Ketogenic diet, it works..

[Zero999]

Some interesting points have been made here.

Yes the ketogenic ketogenic is bad. I've tried it and it didn't work for me in the long term. No population permanently eats a ketogenic diet.

It's good to be aware of calories, but wouldn't recommend counting them rigorously. It's yery difficult to estimate how many calories you should be earing and it's almost impossible to accuractly calorie count, as food labels are often wrong. It doesn't train you how to eat properly and is not a healthy thing to do, from a mental health perspective.

Exercise does work, but it's important to increase your heart rate, for it to be effective. I gain weight, when I'm sedentary for long periods, even if I watch what I eat, but when I'm very active, I don't have to worry about it. Indeed I often have to make sure I eat enough, otherwise it affects my sleep. I find myself waking up with hunger pangs.

[cdev]

This bears repeating! Its that important.

Stop eating after 6pm. Works better than any diet.

For those who have bloodwork they can refer to, who are interested in quantifying aspects of their health this collection of papers on nutrition-related biomarkers looks interesting.

https://academic.oup.com/asn/pages/biomarkers

[cdev]

 I just read this:

https://nutrition.org/ketogenic-diets-what-the-science-says/

Reminds me of this classic scene from Woody Allen's "Sleeper" still one of my favorites. And so much of it rings true today.



This text is from the paper..

High intake of dietary fat is commonly believed, by both scientists and the general public, to cause obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Although many Americans adhere to dietary guidelines that focus on reducing intakes of saturated and total fat, rates of many diet-related chronic diseases have markedly increased.

Ketogenic diets, which provide ≥ 70% of calories from fat, have been dismissed as fad weight-loss diets. However, ketogenic diets have a long history in clinical medicine and human evolution. Noting that ketogenic diets have elicited controversy, David Ludwig (New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center, Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School) provides a comprehensive review, published in The Journal of Nutrition, of evidence-based studies on the effects of ketogenic diets for a wide range of health conditions.

Ketogenic diets may be more effective than low-fat diets for the treatment of obesity and diabetes. In addition to the reductions in blood glucose and insulin achievable through carbohydrate restriction, chronic ketosis might confer unique metabolic benefits resulting in reduced risk of certain cancers, neurodegenerative conditions, and other diseases associated with insulin resistance. Based on available evidence, a well-formulated ketogenic diet does not appear to have major safety concerns for the general public and can be considered a first-line approach for obesity and type 2 diabetes.

High-quality clinical trials of ketogenic diets will further scientific understanding of long-term effects and their full potential in clinical medicine. Key unresolved questions that warrant further investigation include: How does LDL cholesterol elevation with carbohydrate restriction affect cardiovascular risk versus triglyceride elevation with fat restriction? Does the reduction in blood glucose and insulin on a ketogenic diet improve vascular health? Are there susceptible populations or conditions for which a ketogenic diet would be contraindicated? What is the efficacy of a ketogenic diet for long-term weight loss and behavioral change? Does chronic ketosis provide unique metabolic benefits, beyond those obtained by a low-glycemic index, moderate-carbohydrate diet?

References Ludwig DS. The Ketogenic Diet: Evidence for Optimism but High-Quality Research Needed. The Journal of Nutrition, Volume 150, Issue 6, June 2020, Pages 1354–1359, https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/nxz308.

[Miyuki]

Someone mentioned zero salt diet. Unintentionally I lowered my salt intake and got nasty headaches. Took a while for me to find what caused them. French fries with a ton of salt is something that should be eliminated but
that other extreme with zero salt is something only for 90years old people with difficulties to move. Healthy middle-aged individual needs salt intake. Excess intake eliminate with sweating during exercise.

Mammals cannot live without salt, they need it either from food or add pure salt if not enough salt is in food.

[Halcyon]

Someone mentioned zero salt diet. Unintentionally I lowered my salt intake and got nasty headaches. Took a while for me to find what caused them. French fries with a ton of salt is something that should be eliminated but
that other extreme with zero salt is something only for 90years old people with difficulties to move. Healthy middle-aged individual needs salt intake. Excess intake eliminate with sweating during exercise.

Mammals cannot live without salt, they need it either from food or add pure salt if not enough salt is in food.

I think you need to distinguish between "zero salt" and "zero added salt" or low-salt diets.

