there is starting to emerge a small, fringe group of people that believe calories-in-calories-out is a complete myth (or, more specifically, calories-out is a complete unknown given current understanding of metabolic science), which pretty much sends people into apoplectic fits of rage when they hear about it. even if it turns out to be a complete troll, it's great entertainment watching the science develop/debate.
Cal in = Cal out is always true. However, the
Cal in side has a very important % energy extracted modifier. Simarly, the
Cal out side is modified by metabolic rate and exertion modifiers.
Those individuals with high energy extraction and low metabolic rate will find it very difficult to eat as little as required to balance the energy equation without constant hunger and living with excessively small portions. While this is achievable, it is hard and failure is frequent...especially given all the other challenges in life. So naturally, asking whether and how these modifiers can be adjusted is pressing. There is a lot to learn, but thereare known factors that can influence these factors.
For example, co tinued cold exposure leads to activation of brown fat that generates heat, which dramatically raises metabolic rate (e.g. Californian's feel cold in 12°C weather, but someone in New England would wear shorts in that weather). Interestingly, cold weather increases gut caloric absorbancy to compensate for these expenditures..(sorry Id provide references, but I dont have it bookmarked on my current device).
It is an odd design choice, I wonder how much it will effect your back after a few hours, from offsetting your right arm, or conversely your next from offsetting your entire body and turning your head.
Anecdotaly I had to get a third monitor as my next was aching from always turning straight to right then back only, no left turning.
Well the problem is the question "how about you devs". This is very much not aimed at developers or professionals of really any kind (well maybe one kind). This is aimed squarely at gamers.
I used to play semi-pro gaming back before it was a televised event, and an offset keyboard was normal. The mouse was of equal importance, and home row was WASD. I controlled the keyboard with my left hand exclusively, so having it offset to the left on a laptop would make sense. Of course, I wouldn't use a track pad but I actually know people who did (believe it or not).
The target market for this device already have their keyboard offset to the left. And they're not typing 120wpm into NetBeans.
(Besides, as a desktop replacement they're almost expecting you're going to have a mouse and keyboard attached)
Exactly. I'm sure there are professionals who buy Razr products for the performance and form factor but the target audience is going to view this as a 17 inch laptop with a 1080 that's way thinner and lighter than the competition. That said an equivalent MSI laptop is $1500 so they're certainly aiming upmarket.
> If I go to the corner shop and get a sandwich I have no idea what's in it and there is no accurate way to estimate.
uh, why not? i'll do it right now for you off the top of my head, which anyone can do after they look them up for a while.
100g of white bread = ~ 250 calories /
2 tbsp of mayo = ~ 200 calories /
4 oz of deli turkey = ~ 100 calories /
1 tbsp mustard = ~ 10 calories /
2 slices (2 oz.) of cheese = ~ 240 calories /
2 slices of tomato = ~ 20 calories /
1 slice of lettuce = ~ 5 calories /
1 bag of chips = ~ 280 calories (probably on the bag)
there. 1105 calories total. is that perfect? no, but is that useful? yes, a whole lot more useful than "it's too hard, so i might as well not do it."
as an aside: this is why people are fat. a sandwich and a bag of chips is insulin-spiking can easily be over 1k calories, and most people would probably guess it's 300 calories, and 'not fattening', whatever that means.
throw in a soda and you've got a recipe (literally) for disaster.
One time, as a continually hungry teen, I did a one day calorie count for a scout project. I was suitably horrified to find out at the end of the day that I had consumed around 10,000 calories.
What about a medium sized soda at a fast-food place? Those places use consumer surplus as an incentive to get a larger drink, so seeing people with huge cups, presumably filled with soda is very common.
Besides, 140 calories is a lot, considering it has about the same calorie density as milk and the number of great drinks available to you at 0 calories, like black tea, green tea, coffee and plain water.
Soda is sugar only, always, so it's much easier to throw your daily balance of carb/protein/fat off with soda than any other drink (e.g. milk).
I was about to start writing a similar comment, but you saved me the time. I just wanted to emphasize that this is why people consistently under/over estimate how many calories they eat. Every single person who has asked me for help either gaining or losing weight has thought they knew how much they were eating until they actually started counting.
