As with many posts like this, it feels somewhat obvious that "stay active, sleep well, track your weight and calories, and don't go back to eating garbage" are pretty well understood. That said, this is an excellent summary of the research and underlying principles.
I think the real challenge with significant weight loss is in being consistent and maintaining those things, which everyone is pretty silent on.
Mental health and stress levels are the #1 factor in essentially all of those things and deserve more focus in the context of major lifestyle change. You emphatically cannot just willpower through a major change for the rest of your life, and given that, you have to find ways to reduce the active cognition component to a low-effort automatic cognition process.
Setting yourself up for success through organization and routine, avoiding being around situations that cause overeating, not purchasing and keeping in stock foods that are problematic, peer and family support are all things that make a huge difference.
dkarl · 19h ago
This is so true. The mental pressure your body brings to bear to try to reestablish the old equilibrium, and the emotional energy needed to withstand that mental pressure until your body accepts the new equilibrium, are incredibly hard realities of weight loss.
Unfortunately, when you mention these realities, people react very negatively. They say that if it's hard, then it's unhealthy and you're doing it wrong. They preach that it should feel easy and natural, as if that's a path forward. It isn't. It's the end goal, and the path is long and hard.
anon373839 · 5h ago
A lot of this is mental. It really helps to deliberately shift your identity to match your target weight. Instead of thinking of yourself as a 220 pound person who has forced themselves to 180 through deprivation, you think of yourself as a 180 pound person who eats what a (healthy) 180 pound person would eat. The old lifestyle and food choices are something you have to detach from because they are gone forever. If you don’t do this, you’ll continue to feel as if you’re in a transient space, and that increases the lure of familiar old ways.
arp242 · 17h ago
I think the thing is that different people are, well, different.
I talked about this a few weeks ago[1], but for me losing and maintaining weight actually is quite easy. I foresee no problems maintaining weight going forward because I managed to do that for 25 years without really paying much attention to it, and can easily identify the source of my weight gain. Even losing weight is just a few relatively simple adjustments to my diet.
But the reality for other people is very different.
Because I never had problems with my weight before I never really paid much attention to any of these discussion until a few months ago. I've been a bit surprised at the amount of aggression in some of these discussions at times (including on HN). It seems to me that people with different bodies and experiences are just talking past each other, and in addition to that there is a section of rather unpleasant people who are so high up on their moral high horse that they've become hypoxic.
> But the reality for other people is very different.
"Food noise" is the term people use nowadays.
Basically I'm always thinking about food. Always. It's a source of dopamine for me - I have others, but food is a constant.
It's like trying to get off a drug, but you still need to take that drug 3-5 times a day to not die.
Then there are people for whom food is just fuel. They can just ... stop eating. Or eat less. Food doesn't give them any pleasure, it's just a thing they have to consume to not die.
anon373839 · 5h ago
Changing the composition of your diet will do much to quiet this noise. If you’re eating a high protein diet with lots of fibrous vegetables, you will likely end up eating more food with fewer calories overall. And this type of food is very satiating - sometimes to the point that lack of appetite can be an issue.
arp242 · 8h ago
> Food doesn't give them any pleasure, it's just a thing they have to consume to not die.
There are very few, if any, people like that; almost everyone enjoys nice food. The major exception being people with eating disorders.
snarf21 · 19h ago
Agree 100%. The best time to lose weight is making good choices during the 30 minutes you spend grocery shopping each week. Much easier than try to make a healthy choice every minute of every day at home.
toast0 · 19h ago
I think "tracking your weight and calories" is useful, but only if you track it right.
You could look at just raw numbers, but IMHO, first you want to be tracking for you, how many calories it took eating X to achieve satiety / feel not hungry.
Then, hopefully, you can figure out how to meet your daily calorie needs/goals in a way that you don't feel hungry all day. It's hard to stick to your plan when your body is telling you it wants more.
People's hungry signals are different, which is why one size fits all advice doesn't work. Personally, if I ignore my hungry signal for long enough, it goes away; this sounds like it might be good, but then I get all headachey and grumpy because I haven't eaten and there's no signal telling me to eat; so I've got to use my analytic brain for that (but it would rather take a break because I haven't eaten). Some people I describe that to think I'm crazy ... if they don't eat, the hunger signal just keeps getting stronger.
taeric · 18h ago
I mean, sure. But doing it poorly always comes before doing it well. So, the best advice for people that aren't aware of how much they eat is fine to start at anything basic. Probably the more basic the better. Though, as you note, that will be different for different people.
That last is notable. I agree that personal signals are very different between people. But so is basic capability to track things.
What is truly obnoxious here, is that what works for you will also not be static. Expect that what worked for you now will someday not work.
ratelimitsteve · 17h ago
I wholeheartedly agree that mental health and stress levels are the primary determiner in whether you'll succeed with maintaining a good diet and an exercise routine. Just to make things more complex, though, my experience after two years of daily workouts and strict dieting is that exercise, eating clean and sleeping well are the primary drivers of good mental health in my life. It's absolutely a feedback loop. If you set yourself up for success, you'll tend to spiral upward as your metabolism improves, your sleep gets better and your blood sugar is no longer the primary cause of an emotional rollercoaster. Conversely, if you think that you can make the base mechanical changes without re-engineering your entire life you're not very likely to succeed and your success will plateau early.
In recovery, particularly AA, there is the concept of a "dry drunk" who is, eli5, a person who is trying to quit using by simply not using anymore and not examining themselves or their surroundings to determine how they ended up there in the first place. Addiction as a disease is a good model for empirically researching treatments on a population scale but for an individual in recovery it's much more effective to realize that addiction is who you are and the process is about changing yourself, not just being the same guy but without the drug. When I got clean I had to quit my job, ditch a lot of my friends, totally reengineer my life because staying clean is a matter of moments that could break one way or the other and the best way to ensure they never break the wrong way is two-pronged: you maximize the odds of you making the right choice and you minimize the number of times you have to choose.
This idea also works for diet and exercise: a gym membership is good, but an exercise bike in the basement means you don't have to go through all the intervening steps between "I should work out" and actually doing the thing. By the time you've started to try to talk yourself out of it you're already doing it. It's easy to eat cookies and hard to eat celery. But it's easier to eat celery from your fridge than it is to go to the store to get cookies. All of these things help you make choices that support your goals and not make choices that are detrimental to them. Eventually those choices go from efforts of will to part of who you are. I'm not fat me having a salad, I'm the guy who eats salads. I'm not checking out the gym, I'm the guy who works out. I'm not just not high today, I'm Sober and so are all of my friends. I'm a Sober man and a member of a Sober community.
beeflet · 17h ago
I wouldn't just describe it in terms of mental stress, but in terms of physiological free energy.
I find that the less I eat, the more I need to sleep and the less energy I have for cognition. I also get sick more easily (less energy for the immune system no doubt).
However I have the opposite problem of being underweight.
donw · 19h ago
True across the board, and unfortunately the average lifestyle promoted here on HN is one of massive, unavoidable stress, both inside and outside of work.
Fixing your diet is one of those sort of flywheel problems. It takes time to figure out what's both healthy and palatable for you, time and freezer and/or refrigerator space to do meal prep, time and energy to work out, and so on.
All of those are skills that are hard at first. Even with YouTube, you don't go from "burns water" to "Michelin star bodybuilder meals" without a lot of practice.
The better you get at all of that, the faster and easier it becomes, until you hit a point where it's just "how you live", and all that energy and time are again free to pursue other things.
If you have money, sure, you can outsource a lot of that. Zuckerberg has a personal chef and dietician, as well as a handful of dedicated personal trainers guiding his fitness regimen.
But most of us can't afford to invest $250k/year or more into that problem.
jackero · 19h ago
Less obvious things that I’ve found over the years are:
- Some people just don’t like to eat that much. They don’t actually have a faster metabolism. Eating is just a chore to them so they rarely do it.
- Some people like eating more and may eat when bored.
- If I’m busy working on something, I will go 12 hours without eating on accident. If I’m doing nothing at all, I may overeat.
- Some people eat much faster than others. It doesn’t matter if you’re eating protein or fat if you inhale two steaks in 10 minutes. You already consumed too many calories. And because you ate double the amount of calories doesn’t mean that you will be full for double the time.
- Some people who eat too fast do something called low-calorie volume eating so they eat fewer calories and this works better for them than eating protein and fat.
- It’s true that exercise doesn’t make up for a bad diet. It’s easier to eat less.
- There are days when I’m out playing sports for like 10 hours. I burn a ton of calories that does need to be made up by eating.
- A lot of people did sports or were outside for hours growing up but don’t anymore due to lifestyle changes (kids for example). That’s an extremely major loss of a calorie sink that isn’t obvious.
- Water weight is a thing but it really doesn’t matter in the long term. It’s more like an offset from your “real weight” but it can only get so far from it. Trends are better for tracking your real weight.
dkarl · 18h ago
> - Some people just don’t like to eat that much. They don’t actually have a faster metabolism. Eating is just a chore to them so they rarely do it.
I had two friends exactly like this. One of them was 6' and 135lbs when he started college. Another was 5'5" and under 120lbs. They both said that growing up they thought food was gross and only ate because it was the only way not to be hungry all the time. They both started enjoying food in college and gained a bunch of weight. The one who is 5'5" topped out over 200lbs and now weighs around 180. The other I lost track of, but he was on the same trajectory, gaining 30lbs during our undergrad years.
