How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how

Why?, there are a lot of diet sodas that do not contain any calories.

> Avoid too salty food (preprocessed food will be too salty.)

Why, salt doesn't contain any calories.

Going on a diet is very hard in the first place, giving up these two things doesn't seem to make much sense. It will only make a difficult lifestyle change even more difficult.

First link briefly covers the insulin response second link is general information regarding insulin.

http://www.spinalhealth.net/insulin.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin

See the Gary Taube youtube link elsewhere in this thread for a great deal more information.

mountains of contradictory research

Not really. There's mountains of research and then public policy officials and non-scientist nutritionists that have let the food industry provide guidelines and cheap foods that aren't really good for us.

As Gary Taube points out in the video link, the science is old news. The puzzling thing is why the science has been ignored for so long.

I'm sorry to be negative but it seems such a fad people convince themselves and others gluten is equivalent to cyanide. We've been through the Atkins junk he even died from it. I know people with Celiac and it's a daily struggle it's not a trendy disease if you actually have it, you can't even have pepper since most commercial pepper is dusted with wheat flour.

Can't we all agree to valid nutritional information from independent double-blind studies nothing with "supports" or a pil helping your immune system (an extremely complex...you guess it a 'system' not one thing that can be affected by one molecule.)

I weight more now than I ever have and I know why it's because I started working shift work, stopped going to the gym, drank energy drinks and went to Starbucks daily. To get back to being healthy I reverse what I did wrong so back to eating buckets of gluten and carbs but be active.

I'm all for health and good nutrition but these days it seems like nothing is good unless it's some extreme diet. US and Canada beverages are extreme, food portions are extreme, exercise is extreme (bootcamps jogging? bah!), vehicles are extreme now diets are extreme.

I see this all the time on HN and like most things, there is truth in it, but it doesn't tell the whole story.

First and foremost, calories matter. Let's get that out of the way. They matter in that, yes, weight gain comes from eating calories in excess, loss from a deficit...normally (we'll get to that in a minute).

However, this is where everyone should be reading the rest very carefully, details matter here.

For one, if the ONLY thing you care about is number on the scale, eat at a deficit and you'll lose weight.

BUT, if you care about the type of weight you are losing (ie. losing fat vs fat/muscle vs muscle), you HAVE to care about the macronutrient ratios of those calories. For instance, I'm an athlete, recreational bodybuilder/powerlifter and fitness model. I work very, very hard for muscle gains. I don't want to lose muscle when I diet down for a show, competition or photo shoot. If I only cared about calories, I would QUICKLY catabolize my muscle. I need to keep my protein high, fat pretty high and the rest of my calories can come from carbs. In practice, depending on my goal at the time, I implement one of a variety of PSMF (protein sparring modified fast) & CKD (cyclic keto diet, which is Keto with carb refeeds) or TKD (targeted keto diet, which is eating carbs around workouts).

The problem with "just care about calories" is that very few people actually want that as the goal. Most people want to lose FAT, not muscle when they lose weight. If all you understand is calories, yes you'll lose weight, but you'll be losing fat and muscle. Most people, and I would guess everyone reading this, would rather keep whatever muscle they have, they need to understand how to SPARE their muscle when losing weight.

And if someone is overweight there is a very high chance they are or are becoming insulin resistant. If this is the case, Keto is actually appropriate for them.

Before I got into this world seriously, I just thought it was calories, like most people who haven't spent the time to understand the workings of the body. I literally wasted years trying to get lean with just a calories approach. It doesn't work that way.