This article is interesting to me because I have this belief that weight loss is basically about eating less (and exercising more). And some extremely high percentage of everything said about dieting, etc. beyond that is just irrational noise. And that the diets that work don’t work because of the reasons their proponents say they work, but only because they end up restricting calories as a byproduct.
this study is NOT a blow to low-carb dieting, which can be quite effective due to factors such as typically higher protein and more limited junk food options.
This line is the funniest to me. This is why I think low carb diets work: Because if you eliminate the primary source of calories in a person’s diet (carbs, which can be 50%+ of many people’s diets), they will eat significant fewer calories overall restricting themselves to only protein and fat. But people have, instead, made up all sorts of fancy, science-y sounding reasons why carbs were evil.
“Trying to lose weight? Just eat less and exercise more!”
“Trying to get more done? Just stop wasting time!”
“Feeling depressed? Just cheer up!”
“Want not to get pregnant? Just don’t have sex!”
Answer: they would all be quite successful if followed, but they are all difficult enough to follow that people who actually care about results will do better to set different goals that take more account of how human decision-making actually works.
If you eat less and exercise more then, indeed, you will lose weight. (I do not know how reliably you will lose weight by losing fat, which of course is usually the actual goal.) But you don’t exactly get to choose to eat less and exercise more; you get to choose to aim to do those things, but willpower is limited and akrasia is real and aiming to eat less and exercise more may be markedly less effective than (e.g.) aiming to reduce consumption of carbohydrates, or aiming to keep a careful tally of everything you eat, or aiming to stop eating things with sugar in, or whatever.
People with plenty of willpower, or unusually fast metabolism, or brains less-than-averagely inclined to make them eat everything tasty they see around them, may have excellent success by just aiming to eat less and exercise more. In the same way, for many people “just cheer up!” may be sufficient to avoid depression; for many people “just don’t have sex if you don’t want to have babies!” may be sufficient to avoid unwanted pregnancy; etc.
But there are plenty of people for whom that doesn’t work so well, and this is true even among very smart people, very successful people, or almost any category of people not gerrymandered to force it to be false. And for those people, the “just do X” advice simply will not work, and sneering at them because they are casting around for methods other than “just do X” is simply a sign of callousness or incomprehension.
You focused on akrasia, and obviously this is a component.
My guess was: they’re all wildly underdetermined. “Cheer up” isn’t a primitive op. “Don’t have sex” or “eat less and exercise more” sound like they might be primitive ops, but can be cashed out in many different ways. “Eat less and exercise more, without excessively disrupting your career/social life/general health/etc” is not a primitive op at all, and may require many non-obvious steps.
“Trying to lose weight? Just eat less and exercise more!”
“Trying to get more done? Just stop wasting time!”
“Feeling depressed? Just cheer up!”
“Want not to get pregnant? Just don’t have sex!”
Answer: they would all be quite successful if followed, but they are all difficult enough to follow that people who actually care about results will do better to set different goals that take more account of how human decision-making actually works.
The specifics are very different in each of these examples, as Wes_W noted here.
“Trying to lose weight? Just eat less and exercise more!”
Is at lest not actively bad advise, but “cheer up” isn’t a primitive.
“Want not to get pregnant? Just don’t have sex!”
Is actually good advise and a little investigation reveals that the people saying otherwise are placing nearly as much (or even more) value on “you having sex” as on “you not getting pregnant”.
If you eat less and exercise more then, indeed, you will lose weight.
Surprisingly, some people don’t even believe this. I know a sizable group of Paleo proponents and some fruitarians who say that you can eat whatever quantity of food x and this will not have negative effects on your weight.
There are also people who think this advice won’t work because they’ve tried and it didn’t had any effect (but actually they weren’t aware that they were not eating less).
But there are plenty of people for whom that doesn’t work so well, and this is true even among very smart people, very successful people, or almost any category of people not gerrymandered to force it to be false.
I am between those people (those who fail to follow the simple advice, not the very smart or very successful). But I recognize that my failure is in proceeding to eat less from the simple cognition of “I must eat less”. That doesn’t make “eat less” useless, it makes it incomplete. Indeed, when I found a system that allowed me to eat less using whatever low willpower that I have, I indeed started to lose weight.
“But actually they weren’t aware that they were not eating less.”
