(no subject)

[telophase]

Man loses 27 pounds on Twinkies and snack cakes (and vegetables and vitamins, as well). He's a professor of nutrition, running a bit of an experiment to prove to his students that weight loss is, at its core, down to calories in vs. calories out.

Comments

[tehkittykat]

I hate the often trotted out calories-in-calories-out. People often forget that a calorie (more properly, a kilocalorie or kcal since it's the kcal that are used to describe food) is a unit of energy measuring how much heat something puts out when it's burned. Not metabolized.

Burned. As in lit on fire. They actually still light things on fire to figure out how many calories they contain.

I would believe kcal-in-kcal-out if we were robots and/or powered by some kind of food-burning furnace mechanism. But we're not. We're animals. We metabolize some foods (which is not the same as burning-- we process sugars and some fats and proteins into ATP in our mitochondria with no fire involved) and we use others to build important stuff. Like bones. Or muscles. Or, especially in the case of fats and cholesterols, important hormones we need in order to function properly.

And if our metabolic systems are not getting enough kcal in to keep up vital bodily functions, whatever "enough kcal in" happens to be programmed into us via our genetics, then the whole system goes into HOSHIT mode and you can't lose weight. That's why permanent weight loss from a reduced calorie diet pretty much never happens-- I think the best estimate taken from data from Weight Watchers puts the number of people who can even manage a significant weight loss in the first place at around 2% of the population. Diet companies don't exactly put out much actual data on the efficacy of their product, or no one would buy it. That's also why you never see a weight loss study last longer than a couple of years.

I mean, I'm not shocked that this guy managed to do it. You can shift a percentage of your weight on a reduced-calorie diet-- I even lost 25 lbs once! (And the diet gave me gallstones! I'm down the weight of my gallbladder too!) But I bet you anything if you check in on this guy a few years from now, he'll have regained every one of those 27 lbs AND more to boot, since re-gain is your body's way of telling you not to do that crap anymore. I also wouldn't be surprised if he never wanted to eat another snack cake again in his life. XD

[telophase]

In small increments, the amount of calories in food items and in what you metabolize is wildly variable. In larger amounts, the laws of averages work: this apple has only 35 calories, this other apple has 85, but if they're both consumed, it's just like eating 2 60-calorie apples. And yes, if something is processed the calories are easier for your body to utilize: one apple that would normally give you about 60 calories of energy, when made into applesauce is going to provide more than 60 calories worth because your body isn't going to have to work as hard to extract those nutrients. Made into juice, that same apple is even more, because there's almost no work your body has to do to release the nutrients.

I lost 50 pounds back in 2007. I gained a large chunk of it back, and it's not due to genetics, or recovering from starvation-level calories*, or anything other than me starting to drink Coke and Dr. Pepper instead of Diet Dr. Pepper, and in me eating more - until I was full, rather than until I was no longer hungry (and "full" was defined as "stuffed") - but primarily, it was the sodas. I cut those out, and it's damn easy for me to maintain ... I've done that for the past 5 months, and now I'm going back to slowly losing. (And I have physical, joint-related reasons for doing this: not problems that can be cured or managed by strengthening exercise alone, but which are directly affected by load-bearing and how much of a load they're asked to bear.)

There's some fascinating reading in looking at eating behaviors and how our modern society caters to them. Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink. We judge our food intake a lot by portion numbers, instead of portion size, for one.

* I track my calories. If they went below 1500/day for more than a week, I stopped losing. I added more back, I started losing again. I lost weight at 1700-2000/day (before accounting for exercise). That's nowhere near the starvation-level 1200/day that most diets think women should be on.

[tehkittykat]

Hey, you may be in that lucky 2% who can get a whole lot off and keep it off-- even if you aren't most people's weight setpoint is a range, not an exact figure, and many people can manage to get in and stay in the low end of their setpoint by doing the things you've been doing. Good luck on that-- it sounds like you'd be more comfortable in your low range. I'm also not saying that food security, access to proper foods, and getting regular movement to stop being considered a chore wouldn't be a good idea for everyone-- regular exercise and veggie intake are good things that should be spread around. I'm just saying that metabolism, metabolic issues, and weight loss/gain aren't as simplistic as a lot of people seem to think, and it's not helped by the fact that science in general REALLY hasn't put a whole lot into figuring out how it all works aside from setting food on fire and seeing what happens.

I will pass on that you might want to try and cut back the aspartame-containing beverages. I made the switch to diet soda several years ago for reasons similar to yours.. and I managed to develop a sensitivity to it that makes me nauseated whenever I have anything with the stuff in there. A little checking around told me that it's a pretty common sensitivity to develop. (I haven't heard anything terrible about sucralose sensitivity, though I know some people develop problems with other sugar alcohols. Haven't heard about stevia derivatives yet, but they're new on the market.)