I have been trying for the past couple of months to lose weight. I started this journey by counting calories, and did so for about the first six weeks, eating between 1200 and 1500 calories a day. I’ve also been doing a 60 min. cardio workout 4 to 6 times a week. During the first six weeks, I lost 2 pounds per week. For the past two weeks, I have only watched my carb intake, and not counted calories. I only eat when I’m hungry, and stop eating when I am no longer hungry. I’ve also still been doing my cardio workouts, and have lost less than a pound per week. So, it seems that calorie counting works for me, more so than cutting carb intake. Why do you think that is? I’m asking because I would like to get away from counting anything.

It can become progressively more difficult to lose weight as your body fights to maintain enough fat to remain in homeostatis — that is, the point at which your fat cells can supply your body with energy between meals.

I don’t know your height and weight, but I’d be concerned about restrictng calories long-term and slowing your metabolism, especially if you were going hungry all the time. You might want to pick up the latest book on the Atkins diet, which gives detailed advice on moving through the phases of the diet depending on your weight-loss progress.

1) calculated their eaten calories based on calorie tables (2 different ones, which each gave different values, but just take the average…)
2) measured the calories in a laboratory

The calculated value was between 22 and 66% higher than the measured one – the children also didn’t clean their plates 100%, which means the difference was even greater. All in all between 24 and 93% difference between real and calculated.

So the experts know that it’s just that people eat only 100 calories too much per day????!!!! They can’t even measure that! But it sounds scientific – 100 calories – look, it’s a number, it must be science…

If anyone tries to tell me that this is scientific and that denying the calorie theory isn’t, they can burn my poo in a bomb calorimeter.

In which case “bomb calorimeter” might be the appropriate term.

I also found it amusing the restaurants are “getting away” with something by serving bigger portions. If I order a 12-ounce steak it turns out to be 14 ounces, I don’t feel abused.

Love your blog by the way and send people here often to take a look…the ones that want that is

Marc

I ate those Lean Cuisine meals too. They’re worthless. I hope some of your friends see the light.

I owe you one…this post and the comments pushed me to explore my view that Nutrition Facts Labels tend to legitimize food products and stimulate cravings for them, which led to a new post of my own. Thanks for the inspiration.

Cheers!

That’s a good post:

I like the closing point … we probably shouldn’t be eating food that requires a lengthy explanation on the label. My breakfast could be reduced to “Eggs, butter.”

Good lord, how long will it take for these ‘health’ experts to realise its is THEIR theory that is making people fatter and to stop blaming anything and everything under the sun for why counting calories / cutting fat / eating to many grains is not working. Let’s blame the government. No, no, no, surely it’s fault of those scheming restaurants. No actually, maybe people are just too thick to make good choices. Aaaargh, this drives me nuts!

I have just finished reading Gary Taubes updated copy of ‘Good Calories Bad Calories’ and in the final chapter he mentions how nobody in the health industry wants a simple answer to the obesity and diabetic problems, as that would imply they were at fault for missing something so obvious. Better that the answer is something ridiculously complicated, because then all the experts can say “well, no wonder it’s taken us so long to get to the bottom of all this…”.

Great post by the way. I loved the “nutrition labels must make people gain weight” comment – can’t believe that correlation was missed by all those experts out there lol!

Occam’s Razor … sometimes the simplest explanation is the best.

Well, they’d be out of work if they admitted that.

They asked them to eat twice as many calories as they needed to maintain their weight, over a four week period. Most of them managed to do this, but the differences in weight gain (as a percentage of starting weight) was significant.

Two of the ten were physically incapable of doubling their calorie intake for the whole of the four weeks; two responded by increasing how much fidgeting they did. One man gained quite a lot of weight but it turned out that most of the gain was in muscle weight (even though he had not increased the amount of exercise he did – in fact, they worked out that he had increased his basal metabolic rate by 30% over the over-feeding period).

Interestingly, once the experiment was over, almost all of the ten pariticipants lost the weight they had gained…. within two weeks. Even the winner, who had gained almost 10% of his starting weight (6.5 kilos).

Wish I had one of those metabolisms. My wife is pretty much the same. Only time she ever gained weight was during her two years in the Peace Corps, living almost exclusively on grains in a poor African village. As soon as she returned stateside and ate a balanced diet, the weight came off. And of course, she’s never counted calories.