Weight loss comes from having a calorie deficit, not from keto. You can gain weight on keto if you eat more calories.
You can achieve the same weight loss by just eating fewer total calories, without cutting carbs as well.
This is well understood by now. The issue is that most people aren't actually going to track their calories- they eat when they're hungry. If you adjust your diet- you can satiate your appetite on a lower number of calories.
The idea is that meats, vegetables, and fats help you meet your nutritional goals on a fewer amount of calories when compared to carbs- because carbs are empty calories.
Agreed that satiation is a major aspect. How satiating a food is, is not simply about carbs/proteins/fats. Most carb rich foods people eat today are high in sugar and low in fiber. That causes people to overeat. You can also overeat with high fat foods because fat is much more energy dense.
You can just as easy have a bad keto diet as you can have a bad high carb diet. Replacing processed carbs with processed meat will not do any good. It's a group 1 carcinogen and will also lead to high cholesterol level causing heart disease.
My point is that carbs aren't the enemy. Neither is fat. Eating unprocessed/low processed food should be the goal.
in my experience- the more I learn about nutrition, the more I realize that we're just talking about everybody's best guess. Hard facts are scarce in this space.
> The idea is that meats, vegetables, and fats help you meet your nutritional goals on a fewer amount of calories when compared to carbs- because carbs are empty calories.
A minor correction: carbs are not necessarily empty calories. If you consider only sugary soda, then yes. There’s no one verb either. There are simple carbs, complex carbs, etc. The best kind of carbs are from whole foods (not refined where fiber and other nutrients are removed).
"Eat less, move more" is the advice professionals have been giving for years. This advice doesn't work though. Yes you have to do those things but telling people to do that in of itself is useless. There are strong biological/environmental factors at play working against that very advice. Having obesity isn't just some decision that people wake up and decide on.
The main advantage of the low-carb diet is that it may cause you to want to eat less. Even without counting calories, overweight people tend to eat fewer calories on low carb. Sugar and starch may increase your hunger, while avoiding them may decrease your appetite to a more manageable level. If your body wants to have an appropriate number of calories, you don’t need to bother counting them. Thus, calories count, but you don’t need to count them.
It does work in the vast majority of cases. "biological/environmental factors" that may make this harder are the exception, not the norm
> The main advantage of the low-carb diet is that it may cause you to want to eat less
But this isn't unique to low-carb diets. You can also swap out a portion of your food for vegetables and get similar satiety while eating less calories. Eating slower can also help you eat less. The point is, an extremely restrictive diet is not necessary to achieve the same results.
> If it worked, why do we still have an obesity epidemic
not everyone follows the advice? It takes a LOT of effort and discipline? Food is a powerful vice and coping mechanism. Addiction of any kind is not an easy thing to overcome especially when that addiction is so normalized.
> Are there still people who haven’t heard this message?
I think in most first-world countries no, but there is a massive difference between hearing something, understanding something and successfully implementing something
Yes, that's the whole point. Advice "Eat less, move more" does not work because people won't follow that advice, so it's ineffective advice and we need something better.
The appropriate measure for effectiveness of public health recommendations is whether the recommendations get results. It doesn't matter if simply eating less and moving more would get results, if advising people "eat less, move more" does not result in them actually eating less and moving more.
It's not useful to compare diet A with diet B, you need to compare the effect of "tell people to follow diet A" versus "tell people to follow diet B", because the likelihood of actually following the advice (influenced by ease, convenience, and compatibility with natural urges) is probably the most important part that determines what results (if any) it will achieve.
If one system or diet is much more difficult to follow than another, if "it takes a LOT of effort and discipline" then that's a serious limitation, a legitimate flaw of that system or diet. It's worthless to evaluate the effect of a process that almost nobody will do.
And this is a key argument in favor of the keto diet - that people who don't manage to achieve a calorie reduction through simply eating less or calorie counting find it easier to get a calorie reduction through this system, because it better aligns with our normal satiety mechanism.
