There are a few caveats:
- Yes, your diet composition does have metabolic effects. Protein, sugar and fat all follow different metabolic pathways, and converting between them requires energy. Protein is supposedly easier to store as lean mass than as fat, for example. But unless you're already lean and training hard, these effects are relatively minor. If you want to lose 50 pounds of fat, calories are good approximation.
- Unless you're a hard-core distance athlete, the "calories out" side of the equation is mostly useless. Depending on your weight, walking a mile burns about 1 Oreo. Essentially, it takes a lot of energy to run your brain and your digestive system, but exercise is surprisingly energy efficient. So if you work at a desk job, and you don't run 5 miles a day, then use the "Sedentary" option when calculating your daily calories.
- If you want to be both lean and muscular, things get trickier, because you need to worry about your muscle:fat ratio. You can control this with resistance training. But weightlifting while losing fat can be pretty metabolically brutal. Conventional wisdom says that it helps to watch your protein:carbs:fat ratio, and to eat a nutrient-rich diet. (And my personal experience bears this out, especially once I've exhausted the easy gains in the weight room.)
- Most diets fail because most people stop dieting. If you revert to your old habits, you'll eventually revert to your old weight and body composition. As a general rule, few people stick with long-term lifestyle changes.
Losing weight and becoming muscular are both solved problems. The major challenge is sticking with the behaviors that produce the desired result.
That is, in a First Law sense, you can’t gain more than the mass of what you eat & drink, and you will always lose a certain amount of mass each day through breathing (metabolism, exercise) and excreting (waste, sweat).
So for example I lose 1–2 pounds a day with my metabolism, activity level, and diet, so I eat a bit more than that per day and try to make sure that those foods are healthy most of the time. For me, “healthy” means mostly plant-based, high in fiber, balanced in nutrients, and so on. I joke that my diet consists of vegan food and cheeseburgers, but it’s pretty close to the truth.
I think this should be the first step that most people take toward changing their dietary habits, because it’s dead simple: look at the weight on the package of the stuff you’re putting in your face, and get a cheap kitchen scale if you want to be particular about it. Then incorporate calories as you begin to get an intuitive sense of how caloric density affects the answer to “How much of this can I eat if I want to maintain/lose/gain weight?” and then incorporate other details like macronutrients.
Even before all this, the zeroth step is to document your habits by just writing them down. It might just be how my mind works, but if I want to fix something about what I’m doing—eating, sleeping, taking drugs—then it’s way easier to think about it in terms of adjusting a graph than all the details of the actual problem at hand.
The failure rate is something like 98%
An easy run of three miles three times a week takes three half hours out of your week and can easily burn 1000 calories. If you're keeping an eye on calories in and don't go over to compensate, that's a pound every 3-4 weeks. That sounds glacially slow, but if you're doing CICO for six months it's an extra 8-9 lbs.
And this is being conservative: given the lengths of willpower people go to in the calories-in side, going for a half hour run every day isn't that unreasonable. That will lose you an extra 17 lbs in six months. If you're trying to lose even 50-100 lbs, 17 lbs over six months is not insignificant (let alone if you're trying to lose 20-30lbs).
I think the idea that it's not useful for weight loss comes from the fact that it's tough when you're starting, but then, so is calorie restriction.
All of this is ignoring weightlifting, which is even better at making weight loss easier.
In fact I believe being cold in general is a good idea all else being equal if you want to lose weight but the advantage of water is that it's a better conductor of heat out of your body than air is.
I have an anecdotal idea that, basically, folks who are fit enough to exercise off 1000-1500 calories every week and do so are the ones that never have to lose the weight in many cases. Finally, although inefficient in the thermodynamic sense, I think part of why this is true is because most people gain weight over a course of years. That extra soda or beer every day. When you have a simple balancing lever like an extra mile or two of vigorous walking or something else it can all balance. When you are sedentary in the same situation, you slowly get diabetes.
