7 ms·

But a new study, published Tuesday in JAMA, may turn that advice on its head. It found that people who cut back on added sugar, refined grains and highly proces

But a new study, published Tuesday in JAMA, may turn that advice on its head. It found that people who cut back on added sugar, refined grains and highly processed foods while concentrating on eating plenty of vegetables and whole foods — without worrying about counting calories or limiting portion sizes — lost significant amounts of weight over the course of a year. Maybe I missed it in the article but this just seems like calorie restriction to me. Its much harder to eat a large amount of calories if its just meat and vegetables.

dbatten 9y ago
This is particularly true for things like soda. Soda does absolutely nothing to help you feel full, but it's pretty calorie dense due to the sugar. Cut out added sugars (and therefore soda) and BOOM, you're immediately eating less calories but not feeling any more hungry.
- jclardy 9y ago
  Yeah, a few years ago I lost 55 pounds. The primary change was just cutting out soda and an increase in light activity (mainly walking.) Also drinking more water in general. I found for me that if I went to the gym and ran I would end up overeating on those days, so instead I went with the small changes which worked well for me. For me sodas sweetness lended well to making super salty foods taste better, by cutting out the sugar in the sodas I didn't have the same desire to eat salty fast food items.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- eridius 9y ago
  1 can of coke has 140 calories. A good rule of thumb is 3500 calories is a pound. So if you drink a single can of coke every day, after a year that's worth almost 15lbs. This observation is what led to me cutting soda out of my diet entirely almost a year ago (barring the rare treat). And don't be fooled by the promise of diet soda. Lots of studies recently have shown that drinking diet soda doesn't help with weight loss either. Apparently the artificial sweeteners do something to your body by tricking it into thinking it's getting sugar; I'm not really familiar with the details, but studies showed that people who swapped soda for diet soda didn't lose weight, but people who swapped soda for e.g. water did. This advice is what led to me cutting diet soda out of my diet 6 months ago (which I had switched to after cutting out regular soda), so now I drink almost exclusively water. If you're interested in cutting out soda as well, and don't think you can just switch to water, I have a couple of suggestions: 1. Start with those crystal geyser flavored sparkling waters you can get at Costco. I drank those for a while, because the hint of flavor tricked my mouth into thinking I wasn't just drinking water. I eventually stopped though, in favor of 2. Get a SodaStream and just make your own sparkling water. You can add flavor packets to this if you want, but I never have. Once you get used to it, unflavored sparkling water is pretty great. The downside here is the refill tanks for the SodaStream aren't cheap, but if you're concerned about that, there are homebrew carbonation setups as well (they just take up a lot more space; SodaStream is pretty compact).
  - btilly 9y ago
    Apparently the artificial sweeteners do something to your body by tricking it into thinking it's getting sugar... Specifically what happens is that your brain is supposed to taste sugar, and learn to shut off your appetite when it has received enough. But artificial sweeteners teach your brain to ignore that signal because you get what tastes like sugar without getting sugar. So whatever sugary things you eat, you will eat more than you otherwise would without feeling satiated.
    - cornholio 9y ago
      >whatever sugary things you eat, you will eat more than you otherwise would without feeling satiated There is no scientific merit to this frequent claim. [1] In fact, a comparative study on dieters using diet soda versus water shown that the water group lost less mass, hypothetically because they were feeling hungrier and less satisfied with their diet, thus more likely to succumb to sugary foods. [1] Rogers, Peter J. "The role of low-calorie sweeteners in the prevention and management of overweight and obesity: evidence v. conjecture," Proceedings of the Nutrition Society
      - btilly 9y ago
        Huh. I made the claim based on having seen it in many places. But Google showed it to be less certain than my memory said it was. Thanks for the correction. I'll try not to repeat this one blindly in the future.
        bitwize 9y ago
        The primary place I heard it was Hackernews broscience. Till now I even belueved it.
    - criddell 9y ago
