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How to lose weight: What worked for me, with graphs

danieltenner.com

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Re: How to lose weight: What worked for me, with graphs

#21

Post by noodle »

amock wrote: post #6
noodle wrote: post #4

i think he discounted a step: exercise. if you don't, you'll lose some weight, sure, but if you remain sedentary, you won't see that big of a difference. it doesn't even have to be much to start, just walk more. i also would discourage the "skip dinner" plan. i think you'll find you'll have better results if you do eat SOMEthing for dinner. it could just be some of the low calorie foods he mentions, but just to have…

He explicitly mentions not exercising to reduce your hunger and because he and other sources he cited don't think it helps. If you track your weight every day then you can try different eating schedules for a week or so and see which on works best. I know people who ate three small meals every day and lost weight easily, while I found that either one or two meals a day worked well as long as I ate at least 2200 Calor…

no, he misreads or misattributes the the findings of the sources. for example, from one of his sources:

> But few people, an overwhelming body of research shows, achieve significant weight loss with exercise alone, not without changing their eating habits.

exercise alone is what is in question. but we aren't discussing exercise alone. we're discussing exercise within the context of a fairly major diet change.

Re: How to lose weight: What worked for me, with graphs

#22

Post by tcskeptic »

swombat wrote: post #18
zyb09 wrote: post #14

I didn’t try the crazy diets like Atkins or the Maple Syrup diet. Anything that requires eating crazy stuff is probably bad for your health. Now I'm starting to feel like an Atkins Zeolot, I've been defending low-carb on HN so much lately, but I can't let a statement like that sit on itself! There's tons of scientific evidence for Atkins and everybody I talked to that investigated it, agrees. Furthermore "eating less…

If you read the appendix, you'll see that I do recommend staying away from processed sugars and other assorted white-bread-and-white-rice. In my third iteration, I'm also tending to avoid the starchy stuff most of the time (not always though). In the first two, though, I happily ate a sandwich for lunch and potatoes for breakfast, and still lost plenty of both weight and fat. I won't get into a debate about Atkins. I…

OK, so don't get into a debate about it, but I would like to point out that extreme is relative. From an evolutionary perspective (i.e. What we naked apes evolved to eat...) I would argue that a standard american diet is FAR more extereme than an atkins diet (at least one that avoids fake low-carb foods) based around meat, green plants, many kinds of fruit, and nuts.

Re: How to lose weight: What worked for me, with graphs

#23

Post by jules »

> You’ll notice this plan says nothing of exercise. That’s because you don’t need to exercise to lose weight. In my case, I’ve found that exercise, by stimulating hunger, actually makes it harder to eat less. Whereas the weighing and charting generates motivation, exercise sucks it away. In the context of a healthy lifestyle, of course, exercise is very important. I just don’t think it’s that helpful for weight loss. Some notable publications agree with me.

Here's another data point: I lost 3kg when I started running. It was not my intention to lose weight at all, it just happened. In my experience running makes you eat less, I had to make a conscious effort to eat more.

Re: How to lose weight: What worked for me, with graphs

#24

Post by briancooley »

zyb09 wrote: post #14

I didn’t try the crazy diets like Atkins or the Maple Syrup diet. Anything that requires eating crazy stuff is probably bad for your health. Now I'm starting to feel like an Atkins Zeolot, I've been defending low-carb on HN so much lately, but I can't let a statement like that sit on itself! There's tons of scientific evidence for Atkins and everybody I talked to that investigated it, agrees. Furthermore "eating less…

The simple fact is that most people dramatically reduce sugar intake when dieting. That alone is likely to shift their insulin balance in a favorable direction.

Weighing daily and graphing simply promote awareness and can be motivating.

One of the things that makes low-carb believers like myself seem like crackpots is our unwillingness to acknowledge that moderate carb consumption can be a reasonable diet because we believe it to be suboptimal.

For the average individual, simply eliminating most dietary sugar and refined carbohydrates would generate enough significant weight loss and health benefits to encourage them to maintain such a diet (which is likely to be more varied and interesting than a strict low carb diet) for long periods of time.

Re: How to lose weight: What worked for me, with graphs

#25

Post by dkarl »

Interesting ideas and great detail to back it up. I'd like to insert my 2 cents, which is that people have widely varying experiences using exercise for weight loss. In my case, exercise suppresses my appetite. My overeating is mood-driven, and exercise is known to improve mood, so this isn't surprising. Anyone whose overeating is driven by depression (mild or serious) or another mood disorder should consider regulating their mood through exercise.

Re: How to lose weight: What worked for me, with graphs

#26

Post by swombat »

zavulon wrote: post #20
radu_floricica wrote: post #11

I really like the main idea: it's a willpower management issue, not a diet issue. A lot of stuff is approached differently if you think about it this way, especially in the light of studies who found out willpower is a finite resource, which is replenished easiest by... eating.

I actually completely disagree with this main idea. Everybody eventually gives up, no one has 100% steel willpower, we're all human. I would be very interested to see and update in a year or so, to see if the author has managed to keep the weight off. A much better idea is to change your diet completely, so your taste buds change and you stop craving unhealthy things. A wrote a similar article 3 years ago, and took a…

The first graph is from 2.5 years ago.

I have regained weight only when I stopped weighing/charting. Weighing yourself once a day is not an onerous expenditure of time and energy, and I believe it achieves the goal of faking "100% steel willpower" by generating a little willpower for you every day.

Re: How to lose weight: What worked for me, with graphs

#27

Post by frossie »

I’ve gone through this “diet” three times (see graphs). The first time I went from 83kg to 75.5kg over about 3 months. The second time, from 80kg to 71kg over 4 months. My latest iteration of this diet has me down from 75kg to 68.5kg in about 2 months.

Note how each time the starting weight is over the last ending weight? And this is the problem, right there. It is not hard to find an eating regime that will help you lose weight. That's the easy part. The hard part for many is not gaining weight when you are not "manning the store", so to speak.

Re: How to lose weight: What worked for me, with graphs

#28

Post by klous »

jules wrote: post #19

How does one determine body fat percentage? This seems like a really hard problem to me. How do body fat percentage scales work?

The scales use electrical current to measure your body's resistance and compute it based on your weight. Using a fat caliper where you take multiple points of measure tend to give more comparable measurements.

Re: How to lose weight: What worked for me, with graphs

#29

Post by MikeCapone »

tcskeptic wrote: post #22
swombat wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the appendix, you'll see that I do recommend staying away from processed sugars and other assorted white-bread-and-white-rice. In my third iteration, I'm also tending to avoid the starchy stuff most of the time (not always though). In the first two, though, I happily ate a sandwich for lunch and potatoes for breakfast, and still lost plenty of both weight and fat. I won't get into a debate about Atkins. I…

OK, so don't get into a debate about it, but I would like to point out that extreme is relative. From an evolutionary perspective (i.e. What we naked apes evolved to eat...) I would argue that a standard american diet is FAR more extereme than an atkins diet (at least one that avoids fake low-carb foods) based around meat, green plants, many kinds of fruit, and nuts.

Indeed. For those wanting to learn (a lot) more about this, with references to all the studies, check out Gary Taubes's book Good Calories, Bad Calories.
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