This is why I advocate the method of using a Beeminder weight goal (or some equivalent), weigh yourself every day, and don’t eat for the rest of the day when you are above the center line. When you are below it, you can eat whatever you want for the rest of the day.
This doesn’t take very much willpower because there is a very bright line, you don’t have to carefully control what or how much you eat, it’s either you eat today or you don’t.
It doesn’t matter. Fluctuations with scales and with water retention may mean that you may end up fasting an extra day here and there for random reasons, but you will also end up eating on extra days for the same reason. It ends up the same on average.
weigh yourself every day, and don’t eat for the rest of the day when you are above the center line
That has some issues. First, changes in water retention jitter your daily weight by a pound or two. Second, you assume good tolerance for intermittent fasting. If you weight yourself in the morning, decide you’re not going to eat for the whole day, and then suffer a major sugar crash in the afternoon, that will be problematic.
Yes, it won’t work for people who can’t manage a day without eating at least from time to time, although you can also try slowing down the rate of change.
As I said in another comment, changes in water retention (and scale flucuations etc.) don’t really matter because it will come out the same on average.
don’t really matter because it will come out the same on average.
Volatility matters. Imagine that one day the temperature in your house was set to 50F (+10C) and the next day—to 90F (+32C). On the average it comes out to 70F (+20C), so it’s fine, right?
Creating a calorie deficit will cause weight loss. Just like abstinence will prevent pregnancy.
Depression is not like this. You can’t necessarily will yourself free of depression. You could will yourself to “act happy” until the grave, but it wouldn’t necessarily change your neurons.
The point is that you can’t necessarily will yourself to eat less or not have sex or stop wasting time, either. It looks as if you can, but appearances can be misleading.
I agree that depression is a more extreme case, though; a depressed person may be unable to “cheer up” on any single occasion, whereas I think most people can resist temptations to food, sex and timewasting once if they really need to.
(Also, depression isn’t just persistent unhappiness, but that’s usually part of it and is what would be fixed by Just Cheering Up, were that possible for the sufferer.)
The point is that you can’t necessarily will yourself to eat less or not have sex or stop wasting time, either. It looks as if you can, but appearances can be misleading.
Do you think you can necessarily will yourself to drink less (alcohol)?
The debate about “personal responsibility” vs “can’t help him/herself” is very old.
No. More precisely: I’m pretty sure I can. I’m pretty sure most alcoholics can’t. But they may be able to will themselves to drink no alcohol at all, just as it may be easier to follow a diet like “nothing containing sugar” than one like “no more than 2000 kcal/day”.)
I suggest that we should actually care less about whether in some abstract sense we can do these things (exactly what we “can” do will probably depend strongly on the definition of “can”), and more about whether we will. And on that, I think the empirical evidence is pretty good: for many people, just deciding to eat less will probably not result in actually losing weight and keeping it off.
I suggest that we should actually care less about whether in some abstract sense we can do these things … and more about whether we will.
These are somewhat different concerns in the sense that “can” is not sufficient for “will”, but it is necessary for “will”. Since I cannot fly by flapping my arms, the question of whether I will fly this way doesn’t have much meaning.
I suggest that, instead, we stop pretending that there are solutions suitable to absolutely everyone. People are different and are sufficiently different to require quite different approaches. If we take weight as the example, some people (commonly called “that bitch/bastard” :-D) can eat whatever they want and maintain weight; some people can control their weight purely by willing themselves to eat less; some people can control their weight by setting up a system of tricks and misdirections for themselves which works; some people cannot control their weight by themselves and need external help; some people can’t do it even with external help and need something like a gastric bypass; and some people have a sufficiently screwed up metabolism so that pretty much nothing will make them slim.
Yes, the effect of diets on weight-loss is roughly mediated by their effect on caloric intake and expenditure. But this does not mean that “eat fewer calories and expend more” is good advice. If you doubt this, note that the effect of diets on weight-loss is also mediated by their effects on mass, but naively basing our advice on conservation of mass causes us to generate terrible advice like “pee a lot, don’t drink any water, and stay away from heavy food like vegetables”.
