Bodybuilders are experts at loosing fat getting in to single digit body fat percentages consistently and methodically.
Most follow the same rough diet and manipulate calories in the same way, it’s kind of cookie cutter, do this you’ll loose fat.
Most of it is learnt over years of professional bodybuilders keeping meticulous diaries of every training session, every calorie eat, every small change made and every result seen.
Bodybuilders take it to the extreme to be the best, still I think if you are interested in loosing fat there’s a lot that can be learnt from bodybuilders without going to the extreme.
Bodybuilders by definition are self-selected subset of people who can consistently apply high self discipline and dedicate a lot of energy and willpower on that. I think it's pretty safe to count them as outliers when looking at solutions to obesity in the general population.
Also the glossy mag articles don't get written about the actors who fail or struggle with it. Or drop out of acting with long term weight/diet/eating disorder problems as a result. Survivor bias.
I think an actor successful enough to make that list is likewise far from typical. Maybe some get lucky, but most actors detail years of discipline breaking into the field.
Bodybuilders are not a representative population. There is extreme selection bias. They are obsessed about one thing, go to extreme length to achieve it, often to pathological lengths. It's like pointing out monks taking vows of chastity, solitude and silence and claiming that anyone can easily ignore their sex drive and other social needs.
Body builders just have a lot more discipline and will to win at this than the rest of us. So the straight "cut down on calories" strategy can work for them.
For everyone else, they need to not feel hungry while doing it.
In the same way that the most motivated students will overcome a bad teacher, but most will instead not learn anything compared to an interesting teacher.
Bodybuilders are at their weakest after they loose all that fat for competition. And they dehydrate themselves as a bonus. They sometimes even faint due to that.
It is not healthy what they do around competition. It is not workable advice for general population either, because acting like that all the time is pretty much definition of eating disorder.
Yes they take it to the extreme, the unhealthy extreme. Competition day is not a maintainable look and is your body at its weakest, it’s a one day event only. No normal person needs to or aspire to be a competition day bodybuilder unless they want to win a bodybuilding competition, guessing most don’t and most people couldn’t.
It’s definitely not healthy to go to that extreme but I do think there is a lot in following the process and general diet to loose fat then maintain it at a reasonable level.
If you take the competition extreme side out of it the bodybuilding diet is pretty good. Complex carbs, lean meats, lots of greens, nuts and seeds for fats. Fitness model might be a better example as they don’t push it to the extremes are lean but can maintain the shape quiet healthily.
This suffers from potential selection bias. Bodybuilders may be among those with the right hormones to do that while everyone else doesn't approach it or drops out eventually.
>A lot of these articles ignore bodybuilders.
>Bodybuilders are experts at loosing fat getting in to single digit body fat percentages consistently and methodically.
Or maybe body builders don't include the subset of the population that has the claimed hormone problem.
Basic carbs mainly oats, rice or potatoes etc. Lean meat mainly chicken or fish. Lots of green veg, often steamed, a salad etc. Fats are from things such as nuts, avocados, eggs etc not cooking oils. Maybe a banana or odd piece of fruit but generally lots of veg and greens over fruit to avoid sugar. Avoid dairy as calorie dense.
Carbs will be reduced compared to non cutting but still consumed regardless. Normally it’s carbs that get manipulated, lowering them slightly or increase slightly depending on if cutting or bulking.
It’s simple and unglamorous and that’s likely why most people don’t eat like that as it’s simple or as people will say bland and boring. Even if you mix it up with spices and how you cook/prepare it, it’s the same basic core meal.
If you are not bodybuilding and only interested in loosing fat you can likely reduce the amount of protein (meat). You then end up close to a “whole food” diet I see people talk about these days minus the oils and sauces which are calorie dense.
People are talking about thermodynamics here as if your body is a fire and every single thing put in is consumed entirely and exactly for each and every person. Can you gaurantee a 100 calories equivalent food will produce 100 calories worth of energy conversation and gaurantee this for every single individual.
I think this is the opposite of physics envy. People try to dumb down a whole science by waving hands and saying "physics, bitches!"
Sure it's a bit more complicated, and it's a fire that doesn't burn 100% of all different fuels. But it's still thermodynamics, but with byproducts that "waste" some macros more than others, which is good if you want to keep your weight down. Edit: And all the second order effects of hormonal/hunger changes.
