Just a couple of days ago, I wrote I automatically flag any submission with any kind of "dietary" studies. I'm not saying there is no one study well done, but doing it well, is just (almost) impracticable. Not only the people have literally no idea what they eat, they forget and misreport, also a human living normal life in the society has just TOO MANY variables. There is no way to keep the other variables like, sport, social interaction, stress and such out of the study.
> There is no way to keep the other variables like, sport, social interaction, stress and such out of the study.
Sure, but with sufficiently many people, these effects will usually average out. I'm not saying the situation is great, but it's still an important field of study and we need to make progress in some way.
It only averages out if the factors are unrelated though. If a lot of asians eat rice and don’t have a high alcohol tolerance, your study would still show a correlation between eating rice and alcohol tolerance when looking at every single person on earth.
>Sure, but with sufficiently many people, these effects will usually average out.
No they won't. If you have two correlated factors and only measure one of them you can easily get to totally wrong conclusions.
If you have a food that is more often eaten by people doing a lot of sports, you will measure that eating that food is correlated with being more healthy. But it would obviously be fallacious to conclude that this food is more beneficial to health than other foods.
> Sure, but with sufficiently many people, these effects will usually average out.
In the case of dietary studies, not really. There are a few factors which are known to have a big effect on your health--being wealthy, active, and moderate in particular--and a lot of the big studies are really just uncovering yet another proxy for those factors.
Of course, you can turn that around and make the realization that your diet doesn't really matter: there's no diet that will magically make up for being a couch potato. And outside the main well-known interventions (e.g., eating less calories), the solution is generally to just be more active and things like that rather than trying to tweak your diet.
No if they correlate strongly: people eating more vegetables are more likely to do sport, and care about sleeping. Not to mention visiting a doctor much often. That is just one example.
Yeah this is a major issue. The first study that reports a link between some specific thing and health pollutes the data for all follow-up studies, because the folks that care the most about their health are going to change their behavior based on it. So after that you will always see a correlation with all the other things that have been reported to be healthy.
Compare people with vegetarian diet from India (over 1 billion, a good sample!) with European meat eaters, what will be the conclusions? Do effects "average out"? Or people drinking alcohol with millions of muslims? There are some obvious criteria which should be used for example divide people in age, income and cultural groups (my grandfather used to eat and did different things I did, including avoiding doctors, despite living in same country and even same home).
I have long said there are two kinds of diet studies: those that don't apply to you because you are not confined to a hospital bed or prison cell; and those that conclude despite our best effort we couldn't get people to eat their assigned diet.
Maybe, though I suspect there are probably a lot of laws around what you can and cannot do so better get several good lawyers to check what the laws really are around this. Drug treatment programs often work like this so that is the first place to look for laws to watch out for.
I've heard of other attempts at things like this. Generally you are not locked into a cell, you are removed to a very remote location by bus so that if you want to leave you have to go through a formal withdrawal process - while waiting for the bus - during which they convince you to stay). They then not only control your diet they also give you exercise (often lead by military drill instructors) thus being a healthier environment than a diet cell. I have no idea how much money they make.
But even if the people will be confined, you have to be careful to take a broad enough population. I can expect people willing to participate in such study maybe are already orthorexic diet freaks? Or very poor people (which have a diet deviated from “mean”)
The topic has changed from a study to a self selected set of people who want to lose weight badly enough they are willing to pay to be confined in some setting where they cannot access food outside of what is given to them, and they are forced to follow an exercise plan of your (not their) choosing.
You can of course study these people, but the only study anyone is interesting in is how different changes in conditions affect how much people lose and how much money you can get out of them.
That's what I always thought about the kind of research RFK Jr is always talking about. Normally it's not ethical to do food / medicine trials with prisoners, but these would be trials like giving regular food to one set of prisoners and food without dyes or chemicals to the other. The "test group" would just be getting healthier food.
Seems like just radically measuring portion sizes might fit into the same kind of thing. And you could probably measure activity level more easily, too.
We decided that our analytic tech was good enough to figure out that smoking and pollution were bad for us despite infinite confounders.
Most people dismiss dietary research because it simply condemns their favorite foods. They accept causal inferences made from epidemiology everywhere else.
Does this actually pose an issue for most studies?
This seems like it would be an issue for any studies relying on absolute food consumption being accurate. Most studies I come across frame their findings in relative terms (likely for this very reason): Individuals who engage in more of X compared to their peers show a correlation with outcome Y.
For example, if you’re trying to determine whether morning coffee consumption correlates with longevity it doesn’t seem particularly relevant if you believe everyone is underreporting their food intake, as the article implies; it's a relative comparison.
Sure, those findings often get twisted into clickbait headlines like “X is the secret to a longer life!” but that’s more a popular science problem than an issue with dietary research itself.
most people are embarrassed about the truth. So they will over report vegetables while not mentioning how much alcohol or tobacco they had (or illegal drugs which the study probably legally must report to the police). Or a self proclaimed vegetarian will not report meat they ate despite their claim. fat people will report they skipped desert.
I came across a comment as a humorous rule of thumb for this.
1. If you ask someone who much the drink double the answer
2. If you ask them how much the smoke, multiply the answer by five
3. If you ask them how often they have sex, divide the answer by 10.
Why would that be a problem for reporting relative results if the entire population is doing that?
If everyone is under-reporting their alcohol consumption, that seems fine. The absolute numbers will be way off, the relative numbers to their peers won't.
Statistics can do a lot to find data from noise like this, but it is still noise. The biggest issue is nobody knows what variables are important, which are correlated, and so on.
Edit: there is another issue I forget until now: time. Statistically I have several more decades of life left. So even if you get accurate results of my meals yesterday, you need to report when I died, and you probably won't have the meals for the rest of my life. Did some meal I at when I was 10 have a big effect on my life? For that matter if I know you are tracking just one day's meals I will probably eat what I think is better and that doesn't tell you anything about what I eat the rest of the time.
It is easy to track people who have had a heart attack - they are likely to die of another heart attack in a few years so the study times are short. However does having had a heart attack mean either genetic difference such that your results only apply to a subset of the population, or perhaps some other factor of having had a heart attack.
You are assuming that the underreporting will be uniform. In reality people may be underrporting things they are embarrassed about and maybe even overreporting the opposite.
This is a flaw in the data that is much harder to account for.
Why would that be a problem for reporting relative results if everyone is under-reporting things they're embarrassed about and over-reporting the opposite?
Different people are embarrassed by different things. A frat student's probably going to overstate their alcohol consumption, a Morman understate.
People with bigger appetites underestimate their food consumption, people with smaller appetites overstate.
Not to mention the degree of over/under statement will vary wildly. "A big meal" might be 300 calories for somebody with an eating disorder, or 3000+ for somebody on the opposite end of the spectrum.
Sure, but in a representative sample size this is largely irrelevant. The fraternity brothers and the Mormons cancel each other out, and regardless both are dwarfed by the large middle of the population that likely systematically and reliably under-reports their drinking by a few units.
The idea of outliers and systematic biases isn’t new to statistics, relative comparisons are still useful.
>Sure, but in a representative sample size this is largely irrelevant.
There is no way to know whether your sample size is representative. What amount of fraternity brothers and Mormons cancel each other out?
>and regardless both are dwarfed by the large middle of the population that likely systematically and reliably under-reports their drinking by a few units.
> "A big meal" might be 300 calories for somebody with an eating disorder
I knew a guy that complained that he "ate like a lion" and yet couldn't gain weight.
Turns out, his breakfast was typically a single egg and a slice of toast. Lunch would be half a sandwich and a bag of chips that he wouldn't finish. Dinner of course varied, but basically was like 4-6 oz of meat of some sort and a small side of veggies.
Overall, his daily calorie intake was probably only around 1,000 calories.
I don't know if this qualified as an eating disorder, or what, considering when we hear about someone undereating, it's because they're trying to lose weight. He was trying to GAIN weight and yet was still horrendously undereating.
All of those headlines are based on meta-studies putting together 100 junk studies, based on bad data, which then informs actual medicine and health trends and American X Association and...
For your specific example - "morning coffee" could be anything from plain espresso shot to full 600+ calorie starbucks "coffee" but the meta-study-machine will lump them together.
It's kind of like feeding all of reddit's comments into chatgpt, asking it about stuff, and trusting its answers at a society-level with your health on the line.
> "morning coffee" could be anything from plain espresso shot to full 600+ calorie starbucks "coffee" but the meta-study-machine will lump them together.
You're inadvertently proving my point, though.
If morning caffeine is correlated with longevity, regardless of the vehicle/extra sugar/etc and controlling for the easy usual circumstances like income, that's pretty useful information!
But if sugar is worse by more than caffeine is good your study is in trouble. Or maybe it works but it is harmful because people who don't like coffee are going to buy the bad sugar drinks trying to get the good coffee down.
It might be useful information for other researchers to try to figure it what is actually going on, but probably not. And it is not at all useful for you and I trying to make sense of what we should eat.
But finding correlations is only the first and easiest step in determining causation. And almost nobody continues with the hard work that follows. So we have tons of studies showing correlations one way or the other, and tons of conflicting studies. And we are apparently satisfied with this. The state of nutrition research is abysmal.
> This seems like it would be an issue for any studies relying on absolute food consumption being accurate.
Exactly. Those studies either don't get done, or when they're done, they produce garbage results that get ignored or get interpreted as diminishing the importance of absolute food consumption.
> it doesn’t seem particularly relevant if you believe everyone is underreporting their food intake
It says that virtually everyone underreports. It doesn't say that everyone underreports equally, and there are good reasons to expect this not to be the case. If embarrassment is a contributing factor, for example, you would expect people who are more embarrassed about how they eat to underreport more. If people remember meals better than they remember snacks, people who snack more will underreport more than people who snack less. If additional helpings are easier to forget than initial helpings, people will underreport moreish foods more than they underreport foods that are harder to binge on. With so many likely systematic distortions, it would be surprising if everyone underreported equally.
I just weight and scan erything. The only problem is eating out. Mobile apps make this very easy today. They should be using them and scales that automatically report, with photo documentation, etc. Skip self-reporting and go straight to self-measuring.
Do you have scales which self-report because this has been on my wish list for a while now? It seems like it should exist: scales with a BLE read out that dumps out the value after a number has been stable, and flags it if I hit a button on the scale.
There's a whole range of products here which seem like they should exist but just don't (but I hardly want to do a hardware startup).
I do this with the Xiaomi Mi Scale 2. You can connect it to Home Assistant. Once it has a stable reading, it auto-submits, but there's no button for flagging, although you could potentially build this yourself. I never had to connect the scale to the internet; it just worked with Bluetooth
I try calorie count with My Fitness Pal and holy shit it’s a lot of effort. Eat out and you’re screwed (estimated at best). When you include sauces and oils etc it’s really hard to be accurate in the best of times, and it’s just a pain to keep on top of. Best option is to avoid any so you don’t have to count.
I imagine almost everyone will add bad data in a study at some point with the best of intentions.
I think being consistently inaccurate helps. If you always get the same thing at a certain restaurant, you can start by giving your best estimate of the calories in that meal. Then if your average weight doesn't move in the direction you want you can adjust your target calories to compensate.
That probably doesn't work either unless they work in an automated fashion. Did the chef put two or three dashes (official SI unit) of this or that on your meal? A a "dash" or "splash" or "spritz" of certain things can easily mean 100-200 kcal. And if you deal with things like meat, maybe the cut you get today is more or less lean than what you got last week.
I think tracking calories for a couple of weeks can be very enlightening for a lot of people, granted you don't have a personality type where this can get you into trouble. But for the long haul it's not really useful or even feasible, you're better off getting to know what sort of way of eating suits you best and how to correct if you're getting off course. Anyone can stick to a very strict regime for three months, but the trick is to stick to a proper diet you can enjoy for three decades and then three decades more.
Healthy foods are not healthy in an excessive quantity. Diets don't need to be tracked to the individual calorie. We don't burn the same amount l number of calories each day and food labels show an average of the nutritional value. If a person is consistent, they will achieve the desired result; either gaining or losing weight.
I've been tracking consistently for about 5 years. It's feasible.
> Best option is to avoid any so you don’t have to count
This is why one of the best ways to lose weight is to just keep a food diary / count calories. You don't need any special / fad diet, just the act of trying to keep a note of everything you eat will cause you to stop and think, "I don't need to eat this".
One can (and should) extend that concept to anything. Be conscious about what you do. Then you likely know, if you are not doing good - and can change it.
it's less than you'd hope. you need a fairly high volume of protein shake to get more than 40g of it in a sitting, and your target is probably like 100 or more grams of protein a day
I did a daily shake for a while as an after gym recovery food and I still had more calories from carbs than protein. it's just difficult.
If I take two protein shakes with double servings I am not halfway to my daily goal, but sure it helps! I tend to have protein powder and greek yogurt for breakfast (with peanut butter) and a double serving after the gym. That, with a protein dense lunch and dinner gets me to around 180g protein.
You can give yourself an ability akin to time travel by writing things down first.
If I write down the calories afterwards, I get the "oh, I shouldn't have done that" feeling at times. I'd like a little time travel button that takes me back to before I did, and let me adjust my behaviour and run through the situation again. If I write it down first I get to have the "oh, that's not worth it" feeling up front and decide to do something else.
This made a big difference for me, both lowering what I was eating and making me happier about the choices I made.
It takes some effort, but there’s a lot to gain. When I track what I eat and keep my daily calories in check, I feel much better. If I’m unsure of the exact calorie count, I’ll estimate a bit higher - around 1.2x.
Yeah, I have tried a few times to keep track via Cronometer but I can never keep it up. Eating out is the killer, as you say. I find I often don't even have a frame of reference for estimating the amount of calories. With the amount of sauces and oil that go into a lot of stuff, I feel like a lot of things could as easily be 1,200 calories as 500 calories.
one unintended side effect i had with myfitnesspal was that i ended up eating more prepackaged/highly-processed foods because i disliked estimating calories in home-cooked stuff so much (especially because i knew it'd be an inaccurate guess)
Yeah I can get that - pre-packaged cooked chicken is easier than roasted rotisserie chicken from the counter even if it's probably worse (loads of additives and flavourings)
I've used it on and off for 7 or 8 years and it's the only thing that can consistently help me lose weight. Even just the mindfulness of knowing how much you're eating and how much you're exercising are helpful in the process.
You don't have to be that accurate on exact calorie counts for this to work.
These apps also lack stuff besides common American/European dishes. Most of my food is healthy homemade food and entering them is an absolute pain.
Eating homemade stir fried celtuce [1]? Homemade steamed marble goby [2]? Nope, out of luck. They only have nutrition info for packaged mac and cheese.
I found it to be useless for my cooking style. I imagine if your meals were a chicken breast, a single veggie, and a single starch it's useful. However, I tend to do stir fries with lots of different veggies, spices, oils, etc... It was extremely difficult and even more cumbersome to try and enter those meals into that.
I thought this was generally known that people are bad at reporting most things about themselves. It's a good argument in favor of wearables or other smart monitors, if anyone expects to do actual rigorous research it needs to be objective.
> many studies of nutritional epidemiology that try to link dietary exposures to disease outcomes are founded on really dodgy data
I wonder if the data are always skewed in a particular direction. For example, do people typically underreport junk food and overreport salads? Or do they omit entire meals? Or snacks?
While far from being a potential silver bullet, I do wonder if continuous glucose monitoring could help with this. Your food log shows you didn't eat anything between noon and six in the evening but the glucose monitor shows a spike at 2PM? Your diet app could ask if you forgot to log something around that time. Maybe you want for a long walk aside while it was cold and that was the cause. Unless the question is asked, the tracking data for that time period will be questionable.
Everything needs to be weighted on a precise scale, every ingredient and not just the macros. On top of that the reported nutrition values on labels can be wrong by a large margin so for not whole foods, we introduce an error.
This is why calorie counting is ballparking to get us a general idea, and not a precise science.
I find the way we measure calories very interesting: place the food in a metal box filled with oxygen, immerse the box in water, make the food explode so that it combusts completely, and finally measure how much the water heats up.
Rather crude and fun, but that's it, see Bomb Calorimeter. I guess it makes sense in retrospect, how else would you do it?
They usually just measure standard basic ingredients, then you roughly match them to your recipe and add it up. No wonder food labelling is just a ballpark.
I was thinking of methane as input. But what about it as output? How much does leave the system? And should this not be in calories "out" column, but I don't think that is usually counted there...
Could you elaborate on what you mean? What does methane have to do with this and what is the "out" column?
Calorimetry is just measuring the heat transfer from combustion, usually by measuring the temperature change of a known quantity of water in the classical experiment. You perform versions of it in high school and undergrad
Calories are just a unit of energy, and heat can be related back to energy (joules for people using SI)
Well some of the food we eat generates flatulence of which 7% can be methane. Meaning this leaves our system without burning. As such in calorimeter it would be unburned fuel. Meaning that some calories are not absorbed failing the calories in and out equation.
