But a new study, published Tuesday in JAMA, may turn that advice on its head. It found that people who cut back on added sugar, refined grains and highly processed foods while concentrating on eating plenty of vegetables and whole foods — without worrying about counting calories or limiting portion sizes — lost significant amounts of weight over the course of a year.
Maybe I missed it in the article but this just seems like calorie restriction to me. Its much harder to eat a large amount of calories if its just meat and vegetables.
This is particularly true for things like soda. Soda does absolutely nothing to help you feel full, but it's pretty calorie dense due to the sugar. Cut out added sugars (and therefore soda) and BOOM, you're immediately eating less calories but not feeling any more hungry.
Yeah, a few years ago I lost 55 pounds. The primary change was just cutting out soda and an increase in light activity (mainly walking.) Also drinking more water in general. I found for me that if I went to the gym and ran I would end up overeating on those days, so instead I went with the small changes which worked well for me.
For me sodas sweetness lended well to making super salty foods taste better, by cutting out the sugar in the sodas I didn't have the same desire to eat salty fast food items.
1 can of coke has 140 calories. A good rule of thumb is 3500 calories is a pound. So if you drink a single can of coke every day, after a year that's worth almost 15lbs.
This observation is what led to me cutting soda out of my diet entirely almost a year ago (barring the rare treat).
And don't be fooled by the promise of diet soda. Lots of studies recently have shown that drinking diet soda doesn't help with weight loss either. Apparently the artificial sweeteners do something to your body by tricking it into thinking it's getting sugar; I'm not really familiar with the details, but studies showed that people who swapped soda for diet soda didn't lose weight, but people who swapped soda for e.g. water did. This advice is what led to me cutting diet soda out of my diet 6 months ago (which I had switched to after cutting out regular soda), so now I drink almost exclusively water.
If you're interested in cutting out soda as well, and don't think you can just switch to water, I have a couple of suggestions:
1. Start with those crystal geyser flavored sparkling waters you can get at Costco. I drank those for a while, because the hint of flavor tricked my mouth into thinking I wasn't just drinking water. I eventually stopped though, in favor of
2. Get a SodaStream and just make your own sparkling water. You can add flavor packets to this if you want, but I never have. Once you get used to it, unflavored sparkling water is pretty great. The downside here is the refill tanks for the SodaStream aren't cheap, but if you're concerned about that, there are homebrew carbonation setups as well (they just take up a lot more space; SodaStream is pretty compact).
Apparently the artificial sweeteners do something to your body by tricking it into thinking it's getting sugar...
Specifically what happens is that your brain is supposed to taste sugar, and learn to shut off your appetite when it has received enough. But artificial sweeteners teach your brain to ignore that signal because you get what tastes like sugar without getting sugar. So whatever sugary things you eat, you will eat more than you otherwise would without feeling satiated.
>whatever sugary things you eat, you will eat more than you otherwise would without feeling satiated
There is no scientific merit to this frequent claim. [1]
In fact, a comparative study on dieters using diet soda versus water shown that the water group lost less mass, hypothetically because they were feeling hungrier and less satisfied with their diet, thus more likely to succumb to sugary foods.
[1] Rogers, Peter J. "The role of low-calorie sweeteners in the prevention and management of overweight and obesity: evidence v. conjecture," Proceedings of the Nutrition Society
I literally cannot fathom why anyone drinks soda. My parents never let me drink it and never drank it themselves (though wine was always allowed). The other day I had a sip of Coke and it was so sweet it gave me an instant headache and I needed a full glass of water after. Why do people ever give their kids soda knowing how terrible it is for you?
When I switched from regular soda to diet soda I lost about 15 pounds almost immediately. It turns out I was drinking a lot of soda and all that extra sugar didn't help. However the effect quickly went away as my body got used to the diet soda, and then it didn't have much of an effect (and it seems like I found other high carb things to fill my day with).
More recently I cut out diet soda entirely in favor of just water, but I've actually ended up gaining weight, mostly because in retrospect it seems like I've actually replaced a lot of the diet soda with beer (or at least there was a strong inverse correlation between my beer and diet soda consumption). So now I'm working on reducing my beer intake and filling in with the occasional diet soda when I really need some tasty carbonated beverage.
Personally I've never liked flavored sparkling water. When I'm thirsty I prefer plain old water (as long as it's properly filtered), and occasionally I'll drink some unflavored sparkling water. But there's something refreshing about a cold beer or a diet dr pepper that flavored sparkling water just doesn't provide, and it seems that between those two the beer is a lot worse weight wise.
Additional suggestion: Drink unsweetened iced tea. That has allowed me to cut soda entirely except for treats. And has the added bonus of being available in almost every restaurant I've visited.
Soda also makes you hungry af. If I have a soda in the during, I'll be miserably hungry and "grazing" all night long. And it takes a few days for the effect to fully wear off.
Add some butter to your whole-grain-bread, like I do, and you'll end up with some good calories... and I always hated counting those calories that make a bread worth be eaten.
Or just take r-lipoic acid after/with glucose heavy food consumption. It'll help prevent and or lessen the spike. Diabetics use it to control their glucose levels. It can significantly push that down. I'm not seriously suggesting this of course, however it does work.
Dr. Gardner said it is not that calories don’t matter. After all, both groups ultimately ended up consuming fewer calories on average by the end of the study, even though they weren’t conscious of it. The point is that they did this by focusing on nutritious whole foods that satisfied their hunger.
Well, yes, any sustainable diet has to be satisfying. You can, and and least one person has, lost weight on a twinkie diet which also improved his cholesterol, but that wasn't very satisfying and would not have become a permanent diet.
There's also been at least one count of dieting via fasting for over a year. Which is more immediately obvious as unsustainable -- fasting prolonged far enough is called starvation.
What they are saying is that calorie restriction works, but most people are too incompetent to follow through, so need seemingly magical alternative strategies to avoid calorie dense food.
The danger with this approach is that the average Joe hears the message as "weight is not related to how much you eat (energy/quantity), but what you eat (quality)". That message is a public health danger, yet is becoming the prevailing sentiment for health magazines, supplement marketing, popular lifestyle shows etc.
Absolutely nothing magical about eating when you are hungry and stopping when you are sated. As long as you avoid unhealthy, unnatural foods (primarily refined carbs) this strategy works just fine. Animals don't have to count calories to avoid obesity, no reason why humans should either.
Admittedly this is only partially informed, but I am pretty sure most animals don't have access to enough calories to be obese. And those that do (e.g. pets, zoo animals) are (sometimes) kept from obesity due to careful calorie counting by their human caretakers.
Eating is naturally regulated by appetite. That's why appetite and satiation exist. It's difficult to be obese when you eat only unprocessed foods. If you don't believe me, try it out. You might be surprised.
You didn't address their point that zoo animals have to sometimes be kept on diets to remain slim, in spite of their all natural diet. This article seems to think it's a whole gamut of things that keeps these animals thin. http://sciencenordic.com/can-wild-animals-become-overweight
Appetite and satiation are far more complex than just "eat until your full and then stop", for instance amensiac patients have been observed to eat waaay more than they should have just because they did remember eating (Rozin et al. (1998)), even they should have by all rights been physically full. There's whole layers of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral patterns with excess food consumption.
Personally, I have been able to effectively lose and keep off weight while still enjoying all manner of unnatural foods (Ice cream, McDonald's and candy, oh my).
I had success with calorie-counting, and I think part of that came from accidentally co-opting an existing behavior involving bargain-hunting and frugality.
Food choices became about avoiding "spending" my calories on "bad deals", avoiding foods which didn't promise enjoyment commensurate to their cost.
I did that too - I made sure to get my protein (via protein shakes), but after that just ate what I wanted. I developed the same habit too - I ended up restricting things like rice or pasta because I'd rather "spend" those calories on an ice cream cone.
Storing up fat for hibernation is perfectly natural and has no negative effect on the health of the animal. It has nothing to do with obesity as the term is normally used.
My physiology is so far removed from a wild animal’s it’s not even funny. My ancestors propagated thanks to luck, wit and guile, not their ability to get food and mate like wild animals.
What exactly is a whole food? Or a non-processed food? Is honey a natural, healthy food? Are nuts and oily seeds better for your weigh than industrial potato chips? Is cold pressed sesame oil not a high calorie food?
It's a clear public safety danger to imply the above are healthier than their processed counterparts, and my main beef is with the sensationalist title, that aims right at the "calories are a myth" bandwagon. The study itself is good, if it works, it works.
Obviously there are degrees of processing, but it's not hard to see that an apple or a carrot or even a steak are fundamentally less processed and more "natural" than a packet of chips, a bar of chocolate or a TV dinner. They are also much healthier.
This is a good example of prejudice. A TV dinner can be healthy if it contains suficient legumes and low fat meat. And depending on exactly what steak you are proposing and the manner of preparation, it can be significantly more calorie dense and packed with cholesterol and saturated fat.
Freezing and preservatives don't significantly alter nutritional value, and there exist low calorie frozen meals specifically formulated for dieters. Highly processed, but much healthier than some very natural wholesome steaks.
You're asking questions which go against the bias, and cannot be answered without exposing deficiencies in the appeal to nature the "whole foods are best" ideology is founded on. It's disconcerting to see a fallacy being eaten whole by so many.
Eh, I find it hard to judge people for being human. A solution isn't really a good solution if it's difficult to impossible to implement in practice.
This is like saying the solution to addiction is to just stop doing drugs, but people are too incompetent and need magical solutions like rehab and maintenance drugs.
Also, when you start talking about raw foods a lot of those calories won't be bioavailable. Your body simply can't extract more than a trivial amount of nutrition from raw kale.
So all the article is really saying is don't bother with the math, just eat mostly vegetables and you'll lose weight.
Obviously all diets have to be LIMO - Less In, More Out. But the question is how you get there.
Eating vegetables and whole foods without worrying about counting calories or limiting portion sizes doesn't feel like effort. You don't WANT to eat more. And your body becomes happier about burning fat rather than demanding that you eat.
