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

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

#281

Post by ebg13 » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 9:36 PM UTC

RobertRoberts wrote: post #266

ebg13 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

That sounds a lot to an outsider like you'd already made up your mind before you even started. That leads to terrible experimental hygiene, and you're missing a lot of important details in the naive experimentation procedure:

0. Nothing in the body happens at a constant rate. It's wildly inaccurate to assume that everything will happen at the same pace from day to day, even if you change nothing about your behavior.

1. When people talk about losing "weight", what they really mean is losing fat.

2. Without exercise, your muscles atrophy.

3. Muscles weigh something, but that's not the weight you want to lose. The reason that it's diet + exercise and not literally just diet is partly because people want an excuse to not put down the fork but mostly because exercise is critical for physical and mental health beyond weight loss.

4. Nobody says that sleeping isn't important for all kinds of things. Sleeping _is_ important. For one thing, sleeping well help you maintain your diet and exercise better. You will be happier, you may be satiated by eating less, and you will be able to push yourself harder while exercising. But none of those things mean that you're specifically losing weight while you sleep.

5. You don't immediately excrete everything that you took in the previous day when you get up in the morning. It takes a lot longer than one day to pee out your body's retained water unless you're plowing through intense diuretics (DO NOT DO THIS).

6. All of your poop is food that your body didn't absorb plus bacteria that live and die in your intestines. Your body doesn't clear cellular waste that way. You also don't immediately poop out everything from the day before when you get up in the morning unless you're plowing through intense laxatives (DO NOT DO THIS).

7. Your body does clear cellular waste through your urine, but by mass the waste that you pee out (as opposed to all the water) is just not very much.

8. By far the vast majority of weight lost is from carbon exhaled as CO2 [ref1], which you literally do all the time, not just when you sleep.

9. Sleep affects how often and how much you pee (kidney filtration rate) and poop (gut motility).

[ref1] - https://www.sciencealert.com/where-body-fat-ends-up-when-you...

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

#282

Post by bscphil » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 9:50 PM UTC

hcurtiss wrote: post #265

lurquer wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bo…

Well... sort of. There's a major difference in that restaurants usually don't have the ability to directly control how many people enter and how many people leave. So pointing out that there's an in/out inbalance is useless, as you say, since there's nothing that can be easily done about it, and that's obvious, so the person asking the question probably didn't want to know that.

In the case of eating, you can control directly how many calories are coming in, and you have at least a little control over how many calories are going out. So in fact CICO is very often useful: it's a kind of promise that if you cut your intake sufficiently you will lose weight.

It's true that certain diets will make you want to eat more calories: but the promise of CICO is that if you ignore what you are inclined to do, and simply focus on your intake, you will lose weight.

Obviously you are better off adjusting your diet too, but that's because doing so makes it easier by burning slightly more calories and making you slightly less hungry. What you're doing is a sort of sociological analysis: figuring out why people eat too much. Sure, if you can come up with tricks to eat less that help dieters, that's great, but people who want to diet fundamentally have to learn to ignore the instinct to eat and limit their intake.

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

#283

Post by scarface74 » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 9:50 PM UTC

hcurtiss wrote: post #265

lurquer wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bo…

I’m always hungry. There is hardly ever a time that I feel completely satiated. In other words, there is never a time that I don’t have a drive to eat too much. It takes constant discipline to keep my calorie balance in check. As humans, we all have the mental capacity to not give in to our lizard brain.

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

#284

Post by scarface74 » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 9:52 PM UTC

mtreis86 wrote: post #258

RandallBrown wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is still part of your BMR or if you are exercising part of the increased calories out.

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

#285

Post by dpark » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 9:52 PM UTC

cco wrote: post #242

dpark wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is only true in the first up to 6 months of a calorie-restriction diet. Then, body adjusts its metabolism (lower body temperature, making you feel more lethargic to keep you from exercising, etc) and your weight begins to slowly climb back up, sans any further calorie restriction. At this point, it's easy for a dieter to blame himself of lacking willpower: "it worked, and it stopped working now, I must've been…

>It varies by person but is generally not a major effect. A few hundred calories is typical and is largely attributable to changes in NEAT. A few hundred calories is ~10-16% of the daily necessary caloric intake of many people, I daresay most? It is most certainly a major effect and considering that people become obese most often by consuming a small daily surplus, a few hundred calories extra, over many years, a swi…

I wouldn’t consider 200ish calories “major”, in part because the typical weight loss plan includes a deficit of at least 500 calories/day, but mostly because it’s straightforward to turn a 500 calorie deficit into a 700 calorie deficit to accommodate the adaptation. Adaptation isn’t meaningless but it’s also not offsetting large deficits the way many people think it is.

