this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2025
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has nothing to do with eating a deficit in calories. you can workout all day everyday, but if you eat garbage mcdonalds and packaged food, you are not going to lose weight 'micro working out' or even full day workouts.
Well they can loose weight eating nothing but processed food, as long as its a caloric deficit
Yarp, about a decade ago after a break up I went on a 2 month bender, nothing but alcohol and fast food. Drink maybe 10-12 hours a day on average. So more than 2000 calories a day in drinks for sure, and idk what in fast food. But I walked everywhere to not get myself into DUI situations. I lost 20 pounds in 2 months.
Edit: Throw in the couple packs of cigarettes and you could call it super healthy
Lol, going through a similar situation right at this moment. Lost 7 kilos in a month eating barely anything and walking a lot to get my mind distracted from panicking about my bleak lonely future. Majority of calories I get are from vodka and whisky 🥃
sending virtual hugs
Sorry to hear it stranger. If you ever need to rant or something feel free to dm me
Aye, thank you. It means a lot. I have no shortage of friends to talk to at the moment, but if the day comes I'll message you :)
But, and hear me out, fried potatoes.
i was with you when you said fried but then potato and plural? hell yeah vote ayyy for grand senator
Ahhhh to be young and without stomach problems again... Ahahah, I loved making fried potatoes in college alright. But now, alas, it's boiled potatoes time.
The quality of food has little impact on weight loss. It's calories in calories out. Period.
Dunning Kruger.
Your body is so much more complicated than a function that takes calories as input and outputs an expected result. You need more than just calories, you need nutrients. A nutrient deficient person does not burn calories the same way a person with a balanced diet does.
Like just think for a second. Is the only variable of food that matters is calories, then why do you need vitamins? Why do we split calories into categories like protein, carbs, veggies, fruits, etc? Why can you get a PhD in nutrition if it's only as simple as calories in calories out?
The simple answer is it's not simple. Asserting that it is when it isn't creates some terrible narratives around exercise, diet, and body image.
Ok, bud.
Guys, eat nothing but vitamins!
Eh. Calories are... Tricky. What is a calorie? A unit of food which, when burned, will heat a gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. But your body isnt just a furnace, it's complex. And everyone is physiologically different - we aren't all running at the same efficiency (base metabolism). And not all calories are available. For example, fiber is not digestable and can't be absorbed by the digestive system and it also associates with simple sugars which also prevents them from being properly absorbed. So, eating whole fruits will result in absorbing less sugar than drinking juice which has the same total amount of sugar. Processing food - even just cooking it - makes calories more bioavailable.
For sure it can conceptually be boiled down to calories effectively absorbed and calories burned. But digging into what that actually means can actually be quite tricky.
You're making it sound trickier than it is. Nutrition data on all foods will already discount fiber from the calorie counts.
But in a sense you're also not wrong, that while calories are king when it comes to weight loss/gain, there are complications for that. For example if you give two different people the exact same food in the exact same amount of calories, they will gain or lose weight at different rates - highlighting the role of genetics. Another genetic factor related to calories only indirectly is how some people have much higher impulses to eat than others, making calories only a part of the story for their challenges with weight loss. I've also seen a headline for a study claiming that an amount of dairy caused more weight gain than the same amount of calories of peanut butter, though you may want to take that one with a grain of salt unless you actually see the study.
Personally I'm not a fan of measuring calories. Instead I use base knowledge to have ways to intuit calories more naturally. For example, I know that carbs and protein are 4 calories per gram, and fat is 9 calories per gram, making fat almost always the quickest way to make foods significantly more calorie dense. Other things can be very calorie dense too though, like sugary or other caloric beverages. Replacing those with water, coffee, or teas can be enough on its own for some people to start losing weight.
Some foods are more dense than others. Being that leafy greens and many other vegetables are naturally some of the least caloric foods you can eat, loading all of your meals full of them is an elegant way to reduce calorie consumption without needing to starve yourself. It also has the double benefit that high fiber foods are more satiating - they calm food cravings.
Point is, calorie management doesn't have to be a headache, and it doesn't mean a person has to starve themself.
I wasn't talking about fiber, but the sugars bound to fiber. Its very hard to accurately labele just the bioavailable calories, even if you account for things like fiber.
On the note of genetics, it's not just about metabolism. People have different abilities to even absorb the same calories. People have food intolerances, different rates at which they move food through the digestive tract, and different intestinal permeability.
This isn't meant as an excuse to eat junk and not pay attention to your food. But, I actually find more help in paying attention to food quality and listening to how your body interacts with different food. E.g., eat less processed food, be aware that eating fat slows digestion, pay attention to your intolerances, stop eating when full, cut out snacking (again, especially processed foods). If you do this, its very likely you won't need to count at all.
That's not to say that, if calorie counting works for you, then you shouldn't do it. Its just not the end all be all people act like it is. Pretty much any diet and paying more attention to what you eat in any way works: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32238384/
Yeah those are pretty useful common sense approaches.
None of that actually matters when it comes to weight control. What matters is that the linear relationship is retained in your proxy measure of Calories. Meaning that if you eat two pieces of cake, you've doubled your Calorie intake compared to eating one piece.
