to you first. That is, you already know the result of the anecdote before you select the data; it is something you "remember" when you hear about a new situation. This invokes all kinds of biases about how you remember, because you tend to remember anomalies -- and you tend to misremember their content. In anecdotes there is no "control group" and there isn't even a hope for a control; it's all been selected out anyway.
In this respect a single observation is not anecdotal, because they come from separate places. If a doctor puts a flow-meter in an artery after a bypass surgery to see if there is blood flowing at a normal cardiac rate, that is not an "anecdote", that is an "observation." It is not based on some sort of human reckoning; "I've done many bypass surgeries and I once saw an artery which looked just like that and was not, in fact, obstructed," but rather it's something reliable: at this time, a normal amount of blood was flowing through this artery.
Most health-related studies are not true observational studies. Rather, they rely on self-reported (i.e., anecdotal) "data" from study participants.
In some rural areas on my country it's usual to live around 100 - 120 years. In some places, even having a pork farm based economy and eating all sorts of different pork derivatives on a daily base.
IMHO, what kills us on cities is just contamination and stress.
"Fruit and veggie eaters" being healthier is just as likely to be a confirmation bias on your part, that you simply not paying attention to contrary examples. But even if it was true and there was a correlation, there is another possible explanation for it:
People who are obsessed with health will do "X" and they will eat fruits and veggies, because both are believed to be good. "X" does a lot of good, while F&V does nothing at all. Since you don't pay attention to "X", not even knowing what it is, you come to conclusion that F&V are good, while in fact "X" is what decides who is healthy.
The point here is be careful with "I do have two eyes...".
If you want to have the best brain function (your brain is made up of mostly fats) and body function you should strongly consider cutting out gluten based foods (which interfere with so many things in a bad way [2]) and start eating grass fed and finished beef, and wild game with a side of veggies. Cut out as many tubers as you can get away with as well.
Foods that you cannot eat unless they are cooked are probably not the best for your diet, in my mind this makes perfectly logical sense. We are people of the ice age, our diets for many thousands of years consisted of what could be eaten raw, including meats. While we do not yet have a full understanding of the rate at which humanity evolves; it is understood that the core functioning of our bodies energy system can not completely change in the span of a few thousand years.
[1] Dr. William Castilli, "concerning the possibility of a nut...," archives of internal medicine [2] Journal: Neurology - Hadjivassiliou 2001
If fat would make people fat, why are americans the mos obesive nation? Your diets, relatively speaking, consist of less fat than most european diets.
But way way more sugar. In the states, sugar is in everything, including most hamburgers, bread slices and soft drinks.
Watching nutrition experts is like watching economist...they can each prove that they are right, even though they are making mutually exclusive claims. No doubt they mostly all have good intentions...I don't begrudge them their enthusiasm.
While I won't claim that wheat is some magical food, no book will change my view (based on what I've seen), that I'm better off eating wheat and fruits than KFC.
To me it seems that the modern human diet is the most peculiarly unatural thing. It might also be the recipe for human intelligence and longer living.
I'm worried about the adverse effects of some foods.
Bowel cancer is somewhat preventative and food related: http://cancerhelp.cancerresearchuk.org/type/bowel-cancer/abo...
Unsurprisingly, those dieticians overwhelmingly say that meat-heavy diets like paleo (ranked 25th out of 25) are horrific. The idea that there is some controversy about this is mostly due to people on HN without much formal education.
http://noglutennoproblem.blogspot.com/2012/03/wheat-belly-bu...
It sounds like the book often misrepresents the research that it cites.
I have two eyes and that doesn't square at all. The fat people eat packaged food and restaurant food, which are very skimpy on meat and real animal fat.
The main thing I notice about fat people is they eat very often. Thin people eat moderate meals and don't snack. Fat people continuously have handfuls of crap like nuts and fruit and soy and soda.
Probably because they're hungry a lot. The more weight you put on, the more food you need to eat.
The funny thing is that snacking can actually help you lose weight, and is actually recommended by many fitness gurus and bodybuilders. It helps keep your energy levels constant during the day, and also avoids hunger pangs, plus the associated over eating at appointed mealtimes. This will happen if you're working out a lot, since your body is processing your food faster because of the energy you burn in the gym/track/wherever
You just have to make sure you're eating the right stuff. nuts, protein shakes, fruits (minimize the ones with a lot of sugar for really strict definition).
Also, I read that the more sugars you consume, the more you eat as it messes with your insulin and therefore your body does not signal that you are no longer hungry even though you've eaten enough. Can't remember where I read this, so if anyone has any citations or wants to correct me if I got it wrong, I'd appreciate that.
Why not just eat meat?
Sure, protein shakes might be digested faster, but I'm against processed, I'm for natural. Who knows what essential nutrient is missing in these shakes that comes for free with meat.
The problem is if you're doing serious weight training it's difficult to get enough protein from just eating natural foods.
and I notice that many thin people eat very very often (like six times a day), but in small amounts.
We need the empirical evidence.
I will challenge you on your last point. You seriously see a lot of fat people eating fruits and soy?!
I eat mainly wholefoods. My vices are probably beer and the odd bag of white flour. I'm pretty much sedentary (sat most of the day in front of computer.) A little overweight.
I haven't been to the doctors for over 10 years. That's not to say I haven't got a few ailments. I certainly don't feel super healthy or anything. Though I did cycle 6 miles yesterday with no issue.
I buy frozen 'fresh' soybeans, which are quite hard to find. They're nice.
Though as my fiance found out while living in the US, over there things can be sold as gluten free which have oats in them. Bad news for 1 in 4 coeliacs.
You had me until "don't snack". My experience is that moderate snacks help to ensure meals are also of a moderate size - otherwise you get that urge to gorge at your next meal...
Whenever I hear these arguments, I feel like these scientists aren't living in the same world as me. "Eggs are ok, declare scientists" reads the headline while the man sips from 32 oz soda.
In addition to that, having no education in biology, chemistry or any field remotely associated with health and fitness, I do have two eyes. In light of all the contradicting information and conspiracy theories, I'll trust what I've observed. And, what I've observed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that people who favor fruits and vegetables, grains and legumes over beef, pork and fatty foods are healthier.