As for obesity happening due to 100-300 extra calories per day, yes, but also not really. If a person’s intake is 300 calories per day over what’s necessary to maintain a healthy weight, then they will put on weight until TDEE (which increases with body mass) catches up with their intake and they land somewhere above their healthy weight. It’s not an unbounded growth unless caloric intake is also growing continuously. I would imagine it’s quite common to see obese people eating 300 calories over their current TDEE but also to be 1300 calories over their healthy-weight TDEE.

Also don’t forget that the 300 extra calories is after the metabolic adaptation from eating a surplus. So if an individual will increase TDEE by 200 calories in response to a surplus, then they’ll need to eat 500 calories above “real” TDEE to see a 300 calorie effective weight gain.

All this is to say that obese people are generally eating quite a bit more than just 100-300 calories too much per day.

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

#286

Post by scarface74 » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 9:54 PM UTC

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.

The minor difference between the weekly calorie expenditure of the average person and the morbidly obese is mostly meaningless. It’s much more about how much they eat.

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

#287

Post by scarface74 » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

bena wrote: post #276

scarface74 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not about aesthetic judgement. If you won the genetics lottery and have a high metabolism, you will have more calories out. If you won the genetic lottery and grow to be 7 feet as oppose to be 5 foot 5, you will burn more calories and find it easier to be slim. I didn’t win the height genetic lottery or the higher than average metabolism genetic lottery, but I did win the mesomorph one. I naturally look muscular…

Somatotypes are pseudoscience.

Are you really saying that different people don’t naturally have different body types? I’m 5 foot 5 and 175 pounds. Based on BMI, I am “morbidly obese”. But I have a 32 inch waist, muscular looking legs and an objectively toned upper body with little body fat measured with calipers - 6 points. It’s not because I am a body builder. I’ve had this same basic shape whether or not I was lifting and I only occasionally been to the point where I lifted heavy.

I’ve seen other people my same height and weight with large stomachs and no tone and with a completely different waist to hip ratio.

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

#288

Post by dpark » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 10:04 PM UTC

berdon wrote: post #273

dpark wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're right, I didn't say I lost weight at the same rate. Oh well. Cool? It seems you're mostly interested in your own opinions - both with regards to my empirical evidence and your connotation of the word. I'm not interested in either. Also, your analysis of my losing weight on 3500 calories requiring my TDEE to be >3500 is drastically marred by your clear assumption that a calorie = a calorie. You're incapable of…

Please provide any evidence that a carb calorie counts for nearly 4 protein calories and I’ll take your anecdote a lot more seriously. You’re making an extraordinary claim with no evidence. Why would I accept your anecdote over my “assumption” that dietary scientists weren’t all completely incompetent when they agreed that a calorie is roughly a calorie? How is it that you calculated a 4:1 conversion and everyone with an actual lab doesn’t?

If you told me that one time your car got 120 mpg because you switched to premium fuel, I’d likewise not believe you. I’m much more likely to think your gauge is faulty or you misread your actual results.

As much as you might want your personal anecdote to be compelling, it just isn’t. I’m not going to give your anecdote the same weight that I give the broad scientific consensus.

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

#289

Post by bscphil » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 10:05 PM UTC

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 found that you don't lose weight until you sleep.

Hilariously, this implies that if you never sleep you don't need to eat. All we need to do now is figure out a way to put people on enough drugs that they never sleep, run them on treadmills, and voilà, FREE ENERGY!

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

#290

Post by RobertRoberts » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 10:09 PM UTC

riazrizvi wrote: post #27

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…

The difference in the grandmaster situation is that their extreme focus on chess completely displaces their hunger, hunger which needs real estate in your attention to be effective, just like any other felt sensation. And this focus lasts for the majority of the tournament, months. This is different to most people. When you have an immersive job you can get in the zone for many hours of the day, but you do stop worki…

I have had similar experiences when working on something I was driven to finish. Fat simply could not stay on me during those times. I had a ripped six pack without even trying during those times. (When I was younger of course, ha)