1300 words
More bullocks from Dr. Thompson:
I say that if you are over-weight and wish to lose weight, then you should eat less. You should keep eating less until you achieve your desired weight, and then stick to that level of calorific intake.
Why only talk about calories and assume that they do the same things once ingested into the body? See Feinman and Fine (2004) to see how and why that is fallacious. This was actually studied. Contestants on the show The Biggest Loser were followed after they lost a considerable amount of weight. They followed the same old mantra: eat less, and move more. Because if you decrease what is coming in, and expend more energy then you will lose weight. Thermodynamics, energy in and out, right? That should put one into a negative energy balance and they should lose weight if they persist with the diet. And they did. However, what is going on with the metabolism of the people who lost all of this weight, and is this effect more noticeable for people who lost more weight in comparison to others?
Fothergill et al (2016) found that persistent metabolic slowdown occurred after weight loss, the average being a 600 kcal slowdown. This is what the conventional dieting advice gets you, a slowed metabolism with you having to eat fewer kcal than one who was never obese. This is what the ‘eat less, move more’ advice, the ‘CI/CO’ advice is horribly flawed and does not work!
He seems to understand that exercise does not work to induce weight loss, but it’s this supposed combo that’s supposed to be effective, a kind of one-two punch, and you only need to eat less and move more if you want to lose weight! This is horribly flawed. He then shows a few table from a paper he authored with another researcher back in 1974 (Bhanji and Thompson, 1974).
Say you take 30 people who weigh the same, have the same amount of body fat and are the same height, they eat the same exact macronutrient composition, with the same exact foods, eating at a surplus deficit with the same caloric content, and, at the end of say, 3 months, you will get a different array of weight gained/stalled/decrease in weight. Wow. Something like this would certainly disprove the CI/CO myth. Aamodt (2016: 138-139) describes a study by Bouchard and Tremblay (1997; warning: twin study), writing:
When identical twins, men in their early 20s, were fed a thousand extra calories per day for about three months, each pair showed similar weight gains. In contrast, the gains varied across twin pairs, ranging from nine to twenty-nine pound, even though the calorie imbalance esd the same for everyone. An individual’s genes also influence weight loss. When another group of identical twins burned a thousand more calories per day through exercise while maintaining a stable food intake in an inpatient facility, their losses ranged from two to eighteen pounds and were even more similar within twin pairs than weight gain.
Take a moment to think about that. Some people’s bodies resis weight loss so well that burning an extra thousand calpires a day for three months, without eating more, leads them to lose only two pounds. The “weight loss is just math” crows we met in the last chapter needs to look at what happens when their math is applied to living people. (We know what usually happens: they accuse the poor dieter of cheating, whether or not it’s true.) If cutting 3,500 calories equals one pound of weight loss, then everyone on the twuns’ exercist protocol should have lost twenty-four pounds, but not a single participant lost that much. The average weight loss was only eleven pounds, and the individual variation was huge. Such differences can result from genetic influences on resting metabolism, which varies 10 to 15 percent between people, or from differences in the gut. Because the thousand-calorie energy imbalance was the same in both the gain and loss experiments, this twin research also illustrates that it’s easier to gain weight than to lose it.
That’s weird. If a calorie were truly a calorie, then, at least in the was CI/COers word things, everyone should have had the same or similar weight loss, not with the average weight loss less than half what should have been expected from the kcal they consumed. That is a shot against the CI/CO theory. Yet more evidence against comes from the Vermont Prison Experiment (see Salans et al, 1971). In this experiment, they were given up to 10,000 kcal per day and they, like in the other study described previously, all gained differing amounts of weight. Wow, almost as if individuals are different and the simplistic caloric math of the CI/COers doesn’t size up against real-life situations.
The First Law of Thermodynamics always holds, it’s just irrelevant to human physiology. (Watch Gary Taubes take down this mythconception too; not a typo.) Think about an individual who decreases total caloric intake from 1500 kcal per day to 1200 kcal per day over a certain period of time. The body is then forced to drop its metabolism to match the caloric intake, so the metabolic system of the human body knows when to decrease when it senses it’s getting less intake, and for this reason the First Law is not violated here, it’s irrelevant. The same thing also occurred to the Biggest Loser contestants. Because the followed the CI/CO paradigm of ‘eat less and move more’.
