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Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
I want to add to the above post that while all of this violent pro-Atkins, violent anti-Atkins, paleo, food pyramid, whatever, stuff is necessarily stupid and food type choice is ancillary to food amount, it really helps to focus mostly on the right kind of food. This is not news to (nearly) anyone ITT, but obviously, cake and coke are less filling per calorie than carrots, chicken breast and water.

On the other hand, I think it should also be acknowledged that while in theory, losing weight is as simple as inserting fewer calories than what you burn, it seems fairly obvious that humans are wired in such a way that in the situation most find themselves in in the west, it's simply very hard for them to stick to that simple formula. Like, it's genuinely hard - especially for poor people.

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Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
Perhaps it would help, but it will at best have a tiny impact. As will, most likely, every, or almost every, other thing we can do.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

Unseen posted:

How about

1. Calculate BMR (Base Metabolic Rate)
2. Eat 200 calories less than BMR a day

You can sit and watch TV all day and still lose weight.

Alternatively eat at BMR. As long as your daily movement is nonzero, you'll still lose weight.
Well, how about it? Do you want to propose anybody do this?

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

PT6A posted:

Another thing regarding calorie counting: how many people do you think have and regularly use a scale in their kitchen to measure servings? I do for some things, and it's often surprising how my estimation for a proper portion ends up being way larger than it should be. If people are trying to count calories but are only estimating portion sizes, it makes a lot of sense why they think it's impossible and doesn't work to actually lose weight.
The underlying issue is to the hungry person, and the fat person is hungry, "enough" inherently seems "too little".

Unseen posted:

Sure dude, I'll make a jpeg infographic and we'll post it on social media
Let's not, it's bad.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
Lovin' the "what are those negroes even complaining, at least the discrimination they're experiencing is 'unacceptable'" vibe.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

Crystal Geometry posted:

People become overweight largely due to their diet and exercise habits. There could be some kind of genetic component, however this seems unlikely because while people have not substantially changed genetically over the past century, they have fattened dramatically
1. a negligible fraction of people are truly "fat due to their genes" in the sense that with their genes, it would be nearly impossible to be both alive and not fat. This is so incredibly rare as to basically not matter.
2. You're presenting a false dichotomy that is completely missing the key facts of the situation. In general, the ratio of moving to eating determines how fat you are. How much you eat and how much you move is entirely determined by genes, environment, plus the mythical spirit entity "free will".
3. Similarly, how much eating less and moving more than your natural inclination and habits make you do sucks for you as well as your capacity to, by the exertion of willpower, still move more and eat less is entirely determined by your genes, environment, and magical spirit power.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

Discendo Vox posted:

Then talk about caloric density. "nature", "rawness" and "processing" have nothing to do with it.
"Traditionally processed" is a reasonably good, and perhaps right now for many contexts the only practical, proxy for a good ratio of caloric density to undersupplied nutrient density, satiation, and, in general, conduciveness to a healthy lifestyle.

It's not that there's anything magical to it and generally, when people try to explain why exactly brown rice is supposedly better than white rice, they say stupid things, but it's an empirical and very important fact that traditional diets work better than the modern diet.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

fishmech posted:

There is no such thing as calorie-dense, nutrient-poor food. It is literally impossible. The things you most need to get every day or nearly every day is carbs, proteins, and fats, and those are your so-called :airquote:energy nutrients:airquote:.
Where supposedly you = a frictionless sphere living in the 70th millennium BC savannah. In the real world, fat people don't need carbs, don't need much fat, and need to find food that is proportionally denser in the nutrients they're not getting an abundance of, while being much, much poorer in carbs and fats.

fishmech posted:

it's not like people eat until they happen to fill up on the micronutrients
There are independent satiety signals for, or at least, strongly preferentially triggered by, protein. I'm sure there's similar stuff for some of the micronutrients.

fishmech posted:

Further, the vast majority of people get more than plenty of all of them, unless they're doing weird things like going vegan or extremely restrictive fad diets.
P. sure half of the western world is low on omega-3 ffas, fiber, and micronutrients like magnesium, vitamin d and a bit of other stuff. Women are often low on iron.

