The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by dpark » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 7:54 PM UTC

jeffyee wrote: post #184

dpark wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your friend was unable to digest at least a thousand calories a day, likely more, and didn’t see fit to mention the endless diarrhea they must have been experiencing? If you’re spewing a thousand undigested calories out of your ass every day, you should know something isn’t right. Also this is still calories in, calories out .

Yes, nobody is disagreeing with physics. But a discussion about weight gain/loss that always has people saying "calories in = calories out" is like a discussion of every business saying "well profit = revenue - expenses". Obvious but not helpful. The interesting thing is discussing how to modify those variables.

The flipside of this is that people generally want to argue endlessly about what are essentially micro optimizations instead of addressing the core issue. Maybe your gut flora are “out of balance”. Maybe your metabolism is a little lower than average. Sure, there are factors that can matter. But if you’re not losing weight you’re not in a caloric deficit. If you’re not gaining weight, you’re not in a caloric surplus (or you’re spewing diarrhea and should talk to a doctor).

Address the core issue first before arguing about minutiae. The emphasis on relatively low impact factors is especially unhelpful and unhealthy because people latch onto all these discussions as justification for why they can’t lose weight. Sure, an obese person might have a low metabolism[1], but if they eat 3500 daily calories and live an entirely sedentary lifestyle, those are probably the major causes.

[1] But they don’t. Study after study have shown that obese individuals have high metabolism because metabolism is tightly correlated with total body mass.

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

#202

Post by taurath » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 7:54 PM UTC

dpark wrote: post #141

taurath wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your bodies absorbsion of nutrients and yes calories is not a system in a vacuum. Nor it’s decision to store excess calories as fat. There’s a wide range of how much different types of foods affect different people. I had a friend who would eat (we counted) 4000 calories a day and couldn’t get over 120lb. Turns out they had a soy allergy and their bodies didn’t absorb the food. Simplifying it to calories in calories…

So your friend was unable to digest at least a thousand calories a day, likely more, and didn’t see fit to mention the endless diarrhea they must have been experiencing? If you’re spewing a thousand undigested calories out of your ass every day, you should know something isn’t right. Also this is still calories in, calories out .

Calories out usually refers to energy expenditure. Nobody measures their waste energy calories.

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

#203

Post by kerkeslager » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 7:56 PM UTC

RobertRoberts wrote: post #137

kerkeslager wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to try to reiterate more clearly what your parent comment was saying: Your experimental methodology is flawed because it fails to control for water loss. This isn't negligible: in the summer when it's hot and I sweat a lot, I can easily drink a 1 liter Nalgene bottle in the morning, about 2 pounds of water. It's likely that what you've measured is simply the slow loss of water through perspiration and exhal…

>Your experimental methodology is flawed because it fails to control for water loss. I absolutely tested for water loss. What I found was that some extra (?) water retained until we sleep. And that something happens with fat or other processing that occurs during sleep. Again, I charted my weight carefully multiple times a day over a month. Carefully testing when weight loss occured. I Recorded my diet as well as my…

A humorous conclusion we can draw from your posts is that if you're losing weight while you sleep and the weight comes out through urine, this must mean you urinate while you sleep. ;)

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

#204

Post by glogla » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 8:00 PM UTC

dpark wrote: post #187

berdon wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone really is different. Vastly different gut flora, vastly different neural connections in the brain, vastly different neural connections in the gut. In fact, the only things that are similar across bodies are their macroscopic qualities and those are arguably the least important.

None of that changes physics. It might change dietary compliance but that’s all.

This might be true in thermodynamic sense but it is a useless and trite statement.

It's like saying "people are in debt because they borrowed money" - true, but banal and trivial, and pretending it's the whole story and saying nothing of medical debt, student loans or living from paycheck to paycheck and payday loans dayloans is only good for feeling better than someone, most likely while pretending that all people in debt are stupid because they buy too many cars and TVs or whatever.

The whole area (both nutrition and debt/poverty) is very complex, especially when looking at whole society. Thinking in simple caricatures, and dismissing people as stupid is helping nobody.

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

#205

Post by dpark » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 8:01 PM UTC

taurath wrote: post #202

dpark wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your friend was unable to digest at least a thousand calories a day, likely more, and didn’t see fit to mention the endless diarrhea they must have been experiencing? If you’re spewing a thousand undigested calories out of your ass every day, you should know something isn’t right. Also this is still calories in, calories out .

Calories out usually refers to energy expenditure. Nobody measures their waste energy calories.

That’s because waste generally doesn’t contain any significant usable calories. If you’re passing undigested food then obviously it starts to matter, as abusers of laxatives know. It’s not typically discussed because it’s not typically a meaningful factor and if it is you should already know.