      Is this true? It sounds a little like gym-science.
      - deleted 9y ago
- mywittyname 9y ago
  Soda also makes you hungry af. If I have a soda in the during, I'll be miserably hungry and "grazing" all night long. And it takes a few days for the effect to fully wear off.
woliveirajr 9y ago
Add some butter to your whole-grain-bread, like I do, and you'll end up with some good calories... and I always hated counting those calories that make a bread worth be eaten.
- jandrese 9y ago
  Bread is chock full of bioavailable calories to start with, adding a smear of butter on top doesn't really change it that much.
  - MrFantastic 9y ago
    That fat blunts the insulin response.
    - adventured 9y ago
      Or just take r-lipoic acid after/with glucose heavy food consumption. It'll help prevent and or lessen the spike. Diabetics use it to control their glucose levels. It can significantly push that down. I'm not seriously suggesting this of course, however it does work.
    - darpa_escapee 9y ago
      I've always read that the insulin response to fats + carbs is higher than carbs alone.
      - pixl97 9y ago
        Eh, I don't think that is the case. Ice cream has a much lower glycemic index than bread for example.
- magic_beans 9y ago
  Bread is nothing without butter. Exception: freshly baked baguette or ciabatta.
  - 9y ago
nardi 9y ago
You did indeed miss it: Dr. Gardner said it is not that calories don’t matter. After all, both groups ultimately ended up consuming fewer calories on average by the end of the study, even though they weren’t conscious of it. The point is that they did this by focusing on nutritious whole foods that satisfied their hunger.
- msla 9y ago
  Well, yes, any sustainable diet has to be satisfying. You can, and and least one person has, lost weight on a twinkie diet which also improved his cholesterol, but that wasn't very satisfying and would not have become a permanent diet.
  - jdmichal 9y ago
    There's also been at least one count of dieting via fasting for over a year. Which is more immediately obvious as unsustainable -- fasting prolonged far enough is called starvation. http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/07/24/3549931.htm http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/07/24/3549931.ht...
cornholio 9y ago
What they are saying is that calorie restriction works, but most people are too incompetent to follow through, so need seemingly magical alternative strategies to avoid calorie dense food. The danger with this approach is that the average Joe hears the message as "weight is not related to how much you eat (energy/quantity), but what you eat (quality)". That message is a public health danger, yet is becoming the prevailing sentiment for health magazines, supplement marketing, popular lifestyle shows etc.
- briancleland 9y ago
  Absolutely nothing magical about eating when you are hungry and stopping when you are sated. As long as you avoid unhealthy, unnatural foods (primarily refined carbs) this strategy works just fine. Animals don't have to count calories to avoid obesity, no reason why humans should either.
  - nikolaj 9y ago
    Admittedly this is only partially informed, but I am pretty sure most animals don't have access to enough calories to be obese. And those that do (e.g. pets, zoo animals) are (sometimes) kept from obesity due to careful calorie counting by their human caretakers.
    - SketchySeaBeast 9y ago
      I think every labrador retriever on the planet would be 200 lbs if they had their way.
      - trevyn 9y ago
        They also wouldn't be confined to a house or yard.
        SketchySeaBeast 9y ago
        Even farm dogs do their best to get fat. Either way, that's an indictment of activity level then, and not of food quality.
radley 9y ago
It's not harder, just more expensive and inconvenient.
jandrese 9y ago
Also, when you start talking about raw foods a lot of those calories won't be bioavailable. Your body simply can't extract more than a trivial amount of nutrition from raw kale. So all the article is really saying is don't bother with the math, just eat mostly vegetables and you'll lose weight.
btilly 9y ago
Obviously all diets have to be LIMO - Less In, More Out. But the question is how you get there. Eating vegetables and whole foods without worrying about counting calories or limiting portion sizes doesn't feel like effort. You don't WANT to eat more. And your body becomes happier about burning fat rather than demanding that you eat. Counting calories explicitly is a lot of work and a lot of self control. Few people can succeed at that. Personally I follow the former strategy using http://www.weightgrapher.com/ http://www.weightgrapher.com/ to keep myself honest. About 15 years ago I decided to lose 20 pounds, and kept it off for close to a decade. Then I let my weight get away from me, because life got complicated. This time around I've decided to get back to that weight again, and I know it is sustainable. I'm not aiming for fast weight loss, I've been going at a comfortable pace for 3 months and expect to be dieting another 6 months to reach my target. But I know that I'll be able to get there and stay for years without a lot of willpower. Partly luck of genetics/gut biome. Partly because I'm doing it in a mentally easy way.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- cies 9y ago
