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I dislike articles like this as they continue to perpetuate the belief that there are secrets to weight loss. There are no secrets to weight loss. Eat fewer cal

I dislike articles like this as they continue to perpetuate the belief that there are secrets to weight loss. There are no secrets to weight loss. Eat fewer calories than you burn. It doesn't matter if that involves keto, or vegan, or one meal a day. Thyroid problems also don't change physics. The problem is made worse because overweight people typically greatly underestimate how much they eat, while underweight people (me most of my life) typically greatly overestimate how much we eat. It's nearly impossible to accurately gauge calorie intake without strict calorie counting. When talking nutrition with people, I'll often bring up the examine.com piece on "does metabolism vary between two people?"(1) And I am always amazed to find at least one person in any conversation that will flat out deny the information presented there. they are positive that if they ate one single slice of pizza a day and nothing else, they would still be fat. 1: https://examine.com/nutrition/does-metabolism-vary-between-two-people/ https://examine.com/nutrition/does-metabolism-vary-between-t...

electrograv 8y ago
> There are no secrets to weight loss. Eat fewer calories than you burn. It doesn't matter if that involves keto, or vegan, or one meal a day. Thyroid problems also don't change physics. That's like saying "There are no secrets to space flight: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It doesn't matter if that involves Hydrogen, Hydrazine, or just big tubs of water -- throw them one way, and you'll move the opposite. Your choice of fuel doesn't change physics." Of course fundamental physics laws hold. But some fuels and systems of using those fuels are more effective than others. When it comes to diet, different foods and eating patterns do have different effects on our endocrine system, and that does affect how viably we can sustain ourselves on less calories. Different foods will also have different proportions that are retained vs passed the same day. Unless you also capture ALL your own human waste, and measure it in a 'bomb calorimeter', counting calories (intake only) is not nearly as useful as you seem to think. If you disagree, drink 2000 calories of olive oil every day and eat nothing else, then come back after a year and tell me that calories are all that matter :) Disclaimer: Don't actually do that, because you would starve to death.
- projektir 8y ago
  People had stable weight without any special knowledge for most of human history. It's something we generally should know how to do automatically. It's very strange to compare it to spaceflight, as if we're only just now discovering how to do it. This just goes back to OP's point. There's a lot of energy being spent on making weight gain and loss be some mysterious, inscrutable thing. Now we're comparing it to space flight?
  - electrograv 8y ago
    The human body as a machine is actually quite a lot more complex than any current human invention. We're not even close to fully understanding everything. So, the analogy to space flight serves to show that it's as naive to imply there's no subtlety beyond "it doesn't matter what you eat, just the calorie count" as it would be to imply "it doesn't matter what rocket fuel you use". > People had stable weight without any special knowledge for most of human history. A lot of food products highly available today would be rather foreign to most of human history: artificially high sugar, high cab, low fat, snacks everywhere, etc. These trick our taste and hunger systems into eating more of less quality foods than we would "naturally" if exposed only to less "engineered" foods, like pure meat and vegetables. > It's something we generally should know how to do automatically. Maybe we should, but clearly we do not. At least with modern processed foods that are optimized and designed to maximally stimulate our flavor response while compromising nutrition/health (generally).
  - abduhl 8y ago
    I believe research has shown that humans have been malnourished throughout most of human history, which would indicate that we haven’t had a stable weight throughout history.
  - vlasev 8y ago
    Yes, you are right. And humans commonly engaged in a feasting/fasting cycle of having too much/too little food. But we've pretty much stopped doing the fasting stage. Look up "autophagy". It's a beneficial bodily process that only seems to happen within a long-enough fast.
natural219 8y ago
Ketosis reduces your appetite substantially.
- ngngngng 8y ago
  Maybe? It definitely hasn't been shown to be any more effective than a fat free diet.
  - lxrbst 8y ago
    I mean appetite isn't really quantifiable anyway. Sure you can look at leptin and grelin, one of which actually is greatly affected by fasting. Less hunger, less calories.
- thrower123 8y ago
  Totally. I'm not convinced that keto is any more efficient at burning fat, but eating my normal meat-starch-vegetable meals without the starches probably cuts 1000 calories per day out, so there's the calorie restriction. The magic comes in where I'm not ready to gnaw my arm off or murderously hangry on that amount of calories, versus trying to just eat less of the full blend.
  - thebeefytaco 8y ago
    Insulin will cause your body to store more fat and is released when you intake carbohydrates. Macro content does matter and not all calories are created equal. Calories are actually an incredibly crude measurement of metabolism energy, as our stomachs are not furnaces. Gasoline and wood have tons of calories, but no usable energy for humans.
dawhizkid 8y ago
There are plenty of ways to optimize fat burning/weight loss beyond eating fewer calories. When you eat matters. Working out in a fasted state will accelerate fat burner vs working out after eating a meal. Eating a similar number of calories in a keto diet vs a carb-heavy one while maintaining a calorie-deficit will also accelerate fat burning/weight loss.
elbear 8y ago
