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People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

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Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#291
My successful weight loss approach is to give up on counting calories and focus entirely on my own weight.

I set a goal weight for the week, and if I weigh more than that, I don’t eat (or eat just vegetables). I’ve lost 5 kg so far and I maintained the weight loss between thanksgiving and new year’s despite spikes on the holidays.

It’s taught me what proper portions feel like so I don’t have a desire to rebound as soon as I take a break.

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#292
post #116

For those that "track and weight everything" (how ?) do you manage ?: - sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils, mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself - different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat…

This won't be useful for you because you share food with others, but for people who do not share food and are interested in long term tracking rather than short term (e.g., they want to take off some weight at a healthy rate and keep it off, as opposed to people who just want to lose a few pounds rapidly for their class reunion and will make no effort after that to keep it off) there is a simple trick that can make i…

I did this for a few weeks when I was maintaining weight and did MyFitnessPal for a couple weeks a few years later and got pretty much the same calorie count each time. Very effective.

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#293
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been diabetic for 20 years. I have tried every method, app, plan, and tool, including systems falsely marketed as "smart." No method works or delivers decent results except for using a scale and weighing ALL the ingredients. For a diabetic, eating "out" is always a roll of the dice. The "fun" feedback from post-meal blood sugar is always a reminder of how "eyeballing a plate" is utterly useless.

It doesn't help that food manufacturers intentionally make it hard to measure nutrition from most of their foods. They play around with serving sizes to hide carbohydrates making you have to do math just to keep up. Sometimes they will round down on grams of macros after setting the serving size so they can claim it has zero sugar when it does in fact have tons of sugar. Tic-tacs are the worst about this. They claim…

In the EU, food manufacturers are required to label macronutrients (and salt) in mg/100mg or mg/100ml for fluids. Easy to compare, works great.

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really hard (emotionally or motivationally) to undereat, which is what you need to do consistently for a long time to lose weight. Aside from the hunger issue, food is enmeshed in all sorts of value having nothing to do with nutritional value per se and everything to do with sociopsychological value. I think I've massively underestimated that in my own life, or misunderstood what that meant or something. I think…

Also there are ways to convince your body that it needs less, and the journey from A to B is very uncomfortable. If you do it wrong you will just endlessly be suffering from your body thinking it's starving. On top of that though is you have to get over your intellectual ideas of how much food you think you need to eat.

This is so dismissive it's almost condescending.

I know how much food I need to eat in order to survive and maintain a healthy weight. But if I eat that amount of food, I'm still hungry.

Doesn't matter what I eat. I'll eat a diet high in protein and fiber, moderate in fat, and low in sugar and starches, which is supposed to be the recipe to feel full without eating empty calories, but it doesn't work. 16 oz steak paired with an 8 oz portion of green beans or broccoli, and I still get the munchies just 2 hours later.

I should probably go to a doctor and ask about Ozempic or something. I did successfully lose about 50 pounds doing keto and brought my A1C from 6.8 down to 5.4, but I damn near lost my sanity because I was always hungry. I've gained it all back and started to get some of diabetic symptoms again.

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#295

For those that "track and weight everything" (how ?) do you manage ?: - sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils, mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself - different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat…

Depends what your goal is. My suggestion is if your goal is weight loss, don't think about calorie tracking at all. Count your servings of whole vegetables/fruit. Try to MAXIMIZE these. Yes, maximize in order to lose weight. It's far easier to track just this small subset of food. If you are maximizing these items, you'll naturally start feeling full and eat less sweets. Try to do this slowly over time, changing your…

Maximize might be a little overkill. The government recommends 5-9 servings of fruit and vegetables a day and I found that getting to that range involves putting so many vegetables in every meal that you feel full naturally.

