Important to note, that only with metabolism of a young male, it is possible to lose weight without exercise. I am 37 and restricting my calorie intake helps, but not greatly. Exercising daily - helped a lot. Most women of 30+ must exercise to lose weight - metabolism is completely different.
>We're in the internet age. If you have a basic question, ask google.
When somebody presents an opinion that seems to go against the general scientific consensus, no, I won't just google it, I'd rather ask what they base it on.
He didn't say that! It gets harder to maintain that deficit because your metabolism will start to conserve energy, your body gets colder and sleepy and therefore uses less energy. At least if the deficit is chosen too high.
Can you live a life on a consistent 500 kcal diet? I was saying that with age (and with gender) it is much more difficult to maintain weight with just lowering down the calorie intake.
Living life is going to work every day, working 8 hours a day, and then having something for yourself in the evening - walks in the park, or some exercise, or something else that actually requires energy.
I get that it's more difficult to do such changes the older you get just from a psychological standpoint, especially if your body is used to a caloric surplus (which it probably is if you're thinking about going to a 500 kcal deficit). But I'm interested in knowing if the body metabolism really changes so drastically when you get older as to make a -500 kcal diet impractical, and where the cutoff for practicality would then be.
You are mistaken - all life forms including humans obey the laws of physics. If you eat at a caloric deficit you will lose weight no matter your age or if you do exercise.
They are not necessarily mistaken just because we have a hypothesis.
It's a fact that it's harder for women to lose weight than men in certain cases. Their point was that "caloric deficit" is different for each person, and sometimes dramatically so.
a) Doesn't really eat 1000 kcals a day if she's active, and should, instead of building a diet by counting calories (doing which she's prone to miscalculation), simply eat less of whatever she usually eats.
b) Doesn't need to lose half a kg of fat every week.
Metabolism is not as impactful as nowadays is though. Simply - you eat more, you gain more weight. If this is not the case, checking out your overall health would be the way to go.
The rule is simple, but finding your real caloric consumption isn't.
Most online calculators are veeery optimistic (off by >500kcal). If you take the general advice and only restrict to a 500kcal deficit, you won't see much happening :/
We aren't talking about physics. We are talking about a complex, open system. Something closer to macroeconomics. There is truth to what you are saying, but the certainty you are saying it with hides an ocean of complexity. Why are people excessively hungry? Does cutting calories linearly affect everyone the same way? What if we looked at the type of weight lost, is purely focusing on calories the best way to lose predominantly fat while maintaining muscle, organ tissue, and bones? Is focusing purely on calories effective for everyone (compliance) or does it set up some potentially disastrous consequences for some people?
That is absolutely correct. However the problem is that human's body needs energy to run - think, work, feel emotions. So if you can imagine someone on the bed 24/hrs a day, then indeed a simple calorie reduction will help. Because calories will be used for simple body functions, and not anything else. Restricting calorie intake for someone who has to go to work daily, work, live a life, will not work beyond certain limit, which actually allows to live that life.
You may not lose weight healthily if your deficit makes consuming proper nutrients impossible.
The body can adjust its usage of calories way down in the event of a perceived famine, making the amount of calories consumed no longer contain a deficit.
The RMR can change during a diet as both fat and muscle require maintenance, and you nearly always lose both during a period of deficit. This can make maintaining a significant deficit very difficult
Finally, there is evidence that people who have lost significant weight have a reduced metabolic weight (and hunger for more calories) even five years after they completed their dieting. This may explain why the failure rate of people >100 lbs overweight losing and maintaining is nearly 95%
Ok, this is true, but what happens is the calories burned part changes dramatically based on hormones. And hormones change quite a bit as you age and or gain weight, and not in favor of weight loss.
The hormone mix basically tells your body to store some percentage of calories in as fat. When young and/or fit, this percentage is low. Calories above your burn rate are stored as glycogen in your muscles, giving you usable energy stores that will be used when you exercise.
When older or fat or both, calories above your burn rate go to fat cells waiting to fill back up. As the weight packs on, the percentage increases and more and more of the calories you consume are going to fat instead of being burned. Your caloric burn alotment goes down. You lose muscle density. Testosterone goes down, and the percentage of calories dedicated to fat stores climbs.
So it is still true, calories in < calories out to lose weight. But perhaps it would be better to say “calories in < (calories out + calories stored)”
Where calories stored will vary and for fat people it’s much higher than fit.
A fat man can eat the same food and calories as a fit person who does not exercise, and gain weight and feel tired while the fit person feels an energy boost.
Exercise is important, and people should exercise because they get benefits even if they don't lose weight, but you should stop saying it's useful to reduce weight.
We think that people heavily over-estimate the amount of calories burnt by exercise; they under-estimate the amount of calories they eat; and exercising gives people "permission" to eat more calories than they normally would.
Exercise burns calories, so it certainly does help weight loss if done in conjunction with a proper diet.
You are correct that people frequently overestimate how many calories they burn working out, and that they then eat more as a result - both because they think they've earned it, but also because exercise stimulates your appetite. But when you understand these instincts and stick to the diet, exercise will help you lose weight more quickly.
Restricting calories sufficiently can create weight loss at any age. Metabolism is not magic but basic chemistry/physics, if output exceeds input this will happen.
Of course each of us is unique, and also changes over time, so efficiency of both inputs and outputs varies.
I believe you meant that its mentally hard to restrict one so much in later age to suffer from hunger enough to lose weight, but technically its doable and happening in millions of instances around the world all the time (ie due to long term illnesses).
Exercise helps tremendously of course, and everybody should do enough of any healthy type every day to get sweaty (and more). But it isn't necessary to lose weight, not at all, at any age.
This is incorrect. The laws of physics in play are biochemically complex but the net energy differential is straight forward. Calorie Intake > Burn Rate = Weight Gain, and vice-versa. Exercise increases the burn rate, but it doesn't change the formula.
Completely eliminating simple carbs (bread, noodles, rice, pasta, potatoes, and the like) and eating meat and veg and dairy (i.e. a cheese-heavy salad with sugar-less dressing, a big bowl of broccoli with cheese melted on it, as many chicken breasts, steaks, and burgers as I liked, coffee with heavy cream but no sugar, etc.) exclusively worked for me. Weight gradually melted away over the course of the past year and I'm still dropping pounds. Meals like those fill me up quickly and I stay full longer. All while I've exercised very little. And I'm older than you.
Well, to be fair you will lose it if you had it in first place. People who don't bulk up by training, only cary the muscle that... carries them. As long as you keep your protein intake as recommended, you will keep the muscle you need in your regular physical activity level.
The hard part for me is mindset and willpower. Unfortunately, knowing the physics* behind weight loss doesn't make it any easier, and perhaps might make it more stressful. Why can't I do this simple thing that logically is as complex as 2+2. Our minds have their own prerogatives.
I wonder then what did you tell yourself? How many times did you have a bad day? What was your mood like throughout? I'd love to know so much more about the psychology. Great article though and thanks again for sharing!
I think daily tracking in combination with a long term goal is key here, because it allows you some wiggle room when it comes to progress while having a strong rubber band effect (that gets stronger the more you sway) to get you back on track.
Having lost and kept off half my body weight, yeah, the math is really, really, really stupidly easy part of weight loss.
I envy people who don't know what it is like to feel compelled to gorge themselves. It's an unstoppable force sometimes. You'd be amazed at what your mind will do to make you ingest more calories.
And then you get on the internet and, in addition to all the "it's really simple, just eat fewer calories" idiots, there's a thousand know-it-all fucks trying to tell you that if you just follow their fad diet you'll never feel hungry again and your dick will grow three sizes and you'll win the lottery.
There is a part of my brain that, usually around 1030 at night, says, right eat everything in the immediate vicinity because it might vanish / get eaten by sabre-tooth tigers, just be taken away from you.
It's so deeply wired in me i actually resent (no deeply hate) the food industries that take advantage of my biology.
I think the only hope for health care costs to be brought back to earth is to treat most foods like we treat alcohol or tobacco - chocolate bars that cost the same as a bottle of whiskey, sugar eating areas away from other parts of restaurants, cities that revolve around walking not driving,
It's wholesale chnage - and no please don't throw the nanny state argument at me - look at the Libertarian party (Their presidential candidate suggested it would be a good idea to have a driving license ... got crucified) We live in a nanny state and most people don't think it's sane to leave
That's generally how I am. I can't be around food because as soon as I know it is there a part of my mind spends all its time thinking about it. I'll eventually cave and eat it. All of it. People sometimes say things like "no one can eat all that X" and I can tell you from personal experience they are almost always wrong.
Even keeping just enough food in my house for a week's worth of meals (I only eat one, lunch) only works in combination with an appetite suppressant, otherwise I'll find excuses to bake bread or elaborate confections or something. And attending any social function where food might be present is extremely dangerous and to be avoided if at all possible.
> I'll eventually cave and eat it. All of it. People sometimes say things like "no one can eat all that X" and I can tell you from personal experience they are almost always wrong.
100% true for me as well. If it's there I can and will eat it, sometimes past the point of feeling sick. "You ate that whole pint of ice cream in one sitting??" No, you don't know about the other pint of ice cream that I ate a few hours ago and didn't say anything about because of guilt.
Unrestrainable appetite has a natural answer: dietary fat.
Food cravings, hunger pangs, insatiable demands to scarf things: that's often the dark side of an insulin cycle where carbohydrates play a determinative role. But barring issues better treated with psychiatry, most people aren't going to feel the urge to snack after eating a soup-bowl worth of butter...
Its mildly nauseating to eat too much fat. Eliminating insulin spikes makes appetite control 100 times easier. Every body is different, but if you might want to consider a (low carb) high-fat diet for a while.
Also: eating once a day is a bad habit unless you're working things correctly. Maybe check out the "OMAD" (one meal a day), types to see how they're eating? High fat generally plays a role there, too, for satiation and energy reserves.
Ugh. Internet know-it-all parrots some keto bullshit, film at 11.
I have eaten entire 24 ounce jars of peanut butter in one sitting, blocks of cheese, cans of nuts, whatever. It doesn't matter what I'm eating at all. It is endlessly irritating that people like you keep insisting you know more about how my body works than I do.
The reason "people" keep telling you the same thing for the same problem is because you're either describing a treatable mental condition unrelated to nutrition or totally talking out your neck...
Dietary fat causing satiation is hardly "internet know-it-all" and has anything to do with keto in an of itself. The keto diet does encourage other dietary habits that enhance and strengthen the satiation of those goods fats to control and mollify the specific appetite problem you are discussing. It's a system of effects that specifically addresses that urge (https://paleoleap.com/dietary-fat-and-satiety/).
Not a single example you have retorted with points to anything other than poor blood sugar regulation, poor dietary habits, and insufficient fat in your standard diet (which is totally different than binging on something fatty, in the presence of your admittedly poor diet). You are Doing It Wrong.
A whole thing of peanut butter is not going to avoid the insulin spikes. A whole thing of nuts is not sufficient by itself and likely were nuts with the wrong macros. Cheese is nice, but single source foods are not how you should be eating as a grown up, and that habit is causing the problems (says you).
"It doesn't matter what I'm eating at all" contradicts observable research in every aspect of medicine, basic biology, and the standard model. You're whining from ignorance.
> a part of my brain that, usually around 1030 at night, says, right eat everything in the immediate vicinity
Late night snacking has always been my personal achilles heel...
A high-fat diet -- say, steak tacos with avocado sauce in cheese-tortillas -- can do a lot to mitigate snackiness. So instead of a late night chocolate bar, maybe try eating half a pack of bacon and see how you feel... Or an extra half-pack of bacon with your last meal so your appetite calls it quits for a few hours extra...
Within the same caloric footprint, and the hard suffering of eating bacon, I think it's possible to radically reshape your appetite towards more satiating foods that don't leave you snacky. And if you're like me, cutting out the snacking is most of the caloric control you need.
Cons: have to cut carbs so you don't balloon, natural progression towards keto. Pros: less snacky; red wine, whiskey, and bacon as part of a 'weight loss' regimen.
In my experience, one of the easiest ways is to make the process enjoyable. Try and find some sort of exercise you enjoy, or let yourself listen to your favourite podcasts / music whilst you're exercising.
At the end of the day, if you're hating every minute of it, there's very little likelihood you'll keep with your programme. So do whatever you need to do in order that you enjoy yourself whilst doing it, and results will follow :)
I like this idea. I have also been bad about picking podcasts that I like, though. I think laziness and procrastination might be a huge factor for me. :-?
Note that TFA did not exercise (much), instead they used numbers tracking as motivators, think RPG min/maxing. It also works great with laziness and procrastination because all it requires is tracking and optimising a counter or two.
If you're struggling to start, there's a couple of things that might help.
1 - Arrange a regular workout with friends / a personal trainer. Once you're in the habit of exercising regularly, it gets much easier. And putting it off becomes harder thanks to someone else expecting you to turn up.
2 - Take something you really like (food, movies, etc.) and commit to yourself that you'll only do that thing after you've exercised to make it more appealing.
My approach is that I can only watch an episode of a show if I spend the first 30 minutes of it on my stationary bike. (I am currently following Westworld Season 2 and The Expanse Season 3.) Tying my motivation to do cardio to my motivation to see what happens next has worked well for me. Getting motivated to lift 2x a week is another issue...
> Getting motivated to lift 2x a week is another issue...
Was in the same boat until I started doing group classes. Used that to build accountability, motivation, and a "vocabulary" of how the gym works. Now I could spend hours at the gym by myself and love it. Find what works for you, cuz lifting is a blast!
> In my experience, one of the easiest ways is to make the process enjoyable. Try and find some sort of exercise you enjoy, or let yourself listen to your favourite podcasts / music whilst you're exercising.
TFA notes that they didn't exercise (that they tried but didn't stick).
Ideally you'd combine exercise and calorie counting, but for nerds calorie-counting makes the diet into a numbers game which can be a great motivator on its own.
Exercise is ideal, but most people* don't burn enough calories exercising to enter a calorie deficit. Worse still: appetite spikes after exercise make most people eat more. All that really matters is eating below your maintenance calories. Exercise is the cherry on top for making your body actually look good.
*If you're weightlifting HEAVY 2-3 hours a day 6 days a week or running marathons every weekend, then you are burning enough calories to enter a deficit. Otherwise: your workout is burning fewer calories than there are in a banana.
for me exercise has to be fun. I can easily do a 2 hour mountain bike ride and just have fun. I can kitesurf for 3 hours and still want more. Same with ultimate frisbee and hockey. Cycling, running, weightlifting are mind numbing.
The problem I have with exercising is that it makes me really hungry causing me to overeat. If Im exercising 4 days a week, it isnt a problem. But if Im only doing 2 times a week, it is better to not exercise at all.
Skipping dinner works for me (I eat breakfast around 8, lunch at 2, and late snack around 6) except my family wont let me skip dinner. When I used to travel for business it worked and I was able to get down to 165.
Ive been stuck at 175 (5' 9") for a long time, I just downloaded myfitnesspal and will try that. I do like low carb because it reduces the hunger I feel making it much easier to follow reduced calories.
Beat Saber (Oculus Rift) + fitness watch (Vivosmart HR+) + My Fitness Pal is working great for me.
I'd been counting calories for a couple months and dropped about 8 pounds (which is good), but slow. My self-control was 'meh'.
Got Beat Saber two weeks ago. I love music, and apparently I love dancing. Kept tracking calories. Down another 8 pounds in those two weeks. I've been playing about 30-60 minutes a day, and with my average heart rate (at a safe level) and weight, I should be burning ~400-1000 calories in those sessions.
I understand a lot of that is water weight from working out, but I'm also keeping my calories in check WAY more easily. My graph from those two months of calories consumed was spiky with missing days (out of shame, not willing to enter them in). After starting with Beat Saber, my graph is incredibly consistent within ~200 calories, and always at or below my goal.
Having an understanding of what 500 calories actually means in terms of effort helps me mentally connect that with the value of eating that extra 500 calories. It's some kind of connection that doesn't exist when I'm not physically active and tracking calories.
Side note, I only keep track of my calories "burned" out of curiosity. Fitness trackers are notoriously unreliable overall, but it's motivating. I do NOT eat more calories based on activity done, which is a recipe for disaster IMO.
> The hard part for me is mindset and willpower. Our minds have their own prerogatives.
Exactly right. Losing weight by counting calories is an almost entirely mental activity, not physical. We have a physiology that wants food and abhors not eating enough.
> I wonder then what did you tell yourself?
Like the author, I discovered counting calories a couple of years ago, after trying and failing to lose weight through exercise for 20 years.
I do have some mental tricks that worked for me.
Number one: the reason I got overweight is because I’m mis-calibrated. When I feel full, it’s because I already ate too much. What I need to do is re-calibrate to understand what “enough” is. By assigning a negative judgement to feeling full, and seeking the feeling of enough, it helps remove the idea that I just need willpower to overcome any hunger. A little bit of hunger (but not a lot) is a good thing, so I want to stay there.
Number two: I set my calorie budget to my future weight, not my current weight with minus a thousand. This is a “set it and forget it” plan. I want to calibrate my normal eating for the rest of my life, not diet for a month or two and then regress. I also don’t want to make adjustments when I’m done, I want to act like I’m already done. If I want to be 180lbs, and I should be eating 2k calories when I’m 180lbs, then I just start doing that and my weight will trend toward 180lbs. This takes longer than having a larger deficit, but mentally I don’t need to care how long it takes. I spent decades overweight despite trying, a couple extra months losing weight more slowly is nothing, it’s way ahead of where I was before.
Third, I also save some budget in my day for a treat at the end of the day. It leaves me just a tiny bit hungrier, but then when I get my treat it feels like I’m splurging.
Fourth, I still exercise. To lose weight fast I don’t count my exercise as calories burned. In maintenance mode, I use my exercise as a way to earn more calories. Now I’m actually going to the gym not to lose weight, but so I can eat more!
I had days where I went over, but I didn’t really have “bad” days or bad moods, it was never severe. It was more like go to a party when I’m not counting, and whoops, I’m 400 calories over my budget.
The hardest part about counting calories is the first few days. That’s when hunger is worst. After the first week, my body adjusts and my appetite goes down.
I had my “come to Jesus” moment about 3 months ago, at the green age of 39. I’ve since lost 10kg (1.5st or 22lb) and counting.
I am never hungry, I removed all starches and cheese from my diet and the stomach is now silent 100% of the time. I still have the occasional “fuck it, the world hates me, I want a pizza so bad”, but I learnt to manage it: when I feel angry or bored (my triggers), I get my mind busy with something else, anything really (from sudoku to programming, going for a walk with a podcast, or painting miniatures). After a few minutes the impulse is gone. I cheat once or twice a day, in small quantities and in a controlled fashion: knowing the worst time is right after a cheat, I make sure to be very busy and plan follow-up snacks with nuts, to slowly ease off the starch-induced crave.
