I was wondering that but I'm not sure if this has something to do with gut microbes which moderate drinking benefits due to the fermentation process. I think eating fermented food is really good for you. Could be wrong.
Not saying everyone should be sober 100% all the time (I drink occasionally myself), but there are much safer and more fun alternatives (med dose psilocybin etc.)
It certainly shows alcohol isn’t the limiting factor. Anyone could change any number of things to be as healthy as those folks, but for whatever reason academics instead insist alcohol is the problem.
If the best software engineers in the role all consistently use rubber duck debugging, it may not be the case that rubber duck debugging is what makes them the best software engineers in the world, but it’d take a whole lot more evidence than some academic on a podcast saying “rubber duck debugging is harmful to software engineers” to convince me it isn’t at least worth a shot.
Then surely millions people in east asian countries like Japan or Korea sitting at top of highest life expectency table having drinking rooted in their culture are anamoly.
But the real world is full of trade offs and confounders. Like the increased socialization with friends & co workers could have health benefits that outweigh the negatives of alcohol. Or that many people who drink nothing are ex-alcoholics.
I read many of these blue zones are places where folks have lost everything and lied about their age in order to get old age benefit earlier. This is certainly true of the Japan and Spain locations
Not only in a vacuum. In some contexts, like people who don’t drink already and still have a healthy social life (like myself), it is very much real world and zero is best.
Considering only the contexts where you have trade offs and use it as public advice is plain wrong.
One important factor is that many alcoholic beverages taste great and are a way of enjoying life. I don't think "zero because that way you'll live longer" is the be-all end-all of arguments. What if the same hypothetical argument was made of sex [1], "don't do it and you'll live longer", would that be a pleasureable way of living a longer life?
[1] which may not be true of humans, but it's not scifi either. Some species, like octopuses if I'm not mistaken, die after breeding (for the male this means "sometime after having sex", for the female it's more complicated).
In a bubble that might be true, but life is often more messy.
>Put simply – many of the abstainers were either ex-alcoholics or people with factors that would increase the risk of premature death (that is why probably they stopped drinking).
> Even so, after taking into account the confounding factors, the researchers found that moderate drinker was still more likely to live longer than the abstainer or heavy drinker.
I wonder what research he was looking at too. There was lot of fuss made over the “French paradox” and their wine consumption, and follow up studies which purported to show that one glass of red wine a day had tremendously positive effects on longevity.
Turns out the researcher behind those studies faked data and got caught up in the replication crisis.
Red wine in particular has a lot of flavonoids, which are particularly healthful, so it's plausible that there are some health benefits from it. The alcohol itself is probably not conferring any health benefits, though. As with most things, it's probably too simplistic to reduce it down to a single variable.
I've never really liked taste of alcohol containing drinks bar some light beer or few drops of some vine. Hence I've never drank alone. I would drink and get moderately (sometimes more) drunk at parties that were / are happening quite often. In the beginning being drunk with pals and gals brought me into elevated set of mind and I liked it. Also it was easy way to sex when very young. Pass some years that type of high had worn off and it has became utterly boring. So I just stopped. Sure I would take a symbolic drink under some circumstances (2-3 times a year) but that's about it.
So no, I do not have any underlying mental / health issues. Just do not give a fuck about drinking. It did not impede my social life either. I still meet with friends just as before.
Wow, congratulations! 55 lbs is a lot of weight to lose. Your approach of gradual changes and focusing on caloric deficit is refreshing compared to the extreme diets and fad-based approaches that seem to come and go every few months. Keep up the awesome work!
Nope, just me. As someone who also struggles to lose weight I am tired of hearing about Keto and Paleo. I would be thrilled to be down 55 lbs. Sorry if it sounded insincere.
Wow, 40kbs is fantastic progress! Congrats to your wife. I've lost around 15 lbs by run/walking on the treadmill every day. I started at around 20 minutes/day, now I'm up 30-45 minutes per day 5x/week and just watching my calories, especially the sugar intake.
Haha, yeah I think it's the "fanbase" around it (don't want to offend anyone). It's like that old joke, how do you know someone is (a vegan, doing keto, plays guitar)? They'll tell you. There almost seems to be people who want to turn these diets into a competition, oh you're keto? Well, let me tell you how crazy keto I am. Like dude, I'm just trying to not hate myself when I look in the mirror not win the Mr Keto award.
For what it is worth I managed to lose 15kgs in less than 3 months with 20,000 steps per day and not eating over 2,000 cals in a day. I also did keto and 6-18 intermittent fasting at the time but I think it was mainly a boost. Key thing for me was cooking my own food and keeping a full callorie count.
This is almost exactly what I did when I needed to shift 70lbs in a hurry - although I cut my calories harder and incorporated a 2.5 mile walk every day to the office and back. I also only drank gin/vodka/whiskey with diet mixers, when I did drink, and I drank little.
Having WiFi scales helped enormously - seeing my progress day by day, week by week - and being fascinated to see my weight fall but take on a gradual asymptotic curve as my metabolism adapted to the new regime.
