And arrangement matters because I do not get the same satisfaction from chicken breast, flour, mozzarella, and tomatoes eaten individually than when made into a pizza.
I have put myself on extremely restrictive diets where I was consuming 1,000 -> 1300 calories per day. After a few weeks of initial weight loss, the rate of loss completely plateaued and maintained for long enough that if what we have been told about calories were true, my lived experiences would contradict the laws of physics.
The human body is insanely complicated, and from what I've read in research, hormones seem to be the single biggest contributor to body composition and weight management. And for what it's worth, my thyroid is perfectly healthy. I'm not talking about people who have medical conditions impacting their hormones.
Rather, consider that our bodies are basically chemical factories and when we ingest something, our digestive process is a process of chemical reactions. The particular chemicals and nutrients that we are deriving from foods can trigger or suppress certain hormones. When it comes to energy allocation, insulin is the most significant. When your blood sugar spikes, insulin is released in order to direct your cells to absorb that blood sugar. When that becomes saturated, your fat cells are going to begin absorbing. One of the reasons that a lot of people find success on extremely low-carbohydrate diets is that carbs tend to spike insulin.
But there are other hormones that can impact weight as well, such as cortisol (stress hormone), ghrelin (hunger response hormone) etc.
I'm convinced that the reason my ultra-restrictive diets saw plateaus despite sticking with them has to do with what I was eating and less to do with how much I was eating.
I'm not an advocate for any particular diet. I have friends who have switched their lifestyle to a mostly ketogenic diet to great results. I've known other people who eat vegan and do well. I've done those same diets and not seen the same results. What ended up working for me (and only me) was largely eliminating plant-based foods. Given the fact that when I step outside, I am allergic to pretty much every plant that lives ... I wonder if there's some kind of mild dietary allergic reaction at play in my body when I eat certain plants. When I eat pretty much just meat, the weight starts to melt off, I gain muscle mass (makes sense - I'm consuming more protein) and I feel better. My wife can't eat the same diet, though. Gives her heartburn. For her, she seems to look and feel better on a more "Mediterranean diet."
I'm not a fan of fad diets, I'm not an advocate of them. I think it's obviously about long term lifestyle choices. I just think that calories has become a sort of religious belief. I don't think we have ANY data that suggests "You can live on an all cheesecake diet and, as long as you restrict your calories, your body composition will be healthy baseline." And we would need that to be true in order for the calories in vs calories out hypothesis to hold. But research actually suggests the opposite: not all calories are created equal. I even recall a study that was shared on Hacker News a while back where they served two study groups the same daily calorie intake but they were different food types and they were able to observe differences in body fat accumulation in the different groups. I wish I could remember what to search for to dig that up.
Unless you're the size of a small child or were in an extreme state of inactivity and low metabolism you were almost certainly were utilizing more than 1k calories per day. Where was this extra energy coming from if not from your body's fat reserves? This does indeed seem to violate the laws of physics.
We extract out oxygen from the air constantly. I tried to guestimate it once and came up with the rough number that it's possible as much as half of our total energy comes from the air.
So it's not always a violation of the laws of physics, but rather an equation where we're only counting half the variables.
That has been tested for thousands of years, and it's technically called "starving to death".
If you're suggesting the opposite - oxygen restriction - that is called "suffocating to death", and again, probably isn't an optimal weight loss plan.
If I had a nickel everytime I heard "You have to be doing something wrong".
However science is not clear cut, our bodies and genetics are less so. My personal experience also suggest trying to limit calories is not working for me either. It’s absolutely more complex than that. And I managed to lose 45 kgs to 72 once , and recently around 20 to 105. As this implies yes it was not long term at all. ( 3-4 years of slim body ).
Psychology, Hormones, Stress, Sedantal everyday life, eating habit changes has different effects and if the stars don’t align the correct way I can’t lose weight, or keep doing it. Particularly trying to limit calories with conventional ways requires steel nerves which also affects everyday life inversely.