Another trick is to metabolise the concept that the corporate world tries really really hard to sell you food; when you really start to see that it’s all a way to screw you out of your money, it gets easier to say “no thanks”.
I speak about what worked for myself about the psychological part (I lost 20kg in 2 years).
First it was to not enter in a willpower fight. I did accept that I will fail, and I did fail many times (sorry did not count, often in the beginning and I was still failing from time to time until the end). But every time i failed, instead of giving up i was telling to myself "ok you failed, but it worked for X days, you trained your body to eat less, let's start again, it will be more easy this time." And it was true. With time your body require less food to fill "full" even when you fail.
Also a lot of ppl here are talking about fasting. I'm not sure about it at all. Your brain may try to prevent the next "fasting time" and may try to trick you to eat more. I would advise to eat at very regular times so your brain "knows" when you will eat (for me: 6:00/12:00/19:00 +/-30mins). Take time to eat, move in another place, etc ... so you appreciate it more.
I liked the cheat days principle because it gives you short term goals, and it helps to keep some pleasure eating food. It also helps to not bring your diet with you when you go to lunch with friends/family. I also noticed that with time I was cheating less during these days.
Preparing food for myself also saved money, sometimes it helped for motivation.
> I'm not sure [fasting] at all. Your brain may try to prevent the next "fasting time"
There are a lot of varieties of 'fasting'.
Intermittent Feeding or 'Time Restricted Eating' involve upping dietary fat to control hunger feelings and ensuring daily caloric needs are met within a shorter timespan. This leaves the body enjoying 'fasting' benefits for longer while enjoying a normal diet.
> [...] you should be eating fewer calories than your body burns everyday
and
> I never understood how simple it was before starting this.
Sounds so trivial, but sadly true for a lot of things in life. You read and hear something multiple times, but you have to make the experience yourself to get your eyes opened.
Don't cheat, lie or harm any other human being in any way. Sounds simple enough. If all would be heeding this rules, we would have paradise on this planet. Every sane person must realize this when reaching adulthood. Rest should be treated by professionals.
Yet somehow, billions failed, fail and will fail spectacularly.
It's also massively dependent on the person. People like me, yes it really is that simple. I naturally don't even care about eating, and my metabolism seems quite active, as it's hard for me to even gain weight. My wife on the other hand, even just mentally, is another ball game. Food is a big part of her life, even just speaking emotionally. Then of course you have her cycle, which causes her normal urges to ramp up to 7->10.
Also, eating.. pickiness too. I don't mind leftovers, hell I don't even mind eating the same thing for a week, two, etc. She hates leftovers and always wants freshly cooked. Also rotating food types, as it can't be too similar to what she ate recently.
All combined it means that finding hearty meals (and now keto for us) are more effort for her than for someone like me. To no surprise, I have no weight to lose (I need to workout to even maintain weight), but it really frustrates her at how different our bodies are.
She considers her food habits to be an "addiction" in large part due to how different her and my reactions are to food. Her struggles are far more than mine on this front.
Yes, I did not say easy. I guess my point was, for my wife it's not that simple.
For me, it is that simple. My point was that for my wife, there are a ton of other considerations she deals with. Sure, they're mainly in her head (though possibly other factors such as gut biome play a role), but large she has more details to factor in when she thinks about "will I be able to do this?". I on the other hand don't. For me, it's exactly as the author described, simple.
Yes, simple does not mean easy, but saying quitting smoking is simple to a smoker is not an honest assessment of their situation.
Most things in life are simple if you ignore reality and speak of life from a bubble.
I would disagree on that. Quitting smoking is a fairly simple thing, but it can also be a very hard thing to do. Such is the nature of addiction. So as such I find it very honest to say it is simple but hard, and focus on what makes it hard.
Somebodies reaction to a hard thing may be complex, but that is more about them than the thing. Although as you note, there is a risk of oversimplifying (e.g. your example of possible implications of gut biome, but that doesn't really shift the fundamentals).
The reason I think this distinction is a good one to make is the problem with the converse. If something being hard implies it is complex, it will lead often to people generating extraneous complexity around it which makes it actually more difficult for the people involved, and can lead to very convoluted thinking and errors in that thinking. You need only look at the massive industries built around things like weight loss and quitting smoking to see examples of this (not that everything in those industries is nonsense, but they do contain a lot of profitable nonsense).
This had nothing to do with bubbles. The risk is that instead of supporting people in doing a hard thing, we raise false hope of making it easy.
Aren't most things "simple" by that definition though? It's all about specificity, right? Quitting smoking is simple, if you don't talk about ways to overcome addiction. Becoming rich is simple, just get lots of money - simple if you ignore all the complexities of the underlying problem.
That's why I felt my situation and my wife's differed. Mine was simple because there wasn't an underlying pile of complexity. Her underlying "addiction" and etc are noteworthy items in her list of things she needs to do. It's simple if you ignore the problems, but if she wants to actually implement that simple instruction she needs to figure out the little details that affect her.
So yes, it is simple if we're not talking about her situation with context and reality. Mine is simple in all contexts, in my opinion.
Smoking is a good example imo on where our opinions differ. Smoking is super far simple in my mind, because many people can't just stop smoking (or rather, lack the willpower). So they need additional data, the simple instruction was.. imo, not so simple.
Many things are not simple by that definition or any other, and it is not about specificity. Some problems are inherently complex, some are not. It is often true that hard problems are hard because they are complicated but some things are just hard even if they are simple.
You are basically promoting the idea that I am rejecting, that because people find things difficult and have a lot of complicated reactions to it, that means the underlying problem is itself must be complex. I don't believe that is either true or useful, and argue that it can often make the problems themselves worse by muddying the water.
Some problems are complicated but relatively easy. In this case, if you just find "the right trick" you can solve it without much difficultly. We do people a disservice when we pretend that simple-but-hard problems are actually complicated-but-easy. This is something that is often done, for commercial gain, in industries like weight loss and smoking cessation. At core, I am arguing that this is a bad thing.
At any rate, we've probably reached diminishing returns here.
When I was a bicycle messenger I had to eat stupid amounts of food. I needed 4-5000 calories a day. I had to eat two dinners every evening, one after work and one before bed. If I didn't get enough calories down during the day I would wake up in the middle of the night with my body screaming at me to EAT!, and like a zombie I would head into the kitchen and make a box of Kraft Dinner with a cup of butter and inhale it.
I did that for 2 years, and afterwards I developed an aversion to eating, I just got so sick of having to gorge myself at every meal, and never being able to go more than a few hours without thinking about food.
A bit off topic; I'd actively not eat two or three meals a day if I could. I don't find it enjoyable generally, just a waste of time. I love food, but I don't always eat the food I love, so the ones I'm not loving I'd just rather not eat lol. Generally it's not worth the time or money to me.
I'm the type of person Soylent advertises to. I even made my own for a ~year. Keto (mostly low carb for me, not keto) has been a massive boon though. Fats just leave me so much more sated and stable. I highly recommend it if you don't like to eat or want to eat more dense meals.
Well, this is another one of those weight loss articles that tries to say "calories in, calories out" and then laughs at the research that refutes that. I'm referring to this:
>There’s a lot of “science” that say low insulin levels in the fasted state lead to more fat burning.
That "science" he smirks at is the research primarily of Dr. Jason Fung, who specializes in diabetes and obesity. He wrote a book called the obesity code that advocates for intermittent fasting. I think I'll take the word of a man who has spent hours researching and analyzing over the snarky comments of some software engineer.
Some more examples:
> If you’re in a caloric deficit this will happen anyways.
That's not true. I could eat a reduced caloric deficit of bread every day and still not burn fat. The basis of intermittent fasting and the ketogenic diet is to force your body to break fat for energy as opposed to carbs. They take different approaches, but the end result is the same - to lower the amount of insulin. Keto is bit more restrictive in food because so much of the carbs in out food is sugar.
So, why did achieve results? Easy:
> I naturally started eating healthy foods because I could eat more of them. If you eat a chocolate bar, you will still be hungry. For the same amount of calories, you could eat a few bowls of vegetables and be full. That said, the best part about this overall approach is that you can still eat whatever you want – just count the calories.
There's a wide difference between how your body reacts to 100 calories of chocolate bars (sugar) and 100 calories of broccoli (fiber).
This is more junk science and using anecdotal data as opposed to research and science. If you want to lose weight, what you eat is just as important as how much you eat. End of story; caloric restriction alone isn't enough. However, this article is also incredibly short sighted. Losing weight is very much like getting married. People focus on the event and not the afterwards. You can't modify your diet, hit your target weight, and then stop. You need to keep going; fighting obesity is life long battle. I believe the majority of people who lose weight will regain that weight within 7 years. There's horror stories from the biggest loser.
My story, by the way, is that when I got married, I was 280 lbs. One night, I remember coming home from my in-laws house and deciding I was tired of being fat. I changed my diet. I cut out chips and soda at lunch and put in carrots and water. I stopped eating white bread and pasta in favor of whole grain foods. I cut the number of nights I had dessert to 1 to 2 a week. I picked up regular exercise. I tracked and measured my food. It worked. At my lowest, I was ~170 lbs. It's gone back up to 203 right now, but that's because I'm currently focusing on strength training. I will say that eating less is not enough. You have to pick the right food. As a friend of mine once wisely said, you simply cannot outwork a crappy diet.
I recently read The Obesity Code and it has completely shifted my understanding of weight gain. The bit that got me was diabetic patients being given insulin, which has a known symptom of weight gain - the very thing contributing to type 2 diabetes.
So the same calorie diet and the same amount burned can behave differently at storing fat because of a small pill. This for me flies in the face of calories in/calories out. A pill, or insulin can really screw that up.
That book changed my view as well. The section that got to me was the part where he refuted "calories in, calories out". Most machines have some sort of regulator that detects when power is low and will adjust accordingly; my laptop, for example, will reduce the brightness of the screen. On the human side, if a factory manager hears there will be reduced power, he doesn't keep going at full steam, he shuts off none vital operations. I think most of us would agree the human body is a complex machine that with a myriad of regulation mechanism. If it detects lower caloric intact, it's not going to go one as if nothing changed. It's going to adapt to preserve energy.
Yes, I really enjoyed that analogy. It's important to bear in mind that analogies don't prove things, they are just illustrations. What I particularly liked is how he did a very good job at backing it up with different studies that support it. As I was listening to the book, pretty much all the questions I had he answered in a very methodical way.
I've started trying intermittent fasting and low carb/high fat so far I'm amazed at how much energy I have. Still early days and I have a few old habits to kick. But it's definitely going in the right direction.
No I didn't; I said I changed my diet. I swapped out high carb food like chips and soda for water and carrots. I reduced my sugar intake by cutting down the number of desserts. But hey, if you want to believe that, you do you.
That "science" he smirks at is the research
primarily of Dr. Jason Fung
Don't about 50% of diet books follow the diet-advice-from-a-doctor cliche?
Like the books you can get from Dr Rupy Aujla, Charlotte Markey PhD, Dr Arthur Agatston, Dr Clare Bailey, Dr Xand van Tulleken, Dr Michael Mosley, and Dr Aseem Malhotra?
I hope you read the last line of the article too :-
> "Everything I wrote above is what worked for me – that is not to say it will work for everyone. I am also not a doctor, I’m an engineer, so none of this is medical advice – please consult your doctor."
This is just a person who wants to show HOW they did it. You can read all the scientific papers you want, but ultimately you have to put that knowledge into practice. You'll find that people have lost weight in various ways, including what you call "unscientific" or bro-science.
We have a very fuzzy understanding of human metabolic pathways, and an incomplete knowledge of their interactions with each other. If you want to dismiss somebody's data you have to first understand and explain the data, and then add your point of view.
Its a bit like telling Usain bolt hes doing it wrong because he has technical imperfections in his form, but meanwhile hes still winning races.
I've lost weight at separate times in my life doing:
1) Low carb
2) Caloric restriction (CICO)
On both I lost weight. On CICO I still ate "less healthy" foods (processed, breads, fast food, desserts) quite often but kept within a certain calorie range. Neither weight loss involved exercise. I'm convinced #1 was just a fancy way to acheive #2. Were there separate benefits to #2? Yes (less cravings) but not enough to convince me to go back to it. Low carb is too difficult to stick to for me personally, have tried it numerous times (no need to give me advice on how to make it work for me, I'm losing weight on CICO right now and fine with that!)
You answered your own question, the cravings. People who only do CICO with junk food will lose some weight, but a good number of people who do that don't have the will power to overcome the cravings and they regain all their weight.
However, if I'm not mistaken, you've lost weight, gained, and lost it back again, right? The so-called yo-yo effect, another harbinger of people who only do CICO. The vast majority of people who lose weight regain it back within 5 years. As someone who kept it off for a decade and only started gaining it back when I start taking my resistance training a lot more seriously, I can say that if I only did CICO, I would not have kept it off. The only way to take off weight and keep it off for long periods of time is to change what you eat, get regular exercise, and know this is something you will be doing for the rest of your life.
I have yo-yo'd, but I've done low carb more than I have CICO, and low carb is not sustainable at all for me- while day to day cravings went down, overall "hunger" feeling went up. Low carb made almost every meal feel unsatisfying. I have meals with more carbs now that are much more satisfying, while still losing weight. Low carb caused me to want to cheat, eat carbs again, etc.
CICO has been the easiest to "stick with", I can fulfill my cravings without regaining, because I'm not truly cutting anything out, just having less. When I want unhealthy snacks, instead of eating a bag of doritos, a fudge round, and a swiss roll, I have just the doritos and that's it. Moderation is key. I got to the point where I was basically bingeing food and not caring, which is a bad spot to be in.
The only reason I fell off of CICO once before was absolutely a decision on my part to "screw it, gonna eat what I want and however much I want because I love food, life is short" and really had nothing to do with regular here-and-there cravings. It was a conscious choice of food over health, as bad as that is. Before I made that choice, under CICO, I lost 40 pounds and kept that 40 pounds off with no problem, super easy to maintain.
Yes, I will admit that CICO causes me occasionally to choose a healthier food, because they're much less calorie dense- but day-to-day I still have bread, pasta, fruit, and sometimes dessert. I just add in some good, less dense things along the way, and overall eat less, while still enjoying it all. Seems to work. I guess time will tell, eh? :)
This also happens with me. I'm definitely capable (and have a couple of times in the past) of losing weight long-term (longer than a few years) by continuing to eat less healthy food, but less. I've eaten those foods all my life, in fact, and never been at all overweight. You can achieve significant, sustainable weight loss on a less healthy diet.
The trick that gets people, I imagine, is that you really can't eat very much of it all, especially as I've gotten older. You have to be willing to eat rather small portions, and rather infrequently.
I do imagine it will get harder to deal with the "density" of processed food as I get more fit and closer to ideal weight, because calorie dense foods will hit the limit rather quickly.
Thankfully, I like plenty of non-dense foods too and can adjust the balance without cutting any desirable foods completely
> The much bigger mistake Wishnofsky made was misunderstanding how our bodies react to weight loss. As soon as we start cutting calories from our diet, the number of calories our body expends begins to fall. "It literally starts happening on the first day," said Hall. "And it continues to mount as you lose weight."
> The reason Wishnofsky, and so many others since, have botched this biological fact is that it's fairly counterintuitive
Basically our bodies are not simple in any way, in particular when it comes to how it handles energy, which is core to our survival. There is a good amount of survivor bias in all the "that's how I lost weight" tales floating around.
Yes, rigorous fasting might also lead to muscle loss, additionally slowing down the weight loss.
All of the people I know who did reasonable carb counting, stuck to a 8 to 16 hours feeding/fasting period and picked up physical activity (n ~= 5) lost weight in the 5-10kg area.
Anyway, the point I was trying to make was that there are other simple life rules that feel like an epiphany while sounding trivial, e.g. "How I got rid of my debt by spending less than I earn."
> As soon as we start cutting calories from our diet, the number of calories our body expends begins to fall. "It literally starts happening on the first day," said Hall. "And it continues to mount as you lose weight."
This is also discussed in the Hacker's Diet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker's_Diet / https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/, free ebook and accompanying software). There seems to be a plateau around your "normal" lifestyle on which the body adjusts to small differences in calories in and out. You have to push the difference beyond a certain threshold to actually make a difference:
"If you eat a little too much, the body cranks up the burn rate a little: you feel warmer and more inclined to run up a flight of stairs rather than walk. If you eat a tad less than ideal, you may feel chilly and inclined to curl up with a book under the blankets and get a little extra sleep. [...] To achieve weight loss, you have to reduce what goes in below your capacity to adjust by banking the metabolic fires, forcing your body to tap its reserves[.]"
Yea you are right, for every pound you lose, your base calorie burn for the next 24 hours does drop, by like 3 to 5 calories. Got to cut back half a celery stalk or you might get fat??? You can see that with any estimator tool online to see your base rate. Your body ain’t magical. Plus, metabolic rate increases over time with exercise and diet. It’s obvious especially after an earned cheat day. That article sounds like either a fat guy or a magic pill salesman talking. I don’t know anyone that eats relatively healthy and works out a little bit with an ever slowing metabolism. That’s flat out stupid. Guess 2+2=22 then. But hey, people also think if they don’t eat for a few hours, starvation mode kicks in and they magically get fatter by not eating.
Only part I agree with that article, 3500 calories per pound wasn’t accurate for me. 3800 was about right, for me. But it’s not like 3500 is far off. I used it as a base rate until a month of data told me otherwise.
Here’s the reason why people think the simple rule of physics doesn’t work on their body, they are lying to themselves.
Some people think they burn 6000 calories like Michael Phelps because they bobbed in a pool for half an hour. Walked 20 min outside? I “hiked uphill” for 30 min then, I burned 300 calories. A serving of potato chips is 150 calories for 12 chips? Half a family bag is only 300 calories then! My body won’t notice a few cookies.
This is the bullshit people tell themselves regularly. I’ve heard it from MYSELF and from other obese folks who bitch about their problems.
Accurately count every single calorie you take in with a spreadsheet and you’ll see just how much of a fatass you are. That’s what I did for my once fat booty. Even count that cookie and candy bar. No excuses. Count every exercise accurately as well.
Human bodies are amazingly efficient. Scary efficient when you start to think that a slice of bread can walk your sack of meat about a mile. But physics and math will ALWAYS prevail. Energy is never created, only transfered. Fat is stored energy. Real basic high school stuff here people. That bow flex can’t bend the laws of physics.
