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Our appetite is such a finely tuned system that If we were to only eat 4 pistachio nuts a day over my requirements, within a year, anyone of us would put on an additional 25 pounds of fat.
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I was amazed to find how many calories there are in nuts. E.g. 15 grams of walnuts ( which is really not much!) is 100 calories...
Guess who was ignorantly piling on ounces of walnuts on the breakfast oats in the past... no wonder it was hard to lose weight, LOL!
To me, the big "Aha" is where the calories are coming from, there are plenty of counter-intuitive surprises in this space!
Even my mug coffee with milk turned out to be an issue, when you add it up over a day (week, month, year...)
It's not just calories but how much they fill you up and what other nutrients they provide. For example semi-skimmed milk might have the same number of calories per 100ml, as lemonade, but it also has a ton of other nutrients such as calcium and protein and it's absorbed much more slowly, than lemonade, which is just sugary water.
Nuts are energy dense, but they're also packed full of other nutrients, so aren't a bad thing to eat.
When you eat most of your calories is also important. It's generally better to eat more earlier on in the day, so it can be burned off, rather than at night, when it's more likely to be stored as fat.
However it's still energy in vs expenditure which matters. Tricks such as less energy dense food, which is slowly absorbed, eating enough fibre and not too late help to increase the odds of an energy deficit, but physics always wins.
I've found if I'm really active, it's almost impossible to gain weight and I tend to under, rather than over eat, which can cause some disordered eating, such as binging, and waking up in the night to eat. When I'd go for a six mile cycle ride at lunchtime, as well as cycling 4.5 miles to and from work everyday, I'd find myself eating all sorts of processed, sugary, fatty food and still lose weight. Now I still cycle to and from work, but I haven't cycled at lunchtime, since the pandemic, as I'm worried about having an accident and going to hospital, so the binging is rare and I don't wake up to eat any more. When I start cycling at lunchtime again, I'll make more of an effort to eat/drink more calories from substances which don't keep my stomach full for too long, as night eating is a pain and I feel drowsy the following day. All the energy dense foods which are considered to be healthy, tend to be slow release and would keep my stomach full, thus reducing my appetite and what I eat later, so I might resort to eating some junk food, after my lunchtime cycle rides, to keep my intake up.