Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How do you lose weight?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 54 posts

Re: Ask HN: How do you lose weight?

#41

Post by Cheyana »

True story...after popping a button off my dockers for the third time I said "the heck with this" and decided to skip the fast food for lunch, then I embarked on a simple plan.

No fast food, no soda. I weighed a little over 200 pounds. I went to the supermarket after work and bought vegetables, some kind of meat, and decided to just eat food that I cooked, and only drinking water (mostly) and some fruit juice. Some nights I ate salads with vinaigrette for dinner (big ones) and brought roasted vegetables with chicken breasts to work for lunch.

2 months later (and many comments about how I was looking kinda thin) I weighed myself for the first time since I started. 164 pounds. I lost over 30 pounds in two months.

I gained all of it back eventually and then some, then eventually I stayed away from fast food again, along with getting a little more exercise, and I'm around 184 right now, at 5'8".

Moral of the story for me: Don't eat crap.

Re: Ask HN: How do you lose weight?

#42

Post by fiftyacorn »

swasheck wrote: post #23
fiftyacorn wrote: post #19

myfitnesspal or similar - track what you eat then learn to make trade off's like a sweet at 100cal vs 200cal

what i love about myfitnesspal is how it helps with overall nutrition. it reminds about fats, sodium, carbohydrates, etc.

the hard part is logging a bad day

Re: Ask HN: How do you lose weight?

#43

Post by Chyzwar »

DeBraid wrote: post #27

Eat more plants, especially green ones. Drink a ton of water. Don't eat anything that comes in a box. Some less conventional tips: * no calories from liquid! Water and tea (or black coffee) only. No milk, juice, alcoholic beverages, etc. * skip breakfast. This is a form of intermittent fasting called time-restricted eating. Hard to implement at first (you will be hungry during the morning), but gets easier over time.…

Time-restricted eating is not about skipping breakfast, but to shorten window for eating[0]. In fact if you move your feeding window later in a day it can bring adverse effect.

Ketosis might be harmful[1]. For some people this might be dangerous[2]

There is not such thing as perfect diet, or "trick" that works for everyone. Problem with diets is that long term results are difficult to measure.

[0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4255155/ [1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945587/ [2]http://ajpendo.physiology.org/content/early/2014/01/06/ajpen...

Re: Ask HN: How do you lose weight?

#44

Post by pjbster »

Just decide to do it. You'll work it out. You already know what you need to know - sugar is bad and if it comes in a package it's almost certainly unnatural.

Take a look at http://www.marksdailyapple.com/

If there's one thing you need to hang on to it's this: no matter how starving you feel, you're not going to die if you don't eat something! Your body can go for three weeks and more without you taking in anything more than a few glasses of water each day.

In other words, if you can't eat something natural, don't eat anything at all.

You. Do. Not. Need. That. Snack.

(Personal anecdote: I trained for an ultra endurance event a couple of years back and used to set off on 100-mile rides without eating breakfast first. Once your body adapts, you'll be amazed at how little you actually need to consume to really feel alive.)

Re: Ask HN: How do you lose weight?

#45

Post by csa »

cm2012 wrote: post #39

If its just a few lbs, follow the advice here. Otherwise get bariatric surgery. Every legitimate long term study of non surgical weight loss shows that it doesn't happen for the vast, vast majority of people. 1) ["In controlled settings, participants who remain in weight loss programs usually lose approximately 10% of their weight. However, one third to two thirds of the weight is regained within 1 year, and almost a…

While I like and agree with a lot of your comments, I think it's a bit of an accurate-but-myopic look at the issue.

Most/all of these weight loss programs usually seem to target the byproduct of the problem (being overweight) rather than the actual problem (an unhealthy relationship with calories).

While I have not seen any studies on people who have made "lifestyle changes", my personal anecdata suggests that this type of weight loss is sustainable at a fairly decent yield (not 100%, but not 0.2% either).

I realize that well-done studies like this will be hard to execute, but I hope they get done. In the meantime, I hope that people suggest seeking a lifestyle change (likely including doctors, nutritionists, and psychologists) before they do something drastic like getting gastric bypass surgery.

