Weight Loss Thread

That is because "eat what a caveman would" is the super-duper condensed marketing pitch version that is also often spun into strawmen to attack paleo. Any popular paleo literature has a much better and more nuanced version of that, but then you'd need to read a bit and it makes it much harder to attack because overall it s a very reasonable and solid rule of thumb. Michael Pollan calls it the "grandmother" or "great-grandmother" rule which also works (don't eat anything said ancestor wouldn't recognize as food).

I think it is a good family rule because I really don't think kids can, or should count Calories. Their needs are just way too varied and their frontal lobes aren't developed enough to control something as powerful as how good candy tastes. For them the best solution IMO is as much healthy food as they want and limiting unhealthy food by time and/or amount.

You aren't wrong, and are totally right to be skeptical, but there is logic to it.

Generally, things that are toxic to us are compounds that we either didn't evolve alongside or that are in much different concentrations than what we evolved alongside. There are exceptions of course, but this is strongly true. For example, plutonium is much, much more toxic than Uranium. This is for a couple of reasons but also because we evolved alongside a certain concentration of Uranium in the environment and therefore our biology has ways of dealing with it. Plutonium is recent and our bodies have no way of coping with it.

The argument is that the concentrations of compounds in our modern food supply (modern being relative) are toxic because they are in concentrations our bodies did not evolve to deal with, high sugar/low fiber being the most notable difference. Now, depending on who you talk to there are 2 versions of "modern" diet. There is modern as in the beginning of Agriculture ~10k years ago and modern since the green revolution in the ~1950s. I'd argue that they are both equally significant, and both deleterious to our health overall but that the green revolution combined with modern agriculture policy has had a massively negative impact on public health far more than the advent of agriculture 10k years ago.

A modern apple, although different than an ancient apple, still MUCH more closely resemble each other in what compounds they contain and very importantly theconcentrationof those compounds than say a Hungry Man dinner and its unprocessed constituent parts.

Edited to Add:Lactase persistance, or the ability to digest dairy into adulthood, is a good example of the evolutionary adaptation known asneotany. This is the retention of juvenile traits into adulthood and is one of those types of adaptations that can happen relatively easily in a population because usually there is a pretty simple switch "turn off" or "not turn on" the adult trait.

Blonde hair and blue eyes is another example of this in humans. These 2 traits are correlated in Northern Europeans because it is suspected that when people living in central Scandinavian took up agriculture the amount of Vitamin D in their diet dropped sharply. Since light skin means you get more UV exposure to make more Vitamin D in the cold, dark north a relatively simple mutation that caused the genes that control melanin pigmentation production to just not turn on or not turn on as much conferring a massive advantage. Note that indigenous people that maintained a high proportion of fish and wildlife rich in Vitamin D as a part of their diet such as the Inuit and Sami kept their darker complexion. Lactase persistence is correlated with this because milk is a very good source of this nutrient and also would have conferred a big advantage.

Deathwing_sl said:

Teaching my kid how to eat healthily is one I've struggled with the last few months. He's still on the bottle, so I've got some time. But I agree that calorie counting is not going to work.

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Speaking of which, my son definitely follows examples. They learn by what you serve them. I mean my kids eat cheerios, pizza and waffles from time to time but dinner is always something healthy. They get good lunches packed for them etc.

They also seem to fall for obvious tricks like "I saw you grow a little when you ate that broccoli!"

Deathwing_sl said:

Paleo explained that way makes more sense since it basically becomes avoiding the beetus(I know I'm oversimplifying). Maybe sugar and fiber should be macros alongside carbs/fat/protein. When my wife was doing her gestational diabetes bullshit during her pregnancy, I asked her and her doctor a few times does that fiber need to be natural? Can I ingest a fiber supplement with my sugar to help retard the gestation? No one knew.

This is where I reference back to "knowledge is power". Instead of paleo being mismarketed as cavemen crap, you have more people informed about the real problem and we could move forward as a culture. Sure, you can have that piece of cake, if you chug this glass of metamucil with it(no idea if that works). It's especially dangerous to only rely on "well, we didn't always eat this way, so we can't ever".