  > Obviously all diets have to be LIMO Diets designed to "cut" (loose weight), yes. Some people want to gain weight, their regimens are also called diets.
  - msla 9y ago
    If you want to be technical, any habitual pattern of eating is a diet. But technicalities don't define words, usage and context do, and, for the vast majority of people, including people here, diet means a change in your habitual pattern of eating designed to induce weight loss. That's how it's universally understood in this context. Being more technical does not mean being more correct.
    - dwc 9y ago
      "Universally understood" shouldn't be true for this. I've known a number of people who were on diets to gain weight for medical or self image reasons, and it's known still known as a diet.
txsh 9y ago
You’re not counting total calories. You’re limiting calorie density. Counting calories ignores satiety. Watching calorie density allows you to be full while limiting the calories you eat.
Zigurd 9y ago
I close to eliminated sugar, and reduced carbs, and completely eliminated highly processed foods. Over the course of 14 months I lost about 23lbs. I also cut meat consumption and alcohol, but wasn't by any stretch vegetarian or tea total. That's it. Apart from that I ate anything in any quantity I wanted. I found the combination of things I cut back on reduced cravings and overeating. I cooked a lot more, especially bean soups to take to work for lunch. That has other benefits since I work in the land of $11 sandwiches. I tracked my weight every few days with a fitness app, which, for me, helped prevent backsliding because seeing that trend line go in the wrong direction is very irritating. I don't have experimental evidence but anecdata indicates cutting sugar and alcohol are are the low-hanging fruit (cut way back on fruit juice, too).
- cies 9y ago
  > cutting sugar and alcohol are are the low-hanging fruit I did something very similar, then also dropped dairy and whoops some more pounds of body fat melted in the 6 months that followed.
  - Zigurd 9y ago
    Yes! I forgot to mention I drink hardly any milk anymore. I keep a quart in the fridge for making pancakes. I take my coffee black or with unsweetened almond/coconut milk. I still put sour cream on roasted potatoes, though.
avprpl 9y ago
Calorie restriction becomes much easier when you're substituting calorie dense foods with more calorically sparse ones. It's hard to continually fight the hunger caused by just eating less over time.
- cies 9y ago
  The epiphany I had with this was that when you want to substitute "calorie dense foods with more calorically sparse ones" AND also get in enough nutrients, that you are basically shifting towards a WFPB diet (the type of food mankind has been eating mostly, for most of its existence)
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    >WFPB "Whole Food, Plant Based", for those who had to look it up like me. I'm more of a "eat food, not too much, mostly plants" kind of guy, I'm not willing to give up meat, eggs and dairy. Which people have also been eating since forever. But I agree that a lot of people are way over-complicating nutrition.
exelius 9y ago
Right; but it’s calorie restriction through food choice rather than limiting portion size which makes it feel like less of a sacrifice. You just have to change your filter of “things I like to eat” to include less calorie-dense foods, rather than “I like this thing I’m eating but I should stop halfway just to be good”
- cstejerean 9y ago
  It doesn't even matter howe calorie dense the food is as long as you severely limit carbs. A slice of pizza is about 107g and has about 285 calories. A stick of butter is about 133g and has 810 calories. See if you can eat as many sticks of butter as you can slices of pizza. High fat / low carb foods are very hard to eat in large quantities, unless you pair them with sources of carbs (put the butter on bread, add BBQ sauce to fatty meat, etc). It's not just the caloric density, it's how much of it you can eat before you feel full.
  - exelius 9y ago
    Right; but dieting is almost entirely psychological — so any ways to trick your brain into eating less have to be valid diet tips, no?
