Hacker News Reader

Yeah, the actual mechanics of losing weight is pretty basic calories-in calories-out. The difficult part is engaging in behavior that consistently gives a caloric deficit without making unsustainable trade-offs against willpower or other things. Intermittent fasting is a very good way to remove "how much willpower do I spend while holding a fork and looking at food" out of the weight-loss equation. I lost about 60 pounds using keto, which basically moves all decision making over what to eat (and gives compelling reasons to stay on the wagon - restarting the ketogenic biochemistry is not a particularly fun process).

I'm finding that most of the weight loss strategies people talk about are really calorie-reduction mechanisms. Intermittent fasting, keto, carb-free, paleo, all generally boil down to "eat less and maybe exercise".

The "eat less" part is caloric, really, not by volume, so vegetables are better than most for eating. I'm not saying those plans are bad - a scheme that works is a good scheme. It's interesting to see how they all come together.

A year is awfully short to be chiming in with advice for long-term weight loss.

> A year is awfully short to be chiming in with advice for long-term weight loss.

How about nine years? 2007-03-28: 192lb; 2016-04-30: 153lb. I hit 160lb in late September of 2007 and haven't been above it since, typically fluctuating these days between 150-155lb. I did it by simply eating less and paying more attention to hunger signals. If you want to be sure you're not overeating, track calories in and your weight using something like MyFitnessPal. Weight loss is possible; CICO overrides everything.

Tracking calories would blow most people's minds about the quanta of food they're eating. I've been tracking for a while, and sometimes I'm still surprised.

Scale and app. It's never been easier.

Truth! Most people just don't realize because they've never done it.

Side note: it makes me very sad and disappointed to see comments like this downvoted. Do we not claim to value rationalism and the scientific method here? Take the challenge: weigh your food and yourself and log it, and see if you can disprove CICO. If you can, there's a Nobel prize in physics awaiting you!

A scale with wifi was where I started. I downplayed it before but simply measuring kept me thinking about it and once I started losing weight the graphs served like nothing else as reinforcement. Well, not quite. Sites like Weilos helped me feel like even small steps were possible. The biggest jump so far was the combination of discovering MyFitnessPal, Apple Watch exercise calorie monitoring and joining a budget gym within walking distance. The app, and CICO turned it into a numbers game. I was amazed at how many calories were in movie theatre popcorn. But I did have a takeaway from this article, combined with seeing my own results slightly plateau -- it's key that MyFitnessPal is calibrated as much as possible to your resting calories. Or you might find yourself having banked exercise calories and wanting to "spend" them like a savings account. It doesn't actually work that way. Food qualities then play a role. Still figuring that one out for myself though...

Nothing says "science" like a sample size of one.

I'll concur with this. I have been practicing one meal/day for almost 3 years now. I think it took my body over a year to really adjust to all the benefits. Now I realize I have some big eating days, some small eating days, I mostly crave healthy stuff and I let the rest take care of itself.

What about feeling tired/lethargic during the time in which you fast?

Also, can your body really efficiently utilize all of the micro/macro nutrients it needs in a day when it's handed them all at once?

I agree that IF can be a good little mental trick for a quick cut, but I'm skeptical on one meal a day for a life time and if there's any negative effects that could come up.

You've got the energy levels and eating relationship reversed. Over the short run, digestion uses a lot of energy and generally does not give super quick results. Especially if you're eating cleaner food (vs giant piles of sugar etc).

The more involved answer involves talking about the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems (SNS vs PSNS). The SNS is activated when doing things like going for a run, focusing on a specific problem, fight-or-flight, and other generally short-term "do things or have issues" situations. It does large systematic things that make your body better at overcoming the short-term obstacles in your life.

The PSNS, on the other hand, is responsible for more long-term survival goals. Sleep, digestion, relaxing, general awareness, etc.

Another important fact is that activating one of the circuits tends to deactivate the other. Eating activates the PSNS. Having "high energy" and not feeling tired/lethargic is basically a high SNS activation state.

I'm more curious about the second question I raised. I've read stuff before saying x grams of protein can't be absorbed when consumed in one meal. I've heard differing claims, some saying it's a myth, but I would imagine it's possible.