Counting calories explicitly is a lot of work and a lot of self control. Few people can succeed at that.
Personally I follow the former strategy using http://www.weightgrapher.com/ to keep myself honest. About 15 years ago I decided to lose 20 pounds, and kept it off for close to a decade. Then I let my weight get away from me, because life got complicated. This time around I've decided to get back to that weight again, and I know it is sustainable. I'm not aiming for fast weight loss, I've been going at a comfortable pace for 3 months and expect to be dieting another 6 months to reach my target. But I know that I'll be able to get there and stay for years without a lot of willpower. Partly luck of genetics/gut biome. Partly because I'm doing it in a mentally easy way.
If you want to be technical, any habitual pattern of eating is a diet.
But technicalities don't define words, usage and context do, and, for the vast majority of people, including people here, diet means a change in your habitual pattern of eating designed to induce weight loss. That's how it's universally understood in this context.
Being more technical does not mean being more correct.
"Universally understood" shouldn't be true for this. I've known a number of people who were on diets to gain weight for medical or self image reasons, and it's known still known as a diet.
Obviously all diets have to be LIMO - Less In, More Out.
Do they? What exactly does it mean? I had the impression that eating a lot of calories doesn’t mean keeping them – that it depends on what source they come from (fats/proteins/carbs).
A calorie is a measure of engery. The laws of physics say that if you consumer fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight, because your body needs fuel to operate.
Now, your body might try to compensate and change metabolism in response to this, so that you unwittingly burn fewer calories than you consume. And yes, the types of food you're eating can affect this. But ultimately, our bodies are not perpetual motion machines, and cannot expend more energy than they take in as fuel, over the long term.
This has been a long-standing theme in this forum (HN). I've participated myself.
Of course the arguments to physics are true. But they are largely irrelevant. Its not the truth that's going to help people.
People eat too much, not because they don't know better (and physics! will teach them), but because they have some behavioral issue that prevents them from doing the good actions repeatedly.
It always ends up here: "Just don't put the calories in your mouth. That's all you need to do." Which would be true, if food and eating were entirely volitional. But its an emotional need, a very fundamental one.
Imagine saying "Just put the gun to your head and pull the trigger. That's all you need to do." While its undeniably easy, most of us, because of emotional needs to survive and avoid pain, would find it very, very hard to accomplish. (Not saying a gun-to-the-head loses weight; just comparing an easy instruction with the accompanying difficulty in performing it).
Oh, yeah, I totally understand that it's not useful diet advice. I have a desire to lose a few pounds, but that doesn't stop me from having a beer every night as I'm making dinner, or grabbing a piece of candy a couple of times a day while at work.
It's true that bare thermodynamics is not great practical lifestyle advice, but it's also true that a lot of people really, truly, do not know the basics of what calories are and what they mean for weight.
I agree that no one should use thermodynamics as an excuse to be judgmental or dismissive toward people who are having trouble managing their weight.
But I also think that when people directly ask about calories (as the GP zoul did), it's worth being clear and unambiguous about the basic science.
Bodies are complex. Less in More Out is only true and a matter of physics if our bodies can never refuse to absorb a calorie, or ever change gears to add tasks (such as extra DNA-repair) in times of surplus rather than always resort to mere storage. It's very unlikely that that's true. Merely altering the speed of motility through the GI tract (degree of peristalsis) alters the action of our biota and substantially changes how many calories and nutrients are available to be absorbed, as one small example.
A human body is too complex to usefully model based on such low-level physical principles.
No one is going to track of how much mass they breathe in and out, how much mass they lose through sweat, excretion, urination, how much mass they eat and drink or how much energy they gain or lose through radiation. You would have to track all of those things to model weight loss based on laws of thermodynamics.
If you are trying to predict weight loss based on the calorie count on the back of your food boxes and based on your level of activity, the laws of thermodynamics aren't going to be very helpful. The calorie count on the box of food is only a very rough approximation of how much usable energy your body is able to extract from the food. That amount will not be consistent for every person or even for a single person in differing scenario.
"All models are wrong, but some are useful", so why be pedantic about one model being more right when it is also much less useful in the scenario and still is not a completely accurate model of reality?
The best comments I've seen about this is when you look at cumulative storage needed over time to gain weigh vs the total amount of energy consumed, the 'imbalance' is an accounting error.
Simple physics says one thing, simple engineering says another which is anything controlled that finely is under hormonally driven feedback control.
Frankly I think in the 20th century, particularly in the US and Britain there was a strong cultural imperative to assign psychological causes for conditions medical 'science' wasn't able to explain. So fat people are gluttons, erectile dysfunction is physiological, ulcers are caused by physiological stress. Heart disease is caused by a 'type A personality'.
There is some basis of merit to your line of questioning. The current caloric measurements -- 9 for a gram of fat, 4 for a gram of carbohydrates or protein -- is based on oxidation measurement. That is, how many calories are released when the food is literally burned. Then some adjustments are made to estimate the inefficiencies. For instance, dietary fiber is a carbohydrate, but it's considered to provide less energy because it's not easily digestible.
However, barring inaccuracies in these numbers, once a calorie has been consumed into your body, generally the only way to get rid of it is using it. Until such a time, it will be stored as sugar or fat.
In my (totally amateur) perception, there are three different ways to be "hungry". First is hungry for calories (blood sugar may be involved here). Second is hungry for nutrients (cravings may be at least somewhat caused by this). And third is hungry for volume - your stomach physically is empty.
Eating vegetables and whole foods helps with the second and third, and somewhat with the first. By not eating highly processed foods, your blood sugar doesn't spike and then crash. (I think of it as the difference between using coal and jet fuel to make a fire.)
You’re not counting total calories. You’re limiting calorie density. Counting calories ignores satiety. Watching calorie density allows you to be full while limiting the calories you eat.
I close to eliminated sugar, and reduced carbs, and completely eliminated highly processed foods. Over the course of 14 months I lost about 23lbs. I also cut meat consumption and alcohol, but wasn't by any stretch vegetarian or tea total. That's it. Apart from that I ate anything in any quantity I wanted.
I found the combination of things I cut back on reduced cravings and overeating. I cooked a lot more, especially bean soups to take to work for lunch. That has other benefits since I work in the land of $11 sandwiches. I tracked my weight every few days with a fitness app, which, for me, helped prevent backsliding because seeing that trend line go in the wrong direction is very irritating.
I don't have experimental evidence but anecdata indicates cutting sugar and alcohol are are the low-hanging fruit (cut way back on fruit juice, too).
Yes! I forgot to mention I drink hardly any milk anymore. I keep a quart in the fridge for making pancakes. I take my coffee black or with unsweetened almond/coconut milk.
I still put sour cream on roasted potatoes, though.
Calorie restriction becomes much easier when you're substituting calorie dense foods with more calorically sparse ones. It's hard to continually fight the hunger caused by just eating less over time.
The epiphany I had with this was that when you want to substitute "calorie dense foods with more calorically sparse ones" AND also get in enough nutrients, that you are basically shifting towards a WFPB diet (the type of food mankind has been eating mostly, for most of its existence)
"Whole Food, Plant Based", for those who had to look it up like me.
I'm more of a "eat food, not too much, mostly plants" kind of guy, I'm not willing to give up meat, eggs and dairy. Which people have also been eating since forever.
But I agree that a lot of people are way over-complicating nutrition.
Right; but it’s calorie restriction through food choice rather than limiting portion size which makes it feel like less of a sacrifice. You just have to change your filter of “things I like to eat” to include less calorie-dense foods, rather than “I like this thing I’m eating but I should stop halfway just to be good”
It doesn't even matter howe calorie dense the food is as long as you severely limit carbs. A slice of pizza is about 107g and has about 285 calories. A stick of butter is about 133g and has 810 calories. See if you can eat as many sticks of butter as you can slices of pizza.
High fat / low carb foods are very hard to eat in large quantities, unless you pair them with sources of carbs (put the butter on bread, add BBQ sauce to fatty meat, etc). It's not just the caloric density, it's how much of it you can eat before you feel full.
Humans aren't robots. If humans had infinite willpower and could simply do whatever they decided to do then the world would be a much different place. It's easy to get rich if you have infinite willpower. Easy to get in shape. Easy to climb mountains, run ultra marathons, cure cancer, swim the English channel, sail around the world, and so on. With enough willpower.
But that's not how humans work. If you have to choose between two diets with equal caloric intake but one of them is easier to stick to, then that one will be in practice a much more effective form of weight loss. You see a lot of people go on diets in January, you see a lot of people in the gyms in January, all those new years resolutions. And a lot of those folks seem to be very serious about it, they spend a lot of time in the gym, they put in a lot of effort. But this is one of those tortoise/hare situations. A modest diet/exercise regime that you can stick to for the rest of your life is far more valuable than one which is more effective on paper but won't be adhered to in practice.
Additionally, the thermodynamic argument (calories in vs calories out) is only mostly true in broad strokes, as a trend. Sure, if you eat few enough calories and do enough exercise you'll lose weight, and if you eat too many calories and do too little exercise then you'll gain weight. But within the boundaries there is a lot of complexity. There are regions where what you eat, the composition of your diet, and the kind of exercise you do will tip the balance one way or the other in a region of maybe a few hundred calories or so a day, and that too can make a big difference in how easy it is to maintain a diet or exercise regime and how effective it is.
>the thermodynamic argument (calories in vs calories out) is only mostly true in broad strokes, as a trend.
It's not "mostly true". It's literally the only concrete truth in this whole field. If you consume X calories more than you burn you are _guaranteed_ to gain Y weight.
I'm sorry to hear that a network malfunction prevented you from reading the remainder of my post. To reiterate, it's true only in broad strokes, human metabolism is not precisely linear, there is a non-trivial amount of "slop" in the balance. You can "consume more calories than you burn" and yet still lose weight, and you can consume fewer calories than that while "burning more calories" and end up gaining weight. If you consume many more calories or many fewer calories then you will inevitably gain or lose weight. But to maintain a healthy weight, or to maintain consistent weight loss if you are over weight, the details of what you eat are just as important as the calorie counts.
