Nobody is arguing that reducing calories to below the amount spent will not cause weight loss. Of course it will.
I know however that if I ate 1900 calories in sugar a day, let's say by drinking two 2-liter bottles of Coke, I would be constantly hungry. Eating 1900 calories in high-fat high-protein food however leaves me more than satiated.
I think by focusing on the arithmetic in isolation you're making dieting much more difficult than it need be.
EDIT: I'm on the Keto(genic) diet (protein/fat primarily) and run 3x/week. I'm losing ~3lbs/week. Start weight: 178lbs; goal weight: 148lbs. Height: 5ft 6inches. I almost never feel hungry on the diet, and plan on continuing it after I meet my weight loss goals.
Depending on how carefully you want to track how you eat, I would recommend dropping the weight loss to ~1lb per week (~500 calories under TDEE). Any faster than that and you'll probably be sloughing off whatever muscle you already have, and you probably won't like the result of that.
With adequate exercise you won't lose muscle mass.
I work construction and went on a strict keto diet, I was losing ~1lb per weekday. I actually got stronger whilst on the diet, which I attribute to the increased testosterone that comes in after your body becomes adapted.
It's important to note that the Inuit used to live on an exclusive ketogenic diet, they also live in an environment that requires ~6,000 calories a day to simply maintain if living the traditional lifestyle.
What I found working outside whilst on keto and running into winter was that my body managed to maintain its heat extremely well and far better than previous years on a normal diet. I estimated my caloric use at between 4500-5000 a day by how much I ate and how much I lost.
As with any diet it's important to eat adequate protein and exercise. Protein is quite readily converted (very inefficiently) into sugar, and if you don't force it into ketosis you go into starvation and that's when you really risk muscle atrophy.
TL;DR High protein diets increase kidney filtration rates; whether it causes kidney disease is inconclusive. Non-animal protein is preferable to animal-based proteins.
I eat about the same protein as you and am the same height, but my start and target weights are slightly lower (st: 160, target:132). I track my calories/macros religiously (my wife calls it an obsession that I weight and track all the food I eat)
I would still not advise you to go over 2 lbs a week of weight loss (which if you do everything right, will be about 80% fat, 10% muscle and 10% water, give or take). Just because you eat more protein (or lift weights) doesn't mean your body won't trigger muscle breakdown. It will mitigate the amount, sure, but won't just magically stop it because of high protein intake. What most likely will happen, is your body will use protein for energy.
It is quite hard (only found one study that corroborates this (and it was with really untrained obese males) where there was actual muscle increase while losing fat (something along the lines of 2 kgs muscle increase and 9 kg of body fat lost over a period of 6 months I think), but interestingly enough it was a medium carb, medium protein, low fat diet. I'll try to dig up the publication when I can.
Also, do note that keto/low carb (and do note, that fitness keto is different from actual ketogenic diet, the latter being more than 85% of calories from fat) diets tend to produce quick weight loss at the beginning due to water weight and I still recommend to regularly have an high carb-eat at maintenance day to restore hormone levels and fill up the muscles with glycogen (and this will make you go up the scale 2-3 pounds). (ps: high carb day = loads of fruit, some rice, bread, not icecream+cookies+chocolate)
I too have personally had the best luck with 1.5 lbs - 2 lbs per week. The proper caloric deficit to achieve those weight loss amounts per week, along with a 25% carbohydrate, 47% protein, and 28% fat diet has allowed me to lose mostly fat with very little muscle.
With my body at least, it seems that the difference between 2 lbs per week and 3-4 lbs per week is huge in terms of how much muscle is kept during the fat loss process.
If you're already hugely overweight than of course it doesn't matter and fast weight loss should be expected.
Care to share any suggestions how to accomplish this with a diet that actually tastes good and doesn't require too much preparation time? Most people seem to use yucky protein shakes or huge portions of ham or other bland food and I just can't force myself to eat such stuff.
I use Premier Protein shakes, 30g/shake. I'll say this: when I eat like crap, this much protein is really tough. I was a bad-air machine, bathroom trips all day long, to put it nicely. Once I went to the slow carb diet and basically cut out carbs/sugar, it was very doable to have 3-4 shakes per day.
Thanks for the suggestion - these are prohibitively expensive over here (about $15 per single can from amazon.de), but I found similar products at much better prices that I'll give a try.
I used to work with a guy who was a body-builder type, and all he would eat was chicken breast, breakfast, lunch and dinner. I guess you have to pick what's important to you.