Anyway. Eat less was the key, and seeing the measurable progress kept me going until I decided it was quitting time. That was 13 years ago, never regained the weight.
I lost 20 lbs with this method (another vote for MyFitnessPal!), though I gained it back when work got stressful and I stopped being able to control my calories. I’m trying to get back on the wagon again.
I’m also investigating water fasting as both a rapid weight loss and longevity strategy, due to the forced senescence of unhealthy cells. Have you or anyone else here tried that?
Fasting is good, and depending how strict you are...
Fasting promotes autophagy and improves insulin resistance, if you do actual fasting (no calories during fasting). Many people have what's called "metabolic syndrome" which is low insulin sensitivity (high insulin resistance) and that causes many problems eventually leading to Type 2 diabetes.
Fasting with small "breaks" (100-200cal snacks) breaks a true fast (>50cal) but still results in overall reduced calories, and is more sustainable for many (or a path towards true fasting).
You lose weight in fasting due to reduced calories. How you do it determines the benefits - merely reduced calories, or more. Some people have very little weight loss with reduced calories diets b/c their metabolism (insulin sensitivity) is really messed up and won't see benefit until they do true fasting.
I like OMAD (one meal a day) as it feels the "easiest", though I have done regular multi-day fasts in the past and the hardest part is figuring out what to do with yourself since you're not spending time cooking/eating.
A good book is The Obesity Code[1], with lots of background and fasting schedules.
Really, the most benefit I've had from fasting is resetting my appetite - I am now satiated and full from a "normal" meal, and thus eating a reasonable amount of food. I used to easily be able to eat a large pizza and then a pint of ice cream every night (obv that leads straight to obesity). Now 3-4 slices of pizze + side salad is more than enough to fill me up and I have some pieces of chocolate for dessert.
Books like "The Obesity Code" are a mix of solid information and "bro science". I wouldn't necessarily take everything you read there at face value.
Techniques like fasting and OMAD can certainly be effective as temporary measures for some people to lose weight. But they probably aren't a great idea as a sustained practice to maximize healthspan. In particular, to prevent sarcopenia as we age, we should probably be eating at least two high-protein meals per day. There are limits to how much protein the digestive system can absorb in a single meal.
Congratulations! 55lb is a big chunk of weight to not be carrying around!
It's very true that for weight loss, diet is the single most important variable, but that doesn't mean exercise doesn't matter. The kind of exercise you do matters a lot, too, particularly once you start caring about lean mass vs fat, rather than just the gross scale weight. Cardio has this image as "the way you lose weight", but I think that strength training is vastly superior, overall.
Strength training doesn't have to be ultra time-intensive or strenuous, but it has huge benefits for both health and weight loss; muscle is metabolically-active tissue, taking 6-10 kcal/day/lb to maintain, vs 2-4 kcal/day/lb for fat. This has two implications: first, in a caloric deficit, the body will preferentially catabolize unused muscle tissue over fat, since it's more expensive to maintain, and second, maintaining a greater percentage of your weight as muscle rather than fat increases your daily "just keeping the lights on" caloric expenditure. A caloric deficit with a high-protein diet and even moderate weight training will result in a significantly higher level of retained muscle mass, resulting in more net calories/day burned, even on the days you don't train. Think of it as the difference between active and passive income - the more "passive caloric burn" you can rack up, the easier it is to make progress towards those goals.
What we call a calorie in the US many other countries call a kcal, because our “calorie” actually 1000 of the base unit. We abbreviate for whatever reason.
Confusingly, it’s a Calorie, in the sense of “the thing the nutrition label says you probably need 2000 of a day.”
If I remember correctly, 1000 calories (with a lowercase “c”) makes one Calorie (with a capital C). The former is the energy to raise 1g of water through 1 degree Celsius, and the latter 1kg through the same amount of temperature change.
Apparently the US Calorie is because that formal definition was originally 1kg of water, it came to the US and got embedded in nutrition stuff, then got changed to 1g of water: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17116702/
"kilogram calorie" - it's the unit that we colloquially refer to as a "calorie" in the US for nutrition purposes.
That maintenance requirement is just "keeping the cells alive when you're laying in bed in a coma" - actually using those muscles obviously requires more energy than that. Maintaining muscle mass is more than just a function of calories, though - in part because it's more expensive tissue, the body will try to make up caloric deficits from muscle before fat. Building and maintaining muscle requires that you keep your body in a state of muscle synthesis, which is itself a very metabolically-expensive process.
Numbers for energy/lb/day of muscle range from 6kcal-50kcal depending on who you're listening to, but the thing that everyone agrees on is that regardless of the number, muscle is multiple times more expensive than equivalent fat to maintain.
> At this point, I knew I needed to eat 1000 calories/day less than I burned. I used this calculator to identify that, as a sedentary person, I burned about 2450 calories/day.
