Can we please stop repeating the “You have to eat at a deficit to lose weight on KETO” lie?

(PJ) #553

I understand that. I was anorexic for medical reasons for eons (malnourishment led to lack of appetite), and eventually there was no connection between food quality/quantity and my appetite. I mostly had no appetite. If someone gave me tons of food I could eat it. If I had no food at all that was fine too. There just wasn’t much of a desire nor satiation point. Keto helped me partly because it forced me to eat, because I was counting all my macros and working out what I had to eat every day.

If that’s what the count should be in my head, then that’s apparently what I should be eating. I don’t have much of a “I should eat less” or “I should eat more” feeling – even years after a lot of weight loss and a lot of health improvement and getting back some appetite.

Well unless I exercise. Then I want to eat everything in sight.

For some people, it really does have to be more by the numbers. It’s just that of all the numbers, calories seem to me to be the one best approached much later into a ketogenic lifestyle – once initial weight loss is past, once the person has adapted well into that new eating plan and its options, and only IF they are having trouble losing fat despite eating ketogenically.

Although in my experience, when I don’t lose weight – except the menopause stall I’m going to exempt from this discussion – it’s been thanks to diet sodas or too much cheese or something else that is either hiking up my body reactions despite “officially” having no carbs, or hiking up my inflammation, despite being lowcarb.

(Gabe “No Dogma, Only Science Please!” ) #554

It’s a bit frustrating to see this come up again and again on the forums. As Dr Eric Westman has repeated ad nauseam, “calories count, but you don’t need to count calories.” In other words, why are we creating a debate where there doesn’t need to be one?

It is beyond question that your body must be in energy deficit for you to burn fat. As Gary Taubes has always pointed out, however, that’s about as useful as saying that Bill Gates is rich because he spends less than he earns.

The question is WHY – and HOW can we stay satiated while running an energy deficit. The truth is that humans do not yet 100% know. But the carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis is our best hypothesis yet; I’m never hungry and when I’m in ketosis, I lose fat (or maintain) without failure.

I’d put money on LCHF being vindicated and eventually becoming the official dietary guidelines.

Why is this even still a debate? None of us cares about counting calories, right? It is possible to be low carb/ketogenic while agreeing that an energy deficit is required for weight loss. But it’s not a controversy. Nobody here is arguing for the facile, silly “energy balance hypothesis,” because we know that it’s BS.

As Robert Lustig said, it’s time to “kill the calorie.”

We should put this issue to bed once and for all!

(bulkbiker) #555

You need to define what you mean by “energy deficit” .

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #556

I posted a virtual lecture Giles Yeo did for the Royal Institution in the Resources section, in which he deals with this very topic. His thoughts are interesting, reasonable, and some of them have not been aired in our previous iterations of this topic. I doubt anyone will agree with everything he says in the lecture, but it is all worth thinking about.

(Gabe “No Dogma, Only Science Please!” ) #557

Thanks Paul, I checked 1.5 of his lectures out this morning. Very very good, and completely agree. I’ve remarked in these forums over the years that there seem to be people who think the laws of physics don’t apply somehow to LCHF diets. But AFAIK most keto experts will tell you that the primary weight loss mechanism of low carb diets is increased satiety, so we burn body fat while taking in less energy through our mouths.

Interestingly, Giles Yeo sounds in many parts not unlike Jason Fung – at least, his book. I flipped through Fung’s book a couple of times and couldn’t believe how agnostic he was on the ketogenic diet. He identifies the main problems with western diets and leaves room for a number of whole food diets to solve these problems. And for a fasting guru, he doesn’t talk about fasting nearly as much as you’d think.

All of this to say: after losing all the weight I wanted (and probably more to come) from eating a ketogenic diet, I suspect I may be metabolically flexible enough to eat a reasonable amount of fruit and perhaps even whole grains without ballooning into a blimp. I’m very bullish on the ketogenic diet, but I am becoming far more sympathetic to people who advocate other types of whole food diets. They can all work – to reduce obesity, to improve glucose control, and to resolve all the other diseases of lifestyle associated with these.