Your first thought might be that they grew up poor, or that their parents didn't have tasty food around the house, but they were both middle-class, and there were lots of regular foods like pizza and burgers that they disliked as kids and ended up enjoying to excess as adults.
conception · 9h ago
Diet is the way to lose weight for certain. People don’t get it but cut out one slice of bread or one coke out of your daily diet and it’s the same as running one marathon a month calorie wise. If you were at equilibrium before you’ll also lose a pound a month.
Adding a coke a day is the reverse of that.
mrweasel · 19h ago
> It’s true that exercise doesn’t make up for a bad diet. It’s easier to eat less.
That one always gets to me, because it's not universally true. I get the point, and to some extend even agree with it. To me personally, especially when I was younger and had the time, working out more always felt much easier. Controlling what I eat has always been incredibly tricky, simply exercising to the point where it doesn't matter what I eat, fairly easy, it's just a matter of putting in the hours.
Workout for 2.5 hours a day, plus 60-90 minutes transport on a bike, you can pretty much eat anything you like.
robrenaud · 18h ago
I recently got to know someone with a resting heart rate of 45, who will pretty frequently do 8+ mile trail runs and 100 mile bike rides. He is also an amazing cook who makes decadent and delicious foods. He says he consumes 4,000 calories a day. He still has a sizeable belly. I'd say he is at like 10/10 on exercise, but 3/10 on diet. I was surprised at his extreme cardiovascular fitness while still managing to be overfat.
SapporoChris · 3h ago
"Workout for 2.5 hours a day, plus 60-90 minutes transport on a bike, you can pretty much eat anything you like."
Trivial to debunk. Assuming 150 pounds.
Weight lifting 2.5 hours: 1051 calories
Cycling Moderate 1.5 hours: 1051 calories
I'll generously add 2000 calories for the rest of the days activities.
Water intake daily 3.7 liters.
3.7 liters of soda: 1600 calories
Burger and Fries: 1000 calories, 3 times a day: 3000 calories.
You can flex the numbers a number of ways, but it's obvious that you cannot pretty much eat anything you like. Exercise does not make up for a bad diet.
bluecheese452 · 18m ago
Pretty much anything is not the same as anything. Being able to consume 4k calories a day is pretty much anything for the vast majority of people.
jackero · 16h ago
Yeah it’s not universally true.
But for some people, there are low hanging fruit like “cut out 4 Pepsi’s a day” (600 calories).
If you are already eating reasonable healthy and still gaining weight, then adding more exercise can be easier than trying to skimp on food.
znpy · 16h ago
> If I’m busy working on something, I will go 12 hours without eating on accident.
I used to be the same when I was in my early twenties. Now i’m in my early thirties and I don’t seem to be able anymore.
HiPhish · 19h ago
Formerly fat person here. That article is just an overblown list of common sense advice to sell you some crap you don't need. Losing and maintaining your weight is actually really simple. Here is what worked for me (I am not a doctor):
- First of all, drop sugar. Right now. Even if you are not fat, you should not eat it. It's not just extra calories, it's poison. Don't be like "oh, I'll just finish this stuff I still have around", throw it out. If your are only going to follow one point from this list, then let it be this one.
- Forget about calories, a calorie is not a calorie. You cannot "work off" that cake your have eaten, your are not an oven. Calories are an upper limit (you cannot break thermodynamics), but the human metabolism is much more complicated than just balancing an equation.
- Exercise is necessary, but not sufficient. That means you should exercise to get your metabolism going, but exercising itself will not let your lose weight. And when I mean exercising I don't mean you need to get a gym membership. Just going for a walk for half an hour or an hour is good enough for starters.
- Fat won't make you fat. I grew up under low-fat propaganda, yet I kept getting fatter. Then when I increase my fat consumption I started losing weight. By fat I mean real animal fat from meat, not seed oils or other processed fats.
- Eat real food. If you cannot tell what it's made from by looking at it, then it's not real food.
- Processed fruits and vegetables are still processed food, and thus not real food. Don't be fooled by marketing, stuff like fruit juice is not healthy, no matter how many vitamin labels the manufacturer keeps putting on the packaging.
- Caloric restriction works in the short term, but will drive you crazy in the long term. This is why people lapse eventually and regain all their weight.
It is important to understand that obesity is not a "surplus of energy", it's a medical disorder brought about by disruption of your metabolism. I was able to keep eating and eating without ever feeling satiated. It is pure torture to be hungry with a full stomach. It was my body telling me "stop feeding me this garbage, give me real food". I have since been able to keep my weight and never feel hungry. It's only when I find myself unable to eat real food and lapse back into old habits that I start gaining weight again.
e40 · 2h ago
I agree, but I would add one very important thing:
If you consider the diet/lifestyle that allowed you to lose the weight as temporary, then you will fail.
I would diet to lose weight by stop eating sugar and desserts. Then, when I got to my target weight I would say “ok, one dessert a week” and before I knew it I was having them every day. And before long I had gained the weight back.
Currently down 21 lbs and 6 months free of sugar. This time I view it as something I will do for the rest of my life.
lithocarpus · 19h ago
Have to agree with most of the above, with one elaboration:
"If you cannot tell what it's made from by looking at it, then it's not real food."
I would change this a bit and say the ingredients should just be whole plant animal or fungal foods only, no extracts or processed derivatives or anything synthetic or refined. Nothing you couldn't make yourself using the whole food. So no refined flours, sweeteners, juices, oils, etc.
The point of this is to keep it simple. When I go to the grocery store 90% of what's there doesn't fit my criteria and I don't even consider it. Restaurant food or prepared/packaged food is almost all out since 99% of it is made with ultra processed ingredients usually oils/sugars/flours - I don't look at it as an option. If I'm really stuck there's usually nuts or cheese or fruit for sale anywhere.
So I'll buy vegetables, whole fruits, meat, eggs, dairy, butter or meat fat for cooking with, nuts, seeds, and mushrooms.
For social reasons I'll eat things outside of this on occasion in small amounts but whenever I'm providing my own food which is most of the time, these are the rules.
grep_name · 13m ago
Curious what kind of flours you're getting, and which ones you object to. I make sourdough fairly regularly and just use 30% whole wheat, 70% standard bread flour and have never thought twice about it?
testing22321 · 17h ago
Even easier.
Only buy and eat things with one ingredient.
Vegetables, fruit, meats, beans, rice, etc. you are now eating real food.
lithocarpus · 12h ago
That's a simple rule of thumb and matches what I do 95% but there are exceptions like "sugar", "canola oil", "bleached wheat flour" etc.
And there are two-ingredient foods that I do eat, like "peanuts, salt" or "cultured milk, salt, enzymes"
theyinwhy · 17h ago
> Caloric restriction works in the short term, but will drive you crazy in the long term. This is why people lapse eventually and regain all their weight
100%. However, imho it helps to use a tracker at first
to better understand what food has how many calories. Track for a month and drop it afterwards.
bitshiftfaced · 15h ago
Calorie restriction, logging your calories and eating a deficit everyday, actually works for many people who can't figure out how else to lose weight. It also teaches you about how to eat healthy: portion sizes, how caloric each food is, how snacking impacts your total, etc.
> Fat won't make you fat
I had always understood this as true, but it's more complicated than that. The body converts calories from fat into fat much more efficiently than carbs, and protein is the least efficient.
joecool1029 · 11h ago
> The body converts calories from fat into fat much more efficiently than carbs
Does it now? I have some doubt considering carb consumption stimulates insulin more than fat consumption and this is ultimately the storage hormone.
rolisz · 10h ago
Well, carbs have to be converted to fat. Fat doesn't have to be converted
yawpitch · 9h ago
That would be a reasonable assertion if the human body consumed bread and olive oil and stored it all as olive oil.
theshrike79 · 9h ago
Fat also satiates better than sugar.
It's a lot easier to drink and eat X calories of sugar than the same amount in animal fat + protein.
oarfish · 6h ago
Some odd claims here.
> It's not just extra calories, it's poison.
Uh no. You say you grew up under the low-fat propaganda, but still you fall victim to the overly broad "sugar is poison" propaganda. Yes, limit it by all means, but your overall caloric budget is way more important than the exact proportion of nutrients (same as with fat).
> then when I increase my fat consumption I started losing weight. By fat I mean real animal fat from meat, not seed oils or other processed fats.
Good that it worked for you, but this sounds like anti seed oil propaganda, which is debunked. "real animal fat" often means high saturated fat, which when replaced by polyunsaturated and unsaturated (from e.g. seed oils) actually tends to improve your health.
neilk · 17h ago
How long ago was "formerly"?
Signed, a formerly formerly fat person.
HiPhish · 17h ago
Seven or eight years. I did have the occasional lapse when I was under high negative stress and would just let myself go, but I just had to drop the bad habits I was falling back into. The initial wakeup call was when I was diagnosed with a non-alcoholic fatty liver in my late 20s.
homie · 19h ago
“Sugar is poison” is an absolutely insane claim to make
pjmorris · 18h ago
The claim seemed less overblown to me after watching 'Sugar: The Bitter Truth' by Robert Lustig, MD [0].
Most long distance runners fuel in form of gels on their longer runs and races. Those gels are mainly simple sugars and water. They're fine.
Catbert59 · 18h ago
I prefer calling it "Hidden sugar is poison for your soul and body".