Taken together, there is very strong evidence that diets which concentrate on what you eat versus those that concentrate on calorie counting are vastly more effective.
> It's literally the only concrete truth in this whole field
It's true only in the useless tautological sense, where your definition of "consume" and "burn" are so convoluted as to be useless.
Wood pulp is carbohydrates, which you can confirm in a bomb caloriemeter releases ~4kcal/g when burnt. But when people consume it, they derive ~0kcal/g. If you think people don't consume wood pulp, you might want to look at [0] and at the wikipedia entry for microcrystalline cellulose. Gasoline is even denser at ~12kcal/g, but still provides only ~0kcal/g.
There are much subtler examples, where at atwater factors have been shown to be ~30% different in in different measurements (between population and even for the same individual in different times). Which means that the difference between "what you consume" and "the energy you derive" is actually a random variable, with very significant variance.
And that's just the food intake; just sitting in a cold room requires much more energy than sitting in a warm room; And consuming a liter of ice cold water actually costs you ~36 kcal after your body temperature renormalizes.
>Maybe I missed it in the article but this just seems like calorie restriction to me. Its much harder to eat a large amount of calories if its just meat and vegetables.
When people talk about a calorie-restriction diet, what they mean is you count the calories in every food, and then keep caloric intake below a certain level by intentionally eating less than your appetite desires.
In contrast, in this diet, people focused on eating the right foods, and ate as much as they wanted, and the reduction of calories was a consequence.
I would also say that any competent reporting on a topic like this would include whether the trial and data analysis methods were pre-registered and if there were other pre-registered trials on this or similar topics and what their results were.
The pervasive problems with study design and publication incentives have been known about for a while, it's irresponsible to pretend that each new study is the newest version of the truth.
I can't access the full text of the study, but it would be interesting to find out how many calories the participants reduced in their diet by making the changes outlined. I would imagine most overweight individuals make more bad dietary choices and so simply cutting out added sugars etc reduces their calorie intake significant enough to produce weight loss.
Its sort of misleading, even though not counting calories the participants were still likely reducing them...
Sure! Doing calorie math doesn't have anything to do with your weight. However, actually reducing calories still seems to be the way to lose weight:
Dr. Gardner said it is not that calories don’t matter. After all, both groups ultimately ended up consuming fewer calories on average by the end of the study, even though they weren’t conscious of it. The point is that they did this by focusing on nutritious whole foods that satisfied their hunger.
I think it comes from the desire to be scientific about the weight loss. To count the ins and outs and do the balance sheet at the end of the day. This was also pushed by companies like Weight Watchers that could sell products specifically coded with the nutritional information at a nice markup.
For the most part people know how to lose weight, it's not difficult. The difficult part is keeping to a diet that is not fun and at times inconvenient for the rest of your life.
I think so, at least in the US in the 90's when I grew up, thanks to things like the food pyramid containing grains as the base. Companies that had sugary/carb heavy products pushed the idea that fats were what caused weight gain. So everything you bought would be "low-fat" or "reduced-fat" but still contain a ton of sugar and the same calorie count.
The second paragraph contradicts itself. Here's the first two paragraphs:
> Anyone who has ever been on a diet knows that the standard prescription for weight loss is to reduce the amount of calories you consume.
> But a new study, published Tuesday in JAMA, may turn that advice on its head. It found that people who cut back on added sugar, refined grains and highly processed foods while concentrating on eating plenty of vegetables and whole foods — without worrying about counting calories or limiting portion sizes — lost significant amounts of weight over the course of a year.
People who switch to plenty of vegetables and whole foods may not be counting calories, but they're still consuming far fewer calories. Have you ever looked at how few calories are in vegetables? Most of the calories in any vegetable dish you consume are probably coming from added oil. And eating "whole foods" also means avoiding the heavily-processed caloric foods you would be eating otherwise.
Weight loss comes from calorie reduction. Exercise is really important too of course, in particular to maintaining your weight post-loss, but all you really need to lose weight is to reduce your calorie intake. I can personally attest to that, having lost 75lbs in 4 months now using nothing more than calorie restriction¹, and the program I'm doing this through has a very high success rate (which is to say, as long as you actually stick to the program, you're guaranteed to lose a significant amount of weight).
The overall point of the article is still fine, which is that you really don't need to calorie-count in order to lose weight, and focusing on that can make people unhappy. In general it's more effective to simply tailor your diet so the foods you're eating are less caloric (and probably healthier in other ways too). But I am disappointed that the article led with the completely incorrect implication that weight loss does not come from reducing the calories you consume.
¹It's a medically-managed weight loss program through Kaiser Permanente, 960 calories per day (using meal replacements) for 16 weeks with regular bloodwork and doctor visits, then 1200 calories per day (with partial meal replacements) for another 16 weeks (assuming you don't hit your weight goal). I'm currently in the 1200 calorie portion.
I disagree with your characterization of the quoted text. It says the “standard prescription” is to reduce calories, and that the new study may change that. A prescription is an instruction from your doctor. That text is saying that doctors may start telling you to eat more vegetables and whole foods rather than cutting back on calories. I do not believe it is implying that weight loss is disconnected from calories consumed. From later in the article:
Dr. Gardner said it is not that calories don’t matter. After all, both groups ultimately ended up consuming fewer calories on average by the end of the study, even though they weren’t conscious of it. The point is that they did this by focusing on nutritious whole foods that satisfied their hunger.
Right, the rest of the article is ok. My quibble is with the implication in the first two paragraphs. It says the standard prescription is to reduce the amount of calories, and then says the new study "turn(s) that advice on its head", implying that calorie reduction isn't the solution after all. But it still is! It's just a question of how you go about doing it. There's nothing about "reduce the calories you consume" that means you must exercise strict portion control and calorie-count and go to bed hungry. It just means reduce your calorie intake. And a great way to do that is to change the types of food you're eating.
The important takeaway from the study here is that by adjusting your diet, you can reduce your calorie intake without feeling like you're eating less, which is a lot more sustainable than calorie-counting (and leaves you a lot happier too). But the key point here is still reducing your calorie intake. If you're adjusting your diet, you need to pick a diet that does in fact result in fewer calories. If you switch to mostly vegetables, but liberally douse your veggies with lots of oil and butter, you're not actually reducing your calories.
The article has to be special to get readership. If people knew it was the same old, same old said in a different way, nobody would care.
The problem is that CICO (Calories-In/Calories-Out) is the only possible way to lose (or gain) weight. Literally every valid, non-pseudoscientific diet is going to be another way to get to reduced caloric input in a sustainable fashion, because sustaining a caloric deficit is genuinely difficult.
Counting calories doesn't work for people who find it unsustainable (yes, this is somewhat of a tautology). But if you're able to treat it as a lifestyle change, ideally adding exercise on top, or if you're able to permanently correct your portion instincts, then counting calories is a fantastic tool. I've used it to lose 40 pounds over the past nine months or so. That said, of course counting calories isn't the only way to lose weight. Whatever you can figure out that results in you burning more energy than you consume will be effective, as long as you pick something psychologically sustainable.
I agree. It's extraordinarily useful in the process of changing your life. I used it to to drop about 30 pounds over a year. It becomes entirely unnecessary once you alter your lifestyle and build new habits. The counting acts as an enforcer to assist in behavioral change and help you track and identify all bad dietary habits.
The anti-calorie counting argument ignores that calorie counting is strictly an assistant, a tool, not a primary dietary method. Calorie counting should be a mandatory requirement of all significant dietary & lifestyle changes as it pertains to seeking to lose weight. It's the sole means available to most people to identify with any precision what their resting calorie burn rate is: how many calories can you consume before you begin to gain weight.
>Dr. Gardner said it is not that calories don’t matter. After all, both groups ultimately ended up consuming fewer calories on average by the end of the study, even though they weren’t conscious of it. The point is that they did this by focusing on nutritious whole foods that satisfied their hunger.
Of course calories matter. The weight loss problem is twofold:
1. Calories. Counting calories is solution to this. You can lose weight by eating junk food if you count calories.
2. Feeling hungry and self discipline problems. Quality and composition of the food and different ways of consuming food affects how easy it is to consume less calories in the long term.
At the end of the road calorie count doesn't matter as much as the precedence placed, quality of calories does. A calorie in a sugar packet isn't remotely the same value as a calorie of broccoli. The focus on count in this conversation is missing the point. And until someone goes down the path of trying a whole foods based shift in their diet long term I fully believe that is lost on people, unfortunately.
It isn't in the context of nutrition. That was my point which I failed to convey.
The failure in the discussion is that calorie count matters in the grand scheme. But if the focus was nutritional value per calorie that measurement falls apart much more quickly.
I'm having a hard time interpreting your comment. It sounds like you're trying to argue against Dr. Gardner even though you agree with him. He's specifically not disputing the fact that calories matter.
Don't cut out dessert entirely. Here's three suggestions:
1. Eat half the portion you would have otherwise. Just eat smaller bites and savor it. You'll still get the same enjoyment. If you're eating out, split your dessert with someone else (because I know it's hard to leave food on the plate).
2. Find desserts that are less caloric. If the dessert has fewer calories, you can eat the same amount that you used to and you'll still be doing better.
3. Turn it into a treat rather than an every day occurrence. Maybe eat it every other day instead of every day. Maybe only eat it if you cook a healthy meal (and skip it when you go eat that burger from In-n-out).
Going cold turkey is really hard, and not at all required, unless you have impulse control problems (e.g. many people have "trigger" foods, which they should stay away from entirely if they can).
This sounds obvious: but don't keep those foods in the house. It's stupidly easy to go off the diet if those chips are just there and you're hungry because you only ate half a dinner. If they aren't there you won't be tempted.