Yes absolutely. Not only that but plenty of our food passes through undigested whatsoever. In theory we can't control that so we can only measure calories ingested, not calories absorbed but it hopefully sheds light on the fact that this is more complicated than just a number
I think it is an interesting and underappreciated aspect of calorie counting as well. I think calories are a decent first order approximation for foods that humans (and animals) evolved eating, because we are efficient extracting chemical energy.
The alternative would be empirical animal studies that look directly at weight as a function of feed. You will note that agribusiness doesn't mess around with calories when money is on the line. Instead relies on empirical data for mass as a function of feed type.
> This is why calorie counting is ballparking to get us a general idea, and not a precise science.
This is true, because of "caloric availability".[1] If you took that into account, you would have a better idea of how many calories your body is absorbing.
> Is coffee good for you? What about wine or chocolate? Scientists trying to answer these questions
There is a virtually infinite amount of cofounding variables, genetics, meal timing, fitness level, sedentarity, &c. . It's a 80/20 type of problem, do the 80, forget about the 20, you'll never be able to get your answers anyways.
If you look and feel like shit you're most likely eating like shit. If you look and feel good a glass of wine every now and then or a bite of chocolate after dinner won't do much.
Until they track absolutely everything including each trial subject microbiome, hormone profile, &co over time, I still feel it just won't cut it.
Plus it doesn't even matter what is true for the statistical average, given the infinite amount of variables and outcomes one glass of wine might be statistically beneficial but absolutely terrible for your own health because you have one specific gene combination or one specific microbiome mix. Which means you'd have to go through the same regimen of analysing and tracking all the parameters for yourself for it to be applicable
Actually, this is why stats exists in the first place. Larger samples (including metastudies) are so powerful -- you can measure and predict causal impact of test factors even if you can't control for unobservables. The goal is to minimize type 1 and type 2 error. So long as those unobservables are not driving a selection bias, you get wonderful things like the central limit theorem coming to the rescue.
No one can monitor or measure everything, whether philosophically (Heisenberg uncertainty principle) or prosaically (cost). But if something is true, we can often probe it enough to get at least a low-res idea of the nature of it. This moves us light years ahead of primarily using our personal experience, gut, and vibe to establish epistemologically sound assertions.
I suspect (I'm not an expert) that for subjects like nutrition, experimental psychology and so on the next big step forward isn't scientific but political: figuring out how to somehow get funders, researchers and others lined up behind a Big Science model where a very few organisations run experiments with those truly large participation numbers. There are obvious risks in switching to such a model, but if small or middling experiments simply can't answer the open questions then there may be no better alternative.
or you're sleeping like shit. or you have an autoimmune disease. or you're depressed. or you have an ongoing inflammatory state from a lingering virus. etc
For those that "track and weight everything" (how ?) do you manage ?:
- sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils, mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself
- different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat)
- Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
- counting how much you take of a meal shared with others, especially when you serves yourself multiple time
- different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January
I have the feeling that might have been easy at some point in my life when I lived alone and mostly eat packaged food and raw vegetable that looked like clones but not when I share my meal, cook a lot more raw un-barcoded aliments and gained confidence to dose "by the eye" without recipes.
For sauces, I either use a bottled sauce if I really want to stick to macros, or I try to make the exact same recipe each time and then I can select my previously created logged item in the diet app.
That's really key. I've had great success with calorie tracking, but the first few weeks always sucks until I have my regulars figured out, then it becomes a lot easier. Afterwards, it's just a matter of repetition and measuring.
For me I mostly just try to log the high macro and/or calorie items. Like if I make a Caesar dressing I’m mostly counting the oil and if I’m being really meticulous I’ll measure the Parmesan and anchovy content. But I’ll ignore the 2tbsp lemon juice, garlic, mustard, etc. since it’s counting so little towards the totals I care about.
If you’re trying to measure your vitamin intake this may not work for you, though.
For vitamins are probably easier to start in the other end and have a blood test to check how you're doing. I have no idea if that would involve selling your first born in the US though
Many are water soluble and so any excess in the body is peed out by the end of the day and so all tests are useless. Fortunately you typically get more than enough as part of a typical balanced diet and so you shouldn't need to supplement in the first place if you are eating well. Though it is almost impossible to overdose so if it makes you feel good there is no harm in making the vitamin companies rich.
The rest you can get blood tests. In general it isn't worth testing unless your doctor suspects something is wrong though. Just eat a healthy diet and get plenty of exercise and you will mostly be fine. Maybe take some vitamin D in winter, but ask your doctor (my doctor told me vitamin d in winter so that is what I do)
Tracking and weighing everything is a massive waste of time and energy. There are no obese animals (humans included) in the wild. Just stop eating the wrong things.
I maintain a muscular 225 by eating dairy, eggs, and meat. If I want to drop down to 215, I drop dairy.
Not him but because your answer surprised me I chose to reply: at 34 it is also something I always wondered.
Becoming obese always seemed a little extreme to me and I fail to imagine how someone could reach that state without the accordingly extreme food-related habits - though maybe I'm just lucky to have the "right" metabolism and thus cannot relate.
Though even if obesity was always linked to eating disorders, I understand that "just stop" is not an appropriate response to that issue.
I bought myself a food weight to have at the kitchen but just like you I struggled with all the minor things that gets added in rapid succession. The trick is to get good enough at estimating within reason, and focus on one aspect such as calories.
Figure out what one table spoon of oil contains, and when you make a sauce use a table spoon while pouring to count roughly how much oil you are putting in.
For shared meals, or self-restricted portions, I just add the entire meal upfront to my book-keeping, and then after are are done eating I subtract what I didn't eat.
You don't need to keep track of the family history of your cucumbers.
Macros are pretty stable though. A week old veggie has less vitamins than a fresh one, but the carbs are pretty unchanged. Trying to measure and weigh for micro nutrients seems doomed though.
As a way of life, weighing and counting macros also seems pretty doomed to because it's just so much work, but it's very doable for a few days to realign your view of what an appropriate amount of food is, if you're diligent and mindful enough to not have a soda or a snack without thinking
adjusting seasoning/tasting as you go seems like it would complicate matters too, especially if you're in the heat of it and don't have time to stop and weigh that extra pinch of salt etc
Spices and everything else in general have so little in them it doesn't matter. Something like seeds or pepper more so, but you're hardly going to add so many it changes anything.
Which is kind of the point: you look this stuff up once in order to get a sense of what you're actually doing, and quickly realize what is and isn't going to matter overall. If you're really concerned, you start from a fixed mass you'll season from, and then just use that up as you go.
i.e. if you know you'll be adjusting added sugar, then estimate the total amount of sugar you're comfortable putting in the meal up front, and work from that pool. If it's less, great.
I've done that for weight loss, so I focussed on calories only. That was pretty easy:
- while cooking, you weigh every ingredient. Either I just take photos of the scale with my phone, or I write it on a sheet of paper.
- when cooking is done, you weigh the total food (easiest if you know the weight of your pots)
- when eating, you weigh your portions
After some time, you realise that you need to be precise for some things (oil, butter) but can just guess or ignore some things (eg. onions and miso have so little calories that you really don't need to weigh them).
If it's a dish like Lasagna, you don't even need to weigh it at the end, just estimate what fraction of the dish your serving is.
Some foods I know, eg. oil 9kcal/g, but mostly I just check the label. Every food in the EU has the calories/100g or calories/100ml on the label. If it's not packaged, I look it up it FDDB [1].
Keep in mind that I calculate enough to achieve caloric deficit. Not to reach an exact number.
I also leave the nutrient part on just eating a varied diet, with lots of whole foods.
I personally use MyFitnessPal, weigh the calorie significant food (e.g. the Protein, starches, fat-rich vegetables and fatty sauces) and establish a rough estimate about the calories.
I try to maintain the error an order of magnitude lower than my estimate. That's why I don't bother weighing leafy and "watery" vegetables (e.g. spinach, letucce or cucurbits).
Also, I try to keep an eye of sauces like Mayonnaise, but I usually relax on Mustard (I dunno where you live, but mustard here tends to be low-fat by default).
That error can be easily burnt by the casual movement we do in the day.
Exactly this. You just weigh every ingredient. It doesn't matter if it's a sauce or what. If it's something premade (like tomato sauce) you use the calories on the packaging. If it's a raw ingredient you look it up.
I never bothered with weighing the final result or portions, instead I just always divvied up the final product into equal individual portions and divided by the total number of portions. That works well if you freeze them.
Of course, all the calculation is a tremendous amount of work. I did it when I needed to lose weight and only did it for a couple of months. But it definitely "calibrated" my understanding of calories -- e.g. non-starchy veggies have barely any at all, while cheese and butter and oil can easily double the calories in a dish.
Well, by weighing and logging everything. You are correct that it takes a lot longer when you do that. That's the cost of keeping track of your caloric intake. I also do not account for any nutrient loss or divergence from different cooking times, leftovers, or from different species.
I only weigh everything I eat when I am actively trying to lose weight, however, and when I am doing so I deliberately restrict my diet to meals where I won't waste a lot of time weighing everything. If I'm trying to maintain or gain weight, I don't really bother with it.
I am very diligent, and the truth is that it is hard and it changes how you eat to be more countable. On a cut, it matters more. On maintenance, it matters less.
But most of it is a guessing game and making an assumption that it will all even out later. Ignore spices - you can assume 25 calories a day and it’ll still be too much.
Be diligent about oils. 9 calories a gram bites you quickly.
But ultimately, if you miss 100 calories a day, and are in a 500 calorie deficit recorded, you are still going to lose .8 pounds a week. And if that is consistent, adjust your portions and be fine with how you record.
And that’s the key - we know nutrition is variable. You won’t get it perfect. You just have to adjust for the imperfections.
>But ultimately, if you miss 100 calories a day, and are in a 500 calorie deficit recorded, you are still going to lose .8 pounds a week. And if that is consistent, adjust your portions and be fine with how you record.
And the thing is, you'll need to do this anyway - because you can't be sure in advance how many calories represents a "500 calorie deficit" for you, in your specific current conditions.
I was quite underweight in my youth, but I successfully reversed these kinds of feedback techniques to gain weight, and currently maintain what seems to be a healthy level. John Walker (co-founder of Autodesk, who passed away early last year) wrote The Hacker's Diet describing the basic technique. It's still live at https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ .
It's really just focused on a keto diet, but using the app at https://www.carbmanager.com you can look up low-carb foods really well and enter units in all kinds of ways. I know someone who successfully used it for about 2 months a while ago, but then they went off keto and the app DB didn't have many non-carb heavy foods.
I mean I eat very close to the same thing every day, so I am perhaps not the best example, but for example:
> - sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils, mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself
You weigh all this out once, store it as a recipe and just weigh how much sauce you're putting on things. Oils are so high calorie they're basically all the same, and the only other contributor is really if the seed mass is substantial. Log your upper end, and just assume the sauce comes out as that value. Your sauce recipe is hardly going to vary by an enormous amount, just provided you bias it towards the upper end for the purposes of tracking.
EDIT: Also since people have been dropping app links - https://github.com/davidhealey/waistline this is what I use on Android. Libre with nice integrations, works great.
I'm not tracking right now, but used to. So I can answer your question with the caveat that yes it is a pain and I stopped doing it. :)
> sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils, mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself
Yes. The thing is that it also makes you aware of how much everything "costs" you in terms of calories. You become a lot more aware of how big a glug you give of that oil.
> different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat)
I don't understand this part of your question.
> Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
My goal was not to be "accurate", but to lose weight. Overestimating slightly was in fact preferred. So this is not an effect I would have worried about.
> counting how much you take of a meal shared with others, especially when you serves yourself multiple time
You estimate. You know that the whole thing was X so if you eat a quarter of it that is 0.25*X.
> different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January
Cucumber is flavoured water. Whatever is the variability in calories you can probably just ignore it.
It depends why you're tracking things, and what level of "everything" you care about.
Starting with pretty much everything can be a good idea for people to get a sense of what's in what foods. How much does an onion typically weigh? What's that actually adding? What's the difference between getting lean and fattier meat? How much oil are you really adding?
After that it's easier to start dropping things - if I'm trying to lose weight I simply do not care precisely how much celery I've added for the sofrito. I do care about the amount of butter, oil, rice, bread, pasta though.
I'm not concerned about getting fat adding paprika, so I'm not weighing spices. Even if I'm trying to track macros that's just not going to be a considerable contributor to anything.
> - different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat)
Prep/measure things first.
Last three things that smooth things over for me
1. Meal prep on a different day. I'm not in as much of a rush at night, it's proportionally less time involved measuring something for a larger number of meals/sauces/components.
2. Having measuring spoons and fast scales nearby.
3. Measuring before & after amounts rather than exactly what to add. If I need to add butter to a sauce until it's the right consistency, or flour to a dough, or whatever then weighing as I go is a nightmare. Instead just weigh it before and after and you'll see what you used. This tip works pretty well for oil too.
On the first point, you only need to do it once and then you can reuse the information in future (assuming you stick to the same recipe).
For the other points, I think with any kind of data measurement there is a balance between precision and convenience. Trying to consistently track calories is hard enough, trying to track nutrients at the level of precision you are suggesting sounds technically challenging and frankly exhausting. I think a lot of people will take "average" values for a cucumber, an onion, etc. Like others have said, consistency in measurement is probably more important than finding the absolute truth.
I would imagine that having a camera videoing your preparation of ingredients and cooking would give enough data to classify the ingredients and the used volumes. From the video it should be easier to track the weight of everything... and perhaps depending on how the ingredients are used, determine/predict how the macronutrients are altered during the process.
Counting works for people because it quantifies their food intake. For many people, that's an effective way to overcome a learned idea that portions should be huge, or that feeling hungry has to be addressed immediately, or that feeling "full" has to be constant. It's not perfect, and I don't recommend it to people with an ED history; however, after about a month or 2 of doing it, it can really change how you look at your meals, and snacking in particular. I don't obsess over it.
> - sauces you make yourself?
I don't count them. I keep my sauces simple and use them sparingly. I'm not trying to get down to sub-10% bf.
> - different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat)
I count them raw, or if my tracker has them, count them as cooked. I don't care about them being super accurate.
> - Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
I don't care. The calorie counts are basically just estimates anyway. It's less a science than a mental game to control your ballpark calories in.
> - counting how much you take of a meal shared with others, especially when you serves yourself multiple time
If I'm making the meal, I count for the whole meal, then estimate for the share. See above for rationale (I don't care that much.) If my friend has cooked for me, I don't care at all, and just try to eat a "reasonable" portion.
> - different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January
The differences are probably not going to matter all that much. By weight, a cucumber is a cucumber is a cucumber; I'm not trying to be perfect, just get a general sense of calories.
Yep, it doesn't particularly matter if something that's actually 212 or 198 is entered as 200. Sometimes you'll be slightly over, sometimes slightly below - just try to be accurate and these small mistakes average out.
Typically I figure out the actual weight/volume once or twice to get a sense of how much it is, then just eyeball it most of the time and go for the same amount as last time I measured.
I worked on calorie counting software in the 00's. We had desktop software that just used floats, meanwhile the Palm Pilot software was all integer math (counting things in 10ths and 100ths when that precision was needed.)
We'd get emails about people seeing 577 calories on the Palm Pilot and 578 calories on the desktop. "None of the numbers are that accurate anyway!" was a sensible answer but not very brand aligned.
This is it. There will always going to be impossibly unpredictable errors even if you measure everything perfectly.
The point of measuring is to be * as accurate as possible *, not 100% error-free. It helps to better estimate portion sizes, calorie / macro amounts. This is enough precision to control weight gain / loss correctly.
A lot of people also get their maintenance calories estimation wrong, so it doesn't matter if you can measure your food down to the molecules but still eat too much / too little.
A lot of people mess up more by doing a maintenance calorie estimation wrong and relying on it rather than counting calories coupled with weighing themselves and adjusting calorie intake up/down depending on whether they lose/add weight... If you use a feedback loop, then indeed it doesn't matter if your calorie estimate is anywhere near correct anyway, as long as you're reasonably consistent and the errors aren't too badly skewed toward the wrong foods.
I did this. I targeted 0.5kg loss per week, and since 1kg of fat is 7000 kcal that meant 500 kcal deficit per week was needed.
I measured my weight every morning (after peeing) and wrote it down, and used it to compute weekly average.
I did weigh ingredients for the first couple of weeks to get an idea, but after that just did rough estimates coupled with tuning based on feedback from the body weight every week.
Had a near perfect linear trend for the year I did this.
Well, caloric value isn't that exact to begin with, so there is no point in being overly exact. Afaik it's derived by burning the food and measuring the heat it produces, but your body doesn't burn it (like pyrolysis), it uses specialized proteins. So the energy conversion varies, some can't be digested at all.
