Yeo and most nutritionist would agree that certain foods provide "higher quality" calories and certain foods provide "lower quality" calories that affect things like your perceived satiation and energy levels.
But at a chemical level, the fat, protein, and carbohydrates function exactly the same way because at the cellular level, there are only so many chemical pathways to produce energy.
So yeah, eating the equivalent caloric amount of almonds vs fries leaves you feeling different levels of energy and satiation. Your body may even absorb the calories at different rates. It'll receive more proteins and fats from the almonds and more carbohydrates from the fries. But if your body expended more calories than you absorbed, the net effect is a loss of mass.
> But if your body expended more calories than you absorbed, the net effect is a loss of mass.
Yes, I agree with this. This is called Net Metabolisable Energy[1] and is something mentioned in the book.
I think I said it badly, because I still think calories matter. Just that it matters more what kind of food you're eating rather than just reading the food label.
You are incorrect and there is an almost endless amount of evidence that you are incorrect.
In one study they fed rats 90% of their calories from HFCS and they had no health consequences so long as the total calories were controlled to be the same as thr non HFCS group.
The "type of calorie" theory is generally proposed by popular psuedo science articles that appeal primarily to overweight people who are looking for easy answers that don't require them to do something challenging. Meanwhile people on ozempic lose weight while eating junk. Your body doesn't care where the calories come from, all that matters is that you don't eat too much.
> The "type of calorie" theory is generally proposed by popular psuedo science articles that appeal primarily to overweight people who are looking for easy answers that don't require them to do something challenging.
"Pseudo science" like a guy who got an OBE for his research? That's a first one.
By "something challenging", are you referring to physical activity? Physical activity is good and must be done whether or not you need to lose weight. The point is that physical activity alone is not enough.
> By "something challenging", are you referring to physical activity?
I believe they are referring to self-control about the foods consumed. Were you being willfully obtuse about this, given this entire sub-thread is about calories and you're deflecting to exercise?
> I believe they are referring to self-control about the foods consumed.
Then I don't understand how "overweight people avoiding something challenging" would use the excuse of the "type of calorie". It's a much harder concept to understand that fat, proteins and carbohydrates are absorbed differently. And you would also need to calculate it manually as packages don't take into account the difference of the composition of the food.
> Were you being willfully obtuse about this, given this entire sub-thread is about calories and you're deflecting to exercise?
Excuse me, but I am not the one who originally mentioned physical activity. In fact, I cited 2 paragraphs of a book I read talking only about calories absorption, and only 1 sentence of my comments was related to physical activity. Is that insufficient for you?
I think you replied to the wrong comment because I didn't make any point in the one you responded to. It's whatever, because I'm not alone on this hill and many nutrition experts agree on this. And I've chosen to give them credit and believe them as I'm not an obesity researcher.
I think he was just expressing frustration that the people who seem to have the most 'knowledge' about weight loss also seem to be the people who are not able to manage their own weight. This is despite the fact that controlling your weight is incredibly simple to do, it's literally "do the most obvious thing". The truth is that this is very hard to do, and in the face of an inability to control their own behavior they instead convince themselves that there's something very complicated going on.
I agree a lot with what you say. I will take another sentence from the book because I agree with it and have noticed it first hand after changing my diet:
> If you focus on health, your weight will take care of itself
There are some mornings when weighing on the scale where I notice that I lost more than 1kg (compared to 24 hours before). More often than not, I didn't even have a so-called "cheat meal". I eat healthily 95% of the time, so even if I eat junk food and gain 800g in a day I know I'm going to lose them by just sticking to my usual healthy habits.
I guess this was just a really long way of saying: fluctuations in body weight don't matter day-to-day if you stick to a healthy diet.
Taking into account my body weight (I'm lean, with muscles, and shorter than average for a man), I eat way more than I should be. My rice portion, which is a side, is sometimes as much as 250g. And this is about half my plate. Then I eat fruits, nuts during the day. All this after having eaten oatmeal for breakfast (about 100g). Dinner is a bit smaller than lunch but I eat at least twice what my parents would eat (granted, they are older).
If you re-read what you wrote, then the point of calorie counting is simply usesless - because satiation and energy levels contribute to the other side of your calorie equation (you likely expend more energy).
Calorie counting is like counting MIPS or Mhz in a CISC architecture - when the IPC varies based instruction types processed - it's an incomplete (and IMHO useless) view.
> If you re-read what you wrote, then the point of calorie counting is simply usesless - because satiation and energy levels contribute to the other side of your calorie equation (you likely expend more energy).
Biologically, the cells in your body require a specific amount of calories each day just to exist. Whether that's higher than your "base load" because you're very active or lower because you're fasting, the bottom line is that if your intake of calories is lower than your caloric expenditure, you will lose body mass as the body converts energy stores in fat and muscle via metabolic pathways.
In other words, you can lose weight even without exercise (increase in expenditure) as long as you decrease your consumption below your baseline caloric needs.
To add on to this, what about absorption? Like, calories in is important but are there foods that have a certain number of calories when measured in the lab but we actually don't extract all those calories in real life? Does gut microbiome have an effect? What about gut permeability ?
Yeo and most nutritionist would agree that certain foods provide "higher quality" calories and certain foods provide "lower quality" calories that affect things like your perceived satiation and energy levels.
But at a chemical level, the fat, protein, and carbohydrates function exactly the same way because at the cellular level, there are only so many chemical pathways to produce energy.
So yeah, eating the equivalent caloric amount of almonds vs fries leaves you feeling different levels of energy and satiation. Your body may even absorb the calories at different rates. It'll receive more proteins and fats from the almonds and more carbohydrates from the fries. But if your body expended more calories than you absorbed, the net effect is a loss of mass.