And quit acting like survivorship bias is an excuse for laziness. So tired of everyone saying survivorship bias so they can complain about their problems these days. Sure, not everyone will succeed through hard work. But I also admit, I won’t put in the same effort as The Rock. That man earns his glorious cheat days. Earned, not whined. Hell, do you see any relatively decent athlete eating ice cream all day “oh I don’t work at anything, I just take this secret pill that all failures don’t take”.
Seriously, enough already. Do the work and quit with the excuses. Once I quit giving myself reasons why “oh I’m fat because...”, I started losing weight. I stopped eating fast food. Dropped simple carbs. Haven’t had soda since I started. What’s fun, I literally have to eat more steak to make calories and protein everyday. Fantastic perk to all of this. Props to OP for 2.7 average per week. Mine is 1.5 a week. But I’ve also been weight lifting so I’m assuming the muscle mass is slightly offsetting that.
Moral of the story, your comment is hurting people that are on the edge of making a positive change in their life. Stop hurting people for your own crocodile tears.
Sorry if it was misinterpreted, my global point was that there’s a lot going on.
The article I picked was about the body compensating calory loss, but there is also other mechanism like increasing stress that boost up appetite in some people.
For a lot of people decreasing the amount of calories will be a psychological hell and can’t be done without dramatic changes to compensate. Telling them “reduce your calory intake, it’s not magical” will just be cruel and unhelpful, when they need structural rethinking of basicaly their life.
Some other will lose mostly water non-fat stuff and think their diet is working and not understand the ups and downs in their weight, and it’s not simple to manage if you don’t follow your muscle ratio.
Other people need to realize they actually don’t suffer much by reducing food intake, but never tried to because of social stigma or all the “influencers” shouting that diet is hard.
I’m not kin of the “Just do it” mantra thrown around to large swaths of people. As you point out some people might be on the edge of something, I just think they’ll eventually find what they need to do, while the rest of the people hearing the same message also have a chance of getting deeper in their hole by believing simplistic cheerleading.
My message would be “if you care about your health, talk to your doctor to know the actual stakes and see by yourself what you’re comfortable with”
You know, for morbidly obese people there is the possibility of stomach stapling. This physically prohibits over eating and lowers how much hunger you feel. The intervention is covered by the public health insurance in my country. And it comes with psychological supervision.
The background is that to a lot of obese people, eating is a coping mechanism and it turns out they get depressed when they no longer can eat as much as they used to.
The long-term results of various "stomach shrinking surgeries" are not actually that great. People experience a ton of weight loss quickly, yes, but tend to gain a lot of it back over time as they never really adjusted their habits.
A simple illustration that things are more complicated is that most people go roughly from weighing nothing much at conception, 8 or so lbs at birth and 150lbs or so at 18 regardless of calorie counting. It's mostly under genetic and hormonal control at those stages and identical twins come out much the same weight. As adults it's more a mix of factors.
In some cases, 30 meters is the most you can get. Sometimes flapping your hands is the most you can do. Moving is the point, no matter the distance I guess. :D
Damn dude, that's awesome progress! I love the consistency.
On average, it takes about 3,500 calories to burn 1 pound of fat.
Suppose you eat 1,000 fewer calories than your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR).
After a week your body will burn 7,000 calories or 2 lbs of fat.
I'm almost surprised that the weight curve dropped off linearly -- I always thought weight fell off quickly at the beginning, before plateauing towards the end. Great personal "myth" to have dispelled.
Can I also compliment the site design? It's very clean, and presented the information well.
It most likely follows a non-linear pattern in individuals who are consuming an extreme amount of calories. As the author notes, your calorie intake needs to drop as you lose weight to maintain that progress. If you're consuming 4000 calories a day it's really easy to cut to 2000 in the beginning by just not eating sugary crap, but getting down to say 1250 calories a day is a lot harder, which often requires meticulous management.
The consistency is hard to achieve because he had to regularly adjust his calorie intake as he lost weight. If you don't do that, it will work the way you thought - the weight loss slows over time. That's also one of the reasons people feel the last pounds are always the hardest to lose
> I'm almost surprised that the weight curve dropped off linearly -- I always thought weight fell off quickly at the beginning, before plateauing towards the end. Great personal "myth" to have dispelled.
I think that this is due to people not modifying behavior as they lose weight. A person weighing 250 lbs has a higher BMR than when they weigh 200 lbs. So if you lose weight and don't adjust your daily calorie goal, you're no longer eating as far under your BMR as you used to.
> I'm almost surprised that the weight curve dropped off linearly -- I always thought weight fell off quickly at the beginning, before plateauing towards the end. Great personal "myth" to have dispelled.
Commonly there's a sharp initial weight loss due to "water weight" loss: changing to a diet with lower sugars (simple sugar and carbs) and salt leads to retaining less water, which in turn yields a sharp initial weight loss. That doesn't keep going.
However as the essay notes you have to either keep cutting calories and/or start exercising[0]: as weight drops so will BMR, carrying less weight means making less effort (for the same result) and fatty tissues are still living tissue so they do burn some energy. And since "weight change" is a factor of calorie intake / metabolic rate, if BMR drops you have to drop calorie intake for it to remain below BMR (and sustain a ratio < 1).
In the Data chart you can see that TFA's calorie intake drops by ~500 after the initial cut. They do note this issue in the conclusion, and that they attempted the exercise route but didn't care for it so stopped after 3 months.
[0] sustained exercise builds up muscle mass, and muscle increases BMR counteracting the BMR drop from the diet
For people who accomplish things like this, I often wonder about how often they tried and failed in the past and what factors changed to make them finally succeed.
The approach I have to lose weight is fasting. One meal a day for a long period of time (3+ months) + daily exercise. The hard part is to get into the diet. Fighting appetite is very hard, it's what drives us to leave our cave to hunt a mammoth. So the hard part is to get into a habit of eating less. After a couple of weeks, appetite has reduced, and it is easy to follow. One way to get into this habit is the Ulysses approach (tying oneself to a mast, i.e. going to a place where you can't snack). Another is to utilize a period of depression or after having catched a bug which results in no appetite for a few days. And then the secret is zero exception. A single weekend of indulgence and the appetite comes back and the diet is dead.
Another secret is also to do that in a period of low stress. High stress will kill any diet.
As with many things in life, it is a matter of persistence and sacrifice. You have to want it bad enough to suffer through your body literally eating itself, and to keep trying things until you find something that allows you to endure that suffering for the rest of your life, because you don't ever get to stop.
All my previous attempts at weight loss had been exercise based, but to be honest I was too damn lazy to stick at it. Eating less on the other hand is actually less effort (only being slightly facetious). But seriously - if you bring in your own lunch to work, you are totally in control of the calories you will eat that day (assuming you leave your wallet behind! Work vending machines are your pernicious enemy.)
Willpower is of course the problem for all strategies, and breaking habits. If you get used to your chocolate bar at 3pm every day, it is hard to suddenly forgo it.
I used the same approach explained in the article and it also worked very very fast for me. The most pain to me was using MyFitnesPal, that is really annoying because of its usability. It was a pain to use it. I will try to use pencil and paper, and one time a day, type it all on the app.
Myfitnesspal and and fatsecret (the two most popular apps) are annoying as hell in the same way. They make it very difficult to just add calories because they want you to help fill in their food database.
Anyone know of an app that only tracks calories? I personally don't care about my "macros" and salt etc . There's almost no chance of going over recommended values at 1600 calories a day anyways unless you only eat gas station food
Yes, and one of the things that makes me sad is when the screen delays to update. When you touch on the screen to add a food, it goes to a blog post (the slow UI update make you do mistake several times each use). I wish to have time to develop a better app, but I already busy with another. There is a big opportunity for solving this problem.
PS: I reported the bugs but I always was ignored, even being a paid user.
Not trying to push our app too much here but we made Bitesnap for this reason. I was overweight as a kid and tried really hard to use MFP but it was the biggest chore of the whole weight loss process. With Bitesnap we're trying to automate things using computer vision.
Agreed, MyFitnessPal is really aggravating to use and if that wasn't bad enough their food database is full of inaccuracies and mis-spellings.
The app keeps on the phone a very small fraction of the total food database, that is only the food which you have already entered. Trying to use it in the Paris metro, where for the most part I don't get any signal, was very frustrating and I ended up uninstalling it and deleting my account.
>"The only thing you really need to know is that you should be eating fewer calories than your body burns everyday. If you do this, you will lose weight – it’s science. Nothing else matters for weight loss. The magnitude of the caloric difference will regulate how quickly or slowly you lose the weight.
[...]
I naturally started eating healthy foods because I could eat more of them. If you eat a chocolate bar, you will still be hungry. For the same amount of calories, you could eat a few bowls of vegetables and be full.
[...]
Somewhere along the journey I picked up intermittent fasting. I like it but it’s also not necessary. I found that it helped reduce my appetite which means I can eat fewer calories."
I don't really think this is consistent. Basically yes if you eat less calories than are used you must lose weight, but the ease of doing this depends on what you are eating.
Not only is it less than you think, but it changes with consumption! CICO is true but only trivially so, the variables are dependent. You can run 3mi to burn more calories, but you get more hungry as a result.
The biggest challenges I've observed with people trying to lose weight with CICO (calories in, calories out) it getting a reliable estimate of how much your eating and how many calories your body is truly burning. Being off by 100 calories translates into roughly 12 pounds per year.
I know you can use a food scale to get a more accurate estimate of calories in but I'm still at a loss to determine an accurate estimate of calories out.
You don't need extreme precision with counting calories. 500-1000 calories is a lot of food each day as long as your rounding up you can get good enough.
The trick IMO is to simply eat the same thing every day. That way you can remove things as needed to maintain weight loss. But, also adjust based on what you actually eat not just your goals.
Losing weight is not without cost. Be it hunger, time/effort, boredom, or unmet cravings.
Everyone has the right to choose which kind of cost they are willing to endure in order to lose weight - this includes refusing to pay any cost at all (and not losing weight).
It's really not that complicated. If after some amount of time you're not losing/gaining what you expect per your numbers you tweak said numbers a bit. That's all. You don't need to be accurate to the calorie, or even to ~100. If you're on a deficit most days you will absolutely lose weight.
Calorie counting works and eating fewer calories than you burn is the only way to lose weight. Far too many people start exercising a bit, continue to eat in the manner they've become accustomed to, and wonder why they don't lose weight. It's not rocket science; you just need to eat less and (probably) eat better.
It's not so simple. What you eat and your hormones determine the fat storage on your body. 1 calorie of carbs is different to 1 calorie of fat and 1 calorie of protein. Just because they give the same amount of energy, your body uses them in different ways and required different hormones (like insulin) to regulate the consumption of them. It's like saying electric energy is the same as mechanical energy, they produce energy but we consume them in different ways.
Counting calories doesn't really work. What's working is restricting insulin in your system which allows your body to burn fat. When you have insulin it's impossible to burn fat.
>It's not so simple. What you eat and your hormones determine the fat storage on your body.
It is, for the most part, but you're right; insulin spikes are a problem and you should not be gorging yourself on simple carbohydrates when on a diet. Of course, protein and fats can also contribute (ask any keto fan), so you have to eat in moderation and be mindful of your macros.
>Counting calories doesn't really work
Utter and complete nonsense. I have been actively monitoring and modifying my weight via calorie counting for more than two decades. I started boxing at 10, playing football and wrestling at 13, and to this day I still count calories and strength train at an intermediate competitive level ('competitive' in terms of what I lift in the big three at my weight, not to imply that I actually compete.)
I have helped many other people lose weight via calorie counting. It works, and to claim otherwise is simply ignorant. Of course quality of food is the next subject you broach with anyone trying to lose weight. No one should expect to lose weight and be healthy by eating 1200 calories of cake and another 500 in potato chips each day.
When you eat good food (increase your fat and protein as a % of your macros, stay away from processed sugars/carbs, increase your intake of vegetables, etc.) and limit calorie intake you lose weight. Speaking to most people in terms of insulin is a waste of time. They have no simple way to measure that, but if they eat under maintenance and eat generally good food they _will_ lose fat, and that's the goal.
Well we agree that eating the right food makes the biggest difference. If you eat the right food you don't need to count calories though. The thinking that counting calories matter might help you, but ultimately it's wrong. But just like thinking the earth was flat, maps still worked.
It works though. I don't think we disagree much on the principles, but the two concepts are intertwined. If you sit down and stuff your face with e.g. sausage and cheese you will still get an insulin response and you will absolutely gain weight. If you eat well beyond your daily maintenance, I don't care what you're eating, you're going to gain weight.
It's simply a lot easier to tell someone to watch their calorie count and eat good food than it is to tell them to monitor their insulin levels. They get the second bit right if they do the first.
Perhaps "spike" was a poor choice due to connotation, but proteins and, to a lesser degree, fats, do in fact provoke an insulin response (certainly less so than carbohydrates) via gluconeogenesis[1]. I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that this is why it is important to not exceed a certain % daily intake of protein when on keto and to keep fats high (aside from fats being your primary energy source.)
AFAIK, the primary issue with too much protein on keto (gluconeogenisis) isn't the change in blood glucose, but rather that GNG blocks ketosis.
That's the opposite of the diets goals, is an easy issue for people to incur while thinking they're on track, and keto can make you more susceptible to GNG :)
Sausage and cheese is totally kosher: in moderation, ideally beside some leafy greens.
I've tested eating 3lbs of meat and cheese, and had no change in blood sugar or ketones. I don't have the ability to check my insulin, but blood sugar is a good proxy.
I’ve had the same issue and how I approached it was to watch the scale. If I wasn’t losing weight, knock another 100 calories off my diet each day. Eventually you’ll find the sweet spot.
The other challenge is estimating how many calories you burn each day. There can be a large variation in resting metabolic rate let alone how many calories you burn with exercise.
A good quality fitness tracker with a built-in heart rate monitor like a Garmin Forerunner will give you a reasonably accurate estimate of calories out. Your can also get an occasional DXA scan (low dosage x-ray) to measure body composition; the report will include an estimate of your baseline resting calorie consumption per day. Remember that as you lose weight your daily calorie consumption will also drop because you have less fat to carry around and keep alive.
> A good quality fitness tracker with a built-in heart rate monitor like a Garmin Forerunner will give you a reasonably accurate estimate of calories out.
These aren't accurate at all. How would they be? All they have to work with is height, weight, and BPM.
That's why I specified a good quality fitness tracker like a Garmin Forerunner. If you use something cheap like a Fitbit then of course it won't be accurate.
I've done calorie counting a while back. It does not have to be very accurate. Getting more accurate is easier and more efficient after you do it for a while.
I realized that what I eat is fairly stable. There may be 20 different things I eat regularly. Eventually, I started memorizing the most often used ones.
I noticed that there is a pattern to which types of foods have what amounts of calories. For example, fresh fruit and many non-starchy veggies tend to be at around 50kcal/100gr. Starchy veggies got for about 100kcal/100gr. Meats are at around 250kcal/100gr. And so on. Using this, I was able to get estimates for things I don't eat often without needing to Google everything. I did look up things I ate a few times in order to test my estimates.
It is not super-accurate. However, writing it down is more important that writing it down accurately to the last calories.
Many parts of this process were not accurate. I weighed things roughly using an analog scale. I often estimated portion size by eye, as I got a sense of how much 200grams of meat is. I counted the calories using estimates a lot of time. It worked nonetheless.
After 6 months, my weight loss vs. estimated weight loss from calories spreadsheet was within 1kg! I was blown away by how close this was. It makes sense since things like your base metabolic rate and actual calories expenditure also varies, so super-accurate record keeping of food-in was not necessary.
You're right that being off by 100 calories systematically will force a bias. The trick is to be off in one direction one day, and in the other the other day. This way, the error mostly cancels out.
I think people who try to lose weight be serious about CICO. They do need to get a food scale and log everything they eat. It at least opens their eyes on how much they are eating and how quickly little snacks and calories can add up.
Calories out can't be directly measured, BUT you can compute it pretty accurately anyway.
Measure your weight. Track your calorie consumption for N days, then measure your weight again. Then use the 3500 calories per pound conversion to figure out what calories out must have been to cause that.
For example, if over 30 days you ate 2000 calories per day and lost 3 pounds, then you must have burned 3500 * 3 excess calories total. That averages out to 350 calorie deficit per day, so your calories out must have been 2350.
Or if you ate 2000 calories per day for 30 days and your weight remained the same, then your calories out was 2000 as well.
I've been calorie counting for a long time (initially to lose weight, now just habit), and I do this sort of calculation every month or two in order to maintain my weight within a ~5 pound range.
Yep. He even mentions fasting: "Somewhere along the journey I picked up intermittent fasting. I like it but it’s also not necessary. I found that it helped reduce my appetite which means I can eat fewer calories."
I tried that too. Lost 7lbs in 7 days and then a few more. I regularly skip breakfast, but to really make it work skipping lunch and keeping eating to a 4-hour window was really effective. I need to do some more of that. And it does reduce your appetite after a few days.
I’ve been doing intermittent fasting (4h eating) for two months now and I’m struggling not to lose weight. It never was my goal, but now I’m actively trying to curb it, yet still shedding pounds like crazy. Especially if you try to get fibre and carbohydrates in.
I can completely believe that helped in his endeavour.
If I’m being totally honest: probably because I like trying new things and this is fun. I could retroactively justify this with stories about HGH, general alertness, longevity, health, improved eating patterns, but I’d probably be lying to myself. It’s a challenge that’s nicely orthogonal to the rest of my routine, so it’s fun.
Plus some people I trust said it was “good for your health”, so I didn’t bother to look further and just took their word for it.
If you're eating carbs and fasting it will be a struggle -- worth it or not, who knows.
Most of the intermittent fasters I've been following aren't going through some masochistic daily hunger-torture. They're just eating more "paleo" or "keto" so their diet is ripe with dietary fat. That makes going from three smaller, to two larger, or even a single huge meal a matter of habit that can be changed in a couple weeks.
It's also unproblematic to "cheat" on the fast when need arises. The idea is just to clock as much 'fasted' time as pragmatic.
Unless you were morbidly obese, 7 pounds in 7 days isn't a sustainable rate and was probably mostly water weight rather than fat. In order to burn a pound of fat you have to expend about 3500kcal more than you consume; not really possible in a day for most people.
I embarked on a similar course as the author - just after Christmas I realised my BMI was well into the overweight category - and the same strategy of calorie counting worked for me. I can especially recommend using an app, this really helped me too. Turns it into a game almost - where can I cut out the unnecessary calories? Whereas before you might help yourself to a biscuit with a coffee now you know it is going to blow your budget right open. Makes it a lot easier to resist.
