While actually nope, surely many of us experienced that eating X is what makes us a slave or an obsessed one… Going low-carb was so liberating… And I had to sacrifice nothing! At least I didn’t feel it. It was pure win back then (keto and carnivore was more challenging, low-carb was very easy). Well I had my occasional off days. I knew how to make it easy. But I almost never left low-carb, I still had so much carbs there that I didn’t need more (but there is temptation, nostalgy and whatnot sometimes). It was quite great, without high-carb I didn’t want much carbs. Keto was harder but carnivore was easier again… I just had to take a break from the influencer carbs and things automatically got better for a while.
And people who would enjoy low-carb never will give it a try because people talk BS… That’s quite sad. I would love if the idea came earlier to me. And we didn’t have these shaming things when I was little, just everyone ate HCHF and sunflower oil. There was nothing else to be seen. I had no idea there is something else out there for a long while. Even when I have read about keto, that was just that old thing for kids with epilepsy. But when I tried out low-carb, there was no way back It’s not easy and great since day #1 for everyone but it is for some but no one will figure it out if it’s worth it if they deny every possibility to just TRY…
And we can’t know without trying. I couldn’t guess how I will feel without the influence of my old carbs. It’s very different without them.
I agree with you, there are definitely frankenfoods but that is not my problem and I don’t think it has ever been. I think the article does focus more on the frankenfoods but I do think there is a larger issue. Believing that weight is in the control of the average person who is not aware of the effects of high carb foods. It is not. Even for people who are skinny, they have trouble gaining.
Yes there are people who are naturally thin, either because they love exercise, fidget a lot, have a wasteful metabolism, have a good off switch in their bodies (which no one knows where that is kept, whether it is GLP1, Leptin, insulin sensitive), I have no idea why and sadly neither do the experts in my opinion. Some are naturally heavier. I have a friend with one thin parent and one parent who is not. She was heavy from the time she was two. It was not what her parents fed her, her brothers were thin and normal weight (2 brothers), although until she did IF she always craved more food than the average person except when she was pregnant where suddenly food was not too interesting. We still tease her about how she brought home one Greek salad for three people for dinner
Although I have never taken Ozempic, I experienced the off switch with my pregnancies too. Other than the first (where I was normal and was a reasonable weight before pregnancy), my other pregnancies I would literally forget to eat if I was busy. If I went out I would forget to order dessert! With one pregnancy I weighed 20 lbs less after, then proceeded to gain it back with friends while I was home.
Since 2009 when I went GF as an experiment for Hashimotos, I am pretty careful about what I eat in terms of chemicals and processed food (started reading labels then). Even if I “cheat” on low carb, it is usually with a banana or the bread basket at a nice restaurant where the bread was fresh, some pasta with Raos, not Wonder. It still triggers me. When I come home from the restaurant I still want other food, which is not usually what happens now since I stop eating at 6.
When I gained weight, it was initially in the 70s and 80s, before food science was advanced as it is. I had my biggest weight gains in 1981, 1989 and 1992, periods were I went from needing to lose 10 lbs to being objectively overweight (I got lots of comments at the time)
As for dieticians, don’t get me started. Family member had an experience where the kid was a normal weight but had lost 5 lbs recently due to Covid (mild case nothing exciting), the kid wanted to see a nutritionist cause that was what her friends were doing and she had stomach issues unrelated to Covid. Parent thought nutritionist would suggest good foods that agreed with the kid’s stomach (kid has a minor dx). Covered by insurance so why not. The nutritionist managed to convince the kid she had an eating disorder, that her eating is disordered whatever that means.When the parent asked for food suggestions it was the same SAD, chicken parm etc. Was telling her to eat anything as long as it was food. Note kid has a BMI of around 26 even with the minor covid weight loss. The final straw was when the kid was picked up from school carrying a 20oz bottle of regular soda. This family does not even buy diet soda. Bye bye nutritionist
With this sort of argument, I like to replace “X” with “arsenic” or “cyanide.” That tends to put things in perspective.
And the reason Coca-Cola insists that “a calorie is a calorie” is not that they care about consumers’ personal liberty, but because being told not to drink Coke is an assault on their corporate profits.
Or they eat little. There are many people who just eat little and they may even say they can eat as much as they want, they won’t gain. Yep, because they barely eat (in my eyes). I want to eat 2-3 times as much as they do… More if carbs are involved.
But there are many potential reasons, yes. My body LOVES to maintain (now that I get older, it is less superb but I still don’t gain easily… I think… I may on high-carb but I don’t eat like that) and it’s usually very hard to change my weight. It always happens if I eat little, I just can’t eat little (I know it happens because I had such miraculous times occasionally). But eating a modest amount and gaining, oh my, I feel sorry for those people. And for the underweight ones who can’t gain.
