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0 pointsjosephcsible4y ago0 comments

> I think where mainstream nutritional science is going is understanding that people's 'maintenance calories' is insanely hard to calculate for people outside the average. For instance hormones playing a much bigger role, where your calorie range is off from what models will say, so unless you know how to safely find that maintenance and treat your diet like science to find it you're going to constantly be over/under weight.

Isn't this a fairly easy problem to solve? Don't you just need to make a reasonable guess, calculate your expected weight change over some time period, then follow the diet to see what actually happens to your weight, and adjust your guess accordingly?

> If your diet is 30-40% protein and not having refined sugars, you'll feel fuller and won't feel the need for more carbs besides indulgence/treat. You don't need to do this to lose or maintain weight, but look at 300 calories of beef or chicken breast vs 300 calories of bread.

Agreed. Eating healthier kinds of food can make it easier to lose weight, by making you not still feel hungry after you've eaten the correct amount of food, and so making it require less self-control to stick to the diet.

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AnEro4y ago· 2 in thread

> Isn't this a fairly easy problem to solve? Don't you just need to make a reasonable guess, calculate your expected weight change over some time period, then follow the diet to see what actually happens to your weight, and adjust your guess accordingly?

It's easy if you do the work, weigh your food and find the number that's unique to your situation, which could take a month or so adding or taking away calories to find. Having a model to account for all the ephemeral things that plays into that unique number consistently for the population at large is the hard part

Nutritional science is hard because adherence to the diet is to be taken with a grain of salt, you have to just trust participants. Where outside of athletes I doubt may people have the energy to weigh everything, which also starts to feel unhealthy mental health wise making you seem crazy.

I get alot of push back for it myself, and have to plan around not weighing and counting calories to not get to anxious about it since I am so aware of how a small bit of extra food can have me 'lose' so much progress

josephcsibleOP4y ago

> Nutritional science is hard because adherence to the diet is to be taken with a grain of salt, you have to just trust participants.

Yep! People undercount their calories in like crazy, then go around telling everyone CICO doesn't work since they're still gaining weight even though they're at a 1000 calorie deficit, when they're really at a 1000 calorie surplus.

> a small bit of extra food can have me 'lose' so much progress

Do you mean as a one-time thing, or regularly? Because if the former, I don't see how.

AnEro4y ago

>Do you mean as a one-time thing, or regularly? Because if the former, I don't see how.

When you're lifting heavy having one day at maintenance or a gain in the middle of a cut all of a sudden your body loves to get water weight/bloat/put on fat. It's hard to tell which, so I say 'lose' progress cause that weight/bloat/fat can be 1-3 pounds where I'm trying to lose .5-1 pound a week at most to avoid stretch marks. Normally I'd say this doesn't matter, so long as the trend line is down over all.

--my weirdly specific scenario that maybe interesting to fitness nerds-- However I'm in a fun very specific situation where I'm mtf trans, where I'm in fat redistribution the only science I have is like 2 studies showing that I lose fat is typical for males with normal testosterone and start generating fat as for a female with normal estrogen. So the trans 'bro science' approach is to use that logic and cycle 5-10 pounds on and off over time so you'll have better results appearance wise.

While I've noticed a bunch of anecdotal differences of losing and gaining fat from compared to when I wasn't on hormones 3 years ago and sucking at dieting. Now I'm at about 23-4% body fat that if I lose is coming from very specific sections of my stomach and not evenly distributed. So even at what would be healthy calorie deficit I get stretch marks from anything over 300cal and only small ones (if I do get them) when I'm doing 200-300.

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