When I eat carbs, I put on weight. When I don't, I lose weight. However, other people I know are the opposite. Quite honestly, I think you can't generalise 'diets' or eating advice as, frankly, it would appear that different people's bodies work in slightly different ways. This could explain the vast array of different advice that, often times, seems contradictory.
>When I eat carbs, I put on weight. When I don't, I lose weight. However, other people I know are the opposite.
I doubt so.
If you stick to protein and vegetables with no carbs and sugars in general, you get lots of filling fiber, and fewer calories, unless they consume huge quantities of lard or bacon every day, or drink sugars (e.g. in juices or sodas), etc.
> Carbohydrates (also called saccharides) are molecular compounds made from just three elements: carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Monosaccharides (e.g. glucose) and disaccharides (e.g. sucrose) are relatively small molecules. They are often called sugars. Other carbohydrate molecules are very large (polysaccharides such as starch and cellulose).
I wish people would stop hating on "carbs" and redirect their disdain to sugars / small carbohydrates.
Glucogenic amino acids (13 of the approx. 18 main amino acids comprising protein) provide glucose and small carbohydrates when broken down. Point taken on 'enough carbs' though.
I can generalise diets pretty easy. Eat less calories than you burn and loose weight. Eat whatever you want if you can abide by this rule you will loose the weight. But to be healthy. Well you have to eat healthy to be healthy. And that means getting all the fat, carbs and protein your body needs. And what your body needs I agree you can't generalise.
> if you can abide by this rule you will loose the weight
This is the key point and it makes all the difference. You need to be able to stay on the diet for a sufficiently long time, and that's why different approaches are needed fro different people. If you eat carbs you need to measure carefully every meal and calculate the calories, which to many people very quickly gets extremely annoying. On low carb diets you don't have to. Also there are mood changes depending on the taste of the food that you eat. If you like eating meat and veggies, low-carb diets taste great, you enjoy every meal. It makes it much easier to abide the rules. Also general mental state is important, high stress and depression will sabotage your efforts.
Diets are not just about nutrition, that's one of the biggest misconceptions. Psychology and physical activities play equally, if not more important role in dieting.
> Diets are not just about nutrition, that's one of the biggest misconceptions. Psychology and physical activities play equally, if not more important role in dieting.
Loose weight just by counting calories will not take in consideration toxicity (see my other comment in this thread). Many people burn fat this way, which release toxins they can't process. Hence their body is thin but saturated with poison. From here 2 things happens:
- the person gains weight again to protect him/herself. Happens very often.
- the person manage to not gain weight at this expense of his/her health, sometime with terrible consequences you only see months or years later.
One of my friends is currently in the later category. She lost a lot of weight and his very hot. But her skin is degrading at an alarming pace. It's a very bad symptom when your are 30.
All in all, it's important when you loose weight to:
- do it progressively so your body can process the toxins at the same rate they are released.
- help the body to eliminated say toxins by alternating rest and exercise, drinking and if needed, consuming.
- provide the body with a sane diet to not only avoid adding more toxins to the current ones, but also bring minerals than can be used to bring the PH up and vitamins to keep organs running smoothly.
Basically, "sleep well, eat well and exercise". Thank you grand ma :)
I'm not a native english speaker, I don't know the proper world for this.
Some molecules are things that have nothing to do in the body (Maillard reaction output, antibiotic in the meat, pesticide in fruits, etc). Some are just regular things we can process but in a greater concentration that is healthy. Some are just natural waste of our regular body processes, but in a greater quantity than we can manage in our current health.
Basically nothing is a poison, it's a matter of quantity you absorb and can process. I just labeled it "toxin" because I don't have the vocabulary for it.
There is no magic thinking about it.
E.G: the blood PH must be at 7.40 PH. The body has mechanisms to ensure it stays that way. If the body is saturated with things bringing the PH down, it will try to get rid of it (through poop, urine and the like). I called them toxin, it was a bad choice. Fair enough. But the fact remains, if your blood PH goes down to 7.36, you are good for the hospital, and your body will try to avoid it. If it can't get rid of the responsible molecules, it will find a way to compensate. One way is to throw minerals at it since they are mostly basic. Another one is to dilute them by holding water. A last one is to wrap the molecule into fat, store it, so it can be processed later.
Again, no magic thinking. My wording may not be perfect, but I don't see anything unreasonable in what I'm saying.