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #558

I think one reason this topic keeps reappearing is that new folks join the forums. Keep in mind that many folks are here because they want to lose weight/fat. Many or most of those have spent years or decades trying and failing to lose and wrecking their metabolisms in the process. During all that time ‘calories matter’ was pounded relentlessly into their psyches. They dutifully counted and restricted calories, lost weight and regained weight and despaired. Counting calories meant eating less and feeling hungry all the time.

All of sudden, they discover that restricting carbs rather than restricting calories abolishes hunger. All of a sudden, they discover they lose weight and feel satisfied, not constantly hungry. So ‘Calories matter’ segues quite reasonably into ‘Calories don’t matter’. The precise energy balance is besides the point. Most folks can’t explain the laws of thermodynamics. And why should they? They’re eating as much as they want, as long as it’s not carbs, and they see their weight on the scale going down over time.

Those of us who understand and care about thermodynamics can discuss it all we like. We’re the minority.

#559

Bodybuilders following a strict calorie restricted diet slowly tapering calories down towards a bodybuilding show achieving on point calorie in calorie out results would like to have a word.

(Gabe “No Dogma, Only Science Please!” ) #560

I’m not suggesting there’s any malice, but in my experience, it isn’t just new folks who raise the issue. And the trouble is that this doesn’t require a magical explanation, nor does it require a mutually exclusive CICO vs LCHF battle.

The problem with CICO is not so much that it’s wrong, it’s that it’s an insufficient explanation. Nobody seriously disputes that losing fat means expending more energy than you take in. Nor do they dispute that gaining weight means eating more energy than you expend.

But Taubes has said many times that this is about as satisfying an explanation as saying that Bill Gates is rich because he spends less money than he generates. That is, it’s a totally unsatisfactory explanation.

CICO is the same, and we all know how this “explanation” has been manipulated by the processed “food” industry to claim that a calorie is a calorie, and all you have to do is eat a “balanced diet,” and a calorie from Coca Cola is the same as a calorie from broccoli. This is bullshit and we all know it.

The carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis is at least a partial explanation for why, to use Taubes’s metaphor, Bill Gates is rich. Meaning, beyond the facile explanation, what caused Bill Gates’s wealth? What causes a person to remain hungry after eating and to “overeat?”

What bothers me about this debate is that it’s so unnecessary. You do have to eat at a deficit to lose fat. While it might feel magical to us, there’s any number of things that might be happening when you eat a low carb diet: your insulin levels drop so you’re less hungry, you eat less, and your body fat reserves are unlocked and you start burning your own body fat.

(Perhaps also there’s an increase in your basal metabolic rate when you’re on a low carb diet, but from what I’ve seen of the experimental evidence, this effect appears to be relatively minor.)

This has been explained time and again by folks like Westman and Phinney. Phinney’s company, Virta Health, has this helpful graphic on its website, and if only we’d point people in its direction, I think a lot of misunderstandings on this forum could be averted:

Intake-and-Expenditure-04a-100
Intake-and-Expenditure-04a-100.jpg692×654 131 KB

In those initial phases when you’re burning loads of body fat, it does feel incredible – we’ve all felt it. You’re whooshing down in weight and it feels so easy. It feels magical. But no magical explanation is required, and we should go with the simplest explanation, using Ockham’s Razor, rather than talk about more convoluted explanations for how this process works.

(bulkbiker) #561

You appear to contradict yourself a few times in those paragraphs… replacing the word “calorie” with “energy” doesn’t impact the argument.

#562

I felt no problem with this. I think calorie here is eaten calorie while energy is more complex…
That’s why simple CICO doesn’t work for everyone but proper CICO do. We can’t make energy from nothing but our body reacts differently to different food with the same caloric content. We aren’t calorie burning machines, we don’t necessarily get the calculated, measured amount of energy from our food.

