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Lose Weight The Slow, Boring Way
urbazewski writes "As spring gets underway (in the northern hemisphere anyway) it's a good time to start undoing the effects of a winter's worth of websurfing and gameplaying on your physical condition. A meta-analysis of studies of currently popular low carbohydrate diets by doctors at Stanford and Yale reveals that they are really just low calorie diets in disguise: 'findings suggest that if you want to lose weight, you should eat fewer calories and do so over a long time period." John Walker's 'engineer's approach' to losing weight is built around this astonishing insight, as described in his online book/weight loss plan The Hacker's Diet. The spreadsheets are out of commission, but the basic insights are an excellent antidote to fad diets." Ramen, Ramen, Ramen is not on the approved list.
This is another American lie. The weight was not lost: the invaders were chased into the desert and utterly destroyed.
Former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
The Hacker's diet totally works. I lost 35 lbs in 3 months by:
-eating less than 2000 calories each day
-exercising every day
I ate whatever I wanted, as much as I wanted, as long as the daily total remained under 2000 calories. You do have to pay attention to serving sizes to get accurate calorie counts.
I did the 5BX (http://www.flwd.com/5bx/main/) every day, which takes 11 minutes a day to do. Its simple, good exercise that requires no equipment and can be done pretty much anywhere.
I was fat and not while I'm not thin, I'm at least less fat. I would recommend this approach to anyone wanting to loose weight.
I can speak from personal experience on this. I know people have heard this a million times, but I'm not convinced of these "cookie-cutter" diets due to the fact that everyone is different in so many different ways.
For example, how do you explain the fact that I can gain so much weight by not watching every last gram of carbohydrates I eat while a friend of mine can have his "nights of 10,000 calories" and not gain a single pound ever.
I think it all comes down to taking a step back, looking at your body, and picking what's right for you -- not some predetermined plan that you get off of a website.
I am over here... now I am back over here!
There is insufficient evidence to make recommendations for or against the use of low-carbohydrate diets, particularly among
participants older than age 50 years, for use longer than 90 days, or for diets of 20 g/d or less of carbohydrates. Among the published
studies, participant weight loss while using low-carbohydrate diets was principally associated with decreased caloric intake...
A more realistic and reasonable conclusion: Aggregating data from artfully-chosen original research and running it through a 'statistical' analysis provides insufficient basis to conclude anything about anything other than the bias of the 'researchers'.
This is the equivalent of a high school science fair project being treated as if it was actual research.
Seven 'researchers' "identify 2609 potentially relevant" articles (i.e., a MEDLINE search for "low-carbohydrate") and then reduce them to 107 articles by reading the abstracts, carefully avoiding anything that contradicts any currently-held beliefs... As I have mentioned here before, 'research' on nutrition resembles religion far more closely than it does science.
Publishing this article is the equivalent of publishing a google search, except that if it had been written by non-doctors, it would not have even been considered. If you doubt that, ask Dr. Richard Bernstein about his experience with JAMA.
Concealed Handgun License Courses in Plano, Texas
Here is my Idea for the Ultimate diet:
STOP EATING!
-
You'll lose weight and muscle is overated anyway.
I actually followed The Hackers Diet about three years ago and lost 25 pounds over the course of 3 1/2 months.
I lost the will power to keep on the diet and have gained most of that weight back over the last two years, and am currently trying to work up the will power to start it up again. I'm 6 feet tall, so it would be nice to be back to a nice lean 170lbs again.
If you actually read Atkin's books, he explicitly says weight loss comes down to cutting calories. The advantage of a low carbohydrate diet is that the calories you do take in make you feel more satisfied, as well as not driving up your insulin levels.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
As opposed to John Walker Lindh's 'terrorist approach' to losing weight that is built around hanging out in a flooded prison for a week with no food at all.
Visit www.seriouslythough.com
Its that simple really...
Forget all the diets, just burn more then you eat.. you loose weight...
For the couch potatoes, EXERSISE how to use energy.. And dont eat a lot of garbage..
