The quality of food has little impact on weight loss. It’s calories in calories out. Period.
Comment on hows keto working out for you
Fiivemacs@lemmy.ca 13 hours agohas nothing to do with eating a deficit in calories. you can workout all day everyday, but if you eat garbage mcdonalds and packaged food, you are not going to lose weight ‘micro working out’ or even full day workouts.
the_q@lemmy.zip 13 hours ago
FinnFooted@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Eh. Calories are… Tricky. What is a calorie? A unit of food which, when burned, will heat a gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. But your body isnt just a furnace, it’s complex. And everyone’s is physiologically different - we aren’t all running at the same efficiency (base metabolism). And not all calories are available. For example, fiber is not digestable and can’t be absorbed by the digestuv system and it also associates with sugars which also prevents them from being absorbed. So, eating whole fruits will result in absorbing less sugar than drinking juice which has the same total amount of sugar.
For sure it can conceptually be boiled down to calories effectively absorbed and calories burned. But digging into what that actually means can actually be quite tricky.
AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net 1 hour ago
You’re making it sound trickier than it is. Nutrition data on all foods will already discount fiber from the calorie counts.
But in a sense you’re also not wrong, that while calories are king when it comes to weight loss/gain, there are complications for that. For example if you give two different people the exact same food in the exact same amount of calories, they will gain or lose weight at different rates - highlighting the role of genetics. Another genetic factor related to calories only indirectly is how some people have much higher impulses to eat than others, making calories only a part of the story for their challenges with weight loss. I’ve also seen a headline for a study claiming that an amount of dairy caused more weight gain than the same amount of calories of peanut butter, though you may want to take that one with a grain of salt unless you actually see the study.
Personally I’m not a fan of measuring calories. Instead I use base knowledge to have ways to intuit calories more naturally. For example, I know that carbs and protein are 4 calories per gram, and fat is 9 calories per gram, making fat almost always the quickest way to make foods significantly more calorie dense. Other things can be very calorie dense too though, like sugary or other caloric beverages. Replacing those with water, coffee, or teas can be enough on its own for some people to start losing weight.
Some foods are more dense than others. Being that leafy greens and many other vegetables are naturally some of the least caloric foods you can eat, loading all of your meals full of them is an elegant way to reduce calorie consumption without needing to starve yourself. It also has the double benefit that high fiber foods are more satiating - they calm food cravings.
Point is, calorie management doesn’t have to be a headache, and it doesn’t mean a person has to starve themself.
FinnFooted@lemmy.world 29 minutes ago
I wasn’t talking about fiber, but the sugars bound to fiber. Its very hard to accurately labele just the bioavailable calories, even if you account for things like fiber.
On the note of genetics, it’s not just about metabolism. People have different abilities to even absorb the same calories. People have food intolerances, different rates at which they move food through the digestive tract, and different intestinal permeability.
This isn’t meant as an excuse to eat junk and not pay attention to your food. But, I actually find more help in paying attention to food quality and listening to how your body interacts with different food. E.g., eat less processed food, be aware that eating fat slows digestion, pay attention to your intolerances, stop eating when full, cut out snacking (again, especially processed foods). If you do this, its very likely you won’t even need to count.
LavaPlanet@sh.itjust.works 11 hours ago
Yeah, exactly, calories in vs calories out is just another myth that feeds the diet industry’s bottom line. It’s not accurate. Like bmi used to be the big thing, but that’s not an accurate measurement system at all.
AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net 1 hour ago
This is untrue. Calories in vs calories out continues to be, and will always be the center point of weight loss. It’s just complicated by other factors like genetics, finding each individual calorie needs, and following diet and lifestyle patterns that are effective and sustainable.
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 2 hours ago
Calories in calories out is literally just the laws of thermodynamics and conservation of energy. It’s a fact.
Where it gets tricky is that the actual equation has quite a lot of variables.
You could, for example, increase your passive energy requirements with this micro dose of exercise situation. Does it raise your body temp (or rather the demands to maintain it at homeostasis) for a longer period of time and thus increase calories demanded that way?
Or, like a lot of fitness studies, it’s fucking junk because it trusts self reported calorie intakes.
the_q@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
If you get 0 calories what happens?
ewigkaiwelo@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
I was trying to count calories for my soup, some ingredients had calories on the package, but vegies and meat didn’t, so I went to online calculators. None of them were capable of measuring ingredients in grams - I have kitchen scales so can easily weight raw ingredients and put them in the calorie calculator, but all of them measure food in servings instead of concrete number, like what is one serving of my soup? And are the calories for raw ingredient going to be the same after being cooked? The only way to measure calories is to dehydrate it, burn in a special chamber and count the ammount of excluded energy. You can find people onlain making claims like “I’ve eaten 2017 kcals today”, but like how did you measure that 17 kcals with such a precision? The measurements I got from online calculators gave me a 500 kcal range of error, as in a serving of my soup could be 400 kcals or 900 kcal and again those are just estimates made from combining known calories of raw ingredients. Calories are for scientists and experiments, without equipment you can’t actually calculate the calories, just like you can’t really measure how many calories did you burn during the workout, again the range of error is huge, it’s good to keep in mind the calories in calories out idea, but actually measuring them is not for the 99% of thr population
pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
You are not making sense. If I’m a football player and use 3000 calories a day working out, I will lose weight. When you’re counting calories, do you put the exercise factor in?
Yes, calories matter, but working out is usually part of it. This is because it burns calories at the time, but continues to speed up your metabolism.
Our bodies are meant to move, plus counting calories is a defeating process. I’m not saying eat crap, but try to eat healthier and move your ass.
maximumbird@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Tell this to the guy who ate nothing but McDonald’s for a month and lost 60 pounds (26kg)
Kevin Maginnis
undeffeined@lemmy.ml 13 hours ago
Well they can loose weight eating nothing but processed food, as long as its a caloric deficit
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Yarp, about a decade ago after a break up I went on a 2 month bender, nothing but alcohol and fast food. Drink maybe 10-12 hours a day on average. So more than 2000 calories a day in drinks for sure, and idk what in fast food. But I walked everywhere to not get myself into DUI situations. I lost 20 pounds in 2 months
malware@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
Lol, going through a similar situation right at this moment. Lost 7 kilos in a month eating barely anything and walking a lot to get my mind distracted from panicking about my bleak lonely future. Majority of calories I get are from vodka and whisky 🥃
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 10 hours ago
But, and hear me out, fried potatoes.
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Sorry to hear it stranger. If you ever need to rant or something feel free to dm me