Sure, physics doesn't stop working. My argument is, are you sure the "its only physics" people are modeling the world in a correct, precise way and there aren't other factors to be considered beyond what they propose.
The point I think the author is making isn't 'calorie counting is wrong' -- 'calorie counting is not the whole picture'. When someone says software is just 1s and 0s, How hard can building software be? You're right its 1s and 0s, but that's not an entirely helpful model to work with if you're trying to build software.
For example, you could say the number of people coming out of a building will equal the number of people that go into a building, its basic Maths - counting is the only thing you need. Now if the person uses this logic for a maternity hospital and they suddenly find out there are more people coming out than are going in. It doesn't mean that math is broken.
Pointing to thermodynamics is the same "bootstraps" mentality you see elsewhere, just applied to food and health instead of money.
Just like telling the poor "just make more money", it might technically be true but it is such an unhelpful and useless thing to say, that it is hard to believe the speaker is trying to help and not just make themselves feel better.
So I don't think it's physics, I think it's some people just enjoy pretending systemic effects - inequality, privilege and just blind luck don't matter.
well from my own experience there's a percentage of body fat where you actually start some sort of starvation mode where you have 0 energy whatsover. during the evening i used to stare at the wall for like 4 hours before going to sleep because i had no interest in anything. it was quite peaceful though.
Also I felt that some muscle parts were deteriorating so I had to stop.. i would not recommend anyway but it was a fun experience.
I also realized something: body image perception is subjective.. i did that because I thought I was fat. when I took 1kg more after that and I was at 69kg i though it was the end of the world. now i'm like 10 kg more and even though i still think I'm fat, I don't think I'm 10x more fat than back and actually I think I look slightly better (there are other factors.. i do thai boxing so I have more muscle shape also..).
The point is I always felt the same at every weight. I felt "I'm fat". Now I just learnt to live with the "i'm fat" thought into my head and i'm good lol.
> The conventional approaches don’t work because while we can sustain eating less for a while, eventually the hunger gets us because we’re semi-starving ourselves.
So it's all about calories then but people just have a hard time consuming less calories and he wants to make it easier for them? Well okay but it's still absolutely about calories just like it's always been and always will be.
His answer to "what do we know so far?" is that "the most impressive research" was an experiment with no control, conducted by a start-up, which then published the results on their company blog. OK, next.
Your characterization of the experiment is so wrong it's almost hard to know where to start. This is an interventional clinical trial with a large group of participants (hundreds) with a control receiving standard of care run by IU Health with ongoing measurements over years (which is incredibly impressive). You can see the clinical trial registration here: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02519309
And some of the (ongoing) peer-reviewed publications here:
Athinarayanan SJ, Adams RN, Hallberg SJ, et al. Long-Term Effects of a Novel Continuous Remote Care Intervention Including Nutritional Ketosis for the Management of Type 2 Diabetes: A 2-year Non-randomized Clinical Trial. Frontiers in Endocrinology. 2019; 10:348. doi: 10.3389/fendo.2019.00348
Hallberg SJ, McKenzie AL, Williams P, et al. Effectiveness and Safety of a Novel Care Model for the Management of Type 2 Diabetes at One Year: An Open Label, Non-Randomized, Controlled Study. Diabetes Therapy. 2018; 9(2): 583-612. doi: 10.1007/s13300-018-0373-9
McKenzie AL, Hallberg SJ, Creighton BC, et al. A Novel Intervention Including Individualized Nutritional Recommendations Reduces Hemoglobin A1c Level, Medication Use, and Weight in Type 2 Diabetes. JMIR Diabetes. 2017; 2(1):e5.
Bhanpuri NH, Hallberg SJ, Williams PT, McKenzie AL, Ballard KD, Campbell WW, McCarter JP, Phinney SD, Volek JS. Cardiovascular Disease Risk Factor Responses to a Type 2 Diabetes Care Model Including Nutritional Ketosis at One Year: An Open Label, Non-Randomized, Controlled Study. Cardiovasc Diabetol. 2018; 17:56. doi:10.1186/s12933-018-0698-8
Vilar-Gomez E, Athinarayanan SJ, Adams RN, et al Post hoc analyses of surrogate markers of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and liver fibrosis in patients with type 2 diabetes in a digitally supported continuous care intervention: an open-label, non-randomised controlled study BMJ Open 2019;9:e023597. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2018-023597
Siegmann MJ, Athinarayanan SJ, Hallberg SJ, et al. Improvement in Patient-Reported Sleep in Type 2 Diabetes and Prediabetes Participants Receiving a Continuous Care Intervention with Nutritional Ketosis. Sleep Medicine. 2019; 55: 92 - 99. doi: 10.1016/j.sleep.2018.12.014
I am sorry that you are downvoted and getting negative responses, you are exactly right.
