We published in CVPR (top peer reviewed academic conference for computer vision) and people are on average off by 53% and even trained professionals are still off by 40%. Basically if you want to have a higher level of accuracy you need to use a food scale or something that measure the volume of food, people just can't estimate portion sizes visually.
Oils, cooking fats, hidden ingredients are what people are most concerned about but they actually add far less error to people's tracking than portion. Nutrition5k is the paper we published if you want to check out more details on the breakdown of error most people get when tracking.
Sometimes they will round down on grams of macros after setting the serving size so they can claim it has zero sugar when it does in fact have tons of sugar. Tic-tacs are the worst about this. They claim they have zero everything despite just being sugar tablets.
For example - lactose-free yogurt is often just regular yogurt with lactase enzyme added.
If that's what I wanted, I'd buy regular yogurt and take a lactaid supplement.
Since they're not gonna use tweezers, :) are you suggesting instead engineer or breed a special set of cows that don't produce lactase in their milk?
However I can periodically consume dairy when I take a strong dose of lactase supplements.
From some literature it does appear that manufacturers can use "lactose free" even for non-zero amounts of lactose (10mg per 100g).
This is actually higher lactose density than many cheese varieties, especially considering I would be consuming say 150-200g of yogurt, whereas if I am eating cheese its in small careful quantity.
> The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allows calorie content to exceed label calories by up to 20%
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3605747/
> Class I nutrients are those added in fortified or fabricated foods. These nutrients are vitamins, minerals, protein, dietary fiber, or potassium. Class I nutrients must be present at 100% or more of the value declared on the label
> Class II nutrients are vitamins, minerals, protein, total carbohydrate, dietary fiber, other carbohydrate, polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fat, or potassium that occur naturally in a food product. Class II nutrients must be present at 80% or more of the value declared on the label.
> The Third Group nutrients include calories, sugars, total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium. [...] For foods with label declarations of Third Group nutrients, the ratio between the amount obtained by laboratory analysis and the amount declared on the product label in the Nutrition Facts panel must be 120% or less, i.e., the label is considered to be out of compliance if the nutrient content of a composite of the product is greater than 20% above the value declared on the label.
https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidan...
Edit: Expanded the quotes to include definitions.
https://foodlabelmaker.com/regulatory-hub/fda/rounding-rules...
I would recommend taking it easy on the sugar alcohols even though they "don't count" because they can cause significant gas ;-)
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0261/4761/8864/files/Scree...
after a while you can estimate carbs by visually inspecting the contents without scale.
Add to that automatic bolus by a semi closed loop system to correct for errors, you can achieve good results with minimal effort.
does choosing healthier meal, a salad instead of sweet ribs, not suffice for a good blood sugar?
Even low GI foods still cause blood sugar to raise by some amount.
All of the vegetables in the salad have carbohydrates that will raise blood sugar. Carrots, onions, tomatoes, all of that will raise blood sugar. Croutons? Blood sugar.
Obviously selecting a garden salad with no dressing is a healthier choice than "sweet ribs". Most diabetics (that are managing their condition) are not going to be ordering things with refined sugar in them.
Where things get tricky is asking questions like "what's healthier, a honey-miso glazed salmon with brown rice or a salad with croutons and a honey and berry dressing?" or "What's better for you, grilled chicken with a sugary barbeque sauce or fried chicken with no sauce?"
Sure always ask for the vinaigrette eating out, but at home make your own salad dressing:
* get a mixing bowl big enough to toss salad in, and a whisk * add 1T dijon mustard, 1T not-balsamic vinegar (balsamic is high sugar! I like sherry or beer vinegar), salt & pepper * drizzle in 1T olive oil while rapidly whisking. * Add 3 oz or more salad, toss, done for 2 servings
The lengths I’ve seen brands go To avoid having sugar as their 1st or 2nd ingredient…
after that you have invert sugar, corn syrup, molasses, brown rice syrup etc. as following ingredients…
My recipe is basically what you have here, although I usually mix some balsamic and other vinegars, and add a bit lemon juice.
I went from feeling sorry for people who were "forced" to eat salads to craving them. (Side benefit of not having the afternoon urge to sleep.)
So I get some of the sugar sources in the kit. Just smaller amounts.
Otherwise, I just use olive oil and balsamic vinegar with arugula, pecans.
Arugula is a good source of nitrates, which are good for nitric acid.
Making salad dressing is really easy btw in case anyone wants to try. Often all you need is olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper and you're set for most salads. Even a restaurant should be able to whip that up.
https://www.seriouseats.com/two-minute-mayonnaise
(And it tastes way better than commercial mayo!)
I love this author's recipes; it's the opposite of the normal recipe-preamble-slop. All of the stuff before the actual recipe is relevant information. In more complex recipes, he goes over the testing and process that led to the finished recipe. It's a wonderful view into the world of recipe creation.
You can also make mayonnaise with a whisk.
It's so much easier to do it with a hand blender though. It takes longer to clean up afterwards than it takes to make. And no maintaining a steady thin stream of oil, you just put it all into a container and blitz it.
You can make meringues and cakes with a whisk, too, but most people I know have electric mixers for that.
Mechanical eggbeaters with little flywheels were popular before the electric ones, too!
Why do you need a "dressing"? In my corner of Europe they put the above by default on every restaurant table and the salad has nothing in it (or maybe a tiny bit of oil and vinegar), you adjust it to taste.
The only places that offer salad "dressings" are american inspired and even those mostly serve it separately so you can ignore it.
Plus, it's a little hard to emulsify or even suspend the oil and vinegar right there at the table.
For a type 1 diabetic, no (gets more complex with type 2).
Your body produces insulin at a basal rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basal_rate
If you're healthy between the pancreas and the liver you maintain homeostasis and things are fine.
As a T1D you don't get that base rate, so your blood sugar will mostly trend up and stay high, even without eating anything. You simply have to get more insulin to avoid burning out all the systems in your body and dying slowly.
Even a stupid salad, what's in the dressing, what's in the bread/croutons, what was the meat glazed with. Etc.
Restaurant food tastes good because it is generally unhealthy top to bottom, with quantities of salt, butter, etc no sane person would use at home.
One thought experiment - when was the last time you ate out and needed to add salt to anything? Now thing of home cooking how often you might add a little salt while you are eating.
The easiest thing to do is ruling out restaurants entirely, but then that's rather anti-social.. Not to mention family/friends gatherings, etc.
And then there is the supply chain since most restaurants are not cooking every single part of every meal from absolute scratch ingredients.
There was a story about a woman near us operating some sort of celiac friendly/gluten free bakery. One day the donuts were delivered and she noticed some D shaped sprinkles and realized her supplier had come up short and just put some random Dunkin Donuts into the delivery. Good on her catching it, but how in good conscience could she operate a bakery advertising itself as celiac friendly/gluten free if she was outsourcing like this?
If I had any sort of food allergy that could result in hospitalization or death, I'd just stop eating out. I'd rather be a little boring than very dead.
You go to a place advertising itself as gluten free / vegan / celiac safe / whatever .. and its been outsourced.
Once it's outsourced, all bets are off. Who knows if the vendor subbed it out further, etc.
Which is why for a certain level of food sensitivity it's almost not worth eating out. It comes down to - do you trust random strangers with your life?
However, everything is complicated by numerous factors and the technology you use.
Factors: how you feel, stress, exercise, what you ate in previous meals, your blood sugar level at the start of the meal, and the activities you’ll engage in after the meal (physical or mental).
There’s also the issue of how you administer insulin.
In Italy, up until 3-5 years ago, most of us were using the “multiple daily injections” method, which involved taking a dose of “long-acting” insulin (lasting 24 hours) as a “base” and using “rapid or ultra-rapid” insulin at meals. Clearly, this approach provides limited control and requires a VERY habitual lifestyle (you can’t skip a meal; the long-acting insulin keeps working regardless).
Now (at least here in Italy), we are all transitioning to or already using CGM systems, which are more or less intelligent systems that continuously administer insulin at a “medium” rate. Based on input from the patient regarding the predicted amount of carbohydrates (and fats) they will consume, the system calculates the best strategy for what is called the “meal bolus” (using strategies like multi-phase, direct, etc.) and at the same time, it maintains a continuous but adaptable level of injection to achieve a target blood sugar level (day and NIGHT!!)
In essence, it’s a very nerdy way of dying slowly (hopefully as slowly as possible).
È un mondo difficile E vita intensa Felicità a momenti E futuro incerto
I was curious, for the other curious:
"It's a tough world And intense life Happiness in moments And uncertain future"
A diabetic will want to take dose of insulin a bit before eating in order to send their blood glucose level on a lowering trend. If you dose it right the two waves semi cancel each other out and your blood sugar goes up some, but hopefully not a huge amount.
If you get the dose wrong, it drops dangerously or rockets up and you have take correction doses.
We even worked with USDA on putting together a food logging dataset: https://agdatacommons.nal.usda.gov/articles/dataset/SNAPMe_A...
If anyone wants to check out our app or research its on our site: https://www.snapcalorie.com/
PS: Bitesnap was an awesome app!
I was a shitty business person who thought it made sense to try and build a free consumer product on a bootstrapped budget. We had some traction on the B2B side that paid the bills but COVID took a dent in it and it would have taken a long time to build back the revenue stream selling to healthcare companies (tip for others, it can take 6-18months to close healthcare deals and another 6-18months to integrate)
We had a few offers to sell the company and took the one that seemed to make the most sense.