If you are aware of it you can avoid it.
lithocarpus · 19h ago
The dose makes the poison, and with refined sugar the dose required to be harmful is quite small compared to sugar embedded in while fruits.
watwut · 17h ago
Sugar is not a poison and claiming it is one does not help anyone.
mingabunga · 19h ago
Nice one. Agree on all this.
Once you lose the weight through proper eating/deficit, exercise will maintain it.
nonameiguess · 16h ago
There is no way to write what I want to write without coming across like it's scolding you, so to get it out of the way, I apologize for that. I am certain you mean well and you're not lying. The most important thing in all of this is you found something that works for you.
But you didn't find universal truths. That's a danger of getting information from the Internet or from anecdote. I can give you the exact opposite anecdote. I've eaten every diet under the sun, from SAD to paleo. I've eaten no sugar. I've eaten tons of sugar. Never no fat, but the percentage of energy has varied tremendously. No processed foods at times to almost nothing but heavily processed foods. I've run over 100 miles a week at times and I've done no aerobic exercise of any kind at other times. Yet I found a post on physicsforums.com from 2003 a few weeks back from my old user account listing my height and weight at 6'2" 165 lbs. I use MacroFactor and weigh myself daily. Today, 22 years later, I was 162.4 lbs.
Why is that? I don't know. I have four cats. Two of them will eat everything you give them, then scour the entire house for more, begging and pleading the entire time. Give them infinite food and they'll eat until they puke, then eat the puke. The other two can be given infinite food and they'll stop when they've had enough and they've stayed the same size their entire lives, over a decade at this point. These are non-humans that don't give a shit about their physiques, don't feel shame, and are eating exactly the same foods with the same macro breakdowns and levels of processing. There are just genetic differences between mammals, for some reason we don't fully understand, that make overeating almost inevitable if enough food is available, without tremendous willpower and tricks like you try to employ, whereas other people will eat exactly what they need and no more, pretty much no matter what.
As for MacroFactor, things like this end up on Hacker News with no context, but it's the project of a guy named Greg Nuckols who is one of the better science communicators in the field of exercise science and has been for 15 years. He's held multiple world records as a powerlifter and has coached probably thousands of people at this point. He's also a lifelong fat person, but not really unhealthy, and as far as I'm aware, has never made much of an effort to change that. The app was created due to traditional meal planning and tracking by lifters who go through bulk and cut cycles. The way it worked in the pre-app era was to make spreadsheets weighing yourself daily and counting all of your calories, over a span of weeks. Get a moving average to remove daily water and gut content noise from the weight trend, then compare it to the average calorie intake to estimate your personal total energy expenditure. Now add or subtract from that to set targets for bulking and cutting. MacroFactor does exactly the same thing but automated most of the process for you, so all you have to do is log your food and weight.
It is not primarily meant to be a weight loss tool. It exists in large part because all other food loggers on the market at the time were exclusively targeting people trying to lose weight, and none of them personalized the targets based on estimated true energy expenditure, using population estimator formulae instead.
Saying they're trying to sell you crap you don't need is tremendously unfair. This was a tool made by a lifter for other lifters, but as it stands, the market for food loggers continues to be dominated by overweight people looking to lose weight, as there are a lot more of them in existence than there are lifters. Given that, the staff try their best to provide resources based on the best information they can find to support people who just want to lose weight. That is what this is. Maybe the information in here doesn't work for you, but it's based on research and coaching that has touched millions. It's looking at broad trends. If you know what works for you personally already, then absolutely stick with that. But you don't need to be slandering equally well-meaning people who have a very long track record of putting out the most reliable content that exists in the space they serve. Greg is in his 40s now and first became well-known in the pre-Tik Tok, pre-Instagram era. His takes on science and its limitations have been the most sober and reasonable I've encountered in any field of science, let alone the enormously fraught field of fitness now dominated by grifters. I understand why you would be skeptical or distrustful and you have no good reason to trust me any more than him. I'm just a random stranger on the web as well, possibly a sock puppet or being paid off for all you know. But his history is public. strongerbyscience.com has a back catalog of articles that stretches more than a decade. The Stronger by Science podcast is now defunct, but published hundreds of episodes. If you ever get the chance, you will never find more measured, honest content about this topic.
sn9 · 14h ago
Yeah the way the app works is you track what you eat and your weight and this is all you need to make actionable information on how to lose, gain, or maintain weight.
Obviously you could do this on your own with spreadsheets, but the app takes all the unnecessary overhead out of it and uses more sophisticated algorithms to account for things like missing days.
It's just a total gamechanger. Totally worth the very low cost.
gnuckols · 3h ago
Dawg, I'm 33. But, I certainly appreciate the kind words
baal80spam · 18h ago
> a calorie is not a calorie
Sorry but this is antiscience.
rolisz · 10h ago
Glucose can be converted into ATP via two pathways in the mitochondria: one produces 30 something ATP, the other produces 2. Yeah, sure the 1st law of thermodynamics is valid (the rest of the energy goes into heat), but for your cells, they get much less energy in the second (anaerobic) pathway, so you'll feel worse/hungrier if that's how metabolism happens.
2muchcoffeeman · 17h ago
Eating 1 cal of raw sugar isn’t the same as eating 1 cal of almonds. Thats the sense in which they say this.
yawpitch · 18h ago
No, it isn’t… keep reading to the bit about thermodynamics. The calorie represents the potential heat energy present in a sample of a material if that material were fully oxidized (ie burned) in a bomb calorimeter… it has never represented (much less accurately represented) the amount of energy that can actually be released via digestion into a human body (which is very extremely not analogous to a bomb calorimeter).
We are not ovens. We really are not extremely precise ovens burning samples in the presence of stoichiometrically optimal quantities of pure oxygen.
sn9 · 15h ago
But at the level of precision needed to manipulate our weight, we basically are.
Like there are entire communities of practice that know how to do this effectively at will. This is a learnable teachable skill.
yawpitch · 9h ago
I have lived alternating violently between bulimia and anorexia my entire life precisely because someone emphatically, and also utterly and destructively incorrectly, believed that to be true.
I am absolutely certain that I know more about what calories actually are, and how badly fitted they are to actually managing our body mass — the best way to manipulate your weight is to change gravity wells — than you do. I can manipulate my body mass at will, effectively, and to a degree you would, I’m sure, find impossible to accomplish. I learned how to take that “skill” to an extreme any community you’ve survived to be member of has not yet approached. Anyone who teaches that “skill” is immoral.
We are not bomb calorimeters. We do not consume calories, nor do we engage, in even the most ludicrously “basic” sense, in anything resembling the simple combustion of our food supply. There are calories in coal and, for that matter, plutonium… try to metabolize either.
The heat potential of what we consume is not relevant to the safe (much less effective) regulation of our metabolic machinery; the nutrient density and distributions in what we consume is, but is very hard to summarize in marketing copy to idiot monkeys that want a simple eat / no eat light.
sn9 · 9h ago
> I have lived alternating violently between bulimia and anorexia my entire life precisely because someone emphatically, and also utterly and destructively incorrectly, believed that to be true.
Having a mental disorder does not change how physiology works and does not depend on how it works, but it does explain a lot of what you're writing and why.
> I am absolutely certain that I know more about what calories actually are, and how badly fitted they are to actually managing our body mass — the best way to manipulate your weight is to change gravity wells — than you do.
I have a degree in biology and have been reading and researching enough about fitness and health for well over a decade to know how to take someone from the couch to at least 80% of their genetic potential in terms of strength and size while being as shredded as they'd like in a deterministic process.
> We are not bomb calorimeters. We do not consume calories, nor do we engage, in even the most ludicrously “basic” sense, in anything resembling the simple combustion of our food supply. There are calories in coal and, for that matter, plutonium… try to metabolize either.
Yes but if you'd ever opened a biochemistry textbook, you'd see what we actually do and you'd understand why what works in bodybuilding works at all, and how it's all downstream of that.
I hope you get help but you are simply not an authority on this topic. I'll go with all the people with proven track records teaching people how to successfully manipulate their body composition with methods rooted in understanding basic physiology over a random person on the internet.
yawpitch · 9h ago
Ahh, so you’re one of the immoral.
I feel so much sorrow for those you are actively harming. May they survive your naïveté and arrogance.
2muchcoffeeman · 8h ago
This is a bit hyperbolic.
Always remember the Prof who lost 27lbs on the convenience food diet:
Also remember that before the days of tracking apps and watches and services like Zoe, many of us were losing weight, keeping it off and improving athletic performance without any of that stuff.
yawpitch · 7h ago
Always remember that I’ve lost more than 30lbs in a month, more than 150lbs in a year, and well over 1000lbs in a lifetime, never used an app or a service of any sort and without resort to Twinkies. I’m probably in better shape than you, taking age into account… losing weight isn’t hard, at all, all it takes is an eating disorder and a maniacal capacity for self-abuse. The same is true for athletic performance, which is really just as stupid a metric as body mass. Managing a consistently healthy human body over a lifetime of injury and experience, that’s hard, and made harder with idiotic quantitative measures like calories or BMI.
2muchcoffeeman · 6h ago
You sound like you have a bone to pick.
No one “resorts to twinkies”. It was a dumb experiment to show that cutting calories really can work. The stupid foods show that you can improve health markers and lose weight by just watching calories.
