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Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

I hear this a lot. I doubt it's sustainable. A lot of people who calorie count seem to regain eventually.

None of the long term fit people I know count calories. They tend to do a couple things:

1. Have well functioning hunger, which comes from 2. Eating whole foods and 3. Eating high satiety foods

I'm pretty steadily at my lean weight. But when I'm not, I just switch to higher satiety foods and the weight comes off.

This method is both easy and simple, but I rarely see it recommended. Are there people it doesn't work for?

(Of course, the hard part of this method is having a personal dietary culture that includes buying, cooking and eating whole foods.

Note that I'm not including cost, because in areas that aren't good deserts whole foods tend to cost less than processed foods)

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One of the reasons people regain is that they've gone on diets with a calorie intake that is too low (or lacking in protein) and experienced muscle atrophy rather than fat loss. A decrease in muscle mass also decreases their metabolism, which means their BMR is now lower, but because they don't know, when they return to their seemingly normal calorie intake, they'll quickly put the weight they lost back on.

That's a factor, but even if you just lose fat, you calorie expenditure from the same activity pattern, ceteris paribus, will be reduced (because you are carrying less weight), so if you return to the eating pattern which at which you were stable at the higher weight (assuming no other systemic/metabolic changes, just the fat loss) you will gain weight asymptotically approaching the the weight at which that "normal" calorie intake had you stable before.

Muscle loss from calorie restriction is much less than most believe (marginal until you get around sub 10% bodyfat). Same goes for metabolism slowdown. You will lose strength on a calorie deficit, but the muscle tissue remains.

Google "starvation mode myth"

See also this military study where men on extreme calorie deficits and high activity levels did not lose lean muscle tissue until hitting extremely low (sub 5%) bodyfat levels.

http://jap.physiology.org/content/88/5/1820

What about people who don't have much resistance activity? That's the more typical case.

"This method is both easy and simple, but I rarely see it recommended."

It's hard to make money marketing this method. I'm not being cynical it's just fact. If you look at weight loss "solutions" they are based around products that interact well with a supply chain. They are highly processed, loaded with preservatives, and individually packaged. As a result, these solutions tend to be based on methods of calorie restriction that don't provide satiety. Additionally companies are incentivized to create a solution that helps people maintain lost weight _only_ when they are on the company plan.

> I'm pretty steadily at my lean weight. But when I'm not, I just switch to higher satiety foods and the weight comes off. > > This method is both easy and simple, but I rarely see it recommended. Are there people it doesn't work for?

I would hazard a guess at: most people with weight issues. The problem is not how simple the method is, but how psychologically easy it is to adhere to.

Whether or not it's sustainable is a different topic though.

4. Willpower and discipline.

Less than you'd think. On the plan I described you pretty much just eat when hungry, until you're full.

You do need to say "potato chips and candy bars are not things I eat", or have some other mechanism for limiting those without willpower (dessert used to fill this function).

But I hardly need willpower to eat this way, because the body's system handle telling me when to eat.

Well, anecdotally, as someone who lost 100 pounds and kept it off for several years, the mechanisms in place don't work for everyone. I can easily eat a whole "American-sized" restaurant meal without thinking, whereas lean people tend to feel completely stuffed after eating, say, half a sandwich and a few fries.

Also, I get hunger sensations pretty much all the time, no matter how much I eat or how satiating the food is. The worst is that I actually get hunger sensations for quite a while after I eat. I suspect this can be the case for many obese people. For me, I need to use my eyes to regulate my eating rather than my hormones.

The amount of willpower necessary can vary considerably from one person to another, and for people like me just 'eating when hungry until I'm full' is not an option.

But you're definitely right about focusing on better food quality rather than simply eating less. It's far too easy to go overboard eating plates of spaghetti and meatballs than it is grilled-chicken atop salad. After I lost weight and cleaned up my diet, I now perfer the latter to the former. When my diet is consistently clean, it's easier to maintain the cleanliness. There's a lot of inertia when it comes to eating and controlling the velocity is far more valuable than just changing the speed.

Very interesting, thank you for your comment. I'd like to know more about hunger disregulation: does it cause initial weight gain, or is it the result of carrying extra adipose tissue, and does it reverse under any conditions.

Also I agree with your point about consistent cleanliness. I find it very easy to avoid eating something if it's a habit. I find it very hard to "limit" a food except by hunger. And hunger doesn't work well with junk, even when hunger is functioning normally.

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