We don't know why people gain weight, and there are no known essential nutrients which cannot be acquired through eating cows. So what with all this talk about leafy grens? IMHO it is pseudoscience. (Although, I gotta admit, I feel a lot healthier when I EAT some leafy greens rather than when making a pedantic point)
Big corporations can make lots of money selling expensive salad dressings if I'm convinced to buy icky tasteless styrofoam iceberg lettuce. Therefore the intense push to get people to eat veg/fruit in the form of salad. "They" might not be selling profitable wheat flour in the form of twinkies anymore, but "they" are selling salad dressing for about the same cost per pound as chicken/beef (depending on dressing and meat cut, etc), gross fake bacon bits, etc.
I occasionally eat salads but eventually I get burned out on the salad dressings (there really aren't that many) and stop for awhile.
The most revolutionary thing you can do is just eat an apple or gnaw on a carrot or bake a potato. No dips or crusts or toppings or any other profit centers. Assuming you already have enough fiber in your diet, run your veg thru a juicer. That really pisses "them" off.
Believe it or not, not everything is a corporate conspiracy. Iceberg lettuce is pretty useless, but there are hundreds of thousands of leafy green plants that are edible by humans. Romaine is a better simple alternative, but again there a vast amount of edible leaves. And you don't need to put any toppings on at all. Eat it dry.
>The most revolutionary thing you can do is just eat an apple or gnaw on a carrot or bake a potato.
Not if your goal is to lose weight. Those three plants are extremely high energy (carbs). If you want to do something "revolutionary", grow your own. Raise your own chickens. Pasture feed them. Eat their eggs. Butcher them. Feed them your vegetable scraps. Plant some apple trees. Eat a dandelion. Your brain is trained to rebel against these companies. All they have to do is encourage you to eat right and soon you'll be eating unhealthy just to "piss them off".
We actually do. In simple terms, if you eat more than you can use, you will gain weight. It is slightly more complicated. I can explain more, but the web will do a better job than I can.
The talk about leafy greens is that, we know they are low calorie, have essential vitamins and minerals, and provide fiber. Thus, they are definitely good for you. They don't harm you, they provide sustenance and other benefits and so your statement that we don't know what is healthy is just false.
I don't believe that to be true. I have researched the hell out of this for years and I don't believe there is a definitive answer about this weight gain/loss thing.
Are you saying that someone eating 4,000 calories a day, but using only 2,000 per day will not gain weight?
There are a small number of people with a bacteria that helps them gain weight. There are people with a bacteria that helps them not gain weight. There's a small number of endocrine disorders that make weight gain easy. There are some medications (eg some anti-psychotics) that increase weight gain (and it's not just increasing input).
But even with all of that most weight gain is simple: people eat more calories than they use.
The stuff about satiety doesn't address calories in, it just talks about feelings of fullness.
What we don't know so much about is why some people over eat, and over eat to the extent they do. When a bariatric patient in a specialist weight-loss hospital smuggles in packets of crackers and jars of peanut butter (by hiding them under the folds of fat on their bodies) we can say that there's something weird going on.
But again, 500 lb patients are not the norm and that kind of eating isn't the norm.
Most people just don't know how much they're eating; don't know how many calories they're eating; and don't get enough exercise.
The technical explanation of scientifically measured intake and output of calories smashes into uselessness when it collides with real world psychology.
Example. Given gluten-intolerant subject. Feed them 4000 calories of whole wheat bread and they lay on the couch all day feeling kinda "off" and only burn 2000 calories BMR so they get fat. How did you feel today? "Eh about normal". Didn't you lay around all day and take an afternoon nap? "Well, yeah, now that you mention it..." Then feed them 4000 calories of steak and they get all hyper and burn 5000 calories going on a marathon bike ride or whatever and get thin. How did you feel today? "Eh about normal". Didn't you get all hyper and exercise all day like a madman? "Well, yeah, now that you mention it..."
Obviously the real world delta is not 2000 calories a day. But a delta of 100 calories a day, which is NOT a heck of a lot, adds up over a year to 35 thousand calories or a delta, plus or minus, of about 10 pounds of fat per year. Repeat for a couple decades and you get either really fat or really skinny.
You start by saying that calories in vs calories out is useless.
You then give two examples. The first is where someone eats more calories than they burn, and gain weight. The second is where they eat less calories than they burn, and lose weight.
Please, how does this mean that calories in vs calories out is useless?
You appear to be ignoring the part of my post where I say that satiety is important for losing weight, but that it doesn't change the basic calories in vs calories out.
> But a delta of 100 calories a day, which is NOT a heck of a lot, adds up over a year to 35 thousand calories or a delta, plus or minus, of about 10 pounds of fat per year. Repeat for a couple decades and you get either really fat or really skinny.
Yes. We seem to agree? Eating more calories than you burn means you put on weight. Eating less calories than you burn means you lose weight.
Its a hard science error propagation thing. Look at your equation:
(In) - (out) = (delta aka gain/loss)
Some background is that both are about the same, it takes a decade or so to swing from anorexia to the worlds fattest man. Lets say the (delta) represents a percentage of (In) / (Out) of perhaps 110% for a pregnant woman with quadruplets to maybe 99% very long term for an anorexic.
Watch the error propagation. The order of the (delta) error percentage is roughly equal to the order of whichever error is bigger, in or out.
