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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.
There is insufficient evidence to make recommendations for or against the use of low-carbohydrate diets, particularly among
participants older than age 50 years, for use longer than 90 days, or for diets of 20 g/d or less of carbohydrates. Among the published
studies, participant weight loss while using low-carbohydrate diets was principally associated with decreased caloric intake...
A more realistic and reasonable conclusion: Aggregating data from artfully-chosen original research and running it through a 'statistical' analysis provides insufficient basis to conclude anything about anything other than the bias of the 'researchers'.
This is the equivalent of a high school science fair project being treated as if it was actual research.
Seven 'researchers' "identify 2609 potentially relevant" articles (i.e., a MEDLINE search for "low-carbohydrate") and then reduce them to 107 articles by reading the abstracts, carefully avoiding anything that contradicts any currently-held beliefs... As I have mentioned here before, 'research' on nutrition resembles religion far more closely than it does science.
Publishing this article is the equivalent of publishing a google search, except that if it had been written by non-doctors, it would not have even been considered. If you doubt that, ask Dr. Richard Bernstein about his experience with JAMA.
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In Hacker's Diet, John talks a lot about an "eat watch" that tells you when it is time to eat, so that you can follow the watch instead of your natural cravings that were tuned over millions of years of evolution to store up as much fat as possible during times of abundance. In the book, he says this is not technically possible, but we can get close by constantly comparing our diet to daily weight fluctuations (actually a moving, weighted average to mitigate the effect of one-day anomilies).
Now that several years have gone by since he wrote this book, I wonder if the eat watch is still impossible. Glucose level monitoring is much less invasive than it used to be, and I believe that portable devices are sold so diabetics that will read glucose levels through the skin. With a little bit of modification to accomidate for past food intake and weight, this might be modifiable into John Walker's eat watch.
In case John Walker reads this thread, I want to thank you for Hacker's Diet. It motivated and guided me in losing 30 pounds over a one year period.
Why is this premiss so hard to understand? I truely believe some people have something wrong with their heads that blocks that out. Ask those same people what will happen if you sit around eating twinkies and drinking mountain dew all day while playing everquest nonstop and they will say "you will get fat" but you won't ever hear "you will get skinny" to the less calories + more exercize fact.
I read somewhere that a doctor wanted to test the 10,000 steps a day theory. Even as a very active doctor, who took the stairs, and parked his car far away from the building, he could hardly ever get to the magical 10,000 steps that everyone should take a day becuase it is set in our genetics by our ancestors who HAD to walk a lot. They didn't have the option of just sitting all day.
My wife lost 60 pounds, and has been able to keep it off for about a year. She looks fantastistic! Her approach? Stop eating so much, stop eating crap, go to the gym and do exercise classes, and work out. Doesn't sound that glamorous. But it worked for her.
Now what she discovered from all that hard work is that she actually enjoyed it (which she had never realized before, since she had never tried it.
I confess, I didn't read the article, but if it is advocating good old fashioned "straightening up", then it sounds right. I shudder when I walk into the drug store (of all places) and see bottles of tablets that are supposed to help lose weight. I think of all the people that get sucked in by that - I've seen my wife doing fad diets and other quick schemes. The only thing that worked was to change her lifestyle.
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
That's what I did. I lost 20 pounds, 1-2 pounds per week. I'm less lethargic now too. I didn't make any other major changes to my diet. Fats in and of themselves aren't too big a problem.
Note that those "fat-free" desserts have even more sugar than the regular stuff. You'll never lose weight that way. Y'might give your chance at developing diabetes an additional boost though.
In this book, John Walker does suggest low-impact aerobic exercise to help in weight loss. He also says that he reailizes that most of his readers won't do enough exercise to make a difference no matter what he says (If they enjoyed exercise, they would already exercise regularly). There is nothing wrong with suggesting reasonable dietary modification.
What is to criticize with this book? It is a free book where he endorses no commercial products but instead relays his own experience losing weight.
For those interested in losing weight, I've found a mini-howto on the 'net that's worth looking at. It's more empirical than scientific, and has an enlightening personal story attached. It reinforces the less-calorie diet praised by the medical journal article. See this: The Fat Bloke's Guide to Becoming Less Fat
If you eat less then you burn you lose weight! It really is that simple, but the problem is doing it. I have some interesting calculators that help guide your calorie limits at Health and Fitness Calculators (and going to number 6 Health and Fitness)
The low carb diet works, bodybuilders use it, I use it. But its supposed to be for bodybuilders, not just for general weight loss. The reason people go on low carb is so they can lose weight QUICKLY while keeping muscle, if you go on a starvation diet of one meal a day for a month you will lose weight, but half your weight will be in muscle and the other half in fat. Low carb allows you to lose 90 percent fat and maybe 10 percent muscle, these is extremely important to the athelete, the body builder etc who want to lose FAT, not lose weight.
