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How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how

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Re: How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how

#151

Post by unclebucknasty »

dalmaer wrote: post #51
unclebucknasty wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I read the article, I became pleasantly surprised at how it evolved into a story about a guy learning to live a more holistic life vs just one of losing weight. I think that evolution was the author's journey, and it was what he was trying to communicate by recounting it for us.

Thank you. This is not a post from a diet guru trying to sell anything. This is a personal story about how one change is leading to a mindset change. The details of labeling a diet are not the point. Thanks for seeing a bigger picture.

Absolutely. I encourage and am encouraged by anyone who is on a quest for personal development. That you additionally chose to share your story (including your struggles) in such detail was an act of generosity. I appreciate the many references, novel insights, and opportunities for my own self-reflection.

Continued success to you.

Re: How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how

#152

Post by vmarsy »

Proleps wrote: post #121
vmarsy wrote: post #78

Interesting post, the author can be proud. Not being from the united states, and now living there since one year , here is my 2 cent , I think these are the most important points of the post and my own advices: - Drink water only, no soda, even diet coke and whatnot. - Avoid sugars (I'd say especially high corn fructose syrup). - Eat vegetables, cooked in good olive oil in a pan, it's really good. I don't know about…

> no soda, even diet coke and whatnot. Why?, there are a lot of diet sodas that do not contain any calories. > Avoid too salty food (preprocessed food will be too salty.) Why, salt doesn't contain any calories. Going on a diet is very hard in the first place, giving up these two things doesn't seem to make much sense. It will only make a difficult lifestyle change even more difficult.

I use salt in almost every meal, but not too much, It would be stupid not to put salt in the water when cooking pasta for example.

Everything in too high quantities is bad anyway.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2013/03/24/study-ea... It's not affecting your weight, but your overall health.

Also salty food makes you thirsty, so as toble commented, you will drink more diet coke that will makes you more hungry.

I think a glass of iced tea (even with a little bit of cane sugar to remove bitterness) is better than a diet coke. I can't prove why, every people in good shape I know don't drink diet soda. Just try and see is my best advice !

Re: How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how

#153

Post by celeryreally »

voidlogic wrote: post #142
cwzwarich wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Examples: The Kimchi I had with lunch was 15 calories, the half bag of russels sprout I had last night (excluding the oil oil cooked in) 130 calories. I'm not one of the downvoters, but "satiety of eating unrestricted quantities of vegetables outweighs any caloric intake" approach only works if you don't add fats or sugar sauces.

I'm pretty sure I didn't recommend eating unrestricted amounts of veggies, I did laugh about the idea. After all, I would have to eat a walmart/target size bag FULL of brussel sprouts to get my daily allowance of calories from brussel sprouts. That is a huge volume of food! I'm not sure if would be possible. I was responding to someone talking about eating "raw celery". Vegetables in general are low in calories (befo…

Celery does not have a negative net impact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celery#Nutrition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_calorie_food

It's a common misconception.

Re: How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how

#154

Post by encoderer »

crusso wrote: post #144
encoderer wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And from what you've posted in the thread, I gather you believe nutrition and weight gain or loss can be explained in the micro sense by individual things like insulin. Most of what I know about sugar, simple carbs in general, and insulin is what I learned from the just-OK book http://www.amazon.com/Sugar-Blues-William-Dufty/dp/044634312... But most of what I've learned about weight gain/loss and nutrition I've learn…

Actually, we know a great deal about weight gain in the micro sense that is explained by insulin. Jeez, point after point you've made are answered in that Taube youtube link in this thread. You could have your answers if you just clicked the link, opened your mind, and thought about what the guy said. At the end of the day, here's what I know from going on and off low-carb eating for the last ten years. I eat carbs,…

Ok, I'm not one for internet debates and I think this has run it's course fairly. Feel free to take the last word after this if you'd like.

Maybe we've been talking past each other or maybe you just see this differently than I do.

I see a difference between the physical mechanism of weight gain and the mental part of hunger and eating.

Your comment here is something I can totally agree with: When you eat carbs, you crave them and binge eat and over eat and gain weight.

For you, eating carbs leads you to increase your input too much. Now this could be insulin like you insist, or it could just be bad habit. Either way, it's what I consider "mental." Because even if blood sugar issues with carbs triggers the hunger, you're still choosing to satisfy it by eating.

But there's some basic science behind the thermodynamics of weight gain and weight loss that cannot be waved away IMO.

Also, worth noting that carbs do not trigger me to over eat. They are and have been a staple in my diet and I cut them from my lunch meal entirely for reasons of caloric restriction and eat them liberally at my dinner meal. I load UP on carbs at dinner. And still, I don't eat again for at least 18 hours.

Re: How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how

#155

Post by VLM »

cwzwarich wrote: post #150
VLM wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There exist some very expensive grain based foods. Trying to live off a diet of wedding cake would be very expensive. That does not prove a paleo diet is cheaper, any more than the mere existence of kobe beef proves grain based diets are cheaper. I eat an awful lot of salads and veggies and fruits, probably less meat than a "real american"... I just eat lots more pears than wheat.

The reason I pointed out grass-fed or free-range meat is that paleo advocates often like to point out the nutritional inadequacies of the more modern "factory farmed" alternatives. I am not in tune enough to know whether this is a firm part of the paleo diet or not. Whole grains and legumes are pretty cheap. I don't think there is any source of protein from a whole food that is cheaper.

I agree with that meat choice but I have a personality trait to prefer only a little good stuff rather than a big lump of junk. I can't properly discuss that aspect of the diet because of that. This extends beyond the paleo diet, when I occasionally eat something "bad" I usually eat the best bad stuff I can find, no sense eating a quart of horrible dairy ice cream if I can have a truly excellent pint for the same cost.