If there’s anything I can do to help out my email is michalwols at the Google email provider domain
Just trying to keep track of calories for myself stupid things like supersized slices of bread becoming common in stores can really throw off my expected calorie counts.
It seems like this can completely throw off any attempt at figuring out nutrition from an app or research perspective.
Then I obviously got lazy. And while I sometimes still think I can estimate how much I am eating, I am probably wrong, because my bathroom scale says something different. My key takeaway is that it takes quite a bit of effort, but once you got into a routine, it's not hard.
Edit: Also, while I might have tried to ditch "wasted calories", I didn't put too much effort in eating healthy. One step at a time.
The killer for me was breakfast cereals. The box shows a full bowl of whatever, full to the brim etc. in reality the pictures are probably 5 or 6 or more servings - a single serving would barely even cover the base of the bowl and even then be 200ish calories before milk.
If you just pour yourself "a bowl" of cereal without thinking or weighing then you're probably having 1200+ calories (or about 50% of your entire daily quota) even before you add milk or anything else, just for breakfast.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1322248/
> Aiming to pour a “shot” of alcohol (1.5 ounces, 44.3 ml), both students and bartenders poured more into short, wide glasses than into tall slender glasses (46.1 ml v 44.7 ml and 54.6 ml v 46.4 ml, respectively). Practice reduced the tendency to overpour, but not for short, wide glasses. Despite an average of six years of experience, bartenders poured 20.5% more into short, wide glasses than tall, slender ones; paying careful attention reduced but did not eliminate the effect.
A plate is a very wide 'glass'.
I can typically estimate them accurately without direct measurement, and with feedback that will tend to make errors cancel out over time. My trick is to note package weights, and divide containers into N equal portions. That is: I decide a target portion size first, and then portion it out.
If the task is "measure out an ounce of butter" I realistically won't be 40% off - because I can very accurately divide a rectangular solid in half repeatedly, and the butter comes in a one-pound package. Similarly, I have a pretty good idea how much grilled chicken is on my plate, because I know how much raw chicken I cooked, because I made a whole piece from a pack of N roughly-equal pieces weighing X (values which I noted when I bought it).
If I make an egg, cheese, and sausage sandwich in the morning, and forget to weigh out or count how much of something I used, it can still be useful for back-of-napkin estimates if I Google the McDonalds Sausage McMuffin with Egg.
Obviously it's not going to be exactly equivalent, but I usually assume my homemade thing is 20% more than the restaurant to compensate.
It's of course better if you just weigh everything out first, you can get much more accurate measurements and calorie estimates then, but this can work in a pinch.
Our startup (BODYSIM.com) has also been doing research on this a long time. As founders, we all have >16 months of daily food logging mostly by kitchen scale weights, aligned to daily BIA-scale weigh-ins, fitness tracker calories, bi-weekly blood tests, monthly DEXAs, 3D scans, etc etc. We also have a science-based structural model of macronutrient balance and muscle hypertrophy. Given all that, we can VERY confidently estimate your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) and its components, and predict how your fat and muscle mass will change on a daily basis. This is real math/science so you can also run it in reverse. This ("simultaneity constraint") provides enough constraints we can estimate users' individual underestimating/over-indulgence when eating out. In fact, it's better to just NOT log those days AT ALL and we can fill them in. I think this solution isn't more widely used b/c you need all this other "quantified self" type data at the same time.
Even for zero calorie things like water and unsweetened teas/coffees. You just get smaller cups. I'm not even sure you can get a US large in Japan for most drinks?
I've seen what large US drinks look like, and you definitely can't get that here in New Zealand. Like a litre of soft drink at a fast food place, it's absurd.
When I regularly visited New York for work, and we'd get takeaway sandwiches, I'd have to open them and remove half the filling. I just couldn't physically eat that volume of meat, cheese or especially mayonnaise. For all drinks, I'd order small.
Now, there are plenty of food vendors and restaurants in the US where big portions are considered part of the experience. Especially hamburgers, subs, and other sandwiches. I once ate at a place that served a plate-sized burrito completely covered in french fries. 12 inches wide and 6 inches tall. SOME people can eat that amount of food but most people cannot, and nobody is expected to.
Finally, large portions in NY street food are often customary because for lots of people with demanding jobs and 12-16 hour shifts, lunch is often their only meal. Or, half of it is lunch, the other half is dinner later on.
People generally split a Pastrami sandwich over a couple meals or with someone else.
Maybe I got too used to some of the obscure burrito places around Atlanta that would put way too much on them?
I don't know about "the US", but as a "European" I thought serving sizes were comparable to what I get in restaurants at home. Drinks were an exception, since basically all restaurants had unlimited soda for next to nothing. This was actually great, since I was riding a motorbike in the desert in July.
For reference, I live in France and visited LA and random towns in the western states.
And on the drinks, even places in Japan that had free refills still gave, at largest, an 8oz cup. Usually, I think they were even smaller. Even getting popcorn at Universal, the bags were large, but nothing compared to what I'd expect over here.
Some of this, I'm sure, is having gotten used to ordering the larges. For a time, it was not unheard of to get a 32oz soda at any given convenience store. May still be normal? I don't know.
(And, of course, this isn't getting in to the sizes of vehicles.)
But then, I think it's only been Americans I heard this from, so.
The coffee was the one that really surprised me. Order a coffee and get a 6-8oz cup. With nothing on the menu to indicate you can get a 12-16oz. Was surprising. (Not bad, mind. Just surprising.)
You might get a yearly discount offer that is less than $2/month if you get lucky (A/B test split). But that's less than the cost of running the model for people, so hopefully others will consider paying full price.
Now with the current flow I would need to activate the subscription and then immediately go to Play Store settings to deactivate the subscription so that I would not forget it.
It gives some features with a totally free plan. That makes the IaP feel less like a bait and switch.
The proposition of SnapCalorie is compelling. Calory ui is decent and I use a scale so accuracy should be good but I think their database is shitty. Meatloaf will vary from 1.5 kcal/g to 3, steak will show as 1 kcal/g, stuff like that.
That seems like a very dark pattern and is, honestly, pretty scummy.
Our FAQ and pricing pages all list that it is a paid only app. All of our ads explain that it's subscription based. Anyone who asks we're very transparent about it. If there's somewhere else where you think we can list it to make it more clear I'm happy to add it, just not sure where that would be.
Edit: The "dark" pattern is in the registration flow. It doesn't mention that the app requires a subscription anywhere until after you've created an account. Surely you could add a disclaimer before creating your account? This has nothing to do with the App Store.
Edit 2: I'm not saying you intended to implement a dark pattern. Just perhaps a UX oversight.
Edit 3: The download page would be another great place to put this info, since that's the primary CTA on the home page (there's 4 prominent download buttons).
We can't hit people with the paywall before they've registered because we need to assign the trial to their user record. We've tried adding more language during onboarding but no one reads any of it, they just click through.
You're mistaking challenges in building a global app for malicious intent. I left a job paying a lot more to do this because I wanted to help people.
We'll add something back to the FAQ on this, thank you all for pointing it out.
I cannot find a FAQ or pricing page on your website.
Which makes it par for the course in the scam that is mobile development
Back to fitness pal and scanning barcodes (which is not really much of a hardship tbh)
They either need to show you ads, charge you for premium for services that used to be free making your free tier functionally useless (looking at you, MFP who gated barcode scanning behind their honestly ludicrously priced subscription), or sell your data, and they often do all three.
The entire industry is like this, and honestly an app that charges one time and fucks off would be ideal but given the amount you'd probably need to charge as a one off (or for major upgrades) most consumers would rather have the slow bleed of $10/mo than $25 one time.
I'm paying for a fitness app subscription that annually is less than 1 month of gym membership. But I had a 7 day trial which got me hooked before I had to sign up for the subscription.
I find this very hard to believe, unless the term “trained professional” is quite broad. When I was much more into fitness and weighed every meal to the gram, I could tell if a bowl of cereal was a serving to within a gram or two.
In the study we gave people a variety of dishes to make their estimate on, some they were familiar with, some they were not.
The professionals were nutritionists who had trained in portion size estimation and were shown 2D images on a computer screen.
For what it's worth, we've had a lot of people who have claimed to be very accurate at portion size estimation from a long history of using a kitchen scale. We've paid many of them to do a quiz to see if they're above average accuracy and they have almost always ended up around 40% accuracy or worse.
We co-authored a paper on this with Google AI and showed it got about 2x the accuracy of a nutritionist because of it.
Thinking about it again, I'll probably do a lot worse from a picture because I can't have a bite of the food! Just having a spoon makes it so much easier in terms of ratios.
It’s possible to calibrate your estimates, but if you haven’t done that, it’s probably safe to assume you’re not particularly accurate.
Most people don't stay consistent in tracking long enough for any of this to matter, so really it's about what is the most accurate approach to achieve your goal and sustain longer term.
I wonder how good an ML model might be at that task. Maybe given a photograph of the plate and the menu description.
I guess, maybe cooks should have the best precision for this.
Eyeballing a portion of a lot of food can be nearly impossible to determine how much food you actually got, but weight is fairly straightforward and objective (at least to an ounce or so of granularity for most kitchen scales, which is good enough for dieting).
Tracking takes more work and is less accurate. Bad trade.
