this is false, unless there was a point in history where nobody was an infant.
I had a similar issue and have had some success with replacing my nightly snacking (which was significant) with either 1) popcorn (the real deal, popped in a Whirley-Pop on the stove with canola oil), or 2) a hot beverage. In my case it’s usually milky coffee, because I have a massively huge tolerance to caffeine and can still sleep afterward, but I think decaf or herbal tea would fill the same spot. It satisfies that need to be consuming something without actually being a huge caloric intake. I know a lot of people recommend air-popped popcorn but I hate that stuff. I just make real popcorn and account for it in my diet.
:dubious: Is breastmilk considered a dairy product? IME the term is typically reserved for the milk of various quadrupeds.
Well, it is milk and is dairy.
However, consumption of dairy past infancy/early childhood is still something I could see debated over (whether it or refined grains/agriculture came first). I know there are many many cultures that do not consume post-infancy dairy, but just looking at our species’ timeline, that doesn’t necessarily mean post-infancy dairy was adopted later than refined grains. It doesn’t mean it was adopted earlier, either; just means that it’s not enough information to actually draw conclusions.
I hate to be the cite nazi, but could you provide some? I think that human milk is considered milk, but dairy productsare generally defined as those products created from mammal milk for general consumption. Yeah, it’s mostly semantics, but still what is traditionally defined as “dairy” is not considered as good for infants as breast milk - they’re set apart. Many women are advised not to eat dairy products while breastfeeding due to the infant developing or already experiencing a lactose intolerance. I’m sure the same is true with cows, but human milk changes hour by hour and day by day to accommodate the baby’s needs. Formula, typically made from dairy products, is considered inferior in part because it is made from dairy products.
Breast milk is also considered kosher and a clear liquid prior to surgery in the event surgery is being performed on an infant.
Oh fer chrissakes, it’s a valid statement. If you want to get all legal, they we can state ‘Drink Milk type stuff after weaning’
Stoid, for what it’s worth, I’ve only been counting carbs for the past month and ignoring my calorie count completely. I’ve lost 12 pounds in approximately 3 weeks, my blood pressure is down to 120/64 (my highest before the hypertension meds was 150/95, last month is 130/70), I’ve lost several inches around the waist and bust (so no it wasn’t all “water weight”), and I have more energy. The book previously recommended Why We’re Fat is really wonderful. If you already have tried Atkins or low-carb diets, many of the points won’t be new to you, but I thoroughly enjoyed his explanations of how we reached the calorie-in/calorie-out paradigm, and his analysis of the dietary research spanning the past century.
I disagree that weight issues have a behavioral component, that if you would just stop being a fat lazy jerk you’d lose weight, that calories even matter. How you think or what you feel has very little to do with the how and why fat is created and stored in your body. If Gary Taubes is correct, and I have no reason to doubt it since it gels with my own life experience as well as other literature I’ve read on the issue, then all it comes down to is how insulin controls fat burning and storage.
Since I started this, I’ve indulged in pizza, sushi, and a cheeseburger. So I’m not cutting carbs out of my life 100%, but I limit that to once a week, and I limit my intake to one serving. I’ve also started walking a mile every day–not to help me lose weight b/c I don’t think that 100 calories makes any sort of difference (given that a pound is 7000 calories) but because I think it’ll help with my various other problems (blood pressure, swollen feet at the end of the night, etc). And it has helped.
FTR, I eat a lot of cheese and Greek yogurt still (though I switch to almond milk for my milk needs). That hasn’t stopped my weight loss. But nothing anybody says will ever convince me that stuffing my body full of grains and starch is the way to a healthy and happy lifestyle. I also eat most of my meals late at night. I’ve never seen anything to indicate that the only healthy way to eat is the western schedule. I’m not hungry in the morning. I eat my first meal after noon, my second meal early evening, and my last meal around 9 or 10. Eating late at night isn’t a problem or a bad habit to break.
7000 calories is two pounds, not one, so walking every day for a little over a month sheds another pound for you. 10 pounds a year isn’t anything to sneer at.
Yes, you’re right. I’m not sure why I doubled it. Still, in the 2 weeks since I’ve started this, I’ve only burned off 1400-1600 calories (some days I walked more than a mile). So while exercise can have health benefits (which I am currently enjoying) it clearly isn’t the reason I’ve been losing 4 pounds/week.
Dairy is defined as animal milk product, and note that I said ‘dairy products’. Even if I hadn’t, herding happened later than the domestication of grain, so its still technically correct. Cattle domestication is only 7500 and 9000 years old. They may have been feeding their infants non-human milk, but I imagine that wet nursing was more popular, as the adults couldn’t digest dairy products despite their constant presence around cattle as recently as 3,800 and 6,000 years ago.
Different people will have different problems with weight loss because some of our ancestors were built to store fat. From the second link:
A diet that works for one person won’t necessarily work for another. I think a good nutritionist should research a person’s ethnic background before putting together a diet.
Their “dramatic change in diet” was the introduction of white flour and sugar. Naturally cutting carbs reduces calories because so many carb-ladened food is full of calories, but that’s not the real issue. Gary Taubes spends a great deal of time discussing Indians in the Southwestern United States and why and how this development came to be. His conclusion was that it has nothing to do with genes and everything to do with the fact that their “traditional” diet was replaced by food that leads to insulin resistance and all of the problems associated with that (obesity, diabetes, etc).
If the measuring and the monitoring were that close, why the estimate?
Stoid I honestly think you are dealing with too many variables both physiological and psychological to expect an quantifiable and unambiguous result in 1 months time.
