eat more vs eat less, metabolism and fat loss page 2

[gopintos]

It's not what you ate yesterday that determines your weight, it's what you ate this last year.

I must have ate a fat women. Wish I would have opted for the skinny biatch instead

[buddylee13]

as a 43yo male at 5'10 and 207lbs , I have yet to drop a pound the last 6 weeks and yet I'm eating 1600 cal a day. Maybe a high calorie day once in a while would help?

[RichMahogany]

Do calories matter? « The Eating Academy | Peter Attia, M.D. The Eating Academy | Peter Attia, M.D.

[Gorbag]

Do calories matter? « The Eating Academy | Peter Attia, M.D. The Eating Academy | Peter Attia, M.D.

Attias article is beyond the point, but I agree that nobody need to count calories, but if weightloss is the goal then everybody must eat LESS than the body need for maintaining its weight, so portion control can work just as good! Estimating your daily calorie expenditure and creating a deficit can be a useful tool when setting up a diet , but there after is it fully possible to manipulate weightloss by reducing portions when stalling etc...

[Ripped]

How many days/weeks/months does it take of not a lot of food to affect the metabolism? If I have 10lbs to drop, and I am restricting carbs and calories, when should I consider a cal/carb refeed? After a month? A week? A day?

I'm not really sure. It's been my experience that if I reduce calories I'll steadily lose weight for several weeks until fat loss stalls. My bet is that's probably how long my body typically takes to adapt to the lower calories.

But anyways, I do know a lot of diets prescribe one refeed day per week, and a lot of people have had success with that. I know once weekly seems rather arbitrary. It's just a strategy and I don't think there's an ideal number you can put on it anyways.

Also realize that if you do it too often your only canceling your diet out by eating too much all the time. I think that's why once per week seems reasonable from a strategic perspective.

[Ripped]

as a 43yo male at 5'10 and 207lbs , I have yet to drop a pound the last 6 weeks and yet I'm eating 1600 cal a day. Maybe a high calorie day once in a while would help?

I would try it. Try once per week.

And if that doesn't work, try going a bit lower on some of your other days.

Also, don't neglect the high intensity exercise. Right now I'm working out hard twice per week. It's not much, but I really think those 2 workouts are helping. It helps preserve muscle and keep the metabolism high.

[RichMahogany]

Attias article is beyond the point, but I agree that nobody need to count calories, but if weightloss is the goal then everybody must eat LESS than the body need for maintaining its weight, so portion control can work just as good! Estimating your daily calorie expenditure and creating a deficit can be a useful tool when setting up a diet , but there after is it fully possible to manipulate weightloss by reducing portions when stalling etc...

Attia's article is in no way beyond the point, I don't think you read a word of it, and if you did, you failed to understand it at even the most basic level. You're spouting nonsense, but nobody's probably surprised.

[JoanieL]

Counting calories and measuring/weighing foods are good learning tools. To become overweight (barring crashing thyroids and other metabolic anomalies), one eats more than is required to maintain a good weight. If a person is overweight for more than a few years, I believe they no longer know or sense what is the correct amount of food for their body size.

A splash of half n half may have anywhere between 20 and X amount of calories, depending on the pourer's perception of a splash. Two tablespoons has 40 calories. A 12 oz salmon filet looks a lot larger than a 12 oz piece of lean pork.

For people who have always maintained a healthy weight, these learning tools are unnecessary. Their brains and bodies are healthy gauges of the amount of food they need.

I always cringe when someone posts about not being able to lose weight and then uses terms like "serving" and "handful" to describe what they're eating. I know it's not popular, but imo, telling a morbidly obese person to eat when they're hungry and stop when they're not is as close to useless as teats on a bull. Because that's what they've been doing.

[Gladmorning]

I always cringe when someone posts about not being able to lose weight and then uses terms like "serving" and "handful" to describe what they're eating. I know it's not popular, but imo, telling a morbidly obese person to eat when they're hungry and stop when they're not is as close to useless as teats on a bull. Because that's what they've been doing.

I agree with the first part of your statement. Proper portion sizes didn't begin to make sense to me until I bought a food scale. Now, it's fun trying to guess how much something weighs before putting it on the scale. The second part of your statement I have a problem with. I am obese (um, workin' on it ) And it in entirely possible for me to understand the difference in hungry and not hungry. Especially once switched over to primal. What "experts" really need to be telling people is to figure out what signals they are receiving. Stomach growling= hungry the sudden urge to eat something = craving.

Folks need to understand the difference in real hunger and cravings, and learn how to deal with it.

[LauraSB]

However, for someone who needs to kick themselves in the but to diet temporarily to lose weight, it does make sense. For example, if you needed to drop 10 lbs, it might take several weeks along with making your diet a bit more strict on the calories during that time period. The strategy can still be dirt simple, but you still have to have a plan of action. And I think within such a plan, it "might" be helpful to include purposeful refeeds.

I guess the way I see it is, strict dieting is for when you have a little bit of weight to drop. But ordinary eating is for when your just maintaining. And after all, who needs to diet? Anyone who in previous years made the mistake of getting fat. And anyone who is already in great shape and wants to show further improvements.

I'm just saying. I agree with you. But there's also a time and place for a diet.

You know, I think we agree completely on how to eat. I just think how you think about it is supremely important.

In the beginning, 65+ lbs overweight, I set my budget at a 750 calorie/day deficit (theoretically 1.5 lb loss/week). That was 1400 cal/day. I chose that deficit because the calorie budget was pretty close to the budget I would have at a normal weight with minimal exercise. Most days I ate at more like at 1000 cal deficit. My "refeeds" were not deliberately scheduled. They were used to accommodate social situations that made a 1400 calorie budget a real bummer. It did work out to be about once a week though. The first 30 lbs came off at 2-3 lbs/week. Because I was using a calorie counting app that tracked my weight loss, as my weight dropped, so did my calorie budget. As I got close to 1200 cal/day, under eating on that budget started to be a real bummer. So I adjusted my deficit to 500 cal/day. Weight loss slowed, of course, but continued to be steady and I could still "under eat" most days and splurge when necessary. After another 25 lbs, I adjusted my deficit to 250 cal/day and continued with the same pattern of under eating and splurging.

So I've spent 10 months training myself to eat like a 130 lb person who doesn't really diet, who just under eats mostly and then over eats as it's convenient. If I had focused on the whole undereating/overeating strategy as gaming weight loss, rather than trying to think like someone who had always been a normal weight, I'm not sure I'd have gotten here, and felt as comfortable as I do.