It’s not the be all and end all of anything. Just a counter point to the silly “calorie is not a calorie” saying.
yawpitch · 5h ago
And I improved all my health markers and my weight by simply starving myself of any food at all. Sure, eliminating calories leads to weight loss, but the point of “a calorie is not a calorie” is that I could have done exactly the same thing by consuming 10,000 kilo-calories of charcoal a day too. A human being does not burn its food via combustion and pretending it does doesn’t even work over the extremely short run, and it certainly never works over the long run. This idiot, I’m sure, didn’t keep that weight off following that same diet… in fact my guess is he’s the same weight or heavier 5 years after the fact. Statistically that’s true of the vast majority of people who lose a significant percentage of their body mass by the means of any dietary or exercise change, BTW.
A calorie of A is not the metabolic equivalent to a calorie of B because a calorie is only a measure of thermodynamic conversion by direct combustion in a bomb calorimter and cannot tell you anything about metabolic usage of A or B. Thank you for pointing out that you can lose weight and improve your BMI by eating Twinkies… you can do the same thing by sucking your brain out through a straw, or for that matter amputating only one limb; those are also examples of false equivalence and poor quantitative reasoning.
And, yes, when I see people fight to spread what I know to be extremely harmful mythological beliefs, I have a bone to pick.
watwut · 17h ago
That is actually what science says.
layer8 · 19h ago
This is much more complicated than needed. Following the Hacker’s Diet [0] is simple to understand and sufficient, and yes, heed common-sense things like good sleep, some basic exercise, stress reduction, and eating healthy food.
The combination of daily weigh-ins and the exponentially weighted moving average I learned from the Hacker Diet has been absolutely magic for me. It gives me helpful daily feedback signal in the noise of ~5lb daily weight variation. Beeminder has replaced paper graphs for me. Their new moving average isn't quite as helpful for me, but is still workable. I target rates of weight loss on the order of 0.35-0.50lbs/week.
Izkata · 16h ago
Huh, this looks like the same thing I came up with about three years ago. I'd tracked my weight for a long time and only just started tracking calories, then a month or so in wondered if combining the two datasets would result in anything useful. After about six months there were some obvious patterns, and ever since a year in I've been able to control my weight however I want without much effort.
One graph I have that I don't see on there is average-calories-per-day on the X axis and weight-change-per-week on the Y axis (scatter plot). Sticking a linear regression on top told me all those online estimators for how many calories you burn in a day are just wrong, at least for me.
bdz · 19h ago
I’m on liraglutide (Saxenda) for more than a year now. I lost 68kg (150lbs) and incredibly easy to maintain my weight. I’m doing OMAD (1/23 intermittent fasting) and for me it’s pretty much the perfect meal plan. Not even a diet because I eat whatever I want, just roughly counting calories. My daily exercise is 1 hour walking in the morning and the evening too (~20k steps combined)
FredPret · 18h ago
1/23? So you eat for one hour and then you're done for the day?
ffsm8 · 18h ago
OMAD stands for "One Meal A Day"
m348e912 · 17h ago
The one good thing about OMAD is that you can basically eat as much as you want and what you want during that one hour, and as long as that the only time you eat you will likely stay lean. I truly believe that this is the strategy that competitive eater/youtuber beardmeatsfood uses to stay lean while eating an immense amount of food in one sitting.
I have been toying with a 8 hour eating window followed by ~40 hours fasting (basically an evening + a whole day) of not eating, and seen some positive results.
umpalumpaaa · 19h ago
I found loosing weight was a lot easier than maintaining weight. When loosing weight you have a lot more wiggle room… As long as you are spending more calories than consuming you loose weight. It does not matter if you have a deficit of 20kcal or 200kcal.
Maintaining your weight requires one to have 0 deficit in either direction.
kingstnap · 17h ago
Maintaining exact calorie in = out every day is a fools errand. You only need net zero averaged over weeks.
Some days you have to allow eating more. Mainly because food is the original human social activity.
jmugan · 19h ago
It's also a lot more fun to lose weight than maintain weight
strongpigeon · 20h ago
While the key takeaways from the article are indeed good, I think the main problem is seeing weight loss as a phase. Your body weight is a result of your lifestyle. Going on a diet implies that it's just a temporary thing (which can be great to speed up the process), but it's no wonder that people often revert back to their previous weight. To lose weight permanently, you don't go on a diet, you change your diet.
A friend of mine lost > 100 lbs over the course of 2 years by following a weight loss program with a heavy focus on education. The program made him internalize that he had to fundamentally change his life. He has since regained probably around 20 lbs over his minimum, but has maintained his new weight for > 8 years now and is living a life closer to what he wants.
oceanhaiyang · 18h ago
Living in Japan made me get down to my all time lowest weight, returning to America made me shoot up past where I started… healthy lifestyle, lots of walking over driving, and healthy eating options is all it is!
figure out deficit/maintenance/surplus calories
figure out what behavior changes to maintain consumption levels
level2 (extra work, but really what it's at)
figure out what how you want to look good naked... i.e. body composition
figure out workout (usually lifting with some cardio)
eat enough protein, eat other macros that can help you do your workouts. ironically dietting is the SIMPLEST... eat enough protein, fill the rest with what makes you feel "best" or helps "best" with your goal (exercise). This doesn't mean it will feel good depending on cut/bulk... just what feels least bad.
Extra work from level2 can make level1 easier - more lean mass from work out-> more maintenance + tdee calories. The process might be easier if you're 25 BMI with 15% bodyfat than 22 BMI with 20% bodyfat. You'll look better too, which let's be real, is what people usually want. Then health.
That's basically it.
But MOST IMPORTANT to recognize that some goals are simply things you're too mentally/physiologically "weak" / incapable of doing. You may simply not be built for to learn behavior changes (i.e. appetite control) for low BMI/BF. Your genes may simply prevent you from building good FFMI to pull off certain build. This stuff is simple, but not easy.
christophilus · 17h ago
I will say that having switched to carnivore made a difference for me. It was hard for me to say no to junk food as a vegan or when on a healthy ”balanced” diet. With carnivore, the cooking is simple, the “no” is obvious, and the satiation lasts a long time.
That said, it’s hard for me to think this is actually a healthy way to eat, after so many years being vegan, and I don’t know what the staying power will be.
stavros · 18h ago
I know all the theory, but how do I stop food noise? It's extremely annoying to always be thinking about food, no matter how full you are.
SoftTalker · 19h ago
> Maintain (or gain) muscle mass
Almost impossible to do while you're losing weight. You will lose muscle mass as well as fat.
Not that you shouldn't start (or keep doing) weight training. And after you hit your weight loss goals, you'll need to eat more than base maintenance calories (and mostly in the form of protein) to gain muscle back.
malfist · 19h ago
You absolutely can lose weight and gain muscle at the same time. It's the whole basis of body transformation diets.
Is it less efficient at building muscle than a bulking diet? Sure. But you absolutely can.
wijwp · 19h ago
It's so difficult though that it shouldn't even be in the same conversation as someone who has so far not been able to get to a healthy weight.
It's telling a beginner that it's possible to do an expert level skill, without the beginner understanding that it's an expert level skill. It's yet another diet that will fail for that beginner.
malfist · 18h ago
The opposite is true here actually. The less trained you are the easier it is for you to gain muscle and lose body fat at the same time.
It's not that difficult for a newbie to do, there's a reason it's called noob gains, usually the first year of weightlifting you can see insane increases in muscle mass that you just won't see on someone who is better trained and closer to their genetic maximum.
Jeff Nippard recently did a year long program with his untrained, overweight brother and put it all up on youtube.
profsummergig · 18h ago
I agree. If one resistance-trains hard, the body will prioritize retaining muscle.
prepend · 19h ago
The key is maintaining or increasing muscle % of body weight.
Of course you’ll lose muscle mass, along with everything else. But it’s possible to increase the percent lean mass and especially your muscle:fat ratio.
p1esk · 19h ago
I don’t understand this: if I’m fat and I start exercising without changing my diet, I should be losing fat and gaining muscle mass. As a result, my weight can be going down.
cyberax · 19h ago
If you don't change your diet, you will likely be building muscles, but your weight is unlikely to change. You can even _gain_ more weight once you start exercising.
It comes down to math. An hour of resistance training is just 200-500 calories above the baseline. That's just one sports drink worth of energy.
theoriginaldave · 19h ago
I think when you're in an energy deficit (aka losing weight), your body will attempt to reduce energy demand by metabolizing materials from the body.
It prefers to power the body from stored glycogen (carbohydrates), next it will try to metabolize stored fat, next it will go for protein sources (muscle and other tissues). In extreme deficits, it'll even start consuming material from the digestive track and other important stuff.
Many people lose weight, get stronger, get faster and surprisingly lose muscle mass at the same time.
But you can prevent that by eating enough protein, adding strength training, not overtraining or extreme deficit, fueling your workouts with carbohydrates, getting high-quality sleep, and minimizing non-meal, non-workout related simple carbohydrates.
#TLDR
When you walk down the street, your body is doing all these things mostly carbs, some fat and a little protein. When you start pushing yourself, you burn more energy but in similar ratios. After about 90 minutes or at higher levels of effort, you'll shift to burning more fat and even more protein if you reach ketosis, as your body conserves remaining carb stores for important stuff like thinking.