Discendo Vox posted:

"traditionally processed" doesn't mean jack poo poo, and there's no need to make it a proxy for calories when we have calories. You don't know what you're talking about.

It's not hard to avoid the naturalistic fallacy. Here's a pro gamerguide:
STOP USING THESE WORDS
"natural"
"traditional"
"processed"

They're bunk.
You're 100% correct, person speaking from the 23th century where nutrition science has sufficiently figured out the complexities of the human digestive tract and metabolism to every last important detail, and this knowledge has propagated all the way through our cybernetically enhanced minds. The time where we all healthily live on Future Soylent. Meanwhile, us people stranded in the 21st century will do fairly well on a "would grandma's grandma recognize it as food?" rule of thumb. Not because of the magic of NATURAL, but because Grape Drink is bad and grapes are good.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

fishmech posted:

In the real world, everyone should be eating some carbs. I realize certain wacky fad diets say no one should eat any carbs, but that's not valid. You also should be eating some fats, again, insisting on eating almost none is a fad diet thing.
"No carbs" is a strawman. It's not inherently terrible, but so inefficient and pointless to try and eliminate them that basically nobody should bother. Just eat fruit and vegetables and beans and I guess eat a cake once a week who cares. But fat people need to eat way less carbs and fat.

fishmech posted:

Protein is something people need fairly regularly, while many trace minerals and vitamins can be completely missed for weeks at a time without risking deficiency - the body tends to stockpile them
Many. And many you can't store.

fishmech posted:

There is no particular need to have omega 3 fatty acids in particular on a routine basis. Vitamin D is primarily low because the best way to get it, for most people, is synthesis due to sunlight. Fiber being dangerously low in "half the western low" sounds fake. And so on. Bleeding tends to lose iron, what a surprise!
Still means they got to eat that chicken.

And significant fractions of the western world are indeed deficient in a list of micronutrients. I'd wager even most obese people are missing a bunch.

fishmech posted:

The "would grandma's grandma recognize it" rule of thumb is stupid because all sorts of traditional dishes are as "horrible" for you as the modern food people like you whine about as the downfall of mankind. If you just eat stuff your grandma's grandma knows about, you'd also get quite fat!
Me? I'm fine. I'm not gonna get fat.
But the non-strawman position would be: it's easier to live healthy on food than on modern food products; on grapes than on grape drink, all in all. Sure, people knew how to make some disgusting food back in the 15th century, but we've gotten a lot better since, and the worst stuff is mostly that which would be unrecognizable to Lincoln, and most of the helpful stuff (e.g. most plants) would be recognizable to him.

Cause, as nobody sane doubts, fruit and vegetables are useful tools for being less fat, and super processed food opens venues for really providing some calorically dense, non-filling food.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

Discendo Vox posted:

No, people who struggle with overeating should consume fewer calories. It's that simple. You're both fetishizing a past when people were actually nutritionally deficient. It doesn't matter what it looks like, or who would recognize it, or when it was invented. What matters is what is in it. For weight, the answer to that is calories.

fishmech posted:

Incorrect. What fat people need to eat less of is everything.
In the real world, fat people need to eat more lettuce and chicken breast.

Yes, the perfectly spherical fat person needs to simply consume fewer calories than they expend. But the oddly-shaped real fat people need to do that. That's the hard part. And it's a lot harder to eat a calorie deficit on smarties and energy drinks than on water, fruit, nuts, and traditionally prepared dishes based on legumes, lean meat, sea weed and the eyes of an ox.

Yes, if I today decide to lose weight, my first thought is: cut down the calories! The second thought is: how do I eat less than I want while minimizing how starved I feel all the time? And the answer is lettuce.

This is not about fetishization, it's acknowledging the pragmatics of the situation in addition to the physics.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

fishmech posted:

If he eats a lot of hot pockets, he's eating a lot of protein. Only your cherry picked "also it has to be 2000 calories and also he has to be eating in a certain ratio to the pop tarts and soda" shtick makes that impossible.

