Nutrition Education – Won’t Help You Lose Weight
On yesterdays post James mentioned that he might want to go to college to study nutrition because he enjoys learning about it.
No need to go back to school to learn how to lose weight
The important thing James said was that he “enjoys learning about it”. This is probably the only reason to ever study nutrition.
As of 2010 north american (and most industrialized countries) are experiencing the highest rates of overweight and obesity in recorded history…and yet we’ve never ‘known’ more about nutrition and metabolism than we currently do. In other words researching and learning more about nutrition isn’t doing us any good at all with our ability to lose weight. If anything an overall increase in knowledge about nutrition can only be correlated to weight GAIN.
On the other hand studying nutrition isn’t going to help you lose weight if that is your goal. I’ve had many professors in nutrition who were overweight. Knowing about biology and food doesn’t make it any easier to apply even the most basic concept of calories in vs out. In fact a degree in nutrition might actually confuse you more than anything.
Weight loss is just a matter of calories and some degree of self discipline, planning and personal responsibility…none of this is taught in a nutrition degree.
Just to be clear, here is a list of all the things you DON’T need to know about to successfully lose weight:
You don’t need to know:
what insulin is or what it does
anything about blood glucose
what the glycemic index is or the “gi’ of any food
what a carbohydrate is
what a protein is
what fat is
what paleolithic people ate
what your blood type is
the difference between vegetarian and vegan
where the egg whites are in the grocery store
the ratio of fat/carbs/protein in any food
anything at all about your ‘metabolism’
any superfoods you’ve might have heard of
what anyone else eats
…and I’m sure there are dozens of other useless pieces of information that just get in the way of your weight loss success…
As of 2010 north american (and most industrialized countries) are experiencing the highest rates of overweight and obesity in recorded history…and yet we’ve never ‘known’ more about nutrition and metabolism than we currently do. In other words researching and learning more about nutrition isn’t doing us any good at all with our desire to lose weight. If anything an overall increase in knowledge about nutrition can only be correlated to weight GAIN.
All you need to know is how many calories you’re eating and how it makes you look. If you’re not losing weight then you need to eat less total calories…that’s it.
If your stalled in your weight loss progress I suggest you unsubscribe from any email newsletter lists that preach about the importance anything in the above list.
Get a handle on your total calories and you’ll be on your way.
John
22 Responses to “Nutrition Education – Won’t Help You Lose Weight”
Leave a Reply
Blogs
Getting in your best shape for women
Building the perfect body for men
The most flexible diet you will ever find-
February 13th, 2010 at 11:46 am
I like to know about these things for the sake of ‘extra knowledge’ but in no way do i want to be an expert of the feild. It’s just interesting. As SOON as the whole calories in and out thing sifted through my mind it just hit me like a huge reality check “Well Duh”. It just makes so much obvious sense at any angle you look at it. I just wish more people could get it through their heads and DO something about it instead of always being that floating goal without a deadline or endgame. Im nearly at my endgame for weightloss so who can question me if im the one getting results?
L
February 13th, 2010 at 12:33 pm
John, i agree with everything you say, but what about LEPTIN?, it is proven that when levels of Leptin drop, your body starts to shut down or slow some of its non-critical functions (that is why anorexic women, or female bodybuilders stop having theire periods) to save energy, this slows weight loss. Thats why some experts recommend the carb refeed, to increase leptin and keep on losing weight. Whats your opinion on this?
February 13th, 2010 at 12:44 pm
My experience has been I can consume more calories on a low-carb diet — compared to a SAD diet — and lose weight. Dr. Eades gives an interesting explanation: http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/weight-loss/ac-metabolic-advantage-dismemberment/
February 13th, 2010 at 1:07 pm
John, loving this post!
Thank you so much for alleviating the stress factor of weight and food.
Haha because when really it just comes down to just that; its food.
I’m still struggling with not worrying about the whole avoiding carbs/sugar as a means to loosing weight and just enjoying it once in awhile.
Are you sure eating things like ice-cream, cereal, pasta, pizza will be okay as long as there is a calorie deficit?! Doesn’t a woman’s body work differently oppose to a male’s body.
Therefore storing fat more easily in the thigh and stomach region…. Still trying to work past the calorie in vs. calorie out mantra.
Thanks!
February 13th, 2010 at 1:17 pm
This is a quote from Brad Pilon’s email:
“Before you study Nutrition, food is food and drink is drink;
while you are studying nutrition, food is no longer food and drink
is no longer drink; but once you have had enlightenment, food is
once again food and drink is again drink.”
I totally agree with it from my own experience. Once you start studying nutrition you begin to see food as a combination of carbs, proteins and fats and you no longer enjoy it because you are always thinking about having the exact number of grams of each component. But eventually you realise that most of that knowledge is unnecessary and that the best way to enjoy food is to think of as just “food”.
