For those who aren’t familiar with the term, it means believing something that probably shouldn’t be believed, or being influenced to believe something that’s not necessarily in your best interests.
For those who aren’t familiar with the term, it means believing something that probably shouldn’t be believed, or being influenced to believe something that’s not necessarily in your best interests.
Calories in, calories out.
For years I believed that the only reason people got fat was because they ate more than they burned and ended up with an excess of energy. It was also the view pushed by the medical profession, by health education at school, and by society in general. I spent years trying to get my weight under control by eating less and moving more.
After a particularly strict period of literally weighing the margarine container before and after buttering toast so I knew how many calories of margarine I used I had gained weight rather than losing even with a 500kcal deficit. I listened to a podcast (Skeptics with a K) in which they interviewed Gary Taubes about the non-caloric hormonal model of obesity. It basically said that if your insulin level was up you couldn’t access body fat, so all the thoughts of that fat being available were flawed and you couldn’t really lose weight in that state. What ended up happening was a reduction in calorie burn and loss of muscle. Fixing the insulin is the first step to managing weight and if you do that you can access your body fat for energy.
It took another year before I actually tried keto and I lost 20kg in the first two months and another 10kg over the next few. It was a massive change but I didn’t sustain it given the environment I was in and ended up gaining a fair bit of the weight back (though not all).
Years later (over a decade, oh no, so old) and I have a much more comfortable body fat percentage and lots more muscle. I carry only a little more than I want and honestly it is too much effort to get down that last little bit, but I feel better now in my late 30s than I did in my early 20s in terms of movement, energy, and cognition. When i get injured I recover quickly, and when I get sick it is usually very short and then over. I used to get sick for weeks at a time and many times per year, now I have only been sick twice this year and both times in December (filthy children, gross but fun).
If you had asked me in 2010 how to manage weight I would have told you, nose firmly in the air, to eat less and move more. So glad to have been wrong.
While it is more complex, regarding how brains and other metabolic systems signal and process desire to eat etc., it IS calories in / calories out, I believe. If one eats a 500 calorie deficit, they will lose weight. It borders on impossible for some for completely understandable and forgivable reasons, but I’m sorry to say, I suspect you accounting of either calories in or calories out was mistaken.
Yes, there are differences in bioavailability across foods and people but still carbon goes in, breaks off, and is mostly breathed out.
To anybody that downvotes this, I challenge you to suggest what chemical atoms are you adding to your weight when you gain even while eating at a calorie deficit. Don’t mistake me for saying insulin and such don’t play a huge role; they do. But the role they play is in the delicate balance of calories in and out. So, too, does one’s microbiome, which weighs more than one’s brain; so who is doing the thinking. Complex processes that all affect calories in and out.