Doc here. I'm not surprised that an adult male carrying 33.4% body fat dropped weight on an 1,800 calorie diet. Nor am I surprised that his cholesterol stayed down. If you've every seen a patient on total parenteral nutrition or g-tube feeds, they all move toward a normal BMI and then get scrawny. The switch over to skinny is due to muscle atrophy from disuse. If they survive and return to a normal activity level, they typically regain the muscle mass.
The take-away: don't eat too much.
Quiz:
1) what three food groups did he cut out of his diet?
2) What is the normal range of BMI for an adult male?
3) Fat is transported in the blood in various kinds of packets. HDL and LDL are proteins that label the outsides of certain packets. If HDL goes up during weight loss, where do you think those packets are coming from? Where do you think LDL packets are going to? If Professor Haub's weight equilibrates with his new 2100 calorie diet, what do you expect will happen to his HDL and LDL?
I'll take a stab at #1. I'd say he missed the "fish, poultry and eggs", "healthy fats/oils" and "whole grains" groups. He was eating from the "use sparingly", "dairy" (from the shake), and "vegetables and fruits". Eggs are often in the types of snacks he was eating, so it's possible you could argue he was also eating from the "fish, poultry and eggs" group.
Upvote. I wish it was more obvious that I wasn't using food groups as a proper noun. Since he wasn't eating fruit, you can see the friction between the language of reality to the use of language in food politics. "Fruits and vegetables" are different. Compared to stems and leaves, fruits are high in sugar, low in fiber and complex carbs.
I’m going to have to plead some confusion or ignorance I here. I’m well aware that nutrition has become a political hot potato for the last few decades, but I’m trying figure out why you felt the need to bring it up in your response. What do you mean by “not food groups as a proper noun?"
Because the pyramid defines a group "fruits and vegetables". I could define any set of edible things I wanted in a small g group, but the pervasive inclination to think about "fruits and vegetables" inhibits my goal of getting people to think about them separately. Fruits are not the same as stems and leaves.
I think I see your point; when I was a kid I saw charts that handled them separately. (I think it was during Reagan’s or Clinton’s term that they got kerfuddled together.) But it doesn’t help matters that the terms “fruit” and “vegetable” are problematic, at least in English. What a layman thinks is a fruit can be drastically different than what a biologist or lawyer thinks is one, thanks to a real mess of culinary and legal tradition. (The tomato is the textbook example.)
1800 calories a day isn't going to be a major challenge to his insulin system, no matter how high the glycemic index, even in the long term. What he might have to deal with is the increased hunger from lack of satiety signal (leptin, et al), which would then require more will power to avoid overeating, a precious commodity. Better to spend under your caloric limit by eating foods with bulk (broccoli, carrots, etc) and some strategic fats (a sprinkle of cheese on your salad, nuts for a snack), thereby maximizing the satiety signal you get for those 1800 calories.
What's your basis for that line of thinking? He's only consuming 1800 calories spaced evenly throughout the day, so I'd imagine that he'd in no way be coming close to taxing his body's ability to process glucose or produce/respond to insulin.
The "maximum insulin load" is going to depend on factors beyond calorie count.
For example, if you consume a can of Coke, your body is going to try to process the sugar in it all at once. But if you consume a donut with equivalent sugar, the fats and oils in it slow down the digestion process. Thus your maximum insulin load(which is the largest immediate factor in creation of fat tissue) will be lower with donuts. Fruit achieves a similar load-lowering quality through fiber instead of fat.
Also note that in a single can of Coke, you consume 39g of sugar for 140 calories(source: Wikipedia). Therefore 1800 calories in sugar alone is 501g of sugar.
I don't know about you, but I usually do not feel very good if I have more than about 20-30g of "naked" sugar at one time. And this guy's experiment does three things that lower his insulin load substantially so that he probably never crosses that 20-30g boundary:
He eats pastries rather than drinking soda, thus he enjoys a nice levelling effect from the oils and doesn't actually get all of his calories from carbs.
He eats vegetables for extra fiber.
