It isn't that simple and a group of us has proved that isn't necessarily true.
Three times I have lead several people through the Whole30 Challenge laid out the Whole9 website mentioned above. We all ate a ton of food and lost fat and almost all of us lost weight. If anything, our caloric intake stayed the same or went up.
(BTW: the goal wasn't to lose weight. It was to become healthier. Last month, someone improved their cholesterol numbers by 93 points by eating that way.)
Assume there are 3,500 calories in 1 pound of body fat.
Then cut, say, 300 calories daily out of your diet for, say, 3 years.
That's 109,500 calories a year or 328,500 calories over 3 years.
328,500 calories divided by 3,500 calories/pound is 93 pounds.
The math isn't that straight forward, but many people use the very math to explain weight loss, at least in the short term. I just can't buy into the math that 'calories in' equals 'calories out'.
That said, I've done the 30-day challenge three times, not restricted my caloric intake, and still lost weight (lost fat quicker than I gained muscle mass). So, even in the short-term, you can lose weight without restricting calories.
* Cutting carbs typically means people end up eating less calories*
Mostly true, but ore specifically, cutting carbs means that you are sending less sugar into your body. Less sugar means it is more difficult for the body to produce fat. Fat is more dense than muscle and the reason most people diet is to lose the fat.
I am not sure this is scientifically accurate, but this is how I make sense of it:
When I eat Paleo, my body thinks it is surround by high quality energy sources. It gets fed those energy sources frequently. The body recognizes that there is low risk that it will go a short period of time without high quality energy. It determines that it has little use for the fat it has stored on the body. The body then converts the fat into energy. Your body enters into a phase where you go for weeks (or months) of high energy because of all the fat you are burning by eating a lot of high quality food---food a caveman would eat.
It isn't that simple and a group of us has proved that isn't necessarily true.
Three times I have lead several people through the Whole30 Challenge laid out the Whole9 website mentioned above. We all ate a ton of food and lost fat and almost all of us lost weight. If anything, our caloric intake stayed the same or went up.
(BTW: the goal wasn't to lose weight. It was to become healthier. Last month, someone improved their cholesterol numbers by 93 points by eating that way.)
Assume there are 3,500 calories in 1 pound of body fat.
Then cut, say, 300 calories daily out of your diet for, say, 3 years.
That's 109,500 calories a year or 328,500 calories over 3 years.
328,500 calories divided by 3,500 calories/pound is 93 pounds.
The math isn't that straight forward, but many people use the very math to explain weight loss, at least in the short term. I just can't buy into the math that 'calories in' equals 'calories out'.
That said, I've done the 30-day challenge three times, not restricted my caloric intake, and still lost weight (lost fat quicker than I gained muscle mass). So, even in the short-term, you can lose weight without restricting calories.
* Cutting carbs typically means people end up eating less calories*
Mostly true, but ore specifically, cutting carbs means that you are sending less sugar into your body. Less sugar means it is more difficult for the body to produce fat. Fat is more dense than muscle and the reason most people diet is to lose the fat.
I am not sure this is scientifically accurate, but this is how I make sense of it:
When I eat Paleo, my body thinks it is surround by high quality energy sources. It gets fed those energy sources frequently. The body recognizes that there is low risk that it will go a short period of time without high quality energy. It determines that it has little use for the fat it has stored on the body. The body then converts the fat into energy. Your body enters into a phase where you go for weeks (or months) of high energy because of all the fat you are burning by eating a lot of high quality food---food a caveman would eat.