    - headsoup 9y ago
      Only if weight loss by Kg is your only metric of success. And dieting is by definition a temporary thing to fix an issue, rather than actually changing eating patterns and content permanently. People just generally don't want to do the hard slog (i.e. in permanently avoiding sugar and carbs), they want the short term 'fix,' hence 'dieting.'
MrFantastic 9y ago
Avoiding sugar and processed food helps to avoid the feeling of hunger cause by insulin crashes.
hkmurakami 9y ago
Your body is designed so that if you eat whole foods, it's very difficult to over eat.
- cies 9y ago
  Small addition: whole plant foods. That a WFPB diet works better than calorie counting is old news (good to have yet another study confirming it). http://www.wholefoodplantbasedrd.com/2014/04/with-wfpb-there-is-no-need-to-count-calories-or-control-portions/ http://www.wholefoodplantbasedrd.com/2014/04/with-wfpb-there... https://nutritionfacts.org/2016/07/14/caloric-restriction-vs-plant-based-diets/ https://nutritionfacts.org/2016/07/14/caloric-restriction-vs...
InclinedPlane 9y ago
Humans aren't robots. If humans had infinite willpower and could simply do whatever they decided to do then the world would be a much different place. It's easy to get rich if you have infinite willpower. Easy to get in shape. Easy to climb mountains, run ultra marathons, cure cancer, swim the English channel, sail around the world, and so on. With enough willpower. But that's not how humans work. If you have to choose between two diets with equal caloric intake but one of them is easier to stick to, then that one will be in practice a much more effective form of weight loss. You see a lot of people go on diets in January, you see a lot of people in the gyms in January, all those new years resolutions. And a lot of those folks seem to be very serious about it, they spend a lot of time in the gym, they put in a lot of effort. But this is one of those tortoise/hare situations. A modest diet/exercise regime that you can stick to for the rest of your life is far more valuable than one which is more effective on paper but won't be adhered to in practice. Additionally, the thermodynamic argument (calories in vs calories out) is only mostly true in broad strokes, as a trend. Sure, if you eat few enough calories and do enough exercise you'll lose weight, and if you eat too many calories and do too little exercise then you'll gain weight. But within the boundaries there is a lot of complexity. There are regions where what you eat, the composition of your diet, and the kind of exercise you do will tip the balance one way or the other in a region of maybe a few hundred calories or so a day, and that too can make a big difference in how easy it is to maintain a diet or exercise regime and how effective it is.
- parliament32 9y ago
  >the thermodynamic argument (calories in vs calories out) is only mostly true in broad strokes, as a trend. It's not "mostly true". It's literally the only concrete truth in this whole field. If you consume X calories more than you burn you are _guaranteed_ to gain Y weight.
  - InclinedPlane 9y ago
    I'm sorry to hear that a network malfunction prevented you from reading the remainder of my post. To reiterate, it's true only in broad strokes, human metabolism is not precisely linear, there is a non-trivial amount of "slop" in the balance. You can "consume more calories than you burn" and yet still lose weight, and you can consume fewer calories than that while "burning more calories" and end up gaining weight. If you consume many more calories or many fewer calories then you will inevitably gain or lose weight. But to maintain a healthy weight, or to maintain consistent weight loss if you are over weight, the details of what you eat are just as important as the calorie counts. Taken together, there is very strong evidence that diets which concentrate on what you eat versus those that concentrate on calorie counting are vastly more effective. But, you don't have to take my word for it: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1014296 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1014296
woodandsteel 9y ago
>Maybe I missed it in the article but this just seems like calorie restriction to me. Its much harder to eat a large amount of calories if its just meat and vegetables. When people talk about a calorie-restriction diet, what they mean is you count the calories in every food, and then keep caloric intake below a certain level by intentionally eating less than your appetite desires. In contrast, in this diet, people focused on eating the right foods, and ate as much as they wanted, and the reduction of calories was a consequence.