However, I can't help but notice than 3 peoples opposed my explanation by blatantly rejecting it without arguments while I'm taking the time to respectfully demonstrate it. And give references to studies and books in another comment.
Please don't be aggressive. If you know I'm wrong, just make your point with arguments.
You should probably rephrase. I think I get what you are trying to say, but the way you said it is way off.
There most definitely are such things as "toxins". There are neurotoxins produced by black widows, most scorpions, box jellyfish, many algae and cyanobacteria, among others. There are necrotoxins produced by the brown recluse, rattlesnakes, puff adders for example.
Heck, if there were no such thing as toxins, the "Journal of Venomous Animals and Toxins including Tropical Diseases" would have long ago dropped "and Toxins" from its name to save costs on ink :-). The Toxin and Toxin-Target database [1] would also have about 3700 less entries if toxins did not exist.
Not really. If I was in an argument with a UFO theorist where I said the US government wasn't actually hiding live aliens, and someone came along and pointed out that we have illegal aliens in custody, I would point out that this is true and irrelevant.
The word toxin is widely used in "wellness" circles, but the concept so described does not exist. The fact that there is a correct, jargon-specific, scientific usage of the same term notwithstanding.
Wellness people also have weird beliefs about vitamins, and vitamins are in fact complicated, but that doesn't mean I make little air quotes every time I refer to vitamins.
No intention of arguing as I don't believe this is a good reason for not losing weight; I believe that for other reasons. However, just thought you would be interested in this. Check out some of the recent studies on Persistent Organic Pollutants.
This is true, but it ignores a lot of other things that are going on:
Absorption and digestion can greatly vary between humans. (A Common example are algae).
What kind of micro and macronutrients you eat will directly and indirectly affect your metabolism.
What you eat will affect your hunger.
Those and other complex interplays lead to things that are counterintuitive. For instance there recently was some study that drinking soda with artificial sweetener also leads to obesity, if I remember correctly.
> Eat less calories than you burn and loose weight.
This mantra annoys me, because it's like saying that to go to space, all you need to do is to burn rocket fuel and keep the nozzle pointed down (and then to the side).
It's technically true, but every single sane person know that it's true, and it doesn't really help you get to where you want.
It ignores how food affects motivation, digestion, metabolism etc. You can technically loose weight eating only sugar, but you'd find it impossibly hard due to the way the body is wired.
Generalizing to the obvious/trivial is not useful.
People keep repeating it because once you figure out your motivation and dial in a calorie goal that lets you lose weight without feeling like crap, it actually works. You're right that you can't ignore all that other stuff, but you also can't lose sight of the essential fact that you lose weight by eating fewer calories than you burn. The process of dieting requires you to perform tasks that support that goal.
It's a fundamental part of our physiology that we have to consume a certain quantity of macronutrients to support our metabolic processes. If we don't, then our bodies utilize existing stores of macronutrients like fat and muscles, breaking them down and converting them to usable energy to meet the deficit. This causes you to lose weight, as you drink water, metabolize your fat and muscle tissue, and then exhale carbon dioxide, and excrete waste products. You're literally breathing the weight out.
You find motivation so that there's something preventing you from stuffing your face with cake every day. Then you spend a few months iterating while you figure out what you can build a diet out of that will leave you sated and allow you to cut calories. This is where your metabolism, psychology, etc. come in. Once you have that dialed in, and you may arrive at it without counting calories if you're careful, then you will start losing weight.
Weight loss requires a lot of self-awareness and attention to what you enjoy or don't enjoy about a variety of foods. Somehow, through some series of test meals, you figure out that you really like raw bell peppers, but only with salt, or that the only thing trail mix is actually good for is making you hungrier(this is something I struggle with).
> dial in a calorie goal that lets you lose weight without feeling like crap, it actually works.
This greatly describes why so many people have a problem with the blanket statement "Eat less calories than you burn and lose weight.", because it implicitly contains the crux of the matter.
There is no such thing as a single, straightforward "calorie goal that lets you lose weight without feeling like crap". It varies wildly depending on the composition of your diet (which is even different from person to person) and accompanying factors like amount of physical excercise, sleep patterns etc.
And those are the deciding factors. The calorie deficit is a prerequisite, but the difficult part is in finding a way to sustain it. (I mean, you go there yourself in the following paragraphs.)
But the statement alone is borderline useless and actually quite condescending to anyone with a modicum of diet expierience.
It's like saying "Answer enough questions correctly and you'll pass the test." Duh, No shit, sherlock.
