Live data from Hacker News

The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

espn.com

291–300 of 359 posts

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

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Your experimental methodology is flawed because it fails to control for water loss. I absolutely tested for water loss. What I found was that some extra (?) water retained until we sleep. And that something happens with fat or other processing that occurs during sleep. Again, I charted my weight carefully multiple times a day over a month. Carefully testing when weight loss occured. I Recorded my diet as well as my…

> I absolutely tested for water loss. No, you didn't. How do you think you tested for water loss? Briefly, you'd need to separate out the water for your urine, weigh that, then separate out the water from your feces, and weigh that, and spend all your time in a sealed chamber and monitor the humidity of that chamber to see how much water you're exhaling and sweating out. I'm guessing you did exactly none of this. Oh…

>How do you think you tested for water loss?

Over time. I was not dehydrated at the end of the month, but I was 15+ 1bs lighter, and my neck, waist and limbs were slimmer.

>do you really think you're the first person to research this?

Nope, I have no such illusions. I find though that science _requires_ discussion to move forward. And I found a phenomenon. I can't explain the details, but the results are sound.

I think it's simple to test my theory. Stay up all night, don't drink anything, do what you normally do. In the morning, you will not have lost any weight (call it water weight if you want). During sleep, your body does something different. Go take a nap, when you wake you will urinate again, but it will be different.

But maybe you can only understand this difference if you are carefully monitoring your weight over an extended period of time?

The reason I don't think the carbon dioxide thing is the primary method of weight loss is because of my tests, where your body weight simply does not normalize until after sleeping. I think the majority of the fat (by weight) comes out in urine.

But I am just guessing based on my experiments over the past few years. Yep, I am an amateur scientist, but I control my weight now.

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

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is still just calories in and calories out. Some people naturally have a higher metabolism and a higher basal metabolic rate. It still doesn’t change the equation. Yes, it’s a well known fact that if you eat too few calories, that your metabolism slows down - and you burn less calories. That doesn’t make anything that the original poster said scientifically valid. I saw all sorts of crazy crap that people believed…

> It is still just calories in and calories out. The problem with this line of thinking is the "just". Sure, physics says it's calories in and out, and we all agree that mostly makes sense. But -- how do you measure how many calories are going out? Sleep is known to have an impact on weight. How does one translate their sleep quality or sleep issues into a better "out" measure? How do you know how many calories are g…

Sleep only has a second order effect on weight. Almost all of the reasons that lack of sleep affect weight loss is due to overeating (calories in) and lack of exercise (calories in).

https://www.topfitnessmag.com/lifestyle/sleep-important-weig...

This is just like all of the studies showing diet soda causes weight gain.Diet soda doesn’t actually cause weight gain. Diet soda gives people the license to overeat and it may cause some people to crave real sugar more. I’m sure we’ve all seen people order a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, a large fry and a Diet Coke.

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

#293
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some people are naturally skinny and others put on weight quickly. This is already well known and shows that there are complex genetic inputs as well as other ones. We have to discover what those are. So saying it’s just calories in/out, stupid... nope! I never really understood why this was always a catch-all trump card. So you can't gain/lose weight as easily as others. In my mind that just means you need to work…

Or people who are naturally fit with no effort vs. people who aren't willing to massively restrict their diet and live in discomfort for the rest of their lives since the body permanently adapts to expecting a certain amount of food: https://www.thecut.com/2016/05/weight-loss-metabolism-slows-...

I’ve never known anyone who was “naturally fit”, defining fitness as the ability to work out at a certain level of intensity for a given amount of time.

I’ve known people to be naturally skinny or even tone but not “fit”.

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

#294
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…

> This is pseudoscientific garbage. This seems unnecessary. The rest of your comment does not support this assertion. And it's inflammatory, which is contrary to the HN guidelines. To this point: > There is also definitely nothing magic that happens at the 6 month mark and the absurdity of this should be enough to make it clear that this is garbage. There doesn't have to be anything magical. I would have to read the…

Perhaps it was unnecessary. The rest of my absolutely supports it, though. The claim is that within 6 months the body will adapt to a change in caloric intake, completely canceling it out. Indeed, the claim is that the body will adapt so well that it will begin gaining weight from the same caloric intake that was previously a weight-loss-inducing deficit. This is utterly untrue. Not just an incomplete picture or misleading, but an utter falsehood.

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

#295
post #200
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diets fail because people view them as "temporary struggles". Something to get through and then it's over. It's obvious why that doesn't work. It has to be a way of life.

All I'm saying is fasting doesn't work if you make up the calories during non fasting hours.