It's close enough to get results. Nobody is going to put a sandwich from the local sandwich shop into a bomb calorimeter to figure out how many sandwiches they can eat and still lose weight.
If you're going to get hung up on the term calories let's call them approximate calories (or ACs) instead. If I eat mostly the same foods all the time I can use reasonable guesses to get the ACs in each food. Foods I eat infrequently will probably have a greater deviation between my ACs and the actual calories but that doesn't matter much because I don't eat them very often. Foods I eat frequently will probably have less error and the error doesn't matter much as long as I'm consistent with the numbers.
Let's say I decide I want to lose weight. I can start off with the general rule that for a male of my age, build and activity levels I need about 2500 calories a day to maintain weight. Since I want to lose some weight I'll set my daily AC allowance at 2000. After a couple weeks I check how the weight loss is going. Am I losing weight too slowly? Drop the ACs a bit. Am I losing weight too quickly? Increase the ACs a bit. Keep checking and adjusting every couple weeks until I'm happy with the weight loss.
This approach works in the real world. I do weigh and measure some of my food but if I had to weigh everything down to the last gram to make sure I ate exactly 1947 calories per day for ideal weight loss I'd quit pretty quickly.
mixing g and oz - that's a novel and interesting excuse to avoid the work of weight loss. usually people just blame their thyroid but this bullshit excuse at least has some kind of passable scientific pedantry behind it. i'll have to file that one for later.
I've had far more success just keeping a simple food diary and going "wow I eat a lot of cakes" and cutting them out.
I have a theory that 'calorie counters' are shockingly inaccurate (one other poster mentioned a 25% margin is 'fine'!) and their success comes from the very act of attempting to quantify what they're eating being a defacto food diary.
>I have a theory that 'calorie counters' are shockingly inaccurate (one other poster mentioned a 25% margin is 'fine'!)
Accurate or inaccurate is only meaningful related to the task and its requirements. 25% can be totally acceptable margin of error for the task. We use even bigger margins in lots of ventures (determining which startup will have a succesful exit to fund, for one).
And yes, the mere act of quantifying helps. But quantifying with even 25% error is still better than just writing down "ate 5 cakes", especially if one doesn't eat too many repeats of the same food.
Not sure in what reasoning one can complain for a method with 25% margin of error (say), but be OK with a method like "5 cakes" which still applies quantification, just in an even more vague and hazy sense.
5 cakes is much worse than 5 carrots, for example, but with merely writing down how many you ate, you have to rely on a far more relative guesstimation of their relative harm than you would be if you were counting their calories and being off by 25%).
> Not sure in what reasoning one can complain for a method with 25% margin of error (say), but be OK with a method like "5 cakes" which still applies quantification, just in an even more vague and hazy sense.
One method implies rigour and the other one is honest about what it is setting out to do
But you seem to be the only one assuming and/or bringing up rigor in this discussion.
Everybody said it's a quick ballpark figure / back of the envelope style calculation.
The mere fact "cake bad, carrots good" everybody knows. It's not much information concerning "Did I ate too much today?". One can have a caloric budget and stay within it (more or less) without having to be perfect in measurements (or sticking to carrot because it's easier to know its light).
I actually agree with you - to a large degree, counting the calories is enough to change behavior in itself, without even attempting to modify your diet at all.
The point remains, though, that it really doesn't matter how accurate or precise you are, simply that you're gathering data and using it to make measurable changes in your diet.
Your way is perfectly fine too! The nice things about calories (just like money) is that they're a universal medium of comparison, so you can compare your cakes to steaks. But if you simply want to look at a category and say "I am eating N of these, I need to eat N-1 to lose the weight", that's perfectly functional!
The thing I hate is when people make totally non-empirical diet changes, and then lament that they aren't losing weight. You just have to measure and adjust.
My point though is what you're "measuring" is quite difficult to do in a clinical setting, let alone every day living your life.
The above poster talking about the deli sandwich mentally breaking down all the ingredients... I'm happy to be proven wrong but I simply don't believe you can do that with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
I suppose this is turning in to quite a pedantic argument about the definition of "count". I'd call what everyone has said they're doing more accurately a "calorie estimating food diary".
