Yeah, I’ve found that too. And some things are quite easy to change, like fat-free Greek yoghurt instead of 10% and not going mad with butter and oil, or reducing the amount of sugar I use for baking.
How is recommending to not starve yourself dangerous?
Who said anything about being dangerous?
There is a big difference between monitoring your calorie intake and starving yourself.
Any discussion about diet that presupposes there is a Best is problematic from the start. There is fractal nuance. It is honestly not a great topic for the podcast other than “In my experience” type of stuff due to the need to manage advocacy, liability, PR, etc
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See above. To be honest, as someone who has see and dealt with a large amount of people who have had varying degrees of issues, the stridency and tenor of your posts makes me wonder how close you veer to disordered eating.
I come from a background of sports that rewards body composition and have gone down the road of fad diets, extreme calorie restriction, stimulants, and appetite suppressants. What I’ve found is there are two paths that lead to the results I wanted. One, fight my body by doing graduated calorie reduction and restriction to temporarily win, or two, support my body and win long term. I continuously fought my way to mid single digit bodyfat in my teens and twenties, many times having disordered / orthorexic eating, all the while battling anxiety, poor recovery, sleep, and performance. It’s something I’m not proud of. Now I do not restrict my total food intake at all, I just focus on the quality foods that are proven to promote lean body mass, great hormone profile, sleep, performance, etc.
If saying I must have disordered eating was meant to hurt me, discredit me, or make me feel less of a person, simply because I do not believe counting calories is a long term solution, go pound sand. 70% of the country is overweight or obese and has pre or full blown diabetes. Many if not all have tried drastic restriction of calories and it simply hasn’t worked. The problem is the food itself, not a weak mind, not a lack of self control, and it’s sad that they are treated as if it’s their problem and not the industry that pushes trash foods onto people. There is a better way.
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Can you agree that calorie restriction is different from calorie monitoring?
We face a marketing budget of billions of dollars telling us to eat and drink all the time. Food has been chemically altered to give us cravings for more. Speaking personally, I don’t really know when I’m full anymore. Keeping track of calories is helping me to eat a healthy amount of food without binge eating.
My original post stated that the podcast leans heavily away from weight loss. I can appreciate why it does, but as you stated above most people are overweight. Personally, I think podcast could start addressing being a “healthy” weight, even if that means eating less food.
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Calorie monitoring leads to calorie restriction. There’s a reason why many world class elite athletes don’t do it.
Saying you don’t know when you’re full anymore is strange to me. I am full all the time due to the foods I eat. For instance, I tend to eat 400-1000 grams of carbs a day, depending on how hungry I am, a lot of which determined by how little or how much I train. My average is probably 600-700. It takes 8 pounds of potatoes to get 600 grams of carbs, and despite my best efforts, I physically cannot eat 8 pounds of potatoes in a day. I will get so full I feel sick. Rice is a bit easier to get in enough, but still tough. Fruits are a little easier because they get processed so easily, and fruit juice is the easiest since it takes almost no processing, though I still cannot do much more than like 32-40 ounces a day. It generally takes a good combo of all of these foods to get enough in.
Now if you’re eating fast food, or pre packaged foods with large amount of oil and fat, or low levels of carbohydrates, then your body isn’t going to feel full for very long because the ability to convert that food to energy is low. All your body understands is energy / atp, not calories. If you aren’t feeding it the foods that allow it to create energy without a ton of stress hormones, then of course this will be an issue.
Check out the back of a box of pop tarts or literally any box of crackers or chips. Most of these foods have 50% of its calories from fat or more, which is not easily converted to energy. Couple that with fake flavors that trick your body into thinking that food has easily available energy, and you’re going to plow through them without actually getting a significant amount of what your body needs to produce energy efficiently, despite storing a good amount of it as body fat. Again, it’s the foods, not the calories, and once you are only eating quality foods that our bodies are adapted to working with, this issue goes away.
Do you eat potatoes on the bike?
First of all, I want to be clear, absolutely not. I don’t know you, and haven’t been party to your experiences, so I would never make any declarative statements one way or another. I am only making guesses at your motivations for such over the top insistency.
The issue is you are extrapolating the personal to the universal. And it is absolutely dangerous to just aver that everyone eat all they want as long as it’s healthy. As you say, there is an obesity epidemic, and all the negative health outcomes that go with that. The notion of A) only eating what you find subjectively “healthy” and B) you can eat all you want of that is in fact disordered eating. My experience with this comes from many places, not myself thankfully, but one particular source that really demonstrates this is the wellness community, which is supremely $&$)) up when it comes to food. Orthorexia is the tip of the iceberg there.
