Diets 2023 the thinner thread

[shpalman]

Given OtherHalf's allergies all meals are cooked from scratch - how well do those calorie apps do with such things? I'll only know the total quantities in a dish that may end up with 6 or so servings.

I can program recipes into mine but I know how many servings it's going to divide up into.

[Bird on a Fire]

On MyFitnessPal I put in the whole recipe as 1 serving, then if I eat half of it I can specify 0.5 servings (etc).

[Gfamily]

I don't really have a diet, but I know that when I'm out in France I eat better and consistently lose weight
I think it's mainly that we are more controlled with the portion sizes - so rather than having a baked potato, we're more likely to have a set number of pommes noisette or potato croquettes.
In addition,because we are less likely to have packets of crisps or biscuits around there's reduced scope for just snacking between meals.

The horizontal lines show when we've been in France

Weight vs date.png (52.96 KiB) Viewed 885 times

What's clear is that I return with good intentions, but they pass as the weather gets colder

[discovolante]

Which is all fine in theory....

Today starts with me skipping breakfast - because I've been given antibiotics which need to be take 4x daily on empty stomach, and while I can have a later breakfast at the weekend, it doesn't really work at work.

I know this isn't the way you're supposed to diet, but life happens. It'll only be for a week.

I managed to bring fruit in for lunch but left the sandwich in the fridge (probably the effect of not having breakfast). we'll see how badly that goes.



WFIW my diet/exercise is generally pretty wholesome, it had all just got a bit off track in dec, I don't need to lose much, and then I'll reset to my normal trend. I don't own a car so walk a lot anyway, cycle to/from work every day and get out and about at weekends.
Given OtherHalf's allergies all meals are cooked from scratch - how well do those calorie apps do with such things? I'll only know the total quantities in a dish that may end up with 6 or so servings.

On myfitnesspal you can say how many servings a recipe makes. Which is helpful for me because I batch cook a lot.

Edited because my phone autocorrects "is" to "isn't", of course

[shpalman]

Resistance is useful

I've probably posted that before.

[science_fox]

What do people think of this - https://www.chemistryworld.com/features ... 64.article

Chemistry World is the Royal Society of Chemistry's publication so normally quite conservative. The article is a summary of a few papers (which I didn't read), but basically a 'chemicals bad' story, all the usual suspects: plasticisers, phthalates and BPA and its analogues; flame retardants; and per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), with hypothesis that these bind to a fat receptor and change cells metabolism into storage mode.

I still don't see how this changes the calorie in vs calories out argument, other than the efficiency of calorie In is increased.

[shpalman]

What do people think of this - https://www.chemistryworld.com/features ... 64.article

Chemistry World is the Royal Society of Chemistry's publication so normally quite conservative. The article is a summary of a few papers (which I didn't read), but basically a 'chemicals bad' story, all the usual suspects: plasticisers, phthalates and BPA and its analogues; flame retardants; and per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), with hypothesis that these bind to a fat receptor and change cells metabolism into storage mode.

I still don't see how this changes the calorie in vs calories out argument, other than the efficiency of calorie In is increased.

Oh, the obesogens again, causing obesity to rise when we aren't apparently eating more, except that Individuals with overweight or obesity commonly underreport energy intake so of course we're eating more we're just not noticing.

They're really confused about whether "obesogens" (in some cases this refers to the nasty chemicals you mention, in other cases "‘When we add sugar to make a food taste better, we’re making it more obesogenic,’ says Blumberg"*) make you gain weight by somehow making you create fat out of nothing, or if they make you want to eat more, but it can't be the latter because then they'd have to accept that "calories in > calories out" still leads to weight gain (whatever causes it) and they don't want to do that:

The obesogenic community is adamant that calorie counting has led clinicians and the public astray. And they are starting to spread their beliefs to the medical community. If you relegate weight gain to simple maths, energy in and energy out, then you gain weight if you eat too much and exercise too little. This is the energy balance model, and its major premise is that a calorie is a calorie, and you must not end up with too many.