It's impossible to exclude all salt from your diet since it's present in unprocessed meat and vegetables. Most people get enough salt in their diet already and if you're eating processed foods, it's quite easy to exceed recommended levels.

I personally never add salt to any food after cooking (with the exception of popcorn). I use salt (sometimes) during cooking, but a lot of that is lost during the cooking process (e.g.: in pasta water). There are many, more tastier ways to add flavour, chilli and herbs for example.

[Zero999]

Ketogenic diets, which provide ≥ 70% of calories from fat, have been dismissed as fad weight-loss diets. However, ketogenic diets have a long history in clinical medicine and human evolution.

I question the point about human evolution and ketogenic diets. There's no evidence to suggest that any human population has survived for long periods on a ketogenic diet. There are populations living of diets high in animal fat and protein but they're not ketogenic. When an animal is freshly slaughtered and eaten soon after, there are still sugars in the blood and muscle tissue. People have only live off ketogenic diets during periods of famine.

Another issue is how can we feed the world from a low carbohydrate diet, in a sustainable manner? Most diets are high in animal protein and fat and raising animals requires huge amounts of resources, rather than growing crops.

Many populations live on high carbohydrate diets and don't suffer from obesity. 100 years ago, obesity wasn't an issue in the west and people didn't live off a low carbohydrate diet there, back then. Quite the opposite. Meat was relative expensive and people tended to eat more carbohydrate-rich foods such as bread and potatoes. Obesity rates have increased, along with consumption of meat. Of course I'm not saying that meat consumption causes obesity, as there are populations who mostly eat meat and don't get fat.

It's not carbohydrates, meat, or fat, which are the problem, but excess energy intake. Obesity is caused by a diet rich in energy dense foods, combined with a sedentary lifestyle and genes which promote fat storage. The last point about gense is important, because not everyone gets fat, when given the same diet and lack of exercise.

As far as the fat vs carbohydrates debate is concerned: it probably makes sense to get proportionally more calories from fat, for those who are sedentary, with extra calories required by active individuals provided by carbohydrates.

[iMo]

..
I personally never add salt to any food after cooking (with the exception of popcorn). I use salt (sometimes) during cooking, but a lot of that is lost during the cooking process (e.g.: in pasta water). There are many, more tastier ways to add flavour, chilli and herbs for example.

That is exactly what I mentioned in my above post - to limit salting to "almost nil".
Most products you are buying today contain salt/sodium - the food manufacturers add salt/sodium into everything in order to make your taste buds happier.
Excessive intake of Sugar and Salt kills you..

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/salt-reduction

[Cerebus]

..
I personally never add salt to any food after cooking (with the exception of popcorn). I use salt (sometimes) during cooking, but a lot of that is lost during the cooking process (e.g.: in pasta water). There are many, more tastier ways to add flavour, chilli and herbs for example.

That is exactly what I mentioned in my above post - to limit salting to "almost nil".
Most products you are buying today contain salt/sodium - the food manufacturers add salt/sodium into everything in order to make your taste buds happier. Sugar and salt kills you..
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/salt-reduction

No, lack of sugar and salt kills you. It's this kind of simplistic wrongheaded sloganizing that drives me mad. Both salt and sugar are essential to normal body function. Your body ultimately converts all the carbohydrates you ingest to sugars. Your body cannot extract energy from carbohydrates until they have been converted to sugars, specifically glucose.  This is so fundamental that your body starts converting carbohydrates into sugars the second you put them into your mouth - by secreting saliva that contains the enzyme ptyalin. The idea that sugar is fundamentally bad in itself is wrong. Consuming your carbohydrates as sugar in anything more than small quantities is probably a bad idea, we evolved on a diet low in simple sugars, so much so that we evolved ptyalin and you mess with evolution at your peril. But the populist idea that "sugar is bad" is fundamentally wrongheaded.

