To Keto or Not To Keto?

paperpudding wrote: »

neanderthin wrote: »

I love semantics. It says swiss milk on the side of the bus but the bus doesn't go to Switzerland. Cheers

I'm not sure what you mean by that.

saying CICO is a scientific equation that happens whether we track it in any way or not and that CICO is quite different from the tool or method of calorie counting doesnt seem semantics at all to me - it seems simply clarifying what we mean.

DFW_Tom wrote: »

Strict keto is hard to do, but is a good way to transition to a low carb eating style. Keto for a couple of months -> relatively low carb permanently.

neanderthin wrote: »

sijomial wrote: »

neanderthin wrote: »

Yeah, food effects the microbiome and our hormones and each macro has a distinct effect on each, which was kind of my point. I look at CICO as a treatment for the symptom without really treating the root cause and how could it, it's just a measurement of heat. If someone is successful with CICO I'm on board and happy that it works. For me a higher protein diet where satiation was a key factor for my success and lowering highly refined carbs and starches without the need to count calories and if I needed to count calories I would have tried something else until I found what accomplished that, but I've know for over 20 years that a higher protein diet delivers satiation in spades, or at least animal protein, plant proteins didn't do the job for me personally but I would imagine it's because I'm not a growing plant and my physiology best matches the proteins found in animals, but I've never looked into it. Cheers

I'm sure you know that CICO and calorie counting are not the same thing.
You managed your energy balance (CICO) via satiation and I (for a while) managed it via calorie counting.

Regarding the bolded sentence - not everyone has the same root cause.
My root cause was eating too much of a very healthy diet so calorie counting for a time to better estimate and manage my CI and CO was sufficient.

As I don't need to count calories to maintain weight it was just an interlude between maintaining overweight and maintaining at a healthy weight. Probably an atypical experience just like your diet is atypical but both your high animal protein diet and my high carb diet work for us as individuals.

Satiation is also very individual with starchy carbs being my most satiating foods (which isn't that unusual as boiled potatoes often sit at #1 in lists of most satiating foods) and meat not being particularly satiating at all.

Yes CICO would be redundant if we didn't actually count them. Funny you mention boiled potatoes and yes they're satiating and I do consume potatoes. It's the carbohydrates that are turned into powders then transformed into highly palatable foods that I try and stay away from. Broccoli doesn't stand a chance against Doritos and I've done the science behind that, lol. Anyway I'm very happy you now found a solution where you don't need to have the chronic noise in your brain to be always calculating to facilitate the accuracy needed to maintain proper caloric intake. It appears by the numbers that most people haven't figured that out yet.

lemurcat2 wrote: »

neanderthin wrote: »

Yeah, I just want to be clear about something here, I believe whole heartedly energy balance is an exact science and will result in an accurate result physiologically every single time. It's the factors involved in measuring on an individual level the calories we've consumed where the difficulty lies. The plus/minus errors allowed in packaging, the way the food is prepared, chopped, blended and cooking will change the effects on absorption along with the type of food consumed and the difference even within the same measurement of whole foods as well as understanding of portion size with over/under miscalculations of just the food in front of us is extremely imprecise. Basically the numbers going into our bodies can be significantly lower or higher. Even a room full of dietitians asked to calculate their caloric intake were a few hundred calories out and the layperson is far more inaccurate.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12396160/

After we consume food the absorption will vary individually and depends partly on our own gut bacteria and basically our energy balance is regulated by the interplay of networks between our hypothalamus and the many hormones, neural connectors etc.

To be clear, I'm not trying to convince you or anyone else to calorie count -- I don't care what anyone else does, and I don't actually log most of the time. But I am going to explain why to me none of this matters, and why I do think logging can be a useful tool for many, despite the fact that they may not actually know exactly how many calories they are eating (or burning).

While the exact cals we get from a specific food may vary, there seems to be some belief out there that some unlucky people get way more cals from foods than the labels or USDA would say, and that isn't the case. Of course, that would evolutionarily be lucky, but the biggest difference is probably that some have digestive problems that means they don't get so many cals. But generally this isn't a big factor, unlike differences in calories burned and the difficulties some seem to have with counting.