Except when it's not the person's fault responsibility:

His colleague Lustig views energy storage as coming first and increased food intake following. ‘In this energy storage model,’ he says, ‘biochemistry comes first, then the behaviours.’ He arrived at this conclusion partly from a study of children cured of a brain tumour, but obese because a drug ramped up their insulin levels. This pushed energy into fat, leaving them lethargic and hungry.

* - apparently this is the fault of the fructose component which "would cause obesity even if it didn’t have calories".

[shpalman]

Another advantage of advance meal preparation is that refridgerated and then reheated pasta is less fattening and rice does a similar thing.

Keep it in the fridge though.

[Millennie Al]

I still don't see how this changes the calorie in vs calories out argument,

The calories in vs calories out (at least as usually meant) is wrong. You can dry human dung and burn it, proving it still contains energy. While technically the energy you absorb is the difference between calories in and calories out, the out side of the balance sheet contains more than energy expended in exercise etc. A difference in ability to absorb energy in food can make a big difference to your energy absorbtion by changing the amount of energy which passes straight through you.

[shpalman]

I still don't see how this changes the calorie in vs calories out argument,

The calories in vs calories out (at least as usually meant) is wrong. You can dry human dung and burn it, proving it still contains energy.

Most of that would be fibre, which is already substracted from the nutritional carbohydrate calories.

While technically the energy you absorb is the difference between calories in and calories out, the out side of the balance sheet contains more than energy expended in exercise etc. A difference in ability to absorb energy in food can make a big difference to your energy absorbtion by changing the amount of energy which passes straight through you.

What can a person do to change their ability to absorb food? I've already mentioned refrigerating cooked carbohydrates to make resistant starch, and there's at least one drug which reduces the ability to absorb fat by blocking lipase. Generally eating fresh or minimally-processed foods might make their calories less bioavailable.

[science_fox]

I still don't see how this changes the calorie in vs calories out argument,

The calories in vs calories out (at least as usually meant) is wrong. You can dry human dung and burn it, proving it still contains energy. While technically the energy you absorb is the difference between calories in and calories out, the out side of the balance sheet contains more than energy expended in exercise etc. A difference in ability to absorb energy in food can make a big difference to your energy absorbtion by changing the amount of energy which passes straight through you.

That's essentially static. If you're not gaining weight, a body contains n calories. If you eat more than you expend you contain n+x calories, and vice versa if you're losing weight then it's n-x.

It is conceivable, that changes in metabolism mean that of the total 2000 calories in a meal, you may change the proportion of those you a) burn for use, b) store as fat, c) eliminate, however if you've become more efficient at b) you simply need to eat fewer calories to start with.

I guess you could get to a situation where b is massively more efficient than a, so that you don't have the energy to to daily tasks, but still put on weight. This is perhaps what the discussion is about, and how to shift that balance, with the article claiming the Bad Chemicals influence the a/b/c ratio. It would be helpful to know how to shift it back towards a (or c).



ETA today is the first day when I've felt hungry at work, after not having breakfast due to antibiotics (to be taken on an empty stomach). Maybe I'll just continue not eating breakfast which up until now has been a staple part of my meals.

[dyqik]

Other research shows that eating a big breakfast, medium lunch and small dinner is a useful way to keep calorie intake under control.

[Millennie Al]

What can a person do to change their ability to absorb food?

Change their gut microbiome. For example, see the discussion at https://www.healthwriting.com/fmt-weight-loss/ One method, more suitable for DIY, is eating more fibre. However, there is a lot which is not well understood in this area and a lot more research is needed.

[shpalman]

... women burned more body fat during morning exercise, whereas evenings counted more for men.

... women interested in reducing fat around their middle and reducing their blood pressure should aim to exercise in the morning...
However... women trying to improve muscle strength in their upper body as well as their overall mood and food intake, should take evening exercise...

The men in the trial were less sensitive to the time of day they exercised, improving their strength in the mornings and evenings.

... evening exercise was found to be ideal for men interested in improving heart and metabolic health, as well as emotional wellbeing

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10 ... 93783/full

I was actually looking for the thing which suggested that women should actually eat carbs before cardio exercise in order to burn more fat, which is the opposite of what works for men.

