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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

#31

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

brandonmenc wrote: post #7

> Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament Citation, please. I see him making this claim in a number of articles and talks, but am having trouble finding an experiment verifying this.

Thanks for pointing this out. There is an old reddit thread [1] that calls this into question that links to a study that says the max calorie burn they found was 132 cal/hr [2]. (Don't have full access to the study so just going by the reddit comment)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/s2tb2/chess_burns_...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18987876

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

#32

Post by Swizec »

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 used to get this with programming. I still do sometimes but it just isn’t as immersive anymore (probably not enough of a challenge or too many parallel concerns)

Once upon a time video games did it. I’d fire up Empire Total War and 20 minutes later it was getting dark and I felt queasy. Oh wait it’s been 12 hours.

Nowadays I only get that on my motorcycle. Fire up the engine, find an open road, and you don’t even know you’re hungry until you come home 6 hours later and sit down for dinner.

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

#33

Post by keiferski »

I was a competitive chess player as a kid/teenager, and distinctly remember being exhausted, both physically and mentally, after the games.

It was the sort of full exhaustion that I’ve only experienced in sports where rapid strategy-making is deeply important; in hockey, for example. I’ve never gotten the same feeling from a more endurance or strength-based workout, like running or biking. I haven’t done much rock climbing but I imagine it’s akin to chess.

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

#34

Post by jfengel »

lancesells wrote: post #12
brandonmenc wrote: post #7

> Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament Citation, please. I see him making this claim in a number of articles and talks, but am having trouble finding an experiment verifying this.

I would love to see this as well. That's more than 2x what most people burn running a marathon. Hard to believe but would be really interesting if that's true.

I also doubt it, though it's not quite 2x. The number they cite is "6,000 calories a day", which presumably includes the ~2,000 calories one burns just by staying alive. A marathon runner burns ~2,600 calories on the race itself, totalling ~4,600 for the day. So it's about 1.3x rather than 2x.

The numbers all have very wide error bars, so it puts 1.3 in the range closer to 1 than to 2. Still hard to believe, but I'd consider "comparable to a marathon" far more likely than "twice as much".

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

#35

Post by throwaway_law »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #21
sbmthakur wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of sleep pretty much affects every system in the body. Metabolism being no exception. Mathew Walker covers this in detail in Why we sleep .

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…

>Something special happens during sleep that is unrelated to a general concept of metabolism, but instead a specific process.

Sure a number of your systems are shut down while sleeping that otherwise are active as you are awake, and other become more active.

Just one example is the spike of human growth hormone (typically around 75% of HGH is released during sleep), HGH is directly related to metabolism and weight loss/gain. Also as You probably know actual fat loss (as opposed to water weight) is a function of breathing, as in fat isn't "burned" or you don't sweat out fat, but fat is metabolized a literally breathed out of the body, and during REM sleep breathing is increased.

By no means is this an exhaustive list, but beyond maybe sweating a little more than normal (again water weight not fat loss) while sleeping, any actual weight loss is all a function of hormones/metabolism.

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

#37

Post by castlecrasher2 »

Eat less, lose weight. I read long ago that if you want to maintain weight, eat until you're a little bit hungry. If you want to lose weight, eat until you're still pretty hungry.

I've been following the latter on and off over the years, and have been doing it again for the past 8 weeks and have lost a pound a week. I've found it to be much easier than calculating BMR/caloric rate then calculating calories and setting up portion sizes, etc.

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

#38

Post by wysifnwyg »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #21
sbmthakur wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of sleep pretty much affects every system in the body. Metabolism being no exception. Mathew Walker covers this in detail in Why we sleep .

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…

It's the point and time where the body spends energy on repair.

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

#39

Post by [deleted] »

Swizec wrote: post #32
riazrizvi wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 used to get this with programming. I still do sometimes but it just isn’t as immersive anymore (probably not enough of a challenge or too many parallel concerns) Once upon a time video games did it. I’d fire up Empire Total War and 20 minutes later it was getting dark and I felt queasy. Oh wait it’s been 12 hours. Nowadays I only get that on my motorcycle. Fire up the engine, find an open road, and you don’t even k…

[deleted]

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

#40

Post by zaroth »

jfengel wrote: post #34
lancesells wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see this as well. That's more than 2x what most people burn running a marathon. Hard to believe but would be really interesting if that's true.

I also doubt it, though it's not quite 2x. The number they cite is "6,000 calories a day", which presumably includes the ~2,000 calories one burns just by staying alive. A marathon runner burns ~2,600 calories on the race itself, totalling ~4,600 for the day. So it's about 1.3x rather than 2x. The numbers all have very wide error bars, so it puts 1.3 in the range closer to 1 than to 2. Still hard to believe, but I'd…

If you’re going to be pedantic, you subtract out the baseline, and the alleged caloric burn from chess would be 1.5x the measured burn from running a marathon.

But in any case it still astounds me the human body can run that far on just 2,000 calories (2.3kWh).

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