The fuss about salt is somewhat misplaced too. Some people most definitely are sensitive to excess salt intake - there very much is such a thing as salt sensitive high blood pressure, but they are in the minority and the size of the effect is less than one is led to beleive. Excess consumption of salt, for most people, will not lead to high blood pressure. For most people excess salt is simply excreted. If you define salt sensitivity as a change of 3 mmHg in blood pressure between normal (roughly 100 mmol/d = 2.3g Na = 5.8 g/d NaCl) and high (200 mmol/d = 4.6 Na = 11.6 g/d NaCl) sodium intakes then about 40% of the population are salt sensitive. Note that 3 mmHg in the context that high-normal blood pressure is 120 mmHg and the bottom of 'high blood pressure' is 140 mmHg - so a normal versus high salt intake only accounts for 15% of the margin between normal and high blood pressure - much less if you take the margin between the centres of the two bands - when it's only 5%. It's also worth noting that for a small minority this cuts the other way, there are people who have abnormally low blood pressure (symptomatically so) unless they have high levels of salt in their diets. Thus making a medical intervention (low/zero salt diets) on the whole population is clearly wrong headed. If you're going to go down that route where do you stop? If you're going to treat the whole population when only 20% might be affected (40% salt sensitive times 50% with high blood pressure) what about 10%? That level would mean that we should start treating everybody with asthma drugs.

Nobody knows why the population is getting fatter. If they did we would have stopped it by now. It is pretty clear that there is something in the modern diet or environment that is messing with homeostasis but no one has yet figured out what it is.

Ascribing it to a simplistic energy intake <=> expenditure balance is wrong. If you consume the energy equivalent of  one small packet of crisps/chips a day or a large biscuit/cookie (100 kcals) more than you expend in energy you will gain weight at the rate of 1 kg every 35 days. If you did that for 10 years you would gain 105 kg. This does not happen (except in such extreme cases that they feature on 'reality' TV). The truth is that most people who are fatter than they ought to be stop gaining excess weight at some 'set point' which varies from individual to individual, but is usually in the 10-30kg bracket. If energy intake <=> expenditure imbalance was the cause they would just keep getting fatter, not stop at some point.

The fundamental problem here is that there is a lot of "we don't know" in public health combined with a lot of pedalling simplistic easy to understand public health messages. Worse still, working doctors seem to work on the basis of receiving a simplistic message rather than a more nuanced one and give every impression of treating individuals on this basis. It's so prevalent in medicine that it's earned it's own catchphrase "Treating the numbers rather than treating the patient".

One thing we do know, and the numbers add up at the epidemiological level, is that people who get significant physical exercise don't seem to get fat and don't get high blood pressure. Being sedentary is most definitely bad for you (he said sitting at his arse in front of a computer). The amount of exercise by the way is nothing like the amount that would be needed to burn off excess calorie consumption - it's just that people who take significant exercise seem to have better regulation of homeostasis.

[Zero999]

The set point is an interesting theory and there's a lot of evidence to support it. The resting basal metabolic rate of a person is partly determined by energy intake: overfeeding increases it and underfeeding reduces it. this means that if someone diets, their body slows down, to compensate for the energy deficit. The Vermont prison overfeeding study and Minnesota Starvation Experiment have proven this.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5786199/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment

My personal experiance, shows this is true, as far as dieting is concerned. I've suffered from an eating disorder in the past, lost a lot of weight to the point of chronic malnutrition, then with some support and counseling gained it all back, plus s couple of extra killos. When I starved, my metabolism slowed to a crawl, as my energy intake was a fraction as it should have been. My body temperature fell to borderline hypothermic and my heart rate plummeted. My mental health deteriorated to the point of being severely depressed. On refeeding, I first suffered from oedema, heat palputations, as my body switched to glucose, causing potassium levels to fall. Then my metabolism skyrocketed and I felt hot all the time. At first my mood improved, but then I developed anxiety, especially as I suffered from binge eating. It wasn't a linear process. I slipped back into starving again, before finally recovering properly. It took a couple of years for the binge eating to stop, even though I hadn't been dieting and was a bit overweight at the time.

On the other hand, I've found exercise affects my bodyweight. I think settling, rather than a set point, is probably more accurate. When I'm physically active, my body seems to be pushed more to accumulating more lean body mass and less fat, whereas inactivity results in the reverse.  The effects of phsyical activity aren't immediate. It takes a year or so, for my body composition to significantly change, in response to exercise levels. There also seems to be some hysteresis. It takes more exercise to lose fat, than keep it off. Note that when I mean exercise, I'm talking about strenious exercise, enough to get me out of breath and my heart rate up, for a decent length of time.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2990627/

[Psi]

I did vegetarian low carb for around 4 months which is a bit more challenging than normal low carb.
(I didn't go vegetarian just for the period, I was already vegetarian)
First 2 weeks was 20g of carbs per day which is very hard, but is doable. Then 30g a day which is easier.
And then 35g/day after 2 months.

