Ban Ronald McDonald?

[Coito ergo sum]

I can't see why people are arguing over whether ingesting more calories than you need in any form causes weight gain. It's simple.

I'm shocked about it too. But - a lot of folks I run into get snowed by the woo from the "high fructose corn syrup" crowd -- HFCS may well not be good for you, but it has not been shown to be worse for you than table sugar. It gets you fat if you eat more than your body burns/shits/pisses/sweats/farts/cries/burps out.

[Coito ergo sum]

It's because some calories get pulled into stockage with less loss than others... fats are close to our own, so don't need much processing before being transferred to your gut and butt, complex sugars take longer, and take more energy to break down, which also gives the body more margin to burn them and means there will be somewhat less to show on the scales

The fact remains - eat fewer calories than your body needs, and you lose weight. The key is filling in the variables. Some folks have higher metabolic rates. Some foods are harder to digest, of course.

But, the long and short of it is - if a male, 6' tall weighing 250 pounds cuts his calories to 1800 a day, he's going to lose weight, even if it's 100% carbohydrates.

[Warren Dew]

For most people, excess calories cause weight gain. It's why bodybuilders eat more calories to gain muscle and cut calories to cut weight.

One of the main reasons Atkins type diets work is because huge swaths of calories are pulled out of a person's daily food intake.

Most bodybuilders follow that regimen only because they don't vary their macronutrient ratios - the ratios between carbs, fat, and protein. The one bodybuilder I know who does follow a low carb diet didn't need to cut calories to lose weight, because she didn't gain any fat on her high caloric intake. The Atkins induction phase cuts weight even for people who increase their caloric intake - don't forget that on Atkins, you are encouraged to add all the cheese, whipped cream, and butter that you can eat.

Twinkies are all carbohydrates - 27 grams of carbs - 4.5 g of fat - in 1.5 ounces of twinkie. 1 gram of protein only. Doritos are likewise high in carbs - 17 grams in one ounce. 8 grams of fat. 2 grams of protein. White bread, on the other hand, has on average about 15.2 grams of carbs in 1 ounce - so it would have LESS carbohydrate content than Doritos or Twinkies per ounce.

You have to do the comparisons in calories, because fats have more than twice as much calories per gram as carbohydrates. Twinkies are only 71% carbohydrate by calories, less than bread, which is 79%. Doritos are only 47% carbohydrate by calories, less than half, as I said.

Let's suppose you switched from 50% soda, 50% white bread, by calories, to 50% twinkies, 50% doritos, by calories, keeping calories constant at 2000 per day. Your caloric breakdown would be as follows:

Before:
1000 kcal soda: 1000 kcal carb, 0 kcal fat, 0 kcal protein
1000 kcal bread: 790 kcal carb, 110 kcal fat, 100 kcal protein
Total: 1790 kcal carb, 110 kcal fat, 100 kcal protein

After:
1000 kcal twinkies: 710 kcal carb, 270 kcal fat, 20 kcal protein
1000 kcal doritos: 470 kcal carb, 470 kcal fat, 60 kcal protein
Total: 1180 kcal carb, 740 kcal fat, 80 kcal protein

That's more than a 1/3 reduction in carbohydrate, before any reduction in calories. Reducing the calories as well, as he did, would further drop the carbohydrate content of his diet. His "experiment" doesn't differentiate between carbohydrates and calories causing fat.

To prove that it's fewer calories, rather than fewer carbs, that caused the reduced weight, he'd have to switch to a diet that was not only lower in calories, but higher in carbohydrates. He didn't do that, so his "experiment" didn't prove the "lower calories" theory at all.

[Warren Dew]

I can't see why people are arguing over whether ingesting more calories than you need in any form causes weight gain. It's simple.

A lot of things that are simple are also untrue. I know someone who ate 4000 calories of almost all animal fat for weeks on end, with little or no exercise, and still lost weight. For the calories to be stored as fat requires insulin to drive them into the fat cells; carbohydrates cause insulin spikes, and fats basically don't.

The fact remains - eat fewer calories than your body needs, and you lose weight. The key is filling in the variables. Some folks have higher metabolic rates. Some foods are harder to digest, of course.

Your metabolic rate is affected by the types of food you eat, not just by the amount of calories you eat.

[Tigger]

I can't see why people are arguing over whether ingesting more calories than you need in any form causes weight gain. It's simple.

A lot of things that are simple are also untrue. I know someone who ate 4000 calories of almost all animal fat for weeks on end, with little or no exercise, and still lost weight. For the calories to be stored as fat requires insulin to drive them into the fat cells; carbohydrates cause insulin spikes, and fats basically don't.

The fact remains - eat fewer calories than your body needs, and you lose weight. The key is filling in the variables. Some folks have higher metabolic rates. Some foods are harder to digest, of course.

Your metabolic rate is affected by the types of food you eat, not just by the amount of calories you eat.

4000 calories (a day?) would give me the shits too and I'd lose weight. Not to mention the weight loss method factor with ingesting all that crap.

[Ronja]

What's appropriate for scientific papers is different from what's appropriate from conversational postings on a bulletin board. This isn't a peer reviewed journal, and peer reviewed journals don't have quote boxes for direct quotes. You may know a lot about scientific writing, but there may still be things you could learn about idiotic language usage.

