The First Principle of Weight Loss
Losing weight isn't always easy, but it is simple, so let's not make it harder than it has to be. Calories matter most in the end.
Being the guy my friends often ask for training and dieting advice, I’m often confronted with some version of this question:
What should I eat if I want to lose weight?
This, I maintain, is the wrong way to think about it. The solution is not eating the right category of food; it’s the amount of it. The question isn’t what, but how much.
Good food — Bad food
People have this idea in their heads that there are right and wrong or good and bad foods.
The reason they’re overweight is because they are not eating enough of the “right” foods. If they just ate more of those, they’d lose weight1. The right foods are “healthy.” Healthy foods are what fitness people put on Instagram. Preferably things that are “natural,” raw, paleo, vegan, grass-fed, and come in rustic brown paper packaging with the words local, farm, organic, or some combination of those. If the foods have strange names and seem exotic, even better. These foods are eaten by healthy and fit people; surely that must be why they’re so fit?
If only we could give everyone organic coconut butter bulletproof coffee, we’d solve the obesity epidemic in a heartbeat… 🙄
Back to basics
Jokes aside, here's the right way to think about it: Don’t ask what should I eat? Ask, how much? Weight management is fundamentally about calorie control. Anyone who has ever been successful in losing weight has succeeded because they achieved a sustained caloric deficit over time.
They can claim it was a specific diet, a training regimen, a guru - whatever. Those are just the tangible mechanisms or tactics they used to create a calorie deficit (whether they realize it or not). Low-carb diets are not good tools for weight loss because carbs are evil, but because they make it possible for (at least some) people to create an energy deficit over enough time that they see results in the mirror.
It’s not about the specific ratio of carbs to fats but the energy consumption (typically measured in kcal) compared to energy expenditure.
This is the reason people have been able to lose a lot of weight on pretty much any kind of diet conceivable — as long as it creates a calorie deficit. Yes, even Twinkies and McDonald’s.
Every diet “works.”
Calories in — calories out
If you want to lose weight, you just have to figure out some way that enables you to create and maintain a calorie deficit for enough time that you’ll shed a few kilos. By thinking that you need to eat specific foods in specific ways or at specific times, you’re missing the point. You’re treating the symptoms, not the cause. The cause — the fundamentals — is a matter of energy balance. Understanding energy balance, a.k.a the right amount of calories, is the First Principle of dieting.
Everything else is based on that, and anyone who is successful in losing, maintaining, or gaining weight has been able to adjust their calorie consumption and expenditure in whichever direction that supports their goals. Anyone who has been unsuccessful in maintaining their weight and instead gained some over days, months, or years has similarly subjected themselves to a caloric surplus, whether on purpose or not.
But what about genetics? What about insulin? What about psychology? Those things matter in so far as they modulate your energy needs - your calorie requirements - or your appetite, though they are secondary. It still comes down to thermodynamics in the end.
What about people with a funky metabolism? (“I try to gain weight, but no matter how much I eat, it never works.”) Same thing there. You might, for genetic/behavioral/other reasons, have a “fast” or “slow” metabolism, but you’re still beholden to an energy balance equation. It may just be heavily shifted in one direction or the other. In other words, the exact amount of energy that you need to consume to maintain your current weight is a moving target. It can change depending on your body composition, your genetics, your appetite, whether or not you’re in a sustained calorie deficit, diseases, etc. But that’s not the same thing as calorie balance being unimportant. It just means that in practice, we rarely know exactly what our calorie needs are right now —but it still matters!
And in the end, we don’t need to know exactly. We can estimate our current energy requirements and test to see what they are from day to day or week to week. We do that by measuring our weight gain or weight loss. We see whether or not we’re on track, whether or not we have maintained a calorie deficit long enough to lose weight after a few days or weeks. That’s the name of the game.
Don’t make dieting harder than it has to be
There’s a huge psychological aspect to dieting and weight loss that shouldn’t be neglected, of course. But weight loss — or weight management in the broadest sense — is ultimately about energy balance and really nothing else that you need to worry about if you’re a normal person who wants to lose some weight.
This is not to say that it’s as easy as just counting calories. If that were the solution, we would have fixed the obesity epidemic 70 years ago. Yet, on some level, I believe the solution does lie in teaching people about the fundamentals. Calories in, calories out.
Most people make it harder for themselves because most people’s intuitions about food and weight loss are wrong. Having said that, it’s not really their fault. The solutions we’re provided by the fitness industry and the information we’re bombarded with are really all about what to eat or how or when. We’re told that high fat is the way to go, or low fat, or Paleo, or Mediterranean. No wonder we get confused. Though this isn’t very strange: To make money in the fitness industry, and perhaps even in healthcare, you have to provide people with a tangible solution, something they can buy or consume, something that “fixes” their problem. A diet, a pill, a gym card, pre-packaged meals, a recipe book, protein bars, personal training, etc. You won't sell many copies of a book that just tells people to eat less. But that’s really what they need to hear.
There’s too much misinformation and mysticism around weight loss. We have to start with the basic idea of managing our energy requirements, and then we can try to find out what the optimal way for us to do that is. That’s when we start talking about which diet to try. There’s a reason we call it “first principles.”
I’ve read about studies on eating behavior where it was observed that people will perceive an unhealthy food item paired with a healthier food item as having fewer overall calories than just the unhealthy food item by itself — which is obviously impossible. For example, when ordering a hamburger, you’d feel healthier if you also have a salad along with the burger rather than just the burger itself. But no matter how few calories the salad has, the net amount will still be higher than just having the burger. So unless you’re suffering from severe nutrient deficiency, the salad is not gonna do anything for you.
I'll just repost what I shared on your note:
I think your personal experience is perfectly consistent with the idea that calories matter most. I've also used both low carb and fasting to successfully manage weight and fat loss.
Nevertheless, the prevailing scientific consensus supports the calorie centric view. And there have even been controlled trials that more or less falsify the carb insulin hypothesis of obesity. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28074888/).
The bodybuilding community is also a testament to the fact that calorie counting works consistently both for losing and gaining weight. And some bodybuilders and fitness folks will eat extremely high carb low fat diets both for weight loss and weight gain (conversely some opt for low carb), yet manage to lose fat consistently.
It may very well be that counting calories doesn't work for a lot of people over long periods of time. But then again, people don't tend to stick to diets for the rest of their lives and will often regain weight lost over time, even if the diet was successful for a while. In any case, it does come down to energy balance at the end of the day.
"Low-carb diets are not good tools for weight loss because carbs are evil, but because they make it possible for (at least some) people to create an energy deficit over enough time."
While I agree that calorie deficits can enable one to lose weight, I do think this is also somewhat an oversimplification and a pure calorie restricted diet is not sustainable.
Insulin is the primary hormone that tells the body to store energy in the form of fat. Insulin production is triggered by the ingestion of food, but particularly by sugary/carb-laden foods. Frequent ingestion of these foods (which are favored by modern food production as I discussed here https://www.lianeon.org/p/the-paradox-of-processed-food ) can cause insulin resistance in those cells, which tells them to keep storing fat (and for you to keep eating more.)
Calories are not truly equal in impact on weight, fasting helps modulate the above hormonal disfunction, and even with a lot of calories ingested, you can still lose weight. It's working for me anyway.