Re: Ask HN: How do you lose weight?

#46

Post by anant90 »

I'm a 26 year old male living in San Francisco who went from 242 lbs, 32.8 BMI to 168 lbs, 22.8 BMI over the past ~12 months by bringing together weightlifting, running, and the slow-carb diet. And I did this while working on and building my startup. Top lessons that I learnt during the past year:

1. Pick a ridiculously easy workout routine: Losing weight is a confluence of a lot of habit changes. You have to realize that although your entire lifestyle has to change, you cannot do it all in one go. It may take many months of experimentation for you to find your rhythm and get settled into your new lifestyle. But it all starts with picking up a ridiculously easy workout routine. As soon as you start exercising, you automatically want to eat better, sleep better, and in general take care of yourself. It helps if the routine you pick up is so ridiculously easy that it’s almost too hard to come up with an excuse to not follow through. For me, this was the Stronglifts’ 5x5 weight training workout (https://stronglifts.com/5x5/).

2. Pick an audacious fitness goal: I hate doing any cardio in the gym since it usually gets too hot and stuffy for me. Around this time I came across this NYTimes post: How To Start Running (https://www.nytimes.com/well/guides/how-to-start-running), and I cannot thank the author enough for effectively introducing me to a form of cardio that I actually love. In April 2016, I gave myself 4 months to train for the San Francisco Half Marathon held near the end of July. That’s, couch to 13 miles in 4 months. It’s good to have an audacious goal, and it’s absolutely necessary for you to put down that non-refundable fee and make a concrete mental commitment to go through the distance. I like “finishing a long distance race” as a goal since whether you finish or not is very binary and very public. You can’t make excuses, unlike other metrics. Of course, the best cardio workout for you is the one that you actually end up doing. Running outside is the only cardio that I happily look forward to.

3. Compliance, Discipline, Patience: Another thing that I started in parallel in March 2016 was the Slow Carb Diet that a lot of you may have read about somewhere on the web. Tim Ferriss introduced it in his book The 4-Hour Body, and although it’s not radically new, I think Tim’s genius lies in realizing that it is the easiest diet regime to stick to compared to any other low-carb plan. There are a bunch of summaries around the web, but when I read the book a long time ago, I made some notes and put them up here: (https://www.commonlounge.com/discussion/62384879d50b4a8b80bf...). Go read it, and follow it to the letter. This is important. You have to go all in for 6 days a week and make no excuses, or this won’t work. You’ll be tempted to abandon this diet, or abandon getting fit altogether. You’ll hit plateaus every few months, but despite that, I saw a consistent 1.5 lbs per week loss for a whole year.

If you have any questions, I now also run the Fitness community on Commonlounge (https://www.commonlounge.com/community/bf228e76c54c479c92ff0...) (I'm one of the cofounders). If you like this, come say hi and jump in the discussions there.

Re: Ask HN: How do you lose weight?

#47

Post by dugword »

cm2012 wrote: post #39

If its just a few lbs, follow the advice here. Otherwise get bariatric surgery. Every legitimate long term study of non surgical weight loss shows that it doesn't happen for the vast, vast majority of people. 1) ["In controlled settings, participants who remain in weight loss programs usually lose approximately 10% of their weight. However, one third to two thirds of the weight is regained within 1 year, and almost a…

Suggesting surgery is dangerous advice.

The "vast vast majority" of people that regain the weight in those studies are likely to be those who are the most prone to do so, and this can also be interpreted that structured weight-loss programs don't work: http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/25/health/95-regain-lost-weig...

Look AHEAD: 8-year results (nearly 40% of participants who lost >-10% of initial weight at year 1 maintained this loss at year 8): http://www.obesity.org/obesity/news/press-releases/look-ahea...

You are correct, that it is impossible to track your calories everyday, for every meal, for the rest of your life.

If your diet takes work, or requires special foods (e.g. Nutrisystem), you'll eventually stop doing it and it'll fail.

To lose weight you have to make permanent lifestyle changes. Stop eating junk/processed food, rarely eating out, learning to cook, and eating primarily healthy foods.

