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How I Lost 20 Pounds in 20 Weeks With My iPhone (or: Data is King)

chadaustin.me

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Re: How I Lost 20 Pounds in 20 Weeks With My iPhone (or: Data is King)

#41

Post by jerf »

Locke1689 wrote: post #39
kingkongreveng_ wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calorie counting doesn't even work well in the short term. Metabolism drops dramatically at the cellular level on restricted calories. Insulin levels are the key to fat catabolism/anabolism. Calories are secondary. You can get fatter in caloric deficit if you're just eating sugar, or injecting loads of insulin. The value of exercise for weight loss has little to do with burning calories. It's about hormones. Brief, i…

As long as you're not doing anything drastic and your basal metabolism stays fairly constant, reducing your caloric intake works fine. Second law of thermodynamics.

"As long as you're not doing anything drastic and your basal metabolism stays fairly constant, reducing your caloric intake works fine. "

But that's the entire point. Reducing your caloric intake causes your metabolism to drop, for reasons that ought to be fairly obvious if you think about it. If you think about it, it also should become obvious why that's the only possible direction of causality, too.

Re: How I Lost 20 Pounds in 20 Weeks With My iPhone (or: Data is King)

#42

Post by jstevens85 »

kingkongreveng_ wrote: post #15

It's great a calorie counting approach works for this guy, but it has a horrible clinical track record. Dozens of studies conclusively show it does not work in the long run absent focus on the composition of the calories. Even in clinical studies where they control everything the subjects eat it doesn't work. There is good empirical data on how to eat and exercise to get and stay thin. There's no reason to rely on ou…

>Dozens of studies conclusively show it does not work in the long run absent focus on the composition of the calories. Even in clinical studies where they control everything the subjects eat it doesn't work.

If my Internet wasn't capped, I could easily list a dozen academic papers describing clinical studies where subjects lost considerable amounts of weight after being put on low calorie diets. In all of these studies, the addition of regular exercise had a measurable but small affect on weight loss.

Re: How I Lost 20 Pounds in 20 Weeks With My iPhone (or: Data is King)

#43

Post by jrockway »

sophacles wrote: post #40

So calorie counting sounds great. Well not really. See I cook at home. By cook I dont mean "take out of box and put in microwave for specified time", I mean "chop, sautee, bake, stir, etc". If you have ever tried to figure calories from that, you understand why calorie counting sounds like 50-100x more trouble than it's worth.

I don't find it hard to estimate this. Sure, the cow killed to make your steak might be slightly different than every other cow in the world... but probably not. Unprocessed foods often have a predictable nutrition profile.

Re: How I Lost 20 Pounds in 20 Weeks With My iPhone (or: Data is King)

#44

Post by lg »

kingkongreveng_ wrote: post #28
dboyd wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The empirical data that I've read and used was to... - count calories, and ensure that I maintain a calorie deficit (which is the only way to burn body fat). - eat frequently, to reduce hunger and maintain an optimum metabolic rate. - brief bouts of difficult exercise (3x30 minutes of anaerobic and 3x30 minutes of aerobic exercise a week) (the on an empty stomach part isn't very helpful). - but, first and foremost, s…

> eat frequently The human body is made to run off a gas tank of fat reserves, not to be tethered to an extension cord of continuous eating. Eating every couple hours is historically impossible, and just on that basis one can reason it's likely maladaptive. You eat a proper meal, insulin levels spike to put the energy in fat and glycogen, insulin levels drop, then you switch over to running on the fat and glycogen. Y…

Eating every couple hours is not historically impossible. The gatherer end of the hunter-gatherer duo usually do not have to search far for food. You don't need to guess at this, we have records of how the !kung san lived and continue to live.

Besides, people get really hungry if they don't eat for long stretches between meals, what to do about that? Turns out if you have a couple pieces of fresh fruit, every couple hours, it will suppress the hunger and you also won't gain fat. This is because the body handles the sugar differently than more complex sugars, and also because fresh fruit is more filling than a calorically-equivalent ball of white rice. Our primate cousins like the chimps are mostly-frugivores too, by the by.

Re: How I Lost 20 Pounds in 20 Weeks With My iPhone (or: Data is King)

#45

Post by jrockway »

iterationx wrote: post #26

My personal trainer said that weight lifting is better than aerobics because it elevates your metabolism for 36 hours whereas running will only elevate it for 4 hours. Also after my weight training session on Thursday my heart rate monitor / calorie counter unit said I burned 800 calories in an hour so I believe the guy.

