I lost 100 lbs as a vegetarian and I don't restrict my diet beyond the no meat/few animal products part. Calories are and always will be the only factor in weight loss, but as far as health goes limiting and restricting different believed "problematic" aspects of food isn't good. You need carbs, fats, proteins, fiber etc even if cutting something will give quicker, aesthetic changes.

Congrats on your weight loss!

[–] jbrains@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

People make unnecessary assumptions and that causes them problems. When I took active part in various Keto and LCHF communities, I volunteered to help with that. No, you can't just eat bacon. No, carbohydrates aren't forbidden, but merely limited. And so on.

I remember some active folks helping people who didn't want to eat meat learn how to eat Keto without meat. Some of them even managed not to be stereotypical vegans. 😉

And I'll tell you what I've told everyone who has "well, ackshually"d me about CICO: yes, but sugar seems to cause most people most of the time to struggle with limiting food intake, whereas fat tends to do the opposite for those folks, so eating more fat and very little sugar helps them play the game on easy mode. This is an effective way to transform eating habits. I was one of those people. Eat fat xor sugar, for the folks who understand Boolean.

And I'll point out three things:

Studies that purport to study and debunk low carbohydrate eating routinely choose limits for carbohydrates higher than what Keto and LCHF actually eat, which renders them inconclusive regarding what we actually do. Some of them, for the sake of simplicity, feed subjects fats in a way that no human would, which avoids the benefits of eating a variety of whole foods, which Keto and LCHF approaches recommend.
There's no guarantee that the health problems introduced by extensive Keto/LCHF eating are worse than the health problems that accompany an extra 20-50 years of obesity. Neither "side" can be sure of its stance here. In particular, cancer comes for us all, in one way or another. In many ways, life is becoming an exercise in ensuring that cancer gets you instead of some other disease. 🤷
Many folks, including me, report success using Keto/LCHF as an intervention rather than a lifestyle. I can report that I changed my eating habits radically so that now, even when I'm not attentively restricting carbohydrates, my default choices hurt my body less than they did before Keto/LCHF. I think that's why I've regained 40 pounds instead of all of it.

[–] XeroxCool@lemmy.world 1 points 10 hours ago

I appreciate your lengthy comments (by social media standards) to explain what I've tried to explain before. Keto is a tool. For all keto's supposed negatives, there's twice as many confirmed negatives to being obese. "Keto as an intervention, not a lifestyle" is exactly how I use it. A few months of keto reverses (and can overshoot) a year of casual weight gain for me. And yes, I'm very well aware that the major cause of weight loss for me is likely cutting out potatoes, bread(ing), beer, and sweets in all their forms. At this point, I'm fairly stable in weight when left to my own choices. Not perfect, but not bad. I gain maybe 3-5 kilos a year but can drop ~6 in 3 months of keto.

But yes, eat veggies. I understand restricting carbs pushes people to get creative with alternative foods that are primarily protein in exciting new ways, but it gets taken to be an all-protein diet. It doesn't help with the current protein-maxing trend where every damn food is made with 20g protein per serving. My style at home is just eat veggies, so much veg. Eat broccoli and cauliflower until I'm bored to tears. Then move onto the protein/fat sources and weirdly, I'm nowhere near as hungry anymore!

Keto is a tool that gives me progress and stability as needed.

[–] liuther9@lemmy.world -1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Losing weight is not about calories. It is about hunger. Topic is complicated, too lazy to explain, but mainly thats how ozempic became popular

[–] rowinxavier@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Largely correct. It is more about your body either holding on to body fat or using it for energy. There are various ways you can make the body hold on to fat or release fat. Some are more or less healthy depending on personal context.

Many psychiatric meds cause weight gain, specifically fat gain, by driving up insulin. Some others cause increases in appetite. Others cause a reduction in BMR which with no change in diet will cause more fat gain. Some psychiatric meds made getting enough food hard (I'm looking at your Ritalin) and thus have an opposing effect.

Most of the effects on body fat are mediated by hormones like insulin, grehlin, glucagon, and so on. GLP-1 (Glucagon Like Peptide 1) medications target the receptors for glucagon and activate them in a more sustained way that glucagon does, causing changes in appetite along with every availability. There are other effects as well, thus the side effects, but that is the basic mechanism. We actually don't understand GLP-1 medications fully at this point so we can expect any current description to change over time, but for now that is basically how they work.

[–] bloogoose@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

So I can eat 4000 calories a day and only burn 3000 and lose weight? Tell me more!

[–] jbrains@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I infer they mean that you can't divorce CICO from patterns in hunger signals.