Of course this can involve getting everybody in your house on your diet. That's not and easy thing to do.
You absolutely should have dessert because compliance with a diet is the true #1 indicator of weight loss. If you can't stick to a diet, you will rebound. To achieve this, look up If It Fits Your Macros.
Essentially, you can have dessert, but it eats into your daily caloric budget. That's why you see people go for meats and veggies, because they give you the best nutrient bang-for-the-buck, allowing you to eat the most volume of food for the least amount of calories.
I try to keep sugar out of my diet. I also love desert and sweet foods.
My rule is that a desert that's home made - by me, my wife or whoever is allowed. It seems to work. If I really want to eat something sweet then I have to cook it first. It's the instant availability of sugary food from shops that get you.
Secondly - it gets much easier with time. Whether it's habit or a change in your gut biome or both: the sugary cravings do get less.
Thirdly - try and get enough sleep. I think most people crave sugar when they are tired. I find this one the hardest at the moment. Sometimes life can be like that.
In the short-term I found that eating a piece of fruit whenever I craved sweets was a good replacement. Over time the fruit started to taste sweeter and sweeter (in a good way), and junk foods started to taste overly sweet. You can taper down the fruit later if you think you're eating too much of it. I think you also need to minimize non-caloric sweeteners for this to work.
Long-term, I took a food I was already interested in eating daily and made the minimal tweaks necessary for me to think of it as dessert. In my case it was oatmeal: adding 0.5T/11g of blackstrap molasses and 0.5T/6g of brown sugar to 0.5c/40g oatmeal (dry weight) makes a complex, subtly-sweet treat. It's ~200 calories total (~50 from molasses & sugar).
This might not be practical advice for you, but it is worth pointing out: there are two sides to the calorie equation. Increasing calories burned is just as good for weight management as reducing calories consumed (and might provide other health benefits).
So while looking at lifestyle changes, don't forget the activity side. Adding a few long walks, or a new hobby that gets you moving more, might help as much as skipping some dessert.
Like I said--might not be practical for you, but worth remembering.
We could summarize this better as eating higher quality foods with lower calorie densities and better satiating effects will lead to a reduction in calories consumed. This could be easier on the human psyche than just calorie counting.
After all, you can still end up feeling eternally hungry if 100% of your diet was high fructose corn syrup liquids.
Unfortunately this article and study will likely be misconstrued as calories not mattering to weight loss. This is a common misconception or delusion.
I feel like the debate here is mostly between quantifiable nutritional stuff (like CICO), and unquantifiable bits of human psychology like "satiation." The unquantifiable stuff certainly affects the final outcome, but it's often presented with the same certainty and blanket application as biology.
I don't think its quite quantifiable. The snack food industry knows this too. They spend lots of money figuring out how to make foods addicting. The human psychology to eat a calorie deficit and not feel constantly hungry is sure as studiable as junk food addiction.
Sure it isn't quite as simple as how much energy burning food items gives off, but it shouldn't be discounted.
The author of this piece really should know and understand the basic scientific concepts that are involved here. I suspect he may just be doing a dumb-it-down thing that goes a bit too far .
Could you please not post snarky dismissals to HN, especially of other people's work? It breaks a number of the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Specifically, this guideline:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
Well, I would argue that eating less calories definitely help. But sugar doesn't stop the hunger, and you need a certain amount of vitamin, protein, and fibers as well. My mom calls food with just sugar 'empty calories', a term that covers the load pretty well, I think.
I find that fat, proteins, and carbs help me to feel full. I can eat four donuts and still feel like I barely ate something. But one egg and I'm good to go for another hour.
This article is infuriating! Of COURSE the people who ate whole, unprocessed foods lost more weight. Whole foods are more satiating and more filling while being less calorie dense.
Why does that make it infuriating? Calorie counting is still considered the true way to lose weight by most people, despite the fact that it works for almost nobody. This article will convince a few more people that a healthy diet is more important than explicitly counting calories.
It also found an interesting result - both low fat and low carb diets seem to work, regardless of your insulin response.
For those who believe that it's a simple as "move more, eat less", consider that the Biggest Loser contestants weren't able to keep their weight off long-term. This approach also damaged their metabolisms-- their resting metabolic rates were 400-600 calories lower than when they started their program, even 6 years after the fact.
Regardless of whatever metabolic damage may have been caused, the biggest loser is a bad approach to weight loss, as well as a bad case for trying to see if a weight loss approach works. It's like an addict taking a 3 month detox and then throwing them right back into a pile of needles. They are divorced from every trigger they have in their everyday lives and forced to exercise and restrict, and when they get out, there's the cash prize to try and keep their weight loss until the final episode. After that these people don't have any healthy, sustainable habits, just insane routines and rules. Given how warped their initial approach to food and diet was before the show, it's no wonder they revert to form given enough time.
I think the metabolism damage is the greater danger here. These are people who had some of the most intensive training available to learn how to eat healthy and exercise.
And yet having your resting metabolism driven downwards 400-600 calories virtually guarantees that you will yo-yo. Every calorie above your low limit will erode any gains you've made.
Having your metabolism drop should mean that the individual can adjust their eating / activity levels to compensate, but only if they are paying attention and NOT falling back into old habits. I'll bet they aren't. The article says that Sean Algaeir put back on all the weight he lost (~170 lbs). That's not yo-yo weight. That's return to normal behavior weight.
"Mr. Cahill knew he could not maintain his finale weight of 191 pounds. He was so mentally and physically exhausted he barely moved for two weeks after his publicity tour ended. But he had started a new career giving motivational speeches as the biggest loser ever, and for the next four years, he managed to keep his weight below 255 pounds by exercising two to three hours a day. But two years ago, he went back to his job as a surveyor, and the pounds started coming back." <- he went back to old habits and gained the weight back.
Like the quote from Dina Mercado says - "The cravings are there.” I'll bet after a time they gave up and largely went back to your old habits.
Exercising for 3 hours each day isn't a sustainable habit for anyone except perhaps Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.
Mr. Cahill gained close to 60 lbs over a four year period. At that rate, it sounds like he was on his way to regaining the weight as soon as the program was over, rather than just when he returned to his surveyor job. When your resting metabolism is 400-600 calories too low, the fate of your weight loss goals is pretty much sealed.
I overwhelmingly disagree. Counting calories is an important key starting ingredient to weight loss.
What's the point where your resting metabolism burns enough calories so that you're losing weight instead of gaining or maintaining weight? There's no way to easily figure that out without calorie counting. Further, that changes as you age, so doing rare calorie counts is extremely valuable anyway.
My resting burn rate is substantially different from my brother's resting burn rate. Growing up I could live off of pizza and not gain a single pound. I was 6'2" and 155 pounds at 26 years old, living off of the worst carb-heavy diet you can imagine with zero exercise. It simply didn't matter to my weight, my metablism was very high. My brother on the other hand, will carry dozens of pounds more at a similar diet & calorie intake.
As I've gotten older, my metabolism has changed. At an identical diet to ten years ago, I will now carry 20 to 25 more pounds. I have to be more careful with what I eat now. How do you know where that calorie metabolism baseline is if you don't occasionally count? And this is just a routine life example, rather than a serious weight loss context (in which case calorie counting is radically more useful).
After you establish your calorie baseline, then make adjustments to your routine / diet / lifestyle, then you can certainly get rid of the counting. The calorie counting is extremely useful in helping to inform and establish a new lifestyle.
Step one is to figure out how many calories you're really taking in on a daily and weekly basis. In my opinion, most people with serious weight problems will significantly underestimate their calorie intake and will be surprised at how high it is.
Calorie counting also helps to rapidly identify the primary problems in your diet over time. For most people, they don't have 37 problems in their diet, they have only a few (eg cutting out all soda and making pasta/pizza a rare consumption). And if those few items are removed and replaced with superior options, that will take care of 3/4 of the problem. While some may say that the problem areas should be obvious, one of the reasons that people become so overweight in the first place is that it isn't obvious to them, because their lives become routines filled with blank spaces around what they're stuffing into their mouths in a hurry. They literally lose track of lots of the bad things they've consumed in a given week - the calorie counting acts as a powerful mental enforcer, you have to write all of that shit down.
We would be foolish to think that all calories are equal. The body systems are complex... chemistry is complex.
What the body does with one input versus a different input is much more important than the quantity (caloric) of each input. If you could manage to consume 2,000 kcal of lettuce in a day, you will almost certainly gain less weight (or lose more weight) than if you consumed only 1,500 kcal of modern processed American bread.
The problem we face in trying to eat better is that virtually everything you can buy is processed. When you go into a typical American grocery store, about 25% of the outer aisles are unprocessed foods - raw meat, raw vegetables and fruits, nuts, etc. _Everything_ in the inner aisles is processed. Even most of the outer aisle is processed - cheeses, sandwich meats, "fruit juices", etc.
Fiber is a key component to health (and weight loss for those who do not get enough). Raw fruits and vegetables are typically very high in fiber. Processed foods are usually not. Fruits and vegetables are also high in water content. Water and fiber help us feel fuller. It's a bit of an illusion, or rather it's quite temporary because it goes out of our systems more quickly than carbs. Fiber also aids in our gut and colon bacteria balance, and research is beginning to recognize the many roles that bacteria play in our health (including mental!)
The list of reasons for choosing unprocessed foods over processed foods is very long. About the only things really negative about unprocessed foods are their relative higher price and their lower convenience. But if you value quality, then the price argument goes away. Likewise, there are social and emotional benefits to food preparation and meal sharing. So "less convenient" really is just another way of saying "better priorities".
I won't tell you that you're wrong. I can't prove what I'm about to suggest. But I want to suggest it as a possibility as to why you shouldn't say what you just said so confidently.
Imagine if certain foods caused the body or brain, through a very complicated process, in the long term, to hold on to calories and store fat. This would end up making people feel very low energy and have strong cravings to eat more.
