You've provided almost no information, but at 340 lbs it's possible your TDEE was more than 4000 calories/day, meaning it's possible you went on a reduced calorie diet with your bacon strategy. Without more information, your anecdote is useless, and even with more information it's still just an anecdote.

Also, Paleo, like any similar structured diet, is just a trick to get you to ingest fewer calories.

And I'm going to piggy back on the [citation needed] about calories in/out being scientifically disproven.

[1] https://mytdee.com/#gender=male&yr=30&cm=182.9&kg=154.2&bfp=...

To add on to this, my understanding is that technically "calories in, calories out" is correct in the sense that weight gain/loss depends on the net caloric intake for your body. But your base metabolic rate, and as a result your daily energy expenditure, is affected by many different things, including the composition of the calories and the timing of the consumption. Insulin plays a major role in weight gain/loss, and simple carbohydrates have a tendency to spike it.

> Calories in, calories out is not the golden rule, and this has been scientifically proven false.

That's an extreme statement you definitely need to provide source for. I read a lot of scientific journals on the subject and have never heard anything like that.

Based on all of the responses to this comment I can see how someone would be completely confused on what they need to do to lose weight.

While admitting the rest of this thread is bonkers, I'll explicitly list the formula you should follow right now (science is always evolving): Change in Body Stores = (Actual Calories In - Calories Not Absorbed) - (Resting Metabolic Rate + Thermic Effect of Eating + Physical Activity + Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis)

This is the more nuanced formula of calories in, calories out. Changing one variable in that equation can have an effect on the rest of the equation, which is why it appears calories is not equal to calories out. You can read about each variable here: http://www.precisionnutrition.com/metabolic-damage.

I should note that this program is published in scientific journals: http://www.invent-journal.com/article/S2214-7829(16)30006-9/... http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11764-016-0582-z http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/osp4.98/abstract

I think it's really obvious that you can eat even 5000 calories a day, and under certain circumstances, not gain weight.

However, if you eat 1000 calories or less, it's impossible not to lose weight. Unless you know someone who can synthesize energy to live and move out of thin air......

> this has been scientifically proven false.

[Citation Needed]

You'd think that if it has been scientifically proven false, it'd be one of the biggest discoveries of the century - The Human Body, A Perpetual Motion Machine! Energy from Nothing!

> Calories in, calories out is not the golden rule, and this has been scientifically proven false.

Citation, please.

>> Also, hilarious adventure I went on once: I ate 4000 calories of bacon a day and nothing else for a month... ended up cutting it off a little early because I was losing weight too quickly.

I had a soccer teammate in college do something similar. He was a central mid and was constantly getting beat by guys faster than him. He felt he was too fat and needed to drop a few pounds so he could compete better.

He went on what he called a "beer" diet. He would wake up and drink a beer to curb his appetite in the AM. Then at lunch, he would have a 12" subway sandwich, chips and pop. Once he got hungry again, he would drink another beer to curb his appetite until practice. After practice, he would have another beer. He would still drink water throughout the day to stay hydrated.

He dropped some 25lbs in like 45 days.

After he lost the weight, he realized that while he did lose the weight, he also suffered a ton of muscle loss. Before he was getting beat because he was slow, now he was getting beat because he was too weak to either fend off other players, or not strong enough to slow other players down, even though now he could keep up with them.

Afterwards he said he wouldn't do again, and started doing more weight training and interval cardio to maintain a healthier weight. After another six months, he said he finally found a happy median between being fast and being strong and stable on his feet.

First of, congratulations for losing significant weight, albeit in a non-conventional way. Eating two pounds of bacon a day takes a lot of determination.

I am glad it worked for you. However, most people need to start with a basic rule and go from there.

I think it is mainly calories in / calories out. While there seems to be evidence that the source of calories and diet composition do play some role in weight loss, that is what I would call "expert mode".

You can't exercise away a bad diet. One hour of very hard cardio, can burn up to 1,000 calories, depending on your weight and exercise intensity. A big mac meal with a medium drink and fries is more or less that as well. Exercise is great, and is an excellent supplement to a diet, but if you don't watch what you eat, it will be difficult to exercise away the extra calories.

