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Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)

michaelpollan.com

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Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)

#61

Post by 234dd57d2c8db »

legulere wrote: post #56
xaviers wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can generalise diets pretty easy. Eat less calories than you burn and loose weight. Eat whatever you want if you can abide by this rule you will loose the weight. But to be healthy. Well you have to eat healthy to be healthy. And that means getting all the fat, carbs and protein your body needs. And what your body needs I agree you can't generalise.

This is true, but it ignores a lot of other things that are going on: Absorption and digestion can greatly vary between humans. (A Common example are algae). What kind of micro and macronutrients you eat will directly and indirectly affect your metabolism. What you eat will affect your hunger. Those and other complex interplays lead to things that are counterintuitive. For instance there recently was some study that…

None of that matters. If you're gaining weight, consume less calories until you start losing weight. Safe weight loss is a lb a week. It will take quite some time to safely slim down. That is the problem, it took years to put on the weight, people try eating less for a couple weeks and throw up their hands! People don't realize if they are 50lbs overweight, it will take about a year to lose all that safely and comfortably.

Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)

#62

Post by sametmax »

xaviers wrote: post #52
ENTP wrote: post #28

When I eat carbs, I put on weight. When I don't, I lose weight. However, other people I know are the opposite. Quite honestly, I think you can't generalise 'diets' or eating advice as, frankly, it would appear that different people's bodies work in slightly different ways. This could explain the vast array of different advice that, often times, seems contradictory.

I can generalise diets pretty easy. Eat less calories than you burn and loose weight. Eat whatever you want if you can abide by this rule you will loose the weight. But to be healthy. Well you have to eat healthy to be healthy. And that means getting all the fat, carbs and protein your body needs. And what your body needs I agree you can't generalise.

Not exactly true. For the same amount of calories, the quality of food may or may not impact your weight. You can eat 4000 calories/day in banana and loose weight, but eat 2500 in cheese burger and gain.

I tested that on myself. The body does not blindnessly store excess in absorbed energy. It stores fat for many other reasons. One of them is to regulate the blood PH: if you saturate your organism with too much toxic food, you won't process it fast enough. To avoid crossing the unfamous 7.40 PH threshold, one strategy is to use fat to wrap toxic molecules and put them aside on your belly so you can deal with it later. Unfortunately with our current life style, this "later" never comes.

Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)

#63

Post by audunw »

xaviers wrote: post #52
ENTP wrote: post #28

When I eat carbs, I put on weight. When I don't, I lose weight. However, other people I know are the opposite. Quite honestly, I think you can't generalise 'diets' or eating advice as, frankly, it would appear that different people's bodies work in slightly different ways. This could explain the vast array of different advice that, often times, seems contradictory.

I can generalise diets pretty easy. Eat less calories than you burn and loose weight. Eat whatever you want if you can abide by this rule you will loose the weight. But to be healthy. Well you have to eat healthy to be healthy. And that means getting all the fat, carbs and protein your body needs. And what your body needs I agree you can't generalise.

> Eat less calories than you burn and loose weight.

This mantra annoys me, because it's like saying that to go to space, all you need to do is to burn rocket fuel and keep the nozzle pointed down (and then to the side).

It's technically true, but every single sane person know that it's true, and it doesn't really help you get to where you want.

It ignores how food affects motivation, digestion, metabolism etc. You can technically loose weight eating only sugar, but you'd find it impossibly hard due to the way the body is wired.

Generalizing to the obvious/trivial is not useful.

Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)

#64

Post by jschwartzi »

audunw wrote: post #63
xaviers wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can generalise diets pretty easy. Eat less calories than you burn and loose weight. Eat whatever you want if you can abide by this rule you will loose the weight. But to be healthy. Well you have to eat healthy to be healthy. And that means getting all the fat, carbs and protein your body needs. And what your body needs I agree you can't generalise.

> Eat less calories than you burn and loose weight. This mantra annoys me, because it's like saying that to go to space, all you need to do is to burn rocket fuel and keep the nozzle pointed down (and then to the side). It's technically true, but every single sane person know that it's true, and it doesn't really help you get to where you want. It ignores how food affects motivation, digestion, metabolism etc. You ca…

People keep repeating it because once you figure out your motivation and dial in a calorie goal that lets you lose weight without feeling like crap, it actually works. You're right that you can't ignore all that other stuff, but you also can't lose sight of the essential fact that you lose weight by eating fewer calories than you burn. The process of dieting requires you to perform tasks that support that goal.