And the counter to this would be that if you ate the correct foods, your body or brain's long term energy balance will function properly and not hold on to calories, feel energetic, burn excess fat, and not feel very hungry.
From the outside point of view, you could just look at the calories in and out and say that it's obviously the most important factor of weight loss. You could just blame the person for eating too much and moving too little. But if what I described is actually happening, then that wouldn't be good advice because that's not the root cause of the problem.
What I suggested is very possible and has not been ruled out by science.
There are many hypotheticals that have not been ruled out by science... The existence of a flying spaghetti monster that created the universe after drinking heavily, for example...
There are many things that complicate simple calorie counting, and things one can take advantage of. Liquid calories don't make you feel full in the same way solid calories do, high fiber foods make you feel more full, drinking lots of water can keep you feeling full without eating many calories...
But, if you want to lose weight, running a caloric deficit is required...
I really don't feel like you understood what I was saying. I'm wasn't coming up with anything crazy. I presented a broad category of how long term weight management might be affected by food types. There are many different acceptable theories that are accepted any many mainstream scientists:. Insulin causing fat storage, or sugar blocking the brain's ability to see leptin.
But the specifics don't matter. If you're willing to accept that such a model is possible, then that means that recommending a calorie deficit, even though it's required for weight loss, might be really bad advice. If you tell someone to eat less food, and they keep eating the types of food that cause their bodies to store fat, you might be setting them up for failure.
>If you could manage to consume 2,000 kcal of lettuce in a day, you will almost certainly gain less weight (or lose more weight) than if you consumed only 1,500 kcal of modern processed American bread.
No you wouldn't. That's not how energy works.
If you take two people with identical amounts of energy expenditure, then feed one 2000 kcal of lettuce and the other 2000 kcal of wonderbread, they would gain/lose weight at an identical pace. Energy is energy and all the hand waving in the world can't change that.
Of course both would eventually die of malnutrition and they could certainly have different levels of satiation... but if we're just talking about "weight loss", like the article says, a calorie is a calorie, period.
Nope. Your body will do a lot of different things with different inputs.
You're only looking at half of the equation - the input. Look also at the output. If you're eating a lot of fiber and water, such as with lettuce, your "output" will be higher (bathroom).
With white bread, more of what goes in will stay in.
That's an oversimplification, but it's just one example that calories are not all the same.
And for a more interesting example, the studies of fasting have demonstrated that caloric reduction (not complete fasting) will result in more muscle loss as your body is eating its own muscle to operate. But with a few days of total fasting, no calories, you will burn fat to survive. People on a restricted calorie test will lose more weight than people consuming zero calories - at least for a few days.
>We would be foolish to think that all calories are equal.
Given that the calorie is just a unit of energy, I believe they are considered equal. What you imply is analogous to measuring a length of 5 metres and then questioning if each of the metre segments are 'equal'. They must be equal, or else the segments could no longer be considered metres.
It may be more correct to say that the body does not utilise all molecules that it can derive energy from in the same way.
It looks increasingly like "counting calories" won't work as a weight loss strategy until I can have an AI automatically estimate my calorie input by watching everything that I buy, cook, and eat, and compare that against its estimate of caloric expenditure via metabolism and physical activity.
And even then, it would be easier to have a simpler AI that can do little more than recognize an item of junk food and shock the appetite out of me if it detects my hand reaching for it.
Not everyone can do bomb calorimetry at home. It's rare enough that someone can measure food portions to the nearest 10 grams. I think the entire basis of the Weight Watchers "points" system is that the calorie number is just too much math for most people. And then, psychologically, it isn't a matter of "things I can eat versus things I can't eat" but "things I don't have to worry about eating versus things I have to track in a stupid notebook". That bypasses the stubborn counterreaction where forbidding a food only makes the dieter want it more. You can still have it, if you really want it, but you have to do math and accounting, so it had better be worth the hassle.
This study mildly supports my buffet theory (actually a hypothesis). My theory is that you can avoid gaining excess weight at any buffet by following just one rule: you can eat anything you want, as long as every plate you bring back to the table is at least 50% filled with undressed/unsauced salad-bar vegetables, and you eat them first. It's hard to overeat when you're eating a half-plate of raw broccoli between each half-plate of other stuff. If you then replace the buffet with a grocery store, you have a lifestyle strategy: eat anything you want, as long as you have a proportional mass of salad first.
Isn't it already well understood by now that energy storage is controlled by hormones and _what_ we eat directly influences the presence and quantity of those hormones circulating through our bodies?
As long as insulin levels are kept in check, energy storage is as well. Avoiding sweets and simple carbs while having plenty of fiber in your diet is an effective means of achieving that. It's not necessarily calorie restricted, calories are somewhat orthogonal.
There's a story Gary Taubes tells about Oskar Minkowski's [1] discovery of the Pancreas' role in insulin production. I found it quite illuminating when trying to better understand nutrition and will paraphrase it here. The guy was experimenting with dogs and removed the pancreas from some dogs, buttoning them back up and letting them continue to live normally. He observed they lived normal lives as if nothing changed, but no matter how much food they ate - they kept losing weight. They would eventually die from the weight loss. He had noticed that flies were attracted to the urine of the pancreas-free dogs, and being a scientist, he tasted the urine and observed it was exceptionally sweet. Not having insulin in the blood, this stuff just came out in the urine rather than being stored in the fat, because fat cells need to be instructed to steal excess energy and store it, otherwise it just passes through.
Hence if there are foods we can eat which cause the pancreas to behave anomalously for extended periods, our energy storage will follow suit.
There's another story Taubes tells, I think these were from Good Calorie, Bad Calorie but I've read so many things on the topic it's a blur. It's about a woman who had a small tumor removed from her brain, the tumor was next to I believe it was the Pituitary gland. After the succcessful removal, she began gaining weight uncontrollably. Her diet/lifestyle was unchanged from before the surgery, and no matter what they did to her diet to try fix this, she gained more weight, eventually becoming obese. It turned out a part of the brain affected by the surgery controlled the hormones related to energy storage. This woman's body was internally starving itself by erroneously instructing the fat to continuously store energy. If memory serves this story had a good ending though, they discovered a medication to get the hormone production back to normal levels and her weight normalized.
These two anecdotes are important. Any engineering-minded person who has done troubleshooting of comple systems, root-causing of difficult problems, understands the tremendous value in observing how systems fail.
The stories demonstrate a total decoupling of Caloric intake/physical activity to energy storage. Stop fixating on calories, we need to eat foods that keep the energy system functioning properly in the first place.
I don't think it's surprising that we find the more a diet is composed of intact, naturally-occurring foods, having little processing/preparation (including cooking), the more health tends to generally improve. Unless you're steeped in religious beliefs to the contrary, you probably understand and accept humans evolved over a long period of time. Our bodies are still suited to the foods we evolved around, so when we eat things like refined carbohydrates, stuff that requires machinations and technology to create, we're exposing the body to essentially unexpected inputs. So we should at least expect bad results to be more likely when consuming such things.
This title is probably going to pull the pseudoscience out of the woodwork...
The title can easily be misread... It means that the act of counting calories is not key to weight loss - i.e. calories can also be reduced by a more tangible diet (like a low-fat or a low-carbohydrate diet) without explicitly counting calories... It does not say that caloric restriction isn't the most important part of a weight loss diet, it still is...
Considering that the paper itself isn't even meant to address the effectiveness of "counting calories" vs. "not counting calories", this title is extremely clickbait-y...
Yeah, I really feel like the spirit of the article is summed up by the final paragraph
“I think one place we go wrong is telling people to figure out how many calories they eat and then telling them to cut back on 500 calories, which makes them miserable,” he said. “We really need to focus on that foundational diet, which is more vegetables, more whole foods, less added sugar and less refined grains.”
The long term solution is really what he's talking about, right? The long term solution to weight struggles is really transforming your eating habits and gravitating towards more nutritious foods.
I think this is a really clickbaity title - it implies that a caloric deficit via keeping track of what you eat isn't a path to weight loss, despite the article itself stating that that is not the case.
I disagree with the article title - counting calories _is_ the key to weight loss. Aside from gut flora and the random virus that increases your body's propensity for storing fat - your body's only source of fuel is food. Calories are a simplistic, yet generally close enough, approximation of a normalized quantifier for food. Drop the calories and you drop the fat.
The title should be "Counting calories is not the key to sustaining motivation for weight loss".
My source, albeit biased, is my own experiences losing weight. I started counting calories 10 years ago and lost ~120 lbs. Over the last 10 years I've put on ~40 lb bringing my 6'4 frame to 200 lbs while going to the gym and counting calories.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 228 ms ] threadMaybe I missed it in the article but this just seems like calorie restriction to me. Its much harder to eat a large amount of calories if its just meat and vegetables.
For me sodas sweetness lended well to making super salty foods taste better, by cutting out the sugar in the sodas I didn't have the same desire to eat salty fast food items.
This observation is what led to me cutting soda out of my diet entirely almost a year ago (barring the rare treat).
And don't be fooled by the promise of diet soda. Lots of studies recently have shown that drinking diet soda doesn't help with weight loss either. Apparently the artificial sweeteners do something to your body by tricking it into thinking it's getting sugar; I'm not really familiar with the details, but studies showed that people who swapped soda for diet soda didn't lose weight, but people who swapped soda for e.g. water did. This advice is what led to me cutting diet soda out of my diet 6 months ago (which I had switched to after cutting out regular soda), so now I drink almost exclusively water.
If you're interested in cutting out soda as well, and don't think you can just switch to water, I have a couple of suggestions:
1. Start with those crystal geyser flavored sparkling waters you can get at Costco. I drank those for a while, because the hint of flavor tricked my mouth into thinking I wasn't just drinking water. I eventually stopped though, in favor of
2. Get a SodaStream and just make your own sparkling water. You can add flavor packets to this if you want, but I never have. Once you get used to it, unflavored sparkling water is pretty great. The downside here is the refill tanks for the SodaStream aren't cheap, but if you're concerned about that, there are homebrew carbonation setups as well (they just take up a lot more space; SodaStream is pretty compact).