I don't really trust the calorie measurements from heart-rate monitors. I have mine "calibrated" appropriately and I sometimes hit 1300 calories in an hour and a half on my bike. Yeah right...

Re: How I Lost 20 Pounds in 20 Weeks With My iPhone (or: Data is King)

#46

Post by chadaustin »

sophacles wrote: post #40

So calorie counting sounds great. Well not really. See I cook at home. By cook I dont mean "take out of box and put in microwave for specified time", I mean "chop, sautee, bake, stir, etc". If you have ever tried to figure calories from that, you understand why calorie counting sounds like 50-100x more trouble than it's worth.

You'd be surprised. After a couple weeks of obsessively counting calories and ingredients you get really good at estimating the caloric value of food. It's not hard to look at a sandwich and say "Oh, about 800." And if you're plus or minus 100, who cares? You don't have to be perfect, just show continued weight loss.

Re: How I Lost 20 Pounds in 20 Weeks With My iPhone (or: Data is King)

#47

Post by chadaustin »

bedris wrote: post #24

"If you vigorously lifted weights for an hour, you’d only burn ~400 calories, less than a single cheeseburger! You’d have to keep that up every single day without increasing your diet to lose a less than a pound per week. I decided it’s easier to simply eat less." What he is missing here is that lifting weights is anabolic and re-building damaged muscles from weight lifting takes lots of calories. Therefore, your met…

"This guy doesn't seem to know very much about physiology or metabolism..."

Exactly! With a bit of effort and really no impact to my life schedule, I reversed a weight gain trend. I very well could have lifted regularly or gone running, but I didn't want to.

Re: How I Lost 20 Pounds in 20 Weeks With My iPhone (or: Data is King)

#48

Post by kingkongreveng_ »

lg wrote: post #44
kingkongreveng_ wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> eat frequently The human body is made to run off a gas tank of fat reserves, not to be tethered to an extension cord of continuous eating. Eating every couple hours is historically impossible, and just on that basis one can reason it's likely maladaptive. You eat a proper meal, insulin levels spike to put the energy in fat and glycogen, insulin levels drop, then you switch over to running on the fat and glycogen. Y…

Eating every couple hours is not historically impossible. The gatherer end of the hunter-gatherer duo usually do not have to search far for food. You don't need to guess at this, we have records of how the !kung san lived and continue to live. Besides, people get really hungry if they don't eat for long stretches between meals, what to do about that? Turns out if you have a couple pieces of fresh fruit, every couple…

> people get really hungry if they don't eat for long stretches between meals

If you follow garbage diet advice and eat a bran muffin, banana, and skim milk, yeah, you'll be starving two hours after eating. For breakfast I had four eggs scrambled in butter and full fat yogurt with blueberries. I'm just getting hungry now, 12 hours later.

> the hunter-gatherer duo usually do not have to search far for food

Are you kidding? They walk miles and miles.

> !kung san

I don't think the san illustrate your point, but in any case they are a bad model. They are stunted and generally unhealthy, scraping by on marginal desert land. They were forced off the good land. There really aren't any representative modern day hunter gatherers. There are only historical accounts.

Re: How I Lost 20 Pounds in 20 Weeks With My iPhone (or: Data is King)

#49

Post by [deleted] »

jrockway wrote: post #45
iterationx wrote: post #26

My personal trainer said that weight lifting is better than aerobics because it elevates your metabolism for 36 hours whereas running will only elevate it for 4 hours. Also after my weight training session on Thursday my heart rate monitor / calorie counter unit said I burned 800 calories in an hour so I believe the guy.

I don't really trust the calorie measurements from heart-rate monitors. I have mine "calibrated" appropriately and I sometimes hit 1300 calories in an hour and a half on my bike. Yeah right...

[deleted]

Re: How I Lost 20 Pounds in 20 Weeks With My iPhone (or: Data is King)

#50

Post by Locke1689 »

jerf wrote: post #41
Locke1689 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you're not doing anything drastic and your basal metabolism stays fairly constant, reducing your caloric intake works fine. Second law of thermodynamics.

"As long as you're not doing anything drastic and your basal metabolism stays fairly constant, reducing your caloric intake works fine. " But that's the entire point. Reducing your caloric intake causes your metabolism to drop, for reasons that ought to be fairly obvious if you think about it. If you think about it, it also should become obvious why that's the only possible direction of causality, too.

It doesn't necessarily cause your basal metabolism to drop. I just confirmed this with two physicians and a nutrition student.
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