The disagreement, as I see it, is whether or not restricting energy intake is an effective treatment for obesity, long or short term.
We all are agreeing it works and we all are agreeing there must be an energy deficit for weight loss to occur. What is being disagreed upon is whether or not restricting calories to achieve caloric deficit is effective advice. This sounds like a silly debate, but really, it is not and it is a very valid question.

Antz (and the dieting mainstream) feels calories should be restricted if weight loss does not occur. They have a purely scientific approach to weight loss: if one is failing to catabolize body fat for energy, it means consumed energy is in excess. Reduce it, and the body will turn to tissues for energy. Tissue loss, hopefully mostly from fat (especially if controlling blood sugar), is unavoidable.

ABD, Eepobee, and other LC purists are against this. LC purists feel that over eating & maintaining obesity is a symptom of a physical problem. Because it's a symptom, it is not a problem that should be approached head on (meaning, restricting quantity of energy should not be a treatment for overweight). Over eating isn't a behavioral issue, either, so yet again the LC purists feel there is no justification for limiting quantity. Excess calories are usually a carb issue - if you take care of the carbs, the calories take care of themselves, and you'll lose weight. If the calories aren't taking care of themselves, then that means something else is wrong (likely your carbs aren't controlled well enough, or you are eating/doing something that is upsetting your metabolism).
Because the LC purist viewpoint feels over eating and failing to normalize weight is always a symptom and never a problem, they feel that advice to focus on calories is wrong. It is ineffective and unsustainable long term because it does not address the core issue. You are, in effect, fighting your body, and no one can do that for life. Useful for temporary weight suppression for say, vacation or a body building contest? You bet. Long term effectiveness of calorie suppression as a treatment for weight problems is suspect.


Speaking personally, I'm very much torn between the two camps.



On one hand I feel the dieting mainstream makes a good point.
Obviously reducing calories is very effective for reducing body fat. If you are more quantity-conscious, it allows us to eat whatever we want without worrying so much about gains.

Furthermore, who says that it's NATURAL to be thin? The dieting mainstream recognizes that it is a fact people tend to eat too much and tend toward heaviness.
This is the error of the LC camp: they assume if you aren't getting thin (or have a moderate appetite) when eating whatever, it means something is wrong.
There seems to be this assumption that all healthy bodies will stay slim and never fat when allowed to eat as much as possible.
It's possible that slimness is not the only healthy body type.
It's possible that perfectly healthy people do become and stay fat when allowed to eat freely in a food-rich environment.
We are all so thin biased and obsessed with low body fat and high muscles, but who says this is the ONLY healthy body type? I mean yea, obviously there's a point where at which it's obvious you're unhealthfully fat. At 280 pounds, with numerous health problems (reactive hypo & PCOS), and a rapidly climbing weight at such a young age, it was pretty obvious something was wrong with my body (hyperinsulinemia/insulin resistance). But I mean, the guy who maintains a 30 lb heaviness eating whatever, or the woman who's 165 pounds and maintains it steady with no health problems at all... just because these individuals don't spontaneously under eat and lose weight on low carb doesn't necessarily mean something is WRONG. It could be that those are their natural weights in a food-rich environment.

The dieting maintstream seems to more readily recognize that people DO tend to eat a lot and stay heavy, and that this is a normal/natural process.
The dieting mainstream recognizes that sometimes our natural body type, when we are in ideal health, is often less than desirable.
If you would like to be thinner than your natural weight, it means you need to under eat. Peroid. That means watching calories.


Now on the other hand, the LC camp makes good points as well.
If one who has a serious weight problem is failing to lose weight, and is in fact GAINING weight on unrestricted LC, that implies to me something must be wrong.
Focusing on calories in such a situation is the approximate equivalent of injecting insulin to keep blood sugar down in severe insulin resistance. It may produce the desired result, sure, but ultimately the source problem is remaining unaddressed. It is questionable, too, whether or not symptom suppression is truly effective long term. We all know what happens when we focus on symptoms. The root disease usually gets worse. Perhaps increased hunger and failure to lose on LC is a problem of some condition that is remaining unaddressed? Perhaps that symptom - the body's natural way of trying to correct some horrible imbalance - will not motivate us to try to fix the problem. Without the symptom alerting us to a problem, we will ignore it, and it will only get worse. Doctors tend to feel if symptoms are controlled that translates into disease control, but this is not always correct. Symptom control can imply disease control, but it is not an absolute relationship. If symptoms are controlled via artificial means (i.e. under eating to correct excessive appetite & broken metabolism) then that doesn't mean anything.


