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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

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read between the lines? The article is indeed about those things, but they’re almost certainly BS.

Since we're on the topic of making things up not described in the article, I think it's secret gastric bypass surgeries the competitors are undergoing, not amphetamines.

While they were playing chess no less!

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

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is more of the effect of not eating or drinking for ~8 hours. 1 pint of water weighs around 500g. Also the average human exhales 1kg of CO2 a day which about a quarter of that is carbon weight. You will lose weight if you do not drink or eat for 8 hours awake. "Morning weight" == fasted and somewhat dehydrated weight.

>"Morning weight" == fasted and somewhat dehydrated weight. I was tracking weight loss over time, so it's not just water loss. I tracked weight multiple times a day to see when weight loss actually happens. If it was simple dehydration then sleeping would be irrelevant, but sleep is when something is processed, an action occurs that expels the waste/water.

specialp and johnmaguire2013 are correct. 'real' weight loss occurs very slowly in comparison to the ways your body can shed or accumulate water. In a week you're not likely to lose more than a 'real' pound unless you're being pretty extreme about your calorie intake or expenditure, but you can fluctuate by easily 5 pounds of water/food weight in a day.

Source: tracking my calories and weight for the better part of a decade and having lost and kept off 150+lbs.

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

#43

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…

Your body is metabolically active whether or not you're asleep. You can definitely lose weight during the day. It's possible to burn an entire pound of bodyfat in a single day with sustained aerobic activity. It's not even difficult to lose 5+ lbs throughout the course of a day from muscle glycogen and corresponding water loss. Even on rest days, I find that I am sometimes lighter before bed than I was when I woke up.

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

#44

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…

Totally this. I kid you not, I fasted the entire day and somehow weighted the same, and when I slept for three to four hours I literally woke up 2 lbs. less. It almost defies reason the importance of sleep in weight loss. Probably gives new hypothesis of “dad weight”, you gain weight because you don’t get good sleep after having a kid.

a lot of that is water weight, I almost always have to average a weeks worth of weight to get a stable reading on the weight changes. I also, gain like +2lbs if I eat a salty meal the night before.

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

#45

> 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.

It's about on par with what a farm hand would burn per work day at the beginning of the 20th century (unless I'm remembering that wrong). The human brain burns a lot of calories, but I'm pretty skeptical it can manage 6000kcal on its own.

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

#46

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 remember from high school wrestling that you could almost always count on losing 1 pound of weight between night time and early morning weigh-ins. A little less if you went to bed severely dehydrated.

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

#47
post #32

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…

But you can't ride 6 hours on the single tank of gas?

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

#48

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.

Unless you stop breathing during the day, this is super absurd. All non-water non-food weight leaves the body as exhaled carbon (and I suppose also trivially as radiated heat energy). Or are you suggesting that people only exhale CO2 when they sleep?

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

#49
post #40
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Something you learn when you're trying to lose a lot of weight: The human body is disgustingly energy efficient.

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

#50
post #47
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But you can't ride 6 hours on the single tank of gas?

You’d be surprised. 3.5 gallon tank, about 80mpg on highway, 50mpg in spirited canyon riding.

That lasts quite a while. And stopping at a gas station doesn’t take long enough to make you realize you’re starving.

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