Also peanut butter is dense, but a good way to illustrate the problem to someone a good way is to also ask someone if they are willing to walk for 30 minutes for one soda.
Edit: tablespoon, not tea-
This is probably one of the best serious sentences I've ever read.
With a rolling start and flat ground it will pass this test at 30mph, and probably higher too. That's quite a lot faster than I can run, too...
After a bit of training, muscles can store carbon-hydrates for about 1.5 hours of exercise. When these carbs a burned, muscles take new carbs directly from the blood stream.
So if you exercise by burning mostly carbs and don't eat, you end up with low blood sugar levels and a very strong urge to eat.
The trick is to burn fat. But to burn fat in a straight forward way you first have deplete the carb store, and basically force muscles to burn fat. This requires exercise that lasts many hours in one go.
The additional benefit as far as I know is that if muscles are trained to burn fat, they will start burning more fat even when not in use. So the effect lasts a lot longer than just the actual amount of exercise.
So we have a culture where exercise means to go to the gym and do exciting things there. Which mainly burns carbs.
In the past when people did manual labor, they worked the same way for an entire day, burning mostly fat.
That said I have personally run on high fat (even in ketosis, and seperately eating animal products and vegan); high protein/more fairly a body builder bulking macro(including dairy protein: whey and casein); and high carb. And we all know we can find athletes of the highest level in every sport practicing various mixtures of those diets to great success. So I don't think it is fair to say people are doing it wrong by burning primarily glucose as opposed to fat.
I think the most successful diets (no matter the macro nutrient philosophy) have the following in common:
1. Hydration/absorption: obviously no matter what cells must be properly hydrated and absorb micro/macro nutrients.
2. Anti-inflammatory foods: inflammation is linked to every chronic disease there is and even at the highest levels of performance do you want your cells combating inflammation or involved in the krebs cycle.
3. Anti-toxin: toxins can be eliminated from the body through the pores or excretion. Not all toxins can be sweated out and not all will naturally be excreated but certain foods can bind to toxins. So foods promoting removal of toxins from the body are important, but outside diet, exercise is important, abstaining from toxins like cigarettes is important, and probably because of the level of toxins on the modern western diet practices like juice cleanses and fastings could be important tools toward anti toxin cellular health.
4. Anti oxidants: as cells oxidize free radical can spread around the body, it's important to eliminate or isolate free radicals which can be potential causes of diseases like cancer.
5. Micro/macro nutrient: someone else mentioned maximizing micro nutrient intake to calorie ratio, that's probably a good way to put it. As I mentioned I'm starting to see macros as a personal choice based on the individual, that said I have very strong opinions to support my high fat preference (not keto though) and think so long as a person has achieved cellular health through 1-4 they too can experiment with their macros to suite their personal desire and needs.
6. Microbiome: I don't even pretend to understand what's going on here, but often hear this refered to as the second brain. While a neat phrase I'll just point to a study in equatorial Africa on twins, where it's not uncommon to have identical twins on the same diet 1 malnurished and the other not with the only difference to be found in their microbiome.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/dec/05/detox-m...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detoxification_(alternative_me...
That's what I was always using bluntly in arguments with the 'detox crowd' until I learned about chelation therapy [1]. So it's not as simple as 'no way administering any substance will get rid of toxins'. Now, that doesn't mean there is any truth whatsoever in typical detox claims (think 'drink this tea for five days and you'll get rid of toxins stored in your body') but it does mean, to me, that I won't be using overly general claims like 'this whole detox is a bunch of crap' but instead opt for more prudent statements. Which is imo what the one you're replying to did: it wasn't about the standard detox stuff, but about avoiding toxins in the first place and about toxins binding to certain food. Which I'd love to read more about.. Sources anyone?