Just use some common sence. But then again, that wont sell books or diet foods will it...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
My wife lost 60 pounds, and has been able to keep it off for about a year. She looks fantastistic! Her approach? Stop eating so much, stop eating crap, go to the gym and do exercise classes, and work out. Doesn't sound that glamorous. But it worked for her.
Now what she discovered from all that hard work is that she actually enjoyed it (which she had never realized before, since she had never tried it.
I confess, I didn't read the article, but if it is advocating good old fashioned "straightening up", then it sounds right. I shudder when I walk into the drug store (of all places) and see bottles of tablets that are supposed to help lose weight. I think of all the people that get sucked in by that - I've seen my wife doing fad diets and other quick schemes. The only thing that worked was to change her lifestyle.
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
That's what I did. I lost 20 pounds, 1-2 pounds per week. I'm less lethargic now too. I didn't make any other major changes to my diet. Fats in and of themselves aren't too big a problem.
Note that those "fat-free" desserts have even more sugar than the regular stuff. You'll never lose weight that way. Y'might give your chance at developing diabetes an additional boost though.
...but my high-caffeine, low-sunlight diet has kept me at or below my ideal weight for over a decade.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
I wait until mid morning to go into work.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The low carb diet works, bodybuilders use it, I use it. But its supposed to be for bodybuilders, not just for general weight loss. The reason people go on low carb is so they can lose weight QUICKLY while keeping muscle, if you go on a starvation diet of one meal a day for a month you will lose weight, but half your weight will be in muscle and the other half in fat. Low carb allows you to lose 90 percent fat and maybe 10 percent muscle, these is extremely important to the athelete, the body builder etc who want to lose FAT, not lose weight.
I want to lose fat, I go low carb because I can continue to eat fat. You must eat fat if you want your body to remember how to burn it, your body burns what you eat, if you eat low fat and high carbs your body burns carbs, if you eat high fat low carb your body burns fat, and if you eat high protien and low everything, your body burns protien.
What you want to do is make the body adapt, so that you burn fat for fuel with more efficiency while on your low calorie diets, its more of a metabolism boosting diet, and its safer than the traditional starvation diet.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Heh...in all seriousness, DDR has slimed down many a geek...including me.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
The translation, for those of us who've finished our "Hooked On Phonics" (only spelling corrections, grammar be damned):
Poor linguistic abilities aside, this fucker's right. The way to lose weight is to eat right and exercise.
Your goal (for men) should be to drop your body fat percentage to well under 10% (under 15% for women).
I've found a mix of something like 60% carbs, 30% protein, and 10% fat to be a good distribution for my food. Don't put much faith in those numbers (I change it as needed to gain/lose weight). I typically consume anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 calories/day (even a fat bastard would have an amazingly hard time taking in 10kcal/day, trust me on that!)
Fuck being skinny. Pack on some serious muscle too.
My lifting consists of 1-2 hours typically (depending on how focused I am), and I have a 6 day split (2 days on, 1 day off, all 6 to cover my whole body). I aim for at least 30 minutes of cardio per day, sometimes I do more sometimes I do less...
Aim for 1.5-2g of protein per pound of lean bodyweight. I'm currently using Phosphagen XT, which seems pretty damned good. I'm not a huge fan of creatine, but this seems decent (Cell Tech isn't bad either).
Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
If you want to read a REAL nerds book on nutrition, how about one that explains the molecular structure of different fats and explains everything in technical terms. I didn't know any biology before reading it and I was able to follow along. The book actually teaches you all about fats, carbs, free radicals, anti-oxidants, etc. If you're interested in bodybuilding, this one's a must for most of us.
I'm 6'2". In the last year, I've gone from little muscle at 155 lbs to 10% body fat at 180 lbs. Yeah, a year is a long time, but I've done it in a healthy way which is more permanent and life sustaining. :)
-Lucas
I realize this is a touchy subject, but losing weight, even for geeks, is not that difficult if you take some time to study human physiology.
The fact is that most of the commonly held beliefs about losing weight are exactly wrong and only serve to lead one down the path of endless cycles of losing and then gaining back more. If you've ever tried a traditional diet, you know exactly what I am talking about.
