Diet for managing weight

[mtbc]

For many weeks now I have limited myself to eating 14Mcal per week but lost less than half a pound per month. My weight remains at around the top of the healthy range so I would like to buy myself a greater margin there. Perhaps with a little more weight loss my other health indicators would improve a little too. In British Imperial terms, I have already lost well over four stone and kept it off but perhaps I could yet stand to lose just one more.

What puzzles me is that the modern weight calculators suggest that I should need to eat well over 16Mcal per week to maintain my weight. I do take the occasional break from counting calories when we are with extended family or suchlike but I rather doubt that is enough to explain such slow loss. I suspect it is instead more to do with how individuals can vary from the mean.

When I originally reached a healthy weight and adjusted to a more generous maintenance diet I had hoped that I would indeed get to eat more than 16Mcal per week. Instead I am now thinking that I may need to limit myself to 13Mcal per week, at least from mid-August after life has settled back down from various summer holiday things. I will look again at increasing the limit back to at least 14Mcal if I reach 150lb.

Comments

[aldabra]

I don't believe in calories. I think the metabolic behaviour is very different depending on what the food source is, and calories from sugar behave differently from calories from fat, and it is largely meaningless to aggregate them as if they're interchangeable. (And/or, I think people's metabolisms vary so much that it is largely meaningless to aggregate dietary advice across populations. Certainly I think the standard dietary advice as promulgated by government since the 1980s makes me personally iller rather than healthier.)

There is some youtube professor who explains this convincingly, but I haven't got the headspace or the non-work internet connection to go excavating youtube. Lucas? Something like that. Metabolic pathways of fat and sugar and alcohol. "Toxic calories" might be a buzzphrase.

Actually, I can google that on this connection. Professor Lustig. There is a Lustig lecture on this on youtube, I guess about 45 minutes, but I can't confirm which one it is from here.

[mtbc]

Ah, thank you, I will take a look. Partly I was just trying to keep my counting-life as simple as possible but maybe that is overoptimistic!

With this stuff in the British news lately about Sharon Moalem's cracker test to judge amylase level I seem to be one of the people for whom the taste does not turn sweet at all, though I have not acted on that because I have yet to find anything clear and persuasive linking the test to the claimed conclusions.

With a first glance at Robert Lustig's work: mst3kmoxie is very much in favor of low-carb and I have been trying to go along with that but I may have to do more insisting there; fortunately I do not have much of a sweet tooth. Though also this seems to be one of those fields where there is frustratingly little consensus, e.g., Effect of Low-Fat vs Low-Carbohydrate Diet on 12-Month Weight Loss in Overweight Adults and the Association With Genotype Pattern or Insulin Secretion: The DIETFITS Randomized Clinical Trial, Gardner, Trepanowski, Del Gobbo, et al. (2018).

You may also have been thinking of David Ludwig at Harvard who was involved with Effects of Dietary Composition on Energy Expenditure During Weight-Loss Maintenance, Ebbeling, Swain, Feldman, et al. (2012) which I think is probably one of the more interesting early papers that may well support Lustig's work; I'll have to see how well they agree.