shhhh ---- you’ll bust her bubble.
The placebo effect is a mighty thing.
Just getting to this, but I wanted to point out that a serving of soup is 100 grams. OP ate 6 servings and was surprised to gain weight. Even a bowl of soup, which is what is often eaten, is only 400 grams - even if that was all OP ate, they ate 50% more than they were supposed to. Unsurprisingly, weight was gained.
There is no mystery about how to lose weight. Eat fewer calories than you burn off in a day. That means eating less and exercising more. There is no magic to it, whether those calories come from fat, sugar, or protein. But it’s a lot easier to justify a magical diet than to actually make the change.
My guess is this is why OP has ignored ReticulatingSplines’ that shows you can lose weight on a diet of nothing but junk food as long as you watch the calories.
This is too weird. You have no idea what I ate on any given day, what exercise I did, nothing at all about my life - and yet you’re pre-occupied with a pint of water-based vegetable soup. Knock yourself out but it is pretty weird.
btw, your link talks about absolutely everything except sugar content . You wouldn’t even know it contained added sugar, and that’s the point. It’s so significant because the soup i had was perfect except for 27g of added sugar - the entire daily allowance for a woman in one pint of vegetable soup. And it was under 500 cal.
who? If it’s a post here then I only want to deal with one soup nazi at a time. Crazy …
I’m no dietician, but there’s a difference between the sugar in fruit (complex carbohydrate) and refined sugar (simple carbohydrate) that’s added to processed food. Complex carbs are released into the system more slowly and don’t cause the spikes of insulin that simple carbs do. It’s a lot more technical than that, but all sugars are not equal.
Great 1800 cals a day instead of a norm of 2500, and he didn’t measure his added sugar. What am I supposed to do with that?
Not only that but it’s just too difficult to measure natural sugar., from what i’ve read you don’t even need to (unless you go crazy on real sugary fruits). All you have to do is count the grams of sugar on labelling - an adult woman should be under (approx - it varies from person) 27g a day. It feels great.
You’re supposed to realise that the sugar measuring is unnecessary and a total red herring. All that matters is the calories in and the calories out. Your insistence that you have to count sugar is flawed and holding you back. We’re trying to help by pointing out that a guy that ignores “added sugar” and only focused on total calories lost weight, despite eating nothing but “junk food”, a multivitamin, and a protein shake.
No, this is so wrong.
As per the OP, calories were never the issue. I’m 2500 pretty well every day. It’s not an issue at all.
Again, as per the OP, the problem has been hitting the calorie limit,exercising and still not being in control of weight. It’s way too much sugar.
As for holding me back on the question of added sugar, go tell the World Health Organisation.
In fact just Google added sugar for millions of responses to Mr 1800 and his suspected gimmick.
Agree with that - Claiming a calorie is a calorie does sound like an ignorant simplification - I have no strong views on sugar in the diet or diet in general, really, but this does seem obvious.
Calorific values of food are determined by setting it on fire and measuring the exotherm - the analytical science of calorimetry.
Human metabolism involves enzymatic cascades of exquisitely selective chemical transformations - the antithesis of calorimetry, and the reason why no one eats wood on a regular basis, despite the impressive calorific content.
So counting calories makes sense as a starting point to weigh up your diet, because you’ve got to start somewhere, but let’s not roll out nonsense about the thermodynamic equivalency of calories - the chemical pathway of how you get from A to B is everything.
Un. Believable. Dude, the world knows it’s added sugar. Saying it’s a red herring is like saying smoking has nothing to do with cancer. Google added sugar - that’s it.
Men: approx 32-34g a day - just read the labels
Women = 20% less.
This would be a good point if it were correct, but it is not. Refined sugar (aka sucrose) is 50% fructose and 50% glucose. Most fruits are 40 to 55 percent fructose and 60 to 45 glucose. In other words, essentially identical.
It’s true that fruit also has a varying amounts of dietary fiber, the complex carbs you spoke of, but that’s always reported separately on nutritional labels. The part listed as sugar is the same simple carbohydrates as found in sucrose - fructose and glucose.
Also, for example, peaches have 13 g of simple sugar for every 2.3 g of dietary fiber. A cup of blueberries is 15g of simple sugar for 3.6 grams of dietary fiber.
Ignoring the simple sugars in fruit is a recipe for disaster and weight gain.
No, they don’t. Some people think it’s the whole deal, most nutritionists don’t. It’s clearly not as simple as that; the folks who ate nothing but a measured amount of junk food and lost weight shows.
It may work for you, and that’s great. But it’s not universally accepted, and basic control of portions and reasonable choices seems to do the same for a lot of people.
Her’s a thing, go to the website of any organsation you think you can trust for good guidence, if not the WHO above, maybe the US Heart Assocaition - there information is pretty much the same:
Look, I don’t know why I didn’t receive or accept the information that was already out there - everywhere - anyway.
Maybe a month ago I was as resistant to it as you are now. But it is there, everywhere, in plain back and white:
Added sugar - read the labels:
Men 32-34g
Women 20% less.
I agree that added sugar is a huge issue, and since I have started actively reducing my intake after watching Fed Up I have also lost weight (without really paying attention to or caring about anything else other than the sugar content). I am not sure how accurate it is but in that documentary they do explicitly say that it’s just not as simple as “a calorie is a calorie” and give some sciency-sounding explanations for it. Probably the biggest and most obvious issue though is that sugar is addictive, and I have often been prone to eating sugary foods not out of true hunger but out of a desire for the temporary good feeling that comes from eating them.
