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> And for food we should try to focus on whole foods and not calories … This is just plain false. You can “focus” on eating whole foods and if you consume more

> And for food we should try to focus on whole foods and not calories … This is just plain false. You can “focus” on eating whole foods and if you consume more calories than you burn you will gain weight. If you consume less calories than you burn you will lose weight. The science has not changed on this point. No one giving honest diet advice should tell people not to worry about the calories they consume if the individual has the goal to increase, lower or maintain their weight.

greymalik 4y ago
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/stop-counting-calories https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/stop-counting...
- alldayeveryday 4y ago
  > "This idea of 'a calorie in and a calorie out' when it comes to weight loss is not only antiquated, it's just wrong," says Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity specialist and assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. The truth is that even careful calorie calculations don't always yield uniform results. How your body burns calories depends on a number of factors, including the type of food you eat, your body's metabolism, and even the type of organisms living in your gut. You can eat the exact same number of calories as someone else, yet have very different outcomes when it comes to your weight. This is just plain dishonest writing. Just because there are other variables, or that different people burn different amount of calories, does not make 'calorie in and calorie out' wrong. If John burns 2000 calories a day and has different organisms in his gut from Sarah who burns 1500 calories a day, in no way disproves calories in / calorie out. All it proves is that people are different, a premise that the modern science community seems to find a challenging notion.
  - criddell 4y ago
    I think you are missing their point. Calories in and out is a piece of the puzzle and net calories is often not enough to make a good prediction. Two similar people can consume precisely the same number of calories and have the same level of physical fitness and physical activity and have different outcomes. People are indeed different and the scientist you quote is saying precisely that.
    - codethief 4y ago
      > Two similar people can consume precisely the same number of calories and have the same level of physical fitness and physical activity and have different outcomes. You are trying to find a loophole here that doesn't exist. If two people burn the same amount of energy E_O ("out") and take in the same amount of energy E_I ("in") with E_I < E_O, then both of them must take those calories from somewhere else in their body and must therefore undergo weight loss. There is no way around that. Now, notably you didn't specify E_O, you only said > the same level of physical fitness and physical activity which can mean a lot of things. All the supposed loopholes work in exactly the same way: It might not be entirely clear what the values of E_I and E_O are, so "calories in, calories out must be wrong". (Which, again, is impossible because it's just conservation of energy, i.e. a law of physics.) In any case, just like you can bound E_I from above by counting calories, there are ways to constrain E_O from below: If both people have the same mass (say 100kg) and walk up the staircase in one of the towers of Cologne cathedral (~150m), then they will both have spent at least E_O >= 100kg * 150m * 10m/s² = 150,000 J.
      - vorpalhex 4y ago
        The resting burn rate of two people of identical mass is different.
        spiderice 4y ago
        How can you possibly read GP's comment and think they don't realize this? Stop nitpicking. Calories In vs Calories Out is correct. Period. It doesn't matter if Calories out is hard to calculate.
        criddell 4y ago
        Are you saying Harvard professor Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford [1] is incorrect? [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatima_Cody_Stanford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatima_Cody_Stanford
        4y ago
  - criley2 4y ago
    The theoretical concept of CICO is thermodynamics and indisputable, but the point that the data demonstrates and that these Harvard scientists are discussing is that all of the parts of the equation are so error-ridden and faulty that to combine them together in practice is not effective. Everything from the faulty results of burning food in a calorimeter, to users guesstimating the ingredients in food they cook, to the wide amount of false data inputted to calorie tracking apps, to the extremely complex and still not well understood G.I. tract, to measuring how much each individual can absorb, to how much cooking effects it, to how much the personal biomes between gut and colon play an effect, etc all add up to the reality that there is too much error to pretend the system is useful. If using the system got you to eat differently, and eating different made you lose weight, then congratulations, but that doesn't prove that the food you ate was actually X calories or that you actually burned Y calories, and that that deficit is why you lost weight, nor does it mean that someone else who ate as much as you did would have their body change in that way.
    - a9h74j 4y ago
      So true CICO is necessary but not sufficient, particularly as calorimeter-derived CI numbers are suspect, and other reasons?
  - pixl97 4y ago