I want to lose fat, I go low carb because I can continue to eat fat. You must eat fat if you want your body to remember how to burn it, your body burns what you eat, if you eat low fat and high carbs your body burns carbs, if you eat high fat low carb your body burns fat, and if you eat high protien and low everything, your body burns protien.
What you want to do is make the body adapt, so that you burn fat for fuel with more efficiency while on your low calorie diets, its more of a metabolism boosting diet, and its safer than the traditional starvation diet.
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Its not essential but it helps. It boosts your metabolism. But you arent supposed to diet and lift weights at the same time, you cycle between a bulk phase and a cut phase.
When you cut, you diet for months and lose about 1-2lbs a week.
When you bulk, you bulk and gain about 1-2lbs a week. Eventually your ratio of muscle to fat goes out of balance and you get the ripped look.
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Well, once again, it all depends on your personal story.
I definitely lost nearly 35 pounds by lifting and eating a little less.
The weight training makes the diet cut that much more effective in burning the fat from your body.
I am over here... now I am back over here!
> Its that simple really... Forget all the diets, just burn more then you eat.. you loose weight...
To belabor the increasingly obvious: yep. To a first approximation the cure for "industrial disease" is to 'consume' less energy by eating and 'consume' more energy by exercise. (The second-order approximation spells out some preferences about which items you cut back on, such as sugars, refined starches, saturated fats, and carcigens. But the exercise itself will help with blood sugar and lipoprotein ratios, regardless of diet.)
There was a really nice article suggesting a revised food pyramid in the January 2003 issue of Scientific American, and interestingly the base of the new pyramid was "exercise".
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Of course they are low calorie diets, the formula is simple:
calories in > calories used = weight gain
calories in calories used = weight loss
You cannot lose weight if you eat more calories than you burn. Although determining what your maintenance level calories is not an exact science.
It's ridiculous to group all low carbohidrate diets in the same group, for example there is:
1. CKD: cyclical ketogenic diet. To make it short, you eat carbs only on weekends, then return to high fat, medium protein low carb during the week (hence cyclical).
2. TKD: you eat your carbs before working out, and generally stay in a low carbohidrate diet.
3. Any variation that lowers the amount of carbs that a 'normal' diet willl have.
If you really want to learn about it "the book" to read is the one written by Lyle McDonald, it's a bit dense in details but very good:
http://www.theketogenicdiet.com/
It's obviously not the best diet for everyone, but for a large group of people (including myself) it has proven to be a great diet for losing fat while still maintaining muscle (and still being able to move some weight at the gym). I have averaged up to 2 pounds of fat a week with very slight increase in muscle mass. I use calipers to measure bodyfat and track progress.
Me too! I was 240 lbs in Feb 2001. By September, I was down to 170 and I've managed to keep it off.
I had to cut out all the middle of the day snacking, switched entirely to diet soda, and ate smaller portions, but still just the food that I liked.
There's some diet program whose slogan is "A shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch, and a sensible dinner". It works just as wekk if you follow: "A sensible breakfast, a sensible lunch, and a sensible dinner".
Frankly, I didn't really do much of the exercise...
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
I lost 40 lbs on the Atkins diet in 5 months. Eat as much as you like like, no calorie watching, just no carbs. Eat as much chicken, steak, ham, cheese as you like. Bascially give up potatos, rice, sugar, and beer. Not very hard at at all and it feels nice to be thin again.
Why do people put italic HTML tags ontop of the old USENET slash style tags? That's just bad form.
DDR is a GREAT form of exercise. It's highly arobic. It's enjoyable. It's social.
Get 4 people, 10 gallons of OJ and water (yes, 10 gallons. You'll go through it), and DDR for a Saturday. You'll go through all the drinks, have a lot of fun, and feel great at the end.
DDR also helps with coordination, rhythm, and balance. Can't recommend it enough.
I try to follow thePaleo Diet. The premise is that humans have not changed much genetically from our pre-agrarian ancestors. Diets constisting of grain, refined sugars, dariy products, and salty foods were not evolutionary pressures until recent history.
