>“This is clearly a lie. Gaining 34 lb in 28 days requires a caloric surplus of 4300 calories per day, so for a guy his size, he must have eaten 7000 calories a day. He expects me to believe that he dropped 4% in bodyfat as a result of eating 7000 calories? …” I took a big swig of Malbec and read the blog comment again. Ah, the Internet. How far we haven’t come. It was amusing, and one of hundreds of similar comments on this particular blog post, but the fact remained: I had gained 34 pounds of muscle, lost 4 pounds of fat, and decreased my total cholesterol from 222 to 147, all in 28 days, without anabolics or statins like Lipitor. The entire experiment had been recorded by Dr. Peggy Plato, director of the Sport and Fitness Evaluation Program at San Jose State University, who used hydrostatic weighing tanks, medical scales, and a tape measure to track everything from waist circumference to bodyfat percentage. My total time in the gym over four weeks? Four hours.3 Eight 30-minute workouts. The data didn’t lie. But isn’t weight loss or gain as simple as calories in and calories out?
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>Scenario #1: Two male identical twins eat the exact same meals for 30 days. The only difference: one of the subjects just finished a strong course of antibiotics and now lacks sufficient good bacteria for full digestion. Will the body composition outcomes be the same? Of course not.
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>The creator of the “calorie” as we know it, 19th-century chemist Wilbur Olin Atwater, did not have the technology that we have today. He incinerated foods. Incineration does not equal human digestion; eating a fireplace log will not store the same number of calories as burning one will produce. Tummies have trouble with bark, as they do with many things.
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>Scenario #2: Three females of the same race, age, and body composition each consume 2,000 calories daily for 30 days. Subject 1 consumes nothing but table sugar, subject 2 consumes nothing but lean chicken breast, and subject 3 consumes nothing but mayonnaise (2,000 calories is just 19.4 tablespoons, if you’d care to indulge).
Will the body composition outcomes be the same? Of course not. The hormonal responses to carbohydrates (CHO), protein, and fat are different. There is no shortage of clinical studies to prove that beef calories do not equal bourbon calories. One such study, conducted by Kekwick and Pawan, compared three groups put on calorically equal (isocaloric) semistarvation diets of 90% fat, 90% protein, or 90% carbohydrate. Though ensuring compliance was a challenge, the outcomes were clearly not at all the same:
1,000 cals. at 90% fat = weight loss of 0.9 lbs. per day
1,000 cals. at 90% protein = weight loss of 0.6 lbs. per day
1,000 cals. at 90% carbohydrate = weight gain of 0.24 lbs. per day
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Timothy Ferriss. The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman. Crown Publishing Group.
The claims are interesting (if true) but I’m not sure what it adds or changes in regards to how we think about calories or weight loss. And does Ferriss’ n=1 experiment trump other metabolic ward trails that show limited differences or even opposite conclusions about calorie matched diets? And that’s without even getting into the fact that even really well-run nutrition research is plagued by small sample sizes, homogenous participant populations, and doesn’t necessarily translate well to the real world, where humans are also subject to the psychological and sociological factors that influence their food choices, as well as the well-known reality that accurate food tracking is just really, really difficult to achieve.
I’m also not sure what this author gets out of hypotheticals and citing research from the 1950’s and earlier. I think it is fairly well established that lower carb diets produce more weight loss in the short term (usually due to loss of water and lean body mass, not fat), but calorie matched, do not fare any better than other diets in the long run.
While CICO is over-simplified, the basic idea of energy balance still exists. Right now the most practical way we can estimate energy expenditure and intake is to use predictive equations (based on height, weight, activity level) and calorie tracking (with all its flaws) and then adjust based on enjoyment/sustainability and outcomes. If someone is finding more success with a high fat, low carb diet, great. If a higher carb plant-based pattern works better for someone else, awesome.
In theory, the energy balance equation sould include things like measures of body composition, gut microbiome, macronutrient distribution, fibre content, method of food preparation, sleep quality and duration, stress, genetics, dieting history, medical conditions or medications, frequency and timing of meals, NEAT, and more, but we don’t have enough research to put reliable estimates on those variables, and it’s not realistic for the average person to measure all of these things in a meaningful way, anyway. What else is there to discuss?
Weight gain isn’t just directly proportional to energy intake. Sam Feltham did something similar to what is mentioned in OP. He ate over 5000 calories per day for 3 weeks, 3 different times, each with a different diet composition, but with equal energy intake and exercise. His weight and body composition changes were quite different across the different diets. You can see it on his Youtube channel, “Smash The Fat.”
If that’s not “controlled” enough, here’s a rodent study in which one group consumed about four times the energy of the other groups, but all groups weighed about the same:
https://dmsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1758-5996-2-43
Someone might complain that this is rodents and not humans, but the usual argument that weight gain is proportional to energy intake is to say “Well it’s just thermodynamics!” Thermodynamics applies to rodents, too, which means the situation is more complicated.
Yeah a calorie is just a unit of measurement, it isn’t an indication of composition. Like how a mile is unit of measurement, but it tells you nothing about how long it could take you to walk if that mile was uphill, or downhill, or on mud.
\> The hormonal responses to carbohydrates (CHO), protein, and fat are different. There is no shortage of clinical studies to prove that beef calories do not equal bourbon calories.
This very obviously true.
There’s also confusion regarding hypothyroidism. I first ran my panels when I was eating well and somehow gaining weight without weight lifting. I worked with a dietician to make some food changes. Yet I still see that if I enjoy carbs one week, I can lose progress.
I’m still adjusting my medication to be on the right levo level. It’s super frustrating that some people can go have a burger. Yet I know if I do, I will be counting calories for the next week.
I did experiments on myself along these lines and concluded, at least for my body, that not all calories are equal. It was a bit more than a decade ago so I don’t have the data anymore. I did sustained diets for 6 months of different types, and found that not only the effects on weight were different, but also things like cholesterol levels, glucose levels, and blood pressure.
The best overall was Intermittent fasting. I was able to increase calories quite a bit while producing a net weight loss. Best Vitals of all diets. Low fasting glucose, non-existent triglycerides, low LDL’s, high testosterone. Was accused of taking steroids by the physician given the results.
The worse was the high sugar, high fat diet. Couldn’t sustain this one for 6 months but managed to decrease my calories and still gain weight. Vitals were somewhat alarming to the physician.
The results for vegan were not great in any metric. Higher Cholesterol and higher fasting glucose than IF or Keto. Difficult to maintain for 6 months.
Keto diet results were comparable to IF. Was also able to increase calories and lose weight. It was extremely difficult to maintain for 6 months.
My ‘regular’ diet (about 50/30/20) was worse than the others other than the high sugar diet.
You can gain 30 pounds in one day. Of course a ton of it would be water weight. If you go watch those guys that have massive cheat days like Eric the electric on YouTube, he’ll weigh himself before and after he eats a ton of food in a 24 hour period. In some instances he’s gained 30 pounds. It’s water retention from eating carb crap. Of course over the next few days the weight drops back down.
The guy is a liar, but, his ‘scenarios’ aren’t wrong. It matters how much your insulin rises from what you eat, which is a function of glycemic load / index. It affects the amount of fat storage. But the simple truth is if you’re eating a LOT, like he was, and only working out 30 minutes, and you’re putting on weight as well. You can’t be losing fat at the same time. Unless you’re taking some banned substances