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That's because you need stuff besides calories, but the things that people think of as cheapest (i.e. most calories per dollar) have nothing but calories. If you eat a lot of fish and vegetables, you'll feel fuller of fewer calories because your body will have everything it needs.
I don't have a problem with most of what you said, but one thing I should mention is that we don't know how much the average human burns in calories. That is entirely dependent on how much they eat. If they eat a shit ton of food, then the body will upregulate the metabolism in order to be able to burn the calories that it cannot store.
What are you telling me?
The only thing abundantly available in poor countries are grains and legumes, which are quite calorie-dense, but not very nutrient dense. "Malnourished" and "undernourished" aren't exact synonyms. "Nourishment" not only refers to amount but also quality of nutrition.
I would most certainly expect poor people to be obese, in America or otherwise.
o_O
No amount of vitamins or minerals would have prevented their obesity.
The problem isn't that they had nothing but calories. The problem is that their carb intakes were extremely high, and fat and protein intakes very low. One population was basically living off of coffee and white bread, and, despite the fact that the amount of calories they eat were starvation level, 40% of their women and 25% of their men were obese.
That's only true to a very small extent. A person who engages in very little cardiovascular exercise will not ramp up their metabolism to account for a 3000 Calorie/day diet.
I've personally found that when I'm at work (for 12 hours), I burn about 400-500 calories, judging by pedometry and the like. I wouldn't assume that basic metabolic functions of living do anything more than that, so I essentially double that number to find an estimated caloric usage. Meaning, on a good day I burn 1000 calories, but often less. So I try to take in no more than that.
In the last 3 weeks, I've lost 22 pounds. I couldn't be happier.
It's this part
Taubes gave examples of populations that are starving and still have an obesity epidemic. Also, can you cite that 700-1000 calories a day? Cause I can't honestly see anyone living off of that amount of calories unless you're a comatosed infant.
I'm still having trouble losing my football weight.
I played offensive line in the NCAA. You don't even see the field if you're under 340.
Sure. I have lots of energy stores. But if I'm only physically exerting 500 or less calories a day, and science states that most people burn 50 (or so) calories an hour for metabolic processes, I'm only burning 1000 calories a day at best.
You just don't need that much energy daily. Certainly not if you're trying to lose weight.
It's hard to say. If you can't store the fat (due to lack of carbs and therefore lack of insulin), and you can't excrete it, then you have to burn it.
Whenever I eat 3000 calories worth of fat and protein, I feel super-hyper, for example. And even though I have a desk job, and have been eating shitloads for the past few months, I have lost weight. So your numbers don't really play out here. Sure, I exercise, but that doesn't burn that many calories (and people tend to compensate for it by eating more afterward anyways).
Well, you're probably burning 1000 calories a day by working out, in addition to the 600 you burn by just being alive and the 500 you burn by being awake.
Considering how little of your diet is sugars, you're probably just shitting most of your nutrition away, literally. So take some stool softeners, because an all-protein diet can lead to some serious blockage.
This is obviously personally dependent, and I'm also young, but when I was really trying to lose weight I ate 1,200 calories a day or less, and the result was that I lay in bed all day in a half-comatose daze and couldn't sleep at night because I was too hungry.
I'm fairly sedentary, and I must be burning far more that 1,000 calories, because I regularly eat much closer to 2,000 and I have a stable weight.
Please explain this in more detail, because I think you are talking out of your ass.
Also just in general it should be noted that weight isn't a measurement of health, it's a measurement of weight.
If your diet contains more fat than your body can use, then you shit out some of it.
Notice the "if", however. It basically happens very rarely on low-carb diets because instead of carbs for energy, your body is now using fat. This means that you are much less likely to shit it out than you would be if you were on a high carb - high fat diet.
Exactly. Hence my question/comment.
Despite being underweight by any measure, and having a low body fat percentage to start, I've been eating low carbohydrate foods for the past two months. Much of the reasoning behind why high fat diets not only work for weight loss, but are also healthy and sustainable is counter to everything I was taught in the biology labs and at home, but one doesn't have to look very hard to find some manner of evidence - either people or papers - that high fat diets just might work. And doing it yourself is so much more fun than reading a book.
At only two months in I think it's too soon to say what a high fat diet has done to me. I'm going to get a blood test next month, namely to see what the effect of a diet stupidly high in cholesterol has had on my HDL, LDL and triglyceride levels. On top of that I've been recording values of my weight, body fat (using a ghetto D.I.Y. method: callipers!), performance in aerobic and anaerobic exercises and largely unscientific notes on how I feel and how awesome I look. I'm hoping that at the three month mark I can read through my results and maybe further my knowledge of what makes my body tick.
Do bodies tick?
Yeah, I think so.
I don't think I have much of worth to contribute, but I'm eating tonnes of fat and I'm not dead yet. Will notify you all when that changes.
Calories in calories out should dictate that I keep getting bigger, but I've got a pair of pants from 8th grade that are the same size that I wear today
edit: well, 3000 calories on work days/school days when I have fast food, when I cook its far far less
Or let's say I want to reduce fat intake to 500 calories per day, which is reasonable, and then increase protein intake by 300 calories and carb intake by 200 calories. That's not an entirely unreasonable diet.
I mean, I find it hard to accept that eating a reasonably low amount of fat and not eating terrible amounts of sugar and carbs is impossible to do when millions of people do just that and are quite healthy. I'm not shitting on a low-carb diet, but if you're trying to say that's the only way to eat healthily you are a fucking loon.
