Formerly fat person here. That article is just an overblown list of common sense advice to sell you some crap you don't need. Losing and maintaining your weight is actually really simple. Here is what worked for me (I am not a doctor):
- First of all, drop sugar. Right now. Even if you are not fat, you should not eat it. It's not just extra calories, it's poison. Don't be like "oh, I'll just finish this stuff I still have around", throw it out. If your are only going to follow one point from this list, then let it be this one.
- Forget about calories, a calorie is not a calorie. You cannot "work off" that cake your have eaten, your are not an oven. Calories are an upper limit (you cannot break thermodynamics), but the human metabolism is much more complicated than just balancing an equation.
- Exercise is necessary, but not sufficient. That means you should exercise to get your metabolism going, but exercising itself will not let your lose weight. And when I mean exercising I don't mean you need to get a gym membership. Just going for a walk for half an hour or an hour is good enough for starters.
- Fat won't make you fat. I grew up under low-fat propaganda, yet I kept getting fatter. Then when I increase my fat consumption I started losing weight. By fat I mean real animal fat from meat, not seed oils or other processed fats.
- Eat real food. If you cannot tell what it's made from by looking at it, then it's not real food.
- Processed fruits and vegetables are still processed food, and thus not real food. Don't be fooled by marketing, stuff like fruit juice is not healthy, no matter how many vitamin labels the manufacturer keeps putting on the packaging.
- Caloric restriction works in the short term, but will drive you crazy in the long term. This is why people lapse eventually and regain all their weight.
It is important to understand that obesity is not a "surplus of energy", it's a medical disorder brought about by disruption of your metabolism. I was able to keep eating and eating without ever feeling satiated. It is pure torture to be hungry with a full stomach. It was my body telling me "stop feeding me this garbage, give me real food". I have since been able to keep my weight and never feel hungry. It's only when I find myself unable to eat real food and lapse back into old habits that I start gaining weight again.
> Caloric restriction works in the short term, but will drive you crazy in the long term. This is why people lapse eventually and regain all their weight
100%. However, imho it helps to use a tracker at first to better understand what food has how many calories. Track for a month and drop it afterwards.
Sugar is not a poison and claiming it is one does not help anyone.
Have to agree with most of the above, with one elaboration:
"If you cannot tell what it's made from by looking at it, then it's not real food."
I would change this a bit and say the ingredients should just be whole plant animal or fungal foods only, no extracts or processed derivatives or anything synthetic or refined. Nothing you couldn't make yourself using the whole food. So no refined flours, sweeteners, juices, oils, etc.
The point of this is to keep it simple. When I go to the grocery store 90% of what's there doesn't fit my criteria and I don't even consider it. Restaurant food or prepared/packaged food is almost all out since 99% of it is made with ultra processed ingredients usually oils/sugars/flours - I don't look at it as an option. If I'm really stuck there's usually nuts or cheese or fruit for sale anywhere.
So I'll buy vegetables, whole fruits, meat, eggs, dairy, butter or meat fat for cooking with, nuts, seeds, and mushrooms.
For social reasons I'll eat things outside of this on occasion in small amounts but whenever I'm providing my own food which is most of the time, these are the rules.
Curious what kind of flours you're getting, and which ones you object to. I make sourdough fairly regularly and just use 30% whole wheat, 70% standard bread flour and have never thought twice about it?
Even easier.
Only buy and eat things with one ingredient.
Vegetables, fruit, meats, beans, rice, etc. you are now eating real food.
That's a simple rule of thumb and matches what I do 95% but there are exceptions like "sugar", "canola oil", "bleached wheat flour" etc.
And there are two-ingredient foods that I do eat, like "peanuts, salt" or "cultured milk, salt, enzymes"
“Sugar is poison” is an absolutely insane claim to make
The claim seemed less overblown to me after watching 'Sugar: The Bitter Truth' by Robert Lustig, MD [0].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=dBnniua6-oM&t=8s
PSA: Robert Lustig is notorious for broadcasting incorrect views contradicted by current science.
A good debunk of his nonsense claims is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZPKTaVB1IU&t=64s
Most long distance runners fuel in form of gels on their longer runs and races. Those gels are mainly simple sugars and water. They're fine.
I prefer calling it "Hidden sugar is poison for your soul and body".
If you are aware of it you can avoid it.
The dose makes the poison, and with refined sugar the dose required to be harmful is quite small compared to sugar embedded in while fruits.