3 or 4 days after starting you feel horrible and you body reacts like you are trying to kill it. Mainly because your body is so used to getting all the sugar and carbs it wants for energy and it fights tooth and nail at the thought of having to burn fat instead for energy. This is the reason many of people give up. The first 2 weeks are bad.

But after around 2 weeks, 3 for some people, that goes away and you feel ok.
By this point your body is entering ketosis and burning fat for energy. One think you do notice at this point is that you no longer get hungry like you did before. What most people think of as 'feeling hungry' is really just a carb craving.  eg Your body has burnt all the sugars it has available and now wants more.  So once you're in ketosis you don't get hungry the same way.

By the end of the 4 months I had lost 18kg.

I did notice some negative side effects, i got minor leg cramps but it wasn't a big deal.
And as others have said, you can get a bit constipated since you are radically changed your diet and it takes the body some time to figure things out.

After 2-3 months i felt so light on my feet and had so much energy which was an awesome feeling.

[iMo]

@Cerebus: before you comment a post, read it carefully..

[Cerebus]

@Cerebus: before you comment a post, read it carefully..

I'll freely admit to reacting to the "Sugar and Salt kills you.." sentence at the end which should never be said unqualified or use words like "kills". It doesn't. A sentence like that  is sensationalism worthy of the Daily Mail, or the National Enquirer, or whatever substitutes for journalistic toilet paper wherever the reader is. "Excess salt or sugar intake may be harmful in some cases and harmless in others." doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it? We're supposed to be engineers, we're supposed to be better than that.

That you've edited that final sentence to tone it down, and that that edit postdates my post, kind of proves that you knew it to be an erroneous statement. The new version isn't much better because it still promulgates the myth that there's something innately "bad" about salt or sugar. There isn't. Excess intake of water kills you. People automatically recognise that sentence as true but hyperbolical, but when it comes to sugar or sodium, they don't. Sugar and sodium are not poisons per se, they are not even harmful per se, they are essential ingredients of all cellular lifeforms, eukaryotes, prokaryotes, plants, you name it.

[PlainName]

If you consume the energy equivalent of  one small packet of crisps/chips a day or a large biscuit/cookie (100 kcals) more than you expend in energy you will gain weight at the rate of 1 kg every 35 days. If you did that for 10 years you would gain 105 kg.

It's not clear what you're saying there, and in the simple sense I think it is wrong. The reason is that as you get bigger you need more calories just to stand still, so eating an extra 100kcal/day, all other things being equal, would have you plateau at some weight. To keep gaining weight indefinitely you'd need to consume that extra 100kcal PLUS the extra calories that your body now needs just to stay alive. It's kind of like compound interest.

For most people, there's a limit to how much they can eat, so they tend to plateau.

(This is also one reason why any calorie-restrictive diet works well at the start but then tends to not do so well as the weight drops off, leading to comfort eating and the like due to lack of progress.)

[Cerebus]

If you consume the energy equivalent of  one small packet of crisps/chips a day or a large biscuit/cookie (100 kcals) more than you expend in energy you will gain weight at the rate of 1 kg every 35 days. If you did that for 10 years you would gain 105 kg.

It's not clear what you're saying there, and in the simple sense I think it is wrong. The reason is that as you get bigger you need more calories just to stand still, so eating an extra 100kcal/day, all other things being equal, would have you plateau at some weight. To keep gaining weight indefinitely you'd need to consume that extra 100kcal PLUS the extra calories that your body now needs just to stay alive. It's kind of like compound interest.

For most people, there's a limit to how much they can eat, so they tend to plateau.

(This is also one reason why any calorie-restrictive diet works well at the start but then tends to not do so well as the weight drops off, leading to comfort eating and the like due to lack of progress.)

Read it again.

If you consume the energy equivalent of  one small packet of crisps/chips a day or a large biscuit/cookie (100 kcals) more than you expend in energy you will gain weight at the rate of 1 kg every 35 days. If you did that for 10 years you would gain 105 kg.

The point is more than you need. If you got larger and needed more, then that 100 kcals is on top of that.