The causal graph to think about is “advice → behavior → caloric balance → long-term weight loss”, where only the advice node is modifiable when we’re deciding what advice to give. Behavior is a function of advice, not a modifiable variable. Empirically, the advice “eat fewer calories” doesn’t do a good job of making people eat fewer calories. Empirically, advice like “eat more protein and vegetables” or “drink olive oil between meals” does do a good job of making people eat fewer calories. The fact that low-carb diets “only” work by reducing caloric intake does not mean that low-carb diets aren’t valuable.
Empirically, the advice “eat fewer calories” doesn’t do a good job of making people eat fewer calories. Empirically, advice like “eat more protein and vegetables” or “drink olive oil between meals” does do a good job of making people eat fewer calories. The fact that low-carb diets “only” work by reducing caloric intake does not mean that low-carb diets aren’t valuable.
I think it has a net negative effect on the global dieting discussion that it contains these superfluous steps to the actual causes of weight loss.
Having a rational discussion about satiation is one thing. It is a long way from the woo that has been involved in getting people to believe carbs are magically evil.
I remember first digging into the Atkins diet. I thought, “No. This is dumb. It’s just calorie restriction. Why are they pretending it’s more than that?” But I shut my mouth for a while because I didn’t understand the science and Atkins and other low carb variants seemed so popular.
“Eat less and exercise more” is the best dieting advice (Or perhaps even better, “Create a reasonable calorie deficit over time”.) It may be difficult to follow, but it’s clear. It allows people to rationally attack the problem of “how” to accomplish weight loss. Everything else is just muddying the waters.
After changing my mind dozens of time on this topic, exactly what you say is the only stable conclusion I reached. Effective weight loss is effective calorie reduction, whatever you do to reach that is whatever works for you.
Seconded. I’ve noticed that the diets I have tried successfully (which have all been variants on “consume food during a limited number of sittings per day”) have worked by allowing me to use noticeably less willpower than it would normally take for me to use to limit my calorie intake by that much per day.
Hunger is the big diet killer. It’s very hard to maintain a diet if you walk around hungry all day and eat meals that fail to sate your appetite. Losing weight is a lot easier once you find a way to manage your hunger. One of the strengths of the low-carb diet is that fat and protein are a lot better than carbs at curbing hunger.
Yeah. But that’s not really the point. The reason low carb diets lead to weight loss is because they restrict calories. I’m aware of many dieting tricks that can assist, but a calorie deficit must be created in order for weight to be lost.
This may seem self evident, but there is still debate about it. Carbs are not magically evil, they are just a macro nutrient that happens to be a large share of the calories in a typical Western diet. That’s it. No magic.
If you don’t eat after 6pm, never eat dessert or fast food, eat a larger breakfast, have a salad or X raw vegetables everyday, drink X water everyday—these can all help you lose weight. But there is nothing magical, or even scientific about any of these tactics. It’s all stuff we’ve known for 100 years.
Likewise, if you walk 2 miles a day everyday for a year, you’ll burn X calories that will lead to X weight loss. It’s just math.
My point was to specifically disparage diets like the Atkins Diet. It does nothing apart from restricting calories, yet libraries have been written about the magic of how and why it works. It’s all just noise aimed at selling books, etc. to people who are looking for help.
The reason low carb diets lead to weight loss is because they restrict calories. I’m aware of many dieting tricks that can assist, but a calorie deficit must be created in order for weight to be lost.
No one in this thread is disputing that you need a calorie deficit to lose weight. My contention is that this is merely the beginning, not the end. Let’s refer to the following passage from the linked article:
Translation of our results to real-world weight-loss diets for treatment of obesity is limited since the experimental design and model simulations relied on strict control of food intake, which is unrealistic in free-living individuals.
A diet should be realistic for free-living individuals. An obese person who wants to lose 50+ lb. could expect to be at it for the better part of a year. A diet that leaves you hungry all day is doomed to fail: it’s unrealistic to expect pure willpower to last that long. That is the point of my post about hunger control. Disregarding it or dismissing it as a mere trick is to ignore that a very important part of dieting is making sure the dieter sticks to the diet.
My point was to specifically disparage diets like the Atkins Diet. It does nothing apart from restricting calories, yet libraries have been written about the magic of how and why it works. It’s all just noise aimed at selling books, etc. to people who are looking for help.