He drinks a protein shake, which induces satiety(and depending on the type of protein, may also slow digestion).
If you attempted to reproduce the experiment without these things protecting you, you would probably feel too sick to continue within a week.
> For example, if you consume a can of Coke, your body is going to try to process the sugar in it all at once. But if you consume a donut with equivalent sugar, the fats and oils in it slow down the digestion process. Thus your maximum insulin load(which is the largest immediate factor in creation of fat tissue) will be lower with donuts. Fruit achieves a similar load-lowering quality through fiber instead of fat.
You have an understandable and common misconception of glycemic index. You cannot always intuit which foods will have a higher glycemic index. For example, you incorrectly seem to believe that cola has a higher glycemic index than a donut. In fact, donuts have a higher glycemic index than do colas.
You should not conflate your subjective feeling of "badness" with the objective measure of circulating insulin or glucose (unless you have rigorously established the correlation, which is not obvious). Subjectively, I feel just as bad when I only eat a donut as when I only drink a coke.
His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most -- not the nutritional value of the food.
This should not be a startling revelation. Mind you we're speaking simply of weight loss, not "healthy eating" or "good nutrition" or any of the other topics that people often mix up with weight loss.
It seems that in Professor Haub's case that the benefit to losing the weight outweighed the negative consequences of eating junk food -- at least in the short term.
I think this is a startling revelation to MOST people.
Most people do, as you've noted, mix up healthy food with weight loss.
Have you ever told someone who wants to lose weight they should not add ton's of fattening (yet healthy) olive oil to their salads? Typical response: "But, it's healthy fat!" - yea, but it's fattening at 110 calories per tablespoon...
Weight loss and good nutrition are mixed together.
It's the premise behind a lot of marketing on food labels. Look how healthy some food product labels appear. "I want to lose weight, and the label says 'healthy choice' so it must be okay for me to eat!"
A close review of the nutrition facts tells a completely different story.
But who really reviews nutrition facts?
I never looked at the nutrition facts, and I was always overweight. This last year I started tracking my food and it's calories ( one example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1828786 ) - This is the first time in my life that I've been decreasing body fat percentage and increasing muscle percentage. No fad diet, hell, I drink beer and eat pizza. But the days that I do, I make sure to keep my calorie count in a deficit.
It was startling to me, as obvious as it is now, that "healthy food" does not equal "low calorie food." And the way to lose body fat is eat less calories.
As someone who is eating a delicious, olive oil-doused salad right now, I have to interject: your calorie sources do affect your weight gain, albeit indirectly: if you're getting most of your energy from carbs, you'll consistently crave food a few hours after eating. If you get the majority of your calories from protein and fat, you'll get over this.
I consume a lot of fat and protein: two or three dozen eggs per week, fatty red meat for most dinners, olive oil-soaked salads for lunch, etc. This has led to significant weight loss, as well as a substantial energy boost. As this is (fairly) close to the diet that humans evolved to consume, it's not especially surprising that it works.
His point was that eating less carbs leads to eating less total calories (through suppression of appetite). He didn't claim that eating two different foods comprising the same # of calories lead to different amount of weight loss.
> I think this is a startling revelation to MOST people.
> Most people do, as you've noted, mix up healthy food with weight loss.
Absolutely. I came up with the idea this guy tested a few years back, and you would not believe the number of people who are convinced I'm dead wrong. (I shared it with a lot of people)
True. But a healthy weight is by far the single most important nutritional goal in our society. Malnutrition due to any other cause is exceedingly rare in the developed world.
Most of the research and theory that I've seen on the subject espouses the idea that the type of food that you eat has a significant effect on hunger level, not that the type of calorie matters wrt weight loss.
So you'll lose the same amount of weight if you eat the same number of calories of HFCS and beef jerky, but you'll be horribly hungry all day eating the HFCS while you'll feel satiated on the jerky.
In my experience losing 85 pounds with calorie counting, hunger is mostly related to how much fiber I'm taking in. The more fiber I get, the more satisfied I am a few hours later.
