I agree that the case for >1g/lb is overstated, but I think this post overcorrects? To my understanding, there is reasonable evidence that 0.5-0.9 g/lb is beneficial, ie: above RDA of 0.35ish.
The highest benefit they've found in studies was around 0.72g/lb I think, and they added a margin of safety and said 0.83g/lb or so. That's what the calculator shows. That's in anyone, ever. Most people are never going to need that much. The RDA was calculated so that 95% of people would be covered by it.
Food and you eat and probably water is also calculated as lean mass, so the most accurate dexa scan is probably one done in the morning after your bowel movement or similar while fasted
Yea you wanna keep it as constant as possible. But even then, how do you compare someone like myself who's constantly low-carb/low-protein and therefore glycogen & bloat depleted with someone who eats a high-protein, high-carb, high-fiber diet? Probably 5-10lbs "lean mass" difference that would disappear if we counted "real" lean mass, not temporary mass.
I think it starts getting difficult to have a singular definition like that, and probably very difficult to scan for or even define. Like is fat cell mass also affected by your hydration and electrolyte balance? In creatures that are mostly water, what is ‘lean’ vs ‘fat’ vs ‘water’?
DXA was designed mostly for bone density AFAIK, and it is an objective tool, it’s just not measuring what you want in detail more specifically.
An ideal hypothetical scanner for this variation would probably break down things like glycogen content, water mass, food and waste in your intestines and a bunch of other metabolic stores that human bodies vary.
But that is kind of overkill and you could handle that by testing in a fasted state with the keto and non keto diet to see what a person’s glycogen and hydration ‘range’ is
Then you could probably do a study of scanning various populations in this before and after state and provide estimates of what your lean & fat mass would be depending on what diet your on and adjust accordingly.
Yea agreed on all points. It would be kinda useful in determining if somebody lost fat or something else, with something else probably being something you don't want to lose too much of.
I must be some kind of mutant. These calculators never work for me. I'm 6', weigh 325lbs, and I've been following ex150 since March eating 1lb of beef per day. (76g). I tried the whipped cream but that was too much, so my once-daily meal is just the meat, 8oz of veggies, a few spoons of sauce, some fat to cook it in, and spices. It's around 1400-1800 calories per day, and I haven't lost any weight since March. In fact my weight has been stable for around two years now, after losing 40+ lbs when I started keto and home-cooking.
Back in college I was the thinnest I've been as an adult, and I was still over 200 lbs. My goal weight is 230 lbs. I am NOT musclebound by any means; the only exercise I get is lifting my mass off the couch. But according to your calculator (and all of the others based on similar methodologies) the only way I could have a stable weight at 1800 calories/day is if my Fat Free Mass is < 100 lbs. I absolutely do NOT have 70% body fat.
Your metabolic adjustment only goes down to 0.75. I think I would have to push it below 0.5 to get a FFM and TEE output that matches my experience. I'm pretty sure I'm not dead though, so that also doesn't seem right.
I'd say that's where I disagree with a lot of the CICO people, including Pontzer and the other DLW guys: measuring somebody's TEE and then deducing what he should/can be losing weight on is simply not how it works. I've done it in myself, I've been weight stable at 1,000kcal/day and 4,200kcal/day. Presumably, that was my TEE either time. There simply is no "fixed TEE" and if you "just eat less than that you will inevitably lose weight" - that's not how it works at all, in my experience.
Sounds like you're a tough nut like me.
A few ideas:
1. You're eating 1lb of meat, which is way more than ex150. ex150 is a third of that, and that's the critical component of it - I called it "low-protein keto" before I learned about seed oils.
2. If you're concerned that your metabolic rate is dramatically reduced (which btw I don't think follows at all from inability to lose weight, but it could be) you could try doing an RMR (resting metabolic rate) test. Most cities have these for <$100 at fitness type centers or sometimes labs/hospitals. No RX needed. You just sit down, breathe into a tube for 15 minutes, and the computer tells you how much CO2 you breathed out and what metabolic (resting) rate that equates to.
That'd be one easy and relatively inexpensive way to rule out having an absurdly low metabolic rate.
Yeap. Been the girl on her to becoming anorexic struggling to lose weight eating 800-1200kcal a day, and been the girl lifting and exercising and being so hot I am sweating permanently but not gaining weight at like 4000+kcal/d.
