Calories are a very broad way to measure what we need in terms of food. Eating 200-2500 at 50-60% carbs tends to make me fat-ter than eating 3000 at 20%.
I cook most of the food I eat, but I take calories into account very broadly, more narrowly when I diet.
Just to say, 1000 kcal might be half day worth of your energy needs on paper, in reality it's much more complex than that. In fact, if you are eating decent food and keeping fat% at ~30-40, I guarantee you that you will have troubles eating more than 2500 kcal per day. If you drink lots of soda and crap like than, then yes, you can manage even 3000. But eating a lot of calories is not such an easy task as many people think.
Edit: Wow, this generated quite a lot of debate. Just to clarify, I have never said that you lose wait eating as much as you want, I said I think we should consider the number of calories more broadly. Use ranges and look into the weekly intakes too. Check what you eat. Kill all the refined sugars. Kill all the complex foods. Start cooking. That will help you more than counting kcals to the gram. It's about how you shift your way of thinking about food. Lots of food out there is almost poison if eaten regularly, lots of this food is even labelled as "healthy", again, it cannot be only about kcals, it's _also_ about kcals.
> Eating 200-2500 at 50-60% carbs tends to make me fat-ter than eating 3000 at 20%.
This is horse shit. It does not matter what form the calories are in, if you are eating too many you will gain weight. If you eat less than you need you will lose weight.
Not necessarily "horse shit". We know sugars produce insulin responses. We know insulin causes growth/weightgain. We know carbs most directly convert to sugar, followed by protein, followed by fat. So in theory you may be able to eat more fat and protein without gaining AS much weight. Now if you are at a calorie deficit you aren't going to gain I agree with that but I can consume more calories of high fat / low carb and still lose weight.
The bottom line with dieting is find something that works for you.
The two sides of this argument always talk past each other. As someone who lost 100lbs I'm sure you know this but lots of people don't.
* Calories in vs. calories out is 100% what determines how much weight you gain or lose.
* Your macronutrient ratios determine how that weight is partitioned (muscle vs fat) and have some control over hormones that contribute to hunger, like leptin.
The end result is that cutting out carbs can help people get to a calorie deficit without feeling hungry like they would on a "standard" low fat diet.
Cutting carbs helps because carbs aren't filling/satisfying. That's true. But he wasn't making that claim. He was making the old woo-woo claim that you can eat way too many calories in fat and still lose weight.
The only way to lose weight is to have a calorie deficit.
> Calories in vs. calories out is 100% what determines how much weight you gain or lose.
No, its not. Muscle and fat don't take the same calorie surplus/deficit per pound to gain or lose, so calories in vs. calories out will not tell the whole story of how much weight you gain or lose.
I believe, in fact, that it takes less of a calorie surplus to gain a pound of muscle than the calorie deficit to lose a pound of fat, so that its actually possible to gain weight over time on a net calorie deficit, within certain bounds.
Unless your protein intake is severely lower than 50g/day the partitioning is minimal at best.
Also you will never be fully satiated on any meaningful caloric deficit, 40-60g/fiber per day usually increases satiation.
What exactly do you mean by 'standard low fat diet'?
> What exactly do you mean by 'standard low fat diet'?
Sorry, I was referring to what has been the standard recommendation for losing weight and being healthy - low fat, low protein, high carb.
> Also you will never be fully satiated on any meaningful caloric deficit, 40-60g/fiber per day usually increases satiation
I disagree a million times over. I'm a 6'1" 190lb male who frequently cuts on 1700 calories and I can feel stuffed all day by consuming lots of lean protein and vegetables. For example two pounds of chicken breast each day would leave me absolutely stuffed with room for another 750 calories for carbs and fat.
> Sorry, I was referring to what has been the standard recommendation for losing weight and being healthy - low fat, low protein, high carb.
I've never in my life heard anyone recommend "low fat, low protein, high carb" for losing weight and being healthy (as a maintenance diet for people without special needs like losing weight, sure, I've seen that.) Even 30ish years ago, while "low fat" was prominent, a focus on lean protein sources as a main source of calories was common. And, "low carb" to the extreme has been the common recommendation, in various forms, since the late 1990s.
>Also you will never be fully satiated on any meaningful caloric deficit
My personal experience is quite the opposite. When I did the whole low carb thing, I was having to intentionally supplement my calorie intake because I was eating 800-1000 calories per day otherwise which I felt was too low (my BMR at the time was ballpark 3000 calories, so figure burning around 3600/day even sedentary).
The only other time in my life that I've had to make a conscious effort to eat enough was when I was on prescription adderall in high school and would sometimes forget to eat for an entire day. Outside of that, I eat, and eat too much, honestly.
I quit the keto thing after about 6 months because, frankly, I missed pasta too much, but the whole appetite suppression thing with it is very real in my experience and is one of the most commonly reported side effects I've seen online.
I'm not qualified to discuss this in detail, but we shouldn't necessarily discount the biochemistry of people and how they differ. Some people process carbohydrates much less efficiently than others, making it harder to lose weight. While the baseline is absolutely true (you can't stuff an excess of calories in your body on a no-carb diet and expect weight loss), it is more complicated than that.
In fact it does matter where the calories come from. It matters dramatically.
You eat doritos, white pasta, white bread, pizza and Mt. Dew. Consume 2,000 calories per day.
I'll eat broccoli, chicken breasts, eggs, and bacon at 2,000 calories per day.
