It’s generally not because we’re hungry.
I can generally go all day without eating, and often do. There’s a lot of evidence that fasting has some of the benefits of caloric restriction, in terms of life extension.
I’d note, though, that the article seems to subscribe to the caloric theory of weight gain and loss. It doesn’t say what “high-density” foods are, energetically speaking, but not all are created equal. Eating fat doesn’t make you fat.
I am under the impression that the evidence for benefits from caloric restriction in humans is decidedly mixed. Works great in mice, though.
My understanding of “energy-density”, as it relates to food, is that items such as pasta and candy have more energy density than items such as apples or spinach; the calories per volume or weight is higher in those “energy-dense” foods, and you have a higher propensity to over-eat when you eat by volume rather than by calorie count.
Which, of course, leads back to the whole “eat salads instead of candy, and you’ll lose weight” plan. So does energy density explain why salads are healthier than candy, or is it just another way of packaging the fad?
I found the article helpful in shedding additional light on why I sometimes have a hard time changing up my meal habits, rather than just habitual rigor and stubbornness.
It’s not just energy density. Salads are good for you because leaves are much better for you than sugar.
Am I alone in thinking that the best way to lose weight and/or maintain a desired weight, or heck to gain weight, is to measure and record your weight regularly?
I know some people can’t stand to do this because they get depressed whenever they step on the scales, but for those of us who are more adept at accepting reality, doesn’t it stand to reason that you’ve got a lot better chance of affecting change if you have an objective measure of what you’re trying to change?
This may seem incredibly obvious to you, and if it does I invite you to stop challenging the obvious and get on with the task of managing your weight if that’s what you’re aiming to do, but it seems like this is the last thing anyone talks about. Everyone has an opinion on what you should eat, but I honestly feel you’re wasting your time trying to control the variables of your experiment if you don’t have a good (that is, objective and regular) measure of your progress and, as such, what you eat is a lot less relevant than most make it out to be.
There is a tendency to conflate that which is healthy with that which makes you gain weight. Weight gain, specifically, follows a simple formula: g times (mass flow in minus mass flow out).
People getting hung up on sugar, carbs, etc, miss the forest for the trees. And so, you have porcine people waddling up to the counter and ordering a triple bypass burger with super-sized fries and, oh yes, a Diet Coke.
I know that Rand and others don’t subscribe to calorie-based weight loss/gain theories, but your comment about keeping track of weight made me want to say something about it.
When I decided last year that I was overweight and out of shape, I decided to finally do something about it. I had downloaded an app almost a year prior to this decision to track my calories, but I had never used it. So, I figured that I would put in my weight, activity level, and a plan to lose 1.5 pounds/week, and see what happened.
For the first week, I tracked my intake, completely ignoring any limits set by the app. It was eye opening, to say the least, to see how much food and how many calories I actually ate on a daily basis. After that first week, I started working on cutting back my intake generally by eating a smaller dinner, which had been topping out over 2,000 calories by itself. The nice thing about the app was that I could track exercise, and soon started to understand how lowering my daily net calorie intake could be done with either food restriction or MORE EXERCISE.
Do I believe that the app was 100% accurate in the exact number of calories I took into my body every day, or that its exercise calorie counts were 100% accurate? No way, not a chance. But the estimates were close enough to guide the choices I made throughout the day with regards to meals, exercise, etc, and I found that as long as I stuck somewhat close to the recommendations and didn’t try to lie or take “Cheat Days”, I made progress.
Will it work for everyone? Not necessarily. Did it work for me? Yup, I lost almost 40 pounds in right around 10 months. I think that part of why it worked was because it didn’t try to limit me to 1,000 calories/day or anything ridiculous like that. The other reason it worked was because I had the brains to interpret my results and not lie to the app.
It wasn’t until I got my own bathroom scale (which actually resides in my bedroom) that I was finally able to witness additional progress. Weighing myself every morning before I shower has definitely helped keep me honest about my intake and exercise, and also proves to me just how ludicrous all of those “I lost 6 pounds in one week!” fad claims are, since I fluctuate 2-3 pounds on a daily basis, usually based on the previous day’s water intake.
There is a tendency to conflate that which is healthy with that which makes you gain weight.
More like the opposite, I’d say. What are you reading, anyway?
Weight gain, specifically, follows a simple formula: g times (mass flow in minus mass flow out).
True, at a gross level, but not helpful for a detailed analysis. There many mass flow paths out of the body, some obvious (defecation, urination, elevated sweating/respiration due to exercise) and less obvious (normal sweating/respiration due to everyday metabolic processes that go on 24/7).
There is also the matter of accumulation and latency. Briefly, carbs are “sticky.” They are strongly converted to long-latency storable fat and produce other long-term ill-effects such as elevated blood sugar levels and metabolic syndrome.