Quite the contrary. The Atkins Diet is not just about losing the weight. It also includes a plan to keep it off. Maintaining weight loss is generally harder than losing the weight in the first place. Yo-yo dieting) is a very real problem. The problem with naive calorie restriction is that it doesn’t instill good eating habits that can be maintained once the weight-loss period ends. The Atkins Diet addresses this and is designed to ease one into eating habits that will maintain the weight loss.
A diet should be realistic for free-living individuals.
It isn’t unrealistic to create a reasonable calorie deficit for awhile...and I have no idea what a “free-living” individual is. It may be difficult to lose weight, but it’s like anything else that is difficult. It requires focused effort over time. Habits can be hard to change. There are plenty of tricks and hacks to help. Avoiding carbs is a good one becuase it will autmotically eliminate 25-60% of an individual’s daily calorie consumption. That’s all it will do. You could avoid fat, too. Same effect. Fat and carbs = calories. No magic.
A diet that leaves you hungry all day is doomed to fail
Yeah, but strawman. Dieting involves some hunger. It’s not going to kill you. It’s just part of the adjustment to a more healthy level of consumption.
The problem with naive calorie restriction is that it doesn’t instill good eating habits that can be maintained once the weight-loss period ends.
Naive calorie restriction is just regular calorie restriction with a negative name. Good eating habits entail calorie control. That’s not naive. It’s basic.
Weight loss is generally really simple. We should be grateful that this is so. Every discussion I’ve seen on LW makes dieting much more complicated than it need be. It’s very hard for many people, but that doesn’t mean it’s complicated.
Naive calorie restriction is just regular calorie restriction with a negative name. Good eating habits entail calorie control. That’s not naive. It’s basic.
By “naive” I just mean calorie restriction without any other consideration. For example, a diet where one replaces a large pizza, a 2-Liter bottle of Coca-Cola, and a slice of chocolate cake with half a large pizza,1 Liter of Coca-Cola, and a smaller slice of chocolate cake is what I’d consider naive calorie restriction. I don’t know that anyone would seriously argue that the restricted version even remotely resembles good eating habits.
Lest you accuse me of straw-manning, let it be noted that many obese people subsist on a diet consisting of fast food and junk food. In fact, malnutrition is a very real problem among the obese. That’s right: you can eat 5k+ Calories a day and still exhibit signs of malnutrition if all you eat is junk. When I speak of instilling good eating habits, I have in mind people who exhibit severe ignorance or misconception of basic nutrition.
Avoiding carbs is a good one becuase it will autmotically eliminate 25-60% of an individual’s daily calorie consumption. That’s all it will do.
A low-carb diet is not just a matter of eating what you normally eat, minus the carbohydrates. That’s going to end about as well as a vegetarian diet where you simply cut out the meat from your normal diet. You run into a micronutrient deficiency that can end up causing problems if the new diet is sustained for several months.
Yeah, but strawman. Dieting involves some hunger. It’s not going to kill you. It’s just part of the adjustment to a more healthy level of consumption.
It’s an empirical fact that some foods are more filling than others and keep you feeling full for a longer period of time, even if the number of calories consumed is the same. That’s why people care about the glycemic index. I have tried losing weight several times over the last seven years or so. There are diets where you feel satisfied most of the time, then there are diets where you finish a meal feeling as hungry as you did when you started. The psychological difference between the two is quite profound and hardly warrants the charge of “strawman”.
By “naive” I just mean calorie restriction without any other consideration.
Well, of course. I never said or implied calories were the whole ball game. You’re conflating weight loss and nutrition throughout.
A low-carb diet is not just a matter of eating what you normally eat, minus the carbohydrates.
No, but you’d be hard pressed to make up those calories by eating proteins. That is quite the point.
It’s an empirical fact that some foods are more filling than others and keep you feeling full for a longer period of time, even if the number of calories consumed is the same.
I’ve mentioned satiation as a real issue that ought to be addressed by any rational diet plan.
But, again, it isn’t the aim that a diet should involve no hunger when compared to your current meal plan. That is just plain silly and irrational.
Losing weight is like any other pursuit—it requires the expenditure of resources: Will power, focus, effort, energy, discipline. It may diminish your capacity to pursue other things for a time. It doesn’t mean you have to be bedridden or incapacitated. Again, any other pursuit is like this: Working long days on a big project at work, training for a taxing athletic event, studying for difficult classes and exams, etc. Dieting is a significant project to take on.