Of course things are not so simple. Calories in/calories out partially applies to weight gain/weight loss, but it's not the complete story. Hormones also play a role. That's why people start to gain weight as they grow old, even though they eat the same. It involves testosterone/estrogen and an enzyme called lipoprotein lipase.
- ngngngng 8y ago
  > It involves testosterone/estrogen and an enzyme called lipoprotein lipase. This is just a variation of the thyroid problem reasoning. Hormone changes with age or thyroid issues might change your resting metabolic rate over time by 100-200 calories per day (a single candy bar of calories). But that doesn't curse you to be fat, which is what I am trying to disprove. You will then need to adjust your intake/exercise level accordingly to the new resting metabolic rate.
  - elbear 8y ago
    I didn't say that hormone changes lower your resting metabolic rate. They simply make your body be more inclined to store fat. The enzyme that I mentioned LPL, becomes more active and stores more fat. Have you ever wondered why men and women tend to put on weight differently? The same enzyme is involved. For men it's more active around the waist. For women, around the thighs. For a thorough treatment of this topic, I recommend the book Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes. It goes into the biology of why we get fat. Note that it's pretty strong against carbs, so depending on your beliefs, you might not like it. Although, I have to say, it makes a pretty convincing case on why we should lower carbs intake.
NickM 8y ago
The calories in/out model is technically true, it's just not very useful. It's like saying "there's no secret to how a jet plane works, you just need to have enough lift to counter gravity, it's basic physics." Well, sure, but there are a lot of other variables to consider that will dictate how hard/expensive it is to build a working aircraft. Playing with other variables besides calories, like the specific foods you pick and the timing of meals, can produce dramatic, measurable health changes and make a huge difference in how hungry you will feel at different times of day. EDIT: I just saw the other reply someone wrote that used a rocket analogy instead of a jet plane analogy, funny how we both independently came up with such a similar response.
- mikevm 8y ago
  > Playing with other variables besides calories, like the specific foods you pick and the timing of meals, can produce dramatic, measurable health changes and make a huge difference in how hungry you will feel at different times of day. It is true that the kinds of foods you eat may help you with maintaining a caloric deficit -- for example, eating high-volume foods such as vegetables, or low-GI whole-grain carbs may help you feel "full" longer than low-volume foods with high caloric densities (candy, snacks, sodas). But the most important thing is still calories. See a recent meta-analysis on this: https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-017-0174-y https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-017-... Also, timing of meals is actually not that important for weight loss. It is somewhat important for sports performance (e.g., timing carb intake around sports activities). There was a meta-analysis a few years ago that gave more specific recommendations: https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-017-0189-4 https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-017-...
- projektir 8y ago
  > The calories in/out model is technically true, it's just not very useful. It's plenty useful. The biggest barrier I've seen so far in people trying to lose weight is that they just plain don't believe it, and think it won't work. They think they need some complicated specially tailored diet where they need to pick out specific foods, eat foods they don't like, eat at special intervals, and so on. > Playing with other variables besides calories, like the specific foods you pick and the timing of meals, can produce dramatic, measurable health changes and make a huge difference in how hungry you will feel at different times of day. That may be true, but various tricks you might choose to apply to your diet should come /after/ you know how many calories you're consuming. It's a question of where your attention is directed. The purpose is still to reduce calories, and preventing hunger in whatever way works for you or distracting yourself or maintaining a schedule are all just means to the same end: to reduce how much you're consuming. The problem I see is that people seem to not agree on that /end/ and think they're trying to accomplish something else, but I'm not sure how that's supposed to be measurable or reliable.
e1ven 8y ago
I don't think many people believe there are "secrets" involved, but there are many factors which make sticking to a diet easier for people. The linked page talks about this quite a bit - Trying to control for hunger, fullness, desire to eat, etc. "This was a randomized crossover, isocaloric and eucaloric study. That is, all patients did both arms of the study eating the same foods and the same calories and then compared against themselves. ... Those who restricted late-night eating had less desire to eat, but also less capacity to eat. They couldn’t eat more at night even if they wanted to. That’s amazing, because now we are working with our body to lose weight instead of constantly fighting it. " Respectfully, I'm not really sure I understand how your critique applies to this article?
calpaterson 8y ago
> There are no secrets to weight loss. Eat fewer calories than you burn. It doesn't matter if that involves keto, or vegan, or one meal a day. Thyroid problems also don't change physics. Unfortunately that is not true. Different foods are metabolised differently. It is not just "calories in, calories out".
msiyer 8y ago
If I eat 5 burgers a day and reduce it to 2 a day, I will lose weight. However, no amount of burgers is good. For more than a decade I had been fasting intermittently. I ate one very huge meal everyday. Typical Indian meal with fair bit of non-veg included. I was not in the best health possible. A year ago, I got rid of non-veg from my diet. Things improved a bit, but I wanted better results. One month ago, I went fully raw - only raw fruits and no vegetables. I lost many pounds and everybody notices, my sinus troubles have vanished, I feel and look good overall. I eat more than ever, but am losing weight.