Beside the implementation problems (non-randomized etc.) and the backer problem (result is self-serving) the study is literally just "we give patients and intricate personal treatment with daily expert interventions" vs "go on live your life". You explain this away with the Hawthorne effect alone.
Really reminds me of the sugar propaganda some decades ago. They used the exact same combination you see embodied in this thread: Anecdata, Appeal to Authority, Appeal to Emotion, Ad Hominem.
> Beside the implementation problems (non-randomized etc.) and the backer problem (result is self-serving) the study is literally just "we give patients and intricate personal treatment with daily expert interventions" vs "go on live your life". You explain this away with the Hawthorne effect alone.
I am sorry to say that just as atdt was making things up, you are as well. The control group did not just get told "go on live your life" - they received "Usual Care" (Standard of Care) for T2D. There's a whole section in the first paper linked about it:
"The participants recruited for usual care (UC) received care from their primary care physician or endocrinologist and were counseled by a registered dietician as part of a diabetes education program. These participants received the American Diabetes Association (ADA) recommendations on nutrition, lifestyle and diabetes management. No modification of their care was made for the study and routine biomarkers (weight, glucose and ketones) were not collected from these participants. This group was used as a reference control to study the effect of disease progression over 2 years in a cohort of participants prospectively recruited from the same geography and healthcare system."
Athinarayanan SJ, Adams RN, Hallberg SJ, et al. Long-Term Effects of a Novel Continuous Remote Care Intervention Including Nutritional Ketosis for the Management of Type 2 Diabetes: A 2-year Non-randomized Clinical Trial. Frontiers in Endocrinology. 2019; 10:348. doi: 10.3389/fendo.2019.00348
For anyone who's actually interested in the science or methodology of the research, the peer-reviewed work has been linked (and I believe is all open access, if not, it's on sci-hub), and it is written in a pretty accessible manner IMO. The PI, Sarah Hallberg, has quite a few presentations online, including some that delve deeper into some of the details and the pros/cons of their study design (the biggest pro IMO is that they were able to use a biomarker (blood BHB) to track adherence). This of course, is just a single study - there are lots more studies and papers (I've read thousands on the topic area over the past few years). Human nutrition and metabolic health is a minefield, for a variety of reasons and people should be skeptical, but that's also no excuse for adding to the misinformation pile.
> By restricting carbohydrate, the ketogenic diet minimises insulin, and so instead of accumulating fat, your body starts mobilising it.
By restricting carbohydrate to minimise insulin and start mobilising fat rather than accumulating it you are of course reducing the calories too.
Obesity is helped by many different things - hormones, gut biome, overly processed food etc - but mainly by too much food in relation too little exercise.
We don't need to re-engineer food. We need to de-engineer it - rebalance it in favour of nutritional quality, and away from prioritising yield mindlessly.
We already have an obesity crisis. We know that our over-reliance on carbs and demonising of fat is contributing to it, or outright fueling it. We know that our food is poor in vitamins, so basically all urban dwellers must take vitamin supplements.
Part of why our Western diets are so calorie-rich and nutrient-poor (while being allergenic for many people) is because we've mindlessly pursued food yield, rather than food yield balanced with nutrition. Most food items are processed or contain processed ingredients, or junk ingredients that bulk up the volume/substitute for more expensive ones. A lot of people are catching up to that and trying to compensate, but it's a nearly-vertical uphill struggle while you're not well off, because good food tends to be more expensive.
We need to stop that. We need to bring back affordable, healthy food for the masses.
Moreover, a large part of re-engineering food is re-engineering food supply chains. 'Tasty' and 'cheap' generally implies 'fresh', and getting fresh food onto the tables of millions of households requires a change of mindset from both industry and consumer.
Stop trying to invent a startup for every problem. There are so much more dimensions and ideas to "solve" obesity.
For starters, look at the vast differences between national food cultures and their varying success in battling obesity.
There is healthy food which is tasty and cheap, right now, in abundance. They are societal, regulatory, cultural and individual ways to get people to eat it. On the other hand, we are not even remotely close to understanding nutrition well enough to "re-engineer" a significant portion of the populace's food w/o some serious first and second order consequences.