I think that if your goal is just to be generally healthy, there's no need to eat that much protein.
> I think by focusing on the arithmetic in isolation you're making dieting much more difficult than it need be.
On the contrary, I think by trying to teach a beginner all about the different kinds of food (complex numbers), and how much of each they need, you're make weight loss (learning to count) much harder than it need be.
How much easier than "eat less calories than you use" can it be?
Actually, the thinking is that if you eat right, you don't have to count calories. It's certainly easier to say "avoid food types A and B", rather than "take all the foods you eat, get the calories per gram, weigh them up, then count how much you're eating, make sure you stay below this limit, and just ignore that nagging feeling in you're brain that tells you you're hungry, you could avoid that feeling easily by eating right, but that's too complicated for you, just eat whatever and write down these numbers instead."
I don't know for sure what works, but arguing by "what's more simple" is stupidity.
"How much easier than "eat less calories than you use" can it be?"
Sending a rocket to space is easy. You just need enough fuel to get to space.
>>How much easier than "eat less calories than you use" can it be?
Because we have no way to accurately measure how many calories your body actually uses. We only have very, very rough estimates and guidelines, and even then there are so many factors to take into account (some personal, some environmental) that it will simply overwhelm a beginner. For example, when you are at a caloric deficit, your metabolism slows down and therefore burns fewer calories too. Not only that, but your hormone balance changes too, and your body can re-prioritize which tissues to retain and which to get rid of. This is why people who lose weight don't lose just fat but also a lot of muscle, and become weaker as a result.
This is why an "eat this, not that" approach works a lot better than an "eat less calories than you use" approach. The former is very clear and tangible. The other uses a lot of rough measurements and guesswork and the side effects of its results are not always ideal.
that guy is a troll. he's literally repeating the same useless thing over again. everyone knows how simple it is to lose weight, the problem is the difficulty with people who have a physiological and psychological problem of overeating. that's the thing he doesn't address at all and is the actual problem today.
Very few people even bother to track calories. Some people do have trouble sticking with it, but for most, the eureka moment happens sometime in the first week when they realize that they are consuming far more calories than they had believed. It's not a problem of perseverance when most people aren't even bothering to get started.
Calorie logging is actually probably the best solution to the psychological problem. Your stomach is saying to your brain that it is hungry and that you must eat. Sometimes you might be so hungry that you feel you are actually hurting yourself. But if you have been logging your calories and macronutrients, your brain knows that you will be okay. You're not gonna die even if your stomach says that you will. It's a triumph of cognition over biology.
How about fixing the physiological problem that is telling you you are hungry? If you are feeling hungry all the time, it is because you are leptin resistant. People become leptin resistant in an insulin-flooded environment. Solution: restore leptin sensitivity by stopping the flow of insulin. You stop the flow of insulin by reducing carbs (and possibly protein). You maintain leptin sensitivity using intermittent fasting (if you have iron will-power, you could use this as a starting point, but that sounds miserable to me).
Note that this physiological state (leptin resistance) is likely an evolutionary survival advantage as people would be insulin-flooded when eating fruit in the late summer and early fall, just as packing on weight for winter would be most advantageous. Since we never have the proverbial winter to lose the weight and restore leptin sensitivity, we are left starving and eating more all of the time.
People don't get fat because they are eating too many calories. People are eating too much because, physiologically, they are getting fat. Hormones drive the behavior.
> Because we have no way to accurately measure how many calories your body actually uses.
Of course we do!
Weigh yourself every week for months and months on end.
If you're gaining weight, you're eating more than you're using.
If you're more or less maintaining weight, you're in balance.
If you're losing weight, you're eating less than you're using.
And yes, absolutely your body will adjust and adapt and these values will change. That's why we re-adjust and re-evaluate constantly - in fact weekly!
The entire point is to lose weight, which by very definition will reduce your calorie requirements, which will then require you to again eat less calories, which again will make you lose weight,
which.......
> This is why an "eat this, not that" approach works a lot better than an "eat less calories than you use" approach.
They're actually the same approach, one is just at a lower level of abstraction than the other. You're "eat this, not that" is basically just saying "avoid things that are very calorie dense, and as a result you will reduce your calorie intake". Of course, if I eat a lot of "this", I'm still going to put on weight, so your advice is too abstract to always work.
