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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

#251

Post by cheald »

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…

> Then, the body increases its base metabolic rate and adjusts to the new food intake level.

This is a fairly pernicious half-truth, even among fitness types, which is used to explain away much more than it should. It has some truth to it, but people use it way too easily to handwave away differences in intake. It's true that the metabolism adjusts, but that adjustment is slow and limited. The gap between "slow metabolism" and "fast metabolism" people is only a few hundred calories/day at the extremes. Your body isn't going to suddenly start burning an extra 1k calories/day.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4535334/

In this study, they found that the RMR for women varied between 0.721-0.926 kcal/kg/hr (1730-2222 kcal/day @ 100kg), men varied between 0.791-0.969 kcal/kg/hr (1898-2325 kcal/day @100kg).

That is, if you're the slowest of "slow metabolism" people, you pretty much just need to deny yourself a single box of M&Ms to match the net energy expenditure of the fastest of the "fast metabolism" people. Hitting average is even easier.

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

#252

Post by ebg13 »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #208
outworlder wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It is a crazy notion and you weren't careful about your testing. So far it sounds like you didn't actually measure the weight of your consumption and excretion. You just assumed they stayed constant. You also assume other things like that you pee the same volume after sleeping as after not sleeping.

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

#253

Post by partialrecall »

taurath wrote: post #209
dpark wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most people aren't fat because they're lazy. Most people are fat because they eat too much. We have a culture that glorifies food, junkfood more than the rest. Overeating when eating junkfood is absurdly easy. Teaching people how to eat healthier and eat less is the best known way to help people lose weight.

Constantly talking about genetic predispositions, obscure metabolism suppressing viruses or gut flora does about jack shit to help people lose weight.

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

#254

Post by 4b11b4 »

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.

Even if this is true, you still wouldn't have any muscle mass, which is a key signal for your body to regenerate.

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

#255

Post by RobertRoberts »

scarface74 wrote: post #126
RobertRoberts wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am just reporting on real data I collected and asked a question. What are you suggesting is "pseudoscience" that I said? I agree that not eating is what caused weight loss more than anything else. But, I have found that solid waste is not where I lost weight, but through urine. And I mean weight loss as in fat, not water.

“Data” based on a sample set of 1 that can easily be explained by known phenomena? Did you measure your body fat percentage daily?

I understand that it's on me to prove my methodology, not expect you to assume I did it right. That is fair.

The data is multiple points of weight recorded every day (4 times a day) over a month, with a follow up a few years continued observance based on the results. Also, daily exercise and daily diet were documented as well (during the month of testing).

Granted, I did not measure "fat" with calipers or other methods, but I measured my waist (though I did not document this, my failure), where I lost my fat from. Sure, not perfect. But it's enough to prove _something_ was happening. I went from 202 down to 185 lbs. And my pants didn't fit properly half way through, and were baggy by the end.

I think it's fair that "explained phenomena" here, with one meal a day, 2 miles (up to 3 by the end) of running (8 minute miles avg. by the end) and slimming waist, limbs and neck was evidence of 15+ lbs of fat loss, not dehydration.

Science doesn't have to be perfect to demonstrate worth or value in a concept.

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

#256

Post by Dylan16807 »

scarface74 wrote: post #133
berdon wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how I could have made that any clearer. I included (show correlation) specifically for that very reason.

But not causation and still didn’t explain whether that could be explained by the standard CICO equation.

CICO is a copout. Calories in is relatively simple. Calories out is hideously complex. When people describe weird things that metabolism does, real or fake, they're things that shift the Calories Out numbers way beyond the simple results you get from body composition and exercise level.

There are so many separate ways for calories to go "out", too.

So it gets used in this unfair double-standard way, where managing weight is "just CICO", as if it's a handful of inputs into a one-line equation, but if someone argues against that, saying it's more complex, then the natural response is "well actually CICO includes every single complication you've mentioned, so you're wrong to object".

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

#257

Post by berdon »

bena wrote: post #230
partialrecall wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was not my intention to strawman you. I apologize for misreading your intent.

Don't apologize. Regardless of his intent, he claimed "I've lost weight eating 900 calories/day and I've lost weight eating 3500 calories/day with the same level of exercise. The difference was the 900 were carbs, the 3500 was >90% protein" And if you're not trying to refute CICO, you better make damn clear that even though you're ingesting 3500 calories, you're essentially just crapping out most of it because our bo…

Wording is hard.

I've tracked calories for >10 years and macros for >5 years. And, at the time I spoke about, I was taking in protein continuously and meticulously tracking ingestion rate and time and estimating digested and excreted protein levels. But, even still, obviously I was shitting out most of it.

I actually do believe and advocate for CICO for most people. But I reject notions that anything related to the body is black, white, or simple and hold strongly to them as convictions. I tried to provide examples to those points with the last as an example that the C in CICO is a sneaky misnomer and better served as being an E. It's just that in the general case for most people E averages into C.

I do agree with you on the apology - it's the internet, no one expects an apology and if you do you're insane. Furthermore, I wasn't offended and was only pointing out the rhetorical tactic being employed.

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

#258

Post by mtreis86 »

RandallBrown wrote: post #101
omginternets wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Losing weight and gaining weight is simple physics I assume you're referring to the "energy in" vs "energy out" meme in weight-loss. The body is not a closed system. While you _do_ have to balance your chemical equations for glucose catabolysis (or whatever), weight loss is far from a "simple physics" problem.

If you eat 500 calories and burn 600 calories, the energy has to come from somewhere . So in a sense it is actually a pretty simple physics problem. It gets tricky because calculating calorie consumption is really hard (how much of what you ate was actually turned into energy) and calculating calorie expenditure is probably even harder.

You're not counting the amount of energy gained through o2 and released as co2. That changes the calculation.

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

#259

Post by partialrecall »

bscphil wrote: post #245
partialrecall wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CO may be difficult for a person to manipulate, and raising CI to put on weight may be physically difficult, expensive, or ineffective. However, reducing CI takes willpower but will make you lose weight. If you reduce it enough. Somebody may have a CO so low that the reduction in CI required to lose weight might require medical supervision (e.g. to prevent malnutrition.) That's probably not the case for most people t…

> However, reducing CI takes willpower but will make you lose weight. If you reduce it enough. Somebody may have a CO so low that the reduction in CI required to lose weight might require medical supervision (e.g. to prevent malnutrition.) That's probably not the case for most people though; certainly not people like myself. Yes, this is exactly my point. I'm simply giving a measured defense of what berdon has been s…

Then I think berdon's concerns are misprioritized. It's very rare for the necessary reduction in CI to require medical supervision. The overwhelming majority of obese people in America are eating more than is reasonable to eat, and a reduction in consumption would improve their lives considerably with no real risk of malnutrition occurring.

By focusing on obscure edge-cases, all we're really doing is to make it easier for people in the common case to rationalize away their situation. That's very common. There are more voluntary overeaters who claim they have an involuntary obesity-inducing disorder than there are people who actually have such disorders. I've got a whole family full of them. A big bowl of ice cream after every meal is a choice, not a genetic condition.

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

#260

Post by driverdan »

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.

Weighing yourself multiple times a day is just tracking noise. It's not a large enough time interval to track tissue loss.
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