What Do You Eat for Weight Loss?

[jennypenny]

I agree with BRUTE. For *some people* calories are a meaningless metric. I can stick to 1000 cal/day but my weight doesn't budge if I'm eating moderate to high carbs (including bananas, apples, etc). If I keep my carb count sub-30, weight falls off regardless of what I eat. I can eat a hamburger for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and as long as I skip the bun and ketchup, I'm good.

I'm struggling to find a meatless way to stay sub-30 that doesn't drain my system dry.

I've played around with my time-restricted eating to see what works, too. I've found that food consumed between 10am-7pm has a very different effect on me than food consumed between 6am-3pm. The earlier window is best by far for weight loss. I also feel better, sleep better, have reduced GERD symptoms, and less joint pain in the morning.

[BRUTE]

Not doubting your results. I'm curious if you have theories as to why your hypothesis was incorrect?

similar to jennypenny.

the 800-900kcal/day meal consisted mainly of carbs. brute's hypothesis is that these carbs prevented his body from accessing body fat, thus preventing fat loss.

the other one was a relatively extreme fast/feast, completely keto, extremely high in fat. hypothesis: the long fasting periods and low carbs help lipolysis and therefore allow fat loss despite a drastic caloric (fatty acid) surplus.

[7Wannabe5]

in another experiment, brute ate the same 800-900kcal meal as the only meal every day for a month without losing any weight.

Fantastic news! So, all I have to do is round up a small army of BRUTES to work on my potato farm. I will feed them just 3 large potatoes/day and my ROI will go sky high! Way cheaper than a solar-powered robot at today prices.

[BRUTE]

Fantastic news! So, all I have to do is round up a small army of BRUTES to work on my potato farm. I will feed them just 3 large potatoes/day and my ROI will go sky high! Way cheaper than a solar-powered robot at today prices.

maybe if 7Wannabe5 tattoos serial numbers on their wrists or puts stars with fun colors on their shirts, they'll be easier to recognize.

[BRUTE]

perhaps brute should clarify why he is so adamant and angry about the dogma of the CICO pseudo-science zealots.

by adhering to their faith and ignoring the real science behind nutrition and biology, the CICO zealots are responsible for the deaths of millions of people by heart disease, diabetes, certain cancers, Alzheimers, and also directly responsible for the continuation of the obesity epidemic.

CICO is literally causing millions of deaths by preventing society from moving on to models of thought that are actually effective.

believing in CICO is like believing in gay reformation camps. even if the faith is based on ignorance, it is an evil.

[classical_Liberal]

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[classical_Liberal]

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[jacob]

... could be volume, related to glycogen losses.

I think these eternal discussions are in sore need of a more detailed explanation/understanding of what happens in the body in the short run when undertaking diet and exercise changes (discontinuities). I don't think I'm qualified to explain what's going on in great detail, but I think we have ppl here who do. For example,

• Fasting/change from eating to not-eating (weight difference from different bowel movements)
• Adding or removing salt (weight difference from water retention/salt elimination)
• Adding or removing carbs (weight difference from glycogen that binds water, dough belly and all that)

These are all changes in configuration of the digestive system in the form of water and shit worth 5+ lbs inside of a digestive cycle (24-72 hrs) ... but don't actually change body composition even if it looks like way (because the bloating/water-logging is removed).

[7Wannabe5]

@BRUTE:

I don't believe in anything like strict CICO. For instance, since everyone poops, it is pretty obvious that the human body is in many ways not as efficient as a bomb calorimeter. Also, known fact that individual humans vary in their abilities to digest various foodstuffs. I just don't believe that anybody can digest food MORE efficiently than a calorimeter, and I do believe, even given variety of other influential factors such as hormonal influence of different diets, that there is some minimal amount of food energy necessary to keep a human alive even if sleeping or comatose. Therefore, I doubt that any adult could survive indefinitely without losing weight on only 600 kilocalories as measured by calorimeter. OTOH, I do believe that it is possible that a human could eat 4000 kilocalories per day as measured by a calorimeter and not gain weight due to variety of factors.

In fact, there is a good deal of recent research that suggests that previously unconsidered factors such as lack of daily exposure to sunlight and boredom may be partially to blame for obesity epidemic. The brain is very energy hungry and burns more calories when engaged or challenged then when a human is watching television or driving tedious commute or working at a dull routine job. Therefore, working out a tough math problem or fussing with a challenging piece of knitting (any handicraft) is more of a calorie burning activity relative to simply passively watching a screen. IOW, sedentary varies.

[BRUTE]

first, brute wants to apologize to classical_Liberal. brute doesn't usually like to get so righteous and emotional. this is one of the few places left where honest discussion is even possible, and brute is ashamed that he got so carried away.

regarding the questions:

1)3.5 day fast/3.5 feast (breaking the fast on Thursday afternoons)
2)brute was not eating carbs before this, he had been on keto for well over a year at the time.
3)the weight loss continued as long as brute continued the fasting, but that wasn't much longer than the month.
4)there was still extra body fat.
5)the weight loss seemed quite unrelated to the level of caloric intake. this has been brute's experience in general.

brute has tried pretty much any diet under the sun, including vegan, fruitarian, and zero-carb. (not raw zero-carb though, mainly because raw ground beef is hard to get fresh).

his main takeaway is that diet/exercise are overrated when it comes to body composition in humans. they're certainly levers, but the biggest levers by far seem to be stress and sleep. it doesn't matter how deep in ketosis brute is, when he doesn't get sleep, he will gain weight on the exact same diet/caloric intake that he was losing weight on before.

brute is also well aware of the difficulty of measuring body composition - weight is mostly water, especially in the short term. brute typically fluctuates by 8-9lbs over 2 days when fasting/breaking the fast.

waist measurements are as bad as weight, because the body swells up with the increased water just as it gains weight.

brute is even skeptical of DEXA, but it's too inconvenient/expensive to thoroughly test and try to disprove. but brute thinks the only reason it hasn't been shown to be as full of shit as the other methods is that increasing sample frequency is prohibitively expensive.

brute would bet $50 that if he was DEXA'd at the end of a 7 day fast, and the day after breaking said fast, his "lean body mass" as measured by DEXA would be significantly changed. both muscle and fat cells can store various amounts of water.