    CICO is a great model for 3rd parties in your diet. If you have someone watching your dietary intake, they can count calories for you and you will succeed at losing weight nearly 100% of the time if they can monitor everything you eat. Most individuals cannot count calories even reasonably close to what they are consuming due to a number of factors. The model is also an abject failure when it comes to the individual psychology of overeating. This is where people like the above doctor says it's "just wrong". CICO as the only method of weight loss is about as effective as quitting smoking cold turkey (3 to 5% success rate). In general getting people to stop eating high caloric density / high glycemic index foods and replacing them with something else is a good starting point. You're effectively lowering the CI but not requiring a cutoff point for the individual.
  - chasd00 4y ago
    when they said CICO is "just wrong" they should have said "just different for every person". My wife listens to a pretty entertaining podcast called Maintenance Phase and they did an episode on CICO where they basically call it BS because of all the other variables. I have a hard time dealing with CICO being wrong because I just don't see getting around the physics. In my mind, what's missed in CICO is the numbers and measurements are different for each person. A calorie limit for one person that results in weightloss may not work for someone else. It seems pretty obvious to me that calorie counting has to be done on an individual level and has to be done accurately ( a whole other problem ) but that seems to be missed on a lot of people. EDIT: i wanted to mention something someone downthread hit on and that was also in the Maintenance Phase episode. Calorie burn is not constant and your body will adjust, so for you to effectively count calories and stay below some threshold you have to track what your body is burning as it adjusts which is probably very difficult.
    - hombre_fatal 4y ago
      The duo on that podcast asserts gems like: we don't actually know if being fat is bad for you. Worth a chuckle. I can imagine the podcast took off because people are hungry (pun unintentional) for something that validates inaction on improving their bodies. That show treats any sort of ambition about one's body as an eating disorder or unrealistic goal.
      - chasd00 4y ago
        I know this is late but I was going back through my comments and found yours. Yeah , i have problems with the podcast on those terms too. I get their point that fat-shaming is harmful and I totally agree however, if someone is overweight then it's very much a good idea to try and reduce weight and not just consider it normal and healthy like the podcast sometimes implies. Granted, overweight people are a favorite prey for every charlatan out there and i feel like the podcast does an acceptable (but not perfect) job of calling them out. oh and we (my wife and I) found the Maintenance Phase podcast by following Michael Hobbes from You're Wrong About which is another entertaining podcast. I don't always agree with his politics but if I ever met him i'd shake his hand, he does a really good job.
  - asoneth 4y ago
    Note the caveat in your quote. It's not that calorie in/out is theoretically wrong, it's that it is an unhelpful/antiquated strategy "when it comes to weight loss". First, note that the calorie estimates on food packaging can be off, sometimes by as much as 25%.[1] Restaurant foods have an even wider discrepancy. [2] And as you point out, different people will digest them and absorb different nutrients from the same food making comparisons difficult. For example, I absorb a small fraction of the calories from dairy products because they unfortunately pass through my digestive system quickly and remain largely undigested. And as others have noted, accurately estimating calorie expenditure can also be difficult without professional equipment, so in practice measurements of calories expenditure can be off by a significant margin as well. Combining all of these sources of error can result in excessively wide error bars. Someone who relies on calorie in/out estimates to dictate their consumption may end up eating significantly more or less than is optimal. Of course, even if counting calories in/out is wildly inaccurate it might still have a positive effect if it causes people to be more aware of the food they eat. Unfortunately I'm not aware of research that teaching people to count calories results in better health outcomes than other diet strategies. (Though it does seem to increase people's odds of developing eating disorders. [3]) It's one of those cases where the theory may be correct in theory but that doesn't make it particularly useful in practice. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8371446/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8371446/ [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21771989/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21771989/ [3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30155857/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30155857/
    - alldayeveryday 4y ago
      The fact that counting calories is difficult, or that some food labels might be wrong, is not evidence that CICO is incorrect. Just as the fact that different people burn different amounts of energy does not disprove CICO. I'm astonished how many commenters are desperately trying to find loopholes in simple laws of physics.
      - asoneth 4y ago
        I said above, it's not that CICO is wrong. No point I have raised could possibly disprove CICO because CICO is obviously correct from a physics perspective, and I'm not sure if anyone here is trying to find loopholes in simple laws of physics. I (and most of the other commenters here it seems) keep trying to communicate that it is possible to be both technically correct and simultaneously not useful as a weight loss strategy.
- bigyikes 4y ago
  The title of this article is clickbait. Every single piece of advice listed can and should be done in addition to counting calories. The single best heuristic we have for weight loss continues to be “calories in - calories out” simply because you cannot escape thermodynamics. Yes, your base metabolic rate may be different than others and may change over time. Yes different foods are processed differently by your body. This changes the variables, but again, does not change the calorie arithmetic.
