Do you still think it's all about calories in vs calories out and fat people are not disciplined enough ?

[deebate]

I've been doing a lot of online research over the years around diet/ exercise and what's the answer. How can I keep fit and be healthy.

I've tried various things and I am generally a believer in calories in vs calories out. Which seems to be the favoured method on here.

If anyone complains they're struggling with losing weight, it must be because they're not counting everything etc.

In any case, I've now stumbled across a number of podcasts of different doctors and nutritionists in the field talking about gut microbes and sugar spikes etc and how actually it's really not just about calories at all.

What's the consensus on here about all this ?

Calorie deficit diets have been shown to add weight in the long run.

Sorry, what?

Gut problem also because you nit eating right. You want to lose weight number one it’s discipline. Dont ear UPF food. Its a lot out there. Just dont eat it. For me its still discipline, calories in vs out.

Dietitians where I work tell me that restricting calories down leads to weight loss in the short term but that then when you start to eat normally (to your calorie requirements to maintain weight) you put more weight on.

You have also messed with your homeostatic mechanisms and overridden your body’s natural hunger and satiety mechanisms. Your body wants to maintain a healthy weight but then because we are surrounded by abundance, unhealthy foods that are marketed at us relentlessly, our natural eating urges get messed with. So then you are even more susceptible to the cues around you like the smell of bread they artificially pump out of subway.

Dietitians and clinicians in the weight management team where I work talk about;

1 moving more in fun sustainable ways
2 swapping out foods for more nutritional ones - white to wholemeal bread for example.
3 adding in nutrition and cutting down on prepackaged snacks.
4 mindful eating
5 developing a healthy relationship to food and body

I am paraphrasing the advice I hear them give so may have missed a key thing or misremembered something.

This is rather than counting calories and heavily restricting. This makes it more sustainable over the long term.

There are good reasons why people often (some studies say up to 80%) don’t maintain the changes with calorie deficit diets. And often gain more than before.

So, of course if you keep restricting calories you will lose and keep weight off, but, if your body feels like it’s starving it’s going to send you lots of urges to eat more. People who are deprived of food (through choice or circumstance) report more obsessive thoughts about food and it’s hard to concentrate on anything else. Add into that that you are bombarded with very clever marketing and it becomes so hard to resist.

So yes, CICO is the basic idea and the basic biology, but there are multiple biological, psychological and social factors that all interplay meaning that to boil it down to just that is too reductionist. Even the experts working in the field don’t fully understand it. Bit here is the current science in diagram form;

But it isn’t just calories in and out. The type of food you eat to get those calories has an impact too on whether you lose weight. As I’ve said before;

Two people who have the exact same body, do the exact same exercise, eat the wax act same number of calories, can have different experiences of weight loss depending on which foods they eat to get those calories. The type of carbs influences how insulin is released to turn the food to glucose. This influences how that food is proceeded and whether it turns to fat.

This is just one factor in many which mean that whilst CICO is basic fact, it’s way too reductionist to say that it’s just that.

There's something else as well - when you crash diet, you lose muscle as well as fat. We lose muscle as we age anyway, unless we really work to counteract it with strength training. I'm trying to build muscle right now and its quite hard, especially for women. Anyway, if an overweight person crash diets, they can quite easily end up at a lower weight but worse body fat percentage than when they started, particularly as they are unlikely to be doing any meaningful exercise whilst consuming these 800 cal a day shake diets. Muscle burns more calories than fat, even at rest. So now their metabolism is lower, and as soon as they stop the diet (and in the real world, no-one is going to stay on an 800 cal shake diet forever)....they gain rapidly. This is why I think those diets should only be reserved for the most extreme of circumstances and people like Michael Moseley are irresponsible. But people love a quick fix.

Someone made this point upthread, but since I've being putting in the work to fix my back, I've noticed how many people are walking around with next to no muscle and horrible posture.

All weight loss comes from calorie deficit, whether you count those calories or not.

Dietitians and clinicians in the weight management team where I work talk about;

1 moving more in fun sustainable ways
2 swapping out foods for more nutritional ones - white to wholemeal bread for example.
3 adding in nutrition and cutting down on prepackaged snacks.
4 mindful eating
5 developing a healthy relationship to food and body

All of the above will naturally create a calorie deficit, it may not be calorie counting as such but it's still all about calories in vs calories out.
Nobody is recommending a highly restrictive diet, in fact as someone who has to eat a highly restrictive diet I would definitely not recommend it. I do obsess over gluten filled foods because I can't eat them.