Am I good at counting? I don't know, since I don't know how close my 1500 is to a true 1500. What I do know is that it was incredibly easy for me to eat at a level at which I consistently lost. How, given the uncertainties? (And in many cases I did have to guess since, for example, I get meat from a farm and it didn't have cal labels and I had to guess at what USDA entry it was most like, and pre covid I went out to different restaurants that had no cals posted (these are foodie type places, not chains) 1-2x per week -- my friends I used to go with aren't back to pre covid socializing with restaurants and theater, sadly for me).)

I started by considering what I ate on a normal day or over the course of a week as honestly as possible and identified where I was getting excess cals I could easily cut. (I figured out it was mostly grazing at work with food that was around -- which was not sating to me, just emotional eating or procrastination or bad habit), plus more olive oil added than was really necessary when cooking, plus larger portions of starches than I really needed largely bc I am bad at eyeballing things like pasta/rice and also tend to eat more than I really like if it is there.) So I cut back. At first I wasn't logging, and when I started I saw I had cut back too much and was eating around 1000 cals -- was being too restrictive about added fats in particular (on the whole I prefer leaner cuts of meat anyway, but I was going overboard there, not allowing myself any high cal items for flavor like dressing with olive oil in it, cheese, olives). So I corrected that. At that point, without particularly trying, then, my 3 regular meals came in at what I wanted for cals, and with logging I could see how to easily add more in when I had higher activity days (and part of this process for me was upping my activity since one reason I'd gained was going from very active to less so and not adjusting for the fact with my diet).

Because my logging was consistent, I could see if the cals over the course of a week were generally higher or lower than other weeks. So, if I hadn't been losing on track (which I was), I wouldn't have fretted about the fact I SHOULD be losing on the 1400 net or whatever I thought I was eating, but simply adjusted by eating less, and accepted that perhaps my logging was off or metabolism lower or activity burning fewer cals than I had assumed. If one is mindful and consistent, I think it's easy to see if you are eating more or less than you were, and it's easy to see how to up or lower one's calories or activity. You can do this without logging too, of course, but I think a lot of people have trouble being mindful (or are not honest with themselves about how much they eat) and logging can help them. I think this is true even if one isn't super precise with their logging (I know that's important to some, but it wasn't really for me).

AnnPT77 wrote: »

neanderthin wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

neanderthin wrote: »

sijomial wrote: »

neanderthin wrote: »

Yeah, food effects the microbiome and our hormones and each macro has a distinct effect on each, which was kind of my point. I look at CICO as a treatment for the symptom without really treating the root cause and how could it, it's just a measurement of heat. If someone is successful with CICO I'm on board and happy that it works. For me a higher protein diet where satiation was a key factor for my success and lowering highly refined carbs and starches without the need to count calories and if I needed to count calories I would have tried something else until I found what accomplished that, but I've know for over 20 years that a higher protein diet delivers satiation in spades, or at least animal protein, plant proteins didn't do the job for me personally but I would imagine it's because I'm not a growing plant and my physiology best matches the proteins found in animals, but I've never looked into it. Cheers

I'm sure you know that CICO and calorie counting are not the same thing.
You managed your energy balance (CICO) via satiation and I (for a while) managed it via calorie counting.

Regarding the bolded sentence - not everyone has the same root cause.
My root cause was eating too much of a very healthy diet so calorie counting for a time to better estimate and manage my CI and CO was sufficient.

As I don't need to count calories to maintain weight it was just an interlude between maintaining overweight and maintaining at a healthy weight. Probably an atypical experience just like your diet is atypical but both your high animal protein diet and my high carb diet work for us as individuals.

Satiation is also very individual with starchy carbs being my most satiating foods (which isn't that unusual as boiled potatoes often sit at #1 in lists of most satiating foods) and meat not being particularly satiating at all.

Yes CICO would be redundant if we didn't actually count them. Funny you mention boiled potatoes and yes they're satiating and I do consume potatoes. It's the carbohydrates that are turned into powders then transformed into highly palatable foods that I try and stay away from. Broccoli doesn't stand a chance against Doritos and I've done the science behind that, lol. Anyway I'm very happy you now found a solution where you don't need to have the chronic noise in your brain to be always calculating to facilitate the accuracy needed to maintain proper caloric intake. It appears by the numbers that most people haven't figured that out yet.