The only use I see in tracking is to perhaps help one inform one's intuition. But that's as far as I'll go.
> We asked them to estimate the mass of each ingredient present on the plate and subsequently converted these values into nutrition estimates using the same USDA [9] values we used to create our dataset
I get that there's a linear relationship between the mass of a food and its calories, but I'd expect that nutritionists would be better at estimating the calories in a plate of food than the mass of a food item. Most people aren't doing the math in their heads, they're using a frame of reference that recognizes calories. Did you have this in mind? Is there any research on this?
Isn't that obvious? Basic high school science projects would have students using measuring devices. Are you saying that it's common for nutritional studies to tell people to eyeball their portions and that is then used as actual data?
I see from the article "Nutritional epidemiology studies typically ask people to keep a food diary or complete questionnaires about their intake over the past 24 hours, a week, or even several months." I find that hard to believe. How could any study like that be taken seriously? That's like having someone stand at a street corner for an hour and observe the population to then come up with an average BMI for the neighbourhood.
After all - once you started doing it, you started losing weight/building muscle/achieving whatever result.
This alone can be sufficient for some people.
- sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils, mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself
- different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat)
- Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
- counting how much you take of a meal shared with others, especially when you serves yourself multiple time
- different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January
I have the feeling that might have been easy at some point in my life when I lived alone and mostly eat packaged food and raw vegetable that looked like clones but not when I share my meal, cook a lot more raw un-barcoded aliments and gained confidence to dose "by the eye" without recipes.
As such, things like oils and miso can be heavily caloric, and need to be measured strictly. This is also true of most proteins and carbs.
Seeds and tomato sauce can have some caloric density, and should also be measured, but it is less of a priority.
Mustard, lemon juice, most spices (that don't contain sugar), onions, cucumbers (regardless of density) and parsley do not have any substantial caloric density and can be considered "free" unless used in great quantities. Nobody ever gained weight from mustard, lemons, onions, cucumbers and parsley.
As already mentioned, micronutrients like vitamins are not functionally possible to be measured in a home kitchen. If you're concerned about any decrease in micronutrients, simply use vitamin and mineral supplements. Macros like proteins, carbs and fats, on the other hand, can generally be measured using typical cups, spoons and scales, even with leftovers.
When making a meal shared with others if you are looking to strictly track calories, it is easier to break things into macronutrients and mix them on individual plates or bowls rather than cook as a total pot. It's much easier to measure a protein (say, 4oz chicken), a carb (say, a potato), a sauce and a fat individually portioned on a plate than an arbitrary stew. (As above, low-calorie vegetables likely do not need to be measured separately unless there are added macronutrients.)
> micronutrients like vitamins are not functionally possible to be measured
... my concern is micro: I'm engaging on a full vegetable diet (+shrooms +minerals!) and am concerned about thinks like iron, selenium, calcium... I (got-used-to) love vegetable and eat a lot of them so I'm probably fine with most micros, however may miss some selenium for exemple. Some research seems to show that too much vitamins is usually ok but too much minerals may not be. The more I read the more I'm scared! What makes me feel safe is the three long-time vegan I know seems healthy and don't take any supplement appart obvious B12. Perhaps I should just focus on other thinks that doing mad about micros...
Historically mine have always been low but in September of 2023 I started a diet and started taking iron supplements, and when I got my bloodwork I was in the happy "green" range.
ETA:
I should point out that I'm a pretty tall dude (~6'5"), which might make it easier for me to avoid getting too much iron, but if I were getting too much iron I assume it would probably show up in my blood tests?
> - sauces you make yourself?
I don't count them. I keep my sauces simple and use them sparingly. I'm not trying to get down to sub-10% bf.
> - different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat)
I count them raw, or if my tracker has them, count them as cooked. I don't care about them being super accurate.
> - Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
I don't care. The calorie counts are basically just estimates anyway. It's less a science than a mental game to control your ballpark calories in.
> - counting how much you take of a meal shared with others, especially when you serves yourself multiple time
If I'm making the meal, I count for the whole meal, then estimate for the share. See above for rationale (I don't care that much.) If my friend has cooked for me, I don't care at all, and just try to eat a "reasonable" portion.
> - different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January
The differences are probably not going to matter all that much. By weight, a cucumber is a cucumber is a cucumber; I'm not trying to be perfect, just get a general sense of calories.
The point of measuring is to be * as accurate as possible *, not 100% error-free. It helps to better estimate portion sizes, calorie / macro amounts. This is enough precision to control weight gain / loss correctly.
A lot of people also get their maintenance calories estimation wrong, so it doesn't matter if you can measure your food down to the molecules but still eat too much / too little.
I measured my weight every morning (after peeing) and wrote it down, and used it to compute weekly average.
I did weigh ingredients for the first couple of weeks to get an idea, but after that just did rough estimates coupled with tuning based on feedback from the body weight every week.
Had a near perfect linear trend for the year I did this.
Typically I figure out the actual weight/volume once or twice to get a sense of how much it is, then just eyeball it most of the time and go for the same amount as last time I measured.
We'd get emails about people seeing 577 calories on the Palm Pilot and 578 calories on the desktop. "None of the numbers are that accurate anyway!" was a sensible answer but not very brand aligned.
:)
Your daily reminder that ED means more than one thing.
That trick is to focus on months instead of days. Then count your calories when you buy the food instead of when you eat it. For example lets say you buy a loaf of bread. It is 100 calories per slice and there are 17 slices. Add 1700 to your calorie count for the month.
At the end of the month you can approximate your average daily calories as the amount of calories you bought that month divided by the number of days.
Some things you buy in a month might last into the next month. That will introduce some variation but over longer periods it should cancel out. If you want you can smooth that out a bit by logically splitting those items when they have a lot of calories.
For example consider jar of mayonnaise that might last a few months and is 8000 calories. Instead of counting all 8000 in the month you buy it you can count it as 2000 that month and 2000 more each of the next 3 months.
Alternately: you can note the day you first and last ate from the container.
Or what I used to do: make tally marks on the container to figure out how many portions it typically provides; then, going forward, count a "standard" portion of that food accordingly.
A month is a long time and the measurement error will accumulate every day, especially with fats. Not so much problem if you do that with cucumber or spinach.
Over several months the errors will average out. Unless you eat out a lot, then the above method doesn't work. However if you are single (this is the most unlikely factor!) and cook most meals at home then calories in the door - what you throw away = calories that you ate. That is good enough.
I have a whole food, plant-based diet and I cook all my own food. I don't buy any processed food, anything with anything animal in it, refined sugar, refined oils (except olive oil for the air fryer), refined carbohydrates, things preserved with salt/vinegar/oil or any stimulants. For B12 I eat Marmite (UK). Most of what I eat is that rare thing: fresh vegetables.
Because I eat almost everything (sometimes there are bad apples), I throw very little away and that includes packaging too, where I am surprised at how little that amounts to. I have a small box for recycling and I only have to empty it ever two to three months.
I could cheat and not keep the receipt on a huge box of chocolates, beer and biscuits but I would only be fooling myself.
As for bread, I just buy flour and yeast, to put it in the breadmaking machine. I buy wholemeal flour which is white flour with some of the stripped off parts of the wheat thrown back in. I am happy with that compromise as it makes a very nice loaf.
Apart from Marmite, nothing I buy has much of an ingredients label, a cauliflower is a cauliflower and has no ingredients.
The receipts are my way of accounting, I could look at them all for the last year and buy everything I need that is shelf-stable for the year ahead.
Mayonnaise used to be something I did eat a lot of, but now that is on the banned list, and I have no idea why I would ever want to eat that stuff nowadays.
I eat to satiety and beyond, my physical activity consists of walking/cycling and I am fitter than I have ever been with a digestive tract that is rock solid. Bloating, constipation or the runs are alien conditions to me, I also get a 'long range bladder' into the deal.
I don't count calories, my goal is to get as many as possible from just vegetables, beans, legumes, nuts, grains and fruit. I love cooking and my 'self care' routine. Since there are seasons, my food always changes, right now spring greens are floating my boat.
The idea of keeping the receipts is to have all of them with no banned items in them, and also to track my nutrition experiments. At the moment I am trying to do a year long streak of 'an apple a day' to see what that is about.
Regarding counting macronutrients, why bother? Nobody counts fibre, which is crucial for the lower gut, with protein we eat 2x in the West and nobody is counting phytochemicals in plants beyond the 'five a day' thing. With the exception of bread, everything I eat counts towards the 'five a day' so I am probably on twenty portions of fruit or veg a day, not that I am counting.
I don't mind people wanting to diet to fit into a dress for a special event, that is something that works for them, albeit with yoyoing. I want to be at my fittest during the summer months, to go cycling, and, during winter, I don't care. In this way I am embracing yoyoing, however, my weight does not go up over winter, I just lose some muscle, to get it back again during spring.
But most of it is a guessing game and making an assumption that it will all even out later. Ignore spices - you can assume 25 calories a day and it’ll still be too much.
Be diligent about oils. 9 calories a gram bites you quickly.
But ultimately, if you miss 100 calories a day, and are in a 500 calorie deficit recorded, you are still going to lose .8 pounds a week. And if that is consistent, adjust your portions and be fine with how you record.
And that’s the key - we know nutrition is variable. You won’t get it perfect. You just have to adjust for the imperfections.
