good point
the big thing used to be, calories in, calories out...but new research shows that what the calories are does matter because of the bodies response to certain foods.
it's also good to differentiate between simple carbs and complex carbs...both have their place
simple carbs are a fast burn and long distance running needs simple carbs....when people marathon they have to eat during the run as the body needs that fast burning energy...plus most long distance runners carry little to no extra fat as training for a marathon is a year long process
the idea of running makes me want to sit down and have a bagel... :mrgreen:
Food quality matters for health reasons, but you still have to run a calorie deficit to lose weight.
The concept that calories don't matter comes from the observation that going on a low carb diet can cause immediate weight loss that exceeds what conventional weight loss theory tells us we should have.
What everyone is missing is that our body stores nutrients other than fat, and we we start eating low carb, our body will burn large amounts of glucose that is stored in the body, and for every gram of glucose we store we also store 4 grams of water (or something like that) - so loosing 1 lb of glucose can result in a total of five lbs of weight loss, plus when we go on a low carb diet we tend to eat less food and thus at any one given time we will have less undigested food working it's way through our system, and we will drop a few more lbs due to that. So a low carb diet can result in a total loss of 3-5% of our bodyweight in ten days or less - without actually burning one oz of fat.
On a low carb diet, it's only after we are pretty much fully carb depleted that we go into ketoses and start burning fat. And we can regain that first 3-5% nearly instantly if we go off the low carb diet (but that's not particularly bad, it's weight gain but not fat gain).
Even if we don't realize that we are eating less calories, we are, and that's why we eventually start loosing weight on any diet that restricts certain food items. When we restrict our diet from certain foods (or to certain foods) we naturally eat fewer calories.
Yesterday I had a friend to "inform" me that you can eat all the fatty foods that you want to, regardless of calories, and still lose weight, as long as you didn't eat any carbs. While there is some bases for eating a high fat moderate protein near zero carb diet, it's simply not true that carbs don't matter.
There are a ton of people out there trying to sell some weightloss product, claiming that calories don't matter, but that's a sales spiel, that's what people WANT to hear, but it's not the truth.
All that said, I advocate for a high protein, moderately low carb AND moderately low fat diet when trying to lose weight, and high protein moderate carb and fat when trying to maintain.
At least that's my take on it, I've read just about everything I can on the subject, and there is a lot of bro-science out there. We have to filter through the bullcrap to figure out what the truth is.