dbatten 9y ago

This is particularly true for things like soda. Soda does absolutely nothing to help you feel full, but it's pretty calorie dense due to the sugar. Cut out added sugars (and therefore soda) and BOOM, you're immediately eating less calories but not feeling any more hungry.

jclardy 9y ago
Yeah, a few years ago I lost 55 pounds. The primary change was just cutting out soda and an increase in light activity (mainly walking.) Also drinking more water in general. I found for me that if I went to the gym and ran I would end up overeating on those days, so instead I went with the small changes which worked well for me. For me sodas sweetness lended well to making super salty foods taste better, by cutting out the sugar in the sodas I didn't have the same desire to eat salty fast food items.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
eridius 9y ago
1 can of coke has 140 calories. A good rule of thumb is 3500 calories is a pound. So if you drink a single can of coke every day, after a year that's worth almost 15lbs. This observation is what led to me cutting soda out of my diet entirely almost a year ago (barring the rare treat). And don't be fooled by the promise of diet soda. Lots of studies recently have shown that drinking diet soda doesn't help with weight loss either. Apparently the artificial sweeteners do something to your body by tricking it into thinking it's getting sugar; I'm not really familiar with the details, but studies showed that people who swapped soda for diet soda didn't lose weight, but people who swapped soda for e.g. water did. This advice is what led to me cutting diet soda out of my diet 6 months ago (which I had switched to after cutting out regular soda), so now I drink almost exclusively water. If you're interested in cutting out soda as well, and don't think you can just switch to water, I have a couple of suggestions: 1. Start with those crystal geyser flavored sparkling waters you can get at Costco. I drank those for a while, because the hint of flavor tricked my mouth into thinking I wasn't just drinking water. I eventually stopped though, in favor of 2. Get a SodaStream and just make your own sparkling water. You can add flavor packets to this if you want, but I never have. Once you get used to it, unflavored sparkling water is pretty great. The downside here is the refill tanks for the SodaStream aren't cheap, but if you're concerned about that, there are homebrew carbonation setups as well (they just take up a lot more space; SodaStream is pretty compact).
- btilly 9y ago
  Apparently the artificial sweeteners do something to your body by tricking it into thinking it's getting sugar... Specifically what happens is that your brain is supposed to taste sugar, and learn to shut off your appetite when it has received enough. But artificial sweeteners teach your brain to ignore that signal because you get what tastes like sugar without getting sugar. So whatever sugary things you eat, you will eat more than you otherwise would without feeling satiated.
  - cornholio 9y ago
    >whatever sugary things you eat, you will eat more than you otherwise would without feeling satiated There is no scientific merit to this frequent claim. [1] In fact, a comparative study on dieters using diet soda versus water shown that the water group lost less mass, hypothetically because they were feeling hungrier and less satisfied with their diet, thus more likely to succumb to sugary foods. [1] Rogers, Peter J. "The role of low-calorie sweeteners in the prevention and management of overweight and obesity: evidence v. conjecture," Proceedings of the Nutrition Society
    - btilly 9y ago
      Huh. I made the claim based on having seen it in many places. But Google showed it to be less certain than my memory said it was. Thanks for the correction. I'll try not to repeat this one blindly in the future.
      - bitwize 9y ago
        The primary place I heard it was Hackernews broscience. Till now I even belueved it.
  - criddell 9y ago
    Is this true? It sounds a little like gym-science.
    - deleted 9y ago
mywittyname 9y ago
Soda also makes you hungry af. If I have a soda in the during, I'll be miserably hungry and "grazing" all night long. And it takes a few days for the effect to fully wear off.

