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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.
This is another American lie. The weight was not lost: the invaders were chased into the desert and utterly destroyed.
Former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
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.
I can speak from personal experience on this. I know people have heard this a million times, but I'm not convinced of these "cookie-cutter" diets due to the fact that everyone is different in so many different ways.
For example, how do you explain the fact that I can gain so much weight by not watching every last gram of carbohydrates I eat while a friend of mine can have his "nights of 10,000 calories" and not gain a single pound ever.
I think it all comes down to taking a step back, looking at your body, and picking what's right for you -- not some predetermined plan that you get off of a website.
I am over here... now I am back over here!
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.
Here is my Idea for the Ultimate diet:
STOP EATING!
-
You'll lose weight and muscle is overated anyway.
I actually followed The Hackers Diet about three years ago and lost 25 pounds over the course of 3 1/2 months.
I lost the will power to keep on the diet and have gained most of that weight back over the last two years, and am currently trying to work up the will power to start it up again. I'm 6 feet tall, so it would be nice to be back to a nice lean 170lbs again.
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.
If you actually read Atkin's books, he explicitly says weight loss comes down to cutting calories. The advantage of a low carbohydrate diet is that the calories you do take in make you feel more satisfied, as well as not driving up your insulin levels.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
As opposed to John Walker Lindh's 'terrorist approach' to losing weight that is built around hanging out in a flooded prison for a week with no food at all.
Visit www.seriouslythough.com
Its that simple really...
Forget all the diets, just burn more then you eat.. you loose weight...
For the couch potatoes, EXERSISE how to use energy.. And dont eat a lot of garbage..
Just use some common sence. But then again, that wont sell books or diet foods will it...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
...but my high-caffeine, low-sunlight diet has kept me at or below my ideal weight for over a decade.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
I wait until mid morning to go into work.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
This is my first real diet where I'm conciously cutting down on calories. I'm not starving myself but only because I constantly snack on fruits and veggies. I feel like I have to have something in my mouth every hour. Weird feeling but one can get used to it.
I'm not following any particular dieting fad. I just stopped eating all the junk foods that are served at your typical lunch place. No more burgers, pizzas, fries or doughnuts. I firmly believe that Russian females are so slender because they diddn't have junk food for so many years. Accordingly if I remove all junk food from my diet I should get slender too... Time will tell.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Just be sensible if you want to lose weight. A lot of health guides in my opionion are bad... 5+ servings of grain a day? pfft.
I lost 100 pounds over the past 8-9 months and it really wasn't hard. How? 30 minutes of weights daily to build up my heart rate and get the blood flowing. Then I would run 30 minutes. Initially it was walking of course. At 300 pounds my ankles couldn't support me running!
As for the diet I did go for lots of protein. But I didn't neglect other things like the importance of vegetables and fruits I had neglected over the past 10 years. I ate more of these in my 8 months than in the past 10 years. Iron, Zinc, Calcium too... I'd eat pure whole grain multigrain bread with all these crazy seeds and stuff in it. Yeah thats right. CARBS. So what. As long as you don't eat too much they aint a bad thing so screw what those diets of the week say. Just eat a balanced diet. I'd only eat 2-3 grain a day at most.
In order of most to least of the food groups:
1) Fruits and vegetables I cannot stress this enough... tons of goodness in them... VERY low calorie and easy to fill up...some of them taste quite good.
2) Poultry + pork. Chicken is very lean and low calorie. And really high in protein. Ham has more calorie but its a nice to alternate...couldn't eat chicken 24/7. Add something to them for taste.. don't eat them plain, they will taste like cardboard and you will drop your diet faster than a peter north's pants in front of a woman
3) Dairy. 3 fat glasses of milk daily. A fair bit of cheese too.
4) Grain. The lowest but still important to have some in your diet for obvious reasons of staying regular (if you eat too much fruit it does this 10 times more though!) and the added benefits that other groups don't necessarily have.
My immune system is a lot better. I've not got any colds during cold season, ive not even got the flu at all or been sick. Feels great. So much energy. Really if you weigh as much as I did or are at least overweight, lose it. Its so much easier to breath. I can take huge deep breaths now while sitting. Before I could only breath shallowly and it was scary.
Realize it takes time... I finally had to do that. I feel so great being thinner now. Still have to lose some weight but I'm no longer in a danger zone. I found the worst thing about being healthy was not my cravings and hunger. The major reason I ate junkfood was time. Its easier to microwave buttery popcorn than to chop up carrots. Secondly was stress. I'd eat after a long hard day at work. But now my stress-releaser is exercise...and boy it works great especially on kickbox night... exercise, if anything, not to lose weight, but to feel good and release more endorphins.
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.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Our bodies evolved to eat the proteins and fats of animals, vegitables that we scavenged, and occasional fruits. I say occasional because fruits are seasonal and all animals compete for them so they were rather hard to find.
Grain was never part of the fuel that our bodies were designed to run on. 10,000 years is hardly long enough for a selection event to occur, and so grains are quite artificial in the human diet.
Sugar, partially hydrogenated oils, and other refined foods that hit the market this century just add to the problems. They fluctuate your bodies glucose level widely and are stored as fat if not utilized.
While fad diets are going to fade in and out, pillars of evolutionary data point to what you should be eating- what your body was designed to eat.
Animals. Vegies. Occasionally some carbohydeates in the form of fruits.
Bring on the Bacon!
Heh...in all seriousness, DDR has slimed down many a geek...including me.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
The translation, for those of us who've finished our "Hooked On Phonics" (only spelling corrections, grammar be damned):
Poor linguistic abilities aside, this fucker's right. The way to lose weight is to eat right and exercise.
Your goal (for men) should be to drop your body fat percentage to well under 10% (under 15% for women).
I've found a mix of something like 60% carbs, 30% protein, and 10% fat to be a good distribution for my food. Don't put much faith in those numbers (I change it as needed to gain/lose weight). I typically consume anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 calories/day (even a fat bastard would have an amazingly hard time taking in 10kcal/day, trust me on that!)
Fuck being skinny. Pack on some serious muscle too.
My lifting consists of 1-2 hours typically (depending on how focused I am), and I have a 6 day split (2 days on, 1 day off, all 6 to cover my whole body). I aim for at least 30 minutes of cardio per day, sometimes I do more sometimes I do less...
Aim for 1.5-2g of protein per pound of lean bodyweight. I'm currently using Phosphagen XT, which seems pretty damned good. I'm not a huge fan of creatine, but this seems decent (Cell Tech isn't bad either).
Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
If you want to read a REAL nerds book on nutrition, how about one that explains the molecular structure of different fats and explains everything in technical terms. I didn't know any biology before reading it and I was able to follow along. The book actually teaches you all about fats, carbs, free radicals, anti-oxidants, etc. If you're interested in bodybuilding, this one's a must for most of us.
I'm 6'2". In the last year, I've gone from little muscle at 155 lbs to 10% body fat at 180 lbs. Yeah, a year is a long time, but I've done it in a healthy way which is more permanent and life sustaining. :)
-Lucas
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
As for low-carbohydrate diets being the wonder cure for everything -- couple of things that should at least provoke curiosity. One is the idea that prolonged ketosis is good for you. I'm not saying that it's for sure prolonged, as some studies report that the ketosis is transient, but if it's not, how will long-term utilization of the lipid metabolism pathways as the primary source of glucose for the brain and body affect people? No one knows. Furthermore, the observed tendency is for people on the Atkins Diet to eat lots of calories -- more than normal, regardless of what Atkins may have written, and the weight loss is not always as advertised. Metabolism is a somewhat black box to us, especially in terms of individual variances -- some people may have bad reactions to this sort of diet, reflecting differences in biochemistry between people. No, I don't mean fundamental differences, but rather differences in enzyme function and or production that can change how things get metabolized.
Ultimately, as many others have written, the key to weight loss is increasing energy expenditure and decreasing energy intake. Examples include:
Cancer -- rapidly dividing cancer cells use up lots of energy, and cytokines designed to fight the tumor also induce anorexia. Thus, more energy used, less food eaten --> weight loss.
Cystic Fibrosis -- increased energy expenditure secondary to ongoing sinopulmonary infection, decreased intake due to malabsorption caused by pancreatic insufficiency --> weight loss.
"Hacker Diet" -- exercise (increased EE), less than 2000 kcals per day (decreased energy intake).
For a group largely made of computer oriented folk, this simple input output relationship seems unusually difficult. Bottom line -- if you don't utilize the energy you consume as food, your body stores it as fat, and you gain weight. This is NOT rocket science. Low-carb, low-fat, low-whatever -- diets can have too much or too little of things, but no one has ever convincingly yet found the magic mix that lets everyone loose weight.
Just my thoughts,
Kargis Strong, MD
Pediatrician
... omg, i've stooped so low as to post a comment with THAT subject line.. Oh well.
The advantage of a low carbohydrate diet is that the calories you do take in make you feel more satisfied, as well as not driving up your insulin levels.
This is so important. Read Dr. Mercola's pages on Insulin. Eating a diet based around carbohydrates is a lot like filling your car with gasoline, and neglecting the rest of the regular maintenance - no oil changes, no tranny service, no brake pad replacements, never replacing the windshield wipers, headlights, air filters or tires, etc.. Your car will run, well for a while, and it'll keep chugging along for even longer still - but eventually, the damn thing just doesn't work. Nutrition/food is the same way - carbohydrates provide energy to run the body, but are seriously lacking in the "routine care" maintenance nutrients present in veggies and animal products.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
The problem I have though is stopping eating, when I'm hungry, or at least think I'm hungry I eat/drink. I'm starting to work on grabbing a water bottle instead of a coke now though and other such changes.
This is the KEY to losing weight, and no one I find focuses on this enough. If trying to lose weight, and you get hungry outside your meal allotment, then do not eat, drink (and NOT pop).. Get a tal glass of ice water, or a tall class of OJ or other citrus. The water has no calories, and the citrus much less than anything you would eat for a snack. Plus you will find the coolness perky and actually wake you up, unlike fatty snacks like chips that slow you down.
You will find that a nice cold glass of water/juice more than cures your hunger for the few hours until your next meal. Not only does this help keep your caloie count down, it hydrates your body, which any doctor will tell you is good for you anyways. I find that this tip, the tip of drinking, not snacking, is one that is not metionened nearly enough in popular weight loss literature.
I lost 40 lbs just by going from one pack a day to two! Try it, it works!
This sig washed every five years whether it needs it or not!
"The most effective diet in the world is the only-eat-foods-you-don't-like diet."
All these fad diets, when they are successful at all, are only successful because they make people eat less. If the only thing you're allowed to eat is spinach, well, it probably won't take very long before your caloric intake has dropped significantly. Humans are wired to like a diversity of foods, but we're also very bad at counting calories (because over evolutionary timescales, more calories was always better).
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
> Hey you might think its boring but exercise makes you feel good.
For geeks the badly needed aerobic exercise (walk, run, bicycle, swim, etc.) is a great time to get away from the terminal and think out that problem that you've been throwing code at in vain. My daily walk is some of my most productive "programming" time. Figure out bugs, replace inefficent algorithms, design application architectures - all are easily done during the course of a mile or two's walk. Perhaps done better, for getting away from the terminal and thinking about the problem in more abstract terms, or at least at a higher level than a screen full of source code.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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
Losing weight is a pretty simple thing and virtually every diet out there is the same. All diets try to limit calories whether they are low-fat diets or low-carb diets (like the popular Atkin's diet). Fewer calories is the key, and avoiding sodas, alchohol, high sugar foods, are an easy way to get rid of extra calories.
The thing to remember about low-calorie diets though si they stop working. At some point your body gets used to fewer calories; your body requires fewer calories. So you'll need to reduce your calories even more to lose more weight. (ie. your body requires 2000 calories a day. You go on a 1600 calorie/day diet. At somepoint your body will only require 1600 calories/day. At that point a 1600 calorie diet will not help you lose weight).
If you really want to lose weight, you'll also exercise. Exercise burns calories. You have to have a 3500 calorie deficit to lose one pound. If you exercise regularly and watch what you eat, this becomes rather easy. So take extra walks, walk that flight of stairs, restart your exercise regiment--it really makes a difference.
Obesity is a serious health problem around the world. By getting in shape, you are helping diminish the risk of many terrible illness (heart disease, diabetes, cancer).
Physicians who specialize in Bariatrics would be able to give you even more detail, and any physician can prescribe medications to curb your appetites. Good luck to everyone who wants to lose weight. You can do it.
Around new year, I decided I'd got heavier than I'd like. I'm reasonably fit, and a good weight for my height and build, but as a result of an injury I hadn't been doing nearly as much of my physical hobbies as usual, and I'd put on around a stone. So, I decided to try a genuine, honest-to-goodness diet + exercise regime to lose that weight.