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I consider it a macro-nutrient on par in importance as the other 3 big ones. Fiber is basically indigestible plant cellulose, or the stringy parts of your food. Generally more stringy = more fiber. There are 2 kinds, soluble and insoluble, veggies have soluble and grains insoluble.

You can't replace food with Metamucil. Basically you need to eat real food to be healthy and thrive long-term, everything seems to come down to that. There is still a lot about food we don't really understand completely and trying to replace foods with supplements of their constituent parts doesn't really work except in pathological circumstances (i.e you have a nutrient deficiency disease).

Paleo isn't mis-marketed at all, there is just tons of misinformation and strawmen out there from lots of different people that don't like the message. Everything I am telling you I learned on Paleo related websites, and one of the core principles of most of these places is the 80/20 rule. Generally speaking you shouldn't learn about something from people that are apriori against it and will create strawmen to attack without addressing the core arguments or evidence of it.

Khane_sl said:

Low Carb diets will not generally work for most people if you "ease" into them. Mostly because when people try to do so, they do it completely incorrectly. They are essentially all or nothing diet plans. You either go full out and adhere to it to the letter, or just try something else. Overweight people typically do not have the appropriate knowledge to mix and match as you go on any diet plan in reality. It's usually a recipe for failure which just leads to depression and more over eating.

I suggest, if you really want to do this, to do it completely by the book. It will be much easier for you to follow instead of saying "yea, I think eating food X should be fine, right?"

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I think there's a problem with all or nothing diets though. They don't teach someone how to make choices. The donut example is good here because in the end, a donut doesn't fucking matter. But you fail an all or nothing diet if you eat one. Overweight people don't need to be punished for the desire to treat themselves.

When I start cutting next month, I sure as shit won't pass on a piece of cake at work just because it's not a "clean" food. Fuck that, I'll make it fit into my carb macros and I'll enjoy eating it.

I missed Khanes post, which is completely wrong.

Low-carb diets aren't even close to all or nothing. Ketogenic diets are all or nothing because being in ketosis is a binary condition, you are in it or you aren't, but not all low carb diets are ketogenic diets. There are plenty of good diets with varying amounts of low-carb, that are still low carb but some more than others.

I like Paleo, takes a bit of adjusting initially but its the only one that i manage to follow through with.

Denaut_sl said:

I missed Khanes post, which is completely wrong.

Low-carb diets aren't even close to all or nothing. Ketogenic diets are all or nothing because being in ketosis is a binary condition, you are in it or you aren't, but not all low carb diets are ketogenic diets. There are plenty of good diets with varying amounts of low-carb, that are still low carb but some more than others.

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I was oversimplifying it. People tend to get scared away from diet plans because of the huge amount of varying information out there. They are more likely to stick to something that is spelled out for them to the lowest common denominator. So when someone asks me for advice on getting started I usually say "Do this, follow the plan, do not deviate, succeed."

When you guys say "A donut doesn't matter" you mean "A donut doesn't matter if you are aware of the insane amount of calories and sugar in a small, unsatisfying donut and adjust the rest of your intake accordingly". What overweight people hear is "Wooohooo! I can eat donuts! 3 should be fine, losing weight is gonna be easy!"

It's the same thing in this thread over and over again. Someone comes asking for advice; people like Deathwing who are inherently curious and love reading about the facts behind the scenes scare the shit out of people who just want to get started. You guys are all right, but it's just information overload for a newbie. It's the same with anything in life. When you teach someone something you start with small, easy to digest pieces of information. They then see that they can apply this knowledge in some way and they are eager to learn more. Treating a diet as all or nothing will get them results right away and then they will stick with it and learn more as they go. Eventually getting to a level of knowledge that you guys have. It didn't happen for all of you overnight. It was a learning process over probably several months/years.

I appreciated this. It has basically been my stance to folks that were interested in what I am doing.

"Under no circumstance am I a doctor," Scola said. "I don't want to challenge any doctor's opinion. I don't want people reading this interview and taking my word for it. I just found a diet and I tried it and it worked so well and I stuck with it. That's as much as I can tell you."

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So it would be bad to fill a 300+/- calorie hole in my diet with mini croissants?!