9 ms·

Note that (at least the summary indicates) this experiment refutes "calories in calories out" theory - food composition affects thermogenesis. (I am not talking

Note that (at least the summary indicates) this experiment refutes "calories in calories out" theory - food composition affects thermogenesis. (I am not talking about the tautological and useless thermodynamic sense in which it definitely is true; I am talking about the "measure your intake and exercise" crowd)

astrange 9y ago
Exercise is a bad way to increase calories out, because it's just too efficient. The conversion is something like 1 mile run = 1 tbsp peanut butter.
- DanBC 9y ago
  And people almost always overestimate how much they've burnt, and often eat more to compensate.
  - phicoh 9y ago
    My (entirely non-scientific) opinion is that most people exercise the wrong way. After a bit of training, muscles can store carbon-hydrates for about 1.5 hours of exercise. When these carbs a burned, muscles take new carbs directly from the blood stream. So if you exercise by burning mostly carbs and don't eat, you end up with low blood sugar levels and a very strong urge to eat. The trick is to burn fat. But to burn fat in a straight forward way you first have deplete the carb store, and basically force muscles to burn fat. This requires exercise that lasts many hours in one go. The additional benefit as far as I know is that if muscles are trained to burn fat, they will start burning more fat even when not in use. So the effect lasts a lot longer than just the actual amount of exercise. So we have a culture where exercise means to go to the gym and do exciting things there. Which mainly burns carbs. In the past when people did manual labor, they worked the same way for an entire day, burning mostly fat.
    - will_brown 9y ago
      I'm a distance runner and personally find I enjoy a high fat diet for balancing weight, performance (how I feel more than time), and physique (entirely ego driven, but can't over look the real effect of thoughts/beliefs on health). That said I have personally run on high fat (even in ketosis, and seperately eating animal products and vegan); high protein/more fairly a body builder bulking macro(including dairy protein: whey and casein); and high carb. And we all know we can find athletes of the highest level in every sport practicing various mixtures of those diets to great success. So I don't think it is fair to say people are doing it wrong by burning primarily glucose as opposed to fat. I think the most successful diets (no matter the macro nutrient philosophy) have the following in common: 1. Hydration/absorption: obviously no matter what cells must be properly hydrated and absorb micro/macro nutrients. 2. Anti-inflammatory foods: inflammation is linked to every chronic disease there is and even at the highest levels of performance do you want your cells combating inflammation or involved in the krebs cycle. 3. Anti-toxin: toxins can be eliminated from the body through the pores or excretion. Not all toxins can be sweated out and not all will naturally be excreated but certain foods can bind to toxins. So foods promoting removal of toxins from the body are important, but outside diet, exercise is important, abstaining from toxins like cigarettes is important, and probably because of the level of toxins on the modern western diet practices like juice cleanses and fastings could be important tools toward anti toxin cellular health. 4. Anti oxidants: as cells oxidize free radical can spread around the body, it's important to eliminate or isolate free radicals which can be potential causes of diseases like cancer. 5. Micro/macro nutrient: someone else mentioned maximizing micro nutrient intake to calorie ratio, that's probably a good way to put it. As I mentioned I'm starting to see macros as a personal choice based on the individual, that said I have very strong opinions to support my high fat preference (not keto though) and think so long as a person has achieved cellular health through 1-4 they too can experiment with their macros to suite their personal desire and needs. 6. Microbiome: I don't even pretend to understand what's going on here, but often hear this refered to as the second brain. While a neat phrase I'll just point to a study in equatorial Africa on twins, where it's not uncommon to have identical twins on the same diet 1 malnurished and the other not with the only difference to be found in their microbiome.
      - 9y ago
- bitexploder 9y ago