For three months, I kept a spreadsheet of everything I ate or drank, with calorie counts, amounts of protein, carbs, fats and fibre, etc. I also kept a record of how much significant exercise I was doing, and my weight, daily.
Curious facts I discovered while researching/doing it...
So there you go. My top tips for healthy eating with almost no change to your lifestyle:
I lost the stone I wanted to comfortably in three months, and now feel much fitter as I get back into training. And I'm the laziest guy in the world, so if I can do it, anyone can.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I wasn't going to post but it seems worthwhile having read a few other postings.
I'm about 6'4" and I decided to start losing weight when I hit 240, which is firmly in the "obese" category. I'm still in the middle of the diet right now having lost 30, and while I don't know precisely where I'm going to stop, my still-overly-ample gut says "not yet". (But not as ample as it used to be...)
I chose the Atkins diet because A: It made some degree of sense and B: I knew I did not have the willpower to engage in any diet based on staying hungry all the time, which for instance the Hackers diet does. This is especially true because I couldn't fully control the contents of my residence, since my wife lives here too and she's one of those people who can eat whatever she wants, as much as she wants, and not gain significant weight, whether or not she's exercising. (She does a lot of physical stuff at her job now but this was true when she was a college student, too.) This means I could not just throw all X out so that I couldn't possibly eat it, because she happens to like X (starchy products in the case of the low-carb Atkins diet).
The reason I posted is that I decided, both out of laziness (I freely admit) and out of scientific curiousity, not to change my exercise habits. Right now I walk maybe a mile a day in discontinuous chunks between classes and walking to work. I was curious if I could still lose weight just by changing my diet. Part of this curiousity stems from the Atkins discussion of how it works, which if true would imply that exercise would not need to change (though to be clear and fair, Atkins does recommend more exercise; this is my experimentation, not Atkin's).
So far, as I said, I've lost 30 pounds.
One person does not a study make, but when you're working with yourself, it's all you've got; you can't do a controlled study.
One thing I did not really experience that Atkins said I should was an increase in energy after the third or fourth day on his diet. Possible explanations include not exercising, or something internally wrong with me that also requires me to take abnormally large doses of iron just to function normally; it may be physically impossible for me to have a "normal" energy level. (Still working on it.)
Right now I'm dropping diet soda back out of the mix to see if that's contributing to my energy problem, as against Atkin's advice I had been drinking Nutrasweet-based beverages anyhow. Results after two days are still inconclusive, but hopeful. (Nutrasweet has been reported to slow the metabolism in some cases, both slowing weight loss and causing energy problems.)
The point? "Just eat less and exercise more, dufus!" didn't help me much. To others in my position, I recommend reading up on the available alternatives, and trying as much as is possible with a sample size of one to experiment to see how you lose wieght. For me, there was a chicken and egg problem: 240-lb me didn't really want to exercise. 210-lb me has been much more open to the idea. 190-lb me will probably enjoy it. But if I had to start with a program of heavy exercise, I probably wouldn't have started at all, which is the worst possible outcome.
I needed something a little formal, but flexible. (Technically, I'm no longer "doing Atkins" but doing an Atkins-inspired diet, as once I got the gist of the diet the strict regimentation didn't appeal to me; it does not seem fundamental to the system and makes me suspect Dr. Atkins lays it out as he does to serve the Average Reader who expects complete regimentation out of a diet book. Less carb counting and a more free-form approach is working for me where a regimented diet would have made me quit in disgust, YMMV.) Maybe you just need to drop the cola out of your life and replace it with water or other calorie-free choices. Maybe you just need to exercise and your diet will fix itself. Maybe you need something extremely strict. The most important thing i
I've been on Atkins for over a month now. I'm never going back to eating sugars and starchy foods. Understand how sugars and starches cause your insulin to surge, and you'll understand why you may have the shakes if you don't get a meal on time.
After putting up with those shakes that caused me to overindulge my whole life, I tried Atkins. After about a week of no processed carbs, I felt a noticeable difference. The shakes were gone for good, and the pounds have been coming off easily. I've never been one to stick to a diet, but this one is easy. You don't feel like you're starving yourself, and that's one of the diet's main benefits.
Not being a slave to my hopoglycemic shakes and brain fogs is the number one benefit, though. I never realized how often that brain fog had me under its grip until about a week after starting Atkins. Since then, I've felt remarkably clear-headed. I know others on low-carb diets who report the same thing.
Don't knock low carb diets until you understand why they work.
Personally, I think that the low-fat mentality generated by the medical community in the 70's, 80's, and 90's was the biggest failing of Science in the 20th century.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
I know a lot about the subject of losing weight. I've read books and Ive done my research, so listen up.
If you're only concern is to lose weight (fat as well as muscle tissue), then going on a low-carb diet is the way to go. No candy, no soda, no pasta.
If you want to tone up and as a result, lose body fat, then you have no other choice than to eat right, with lots of protein, coupled with weight traning. You don't need to be like Arnold. Light weights can go a long way. The point is resistance. It's the only way your muscles will react. In case you didnt know: the more muscle you have, the more fat you will burn, because the more engery your body will need to give to your muscles.
If you opt for the first choice, be sure to stay away from carbs for the rest of your life, because as soon as you start to eat pasta and drink soda on the regular, you will be right back where you started.
Eitherway, I would recommend to EVERYONE to get at least 20 minutes of exercise a day. If it's walking around your block a few times, going for a bike ride, it doesn't matter.
For those of you who have tried and been unsuccessful on this or any other plan -- the key is to take it one step at a time.
The biggest problem I hear about (and see in any office) is that people have two modes of operation: 'regular' and 'diet,' so -- at best -- they diet and work out until they get what they want and then stop, and then this repeats indefinitely.
If you have trouble keeping up the willpower to follow one of the regimens linked to in these comments, don't do at all once. The BEST ADVICE YOU CAN TAKE AS A NERD:
Give up soda. No real soda, no diet soda. The worst thing in the world to put into your body is sugar, and that's all you're getting with soda. Replace it with water. If you drink a lot of coffee, a) cut the sugar down to the minimum you need for the coffee, and b) drink even more water. Soda does nothing but dehydrate you and fill your body with shit. At @200 calories a pop for non-diet, you can easily shave 400-800 calories off of your daily diet. That's about how many calories you burn when you run a few miles -- down the crapper in the couple of minutes it takes you to drink a coke.
The key is to make these habits routine, so you don't have to think 'oh, I'm on a diet this week.' Even the best 'whiz' diet will not help you if you do not adapt a healthy living style. Don't aim for going to the gym twice a week. Aim for doing something EVERY DAY (even if it's the 11-minute 5BX Plan) -- and then augment that daily routine with a few _serious_ work outs.