I've seen plenty of calculators like this around the web, and even seen calculators that estimate how many pounds per time you'll gain/lose depending on the activity level and food intake, but they never show their formulae or cite sources that give formulae. Does anyone know of reasonable sources for that?
I'd love to have a probabilistic model of "a group of people who eat X calories per day and weigh Y with Z body fat percentage, will weigh (in distribution) A +/- B with C +/- D body fat after T time period" or similar, but nutrition info is never written in that detail, even though these calculators must come from somewhere.
On an individual basis it doesn't really matter. Those calculators can only ever provide a rough estimate as a starting point. People who want to lose weight will have to weigh themselves on at least a weekly basis and then titrate their calorie intake up or down to hit their target.
If you do want to know how many calories you burn as a sedentary person, then just go get a resting metabolic rate (RMR) test. This is a cheap, non-invasive test where they measure how much oxygen you metabolize and use that to directly calculate baseline daily calorie consumption. Any physical activity will then be additive to that baseline.
Effects on body fat or body composition vary tremendously based on dietary macronutrients, exercise, genetics, gut microbiome, and other factors so I don't think we know enough to construct an accurate probabilistic model of that. In general, to avoid loss of muscle tissue the recommendation is to maintain a high protein intake and do resistance (weight) training.
Really all the complicated algorithm here is estimating basal metabolic rate - the "amount of energy expended while at rest in a neutrally temperate environment, and in a post-absorptive state (meaning that the digestive system is inactive, which requires about 12 hours of fasting)". That quote comes from the BMR calculator I use, which also explains clearly the different estimation methods and their variables [1]. Their calculator takes sex, weight, height, age, and body fat percent.
Other than your BMR, you can compute (weight loss / day) with 3 more variables, the activity calories per day (just added to your BMR), the number of calories in a pound of fat (most round to 3500kcal because it makes mental math easier), and the calorie intake per day. Then:
1000 calories per day deficit (kcal for those using a sane system) is HARD.
More power to him for pulling it off, but most people's bodies will fight them really badly with that kind of deficit.
After two weeks on that kind of caloric deficit I get really angry and grouchy all the time. I have done it, but people around me definitely made comments when I went back to "normal" as to how much nicer I was.
If I didn't skip it, it's not mentioned in the article, but it's very important in my experience. If you don't sleep enough, going through with a reduced calorie intake will be much harder.
I personally tend to overeat if I haven't slept for more than 6 hours the last night. Lost 88lb a long time ago within a (too) short time.
seconding. when i was doing some seriously lifting i built in a day to sleep in and skip the gym (wednesdays).
after life got busy i started doing the same for saturdays, too, and pushed the sat workout stuff to other days. didn't see any loss of performance or size, and felt much, much better.
big part of it, tbh, was because these were college-ish times and not staying out drinking == better overall sleep and health. yeah missed out on a couple of ragers, but also didn't really have any problems meeting people & staying social.
I lost 35lbs recently—surpassing my goal. I tracked every calorie I consumed and used an Apple Watch to be sure I was hitting my calorie deficit goals. However if I were doing it again today, I would follow some simple rules: cut anything I was planning on eating in half, then substitute with as much salad and fruit as I want. You can reduce calories in dressing by adding acids to it (pickle liquid, etc.). Easy to remember, really effective.
Fruit may actually not be that healthy due to sugar content, but in my experience still a healthier treat than other sugary options. Nonetheless, I followed an approach similar to your simple rules with great success.
Congrats on the author. I've lost 18kg over a year, but reached a plateau. I'm now trying to gain muscles to be able to burn more kcal per day.
On a side note, the article started in US customs (pounds), and then uses kcal for measuring the energy, and finally uses grams and g/lb for proteins. Just switch to metric :)
Keeping weight off turns out to be way harder than losing weight.
Not that losing weight is easy; just way easier.
You'll notice that almost any comment or post about successful weight loss is written when the weight loss is recent. And of course, people tend to talk about their recent success, so fair enough.
But I almost see people going around saying, this or that worked great for me 3 years ago, and I'm still doing great. I know it happens, and to me, that's the more interesting secret. (And that said, there's a nice counterexample in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39082494 - 13 years!)
I've successfully lost a lot of weight through sheer force of will a few times when I was younger and competitive and had people to compete with.
I've successfully lost a lot of weight through ketogenic diet a few times before, and that has had better success at sticking. It's lasted up to 2 years, which is still great. But still comes back eventually. Eventually I stop being strict about macros and start just kinda labeling some food as keto and sticking to that, and that doesn't work.
Right now I'm on Mounjaro, one of the new weight loss drugs like Ozempic. This is truly the lazy (but expensive) way to lose weight. And of course I know I need a plan for keeping it off once I lose it all, if I wish to stop taking the drug.
I have no idea if this will work for anyone else and I don't have any data on which components are more important than others or how they interact, but the following is how I lost 35 kgs down to my target of 79 kg. from 1st of January 2023 to 15th May 2023, a weight which I retain +/- 2 kg. as of today.