AND to include the "emotional" part, telling me I can't eat chocolate cake or have a beer sucks and it's too hard. I'm never going to sustain that for the rest of my life. Everyone slips up.
>>Of course we do! Weigh yourself every week for months and months on end.
Weight fluctuates a lot in the short term, which means that it is a very unreliable measure of one's progress. Furthermore...
>>The entire point is to lose weight
No, the entire point is to lose fat, and retain lean body mass. A simple scale will not show you these details, and even the fancy fat-measuring scales are grossly inaccurate.
>>Your "eat this, not that" is basically just saying "avoid things that are very calorie dense, and as a result you will reduce your calorie intake".
Nope. I don't have a problem with calorie-dense foods, because they keep me full for a longer period of time. What I do have a problem with is sugars, starches and simple processed foods. You know, things that spike insulin levels and increase both fat gain in the short term and risk of diabetes in the long term. The fact that these often times appear in calorie-dense foods does not mean that calorie-density itself is the problem. That's why an "eat this, not that approach" is useful: it can shed light on these types of discrepancies, as opposed to hiding them behind the calorie layer of abstraction. And ironically, keeping a simple list of foods to eat and foods to avoid is a lot easier than obsessively counting calories day in day out.
I have lost 35 lbs in the past six weeks or so. I could not have done it without my simple, digital scale. After using several methods of measuring progress, I realized that the scale is the only tool that isn't horribly prone to operator fluctuations in use. You can keep your calipers, your body tape, your impedance scale, I'll keep my scale, thank you very much.
> No, the entire point is to lose fat, and retain lean body mass.
This is a foolish thing to try to accomplish, as it's impossible to measure your progress and be sure that what you are doing is effective, unless you have your own underwater weighing device or DEXA pod or whatever.
You can effectively have one of two goals, gaining lean mass, or losing weight. It's pointless to gain lean mass unless you've lost enough weight that you'll be able to see the results of gaining mass. When you lose weight, you will also lose a certain amount of lean mass, which you can gain back easily, at least easier than it was to lose the weight.
My favored method for losing weight is to combine intermittent fasting, calorie restriction and carb restriction. I eat a small meal once a day. The other day I had a pub burger without fries and water, that was a rare meal where I had significant carbs. I also do light exercise consisting of a daily 2-3 mile walk. I've gone from 205 to 170 so far, and intend on continuing until I hit 160-155. I trick hunger with small spoonfuls of almond butter.
It sucks for energy and mood but it's fantastic for weight loss. I suspect the energy and mood part are largely mental. What I love about it is that I'm literally melting away years of neglect in the space of a few weeks. I didn't start out so strict, I used to eat a lot more calories in my one meal, around 1300-1500. Now it's closer to 5-900.
At some point I will stop starving myself and start lifting again. I used to try to do both, lose weight and gain lean mass, but without tools I could use to make sure I was on the right track I just gained muscle and kept the fat.
It doesn't even tell you that very well. If you are losing muscle, you are likely becoming less healthy. The scale is an awful tool for measuring health.
I think you've lost track of the big picture here. Measuring against the goal of weight loss is the point. In absolute terms it's a terribly inaccurate way of finding calorie use, but in diet-management terms it's perfectly sufficient. Despite a multi-pound margin of error, given several weeks of data you'll have more accurate information on net calories than on income.
Weight loss is hardly as simple as learning to count, assuming we're talking about actually doing something and not just planning for it. You seem to assume very little capacity for learning basic nutritional facts and very high capacity for sticking to a diet (willpower). I would argue most people are in the opposite position.
Would you lose more weight drinking two liters of coca-cola a day or eating the equivalent total calories in a high-fat protein rich food?
I would think your body would burn through the straight sugar calories much faster than the protein. But consuming all the sodium in the coca cola product might cause water retention.
Toss up. But most if not everyone's diet will never be that one-dimensional.
You completed omitted any impact that hormones will have on this equation.
The sugar you eat in Coke is going to send your blood sugar / insulin levels to sky rocket. High insulin levels cause fat storage. You could "lose" weight, but your body composition (or body fat percentage) certainly won't improve.
Insulin levels cause fat storage in order to lower blood sugar levels. If all you did was chug two 2-liter bottles of Coke, you'd temporarily go through lipogenesis, then go back through lipolysis to pull the stored calories back out for use later in the day.
Insulin doesn't magically make you fatter if you're consuming the same number of calories. A high protein/fat diet is more satiating and you consume less calories, but insulin is not evil.