It's like the old "pound of steel or pound of feathers" argument, in a way.
Fats have higher calorie density than sugars.
I don't know which "millions of people" you are looking at, because last time I checked, obesity rates were skyrocketing across all age groups, and people who were on low fat/moderate-carb diets were struggling with various CVD risk factors. Maybe that fact changed between the time I look at the data and you posted on this thread, though.
I mean, you're probably young (I am - not saying that to be condescending), so you may not have had to deal with that stuff yet, but it is a real threat for a large portion of the population.
I am arguing that it is much healthier than diets that have moderate/high carb levels.
Really, the right answer is: who gives a fuck about what we ate in the prehistoric era? It's not like social or natural evolutionary pressures are pushing us towards personal fulfillment, happiness, and longevity. They're pushing us towards some sort of personal or group fitness that quite possibly involves short, horrible, and malnourished lives.
There's no secret fountain of youth that we can discover by finding what nature really intended for us, as if that phrase even had a real meaning.
trust me, he is older than you
He may be - I am just saying, is he old enough to start worrying about CVD/CHD?
When you're young, it's very easy to eat whatever you want and believe you're healthy because hey, you never get sick!
The part of your post I highlighted was about nutrients (vitamins and minerals). Vitamins are either water or fat soluble. Hence, fat intake is required for some vitamins (Vitamins A, D, E, and K).
Carbs have one use: Energy for muscles. If you aren't very active, you don't need very many carbs. When it comes to low/high carbs, that's really the only consideration you should be making. Hence the current obesity 'epidemic': Lazy people eating a 60 - 80% carb diet.
Where does that figure come from? As far as I'm aware Basal Metabolic Rates are in the region of 1300 for an average woman and 1800 for men (+- 10% in each case).
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
I think the consensus is that it comes out of his ass.
The static metabolic rate for relative inactivity is 50-60 Calories an hour. It's a bit higher when you're awake, but not much. That puts an inactive person at about 600-700 calories a day. If you walk to work or live in a big city, you probably burn a lot more just in getting around. If you live in a suburb and work in a cubicle, you burn far less. Me personally, I drive to work because I have no other option. I'm not particularly active. And according to several different measurements I've taken, I've estimated I burn about 500 calories a day, at best, during a 12-hour shift, which involves a lot of walking around.
My actual rate may be as high as 1200 or 1300, but I also have days at work where I do nothing and burn few calories. This is the math I'm using, and what I'm basing my weight-loss regimen on, and it's working like gangbusters so far.
BMR is for calculating and maintaining "healthy" normal body function. I do not wish to maintain my current health status, because I'm about 80 pounds overweight.
When I get down to my goal weight, I can take in about 2200 Calories/day and stay fit, which is about right according to most models. But I'm not going to get there by consuming enough calories to maintain my current weight.
1. Your body is shedding muscle mass as rapidly as possible for 2 reasons:
a) You need the protein, amino acids, etc. to repair vital organs.
b) Your body is trying to lower your required calories for survival (less muscle, less calories needed).
2. Your body is scaling down metabolism as low as possible since you are starving, leaving you feeling tired, irritable, etc. Any excess calories produced by this reduction in metabolic rate are stored as fat.
I guarantee you that if you are eating under your BMR, all of your weight loss is muscle mass, and you are actually gaining fat. Also, once you do reach your 'weightloss' goal and start eating normally, you will gain it all back again. Why?
Because of point #2 - your body is being starved, and is trying to store as much fat as possible. It will take a few days of eating normally for the metabolism to pick back up and stop this fat storage priority. In the mean time - you will plump right the fuck back up.
Calculate your BMR * 1.2. Aim to eat 500 calories less. If that cannot be achieved without going below BMR, produce the gap via exercise.
Safflower. Not sunflower. It's basically all monounsaturated.
(edit) Though reading more, I've seen stuff tell me that polyunsaturated is what helps with cholesterol. And that safflower is actually high in it, contrary to that chart. This stuff is friggin' confounding.
But... you said you burned only 700-1000 calories a day.
Sorry, but WHAT? Please check your math. Let's go conservative. 50 calories per hour * 24 hours per day is 1200 calories MINIMUM.
The clock goes up to 12, but there are 24 hours in a day. (This seems the most likely source of the mistake to get the numbers you got)
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Safflower isnt too bad (the monosaturated type - not the cooking oil poly type - apparently it comes in two different varieties). It's got more poly-unsaturated then olive oil but less then the other industrial seed/vegetable oils.
The main thing with polyunsaturated fat that you need to understand is that there are two main dietary types - omega 3 and omega 6. omega 6 intake should be minimized as much as possible. omega 3 should be maximized. And most polyunsaturated fat in the modern diet is from omega 6, so it's best to just generally lower your intake of it.
Any time you see a health benefit attributed generically to "polyunsaturated fat", be wary. And by wary I mean you should just ignore it.
I tend to use olive oil when cooking when butter isn't a huge part of the taste because well, it's not bad. I also tend to use bread dipped in olive oil with spice because as far as I can tell butter/margarine/cream cheese are a lot of caloric intake for not much taste.
I'm also pretty sure Canola has a good profile of the right sort of fat and all.
Edit: It does make a sort of sense, but then again we evolved in environments that were similar/different in a vast number of ways, and can't predict which of those factors has changed for the better or worse.
I mean we evolved brachiating limbs, this doesn't mean it makes sense for us to live exclusively in trees.