Specifically what happens is that your brain is supposed to taste sugar, and learn to shut off your appetite when it has received enough. But artificial sweeteners teach your brain to ignore that signal because you get what tastes like sugar without getting sugar. So whatever sugary things you eat, you will eat more than you otherwise would without feeling satiated.
There is no scientific merit to this frequent claim. [1]
In fact, a comparative study on dieters using diet soda versus water shown that the water group lost less mass, hypothetically because they were feeling hungrier and less satisfied with their diet, thus more likely to succumb to sugary foods.
[1] Rogers, Peter J. "The role of low-calorie sweeteners in the prevention and management of overweight and obesity: evidence v. conjecture," Proceedings of the Nutrition Society
Thanks for the correction. I'll try not to repeat this one blindly in the future.
It sounds a little like gym-science.
I drink soda, mostly diet, love Ice Cream and sweets and usually have a cheat day on the weekend and probably overeat once or twice during the week.
I also enjoy exercising and workout about 5-7 hours a week. There is a balance. It's no different than earning more and spending more.
More recently I cut out diet soda entirely in favor of just water, but I've actually ended up gaining weight, mostly because in retrospect it seems like I've actually replaced a lot of the diet soda with beer (or at least there was a strong inverse correlation between my beer and diet soda consumption). So now I'm working on reducing my beer intake and filling in with the occasional diet soda when I really need some tasty carbonated beverage.
Personally I've never liked flavored sparkling water. When I'm thirsty I prefer plain old water (as long as it's properly filtered), and occasionally I'll drink some unflavored sparkling water. But there's something refreshing about a cold beer or a diet dr pepper that flavored sparkling water just doesn't provide, and it seems that between those two the beer is a lot worse weight wise.
Exception: freshly baked baguette or ciabatta.
Dr. Gardner said it is not that calories don’t matter. After all, both groups ultimately ended up consuming fewer calories on average by the end of the study, even though they weren’t conscious of it. The point is that they did this by focusing on nutritious whole foods that satisfied their hunger.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/07/24/3549931.ht...
The danger with this approach is that the average Joe hears the message as "weight is not related to how much you eat (energy/quantity), but what you eat (quality)". That message is a public health danger, yet is becoming the prevailing sentiment for health magazines, supplement marketing, popular lifestyle shows etc.
Appetite and satiation are far more complex than just "eat until your full and then stop", for instance amensiac patients have been observed to eat waaay more than they should have just because they did remember eating (Rozin et al. (1998)), even they should have by all rights been physically full. There's whole layers of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral patterns with excess food consumption.
Personally, I have been able to effectively lose and keep off weight while still enjoying all manner of unnatural foods (Ice cream, McDonald's and candy, oh my).
Food choices became about avoiding "spending" my calories on "bad deals", avoiding foods which didn't promise enjoyment commensurate to their cost.
It's a clear public safety danger to imply the above are healthier than their processed counterparts, and my main beef is with the sensationalist title, that aims right at the "calories are a myth" bandwagon. The study itself is good, if it works, it works.
Freezing and preservatives don't significantly alter nutritional value, and there exist low calorie frozen meals specifically formulated for dieters. Highly processed, but much healthier than some very natural wholesome steaks.
This page:
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...
has this sentence:
> There are many natural things that are better than unnatural, but they must be evaluated based on other criteria besides the “naturalness”.
which sums up the whole thing nicely.
This is like saying the solution to addiction is to just stop doing drugs, but people are too incompetent and need magical solutions like rehab and maintenance drugs.
So all the article is really saying is don't bother with the math, just eat mostly vegetables and you'll lose weight.
Eating vegetables and whole foods without worrying about counting calories or limiting portion sizes doesn't feel like effort. You don't WANT to eat more. And your body becomes happier about burning fat rather than demanding that you eat.
Counting calories explicitly is a lot of work and a lot of self control. Few people can succeed at that.
Personally I follow the former strategy using http://www.weightgrapher.com/ to keep myself honest. About 15 years ago I decided to lose 20 pounds, and kept it off for close to a decade. Then I let my weight get away from me, because life got complicated. This time around I've decided to get back to that weight again, and I know it is sustainable. I'm not aiming for fast weight loss, I've been going at a comfortable pace for 3 months and expect to be dieting another 6 months to reach my target. But I know that I'll be able to get there and stay for years without a lot of willpower. Partly luck of genetics/gut biome. Partly because I'm doing it in a mentally easy way.
Diets designed to "cut" (loose weight), yes. Some people want to gain weight, their regimens are also called diets.
But technicalities don't define words, usage and context do, and, for the vast majority of people, including people here, diet means a change in your habitual pattern of eating designed to induce weight loss. That's how it's universally understood in this context.
Being more technical does not mean being more correct.
Do they? What exactly does it mean? I had the impression that eating a lot of calories doesn’t mean keeping them – that it depends on what source they come from (fats/proteins/carbs).
Now, your body might try to compensate and change metabolism in response to this, so that you unwittingly burn fewer calories than you consume. And yes, the types of food you're eating can affect this. But ultimately, our bodies are not perpetual motion machines, and cannot expend more energy than they take in as fuel, over the long term.
Of course the arguments to physics are true. But they are largely irrelevant. Its not the truth that's going to help people.
People eat too much, not because they don't know better (and physics! will teach them), but because they have some behavioral issue that prevents them from doing the good actions repeatedly.
It always ends up here: "Just don't put the calories in your mouth. That's all you need to do." Which would be true, if food and eating were entirely volitional. But its an emotional need, a very fundamental one.
Imagine saying "Just put the gun to your head and pull the trigger. That's all you need to do." While its undeniably easy, most of us, because of emotional needs to survive and avoid pain, would find it very, very hard to accomplish. (Not saying a gun-to-the-head loses weight; just comparing an easy instruction with the accompanying difficulty in performing it).
I agree that no one should use thermodynamics as an excuse to be judgmental or dismissive toward people who are having trouble managing their weight.
But I also think that when people directly ask about calories (as the GP zoul did), it's worth being clear and unambiguous about the basic science.
No one is going to track of how much mass they breathe in and out, how much mass they lose through sweat, excretion, urination, how much mass they eat and drink or how much energy they gain or lose through radiation. You would have to track all of those things to model weight loss based on laws of thermodynamics.
If you are trying to predict weight loss based on the calorie count on the back of your food boxes and based on your level of activity, the laws of thermodynamics aren't going to be very helpful. The calorie count on the box of food is only a very rough approximation of how much usable energy your body is able to extract from the food. That amount will not be consistent for every person or even for a single person in differing scenario.
"All models are wrong, but some are useful", so why be pedantic about one model being more right when it is also much less useful in the scenario and still is not a completely accurate model of reality?
Simple physics says one thing, simple engineering says another which is anything controlled that finely is under hormonally driven feedback control.
Frankly I think in the 20th century, particularly in the US and Britain there was a strong cultural imperative to assign psychological causes for conditions medical 'science' wasn't able to explain. So fat people are gluttons, erectile dysfunction is physiological, ulcers are caused by physiological stress. Heart disease is caused by a 'type A personality'.
However, barring inaccuracies in these numbers, once a calorie has been consumed into your body, generally the only way to get rid of it is using it. Until such a time, it will be stored as sugar or fat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_energy
Eating vegetables and whole foods helps with the second and third, and somewhat with the first. By not eating highly processed foods, your blood sugar doesn't spike and then crash. (I think of it as the difference between using coal and jet fuel to make a fire.)
I found the combination of things I cut back on reduced cravings and overeating. I cooked a lot more, especially bean soups to take to work for lunch. That has other benefits since I work in the land of $11 sandwiches. I tracked my weight every few days with a fitness app, which, for me, helped prevent backsliding because seeing that trend line go in the wrong direction is very irritating.
I don't have experimental evidence but anecdata indicates cutting sugar and alcohol are are the low-hanging fruit (cut way back on fruit juice, too).
I did something very similar, then also dropped dairy and whoops some more pounds of body fat melted in the 6 months that followed.
I still put sour cream on roasted potatoes, though.
"Whole Food, Plant Based", for those who had to look it up like me.
I'm more of a "eat food, not too much, mostly plants" kind of guy, I'm not willing to give up meat, eggs and dairy. Which people have also been eating since forever.
But I agree that a lot of people are way over-complicating nutrition.
High fat / low carb foods are very hard to eat in large quantities, unless you pair them with sources of carbs (put the butter on bread, add BBQ sauce to fatty meat, etc). It's not just the caloric density, it's how much of it you can eat before you feel full.
And dieting is by definition a temporary thing to fix an issue, rather than actually changing eating patterns and content permanently.
People just generally don't want to do the hard slog (i.e. in permanently avoiding sugar and carbs), they want the short term 'fix,' hence 'dieting.'
That a WFPB diet works better than calorie counting is old news (good to have yet another study confirming it).
http://www.wholefoodplantbasedrd.com/2014/04/with-wfpb-there...
https://nutritionfacts.org/2016/07/14/caloric-restriction-vs...
But that's not how humans work. If you have to choose between two diets with equal caloric intake but one of them is easier to stick to, then that one will be in practice a much more effective form of weight loss. You see a lot of people go on diets in January, you see a lot of people in the gyms in January, all those new years resolutions. And a lot of those folks seem to be very serious about it, they spend a lot of time in the gym, they put in a lot of effort. But this is one of those tortoise/hare situations. A modest diet/exercise regime that you can stick to for the rest of your life is far more valuable than one which is more effective on paper but won't be adhered to in practice.
Additionally, the thermodynamic argument (calories in vs calories out) is only mostly true in broad strokes, as a trend. Sure, if you eat few enough calories and do enough exercise you'll lose weight, and if you eat too many calories and do too little exercise then you'll gain weight. But within the boundaries there is a lot of complexity. There are regions where what you eat, the composition of your diet, and the kind of exercise you do will tip the balance one way or the other in a region of maybe a few hundred calories or so a day, and that too can make a big difference in how easy it is to maintain a diet or exercise regime and how effective it is.