The base rule is you have to watch what you eat. You can play with the composition, but concentrate on the calories. I can not say this enough. If you have extra pounds that you want to lose, and you have not yet found a way to do it, stay away from gimmicks.

Losing weight involves eating less, not eating more.

Regarding different types of calories, it's important to note that fats, proteins, sugars, and carbohydrates are digested in different ways. If you ingest 500 calories worth of sugar your body will be able to use almost all of that for its energy needs. Meanwhile, digesting protein is more complicated, and your body will be able to extract fewer of those 500 calories for its own needs.

Energy in, energy out sounds pretty basic to me. I would be interested to know where you think your energy intake comes from, unless it is from food?

Or is it just the caloric measurement you think is irrelevant for human energy intake? While obviously imperfect, I'm skeptical it could be an order of magnitude off for example.

Perhaps "calories in calories out" is still the golden rule for startups that want to make money instead of helping people to lose weight in the long term. I can't see any startup going against this deeply entrenched popular belief.

Weight isn't the only issue. Eating such a high-fat, high-protein diet, with little to no other sources of important nutrients, probably did horrible things to your kidneys, liver and arteries.

That's absolutely awesome, congratulations. You probably were running a lot of other risks besides joint damage, and all or most of those are now substantially less.

   Calories in, calories out is not the golden rule, and this has been scientifically proven false.

It's not exactly correct, but it's a pretty good first approximation. As simplified heuristics go, it's much better than:

   It is not how many calories you eat, it is where they come from.

If only because we don't actually understand the where & mechanisms very rigorously (notwithstanding all the violent handwaving surrounding many flavor-of-the-decade diet proponents)

About the best we can do with current science is (a better worded version of): How many calories you consume is important, and so is the nature of those calories, and when you consume them. Also something in there about calories being reductive, and other things matter.

In fact you can (and man do) do much worse for advice than Michael Pollans' summary: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.[1]" - but "food" is doing extra work here and human health is not the only consideration.

1 -http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/unhappy-meals/

I was fascinated to see how much bacon 4000 calories really is. A quick Google suggests about ten rashers, which, I guess, spread over a day wouldn't seem all that bad (in comparison with, say, Michael Phelps' reputed diet - he really put the "eating" into "competing"...).

Still, that's a pretty epic diet, and could be very popular in developer circles. You should maybe consider patenting it.

You might find this helpful: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/rubberbag.html

A human body is a mechanical system.

Fuel + air in --> Work done + waste out.

That's it. Any other argument is literally disputing the laws of thermodynamics.

That sounds more like a malnutrition issue no? If all you were eating is bacon and nothing else.

> Also, hilarious adventure I went on once: I ate 4000 calories of bacon a day and nothing else for a month... ended up cutting it off a little early because I was losing weight too quickly.

That sounds like an extreme form of a ketogenic diet [1], or Atkins diet [2]. Very effective, but with only bacon you'll miss some important micronutrients.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketogenic_diet

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkins_diet

Your bacon excursion is perfectly compatible with calories in calories out (you burned some of the calories, others took a different exit).

The mystery would be if you gained weight over a long period of time while consuming food at a calorie deficit. People do make this argument against calorie counting...

The fundamental lesson of calories in calories out is that someone who wishes to lose weight should seek to reduce their calorie intake to a level where it happens. It probably isn't all that useful a lesson, estimating calories consumed is hard, as is reducing them.

Calories-in, calories-out is the golden rule, but what a lot of people forget (like you have here) is that what kind of calories you put in affects calories-out (along with lots of other things.)

This is keeper, I'm at 350+ ideal weight around 230-240lbs (6'7") and looking for something to shake up my consumption that makes sense. I regularly exercise (20hrs/week low-medium impact) but eat fast foods

+1 for Paleo. I'm also on a 'light' version of it for the past 2 years and can confirm the effects.

>Calories in, calories out is not the golden rule, and this has been scientifically proven false.

Quite the opposite actually. See thermodynamics for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics

>Calories in, calories out is not the golden rule, and this has been scientifically proven false.

No. If the laws of thermodynamics had been proven false, we would have heard of it.