  Assuming you meant inefficient. It is exceedingly difficult for people to make lifestyle change. Some shockingly small percentage of people lose 40 lbs and keep it off. I have an anecdotal idea that, basically, folks who are fit enough to exercise off 1000-1500 calories every week and do so are the ones that never have to lose the weight in many cases. Finally, although inefficient in the thermodynamic sense, I think part of why this is true is because most people gain weight over a course of years. That extra soda or beer every day. When you have a simple balancing lever like an extra mile or two of vigorous walking or something else it can all balance. When you are sedentary in the same situation, you slowly get diabetes. Also peanut butter is dense, but a good way to illustrate the problem to someone a good way is to also ask someone if they are willing to walk for 30 minutes for one soda.
  - rebuilder 9y ago
    Moving the mass of a human body over a mile on one tablespoon of fuel is highly efficient! Edit: tablespoon, not tea-
    - cma 9y ago
      Trains do about 30 times better on a tablespoon of diesel, and that's only including the weight of the freight and not the train itself.
      - meesterdude 9y ago
        i feel like a train isn't going to get anywhere on a tablespoon. That's enough for a few engine strokes perhaps, but that's hardly 30 times better than a mile by a human, no?
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        9y ago
- barking 9y ago
  Except swimming where a lot of calories are burned to maintain body temperature. The number of calories top swimmers have to eat per day dwarfs those of other sports I believe. In fact I believe being cold in general is a good idea all else being equal if you want to lose weight but the advantage of water is that it's a better conductor of heat out of your body than air is.
  - wolco 9y ago
    Cold in general prompts the body to begin to hold fat. Heat makes breaking of bonds easier.
    - barking 9y ago
      Yes but if the body is trying to maintain normal body temperature it is necessary to burn fat if you are not eating to excess.
    - majkinetor 9y ago
      Cold in general also makes your brown fat more prominent relative to the white fat. The brown fat is the good one, and its purpose is to dissipates heat. If you are never cold, it will get reduced to the minimum in a 'use it or loose' it sense.
- jghn 9y ago
  You're right, but it depends. This is certainly true for aerobic exercise but things like weightlifting for mass will long term increase your BMR.
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  I feel like it's one of those things that sits in the background and eventually has a decent effect over time (assuming you're not looking for unreasonably rapid weight loss). It's an extra tool not, not a replacement for restriction (as well as a safeguard against a crashing metabolism). An easy run of three miles three times a week takes three half hours out of your week and can easily burn 1000 calories. If you're keeping an eye on calories in and don't go over to compensate, that's a pound every 3-4 weeks. That sounds glacially slow, but if you're doing CICO for six months it's an extra 8-9 lbs. And this is being conservative: given the lengths of willpower people go to in the calories-in side, going for a half hour run every day isn't that unreasonable. That will lose you an extra 17 lbs in six months. If you're trying to lose even 50-100 lbs, 17 lbs over six months is not insignificant (let alone if you're trying to lose 20-30lbs). I think the idea that it's not useful for weight loss comes from the fact that it's tough when you're starting, but then, so is calorie restriction. All of this is ignoring weightlifting, which is even better at making weight loss easier.
NikolaeVarius 9y ago
The two are the exact same thing. Not sure how the article refutes.
- beagle3 9y ago
  It says that different composition of X calorie in induces different calorie out spent on metabolism. That means short of living in a sealed chamber that measures everything, "calorie out" precision is so low that makes it a much less useful measure if you are trying to gain or lose weight.
  - NikolaeVarius 9y ago
    No it doesn't. If you're not losing weight, it just means eat less. Every single fitness board ever knows that its impossible to know exactly how much you're consuming or exerting. Which is why you're supposed to just drop another 250 calories a day until you start losing weight again.
    - beagle3 9y ago