- Udik 8y ago
  Only eat raw vegetables and you'll lose even more. Reason: they're mostly water anyway and less sugary that fruits, so less carbs. You can fill your belly with them and you'll get very little calories. Another possibility: only eat naturally blue foods. Or only eat foods beginning by 'K' (a different one each day of the week).
  - wild_preference 8y ago
    I don’t eat anything that casts a shadow.
    - Udik 8y ago
      Bulletproof diet.
- projektir 8y ago
  > If I eat 5 burgers a day and reduce it to 2 a day, I will lose weight. However, no amount of burgers is good. What's so terrible about burgers? From what I can see they're much less harmful than just obesity in and of itself.
  - msiyer 8y ago
    Burgers are terrible food. They are addictive and are loaded with empty calories. Edit: Downvoting me will not change facts.
agumonkey 8y ago
There are other benefits beside weight loss. Changing the way you eat seems to be linked to a lot of part of your system.
dionidium 8y ago
> It's nearly impossible to accurately gauge calorie intake without strict calorie counting. Yes, but you can get most of the way there just by counting for a while, so that you build a model in your head for how many calories different foods have. Unless you've counted before, the results can be surprising. Stopping at Starbucks for a snack and deciding between a cake pop [0] and the chocolate chip cookie [1]? The cookie has 380 more calories. Thinking about grabbing a quick lunch and trying to decide between a burger from Shake Shack or a burrito at Chipotle? That burrito could easily have 1200+ calories [2]. The burger has 530. [3] (A bowl without rice at Chipotle, on the other hand, can have as few calories as the burger. So, again, knowing that difference can help you make better choices.) These are just random examples from my own life, recently. Knowing these differences makes a difference (especially over the course of many meals). [0] https://www.starbucks.com/menu/food/bakery/cat-cake-pop?foodZone=9999 https://www.starbucks.com/menu/food/bakery/cat-cake-pop?food... [1] https://www.starbucks.com/menu/food/bakery/chocolate-chip-cookie?foodZone=9999 https://www.starbucks.com/menu/food/bakery/chocolate-chip-co... [2] https://www.chipotle.com/nutrition-calculator https://www.chipotle.com/nutrition-calculator [3] https://www.shakeshack.com/food-and-drink/ https://www.shakeshack.com/food-and-drink/
ericb 8y ago
> There are no secrets to weight loss. Eat fewer calories than you burn. It doesn't matter if that involves keto, or vegan, or one meal a day. Thyroid problems also don't change physics. You seem focused on the physics and materialist viewpoint, but it seems like you are taking that line of reasoning just far enough where we can be judgmental and snarky about "secrets." What if we take your thinking a little farther and think about the brain chemistry and drives that affect behavior. We are just materialistic machines, right? Ever seen a sick person who just doesn't want to eat? Or a skinny person with little interest in food? Ever try to hold your breath for 3 minutes? This should, in theory, for the average person be possible. But for some reason it is really really hard. What if, these diets don't affect the physics of weight loss, they affect the hunger drive--the chemicals in the brain? Do we still get to ride our moral high-horse then? Or what if there are drives and chemicals in the brain and even the metabolism itself fights back. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/6-years-after-the-biggest-loser-metabolism-is-slower-and-weight-is-back-up/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/6-years-after-the...
- ngngngng 8y ago
  Excellent points > Or a skinny person with little interest in food? And yes, that's me all the time. What i'm saying is, everyone has a resting metabolic rate. That rate is relatively stable among the entire human population. If you eat more than your metabolic rate, you gain weight. Less, and you lose weight. Most readers on hacker news are saying "duh ngngngng, but you're oversimplifying". Correct, I am. But the reason for that is I believe most Americans (maybe other countries too), do not believe the information I just presented. Most Americans think if they are fat that their resting metabolic rate must be 1500 calories different from most skinny people. I think this creates a sense of hopelessness. "No matter what I eat, i'll be fat. But no matter what ngngngng eats, he stays skinny!" Even though the reality is my metabolism is average, and the referenced overweight person probably has a similar metabolism as me.
  - sooheon 8y ago
    "No matter what I eat, i'll be fat. But no matter what ngngngng eats, he stays skinny!" This is plain denial, and is not the view expressed in the article. Anyone who reads and understands the article, and the purported benefits isn't likely to simultaneously hold that inane view.
cptskippy 8y ago
That article doesn't disagree with what you're saying. My two takeaways were: 1) We snack more now than we did 50 years ago and those extra calories are probably why we're fat. 2) Reducing the window of time that you eat during the day reduces your desire to eat and your ability to consume. I'm not sure how you took that as perpetuating a secret to weight loss.
werbel 8y ago
As others mentioned there’s an aspect of efficiency there but I think there’s something more important. The whole discussion revolves around losing weight while diet and nutrition is not really about that. It’s about how to eat to stay healthy. Not being obese is just a part of that. If you consider the bigger scope you’ll realize that despite the fact it came out from Neil deGrasse Tyson mouth, in this context it’s just a stupid thing to say.
tzs 8y ago