I, myself, have struggled with it for many years. I took just about every approach imaginable (and a few I won't even mention here). Sure, some things had short-term benefits but ultimately they lead me right back where I was going.
So what really works?
First I'll tell you, and for many people you'll hate to hear it: eat right and exercise.
Okay, now that that's out of the way, here is the semi-techy explanation. Excuse my over-simplifications because I am looking to cover the subject lightly:
Consider your typical overweight person. He has a high percentage of body fat, and he knows it. How to get thin? Well you could start by reducing caloric input. Sounds reasonable, right? After all, the less you take in the less that becomes body fat.
True, but here is what really happens: When you reduce your caloric intake your body responds to this as if it were a crisis of famine. Blame evolution, but your body is going to think that food is scarce. If the amount of energy input is less than the output needed to live, the body must make up for the excess somehow. And it has two main choices: It can either munch on energy stored in our fat cells (which would be swell) or it can chew away at energy stored in our muscles.
In making this decision, the body considers this critical fact: Muscle mass requires energy to exist, whereas body fat requires very little. So, in a leap of perfectly sound logic, the body consumes the wrong kind of weight. And since muscle weighs a lot more per volume than body fat, the result is weight reduction. The diet seems to work!
It works for awhile, yes. But as you lose muscle mass your basil metabolic rate drops. This causes you to need less and less energy to exist. Do the math. Eventually you reach equilibrium with the input (your diet) and you hit the dreaded plateau we all know too well.
This is so disconcerting that people eventually give up. But here is the killer: Your body has been ravaged! You may have lost weight, but your percentage of body fat is probably worse than when you started. And now you are start eating the "old way" again and soon you are ballooning back up again. And, often, you get worse than when you started.
That's the cycle. And I'm sure a lot of you know it really well.
So how do you break that cycle?
The basic principle is simple: Do the opposite of what doesn't work. Duh.
To do this, you increase your muscle mass. When you do this, your BMR goes up and your body requires more and more energy. Efficient and effective cardio and strength training out requires a really good understanding of how they work to do them right. You can bang away all day long in a gym and not get much results if you don't know what you are doing. More on this in a bit.
Second you feed yourself carefully. I hesitate to use the word 'diet' here because this has nothing to do with starvation. In fact, you typically feed yourself a lot more than you use too. Most importantly, you eat six times a day. This feeding pattern prevents your body from going into "oh my god...we're going to starve" panic mode. You also hydrate a lot more than you are probably use too (10 glasses of water a day).
I'll simplify here for brevity, but the meals consist of a portion of protein and a portion of carbohydrate. A couple of them you add a portion of veggies. A "portion" is roughly the size and thickness of the palm of your hand for protein and your clenched fist for carbs. That simple hand rule is all you need. Note: there is no need to count calor
David Whatley
... omg, i've stooped so low as to post a comment with THAT subject line.. Oh well.
The advantage of a low carbohydrate diet is that the calories you do take in make you feel more satisfied, as well as not driving up your insulin levels.
This is so important. Read Dr. Mercola's pages on Insulin. Eating a diet based around carbohydrates is a lot like filling your car with gasoline, and neglecting the rest of the regular maintenance - no oil changes, no tranny service, no brake pad replacements, never replacing the windshield wipers, headlights, air filters or tires, etc.. Your car will run, well for a while, and it'll keep chugging along for even longer still - but eventually, the damn thing just doesn't work. Nutrition/food is the same way - carbohydrates provide energy to run the body, but are seriously lacking in the "routine care" maintenance nutrients present in veggies and animal products.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
The problem I have though is stopping eating, when I'm hungry, or at least think I'm hungry I eat/drink. I'm starting to work on grabbing a water bottle instead of a coke now though and other such changes.
This is the KEY to losing weight, and no one I find focuses on this enough. If trying to lose weight, and you get hungry outside your meal allotment, then do not eat, drink (and NOT pop).. Get a tal glass of ice water, or a tall class of OJ or other citrus. The water has no calories, and the citrus much less than anything you would eat for a snack. Plus you will find the coolness perky and actually wake you up, unlike fatty snacks like chips that slow you down.
