If I were to write a diet book (not that I’m at all qualified to do so), it would be one page long and that’s what it would say, and it wouldn’t sell. What you need for a successful diet book is a gimmick, a distraction to keep your mind away from the awful, impossible mantra of “Eat less, exercise more”, because that’s what people will pay for. “Oh, I can eat all the bacon I want as long as I avoid asparagus? That’s the diet for me!”
Yvette d’Entremont takes on the keto diet, which is the latest incarnation of a long line of wish-fulfillment diet strategies. The Atkins diet, the Paleo diet, and now the Keto diet are all rationalizations for consuming all the high calorie, fat-rich foods we crave with the magic trick of shunning one other kind of food. The scientific studies show they don’t work, or at least don’t work the way their proponents think they do. The simple formula is still the hard truth.
You could pick any of the countless diet books on the market, follow their plan to the last calorie, and lose weight. This is because — as study after study has shown — calories and dietary adherence matter more than anything for weight loss. You can gain or lose weight on any combination of foods. People have lost weight on twinkies, McDonalds, juice, plants, and obscene amounts of meat.
It’s important to remember weight loss alone doesn’t necessarily cause all health markers to improve, and a diet causing weight loss does not mean it’s appropriate and healthy for everyone. Some foods are better than others at making weight loss and maintenance easier for different people, so balancing a diet is a fairly personalized thing. If your doctor gives you the green light and keto works for you, do it. If low fat works for you, do it. If plant-based, paleo, Mediterranean, or one of the zillion other diets help you improve your health and your relationship with food? Do it. There’s no one right way to eat for everyone, just as there is no miracle diet plan for weight loss.
Also — here’s an article by a woman who got to experience a metabolism chamber and actually measure directly how food intake affected her caloric output. It’s got lots of solid, basic information on human physiology, and concludes much the same thing.
When it comes to diets, the researchers have also debunked the notion that bodies burn more body fat while on a high-fat and low-carb ketogenic diet, compared to a higher-carb diet, despite all the hype.
“We could have found out that if we cut carbs, we’d lose way more fat because energy expenditure would go up and fat oxidation would go up,” said Kevin Hall, an obesity researcher at NIH and an author on many of these studies. “But the body is really good at adapting to the fuels coming in.” Another related takeaway: There appears to be no silver bullet diet for fat loss, at least not yet.
That “not yet” is optimistic. I think we’re just going to have to face the fact that our cellular metabolism has been optimized by billions of years of evolution to be flexible and responsive to the environment…as if that isn’t a good thing.
I am on a sea food diet ,i see food and i eat it .
Yeah, being adaptable is a good thing, but sometimes the body is stupid. Morbid obesity is not adaptive, AFAICT, yet the body does that to itself.
It’s damned unfortunate to be sure, but not all the combinations of the human genome spells success. Gotta qualify that by adding that I know several morbidly obese persons and they seem to be enjoying life just as much as anyone else. And who the hell am I to define ‘genetic success’?
That’s exactly how I went from 324.5 to 160 — I started journaling my calories and rigorously weighed/calculated the calories of anything I ate that didn’t come in a package. Started moving more too.
Nothing beats physics and chemistry.
My diet book would be a bit longer:
“Diets do not work in the long term for 99.9% of the population. There is no permanent, safe way to make a fat person thin.”
Doesn’t matter how many calories you burn or stop eating. The human body is not a bunsen burner. It is not simply a question of “eat fewer calories than you burn.” Bodies adapt and fight back. The weight will come back. Pretty much any study that claims successful weight loss doesn’t extend more than 2 years in time for the study and the follow-up period if there even is one. Within 2-5 years virtually everyone who loses weight on a diet gains it all back, and more than half gain back more weight than they originally lost. Anyone wants to argue with me, you must go read the entire archive at Fat Nutritionist first. (http://www.fatnutritionist.com/)
I remember seeing that Mark Bittman the cookbook writer, wrote a diet book, and lost some respect for him. It was just an extension of his Food Matters book, but still.
I’ve lost over 50 pounds and kept it off for three years. I am not proud of it, because I didn’t lose the weight until I developed type 2 diabetes. My sister lost over a hundred pounds with surgery. We’ll probably gain it back.
“If I were to write a diet book (not that I’m at all qualified to do so)”
When has that stopped anyone??
I was a borderline type 2 diabetic at the start of last year. Banished all snack food from the house, cut way back on sugary drinks, and tried to keep my caloric intake around 1500-1800 calories per day. Lost 40 pounds over the course of the year, although that slowed and stopped after I switched to a more Mediterranean diet on the advice of my cardiologist. My A1C levels are now normal. Still maintaining the diet, which maintains my weight.
I wish I remembered the name, but I have seen a joke book of diet tips that was just “eat less” written on otherwise blank pages.
