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How to lose weight: What worked for me, with graphs

danieltenner.com

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Re: How to lose weight: What worked for me, with graphs

#61

Post by sev »

liedra wrote: post #52
sev wrote: post #34

I tried the fruitarian diet recently and lost 8 pounds in 2 weeks. Of course, how much you lose is highly dependent upon your current weight and body fat %. The fruitarian diet is where you only eat fruits and vegetables and drink water and 100% pure juices. Avocados have the protein you need, and you can do without starch for 2 weeks. It really cleanses your body and leaves you feeling great! I'd suggest doing a fru…

Your body doesn't need cleansing. What it needs is a healthy diet to start with. Eat healthily, get exercise and fresh air, and you won't need to go on extreme diets that will only cause you to put all the weight back on later.

A normal to health body doesn't, you're right. But at some point, and depending on your age, it might need cleansing. Either way though, cleansing isn't bad. Especially if you stick to a good diet afterward. It'll give you a head start. Even if you put it back on later, but through a good diet, as opposed to junk that may have caused it in the first place, you're better off than before.

Re: How to lose weight: What worked for me, with graphs

#62

Post by jws »

erikstarck wrote: post #38

As I suppose many of the people here do, I have a long list of pet projects that I plan to one day finish. One of them is lineardiet.com. The idea is simple. You just enter your current weight (C) and your desired weight (D). The service then plots you a graph with a line from weight C to weight D. The Y axis is the weight and the X axis is time. Now you have to weigh yourself every day. If you are above the line it'…

There is an iPhone app called Bang Bang that does just this. It has warts[1], but overall does the job.

If I were doing it I'd use the HTML-5 localStorage and the 'manifest' offline web page stuff and just keep it all on person's phone.[2] Maybe I'd sync it up to a server somewhere in case they lost their phone.

[1] Warts list:

• Bang Bang is inexplicably slow. I'm down the stairs, through the house and out the door sometimes before I can get my weight entered.

• The keyboard entry is inappropriate. Even assuming you want keyboard, you only need 10 digits and a decimal point, the whole keyboard makes the touch points to small and fiddly. Still better would be a roller. Today's weight is pretty close to yesterday's. One motion would suffice.

• Some error checking wouldn't be bad. If I accidentally enter 600 pounds more than yesterday, maybe flag me instead of just graphing the result.

• The starting date is lost in the UI.

• The UI to get the starting weight and ending targets is unintuitive and will only be found by accident. Like by tapping at the screen while yelling "Why is this tiny graph so slow to draw‽"

Re: How to lose weight: What worked for me, with graphs

#63

Post by noarchy »

pizza wrote: post #58

OK, let me just talk about the low-calories idea and some other stuff for a second. It's gonna be a little long. This is pretty much all copy-pasted from Gary Taubes' ideas, so please don't accuse me of plagiarism!. [Notes, from http://higher-thought.net/complete-notes-to-good-calories-ba... Really really great resource, everyone should read it if they haven't read Good Calories, Bad Calories] 1.) This guy is saying…

Carbs are quite fine if you're an endurance athlete, much less so if you are sedentary. Take a look at what a pro cyclist consumes during a tour: thousands of calories a day beyond what most people would consume, the majority of which are carbs. It works for them, because not only do they need the energy from it, but they are burning it. And these are not fat people (some of them are close to being underweight, by some people's standards). But if you're not active, eating a lot of carbs is like shoving extra gasoline into a car that never goes anywhere; useless, and counter-productive.

Re: How to lose weight: What worked for me, with graphs

#64

Post by phreanix »

WilliamLP wrote: post #56
phreanix wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I'm understanding this correctly: 5. Obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation, not overeating, and not sedentary behavior. 6. Consuming excess calories does not cause us to grow fatter, any more than it causes a child to grow taller. Expending more energy than we consume does not lead to long-term weight loss; it leads to hunger. So if I didn't have this disorder I can over-eat and become sedenta…

I think he's just reframing the levels of causation a bit. You don't say pregnant women gain weight because they eat more than they consume, although from a thermodynamic point of view this is strictly true. Have you ever met skinny unhealthy programmers who are very sedentary and eat a lot of junk food? I have met many. The point is that different people have very different reactions to food, in terms of hunger, men…

Thanks, that's clearer to me. =)

Can you share how you got to where you are now?