The original point was to illustrate that it requires a surprisingly small imbalance between food intake and energy expenditure to gain (or lose weight). To maintain any semblance of weight control requires a homeostatic mechanism, and there is one, and for a long time it worked perfectly for the vast majority of people. For some reason in modern western society it is not and we are seeing the 'set point' that control mechanism aims at changing.

It's irrelevant to that argument whether that expenditure is doing external work or simply metabolic expenditure. For what it's worth, the actual metabolic activity of fat stores is low.

I'm sure, you could figure out a mathematical model where, at the limit, weight would be limited by the ability to intake food balanced against the metabolic load of reaching a certain weight. But it's not what happens to the vast majority of people. Most overweight people are at most a few 10's of kilos overweight, not 100s of kilo - but there are examples of the latter which indicates that is it possible to consume enough to reach that condition but the vast majority of overweight folks do not. The 'fattest man' on record at the moment is 635 kg!

Remember, I'm talking about 1 biscuit a day more than you need - how much would have to need to stuff into your face to meet your metabolic requirements where you couldn't manage to stuff in one biscuit extra.

Looked at another way, if there wasn't an effective mechanism to tell you to eat more or less you would be unable to adjust your level of physical activity to demand without incurring permanent weight loss or gain. This whole thing is very finely balanced and it is a surprisingly small number of calories that your body needs to add or subtract to keep things at the set point it is aiming for.

You want to play with the maths you can find a model of basal metabolic versus weight here which is:

Basal Metabolic Rate = 11 x Body Weight in kg - 3 x age (years) +272 * gender (f=0, m=1) +777 kcals.

A standard figure for the calorific equivalent of fat storage is  3500 kcals = 1 Kg body fat.

[iMo]

@Cerebus: before you comment a post, read it carefully..

..That you've edited that final sentence to tone it down, and that that edit postdates my post, ..

@Cerebus: You posted your Thesis 1 hour after my last edit.
I edited it because I knew you will jump on it and you will spend hours elaborating a Thesis about something such obvious like that an excessive intake of sugar and salt is not good for your health

[Halcyon]

..
I personally never add salt to any food after cooking (with the exception of popcorn). I use salt (sometimes) during cooking, but a lot of that is lost during the cooking process (e.g.: in pasta water). There are many, more tastier ways to add flavour, chilli and herbs for example.

That is exactly what I mentioned in my above post - to limit salting to "almost nil".
Most products you are buying today contain salt/sodium - the food manufacturers add salt/sodium into everything in order to make your taste buds happier. Sugar and salt kills you..
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/salt-reduction

No, lack of sugar and salt kills you. It's this kind of simplistic wrongheaded sloganizing that drives me mad. Both salt and sugar are essential to normal body function.

No one is arguing the science behind this. The point I was making, is that most people get their daily requirements of salt and sugar by simply eating normally and in many cases, exceed the recommended amount... by a lot! For example, if you eat a single serving of typical (Australian) white bread for breakfast (without any toppings), you're already 30 to 60% of your way to the daily recommended intake of salt for a normal adult. The amount is even more if you choose the gluten free option! There is no "minimum" recommended dietary intake of sugar, rather a recommended maximum since sugar is present in just about everything in various forms. If your blood sugar is low to the point where it's making you unwell, either you're not eating properly or you have some other underlying condition that needs to be addressed.

I almost never add salt to any of my food as it already contains enough (naturally) and sugars are found in fruits, vegetables and just about every other food, processed or not. The only time I reach for supplemental sugar is if I'm baking a cake, otherwise, I never add it food. There's no need. My doctor confirms this and my blood work always comes back within normal ranges.

The only people who need to supplement their salt or sugar levels are those who aren't eating properly, have allergies which means they can't eat a normal, balanced diet or have some other underlying health condition.

Remember, I'm talking about your normal, average person. Of course there are always those who have a higher calorific requirement, such as athletes, but that then becomes something other than the norm.

[Miyuki]

That is exactly what I mentioned in my above post - to limit salting to "almost nil".
Most products you are buying today contain salt/sodium - the food manufacturers add salt/sodium into everything in order to make your taste buds happier. Sugar and salt kills you..
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/salt-reduction

Nobody knows why the population is getting fatter. If they did we would have stopped it by now. It is pretty clear that there is something in the modern diet or environment that is messing with homeostasis but no one has yet figured out what it is.

