Hey, you know how to prevent the insulin response that's making you fat? Stop stuffing yourself with carbohydrates.
You cannot outrun a poor diet. Exercise plays very little part in weight loss; for people who do not have some sort of severe metabolic disorder, weight loss is achieved mostly through diet. You can literally sit around doing nothing and lose weight.
You are very ignorant on the subject, as indicated by your response. You probably advise people to "Eat less and move more!" and tell them "Calories in vs. calories out!"
You have no idea what you're talking about.
The post that this discussion is centered around said that after a change in activity level, they saw a change in weight. I have zero reason to believe that they're lying. This is very common. Personally, at one point, I was working a relatively physical job, and doing bicycle training as well. I had to eat around 4500-5000 calories per day to sustain my weight. I then switched to a desk job, and due to life circumstances, stopped training as well. I wasn't tracking food during this time, but I know for a fact that I was eating far fewer carbs. Shockingly, despite eating fewer carbs, I gained a huge amount of weight.
I know the expression "you can't outwork a bad diet", and I largely agree, but outside of very extreme examples, exactly what a bad diet is, is relative to everything else in your life. If you're very out of shape, and incredibly fat, you have a very limited capacity for exercise, and it would be difficult to burn off more than 200-300 extra calories per day through exercise. If on the other hand, you're an endurance athlete, especially at a higher level of fitness, it can often be more difficult to eat the thousands upon thousands of calories required to maintain your weight than it is to do the actual training. Of course events and races don't represent a typical day, but during those, its often physically impossible for the body to digest and absorb enough food to hit maintenance calories. There's a reason that the tour de France isn't full of fat fucks, despite them eating more carbs in an afternoon than you might in a week.
Yes, you can sit around doing nothing, eat very little, and lose weight. You seem to believe that this refutes CICO for some reason.
On a pure mass balance level, net caloric balance is the only thing that matters. Sure, water weight is a thing, and has zero calories. If, for example, you were in congestive heart failure, dropping water weight might be a really high priority in the short term. If you're an athlete competing in weight class, and you're just over the cutoff, dropping a little water, and then regaining it right after you weigh in might make sense. If you're a bodybuilder, or model, who needs to look as good as possible for an hour or two, that might involve water manipulation.
There might be a handful of other fringe scenarios I'm not thinking about, but 99℅ of the time when people talk about losing weight, their aim is to lose actual body tissue. For this, a caloric deficit is the one and only requirement. If the only goal is reducing the amount of body tissue, it literally does not matter how that deficit is achieved.
Realistically, most of the time that people want to lose weight, they specifically want to lose fat, while maintaining muscle. They might not know this consciously, and might even say that they don't care about muscle... But typically, whether they know it or not, maintaining muscle is implicit in their goal.
This introduces some additional nuance. Now protein should be prioritized above other macronutrients, at least until a certain threshold is reached. We can argue about exactly where that threshold is, but its going to vary both in the amount required and the importance of hitting it, depending on how lean/fat you are.
During the diet, different people will be doing varying levels of exercise. Some of this exercise may be done intentionally, as part of the diet, to help create a larger a deficit, or it might be part of a larger lifestyle. This brings in some more nuance, where different nutritional strategies may work better or worse, depending on both type and volume of exercise.
Most people are also seeking to improve health during a diet, or at the very least, not worsen it. This introduces a massive amount of additional nuance. Health is not a one dimensional axis from "good" to "bad". There are many different dimensions of health. Sure, oftentimes, something that helps one area is going to have benefits in others, but there also tradeoffs. Different people have different health concerns, and different levels of risk (real or perceived) in different areas.
Depending on all of these factors, different nutritional, lifestyle, and drug interventions will make more or less sense for different people, at different points in their lives. Personally, I find if my immediate goal is to lose weight, its easiest to only modestly decrease my food, and make up the rest of my deficit from physical activity, mostly of a very low intensity, such as walking. The low intensity is super easy to recover from, and allows me to very sustainably burn a large number of calories through exercise. Then i'm able to have a fairly aggressive deficit, while still eating 2500-3000 calories per day. This allows me to much more easily get a diet rich in a wide variety of micro nutrients, and typically keeps hunger almost nonexistent until around 2 months into my diet, at which point, I'm in the final few weeks anyways. I keep protein high, try to keep fat down to levels required to sustain bodily function (although I almost always go a bit over), and fill in the rest of my budget with carbs
Personally, I think a lot of people would benefit from trying something along these lines, as opposed to immediately bringing their food super low. At the same time, I'm aware that everybody, myself included, has a tendency to universalize their experience, and assume that the hyper specific things that work well for them will work well for everybody
As you can see, there's a lot of nuance involved, and room for many, many different strategies. While many weight loss strategies will work, they all depend on a caloric deficit, and exactly the best strategy to make that happen is highly dependent on the individual, and a million different pieces of context.