[classical_Liberal]

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[Michael_00005]

Watching a quick 3.5 minute video pretty much says it all, and the source of obesity is:

https://nutritionfacts.org/video/thousa ... s-studied/

A major problem in asking for health advice in forums is that you cannot see pictures of those giving advice, and everyone likes to give advice. Whether obese, sickly, narrow minded, uneducated, it matters not, everyone likes to expound their opinion. I'd have to say, it would be extremely interesting to see pictures of people posting under health.

One item I've come across in regards to toxins, is that they are stored in fat. And to be rid of the fat, the body needs to be able to safely dispose of these toxins. It's one of the reasons a good weight loss program works slowly. And when you understand the amount of toxins it meat, which gets worse every years, you see way meat consumption has such a strong correlation to obesity.

[herp]

@Michael_00005: I'm not convinced that Dr. Greger is entirely unbiased.

I'm also curious about your interest in seeing pictures. Why do you feel that would be valuable in such a discussion?

[Michael_00005]

The blind leading the blind.

I'm also curious about your interest in seeing pictures. Why do you feel that would be valuable in such a discussion?

A major reason healthcare is so horrid in the US, is because doctors are not able to take care of themselves. What sort of heart advice can we expect from a "so called" expert who does not know the cause of heart disease? A few years back I was on a forum with a bunch of doctors, and they thought it incredulous a person could reverse heart disease... even though it was proven in the 1990's - Dr. Esselstyn's "Prevent & Reverse Heart Disease". Not a single person knew the truth, and this was a forum for health professionals and doctors. Pretty pathetic, a guy in IT telling doctors where to do their research.

[BRUTE]

brute demands pictures of human hearts!

[BRUTE]

how did you manage to consume an overall caloric surplus for the entire week in only 3.5 days? That's impressive! Were you only eating once per day in the 3.5days of feast?

1-2 meals per day. it's easier after a 3.5 day fast.

[IlliniDave]

Joining late, I'm another skeptic of "a calorie is a calorie". Our bodies respond differently on a hormonal level to each of the three macro nutrients (carbohydrates, protein, and fat). Each of those categories have differing effects in their metabolic process. For example excess carbs are very efficiently stored in body fat.

The way my body works there is a single dietary key to weight loss: eliminate carbohydrates from sugar, grains, and starch, and to moderate fruit intake. Carbs from non-starchy green, yellow, and red vegetables can be eaten to the point of feeling like Mr Creosote. I like to roughly split my caloric intake equally between protein, carbs as described above, and fat. That's pretty much the Zone diet approach. When I'm exercising a lot I up the protein. But again, the key when it comes to weight loss is to avoid foods which cause insulin surges.

[Smashter]

CICO is literally causing millions of deaths by preventing society from moving on to models of thought that are actually effective.

I know you were in the throes of passion while writing this, but I still think it needs further challenging.

You really think all the disease of civilization would be drastically reduced if stopped believing in CICO? Can't we find a better scapegoat? Replace "CICO" with "a completely insane food environment that allows for gorging on unhealthy, cheap foods with very little physical effort" and I'd be on board.

CICO, as much as your n=1 experiments say otherwise, is the key to weight loss according to the best research we have.

Sure, maybe the scientists who devote their lives to obesity research are all corrupt and Taubes, Teicholz, and the other low carb zealots know the real truth.

But I doubt it. Gary Taubes' own NUSI research has shown that high sugar intake does not impair weight loss.

That's not to say that hormones, stress, and sleep don't play a huge role in determining how many calories you take in. They do! And some people, like you and iDave, do great on lower carb diets. That's great! But I think it's misguided to heap massive blame on CICO.

[IlliniDave]

CICO is certainly part of the equation, it has to be. But even within carbohydrates I react dramatically differently if I eat, say 400 carbohydrate calories of broccoli (not a trivial feat-4.5 cups per meal times 4 meals/day) versus 400 calories of bread (not hard in a single sitting) with everything else held pretty much constant (protein and fat intake/sources). So for me it isn't about demonizing carbohydrates except for the subset of carbs that for the most part arrives at the store shelves via a factory of some sort.

Another advantage to sticking to low starch veggies as a primary (or exclusive) carbohydrate source is that it is nearly impossible overload on them the way one can easily do on junk food carbohydrates (which compounds the rush of blood sugar they cause with grossly excessive caloric intake).

I can't say I'm typical or atypical, but for my n=1 database, quality dwarfs quantity when it comes to losing weight, as long as we're not talking extreme deficits. I can't say for gaining weight as that usually happens only when I am not paying attention.

[black_son_of_gray]

Many of you might enjoy this talk (~35-40 min), which covers topics like:

• calories in/calories out
• how body weight can be modeled
• an interesting study of The Biggest Loser contestants
• metabolic adaptation that occurs with weight loss
• other sundries

The impression that I get is that calories in/calories out is coarsely true, but there are some very important caveats (e.g. the perceived effort of dieting vs. the reality of calorie intake, metabolic adaptation) that aren't intuitive.

Other resources:
The slide deck [pdf]
Referenced body weight planner tool