Tangentially, I don't understand why so many articles/diets get written about weight loss. At the end of the day, everything boils down to "eat fewer calories than you expend". Given enough time, this regimen will reduce your weight. Period. End of story.
Why must people continually try to create new weight-loss fads all the time?
>At the end of the day, everything boils down to "eat fewer calories than you expend".
Sure, if you stop eating you will lose some weight, but, you can die of starvation while obese. In animal studies, that Taubes cites in one of his books, it is possible to reduce calories and the animals won't lose weight and it is also possible to add a lot of extra calories and not become obese.
Calories have something to do with it because they are one part of the equation. Calories in does equal calories out. Calories In = Calories Stored + Calories Expended. But, the mistake is in thinking that the law of thermodynamics means that the type of calories in doesn't impact the ratio of calories stored/expended -- the variables are not independent. The content of the food you eat impacts: your hunger, your energy level, fat storage rates, and your metabolic rate, all of which mean that attempting to cut or add calories may not have the expected impact depending on what the food is.
> Sure, if you stop eating you will lose some weight, but, you can die of starvation while obese.
This guy[1] went for over a year on vitamins and water. He didn't die, and he did drop a lot of weight. Actually, "prolonged fasting in this patient had no ill-effects." Though it's probably one of those things you really shouldn't try at home.
Taubes gives the example of rats bred or genetically modified to be fat - if you starve them, the body eats the heart and the brain before it gives up on the fat - the animal can starve to death while still fat. Getting fat changes you - a person who was 400 lbs and diets down to 200 has a very different metabolism than a person who has always been 200 lbs. It's possible that something we've been doing is making fat more prone to stick around than it was in times past.
The hypothesis that the problem is too many carbs is plausible but not proven and the full truth is certainly going to be more complex.
Starvation guy is an interesting data point in any cace.
If you boil down what Taubes is saying you get something like the following:
Consciously counting caloric intake and expenditure and trying to target numbers generally doesn't work for losing fat and keeping it off. A good way to lose fat and keep it off is by restricting carbohydrate intake, which in turn will cause your body to spend more calories than it takes in. The first approach is more difficult than the second, and the second one will also help to keep one healthy in other respects.
...
So basically, it's a weight-loss/health strategy that tries to focus on what you're taking in as opposed to how much food in general you're taking in.
The thermodynamics are straightforward. The amount of calories you eat is a known quantity, the amount you expend is a function of a number of variables.
Perhaps something along the lines of:
calories_in(food) => calories_out(activity_level, gender, age, weight, body_fat_percentage, protein, carbohydrates, fat, genetics)
I think the complicated part is altering your environment and/or yourself so that you, on average, don't eat more calories than you expend. That is, to fix the feedback loop to make calories_in equal to calories_out at your desired weight.
It's not the simplest of problems, for instance, two people can do the exact same activities and eat the same amount of food and gain different amounts of weight.
Ideally, people would simply stop being hungry when they had eaten enough food, but if that was true, there would be far less fat people. So what actually seems to be the problem is that the biological system that controls hunger is often miscalibrated. I believe that diets attempt to fix that, to make people feel the 'correct' amount of hunger.
For instance, if sugar caused people to become hungry, or to eat more calories than they otherwise would, or to burn less calories than they normally would, you could create a diet that contained no sugar. The average person, if they followed the diet, would hopefully have a more appropriate hunger level at any given time.
The thermodynamics are straightforward but the mechanisms for energy expenditure aren't.
The body is a dynamic system. It responds to the stresses placed on it and adapts. Remove calorie inputs from the system and it tries to compensate by reducing the calorie expenditure.
Low-carb diets work because they control insulin levels. If you can control/avoid the insulin spikes that regulate the absorption/storage of blood glucose, you can modulate your adipose tissue creation/consumption.
Weightlifters/bodybuilders have known this for a long time. If you're looking for answers and evidence, take a good look at the population that's been experimenting and learning how to effectively build muscle mass and avoid excessive body fat.
What you eat affects how much you want to eat and how much energy your body expends, which is why "eat fewer calories than you expend" is overly simplistic. I'm sure you've come across this argument before, so I don't understand the confusion.
To get down to a 'normal' weight where you look slender but kind of doughy you can probably just cut calories. If you want to be muscular, lean then it's not so simple.
Why must people continually try to create new weight-loss fads all the time?