For me it's so easy to see the body is trying to preserve itself when I lower my calories. I don't want to exercise, I have a harder time thinking, I get SUPER cold quickly, I sleep more, I am more lazy etc.. Likewise the opposite when I overeat, where sitting at home becomes impossible because I have so much energy to burn and need to move.
With all due respect, I think your experimental fat loss experiments are a waste of time.
From everything I’ve read, ( and it’s been a lot) whether it be high crab, low carb, no carb, keto, paleo, carnivore etc etc., what it comes down to in my opinion, is the amount of food a person eats.
If you eat more calories than your body needs, you will gain.
If you eat less, you will lose.
I think people in the weight loss industry today, have way way wayover complicated what works in losing weight.
Granted, it should be satiating and nutrious food for the most part, but still in order to lose, you have to eat less calories than your body needs.
Why do I say that?
The people who take Ozempic lose weight because it lowers their appetite. THEY EAT LESS.THEY LOSE WEIGHT.
The people who have gastric bypass surgery, have smaller stomachs. THEY EAT LESS. THEY LOSE WEIGHT.
The people who do KETO, have a diminished appetite because they are eating more fat, less carbs. So, THEY EAT LESS, THEY LOSE WEIGHT.
The people who take diet pills- the diet pills kills their appetite. THEY EAT LESS, THEY LOSE WEIGHT.
The people who track their calories, and who do it sucessfully: THEY EAT LESS, THEY LOSE WEIGHT.
The people who fast and eat one meal a day ( OMAD) THEY EAT LESS, THEY LOSE WEIGHT. Because you can only eat so much in one meal.
Do you see a pattern here? Eating LESS food than your body needs makes you lose weight.
This is the ONLY thing that has sucessfully helped me lose weight. EATING LESS FOOD in a day.
That’s it.
I didn’t say starving. I just said eating less than my body needs. I eat carbs, protein, starch, whatever. I just don’t eat A TON of food. I eat less. I lose weight when I eat less.
Exercizing for hours never helped me lose weight because it just made me more hungry.
Now I walk around maybe 3 x a week at a reasonably pace because it makes me feel better. I don’t do it “to lose weight”. Forget killing yourself doing HITT. That just sets you up for eating more because you are taxing your body and causing it needless stress.
So I eat more when I am hungry. BAD. Less stress on my body. Less hungry. GOOD.
So I eat satisfying satiating food that I like but LESS OF IT. And I lose weight.
Also I will add, Dr. Eades who wrote Protein Power back in the 90’s talked about eating one meal a day before anyone else heard of OMAD. He said you should eat your one meal during one hour.
The reason this works is because your body is releasing insulin one time of day. Only for 1 hour.
If you eat all day long, you are releasing insulin all day long and you never can let your body lose weight.
I think he was on to something but no one gives him the credit. I think he was right.
Well how do you explain all the examples I gave of people eating less and losing weight? In every single method, that was the formula. They ate less food, they lost weight. And that is the only method that works for me. I’ve tried every other way of eating. I ate more. I just gained weight. Because I was eating more calories than my body needed.
Note, I didn’t say I was starving myself. But I eat less of what I love. I don’t feel deprived. If I only ate carrot sticks and lettuce I’d be miserable. Personally, I eat foods I find that are satisfying, delicious but also nutrious. Foods that nourish my body, not give it empty stuff. For the most part. I’m maintaining my 20 lb. weightloss for several months now.
That seems to be the only thing works in the evidence I’ve seen. And in my own life.
I think it defies logic that we can eat an abundance of food and lose weight.
If someone is maintaining their weight loss, they can eat a little bit more. But to lose weight you have to be in a calories deficit to some degree.
Also if it works yet it's "the formula" but it's just measuring success. You're conflating "people ate less -> they lost weight" with "there was a caloric deficit -> they lost weight" which are not the same.
I agree that the case for >1g/lb is overstated, but I think this post overcorrects? To my understanding, there is reasonable evidence that 0.5-0.9 g/lb is beneficial, ie: above RDA of 0.35ish.
I generally like the Examine article on this (https://examine.com/guides/protein-intake/), but I’m still a little unsure of its highest end claims.
There generally seems to be evidence that above RDA protein intake is beneficial for muscle mass, and my prior on the RDA’s optimality is quite weak.