It's not "mostly true". It's literally the only concrete truth in this whole field. If you consume X calories more than you burn you are _guaranteed_ to gain Y weight.
Taken together, there is very strong evidence that diets which concentrate on what you eat versus those that concentrate on calorie counting are vastly more effective.
But, you don't have to take my word for it:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1014296
It's true only in the useless tautological sense, where your definition of "consume" and "burn" are so convoluted as to be useless.
Wood pulp is carbohydrates, which you can confirm in a bomb caloriemeter releases ~4kcal/g when burnt. But when people consume it, they derive ~0kcal/g. If you think people don't consume wood pulp, you might want to look at [0] and at the wikipedia entry for microcrystalline cellulose. Gasoline is even denser at ~12kcal/g, but still provides only ~0kcal/g.
There are much subtler examples, where at atwater factors have been shown to be ~30% different in in different measurements (between population and even for the same individual in different times). Which means that the difference between "what you consume" and "the energy you derive" is actually a random variable, with very significant variance.
And that's just the food intake; just sitting in a cold room requires much more energy than sitting in a warm room; And consuming a liter of ice cold water actually costs you ~36 kcal after your body temperature renormalizes.
So, really, it's very broad strokes.
[0] https://qz.com/223742/there-is-a-secret-ingredient-in-your-b...
When people talk about a calorie-restriction diet, what they mean is you count the calories in every food, and then keep caloric intake below a certain level by intentionally eating less than your appetite desires.
In contrast, in this diet, people focused on eating the right foods, and ate as much as they wanted, and the reduction of calories was a consequence.
The pervasive problems with study design and publication incentives have been known about for a while, it's irresponsible to pretend that each new study is the newest version of the truth.
Its sort of misleading, even though not counting calories the participants were still likely reducing them...
Dr. Gardner said it is not that calories don’t matter. After all, both groups ultimately ended up consuming fewer calories on average by the end of the study, even though they weren’t conscious of it. The point is that they did this by focusing on nutritious whole foods that satisfied their hunger.
For the most part people know how to lose weight, it's not difficult. The difficult part is keeping to a diet that is not fun and at times inconvenient for the rest of your life.
> Anyone who has ever been on a diet knows that the standard prescription for weight loss is to reduce the amount of calories you consume.
> But a new study, published Tuesday in JAMA, may turn that advice on its head. It found that people who cut back on added sugar, refined grains and highly processed foods while concentrating on eating plenty of vegetables and whole foods — without worrying about counting calories or limiting portion sizes — lost significant amounts of weight over the course of a year.
People who switch to plenty of vegetables and whole foods may not be counting calories, but they're still consuming far fewer calories. Have you ever looked at how few calories are in vegetables? Most of the calories in any vegetable dish you consume are probably coming from added oil. And eating "whole foods" also means avoiding the heavily-processed caloric foods you would be eating otherwise.
Weight loss comes from calorie reduction. Exercise is really important too of course, in particular to maintaining your weight post-loss, but all you really need to lose weight is to reduce your calorie intake. I can personally attest to that, having lost 75lbs in 4 months now using nothing more than calorie restriction¹, and the program I'm doing this through has a very high success rate (which is to say, as long as you actually stick to the program, you're guaranteed to lose a significant amount of weight).
The overall point of the article is still fine, which is that you really don't need to calorie-count in order to lose weight, and focusing on that can make people unhappy. In general it's more effective to simply tailor your diet so the foods you're eating are less caloric (and probably healthier in other ways too). But I am disappointed that the article led with the completely incorrect implication that weight loss does not come from reducing the calories you consume.
¹It's a medically-managed weight loss program through Kaiser Permanente, 960 calories per day (using meal replacements) for 16 weeks with regular bloodwork and doctor visits, then 1200 calories per day (with partial meal replacements) for another 16 weeks (assuming you don't hit your weight goal). I'm currently in the 1200 calorie portion.
Dr. Gardner said it is not that calories don’t matter. After all, both groups ultimately ended up consuming fewer calories on average by the end of the study, even though they weren’t conscious of it. The point is that they did this by focusing on nutritious whole foods that satisfied their hunger.
The important takeaway from the study here is that by adjusting your diet, you can reduce your calorie intake without feeling like you're eating less, which is a lot more sustainable than calorie-counting (and leaves you a lot happier too). But the key point here is still reducing your calorie intake. If you're adjusting your diet, you need to pick a diet that does in fact result in fewer calories. If you switch to mostly vegetables, but liberally douse your veggies with lots of oil and butter, you're not actually reducing your calories.
The problem is that CICO (Calories-In/Calories-Out) is the only possible way to lose (or gain) weight. Literally every valid, non-pseudoscientific diet is going to be another way to get to reduced caloric input in a sustainable fashion, because sustaining a caloric deficit is genuinely difficult.
The anti-calorie counting argument ignores that calorie counting is strictly an assistant, a tool, not a primary dietary method. Calorie counting should be a mandatory requirement of all significant dietary & lifestyle changes as it pertains to seeking to lose weight. It's the sole means available to most people to identify with any precision what their resting calorie burn rate is: how many calories can you consume before you begin to gain weight.
Of course calories matter. The weight loss problem is twofold:
1. Calories. Counting calories is solution to this. You can lose weight by eating junk food if you count calories.
2. Feeling hungry and self discipline problems. Quality and composition of the food and different ways of consuming food affects how easy it is to consume less calories in the long term.
Caloric-wise it sure is. The difference is in the ability to eat the same amount of calories in sugar and not eating more.
The failure in the discussion is that calorie count matters in the grand scheme. But if the focus was nutritional value per calorie that measurement falls apart much more quickly.
I'm doing a little better about portion control, but whenever I think about never eating dessert again, I just want more dessert... thanks brain.
1. Eat half the portion you would have otherwise. Just eat smaller bites and savor it. You'll still get the same enjoyment. If you're eating out, split your dessert with someone else (because I know it's hard to leave food on the plate).
2. Find desserts that are less caloric. If the dessert has fewer calories, you can eat the same amount that you used to and you'll still be doing better.
3. Turn it into a treat rather than an every day occurrence. Maybe eat it every other day instead of every day. Maybe only eat it if you cook a healthy meal (and skip it when you go eat that burger from In-n-out).
Going cold turkey is really hard, and not at all required, unless you have impulse control problems (e.g. many people have "trigger" foods, which they should stay away from entirely if they can).
Of course this can involve getting everybody in your house on your diet. That's not and easy thing to do.
Essentially, you can have dessert, but it eats into your daily caloric budget. That's why you see people go for meats and veggies, because they give you the best nutrient bang-for-the-buck, allowing you to eat the most volume of food for the least amount of calories.
My rule is that a desert that's home made - by me, my wife or whoever is allowed. It seems to work. If I really want to eat something sweet then I have to cook it first. It's the instant availability of sugary food from shops that get you.
Secondly - it gets much easier with time. Whether it's habit or a change in your gut biome or both: the sugary cravings do get less.
Thirdly - try and get enough sleep. I think most people crave sugar when they are tired. I find this one the hardest at the moment. Sometimes life can be like that.
Long-term, I took a food I was already interested in eating daily and made the minimal tweaks necessary for me to think of it as dessert. In my case it was oatmeal: adding 0.5T/11g of blackstrap molasses and 0.5T/6g of brown sugar to 0.5c/40g oatmeal (dry weight) makes a complex, subtly-sweet treat. It's ~200 calories total (~50 from molasses & sugar).
So while looking at lifestyle changes, don't forget the activity side. Adding a few long walks, or a new hobby that gets you moving more, might help as much as skipping some dessert.
Like I said--might not be practical for you, but worth remembering.
After all, you can still end up feeling eternally hungry if 100% of your diet was high fructose corn syrup liquids.
Unfortunately this article and study will likely be misconstrued as calories not mattering to weight loss. This is a common misconception or delusion.
Sure it isn't quite as simple as how much energy burning food items gives off, but it shouldn't be discounted.
The author of this piece really should know and understand the basic scientific concepts that are involved here. I suspect he may just be doing a dumb-it-down thing that goes a bit too far .
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
I find that fat, proteins, and carbs help me to feel full. I can eat four donuts and still feel like I barely ate something. But one egg and I'm good to go for another hour.
It also found an interesting result - both low fat and low carb diets seem to work, regardless of your insulin response.
https://idmprogram.com/biggest-loser-diet-explained/
And yet having your resting metabolism driven downwards 400-600 calories virtually guarantees that you will yo-yo. Every calorie above your low limit will erode any gains you've made.
"Mr. Cahill knew he could not maintain his finale weight of 191 pounds. He was so mentally and physically exhausted he barely moved for two weeks after his publicity tour ended. But he had started a new career giving motivational speeches as the biggest loser ever, and for the next four years, he managed to keep his weight below 255 pounds by exercising two to three hours a day. But two years ago, he went back to his job as a surveyor, and the pounds started coming back." <- he went back to old habits and gained the weight back.
Like the quote from Dina Mercado says - "The cravings are there.” I'll bet after a time they gave up and largely went back to your old habits.
What's the point where your resting metabolism burns enough calories so that you're losing weight instead of gaining or maintaining weight? There's no way to easily figure that out without calorie counting. Further, that changes as you age, so doing rare calorie counts is extremely valuable anyway.
My resting burn rate is substantially different from my brother's resting burn rate. Growing up I could live off of pizza and not gain a single pound. I was 6'2" and 155 pounds at 26 years old, living off of the worst carb-heavy diet you can imagine with zero exercise. It simply didn't matter to my weight, my metablism was very high. My brother on the other hand, will carry dozens of pounds more at a similar diet & calorie intake.