Ascribing it to a simplistic energy intake <=> expenditure balance is wrong. If you consume the energy equivalent of  one small packet of crisps/chips a day or a large biscuit/cookie (100 kcals) more than you expend in energy you will gain weight at the rate of 1 kg every 35 days. If you did that for 10 years you would gain 105 kg. This does not happen (except in such extreme cases that they feature on 'reality' TV). The truth is that most people who are fatter than they ought to be stop gaining excess weight at some 'set point' which varies from individual to individual, but is usually in the 10-30kg bracket. If energy intake <=> expenditure imbalance was the cause they would just keep getting fatter, not stop at some point.

The fundamental problem here is that there is a lot of "we don't know" in public health combined with a lot of pedalling simplistic easy to understand public health messages. Worse still, working doctors seem to work on the basis of receiving a simplistic message rather than a more nuanced one and give every impression of treating individuals on this basis. It's so prevalent in medicine that it's earned it's own catchphrase "Treating the numbers rather than treating the patient".

One thing we do know, and the numbers add up at the epidemiological level, is that people who get significant physical exercise don't seem to get fat and don't get high blood pressure. Being sedentary is most definitely bad for you (he said sitting at his arse in front of a computer). The amount of exercise by the way is nothing like the amount that would be needed to burn off excess calorie consumption - it's just that people who take significant exercise seem to have better regulation of homeostasis.

Most probably it is connected to "processed" food, with added simple sugars and super fast digestion with high GI and density
It lacks "self regulation" of "whole" food, you can't get huge excess of calories from a piece of meat and vegetables, you just cannot eat the sheer volume of it and also the same volume makes you feel more full, this relates not just to the volume of food but also to some hormones released during digestion, this is a very important part of body weight regulation mechanism as studies shows
It if is mainly caused by "processed food" it will be a thug fight from manufacturers of them, like tobacco and alcohol companies show
Can you imagine that fight about adding a warning, as is on every pack of smokes, to every chocolate bar?

btw I'm now fasting the second day and feels great

[Cerebus]

Most probably it is connected to "processed" food, with added simple sugars and super fast digestion with high GI and density
It lacks "self regulation" of "whole" food, you can't get huge excess of calories from a piece of meat and vegetables, you just cannot eat the sheer volume of it and also the same volume makes you feel more full, this relates not just to the volume of food but also to some hormones released during digestion, this is a very important part of body weight regulation mechanism as studies shows
It if is mainly caused by "processed food" it will be a thug fight from manufacturers of them, like tobacco and alcohol companies show
Can you imagine that fight about adding a warning, as is on every pack of smokes, to every chocolate bar?

btw I'm now fasting the second day and feels great

The thing is that previous generations also had access to processed foods. White bread has been a thing for a long time and formed a much larger proportion of earlier generations diets than it does ours now, so that can't be the whole answer. Highly processed foods, yeah they are only really a thing for the last two generations. Whatever is the cause it isn't a single faceted thing like processed foods.  Anecdotal non-evidence: I used to know a fat vegetarian hippy, I mean really fat, who only ate wholefoods.

[PlainName]

Read it again.

I did, which is why I queried what you meant. Clearly, if you did that (kept adding above your static needs) then you would get infinitely heavy, albeit at a slowing rate. But you then said:

This does not happen (except in such extreme cases that they feature on 'reality' TV).

Which is what lead me to think that you mean what it looked like you were saying at all. Hence my rider, which you seem to have missed. Perhaps you could read it again.

[Zero999]

(This is also one reason why any calorie-restrictive diet works well at the start but then tends to not do so well as the weight drops off, leading to comfort eating and the like due to lack of progress.)

It's a myth that calorie restrictive diets fail, due to comfort eating. In most cases, it is not comfort eating, but eating due to an incease in hunger, as a direct result of energy restriction. I suppose one could call it comfort eating as, it relieves the discomfort of hunger, but that's not what most people think of when they hear the words comfort eating.

Again, refer to the Minnesota starvation experiment. I appreciate that most diets aren't that extreme, but you don't have to lose that much weight to experiance similar psychological symptoms, albeit milder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment

I'm not saying that eating for emotional reasons, rather than true hunger,  isn't a thing, but it's overestimated and doesn't seem to be the main reason most diets fail, or most people are overweight.

btw I'm now fasting the second day and feels great

On the other hand fasting for emotional reasons seems to be quite common. Yes, it can feel good, but it isn't healthy to do it for too long. It also tends to cause problems with overeating in the long run. Now if you find yourself being tempted by high calorie food, you pretty much know it's been caused by fasting/resistriction.

