6 ms·

I can generalise diets pretty easy. Eat less calories than you burn and loose weight. Eat whatever you want if you can abide by this rule you will loose the wei

by xaviers 10y ago

I can generalise diets pretty easy. Eat less calories than you burn and loose weight. Eat whatever you want if you can abide by this rule you will loose the weight. But to be healthy. Well you have to eat healthy to be healthy. And that means getting all the fat, carbs and protein your body needs. And what your body needs I agree you can't generalise.

legulere 10y ago
This is true, but it ignores a lot of other things that are going on: Absorption and digestion can greatly vary between humans. (A Common example are algae). What kind of micro and macronutrients you eat will directly and indirectly affect your metabolism. What you eat will affect your hunger. Those and other complex interplays lead to things that are counterintuitive. For instance there recently was some study that drinking soda with artificial sweetener also leads to obesity, if I remember correctly.
- 234dd57d2c8db 10y ago
  None of that matters. If you're gaining weight, consume less calories until you start losing weight. Safe weight loss is a lb a week. It will take quite some time to safely slim down. That is the problem, it took years to put on the weight, people try eating less for a couple weeks and throw up their hands! People don't realize if they are 50lbs overweight, it will take about a year to lose all that safely and comfortably.
ivanhoe 10y ago
> if you can abide by this rule you will loose the weight This is the key point and it makes all the difference. You need to be able to stay on the diet for a sufficiently long time, and that's why different approaches are needed fro different people. If you eat carbs you need to measure carefully every meal and calculate the calories, which to many people very quickly gets extremely annoying. On low carb diets you don't have to. Also there are mood changes depending on the taste of the food that you eat. If you like eating meat and veggies, low-carb diets taste great, you enjoy every meal. It makes it much easier to abide the rules. Also general mental state is important, high stress and depression will sabotage your efforts. Diets are not just about nutrition, that's one of the biggest misconceptions. Psychology and physical activities play equally, if not more important role in dieting.
- sametmax 10y ago
  This is dangerous advice though. Loose weight just by counting calories will not take in consideration toxicity (see my other comment in this thread). Many people burn fat this way, which release toxins they can't process. Hence their body is thin but saturated with poison. From here 2 things happens: - the person gains weight again to protect him/herself. Happens very often. - the person manage to not gain weight at this expense of his/her health, sometime with terrible consequences you only see months or years later. One of my friends is currently in the later category. She lost a lot of weight and his very hot. But her skin is degrading at an alarming pace. It's a very bad symptom when your are 30. All in all, it's important when you loose weight to: - do it progressively so your body can process the toxins at the same rate they are released. - help the body to eliminated say toxins by alternating rest and exercise, drinking and if needed, consuming. - provide the body with a sane diet to not only avoid adding more toxins to the current ones, but also bring minerals than can be used to bring the PH up and vitamins to keep organs running smoothly. Basically, "sleep well, eat well and exercise". Thank you grand ma :)
  - CPLX 10y ago
    This post is unscientific and literally nonsense. There's no such thing as a "toxin" and reducing your adipose fat tissue does not poison your body. It's precisely this sort of magical thinking that the OP is trying to counter.
    - tzs 10y ago
      You should probably rephrase. I think I get what you are trying to say, but the way you said it is way off. There most definitely are such things as "toxins". There are neurotoxins produced by black widows, most scorpions, box jellyfish, many algae and cyanobacteria, among others. There are necrotoxins produced by the brown recluse, rattlesnakes, puff adders for example. Heck, if there were no such thing as toxins, the "Journal of Venomous Animals and Toxins including Tropical Diseases" would have long ago dropped "and Toxins" from its name to save costs on ink :-). The Toxin and Toxin-Target database [1] would also have about 3700 less entries if toxins did not exist. [1] http://www.t3db.ca http://www.t3db.ca
sametmax 10y ago
Not exactly true. For the same amount of calories, the quality of food may or may not impact your weight. You can eat 4000 calories/day in banana and loose weight, but eat 2500 in cheese burger and gain. I tested that on myself. The body does not blindnessly store excess in absorbed energy. It stores fat for many other reasons. One of them is to regulate the blood PH: if you saturate your organism with too much toxic food, you won't process it fast enough. To avoid crossing the unfamous 7.40 PH threshold, one strategy is to use fat to wrap toxic molecules and put them aside on your belly so you can deal with it later. Unfortunately with our current life style, this "later" never comes.
- philfrasty 10y ago
  „You can eat 4000 calories/day in banana and loose weight, but eat 2500 in cheese burger and gain.“ This my friend, is not true. Not true in like...completely false. (source: Bodybuilding for a long long time...dieting 6 months every year...bulking up the other 6 months of the year...been counting every calorie for years)
  - sametmax 10y ago
    Again I tested it on myself. I tried so many diets it's not funny: - full prot diet; - mono-diet; - fasting; - raw food diet; - veggie; - vegan; - classic 'balanced diet'; - body-building diet where you weight your chicken; - and of course the good old "student-fast-food" diet. I usually take blood samples before and after and graph my weight and IMC.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      >Again I tested it on myself. It doesn't matter, it's still not true. And there are tons of ways the measuring can go wrong or be misleading.