I claim the percentage error of (Out) greatly exceeds 10%. Saying more than 50% makes me uncomfortable. Probably the true value is well in excess of 25%. This means any estimation or modification of (In) less than 25% is lost in the noise of the (Out) signal making the calculated delta meaningless. Garbage in equals garbage out.
Very few people screw around with their diet on a long term average more than 25%. Therefore any change they make will be lost in the noise of output energy level.
The way you get thin is by altering your diet so you are more active. Some diets screw around with your blood sugar, insulin levels, inflammation levels, all that is going to screw around with energy out flow. Large amounts of dairy products make me kinda queasy, so rather than going out for a walk or yard work, its sit on the couch. Large amounts of protein make me feel pretty darn energetic so I walk about more. Certainly the swing exceeds that experienced with having a cold vs being healthy. For some people with gluten issues its probably more like having the flu vs being healthy.
The TLDR is (in)-(out)=(delta) is useless because you need to characterize (delta) to pretty high accuracy to even figure out if your gaining or losing, and outside of a medical facility under observation you cannot characterize (out) accurately enough, or frankly, probably not characterize (in) well enough either unless you stick to industrially produced hyper consistent super processed foods, like all TV dinners every day, or always and only fast food or vending machines.
Rats on a treadmill hooked up to a timer with analytical balance measured food intake and no free will WRT activity, yes that equation could have low enough error bars on both (in) and (out) to be usefully applied to get a realistic value for (delta). Average american diet and lifestyle? Naw all you're going to get as an output is a white noise source, on a medium term large population average anyway.
(Ah I edit in this "real world-ish" example. Lets say skinny 20 yr old dude turns into fat 30 year old dude and he burns about 3000 calories per day to make the math easy. That means he averages a mere 103% of his perfect ratio of (In) vs (Out) where 100% would have resulted in no gain or loss over a decade. I theorize the error bars on (In) exceed three percent unless under constant medical supervision (every apple you ever ate was within 3% of spec? Really?) and the error bars on (Out) exceed twenty five percent, so the delta is meaningless WRT getting this dude either fat or thin. What does work is if his diet makes him sleepy / lazy / queasy / slow / blood sugar high or crash / whatever that screws up his (Out) enough to make him fat. And any change in (Out) is going to be more effective than any change in (In). So eat what makes you healthy, as long as you define healthy as "active" not necessarily classical stereotypical exercising)
arguing by assertion doesn't make it true. You are referring to the caloric balance hypothesis, and it is sad that you guys are downvoting me for calling it in to question. It has not been experimentally verified.
And yeah, some friends and I have tested on ourselves eating 4,000 calories without significantly altering exercise levels, and anecdotally have not gained weight.
I just spent the last year losing 60 pounds. I did so by reducing my food intake. At one point I began to exercise without reducing intake and I began to lose weight. Once classes started, I could not longer exercise as much and my weight loss stagnated. So I tried simply eating less and continued to lose weight. I lost about 40 by exercising only and about 20 reducing intake only.
There is a difference between protein calories and carbohydrate calories and how each is processed, but beside that, calories represent energy. Energy that must be used. Otherwise, it will be stored.
Just because something works doesn't mean your hypothesis as to WHY it works is true. See any research published on Traditional Chinese Medicine for a similar example. [spoiler: it definitely works, but is it REALLY because of qi meridians?] I think it is great that your approach is working for you, because that is what matters. Congrats on the weight loss.
>Just because something works doesn't mean your hypothesis as to WHY it works is true.
But in general, it actually does. This is how science works. You get an idea that doing something will produce a result. If you do that thing and see the expected result, that indicates a successful hypothesis. After that the conversation devolves into existential questions on whether humans can really know.
Ah, the oldest scientific trap. In actuality you must form a hypothesis, then construct an experiment designed to DISPROVE the hypothesis. For example, for how many months must I eat 4000 calories a day without altering exercise or gaining weight (just hypothetically) before I cause you to reconsider your hypothesis.
To disprove a hypothesis, you must already have data. You can't form a hypothesis without data. How can I start to collect data to disprove a hypothesis I haven't come up with yet?
Well to get initial data, you must have some guidance in the data you decide to collect. There must be structure, a control, standardized values. You can't form a proper experiment without first having a hypothesis. Your goal is not to prove it correct regardless of the results, your goal is to gain insight on your hypothesis base on the results. I never said you must prove your hypothesis correct. But the goal is certainly to assess the accuracy of your estimation.
Your comment is really just a strawman tactic anyway. Thread derailed.
People are notoriously poor at recording and estimating both food intake and actual caloric output including changes in base metabolic rate and overall activity level including sleep and even mood changes. Unless you were in some kind of inpatient medical facility under medical observation I'm not thinking your data is going to be accurate enough to detect any change, especially short term.
The other issue is a crude engineering rule of thumb (why isn't it a dietary rule of thumb?) is something like one hundred calories per day, every day, equals one hundred pounds of fat per decade, either plus or minus. Very few people get fat (or thin) in a week or a month or even a year. It takes a fairly heroic effort for a woman to just gain baby weight in 9 months. Try four thousand calories per day for a decade and get back to us, if someone can roll you to the keyboard at that time (unless you're all pro atheletes or lumberjacks or something).
I have experienced dramatic weight loss in recent years by addressing other issues. I agree with some of the statements you have made here, though they don't give a good idea of what you do think is true. I would be interested in hearing about that. If you don't want to do it in a public and openly hostile environment, my email address is in my profile.
