A lot of people seem to have a purely emotional relationship with resources which logic doesn't seem to be able to penetrate. Food and finances seem similar here. For years I tried to get my wife to stick to a grocery budget. That is, we have $n per week for all groceries. She'd blow badly over the limit every time. "But we needed [food]" or "These were toiletries, so they don't _count_ as groceries." Ultimately we never had an real success sticking to a grocery budget, and ultimately the solution was me working towards better paying jobs.
This feels a LOT like weight loss. Calories in --> calories out is conceptually very simple, but in practice more people struggle with it than not. It certainly cannot be the case that they struggle with the concept; they struggle with actually putting it into action. Lying to themselves, twisting themselves into philosophical knots, and probably most often, conceding to their cravings. Food acquisition is one of out more basic drives, so it should probably be no surprise that people struggle to intellectualize it.
(as and aside, there are also people who wrongly believe that calories in --> calories out is a flawed concept because not all people have the same metabolism, or not all calories are equal. Both of these are true, but none of them actually negate the premise. For whatever your metabolism, and whatever your category of calories, fewer calories will still produce weight loss. It may feel unfair that someone doesn't have to work as hard as you to produce the same result, but this is actually true in all areas of life. Now that said, improving the quality of your calories is very important, and should not be ignored -- but it also does not negate the premise.)
Oh hey, I'm the wife in this story. Having a fixed $/month budget for "things you buy at a grocery store" was doomed from the beginning. All the stuff in your house/pantry are on all kinds of weird replacement cycles that vary with usage and changes in habits. A monthly cadence also makes you sub-optimally plan around price movements.
An attainable goal is to reduce the average amount of monthly grocery spend and you do it by deciding, in advance, things you're no longer going to stock in the house, items you'll replace for cheaper options, or items you'll stock from wholesale clubs.
It's hard to bring the budget for gas down without people driving less. Your wife being the one tasked with filling up the tank is the messenger. It could be an emotional reaction as you describe but I would at least entertain the idea that her "bending the rules" is her way of trying to make an impossible ask doable. Whether she is consciously thinking about it or not, I bet the stuff that "doesn't count" aren't replaced every month and have spikey cost patterns.
I totally agree that you'd need to find a reasonable average weekly cost because costs and timing would vary. In my mind, this means you could find a reasonable average weekly cost that you often go under, and seldom go over. But, it just never happened for us. In principle we could have just kept raising the price ceiling, but eventually that becomes meaningless in the context of a budget. To me, at least, it felt just like calories; what could have been a pretty easy math problem was defeated by human psychology.
It's really hard (emotionally or motivationally) to undereat, which is what you need to do consistently for a long time to lose weight.
Aside from the hunger issue, food is enmeshed in all sorts of value having nothing to do with nutritional value per se and everything to do with sociopsychological value.
I think I've massively underestimated that in my own life, or misunderstood what that meant or something. I think the way it plays out is much more pervasive and subtle than what people realize. I'm not even saying it's wrong, it's just hard to suddenly deprive yourself of something that is meaningfully rewarding, and especially so when you're unaware of it consciously.
My opinion is the only reliable way to lose weight (other than ozempic) is to eat in such a way that regulates satiety such that you don't feel hungry when losing weight.
Intermittent fasting + lower carb + whole foods can do this. But the trick is satiety in any one person is regulated by multiple processes. I doubt there's a one size fits all and probably the problem gets harder the more satiety is dysregulated.
But I think any approach aimed at undereating in the sense of being hungry is not likely what people who lose weight successfully are doing. Or at least those who avoid rebounds. You'd instead want to find something that is highly satiating and satisfying and that also can't be overeaten.
Example: almonds may be high satiety by some technical definition. But is is very very possible to eat past hunger with them.
In my own experience it is very difficult to eat too much steak. I find it delicious but simply couldn't past a certain point. Others have reported similar results by adding lots of potatoes.
I don't guarantee success by targeting satiety but I think it's worth trying rather than calories or weight directly. At some level you need to roughly figure out macronutrients to know where you can err but anytime I've lost weight it's been by focussing on type of food rather than amount. But strictly so.
I agree and from experience of keeping relatively the same weight 4kg+/- for over a decade. If I need to lose weight I need to undereat consistently and as another commenter mentioned, its also using techniques to remove as much satiety as possible.
I need to eat foods that are nutrient and fiber dense to keep me from feeling hungry or snacking, drinking lots of water etc. And importantly, its understanding that sometimes between meals I might go hungry and that's okay, I don't need to eat straight away to fix that hunger craving.
One of the challenges I faced and I'd say most people face as well, is that eating is a source of joy and comfort and when losing weight you sometimes need to delay that joy or comfort.
Also there are ways to convince your body that it needs less, and the journey from A to B is very uncomfortable. If you do it wrong you will just endlessly be suffering from your body thinking it's starving.
On top of that though is you have to get over your intellectual ideas of how much food you think you need to eat.