There seems to be this idea floating around that you can diet, lose lots of weight, and not have it consume some bandwidth in your life. BS. There are some great, rational hacks available, but it takes some sustained work to lose weight. There isn’t anyway around that.
You’re conflating weight loss and nutrition throughout.
Short term, the body is resilient enough that you can go on a crash diet to quickly drop a few pounds without worrying about nutrition. On the other hand, nutrition is an essential consideration in any weight-loss plan that’s going to last many months. That’s why I associate the two.
But, again, it isn’t the aim that a diet should involve no hunger when compared to your current meal plan. That is just plain silly and irrational.
Certain approaches purport to do this very thing by means of suppressing the appetite so that one naturally eats less. Consider, for example, the Shangri-La diet.
I will grant that if one wants to lose 2+ pounds a week over a long period of time, then the pangs of hunger are unavoidable.
There seems to be this idea floating around that you can diet, lose lots of weight, and not have it consume some bandwidth in your life. BS.
Agreed. This is especially true if there’s a psychological component to the initial weight gain. For example, stress eaters will have to either avoid stress or figure out a new coping mechanism if they want to lose weight and maintain the weight loss.
This is why I think low carb diets work: Because if you eliminate the primary source of calories in a person’s diet (carbs, which can be 50%+ of many people’s diets), they will eat significant fewer calories overall restricting themselves to only protein and fat.
Fat has calories too. If someone eats less carbs, why do you believe they will not eat more fat? I could swap carbs and fat in your statement and get something with the same logic.
This article is interesting to me because I have this belief that weight loss is basically about eating less (and exercising more). And some extremely high percentage of everything said about dieting, etc. beyond that is just irrational noise. And that the diets that work don’t work because of the reasons their proponents say they work, but only because they end up restricting calories as a byproduct.
This line is the funniest to me. This is why I think low carb diets work: Because if you eliminate the primary source of calories in a person’s diet (carbs, which can be 50%+ of many people’s diets), they will eat significant fewer calories overall restricting themselves to only protein and fat. But people have, instead, made up all sorts of fancy, science-y sounding reasons why carbs were evil.
What do the following have in common?
“Trying to lose weight? Just eat less and exercise more!”
“Trying to get more done? Just stop wasting time!”
“Feeling depressed? Just cheer up!”
“Want not to get pregnant? Just don’t have sex!”
Answer: they would all be quite successful if followed, but they are all difficult enough to follow that people who actually care about results will do better to set different goals that take more account of how human decision-making actually works.
If you eat less and exercise more then, indeed, you will lose weight. (I do not know how reliably you will lose weight by losing fat, which of course is usually the actual goal.) But you don’t exactly get to choose to eat less and exercise more; you get to choose to aim to do those things, but willpower is limited and akrasia is real and aiming to eat less and exercise more may be markedly less effective than (e.g.) aiming to reduce consumption of carbohydrates, or aiming to keep a careful tally of everything you eat, or aiming to stop eating things with sugar in, or whatever.
People with plenty of willpower, or unusually fast metabolism, or brains less-than-averagely inclined to make them eat everything tasty they see around them, may have excellent success by just aiming to eat less and exercise more. In the same way, for many people “just cheer up!” may be sufficient to avoid depression; for many people “just don’t have sex if you don’t want to have babies!” may be sufficient to avoid unwanted pregnancy; etc.
But there are plenty of people for whom that doesn’t work so well, and this is true even among very smart people, very successful people, or almost any category of people not gerrymandered to force it to be false. And for those people, the “just do X” advice simply will not work, and sneering at them because they are casting around for methods other than “just do X” is simply a sign of callousness or incomprehension.
This is true. But, unfortunately, those people often come to the conclusion that “X never works” and they defend this position with great tenacity.
The typical mind (or body) fallacy is pervasive :-/
You focused on akrasia, and obviously this is a component.
My guess was: they’re all wildly underdetermined. “Cheer up” isn’t a primitive op. “Don’t have sex” or “eat less and exercise more” sound like they might be primitive ops, but can be cashed out in many different ways. “Eat less and exercise more, without excessively disrupting your career/social life/general health/etc” is not a primitive op at all, and may require many non-obvious steps.
The specifics are very different in each of these examples, as Wes_W noted here.
Is the only one that’s potentially actively bad advise, for the same reason “pee a lot, don’t drink any water, and stay away from heavy food like vegetables” is bad advice.
