Ask YC: How do you lose weight?

I have often heard the exact opposite advice: eat smaller meals and have more between meal snacks, though obviously with a focus on healthy snacks.

Why do you find this to be a more effective approach?

From what I read and experienced over time there are some conclusions to be drawn:

1. Most diets are short-medium term, and for long term they're inefficient or (if at least one study is to be believed) even detrimental.

2. Excercise does help. The single most efficient thing you can do, with long term results and no side-effects is to build up your muscle mass. Aerob (resistance) exercise helps too, but I'm not sure yet how much.

3. Meta-diets are more efficient. Instead of following a certain diet, make long-term smaller changes to the way you eat. A few things you can try:

- Add more variety. That's btw what all the doctors say: a balanced diet is a healthy diet.

- Switch starting/stopping a meal from external cues to internal cues. Eat when you're hungry, not when you are offered food or the favorite show is on. Stop eating when you're full, not when the plate is empty. If you can, don't do anything when eating, like watching tv or reading. Hurts the above-mentioned internal cues.

- Don't base your diet on willpower. Willpower is a limited commodity, and it's best kept for other things (really, it's cognitive science).

A good way of combining all of the above is to plan what you're going to eat, but not from a diet standpoint but from a gourmand one. Eat only delicious food. Eat whatever you feel like at the moment. Enjoy eating. By that i don't men stuff yourself with the same hamburgers all the time, but cook your own food and actively search new eating places and foods.

The exercise plan involved a lot of balance, stretching and unconventional weight training. For instance, rather than just pumping iron, the trainer had me do things like stand on a wobbly platform and lift "kettlebells."

Prior to getting fat, I was relatively athletic and went to the gym regularly. I would use the treadmill and lift weights. The new training methods my trainer introduced were much more effective than what I was doing on my own, and I'm now much stronger and more flexible than I ever have been in the past.

I highly recommend this approach if you are serious about getting into shape. Look for a trainer who is into balance, flexibility, "core fitness" and who knows something about nutrition. Most hackers I know are very DIY-independent and are skeptical about hiring someone to help them achieve goals. I am this way, but I found that having a trainer really helped me much more than I was able to achieve on my own.

Once I knew I'd be using the treadmill long-term, I bought a Nordic Track A2350 treadmill online, along with a 4-year extended warranty (added to the year that's already included). There is little chance the treadmill will actually last through 5 years of 5-8h daily usage, so I expect to get my value out of the extended warranty. The whole thing cost about $950 delivered. Far less than a treadmill that's actually built to tolerate this sort of long-term usage.