From what I've read, we evolved to eat a far greater amount of fiber than most American's eat today which is one of the significant problems with our diet.
I think jumping to the conclusion that "calorie counting is what matters most" or that it's "not the nutritional value of the food" is bad science. This experiment proved that it was possible for one man to loose weight eating only junk food. I'm not a statistician, but I'm going to guess that a sample size of 1 is too small to generalize. There was also no competing hypothesis tested in this experiment. A trial was not done where the nutritional value of the food was tested.
Anyway, in my anecdotal experience, I've been able to go from 205 back to my college pole-vaulting weight of 185 by following a 40-30-30 ratio of calories from fats, carbs, and protein without ever worrying about total calories. That's great for me but it says nothing about you because a simply can't generalize from my unique experience.
Maintaining a healthy weight is by far the most important nutritional goal in the developed world, and, by a vast margin, the most important thing you have to do (not optional), is watch how much you eat.
I’m not surprised at all. I lost 40 pounds just calorie counting, changing nothing at all about what I ate. (No happy ending here. You have to be really disciplined for a long time to keep your weight and over the following years I gained it all back.)
You will automatically tend to eat healthier, though. 200g of potato chips make you happy for a few hours but you will feel terrible for the rest of the day (because you cannot eat anything else). Carrots taste nearly as good and you can eat a ton (not literally) of them.
I've also lost 40 pounds with purely calorie counting. Although I've managed to keep it off for two years, and I don't see it coming back (easily). My approach was to kill bad habits one at a time and create new good habits to take their place. For example I replaced smoking with walking. I replaced high calorie snacks at home with fruits and vegetables so I would go for those instead.
The key has been to take things slowly and not try to do too much at once. I still count calories, but what I eat is pretty much a mindless habit now, (the good kind). I have also gotten into the habit of weighing myself daily and plotting it on a graph. This gives me very good feedback when I'm going in the wrong direction.
Almost 4 years ago I weighed 220 and smoked a pack a day. Now I weigh 175, ran my first 5K this year and I ride my bike 20 miles to work every day!
Edit: I hope you give it a go again. It's not easy, but once you turn the corner it's really worth it.
Why does a pregnant woman gain weight? Because she consumes more calories than she burns. Why does someone with hypothyroidism gain weight? They consume more calories than they burn. Why does someone on prednisone or antipsychotics gain weight? They consume more calories than they burn. Why does someone on an 11-day meth bender lose weight? They burn more calories than they consume.
All true, but it's not the most enlightening way to look at it. The more interesting question is why they eat so much/little.
In my experience, and the experience of lots of others, eating food like Little Debbie's makes you want to pig out, whereas it's practically impossible to pig out on steak or chicken.
I'm not surprised that you could lose weight on an 1800 calorie junkfood diet, but I think it would be hard to stick with it, even by the standards of diets, which are pretty much all hard to stick with. The fact that a doctor, a profession loaded with people who are a few standard deviations above the norm in terms of ability to delay gratification and self-discipline - a med school professor, no less (same but more so) - has the discipline to do this for 10 weeks, is not surprising, and probably not relevant for the average person who's struggling to lose weight.
...whereas it's practically impossible to pig out on steak or chicken.
Speak for yourself. I've witnessed my ex-roommate eat in excess of 3000 calories of rotisserie chicken in a single sitting. Ditto for steak. And yes, like most big meat-eaters, he was obese.
As someone who is pretty active in the health/fitness community I HATE n=1 studies like this that get so much press. All this does is give people yet another excuse not to eat a healthy diet and it gets quite annoying.
Of course if you starve yourself of calories you will lose weight, but how sustainable is that in the long term? The reason 90% of diets fail is because people can't keep to them, and who can keep on such a calorie restrictive diet. Never mind the fact that you will be losing muscle mass along with the fat in a starvation type diet like this.