AND as you exercise, especially as you reach your strength thresholds, you incur damage in your muscles. When you have your recovery meal/drink with carbohydrates after your workout , especially when resting, the insulin spike, triggers your body to consume protein to rebuild your muscles and add more mass/strength.
But if your workouts don't include enough strength training, your body may not get the anabolic muscle building signal, and it may instead focus on reducing weight (via fat and muscle), or increasing nutrient and oxygen flow to the muscles (building hemoglobin, growing capillaries), increasing muscle activation and engagement (new neural pathways), and/or increasing energy creation capacity (growing more mitochondria or expressing more efficient chemical pathways).
Which is why you can get faster, stronger with smaller muscles.
So my recipe for building muscle while losing fat:
* Strength train each muscle group in sets of about 10 for 80 reps per week (I shoot for 2 days, whole body, 4 sets of 10 reps).
* Prepare for every workout with some carbohydrates and electrolytes
* For workouts lasting more than 90 min, especially cardio/endurance, begin consuming carbs at 30 min and consume 90-12g/hr for high intensity (Zone 3 or higher)
* Try to consume 2g of whole protein per kg of target body weight. Or 4g per kg of lean body mass. YMMV. these are all rules of thumb.
* Wake up at the same time every day, and prepare for bed 9-10 hours before you have to wake up (have a last snack, some water, turn out the overhead lights, start relaxing) so that by the time bedtime rolls around you can fall asleep quickly and get 7.5-9.5 hours of quality sleep
If you're really hitting it hard and you've induced severe muscle fatigue, bump up the protein intake and get more rest and recovery time.
p1esk · 17h ago
Thank you! That’s quite a lot of information to digest. What do you mean by “Prepare for every workout with some carbohydrates and electrolytes”? What should I prepare?
A small caveat here: unless you're totally new to resistance training. If you're a total noob and just start training for the first time, you'll likely have such a low base that you can actually _gain_ muscle mass even during the overall weight loss.
TeaVMFan · 18h ago
For the "logging" step, I created and rely on CalorieFreq, a local-first Java SPA:
15 years ago, I lost 32 kg. Ever since, I've been keeping a weight diary, weighing myself almost every day. I've now regained those kilos, plus an additional 15. The funny thing is that the yo-yo effect took 9.5 years to fully happen, and looking back at the entire 15-year span, it's perfectly clear. But year by year, I couldn't even notice it happening. I’d gain a few kilos, lose a few, gain again, lose again, except each time I'd gain slightly more than I'd lost.
I don't have much more to add, other than it being really eye-opening how my body seemed to play the long game, eventually regaining all the weight I'd initially lost.
testing22321 · 17h ago
Your body didn’t play a long game, your mouth did.
For all those years you’ve been consuming more energy than your body needs to run, so your body stored the excess for later.
poszlem · 16h ago
Thank you for this unhelpful response. Obviously my mouth was involved, but so were my brain, gut, and the rest of my body. The point I'm making is that I never consciously decided to gain weight. My body, however, seemed to have its own plan.
testing22321 · 16h ago
My comment was helpful, because you are demonstrating a lack of knowledge about why you gained weight.
Even your reply implies you think you need to consciously decide to gain weight for it to happen - which is very much not correct.
You can’t fix something if you don’t understand the whys involved.
znpy · 16h ago
So we’re sharing anecdotes so here’s mine: the speed in weight loss matters, in the sense that faster weight loss might not be the best. Your body will try to regain weight if you don’t give it time to get accustomed to the new weight.
In late 2020 / early 2021 i did the Dukan diet and lost ~10kg in like two months and a half, i lost like a kilogram (about two pounds) per week, my body was perfect.
Then i stupidly eyed the next challenge (quitting smoking) and gained everything back (with intenterests, damnit).
I should have really focused on consolidation, that for the dukan diet means slowly reintroducing other foods slowly to let your body get used to the new state of affairs.
Last year started dieting again and i lost 10 kilograms again, over a year, by mostly eating less (i amicably call it “controlled malnourishment”). This time i’m not gaining it back and i think it’s because even in the weeks where I’ve exceeded, my body got time to get acquainted to the new weight. During this last year i hit a plateau as well… i just had to be patient.
sorcerer-mar · 20h ago
All good tips but I think it really boils down to the last bit: sustainable changes. This doesn't help one understand how to differentiate a sustainable versus unsustainable change.
In my experience, the single most important factor is realizing that the sensation of hunger is your primary enemy and that you can attack it head-on.
Satiety is not dictated by how many calories you've eaten but (mostly) by the physical weight of your stomach. If your goal is to eliminate the sensation of hunger while consuming the least number of calories, the nutrition label tells you everything you need to know: eat a lot of low caloric density foods.
What you'll find over time is that foods widely regarded as unhealthy are simply ultra-dense (e.g. peanut butter is an engineering miracle) while healthier foods tend to be extremely low-density (e.g. non-fat Greek yogurt and fresh vegetables).
The biggest error I see in people dieting is thinking they just need to muscle through the feeling of hunger. It doesn't work in the long run. Accept that it's an important sensation but it's distinct from actual starvation, and address it directly!
theoriginaldave · 18h ago
Back to the OP, the hunger and satiety signals are very complicated and only partially driven by the digestive track.
I'm a fatty. I've lost a lot of weight but my body knows I used to be fat and it wants to be fat again.
A very potent signal for hunger or fatigue is when your fat cells get small i.e. you've burnt a lot of fat, and your little fuel cells are feeling empty. Each shrunken fat cell sends out a chemical "feed me" signal. And they are very very persuasive.
And the kicker is that when you fill them up, they want to be maintained at full. But if they're full too long, or get too full (persistently increase body fat by a few percent(, it triggers mitosis and you now have two half full fat cells who are both shouting "Feed me"
To add insult to injury when you lose weight, you don't kill off fat cells, you just have a bunch of really hungry fat cells shouting for a cheeseburger.
The nice thing about the GLP1 drugs is that they quiet the shouting. So you just don't get the demonic urge to feet all your wilting fat cells.
The bad thing about it is that the shouting is still there, and as soon as you quit the drug, you can get overwhelmed and go back to overeating and your weight and percent body fat go right back up
iwanttocomment · 19h ago
I regret to inform you that water, fiber content and weight don't move the bar on satiety for those chronically overweight. If so, we all could just down green beans or Metamucil and feel totally full. (Narrator: they were still hungry.)
Similarly, we would all be eating pounds of cheesecake without feeling full. (Narrator: they did get full, but not after eating too much calorically.)
Satiety is not dictated by weight. Please don't.
pazimzadeh · 19h ago
try coleslaw with a dressing of apple cider vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper, and herbes de provences. it's good takes up a good amount of space in your stomach
humanrebar · 17h ago
That might be a good tip, but people do get signals from their bodies when running a nutrient deficit. People crave calories when in a calorie deficit. And they crave carbohydrates, proteins, or fats when abstaining from them, at least some of the time.
bregma · 18h ago
Satiety is mediated by cholecystokinin released in reaction to the presence of fatty acids and certain amino acids (partially digested fats and proteins) in the duodenum, or first part of the small intestines. That hormone stimulates the release of bile and pancreatic enzymes (necessary for the further digestion of fats and proteins) and also parts of your limbic system, which is the part of your brain that regulates satiety. In particular, it affects the ventromedial hypothalamus.
In other words, fats and proteins satisfy your hunger. You can eat really dense carbohydrates until your stomach bursts (it won't but it might feel like it's going to -- it's the stretch receptors signalling your limbic system to stop or it's going to tell you to vomit) and you still won't feel satisfied. Slather a bit of (protein-rich high-fat) peanut butter on your celery sticks and you'll be fine.
The best advice is balance.
dzink · 20h ago
Your brain needs protein and fat. Your brain tells your body when it is hungry and if the body doesn’t feed it, the brain is hangry. Protein satiates the brain and reduces cravings for less protein containing foods that the body will still eat in pursuit of satiating the brain.
rolisz · 20h ago
Or eat lots of protein. That makes you fill full incredibly fast.
yjftsjthsd-h · 20h ago
> Satiety is not dictated by how many calories you've eaten but (mostly) by the physical weight of your stomach. If your goal is to eliminate the sensation of hunger while consuming the least number of calories, the nutrition label tells you everything you need to know: eat a lot of low caloric density foods.
If that's all there is to it, can you just eat a little bit and then chug water until your stomach is convinced you're full?
russfink · 19h ago
Not recommended but “almost.” Eat a lot of watery foods - watermelon is the best: sweet, bulky, satisfying. Celery to hold that peanut butter. And like others said, go with protein.
f1shy · 19h ago
Just water is not recommended. 1- Would be too much. And 2- it gets absorbed too fast. But yes, it helps.
keybored · 20h ago
Eating high-fat foods makes me feel very full in my experience.
I think the real challenge with significant weight loss is in being consistent and maintaining those things, which everyone is pretty silent on.
Mental health and stress levels are the #1 factor in essentially all of those things and deserve more focus in the context of major lifestyle change. You emphatically cannot just willpower through a major change for the rest of your life, and given that, you have to find ways to reduce the active cognition component to a low-effort automatic cognition process.
Setting yourself up for success through organization and routine, avoiding being around situations that cause overeating, not purchasing and keeping in stock foods that are problematic, peer and family support are all things that make a huge difference.