> The problem is made worse because overweight people typically greatly underestimate how much they eat, while underweight people (me most of my life) typically greatly overestimate how much we eat. It's nearly impossible to accurately gauge calorie intake without strict calorie counting. This suggests that you might be able to take pairs of people, one who is overweight and one who is underweight, and help both of them by simply arranging for them to eat every meal together and do all their snacking together. For each meal or snack, each buys or prepares what they normally would, but before they actually consume the food, they each exchange half of their food with the other. There...an easy to follow diet, without strict calorie counting, that should move the overweight person to a lower weight and put some weight on the underweight person. You could probably build a reality TV show around this. Half the contestants would be people wanting to lose weight, and half would be people trying to gain, with the lowest weight person in the first group being substantially heavier than the highest weight person in the second group. Each week, there would be challenges and contests which determine priority for picking who your eating partner will be for the next week. Pick the contestants from a wide range of culinary cultures and ethnic and religious backgrounds so that some potential pairings would be difficult for the participants, and so doing well in the challenges is important.
- ngngngng 8y ago
  I've actually had this idea for years. When I was a teenager, I was constantly told by classmates or family members, "I wish I was like you and could eat anything I want and stay so skinny!" I didn't understand the information in my original comment at the time, but it occurred to me it might make a fun documentary to have me live with someone morbidly obese for a month and eat everything they eat when they eat it and see if I gained weight.
jmull 8y ago
Telling people to eat fewer calories than they burn is useless without telling them how. As you yourself acknowledge, it’s not that simple. You use calorie counting to stay on track — but that’s another secret to weight loss, isn’t it? You may not think of it that way because it works for you (which is great by the way), but that’s what it is. But now we’re getting to the meat of the issue. Eating fewer calories than you burn results in weight loss, but how? We should be focusing on the methods that work for many people. If we know what they are, we can advise people attempting to lose weight to try them and hopefully most wont have to try too many before they find one that works for them. As far as I can tell, the three methonds that work well for many people are: (1) strict calorie counting (usually app + food scale), (2) intermittent fasting — which is what this article is about — and (3) keto. Of course, it’s fair to scoff at and criticize the methods that usually don’t work well especially when results are oversold especially in money-making schemes. But this guy is just promoting IF in a fair and reasonable way. Also, there is a reasonable chance IF has health benefits beyond weight loss, which is potentially a reason to prefer it over calorie counting (although I found that when calorie counting I was effectively doing a mild IF anyway)
songshu 8y ago
It's like saying there are no secrets to computing and to just imagine a computer as a Turing machine, forget about stuff like pipelining and caches and whatever. On the other hand, I do believe the supposed "secrets" have actually been known for a long time. Here's my favorite article about it: http://www.grubstreet.com/2018/03/ultimate-conversation-on-healthy-eating-and-nutrition.html http://www.grubstreet.com/2018/03/ultimate-conversation-on-h...
- sooheon 8y ago
  Damn, this thread is full of actual good analogies today! Thanks for this one :)
theorique 8y ago
There are no secrets to weight loss. Eat fewer calories than you burn. It doesn't matter if that involves keto, or vegan, or one meal a day. Thyroid problems also don't change physics. The point of the article is, the timing of feeding vs fasting leads to differences in fat storage. The work of Dr Fung, among others, suggests that concentrating eating into a few (4-8) hour period per day causes better outcomes than feeding during the entire waking period. Same thing with the balance of macronutrients. Tuning the ratio of fat:protein:carbohydrate can make a diet more filling and more sustainable on fewer calories. This enables that "calories in / calories out" rule to actually work and cause reduction in stored body fat.
ha8o8le 8y ago
There's way more to this story as people are pointing out. I talk about a lot of this stuff with nutrition experts on my podcast http://peak-human.com http://peak-human.com and am getting the author of this article on soon.
vlasev 8y ago
Unfortunately the human body is quite a bit more complicated than that and a single article on examine.com is woefully inadequate at capturing the complexities. While people's metabolism doesn't seem to vary too much from person to person, it does tend to vary a lot within the same individual based on lifestyle choices. Whether I choose to eat or not, or choose how much to eat, my metabolism can vary. When you consider your glycogen reserves, carb vs fat metabolism, insulin, ghrelin and other hormones, you get a rather complex machine. And what's really frustrating is that you are technically correct, in a sense. Eat fewer calories than you burn and you will lose weight. But that simplification borders on the dangerous. What's missing is that your body is not some passive observer, but an active participant, trying its best to help you survive. Your body is amazingly good at adjusting how much you burn. When you cut calories, say 500 a day, your body will tend to compensate by burning a little less by reducing its temperature, by reducing fidgeting, by reducing your mood even! You'd need to cut 500 calories ABOVE that difference. So you end up having to cut closer to 750-1000 calories per day to get the same effect. Whereas when you fast, your metabolism rather obnoxiously tends to rise. It ends up being healthier (and much easier) to eat 3500 calories less in one go, rather than splitting the difference across 7 days.
Axsuul 8y ago
Calories in/calories out is a simple pipe dream that conveniently ignores the deleterious effects that hormones can have on your metabolism. There are tons of people out there intaking less calories than their BMR and not losing weight because they have thyroid issues, are insulin resistant, etc.

