Counting calories while eating out

Witness all the ‘rice’ bellies on men.

If I eat huo huo until I’m full for 2 weeks. I’ll probably gain 20+ lbs once’s it’s said and done

You sure those aren’t beer bellies?

Try it. You won’t. You’ll get thinner.

If you “count your calories” and limit your food intake, you’ll get fatter, at least over the long term.

Counterintuitive, I know. But that’s how it works.

Apart from anything else, 20lb of fat is 70,000kCal, or 5000kCal excess per day. It’s a bit unlikely.

Whole lot of people including myself will say intuitive eating does not work and CICO is the way to go.

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Then, unfortunately, you’re going to get slowly and steadily fatter.

Please don’t be one of those people who only figures it out after decades of “strugging with my weight”. People who finally get there in their 60s find that they’ve wasted the best years of their lives, and they get pretty upset about it.

I’m suggesting a two-week experiment. You have nothing to lose but your gut. Worst that can happen is that it won’t work and you can go back to your calorie-counting.

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Appreciate the suggestion, but i’m pretty happy with my gut the way it is right now. Rather not put on 20 lbs of fat just to have to diet it back off again. I ate intuitively before covid happened and it’s how I gained the weight. Dieted it back off from March-Dec last year. Stop dieting and eating out more at night market and huo guos and it’s slowly creeping up. I want to be able to enjoy the huo guos and night market. I just need to know how much of it I can enjoy so the weight doesn’t slowly creep up. Was just hoping I didn’t have to do trial and error for a year to figure it out.

Fair enough. Just bear in mind that it’s the “what” that’s messing you up, not the “how much”.

From fall 2018 to spring 2019 I lost ~20lbs/ 9 kilos.

I don’t recall the exact schedule, but probably started around 2300 cal/ day, and targeted 10 to 15k steps a day, a little ~5-7 miles for me, I think. I finished at 2000 cal/day.

Only diet change was really limiting calorie dense items, for example, after I stopped getting my daily double cookie at the work canteen, the lady asked why. Then she told me they were about 200 calories each. Sometimes I’d get 3.

Side note, after just a month, my appetite had contracted quite a bit.

Now here, with less activity, less nutritional information by which to navigate my diet, I am probably 10 lbs up.

Input - output < 0, and you lose weight.

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This but it’s hard to count fats from oil which a lot of food has here.

This is debatable. Weight loss/gain is a determined by calories in vs calories out. Sure if you eat like crap it’ll be bad for you but you could lose weight as long as you’re consistently in a caloric deficit and conversely gain weight as long as you’re consistently in a caloric surplus.

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This is a conversation I’ve had many times before so I won’t rehash it here. I’ll just point out that your body is not a dumb set of buckets into which energy is poured by some external agency. It is an incredibly sophisticated self-fuelling machine, and therefore everything concerned with energy intake, storage, and expenditure has several closed-loop control systems associated with it. Your bodyfat mass, for example, has a setpoint, which is in turn related to the setpoint for blood sugar and to a whole bunch of other things.

The behaviour of closed-loop dynamic systems is highly non-intuitive. Self-tuning control systems (of which your body has several examples), doubly so. Interlinked, nested, or non-linear systems, OMG. I have a degree in the subject (or at least a degree that included it) and contemplating control systems theory still makes my brain melt.

Not knowing any of this might easily lead someone to conclude that one’s body is, indeed, just a bunch of energy-containing buckets. But it’s wrong. It’s easy to show that it’s wrong because a body that really did operate in the way you suggest would have been eliminated by natural selection at the first famine, many millennia ago. Meanwhile, the more sophisticated version that I’m describing would have thrived and passed on his/her genes. And here we all are.

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I have to concur from my own experiments. Used to live beside an all you can eat salad restaurant and went regularly. Ate like a pig and felt full, lost a lot of weight and felt healthy. Try the same at a pizza hut buffet and I wanted to take naps all the time and was still hungry at the end and very fat. Once I cut out the crappy carby foods and focused on the meats and veg the weight came off without having to watch calories.
Chicken is one example… I can literally eat the entire chicken myself or even two, feel like I’m going to explode, and lose a pound or two in the morning. Have a small McDonald’s sandwich by itself and im up a pound.

Essentially when you feel hungry, your willpower drops and suddenly you are loading up on crap foods to compensate.

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Is this salad bar in Taipei?

I used to live in an area with one of those steak shops that did an all-you-can-eat salad buffet, but then moved away. Back when I was attempting to actually lose weight, I used to eat there a couple of times a week (no noodles with the steak, obviously).

I’d quite like to find a new one like that.

Sure but that doesn’t mean calories in vs out doesn’t attribute to weight fluctuation and your examples are way off topic. We’re talking about eating food from night markets, not eating only grass for two years straight or living off of Crisco.

Calories below one’s daily caloric needs will lead to weight loss

Calories above will lead to weight gain.

Not hard.

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I try to break out the major foods or ingredients in each snack or dish into some food that is similar on the app. So I’ll break out the rice, the noodles, the meats, the vegetables, etc. and include the preparation method like fried, breaded, steamed, boiled, etc.

I use an app called Carb Manager.

hmmm i’m mid calorie deficit diet at the moment. I’m sticking to a semi strict 800 calories/day diet for at least the next 8 weeks. I’m finding it impossible to eat out. The restaurants I frequent are high calorie places… hard to trust guesses at restaurants with ingredients because it takes a few ingredients to throw the calorie numbers off. Hard to guess without scales too. It’s all cooking at home for me at the moment. Simple salads with ingredients bought from Jasons or egg muffins for me. Have you checked out Herbivore in Xinyi?.. place looks like they’d count calories. I’m interested to know how you do it.

I see there is a wee bit of debate about “stuff”. I’m 9 days in and i’ve lost 8kg’s I got another 20 to go. Feel great. It’s nice to have a program, motivation and a method (including recipes). 800calories works out to be a lot if you’re eating the right foods. I do find i’m eating my last 150calories in almonds just to get some good fats in. I’m following the Fast800 diet. Book by Michael Mosley and a recipe book by someone else. I’m just a fan from a series he did years ago. He’s got my trust. I’ll move onto the 5:2 diet after I reach my goal weight where I do 800 calories 2 days a week. Good luck to you my friend.

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I personally think calorie counting is wrong way to go. 800 calories of sugar is not the same as 800 calories of vegetables.

Better to count carbs. And that forces you to focus on healthy calories.

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It’s 800 calories in total for 2 -12 weeks. Mediterranean style of low to no carbs. Eating a variety of healthy foods and snacks not just 800 calories… healthy calories. Plenty of science to back up the claims and benefits. Gotta look at the book. Im not a person who has tried other diets… this is the only one I’ve tried.

Counting carbs you can still eat $hit.

This works great for me. Managed to get my father off diabetes medication with it too.

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You can’t. That’s why I tell people they can’t realistically lose fat in the long run eating out. Something might look healthy, but they can be dumping sugar into it. There’s an incentive to make food taste as good and addictive as possible. And those are easily triggered by sugar.

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