It's a fundamental part of our physiology that we have to consume a certain quantity of macronutrients to support our metabolic processes. If we don't, then our bodies utilize existing stores of macronutrients like fat and muscles, breaking them down and converting them to usable energy to meet the deficit. This causes you to lose weight, as you drink water, metabolize your fat and muscle tissue, and then exhale carbon dioxide, and excrete waste products. You're literally breathing the weight out.

You find motivation so that there's something preventing you from stuffing your face with cake every day. Then you spend a few months iterating while you figure out what you can build a diet out of that will leave you sated and allow you to cut calories. This is where your metabolism, psychology, etc. come in. Once you have that dialed in, and you may arrive at it without counting calories if you're careful, then you will start losing weight.

Weight loss requires a lot of self-awareness and attention to what you enjoy or don't enjoy about a variety of foods. Somehow, through some series of test meals, you figure out that you really like raw bell peppers, but only with salt, or that the only thing trail mix is actually good for is making you hungrier(this is something I struggle with).

Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)

#65

Post by sametmax »

ivanhoe wrote: post #59
xaviers wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can generalise diets pretty easy. Eat less calories than you burn and loose weight. Eat whatever you want if you can abide by this rule you will loose the weight. But to be healthy. Well you have to eat healthy to be healthy. And that means getting all the fat, carbs and protein your body needs. And what your body needs I agree you can't generalise.

> if you can abide by this rule you will loose the weight This is the key point and it makes all the difference. You need to be able to stay on the diet for a sufficiently long time, and that's why different approaches are needed fro different people. If you eat carbs you need to measure carefully every meal and calculate the calories, which to many people very quickly gets extremely annoying. On low carb diets you d…

This is dangerous advice though.

Loose weight just by counting calories will not take in consideration toxicity (see my other comment in this thread). Many people burn fat this way, which release toxins they can't process. Hence their body is thin but saturated with poison. From here 2 things happens:

- the person gains weight again to protect him/herself. Happens very often.

- the person manage to not gain weight at this expense of his/her health, sometime with terrible consequences you only see months or years later.

One of my friends is currently in the later category. She lost a lot of weight and his very hot. But her skin is degrading at an alarming pace. It's a very bad symptom when your are 30.

All in all, it's important when you loose weight to:

- do it progressively so your body can process the toxins at the same rate they are released.

- help the body to eliminated say toxins by alternating rest and exercise, drinking and if needed, consuming.

- provide the body with a sane diet to not only avoid adding more toxins to the current ones, but also bring minerals than can be used to bring the PH up and vitamins to keep organs running smoothly.

Basically, "sleep well, eat well and exercise". Thank you grand ma :)

Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)

#66

Post by philfrasty »

sametmax wrote: post #62
xaviers wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can generalise diets pretty easy. Eat less calories than you burn and loose weight. Eat whatever you want if you can abide by this rule you will loose the weight. But to be healthy. Well you have to eat healthy to be healthy. And that means getting all the fat, carbs and protein your body needs. And what your body needs I agree you can't generalise.

Not exactly true. For the same amount of calories, the quality of food may or may not impact your weight. You can eat 4000 calories/day in banana and loose weight, but eat 2500 in cheese burger and gain. I tested that on myself. The body does not blindnessly store excess in absorbed energy. It stores fat for many other reasons. One of them is to regulate the blood PH: if you saturate your organism with too much toxic…

„You can eat 4000 calories/day in banana and loose weight, but eat 2500 in cheese burger and gain.“

This my friend, is not true. Not true in like...completely false.

(source: Bodybuilding for a long long time...dieting 6 months every year...bulking up the other 6 months of the year...been counting every calorie for years)

Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)

#67

Post by tracker1 »

proteinbased wrote: post #41
reflexive wrote: post #39

Pollan's famous "maxim" manages to be condescending, unhelpful and inaccurate - all at the same time. Eat food: duh Not too much: again, thanks? Mostly plants: Oh you mean like, sugars and starches - the most toxic constituents of the modern diet. Pollan is the prototypical Bay-Area insufferable foodie. His documentary was a cringe-fest of pseudo-spiritual fawning. Rene Girard talks about how food has become a new st…

Depends on your interpretation of plants. Legumes do contain a fair share of protein.