      ... which means the CI - CO is a useless equation because CO cannot be measured reliably in a standard setting. You know that obviously, and so do I, but there are a lot of people (including here on HN) who argue that eating an Apple daily and otherwise not changing anything is guaranteed to make you gain weight, and that's just not true. You say "cut 250" but the article just gave an example that 120 cals of different composition were netting amounts different by 40. That's a 30 percent difference based on composition.
ekidd 9y ago
"Calories in, calories out" is both true (in the thermodynamic sense) and accurate enough to be useful (in a practical sense). I've personally performed the experiment, using MyFitnessPal and a $14 digital scale, and it turns out that I can control my weight to within a few pounds. There are a few caveats: - Yes, your diet composition does have metabolic effects. Protein, sugar and fat all follow different metabolic pathways, and converting between them requires energy. Protein is supposedly easier to store as lean mass than as fat, for example. But unless you're already lean and training hard, these effects are relatively minor. If you want to lose 50 pounds of fat, calories are good approximation. - Unless you're a hard-core distance athlete, the "calories out" side of the equation is mostly useless. Depending on your weight, walking a mile burns about 1 Oreo. Essentially, it takes a lot of energy to run your brain and your digestive system, but exercise is surprisingly energy efficient. So if you work at a desk job, and you don't run 5 miles a day, then use the "Sedentary" option when calculating your daily calories. - If you want to be both lean and muscular, things get trickier, because you need to worry about your muscle:fat ratio. You can control this with resistance training. But weightlifting while losing fat can be pretty metabolically brutal. Conventional wisdom says that it helps to watch your protein:carbs:fat ratio, and to eat a nutrient-rich diet. (And my personal experience bears this out, especially once I've exhausted the easy gains in the weight room.) - Most diets fail because most people stop dieting. If you revert to your old habits, you'll eventually revert to your old weight and body composition. As a general rule, few people stick with long-term lifestyle changes. Losing weight and becoming muscular are both solved problems. The major challenge is sticking with the behaviors that produce the desired result.
- evincarofautumn 9y ago
  An even blunter instrument that I’ve found very useful for weight and health is “mass in, mass out”. That is, in a First Law sense, you can’t gain more than the mass of what you eat & drink, and you will always lose a certain amount of mass each day through breathing (metabolism, exercise) and excreting (waste, sweat). So for example I lose 1–2 pounds a day with my metabolism, activity level, and diet, so I eat a bit more than that per day and try to make sure that those foods are healthy most of the time. For me, “healthy” means mostly plant-based, high in fiber, balanced in nutrients, and so on. I joke that my diet consists of vegan food and cheeseburgers, but it’s pretty close to the truth. I think this should be the first step that most people take toward changing their dietary habits, because it’s dead simple: look at the weight on the package of the stuff you’re putting in your face, and get a cheap kitchen scale if you want to be particular about it. Then incorporate calories as you begin to get an intuitive sense of how caloric density affects the answer to “How much of this can I eat if I want to maintain/lose/gain weight?” and then incorporate other details like macronutrients. Even before all this, the zeroth step is to document your habits by just writing them down. It might just be how my mind works, but if I want to fix something about what I’m doing—eating, sleeping, taking drugs—then it’s way easier to think about it in terms of adjusting a graph than all the details of the actual problem at hand.
steveplace 9y ago
Weight Change = CI - CO Where CO has a CI input. This has been known for while. Protein has a thermic effect which can change your CO. But the equation still works.
- beagle3 9y ago
  On the useless tautological sense. If you can't measure CO to within 20%, can hardly measure CI to within that range - then for all practical purposes, the equation does not work. You may want to read about (lack of) precision in Atwater factors, to the tune of 50%, if you believe CI is easy to compute.
theprotocol 9y ago
I'd say it adds a logic circuit to the input, factoring in absorption.