You're not actually using math or evidence. Eat 10 of the average hot pocket a day and you've gotten more than enough protein and you're still under 1700 calories, incidentally.
And in the real world, you won't - by lunchtime, you'll have eaten 15 pop tarts and two burgers. The guy next to you trying to do it on real food however will have a much better chance of meeting his targets.

Sure, if you eat 1500 kcal of pop tarts and I eat 7000 kcal of avocado and 100% GMO free snake oil, you'll go lean and I'll go fat. But, neither of us will. I'll eat 3000 kcal at best and feel loving stuffed, and you'll eat 4000 kcal of poptarts and still hate your life.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

Series DD Funding posted:

You don't need 150 grams of protein
You don't need to be thin either. But it helps.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

fishmech posted:

Uh, I know tons of fat people who eat a lot of lettuce and chicken breast dude. Was the last time you went to a fast food place or restaurant 1948?
I'm saying more. Literally eat a whole head. Eat a pound of chicken breast.

fishmech posted:

Smarties are like 15 calories a roll bub.
A contest between a guy eating lettuce and a guy eating smarties, whoever gets the most calories down in 15 minutes, I'm betting on the smarties guy.

fishmech posted:

Most people aren't going to eat two whole boxes of pop tarts by noon. Christ, you're spending like $8 on pop tarts every day at that point if you don't eat any after lunch. Let alone burgers on top of that.
$8 dollars for a single meal isn't a lot.

fishmech posted:

15 pop tarts is 1.7 pounds of food and it's only lunchtime.
1. Have you ever met a fat person? 2. Have you ever met a skinny person trying to gain weight?

I can eat a lot of cake.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

Asiina posted:

Fat people don't just eat the same things as skinny people but in much larger doses, they actually eat different food. You're right that they aren't eating 15 pop tarts for breakfast just like they aren't eating multiple heads of lettuce. Even fat people can't eat that much in day or they would literally never not be eating. The only way that they are eating so many calories is if they are eating food that is rich in calories while not being very filling, most of which is missing a lot of nutrients!

The amount of food that is in 100 calories of lettuce compared to 100 calories of chicken compared to 100 calories of poptarts is a pretty big difference in the actual amount of physical matter. So no, they aren't eating comparatively as much lettuce as they are pop tarts because, as you said yourself, that is ridiculous.
Lettuce is actually pretty nutrient poor. It's a bit of water and a tiny bit of fiber and that's basically it.

And IME fat people DO eat the same stuff skinny people eat, more or less. Just, like, more of it. A lot.

And the livable way of eating less calories includes eating stuff that's more filling per calorie - that is, fewer pop tarts, more chicken breast.

fishmech posted:

They're already eating a lot of lettuce. They're already eating over a pound of chicken. That's why they're so loving fat, brah.

What's that supposed to have to do with anything?

What kind of hosed up mindset do you have where 1.7 pounds of pop tarts is a single meal? You kinda sound like you've never ever had any if you think eating 15 of them before lunch is a common thing that's done. That is a LOT of them.

Yes I've met plenty of fat people. They don't literally eat 2 whole boxes of pop tarts in single day, let alone by lunch. They don't also cram down two whole burgers on top of that by lunchtime. That's how you get to be loving 600 pounds not 300 pounds.
I eat two whole burgers at lunchtime and I'm a skinny 160lbs, give or take 10, right now.

And fat people eat a lot more than I do. Like, add the pop tarts, and I'd be a fat person.

You need to eat a lot of disgusting stuff to get to 300 lbs.

But these stories aren't really so important. What's important is that while the physics of the situation is that fat people need less calories, the psychology is that it's a lot harder to eat a deficit diet of super processed food products, than of chicken breast, lettuce, and low-fat yoghurt with artificial sweetener.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

fishmech posted:

Ok, good for you?

Yes if you added literally 1.7 pounds of pop tarts you'd get really fat, but most fat people eat nothing close to 15 pop tarts a day. Again, that's nearly 2 full boxes of it. It is bizarre that you think that's a reasonable amount to say that fat people are currently eating of them!