My own recommendation is a very Conservative weight loss goal of 0.5-1lb/week which is a deficit of 250-500calories. I recommend not banning any foods, instead learn portion control. I also recommend very slowly increasing activity. That may mean increasing your average daily step count by 1000 each week.

I'm speaking as someone who has successfully lost 10stone, kept it off for 6years and has just completed a nutrition for weightloss and sports nutrition qualification

@firef1y this sounds ideal

I find all these theories about weight loss being due to a mysterious mechanism and not simply CICO have led to me gaining weight.

we’d all love to discover a diet where we can eat what we want and lose weight. It doesn’t exist.

high protein- I can eat enough cheese to gain weight, even if I don’t eat any carbs. No mysterious insulin whatever, I simply eat too many calories in cheese. Eating only cheese does not mean I lose weight.

fasting- I can eat enough in my 8 hour “window”’to gain weight. Again no magic fasting/insulin/fat storage mechanism, i eat too many calories. Fasting does not mean I lose weight.

mentally I convince myself, even though I know the science and know it’s cICO. I want to believe. So I think ooh if I have no carbs/fast for 16 hours I can take all other restrictions off. I give myself permission to eat as much as I can because I’m not eating carbs, or that I’ve not eaten since 6pm last night.

after years of frustration ending up tipping into the obese category I am now a healthy weight by eating 3 meals a day. No fannying around with magic thinking to change my metabolism, just eating in a calorie deficit. If i stopped losing I reduced my calorie allowance.

Yes. But CICO isn’t the whole picture and it’s not as simple as people just need more willpower. That’s too reductionist.

cico is the full picture.

just that everyone/everybody is different and it is very hard to determine the balance.

and yes, changing habits sustainably is very difficult and near impossible to do with willpower alone and without sensible outside support.

Look at Ben Carpenter on Instagram: Is being fat a choice?

He addresses the issues really well.

I'm in two minds about this.

Calories in calories out works - if you can do it. It can be very difficult to stick to, especially if you still eat sugar in any form. I have lost weight that way in the past, as I worked out that at the size and activity level I was, I could lose weight on 1800 calories, which is not that restrictive. But the most recent time I tried it, I just felt deprived and unhappy all the time and couldn't keep it up for long.

I find it easier to follow the Whole30, but obviously you can't do that all the time (or at least the person who devised it doesn't recommend it, and it does make life very difficult if you like to eat out etc). The difference is that if you completely eliminate sugar and grains, after a few days you don't miss them, whereas if you try to restrict them a bit, you really do. Unfortunately it's very easy to bounce straight back into eating too much of the wrong things afterwards.

So yes, CICO is probably the best if you have the sort of temperament that can discipline yourself that much. I have often heard it said that if a diet relies mainly on willpower, it is not sustainable.

Since becoming middle aged I have found that eating more will definitely add weight, but eating less doesn't make much difference UNLESS I also drink vast amounts of water and get enough sleep. It is like I can only access the stored reserves at all whilst unconscious and very well hydrated.

Interesting @BestZebbie

Hunger is the enemy that sabotages. It’s why Wegovy etc work.

Smoking dulls hunger, one reason for lack of obesity in past (?) as generally does 3 regular small meals a day to stabilise blood sugar.

So yes, CICO is probably the best if you have the sort of temperament that can discipline yourself that much. I have often heard it said that if a diet relies mainly on willpower, it is not sustainable

CICO is “the best”, it’s the only way to lose weight.

what are you proposing that isn’t CICO?

all diets, whatever their claims, work by reducing CI. Low fat works by eliminating fat, so you eat less calories. High protein works by eliminating carbs, so you eat less calories. Fasting works by reducing the time you spend eating, so you eat less calories.

there’s no magic fix. All the stuff about changing metabolism, insulin, glucose etc, none of it means you can eat more calories than you burn.

people are all different, vastly. Their bodies are different, metabolisms are different. Key is finding a weight loss diet that you can stick to and you don’t find too restrictive. There is no quick fix, and all the talk of insulin and glucose is irrelevant if you aren’t in a calorie deficit. You can’t trick your body into not storing excess food as fat.

