I understand that from the zoomed out perspective, when you learn about advancements in the field from newspapers, magazines or blogs, it looks that way. But this is mostly the fault of various media sensationalizing findings, drawing their own conclusions and prioritizing shocking headlines over levelheaded critique of scientific study results as well as framing it in the proper context.
The total body of scientific evidence is not really in such disarray as the reporting would have you believe.
However, your conclusion still hits the mark; eat well and exercise.
Being overweight is unhealthy, it can't be done in a healthy way; not in the long term.
While it is possible for an overweight person to not have any of the common health problems associated with being overweight, that is temporary. If you are overweight, you will develop those health problems, it's just a matter of time.
It's basically like smoking and cancer; not all smokers have cancer or get cancer, but there is no such thing as smoking in a healthy way, and if you do it, then the best way to get healthier and to prevent developing health problems in the future is to stop doing it.
Some people can be overweight without developing health problems for a long time, even for a decade or two, but it's just a matter of time. Reducing your bodyweight is easily the best way to improve your health, and to make sure you don't develop health problems in the future.
And, vice versa, many of the things we associate with bad health don't become health problems at all for people who stay lean. Food that we know to have strong correlations with bad health, like eating red meat, sodium, cholesterol, etc, are only really problematic if you also over eat.
Exercise is great, it's terrific, but not over eating is much more important. The saying is true, "you can't outrun a bad diet".
> The term "overweight" does not differentiate between muscle and fat, plain and simple. You're wrong.
You're wrong. The typical diagnostic method for overweight and obesity (BMI) does not differentiate between muscle and fat, because mechanisms that do are too expensive/complex for the use, but the term, in fact, does.
At their most basic, the words “overweight” and “obesity” are ways to describe having too much body fat. [0]
Overweight and obesity are defined as abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that may impair health. [1]
Research has shown that, among dietary and health guidelines, switching soda for diet soda is the most effective guideline that exists.
Eating better is obviously preferable, but the reason most people fail their diet is because it is too hard for them to comply with it. This is where the "switch to diet soda" is so effective; people can actually do it.
I wasn't comparing regular soda to diet soda, I was comparing having diet soda to not having diet soda. Diet soda affects gut flora and insulin levels. Calories are not the whole story.
That has only been demonstrated in mice, however, and only with semi-unrealistically large dosages of sucralose, if memory serves me right.
In humans, we have a lot of evidence that shows that the source of calories does not matter, for fat loss. Long term health is another issue, of course.
IMHO, putting focus anywhere but on calories is doing oneself a very big disservice, except for some athletes and bodybuilders for whom other factors are important as well.
You are confusing "calorie counting", which is a method of losing weight, with a "caloric deficit" being the number one factor for losing weight, which is a fact.
It doesn't matter if you count calories or not. What matters is that you achieve a caloric deficit. Any method that is applied successfully to achieve weight loss has resulted in a caloric deficit, whether or not that method was calorie counting.
Calorie deficit is harmful for you though, there's an imbalance. You tell your body it's starving. As soon as you have an extra calorie to spare, you're body will immediately store it as fat, making your hard work essentially meaningless in the long run.
What scientific evidence? Let me guess, some blog post from a company that sells said diet? Give me a break.
Starving your body does indeed make you lose weight, that's true. It's just not a healthy way to do it. Nor is it long term. Your body will more than compensate for it as it regains all the weight you lost as soon as you eat like a regular person.
No, I'm talking about actual scientific evidence published in peer reviewed scientific journals. There are mountains of it available.
Being in a caloric deficit is not starving yourself, it just means that over a period of time, usually a full day, you spent more energy than you consumed, and the difference is taken out of your energy storage, which is mostly adipose tissue. This is how fat loss happens.
Oh I get it now, there's a misconception here.
A caloric deficit DIET is detrimental to you. But you can still obtain calorie deficit process by simply increasing the output (i.e. exercise). Eating quality food helps too.
There is nothing detrimental about being on a caloric deficit diet if are overweight. It's not starving yourself, it's not bad for you, it's the ONLY way you can lose fat. Reducing intake is much more efficient than increasing output, as the article we are discussing elaborates on.
> There is nothing detrimental about being on a caloric deficit diet if are overweight.
Yes, there is. Sustained calorie deficit has a number of potential adverse effects. OTOH, if you are overweight, those detrimental effects may be justified by the expected long-term health benefits of weight loss.
Yes you do lose weight, I don't disagree. If you do have a weight problem, it might be an option. But I don't think it's not detrimental for you or that it's a viable long term solution.
You are making the claim that a caloric deficit is detrimental to health (although you choose to call it "starving yourself" for unknown reasons, even though starvation is something completely different), the onus is on you to show evidence for that.
And I gave you links explaining the downsides. A calorie deficit diet does not guarantee fat-loss, it's more likely that your muscles break down before your fat. Your metabolism slows, making it even harder to lose weight, you'll be stuck in a vicious cycle. And finally, a big enough deficit can trigger starvation (medically) which tells your body to store fat as much as it possibly can. Meaning that as soon as you stop the diet, the weight will come right back, as fat. The proper way to lose weight is to increase the output (i.e. exercise) and eating more quality food. Not eating less.
I'm not against obtaining a calorie deficit because of more exercising or eating less sugar, I'm against having a calorie deficit diet by eating less, as the article suggests.
