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For the purpose of losing weight it really doesn't matter if the calorie counts are accurate or not: consistency is what is important. If you want to lose weig

• dionidium 11y ago
  Right, I fear that this is another article that, while interesting, will be used to needlessly complicate discussions about weight loss. Paying attention to the (inexact) reported calorie information on the food you eat is still the only reliable way to lose weight.
  • randlet 11y ago
    Yup. The same goes for gaining weight of course. I've heard people say "I can't gain weight no matter how hard I try or how much I eat!". Wrong. Again, track your calories and increase the number of calories you are eating until you begin to gain weight.
  • Someone1234 11y ago
    > reported calorie information on the food you eat is still the only reliable way to lose weight. Carbohydrate and sugar reductions seem like a very reliable way too. There are many anecdotes about successful weight loss on diets that allowed the person to "eat as much as they want" but had to limit their daily intake of carbohydrates.
    • TurboHaskal 11y ago
      This is just a way to reduce calorie intake, indirectly.
    • n4r9 11y ago
      There's a fundamental difference between these approaches which is not highlighted enough in discussions about weight loss. There is a physiological factor: weight loss is attributable to calories in vs calories out (despite those figures being difficult to obtain). Then there's the psychological factor: some diets are easier to stick to than others, and some will naturally cause you to eat fewer calories than others. Using reported calorie information is a physiological method, and appeals to those who prefer quantifying and tracking their everyday life. Carbohydrate reduction is (in this sense) a psychological method, and appeals to those who struggle with cravings and a lack of structure.
    • luso_brazilian 11y ago
      Limiting the daily intake of carbs is a proxy for limiting the daily intake of calories. 1 bowl (2 cups of rice, about 330g, more or less 1 serving in areas where white rice is a staple food) have a 331 kcal [1] Even if one would ate a whole package of Canadian Bacon (6 oz, 139g) it would only be 257 kcal [2]. Carbs are very easy to gorge. A medium sized fast food cup of soda is 180kcal. Same cup for raw orange juice is 223kcal. For comparison 150g of beef is 274kcal and that would be a big serving (IMO). When people cut carbs from their diets they end up cutting the most densely caloric food: pasta, rice, starch and sugar and that's a good thing too, even eating as much of the rest as they want they will hardly be able to overconsume calories. [1] http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/6497?man=&lfacet=&count=&max=35&qlookup=20089&offset=&sort=&format=Abridged&reportfmt=other&rptfrm=&ndbno=&nutrient1=&nutrient2=&nutrient3=&subset=&totCount=&measureby=&_action_show=Apply+Changes&Qv=1&Q12258=2 http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/6497?man=&lfacet=&cou... [2] http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/2636?fgcd=&manu=&lfacet=&format=&count=&max=35&offset=&sort=&qlookup=bacon http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/2636?fgcd=&manu=&lfac...
• rancur 11y ago
  if you want to lose weight reliably, get your desires under control and then eat vegetables and meat. it's too fucking simple
  • eddieroger 11y ago
    It's not that simple. You can still eat more of those than your body needs to fuel itself for the day, and then what? Plus, denying your desires completely is the best way to fall hard off the wagon. Like most things in life, it's about the balance. One bad day is recoverable, quitting entirely is not.
    • PopeOfNope 11y ago
      > You can still eat more of those than your body needs to fuel itself for the day Have you ever tried that? Protein and Fat trigger the release of leptin[0]. Unless you're also eating a lot of fructose[1] with your meat, most people feel like they just can't eat anymore long before they get to the point where they would be eating considerably more energy than their body needs. I know this from experience. Common wisdom in bodybuilding circles is to get 1g of protein per lean pound of muscle. For me, that's about 140g of protein a day. I find that number almost impossible to hit without the aid of protein powders, from an appetite perspective alone. [0]: the hormone that tells your brain you're full. [1]: a side effect of processing fructose is the suppression of leptin production.