The first step in changing the public’s thinking: Make people understand that a diet is the total of what you eat, not a reduction of it. Eating only fruit is a diet. Eating only hamburgers is a diet. The content and calories don’t determine whether it is or isn’t a diet, and what most call a “diet” often amounts to starvation and deprivation.
The time needed for evolutionary change to happen varies from decades to millions of years, but major change in short periods is rare. We crave fat and sugar because we are essentially the gatherer-hunters we were 10,000 years ago before settlements and agriculture, when fat and sugar were rarities.
Most of us are eating a fat filled, processed food diet less than fifty years old. Only wishful thinkers and those in denial could believe we have adapted to eating doughnuts morning, noon and night.
I hate that equation. It treats the body as a calorimeter, which is clearly wrong. For one blatantly obvious example, 1 g of starch has the same caloric content as 1 g of cellulose. Carbs, fats, and proteins, all have important roles in diet, but energy is not extracted from them, used, or stored, all with the same efficiency. That’s even true within a class. Hell, ricin and botulinum toxin are both proteins. How do they figure into that simple equation. Blech oversimplification
Well, these two sentences sum the problems quite clearly:
I can literally eat whatever I like in whatever ammounts I feel like, and I keep my BMI bellow 20 without problems even though I have sedentary work. I know people who eat less, calories wise, do more physically demanding work than I do, and weigh more.
I do not bother with “healthy” diet in any sense of the word, so I might be having some health related problems due to my eating habits in the future. However overweight or obesity do not seem to be on the radar so far.
The methabolic variance both between and within individuals makes the advice “eat less, exercise more” about as usefull as an advice “make more money than you spend” to a poor person ind debt spiral. The problem does not lie in what, but in how.
The only diet fad I can imagine that would actually work would be something along the lines of Olestra. A chemical or substance that prevents the digestive track from absorbing a certain class of substances.
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blockquote>For one blatantly obvious example, 1 g of starch has the same caloric content as 1 g of cellulose.
21,510,540,000 kcal, to be precise.
E=MC^2. It’s simple math. Just wilpawor lol.
…what even was that?
As of today I just lost 40 lbs on that diet, but sure, it doesn’t work, go with that.
I’m a little unconvinced that the article’s author understands what keto dieting people do because there’s a lot of ideas and behaviors in it that I have never heard of before, but the conclusion is actually something I completely agree with:
It’s NOT as simple as calories in > calories out, even if we ignore the supposed metabolic changes, if for no other reason than the complicated psychology of the people trying to do it. One thing that’s been proven over and over – nobody loses weight until they really really want to. I don’t mean ‘agree they should’, I mean want to in your core, to the point where the most common problem with every diet – cheating – just doesn’t register as a thing.
@5: “Doesn’t matter how many calories you burn or stop eating.”
You can lead them to knowledge, but you can’t make them think.
That is exactly what it’s about. Wishful thinking on your part will not change the laws of physics.
Sorry.
People are overweight or obese because they’ve acquired bad dietary habits over many years (I read an article by a dietician recently talking about a study she’d recently did on behavioural management of obesity – the example she gave was that if a person eats a snack whenever he gets home from work, eating a snack at that time will become a habit regardless of hunger, and the snack will add to calories consumed).
Her hypothesis was that to lose weight the person has to get rid of the bad habits and replace them with new habits, good habits, which will be different from person to person.
Diets work because they’re radical destroyers of habits, including bad habits. Diets often fail because the new habits replacing the old habits are often bad too. Or they’re difficult to persist with.
Just World Fallacy on your part will not make any (not “the”) human metabolism a “Spherical Cow” undergraduate thermodynamics problem.
@peachesthewaitress
I’m not sure which Mark Bittman book you mean; I don’t recall any actual diet book.
@5: “Doesn’t matter how many calories you burn or stop eating.”
@18 “That is exactly what it’s about. Wishful thinking on your part will not change the laws of physics.”
Take some time to learn a little biochemistry and you’ll be amazed see how the laws of physics are fully obeyed and yet duly tortured by biology. A calorie is not a calorie is not a calorie as far as physiology is concerned. Wishful thinking on your part won’t make biochemistry look like a calorimeter.
“Eat food. Mostly plants.” — Michael Pollan
steveht@11–
Not if you are human. We cannot digest any part of cellulose and therefore there is zero caloric input from eating cellulose. Cows and other ruminants work with bacteria to break down cellulose into smaller, digestible sugar chains and therefore do absorb calories from it. This is why celery (mostly cellulose) is listed as 16 cal/100g, while it’s around 80 cal/100g for potatoes (high starch) despite the fact that there is more than double the sugar in celery (1.8g v 0.8 g/100g).
Argh. Confusing para structure above. Meant to put brackets around the sentence about ruminants.
@16, abbeycadabra
It’s not that it doesn’t work*, it’s that it doesn’t work the way people says it works.
*arguably, it can be said it doesn’t work in that nearly everyone who goes on a keto diet will fail as any diet that requires radical changes in what you eat is largely impossible to maintain over a lifetime. Though this isn’t universally true, as there are a few people who can maintain such a change, though they are the exception rather than the rule.