As I've gotten older, my metabolism has changed. At an identical diet to ten years ago, I will now carry 20 to 25 more pounds. I have to be more careful with what I eat now. How do you know where that calorie metabolism baseline is if you don't occasionally count? And this is just a routine life example, rather than a serious weight loss context (in which case calorie counting is radically more useful).
After you establish your calorie baseline, then make adjustments to your routine / diet / lifestyle, then you can certainly get rid of the counting. The calorie counting is extremely useful in helping to inform and establish a new lifestyle.
Step one is to figure out how many calories you're really taking in on a daily and weekly basis. In my opinion, most people with serious weight problems will significantly underestimate their calorie intake and will be surprised at how high it is.
Calorie counting also helps to rapidly identify the primary problems in your diet over time. For most people, they don't have 37 problems in their diet, they have only a few (eg cutting out all soda and making pasta/pizza a rare consumption). And if those few items are removed and replaced with superior options, that will take care of 3/4 of the problem. While some may say that the problem areas should be obvious, one of the reasons that people become so overweight in the first place is that it isn't obvious to them, because their lives become routines filled with blank spaces around what they're stuffing into their mouths in a hurry. They literally lose track of lots of the bad things they've consumed in a given week - the calorie counting acts as a powerful mental enforcer, you have to write all of that shit down.
What the body does with one input versus a different input is much more important than the quantity (caloric) of each input. If you could manage to consume 2,000 kcal of lettuce in a day, you will almost certainly gain less weight (or lose more weight) than if you consumed only 1,500 kcal of modern processed American bread.
The problem we face in trying to eat better is that virtually everything you can buy is processed. When you go into a typical American grocery store, about 25% of the outer aisles are unprocessed foods - raw meat, raw vegetables and fruits, nuts, etc. _Everything_ in the inner aisles is processed. Even most of the outer aisle is processed - cheeses, sandwich meats, "fruit juices", etc.
Fiber is a key component to health (and weight loss for those who do not get enough). Raw fruits and vegetables are typically very high in fiber. Processed foods are usually not. Fruits and vegetables are also high in water content. Water and fiber help us feel fuller. It's a bit of an illusion, or rather it's quite temporary because it goes out of our systems more quickly than carbs. Fiber also aids in our gut and colon bacteria balance, and research is beginning to recognize the many roles that bacteria play in our health (including mental!)
The list of reasons for choosing unprocessed foods over processed foods is very long. About the only things really negative about unprocessed foods are their relative higher price and their lower convenience. But if you value quality, then the price argument goes away. Likewise, there are social and emotional benefits to food preparation and meal sharing. So "less convenient" really is just another way of saying "better priorities".
This is not what the study says, nor is it correct. The caloric quantity is still the most important thing in terms of weight loss/gain...
Imagine if certain foods caused the body or brain, through a very complicated process, in the long term, to hold on to calories and store fat. This would end up making people feel very low energy and have strong cravings to eat more.
And the counter to this would be that if you ate the correct foods, your body or brain's long term energy balance will function properly and not hold on to calories, feel energetic, burn excess fat, and not feel very hungry.
From the outside point of view, you could just look at the calories in and out and say that it's obviously the most important factor of weight loss. You could just blame the person for eating too much and moving too little. But if what I described is actually happening, then that wouldn't be good advice because that's not the root cause of the problem.
What I suggested is very possible and has not been ruled out by science.
There are many things that complicate simple calorie counting, and things one can take advantage of. Liquid calories don't make you feel full in the same way solid calories do, high fiber foods make you feel more full, drinking lots of water can keep you feeling full without eating many calories...
But, if you want to lose weight, running a caloric deficit is required...
But the specifics don't matter. If you're willing to accept that such a model is possible, then that means that recommending a calorie deficit, even though it's required for weight loss, might be really bad advice. If you tell someone to eat less food, and they keep eating the types of food that cause their bodies to store fat, you might be setting them up for failure.
No you wouldn't. That's not how energy works.
If you take two people with identical amounts of energy expenditure, then feed one 2000 kcal of lettuce and the other 2000 kcal of wonderbread, they would gain/lose weight at an identical pace. Energy is energy and all the hand waving in the world can't change that.
Of course both would eventually die of malnutrition and they could certainly have different levels of satiation... but if we're just talking about "weight loss", like the article says, a calorie is a calorie, period.
You're only looking at half of the equation - the input. Look also at the output. If you're eating a lot of fiber and water, such as with lettuce, your "output" will be higher (bathroom).
With white bread, more of what goes in will stay in.
That's an oversimplification, but it's just one example that calories are not all the same.
And for a more interesting example, the studies of fasting have demonstrated that caloric reduction (not complete fasting) will result in more muscle loss as your body is eating its own muscle to operate. But with a few days of total fasting, no calories, you will burn fat to survive. People on a restricted calorie test will lose more weight than people consuming zero calories - at least for a few days.
Given that the calorie is just a unit of energy, I believe they are considered equal. What you imply is analogous to measuring a length of 5 metres and then questioning if each of the metre segments are 'equal'. They must be equal, or else the segments could no longer be considered metres.
It may be more correct to say that the body does not utilise all molecules that it can derive energy from in the same way.
And even then, it would be easier to have a simpler AI that can do little more than recognize an item of junk food and shock the appetite out of me if it detects my hand reaching for it.
Not everyone can do bomb calorimetry at home. It's rare enough that someone can measure food portions to the nearest 10 grams. I think the entire basis of the Weight Watchers "points" system is that the calorie number is just too much math for most people. And then, psychologically, it isn't a matter of "things I can eat versus things I can't eat" but "things I don't have to worry about eating versus things I have to track in a stupid notebook". That bypasses the stubborn counterreaction where forbidding a food only makes the dieter want it more. You can still have it, if you really want it, but you have to do math and accounting, so it had better be worth the hassle.
This study mildly supports my buffet theory (actually a hypothesis). My theory is that you can avoid gaining excess weight at any buffet by following just one rule: you can eat anything you want, as long as every plate you bring back to the table is at least 50% filled with undressed/unsauced salad-bar vegetables, and you eat them first. It's hard to overeat when you're eating a half-plate of raw broccoli between each half-plate of other stuff. If you then replace the buffet with a grocery store, you have a lifestyle strategy: eat anything you want, as long as you have a proportional mass of salad first.
As long as insulin levels are kept in check, energy storage is as well. Avoiding sweets and simple carbs while having plenty of fiber in your diet is an effective means of achieving that. It's not necessarily calorie restricted, calories are somewhat orthogonal.
There's a story Gary Taubes tells about Oskar Minkowski's [1] discovery of the Pancreas' role in insulin production. I found it quite illuminating when trying to better understand nutrition and will paraphrase it here. The guy was experimenting with dogs and removed the pancreas from some dogs, buttoning them back up and letting them continue to live normally. He observed they lived normal lives as if nothing changed, but no matter how much food they ate - they kept losing weight. They would eventually die from the weight loss. He had noticed that flies were attracted to the urine of the pancreas-free dogs, and being a scientist, he tasted the urine and observed it was exceptionally sweet. Not having insulin in the blood, this stuff just came out in the urine rather than being stored in the fat, because fat cells need to be instructed to steal excess energy and store it, otherwise it just passes through.
Hence if there are foods we can eat which cause the pancreas to behave anomalously for extended periods, our energy storage will follow suit.
There's another story Taubes tells, I think these were from Good Calorie, Bad Calorie but I've read so many things on the topic it's a blur. It's about a woman who had a small tumor removed from her brain, the tumor was next to I believe it was the Pituitary gland. After the succcessful removal, she began gaining weight uncontrollably. Her diet/lifestyle was unchanged from before the surgery, and no matter what they did to her diet to try fix this, she gained more weight, eventually becoming obese. It turned out a part of the brain affected by the surgery controlled the hormones related to energy storage. This woman's body was internally starving itself by erroneously instructing the fat to continuously store energy. If memory serves this story had a good ending though, they discovered a medication to get the hormone production back to normal levels and her weight normalized.
These two anecdotes are important. Any engineering-minded person who has done troubleshooting of comple systems, root-causing of difficult problems, understands the tremendous value in observing how systems fail.
The stories demonstrate a total decoupling of Caloric intake/physical activity to energy storage. Stop fixating on calories, we need to eat foods that keep the energy system functioning properly in the first place.
I don't think it's surprising that we find the more a diet is composed of intact, naturally-occurring foods, having little processing/preparation (including cooking), the more health tends to generally improve. Unless you're steeped in religious beliefs to the contrary, you probably understand and accept humans evolved over a long period of time. Our bodies are still suited to the foods we evolved around, so when we eat things like refined carbohydrates, stuff that requires machinations and technology to create, we're exposing the body to essentially unexpected inputs. So we should at least expect bad results to be more likely when consuming such things.
Oops.
Edit won't let me do anything, can't even fix the s/comple systems/complex systems/ typo. Size limit perhaps?
The title can easily be misread... It means that the act of counting calories is not key to weight loss - i.e. calories can also be reduced by a more tangible diet (like a low-fat or a low-carbohydrate diet) without explicitly counting calories... It does not say that caloric restriction isn't the most important part of a weight loss diet, it still is...
Considering that the paper itself isn't even meant to address the effectiveness of "counting calories" vs. "not counting calories", this title is extremely clickbait-y...
“I think one place we go wrong is telling people to figure out how many calories they eat and then telling them to cut back on 500 calories, which makes them miserable,” he said. “We really need to focus on that foundational diet, which is more vegetables, more whole foods, less added sugar and less refined grains.”
The long term solution is really what he's talking about, right? The long term solution to weight struggles is really transforming your eating habits and gravitating towards more nutritious foods.
The title should be "Counting calories is not the key to sustaining motivation for weight loss".
My source, albeit biased, is my own experiences losing weight. I started counting calories 10 years ago and lost ~120 lbs. Over the last 10 years I've put on ~40 lb bringing my 6'4 frame to 200 lbs while going to the gym and counting calories.
And as I've said above CI has to be defined - if it means "eaten", that's probably false or at least imprecise.