Broken_Hippo 4y ago
"No one giving honest diet advice should tell people not to worry about the calories they consume if the individual has the goal to increase, lower or maintain their weight." That's not realistically true. If I watch actual calories, I wind up hungry all the time because I spend so much time thinking about food. On the other hand: I can do things like make sure I eat enough vegetables. Replace some meat with veggies or legumes. With some things, I can use less fat than my mother would have. Eat slightly smaller servings, change the items I eat for food during the day, or wait just a little bit before having the snack so I don't wind up eating two snacks instead of one. The end result is that I'm changing out higher calorie stuff with lower calorie stuff without actually worrying about the calories I take in. You simply need to know that some things are lower in calories than other, and that's not exactly "worrying" - and it definitely isn't counting. And this was based on honest advice from folks. It also means that this is a way to actually change a diet: Few folks want to count calories for the next few decades of their life, after all.
- amanj41 4y ago
  these arguments aren't at odds. In fact, your strategy is an excellent way to diet with calorie counting. One of the best ways to improve satiety in a hypocaloric setting is by replacing high calorie density foods with low calorie density foods (such as vegetables and fruits, as you mentioned). You still need to count calories for maximum accuracy and efficiency of weight loss, but it doesn't have to be as painful as eating one big mac and fried a day and starving the rest of the day since you hit your calorie limit
  - z9znz 4y ago
    > for maximum accuracy and efficiency of weight loss That's the point though... "ain't nobody got time for that" is the reason most of us fail at high performance diets. We need the simplest, most minimal first step which can become habit (and which also likely leads to _some_ weight loss, even if not maximum). Once that very significant behavior is changed (choosing better foods), then it can be refined.
- davidguetta 4y ago
seadan83 4y ago
Not sure if properly highlighted, though the science is uncertain about calorie absorption. In other words, not all food-source calories are equal, further a persons metabolism and their GI tract play a role as well. These additional variables have sparked my interest quite a bit, I'm very interested to learn more if others have more information/links about these variables to calorie intake.
z9znz 4y ago
80/20 rule here. If you focus on eating whole foods (instead of focusing on calories), you're more likely to consume fewer calories simply because whole foods are less calorie dense than packaged/processed foods. Plus you'll be getting less sugar and salt (although salt's harm is up for debate). It's also likely that the body behaves differently depending on the quality of food consumed. Consuming less than 2000 calories of processed food may cause the body to operate less efficiently for any number of reasons (not the least of which involves your gut bacterial balance). So the end result might be less weight loss than a 2200 "whole food" diet would result in. People are busy in modern times. Perfecting and managing a diet is hard work, so "hacks" like just choosing whole foods are a pretty great way to make positive progress.
- jononomo 4y ago
  If you religiously limit yourself to only eating beef, eggs, and sardines, then you will consume the fewest calories with the greatest return in terms of nutrition of any possible diet plan.
  - z9znz 4y ago
    And if you min/max in that way, you're likely going to be introducing some other problem (perhaps one that takes a long time to recognize) into your complex biological system which is accustomed to having a variety of inputs. Granted, for non-plant protein, small/young sardines are probably the best. Not only do you get fish oil, but you get load of calcium which is difficult to get elsewhere unless you consume a lot of dairy. Beef and eggs are trickier, because their downsides tend to be related to how they are produced/raised. Also there's the animals in captivity factor which does not scale well (or humanely). Pumpkin seeds are an amazing source of protein (and some other minerals which we don't normally get much of). Dried, I think they taste horrible. But roasted with a little seasoning, they are quite nice. And they can be added to other dishes to give extra texture. Chickpeas are good. Peas are good. Cashews and peanuts are good. And if you consume a variety of vegetables, you can get the complete assortment of amino acids (so usable protein). There is virtually no way someone could get fat from eating the foods I have listed. If they do, then they have some other underlying health issue or a gut biome that's way out of whack (which most of ours are pretty far out).
oezi 4y ago
I recently learned that the science has changed and I can recommend the book Burn by Herman Pontzer on this: The human body can adjust the Basal Metabolic Resting Rate quite a lot in the face of exercise. Spending an extra 500 kcals on exercise can easily only lead to 200 kcals higher total energy expenditure. The body apparently will for instance reduce sex drive and immune functions when under regular exercise. So to achieve weight loss exercise alone is a very hard path unless diet is also modified. In other words the mechanistic model of "calories in minus exercise calories minus resting calories" doesn't work well or at least it is harder to assess "calories out" than it seems at first hand.
- jononomo 4y ago
  It saddens me that it is not universally understood that the way to get in shape is not to exercise but to stick religiously to a diet of only fatty beef, eggs, and sardines.