I think the point is that in order to take in less calories than you burn, and stay vaguely healthy, you need to be aware of what you're eating, how your body processes it, and how to avoid the temptation to eat more. If you're not eating the right sorts of foods, then you're going to wind up hungry well before your next meal - which isn't conducive to an ongoing diet change.
Part of "that other stuff" is that the body do not burn or metabolize consistently when you change diet. For example, the body can go into a starving cycle which increase metabolism, lower energy usage, and make you less sated, and which reportedly takes a rather long time to recover from. It should not be that surprising that the human body has evolved to adapt when food availability change.
Perhaps, but if everyone around you was using molasses instead of rocket fuel and pointing their spaceships at the side of the mountain and then posting "I've tried everything I don't know why I'm not soaring in space yet" on Facebook you might start by reference to those basic principles.
I can't speak for anyone else but in my case, an excess of calories usually results in me being an awful lot hotter as my body burns off the extra energy. I'm not a biologist but I was under the impression that a release of insulin was required to store excess energy as fat? That would suggest it's more related to blood sugar spikes than actual energy consumed.
There are absolutely different ways bodies can handle excess calories, and it's pretty clearly documented.
For some people, their body will try to burn the extra calories - this in part may be due to the amount of brown fat, which is one of the mechanisms the body uses to generate heat. For others, their body will store as much energy as possible as fat, and they need to increase their activity level to compensate.
In addition, your body can become more efficient, using less energy based on the calories you consume. This is one reason that it can be very hard to keep weight off after you lose it.
Metabolism is an incredibly complex process, and while we understand a lot of the pieces, we do not yet have a full understanding of how those pieces fit together, and how to use that information to help people change their metabolism beyond more than very general advice (build muscle, be more active), and some things were sort of taken for granted - such as how it used to be thought that lactic acid was responsible for muscle soreness in the days after workouts, when more recent research has shown this isn't the case: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/16/health/nutrition/16run.htm....
Maybe in another 50 years we'll have people who can really understand this stuff.
Not exactly true. For the same amount of calories, the quality of food may or may not impact your weight. You can eat 4000 calories/day in banana and loose weight, but eat 2500 in cheese burger and gain.
I tested that on myself. The body does not blindnessly store excess in absorbed energy. It stores fat for many other reasons. One of them is to regulate the blood PH: if you saturate your organism with too much toxic food, you won't process it fast enough. To avoid crossing the unfamous 7.40 PH threshold, one strategy is to use fat to wrap toxic molecules and put them aside on your belly so you can deal with it later. Unfortunately with our current life style, this "later" never comes.
„You can eat 4000 calories/day in banana and loose weight, but eat 2500 in cheese burger and gain.“
This my friend, is not true. Not true in like...completely false.
(source: Bodybuilding for a long long time...dieting 6 months every year...bulking up the other 6 months of the year...been counting every calorie for years)
>In the bottom comment I provided links to resources dealing with food toxicity.
You just provided general resources about food and nutrition (based on the links I'm familiar with -- others could be pseudo-science). Give some specific excerpts about "toxins" and we can discuss them.
All food has side effects (e.g. too much sugar and diabetes, micro-allergies, cured meat and cancer, etc). This is not the same as some unspecified BS "toxins".
It also has nothing to do with "I eat less calories and I get fatter compared to eating more" which was the original claim we disputed -- which is absolutely incorrect.
> You just provided general resources about food and nutrition
Well of course, why would I not ? They include the knowledge I'm using right now.
However I can't help but notice you provide blog posts with opinions, not studies or books.
Again I agree that using the word "toxin" was not a good choice. I'm not a native English speaker, I don't know any proper term for "things the body can't process, and that harms it".
> I eat less calories and I get fatter compared to eating more
Yes it has. A calorie is always in a context. It's extracted it and from this context. During this process, molecules that can harm the body can enter it, or be produced in it. Since using fat to wrap molecules is one of the ways the body cope with it, it has an impact on it.
I'm not saying eating only banana is healthy, but it has few chances of triggering the late mechanism.
No, the context only applies to health. You will always lose weight if you eat less calories, period.
>During this process, molecules that can harm the body can enter it, or be produced in it. Since using fat to wrap molecules is one of the ways the body cope with it, it has an impact on it.
That's not what happens. There is no such procedure that uses fat to "cope with it". Some substances just get accumulated in fat, with no bearing as to wether you can lose that weight by eating less calories. That's a common pseudo-scientific misconception on the "detox" circles.