Ok but my point is you're not just eating cake so its hard to keep track of the linear relationship sometimes. Calorie reporting can be incorrect and bodies are weird. That's all I'm saying.
Realistically, being on most any diet is equally effective. From simple calorie counting to the keto diet. It turns out that, if you find a diet you can stick to, then just kind of paying attention to what you're eating in a general sense works.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32238384/
An example with an oversimplified diet to illustrate the point I think you're trying to make: You have a diet that's exclusively cake and you've determined that you need 2000 Calories of cake to maintain your weight. That 2000 Calories figure is an estimate and we don't know exactly how much of it we're actually absorbing. In reality, it's actually more like 1800 Calories. Now all of a sudden, you switch your diet to eating exclusively cookies. You measure out exactly 2000 Calories of cookies and eat the same thing every day. But your Calorie estimate is wrong and you're actually eating 2100 Calories of cookies per day. Now you gain weight on this supposed 2000 Calorie diet.
I argue that this doesn't matter either. If you see that you're gaining weight, then it means you're eating too much. Reduce your Calorie target and you'll be back on track. In a real world scenario, you're going to have a much more varied diet than only cake or only cookies, and each item will come with their own measurement errors. But for most people, their diets are varied in a fairly consistent way, so these errors are also consistent on average. If you ever make changes in your diet (e.g. completely cut out McDonald's), you'll change both your estimated Calorie intake and target like in the example above. Adjust your numbers accordingly based on how your bodyweight moves and you're good.
Of course, other ways of dieting are also effective. It depends mostly on what you can adhere to and your goals.
Yeah, exactly, calories in vs calories out is just another myth that feeds the diet industry's bottom line. It's not accurate. Like bmi used to be the big thing, but that's not an accurate measurement system at all.
question, you point out the diet industry, but how do you feel about the fast food industry purposely making their food addictive just to make a profit, health be damned?
Calories in calories out is literally just the laws of thermodynamics and conservation of energy. It's a fact.
Where it gets tricky is that the actual equation has quite a lot of variables.
You could, for example, increase your passive energy requirements with this micro dose of exercise situation. Does it raise your body temp (or rather the demands to maintain it at homeostasis) for a longer period of time and thus increase calories demanded that way?
Or, like a lot of fitness studies, it's fucking junk because it trusts self reported calorie intakes.
This is untrue. Calories in vs calories out continues to be, and will always be the center point of weight loss. It's just complicated by other factors like genetics, finding each individual calorie needs, and following diet and lifestyle patterns that are effective and sustainable.
If you get 0 calories what happens?
I was trying to count calories for my soup, some ingredients had calories on the package, but vegies and meat didn't, so I went to online calculators. None of them were capable of measuring ingredients in grams - I have kitchen scales so can easily weight raw ingredients and put them in the calorie calculator, but all of them measure food in servings instead of concrete number, like what is one serving of my soup? And are the calories for raw ingredient going to be the same after being cooked? The only way to measure calories is to dehydrate it, burn in a special chamber and count the ammount of excluded energy. You can find people onlain making claims like "I've eaten 2017 kcals today", but like how did you measure that 17 kcals with such a precision? The measurements I got from online calculators gave me a 500 kcal range of error, as in a serving of my soup could be 400 kcals or 900 kcal and again those are just estimates made from combining known calories of raw ingredients. Calories are for scientists and experiments, without equipment you can't actually calculate the calories, just like you can't really measure how many calories did you burn during the workout, again the range of error is huge, it's good to keep in mind the calories in calories out idea, but actually measuring them is not for the 99% of thr population
It's weird that it works for most people.
I think, for some people, calorie counting is frutrating. Personally, I'm a bit too neurotic for it. I get really caught up in the details and coutning every calorie right and then frustration when the calories are reported incorrectly or if mutliple sources give different calorie values for the same raw ingredient. I honestly get so obsessive when I try to calorie count it becomes a borderline eating disorder. And, in fact, calroie counting has resulted in eating disorders for many people.
I think it's good for a lot of other people. But, when it boils down to it, any diet you can stick to is the right diet for you. Seriously, research has shown time and time again that, after a few months, most diets have the same weight loss results for most people if they stick to it. So I personally don't find the "its just calories in and out" rhetoric thats really popular to always be the most correct or helpful statment.
Calorie counts on food are an approximation, sure, but it's not unreliable. If someone eats roughly X amounts of calories every day and they lose/gain weight at Y rate, then the exact amount isn't as important.
You are not making sense. If I'm a football player and use 3000 calories a day working out, I will lose weight. When you're counting calories, do you put the exercise factor in?
Yes, calories matter, but working out is usually part of it. This is because it burns calories at the time, but continues to speed up your metabolism.
Our bodies are meant to move, plus counting calories is a defeating process. I'm not saying eat crap, but try to eat healthier and move your ass.
Most people severely overestimate the amount of calories they burn working out and eat more than they need to as a result. Working out is important for health, yeah, but losing weight is best done by changing your diet
Tell this to the guy who ate nothing but McDonald’s for a month and lost 60 pounds (26kg)
Kevin Maginnis