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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.
I did it by eliminating extra sugar. Doc warned me I was pushing hte pre-diabetic stage with my morning blood sugar.
No more sweet tea, coke, or adding sugar to my coffee. Sucked for about a week, after that, no problems, and I've dropped 30lbs with no real effort other than breaking the sugar habit in that first week.
Quit smoking 2 weeks ago, we'll see how that part goes and if I end up gaining weight back ('cause food will taste better, supposedly, or maybe just noshing as a replacement for having a smoke ... so far hasn't happened)
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Another thing is to eat slower. Put your knife and fork down between mouthfulls.
Eat well.
Exercice
Everything else is plain wishful thinking.
How fricking complicated is it to eat less than you burn?
Calories and Macros
Basic Terminology
1/ BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate): The amount of calories you need to consume to maintain if you were comatose (base level).
2/ NEAT (Non-Exercise Associated Thermogenesis): The calorie of daily activity that is NOT exercise (eg: washing, walking, talking, shopping, working). ie: INCIDENTAL EXERCISE! It is something that everyone has a good amount of control over.
3/ EAT (Exercise Associated Thermogenesis): The calorie requirements associated with planned exercise. Unless someone is doing a whole heap of exercise (eg: two or more hrs training a day) it usually doesn't add a stack of calories to your requirements (30 minutes of 'elliptical training' isn't going to burn 6000 cals)
4/ TEF (Thermic effect of feeding): The calorie expenditure associated with eating. This is NOT dependent on MEAL FREQUENCY. It is a % of TOTAL CALORIES CONSUMED (and 15% of 3 x 600 cal meals is the same as 15% of 6 x 300 cal meals). It varies according to MACRONUTRIENT and FIBER content. For most mixed diets, it is something around 15%. Protein is higher (up to 25%), carbs are variable (between 5-25%), and fats are low (usually less than 5%). So more protein, more carbs, and more fiber = HIGHER TEF. More FAT = LOWER TEF.
5/ TEE (Total Energy Expenditure): The total calories you require. It = sum of the above (BMR + NEAT + EAT + TEF).
To make things simple, NEAT + EAT + TEF is often just calculated through a daily ACTIVITY FACTOR.
How much do I Need?
A multitude of things impact MAINTENANCE calorie needs.
- Age & sex (males generally need > females)
- Total weight & lean mass (more lean mass = more needed)
- Physiological status (eg: sick or injured, pregnant, growth')
- Hormones
- Exercise level (more activity = more needed)
- Daily activity level (more activity = more needed)
- Diet (that is - macronutrient intake)
In order to calculate your requirements the most accurate measure is Calorimetry [the measure of 'chemical reactions' in your body & the heat produced by these reactions], either directly (via a calorimeter where the heat you produce is measured) or indirectly (eg: HOOD studies where they monitor how much oxygen you use/ carbon dioxide and nitrogen you excrete over a given time). But these are completely impractical for most people & we rely on pre-set formula to calculate our needs.
Estimating Requirements
The simplest method uses a standard 'calories per unit weight (usually kgs)'. They calculate a TOTAL CAL REQUIREMENT (TEE). That means you DO NOT need to x by an ACTIVITY FACTOR. They are:
- 26 to 30 kcals/kg/day for normal, healthy individuals with sedentary lifestyles doing little physical activity [12.0-14 kcal/pound]
- 31 to 37 kcal/kg/day for those involved in light to moderate activity 3-5 x a week with moderately active lifestyles [14-16 kcal/ pound]
- 38 to 40 kcals/kg/day for those involved in vigorous activity and highly active jobs [16-18 kcal/ pound].
For those involved in HEAVY training (eg: athletes) - the demand is greater:
- 41 to 50 kcals/kg/day for those involved in moderate to heavy training (for example: 15-20 hrs/ week training) [18.5-22 kcal/ pound]
- 50 or above kcals/kg/day for those involved in heavy to extreme training [> 22 kcal/ pound]
THEN - There are also other formula which calculate BMR. For these you then ADD AN ACTIVITY FACTOR TO REACH TEE. These are:
1/ Harris-Benedict formula: Very inaccurate & derived from studies on LEAN, YOUNG, ACTIVE males in 1919. Notorious for OVERESTIMATING requirements, especially in the overweight. DON'T USE IT!
