Yes, it is true, and the law of the conservation of mass-energy has been established very well.
The question asked was -
The answer to the question is No.
Regards,
Shodan
Remember that people don’t eat until they’ve ingested a fixed number of calories. They eat until they’re satisfied. Different foods promote different levels of satiety for the same number of calories.
So if you want to lose weight without drawing on herculian levels of will power, you need to find foods that will leave you feeling satisfied most of the time (nothing wrong with getting hungry an hour or so before eating) with fewer calories. These foods need to be good, so you like eating them, but not too good, or you won’t be able to stop eating them.
That may have been the question that was asked, but that wasn’t the question you answered. You threw in business about carrots and sugar and said that it doesn’t matter which one you eat, you’ll lose weight either way. And that’s the part that’s not true, because as pretty much everyone else in this thread pointed out, there’s more to weight loss than simple physics.
First, an apology for being rude to you yesterday on a different thread.
A number of people including me have been trying to tell you over and over again what RickJay just stated above. Yes, it takes patience. Yes, it will take you a while to reach your goal, but it is absolutely the right way to do it for most people.
Four years ago I weighed 45 more lbs than I do now. I lost it over the period of a year and went back to what I weighed in my early 20s. I got down to 117 at one point because something happened at the end of 2010 that was so stressful I lost my appetite for weeks and only ate when I had to. As things improved so did my food consumption. Now I stay at a pretty stable 125 give or take a couple of lbs. It’s easy to get stuck on the number on the scale. I’d like to lose more, but I mainly just want to continue feeling healthy enough to do the things that I love, that’s all.
Give yourself a realistic goal with a realistic time frame. Then follow RickJay’s advice.
Good luck.
Yes, it is the question I answered, which is why I posted it.
No I did not - I said
which is entirely true. 100 kcal = 100 kcal.
Regards,
Shodan
So you’re suggesting that eating the same caloric content of sawdust is the same as eating the same amount of sugar? This may be true if you are a termite, but not for humans. This is a facetious example, but it demonstrates that the idea that the law of conservation of mass-energy has something to do with weight gain or loss is ridiculous.
If you had restricted your response to that simple answer, you would probably be correct. Organic and non-organic versions of the same food item, such as meat, are probably not significantly different with regard to effect on weight loss. But you went beyond that to claim that carrots and sugar, which are digested and metabolized very differently, are exactly equivalent in terms of weight loss. There is no definitive substantiation for that, and physiological reasons why it is probably not true.
Which doesn’t have anything much to do with how the different foods may affect weight loss, which is the basic question at hand.
No, I did not.
This statement is true.
This statement -
is ridiculous.
I said exactly what I said, and what I said is exactly and literally true. 100 kcal = 100 kcal. If you burn off X calories and take in X - Y calories, you will always lose weight for any value of Y > 0.
Wrong. The question asked was
To which the answer is No. If the amount of calories is different, then it may or may not make a significant difference, but that is not the question asked.
Regards,
Shodan
And to clarify terminology, there is a difference between the simple kCal/“large calorie” used in physics, and the calorie used to measure food energy.
Bolding mine. Food energy doesn’t depend purely on the calories (as measured by bomb calorimetry) contained in the food, but is calculated in part on the basis of digestion and absorption. The caloric values of foods that are given in references should be regarded as only a very rough approximation of the actual food energy provided to the human body. It should also be noted that individuals may differ considerably in aspects of digestion and energy metabolism, making the effect of a specific amount of calories difficult to predict in any exact manner.
If wish to argue that a very narrow and specific statement you made is true, knock yourself out. But your post considered as a whole was incorrect, and had no real relevance to the broader question at issue, which is the relationship between differences in foods and weight loss.
Are you guys done derailing the thread yet?
To answer the question Shodan didn’t, there is no difference between organic food and regular food, as long as you’re talking about same food. That is, an organic apple is the same as a regular apple, at least from a nutritional standpoint.
That said, not all “healthy” food is going to be conducive to weight loss. A lot of “organic” and “natural” foods are still processed food with no real difference between the “organic” version and its non-organic counterpart. Amy’s organic mac n’ cheese is the same as Kraft Dinner, in other words.
Derailing?.. It has been and likely will be the only enlightening thing to come out of this thread.
My wife was a personal fitness instructor for some years. A common amateur question is “What’s the best exercise for me?” Her answer: “The one you’ll do.”
The same thinking applies to weight loss and maintaining the ideal weight after you’ve lost the excess. The ideal “diet” is the one you’ll gladly eat for years. So it needs to feel natural to you. It *can *feel different at first. But it has to be something you can grow to feel is normal and be something you can do for decades on your own.
Some people can only manage to cut back from a ginormous double-crust double-cheese loaded pizza 6 nights a week to the same thing 4 nights a week. Other people can readily adapt to white meat skinless chicken & broccoli with no salt 21 meals a week. These are extreme silly examples, and the chix & broc is also far from an ideal long term regimen. But I hope you see the difference in terms of adaptation required.
As **RickJay **said and so many people have reiterated, this:
“Cut down on empty calories, eat smaller portions of a generally balanced diet, but eat regularly, and you can lose weight.”
No, it’s a pointless debate because the two sides aren’t really discussing the same thing and nobody is going to replace 300000 calories worth of chocolate (50 grams) with 300000 calories worth of celery sticks (2 kilos) in real life.
And at some risk, back to Shodan’s point.
Physics sets the thermodynamic limit on what’s biologically possible. But the human nutrition / digestion system always operates very, very far from the physics-imposed limits.
As such, changes in what one eats, what else one eats with it, how the meals are timed, presence / absence of exercise or disease, etc., can move the practical effect on weight loss / gain all over the map. Always within the boundaries of the physics-imposed envelope.
So while some of Shodan’s comments about the physics are valid as far as they go, they don’t go but a tiny fraction of the way into the real practical issues of human nutrition and weight loss / gain. And all the rest of that complexity is the interesting part. And it’s really what the OP is asking about, regardless of how skillfully (or not) he phrased his OP.
And like most fundamentalist statements, Shodan’s physics-absolutist statements obscure those complexities, in effect implicitly denying they exist. And that amounts to major league practical falsity. Or at least misleadingness. IMO, YMMV.
The idea that that amounts of sugar and carrots that are equivalent in calories necessarily have the same effect on weight loss is a common misconception that should be debunked. That’s of direct relevance to the OP.
But people often discuss the effect of substituting equivalent caloric amounts of carbohydrate and protein, say. And that debate is not pointless, it’s rather fundamental to the OP.
I hope 50 grams of chocolate isn’t 300,000 calories. Otherwise, I’d gain a ton of weight eating a single Hershey bar!
Fasting is the best way to lose weight.