I walk 10 km every day, no exceptions. (I still do this)
I had a banana + coffee w. skimmed milk for breakfast.
I had a plate of 2/3 heavy vegs (e.g. carrot, cabbage) 1/3 protein for lunch.
I had ONLY one serving of whatever we were having for dinner.
No alcohol, beer, crisps, candy at home - ever.
When we went out I drank and ate whatever everyone else did.
Those are the broad strokes. Feel free to ask any questions you might have.
What you claim here is too easy for people to accept. They need apps, clocks, shakes and fads for their weight loss to make sense.
Most people don't want to put in the work it takes. That is primarily the reason why the sports and food industry is so big.
But you can't cheat your way into a healthy living. It is hard work.
As a long time amateur bike rider, the advice and habits you dictate here are very much in line with how simple it really is to have some good habits around ones life.
You can go easy on yourself after a while doing your routine. Your body will remember and adjust faster than previously, so you can easily start adjusting if you want and learn more about how your body reacts to certain things.
Sounds like you have dialed it in pretty good. Be proud. Good job!
Thanks. I love gadgets, apps etc. but I felt the rules around this had to be so simple I did not need any support to keep them. Originally I had planned to start running after a month or 2, to save time, but when I saw the progress I decided to stick with walking to be sure I did not get injured. At age 50 that is a real possibility.
While I don’t disagree with you, I feel like I have to point out that this post does something that I see a lot in discussions around weight loss, which is conflating “simple” with “easy”. It is simple to walk 10k every day, but it is not easy. I did a similar thing once where I ran 5k every day for two months straight. It was a simple plan, but not an easy one to follow.
90% of the time it is in one go, 10 % 8 and 2. In the beginning it was about 2 hours, now it is around 1 hour 40 mins. Outside always, mostly in the morning. I listen to podcasts, news and audiobooks.
A lot of weight loss suggestions - the linked article included - start with "improve your diet", "eat healthy", "substitute fruits for hamburgers" and the like.
I am fat despite eating healthy. Or rather, because of it: I almost entirely avoid junk food and alcohol, rarely have restaurant food, but I love healthy, nutritious, home-cooked meals and fresh fruits and vegs so much that I simply eat far too much of them. I wonder if anyone has been in my situation and has suggestions?
In my experience, similar to the authors, it comes down to caloric intake. If you sit at home most of day and aren’t expending much energy, then you need to eat less.
When I go out and have a big day hiking or biking, I’ll eat more to fuel that activity and recovery. But on a rest day or day at home, ill eat a good bit less since my body doesn’t need the fuel.
First off, as much as possible, eliminate liquid calories. Those really add up fast and don't contribute to satiation.
Second, try reducing simple sugar/starch intake in favor of complex and higher fiber alternatives where possible. Increasing the ratio of protein and fat in your diet can help you reach satiety much faster, too. Fat is 9kcal/g, protein and carbohydrates are 4 kcal/g, but in terms of satiety, fat > protein >>> carbohydrate.
If you're biohacking-inclined, look into how your specific diet impacts ghrelin (hunger hormone) and leptin (satiety hormone) production and uptake. You might find that you're eating things which provoke hunger or delay satiation. And don't discount that many of us just eat because it makes us feel good - that's a much harder hill to climb, but it is possible.
Congrats! This is a great read and aligns with my own experiences being in a similar position. Before COVID I was 210lbs, pre-hypertension, and sedentary. The work from home change and pandemic was a wake up call that allowed me to eat better food at home, exercise before and after work, and get better sleep.
I think this is the recipe to weight loss, not once did I go on a special diet or crazy hard exercise routine, just eating less and a bit of exercise over time.
Im now down to 165lbs and the healthiest I've ever been.
I think the author's take on the role of exercise is kind of harsh compared to my own experiences and of those around me.
> An hour of intense exercise might burn 500 calories, and it’s very hard to keep up that level of effort for even one full hour — especially if you’ve been sitting in a chair all day for years on end.
This is probably true, though it doesn't factor in the effect of muscle mass and "afterburn" on resting metabolism. Muscle is expensive, that's why your body gets rid of it quickly when you don't use it. And you spend a lot of calories replenishing energy stores and repairing your muscles in the days after your exercise, because that's far from a 100% efficient process.
If you're male and an absolute beginner (as sitting in a chair all day implies), you can gain significant muscle mass with just 90 minutes a week of strength training.
The direct calorie expenditure of exercising that much may be minor. But you will soon be burning an extra 150kcal/day in afterburn and muscle maintenance just sitting on your ass on your off-days. That adds up to a nice beer budget.
Intensive strength training isn't for everyone though, I can see why a guide for the lazy person might leave it out. But if you're even slightly more of a minmaxer than just lazy you should consider it, given all the other additional benefits of exercise.
Finally the protein paragraphs are very spot on. Especially now quality protein shakes are cheap and easily available. One of those (125kcal) fills me up like lunch, and two like dinner. They're an incredible weight loss hack.