greymalik 4y ago

https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/stop-counting-calories https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/stop-counting...

alldayeveryday 4y ago
> "This idea of 'a calorie in and a calorie out' when it comes to weight loss is not only antiquated, it's just wrong," says Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity specialist and assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. The truth is that even careful calorie calculations don't always yield uniform results. How your body burns calories depends on a number of factors, including the type of food you eat, your body's metabolism, and even the type of organisms living in your gut. You can eat the exact same number of calories as someone else, yet have very different outcomes when it comes to your weight. This is just plain dishonest writing. Just because there are other variables, or that different people burn different amount of calories, does not make 'calorie in and calorie out' wrong. If John burns 2000 calories a day and has different organisms in his gut from Sarah who burns 1500 calories a day, in no way disproves calories in / calorie out. All it proves is that people are different, a premise that the modern science community seems to find a challenging notion.
- criddell 4y ago
  I think you are missing their point. Calories in and out is a piece of the puzzle and net calories is often not enough to make a good prediction. Two similar people can consume precisely the same number of calories and have the same level of physical fitness and physical activity and have different outcomes. People are indeed different and the scientist you quote is saying precisely that.
  - codethief 4y ago
    > Two similar people can consume precisely the same number of calories and have the same level of physical fitness and physical activity and have different outcomes. You are trying to find a loophole here that doesn't exist. If two people burn the same amount of energy E_O ("out") and take in the same amount of energy E_I ("in") with E_I < E_O, then both of them must take those calories from somewhere else in their body and must therefore undergo weight loss. There is no way around that. Now, notably you didn't specify E_O, you only said > the same level of physical fitness and physical activity which can mean a lot of things. All the supposed loopholes work in exactly the same way: It might not be entirely clear what the values of E_I and E_O are, so "calories in, calories out must be wrong". (Which, again, is impossible because it's just conservation of energy, i.e. a law of physics.) In any case, just like you can bound E_I from above by counting calories, there are ways to constrain E_O from below: If both people have the same mass (say 100kg) and walk up the staircase in one of the towers of Cologne cathedral (~150m), then they will both have spent at least E_O >= 100kg * 150m * 10m/s² = 150,000 J.
    - vorpalhex 4y ago
      The resting burn rate of two people of identical mass is different.
      - spiderice 4y ago
        How can you possibly read GP's comment and think they don't realize this? Stop nitpicking. Calories In vs Calories Out is correct. Period. It doesn't matter if Calories out is hard to calculate.
        criddell 4y ago
        Are you saying Harvard professor Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford [1] is incorrect? [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatima_Cody_Stanford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatima_Cody_Stanford
        4y ago
- criley2 4y ago
  The theoretical concept of CICO is thermodynamics and indisputable, but the point that the data demonstrates and that these Harvard scientists are discussing is that all of the parts of the equation are so error-ridden and faulty that to combine them together in practice is not effective. Everything from the faulty results of burning food in a calorimeter, to users guesstimating the ingredients in food they cook, to the wide amount of false data inputted to calorie tracking apps, to the extremely complex and still not well understood G.I. tract, to measuring how much each individual can absorb, to how much cooking effects it, to how much the personal biomes between gut and colon play an effect, etc all add up to the reality that there is too much error to pretend the system is useful. If using the system got you to eat differently, and eating different made you lose weight, then congratulations, but that doesn't prove that the food you ate was actually X calories or that you actually burned Y calories, and that that deficit is why you lost weight, nor does it mean that someone else who ate as much as you did would have their body change in that way.
  - a9h74j 4y ago
    So true CICO is necessary but not sufficient, particularly as calorimeter-derived CI numbers are suspect, and other reasons?
- pixl97 4y ago
  CICO is a great model for 3rd parties in your diet. If you have someone watching your dietary intake, they can count calories for you and you will succeed at losing weight nearly 100% of the time if they can monitor everything you eat. Most individuals cannot count calories even reasonably close to what they are consuming due to a number of factors. The model is also an abject failure when it comes to the individual psychology of overeating. This is where people like the above doctor says it's "just wrong". CICO as the only method of weight loss is about as effective as quitting smoking cold turkey (3 to 5% success rate). In general getting people to stop eating high caloric density / high glycemic index foods and replacing them with something else is a good starting point. You're effectively lowering the CI but not requiring a cutoff point for the individual.
