“ Calories in, calories out ” and macronutrient intake: The Hope, Hype, and Science of Calories

(Todd Allen) #1

Don’t shoot the messenger. Just posting to stimulate discussion…

http://sci-hub.cc/10.1152/ajpendo.00156.2017

(Sonia A.) #2

In my opinion, the body doesn’t understand what a calorie is. It understands nutrients and hunger. If you give it nutrient dense foods to satiety, it doesn’t matter if your calories are low. That’s why a ketogenic diet works so well. It has a double effect :

  1. It lowers insulin and allows the body to tap into our body fat.
  2. Fat is very satiating, so de facto we eat less calories. Without hunger signals, we don’t have the side effects of a slow metabolism.

So, that’s my theory. I don’t know what it’s worth.

(John) #3

A study on confirmation bias? All they did was select studies that fit their CICO model and talked them up while highlighting studies that ‘disproved’ the insulin model.

Anyone highlighting thermodynamics is already arguing something totally different, so we can get that out of the way. Calorie counting has been around for decades and has produced rampant obesity that can be blamed on primarily the obese. To even think that so many millions just can’t count calories is ludicrous.
I can go with the mainstream opinion of CICO that everybody knows but apparently nobody can use, including the dozens of diets I went on in my life that did nothing but make me worse, or I could go with a diet that saved me from a life of T2D and obesity as well as that of everyone I know who has tried.

At the end of the day, if you want to say CICO did it, I couldn’t give a shit less. Eat keto, let CICO and thermodynamics do their magic and be healthier.

(Alan Williamson) #4

Calories don’t matter as much as the insulin response. If a person eats 6 small meals a day, each meal will produce an insulin response. Further, it takes 4 hours for the insulin to lower back to the start level. In this case, a person’s insulin will be high most of the day. Eating OMAD (one meal a day), just 1 insulin response during the day. Fasting, zero response. Lower insulin is the key to losing weight. If the insulin is high a person can’t burn body fat. It takes 4 hours after eating for the insulin to go back to the original level. Insulin will also make a person hungry. Other hormones like ghrelin make a person hungry too.

The thing l like about fasting is that it resets a person’s hunger and taste levels. I don’t get hungry like I used to. At one time, I was eating food every hour or so because I was hungry. It was crazy. I’m sure the food companies like that. Taste returns. During fasting, drinking water, the water tastes good. It is awesome. If I eat something sweet, it will taste to sweet. The meal after ending the fast tastes awesome. Fasting resets the body.

I have lost 90 pounds doing keto and then fasting. Today, I do 3 fasts a week for 36 hours, one day without eating. It is not difficult and it keeps me lean. For myself, the key is to keep low insulin level.

(Todd Allen) #5

I think it is possible for most of the claims in this paper regarding the properties of carbs, protein and fat to be true, such as no metabolic advantage for fats, as well as CICO being a fairly good predictor of weight loss/gain at least in the short term and yet eating keto or LCHF still being the most effective approach for weight loss, at least for those with any degree of insulin resistance, myself included.

Before going low carb I never even entertained the possibility of dieting. I was on the glucose roller coaster and had to feed the beast every couple hours or crash. I wouldn’t leave home without an orange or a bag of raisins or some other supposedly healthy food in my pocket. After going low carb I found it easy to lose weight for 3 months. Further restricting to keto got me another couple months of fairly easy weight loss. Since then it’s been more challenging with a modest rebound but through a variety of fasting practices I’m slowly losing again.

I expect I will achieve and maintain my weight goals via fasting. Eating keto makes fasting relatively accessible. I don’t find it effortless as some claim but it is manageable. I can eat a relatively effortless keto for several weeks and gain a few lbs and then do a few days of fasting and a few weeks of IF and lose it back plus a few lbs more. I’ve been at this roughly 15 months and I expect my approach will change over the coming years, but at the moment I can’t imagine having made the progress I have or sustain it going forward following the US dietary guidelines.

As I understand it only a small fraction of dieters are successful past the 1 year point. I think it would be interesting to have a survey examining the percentage who are successful and the degree of their success over longer periods, say 1 to 10 years with respect to the various diet strategies used.

(German Ketonian) #6

Sorry to bring up this old topic, but I just wanted to offer some thoughts on fasting based on my own case.

I think one thing to keep in mind is available body fat. I used to get annoyed by people finding fasting so easy and feeling so good with no food in their body for days. I, myself, can barely make it to 48h usually. But what I sometimes forget is the body fat those people have at their disposal. I have roughly 15kg of it. Other guys and gals may have 50+kgs… that matters! I “tested” this by attempting a fat fast and managed to last 4 days (after that, reason told me to quit, as fat fasts shouldn’t be prolonged for particularly for relativel lean people).

@brownfat, you seem to be relatively lean as well. Thus, I thought this might be something to consider when it comes to weight loss or maintenance and fasting ease.

(Todd Allen) #7

I’m currently about 24% bodyfat but a much higher percentage of that than normal, probably over half, is stuck in my muscles and probably isn’t doing a lot to support fasting metabolism. I’m a bit over a week into a planned couple months of aggressive fat loss hoping to drop into the mid-teens for body fat % for my next dexa Sept. 21.

But this time I’m not incorporating fasting but rather a sustained ~33% caloric deficit while keeping protein high for me, 90 - 120 g / day, and as much carbs as I can eat while staying over 0.5 mmol/l ketones which was roughly 90 g total, 60 g net the past 3 days. Some fear this is a formula for metabolic destruction but so far it is going well other than I sometimes get waves of hunger significantly more intense than when fasting, probably due to blood sugar swinging between 60 and 90 mg/dl instead of staying mostly in the range of 65-70 mg/dl when fasting. But I’m mostly concerned with physical performance and that’s slowly increasing which is a huge victory for me since I have a supposedly untreatable progressive genetic muscle wasting disease.