The Calories In = Calories Out dogma, has been ousted out of the hardcore Health/Nutrition community (See Gary Taubes book Good Calories, Bad Calories). The quality and type of foods you eat, i.e the macronutritent ratios, are infinitely more important than the total number of calories. That is not to say that we can eat 10,000 calories of the right food, but you can eat to satiety or to your BMR and still lose weight by eating food that in the right macro ratios.
A diet like the one described here would be destroying this persons insulin sensitivity and in turn his leptin sensitivity. He will be at high risk of Type 2 Diabetes among other things.
If you want to lose weight and get healthy easily, cut your carbs dramatically, eat protein and fat to satiety. Lift some weights and do some slow steady cardio every other day (brisk walk etc.) Fix your sleep hygiene (this is super important) and you will be blown away at how the fat will disappear.
Case in point: I started a diet like that about 3.5 weeks ago. No bread/cheese/beer/soda/candy/potatoes. I eat a good deal of meat and tons of broccoli, bean sprouts, and mushrooms each day. I also started a simple weight lifting regime (3 times a week), and hit the bike a few times.
I'm down 15 lbs so far and feeling really good. The biggest problem with sustaining this I think is going to be boredom with my food options. I'm not a fan of how most vegetables taste.
With regards to boredom, if you have the time, learn to cook. I can't tell you how much my health has improved from just learning to cook. With the right amount of olive oil (or bacon fat ;]) you can make some pretty awesome salads.
Thanks. It's been a bit of a revelation. Two years of bootstrapping turned me into a fatso. I'm getting back down to "fighting shape" and so far so good.
The first 4 days were pretty miserable. It's all been bearable since though.
The most interesting bit has been how my mood seems to have calmed down on the whole. Tedious tasks that use to frustrate me are now more manageable. I wonder if I had "carb rage" all these years that made my body rise up against actions that weren't going to lead to immediate gratification.
Warren Buffett is a big practitioner of this kind of diet. In his biography, there is a segment about his dieting habits and he used a two pronged approach:
1. Calorie restriction but eat a food he loved - so ice cream or milk shakes all day one day.
2. Make it so if he didn't stick to the diet, he'd have to pay one of his friends a large sum of money.
The combination of greed and eating what you love seemed to pay off in terms of keeping his weight in line.
For his own health I am glad that he didn't continue the diet much longer. There are a number of confounding variables here that the article forgot to mention, which most likely played a larger part in his weight loss than any calorie counting:
Stress. Stress can cause sudden weight loss. This weight will come right back if you give your body any time to catch up and yet the effect is significant enough to provide "evidence" for the craziest of dieting fads. Eating debbie cakes for 3 meals a day is going to put some serious stress on your body.
Metabolism is not constant. Michael Phelps eats more for breakfast than I do in a week, and yet he is in much better shape. The scary thing about junk food is not so much the empty calories, but more how it affects your metabolism in the long term. If you draw out this sort of a diet for 2 or 3 years, then I would expect that not only could you give yourself diabetes, but also you will start craving more and needing less. That is when weight gain will start to become a serious problem.
There are a number of confounding variables here that the article forgot to mention, which most likely played a larger part in his weight loss than any calorie counting.
I disagree completely. Stress and metabolism are minor factors compared to the repeatable, testable, and well understood calculus of calories in vs calories out.
I'm sorry but in the Health and fitness community this has been disproven time and time again. Someone can fix their sleep and eat at their bmr with good foods and still lose heaps of weight. See good calories bad calories by Gary taubes
Basal metabolic rate is something developed in hospitals for bed-ridden patients on total parenteral nutrition. It is the calories you burn just staying alive. If you, a healthy person walking around, eats at your BMR, you will, definitely, loose a heap of weight. However, the BMR for the average human is quite low.
Also, on brief review, Taubes appear to thoroughly misunderstand the issue on a variety of levels. I'm going through more of his material, if I am mistaken, I will report my error.
I don't disagree completely. We are talking about completely different things.
I am talking about long term, you are talking about 10 weeks. Yes, you can calculate calories in vs calories out. No, you cannot extrapolate that to determine if Professor Mark Haub will be alive on that diet in 3 years. What is the metabolism of dead?