Being in shape half the time and spending the other half trying to get back in shape doesn't help your health very much. Change your lifestyle and then you can 'cheat' without it being even being cheating, because you do the right thing 95% of the time.
Sugar is not bad. People are designed to eat sugars (specifically fructose). Proccessed sugar - you're right, bad (in large quantities). Complex carbs are NOT bad. They are good because the are easier for the human body to digest than meats. (Meats are protein strands - one strand is a very complex mass of amino acids). Complex carbs provide a good source of energy. They are only bad when consumed in large quantities (americans eat far too many carbs). Meats --- lean meats can provide a great source of long-term energy. It digests slowly, and therefore can last you a while. However, fat is far worse than anything. Avoid fats, they have no nutritional value. Therfore, you should not eat loads of bacon everyday. Eggs, the whites are good for you, the yolks are full of calories and fats. Again, avoid fats. Now, if you happen to loose weight while scarfing down eggs and bacon, it is more than likely that your body can't absorb most of what is being digested and is therefore being passed through. That is a waste of food, and prooves dangerous as it restricts important vitamins and minerals. I will stress that you eat fruits and vegitables. They have important nutrients. They are lower in calories than many other foods. The fructose found in fruits is actually good for the body. Don't beleive me? Fine, but don't come crying to me when you have a heart attack and die. And remember, being low in weight does not make you healthy. Nutrients are important, as is such invisible things as clogged arteries. So excersize, and eat a balanced diet. Such is the key to health.
YOU SUCK BALLS!
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.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
A couple quick tips for people who don't want to try very hard and don't mine losing the weight slowly:
STAY BUSY. Always have something todo, no this doesn't mean sitting in front of the computer all day.That isn't something todo, go running, play a sport, work on your car or even just hang out at a friends house...it will keep you away from the fridge when you're bored.
DRINK LESS SODA, or none at all. Not even diet soda, see the next section for my shpeil on corn syrup. I just stopped buying the stuff, all I drink is water now, and occasionally, fruit juice. REAL fruit juice, not hawiian punch.
AVOID High Fructose Corn Syrup. It turns into fat faster than almost anything else, processed sugars in general do this. The thing about processed sugars is that you're going to find them in almost any sweetened processed food. The deal is that corn syrup is much much cheaper than regular sugar, but also much worse for you. Which do YOU think is more important to food producers?
Anyway, thats about it. I mean, if you really want to look good and be healthy, not just thin, go exersize.
AND GUYS: Don't use "She care more about my mind" as an excuse to not work out. The truth is, she DOES care more about your mind, but you probably won't get a chance to talk to her if you don't look good first.
I play DDR Max 7th mix in the arcade near me. Alot of people crowd around, stare and poke fun. But you know what? Who gives a damn? I'm having more fun playing the arcade game than they are having making fun on me...and it's keeping me physically fit. I never exercised regulary before, but now I have a fun excuse to. Besides, I offer some of the people who make fun of me a free game. Those who take me up on the offer, I usually see playing next time I'm there. ;-)
2. Eat smaller portions; stop eating as soon as (or before) you feel full. This is especially important if you eat out; lots of restaurants give you unnecessarily big portions. Eat a Whopper Jr. instead of a full-size Whopper; throw out half your french fries. Pay attention to portion sizes on food packages. Remember, feeling a little bit hungry is not a bad thing.
3. Cut down or eliminate deep-fried stuff. It's loaded with fat. Eat grilled chicken instead of fried; have broiled fish instead of fish-and-chips. Substitute flank steak for hamburger. Have an occasional vegetarian/vegan meal. While I have no intention of going 100% vegan, there are plenty of meatless meals that I've found I like.
4. Avoid between-meal snacks. The calories can really add up. It's OK to have a treat now and then; just don't overdo it. Choose low-calorie snacks, and eat fresh fruit instead of candy.
I once weighed 245 lbs/111 kilos. Then, I made those four changes to my eating habits. For a month, I avoided stepping onto the scale, and when I finally did so, I found that I had lost a little weight. After six months, I was down to 210 lb/95 kg, and after a year, I leveled off at 170 lb/77 kg.
As for keeping the weight off, get some exercise. After my weight leveled off, I dragged my old mountain bike out of storage and started riding for the first time in eight years. I then switched to a recumbent for more comfort and speed (Mine is the 2001 model). I've taken many long rides on it; my personal distance record so far for a one-day ride is 150 miles/241 km.
This winter, the weather discouraged me from riding much, so I went back into diet mode when I noticed that I had gained a little. Now I'm down to 165 lb/75 kg...
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
First off, the basis of energy consumption in your body called the Krebbs cycle. The input is sugar (glucose, to be specific) and oxygen. The output is water, carbon dioxide, and energy stored in the bonds of a ATP (adenosine triphosphate). This chemical reaction is fixed. While the body can operate in an anaerobic process, this occurs when vigerously exercising. Even then, the input is still glucose.
Any sugar or starch you consume is converted to glucose. Sucrose is two glucose molcules stuck together. Fructose is a sugar with 1 carbon missing. Starch is a chain of sugars. All of these are converted into glucose.
So, what happens when not enough sugar is around? The body draws on the reserves of fat and protein. Glucose is able to come out of fat pretty easily. For protein, the body does some complex conversion which use the protein to create glucose to stuff into the Krebbs cycle. The downside is some unpleasant byproducts need to be dealt with by the liver.
So why does the body burn fat and protein? Because, when you burn protein, you reduce muscle mass, and hence your caloritic requirements. Kind of like a layoff.
Ok, so after all that: Glucose (sugar) is the only thing the body "burns". It all comes down to how much you take in. It is simply accounting. If you eat more than you need, you gain weight. If you eat less, your body starts cutting back on muscle and uses up fat. Carbs have 5 cal/gram, while fat has 9cal/gram (I don't remember protein).
So you can think all you want about high GI and low GI and fat and so on. You still get X cals from Y grams of carbs, and X cals from 5/9Y grams of fat. End of story.
I think that the real reason that these diets are effective is because they are less "boring" than high carb diets and also self-limiting. If you can only eat the patty and not the bun, how many burgers are you going to stuff in your face?