astrange 9y ago

Exercise is a bad way to increase calories out, because it's just too efficient. The conversion is something like 1 mile run = 1 tbsp peanut butter.

DanBC 9y ago
And people almost always overestimate how much they've burnt, and often eat more to compensate.
- phicoh 9y ago
  My (entirely non-scientific) opinion is that most people exercise the wrong way. After a bit of training, muscles can store carbon-hydrates for about 1.5 hours of exercise. When these carbs a burned, muscles take new carbs directly from the blood stream. So if you exercise by burning mostly carbs and don't eat, you end up with low blood sugar levels and a very strong urge to eat. The trick is to burn fat. But to burn fat in a straight forward way you first have deplete the carb store, and basically force muscles to burn fat. This requires exercise that lasts many hours in one go. The additional benefit as far as I know is that if muscles are trained to burn fat, they will start burning more fat even when not in use. So the effect lasts a lot longer than just the actual amount of exercise. So we have a culture where exercise means to go to the gym and do exciting things there. Which mainly burns carbs. In the past when people did manual labor, they worked the same way for an entire day, burning mostly fat.
  - will_brown 9y ago
    I'm a distance runner and personally find I enjoy a high fat diet for balancing weight, performance (how I feel more than time), and physique (entirely ego driven, but can't over look the real effect of thoughts/beliefs on health). That said I have personally run on high fat (even in ketosis, and seperately eating animal products and vegan); high protein/more fairly a body builder bulking macro(including dairy protein: whey and casein); and high carb. And we all know we can find athletes of the highest level in every sport practicing various mixtures of those diets to great success. So I don't think it is fair to say people are doing it wrong by burning primarily glucose as opposed to fat. I think the most successful diets (no matter the macro nutrient philosophy) have the following in common: 1. Hydration/absorption: obviously no matter what cells must be properly hydrated and absorb micro/macro nutrients. 2. Anti-inflammatory foods: inflammation is linked to every chronic disease there is and even at the highest levels of performance do you want your cells combating inflammation or involved in the krebs cycle. 3. Anti-toxin: toxins can be eliminated from the body through the pores or excretion. Not all toxins can be sweated out and not all will naturally be excreated but certain foods can bind to toxins. So foods promoting removal of toxins from the body are important, but outside diet, exercise is important, abstaining from toxins like cigarettes is important, and probably because of the level of toxins on the modern western diet practices like juice cleanses and fastings could be important tools toward anti toxin cellular health. 4. Anti oxidants: as cells oxidize free radical can spread around the body, it's important to eliminate or isolate free radicals which can be potential causes of diseases like cancer. 5. Micro/macro nutrient: someone else mentioned maximizing micro nutrient intake to calorie ratio, that's probably a good way to put it. As I mentioned I'm starting to see macros as a personal choice based on the individual, that said I have very strong opinions to support my high fat preference (not keto though) and think so long as a person has achieved cellular health through 1-4 they too can experiment with their macros to suite their personal desire and needs. 6. Microbiome: I don't even pretend to understand what's going on here, but often hear this refered to as the second brain. While a neat phrase I'll just point to a study in equatorial Africa on twins, where it's not uncommon to have identical twins on the same diet 1 malnurished and the other not with the only difference to be found in their microbiome.
    - 9y ago
bitexploder 9y ago
Assuming you meant inefficient. It is exceedingly difficult for people to make lifestyle change. Some shockingly small percentage of people lose 40 lbs and keep it off. I have an anecdotal idea that, basically, folks who are fit enough to exercise off 1000-1500 calories every week and do so are the ones that never have to lose the weight in many cases. Finally, although inefficient in the thermodynamic sense, I think part of why this is true is because most people gain weight over a course of years. That extra soda or beer every day. When you have a simple balancing lever like an extra mile or two of vigorous walking or something else it can all balance. When you are sedentary in the same situation, you slowly get diabetes. Also peanut butter is dense, but a good way to illustrate the problem to someone a good way is to also ask someone if they are willing to walk for 30 minutes for one soda.
- rebuilder 9y ago
  Moving the mass of a human body over a mile on one tablespoon of fuel is highly efficient! Edit: tablespoon, not tea-
  - cma 9y ago
    Trains do about 30 times better on a tablespoon of diesel, and that's only including the weight of the freight and not the train itself.
    - meesterdude 9y ago
      i feel like a train isn't going to get anywhere on a tablespoon. That's enough for a few engine strokes perhaps, but that's hardly 30 times better than a mile by a human, no?
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - 9y ago
barking 9y ago
Except swimming where a lot of calories are burned to maintain body temperature. The number of calories top swimmers have to eat per day dwarfs those of other sports I believe. In fact I believe being cold in general is a good idea all else being equal if you want to lose weight but the advantage of water is that it's a better conductor of heat out of your body than air is.
- wolco 9y ago
  Cold in general prompts the body to begin to hold fat. Heat makes breaking of bonds easier.
  - barking 9y ago
    Yes but if the body is trying to maintain normal body temperature it is necessary to burn fat if you are not eating to excess.
  - majkinetor 9y ago
    Cold in general also makes your brown fat more prominent relative to the white fat. The brown fat is the good one, and its purpose is to dissipates heat. If you are never cold, it will get reduced to the minimum in a 'use it or loose' it sense.
jghn 9y ago
You're right, but it depends. This is certainly true for aerobic exercise but things like weightlifting for mass will long term increase your BMR.
wutbrodo 9y ago
I feel like it's one of those things that sits in the background and eventually has a decent effect over time (assuming you're not looking for unreasonably rapid weight loss). It's an extra tool not, not a replacement for restriction (as well as a safeguard against a crashing metabolism). An easy run of three miles three times a week takes three half hours out of your week and can easily burn 1000 calories. If you're keeping an eye on calories in and don't go over to compensate, that's a pound every 3-4 weeks. That sounds glacially slow, but if you're doing CICO for six months it's an extra 8-9 lbs. And this is being conservative: given the lengths of willpower people go to in the calories-in side, going for a half hour run every day isn't that unreasonable. That will lose you an extra 17 lbs in six months. If you're trying to lose even 50-100 lbs, 17 lbs over six months is not insignificant (let alone if you're trying to lose 20-30lbs). I think the idea that it's not useful for weight loss comes from the fact that it's tough when you're starting, but then, so is calorie restriction. All of this is ignoring weightlifting, which is even better at making weight loss easier.