Most people when they say they want to lose "weight" meant they want to lose "fat" and improve body composition.
Focusing solely on calories in / calories out omits any effects hormones have on fat burning / storage.
In your scenario - yes - if someone drank 2000 calories of coke and that's it, they might not get "fatter", but that's not how real life works.
99/100 times, that person who drank 2000 calories of coke is going to be starving shortly afterwards and isn't going to simply "fast" and let lipolysis take place. Instead, because sugar causes ridiculous cravings - they're probably going to crack and down another 1,000 calories of another carb intensive, sugary food ('cause cravings) until their calorie intake exceeds their calories used and their hormone levels are thoroughly trashed.
I like hypothetical scenarios as much as the next guy, but focusing strictly on calories in / calories out and ignoring hormone imbalances, cravings and other real-life factors are typically symptoms of someone who reads lots of books, but hasn't has too many real life case studies to work with.
No, we aren't arguing semantics. You're arguing semantics now that you have a lot of qualifiers on the statement you made earlier.
Your initial assertion was that high insulin levels cause fat storage (really, insulin causes blood glucose to drop, either through glycogen uptake in muscle tissue or lipogenesis and glucagon causes it to rise via the opposite mechanisms) in response to the prompt:
> Would you lose more weight drinking two liters of coca-cola a day or eating the equivalent total calories in a high-fat protein rich food?
I'm sorry that my made-up scenario isn't the same as your made-up scenario, which now has a ton of conditions and it suddenly "real life".
Yes, in real life, someone who consumes 2000 liquid calories is going to be hungry. As is someone who consumes 2000 calories of bread. Or donuts. Or anything else which is digested rapidly (and this is exactly why I brought up satiation).
But this isn't a "hormone imbalance." This is, in fact, absolutely typical and ideal action from hormones doing their job, unless your made-up-real-world scenario now also involves people with insulin resistance. Because 2000 calories is 2000 calories, and while studies show that the normal metabolic range is +/- 200kcal from calculated bmr, "hormones" are not some wild card. Men eat more (higher bmr, testosterone promotes liposysis and better nutrient partitioning), but a man or a woman doesn't go through massive hormonal changes on a regular basis, and consumption of an equivalent number of calories from different macronutrient groups can be expected to have about the same effects on composition (unless it's all protein, in which case you get to worry about dying).
If you want to discuss hypothetical scenarios (2000 calories of sugar vs equivalent total calories in a high-fat protein rich food), discuss them. But don't change your stance when someone questions you.
The problem with people who do things like drink 2 litres of coke, is that they become insulin resistant. Meaning they produce a lot more insulin than required, as thier bodies ability to gauge how much insulin is thrown out of wack (by the spikes in sugar).
Now when you have something that only requires 2units of insulin, your body outputs 4 (because of insulin resistance) and now fat cells are being created when they shouldn't be. (Because insulin is what regulates fat storage, i.e insulin takes the sugar out of your blood by shoving it in a fat cell).
Keep this up, and you eventually end up diabetic.
You are both saying the two different sides to the same coin.
EDIT:
To be clear - If you have regulated insulin (by controlling carbs and suger) you will gain less fat (but lose it normally). If you starve your body of those sugars in the first place you will lose more than you gain (regardless of insulin). This is why WeightWatchers works, and why Excercising your arse off works, and also why Paleo/Atkins/Low-carb works.
I can't reply to your comment & don't want this to turn into a flamewar, but we're essentially saying the same thing.
Calories in > calories out can "work", but it's not an efficient way to address body composition - especially with people new to nutrition because of the hunger / craving factor that invariably comes up.
Also - continually drinking 2000 calories of coke is going to lead to chronically high blood sugar / insulin levels and will degrade their insulin sensitivity over time.
You have to eat zero fat on a sustained basis and absolutely gorge on sugar to make lipogenesis happen at all. The body can store pounds of sugar as glycogen. In humans lipogenesis is an extremely inefficient process that burns up nearly 30% of the calories in conversion.
Zero fat, high sugar diets have been a proven way to get lean for decades. If you put people on a very low fat diet with a good amount of protein (say 90 grams), you can allow them to eat sugar and starch ad libitum and they will get lean. No need to count calories.