The entirety of the comments seem to be either saying "This guy is a genius and is 100% right" or "This guy is talking out of his backside".
The scientific consensus on weight loss is pretty clear: all forms of diets are similarly effective when you control for calorie intake. Low carb diets work, low fat diet work, intermittent fasting works, plain old fasting works, McDonald's diet and Twinkie diets work. This is nothing new and calorie deficit is always the best predictor regardless of the diet type.
He seems to make the argument that high insulin causes fat to accumulate and as such reducing carbohydrate lowers insulin and increases weight loss, but I have yet to see any evidence that a high-calorie keto diet will result in weight loss.
The general consensus as to why keto works for some people is that it makes hunger management easier, although AFAIK there is no mechanism that has been clearly identified as being the main responsible, people who succeed on keto report higher levels of satiety after meals, but the same can be said of many other diets for people on which they work.
There's a paragraph in there about keto being restrictive and he's basically dismissing the claim with "it feels less restrictive for people who feel less hungry on keto", which, fair enough but I don't think that enough evidence to say "promoting the keto diet will address the obesity problem". There may well be tons of people for whom keto is too restrictive, because they won't feel less hungry after meals.
In the end, the best diet is the one you can stick to. For some people that's keto, for most people it's portion control, for others it may be intermittent fasting, for others it may be offsetting their food intake with exercise. In the end, I think it's harmful to promote any specific diet as "the cure to obesity", and it's far better to encourage people to try out different diets rather than giving them the idea that "if this diet won't work, nothing will". Try different things out and see what works for you.
My personal experience is that when I eat carbohydrates I enter “berserk” mode, where my appetite is extremely elevated. It usually ends up with overeating and an insulin crash.
While when eating no carbohydrates I don’t get that same feeling and can have more self-control.
> all forms of diets are similarly effective when you control for calorie intake. Low carb diets work, low fat diet work, intermittent fasting works, plain old fasting works, McDonald's diet and Twinkie diets work
And none of them creates sustainable long term weight loss. Overwhelming majority of people who loose weight, gain it again. Keeping diets long term means that they feel bad all the time, you are tired etc. And you fail the moment keeping diet is not priority number one.
Which leads to search for something that will work long term for majority of people.
Yes, the theory behind weight loss and maintenance is very simple. As with many theories, however, it's the application that's the problem.
I've lost and maintained 150lb weight loss until recently, when circumstances and stress has caused me to gain back some portion of that I haven't been keen to measure. I can tell you from significant first hand experience that it is very difficult to override your brain when your brain thinks it needs more food.
Actually, it is harder to do in the US than in Europe due to the insane amount of sugar they put into everything (even bread!).
Also, keeping oneself to a diet is a habit change, which is like the hardest thing to do, so don’t think lowly of those who have some trouble keeping themselves to it.
In the end, many revolutionary developments come down to us realizing the simplicity of things. Quantum mechanics is complicated. Eating well is simple. One just has to "get it".
It's like with shoes. If you buy cheap shoes, you end up paying more for shoes overall because they break much faster and you have to buy yet another pair. If you eat bad because it's cheaper/more convenient/whatever, you end up paying more for that decision than if you had made the right decision in the first place.
Repeating the mantra of "it's not that simple" is literally a self-actualizing curse. By thinking so, you make it so in your mind, which causes you not to act. My philosophy is that things really are simple.
Yesterday I ate nothing but ice cream. I wanted it, I bought it, I ate it. And it was stupid. There's some back and forth between competing desires, but eventually you will settle on the correct course of action. Every single substance and habit, no matter how addictive, I've started and also stopped. The key is literally just willpower. And maybe a bit of math. You have to count the goods and the bads to arrive at a conclusion. Ice cream tastes less good than it makes me feel ill for overconsumption therefore DON'T BUY ICE CREAM. Problem solved. If you then desire ice cream again, remember not how good it tastes but how ill it made you afterwards. What is it anyway? Cream and sugar. Sugar is a drug, so focusing on the cream it's probably an indication that my diet is lacking in fat. Eat more fat. What contains fat? Nuts, for example. Next time you desire ice cream, eat nuts. Problem solved.
For me, the keto diet was effective because after I stopped eating carbohydrates I also stopped craving them. This produced a tectonic shift in my eating habits.