My initial post was genuinely curious about how people can be so accurate when eating foods from a variety of non pre-measured sources. It turns out they're not being accurate.
>The above poster talking about the deli sandwich mentally breaking down all the ingredients... I'm happy to be proven wrong but I simply don't believe you can do that with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
You are just overestimating both the difficulty and the degree of accuracy required.
While at the same time, still relying on even more vague terms, to determine if you ate too many cakes etc (as per your other example).
I'm not claiming any degree of accuracy in the estimates, just that without tricking yourself in to think you're being rigorous you can achieve pretty much the same results. I outlined the mechanism that I think these 'counters' are actually achieving results by in spite of their atrocious data collection.
I can't believe people are defending such poor data collection practices. You'd be all over it if someone else was selling their results based on such inaccurate data but in this case it's fine?
If you're going to call it counting you need to be accurate.
>I outlined the mechanism that I think these 'counters' are actually achieving results by in spite of their atrocious data collection.
The mechanism is simple: they reduce their caloric intake, because they can track how much they eat. More or less: it doesn't have to be perfect, nor is it "atrocious" if it isn't. And you can easily just round the numbers up ("I calculated 500 for this thing, but let's say it's 600 just to be safe").
You seem to believe that any kind of "back of the envelope" / "ballpark" calculation is useless. Or that people only eat complex multi-part meals with no nutricion information, and have to gauge everything from zero all the time.
So I went looking for any studies about peoples ability to estimate calories, since any under/over estimation compounds either way in terms of results.
It turns out like everything, that's a tricky thing to study. When people are aware that their meals are going to be scrutinised they change what they eat for the duration of the study.
I wasn't able to find a recent study that investigates people's ability to estimate calories and the variance in their estimations.
> You seem to believe that any kind of "back of the envelope" / "ballpark" calculation is useless.
I do think that anything above a "good, bad, not sure" estimate is probably going to be so inaccurate as to not be worth the effort. However the act of trying to count calories itself promotes a mindfulness of what we're eating and that can induce change.
(I think that coming closer to a definition of spring would be "stores mechanical energy through compression and releases it through expansion").
I think that you could somewhat legitimately differentiate between an object that stores mechanical energy and releases it due to its atomic structure (ie, every object), and one which stores and releases it at an improved ratio due to macroscopic structure, such as a, well, traditional spring.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough: my impression of LA is that what is considered a "normal" commute/travel time there is actually quite large and more that what might be considered normal in other cities.
> Does anyone else actually enjoy going to the grocery store or walking to a local place to pick up food?
i enjoy this also.
the problem with food delivery is a lot of the time they forget something, or are out of something, or don't give you enough of something, so you end up going to the store.
and delivered prepared food is always disappointing compared to cooking or going out. it also generates an absurd amount of waste.
the only thing i really get delivered are products i can't buy locally, or without sitting in traffic for an hour.
not only that, but new housework can be invented out of thin air to fit any sized time or money budget/surplus, which is what the entire home improvement / remodeling industry exists for.
1. the project slips while you expect your new hire to work, and they don't deliver.
2. opportunity cost of actually hiring someone good - by the time you've realized you've made a mistake, a good person is off the market.
3. you actually have to pay a bad hire for their time. you can't just not pay them. that's cold hard cash out the door.
4. everyone on the team starts wondering, how the hell did this guy make it through this process? are we being run by idiots?
5. if the hire is remote in another state, you have to register your business with their tax authorities, and deal with that whole payroll rigamarole.
6. also health insurance bullshit.
7. setting up accounts, changing passwords/keys when they get canned.
8. actually firing them is not fun unless you are a total sociopath, or they are actively causing damage by destroying value (which is extremely rare -- most people will just silently not do a fucking thing for weeks on end).
9. worrying about a lawsuit because ironically, people who cause damage like to threaten these things.
this is on top of your already full workload of doing actual, productive things for actual paying customers and good employees.
there is starting to emerge a small, fringe group of people that believe calories-in-calories-out is a complete myth (or, more specifically, calories-out is a complete unknown given current understanding of metabolic science), which pretty much sends people into apoplectic fits of rage when they hear about it. even if it turns out to be a complete troll, it's great entertainment watching the science develop/debate.