Unfortunately, when you mention these realities, people react very negatively. They say that if it's hard, then it's unhealthy and you're doing it wrong. They preach that it should feel easy and natural, as if that's a path forward. It isn't. It's the end goal, and the path is long and hard.
I talked about this a few weeks ago[1], but for me losing and maintaining weight actually is quite easy. I foresee no problems maintaining weight going forward because I managed to do that for 25 years without really paying much attention to it, and can easily identify the source of my weight gain. Even losing weight is just a few relatively simple adjustments to my diet.
But the reality for other people is very different.
Because I never had problems with my weight before I never really paid much attention to any of these discussion until a few months ago. I've been a bit surprised at the amount of aggression in some of these discussions at times (including on HN). It seems to me that people with different bodies and experiences are just talking past each other, and in addition to that there is a section of rather unpleasant people who are so high up on their moral high horse that they've become hypoxic.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44554154
"Food noise" is the term people use nowadays.
Basically I'm always thinking about food. Always. It's a source of dopamine for me - I have others, but food is a constant.
It's like trying to get off a drug, but you still need to take that drug 3-5 times a day to not die.
Then there are people for whom food is just fuel. They can just ... stop eating. Or eat less. Food doesn't give them any pleasure, it's just a thing they have to consume to not die.
There are very few, if any, people like that; almost everyone enjoys nice food. The major exception being people with eating disorders.
You could look at just raw numbers, but IMHO, first you want to be tracking for you, how many calories it took eating X to achieve satiety / feel not hungry.
Then, hopefully, you can figure out how to meet your daily calorie needs/goals in a way that you don't feel hungry all day. It's hard to stick to your plan when your body is telling you it wants more.
People's hungry signals are different, which is why one size fits all advice doesn't work. Personally, if I ignore my hungry signal for long enough, it goes away; this sounds like it might be good, but then I get all headachey and grumpy because I haven't eaten and there's no signal telling me to eat; so I've got to use my analytic brain for that (but it would rather take a break because I haven't eaten). Some people I describe that to think I'm crazy ... if they don't eat, the hunger signal just keeps getting stronger.
That last is notable. I agree that personal signals are very different between people. But so is basic capability to track things.
What is truly obnoxious here, is that what works for you will also not be static. Expect that what worked for you now will someday not work.
In recovery, particularly AA, there is the concept of a "dry drunk" who is, eli5, a person who is trying to quit using by simply not using anymore and not examining themselves or their surroundings to determine how they ended up there in the first place. Addiction as a disease is a good model for empirically researching treatments on a population scale but for an individual in recovery it's much more effective to realize that addiction is who you are and the process is about changing yourself, not just being the same guy but without the drug. When I got clean I had to quit my job, ditch a lot of my friends, totally reengineer my life because staying clean is a matter of moments that could break one way or the other and the best way to ensure they never break the wrong way is two-pronged: you maximize the odds of you making the right choice and you minimize the number of times you have to choose.
This idea also works for diet and exercise: a gym membership is good, but an exercise bike in the basement means you don't have to go through all the intervening steps between "I should work out" and actually doing the thing. By the time you've started to try to talk yourself out of it you're already doing it. It's easy to eat cookies and hard to eat celery. But it's easier to eat celery from your fridge than it is to go to the store to get cookies. All of these things help you make choices that support your goals and not make choices that are detrimental to them. Eventually those choices go from efforts of will to part of who you are. I'm not fat me having a salad, I'm the guy who eats salads. I'm not checking out the gym, I'm the guy who works out. I'm not just not high today, I'm Sober and so are all of my friends. I'm a Sober man and a member of a Sober community.
I find that the less I eat, the more I need to sleep and the less energy I have for cognition. I also get sick more easily (less energy for the immune system no doubt).
However I have the opposite problem of being underweight.
Fixing your diet is one of those sort of flywheel problems. It takes time to figure out what's both healthy and palatable for you, time and freezer and/or refrigerator space to do meal prep, time and energy to work out, and so on.
All of those are skills that are hard at first. Even with YouTube, you don't go from "burns water" to "Michelin star bodybuilder meals" without a lot of practice.
The better you get at all of that, the faster and easier it becomes, until you hit a point where it's just "how you live", and all that energy and time are again free to pursue other things.
If you have money, sure, you can outsource a lot of that. Zuckerberg has a personal chef and dietician, as well as a handful of dedicated personal trainers guiding his fitness regimen.
But most of us can't afford to invest $250k/year or more into that problem.
- Some people just don’t like to eat that much. They don’t actually have a faster metabolism. Eating is just a chore to them so they rarely do it.
- Some people like eating more and may eat when bored.
- If I’m busy working on something, I will go 12 hours without eating on accident. If I’m doing nothing at all, I may overeat.
- Some people eat much faster than others. It doesn’t matter if you’re eating protein or fat if you inhale two steaks in 10 minutes. You already consumed too many calories. And because you ate double the amount of calories doesn’t mean that you will be full for double the time.
- Some people who eat too fast do something called low-calorie volume eating so they eat fewer calories and this works better for them than eating protein and fat.
- It’s true that exercise doesn’t make up for a bad diet. It’s easier to eat less.
- There are days when I’m out playing sports for like 10 hours. I burn a ton of calories that does need to be made up by eating.
- A lot of people did sports or were outside for hours growing up but don’t anymore due to lifestyle changes (kids for example). That’s an extremely major loss of a calorie sink that isn’t obvious.
- Water weight is a thing but it really doesn’t matter in the long term. It’s more like an offset from your “real weight” but it can only get so far from it. Trends are better for tracking your real weight.
I had two friends exactly like this. One of them was 6' and 135lbs when he started college. Another was 5'5" and under 120lbs. They both said that growing up they thought food was gross and only ate because it was the only way not to be hungry all the time. They both started enjoying food in college and gained a bunch of weight. The one who is 5'5" topped out over 200lbs and now weighs around 180. The other I lost track of, but he was on the same trajectory, gaining 30lbs during our undergrad years.
Your first thought might be that they grew up poor, or that their parents didn't have tasty food around the house, but they were both middle-class, and there were lots of regular foods like pizza and burgers that they disliked as kids and ended up enjoying to excess as adults.
Adding a coke a day is the reverse of that.
That one always gets to me, because it's not universally true. I get the point, and to some extend even agree with it. To me personally, especially when I was younger and had the time, working out more always felt much easier. Controlling what I eat has always been incredibly tricky, simply exercising to the point where it doesn't matter what I eat, fairly easy, it's just a matter of putting in the hours.
Workout for 2.5 hours a day, plus 60-90 minutes transport on a bike, you can pretty much eat anything you like.
Trivial to debunk. Assuming 150 pounds. Weight lifting 2.5 hours: 1051 calories Cycling Moderate 1.5 hours: 1051 calories I'll generously add 2000 calories for the rest of the days activities.
Water intake daily 3.7 liters. 3.7 liters of soda: 1600 calories Burger and Fries: 1000 calories, 3 times a day: 3000 calories.
Calories burned daily total: 4102 calories Calories ingested daily: 4600 calories Yearly weight gain: 498*365/3500 = ~51 pounds.
You can flex the numbers a number of ways, but it's obvious that you cannot pretty much eat anything you like. Exercise does not make up for a bad diet.
But for some people, there are low hanging fruit like “cut out 4 Pepsi’s a day” (600 calories).
If you are already eating reasonable healthy and still gaining weight, then adding more exercise can be easier than trying to skimp on food.
I used to be the same when I was in my early twenties. Now i’m in my early thirties and I don’t seem to be able anymore.
- First of all, drop sugar. Right now. Even if you are not fat, you should not eat it. It's not just extra calories, it's poison. Don't be like "oh, I'll just finish this stuff I still have around", throw it out. If your are only going to follow one point from this list, then let it be this one.
- Forget about calories, a calorie is not a calorie. You cannot "work off" that cake your have eaten, your are not an oven. Calories are an upper limit (you cannot break thermodynamics), but the human metabolism is much more complicated than just balancing an equation.
- Exercise is necessary, but not sufficient. That means you should exercise to get your metabolism going, but exercising itself will not let your lose weight. And when I mean exercising I don't mean you need to get a gym membership. Just going for a walk for half an hour or an hour is good enough for starters.
- Fat won't make you fat. I grew up under low-fat propaganda, yet I kept getting fatter. Then when I increase my fat consumption I started losing weight. By fat I mean real animal fat from meat, not seed oils or other processed fats.
- Eat real food. If you cannot tell what it's made from by looking at it, then it's not real food.
- Processed fruits and vegetables are still processed food, and thus not real food. Don't be fooled by marketing, stuff like fruit juice is not healthy, no matter how many vitamin labels the manufacturer keeps putting on the packaging.
- Caloric restriction works in the short term, but will drive you crazy in the long term. This is why people lapse eventually and regain all their weight.
It is important to understand that obesity is not a "surplus of energy", it's a medical disorder brought about by disruption of your metabolism. I was able to keep eating and eating without ever feeling satiated. It is pure torture to be hungry with a full stomach. It was my body telling me "stop feeding me this garbage, give me real food". I have since been able to keep my weight and never feel hungry. It's only when I find myself unable to eat real food and lapse back into old habits that I start gaining weight again.
If you consider the diet/lifestyle that allowed you to lose the weight as temporary, then you will fail.