Furthermore, I think the LC camp is more tolerant of accepting heaviness as normal. The "traditional dieter" camp is less health focused; they are more likely to validate (and encourage) weight manipulation for aesthetics. The LC purists are more likely to say "whatever weight you settle at when your health and lifestyle are healthy is the weight you are supposed to be". For this reason the LC purists are less likely to validate weight suppression via under eating; it is pointless vanity and does nothing for health.

Speaking personally, I feel that obesity, like diabetes, is a permanent condition. Yes, one can prevent obesity, just like one can prevent diabetes. However, once you have it, you have it, and you can either suppress the weight (to conform for aesthetics) or accept it.
Obesity is not simply "choosing" to eat too much. It's not something that can be gotten rid of by going on LC. It's a real, physical disease. The hyperinsulinemia & the extremely lipogenic state which characterizes obesity, triggered by high carbohydrate diet, causes profound and irreversible physiological changes in fat and endocrine system. These changes, I speculate, have the net result of raising "set point" at a high normal or even obese weight.
The gain cycle is almost always stopped. Partial weight reduction is also very likely. However, for us TDCers it becomes obvious eventually a plateau, a permanent one, is reached. At this point we either make the choice to suppress our weights via under eating or accept our natural heaviness.

You are on the right track but in thermodynamics, calories specify a particular reaction, e.g.
food + oxygen --> CO2 + H2O
The calories assigned to a food are for carrying out this reaction in a calorimeter where nothing else happens.
You cannot compare two chemical reactions unless they have exactly the same reactants and products. So the calorimeter value may not be useful if you make alot of other stuff. In practice two diets may give the same amount of energy if they don't differ much in the metabolic changes but there is no requirement for energy balance. So you have to try to find conditions where one is more or less efficient but you will never find that if you start out with the idea that it is impossible. I also am a fan of Anthony Colpo but on this issue he has decided that he doesn't have to learn anything new.

It's clear that this bears repeating. I've written, in the past, the equivalent of the mistake shown here.

Food calories are not thermodynamic kilocalories, as is commonly stated. They are thermodynamic calories as determined for a particular food, adjusted by the Atwater factor which supposedly takes into consideration the metabolic differences. But those factors were determined by limited experiment a long time ago, and, among other problems, dietary context was not even considered. It might make a difference what metabolic state the body was already in when the food is consumed, for example.

anyone care to revisit this thread given the ammunition in taubes' book? i think two of anthony colpo's assertions (calories do count baby! and the beneftis of carb-loading after exercise to restore glycogen) have been directly refuted.

I don't think they were. To refute them, you'd need a well-controlled study that had people eat a signficant surplus of calories on low-carb, and I don't believe Gary provided that. (Did I miss it?) Volek tried to get people just to eat maintenance level on low-carb and had trouble doing it. Which of course, is the beauty of low-carb. (Keep in mind this study was done on normal-weight men.)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/e...Pubmed_RVDocSum

I also don't think Gary looked at the benefits of eating carbs after weight training in the context of low-carb, and for the benefit of building muscle without gaining fat. Correct me if I'm wrong. It's one thing to say that the practice of carb-loading after exercise may not be ideal for people who eat a high-carb diet and want to lose weight, but it's another to suggest their are no benefits to such a practice. Depends on the situation and on the goals, no?

I think Taubes included a study back in the 50's where researchers attempted to overfeed subjects a high-fat & meat diet compared to a high-carb diet....the high-carb arm (it may have been a separate study actually) overfed folks at like 10,000 calories a day and the high-fat arm (or separate study, I can't remember) they couldn't do it - no one could be forced to overeat calories when it was meat and fats.

I honestly fail to see how anybody eating lowcarb, unless they are specializing in bacon, sausage, pepperoni, mayonnaise, or a ton of baked stuff (like flax seed meal products), can possibly overeat calories. If I eat six times a day and am stuffed all day I'm lucky to make 2200 calories, and that's with some of the above plus butter, cream and hard cheeses, etc.

I eat way more food (in 'filling' sense) when I'm on lowcarb. The very idea that I could have spent my life eating 5x more food and weighed 5x less is really mindbending.

That doesn't refute the idea that too many calories from a low-carb diet won't make you fat over time, which is how I read "calories don't count." I certainly concur that it's hard to overeat on low carb, which is one reason that I'm a big supporter of it--and of not counting calories.

When the heck are you ever going to blog again, Regina? You're getting worse than me!

Shhhh....I'll tell ya a secret, but don't tell anyone, OK? (LOL)

I'm working on securing a spot for myself where I'll actually be paid to write - gasp! - and it's taking every ounce of my ability to not only write, but write boatloads of stuff quickly......format it, upload it and link it all over the place correctly......in a bid to "win" the spot I'm smack-dab in the middle of trying to get. Posting here - minor distraction to shake out my head before getting back to banging out page after page after page....behind the scenes.....if it goes well, you'll be the first to know.....cause, ya know, it's a secret!

