Say it again: watch calories, not fat

Just wanted to highlight this little tidbit in the Vancouver Sun which reiterates something I’ve believed for a while now: it’s not so much important where you get your calories from, so much as how many you get, if you want to lose weight.

Bray, of Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and his colleagues randomly assigned several hundred overweight or obese people to one of four diets: average protein, low fat and higher carbs; high protein, low fat, and higher carbs; average protein, high fat and lower carbs; or high protein, high fat and lower carbs.

Essentially, they were testing high-carb diets, low-fat diets,  low-carb diets, and high protein/fat diets (like paleo). The results?

At six months, people had lost more than nine pounds of fat and close to five pounds of lean mass, but some of this was regained by the two-year mark.

People were able to maintain a weight loss of more than eight pounds after two years. Included in that was a nearly three-pound loss of abdominal fat, a reduction of more than seven per cent.

The team found no differences in weight loss or fat reductions between the diets.

Mainly saying, it doesn’t matter where you get your calories, just as long as you stay under your caloric limits. Now that being said, different diets will have an effect on other health factors, like heart health, cholesterol, insulin resistance, and so on. But for straight weight loss, it’s less calories, not less fat.

Source