      - sametmax 10y ago
        In the bottom comment I provided links to resources dealing with food toxicity. Part of them deal with toxicity and weight. Would you provide the resources to counter examples ? It's only fair to have literature to compare the 2 point of views.
audunw 10y ago
> Eat less calories than you burn and loose weight. This mantra annoys me, because it's like saying that to go to space, all you need to do is to burn rocket fuel and keep the nozzle pointed down (and then to the side). It's technically true, but every single sane person know that it's true, and it doesn't really help you get to where you want. It ignores how food affects motivation, digestion, metabolism etc. You can technically loose weight eating only sugar, but you'd find it impossibly hard due to the way the body is wired. Generalizing to the obvious/trivial is not useful.
- jschwartzi 10y ago
  People keep repeating it because once you figure out your motivation and dial in a calorie goal that lets you lose weight without feeling like crap, it actually works. You're right that you can't ignore all that other stuff, but you also can't lose sight of the essential fact that you lose weight by eating fewer calories than you burn. The process of dieting requires you to perform tasks that support that goal. It's a fundamental part of our physiology that we have to consume a certain quantity of macronutrients to support our metabolic processes. If we don't, then our bodies utilize existing stores of macronutrients like fat and muscles, breaking them down and converting them to usable energy to meet the deficit. This causes you to lose weight, as you drink water, metabolize your fat and muscle tissue, and then exhale carbon dioxide, and excrete waste products. You're literally breathing the weight out. You find motivation so that there's something preventing you from stuffing your face with cake every day. Then you spend a few months iterating while you figure out what you can build a diet out of that will leave you sated and allow you to cut calories. This is where your metabolism, psychology, etc. come in. Once you have that dialed in, and you may arrive at it without counting calories if you're careful, then you will start losing weight. Weight loss requires a lot of self-awareness and attention to what you enjoy or don't enjoy about a variety of foods. Somehow, through some series of test meals, you figure out that you really like raw bell peppers, but only with salt, or that the only thing trail mix is actually good for is making you hungrier(this is something I struggle with).
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    I think the point is that in order to take in less calories than you burn, and stay vaguely healthy, you need to be aware of what you're eating, how your body processes it, and how to avoid the temptation to eat more. If you're not eating the right sorts of foods, then you're going to wind up hungry well before your next meal - which isn't conducive to an ongoing diet change.
ENTP 10y ago
I can't speak for anyone else but in my case, an excess of calories usually results in me being an awful lot hotter as my body burns off the extra energy. I'm not a biologist but I was under the impression that a release of insulin was required to store excess energy as fat? That would suggest it's more related to blood sugar spikes than actual energy consumed.
- tallanvor 10y ago
  There are absolutely different ways bodies can handle excess calories, and it's pretty clearly documented. For some people, their body will try to burn the extra calories - this in part may be due to the amount of brown fat, which is one of the mechanisms the body uses to generate heat. For others, their body will store as much energy as possible as fat, and they need to increase their activity level to compensate. In addition, your body can become more efficient, using less energy based on the calories you consume. This is one reason that it can be very hard to keep weight off after you lose it. Metabolism is an incredibly complex process, and while we understand a lot of the pieces, we do not yet have a full understanding of how those pieces fit together, and how to use that information to help people change their metabolism beyond more than very general advice (build muscle, be more active), and some things were sort of taken for granted - such as how it used to be thought that lactic acid was responsible for muscle soreness in the days after workouts, when more recent research has shown this isn't the case: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/16/health/nutrition/16run.html http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/16/health/nutrition/16run.htm.... Maybe in another 50 years we'll have people who can really understand this stuff.
bloat 10y ago
Why is this true? Calories measure energy, not mass. If I eat high calorie food, why does that cause me to retain more of the mass of that food in my body, compared to the same quantity of low calorie food? This is a genuine question which I've never found a good answer for. It would make much more sense to me if you said "Eat fewer kg of food than you excrete, and loose weight".
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- rory 10y ago
  Your body stores excess energy as fat, or uses it to build muscle. The amount of food mass in your body at any given time is assumed to be constant in the long term, so when we talk about a person's weight changing we are generally referring to a change in their fat or muscle mass. 1kg of ice cream has a much greater potential to change your long-term mass than 1kg of broccoli because your body has the ability to extract more energy from it, and thus build more fat or muscle.

by xaviers 10y ago

legulere 10y ago

This is true, but it ignores a lot of other things that are going on: Absorption and digestion can greatly vary between humans. (A Common example are algae). What kind of micro and macronutrients you eat will directly and indirectly affect your metabolism. What you eat will affect your hunger. Those and other complex interplays lead to things that are counterintuitive. For instance there recently was some study that drinking soda with artificial sweetener also leads to obesity, if I remember correctly.

