I think I will stop telling noobs that “calories don’t matter as long as”… and switch to “don’t worry about calories so much as long you stay under 20 carbs and eat to satiety”. I wouldn’t want anyone to read my post and get pissed off and lose their ability to KCKO.
Seriously, this topic is cancer in this forum. I wonder what the poor OP thinks of all of this…
The problem is, that doesn’t really mean a lot to most people. I’m currently saying that calories can be ignored initially, the goal is to get fat adapted, and you do that by keeping carbs under 20g and eating plenty of good food.
Absolutely, but I think we can be TOO brief at times.
Well, SOME people can 
Cool, Bob. 
Indeed - there are two potentially massive changes to the ‘Out’ side over time (aside from exercise) - that of metabolic changes which can include slowdown related to the “In” side, and the high insulin versus low insulin store fat/burn fat deal.
And unless you’re elite, exercise isn’t really in the same league as the other two.
She might have clocked out. 
It’s certainly true that when insulin resistance and lack of fat-adaption is a problem, calorie-counting is much less important or not really important at all. That, however, is nothing against CICO.
‘CICO’ does not mean that “calorie reduction is necessarily a good thing” - I think this is a big hurdle for a lot of people to get over - both on the part of those who would maintain that, and among those who portray the ‘pro-CICO’ crowd as that and nothing more.
She knew to use CICO as clickbait, I doubt this was a shock to her, this result
So in my life, the few people that have lost a lot of weight 50lbs + have sadly gained it back with in 2 years… I don’t want to suffer the “biggest loser” aftermath… out of all the contestants, only 2 or 3 kept it off. All of them faced a permanently lowered BMR to a point that they needed to eat less than 500 calories a day than to someone with the same weight (not having gone through the extreme loss via cico) to maintain their current weight. If they are like their counter parts’ maintenance level, they would gain fat!
I am hoping this does not happen to me and researching ways to keep my BMR constant through this weight loss. It seems fasting 2-3 days actually raises it slightly and keto is another where many seem to be able lose weight on keto without such huge calorie restrictions. I hope I’m right about this assessment on keto!
I still like Gary Taubes’s summation: The causality is reversed, and we eat more than we expend because we are gaining weight, and we eat less than we expend because we are losing weight. The caloric imbalance is the result, not the cause.
One of the best examples is the growth spurt at puberty. CICO says kids grow because they eat too much. The hormonal hypothesis says, no, kids eat their parents out of house and home because they are growing.
No one denies the existence of the energy imbalance. What we are arguing about is the reason for the imbalance: gluttony and sloth on the one hand, and hormonal mechanisms manipulating behavior on the other. I know that my appetite suddenly subsided a few weeks after I went full keto, and I attribute that to the hormonal re-regulation of the leptin signaling from my adipose tissue.
I stand by everything I said in my earlier post. Calories 100% matter.
Some people then seem to assume that what I mean by this is that people should keep eating to the food pyramid and reduce their calorie intake to lose weight. They think I’m saying “eat bread, just eat less of it.” This is what they think the word “calorie” means. These people either don’t read the rest of my posts or they are just being willfully ignorant and dogmatic.
Eating low carb, and accepting the carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis, doesn’t mean you stop believing in the physical concept of energy. Apparently that’s what some people on these boards seem to think: that new science supplants the basic concepts of physics and biochemistry.
What those of you insisting that calories are irrelevant need to know is that you are not supported by any of the literature or the top experts in the low carb space. Nobody apart from you thinks that calories don’t matter. Either that or you’re misunderstanding people who use the word “calories” because the very use of the word sends you stark raving mad!
I explained all of this at length above.
Saying calories matter doesn’t mean I’m in favour of telling people to eat sugar and carbs and cut their calories. That’s a straw man argument. I haven’t said that, have I?
The implication of “calories are irrelevant” is clear: you can eat as many ridiculous “fat bombs” and Keto treats and drink olive oil and eat butter as you like, and you’ll be Keto so you’ll be fine! This is patently absurd.
What “calories matter” means is that when you eat low carb, you should stop at satiety. Because when you eat past your hunger signals, you can consume too many calories. (Oh my god! Alert the Keto police! Somebody said Calories!)
Don’t insist calories don’t matter when you have countless folks upset that they’re stalled on “keto” while they’re mainlining chicken skins and pork rinds.
Seriously, it’s gotten out of hand. This idea you can eat as much as you want and keep on going and that calories don’t matter. They do. How much you eat totally matters. And as Phinney notes on his Virta Health site, someone starting LCHF very obese might only be eating a much smaller percentage of calories as fat and a much higher percentage of their CALORIC INTAKE as protein. This is because a lot of their fat calories are coming from body fat.
Instead, the “calories are irrelevant” crowd keep insisting that everyone should be drowning everything in sticks of butter from day 1. This is totally unscientific [spoiler]bullshit[/spoiler].
A last point I’ll make is that some people’s satiety signaling has been deranged by years of poor nutrition. I know people like this. And even on strict keto they find they actually have to track their caloric intake meticulously because they simply don’t have a properly calibrated satiety mechanism.
Anyway this has been done to death on this forum, notably on my thread “stop telling newbies to eat more fat.” I’ll leave it here. But seriously, stop attacking anyone who talks about calories (energy intake/expenditure) as if they’re a pasta-eating vegan advocating 80% carb intake. Try understand who you’re talking to.
Yeah, sorry, I’m not going to read 100+ comments just to see if a specific thing is mentioned. Maybe that’s your thing, and apparently it is, but I had a comment to share and therefore did.
I made a point to clear up that I may be repeating information, and then tried to bring something to the conversation that I thought may be helpful, so please explain how your snarky remark brought something beneficial?