But if you're retarded, that's too much to think about, and you'd rather just listen to some faggot gook promising the "One WEIRD TRICK to CRUSH belly fat!!!"
The reality is that there's nothing magically evil about either carbs or insulin. Carbs are a macronutrient. Insulin is a hormone. Contextually, they can both be good, bad, or somewhere in between.
Hypothetically, if you were in a metabolic ward, with no food, and were being given a constant IV drip of glucose, calculated to keep you perfectly at maintenance, along with megadoses of Insulin, you wouldn't gain any actual weight. If you were given just as much insulin, and 200 calories less glucose, you would lose weight. Again, I'm not talking about water, I mean actual tissue. And I assume if you were laying in bed for weeks, on 100℅ sugar diet, and megadoses of insulin, body comp wouldn't be moving in a positive direction, and you'd probably feel like shit.
There's also an old school bodybuilding technique, where a relatively large dose of insulin is injected immediately before fasted cardio. This is done to intentionally induce a state of hypoglycemia, which causes the body to release glucagon. The glucagon restores blood glucose to a tolerable range, by inducing liberation of fatty acids, which then allows the glycogen backbone to be converted into glucose. In other words, in some contexts, high insulin can counterintuitively increase fat burning. This isn't done very much nowadays, because its super fucking sketchy, and there are better drugs available for weight loss, that don't make you feel like you're literally seconds from death.
Assuming you're sensitive to insulin, its also incredibly anabolic, and shuttles nutrients into muscles, helping to prevent muscle loss during a diet.
Prolonged carbohydrate restriction can also cause an increase in SHBG (Sex Hormone Binding Globulin), and decrease in T3. The increased SHBG means a reduction in free testosterone, which in certain cases, can produce symptoms akin to actual hypogonadiam, even with healthy levels of total testosterone. T3 is one of the main hormones that modulate basal metabolism. A drop in T3 leads metabolism to slow down. You can also see a concurrent increase in reverse t3, which binds to the same receptors, without agonizing them, leading to an even bigger drop in metabolic rate.
Will cutting carbs cause you lose weight? Yes. But not because there's anything special about them. If the average persons diet is 60℅ carbs, and you cut those in half, congratulations, as long as everything else stays the same, you've created a 30℅ deficit. In the real world, that might end up being closer to 10-15℅ when alls said and done
Will switching primarily to slow digesting, fiber rich sources of carbs that cause less of an insulin response cause you to lose weight? Yes. Not (primarily) because of anything to do with insulin, but because now you're eating large volumes of highly satiating, low calorie foods. Congratulations, you've created a deficit
Will fasting, either intermittent, or prolonged, cause weight loss? Assuming that you don't binge eat in between, then yes. Again, not because there's anything magic about a fast. If you don't eat every other day, and eat at maintenance on the days in between, guess what? You've now created a 50℅ deficit
I'm not trying to say that insulin and carbs are good, or that fasting is bad. I just did a 6 day long water fast, followed by three days at maintenance, and then a week of a protein sparing modified fast.
The point I'm trying to make is that this guy acts like he has some sort of revelation that's revolutionized weight loss, but if you stop to actually think about what he's saying, or watch an interview where he gets pushback from anyone who isn't retarded, it basically just boils down to the most basic bitch diet advice that everyone in the world has understood for decades, if not centuries. Eat filling low calorie foods. Fasting is an option, and might have some advantages in some circumstances.
No fucking shit
Oh, he figured out that diabetes is reversible! Again, no fucking shit. It's an accrued tolerance to insulin. Its just medically considered incurable because of weird semantics (most people who resolve it will relapse, so then it's not resolved... By this logic, obesity is also incurable, since most people regain weight), and because when doctors give health advice, the overwhelming majority of patients just ignore it, so the medical community has by and large decided that its not to resources wasting their breath to tell people to please stop eating themselves to death. While I don't necessarily agree with that choice, I can understand it
