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Lose Weight The Slow, Boring Way
urbazewski writes "As spring gets underway (in the northern hemisphere anyway) it's a good time to start undoing the effects of a winter's worth of websurfing and gameplaying on your physical condition. A meta-analysis of studies of currently popular low carbohydrate diets by doctors at Stanford and Yale reveals that they are really just low calorie diets in disguise: 'findings suggest that if you want to lose weight, you should eat fewer calories and do so over a long time period." John Walker's 'engineer's approach' to losing weight is built around this astonishing insight, as described in his online book/weight loss plan The Hacker's Diet. The spreadsheets are out of commission, but the basic insights are an excellent antidote to fad diets." Ramen, Ramen, Ramen is not on the approved list.
The Hacker's diet totally works. I lost 35 lbs in 3 months by:
-eating less than 2000 calories each day
-exercising every day
I ate whatever I wanted, as much as I wanted, as long as the daily total remained under 2000 calories. You do have to pay attention to serving sizes to get accurate calorie counts.
I did the 5BX (http://www.flwd.com/5bx/main/) every day, which takes 11 minutes a day to do. Its simple, good exercise that requires no equipment and can be done pretty much anywhere.
I was fat and not while I'm not thin, I'm at least less fat. I would recommend this approach to anyone wanting to loose weight.
A lot of people don't realize that resistance training is essential to losing weight -- even more so than regular cardiovascular, aerobic exercise.
I get a lot of funny looks when I mention this (especially from women who want to not bulk up). However, the key ingredient to weight loss is an increase in your resting metabolic rate (how much energy your body consumes on a regular basis). The only true way to do this is to increase your muscle tissue because muscle burns more energy than fat.
Obviously, resistance training is essential to increasing the muscle tissue and resting metabolic rate.
I am over here... now I am back over here!
I realize this is a touchy subject, but losing weight, even for geeks, is not that difficult if you take some time to study human physiology.
The fact is that most of the commonly held beliefs about losing weight are exactly wrong and only serve to lead one down the path of endless cycles of losing and then gaining back more. If you've ever tried a traditional diet, you know exactly what I am talking about.
I, myself, have struggled with it for many years. I took just about every approach imaginable (and a few I won't even mention here). Sure, some things had short-term benefits but ultimately they lead me right back where I was going.
So what really works?
First I'll tell you, and for many people you'll hate to hear it: eat right and exercise.
Okay, now that that's out of the way, here is the semi-techy explanation. Excuse my over-simplifications because I am looking to cover the subject lightly:
Consider your typical overweight person. He has a high percentage of body fat, and he knows it. How to get thin? Well you could start by reducing caloric input. Sounds reasonable, right? After all, the less you take in the less that becomes body fat.
True, but here is what really happens: When you reduce your caloric intake your body responds to this as if it were a crisis of famine. Blame evolution, but your body is going to think that food is scarce. If the amount of energy input is less than the output needed to live, the body must make up for the excess somehow. And it has two main choices: It can either munch on energy stored in our fat cells (which would be swell) or it can chew away at energy stored in our muscles.
In making this decision, the body considers this critical fact: Muscle mass requires energy to exist, whereas body fat requires very little. So, in a leap of perfectly sound logic, the body consumes the wrong kind of weight. And since muscle weighs a lot more per volume than body fat, the result is weight reduction. The diet seems to work!
It works for awhile, yes. But as you lose muscle mass your basil metabolic rate drops. This causes you to need less and less energy to exist. Do the math. Eventually you reach equilibrium with the input (your diet) and you hit the dreaded plateau we all know too well.
This is so disconcerting that people eventually give up. But here is the killer: Your body has been ravaged! You may have lost weight, but your percentage of body fat is probably worse than when you started. And now you are start eating the "old way" again and soon you are ballooning back up again. And, often, you get worse than when you started.
That's the cycle. And I'm sure a lot of you know it really well.
So how do you break that cycle?
