Ricky Sin

Dave, I'm a big fan of yours on the MWS thread but Rogerborg knows what he's talking about. There's NO requirement to consume carbs EVER. Plenty of resources for you to check out: from an athletic point of view, start with the 2015 FASTER (Fat Adapted Substrate use in Trained Elite Runners) Study by Phinney & Volek; for purely dietary info, look up Dr Paul Saladino or Dr Shawn Baker (not that I'm personally a proponent of the carnivore diet) or just read about Vilhjalmur Stefansson who got stuck with the Innuit in the 1920s. Keto does work & plenty of people do it for years with no ill effects. Not my thing but it shows carbs are not essential. Calories in calories out also doesn't work, sorry, at least not in any meaningful way. If you asked a financial advisor how to get rich & he told you to earn more money than you spent, you wouldn't be impressed. A calorie is merely the measurement of energy required to heat 1 gram of water by 1 degree celsius & has nothing to do with how food is converted to energy in the human digestive system. If you consume 1000 calories as lemonade, for example, that's all going straight into your bloodstream. If you could even manage to eat 1000 calories of steak, at least a quarter of that energy is used just to fuel the digestive process itself, so you can only use the 750 calories left. Plus everybody's digestive tract has a different amount & composition of gut bacteria to everybody else so 2 people eating the same food, day in day out, will not get the same results. Even if you did decide to restrict calories, sure, your body would burn body fat initially & you'd lose some weight. But eventually your body would decide the low-calorie environment was not a temporary situation & would cling on to your remaining fat reserves for dear life, literally. Your body just down regulates its immune & reproductive systems & makes you want to exercise less while the number on the scale doesn't change. Potatoes are fine, but they're not as nutritious as animal food sources. Bread is NOT great & giving up wheat would benefit pretty much everybody. I don't recommend brown rice as its high in phytic acid & even arsenic, but white is ok in moderation. PopRocket123, We all need to eat more in line with how homo sapiens have been eating for the majority of our 300,000 years. Eat healthy animal sources of fat & protein year round, fruit & veg when (& ONLY WHEN) they are in season if you want. Fruit is sweet because the tree wants us to consume it & spread its seeds, but it will make you fat (actually a desirable trait as a hunter-gatherer facing a long cold winter). As for vegetables, only 4% of all the known plants in the world are edible & ALL are toxic to some degree. When people bang on about kale or broccoli being high in antioxidants, what they really mean is the veg is mildly toxic which causes our bodies to produce more antioxidants in case we decide to eat any more of it in the future. I see you've had a kid recently, bet you couldn't get anything green down them when they were young. That's our natural instinct to stop us poisoning ourselves out of existence! If your goal is to lose weight, then you need to focus on NUTRITION, not calories. Eat when you are hungry - DO NOT wait for a random number of hours! Hit your protein / vitamin / mineral targets early in the day & you'll not want to eat as much later. Ever had a 2,500 kcal McD's for lunch & been starving at dinner? Because your body didn't get much nutrition out of it & is forcing you to try again. Weight gain / loss is about hormones, not calories, and insulin is the king of those hormones. Eating low carb means you will not produce insulin, meaning energy cannot be absorbed by your fat cells. Protein goes where it is needed, fat just floats around the bloodstream til we use it, and our fat reserves can make up any energy deficit which we actually breath out. In fact, just working on your breathing technique can help you lose weight, I promise! PS the DASH diet is a piece of shite. Rant over!