Protein and fat intake, in contrast, are “slippery.” They pass through quickly with little or no contribution to increased body mass or latency. To summarize, fat consumption doesn’t make you fat, carb consumption/conversion does. Corollaries: (1) consuming cholesterol does not elevate your serum cholesterol, but consuming carbs does. (2) development of atherosclerotic disease is not correlated with fat consumption, but with inflammatory processes induced by excess carb consumption, long-term elevated blood sugar levels and metabolic syndrome.
People getting hung up on sugar, carbs, etc, miss the forest for the trees.
No, we don’t. Carbs are the trees. You just think irrelevant other things are also trees. They’re not.
And so, you have porcine people waddling up to the counter and ordering a triple bypass burger with super-sized fries and, oh yes, a Diet Coke.
It isn’t the burger that’s going to cause that triple-bypass, it’s the fries. At least said “porcine person” is not making things worse with directly assimilable carbs like the high-fructose corn syrup in “sugared” sodas.
Your comment assumes the only important variable in weight gain/loss is the balance between intake mass and outgoing mass. You don’t seem to allow for the nature and metabolic behavior in response to said mass having any relevance. Entirely backwards, sir.
I lost 40 pounds on a low/no-carb diet which consists, on a best day, of zero carbs and on a worst day of perhaps 5%. The rest is protein, fat and unassimilable fiber, mostly from low-carb vegetables. I haven’t done any kind of analysis, but I am sure my new diet represents more calories per unit mass than my old one because its individual constituents mostly do. I changed my exercise regime – pretty much non-existent – not an iota. According to believers in conventional, simple-minded mass-balance or calorie-balance nutrition theories, what I did should be impossible.
As for Johnny B. It is certainly possible to lose weight, even quite a bit of it, by amping up your exercise regime. Back when I still believed in all the conventional twaddle about diet and weight, I did this several times, to no lasting effect. Weight comes off easily at first with more exercise, but then it plateaus and any diminution of exercise returns those lost pounds with interest if you’ve made no changes to the default American gov’t.-urged fat-poor, carb-heavy diet. YMMV, but permit me to doubt that, over the long term, it will.
It’s only been 10 months, and I haven’t really reached my “maintenance” weight yet, so I can’t say for sure how lasting the effects will be in dropping from 215 to 175 pounds. As far as exercise, 30 minutes of walking per day is all the exercise I’m really talking about at this point. However, things like shoveling the snow in the winter, mowing the grass and raking the leaves in the spring and summer, are also technically “exercise”, inasmuch as performing those tasks consumes more energy than watching someone else perform those tasks. Beyond that, I don’t distance run, bicycle, or really do much else other than some chin-ups, push-ups, and sit-ups a few times a week.
My weight loss in the last 10 months has also traced a rather steady line, plotted out with weekly weighings. No extreme drops, no plateaus, no “exercise isn’t working any more”, none of that. I stopped eating 3,000 calories per day and instead try to stick to 2,000, and I’ve been just fine.
I would also mention that my diet has consisted of over 8 ounces of pasta 5 or more times a week for the last 3 or 4 years (it was almost a pound of pasta/day before I started tracking calories), including the last 10 months, but that doesn’t really fit in with the whole “carbs are the most evil thing in the world” meme, so I won’t. At least, not directly.
It’s all relative, and every body is somewhat different. If everyone’s body reacted to food the exact same way, we wouldn’t have Celiac’s, Crohn’s, food allergies, etc.
You appear personally offended. I have no idea why. I was simply stating a fact. People want to eat a lot, and still lose weight. It can’t be done. The Diet Coke isn’t going to annihilate the burger and fries.
Exercise is important to turn the intake into waste so it can be excreted. But, IMHO, the #1 reason we are so fat today is that our food portions have gotten out of control.
When the McDonald’s in my home town first opened, they served what are today called “small” burgers and “small” fries. That was it. If you wanted more, you bought more of the basic unit.
It has been repeated everywhere. When we go out to a restaurant today, I typically take half of my ludicrously overloaded plate home to eat later. The only reason for it is that restaurants can make more profit by charging you more per plate, and loading it up to keep you from protesting that you didn’t get your money’s worth.
The typical portions we eat today have exploded well beyond what they were before the country became so obese. That, IMHO, is the most significant factor driving the epidemic.
Disagree if you like, but Christ – when did we get so sensitive that you have to lay into me like a hurricane for expressing my opinion? About the time our portions starting trending out of control, I think. Maybe those extra portions cause more ills than just obesity.
When we go out to a restaurant today, I typically take half of my ludicrously overloaded plate home to eat later.
I do the same thing. It actually makes paying for dinner out feel somewhat more worthwhile the two or three times a year that I do it. I split up the food into smaller portions when I get home or the next morning, and end up with two or three rather delicious lunches for the work-week.
There’s one restaurant in town that serves really juicy, really tender broasted chicken. Along with pasta and a side veggie, they serve two full breasts, which apparently come from mutant super-chickens, and it’s all I can do to get through one of them even before I started cutting back on my intake. It’s great for leftovers, but I wonder why they send so much food out the door when it’s not profitable to do so.
