Calories in, calories out argument

(Stan Brooks) #15

Sperico. Death Wish are the two that pop straight to my head

(Rob) #16

Good call… I am embarrassed to say I’ve never seen Serpico :flushed: I will!

Death Wish was on the list of movies I wasn’t allowed to see as a young child (unsurprisingly) so when I did get to see it, the shock value was largely gone.

#17

People who do Crossfit don’t get to make statements like that. Tell him to pick up some weight without running at it full speed first and then having the strength left to put it down instead of throwing it while running away.

BOOM!

Your not going to get through, those heads are too thick, I know my brother is a former bodybuilder BUT if you want to MAYBE grab his attention ask him what he does during his winter bulking, they eat nothing but carbs, ask him WHY they put on all their weight eating chicken and brown rice and oatmeal all day, they’re not eating fat, so where is it coming from! They ask him how all those carbs give him that energy, then remind him that it all converts to glucose. Then ask him why bodybuilders shoot insulin with their “supplements” to bulk faster? Then ask him how you eat during a cut, you’ll notice real fast it’s very low carb. You gotta glue pieces together that he’ll identify with, but still expect to fail.

(KetoCowboy) #18

I follow a youtube channel called OMAD Revolution that–predictably–advocates eating one meal a day.
Oddly, the guy who runs the channel insists that it works only because of caloric restriction and has no meaningful impact on insulin.
When challenged on this, he becomes angry and says stuff like “It’s all about calories in and calories out because it just is.”
I think a lot of people have spent so many years struggling under a false paradigm that changing it means essentially repudiating their own personal history.
No one wants a cherished belief that has driven behavior for decades to be falsified, so maybe the best resolution possible is to celebrate the positive outcome your friend is able to achieve despite his failure to understand the role of hormones in weight loss.
I think OMAD Revolution guy is wrong about why it’s working for him, but hey–it’s def working.
So is it really worth arguing over?

(Liz ) #19

I am genetically predisposed to be insulin resistant, it runs in my family. I think they are saying 8 in 10 have the potential to be IR? Someone correct me if I’m misremembering that.

I also am a recovering carb addict. Yes, that’s a real thing:

So my addiction triggered the insulin resistance that was cued up to happen if I ate too many carbs, which I did, for years.

I knew I was an addict from childhood & tried to quit sugar time and time again my entire life with no lasting success, I’m 48.

Atkins saved me in 2003 but I slid back with Paleo a few years ago and Keto is saving me now. I have to be a tee totaler or my addiction is right there, ready to take over my life again. And it’s no small issue, it changes my behavior, ruins my relationships, just like drugs or alcohol addiction.

So, good on folks who don’t have these experiences, lucky them. Sorry they lack imagination or empathy to understand not everyone is wired the same. I’m glad you found Keto because I think it’s going to save your life, too.

(Jeanne Wagner) #20

Thanks! I had no idea what they do to bulk up. He has claimed with his Dr. nutritionist ‘wizard’ he’s lost 15 lbs and his performance has been better than ever. And this is very recent within the last 2-3 weeks for him. And what he does is eat only when he’s hungry. That’s about it.

I was hoping to explain the whole insulin resistance thing so he understood that CICO wasn’t as simple as he thinks. But yeah, he’s just stuck on why people get IR to begin with (i.e. fork to mouth).

(Michael ) #21

The equation varies from person to person but in general, elevated insulin levels prevent fat burning. So, the question is with calories out defined. People want to bring up thermodynamics, but if you investigate what “calories out” means, the equation gets more complicated than the CICO zealots would lead you to believe. I can restrict calories in to 1000 a day of sugar distributed through six meals. My insulin levels will remain elevated throughout the day and make it impossible to access fat storage (insulin resistance will cause even higher levels for longer). So, the result is feeling cold and weak all day…not to mention hungry. I’m running on sugar and mostly leaving fat alone. Thermodynamic laws aren’t being violated; my body is using the calories in to fuel the body…but not very well. Alternatively, when i keep insulin low through IF and avoiding carbs, my body heat and energy levels run high. This doesn’t mean I can eat 20k calories a day (protein spikes insulin too) but I feel better, move more and can lose weight with more calorie wiggle room than carbs.

I should add that this is my theory of how it works based on personal experience and the writing of Dr Fung and others from the evil insulin camp. My personal opinion is that higher levels of insulin resistance negatively impacts the effectiveness of keto and takes time to heal. This is why some people have to aggressively monitor calories on keto whilst others get away with calorie murder.

