Hacking Weight Loss: What I Learned Losing 30 Pounds

reifman writes The CDC reports that 69% of adult Americans are overweight or obese. Techies like us are at increased risk because of our sedentary lifestyles. Perhaps you even scoffed at Neilsen's recent finding that some Americans spend only 11 hours daily of screen time. Over the last nine months, I've lost 30 pounds and learned a lot about hacking weight loss and I did it without fad diets, step trackers, running or going paleo. No such discussion is complete without a link to the Hacker Diet.

Comments

Move more, eat less

[Anonymous Coward]

Another thing is to eat slower. Put your knife and fork down between mouthfulls.

Re:Move more, eat less

[Austerity Empowers]

As far as I'm concerned this is the real problem. Most meals come with way, way more calories than you should have, particularly if you're eating any form of take-out. To the point where you may be eating two days of food in one sitting, and not really even realize it. I looked at one meal at a restaurant my wife likes, and calculated 4500 calories. We like to laugh at the imgur photos with the fat person and 5 buckets of KFC, but this particular meal did not look nearly so gluttonous.

Eat slowly, take drinks, but if you clean your plate like mom asked then you just ate 2 days worth of food in one sitting and probably didn't even realize it (and will be hungry in a few hours, depending on how starchy it all was). I've lost 50 lbs by just packing my own food 19/21 meals a week (and actually eating 3x a day, which goes to OPs point about spacing things out a bit, which does help). Not only does it save a ton of money, it takes the pounds off.

Take-out has a dilemma, in that labor and rent is a high cost to them, so they tend to give you too much food which is relatively cheap in the US to make you feel like you got your money's worth. But what we really need is half that amount of food, spaced better through the day.

Not a diet, but a lifestyle change

[QuietLagoon]

If you "go on a diet" you are defeated before you even start.

.
If you want to lose weight, you have to go into the process with the goal of changing your lifestyle permanently, otherwise the weight will return when you finish the diet.

Go into the weight loss process with the right mindset - a permanent change of what and how you eat, along with any changes in your activity regimen.

The reason most people regain the wieght they lose on a diet is that they view a diet as something temporary, which it is.

Don't go on a diet (Hacker's Diet or otherwise), but do make a permanent change to your lifestyle.

Re:Not a diet, but a lifestyle change

[itzly]

Don't go on a diet (Hacker's Diet or otherwise), but do make a permanent change to your lifestyle.

In other words: go on a diet, but never quit.

Re:It's simple. Eat less and eat less crap

[TheRealMindChild]

East less calories? Gotcha.

The problem isn't so much "too many calories" consumed, but that the sedimentary lifestyle people are accustomed doesn't require even close to the 2000 calorie "standard diet". If you drive to work, sit behind a desk all day, go home and even do mundane, unimpactful chores, like vacuuming and wiping things down, and average person would be lucky to need maybe 1200-1300 calories as their TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure). Even drinking nothing but water, and consuming mostly calorie empty foods like lettuce/salad, you still need your macronutrients, which when adding carbs and fat now will take you to your quite low TDEE with very little food/effort.

Re:Eat less than you burn

[itzly]

How fricking complicated is it to eat less than you burn?

It's not complicated, just hard.

Re:Eat less than you burn

[Anonymous Coward]

How fricking complicated is it to eat less than you burn?
 
Obviously it is more involved or you wouldn't have felt the need to go into a damn-near novel length dissertation that included (GASP!) numbers and talk about such concepts as protein intake...
 
Seriously, if you think you have it all figured out with a simple sentence then good on you. Some of us know that it's not as simple as taking in less than you expel. The point isn't just to lose weight but to do it in a controlled fashion that also provides good nutrition. If it was as simple as taking in less and putting out more then most people would just lose weight by drinking water and eating celery. Any lunkhead knows that isn't going to work. So, no, it's not that simple and you know that.
 
Now stop being a snide, rude jackass about it.

Re:Common sense

[danbob999]

Neither was one called "Salad" or "Tofu".

Hacking?

[jdharm]

You didn't hack crap. You just acted like a reasonable person and not a mindless sedentary eating machine. That's like walking and saying you "hacked sitting" to get you from point A to point B.

Re:eliminate extra sugar

[losfromla]

I would note that the guy who dies at 65 with a Bic Mac in hand appears to be happier than the guy who dies at 82 on a treadmill sweating his bloody ass off.

Really? Some fat guy with high cholesterol, a non-functioning penis, out of breath from walking from his car to McDonalds looks happier than the 82 year old who has a fully functioning body and still wears out his old lady? Besides, he's likely to die instead while running outside on a bright sunshiny day or harvesting in his garden. Even if he is in the gym, he died while doing what he wanted to do and outlived the 65 year old fattie by almost 20 years, win!

Re:Eat less than you burn

[bill_mcgonigle]

How fricking complicated is it to eat less than you burn?

It's way more complicated than you make it out to be. You're offering the very best advice 1983 had to offer.

Until you factor in the rates of digestion, the enzyme production rate of the individual, the hormone response of the individual, and the freaking liver and pancreas, not to mention the brain which mediates the whole thing, the very best you can offer is an order-of-magnitude estimate. There aren't seven billion different metabolisms out there, but there is at least an n-by-m matrix of them for every variability in the human metabolic system.

This is why so many people fail even at strict calorie-counting diets. Humans are NOT bomb calorimeters! Say it again and again until it sinks in.

For Pete's sake, there are leptin-resistent people who can put weight on at 500 calories a day.

Until we have mastered DNA analysis on this to genotype individuals, cutting out simple and refined carbohydrates is at least a way to claw back the worst of the modern diet, and avoid big swings in the leptin/ghrelin/insulin feedback systems - most people eat because they are hungry.