Through personal experience I have found you need a fairly large sample set to accurately gauge weight loss and rate at which it is happening. Several months on daily data, plotted and smoothed with a trend line. I can be all over the place weight wise, especially in the beginning of a diet. Most of that is just “noise” that makes it harder to see what is really happening. The more “noise”, variations in activity level, caloric intake, consumption patterns, food types, water consumption, so on and so forth, the more data points it will take to make a clear picture.
Just pointing out that “water weight” can make you physically bigger around the middle, too. Half a year ago when I was retaining water like crazy, I lost 14 pounds and two inches around my gut in less than a week, and given how fast it came off, I doubt much, if any, was fat.
That said, it probably wasn’t all water weight for you, but using your waist size as a measure of that doesn’t necessarily work. Water takes up space, too.
Having observed, monitored and measured every morsel for a month or so of conscious eating and seeing what that worked out to be, I have a better perspective and I can better estimate what I was consuming unconsciously and unmonitored prior to that.
Yep. I’m a thin person (currently trying to lose the last five of the fifteen that snuck up on me). There are a few times a year where I eat until I’m full (Thanksgiving), but when weight isn’t sneaking up on me, I’m often “a little hungry.” And I avoid food. Home is horrible - if I work from home I munch all day long. Work is easy. I sit at my desk, eat a small lunch - usually now at my desk - go home and eat a sensible dinner. Am I hungry when I get home? - every single day. Every day I walk past the candy machine and avoid the “I could grab something from a drivethrough” knowing that I will get home in half an hour, have a light snack there, and eat in another hour.
This is a hard lesson to learn as a parent, too. My kids would not eat their dinner and they cry “I’m hungry.” Your kids telling you they are hungry pushes a hell of a lot of buttons - and they learn quickly its a manipulative statement. And if you give into it, you teach them that it isn’t ok to be hungry. Took a while, but my kids have pretty much learned “you can wait until we get home and have a snack then, you won’t starve.” (Sometimes, I sound like my own mother)
One of the big ways I loose weight is scheduling my calories - meals and a light snack between lunch and dinner. Otherwise I find myself grazing.
I thought this relevant, from calorieking.com.au
It still all comes down to one question, do you want to still be fat? My life is better on this side than on that one but your priorities are yours to decide. I hope you find your way out if you want to and I’ll make no judgement if you don’t. It is seriously bloody hard.
This really struck a chord with me. When I was younger, and every time I’ve lost weight, I’ve been slightly hungry or just on the comfortable side of not hungry most of the time. The first few days it’s hard to get used to, then it actually makes me feel good. If I’m stuffed, I’m sluggish. When I was young and slender and athletic, I brought my lunch and when that was gone, my next opportunity to get food was at home.
Another thing that really helps me is family meals. I actually have to plan those because if we’re eating with the kids, they’re required to have veggies and fruits with their meal. To model healthful eating, I eat mostly fruits & veggies and a little bit of meat and bread. If I’m only cooking for me and my husband, the rules change and we eat much, much later, which leaves plenty of time to snack before dinner, then eating a full (unhealthy) dinner.
If I eat with the kids, I usually consider the kitchen closed, even if I’m a little hungry. If I don’t, it’s open all night.
Received (and I emailed you… did you get it?). Halfway through, and I am not surprised, but I am very pleased and relieved to see that I’m not crazy. And neither was Atkins.
It’s very nice to see that the science is there, and disappointing to note how little attention this book has received.
And from now on, in any and every discussion of obesity and weight loss and what’s true and what’s not, I’m going to call bullshit on anyone who opens their mouth to say a single thing if they haven’t read this book from cover to cover, because here’s the bottom line: Calories in vs. Calories Out is a big lie, and the science proves it over and over and over again.
From a review of the book (emphasis mine):
I feel completely freed now from the tyranny of “Fat people just eat too much.” in every form. It also confirms why I haven’t been losing weight, because my diet has been far too high in carbs & sugars. The biggest revelation here is what I now fully understand about how difficult it is for me at this point in my life; the fatter you are to start, the harder it is, because the fat it itself fights you.
Now the challenge becomes managing the real sacrifice necessary, which isn’t coping with hunger, it’s coping with desire. As I said elsewhere in the thread, the type of eating that will actually result in weight loss is also hard to sustain, I’ve done it before, many times, starting in the early 1970’s. But it’s probably easier than hunger. And the beautiful thing about this book is that it really takes away any doubts I’ve ever had about the legitimacy of a low-carb approach.
But much as I love meat, and fatty meat… I love it best in concert with carbs and followed by sweet carbs. The degree to which I must reduce my dependence on fruit is a challenge as well. But if there were no sacrifice at all necessary, then it’s unlikely that anyone would ever get fat to begin with.
IMHO, you’re conflating two things: (1) where the body stores excess calories (and what it burns when there is a calorie deficit) – which is a consequence of insulin, but also many other factors, like sex hormones; and (2) whether the body is experiencing a state of caloric excess or deficit.
If you’re experiencing a caloric surplus, you can minimize fat gain at the margins by focusing on carbohydrate intake. If you’re experiencing caloric deficit, you can maximize fat loss by focusing on carbohydrate intake. But in neither scenario is carbohydrate intake the prime mover, it is instead the state of caloric deficit or surplus.
So when you say “calories in vs. calories out” is a big lie, you’re either parroting bad marketing, misunderstanding the book, or the book goes against well-accepted science. Maybe all three.
Consider how much confirmation bias you’re apt to have here.
This proves that you have not read the book yourself, because the book demonstrates that however “well-accepted” you imagine genuine science to be… the real science (which the book extensively demonstrates is repeatedly ignored) does not agree with what is “well-accepted” to be true and assumed to be proved true by science. That is the entire point of the book: to show that what is “well-accepted” just isn’t so, and everyone keeps saying it in spite of the fact that we don’t really have good reasons to believe it.
Read the book. The actual book itself, not summaries or reviews. Get an education.