"Super processed" is a meaningless concept and cooked chicken breast is by necessity a quite processed food, and yogurt is processed to gently caress and back, especially with artificial sweetener which is like the platonic ideal of a "processed" ingredient in something.
"Traditionally prepared dishes over heavily processed (rather than prepared) food products" is a good guideline. "Not obsessing over stuff (such as the dishes/food products thing)" is another one. They are in fact not incompatible.
Thus, it is okay* to eat mostly plants and hopefully lean meats prepared in a form you don't need a lab for, and still drink the occasional energy drink.

* okay in the sense of: a sensible way to go about eating less

fishmech posted:

The thing is the current messaging is not mostly "eat less calories" but all sorts of conflicting things about "cut down on food x" where another campaign says "cut down on food type y" and then the horde of for profit diet plan ads and books.
Yeah but baby, bathwater.

You're arguing against the hypothetical person who says, only with the magic of Clean Eating can you lose weight, and once you decide to cut Evil Food Items from your diet, you'll lose weight by magic, instead of the plebs who try to lose weight via physics.
However, this person is not here, and you are in fact talking to people who're trying to communicate the very simple point that while it is physically true that the goal is a caloric deficit, it is also practically true that achieving a deficit is hard and people hate being in one because it sucks and it sucks a good deal less if you eat more filling food and less pop tarts.
To real people in the real world, "don't worry about the pop tarts only worry about the calories" is, while physically true, not helpful. The reasonable advice is "eat a calorie deficit. Here are some tips on how to practically do that".

One you start engaging with the content of the argument and how it relates to the real world, you will become less useless.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

fishmech posted:

Which is way far away from "if you eat any less than this you'll be sick". The reccomended daily minimums are an amount that is well above where you'd get sick from deficiency. The average person has no need for 100 grams of protein a day, let alone more.
The average fat person however will experience less hunger problems if their deficit is achieved by reducing carbs and fats while keeping protein high (to speak in terms of chemicals), and adding more plants.

You pretty much cannot eat too many plants. Every head of lettuce helps.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

fishmech posted:

if people just ate less of what they eat, the vast majority of them would loses enough weight to get down to normal range, given sufficient time of maintaining that.
This is true (if "less" implies a deficit), but it is also not incompatible with what I said.

I understand your anger. I understand your pain. I know where Uncle Taubes has touched you. But this is a safe place. Nobody here doubts that it's calories in, calories out. We have accepted that a while ago. The current topic is, for your information, how to practically achieve this "eating less" thing the essential importance whichof we all understand. Some have suggested lettuce, dishes over purple food products, and possibly substituting sugar with artificial sweeteners may help.

The magic word here is "help", as in "help with eating less".

fishmech posted:

I severely doubt that. You have to cut a lot of calories if you're already obese and you will always feel very hungry for a very long time. There is no magic diet to get around that, no matter how much you want there to be!
You're presenting a false dichotomy: "you will be hungry/you won't be hungry". You're rejecting #2 as impossible. This is true. It is also irrelevant.

The magic word you missed was "less".

fishmech posted:

Also you shouldn't eat lettuce. It does nothing. Eat some spinach and carrots, gently caress lettuce.
Spinach is fine, too. It has, like, micronutrients.

Oh and if you want studies on how various food items help with hunger, there actually is research on this. You do not have to doubt. You can look it up.

Cingulate fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Jan 17, 2016

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
nm

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

fishmech posted:

does not make you feel hungry

Cingulate posted:

You're presenting a false dichotomy: "you will be hungry/you won't be hungry". You're rejecting #2 as impossible. This is true. It is also irrelevant.

The magic word you missed was "less".

