this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
297 points (97.4% liked)
Asklemmy
43847 readers
696 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Extreme focus on sports, wearing sportswear (both men and women do this), always “exercising”, mentioning calories on a menu card (a Caesar salad contains 1200 calories!).
An obesity crisis will do that
I think this is a good thing. I would like to keep track of the calories I consume. (Do I? Nah, I just eat whatever looks healthy)
calories are an arbitrary metric anyways, wood has a ton of calories but you can’t digest it, so they’re a very vague guideline at the very best, and misleading at worst
They're still helpful in sorting out a 600 calorie meal that's going to keep someone on track to lose weight versus a 1200 calorie meal that is going to make them gain weight. Even if it's not exact, it's a useful guideline.
There’s not really much actual solid research which demonstrates that calorie-counting is an effective method of weight loss.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/stop-counting-calories
Moreover, there’s not really much solid research which demonstrates that weight loss should even be the focus of improving our health. People who are considered “overweight” based on their BMI score (which is another completely arbitrary and unhelpful metric) should not be focusing on weight loss.
The thing that people should be focusing on is simply any type of regular physical activity. It doesn’t particularly matter much what that activity is, it’s far more effective to choose an activity you enjoy.
Yeah. No.
As much as science knows anything, it knows that having too much body fat is bad for your health. Even the article you just linked states weight loss as its goal.
BMI is a crappy measure of body fat, fair; bodybuilders and athletes often have very high BMIs while having very little fat, but it's not "arbitrary" either. Doesn't matter much, since we have tools to measure body fat percentage directly. No need to use BMI at all.
Also note that article says to eat less "processed" food, but doesn't explain what that actually means. Is bread processed? How about a salad? How much dressing do I have to add to lettuce before it counts as "processed"? No answers here.
There's something to be said for the caloric availability of any given food, but it's pretty silly to say that you shouldn't consider them at all. People who are trying to lose weight need some measure of how much they're eating so they can be sure they're eating less. Until we have a better one, calories aren't going anywhere.
As for exercise, it is definitely important, but it simply isn't realistic to out-train a bad diet. It's not at all reasonable to say that exercise is more important for weight loss, and anyone who's actually lost a ton of weight will tell you as much.
Agreed on BMI but you're missing the point on calories. If people want to lose weight the simplest way is to count calories. Run a caloric deficit, lose weight. Doesn't get any more simple than that. It doesn't matter if it's not 100% accurate if it works.