And the thing is, you'll need to do this anyway - because you can't be sure in advance how many calories represents a "500 calorie deficit" for you, in your specific current conditions.
I was quite underweight in my youth, but I successfully reversed these kinds of feedback techniques to gain weight, and currently maintain what seems to be a healthy level. John Walker (co-founder of Autodesk, who passed away early last year) wrote The Hacker's Diet describing the basic technique. It's still live at https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ .
Count your servings of whole vegetables/fruit. Try to MAXIMIZE these. Yes, maximize in order to lose weight.
It's far easier to track just this small subset of food. If you are maximizing these items, you'll naturally start feeling full and eat less sweets. Try to do this slowly over time, changing your diet dramatically overnight will cause you to hate the process and give up.
Change your diet less than 10% per week, keep eating all of your favorite guilty pleasure foods, just incorporate more healthy foods you enjoy as well, ideally before you eat the less healthy items to give yourself time to start feeling full from them. Slowly find more dishes heavy in vegetables that you like. Try to eat them more often. If you're cooking for yourself or serving yourself, try to increase the ratio of vegetable to other items.
Getting pizza? Maybe do a side salad first or a get a veggie pizza. Don't try to cut the pizza entirely until you're further along in your journey.
Don't stress about it. If you're consistently finding ways to make small changes like this you'll start heading in the right direction over the long haul and your pallet will adapt to enjoy the foods you're not used to slowly.
If people are hitting that goal then they can start moving into more nuanced dietary changes like minimizing adde sugars and sodium, or maximizing nuanced micros and diversity.
I really like this aspect, the inside-out skin care, and I now see little point in eating something such as a huge bowl of pasta or rice because of a lack of phytochemicals. I need green veggies, orange ones, red ones and the phytochemicals that make them so.
I think that 'nutrition experiments' are what you need, so, as you say, small changes. This means discontinuing things as well as adopting new things. With an 'experiment' in can be for a month. I quit processed foods, dairy and much else in this way, to note the improvements to things like oral health, joint pain, digestion and so on.
You are right about changing the palate, it actually takes about ten days for the taste buds to be replaced.
Don't worry about how leftover nutrients decrease over time: you'll get enough nutrients in a well balanced diet without having to worry about the minutia. If you're really worried about it, pop a multivitamin for cheap insurance.
Also don't worry about the variation in calories between one type of cucumber / apple / whatever vs. another. Those variations aren't significant and they probably average out anyway. Realize too that the sources aren't exact in the first place: once source is likely to give a different caloric value for something like dried beans vs another.
If you're going to track, don't get too caught up worrying about if the absolute value of the calories you're recording is 100% accurate because even if they were, you can't track your energy expenditure 100% accurately. If the bathroom scale goes in the wrong direction for you, adjust your caloric intake to compensate. Look at trends over the week and over the month vs day to day variations and it won't take long to zero in on the right number for you.
Yup, it will. Nobody said tracking nutrients was quick.
> - different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat)
Cooking time doesn't matter for macronutrients.
> - Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
They don't for macronutrients.
> - different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January
The differences don't really matter for calorie purposes. High-caloric things don't vary in density meaningfully.
You seem to be confusing tracking macronutrients (carbs, fats, protein) with micronutrients (vitamin C etc.). People track macros, generally to lose weight. I've never heard of anyone tracking micros. I don't think it's even possible.
well, many say it's "easy" (it's not)
like the worry about sauces is true but if you eat mostly chicken and rice and one slice of bread a day you can really get that variability down. when I was heavily restricting I would only cook very simple things like that and otherwise eat packaged food, and it certainly worked to lose weight. but you sacrifice variety and flavor and you'll feel kinda stressed and hungry for months at a time.
the last factor is living with people who are not dieting - I personally think this makes the required willpower basically impossible. if there is food in the house you will eventually succumb to the temptation of eating it in my experience. it's much easier if you live alone and only have the diet food in the house at all, buying nothing else, etc.
some prepared foods are basically the "empty calories" that people always talk about, like chips. high calorie (and usually like 3-4 servings per bag, not single serving really at all) and also low satiation so they almost make you hungrier to eat.
For partitioning a meal: Sometimes I weigh my portion. Over time I've trained myself to estimate the weight of what I take such that my visual estimates are reasonable. Eventually my visual estimates have gotten better.
A lot of your other challenges are just not that important: If you're off by a few calories in either direction, it's not a big deal. It'll average out in the long run. If you're systematically off, you'll eventually recalibrate your goals anyway based on how you feel and/or your weight patterns vs what the calorie counts tell you.
But over that week, I "calibrated" myself. I know, vibe-wise, how it feels to be eating the correct amount of food. And now I just keep doing that.
I didn’t make a ton of sauces myself, but if it was then I would round spices down to zero and weigh the main caloric components (think mayo, soy sauce, sugar, oil, tomato paste, etc)
I always weighed the uncooked food, so different cooking times was a non factor.
As for nutrients decreasing, I dealt with this by not believing in it. Seriously though, I was tracking fats, carbs, and proteins which to my knowledge do not meaningfully decay in non negligible amounts.
I lived alone so I didn’t often have to cook for multiple people. When I did I would just make 2 omelets or waffles or whatever and weigh mine.
As far as different species/cultivation methods, I realized there was an absolute edge to my ability to track. For example: bread is often listed at 70 calories per slice, but if you weigh each slice, you’ll find it deviates from what the package considers a “slice” of bread substantially. Further, you’ll often find packages that are inconsistent. For example, you might see a box that claims 14g of a food is 5 calories but the entire 28g container is also listed at 15 calories.
The error in estimation of foods eaten out I treat as a constant factor baked into the daily caloric budget. If I'm gaining weight, the budget just needs to be tightened, i.e. rescaled to account for an error factor that was larger than anticipated. The problem basically becomes estimating one's own estimation error, then adjusting.
I can't speak for anyone else, and I actually do try and weigh everything, but if I forget to weigh or the portions are too small to measure with my cheap kitchen scale: I weigh out my serving of the finished product, and Google either the restaurant or premade-grocery-version of what I made and look at their nutrition labels.
Obviously it's not going to be perfect, but I figure that my homemade pizza sauce will have roughly the same ingredients as the Ragu pizza sauce at the grocery store and thus roughly the same calories and nutrition at a per-ounce level. I always assume that my homemade stuff is 20% higher in calories more just to compensate for uncertainty, but doing this I did manage to lose about 60lbs.
Figure out what one table spoon of oil contains, and when you make a sauce use a table spoon while pouring to count roughly how much oil you are putting in.
For shared meals, or self-restricted portions, I just add the entire meal upfront to my book-keeping, and then after are are done eating I subtract what I didn't eat.
You don't need to keep track of the family history of your cucumbers.
> sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils, mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself
Yes. The thing is that it also makes you aware of how much everything "costs" you in terms of calories. You become a lot more aware of how big a glug you give of that oil.
> different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat)
I don't understand this part of your question.
> Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
My goal was not to be "accurate", but to lose weight. Overestimating slightly was in fact preferred. So this is not an effect I would have worried about.
> counting how much you take of a meal shared with others, especially when you serves yourself multiple time
You estimate. You know that the whole thing was X so if you eat a quarter of it that is 0.25*X.
> different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January
Cucumber is flavoured water. Whatever is the variability in calories you can probably just ignore it.
The measuring of ingredients is much easier if you use a scale. A case like cold sauces where you can put the mixing vessel on the scale is the easiest case.
On sharing with others: I'd always calculate the total calories and total weight of the entire dish and then simply place the serving plate on the scale and calculate the taken calories based on the weight.
Starting with pretty much everything can be a good idea for people to get a sense of what's in what foods. How much does an onion typically weigh? What's that actually adding? What's the difference between getting lean and fattier meat? How much oil are you really adding?
After that it's easier to start dropping things - if I'm trying to lose weight I simply do not care precisely how much celery I've added for the sofrito. I do care about the amount of butter, oil, rice, bread, pasta though.
I'm not concerned about getting fat adding paprika, so I'm not weighing spices. Even if I'm trying to track macros that's just not going to be a considerable contributor to anything.
> - different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat)
Prep/measure things first.
Last three things that smooth things over for me
1. Meal prep on a different day. I'm not in as much of a rush at night, it's proportionally less time involved measuring something for a larger number of meals/sauces/components.
2. Having measuring spoons and fast scales nearby.
3. Measuring before & after amounts rather than exactly what to add. If I need to add butter to a sauce until it's the right consistency, or flour to a dough, or whatever then weighing as I go is a nightmare. Instead just weigh it before and after and you'll see what you used. This tip works pretty well for oil too.
It's less important to get the calorie numbers perfect, and more important to be consistent in your under/over reporting. To me, it's a tool to track the consistency of my diet. No amount of over/under reporting is hiding 2 slices of pizza on a graph.
In sweet dishes, 2 TBSP sugar is 120 calories. In savory dishes, 1 TBSP oil is 100 calories. None of the other minor ingredients have any appreciable calories. You should be able to predict quantities within a 1 TBSP tolerance range. The rest of your calories come from foods with visible volume, and chatgpt does a good job of predicting their calories from screenshots. With that, hopefully, you don't under-report any meal by more than 200 calories. If you're following a recipe, dump the whole thing into chatgpt, voila.