For you. This is the key point.
Again, for you. It’s very common, and again why it’s dangerous to say eat all you want because millions of people can eat way past their required caloric intake, even on notionally healthy foods. A sedentary 50kg person can do it in a blink if they don’t have the satiety response to know when to stop. And conversely they may undereat as well, it’s not just for too much calories.
There is no universal other than energy balance it’s the ultimate arbiter. The mechanisms how that happens is a very individual process, and any denial of that is dangerous and misleading.
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You’re doing what the TR Podcast Team does - talking to yourself (or a percentage of the population anyways) and not acknowledging that not everyone is like that.
I think it’s full of crap to say that you should never restrict or monitor foods. Maybe if you’re the type of person that has trouble fueling, has trouble getting enough calories, sure. But what if you’re not? What if you’re the type of person that can put on bodyfat doing almost 20 hours a week because you have zero issue fueling and eating? What if you’re the type of person that will grab a snack every time you walk through the kitchen if you’re just focused on “Fueling the work”?
I’m not saying it works for everyone, but monitoring what you eat, some form of (mild) restriction is absolutely the norm for some people, and can be healthy and helpful. I am a pretty lean guy, but put me in that bucket as I always have to monitor what I eat if I’m interested in staying lean. Period. The fact is I like eating (And like good food, bad food, and have an iron stomach so I almost never have trouble getting food down). It’s why I am in the camp of turning off the podcast whenever I hear the TR team start addressing it because I think they do a poor job of looking at both sides.
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Bingo
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I am the guy that always grabs a snack when I’m hungry. I buy bananas in bulk, and literally have dozens of bananas in various stages of ripening. Not to mention I keep pounds of other fruits on the kitchen counter. I boil pots full of potatoes and rice every day or two, and will literally microwave a couple of boiled potatoes as a snack. My blender is used a couple times a day, full of fruit juice, fruits, etc. I eat probably 10-12 bagels a week with honey and jam. Pasta is also good. My main source of protein is steak, and who doesn’t love a good ribeye. I eat as much as I want of all of this. Oh, I also eat 60-100 grams of maltodextrin & fructose, or straight sugar, per hour of training while on the bike. The calorie and carb intake is very high, but it’s all easily converted to energy, and consequently have tons of energy and never have to go hungry. Again, if you’re eating trash and highly processed industrial fats loaded with fake flavoring I’m not surprised your hunger signals are awful. The solution isn’t to continue to eat those things and just count calories though. CICO is the industries answer to support their low quality high profit processed junk. The moment you switch to high quality foods with high energy availability, this is no longer a concept that even has to be debated.
Notice how many times you said “I” in that post
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100% The same here. Except I don’t do Bagels and Jam, and I do more brown Rice than Potatoes. Love cheerios. I’ve got a dedicated freezer full of (sometimes) hundreds of pounds of lean protein. I go through pounds and pounds of apples. Smoothies with frozen berries and protein powder. Bananas are when I’m getting on the bike for an endurance ride and don’t want to guzzle malto / fructose. I prioritize 150g+ of protein per day. I live with a marathon runner and no kids. I’d guess the food in our house and that we eat on a weekly basis is more healthy than 99% of the population.
And guess what? I can still overeat and gain bodyfat.
Cut it out with the “Me, me, me and everyone is like me or should be.” It’s like you can’t acknowledge that there are people who are different than you.
And, for the record, you’re not the only one. You’re just making an issue of it here trying to tell everyone how right you are.
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As long as you’re happy keep doing what you enjoy! Depriving yourself is no way to live. Glad you found a system that works!
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Having to be conscious of what you eat, and not eating to excess, to keep from gaining weight isn’t depriving yourself.
I’ll use your words. There’s a lot of bad “science” and even worse interpretations that keep people on a path that simply doesn’t work.
And what you’re recommending is one of those paths that doesn’t work for everyone.
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Seriously, Im glad your system works for you! Keep going, and I hope you break every goal you have this season and beyond. 
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And I say the same for you. I am genuinely happy that you seem to be in a good place with food, so many people struggle.
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Not to fire this heated discussion up more, but I’ve found it genuinely helpful to get a sense of my calorie input vs expenditure. I love sweet stuff and it’s useful to see how many calories are in some of my favourite snacks. Just knowing that makes me more likely to opt for something else. It’s just additional information.
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