Humans are very inefficient at converting carbohydrate to fat; we don’t do it under normal conditions. (The cost for this conversion is 30 percent of the calories consumed.) Subjects overfed large amounts of simple sugars under experimental laboratory conditions, however, will convert a small amount of carbohydrate to fat. For example, both trim and obese women fed 50 percent more calories than they usually ate in a day, along with an extra 3 ½ ounces (135 grams) of refined sugar, produced less than 4 grams of fat daily (less than 1/8 ounce). That’s just 36 extra calories stored as fat per day. You’d have to overeat all of those extra calories and table sugar every day for nearly 4 months just to gain 1 pound of extra body fat.
6 . Hellerstein MK. De novo lipogenesis in humans: metabolic and regulatory aspects. Eur J Clin Nutr. 1999 Apr; 53 Suppl 1: S53-65. 7 . Acheson KJ, Schutz Y, Bessard T, et al. Glycogen storage capacity and de novo lipogenesis during massive carbohydrate overfeeding in man. Am J Clin Nutr. 1988 Aug; 48 (2): 240-47. 8 . Minehira K, Bettschart V, Vidal H, et al. Effect of carbohydrate overfeeding on whole body and adipose tissue metabolism in humans. Obes Res. 2003 Sep; 11 (9): 1096-1103. 9 . McDevitt RM, Bott SJ, Harding M, et al. De novo lipogenesis during controlled overfeeding with sucrose or glucose in lean and obese women. Am J Clin Nutr. 2001 Dec; 74 (6): 737-46. 10 . Dirlewanger M, di Vetta V, Guenat E, et al. Effects of short-term carbohydrate or fat overfeeding on energy expenditure and plasma leptin concentrations in healthy female subjects. Int J Obes Relat Metab Disord. 2000 Nov; 24 (11): 1413-18. 11 . McDevitt RM , Bott SJ, Harding M, et al. De novo lipogenesis during controlled overfeeding with sucrose or glucose in lean and obese women. Am J Clin Nutr. 2001 Dec; 74 (6): 737-46. 12 . Danforth E Jr. Diet and obesity. Am J Clin Nutr. 1985 May; 41 (5 Suppl): 1132-45. 13 . Hellerstein MK. No common energy currency: de novo lipogenesis as the road less traveled. Am J Clin Nutr. 2001 Dec; 74 (6): 707-8.
"Eucaloric replacement of dietary fat by CHO does not induce hepatic DNL to any substantial degree. Similarly, addition of CHO to a mixed diet does not increase hepatic DNL to quantitatively important levels, as long as CHO energy intake remains less than total energy expenditure (TEE)."
You need to read more than your confirmation bias-laden sources if you believe these things. Stop reading Taubes and pick up Aragon and McDonald. The best way to actually learn the truth is to read something that runs counter to your viewpoint and analyze it.
> The best way to actually learn the truth is to read something that runs counter to your viewpoint and analyze it.
The best way to learn the truth is to experiment for yourself and see what actually happens.
I'm always willing to read counterpoints - but I've yet to see anything that counteracts the fact that high insulin levels prevent the fat burning process from taking place. Insulin isn't evil and if you time it right - it can actually be quite beneficial, but chronically elevated insulin levels are a problem for people trying to burn fat.
I'm happy to read any links you want to send my way. In the meantime, I suggest you take a look at John Kiefer's work at http://body.io to see how your hormone levels can have a bigger effect on your overall body composition than straight calories.
>body composition (or body fat percentage) certainly won't improve.
It most certainly would improve. He might have a better result with a more reasonable diet, but he would still see a significant reduction in his body fat percentage if he stayed on the diet long enough.
> I would think your body would burn through the straight sugar calories much faster than the protein. But consuming all the sodium in the coca cola product might cause water retention.
It is more complex then the situation you presented.
Sugar is literally a poison, it's the reason why unchecked type 1 diabetes leads to deterioration of various organs. The body knows this but also runs on the stuff, so it tries to keep it at a sane level that does the least amount of damage to the body while still providing enough energy to run.
When blood sugar spikes, the body starts storing in the liver, when that storage is used up, it starts converting the sugar into cholesterol(and fat). Insulin is the primary hormone involved in this mechanism. So the body starts storing the energy in alternative non-immediately usable forms not because it runs out of storage and an excess of sugar in the blood is extremely harmful.
Protein based or complex carbs which convert to sugar interaction with this bodily hysteresis differently. It does not cause the blood sugar spike and the associated insulin surge.
