5 ms·

> 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

> 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.
- pjc50 8y ago
  People, especially kids, have routinely died of hunger and gastrointestinal diseases for most of history. Availability of calories was the limiting factor on human numbers until the industrial revolution. Most people did manual labour of some sort and walked everywhere. And when a few people had enough status to get all the calories they wanted and didn't exercise .. they got fat. Really the problem goes in the other direction: now we have food from the "space age", and labour-saving automation, we can accidentally eat far more calories than we need.
parthdesai 8y ago
If you break it down into carbs, fats and protein, calorie in calorie out model does wonders. OP is right, weight loss is hard work. Frankly, people want to believe that there is an alternate method because a lot of them are just lazy. Also, it's easier to maintain weight than to loose/gain weight. So once you have lost that weight, it's much easier to be at that weight. Of course you lost a huge amount of weight in a short span, this won't be true.
- msiyer 8y ago
  For the majority, losing weight is not tough in theory. In practice, however, will-power causes most trouble. It is really easy. Species-specific diet can do wonders in a very short time. I have tried it with my dogs and I am trying this on myself. I am seeing excellent results.
bshoemaker 8y ago
This comment has very little to do with the comment above it, which makes the point that weight is dictated by net calories, with very few exceptions.
atomical 8y ago
> 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. People who care about this aren't interested in the secrets of the endocrine system. They are interested in how they can remain trim while eating rich food like meat and dairy. These folks like fasting because they can eat one large meal and get more stimulation from the food.
auganov 8y ago
No you wouldn't starve to death. If you didn't take a decent multivitamin you might develop life-threatening nutrient deficiencies, yes. Also it's not as if we have a great understanding of how different foods influence our food consumption patterns. I totally agree with ops point. Almost anytime the topic of nutrition comes up people are either unaware of the basic mechanics or have been convinced they're somehow fake [0]. [0] as in that there are huge differences in metabolic efficiency between foods or that people's BMRs usually differ greatly.
- electrograv 8y ago
  > No you wouldn't starve to death. If you didn't take a decent multivitamin you might develop life-threatening nutrient deficiencies, yes. You're claiming that a human can viably survive their whole life by consuming a daily diet of: 1. Olive Oil 2. Multi-Vitimin 3. Water This seems extremely far-fetched. Do you have a source for this claim?
  - ngngngng 8y ago
    > I'm so confused why people are posting this. Replying here because I can't reply to where you posted this ^^ Everyone's posting it because you are wrong. A calorie is a calorie. If I eat 500 calories surplus a day, i'll gain ~1 pound a week.
    - electrograv 8y ago
      > If I eat 500 calories surplus a day, i'll gain ~1 pound a week. Not if you expel an excess 500 calories per day on the toilet. This is what would happen if you chug a glass of olive oil, for example -- your body won't digest it all, and the vast majority of it will pass straight through. This is an extreme example, but I make it to demonstrate a point 'calorie couters' always seem to forget: You keep assuming that you retain 100% of the calories you ingest, minus what you burn. This is demonstrably incorrect.
      - zbentley 8y ago
goostavos 8y ago
I always see this response in these threads and get a little frustrated. I feel like it purposefully misses the forest for the trees a bit. Sure, at a super granular level, different foods affect you differently, trigger different biological responses, etc.. etc.. but if you zoom out, the details just don't matter. If you're under calories, the weight will come off. Nobody is suggesting to "drink olive oil." you can keep you normal diet, just eat less of it, and magic will happen.
- base698 8y ago
  If you eat a 16 to 20 oz ribeye (1200 calories) in the morning you won't want to eat until at least dinner time. If you eat 3 donuts (1200 calories), you'll be ravenous by noon. What you eat effects when you want to eat and how much dramatically. Why run against a headwind?
  - goostavos 8y ago
    Oh boy, I regret commenting in this thread. I feel like people keep either inventing things to argue against (olive oil) or bringing up scenarios that are purposefully missing the overall point of what people are actually saying. Again, sure, if you zoom in, eating donuts is probably a bad strategy because you'll be hungry again, and thus eat more calories. But in the grand scheme of things, you CAN eat a donut if you remain below you calories. That is all people are saying. Nothing more. Nothing less. fwiw, we weight lifters regularly put this into practice. Bulking? add more food. Cutting? less food. Yes, there are details (gotta hit those macros!), but overall, the strategy boils down to calories in/out.
    - amanaplanacanal 8y ago
      You say that like measuring calories in/out is an easy thing to do :-) For most people it absolutely is not, on either end of that.
      - electrograv 8y ago
darkerside 8y ago
The premise you've presented fascinates me. I wonder what would be the impacts of a 2000 calorie olive oil diet. Is it truly a starvation diet (due to inability of the body to process those calories)? I generally agree with the "calories in, calories out" principles of weight management, but I could see this being a useful counterexample.