I would diet to lose weight by stop eating sugar and desserts. Then, when I got to my target weight I would say “ok, one dessert a week” and before I knew it I was having them every day. And before long I had gained the weight back.
Currently down 21 lbs and 6 months free of sugar. This time I view it as something I will do for the rest of my life.
"If you cannot tell what it's made from by looking at it, then it's not real food."
I would change this a bit and say the ingredients should just be whole plant animal or fungal foods only, no extracts or processed derivatives or anything synthetic or refined. Nothing you couldn't make yourself using the whole food. So no refined flours, sweeteners, juices, oils, etc.
The point of this is to keep it simple. When I go to the grocery store 90% of what's there doesn't fit my criteria and I don't even consider it. Restaurant food or prepared/packaged food is almost all out since 99% of it is made with ultra processed ingredients usually oils/sugars/flours - I don't look at it as an option. If I'm really stuck there's usually nuts or cheese or fruit for sale anywhere.
So I'll buy vegetables, whole fruits, meat, eggs, dairy, butter or meat fat for cooking with, nuts, seeds, and mushrooms.
For social reasons I'll eat things outside of this on occasion in small amounts but whenever I'm providing my own food which is most of the time, these are the rules.
Only buy and eat things with one ingredient.
Vegetables, fruit, meats, beans, rice, etc. you are now eating real food.
And there are two-ingredient foods that I do eat, like "peanuts, salt" or "cultured milk, salt, enzymes"
100%. However, imho it helps to use a tracker at first to better understand what food has how many calories. Track for a month and drop it afterwards.
> Fat won't make you fat
I had always understood this as true, but it's more complicated than that. The body converts calories from fat into fat much more efficiently than carbs, and protein is the least efficient.
Does it now? I have some doubt considering carb consumption stimulates insulin more than fat consumption and this is ultimately the storage hormone.
It's a lot easier to drink and eat X calories of sugar than the same amount in animal fat + protein.
> It's not just extra calories, it's poison.
Uh no. You say you grew up under the low-fat propaganda, but still you fall victim to the overly broad "sugar is poison" propaganda. Yes, limit it by all means, but your overall caloric budget is way more important than the exact proportion of nutrients (same as with fat).
> then when I increase my fat consumption I started losing weight. By fat I mean real animal fat from meat, not seed oils or other processed fats.
Good that it worked for you, but this sounds like anti seed oil propaganda, which is debunked. "real animal fat" often means high saturated fat, which when replaced by polyunsaturated and unsaturated (from e.g. seed oils) actually tends to improve your health.
Signed, a formerly formerly fat person.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=dBnniua6-oM&t=8s
A good debunk of his nonsense claims is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZPKTaVB1IU&t=64s
If you are aware of it you can avoid it.
But you didn't find universal truths. That's a danger of getting information from the Internet or from anecdote. I can give you the exact opposite anecdote. I've eaten every diet under the sun, from SAD to paleo. I've eaten no sugar. I've eaten tons of sugar. Never no fat, but the percentage of energy has varied tremendously. No processed foods at times to almost nothing but heavily processed foods. I've run over 100 miles a week at times and I've done no aerobic exercise of any kind at other times. Yet I found a post on physicsforums.com from 2003 a few weeks back from my old user account listing my height and weight at 6'2" 165 lbs. I use MacroFactor and weigh myself daily. Today, 22 years later, I was 162.4 lbs.
Why is that? I don't know. I have four cats. Two of them will eat everything you give them, then scour the entire house for more, begging and pleading the entire time. Give them infinite food and they'll eat until they puke, then eat the puke. The other two can be given infinite food and they'll stop when they've had enough and they've stayed the same size their entire lives, over a decade at this point. These are non-humans that don't give a shit about their physiques, don't feel shame, and are eating exactly the same foods with the same macro breakdowns and levels of processing. There are just genetic differences between mammals, for some reason we don't fully understand, that make overeating almost inevitable if enough food is available, without tremendous willpower and tricks like you try to employ, whereas other people will eat exactly what they need and no more, pretty much no matter what.
As for MacroFactor, things like this end up on Hacker News with no context, but it's the project of a guy named Greg Nuckols who is one of the better science communicators in the field of exercise science and has been for 15 years. He's held multiple world records as a powerlifter and has coached probably thousands of people at this point. He's also a lifelong fat person, but not really unhealthy, and as far as I'm aware, has never made much of an effort to change that. The app was created due to traditional meal planning and tracking by lifters who go through bulk and cut cycles. The way it worked in the pre-app era was to make spreadsheets weighing yourself daily and counting all of your calories, over a span of weeks. Get a moving average to remove daily water and gut content noise from the weight trend, then compare it to the average calorie intake to estimate your personal total energy expenditure. Now add or subtract from that to set targets for bulking and cutting. MacroFactor does exactly the same thing but automated most of the process for you, so all you have to do is log your food and weight.
It is not primarily meant to be a weight loss tool. It exists in large part because all other food loggers on the market at the time were exclusively targeting people trying to lose weight, and none of them personalized the targets based on estimated true energy expenditure, using population estimator formulae instead.
Saying they're trying to sell you crap you don't need is tremendously unfair. This was a tool made by a lifter for other lifters, but as it stands, the market for food loggers continues to be dominated by overweight people looking to lose weight, as there are a lot more of them in existence than there are lifters. Given that, the staff try their best to provide resources based on the best information they can find to support people who just want to lose weight. That is what this is. Maybe the information in here doesn't work for you, but it's based on research and coaching that has touched millions. It's looking at broad trends. If you know what works for you personally already, then absolutely stick with that. But you don't need to be slandering equally well-meaning people who have a very long track record of putting out the most reliable content that exists in the space they serve. Greg is in his 40s now and first became well-known in the pre-Tik Tok, pre-Instagram era. His takes on science and its limitations have been the most sober and reasonable I've encountered in any field of science, let alone the enormously fraught field of fitness now dominated by grifters. I understand why you would be skeptical or distrustful and you have no good reason to trust me any more than him. I'm just a random stranger on the web as well, possibly a sock puppet or being paid off for all you know. But his history is public. strongerbyscience.com has a back catalog of articles that stretches more than a decade. The Stronger by Science podcast is now defunct, but published hundreds of episodes. If you ever get the chance, you will never find more measured, honest content about this topic.
Obviously you could do this on your own with spreadsheets, but the app takes all the unnecessary overhead out of it and uses more sophisticated algorithms to account for things like missing days.
It's just a total gamechanger. Totally worth the very low cost.
Sorry but this is antiscience.
We are not ovens. We really are not extremely precise ovens burning samples in the presence of stoichiometrically optimal quantities of pure oxygen.
Like there are entire communities of practice that know how to do this effectively at will. This is a learnable teachable skill.
I am absolutely certain that I know more about what calories actually are, and how badly fitted they are to actually managing our body mass — the best way to manipulate your weight is to change gravity wells — than you do. I can manipulate my body mass at will, effectively, and to a degree you would, I’m sure, find impossible to accomplish. I learned how to take that “skill” to an extreme any community you’ve survived to be member of has not yet approached. Anyone who teaches that “skill” is immoral.
We are not bomb calorimeters. We do not consume calories, nor do we engage, in even the most ludicrously “basic” sense, in anything resembling the simple combustion of our food supply. There are calories in coal and, for that matter, plutonium… try to metabolize either.
The heat potential of what we consume is not relevant to the safe (much less effective) regulation of our metabolic machinery; the nutrient density and distributions in what we consume is, but is very hard to summarize in marketing copy to idiot monkeys that want a simple eat / no eat light.
Having a mental disorder does not change how physiology works and does not depend on how it works, but it does explain a lot of what you're writing and why.
> I am absolutely certain that I know more about what calories actually are, and how badly fitted they are to actually managing our body mass — the best way to manipulate your weight is to change gravity wells — than you do.
I have a degree in biology and have been reading and researching enough about fitness and health for well over a decade to know how to take someone from the couch to at least 80% of their genetic potential in terms of strength and size while being as shredded as they'd like in a deterministic process.
> We are not bomb calorimeters. We do not consume calories, nor do we engage, in even the most ludicrously “basic” sense, in anything resembling the simple combustion of our food supply. There are calories in coal and, for that matter, plutonium… try to metabolize either.
Yes but if you'd ever opened a biochemistry textbook, you'd see what we actually do and you'd understand why what works in bodybuilding works at all, and how it's all downstream of that.
I hope you get help but you are simply not an authority on this topic. I'll go with all the people with proven track records teaching people how to successfully manipulate their body composition with methods rooted in understanding basic physiology over a random person on the internet.
I feel so much sorrow for those you are actively harming. May they survive your naïveté and arrogance.
Always remember the Prof who lost 27lbs on the convenience food diet:
https://www.acsh.org/news/2010/11/09/food-for-thought-twinki...
Also remember that before the days of tracking apps and watches and services like Zoe, many of us were losing weight, keeping it off and improving athletic performance without any of that stuff.
No one “resorts to twinkies”. It was a dumb experiment to show that cutting calories really can work. The stupid foods show that you can improve health markers and lose weight by just watching calories.
It’s not the be all and end all of anything. Just a counter point to the silly “calorie is not a calorie” saying.
A calorie of A is not the metabolic equivalent to a calorie of B because a calorie is only a measure of thermodynamic conversion by direct combustion in a bomb calorimter and cannot tell you anything about metabolic usage of A or B. Thank you for pointing out that you can lose weight and improve your BMI by eating Twinkies… you can do the same thing by sucking your brain out through a straw, or for that matter amputating only one limb; those are also examples of false equivalence and poor quantitative reasoning.