Is at lest not actively bad advise, but “cheer up” isn’t a primitive.
Is actually good advise and a little investigation reveals that the people saying otherwise are placing nearly as much (or even more) value on “you having sex” as on “you not getting pregnant”.
Surprisingly, some people don’t even believe this. I know a sizable group of Paleo proponents and some fruitarians who say that you can eat whatever quantity of food x and this will not have negative effects on your weight. There are also people who think this advice won’t work because they’ve tried and it didn’t had any effect (but actually they weren’t aware that they were not eating less).
I am between those people (those who fail to follow the simple advice, not the very smart or very successful). But I recognize that my failure is in proceeding to eat less from the simple cognition of “I must eat less”. That doesn’t make “eat less” useless, it makes it incomplete. Indeed, when I found a system that allowed me to eat less using whatever low willpower that I have, I indeed started to lose weight.
“But actually they weren’t aware that they were not eating less.”
This is why I advocate the method of using a Beeminder weight goal (or some equivalent), weigh yourself every day, and don’t eat for the rest of the day when you are above the center line. When you are below it, you can eat whatever you want for the rest of the day.
This doesn’t take very much willpower because there is a very bright line, you don’t have to carefully control what or how much you eat, it’s either you eat today or you don’t.
Do scales actually work with enough accuracy that doing this even makes any sense?
It doesn’t matter. Fluctuations with scales and with water retention may mean that you may end up fasting an extra day here and there for random reasons, but you will also end up eating on extra days for the same reason. It ends up the same on average.
That has some issues. First, changes in water retention jitter your daily weight by a pound or two. Second, you assume good tolerance for intermittent fasting. If you weight yourself in the morning, decide you’re not going to eat for the whole day, and then suffer a major sugar crash in the afternoon, that will be problematic.
Yes, it won’t work for people who can’t manage a day without eating at least from time to time, although you can also try slowing down the rate of change.
As I said in another comment, changes in water retention (and scale flucuations etc.) don’t really matter because it will come out the same on average.
Volatility matters. Imagine that one day the temperature in your house was set to 50F (+10C) and the next day—to 90F (+32C). On the average it comes out to 70F (+20C), so it’s fine, right?
Creating a calorie deficit will cause weight loss. Just like abstinence will prevent pregnancy.
Depression is not like this. You can’t necessarily will yourself free of depression. You could will yourself to “act happy” until the grave, but it wouldn’t necessarily change your neurons.
The point is that you can’t necessarily will yourself to eat less or not have sex or stop wasting time, either. It looks as if you can, but appearances can be misleading.
I agree that depression is a more extreme case, though; a depressed person may be unable to “cheer up” on any single occasion, whereas I think most people can resist temptations to food, sex and timewasting once if they really need to.
(Also, depression isn’t just persistent unhappiness, but that’s usually part of it and is what would be fixed by Just Cheering Up, were that possible for the sufferer.)
Do you think you can necessarily will yourself to drink less (alcohol)?
The debate about “personal responsibility” vs “can’t help him/herself” is very old.
No. More precisely: I’m pretty sure I can. I’m pretty sure most alcoholics can’t. But they may be able to will themselves to drink no alcohol at all, just as it may be easier to follow a diet like “nothing containing sugar” than one like “no more than 2000 kcal/day”.)
I suggest that we should actually care less about whether in some abstract sense we can do these things (exactly what we “can” do will probably depend strongly on the definition of “can”), and more about whether we will. And on that, I think the empirical evidence is pretty good: for many people, just deciding to eat less will probably not result in actually losing weight and keeping it off.
These are somewhat different concerns in the sense that “can” is not sufficient for “will”, but it is necessary for “will”. Since I cannot fly by flapping my arms, the question of whether I will fly this way doesn’t have much meaning.
I suggest that, instead, we stop pretending that there are solutions suitable to absolutely everyone. People are different and are sufficiently different to require quite different approaches. If we take weight as the example, some people (commonly called “that bitch/bastard” :-D) can eat whatever they want and maintain weight; some people can control their weight purely by willing themselves to eat less; some people can control their weight by setting up a system of tricks and misdirections for themselves which works; some people cannot control their weight by themselves and need external help; some people can’t do it even with external help and need something like a gastric bypass; and some people have a sufficiently screwed up metabolism so that pretty much nothing will make them slim.