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

bartlebyshop posted:

Sometimes, when I'm hungry but close to my calorie limit, I'll just eat like a half pound of raw carrots. There's like 80-90 calories in that. But isn't that a hard sell to most people who are hungry, but specifically craving something like a grilled cheese or a slice of cake? How can we help people choose to fill up on celery and peanut butter rather than things they tend to like more?
In the end, losing weight inherently involves doing something that people rather wouldn't.

fishmech posted:

And those ways are so variable among different people that there's none you can recommend to the average person, sight unseen.
I'll just go about recommending vegetables, dishes over food products, lean meat and so on to people even though 1 in 7657 people would literally lose weight better on pop tarts somehow.

fishmech posted:

Plus you're still going to be hungry if you're making a switch from the diet that kept you at 310 pounds to a diet targeted to get you to a healthy weight over the next like 2 years, because you're taking a massive drop in calories that no combination of foods is going to make up for. You will be quite hungry for quite a while until you finally adjust.
There is no adjusting. You'll always want to eat more.

But there is, besides for your dichotomy of no hunger/hunger, also more hunger/less hunger.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
Actually it's harder for thinner people to lose weight.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

fishmech posted:

you will feel hungry for quite a while! There's no magic combination of foods to prevent this.

Cingulate posted:

You're presenting a false dichotomy: "you will be hungry/you won't be hungry". You're rejecting #2 as impossible. This is true. It is also irrelevant.

The magic word you missed was "less".

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
I've been trying to eat in a way that's less bad for the climate and my wife simply can't get into legumes, including derivatives like tofu. It's very sad.

So, uh. Since we've all made clear where we stand regarding the pop tart and toxic waste vs. lettuce and free range kangaroo meat issue, anybody wanna get back to the thread topic?

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

Crystal Geometry posted:

I want to lose weight by eating less food, how can I do that?
:eng101: Count your calories, compare them to your calculated BMR, weigh yourself regularly, eat more filling foods, also while you're at it you might want to look into running or lifting weights, . . .

I want to lose weight by making no dramatic changes to my lifestyle, how can I do that?
:eng99:

The argument I'm reading says that the latter is most people
BMR is such a big word. All them crazy formulae man. And people always mix it up with the actual concept of interest, TDEE. In real research, scientists usually use a fixed multiplier of bodyweight and that works fine.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
I don't know. Correction? It's my half-assed opinion. I doubt the failure rates between people who go by BMR and people who go by TDEE and people who go by very simple formulas are much different. I'm just nitpicking.

Don't listen to me, I'm super pessimistic. People are fat, and this is at best going to very slowly change for the better. Like, a tenth of a BMI point per year better would be a radically fast improvement beyond what anyone should hope for. In reality, we can be happy if things stay approximately as they are.

But if I decide I want to lose/gain weight, I'm gonna think about how that would be implemented in the least uncomfortable way, for me.

Cingulate fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Jan 18, 2016

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

weird vanilla posted:

This brings up a longstanding question I've had, namely the science behind BMR determination. I've read that they link it with oxygen consumption studies, but the underlying idea that all the different efficiencies of metabolic pathways will match up equally with oxygen consumption make me suspicious as a professional chemist (physical chemist, however, definitely not a biochemist). Given the lack of comparative rigor in nutritional studies, I was always curious whether this suspicion was founded or not. Do you (or anyone else) have any light to shed on this angle?
The relevant figure is that in empirical studies, BMR-based equations on average slightly underpredict the actual caloric expenditure of obese individuals. But usually not by much. The error will be larger than what physicists would be comfortable with, but for human sciences, it's tolerable.

The figures are good within reasonable boundaries. The margin of error is usually so good that if you base your calories on these equations, you will be in a deficit (if you attempt so, that is).

Another huge hairy issue is food calories. Calories are measured in the lab by literally burning stuff and looking at poo. In the real world, in human stomachs, some fats will have a significantly (~+10%) higher accessible caloric value to human digestion, and a bunch of carbs and especially protein has much lower calories than what's derived by Atwater protocols and calorimetry.
And here, too is individual variance - some people simply don't digest certain food well, so the calorie numbers on the box labels will be an overestimate.

FAO have a number of very in-depth studies on this.

But the bottom line is, if you start with any reasonable formula, you'll almost never end far from a reasonable estimate of useful calories.
Moreover, these forms of noise are usually in the range of neigh-unavoidable and much more trivial noise such as imprecision in serving sizes. When you bake a cake, you will be off my fractions that would be intolerable to lab science! And in the end, it all roughly balances out and if you stay fat, it's usually not because the formula was wrong, but because you're not actually eating what the formula says.

