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Everyone knows that if you burn more calories than you take in, you will lose weight. But does it really matter where those calories come from? I've lost weight before by just eating smaller portions and I didn't pay attention at all to how much protein, carbs and fat I consumed every day. Heck, I probably even ate some white carbs.
So does limiting certain things, like fat or carbs, really make you lose weight faster? I've always heard that just eating healthy carbs and limiting them after dinner will help you lose weight faster. But now I'm reading more and more about how animal products make you store more fat. Are you more likely to stay skinny if you're a vegetarian/vegan or follow a low carb diet? What is better?
I think it matters. However, if you cut out white carbs, fatty foods, salty foods and sugary foods, what you are left with is pretty low calorie food. So if you cut out certain things, you'll probably end up eating less calories without really trying. I've lost a lot of weight just by cutting out certain foods, because I can't stand being hungry. I eat as much as I want, whenever I want, and I'm still losing weight (but I exercise a lot, too).
My sister is around 5'10" 115 pounds. She rides her bike two hours per day (back and forth from work) and only eats once per day. She usually eats relatively healthy food but once in a while will eat a huge burger and have a couple huge glasses of wine. I have never seen her eat anything like cookies, candy or ice cream, though. She has been like this since high school. It's all calories in / calories out.
Does she have an eating disorder? If she eats just one meal per day, she probably doesn't have more than 500 calories a day. 115 pounds is extremely skinny for someone who is 5'10". I seriously doubt anyone can be that skinny without severely restricting.
She's just really skinny. She's always been like that. I'd guess she eats about 1500 calories per day. Her doctor has tried to get her to gain weight and she's gotten up to about 125 when she used to be on the swim team. Even then she was still "ripped" and looked kind of freakish cuz mostly just her shoulders and arms got bigger. Think Madonna's arms. I'm really skinny too, I was 6'1" and 140 lbs but I worked out with weights and ate tons of food so I could play football and got up to 195. However, when I quit doing that I shrank back down to 165 lbs. A lot of it is just genetics. One side of my family is tall and skinny and the other side is short and stocky. My other sister and brother got the short and stocky genes.
I'm in the military and I just got back from a 6 month TDY (Temporary Duty) in which I lived in a hotel and didn't cook anything. I lost 10lbs by counting calories and exercising. Most of my meals were from fast food restaurants and I did eat white carbs too.
I'm in the military and I just got back from a 6 month TDY (Temporary Duty) in which I lived in a hotel and didn't cook anything. I lost 10lbs by counting calories and exercising. Most of my meals were from fast food restaurants and I did eat white carbs too.
+1
When I lived in Japan I lost 15 pounds and all I ate was: rice, noodles, beer, mcdonalds and junk food / candy.
OP, in reality no. It's calories in and calories out that matters in the end to lose or maintain weight. But by making smart food choices and select the foods that keeps you full, you feel satisfied longer and therefor wont overeat.
I keep a food diary and limit myself to 1450 net calories per day. I weigh and measure everything I eat. If I want to drink wine and eat something extra one day i log those calories. Obviously knowing that Im gonna drink a bottle of wine one evening I have to adjust my calories for that day accordingly. In the end of the day my net calories are still only 1450!
I also work out almost everyday and Im pretty active outside the gym so that helps too.
OP, in reality no. It's calories in and calories out that matters in the end to lose or maintain weight. But by making smart food choices and select the foods that keeps you full, you feel satisfied longer and therefor wont overeat.
I keep a food diary and limit myself to 1450 net calories per day. I weigh and measure everything I eat. If I want to drink wine and eat something extra one day i log those calories. Obviously knowing that Im gonna drink a bottle of wine one evening I have to adjust my calories for that day accordingly. In the end of the day my net calories are still only 1450!
I also work out almost everyday and Im pretty active outside the gym so that helps too.
What does net calories mean? Do you eat that many calories to lose or maintain weight?
It absolutely matters, particularly if you're trying to lose weight which can be taxing on the body, you need to make sure you're getting the proper amount of nutrients, even on a reduced calorie diet. You're simply not going to get those nutritional benefits from eating junk food making your results less than optimal. You often hear about people who go on crazy starvation diets losing their hair and generally looking and feeling like crap. Metafast is a dieting system that is infamous for that and part of the problem is not enough real food and too many crap supplements....etc.
Its better to lose weight more slowly while eating a more healthful diet than crash diet with some fad supplements or go on the "2 Cupcakes A Day" type diets.