The problem most people have is being scale focused and impatient. They complain that they haven’t lost enough weight in 2 weeks on keto. A better way of looking at it IMO, is getting on board for the long haul and reaping the health benefits. I think that if you investigate people who have done keto long term, they’re likely more metabolic healthy and get away with more calories and are more active.

So, stop worrying about weight and start focusing on health. Don’t lose weight to get healthy, get healthy to lose weight. I guarantee nobody that takes shortcuts and loses 10 pounds a week will stay that way for a lifetime. It’s a journey, not a race

(Jeanne Wagner) #22

Thank you Mike. I have to agree with your logic. :slight_smile: Not that it took a lot of convincing, you know… But I love to hear explanations of things. It makes me understand things better and I feel like I can just make it part of me more.

I think my favorite part of what you said was don’t lose weight to get healthy, get healthy to lose weight. It is so true.

(Sjur Gjøstein Karevoll) #23

I agree with your post, but I just feel I need to point out that just as energy balance in the human body is more complicated than just thermodynamics, so too is insulin’s role in weight gain more complicated than that it decreases fat burning.

It is generally true that insulin prevents fat burning, but it also increases carb burning and does so proportionally to the amount of calories available from carbs. Insulin also won’t prevent fat burning in the absence of carbs, it takes both insulin and available glucose to stop fat burning, meaning that high insulin from insulin resistance won’t prevent fat burning unless you’re also eating carbs (if this wasn’t true keto would kill people with advanced IR/T2DM).

it gets really complicated once you dig into it, and I think part of both the complication and the confusion is that there are multiple causes of obesity so you can’t just look for a single culprit. Insulin resistance plays a huge role in obesity, yet there are fat people who aren’t insulin resistant, and there are insulin resistant people who aren’t fat.

I also can’t emphasize your last paragraph enough. Focusing on weight is very often the wrong thing to do. If you become healthy it is much easier to get to a healthy weight than if you ignore your health or possibly even actively harm yourself in an attempt to slim down. There are also way too many people who have turned weight loss into some totem project they can hoist all their other life problems on, and believe that once they’ve reached their “goal weight” their life will magically fix itself and they’ll live happily ever after.

(Duncan Kerridge) #24

Perhaps you could point out that the founder of CrossFit advocates a low carb diet : https://www.crossfit.com/foundation

‘As noted by CrossFit founder Greg Glassman, the CrossFit stimulus—constantly varied high-intensity functional movement coupled with a diet of meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar—can prevent the cause of 70 percent of deaths in the United States.’

(Mary) #25

Actually, I doubt that what you wrote is true for everybody (aren’t we all special little snowflakes?). There seem to be an awful lot of us who are not obviously fat burning (ie. no lbs or inches lost) despite strict compliance. I’m sure there’s some sort of healing going on before insulin levels drop low enough to allow access to fat but I have no idea how long that process takes. Three weeks so far for me and my only option is KCKO. Frustrating, yes, but stopping keto is not an option.

(Liz ) #26

Hmm, this does not sound accurate to me. Can you point to the science that states this? I believe @Richard has posted a chart many times that shows the inverse proportion of basal insulin level to the ability to access fat stores, carbs were never mentioned.

(Richard Morris) #27

Insulin potentiates the inhibition by Malonyl-CoA upon Carnitine palmotoyl trasferase (CPT) - this is a super quick transport shuttle by which long chained fatty acids (palmitic and longer fatty acids) get into the mitochondria to be burned for energy. In people who’s cells have become insulin resistant to protect themselves from high systemic levels - that can be up to a 50x increase in inhibition [ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1135974/ ]. Insulin also inhibits transcription of the gene that codes for CPT activity.

Short and medium chained fats can diffuse straight into the mitochondria (which is why I tell type 2 diabetics starting keto to add coconut oil to food). Long chained fatty acids have to be shuttled into the mitochondria by CPT.

Insulin Inhibiting CPT means long changed fatty acids have to instead be cleaved into medium and short chained fats in different organelles called peroxisomes before they can diffuse into the mitochondria to be burned, which is a much slower process, and a polluting one. It’s not a complete shut off of fat burning, it’s a dramatic decrease with an increase in peroxide produced.

Even tho we make malonyl-CoA only when making new fat from excess energy, we are still making incredibly small amounts most of the time - that 50x inhibition really bites hard for type 2 diabetics with high insulin all the time.

