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Comment by prostoalex | Hacker News Reader

> Basically you just have to be vigilant with not eating too much.

No. There's no consistent evidence of large groups of people who started reducing calories and in return lost pounds predictably. Subjects lose energy, become irritable, get headaches and migraines, have hunger pangs, every now and then just fall off the wagon and over-indulge, or just plain simple gain weight on reduced calorie diet in a controlled experiment.

The book "Good Calories, Bad Calories" contains in-depth research on the topic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Calories,_Bad_Calories

> with low carbs, no sugar

Now you're onto something. Sugar and carbs stimulate insulin production, which then stimulates fat storage.

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> There's no consistent evidence of large groups of people who started reducing calories and in return lost pounds predictably.

The only inconsistencies come from inaccurate self reporting of caloric intake by study participants. There's been several meta-studies on this. Eating carbs/sugars is indeed a problem because of GI issues - you will feel hungry again soon after consuming sugar which makes it harder to stick to your calorie target.

Medicare has commissioned a research of calorie-restricted diets back in 2007, seeing how obesity was prevalent in the society and Medicare was on the hook to pay for consequences. The full study is available (among other sources) here http://motivatedandfit.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Diets_...

But in a nutshell, from intro paragraph, "there is little support for the notion that diets lead to lasting weight loss or health benefits."

You misrepresent the study. The paper you link to is very clear that people who diet lose weight while dieting, but gain weight when they stop dieting.

We've known that for a while which is why people now talk about "lifestyle change" instead of "dieting". We know dieting is harmful.

Ethics prevent a real study where you lock the fatties in a cage and accurately measure the calories eaten.

Fatties lie like a pro when it comes to dieting.

And yet when calorie restriction is done through restricting carbohydrates, the results are much more convincing http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2716748/

And if PubMed isn't your cup of tea, just head over to https://www.reddit.com/r/keto, unless you think those ~125K subreddit members are just lying.

Not all calories are the same. I myself lost almost 40lbs on the keto diet (~200 to start, now around 160lbs). 31, male, sedentary IT worker. NO EXERCISE. I eat everything except carbs (fruit, beer, anything with sugars).

Beer and alcohol has quite a lot of sugar.

Alcohol doesn't contain sugar. Rather, it replaces glucose in the blood and can be used directly as a fuel without any conversion.

This is unlike in low-carb diets, where fat must be converted to a fuel (via gluconeogenesis) before cells can use it as energy, and this conversion itself takes energy.

Effectively, alcohol reduces the benefit of low-carb diets but doesn't necessarily increase the insulin response as would a high-sugar diet.

My typing mistake. Those items I listed were what I don't eat.

Beer has quite a bit of sugar, but hard alcohols do not.

http://www.thespartanwarrior.com/post/6355061720/lowcarbvsal...

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