What I did is just get a rough estimate of calories of things I'm eating. Along with tracking weight every day. Then over a couple of weeks, calibrated calorie estimates with recorded weight changes. Developed an intuition.
After that, I never looked up another calorie, and counted based on how the food felt, and basically lost exactly 0.5 kg/week over a period of 5 months. (500 kcal deficit/day).
Even if I'm wrong for a particular meal, the over/under-estimates must be cancelling out. My food situation makes it extremely hard to actually calculate calories, so I had to develop this skill.
I don't, but what I did do was track everything obsessively in a spreadsheet for about a week, while exercising and eating and sleeping a nominally correct amount. As you indicate, it's a lot of manual effort to track everything like that, and I couldn't see myself doing it long term.
But over that week, I "calibrated" myself. I know, vibe-wise, how it feels to be eating the correct amount of food. And now I just keep doing that.
I've only done this on occasion when cooking for my spouse when she was counting.
The measuring of ingredients is much easier if you use a scale. A case like cold sauces where you can put the mixing vessel on the scale is the easiest case.
On sharing with others: I'd always calculate the total calories and total weight of the entire dish and then simply place the serving plate on the scale and calculate the taken calories based on the weight.
Eventually you learn recipes and their values. I memorised a lot of basics. But mostly I cut out non-vegetable carbohydrates and ate a ton of salads with nonfat Greek yogurt and hot sauce as a dressing, and whey protein.
You're never going to be 100% precise for every day, but you should be able to be roughly correct in aggregate and the fact of recording what you eat makes you more conscious of what you put in your mouth.
For weighing things, I have a kitchen scale that lets me tare it with something on it. I find it easier to tare a container of an ingredient, then dose some of that ingredient out, then reweigh it to get the delta I put in. For things which have a dash of an ingredient I'll just guess. A few grams here and there won't really matter much.
For partitioning a meal: Sometimes I weigh my portion. Over time I've trained myself to estimate the weight of what I take such that my visual estimates are reasonable. Eventually my visual estimates have gotten better.
A lot of your other challenges are just not that important: If you're off by a few calories in either direction, it's not a big deal. It'll average out in the long run. If you're systematically off, you'll eventually recalibrate your goals anyway based on how you feel and/or your weight patterns vs what the calorie counts tell you.
I suppose it depends what goals you're pursuing with your tracking. If it's simply losing weight, you can focus on the things with lots of calories in them. Oil, sugar, processed foods. Tomatoes, cucumber and lemon juice shouldn't be an issue.
> - sauces you make yourself?… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself
Yup, it will. Nobody said tracking nutrients was quick.
> - different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat)
Cooking time doesn't matter for macronutrients.
> - Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
They don't for macronutrients.
> - different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January
The differences don't really matter for calorie purposes. High-caloric things don't vary in density meaningfully.
You seem to be confusing tracking macronutrients (carbs, fats, protein) with micronutrients (vitamin C etc.). People track macros, generally to lose weight. I've never heard of anyone tracking micros. I don't think it's even possible.
tbh it's "easy" if you're also doing a pretty specific focused diet. (maybe simple would be a better phrase - it can be reduced to very simple steps. mentally choosing to do this and enduring it is difficult, but the process itself is straightforward.)
like the worry about sauces is true but if you eat mostly chicken and rice and one slice of bread a day you can really get that variability down. when I was heavily restricting I would only cook very simple things like that and otherwise eat packaged food, and it certainly worked to lose weight. but you sacrifice variety and flavor and you'll feel kinda stressed and hungry for months at a time.
the last factor is living with people who are not dieting - I personally think this makes the required willpower basically impossible. if there is food in the house you will eventually succumb to the temptation of eating it in my experience. it's much easier if you live alone and only have the diet food in the house at all, buying nothing else, etc.
One insidious thing is that it's incredibly easy to do food tracking if you eat mostly single-serving prepared foods, but those are, by nature of being incredibly palatable and digestible, the most psychologically and metabolically challenging foods to maintain a calorie deficit with.
yeah, although there's a variety there and you can find some lower and higher ones. (bags of anything starchy are difficult, sandwiches are very variable.. I leaned on wraps and stuff like Chicken salad without toppings a lot.)
some prepared foods are basically the "empty calories" that people always talk about, like chips. high calorie (and usually like 3-4 servings per bag, not single serving really at all) and also low satiation so they almost make you hungrier to eat.
I get what you're saying, but I'm referring strictly to the task of nutrient tracking. I'm doing it right now while _not_ trying to lose weight (or gain it, or necessarily stay the same weight) and it's a big game of eyeballing stuff where it's incredibly hard to get it right
In what you listed under making a sauce, only mayo and the oils need to be weighed (unless it's some ridiculous amount of seeds). If you don't already know whats high calorie you learn quickly, in reality the average person gets the bulk of their calories from probably less than 10 items (flour/rice/chicken/etc).
For things I prepare in bulk myself (eg perhaps sauce in your case), I usually just get stats on the whole batch. Then just approximate per serving or average it over the whole batch.
I have been obese for many years and also now if I do not pay attention to what I eat I gain weight immediately.
Eventually I have learned to control exactly what I eat, in order to control my weight, but I no longer find this difficult, mainly because normally I eat only what I cook myself (with the exception of trips away from home).
When I experiment how to cook something that I have never cooked before, after I reach a stable recipe with which I am content, I measure carefully every ingredient, either with digital kitchen scales or with a set of volumetric spoons. Then I compute the relevant nutrient content, e.g. calories, protein content, fatty acid profile, possibly some vitamin and mineral content, in the cases when there exists a significant content of that.
While I do this carefully the first time and I record the results, whenever I cook the same later I do not need to pay attention to this, because I already know the nutrient content, so summing for all the portions of food that I plan to eat in that day I can easily estimate the daily intake for everything.
The essential change in my habits that enabled me to lose the excessive weight was that in the past I was eating without paying attention to quantity, until I was satiated, while now I always plan what amount of food I will eat during a day and I always cook the food in portions of the size that I intend to eat, which is always the same for a given kind of food, so I no longer have to repeat any of the computations that I have made when I have determined for the first time a recipe.
In a recipe, things like spices can be ignored, because they add negligible nutrients. Even many vegetable parts, like leaves or stalks, or even some of the roots or of the non-sweet non-fatty fruits, may be ignored even when used in relatively great quantities, because their nutrient content is low. So such ingredients may be added while cooking without measuring them.
For many vegetables and fruits, which are added to food as a number of pieces, I do not measure them when cooking, but when buying. I typically buy an amount sufficient for next week, which is weighed during buying. Then I add every day a n approximate fraction of what I have bought, e.g. 1/7 if used for cooking every day. Then for estimating the average daily intake, I divide by 7 what I have bought for the week.
What cannot be ignored and must always be measured during cooking, to be sure that you add the right amount, are any kinds of seeds or nuts or meat or dairy or eggs, anything containing non-negligible amounts of starch or sugar, any kind of fat or oil or protein extracts. Any such ingredients must always be measured by weight or by volume, to be sure that you add the right amount to food.
Nevertheless, measuring the important ingredients adds negligible time to cooking and ensures perfectly reproducible results.
I eat only what I cook myself and I measure carefully everything that matters, but the total time spent daily with measurements is extremely small. I doubt that summing all the times spent with measuring food ingredients during a whole day can give a total of more than one minute or two. Paring and peeling vegetables or washing dishes takes much more time.
This won't be useful for you because you share food with others, but for people who do not share food and are interested in long term tracking rather than short term (e.g., they want to take off some weight at a healthy rate and keep it off, as opposed to people who just want to lose a few pounds rapidly for their class reunion and will make no effort after that to keep it off) there is a simple trick that can make it a lot easier.
That trick is to focus on months instead of days. Then count your calories when you buy the food instead of when you eat it. For example lets say you buy a loaf of bread. It is 100 calories per slice and there are 17 slices. Add 1700 to your calorie count for the month.
At the end of the month you can approximate your average daily calories as the amount of calories you bought that month divided by the number of days.
Some things you buy in a month might last into the next month. That will introduce some variation but over longer periods it should cancel out. If you want you can smooth that out a bit by logically splitting those items when they have a lot of calories.
For example consider jar of mayonnaise that might last a few months and is 8000 calories. Instead of counting all 8000 in the month you buy it you can count it as 2000 that month and 2000 more each of the next 3 months.
A jar of mayonnaise?? you can measure by the spoonful (or better, by weight, since its nutritional value is in the package) whenever you eat.
A month is a long time and the measurement error will accumulate every day, especially with fats. Not so much problem if you do that with cucumber or spinach.
> A month is a long time and the measurement error will accumulate every day, especially with fats
Over several months the errors will average out. Unless you eat out a lot, then the above method doesn't work. However if you are single (this is the most unlikely factor!) and cook most meals at home then calories in the door - what you throw away = calories that you ate. That is good enough.
>Some things you buy in a month might last into the next month. That will introduce some variation but over longer periods it should cancel out.
Alternately: you can note the day you first and last ate from the container.
Or what I used to do: make tally marks on the container to figure out how many portions it typically provides; then, going forward, count a "standard" portion of that food accordingly.
I did this for a few weeks when I was maintaining weight and did MyFitnessPal for a couple weeks a few years later and got pretty much the same calorie count each time. Very effective.
Even simpler if just looking after oneself: keep the receipts, make the accounting YEARLY.
I have a whole food, plant-based diet and I cook all my own food. I don't buy any processed food, anything with anything animal in it, refined sugar, refined oils (except olive oil for the air fryer), refined carbohydrates, things preserved with salt/vinegar/oil or any stimulants. For B12 I eat Marmite (UK). Most of what I eat is that rare thing: fresh vegetables.
Because I eat almost everything (sometimes there are bad apples), I throw very little away and that includes packaging too, where I am surprised at how little that amounts to. I have a small box for recycling and I only have to empty it ever two to three months.
I could cheat and not keep the receipt on a huge box of chocolates, beer and biscuits but I would only be fooling myself.
As for bread, I just buy flour and yeast, to put it in the breadmaking machine. I buy wholemeal flour which is white flour with some of the stripped off parts of the wheat thrown back in. I am happy with that compromise as it makes a very nice loaf.
Apart from Marmite, nothing I buy has much of an ingredients label, a cauliflower is a cauliflower and has no ingredients.
The receipts are my way of accounting, I could look at them all for the last year and buy everything I need that is shelf-stable for the year ahead.
Mayonnaise used to be something I did eat a lot of, but now that is on the banned list, and I have no idea why I would ever want to eat that stuff nowadays.
I eat to satiety and beyond, my physical activity consists of walking/cycling and I am fitter than I have ever been with a digestive tract that is rock solid. Bloating, constipation or the runs are alien conditions to me, I also get a 'long range bladder' into the deal.
I don't count calories, my goal is to get as many as possible from just vegetables, beans, legumes, nuts, grains and fruit. I love cooking and my 'self care' routine. Since there are seasons, my food always changes, right now spring greens are floating my boat.
The idea of keeping the receipts is to have all of them with no banned items in them, and also to track my nutrition experiments. At the moment I am trying to do a year long streak of 'an apple a day' to see what that is about.
Regarding counting macronutrients, why bother? Nobody counts fibre, which is crucial for the lower gut, with protein we eat 2x in the West and nobody is counting phytochemicals in plants beyond the 'five a day' thing. With the exception of bread, everything I eat counts towards the 'five a day' so I am probably on twenty portions of fruit or veg a day, not that I am counting.
I don't mind people wanting to diet to fit into a dress for a special event, that is something that works for them, albeit with yoyoing. I want to be at my fittest during the summer months, to go cycling, and, during winter, I don't care. In this way I am embracing yoyoing, however, my weight does not go up over winter, I just lose some muscle, to get it back again during spring.
I founded a startup based on this idea. Track purchases with credit cards and sum things up on a monthly basis. Unfortunately couldn't find a grocer to take me up on it mid pandemic, but I want to try it again in a few years if no one has made it work yet.
As someone who has successfully tracked calories in the past with great effort, the trick is to be strict about measuring calorie-dense foods, but to be liberal with "lighter" foods where the calories are functionally de minimis. An ounce of olive oil has 250 kilocalories. An ounce of lean protein generally has 30-50 kilocalories. An ounce of green vegetables contains virtually no kilocalories.
As such, things like oils and miso can be heavily caloric, and need to be measured strictly. This is also true of most proteins and carbs.
Seeds and tomato sauce can have some caloric density, and should also be measured, but it is less of a priority.
Mustard, lemon juice, most spices (that don't contain sugar), onions, cucumbers (regardless of density) and parsley do not have any substantial caloric density and can be considered "free" unless used in great quantities. Nobody ever gained weight from mustard, lemons, onions, cucumbers and parsley.
As already mentioned, micronutrients like vitamins are not functionally possible to be measured in a home kitchen. If you're concerned about any decrease in micronutrients, simply use vitamin and mineral supplements. Macros like proteins, carbs and fats, on the other hand, can generally be measured using typical cups, spoons and scales, even with leftovers.
When making a meal shared with others if you are looking to strictly track calories, it is easier to break things into macronutrients and mix them on individual plates or bowls rather than cook as a total pot. It's much easier to measure a protein (say, 4oz chicken), a carb (say, a potato), a sauce and a fat individually portioned on a plate than an arbitrary stew. (As above, low-calorie vegetables likely do not need to be measured separately unless there are added macronutrients.)
That may sense. Most of the folks here seems to track calories and other macro. In the meantime...
> micronutrients like vitamins are not functionally possible to be measured
... my concern is micro: I'm engaging on a full vegetable diet (+shrooms +minerals!) and am concerned about thinks like iron, selenium, calcium... I (got-used-to) love vegetable and eat a lot of them so I'm probably fine with most micros, however may miss some selenium for exemple. Some research seems to show that too much vitamins is usually ok but too much minerals may not be. The more I read the more I'm scared! What makes me feel safe is the three long-time vegan I know seems healthy and don't take any supplement appart obvious B12. Perhaps I should just focus on other thinks that doing mad about micros...
Both supplementation and dietary strictness are scary because of the consistency. A quantity that is safe every day for a week or a month is not necessary safe every day for a year, and a quantity that is safe for a year is not necessarily safe for ten years. I've known two long-term vegetarians who were diagnosed with iron deficiency anemia in their thirties. One of them passed out while cycling home from work, which I'm guessing meant that she was suffering in small ways for a long time before she realized it. But if she took a mineral supplement every day for twenty years, how might she find out if she was getting too much of something? They sell the same supplements to people who are 5' 100 lbs and 6'4" 250 lbs.
I mean, in regards to iron specifically, I get bloodwork done in my yearly checkup and it will tell me my iron levels.
Historically mine have always been low but in September of 2023 I started a diet and started taking iron supplements, and when I got my bloodwork I was in the happy "green" range.
ETA:
I should point out that I'm a pretty tall dude (~6'5"), which might make it easier for me to avoid getting too much iron, but if I were getting too much iron I assume it would probably show up in my blood tests?
This probably doesn't count, but I pretty much eat the same thing every day. I think being pretty far along the autistic spectrum makes this easier for me than most.
I use myfitnesspal and try to get close. There is a lot of data in the database. It is a tool like anything else it just helps me eat more intentionally.
I use Cronometer (www.cronometer.com) and a scale. It lets you create recipes with the weight of each item and the weight of the final result. I then weigh the portion I have with a meal. Why do I do this in the first place? I'm one of those people that eats too little vs too much, especially in the summers when I'm outside all day burning tons of energy: tracking calories helps me keep weight on. I have to eat so much food to maintain my target weight that it gets pretty uncomfortable some days. Yay for muffins and cookies.
Don't worry about how leftover nutrients decrease over time: you'll get enough nutrients in a well balanced diet without having to worry about the minutia. If you're really worried about it, pop a multivitamin for cheap insurance.
Also don't worry about the variation in calories between one type of cucumber / apple / whatever vs. another. Those variations aren't significant and they probably average out anyway. Realize too that the sources aren't exact in the first place: once source is likely to give a different caloric value for something like dried beans vs another.
If you're going to track, don't get too caught up worrying about if the absolute value of the calories you're recording is 100% accurate because even if they were, you can't track your energy expenditure 100% accurately. If the bathroom scale goes in the wrong direction for you, adjust your caloric intake to compensate. Look at trends over the week and over the month vs day to day variations and it won't take long to zero in on the right number for you.
I don’t do this anymore, but when I was, the answers are as follows:
I didn’t make a ton of sauces myself, but if it was then I would round spices down to zero and weigh the main caloric components (think mayo, soy sauce, sugar, oil, tomato paste, etc)
I always weighed the uncooked food, so different cooking times was a non factor.
As for nutrients decreasing, I dealt with this by not believing in it. Seriously though, I was tracking fats, carbs, and proteins which to my knowledge do not meaningfully decay in non negligible amounts.
