Cutting sugar and flour: the approach that defies the calorie dogma

Cutting sugar and flour: the approach that defies the calorie dogma

What if being overweight were not a matter of adding and subtracting calories? A man 1.70 metres tall and weighing 78 kilos decided to find out. He dropped the sugar in his coffee, restricted bread and flour to once or twice a week, went running three days a week with sprint intervals, and started eating meat, fish, eggs, nuts and olive oil without counting anything. In a year and a half he lost eight kilos, got visible abs without doing ab exercises, and quit smoking. "I eat everything I want and I'm never hungry," he sums up. His experience, echoed by dozens of people across more than 12,800 replies, is the starting point of a discussion that has been questioning the official food pyramid for nine years.

The thesis running through the whole thread is that the enemy is neither fat nor excess calories, but insulin. Eating refined carbohydrates spikes this hormone, which blocks lipolysis — the burning of stored fat — and tells the body to build up reserves. A beef steak barely triggers an insulin response; a doughnut, by contrast, "tells the body it's time to store fat for the winter," as one of the most quoted analyses puts it. Under this logic, two 2,000-kilocalorie diets with different macronutrient compositions produce opposite metabolic effects, even though the energy label is identical.

The case that peine the floodgates: 78 kilos, 30 years old and a radical change

The original story describes an adult with a tendency to be overweight since childhood, who gained ten kilos in a sedentary, highly stressful job between the ages of 24 and 27. After leaving that job he lost eight kilos just from less stress and better eating. But the real leap came when he cut out sugar and flour and added high-intensity fasted training. He lost five kilos in the first month. Then more slowly, until stabilising at 69-70 kilos with more muscle in his legs, arms and back.

What stands out is not just the result but the method: no weighing food, no counting calories, no going hungry. He eats avocado, nuts, olive oil, oily fish and fatty sauces every day. At weekends he allows himself pizza, burgers or a pastry at a restaurant. The key, according to his experience, is that satiety arrives on its own when glucose doesn't swing up and down.

Why the calorie balance falls short in explaining obesity

The argument repeated most often throughout the discussion is that the first law of thermodynamics always holds, but explains nothing. "It's obvious the body cannot abusa the laws of thermodynamics, but that explains NOTHING," the original post points out. Basal metabolism accounts for around 85% of total energy expenditure; exercise, barely 15%. Hence a spinning session has minimal impact on weight loss if resting metabolism is depressed by years of insulin spikes.

The criticism extends to official recommendations: restricting fats and basing the diet on bread, pasta and potatoes. It is argued that these guidelines lack solid scientific backing and that conventional obesity treatments are "tremendously ineffective." The empirical observation that keeps coming up: people with chronic overweight never lose weight unless there is an epiphany or a radical life change.

Some take the scepticism into the realm of physics. One participant tried to explain metabolism by invoking entropy and the second law of thermodynamics; another corrected him: living beings decrease their local entropy at the cost of increasing it in their surroundings, and when the brain gets no carbohydrates it does not make glucose from protein but converts fat into ketone bodies. The thermodynamic explanation, they concluded, is not relevant to this case.

The results that keep piling up: from 86 to 71 kilos in nine months

Over the years, various participants have reported their numbers. One went from 86 kilos in January to 78.5 in May on a conventional diet, and from there to 71 in October after adopting a low-carb diet: "I feel better, I eat like an animal and I'm more defined than when I was 20." Another lost 19 kilos in 20 weeks and kept his target weight a year later with 16-8 intermittent fasting and avoiding carbs. A third, starting from 93 kilos at 1.85 metres, began with heartburn and mood swings and ended up reversing the trend.

The pattern repeats: rapid initial loss — much of it water associated with glycogen — then a slower decline and stabilisation. The scale deceives, they warn: it doesn't distinguish fat, muscle, bone, organs or intestinal content. That's why some recommend measuring yourself instead of weighing yourself.

The Asian paradox and the sedentary myth

The argument that we are more sedentary today than our grandparents is challenged with a homely example: the grandfather who thought running without an animal chasing you was crazy, that lifting weights does damage, and who made walking and the pasodoble his only exercise. He was never fat, he smoked and he ate bacon. Today's average population does more sport than in the past; what has changed is the food.

As for the supposed paradox of Asians who eat rice and don't gain weight, the answer is that they ate rested rice, hardly any sugar, seasoned it with vinegar and spices that slow absorption, and fasted at least twelve hours a day. That balance is deteriorating: China is the country where obesity is growing fastest, and in Italy — a Mediterranean-diet country — bellies are proliferating, with people distinguishing between thin-crust pizza made with natural ingredients and ultra-processed dough.

Cholesterol, statins and the hyper-responder phenotype

In the most recent phase, the conversation shifted to lipids. The LMHR phenotype (Lean Mass Hyper-Responder) is debated: slim, athletic, metabolically healthy people who, when adopting ketogenic diets, push LDL above 200 mg/dl with HDL above 80 and triglycerides below 70. The working consensus is that without inflammation or atherogenic dyslipidemia, that elevated LDL does not generate plaque. A five-year study, it is claimed, found no pogre of atherosclerosis in these subjects.

The criticism of statins is blunt: "According to the pharmaceutical companies' own data, lowering cholesterol with statins increases life expectancy by an average of four days." It is noted that those primary prevention trials included people with diabetes and hypertension, not healthy subjects with isolated high LDL. The key, they insist, is low triglycerides and controlled glucose so that LDL particles don't oxidise.

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Nine years after the first post, the debate is still alive and unresolved. Those who arrived with the calorie calculator have left; those who tried it, stayed. The question is no longer whether it works, but for whom and at what cost. And there, as in almost everything, the answer depends on each person's liver.