And it was easier than I thought - a piece of fruit for breakfast, a small lunch (single sandwich, down from two with crisps and chocolate bar on top some days), and a normal evening meal. That would come to around 1500 calories or less a day, easily enough to lose a few pounds a week. It becomes easier as time goes on - your body expects less, I guess. And you do gravitate towards healthier food, simply because you can eat so much more of it.
I've lost two and a half stone since then (I don't follow the diet at weekends so I could have lost more) and am back in the green. Not as much as the article's author - his loss was spectacular!
Alas I did not take a before and after picture, though others have commented, which feels good.
So yeah, great article that I can fully endorse, and encourage others to follow. Just set realistic targets, change will come eventually.
I used the Samsung Health fitness app, you can use it without an account I think. Seems to offer pretty much the same functionality (definitely does the calorie counting and targetting).
You don't need to create any accounts with Samsung, they already have all your data anyway, linked to your device Id. Your data is safe in their cloud, don't worry. /s
That is one instance of one app leaking data which is "not particularly sensitive." I bet you've had e.g. your email leaked many times by now by many companies. Are calorie counting apps _more_ likely to leak data as you are implying?
I just create my own "refrigerator" by manually adding foods I eat (no bar code scanner or online database).
BTW, someone actually took forked my code and placed a version in the App store without ever asking me. I was sort of dumbfounded that someone would do this.
I should have thrown a license on this, but it was really just a personal project and never meant it to be released into the wild (GitHub was just a place to store the code)... I suppose I should go back and update this, add a README, and a license.
GP is saying that since there is no license, the code is copyrighted and there is no allowable use anyone could put it to. Therefore, since you own the copyright, and did not license the code to a third party, you could have the app using your code taken down from the App Store.
In contrast, if you had put an open source license on it, then anyone would be well within their rights (assuming the license allows it) to compile and release a version to whatever app store they want.
> In contrast, if you had put an open source license on it, then anyone would be well within their rights (assuming the license allows it) to compile and release a version to whatever app store they want.
This is actually potentially untrue, as some versions of the GPL require that the end user must not be restricted wrt the app they download, and that's not compatible with the Apple's store requirements. See e.g. https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/6109/is-it-possibl...
I use mynetdiary. It's not perfect but it's free and doesn't require an account. And most importantly for me it's effective (lost about 17 lbs in four months).
I just use an excel spreadsheet that /u/3suns (I believe is his handle) from reddit put together. You just put in your current weight, target weight and a couple other metrics then fill in your current weight and calories consumed each day. It's supposed to have a pretty good estimate of your true TDEE after about three weeks assuming the information you input is good.
Besides that, I wrote a small JS script that allows me to input various foods along with their respective protein/fat/carb macro ratios that I then combine into meals along with a few helper functions that print the total calories based off the macros. It's nothing special but it gets the job done and I don't have to worry about signing up for yet another app or getting bogged down by a bunch of features I don't care about. I'd be happy to push it and a link to the spreadsheet up to a repo if anyone else would be interested in using them.
12% body fat with enough muscle to almost be considered obese by BMI standards is quite a few standard deviations outside of the mean. Anyone with that kind of body is well aware of that BMI shortcoming. For most of the population, it’s still a pretty good rule of thumb.
There's a very good chance you're not testing your body fat correctly. I've gotten several friends, including bodybuilders and various athletes to get DXA scans done... pretty much every one underestimated their BF% by 5-10%. Including the ones who swore up and down by their personal trainer's caliper measurements, the BF testing machine (the electric handles one) at their local supplement store, etc.
I'm 14% BF and a BMI of 20... looks to be right on point.
BMI is not a percentage. The unit for BMI is kg * m^-2.
Ancestor post was referring to either percentage of total body mass as fat, or percentage of lean mass. Both are dimensionless, as kg/kg cancels out.
As such, if the 12% was % of lean mass, that would be 10.7% of total body weight. If it was 12% of total body mass (more likely), that would be 13.6% of lean mass. Either way, that's classified as "very lean".
It is a useful guideline for the general public. If it says you're overweight and are sporting a beer belly, you likely aren't an edge case.
Better measurements exist, but for most collecting the data needed is complex (and the impedance measuring ones aren't reliable). If you have a suggested alternative I'd welcome reading about it.
It's not, if you understand what BMI actually means.
BMI is an aggregate metric that has been misapplied to individuals.
Due to the averaging effect, it's a pretty decent predictor for groups, but due to variation within groups, it's not going to predict that well for all individuals (except for individuals who are close to the average of the group).
He's right - the BMI formula penalizes very muscular people and tall people. The height issue comes from the square term in the formula, and obviously it cant distinguish muscle from fat.
DXA scan is pretty much the only way to do it accurately. Calipers, "smart" digital scales, and comparing yourself to diagrams online are all very poor methods of checking bodyfat and should be considered to have somewhere around a +-10% error range.
I found a guy in my city doing DXA scans for $80, I usually go get one done every six months or so.
> The only thing you really need to know is that you should be eating fewer calories than your body burns everyday. If you do this, you will lose weight – it’s science. Nothing else matters for weight loss. The magnitude of the caloric difference will regulate how quickly or slowly you lose the weight.
One important point to note is that past a certain level, usually around a 500kcal per day deficit, it becomes extremely hard to maintain. Performance physically + mentally will start dropping off quickly. If you do want / need a larger deficit, do more low-intensity exercise rather than reducing caloric intake, and make sure you have a reasonably varied diet (or at least take a multivitamin).
(I used to do competitive sport with weight classes, and messing up your weight plan was never fun ...). Standard disclaimer: I am not a doctor or nutritionist etc.
Low-intensity exercise burns such a remarkably tiny amount of calories that it basically worthless. A 200lb person running will burn about 150kcal/mile, which is a single can of soda, a third of a donut, 1.5 apples, 2 eggs, or 1.5 slices of bread.
Even high-intensity exercise burns very little energy in the grand scheme of things. The value of exercise for weight loss is building muscle mass which increases BMR.
Why is that low? One mile is very little. But running at least 3-4 miles it is about 500kcal for that person. Is that little? Even 150-200kcal daily will make big difference in a year. And that is not even accounting for health benefits beside weight.
Sure, but they can probably walk at least that. And (not) surprisingly walking is comparable (usually about 1/2 from jogging) as energy expenditure. Low intensity exercise (cardio) is the biggest burner of energy, since you can sustain it for long periods of time. Try burning 500 Kcal with weight lifting. You will quickly see that an hour long walk is much easier thing to do.
When you are losing weight for more than a month, I guarantee you, if you are a reasonable person, you wouldn't be losing a donut with those 500 Kcal. You'd instead be giving up 500grams (almost 2 pounds) of tomatoes + 80 grams of cheese + slice of wholegrain bread. That's a meal right there.
BTW, training during weight loss (by caloric restriction, at least) is mostly done to keep your existing muscle mass + keep metabolic rate up. You wouldn't train to create a bigger deficiency. So every calorie you burn through training (even low-intensity) you should intake back as food.
I will be walking for about an 1.5h tonight to "gather" some calories for dinner. I spend my rations for a bit more caloric lunch and now I will have to pay for it. :)
I've also done a substantial weight loss, while staying healthy (you can check my 1st-level comment in this same discussion).
I guess the "random internet know-it-all" is supposed to be me. I am in no way anonymous, btw (you can check my profile for links, in case you want to learn more about me), so maybe you can search for something that I have EVER posted that you are 100% sure was a lie and then try to label me? I find your comment rude and your username appropriate, Ms./Mr. AnIdiotOnTheNet.
Half my bodyweight was roughly 160lbs, that's nearly 4 times what you seem to consider "substantial" so you'll forgive me if I think I have a somewhat different perspective on weight loss than you do.
Besides which, here's what you've missed in your calculations: Precisely because there are lower calorie foods that you can eat, choosing not to eat 500 extra calories is much easier than 500 calories of walking. You can eat three of the meals you described every day (assuming your math is correct, I didn't check) and only consume 1500kcal, right? Since that's bound to be a deficit for pretty much anybody who actually needs this advice, you don't even need to walk at all. You probably should, just don't kid yourself into thinking that it makes up for poor dietary choices.
160 lbs loss and that being half of your weight is a huge accomplishment. Congrats! I hope you did it in a healthy and sustainable way and now feel much better than before. If you don't mind me asking - how tall are you, how long did the weight loss last and for how long have you kept the new weight?
44 lbs is about 1/4 of what you needed to do, yes, but that doesn't mean that my accomplishment is not significant. I wouldn't call a 6-month-long starvation insignificant effort. And 1/4 from a billion dollars is still a lot of money, isn't it? In my case it was 19% of my body weight that I trimmed, I am 6ft 1 and I am about 6 lbs above that previous mark, 6 months after I finished my weight-loss sprint (and this year I will continue to go down).
As I said - I wouldn't exercise to create a deficit. I would do it after I have achieved a big-enough deficit, and would replenish any calories expended through it with food.
So I don't try to argue you should "work" instead of "starve" - I am arguing that you should "starve" to get that deficit in and then "work to preserve muscle; continue burning on a good rate; eat more". Does that make sense?
It's the "eat more" that I don't agree with. That is seriously bad advice for food addicts because your brain will convince you of crazy things in its desire to eat and my experience is that you should never give it any room for excuses.
I'm 5'11". I achieved my lowest weight about 2 years ago and have managed to keep off all but 10lbs of it, much of which I'm confident is muscle. It took me 4-5 years to hit the low mark.
I didn't mean to imply that 44lbs was insubstantial, rather that I've had to operate at a different scale and so have a different perspective on what works and what doesn't.
> I achieved my lowest weight about 2 years ago and have managed to keep off all but 10lbs of it, much of which I'm confident is muscle. It took me 4-5 years to hit the low mark.
It’s not all about the immediate caloric burn though - that run will boost your metabolism for the next several hours and will cause you to continue to burn calories at an elevated rate.
It's true, there were a lot of 60-90 min sessions sitting on an exercise bike. High intensity can work for lots of people, but depends quite heavily on your weight / health condition. There's also a heightened risk of illness and injury if you're combining lots of high intensity training with a significant caloric deficit.
I'd suggest talking to a PT and /or your doctor before jumping into doing high-intensity work if you haven't before.
IMO one of the key values of exercise (when it comes to losing weight, at least) is mental. Sure, maybe I can eat more calories in a spoonful of peanut butter than I can burn in an hour of exercise ... but the exercise makes me feel healthier and more willing to stick to my dietary goals.
And let's face it, losing weight only comes down to calories in vs calories out when you look at it biologically. In reality it's 100% a psychological problem.
Exercise isn't only great because it burns calories directly. What it does is retain / build up muscle, and that in turn increases your base calories burning rate, each day.
Nutrition and weight regulation is not as simple as a direct function of calorie intake. The storage of fat in our bodies does not follow the "laws of physics" like someone down in the comments mentioned. This field is actively being studied (and heavily lobbied/backed by some food companies).
I'm glad this strategy worked for you, but I hope people don't take this as advice that is easily generalized.
Yes, duh. You keep saying this like it's a revelation to people who're discussing which mechanisms are available to a) control how many calories consumed and b) control how many calories are burned, and c) what feedback loops exists between a) and b).
For a lot of people here, I suspect, it's like getting a lecture on if statements when discussing multi-threaded control flow.
I've found exercising right before lunch works really well to avoid this problem.
Of course, not everyone has the luxury to exercise for half an hour, have a shower, and then eat lunch in the middle of the day. Any company that doesn't give their employees adequate time to exercise is just harming itself. Healthy employees are productive employees.
You don't have to exercise, but keep in mind that way you'll go from being fat to being skinny fat. I made that mistake myself and to be honest my body looked better before losing weight.
I started body weight exercises with a friend who guided me—and is very experienced in the area, and also started being in a slight [1] calories deficit.
I've been at it for about 5 months now and I've dropped 30 kg as of a few days ago (from 118kg), which is 66lbs (from 260lbs).
The added benefit of exercise is that my energy levels are much more stable throughout the day, and my mood is generally better and more positive.
Also, this wasn't so much of a diet as a lifestyle change. I always wanted to get into body weight exercises and gymnastics, but got discouraged by injuries and lack of knowledge/guidance. So, I'm very lucky to have met my friend (in more ways than one) who helped set me on the path I wanted to be!
[1]: The deficit might not be so slight anymore, given I gained strength and increased my intnesity whilst keeping the calories the same. I've started eating a bit more to compensate for that now, but I'm still in a net deficit.
Counting calories in/out is a way to lose weight that works for a lot of people. It also works well in clinical & research settings, where control mechanisms are strong. That said:
"The only thing you really need to know is that you should be eating fewer calories than your body burns everyday. If you do this, you will lose weight – it’s science. Nothing else matters for weight loss"
This may be one of the most harmful statements about diet. It's mostly true, but in a fairly banal sense. A baby will have a caloric surpluss as it grow. So will a potato. Without the calories, growth will stunt. This is the trivial fact.
The growth trajectory of a potato or baby is not trivially determined by caloric surplusses. One big factor is genetics, which tell babies and potatoes to grow. There are environmental factors, many of which are calorie related.
"This is a scientific fact" is in the context it's used, an empty tautology. Caloric surplusses can be used in exactly the same way to "explain" why an elephant is bigger than a mouse, why there are 6 billion people on the planet, how a bodybuilder got his biceps or why you got fat. This makes it a nonexplanation.
A less abstract hint that we're dealing with a nonexplanation is apples. Add one apple a day to your diet, and calorie counting will tell you that amounts to 5kg fat per year.
We know from experience that people do not gain/lose 10 lbs per year by adding an apple a day to their diet. Your apetite or metabolism (these are related) will compensate for the apple.
That doesn't mean that intentional caloric restriction isn't a good method. It works well for some. Other things work well for others. We don't have perfect knowledge about what works "in the wild" or even in the lab.
After all that you typed out it still doesn't matter, the only way to loose weight is to consume less calories than you "burn". Everything else you talk about is either different ways to accomplish this or excuses. There is no beating conservation of energy.
This is one of those inconvenient truths that no one likes talking about. Keto works, ultimately, because you're consuming fewer calories than you're burning. Low carb works, ultimately, because you're consuming fewer calories than you're burning. Exercising more works, ultimately, because you're consuming fewer calories than you're burning. Counting calories works, ultimately, because you're consuming fewer calories than you're burning.
Yes people will jump in and say "but but but but macros" and "but but but ketosis" but ultimately it's calories in < calories out.
Much like programming, everything eventually gets translated to machine code. Putting Assembly on that, and C on that, and then using Python just makes programming easier. But it doesn't change the fact that ultimately, it's all machine code. The Atkins diet is just syntactic sugar on top of the machine code of your body.
That's not to say it's a useless abstraction... there are plenty of programmers who wouldn't be doing the job, and plenty of jobs that wouldn't get done, if everyone had to program in machine code. Making it more accessible is a good thing, as long as you understand that Python ultimately becomes machine code, and your diet plan ultimately becomes calories in < calories out.
It's not an inconvenient truth, it's a trivial truth.
"You can make this program in any Turing complete language" is true. That truth is interesting to a computer science class. It's completeky useless and meaningless to a person writing a program. Say you want a program that does something with a relational database. The right advice is "you can do this with SQL."
The fact that human bodies follow the laws of physics ads no information. It is a logical red herring.
I wouldn't say it's trivial at all. I'd consider it the most important piece of knowledge there is on the subject.
You can be on a keto diet and gain weight. You can be on a low carb diet and gain weight. And if you don't understand the basic principles of why that is, you'll think that losing weight is impossible. If you believe that keto is the only way to lose weight and you gained weight while following it, you're going to quit.
You need to understand why various diet plans work. Ultimately, they all work because they help you eat fewer calories than you're burning. If you follow the diet exactly but still consume more calories than you're burning, you will gain weight. If you don't understand that fact, you've already lost.
I can't think of a single more important fact to understand than that.
> You can be on a keto diet and gain weight. You can be on a low carb diet and gain weight.
No you can't
I'm in a Ketogenic diet 6 months now (lost 83 pounds so far) and although i'm eating the same amount of calories (and even more) as i did before i started i'm losing weight non stop, no exercise , no intermittent fasting, NO-THING!
You clearly have no idea what you're talking about
So you're saying that you can consume 5000 calories per day, only burn 2000, and still lose weight. Have you considered submitting this to a scientific journal? This changes our entire understanding of the laws of physics. Faster-than-light travel actually sounds possible now.
Or you're lying, and also making anyone who did gain weight on the keto diet feel worse about themselves and give up on losing weight altogether.
It doesn't have to be lying. It could just be "ignorant, sure of themselves, and loudmouthed". Seriously, the accusation of lying is not one you should make lightly, no matter how mistaken the position being presented.
True, but I'd still consider that to be lying to themselves, rather than lying to us.
If the story is true, the likely reality is they're not counting their calories so they don't realize they ended up eating fewer calories than they were before. They just think they're eating more because they didn't realize how many they were consuming before.
I don't make the accusation of lying lightly. We're dealing with a new account making wild claims that break the laws of physics and could have serious impact on someone's health, claims made in the face of all available science. Whether they believe it to be true or not, it's a lie.
"It's a lie" can mean "it is not true" (at least in one of it's meanings)
"They are lying" means that they know it's not true.
I'm not saying that po9her is right. But I too often see people use "you're lying" to mean "you're wrong". Even if they are blatantly wrong, the two are not equivalent.
Yes, but is it fat or protein? If an adult human male weights 203 lbs at 25% body fat undergoes a transformation and goes to 250 lbs at 10% body fat, I think you'd be hard pressed to call him overweight. I think the NFL would like to have a talk with him.
If you manage to gain 50lbs of muscle just from keto and nothing else, yes you should be in the NFL.
But you should realize gaining muscle is actually difficult, and you should realize that it's basically impossible to lose weight and add substantial muscle at the same time since one requires a calorie deficit and the other requires a calorie surplus. Possible, but extremely extremely difficult and time consuming.
There's a reason professional athletes go through bulking/cutting cycles. No one is accidentally putting on 50lbs of muscle just by switching to keto.
Lots of people don't believe that bodies follow the laws of physics. I have friends that have told me with a straight face that it's possible to gain weight while having a caloric deficit if you're not eating the "right" food.
Everything (most things) that accomplishes weight loss will involve caloric deficits. This is true in the same way that "eat your dinner or you won't grow" is a true statement.
It's true in some uninteresting abstract sense. Growing up involves caloric surpluses. Death involves an end to caloric intake. Did that corpse rot because it stopped ingesting calories?