I lived alone so I didn’t often have to cook for multiple people. When I did I would just make 2 omelets or waffles or whatever and weigh mine.
As far as different species/cultivation methods, I realized there was an absolute edge to my ability to track. For example: bread is often listed at 70 calories per slice, but if you weigh each slice, you’ll find it deviates from what the package considers a “slice” of bread substantially. Further, you’ll often find packages that are inconsistent. For example, you might see a box that claims 14g of a food is 5 calories but the entire 28g container is also listed at 15 calories.
Depends what your goal is. My suggestion is if your goal is weight loss, don't think about calorie tracking at all.
Count your servings of whole vegetables/fruit. Try to MAXIMIZE these. Yes, maximize in order to lose weight.
It's far easier to track just this small subset of food. If you are maximizing these items, you'll naturally start feeling full and eat less sweets. Try to do this slowly over time, changing your diet dramatically overnight will cause you to hate the process and give up.
Change your diet less than 10% per week, keep eating all of your favorite guilty pleasure foods, just incorporate more healthy foods you enjoy as well, ideally before you eat the less healthy items to give yourself time to start feeling full from them. Slowly find more dishes heavy in vegetables that you like. Try to eat them more often. If you're cooking for yourself or serving yourself, try to increase the ratio of vegetable to other items.
Getting pizza? Maybe do a side salad first or a get a veggie pizza. Don't try to cut the pizza entirely until you're further along in your journey.
Don't stress about it. If you're consistently finding ways to make small changes like this you'll start heading in the right direction over the long haul and your pallet will adapt to enjoy the foods you're not used to slowly.
Maximize might be a little overkill. The government recommends 5-9 servings of fruit and vegetables a day and I found that getting to that range involves putting so many vegetables in every meal that you feel full naturally.
Totally fair point. My guess though is most people who are getting 5-9 servings of whole fruits / vegetables per day consistently don't (or maybe shouldn't for long) have a goal of losing weight.
If people are hitting that goal then they can start moving into more nuanced dietary changes like minimizing adde sugars and sodium, or maximizing nuanced micros and diversity.
You are onto something. If you maximise fruit and veg then you are also maximising phytochemicals, and that means having a nice skin tone.
I really like this aspect, the inside-out skin care, and I now see little point in eating something such as a huge bowl of pasta or rice because of a lack of phytochemicals. I need green veggies, orange ones, red ones and the phytochemicals that make them so.
I think that 'nutrition experiments' are what you need, so, as you say, small changes. This means discontinuing things as well as adopting new things. With an 'experiment' in can be for a month. I quit processed foods, dairy and much else in this way, to note the improvements to things like oral health, joint pain, digestion and so on.
You are right about changing the palate, it actually takes about ten days for the taste buds to be replaced.
It's less important to get the calorie numbers perfect, and more important to be consistent in your under/over reporting. To me, it's a tool to track the consistency of my diet. No amount of over/under reporting is hiding 2 slices of pizza on a graph.
In sweet dishes, 2 TBSP sugar is 120 calories. In savory dishes, 1 TBSP oil is 100 calories. None of the other minor ingredients have any appreciable calories. You should be able to predict quantities within a 1 TBSP tolerance range. The rest of your calories come from foods with visible volume, and chatgpt does a good job of predicting their calories from screenshots. With that, hopefully, you don't under-report any meal by more than 200 calories. If you're following a recipe, dump the whole thing into chatgpt, voila.
Over 2 meals, under-reporting by 200 calories feels like a lot. But wait to have 1 milkshake, beer or 1 tiny baklava and see the graph shoot beyond any of these pesky concerns. The goal is to track and be accountable for the latter: the ultra-palatable foods. The extra onions and parsley are not making you fat.
For outside food, you can find official numbers reported by fast food places. Add 20% to their estimate. Actually, add 10% to all estimates. Every your own food. If a full meal randomly lands under 500 calories. I look at it with scrutiny. It takes careful effort to stay under 500 and feel full. If it happens consistently and you don't lose weight, then you're tracking something wrong.
PSA: NUTS HAVE A SH*T TON OF CALORIES. ALWAYS REPORT THEM. YOU WILL BE SHOCKED.
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The system has worked quite well for me.
In all cases, my weight gain has corresponded to long periods of door dashing, liquid calories & dessert binges. On these days, my daily calorie consumption jumps by ~800 calories. Getting your oil intake wrong by 1 TBSP makes no difference to that number. Focus on the main culprits.
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P.S: ofc, if you care about micros, my comment is irrelevant.
90%+ of the effort is just weighing everything and writing it down. If you make a lot of custom dishes that's fine - just save the recipe and measure out the ingredients consistently. Weigh out your portions and it's not a big deal...
People who are tracking everything are usually doing it because they're trying to achieve a particular goal that involves cutting or bulking. I don't know too many people who do rigorous calorie tracking to achieve maintenance unless their body is their profession.
Getting the grams right goes a long way. At the end of the day, you're trying to approximately measure the caloric density per gram, and maybe macros (proportion protein / fat / carbs). You're thinking in way too fine detail for it to be sustainable. Even with a lax approach, it is pretty tedious.
I wouldn't really recommend tracking long-term, but doing it for a week or so just to get a sense of how much you're currently consuming is a good idea.
> sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils, mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself
I can't speak for anyone else, and I actually do try and weigh everything, but if I forget to weigh or the portions are too small to measure with my cheap kitchen scale: I weigh out my serving of the finished product, and Google either the restaurant or premade-grocery-version of what I made and look at their nutrition labels.
Obviously it's not going to be perfect, but I figure that my homemade pizza sauce will have roughly the same ingredients as the Ragu pizza sauce at the grocery store and thus roughly the same calories and nutrition at a per-ounce level. I always assume that my homemade stuff is 20% higher in calories more just to compensate for uncertainty, but doing this I did manage to lose about 60lbs.
I just measure the ingredients "roughly" and same with serving I try to eye-ball halving or quartering etc and don't worry too much about being super precise. 5g is enough precision for me, unless it is something like cheese or other high-fat things. And I don't count vegetables at all (apart from potato)
Some days you'll go over, others go under etc.
It helps a lot of your partner is also weighing etc
Where it is really hard though is at a BigCo office where food is free and self-served. I have no idea what I am loading onto my plate - I try to search for something similar in the app and deliberately over-estimate the quantity knowing that there is a tendency to under estimate.
Really though weighing things is almost beside the point. It's about being aware/mindful of what you are eating. Without tracking it, it is easy to absent mindedly just snack on things and then entirely forget about that brownie you had with your morning coffee, or that ice cream you had at lunch time. You start to make choices like "Hmm I wont have that chocolate now because it would be a disappointment not to have some for dessert at dinner time" etc, whereas without tracking you'd probably just eat everything and not even realise/remember/be-aware of it.
I live by myself and "charge" calories to an account whenever I buy raw foods at the store or eat out. Then, whatever is in my house, I have already "accounted" for in my caloric budget. The strategy comes in figuring out what foods / combinations of foods leave me feeling satisfied. Beans (another great living-alone food, haha) are an allstar. I weigh ingredients for a lot of cooking only so I pace the consumption of rice, beans, etc.
The error in estimation of foods eaten out I treat as a constant factor baked into the daily caloric budget. If I'm gaining weight, the budget just needs to be tightened, i.e. rescaled to account for an error factor that was larger than anticipated. The problem basically becomes estimating one's own estimation error, then adjusting.
I would look at nutrition labels for ingredients, estimate how much I used and approximate calories. For prepared foods, I'd look at other common examples with known quantities on the internet and extrapolate.
The benefits of the Minnesota Starvation Study were that both food intake and physical activity could be accurately tracked. If we had a draft and there were conscientious objectors, would similar studies be possible as alternative service? I suspect that our ethical concerns now are greater than they were back then, so maybe it wouldn't be possible to conduct.
This is why sleep studies are conducted in clinics, not left to patients to self-report. they want accurate data? They will need to conduct a real study, portion the meals out themselves, give people a schedule.
Such studies do exist - randomized feeding trials. In these studies the participants are provided all meals and snacks, and sometimes are under constant surveillance for weeks and sometimes months on end.
Obviously such studies are far more invasive and expensive to run than the classic "fill out of a survey" observational study [1], so they tend to be the outliers. But they exist and have incredibly useful results.
[1] There is a widely cited nutritional survey vehicle called the Nurses' Health Study, and it is the foundation of countless largely disposable nutrition clickbait results. This survey-based observation has been used to prove that meat is bad for you, and good for you. That artificial sweeteners make you thinner, and fatter. And on and on. That single "every now and then try to remember the kinds of things you ate over the past period of time" survey is the root of an incredible amount of noise in nutrition science.
Prisons give you the control needed, but prisons generally are not realistic to how people could live their lives. When you are locked in a cell most of the day that limits movement (in ways different from an office where people get up to go to meetings and the like). Prisons will get you your 20 minutes a day of exercise, but it isn't representative of how most people will exercise (even counting only those who go to the gym). As such you can get a lot of data but it is unknown which data applies to normal people who live lives in ways that are likely different in ways that matter.
The study you point to here is a guideline on conducting studies. It was unfortunately not available online so I can't evaluate their recommended methodology. Looking for actual studies that tried to do randomized feeding trials, I found "A randomized controlled-feeding trial based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans on cardiometabolic health indexes"[1] as a top hit, which fortunately had the full text [2] available.
Randomized controlled-feeding sounds good, let's check it out. After trudging through this for a bit I came to the meat of the methodology:
> Participants were provided a daily meal checklist (Supplemental Figure 1) that included each menu item with space for documenting the amount consumed; the time each item was consumed; a checkbox to confirm having only eaten study foods; a checkbox to confirm not taking any medications, supplements, or other remedies; space for documenting any adverse events related to eating the meals; and space for documenting any nonstudy foods, drinks, medications, supplements, or other remedies. They were also instructed to return all unwashed packaging; visual inspection was documented by the metabolic kitchen. In addition to the checklists and returned packaging, participants were educated on food safety as well as provided tips on managing challenging social situations while participating in a feeding study. Repeated reinforcement of the value of honesty over perfection was provided. Study coordinators reviewed the returned checklists with the participants to verify completeness.
I'm not sure what the intention of your comment is. Yes, I linked to the guidelines on feeding studies because that is entirely the point of my comment.
You linked to a study where food was provided to the subjects (the food obviously nutritionally selected and provided per the study groups), and the subjects obviously are assumed to stick to the provided food and to accurate report what they ate among that reported food (with the study counting packaging, remainders, etc). This is a *UNIVERSE* better than the classic "tell us how many eggs you ate over the past two months" type nutrition studies, which are by far the most common (e.g. the Nurses' Health Survey).
Are you expecting the people to be inprisoned? I mean, there are in-patient studies but they are obviously massively more difficult to carry out.
> Are you expecting the people to be inprisoned? I mean, there are in-patient studies but they are obviously massively more difficult to carry out.
I expect rigorous methodologies to be employed before conclusions are drawn or held to be widely applicable. Self-reporting is intrinsically flawed. It does not seem like feeding studies as defined here addresses this or has been validated to produce superior results -- detected non-compliance was significant (though they did not report the difference between self-reported non-compliance and methodologically detected non-compliance) and undetected non-compliance was of course not measured.
Would I expect to be only satisfied by imprisonment or inpatient studies? I don't even think I'd be satisfied by that! The differences in activity would make all such results difficult to interpret. But if inpatient is the best we can do, but it's difficult, then we have to live with the fact that our understanding of nutritional interventions is extremely dubious. You can't just accept bad science because it's the best you can do.
Another way to look at it is that tracking what you eat is very difficult. Currently trying to lose a few pounds and doing calorie tracking. Practically carry a scale and a calorie tracking app with me. About once a day there's still some "estimation" involved due to the fact that all the ingredients are mixed together.
Statistics work in your favor here though: at 2,000 kcal a day over a month, you'll consume 56,000 kcal total. So the question isn't whether any given thing was or wasn't some value - it's how much of a buffer is in your "unknown" chunk of that month that you're not winding up way out.
Like if you just tracked the things you can track, and noted the number of occurrences you didn't, then your end of the month weight will tell you whether you're overshooting or not, and you can estimate what proportion the "unknowns" might represent (and whether you should put a conscious effort into reducing them.
The estimating is often enough to make better choices.
I know I’m not going to be able to eat my main, a couple slices of pizza, one or two entrees and a dessert with only 800 calories left in my budget.
Sure, I might be somewhat off in my estimate, but in practice, I might forgo the entrees and dessert (or share a bite from someone else), set some of my main aside to take home, and have a slice of pizza.
thats a problem for research that relies on food questionaires and thats been known for a while, and probably why there's even a thing called 'the french paradox' and so on.
but i get it
it's expensive to do properly, and so its not really done that often, and when it happens there's usually only a few participants.
There are apps, but they are incredibly inaccurate. For starters, they don't recognize the food right. Usually you have to pick from a menu of 10 items. Then they have to estimate a 3D quantity (volume) from a 2D image, then they have to estimate the density... the amazing thing though is despite all this, they are still more accurate than recall diaries.
There is no problem with dietary research. The 'problem' is by design.
Both people doing the research and people funding the research know very well that what the flaw of this approach is, but just chose to do the shoddy job that they do because it brings in money. If it's not by design then there is a worse conclusion - the researchers/funders are incompetent. It's most likely a mix of incompetence/corruption.
Seems like a decent use of AI if we could use something like Glass to scan the label and plate to estimate calories and stuff. You could even record those portions to be used for audit.
ChatGPT does a surprisingly good job of estimating calories from a picture of your plate. Especially if you add details that are hard to tell from the picture.
We're far too generous with what we allow to be called "science".
There is no dietary research, because you can't pull off an unbiased dietary study over a meaningful period of time. Practical and ethical problems abound.
Maybe one day we can simulate n=10mm people from the neck down for a period of 30 years, and feed half of them bacon and half of them beans, but even that will have the major problems of being a simulation and that only from the neck down.
Read the original "fat = heart attacks" studies by Ancel Keys from the 1950's. I've done free online 5-minute long data science tutorials with more statistical rigor.
There are ALL kinds of things we can't run experiments on. Climate, society, evolution, tech development, surgery, and more. We don't throw our hands in the air and say "science here is impossible!". Instead we roll up our sleeves and develop more and better causal inference models that improve over time.
OK, name such an approach in nutrition that doesn't already fall under regular biology.
The reason we can do science on some things without doing experiments is that there's lots of hard, unambiguous data about relatively much simpler systems.
Getting good data on the extremely complex thing that is homo sapiens is just not feasible, unless you're studying specific chemical reactions in the gut, in which case it'll take an extremely long time to figure out an actual dietary recommendation.
It sounds like your describing models. Yes we have small models. Yes we have big models. We have rat models, we have matching models, we have twin models. We have lots of models I don't know about.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. These models get better, our understanding is improved, and we will slowly uncover more truths. We already have so much more knowledge about nutrition than we did 100 years ago.
Maybe we should indeed develop different words and taxonomy to differentiate the methods in different fields. Calling anything a "Science" brings an aura of seriousness, which doesn't necessarily exists, it's a way to manipulate our minds to make us believe it is as rigorous as physics and maths
I was wondering if there’s a way to automatically measure calorie intake—like some kind of biosensor that could be worn on the body. Companies are investigating this I bet!
A lot of people seem to have a purely emotional relationship with resources which logic doesn't seem to be able to penetrate. Food and finances seem similar here. For years I tried to get my wife to stick to a grocery budget. That is, we have $n per week for all groceries. She'd blow badly over the limit every time. "But we needed [food]" or "These were toiletries, so they don't _count_ as groceries." Ultimately we never had an real success sticking to a grocery budget, and ultimately the solution was me working towards better paying jobs.
This feels a LOT like weight loss. Calories in --> calories out is conceptually very simple, but in practice more people struggle with it than not. It certainly cannot be the case that they struggle with the concept; they struggle with actually putting it into action. Lying to themselves, twisting themselves into philosophical knots, and probably most often, conceding to their cravings. Food acquisition is one of out more basic drives, so it should probably be no surprise that people struggle to intellectualize it.
(as and aside, there are also people who wrongly believe that calories in --> calories out is a flawed concept because not all people have the same metabolism, or not all calories are equal. Both of these are true, but none of them actually negate the premise. For whatever your metabolism, and whatever your category of calories, fewer calories will still produce weight loss. It may feel unfair that someone doesn't have to work as hard as you to produce the same result, but this is actually true in all areas of life. Now that said, improving the quality of your calories is very important, and should not be ignored -- but it also does not negate the premise.)
Im reading Sapiens at the moment and one statement really got my attention: human society is a marvel, but individually we are embarrassingly similar to Chimps. This mental model really helps put put so much behavior into context, like resource hogging and the hoarding instinct, despite obvious surplus of everything everywhere at all times.
It's really hard (emotionally or motivationally) to undereat, which is what you need to do consistently for a long time to lose weight.