electrograv 8y ago

> There are no secrets to weight loss. Eat fewer calories than you burn. It doesn't matter if that involves keto, or vegan, or one meal a day. Thyroid problems also don't change physics. That's like saying "There are no secrets to space flight: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It doesn't matter if that involves Hydrogen, Hydrazine, or just big tubs of water -- throw them one way, and you'll move the opposite. Your choice of fuel doesn't change physics." Of course fundamental physics laws hold. But some fuels and systems of using those fuels are more effective than others. When it comes to diet, different foods and eating patterns do have different effects on our endocrine system, and that does affect how viably we can sustain ourselves on less calories. Different foods will also have different proportions that are retained vs passed the same day. Unless you also capture ALL your own human waste, and measure it in a 'bomb calorimeter', counting calories (intake only) is not nearly as useful as you seem to think. If you disagree, drink 2000 calories of olive oil every day and eat nothing else, then come back after a year and tell me that calories are all that matter :) Disclaimer: Don't actually do that, because you would starve to death.

projektir 8y ago
People had stable weight without any special knowledge for most of human history. It's something we generally should know how to do automatically. It's very strange to compare it to spaceflight, as if we're only just now discovering how to do it. This just goes back to OP's point. There's a lot of energy being spent on making weight gain and loss be some mysterious, inscrutable thing. Now we're comparing it to space flight?
- electrograv 8y ago
  The human body as a machine is actually quite a lot more complex than any current human invention. We're not even close to fully understanding everything. So, the analogy to space flight serves to show that it's as naive to imply there's no subtlety beyond "it doesn't matter what you eat, just the calorie count" as it would be to imply "it doesn't matter what rocket fuel you use". > People had stable weight without any special knowledge for most of human history. A lot of food products highly available today would be rather foreign to most of human history: artificially high sugar, high cab, low fat, snacks everywhere, etc. These trick our taste and hunger systems into eating more of less quality foods than we would "naturally" if exposed only to less "engineered" foods, like pure meat and vegetables. > It's something we generally should know how to do automatically. Maybe we should, but clearly we do not. At least with modern processed foods that are optimized and designed to maximally stimulate our flavor response while compromising nutrition/health (generally).
- abduhl 8y ago
  I believe research has shown that humans have been malnourished throughout most of human history, which would indicate that we haven’t had a stable weight throughout history.
- vlasev 8y ago
  Yes, you are right. And humans commonly engaged in a feasting/fasting cycle of having too much/too little food. But we've pretty much stopped doing the fasting stage. Look up "autophagy". It's a beneficial bodily process that only seems to happen within a long-enough fast.

natural219 8y ago

Ketosis reduces your appetite substantially.

ngngngng 8y ago
Maybe? It definitely hasn't been shown to be any more effective than a fat free diet.
- lxrbst 8y ago
  I mean appetite isn't really quantifiable anyway. Sure you can look at leptin and grelin, one of which actually is greatly affected by fasting. Less hunger, less calories.
thrower123 8y ago
Totally. I'm not convinced that keto is any more efficient at burning fat, but eating my normal meat-starch-vegetable meals without the starches probably cuts 1000 calories per day out, so there's the calorie restriction. The magic comes in where I'm not ready to gnaw my arm off or murderously hangry on that amount of calories, versus trying to just eat less of the full blend.
- thebeefytaco 8y ago
  Insulin will cause your body to store more fat and is released when you intake carbohydrates. Macro content does matter and not all calories are created equal. Calories are actually an incredibly crude measurement of metabolism energy, as our stomachs are not furnaces. Gasoline and wood have tons of calories, but no usable energy for humans.

dawhizkid 8y ago

There are plenty of ways to optimize fat burning/weight loss beyond eating fewer calories. When you eat matters. Working out in a fasted state will accelerate fat burner vs working out after eating a meal. Eating a similar number of calories in a keto diet vs a carb-heavy one while maintaining a calorie-deficit will also accelerate fat burning/weight loss.

elbear 8y ago

Of course things are not so simple. Calories in/calories out partially applies to weight gain/weight loss, but it's not the complete story. Hormones also play a role. That's why people start to gain weight as they grow old, even though they eat the same. It involves testosterone/estrogen and an enzyme called lipoprotein lipase.