The highest benefit they've found in studies was around 0.72g/lb I think, and they added a margin of safety and said 0.83g/lb or so. That's what the calculator shows. That's in anyone, ever. Most people are never going to need that much. The RDA was calculated so that 95% of people would be covered by it.
Food and you eat and probably water is also calculated as lean mass, so the most accurate dexa scan is probably one done in the morning after your bowel movement or similar while fasted
Yea you wanna keep it as constant as possible. But even then, how do you compare someone like myself who's constantly low-carb/low-protein and therefore glycogen & bloat depleted with someone who eats a high-protein, high-carb, high-fiber diet? Probably 5-10lbs "lean mass" difference that would disappear if we counted "real" lean mass, not temporary mass.
I think it starts getting difficult to have a singular definition like that, and probably very difficult to scan for or even define. Like is fat cell mass also affected by your hydration and electrolyte balance? In creatures that are mostly water, what is ‘lean’ vs ‘fat’ vs ‘water’?
DXA was designed mostly for bone density AFAIK, and it is an objective tool, it’s just not measuring what you want in detail more specifically.
An ideal hypothetical scanner for this variation would probably break down things like glycogen content, water mass, food and waste in your intestines and a bunch of other metabolic stores that human bodies vary.
But that is kind of overkill and you could handle that by testing in a fasted state with the keto and non keto diet to see what a person’s glycogen and hydration ‘range’ is
Then you could probably do a study of scanning various populations in this before and after state and provide estimates of what your lean & fat mass would be depending on what diet your on and adjust accordingly.
Yea agreed on all points. It would be kinda useful in determining if somebody lost fat or something else, with something else probably being something you don't want to lose too much of.
when I sleep and feel my heartbeat rising and wake up?
Sorry, I don't get it, what do you mean?
A dissent: some people think protein requirements are unrelated to mass, huh: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/athlete-protein-intake/
Thanks, will check it out
I must be some kind of mutant. These calculators never work for me. I'm 6', weigh 325lbs, and I've been following ex150 since March eating 1lb of beef per day. (76g). I tried the whipped cream but that was too much, so my once-daily meal is just the meat, 8oz of veggies, a few spoons of sauce, some fat to cook it in, and spices. It's around 1400-1800 calories per day, and I haven't lost any weight since March. In fact my weight has been stable for around two years now, after losing 40+ lbs when I started keto and home-cooking.
Back in college I was the thinnest I've been as an adult, and I was still over 200 lbs. My goal weight is 230 lbs. I am NOT musclebound by any means; the only exercise I get is lifting my mass off the couch. But according to your calculator (and all of the others based on similar methodologies) the only way I could have a stable weight at 1800 calories/day is if my Fat Free Mass is < 100 lbs. I absolutely do NOT have 70% body fat.
Your metabolic adjustment only goes down to 0.75. I think I would have to push it below 0.5 to get a FFM and TEE output that matches my experience. I'm pretty sure I'm not dead though, so that also doesn't seem right.
I'd say that's where I disagree with a lot of the CICO people, including Pontzer and the other DLW guys: measuring somebody's TEE and then deducing what he should/can be losing weight on is simply not how it works. I've done it in myself, I've been weight stable at 1,000kcal/day and 4,200kcal/day. Presumably, that was my TEE either time. There simply is no "fixed TEE" and if you "just eat less than that you will inevitably lose weight" - that's not how it works at all, in my experience.
Sounds like you're a tough nut like me.
A few ideas:
1. You're eating 1lb of meat, which is way more than ex150. ex150 is a third of that, and that's the critical component of it - I called it "low-protein keto" before I learned about seed oils.
2. If you're concerned that your metabolic rate is dramatically reduced (which btw I don't think follows at all from inability to lose weight, but it could be) you could try doing an RMR (resting metabolic rate) test. Most cities have these for <$100 at fitness type centers or sometimes labs/hospitals. No RX needed. You just sit down, breathe into a tube for 15 minutes, and the computer tells you how much CO2 you breathed out and what metabolic (resting) rate that equates to.
That'd be one easy and relatively inexpensive way to rule out having an absurdly low metabolic rate.
Yeap. Been the girl on her to becoming anorexic struggling to lose weight eating 800-1200kcal a day, and been the girl lifting and exercising and being so hot I am sweating permanently but not gaining weight at like 4000+kcal/d.