What repeatable calculus? This is a story about one guy not a study of a population of people. I'd be cautious before you jump to the conclusion that these results will generalize. That probably says more about your own biases than it does any scientific learning that was produced by this experiment.
The Harris-Benedict equations are generally accepted as empirically corroborated and reliable predictors of weight change as a function of daily caloric intake.
Of course. Most dieters don't have access to a ventilated hood indirect colorimeter, so they have to rely on a method for estimating their BMR.
What I'm saying is that the difference between their measured BMR and estimated BMR (using either Harris-Benedict, WHO, or Schofield equations) is a minor factor.
I'm saying that I believe that diet has a real effect on metabolism. Not basal metabolism, but on the ability to maintain a given activity level. If you try and restrict your calorie intake, you will be less likely to go on a run, take a walk - etc. This is why Harris-Benedict may not be a good tool to manage long term weight loss, even though it is a useful predictive tool.
I'm doing something similar to shift a few pounds. Two weeks ago I came home, I'd been particularly involved and forgot to eat. In order to get my calorific intake up to the minimum in my diet, I had to get some serious calories. So I had a small pizza, 4 bottles of Sol and a wife with a very suspicious look on her face.
To curb calories, he avoided meat, whole grains and fruits.
Hmm, confounding. There's a lot of crazy stuff in meat, stuff that might well have something to do with obesity rates rising.
There are many studies that show that the vegetarian diet is the most healthy. His results may have less to do with Twinkies than with the meat he avoided.
Edit: Not sure why I'm getting down voted to oblivion? I eat meat... I have no agenda here, just pointing out a deficiency in the article's reasoning.
I think you're getting downvoted because it doesn't matter what he cut out - it matters that he was eating a caloric number conducive to weight loss.
He could've eaten 1800 calories of steak, grains, and fruits each day and lost weight, too. It's just a lot easier to count calories for junk food, as the amounts are right there on the package.
This diet was by no means healthy. It was simply a weight losing diet. Long-term, it'd be hell on your body, but it's an interesting approach to quickly bringing weight down (after which one'd hope he'd switch to a nice healthy diet).
Well, that's why I called it confounding, if he maintained the same diet and cut calories, that would be a much better experiment.
Instead, he both cut calories and massively altered his diet, so there's no telling why he lost weight. I mentioned cutting meat as confounding his results, but the other alterations count just as much, too.
Both the article and the diet are sloppy. Yes, he lost weight but even the nutritionist can't explain why, or even if it's a good idea to eat Twinkies for meals.
Fat has about 3500 kCal/lb. If you consume fewer calories than you use, you will lose weight based on that ratio and your calorie deficit. Doing it wrong just means that your body tries to work against you (makes you hungry, makes you tired, makes you want to put on a sweater, etc) and you feel like shit, but for as long as you manage to stick to it you will lose weight.
"I think you're getting downvoted because it doesn't matter what he cut out..."
I agree that this is probably why mrj got downvoted. However, mrj's comments are valuable and further the discussion, so I really wish people didn't downvote.
Furthermore, mrj could be right and the article's point--that cutting calories is all you need to focus on--could be wrong. That's the point of science: to form a hypothesis and then test it with multiple trials and multiple studies. If he got back up to 201 lbs and then did the same diet again but with fruits and vegetables instead of junk food, maybe he would've lost weight faster? Who knows until you do it?
I would wager this is almost certainly why his cholesterol dropped and explains many of the effects. This is basically the central premise of the book The China Study, which is what convinced me to go vegetarian myself about a year ago (I dropped 30 lbs without even trying in about three months and now I weigh less than I did in high school).
Still, he's eating a lot of refined sugar, so I'm pretty surprised. Then again, so am I (thanks Halloween!).
>I would wager this is almost certainly why his cholesterol dropped and explains many of the effects.
His cholesterol dropped because he went from a consuming more calories than he burned to a diet where he was burning more calories than he ate. The excess calories were converted into fat and transported in LDL-labeled packets to the adipocytes. Once he started losing weight, adipocytes started releasing fat in smaller HDL-labeled packets for the liver to convert to glucose to meet his energy needs.