Let's compare results after six months. Can you lose weight by keeping your terrible diet below X calories - good luck with that - but yes you can, assuming you can handle what the hyper carb diet does to your body's sense of being full and energy levels. However we will not have the same results, and you can eat more calories in my diet than you can in yours, because to process my diet burns more calories than yours, and the protein in my diet will aid your muscle retention a lot more than the high sugar diet.
Hint: protein is a vastly superior intake vs junk carbohydrates. 300 calories from chicken are NOT used or processed by the body the same way as 300 calories from a Mt. Dew. Broccoli burns a lot of calories during the process of digestion relative to its calorie count.
You are 100% wrong. First off, neither of us are going to significantly lose weight at 2k/day. That's not much of a deficit unless you are really, really fat or really, really active.
Secondly, yes I can eat garbage like McDonald's and Wendy's and only eat 1500 calories/day and lose weight. That's exactly what I did.
> It does not matter what form the calories are in
This is horse shit.
Carbohydrates are very easy to transform to glucose, therefore you get a spike in glucose levels from a carb-reach meal. An excess of glucose gets converted and stored as fat. The same amount of calories consumed as fat or proteins would take much longer to process, thus not causing a spike in glucose level, thus not triggering a fat storage process.
The calorie range you listed is the difference between a cut and a bulk for most people. There is no possible way you could achieve better weight loss running a calorie surplus relative to a calorie deficit.
> In fact, if you are eating decent food and keeping fat% at ~30-40, I guarantee you that you will have troubles eating more than 2500 kcal per day.
2500 calories per day is what I eat when I'm running a cut, and I'm usually hungry even after hitting my macros. Daily caloric needs are individual.
As a response to some of the other commenters, weight loss is a more holistic thing than just number of calories.
Even if we assume a calorie is a calorie, and that what kind of calorie has no effect on how fast your body naturally burns them (and that's debatable), the body response may be such that you naturally exercise more if you eat a diet geared one way or another.
That is, the poster may find that after eating carbs, especially simpler ones, their energy spikes, but they're too full to comfortably exercise. But by the time they'd be comfortable exercising they're too tired, and they simply don't. Whereas with higher fat/protein, they feel less full, and/or maintain energy levels longer, and naturally exercise more. Or whatever.
> Eating 200-2500 at 50-60% carbs tends to make me fat-ter than eating 3000 at 20%.
Assuming that's a typo and you mean 2000-2500 at 50-60% carbs, that's not at all as implausible as some response seem to make it seem -- if it has an effect on your activity level. Its not implausible that a subtle effect that doesn't even consciously register could make a 500 calorie difference for someone who isn't actively tracking activity (a 1000 calorie difference is less likely without noticing the activity impact.)
Human metabolism is a (set of) complex process(es). You are not just burning the plate of food in a furnace.
Of course if you eat less calories than the bare minimum needed to sustain life, you will loose weight no matter what, but that is an unhealthy way of doing it and no sane nutritionist will risk advising you to do so.
On the other hand, it is actually possible to gain weight by restricting calories just a little. Humans did not evolve in an environment where superabundance of food required voluntary abstinence to keep in good shape. When you just cut calorie intake your body enters "starvation mode": metabolism slows down, non essential processes get suspended, you tire out more easily, etc. The result is that if you do not overcompensate with will force and do exercise, you will end up undercutting your calorie usage below your reduced calorie intake, and grow fast.
The body is wise: it knows when things begin to go bad, they always can get worse.
Without agreeing with the OP's point this is a stupid retort. Even with a jet engine you're going to have different amounts of output even with the same amount of input fuel, based on differences in combustion efficiency.
What about other factors? Sure thermodynamics says if you burn more calories then you take in you will lose weight but what about other factor like insulin that cause weight gain? Is eating 300 calories of sugar really the same as 300 calories of fat? I know from personal experience I can eat the same amount of calories on a keto(low carb high fat diet) and lose weight. Although eating fat makes it much easier to cut down on calories and accelerate weight loss even quicker because I'm simply not hungry like I usually am.
There are very few activities that let you meaningfully adjust your metabolism, the effective ones are thermogenic in nature. The only one of these that's at all fun is swimming. I spent all of last year trying to exercise to lose weight, the only thing that worked was lowering my intake.
People say weightlifting works, but it only helps when you're already relatively skinny. I know, I tried. You can be strong and fat. People say running works. It has a small effect but it's nothing to write home about. My sister runs marathons and still struggles with her weight. The problem is that exercise is maybe 10% of the picture, whereas intake is the other 90%. It's easy to fool yourself into thinking you're making progress on your weight goals by exercising, then throwing it all away on extra snacks. People get caught up in chasing mushy health goals and forget about the hard empirical facts.
I cook most of the food I eat, but I take calories into account very broadly, more narrowly when I diet.
Just to say, 1000 kcal might be half day worth of your energy needs on paper, in reality it's much more complex than that. In fact, if you are eating decent food and keeping fat% at ~30-40, I guarantee you that you will have troubles eating more than 2500 kcal per day. If you drink lots of soda and crap like than, then yes, you can manage even 3000. But eating a lot of calories is not such an easy task as many people think.
Edit: Wow, this generated quite a lot of debate. Just to clarify, I have never said that you lose wait eating as much as you want, I said I think we should consider the number of calories more broadly. Use ranges and look into the weekly intakes too. Check what you eat. Kill all the refined sugars. Kill all the complex foods. Start cooking. That will help you more than counting kcals to the gram. It's about how you shift your way of thinking about food. Lots of food out there is almost poison if eaten regularly, lots of this food is even labelled as "healthy", again, it cannot be only about kcals, it's _also_ about kcals.