I agree, but I would add one very important thing:
If you consider the diet/lifestyle that allowed you to lose the weight as temporary, then you will fail.
I would diet to lose weight by stop eating sugar and desserts. Then, when I got to my target weight I would say “ok, one dessert a week” and before I knew it I was having them every day. And before long I had gained the weight back.
Currently down 21 lbs and 6 months free of sugar. This time I view it as something I will do for the rest of my life.
Calorie restriction, logging your calories and eating a deficit everyday, actually works for many people who can't figure out how else to lose weight. It also teaches you about how to eat healthy: portion sizes, how caloric each food is, how snacking impacts your total, etc.
> Fat won't make you fat
I had always understood this as true, but it's more complicated than that. The body converts calories from fat into fat much more efficiently than carbs, and protein is the least efficient.
> The body converts calories from fat into fat much more efficiently than carbs
Does it now? I have some doubt considering carb consumption stimulates insulin more than fat consumption and this is ultimately the storage hormone.
Much more efficiently. Carbs and protein rely on de novo lipogenesis to convert into fat. But you're right in that a surge of insulin from carbs ensures that the available dietary fat will prefer to go to storage instead of being used as fuel.
In a scenario where you're running a calorie surplus, the effect of overeating carbs will work together with and make dietary fat more significantly contribute to body fat. In a scenario where you're running a calorie deficit to lose weight, and the insulin isn't surging, choosing carbs over dietary fat can actually make sense.
Well, carbs have to be converted to fat. Fat doesn't have to be converted
That would be a reasonable assertion if the human body consumed bread and olive oil and stored it all as olive oil.
Fat also satiates better than sugar.
It's a lot easier to drink and eat X calories of sugar than the same amount in animal fat + protein.
How long ago was "formerly"?
Signed, a formerly formerly fat person.
Seven or eight years. I did have the occasional lapse when I was under high negative stress and would just let myself go, but I just had to drop the bad habits I was falling back into. The initial wakeup call was when I was diagnosed with a non-alcoholic fatty liver in my late 20s.
Nice one. Agree on all this. Once you lose the weight through proper eating/deficit, exercise will maintain it.
Some odd claims here.
> It's not just extra calories, it's poison.
Uh no. You say you grew up under the low-fat propaganda, but still you fall victim to the overly broad "sugar is poison" propaganda. Yes, limit it by all means, but your overall caloric budget is way more important than the exact proportion of nutrients (same as with fat).
> then when I increase my fat consumption I started losing weight. By fat I mean real animal fat from meat, not seed oils or other processed fats.
Good that it worked for you, but this sounds like anti seed oil propaganda, which is debunked. "real animal fat" often means high saturated fat, which when replaced by polyunsaturated and unsaturated (from e.g. seed oils) actually tends to improve your health.
There is no way to write what I want to write without coming across like it's scolding you, so to get it out of the way, I apologize for that. I am certain you mean well and you're not lying. The most important thing in all of this is you found something that works for you.
But you didn't find universal truths. That's a danger of getting information from the Internet or from anecdote. I can give you the exact opposite anecdote. I've eaten every diet under the sun, from SAD to paleo. I've eaten no sugar. I've eaten tons of sugar. Never no fat, but the percentage of energy has varied tremendously. No processed foods at times to almost nothing but heavily processed foods. I've run over 100 miles a week at times and I've done no aerobic exercise of any kind at other times. Yet I found a post on physicsforums.com from 2003 a few weeks back from my old user account listing my height and weight at 6'2" 165 lbs. I use MacroFactor and weigh myself daily. Today, 22 years later, I was 162.4 lbs.
Why is that? I don't know. I have four cats. Two of them will eat everything you give them, then scour the entire house for more, begging and pleading the entire time. Give them infinite food and they'll eat until they puke, then eat the puke. The other two can be given infinite food and they'll stop when they've had enough and they've stayed the same size their entire lives, over a decade at this point. These are non-humans that don't give a shit about their physiques, don't feel shame, and are eating exactly the same foods with the same macro breakdowns and levels of processing. There are just genetic differences between mammals, for some reason we don't fully understand, that make overeating almost inevitable if enough food is available, without tremendous willpower and tricks like you try to employ, whereas other people will eat exactly what they need and no more, pretty much no matter what.
