I hope you see my comment I am late to the game. Try my diet called the half and half. Make your plate of food and take a second plate and split everything exactly 50/50 on to the second plate. Now eat your first plate. Now you have to wait half and hour and if you are still hungry go back to the second plate. I promise you it will help you lose weight. No rules that say you can’t eat anything but by waiting half an hour you will find often you get busy or your stomach catches up and you don’t go back. Not long after your stomach will decrease in size and your meals will get smaller and smaller. I lost 50lbs with this diet. The only other rule is if you are feeling full stop eating don’t just say oh it’s only one more bit and eat it just toss it. Small bites add up so if full stop.
Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
711–720 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#712Lift weights two or three times per week, and walk just barely enough to avoid being completely sedentary. Nothing crazy, I'm talking about using the weight machines at a gym, and walking just ~8k steps per day with a pedometer watch to gamify it. I'm a naturally obese person, and I've read a thousand of these threads over the years. Nearly every comment is either: * Telling you to "hack your body", with keto or what…
I also prefer 2-3 lifts per week for health, but it amplifies my already prodigious appetite to rediculous levels. I can and have eaten 6000kcal in a sitting. I usually end up gaining fat when I start lifting and haven't ever managed a cut. I always lose weight by not lifting and restricting calories. Right now the intermittent fasting is working well for me. I'm curious how that will work when I start lifting again.
As someone who can easily eat 4000 calories of real food in a single meal before feeling satiated, I have found that the fix for me is psychological and behavioral. I have an internalized belief that unless I carry on eating until I feel satisfied, then I will feel hungry and uncomfortable after the meal. However, this is not actually true - if I instead eat a reasonable sized portion for my height and activity level, then wait an hour, I do feel satisfied and comfortable. So the trick for me has just been mentally challenging that internalized belief that I need to eat until I feel full. If I just eat, stop, and wait, I feel great.
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#713Stop Drinking Calories. No alcohol, no soda, no fruit juice. This is by far the easiest way to lose weight.
Bonus: You don't need to eat what's in front of you. My family looks weirdly at me because I remove half the bread from a sandwich where the bread is too large. You don't have eat anything, you don't have to waste your caloric budget on "bad carbs".
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#714Earlier quoted context omitted.
> hack your body This seems a bit of a straw-man. Almost nobody who's telling you to be more healthy will tell you to eat better without also telling you to exercise more. Also, it's not "hack your body " it's actually "hack your brain " or, more specifically, hack hunger . That's also why there's so many different diets - everyone's different, and what works for one person won't work for another person. But there ar…
Exercise is important, but the befits taper off rapidly. A little exercise goes a long way, but more isn't incrementally better. People need to stop referring to such a goal as weight loss, as what they are really talking about is fat loss. Pro tip; if you want to lose weight most rapidly then don't eat! That works for 100% of people, as we are highly adapted to survive short periods of famine. What we are not adapte…
Yeah, but then you lose muscle mass and reduce your MBR, so when you start eating again, you'll put it all back on. Losing fat takes a long time and is a result of changing one's eating habits day after day after day.
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#715My hack for OMAD IF: skip breakfast and workout at lunch. Exercise killed the feeling of being hungry and I could easily make it to dinner with just 1 small plain yogurt snack (50 cal) at lunch.
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#716Lift weights two or three times per week, and walk just barely enough to avoid being completely sedentary. Nothing crazy, I'm talking about using the weight machines at a gym, and walking just ~8k steps per day with a pedometer watch to gamify it. I'm a naturally obese person, and I've read a thousand of these threads over the years. Nearly every comment is either: * Telling you to "hack your body", with keto or what…
To add to that, if going out to the gym is by itself challenging, I'd consider getting just the basic hardware that you need to lift at home. I've been doing that for over 10 years, and while I recognize that being around other people has an added in terms of motivations, the accessibility of having all I need at home is one of the things that I think enabled me to persist.
I would not recommend anyone to follow this advice for some exercises without practicing a good form to avoid injuries.
In terms of hardware, what I have is really basic:
* 2x Dumbbell bars
* 1x Barbell bar
* 1x Easy (W) barbell bar (I don't often use it anymore)
* Plates in total weight of 130 KG (286 pounds). I'd start with only as many plate as needed to accommodate for your 1-rep max of either squat or dead-lift (you don't really need to have as much weight as you'll need for your 1RM but it provides a good buffer so that you don't need to acquire extra plates every week for quite some time)
* 2x home made makeshifts stands for squat (this part can be risky and I'd not advise it whoeheartedly. It is also why I avoid anything more than 250 lbs squats and opt for 8-10 reps instead of 4-6)
* CCF pad + foam roller (I use the roller instead of a bench-press bench)
If you have the budget and mostly the room for that, I'd get a real bench and a squat rack/cage, but the reason I made those choices is mostly to save on space. All of the above can easily be deployed and removed from sight.