I don't use "anti-toxin" as a magical detox, and never thought that's how people would interpret what I wrote but I believe you are correct and that's what's occurring. I mean it as consuming foods that maximize detoxification processes of the body (healthy pores, health liver function, healthy kidney function) and minimizing the introduction of toxins, but also minimizing foods that clog the processes. I even acknowledge toxins don't all come from diet, and promote not smoking and exercise (sweating to release toxins), I'm not exactly selling anti toxin snake oil.
Truthfully I don't put a great amount of stock in juicing and fasting in otherwise healthy diets, which can be fairly read into my OP - though I'm open minded and understand the latest science to suggest fasting promotes cellular health and longevity - so while nothing of magic I do believe they are tools for people whose systems are regularly over overwhelmed.
There was just a great article on HN about how far away we are from immortality and to date the greatest tools we have are diet and exercise, it was just an interview but if you can find it, you would be able to find the research group and their studies, I never went further but I felt like I had finally found another person discussing diet/nutrition in terms of cellular health. Also I find pharmacists and doctors know a lot about the Krebs cycle. Separately, I would recommend talking to athletes about their diets, it's my personal Favorite way of learning, from body builders to endurance athletes, I like to think they are the real diet hackers and has what lead me to the philosophy I outline above. Personally I could talk about every food I eat and why. Lastly, there are a ton of food industry/diet documentaries on Netflix, they are a mixed bag and I will go so far as to say selling snake oil or industry propaganda, that said if this stuff interests you watch them, one of my favorites is a "juicing" one called fat sick and dying (or something) and while it's a bit of a sales pitch it inspired me to begin consuming (juicing/eating) a wide variety of green veggies and the impact is so great on my health and running that the reality is greater than the snake oil they sell.
Even if you don't believe the science showing that certain food can bind with toxins allowing them to be brought to the liver, kidneys or excreted, It's not controverisial to belihumans can avoid adding unncecessary toxins to their body thru diet if not avoiding smoking. But honestly toxins in the body and the function of the liver are not controverial and it's not controversial that diet can either promote liver health and function or Overwhelm the liver leading to short term issues like alcohol posioning or long term issues including fatty liver disease.
It's much better people not have fatty liver, their livers otherwise process sugar/toxins properly, but to maximize cellular health mimizing the need for the liver spend energy detoxifying the body/processing sugar.
Yeah, because toxins do not exist, right ? And you can't ingest them or be exposed to them chronically. It only makes sense that we all live in perfectly clean environment and eat perfectly nutritious food 24x7 ...
</sarcasm>
So to promote optimal health foods that promote healthy detox functions should be consumed and those that uncessisarily introduce toxins or disturb proper detox functions of the body should be avoided...if you call that a "normal diet" fine, at this point you are debating semantics.
Just to put things in perspective with "normal", 10% of US kids have non alcoholic fatty liver disease, just like childhood diabetes...these diseases didn't exist in kids 30 years ago and they are all dietary, so let's drop words like "normal" and talk specifics.
Edit:
Where do you think the disease fatty liver comes from? You do understand a fatty liver isn't going to be functioning normally and more easily overwhelmed by toxins in the future right?
Why do you think children for the first time in history have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease? Their livers are being overworked, not to the extent death by toxicity occurred, but to the extent they develop chronic conditions in childhood that it used to take a lifetime to acquire.
No one is talking about mystical healing, rational people are discussing eating foods that promote healthy liver/kidney function, in turn promote overall cellular health, and to the extent possible avoiding unnecessary toxins like smoking or excessive drinking.
Where CO has a CI input.
This has been known for while. Protein has a thermic effect which can change your CO.
But the equation still works.
You may want to read about (lack of) precision in Atwater factors, to the tune of 50%, if you believe CI is easy to compute.
You know that obviously, and so do I, but there are a lot of people (including here on HN) who argue that eating an Apple daily and otherwise not changing anything is guaranteed to make you gain weight, and that's just not true.
You say "cut 250" but the article just gave an example that 120 cals of different composition were netting amounts different by 40. That's a 30 percent difference based on composition.