Sure. So theoretically you can accomplish calories in < calories out by eating nothing but sugar. In practice, this doesn't work very well because sugar a) isn't filling; and b) trains your body to crave more sugar; and c) eating nothing but will leave you with deficits in pretty much every nutrient your body needs to thrive, which will in turn cause cravings. Nobody I've ever met has enough willpower to sustain a diet under those conditions.
The difficulty of weight loss isn't the math. It's how to hack your mind and body to minimize the willpower needed to maintain a caloric deficit that millions of years of evolution have optimized your system to avoid.
Ok, so if you eat as much as you want of home-cooked bacon, eggs, and fresh-sliced potatoes fried in lard you'll lose weight? Or is that not "real food"?
No, it's not as simple as avoiding packaged food. And even if it were, avoiding consuming all that crap may be simple but it's not easy. It takes a lot of willpower. If that's easy for you, you're in a tiny and fortunate minority.
The human body is a complex system with all sorts of feedback loops on inputs and outputs that can make it extremely difficult to change its equilibrium.
Calling people lazy when in fact they're losing a fight against every instinct of their biology (plus all sorts of societal ills like long work hours and food deserts and advertising) is unproductive.
If you ask the Keto people, they will say you can. But the point being made is to eat healthy real food. Sure you can be dumb about it, but it's a good starting place.
Yes, the human body is very complex and metabolisms and people are all different, but you can't really do too much about that. So just eat healthy, eat less, burn more calories. What else can you do?
The point is that the reason that there's so much diet advice out there beyond calories in < calories out is that accomplishing calories in < calories out on an ongoing basis is HARD.
The advice (aside from the scams and a little bit of idiocy) is on how to achieve that deficit in a way that minimizes the willpower required - because humans suck at willpower and one's biology is constantly trying to undermine that willpower in order to achieve the "store more reserves" imperative.
>>Ok, so if you eat as much as you want of home-cooked bacon, eggs, and fresh-sliced potatoes fried in lard you'll lose weight? Or is that not "real food"?
Yes, if "as much as you want" means you maintain a caloric deficit.
You keep saying that as if human bodies are batteries and we perfectly break down all calories and nutrients in all food.
Eating two oranges vs. drinking a glass of those two oranges' juice will yield very different results on the body, both in terms of how hungry you are, and how the nutrients are broken down.
Edit: I recommend giving "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" a watch. It's an excellent talk and should be available freely on youtube.
Edit 2: Furthermore, we don't burn calories at equal pace every day, even given the same amount of effort/exercise. Metabolism change means even passively you burn calories at different intensities on different days. These mechanisms result in significant differences between people.
People often promote energy restriction without mentioning the key fact - you will be hungry.
The human body has an amazing set of machinery that's dedicated to making you eat when your metabolism needs certain kinds of materials and would rather not break down tissue to get them.
> People often promote energy restriction without mentioning the key fact - you will be hungry.
People won’t simply omit that fact. They’ll often actively argue that it’s untrue, that “you shouldn’t be hungry” when losing weight. This is only true if you simply don’t ever experience hunger normally (in which case you probably don’t need to lose weight).
Losing weight is hard. It doesn’t become easy because we pretend it is.
Happy this is not quite true. There is one therapy which reduces intake without making people physiologically hungry (addiction to food is a different matter) - gastric bypass or sleeve gastrectomy.
True, I wasn't thinking of surgical techniques. Sometimes that works without physiological hunger (or at least much). However, it also typically comes with a host of other problems and should only ever be considered in extreme circumstances, in my opinion.
I have known several people who have gone through this process, and each of them have chronic health issues related to it. Some of those seem pretty miserable.
I'm not sure how this relates to the overall statistics of long-term success, and I suspect all but one of the people I mention would still choose to do it again.
So I guess by extreme I mean something like: a) a significant amount of weight loss, the need for which is (b) driven by existing and worsening medical problems due to the weight and, importantly (c) for someone who has been seriously trying to lose the weight for some time now and repeatedly failed.
If you aren't in that sort of scenario I am unconvinced the surgical risk and risk of ongoing issues will outweigh the benefits...
I've found that intermittent fasting was easies to implement in 12, 14, 16 hour increments. I do "cheat" just a bit with a coffee in the morning, and 14 hour cheat days on the weekends. Intermittent fasting, allegedly, has numerous benefits. Stem cell regeneration of damaged, old immune system. Improved dopamine levels in the brain. Increased growth hormone production.
I personally have found that I do feel "run down" which turned out to be lower blood pressure. I attributed this to low sodium intake. So, I drink two very low sugar (6g) recovery drinks for my first caloric intake around noon.
One thing that wasn't covered, and likely isn't in many of these weight loss recaps, is not just caloric deficit; but also food content. Sugar's (and carbs) relationship to fat and our bodies cannot be understated. There's plenty of reading on how high sugar diets are detrimental. Here's an interesting listen: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/refined-sugar
I think most people are aware of this in principle, but don't often associate normal foods as being high in sugar. Orange juice is probably the worst offender. All the sugar, none of the fiber.
Ive been hearing more and more about IF. Curious how you manage it - for lets say 16 hours? Do you have a "dinner cutoff time" that works well? Does it mean you're skipping breakfast?
I never believed that breakfast was "the most important meal of the day". IF success sort of supports this & the fact that it was mostly marketing.
I do the opposite: dinner time to a bit before bed-time. Easy routine, no gross co-worker lunch smells, and I'm always eating planned meals I prepare. Better a hot steak than something reheated at work, IME.
Yeah I always joke that "intermittent fasting" is really just fancy jargon for "skipping breakfast" - at least it is for me. Don't eat till noon, don't eat after 8pm - congrats, you're part of the IF crowd.
And yes, it does seem to help burn a bit more fat than before - though I wouldn't call it life-changing.
Huh, I've been doing this for years without realizing it. I'm never hungry in the morning except for coffee (maybe that ruins this). To add more to discussion I also lift 4-5 times a week. Besides obvious physical benefits of muscle mass lifting improves life in many other ways. I notice if I ever skip or don't stick to my regular gym regimen I mentally feel unfit. Going to the gym actually increases energy and allows more productivity at work, social outings, etc.
These are the basics, yes, but it's not that simple. To me, IF means: from 8PM to noon next day drink only water and (if you like) one black coffee in the morning. Then, from noon until 4PM eat just proteins, healthy oils & fats and raw vegetables - this is crucial, absoultely no carbs! Finally, from 4PM until 8PM eat everything.
That way you keep insulin under control for the 20 hours (out of 24). Your concentration and focus will increase very soon.
Good question! I'm sorry I left out the details. Yes, it is the caffeine and the book I followed (The Renegade Diet by Jason Ferrugia) recommends 1 cup about 30-45 mins before the workout to burn fat even faster.
Even though I now rarely work out before going to work, I still start my day by drinking a glass of water and then a cup of coffee and it still feels good :) If you drink decaf, I think it would have no positive (but probably also no negative) effect.
It hasn't been life changing in itself, but I found it to be beneficial for keeping my body weight stable, which in turn improves a bunch of other health outcomes. It could just be placebo, but I feel much better with IF.
Does it really work? I don't know, the scientific evidence isn't that strong at the moment.
But it has convex outcomes: if it works, the upside is tangible... and if it doesn't, the downside is negligible.
Going on two years of 16/8 IF myself, but I'd say that it absolutely was life-changing for me.
I initially lost about 45 lbs (217 – 172) in about 10 months, but have since leveled out between 170-175. Beyond the weight loss, I noticed marked improvements in general energy levels, sleep quality, and chronic issues such as heartburn. More importantly though, I think the biggest adjustment that IF enabled me to make was transitioning into _wanting_ to eat healthy/whole foods and cut out foods with processed carbs and added sugar.
But I totally agree, there definitely is a psychological aspect of it, whether the improvements are quantifiable or not. Maybe the results are placebo, maybe it's confirmation bias, but I definitely think that IF allowed me to reframe the way I approach my diet, and eat in a way that is more attuned to being healthy.
Breakfast isn't that important. Nutrient timing is mostly made up junk science. Eating some carbs after cardio is important. But, generally, it just doesn't matter too much. IF, I do still like to eat before or after a workout and then fast. Or just do regular old 24h fasts. It's 100% mentality once you get used to it.
I've read that high level body builders will actually eat candy after a workout for the same effect. Also, ultra marathons will have mountain dew at aid stations for that immediate boost.
Yeah there is interesting "math" you can do. But, for most people, your liver stores about 1200-1500 calories of glycogen. You have some in all of your muscles, etc. Marathon is right at the distance you can run and stay under "the wall". In fact, that is a key part of pacing. Finding your race pace to basically operate on glycogen for all but the last bit of it (1-2 miles) where you can just push/suffer through on will power. If you go out too hard, you burn glycogen too fast, hit the wall at 6 miles out... that is the suck. 6 miles can be an actual eternity when you hit the wall.
That's right. You basically won't be able to do a cardio effort to your body's capabilities. Anyone that has ever run an ultra marathon is essentially operating in ketosis like state. You just burn more energy than your body can absorb so it is a combination of stored fat and incoming carbs/fat/protein that keep you moving.
edit: Your body also slows down its nutrient absorption rate during any exercise as it diverts blood to your extremities and core body functions. So digestion is more of a challenge.
Studies that show a drop in cardio performance from low-carb have been measuring in the adaptation period, before the body adapts to low-carb performance.
This is covered pretty thoroughly and with a much higher level of detail in Lore of Running (Noakes). Down to the biochemical level of what is actually going on as you adapt to a low / no-carb state. You have to be precise with what you mean by "long-duration" cardio. Up to Marathon level you simply won't be able to go as fast as a runner that has muscle glycogen. You won't find any examples of elite marathon runners performing at their peak on a no-carb diet. Somewhere right at, or shortly after, marathon distance for most runners you have used up your glycogen stores anyway, so a great portion of your ultra is going to be executed without a lot of carbs / easy glycogen anyway. I don't think anyone will dispute some runners can operate with no carbs, etc. So, it just makes sense to train your body to burn fats / body fat efficiently because that is where a big portion of your fuel comes from in an ultra.
I can't remember the exact time period, but it only takes a few weeks to fully adapt to low/no carb diet where your body gets good at making energy from fat. The actual chemical process is really cool.
You definitely lose your ability to do high performance shorter events at the peak of your body's capability (5K/10K, etc.). It is simply a less efficient process of creating the primary fuel your cells use to do their thing.
You also have to be precise about what you mean by "elite". Definitely "most runners" don't fit that category, so saying "you simply won't be able to go as fast" is probably overgeneralizing.
“If you’re going to run a marathon under two hours and 10 minutes, then yes, you probably need lots of carbohydrate to be able to perform to such an intense level of activity, but once you’re slower than two and a half hours, I’m not really convinced you do.”
Adaptation periods are probably 6 weeks, possibly longer to fully adapt, though adaptation appears progressive.
And training low-carb can have benefits even if racing carb-loaded.
My understanding, barring real genetic outliers, is that the human body just can't go as fast in a fat adapted state. I would say "any runner". Meaning anyone with a few months of real training under their belt is going to run sub marathon efforts slower. The article you linked pointed that out. This isn't just for elites, but everyone. Most recreational/non-professional runners run sub marathon races. This implies some important things about how you train and eat. 1.) When doing max effort running, to push your body to it's limit you need some carbs. 2.) To run your fastest race you need some carbs. You can still train and do well without them, of course. I think for most runners it's fine and the difference doesn't amount to much in practical sense.
Here's an article that talks about the process of fat adaptation. https://medium.com/@davidludwigmd/adapting-to-fat-on-a-low-c... Note the graphs showing ketone levels continuing to rise through 38 days of complete fasting. If you are ingesting some carbohydrates or protein, this would slow the adaptation process beyond that.
There are lots of studies showing a performance decrease during within those early few weeks of the adapatation process, but they aren't really showing the fully adapted, optimized state.
Only if you feel you need to "replenish glycogen stores". If you intend to remain in ketosis, you don't need to re-stock with carbs.
However, when your glycogen stores are depleted, your body is more able to make effective use of consumed carbohydrates (storing them in muscles), so shortly after exercise is probably the best time to eat carbs.
Another approach that some people might prefer is a 24h once a week fast, which I've found much easier than 12-16h daily.
I don't eat breakfast per se, just a protein shake but I found it difficult to cut out for a number of reasons.
A couple of months ago my wife and I started doing a weekly 24h fast on Sundays from breakfast Sunday to breakfast Monday. The first couple of times it was a bit of struggle but now we don't really notice anymore.
Whatever fits your lifestyle is the way to go, otherwise it's always going to be a struggle to maintain.
No calories at all, just drink water when we're thirsty.
I've found it has worked wonders for resetting my relationship with hunger; I feel I'm far less susceptible to boredom hunger in the few days immediately after the fast, something I'm hoping will progressively improve further.
Honestly, we haven't found it that hard at all. The first two weeks were a bit of a struggle just because you aren't used to going that long without food, but now it's just the day we don't eat and we don't really pay it much attention past that.
I only eat from 4pm to midnight (wife hates it if we don't have dinner together), and it's not a problem to last till 4 on back coffee alone if you tend to sleep late
If you look at Rhonda Patrick's work, she does the reverse: time restricted eating. It's the same thing, you give yourself 8-9 hour time window to eat (instead of having a 16 hour fasting window). I think she recommends skipping dinner though because she's all about the circadian rhythm and eating only when it's light out. But I don't think she has any scientific reasoning behind that.
She's also not a fan of drinking coffee during your fasting period, and she believes that breaks the fast because the liver metabolizes the caffeine. So that starts the metabolic process in the body, taking you out of the fasted state.
Most people skip breakfast, like I do. It's easier for busy people to skip breakfast. I think it depends on the person's schedule. I skipped breakfast before and tried skipping dinner. Both methods work well. Skipping dinner does make me bored at night. I had all this free time not having to cook or eat. That could be an advantage for some people.
Drinking coffee is not cheating, as it does not spike your insulin and does not put your body in metabolic state. No sugar and no cream. You’re all good! :)
I guess it depends on your goals. For weight loss benefits I think you're right. But coffee does contain caffeine which has to be metabolized so it apparently interferes with other health benefits of IF, eg autophagy.
I mean, we're quickly getting into "somebody once told me" territory here, but: word on the street is coffee triggers / speeds up autophagy, not slow it down?
Oh you know what, maybe you're right. I was basing my comment on this reddit post and the timestamped video it links to:
https://www.reddit.com/r/intermittentfasting/comments/788v15...
If you rewind that video a bit turns out she's talking about something else, circadian rhythm/time restricted eating, no idea.
I happened on this post just the other day, that's why I replied to your comment in the first place. It's funny my wife and I were going to start trying out IF and I've been railing on her about how it's gotta just be water until we eat or we lose all the benefits..haha I gotta loosen up. Too much information out there, easy to get lost in the weeds.
No worries man, I feel you 100% on the low entropy problem of nutritional info out there. It’s a travesty. How anyone without at least a bio minor is supposed to make heads or tails of this is completely beyond me. Not to mention all the actual research is locked up behind paywalls, so if you don’t know about scihub you’re just sorely SOL.
Madness, I tell you.
Good luck and have fun with the intermittent fasting :)
Even if you've studied something like biology or nutrition it's incredibly difficult to judge what is good and what is bad advice, as your average school (and professor) is just as full of dogma that has only the most tenuous basis of evidence.
Far and wide the best ground advice you can give yourself and others is to work out - that'll do good things to you, even if you can do it a little. Other than that, eat a moderately varied set of foods. Anything further than that is usually just something someone came up with in the shower and that other people thought sounded real good.
Once you survive the first 24 hours of fasting (given you replenish electrolytes with salty water), i.e. some headache after 16-20 hours, then you can easily add another 48 hours, making it 3-in-a-row, and you can happily do high-intensity training as usually, without any effect on your performance. After 3 days you either start eating again or stop training. 3 days are recommended for "rebooting" the immune system; I try to do it once 1-2 months, not sure if it helps but I don't see any bad effects either, and it strengthens the will.
I recently started 5:2 fasting, on five days I try to eat roughly maintenance, I also eat a slice of my coworkers birthday cake.
On two days, I limit my intake to 600kcal which I eat at lunchtime (I prepare a bento box with rice, vegetables and meat). You do the math, and it boils down to a caloric reduction diet roughly. The difference is, that I am only hungry on two days during the week, and I feel like going a day with almost no food is not harder than doing a constant deficit every day.
> going a day with almost no food is not harder than doing a constant deficit every day
A high fat diet will do a lot to make a caloric deficit a matter of habit, and not iron-strong will :)
Intermittent Fasting and low-carb high-fat food can readily sustain 16-20 hour fasts without the hunger or cravings. It's also really satiating when you do start eating.
Not if the jar pays you an interest rate. I'm being facetious.
But my point is calories out will vary depending on calories in. You can eat 2000 calories of carbs 1 day and 2000 calories of protein the next... turns out your calories out will be higher when you eat protein because your metabolism increases. This isn't physics. This is nutrition. And its still not fully understood IMHO.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] threadAnd, of course I can question curiosity. We're in the internet age. If you have a basic question, ask google.
When somebody presents an opinion that seems to go against the general scientific consensus, no, I won't just google it, I'd rather ask what they base it on.
It's a fact that it's harder for women to lose weight than men in certain cases. Their point was that "caloric deficit" is different for each person, and sometimes dramatically so.
Every living person that is maintaining their weight can eat 500 kcals a day less than they do now and they'd lose weight.
a) Doesn't really eat 1000 kcals a day if she's active, and should, instead of building a diet by counting calories (doing which she's prone to miscalculation), simply eat less of whatever she usually eats. b) Doesn't need to lose half a kg of fat every week.
Most online calculators are veeery optimistic (off by >500kcal). If you take the general advice and only restrict to a 500kcal deficit, you won't see much happening :/
The body can adjust its usage of calories way down in the event of a perceived famine, making the amount of calories consumed no longer contain a deficit.
The RMR can change during a diet as both fat and muscle require maintenance, and you nearly always lose both during a period of deficit. This can make maintaining a significant deficit very difficult
Finally, there is evidence that people who have lost significant weight have a reduced metabolic weight (and hunger for more calories) even five years after they completed their dieting. This may explain why the failure rate of people >100 lbs overweight losing and maintaining is nearly 95%
The hormone mix basically tells your body to store some percentage of calories in as fat. When young and/or fit, this percentage is low. Calories above your burn rate are stored as glycogen in your muscles, giving you usable energy stores that will be used when you exercise.
When older or fat or both, calories above your burn rate go to fat cells waiting to fill back up. As the weight packs on, the percentage increases and more and more of the calories you consume are going to fat instead of being burned. Your caloric burn alotment goes down. You lose muscle density. Testosterone goes down, and the percentage of calories dedicated to fat stores climbs.