Over 2 meals, under-reporting by 200 calories feels like a lot. But wait to have 1 milkshake, beer or 1 tiny baklava and see the graph shoot beyond any of these pesky concerns. The goal is to track and be accountable for the latter: the ultra-palatable foods. The extra onions and parsley are not making you fat.
For outside food, you can find official numbers reported by fast food places. Add 20% to their estimate. Actually, add 10% to all estimates. Every your own food. If a full meal randomly lands under 500 calories. I look at it with scrutiny. It takes careful effort to stay under 500 and feel full. If it happens consistently and you don't lose weight, then you're tracking something wrong.
PSA: NUTS HAVE A SH*T TON OF CALORIES. ALWAYS REPORT THEM. YOU WILL BE SHOCKED. _____
The system has worked quite well for me.
In all cases, my weight gain has corresponded to long periods of door dashing, liquid calories & dessert binges. On these days, my daily calorie consumption jumps by ~800 calories. Getting your oil intake wrong by 1 TBSP makes no difference to that number. Focus on the main culprits.
____
P.S: ofc, if you care about micros, my comment is irrelevant.
If you’re trying to measure your vitamin intake this may not work for you, though.
Many are water soluble and so any excess in the body is peed out by the end of the day and so all tests are useless. Fortunately you typically get more than enough as part of a typical balanced diet and so you shouldn't need to supplement in the first place if you are eating well. Though it is almost impossible to overdose so if it makes you feel good there is no harm in making the vitamin companies rich.
The rest you can get blood tests. In general it isn't worth testing unless your doctor suspects something is wrong though. Just eat a healthy diet and get plenty of exercise and you will mostly be fine. Maybe take some vitamin D in winter, but ask your doctor (my doctor told me vitamin d in winter so that is what I do)
I wouldn't really recommend tracking long-term, but doing it for a week or so just to get a sense of how much you're currently consuming is a good idea.
After that, I never looked up another calorie, and counted based on how the food felt, and basically lost exactly 0.5 kg/week over a period of 5 months. (500 kcal deficit/day).
Even if I'm wrong for a particular meal, the over/under-estimates must be cancelling out. My food situation makes it extremely hard to actually calculate calories, so I had to develop this skill.
As a way of life, weighing and counting macros also seems pretty doomed to because it's just so much work, but it's very doable for a few days to realign your view of what an appropriate amount of food is, if you're diligent and mindful enough to not have a soda or a snack without thinking
For the other points, I think with any kind of data measurement there is a balance between precision and convenience. Trying to consistently track calories is hard enough, trying to track nutrients at the level of precision you are suggesting sounds technically challenging and frankly exhausting. I think a lot of people will take "average" values for a cucumber, an onion, etc. Like others have said, consistency in measurement is probably more important than finding the absolute truth.
Some days you'll go over, others go under etc.
It helps a lot of your partner is also weighing etc
Where it is really hard though is at a BigCo office where food is free and self-served. I have no idea what I am loading onto my plate - I try to search for something similar in the app and deliberately over-estimate the quantity knowing that there is a tendency to under estimate.
Really though weighing things is almost beside the point. It's about being aware/mindful of what you are eating. Without tracking it, it is easy to absent mindedly just snack on things and then entirely forget about that brownie you had with your morning coffee, or that ice cream you had at lunch time. You start to make choices like "Hmm I wont have that chocolate now because it would be a disappointment not to have some for dessert at dinner time" etc, whereas without tracking you'd probably just eat everything and not even realise/remember/be-aware of it.
Spices and everything else in general have so little in them it doesn't matter. Something like seeds or pepper more so, but you're hardly going to add so many it changes anything.
Which is kind of the point: you look this stuff up once in order to get a sense of what you're actually doing, and quickly realize what is and isn't going to matter overall. If you're really concerned, you start from a fixed mass you'll season from, and then just use that up as you go.
i.e. if you know you'll be adjusting added sugar, then estimate the total amount of sugar you're comfortable putting in the meal up front, and work from that pool. If it's less, great.
I only weigh everything I eat when I am actively trying to lose weight, however, and when I am doing so I deliberately restrict my diet to meals where I won't waste a lot of time weighing everything. If I'm trying to maintain or gain weight, I don't really bother with it.
People who are tracking everything are usually doing it because they're trying to achieve a particular goal that involves cutting or bulking. I don't know too many people who do rigorous calorie tracking to achieve maintenance unless their body is their profession.
Eventually I have learned to control exactly what I eat, in order to control my weight, but I no longer find this difficult, mainly because normally I eat only what I cook myself (with the exception of trips away from home).
When I experiment how to cook something that I have never cooked before, after I reach a stable recipe with which I am content, I measure carefully every ingredient, either with digital kitchen scales or with a set of volumetric spoons. Then I compute the relevant nutrient content, e.g. calories, protein content, fatty acid profile, possibly some vitamin and mineral content, in the cases when there exists a significant content of that.
While I do this carefully the first time and I record the results, whenever I cook the same later I do not need to pay attention to this, because I already know the nutrient content, so summing for all the portions of food that I plan to eat in that day I can easily estimate the daily intake for everything.
The essential change in my habits that enabled me to lose the excessive weight was that in the past I was eating without paying attention to quantity, until I was satiated, while now I always plan what amount of food I will eat during a day and I always cook the food in portions of the size that I intend to eat, which is always the same for a given kind of food, so I no longer have to repeat any of the computations that I have made when I have determined for the first time a recipe.
In a recipe, things like spices can be ignored, because they add negligible nutrients. Even many vegetable parts, like leaves or stalks, or even some of the roots or of the non-sweet non-fatty fruits, may be ignored even when used in relatively great quantities, because their nutrient content is low. So such ingredients may be added while cooking without measuring them.
For many vegetables and fruits, which are added to food as a number of pieces, I do not measure them when cooking, but when buying. I typically buy an amount sufficient for next week, which is weighed during buying. Then I add every day a n approximate fraction of what I have bought, e.g. 1/7 if used for cooking every day. Then for estimating the average daily intake, I divide by 7 what I have bought for the week.
What cannot be ignored and must always be measured during cooking, to be sure that you add the right amount, are any kinds of seeds or nuts or meat or dairy or eggs, anything containing non-negligible amounts of starch or sugar, any kind of fat or oil or protein extracts. Any such ingredients must always be measured by weight or by volume, to be sure that you add the right amount to food.
Nevertheless, measuring the important ingredients adds negligible time to cooking and ensures perfectly reproducible results.
I eat only what I cook myself and I measure carefully everything that matters, but the total time spent daily with measurements is extremely small. I doubt that summing all the times spent with measuring food ingredients during a whole day can give a total of more than one minute or two. Paring and peeling vegetables or washing dishes takes much more time.
> - sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils, mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself
You weigh all this out once, store it as a recipe and just weigh how much sauce you're putting on things. Oils are so high calorie they're basically all the same, and the only other contributor is really if the seed mass is substantial. Log your upper end, and just assume the sauce comes out as that value. Your sauce recipe is hardly going to vary by an enormous amount, just provided you bias it towards the upper end for the purposes of tracking.
EDIT: Also since people have been dropping app links - https://github.com/davidhealey/waistline this is what I use on Android. Libre with nice integrations, works great.
- while cooking, you weigh every ingredient. Either I just take photos of the scale with my phone, or I write it on a sheet of paper.
- when cooking is done, you weigh the total food (easiest if you know the weight of your pots)
- when eating, you weigh your portions
After some time, you realise that you need to be precise for some things (oil, butter) but can just guess or ignore some things (eg. onions and miso have so little calories that you really don't need to weigh them).
If it's a dish like Lasagna, you don't even need to weigh it at the end, just estimate what fraction of the dish your serving is.
I never bothered with weighing the final result or portions, instead I just always divvied up the final product into equal individual portions and divided by the total number of portions. That works well if you freeze them.
Of course, all the calculation is a tremendous amount of work. I did it when I needed to lose weight and only did it for a couple of months. But it definitely "calibrated" my understanding of calories -- e.g. non-starchy veggies have barely any at all, while cheese and butter and oil can easily double the calories in a dish.
I also leave the nutrient part on just eating a varied diet, with lots of whole foods.
I personally use MyFitnessPal, weigh the calorie significant food (e.g. the Protein, starches, fat-rich vegetables and fatty sauces) and establish a rough estimate about the calories.
I try to maintain the error an order of magnitude lower than my estimate. That's why I don't bother weighing leafy and "watery" vegetables (e.g. spinach, letucce or cucurbits). Also, I try to keep an eye of sauces like Mayonnaise, but I usually relax on Mustard (I dunno where you live, but mustard here tends to be low-fat by default).
That error can be easily burnt by the casual movement we do in the day.
[1]: https://fddb.info/db/de/produktgruppen/produkt_verzeichnis/i...
It tracks not only calories, but also macros and micros.
I maintain a muscular 225 by eating dairy, eggs, and meat. If I want to drop down to 215, I drop dairy.
Becoming obese always seemed a little extreme to me and I fail to imagine how someone could reach that state without the accordingly extreme food-related habits - though maybe I'm just lucky to have the "right" metabolism and thus cannot relate.
Though even if obesity was always linked to eating disorders, I understand that "just stop" is not an appropriate response to that issue.
This feels a LOT like weight loss. Calories in --> calories out is conceptually very simple, but in practice more people struggle with it than not. It certainly cannot be the case that they struggle with the concept; they struggle with actually putting it into action. Lying to themselves, twisting themselves into philosophical knots, and probably most often, conceding to their cravings. Food acquisition is one of out more basic drives, so it should probably be no surprise that people struggle to intellectualize it.