That person shouldn’t be around kids especially not talking BS to them. It is maddening.
Ignoring those folks who are mentally forcing themselves to eat very little, I think there’s some type of feedback mechanism that some people have. As an electrical engineer, “feedback” is a signal you get when you do something, like transmit information. That feedback allows you to adjust what you’re doing, eg, increase or decrease power, etc.
As @Saphire points out, we don’t know what causes this feedback (an off switch for instance). Some people think it’s high PUFA (poly unsaturated fat) content in our fat cells, which drives us to be hungry. Others think food simply tastes too good. There are so many other theories.
I think they all have some truth. I know that I will sometimes not be hungry at dinner, so I’ll eat a small amount of food. Then eat more. Then eat more. I’ll end up eating a normal meal or more when I wasn’t hungry. I theorize that something is wrong with my feedback system.
But I used to get some coconut macaroons from a local store. They had some sugar in them, and I would eat them on the days I lifted weights. They had a harder exterior and a soft interior. Other than having sugar in them, they were pretty “clean”, meaning not a lot of crap additives. I have tried to recreate them, and I cannot. (Of course, I was using fake sugar, which has an effect.) It shows me that the manufacturers of this stuff really know how to make these things taste good.
And I’m very good at not eating things. But once I do eat something, I find it hard to stop. My wife made some small potatoes, then browned them in butter, for my daughter. There were some left over, and I ate one…then another…then all of them. If there were 20 more, I’d have eaten all those too. (This is one reason why I think the idea that saturated fat causes you to be full is crap – I can keep eating something like potatoes + butter and pretty much never get full.)
As an aside, though tangentially related, there’s a guy on Threads who ate 4,000 calories a day for 20 or 21 days of carnivore and … lost weight. Now, he’s very well built and muscular and I’m sure very insulin sensitive. But now he’s going to try a SAD of 4,000 calories a day to see what happens.
When he was eating 4,000 calories of carnivore, he listed what he was eating, and it was so much. 12 ounces of raw milk for instance, plus a ton of meat and some cheese. He said he had a hard time eating that much, and I believe it.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens on the SAD. Because he’s insulin sensitive, I think there will still be issues, but not as many as perhaps someone like I would have.
Sounds like Sam Feltham’s experiments with 5000-calorie keto and standard diets. On keto, he gained a kilo or two of weight, but a DEXA scan showed it was muscle; he’d actually lost a bit more fat. On the standard diet, he gained a lot more, and it was fat.
IDK about PUFA and hunger, it’s plant carbs for me. And some animal items. Satiation is such a complex thing and it has a huge individual factor, the satiation effect of some food is drastically different for different people.
Good tasting food - that’s where one is very satiated, even full, even completely full - and still has appetite. Thankfully not everyone can have this very unhealthy and often compulsive thing, at least not at very high level. The most miserable ones eat even when it hurts… I just overate because the food was tasty AND triggering or not satisfying enough (I mean, it may be lovely to eat - but I want more. and more. and it never stops until I get very full. the desire is still there - but my desire not to feel awful is even bigger and at some point I really can’t eat or drink anymore for maybe 15 minutes).
But some people just don’t have proper hunger/satiation signs. Even mine are weird sometimes.
This is very normal I am sure. Very many of us works that way. The body is fine but if it gets a teasing bite, it wants a complete meal. My SO is like that. I am like that. I heard about many people who is like that. It makes sense to me and I see no problem with it as long as we use the knowledge and don’t start snacking all the time.
It’s not fake sugar, it’s a real sweetener to me but whatever, not the point.
Very rarely it matters, yes. Usually don’t, the texture will be different due to the “flour” already Of course, if the sugar is a big percentage of the dough, using a tiny bit of sweetener probably wouldn’t be good enough - but again, you already can’t recreate a starchy thing without starch, at least I always feel a huge difference… I just want a nice substitute, it doesn’t need to be the same, I actually prefer if it’s better… Baking is where I just forgot about many items, they are hopeless and it’s perfectly fine for me. I still can have my desserts even if the variety dropped.
And if it’s a food industry stuff, you just can’t have access to certain methods and ingredients… Good thing we don’t need such things. My anchestors were fine without too And I strongly prefer the taste of my own desserts, most of the time. I don’t even like the taste of sugar, the additives often bothered me taste wise etc. Am I lucky? Possibly. I preferred homemade cakes before keto (not by me, I didn’t make cakes until keto but then I managed to get bored of them, I ate so much) so I just felt the store-bought things weird tasting sometimes. Other times I liked the taste but it’s usually was the texture. I never could make very very airy wafers and I liked those. My wafers are denser. And not carnivore, oh well. Carnivore baking is challenging I must say especially when I want super crunchy cookies… But I rarely want those.
