Net calories (ie digestible calories) are of paramount importance for weight management. They determine whether you will gain or lose weight. It depends on them what the scale will show. Macronutrients or selected foods rather affect how healthy, meaningful or what a diet will gain (muscle or fat). In general, weight is rarely the only concern. Of course, there are cases where due to a serious health problem, sudden weight loss is required, but then it does not matter much how much muscle will be burned along the fat. For athletes, body composition is extremely important, but the information here will surely be useful for them as well.
- “But I was told that I just shouldn’t eat ________ (put waffles, cakes, honey, bread, soda, fried, fruit here) and I would lose weight.”
- “a friend bought a book and followed the diet inside and lost weight without even looking at his calories! He doesn’t even know what calories are.”
- “Everyone says that if I want to lose weight, I have to go to NVD. Otherwise I will stay fat from carbohydrates.”
These are the first things I will oppose in this article, so we will have to look at them in detail. But for that after a while.
Does it matter then what foods I eat if I want to lose weight?
If your only concern is weight and you are not interested in whether you will lose muscle mass and how healthy the whole process will be, then roughly speaking, it does not matter. This, of course, is not a very real case, because it is always important for a nutritional approach to be healthy, but here we just want to answer the question originally asked.
You can only eat chicken, broccoli and brown rice, but if your calories exceed your calorie balance, you will gain weight. If you eat only cake and serve it with carbonated drinks, but the total calories consumed for the day do not exceed those you expend, you will lose weight. It sounds a little strange, but it’s a fact. In the case of a healthy and well-written diet, you need to eat a certain amount of protein, which will have three main functions:
- maintenance of vital organs and processes;
- prevention of significant muscle tissue loss
- and as a third function – causing a feeling of satiety. Protein is the most saturating macronutrient and this is one of the main reasons for its high percentage in diets. For healthy weight loss you need to take a certain amount of fat, which is also an essential macronutrient and is important for the body and hormonal balance. Another aspect is the intake of foods rich in trace elements (vitamins and minerals) as well as fiber.
A little theory
We’ll do a little bit of physics here, but I promise it’s not complicated.
The explanation for the difference between energy consumption and energy intake is often sweetly associated with the laws of thermodynamics. This is a good rationale, but very few people have a concept of thermodynamics (ironically, sometimes those who try to explain it to you), so I will offer an alternative and very simple explanation.
Everyone has heard of Einstein’s famous formula E = mc2 (by the way, this is the simplified version, where inertia is assumed to be zero). In it E is the energy of a body, m is its mass, and c is a constant quantity (constant).
Without getting carried away, we only need to remember the most basic thing that this equation says, and that is that each mass corresponds to a certain energy and vice versa. Mass and energy are directly proportional and differ only in one constant coefficient. In our case – the more energy (calories) we put into a system (our body), the more its mass will increase. In other words, the less we eat, the more we will lose weight. Whatever foods we eat, if at the end of the day, the calories consumed are less than the ones consumed, then the system (our body) will lose energy (respectively mass).
When at the end of the day our calories are in the plus, our mass will rise. Energy intake determines movement in weight, not specific foods or specific macronutrients. And now back to our world.
Can there be a difference in weight loss with two diets with the same calories but different foods?
Maybe, but this is more of a “technical error”. Let’s look at a hypothetical (and unrealistic) situation. If we have two people who eat the same calories, but one consumes 100 g of protein and the other 300 g, then in the end there may be a difference in weight loss. It’s small, but let’s see why it happens. Doesn’t this contradict the original statement of the article? No.
There is talk of net energy intake, of calories absorbed. In the case of different protein intake, the difference will occur due to the thermal effect of the protein. Assume that the processing of the received protein consumes 25% of its caloric value. That is, if you eat 25 g of protein, which you have considered on the label as 100 calories, then 25 of them will go for digestion and processing, and only 75 of them will be absorbed. Small differences can occur because the calories you have calculated may be the same, but those that have entered the body and are ready for use and absorption are different.
In our hypothetical case, this will be about 0.25 * 4 * (300-100) = 200 kcal. However, in order for diets to be isocaloric, we will assume that the difference in protein is compensated by carbohydrates. They, in turn, assume that they have a thermal effect of 10% (sometimes up to 25%). That is, we have 200 g of carbohydrates, which will give 0.10 * 4 * (300-100) = 80 kcal. In the end, the difference between the two diets will be that the second will absorb 200 – 80 = 120 kcal more. Such a situation is in practice very rare, because the differences in protein intake are unrealistic, but I still mention it for clarity.
to be continued
In the second part of Which is more important for weight loss (part2) we will talk more about the topic. We will look at what happens when we exclude certain foods from our menu and link this whole theory to many practical examples and proofs of all the above statements.
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