So it is still true, calories in < calories out to lose weight. But perhaps it would be better to say “calories in < (calories out + calories stored)”
Where calories stored will vary and for fat people it’s much higher than fit.
A fat man can eat the same food and calories as a fit person who does not exercise, and gain weight and feel tired while the fit person feels an energy boost.
There's also the fact that muscles burn fat whereas fat begets fat storage.
I believe metabolism does slow year over year once you get to a certain age, but it's difficult to find data on that.
Exercise is important, and people should exercise because they get benefits even if they don't lose weight, but you should stop saying it's useful to reduce weight.
We think that people heavily over-estimate the amount of calories burnt by exercise; they under-estimate the amount of calories they eat; and exercising gives people "permission" to eat more calories than they normally would.
http://www.cochrane.org/CD003817/ENDOC_exercise-for-overweig...
You are correct that people frequently overestimate how many calories they burn working out, and that they then eat more as a result - both because they think they've earned it, but also because exercise stimulates your appetite. But when you understand these instincts and stick to the diet, exercise will help you lose weight more quickly.
Of course each of us is unique, and also changes over time, so efficiency of both inputs and outputs varies.
I believe you meant that its mentally hard to restrict one so much in later age to suffer from hunger enough to lose weight, but technically its doable and happening in millions of instances around the world all the time (ie due to long term illnesses).
Exercise helps tremendously of course, and everybody should do enough of any healthy type every day to get sweaty (and more). But it isn't necessary to lose weight, not at all, at any age.
/s
But yes, diet is much more important than exercise.
The hard part for me is mindset and willpower. Unfortunately, knowing the physics* behind weight loss doesn't make it any easier, and perhaps might make it more stressful. Why can't I do this simple thing that logically is as complex as 2+2. Our minds have their own prerogatives.
I wonder then what did you tell yourself? How many times did you have a bad day? What was your mood like throughout? I'd love to know so much more about the psychology. Great article though and thanks again for sharing!
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuIlsN32WaE
I envy people who don't know what it is like to feel compelled to gorge themselves. It's an unstoppable force sometimes. You'd be amazed at what your mind will do to make you ingest more calories.
And then you get on the internet and, in addition to all the "it's really simple, just eat fewer calories" idiots, there's a thousand know-it-all fucks trying to tell you that if you just follow their fad diet you'll never feel hungry again and your dick will grow three sizes and you'll win the lottery.
Easy to prescribe, tricky to implement judging from the state of the world.
There is a part of my brain that, usually around 1030 at night, says, right eat everything in the immediate vicinity because it might vanish / get eaten by sabre-tooth tigers, just be taken away from you.
It's so deeply wired in me i actually resent (no deeply hate) the food industries that take advantage of my biology.
I think the only hope for health care costs to be brought back to earth is to treat most foods like we treat alcohol or tobacco - chocolate bars that cost the same as a bottle of whiskey, sugar eating areas away from other parts of restaurants, cities that revolve around walking not driving,
It's wholesale chnage - and no please don't throw the nanny state argument at me - look at the Libertarian party (Their presidential candidate suggested it would be a good idea to have a driving license ... got crucified) We live in a nanny state and most people don't think it's sane to leave
Even keeping just enough food in my house for a week's worth of meals (I only eat one, lunch) only works in combination with an appetite suppressant, otherwise I'll find excuses to bake bread or elaborate confections or something. And attending any social function where food might be present is extremely dangerous and to be avoided if at all possible.
100% true for me as well. If it's there I can and will eat it, sometimes past the point of feeling sick. "You ate that whole pint of ice cream in one sitting??" No, you don't know about the other pint of ice cream that I ate a few hours ago and didn't say anything about because of guilt.
Food cravings, hunger pangs, insatiable demands to scarf things: that's often the dark side of an insulin cycle where carbohydrates play a determinative role. But barring issues better treated with psychiatry, most people aren't going to feel the urge to snack after eating a soup-bowl worth of butter...
Its mildly nauseating to eat too much fat. Eliminating insulin spikes makes appetite control 100 times easier. Every body is different, but if you might want to consider a (low carb) high-fat diet for a while.
Also: eating once a day is a bad habit unless you're working things correctly. Maybe check out the "OMAD" (one meal a day), types to see how they're eating? High fat generally plays a role there, too, for satiation and energy reserves.
I have eaten entire 24 ounce jars of peanut butter in one sitting, blocks of cheese, cans of nuts, whatever. It doesn't matter what I'm eating at all. It is endlessly irritating that people like you keep insisting you know more about how my body works than I do.
Dietary fat causing satiation is hardly "internet know-it-all" and has anything to do with keto in an of itself. The keto diet does encourage other dietary habits that enhance and strengthen the satiation of those goods fats to control and mollify the specific appetite problem you are discussing. It's a system of effects that specifically addresses that urge (https://paleoleap.com/dietary-fat-and-satiety/).
Not a single example you have retorted with points to anything other than poor blood sugar regulation, poor dietary habits, and insufficient fat in your standard diet (which is totally different than binging on something fatty, in the presence of your admittedly poor diet). You are Doing It Wrong.
A whole thing of peanut butter is not going to avoid the insulin spikes. A whole thing of nuts is not sufficient by itself and likely were nuts with the wrong macros. Cheese is nice, but single source foods are not how you should be eating as a grown up, and that habit is causing the problems (says you).
"It doesn't matter what I'm eating at all" contradicts observable research in every aspect of medicine, basic biology, and the standard model. You're whining from ignorance.
Late night snacking has always been my personal achilles heel...
A high-fat diet -- say, steak tacos with avocado sauce in cheese-tortillas -- can do a lot to mitigate snackiness. So instead of a late night chocolate bar, maybe try eating half a pack of bacon and see how you feel... Or an extra half-pack of bacon with your last meal so your appetite calls it quits for a few hours extra...
Within the same caloric footprint, and the hard suffering of eating bacon, I think it's possible to radically reshape your appetite towards more satiating foods that don't leave you snacky. And if you're like me, cutting out the snacking is most of the caloric control you need.
Cons: have to cut carbs so you don't balloon, natural progression towards keto. Pros: less snacky; red wine, whiskey, and bacon as part of a 'weight loss' regimen.
At the end of the day, if you're hating every minute of it, there's very little likelihood you'll keep with your programme. So do whatever you need to do in order that you enjoy yourself whilst doing it, and results will follow :)
1 - Arrange a regular workout with friends / a personal trainer. Once you're in the habit of exercising regularly, it gets much easier. And putting it off becomes harder thanks to someone else expecting you to turn up.
2 - Take something you really like (food, movies, etc.) and commit to yourself that you'll only do that thing after you've exercised to make it more appealing.
Was in the same boat until I started doing group classes. Used that to build accountability, motivation, and a "vocabulary" of how the gym works. Now I could spend hours at the gym by myself and love it. Find what works for you, cuz lifting is a blast!
TFA notes that they didn't exercise (that they tried but didn't stick).
Ideally you'd combine exercise and calorie counting, but for nerds calorie-counting makes the diet into a numbers game which can be a great motivator on its own.
*If you're weightlifting HEAVY 2-3 hours a day 6 days a week or running marathons every weekend, then you are burning enough calories to enter a deficit. Otherwise: your workout is burning fewer calories than there are in a banana.
The problem I have with exercising is that it makes me really hungry causing me to overeat. If Im exercising 4 days a week, it isnt a problem. But if Im only doing 2 times a week, it is better to not exercise at all.
Skipping dinner works for me (I eat breakfast around 8, lunch at 2, and late snack around 6) except my family wont let me skip dinner. When I used to travel for business it worked and I was able to get down to 165.
Ive been stuck at 175 (5' 9") for a long time, I just downloaded myfitnesspal and will try that. I do like low carb because it reduces the hunger I feel making it much easier to follow reduced calories.
I'd been counting calories for a couple months and dropped about 8 pounds (which is good), but slow. My self-control was 'meh'.
Got Beat Saber two weeks ago. I love music, and apparently I love dancing. Kept tracking calories. Down another 8 pounds in those two weeks. I've been playing about 30-60 minutes a day, and with my average heart rate (at a safe level) and weight, I should be burning ~400-1000 calories in those sessions.
I understand a lot of that is water weight from working out, but I'm also keeping my calories in check WAY more easily. My graph from those two months of calories consumed was spiky with missing days (out of shame, not willing to enter them in). After starting with Beat Saber, my graph is incredibly consistent within ~200 calories, and always at or below my goal.
Having an understanding of what 500 calories actually means in terms of effort helps me mentally connect that with the value of eating that extra 500 calories. It's some kind of connection that doesn't exist when I'm not physically active and tracking calories.
Side note, I only keep track of my calories "burned" out of curiosity. Fitness trackers are notoriously unreliable overall, but it's motivating. I do NOT eat more calories based on activity done, which is a recipe for disaster IMO.
Exactly right. Losing weight by counting calories is an almost entirely mental activity, not physical. We have a physiology that wants food and abhors not eating enough.
> I wonder then what did you tell yourself?
Like the author, I discovered counting calories a couple of years ago, after trying and failing to lose weight through exercise for 20 years.
I do have some mental tricks that worked for me.
Number one: the reason I got overweight is because I’m mis-calibrated. When I feel full, it’s because I already ate too much. What I need to do is re-calibrate to understand what “enough” is. By assigning a negative judgement to feeling full, and seeking the feeling of enough, it helps remove the idea that I just need willpower to overcome any hunger. A little bit of hunger (but not a lot) is a good thing, so I want to stay there.
Number two: I set my calorie budget to my future weight, not my current weight with minus a thousand. This is a “set it and forget it” plan. I want to calibrate my normal eating for the rest of my life, not diet for a month or two and then regress. I also don’t want to make adjustments when I’m done, I want to act like I’m already done. If I want to be 180lbs, and I should be eating 2k calories when I’m 180lbs, then I just start doing that and my weight will trend toward 180lbs. This takes longer than having a larger deficit, but mentally I don’t need to care how long it takes. I spent decades overweight despite trying, a couple extra months losing weight more slowly is nothing, it’s way ahead of where I was before.
Third, I also save some budget in my day for a treat at the end of the day. It leaves me just a tiny bit hungrier, but then when I get my treat it feels like I’m splurging.
Fourth, I still exercise. To lose weight fast I don’t count my exercise as calories burned. In maintenance mode, I use my exercise as a way to earn more calories. Now I’m actually going to the gym not to lose weight, but so I can eat more!
I had days where I went over, but I didn’t really have “bad” days or bad moods, it was never severe. It was more like go to a party when I’m not counting, and whoops, I’m 400 calories over my budget.
The hardest part about counting calories is the first few days. That’s when hunger is worst. After the first week, my body adjusts and my appetite goes down.
I had my “come to Jesus” moment about 3 months ago, at the green age of 39. I’ve since lost 10kg (1.5st or 22lb) and counting.
I am never hungry, I removed all starches and cheese from my diet and the stomach is now silent 100% of the time. I still have the occasional “fuck it, the world hates me, I want a pizza so bad”, but I learnt to manage it: when I feel angry or bored (my triggers), I get my mind busy with something else, anything really (from sudoku to programming, going for a walk with a podcast, or painting miniatures). After a few minutes the impulse is gone. I cheat once or twice a day, in small quantities and in a controlled fashion: knowing the worst time is right after a cheat, I make sure to be very busy and plan follow-up snacks with nuts, to slowly ease off the starch-induced crave.
Another trick is to metabolise the concept that the corporate world tries really really hard to sell you food; when you really start to see that it’s all a way to screw you out of your money, it gets easier to say “no thanks”.
First it was to not enter in a willpower fight. I did accept that I will fail, and I did fail many times (sorry did not count, often in the beginning and I was still failing from time to time until the end). But every time i failed, instead of giving up i was telling to myself "ok you failed, but it worked for X days, you trained your body to eat less, let's start again, it will be more easy this time." And it was true. With time your body require less food to fill "full" even when you fail.
Also a lot of ppl here are talking about fasting. I'm not sure about it at all. Your brain may try to prevent the next "fasting time" and may try to trick you to eat more. I would advise to eat at very regular times so your brain "knows" when you will eat (for me: 6:00/12:00/19:00 +/-30mins). Take time to eat, move in another place, etc ... so you appreciate it more.
I liked the cheat days principle because it gives you short term goals, and it helps to keep some pleasure eating food. It also helps to not bring your diet with you when you go to lunch with friends/family. I also noticed that with time I was cheating less during these days.
Preparing food for myself also saved money, sometimes it helped for motivation.
There are a lot of varieties of 'fasting'.
Intermittent Feeding or 'Time Restricted Eating' involve upping dietary fat to control hunger feelings and ensuring daily caloric needs are met within a shorter timespan. This leaves the body enjoying 'fasting' benefits for longer while enjoying a normal diet.
and
> I never understood how simple it was before starting this.
Sounds so trivial, but sadly true for a lot of things in life. You read and hear something multiple times, but you have to make the experience yourself to get your eyes opened.
Yet somehow, billions failed, fail and will fail spectacularly.
Also, eating.. pickiness too. I don't mind leftovers, hell I don't even mind eating the same thing for a week, two, etc. She hates leftovers and always wants freshly cooked. Also rotating food types, as it can't be too similar to what she ate recently.
All combined it means that finding hearty meals (and now keto for us) are more effort for her than for someone like me. To no surprise, I have no weight to lose (I need to workout to even maintain weight), but it really frustrates her at how different our bodies are.
She considers her food habits to be an "addiction" in large part due to how different her and my reactions are to food. Her struggles are far more than mine on this front.
For me, it is that simple. My point was that for my wife, there are a ton of other considerations she deals with. Sure, they're mainly in her head (though possibly other factors such as gut biome play a role), but large she has more details to factor in when she thinks about "will I be able to do this?". I on the other hand don't. For me, it's exactly as the author described, simple.
Yes, simple does not mean easy, but saying quitting smoking is simple to a smoker is not an honest assessment of their situation.
Most things in life are simple if you ignore reality and speak of life from a bubble.
Somebodies reaction to a hard thing may be complex, but that is more about them than the thing. Although as you note, there is a risk of oversimplifying (e.g. your example of possible implications of gut biome, but that doesn't really shift the fundamentals).
The reason I think this distinction is a good one to make is the problem with the converse. If something being hard implies it is complex, it will lead often to people generating extraneous complexity around it which makes it actually more difficult for the people involved, and can lead to very convoluted thinking and errors in that thinking. You need only look at the massive industries built around things like weight loss and quitting smoking to see examples of this (not that everything in those industries is nonsense, but they do contain a lot of profitable nonsense).
This had nothing to do with bubbles. The risk is that instead of supporting people in doing a hard thing, we raise false hope of making it easy.
That's why I felt my situation and my wife's differed. Mine was simple because there wasn't an underlying pile of complexity. Her underlying "addiction" and etc are noteworthy items in her list of things she needs to do. It's simple if you ignore the problems, but if she wants to actually implement that simple instruction she needs to figure out the little details that affect her.
So yes, it is simple if we're not talking about her situation with context and reality. Mine is simple in all contexts, in my opinion.
Smoking is a good example imo on where our opinions differ. Smoking is super far simple in my mind, because many people can't just stop smoking (or rather, lack the willpower). So they need additional data, the simple instruction was.. imo, not so simple.
You are basically promoting the idea that I am rejecting, that because people find things difficult and have a lot of complicated reactions to it, that means the underlying problem is itself must be complex. I don't believe that is either true or useful, and argue that it can often make the problems themselves worse by muddying the water.
Some problems are complicated but relatively easy. In this case, if you just find "the right trick" you can solve it without much difficultly. We do people a disservice when we pretend that simple-but-hard problems are actually complicated-but-easy. This is something that is often done, for commercial gain, in industries like weight loss and smoking cessation. At core, I am arguing that this is a bad thing.
At any rate, we've probably reached diminishing returns here.
I did that for 2 years, and afterwards I developed an aversion to eating, I just got so sick of having to gorge myself at every meal, and never being able to go more than a few hours without thinking about food.
I'm the type of person Soylent advertises to. I even made my own for a ~year. Keto (mostly low carb for me, not keto) has been a massive boon though. Fats just leave me so much more sated and stable. I highly recommend it if you don't like to eat or want to eat more dense meals.
"You can't tell people anything" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17384703
>There’s a lot of “science” that say low insulin levels in the fasted state lead to more fat burning.
That "science" he smirks at is the research primarily of Dr. Jason Fung, who specializes in diabetes and obesity. He wrote a book called the obesity code that advocates for intermittent fasting. I think I'll take the word of a man who has spent hours researching and analyzing over the snarky comments of some software engineer.
Some more examples: > If you’re in a caloric deficit this will happen anyways.
That's not true. I could eat a reduced caloric deficit of bread every day and still not burn fat. The basis of intermittent fasting and the ketogenic diet is to force your body to break fat for energy as opposed to carbs. They take different approaches, but the end result is the same - to lower the amount of insulin. Keto is bit more restrictive in food because so much of the carbs in out food is sugar.
So, why did achieve results? Easy:
> I naturally started eating healthy foods because I could eat more of them. If you eat a chocolate bar, you will still be hungry. For the same amount of calories, you could eat a few bowls of vegetables and be full. That said, the best part about this overall approach is that you can still eat whatever you want – just count the calories.
There's a wide difference between how your body reacts to 100 calories of chocolate bars (sugar) and 100 calories of broccoli (fiber).
This is more junk science and using anecdotal data as opposed to research and science. If you want to lose weight, what you eat is just as important as how much you eat. End of story; caloric restriction alone isn't enough. However, this article is also incredibly short sighted. Losing weight is very much like getting married. People focus on the event and not the afterwards. You can't modify your diet, hit your target weight, and then stop. You need to keep going; fighting obesity is life long battle. I believe the majority of people who lose weight will regain that weight within 7 years. There's horror stories from the biggest loser.
My story, by the way, is that when I got married, I was 280 lbs. One night, I remember coming home from my in-laws house and deciding I was tired of being fat. I changed my diet. I cut out chips and soda at lunch and put in carrots and water. I stopped eating white bread and pasta in favor of whole grain foods. I cut the number of nights I had dessert to 1 to 2 a week. I picked up regular exercise. I tracked and measured my food. It worked. At my lowest, I was ~170 lbs. It's gone back up to 203 right now, but that's because I'm currently focusing on strength training. I will say that eating less is not enough. You have to pick the right food. As a friend of mine once wisely said, you simply cannot outwork a crappy diet.
So the same calorie diet and the same amount burned can behave differently at storing fat because of a small pill. This for me flies in the face of calories in/calories out. A pill, or insulin can really screw that up.