[shpalman]

What can a person do to change their ability to absorb food?

Change their gut microbiome. For example, see the discussion at https://www.healthwriting.com/fmt-weight-loss/ One method, more suitable for DIY, is eating more fibre. However, there is a lot which is not well understood in this area and a lot more research is needed.

That reminded me to look up the case of Rapid and unexpected weight gain after fecal transplant.

The resistant starch thing from refrigerating pasta or rice counts like eating more fibre.

If the way to improve the gut microbiome is to eat better food which isn't junk then that's also the right answer to some of the other questions in this thread so do that anyway. Otherwise until the fecal transplant thing becomes mainstream you're just going to have to work with the gut microbiome you've got, and if it's too good at absorbing food, eat less food.

[Millennie Al]

That reminded me to look up the case of Rapid and unexpected weight gain after fecal transplant.

...

Otherwise until the fecal transplant thing becomes mainstream you're just going to have to work with the gut microbiome you've got, and if it's too good at absorbing food, eat less food.

The extremely large and healthy diet industry gets so much repeat business that it shows that attempting to eat less food does not work. And indeed, in the very article you cited it says:

Sixteen months later, the woman weighed 170 pounds, and her BMI was 33, meeting medical criteria for obesity. The weight gain persisted despite a medically supervised liquid protein diet and exercise program. Continuing efforts to diet and exercise did not lower her weight: Three years after the transplant, she weighed 177 pounds with a BMI of 34.5, and she remains obese today.

[shpalman]

Hey look based on one anecdote someone went and got data:

Body Mass Index Changes After Fecal Microbiota Transplant for Recurrent Clostridium difficile Infection

Overall, 103 (65%) patients undergoing FMT maintained their weight group, 19 (12%) patients decreased by one weight group, 33 (20%) patients increased by one weight group, and one patient increased by two weight groups... there seemed to be no effect of donor BMI on recipient BMI after one time FMT.

And diets do work for losing weight, the problem is that then people either don't follow them or just stop doing them because they're usually sold or understood as unsustainable short-term fixes, and they gain it back.

Scientific evidence of diets for weight loss: Different macronutrient composition, intermittent fasting, and popular diets

In the short term, high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets and intermittent fasting are suggested to promote greater weight loss and could be adopted as a jumpstart. However, owing to adverse effects, caution is required. In the long term, current evidence indicates that different diets promoted similar weight loss and adherence to diets will predict their success. Finally, it is fundamental to adopt a diet that creates a negative energy balance and focuses on good food quality to promote health.

[science_fox]

Hey look based on one anecdote someone went and got data:

Body Mass Index Changes After Fecal Microbiota Transplant for Recurrent Clostridium difficile Infection

Overall, 103 (65%) patients undergoing FMT maintained their weight group, 19 (12%) patients decreased by one weight group, 33 (20%) patients increased by one weight group, and one patient increased by two weight groups... there seemed to be no effect of donor BMI on recipient BMI after one time FMT.

And diets do work for losing weight, the problem is that then people either don't follow them or just stop doing them because they're usually sold or understood as unsustainable short-term fixes, and they gain it back.

Scientific evidence of diets for weight loss: Different macronutrient composition, intermittent fasting, and popular diets

In the short term, high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets and intermittent fasting are suggested to promote greater weight loss and could be adopted as a jumpstart. However, owing to adverse effects, caution is required. In the long term, current evidence indicates that different diets promoted similar weight loss and adherence to diets will predict their success. Finally, it is fundamental to adopt a diet that creates a negative energy balance and focuses on good food quality to promote health.

There's two issues here (esp the bold part). a)Can you lose weight on a diet. (ans Yes).
b) what food regime should you eat to maintain a given weight.

b is trickier. Obviously if you go back to eating what you did beforehand when you were gaining weight, you'll go back to gaining weight. So once you're about 'right' you can relax your diet a bit, because you don't want to continue losing weight, but that 'bit' is difficult to judge with many factors in play.