[Miyuki]

The thing is that previous generations also had access to processed foods. White bread has been a thing for a long time and formed a much larger proportion of earlier generations diets than it does ours now, so that can't be the whole answer. Highly processed foods, yeah they are only really a thing for the last two generations. Whatever is the cause it isn't a single faceted thing like processed foods.  Anecdotal non-evidence: I used to know a fat vegetarian hippy, I mean really fat, who only ate wholefoods.

Of course, it works together with modern lifestyle
And vegetarian buying any of those "alternative meats" or so, they are way worse than most "normal" foods. They have insane amounts of salts, fats and are so highly processed that digest almost immediately. And I tryid plenty of them.
I'm not a biologist. But for me, the chemistry explanation sounds like one of the main factor.
"Natural" food needs a long time to digest and has time to release digestive hormones to regulate hunger and weight.
"Processed" food is so easy to digest it broke this cycle. You can just eat it indefinitely and it just passes by your stomach, because it detects it ready to pass to extract nutrients. And it already is when you swallow it.

[bd139]

Indeed.

Anecdotally speaking, I avoid processed and convenience foods where possible these days. It has a positive psychological impact too. Actually making your meals is really important.

Secondarily yes those meat substitutes are terrible. The only way they have flavour is bucket loads of salt. Quite frankly if you are going to go vegetarian or vegan or whatever, don’t look for a meat shaped solution; look for something new and exciting to eat. There’s a nice cafe near me ( http://theretreatkitchen.co.uk/ ) which does a lot of nice dishes.

Alas I’m a carnivore so this is required to be supplemented with something else later. But I do enjoy the place.

[PlainName]

It's a myth that calorie restrictive diets fail, due to comfort eating.

Well, there are many causes of failure and you'll perhaps note that I didn't suggest comfort eating as a cause of failure, only that it might take place after failing. After all, if you don't fail you don't need comforting.

Again, refer to the Minnesota starvation experiment.

I think that's quite inappropriate. The experiment was well-named since there was a continuous period of starvation. Further, they record 3,500 kcal as being a daily intake for normal people, which is quite adrift from what we think now.

Starvation diets like that will ultimately fail for the same reason that eating 100kcal excess every day will lead to being massively overweight - it's unsustainable and failure is built in. A more appropriate diet is like the 5:2 where your overall intake is reduced but your noticeable daily intake seems not to be. Perhaps it works because you fool yourself that you're not on a diet (except for the days when you are), or because doing it for a day at a time is bearable.

[Zero999]

It's a myth that calorie restrictive diets fail, due to comfort eating.

Well, there are many causes of failure and you'll perhaps note that I didn't suggest comfort eating as a cause of failure, only that it might take place after failing. After all, if you don't fail you don't need comforting.

Again, refer to the Minnesota starvation experiment.

I think that's quite inappropriate. The experiment was well-named since there was a continuous period of starvation. Further, they record 3,500 kcal as being a daily intake for normal people, which is quite adrift from what we think now.

Read it again. They didn't say 3200kCal is normal. They titrated their energy intake to result in the volunteers achieving their ideal weight, which required 3200kCal on average. The high number, for modern standards, might be because a good number of them were malnourished and the fact they were physically active, rather than sitting around all day.

Starvation diets like that will ultimately fail for the same reason that eating 100kcal excess every day will lead to being massively overweight - it's unsustainable and failure is built in. A more appropriate diet is like the 5:2 where your overall intake is reduced but your noticeable daily intake seems not to be. Perhaps it works because you fool yourself that you're not on a diet (except for the days when you are), or because doing it for a day at a time is bearable.

It doesn't have to be a starvation diet to induce some of symptoms of starvation. Ordinary weight loss diets do, but they're milder and more subtle. Unfortunately the evidence suggests it doesn't matter what the restricted diet is. It's bound to fail in the long time. It has little to do with self-control, or falling back into bad habits, but an increase in hunger, resulting from an energy deficit. Even if you manage to fool your mind into thinking you're not on an energy restricted diet, your body knows it and it will eventually affect your mental state, even though it might not be obvious.

[bd139]

Yeah it does that. I've been on 1700 cals most of this week. Today I ate half of pizza hut without even thinking it.