I've started trying intermittent fasting and low carb/high fat so far I'm amazed at how much energy I have. Still early days and I have a few old habits to kick. But it's definitely going in the right direction.
Like the books you can get from Dr Rupy Aujla, Charlotte Markey PhD, Dr Arthur Agatston, Dr Clare Bailey, Dr Xand van Tulleken, Dr Michael Mosley, and Dr Aseem Malhotra?
> "Everything I wrote above is what worked for me – that is not to say it will work for everyone. I am also not a doctor, I’m an engineer, so none of this is medical advice – please consult your doctor."
This is just a person who wants to show HOW they did it. You can read all the scientific papers you want, but ultimately you have to put that knowledge into practice. You'll find that people have lost weight in various ways, including what you call "unscientific" or bro-science.
We have a very fuzzy understanding of human metabolic pathways, and an incomplete knowledge of their interactions with each other. If you want to dismiss somebody's data you have to first understand and explain the data, and then add your point of view.
Its a bit like telling Usain bolt hes doing it wrong because he has technical imperfections in his form, but meanwhile hes still winning races.
1) Low carb 2) Caloric restriction (CICO)
On both I lost weight. On CICO I still ate "less healthy" foods (processed, breads, fast food, desserts) quite often but kept within a certain calorie range. Neither weight loss involved exercise. I'm convinced #1 was just a fancy way to acheive #2. Were there separate benefits to #2? Yes (less cravings) but not enough to convince me to go back to it. Low carb is too difficult to stick to for me personally, have tried it numerous times (no need to give me advice on how to make it work for me, I'm losing weight on CICO right now and fine with that!)
Why would both work if CICO is bunk?
However, if I'm not mistaken, you've lost weight, gained, and lost it back again, right? The so-called yo-yo effect, another harbinger of people who only do CICO. The vast majority of people who lose weight regain it back within 5 years. As someone who kept it off for a decade and only started gaining it back when I start taking my resistance training a lot more seriously, I can say that if I only did CICO, I would not have kept it off. The only way to take off weight and keep it off for long periods of time is to change what you eat, get regular exercise, and know this is something you will be doing for the rest of your life.
CICO has been the easiest to "stick with", I can fulfill my cravings without regaining, because I'm not truly cutting anything out, just having less. When I want unhealthy snacks, instead of eating a bag of doritos, a fudge round, and a swiss roll, I have just the doritos and that's it. Moderation is key. I got to the point where I was basically bingeing food and not caring, which is a bad spot to be in.
The only reason I fell off of CICO once before was absolutely a decision on my part to "screw it, gonna eat what I want and however much I want because I love food, life is short" and really had nothing to do with regular here-and-there cravings. It was a conscious choice of food over health, as bad as that is. Before I made that choice, under CICO, I lost 40 pounds and kept that 40 pounds off with no problem, super easy to maintain.
Yes, I will admit that CICO causes me occasionally to choose a healthier food, because they're much less calorie dense- but day-to-day I still have bread, pasta, fruit, and sometimes dessert. I just add in some good, less dense things along the way, and overall eat less, while still enjoying it all. Seems to work. I guess time will tell, eh? :)
The trick that gets people, I imagine, is that you really can't eat very much of it all, especially as I've gotten older. You have to be willing to eat rather small portions, and rather infrequently.
Thankfully, I like plenty of non-dense foods too and can adjust the balance without cutting any desirable foods completely
It's often not that trivial, nor true. There's a ton of litterature on the subject, here is an articla I like:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/28/why-t...
A good quote:
> The much bigger mistake Wishnofsky made was misunderstanding how our bodies react to weight loss. As soon as we start cutting calories from our diet, the number of calories our body expends begins to fall. "It literally starts happening on the first day," said Hall. "And it continues to mount as you lose weight."
> The reason Wishnofsky, and so many others since, have botched this biological fact is that it's fairly counterintuitive
Basically our bodies are not simple in any way, in particular when it comes to how it handles energy, which is core to our survival. There is a good amount of survivor bias in all the "that's how I lost weight" tales floating around.
All of the people I know who did reasonable carb counting, stuck to a 8 to 16 hours feeding/fasting period and picked up physical activity (n ~= 5) lost weight in the 5-10kg area.
Anyway, the point I was trying to make was that there are other simple life rules that feel like an epiphany while sounding trivial, e.g. "How I got rid of my debt by spending less than I earn."
This is also discussed in the Hacker's Diet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker's_Diet / https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/, free ebook and accompanying software). There seems to be a plateau around your "normal" lifestyle on which the body adjusts to small differences in calories in and out. You have to push the difference beyond a certain threshold to actually make a difference:
"If you eat a little too much, the body cranks up the burn rate a little: you feel warmer and more inclined to run up a flight of stairs rather than walk. If you eat a tad less than ideal, you may feel chilly and inclined to curl up with a book under the blankets and get a little extra sleep. [...] To achieve weight loss, you have to reduce what goes in below your capacity to adjust by banking the metabolic fires, forcing your body to tap its reserves[.]"
Only part I agree with that article, 3500 calories per pound wasn’t accurate for me. 3800 was about right, for me. But it’s not like 3500 is far off. I used it as a base rate until a month of data told me otherwise.
Here’s the reason why people think the simple rule of physics doesn’t work on their body, they are lying to themselves.
Some people think they burn 6000 calories like Michael Phelps because they bobbed in a pool for half an hour. Walked 20 min outside? I “hiked uphill” for 30 min then, I burned 300 calories. A serving of potato chips is 150 calories for 12 chips? Half a family bag is only 300 calories then! My body won’t notice a few cookies.
This is the bullshit people tell themselves regularly. I’ve heard it from MYSELF and from other obese folks who bitch about their problems.
Accurately count every single calorie you take in with a spreadsheet and you’ll see just how much of a fatass you are. That’s what I did for my once fat booty. Even count that cookie and candy bar. No excuses. Count every exercise accurately as well.
Human bodies are amazingly efficient. Scary efficient when you start to think that a slice of bread can walk your sack of meat about a mile. But physics and math will ALWAYS prevail. Energy is never created, only transfered. Fat is stored energy. Real basic high school stuff here people. That bow flex can’t bend the laws of physics.
And quit acting like survivorship bias is an excuse for laziness. So tired of everyone saying survivorship bias so they can complain about their problems these days. Sure, not everyone will succeed through hard work. But I also admit, I won’t put in the same effort as The Rock. That man earns his glorious cheat days. Earned, not whined. Hell, do you see any relatively decent athlete eating ice cream all day “oh I don’t work at anything, I just take this secret pill that all failures don’t take”.
Seriously, enough already. Do the work and quit with the excuses. Once I quit giving myself reasons why “oh I’m fat because...”, I started losing weight. I stopped eating fast food. Dropped simple carbs. Haven’t had soda since I started. What’s fun, I literally have to eat more steak to make calories and protein everyday. Fantastic perk to all of this. Props to OP for 2.7 average per week. Mine is 1.5 a week. But I’ve also been weight lifting so I’m assuming the muscle mass is slightly offsetting that.
Moral of the story, your comment is hurting people that are on the edge of making a positive change in their life. Stop hurting people for your own crocodile tears.
The article I picked was about the body compensating calory loss, but there is also other mechanism like increasing stress that boost up appetite in some people.
For a lot of people decreasing the amount of calories will be a psychological hell and can’t be done without dramatic changes to compensate. Telling them “reduce your calory intake, it’s not magical” will just be cruel and unhelpful, when they need structural rethinking of basicaly their life.
Some other will lose mostly water non-fat stuff and think their diet is working and not understand the ups and downs in their weight, and it’s not simple to manage if you don’t follow your muscle ratio.
Other people need to realize they actually don’t suffer much by reducing food intake, but never tried to because of social stigma or all the “influencers” shouting that diet is hard.
I’m not kin of the “Just do it” mantra thrown around to large swaths of people. As you point out some people might be on the edge of something, I just think they’ll eventually find what they need to do, while the rest of the people hearing the same message also have a chance of getting deeper in their hole by believing simplistic cheerleading.
My message would be “if you care about your health, talk to your doctor to know the actual stakes and see by yourself what you’re comfortable with”
We've finally, as a general society, grown out of telling people with clinical depression to just cheer up.
Yet we tell obese people to "just eat less". I think most obese people realise that if they want to lose weight they need to eat less.
You know, for morbidly obese people there is the possibility of stomach stapling. This physically prohibits over eating and lowers how much hunger you feel. The intervention is covered by the public health insurance in my country. And it comes with psychological supervision.
The background is that to a lot of obese people, eating is a coping mechanism and it turns out they get depressed when they no longer can eat as much as they used to.
I've know people personally who had the surgery and are still obese.
For a few seconds I was confused as to how much running 30 meters would help :D But I guess he means 30 minutes.
Can I also compliment the site design? It's very clean, and presented the information well.
I think that this is due to people not modifying behavior as they lose weight. A person weighing 250 lbs has a higher BMR than when they weigh 200 lbs. So if you lose weight and don't adjust your daily calorie goal, you're no longer eating as far under your BMR as you used to.
Commonly there's a sharp initial weight loss due to "water weight" loss: changing to a diet with lower sugars (simple sugar and carbs) and salt leads to retaining less water, which in turn yields a sharp initial weight loss. That doesn't keep going.
However as the essay notes you have to either keep cutting calories and/or start exercising[0]: as weight drops so will BMR, carrying less weight means making less effort (for the same result) and fatty tissues are still living tissue so they do burn some energy. And since "weight change" is a factor of calorie intake / metabolic rate, if BMR drops you have to drop calorie intake for it to remain below BMR (and sustain a ratio < 1).
In the Data chart you can see that TFA's calorie intake drops by ~500 after the initial cut. They do note this issue in the conclusion, and that they attempted the exercise route but didn't care for it so stopped after 3 months.
[0] sustained exercise builds up muscle mass, and muscle increases BMR counteracting the BMR drop from the diet
Another secret is also to do that in a period of low stress. High stress will kill any diet.
Willpower is of course the problem for all strategies, and breaking habits. If you get used to your chocolate bar at 3pm every day, it is hard to suddenly forgo it.
Anyone know of an app that only tracks calories? I personally don't care about my "macros" and salt etc . There's almost no chance of going over recommended values at 1600 calories a day anyways unless you only eat gas station food
PS: I reported the bugs but I always was ignored, even being a paid user.
The app keeps on the phone a very small fraction of the total food database, that is only the food which you have already entered. Trying to use it in the Paris metro, where for the most part I don't get any signal, was very frustrating and I ended up uninstalling it and deleting my account.
I don't really think this is consistent. Basically yes if you eat less calories than are used you must lose weight, but the ease of doing this depends on what you are eating.
The devil is in the details.
Sure the rule is simple: Calories in == Calories out
But you need to find out rather exactly how much you really burn, it's often less than you think.
And then you have to eat stuff that doesn't fill your daily calories with one meal, or else you will crave more later that day.
I know you can use a food scale to get a more accurate estimate of calories in but I'm still at a loss to determine an accurate estimate of calories out.
The trick IMO is to simply eat the same thing every day. That way you can remove things as needed to maintain weight loss. But, also adjust based on what you actually eat not just your goals.
And die from boredom removing the problem of obesity completely ...
Everyone has the right to choose which kind of cost they are willing to endure in order to lose weight - this includes refusing to pay any cost at all (and not losing weight).
Nothing comes for free.
Calorie counting works and eating fewer calories than you burn is the only way to lose weight. Far too many people start exercising a bit, continue to eat in the manner they've become accustomed to, and wonder why they don't lose weight. It's not rocket science; you just need to eat less and (probably) eat better.
Counting calories doesn't really work. What's working is restricting insulin in your system which allows your body to burn fat. When you have insulin it's impossible to burn fat.
Suggest having a ready of some of Gary Taubes and something like https://www.dietdoctor.com/first-law-thermodynamics-utterly-...
It is, for the most part, but you're right; insulin spikes are a problem and you should not be gorging yourself on simple carbohydrates when on a diet. Of course, protein and fats can also contribute (ask any keto fan), so you have to eat in moderation and be mindful of your macros.
>Counting calories doesn't really work
Utter and complete nonsense. I have been actively monitoring and modifying my weight via calorie counting for more than two decades. I started boxing at 10, playing football and wrestling at 13, and to this day I still count calories and strength train at an intermediate competitive level ('competitive' in terms of what I lift in the big three at my weight, not to imply that I actually compete.)
I have helped many other people lose weight via calorie counting. It works, and to claim otherwise is simply ignorant. Of course quality of food is the next subject you broach with anyone trying to lose weight. No one should expect to lose weight and be healthy by eating 1200 calories of cake and another 500 in potato chips each day.
When you eat good food (increase your fat and protein as a % of your macros, stay away from processed sugars/carbs, increase your intake of vegetables, etc.) and limit calorie intake you lose weight. Speaking to most people in terms of insulin is a waste of time. They have no simple way to measure that, but if they eat under maintenance and eat generally good food they _will_ lose fat, and that's the goal.
It's simply a lot easier to tell someone to watch their calorie count and eat good food than it is to tell them to monitor their insulin levels. They get the second bit right if they do the first.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluconeogenesis
That's the opposite of the diets goals, is an easy issue for people to incur while thinking they're on track, and keto can make you more susceptible to GNG :)
Sausage and cheese is totally kosher: in moderation, ideally beside some leafy greens.
That is why it is important to keep protein under a certain threshold when on keto.
The other challenge is estimating how many calories you burn each day. There can be a large variation in resting metabolic rate let alone how many calories you burn with exercise.
These aren't accurate at all. How would they be? All they have to work with is height, weight, and BPM.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-fitness-tracker-ac...
Disclosure: I work for Fitbit, but don't speak for Fitbit.
I concede that Garmin integrates with chest straps that are more accurate, but who's going to wear one of those for around-the-clock calorie counting?
I realized that what I eat is fairly stable. There may be 20 different things I eat regularly. Eventually, I started memorizing the most often used ones.
I noticed that there is a pattern to which types of foods have what amounts of calories. For example, fresh fruit and many non-starchy veggies tend to be at around 50kcal/100gr. Starchy veggies got for about 100kcal/100gr. Meats are at around 250kcal/100gr. And so on. Using this, I was able to get estimates for things I don't eat often without needing to Google everything. I did look up things I ate a few times in order to test my estimates.
It is not super-accurate. However, writing it down is more important that writing it down accurately to the last calories.
Many parts of this process were not accurate. I weighed things roughly using an analog scale. I often estimated portion size by eye, as I got a sense of how much 200grams of meat is. I counted the calories using estimates a lot of time. It worked nonetheless.
After 6 months, my weight loss vs. estimated weight loss from calories spreadsheet was within 1kg! I was blown away by how close this was. It makes sense since things like your base metabolic rate and actual calories expenditure also varies, so super-accurate record keeping of food-in was not necessary.
You're right that being off by 100 calories systematically will force a bias. The trick is to be off in one direction one day, and in the other the other day. This way, the error mostly cancels out.
Measure your weight. Track your calorie consumption for N days, then measure your weight again. Then use the 3500 calories per pound conversion to figure out what calories out must have been to cause that.
For example, if over 30 days you ate 2000 calories per day and lost 3 pounds, then you must have burned 3500 * 3 excess calories total. That averages out to 350 calorie deficit per day, so your calories out must have been 2350.
Or if you ate 2000 calories per day for 30 days and your weight remained the same, then your calories out was 2000 as well.
I've been calorie counting for a long time (initially to lose weight, now just habit), and I do this sort of calculation every month or two in order to maintain my weight within a ~5 pound range.
I tried that too. Lost 7lbs in 7 days and then a few more. I regularly skip breakfast, but to really make it work skipping lunch and keeping eating to a 4-hour window was really effective. I need to do some more of that. And it does reduce your appetite after a few days.
I can completely believe that helped in his endeavour.
Plus some people I trust said it was “good for your health”, so I didn’t bother to look further and just took their word for it.
Most of the intermittent fasters I've been following aren't going through some masochistic daily hunger-torture. They're just eating more "paleo" or "keto" so their diet is ripe with dietary fat. That makes going from three smaller, to two larger, or even a single huge meal a matter of habit that can be changed in a couple weeks.
It's also unproblematic to "cheat" on the fast when need arises. The idea is just to clock as much 'fasted' time as pragmatic.
It's way to easy to lose those 5 pounds, get "stuck", and get frustrated.
And it was easier than I thought - a piece of fruit for breakfast, a small lunch (single sandwich, down from two with crisps and chocolate bar on top some days), and a normal evening meal. That would come to around 1500 calories or less a day, easily enough to lose a few pounds a week. It becomes easier as time goes on - your body expects less, I guess. And you do gravitate towards healthier food, simply because you can eat so much more of it.
I've lost two and a half stone since then (I don't follow the diet at weekends so I could have lost more) and am back in the green. Not as much as the article's author - his loss was spectacular!
Alas I did not take a before and after picture, though others have commented, which feels good.
So yeah, great article that I can fully endorse, and encourage others to follow. Just set realistic targets, change will come eventually.
Are there any similar apps which store the data locally?
For example: https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/29/17177848/under-armour-myf...
We are working on syncing across devices though so at some point we'll add a way to create an optinal account.
https://github.com/wcochran/calfoo
I just create my own "refrigerator" by manually adding foods I eat (no bar code scanner or online database).
BTW, someone actually took forked my code and placed a version in the App store without ever asking me. I was sort of dumbfounded that someone would do this.
In contrast, if you had put an open source license on it, then anyone would be well within their rights (assuming the license allows it) to compile and release a version to whatever app store they want.
This is actually potentially untrue, as some versions of the GPL require that the end user must not be restricted wrt the app they download, and that's not compatible with the Apple's store requirements. See e.g. https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/6109/is-it-possibl...
Besides that, I wrote a small JS script that allows me to input various foods along with their respective protein/fat/carb macro ratios that I then combine into meals along with a few helper functions that print the total calories based off the macros. It's nothing special but it gets the job done and I don't have to worry about signing up for yet another app or getting bogged down by a bunch of features I don't care about. I'd be happy to push it and a link to the spreadsheet up to a repo if anyone else would be interested in using them.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.waist.line/
I'm 14% BF and a BMI of 20... looks to be right on point.
Ancestor post was referring to either percentage of total body mass as fat, or percentage of lean mass. Both are dimensionless, as kg/kg cancels out.
As such, if the 12% was % of lean mass, that would be 10.7% of total body weight. If it was 12% of total body mass (more likely), that would be 13.6% of lean mass. Either way, that's classified as "very lean".