Because it is profitable to do so. Chicken doesn’t cost much, and the marginal cost of giving more food is less than the perceived value to the customer and return business. That’s also the reason that fast food places supersize cheap carbs for little additional price.
If food is going home with people, enough for a full meal or two, then it can’t be profitable in the long term, even if it’s not recording a loss in the short term; if you feed people enough for them to eat two meals, you’re shorting yourself the income from another meal (and the even more enormous profit from their drinks) in the future.
Even though chicken may be cheaper than beef, both have seen a dramatic increase in cost in recent years. If you increase your portion size to justify your price, you have even more risk in loss as the cost of inputs increases, because your number of units per meal are so much higher than they should be or need to be. Your other risk with the increased cost of inputs is in being forced to downsize your portions while maintaining the price to ensure profitability, or being forced into that much bigger of a price increase (for, say, a 24 ounce steak instead of a 12 ounce portion) to ensure viability of your business.
Not necessarily. You’re assuming that the customers have unlimited financial resources, and their choices are to pay for one meal and eat two, or pay for two meals and eat two, but they may not be able to afford the latter, so the restaurant isn’t really giving up any business. In addition, there is a cost in time to go out to eat. The restaurant is providing what it thinks is the best value to its customers, and is making a profit while doing it. If meat prices increase enough to make that an unviable business proposition, then they’ll stop, but until then there is no need to. You are aware that the cost of food, including meat, is in general the lowest component of the cost of serving a restaurant meal, don’t you?
I had written a post, and got a Javascript error while posting, so I’ll summarize my thoughts in my replacement post.
Yes, I understand that labor is the biggest cost in running a restaurant. Food isn’t arbitrarily low, however, and the doubling of any input will still affect the price of a good at some point. Proposed minimum wage increases would probably tank more restaurants than the ever-increasing cost of grain due to ethanol mandates, but both will cause price concerns.
If restaurants are “part of the problem of obesity” because of their portion sizes, then getting restaurants to shrink portion sizes has multiple benefits besides just a reduction in costs. I take no stance either way, as I don’t think that restaurant owners should necessarily bear the burden of effecting social change.
As far as the financial means argument, I made no such assumptions about the resources of restaurant patrons. However, the idea that “they may not be able to afford the latter, so the restaurant isn’t really giving up any business” ignores the opportunity costs of those patrons who CAN afford two meals in two visits. As long as the number of patrons who can afford two meals over two visits is larger than the number of patrons who stop coming to the restaurant for their first visit because of a perceived “lack of value”, the restaurant has business to gain. And until you fill all of your tables, your labor costs aren’t efficiently amortized, so it’s in the restaurant’s best interest to fill as many tables as often as possible.
At most national chains, all of these equilibrium-type questions are determined by very large markets, and teams of corporate whiz-kids. For small, local restaurants, however (the kind that tend to fail at large rates), the twin evils of spoilage and “doggy bag syndrome” are usually the low-hanging fruit of profitability/market share/viability that tend to get ignored even when other solutions (such as cutting labor costs) have been attempted to no avail.
Again, you have the causality arrow pointing in the wrong direction. If people eat more food these days, it’s not because they mysteriously just started wanting to do so, nor – pace Morgan Spurlock – is it due to the evil machinations of fast food executives.
I remember the pre-Big Mac days at McDonald’s too. People didn’t eat just one burger, they ate multiples. Hell, White Castle burgers were designed to be ordered and consumed as multiples. But people didn’t start really pigging out until the federal gov’t. began its science-free assault on dietary fat. People eat more these days because they’re hungry all the time. Near-constant hunger is one of the positive feedback loop effects of overconsumption of carbs and the consequent long-term elevation of blood sugar levels.
One of the pleasanter aspects of my as-carb-free-as-possible diet is that I can eat a nice zero-carb breakfast (3-egg omelet w/cheese & mushrooms plus six or eight sausage links) and have no trouble with hunger until well into the evening. My formerly carb-centric eating would have me climbing the walls for a snack by 10:30 AM.
Again, what you eat matters. How much you eat, at a sitting or over an entire day, is much less important if it’s the right sort of stuff, because you soon reduce overall consumption through self-regulation anyway. Abandoning carbs makes this easy. It gets the metabolic syndrome monkey off your back and allows you to recover from carb addiction.
I zing you for your current opinions on these matters not because they are merely different than mine, but because they are wrong.
Well, then, we disagree. I won’t say you’re totally wrong. Some foods are undoubtedly processed and the wastes excreted less readily. But, when I see an overweight person eat, they are almost invariably scarfing down a loaded plate, with an artificially sweetened drink to make it OK. For those people, and it is my anecdotal opinion that they are the majority of those with a weight problem, it is far less a problem of quality than of quantity.
I do not blame “greedy” restauranteurs – they are just giving the customers what they want. Ditto the high-fructose corn syrup producers. Or, for that matter, the video game producers, who have lured the children into sedentary means of recreation. The problem is overwhelmingly within ourselves.