234dd57d2c8db 10y ago
None of that matters. If you're gaining weight, consume less calories until you start losing weight. Safe weight loss is a lb a week. It will take quite some time to safely slim down. That is the problem, it took years to put on the weight, people try eating less for a couple weeks and throw up their hands! People don't realize if they are 50lbs overweight, it will take about a year to lose all that safely and comfortably.

ivanhoe 10y ago

> if you can abide by this rule you will loose the weight This is the key point and it makes all the difference. You need to be able to stay on the diet for a sufficiently long time, and that's why different approaches are needed fro different people. If you eat carbs you need to measure carefully every meal and calculate the calories, which to many people very quickly gets extremely annoying. On low carb diets you don't have to. Also there are mood changes depending on the taste of the food that you eat. If you like eating meat and veggies, low-carb diets taste great, you enjoy every meal. It makes it much easier to abide the rules. Also general mental state is important, high stress and depression will sabotage your efforts. Diets are not just about nutrition, that's one of the biggest misconceptions. Psychology and physical activities play equally, if not more important role in dieting.

sametmax 10y ago
This is dangerous advice though. Loose weight just by counting calories will not take in consideration toxicity (see my other comment in this thread). Many people burn fat this way, which release toxins they can't process. Hence their body is thin but saturated with poison. From here 2 things happens: - the person gains weight again to protect him/herself. Happens very often. - the person manage to not gain weight at this expense of his/her health, sometime with terrible consequences you only see months or years later. One of my friends is currently in the later category. She lost a lot of weight and his very hot. But her skin is degrading at an alarming pace. It's a very bad symptom when your are 30. All in all, it's important when you loose weight to: - do it progressively so your body can process the toxins at the same rate they are released. - help the body to eliminated say toxins by alternating rest and exercise, drinking and if needed, consuming. - provide the body with a sane diet to not only avoid adding more toxins to the current ones, but also bring minerals than can be used to bring the PH up and vitamins to keep organs running smoothly. Basically, "sleep well, eat well and exercise". Thank you grand ma :)
- CPLX 10y ago
  This post is unscientific and literally nonsense. There's no such thing as a "toxin" and reducing your adipose fat tissue does not poison your body. It's precisely this sort of magical thinking that the OP is trying to counter.
  - tzs 10y ago
    You should probably rephrase. I think I get what you are trying to say, but the way you said it is way off. There most definitely are such things as "toxins". There are neurotoxins produced by black widows, most scorpions, box jellyfish, many algae and cyanobacteria, among others. There are necrotoxins produced by the brown recluse, rattlesnakes, puff adders for example. Heck, if there were no such thing as toxins, the "Journal of Venomous Animals and Toxins including Tropical Diseases" would have long ago dropped "and Toxins" from its name to save costs on ink :-). The Toxin and Toxin-Target database [1] would also have about 3700 less entries if toxins did not exist. [1] http://www.t3db.ca http://www.t3db.ca

sametmax 10y ago

Not exactly true. For the same amount of calories, the quality of food may or may not impact your weight. You can eat 4000 calories/day in banana and loose weight, but eat 2500 in cheese burger and gain. I tested that on myself. The body does not blindnessly store excess in absorbed energy. It stores fat for many other reasons. One of them is to regulate the blood PH: if you saturate your organism with too much toxic food, you won't process it fast enough. To avoid crossing the unfamous 7.40 PH threshold, one strategy is to use fat to wrap toxic molecules and put them aside on your belly so you can deal with it later. Unfortunately with our current life style, this "later" never comes.