Ya, I dunno. I spend 3-5 hours lifting and 12-20+ hours a week on my bike training. I can still quickly gain weight and you don't present the ultimate difficulty, training makes you really fucking hungry. I burn 1000 KJ/hour average on the bike and I can undo that real quick, 150kcal/day is a small handful of chips.
I'm extremely dubious of any answer to weight loss which isn't get your diet in line.
That's interesting. I've been exercising my current amount for so long that I didn't factor in the side effect of additional hunger. Good point.
Though I will say that when it comes to my 50 minute strength sessions, I don't really feel that hungry after. I tend to do them after work, before dinner, and then eat the same amount as any off day. I'm no athlete, just doing the minimum, at which point additional hunger is not that noticable.
50 Minutes of strength is far from your continuous 277W output (nice!), for multiple hours. I think the target audience would literally die far before feeling anything like your levels of hunger, should they ever go on a bike ride with you.
It is my understanding that some people who don't exercise at all have a hard time controlling their appetites, and then when they introduce moderate exercise, they find it much easier to keep their eating in check. I think it's synergistic.
> you can gain significant muscle mass with just 90 minutes a week of strength training.
I’ll second this. I’ve recently begun StrongLifts 5x5 and it has changed my appearance and strength so quickly as to defy my most optimistic expectations. I’ve been a daily runner for years, rarely skipping a day, and forgot the joy of trying something totally new and greedily getting all the early, low hanging gains.
Stronglifts 5x5 is super easy to start with and I’d highly recommend it.
Also done Stronglift 5x5 and similar before it, and it's great. Before that, I was at one point up to 1h30m per session, and the extra time in the gym added surprisingly little. It's so much easier to stay consistent with a program that's so simole and limited.
The extra energy consumption from increased muscle mass makes a difference, but it's not even the most important reason. Skeletal muscle is a crucial part of the endocrine system in that it acts as a glucose sink. When blood glucose levels rise, if you have enough lean muscle mass then much of the glucose will be stored as glycogen in the muscles rather than being converted to fat and stored in that form. People who lose weight strictly through dieting without doing intensive strength training often end up "skinny fat" which is problematic for long-term metabolic health.
If you're male and an absolute beginner (as sitting in a chair all day implies), you can gain significant muscle mass with just 90 minutes a week of strength training.
Can confirm, almost 3 year ago I started lifting and carrying around a weight. I started with a bit under 8 lbs and I lift 32 lbs now, and I've gained about 10 lbs of muscle mass and doubled my upper body strength.
Mind you, it hasn't helped with weight loss. Eating her left overs has resulted in my gaining another 10 lbs of fat. :-(
>you can gain significant muscle mass with just 90 minutes a week of strength training.
Basically, lean mass / muscle you gain are weight you don't have to lose. Untrained can gain 20% of muscles in year of training. That's 4-6 months of fat loss. And it raises maintainance calories so keeping weight off is less difficult. It's almost stupid not to take advantage.
Cheers on loosing weight. But so many things are wrong in this approach, guaranteed weight gain in the next months/years. Always focus on calories and muscle mass. Writing training doesn't account for much is such a lack of understanding it's troubling. And BMI? a complete waist of time.
If you don’t mind paying for a subscription, I’d strongly recommend MacroFactor over MyFitnessPal’s free version. As a fellow developer and gym devotee, I am continually impressed by how dang good that app is. The developers clearly use their product and it’s full of little loving touches that make it genuinely enjoyable to use (no affiliation, just a big fan)
Altough I never quite understand the mechanical "kcal" focused approach. We're not machines. It's not just calories – altough in the end, it is – it's also how they make you feel.
It's easier to eat a full plate of seafood, rice and vegetables than eat only 1/5 of a fast food burger.
About exercise: You're also not only burning 600kcal swimming, you're also getting hungry – a lot!
Every successful diet adheres to that, but none mentions it explicitly.
92 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadSee: https://podcastnotes.org/huberman-lab/episode-86-what-alcoho...
Not saying everyone should be sober 100% all the time (I drink occasionally myself), but there are much safer and more fun alternatives (med dose psilocybin etc.)
https://www.wellandgood.com/alcohol-in-blue-zones/
If the best software engineers in the role all consistently use rubber duck debugging, it may not be the case that rubber duck debugging is what makes them the best software engineers in the world, but it’d take a whole lot more evidence than some academic on a podcast saying “rubber duck debugging is harmful to software engineers” to convince me it isn’t at least worth a shot.
I don't know who is saying it's "THE" problem, but it definitely isn't A solution.
Edit: Billions if you add China to that list.
I thought it had already been shown that the only healthy amount of alcohol is zero. I'm also surprised that "moderate" is better than "occasional".
But the real world is full of trade offs and confounders. Like the increased socialization with friends & co workers could have health benefits that outweigh the negatives of alcohol. Or that many people who drink nothing are ex-alcoholics.
https://www.wellandgood.com/alcohol-in-blue-zones/
Considering only the contexts where you have trade offs and use it as public advice is plain wrong.