I mostly agree with Gabe but I heard too many stories about people eating very much and losing on keto so something near magical seem to happen to the lucky ones :smiley: Not to me but it’s fine, I wouldn’t want spend unnecessarily much money and time and effort on food anyway.

(bulkbiker) #563

If just one example of that is true (and I believe that there are thousands if not more) then the CICO theory is disproven, period.

(Polly) #564

Your finest black swan argument. :swan:

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #565

If you haven’t yet, watch this video. I think you’ll find it both informative and entertaining.

In my opinion - I think supported by Yeo’s comments about it - CICO isn’t wrong because ‘Energy Balance Theory’ is wrong per se. As Yeo describes matters so well (and entertainingly), we humans are not bomb calorimeters. We extract and utilize available food energy in varying degrees of efficiency. For example, you and I - or anyone else - could eat exactly the same helping of food and derive different amounts of energy and expend/store that energy very differently. CICO ignores this fact, presuming that energy extraction and utilization are the same regardless of individual variation and extraction/utlization can both be determined with extreme accuracy. And all this can be measured usefully by ‘counting calories’. It’s not and it can’t be.

CICO is wrong because the flow through of energy is virtually impossible to measure with sufficient accuracy to work well. Counting calories in and out doesn’t help much. To work at all, CICO requires restricting calories to the point of chronic hunger. The chronic hunger in turn causes a cascade of physiological and psychological responses and consequences that work against losing the fat and maintaining the loss.

After years of losing and regaining, most folks give up on CICO and get off the roller coaster. When they discover they can actually burn fat, lose weight and not feel hungry all the time - even when they are in fact consuming less overall caloric energy - it does seem miraculous! The graphic you posted from Virta illustrates this well. Folks eat less overall - but still to satiety - and utilize body fat to make up the difference. And do not feel hungry doing it. When you’ve done CICO for 20 years and weigh more now than you did 20 years ago - this seems like magic.

The real ‘magic’ we all know it’s just cutting out the carbs. Consuming carbs is the problem and not consuming them is the solution. Ketogenic eating enables our metabolism to return to it’s normal state of energy utilization and health.

(Doug) #566

Logic, Science and Rationalism show the way. As long as the Out goes up enough to be more than the In, then weight loss will occur, no magic required.

#567

Nope, CICO always works, even here. Their CO is obviously bigger than their CI if they lose fat. It doesn’t matter if they eat very much, there is no other way and I see no problem.
We can’t tell our CI and CO… We may have an educated guess but that’s it. If we function properly and don’t eat way too much so our body can handle it, we can guess our CI to some extent (though if I eat fatty meat, I never have a good idea about the fat content. it’s not like it’s written on it) but not our CO. And the latter is the one that can do some surprising things. Mine surely did, that’s why I basically always stall despite eating very different amount of calories in different times (there are limits, of course but my maintenance calorie range is surprisingly big. many people have a tiny range).

#568

That’s a stupid, simplified CICO then… :smiley: Some people still can use that effectively as their body works that way (and tiny changes don’t matter anyway as we never can accurately track even the bomb calorimeter energy content of our food as our food isn’t the food that someone used to get the numbers we use. it may be quite different) but others clearly not. Oversimplified things for humans in general are usually wrong, no wonder.

The proper CICO always works, we just don’t have access to CI and especially CO :smiley: Tracking still can help some - and not or not always others. I usually very clearly see that I definitely won’t lose fat eating that much and that’s informative. If I bring down the calories in the food I eat significantly, my own CI will go down as well and it’s the right direction for me.

(bulkbiker) #569

The quote was from you…

You disagree with yourself now?

#570

Nope, I don’t… I won’t read back to try to figure out what you mean but simplified CICO doesn’t work, the real, complex CICO do and people are different.

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #571

@Shinita The Gulag Archipelago proved CICO works. For EVERYONE. That was simplified CICO! There are other examples of the same…

(Gabe “No Dogma, Only Science Please!” ) #572

I don’t want to put too fine a point on this, but no organism that’s ever lived has burnt fat whilst consuming more energy than their body expended. Not possible, never happened, never will.