Better measurements exist, but for most collecting the data needed is complex (and the impedance measuring ones aren't reliable). If you have a suggested alternative I'd welcome reading about it.
Waist to Height ratio is AFAIK the best "simple but data supported" measure: https://qz.com/1002707/bmi-calculators-arent-accurate-but-ou...
BMI is an aggregate metric that has been misapplied to individuals.
Due to the averaging effect, it's a pretty decent predictor for groups, but due to variation within groups, it's not going to predict that well for all individuals (except for individuals who are close to the average of the group).
Nick Trefethen from Oxford:
https://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/trefethen/bmi.html
I found a guy in my city doing DXA scans for $80, I usually go get one done every six months or so.
Obviously there are better tools, but none of them are so easy to measure.
The guy refused to eat at dinner because he gets his energy from the sun using photosynthesis.
As laughable as it sounds, it's not out-of-line compared to all the dietary marketing myths and superstitions that somehow persist.
One important point to note is that past a certain level, usually around a 500kcal per day deficit, it becomes extremely hard to maintain. Performance physically + mentally will start dropping off quickly. If you do want / need a larger deficit, do more low-intensity exercise rather than reducing caloric intake, and make sure you have a reasonably varied diet (or at least take a multivitamin).
(I used to do competitive sport with weight classes, and messing up your weight plan was never fun ...). Standard disclaimer: I am not a doctor or nutritionist etc.
The error is to think that 1 mile is a long distance. That takes like 7-20 minutes.
That time frame represents a big range of abilities.
The person doing it in 7 minutes is probably in good shape. The person doing it in 20 minutes is probably walking it, and not fast.
When you are losing weight for more than a month, I guarantee you, if you are a reasonable person, you wouldn't be losing a donut with those 500 Kcal. You'd instead be giving up 500grams (almost 2 pounds) of tomatoes + 80 grams of cheese + slice of wholegrain bread. That's a meal right there.
BTW, training during weight loss (by caloric restriction, at least) is mostly done to keep your existing muscle mass + keep metabolic rate up. You wouldn't train to create a bigger deficiency. So every calorie you burn through training (even low-intensity) you should intake back as food.
I will be walking for about an 1.5h tonight to "gather" some calories for dinner. I spend my rations for a bit more caloric lunch and now I will have to pay for it. :)
I've also done a substantial weight loss, while staying healthy (you can check my 1st-level comment in this same discussion).
I guess the "random internet know-it-all" is supposed to be me. I am in no way anonymous, btw (you can check my profile for links, in case you want to learn more about me), so maybe you can search for something that I have EVER posted that you are 100% sure was a lie and then try to label me? I find your comment rude and your username appropriate, Ms./Mr. AnIdiotOnTheNet.
Besides which, here's what you've missed in your calculations: Precisely because there are lower calorie foods that you can eat, choosing not to eat 500 extra calories is much easier than 500 calories of walking. You can eat three of the meals you described every day (assuming your math is correct, I didn't check) and only consume 1500kcal, right? Since that's bound to be a deficit for pretty much anybody who actually needs this advice, you don't even need to walk at all. You probably should, just don't kid yourself into thinking that it makes up for poor dietary choices.
44 lbs is about 1/4 of what you needed to do, yes, but that doesn't mean that my accomplishment is not significant. I wouldn't call a 6-month-long starvation insignificant effort. And 1/4 from a billion dollars is still a lot of money, isn't it? In my case it was 19% of my body weight that I trimmed, I am 6ft 1 and I am about 6 lbs above that previous mark, 6 months after I finished my weight-loss sprint (and this year I will continue to go down).
As I said - I wouldn't exercise to create a deficit. I would do it after I have achieved a big-enough deficit, and would replenish any calories expended through it with food.
So I don't try to argue you should "work" instead of "starve" - I am arguing that you should "starve" to get that deficit in and then "work to preserve muscle; continue burning on a good rate; eat more". Does that make sense?
I'm 5'11". I achieved my lowest weight about 2 years ago and have managed to keep off all but 10lbs of it, much of which I'm confident is muscle. It took me 4-5 years to hit the low mark.
I didn't mean to imply that 44lbs was insubstantial, rather that I've had to operate at a different scale and so have a different perspective on what works and what doesn't.
Good job.
I'd suggest talking to a PT and /or your doctor before jumping into doing high-intensity work if you haven't before.
Do that 3 times a week and you'll burn a pound every second week or 25 pounds a year.
I also find that I tend to eat less if I exercise. No idea why, but it just seems to work that way for me.
And let's face it, losing weight only comes down to calories in vs calories out when you look at it biologically. In reality it's 100% a psychological problem.
I'm glad this strategy worked for you, but I hope people don't take this as advice that is easily generalized.
For a lot of people here, I suspect, it's like getting a lecture on if statements when discussing multi-threaded control flow.
did you find exercise made you hungry? maybe that's why going for a run before bed might be beneficial as you can sleep rather than eat.
Of course, not everyone has the luxury to exercise for half an hour, have a shower, and then eat lunch in the middle of the day. Any company that doesn't give their employees adequate time to exercise is just harming itself. Healthy employees are productive employees.
I've been at it for about 5 months now and I've dropped 30 kg as of a few days ago (from 118kg), which is 66lbs (from 260lbs).
The added benefit of exercise is that my energy levels are much more stable throughout the day, and my mood is generally better and more positive.
Also, this wasn't so much of a diet as a lifestyle change. I always wanted to get into body weight exercises and gymnastics, but got discouraged by injuries and lack of knowledge/guidance. So, I'm very lucky to have met my friend (in more ways than one) who helped set me on the path I wanted to be!
[1]: The deficit might not be so slight anymore, given I gained strength and increased my intnesity whilst keeping the calories the same. I've started eating a bit more to compensate for that now, but I'm still in a net deficit.
"The only thing you really need to know is that you should be eating fewer calories than your body burns everyday. If you do this, you will lose weight – it’s science. Nothing else matters for weight loss"
This may be one of the most harmful statements about diet. It's mostly true, but in a fairly banal sense. A baby will have a caloric surpluss as it grow. So will a potato. Without the calories, growth will stunt. This is the trivial fact.
The growth trajectory of a potato or baby is not trivially determined by caloric surplusses. One big factor is genetics, which tell babies and potatoes to grow. There are environmental factors, many of which are calorie related.
"This is a scientific fact" is in the context it's used, an empty tautology. Caloric surplusses can be used in exactly the same way to "explain" why an elephant is bigger than a mouse, why there are 6 billion people on the planet, how a bodybuilder got his biceps or why you got fat. This makes it a nonexplanation.
A less abstract hint that we're dealing with a nonexplanation is apples. Add one apple a day to your diet, and calorie counting will tell you that amounts to 5kg fat per year.
We know from experience that people do not gain/lose 10 lbs per year by adding an apple a day to their diet. Your apetite or metabolism (these are related) will compensate for the apple.
That doesn't mean that intentional caloric restriction isn't a good method. It works well for some. Other things work well for others. We don't have perfect knowledge about what works "in the wild" or even in the lab.
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2093802-stomach-tap-to-...
Yes people will jump in and say "but but but but macros" and "but but but ketosis" but ultimately it's calories in < calories out.
Much like programming, everything eventually gets translated to machine code. Putting Assembly on that, and C on that, and then using Python just makes programming easier. But it doesn't change the fact that ultimately, it's all machine code. The Atkins diet is just syntactic sugar on top of the machine code of your body.
That's not to say it's a useless abstraction... there are plenty of programmers who wouldn't be doing the job, and plenty of jobs that wouldn't get done, if everyone had to program in machine code. Making it more accessible is a good thing, as long as you understand that Python ultimately becomes machine code, and your diet plan ultimately becomes calories in < calories out.
"You can make this program in any Turing complete language" is true. That truth is interesting to a computer science class. It's completeky useless and meaningless to a person writing a program. Say you want a program that does something with a relational database. The right advice is "you can do this with SQL."
The fact that human bodies follow the laws of physics ads no information. It is a logical red herring.
You can be on a keto diet and gain weight. You can be on a low carb diet and gain weight. And if you don't understand the basic principles of why that is, you'll think that losing weight is impossible. If you believe that keto is the only way to lose weight and you gained weight while following it, you're going to quit.
You need to understand why various diet plans work. Ultimately, they all work because they help you eat fewer calories than you're burning. If you follow the diet exactly but still consume more calories than you're burning, you will gain weight. If you don't understand that fact, you've already lost.
I can't think of a single more important fact to understand than that.
No you can't
I'm in a Ketogenic diet 6 months now (lost 83 pounds so far) and although i'm eating the same amount of calories (and even more) as i did before i started i'm losing weight non stop, no exercise , no intermittent fasting, NO-THING!
You clearly have no idea what you're talking about
Or you're lying, and also making anyone who did gain weight on the keto diet feel worse about themselves and give up on losing weight altogether.
If the story is true, the likely reality is they're not counting their calories so they don't realize they ended up eating fewer calories than they were before. They just think they're eating more because they didn't realize how many they were consuming before.
I don't make the accusation of lying lightly. We're dealing with a new account making wild claims that break the laws of physics and could have serious impact on someone's health, claims made in the face of all available science. Whether they believe it to be true or not, it's a lie.
"They are lying" means that they know it's not true.
I'm not saying that po9her is right. But I too often see people use "you're lying" to mean "you're wrong". Even if they are blatantly wrong, the two are not equivalent.
Yes, but is it fat or protein? If an adult human male weights 203 lbs at 25% body fat undergoes a transformation and goes to 250 lbs at 10% body fat, I think you'd be hard pressed to call him overweight. I think the NFL would like to have a talk with him.
But you should realize gaining muscle is actually difficult, and you should realize that it's basically impossible to lose weight and add substantial muscle at the same time since one requires a calorie deficit and the other requires a calorie surplus. Possible, but extremely extremely difficult and time consuming.
There's a reason professional athletes go through bulking/cutting cycles. No one is accidentally putting on 50lbs of muscle just by switching to keto.
It's true in some uninteresting abstract sense. Growing up involves caloric surpluses. Death involves an end to caloric intake. Did that corpse rot because it stopped ingesting calories?
The difficulty of weight loss isn't the math. It's how to hack your mind and body to minimize the willpower needed to maintain a caloric deficit that millions of years of evolution have optimized your system to avoid.
No need for hacks. 1) Don't eat things in a box or bag, real food only, 2) Caloric deficit.
It's actually very easy, people are just lazy or addicted to poor habits.
No, it's not as simple as avoiding packaged food. And even if it were, avoiding consuming all that crap may be simple but it's not easy. It takes a lot of willpower. If that's easy for you, you're in a tiny and fortunate minority.
The human body is a complex system with all sorts of feedback loops on inputs and outputs that can make it extremely difficult to change its equilibrium.
Calling people lazy when in fact they're losing a fight against every instinct of their biology (plus all sorts of societal ills like long work hours and food deserts and advertising) is unproductive.
Yes, the human body is very complex and metabolisms and people are all different, but you can't really do too much about that. So just eat healthy, eat less, burn more calories. What else can you do?
The advice (aside from the scams and a little bit of idiocy) is on how to achieve that deficit in a way that minimizes the willpower required - because humans suck at willpower and one's biology is constantly trying to undermine that willpower in order to achieve the "store more reserves" imperative.
Yes, if "as much as you want" means you maintain a caloric deficit.
Eating two oranges vs. drinking a glass of those two oranges' juice will yield very different results on the body, both in terms of how hungry you are, and how the nutrients are broken down.
Edit: I recommend giving "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" a watch. It's an excellent talk and should be available freely on youtube.
Edit 2: Furthermore, we don't burn calories at equal pace every day, even given the same amount of effort/exercise. Metabolism change means even passively you burn calories at different intensities on different days. These mechanisms result in significant differences between people.
The human body has an amazing set of machinery that's dedicated to making you eat when your metabolism needs certain kinds of materials and would rather not break down tissue to get them.
People won’t simply omit that fact. They’ll often actively argue that it’s untrue, that “you shouldn’t be hungry” when losing weight. This is only true if you simply don’t ever experience hunger normally (in which case you probably don’t need to lose weight).
Losing weight is hard. It doesn’t become easy because we pretend it is.
I'm not sure how this relates to the overall statistics of long-term success, and I suspect all but one of the people I mention would still choose to do it again.
So I guess by extreme I mean something like: a) a significant amount of weight loss, the need for which is (b) driven by existing and worsening medical problems due to the weight and, importantly (c) for someone who has been seriously trying to lose the weight for some time now and repeatedly failed.
If you aren't in that sort of scenario I am unconvinced the surgical risk and risk of ongoing issues will outweigh the benefits...
I personally have found that I do feel "run down" which turned out to be lower blood pressure. I attributed this to low sodium intake. So, I drink two very low sugar (6g) recovery drinks for my first caloric intake around noon.
One thing that wasn't covered, and likely isn't in many of these weight loss recaps, is not just caloric deficit; but also food content. Sugar's (and carbs) relationship to fat and our bodies cannot be understated. There's plenty of reading on how high sugar diets are detrimental. Here's an interesting listen: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/refined-sugar
This image alone scares the snot out of me: http://reachingutopia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/sugar-i...
I think most people are aware of this in principle, but don't often associate normal foods as being high in sugar. Orange juice is probably the worst offender. All the sugar, none of the fiber.
I never believed that breakfast was "the most important meal of the day". IF success sort of supports this & the fact that it was mostly marketing.
And yes, it does seem to help burn a bit more fat than before - though I wouldn't call it life-changing.
That way you keep insulin under control for the 20 hours (out of 24). Your concentration and focus will increase very soon.
Even though I now rarely work out before going to work, I still start my day by drinking a glass of water and then a cup of coffee and it still feels good :) If you drink decaf, I think it would have no positive (but probably also no negative) effect.
It hasn't been life changing in itself, but I found it to be beneficial for keeping my body weight stable, which in turn improves a bunch of other health outcomes. It could just be placebo, but I feel much better with IF.
Does it really work? I don't know, the scientific evidence isn't that strong at the moment.
But it has convex outcomes: if it works, the upside is tangible... and if it doesn't, the downside is negligible.
I initially lost about 45 lbs (217 – 172) in about 10 months, but have since leveled out between 170-175. Beyond the weight loss, I noticed marked improvements in general energy levels, sleep quality, and chronic issues such as heartburn. More importantly though, I think the biggest adjustment that IF enabled me to make was transitioning into _wanting_ to eat healthy/whole foods and cut out foods with processed carbs and added sugar.
But I totally agree, there definitely is a psychological aspect of it, whether the improvements are quantifiable or not. Maybe the results are placebo, maybe it's confirmation bias, but I definitely think that IF allowed me to reframe the way I approach my diet, and eat in a way that is more attuned to being healthy.
Why?
edit: Your body also slows down its nutrient absorption rate during any exercise as it diverts blood to your extremities and core body functions. So digestion is more of a challenge.
Studies that show a drop in cardio performance from low-carb have been measuring in the adaptation period, before the body adapts to low-carb performance.
I can't remember the exact time period, but it only takes a few weeks to fully adapt to low/no carb diet where your body gets good at making energy from fat. The actual chemical process is really cool.
You definitely lose your ability to do high performance shorter events at the peak of your body's capability (5K/10K, etc.). It is simply a less efficient process of creating the primary fuel your cells use to do their thing.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/the-running-blog/20...
“If you’re going to run a marathon under two hours and 10 minutes, then yes, you probably need lots of carbohydrate to be able to perform to such an intense level of activity, but once you’re slower than two and a half hours, I’m not really convinced you do.”
Adaptation periods are probably 6 weeks, possibly longer to fully adapt, though adaptation appears progressive.
And training low-carb can have benefits even if racing carb-loaded.
There are lots of studies showing a performance decrease during within those early few weeks of the adapatation process, but they aren't really showing the fully adapted, optimized state.
However, when your glycogen stores are depleted, your body is more able to make effective use of consumed carbohydrates (storing them in muscles), so shortly after exercise is probably the best time to eat carbs.
But it's really easy to go overboard.
I don't eat breakfast per se, just a protein shake but I found it difficult to cut out for a number of reasons.
A couple of months ago my wife and I started doing a weekly 24h fast on Sundays from breakfast Sunday to breakfast Monday. The first couple of times it was a bit of struggle but now we don't really notice anymore.
Whatever fits your lifestyle is the way to go, otherwise it's always going to be a struggle to maintain.
What about dairy products (like milk) etc?
I've found it has worked wonders for resetting my relationship with hunger; I feel I'm far less susceptible to boredom hunger in the few days immediately after the fast, something I'm hoping will progressively improve further.
Honestly, we haven't found it that hard at all. The first two weeks were a bit of a struggle just because you aren't used to going that long without food, but now it's just the day we don't eat and we don't really pay it much attention past that.
So I guess it's a habit thing. Once you make a habit of it, you just stick to it.
- No obvious impact on rate of weight loss.
- I do seem to be getting better sleep at night.
She's also not a fan of drinking coffee during your fasting period, and she believes that breaks the fast because the liver metabolizes the caffeine. So that starts the metabolic process in the body, taking you out of the fasted state.
Most people skip breakfast, like I do. It's easier for busy people to skip breakfast. I think it depends on the person's schedule. I skipped breakfast before and tried skipping dinner. Both methods work well. Skipping dinner does make me bored at night. I had all this free time not having to cook or eat. That could be an advantage for some people.
Madness, I tell you.
Good luck and have fun with the intermittent fasting :)
Far and wide the best ground advice you can give yourself and others is to work out - that'll do good things to you, even if you can do it a little. Other than that, eat a moderately varied set of foods. Anything further than that is usually just something someone came up with in the shower and that other people thought sounded real good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R-eqJDQ2nU
Dr. Panda goes into detail about fasting and coffee. Great podcast about fasting.
Intermittent Fasting Confers Protection in CNS Autoimmunity by Altering the Gut Microbiota
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(18)...
doesn't sound like a real thing...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/12/fasting-for-t...
A high fat diet will do a lot to make a caloric deficit a matter of habit, and not iron-strong will :)
Intermittent Fasting and low-carb high-fat food can readily sustain 16-20 hour fasts without the hunger or cravings. It's also really satiating when you do start eating.
This is generally contested by recent diet and nutrition research, as I understand it.
If you have a jar with €100 in it, and you put €9 more in every month but also take out €10 then you will lose €1, no matter what an economist says.
There is still research being done in how the body reacts to different caloric deficits, but the basics hold up.
But my point is calories out will vary depending on calories in. You can eat 2000 calories of carbs 1 day and 2000 calories of protein the next... turns out your calories out will be higher when you eat protein because your metabolism increases. This isn't physics. This is nutrition. And its still not fully understood IMHO.