a cool guide to diets

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, what if you were asking about how to hike up a mountain. Like you really wanted to get into it seriously, and learn and be prepared for the demands of the trail. What if the internet essentially just kept telling you “the only thing that matters is increasing your elevation”

Like, yeah, that’s true in a very unarguable way. The summit is higher than the base. But if that’s the only thing on your mind you’re probably gonna make a lot of mistakes that make things way harder for you.

Nobody told you about hiking boots, so you just showed up in flip flops? Technically you still only have to accomplish the same task of increasing your elevation, but now you’ll be miserable and about 100x more likely to just quit.

What if the mountain path suddenly dips down before going back up? If all you know is you’re supposed to increase your elevation, you might get really freaked out and think you’re doing something wrong when you start descending.

All of this is to say, the multitude of details are very much worth discussing in terms of weight loss. Two things can be true at once: being in a calorie deficit will result in weight loss, and calorie counting as a strategy may not work for everyone unless they have the requisite knowledge required to design a sustainable diet for themselves

To me it is not an informative graphic, it is a tongue in cheek one; all diets are reduction of calories

Yeah total nonsense.

Keto (not advertizing it, people just eating animals are the worst for our planet) works by changing your entire body to use Ketones instead of Sugar.

This completely changes your appetite and energy levels, also you will be in a constant state of burning fat, so pauses will immediately cause weight loss, different from eating sugar, where you have glucose and glycogen still there. this is not proven.

I think the point of the infographic is that there isnt a weight loss diet in existence that encourages a calorie surplus. Theres a literally infinite number of variables, ideologies, psychological and physiological differences as well as desired secondary outcomes that make certain weight loss diets more useful or attractive to individuals but they all share the same KEY mechanism for reducing adipose tissue as a primary goal.

And caloric deficit is only true on a fictitious notion of metabolism via a simplified system model of a human as a black box. As far as weight loss strategies go, calorie counting is extremely ineffective, and often leads to worse quality of life.

If your goal is however to shame people with a highschool level understanding of metabolism by making the problem into something "simple" they are failing to do with your actively bad advice, it's effective.

For those who are unaware:
Registered Dieticians are different than Nutritionists

Registered Dieticians are well educated (as of now, requires a Masters of Nutrition degree), and have to take continual education and bi-yearly license renewal tests, to stay relevant and up-to-date.

Nutritionists can literally be anybody who wants to call themselves a Nutritionist. No education/training/credentials necessary.

Same here. I generally eat decent food since I enjoy cooking but I do smaller portions and straight up avoid snacks and sugar drinks as much as possible. It's working, slowly but it's working and I don't feel miserbake doing it. People keep forgetting it's a marathon and not a sprint.

Oh my bad:

Plant Based | A diet made up of only plants | by creating a caloric deficit

The list seems to only be for dangerous, marketable diets. LOL

Ate paleo for a few months a couple of years ago. Got to under 10% body fat, decent muscle growth (was working out

Those results were probably in spite of the diet, if you were only on it for a few months.

Unless you started at 30% fat and unable to do a single push up, I think you were probably already in decent shape before the diet experiment.

Fat doesn't make you fat. Overeating is generally the problem. Check out a book called The Big Fat Surprise -- it's quite a good read.

Because from a weight-loss perspective it doesn't matter what you eat, only how much calories you stuff into your mouth. You could eat nothing but bacon and still lose weight, if you eat only so much that you still burn more calories per day than the bacon delivers. If you keep your portions the same size but move to food with more calories, you will of course gain weight.

Fat can also trigger parts of your system to stop craving it, so you stop trying to aquire it by overeating. There are some science articles about it.

Staving off constant hunger can be as easy as cooking up a lentil (daal) soup that has some oil/butter in it. The lentils make you get a very full satisfied feeling in the bowel and the fats hit the part that wants fats.

Carbs are processed first, so if you don't eat carbs, in theory your body will burn depot fat earlier.

You still need to eat less calories than you burn though.