Aside from the hunger issue, food is enmeshed in all sorts of value having nothing to do with nutritional value per se and everything to do with sociopsychological value.
I think I've massively underestimated that in my own life, or misunderstood what that meant or something. I think the way it plays out is much more pervasive and subtle than what people realize. I'm not even saying it's wrong, it's just hard to suddenly deprive yourself of something that is meaningfully rewarding, and especially so when you're unaware of it consciously.
Also there are ways to convince your body that it needs less, and the journey from A to B is very uncomfortable. If you do it wrong you will just endlessly be suffering from your body thinking it's starving.
On top of that though is you have to get over your intellectual ideas of how much food you think you need to eat.
I know how much food I need to eat in order to survive and maintain a healthy weight. But if I eat that amount of food, I'm still hungry.
Doesn't matter what I eat. I'll eat a diet high in protein and fiber, moderate in fat, and low in sugar and starches, which is supposed to be the recipe to feel full without eating empty calories, but it doesn't work. 16 oz steak paired with an 8 oz portion of green beans or broccoli, and I still get the munchies just 2 hours later.
I should probably go to a doctor and ask about Ozempic or something. I did successfully lose about 50 pounds doing keto and brought my A1C from 6.8 down to 5.4, but I damn near lost my sanity because I was always hungry. I've gained it all back and started to get some of diabetic symptoms again.
I'm kinda convinced that something has changed (prescription meds ending up in the water supply? micro plastics?) that makes people hungrier than they were in the mid 20th century. the effort required to eat less seems higher than ever, and you can't totally explain the gap and rise in obesity with just lifestyle and food availability.
if some unknown element was making everyone's internal thermostat aim for more food it would explain a lot.
Our genes are heavily evolved to live in calorie scarce environments. In those environments, high calorie foods are amazing. Our biology is built to find them incredibly rewarding.
Science and capitalism have created incredibly delicious foods that are nutritionally lacking, hyper optimized for (against?) our now mis-aligned reward system. In the west, calories are not scarce and the most delcious foods are far from the most nutritious. It will take a long time for our genes to catchup.
Mass producing delicious, cheap, but low nutrition food is profitable. Companies have gotten very good at it. That's the real big change.
that's the macro change, yeah, but the rate of increase in obesity in the us got sharper after the 80s, so it doesn't feel like the complete picture to me.
we got the abundant food and the largely car bound live cycles and it still kept getting worse for decades after that point. I suppose it could be generations growing up only knowing this and so habituated to it more?
The ability to experience endorphins from things unrelated to food has gotten more expensive. Would you rather buy a $13 dollar move ticket and go hungry, or just buy a $13 McDonald's meal and go home to watch a movie? Buy a $75 dollar ticket to a special event? Buy several thousands of dollars in travel? Food is much easier to fill the gaps in feeling good.
The "public presence" of society has diminished due to the internet. You no longer need to put effort into constantly looking your best because social media helps curate your appearance. Going to Walmart is now so relaxed that you can wear pajamas. Putting on your "best appearance" occurs elsewhere in curated ways (i.e. facebook/instagram posts and careful selfies). You can "partition" your social life so that the people shopping at walmart see pajama-you while the Tinder matches see someone totally different.
How much protein were you getting on the high protein diet? For a long time I heard about "get lots of protein, it helps with satiety" and I thought I had enough protein. When I went to a nutritionist and she made me do a food journal, her first feedback was that I needed to up the proteins even more. And then indeed, I stopped feeling as hungry.
Try 1g/pound of bodyweight (some say ideal bodyweight). For me it's 180-190 g per day. It's hard to eat that much protein. But when I do, the hunger goes away (unusual feeling for me too)
My opinion is the only reliable way to lose weight (other than ozempic) is to eat in such a way that regulates satiety such that you don't feel hungry when losing weight.
Intermittent fasting + lower carb + whole foods can do this. But the trick is satiety in any one person is regulated by multiple processes. I doubt there's a one size fits all and probably the problem gets harder the more satiety is dysregulated.
But I think any approach aimed at undereating in the sense of being hungry is not likely what people who lose weight successfully are doing. Or at least those who avoid rebounds. You'd instead want to find something that is highly satiating and satisfying and that also can't be overeaten.
Example: almonds may be high satiety by some technical definition. But is is very very possible to eat past hunger with them.
In my own experience it is very difficult to eat too much steak. I find it delicious but simply couldn't past a certain point. Others have reported similar results by adding lots of potatoes.
I don't guarantee success by targeting satiety but I think it's worth trying rather than calories or weight directly. At some level you need to roughly figure out macronutrients to know where you can err but anytime I've lost weight it's been by focussing on type of food rather than amount. But strictly so.
I agree and from experience of keeping relatively the same weight 4kg+/- for over a decade. If I need to lose weight I need to undereat consistently and as another commenter mentioned, its also using techniques to remove as much satiety as possible.
I need to eat foods that are nutrient and fiber dense to keep me from feeling hungry or snacking, drinking lots of water etc. And importantly, its understanding that sometimes between meals I might go hungry and that's okay, I don't need to eat straight away to fix that hunger craving.
One of the challenges I faced and I'd say most people face as well, is that eating is a source of joy and comfort and when losing weight you sometimes need to delay that joy or comfort.
> For whatever your metabolism, and whatever your category of calories, fewer calories will still produce weight loss.
I thought that wasn't true, that the human body stores and burns calories at varying rates based on many signals, and that our bodies or some bodies effectively conserve weight or caloric stores at a certain level.
The body can compensate at the margins. Eat 5 fewer calories per day and you will see zero change. Eat 500 fewer calories per day, consistently every day, and you will absolutely see changes. (I'm not actually suggesting that it would be _healthy_ or advisable to drop your diet by 500 calories -- just pointing out that the body cannot compensate indefinitely.)
yeah, you want to force yourself to do some activities that keep your metabolism up along with the restrictions
you can't exercise out of a bad diet but exercise is a helpful supplement to a good diet too. it's just that making yourself do it when you're tired and hungry is draining.
You can, but it's not easy. People who exercise _a lot_ often have trouble eating enough calories. 5,000 to 10,000 calories a day is hard to eat and not out of reach.
I knew a guy who was drinking a gallon of whole milk a day for a while to try to maintain weight.
One of the traps is mental health. People focus on their body when dieting, but there are far more aspects to manage, and forcing themselves to do things they utterly hate will have wider impacts.
At the end of the day they'll blame will power or motivation or whatever else on why the diet failed, but still won't account for these same factors when trying the next diet involving basically the same mechanics.
> they struggle with actually putting it into action [...] conceding to their cravings
The trouble is that people who have no problems to do this ... are the ones at risk for anorexia. They lack the instincts that make the rest of us safe from that particular hell.
Healthy relationship with food does not involve restriction or conscious attempts to loose weight. You eat when hungry and stop when not hungry.
The thing that makes anorexia possible (among other things) is you being able to ignore hunger. Healthy organism will instinctively eat when hungry or missing something. The instincts takes over, body produces hormones to override behavior and diet ends.
Yeah but people in this conversation and other conversations about calorie restriction, are not arguing from the standpoint of someone being healthy, and then indulging in unhealthy relationships with food. They are talking about someone who has an unhealthy relationship with food and their body, demonstrable by their excess weight, and talking about ways to correct the poor health by having a healthy relationship with their own will. You need a healthy will in order to manage weight loss due to caloric restriction.
I think a lot of people talking past each other on this topic are really just disagreeing about what healthy will power actually is. To be specific, comments along the lines of "it's not my/their fault, it's the fault of our environment, and the availability of unhealthy food".
I think this is just having an unhealthy will. I think this is also the whole divide on things like ozempic - some people view it as enabling people to have unhealthy will power. Other people view it as the only way someone can have healthy weight. I don't think either party is wrong, I think they are just talking past eachother.
Oh hey, I'm the wife in this story. Having a fixed $/month budget for "things you buy at a grocery store" was doomed from the beginning. All the stuff in your house/pantry are on all kinds of weird replacement cycles that vary with usage and changes in habits. A monthly cadence also makes you sub-optimally plan around price movements.
An attainable goal is to reduce the average amount of monthly grocery spend and you do it by deciding, in advance, things you're no longer going to stock in the house, items you'll replace for cheaper options, or items you'll stock from wholesale clubs.
It's hard to bring the budget for gas down without people driving less. Your wife being the one tasked with filling up the tank is the messenger. It could be an emotional reaction as you describe but I would at least entertain the idea that her "bending the rules" is her way of trying to make an impossible ask doable. Whether she is consciously thinking about it or not, I bet the stuff that "doesn't count" aren't replaced every month and have spikey cost patterns.
I totally agree that you'd need to find a reasonable average weekly cost because costs and timing would vary. In my mind, this means you could find a reasonable average weekly cost that you often go under, and seldom go over. But, it just never happened for us. In principle we could have just kept raising the price ceiling, but eventually that becomes meaningless in the context of a budget. To me, at least, it felt just like calories; what could have been a pretty easy math problem was defeated by human psychology.
This theory is not scientific (food is not energy, the body is not a machine, measurements are not precise etc.) so there is nothing rationale you can say that will convince people who believe in it to switch to something else
cico is true, but you can't measure calories in accurately and you can't be sure of calories out accurately. isn't that fun?
(in practice as you know, you just kinda do it on feel and end up restricting calories enough to lose weight. but my own intuition is that I had to aim for 100 or 200 less than my estimated BMR so the math is very fuzzy isn't it?)
> This feels a LOT like weight loss. Calories in --> calories out is conceptually very simple, but in practice more people struggle with it than not. It certainly cannot be the case that they struggle with the concept; they struggle with actually putting it into action. Lying to themselves, twisting themselves into philosophical knots, and probably most often, conceding to their cravings. Food acquisition is one of out more basic drives, so it should probably be no surprise that people struggle to intellectualize it.
Imagine a piano teacher. Their mantra is practice in --------> skill out. Profound. Every time their students come to them and complain about not being motivated, practice being too dull, experiencing back pain or repetitive stress syndromes, wanting to change up the practice, they just say: practice in equals skill out. What is so hard to understand?
That’s what the "calories in/out" people are like. And this is the only area where this is an accepted argument. Where it is even treated as a valid argument at all.
Everyone knows that you have to put in time on an instrument in order to get better. Everyone. No one denies it. Similarily I don’t think the overlap of weight loss pursuers and deniers of energy conservation as it moves through food groups (plants to cows to humans) is terribly large.
If you truly want to rationally assist people who want to learn the piano or lose weight you do what works. You don’t repeat a truism. Cutting out sugar? Meat? Intermmitteng fasting? Counting calories? Anything that works. You don’t sheepishly point out that they failed to practice their ten hours last week without even asking why didn’t follow through.
The in/out people seem to have a hard time intellectualizing this simple concept.
Calories in -> calories out is flawed (or, rather, not useful) because metabolism is a feedback loop, not a one-way serial process. The types of foods you eat, how they're prepared, and when you eat them have complex influence for how hungry you feel and how much energy you have to exercise or resist impulses, as well as ramifications for the state of your physiology, per nutrient intake.
CICO helps explain weight management issues retrospectively, but it's inadequate with regard to planning, and for maintaining quality of life while working towards a weight management goal.
I don't know the mechanics, but my understanding is that such a water fast also permanently alters your digestion and metabolism.
A (logical extreme) example I was thinking of counterig with: if you eat 500,000 calories in 24 hours on the first of the year, and nothing else for the rest of it, you'll achieve a 1,350 calorie/day average, certainly enough to lose a significant amount of weight. And you will! Because your stomach will have ruptured and you'll be dead by the 2nd. Rotting is one way to burn calories. (I mention this to illustrate how focusing solely on the numbers, to the detriment of the actual lived quality of life during the weight management process, misses the forest for the trees.)
"> Is coffee good for you? What about wine or chocolate? Scientists trying to answer these questions"
These are dumb questions to ask in the first place, because the "you" and "good" here are too personal for any general answer to be useful to most people. Unfortunately, this is not just lazy writing that took complex questions and simplified them to the point of uselessness - we really are asking these kinds of questions :(
Most of this doesn't generalize to populations the size of the world in the way something like "physics" does, because, for starters, we aren't very deterministic or very homogeneous at large scale.
Instead, you end up with millions to tens of millions of people in a subgroup particularly affected or unaffected by something because of genetic variation, etc.
Any reasonable scientist knows this. Instead, the main reason to try to answer these questions framed like this seems to be either to get funding, or to make headlines.
Sometimes we can answer extreme versions of this question (IE it seems data suggests alcohol is fairly universally bad for almost any person, definition of bad, and amount), but that's pretty rare. This then gets used as a "success" to do more poorly designed and thought out studies.
Just because we want to know things doesn't mean we should use mechanisms that we know don't work and produce mostly useless results. This is true even when we don't have lots of mechanisms that do work or produce useful results.
It's much slower and much more expensive, but what we learn is at least more useful.
It's really hard, slow, and expensive to answer questions about particle physics - this doesn't mean we revert to asking atoms to self-report their energy levels and publishing headlines about how "larger atoms that move around more live longer" or whatever based on the results. Instead, we accept that it will hard, slow, and expensive, and therefore, we better get started if we want to ever get somewhere.
It is an important question because people want to think whatever their vice is, it is good for them. Thus you can make lots of money if you can get a headline showing something is good, no matter how bad the study is.
There's have been several studies, well researched and cited, where people who claim to be "diet resistant" are given metabolic markers "double labeled water" that will accurately show caloric intake.
In the NEJM article they note that every single person who claimed to be "diet resistant" was lying about food intake.
> The main finding of this study is that failure to lose weight despite a self-reported low caloric intake can be explained by substantial misreporting of food intake and physical activity. The underreporting of food intake by the subjects in group 1 even occurred 24 hours after a test meal eaten under standardized conditions. In contrast, values for total energy expenditure, resting metabolic rate, thermic effect of food, and thermic response to exercise were comparable with those of obese subjects in group 2 who did not report a history of diet resistance.
and
> In addition to their greater degree of misreporting, the subjects in group 1 used thyroid medication more often, had a stronger belief that their obesity was caused by genetic and metabolic factors and not by overeating, and reported less hunger and disinhibition and more cognitive restraint than did the subjects in group 2. Subjects presenting for weight-control therapy who had these findings in association with a history of self-reported diet resistance would clearly convey the impression that a low metabolic rate caused their obesity.
Calories-in/Calories-out is true for everyone, and everyone can lose weight by putting down his fork.
I've heard about using food tracking apps as a planner instead. Instead of logging what you ate, you add what you PLAN to eat for the day, and adjust accordingly to fulfill the nutrition requirements.
It’s also just really hard unless you live off packaged meals or only eat thing that are isolated.
Something like a curry cooked in kitchen and shared among a family is a complete black box as to who got how many calories. Maybe one person got a different ratio of rice to curry. Or this family likes a sweeter type of curry etc
For an individual trying to lose weight this isn't a problem - if you are not losing then you just need to eat less. For population level trying to figure out if curry is healthy in the first place this matters though (is it curry itself that is good/bad, one of the spices, or how much sweetener added - if all we know is curry that isn't helpful)
No, you get a food scale and weight every single ingredient before adding it to the meal. As for who got how many calories, weighing of the portions should provide that information given the ingredients and how much of each there is.
Your metabolism is a system. Like any system, data about its inputs and outputs can be gathered if you would but measure it. Make getting accurate portion sizes a part of your daily routine.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 309 ms ] threadSure, but with sufficiently many people, these effects will usually average out. I'm not saying the situation is great, but it's still an important field of study and we need to make progress in some way.
No they won't. If you have two correlated factors and only measure one of them you can easily get to totally wrong conclusions.
If you have a food that is more often eaten by people doing a lot of sports, you will measure that eating that food is correlated with being more healthy. But it would obviously be fallacious to conclude that this food is more beneficial to health than other foods.
In the case of dietary studies, not really. There are a few factors which are known to have a big effect on your health--being wealthy, active, and moderate in particular--and a lot of the big studies are really just uncovering yet another proxy for those factors.
Of course, you can turn that around and make the realization that your diet doesn't really matter: there's no diet that will magically make up for being a couch potato. And outside the main well-known interventions (e.g., eating less calories), the solution is generally to just be more active and things like that rather than trying to tweak your diet.
I've heard of other attempts at things like this. Generally you are not locked into a cell, you are removed to a very remote location by bus so that if you want to leave you have to go through a formal withdrawal process - while waiting for the bus - during which they convince you to stay). They then not only control your diet they also give you exercise (often lead by military drill instructors) thus being a healthier environment than a diet cell. I have no idea how much money they make.
Doing studies with humans ist just hard!
You can of course study these people, but the only study anyone is interesting in is how different changes in conditions affect how much people lose and how much money you can get out of them.
