Diet-Fitness-General Wellness Your Thoughts?

[muffler dragon]

There's gotta be a limit to how many calories you eat a day. Even if you run and work out if you're eating between 3,000 and 4,000 calories a day you're going to put on fat. If you eat that many calories just fruit you're going to get fat.

This isn't entirely true. There is a limit on how much protein one can ingest before the body rejects the amount. It should also be noted that eating fat does not make you fat.

 

[knapplc]

There's gotta be a limit to how many calories you eat a day. Even if you run and work out if you're eating between 3,000 and 4,000 calories a day you're going to put on fat. If you eat that many calories just fruit you're going to get fat. I know lots of dudes who lift and are really big in the arms, chest an back but they eat so much trying to get as much fuel as possible and they also have big guts.

I worked with a guy like that. In my twenties I had big legs from biking and sand volleyball, but his arms were nearly as big as my legs, and he had huge traps and a huge barrel chest. But he had a gut from drinking all the time, and he NEVER did leg work, so he had these funny skinny short legs. He looked like a cartoon.

 

[Fungo Squiggly]

My mother, I believe, is hoping against hope that I'm near heart-attack levels

Based on the life insurance policy I helped your wife fund, that's what I'm hoping, too.

 

[muffler dragon]

Based on the life insurance policy I helped your wife fund, that's what I'm hoping, too.

I distinctly remember her placing a "no cocksucker" as beneficiary clause into it; therefore, you'd never see a penny.

 

[powerlifter]

This isn't entirely true. There is a limit on how much protein one can ingest before the body rejects the amount. It should also be noted that eating fat does not make you fat.

Yes,there are limits on how much protein your body can use,but if you live over a calorie cap you will gain weight. I put a lot of faith in macros probably more then most people,but that doesn't change if you exceed how many calories your body can handle,then you will put on weight(the macros will have a strong impact on what kind of weight you gain,obviously).

The people that go on certain types of diets that normally drop one of the macronutrients to nothing (most of the time carbs) are fine if you plan on living that way the rest of your life. If you cut out carbs you will drop water,with some fat. If you go back to eating carbs (even healthy ones) the water will come back.

I know quite a few serious bodybuilders that will start out 16 weeks (or 20) and meticulously cut carbs more and more closer to contest. By the time they are done with their contest it's not abnormal to see them gain 20-30lbs of water in a couple weeks.

 

[powerlifter]

 

[Dryden]

What limitations do you place on your consumption of core primal foods?

For instance, do you eat nuts sparingly or are you unconcerned with fat content altogether ?

I'm not asking whether you can go nuts for nuts, but rather whether you are careful about how much of which primal food items you eat.

Can't speak for md, but for me, the answer is no. The entire premise of primal/paleo/evolutionary nutrition is to eat like our ancestors ate -- eat what evolution has provided us over millions of years. Cavemen didn't count calories, or put back a handful of nuts because they were worried it'd make them fat. Hell, our own grandparents didn't do that. Calorie-counting self-consciousness is another invention of the low-fat diet craze of the 1980s.

As for fat content, there is no reason to avoid fat in foods. Every single large scale study conducted since the 1940s has proven conclusively that fat doesn't make you fat, and dietary cholesterol has no effect on your blood serum cholesterol. In fact, the Framingham Heart Study, which began in the late 1940s and is still ongoing today with it's third generation of continually monitored subjects, disproved the fat/cholesterol/CVD risk links in 1960, and actually wound up proving the opposite in the 1980s, when they published a report admitting that the evidence gathered over 35 years showed eating fat causes HDL to go up, and HDL prevents heart disease.

Oops.

 

[DubCoffman62]

Can't speak for md, but for me, the answer is no. The entire premise of primal/paleo/evolutionary nutrition is to eat like our ancestors ate -- eat what evolution has provided us over millions of years. Cavemen didn't count calories, or put back a handful of nuts because they were worried it'd make them fat. Hell, our own grandparents didn't do that. Calorie-counting self-consciousness is another invention of the low-fat diet craze of the 1980s.

As for fat content, there is no reason to avoid fat in foods. Every single large scale study conducted since the 1940s has proven conclusively that fat doesn't make you fat, and dietary cholesterol has no effect on your blood serum cholesterol. In fact, the Framingham Heart Study, which began in the late 1940s and is still ongoing today with it's third generation of continually monitored subjects, disproved the fat/cholesterol/CVD risk links in 1960, and actually wound up proving the opposite in the 1980s, when they published a report admitting that the evidence gathered over 35 years showed eating fat causes HDL to go up, and HDL prevents heart disease.

Oops.

Yes, they were too busy worrying about starving to death

 

[kinch]

This has always worked for me:

Use fresh ingredients. Try to eat a little of everything. Avoid all grocery store foods (like boxed stuff etc.).

Don't watch much TV.

Ta da! I've always been skinny. I eat real butter, whole milk, lots of fresh meat, lots of bread and ice cream, etc. too. I really don't understand how people gain weight given how much I eat and drink. There must be something to the whole processed food thing changing your body.