As for MacroFactor, things like this end up on Hacker News with no context, but it's the project of a guy named Greg Nuckols who is one of the better science communicators in the field of exercise science and has been for 15 years. He's held multiple world records as a powerlifter and has coached probably thousands of people at this point. He's also a lifelong fat person, but not really unhealthy, and as far as I'm aware, has never made much of an effort to change that. The app was created due to traditional meal planning and tracking by lifters who go through bulk and cut cycles. The way it worked in the pre-app era was to make spreadsheets weighing yourself daily and counting all of your calories, over a span of weeks. Get a moving average to remove daily water and gut content noise from the weight trend, then compare it to the average calorie intake to estimate your personal total energy expenditure. Now add or subtract from that to set targets for bulking and cutting. MacroFactor does exactly the same thing but automated most of the process for you, so all you have to do is log your food and weight.
It is not primarily meant to be a weight loss tool. It exists in large part because all other food loggers on the market at the time were exclusively targeting people trying to lose weight, and none of them personalized the targets based on estimated true energy expenditure, using population estimator formulae instead.
Saying they're trying to sell you crap you don't need is tremendously unfair. This was a tool made by a lifter for other lifters, but as it stands, the market for food loggers continues to be dominated by overweight people looking to lose weight, as there are a lot more of them in existence than there are lifters. Given that, the staff try their best to provide resources based on the best information they can find to support people who just want to lose weight. That is what this is. Maybe the information in here doesn't work for you, but it's based on research and coaching that has touched millions. It's looking at broad trends. If you know what works for you personally already, then absolutely stick with that. But you don't need to be slandering equally well-meaning people who have a very long track record of putting out the most reliable content that exists in the space they serve. Greg is in his 40s now and first became well-known in the pre-Tik Tok, pre-Instagram era. His takes on science and its limitations have been the most sober and reasonable I've encountered in any field of science, let alone the enormously fraught field of fitness now dominated by grifters. I understand why you would be skeptical or distrustful and you have no good reason to trust me any more than him. I'm just a random stranger on the web as well, possibly a sock puppet or being paid off for all you know. But his history is public. strongerbyscience.com has a back catalog of articles that stretches more than a decade. The Stronger by Science podcast is now defunct, but published hundreds of episodes. If you ever get the chance, you will never find more measured, honest content about this topic.
Yeah the way the app works is you track what you eat and your weight and this is all you need to make actionable information on how to lose, gain, or maintain weight.
Obviously you could do this on your own with spreadsheets, but the app takes all the unnecessary overhead out of it and uses more sophisticated algorithms to account for things like missing days.
It's just a total gamechanger. Totally worth the very low cost.
Dawg, I'm 33. But, I certainly appreciate the kind words
> a calorie is not a calorie
Sorry but this is antiscience.
No, it isn’t… keep reading to the bit about thermodynamics. The calorie represents the potential heat energy present in a sample of a material if that material were fully oxidized (ie burned) in a bomb calorimeter… it has never represented (much less accurately represented) the amount of energy that can actually be released via digestion into a human body (which is very extremely not analogous to a bomb calorimeter).
We are not ovens. We really are not extremely precise ovens burning samples in the presence of stoichiometrically optimal quantities of pure oxygen.
But at the level of precision needed to manipulate our weight, we basically are.
Like there are entire communities of practice that know how to do this effectively at will. This is a learnable teachable skill.
I have lived alternating violently between bulimia and anorexia my entire life precisely because someone emphatically, and also utterly and destructively incorrectly, believed that to be true.
I am absolutely certain that I know more about what calories actually are, and how badly fitted they are to actually managing our body mass — the best way to manipulate your weight is to change gravity wells — than you do. I can manipulate my body mass at will, effectively, and to a degree you would, I’m sure, find impossible to accomplish. I learned how to take that “skill” to an extreme any community you’ve survived to be member of has not yet approached. Anyone who teaches that “skill” is immoral.
We are not bomb calorimeters. We do not consume calories, nor do we engage, in even the most ludicrously “basic” sense, in anything resembling the simple combustion of our food supply. There are calories in coal and, for that matter, plutonium… try to metabolize either.
The heat potential of what we consume is not relevant to the safe (much less effective) regulation of our metabolic machinery; the nutrient density and distributions in what we consume is, but is very hard to summarize in marketing copy to idiot monkeys that want a simple eat / no eat light.
> I have lived alternating violently between bulimia and anorexia my entire life precisely because someone emphatically, and also utterly and destructively incorrectly, believed that to be true.