Using a completely different line of logic, it's trivial to say that energy in / energy used is the dominating factor in weight gain or loss, when you examine people that eat a lot and don't gain weight regardless of exercise/fitness related factors, vs those that eat moderate portions with moderate exercise but nevertheless do not lose weight.
In short, there are a lot of factors involved here.
"a substance that is capable of causing the illness or death of a living organism when introduced or absorbed."
Water can be a poison if it wants to be too, however, sugar is orders of magnitude more poisonous than water.
Sugar is not a substance like water in which "hey if you drink enough water, more than most people can even if they were trying to, you can die." It's more like, the body is constantly struggling to keep blood sugar levels at a level that won't kill it, and there are great many metabolic disorders in which it fails to do this, and dies.
Also, there are diets which can simply overwhelm the body's ability to regulate blood sugar levels, some which lead to the body dying, see: type 2 diabetes.
If you count up the premature deaths(looking at human-life-years lost is probably most informative) associated with type 2 diabetes and heart disease related to sugar-induced metabolic disorders, one might be surprised that the poison we call sugar may have one of the highest kill counts of all known poisons. And to top it off, it happens to be a poison that we are, by an unfortunate evolutionary happenstance, generally addicted to. Oh yeah, it's also supported and pushed by multiple billion dollar industries with significant lobbying power.
If I drink a litre of water in one sitting, I feel queasy and unwell. This is "the illness of a living organism". I've done it before on hot days - it's not like it's hard to drink a litre, most people can do it easily. I have been poisoned by water, using that definition, but most would say that using the term that way is needlessly pedantic.
Are you aware that just like the body regulates sugar, it also regulates water? The body tries to maintain the right level of water, and it's easy to show: drink a lot. In short order, you'll be pissing a lot, to get rid of the excess water. People that have their ability to regulate water inhibited also show a lot of illnesses as a result - in terms of demographics, this can be seen in cultures where women aren't allowed to go to the toilet during the day. Sugar doesn't get magical, unique treatment in biology - water even has its own organ system that is primarily devoted to managing water content. And if you want to get socio-political about it (unsure why this means it's a poison...), we're also addicted to water and nations go to war over fresh water supplies... something that is pretty rare for corn or cane fields.
The point is that labeling sugar as a poison is being simplistic, and the picture is far more complex than that when discussing diet.
>I've never seen sugar implicated as a cause of type II diabetes.
Sugar has been implicated as a cause of type II diabetes by many people [1]. Whether they are right or not is up for debate.
Even my great grandmother, born in 1915, used to warn that too much sugar would cause diabetes. According to her this was conventional wisdom when she was young.
And my grandmother said dietary oil causes acne. Conventional wisdom isn't science. If it were, all science would ever do is confirm conventional wisdom.
I'm not arguing conventional wisdom is evidence that sugar causes diabetes.
The GP said he or she had never seen sugar implicated as a cause, like that was something he'd never heard of--when in fact it was and is a common belief. Whether that belief is true isn't something I'm arguing.
There is a new documentary called Fed Up, produced by Katie Couric, that I'm pretty sure will say that sugar is the most likely cause of the diabetes epidemic. I have it on preorder.... out Sept 9th.
No, it really isn't. "Sugar" is not a poison. "A very large dose of sugar" is a poison. It's a very important distinction. Small or moderate amounts of sugar do not cause problems, and in fact give the organism more energy to work with. If you take the position that the substance is a poison simply because it's possible to hurt yourself if you take ridiculous amounts of it, then the term 'poison' becomes meaningless. Everything then becomes a poison, and it's then completely redundant to label something a poison.
Besides, sugar is the primary fuel for your brain; without sugar, we don't exist. It's a funny sort of poison that is necessary for our existence.
I'm not saying it's useful to call sugar a poison, and I don't generally refer to it as one. I'm saying it fits the definitions I've seen of poison, and that makes it literally a poison.
> Besides, sugar is the primary fuel for your brain; without sugar, we don't exist. It's a funny sort of poison that is necessary for our existence.
Arsenic, along with several other low-dose poisons, is also necessary for our existence[0]. Do you disagree it's a poison?
Let's stop being silly. No substance is or is not a poison. You have to talk about concentration and mass relative to everyday exposure when you claim something is poison.
I know however that if I ate 1900 calories in sugar a day, let's say by drinking two 2-liter bottles of Coke, I would be constantly hungry. Eating 1900 calories in high-fat high-protein food however leaves me more than satiated.
I think by focusing on the arithmetic in isolation you're making dieting much more difficult than it need be.