Why We Get Fat
sciencebasedmedicine.org
Why We Get Fat
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Re: Why We Get Fat
#2"So, why does it get warmer in the summer?"
"Because our hemisphere takes in more calories than it gives off, causing it to get warmer."
"Well, I mean I suppose that's true in the strictest sense, but is there a reason we can come up with tha--"
"What, you don't believe in thermodynamics? What a crackpot!"
Re: Why We Get Fat
#3Tangentially, I don't understand why so many articles/diets get written about weight loss. At the end of the day, everything boils down to "eat fewer calories than you expend". Given enough time, this regimen will reduce your weight. Period. End of story.
Why must people continually try to create new weight-loss fads all the time?
Re: Why We Get Fat
#4While this is highly non scientific and very subjective, my personal experience is pretty much exactly mirroring the article. A high-fat, low-carb diet makes it easy to lose weight and and fat at the same time. While running/pullups/... help with muscle definition and make me feel healthy in general, the weight loss for me seems to be 80% related to the food I eat.
Here are the graphs:
I lost an additional 4-5 kilos before starting to use the withings scale that generates these graphs.
Re: Why We Get Fat
#5If you are doing exercise for which you need energy, the fact remains that carbohydrates can give quicker access to energy than any other macronutrient.
Re: Why We Get Fat
#6Tangentially, I don't understand why so many articles/diets get written about weight loss. At the end of the day, everything boils down to "eat fewer calories than you expend". Given enough time, this regimen will reduce your weight. Period. End of story. Why must people continually try to create new weight-loss fads all the time?
Because it's not just about the calories.
Among other things, insulin spikes caused by carbohydrates influence how the body stores/doesn't store fat/sugars.
You can eat the same amount of calories in fat and carbs and your body will decide to do different things for both cases.
Re: Why We Get Fat
#7Uh, this is a terrible article. I don't even know where to begin.
I will say this: don't drink two boullion cubes a day. Don't eat bacon and eggs every morning without consulting your doctor and getting your blood tested, and carbohydrates are not satanic but actually beneficial if you eat them at the appropriate times.
Whoever is voting this stuff up, please get a clue.
Re: Why We Get Fat
#8Tangentially, I don't understand why so many articles/diets get written about weight loss. At the end of the day, everything boils down to "eat fewer calories than you expend". Given enough time, this regimen will reduce your weight. Period. End of story. Why must people continually try to create new weight-loss fads all the time?
If you boil down what Taubes is saying you get something like the following:
Consciously counting caloric intake and expenditure and trying to target numbers generally doesn't work for losing fat and keeping it off. A good way to lose fat and keep it off is by restricting carbohydrate intake, which in turn will cause your body to spend more calories than it takes in. The first approach is more difficult than the second, and the second one will also help to keep one healthy in other respects.
...
So basically, it's a weight-loss/health strategy that tries to focus on what you're taking in as opposed to how much food in general you're taking in.
Re: Why We Get Fat
#9Tangentially, I don't understand why so many articles/diets get written about weight loss. At the end of the day, everything boils down to "eat fewer calories than you expend". Given enough time, this regimen will reduce your weight. Period. End of story. Why must people continually try to create new weight-loss fads all the time?
The thermodynamics are straightforward. The amount of calories you eat is a known quantity, the amount you expend is a function of a number of variables.
Perhaps something along the lines of: calories_in(food) => calories_out(activity_level, gender, age, weight, body_fat_percentage, protein, carbohydrates, fat, genetics)
I think the complicated part is altering your environment and/or yourself so that you, on average, don't eat more calories than you expend. That is, to fix the feedback loop to make calories_in equal to calories_out at your desired weight.
It's not the simplest of problems, for instance, two people can do the exact same activities and eat the same amount of food and gain different amounts of weight.
Ideally, people would simply stop being hungry when they had eaten enough food, but if that was true, there would be far less fat people. So what actually seems to be the problem is that the biological system that controls hunger is often miscalibrated. I believe that diets attempt to fix that, to make people feel the 'correct' amount of hunger.
For instance, if sugar caused people to become hungry, or to eat more calories than they otherwise would, or to burn less calories than they normally would, you could create a diet that contained no sugar. The average person, if they followed the diet, would hopefully have a more appropriate hunger level at any given time.
Re: Why We Get Fat
#10Tangentially, I don't understand why so many articles/diets get written about weight loss. At the end of the day, everything boils down to "eat fewer calories than you expend". Given enough time, this regimen will reduce your weight. Period. End of story. Why must people continually try to create new weight-loss fads all the time?
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