If you control for calories, when you eat does actually have an impact: https://www.uab.edu/shp/nutrition/news/168-time-restricted-e...

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

#296
post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is pseudoscientific garbage. This seems unnecessary. The rest of your comment does not support this assertion. And it's inflammatory, which is contrary to the HN guidelines. To this point: > There is also definitely nothing magic that happens at the 6 month mark and the absurdity of this should be enough to make it clear that this is garbage. There doesn't have to be anything magical. I would have to read the…

Perhaps it was unnecessary. The rest of my absolutely supports it, though. The claim is that within 6 months the body will adapt to a change in caloric intake, completely canceling it out. Indeed, the claim is that the body will adapt so well that it will begin gaining weight from the same caloric intake that was previously a weight-loss-inducing deficit. This is utterly untrue. Not just an incomplete picture or misl…

> This is utterly untrue. Not just an incomplete picture or misleading, but an utter falsehood.

Would you be so kind as to elaborate? You are literally stating that something is 'utterly untrue' without supporting rationale. I'm not expecting you to do a peer-reviewed study. Just to explain why you feel this way.

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

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the fundamental mistake of the last three decades of health advice is overestimating that capacity in the face of declining insulin sensitivity due to persistently high glycemic loads.

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

#298
post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it was unnecessary. The rest of my absolutely supports it, though. The claim is that within 6 months the body will adapt to a change in caloric intake, completely canceling it out. Indeed, the claim is that the body will adapt so well that it will begin gaining weight from the same caloric intake that was previously a weight-loss-inducing deficit. This is utterly untrue. Not just an incomplete picture or misl…

> This is utterly untrue. Not just an incomplete picture or misleading, but an utter falsehood. Would you be so kind as to elaborate? You are literally stating that something is 'utterly untrue' without supporting rationale. I'm not expecting you to do a peer-reviewed study. Just to explain why you feel this way.

Because there’s absolutely no scientific evidence for this claim. Please share any evidence you have for the claim that a human body will “adapt” to a caloric deficit so well that it will regain the lost weight without calories increasing again.

The statement is essentially that calories consumed are unrelated to weight gain and loss except in the short term after which the body will return to its normal weight no matter what you do. This simply doesn’t make any sense. If this were true people couldn’t starve to death and obesity wouldn’t be a thing. And also the conservation of mass would not be an actual physical law.

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

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but I found something more specific. I tracked weight loss for a month. Eating only one meal a day. I recorded multiple times a day my weight. Only in the morning did I actually record any "loss". So, I did some tests for this. I stayed up all night to see if I lost weight in the morning like every other day, but I didn't. I slept, woke up in the afternoon, and I had lost .5 pounds from the previous day. Someth…

The special thing that happens during sleep is the subject does not generally eat or sleep during that time.

drink, not sleep (too late to edit)

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

#300
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some people are naturally skinny and others put on weight quickly. This is already well known and shows that there are complex genetic inputs as well as other ones. We have to discover what those are. So saying it’s just calories in/out, stupid... nope! I never really understood why this was always a catch-all trump card. So you can't gain/lose weight as easily as others. In my mind that just means you need to work…

Or people who are naturally fit with no effort vs. people who aren't willing to massively restrict their diet and live in discomfort for the rest of their lives since the body permanently adapts to expecting a certain amount of food: https://www.thecut.com/2016/05/weight-loss-metabolism-slows-...

First, I take issue with the cited article because the study referenced in the opening paragraph because they do not provide any discussion over limitations of their study. In particular, that members of the "Biggest Loser" show may have also been more extrinsically motivated by money and fame than intrinsically motivated to become healthy. Thus, when they failed to earn said money/fame, they returned to their normal behaviors.

> people who aren't willing to massively restrict their diet and live in discomfort for the rest of their lives

I also take issue with this statement. Many fitness motivation images on the Internet talk about rejecting temptation to work towards your goals. As I was thinking about this comment, I was reminded of Ben Stiller's pizza scene in the movie Dodgeball [1]. Jokes aside, the scene is a hyperbole to how even fit people are susceptible to temptation and take actions to not giving in. Not to Stiller's degree, but I can distinctly remember times where I just stare at the ice cream aisle with grocery shopping. It is my own mental discipline to not buy it. Quitting World of Warcraft to get in better shape is also a part of my past. Shifting to an active lifestyle is hard, it has a difficult initial start, but persevering through it has helped me become the healthier person I am. I also recall Jesse Shand's transformation [2], where I believe one of the phases of his weight loss was simply reducing the number of fast food meals he'd consume in a single sitting (instead of 8, only eat 7, etc).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPmX2gNIqE8

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpy1FlGKYz0

Post reply on HN