Must be fun to be able to ignore everything everyone says unless they did a Phd on the subject, while never actually presenting any arguments yourself.
>>> Among the conclusions from the study was the confirmation that prolonged semi-starvation produces significant increases in depression, hysteria and hypochondriasis
>>> Participants exhibited a preoccupation with food, both during the starvation period and the rehabilitation phase
>>> There were marked declines in physiological processes indicative of decreases in each subject’s basal metabolic rate (the energy required by the body in a state of rest), reflected in reduced body temperature, respiration and heart rate.
Depending on the amount of calorie deficit, the symptoms may not be as sever, but they are there. I don't really understand why you can't accept basic science.
My experience is different. I can go days without eating, and not suffer. Food occurs to me, but I'm not preoccupied. I work normally or with extra concentration, for longer. Fasting is the route to focus for me.
Call nutrition science if you like, but begin by admitting each experience may vary. We're not all built the same.
Yes, every person is different. But there are standards and averages and common approaches to these things. Otherwise medicine wouldn't exist since no two people have the same physiology. This is not an excuse to ignore scientific results.
Days without eating is not normal in any sense of the word.
Well, depends. For the first million years it was the norm. In a sense we're designed for it. Modern city-dwellers are all soft and weak and think they have to eat three times a day. But there's absolutely no biological reason its necessary.
That's just not true. If you are talking about hunter-gatherer societies, you'd be surprised to find out they didn't starve themselves regularly. They ate well and worked fewer hours than us, with a surprisingly high life expectancy.
"According to Sahlins, ethnographic data indicated that hunter-gatherers worked far fewer hours and enjoyed more leisure than typical members of industrial society, and they still ate well."
"Sackett found that adults in foraging and horticultural societies work, on average, about 6.5 hours a day, where as people in agricultural and industrial societies work on average 8.8 hours a day.[26]"
A moderate caloric deficit is not starvation, however. So the experiment in question is completely unrelated to your claims. Science does not say that a caloric deficit automatically is starvation, you alone are making that claim.
>>> Science does not say that a caloric deficit automatically is starvation, you alone are making that claim
I never said that. Eating 100 calories less a day is not starvation, duh. But that diet it's not really effective at losing weight, now is it?
I know it's hard to admit being wrong on the internet, but you have no argument here.
You don't need to starve yourself to suffer from those symptoms. Your metabolism slows because it literally doesn't have the same energy to work. Meaning you'll get fat very easily. This doesn't even need a scientific paper, it's just common sense.
If you read closer, the Minnesota experiment showed that when terminating a low calorie diet the body becomes primed to gain fat FIRST before anything else. And your metabolism slows, making it extremely hard to continuously lose weight.
And most importantly, it doesn't work long-term. You can't just lose the weight, you have to stay like that.
Finally, no medical organisation recommends it unless you have a valid medical reason to do so.
"For people who are overweight but not obese (BMI of 27-30), very low-calorie diets should be reserved for those who have weight-related medical problems and are under medical supervision."
Yes, it has been scientifically proven about a bajillion or so times that a caloric deficit causes weightloss, and a caloric surplus causes weight gain, irrespective of the source of calories.
However, eating 3000kcal of "healthy food" is a lot harder than eating the same amount of "junk food", because "junk food" has a higher caloric density -- that is the very thing that makes the food "bad".
A person can easily eat 3000kcal of junk food in a day and still not be satisfied, while a person who eats as much healthy food as they can may still fall shy of 3000kcal.
The literature shows that a caloric deficit is what matters the most for weightloss, by an extremely large margin, so large that all other factors can safely be ignored for "normal people".
Nutrient timing is completely irrelevant for normal people who want to lose weight, and only becomes relevant for bodybuilders with extremely low body fat levels, as well as athletes who train or compete multiple times a day, and even for them it is not one of the most important factors.
I just said nutrient timing is not important; i.e. the exact moment when you eat things, or don't eat things, is not important, for most normal people.
And they are not "my sources"; I'm refering to the available scientific evidence, they are everyone's sources.
And, lastly, the idea that you need to "break down" muscle in order to build it up is not really correct, either. Muscle breakdown happens yes, but it happens whether you workout or not, working out just elevates muscle protein synthesis, thus both the breakdown and build up of muscle protein. But it's not like the breakdown causes the build up, and it's not like there can't be buildup without breakdown, it's not a very good analogy and it's not a really good illustration of the mechanics at work.
There is too much mysticism around nutrition and health; people think it's about the method when it's rather about finding a method that works for you the way you apply it.
People seem to find it very hard to reason about dosages as well; so-and-so is "good for you" and so-and-so is "bad for you", again with the mysticism. Nothing is bad for you and everything is bad for you, all depending on the dose. And vice versa, foods that are supposedly good for you don't do shit if you don't dose it appropriately, and become bad for you if you overdose it.
Another Swede, I agree with a lot of the points, especially how the current government can't help but make themselves look foolish.
But, free health care, free education, almost no religious zealots what so ever, zero religious impact on lawmaking, a relatively inclusive society, etc, makes Sweden one of the better places to live in the world, imho. Obviously, I'm biased.
I too find it rather weird that someone who yearns for more socialism would move from Sweden to the US. :)
