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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.
.
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.
"How fricking complicated is it to eat less than you burn?"
Followed by a huge, complicated, wall of text.
I suppose it's THAT complicated!
Here's an easier alternative:
1. Eliminate all sugar (read labels... do not eat anything over 2g of sugar)
2. Eat vegetables (brussel sprouts, celery, broccoli, peppers, onions)
3. Eat fish
4. Eat nuts
5. Eat salad
6. Eggs and bacon for breakfast
7. Drink lots of water, and eat salt as you crave it
Fat is good, protein is good, carbs should be avoided, but if you must eat carbs, eat fresh potatoes.
How fricking complicated is it to eat less than you burn?
It's not complicated, just hard.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)