You are like 25 years behind the science. There is a difference in absorption, but its negligible. Your digestion is incredibly efficient at absorbing calories. Unless you have some weird condition, you can count calories 1:1 and ignore the rounding error of absorption.
This calorimeter talking point has been debunked for a long time now.
You can eat McDonalds responsibly if you don’t eat too much. If you feel like you are still hungry get a burger and a salad instead of two burgers. Or stuff like that.
It’s OK to eat McDonalds. The problem is irresponsibly eating McDonalds.
The cheapest food would be raw ingredients like rice, beans etc. That way you can eat an appropriate amount and not feel hungry. Also let’s not pretend like frozen veggies are more expensive than McDonalds or other restaurants.
Otherwise eating less is always cheaper, you just might feel hungry.
You don’t have to avoid UPF. Just eat less and fill with salad/veggies until you aren’t hungry. As long as you keep the calories in range you’ll be mostly fine. Maybe watch the macros a bit.
Broo the amount of people pretending that they can’t get rice, beans, frozen veggies and some sauce, but McDonalds is cheaper and available is insane.
“I have no choice, but to buy McDonalds every day” Lmao what? Unless you don’t have a kitchen, that is ridiculous. Even then, don’t they sell salads? Get the burgers for the calories you need and fill with salads until you aren’t hungry anymore.
Edit: For relatively cheap and complete protein source consider Soy-granulate, sometimes called TVP. It also has a long shelf life since its dry.
They raise your heart rate a little bit. But mostly suppress hunger and impulse-eating. For some they can cause weight loss. But they mostly stabilize your diet by making it easier to follow a schedule.
I have been taking them for 2 years and those have been the years I actually gained weight. But I can see how they could make loosing weight easier too.
What? I’m trying to gain weight. The meds help me remember to eat.
We can use the glycemic index for the insulin spikes and calorie density for how much you can fit. But the taste isn’t really measured I think.
The calories hit basically the same. The carbs might be closer to sugar and combined with the missing fiber you’ll get a big insulin spike. Gotta watch out for those to not build resistance.
But there is this obsession with the “chemicals” like the Red dye 40 scare recently. Those are like 0.5% of the problem, but distract from the real problem of too many calories.
The point at which you should care about Red40 is when you’re a professional athlete or bodybuilder on contest prep. No normal human has health issues from these “chemicals” (allergies notwithstanding) anywhere comparable to the issues of too many calories.
Edit: As a German I do agree that American “Bread” should be classified and sold as dishwashing sponges.
No, that’s the current problem. Growing up my parents believed that a vegetarian diet of 80% vegetables was healthy. While I probably got all the micro nutrients I could not physically fit the needed amount of calories in the form of vegetables into my stomach.
I really should get a refill XD
Don’t get me wrong, I do mealprep, just forget or don’t have time for lunch some days. Then I eat “junkfood” because I can’t eat 2000 calories in one go, when I eat rice and lentils.
Can we stop bitching about UPF? They are tasty, so you eat a lot of them and get fat. Simple as that.
The definition itself is stupid. Bread is ultra processed. Protein powder is ultra processed. Can we focus on calory-density and taste?
Also as someone with ADHD I regularly forget to eat lunch. If I couldn’t eat 2 pizzas for dinner, I would loose even more weight. This propaganda about good and bad foods has kept me underweight for most of my life.
Yea, not a good food source, but if you use it, you don’t have to get fat.
If you have no time to cook, do mealprep, or if you have the money buy premade meals.