Processed food is not bad in itself, but it is hard to monitor what is in it, and it is probably best avoided if you wish to lose weight, that is, it should not be a large part of your habitual intake.
If you’re trying to lose weight you should most definitely avoid processed foods and carbohydrates.
In general, all foods are good for you, in moderation. There are circumstances when you may have to eat what is available, even if it is not the best basis for a permanent sustained diet.
I only contest the ‘all foods are good for you’ part. Moderation, yes. But in our hedonistic world we live in today with a constant bombardment of advertisements there is no such thing as ‘moderation’. Finally, again, willpower is irrelevant to obesity.
I’d like to know the individual weight gains in Thompson’s study. I bet it’d follow both what occurred in the study described by Aamodt and the study by Sims et al. The point is, human physiological systems are more complicated than to attempt to break down weight loss to only the number of calories you eat, when not thinking of what and how you eat it. What is lost in all of this is WHEN is a good time to eat? People continuously speak about what to eat, where to eat, how to eat, who to eat with but no one ever seriously discusses WHEN to eat. What I mean by this is that people are constantly stuffing their faces all day, constantly spiking their insulin which then causes obesity.
The fatal blow for the CI/CO theory is that people do not gain or lose weight at the same rate (I’d add matched for height, overall weight, muscle mass and body fat, too) as seen above in the papers cited. Why people still think that the human body and its physiology is so simple is beyond me.
Hedonism along with an overconsumption of calories consumed (from processed carbohydrates) is why we’re so fat right now in the third world and the only way to reverse the trend is to tell the truth about human weight loss and how and why we get fat. CI/CO clearly does not work and is based on false premises, no matter how much people attempt to save it. It’s highly flawed and assumed that the human body is so ‘simple’ as to not ‘care’ about the quality of the macro nor where it came from.
NotPoliticallyCorrect 
Intermittent fasting is the answer.
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You have the right idea.
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I think with this–as with many things–there’s a matter of what level you are trying to analyze. Back in part 1, you complained that Dr. Thompson, in reference to high-calorie shakes given to anorexics, pointed out that increasing the calories increases the weight gain, with a comment about “thermodynamics.”
But this example of weight gain in action isn’t a fat person trying to diet on the long term. It’s a malnourished, underfed person in a hospital setting. If you are actually dealing with actual anorexics–or anyone who has a similar problem of getting enough calories, perhaps because they have an intestinal problem–then physically pumping more calories into them absolutely does cause weight gain.
Sure, not all food is exactly the same. Obviously if you pumped them full of pure protein, they’d starve. But no one eats a pure protein diet unless they are already in the middle of a famine. The protein drinks are already optimized for nutritional content, so then it’s just a matter of how much you’re getting–which doctors can adjust by putting a tube into your stomach and pumping it straight in.
In that context, yes, if someone is going from 1,000 calories a day to 3,000 or 4,000 a day, they will gain weight, not because the formula has some superior mix of macronutrients, but because of the sheer number of calories they’re now getting. That is thermodynamics.
Now, sure, that doesn’t mean everyone will gain the exact same amount of weight. It doesn’t mean you’d gain the same amount of weight while eating a different formula or eating it only at specific hours (though why anyone would try to limit malnourished sick people to only eating at specific hours is beyond me.) It just means that under those circumstances, it’s true.
On the flip side, if people happen to weigh too much and want to lose weight, then chances are they are eating more calories than they actually need. “Eat less” might suck as practical advice, just as “eat more” doesn’t seem to convince many anorexics, but it still seems reasonable that if a person is consuming more calories than they need, then they should find some way to cut back the number of calories they consume to some stasis amount.
It does not matter what you eat, if you eat few enough calories of it, you will starve to death. (Plenty of POWs have starved to death on “high carb” diets of bread and rice. You absolutely can lose weight on a high-carb diet; It’s just not very fun.) Now, yes, I agree, not everyone will starve to death at equal rates. Some will lose weight faster and others slower. But everyone, eventually, will starve if the calories are too low.