You will find that a nice cold glass of water/juice more than cures your hunger for the few hours until your next meal. Not only does this help keep your caloie count down, it hydrates your body, which any doctor will tell you is good for you anyways. I find that this tip, the tip of drinking, not snacking, is one that is not metionened nearly enough in popular weight loss literature.
I lost 40 lbs just by going from one pack a day to two! Try it, it works!
This sig washed every five years whether it needs it or not!
> Hey you might think its boring but exercise makes you feel good.
For geeks the badly needed aerobic exercise (walk, run, bicycle, swim, etc.) is a great time to get away from the terminal and think out that problem that you've been throwing code at in vain. My daily walk is some of my most productive "programming" time. Figure out bugs, replace inefficent algorithms, design application architectures - all are easily done during the course of a mile or two's walk. Perhaps done better, for getting away from the terminal and thinking about the problem in more abstract terms, or at least at a higher level than a screen full of source code.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
1. Realize that the world has been lying to you. McDonalds, BurgerKing, and all respectable fast food joints have been getting fat by making you fat. Candy bar companies, soda pops all exist not to "quench that thirst" or "feed that hunger" but to destroy you. No one is meant to be fat. NO ONE no one is big-boned, no one is "natually" fat. I have been 250+ since I was 15, and hit my heaviest at 285. I am now down to 240, and still losing following this concept.
:) You like Pizza and COke? Just make sure it's within your Caloric intake. Hell I'm vegetarian (a bit harder) but think of all you meat eaters! Lots of meats to choose from with little calories!
2. Slow and steady wins the race. I have lost 45 pounds in the past 6 months, not the fastest out there, but at 1 or 2 pounds a week my body is GRADUALLY changing, which means it's VERY fogiving when I blow my diet once every couple of weeks. Like a rubber band my weight snaps right back into losing weight. It's the law of averages, if you eat 2000 calories a day for 3 weeks, then all of a sudden eat 4000 in a day, then the next day go back to 2000, your body expects and DEMANDS that 2000. It won't store the exceess because you're not starving yoursef.
3. Find your DMR (Daily Burn Rate). Because I sit all day, my caloric DMR is about 2000. Therefore I eat 1850. if you burn 2000, and only feed yourself 1850, where does the other 150 come from? YOUR FAT. It's a beutiful simple concept.
4. Eat the right foods. I can have 1/2 bowl of pasta or 5 bowls of chili (insert "fart joke here"). It's all in the calories. Lots of calories in rice and pasta, very little in beans. I eat a lot of fruit now, lots of salad piled with veggies and low-fat dressing. Oh and another choice is 2 tblspoons of regular salad dressing or 5 bowls of salad piled high with lowfat dressing, your pick.
5. DON'T RELY ON ANYTHING. Don't do exercises. I don't do exercises because I know I can't keep them up. Too many stories of "oh I lost 50lbs once, but now it's all back" what did they do differently? Stopped anything they were doing which shocked their body.
6. PROFIT!......a wonderful program I use for my palm pilot called e-diet has an entire database of foods (yes pizza and coke are in there) and you can modify it with your foods and calories. It helps me maintain my daily calories while also telling me what specific exercise and for how long to burn off calories when I go over (stuff like laundry, cleaning, coding). You plug in your height, weight, activity level, and how much you want to lose in how long and it shows you the path you need to take. Losing weight really is just plain mathematics, which should motivate at least SOME of you geek's out there.
Good Luck and drop me a line if you have any questions.
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering (bread and butter is 200 calories a slice!)
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
Around new year, I decided I'd got heavier than I'd like. I'm reasonably fit, and a good weight for my height and build, but as a result of an injury I hadn't been doing nearly as much of my physical hobbies as usual, and I'd put on around a stone. So, I decided to try a genuine, honest-to-goodness diet + exercise regime to lose that weight.
For three months, I kept a spreadsheet of everything I ate or drank, with calorie counts, amounts of protein, carbs, fats and fibre, etc. I also kept a record of how much significant exercise I was doing, and my weight, daily.
Curious facts I discovered while researching/doing it...
