Kansas State University professor Mark Haub ate a Twinkies every three hours for ten weeks and lost 27 pounds! His cholesterol numbers improved as well. Haub put himself through this horrible regimen to prove a point: weight loss is all about caloric intake, not the type of food you eat. James Plafke at Geekosystem explains:
Of course, there's a lot more to the story. Link
When I first started working out, I couldn’t gain weight no matter what I tried. I asked a large amount of people at the few gyms I attended at the time, and the advice received has always stuck out: Eat everything. The first (extremely in-shape) person I asked told me to buy a box of bakery cupcakes from the local grocery store and eat that after lunch a few times a week. The next (very ripped and cut) person I asked told me he ate a tub of chocolate pudding a few times a week after dinner. The message was clear: So long as you’re correctly working out, the type of food you eat doesn’t matter as much as you may think.
Of course, there's a lot more to the story. Link
BINGO
What a lot of these guys are doing is probably: keeping their metabolism going by "grazing" instead of the traditional 3 big meals per day.
Grazing creates a more stable blood-sugar environment and keeps your metabolism going.
Generally, a non-obese person would eat 12 calories per pound of bodyweight per day as maintenance and then add an activity percentage to that. -->Hardcore trainers eating like crazy.
But to address your point, you cannot create a Calorie Deficit of more than 10% without your body going into Starvation Mode and slowing down your metabolism.
You have to know your cal allowance numbers and eat as precisely as possible; try not to go too over or under at each meal or with cheats. And bad food is still bad food, regardless of a silly Twinkie article.
Even Lyle McDonald himself, who is THE GUY on nutrition, now makes these same simple "eat less than you burn" recs to almost everyone. And Lyle is the guy who actually IMPROVED ON Dan Duchaine's CKD masterpiece diet, "BodyOpus".
No shit, Sherlock. How about eating nothing then? Or perhaps barfing it up afterwards? You'll definitely lose weight.
The way the media is promoting this story is really irresponsible. You too, Neatorama.
The proper idea is about overall health. The more you eat foods from the outside aisles of the supermarket or from local farms and CSAs, the better off you'll be, omnivore or vegetarian. The less processing the better. There's no way I could perform my daily activities on such a crap diet.
The point should be that you should be eating higher quality foods and finding active ways to enjoy yourself rather than worrying about the measure of the gravitational pull of the earth on theyour body.