Or at least that's what I remember from having read a bunch of studies a few years ago.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

Asiina posted:

If you want to stop children from becoming obese you have to
invent smart drugs. Or maybe nifty robots.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
Everyone (well, everyone but Gary taubes, and I guess the 100.000.000 people who buy his books) knows that the solution is to move more and eat less. The question, both for each individual and for public policy makers, is how to get people to do this thing they don't want to do.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
It's about as much and more about our biology than about our culture (unless you want to go back to or below subsistence levels). We simply have frontal vortices that are too small for our own good, and a behavioral program that cares only indirectly about our well being and that of our society.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

Stinky_Pete posted:

For example, it had not occurred to me until reading this thread today, that maybe I can end up feeling hungry merely an hour or two after a substantial 600-700 Calorie meal because it lacked some of the micronutrients or types of proteins that I need.

So I can't just satiate myself by shoving down more broccoli, as that just occupies my stomach but doesn't kill the hunger signal because there are still molecules in shortage. It explains the times I've been bloated yet weirdly feeling an emptiness. I guess I'll have to make more salads now.
Before Fishmech gets a stroke or, worse, feels his criticism is justified, let this be made clear: you don't feel hungry because you're lacking a certain "type of protein", at least not in realistic contexts, and the idea that you feel hungry because you lack certain micronutrients must also be handled with great care. So let us unpack this.

First, "hunger" and "satiety"/"being full" are to the body not atomic, but complex packages. There are multiple hunger pathways, and multiple anti-hunger pathways. Some are very simple; simply having a full stomach, and be it water or lettuce, will make you eat less in the near future. Some depend not on food, but on time (Ghrelin); your body learns when you serve breakfast, and in time makes you hungry before breakfast, regardless of how full you are. There is also the unbeatable reality of a calorie deficit leading near-inevitably to hunger: on a longer time scale, the body realizes if you're in a calorie deficit, and you'll be hungry.
And then, there's food specific stuff.

Okay, protein. Protein has in many ways the most "bang for the buck" what the calories:hunger ratio is concerned. This is for a number of reasons. It is metabolically inefficient; that is, it's very hard, and that means wasteful, to derive energy from protein, compared to fat or carbs. This effect shows some variance between different protein sources (e.g. legumes vs. meat vs. dairy), but the variance within proteins is low compared to the difference between proteins (which lose around 10 or 15% of their energy content to waste) and fat (which lose approx. 0%). The process is also slow, so protein will occupy your digestive system for longer. There is also a specific pathway of satiety signals that is only, or at least preferentially, triggered by protein food: the mu-opioid receptors. Protein is also a cost-effective way of triggering insulin signals, which also decrease appetite. On these multiple dimensions, protein has a good ratio of effect per caloric worth; you can trigger all, or at least most, of these with other macronutrients (e.g. use carbs to raise insulin), but protein is better. It has the lowest energy density to begin with, and then the other factors come on top of that.

A similar story is fiber: fiber is inefficiently digested, slow, and by this keeps you full for what it "costs" regarding your calorie budget.

But then, protein and fiber are just words, right? Worse, some people will read stuff this and think "okay, I can't eat apples cause they're carbs, but sausages are good because they're protein". This is of course not the way to think about this; in the end, it's calories, and apples are very low in them compared to how filling they are, and sausages not (mostly because they're much more fat than protein).

And one way I think really helps here is trying to not overthink any of this complicated biology stuff (the complexities of hunger signals are vastly beyond my comprehension!*), but come up with pragmatic solutions. Such as this: sometimes, you really hunger after a certain food experience. You need something fresh now, or something hearty. And the story of why that is so, if it is a desire for a certain nutrient you're deficient in, that is not so important. What matters is that you have available, cognitively and practically, the option to answer your desire for something fresh by getting an apple and cold water, and not a bunch of carbs in water (which will trigger satiety signals in very inefficient ways), and that you fulfill your desire for something hearty by going for a comparatively lean source - chicken breast instead of burgers.