February 13th, 2010 at 1:31 pm
Eades claims that the “metabolic advantage” of low carb is only 100-300 calories. Pretty paltry even if it does exist. I think I’d rather eat 100-300 calories less of what I really like to eat.
I don’t read a lot of newsletters, but I read a lot of blogs. I unsubscribed from a whole bunch of them several months ago (I read everything from my Google Reader,) and I unsubscribed from a few more recently. I think I’m due for another “house cleaning.” So much of this stuff is either confusing, contradictory, arouses counterproductive emotional responses, or simply takes too much time.
February 13th, 2010 at 2:08 pm
Glad to see my comment didn’t go unnoticed, haha. Anyway, I guess what John is saying in this post is that from a weight loss perspective you don’t need to know anything about the details of nutrition, because it doesn’t necessarily help you accomplish your goal. If you read my comment in the previous post you would know that I don’t have to lose weight or anything, I just enjoy learning about this stuff, to me it’s fun seeing how everything fits together and maybe having the chance to discover something new. But like John said you don’t need to know the details of how everything works in order to successfully lose weight, the fact of the matter is you’ll lose weight if you have a caloric deficit. It doesn’t matter what your gender is, what your blood type is, or what the gi of the food you’re eating is. It has and always will be calories in vs. calories out. Remember what Bruce Lee once said, “It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.” So there is no need to burden yourself with extra knowledge that doesn’t help you accomplish your goal.
February 13th, 2010 at 2:17 pm
John and I make the argument in this weeks AL podcast that the only thing really necessary on food labels for the vast majority of people is just total calories.
For most people, going simpler is and cleaning house of unnecessary into may just be what the “doctor ordered”
B
February 13th, 2010 at 2:25 pm
Nutrition Education Wont Help You Lose Weight…
Dienting and Weight Loss – Learning about nutrition doesn’t help you lose weight, if it did there wouldn’t be any overweight professors or educators….
February 13th, 2010 at 2:36 pm
Good post again, wanted to ask how can you track the calories when I dont know the amount of the food? Lets see a slice of pizza or any food eaten in a restaurant?
by the way I use ESE this year 2 fast per week and eat what I want (or better said I can) just not so much, and lost about 10 pounds. Hard to convience myself this wasnt all muscle lol. But I trust You and 15 pounds more to have a six pack. Or a skinny fat outfit we see
February 13th, 2010 at 4:03 pm
Grace,
There is no difference in a womans or mans body as far as gaining or losing weight is concerned (expect of the location of the greatest fat deposits…ie: men tend to store it around our waist, women tend to store around hips/thighs…but that is just an average)
It’s just calories.
JB
February 13th, 2010 at 4:03 pm
Darin,
This might be true, but the ‘weight’ is most likely coming from a reduction in water retention and not a burning of fat.
JB
February 13th, 2010 at 4:04 pm
Mike,
You’ve got your facts incorrect about leptin.
JB
February 13th, 2010 at 4:13 pm
I probably already know your answer to this but if I drop my calroies intake from 2000 to 1500 to lose weight, then why I am I hungry most of the time? Is it because i am not getting enough protein and fat to fill me up or is that my body just isn’t use to 1500 calories a day? I have a feeling its the second reason becaause my body just isn’t use to it yet.
A lot of Paleo eaters (clean eaters is what I call them) use the hunger aspect as their trump card saying that simply cutting calories will not work because you will stay hungry all the time. Meats, fruits, and veggies fill you up faster. This is the aspect that I get hung up on. Your thoughts.
February 13th, 2010 at 4:40 pm
Al,
You’ve just asked the $64,000 question. ‘Hunger’ (our desire to eat) is the most puzzling thing to measure. It’s clear that some of us will eat far beyond what we need to sustain our lean body mass, while others seem to be perfectly satisfied to eat just enough food to be lean and never gain weight. This is a very complex issue that has genetic, social, psychological, emotional and environmental factors associated with it. It really encompasses your entire life.
Unfortunately this is the personal challenge part that we all must face. My first guess is that most of us seem to feel hungry enough to want to eat up to our BMR and to compensate for our daily activity levels…this seems like a reasonable place to start. In other words, if you burn 2000 calories today, you’re probably going to feel moments of hunger throughout the day until you’ve eating 2000 calories. But this is by no means how it really works, this is just the starting point of the discussion.
From there it gets very complex adding in emotional factors, environmental factors, habits, addiction to sugar and fat, pleasure stimulus of highly palatable foods, the calorie density of the food, and on and on.
This is by no means a simple one to figure out, and I would think that it changes as we change personally, and as our relationships and our environment change.
