Are they good, bad, ugly?
Paleo, Keto, Atkins etc. what's the deal? my instinct is they're all scams but i ain't no expert
Study after study has found that the only way to keep weight loss is to permanently change lifestyle. Fad diets all promise results, and may deliver them, but they're unsustainable over the long term. Keto in particular is expensive and might be bad for your health long-term.
The best diet for your general health is :im-vegan: with supplements (or vitamin B-enriched nooch) or something akin to the Mediterranean diet with a lot of leafy greens and fats.
Why do you say that keto can be bad for health long term? There are people with epilepsy who do it permanently on doctors orders
It can be expensive though. Avocados aren’t cheap
Yeah that makes sense. If you do keto by eating mostly meat and saturated fats it won’t be healthy because those things aren’t healthy in large quantities
people with epilepsy who do it permanently
:very-smart: humours theory once again proves correct
Alleviating a very severe illness can justify a lot of harm to the body. Its a lesser-of-two-evils. Getting radiation is bad for you but chemo is necessary to fight cancer.
Paleo is made up bullshit. Paleolithic people in most temperate and tropical regions ate like 60-70% plant foods. The only places where people ate huge amounts of meat all the time are like the arctic.
Keto, I think, was a specific diet for like diabetes or some condition. Same with Atkins. Neither were intended for general use.
Something like 90+% of people who try to lose weight dieting gain back all the weight within five years, and often gain more. Dieting is made up BS. Totally unscientific, unserious nonsense.
Of all the fad diets that exist, Paleo is one of the least harmful. A lot of it boils down to eating more vegetables and unprocessed food. Obviously the "we gotta eat like cavemen" aspect is pseudoscientific nonsense, but it could be a lot worse.
Keto was originally used as a way to prevent epileptic episodes, and there's evidence that it's effective at this. There's also evidence that it's destructive to literally every single organ in your body and correlates to massively reduced life expectancy iirc
The paleo is where some diet guru says "eat like a caveman, cut out all processed sugars and starches in favor of vegetables" and then someone with a typical Western diet consisting of nothing but meat and processed sugars hears it, skips over the word vegetables, and eats nothing but meat.
"I eat raw ground beef patties, just like my ancestors" :so-true:
:sicko-yes: i've thought Paleo is stupid forever since i knew a weird bodybuilding household that did it. and these days its completely commercialized like motherfucking paleo bread made of flour-from-a-plant-we-arbitrarily-decided-is-OK. oh CAVEMEN had fucking nut farms they crushed up to make disgusting tortillas? DID THEY THOUGH? nuts & fruits totally haven't been selectively bred by humans in comparable ways to grains
The only places where people ate huge amounts of meat all the time are like the arctic
and they had to eat a bunch of nasty shit to make up for nutrient shortfalls. seeing a distinct lack of sea urchins and blubber on paleo plates :thonk:
Paleo is made up bullshit. Paleolithic people in most temperate and tropical regions ate like 60-70% plant foods. The only places where people ate huge amounts of meat all the time are like the arctic.
The first time I heard about paleo, it was a guy on Stephen Colbert who emphasized that a big part of the diet was eating a lot of leafy greens and unprocessed fruit and veg. I think some wires got crossed somewhere and people started calling their wacky all raw meat diets "paleo" when that wasn't what that diet was supposed to be.
Keto worked for me to lose some weight. Once I’m in it my appetite is reduced. It helped me that you can’t cheat on keto or you mess it up for days. Anything that requires you to make conscious decisions for meals can be helpful.
Keto works because it actually changes the way your body breaks down fat and causes it it burn through stored fat quicker. If you're going to do keto get some ketone testing strips to tell when your in ketosis because the diet is basically pointless other wise.
Long term ketosis isn't healthy for most people so once you've lost your fat or after a few months you'll want to stop and just start watching your calories as a life style not a diet. Keto is scientific and there is a lot of real info out there amongst all the bull shit so just do your research with a critical mind.
Edit: also you can do keto as vegetarian/vegan, it's really fucking annoying but totally possible.
For anyone who doesn't know; Ketosis is the survival process that kicks in when your body is starving to death.
Yeah, so in this case you're tricking your body into burning it's "emergency" fat stores while still giving it enough protein that it doesn't start to burn muscle too. And enough calories from fat that rest of your systems still function. One reason you don't want to do it long term is you can permanently fuck your metabolism and change the way you break down and store fat.
Nope, sorry but you are objectively completely wrong. Ketoacidosis is a different phenomenon and occurs when your ketone levels are an ORDER OF MAGNITUDE higher than in ordinary ketosis. Ketoacidosis is starving to death. Ketosis is perfectly healthy, works for weight loss, is good for mental tasks because ketones are great brain fuel, and so on. It's possible to be in ketosis for years and years and NEVER enter ketoacidosis. Ketoacidosis occurs when you go into ketosis and then don't eat for like six days straight, which no keto diet EVER recommends anyone do.
Funniest one is the paleo raw diet, where people have built their entire philosophy off a misunderstanding that could be cleared up with like two Google searches and 60 seconds of reading.
Homo Sapiens didn't invent culinary arts. Cooking was here before us and it invented us.
its so funny that people believe a goddamn caveperson is the ideal physical form. yeah gimme that life expectancy of 35 :chefs-kiss:
All fad diets are effective in so far as they represent a period of you life where you are more mindful about eating and most remove you from addictive and unfilling highly processed foods.
All diets are based on the principle of calories in, calories out. You could lose weight eating only cake as long you burn more calories then you eat.
These fad diets can be helpful if you find the certain restrictions useful, but most people trying to lose weight need to make permanent changes to their lifestyle and eating habits and these diets with their harsh restrictions can be difficult to maintain over a lifetime.