In this context, @neanderthin, I'm curious: For how long did you try calorie counting, and wrestle with the experience you describe in the post I quoted? What was the experience like for you, subjectively?

I promise, this is not some kind of setup for an attempted "gotcha". It's genuine curiosity.

I absolutely know that calorie counting isn't right for everyone, and support folks using methods that work for them, including methods that involve restricting or emphasizing certain foods/macros if that helps the person find a sustainable path to long-term health.

Because I'm now a calorie counter myself, I assume I have a too-simplistic polarized view about how people come to find counting uncongenial. I'd genuinely like a better understanding.

At one extreme, I'd speculate that some people try counting for shorter times, and do find that it just takes up too much mind-share, time, etc.; or in some people creates a mentally unhealthy degree of obsession that would be destructive to a happy life.

At the other extreme, my too-simplistic mental model is that some people try it for a long period, and burn out with the time and effort for them.

Anywhere along that continuum, an individual finding counting to be unsuccessful for them (in weight management terms) - that would also be a dissatisfier, of course. There are any number of reasons why it might not be satisfyingly successful for an individual.

I don't feel critical about people who experience calorie counting in the ways I've (speculatively) described above, by the way. I'm very much a "many paths - find the one that suits you" advocate (with caveats about things that I personally consider seriously unhealthful, such as long-term VLCDs in people who aren't at a weight that itself creates health risk, for example).

Further, I admit I push back (in threads) sometimes when people who've rejected calorie counting for themselves try to influence others not to give it a reasonable try, for no apparent reason other than that it didn't work for them . . . and on a calorie counting focused site, besides.

In this thread, I'm sincerely interested in what experience(s) make a counting critic feel the way they do, and you seem willing to engage. I may be wrong, but I do think it's relevant to "keto or not keto" in a context where keto has been presented in some replies as a potential way to avoid needing to count.

Yeah, I just want to be clear about something here, I believe whole heartedly energy balance is an exact science and will result in an accurate result physiologically every single time. It's the factors involved in measuring on an individual level the calories we've consumed where the difficulty lies. The plus/minus errors allowed in packaging, the way the food is prepared, chopped, blended and cooking will change the effects on absorption along with the type of food consumed and the difference even within the same measurement of whole foods as well as understanding of portion size with over/under miscalculations of just the food in front of us is extremely imprecise. Basically the numbers going into our bodies can be significantly lower or higher. Even a room full of dietitians asked to calculate their caloric intake were a few hundred calories out and the layperson is far more inaccurate.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12396160/

After we consume food the absorption will vary individually and depends partly on our own gut bacteria and basically our energy balance is regulated by the interplay of networks between our hypothalamus and the many hormones, neural connectors etc.

My brain doesn't work well under these realizations lol and I have tried to find a solution where metabolic health, energy balance and well being is not focused on the caloric value per se but more focused on the foods I consume, and yes I'm well aware that many here on this site do both and are successful counting calories but many aren't and to be honest it's the vast majority that have almost no knowledge of nutrition in general that get discouraged and stop altogether and feel they've failed because as the popular saying goes, it's all about calories in and calories out, so blame is well deserved when they fail they try again hoping they don't the next time. My personal focus is more of a lifestyle change in regards to the foods I eat, the exercise I commit to that allows me to never worry very much about weight, health markers or my general health, though I have had to make these adjustments over time, those being a few years to fully commit. For people that have counted calories and have made that a commitment and have found success I do respect that, my reptilian brain would fall out.

Thank you for trusting me enough to answer.

That's reasonable, as a personalized approach. (I'm a big fan of customizing weight management tactics to one's own preferences, strengths and limitations, as a generality. Individual humans differing is part of what makes life interesting - and I don't mean that ironically.)

For myself, I started MFP with a perspective that counting could work. I'd been rough-estimating calories from about April to July (2015), and had lost around 28 pounds . . . but the rate was slowing down, becoming less predictable. That was when I joined MFP, to log more precisely. So, going in with the idea that the general method could work, and willing to put in some time to learn the ropes of more precision because I thought it would help me.

I did/do recognize that it'll never be perfect, but all I personally need is "close enough" in counting. "Close enough" is reasonable predictability of outcomes from a given set of habits/practices.

