Reminder: Low Carb is not about starving yourself until you're skinny.

FIT_Goat

This whole thing is a decent read. It's pretty anti-low carb, but it does get the calorie information right.

Interesting thing that I learned while reading about the stuff mentioned in this article, the person who popularized the idea of counting calories was also promoting intermittent fasting way back then. While I find myself naturally eating two meals a day, usually in the afternoon and evening, I don't encourage IF for weight loss.

https://tuftsmagazine.com/issues/magazine/finally-end-counting-calories

“In the short term, calorie counting works great,” said Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts. “If you reduce your calories, whatever the composition of your diet, you will lose weight for a few months. That’s why all fad diets work initially.” But eventually, the body will fight back and the weight will return.

Which is not to say the Atkins diet hasn’t helped clarify a key lesson: that strict calorie counting is unnecessary. “Where the Atkins diet was correct was to ignore calorie counting. It has no calorie limits,” Mozaffarian said. “And that sort of blows the calorie-counting hypothesis out of the water.” Within the past year, two studies—one published in February 2018 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, another in November 2018 in BMJ—reported significant weight loss in adults who didn’t count calories.

Like much of the science on weight control, not every expert agrees about focusing on portion sizes. “If you are eating foods likely to cause weight gain—foods rich in rapidly digesting refined starch and sugar, sugary drinks, or processed meats—then, absolutely, eat as small a portion as possible,” Mozaffarian said. “But, if you’re eating foods that help the body’s usual pathways for weight control, improve metabolism, and augment health—foods like minimally processed fruits, nuts, seeds, beans, nonstarchy vegetables, whole grains, plant oils, yogurt, and perhaps even cheese—there is little evidence that portion control is relevant.”

I would argue about the example foods that "augment health" from above, but the idea is right.

FIT_Goat

I was watching a random youtube video (irrelevant to this conversation) and they were talking about NASA's numbers for oxygen requirements. They had a screenshot of this PDF "Design Rules for Life Support Systems". What caught my attention was the other side of the page. It included this comment:

CALORIE NEEDS - The calorie requirement for an average adult American man weighing 79 kg is 3,402 Calories, and for an average adult woman weighing 63 kg is 2,547 Calories, based on the level of physical activity described below. (Jones) The male-female average calorie requirement is then 2,975 Calories.

Do you see those numbers? Do those seem a bit higher than the amounts we typically think of, especially for women? Maybe crew-members are expected to be more active. Well, they get into that in the next part.

The above computation of calorie needs assumed that the crewmember spent 8 hours sleeping, 11 hours sitting, 2 hours standing, 2 hours walking, 1/2 hour in heavy work, and 1/2 hour in exercise. If the average 79 kg man merely slept and sat, his calorie expenditure (due to basal metabolic rate and diet induced thermogensisis) would be only 2,641 Calories. This is 760 less than the above 3,402 Calories which includes the described physical activity. If the 63 kg woman merely slept and sat, her calorie expenditure would be 1,940 Calories, 606 less than the above 2,547 Calories with the assumed physical activity. Much higher levels of physical activity are possible. If the number of calories expended in physical activity doubles, the total calories will increase 23 percent.

That's a fairly big drop, but not nearly the drop you expect from the amounts people assume they actually burn due to the calculators online. Those things will frequently underestimate the calorie needs. I get more into that on the bottom of this post. I did go and find the reference (Jones) to see how they were running their numbers. It's basic stuff, but they have one very interesting statement.

PA [Physical Activity] is not always correctly estimated. For example, people in offices or classrooms appear sedentary but may expend considerable energy by tensing their muscles or making small nervous movements. PA is a highly variable component of calorie needs and it can be reduced if food is temporarily in short supply.

You know all my talk about how your body will find a way to reduce the CO side, when you force the CI side down? That's it right there. And, when CI goes up, the body can do the same and bring the CO side up to maintain a balance. That's assuming the system is operating normally. We need more calories than we think we do, and when we try and starve ourselves thin, the body resists and will reduce the amount we burn.

In short, don't count. Eat to hunger. Fix the hormones and the body will take care of the weight without you.

Note: I went to the keto-calculator and put in a 5'10" man weighing 79 kg and said they were "Very active. Construction workers, hard exercise 6–7 days per week" and it said they burn only 2,850 calories a day. That's 550 calories less than the man above who is only doing "2 hours standing, 2 hours walking, 1/2 hour in heavy work, and 1/2 hour in exercise." MFP gives an extremely active 5'10" guy 3,070 calories a day. Still, over 300 calories fewer than a less active man really needs. This chronic underestimation of calorie needs is everywhere. It's another reason I insist that very few people actually have the right number to set their own deficit.

FIT_Goat

Eating low-carb addresses and repairs the cause of us getting fat. Losing the excess weight is a side-effect of fixing the underlying cause. It's time to stop thinking we need to try and attack the symptom. We need to address the reason we're fat. Not just starve ourselves until we're thinner and still have the problem waiting in the wings to put the weight back on.

From "Why We Get Fat" by Taubes.

Health experts think that the first law is relevant to why we get fat because they say to themselves and then to us, as the The New York Times did, “Those who consume more calories than they expend in energy will gain weight.” This is true. It has to be. To get fatter and heavier, we have to overeat. We have to consume more calories than we expend. That’s a given. But thermodynamics tells us nothing about why this happens, why we consume more calories than we expend. It only says that if we do, we will get heavier, and if we get heavier, then we did.

Imagine that, instead of talking about why we get fat, we’re talking about why a room gets crowded. Now the energy we’re discussing is contained in entire people rather than just their fat tissue. Ten people contain so much energy, eleven people contain more, and so on. So what we want to know is why this room is crowded and so overstuffed with energy—that is, people.

If you asked me this question, and I said, Well, because more people entered the room than left it, you’d probably think I was being a wise guy or an idiot. Of course more people entered than left, you’d say. That’s obvious. But why? And, in fact, saying that a room gets crowded because more people are entering than leaving it is redundant—saying the same thing in two different ways—and so meaningless.

Now, borrowing the logic of the conventional wisdom of obesity, I want to clarify this point. So I say, Listen, those rooms that have more people enter them than leave them will become more crowded. There’s no getting around the laws of thermodynamics. You’d still say, Yes, but so what? Or at least I hope you would, because I still haven’t given you any causal information. I’m just repeating the obvious.

This is what happens when thermodynamics is used to conclude that overeating makes us fat. Thermodynamics tells us that if we get fatter and heavier, more energy enters our body than leaves it. Overeating means we’re consuming more energy than we’re expending. It says the same thing in a different way. Neither happens to answer the question why. Why do we take in more energy than we expend? Why do we overeat? Why do we get fatter?