So there you go. My top tips for healthy eating with almost no change to your lifestyle:
I lost the stone I wanted to comfortably in three months, and now feel much fitter as I get back into training. And I'm the laziest guy in the world, so if I can do it, anyone can.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I wasn't going to post but it seems worthwhile having read a few other postings.
I'm about 6'4" and I decided to start losing weight when I hit 240, which is firmly in the "obese" category. I'm still in the middle of the diet right now having lost 30, and while I don't know precisely where I'm going to stop, my still-overly-ample gut says "not yet". (But not as ample as it used to be...)
I chose the Atkins diet because A: It made some degree of sense and B: I knew I did not have the willpower to engage in any diet based on staying hungry all the time, which for instance the Hackers diet does. This is especially true because I couldn't fully control the contents of my residence, since my wife lives here too and she's one of those people who can eat whatever she wants, as much as she wants, and not gain significant weight, whether or not she's exercising. (She does a lot of physical stuff at her job now but this was true when she was a college student, too.) This means I could not just throw all X out so that I couldn't possibly eat it, because she happens to like X (starchy products in the case of the low-carb Atkins diet).
The reason I posted is that I decided, both out of laziness (I freely admit) and out of scientific curiousity, not to change my exercise habits. Right now I walk maybe a mile a day in discontinuous chunks between classes and walking to work. I was curious if I could still lose weight just by changing my diet. Part of this curiousity stems from the Atkins discussion of how it works, which if true would imply that exercise would not need to change (though to be clear and fair, Atkins does recommend more exercise; this is my experimentation, not Atkin's).
So far, as I said, I've lost 30 pounds.
One person does not a study make, but when you're working with yourself, it's all you've got; you can't do a controlled study.
One thing I did not really experience that Atkins said I should was an increase in energy after the third or fourth day on his diet. Possible explanations include not exercising, or something internally wrong with me that also requires me to take abnormally large doses of iron just to function normally; it may be physically impossible for me to have a "normal" energy level. (Still working on it.)
Right now I'm dropping diet soda back out of the mix to see if that's contributing to my energy problem, as against Atkin's advice I had been drinking Nutrasweet-based beverages anyhow. Results after two days are still inconclusive, but hopeful. (Nutrasweet has been reported to slow the metabolism in some cases, both slowing weight loss and causing energy problems.)
The point? "Just eat less and exercise more, dufus!" didn't help me much. To others in my position, I recommend reading up on the available alternatives, and trying as much as is possible with a sample size of one to experiment to see how you lose wieght. For me, there was a chicken and egg problem: 240-lb me didn't really want to exercise. 210-lb me has been much more open to the idea. 190-lb me will probably enjoy it. But if I had to start with a program of heavy exercise, I probably wouldn't have started at all, which is the worst possible outcome.
I needed something a little formal, but flexible. (Technically, I'm no longer "doing Atkins" but doing an Atkins-inspired diet, as once I got the gist of the diet the strict regimentation didn't appeal to me; it does not seem fundamental to the system and makes me suspect Dr. Atkins lays it out as he does to serve the Average Reader who expects complete regimentation out of a diet book. Less carb counting and a more free-form approach is working for me where a regimented diet would have made me quit in disgust, YMMV.) Maybe you just need to drop the cola out of your life and replace it with water or other calorie-free choices. Maybe you just need to exercise and your diet will fix itself. Maybe you need something extremely strict. The most important thing i
I've been on Atkins for over a month now. I'm never going back to eating sugars and starchy foods. Understand how sugars and starches cause your insulin to surge, and you'll understand why you may have the shakes if you don't get a meal on time.
After putting up with those shakes that caused me to overindulge my whole life, I tried Atkins. After about a week of no processed carbs, I felt a noticeable difference. The shakes were gone for good, and the pounds have been coming off easily. I've never been one to stick to a diet, but this one is easy. You don't feel like you're starving yourself, and that's one of the diet's main benefits.
Not being a slave to my hopoglycemic shakes and brain fogs is the number one benefit, though. I never realized how often that brain fog had me under its grip until about a week after starting Atkins. Since then, I've felt remarkably clear-headed. I know others on low-carb diets who report the same thing.