Not all excessive calories are converted into fat. It all depends on blood glucose level, and liver/muscle glycogen storage levels and the level of activity after the meals.
Glycogen isn't excess. There's a fairly fixed upper bound to your glycogen stores. In fact there's a whole class of glycogen storage diseases which are very life-limiting, all due to excess storage (inadequate storage would be lethal in utero). Calories burned through activity are by definition not excess. I suppose you could argue that in diabetics with blood sugar above 200, then yes, the sugars become an osmotic diuretic and they literally pee out the calories, but otherwise, excess calories go to fat. Fat is the ultimate, infinite sink in this equilibrium equation.
As a vegetarian, I can attest to the health aspect of it. I am more healthy than anyone I know (all meat/dairy/egg eaters). Whenever I get a checkup they always ask if i am an athlete or some weird health nut, I just say , "no I just don't eat animals."
You can be unhealthy and be a vegetarian as well. I know plenty of overweight vegetarians. I also know a tonne of VERY healthy vegetarians. Mostly, vegetarians are just more interested in healthy eating than the average person.
There is nothing inherently more healthy about a vegetarian diet than a non-vegetarian diet.
How do you think they fatten up animals before slaughter? By feeding them meat? No, by feeding them grain.
> There is nothing inherently more healthy about a vegetarian diet than a non-vegetarian diet.
Can you provide a reference for this totally unsupported assertion? There is a wealth of evidence that contradicts this statement. Here is a link to one highly respected and large study - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study
> How do you think they fatten up animals before slaughter? By feeding them meat? No, by feeding them grain.
What? This comment is stupid on so many levels I don't know where to start. Here's a short list
- These animals are 'by definition' different to humans. You can't extend results beyond species.
- The animals are mostly dedicated herbivores. Feeding them meat would make them sick and very unhealthy to consume.
- Meat is a lot more expensive to produce than grain. It takes about 10 calories of plant material to produce 1 calorie of meat. Using meat to produce meat would be uneconomical and ultimately unsustainable.
- I'm not sure about the 'species BMI' they aim for but I would have thought that meat from 'obese' cows wouldn't be all the popular. I thought consumers generally tried to avoid the obvious fat.
Do you sport or have physical activity in another way? I've found that there is a huge difference between sporting 30 minutes a week and no high intensity physical activity at all.
Question: The Cookie Diet: Can it help you lose weight? What is the Cookie Diet? How does it work?
Answer from Katherine Zeratsky, R.D., L.D.: "The original Cookie Diet was created in 1975 by Dr. Sanford Siegal to help his overweight patients lose weight. The Cookie Diet limits calories to no more than 1,000 a day, which come from six prepackaged cookies plus one meal, such as skinless chicken and steamed vegetables. The cookies are made and sold by Dr. Siegal's company and are said to contain a proprietary amino acid mixture that fights hunger.
If followed, a diet of less than 1,000 calories a day will likely lead to weight loss. But such a restricted diet can make it hard to meet all of your nutritional needs. In addition, it's difficult to stick with extreme diets such as the Cookie Diet. As a result, any lost pounds come right back once the diet stops.
The bottom line: To achieve and maintain a healthy weight, you need to make permanent and sustainable changes in your eating and exercise habits."
The thing that makes healthy food healthy is that you become full & satiated on less calories. Proving that you can force yourself to eat 1,800 calories of unhealthy food doesn't say much.
The take-away: don't eat too much.
Quiz:
1) what three food groups did he cut out of his diet?
2) What is the normal range of BMI for an adult male?
3) Fat is transported in the blood in various kinds of packets. HDL and LDL are proteins that label the outsides of certain packets. If HDL goes up during weight loss, where do you think those packets are coming from? Where do you think LDL packets are going to? If Professor Haub's weight equilibrates with his new 2100 calorie diet, what do you expect will happen to his HDL and LDL?