I would disagree on meat being overly expensive. The USDA theoretical diet claims 50 grams of protein is great. Sometimes I eat more than twice as that, or 100 grams. Its a uniquely american problem that we talk grams but sell in pounds or ounces leading to some weird ideas about portion size. I would suspect the average american thinks they need to eat perhaps 24 oz of steak to get a reasonable daily protein intake. The actual figure is a lot closer to a quarter pound. "a" quarter pound per day not two triple cheeseburger for each meal.

Broccoli stir-fry with thin slices of beef steak, mostly grilled veggie kabobs with some chunks of meat, salads with some meat on the side, that kind of thing. In the winter a homemade slow cooker mostly vegetable stew with some meat. Not meals that are 90% a slab of meat, or even 50% meat 50% carb.

I have not analyzed it but I believe I spend much more in the produce aisle than the meat aisle at the store. Sometimes in the winter my mostly fruit breakfast costs like $3 and I feel ripped off compared to what I pay in the summer, but they are flying this stuff in from another hemisphere so I guess its not so bad. If you're going to complain about expense, complain about $7 pints of organic blueberries rather than $5 little steaks because I eat more blueberries than steaks, by either volume or dollar amount. Out of season oranges flown in from Israel are another ripoff expense, although they certainly taste pretty good. Spinach is sometimes ridiculously priced also. Also sometimes bags of nuts have crazy prices like $8/pound... why decent quality walnuts sometimes cost almost as much as tenderloin confuses me.

Re: How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how

#156

Post by voidlogic »

celeryreally wrote: post #153
voidlogic wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure I didn't recommend eating unrestricted amounts of veggies, I did laugh about the idea. After all, I would have to eat a walmart/target size bag FULL of brussel sprouts to get my daily allowance of calories from brussel sprouts. That is a huge volume of food! I'm not sure if would be possible. I was responding to someone talking about eating "raw celery". Vegetables in general are low in calories (befo…

Celery does not have a negative net impact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celery#Nutrition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_calorie_food It's a common misconception.

I stand corrected- thats what I get for believing what I was talk in highschool health class. Celery is simply very low in calories.

Btw, why would you create a user name just to post the above?

Re: How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how

#157

Post by celeryreally »

voidlogic wrote: post #156
celeryreally wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Celery does not have a negative net impact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celery#Nutrition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_calorie_food It's a common misconception.

I stand corrected- thats what I get for believing what I was talk in highschool health class. Celery is simply very low in calories. Btw, why would you create a user name just to post the above?

Because I didn't have an account (having previously nothing to contribute).

Re: How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how

#158

Post by ef4 »

patrickk wrote: post #131
ef4 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For those who find it a pain to use [a calorie-counting app], I recommend sticking with it for a few months at least initially. After a while, your mind gets attuned to the idea of how much food is enough for you to be satiated. But satiation is a built-in feature of your body. A healthy human body counts calories automatically, and governs appetite and metabolism appropriately to keep body weight in a narrow targe…

> But satiation is a built-in feature of your body. A healthy human body counts calories automatically, and governs appetite and metabolism appropriately to keep body weight in a narrow target range. It's not just the human body, but the mind as well. Sometimes I'd get engrossed in a piece of work or reading something interesting and forget to eat for hours. Then I'd get hunger pangs, and eat some sugary crap or some…

> forget to eat for hours.... Then I'd get hunger pangs...

This is a typical symptom of impaired blood sugar control. If you need four meals a day to keep the hunger pangs away, you're on the road to type 2 diabetes. With a healthy metabolism, you can go all day without eating, with no discomfort and no loss of function (so long as you've been eating well in prior days).

> I'm about a month into this new regime and I'm never going back.

Study after study says that calorie counting diets work great for the first several months, up to a year.

And then by year five, only a tiny fraction of people are still doing it, and the rest have gained back all their weight and then some.

Maybe you will beat the odds. I do think that many HN readers are more likely than the general population to succeed this way -- geeks are better at living inside number-based systems of rules. Good luck.

Re: How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how

#159

Post by shanev »

dirtyvagabond wrote: post #98
shanev wrote: post #86

Despite the sensationalist headline, the author knew exactly what he was doing. He basically did a paleo diet, and references a bunch of books that are popular in the community. Mark's Daily Apple features a success story like this every Friday: http://www.marksdailyapple.com .

Agreed. I found the author's account inspiring, and I immediately recognized his overall outline as a basic paleo diet. I started down a paleo path fairly recently, hoping to lose a few pounds. I surprised myself by realizing after about a week that I was feeling so much better physically, I wasn't very concerned anymore about a relatively few extra pounds. FWIW, it was the "Latest in Paleo" podcast that inspired me…

Latest in Paleo is a great resource to keep up with health news, and Anthony Coppola is a very inspiring guy. I really like Robb Wolf's podcast as well as it occasionally has some science (scary!) for us who like to geek out on this stuff: http://robbwolf.com/podcast/. I lost 45 lbs within the first three months. There's no way I'd eat any differently anymore.

Re: How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how

#160

Post by MDS100 »

crusso wrote: post #93
carbocation wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even Gary Taubes denies thermodynamics, and a link to a youtube video does not justify vitriol.

I didn't say that I or Taubes denied thermodynamics. You're spinning. I said that the caloric intake explanation of weight gain is "noise" in this discussion. It's useless. Taube even covers why it's a useless statement in the provided link. Secondly, I disagree with your assessment of anything I said as "vitriol". If it's vitriol to call someone's statement ignorant or point out that they're committing the very act…

It is NOT useless. There are a plethora of factors influencing energy intake. Which you can work on. His unsubstantiated pet theory that carbs are to blame lacks evidence.
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