ngngngng 8y ago
> It involves testosterone/estrogen and an enzyme called lipoprotein lipase. This is just a variation of the thyroid problem reasoning. Hormone changes with age or thyroid issues might change your resting metabolic rate over time by 100-200 calories per day (a single candy bar of calories). But that doesn't curse you to be fat, which is what I am trying to disprove. You will then need to adjust your intake/exercise level accordingly to the new resting metabolic rate.
- elbear 8y ago
  I didn't say that hormone changes lower your resting metabolic rate. They simply make your body be more inclined to store fat. The enzyme that I mentioned LPL, becomes more active and stores more fat. Have you ever wondered why men and women tend to put on weight differently? The same enzyme is involved. For men it's more active around the waist. For women, around the thighs. For a thorough treatment of this topic, I recommend the book Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes. It goes into the biology of why we get fat. Note that it's pretty strong against carbs, so depending on your beliefs, you might not like it. Although, I have to say, it makes a pretty convincing case on why we should lower carbs intake.

NickM 8y ago

The calories in/out model is technically true, it's just not very useful. It's like saying "there's no secret to how a jet plane works, you just need to have enough lift to counter gravity, it's basic physics." Well, sure, but there are a lot of other variables to consider that will dictate how hard/expensive it is to build a working aircraft. Playing with other variables besides calories, like the specific foods you pick and the timing of meals, can produce dramatic, measurable health changes and make a huge difference in how hungry you will feel at different times of day. EDIT: I just saw the other reply someone wrote that used a rocket analogy instead of a jet plane analogy, funny how we both independently came up with such a similar response.

mikevm 8y ago
> Playing with other variables besides calories, like the specific foods you pick and the timing of meals, can produce dramatic, measurable health changes and make a huge difference in how hungry you will feel at different times of day. It is true that the kinds of foods you eat may help you with maintaining a caloric deficit -- for example, eating high-volume foods such as vegetables, or low-GI whole-grain carbs may help you feel "full" longer than low-volume foods with high caloric densities (candy, snacks, sodas). But the most important thing is still calories. See a recent meta-analysis on this: https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-017-0174-y https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-017-... Also, timing of meals is actually not that important for weight loss. It is somewhat important for sports performance (e.g., timing carb intake around sports activities). There was a meta-analysis a few years ago that gave more specific recommendations: https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-017-0189-4 https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-017-...
projektir 8y ago
> The calories in/out model is technically true, it's just not very useful. It's plenty useful. The biggest barrier I've seen so far in people trying to lose weight is that they just plain don't believe it, and think it won't work. They think they need some complicated specially tailored diet where they need to pick out specific foods, eat foods they don't like, eat at special intervals, and so on. > Playing with other variables besides calories, like the specific foods you pick and the timing of meals, can produce dramatic, measurable health changes and make a huge difference in how hungry you will feel at different times of day. That may be true, but various tricks you might choose to apply to your diet should come /after/ you know how many calories you're consuming. It's a question of where your attention is directed. The purpose is still to reduce calories, and preventing hunger in whatever way works for you or distracting yourself or maintaining a schedule are all just means to the same end: to reduce how much you're consuming. The problem I see is that people seem to not agree on that /end/ and think they're trying to accomplish something else, but I'm not sure how that's supposed to be measurable or reliable.

e1ven 8y ago

I don't think many people believe there are "secrets" involved, but there are many factors which make sticking to a diet easier for people. The linked page talks about this quite a bit - Trying to control for hunger, fullness, desire to eat, etc. "This was a randomized crossover, isocaloric and eucaloric study. That is, all patients did both arms of the study eating the same foods and the same calories and then compared against themselves. ... Those who restricted late-night eating had less desire to eat, but also less capacity to eat. They couldn’t eat more at night even if they wanted to. That’s amazing, because now we are working with our body to lose weight instead of constantly fighting it. " Respectfully, I'm not really sure I understand how your critique applies to this article?

calpaterson 8y ago

msiyer 8y ago

If I eat 5 burgers a day and reduce it to 2 a day, I will lose weight. However, no amount of burgers is good. For more than a decade I had been fasting intermittently. I ate one very huge meal everyday. Typical Indian meal with fair bit of non-veg included. I was not in the best health possible. A year ago, I got rid of non-veg from my diet. Things improved a bit, but I wanted better results. One month ago, I went fully raw - only raw fruits and no vegetables. I lost many pounds and everybody notices, my sinus troubles have vanished, I feel and look good overall. I eat more than ever, but am losing weight.