- chasd00 4y ago
  when they said CICO is "just wrong" they should have said "just different for every person". My wife listens to a pretty entertaining podcast called Maintenance Phase and they did an episode on CICO where they basically call it BS because of all the other variables. I have a hard time dealing with CICO being wrong because I just don't see getting around the physics. In my mind, what's missed in CICO is the numbers and measurements are different for each person. A calorie limit for one person that results in weightloss may not work for someone else. It seems pretty obvious to me that calorie counting has to be done on an individual level and has to be done accurately ( a whole other problem ) but that seems to be missed on a lot of people. EDIT: i wanted to mention something someone downthread hit on and that was also in the Maintenance Phase episode. Calorie burn is not constant and your body will adjust, so for you to effectively count calories and stay below some threshold you have to track what your body is burning as it adjusts which is probably very difficult.
  - hombre_fatal 4y ago
    The duo on that podcast asserts gems like: we don't actually know if being fat is bad for you. Worth a chuckle. I can imagine the podcast took off because people are hungry (pun unintentional) for something that validates inaction on improving their bodies. That show treats any sort of ambition about one's body as an eating disorder or unrealistic goal.
    - chasd00 4y ago
      I know this is late but I was going back through my comments and found yours. Yeah , i have problems with the podcast on those terms too. I get their point that fat-shaming is harmful and I totally agree however, if someone is overweight then it's very much a good idea to try and reduce weight and not just consider it normal and healthy like the podcast sometimes implies. Granted, overweight people are a favorite prey for every charlatan out there and i feel like the podcast does an acceptable (but not perfect) job of calling them out. oh and we (my wife and I) found the Maintenance Phase podcast by following Michael Hobbes from You're Wrong About which is another entertaining podcast. I don't always agree with his politics but if I ever met him i'd shake his hand, he does a really good job.
- asoneth 4y ago
  Note the caveat in your quote. It's not that calorie in/out is theoretically wrong, it's that it is an unhelpful/antiquated strategy "when it comes to weight loss". First, note that the calorie estimates on food packaging can be off, sometimes by as much as 25%.[1] Restaurant foods have an even wider discrepancy. [2] And as you point out, different people will digest them and absorb different nutrients from the same food making comparisons difficult. For example, I absorb a small fraction of the calories from dairy products because they unfortunately pass through my digestive system quickly and remain largely undigested. And as others have noted, accurately estimating calorie expenditure can also be difficult without professional equipment, so in practice measurements of calories expenditure can be off by a significant margin as well. Combining all of these sources of error can result in excessively wide error bars. Someone who relies on calorie in/out estimates to dictate their consumption may end up eating significantly more or less than is optimal. Of course, even if counting calories in/out is wildly inaccurate it might still have a positive effect if it causes people to be more aware of the food they eat. Unfortunately I'm not aware of research that teaching people to count calories results in better health outcomes than other diet strategies. (Though it does seem to increase people's odds of developing eating disorders. [3]) It's one of those cases where the theory may be correct in theory but that doesn't make it particularly useful in practice. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8371446/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8371446/ [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21771989/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21771989/ [3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30155857/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30155857/
  - alldayeveryday 4y ago
    The fact that counting calories is difficult, or that some food labels might be wrong, is not evidence that CICO is incorrect. Just as the fact that different people burn different amounts of energy does not disprove CICO. I'm astonished how many commenters are desperately trying to find loopholes in simple laws of physics.
    - asoneth 4y ago
      I said above, it's not that CICO is wrong. No point I have raised could possibly disprove CICO because CICO is obviously correct from a physics perspective, and I'm not sure if anyone here is trying to find loopholes in simple laws of physics. I (and most of the other commenters here it seems) keep trying to communicate that it is possible to be both technically correct and simultaneously not useful as a weight loss strategy.
bigyikes 4y ago
The title of this article is clickbait. Every single piece of advice listed can and should be done in addition to counting calories. The single best heuristic we have for weight loss continues to be “calories in - calories out” simply because you cannot escape thermodynamics. Yes, your base metabolic rate may be different than others and may change over time. Yes different foods are processed differently by your body. This changes the variables, but again, does not change the calorie arithmetic.