When I I lost weight by counting calories I have never been so full. I struggled to eat the days allowance, as I ate loads of protein, so I could keep muscle, and that made such a difference. Measuring and weighing everything but being able to eat any food, anytime. It’s great

I actually love Ben Carpenter and he will tell you that it is as simple as calories in vs calories out. But just because its simple it doesn't mean its easy.
He acknowledges that there are various factors that can make it harder for some people to create that deficit, but it is still the deficit that counts. He also acknowledges that he has never been vastly overweight, so he doesn't have direct experience of that starting point.
Guess what, I have. I was 290lb, with a binge eating disorder, I had a GP who was like some of you posters, who said my only chance of losing weight was surgery.

I found my own little stubborn streak and proved him wrong, I made lots of little changes that added up to big changes. I taught myself a whole new way of life, luckily when you weighed as much as I did the weight drops off pretty quickly to start with even with eating only a little less and burning calories is a lot easier when you are so heavy, so you get some good motivation at the beginning.

I lost 10stone, by reducing the amount I ate and increasing the amount I moved. Did I fuck up occasionally? Yep. I have a BED, I had binge periods throughout, still have them now, I try to not have my trigger foods in the house, but it happens.

6years on I still have to make sure I have a good balance between in and out and am finding the in has had to reduce some as the menopause has hit. The out has stayed around the same, but I can't realistically increase it as I'm already well above the recommended activity level (hit that by lunchtime on a monday)

People are always shocked when I tell them that this was how I lost 10stone. I think they expect some kind of magic diet, pill or surgery.

I admit I am currently low carb, but that's because I've recently developed a gluten intolerance and most gluten free versions of bread and pasta are simply gross. But I lost the weight eating loads of carbs along with a good amount of protein. I had a lot of calories to play with, I'd start the day with 2000 and that would increase as I moved to anything up to 3000 (my record was over 4500, but that was running a marathon)

That is brilliant @firef1y , very impressive!

I should really get back on it 🙈

I think people try to convince themselves it's not CICO to avoid the reality of the fact that it's not easy to lose weight.

It doesn't matter whether you have Hashimoto's disease (as I do) or PCOS, or are menopausal, had a hysterectomy, or anything else.

Any of those may affect how much you eat or exercise but they don't get away from the fact that if you consume more than you use you get get fatter and if you consume less you lose weight.

It's like a bank balance: if you put in more money than you spend your balance will increase - it doesn't matter where the money came from that you put in, or what you spent the money on when you took it out. Your balance doesn't increase more because the £100 you put in was from 8 hours of hard physical labour or a lottery scratch card.

Well, I've done a couple of weeks on Zoe now and I've actually lost weight, without tracking my calories as much as I usually need to. I know roughly how much I've been eating.

So usually, I ate a lot of chicken and lean meat, plus salads and broccoli. Lots of eggs and vegetables. Low carb kind of thing. I would measure my oils and vinegars and vegetables.

I still really struggled a lot to lose any weight this way. Very very slow losses. I also exercise 3-4 times a week and I'm generally active on top of that.

In any case, I've now been eating a lot of legumes / beans. Lots of avocados. Hummus, tahini. Lots of vegetables. Lots of olive oil ( no measuring it at all, just lathering it on vegetables ). I've loosely weighed certain things, but not olive oil. I've probably been eating between 1300 and 1800 calories a day ( without measuring olive oil ) so with olive oil, that would increase A LOT.

I was being SO strict before, measuring and weighing everything that went in, super active - the scales did not move. Why are the scales suddenly moving ?

I wasn't measuring wrong before. I've done all this calorie counting before and it did work for me. But the last few years, it's just not been working anymore. It's been so defeating, putting all this effort in and not getting results.

I'm not saying CICO doesn't work but I am surprised I'm losing weight eating chickpeas and LOTS of nuts. The other day I probably ate around 800 calories of nuts ! It's quickly done. I always avoided nuts before a bit. I also didn't eat legumes much, because I considered them to be high carb.

Anyway, just my two cents. I know lots will say, my calories must have dropped and that's the answer.

I read something somewhere ages ago about nuts helping you lose weight, despite the high fat. The same is true of olive oil. There was a section on a health programme on TV some years ago where they got people to literally drink a glass of olive oil each day on top of what they usually ate, to see if it change their blood lipids or something (I forget the exact reasons). Anyway, the most interesting result that not only did none of the group lose weight, but some actually lost it.

I put on about 4lb following the Zoe method. I used to roughly estimate calories but started doing Zoe and got excited having more nuts, hummus, avocado etc. when I asked the team for advice they told me to keep an eye on the calorie content

I know lots will say, the fact is my calories must have dropped and that's the answer.