Affirmative. With my somewhat über-academic background I have repeatedly felt confused about usage and conventions in Forumglish (and expect to feel so again, soon enough). Also, as I have never seen scare quotes used in quite the manner you did, it took me a while to figure out what you were saying about quotation marks for signaling irony or distancing. A big thanks is due to Coito for giving the exact term and its synonyms - not to mention his generous praise; his post right before yours clarified quite a bit of what you were trying to convey, and was thus very educational.


As you have taught me something new, allow me now to return the favor: below is my attempt at discourse analysis (or content analysis for those who like to define "discourse" exclusively as spoken communication) on the paragraph of your text that I understood differently from what you had intended. It is something like this analysis that I would be interested in seeing you do on TMH's text, if you can afford the time. With such an analysis at hand it might be easier for us to figure out how we can each see the same words in so very different a light.

BTW - I am not claiming that you mislead intentionally. I am just trying to show why it was possible for me to misunderstand the expression you put in quotes as a direct quote.

First you presented what looked like an assertive claim about facts:

He's not reading anything in

(my intuitive impression of this: it is a fact (as opposed to your opinion) that this issue in this thread is not a question of interpretation, it is a question of the actual words that TMH wrote) - if you had begun with e.g. "In my opinion", I would naturally have seen this clause quite differently.

Next you used this expression

it's right there in black and white.

(my intuitive impression: the words soon to follow are the actual words that TMH wrote in this thread) - to me this choice of words strongly suggests that there exists some specific text ("in black and white") to look at "there" = somewhere in the thread.

Right after the above came this: a whole sentence, in first person singular and enclosed in double quotes

"I know what people at McDonald's should be eating"

(my intuitive impression: this is a direct quote from the actual words that TMH wrote, but they may be quoted based on memory, as the forum quote tool was not used) - this impression was of course wrong, but I hope you can see how the two clauses directly preceding this could seem to indicate that actual text in the thread was being quoted.

After all that followed

with the assumption that they don't, assumes superiority, which is condescending, intentional or not.

(my intuitive impression: this is the first part of this paragraph that contains your own interpretation - what came before the interpretation therefore must be the facts that the interpretation is based on) - these clauses contain both "assumption" and "intentional or not", and thus this part of the paragraph is the first to express anything that has to do with uncertainty, interpretation, or alternative views.


It is perhaps not too surprising that I would read your words like this, seeing as I have never before experienced or heard of scare quotes around a full sentence - only around one word, a concept, or a short phrase. I would be very interested in any English language guide (printed or on-line), which would explain such usage in detail - despite varying my Google searches in half a dozen ways, I have been utterly unable to find even one.

[Warren Dew]

What's appropriate for scientific papers is different from what's appropriate from conversational postings on a bulletin board. This isn't a peer reviewed journal, and peer reviewed journals don't have quote boxes for direct quotes. You may know a lot about scientific writing, but there may still be things you could learn about [idiomatic, not] idiotic language usage.

Do you think it's okay to misquote people now? Or did you not realize that "idiomatic" is an actual word, not a misspelling?

If the latter, you may want to try looking up new letter groupings in the dictionary before making incorrect assumptions.

[Ronja]

What's appropriate for scientific papers is different from what's appropriate from conversational postings on a bulletin board. This isn't a peer reviewed journal, and peer reviewed journals don't have quote boxes for direct quotes. You may know a lot about scientific writing, but there may still be things you could learn about idiotic language usage.

Do you think it's okay to misquote people now? Or did you not realize that "idiomatic" is an actual word, not a misspelling?

But honestly, Warren - where's your sense of humor? A "ISWYDT" or would have covered that quite nicely.

Or is a middle-aged lady who is making a bit of fun of you something so extremely dangerous that all the rest of the post deserves to be completely ignored?

[Coito ergo sum]

What's appropriate for scientific papers is different from what's appropriate from conversational postings on a bulletin board. This isn't a peer reviewed journal, and peer reviewed journals don't have quote boxes for direct quotes. You may know a lot about scientific writing, but there may still be things you could learn about idiotic language usage.

Do you think it's okay to misquote people now? Or did you not realize that "idiomatic" is an actual word, not a misspelling?

But honestly, Warren - where's your sense of humor? A "ISWYDT" or would have covered that quite nicely.

Or is a middle-aged lady who is making a bit of fun of you something so extremely dangerous that all the rest of the post deserves to be completely ignored?

27 is "middle age" in Finland?

[Svartalf]

Yeah, after the great Evangelical Lutheran Debacle, they mass converted to islam, so girls are married off at 9, and a 27 year old could be a grandmother, possibly expecting great grandkids

[Ronja]

27 is "middle age" in Finland?

Either you have extremely bad dyslexia (or rather dyscalculia, considering how copiously-yet-surprisingly-readably you usually write), or this is an extremely transparent case of attempted flattery - but how can we tell which it is?

[Tigger]

I think the middle-aged lady might have smacked some arse here.

[sandinista]

[Coito ergo sum]

27 is "middle age" in Finland?

Either you have extremely bad dyslexia (or rather dyscalculia, considering how copiously-yet-surprisingly-readably you usually write), or this is an extremely transparent case of attempted flattery - but how can we tell which it is?

I find transparent flattery to be the best kind.

[Warren Dew]

Or is a middle-aged lady who is making a bit of fun of you

Oh, you're saying it was intended to be humor! Humor is another thing that nonnative speakers don't do well, by the way. You might want to study English idiom (not a misspelling) more first.