MEN: BMR = 66 + [13.7 x weight (kg)] + [5 x height (cm)] - [6.76 x age (years)]
WOMEN: BMR = 655 + [9.6 x weight (kg)] + [1.8 x height (cm)] - [4.7 x age (years)]
2/Mifflin-St Jeor: Developed in the 1990s and more realistic in todays settings. Still doesn't cons
.
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.
Wow! The guy ate less calories, and he lost weight!
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
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.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Was I the only one who went to his site hoping for an Arduino mod for my dyson that will turn it into a liposuction machine?
I realize that randomized, controlled trials in peer-reviewed journals may not be the whole, final truth, but this is a nice catalog of everything that you can argue over.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
Myths, Presumptions, and Facts about Obesity
Krista Casazza, Kevin R. Fontaine, Arne Astrup, et al.
N Engl J Med 2013; 368:446-454. January 31, 2013. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMsa1208051 [FREE]
Results. We identified seven obesity-related myths concerning the effects of small sustained increases in energy intake or expenditure, establishment of realistic goals for weight loss, rapid weight loss, weight-loss readiness, physical-education classes, breast-feeding, and energy expended during sexual activity. We also identified six presumptions about the purported effects of regularly eating breakfast, early childhood experiences, eating fruits and vegetables, weight cycling, snacking, and the built (i.e., human-made) environment. Finally, we identified nine evidence-supported facts that are relevant for the formulation of sound public health, policy, or clinical recommendations.
My Fitness Pay is a great "Food log" which was told I should use 25 years ago when I first started noticing the "behind the desk" effect. I still play sports constantly but the weight gain was huge.
I lost 50+ lbs on MyfitnessPal. I didn't need to eat the crappy "whey" and other tasteless stuff. I chose to eat a bowl of cereal in the morning, low cal lunch (100-200 cals from a frozen quick meal) and I would eat a big dinner. Big dinner? Steak and Potato with a Salad at Outback. All that under the calorie limit to sit sedentary and lose 1.5 lbs a week.
When I stopped Myfitnesspal, I gained weight. Its a simple equation: Get a real Food Diary and use it.
Now, to get that my fitness pal back on track.
Oh, and avoid Diet Drinks. This guy mentions he ate high protein to make sure he burned FAT but diet drinks just make you crave food. I really think high protein foods = less sugar = less cravings. Thus the steaks are much better than burgers effect for losing weight. They stay in you longer and are half the calories.
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
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.
The best way to lose weight is to burn more calories than you consume. One problem is that it is really easy in our society to consume calories. You just ate a plate of whole wheat pasta with veggies. Healthy right? No, because you likely had about 3 servings of pasta.
I used MyFitnessPal to help me track my calorie intake. One helpful feature is the bar code scanner. You can scan almost any product and get the nutritional information right into your mobile device. I dropped about 20 pounds while using that.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
To (miss)quote Mark Twain: Nothing is easier than loosing 70 pounds, I've done it several times ;-).
Original quote: http://www.goodreads.com/quote...
Loosing weight is always easy, not picking it up again is the hard part.
You need very little fat. You can cut most of it out and not have any problems (besides hunger).
Well aside from rabbit starvation if you go too low and the fact that your testosterone production will drop through the floor, but hey who needs to feel good anyways?
Eat less.
Not losing weight?
Eat less.
Still not losing weight.
Eat less.
Granted, you still want to be having a mix of foods and not just less "burgers and only burgers 24/7", but it's a pretty simple rule to follow.
So long as you're eating a mix, you won't veer into malnutrition like this unless you ACTUALLY have a medical problem that requires constant treatment.
Of every person I ever see who diets, or who over-exercises in order to compensate, etc. I'm always just shocked that - rather than follow some faddy diet that's complicated and expensive and has all sorts of problems with it - they don't think to weigh what they eat over the course of a week and eat less the next week.
Different kinds of fatty acids also also needed as essential building blocks for all kinds of stuff the body needs. Carbs are just for energy.
I've lost over 45 pounds and kept it off for over three years so far. And best of all, I didn't do it by starving myself.
I've considered myself overweight for most of my adult and childhood life. Oddly enough, I had always been fairly athletic, and exercised regularly throughout my life. I had strong willpower. But I just couldn't seem to keep weight off.