      • rancur 11y ago
        > Have you ever tried that? Protein and Fat trigger the release of leptin[0]. Unless you're also eating a lot of fructose[1] with your meat, most people feel like they just can't eat anymore that's what happens to me when it's proteins and vegetables, I find it just stays with me for 6 hours or 8 until I need it; otherwise just passes through. Carbs are too easy to jidest* and don't get that chance, nor do they carry any vitamins/minerals/nutrients worth picking out along the way. in conclusion, I am amazing at life, and I need another beer > 140g of protein you, sir, are also amazing at life. I only need about 60. Envy your deity status.
• DannyBee 11y ago
  "For the purpose of losing weight it really doesn't matter if the calorie counts are accurate or not" Pretty basic math tells you even a very small percent wrong (1-2) would affect weight gain/loss over the course of a year :) I'm also not sure what you mean by "consistency". You say " If you aren't losing weight, adjust your caloric intake until you are losing weight at a steady ~1-2lb per week." How can you adjust your caloric intake if you don't know the real numbers? I guess you are assuming you eat literally the same thing every week, and drop stuff on the floor until you have a set of foods you know make you lose weight, and then only eat that for the rest of your life? That seems a bad strategy to keep weight off. Most people would probably be willing to eat less of something (which they sanely could if they knew the real calorie counts), but probably not change their entire diet and keep it steady forever. Even if you just reduce the number of calories to try to account for all the inaccuracies, you are still in a situation where you actually have no idea what you can or can't eat. IE i you say "well, 1500 calories a day didn't work, i'll try 1000", in practice, some days you will have eaten 1500, some days, 900. Your claim this will just average out magically is patently false (it only averages out over time if the numbers are less than a certain percentage away from right, and that percent is very small). If you are eating different combinations of things, the likelihood you will ever find which are wrong/right, so you know to eat less/more of it, seems really slim. You still have zero idea what you can eat for real, and you'll still find if you swap what foods you eat, you may start gaining/losing weight. So "consistency" or whatever you want to call it, doesn't make any sense. Now, i'll grant there may be no other way to accomplish your goal right now, but suggesting this is a good method is wrong. It's a horrible method. This is like trying to optimize a multivariable constraint problem through random guessing.
  • andylei 11y ago
    as long as the calories on the labels are correlated with the real numbers it works. plus, its not like you're going to adjust your calorie consumption by 1% to gain/lose weight. if you're altering your consumption by 20-30%, you can tolerate small amounts of errors. also, counting calories works. anyone that has actually done it can tell you that.
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• jaequery 11y ago
  I don't know, if losing weight is so simple, I'd assume obesity rates won't be as high as 80% in USA during the "diet/health" craze phase we have going on. Theres gotta be other factors that we just don't know about, like metabolization, which will be ultimately what drives obesity down.
  • andylei 11y ago
    obesity rates are high because people don't try hard and consistently to lose weight. people lead busy lives, diets are not fun, and its very easy to eat a high calorie diet. diets don't work because people don't stick to them, not because diets don't work.
  • randlet 11y ago
    "Simple, not easy". You track your calories, you track your weight. If you're not losing weight you reduce your calories until you are. This method compensates for peoples differing metabolism and activity levels.
  • deleted 11y ago
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  • mikeash 11y ago
    It's key in how he summarizes it at the end: "it's not easy, but it's very simple." Losing weight isn't complicated. Eat less, move more. That's it. Losing weight is extremely difficult. The drive to eat is a fundamental instinct. That instinct isn't calibrated for constant easy availability of food. We inherently want to eat more than is good for us in an environment of abundance. Fighting that requires a great deal of willpower, which is a limited resource. Successful weight loss comes down to figuring out how to reduce your intake and increase your movement without requiring more willpower than you can actually muster. This is really hard. But losing weight is still simple.
