The First Principle of weight loss

Being the guy my friends sometimes ask for training and dieting advice, I’m often confronted with some version of this question:

What should I eat if I want to lose weight?

This is the wrong way to think about it. The solution is not a category of food, it’s the amount of it. The question isn’t what, but how much.

Good food — Bad food

People have this idea in their heads that there are right and wrong foods. The reason they’re fat or overweight is because they are not eating enough of the “right” foods. If they just ate more of those, they’d lose weight[1]. The right foods are “healthy”. Healthy foods are what fitness people put on Instagram. Preferably things that are “natural”, raw, paleo, vegan, grass-fed and come in rustic brown paper packaging with the words local, farm, organic or some combination of those. If the foods have strange names and seem exotic, even better. These foods are eaten by healthy and fit people, surely that must be why they’re so fit?

If there were only a nice way to mix in some Açaí[asaí] berries in my coconut butter bulletproof coffee, I swear I’d burn that fat like an industrial oven.

Back to basics

Jokes aside, here's the right way to think about it: Don’t ask what should I eat? Ask, how much? Weight management is about calorie control. Anyone who has ever been successful in losing weight has succeeded because they achieved a sustained caloric deficit over time.

They can claim it was a specific diet, a training regimen, a guru, whatever. Those are just the tangible mechanisms or tactics they used to create a calorie deficit (whether they realize it or not). Low carb diets are not good tools for weight loss because carbs are evil, but because they make it possible for (some) people to create an energy deficit over enough time that they see results in the mirror. It’s NOT the carbs! It’s the frikkin’ calories! This is why people have been able to lose a lot of weight on pretty much any kind of diet conceivable — as long as it creates a calorie deficit. Yes, even Twinkies and McDonald’s.

Understanding energy balance, a.k.a the right amount of calories, is the First Principle of dieting.

Calories in — calories out

If you want to lose weight, you just have to figure out some way that enables you to create and maintain a calorie deficit for enough time that you’ll shed a few kilos. By thinking that you need to eat specific foods, in specific ways or at specific times you’re missing the point. You’re treating the symptoms, not the cause. The cause — the fundamentals — is a matter of energy balance. Understanding energy balance, a.k.a the right amount of calories, is the First Principle of dieting.

Everything else is based on that and anyone who is successful in losing, maintaining or gaining weight has been able to adjust their calorie consumption and expenditure in whichever direction that supports their goals. Anyone who has been unsuccessful in maintaining their weight and instead gained some over days, months or years has similarly subjected themselves to a caloric surplus, whether on purpose or not.

But what about genetics? What about insulin? Those things matter in so far as they modulate your energy needs, your calorie requirements; though they are secondary. It still comes down to thermodynamics in the end. What about people with a funky metabolism? (“I try to gain weight but no matter how much I eat it never works”.) Same thing there. You might, for genetic/behavioral/other reasons have a “fast” or “slow” metabolism, but you’re still beholden to an energy balance equation —it may just be heavily shifted in one direction or the other. In other words, the exact amount of energy (quantified as kcal) that you need to consume to maintain your current weight is a moving target. It can change depending on your body composition, your genetics, your appetite, whether or not you’re in a sustained calorie deficit, diseases, etc. But that’s not the same thing as calorie balance being unimportant. It just means that in practice, we rarely know exactly what our calorie needs are right now —but it still matters!

And in the end, we don’t need to know exactly. We can estimate our current energy requirements and test to see what they are from day to day or week to week. We do that by measuring our weight gain or weight loss. We see whether or not we’re on track, whether or not we have maintained a calorie deficit long enough to lose weight, after a few days or weeks. That’s name of the game.

Don’t make dieting harder than it has to be

There’s a huge psychological aspect to dieting and weight loss that shouldn’t be neglected, of course. But weight loss — or weight management in the broadest sense — is ultimately about energy balance and really nothing else that you need to worry about if you’re a normal person who wants to lose some weight.

This is not to say that it’s as easy as just counting calories. If that was the solution we would have fixed the obesity epidemic 70 years ago. Yet, on some level, I believe the solution does lie in teaching people about the fundamentals. Calories in, calories out. Most people make it harder for themselves because most people’s intuitions about food and weight loss are wrong. Having said that, it’s not really their fault. The solutions we’re provided by the fitness industry, and the information we’re bombarded with is really all about what to eat, or how or when. We’re told that high fat is the way to go, or low fat, or Paleo, or Mediterranean. No wonder we get confused. Though this isn’t very strange: To make money in the fitness industry, and perhaps even in healthcare, you have to provide people with a tangible solution, something they can buy or consume, something that “fixes” their problem. A diet, a pill, a gym card, pre-packaged meals, a recipe book, protein bars, personal training, etc. You won't sell many copies of a book that just tells people to eat less. But that’s really what they need to hear.

There’s too much misinformation and mysticism around weight loss. We have to start with the basic idea of managing our energy requirements, and then we can try to find out what the optimal way for us to do that is. That’s when we start talking about which diet to try. There’s a reason we call it “first principles”.

Footnotes

[1] Interestingly, in studies on eating behavior, it has been observed that people will perceive an unhealthy food item paired with a healthier food item as having fewer overall calories than just the unhealthy food item by itself — which is obviously impossible. For example, when ordering a hamburger you’d feel healthier if you also have a salad along with the burger, rather than just the burger itself. But no matter how few calories the salad has, the net amount will still be higher than just having the burger. In other words, and unless you’re suffering from severe nutrient deficiency, the salad is not gonna do anything for you.

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