There is no general solution—it depends.
I was under the impression that that was pretty much exactly what I’d been saying :-).
Yes, the effect of diets on weight-loss is roughly mediated by their effect on caloric intake and expenditure. But this does not mean that “eat fewer calories and expend more” is good advice. If you doubt this, note that the effect of diets on weight-loss is also mediated by their effects on mass, but naively basing our advice on conservation of mass causes us to generate terrible advice like “pee a lot, don’t drink any water, and stay away from heavy food like vegetables”.
The causal graph to think about is “advice → behavior → caloric balance → long-term weight loss”, where only the advice node is modifiable when we’re deciding what advice to give. Behavior is a function of advice, not a modifiable variable. Empirically, the advice “eat fewer calories” doesn’t do a good job of making people eat fewer calories. Empirically, advice like “eat more protein and vegetables” or “drink olive oil between meals” does do a good job of making people eat fewer calories. The fact that low-carb diets “only” work by reducing caloric intake does not mean that low-carb diets aren’t valuable.
I think it has a net negative effect on the global dieting discussion that it contains these superfluous steps to the actual causes of weight loss.
Having a rational discussion about satiation is one thing. It is a long way from the woo that has been involved in getting people to believe carbs are magically evil.
I remember first digging into the Atkins diet. I thought, “No. This is dumb. It’s just calorie restriction. Why are they pretending it’s more than that?” But I shut my mouth for a while because I didn’t understand the science and Atkins and other low carb variants seemed so popular.
“Eat less and exercise more” is the best dieting advice (Or perhaps even better, “Create a reasonable calorie deficit over time”.) It may be difficult to follow, but it’s clear. It allows people to rationally attack the problem of “how” to accomplish weight loss. Everything else is just muddying the waters.
After changing my mind dozens of time on this topic, exactly what you say is the only stable conclusion I reached. Effective weight loss is effective calorie reduction, whatever you do to reach that is whatever works for you.
Seconded. I’ve noticed that the diets I have tried successfully (which have all been variants on “consume food during a limited number of sittings per day”) have worked by allowing me to use noticeably less willpower than it would normally take for me to use to limit my calorie intake by that much per day.
Hunger is the big diet killer. It’s very hard to maintain a diet if you walk around hungry all day and eat meals that fail to sate your appetite. Losing weight is a lot easier once you find a way to manage your hunger. One of the strengths of the low-carb diet is that fat and protein are a lot better than carbs at curbing hunger.
Yeah. But that’s not really the point. The reason low carb diets lead to weight loss is because they restrict calories. I’m aware of many dieting tricks that can assist, but a calorie deficit must be created in order for weight to be lost.
This may seem self evident, but there is still debate about it. Carbs are not magically evil, they are just a macro nutrient that happens to be a large share of the calories in a typical Western diet. That’s it. No magic.
If you don’t eat after 6pm, never eat dessert or fast food, eat a larger breakfast, have a salad or X raw vegetables everyday, drink X water everyday—these can all help you lose weight. But there is nothing magical, or even scientific about any of these tactics. It’s all stuff we’ve known for 100 years.
Likewise, if you walk 2 miles a day everyday for a year, you’ll burn X calories that will lead to X weight loss. It’s just math.
My point was to specifically disparage diets like the Atkins Diet. It does nothing apart from restricting calories, yet libraries have been written about the magic of how and why it works. It’s all just noise aimed at selling books, etc. to people who are looking for help.
No one in this thread is disputing that you need a calorie deficit to lose weight. My contention is that this is merely the beginning, not the end. Let’s refer to the following passage from the linked article:
A diet should be realistic for free-living individuals. An obese person who wants to lose 50+ lb. could expect to be at it for the better part of a year. A diet that leaves you hungry all day is doomed to fail: it’s unrealistic to expect pure willpower to last that long. That is the point of my post about hunger control. Disregarding it or dismissing it as a mere trick is to ignore that a very important part of dieting is making sure the dieter sticks to the diet.
Quite the contrary. The Atkins Diet is not just about losing the weight. It also includes a plan to keep it off. Maintaining weight loss is generally harder than losing the weight in the first place. Yo-yo dieting) is a very real problem. The problem with naive calorie restriction is that it doesn’t instill good eating habits that can be maintained once the weight-loss period ends. The Atkins Diet addresses this and is designed to ease one into eating habits that will maintain the weight loss.
