Well, let's see.


Now if he REALLY meant: "Two ways to continue weight loss: Ingest fewer calories or burn more calories or waste more calories." But that's three things, so I don't think he meant what you think he meant. Which is okay, since 12 hours ago you had no idea what we were talking about.

It is possible to limit the "calories in" part to food ingested and get that half of the equation correct. As you have come to realize in this thread, that limiting "calories out" to calories burned by muscles during exercise fails to describe cell metabolism or mammal digestion.

And if he (or you) REALLY mean that "calories out" means EVERY calorie that could possibly leave the body in any way imaginable, then we call that a tautology. Borderline tautology, really, but at the very least, mundane. Water is wet. Dogs bark. That sort of thing.

So we presume that someone posting here is not posting to tell us that "water is wet" or that "calories in equals calories out in every single possible way that caloric energy can leave the body". We presume that "calories in equals calories out" is a statement of exercise, as in, if you want to loose weight just ingest fewer calories or burn more calories. And since that is exactly what doctorK said, well.

I think what it really comes down to is that people who spend a great deal of time and discipline to maintain what they believe passes for health resent it when someone succeeds without, apparently, paying their dues.

The problem with that is, however much you may believe in the Puritan Work Ethic, it's not a good model for our physiology. Try chemistry and physics.

Actually this was my position from the beginning. (This is precisely why CI=CO during weight maintenance.) At what point did I say CO only includes exercise?


Not sure why you're speaking for the forum as a whole, but your assumption seems to be a bad one. I haven't encountered anyone who thinks calories are only burned during exercise. Maybe you deal with a different breed over in the war zone. In any case, the somewhat-subtle condescending tone of your posts is very charming indeed. Maybe try relaxing a little, not taking an Internet forum so seriously. You look like such a nice guy in your picture -- try acting like one.

Hi kilton:

You seem to assume that the posts above yours are arguing with doctorK's first sentence. I took them as a response to the second and third sentences.

Here's doctorK's full post:



As an obese woman whose weight loss has stalled and who is part of "this group" in that I share the views of many on this forum about the metabolic causes of obesity, here's what I heard doctorK say:

"It's really very easy. If you want to lose weight, stop shoving so much food in your pie hole and/or get off your bottom and move, you lazy gluttons. But of course the folks on this forum are too weak-willed to do that, so they've come up with a bunch of gobbledy-gook so-called science to justify why they're still fat and why they shouldn't do the most obvious thing in the world - diet and exercise."

(My apologies to doctorK if that's not what he intended, but that's what I heard, probably because that is the popular view. And "calories in, calories out" is code for the popular view.)

The problem is that I know from personal experience that eating less and exercising more did not help me lose weight. I also know from personal experience that when I adjusted what I ate (fewer carbs not fewer calories) so that I was working with my hormones rather than against them, I lost almost 20% of my weight and maintained that loss effortlessly.

The science described in books like GCBC explains why that's so.

So I agree with Caveman and Seejay. Science and experience contradict doctorK's statement - at least the last two sentences.

There's no simple answer for obesity. In my case, I'm extremely insulin resistant. After a year and a half of low-carbing, my serum insulin is still pretty high. My doctor says that as the insulin levels come down, I'll lose weight. As that stored fat is released, maybe I'll eat less because some of my energy needs will be met from this released fat. If that happens, I will be "ingesting less" as doctorK suggests. But I won't be losing weight because I'm ingesting less. I'll be ingesting less because I'm losing weight. The question I need to answer is: How do I lower my insulin?

I could follow doctorK's advice, but if my insulin stays high and I remain insulin resistant, I won't lose weight; I'll simply become hungry and dragged out. This is because the amount of fat I have stored and the ability to release that fat for energy is not determined by, as doctorK has implied, how much I eat and how much I move, but by insulin. [I leave aside the issue of whether fewer calories or more exercise would lower my insulin or increase my insulin sensitivity. One or both of them may. But I don't think that's what doctorK intended by his comment.]

Anyway I guess my point is that I don't have any particular quarrel with doctorK's first sentence - which is actually uninteresting and unimportant as far as I'm concerned. My quarrel is with sentence two - which offers a "solution" to obesity which doesn't work for me - and sentence three - which somewhat sarcastically implies that only a ninny would disagree with such an obvious solution.

Hey costello22,

I can understand your position. But based on past posts that I've seen by doctorK, and the fact that he's lost weight (but not yet all the weight he wants to lose) by doing LC and exercise, I don't think he meant what you think he meant.

There does indeed appear to be a lot of interpretation going on in this thread, which is leading to disagreement. Fundamentally, it is absolutely true that to lose weight CO must be greater than CI. (We'll see if anyone wants to nitpick this statement to death.) We all know that different types of calories lead to different metabolic results (so "a calorie isn't a calorie" in this sense), but that doesn't change the fact that CO must exceed CI. LC tends to reduce CI by controlling hunger; hence, weight loss. But the ever-so-common stall shows that things aren't as simple as perhaps we would like.

