this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Regardless of method, weight always boils down to a balance of calories consumed vs calories burned.
Your control of calories burned is limited - outside of physical exercise, your body does a lot of crap on its own, and finding the number of calories you passively burn on an average day is a major hurdle.
To do that, log and calculate the caloric value of everything that goes into your mouth; and your weight. If your weight is trending up, reduce your intake and keep checking. Once it stabilizes, you've got your number. If your baseline is weird, something's fucking with your metabolism - see your doctor (for real, that could be a sign of some really bad shit).
From there, you can either further decrease calories consumed by eating/drinking less, or increase calories burned by cranking up the exercise, or a combo of the two. You'll be more comfortable/satiated if you limit things like processed shit, but you can literally eat nothing but Twinkies and still lose weight if you stay within your caloric budget (you'll also be starving all the time, pissed off, and unless you're a fucking robot, give in and eat some actual food, breaking your caloric budget and thus your goals, so don't actually try the Twinkie thing, but it's 'technically' possible).
Any and every diet that actually works does so via a caloric deficit. Maybe fructose is the biggest enemy; maybe it's other sugars; or fats; but keep your caloric consumption-to-burn ratio in the negative regardless of source, and you WILL lose weight.
Our bodies absolutely do not treat all calories equally
This.
It's crazy, the science on processed fructose vs glucose is clear
but people still cling to old ideas about all calories all being the same.
Don't you people have some vitamin supplements to piss out?
@DragonTypeWyvern
Which "people" would those be?
I thought literature.cafe was a normal instance but your comment sounds a bit troll-like? Have added a link to my comment to show what I mean.
People that think that link proves their point, lmao.
@DragonTypeWyvern ha ha that link was meant as an illustration not a proof. It's not even a scientific paper, it's Harvard Health.
I seriously doubt that fructose is the "root cause of obesity" like this article claims. But @AnaGram is right, all calories are not equal and the science has been clear for a long time when it comes to metabolic differences between how the body processes, say, fructose vs glucose.
I think there are probably a bunch of TOFI addicted to HFCS who don't want it to be true though!
An illustration that you don't understand what calories in equals calories out means lul
@DragonTypeWyvern yeah turns out I had the wrong link, it was meant to be one about how the liver processes different molecules.
Anyway there's one in my other comments.
The way the body processes fructose specifically is really interesting and challenges the old beliefs, but you'll learn about it sometime if it interests you.
And for a very short summation of the small novella I've written in other comments, not every calorie has the same amount of nutrition in it.
There are non caloric nutrients in food that are absolutely vital for human health and happiness and when you are deficient in those nutrients your body will compel you to continue eating until you have met your baselines.
Solve the nutritional problem and you will most likely go a long long way towards solving the obesity problem.
They don't, there's a million little things that depend on what you eat, but regarding weight this is how it works.
Yeah, the key word there is "calories out" -- as in, not all calories get absorbed equally well by the body, so some get excreted. "Calories out" does not just mean burning them with metabolism and exercise. "Eat less and exercise more" is a gross oversimplification.
Less efficient calorie conversion means you'd lose weight even easier . . .
Right: skinny people might have less efficient calorie conversion than fat ones.
. . . . but 99% of the time they just eat less
In terms of weight - yes, they do.