In my experience this satiety looks like has some - small or big- effect.
There are different effects like NEAT, p-ratios or Adaptive Thermogenesis. As google gemini told me recently, (check for facts as I didn’t do much) there are few theories working towards understanding these body responses to similar diets like set point theory, or thrifty gene theory.
So instead of rejecting these claims perhaps we need to look with more accepting eyes to understand these kinds of calori restriction responses for different gene compositions.
I recently bumped up to 2200 and the weight has shed off. This was on chatgpts suggestion.
I have no explanation. I feel much warmer on 2200 and my workouts are easier for sure.
But yeah, I started at 1800 / day thinking I'd do it for a few months and lose 15-20 lbs and then go to maintenance, but that did not work.
Now you can claim I wasn't measuring or whatever... Maybe that's true. However, I've followed my same methodology in increasing my calories, which means, if I was over counting then , then I am over counting now too.
But the conclusion is the same .. I ate more and lost weight. That is simply an objective reality
I almost never eat out of hunger. I eat because it's noon, early evening, or I'm bored, depressed, socializing, celebrating, watching TV, or it's some other time I traditionally graze.
There are no studies that have shown that calories in < calories out does not work.
I was one of those people, until I got serious and weighed my food, didn't eat unless at a meal, and weight SLOUGHED off and my parents thought I had gotten cancer or a disease since how fast I lost weight.
That's all it takes to make a difference between losing or gaining. I added a mile or two walk every day to burn just a little more calories just in case. Ended up dropping 50 lbs in about a year without any suffering (and kept all but 10 of it off).
Weighing food, and being selective about what I eat, on top, really helps.
Also processed foods love removing fiber that takes a long time to digest.
This feels more like someone trying to sell you something than help you find satiating foods.
There really is only one study in the field of satiety: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15701207_A_Satiety_...
Which to the articles credit, it links in reference '3', but then fails to use the data within.
The journal article cites potatoes as having a Satiety Index % of 323+-51. The next highest is Ling Fish with 225+-30, yet TFA omits mentioning potatoes and chooses rather to harp on about protein protein protein which is very faddy diet advice across all major social media platforms at the moment.
My point was more to say the 'protein all the things' angle of TFA has more to do with the popularity of this diet advice right now than anything informed by satiety research.
My problem was that I was still eating large bowls of what I thought was a healthy cereal, but even if the calories looked good on paper, the insulin spike was killing weight loss.
People don't get fat eating brown rice. They get fat eating cereal with hidden sweets. 'healthy' oatmeal that's laden with sugar. Fried potatoes, etc.
It's not normal, it's Nixon!
I dice up two giant baked potatoes for lunch daily and mix with a lean protein and some toppings like sliced jalapenos and sometimes Greek yogurt.
At 3 PM, I drink a Premier protein shake but don't eat again until 7AM the next day, yet I am still full by bedtime. Breakfast is a larger protein shake with fruit or almond butter + almond milk.
Easiest diet ever, and I feel great and hardly crave bread or sugar now.
Unless you mean the packaged protein shakes, in which case I agree, and also incidentally they are kind of gross.
So I came up with the idea of eating all I want, but just make it mostly food that is filling but reasonably low in calories. So this is what I did, and I lost 50 lb, and have kept it off ever since. I call it the low will-power diet. I don't know that it would would work for everyone, but I bet it would work with a lot of people who find standard calorie-counting diets don't. Also, it seems to me the Mediterranean diet is a version of this.
lopis•3mo ago
lukas099•3mo ago
Fire-Dragon-DoL•3mo ago
Discovered this recently and I like egg white way more than chicken breast.
My lunch salad is 150g of chicken thigh, 200g of egg white, 1 whole egg, 2 tomatoes, 1 romaine heart and 50g of cottage cheese (unfortunately I cannot eat greek yogurt). For topping I add some low calories pickled cucumber and 0 calories mustard.
Very filling even at 400 calories (very low). With 2 meals like that I get close to my protein goal per day.