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Comment by dahfizz | Hacker News Reader

This smells like a straw man. From the article:

> it is important to understand exactly what it is meant by "a calorie is a calorie." The most common meaning is that is it impossible for two isocaloric diets to lead to different weight loss.

I think that is hyperbolic - I've never heard that all isocaloric diets are guaranteed to result in the exact same weightloss. The point of "a calorie is a calorie" is that you need to reduce calories to lose weight.

From the chart in the article, going from a 10% carb diet to a 50% carb diet (which is a huge change) only results in a effective caloric difference of ~130. It is _much_ simpler and more effective to just skip a 100 cal snack than it is to cut all carbs out of your diet.

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A more recent study [1] showed it to be around 209-278 calories per day, and 308-478 calories per day in people who had high insulin secretion. The study also showed that a hormone that increases hunger decreased significantly on the low carbohydrate diet.

I'm currently on a lazy keto diet and am down 33 pounds. I know it's only one data point, but it definitely seems easier than other diets I've tried.

[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2018/11/27/effe...

Yes, this is the argument that Gary Taubes (and others) have been making for at least 15 years: "calories in, calories out" fails not because it is wrong, but because it is not powerful enough to account for empirical observations of human metabolism. The most glaring example of which is insulin resistance from high sugar diets, which causes the body to constantly stash away calories into fat cells.

One thing I've recently been thinking a lot about is how much of those calories the bacteria in your stomach may or may not use and how that translates for different people and how the chemistry in your guts can use said energy.

The real argument against sugar (or dietary advice that treats sugar just like any other calorie) is not that "calories in, calories out" is severely flawed but rather that the body is not a static heat engine (duh) and in fact changes its own metabolic optimization in response to the kind of food we eat. High sugar diets can lead to chronically elevated insulin levels, which (basically) causes the body to lock too much energy away in fat cells, leading to increased sensations of hunger for the same caloric intake.

The article is saying that weight loss can happen without reducing calories, and no weight loss can occur while reducing calorie. Skipping the 100 call snack is not equivalent

This is a common motte & bailey argument. If you press in on "are all foods really the same?", you get "Oh, no, of course there are differences", but as soon as you're not pressing we end up right back at "you just have to cut your calories because all calories are exactly the same and it doesn't matter where they come from".

Ironically, you demonstrate this in your last paragraph. If all calories are the same, yeah, just cut 100 out some other way. But if they have different effects on hormones, satiety, any number of other systems, then it may not be "simpler and more effective" to "just" drop 100 calories as a snack. You may need to actually change what you eat.

According to math yes. Reality is carbs increase hunger making dieting harder.

That's just in your head not something that is universally true for everyone.

In my experience all large quantities of food increase hunger because you get your body used it. With carbs it's just easier to eat more in a smaller amount of space.

I lost weight on a high carb diet and I have lost weight on a low carb diet. Day 2 they felt different, but by day 200 the body adjusts and you get hungry either way.

To simplify the body approximates the food in your diet, but also measures the amount of fat you have. A great many things trick the first, but the second doesn’t care what or when you eat. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6039924/

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