[Rainymood]

>It's like trying to control your weight by calories - calories are the roughest, least precise way to decide what you need to eat

>Please people, do your research

You're being contradictory here. Your body obeys the laws of physics.

Losing weight is LITERALLY calories in < calories out.

Being healthy and losing weight are two different things that often overlap.

>(are you literally burning your food in fire when you digest it?)

What a silly remark ... of course not.

"Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material in the exothermic chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction products.[1] Slower oxidative processes like rusting or digestion are not included by this definition." (Wikipedia)

>It's like measuring programming capabilities by the number of lines written, yet we still somehow stick with it when planning our diets.

Comparing apples with oranges.

[JoeAltmaier]

There's this strange opinion circulating that the calories don't matter. It stems from an observation that some calories 'stick' more readily than others. From that, they leap to the conclusion that calories are meaningless.

I'm with you - physics rules. No matter what calories you consume, fewer is better for weight control. But don't try to argue with these folks. They can't acknowledge even the obvious boundary cases: eating nothing inevitably leads to losing weight.

[Nrsolis]

There is some anecdotal evidence that varying macronutrient levels affect hormone levels in significant ways.

Screwing with hormone levels is a great way to affect the metabolism rate and lipid storage capability of the human body. That's what bodybuilders have been doing for decades. Steroid use is the ultimate manifestation of that school of thought.

The truth is that we know very very little about nutrition because doing controlled double-blind studies on human subjects is very very difficult. Bodybuilders are probably the best population to study because of the self-experimentation angle.

[JoeAltmaier]

We know this about nutrition: activity burns calories at extremely predictable rates. Food has calories at extremely predictable densities. Physics works.

And see? Even these fundamental facts about physics get disputed/denied by the nutrition nuts.

[whatusername]

I'll bite.

We measure calories in food by burning it in a lab and calculating the exact energy given off. Very precise. What we don't measure is how many pieces of that cob of corn I ate for dinner will pass through to my stool.

And I'll accept the comment that activities burn calories at predictable rates (they don't across populations -- look at exercise adaptation) but they can per individual. But treating the consumption of calories and the expenditure of calories as independent variables seems foolish. For an absurd comparison -- do you think my Caloric consumption over the next 24 hours would be identical if I consumed 10 calories of chocolate or 10 calories of amphetamines?

Physics works. A calorie is a calorie. But pretending that the human body treats all calories the same as a calorometer seems foolish.

[JoeAltmaier]

All correct, agreed. What it means is, there is some level of exercise that will consume enough calories to exhaust ready supply. Then weight loss occurs.

The silliness begins when folks start to bargain. How little exercise can I get away with? How can I eat a lot and not gain weight? Its this lazy concern that occupies everybodys thoughts and behaviors. They write whole books about it.

When in fact, if they'd get off their lazy butts and exercise, really exercise, they could forget about all those details. Physics could work for them.

And by exercise I mean ride that bike 20 miles over the lunch hour. With some stiff hills involved. Really exert yourself. But few want to do that. They want to ride a recumbent 5 miles on the flat and then eat 3 hamburgers. And complain that exercise clearly doesn't work because they're not losing weight.

Its astonishing how little exercise most folks have ever done in their lives. I'd go this far: most folks have never exercised. They've warmed up, and then stopped when they hit the point their muscles feel it. I know this - I've taken folks hill-riding and had them stop. "Something's wrong. I feel funny. My heart rate is up and my muscles are complaining". They'd never gotten aerobic in their entire lives, and were afraid of the feeling.

[pharke]

From personal experience, and this was some years ago, I've found that on a high carb, high fat diet e.g. breakfast: beans, bacon, eggs, toast. lunch: sandwich with deli meat, cheese, mayo. supper: bread, veg, and meat, plus a few cups of coffee and a beer thrown in caused pretty rapid weight gain (30lbs.) with what I would call a normal amount of activity, walking a reasonable distance to and from work, intentional exercise 2 - 3 times per week, some activity on the weekends but the rest of the time spent at a desk or on a couch.

After taking a summer job doing manual labour that involved constant, intense activity (lots of shovelling, sweeping, lifting, walking, pushing and pulling) from 8 AM to 1 PM every day I saw a complete reversal in weight while maintaining the same diet.

So from my own experience, it is absolutely possible to eat a fairly heavy diet and lose weight. It all depends on balancing your intake with the amount of energy you consume during the day. The only problem is that it takes a lot of heavy physical work to use those calories and the exercise regimen that most people assume comes no where near to what it takes to use up the amount they take in.

As far as quitting before you actually really start exercising, there was a good quote by Muhammad Ali circulating the other day [1] "I don't count my sit-ups. I only start counting when it starts hurting. That is when I start counting, because then it really counts. That's what makes you a champion."

[1] https://i.imgur.com/ylOAYnR.jpg

[geon]

Exercise is great and all, but diet is faaaaaar more important for weight loss.

[crusso]

While your are correct in a fundamental physics way, you might be ignoring the details of human chemistry and its resulting psychology impact. There's are reasons for the relatively recent obesity epidemic. Those reasons are rooted in the misguided dietary recommendations to reduce fat in favor of increasing carbs.

https://www.thebairs.net/2015/05/recommended-reading-why-we-...

[JoeAltmaier]

These reasons are rooted in everybody sitting on their butt 23 hours a day, and not really exercising at all even when 'working out'.

[crusso]

You say that as though exercising like a competitive athlete is necessary for good health or weight maintenance. It isn't. It's much simpler to understand the insulin cycle and work with it rather than against it.

[greggyb]

I'll hop in, though I'm likely to regret this. Note that I am not only replying to the parent comment here, but also addressing the general conversation descending.

The primary disconnect I see in this sort of disagreement about the importance of calories is what we count as "calories in" and what we count as "calories out". The calories listed on nutrition labels are determined by burning a sample of food in a bomb calorimeter. Since our body does not reach the efficiency of a bomb calorimeter, calories consumed through oral or intravenous ingestion will overstate the number of calories that are used by the human body calories in < calories out. As a stupid example, there is clearly a large amount of energy in wood. A human may ingest wood and "touch" none of the calories contained therein. Should a daily branch of intake count as part of our calories in? Where do we draw the line then? Should we exclude calories from fiber?

The nutrition label gives us an upper limit of what we can consider calories in, but does not, on its own, give us an actual value for this measure.

The other side of the disconnect is how we measure calories out. Some people consider only energy expenditure, or how many calories ingested are turned into energy for useful work in the body. Some may also consider those calories utilized for structural purposes. Protein does not necessarily get utilized for energy; in fact it is the least desirable energy source of the three macronutrients. Some may also consider the caloric value of excrement for measurement of calories out.

So calories in can be calories ingested, or calories "processed" (here loosely defined as anything that doesn't pass straight through to stool or urine). Calories out can be calories utilized for useful work, or anything that exits the body, as energy/heat or excrement.

Here alone we have enough for significant confusion among reasonable people depending on which definition they are using.

I hope this helps those involved in the conversation to clarify what they mean and consider that their conversation partner may be less of a moron than they assume.

Add to this that the only piece of this that we can accurately measure across populations is gross calories ingested, and there is a lot of room for reasonable people to disagree on a "healthy intake".

Please note: I am trying to be neutral in this comment, and to only help shed some light on where we find confusion in words. I am explicitly not making an argument for or against any specific interpretation of these words. If you choose to take issue with any inferred stake I hold, have fun. I am perfectly happy to consider discussion on the potential for confusion in the words we use when discussing the issue of caloric intake, though.

[namlem]

You're assuming it's easy to measure "calories out."