The basic principle is simple: Do the opposite of what doesn't work. Duh.
To do this, you increase your muscle mass. When you do this, your BMR goes up and your body requires more and more energy. Efficient and effective cardio and strength training out requires a really good understanding of how they work to do them right. You can bang away all day long in a gym and not get much results if you don't know what you are doing. More on this in a bit.
Second you feed yourself carefully. I hesitate to use the word 'diet' here because this has nothing to do with starvation. In fact, you typically feed yourself a lot more than you use too. Most importantly, you eat six times a day. This feeding pattern prevents your body from going into "oh my god...we're going to starve" panic mode. You also hydrate a lot more than you are probably use too (10 glasses of water a day).
I'll simplify here for brevity, but the meals consist of a portion of protein and a portion of carbohydrate. A couple of them you add a portion of veggies. A "portion" is roughly the size and thickness of the palm of your hand for protein and your clenched fist for carbs. That simple hand rule is all you need. Note: there is no need to count calor
David Whatley
1. Realize that the world has been lying to you. McDonalds, BurgerKing, and all respectable fast food joints have been getting fat by making you fat. Candy bar companies, soda pops all exist not to "quench that thirst" or "feed that hunger" but to destroy you. No one is meant to be fat. NO ONE no one is big-boned, no one is "natually" fat. I have been 250+ since I was 15, and hit my heaviest at 285. I am now down to 240, and still losing following this concept.
:) You like Pizza and COke? Just make sure it's within your Caloric intake. Hell I'm vegetarian (a bit harder) but think of all you meat eaters! Lots of meats to choose from with little calories!
2. Slow and steady wins the race. I have lost 45 pounds in the past 6 months, not the fastest out there, but at 1 or 2 pounds a week my body is GRADUALLY changing, which means it's VERY fogiving when I blow my diet once every couple of weeks. Like a rubber band my weight snaps right back into losing weight. It's the law of averages, if you eat 2000 calories a day for 3 weeks, then all of a sudden eat 4000 in a day, then the next day go back to 2000, your body expects and DEMANDS that 2000. It won't store the exceess because you're not starving yoursef.
3. Find your DMR (Daily Burn Rate). Because I sit all day, my caloric DMR is about 2000. Therefore I eat 1850. if you burn 2000, and only feed yourself 1850, where does the other 150 come from? YOUR FAT. It's a beutiful simple concept.
4. Eat the right foods. I can have 1/2 bowl of pasta or 5 bowls of chili (insert "fart joke here"). It's all in the calories. Lots of calories in rice and pasta, very little in beans. I eat a lot of fruit now, lots of salad piled with veggies and low-fat dressing. Oh and another choice is 2 tblspoons of regular salad dressing or 5 bowls of salad piled high with lowfat dressing, your pick.
5. DON'T RELY ON ANYTHING. Don't do exercises. I don't do exercises because I know I can't keep them up. Too many stories of "oh I lost 50lbs once, but now it's all back" what did they do differently? Stopped anything they were doing which shocked their body.
6. PROFIT!......a wonderful program I use for my palm pilot called e-diet has an entire database of foods (yes pizza and coke are in there) and you can modify it with your foods and calories. It helps me maintain my daily calories while also telling me what specific exercise and for how long to burn off calories when I go over (stuff like laundry, cleaning, coding). You plug in your height, weight, activity level, and how much you want to lose in how long and it shows you the path you need to take. Losing weight really is just plain mathematics, which should motivate at least SOME of you geek's out there.
Good Luck and drop me a line if you have any questions.
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering (bread and butter is 200 calories a slice!)
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
1 gram of protein does not have the same caloric content as 1 gram of carbohydrate.
1 gram carbohydrate = 4.3 kcal
1 gram fat = 9.5 kcal
1 gram protein = 5.7 kcal
But you were right on the other part. It does take more energy to digest the protein, as it needs to be converted by the liver into a usable sugar.
SF