Udik 8y ago
Only eat raw vegetables and you'll lose even more. Reason: they're mostly water anyway and less sugary that fruits, so less carbs. You can fill your belly with them and you'll get very little calories. Another possibility: only eat naturally blue foods. Or only eat foods beginning by 'K' (a different one each day of the week).
- wild_preference 8y ago
  I don’t eat anything that casts a shadow.
  - Udik 8y ago
    Bulletproof diet.
projektir 8y ago
> If I eat 5 burgers a day and reduce it to 2 a day, I will lose weight. However, no amount of burgers is good. What's so terrible about burgers? From what I can see they're much less harmful than just obesity in and of itself.
- msiyer 8y ago
  Burgers are terrible food. They are addictive and are loaded with empty calories. Edit: Downvoting me will not change facts.

agumonkey 8y ago

There are other benefits beside weight loss. Changing the way you eat seems to be linked to a lot of part of your system.

dionidium 8y ago

> It's nearly impossible to accurately gauge calorie intake without strict calorie counting. Yes, but you can get most of the way there just by counting for a while, so that you build a model in your head for how many calories different foods have. Unless you've counted before, the results can be surprising. Stopping at Starbucks for a snack and deciding between a cake pop [0] and the chocolate chip cookie [1]? The cookie has 380 more calories. Thinking about grabbing a quick lunch and trying to decide between a burger from Shake Shack or a burrito at Chipotle? That burrito could easily have 1200+ calories [2]. The burger has 530. [3] (A bowl without rice at Chipotle, on the other hand, can have as few calories as the burger. So, again, knowing that difference can help you make better choices.) These are just random examples from my own life, recently. Knowing these differences makes a difference (especially over the course of many meals). [0] https://www.starbucks.com/menu/food/bakery/cat-cake-pop?foodZone=9999 https://www.starbucks.com/menu/food/bakery/cat-cake-pop?food... [1] https://www.starbucks.com/menu/food/bakery/chocolate-chip-cookie?foodZone=9999 https://www.starbucks.com/menu/food/bakery/chocolate-chip-co... [2] https://www.chipotle.com/nutrition-calculator https://www.chipotle.com/nutrition-calculator [3] https://www.shakeshack.com/food-and-drink/ https://www.shakeshack.com/food-and-drink/

ericb 8y ago

> There are no secrets to weight loss. Eat fewer calories than you burn. It doesn't matter if that involves keto, or vegan, or one meal a day. Thyroid problems also don't change physics. You seem focused on the physics and materialist viewpoint, but it seems like you are taking that line of reasoning just far enough where we can be judgmental and snarky about "secrets." What if we take your thinking a little farther and think about the brain chemistry and drives that affect behavior. We are just materialistic machines, right? Ever seen a sick person who just doesn't want to eat? Or a skinny person with little interest in food? Ever try to hold your breath for 3 minutes? This should, in theory, for the average person be possible. But for some reason it is really really hard. What if, these diets don't affect the physics of weight loss, they affect the hunger drive--the chemicals in the brain? Do we still get to ride our moral high-horse then? Or what if there are drives and chemicals in the brain and even the metabolism itself fights back. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/6-years-after-the-biggest-loser-metabolism-is-slower-and-weight-is-back-up/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/6-years-after-the...

ngngngng 8y ago
Excellent points > Or a skinny person with little interest in food? And yes, that's me all the time. What i'm saying is, everyone has a resting metabolic rate. That rate is relatively stable among the entire human population. If you eat more than your metabolic rate, you gain weight. Less, and you lose weight. Most readers on hacker news are saying "duh ngngngng, but you're oversimplifying". Correct, I am. But the reason for that is I believe most Americans (maybe other countries too), do not believe the information I just presented. Most Americans think if they are fat that their resting metabolic rate must be 1500 calories different from most skinny people. I think this creates a sense of hopelessness. "No matter what I eat, i'll be fat. But no matter what ngngngng eats, he stays skinny!" Even though the reality is my metabolism is average, and the referenced overweight person probably has a similar metabolism as me.
- sooheon 8y ago
  "No matter what I eat, i'll be fat. But no matter what ngngngng eats, he stays skinny!" This is plain denial, and is not the view expressed in the article. Anyone who reads and understands the article, and the purported benefits isn't likely to simultaneously hold that inane view.

cptskippy 8y ago

That article doesn't disagree with what you're saying. My two takeaways were: 1) We snack more now than we did 50 years ago and those extra calories are probably why we're fat. 2) Reducing the window of time that you eat during the day reduces your desire to eat and your ability to consume. I'm not sure how you took that as perpetuating a secret to weight loss.

werbel 8y ago

As others mentioned there’s an aspect of efficiency there but I think there’s something more important. The whole discussion revolves around losing weight while diet and nutrition is not really about that. It’s about how to eat to stay healthy. Not being obese is just a part of that. If you consider the bigger scope you’ll realize that despite the fact it came out from Neil deGrasse Tyson mouth, in this context it’s just a stupid thing to say.

