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The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

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Re: The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

#21

Post by RobertRoberts »

sbmthakur wrote: post #10
RobertRoberts wrote: post #9

I did tests for weight loss. I found that you don't lose weight until you sleep. (stay up all night and weigh your self repeatedly, in the morning, no loss, but after you sleep and wake, your weight goes back to "morning weight") I found that if you don't sleep well, you don't lose as much. If you eat too late before going to bed, you don't lose as much. If you adjust your diet (however you want is my experience) to…

Lack of sleep pretty much affects every system in the body. Metabolism being no exception. Mathew Walker covers this in detail in Why we sleep .

Sure, but I found something more specific.

I tracked weight loss for a month. Eating only one meal a day. I recorded multiple times a day my weight. Only in the morning did I actually record any "loss".

So, I did some tests for this. I stayed up all night to see if I lost weight in the morning like every other day, but I didn't.

I slept, woke up in the afternoon, and I had lost .5 pounds from the previous day.

Something special happens during sleep that is unrelated to a general concept of metabolism, but instead a specific process. It's like some kind of processing the bodies does that is related to weight loss/waste management that does not occur at all (or maybe only a little?) when you are awake. (my amateur assessment)

Re: The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

#22

Post by oarabbus_ »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #9

I did tests for weight loss. I found that you don't lose weight until you sleep. (stay up all night and weigh your self repeatedly, in the morning, no loss, but after you sleep and wake, your weight goes back to "morning weight") I found that if you don't sleep well, you don't lose as much. If you eat too late before going to bed, you don't lose as much. If you adjust your diet (however you want is my experience) to…

>I found that you don't lose weight until you sleep.

You may just not notice it until you wake up, but you can certainly lose weight during the day if you aren't eating and you are exerting yourself physically.

Re: The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

#23

Post by oarabbus_ »

Ensorceled wrote: post #17
brandonmenc wrote: post #7

> Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament Citation, please. I see him making this claim in a number of articles and talks, but am having trouble finding an experiment verifying this.

Anecdotally, I’ve run marathons and half-marathons and would compare calorie burn to a competitive MtG tourney.

Anecdotally, I don't believe that for half a second.

Re: The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

#24

Post by oarabbus_ »

rajacombinator wrote: post #4
snazz wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article? It’s about diet, exercise, and the energy burnt playing chess.

Did you read between the lines? The article is indeed about those things, but they’re almost certainly BS.

Since we're on the topic of making things up not described in the article, I think it's secret gastric bypass surgeries the competitors are undergoing, not amphetamines.

Re: The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

#25

Post by achenatx »

I was 175 and have been trying to lose 5 pounds for 8 years. In the last 2 months Ive lost 10 pounds. I hit as high as 180

I started doing brazilian jiu jitsu about 7 hours/week. My body was sore for the first 1 month. I also did a low carb diet (moderate adherence)

Keto generally reduces my hunger so I would skip dinner because the exercise would kill my appetite. I would then not be hungry until lunch the next day. This ended up turning into intermittent fasting.

I hit 170 after about 1.5 months which was a huge milestone. The intermittent fasting was really easy (which was strange) to the point where I am only eating 0 or once every 24 hours. This last week I started losing about .4-.5 pounds/day and so I lost another 4 pounds in the last week.

I believe it was the keto which kills hunger spikes, the massive exercise in the evening which killed nighttime eating which transitioned me into fasting.

If you had asked me if a year ago if I could easily not eat for two days I would have said no way. Once your body is burning fat, then it is easy.

Re: The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

#26

Post by aluminussoma »

kensai wrote: post #13
aluminussoma wrote: post #5

I track my vital metrics religiously. Last week, I interviewed at three companies who have intensive technical interviews (Dropbox, Google, Apple). The morning after the second interview, at Google which was intensive, I was my lowest weight ever in several years (dropped three to four pounds from five days before) I gained the weight back after a week. But it was interesting to observe the physiological effects from…

You were probably forgetting to drink enough. Okkam’s razor.

I guarantee you I was hydrated. Maybe over hydrated. I went through about 12 fl oz of water an hour, maybe more (I brought my own water bottle).

Re: The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

#27

Post by riazrizvi »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #9

I did tests for weight loss. I found that you don't lose weight until you sleep. (stay up all night and weigh your self repeatedly, in the morning, no loss, but after you sleep and wake, your weight goes back to "morning weight") I found that if you don't sleep well, you don't lose as much. If you eat too late before going to bed, you don't lose as much. If you adjust your diet (however you want is my experience) to…

The difference in the grandmaster situation is that their extreme focus on chess completely displaces their hunger, hunger which needs real estate in your attention to be effective, just like any other felt sensation. And this focus lasts for the majority of the tournament, months. This is different to most people. When you have an immersive job you can get in the zone for many hours of the day, but you do stop working, and your hunger returns.

The closest thing I ever experienced to what they are describing was when I played the game Civilization for the first time in ‘93. I was so obsessed I played it for three days straight, night and day, before I took my first nap. The fluid drained from body, I looked like a skeleton with black holes for eyes. I also did not eat, I remember literally running to the store to get a single can of coke otherwise I just drank water from the bathroom faucet because it was next to my room. Within five days I had easily lost a couple of pounds of bodyfat.

Having played chess competitively throughout school, it’s no surprise chess Grandmasters have this total level of focus in tournaments.

Re: The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

#28

Post by balfirevic »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #19
specialp wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is more of the effect of not eating or drinking for ~8 hours. 1 pint of water weighs around 500g. Also the average human exhales 1kg of CO2 a day which about a quarter of that is carbon weight. You will lose weight if you do not drink or eat for 8 hours awake. "Morning weight" == fasted and somewhat dehydrated weight.

>"Morning weight" == fasted and somewhat dehydrated weight. I was tracking weight loss over time, so it's not just water loss. I tracked weight multiple times a day to see when weight loss actually happens. If it was simple dehydration then sleeping would be irrelevant, but sleep is when something is processed, an action occurs that expels the waste/water.

Wait.. Where does the weight go? Apart from water - sweated and breathed out, which you say isn't all that's happening.

Re: The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

#29

Post by gms »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #9

I did tests for weight loss. I found that you don't lose weight until you sleep. (stay up all night and weigh your self repeatedly, in the morning, no loss, but after you sleep and wake, your weight goes back to "morning weight") I found that if you don't sleep well, you don't lose as much. If you eat too late before going to bed, you don't lose as much. If you adjust your diet (however you want is my experience) to…

This is very interesting; thanks for sharing your experiments!

Re: The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

#30

Post by radlad »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #19
specialp wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is more of the effect of not eating or drinking for ~8 hours. 1 pint of water weighs around 500g. Also the average human exhales 1kg of CO2 a day which about a quarter of that is carbon weight. You will lose weight if you do not drink or eat for 8 hours awake. "Morning weight" == fasted and somewhat dehydrated weight.

>"Morning weight" == fasted and somewhat dehydrated weight. I was tracking weight loss over time, so it's not just water loss. I tracked weight multiple times a day to see when weight loss actually happens. If it was simple dehydration then sleeping would be irrelevant, but sleep is when something is processed, an action occurs that expels the waste/water.

You can lose "true" weight during the day, while still gaining enough weight from food/water to offset the previous night's fasting and weight loss.

In other words, it's not that you don't lose weight until you sleep: it's that you can't differentiate whether you have net lost weight or gained weight until you have similar conditions of measurement.

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