Healthy weight is also a lot more complicated than just one hormone. Taubes is not discussing, for example, the difference between healthy and unhealthy obesity and the role that dysfunctional adipogenesis plays in the latter by inducing hypertrophic changes in fat cells (distended fat cells) rather than hyperplasia (create more fat cells).
A lot of research has focused on finding agonists for PPARgamma to restore healthy adipogenesis and reduce unhealthy inflammation of fat tissue. Some have been taken off the market for suspected toxicities, but piaglitazone is still widely prescribed.
Just wanted to let you know, although it's been a few days, that I genuinely appreciate this reply. I am curious why this got downvoted. It adds context to one of my uncertainties (the exact mechanism for increased satiety under keto) and adds more context as to why obesity is unhealthy in the first place and how the original article is extremely reductive. I don't know of any way to enable notifications for replies to my comments (be it via email or on HN itself) so if anyone knows please let me know!
So, we are finally dismissing "low fat-low weight" because the evidence was always weak and the few actually relevant studies had very questionable backers (sugar industry) and very widely misrepresented to benefit nutrition gurus to sell their books? Good!
Aaaand we are replacing that immediately with a similarly reductionist view (see title) with questionable backed evidence (one study by a start-up, not randomized) easily misrepresented by nutrition gurus (title image of the blog is the author) to sell his two books? Incredible!
We still don't even really understand where the "hungry" feeling comes from, entirely. Nutrition is incredibly complex. It is a function of culture, genetics, neurology, society, healthcare system, medical education, funding, corporate culture, advertising, cognition, organ function, sports, mental health, environment, climate, industry regulations and probably fifty more. It would be nice if at least the scientific community move away from the idea that we just have to find the "10 diet rules to change your life" and then we win - that's as embarrassing as it is prevalent.
I just skimmed the article, but it doesn't seem to mention how chemicals commonly found in our lived environment act as endocrine disruptors and which studies are showing lead to obesity.
This comment breaks two of the most important site guidelines:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here. We're trying to avoid shallow, repetitive discussion, because it's boring [1], and because it has a tendency to get nastier as it goes along [2].
You could only dismiss this with that much arrogance if your body digested every single calorie of food you ingest with 100% efficiency, which it doesn't. And you need to conclude that people are all motivated by food to exactly the same extent, which is also not true.
(It might still be wrong, but the debunking needs to be less pithy and more thorough).
It's important to realize that saying it's not a "calorie problem" is not the same as saying "it has nothing to do with calories".
It's saying it's the wrong place to try to find a leverage point for defeating it.
What Taubes is claiming is that talking about calories to someone who is obese doesn't help them. Like Nicholson's character says in "As Good As It Gets", it's like describing the water to someone who is drowning: it's information that is true, but doesn't solve their problem.
How you do that does matter though, because how easy it is affects how likely it is that you would succeed at weight loss.
This is like saying it doesn't matter what means of transport you take to work because if you keep moving you'll get there eventually. It's kind of true, but it's missing the point - it's obviously better to e.g. cycle than to crawl.
Edit: before you nitpick about one being faster I'll change my analogy to walking forwards vs walking backwards at the same speed.
You ignire the fact that human bodies have various systems to keep weight in place. E.g. with a calorie surplus most people will inadvertedly do more small movements to burn up to 600kcal/day without even noticing.
Without those systems, with just a 100kcal a day, you would gain 5kg of fat a year.
Calories are a unit of energy, not weight. Conflating the two is sloppy thinking.
Eat nothing but grass and you will die of starvation. Yet ruminants live on grass, and its energy content can be measured with a calorimeter. Thermodynamics are a poor mechanism for understanding biology.
The number of calories are largely irrelevant. The hormones direct what is done with those calories. Is it used or stored. The body has multiple ways of burning more or less energy.
Stating that this isn't a problem if thermodynamics isn't saying thermodynamics isn't real. It is just saying that it doesn't apply in this problem, i.e. it is an irrelevant factor.
It is similar to saying speed isn't the reason you are late to work today. There was an accident and the freeway was locked up. Speed is still real. It just doesn't explain anything.
does it literally say it "has nothing to do with"?
Ctrl-f tells me that no, it does not.
If a problem were solved, then the problem would be solved. But that doesn't mean that every problem is best described as a "solve the problem"-problem .
Indeed, if the mass that exits the body (including via respiration) is more than the mass that enters it, then the mass of the body decreases. This is obvious. If you think that people advocating different focuses don't believe this, I think you are for the most part mistaken.