I have been on the Paleo Diet for 5 months now, and I am very happy with it. It took about a week for my digestive tract to get used to more fiber in my diet, but other than that I have had a very positive expirence. Being an athlete, it has definitely helped my recovery time, and I have been much less injury prone this winter
For the most part I eat only fruits, vegetables, and meat. Some would see this as restrictive, but I find it quite liberating. So much of the American diet is centered around bread, rice, and potatoes we for get the bounty of other foods out there.
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The low carb thing seems to make sense anthropologically. Most nomadic peoples were from warm weather climates, where body fat isn't really needed except for times of low availability. Nomads (hunter gatherers) ate mostly meat and gathered veggies, verses cultivated grains (carbs.) I don't know if this sort of view has been debunked. I'd like to find out. I'm also really curious about the FDA stickers. Are the caloric values they post gained from straight burning tests (put something in a calorimeter, burn it, see how much energy it gives off..), or is there more to it? I can believe that the n - calories I get from eating a slice of high fiber wheat bread is equal to the n - calories I get from eating x cookies.
I was reading one of his critics who said , and i paraquote 'Atkins's low carb diet is actually a low calorie diet, but because there are no carbohydrates to trigger the hunger, you dont notice"
SO le me get this straight, 20 fucking years of struggling with weight loss, on high carb, lofat, low carb diets, and they say that his is wrong because, it dosent do anything special, yOU JUST DONT NOTICE THE FUCKING LOW CALORIES?!?!!??
CARBOHYDRATES TRIGGER HUNGER!! NOONE EVER FUCKING TOLD ME THAT!!
SOrry bout the yelling, by my fucking god.
I started with atkins, and goddamn, if i dont feel hungy. Ive lost 15 pounds in the past month, and thats with 0 exercise. IM going to star tthat this week i hope. Just spend a week, reading the ingredients on EVERYTHING you eat, and see how much fucking sugar you get in your diet. EVERY processed food has it.
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dude, last year my dad was struck with colon cancer - after trying the Atkins approach for about 3-4 months. He attributes it to the rotting meat sitting in his gut.
On top of which, Atkins himself suffered a heart attack just about a year ago...
Nutrition expert and author Dr. Robert Atkins, creator of the high-protein/low-carbohydrate "Atkins Diet," was released Wednesday from hospital care and is resting well after his heart stopped, a condition called cardiac arrest.
- passion
Works like a damn charm. My new year's resolution last year was to lose weight. I started the second week of January with a friend at work, doing SlimFast (which, to be honest, I never thought would work). I lost 7 lbs the first week, then leveled off to 1-3 lbs a week after that. I dropped from 240-ish to 190 lbs by following the directions on the package: drink for breakfast, drink for lunch, healthy sensible dinner. If I wanted a snack, I had an apple or a banana. If I was thirsty I drank *WATER*. Lots and lots of WATER. I went through about about a case of bottled water a week, just at work. The eating habits have stuck with me and my weight seems to have leveled off (I'm 6'1", so this seems to be a good weight for me, though I'd like to drop a few more lbs). I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a weight loss plan, but it doesn't happen over night.
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The biggest problem with the Atkins diet is that he actually sells it as a fad diet. He devotes pages saying how you can eat as much fat as you want then slips in a line or two about keeping it below 1800 calories. Fat is very high in calories. If you lay off the carbs and keep the calories under control the weight stays off and you don't have to eat a pound of butter a day. I lost 36 pounds in less than a month and I've kept it off for six months. Most people simply go back to eating normally and complain they can't eat fries and pasta and stay thin. There's no miracle diet. Keep it below 1500 to 1800 calories, depends on whether you are a man or woman and get moderate exercise. Check out "Fit For Life". Excellent program but a bit hard to stay on if you have a busy life style. Probably the best most balanced program I ever found.
This gimmick is +5 funny today. It will be +4 funny tomorrow. +3 funny the next day. +2 funny the day after. Perhaps in four days it will be +2 from the karma bonus. After that, +1 offtopic. Then 0 offtopic. Then -1 troll. Then it dies.
The future, as told by localghost.
It's only the last 200 years that the human animal has been able to guarantee 3 square meals per day. It's only the last 50 years that the human animal hasn't had to perform significant physical effort on a day to day basis.
There's a hundred thousand years of evolution where your ancestors bodies have coped admirably with low food and no food conditions. Simply changing from a must eat every day to an eat when hungry mentality i've gone from 112kg (245lbs) to 90kg (196lbs) in around 6 months.
Another 10kg (22lbs) to lose, no bother at all.
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