by gspencley | 2025-10-28 18:12:07+00:00
After decades of struggling with weight, I no longer believe in the calorie religion. That's not to say that calories are useless or don't matter at all. I just think that calories matters a hell of a lot less than people are led to believe and that the idea of calories in vs calories burned is an oversimplification so extreme that it is useless, and can actually lead people to making bad diet decisions.

I have put myself on extremely restrictive diets where I was consuming 1,000 -> 1300 calories per day. After a few weeks of initial weight loss, the rate of loss completely plateaued and maintained for long enough that if what we have been told about calories were true, my lived experiences would contradict the laws of physics.

The human body is insanely complicated, and from what I've read in research, hormones seem to be the single biggest contributor to body composition and weight management. And for what it's worth, my thyroid is perfectly healthy. I'm not talking about people who have medical conditions impacting their hormones.

Rather, consider that our bodies are basically chemical factories and when we ingest something, our digestive process is a process of chemical reactions. The particular chemicals and nutrients that we are deriving from foods can trigger or suppress certain hormones. When it comes to energy allocation, insulin is the most significant. When your blood sugar spikes, insulin is released in order to direct your cells to absorb that blood sugar. When that becomes saturated, your fat cells are going to begin absorbing. One of the reasons that a lot of people find success on extremely low-carbohydrate diets is that carbs tend to spike insulin.

But there are other hormones that can impact weight as well, such as cortisol (stress hormone), ghrelin (hunger response hormone) etc.

I'm convinced that the reason my ultra-restrictive diets saw plateaus despite sticking with them has to do with what I was eating and less to do with how much I was eating.

I'm not an advocate for any particular diet. I have friends who have switched their lifestyle to a mostly ketogenic diet to great results. I've known other people who eat vegan and do well. I've done those same diets and not seen the same results. What ended up working for me (and only me) was largely eliminating plant-based foods. Given the fact that when I step outside, I am allergic to pretty much every plant that lives ... I wonder if there's some kind of mild dietary allergic reaction at play in my body when I eat certain plants. When I eat pretty much just meat, the weight starts to melt off, I gain muscle mass (makes sense - I'm consuming more protein) and I feel better. My wife can't eat the same diet, though. Gives her heartburn. For her, she seems to look and feel better on a more "Mediterranean diet."

I'm not a fan of fad diets, I'm not an advocate of them. I think it's obviously about long term lifestyle choices. I just think that calories has become a sort of religious belief. I don't think we have ANY data that suggests "You can live on an all cheesecake diet and, as long as you restrict your calories, your body composition will be healthy baseline." And we would need that to be true in order for the calories in vs calories out hypothesis to hold. But research actually suggests the opposite: not all calories are created equal. I even recall a study that was shared on Hacker News a while back where they served two study groups the same daily calorie intake but they were different food types and they were able to observe differences in body fat accumulation in the different groups. I wish I could remember what to search for to dig that up.