This is just a first-level analysis, though, because we want our overweight people to be healthy and happy, not dead. The second-level analysis looks at the what and when of eating.
Overweight people, unlike anorexics, usually aren’t given already nutritionally balanced formula and told to just drink a certain amount of it per day. They have to contemplate questions like “How much chicken should I have? Breast or thigh? Skin on or off? Gravy? Pie?” You don’t let anorexics ask those questions because they’ll just answer “no” to all of them.
Same with timing/snacking (I cant believe we’re calling “not snacking between meals” “fasting” these days, but here we are.) Anorexics don’t snack in the first place, and when you physically pump someone full of calories it takes a while, like a continuous 12 hours of tube feeding. You don’t just dump 4,000 calories into someone’s stomach in half an hour, after all.
But overweight people do confront questions like “Should I have a midnight snack?”
Whether this fasting business works for (some?) people because it has a direct effect on the digestive system (by making it stop digesting calories in between meals?) or by getting people to eat fewer calories because they were consuming an extra 500 in their daily snacks, I don’t know. Maybe it’s a bit of both. But “eat at specific times” and “eat fewer calories” don’t have to be in conflict–they can both be true, just at different levels of the issue.
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This isn’t contested. The First Law always holds, it just gives us absolutely no causal information. It’s like with the ‘starvation experiments’ (beginning at 1500 kcal a day is not starvation) by Ancel Keys. Case closed, right? Eat less and move more and lose weight? No, it’s not that simple and actually very far from it.
Per 100 g serving, complan had 64 kcal coming from carbs with 33 kcal coming from sugar. That’s not good for you. These ‘health drinks’ are just loaded with sugar.
I just think thermodynamics (First Law) is irrelevant to human physiology. It only tells us that if someone eats more than they expend, they will gain weight. Do you think it’s weird that people are being told a law of physics to lose weight? What does physics have to do with weight loss? Absolutely nothing.
Of course, this was seen in the twin study as quoted from Aamodt (problems with twin studies aside, that study showed definitively that individuals eating the same amount of kcal do not gain weight at the same rate, and I’d bet that it’d hold true even for people with similar heights, weights, muscle mass, body fat percentage etc).
Right. The whole point here is the fallacy of ‘a calorie is a calorie’. All calories don’t do the same thing once ingested, nor do they go through the same metabolic pathways.
Yes, see Ancel Keys’ study.
And this article by Dr. Fung:
The Science of Why Caloric Restriction Fails
It does work and the common naysayer’s argument is ‘it works because they cut kcal in the first place, see CICO!!’ It doesn’t work like that. It works because insulin drops while in a fasted state and therefore fat can be unlocked from the adipocyte, which does not occur when there is an abundance of glucose in the blood from processed carbohydrates.
Insulin inhibits the breakdown of fat in the adipose tissue by inhibiting the lipase that hydrolyzes (the chemical breakdown of a compound due to a reaction with water) the fat out of the cell. Since insulin facilitates the entry of glucose into the cell, when this occurs, the glucose is synthesized into glycerol. Along with the fatty acids in the liver, they both are synthesized into triglycerides in the liver. Due to these mechanisms, insulin is directly involved with the shuttling of more fat into the adipocyte. Since insulin has this effect on fat metabolism in the body, it has a fat-sparing effect. Insulin drives most cells to prefer carbohydrates for energy. Putting it all together, insulin indirectly stimulates the accumulation of fat into the adipose tissue.
So take away the insulin, take away the ability to store fat. This is seen with type I diabetics who need to be injected with insulin and they then gain weight. Dr. Fung has also cited studies showing a clear relationship between insulin increases leading to weight gain.
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you mean “bollocks” not “bullocks”. the first means testicles. the second means steers.
“bollocks” is british slang for “bullshit”, but it has nothing to do with bulls.
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what’s amazing is that dr thompson is a professor at UCL, one of britain’s top universities.
the only reason to use “calorific” in “calorific intake” rather than “calorie” is to distinguish it from non-calorific intake, aka water or diet soda. if dr thompson really said that he’s just a poser. maybe UCL is a good school, but its psychology department is pathetic.
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I think most psychology is pathetic, to be honest.
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