When people say that something "is an <X> problem", I think they generally mean (something along the lines of) that the most useful way (or, one way among the more useful ways) to think about the problem, is to think of it in terms of <X> , or that <X> is important to think about when trying to solve or understand the problem.
So, when someone says "It is a hormone problem, not a calorie problem", they aren't saying that human bodies violate conservation of mass, they are saying that the best way to understand the problem is through hormones, and how the hormones influence the mass in vs mass out.
When someone is drunk, they tend to behave differently. Surely you understand this? When someone is hungry, they tend to behave differently.
"In the future, eat less and exercise more." Is not an atomic action that a person can take at a given time. A person in the moment makes a decision as to what to do in that moment, and this can include thoughts or other mental actions with the goal of influencing their future decisions.
But, if one's current "decision" to do something in the future is only a mental action with the goal of influencing the future actions, then to succeed in influencing those future actions, doing things that influence one's body chemistry and thereby influence one's future actions, can be helpful, and possibly more consistently effective than merely making some mental actions.
Suppose one wants to act in a professional and formal manner during a meeting which takes place in a few(?) hours. If one has this goal, then it may be helpful to currently refrain from drinking large quantities of alcohol.
If one has adhd and needs to be able to focus on some task later in the day, that may be a reason for them to not refrain from taking their prescribed medication.
Our decision making processes are not like a RL-agent simply getting data in and sending actions out, but always using the same process, but rather, our interactions with the environment can influence our decision making processes.
We can get drunk. we can consume caffeine. We can consume things that influence thought processes in more radical ways (like, hallucinogens or whatever). A railroad spike through the brain can drastically and in a long-term way alter someone's behavior.
If someone has an alien brain-slug on their head that compels them to punch spotted dogs that they encounter, the solution to this is not to tell them "stop punching spotted dogs", but to tell them to remove the alien brain-slug. This is true even if the former would result in them sometimes successfully resisting the compulsion to punch spotted dogs.
(?) : I don't actually know how long it takes for someone to become drunk or cease being drunk, as I've never really been around people while they have been drunk.
I am neither a journalist or a scientist, but experiments done on my own body for the last 20 years (body hacking, you could call it) has led me to conclude pretty much the same thing as described in this article. I.e. it works on my own body - I dont know what works for others.
> The conventional approaches don’t work because while we can sustain eating less for a while, eventually the hunger gets us because we’re semi-starving ourselves.
I interpreted him as saying it is a viable approach scientifically, but one that does not practically work because people get hungry while taking that approach and quit.
we get hungry because we are over stimulated. from sight to smell to sounds..every one of our sensory organs is primed to consume more food for the experience. not necessarily for calories.
There is a difference between "hungry" and "hungry". Doing some fasting will teach the difference. One is a feeling of withdraw, not unlike from an addiction, we know there is food available and that it is pleasurable and our mind tells us to go and grab it. The second one is more physiological, a very different sensation and comes from the core/stomach. You feel like a black hole in your core.
When you eat at very specific hours you'll get an urge to eat around that same hour even if you took a big meal a few hours before. That's the addiction speaking.
What you are mentioning is the first one, cravings, these can be biased/manufactured by society and ads. I suspect that if we only really ate when we are physiologically hungry there wouldn't be any overweight issue.
He's arguing for eating different types of foods (fats instead of carbohydrates). I have no idea if that's a good idea or not, but there would be no violation of the laws of thermodynamics if it did work. (Admittedly headline is awkwardly worded)
Reminder: Taubes is the well known author of “Good Calories, Bad Calories” and “Why we get fat”. Which is to say, he isn’t just a journalist, but also someone who has authorized bestselling books on this set of topics.
well..then obesity should be easily solved. if its a hormone problem, then why are we looking at diets rather than administering hormone therapies?
testosterone could be an umbrella weight loss strategy. except there is the aggression part.
ok. now what? the only logical solution is calorie restriction. rather than diets or hormones. and its easy. dont eat too much. we didnt evolve to where we are by eating three square meals a day. we ate little and often starved in between while hunting and foraging. and likely had a lot of adrenaline coursing through our bodies.
never has there been an obese caveman. but they didnt have butter either. we likely subsisted on berries and fruits and wild edible. i want to throw in mushrooms or hallucinogens and some version of the good herb..and a small amount of meat and fish.
No, it's not easy. It's extremely hard for most people, that is the whole point of the article.