I know how much food I need to eat in order to survive and maintain a healthy weight. But if I eat that amount of food, I'm still hungry.
Doesn't matter what I eat. I'll eat a diet high in protein and fiber, moderate in fat, and low in sugar and starches, which is supposed to be the recipe to feel full without eating empty calories, but it doesn't work. 16 oz steak paired with an 8 oz portion of green beans or broccoli, and I still get the munchies just 2 hours later.
I should probably go to a doctor and ask about Ozempic or something. I did successfully lose about 50 pounds doing keto and brought my A1C from 6.8 down to 5.4, but I damn near lost my sanity because I was always hungry. I've gained it all back and started to get some of diabetic symptoms again.
How much protein were you getting on the high protein diet? For a long time I heard about "get lots of protein, it helps with satiety" and I thought I had enough protein. When I went to a nutritionist and she made me do a food journal, her first feedback was that I needed to up the proteins even more. And then indeed, I stopped feeling as hungry.
Try 1g/pound of bodyweight (some say ideal bodyweight). For me it's 180-190 g per day. It's hard to eat that much protein. But when I do, the hunger goes away (unusual feeling for me too)
I'm kinda convinced that something has changed (prescription meds ending up in the water supply? micro plastics?) that makes people hungrier than they were in the mid 20th century. the effort required to eat less seems higher than ever, and you can't totally explain the gap and rise in obesity with just lifestyle and food availability.
if some unknown element was making everyone's internal thermostat aim for more food it would explain a lot.
Our genes are heavily evolved to live in calorie scarce environments. In those environments, high calorie foods are amazing. Our biology is built to find them incredibly rewarding.
Science and capitalism have created incredibly delicious foods that are nutritionally lacking, hyper optimized for (against?) our now mis-aligned reward system. In the west, calories are not scarce and the most delcious foods are far from the most nutritious. It will take a long time for our genes to catchup.
Mass producing delicious, cheap, but low nutrition food is profitable. Companies have gotten very good at it. That's the real big change.
that's the macro change, yeah, but the rate of increase in obesity in the us got sharper after the 80s, so it doesn't feel like the complete picture to me.
we got the abundant food and the largely car bound live cycles and it still kept getting worse for decades after that point. I suppose it could be generations growing up only knowing this and so habituated to it more?
The ability to experience endorphins from things unrelated to food has gotten more expensive. Would you rather buy a $13 dollar move ticket and go hungry, or just buy a $13 McDonald's meal and go home to watch a movie? Buy a $75 dollar ticket to a special event? Buy several thousands of dollars in travel? Food is much easier to fill the gaps in feeling good.
The "public presence" of society has diminished due to the internet. You no longer need to put effort into constantly looking your best because social media helps curate your appearance. Going to Walmart is now so relaxed that you can wear pajamas. Putting on your "best appearance" occurs elsewhere in curated ways (i.e. facebook/instagram posts and careful selfies). You can "partition" your social life so that the people shopping at walmart see pajama-you while the Tinder matches see someone totally different.
> This feels a LOT like weight loss. Calories in --> calories out is conceptually very simple, but in practice more people struggle with it than not. It certainly cannot be the case that they struggle with the concept; they struggle with actually putting it into action. Lying to themselves, twisting themselves into philosophical knots, and probably most often, conceding to their cravings. Food acquisition is one of out more basic drives, so it should probably be no surprise that people struggle to intellectualize it.
Imagine a piano teacher. Their mantra is practice in --------> skill out. Profound. Every time their students come to them and complain about not being motivated, practice being too dull, experiencing back pain or repetitive stress syndromes, wanting to change up the practice, they just say: practice in equals skill out. What is so hard to understand?
That’s what the "calories in/out" people are like. And this is the only area where this is an accepted argument. Where it is even treated as a valid argument at all.
Everyone knows that you have to put in time on an instrument in order to get better. Everyone. No one denies it. Similarily I don’t think the overlap of weight loss pursuers and deniers of energy conservation as it moves through food groups (plants to cows to humans) is terribly large.
If you truly want to rationally assist people who want to learn the piano or lose weight you do what works. You don’t repeat a truism. Cutting out sugar? Meat? Intermmitteng fasting? Counting calories? Anything that works. You don’t sheepishly point out that they failed to practice their ten hours last week without even asking why didn’t follow through.
The in/out people seem to have a hard time intellectualizing this simple concept.
Calories in -> calories out is flawed (or, rather, not useful) because metabolism is a feedback loop, not a one-way serial process. The types of foods you eat, how they're prepared, and when you eat them have complex influence for how hungry you feel and how much energy you have to exercise or resist impulses, as well as ramifications for the state of your physiology, per nutrient intake.
CICO helps explain weight management issues retrospectively, but it's inadequate with regard to planning, and for maintaining quality of life while working towards a weight management goal.
I don't know the mechanics, but my understanding is that such a water fast also permanently alters your digestion and metabolism.
