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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

#261

Post by scarface74 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #256
scarface74 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 we…

It is just CICO, whether you won the genetic lottery that makes the calculation simpler or not doesn't mean it's any less of a cop out than saying that it would be simpler for me to be a great basketball player if I were 6 foot 8 instead of 5 foot 5.

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

#262

Post by driverdan »

Touche wrote: post #89
papito wrote: post #64

After 30, one should seriously evaluate breakfast. Three meals per day becomes just too many calories to burn. Two meals for an adult is plenty. Coffee in the morning suppresses hunger, so one can go until 12-12:30 before getting woozy. At some point I noticed that I was force-feeding myself lunch if I ate breakfast. Hunger is a normal feeling - embrace it.

Change what you eat, not how often you eat. A yogurt and some fruit is fine for breakfast.

Yogurt and fruit are full of sugar and aren't very healthy.

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

#263

Post by Geee »

Most comments so far seem to focus on the weight loss part, but I don't think that's very interesting.

What's more interesting is how he is able to manage mental exhaustion and performance with this regimen. I think everything here applies to other mentally exhaustive work such as software engineering as well.

Maybe there's a need for more systematic approach for exercise and diet for software engineering. Not for weight loss, but better sustained performance in the job.

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

#264

Post by cheald »

pastor_elm wrote: post #140

>Today's players have begun to incorporate strict food and fitness regimens to increase oxygen supply to the brain during tournaments Is there really such a possible variance when it comes to getting oxygen to the brain? Why don't they just take hits of O2 then?

Absolutely. The difference in VO2 max (essentially, efficiency of oxygen uptake) between trained and untrained individuals is stark and substantial.

Hits of pure O2 produce a euphoric high, which probably isn't what you want during intense mental competition.

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

#265

Post by hcurtiss »

lurquer wrote: post #225
omginternets wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you eat 500 calories and burn 600 calories, the energy has to come from somewhere. Yes, hence "you have to balance your chemical equations", but we need to agree on what we're calling "eat" and "burn", here. Burning 600 calories can just as well "work up an appetite" as it can "draw upon fat reserves". We're used to thinking of weight loss as a behavioral problem withy metabolic symptoms ("he eats too much, so he…

I've yet to meet a fat person who didn't eat large portions and sugary foods. "It's a glandular problem," you'd often hear a few decades back. Now, there is other mumbo-jumbo. But, at the end of the day, fat people eat too much. Period. Mass is not created out of thin air. (Unless you're a plant.) Whether this fact is "helpful" to people trying to lose weight, I'll leave to the psychologists. But, it's true. And, the…

Of course they eat too much. The question is why? Taubes has a good example. If I asked you why that restaurant was so full, and you responded "because more people entered than exited," I would think you were an asshole. But CICO is the same kind of platitude. It doesn't actually tell you anything. Taubes and many others assert that the kind of food you put in your body dictates your drive to put more food in your body. Eat sugary foods, and you'll drive insulin, pack glucose away in adipose tissue, move less, and want to eat more. Sugar drives energy into adipose tissue AND slows your BMR AND drives hunger. That's a far more useful observation than CICO.

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

#266

Post by RobertRoberts »

ebg13 wrote: post #252
RobertRoberts wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, what if you pee more after sleeping? I agree. But I found that it affected total weight loss, I didn't lose as much when my sleep was affected.

My assumption is that waste, fat, energy process is complicated, and that something happens during sleep that the body gets rid of stuff, and if it doesn't have enough time to do that, it will just leave some things in place.

This is a logical conclusion based on limited resources = limited outcome. The assumption I am challenging is simply that "diet + exercise" = weight control. But I have found that you need "diet + exercise + quality sleep" = weight control in my tests. But then later, I found that "diet + sleep" = weight control. (I have not exercised for over 2 years now testing this, weighing myself daily)

After this experiment a few years ago I gained almost all the weight lost in 6 months. But then lost _more_ weight without any exercise at all. (I stopped exercising entirely for more than a year to test this theory)

And I found that I could eat 2 meals a day, no exercise, good sleep and I could lose weight. And as soon as I break my good patterns (any of the ones I mentioned in my comments already), weight will come back on.

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

#267

Post by dpark »

berdon wrote: post #241
dpark wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Empirical I think the word you’re looking for is “anecdotal”. No one here knows anything about your TDEE so it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that you could lose weight on 3500 calories/day. If your TDEE is >3500, then yeah, weight loss. Especially since the thermic effect of food is quite high for protein, and that people suck at accurately recording or even measuring their actual intake.

I addressed your concerns over my TDEE by stating both instances occurred under the same level of activity and general conditions. In both instances, I lost about the same amount of weight weekly as well. I've also been counting calories for longer than 10 years and at that time I had a spreadsheet with such granular detail I could track the average duration and quantity of protein still within my gut based on averag…

You didn’t originally say that you lost weight at the same rate, making your statement almost meaningless. Now that you’ve added that statement, I honestly just don’t believe your assessment. This isn’t a judgement call and I’m not questioning your truthfulness. I simply think your observation was either biased, incomplete, or insufficient.

My gut says you did this for too short of a period of time for the results to be meaningful, or else that you’ve left out something meaningful, or that you simply didn’t accurately measure your caloric intake. If you were losing weight on 3500 calories/day, then your TDEE was north of 3500. If you dropped to 900 calories, you’d be in a 2600 calorie/day deficit without even accounting for whatever deficit you were in initially. I don’t care if that was all HFCS, you’d be losing over 5 pounds a week. That’s major weight loss and I don’t believe you saw the same weight loss at 3500 calories and 900 calories for an extended period of time. It simply doesn’t work from a physical standpoint.

“Empirical” to me implies a level of data that you don’t get from a singular anecdote.

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

#268

Post by Dylan16807 »

scarface74 wrote: post #261
Dylan16807 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 we…

It is just CICO, whether you won the genetic lottery that makes the calculation simpler or not doesn't mean it's any less of a cop out than saying that it would be simpler for me to be a great basketball player if I were 6 foot 8 instead of 5 foot 5.

Something can be both true and used in a misleading manner.

To use your same metaphor, there are people going around speaking as if height and total hours of training are the only things that matter for basketball skill.

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

#269

Post by hcurtiss »

brandonmenc wrote: post #248
nscalf wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is probably mostly true, there is good science indicating that certain hormonal portfolios "hold" onto calories better than others. There is a reason power lifters are spiking insulin post workout, people are taking steroids, and medical conditions can make you fat. If my mother wants to cut weight, I'm telling her this. If an athlete has to make weight for a fight, this is a stupid way of thinking. At the…

> While this is probably mostly true, there is good science indicating that certain hormonal portfolios "hold" onto calories better than others. Yes, that's true, but too many people believe that hormones have a whole number multiplier effect when in fact they probably just nudge TDEE by, what, (off the cuff here) ten percent plus or minus? Maybe less? Is that enough to significantly reduce a person's margin of error…

But nudging TDEE by 10 percent over the course of a year has a HUGE effect on body composition. Even 0.01% does.

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

#270

Post by Touche »

driverdan wrote: post #262
Touche wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Change what you eat, not how often you eat. A yogurt and some fruit is fine for breakfast.

Yogurt and fruit are full of sugar and aren't very healthy.

Not all sugar is the same. Fruits are extremely healthy for you.
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