[1] which may not be true of humans, but it's not scifi either. Some species, like octopuses if I'm not mistaken, die after breeding (for the male this means "sometime after having sex", for the female it's more complicated).
>Put simply – many of the abstainers were either ex-alcoholics or people with factors that would increase the risk of premature death (that is why probably they stopped drinking).
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/199398#1
It has been, but asking people to completely refrain from alcohol is basically a non-starter for a huge part of the population.
Turns out the researcher behind those studies faked data and got caught up in the replication crisis.
So no, I do not have any underlying mental / health issues. Just do not give a fuck about drinking. It did not impede my social life either. I still meet with friends just as before.
Non-drinkers might have reasons not to drink. Like taking medicaments, health issues, etc.
Wife's also doing it for over 2 years now and reversed her pre-diabetic diagnosis and also lost close to 40kgs since she started it.
Is it just too preachy and is causing people to be tired from hearing about it?
Haha, yeah I think it's the "fanbase" around it (don't want to offend anyone). It's like that old joke, how do you know someone is (a vegan, doing keto, plays guitar)? They'll tell you. There almost seems to be people who want to turn these diets into a competition, oh you're keto? Well, let me tell you how crazy keto I am. Like dude, I'm just trying to not hate myself when I look in the mirror not win the Mr Keto award.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker%27s_Diet [2] https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
Having WiFi scales helped enormously - seeing my progress day by day, week by week - and being fascinated to see my weight fall but take on a gradual asymptotic curve as my metabolism adapted to the new regime.
Anyway. Eat less was the key, and seeing the measurable progress kept me going until I decided it was quitting time. That was 13 years ago, never regained the weight.
I’m also investigating water fasting as both a rapid weight loss and longevity strategy, due to the forced senescence of unhealthy cells. Have you or anyone else here tried that?
Fasting promotes autophagy and improves insulin resistance, if you do actual fasting (no calories during fasting). Many people have what's called "metabolic syndrome" which is low insulin sensitivity (high insulin resistance) and that causes many problems eventually leading to Type 2 diabetes.
Fasting with small "breaks" (100-200cal snacks) breaks a true fast (>50cal) but still results in overall reduced calories, and is more sustainable for many (or a path towards true fasting).
You lose weight in fasting due to reduced calories. How you do it determines the benefits - merely reduced calories, or more. Some people have very little weight loss with reduced calories diets b/c their metabolism (insulin sensitivity) is really messed up and won't see benefit until they do true fasting.
I like OMAD (one meal a day) as it feels the "easiest", though I have done regular multi-day fasts in the past and the hardest part is figuring out what to do with yourself since you're not spending time cooking/eating.
A good book is The Obesity Code[1], with lots of background and fasting schedules.
Really, the most benefit I've had from fasting is resetting my appetite - I am now satiated and full from a "normal" meal, and thus eating a reasonable amount of food. I used to easily be able to eat a large pizza and then a pint of ice cream every night (obv that leads straight to obesity). Now 3-4 slices of pizze + side salad is more than enough to fill me up and I have some pieces of chocolate for dessert.
[1] https://a.co/d/9ZfHjr7
Techniques like fasting and OMAD can certainly be effective as temporary measures for some people to lose weight. But they probably aren't a great idea as a sustained practice to maximize healthspan. In particular, to prevent sarcopenia as we age, we should probably be eating at least two high-protein meals per day. There are limits to how much protein the digestive system can absorb in a single meal.
https://peterattiamd.com/donlayman/
It's very true that for weight loss, diet is the single most important variable, but that doesn't mean exercise doesn't matter. The kind of exercise you do matters a lot, too, particularly once you start caring about lean mass vs fat, rather than just the gross scale weight. Cardio has this image as "the way you lose weight", but I think that strength training is vastly superior, overall.
Strength training doesn't have to be ultra time-intensive or strenuous, but it has huge benefits for both health and weight loss; muscle is metabolically-active tissue, taking 6-10 kcal/day/lb to maintain, vs 2-4 kcal/day/lb for fat. This has two implications: first, in a caloric deficit, the body will preferentially catabolize unused muscle tissue over fat, since it's more expensive to maintain, and second, maintaining a greater percentage of your weight as muscle rather than fat increases your daily "just keeping the lights on" caloric expenditure. A caloric deficit with a high-protein diet and even moderate weight training will result in a significantly higher level of retained muscle mass, resulting in more net calories/day burned, even on the days you don't train. Think of it as the difference between active and passive income - the more "passive caloric burn" you can rack up, the easier it is to make progress towards those goals.
Are you saying, for example, maintaining 20 pounds of muscle only requires consuming 200 Calories per day more of food?
Edit: According to the Internet, this is actually approximately correct, 20kcal/lb/day.
I must just have high metabolism, because I must consume more like 40kcal/lb/day or more to maintain muscle mass.
Cheers.
