Diet, medication, flexibility, and training.

[ChessGuy]

No. Why do people keep saying this stuff though? It continues to baffle me.

What stuff?

[Sean Herbison]

The myth that it's the calories has done much damage to our health.

Really? Everything I've seen has shown that calories are the primary factor, and too many (or too few, but that's not much of an issue in the US/Europe) of them from any source lead to poor health. I've seen people get good results with high carb/low carb/keto, intermittent fasting/eating every two hours, or avoiding wheat/having a bread-based diet, but I've never seen any diet that produces good health or performance with too many or too few calories, regardless of the eating strategy or ingredients.

[greywar]

What stuff?

Pretty much everything you posted.

"No need for testing, I just KNOW." (paraphrased) was my favorite.

[tallison]

the diuretic medicine used to help control my blood pressure and which I took for 20 years.

Wait, so what happened with your bp?

[Dave Hahn]

I seem to recall some literature around thiazide diuretic use and gout or pseudo-gout. Did you ever had your uric acid level monitored while on the thiazide diuretic?

[ChessGuy]

I seem to recall some literature around thiazide diuretic use and gout or pseudo-gout. Did you ever had your uric acid level monitored while on the thiazide diuretic?

No, never. I did read something about "gouty" arthritis. The Orthopedic Doc who diagnosed my knee arthritis a couple of years ago by looking at the Xrays didn't mention anything about gout. He gave me a shot in each knee which helped with the pain but produced some scary side effects.

The fact is I don't think that taking a thiazide for 20 years is very healthy. My recovery from the multiple aches and pains which I had previously attributed to old age has been remarkable. Since I was doing lots of stair climbing at work, the Doc and I agreed to just keep taking only my Lisinopril. It worked.

[Jordan Feigenbaum]

We are all happy you're feeling better, dude- seriously.

That said, while it's plausible the medication and you just didn't get along- it's also possible something else, perhaps even supratentorial is involved.

Only reason I even commented was your points about diet, which have been falsified far too many times.

Then the last part about you not thinking taking a thiazide for 20 years being "healthy". Why do you think that explicitly?

[Mulgere Hircum]

Really? Everything I've seen has shown that calories are the primary factor, and too many (or too few, but that's not much of an issue in the US/Europe) of them from any source lead to poor health.

Funny this would come up when I start reading the board again, because I'm in the process of tracking down personal issues that behave differently than you expect. A little while ago I went on a low GI diet and started losing about a lb/week without calorie restriction--quite the contrary, for several reasons my calorie consumption went up without affecting the spontaneous body composition. A few years before that my wife discovered that a number of foods, notably gluten and dairy, trigger an autoimmune attack on her thyroid (diagnosed as Hashimoto's, not celiac, though I don't think Hashimoto's is usually food dependent--I'd have to ask her), which effectively put her on a low GI diet for life. She never at any point attempted to restrict calories or lose weight, but she began to steadily and gradually lose weight and now in her late forties she is below her weight before she gave birth to three children (with all the weight gain that implies). If your statement was meant to apply to everyone (I assume not), formally speaking that would disprove it by counterexample. I in practical terms it primarily illustrates is that most general statements about how exceedingly complex and poorly understood molecular machinery will react to its chemical environment are, at best, statistical. If you happen to have a study in hand that actually applies to you, then you might even have a guess as to your odds (which is all the use most people can get from that kind of study).

For most people, the main use of anecdotes is to direct your experiments on your own body, because unless you write books you don't really care about what makes other people lose (or on this board, gain) weight. People care about what will make *them* lose weight. And they don't care about that alone--they have other priorities, like not losing lean mass (sufficient calorie restriction will make anyone lose weight, but so will a sufficiently severe infection of parasitic worms). No anecdote call tell you that, but then neither can a peer-reviewed, double-blind study. What both can do is provide you with reasonable hypotheses to test on yourself. Parsimony suggests that what is most likely to work for you is probably what works most often for other people, because statistically you're more likely to be like them than not. But you get no guarantee of any particular result. Nor is there a single answer to which you should try first, because that's a question of how much you're going to dislike whatever you try.

So will eliminating wheat, or eliminating high GI food, or watching Stooges make you lose weight? Nothing can tell you that. They're worth trying if you are having problems losing weight by simple calorie restriction, but only as testable hypotheses. Simple calorie restriction works for a lot of people, so it's a reasonable first try. If it works in a way that meets your goals, you're done. If not, well, try whatever you think next most likely or next least odious (I suggest trying low GI before watching Stooges, but I suppose if you love both carbs and the Stooges enough you might try throwing a Hail Mary first and see if you're the one guy on the planet who can Stooge-a-thon his way to lower body fat). If you're unlucky, you'll discover your machinery works a bit differently than the majority, and you'll have to find more reasonable (i.e. not Stooges) hypotheses to test. My brother was skinny as a rail until eventually a specialist discovered he had a mild but chronic upper intestinal infection. As soon as that was eliminated, he started gaining the lean weight he should have gained in his teens and twenties. Literally nothing else probably would have worked, since his body was failing to absorb most of what he was eating. That method is probably not going to work for you, so I wouldn't suggest trying it first. But if you have some other indications that you're not absorbing nutrients well, maybe try it before the Stooge-a-thon (unless you reaaaly like the Stooges, of course, I'd never stand in the way of that).

No guarantees, even from peer-reviewed research. That's not how Science works, even if very few people seem to understand that. No guarantees.

I'm sorry.

[marcf]

No need for testing. We pretty much know that the over consumption of high fructose corn syrup and wheat products is the main reason for the exploding plague of obesity and diabetes in this country. Most everyone who I know who reduces or eliminates both items from their diet get to feel much better, health wise.

I eat a LOT of donuts and pastries every week and I'm not fat and I generally feel pretty great.

[Jordan Feigenbaum]

Funny this would come up when I start reading the board again....[long post]

You misunderstand- no one is saying that personal experience on what works best is not important. What we are saying is that the wheat, insulin/carb, or GI hypotheses have been thoroughly rebuked and that using these methods or purported mechanisms for predicting, understanding, or explaining what happens is wrong and generally leads to wasting time.