It's been a month since my last check-in.... Still not tracking food or weighing more than once every 10 days or so.
Last month I decided to see if I could go on a short cut and lose a little fat without measuring my food or weighing myself. So I reined in portion sizes just a tiny amount and started swapping some - but not all - discretionary snacks with less calorie-dense choices. Sure enough, the belt is a little looser, and the scale at my physician's office had me down 2 pounds. Bingo.
Random nutrition articles that might be of interest:
Why junk food is unlikely to end obesityNice article reconciling why lower-calorie versions of junk are still probably not going to affect population obesity rates. One of the better quotes:
Quote:Healthful eating isn't simply about more (or, in this case, less) of a few specific nutrients, nor is consumer behavior simple to predict as, when it comes to health halos, the research to date suggests it's both counterintuitive and perhaps even downright bizarre.
Undoubtedly, processed foods are here to stay. Were the food industry to make lower-calorie options more readily available, then those options may well be beneficial for those who truly take the time to carefully evaluate their diet's nutrition and caloric breakdowns. They won't, however, help the average, harried consumer in our currently overhyped marketplace.
The "Health Halo" effect is no joke. It's one of the reasons I became and stayed fat.
But I think that last sentence inadvertently sums up the debate about calories vs ...whatever the alternative to calories is today. Despite neverending forum arguments, a calorie deficit is both necessary and sufficient to lose mass. This isn't really debatable any longer. But it's also not more than one part of the story. The way people achieve and sustain a calorie deficit matters is crucial to the long-term success of body recomposition, and since most people aren't interested in learning a lot of nutritional theory, and then weighing and tracking all their food - playing it all by ear becomes much easier when the diet is higher in a diverse balance of whole and less-processed foods, and heavier on protein.
Next:
Dietary intake of carbohydrates and risk of type 2 diabetes: the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer-Norfolk studyQuote:Dietary intakes of total carbohydrates, starch, sucrose, lactose or maltose were not significantly related to diabetes risk after adjustment for confounders. However, in the residual method for energy adjustment, intakes of fructose and glucose were inversely related to diabetes risk.... The replacement of 5 % energy intake from SFA with an isoenergetic amount of fructose was associated with a 30% lower diabetes risk.
Yep. Fructose and glucose in the diet were
inversely related to the risk of diabetes, and swapping saturated fats with an isocaloric amount of fructose was correlated with a significantly lower risk of diabetes. BUT this was just an observational study, so not as interesting as a controlled experiment. Overconsumption in general still appears to be the bigger risk, more so than individual ingredients or macros.
And here's another primer on the fundamentals (with special guest appearance by Alan Aragon in the comments), since it's destined to be an unending debate, apparently:
Why Calories CountQuote:In studies where subjects are forced to overeat — they always gain weight.18-24 25-28
There is often a lot of individual variation in how much weight and fat people gain, but they always gain some. These differences are mostly because some people subconsciously move more when they overeat to burn off the extra calories (a phenomenon called non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or “NEAT,” which we’ll talk about later).19,24,29-32
However, this increase in subconscious energy expenditure is never enough to completely offset the increase in calories. In every study thus far — people still gain weight when they are eating more calories than they expend. They never expend enough to completely prevent weight gain when they overeat calories.