First off, I'm not trying to "push my position" with this thread -- I don't even have one. I'm genuinely curious about what people think is going on here.
Like many vegan youtubers, this guy:
1. Makes lots of "what I ate today" videos.
2. Eats a high carb, low fat and low protein diet.
3. Exercises daily (endurance training).
As someone who thinks "calories in, calories out" is the best model for understanding weight gain/fat loss, I'm baffled by his results. In short, he did a series of 31 videos chronicling his daily eating/exercising. He eats about 4-8k daily (summaries at end of videos), and does about 1-3 hours of aerobic activity (distance running, mostly).
Even being VERY generous, he's burning MAYBE 2000 cals/day exercising, yet it doesn't look like he's gained any weight throughout the month. Furthermore, as far as I can tell, he's been eating more or less the same way for the past year (at least), and doesn't look to have put on any appreciable amount of weight.
Here's the last three videos (days 29-31):
(7.7k cals)
(6.9k cals)
(6.4k cals)
And the first three (days 1-3):
(4.6k cals)
(4.3 kcals)
(6.1 kcals)
I chose this guy because I think he's a good example of a difficult-to-explain phenomenon. Across the board, these vegan youtubers seem to have normal or even very low bodyfat while consuming tons of food.
To me, a few reasonable possibilities may be:
1. He's young (about 20) and you can eat more when you're young.
2. He's genetically predisposed to handle this diet well.
3. He's lying.
As a counterpoint to 1 and 2 though, take someone like freelee. She looked like shit in her 20s -- I don't think anyone would bring up her DNA just from looking at her. Now, in her mid-thirties she's sickeningly lean on the same sort of diet/exercise regime (supposedly).
Yeah, they could both be scammers (vegan agenda), you can't know much about someone's DNA just by looking at them, etc.
Still, it has me very curious -- maybe there's something to high-carb diets? And if so, why are they so out-of-fashion?