“This study shows that conventional wisdom — to eat everything in moderation, eat fewer calories and avoid fatty foods — isn’t the best approach,” Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health and lead author of the study, said in an interview. “What you eat makes quite a difference. Just counting calories won’t matter much unless you look at the kinds of calories you’re eating.”
Dr. Frank B. Hu, a nutrition expert at the Harvard School of Public Health and a co-author of the new analysis, said: “In the past, too much emphasis has been put on single factors in the diet. But looking for a magic bullet hasn’t solved the problem of obesity.”
Also untrue, Dr. Mozaffarian said, is the food industry’s claim that there’s no such thing as a bad food.
“There are good foods and bad foods, and the advice should be to eat the good foods more and the bad foods less,” he said. “The notion that it’s O.K. to eat everything in moderation is just an excuse to eat whatever you want.”
I didn’t intend to, and I certainly never counted a single calorie, but I’ve lost about fifteen pounds over the last few months by almost completely cutting out grains and root vegetables (going mainly paleolithic), in the interest of trying to reduce my blood pressure.
Modern nutritionists (and the FDA) have primitive, unscientific beliefs (like the idiotic war on fat and saturated fat “You are what you eat”). They’re like the doctors that still prescribe leeches for ailments. And unfortunately, too many in the medical profession think they know what they’re talking about.
I have similar results… I can’t eat (except in very small amounts, and only occasionally) grains, root vegetables, and fruit. (I’m diabetic, and of course can’t have other forms of sugar, either).
What an alarming number of “experts” don’t get is that Diabetics need to avoid large amounts of sugar. Sounds obvious, and they’d agree phrased like that, but the sugar in fruit is just as bad as table sugar. Also, starch is sugar; it’s just glucose molecules linked end to end, and resumes being glucose moments after you eat it.
I lost 15 pounds once I began this diet several years ago, and to my amazement my cholesterol reacted to the increased fat intake by dropping, into the excellent range.
I now have to be careful regarding weight; if I’m not, I start losing again, which would be great if I was still overweight. I’m not, and don’t want to go underweight, so I have to make sure I get about 3000 calories a day (I’m into a lot of outdoor sports, so some days it’s more).
I often say that one should not take the laws that apply to big numbers and apply them to small numbers. Doctors and medical researchers never listen to me. I have eaten a high saturated fat and low carbohydrate diet for many years and have fabulous cholesterol and blood pressure numbers. I am almost 60 years old, and when I dine out with friends am always amused when they criticize my steak with fried onions and steamed broccoli, considering that by those gold standard indications of health, I can beat all of them. I once heard a comedian’s schtick wherein he averred that we all have our own health. That’s not funny, it is true. If I ate a low fat diet that any cardiologist would urge me to follow I would no doubt have the same heart problems that my parents and grandparents all had by their late 40s and early 50s.
Diabetics are sensitive to a high rate of change of glucose levels. Starches tend to break down slowly – releasing glucose slowly – and for many diabetics that is slow enough for them to be able to process. Whereas, eating refined sugar immediately rises the blood sugar.. so even in small amounts some diabetics can’t process it fast enough. Attach an alcohol molecule to the sugar and you don’t raise the blood sugar at all (as the sugar can’t be used), which is how the good artificial sweeteners work.
And yes, I’m diabetic.. I don’t eat sugar and try to get sufficient exercise. That’s sufficient to keep me off medication.
I’m doomed. I’m heavily addicted to pumpernickel bread & cheese.
How long until this theory becomes obsolete?
I guess this means the Thermodynamic Diet will never catch on.
But the icewater enemas would have been a roadblock anyway.
I’ve dropped 17 pounds in the last 8 months by essentially the same method as Rand. I follow the Zone which, in essence, simply removes grain, spaghetti, potato and sugar carbs from the diet. You can eat those but to eat them and follow the diet would have required massive amounts of protein. Easier to just eliminate them
I still wonder about the effects of exercise in weight loss. I haven’t bought into the idea that if you exercise matters all that much, though there are other benefits. I once lost 50 pounds on the Adkins diet with not one bit of exercise.
I didn’t know that paleo precludes root veggies though I haven’t studied it all that much.