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

#206

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 8:01 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #51

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 hate to be blunt. But this is as much pseudoscience as the anti vaxers. Losing weight and gaining weight is simple physics. There is also a big difference between losing weight based on water weight and losing real body mass. I sweat like a pig anytime I work out. I use to teach two hour fitness classes and even now after the end of a workout, I’ve “lost 5 pounds” but that’s pure water weight. I’m burning around 10…

[deleted]

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

#207

Post by Reedx » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 8:02 PM UTC

berdon wrote: post #174

dpark wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no panacea for weight loss - everyone is different. You described the panacea: Eat less. If you eat less than you burn, you will lose weight. This effect is so predictable and reliable that taken to its logical conclusion it results in death. We call this starvation. And everyone really isn’t different. The only thing different for most people is what sort of diet they find more tolerable. The fundamentals…

Everyone really is different. Vastly different gut flora, vastly different neural connections in the brain, vastly different neural connections in the gut. In fact, the only things that are similar across bodies are their macroscopic qualities and those are arguably the least important.

Regardless of those differences, people don't become (or remain) obese with a consistent healthy diet.

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

#208

Post by RobertRoberts » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 8:03 PM UTC

outworlder wrote: post #82

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 did tests for weight loss. I found that you don't lose weight until you sleep. What would be the physical mechanism that would account for this? You are probably just measuring hydration + gut contents.

Gut contents were almost irrelevant in my tests. Logically I think this comes down to dehyrdated food weighs very, very little. So in general the weight of food is mostly from water. Therefore, gut contents don't contribute much to weight.

Hydration wasn't the issue, because I weighed myself consistently at regular intervals. And "true weight" (if that is right term) is supposed to be based on morning weight. Well I could compare morning, noon, even and night weight across all days for a month. So I could tell when I weighed at any particular time.

In my experiment I always was my lowest weight in the morning. The normal explanation is "because you pee'd and were dehydrated." Well, then if I stay up all night, don't drink anything extra, and pee in the morning as usual, then I should weigh the same as when I slept?

But that is not what happened. I didn't lose weight. Then i went to sleep, woke, urinated, and then I had lost the expected .5 pounds that afternoon instead.

Again, I only ate one meal a day (at the end of the day, 5pm, so this did not effect the sleep pattern), and I tested for water intake/urination.

I lost on average .5 lbs a day, and that day I didn't lose that weight until after sleeping until the afternoon.

I seem to have stirred up a hornets nest by making this claim, but I was careful about my testing, and it's not a crazy notion.

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

#209

Post by taurath » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 8:05 PM UTC

dpark wrote: post #201

jeffyee wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, nobody is disagreeing with physics. But a discussion about weight gain/loss that always has people saying "calories in = calories out" is like a discussion of every business saying "well profit = revenue - expenses". Obvious but not helpful. The interesting thing is discussing how to modify those variables.

The flipside of this is that people generally want to argue endlessly about what are essentially micro optimizations instead of addressing the core issue. Maybe your gut flora are “out of balance”. Maybe your metabolism is a little lower than average. Sure, there are factors that can matter. But if you’re not losing weight you’re not in a caloric deficit. If you’re not gaining weight, you’re not in a caloric surplus…

I think people cling to their narratives of lazy people like it’s a religion, and ultimately it doesn’t help people lose weight.

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

#210

Post by skygazer » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 8:06 PM UTC

teflodollar wrote: post #189

hoschicz wrote: post #153

I first wrote this as a reply in this thread and now I'm looking at it, I think it's relevant to the article as a whole -- sugar, insulin, calorie reduction, stress, fitness in general. I believe that the "diet" mentioned in the article is in effect a calorie-restriction one. > Losing weight and gaining weight is simple physics. > you are losing weight because you are consuming less calories. This is only true in the…

Excuse me, but this does not make any sense. If somebody stopped losing weight after making progress for six months on the exact same diet, it would only mean that their body is now burning as much as it is consuming, so their intake would need to be reduced again. This is basic thermodynamic stuff. I promise I could lose weight eating nothing but ice cream sprinkled with powdered starch, as long as I could control m…

Yes, what you said is correct. If you could control your appetite, or response to it, you could lose weight on a calorie restricted diet of "fattening" foods.

While I'm not a proponent of Jason Fung or his book, I have read it. From what I recall, where your as-long-as-I-could-control-my-portions diverges from Fung's book is that he believes its nearly impossible for people generally to ignore their appetite in the long run, without correcting the issues that are continually increasing their "set point" and appetite.

He defines your "set point" as your level of secretion and resistance to insulin, which is continually, but slowly, increased by frequent meals, snacking, sweeteners, poor sleep, stress and consumption of mostly processed foods.

He believes insulin levels strongly influence appetite and metabolism. Inject a thin person with insulin, and they will invariably gain weight. Suppress insulin, and people lose weight. He lists studies to that effect.

He rejects calories-in-calories-out, not because it's false, but because it ignores people's inability to ignore their appetite in the long run.

His solution is both correcting the frequent meals, snacking, sweeteners, poor sleep, stress and processed foods. He also advocates fasting, which he claims is safe and reduces chronically high insulin levels better than any other (non-drug) intervention. He provides more studies supporting those assertions.

As to the 6 months, I vaguely remember him mentioning "6 months, or a year" in the contexts of most diet's plateauing effectiveness, but his general thrust was, most diet's don't work in the long run, because they ignore insulin.