[shpalman]

Hey look based on one anecdote someone went and got data:

Body Mass Index Changes After Fecal Microbiota Transplant for Recurrent Clostridium difficile Infection

Overall, 103 (65%) patients undergoing FMT maintained their weight group, 19 (12%) patients decreased by one weight group, 33 (20%) patients increased by one weight group, and one patient increased by two weight groups... there seemed to be no effect of donor BMI on recipient BMI after one time FMT.

And diets do work for losing weight, the problem is that then people either don't follow them or just stop doing them because they're usually sold or understood as unsustainable short-term fixes, and they gain it back.

Scientific evidence of diets for weight loss: Different macronutrient composition, intermittent fasting, and popular diets

In the short term, high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets and intermittent fasting are suggested to promote greater weight loss and could be adopted as a jumpstart. However, owing to adverse effects, caution is required. In the long term, current evidence indicates that different diets promoted similar weight loss and adherence to diets will predict their success. Finally, it is fundamental to adopt a diet that creates a negative energy balance and focuses on good food quality to promote health.

There's two issues here (esp the bold part). a)Can you lose weight on a diet. (ans Yes).
b) what food regime should you eat to maintain a given weight.

b is trickier. Obviously if you go back to eating what you did beforehand when you were gaining weight, you'll go back to gaining weight. So once you're about 'right' you can relax your diet a bit, because you don't want to continue losing weight, but that 'bit' is difficult to judge with many factors in play.

Wot people reckon is that you're fighting your body's "set point" with a short-term diet when what you should actually be doing is trying to gradually move the set point over the long term. I'm going to cite exactly the same number of sources for this as you just did.

[shpalman]

Ah it's ok bread with a bit of broad-bean flour in it will fix everything because “Ninety-six per cent of people in the UK eat bread, and 90% of that is white bread...” obviously means that 86% of the population subsist entirely on nothing but white bread.

[Stranger Mouse]

I put on some weight over Christmas and I’ve only just started dropping it. I reread Gene Eating by Giles Yeo (about appetite) and started reading his Why Calories Don’t Count which really made me reassess how I was eating (fwiw both books are cheap on ebook for another couple of days http://www.amazon.co.uk/Giles-Yeo/e/B07 ... scns_share )

As a result of reading these I’ve started to eat more calories on my night shift (which is quite physically active) even though I don’t have much appetite then. Before I wasn’t feeling hungry in the morning after just having a couple of bananas in the night but I was still pigging out on all types of rubbish when I got back and that was also interfering with my sleep. Now I have one of these peanut high protein flapjacks which provide useful amounts of energy in a slow release form in a convenient manner and then go straight to sleep when I get back without problems. https://www.amazon.co.uk/PhD-Nutrition- ... 192&sr=1-1

I’m trying to resign my whole attitude to macronutrients with particular regard to bumping up higher quality fats at particular times to reduce potential hunger several hours later rather than immediately. I also try and time carbohydrates in the middle of my activity (to replace glycogen that has been used and prepare for further activity.

My resting heart rate also went up to mid seventies after Christmas but now it’s back down to 64. I must remember to check my blood pressure again which before Christmas had gone from high to high normal to normal to optimal but I have no doubt increased after Christmas.

My next plan is to try an get a bit more active at weekends as I get practically immobile then. My last full week on my Fitbit show just what a drop off there is

Mon 16th Jan 22,421 steps
Tue 33,704
Wed 34,131
Thur 31,520
Fri 24,987

Sat 1,692
Sun 2,198

[shpalman]

Apparently eating a fat-rich dessert as a first rather than final course is a thing but it's not obvious where that comes from since this reference is about the choice order but I suppose that people are choosing the subsequent courses all at once so it can't be based on how sated they feel after eating the first thing.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-04355-001

[shpalman]

... message that exercise won’t help you lose weight “lacks nuance”

Pontzer... traveled to Tanzania to study the energy budgets of the Hadza hunter-gatherers.... As they hunt and forage, Hadza women walk about 8 kilometers daily; men, 14 kilometers—more than a typical American walks in 1 week.