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#717Weight loss is a very personal thing, to fix your weight you need to correct where you are not doing so well.
I don't eat that much but am super sedentary, so for me increasing exercise does more than eating less.
If you need to eat less keto style diets are good for brain hacking yourself in to being less hungry. I am not suggesting going full keto just reduce refined sugar, whole fruit is still cool.
If you need to exercise more, start slow. Pick a routine (I like reddit's r/bodyweightfitness recommended routine). Just do the warm up for a week, then add the rest. Start the routine on a weekend when you have more time to do it slowly and figure things out. Then work it in to your daily routine, until it is just something you do like brushing your teeth.
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#718Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nearly everyone always says to also combine a diet with exercise, but there's been a shift recently toward noticing that exercise energy budgets largely come out of the rest of your day for people who aren't primarily athletes[0]. Additionally, for many people, doing a little exercise on top of the normal day makes one ravenous, although I get that some people report a decrease in appetite as you did. Google[1] finds…
I typically need 40 minutes of "intentional" walking per day (i.e. two laps around my subdivision) to supplement my "incidental" walking (i.e. going from the bedroom to kitchen to bathroom). I'm highly skeptical that anyone needs a trip to the gym to walk . It's walking !
Spoken like a person whose never experienced -20f weather. I’m teasing not looking for a “weather off”.
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#719Lift weights two or three times per week, and walk just barely enough to avoid being completely sedentary. Nothing crazy, I'm talking about using the weight machines at a gym, and walking just ~8k steps per day with a pedometer watch to gamify it. I'm a naturally obese person, and I've read a thousand of these threads over the years. Nearly every comment is either: * Telling you to "hack your body", with keto or what…
You're so right.
> * Telling you to "just eat well and exercise". Which is about as useful as telling drug addicts to "just stop using drugs",
I like to liken it to telling poor people that overcoming debt and becoming wealthy is a matter of spending less money than you earn. True and useless!
> 1. Exercise helps you eat well
I've noticed this as well.
Also: I'd like to be proven wrong on this, but I believe the point of exercise that builds muscle is that it increases your energy costs at rest. Muscles are expensive, or we wouldn't lose them. They're pretty useful otherwise! I can't see this fact anywhere though. Is that stupid? So obvious to everyone that nobody even mentions it?
So yeah, do you even lift?
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#720Lift weights two or three times per week, and walk just barely enough to avoid being completely sedentary. Nothing crazy, I'm talking about using the weight machines at a gym, and walking just ~8k steps per day with a pedometer watch to gamify it. I'm a naturally obese person, and I've read a thousand of these threads over the years. Nearly every comment is either: * Telling you to "hack your body", with keto or what…
As I posted in the intermittent fasting thread (which has never worked for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30627290), fitbit was for me the game changer.
I've always lifted weights + cardio for exercise. Fitbit allows me to see that cardio >> weight lifting for calorie burn. Even the idea that "muscle burns more calories that fat" is a red herring because muscle burns about 4 calories per day per pound than fat. How much muscle fiber can someone build in a year? The most Arnold Schwarzenegger ever built was 25 pounds. That's full time professional with all the additives. Most 25 year old men can build maybe 8-10 pounds. Congratulations, you're burning half an Oreo cookie more per day.
Another thing that surprised me is how much more effective low-to-medium intensity exercise is that high intensity- for burning calories. Yes, even including the "afterburn." Now to be clear, the per minute burn of high intensity is more while doing it, but you can't maintain it (by definition of "high intensity"). So if you can do some light aerobics for 40 minutes you will burn more calories than a 20 minute High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) workout. At least according to fitbit.
Also, at nearly 60 years old, by basal metabolic burn rate (according to online calculators, so YMMV) is only about 225 calories per day. At my weight that is like a 30-40 walk. That result surprised the crap out of me.
So: You make your most percentage gains simply by getting off the couch and walking. For me I go from about 1.25 kCal/min to 5 kCal/minute. Add some light intensity you can add 40% or more (calculated from the new burn rate; for me, 7 kCal/min). Increase the intensity and I can get to something approaching double that (12-13 kCal/min for me). The HIIT workout averages lower for me because I usually do 30 sec on and 30 sec off, and my recovery is decent.