It isn’t unrealistic to create a reasonable calorie deficit for awhile...and I have no idea what a “free-living” individual is. It may be difficult to lose weight, but it’s like anything else that is difficult. It requires focused effort over time. Habits can be hard to change. There are plenty of tricks and hacks to help. Avoiding carbs is a good one becuase it will autmotically eliminate 25-60% of an individual’s daily calorie consumption. That’s all it will do. You could avoid fat, too. Same effect. Fat and carbs = calories. No magic.
Yeah, but strawman. Dieting involves some hunger. It’s not going to kill you. It’s just part of the adjustment to a more healthy level of consumption.
Naive calorie restriction is just regular calorie restriction with a negative name. Good eating habits entail calorie control. That’s not naive. It’s basic.
Weight loss is generally really simple. We should be grateful that this is so. Every discussion I’ve seen on LW makes dieting much more complicated than it need be. It’s very hard for many people, but that doesn’t mean it’s complicated.
By “naive” I just mean calorie restriction without any other consideration. For example, a diet where one replaces a large pizza, a 2-Liter bottle of Coca-Cola, and a slice of chocolate cake with half a large pizza,1 Liter of Coca-Cola, and a smaller slice of chocolate cake is what I’d consider naive calorie restriction. I don’t know that anyone would seriously argue that the restricted version even remotely resembles good eating habits.
Lest you accuse me of straw-manning, let it be noted that many obese people subsist on a diet consisting of fast food and junk food. In fact, malnutrition is a very real problem among the obese. That’s right: you can eat 5k+ Calories a day and still exhibit signs of malnutrition if all you eat is junk. When I speak of instilling good eating habits, I have in mind people who exhibit severe ignorance or misconception of basic nutrition.
A low-carb diet is not just a matter of eating what you normally eat, minus the carbohydrates. That’s going to end about as well as a vegetarian diet where you simply cut out the meat from your normal diet. You run into a micronutrient deficiency that can end up causing problems if the new diet is sustained for several months.
It’s an empirical fact that some foods are more filling than others and keep you feeling full for a longer period of time, even if the number of calories consumed is the same. That’s why people care about the glycemic index. I have tried losing weight several times over the last seven years or so. There are diets where you feel satisfied most of the time, then there are diets where you finish a meal feeling as hungry as you did when you started. The psychological difference between the two is quite profound and hardly warrants the charge of “strawman”.
Well, of course. I never said or implied calories were the whole ball game. You’re conflating weight loss and nutrition throughout.
No, but you’d be hard pressed to make up those calories by eating proteins. That is quite the point.
I’ve mentioned satiation as a real issue that ought to be addressed by any rational diet plan.
But, again, it isn’t the aim that a diet should involve no hunger when compared to your current meal plan. That is just plain silly and irrational.
Losing weight is like any other pursuit—it requires the expenditure of resources: Will power, focus, effort, energy, discipline. It may diminish your capacity to pursue other things for a time. It doesn’t mean you have to be bedridden or incapacitated. Again, any other pursuit is like this: Working long days on a big project at work, training for a taxing athletic event, studying for difficult classes and exams, etc. Dieting is a significant project to take on.
There seems to be this idea floating around that you can diet, lose lots of weight, and not have it consume some bandwidth in your life. BS. There are some great, rational hacks available, but it takes some sustained work to lose weight. There isn’t anyway around that.
Short term, the body is resilient enough that you can go on a crash diet to quickly drop a few pounds without worrying about nutrition. On the other hand, nutrition is an essential consideration in any weight-loss plan that’s going to last many months. That’s why I associate the two.
Certain approaches purport to do this very thing by means of suppressing the appetite so that one naturally eats less. Consider, for example, the Shangri-La diet.
I will grant that if one wants to lose 2+ pounds a week over a long period of time, then the pangs of hunger are unavoidable.
Agreed. This is especially true if there’s a psychological component to the initial weight gain. For example, stress eaters will have to either avoid stress or figure out a new coping mechanism if they want to lose weight and maintain the weight loss.
Fat has calories too. If someone eats less carbs, why do you believe they will not eat more fat? I could swap carbs and fat in your statement and get something with the same logic.