I am becoming more convinced that calories are not what determine weight storage and loss. I wrote a long post about my kids in general -- our entire family has increased calories with fat but cut down on carbohydrates, and the result has been they have all continued to grow in height following the standard growth curve but have fallen in weight on those same charts. This is on increased calories.

Of course, I have zero scientific evidence to back me up. But there is SO much more to the picture than CI/CO. But as long as people cling to that, I suppose it's easier to blame the fat people than blame the crappy understanding of the process.

I'm not familiar with doctorK's past posts.



Yep.



I disagree. LC causes weight loss by lowering insulin.

I also disagree that CI is necessarily reduced, especially in the early stages of weight loss when some people find the weight falls off without lowering calories.



I haven't thought obesity and weight loss were simple for many, many years. If it were simple, I'd be thin.

Your profile says you've read GCBC, but I'm not sure you understood it. [I know that sounds really rude, and I don't mean to be. I tried to rewrite it - and smiled while making the attempt - but it still came out rude. ]

And what does lowering insulin do? Allows fat stores to be used for energy instead of CI. So CI is lowered (i.e., you eat less).

And if in some cases CI isn't lowered (which is hard to believe, but I know some people claim it), CO must increase -- the body will have excess energy to burn/waste (instead of storing, due to low insulin).

You may be familiar with insulin theory, but your previous message didn't reflect that.

Your statement was "LC tends to reduce CI by controlling hunger; hence, weight loss."

LC ==> controlled hunger ==> reduced CI ==> weight loss

That's just the old "calories in, calories out" theory with LC thrown in to make it easier to reduce calories.

Your new statement is "Lowering insulin allows fat stores to be used for energy instead of CI. So CI is lowered (i.e., you eat less)."

LC ==> lowered insulin ==> fat stores used for energy ==> lower CI/eat less (reduced hunger)

So, your first statement says you're losing weight because you're eating less. (The simplistic view that most of the world seems to believe.) Your second statement says you're eating less because you're losing weight. (A more sophisticated view that reflects some knowledge of metabolism.)

The two ideas aren't equivalent.

Heh, okay. I see what happened now. It's the order of events in my first sentence that you were concerned about. Fair enough.

In retrospect I shouldn't have included that sentence at all. It had no relevance to the main point of my post which was that CO has to be greater than CI for weight loss.

Biochem 101, anaerobic metabolism.
The glycogen used by muscles is in the muscles, not the blood. When dietary glucose is in short supply, it's replenished by gluconeogenesis from glycerol, lactate and some amino acids. "running on fat" means that fatty acids are available because of a favorable hormonal environment for fat mobilization out of the adipocytes. This effects aerobic metabolism. It doesn't imply impaired anaerobic metabolism.
Glucose is required for anerobic exercise. High intensity training can deplete glycogen in a matter of minutes. I'm sure I'm not the only person on this board doing VLC (in my case, usually <15 grams per day) and HIT. Keep in mind that HIT produces large quantities of lactate which is a good substrate for gluconeogenesis. I'm probably not burning much if any fat during exercise, but could be burning as much as a runner for hours afterward, while the lactate is being disposed by way of aerobic metabolism (plus the Cori cycle "wastes" quite a bit of energy). But burning calories is not my main reason for doing HIT.

Ok, I won't argue with that statement even though I'm not sure it's true. I've heard reports of people losing weight on huge amounts of calories. I never know how much credence to give to those stories though. And I'm simply not a calorie counter myself, so I don't know if my calories are higher, lower, or the same as they were before LC.

The only tiny quibble I have is that when you say "CO has to be greater than CI for weight loss" but fail to mention the metabolism which is driving the whole thing, it almost sounds like "eat less, exercise more" to lose weight.

And I still think that's exactly what doctorK meant: Eat less, exercise more to lose weight. And that's where this whole conversation started.

It's confusing when you use the same word, "calories," in two ways in the same paragraph. One is theoretically measuring just energy (calories). The other is the leap to imply that food is just the energy in side, but in reality the calories we eat affects the burn rate of the calories we eat, so it's circular. Unlike just burning the food to ash like in a calorimeter.

After looking up the word 'Tautology' I need to clarify a few things. ;-) Everyone here is arguing from their own experience. Mine is that on lowcarb I went from 220 to 170 over two years and have been stuck there for several years. I increased exercise and was able to drop to 160 but quickly regained once I cut back on exercise. My plan now is reducing intake, expecially protein. Excess protein turns into sugar and ultimately fat. So I stand firm on my original statement that CI equals CO in a stall. To break the stall, eat less or run more. Everything else is obfuscation. You can't turn lead into gold, you can't lose weight if calories are too high. Plenty of metabolic quirks can dramatically slow weight loss but not stop it if calories are low enough.

Except when I eat low carb I can eat a lot more calories than when I eat low fat. I started feeding my family a higher fat diet and they all have gotten leaner (they all eat moderate carbs) despite the increase in calories.

I wish more research would be done in this area. People just stick with CI/CO and cut calories instead of looking at other things to cut. Cutting out grains did far more for my weightloss than cutting calories ever did.