Dunning Kruger.
Your body is so much more complicated than a function that takes calories as input and outputs an expected result. You need more than just calories, you need nutrients. A nutrient deficient person does not burn calories the same way a person with a balanced diet does.
Like just think for a second. Is the only variable of food that matters is calories, then why do you need vitamins? Why do we split calories into categories like protein, carbs, veggies, fruits, etc? Why can you get a PhD in nutrition if it’s only as simple as calories in calories out?
The simple answer is it’s not simple. Asserting that it is when it isn’t creates some terrible narratives around exercise, diet, and body image.
FinnFooted@lemmy.world 6 days 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 5 days 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 5 days 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.
AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net 5 days ago
Yeah those are pretty useful common sense approaches.
LavaPlanet@sh.itjust.works 6 days 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.
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 5 days 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.
LavaPlanet@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
I get where you’re going, a human body isn’t quite comparable to those factors though, it’s a bit more complex than that, because what you’re trying to do is kick in a chemical reaction to release hormones to signal to your fat cells to release them, and that they no longer need to be stored.
In that premise you need to look at why your body stores fat, and in what mechanisms it releases them.
Fat is seen by the body as more of a battery, to save itself (you) if shortages should occur, which is kinda where the calories in vs calories out come from. Right, but, that’s a temporary, survival mechanism that you’re trying to kick in there, and when you tell your body you don’t need to be in survival mechanism mode, any more, it goes, “oh, look, we’re resting, that fat that I stored saved us, I need to save more”
You can’t continually operate in a calorie deficit, and exercising more than you intake. It’s not sustainable long term. Your body will try and bounce back to it’s “normal”.
Calories in and of themselves don’t have one static notion or rule, summing up all things edible to calories is entirely deceptive, in and of itself. Food offers different nutrients, and your body is really good at making the essential nutrients it needs, out of chemical reactions, from whatever you put in, other than some essential amino acids, which is can’t make on its own. But also, different foods do different things to your digestive system on the way through.
Calling all food calories, and trying to reduce it to a same action product, in the first part of the equation (calories in) is like saying anything with computing powers, is the same and can and does the same actions, but you can’t send emails with your alarm clock.
Different foods offer different energy output and productions in the body. You won’t get the same energy levels from fibre that you do from protein. So summing up all food into one label like that, ignores so many chemical factors that occur in the body when you digest food, and how different foods operate in said meat machine.
Not all calories are equal, so the premise is inaccurate, in that summation.
Calories out, similarly ignores huge wafts of data, chemical reactions, hormone functions, metabolic rates, genetics, gender (it has only ever been a model tested, if you can call it that, on males), age, and more. It, also similarly ignores the base systems of the body, and why it stores fat, what happens if you release fat in the wrong way, and the rubber band effect, that causes. I could go into so much detail about that part, but I’m already waffling.
I don’t know if thermodynamics matches how a human body sets off a chain reaction to release fat cells, but if I were to relate it to energy, which thermodynamics is a form of. Because we’re talking about a very complex system of chemical reactions. It’s a way too simplistic thing to relate it to, because the human body has so many hormones that all combined do so many different coded locks and key processes in the body. Adrenalin is a hormone, dopamine is a hormone, even histamine (allergy reactions) are hormones. And they all signal different actions to and within different cells of the body.
Whereas energy, in physics is a very simplistic thing that reacts the same every time, in so much as that they have equations that math it out, every time. You can calculate the energy loss, resistance, voltage, amps etc, and they’re the same, because it’s one form, not a complex system, which a human body is. It’s also not going to equate to the same calculable set of parameters in every human body, like you can with energy. Energy is “a” being equal to “c” divided by “b”, and it will always be the same. Every human body absorbs and processes different nutrient intake differently.
But imagine if you told everyone, instead, to find a long term comfortable sustainable diet rich with variety of fruits, vegetables, legumes and beans, nuts, meats. Less, ideally no, processed foods or junk foods, and just moved their body frequently and regularly, nothing big, just something. Minimally. (that not being the entirety of it) how many businesses and whole bodies of corporations does that message, put out of business?
AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net 5 days 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.
LavaPlanet@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
See but I think we’re both actually saying the same thing. The amount of factors that go into calories in vs calories out, essentially makes it unusable. Just looking at calories as a base whole product, not the individual piece of food and the nutrients it provides, is mad. By that rationale you could just live on oranges. They’re calories, or junk food. Calories.
It’s not calculable, how one individual body absorbs, processes, and then manufactures the essential nutrients it needs, from “calories”. It’s essentially saying how much food in vs how much food burning out. But that’s not how fat is turned from fat to energy consumption, by the human body. It has nothing about the essential needs of the body.
It’s a myth perpetuated by diet industry that only keeps you on the hamster wheel of weight loss and, for most people not genetically gifted, never really works. Or only works short term but then your body goes into survival mode, and stacks it all, and more, back on.
Here’s a an article that might help say things better than I am. …edu.au/…/its-time-to-bust-the-calories-in-calori…
JandroDelSol@lemmy.world 5 days ago
question, you point out the diet industry, but how do you feel about the fast food industry purposely making their food addictive just to make a profit, health be damned?
LavaPlanet@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Predatory af, right! Similarly as predatory. There’s 18 ingredients in maccas chips. Wtf.
howrar@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
None of that actually matters when it comes to weight control. What matters is that the linear relationship is retained in your proxy measure of Calories. Meaning that if you eat two pieces of cake, you’ve doubled your Calorie intake compared to eating one piece.
FinnFooted@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Ok but my point is you’re not just eating cake so its hard to keep track of the linear relationship sometimes. Calorie reporting can be incorrect and bodies are weird. That’s all I’m saying.
Realistically, being on most any diet is equally effective. From simple calorie counting to the keto diet. It turns out that, if you find a diet you can stick to, then just kind of paying attention to what you’re eating in a general sense works.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32238384/
howrar@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
An example with an oversimplified diet to illustrate the point I think you’re trying to make: You have a diet that’s exclusively cake and you’ve determined that you need 2000 Calories of cake to maintain your weight. That 2000 Calories figure is an estimate and we don’t know exactly how much of it we’re actually absorbing. In reality, it’s actually more like 1800 Calories. Now all of a sudden, you switch your diet to eating exclusively cookies. You measure out exactly 2000 Calories of cookies and eat the same thing every day. But your Calorie estimate is wrong and you’re actually eating 2100 Calories of cookies per day. Now you gain weight on this supposed 2000 Calorie diet.
I argue that this doesn’t matter either. If you see that you’re gaining weight, then it means you’re eating too much. Reduce your Calorie target and you’ll be back on track. In a real world scenario, you’re going to have a much more varied diet than only cake or only cookies, and each item will come with their own measurement errors. But for most people, their diets are varied in a fairly consistent way, so these errors are also consistent on average. If you ever make changes in your diet (e.g. completely cut out McDonald’s), you’ll change both your estimated Calorie intake and target like in the example above. Adjust your numbers accordingly based on how your bodyweight moves and you’re good.
Of course, other ways of dieting are also effective. It depends mostly on what you can adhere to and your goals.
the_q@lemmy.zip 6 days ago
If you get 0 calories what happens?
ewigkaiwelo@lemmy.world 5 days 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
the_q@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
It’s weird that it works for most people.
JandroDelSol@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Calorie counts on food are an approximation, sure, but it’s not unreliable. If someone eats roughly X amounts of calories every day and they lose/gain weight at Y rate, then the exact amount isn’t as important.