woliveirajr 9y ago

Add some butter to your whole-grain-bread, like I do, and you'll end up with some good calories... and I always hated counting those calories that make a bread worth be eaten.

jandrese 9y ago
Bread is chock full of bioavailable calories to start with, adding a smear of butter on top doesn't really change it that much.
- MrFantastic 9y ago
  That fat blunts the insulin response.
  - adventured 9y ago
    Or just take r-lipoic acid after/with glucose heavy food consumption. It'll help prevent and or lessen the spike. Diabetics use it to control their glucose levels. It can significantly push that down. I'm not seriously suggesting this of course, however it does work.
  - darpa_escapee 9y ago
    I've always read that the insulin response to fats + carbs is higher than carbs alone.
    - pixl97 9y ago
      Eh, I don't think that is the case. Ice cream has a much lower glycemic index than bread for example.
magic_beans 9y ago
Bread is nothing without butter. Exception: freshly baked baguette or ciabatta.
- 9y ago

nardi 9y ago

You did indeed miss it: Dr. Gardner said it is not that calories don’t matter. After all, both groups ultimately ended up consuming fewer calories on average by the end of the study, even though they weren’t conscious of it. The point is that they did this by focusing on nutritious whole foods that satisfied their hunger.

msla 9y ago
Well, yes, any sustainable diet has to be satisfying. You can, and and least one person has, lost weight on a twinkie diet which also improved his cholesterol, but that wasn't very satisfying and would not have become a permanent diet.
- jdmichal 9y ago
  There's also been at least one count of dieting via fasting for over a year. Which is more immediately obvious as unsustainable -- fasting prolonged far enough is called starvation. http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/07/24/3549931.htm http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/07/24/3549931.ht...

cornholio 9y ago

What they are saying is that calorie restriction works, but most people are too incompetent to follow through, so need seemingly magical alternative strategies to avoid calorie dense food. The danger with this approach is that the average Joe hears the message as "weight is not related to how much you eat (energy/quantity), but what you eat (quality)". That message is a public health danger, yet is becoming the prevailing sentiment for health magazines, supplement marketing, popular lifestyle shows etc.

briancleland 9y ago
Absolutely nothing magical about eating when you are hungry and stopping when you are sated. As long as you avoid unhealthy, unnatural foods (primarily refined carbs) this strategy works just fine. Animals don't have to count calories to avoid obesity, no reason why humans should either.
- nikolaj 9y ago
  Admittedly this is only partially informed, but I am pretty sure most animals don't have access to enough calories to be obese. And those that do (e.g. pets, zoo animals) are (sometimes) kept from obesity due to careful calorie counting by their human caretakers.
  - SketchySeaBeast 9y ago
    I think every labrador retriever on the planet would be 200 lbs if they had their way.
    - trevyn 9y ago
      They also wouldn't be confined to a house or yard.
      - SketchySeaBeast 9y ago
        Even farm dogs do their best to get fat. Either way, that's an indictment of activity level then, and not of food quality.

radley 9y ago

It's not harder, just more expensive and inconvenient.

jandrese 9y ago

Also, when you start talking about raw foods a lot of those calories won't be bioavailable. Your body simply can't extract more than a trivial amount of nutrition from raw kale. So all the article is really saying is don't bother with the math, just eat mostly vegetables and you'll lose weight.