I know this is anecdotal, but I know a dozen or so people in my life that have made lifestyle changes to their diet have kept the weight off for 10+ years. And they are the vast majority of people I know who have lost a significant amount of weight.

They didn't join any weight loss programs, so I don't know how a researcher would ever find statistics on them.

Re: Ask HN: How do you lose weight?

#48

Post by southbridge »

maxcan wrote: post #22

Lots of good advice here regarding diet and meal tracking with MyFitnessPal. One thing I'd like to add which doesn't get nearly enough attention is _periodization_. If you go on an extended caloric deficit your body will adapt and lower your metabolic rate which result is a small deficit for a given intake and commensurately lower energy levels and activity. So, my advice is to go on a caloric deficit for _at most_ 3…

I would agree with periodization... From what I have seen the current fitness trends are using this as well. Body builders refer to it as 'cutting' and 'bulking' phases FYI.

Re: Ask HN: How do you lose weight?

#49

Post by carlosgg »

Different things work for different people. I lost about 70 pounds over 10 months in 2006-2007, and have mostly kept the weight off so far. I am about 5'9. My strategy consisted of eating a good lunch portion every day: rice and meat (mostly chicken), and some vegetables if possible. It could be Thai or Mexican or Chinese or Indian... Didn't matter, so long as it had a good ration of rice and meat. Make sure it's enough so that you are not dizzy from hunger in the afternoon, but not too much so you don't go back to the desk feeling sleepy. As you are finishing the lunch, before each of the last few bites, ask yourself if you are full. In the evening, I had Lean Cuisine and a banana. LC boxes don't have too much sodium, and a lot of them are actually quite tasty (Swedish Meatballs!). You can get them at Target. I always went for the ones that maximized the proteins/calories ratio, at least 15 g of protein for a 300-calorie box. At home I kept some diet soda (0 calories) around to quelch the "sweet-tooth" cravings. Obviously, lay off the greasy stuff and regular sodas. At the Mexican places, skip those items that appear to be swimming in cheese, and also those "refried" beans and the chips-and-salsa are not good for you. At the Thai places, the rice-with-some-meat items are nice; lay off the pad thai.

Bananas and apples are good because they are so large, they take a while to eat, and don't have too many calories; grapes, raisins, and strawberries are not so good because I can eat like 30 of any of them in one sitting and not even notice. They are all "high-energy-density" foods (a lot of calories in a small volume of food). Not good. Once you get to your target weight you can dispense with the Lean Cuisine.

On days that are particularly stressful you might have to compromise, just don't go overboard. Don't eat like 3,000 calories or something. That's actually pretty important: on the days in which you have to take a break, take a break, not a BREAK. Don't kill your momentum. The hardest part is the first two weeks, when you are getting started. BTW, the body adjusts and tries to conserve energy in that second week, so you might lose little or no weight on Week 2. Maybe don't weigh yourself the second week. Good luck.

Re: Ask HN: How do you lose weight?

#50

Post by anotherevan »

cm2012 wrote: post #39

If its just a few lbs, follow the advice here. Otherwise get bariatric surgery. Every legitimate long term study of non surgical weight loss shows that it doesn't happen for the vast, vast majority of people. 1) ["In controlled settings, participants who remain in weight loss programs usually lose approximately 10% of their weight. However, one third to two thirds of the weight is regained within 1 year, and almost a…

If the issue is obesity (e.g., you need to shed over a third of your current body weight) then I agree that bariatric surgery is definitely an option to consider. The odds really are against you trying to lose that amount of weight via diet and exercise alone at the parent post suggests.

(Considering surgery is certainly a more helpful suggestion then, "Have you tried eating less and moving more?" like they are the first person to ever tell you that. The way different bodies process things is far more nuanced than that, involving so many factors including hormones, age, gut bacteria and heaps of other things, not just will power. The more we discover about nutrition shows how much we don't know about nutrition. End rant.)

From my own personal experience[1] I would consider a gastric bypass or gastric sleeve, but avoid a lapband - all other factors being equal.

Obviously seek competent advice from medical specialists on the matter before doing something irreversible.

[1] http://www.michevan.id.au/content/adventures-in-bariatric-su...

Post reply on HN