Of course, my belief is that people really evolved eating mainly vegetables and only occasionally fruit, meat, and grains. Do I eat that way? Hell no! But I do try to eat vegetables whenever I can.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
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.
if you want to be lean, you actually have to weigh MORE,
since lean strong muscles weigh more than fat, but they
look more toned.
therefore, using weight to guage fitness is totally bogus.
a lean person will look 'skinnier' but weigh MORE.
the other thing that makes people fat is 'Low Fat' food.
if all you eat is low-fat stuff, your body never gets the
nutrition it needs, and hence you have to eat more of
the stuff to make up your body's requirements. the best
thing to do if you want to lose weight is to eat more
of the 'Regular Fat' foods, and then your body won't
need so much of the stuff to feel 'full'.
best regards,
john
It works great, especially for engineers/programmers!
The hacker's diet is very simple: you can eat whatever you want, just make sure you eat less calories than what your body needs. You can feed on hamburgers if you want as long as you eat less. You can worry about exercising or eating healthy stuff later, this will come automatically once you've lost some weight.
4 years ago I was at 215 lbs (for 5'10), loathed any form of physical activity, and was not very happy about this situation. After skimming through the hacker's diet I decided to lower my daily food intake to around 1000-1200 cal (the average intake for a man is between 2000-2500 cal)
This wasn't very pleasant at first but it worked and 12 months later I was down to 155 lbs (60 pounds less), without any exercise at all. To keep the same weight I started eating a bit more and I immediately felt like running everywhere instead of walking! So I bought a bike to get some low impact exercise and a year afterwards I found myself cycling 20 miles every day to work (not in the snow though)
Today, 4 years after I started this very simple diet, I'm still at 155 lbs, very active and generally much happier. Also I'm not closely counting calories anymore as my body automatically knows how much food is enough.
The most difficult part I found when starting the diet was evaluating calories in food. You can find calories on most food labels (usually in cal/100g of product) but it took me a while to learn what type of food would bring me the best quantity/energy ratio. I found some great low cal food are veggies (I am lucky to love beans and 1kg of beans is about 200cal - you can stuff yourself on this without any problem), chicken, fish...
All this food happens to be very healthy too, so as you see there is no need to worry about knowing what's healthy and what's not because if you want to eat a lot (as in volume) without taking in too many calories, it will have to be healthy food anyway.
Read the Hacker's Diet for more info, it is definitely worth it!!
BTW the first time I heard about the Hacker's diet was on Slashdot, 4 years ago.
blop.
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.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
This is just more of the same old Fat People listening to Fat People. Low calorie diets do not work; this has been known since the beginning of the whole concept of dieting. Heresy you say? Look: no generally accepted study has ever found ANY diet to work without compulsion. NO KNOWN DIET WORKS for general populace.
What we have here, as usual, is an anecdotal story of one's mans (apparent) success at losing weight. The bookstore is littered with this sort of thing.
As it stands today, if you are fat and want to not be fat, the only scientifically proven method is a fat prison. A place where you are literally locked up and unable to eat.
Thus I say to you, eat what you will and be happy. Diets are often times worse than the effects of the fat.
It's aboslutely appalling that the above post was modded up as informative. From the first sentence to the last, it's filled with half-true statements, and reeks of absurd pseudo-science.
First off: "The body is not designed to burn sugar."
Ugh. Go to the bookstore. Pick up an introductory biology textbook (biochemistry would work too). Find out that, in fact, the preferred source of energy for living organisms is sugar. Can the human body process other compounds for energy? Yes, but you'll find that none of these processes are as efficient as the catalysis of sugar for energy production, and that nearly all are overlooked in favor of glycolysis when glucose is present.
Next: Bacon is easier to burn and digests slowly
First, you have to define "digest," and you have to define "burn." If, by digest, you mean that a chunk of bacon is absorbed by the intestines less rapidly than a chunk of rice, you may or may not be correct. It doesn't matter. What does matter is that the body will absorb these things, and will somehow break these foods down into molecular units it can use. Fat, protein and sugar can all be converted to glucose through molecular pathways of varying efficiency -- this is what is traditionally meant by the "burning" of food.
Now, is bacon really easier to "burn" than rice? No. That's the opposite of the truth, actually. Bacon is muscle, which means that it is mostly protein and fat. And protein digestion is the metabolic pathway of last resort in humans. Thus, the body will (in an average person), digest the fat in the bacon first (and don't forget that, pound for pound, fat contains 9 times the caloric content of sugar!), store whatever it doesn't use as fat, use some of the protein for non-metabolic needs, and, most likely, squirt the rest of the protein out through the kidneys (via the liver). This is why people on extremely-high protein diets tend to have problems with kidney and liver function later in life.
Moving on: "Rice has no fat, so your hormones may get out of balance."
Bzzzt. Wrong again. Let's take another look at that biology 101 textbook: hormones are, by and large, cholesterol derivatives. Testosterone? Cholesterol. Estrogen? Ditto. In fact, you'd be pretty hard-pressed to find an important human hormone that wasn't derived from cholesterol, metabolically. And guess what? Plants have cholesterol too. More than enough for hormone synthesis needs, actually. This fact has been well-known by dieticians and doctors for decades.
So what about this gem: "Rice...is a complex carb, your body is not designed to handle it, so it takes a longer time to burn"
Nope. Compared to the protein or fat in bacon, rice is trivial for the body to "burn". It might take a smidge longer to digest, depending on how it's cooked, but we're not talking nutritionally-important differences here (your body will digest it one way or another). And the suggestion that the human body "is not designed to handle" complex carbohydrates? Utter nonsense. Go spit in a glass. See that? You're looking at a highly efficient mixure of enzymes, designed by evolution specifically for the digestion of complex carbohydrates. Pick up that biology book again...look up "alpha amylase," and you'll see what I mean.
So once we clear away the pseudo-science, what are we left with? Well, we know that protein is burned more slowly than fat, which is burned more slowly than sugars. And carbohydrates are sugars. So there is a bit of truth to your conclusion: when we eat high-protein diets, the body will find other mechanisms to meet it's sugar needs. It will do everything it can to create glucose without digesting protein. Of course, in the real world, no one eats pure protein (and for good reason -- see above), and protein has the nasty habit of coming in animal form, which means that lots of fat comes with it. It doesn't take much fat
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
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I don't buy this complex carb theory. It's not how complex the carb is, it's how quickly it is absorbed, and how good for you the food is. Maltodextrin is a complex carb, but is absorbed the most quickly of any carbohydrate.
Check out the Glycemic Index (GI). If you eat mainly low GI foods, you will generally be less hungry, and your body will have more time to deal with the carbs without turning them into fat.
Eating some fruit every day is great. However if you eat a lot of fruit every day, then it's probably bad for you (e.g. a dozen tangerines).