Broken_Hippo 4y ago

"No one giving honest diet advice should tell people not to worry about the calories they consume if the individual has the goal to increase, lower or maintain their weight." That's not realistically true. If I watch actual calories, I wind up hungry all the time because I spend so much time thinking about food. On the other hand: I can do things like make sure I eat enough vegetables. Replace some meat with veggies or legumes. With some things, I can use less fat than my mother would have. Eat slightly smaller servings, change the items I eat for food during the day, or wait just a little bit before having the snack so I don't wind up eating two snacks instead of one. The end result is that I'm changing out higher calorie stuff with lower calorie stuff without actually worrying about the calories I take in. You simply need to know that some things are lower in calories than other, and that's not exactly "worrying" - and it definitely isn't counting. And this was based on honest advice from folks. It also means that this is a way to actually change a diet: Few folks want to count calories for the next few decades of their life, after all.

amanj41 4y ago
these arguments aren't at odds. In fact, your strategy is an excellent way to diet with calorie counting. One of the best ways to improve satiety in a hypocaloric setting is by replacing high calorie density foods with low calorie density foods (such as vegetables and fruits, as you mentioned). You still need to count calories for maximum accuracy and efficiency of weight loss, but it doesn't have to be as painful as eating one big mac and fried a day and starving the rest of the day since you hit your calorie limit
- z9znz 4y ago
  > for maximum accuracy and efficiency of weight loss That's the point though... "ain't nobody got time for that" is the reason most of us fail at high performance diets. We need the simplest, most minimal first step which can become habit (and which also likely leads to _some_ weight loss, even if not maximum). Once that very significant behavior is changed (choosing better foods), then it can be refined.
davidguetta 4y ago

seadan83 4y ago

Not sure if properly highlighted, though the science is uncertain about calorie absorption. In other words, not all food-source calories are equal, further a persons metabolism and their GI tract play a role as well. These additional variables have sparked my interest quite a bit, I'm very interested to learn more if others have more information/links about these variables to calorie intake.

z9znz 4y ago

80/20 rule here. If you focus on eating whole foods (instead of focusing on calories), you're more likely to consume fewer calories simply because whole foods are less calorie dense than packaged/processed foods. Plus you'll be getting less sugar and salt (although salt's harm is up for debate). It's also likely that the body behaves differently depending on the quality of food consumed. Consuming less than 2000 calories of processed food may cause the body to operate less efficiently for any number of reasons (not the least of which involves your gut bacterial balance). So the end result might be less weight loss than a 2200 "whole food" diet would result in. People are busy in modern times. Perfecting and managing a diet is hard work, so "hacks" like just choosing whole foods are a pretty great way to make positive progress.

jononomo 4y ago
If you religiously limit yourself to only eating beef, eggs, and sardines, then you will consume the fewest calories with the greatest return in terms of nutrition of any possible diet plan.
- z9znz 4y ago
  And if you min/max in that way, you're likely going to be introducing some other problem (perhaps one that takes a long time to recognize) into your complex biological system which is accustomed to having a variety of inputs. Granted, for non-plant protein, small/young sardines are probably the best. Not only do you get fish oil, but you get load of calcium which is difficult to get elsewhere unless you consume a lot of dairy. Beef and eggs are trickier, because their downsides tend to be related to how they are produced/raised. Also there's the animals in captivity factor which does not scale well (or humanely). Pumpkin seeds are an amazing source of protein (and some other minerals which we don't normally get much of). Dried, I think they taste horrible. But roasted with a little seasoning, they are quite nice. And they can be added to other dishes to give extra texture. Chickpeas are good. Peas are good. Cashews and peanuts are good. And if you consume a variety of vegetables, you can get the complete assortment of amino acids (so usable protein). There is virtually no way someone could get fat from eating the foods I have listed. If they do, then they have some other underlying health issue or a gut biome that's way out of whack (which most of ours are pretty far out).

oezi 4y ago

I recently learned that the science has changed and I can recommend the book Burn by Herman Pontzer on this: The human body can adjust the Basal Metabolic Resting Rate quite a lot in the face of exercise. Spending an extra 500 kcals on exercise can easily only lead to 200 kcals higher total energy expenditure. The body apparently will for instance reduce sex drive and immune functions when under regular exercise. So to achieve weight loss exercise alone is a very hard path unless diet is also modified. In other words the mechanistic model of "calories in minus exercise calories minus resting calories" doesn't work well or at least it is harder to assess "calories out" than it seems at first hand.

jononomo 4y ago
It saddens me that it is not universally understood that the way to get in shape is not to exercise but to stick religiously to a diet of only fatty beef, eggs, and sardines.