Comment on Nutritional Hexes
BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
The number of people that don’t believe that taking in fewer calories than you put out will cause you to lose weight still astounds me. Your body isn’t some magic device that doesn’t have to obey the laws of physics.
Some people mistake healthier with less calories.
I switched from a box of Little Debbie’s a day to a bag of trail mix! Why can’t I lose weight?
That olive oil you’re using is good for you, sure, but it’s not a freebee. It has calories. Things like this are often not even noticed or counted.
Tracking calories accurately is a balance between good data and time investment.
I didn’t usually count oils and fats when I made food because I use so little. But I also wouldn’t worry much about very low calorie vegetables either.
To be fair though my goal was to gain weight and meet macros, not to lose weight.
But either way at the end of the day even with really good apps making counting calories way easier than it used to be, there’s still a line that needs to be drawn somewhere as to what your time is worth. If you’re in the ballpark you’re good unless you have very explicit needs to get more detailed data.
Tracking calories accurately is a balance between good data and time investment.
Absolutely true, and getting good data is really, really hard. In fact, the nutritional content on food labels (in the USA) is allowed to be over by as much as 20% by the FDA.
In addition to that the processes and formulas used to calculate those numbers are also far from precise .
The most accurate method to measure energy and calories in food is called a bomb calorimeter, Li said. The process works on the theory that when one thing releases heat — in this case, food — it’s absorbed by another, in this case whoever is digesting that food, as energy.
To make this calculation, food scientists seal a piece of food in a pressurized, oxygen-filled steel container — the “bomb.” That container is encased in an insulated box filled with water.
The scientists light the food on fire and let it burn completely. Then, they take the temperature of the water. They use an equation to tell them how much energy — and therefore calories — are in that piece of food, based on how much the burning piece of food raised the temperature of the water surrounding it.
However, this is only an estimate because not everything that burns and releases energy to heat the water can be digested by a person eating it. Fiber, for example, burns in the calorimeter but will just pass through your digestive system without giving up its energy.
Many food companies don’t even test food like this. They simply estimate the calorie content based on the number of grams of fat, carbs, and proteins in the food. Still, unless and until someone comes up with a better way to determine the calories in a given measure of food, it’s the best system we’ve got.
I’ll just keep repeating this, but your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) is not scientifically set in stone.
While it’s accurate for I would say 90% of the population, rough estimate, there are many things that can cause your BMR to not be accurate, like thyroid issues or lack of musculature due to sedentary lifestyle or due to hormone imbalances or any number of myriad things.
I went and had mine tested and it cost me I believe $70 at a sports medicine place, and I burn approximately 200 calories less than my BMR chart says that I should.
So if I wanted to maintain my weight, and I ate the calories the internet says that I should every day, I would actually gain almost 20 lbs a year (a nice rough estimate is every 10 calories a day you cut from your diet you lose one pound a year).
And as I am working on losing weight, and I’m eating 500 calories under my BMR, I’m actually only eating 300 calories under my true BMR, which means my weight loss is incredibly slow.
So yes, while calories and calories out is true, there are external factors that make it difficult to get accurate numbers to compare against.
Therefore calories in calories out is much simpler to say than it is to do for some percentage of the population.
Getting the numbers in practice can be difficult but that’s not the same as saying that CI/CO is bullshit, as many people do sho don’t understand that it’s simple thermodynamics. If your fire isn’t producing enough heat, you add more wood. You don’t start to doubt that burning is exothermic.
The body isn’t a fire and food isn’t wood, so the analogy isn’t a very good one.
And even if it was, wood in a fire pit does not burn uniformly.
The type of wood, the quality of the wood, the contents of the wood all affect how fast it burns and how hot it burns.
Very dry pine wood burns incredibly hot and very fast, whereas damp maple may self-extinguish. It may not be capable of maintaining its own fire due to its moisture content and the density of the fibers in the wood.
And while you can look at the whole and say this amount of wood emitted this many BTUs of heat energy, you can’t say “this amount of wood being burned should emit this amount of heat in this period of time” when you’re not taking into consideration the type of wood, the quality of wood, and even how the logs are arranged.
Science is about controlling variables, and when you have too many variables that are not being taken account of, you cannot get an accurate scientific measurement of the results of your experiment.
And that’s not even taking into consideration the fact that the raw nutritional quality of foods grown in the western world at least has dropped precipitously, inducing people to eat more food to get the raw nutrition they need that’s not just calories.
We know that calories are comprised of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, and we can generally account for those, but the nutrition, the selenium, the zinc, the iron, the calcium, the phosphates, the everything else that makes up the food that we eat. If it’s not there in sufficient qualities to meet what our bodies are calling for, then it’s natural for us to overeat to attempt to fill in those nutritional deficiencies.
And when your brain has been fucked by not getting the nutrition it needs, and your body has been fucked by not getting the nutrition it needs, and your food has been fucked by not delivering the nutrition you need, then once you’re in that situation, it’s not as simple as, oh, just don’t eat that Twinkie.
So calories in, calories out is the truth.
Just like gravity is the truth.
But knowing the math, 9.8 meters a second squared, is not enough to go to the moon.
We literally burn sugar as fuel. Fires are just fast oxidation.
Not only is it not set in stone, it appears that your BMR is affected by what you do. If not provided with sufficient nutrition, the body seems to adapt and lowers BMR.
Yet, cico works.
You have completely missed the point of my entire rant.
Cico works, but “o” is a variable that can vary wildly from person to person based on environmental, genetic, and nutritional factors.
Yes. And you can carefully select the value for your case.
Eating a tapeworm also makes you lose weight, doesn’t mean it’s healthy. Not everyone can starve themselves thin in a healthy way.
You don’t need to “starve” yourself. That journey can be milder (though longer).
I can’t digest pork well (it runs right through me and frequently causes vomiting), so I don’t l eat it, but if I were to follow a diet with 500 calories of pork in it, I might get 100 from it. On the other hand, I digest beans and lentils incredibly well, with no noticeable gas. I can imagine that I might actually get 110 calories from a “100 calorie serving.” It is possible to determine your caloric intake despite this variation, but because people aren’t well educated about it, they see a mismatch in the math and reality and think it’s pointless to calculate it at all instead of realizing they need to adjust it for their specific digestive system.
absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz 1 hour ago
Whilst this is true; your body does have some pretty neat tricks to maintain homeostasis; it can shift the energy budget around quite a bit to where it is needed.
Your body will down regulate some systems to try to keep your total energy balance within what is “normal” for each person.
Digestion uses quite a bit of energy; this is why sometimes you feel sleepy after eating; your brain has been down regulated to enable digestion.
Another common example is when runners get into “the zone”; this is your brain prioritising the required processes and reducing the energy of other parts, putting you into a semi trance…this is so your body can maintain an energy balance.
It is also why we sometimes feel sick if exercising hard and then eat quickly afterward; your gut is not ready for that job.
High energy process that can be “switched off” or at least significantly reduced:
Just because you have done some exercise; doesn’t mean you have used more total energy that day…it seems counter intuitive; but your body likely shifted energy from one thing (immune system, brain) to muscles, for the time your were exercising.
In saying that exercising is so good for other things; physical and mental health are enhanced by exercise, there are so many good things about exercise, just don’t rely on it for weight loss.
As the old saying goes “you can’t out run a bad diet”; you are correct, if over the long term you eat fewer calories than your body requires, you will see an effect. But your body is a tricksy beast, it will do all it can to prevent this; it is why dieting is so hard in an age of abundant food.