Don't knock low carb diets until you understand why they work.
Personally, I think that the low-fat mentality generated by the medical community in the 70's, 80's, and 90's was the biggest failing of Science in the 20th century.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
First off, the basis of energy consumption in your body called the Krebbs cycle. The input is sugar (glucose, to be specific) and oxygen. The output is water, carbon dioxide, and energy stored in the bonds of a ATP (adenosine triphosphate). This chemical reaction is fixed. While the body can operate in an anaerobic process, this occurs when vigerously exercising. Even then, the input is still glucose.
Any sugar or starch you consume is converted to glucose. Sucrose is two glucose molcules stuck together. Fructose is a sugar with 1 carbon missing. Starch is a chain of sugars. All of these are converted into glucose.
So, what happens when not enough sugar is around? The body draws on the reserves of fat and protein. Glucose is able to come out of fat pretty easily. For protein, the body does some complex conversion which use the protein to create glucose to stuff into the Krebbs cycle. The downside is some unpleasant byproducts need to be dealt with by the liver.
So why does the body burn fat and protein? Because, when you burn protein, you reduce muscle mass, and hence your caloritic requirements. Kind of like a layoff.
Ok, so after all that: Glucose (sugar) is the only thing the body "burns". It all comes down to how much you take in. It is simply accounting. If you eat more than you need, you gain weight. If you eat less, your body starts cutting back on muscle and uses up fat. Carbs have 5 cal/gram, while fat has 9cal/gram (I don't remember protein).
So you can think all you want about high GI and low GI and fat and so on. You still get X cals from Y grams of carbs, and X cals from 5/9Y grams of fat. End of story.
I think that the real reason that these diets are effective is because they are less "boring" than high carb diets and also self-limiting. If you can only eat the patty and not the bun, how many burgers are you going to stuff in your face?
Of course, my belief is that people really evolved eating mainly vegetables and only occasionally fruit, meat, and grains. Do I eat that way? Hell no! But I do try to eat vegetables whenever I can.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
if you want to be lean, you actually have to weigh MORE,
since lean strong muscles weigh more than fat, but they
look more toned.
therefore, using weight to guage fitness is totally bogus.
a lean person will look 'skinnier' but weigh MORE.
the other thing that makes people fat is 'Low Fat' food.
if all you eat is low-fat stuff, your body never gets the
nutrition it needs, and hence you have to eat more of
the stuff to make up your body's requirements. the best
thing to do if you want to lose weight is to eat more
of the 'Regular Fat' foods, and then your body won't
need so much of the stuff to feel 'full'.
best regards,
john
It works great, especially for engineers/programmers!
The hacker's diet is very simple: you can eat whatever you want, just make sure you eat less calories than what your body needs. You can feed on hamburgers if you want as long as you eat less. You can worry about exercising or eating healthy stuff later, this will come automatically once you've lost some weight.
4 years ago I was at 215 lbs (for 5'10), loathed any form of physical activity, and was not very happy about this situation. After skimming through the hacker's diet I decided to lower my daily food intake to around 1000-1200 cal (the average intake for a man is between 2000-2500 cal)
This wasn't very pleasant at first but it worked and 12 months later I was down to 155 lbs (60 pounds less), without any exercise at all. To keep the same weight I started eating a bit more and I immediately felt like running everywhere instead of walking! So I bought a bike to get some low impact exercise and a year afterwards I found myself cycling 20 miles every day to work (not in the snow though)
Today, 4 years after I started this very simple diet, I'm still at 155 lbs, very active and generally much happier. Also I'm not closely counting calories anymore as my body automatically knows how much food is enough.
The most difficult part I found when starting the diet was evaluating calories in food. You can find calories on most food labels (usually in cal/100g of product) but it took me a while to learn what type of food would bring me the best quantity/energy ratio. I found some great low cal food are veggies (I am lucky to love beans and 1kg of beans is about 200cal - you can stuff yourself on this without any problem), chicken, fish...