However, fat is far worse than anything. Avoid fats, they have no nutritional value. Therfore, you should not eat loads of bacon everyday. Eggs, the whites are good for you, the yolks are full of calories and fats. Again, avoid fats.
Nope. Fats are essential for life. A whole egg per day is GOOD for you. (Some early research said otherwise, however it turned out they were using dried eggs, fresh eggs turn out to be ok, and contain vitamins). However you should definitely minimise saturated and hydrogenated fats. Unsaturated should be eaten in moderation, and monounsaturated- eat lots of that.
Meats --- lean meats can provide a great source of long-term energy.
Yeah lean meat is good; fish (particularly oily fish) is as good or better.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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.
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
Just out of curiosity, does your excercise routine involve repeatedly HOLDING DOWN THE SHIFT KEY? Because if it doesn't I wish you'd knock it off.
Hmm, seems like someone either confused "informative" with "funny"... It it true that a lean, muscular person weighs a little bit more than a lean, weak person - but he will still weigh far less than a fat person. And fat is not nutritious. Low-fat food is just as nutitrious as high-fat food, but more healthy because it contains less fat. You eat the same amount of it because your body needs a certain volume to feel full, not because you have to reach a certain fat-content before you can stop eating. If you are too fat you do yourself a real favor by losing weight. Don't look for stupid excuses to stay fat, and don't blame it on the food. Instead eat healthy food, eat at regular times and eat regular portions, don't snack, and move. So here's what to do (and you don't even have to buy an expensive book for these tips!): - buy a bike. Use it for every 10km (that's 6 miles or so) trip you have to make. If necessary, make up imaginary goals for your trips. - Never buy snacks. If they are not in the house no amount of temptation will set you to snacking. Instead buy fruit (preferably fresh, but have some canned fruit ready for emergencies). If the need to snack becomes unbearable, start on the fruit. - When snacking, eat one thing, then wait ten minutes. Ten minutes is the time before the body realizes it has received some food and shuts up about wanting more. You can do ten minutes right? - When buying food, buy stuff that is at least somewhat healthy (no pizza or hamburgers). There is no particular need to minimize fat intake, just eat what you like, but do so at regular times and with moderation (decide what you are going to eat beforehand and do so). - Use some common sense. Disclaimer: it works for me. I'm 32 years old, 1.90m tall and weigh 78kg, and have been like that for pretty much the last 8 years.
Jim Fixx had a genetic proclivity to heart problems. Several of his relatives died very young.
Jogging added about 10-15 years to his life. He also wrote one of the best books about running (for fun and competition) ever written.
But there's a lot of fat-assed idiots out there who can't resist giggling at a potential "Ironic" tag on Fark.com whenever a health nut dies, regardless of what the real facts are.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
OK, good points, but just a caveat, "strong muscle weigh more than fat" makes no sense. 1 lb. of muscle weighs the same as one 1lb of fat. Are you talking about weight per volume? a fit person WILL weigh more for several reasons: fat (per volume) weighs less than muscle AND they will have more muscle, and aerboic execise increases blood volume and therefore water weight. no excuses people, get off your seat and run a little every day.
I can help. Here's what you do, and I promise you it works:
1. Before each meal, drink an entire glass of ice water.
2. Eat your meal slowly and leisurely until full, but not stuffed. Avoid reading or watching TV while eating your meal, because it tends to make you sit there and keep eating, distracted from the fact that you are already full.
3. Drink another full glass of ice water after your meal.
4. Don't snack between meals. Avoid sodas, and consume alchohol in moderation.
5. Weigh yourself every morning, right after you wake up and have that first piss. Record the weight so you can see how it's changing.
6. Try to get out and excercise a little bit more.
7. Fast food like you get at McDonalds or Burger King is expensive and tastes shitty. Quit eating it, and you will be surprised at how much you don't miss it once you are eating real food every day. Insist on sit-down restaurants or home cooking.
8. Don't expect to lose weight any faster than about 5 pounds a month if you are currently very heavy, and slower if you are in pretty good shape.
9. (Most importantly) Don't be religious abotu any of these rules. Live your life and be happy. Go ahead and read a sci-fi novel while scarfing down a Big Mac once in a while. As long as you are mostly eating better and living more healthilly, it's not going to be the end of the world.
Follow all of that, and you will get slim and fit without drastically changing your lifestyle. I have gradually lost more than 60 pounds that way so far. I'm never hungy, even a little bit.
The only reason why you never hear about programs like what I just laid out is because it's too simple and obvious. There's not enough to it to fill up a $50 text, or make into a $20/month program. Here's the thing though: it works.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Don't beleive me? Fine, but don't come crying to me when you have a heart attack and die.
...
I suspect you won't have many of those
Yeah, because I am a living proof the hacker's diet doesn't work.
If the Hacker's Diet spreadsheets are "out of commission", this is news to me. I wrote them and have used them continuously since 1990. The Excel spreadsheets are available in six--count 'em--six versions compatible with every release of Excel from 2.1 through 2002 (Office XP). This is, of course, five more versions than should have been necessary, but the perpetrators of Excel prefer to treat users' investment in macros as a wasting asset rather than capital.
Being a multiple-document Excel spreadsheet, you need to open the main log document from the "Open" menu within Excel rather than clicking on the document icon or using the recent documents menu. Otherwise Excel won't find the associated history database which is cleverly hidden in the very same directory as the main spreadsheet. This "enhancement" first appeared in Excel 5.0 and has never been remedied by any subsequent version. As long as you open the main log from the "Open" menu, everything works fine. The Excel macros are unprotected; you can modify them as you wish.
The Hacker's Diet software tools are also available in a Palm OS edition, which can interchange data with the Excel spreadsheet and/or produce desktop logs in HTML format on any platform which can talk to a PalmOS PDA and run C programs. Complete source code, in the public domain, is available for all of this, either from my site through the link above or via CVS from SourceForge.
"Your body is designed to burn food, not sugar. Food is turned into Glucose, but you arent designed to drink dextrose(sugar). Your body doesnt know what to do with it, so 100 percent of it gets stored as fat unless you are running a marathon and drinking it (gatorade).
Who is teaching you this stuff? Look man, our bodies burn glucose. "Food" is an abstract concept that makes it easier for us to think about what our bodies are doing to the stuff we eat. And, you're wrong -- our bodies do know what to do with glucose when we eat it. That's why we can administer pure dextrose as a drug to treat hypoglycemia. Your body doesn't care where it comes from -- glucose is glcose is glucose.