If you are looking to lose weight:
Track your calories
Keep a good eating schedule
Try and eat home cooked meals
Eat plenty of vegetables and fruits. Fruits are the best snacks of all IMO
Get enough protein
and ffs take good data when you track stuff, and design your estimates so that if you're wrong by a little bit, you'll still get the result you want.
principle of calories in, calories out
to me this feels like an iron law of biology you can only escape through abusing your body alla boulimia, but there cottage industries upon cottage industries peddling "nu-uh"
yes but you still got to eat & taste it which is a part of overreating. destroys your teeth though
awful disease! not questioning that part. was just pointing out that bullimia doesn't violate conservation of mass with CI/CO; it's just an alternate pathway for calories out :(
They’re all pretty useless except for very niche cases for those with specific health conditions.
All I do is count calories coming in and the macros. Extremely simple. I’ve lost more weight consistently compared to the people I know who do weird shit like fasting for 24 hours or going on a water fasting or keto diet. It’s called a fad diet for a reason. It won’t stick around.
Tbh, some of the purest bro-science you will ever encounter is what the "ideal human diet" is. People will site all kinds of various studies that point different directions and everyone has a different opinion and the human body is pretty versatile.
I have done keto (lost 65 lbs and kept it off) and do it to occasionally lose weight. I always felt the best doing it but it isn't for everyone, and its certainly easy to overdo. Vegans hate the keto diet and will tell you it will kill you because it naturally ends up involving a lot of animal fat/protein, and they will tell you that ketosis and ketacidosis are the same thing. A key thing is still having cheat days and having fiber intake. You also should avoid a lot of products that are marketed as "keto" because they usually are not. The rule I have usually followed is that if I am craving something, I shouldn't have it.
Also you won't stay keto because food is too delicious to live that way anyway. Naturally you are going to find yourself eating less so it does end up being a calories in/out routine. However people who preach the calories in/out mindset usually ignore the fact that your body will adjust your energy levels because it doesnt want to lose weight. It isn't a perfect controllable model of thermodynamics. They also disregard the role blood sugar levels and insulin resistance have with weight gain and retention. Keto essentially makes your body re-adjust its metabolism to where it doesn't have an excuse to have the extra body fat.
Find a diet that works for you and makes you feel good. If you wanted my advice, I would just say do something low-carb with veggies and occasional fruit and commit yourself to exercise and be mindful of what you eat. You don't need to do anything too extreme beyond just changing your lifestyle.
It won't happen instantly either. In fact it might be a while before you see the scale move but if you make changes, your body will have to change before it loses.
My only successful diet was extreme calorie restriction for a few months that involved eating boiled chicken and cucumbers for basically every meal.
Calories in calories out is nonsense because your body is not a fucking bomb calorimeter, which is how calories are measured. Biochemistry is far more complicated and all of the anti-fat anti-meat diet studies are not randomised controlled trials over lifetimes but observational data studies absolutely rife with confounding by genetics, income, lifestyle, activity, sleep, and dozens of other risk factors to the point of being absolutely useless. The only guidelines with any real data beyond noise are to avoid sugar in all forms including sugar substitutes, don't eat from the hour you wake up until the hour you go to sleep (fasting for up to 16 hours per day is good, more than that can be harmful) and don't eat so much gluten in shit like bread that your intensines can't absorb any nutrients any more. Don't smoke, avoid alcohol, and exercise one or two times per week. See https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24332380-000-why-everything-you-know-about-nutrition-is-wrong/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=currents
it's not nonsense just because you're measuring it wrong. your body isn't a perfect calorimeter but it does obey the laws of thermodynamics.
when i was in a good enough headspace to be measuring everything and exercising regularly, I found I was slightly over-estimating my intake, whether that's labelling error, cooking loss, my body not absorbing as much as expected, or under-estimating my calories out doesn't matter because i was consistent methodologically so all the inaccuracy was in the same direction and precision was maintained.
the bigger problem with calorie tracking is that most people aren't chem lab dorks and will do a bad job on the data collection and under-estimate unlabeled prepared meals, forget to count condiments, extra butter, beverages, etc. or wildly overestimate on the output side.
i also think i read something about food labelling using a different method and some kind of correction for absorbtion, but i can't remember if that was enacted or like a FDA proposal and the labelling was "good enough" for me 5 or 10 years ago for the significant figures I was precise enough to care about.
don’t eat from the hour you wake up until the hour you go to sleep
Am I supposed to eat while I'm asleep?
As far as loosing weight goes, a ton of Fad Diets will actually work, because they restrict your food options and make you actually think about each meal.
This is why some fad diets that have claims that are opposite of each other will both often help people lose weight.
A bigger problem is keeping the weight off; a lot of fad diets can be hard to keep up with, and kinda have to be followed forever to keep the weight off.
I think the diet that will work best for a person is based on their taste, life experience, goals and a lot of other things. With that in mind people will do keto, atkins etc and find that it totally works for them and become evangelists for it - but that doesn't mean it works for most people. Changing your diet for permanent weight change is like changing any other habit that you're in, with the added complication of the fact that your body is wired to give you a chemical reward for doing the thing you're already doing even if it's demonstrably unhealthy and to punish you even if you're making a change for the better - you may be able to hijack that process for a few months or a year and see results, but if you haven't addressed the underlying problem then as soon as you let your guard down you're going to start rubber banding back to where you were.
That said, I also think that the primary "underlying problem" for like 90% of overweight people in western countries is capitalism-driven food culture. They want to pump us full of as much addictive food as possible, and some people are going to be more or less susceptible to that based on their genetics, but it can only get worse with time.