That's what I always thought about the kind of research RFK Jr is always talking about. Normally it's not ethical to do food / medicine trials with prisoners, but these would be trials like giving regular food to one set of prisoners and food without dyes or chemicals to the other. The "test group" would just be getting healthier food.
Seems like just radically measuring portion sizes might fit into the same kind of thing. And you could probably measure activity level more easily, too.
Most people dismiss dietary research because it simply condemns their favorite foods. They accept causal inferences made from epidemiology everywhere else.
This seems like it would be an issue for any studies relying on absolute food consumption being accurate. Most studies I come across frame their findings in relative terms (likely for this very reason): Individuals who engage in more of X compared to their peers show a correlation with outcome Y.
For example, if you’re trying to determine whether morning coffee consumption correlates with longevity it doesn’t seem particularly relevant if you believe everyone is underreporting their food intake, as the article implies; it's a relative comparison.
Sure, those findings often get twisted into clickbait headlines like “X is the secret to a longer life!” but that’s more a popular science problem than an issue with dietary research itself.
1. If you ask someone who much the drink double the answer 2. If you ask them how much the smoke, multiply the answer by five 3. If you ask them how often they have sex, divide the answer by 10.
If everyone is under-reporting their alcohol consumption, that seems fine. The absolute numbers will be way off, the relative numbers to their peers won't.
Edit: there is another issue I forget until now: time. Statistically I have several more decades of life left. So even if you get accurate results of my meals yesterday, you need to report when I died, and you probably won't have the meals for the rest of my life. Did some meal I at when I was 10 have a big effect on my life? For that matter if I know you are tracking just one day's meals I will probably eat what I think is better and that doesn't tell you anything about what I eat the rest of the time.
It is easy to track people who have had a heart attack - they are likely to die of another heart attack in a few years so the study times are short. However does having had a heart attack mean either genetic difference such that your results only apply to a subset of the population, or perhaps some other factor of having had a heart attack.
This is a flaw in the data that is much harder to account for.
People with bigger appetites underestimate their food consumption, people with smaller appetites overstate.
Not to mention the degree of over/under statement will vary wildly. "A big meal" might be 300 calories for somebody with an eating disorder, or 3000+ for somebody on the opposite end of the spectrum.
The idea of outliers and systematic biases isn’t new to statistics, relative comparisons are still useful.
There is no way to know whether your sample size is representative. What amount of fraternity brothers and Mormons cancel each other out?
>and regardless both are dwarfed by the large middle of the population that likely systematically and reliably under-reports their drinking by a few units.
And? That does not prevent spurious correlations.
I knew a guy that complained that he "ate like a lion" and yet couldn't gain weight.
Turns out, his breakfast was typically a single egg and a slice of toast. Lunch would be half a sandwich and a bag of chips that he wouldn't finish. Dinner of course varied, but basically was like 4-6 oz of meat of some sort and a small side of veggies.
Overall, his daily calorie intake was probably only around 1,000 calories.
I don't know if this qualified as an eating disorder, or what, considering when we hear about someone undereating, it's because they're trying to lose weight. He was trying to GAIN weight and yet was still horrendously undereating.
For your specific example - "morning coffee" could be anything from plain espresso shot to full 600+ calorie starbucks "coffee" but the meta-study-machine will lump them together.
It's kind of like feeding all of reddit's comments into chatgpt, asking it about stuff, and trusting its answers at a society-level with your health on the line.
You're inadvertently proving my point, though.
If morning caffeine is correlated with longevity, regardless of the vehicle/extra sugar/etc and controlling for the easy usual circumstances like income, that's pretty useful information!
Exactly. Those studies either don't get done, or when they're done, they produce garbage results that get ignored or get interpreted as diminishing the importance of absolute food consumption.
> it doesn’t seem particularly relevant if you believe everyone is underreporting their food intake
It says that virtually everyone underreports. It doesn't say that everyone underreports equally, and there are good reasons to expect this not to be the case. If embarrassment is a contributing factor, for example, you would expect people who are more embarrassed about how they eat to underreport more. If people remember meals better than they remember snacks, people who snack more will underreport more than people who snack less. If additional helpings are easier to forget than initial helpings, people will underreport moreish foods more than they underreport foods that are harder to binge on. With so many likely systematic distortions, it would be surprising if everyone underreported equally.
I always wondered if i could volunteer for this types of studies somehow
There's a whole range of products here which seem like they should exist but just don't (but I hardly want to do a hardware startup).
I imagine almost everyone will add bad data in a study at some point with the best of intentions.
I think tracking calories for a couple of weeks can be very enlightening for a lot of people, granted you don't have a personality type where this can get you into trouble. But for the long haul it's not really useful or even feasible, you're better off getting to know what sort of way of eating suits you best and how to correct if you're getting off course. Anyone can stick to a very strict regime for three months, but the trick is to stick to a proper diet you can enjoy for three decades and then three decades more.
I've been tracking consistently for about 5 years. It's feasible.
This is why one of the best ways to lose weight is to just keep a food diary / count calories. You don't need any special / fad diet, just the act of trying to keep a note of everything you eat will cause you to stop and think, "I don't need to eat this".
One can (and should) extend that concept to anything. Be conscious about what you do. Then you likely know, if you are not doing good - and can change it.
Turned out I was also stupidly deficient on protein day to day.
Getting protein in takes dedication & awareness
I did a daily shake for a while as an after gym recovery food and I still had more calories from carbs than protein. it's just difficult.
You can give yourself an ability akin to time travel by writing things down first.
If I write down the calories afterwards, I get the "oh, I shouldn't have done that" feeling at times. I'd like a little time travel button that takes me back to before I did, and let me adjust my behaviour and run through the situation again. If I write it down first I get to have the "oh, that's not worth it" feeling up front and decide to do something else.
This made a big difference for me, both lowering what I was eating and making me happier about the choices I made.
And even if you don't record with 100pc accuracy, there's still a lot of value
Eating homemade stir fried celtuce [1]? Homemade steamed marble goby [2]? Nope, out of luck. They only have nutrition info for packaged mac and cheese.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtuce
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyeleotris_marmorata
I wonder if the data are always skewed in a particular direction. For example, do people typically underreport junk food and overreport salads? Or do they omit entire meals? Or snacks?
This is why calorie counting is ballparking to get us a general idea, and not a precise science.
Rather crude and fun, but that's it, see Bomb Calorimeter. I guess it makes sense in retrospect, how else would you do it?
They usually just measure standard basic ingredients, then you roughly match them to your recipe and add it up. No wonder food labelling is just a ballpark.
We can't eat wood (or coal) but they're very calorific when measured via bomb calorimetry.
Calorimetry is just measuring the heat transfer from combustion, usually by measuring the temperature change of a known quantity of water in the classical experiment. You perform versions of it in high school and undergrad
Calories are just a unit of energy, and heat can be related back to energy (joules for people using SI)
The alternative would be empirical animal studies that look directly at weight as a function of feed. You will note that agribusiness doesn't mess around with calories when money is on the line. Instead relies on empirical data for mass as a function of feed type.
This is true, because of "caloric availability".[1] If you took that into account, you would have a better idea of how many calories your body is absorbing.
[1]: https://x.com/gilesyeo/status/1084463469997555717
There is a virtually infinite amount of cofounding variables, genetics, meal timing, fitness level, sedentarity, &c. . It's a 80/20 type of problem, do the 80, forget about the 20, you'll never be able to get your answers anyways.
If you look and feel like shit you're most likely eating like shit. If you look and feel good a glass of wine every now and then or a bite of chocolate after dinner won't do much.
Unfortunately for these studies you have multiple selection criteria that are nonrandom:
(1) interest in the study
(2) adherence to protocol of the study
(3) reporting back in
If nutrition science wants to be serious, their N should not be in the 10s but rather the 10,000s.
That has an expense, but for important things it is absolutely the right thing to do.
Plus it doesn't even matter what is true for the statistical average, given the infinite amount of variables and outcomes one glass of wine might be statistically beneficial but absolutely terrible for your own health because you have one specific gene combination or one specific microbiome mix. Which means you'd have to go through the same regimen of analysing and tracking all the parameters for yourself for it to be applicable
No one can monitor or measure everything, whether philosophically (Heisenberg uncertainty principle) or prosaically (cost). But if something is true, we can often probe it enough to get at least a low-res idea of the nature of it. This moves us light years ahead of primarily using our personal experience, gut, and vibe to establish epistemologically sound assertions.
It is true in the limit but not useful in practice.
When it comes to studying food / diet studies really do need to be a lot more careful about trying to control their variables.
Nutrition science as a field seems to have few absolute truths and many many overturned papers / results.
- sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils, mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself
- different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat)
- Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
- counting how much you take of a meal shared with others, especially when you serves yourself multiple time
- different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January
I have the feeling that might have been easy at some point in my life when I lived alone and mostly eat packaged food and raw vegetable that looked like clones but not when I share my meal, cook a lot more raw un-barcoded aliments and gained confidence to dose "by the eye" without recipes.
If you’re trying to measure your vitamin intake this may not work for you, though.
Many are water soluble and so any excess in the body is peed out by the end of the day and so all tests are useless. Fortunately you typically get more than enough as part of a typical balanced diet and so you shouldn't need to supplement in the first place if you are eating well. Though it is almost impossible to overdose so if it makes you feel good there is no harm in making the vitamin companies rich.
The rest you can get blood tests. In general it isn't worth testing unless your doctor suspects something is wrong though. Just eat a healthy diet and get plenty of exercise and you will mostly be fine. Maybe take some vitamin D in winter, but ask your doctor (my doctor told me vitamin d in winter so that is what I do)
I maintain a muscular 225 by eating dairy, eggs, and meat. If I want to drop down to 215, I drop dairy.
Becoming obese always seemed a little extreme to me and I fail to imagine how someone could reach that state without the accordingly extreme food-related habits - though maybe I'm just lucky to have the "right" metabolism and thus cannot relate.
Though even if obesity was always linked to eating disorders, I understand that "just stop" is not an appropriate response to that issue.
Figure out what one table spoon of oil contains, and when you make a sauce use a table spoon while pouring to count roughly how much oil you are putting in.
For shared meals, or self-restricted portions, I just add the entire meal upfront to my book-keeping, and then after are are done eating I subtract what I didn't eat.
You don't need to keep track of the family history of your cucumbers.
As a way of life, weighing and counting macros also seems pretty doomed to because it's just so much work, but it's very doable for a few days to realign your view of what an appropriate amount of food is, if you're diligent and mindful enough to not have a soda or a snack without thinking
Spices and everything else in general have so little in them it doesn't matter. Something like seeds or pepper more so, but you're hardly going to add so many it changes anything.
Which is kind of the point: you look this stuff up once in order to get a sense of what you're actually doing, and quickly realize what is and isn't going to matter overall. If you're really concerned, you start from a fixed mass you'll season from, and then just use that up as you go.
i.e. if you know you'll be adjusting added sugar, then estimate the total amount of sugar you're comfortable putting in the meal up front, and work from that pool. If it's less, great.
- while cooking, you weigh every ingredient. Either I just take photos of the scale with my phone, or I write it on a sheet of paper.
- when cooking is done, you weigh the total food (easiest if you know the weight of your pots)
- when eating, you weigh your portions
After some time, you realise that you need to be precise for some things (oil, butter) but can just guess or ignore some things (eg. onions and miso have so little calories that you really don't need to weigh them).
If it's a dish like Lasagna, you don't even need to weigh it at the end, just estimate what fraction of the dish your serving is.
[1]: https://fddb.info/db/de/produktgruppen/produkt_verzeichnis/i...
I also leave the nutrient part on just eating a varied diet, with lots of whole foods.
I personally use MyFitnessPal, weigh the calorie significant food (e.g. the Protein, starches, fat-rich vegetables and fatty sauces) and establish a rough estimate about the calories.
I try to maintain the error an order of magnitude lower than my estimate. That's why I don't bother weighing leafy and "watery" vegetables (e.g. spinach, letucce or cucurbits). Also, I try to keep an eye of sauces like Mayonnaise, but I usually relax on Mustard (I dunno where you live, but mustard here tends to be low-fat by default).
That error can be easily burnt by the casual movement we do in the day.
It tracks not only calories, but also macros and micros.
I never bothered with weighing the final result or portions, instead I just always divvied up the final product into equal individual portions and divided by the total number of portions. That works well if you freeze them.
Of course, all the calculation is a tremendous amount of work. I did it when I needed to lose weight and only did it for a couple of months. But it definitely "calibrated" my understanding of calories -- e.g. non-starchy veggies have barely any at all, while cheese and butter and oil can easily double the calories in a dish.
I only weigh everything I eat when I am actively trying to lose weight, however, and when I am doing so I deliberately restrict my diet to meals where I won't waste a lot of time weighing everything. If I'm trying to maintain or gain weight, I don't really bother with it.
But most of it is a guessing game and making an assumption that it will all even out later. Ignore spices - you can assume 25 calories a day and it’ll still be too much.
Be diligent about oils. 9 calories a gram bites you quickly.
But ultimately, if you miss 100 calories a day, and are in a 500 calorie deficit recorded, you are still going to lose .8 pounds a week. And if that is consistent, adjust your portions and be fine with how you record.
And that’s the key - we know nutrition is variable. You won’t get it perfect. You just have to adjust for the imperfections.
And the thing is, you'll need to do this anyway - because you can't be sure in advance how many calories represents a "500 calorie deficit" for you, in your specific current conditions.
I was quite underweight in my youth, but I successfully reversed these kinds of feedback techniques to gain weight, and currently maintain what seems to be a healthy level. John Walker (co-founder of Autodesk, who passed away early last year) wrote The Hacker's Diet describing the basic technique. It's still live at https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ .
> - sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils, mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself
You weigh all this out once, store it as a recipe and just weigh how much sauce you're putting on things. Oils are so high calorie they're basically all the same, and the only other contributor is really if the seed mass is substantial. Log your upper end, and just assume the sauce comes out as that value. Your sauce recipe is hardly going to vary by an enormous amount, just provided you bias it towards the upper end for the purposes of tracking.
EDIT: Also since people have been dropping app links - https://github.com/davidhealey/waistline this is what I use on Android. Libre with nice integrations, works great.
> sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils, mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself
Yes. The thing is that it also makes you aware of how much everything "costs" you in terms of calories. You become a lot more aware of how big a glug you give of that oil.
> different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat)
I don't understand this part of your question.
> Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
My goal was not to be "accurate", but to lose weight. Overestimating slightly was in fact preferred. So this is not an effect I would have worried about.
> counting how much you take of a meal shared with others, especially when you serves yourself multiple time
You estimate. You know that the whole thing was X so if you eat a quarter of it that is 0.25*X.
> different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January
Cucumber is flavoured water. Whatever is the variability in calories you can probably just ignore it.
Starting with pretty much everything can be a good idea for people to get a sense of what's in what foods. How much does an onion typically weigh? What's that actually adding? What's the difference between getting lean and fattier meat? How much oil are you really adding?
After that it's easier to start dropping things - if I'm trying to lose weight I simply do not care precisely how much celery I've added for the sofrito. I do care about the amount of butter, oil, rice, bread, pasta though.
I'm not concerned about getting fat adding paprika, so I'm not weighing spices. Even if I'm trying to track macros that's just not going to be a considerable contributor to anything.
> - different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat)
Prep/measure things first.
Last three things that smooth things over for me
1. Meal prep on a different day. I'm not in as much of a rush at night, it's proportionally less time involved measuring something for a larger number of meals/sauces/components.
2. Having measuring spoons and fast scales nearby.
3. Measuring before & after amounts rather than exactly what to add. If I need to add butter to a sauce until it's the right consistency, or flour to a dough, or whatever then weighing as I go is a nightmare. Instead just weigh it before and after and you'll see what you used. This tip works pretty well for oil too.
For the other points, I think with any kind of data measurement there is a balance between precision and convenience. Trying to consistently track calories is hard enough, trying to track nutrients at the level of precision you are suggesting sounds technically challenging and frankly exhausting. I think a lot of people will take "average" values for a cucumber, an onion, etc. Like others have said, consistency in measurement is probably more important than finding the absolute truth.
> - sauces you make yourself?
I don't count them. I keep my sauces simple and use them sparingly. I'm not trying to get down to sub-10% bf.
> - different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat)
I count them raw, or if my tracker has them, count them as cooked. I don't care about them being super accurate.
> - Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
I don't care. The calorie counts are basically just estimates anyway. It's less a science than a mental game to control your ballpark calories in.
> - counting how much you take of a meal shared with others, especially when you serves yourself multiple time
If I'm making the meal, I count for the whole meal, then estimate for the share. See above for rationale (I don't care that much.) If my friend has cooked for me, I don't care at all, and just try to eat a "reasonable" portion.
> - different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January
The differences are probably not going to matter all that much. By weight, a cucumber is a cucumber is a cucumber; I'm not trying to be perfect, just get a general sense of calories.