But they don't contain a lot of the fats/acids that come from meat that are hard for the body to synthesize/metabolize. I'm not saying only eat meat/fish, but there's more than just protein.

Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)

#68

Post by tomp »

sametmax wrote: post #62
xaviers wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can generalise diets pretty easy. Eat less calories than you burn and loose weight. Eat whatever you want if you can abide by this rule you will loose the weight. But to be healthy. Well you have to eat healthy to be healthy. And that means getting all the fat, carbs and protein your body needs. And what your body needs I agree you can't generalise.

Not exactly true. For the same amount of calories, the quality of food may or may not impact your weight. You can eat 4000 calories/day in banana and loose weight, but eat 2500 in cheese burger and gain. I tested that on myself. The body does not blindnessly store excess in absorbed energy. It stores fat for many other reasons. One of them is to regulate the blood PH: if you saturate your organism with too much toxic…

I'd like to read more about this. Are there any sources/studies/articles of these mechanisms?

Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)

#69

Post by [deleted] »

tinbucket wrote: post #58
dualogy wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Plants" covers a diverse group of foods, some of which are the most nutrient rich available to us. That's some meme. Which ones exactly? The most nutrient- dense foods (per gram / per kcal) available to us are livers, other organs, eggs and ruminant meat --- even before accounting for the latters' vastly superior digestability and bio-availability , and even before accounting for the formers' countless antinutrien…

At no point did I state that any of the foods you mentioned were nutrient poor -- I just said that some plants are among the most nutrient dense foods available. This can be true without dismissing other foods as nutrient poor. That even fits in with Pollan's maxim, which simply states most of the food you eat should be plants. Since you asked, here are some nutrient rich plants from memory: kale, spinach, blueberrie…

[deleted]

Re: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)

#70

Post by sametmax »

Freestyler_3 wrote: post #47
ENTP wrote: post #28

When I eat carbs, I put on weight. When I don't, I lose weight. However, other people I know are the opposite. Quite honestly, I think you can't generalise 'diets' or eating advice as, frankly, it would appear that different people's bodies work in slightly different ways. This could explain the vast array of different advice that, often times, seems contradictory.

I can eat anything and wont gain weight. It really seems like there is too much diversity in how we handle food inside our body. The best diet is to try some things(experiment) and do whatever works best, not what feels best. Too many of these diets read like they are the most fun thing to do in the world. Also a lot of people have the tendency to get their goal and then stop the diet only to gain weight again (then…

This is not exactly true.

Yes, there is a big variance in the way people process food. But people also usually exhibits common characteristics:

- they don't eat that much on average. While they may sometime eat a lot, if you what the quantity during one week, you'll see they eat less than most people. - they eat slowly.

Those 2 things alone allow you to process a certain amount of unbalanced diet.

BTW, if anybody want to loose weight, the second one, eating slowing, on a table doing nothing else than eating, and chewing a lot, is a good starting point. You don't need to change your diet and you will loose quite some weight.

A 3rd thing is that indeed, somebody type will be able to eat a lot of things and not gain weight. But it's not a good thing.

Eating a bad diet will bring toxins in your body. The body usually process it with various organs. But if it can't because the amount is too important, it has 3 strategies:

- watering it down. Diluting toxins by holding a lot of water in the body. Typically the 4 pounds you take on Xmas. It's not fat, it's water.

- wrapping it in fat. Love handles are actually temporary storage for emergency that got a bit permanent. This is why people say it's the most toxic fat and the hardest to loose. Fat people fall into this category.

- using minerals to bring your blood PH up.

Thin people with a bad diet fall into this category. Now if you eat a lot of greens, you'll have the minerals to play this game and it's ok. But most people don't eat enough vegetable to allow that, so the body take minerals from various part of the body, including the bones. Instead of getting fat, you destroy your skeleton. It's not a good thing.

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