If I remember correctly, 1000 calories (with a lowercase “c”) makes one Calorie (with a capital C). The former is the energy to raise 1g of water through 1 degree Celsius, and the latter 1kg through the same amount of temperature change.
That maintenance requirement is just "keeping the cells alive when you're laying in bed in a coma" - actually using those muscles obviously requires more energy than that. Maintaining muscle mass is more than just a function of calories, though - in part because it's more expensive tissue, the body will try to make up caloric deficits from muscle before fat. Building and maintaining muscle requires that you keep your body in a state of muscle synthesis, which is itself a very metabolically-expensive process.
Numbers for energy/lb/day of muscle range from 6kcal-50kcal depending on who you're listening to, but the thing that everyone agrees on is that regardless of the number, muscle is multiple times more expensive than equivalent fat to maintain.
I've seen plenty of calculators like this around the web, and even seen calculators that estimate how many pounds per time you'll gain/lose depending on the activity level and food intake, but they never show their formulae or cite sources that give formulae. Does anyone know of reasonable sources for that?
I'd love to have a probabilistic model of "a group of people who eat X calories per day and weigh Y with Z body fat percentage, will weigh (in distribution) A +/- B with C +/- D body fat after T time period" or similar, but nutrition info is never written in that detail, even though these calculators must come from somewhere.
If you do want to know how many calories you burn as a sedentary person, then just go get a resting metabolic rate (RMR) test. This is a cheap, non-invasive test where they measure how much oxygen you metabolize and use that to directly calculate baseline daily calorie consumption. Any physical activity will then be additive to that baseline.
Effects on body fat or body composition vary tremendously based on dietary macronutrients, exercise, genetics, gut microbiome, and other factors so I don't think we know enough to construct an accurate probabilistic model of that. In general, to avoid loss of muscle tissue the recommendation is to maintain a high protein intake and do resistance (weight) training.
Other than your BMR, you can compute (weight loss / day) with 3 more variables, the activity calories per day (just added to your BMR), the number of calories in a pound of fat (most round to 3500kcal because it makes mental math easier), and the calorie intake per day. Then:
NET_DAILY_KCAL = (BMR + ACTIVE_CALS) - INTAKE
WEIGHT_CHANGE_RATE = NET_DAILY_KCAL * FAT_PER_KCAL
[1]: https://www.calculator.net/bmr-calculator.html
More power to him for pulling it off, but most people's bodies will fight them really badly with that kind of deficit.
After two weeks on that kind of caloric deficit I get really angry and grouchy all the time. I have done it, but people around me definitely made comments when I went back to "normal" as to how much nicer I was.
If I didn't skip it, it's not mentioned in the article, but it's very important in my experience. If you don't sleep enough, going through with a reduced calorie intake will be much harder.
I personally tend to overeat if I haven't slept for more than 6 hours the last night. Lost 88lb a long time ago within a (too) short time.
after life got busy i started doing the same for saturdays, too, and pushed the sat workout stuff to other days. didn't see any loss of performance or size, and felt much, much better.
big part of it, tbh, was because these were college-ish times and not staying out drinking == better overall sleep and health. yeah missed out on a couple of ragers, but also didn't really have any problems meeting people & staying social.
On a side note, the article started in US customs (pounds), and then uses kcal for measuring the energy, and finally uses grams and g/lb for proteins. Just switch to metric :)
Not that losing weight is easy; just way easier.
You'll notice that almost any comment or post about successful weight loss is written when the weight loss is recent. And of course, people tend to talk about their recent success, so fair enough.
But I almost see people going around saying, this or that worked great for me 3 years ago, and I'm still doing great. I know it happens, and to me, that's the more interesting secret. (And that said, there's a nice counterexample in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39082494 - 13 years!)
I've successfully lost a lot of weight through sheer force of will a few times when I was younger and competitive and had people to compete with.
I've successfully lost a lot of weight through ketogenic diet a few times before, and that has had better success at sticking. It's lasted up to 2 years, which is still great. But still comes back eventually. Eventually I stop being strict about macros and start just kinda labeling some food as keto and sticking to that, and that doesn't work.
Right now I'm on Mounjaro, one of the new weight loss drugs like Ozempic. This is truly the lazy (but expensive) way to lose weight. And of course I know I need a plan for keeping it off once I lose it all, if I wish to stop taking the drug.
I walk 10 km every day, no exceptions. (I still do this) I had a banana + coffee w. skimmed milk for breakfast. I had a plate of 2/3 heavy vegs (e.g. carrot, cabbage) 1/3 protein for lunch. I had ONLY one serving of whatever we were having for dinner. No alcohol, beer, crisps, candy at home - ever. When we went out I drank and ate whatever everyone else did.
Those are the broad strokes. Feel free to ask any questions you might have.
Most people don't want to put in the work it takes. That is primarily the reason why the sports and food industry is so big.
But you can't cheat your way into a healthy living. It is hard work.