Another problem with the advice of eat less move more is that you are putting blame on the person. If they only tried harder they wouldn't be fat. No matter if they have tried really hard only to get told they aren't good enough. When really the whole game is stacked against them. Companies creating highly desired, but low in nutrition and satiety food. Cereals full of sugar being marketed as heart healthy. It's all stacked against them and the message needs to change.
you can certainly cite the multitudes of factors working against staying healthy in todays modern environment, and those are super valid and should be considered. However, ULTIMATELY nobody can force you to be healthy and bar getting rid of any possibility of anyone obtaining "unhealthy" food, the responsibility in the end lies with the individual in most cases.
How does it take less effort? I lost around 30 kg from being obese without doing low, high or abstain anything. Also no calorie counting except in the very beginning.
After going down the rabit whole of trying to understand all the details of nutrition. What eventually worked is the simple and stupid advice: eat less, move more.
The problem is that there are no easy 30 day hacks, which is what people often expect.
From my perspective, whichever diet, it will take time and you need to make lasting lifestyle changes. The rest are implementation details.
The claim (which the above comments are seemingly ignoring, and I kind of believe myself but am not asserting) is that low-carb diet decreases hunger, making it naturally less effort to eat less (or at least requiring less willpower)
From what I heard the hunger problem is mostly coming from refined carbs, not carbs in general. I have nowhere near the expertise to make a claim one way or the other.
But even if true, if you don't go for a drastic weight reduction schedule you can snack on fruits, vegetables, nuts, etc. trough the day while still staying well within approximate calorie goals. I don't quite see why you should limit yourself to 3 fixed meals.
While at some point we might be able to say with certainty diet x is better for situation y, from my experience with myself and people in my circles, in practice, the by far hardest, but most important part of losing weight is switching and staying from an unhealthy lifestyle to a reasonably healthy one, whichever philosophy that might be.
I think for a lot of people Keto offers a fairly smooth transition. Just the images of the dishes alone look 10x more appealing than what is usually associated with diet meals. But in my case, you would have to pry that European bread from my dead hands before I remove it from my diet. I would not stick with Keto for a single week. On the extreme change side, I also saw someone going straight from living off of instant ramen, burgers and energy drinks to full on vegan buying only on farmers market or make/grow it at home.
"less effort and discipline" than what? depends on the comparison
Also, I'm sure a lot of people who have had trouble staying on the diet would disagree. Regardless of the specific regime, if a diet is restrictive (especially of things people are used to consuming) it can require a lot of discipline.
It's usually a lot harder to eat too many calories on Keto, though. I know I was struggling to get enough calories for my meals from restaurants when I was eating keto. I was getting double meat and a side salad everywhere I went just to get my meal up to like 700 calories, and paying a lot more than I did off the diet.
Like at Panda Express for example, I'd have to get a 3-entree instead of a 2-entree, get greens instead of rice for 45 calories, grilled teriyaki chicken for 300 calories, mushroom chicken for 220 calories, and broccoli beef for 150 calories, for a total of 715 calories, and even that was just enough carbs it could knock me out of keto, at 36 grams of carbs, so I usually tried to do some form of exercise after that meal.
Meanwhile at Panda Express just getting chow mein, before you even start with entrees, is 510 calories, and fried rice is 520 calories. Then they'd probably get Orange Chicken, at 480 calories, and Beijing Beef at 470 calories, and the 2-entree meal is 1,460 calories, or 2x the calories that I consumed with my 3-entree. (Those 3 things are in the top 4 most popular dishes at Panda Express according to fan rankings: https://www.ranker.com/list/best-panda-express-menu-items/ra..., if they got #3, Honey Walnut Shrimp, it'd be 100 calories less)
The amount of carbs included with just about every possible meal at most places is a substantial source of calories, and you don't get a discount for telling them to leave it off (not that I expect them to do so, but a few more keto friendly options that I don't have to substitute would be nice).