And, yes, when I see people fight to spread what I know to be extremely harmful mythological beliefs, I have a bone to pick.
[0] https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
One graph I have that I don't see on there is average-calories-per-day on the X axis and weight-change-per-week on the Y axis (scatter plot). Sticking a linear regression on top told me all those online estimators for how many calories you burn in a day are just wrong, at least for me.
I have been toying with a 8 hour eating window followed by ~40 hours fasting (basically an evening + a whole day) of not eating, and seen some positive results.
Maintaining your weight requires one to have 0 deficit in either direction.
Some days you have to allow eating more. Mainly because food is the original human social activity.
A friend of mine lost > 100 lbs over the course of 2 years by following a weight loss program with a heavy focus on education. The program made him internalize that he had to fundamentally change his life. He has since regained probably around 20 lbs over his minimum, but has maintained his new weight for > 8 years now and is living a life closer to what he wants.
level1
figure out deficit/maintenance/surplus calories figure out what behavior changes to maintain consumption levels
level2 (extra work, but really what it's at)
figure out what how you want to look good naked... i.e. body composition figure out workout (usually lifting with some cardio) eat enough protein, eat other macros that can help you do your workouts. ironically dietting is the SIMPLEST... eat enough protein, fill the rest with what makes you feel "best" or helps "best" with your goal (exercise). This doesn't mean it will feel good depending on cut/bulk... just what feels least bad.
Extra work from level2 can make level1 easier - more lean mass from work out-> more maintenance + tdee calories. The process might be easier if you're 25 BMI with 15% bodyfat than 22 BMI with 20% bodyfat. You'll look better too, which let's be real, is what people usually want. Then health.
That's basically it.
But MOST IMPORTANT to recognize that some goals are simply things you're too mentally/physiologically "weak" / incapable of doing. You may simply not be built for to learn behavior changes (i.e. appetite control) for low BMI/BF. Your genes may simply prevent you from building good FFMI to pull off certain build. This stuff is simple, but not easy.
That said, it’s hard for me to think this is actually a healthy way to eat, after so many years being vegan, and I don’t know what the staying power will be.
Almost impossible to do while you're losing weight. You will lose muscle mass as well as fat.
Not that you shouldn't start (or keep doing) weight training. And after you hit your weight loss goals, you'll need to eat more than base maintenance calories (and mostly in the form of protein) to gain muscle back.
Is it less efficient at building muscle than a bulking diet? Sure. But you absolutely can.
It's telling a beginner that it's possible to do an expert level skill, without the beginner understanding that it's an expert level skill. It's yet another diet that will fail for that beginner.
It's not that difficult for a newbie to do, there's a reason it's called noob gains, usually the first year of weightlifting you can see insane increases in muscle mass that you just won't see on someone who is better trained and closer to their genetic maximum.
Jeff Nippard recently did a year long program with his untrained, overweight brother and put it all up on youtube.
Of course you’ll lose muscle mass, along with everything else. But it’s possible to increase the percent lean mass and especially your muscle:fat ratio.
It comes down to math. An hour of resistance training is just 200-500 calories above the baseline. That's just one sports drink worth of energy.
It prefers to power the body from stored glycogen (carbohydrates), next it will try to metabolize stored fat, next it will go for protein sources (muscle and other tissues). In extreme deficits, it'll even start consuming material from the digestive track and other important stuff.
Many people lose weight, get stronger, get faster and surprisingly lose muscle mass at the same time.
But you can prevent that by eating enough protein, adding strength training, not overtraining or extreme deficit, fueling your workouts with carbohydrates, getting high-quality sleep, and minimizing non-meal, non-workout related simple carbohydrates.
#TLDR When you walk down the street, your body is doing all these things mostly carbs, some fat and a little protein. When you start pushing yourself, you burn more energy but in similar ratios. After about 90 minutes or at higher levels of effort, you'll shift to burning more fat and even more protein if you reach ketosis, as your body conserves remaining carb stores for important stuff like thinking.
AND as you exercise, especially as you reach your strength thresholds, you incur damage in your muscles. When you have your recovery meal/drink with carbohydrates after your workout , especially when resting, the insulin spike, triggers your body to consume protein to rebuild your muscles and add more mass/strength.
But if your workouts don't include enough strength training, your body may not get the anabolic muscle building signal, and it may instead focus on reducing weight (via fat and muscle), or increasing nutrient and oxygen flow to the muscles (building hemoglobin, growing capillaries), increasing muscle activation and engagement (new neural pathways), and/or increasing energy creation capacity (growing more mitochondria or expressing more efficient chemical pathways).
Which is why you can get faster, stronger with smaller muscles.
So my recipe for building muscle while losing fat: * Strength train each muscle group in sets of about 10 for 80 reps per week (I shoot for 2 days, whole body, 4 sets of 10 reps). * Prepare for every workout with some carbohydrates and electrolytes * For workouts lasting more than 90 min, especially cardio/endurance, begin consuming carbs at 30 min and consume 90-12g/hr for high intensity (Zone 3 or higher) * Try to consume 2g of whole protein per kg of target body weight. Or 4g per kg of lean body mass. YMMV. these are all rules of thumb. * Wake up at the same time every day, and prepare for bed 9-10 hours before you have to wake up (have a last snack, some water, turn out the overhead lights, start relaxing) so that by the time bedtime rolls around you can fall asleep quickly and get 7.5-9.5 hours of quality sleep
If you're really hitting it hard and you've induced severe muscle fatigue, bump up the protein intake and get more rest and recovery time.
[0] https://macrofactorapp.com/recomposition/
A small caveat here: unless you're totally new to resistance training. If you're a total noob and just start training for the first time, you'll likely have such a low base that you can actually _gain_ muscle mass even during the overall weight loss.
https://frequal.com/cf/
It is built on the Flavour framework:
https://flavour.sf.net
I don't have much more to add, other than it being really eye-opening how my body seemed to play the long game, eventually regaining all the weight I'd initially lost.
For all those years you’ve been consuming more energy than your body needs to run, so your body stored the excess for later.
Even your reply implies you think you need to consciously decide to gain weight for it to happen - which is very much not correct.
You can’t fix something if you don’t understand the whys involved.
In late 2020 / early 2021 i did the Dukan diet and lost ~10kg in like two months and a half, i lost like a kilogram (about two pounds) per week, my body was perfect.
Then i stupidly eyed the next challenge (quitting smoking) and gained everything back (with intenterests, damnit).
I should have really focused on consolidation, that for the dukan diet means slowly reintroducing other foods slowly to let your body get used to the new state of affairs.
Last year started dieting again and i lost 10 kilograms again, over a year, by mostly eating less (i amicably call it “controlled malnourishment”). This time i’m not gaining it back and i think it’s because even in the weeks where I’ve exceeded, my body got time to get acquainted to the new weight. During this last year i hit a plateau as well… i just had to be patient.
In my experience, the single most important factor is realizing that the sensation of hunger is your primary enemy and that you can attack it head-on.
Satiety is not dictated by how many calories you've eaten but (mostly) by the physical weight of your stomach. If your goal is to eliminate the sensation of hunger while consuming the least number of calories, the nutrition label tells you everything you need to know: eat a lot of low caloric density foods.
What you'll find over time is that foods widely regarded as unhealthy are simply ultra-dense (e.g. peanut butter is an engineering miracle) while healthier foods tend to be extremely low-density (e.g. non-fat Greek yogurt and fresh vegetables).
The biggest error I see in people dieting is thinking they just need to muscle through the feeling of hunger. It doesn't work in the long run. Accept that it's an important sensation but it's distinct from actual starvation, and address it directly!
I'm a fatty. I've lost a lot of weight but my body knows I used to be fat and it wants to be fat again.
A very potent signal for hunger or fatigue is when your fat cells get small i.e. you've burnt a lot of fat, and your little fuel cells are feeling empty. Each shrunken fat cell sends out a chemical "feed me" signal. And they are very very persuasive.
And the kicker is that when you fill them up, they want to be maintained at full. But if they're full too long, or get too full (persistently increase body fat by a few percent(, it triggers mitosis and you now have two half full fat cells who are both shouting "Feed me"
To add insult to injury when you lose weight, you don't kill off fat cells, you just have a bunch of really hungry fat cells shouting for a cheeseburger.
The nice thing about the GLP1 drugs is that they quiet the shouting. So you just don't get the demonic urge to feet all your wilting fat cells.
The bad thing about it is that the shouting is still there, and as soon as you quit the drug, you can get overwhelmed and go back to overeating and your weight and percent body fat go right back up
Similarly, we would all be eating pounds of cheesecake without feeling full. (Narrator: they did get full, but not after eating too much calorically.)
Satiety is not dictated by weight. Please don't.
In other words, fats and proteins satisfy your hunger. You can eat really dense carbohydrates until your stomach bursts (it won't but it might feel like it's going to -- it's the stretch receptors signalling your limbic system to stop or it's going to tell you to vomit) and you still won't feel satisfied. Slather a bit of (protein-rich high-fat) peanut butter on your celery sticks and you'll be fine.
The best advice is balance.
If that's all there is to it, can you just eat a little bit and then chug water until your stomach is convinced you're full?