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army1987 comments on Critiquing Gary Taubes, Final: The Truth About Diets and Weight Loss - Less Wrong
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If rather than keeping track of how many grams of fats (or carbs) you're eating you can just abstain from foods with lots of fats (or carbs), can't you do the same with calories too?
In principle, yes, of course. That's the "avoid junk food" diet.
Unfortunately, trying to restrict total calories this way without counting gives you a relatively narrow margin of error, and most of us aren't very well-calibrated. A normal calorie deficit for weight loss means eating ~20% below your maintenance level, so if you overshoot by 25% (quite easy to do when you're not measuring portion sizes), you're making zero progress and don't even know there's a problem.
It is comparatively difficult to accidentally eat bread at every meal without noticing.
Then again, if one day you overshoot by 25% and another day you undershoot by 25%, the (first-order) effects cancel out (there are second-order effects, but they are, well, second-order). Unless there's a systematic error, in which case you will notice in a couple of weeks, because you will gain/lose weight at a rate different than you want to gain/lose weight at.
No? once you know that beef has no carbs in it you no longer need to track anything about it. You can just eat it. But tracking calories involves knowing how many calories are in every food item you may want to eat and knowing how much and which you've eaten throughout the day.
And once you know that water has no calories in it you no longer need to track anything about it. You can just drink it. What's the difference?
Are you dense or just trolling? You can't live on just water. So you have to eat some food. this food will have varying amounts of calories. If you want to keep your calories below a certain amount, you need to track calories.
Can you live on just beef? (Possibly, but is it healthy to live on just beef? Is it fun to live on just beef? Is it cheap to live on just beef? Is it convenient to live on just beef?)
What do you mean by “track calories”? Did pre-WW2 Okinawans track calories?
as in figure out how many calories are in each item you eat and then write it down and add it up?
I think his point is that you don't have to know the exact number of calories to lower how many calories you are eating. You can roughly ballpark it. i.e. if I want to eat 1/3 fewer calories I can eat 2/3 of my usual portion size.
Exactly. Another possibility is to look at these pictures, decide which ones look the least satiating, and avoiding those kinds of food.