Can you give a concrete example of this? I feel kind of slow in catching on to what this looks like in real life!

Thanks,
Kathrin

Awesome article as usual, but one minor quibble. I’ve read that the thermic effect of food is not that substantial in terms of overall calorie expenditure. Can you point me to a source that demonstrates otherwise?

I have worked with AND debated with “experts” on both sides of this silly debate. What is striking about both arguments is that they also come pre-loaded with excuses as to why the calorie counting doesn’t work for some people, or the just-counting-carbs sometimes backfires.

Basically, if you say, “but hey low carb proponent, here’s an example of someone who did everything right according to the principles of your diet — but also definitely overate — and he actually gained more fat on your low carb diet”… the response you get is something like, “well yeah, you can’t overeat.”

OR the classic, the one the CICO proponents like to use: “he must have cheated.”

MKAY. So apparently for these experts, it’s not a problem that:

* The magic low carb diet only works for people who have properly functioning hormonal control of hunger and satiety and no emotional eating problems.

* Firm belief in CICO necessarily implies believing that a disproportionate number of dieters are OBVIOUSLY sneaky lying bastards.

*sigh*

I mean, to me, the fact that it’s going to be a combination of hormonal manipulation, calorie *monitoring* (not necessarily restricting), and fitting diet to exercise types would be a no-brainer. And that people would probably be compliant to their diets if they actually believed they worked!

Am in the middle of it.. giving myself time to figure it out…reading LOTS. Started with Primal diet… some friends of ours were paleo a couple years and we didn’t understand or comprehend it. After a couple years, we tried it for 30 days out of complete spite to show that it wouldn’t possibly work for US.

HA! Jokes’ on my husband and me… immediately we began sleeping vs. being wide awake at 2am and having to take tylenol pm to sleep thru the night. My belly bloating stopped… our energy levels were even vs. highs and lows… it was enough for us to keep with it. I think if I went into it for weight loss alone I would not have stuck with it. The added benes of my mood improvement, sleeping…omg…glorious sleep, and the overall improvement in feeling better kept us sticking with it.

After 30 days and feeling like we had the hang of our “diet” (hate calling it that as it’s not a fad thing but a way of eating for us now) I began adding in some more moving. Because I just couldn’t do everything at once… it had to be gradual or it would have been overwhelming.

We always walked the dogs for 2 miles in the AM and I began to add in some of the intensity things… from a free .pdf on exercise on Marks Daily Apple and it was small. I couldn’t do 10 knee pushups in a row…. but I just kept at it. Doing what I could do. Bit by bit being able to do a little more.

I read Dan John… I bought Convict Conditioning… picked up a couple old tractor tires for free… duffel bags from the thrift store to fill with sand to carry around….my husband built me an adjustable bar I could do some things with… tried to incorporate whole body movement as much as possible…push, pull, squats…

My husband and I have both lost around 25lbs. I was a size 16 going on 18 when I was my heaviest and fought a lot with depression (was told it ran in the family).

Now I’m a size 8, have never felt better in my entire life! All the depression brain bugs have left the building — it’s wonderful. I feel so emotionally healthy I can’t stand it. For the first time in my life really. Of course I still get sad about things or have bad days, however, it’s very different than being plauged by depression.

We recently joined crossfit to learn the olympic lifts and to be pushed harder… I’m interested to see how much better things can get tho’ I am not looking to sacrifice health or strength to do so. It’s just I’ve never been THIS good… so how do I know how much BETTER I can be?

It’s so exciting and wonderful. I never knew how bad I felt until I discovered how incredible I CAN and DO feel now.

Tho the interesting thing I find now is being almost chastized by society for figuring out a way to be healthy. I was getting a lot of anorexic comments even tho I eat a TON – it’s just healthy fuel vs. crap. And people saying how it’s easy for ME to do it but I’ve never been as heavy as THEY are…

shrug. It’s quite interesting watching people react to my new lifestyle. You’d be suprised – or maybe not – how people almost want you to feel guilty or bad for finding a way to be free and fly…. Have you done any posts about that?

Thanks for your posts! I’ll be reading them!

I think the even greater impact may be from what the latest research is calling “gut bacteria population”. The number, type, and proportions of the bacteria in *your* individual digestive system determines how much of the theoretical calories in your food get extracted and used in the body (vs that of someone else who may have a very different population of gut bacteria that process *their* food in a way that is different enough to be significant”. The calorie value listed on the food package represents sort of an average value…some bodies will squeeze more or less calories out of that same amount of food. The variability is quite wide ranging, as it is with most biological traits, and helps to explain why some people seem to gain on very little calories while others can’t seem to gain no matter how much they eat, and most of us are in between.