The good thing about a calorie deficit is that it always works. Unless your body somehow escapes the laws of physics or you developed the power of photosynthesis, you WILL lose weight if you eat less than your caloric needs.

You could have medical anomolies that slow metabolism, so that weight loss is extremely difficult, but even then a reduction in caloric intake will cause weight loss. But somebody surviving on 2000 a day dropping 200 calories out is easy, compared to somebody sustaining on an 800 calorie diet and trying to cut 200 out.

There are some meds like olanzipine? that tweak your metabolism and it uses calories more efficiently, therby causing weight gain on same caloric intake, so the remedy on that med is eat less calories

Spot on! The CICO model should be outdated. Weight management should be a multi factorial issue taking into account more than just food intake.

CICO is only part of the story. Yes a calorie deficit will help you get the weight off but will it help keep it off?

From personal experience, once I beat the insulin spikes, keeping the weight off was almost effortless. I could look over ice cream after dinner and not even notice it, despite being a complete fiend for the stuff.

It promotes a calorie deficit because it would be difficult to stuff your face with an entire day's worth of calories in a matter of 1-2 meals. Unless you derp by eating certain fast food and processed sweets/desserts, then yeah, easily achievable to surpass your maintenance calories.

So you eat double before/after? How does it not create a deficit?

The point of intermittent fasting is that during the fast your metabolism increases and your body enters partial ketosis which is beneficial for healing and general well being.

Always reassuring to suggest a scientist and then say "but don't read anything more recent"

But if you eat nothing but Snickers and maintain a calory deficit you're gonna have a bad time.

But you would lose weight, because of the deficit. It's just that it would be very difficult to maintain that diet for myriad reasons.

The obvious intent of the graphic is in regards to dieting for the purpose of losing weight.

Close but not exactly, your body is capable of freely switching between fat or carb burning. When your body really thinks it's starving, it will start "eating" your muscles instead.

Fat burning gives steady supply of energy instead of the highs and lows of energy dense carbs. You feel this the hardest after lunch, on carbs you'll often feel tired and sluggish. You don't have this on keto.

Switching into keto can be a miserable experience though, so you're right about that. Once in keto it's chill.

The thing with keto is when overweight people start they are overeating, and so dropping carbs puts them into calorie deficit for sustaining the bodily functions. Then forcing the body to have no quick fuel availble starts ketosis.

But over eating on keto can keep you from losing weight. Look to the traditional diet Inuit First nation that survived in the tundra on meats and fats. They weren't in ketosis

Not only that, but CICO on its own terms just isn't at all useful. It's like saying "the cure to poverty is to make more than you spend." Like, no shit. It's just fully handwaving in terms of anything actionable. What are the barriers to exertion? What effect does food type have on feeling satiated? Is there a biochemical mechanism? Psychological? Social?

It's just an absurd reduction to "personal responsibility" that seems to be the default answer to any widespread, population level problems that the speaker doesn't really understand.

Keto causes greater water loss vs calorie counting on a healthy diet, so it's not surprising you lost more "weight" per day. It's a terrible way to lose weight, though.

This video explains it (all sources to studies are listed, too).

I was consuming about 150% of my normal pre-diet Calorie intake and losing 500g per day for a month. CICO is flatout not the mechanic used.

You are stating that without knowing your calories out, and asserting that the laws of thermodynamics aren't real

Keto works due to two things: 1) proteins and fats are more filling than carbs, and 2) your basal metabolic rate increases when you are in ketosis

What do anabolic hormones do?

Whether you burn fat or carbs doesn't matter here, if it's the same amount of calories.

There are credible arguments you can make for why eating specific foods would help weight loss, but this is not one of them.

Not entirely true.

Ketosis a metabolic condition where fat is used for energy.

A ketogenic diet is a diet that never makes the body leave this state (i.e. no sugar/carbs/alcohol)

Without sugar and insulin levels going crazy the body is less likely to overeat and people stop eating more quickly. But it is absolutely possible to gain weight while on a ketogenic diet. You would just be fighting yourself. (Example... You CAN eat 12 hard boiled eggs at once... You just really don't want to)