I can eat any amount of food, until it doesn’t give me a high protein intake, I won’t get satiated. And chicken doesn’t count if it’s alone (I think it does when mixed).
I am properly hungry. What do I eat? 500g bread with lots of butter and honey? Starving. 1kg chicken thigh (I only did it when I hadn’t eaten all day, it probably matters)? Starving.
Satiation is individual and basically anything is possible. I heard about people who couldn’t get satiated without a lot of fruit, ever. (They said that, maybe it wasn’t true, I didn’t even know them well or irl. But it was so weird I can’t forget. Fruit makes a normal person very hungry, doesn’t it? Or maybe not, thinking about the ZILLION meals in literature where people eat fruit when hungry. But I don’t believe it is a thing for many. It’s just a literature thing among certain creators.)
There is NO such thing as X or Y makes everyone satiated though 1 kg red meat has VERY good chances IMO… But everything else… Nope, someone (in very many cases me) will be hungry afterwards, more than before.
And it makes sense. My body wants protein. If it get teased with other things, it keeps giving me hunger and dissatisfaction signs. It wants lots of energy and fat too so I need to give it both. Smart body, knows what it needs. I often wondered how on earth can someone get satiated by an apple or a mostly bread sandwich… But it can be useful in famines. But I would rather fast (for a while, obviously some fuel is better than nothing longer term), that’s less hungry and I can’t stand hunger.
By the way, potatoes with butter are extremely delicious. I could eat that for long too if I didn’t have my knowledge about it not being good or useful for me and there are the carnivore habits… But in the past, sure, I ate up a lot of potatoes with butter, isn’t that what people do…?
Okay, surely some people get satiated by saturated fat or anything, really. But normal people…? I don’t know, it doesn’t seem so.
I had 4000+ kcal days on carnivore, it isn’t so much, sadly. Carni food tends to be quite dense.
That’s a bigger glass Even 1 liter milk is barely anything, it’s just a drink. With a lot of sugar and fat and protein, sure but give me 5 minutes, I drink it and want something to eat too. I regularly drank at least as much milk when I was a small girl… Many people do.
Eating 4000 kcal (double of my energy need?) on carnivore every day is a different thing, THAT probably wouldn’t come naturally even to me. But I never tried, I am on a mission to minimize fat and protein and I ate over 4000 with that mindset and habit… I am careful with fatty pork since.
It can be maintenance and gain too. With certain digestive problems (maybe caused by the carbs), fat-loss as well… I didn’t gain anything in a mere month when I massively overate carbs.
It would be interesting to see multiple persons doing it. There are people gaining fat rapidly on carnivore too when they overdo fat forcefully for some percentages, it makes sense, of course not gaining is quite possible too, it’s individual (and depends on the level of overeating I suppose…?)
Yep, that too. But I really would like to see it with different people, male, female, healthy, metabolically unhealthy, one who always were thin, one who could have become a CICO mascot with their fat gain/lose etc.
1kg pork shoulder is already about 3000 kcal and it’s just 2 smallish* meals. I add some eggs and dairy and voila, 4000 kcal without even trying.
*Smallish looking. Of course the macros are decent. Per meal. And “oh my god” in total for someone like me. But if I am hungry (or tempted) and I only have that as my meat, yeah, I eat that and a bunch of other stuff. (No way I skip my eggs and dairy just because I ate 1 kg fatty pork.)
Of course it’s individual what one considers much and yes, there are some less dense carnivore items too, I regularly eat boiled eggs with much more whites than yolks. But if one eats fatty meat, butter, cream, cheese… Oh boy, those are dense!!!
I have read from smallish women that they easily eat 3-4 pounds of meat (IDK the fattiness but the mere amount is huge). I can’t do that but I can eat 2 and my other items occasionally (I never tried it long term as I aim to minimize my fat and protein intake since ages. maybe I could do it, maybe not).
Hmmm… Maybe the protein was much? One can eat 4000 kcal with any amount of protein so that can be helped… I stop at 250g protein myself (or earlier). My 4200 kcal day had only that, the rest was fat and little carbs. I didn’t even try (I always plan to eat little), I just was hungry and liked my food and ate 2 meals on that day. Felt perfectly satiated, not too full. But it was one day, yes.