:)
Typically I figure out the actual weight/volume once or twice to get a sense of how much it is, then just eyeball it most of the time and go for the same amount as last time I measured.
We'd get emails about people seeing 577 calories on the Palm Pilot and 578 calories on the desktop. "None of the numbers are that accurate anyway!" was a sensible answer but not very brand aligned.
Your daily reminder that ED means more than one thing.
The point of measuring is to be * as accurate as possible *, not 100% error-free. It helps to better estimate portion sizes, calorie / macro amounts. This is enough precision to control weight gain / loss correctly.
A lot of people also get their maintenance calories estimation wrong, so it doesn't matter if you can measure your food down to the molecules but still eat too much / too little.
I measured my weight every morning (after peeing) and wrote it down, and used it to compute weekly average.
I did weigh ingredients for the first couple of weeks to get an idea, but after that just did rough estimates coupled with tuning based on feedback from the body weight every week.
Had a near perfect linear trend for the year I did this.
After that, I never looked up another calorie, and counted based on how the food felt, and basically lost exactly 0.5 kg/week over a period of 5 months. (500 kcal deficit/day).
Even if I'm wrong for a particular meal, the over/under-estimates must be cancelling out. My food situation makes it extremely hard to actually calculate calories, so I had to develop this skill.
But over that week, I "calibrated" myself. I know, vibe-wise, how it feels to be eating the correct amount of food. And now I just keep doing that.
The measuring of ingredients is much easier if you use a scale. A case like cold sauces where you can put the mixing vessel on the scale is the easiest case.
On sharing with others: I'd always calculate the total calories and total weight of the entire dish and then simply place the serving plate on the scale and calculate the taken calories based on the weight.
For partitioning a meal: Sometimes I weigh my portion. Over time I've trained myself to estimate the weight of what I take such that my visual estimates are reasonable. Eventually my visual estimates have gotten better.
A lot of your other challenges are just not that important: If you're off by a few calories in either direction, it's not a big deal. It'll average out in the long run. If you're systematically off, you'll eventually recalibrate your goals anyway based on how you feel and/or your weight patterns vs what the calorie counts tell you.
Yup, it will. Nobody said tracking nutrients was quick.
> - different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat)
Cooking time doesn't matter for macronutrients.
> - Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
They don't for macronutrients.
> - different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January
The differences don't really matter for calorie purposes. High-caloric things don't vary in density meaningfully.
You seem to be confusing tracking macronutrients (carbs, fats, protein) with micronutrients (vitamin C etc.). People track macros, generally to lose weight. I've never heard of anyone tracking micros. I don't think it's even possible.
well, many say it's "easy" (it's not)
like the worry about sauces is true but if you eat mostly chicken and rice and one slice of bread a day you can really get that variability down. when I was heavily restricting I would only cook very simple things like that and otherwise eat packaged food, and it certainly worked to lose weight. but you sacrifice variety and flavor and you'll feel kinda stressed and hungry for months at a time.
the last factor is living with people who are not dieting - I personally think this makes the required willpower basically impossible. if there is food in the house you will eventually succumb to the temptation of eating it in my experience. it's much easier if you live alone and only have the diet food in the house at all, buying nothing else, etc.
some prepared foods are basically the "empty calories" that people always talk about, like chips. high calorie (and usually like 3-4 servings per bag, not single serving really at all) and also low satiation so they almost make you hungrier to eat.
Eventually I have learned to control exactly what I eat, in order to control my weight, but I no longer find this difficult, mainly because normally I eat only what I cook myself (with the exception of trips away from home).
When I experiment how to cook something that I have never cooked before, after I reach a stable recipe with which I am content, I measure carefully every ingredient, either with digital kitchen scales or with a set of volumetric spoons. Then I compute the relevant nutrient content, e.g. calories, protein content, fatty acid profile, possibly some vitamin and mineral content, in the cases when there exists a significant content of that.
While I do this carefully the first time and I record the results, whenever I cook the same later I do not need to pay attention to this, because I already know the nutrient content, so summing for all the portions of food that I plan to eat in that day I can easily estimate the daily intake for everything.
The essential change in my habits that enabled me to lose the excessive weight was that in the past I was eating without paying attention to quantity, until I was satiated, while now I always plan what amount of food I will eat during a day and I always cook the food in portions of the size that I intend to eat, which is always the same for a given kind of food, so I no longer have to repeat any of the computations that I have made when I have determined for the first time a recipe.
In a recipe, things like spices can be ignored, because they add negligible nutrients. Even many vegetable parts, like leaves or stalks, or even some of the roots or of the non-sweet non-fatty fruits, may be ignored even when used in relatively great quantities, because their nutrient content is low. So such ingredients may be added while cooking without measuring them.
For many vegetables and fruits, which are added to food as a number of pieces, I do not measure them when cooking, but when buying. I typically buy an amount sufficient for next week, which is weighed during buying. Then I add every day a n approximate fraction of what I have bought, e.g. 1/7 if used for cooking every day. Then for estimating the average daily intake, I divide by 7 what I have bought for the week.
What cannot be ignored and must always be measured during cooking, to be sure that you add the right amount, are any kinds of seeds or nuts or meat or dairy or eggs, anything containing non-negligible amounts of starch or sugar, any kind of fat or oil or protein extracts. Any such ingredients must always be measured by weight or by volume, to be sure that you add the right amount to food.
Nevertheless, measuring the important ingredients adds negligible time to cooking and ensures perfectly reproducible results.
I eat only what I cook myself and I measure carefully everything that matters, but the total time spent daily with measurements is extremely small. I doubt that summing all the times spent with measuring food ingredients during a whole day can give a total of more than one minute or two. Paring and peeling vegetables or washing dishes takes much more time.
That trick is to focus on months instead of days. Then count your calories when you buy the food instead of when you eat it. For example lets say you buy a loaf of bread. It is 100 calories per slice and there are 17 slices. Add 1700 to your calorie count for the month.
At the end of the month you can approximate your average daily calories as the amount of calories you bought that month divided by the number of days.
Some things you buy in a month might last into the next month. That will introduce some variation but over longer periods it should cancel out. If you want you can smooth that out a bit by logically splitting those items when they have a lot of calories.
For example consider jar of mayonnaise that might last a few months and is 8000 calories. Instead of counting all 8000 in the month you buy it you can count it as 2000 that month and 2000 more each of the next 3 months.
A month is a long time and the measurement error will accumulate every day, especially with fats. Not so much problem if you do that with cucumber or spinach.
Over several months the errors will average out. Unless you eat out a lot, then the above method doesn't work. However if you are single (this is the most unlikely factor!) and cook most meals at home then calories in the door - what you throw away = calories that you ate. That is good enough.
Alternately: you can note the day you first and last ate from the container.
Or what I used to do: make tally marks on the container to figure out how many portions it typically provides; then, going forward, count a "standard" portion of that food accordingly.
I have a whole food, plant-based diet and I cook all my own food. I don't buy any processed food, anything with anything animal in it, refined sugar, refined oils (except olive oil for the air fryer), refined carbohydrates, things preserved with salt/vinegar/oil or any stimulants. For B12 I eat Marmite (UK). Most of what I eat is that rare thing: fresh vegetables.
Because I eat almost everything (sometimes there are bad apples), I throw very little away and that includes packaging too, where I am surprised at how little that amounts to. I have a small box for recycling and I only have to empty it ever two to three months.
I could cheat and not keep the receipt on a huge box of chocolates, beer and biscuits but I would only be fooling myself.
As for bread, I just buy flour and yeast, to put it in the breadmaking machine. I buy wholemeal flour which is white flour with some of the stripped off parts of the wheat thrown back in. I am happy with that compromise as it makes a very nice loaf.
Apart from Marmite, nothing I buy has much of an ingredients label, a cauliflower is a cauliflower and has no ingredients.
The receipts are my way of accounting, I could look at them all for the last year and buy everything I need that is shelf-stable for the year ahead.
Mayonnaise used to be something I did eat a lot of, but now that is on the banned list, and I have no idea why I would ever want to eat that stuff nowadays.
I eat to satiety and beyond, my physical activity consists of walking/cycling and I am fitter than I have ever been with a digestive tract that is rock solid. Bloating, constipation or the runs are alien conditions to me, I also get a 'long range bladder' into the deal.
I don't count calories, my goal is to get as many as possible from just vegetables, beans, legumes, nuts, grains and fruit. I love cooking and my 'self care' routine. Since there are seasons, my food always changes, right now spring greens are floating my boat.
The idea of keeping the receipts is to have all of them with no banned items in them, and also to track my nutrition experiments. At the moment I am trying to do a year long streak of 'an apple a day' to see what that is about.
Regarding counting macronutrients, why bother? Nobody counts fibre, which is crucial for the lower gut, with protein we eat 2x in the West and nobody is counting phytochemicals in plants beyond the 'five a day' thing. With the exception of bread, everything I eat counts towards the 'five a day' so I am probably on twenty portions of fruit or veg a day, not that I am counting.
I don't mind people wanting to diet to fit into a dress for a special event, that is something that works for them, albeit with yoyoing. I want to be at my fittest during the summer months, to go cycling, and, during winter, I don't care. In this way I am embracing yoyoing, however, my weight does not go up over winter, I just lose some muscle, to get it back again during spring.
As such, things like oils and miso can be heavily caloric, and need to be measured strictly. This is also true of most proteins and carbs.
Seeds and tomato sauce can have some caloric density, and should also be measured, but it is less of a priority.
Mustard, lemon juice, most spices (that don't contain sugar), onions, cucumbers (regardless of density) and parsley do not have any substantial caloric density and can be considered "free" unless used in great quantities. Nobody ever gained weight from mustard, lemons, onions, cucumbers and parsley.
As already mentioned, micronutrients like vitamins are not functionally possible to be measured in a home kitchen. If you're concerned about any decrease in micronutrients, simply use vitamin and mineral supplements. Macros like proteins, carbs and fats, on the other hand, can generally be measured using typical cups, spoons and scales, even with leftovers.
When making a meal shared with others if you are looking to strictly track calories, it is easier to break things into macronutrients and mix them on individual plates or bowls rather than cook as a total pot. It's much easier to measure a protein (say, 4oz chicken), a carb (say, a potato), a sauce and a fat individually portioned on a plate than an arbitrary stew. (As above, low-calorie vegetables likely do not need to be measured separately unless there are added macronutrients.)
> micronutrients like vitamins are not functionally possible to be measured
... my concern is micro: I'm engaging on a full vegetable diet (+shrooms +minerals!) and am concerned about thinks like iron, selenium, calcium... I (got-used-to) love vegetable and eat a lot of them so I'm probably fine with most micros, however may miss some selenium for exemple. Some research seems to show that too much vitamins is usually ok but too much minerals may not be. The more I read the more I'm scared! What makes me feel safe is the three long-time vegan I know seems healthy and don't take any supplement appart obvious B12. Perhaps I should just focus on other thinks that doing mad about micros...
Historically mine have always been low but in September of 2023 I started a diet and started taking iron supplements, and when I got my bloodwork I was in the happy "green" range.
ETA:
I should point out that I'm a pretty tall dude (~6'5"), which might make it easier for me to avoid getting too much iron, but if I were getting too much iron I assume it would probably show up in my blood tests?
Don't worry about how leftover nutrients decrease over time: you'll get enough nutrients in a well balanced diet without having to worry about the minutia. If you're really worried about it, pop a multivitamin for cheap insurance.
Also don't worry about the variation in calories between one type of cucumber / apple / whatever vs. another. Those variations aren't significant and they probably average out anyway. Realize too that the sources aren't exact in the first place: once source is likely to give a different caloric value for something like dried beans vs another.
If you're going to track, don't get too caught up worrying about if the absolute value of the calories you're recording is 100% accurate because even if they were, you can't track your energy expenditure 100% accurately. If the bathroom scale goes in the wrong direction for you, adjust your caloric intake to compensate. Look at trends over the week and over the month vs day to day variations and it won't take long to zero in on the right number for you.
I didn’t make a ton of sauces myself, but if it was then I would round spices down to zero and weigh the main caloric components (think mayo, soy sauce, sugar, oil, tomato paste, etc)
I always weighed the uncooked food, so different cooking times was a non factor.
As for nutrients decreasing, I dealt with this by not believing in it. Seriously though, I was tracking fats, carbs, and proteins which to my knowledge do not meaningfully decay in non negligible amounts.
I lived alone so I didn’t often have to cook for multiple people. When I did I would just make 2 omelets or waffles or whatever and weigh mine.
As far as different species/cultivation methods, I realized there was an absolute edge to my ability to track. For example: bread is often listed at 70 calories per slice, but if you weigh each slice, you’ll find it deviates from what the package considers a “slice” of bread substantially. Further, you’ll often find packages that are inconsistent. For example, you might see a box that claims 14g of a food is 5 calories but the entire 28g container is also listed at 15 calories.
Count your servings of whole vegetables/fruit. Try to MAXIMIZE these. Yes, maximize in order to lose weight.
It's far easier to track just this small subset of food. If you are maximizing these items, you'll naturally start feeling full and eat less sweets. Try to do this slowly over time, changing your diet dramatically overnight will cause you to hate the process and give up.
Change your diet less than 10% per week, keep eating all of your favorite guilty pleasure foods, just incorporate more healthy foods you enjoy as well, ideally before you eat the less healthy items to give yourself time to start feeling full from them. Slowly find more dishes heavy in vegetables that you like. Try to eat them more often. If you're cooking for yourself or serving yourself, try to increase the ratio of vegetable to other items.
Getting pizza? Maybe do a side salad first or a get a veggie pizza. Don't try to cut the pizza entirely until you're further along in your journey.
Don't stress about it. If you're consistently finding ways to make small changes like this you'll start heading in the right direction over the long haul and your pallet will adapt to enjoy the foods you're not used to slowly.
If people are hitting that goal then they can start moving into more nuanced dietary changes like minimizing adde sugars and sodium, or maximizing nuanced micros and diversity.
I really like this aspect, the inside-out skin care, and I now see little point in eating something such as a huge bowl of pasta or rice because of a lack of phytochemicals. I need green veggies, orange ones, red ones and the phytochemicals that make them so.
I think that 'nutrition experiments' are what you need, so, as you say, small changes. This means discontinuing things as well as adopting new things. With an 'experiment' in can be for a month. I quit processed foods, dairy and much else in this way, to note the improvements to things like oral health, joint pain, digestion and so on.
You are right about changing the palate, it actually takes about ten days for the taste buds to be replaced.
It's less important to get the calorie numbers perfect, and more important to be consistent in your under/over reporting. To me, it's a tool to track the consistency of my diet. No amount of over/under reporting is hiding 2 slices of pizza on a graph.
In sweet dishes, 2 TBSP sugar is 120 calories. In savory dishes, 1 TBSP oil is 100 calories. None of the other minor ingredients have any appreciable calories. You should be able to predict quantities within a 1 TBSP tolerance range. The rest of your calories come from foods with visible volume, and chatgpt does a good job of predicting their calories from screenshots. With that, hopefully, you don't under-report any meal by more than 200 calories. If you're following a recipe, dump the whole thing into chatgpt, voila.
Over 2 meals, under-reporting by 200 calories feels like a lot. But wait to have 1 milkshake, beer or 1 tiny baklava and see the graph shoot beyond any of these pesky concerns. The goal is to track and be accountable for the latter: the ultra-palatable foods. The extra onions and parsley are not making you fat.
For outside food, you can find official numbers reported by fast food places. Add 20% to their estimate. Actually, add 10% to all estimates. Every your own food. If a full meal randomly lands under 500 calories. I look at it with scrutiny. It takes careful effort to stay under 500 and feel full. If it happens consistently and you don't lose weight, then you're tracking something wrong.
PSA: NUTS HAVE A SH*T TON OF CALORIES. ALWAYS REPORT THEM. YOU WILL BE SHOCKED. _____
The system has worked quite well for me.
In all cases, my weight gain has corresponded to long periods of door dashing, liquid calories & dessert binges. On these days, my daily calorie consumption jumps by ~800 calories. Getting your oil intake wrong by 1 TBSP makes no difference to that number. Focus on the main culprits.
____
P.S: ofc, if you care about micros, my comment is irrelevant.
People who are tracking everything are usually doing it because they're trying to achieve a particular goal that involves cutting or bulking. I don't know too many people who do rigorous calorie tracking to achieve maintenance unless their body is their profession.
I wouldn't really recommend tracking long-term, but doing it for a week or so just to get a sense of how much you're currently consuming is a good idea.
I can't speak for anyone else, and I actually do try and weigh everything, but if I forget to weigh or the portions are too small to measure with my cheap kitchen scale: I weigh out my serving of the finished product, and Google either the restaurant or premade-grocery-version of what I made and look at their nutrition labels.