  • n4r9 11y ago
    I think "other factors" could well include the reluctance of the average human mind to undergo consistent discipline, and the reluctance of health food corporations to concede that it pays off if successful.
• graeme 11y ago
  I hear this a lot. I doubt it's sustainable. A lot of people who calorie count seem to regain eventually. None of the long term fit people I know count calories. They tend to do a couple things: 1. Have well functioning hunger, which comes from 2. Eating whole foods and 3. Eating high satiety foods I'm pretty steadily at my lean weight. But when I'm not, I just switch to higher satiety foods and the weight comes off. This method is both easy and simple, but I rarely see it recommended. Are there people it doesn't work for? (Of course, the hard part of this method is having a personal dietary culture that includes buying, cooking and eating whole foods. Note that I'm not including cost, because in areas that aren't good deserts whole foods tend to cost less than processed foods)
  • randlet 11y ago
    Whether or not it's sustainable is a different topic though.
  • hellodevnull 11y ago
    One of the reasons people regain is that they've gone on diets with a calorie intake that is too low (or lacking in protein) and experienced muscle atrophy rather than fat loss. A decrease in muscle mass also decreases their metabolism, which means their BMR is now lower, but because they don't know, when they return to their seemingly normal calorie intake, they'll quickly put the weight they lost back on.
    • dragonwriter 11y ago
      That's a factor, but even if you just lose fat, you calorie expenditure from the same activity pattern, ceteris paribus, will be reduced (because you are carrying less weight), so if you return to the eating pattern which at which you were stable at the higher weight (assuming no other systemic/metabolic changes, just the fat loss) you will gain weight asymptotically approaching the the weight at which that "normal" calorie intake had you stable before.
    • billmalarky 11y ago
      Muscle loss from calorie restriction is much less than most believe (marginal until you get around sub 10% bodyfat). Same goes for metabolism slowdown. You will lose strength on a calorie deficit, but the muscle tissue remains. Google "starvation mode myth" See also this military study where men on extreme calorie deficits and high activity levels did not lose lean muscle tissue until hitting extremely low (sub 5%) bodyfat levels. http://jap.physiology.org/content/88/5/1820 http://jap.physiology.org/content/88/5/1820
• acjohnson55 11y ago
  That doesn't make any sense, unless you're consistently eating the same foods prepared the same way.
  • randlet 11y ago
    As I've said elsewhere, calorie estimates on packages are close enough that it doesn't really matter what you eat as long as you estimate consistently.
    • acjohnson55 11y ago
      That still doesn't make sense. One example cited in the article says that for almonds, 129 calories were absorbed out of the 170 listed on the label. That's a 25% difference. The article unfortunately doesn't give a whole lot more info on how this tracks across various foods under various methods of preparation, but it would seem to me that if this difference is highly variable, it basically defeats the idea of fungibility of "label calories", which seems to me to be the entire point of listing them in the first place. Granted, if you're basically eating the same stuff, but just increasing or decreasing helpings, that's not such an issue. People might disagree with my reasoning here, but I'm not really seeing how I deserve downvotes.
      • randlet 11y ago
        That 25% difference is for a single serving of food and only translates into a ~2.5% error in your daily food total. People eat a varied enough diet that a 25% difference in a single food item really won't make a huge difference. Lets take a man who needs ~2500kCal per day to maintain his current weight. A nice steady loss of 1lb per week would require this guy to eat at roughly a 500kCal/day deficit (a total deficit of 3500kCal translates to a fat loss of 1 lb). Even underestimating his total caloric intake by 10% (he eats 2200kCal instead of 2000kCal) every single day will still see him losing weight at .6lb per week. After 4 weeks of this he can see that he's only lost 2.4 lbs and can therefore reduce his intake by another 200kCal/day to achieve the desired 1lb/week loss. Tracking your weight/calories like this makes it fairly trivial to lose weight. It really doesn't matter if all the individual food items have perfectly assessed caloric content...as I say, they're close enough.