All this food happens to be very healthy too, so as you see there is no need to worry about knowing what's healthy and what's not because if you want to eat a lot (as in volume) without taking in too many calories, it will have to be healthy food anyway.
Read the Hacker's Diet for more info, it is definitely worth it!!
BTW the first time I heard about the Hacker's diet was on Slashdot, 4 years ago.
blop.
It's aboslutely appalling that the above post was modded up as informative. From the first sentence to the last, it's filled with half-true statements, and reeks of absurd pseudo-science.
First off: "The body is not designed to burn sugar."
Ugh. Go to the bookstore. Pick up an introductory biology textbook (biochemistry would work too). Find out that, in fact, the preferred source of energy for living organisms is sugar. Can the human body process other compounds for energy? Yes, but you'll find that none of these processes are as efficient as the catalysis of sugar for energy production, and that nearly all are overlooked in favor of glycolysis when glucose is present.
Next: Bacon is easier to burn and digests slowly
First, you have to define "digest," and you have to define "burn." If, by digest, you mean that a chunk of bacon is absorbed by the intestines less rapidly than a chunk of rice, you may or may not be correct. It doesn't matter. What does matter is that the body will absorb these things, and will somehow break these foods down into molecular units it can use. Fat, protein and sugar can all be converted to glucose through molecular pathways of varying efficiency -- this is what is traditionally meant by the "burning" of food.
Now, is bacon really easier to "burn" than rice? No. That's the opposite of the truth, actually. Bacon is muscle, which means that it is mostly protein and fat. And protein digestion is the metabolic pathway of last resort in humans. Thus, the body will (in an average person), digest the fat in the bacon first (and don't forget that, pound for pound, fat contains 9 times the caloric content of sugar!), store whatever it doesn't use as fat, use some of the protein for non-metabolic needs, and, most likely, squirt the rest of the protein out through the kidneys (via the liver). This is why people on extremely-high protein diets tend to have problems with kidney and liver function later in life.
Moving on: "Rice has no fat, so your hormones may get out of balance."
Bzzzt. Wrong again. Let's take another look at that biology 101 textbook: hormones are, by and large, cholesterol derivatives. Testosterone? Cholesterol. Estrogen? Ditto. In fact, you'd be pretty hard-pressed to find an important human hormone that wasn't derived from cholesterol, metabolically. And guess what? Plants have cholesterol too. More than enough for hormone synthesis needs, actually. This fact has been well-known by dieticians and doctors for decades.
So what about this gem: "Rice...is a complex carb, your body is not designed to handle it, so it takes a longer time to burn"
Nope. Compared to the protein or fat in bacon, rice is trivial for the body to "burn". It might take a smidge longer to digest, depending on how it's cooked, but we're not talking nutritionally-important differences here (your body will digest it one way or another). And the suggestion that the human body "is not designed to handle" complex carbohydrates? Utter nonsense. Go spit in a glass. See that? You're looking at a highly efficient mixure of enzymes, designed by evolution specifically for the digestion of complex carbohydrates. Pick up that biology book again...look up "alpha amylase," and you'll see what I mean.
So once we clear away the pseudo-science, what are we left with? Well, we know that protein is burned more slowly than fat, which is burned more slowly than sugars. And carbohydrates are sugars. So there is a bit of truth to your conclusion: when we eat high-protein diets, the body will find other mechanisms to meet it's sugar needs. It will do everything it can to create glucose without digesting protein. Of course, in the real world, no one eats pure protein (and for good reason -- see above), and protein has the nasty habit of coming in animal form, which means that lots of fat comes with it. It doesn't take much fat
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
1 gram of protein does not have the same caloric content as 1 gram of carbohydrate.
1 gram carbohydrate = 4.3 kcal
1 gram fat = 9.5 kcal
1 gram protein = 5.7 kcal
But you were right on the other part. It does take more energy to digest the protein, as it needs to be converted by the liver into a usable sugar.