Also, it was pretty shocking to learn that Big Sugar fought against getting a daily allowance % for sugar on food labels. You’ll notice that nutrition labels say the amount of sugars but there is no % next to that line item like there is for everything else. The WHO recommends about ~50g daily, but a single Jamba Juice smoothie has about 70-80g of sugars. Same for a Starbucks frappuccino, and all kinds of other stuff that millions of people are regularly consuming in the US. It’s way out of control.
Yep, it really is an two things have struck me about it (a) the level of irrational resistance in the wake of so much overwhelming advice - and I was absolutely party to that until very recently, and (b) how hard it is to get accurate, just plain readable information about what it is any given product you are thinking of buying actually contains.
All you need is a simple label that expressly states added sugar content in usable language - like in grams or even calories (125 cals a day for a man, 100-ish for a woman).
I have no dog in the fight and don’t really care what you eat, but it’s clear from reading the thread that the people responding to you are not resisting anything you’ve provided evidence of, and in fact have already agreed to the things you’ve said which are not that particular violation of the laws of physics you’ve extolled.
Look, the sugar is a red herring no matter what scam sites you go to.
Is there added sugar to a lot of processed food? Sure.
Should you eat a ton of extra sugar? Of course not.
The fact remains that weight change is a matter of calories in - calories out = change in weight. Doesn’t matter what those calories come from. You can eat 2000 calories of sugar or 2000 calories of fat, won’t make a difference. What makes a difference is how much you consume versus how much you burn. That’s a law of physics, as Shodan mentioned back in post 42. Well, really back at post 2, he was just more curt about it then.
We’re telling you this because we want to help you, not tear you down.
The soup is emblematic of the issue. We pointed out that you ate way more soup than you were supposed to and that’s why you gained weight. You decided to ignore that and assume it must be the sugar in the soup. It’s not. It’s the fact that you ate more calories than you burned. You have to admit that to yourself before you’ll really be able to shed the pounds.
FWIW, 2500 calories is a maintenance diet at about 180 pounds. If you’re maintaining at that level and you’re happy with it, great. If you want to lose more, you need to cut the calories or increase the exercise or both. There’s no other way around it.
Sorry but those here trying to educate and “help” up_the_junction are displaying a huge amount of ignorance themselves.
A diet that is high in foods that are high in added sugar will most typically result in weight gain and people who avoid foods high in added sugar will usually lose weight. Very few who eat as much fruit and vegetables as they want (almost half the calories of carrots come from sugar and almost all the rest as other carbs) will gain weight.
Nothing magic or against the laws of physics involved. It is just that the human body is a not as simple a machine as some here imagine it to be. And a peach (with 15 grams of sugar, 2 grams of fiber, 68 Kcal) is different than a processed food with the same amount of sugar added to it even if they also add the same amount if fiber. The impact of the whole is more than the sum of its parts. The package matters and impacts how it moves along the GI tract, the time course of its absorption into the body, the impact upon various neuroendocrine transmitters, how much satiety it causes, and more. It is not just the fiber; it is the fact that the sugar already in real foods is inside cells that need to be broken down and travel with a host of other compounds that influence digestion and satiety. Foods with added sugar (sucrose or HFCS both) have their sugar absorbed much faster. No need to evoke insulin hypotheses, it hits the liver fast and hard enough that it causes fat build up in the liver, it does not trigger the brain’s satiety (fulla uppa) centers well and does hit the brain’s hedonic (eat more of me yum!) centers dead on.
Calorie counting is a diet method, but not one that works well for most people. If you are someone for whom it has worked well then fantastic for you! But up is like many others in having been there tried that and experienced it as a very ineffective approach.
Yes, end of day the difference between calories absorbed by the body (not quite the same as calories counted) and calories actually burned (very different than what some on-line calculator will tell you and very hard to actually know; a very dynamic figure) results in weight gained or lost (and in a more complex manner than X calories = Y weight).
Yes if one eats a diet that consists exclusively of Coke and Hostess cupcakes and is able to only consume 1500 calories a day on that (3 12 ounce Cokes and 6 Hostess cupcakes each day) then one would lose over time roughly the same weight as eating a 1500 calorie a day diet of lean grilled chicken breast, a variety of vegetables and fruits, baked potato, and nuts (such as 2 5 oz servings of grilled chicken breast; 2 medium baked potatoes; 1 cup cooked kale; 3 medium raw carrots or alternatively 3 cups of raw cauliflower; a snack of 1 oz of dry roasted almonds; 1 cup of raw blueberries; 1 medium apple; 2 medium bananas; and as much water and black coffee and/or tea as you want … all calories used in calculation from nutritiondata.com) IF also metabolism and activity level (including non-exercise activity which responds without any conscious awareness to diet changes) stayed the same.
Of course eating the 1500 calorie Coke and cupcake diet would leave most feeling very hungry most of the time, a bit sick after a short while, and result in most people not moving around very much. Eating the real food diet would result in much less hunger and more calories expended over the course of each day by a variety of mechanisms.
Before y’all treat up so condescendingly you may want to check out the WHO link the (s)he provided:
(Bolding mine.)