As a long time amateur bike rider, the advice and habits you dictate here are very much in line with how simple it really is to have some good habits around ones life.
You can go easy on yourself after a while doing your routine. Your body will remember and adjust faster than previously, so you can easily start adjusting if you want and learn more about how your body reacts to certain things.
Sounds like you have dialed it in pretty good. Be proud. Good job!
I am fat despite eating healthy. Or rather, because of it: I almost entirely avoid junk food and alcohol, rarely have restaurant food, but I love healthy, nutritious, home-cooked meals and fresh fruits and vegs so much that I simply eat far too much of them. I wonder if anyone has been in my situation and has suggestions?
When I go out and have a big day hiking or biking, I’ll eat more to fuel that activity and recovery. But on a rest day or day at home, ill eat a good bit less since my body doesn’t need the fuel.
Second, try reducing simple sugar/starch intake in favor of complex and higher fiber alternatives where possible. Increasing the ratio of protein and fat in your diet can help you reach satiety much faster, too. Fat is 9kcal/g, protein and carbohydrates are 4 kcal/g, but in terms of satiety, fat > protein >>> carbohydrate.
If you're biohacking-inclined, look into how your specific diet impacts ghrelin (hunger hormone) and leptin (satiety hormone) production and uptake. You might find that you're eating things which provoke hunger or delay satiation. And don't discount that many of us just eat because it makes us feel good - that's a much harder hill to climb, but it is possible.
I think this is the recipe to weight loss, not once did I go on a special diet or crazy hard exercise routine, just eating less and a bit of exercise over time.
Im now down to 165lbs and the healthiest I've ever been.
> An hour of intense exercise might burn 500 calories, and it’s very hard to keep up that level of effort for even one full hour — especially if you’ve been sitting in a chair all day for years on end.
This is probably true, though it doesn't factor in the effect of muscle mass and "afterburn" on resting metabolism. Muscle is expensive, that's why your body gets rid of it quickly when you don't use it. And you spend a lot of calories replenishing energy stores and repairing your muscles in the days after your exercise, because that's far from a 100% efficient process.
If you're male and an absolute beginner (as sitting in a chair all day implies), you can gain significant muscle mass with just 90 minutes a week of strength training.
The direct calorie expenditure of exercising that much may be minor. But you will soon be burning an extra 150kcal/day in afterburn and muscle maintenance just sitting on your ass on your off-days. That adds up to a nice beer budget.
Intensive strength training isn't for everyone though, I can see why a guide for the lazy person might leave it out. But if you're even slightly more of a minmaxer than just lazy you should consider it, given all the other additional benefits of exercise.
Finally the protein paragraphs are very spot on. Especially now quality protein shakes are cheap and easily available. One of those (125kcal) fills me up like lunch, and two like dinner. They're an incredible weight loss hack.
I'm extremely dubious of any answer to weight loss which isn't get your diet in line.
Though I will say that when it comes to my 50 minute strength sessions, I don't really feel that hungry after. I tend to do them after work, before dinner, and then eat the same amount as any off day. I'm no athlete, just doing the minimum, at which point additional hunger is not that noticable.
50 Minutes of strength is far from your continuous 277W output (nice!), for multiple hours. I think the target audience would literally die far before feeling anything like your levels of hunger, should they ever go on a bike ride with you.
I’ll second this. I’ve recently begun StrongLifts 5x5 and it has changed my appearance and strength so quickly as to defy my most optimistic expectations. I’ve been a daily runner for years, rarely skipping a day, and forgot the joy of trying something totally new and greedily getting all the early, low hanging gains.
Stronglifts 5x5 is super easy to start with and I’d highly recommend it.
https://gabriellereece.com/muscle-as-the-cornerstone-of-long...
Can confirm, almost 3 year ago I started lifting and carrying around a weight. I started with a bit under 8 lbs and I lift 32 lbs now, and I've gained about 10 lbs of muscle mass and doubled my upper body strength.
Mind you, it hasn't helped with weight loss. Eating her left overs has resulted in my gaining another 10 lbs of fat. :-(
Basically, lean mass / muscle you gain are weight you don't have to lose. Untrained can gain 20% of muscles in year of training. That's 4-6 months of fat loss. And it raises maintainance calories so keeping weight off is less difficult. It's almost stupid not to take advantage.
Altough I never quite understand the mechanical "kcal" focused approach. We're not machines. It's not just calories – altough in the end, it is – it's also how they make you feel.
It's easier to eat a full plate of seafood, rice and vegetables than eat only 1/5 of a fast food burger.
About exercise: You're also not only burning 600kcal swimming, you're also getting hungry – a lot!
Every successful diet adheres to that, but none mentions it explicitly.
My current approach is fairly simple but hard.
* Exercise 4 hours per week (Mostly cardio)
* Drink a lot of water and no alcohol (Social events one or twice a month are an exception)
* Eat no processed food. No crisps, no candy.
* Try to eat as much protein as possible. Meaning 1-2g protein per kg bodyweight per day.