For me it's so easy to see the body is trying to preserve itself when I lower my calories. I don't want to exercise, I have a harder time thinking, I get SUPER cold quickly, I sleep more, I am more lazy etc.. Likewise the opposite when I overeat, where sitting at home becomes impossible because I have so much energy to burn and need to move.
100%. The people who think it's all just CICO must not have had this experience; which completely seems to invalidate their model.
Can you add a little calculator for lean mass from bodyweight and body fat percent in there? It's a pain to have to go elsewhere to calculate it.
Will do!
that calorie projection seems right on for me......
Interesting article. I like to tell people to eat slightly more than these levels just because, from experience, many will underachieve.
Unfortunately, just like with vitamins, "just in case" is just as likely to do damage as it might do good :)
It’s difficult to relate the damage of micro and macro nutrients because their roles and impacts are fundamentally different.
With all due respect, I think your experimental fat loss experiments are a waste of time.
From everything I’ve read, ( and it’s been a lot) whether it be high crab, low carb, no carb, keto, paleo, carnivore etc etc., what it comes down to in my opinion, is the amount of food a person eats.
If you eat more calories than your body needs, you will gain.
If you eat less, you will lose.
I think people in the weight loss industry today, have way way wayover complicated what works in losing weight.
Granted, it should be satiating and nutrious food for the most part, but still in order to lose, you have to eat less calories than your body needs.
Why do I say that?
The people who take Ozempic lose weight because it lowers their appetite. THEY EAT LESS.THEY LOSE WEIGHT.
The people who have gastric bypass surgery, have smaller stomachs. THEY EAT LESS. THEY LOSE WEIGHT.
The people who do KETO, have a diminished appetite because they are eating more fat, less carbs. So, THEY EAT LESS, THEY LOSE WEIGHT.
The people who take diet pills- the diet pills kills their appetite. THEY EAT LESS, THEY LOSE WEIGHT.
The people who track their calories, and who do it sucessfully: THEY EAT LESS, THEY LOSE WEIGHT.
The people who fast and eat one meal a day ( OMAD) THEY EAT LESS, THEY LOSE WEIGHT. Because you can only eat so much in one meal.
Do you see a pattern here? Eating LESS food than your body needs makes you lose weight.
This is the ONLY thing that has sucessfully helped me lose weight. EATING LESS FOOD in a day.
That’s it.
I didn’t say starving. I just said eating less than my body needs. I eat carbs, protein, starch, whatever. I just don’t eat A TON of food. I eat less. I lose weight when I eat less.
Exercizing for hours never helped me lose weight because it just made me more hungry.
Now I walk around maybe 3 x a week at a reasonably pace because it makes me feel better. I don’t do it “to lose weight”. Forget killing yourself doing HITT. That just sets you up for eating more because you are taxing your body and causing it needless stress.
So I eat more when I am hungry. BAD. Less stress on my body. Less hungry. GOOD.
So I eat satisfying satiating food that I like but LESS OF IT. And I lose weight.
Also I will add, Dr. Eades who wrote Protein Power back in the 90’s talked about eating one meal a day before anyone else heard of OMAD. He said you should eat your one meal during one hour.
The reason this works is because your body is releasing insulin one time of day. Only for 1 hour.
If you eat all day long, you are releasing insulin all day long and you never can let your body lose weight.
I think he was on to something but no one gives him the credit. I think he was right.
I think that's wrong
Well how do you explain all the examples I gave of people eating less and losing weight? In every single method, that was the formula. They ate less food, they lost weight. And that is the only method that works for me. I’ve tried every other way of eating. I ate more. I just gained weight. Because I was eating more calories than my body needed.
Note, I didn’t say I was starving myself. But I eat less of what I love. I don’t feel deprived. If I only ate carrot sticks and lettuce I’d be miserable. Personally, I eat foods I find that are satisfying, delicious but also nutrious. Foods that nourish my body, not give it empty stuff. For the most part. I’m maintaining my 20 lb. weightloss for several months now.
That seems to be the only thing works in the evidence I’ve seen. And in my own life.
I think it defies logic that we can eat an abundance of food and lose weight.
If someone is maintaining their weight loss, they can eat a little bit more. But to lose weight you have to be in a calories deficit to some degree.
Largely I'd say they're not true.
Also if it works yet it's "the formula" but it's just measuring success. You're conflating "people ate less -> they lost weight" with "there was a caloric deficit -> they lost weight" which are not the same.