I’ll be a contrarian to the point of view of the “experts” quoted in the article.
Counting calories works. The problem is that dieters who claim to do it really are not doing it well. They must count calorie intake and calorie burn, including both exercise and “at rest” calorie burn. It requires being conscientious.
One has a daily intake of fuel (known as food) plus stored fuel (known as fat). If your fuel burn exceeds your daily intake of fuel, then your body must burn the stored fuel.
So it has always been. So it will always be.
—Tom Nally, New Orleans
It might also be noted that the ketosis thought by Atkins’ enemies to be an indication of the diet’s unhealthiness is actually the entire point. If there are ketones in your urine and breath, then it means you are breaking down fat and throwing it away.
As the diabetics who have already posted here already know no doubt, excessive amounts of glucose do direct damage to the nerves and circulatory system that is far worse than the effects of cholesterol even if cholesterol is very high. It’s also notable that blood levels of homocysteine are far better correlated with circulatory problems than is the level of cholesterol.
If you can find a copy somewhere, then check out “The Stone Age Diet” – it’s quite old and possibly out of print. The idea is in the title. It’s a truism that modern diets in the West are nothing like the diet our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate, and the 7000 years or so of the agricultural era are an eyeblink in evolutionary terms.
If you have a printed copy of the official food pyramid, use it for lighting fires – it is completely useless, having been hijacked by the agribusiness lobby.
The thing you learn by counting calories (ingested and burned), is how losing weight is a long term commitment. You wont lose the lbs you packed on over 20 years in a month or two.
However, people who get yolked out in a short period of time increase their calorie intake an insane amount and exercise six hours a day.
Ethan Suplee lost his weight cycling, http://www.tmz.com/2011/03/24/my-name-is-earl-ethan-suplee-fat-weight-loss-bicycle/
This is the big catch, isn’t it? The most dramatic weight loss I’ve ever seen (dozens of pounds from my not-already-obese father over several weeks) came from the “runaway hyperthyroidism diet”. No changes in eating or exercise habits required. (Just some surgery and medicine to stop the process before it lead to death…)
Even for those of us who haven’t (yet) been afflicted by wild hormone swings, I suspect the long-term effects of food and exercise on basal metabolism are more significant to weight loss than the short-term calories in and out.
Counting calories works. The problem is that dieters who claim to do it really are not doing it well. They must count calorie intake and calorie burn, including both exercise and “at rest” calorie burn.
The key point of the study linked to is that counting calories doesn’t work because 100 calories of sugar will turn down your metabolic rate and 100 calories of protein won’t.
I’ve had much better success losing weight with a restricted carb diet, as recommended by my internist. It’s interesting that the internal medicine and cardiology community have been getting on board with restricting carbs – lowering them, but not as low as Atkins – as the best diet for preventing diabetes and reducing cardiac and stroke risk; but the diet police ignore the data.
A few years ago there was someone who had an article, and I guess it turned out to be the real deal. “The eat whatever you want diet.” But the point wasn’t that you should be gluttonous, it was that you eat, when you decide to eat, you eat what you feel like eating, and you only eat as much as you feel like eating.
The idea being that cravings are really just our way of understanding what our body wants at a given time, and we shouldn’t try to counterbalance a huge history of evolution that made us want, or act in that way.
I frankly do it, I’ve never been fat in my life and I gorge on food, but I eat whatever the hell I want, an advantage to living on my own, and knowing how to cook. ODDLY ENOUGH! the more sedentary I am, the less I weigh, though I look the same, the more active I am, the more I weigh.
I go back and forth between 180 and 220 every couple years, not cuz I’m dieting, but because sometimes I start working out, and sometimes I stop. When I’m working out, I get heavy, though I look the same, when I’m not, I shed weight. One thing that is consistent in those periods is that I eat whatever the hell I want.
Muscle weighs more than fat. 40lbs of muscle would be pretty noticeable but for most people who go from out of shape to exercising, they lose a nice chunk of weight but then slow down, partly because they are adding muscle.
I have a 5 point swing day to day and over a year I will add and lose 10 lbs. Too bad beer is so delicious.