btilly 9y ago

Obviously all diets have to be LIMO - Less In, More Out. But the question is how you get there. Eating vegetables and whole foods without worrying about counting calories or limiting portion sizes doesn't feel like effort. You don't WANT to eat more. And your body becomes happier about burning fat rather than demanding that you eat. Counting calories explicitly is a lot of work and a lot of self control. Few people can succeed at that. Personally I follow the former strategy using http://www.weightgrapher.com/ http://www.weightgrapher.com/ to keep myself honest. About 15 years ago I decided to lose 20 pounds, and kept it off for close to a decade. Then I let my weight get away from me, because life got complicated. This time around I've decided to get back to that weight again, and I know it is sustainable. I'm not aiming for fast weight loss, I've been going at a comfortable pace for 3 months and expect to be dieting another 6 months to reach my target. But I know that I'll be able to get there and stay for years without a lot of willpower. Partly luck of genetics/gut biome. Partly because I'm doing it in a mentally easy way.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
cies 9y ago
> Obviously all diets have to be LIMO Diets designed to "cut" (loose weight), yes. Some people want to gain weight, their regimens are also called diets.
- msla 9y ago
  If you want to be technical, any habitual pattern of eating is a diet. But technicalities don't define words, usage and context do, and, for the vast majority of people, including people here, diet means a change in your habitual pattern of eating designed to induce weight loss. That's how it's universally understood in this context. Being more technical does not mean being more correct.
  - dwc 9y ago
    "Universally understood" shouldn't be true for this. I've known a number of people who were on diets to gain weight for medical or self image reasons, and it's known still known as a diet.

txsh 9y ago

You’re not counting total calories. You’re limiting calorie density. Counting calories ignores satiety. Watching calorie density allows you to be full while limiting the calories you eat.

Zigurd 9y ago

I close to eliminated sugar, and reduced carbs, and completely eliminated highly processed foods. Over the course of 14 months I lost about 23lbs. I also cut meat consumption and alcohol, but wasn't by any stretch vegetarian or tea total. That's it. Apart from that I ate anything in any quantity I wanted. I found the combination of things I cut back on reduced cravings and overeating. I cooked a lot more, especially bean soups to take to work for lunch. That has other benefits since I work in the land of $11 sandwiches. I tracked my weight every few days with a fitness app, which, for me, helped prevent backsliding because seeing that trend line go in the wrong direction is very irritating. I don't have experimental evidence but anecdata indicates cutting sugar and alcohol are are the low-hanging fruit (cut way back on fruit juice, too).

cies 9y ago
> cutting sugar and alcohol are are the low-hanging fruit I did something very similar, then also dropped dairy and whoops some more pounds of body fat melted in the 6 months that followed.
- Zigurd 9y ago
  Yes! I forgot to mention I drink hardly any milk anymore. I keep a quart in the fridge for making pancakes. I take my coffee black or with unsweetened almond/coconut milk. I still put sour cream on roasted potatoes, though.

avprpl 9y ago

Calorie restriction becomes much easier when you're substituting calorie dense foods with more calorically sparse ones. It's hard to continually fight the hunger caused by just eating less over time.

cies 9y ago
The epiphany I had with this was that when you want to substitute "calorie dense foods with more calorically sparse ones" AND also get in enough nutrients, that you are basically shifting towards a WFPB diet (the type of food mankind has been eating mostly, for most of its existence)
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  >WFPB "Whole Food, Plant Based", for those who had to look it up like me. I'm more of a "eat food, not too much, mostly plants" kind of guy, I'm not willing to give up meat, eggs and dairy. Which people have also been eating since forever. But I agree that a lot of people are way over-complicating nutrition.

exelius 9y ago

Right; but it’s calorie restriction through food choice rather than limiting portion size which makes it feel like less of a sacrifice. You just have to change your filter of “things I like to eat” to include less calorie-dense foods, rather than “I like this thing I’m eating but I should stop halfway just to be good”

cstejerean 9y ago
It doesn't even matter howe calorie dense the food is as long as you severely limit carbs. A slice of pizza is about 107g and has about 285 calories. A stick of butter is about 133g and has 810 calories. See if you can eat as many sticks of butter as you can slices of pizza. High fat / low carb foods are very hard to eat in large quantities, unless you pair them with sources of carbs (put the butter on bread, add BBQ sauce to fatty meat, etc). It's not just the caloric density, it's how much of it you can eat before you feel full.
- exelius 9y ago
  Right; but dieting is almost entirely psychological — so any ways to trick your brain into eating less have to be valid diet tips, no?
  - headsoup 9y ago
    Only if weight loss by Kg is your only metric of success. And dieting is by definition a temporary thing to fix an issue, rather than actually changing eating patterns and content permanently. People just generally don't want to do the hard slog (i.e. in permanently avoiding sugar and carbs), they want the short term 'fix,' hence 'dieting.'