- eat a little protein and lots of fructose from an apple from your garden;
- eat the same amount of calories as proteins + fat in industrial meat.
The second amount will create vastly more waste, such as urea, to be processed by the body. It will also require more energy to processed because the fructose is almost usable as-is. Because the second source of calories brings less minerals, it will also bring your PH down, forcing the body to deal with it. Because it's industrial meat, it will contains synthetic products such as antibiotic than will make your livers works a lot more and impact your digestive system flora.
But will not trigger the same insulin response.
Same amount of calories, very different context, and impact on the body.
Again, I notice a trend in those responses: you are just saying I'm wrong harshly but don't make demonstrations. If you know I'm wrong, please use arguments.
- "Constitution des organismes animaux et végétaux Causes des maladies qui les atteignent" is a fantastic complement but I don't know if it exists in english. Careful though, it has a controversial point of view on vaccines. Still worth it: https://www.amazon.fr/Constitution-organismes-bact%C3%A9rien...
Why is this true? Calories measure energy, not mass.
If I eat high calorie food, why does that cause me to retain more of the mass of that food in my body, compared to the same quantity of low calorie food?
This is a genuine question which I've never found a good answer for.
It would make much more sense to me if you said "Eat fewer kg of food than you excrete, and loose weight".
Your body stores excess energy as fat, or uses it to build muscle. The amount of food mass in your body at any given time is assumed to be constant in the long term, so when we talk about a person's weight changing we are generally referring to a change in their fat or muscle mass.
1kg of ice cream has a much greater potential to change your long-term mass than 1kg of broccoli because your body has the ability to extract more energy from it, and thus build more fat or muscle.
I see the article talking about a „interpersonal variability in post-meal glucose levels“.
But there is no mention of the parent-comments main point „When I eat carbs, I put on weight“ .... which might be an indirect effect of a higher blood glucose level (more hungry) ...but definitely not a direct effect.
The article isn't pay walled for once, I encourage you to read it, I consider it a ray of sunshine in the current darkness of nutritional science.
They use the post-prandial glucose response (PPGR) as a surrogate marker for how the body absorbs and metabolises food. Spikes in glucose levels after a meal are considered 'bad' as they cause large excursions in insulin secretion, and are associated with diabetes, heart disease and obesity.
They found a wide range of inter-personal variability in how particular foods affect blood glucose levels after a meal. Some people could eat a pizza for example, and the PPGR would hardly budge, whereas for others it would surge. The gut microbiome seemed to be important to this response. I believe the scientists have formed a company which plans to make personalised nutrition suggestions based on microbiome analysis, among other things.
Not sure if i fully understood you correctly, but yes, I feel a lot more hungry when eatinv more carbs. A good example of this is toast: no matter how many slices i eat, i'm never full. It actually makes me just want to eat more....
You eat the wrong kind of carbs. The kind of carbs you eat have ZERO fiber...so of course you will be hungry. Eat a bowl of oatmeal (100g) with a banana and milk, add a little cinnamon, heat on the stove or in the microwave and you are set for the next 8 hours.
I so wish that were true. I experience crashes on a regular basis when eating such food. There is no way i can go more than 4-6 hours without eating, apart from sleeping. My crashes come quick and once almost lead to a blackout. I don't experience this eating high fat/protein food.
the only thing that matters for weight (barring some serious disorders) is the balance of energy. eat excessive calories and your body stores it as fat. eat too little and your body burns fat for energy. regarding carbs: they make about 50 pct of the average persons caloric intake and they really aren't filling (atleast simple carbs). so cutting them out usually means getting rid of s major source of calories and usually replacing it with something more filling.
lowering fats would work as well since itd lower overall calories.
Weirdly, I find increasing fat intake makes me lose weight faster. This is probably because it's hard to eat lots of fat, but easy to consume the equivalent calories through carbs (I'm looking at you Oreo milkshakes...)
I still don't understand this idea that is hard to eat a lot of fat.
Lean protein sure, there is a limit to the number of chicken breasts I can eat, but fat? Bacon, Cheese, Fatty meats. I can easily eat 1000-1500kcal in a single meal without feeling really full.
I eat 4-5 eggs with bacon with a bit of butter, being around 750kcals for breakfast and then by lunch time, want to eat a bunch again. I easily eat a pound of meat/baby ribs that go over 1000kcals easily (black iberian pig baby back ribs are more fat than anything else) and after a few hours I will be hungry.