I don’t see a lot of this at all. I see people telling newbies not to restrict fat at first & not to force a calorie deficit. I see people suggesting that others eat whole food, including the fat that came with it. I see them suggesting that some hunger may be transient & will pass but that if it is persistent then you should eat or review your diet to look for possible triggers. I see common sense such as this 
There is some nonsense but for the most part I see a lot of good.
I think it’s kind of funny that you make both of those statements in the same post. You ask for moderation in the way the “anti-calorie” folks respond to those who talk about calories. Yet in the earlier part of the post, you make the statement about the anti-calorie people telling everyone to drown everything in sticks of butter. Tolerance goes both ways.
I don’t read any of the “anti-calorie” people saying “eat as much as you want, it doesn’t matter!” There’s always the caution to eat to satiety and NOT eat when not hungry. I’m sure there are some more extreme views with the fat bombs and such, but I think those are more in an effort to get people fat-adapted and to stop looking to carbs for the energy fix. CICO has been so beaten into people that it’s hard to let go of that long enough to get used to using fat for energy. Yes, of course, overweight people need to use their own fat for fuel, but they FIRST need to become comfortable with the shift in thinking that fat is ok, eating is ok, AND get their hunger under control.
There is definitely a huge mental block with this in the keto community, as if admitting that calories have a place means you’re saying hormones and everything else don’t matter and that it’s all about the ol’ “eat less, move more”. I’ve ketofied a lot of people over the years and I’ve always taught them to TRY eating to satiety since it’s easier and I want them to not feel like this is a “diet” but to also realize that it doesn’t work for everybody and you can’t track what you’re doing by saying you ate 3 fist fulls of beef and 2 scoops of mayonnaise and if/when they come to that conclusion then they’ll need to figure out what their metabolism is doing and we only have one real way to track that stuff…
It’s really hit the point of politics IMO, No doubt the left and right both OBVIOUSLY do have agreements with each other on certain things BUT they’ll never actually admit it publicly, because that would get them attacked by others who they view to be on their side. Exact same situation with the CICO argument.
For my first couple years being ketogenic (perpetual Atkins induction) I was a member at the Atkins diet bulletin board, at one point it was as busy as we are here, but they ONLY would view Atkins’ 02 book as “Atkins”, everybody that would come in as a new member asking current day Atkins questions would be slammed as not doing “Atkins” and it was to the point that is was pushing people away, people would feel it was too strict and quit, big surprise it was all the same arguments like the never ending eat more fat, net vs actual, dairy vs non blah blah blah. Nobody ever wanted to concede that there is more than one approach to successfully do it. The forum lost more and more new members until it turned into a forum of the same 50 people filling thousands of post with “games” and chit chat instead of being a great information source. I have fears that the internal split within the keto community may eventually rise to this. Look at how fractured Paleo became!
Coming from someone who suffers from anorexia, calorie restriction works like a dream. I’ve been suffereing from it since I was 15. That’s 20 years. It’s certainly a long term solution, and sadly (I’m in no way promoting this WOE as it’s devastating to your body and mental state) it’s extremely effective if done right. You can’t stop eating all together. You have to give your body something. But just enough. There is a sweet spot. Once I found mine I managed to hang around a BMI that put me just at the underweight category for years. Which mentally is where I wanted to be to feel like I had accomplished my weight goal. But that’s a whole different story…
Basically yes, CICO can work. Maybe only for some. But I lived on 800-1000 calories a day for a long time and would indulge on occasion to trick my body out of starvation mode and jump start my metabolism again. I had it figured out and it almost killed me. I ended up in the hospital with a severe electrolyte imbalance at one point, recovered for awhile, then was back at it. Now I’m in recovery again and doing keto.
I found this to be true on Thanksgiving this year! I was very excited because I ate nothing that wasn’t keto approved. But I did have two glasses of dry red wine and I ate so many vegetable side dishes that my stomach hurt. I made about four vegetable dishes to go along with the turkey and we had cheese for dessert. All the vegetables were prepared with grass fed butter, bacon or olive oil so most of my calories came from fat. Low and behold I put on 3.6 pounds! So yes, if you over consume, even on keto you are going to gain weight. It took me over two weeks to take it off so it wasn’t just water weight or the weight of the meal. Of course, every BODY is different so it might be that some folks on here can consume 3000 calories of fat and not gain, but THIS body does better at 1600-1900 and with 5-8 % total carbs (not net).
I was working to lose weight and had cut to 1500 calories and could not lose anything. I was stalled at 230 pounds. If I dropped to 1300 I would lose for about a week but would then stop sleeping - my body was starving. At that point I had mostly cut out grain but was doing lower fat so was high protein and ate lots of fruit and vegetables. Then I upped my healthy fats in April of 2016 and was able to go up to about 1700 a day and lose. I have been slowly losing since - I hit plateaus along the way so have since cut out all added sugar (March of 2018) and most fruit (June of 2018) which effectively put me on Keto diet. I probably have about 80 grams of either blueberries or cherries twice a week now as a treat. I am now down to 172. I have about 12 pounds to go before I am HWP according to BMI and my DXA scan in October. I am down from a high of 270. So I would be someone that successfully increased her calories and has had weight loss success because the increase was because of healthy fat consumption and the removal or carbohydrates.
Ah, those are high PUFA foods, meaning they cause your fat cells to be insulin sensitive, meaning they’re causing you to get fatter. Switch them to “high” saturated fat,low PUFA foods (eg, tallow from grass fed beef) and see what happens. (Saturated fat causes fat cells to be insulin sensitive, meaning they shut down and won’t accept calories, you’re getting thinner.)
See the problem? The TYPEs of calories aren’t the same and have effects. This is what makes this area so difficult.
If you want to count calories, do it. It’s your life.
