Comment on How exactly does one eat 1500 calories a day?
grue@lemmy.world 5 weeks agoI low-key hate the “calories in vs calories out” mantra because I believe it tends to disregard an important source of “calories out:” the ones that don’t get absorbed in the intestines and that you poop out instead. It’s still somewhat early days for the science, but there’s increasing evidence to suggest that a lot of the difference between skinny people and fat people isn’t necessarily that their calorie intake or calorie burn is wildly different, but that fat people’s digestive tracts are better at absorbing all the calories.
howrar@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
“Calorie in” means what your body absorbs. If it absorbs more, then the number is higher, and vice versa.
TempermentalAnomaly@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
How do you measure that for weight loss?
nous@programming.dev 5 weeks ago
You cannot accurately measure just that. But measuring calories you eat is a good enough approximation to help you control how much you eat. You can estimate you calories out by your weight, if you are gaining weight you are eating (and adsorbing) more then you are using, if you are losing weight then you are eating less - and that is the most important part.
There is also water weight to account for, but realistically there is an upper and lower bound to that and over several weeks you can get a pretty good idea for what level of calories you ingest leads to weight gain or loss. And if that changes for any reason you can adjust the amount you eat in correspondence. We are just looking for averages over time and the overall balance here, no need to be super accurate with exactly what you adsorb and what you have accurately used during an exercise. I never even measure calories burnt as it does not give much value vs just weighting your self over time.