> we didnt evolve to where we are by eating three square meals a day. we ate little and often starved in between while hunting and foraging.
Yes, and that is exactly the reason why we evolved to eat as much as we can when there is lots of food available, so we'll survive the starvation when there isn't.
Our evolutionary programming compels us (via hormones) to be obese.
It's easy if your hormones are in balance. Thin people don't go snacking all the time, it's the chubby folks who do that.
For example, if your cortosol (the "stress" hormone) is high, you will be craving snacks. The moment it's back to normal (you don't have stress) you can sit around and not want snacks.
As other posters said, it is extremely hard to avoid snacking when your body craves them. It is extremely easy to not snack, when your body does not want them.
Stop throwing around this "easily" "its easy" around. If it were easy, we would not have this conversation.
It is very easy to diet yourself to malfunction. Contemporary debate about diet focuses almost exclusively on aesthetic. But equally or more important is that if you dont eat enough, you wont perform in work due to tiredness and difficulty to focus. You will loose attention while driving. You will have crappy mood, treating everyone around badly. You will build anemia or whatever and you wont be able to walk fast, do any activity that requires physical movement. Your calorie output will go super down, because you will be constantly tired.
> we didnt evolve to where we are by eating three square meals a day. we ate little and often starved in between while hunting and foraging. and likely had a lot of adrenaline coursing through our bodies.
First, obviously, those groups had males, females and children. Not everyone was hunting, because that is literally impossible. Second, the lifespan of those people was shorter then ours. They died younger, oftentimes from diseases that had to do with malnutrition of one kind or another.
We already fixed whole range of grave diseases that had to do with lack of nutrients in food.
The amount of intellectual acrobatics that occurs in this area is troubling.
Poor diet due to financial and educational restriction will affect gut bacteria and other things that contribute to appetite. This can be difficult to shift in later life, but is not impossible thanks to healthy alternatives.
Lack of consistent rigorous exercise will ensure that you stay fat regardless. Calories in vs calories out makes the difference.
The science is pretty clear and supports what is said in this article.
I changed my diet from "normal" to carnivour (which basically is a form of low carb) and had lots of improvements in my health even thought I had normal weight. I had ulcerative colitis for 20 years and all symptoms was gone within 6 months, also verified with a rectoscopy.
I also had great improvements in mood and motivation by taking vitamin-d and for cramps/sleep by taking ZMA (Zinc for testosterone, Magnesium for cramps).
Can recommend the books Deep Nutrition and Genius Foods, the latter is probably more accessible.
Also recommend following @Mangan150 on twitter.
Isn't animal product a lot worse for the environment than plant-based food? Long term the world has to move towards consuming less animal product, not more.
Eating food that make you unhealthy is not a choice for me, and I am happy for those have better life with different diets. For those who have problems, I can recommend trying this out for some months and see if it helps you.
I wasn't suggesting eating food that's bad for you, but rather if there are plant-based protein sources (such as legumes) that can be used as (at least partially) a replacement for meat.
Wait does the carnivore diet actually work? I remember Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson discussing this diet, and Peterson was widely ridiculed for it (example https://www.theguardian.com/food/2018/sep/10/my-carnivore-di...). Has the consensus on it changed?
Problem is though, anecdotal evidence does not correct for various things, for example regression to the mean.
The improvement may purely coincidental with the change of diet, or the chosen diet.
Hence we need studies and not anecdata to judge, if something works.
As an individual you should still be allowed to test put various things.
No, as an individual you aren't allow to preach afterwards that anyone can do this.
But you can say: this helped me.
As an individual you don't have to care if it is s result of placebo, your particular gut biome or even magic. If it works it works.
Be happy, write that it helped you, don't write, just don't be annoying about it ;-)
Also the currently top comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25819790 summarize it neatly, something like: as far as we know all diets work for weight loss as long as we control for calorie intake (but read the original I linked to).
Bodybuilders are experts at loosing fat getting in to single digit body fat percentages consistently and methodically.
Most follow the same rough diet and manipulate calories in the same way, it’s kind of cookie cutter, do this you’ll loose fat.
Most of it is learnt over years of professional bodybuilders keeping meticulous diaries of every training session, every calorie eat, every small change made and every result seen.
Bodybuilders take it to the extreme to be the best, still I think if you are interested in loosing fat there’s a lot that can be learnt from bodybuilders without going to the extreme.