I lost my weight by signing up for weight watchers online. Weight watchers online is a program that allows you to conveniently keep track of the food you eat. All of it. I don't think weight watchers is magic; instead, I think the process of making eating a deliberate and measured action is what helped me. I like numbers. I can do numbers.
What I found by recording everything I ate is that a small number of foods accounted for a large amount of calories. Beef, fries, bread, snacks. I've largely eliminated these foods from my diet. It's not that I can't eat them, I just don't feel that the value is high enough for the calories to eat them a lot. I was able to decrease the number of calories I ate without starving myself by eating smart. The other benefit of recording food is that there are some replacement foods that are significantly healthier. For me, I started snacking more on pretzels, which I found a lot more filling, but contained less calories than many of the other snacks I ate.
After about a year, I stopped using weight watchers. I had internalized most of the good behaviors, and no longer needed to record everything I ate. I continued to lose weight, slowly but steadily. Eventually I stopped at a healthy weight, and I feel great. Over time, even though I was never starving myself, I started eating higher calorie foods and exercising more regularly to offset it. On that note, for burning calories, exercising longer and with lower intensity is better than short, intense workouts. I like to use the elliptical; I can exercise for 90 minutes without killing myself, and burn over 1000 calories. I've found that playing video games at the same time really distracts me from the act of exercising, and even makes it enjoyable.
If you're skeptical, and think you know enough about dieting to not record everything, think again. There are simply too many surprises. Go to your favorite restuarant's website and look at the nutrition information. I used to go to Chili's quite often. I haven't been there for a long time. I don't know how they cook their food, but it's insanely high in calories. Even seemingly safe foods like salad can be high in calories depending on the dressing. The opposite is true as well. Some fast food, like KFC, can be very low in calories (although probably bad for other reasons). Over time, you'll learn what fills you up and doesn't have a ton of calories. If you just start "eating less" without any data, you'll still be eating the same inefficient foods, and you'll probably gain your weight back after you can't take it anymore.
Stop using Keurig. I had one, and while I really liked the ease with which I could make a coffee, I decided it was too expensive for the quality of coffee produced. Also, I'm not a big fan of the amount of waste it produces. I got an Aeropress and I'm very happy with my coffee now. It's cheap, tastes good, and produces no garbage. I can use any coffee I want. Clean up is a little more time consuming than with Keurig, but it doesn't really take that much effort.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The flip side of the question is "Why are skinny people not fat?".
It's a more interesting question than you may think. One bit of semi-famous research is the 1970s Vermont 'prisoner overfeeding study' (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5Rv8JnFgw4). Like bits of Nazi science, this is probably irreproducible, as it'd *never* get past a human subject review committee today.
A number of lifetime-normal-weight prisoners were fed substantially over their basal metabolic needs for an extended period. Their input was rigorously controlled (being prisoners), and their exercise regimen was pretty easy to monitor and control. Most of them gained weight, but almost none of them nearly as much as the standard "3500 kCal is a pound of fat" Standard Model would predict. Several plateaued on weight gain, and a few lucky (?) prisoners were *never* able gain 10% of their body weight when eating nearly 10,000 Calories a day. Simply couldn't do it.
A lot of people are overeating in the western culture. A lot more that, by the numbers, should be in the 300-pound range. And while there are no shortage of very-very-fat people, they're not nearly as common as they should be if you study individual diet patterns. This is part of the problem. People look at their skinny friends' diets, and some of those skinny friends are like the luckier Vermont prisoners.
Well, at least, changing the bacterial flora to make him crave for healthy foods would have been a hack. What the guy did is not a hack in any way.
Dr Atkins died because he slipped on an icy sidewalk outside of his New York City office. He later died while in a coma. While in the coma he suffered from swelling. His autopsy shows he had heart damage. This is the headline most people have heard. The full story is that he had heart damage as a young man and the corner did note there was heart damage, but did not attribute it to his diet.
vi +
One way to passively burn more energy that I don't see mentioned enough is to simply lower the ambient temperature (and don't add more clothing). Staying in a cooler room (or not using a heavy blanket when sleeping, etc) can use a significant amount of extra energy. Sleeping humans use between 20 and 80 kCal/hour, depending on ambient temperature, blankets, etc. (80-20)*8=480kCal potential burn, per night of sleep. Over the course of a week that's 3360kCal, or nearly a pound of body fat's worth of energy. Use your basal metabolic rate to burn more energy by staying in cooler environments.
Not a sentence!