Seriously - I'll be done by October 29th - then know what happened.....so the blog is on hiatus because I really really really don't have time to write there and write for this position too!

I've packed away incredible levels of calories while keeping carbs very low (less than 40g a day) and not gained - I'm talking in the 4000-calorie range.....I definitely can't do it day after day - but have done it and not gained, but not lost either.

And....true story.....after reading Taubes book, I had a houseguest who does low-carb, consistently and is pretty strict (about 40-60g a day net)......day after day I was SHOCKED (first time I was actually paying attention) by how much this person ate for calories - seriously 3500-5000 a day no problem - and didn't gain.....the majority of the calories though were fat calories....not protein, not carb, not alcohol (actually no alcohol)......no weight gain - no weight loss. I'm talking - really - atleast 1/2 cup of mayo, if not more, on the side of the plate at dinner to dip the veggies and meat in, and it's all used.....1/2 stick of butter on the veggies (drowing them).....3-4 ounces of cheese added to 3 or 4 eggs at breakfast, cooked in a whooping spoon of butter......honestly, I was shocked when I ran some numbers to benchmark the calorie intake - I'd never seen someone eat that much fat - added fat mind you - every day.......and not gain! And - NOT EXERCISE!

Taubes noted the one guy who would completely stall and even regain if he ate so much as the amount of carbohydrates in a single apple. What's that, about 20?

I think there are some people out there that have extremely low tolerance for carbohydrates.

Intake - work= weight gain.
Work=Me-Carbs.

the point colpo originally made was that weight loss was impossible without the creation of an energy deficit. based on a number of studies cited by taubes (i'll dig them out later) we can safely say that the opposite has been shown to be not always true (i.e. weight gain occurring on calorie-restricted diets). we could infer from this that weight loss might be possible on diets exceeding energy expenditure, since calories have clearly been shown not to be the most important component in weight balance.

but here's another way to prove it. eat a high-calorie (6000kcal/day) cho-restricted (<40g/d) diet for two weeks. then, for the third week, eat a low-calorie (1000kcal/day) cho-restricted diet. your total calorie count for the 21 days would be 91,000kcal or 4333kcal/day. can we agree that this would exceed average daily energy expenditure? what sort of outcome do you think we'd get? if colpo is right and we can't lose weight without an energy deficit, there's no way you could lose an ounce.

Calorie restriction slows down the metabolism, insulin causes energy to be stored, both cause you to feel sluggish and cause the energy expenditure side of the equation to decrease right along with the energy input.

So what happens in low carb that makes it possible to eat more food and stay lean? Probably tiny little expenditures of energy we don't notice, like futile cycles or things on a cellular level that go unnoticed. In which case, it'd look like the laws of thermodynamics are being broken, but aren't.

I'm pretty sure this is what the Taubes book was saying on the subject. But we're talking VERY low carb for some people to make this happen. (Like I suspect me)

It seems to me that the problem is the presumption that EVERY thing that enters the mouth must either be burned for energy OR stored as fat. Clearly this cannot be true. Some of what we eat is used to make hair, nails, skin, and the lining of the digestive tract plus all the other things that wear out or are either sloughed or cut off and lost.

Also the presumption assumes that all except fiber is absorbed to be used for energy or stored as fat. Again this cannot be true. If it were, then my stools would be MUCH smaller than they are as the only fiber I regularly eat is about a quarter to a third of a cup of broccoli for supper every day. Something else is getting through.

People have forgotten that when the pioneers got out on the prairie there were no trees. Certainly not enough to waste for fuel. They used grass but also buffalo chips - the dried excrement from all the buffalo still there. Now I don’t think my stool will have the caloric value of a buffaloes since they eat so much more fiber. But wait, they were meant to eat fiber since they can digest it and I can’t. So it might not be as big a difference as at first blush.

And then I am reminded that there are all those “buggies” in the gut. They use up some of the food to stay alive and multiply. And some of their activity makes methane gas which we cannot absorb but rather expel, hopefully not in a embarrassing way Anybody know what the caloric value of methane is? Don’t think it is insignificant. Some people’s production may be, but I know some that make a lot.

Another thing that is missed is the calories lost to the surrounding atmosphere as heat, especially when it is cold out. Those calories are ones not used for muscle movement which is the way most people will assume calories are used.

So when you forget to include ALL the variables/factors/terms in an equation, no wonder it does not balance out.

MY $0.02