We should eat well balanced diets that are tailored to each of us as individuals. I tried high fat high protein before and it didn't work very well with my metabolism, to spare you some details.
Listen to your body, and give it what it needs. Experiment a bit. That's what I learned after trying fad diets. The realization is we are individuals each with our own metabolism that is slightly different.
What I found is that low carb diets are a big sham. The key is not to avoid carbs, but to avoid SUGAR and HFCS. Lots of "carbs" we eat come from absolute garbage, like white bread.
Trust me, a diet of mostly high fiber green vegetables is NOT going to effect your health adversely. It will do only the opposite, no matter how many damn carbs are in it.
by "low carb diet" I am specifically referring to carb-restriction type diets like atkins that advocate eating an extraordinarily low amount of carbohydrates.
carbohydrates are an important macronutrient. the problem is not with carbs, but with bad carbs.
go visit some third world countries where they eat primarily carbs and find me the obese people. (hint: you won't find any)
You can alter your caloric intake by changing the amount and type of food you eat. You can alter your caloric burn by changing the amount of exercise / labor you perform.
Those formulas have the appeal of simplicity, but it's more complicated than that. For starters, caloric burn is highly correlated with caloric intake. They're not independent variables by a long shot. Consume less and your metabolism will actually shift down to burn less. Burn more by exercise and your appetite will increase to partially compensate.
Also, exercise is actually a low load on our body calorically (for most types of exercise). The overwhelming majority of calories burnt are for maintaining homeostasis, and have nothing to do with aerobic exercise.
Here's an example that shows how people are deceived. If you're an average male, and you start using a high-tech treadmill, the calories/hour measure might say something like "120 calories/hour". Sounds great, right? Well, what it doesn't say is that 100 calories of that measurement are just due to your basal metabolic rate, the amount you would burn just sitting in a chair. Running (possibly the most efficient exercise) itself only burnt 20 calories an hour. A carrot is sufficient to cover that.
Plus, exercise is not the only output. Heat production is an even better one. The amount of calories expended in maintaining body temperature is way higher than exercise. There's also excretion, but luckily, nobody's advocating laxatives as a weight-loss regimen yet. :)
I absolutely agree that weight is regulated by calories consumed vs calories burned.
In practice though, trying to say that is the only important aspect is complete bull. Try getting all your calories from wood chips and let me know how that work.
In order for consistent weight loss to occur, we need to eat healthy foods so that we feel good. Feeling lousy will cause you to overeat. Eating bad foods could also make you sick.
Well yes, of course your diet should be well-rounded and contain all the necessary vitamins, fibers, protein your body needs.
My comment was more a reaction to all the different kinds of diets, and how they're supposedly a better way to lose weight than the previous diet. If you want to lose weight, and you already have a varied diet that meets your body's daily intake requirements, it can be useful to calculate your calorie consumption and burn rate and try to tweak both of those so that you end up with a caloric deficit.
Of course this only directly affects your weight, and you need to also take care of your body's general health. I would hope it's obvious to most that you shouldn't start a wood chip diet.
My great-grandfather ate white bread regularly from before 1910 and stayed thin all the way into his 90's. He spent his last ten years or so living with my family starting about when I was in middle school, so I remember it well. AFIK, he'd been eating the same kinds of stuff for 50 years -- cornflakes and whole milk for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch and meat and potatoes with a few veggies for dinner.
Especially when looking at my own ancestors (all of whom were thinner than me 3 generations back), I tend to discount any sort of "oh they were just genetic freaks" kinds of arguments. None of them really dieted or deprived themselves, but they were used to pretty bland monotonous diets. I clearly remember ordering pizza in high school and they tried eating it with forks and knives and said they weren't big on "Italian food". The truth is it's the more recent generations who are the freaks. We're used to access to pretty much any kind of tasty, convenient food whenever we want it.
Seth's blog is pretty awesome, also. The man is extremely inventive and clear thinking. That being said, I personally believe that most of what he's found can be accounted for by the placebo effect, but his ideas and reports from other people always make me think.
Seth is a very interesting fellow with some fascinating ideas (butter improves mental reasoning, standing on one leg can improve sleep, flavorless calories interfere with weight setpoints), but I think he's made a mistake in arguing against man-made climate change.
He isn't arguing against climate change. He is arguing that the people who do argue climate change are making arguments from religion, rather than science. And I tend to agree.
As near as I can tell from his writing, his key objection is the inaccuracy of climate models and their predictive failure. While it's a truism that any model with enough free variables can "fit" a data set, this does not render the exercise useless.
Nor are models the only reason we think people are driving the global temperature change. There are still large numbers of plausible biological/chemical explanations for man-made global warming, and fewer that involve random fluctuations.
In the end, though, I think the best argument is simply caution. There's no backup planet if people like you are wrong, so it's best to proceed as if we're tiptoeing on the edge of a cliff. If 99% of scientists are wrong, then all we'll have wasted are funding dollars as effort. If you're wrong, we might see the coasts become uninhabitable, and wars break out over things like water and land.
I should add, I also tried "juicing" which was popularized by
films such as fat, sick, and nearly dead. What they don't tell you in that movie is that juicing the vegetables removes most of the fiber and results in you drinking what is essentially a somewhat fibrous cup of sugar and nutrients. After just a couple juices you will be bouncing off the walls....
You are contradicting yourself by stating that diets should be tailored to our needs but at the same time you slag off a diet that might fit someone else.
I am referring to extreme diets like atkins. My contention is that most "fad diets" aren't tailored to anyone's metabolism. What they're tailored to is profit.
Each of us needs to figure out a healthy ratio of carb/protein/fat.
Listen to your body, and give it what it needs. Experiment a bit. That's what I learned after trying fad diets. The realization is we are individuals each with our own metabolism that is slightly different.
What I found is that low carb diets are a big sham. The key is not to avoid carbs, but to avoid SUGAR and HFCS. Lots of "carbs" we eat come from absolute garbage, like white bread.
Trust me, a diet of mostly high fiber green vegetables is NOT going to effect your health adversely. It will do only the opposite, no matter how many damn carbs are in it.