Re: How to lose weight: What worked for me, with graphs

#65

Post by jws »

phreanix wrote: post #50
erikstarck wrote: post #38

As I suppose many of the people here do, I have a long list of pet projects that I plan to one day finish. One of them is lineardiet.com. The idea is simple. You just enter your current weight (C) and your desired weight (D). The service then plots you a graph with a line from weight C to weight D. The Y axis is the weight and the X axis is time. Now you have to weigh yourself every day. If you are above the line it'…

Is the site in german?

It is a parked domain. Interesting choice to shill from a parked domain in a language with only 100 million native speakers.

Re: How to lose weight: What worked for me, with graphs

#66

Post by noarchy »

Most of my diet consists of carbs, and I am in pretty good shape, which is why I would tend to agree with the author in dismissing the low-carb diets. The key for me, I think, is an active lifestyle. People who think that they don't have time for exercise, should try to think of creative ways to bring activity into their lives. Bicycling to work is one that works for me, and many others that I know.

Re: How to lose weight: What worked for me, with graphs

#67

Post by blehn »

goodness wrote: post #51
zyb09 wrote: post #14

I didn’t try the crazy diets like Atkins or the Maple Syrup diet. Anything that requires eating crazy stuff is probably bad for your health. Now I'm starting to feel like an Atkins Zeolot, I've been defending low-carb on HN so much lately, but I can't let a statement like that sit on itself! There's tons of scientific evidence for Atkins and everybody I talked to that investigated it, agrees. Furthermore "eating less…

The other thing to say here is that the latest research indicates that carbs may actually be a leading cause of heart disease rather than fat. For example: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=carbs-again... So low carbs can be healthy even if you're not trying to lose weight.

The study says refined carbs are bad — that's an important distinction. Also, some research (The China Study, for example) suggests that proteins (not fat) from animal-based foods are a cause of heart disease (and cancers).

Re: How to lose weight: What worked for me, with graphs

#68

Post by pizza »

noarchy wrote: post #63
pizza wrote: post #58

OK, let me just talk about the low-calories idea and some other stuff for a second. It's gonna be a little long. This is pretty much all copy-pasted from Gary Taubes' ideas, so please don't accuse me of plagiarism!. [Notes, from http://higher-thought.net/complete-notes-to-good-calories-ba... Really really great resource, everyone should read it if they haven't read Good Calories, Bad Calories] 1.) This guy is saying…

Carbs are quite fine if you're an endurance athlete, much less so if you are sedentary. Take a look at what a pro cyclist consumes during a tour: thousands of calories a day beyond what most people would consume, the majority of which are carbs. It works for them, because not only do they need the energy from it, but they are burning it. And these are not fat people (some of them are close to being underweight, by so…

I think the reason why carbs work well for endurance athletes is because it gets stored in the muscle glycogen and they actually use it. Yeah, otherwise it's useless.

Re: How to lose weight: What worked for me, with graphs

#69

Post by jgaudette »

ghoerz wrote: post #12

Hacker's Diet Online has a nice graphing utility. It's much easier to see progress on the average than with daily fluctuations. https://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/HackDiet

My "weekend hobby" is a site that aims for a better user experience that John Walker's site, while remaining true to the hacker's diet tenants. http://myhackerdiet.com

I've also integrated the Withing's wifi scale, so daily readings are fully automated!

Re: How to lose weight: What worked for me, with graphs

#70

Post by kellishaver »

What's worked for me is to stop thinking about how hard it is to lose weight and to just approach it as a big math/science project that I can geek out on and run the numbers.

I exercise daily, 20-40mins on a bike and usually a 30-60min swim, and I'll do some light weights a couple of times a week. This may sound like a lot of exercise, but it's really not. It's an hour or two a day of being active. That's in no way overdoing it, even though when I tell people this, a lot of times their reaction is that to tell me I am. I built up to this from an almost completely sedentary lifestyle in which I did almost nothing but sit at the computer and work.

This helped, and definitely made me feel better, physically. I'm healthier than I have been in a long time, and doing this, I started slowly losing weight, but the big difference came when I cut out processed sugars and lowered my carbohydrate intake. It's not a super-low low-carb extreme diet, but it's definitely a lot lower than it was.

I felt even better, more energy, more weight loss (about 3x faster than I was before), headaches went away, and I started sleeping better.

Once I got used to not having all the sugar and carbs, my body stopped craving it. It took some willpower at first, but now it's basically easy to stick to, because I'm used to eating healthier and just don't have any desire not to anymore.

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