To steveht @11: No, this formula does not treat the body as a calorimeter. All you need is to consider all the routes through which calories come out. Including undigested material in excrement.
So calories out is not properly defined.
I don’t get it. Ms d’Entremont says that “calories and dietary adherence matter more than anything for weight loss”, immediately followed by “People have lost weight on … obscene amounts of meat.” Uhhh… doesn’t “obscene amounts of meat” imply obscene amounts of calories?
Bottom line is, claiming that weight loss/gain happens because you consume fewer/more calories than you use is pretty much like having your plumber tell you that the reason your toilet is overflowing is because there’s more water going in than draining out, or your students telling you that you zebrafish population is declining because more of them are dying than being born: 100% correct, 100% meaningless.
@29, torcuato
Depends entirely on how you’re using the term. If you’re using it to mean “10 lbs of meat a day,” then yes. If you’re using to mean “100% of your diet is meat,” then no (or at least, not necessarily).
Aside from the “laxative-swilling” version of bullimia, when the hell is that ever even proposed to be counted?
The point being made is that Just World Fallaciers insist that humans’ individual metabolisms can be modeled as shit-stupid-simple thermodynamic systems with “food” as one simple input with the same value for any given instance of food in all circumstances, one output that’s similarly simple and universal, and one supposed controlling variable which is called various things, the least insulting of which is “willpower.”
Yes, you can add to and expand on this model until it can at least sit down and have a civil conversation with reality, but then you end up thinking “bodies are complicated” and “well-being doesn’t have cliff notes or a Konami Code” instead of getting to sell yo-yo dieting products or substitute “being better than the fatties” for “being better than the [insert racial slur of choice here]” now that the latter tends to get pushback from society at large. Hence, civil-conservation-with-reality models are not what’s at issue here, and that is the entire fucking point.
I dieted for ten years, on and off.
I gained about 50kg. I also gained a serious decrease in the quality of my mental health (because “diet talk” is practically a recipe for intensifying any existing depressive or anxious mental illness you already have) and I strongly suspect it triggered my thyroid to shut down, leaving me with a chronic under-active thyroid for which I have to take medication in order to manage normal metabolic function.
I’m not saying “diets don’t work” – I’m saying that sometimes the “successes” aren’t the ones you were expecting.
On the contrary. Consider “Dieting” as a form of “purifying” ritual self-scarification and you see it does exactly what it was always meant to do.
On that note:
Is a fascinating way of rephrasing “so traumatized by sizist bigotry that forcing one’s body, practically at gunpoint, to eat itself until it’s the size that photoshopped advertisements say it should be seems reasonable by comparison.”
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blockquote>Is a fascinating way of rephrasing “so traumatized by sizist bigotry that forcing one’s body, practically at gunpoint, to eat itself until it’s the size that photoshopped advertisements say it should be seems reasonable by comparison.” Is a huge assumption, there are a lot of reasons why you might finally decide you really mean it when it comes to losing weight, not the least including that being overweight is physically uncomfortable, restricts your activity, restricts what you can wear (because for some reason it is assued that large people will want to wear synthetics) and can be fucking unhealthy.
Normally I prefer to be relatively civil here, but right now I’m going to have to go with a more uncouth:
Fuck you, Azkyroth. Fuck your armchair psychology, fuck your not-even-armchair biology, fuck your broken understanding of ethics, and triple fuck with a side of chili your attempt to guess why I am doing what I am doing.
I have my reasons, and at this point they’re none of your ignorant business. Fuck you hardest of all with a curare-tipped piledriver for trying to shit on me for learning to be what makes me feel right.
Diabetes runs in my family. Though being overweight may be more of a effect than a cause.
Did you know those of us who have type 2 running in our families have muscles that produce more fat when they are recovering from exercise? Wonder what that does for appetite.
robertbaden, um, there are muscle cells and there are fat cells, and there’s muscle tissue and adipose tissue. So your claim confuses me.
To Azkyroth @31:
When calculating what part of the stuff that one eats is available for one’s body to use. This relates to a previous comment where steveht compared cellulose and starch. Yes, they both contain the same amount of burnable matter per gram, yes, only one of them is bioavailable, but if one subtracts the burnable matter in stools as ‘calories out’ the formula in the OP is correct. This calculation also corrects for any individual differences in efficiency of digestion and absorption of nutrients or such differences occurring over time in the same individual.
abbeycadabra @35: Blinkered ideologues and lazy thinkers don’t care about the complications that inform individual choices. To them, everything and everyone can be neatly pigeonholed into slots labelled by simplistic little titles, like “sizeist bigotry”. Not that sizeist bigotry doesn’t exist. Of course it does. But to take an individual’s personal experience, expressed in a short comment, and reflexively “translate” it into one of their bugbears, is just bullshit. I’m sorry you have to put up with it.