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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

#31

Post by swombat »

frossie wrote: post #27

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…

Yep. The simple method I've found to deal with this is to keep on weighing myself every day. I can eat all sorts of crap, as long as I keep weighing myself.

There's a lengthy period of time which I haven't typed in the data for where I just weighed myself every day. I still managed to keep the weight off when I did that. The minute I stopped weighing myself, though, the weight piled back on.

A daily ritual of stepping on a scale seems a small price to pay for not needing to worry about weight gain, though.

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

#32

Post by swombat »

patrickryan wrote: post #30

I'd suggest not weighing yourself everyday, but every week at the same time of day. This is because each day your body weight varies from water weight lost and gained. So one day you may be a few lbs. more than usual, which can be discouraging.

It's not discouraging if you graph it too, so that you can see it in perspective.

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

#33

Post by briancooley »

jessriedel wrote: post #9

He says, as I've heard, that those body fat scales are wildly inaccurate. But it looks like the variance is less than a percentage point, which seems really good to me. I guess it's more of an issue of a constant error? EDIT: Yea, I guess it is probably a constant (person-specific) error. The first google result said >Use [the scales] to measure your progress only. Don't compare your body fat percentage to tables or…

Yes, they vary widely. If you control for certain variables, they can give you decent directional information.

One of the biggest factors in the accuracy of the older Tanita brand scales (this is the brand I have had for many years) is your hydration. For example, if you weigh right when you get out of the shower (even toweled dry), your reported body fat will be much lower than your reported body fat before the shower.

They are also sensitive to callouses on your feet.

My brother reports much more consistent results with a handheld body fat analyzer, but I've never tried one on a consistent basis.

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

#34

Post by sev »

I tried the fruitarian diet recently and lost 8 pounds in 2 weeks. Of course, how much you lose is highly dependent upon your current weight and body fat %.

The fruitarian diet is where you only eat fruits and vegetables and drink water and 100% pure juices. Avocados have the protein you need, and you can do without starch for 2 weeks.

It really cleanses your body and leaves you feeling great! I'd suggest doing a fruitarian diet once every few months for cleansing purposes.

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

#35

Post by nickelplate »

daeken wrote: post #2

I'm planning on following this pretty closely soon. I've lost a lot of weight over the last couple of years (somewhere around 130lbs, starting at nearly 400lbs), but it's been largely due to cutting out soda and simply getting off my arse. Now I'm walking 3mi every other day or so, and the next step is to figure out what to eat to maximize my energy while keeping my weight on a downward trend, and I think that having…

Wow congrats man, and good luck!

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

#36

Post by zavulon »

swombat wrote: post #26
zavulon wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For me, weighing myself has little to do with helping willpower - I still get days where I just feel like gorging on whatever's available in the fridge, willpower be damned. And I think the trick is to get yourself to a point where you don't need willpower at all - just a habit to eat healthy.

But - if it works for you, that's awesome. I definitely don't want to discourage you from what you're doing if it works. It looks like you have a lot of willpower, much more than I or most people I know do, so just keep doing it.

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

#38

Post by erikstarck »

As I suppose many of the people here do, I have a long list of pet projects that I plan to one day finish.

One of them is lineardiet.com.

The idea is simple. You just enter your current weight (C) and your desired weight (D). The service then plots you a graph with a line from weight C to weight D. The Y axis is the weight and the X axis is time.

Now you have to weigh yourself every day.

If you are above the line it's BROCCOLI DAY (as in: watch what you eat).

If you are below the line it's PIZZA DAY (as in: eat whatever you like).

That's it. It's guaranteed to work! :)

Could be a fun little service. Business model? I plan to collect all the fat people are losing and sell it as eco-fuel. ;) No, not really. It's just for fun.

Now if I only didn't have a ton of other projects like this plus a life to lead... one day...

Actually, I leave this as a question to the HN community: what would be fastest way for me to finish this service? I'm talking hours of development time, not days.

How would you build it?

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

#39

Post by runjake »

sev wrote: post #34

I tried the fruitarian diet recently and lost 8 pounds in 2 weeks. Of course, how much you lose is highly dependent upon your current weight and body fat %. The fruitarian diet is where you only eat fruits and vegetables and drink water and 100% pure juices. Avocados have the protein you need, and you can do without starch for 2 weeks. It really cleanses your body and leaves you feeling great! I'd suggest doing a fru…

People might want to integrate brewer's yeast with this kind of diet, which will provide you with much-needed B12. It's great on popcorn.

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

#40

Post by goodness »

frossie wrote: post #27

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…

This is actually where exercise can come in to play. The author is right that recent research says that exercise is not necessarily the most effective way to lose weight. However, there is evidence that exercise can help you maintain your weight.

So if you backslide a bit and stop watching what you eat, you can still help yourself out by exercising.

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