MrFantastic 9y ago

Avoiding sugar and processed food helps to avoid the feeling of hunger cause by insulin crashes.

hkmurakami 9y ago

Your body is designed so that if you eat whole foods, it's very difficult to over eat.

cies 9y ago
Small addition: whole plant foods. That a WFPB diet works better than calorie counting is old news (good to have yet another study confirming it). http://www.wholefoodplantbasedrd.com/2014/04/with-wfpb-there-is-no-need-to-count-calories-or-control-portions/ http://www.wholefoodplantbasedrd.com/2014/04/with-wfpb-there... https://nutritionfacts.org/2016/07/14/caloric-restriction-vs-plant-based-diets/ https://nutritionfacts.org/2016/07/14/caloric-restriction-vs...

InclinedPlane 9y ago

Humans aren't robots. If humans had infinite willpower and could simply do whatever they decided to do then the world would be a much different place. It's easy to get rich if you have infinite willpower. Easy to get in shape. Easy to climb mountains, run ultra marathons, cure cancer, swim the English channel, sail around the world, and so on. With enough willpower. But that's not how humans work. If you have to choose between two diets with equal caloric intake but one of them is easier to stick to, then that one will be in practice a much more effective form of weight loss. You see a lot of people go on diets in January, you see a lot of people in the gyms in January, all those new years resolutions. And a lot of those folks seem to be very serious about it, they spend a lot of time in the gym, they put in a lot of effort. But this is one of those tortoise/hare situations. A modest diet/exercise regime that you can stick to for the rest of your life is far more valuable than one which is more effective on paper but won't be adhered to in practice. Additionally, the thermodynamic argument (calories in vs calories out) is only mostly true in broad strokes, as a trend. Sure, if you eat few enough calories and do enough exercise you'll lose weight, and if you eat too many calories and do too little exercise then you'll gain weight. But within the boundaries there is a lot of complexity. There are regions where what you eat, the composition of your diet, and the kind of exercise you do will tip the balance one way or the other in a region of maybe a few hundred calories or so a day, and that too can make a big difference in how easy it is to maintain a diet or exercise regime and how effective it is.

parliament32 9y ago
>the thermodynamic argument (calories in vs calories out) is only mostly true in broad strokes, as a trend. It's not "mostly true". It's literally the only concrete truth in this whole field. If you consume X calories more than you burn you are _guaranteed_ to gain Y weight.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  I'm sorry to hear that a network malfunction prevented you from reading the remainder of my post. To reiterate, it's true only in broad strokes, human metabolism is not precisely linear, there is a non-trivial amount of "slop" in the balance. You can "consume more calories than you burn" and yet still lose weight, and you can consume fewer calories than that while "burning more calories" and end up gaining weight. If you consume many more calories or many fewer calories then you will inevitably gain or lose weight. But to maintain a healthy weight, or to maintain consistent weight loss if you are over weight, the details of what you eat are just as important as the calorie counts. Taken together, there is very strong evidence that diets which concentrate on what you eat versus those that concentrate on calorie counting are vastly more effective. But, you don't have to take my word for it: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1014296 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1014296

woodandsteel 9y ago

>Maybe I missed it in the article but this just seems like calorie restriction to me. Its much harder to eat a large amount of calories if its just meat and vegetables. When people talk about a calorie-restriction diet, what they mean is you count the calories in every food, and then keep caloric intake below a certain level by intentionally eating less than your appetite desires. In contrast, in this diet, people focused on eating the right foods, and ate as much as they wanted, and the reduction of calories was a consequence.