A (logical extreme) example I was thinking of counterig with: if you eat 500,000 calories in 24 hours on the first of the year, and nothing else for the rest of it, you'll achieve a 1,350 calorie/day average, certainly enough to lose a significant amount of weight. And you will! Because your stomach will have ruptured and you'll be dead by the 2nd. Rotting is one way to burn calories. (I mention this to illustrate how focusing solely on the numbers, to the detriment of the actual lived quality of life during the weight management process, misses the forest for the trees.)
Im reading Sapiens at the moment and one statement really got my attention: human society is a marvel, but individually we are embarrassingly similar to Chimps. This mental model really helps put put so much behavior into context, like resource hogging and the hoarding instinct, despite obvious surplus of everything everywhere at all times.
> For whatever your metabolism, and whatever your category of calories, fewer calories will still produce weight loss.
I thought that wasn't true, that the human body stores and burns calories at varying rates based on many signals, and that our bodies or some bodies effectively conserve weight or caloric stores at a certain level.
The body can compensate at the margins. Eat 5 fewer calories per day and you will see zero change. Eat 500 fewer calories per day, consistently every day, and you will absolutely see changes. (I'm not actually suggesting that it would be _healthy_ or advisable to drop your diet by 500 calories -- just pointing out that the body cannot compensate indefinitely.)
yeah, you want to force yourself to do some activities that keep your metabolism up along with the restrictions
you can't exercise out of a bad diet but exercise is a helpful supplement to a good diet too. it's just that making yourself do it when you're tired and hungry is draining.
One of the traps is mental health. People focus on their body when dieting, but there are far more aspects to manage, and forcing themselves to do things they utterly hate will have wider impacts.
At the end of the day they'll blame will power or motivation or whatever else on why the diet failed, but still won't account for these same factors when trying the next diet involving basically the same mechanics.
You can, but it's not easy. People who exercise _a lot_ often have trouble eating enough calories. 5,000 to 10,000 calories a day is hard to eat and not out of reach.
I knew a guy who was drinking a gallon of whole milk a day for a while to try to maintain weight.
If you have a real chance to win the gold in the Olympics in most events you have to be working out that much. Even if you end up coming in last of the serious competitors just the workload to be a serious competitor will be 10k+ per day.
At that level training is your full time job though.
> they struggle with actually putting it into action [...] conceding to their cravings
The trouble is that people who have no problems to do this ... are the ones at risk for anorexia. They lack the instincts that make the rest of us safe from that particular hell.
Healthy relationship with food does not involve restriction or conscious attempts to loose weight. You eat when hungry and stop when not hungry.
The thing that makes anorexia possible (among other things) is you being able to ignore hunger. Healthy organism will instinctively eat when hungry or missing something. The instincts takes over, body produces hormones to override behavior and diet ends.
Yeah but people in this conversation and other conversations about calorie restriction, are not arguing from the standpoint of someone being healthy, and then indulging in unhealthy relationships with food. They are talking about someone who has an unhealthy relationship with food and their body, demonstrable by their excess weight, and talking about ways to correct the poor health by having a healthy relationship with their own will. You need a healthy will in order to manage weight loss due to caloric restriction.
I think a lot of people talking past each other on this topic are really just disagreeing about what healthy will power actually is. To be specific, comments along the lines of "it's not my/their fault, it's the fault of our environment, and the availability of unhealthy food".
I think this is just having an unhealthy will. I think this is also the whole divide on things like ozempic - some people view it as enabling people to have unhealthy will power. Other people view it as the only way someone can have healthy weight. I don't think either party is wrong, I think they are just talking past eachother.
This theory is not scientific (food is not energy, the body is not a machine, measurements are not precise etc.) so there is nothing rationale you can say that will convince people who believe in it to switch to something else
cico is true, but you can't measure calories in accurately and you can't be sure of calories out accurately. isn't that fun?
(in practice as you know, you just kinda do it on feel and end up restricting calories enough to lose weight. but my own intuition is that I had to aim for 100 or 200 less than my estimated BMR so the math is very fuzzy isn't it?)
This feels a LOT like weight loss. Calories in --> calories out is conceptually very simple, but in practice more people struggle with it than not. It certainly cannot be the case that they struggle with the concept; they struggle with actually putting it into action. Lying to themselves, twisting themselves into philosophical knots, and probably most often, conceding to their cravings. Food acquisition is one of out more basic drives, so it should probably be no surprise that people struggle to intellectualize it.
(as and aside, there are also people who wrongly believe that calories in --> calories out is a flawed concept because not all people have the same metabolism, or not all calories are equal. Both of these are true, but none of them actually negate the premise. For whatever your metabolism, and whatever your category of calories, fewer calories will still produce weight loss. It may feel unfair that someone doesn't have to work as hard as you to produce the same result, but this is actually true in all areas of life. Now that said, improving the quality of your calories is very important, and should not be ignored -- but it also does not negate the premise.)