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#296

I've done research in this space for many years at Google AI and now at SnapCalorie. The thing I find interesting is how confident people are in their ability to estimate portion size visually, and in truth how wrong they all are. We published in CVPR (top peer reviewed academic conference for computer vision) and people are on average off by 53% and even trained professionals are still off by 40%. Basically if you w…

I'm currently dieting again, and the only way that I've been able to properly portion calories is to weigh nearly everything I eat and then add the numbers together in Google Sheets.

Eyeballing a portion of a lot of food can be nearly impossible to determine how much food you actually got, but weight is fairly straightforward and objective (at least to an ounce or so of granularity for most kitchen scales, which is good enough for dieting).

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, first off, commercial salad dressing almost always has sugar in it. Look at the nutritional facts label next time you're shopping for it. There's a few brands that offer "simple vinegar and oil" style dressings that don't have any sugar in them, but MOST salad dressings Americans come in contact with are full of sugar. Even low GI foods still cause blood sugar to raise by some amount. All of the vegetables in the…

Also watch out for "sugar by another name" ... pineapple puree, white grape juice/concentrate, apple juice/concentrate are very common commercial dressing ingredients to load up on sugar. Sure always ask for the vinaigrette eating out, but at home make your own salad dressing: * get a mixing bowl big enough to toss salad in, and a whisk * add 1T dijon mustard, 1T not-balsamic vinegar (balsamic is high sugar! I like s…

I just use old dijon bottles with a bit left in it to get the rest out and shake the heck out of it but I go through a lot of mustard.

The lengths I’ve seen brands go To avoid having sugar as their 1st or 2nd ingredient…

after that you have invert sugar, corn syrup, molasses, brown rice syrup etc. as following ingredients…

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#298
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't help that food manufacturers intentionally make it hard to measure nutrition from most of their foods. They play around with serving sizes to hide carbohydrates making you have to do math just to keep up. Sometimes they will round down on grams of macros after setting the serving size so they can claim it has zero sugar when it does in fact have tons of sugar. Tic-tacs are the worst about this. They claim…

Plus the whole sugar vs. sugar alcohol nonsense, which I still don't completely understand.

Sugar alcohols seem simple enough to me. The properties vary but they generally have fewer calories per gram and a low glycemic index, and some of them are much sweeter per calorie.

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tbh it's "easy" if you're also doing a pretty specific focused diet. (maybe simple would be a better phrase - it can be reduced to very simple steps. mentally choosing to do this and enduring it is difficult, but the process itself is straightforward.) like the worry about sauces is true but if you eat mostly chicken and rice and one slice of bread a day you can really get that variability down. when I was heavily re…

One insidious thing is that it's incredibly easy to do food tracking if you eat mostly single-serving prepared foods, but those are, by nature of being incredibly palatable and digestible, the most psychologically and metabolically challenging foods to maintain a calorie deficit with.

yeah, although there's a variety there and you can find some lower and higher ones. (bags of anything starchy are difficult, sandwiches are very variable.. I leaned on wraps and stuff like Chicken salad without toppings a lot.)

some prepared foods are basically the "empty calories" that people always talk about, like chips. high calorie (and usually like 3-4 servings per bag, not single serving really at all) and also low satiation so they almost make you hungrier to eat.

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#300

In my experience, people are especially bad at understanding how calorific alcohol is. Carbs and protein are generally 4 calories per gram. Alcohol is 7 calories per gram. Only fat is more energy dense at 9 calories per gram. I can recall in the aughts when there was a major low carb food trend and Bacardi had a popular ad campaign around the fact that their rum had no carbs, basically marketing it as the smarter opt…

Alcohol is a tricky one, because its calories are an especially bad way of measuring impact on energy and weight.

It is kind of like measuring the calories of wood. It burns well, so it has a high calories, but metabolizes poorly. A block of wood is about 400 kCal/100g.

Ethanol has 1325 kJ/mol of energy. If the reaction stops part way through the metabolic pathways, which happens because acetic acid is excreted in the urine after drinking, then not nearly as much energy can be derived from alcohol, only 215.1 kJ/mol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacology_of_ethanol#Metabo...

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