No one's arguing that all food is converted to glucose, its the speed that matters. Down 500 grams of glucose and have it absorb into your system within seconds, what is the chance that your body will burn 100 percent of it? Oh thats right 0. You will not burn it all and the majority of it will go to fat.
It's not 0, but I'll agree that you're not likely to completely utilize a massive amount of glucose unless you're undergoing some strenuous exercise. That said, you have to make up your mind -- a few sentences from now, you're going to argue that complex carbs are bad, because they absorb slowly. So what is it?
Rice takes forever to burn and digests instantly, its a fucking complex carbohydrate, marathon runners use rice and noodles, starches are high GI and take forever to burn, its equal to drinking a really high quality form of glucose which wont burn off with excercise, good if you want to run a marathon, REALLY BAD IF YOU WANT TO BURN FAT!
Ah, yes. "Proof by louder repetition." A favorite amongst slashdotters.
Why in the world do you think that glucose leads to fat? You still haven't justified this assertion. Your body wants to maintain a constant level of blood glucose -- it will attempt to do this (assuming you're not diabetic), by balancing the release of insulin and glucagon to regulate the uptake and release of glucose from your cells. Now, when you eat, your body converts whatever food it can into glucose, using the most efficient metabolic pathway available to it. Thus, eating results in the addition of glucose to your bloodstream, unless, of course, you choose to eat only fat and/or protein. In that case, you'd better eat a lot less food, because the caloric density of fat is very high, and, as I noted before, a high-protein diet can lead to other nasty things.
Avoid complex carbs as well, they take longer to digest but they take forever to burn
Again, I think you need to go back and think about your definitions, here. Complex carbs take a bit longer to get into the blood, but they're relatively quickly converted into glucose once they're there (complex carbohydrates are nothing more than long-chain polysaccharides, and are easily divided by hydrolysis -- your body does a good job of it). Once hydrolized, they're burned as efficiently as any other glucose molecule in your blood. The "problem" you're referring to is the tendency of the slowly-absorbed carbohydrates to provide a long-term rise in blood glucose levels. And remember, just a few sentences ago, you were arguing that the "quick-burning" simple sugars are bad! So which is it?
really starches have no purpose in the human body, we arent designed for it and thats why it spikes our insulin and then gets stored as bodyfat.
Let me get this straight -- because complex carbohydrates can possibly lead to insulin spikes (though this is far less of a danger than with simple sugars), that means our body "wasn't designed" for them? So, what -- I tell you that those protein supplements the weightlifters use leads to kidney failure, and you're going to tell me that our bodies weren't "designed" for protein? Does it even matter to you that human beings evolved from agrarian populations? That much of our metabolic ma
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
Low-fat food is just as nutitrious as high-fat food, but more healthy because it contains less fat.
That has yet to be confirmed. Fat is not necessarily bad.
You eat the same amount of it because your body needs a certain volume to feel full, not because you have to reach a certain fat-content before you can stop eating.
The parent post was implying that your body eats to obtain a certain amount of *calories* before it feels satisfied (not volume). Since fat packs more calories per pound than any other digestible ingredient, you can eat much less fatty food than low-fat food, and yet be just as sated. Furthermore, most fats have a certain chemical component which when broken down in your stomach makes you feel fuller than you really are.
But take all claims with a grain of salt (especially what the government says about healthy eating - they know less than anyone in the field and even the people in the field aren't sure what the answers are).
See:
Thread on food
Comprehensive NY Times article discussing fat in diet
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
The equation is simple. Burn more calories than you ingest.
Using the same logic, one can treat kidney failure by drinking less fluid - if you drink only as much fluid as you lose, you cant get fluid retention and swell up (as people in kidney and heart failure tend to do).
But the problem with this "black box" analysis of the human body is that it grossly simplifies the idea of metabolism. The body is alot more complex than this, and people are just starting to realise this. Delete a gene from a mouse, and it gets fat, even on the same caloires of a normal mouse. Or give a human some amphetamines and watch them lose weight.
Point is, we didn't spend thousands of years in evolution without developing tight regulation of our metabolism. Thus the problem with simply dieting - for most people, in the long run, it just doesn't work. Because they are fighting their programming. And telling them to eat less than they burn is as useful as telling someone in heart failure to drink less water.
My 2c
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
Been doing low-carb diets (two of them, one twice and one once) for over 3 years now, and I can give folks some useful facts without all of the confusing opinion that everyone wants to throw in:
;-) When you go back to a "normal" diet, you'll find you can gain the weight back very fast (I gained about 90% back)
1. If you simply eliminate 80-90% of the rice, other grains (and products made from them like bread), starchy roots, and sugars from your diet, you will lose weight.
2. Cheating is good. Simply put, if you do the above you pretty much need to cheat in order to maintain some balance in your diet. I recommend a glass of OJ or V8 at least once a week and a bowl of high-fiber cereal once a week (Fiber One has a good fiber/carb ratio).
3. Losing is easy, so is gaining. The problem is that you have to have an exit-plan because after a year of this diet, you may have lost 50 lbs like I did, but you're going to be sick of not eating sandwiches.
4. The Carbohydrate Addicts diet is somewhat less effective, but does give you a major win: dinner.
I started my original diet again and a doctor suggested, for reasons unrelated to weight, that I switch to the CA diet (you can find the book just about anywere, but you don't need it). The diet is simple: even more strict carb reduction with no snacks coupled with a one-hour dinner of whatever the heck you want. The book has some maintenance plans that basically leave you on the diet permanently in a way that is not very difficult live with. The way this diet works is by tricking the body's insulin-release process. By eating low carbs for 2 meals and then limiting yourself to one hour for your "reward dinner", you end up processing that dinner pretty much the same way as you would a low-carb meal.
5. The cold hard truth is that while a low-carb diet will work, excersise still can't be beat. If you get 20 contiguous, minutes or more of sweat-inducing activity in per day, at least 3 days per week, the aerobic benefit is gigantic.
Good luck all!
Yes, but if you are consuming more calories than you're eating, on a regular basis, your metabolism will slow to compensate. The result: you'll be hungry, tired, and won't really lose that much weight. And when you give up on the diet, your slower metabolism will take a while to compensate for increased intake-- so you'll gain your fat back.
Using the same logic, one can treat kidney failure by drinking less fluid - if you drink only as much fluid as you lose, you cant get fluid retention and swell up (as people in kidney and heart failure tend to do).