It means that we don’t quickly burn fats, until we get insulin down. So even tho our adipose tissue has become biomechanically insulin resistant by becoming over stuffed with stored energy and is overflowing with fat … we have plenty of fat in circulation but we can’t use it at our energy consuming cells.

This explains the paradox of the fat man who is hungry and has no energy.

The other thing this explains is why when we go keto and lower insulin we have a whoosh of weight loss and energy … until we hit a plateau. That is the point where our body fat can hold onto energy in the presence of our basal insulin. A plateau is literally a sign that we are becoming healthier.

(Jeanne Wagner) #28

True, I am trying to open people’s eyes to the falsities of the old nutrition information. I am a bit zealous, and I get my dander up when people act too high and mighty in their ignorance… but I guess I’m sort of being a bit superior myself. It is best to lead by example, but I know from my own experience that alone is not enough. The person observing has to also be fed up with their situation to want to do anything different, for the Keto way to be even slightly interesting to them.

Keeping Calm, and Ketoing On. :wink:

(Allie) #29

Probably just doesn’t want to be made to look stupid with the advice he’s been giving for however many years being wrong. Rather keep arguing it to be fact than actually stop and look at the most up to date info…

(Karen Parrott) #30

I do find if I over eat calories , I do gain. So that part rings true. I was in my own way for many years. Keto helps me a lot not to over eat. That’s also true for me.

I live both sides daily.Just do what works. I doubt gym dude gives two hoots about anything and your time could be spent talking to folks who ask you about your great results.

Many people like to argue because it’s their MO. I’ve been listening to the Fit2fat2fit podcast. Doubt those trainers would have listened or had deep empathy for their clients without having experienced it for themselves no matter what anyone said. Some are just not capable of deep emotional intelligence. Onward.

#31

I love Gary Taubes’ way of framing this: saying that avoiding obesity is just about CICO is kind of like saying that avoiding poverty is just about earning more than you spend. It may be true in the most literal sense, but it’s pretty much useless when it comes to addressing poverty.

(Richard Morris) #32

Man is a social animal, so there is an evolutionarily appropriate social bias against a member of the tribe who is eating more than their fair share, and not pulling their weight - that person raises the risk of starvation for the entire tribe. That is likely the origin of the concept of sins of gluttony and sloth, they are hard wired into us, even deeper than racism. This appears to be why it is easy for lazy thinkers to fall into viewing things through that prism.

For many it starts in the womb. A glucose molecule is small, C6 H12 O6, it passes the placental barrier between mum and bub easily … which makes sense, glucose is pure energy substrate.

image

Circulating insulin, however, is a massive baroque structure, with 6 individual insulin molecules each made up of 2 arms each containing 51 amino acids. Each of those amino acids is larger than a glucose molecule. The formula of an insulin molecule is C257 H383 N65 O77 S6 and it’s molecular weight is around 5800g per mole (glucose is 180g/mol).

Insulin looks like a dozen olympic ribbon twirling gymnasts … on acid, viewed through a keleidoscope.

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image.jpg800×558 82.3 KB

Insulin doesn’t have any transports to get across the placental barrier, and at that size it’s not diffusing through any membrane. So depending on what the mothers glucose levels do, the child’s pancreas has to mature very quickly to keep up with the load.

This is likely the beginning of insulin resistance for most type 2 diabetics. If mom has a low and slow bath of glucose for the child to develop in then the child’s pancreas develops normally, if mum is on the glucose roller-coaster however, then the developing pancreas has to become acclimated to making heroic amounts of insulin and the child’s tissues need to learn to become insulin resistant to protect itself.

That’s going to happen 20-30 years before obesity starts, a body gradually making more and more insulin. During adolescence most hyperinsulinaemics don’t become obese because their metabolic rates increase … it’s when that slows down in their 20s and 30s that the chickens come home to roost.

And it’s only once the person hits their personal fat threshold sometimes decades years after they had started to pack on fat that they begin to lose glucose stasis - which is where we diagnose Diabetes.

And then someone with a poor understanding of what is going on will observe “Look at that glutton, he’ll get diabetes if he keeps eating like that”. Classic “post hoc” logic fallacy, assuming that because effect B (diabetes) happened AFTER effect A (obesity), therefore A was the cause. In fact both happened decades after cause C (hyperinsulinaemia).

Yes a person who is obese eats more, necessarily. They also do less exercise. Of course they do, duh. But is it possible to say that those are CAUSES or EFFECTS?