I'm a small guy so 2000kcal is about the food I need to keep my weight and I work out a lot.
Obviously the "quality" of fat source can make a difference just like for carbs, getting them from broccoli or brown rice can be more filling than getting them from fries per calorie. Avocado's and nuts are obviously more filling than animal fats. For the most part, I think your body "craves" fats and eating them solves that craving. But this isn't the same as being "filling". I've also heard that the beginning of going on a high fat (ketogenic) diet is difficult, but your body adapts and fat tends to start filling you.
finally, peoples bodies vary and some are full with fewer fats or carbs than others.
"fat bombs" are something I never understood in low carb communities. It's not hard at all to eat fat without supplementing. I eat bacon, eggs, red meat, salad dressing, dairy, etc and get plenty of fat.
My favourite food is called "Secretos Porco Preto" (black iberian pig secrets) [1]
This is the most fatty meat I ever eaten. I eat up and iron skillet, I put the piece there, it renders so much fat that it then fries itself (not grilled/sauted, the fat renders, heats up and fries the meat). After I take the meat out I get about 1/2 cup of fat for about 1.5 pounds of meat. I honestly don't understand how people think this won't get me as fat as the Michellin man if I just ate what I wanted...
I can eat anything and wont gain weight. It really seems like there is too much diversity in how we handle food inside our body.
The best diet is to try some things(experiment) and do whatever works best, not what feels best. Too many of these diets read like they are the most fun thing to do in the world.
Also a lot of people have the tendency to get their goal and then stop the diet only to gain weight again (then dismiss the diet because it didn't work) And this gain shows how people can work differently inside. Some will not gain back the weight after a diet, others would need to diet for life.
Yes, there is a big variance in the way people process food. But people also usually exhibits common characteristics:
- they don't eat that much on average. While they may sometime eat a lot, if you what the quantity during one week, you'll see they eat less than most people.
- they eat slowly.
Those 2 things alone allow you to process a certain amount of unbalanced diet.
BTW, if anybody want to loose weight, the second one, eating slowing, on a table doing nothing else than eating, and chewing a lot, is a good starting point. You don't need to change your diet and you will loose quite some weight.
A 3rd thing is that indeed, somebody type will be able to eat a lot of things and not gain weight. But it's not a good thing.
Eating a bad diet will bring toxins in your body. The body usually process it with various organs. But if it can't because the amount is too important, it has 3 strategies:
- watering it down. Diluting toxins by holding a lot of water in the body. Typically the 4 pounds you take on Xmas. It's not fat, it's water.
- wrapping it in fat. Love handles are actually temporary storage for emergency that got a bit permanent. This is why people say it's the most toxic fat and the hardest to loose. Fat people fall into this category.
- using minerals to bring your blood PH up.
Thin people with a bad diet fall into this category. Now if you eat a lot of greens, you'll have the minerals to play this game and it's ok. But most people don't eat enough vegetable to allow that, so the body take minerals from various part of the body, including the bones. Instead of getting fat, you destroy your skeleton. It's not a good thing.
Again I'm not a native english speaker, "toxins" is just a generic world I used to try to convey "anything the body can't process right now, how that is destroy it".
"Some molecules are things that have nothing to do in the body (Maillard reaction output, antibiotic in the meat, pesticide in fruits, etc). Some are just regular things we can process but in a greater concentration that is healthy. Some are just natural waste of our regular body processes, but in a greater quantity than we can manage in our current health."
But I eat lots more and am not gaining or losing weight.
When I do nothing and stay home for a week I will eat even more and still not gain.
Which is frustrating because my ideal weight would be 80kg, but I cant get much above 75.
It isn't high on my priority list so I have not tried many things. I just go around life and enjoy the food I want to enjoy, but my concious is there telling me "don't eat too much bad stuff, you want to stay healthy"
Because even though I don't gain weight it is still bad to eat lots of fats etc.
So yes I do eat plenty of green, and other variations of things.
(also earlier I said "what feels good" I meant psychologically not physically)
This worked for me too, I could eat any amounts of anything and weight even less than normal. Then I realized (well, my gastroenterologist did) that my liver had a pretty common pathology all that time and it started to make harm. We quickly fixed that and now I have to choose what to eat, because gaining, say, 5kg in one week is a no-brainer now. This is the story of one specific issue with a human body, that has tens if not hundreds of them.
