What Does 200 Calories Look Like?

First of all, congrats, that's great.

I've attended hundreds of Weight Watchers meetings over many years and I've personally seen at least 1000 people go from being completely helpless with weight loss to losing somewhere between 50-200lbs each. It's a great achievement.

> What the basic calorie-in-calorie-out equation doesn't take into account is that it is a biological imperative to eat.

I didn't say eating less calories than you burn is mentally easy. It takes discipline and hard work, no doubt about it. We all have slip-ups and set backs along the way, which is all part of it. Nothing worth doing is easy.

> And just saying "cut calories" does not work. Three percent of obese people will manage to lose weight by dieting. Do you think they are just "too ignorant" to "get" the equation? Or are they just "too lazy" to do what needs to be done? Because I know that neither is the case.

In my experience watching at least a thousand people lose a massive amount of weight, every single one of them did it by slowly reducing their calorie intake, and increasing their activity to burn more calories. Why did they need WW for that? There are a variety of reasons, though I think Number 1 is that people honestly don't know fries, coke, burgers, chocolate, alcohol, etc. aren't food and you shouldn't eat them regularly. They are so enormously calorie dense they mess everything up.

Reason number 2 is simply being completely and utterly overwhelmed by the contradictory and complicated information about weight loss, causing them to give up completely. This is evidenced by the > 200 comments here.

> Your "engine" becomes more efficient the less you feed it.

Of course it does!

So next week/month will be a different intake/burn than last week/month. It's a constant process to make sure you're eating less than you take in. Although, again being honest here, anyone that is 100lbs+ overweight can likely just cut out one enormous calorie dense food (soda or fast food for a lot of people) and they will lose weight for a long time before they need to re-jig the equation, because they've been eating an enormous number of calories for a very long time.

Don't be confused and think I said it's an easy process to achieve. Many people find it one of the hardest things they will ever do in their lives. I said it's a simple process to understand.

The use of sentences like "Period." and "Fullstop." really has become a giant red flag.

I guess that's handy, actually.

Tell that to the Inuits. ;)

Actually, there's a lot of counterevidence to this "well-established" link between fat and heart disease. The classic on the subject is Gary Taube's "Good Calories, Bad Calories." But also, check out William Davis' blog (he's a cardiologist who recommends a low carb diet.) Or this:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20071648?itool=EntrezSyst....

Remember when eggs used to be bad for you, because they had high cholesterol, and then they became ok again? (http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/28/eggs-regain-reputat...) I'm afraid I don't fully trust any source of nutritional information until I've tested it empirically.

Which I did. I cut out all grains and found that my cholesterol plummeted and I lost a lot of weight (and I have more energy.) That's on a moderate fat diet. I'm just one anecdote, of course. I invite people to experiment for themselves.

It's conceptually simple, but pretends that the human animal is a lot more rational and a lot better at arithmetic than he really is. It's hard to start going through your day leaving 1/4 of your sandwich uneaten (and our restaurants, etc, are not set up to give you healthy portion sizes). People are bad at measuring their metabolic rate and bad at estimating their calorie intake. They also get hungry and it's really easy to fall back to your old eating habits when your diet plan is "eat the same food, just less of it."

The key to weight loss is sticking to your diet. That means adopting a diet that's easy to stick to. In my opinion, ketogenic diets are easier to stick to (for typical people) for two reasons:

1) there are lots of tasty, filling, foods that fit into the diet; 2) meat/dairy aren't peddled to bulk-up entrees in the same way as carbs (e.g. free tortilla chips and salsa) so cost forces some discipline;

Re: 1. Say you're at a restaurant and want to order a salad. On a low-fat diet, you might have some grilled chicken with bland greens with no dressing and a bread-stick. On the "eat less" diet, you might just leave a quarter of the food untouched and starting at you. On a keto diet, you can slather an ounce of caesar dressing on that salad in exchange for just leaving aside the croutons and breadstick. The first option fills you up, but isn't tasty. The second option leaves you a little hungry. The third option fills you up (because you eat all the greens, which take up volume) and is tasty (because even greens are tasty with caesar dressing).

YMMV, but pretending it's just a simple math equation is stupid and sets people up for failure. It is math, but it's a complex optimization problem. Each food item has two associated values: satisfaction and calories. The goal is to optimize satisfaction at a given calorie budget.

I think on a satisfaction per calorie basis, carb-y foods often lose unless you put fat/sugar in them. What would you rather have for breakfast? A two-egg omelet with an ounce of shredded Parmesan cheese, or a plain bagel (both 280-300 calories)?

You're falling into the oversimplification trap. You can lose weight with a low calorie, high carb diet + running 4-5 hours a week. You can also lose weight with a low calorie, high protein/high fat diet + lifting weights 2 hours a week. Which routine is easier to keep?

I think one of the reasons people fail at weight loss is because of the conventional wisdom of low-fat (read: low-flavor) diets combined with low-effectiveness exercises like running. It's pseudo-scientific crock. If you've tried the CW and failed, try something else. Have a couple of slices of bacon instead of that plain breadstick (and avoid the urge to blow your calorie budget by slathering it in butter!) and instead of spending hours on a treadmill do high-intensity weightlifting 3x30 min a week. For your average sedentary Aeron-chair dweller, that's going to be a far more likely path to success.