(as and aside, there are also people who wrongly believe that calories in --> calories out is a flawed concept because not all people have the same metabolism, or not all calories are equal. Both of these are true, but none of them actually negate the premise. For whatever your metabolism, and whatever your category of calories, fewer calories will still produce weight loss. It may feel unfair that someone doesn't have to work as hard as you to produce the same result, but this is actually true in all areas of life. Now that said, improving the quality of your calories is very important, and should not be ignored -- but it also does not negate the premise.)
Aside from the hunger issue, food is enmeshed in all sorts of value having nothing to do with nutritional value per se and everything to do with sociopsychological value.
I think I've massively underestimated that in my own life, or misunderstood what that meant or something. I think the way it plays out is much more pervasive and subtle than what people realize. I'm not even saying it's wrong, it's just hard to suddenly deprive yourself of something that is meaningfully rewarding, and especially so when you're unaware of it consciously.
On top of that though is you have to get over your intellectual ideas of how much food you think you need to eat.
I know how much food I need to eat in order to survive and maintain a healthy weight. But if I eat that amount of food, I'm still hungry.
Doesn't matter what I eat. I'll eat a diet high in protein and fiber, moderate in fat, and low in sugar and starches, which is supposed to be the recipe to feel full without eating empty calories, but it doesn't work. 16 oz steak paired with an 8 oz portion of green beans or broccoli, and I still get the munchies just 2 hours later.
I should probably go to a doctor and ask about Ozempic or something. I did successfully lose about 50 pounds doing keto and brought my A1C from 6.8 down to 5.4, but I damn near lost my sanity because I was always hungry. I've gained it all back and started to get some of diabetic symptoms again.
if some unknown element was making everyone's internal thermostat aim for more food it would explain a lot.
Science and capitalism have created incredibly delicious foods that are nutritionally lacking, hyper optimized for (against?) our now mis-aligned reward system. In the west, calories are not scarce and the most delcious foods are far from the most nutritious. It will take a long time for our genes to catchup.
Mass producing delicious, cheap, but low nutrition food is profitable. Companies have gotten very good at it. That's the real big change.
we got the abundant food and the largely car bound live cycles and it still kept getting worse for decades after that point. I suppose it could be generations growing up only knowing this and so habituated to it more?
The "public presence" of society has diminished due to the internet. You no longer need to put effort into constantly looking your best because social media helps curate your appearance. Going to Walmart is now so relaxed that you can wear pajamas. Putting on your "best appearance" occurs elsewhere in curated ways (i.e. facebook/instagram posts and careful selfies). You can "partition" your social life so that the people shopping at walmart see pajama-you while the Tinder matches see someone totally different.
CICO helps explain weight management issues retrospectively, but it's inadequate with regard to planning, and for maintaining quality of life while working towards a weight management goal.
I thought that wasn't true, that the human body stores and burns calories at varying rates based on many signals, and that our bodies or some bodies effectively conserve weight or caloric stores at a certain level.
you can't exercise out of a bad diet but exercise is a helpful supplement to a good diet too. it's just that making yourself do it when you're tired and hungry is draining.
You can, but it's not easy. People who exercise _a lot_ often have trouble eating enough calories. 5,000 to 10,000 calories a day is hard to eat and not out of reach.
I knew a guy who was drinking a gallon of whole milk a day for a while to try to maintain weight.
At that level training is your full time job though.
An attainable goal is to reduce the average amount of monthly grocery spend and you do it by deciding, in advance, things you're no longer going to stock in the house, items you'll replace for cheaper options, or items you'll stock from wholesale clubs.
It's hard to bring the budget for gas down without people driving less. Your wife being the one tasked with filling up the tank is the messenger. It could be an emotional reaction as you describe but I would at least entertain the idea that her "bending the rules" is her way of trying to make an impossible ask doable. Whether she is consciously thinking about it or not, I bet the stuff that "doesn't count" aren't replaced every month and have spikey cost patterns.
I totally agree that you'd need to find a reasonable average weekly cost because costs and timing would vary. In my mind, this means you could find a reasonable average weekly cost that you often go under, and seldom go over. But, it just never happened for us. In principle we could have just kept raising the price ceiling, but eventually that becomes meaningless in the context of a budget. To me, at least, it felt just like calories; what could have been a pretty easy math problem was defeated by human psychology.
Imagine a piano teacher. Their mantra is practice in --------> skill out. Profound. Every time their students come to them and complain about not being motivated, practice being too dull, experiencing back pain or repetitive stress syndromes, wanting to change up the practice, they just say: practice in equals skill out. What is so hard to understand?
That’s what the "calories in/out" people are like. And this is the only area where this is an accepted argument. Where it is even treated as a valid argument at all.
Everyone knows that you have to put in time on an instrument in order to get better. Everyone. No one denies it. Similarily I don’t think the overlap of weight loss pursuers and deniers of energy conservation as it moves through food groups (plants to cows to humans) is terribly large.
If you truly want to rationally assist people who want to learn the piano or lose weight you do what works. You don’t repeat a truism. Cutting out sugar? Meat? Intermmitteng fasting? Counting calories? Anything that works. You don’t sheepishly point out that they failed to practice their ten hours last week without even asking why didn’t follow through.
The in/out people seem to have a hard time intellectualizing this simple concept.
The trouble is that people who have no problems to do this ... are the ones at risk for anorexia. They lack the instincts that make the rest of us safe from that particular hell.
The thing that makes anorexia possible (among other things) is you being able to ignore hunger. Healthy organism will instinctively eat when hungry or missing something. The instincts takes over, body produces hormones to override behavior and diet ends.
I think a lot of people talking past each other on this topic are really just disagreeing about what healthy will power actually is. To be specific, comments along the lines of "it's not my/their fault, it's the fault of our environment, and the availability of unhealthy food".
I think this is just having an unhealthy will. I think this is also the whole divide on things like ozempic - some people view it as enabling people to have unhealthy will power. Other people view it as the only way someone can have healthy weight. I don't think either party is wrong, I think they are just talking past eachother.
(FYI - I stay thin by limiting calories, so I don't disagree that fewer calories causes weight loss)
(in practice as you know, you just kinda do it on feel and end up restricting calories enough to lose weight. but my own intuition is that I had to aim for 100 or 200 less than my estimated BMR so the math is very fuzzy isn't it?)
I imagine almost everyone will add bad data in a study at some point with the best of intentions.
This is why one of the best ways to lose weight is to just keep a food diary / count calories. You don't need any special / fad diet, just the act of trying to keep a note of everything you eat will cause you to stop and think, "I don't need to eat this".
You can give yourself an ability akin to time travel by writing things down first.
If I write down the calories afterwards, I get the "oh, I shouldn't have done that" feeling at times. I'd like a little time travel button that takes me back to before I did, and let me adjust my behaviour and run through the situation again. If I write it down first I get to have the "oh, that's not worth it" feeling up front and decide to do something else.
This made a big difference for me, both lowering what I was eating and making me happier about the choices I made.
One can (and should) extend that concept to anything. Be conscious about what you do. Then you likely know, if you are not doing good - and can change it.
Turned out I was also stupidly deficient on protein day to day.
Getting protein in takes dedication & awareness
I did a daily shake for a while as an after gym recovery food and I still had more calories from carbs than protein. it's just difficult.
Eating homemade stir fried celtuce [1]? Homemade steamed marble goby [2]? Nope, out of luck. They only have nutrition info for packaged mac and cheese.
I think tracking calories for a couple of weeks can be very enlightening for a lot of people, granted you don't have a personality type where this can get you into trouble. But for the long haul it's not really useful or even feasible, you're better off getting to know what sort of way of eating suits you best and how to correct if you're getting off course. Anyone can stick to a very strict regime for three months, but the trick is to stick to a proper diet you can enjoy for three decades and then three decades more.
I've been tracking consistently for about 5 years. It's feasible.
And even if you don't record with 100pc accuracy, there's still a lot of value
This should be a fundamental understanding of anybody asking people anything. That scientists imagine there's some accurately-reporting population of subjects for their experiment is an example of the breathtaking naivete of scientists.
Crows are never whiter by washing.
You cannot dispense common sense through the educational system. Most career scientists are mediocre, and/or they are trying to survive in a rigged system.
And whilst analogue recordings have long been subject to manipulation, most of the time that took effort and expertise to accomplish smoothly, and independent recordings could be compared to detect edits and alterations. Following the emergence of digital image manipulation with photoshop, photographic "evidence" has become increasingly less evidentiary, with the spread of AI and smartphones, virtually all still and video images are at least somewhat processed, and with AI we can generate lifelike fabulations in realtime in multiple modes (still image, video, audio), including speech and background sounds, which can confound pretty much anyone, layperson or expert.
Which means that we're back in the realm of low-reliability fabulated reporting even or exspecially when mediated by our technologies, which had previously offered a solution to that problem.
Or maybe the researchers know all this from years working in this field, the problem might be from those simplifying the research for the public
One of the ... beyond annoying ... aspects of our track-everything-individuals-do-and-utilise-it-against-them contemporary information ecology is that it is so painfully difficult to make use of that information for personal advantage.