This is the biggest and toughest question of them all when it comes to nutrition. If you had the definitive answer that worked for everyone you would be a billionaire.
JB
February 13th, 2010 at 5:11 pm
Difficult to track calories in foods that don’t provide a breakdown…there are some online databases that can help.
My other suggestion is to assume that there are more calories in any food than is suggested on a database or the label…this way you’re always erring on the side of less than more.
JB
February 13th, 2010 at 8:18 pm
On the day’s i go light (mon-fri) i’ll skip all meals until dinner time but i’ll have a hot milk drink of some sort (usually bit of nesquick or a black tea) in the middle of the day. It’s the one thing that seems to supress my hunger emotion. If i eat every meal (breakfast, 10 min break at work, lunch and dinner) then i find im never satisfyed and wouldn’t be hard to already be over my BMR. I’ll then have dinner at like 7pm then a hot drink before bed again. That’s me personally, for some reason hot milk supresses my hunger for a long time. Im also pretty use to the hungry feeling and it usually goes away after a few hours of working, keeping busy.
L
February 13th, 2010 at 8:20 pm
Just realised it makes me sound a bit like a baby. ONLY MILK WILL SATISFY
February 14th, 2010 at 8:09 am
Lately I have been having the hardest time losing the last 5lbs. I’m petie framed and work a desk job, so needless to say not much of a calorie burn. Anyhow, I feel that in order to lose the last 5lbs I need to drop my calories to 1400. Many nutritionists I’ve spoken to, say this is to low and I’ll slow my metabolism. They say I need to increase my calories a bit and lift heavy weights???
February 14th, 2010 at 11:39 am
John, you wrote about “addiction to sugar and fat, pleasure stimulus of highly palatable foods, the calorie density of the food.” That resonates. So you believe that there is such a thing as an addiction to sugar and fat? That’s interesting. Are there any specific strategies for this, or is it just about practicing self-control and eating less? Would it be appropriate to *temporarily* cut out certain problem foods until one can exert full control over the consumption of that food? (I don’t mean this in a “clean eating” way, just to be pragmatic about it. ) Or would it be better to attempt self-control and moderation with those foods from the very beginning? Self-control and moderation are great for the long haul, but if there really is an addiction of some sort, or just a really entrenched habit- almost to the point of being subconscious or unconscious- it may be easier at first to simply not eat those foods for a while, and reintroduce them later.
My over-eating can sometimes feel almost automatic, like I don’t even think about it. I eat a meal, then go back into the kitchen and eat more food, while only partially aware of what I’m doing. I don’t feel like I’m deciding to eat more, it just sorta happens. Afterwords I’m like, “crap, I did it again.” I’m definitely not making excuses. I take full responsibility for everything I eat. But there seem to be something going on underneath the surface. I dunno, just thinking out loud.
February 14th, 2010 at 2:45 pm
Jordan, your post could have been written by me. (And, I suspect, a lot of other people.) I will have an awesome day of eating and exercising “perfectly” and then eat an entire XL pizza. The thought process (such that it is) involved there is fascinating to me, and I’m CERTAIN it’s very similar to that of a drug addict’s or alcoholic’s. I will know (KNOW) that what I’m about to do will make me unhappy, but I do some kind of lightning-fast rationalization, literally in seconds, that makes it “OK” for me to eat that food.
It is truly fascinating to me. I’m not HUGELY overweight, but do need to lose about 40 lbs. I am absolutely certain that everything JB writes about is true, because I’ve tried every dumb gimmick that he’s debunked.
The missing link is how to deal with “hunger”. And I have NO idea what the answer is there.
February 14th, 2010 at 5:10 pm
I’m fascinated by it, too, Dave. Yeah, that rationalization is lightning-fast, absolutely. Like I said before, I really don’t feel like I’m “deciding” to eat more, at least not consciously. If I do, it’s so subtle that I can’t really remember making that decision. I hope I don’t sound too weird!
For me, it’s not so much “hunger” per se. Honestly, I eat too much to get hungry that often! I actually like hunger because it’s a good sign that I’m eating less. Now, if I were in a more constant calorie deficit, I may feel hungry more often, and that could be a concern. But in terms of my overweight, I wouldn’t really classify my problem as “hunger,” or even cravings really. I’m not sitting around thinking about what I want to eat. Occasionally, I’ll think about a particular dessert, but not that often. I just walk into the kitchen and eat. I would classify it more as “mindless eating,” deeply entrenched habits, maybe even a “trance-like” state of over-eating, if that isn’t too melodramatic. Lol. More and more, I’ve come to realize that overweight is simply a behavioral problem for me. I just have to keep hammering away at those bad behaviors.