If you want to, you can look at numbers: protein high fiber high carbs low fat low CALORIES LOW. And as a rule of thumb, if you need a modern factory to produce it, it is probably not the best choice.

And this isn't surprising, right?

I hope that makes some sense.

Finally, broccoli is pretty nutrient rich. The "dark green" stuff usually is. 100g of broccoli has like 100% of your daily dose of vitamin C, easily more than oranges. You should probably try adding protein to your meals. And in the end, no matter how smart you go about it, if you're eating less calories than you expend, your body WILL make sure you feel this.


* I haven't mentioned leptin, the possibly biggest player, at all, although I've hinted at its role.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

fishmech posted:

There has been no indication that human bodies have signaling sensitive enough to let you know that you're missing a couple of micrograms of a mineral or certain amino acids just because they weren't in that one meal.
One meal, micrograms - possibly not. (I have no idea how much "1 microgram of vitamin B12" actually is, maybe that's, like, a buttload of B12.)
But there is a wide range of "specific appetites" for specific micronutrients you happen to be deficient in right now, and while it's unknown if there are any for specific AAs, there most likely is one for protein.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
You guys can be much softer on truly diet-friendly meals. It is extremely hard to overeat on chicken breast and broccoli. Next to impossible. You will not get fat on apples. Processed sugar, starches, and fat are practically essential for weight gain.

fishmech posted:

School meals are often already meager as hell , and the poorer students rely on them for both lunch and breakfast. They're also quite rarely "out of balance" or whatever, their main crime is to be unappetizing.
Palatability is positively correlated with intake though so ...

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

fishmech posted:

That's utterly bullshit. People eat tons of chicken breast all the time. It's one of the most commonly purchased meats in the country!

So then wouldn't unpalatable school meals mean people are eating less according to you?

1. I didn't make up the scientific studies according to which palatability is correlated with food intake. You may interpret it any way you like, too.

2. It is certainly possible to overeat in chicken meat with breading deep fried and served with a Coke. However, it is practically impossible to get fat on chicken breast and broccoli. Note: chicken breast and broccoli. Not, meals that include chicken breast and broccoli in addition to a bunch of fat and carbs.

I know you're not inclined to pay attention to the content of other posters arguments or the scientific evidence being referenced here, but if you happen to be fat right now: here's a tip. Eat more lean meat and plants, and less carbs and fat. Take it on blind faith.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

Asiina posted:

I agree with all of that, and have been in similar situations.

Losing weight is exhausting, not just physically but mentally, and most people can't keep it up forever, because the idea of forever is truly depressing when you are trying to break these habits you've had all your life.

It's why healthy habits need to be in from the start. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is both figuratively and literally true.
On the bright side: one day you will die.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

BRAKE FOR MOOSE posted:

I'm debating whether this is worthwhile to point out, but I'm pretty sure the relationship between glycemic index and hunger is weak at best. e.g. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8968699 It's a bit more complicated than just carbs -> insulin -> hungry.
It's complex, ie., nonlinear.

Insulin is one satiety trigger btw.

fishmech posted:

Again: This is a total lie, chicken breast and broccoli have no special powers to keep you from getting fat. You personally seem to not like eating too much at once, a lot of people do.
I see you are unfamiliar both with reality, and the scientific literature.

fishmech posted:

Except he's saying to eat chicken breast with it. Chicken breast is a pretty midrange meat for calories, and if you're eating it with broccoli, you can easily consume thousands of calories.
It's in fact even more practically impossible to overeat on purely broccoli, but the problem is you'd go insane and/or die very quickly if you tried that.

Also at 100kcal/100g, chicken breast is pretty much the lowest calorie source in its class.

fishmech posted:

I have seen fat people at the college cafeteria down 3 pounds of grilled chicken breast, which is somewhere between 1800 and 2200 calories depending on precisely how you prepare it. And this after seeing the same people eating a full breakfast earlier in the day.
100 g chicken breast ~ 110 kcal, x3x4.5 ~ 1.485 kcal.