OP, in reality no. It's calories in and calories out that matters in the end to lose or maintain weight. But by making smart food choices and select the foods that keeps you full, you feel satisfied longer and therefor wont overeat.
I keep a food diary and limit myself to 1450 net calories per day. I weigh and measure everything I eat. If I want to drink wine and eat something extra one day i log those calories. Obviously knowing that Im gonna drink a bottle of wine one evening I have to adjust my calories for that day accordingly. In the end of the day my net calories are still only 1450!
I also work out almost everyday and Im pretty active outside the gym so that helps too.
Calorie in/Calorie out is a tired old mantra needs to be retired back in the 90's where it belongs. The reality is that foods vary in their impact upon the body and its never as simple as stated. Changes in metabolism occur as a result of consuming different foods, its far more complex than a cliched tagline implies. The latest research keeps moving away from "calorie in/calorie out" and its definitely past time for that. This does not that I'm arguing for people to completely ignore their caloric intake, but I hear so much misguided crap about "it doesn't matter what you eat, just track your calories" and we're learning that sort of advice simply is wrong. "Calorie In/Calorie out" is simply an incomplete suggestion in light of new data.
"The new research, by five nutrition and public health experts at Harvard University, is by far the most detailed long-term analysis of the factors that influence weight gain, involving 120,877 well-educated men and women who were healthy and not obese at the start of the study. In addition to diet, it has important things to say about exercise, sleep, television watching, smoking and alcohol intake.
The study participants — nurses, doctors, dentists and veterinarians in the Nurses’ Health Study, Nurses’ Health Study II and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study — were followed for 12 to 20 years. Every two years, they completed very detailed questionnaires about their eating and other habits and current weight. The fascinating results were published in June in The New England Journal of Medicine.
The analysis examined how an array of factors influenced weight gain or loss during each four-year period of the study. The average participant gained 3.35 pounds every four years, for a total weight gain of 16.8 pounds in 20 years.
“This study shows that conventional wisdom — to eat everything in moderation, eat fewer calories and avoid fatty foods — isn’t the best approach,” Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health and lead author of the study, said in an interview. “What you eat makes quite a difference. Just counting calories won’t matter much unless you look at the kinds of calories you’re eating.”
Dr. Frank B. Hu, a nutrition expert at the Harvard School of Public Health and a co-author of the new analysis, said: “In the past, too much emphasis has been put on single factors in the diet. But looking for a magic bullet hasn’t solved the problem of obesity.”
Also untrue, Dr. Mozaffarian said, is the food industry’s claim that there’s no such thing as a bad food.
“There are good foods and bad foods, and the advice should be to eat the good foods more and the bad foods less,” he said. “The notion that it’s O.K. to eat everything in moderation is just an excuse to eat whatever you want.”
The study showed that physical activity had the expected benefits for weight control. Those who exercised less over the course of the study tended to gain weight, while those who increased their activity didn’t. Those with the greatest increase in physical activity gained 1.76 fewer pounds than the rest of the participants within each four-year period. But the researchers found that the kinds of foods people ate had a larger effect over all than changes in physical activity.
“Both physical activity and diet are important to weight control, but if you are fairly active and ignore diet, you can still gain weight,” said Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health and a co-author of the study.
As Dr. Mozaffarian observed, “Physical activity in the United States is poor, but diet is even worse.”"
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But, consistent with the new study’s findings, metabolism takes a hit from refined carbohydrates — sugars and starches stripped of their fiber, like white flour. When Dr. David Ludwig of Children’s Hospital Boston compared the effects of refined carbohydrates with the effects of whole grains in both animals and people, he found that metabolism, which determines how many calories are used at rest, slowed with the consumption of refined grains but stayed the same after consumption of whole grains.
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The Journal of the American Medical Association published the results of a clinical trial by Dr. David Ludwig of Boston Children’s Hospital and his collaborators. While the media tended to treat the study as another diet trial — what should we eat to maintain weight loss? — it spoke to a far more fundamental issue: What actually causes obesity? Why do we get fat in the first place? Too many calories? Or something else? The calorie-is-a-calorie notion dates to 1878, when the great German nutritionist Max Rubner established what he called the isodynamic law.
It was applied to obesity in the early 1900s by another German — Carl Von Noorden, who was of two minds on the subject. One of his theories suggested that common obesity was all about calories in minus calories out; another, that it was about how the body partitions those calories, either for energy or into storage.