Obviously it's not going to be perfect, but I figure that my homemade pizza sauce will have roughly the same ingredients as the Ragu pizza sauce at the grocery store and thus roughly the same calories and nutrition at a per-ounce level. I always assume that my homemade stuff is 20% higher in calories more just to compensate for uncertainty, but doing this I did manage to lose about 60lbs.
Some days you'll go over, others go under etc.
It helps a lot of your partner is also weighing etc
Where it is really hard though is at a BigCo office where food is free and self-served. I have no idea what I am loading onto my plate - I try to search for something similar in the app and deliberately over-estimate the quantity knowing that there is a tendency to under estimate.
Really though weighing things is almost beside the point. It's about being aware/mindful of what you are eating. Without tracking it, it is easy to absent mindedly just snack on things and then entirely forget about that brownie you had with your morning coffee, or that ice cream you had at lunch time. You start to make choices like "Hmm I wont have that chocolate now because it would be a disappointment not to have some for dessert at dinner time" etc, whereas without tracking you'd probably just eat everything and not even realise/remember/be-aware of it.
The error in estimation of foods eaten out I treat as a constant factor baked into the daily caloric budget. If I'm gaining weight, the budget just needs to be tightened, i.e. rescaled to account for an error factor that was larger than anticipated. The problem basically becomes estimating one's own estimation error, then adjusting.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39134209/
Obviously such studies are far more invasive and expensive to run than the classic "fill out of a survey" observational study [1], so they tend to be the outliers. But they exist and have incredibly useful results.
[1] There is a widely cited nutritional survey vehicle called the Nurses' Health Study, and it is the foundation of countless largely disposable nutrition clickbait results. This survey-based observation has been used to prove that meat is bad for you, and good for you. That artificial sweeteners make you thinner, and fatter. And on and on. That single "every now and then try to remember the kinds of things you ate over the past period of time" survey is the root of an incredible amount of noise in nutrition science.
Randomized controlled-feeding sounds good, let's check it out. After trudging through this for a bit I came to the meat of the methodology:
> Participants were provided a daily meal checklist (Supplemental Figure 1) that included each menu item with space for documenting the amount consumed; the time each item was consumed; a checkbox to confirm having only eaten study foods; a checkbox to confirm not taking any medications, supplements, or other remedies; space for documenting any adverse events related to eating the meals; and space for documenting any nonstudy foods, drinks, medications, supplements, or other remedies. They were also instructed to return all unwashed packaging; visual inspection was documented by the metabolic kitchen. In addition to the checklists and returned packaging, participants were educated on food safety as well as provided tips on managing challenging social situations while participating in a feeding study. Repeated reinforcement of the value of honesty over perfection was provided. Study coordinators reviewed the returned checklists with the participants to verify completeness.
So ... self reported with some extra steps.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30101333/
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291652...
You linked to a study where food was provided to the subjects (the food obviously nutritionally selected and provided per the study groups), and the subjects obviously are assumed to stick to the provided food and to accurate report what they ate among that reported food (with the study counting packaging, remainders, etc). This is a *UNIVERSE* better than the classic "tell us how many eggs you ate over the past two months" type nutrition studies, which are by far the most common (e.g. the Nurses' Health Survey).
Are you expecting the people to be inprisoned? I mean, there are in-patient studies but they are obviously massively more difficult to carry out.
I expect rigorous methodologies to be employed before conclusions are drawn or held to be widely applicable. Self-reporting is intrinsically flawed. It does not seem like feeding studies as defined here addresses this or has been validated to produce superior results -- detected non-compliance was significant (though they did not report the difference between self-reported non-compliance and methodologically detected non-compliance) and undetected non-compliance was of course not measured.
Would I expect to be only satisfied by imprisonment or inpatient studies? I don't even think I'd be satisfied by that! The differences in activity would make all such results difficult to interpret. But if inpatient is the best we can do, but it's difficult, then we have to live with the fact that our understanding of nutritional interventions is extremely dubious. You can't just accept bad science because it's the best you can do.
Like if you just tracked the things you can track, and noted the number of occurrences you didn't, then your end of the month weight will tell you whether you're overshooting or not, and you can estimate what proportion the "unknowns" might represent (and whether you should put a conscious effort into reducing them.
I know I’m not going to be able to eat my main, a couple slices of pizza, one or two entrees and a dessert with only 800 calories left in my budget.
Sure, I might be somewhat off in my estimate, but in practice, I might forgo the entrees and dessert (or share a bite from someone else), set some of my main aside to take home, and have a slice of pizza.
but i get it
it's expensive to do properly, and so its not really done that often, and when it happens there's usually only a few participants.
Both people doing the research and people funding the research know very well that what the flaw of this approach is, but just chose to do the shoddy job that they do because it brings in money. If it's not by design then there is a worse conclusion - the researchers/funders are incompetent. It's most likely a mix of incompetence/corruption.
There is no dietary research, because you can't pull off an unbiased dietary study over a meaningful period of time. Practical and ethical problems abound.
Maybe one day we can simulate n=10mm people from the neck down for a period of 30 years, and feed half of them bacon and half of them beans, but even that will have the major problems of being a simulation and that only from the neck down.
Read the original "fat = heart attacks" studies by Ancel Keys from the 1950's. I've done free online 5-minute long data science tutorials with more statistical rigor.
The reason we can do science on some things without doing experiments is that there's lots of hard, unambiguous data about relatively much simpler systems.
Getting good data on the extremely complex thing that is homo sapiens is just not feasible, unless you're studying specific chemical reactions in the gut, in which case it'll take an extremely long time to figure out an actual dietary recommendation.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. These models get better, our understanding is improved, and we will slowly uncover more truths. We already have so much more knowledge about nutrition than we did 100 years ago.
This feels a LOT like weight loss. Calories in --> calories out is conceptually very simple, but in practice more people struggle with it than not. It certainly cannot be the case that they struggle with the concept; they struggle with actually putting it into action. Lying to themselves, twisting themselves into philosophical knots, and probably most often, conceding to their cravings. Food acquisition is one of out more basic drives, so it should probably be no surprise that people struggle to intellectualize it.
(as and aside, there are also people who wrongly believe that calories in --> calories out is a flawed concept because not all people have the same metabolism, or not all calories are equal. Both of these are true, but none of them actually negate the premise. For whatever your metabolism, and whatever your category of calories, fewer calories will still produce weight loss. It may feel unfair that someone doesn't have to work as hard as you to produce the same result, but this is actually true in all areas of life. Now that said, improving the quality of your calories is very important, and should not be ignored -- but it also does not negate the premise.)
Aside from the hunger issue, food is enmeshed in all sorts of value having nothing to do with nutritional value per se and everything to do with sociopsychological value.
I think I've massively underestimated that in my own life, or misunderstood what that meant or something. I think the way it plays out is much more pervasive and subtle than what people realize. I'm not even saying it's wrong, it's just hard to suddenly deprive yourself of something that is meaningfully rewarding, and especially so when you're unaware of it consciously.
On top of that though is you have to get over your intellectual ideas of how much food you think you need to eat.
I know how much food I need to eat in order to survive and maintain a healthy weight. But if I eat that amount of food, I'm still hungry.
Doesn't matter what I eat. I'll eat a diet high in protein and fiber, moderate in fat, and low in sugar and starches, which is supposed to be the recipe to feel full without eating empty calories, but it doesn't work. 16 oz steak paired with an 8 oz portion of green beans or broccoli, and I still get the munchies just 2 hours later.
I should probably go to a doctor and ask about Ozempic or something. I did successfully lose about 50 pounds doing keto and brought my A1C from 6.8 down to 5.4, but I damn near lost my sanity because I was always hungry. I've gained it all back and started to get some of diabetic symptoms again.
if some unknown element was making everyone's internal thermostat aim for more food it would explain a lot.
Science and capitalism have created incredibly delicious foods that are nutritionally lacking, hyper optimized for (against?) our now mis-aligned reward system. In the west, calories are not scarce and the most delcious foods are far from the most nutritious. It will take a long time for our genes to catchup.
Mass producing delicious, cheap, but low nutrition food is profitable. Companies have gotten very good at it. That's the real big change.
we got the abundant food and the largely car bound live cycles and it still kept getting worse for decades after that point. I suppose it could be generations growing up only knowing this and so habituated to it more?
The "public presence" of society has diminished due to the internet. You no longer need to put effort into constantly looking your best because social media helps curate your appearance. Going to Walmart is now so relaxed that you can wear pajamas. Putting on your "best appearance" occurs elsewhere in curated ways (i.e. facebook/instagram posts and careful selfies). You can "partition" your social life so that the people shopping at walmart see pajama-you while the Tinder matches see someone totally different.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42692418
Intermittent fasting + lower carb + whole foods can do this. But the trick is satiety in any one person is regulated by multiple processes. I doubt there's a one size fits all and probably the problem gets harder the more satiety is dysregulated.
But I think any approach aimed at undereating in the sense of being hungry is not likely what people who lose weight successfully are doing. Or at least those who avoid rebounds. You'd instead want to find something that is highly satiating and satisfying and that also can't be overeaten.
Example: almonds may be high satiety by some technical definition. But is is very very possible to eat past hunger with them.
In my own experience it is very difficult to eat too much steak. I find it delicious but simply couldn't past a certain point. Others have reported similar results by adding lots of potatoes.
I don't guarantee success by targeting satiety but I think it's worth trying rather than calories or weight directly. At some level you need to roughly figure out macronutrients to know where you can err but anytime I've lost weight it's been by focussing on type of food rather than amount. But strictly so.
Re potatoes: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/07/12/lose-10-6-pounds-in...
I need to eat foods that are nutrient and fiber dense to keep me from feeling hungry or snacking, drinking lots of water etc. And importantly, its understanding that sometimes between meals I might go hungry and that's okay, I don't need to eat straight away to fix that hunger craving.
One of the challenges I faced and I'd say most people face as well, is that eating is a source of joy and comfort and when losing weight you sometimes need to delay that joy or comfort.
I thought that wasn't true, that the human body stores and burns calories at varying rates based on many signals, and that our bodies or some bodies effectively conserve weight or caloric stores at a certain level.
you can't exercise out of a bad diet but exercise is a helpful supplement to a good diet too. it's just that making yourself do it when you're tired and hungry is draining.
You can, but it's not easy. People who exercise _a lot_ often have trouble eating enough calories. 5,000 to 10,000 calories a day is hard to eat and not out of reach.
I knew a guy who was drinking a gallon of whole milk a day for a while to try to maintain weight.
At the end of the day they'll blame will power or motivation or whatever else on why the diet failed, but still won't account for these same factors when trying the next diet involving basically the same mechanics.
The trouble is that people who have no problems to do this ... are the ones at risk for anorexia. They lack the instincts that make the rest of us safe from that particular hell.
The thing that makes anorexia possible (among other things) is you being able to ignore hunger. Healthy organism will instinctively eat when hungry or missing something. The instincts takes over, body produces hormones to override behavior and diet ends.
I think a lot of people talking past each other on this topic are really just disagreeing about what healthy will power actually is. To be specific, comments along the lines of "it's not my/their fault, it's the fault of our environment, and the availability of unhealthy food".
I think this is just having an unhealthy will. I think this is also the whole divide on things like ozempic - some people view it as enabling people to have unhealthy will power. Other people view it as the only way someone can have healthy weight. I don't think either party is wrong, I think they are just talking past eachother.
An attainable goal is to reduce the average amount of monthly grocery spend and you do it by deciding, in advance, things you're no longer going to stock in the house, items you'll replace for cheaper options, or items you'll stock from wholesale clubs.
It's hard to bring the budget for gas down without people driving less. Your wife being the one tasked with filling up the tank is the messenger. It could be an emotional reaction as you describe but I would at least entertain the idea that her "bending the rules" is her way of trying to make an impossible ask doable. Whether she is consciously thinking about it or not, I bet the stuff that "doesn't count" aren't replaced every month and have spikey cost patterns.
I totally agree that you'd need to find a reasonable average weekly cost because costs and timing would vary. In my mind, this means you could find a reasonable average weekly cost that you often go under, and seldom go over. But, it just never happened for us. In principle we could have just kept raising the price ceiling, but eventually that becomes meaningless in the context of a budget. To me, at least, it felt just like calories; what could have been a pretty easy math problem was defeated by human psychology.
Oversimplification and over confidence in estimation.
Engineers tend to do this a lot.
(FYI - I stay thin by limiting calories, so I don't disagree that fewer calories causes weight loss)
(in practice as you know, you just kinda do it on feel and end up restricting calories enough to lose weight. but my own intuition is that I had to aim for 100 or 200 less than my estimated BMR so the math is very fuzzy isn't it?)
Imagine a piano teacher. Their mantra is practice in --------> skill out. Profound. Every time their students come to them and complain about not being motivated, practice being too dull, experiencing back pain or repetitive stress syndromes, wanting to change up the practice, they just say: practice in equals skill out. What is so hard to understand?
That’s what the "calories in/out" people are like. And this is the only area where this is an accepted argument. Where it is even treated as a valid argument at all.
Everyone knows that you have to put in time on an instrument in order to get better. Everyone. No one denies it. Similarily I don’t think the overlap of weight loss pursuers and deniers of energy conservation as it moves through food groups (plants to cows to humans) is terribly large.
If you truly want to rationally assist people who want to learn the piano or lose weight you do what works. You don’t repeat a truism. Cutting out sugar? Meat? Intermmitteng fasting? Counting calories? Anything that works. You don’t sheepishly point out that they failed to practice their ten hours last week without even asking why didn’t follow through.
The in/out people seem to have a hard time intellectualizing this simple concept.
CICO helps explain weight management issues retrospectively, but it's inadequate with regard to planning, and for maintaining quality of life while working towards a weight management goal.
Additionally the distribution of your muscles and fat will also change.
A (logical extreme) example I was thinking of counterig with: if you eat 500,000 calories in 24 hours on the first of the year, and nothing else for the rest of it, you'll achieve a 1,350 calorie/day average, certainly enough to lose a significant amount of weight. And you will! Because your stomach will have ruptured and you'll be dead by the 2nd. Rotting is one way to burn calories. (I mention this to illustrate how focusing solely on the numbers, to the detriment of the actual lived quality of life during the weight management process, misses the forest for the trees.)
These are dumb questions to ask in the first place, because the "you" and "good" here are too personal for any general answer to be useful to most people. Unfortunately, this is not just lazy writing that took complex questions and simplified them to the point of uselessness - we really are asking these kinds of questions :(
Most of this doesn't generalize to populations the size of the world in the way something like "physics" does, because, for starters, we aren't very deterministic or very homogeneous at large scale.
Instead, you end up with millions to tens of millions of people in a subgroup particularly affected or unaffected by something because of genetic variation, etc.
Any reasonable scientist knows this. Instead, the main reason to try to answer these questions framed like this seems to be either to get funding, or to make headlines.
Sometimes we can answer extreme versions of this question (IE it seems data suggests alcohol is fairly universally bad for almost any person, definition of bad, and amount), but that's pretty rare. This then gets used as a "success" to do more poorly designed and thought out studies.
Just because we want to know things doesn't mean we should use mechanisms that we know don't work and produce mostly useless results. This is true even when we don't have lots of mechanisms that do work or produce useful results.
It's much slower and much more expensive, but what we learn is at least more useful.
It's really hard, slow, and expensive to answer questions about particle physics - this doesn't mean we revert to asking atoms to self-report their energy levels and publishing headlines about how "larger atoms that move around more live longer" or whatever based on the results. Instead, we accept that it will hard, slow, and expensive, and therefore, we better get started if we want to ever get somewhere.
For example:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199212313272701
and
https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpendo.200...
In the NEJM article they note that every single person who claimed to be "diet resistant" was lying about food intake.
> The main finding of this study is that failure to lose weight despite a self-reported low caloric intake can be explained by substantial misreporting of food intake and physical activity. The underreporting of food intake by the subjects in group 1 even occurred 24 hours after a test meal eaten under standardized conditions. In contrast, values for total energy expenditure, resting metabolic rate, thermic effect of food, and thermic response to exercise were comparable with those of obese subjects in group 2 who did not report a history of diet resistance.
and
> In addition to their greater degree of misreporting, the subjects in group 1 used thyroid medication more often, had a stronger belief that their obesity was caused by genetic and metabolic factors and not by overeating, and reported less hunger and disinhibition and more cognitive restraint than did the subjects in group 2. Subjects presenting for weight-control therapy who had these findings in association with a history of self-reported diet resistance would clearly convey the impression that a low metabolic rate caused their obesity.
Calories-in/Calories-out is true for everyone, and everyone can lose weight by putting down his fork.
Something like a curry cooked in kitchen and shared among a family is a complete black box as to who got how many calories. Maybe one person got a different ratio of rice to curry. Or this family likes a sweeter type of curry etc
Your metabolism is a system. Like any system, data about its inputs and outputs can be gathered if you would but measure it. Make getting accurate portion sizes a part of your daily routine.