EDIT: Or we can look at it like this: He probably already needed some decent amount of energy, like 3000 kcal (but easily significantly more if he is tall, muscular and active) so he only needed to add a little bit of fat to reach 4000 kcal. Protein was already there and fat is dense. I could add 100-200 g extra very easily without extra satiation, I can imagine not everyone is like that but at least the extra food amount is very, very little. But I would need 2000 kcal extra while, as I wrote, he probably don’t need nearly that much.
I don’t think anyone knows but it seems to be a combination of genetics and what we eat and our current situation. I don’t think it is PUFAs and I don’t think initially (until we start to diet) it is even on a consicous level. I remember seeing a story about identical twins that were accidentally separated and then reunited when they were in college. The family had three other kids and a different boy was accidentally placed with the family instead of the missing twin. The missing twin was adopted. The missing twin, the twin, and the rest of the family appeared to be naturally thin. The replacement boy was heavy (he also said he always felt out of place for many reasons, turns out he was right). They grew up eating the same foods. Here is the story. I saw it on 2020 years ago https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/repaired/
As I mentioned some people during pregnancy eat a lot, others eat less and it is not intentional. I worked with someone who was 100 lbs soaking wet but she said she gained 80lbs with each of her two kids. She said she was starving all the time. Then in the delivery room the desire to eat went away. I had the opposite as did my heavy friend.
I’ve seen papers that discuss that the conditions in the womb have a big effect on the epigenetics of the child when it is born, particularly if the mother had gestational diabetes, smoked, was stressed, etc. Maybe it’s possible that children who tend to be heavier from a young age are that way because of the conditions in the womb, something was turned on epigenetically?
Yeah, my appetite increased the second the egg was fertilized. I wouldn’t know I was pregnant and couldn’t understand why I was suddenly eating like a truck driver.
Yeah, my daughter was falling for the “Intuitive Eating”.
While we agreed that I am not her Coach/Dietitian…
We had the conversation that said…
It’s mighty one-sided to have the SAME people who test their foods for ADDICTIVENESS use the words “Intuitive Eating”…
Because if you are eating their foods, your intuition has likely been hijacked.
And pay close attention… Because if you claim to be intuitively eating an All Meat diet… SOMETHING tells me they will push back against you…
I find it strange.
So, she agreed that it did seem to be one sided, and by not discouraging addictive foods and ingredients… Intuition is questionable as a decision process…
I think there is such a thing as intuitive eating. On this side of the sheets we call it “listening to your body”. The big distinction is that you can’t already be in a metabolically deranged state and surrounded by junk, because if so, you will be distracted by all sorts of unhealthy foods whispering in your ear, that you will believe is your body talking to you.
Well, there is also listening to your body, and listening to your body. I used to practice “intuitive drinking.” I listened to my body and drank vast quantities of alcohol, until I listened to my body and stopped.
Yeah. Vegan eating, which excludes all meat, an entire food group, is healthy, but carnivore eating, which excludes all plant foods, is ipso facto “excluding an entire food group” and by definition is unhealthy. Go figure!
I never understood what intuitive eating exactly means… But I doubt people’s instincts or desires are reliable after most of our childhood… At least I “intuitively” (or not) ate a very nutritious diet. It wasn’t right for me, though but I didn’t suffer from malnutrition, at least I didn’t notice.
I see no problem with intuitively eating just meat They say one should do it intuitively so they shouldn’t complain if one doesn’t factor their interests, beliefs and money or whatever into it
Excluding meat is no problem (except when one needs a quite low carb diet for some reason. but I am sure there are tons of healthy vegetarians) but vegans exclude WAY more. That may or may not be a problem but it seems it is for very many people, no matter how much effort and time and money they put into it. Some people REALLY tried to be a vegan, didn’t do it in a stupid ignorant way either and failed. It seems it’s just not good for everyone. Carnivore either but it does work for more extrapolating from what I have heard this far. And it makes perfect sense when one thinks about how the human body works (not like I know so much about it but some). Or our dietary history. Humans are omnivores and all normal land omnivores gulp down eggs when they find it… At least as far as I know.
I think you cannot do intuitive eating in a supermarket. While I do keep bread, rice and pasta in the house for family, I don’t keep cookies etc unless we have guests. Although one person in the house will occasionally buy himself the random bag of cookies. Also, they will also occasionally order Pizza (the only food I really cannot resist). All of a sudden I will pass the cookies or smell Pizza on the counter and my body will “intuitively” want them, even if I was not hungry 5 minutes earlier. Too often Intuitive Eating is really a See Food Diet
It’s not easy and great since day #1 for everyone but it is for some but no one will figure it out if it’s worth it if they deny every possibility to just TRY…
and at some point I really can’t eat or drink anymore for maybe 15 minutes).