 

[DubCoffman62]

This has always worked for me:

Use fresh ingredients. Try to eat a little of everything. Avoid all grocery store foods (like boxed stuff etc.).

Don't watch much TV.

Ta da! I've always been skinny. I eat real butter, whole milk, lots of fresh meat, lots of bread and ice cream, etc. too. I really don't understand how people gain weight given how much I eat and drink. There must be something to the whole processed food thing changing your body.

I think that keeping active is the key and living in NYC like you do forces one to do a lot of walking unless you have a driver waiting for you everywhere you go. And yes, I avoid processed foods as much as I can.

 

[jwinslow]

I really don't understand how people gain weight given how much I eat and drink.

...

There has been some research that implicates sugar consumption in the rise of cancer

Genetics can be a bitch.

What do we feed cows and pigs to fatten them up? We feed them grains, and lots of them. Our bodies work the same way.

there are just as many fat, healthy people as there are skinny, sick people.

Art De Vany has long suggested that marathoners and endurance athletes are at a higher risk for cancer

Genetics can be a bitch.

 

[Bucknut24]

This has always worked for me:

Use fresh ingredients. Try to eat a little of everything. Avoid all grocery store foods (like boxed stuff etc.).

Don't watch much TV.

Ta da! I've always been skinny. I eat real butter, whole milk, lots of fresh meat, lots of bread and ice cream, etc. too. I really don't understand how people gain weight given how much I eat and drink. There must be something to the whole processed food thing changing your body.

different metabolisms, I know people who will eat way more than myself and he won't gain a lb but I would gain like 5 by just eating half that.

 

[Buckeneye]

I'm able to eat like a horse and pretty much whatever I'd like without getting....'chunky'. My metabolism has been through the roof since I was a kid and I've always been quite active as well.

Some people are more genetically per-determined/dis-positioned to gain weight easier then others.

 

[Dryden]

Some people are more genetically per-determined/dis-positioned to gain weight easier then others.

This is true in a broader sense when you compare people of one ethnicity to another, which is something that results over tens of thousands of years of evolution, but people within a given race are largely the same, metabolically speaking.

What you eat effects your metabolism far more than who your parents or grandparents are, and this is proven rather simply in clinical trials where subjects are put on multiple different diets, so each individual person is the control for himself/herself.

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/metabolism/thermodynamics-and-weight-loss/

If we have a diet containing plenty of carbohydrate, the carbohydrate goes into the blood as sugar. There are very few chemical reactions along the way, and there is a loss of energy to the universe with each of these reactions. But, since there aren't many conversions, there isn't a lot of energy loss.

If we have no carbohydrates (or few) in the diet, however, it's a different story. In order to maintain the necessary sugar level in the blood the body is forced to make sugar out of protein, which isn't a simple operation. Look in any basic biochemistry textbook and you can see all the reactions required to convert protein to sugar, and each one of these reactions consumes energy just to take place but loses energy to the universe in the process as well. It's much less efficient for the body to convert protein to sugar than it is to simply take the sugar as it comes in already formed.

The second law of thermodynamics virtually mandates that there be a larger loss of energy when one has to convert protein to sugar instead of merely using the sugar as it comes in. Since there are 4 kcal of energy in a gram of sugar and 4 kcal of energy in a gram of protein, it should be apparent that less of the 4 kcal in a gram of sugar will be dissipated than will be the 4 kcal in a gram of protein if this gram of protein has to first be converted to sugar.

And, consequently, one would think that a diet low in carbohydrate and higher in protein and fat (both of which have to be converted to sugar) would bring about a greater weight loss than a diet of the same number of calories but with higher levels of carbohydrate. In fact, the second law of thermodynamics predicts this very phenomenon. But despite this rather obvious notion that complies perfectly with the second law, many ignorant people continue to cling to the idea that 'a calorie is a calorie' despite that idea flying in the face of the second law.

The truth is probably more along the lines of being, 'many people who are fat eat a lot of garbage and aren't very active became so because their parents were fat, ate a lot of garbage, and weren't very active.' It's easy to dismiss as genetics, but when you dig deeper into the cause, genetics really doesn't have anything to do with that.

17 or 18 years of parental influence will have a far more profound and long lasting effect on every aspect of a persons' life than what is or isn't programmed into their DNA. Even this has been proven repeatedly in studies of identical twins and the similarities presented when the twins are raised together vs the differences presented when the twins are raised apart.

This is why we even have the biological field of epigenetics, which is the study of how environment causes genes to turn themselves on or off. One of the classic photos on the subject is of the twin brothers Otto and Ewald.

Picture was at the age of 23. Both were track & field athletes and identical in every regard, save one. Otto ran distance events, Ewald competed in the field events.

 

[Buckeneye]

This is true in a broader sense when you compare people of one ethnicity to another

This is in the sense my comment was following. The specifics I'm well aware of, but... uhh. You did a far better job (and bothered to take the time) to illustrate as such.

Next time I'll try to be less general


Props for coming in to clean this up though.