In the specific case of food intake, it should be reasonably trivial to aggregate purchase information, at grocery stores, restaurants, and online deliveries, and at least arrive at a reasonable baseline of total consumption. Rather than having to fill out a food diary from memory with uncertain measurments, one can rely on grocery and menu receipts directly.
This is more useful for those who live alone or shop for themselves (a large fraction of the population, but far from complete). It's based on the general principle that you tend to eat what you buy. There's some error imposed by food acquired elsewhere (shared at work, school, from friends, etc.), and of tossed food, but what you'll arrive at is over time a pretty accurate record of intake.
I'm surprised that such methods aren't more widely used or reported in both dietary management and research.
My own personal experience has been that I've been most successful in dietary management when 1) I have direct control over shopping and 2) I focus far more on what I eat than how much, though some of the latter applies. If I'm aware that specific foods are deleterious to goals (highly-processed, junk foods, high-caloric / high-sugar liquids, etc), then the most effective control point at minimum decision cost is at the store. If you don't buy crisps, chips, biscuits, fizzy drinks, ice cream, and the like, it's not at the house for you to consume.
I'm well aware that there are circumstances in which this is difficult to arrange, sometimes with friends or roommates, more often with families. I'll only say that clearly expressing terms and boundaries is tremendously useful here.
I can recall in the aughts when there was a major low carb food trend and Bacardi had a popular ad campaign around the fact that their rum had no carbs, basically marketing it as the smarter option for people watching their weight -- even though all unflavored hard liquor has no carbs and is still incredibly calorific.
It is kind of like measuring the calories of wood. It burns well, so it has a high calories, but metabolizes poorly. A block of wood is about 400 kCal/100g.
Ethanol has 1325 kJ/mol of energy. If the reaction stops part way through the metabolic pathways, which happens because acetic acid is excreted in the urine after drinking, then not nearly as much energy can be derived from alcohol, only 215.1 kJ/mol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacology_of_ethanol#Metabo...
There is a virtually infinite amount of cofounding variables, genetics, meal timing, fitness level, sedentarity, &c. . It's a 80/20 type of problem, do the 80, forget about the 20, you'll never be able to get your answers anyways.
If you look and feel like shit you're most likely eating like shit. If you look and feel good a glass of wine every now and then or a bite of chocolate after dinner won't do much.
Unfortunately for these studies you have multiple selection criteria that are nonrandom:
(1) interest in the study
(2) adherence to protocol of the study
(3) reporting back in
If nutrition science wants to be serious, their N should not be in the 10s but rather the 10,000s.
That has an expense, but for important things it is absolutely the right thing to do.
Plus it doesn't even matter what is true for the statistical average, given the infinite amount of variables and outcomes one glass of wine might be statistically beneficial but absolutely terrible for your own health because you have one specific gene combination or one specific microbiome mix. Which means you'd have to go through the same regimen of analysing and tracking all the parameters for yourself for it to be applicable
No one can monitor or measure everything, whether philosophically (Heisenberg uncertainty principle) or prosaically (cost). But if something is true, we can often probe it enough to get at least a low-res idea of the nature of it. This moves us light years ahead of primarily using our personal experience, gut, and vibe to establish epistemologically sound assertions.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39134209/
Obviously such studies are far more invasive and expensive to run than the classic "fill out of a survey" observational study [1], so they tend to be the outliers. But they exist and have incredibly useful results.
[1] There is a widely cited nutritional survey vehicle called the Nurses' Health Study, and it is the foundation of countless largely disposable nutrition clickbait results. This survey-based observation has been used to prove that meat is bad for you, and good for you. That artificial sweeteners make you thinner, and fatter. And on and on. That single "every now and then try to remember the kinds of things you ate over the past period of time" survey is the root of an incredible amount of noise in nutrition science.
Randomized controlled-feeding sounds good, let's check it out. After trudging through this for a bit I came to the meat of the methodology:
> Participants were provided a daily meal checklist (Supplemental Figure 1) that included each menu item with space for documenting the amount consumed; the time each item was consumed; a checkbox to confirm having only eaten study foods; a checkbox to confirm not taking any medications, supplements, or other remedies; space for documenting any adverse events related to eating the meals; and space for documenting any nonstudy foods, drinks, medications, supplements, or other remedies. They were also instructed to return all unwashed packaging; visual inspection was documented by the metabolic kitchen. In addition to the checklists and returned packaging, participants were educated on food safety as well as provided tips on managing challenging social situations while participating in a feeding study. Repeated reinforcement of the value of honesty over perfection was provided. Study coordinators reviewed the returned checklists with the participants to verify completeness.
So ... self reported with some extra steps.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30101333/
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291652...
You linked to a study where food was provided to the subjects (the food obviously nutritionally selected and provided per the study groups), and the subjects obviously are assumed to stick to the provided food and to accurate report what they ate among that reported food (with the study counting packaging, remainders, etc). This is a *UNIVERSE* better than the classic "tell us how many eggs you ate over the past two months" type nutrition studies, which are by far the most common (e.g. the Nurses' Health Survey).
Are you expecting the people to be inprisoned? I mean, there are in-patient studies but they are obviously massively more difficult to carry out.
This seems like it would be an issue for any studies relying on absolute food consumption being accurate. Most studies I come across frame their findings in relative terms (likely for this very reason): Individuals who engage in more of X compared to their peers show a correlation with outcome Y.
For example, if you’re trying to determine whether morning coffee consumption correlates with longevity it doesn’t seem particularly relevant if you believe everyone is underreporting their food intake, as the article implies; it's a relative comparison.
Sure, those findings often get twisted into clickbait headlines like “X is the secret to a longer life!” but that’s more a popular science problem than an issue with dietary research itself.
This is a flaw in the data that is much harder to account for.
People with bigger appetites underestimate their food consumption, people with smaller appetites overstate.
Not to mention the degree of over/under statement will vary wildly. "A big meal" might be 300 calories for somebody with an eating disorder, or 3000+ for somebody on the opposite end of the spectrum.
I knew a guy that complained that he "ate like a lion" and yet couldn't gain weight.
Turns out, his breakfast was typically a single egg and a slice of toast. Lunch would be half a sandwich and a bag of chips that he wouldn't finish. Dinner of course varied, but basically was like 4-6 oz of meat of some sort and a small side of veggies.
Overall, his daily calorie intake was probably only around 1,000 calories.
I don't know if this qualified as an eating disorder, or what, considering when we hear about someone undereating, it's because they're trying to lose weight. He was trying to GAIN weight and yet was still horrendously undereating.
The idea of outliers and systematic biases isn’t new to statistics, relative comparisons are still useful.
There is no way to know whether your sample size is representative. What amount of fraternity brothers and Mormons cancel each other out?
>and regardless both are dwarfed by the large middle of the population that likely systematically and reliably under-reports their drinking by a few units.
And? That does not prevent spurious correlations.
Exactly. Those studies either don't get done, or when they're done, they produce garbage results that get ignored or get interpreted as diminishing the importance of absolute food consumption.
> it doesn’t seem particularly relevant if you believe everyone is underreporting their food intake
It says that virtually everyone underreports. It doesn't say that everyone underreports equally, and there are good reasons to expect this not to be the case. If embarrassment is a contributing factor, for example, you would expect people who are more embarrassed about how they eat to underreport more. If people remember meals better than they remember snacks, people who snack more will underreport more than people who snack less. If additional helpings are easier to forget than initial helpings, people will underreport moreish foods more than they underreport foods that are harder to binge on. With so many likely systematic distortions, it would be surprising if everyone underreported equally.
For your specific example - "morning coffee" could be anything from plain espresso shot to full 600+ calorie starbucks "coffee" but the meta-study-machine will lump them together.
It's kind of like feeding all of reddit's comments into chatgpt, asking it about stuff, and trusting its answers at a society-level with your health on the line.
You're inadvertently proving my point, though.
If morning caffeine is correlated with longevity, regardless of the vehicle/extra sugar/etc and controlling for the easy usual circumstances like income, that's pretty useful information!
If everyone is under-reporting their alcohol consumption, that seems fine. The absolute numbers will be way off, the relative numbers to their peers won't.
Edit: there is another issue I forget until now: time. Statistically I have several more decades of life left. So even if you get accurate results of my meals yesterday, you need to report when I died, and you probably won't have the meals for the rest of my life. Did some meal I at when I was 10 have a big effect on my life? For that matter if I know you are tracking just one day's meals I will probably eat what I think is better and that doesn't tell you anything about what I eat the rest of the time.
It is easy to track people who have had a heart attack - they are likely to die of another heart attack in a few years so the study times are short. However does having had a heart attack mean either genetic difference such that your results only apply to a subset of the population, or perhaps some other factor of having had a heart attack.
1. If you ask someone who much the drink double the answer 2. If you ask them how much the smoke, multiply the answer by five 3. If you ask them how often they have sex, divide the answer by 10.
I've heard of other attempts at things like this. Generally you are not locked into a cell, you are removed to a very remote location by bus so that if you want to leave you have to go through a formal withdrawal process - while waiting for the bus - during which they convince you to stay). They then not only control your diet they also give you exercise (often lead by military drill instructors) thus being a healthier environment than a diet cell. I have no idea how much money they make.
That's what I always thought about the kind of research RFK Jr is always talking about. Normally it's not ethical to do food / medicine trials with prisoners, but these would be trials like giving regular food to one set of prisoners and food without dyes or chemicals to the other. The "test group" would just be getting healthier food.