Within a few weeks of showing up on MFP, I'd figured out what I needed to do to make my loss rate and results quite predictable (as averaged over a few weeks).

I'm going to say some more about why calorie counting works well for me. I want to explicitly say that I don't assume that all the things I mention as true of me are not true of you. (In some cases, that might seem insulting!) But I do think that not all of the things that make counting easy for me are true for everyone, and that will create differences in what works best for any given person.

I'm a data geek (worked with data as part of my decades-long profession). I'm familiar with things like "the law of large numbers", and comfortable with assuming that that kind of idea applies fuzzily in this realm, which is more like medium than large numbers. I'm comfortable with estimation and approximation. (I'm not going to sweat over calorie uncertainties/discrepancies that are a tiny fraction of the day's probable TDEE. It's pointless, purely on the arithmetic.)

I'm similarly familiar with basic statistics, so it's second nature to believe that my calorie needs are somewhere in the bell curve, most likely close to the peak - which is the population average for people like me, loosely, that calorie needs calculators spit out . . . but not necessarily close. (That makes a needs estimate a hypothesis to be tested. Lemur's point about some imprecision in logging not mattering applies here, too - I know that something like logging errors are somewhat likely to be systematic, i.e., I'll repeat the same patterns, so if my 1500 is really 1300 or is really 1800, it doesn't matter as long as I get the desired weight-management outcome over time, or close enough.)

I know or have learned enough along the way to understand some basics of the physiology: That heart rate is not a measure of calorie burn, that some people will absorb more calories from a food than others (never more than the food contains, of course), that adaptive thermogenesis can happen (but people can starve to death anyway), that water weight can distort the scale for a long time, that TEF has some impact but it's limited, etc.

I also am cynical enough about culture to research things before I assume they're true ("muscle burns more calories than fat", "capsaicin increases metabolism", "you have to confuse your body by switching exercise", etc. . . . as well as checking out some of the basics of counting and CICO itself). I know how to identify reliable sources. I'm not a scientist, though, so I'm sure I make some errors in that realm. But I do think an inclination to research and question is useful.

Psychologically, I can let things go, and - in this weight management anyway - maintain a calm perspective. If the scale's up one day or a few, and I don't know why; or I forget to log some food and go over goal, or even seriously over-indulge, I can shrug it off as trivial in the big picture, rather than feeling guilty or like I've failed.

I also think that - unfortunately - just the arithmetic makes calorie counting difficult for a certain minority of folks. At an extreme, we've literally had posts here that said "If a frozen pizza says 350 calories per serving, and there are 8 servings, but I ate 1/3 of a pizza, how many calories is that?". Fairly common is "I ate 212 grams of food X, but I can only find serving sizes in the database for 100 grams, what can I do?". I'm lucky that at least the beginning bits of algebra stuck, for me - as they did for many others, too, of course - because that makes counting much easier and less stressful. (Extreme difficulty with arithmetic could make counting well-nigh impossible.)

I could go on, but you get the idea.

TL;DR: I think there are certain skills or background knowledge that make calorie counting easy and natural for some people, and certain . . . habits of mind, or personality traits . . . do, too. None of that is a value judgement about the inherent universal goodness of those skills/traits, just a statement that they're a thing that maybe makes counting more easy/natural.

neanderthin wrote: »

lemurcat2 wrote: »

neanderthin wrote: »

Yeah, I just want to be clear about something here, I believe whole heartedly energy balance is an exact science and will result in an accurate result physiologically every single time. It's the factors involved in measuring on an individual level the calories we've consumed where the difficulty lies. The plus/minus errors allowed in packaging, the way the food is prepared, chopped, blended and cooking will change the effects on absorption along with the type of food consumed and the difference even within the same measurement of whole foods as well as understanding of portion size with over/under miscalculations of just the food in front of us is extremely imprecise. Basically the numbers going into our bodies can be significantly lower or higher. Even a room full of dietitians asked to calculate their caloric intake were a few hundred calories out and the layperson is far more inaccurate.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12396160/

After we consume food the absorption will vary individually and depends partly on our own gut bacteria and basically our energy balance is regulated by the interplay of networks between our hypothalamus and the many hormones, neural connectors etc.