philfrasty 10y ago
„You can eat 4000 calories/day in banana and loose weight, but eat 2500 in cheese burger and gain.“ This my friend, is not true. Not true in like...completely false. (source: Bodybuilding for a long long time...dieting 6 months every year...bulking up the other 6 months of the year...been counting every calorie for years)
- sametmax 10y ago
  Again I tested it on myself. I tried so many diets it's not funny: - full prot diet; - mono-diet; - fasting; - raw food diet; - veggie; - vegan; - classic 'balanced diet'; - body-building diet where you weight your chicken; - and of course the good old "student-fast-food" diet. I usually take blood samples before and after and graph my weight and IMC.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >Again I tested it on myself. It doesn't matter, it's still not true. And there are tons of ways the measuring can go wrong or be misleading.
    - sametmax 10y ago
      In the bottom comment I provided links to resources dealing with food toxicity. Part of them deal with toxicity and weight. Would you provide the resources to counter examples ? It's only fair to have literature to compare the 2 point of views.

audunw 10y ago

> Eat less calories than you burn and loose weight. This mantra annoys me, because it's like saying that to go to space, all you need to do is to burn rocket fuel and keep the nozzle pointed down (and then to the side). It's technically true, but every single sane person know that it's true, and it doesn't really help you get to where you want. It ignores how food affects motivation, digestion, metabolism etc. You can technically loose weight eating only sugar, but you'd find it impossibly hard due to the way the body is wired. Generalizing to the obvious/trivial is not useful.

jschwartzi 10y ago
People keep repeating it because once you figure out your motivation and dial in a calorie goal that lets you lose weight without feeling like crap, it actually works. You're right that you can't ignore all that other stuff, but you also can't lose sight of the essential fact that you lose weight by eating fewer calories than you burn. The process of dieting requires you to perform tasks that support that goal. It's a fundamental part of our physiology that we have to consume a certain quantity of macronutrients to support our metabolic processes. If we don't, then our bodies utilize existing stores of macronutrients like fat and muscles, breaking them down and converting them to usable energy to meet the deficit. This causes you to lose weight, as you drink water, metabolize your fat and muscle tissue, and then exhale carbon dioxide, and excrete waste products. You're literally breathing the weight out. You find motivation so that there's something preventing you from stuffing your face with cake every day. Then you spend a few months iterating while you figure out what you can build a diet out of that will leave you sated and allow you to cut calories. This is where your metabolism, psychology, etc. come in. Once you have that dialed in, and you may arrive at it without counting calories if you're careful, then you will start losing weight. Weight loss requires a lot of self-awareness and attention to what you enjoy or don't enjoy about a variety of foods. Somehow, through some series of test meals, you figure out that you really like raw bell peppers, but only with salt, or that the only thing trail mix is actually good for is making you hungrier(this is something I struggle with).
- vertex-four 10y ago
  I think the point is that in order to take in less calories than you burn, and stay vaguely healthy, you need to be aware of what you're eating, how your body processes it, and how to avoid the temptation to eat more. If you're not eating the right sorts of foods, then you're going to wind up hungry well before your next meal - which isn't conducive to an ongoing diet change.

ENTP 10y ago

I can't speak for anyone else but in my case, an excess of calories usually results in me being an awful lot hotter as my body burns off the extra energy. I'm not a biologist but I was under the impression that a release of insulin was required to store excess energy as fat? That would suggest it's more related to blood sugar spikes than actual energy consumed.

tallanvor 10y ago
There are absolutely different ways bodies can handle excess calories, and it's pretty clearly documented. For some people, their body will try to burn the extra calories - this in part may be due to the amount of brown fat, which is one of the mechanisms the body uses to generate heat. For others, their body will store as much energy as possible as fat, and they need to increase their activity level to compensate. In addition, your body can become more efficient, using less energy based on the calories you consume. This is one reason that it can be very hard to keep weight off after you lose it. Metabolism is an incredibly complex process, and while we understand a lot of the pieces, we do not yet have a full understanding of how those pieces fit together, and how to use that information to help people change their metabolism beyond more than very general advice (build muscle, be more active), and some things were sort of taken for granted - such as how it used to be thought that lactic acid was responsible for muscle soreness in the days after workouts, when more recent research has shown this isn't the case: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/16/health/nutrition/16run.html http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/16/health/nutrition/16run.htm.... Maybe in another 50 years we'll have people who can really understand this stuff.

bloat 10y ago

Why is this true? Calories measure energy, not mass. If I eat high calorie food, why does that cause me to retain more of the mass of that food in my body, compared to the same quantity of low calorie food? This is a genuine question which I've never found a good answer for. It would make much more sense to me if you said "Eat fewer kg of food than you excrete, and loose weight".

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
rory 10y ago
Your body stores excess energy as fat, or uses it to build muscle. The amount of food mass in your body at any given time is assumed to be constant in the long term, so when we talk about a person's weight changing we are generally referring to a change in their fat or muscle mass. 1kg of ice cream has a much greater potential to change your long-term mass than 1kg of broccoli because your body has the ability to extract more energy from it, and thus build more fat or muscle.