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.
pjc50 8y ago
People, especially kids, have routinely died of hunger and gastrointestinal diseases for most of history. Availability of calories was the limiting factor on human numbers until the industrial revolution. Most people did manual labour of some sort and walked everywhere. And when a few people had enough status to get all the calories they wanted and didn't exercise .. they got fat. Really the problem goes in the other direction: now we have food from the "space age", and labour-saving automation, we can accidentally eat far more calories than we need.

parthdesai 8y ago

If you break it down into carbs, fats and protein, calorie in calorie out model does wonders. OP is right, weight loss is hard work. Frankly, people want to believe that there is an alternate method because a lot of them are just lazy. Also, it's easier to maintain weight than to loose/gain weight. So once you have lost that weight, it's much easier to be at that weight. Of course you lost a huge amount of weight in a short span, this won't be true.

msiyer 8y ago
For the majority, losing weight is not tough in theory. In practice, however, will-power causes most trouble. It is really easy. Species-specific diet can do wonders in a very short time. I have tried it with my dogs and I am trying this on myself. I am seeing excellent results.

bshoemaker 8y ago

This comment has very little to do with the comment above it, which makes the point that weight is dictated by net calories, with very few exceptions.

atomical 8y ago

> 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. People who care about this aren't interested in the secrets of the endocrine system. They are interested in how they can remain trim while eating rich food like meat and dairy. These folks like fasting because they can eat one large meal and get more stimulation from the food.

auganov 8y ago

No you wouldn't starve to death. If you didn't take a decent multivitamin you might develop life-threatening nutrient deficiencies, yes. Also it's not as if we have a great understanding of how different foods influence our food consumption patterns. I totally agree with ops point. Almost anytime the topic of nutrition comes up people are either unaware of the basic mechanics or have been convinced they're somehow fake [0]. [0] as in that there are huge differences in metabolic efficiency between foods or that people's BMRs usually differ greatly.

electrograv 8y ago
> No you wouldn't starve to death. If you didn't take a decent multivitamin you might develop life-threatening nutrient deficiencies, yes. You're claiming that a human can viably survive their whole life by consuming a daily diet of: 1. Olive Oil 2. Multi-Vitimin 3. Water This seems extremely far-fetched. Do you have a source for this claim?
- ngngngng 8y ago
  > I'm so confused why people are posting this. Replying here because I can't reply to where you posted this ^^ Everyone's posting it because you are wrong. A calorie is a calorie. If I eat 500 calories surplus a day, i'll gain ~1 pound a week.
  - electrograv 8y ago
    > If I eat 500 calories surplus a day, i'll gain ~1 pound a week. Not if you expel an excess 500 calories per day on the toilet. This is what would happen if you chug a glass of olive oil, for example -- your body won't digest it all, and the vast majority of it will pass straight through. This is an extreme example, but I make it to demonstrate a point 'calorie couters' always seem to forget: You keep assuming that you retain 100% of the calories you ingest, minus what you burn. This is demonstrably incorrect.
    - zbentley 8y ago

goostavos 8y ago

I always see this response in these threads and get a little frustrated. I feel like it purposefully misses the forest for the trees a bit. Sure, at a super granular level, different foods affect you differently, trigger different biological responses, etc.. etc.. but if you zoom out, the details just don't matter. If you're under calories, the weight will come off. Nobody is suggesting to "drink olive oil." you can keep you normal diet, just eat less of it, and magic will happen.

base698 8y ago
If you eat a 16 to 20 oz ribeye (1200 calories) in the morning you won't want to eat until at least dinner time. If you eat 3 donuts (1200 calories), you'll be ravenous by noon. What you eat effects when you want to eat and how much dramatically. Why run against a headwind?
- goostavos 8y ago
  Oh boy, I regret commenting in this thread. I feel like people keep either inventing things to argue against (olive oil) or bringing up scenarios that are purposefully missing the overall point of what people are actually saying. Again, sure, if you zoom in, eating donuts is probably a bad strategy because you'll be hungry again, and thus eat more calories. But in the grand scheme of things, you CAN eat a donut if you remain below you calories. That is all people are saying. Nothing more. Nothing less. fwiw, we weight lifters regularly put this into practice. Bulking? add more food. Cutting? less food. Yes, there are details (gotta hit those macros!), but overall, the strategy boils down to calories in/out.
  - amanaplanacanal 8y ago
    You say that like measuring calories in/out is an easy thing to do :-) For most people it absolutely is not, on either end of that.
    - electrograv 8y ago

darkerside 8y ago

The premise you've presented fascinates me. I wonder what would be the impacts of a 2000 calorie olive oil diet. Is it truly a starvation diet (due to inability of the body to process those calories)? I generally agree with the "calories in, calories out" principles of weight management, but I could see this being a useful counterexample.