SF
i've been playing ddr on and off for the past year or so.. i'm not 16 or 17 like a lot of the ddr players at the local arcade but you know what? i still play it anyway.. some of my work friends think its stupid but i'd like to see one of them even try doing afronova in basic ;P
ddr rules
OK, good points, but just a caveat, "strong muscle weigh more than fat" makes no sense. 1 lb. of muscle weighs the same as one 1lb of fat. Are you talking about weight per volume? a fit person WILL weigh more for several reasons: fat (per volume) weighs less than muscle AND they will have more muscle, and aerboic execise increases blood volume and therefore water weight. no excuses people, get off your seat and run a little every day.
Low-fat food is just as nutitrious as high-fat food, but more healthy because it contains less fat.
That has yet to be confirmed. Fat is not necessarily bad.
You eat the same amount of it because your body needs a certain volume to feel full, not because you have to reach a certain fat-content before you can stop eating.
The parent post was implying that your body eats to obtain a certain amount of *calories* before it feels satisfied (not volume). Since fat packs more calories per pound than any other digestible ingredient, you can eat much less fatty food than low-fat food, and yet be just as sated. Furthermore, most fats have a certain chemical component which when broken down in your stomach makes you feel fuller than you really are.
But take all claims with a grain of salt (especially what the government says about healthy eating - they know less than anyone in the field and even the people in the field aren't sure what the answers are).
See:
Thread on food
Comprehensive NY Times article discussing fat in diet
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Using the same logic, one can treat kidney failure by drinking less fluid - if you drink only as much fluid as you lose, you cant get fluid retention and swell up (as people in kidney and heart failure tend to do).
This is not 100% accurate. In normal mammals in the wild, this would surely be true, but humans do not consume a natural diet. Salt and alcohol are two substances which will cause water retention. Another major culprit is cooked food, as heat damaged proteins cannot be utilized by your body and instead are secreted through your sweat glands as a waste product (same way as certain proteins in onions, giving your sweat a different odor). All protein is hydophobic, thus resulting in water retention in the outer layer of your skin. This results in acne, dry skin, and in many people facial edema.
Delete a gene from a mouse, and it gets fat, even on the same caloires of a normal mouse.
I have heard this before, but there was no such study. The gene in question seemed to involve hunger. The mice in question did consume more calories than the other mice. You cannot magically produce fat from nothing. A glucose molecule or a fatty acid molecule is the same size in an ant, elephant, or mouse. These people were also feeding mice wheat based pellets, ignoring a well known fact that wheat products contain opioid peptides and are addictive. Most likely, the genes had nothing to do with hunger but response to mu-opioid agonists, ie those mice crave opioid drugs more than others. This is also the case with humans. Opioid peptides derived from wheat and dairy products are added to pretty much every junk food. MSG is another addictive substance.
Point is, we didn't spend thousands of years in evolution without developing tight regulation of our metabolism.
There is not tight regulation as you speak, your metabolic activity is supposed to be tightly connected to appetite. Unfortunatley, our shift to a diet of cooked food, wheat, and dairy products has created a situation where people aren't craving the food but the drugs they contain. You have a drug delivery system rich in calories.
Thus the problem with simply dieting - for most people, in the long run, it just doesn't work.
It can easily work, if people eliminate addictive foods from their diet. But to comment on your statement, if what you say is true, then all hope is lost for the human race.
Because they are fighting their programming.
Programming? You mean like genetic programming? It is an absolute myth, plain and simple, that human beings are predisposed to gluttony. It is simply not true. A simple survey of photographs from past would show you that humans today are SICK, and it is not normal. Food has been plentiful in the US for most of its entire existence, yet obesity of the level today simply did not exist in the 19th century and early 20th century. Look at pictures of the beach at Coney Island in 1920 for example, when food was plentiful in NYC. There were no fat people at all.
There are plenty of examples, but the evidence is overwhelming that humans eating a normal western diet are following an addictive behavior pattern, not a normal human one.
I will give you a hint, governments do not want it to become widely known that opioid drugs are found throughout our food supply. It is only a secondary reason that companies add them so that profits increase due to customers eating and buying more of their crap. Governments want opioid drugs in foods because they create contentment in the people. Secondary effects like asthma and constipation are also quite handy in keeping a people from revolting.
I don't read or respond to AC posts