To be clear, I'm not trying to convince you or anyone else to calorie count -- I don't care what anyone else does, and I don't actually log most of the time. But I am going to explain why to me none of this matters, and why I do think logging can be a useful tool for many, despite the fact that they may not actually know exactly how many calories they are eating (or burning).

While the exact cals we get from a specific food may vary, there seems to be some belief out there that some unlucky people get way more cals from foods than the labels or USDA would say, and that isn't the case. Of course, that would evolutionarily be lucky, but the biggest difference is probably that some have digestive problems that means they don't get so many cals. But generally this isn't a big factor, unlike differences in calories burned and the difficulties some seem to have with counting.

Am I good at counting? I don't know, since I don't know how close my 1500 is to a true 1500. What I do know is that it was incredibly easy for me to eat at a level at which I consistently lost. How, given the uncertainties? (And in many cases I did have to guess since, for example, I get meat from a farm and it didn't have cal labels and I had to guess at what USDA entry it was most like, and pre covid I went out to different restaurants that had no cals posted (these are foodie type places, not chains) 1-2x per week -- my friends I used to go with aren't back to pre covid socializing with restaurants and theater, sadly for me).)

I started by considering what I ate on a normal day or over the course of a week as honestly as possible and identified where I was getting excess cals I could easily cut. (I figured out it was mostly grazing at work with food that was around -- which was not sating to me, just emotional eating or procrastination or bad habit), plus more olive oil added than was really necessary when cooking, plus larger portions of starches than I really needed largely bc I am bad at eyeballing things like pasta/rice and also tend to eat more than I really like if it is there.) So I cut back. At first I wasn't logging, and when I started I saw I had cut back too much and was eating around 1000 cals -- was being too restrictive about added fats in particular (on the whole I prefer leaner cuts of meat anyway, but I was going overboard there, not allowing myself any high cal items for flavor like dressing with olive oil in it, cheese, olives). So I corrected that. At that point, without particularly trying, then, my 3 regular meals came in at what I wanted for cals, and with logging I could see how to easily add more in when I had higher activity days (and part of this process for me was upping my activity since one reason I'd gained was going from very active to less so and not adjusting for the fact with my diet).

Because my logging was consistent, I could see if the cals over the course of a week were generally higher or lower than other weeks. So, if I hadn't been losing on track (which I was), I wouldn't have fretted about the fact I SHOULD be losing on the 1400 net or whatever I thought I was eating, but simply adjusted by eating less, and accepted that perhaps my logging was off or metabolism lower or activity burning fewer cals than I had assumed. If one is mindful and consistent, I think it's easy to see if you are eating more or less than you were, and it's easy to see how to up or lower one's calories or activity. You can do this without logging too, of course, but I think a lot of people have trouble being mindful (or are not honest with themselves about how much they eat) and logging can help them. I think this is true even if one isn't super precise with their logging (I know that's important to some, but it wasn't really for me).

A good argument if one is equipped with the knowledge and insight to consider what or where adjustments on the fly should me made and will lead with the hope that a particular action over a particular time interval gets the desired result and I suspect you're very capable of doing that but I also suspect many would get pretty frustrated with themselves and also suspect it's a contributing factor as to why people give up. The desire for instant results is common among dieters, which in and of itself is unrealistic and generally never achieved. The big investment in time and commitment in order just to facilitate calorie counting only to find differences gaining weight on their 1200 calorie diet is a soul destroyer which is only 1 scenario of many. The cliche of needing to make lifestyle change has become a meme and commitment to changing lifelong habits is for some a mountain too high.

I do think that's hyperbolic, though, frankly. You speak as if those conditions were universal, as if we need to overcome them to make counting work individually.

I didn't find the time/commitment investment to be big. (Now, it's like 10 minutes a day, for a huge return in positive quality of life.) Nothing about the learning process (when I made errors) was soul destroying: It was just a natural part of a fun, productive grown-up science fair experiment.

Is what you describe true for some people? Sure. But I feel like it comes across as if you're trying to sell the idea that it's so generally true as to condemn the method as generally useless - the time/commitment, the destroyed souls, etc.

In terms of community benefit, I think your personal statement about why counting didn't work well for you is more helpful and persuasive than the hyperbole, honestly. But maybe that, too, is just me.

Thank you for engaging in this conversation, sincerely. It's been informative, for me.