Seems like just radically measuring portion sizes might fit into the same kind of thing. And you could probably measure activity level more easily, too.
Doing studies with humans ist just hard!
You can of course study these people, but the only study anyone is interesting in is how different changes in conditions affect how much people lose and how much money you can get out of them.
Sure, but with sufficiently many people, these effects will usually average out. I'm not saying the situation is great, but it's still an important field of study and we need to make progress in some way.
In the case of dietary studies, not really. There are a few factors which are known to have a big effect on your health--being wealthy, active, and moderate in particular--and a lot of the big studies are really just uncovering yet another proxy for those factors.
Of course, you can turn that around and make the realization that your diet doesn't really matter: there's no diet that will magically make up for being a couch potato. And outside the main well-known interventions (e.g., eating less calories), the solution is generally to just be more active and things like that rather than trying to tweak your diet.
No they won't. If you have two correlated factors and only measure one of them you can easily get to totally wrong conclusions.
If you have a food that is more often eaten by people doing a lot of sports, you will measure that eating that food is correlated with being more healthy. But it would obviously be fallacious to conclude that this food is more beneficial to health than other foods.
Most people dismiss dietary research because it simply condemns their favorite foods. They accept causal inferences made from epidemiology everywhere else.
I guarantee you, it’s an incredibly complex task. Unless one adopts a monastic approach of always eating exactly the same carefully measured meals at home, the challenge is constant.
If one day a system based on vision and AI could accomplish this task (and it can't, it’s impossible), it could charge any price and have millions of users.
Sometimes dozens of these studies get wrapped up and analyzed together, and we headlines that THING IS BAD with a hazard ratio of like 1.05 (we figured out smoking was bad with a hazard ratio that was like 3! - you need a really good signal when you are analyzing such low quality data)
I know I’m not going to be able to eat my main, a couple slices of pizza, one or two entrees and a dessert with only 800 calories left in my budget.
Sure, I might be somewhat off in my estimate, but in practice, I might forgo the entrees and dessert (or share a bite from someone else), set some of my main aside to take home, and have a slice of pizza.
Like if you just tracked the things you can track, and noted the number of occurrences you didn't, then your end of the month weight will tell you whether you're overshooting or not, and you can estimate what proportion the "unknowns" might represent (and whether you should put a conscious effort into reducing them.
These are dumb questions to ask in the first place, because the "you" and "good" here are too personal for any general answer to be useful to most people. Unfortunately, this is not just lazy writing that took complex questions and simplified them to the point of uselessness - we really are asking these kinds of questions :(
Most of this doesn't generalize to populations the size of the world in the way something like "physics" does, because, for starters, we aren't very deterministic or very homogeneous at large scale.
Instead, you end up with millions to tens of millions of people in a subgroup particularly affected or unaffected by something because of genetic variation, etc.
Any reasonable scientist knows this. Instead, the main reason to try to answer these questions framed like this seems to be either to get funding, or to make headlines.
Sometimes we can answer extreme versions of this question (IE it seems data suggests alcohol is fairly universally bad for almost any person, definition of bad, and amount), but that's pretty rare. This then gets used as a "success" to do more poorly designed and thought out studies.
Just because we want to know things doesn't mean we should use mechanisms that we know don't work and produce mostly useless results. This is true even when we don't have lots of mechanisms that do work or produce useful results.
It's much slower and much more expensive, but what we learn is at least more useful.
It's really hard, slow, and expensive to answer questions about particle physics - this doesn't mean we revert to asking atoms to self-report their energy levels and publishing headlines about how "larger atoms that move around more live longer" or whatever based on the results. Instead, we accept that it will hard, slow, and expensive, and therefore, we better get started if we want to ever get somewhere.
Something like a curry cooked in kitchen and shared among a family is a complete black box as to who got how many calories. Maybe one person got a different ratio of rice to curry. Or this family likes a sweeter type of curry etc
Your metabolism is a system. Like any system, data about its inputs and outputs can be gathered if you would but measure it. Make getting accurate portion sizes a part of your daily routine.
This is why calorie counting is ballparking to get us a general idea, and not a precise science.
Rather crude and fun, but that's it, see Bomb Calorimeter. I guess it makes sense in retrospect, how else would you do it?
They usually just measure standard basic ingredients, then you roughly match them to your recipe and add it up. No wonder food labelling is just a ballpark.
The alternative would be empirical animal studies that look directly at weight as a function of feed. You will note that agribusiness doesn't mess around with calories when money is on the line. Instead relies on empirical data for mass as a function of feed type.
We can't eat wood (or coal) but they're very calorific when measured via bomb calorimetry.
Calorimetry is just measuring the heat transfer from combustion, usually by measuring the temperature change of a known quantity of water in the classical experiment. You perform versions of it in high school and undergrad
Calories are just a unit of energy, and heat can be related back to energy (joules for people using SI)
This is true, because of "caloric availability".[1] If you took that into account, you would have a better idea of how many calories your body is absorbing.
So it's still not great.
There is no dietary research, because you can't pull off an unbiased dietary study over a meaningful period of time. Practical and ethical problems abound.
Maybe one day we can simulate n=10mm people from the neck down for a period of 30 years, and feed half of them bacon and half of them beans, but even that will have the major problems of being a simulation and that only from the neck down.
Read the original "fat = heart attacks" studies by Ancel Keys from the 1950's. I've done free online 5-minute long data science tutorials with more statistical rigor.
The reason we can do science on some things without doing experiments is that there's lots of hard, unambiguous data about relatively much simpler systems.
Getting good data on the extremely complex thing that is homo sapiens is just not feasible, unless you're studying specific chemical reactions in the gut, in which case it'll take an extremely long time to figure out an actual dietary recommendation.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. These models get better, our understanding is improved, and we will slowly uncover more truths. We already have so much more knowledge about nutrition than we did 100 years ago.
We're all experts at eating food but having an instinctual understanding of exactly when to stop eating was probably much less important historically.
Both people doing the research and people funding the research know very well that what the flaw of this approach is, but just chose to do the shoddy job that they do because it brings in money. If it's not by design then there is a worse conclusion - the researchers/funders are incompetent. It's most likely a mix of incompetence/corruption.
I wonder if the data are always skewed in a particular direction. For example, do people typically underreport junk food and overreport salads? Or do they omit entire meals? Or snacks?
but i get it
it's expensive to do properly, and so its not really done that often, and when it happens there's usually only a few participants.
I always wondered if i could volunteer for this types of studies somehow
I set a goal weight for the week, and if I weigh more than that, I don’t eat (or eat just vegetables). I’ve lost 5 kg so far and I maintained the weight loss between thanksgiving and new year’s despite spikes on the holidays.
It’s taught me what proper portions feel like so I don’t have a desire to rebound as soon as I take a break.
All calorie/portion numbers on packaged food are off by 10-20%. I set MyFitnessTracker to 1.5k calories (deficit for my build) and for weeks nothing would budge - even with strict portion control and weighing everything, plus 800 extra cals spent through exercise.
Once I went to "1250" calories, I started losing weight. Went from to 205 to 175 pounds.
With packaged food I mean anything like cream cheese, various sides, etc. - not pre-built meals (I assume those would be off by 50%).
What weighing your food really does, is reveal how shockingly little you actually should be eating. I switched to small plates for all meals, as using the normal large ones was pointless and slightly de-motivating.
But yeah, it's just calories. No matter what you eat.
Since I eat out daily at fairly healthy places (Cava, Panera, chic fil a only grilled nuggets & fruit cups, Jersey Mikes number 7 mini, noodles & company, MOD pizza) GPT knows their menu & each items calories. Upon getting the food I just tell GPT what I'm about to eat each time and it counts & retains and calculates through the day.
In doing so as adult male (late 40s) 5'10 175 my body has gotten used to eating 1500 to 2k calories a day. Do weigh myself daily to ensure I'm not gaining as I do have a cheat day once a week.
I understand the sodium content is higher then if I cooked at home but I'm focused on maintaining a fit look & counting calories along with a few weekly gym visits I think keeps me as I seek.
See : Genetics, Nutrition, and Health: A New Frontier in Disease Prevention
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/27697061.2023.22...
For example:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199212313272701
and
https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpendo.200...
In the NEJM article they note that every single person who claimed to be "diet resistant" was lying about food intake.
> The main finding of this study is that failure to lose weight despite a self-reported low caloric intake can be explained by substantial misreporting of food intake and physical activity. The underreporting of food intake by the subjects in group 1 even occurred 24 hours after a test meal eaten under standardized conditions. In contrast, values for total energy expenditure, resting metabolic rate, thermic effect of food, and thermic response to exercise were comparable with those of obese subjects in group 2 who did not report a history of diet resistance.
and
> In addition to their greater degree of misreporting, the subjects in group 1 used thyroid medication more often, had a stronger belief that their obesity was caused by genetic and metabolic factors and not by overeating, and reported less hunger and disinhibition and more cognitive restraint than did the subjects in group 2. Subjects presenting for weight-control therapy who had these findings in association with a history of self-reported diet resistance would clearly convey the impression that a low metabolic rate caused their obesity.
Calories-in/Calories-out is true for everyone, and everyone can lose weight by putting down his fork.
There's a whole range of products here which seem like they should exist but just don't (but I hardly want to do a hardware startup).