To learn about their energy expenditure, Pontzer asked the Hadza whether they’d drink his [doubly labeled water] and give urine samples.* They agreed. He almost couldn’t get funding for the study, because other researchers assumed the answer was obvious. “Everyone knew the Hadza had exceptionally high energy expenditures because they were so physically active,” he recalls. “Except they didn’t.”

Individual Hadza had days of more and less activity, and some burned 10% more or less calories than average. But when adjusted for nonfat body mass, Hadza men and women burned the same amount of energy per day on average as men and women in the United States, as well as those in Europe, Russia, and Japan, he reported in PLOS ONE in 2012. “It’s surprising when you consider the differences in physical activity,” Schoeller says.

Studies of other hunter-gatherer and forager groups have confirmed the Hadza are not an anomaly. Pontzer thinks hunter-gatherers’ bodies adjust for more activity by spending fewer calories on other unseen tasks, such as inflammation and stress responses. “Instead of increasing the calories burned per day, the Hadza’s physical activity was changing the way they spend their calories,” he says.

He backed this up with a new analysis of data from another team’s study of sedentary women trained to run half marathons: After weeks of training, they barely burned more energy per day when they were running 40 kilometers per week than before they started to train. In another study of marathoners who ran 42.6 kilometers daily 6 days per week for 140 days in the Race Across the USA, Pontzer and his colleagues found the runners burned gradually less energy over time—4900 calories per day at the end of the race compared with 6200 calories at the start.

As the athletes’ ran more and more over weeks or months, their metabolic engines cut back elsewhere to make room for the extra exercise costs, Pontzer says. Conversely, if you’re a couch potato, you might still spend almost as many calories daily, leaving more energy for your body to spend on internal processes such as a stress response.

“You can’t exercise your way out of obesity,” says evolutionary physiologist John Speakman of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “It’s one of those zombie ideas that refuses to die.” Already the research is influencing dietary guidelines for nutrition and weight loss. The U.K. National Food Strategy, for example, notes that “you can’t outrun a bad diet.”

But Thyfault warns that message may do more harm than good. People who exercise are less likely to gain weight in the first place, and those who exercise while they diet tend to keep weight off better, he says. Exercise also can impact where fat is stored on the body and the risk of diabetes and heart disease, he says.

Pontzer agrees that exercise is essential for good health: The Hadza, who are active and fit into their 70s and 80s, don’t get diabetes and heart disease. And, he adds, “If exercise is tamping down the stress response, that compensation is a good thing.” But he says it’s not fair to mislead dieters: “Exercise prevents you from getting sick, but diet is your best tool for weight management.”

* -

People drink a harmless cocktail of labeled water, in which distinct isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen replace the common forms. Then researchers sample their urine several times over 1 week. The labeled hydrogen passes through the body into urine, sweat, and other fluids, but as a person burns calories, some of the labeled oxygen is exhaled as carbon dioxide. The ratio of labeled oxygen to labeled hydrogen in the urine thus serves as a measure of how much oxygen a person’s cells used on average in a day and therefore how many calories were burned.

[shpalman]

Meanwhile the Guardian suggests having dinner for breakfast, or at least that you should get more protein in the morning.

[bagpuss]

Meanwhile the Guardian suggests having dinner for breakfast, or at least that you should get more protein in the morning.

n=1, anecdata and all that but...

I changed my breakfast habits about 18 months ago, from always eating something heavy on the carbs, albeit "healthy"*, such as a low sugar cereal or porridge (unless staying at a hotel/B&B) to always ensuring I had a good amount of protein at breakfast. As I hate eggs and don't really have much interest in eating dinner for breakfast, this is almost always plain skyr, with some high protein granola and fresh or frozen fruit to make it more enjoyable to eat. Whereas before, I was always hungry by mid-late morning and really wanting an elevenses snack, I very very rarely feel hungry before lunch now. It works for me, for sure.

My downfall is now sugar cravings in the evening when I'm tired, but I'm working on that one.


*Whatever that means - in this case, porridge, Weetabix, or Bitesize Shredded Wheat, either with or without fruit.