Sorry, but your statement is as true as it's pointless.
Consider: healthy people who are injected a small dose of insulin experience tiredness (reduced energy use) and increased hunger.
Contrary to eating fats, eating carbs triggers the release of insulin. Young, healthy people who have a properly working endocrine system handle eating carbs fine. But for those who don't, it's a different story. Just like those test subjects, their body limits energy consumption and experiences constant hunger.
So yeah, they don't burn enough calories and eat too much of them, but the saying so is pointless if not insulting; the question that needs addressing is why.
I'm not trying to say keto isn't helpful. If it works for you that's great, go for it. It may even be better than other diets in certain scenarios as you have mentioned.
However prescribing it as the default solution isn't right. If you're gaining weight the default solution is to reduce total calorie intake. Most of the benefits people see on keto can just as easily be had by simply avoiding processed junk foods. Demonizing carbs is counterproductive as it causes people to needlessly exclude nutritious foods like fruits from their diet. Yes, you will feel hungry on a low calorie diet initially. Keto will also give you the "keto flu" in the first week. Later on your body adapts to it (in both diets). The insulin release and hunger is your body's primary mechanism developed over hundreds of thousands of years. If you're advocating bypassing that in favour of something else, you better have a very good reason to do so.
I think the keto part is operative. You can lose weight on calorie restricted diets but a) to do so is pure suffering and b) the hormonal explanation of body fat accumulation (ie insulin/glucagon cycle) seems to have a lot more predictive power than the calorie accounting theory, which just seems total bunk to me.
The only thing I can say about calories is that after seven years on keto and feeling great, I have never given any thought to my calorie intake.
My weight remains stable as do my energy levels, so I can only assume that (1) I am getting exactly the right amount of calories from my diet, or (2) calories are an irrelevant metric.
> You can achieve the same weight loss by just eating fewer total calories, without cutting carbs as well.
Achieve weight loss - yes, achieve the same weight loss - no. If you primarily want to lose fat rather than muscle, your insulin metabolism becomes an important variable.
This is a popular myth. There is simply no evidence to back to this claim. On the other hand there is a lot of evidence that preserving/increasing lean mass (non fat mass) depends only on protein and not fats/carbs. Check this article which summarizes multiple studies in this area - https://www.menshealth.com/health/a25924744/keto-diet-carbs-...
Yes yes calorie in calorie out blah blah. Most people can't maintain a caloric deficit for an extended duration. Countless studies have shown that.
The point is people who are overweight tend to lose weight when eating ad libitum on a ketogenic diet, whereas people on a standard diet generally gain weight (see western populations).
If you cut out cookies, cake, pretzels, chips, and virtually all other junk food of course you will lose weight. IMHO, the keto folks are missing the actual cause here. You're not losing weight because you eat your burger without a bun. It's because you don't eat a pile of fries.
1. People on western diets. This isn't some hidden mystery.. it's in plain view. Plenty of studies done, or just ask _any_ doctor that sees patients, or any of your friends/family who have tried diets. Or search pubmed for diet adherence.
2. Because their base metabolic rate reduces over time to match their new reduced caloric intake.
The benefit of low carb is the reduction in your body's production of Insulin.
Insulin resistance after decades of high carb diets, regardless of the # of calories consumed, is the source of all metabolic disease.
Low carb is going to reverse this, a simple reduction in calories won't.
The low carb diet also has access to your entirety of fat stores.
Insulin resistance will result in a huge amount of insulin in your blood stream. Insulin prevents fat from being removed from your fat storage so a reduction in calories, while it does show a short term (i.e.6 week) reduction in body weight, it also reduces your BMR which is why people regain the weight lost.
Once the alpha cells in your pancrease are insulin resistant, they will be producing glucagon causing elevated blood sugar compounding the problem.
tl/dr; - Insulin resistance is the source of all metabolic disease. Reduce it via a low carb/fasting lifestyle.