tzs 8y ago

> The problem is made worse because overweight people typically greatly underestimate how much they eat, while underweight people (me most of my life) typically greatly overestimate how much we eat. It's nearly impossible to accurately gauge calorie intake without strict calorie counting. This suggests that you might be able to take pairs of people, one who is overweight and one who is underweight, and help both of them by simply arranging for them to eat every meal together and do all their snacking together. For each meal or snack, each buys or prepares what they normally would, but before they actually consume the food, they each exchange half of their food with the other. There...an easy to follow diet, without strict calorie counting, that should move the overweight person to a lower weight and put some weight on the underweight person. You could probably build a reality TV show around this. Half the contestants would be people wanting to lose weight, and half would be people trying to gain, with the lowest weight person in the first group being substantially heavier than the highest weight person in the second group. Each week, there would be challenges and contests which determine priority for picking who your eating partner will be for the next week. Pick the contestants from a wide range of culinary cultures and ethnic and religious backgrounds so that some potential pairings would be difficult for the participants, and so doing well in the challenges is important.

ngngngng 8y ago
I've actually had this idea for years. When I was a teenager, I was constantly told by classmates or family members, "I wish I was like you and could eat anything I want and stay so skinny!" I didn't understand the information in my original comment at the time, but it occurred to me it might make a fun documentary to have me live with someone morbidly obese for a month and eat everything they eat when they eat it and see if I gained weight.

jmull 8y ago

Telling people to eat fewer calories than they burn is useless without telling them how. As you yourself acknowledge, it’s not that simple. You use calorie counting to stay on track — but that’s another secret to weight loss, isn’t it? You may not think of it that way because it works for you (which is great by the way), but that’s what it is. But now we’re getting to the meat of the issue. Eating fewer calories than you burn results in weight loss, but how? We should be focusing on the methods that work for many people. If we know what they are, we can advise people attempting to lose weight to try them and hopefully most wont have to try too many before they find one that works for them. As far as I can tell, the three methonds that work well for many people are: (1) strict calorie counting (usually app + food scale), (2) intermittent fasting — which is what this article is about — and (3) keto. Of course, it’s fair to scoff at and criticize the methods that usually don’t work well especially when results are oversold especially in money-making schemes. But this guy is just promoting IF in a fair and reasonable way. Also, there is a reasonable chance IF has health benefits beyond weight loss, which is potentially a reason to prefer it over calorie counting (although I found that when calorie counting I was effectively doing a mild IF anyway)

songshu 8y ago

It's like saying there are no secrets to computing and to just imagine a computer as a Turing machine, forget about stuff like pipelining and caches and whatever. On the other hand, I do believe the supposed "secrets" have actually been known for a long time. Here's my favorite article about it: http://www.grubstreet.com/2018/03/ultimate-conversation-on-healthy-eating-and-nutrition.html http://www.grubstreet.com/2018/03/ultimate-conversation-on-h...

sooheon 8y ago
Damn, this thread is full of actual good analogies today! Thanks for this one :)

theorique 8y ago

There are no secrets to weight loss. Eat fewer calories than you burn. It doesn't matter if that involves keto, or vegan, or one meal a day. Thyroid problems also don't change physics. The point of the article is, the timing of feeding vs fasting leads to differences in fat storage. The work of Dr Fung, among others, suggests that concentrating eating into a few (4-8) hour period per day causes better outcomes than feeding during the entire waking period. Same thing with the balance of macronutrients. Tuning the ratio of fat:protein:carbohydrate can make a diet more filling and more sustainable on fewer calories. This enables that "calories in / calories out" rule to actually work and cause reduction in stored body fat.

ha8o8le 8y ago

There's way more to this story as people are pointing out. I talk about a lot of this stuff with nutrition experts on my podcast http://peak-human.com http://peak-human.com and am getting the author of this article on soon.

vlasev 8y ago

Unfortunately the human body is quite a bit more complicated than that and a single article on examine.com is woefully inadequate at capturing the complexities. While people's metabolism doesn't seem to vary too much from person to person, it does tend to vary a lot within the same individual based on lifestyle choices. Whether I choose to eat or not, or choose how much to eat, my metabolism can vary. When you consider your glycogen reserves, carb vs fat metabolism, insulin, ghrelin and other hormones, you get a rather complex machine. And what's really frustrating is that you are technically correct, in a sense. Eat fewer calories than you burn and you will lose weight. But that simplification borders on the dangerous. What's missing is that your body is not some passive observer, but an active participant, trying its best to help you survive. Your body is amazingly good at adjusting how much you burn. When you cut calories, say 500 a day, your body will tend to compensate by burning a little less by reducing its temperature, by reducing fidgeting, by reducing your mood even! You'd need to cut 500 calories ABOVE that difference. So you end up having to cut closer to 750-1000 calories per day to get the same effect. Whereas when you fast, your metabolism rather obnoxiously tends to rise. It ends up being healthier (and much easier) to eat 3500 calories less in one go, rather than splitting the difference across 7 days.

Axsuul 8y ago

Calories in/calories out is a simple pipe dream that conveniently ignores the deleterious effects that hormones can have on your metabolism. There are tons of people out there intaking less calories than their BMR and not losing weight because they have thyroid issues, are insulin resistant, etc.