It’s one of those logic traps, that falls into our deep prejudices against gluttony & sloth in a tribe member.

You can take the easy way out and say, oh well that person is just sinful and the horrible diabetes that is headed their way is a just punishment for that moral turpitude. All wrapped up into a nice neat moralistic package, with the bonus that if you yourself are not obese you can pat yourself on the back for your work ethic, self control, discipline, thrift, moral righteousness.

The problem is that all these complex mythical behaviors don’t explain the fundamental biochemical paradox of the man who is at once obese, hungry and lethargic.

You have to invent complex behaviors that are antithetical to the organisms survival. “Some people are just lazy” is an example of this. Why some people, why not everyone? Isn’t energy conservation an optimal posture for an organism?

There is another simpler explanation that explains the observations. Elevating insulin inhibits the release of stored energy from body fat, and the use of fat as a substrate for making energy. Lowering insulin enables the release of energy from storage, and use of it as a substrate for making energy.

Feasting = insulin :arrow_up: fat use :arrow_down:

Fasting = insulin :arrow_down: fat use :arrow_up:

We apparently evolved to cycle insulin through these feast-fast cycles.

Any environmental stressor that keeps insulin elevated (Industrial supply of sugar & starches, permanent feeding, circadian disruption) keeps stored energy from contributing to available energy - driving hunger and lethargy and obesity. Eventually too much insulin for too long feeds a vicious cycle of insulin begetting resistance begetting more insulin. At some point body fat can take no more energy and it overflows into circulation driving up LDL among other things. But now insulin is hopelessly elevated permanently with no chance for it to come done short of an heroic intervention - like bariatric surgery, or Keto/fasting.

(Consensus is Politics) #33

Truth is truth I say. It’s important. If you are having good results with something you need to know the why. Otherwise you risk making assumptions in other areas based on what you know. For example… and sorry if this triggers the trolls… but I seriously doubt they live anywhere near a science minded group as ours…

Flat Earth theory. There are people who believe this drivel. They are all in, although I think most are just trolls looking to get someone going. But I have had people in real life mention it, and asked what I thought about it. They are confused because they’ve believed for years that the earth is round, spherical, spheroid being the technical term. Suddenly groups of people challenge them on this, with “scientific obsevations” which defy scientific logic.

When the flat earth person is asked to explain gravity, they explain it as “the earth is accelerating that direction” and points to the sky. When asked why we don’t run into the sun or moon, they say they are built on rails, that are attached to the snow globe like ceiling or dome, that sits around the earth to keep the air and water in. It just gets stranger and weirder from there.

My point is if you choose to ignore the truth about something, you will begin to go down a path of non-truths. You will need to, to keep your truth valid, you will need to invent new truths to support it.

That doesn’t mean we have to rub their faces into it. But definitely need to ask them about where the idea comes from. They will often say, “it’s a law of thermal dynamics”. Which I say, ok, conservation of energy. Good. Then what about the second law of thermodynamics? Entropy. Things break. They wear out. They become unwound. They cool off. Their energy leaves them. CICO fails to take into account that our bodies are constantly repairing themselves. That takes enormous amounts of energy. The repairing has nothing to do with exercise.

What’s a daily avg for calorie consumption for a failry active person? About 2,000 calories? How many calories are needed for a good workout? Let’s say a 15 mile bike ride? Roughly 300 calories. So, according to CICO if I don’t want to get fat, I can ride a bike for 15 miles. Or just don’t eat that 300 calories? Is dropping my intake to 1700 calories really going to make that kind of difference? No, it’s not. My metabolism will adjust, maintenance will slow down, seeing as it still has 1700 calories to work with it will just slow down a little bit to make up for the calorie restriction. No breaking of any laws required.

(Matthew) #34

There is a picture of a girl with type 1 diabetes (they make no insulin) in Dr. Fung’s book “The complete guide to fasting”. She is as skinny as a rail. The doctors of the time tried to feed type 1 diabetics absurd amounts of calories (10,000 calories per day) and they still looked like they stepped out of a concentration camp. Give them a little insulin, and they fatten right up. Ask a type 2 diabetic what happens when they start taking insulin - they gain 20, 30, 40 pounds even if they are exercising and dieting like crazy. There is even a fad among type 1 diabetics to ease off taking insulin if they want to lose weight (even if it damages them through high blood glucose).

Insulin regulates fat, not calories. Period.