NikolaeVarius 9y ago

The two are the exact same thing. Not sure how the article refutes.

beagle3 9y ago
It says that different composition of X calorie in induces different calorie out spent on metabolism. That means short of living in a sealed chamber that measures everything, "calorie out" precision is so low that makes it a much less useful measure if you are trying to gain or lose weight.
- NikolaeVarius 9y ago
  No it doesn't. If you're not losing weight, it just means eat less. Every single fitness board ever knows that its impossible to know exactly how much you're consuming or exerting. Which is why you're supposed to just drop another 250 calories a day until you start losing weight again.
  - beagle3 9y ago
    ... which means the CI - CO is a useless equation because CO cannot be measured reliably in a standard setting. You know that obviously, and so do I, but there are a lot of people (including here on HN) who argue that eating an Apple daily and otherwise not changing anything is guaranteed to make you gain weight, and that's just not true. You say "cut 250" but the article just gave an example that 120 cals of different composition were netting amounts different by 40. That's a 30 percent difference based on composition.

ekidd 9y ago

"Calories in, calories out" is both true (in the thermodynamic sense) and accurate enough to be useful (in a practical sense). I've personally performed the experiment, using MyFitnessPal and a $14 digital scale, and it turns out that I can control my weight to within a few pounds. There are a few caveats: - Yes, your diet composition does have metabolic effects. Protein, sugar and fat all follow different metabolic pathways, and converting between them requires energy. Protein is supposedly easier to store as lean mass than as fat, for example. But unless you're already lean and training hard, these effects are relatively minor. If you want to lose 50 pounds of fat, calories are good approximation. - Unless you're a hard-core distance athlete, the "calories out" side of the equation is mostly useless. Depending on your weight, walking a mile burns about 1 Oreo. Essentially, it takes a lot of energy to run your brain and your digestive system, but exercise is surprisingly energy efficient. So if you work at a desk job, and you don't run 5 miles a day, then use the "Sedentary" option when calculating your daily calories. - If you want to be both lean and muscular, things get trickier, because you need to worry about your muscle:fat ratio. You can control this with resistance training. But weightlifting while losing fat can be pretty metabolically brutal. Conventional wisdom says that it helps to watch your protein:carbs:fat ratio, and to eat a nutrient-rich diet. (And my personal experience bears this out, especially once I've exhausted the easy gains in the weight room.) - Most diets fail because most people stop dieting. If you revert to your old habits, you'll eventually revert to your old weight and body composition. As a general rule, few people stick with long-term lifestyle changes. Losing weight and becoming muscular are both solved problems. The major challenge is sticking with the behaviors that produce the desired result.

evincarofautumn 9y ago
An even blunter instrument that I’ve found very useful for weight and health is “mass in, mass out”. That is, in a First Law sense, you can’t gain more than the mass of what you eat & drink, and you will always lose a certain amount of mass each day through breathing (metabolism, exercise) and excreting (waste, sweat). So for example I lose 1–2 pounds a day with my metabolism, activity level, and diet, so I eat a bit more than that per day and try to make sure that those foods are healthy most of the time. For me, “healthy” means mostly plant-based, high in fiber, balanced in nutrients, and so on. I joke that my diet consists of vegan food and cheeseburgers, but it’s pretty close to the truth. I think this should be the first step that most people take toward changing their dietary habits, because it’s dead simple: look at the weight on the package of the stuff you’re putting in your face, and get a cheap kitchen scale if you want to be particular about it. Then incorporate calories as you begin to get an intuitive sense of how caloric density affects the answer to “How much of this can I eat if I want to maintain/lose/gain weight?” and then incorporate other details like macronutrients. Even before all this, the zeroth step is to document your habits by just writing them down. It might just be how my mind works, but if I want to fix something about what I’m doing—eating, sleeping, taking drugs—then it’s way easier to think about it in terms of adjusting a graph than all the details of the actual problem at hand.

steveplace 9y ago

Weight Change = CI - CO Where CO has a CI input. This has been known for while. Protein has a thermic effect which can change your CO. But the equation still works.

beagle3 9y ago
On the useless tautological sense. If you can't measure CO to within 20%, can hardly measure CI to within that range - then for all practical purposes, the equation does not work. You may want to read about (lack of) precision in Atwater factors, to the tune of 50%, if you believe CI is easy to compute.

theprotocol 9y ago

I'd say it adds a logic circuit to the input, factoring in absorption.