This is not 100% accurate. In normal mammals in the wild, this would surely be true, but humans do not consume a natural diet. Salt and alcohol are two substances which will cause water retention. Another major culprit is cooked food, as heat damaged proteins cannot be utilized by your body and instead are secreted through your sweat glands as a waste product (same way as certain proteins in onions, giving your sweat a different odor). All protein is hydophobic, thus resulting in water retention in the outer layer of your skin. This results in acne, dry skin, and in many people facial edema.
Delete a gene from a mouse, and it gets fat, even on the same caloires of a normal mouse.
I have heard this before, but there was no such study. The gene in question seemed to involve hunger. The mice in question did consume more calories than the other mice. You cannot magically produce fat from nothing. A glucose molecule or a fatty acid molecule is the same size in an ant, elephant, or mouse. These people were also feeding mice wheat based pellets, ignoring a well known fact that wheat products contain opioid peptides and are addictive. Most likely, the genes had nothing to do with hunger but response to mu-opioid agonists, ie those mice crave opioid drugs more than others. This is also the case with humans. Opioid peptides derived from wheat and dairy products are added to pretty much every junk food. MSG is another addictive substance.
Point is, we didn't spend thousands of years in evolution without developing tight regulation of our metabolism.
There is not tight regulation as you speak, your metabolic activity is supposed to be tightly connected to appetite. Unfortunatley, our shift to a diet of cooked food, wheat, and dairy products has created a situation where people aren't craving the food but the drugs they contain. You have a drug delivery system rich in calories.
Thus the problem with simply dieting - for most people, in the long run, it just doesn't work.
It can easily work, if people eliminate addictive foods from their diet. But to comment on your statement, if what you say is true, then all hope is lost for the human race.
Because they are fighting their programming.
Programming? You mean like genetic programming? It is an absolute myth, plain and simple, that human beings are predisposed to gluttony. It is simply not true. A simple survey of photographs from past would show you that humans today are SICK, and it is not normal. Food has been plentiful in the US for most of its entire existence, yet obesity of the level today simply did not exist in the 19th century and early 20th century. Look at pictures of the beach at Coney Island in 1920 for example, when food was plentiful in NYC. There were no fat people at all.
There are plenty of examples, but the evidence is overwhelming that humans eating a normal western diet are following an addictive behavior pattern, not a normal human one.
I will give you a hint, governments do not want it to become widely known that opioid drugs are found throughout our food supply. It is only a secondary reason that companies add them so that profits increase due to customers eating and buying more of their crap. Governments want opioid drugs in foods because they create contentment in the people. Secondary effects like asthma and constipation are also quite handy in keeping a people from revolting.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
My birthday is coming up (the "big" 3-0, of course) - so I thought it would be in my best interest to have a full physical done. I had an idea that when the blood work came back, there would be hell to pay. I am your typical geek - little in the way of exercise, high fat/high carb food consumption (ie, Jack in the Box and KFC on a weekly basis, lots of home cooked meals like polish sausage and fried potatoes, grilled rib-eye steak, homemade fried pork chops), and worst of all, funky eating habits (no breakfast, no lunch, three helpings at dinner).
That all changed when I got my blood work back the next week, and was prescribed Lipitor for high cholesterol.
Attention all geeks - I cannot stress this enough - if you are overweight and eat like I eat, get your blood work done, and change your habits - before they get to a point where they kill you. It isn't hard to do, and can be a little fun (ok, not much - but it is interesting, to say the least).
Ok, so now I am on Lipitor for the immediate future. As soon as I got my bloodwork back, I was what could be called something like "low-high" range - in that I had more than reccommended total cholesterol (a bit over 200), a lot more of the bad cholesterol, and less than needed (a lot less) of the good cholesterol. I immediately (the night I picked up my prescription) changed my diet and my habits.
1. No more fast food, unless it is a healthy alternative like Subway (no mayo, etc), or some kind of chinese food (chicken and white rice, but the chicken can't be fried).
2. No more fried foods.
3. Eat on a regular basis - I now eat a breakfast, a lunch, and a dinner, all normal size portions - no more triple-helpings at "dinner".
4. Eat more grilled foods - chicken and seafood mainly, every now and then, pork (lean chops). The upside is that I love chicken - I just can't have it fried.
5. Eat more baked foods - lemon-pepper baked salmon and rice - yum!
6. Take a walk on regular basis - I now walk about 1-2 miles every evening after I eat.
7. Park further away from places - this isn't something I always do, but I do more often now - not only do you get a parking space all the time, but you get a bit of exercise as well.
8. No more "sweets" - ie, processed snack cakes, candy bars, etc.
9. Drink less soda - no more 44 oz drinks from Circle K - I drink a lot more water now, I also buy flavored/carbonated water. I also drink a fair amount of soy milk (Silk brand is the best I have found, so far).
10. If you drink milk, go with 1-2%, and where you can stand it, drink soy milk as I noted above - I tend to buy vanilla flavored, and have it with cherrios for my breakfast.
11. Eat more fruit and vegetables - steam your vegatables when/where you can - or roast them, or bake them, or have them raw.
12. When you are full, stop eating - this isn't as hard if you are eating regularly. When I switched to a breakfast/lunch/dinner schedule of eating, I found out I was eating a lot less food, and I filled up quickly.
When you buy food, look for the lowest of everything on the back - however, most of the time you will have to compromise. Typically, if it is low fat, it is high carb - or it will be vice-versa. Rarely will you find foods (especially processed foods) that are "perfect" in all categories. Many foods are actually completely "empty" - they have calories, and that's it - Redi-Whip is like this. What is nice about these is that if you keep your daily calorie count low enough, you can use redi-whip, chocolate syrup, and low-fat vanilla ice cream and have a nice "sweet" that isn't too bad for you.
Eat more fish and seafood - salmon, catfish and others are pretty good eats, prepared right. Just don't dip in batter and fry - bake or grill instead. Grilled pork chops with barbeque sauce are fi
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
One calorie is the amount of heat needed to raise 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius.
Truly ice-cold water is at 0C. Body temperature is 37C. That means that if you drink 250 mL of ice-cold water, it'll take 250*37 = 9250 calories to raise that water to body temperature.
Those are chemist's calories, though, not food calories. A food calorie is one kilocalorie, so in terms of food, drinking a glass of ice-cold water burns about 9 calories. You'd do better to drink the water at your preferred temperature and just take the long way back to your computer from the water cooler.
Well said. Of course, you can't build muscle by just eating protein. So start lifting those 22" trinitron monster monitors!
:-D
Aha! Something we can finally blame the LCD monitor manufacturers for!
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.