= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Wes_W comments on Critiquing Gary Taubes, Final: The Truth About Diets and Weight Loss - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (87)
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.