Having a mental disorder does not change how physiology works and does not depend on how it works, but it does explain a lot of what you're writing and why.
> I am absolutely certain that I know more about what calories actually are, and how badly fitted they are to actually managing our body mass — the best way to manipulate your weight is to change gravity wells — than you do.
I have a degree in biology and have been reading and researching enough about fitness and health for well over a decade to know how to take someone from the couch to at least 80% of their genetic potential in terms of strength and size while being as shredded as they'd like in a deterministic process.
> We are not bomb calorimeters. We do not consume calories, nor do we engage, in even the most ludicrously “basic” sense, in anything resembling the simple combustion of our food supply. There are calories in coal and, for that matter, plutonium… try to metabolize either.
Yes but if you'd ever opened a biochemistry textbook, you'd see what we actually do and you'd understand why what works in bodybuilding works at all, and how it's all downstream of that.
I hope you get help but you are simply not an authority on this topic. I'll go with all the people with proven track records teaching people how to successfully manipulate their body composition with methods rooted in understanding basic physiology over a random person on the internet.
Ahh, so you’re one of the immoral.
I feel so much sorrow for those you are actively harming. May they survive your naïveté and arrogance.
This is a bit hyperbolic.
Always remember the Prof who lost 27lbs on the convenience food diet:
https://www.acsh.org/news/2010/11/09/food-for-thought-twinki...
Also remember that before the days of tracking apps and watches and services like Zoe, many of us were losing weight, keeping it off and improving athletic performance without any of that stuff.
Always remember that I’ve lost more than 30lbs in a month, more than 150lbs in a year, and well over 1000lbs in a lifetime, never used an app or a service of any sort and without resort to Twinkies. I’m probably in better shape than you, taking age into account… losing weight isn’t hard, at all, all it takes is an eating disorder and a maniacal capacity for self-abuse. The same is true for athletic performance, which is really just as stupid a metric as body mass. Managing a consistently healthy human body over a lifetime of injury and experience, that’s hard, and made harder with idiotic quantitative measures like calories or BMI.
You sound like you have a bone to pick.
No one “resorts to twinkies”. It was a dumb experiment to show that cutting calories really can work. The stupid foods show that you can improve health markers and lose weight by just watching calories.
It’s not the be all and end all of anything. Just a counter point to the silly “calorie is not a calorie” saying.
And I improved all my health markers and my weight by simply starving myself of any food at all. Sure, eliminating calories leads to weight loss, but the point of “a calorie is not a calorie” is that I could have done exactly the same thing by consuming 10,000 kilo-calories of charcoal a day too. A human being does not burn its food via combustion and pretending it does doesn’t even work over the extremely short run, and it certainly never works over the long run. This idiot, I’m sure, didn’t keep that weight off following that same diet… in fact my guess is he’s the same weight or heavier 5 years after the fact. Statistically that’s true of the vast majority of people who lose a significant percentage of their body mass by the means of any dietary or exercise change, BTW.
A calorie of A is not the metabolic equivalent to a calorie of B because a calorie is only a measure of thermodynamic conversion by direct combustion in a bomb calorimter and cannot tell you anything about metabolic usage of A or B. Thank you for pointing out that you can lose weight and improve your BMI by eating Twinkies… you can do the same thing by sucking your brain out through a straw, or for that matter amputating only one limb; those are also examples of false equivalence and poor quantitative reasoning.
And, yes, when I see people fight to spread what I know to be extremely harmful mythological beliefs, I have a bone to pick.
Actively causing harm is telling people things that are demonstrably untrue that will affect how successful they are in improving their health and wellbeing and using your mental illnesses as proof of your authority instead of decades of academic research as well as the decades of practice of different communities all using the exact same methods you claim to be false.
At a certain point, you have to accept that you have no idea what you're talking about, and it's the height of arrogance to assume that you know something with a higher amount of quality evidence than the mountains of evidence that disprove your claims about how things work and your naive and arrogant claims of expertise.
Glucose can be converted into ATP via two pathways in the mitochondria: one produces 30 something ATP, the other produces 2. Yeah, sure the 1st law of thermodynamics is valid (the rest of the energy goes into heat), but for your cells, they get much less energy in the second (anaerobic) pathway, so you'll feel worse/hungrier if that's how metabolism happens.
Eating 1 cal of raw sugar isn’t the same as eating 1 cal of almonds. Thats the sense in which they say this.
That is actually what science says.