Compare to 3lbs of bacon. Or 3lbs of literally any other food source, e.g. chicken wings - roughly 4500 kcal - so a person who manages 3 pounds of chicken breast would probably manage 3 lbs of chicken wings, but with 3 lbs of chicken wings, they've already eaten 4500 kcal. Think of 1500 kcal of chicken plus 3000 kcal of broccoli; you will see why it would be so much, and fundamentally impossibly, harder to get fat on literally chicken breast plus broccoli.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

ToxicSlurpee posted:

Chicken gets a bad rap because Americans loving love deep fried chicken. The difference between a breaded, deep fried chicken breast and a baked one is a few hundred calories. It's massive. Another issue is fiber; vegetables don't have much when it comes to carbs but plenty of fiber. It fills you up faster without putting as many calories in.
Yeah it's about adding carbs and fat.

And the energy from protein is probably an overestimate of the actual net metabolizable energy (specifically for protein). The calculations on your labels are probably based on 3.75kcal/g or maybe 4, and reality might look more like 3.2kcal/g. And chicken breast by itself is ONLY protein.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

Bast Relief posted:

Fry the chicken, pour ranch on the broccoli to make it palatable and now you've got a mess. This is why my coworker, who has been put on a diet because of sleep apnea, is driving me nuts right now. He's been whining everyday about how bored he is with his food and how gross veggies taste. He's literally shoved his Tupperware across the table with a big dramatic sigh that he just can't eat it, then complains about being horribly hungry.

Just eat the loving broccoli you big babby.
EVERYTHING about the situation is set up against him. Tasty, energy-rich food is the prototypical reward. His situation is inherently one of suffering.
Maybe a heart attack sometimes is the better choice (for single people).

I think two major problems with regards to dieting for weight loss are
1. it inherently means not eating what, and how much, you want
2. people try to sell you the opposite

You can see how much #1 sucks by how common #2 is.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
No but you can't always get what you want. Or in the case if a fat person wanting to be lean, almost never. You can come to terms with not having what you'd prefer to eat, and you can go the hard or the less hard way. But it's inherently about not getting what you want. Ever.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

ToxicSlurpee posted:

That's not entirely true. The people I know who succeeded in their diets were the ones that cheated on them. Probably the most successful way is "6 days of healthy eating and if I behave I get to eat garbage for a day." It's way better than eating like crap 7 days a week and turns your favorite food into a reward instead of some tantalizing thing always out of reach you can't have anymore.
But that's what I said.

quote:

you can't always get what you want. Or in the case if a fat person wanting to be lean, almost never
And what you said was, 6 out of 7 days, they don't get what they want.

fishmech posted:

I don't know why you find it so hard to believe that an extremely common form of meat is eaten by people who get fat.
Well if you read me as claiming chicken breast inherently makes you slim, then I can understand why you'd say I'm wrong.
Also I'd not be surprised if you did that, because you're really into willful misrepresentation for the sake of "winning an argument".

Noam Chomsky posted:

Well, part of the problem is that the one-size-fits-all eat-flavorless-healthy-stuff diet sets people up for failure.
Actually in an organized setting the research is fairly promising. Sure, it's depressing, but so is a heart attack.

Trent posted:

I generally agree, but it shouldn't be "cheating" it should be built in.
Yeah I'd phrase it like that too. Instead of building a scheme and regularly failing it, just build one that's slightly less awful that you can actually stick to.

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Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

ToxicSlurpee posted:

When I noticed myself porking up I changed my eating habits away from "cake every day" to "no cake at all" by not buying cake.

Really when you're hungry you'll just eat whatever is in the kitchen. If you fill it with healthy food that you like it's hard to eat badly. If you have 12 boxes of snack cakes, ten pounds of chips, and a refrigerator full of nothing but chocolate and whipped cream take a wild guess what you'll be having for dinner. I primarily changed my eating habits by just not buying so much crap.

I also bought a wok and learned how to stir fry. poo poo's good, yo.
Yeah this it seems to me are some incredibly undervalued tips.
Like, to slim up, stack your fridge with the right stuff - always something to eat, but almost only diet-friendly stuff.

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