This has been the core of the controversy ever since, and it’s never gone away. If obesity is a fuel-partitioning problem — a fat-storage defect — then the trigger becomes not the quantity of food available but the quality. Now carbohydrates in the diet become the prime suspects, especially refined and easily digestible carbohydrates (foods that have what’s called a high glycemic index) and sugars.
UNTIL the 1960s, carbohydrates were indeed considered a likely suspect in obesity: “Every woman knows that carbohydrate is fattening,” as two British dietitians began a 1963 British Journal of Nutrition article.
The obvious mechanism: carbohydrates stimulate secretion of the hormone insulin, which works, among other things, to store fat in our fat cells. At the time, though, the conventional wisdom was beginning its shift: obesity was becoming an energy issue.
Carbohydrates, with less than half the calories per gram as fat, were beginning their official transformation into heart-healthy diet foods. One reason we’ve been told since to eat low-fat, carbohydrate-rich diets is this expectation that they’ll keep us thin. What was done by Dr. Ludwig’s team has never been done before. First they took obese subjects and effectively semi-starved them until they’d lost 10 to 15 percent of their weight. Such weight-reduced subjects are particularly susceptible to gaining the weight back. Their energy expenditure drops precipitously and they burn fewer calories than people who naturally weigh the same. This means they have to continually fight their hunger just to maintain their weight loss. The belief is that weight loss causes “metabolic adaptations,” which make it almost inevitable that the weight will return. Dr. Ludwig’s team then measured how many calories these weight-reduced subjects expended daily, and that’s how many they fed them. But now the subjects were rotated through three very different diets, one month for each. They ate the same amount of calories on all three, equal to what they were expending after their weight loss, but the nutrient composition of the diets was very different. One diet was low-fat and thus high in carbohydrates. This was the diet we’re all advised to eat: whole grains, fruits, vegetables, lean sources of protein. One diet had a low glycemic index: fewer carbohydrates in total, and those that were included were slow to be digested — from beans, non-starchy vegetables and other minimally processed sources. The third diet was Atkins, which is very low in carbohydrates and high in fat and protein. The results were remarkable. Put most simply, the fewer carbohydrates consumed, the more energy these weight-reduced people expended. On the very low-carbohydrate Atkins diet, there was virtually no metabolic adaptation to the weight loss. These subjects expended, on average, only 100 fewer calories a day than they did at their full weights. Eight of the 21 subjects expended more than they did at their full weights — the opposite of the predicted metabolic compensation. On the very low-carbohydrate diet, Dr. Ludwig’s subjects expended 300 more calories a day than they did on the low-fat diet and 150 calories more than on the low-glycemic-index diet. As Dr. Ludwig explained, when the subjects were eating low-fat diets, they’d have to add an hour of moderate-intensity physical activity each day to expend as much energy as they would effortlessly on the very-low-carb diet. And this while consuming the same amount of calories. If the physical activity made them hungrier — a likely assumption — maintaining weight on the low-fat, high-carb diet would be even harder. Why does this speak to the very cause of obesity? One way to think about this is to consider weight-reduced subjects as “pre-obese.” They’re almost assuredly going to get fatter, and so they can be research stand-ins — perhaps the best we have — for those of us who are merely predisposed to get fat but haven’t done so yet and might take a few years or decades longer to do it. If we think of Dr. Ludwig’s subjects as pre-obese, then the study tells us that the nutrient composition of the diet can trigger the predisposition to get fat, independent of the calories consumed. The fewer carbohydrates we eat, the more easily we remain lean. The more carbohydrates, the more difficult. In other words, carbohydrates are fattening, and obesity is a fat-storage defect. What matters, then, is the quantity and quality of carbohydrates we consume and their effect on insulin.
From this perspective, the trial suggests that among the bad decisions we can make to maintain our weight is exactly what the government and medical organizations like the American Heart Association have been telling us to do: eat low-fat, carbohydrate-rich diets, even if those diets include whole grains and fruits and vegetables.
“It says that from a metabolic perspective all calories are not alike,” said Dr. David Ludwig, director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children’s Hospital. “The quality of the calories going in affects the number of calories going out.”
There should be a focus on the amount of calories people take in obviously but the era of "eat whatever you want to fit into your total caloric intake" are coming to an end. More and more data and research is supporting the notion that WHAT you eat is just as important as HOW much you eat.
Last edited by Juram; 05-04-2014 at 06:09 AM..
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