Anecdotally, I usually feel dramatically better when I fast. There is an incredible mental clarity and productivity that itself makes fasting worth it. I don't feel tired when I fast - in fact, I often feel like I could easily go for a 10-mile run.

FWIW, it takes getting used to. If you drop everything and do a 24-hour fast after years of "6 meals a day", you will feel cold, irritable, and unproductive.

Also, coffee is a powerful thing.

I've never been overweight, but eating ~once per day works for me too.

Good point that laziness helps. Being busy helps. Eating only after exercising (I run ~3 miles daily) also helps.

Eating only once per day also helps to learn what food is good and bad for me. If hours after the meal I feel bad taste in my mouth - the food probably had a component that I should eat less. Sugar in big quantities is definitely once such bad component.

I think the message here is to listen to your body. Too often one finds themselves eating just because they were invited to lunch, or even because they are bored. If you listen to your body and just eat when you are hungry, magical things will happen.

Although this may work for some people, it definitely won't work for me, and many others. I constantly get "cravings" which, AFAICT, are indistinguishable from hunger. I have to consciously add up my calories to know if I've been eating too much. If I was to "listen to my body", I would overeat constantly.

Agreed. I never eat when I'm not hungry. I can't imagine doing that. I'd suspect a real eating disorder if I were forcing myself to eat.

I think the idea is to not eat because it feels good or because you've got to finish your meal, but only because you're hungry.

Says I, who just completed my meal even though it was slightly painful....

I guess that's the only exception I can think of - I may continue eating at a restaurant when I'm full because I don't like to waste, and I also don't like to take things home.

That alone doesn't explain the 40 pounds I need to lose, though.

Same. It's even worse for me though because the more I eat the hungrier I get. It's an awful positive feedback loop.

In my experience, that's great advice for already thin people. I could only lose 10 stone and reach normal weight by ignoring my body demanding it was starving for a year or so.

The biggest scam that the diet industry ever pulled on the general public is the perception that "a diet" is a short term thing which you do until you're a healthy weight, and then you can eat whatever you want again.

The second biggest scam is the perception that most people can lose weight without either doing an absolute ton of exercise, or feeling hungry quite a lot of the time.

Unfortunately that doesn't really work as a guiding principle. The body is entirely too easy to ignore, and social concerns ultimately are more important and urgent than personal ones. How exactly are you going to handle getting invited out to eat if you're not particularly hungry but could eat anyway? I had to answer this and way more in the year-long or so path to really getting serious about losing it and keeping it off.

And boredom is a real problem.

I liken trying to lose weight to trying to quit smoking. If all you had to fight were the nicotine cravings, nobody would be smoking today. It's the habits you have to fight, those things we build our life out of, and to fight habit you have to fix a lot of other parts of your life. Just finding ways to take five minute breaks that don't involve smoking. We want to treat these things in isolation, but they're not isolated, they all interact with each other. To do something like this forces you to deal with your entire life up to the present and be confronted with your own inadequacies. So there's that too.

Somebody who manages to quit smoking or lose weight and keep it off hasn't just managed to do that one thing, they've also managed to effect a complicated and difficult lifestyle change, and should by all rights be considered a completely different person. I don't feel particularly different from the me that was 210 pounds, but when I look at the big picture, I can understand why women aren't just being shallow when they wouldn't even look at me before, and now all seem to beg for attention.

That's why I focus at the level of lifestyle rather than on more mechanistic concerns like whether the keto diet is better than slow-carb and whatnot.

I'm interested in how you did handle the social aspects. What adjustments did you make? How did you handle the invites-to-lunch when you weren't really hungry?

That's one of my biggest issues. I'm on a meal plan at the moment which is great during my workdays and I'm really feeling good.... but then on the weekend when I'm not home and I'm visiting family or friends, I don't know how to stick to it without being a) extremely tempted by the food or b) potentially feeling rude or out-of-place (bringing my own food, etc).

If I get an invite to lunch, I'll make that my one-meal-a-day. If I don't, I'll generally wait until around 5-6pm before either hitting a friend up for dinner or just going to grab whatever I feel like eating. My social life isn't good enough that I often get lunch and dinner invitations on the same day, I'm looking forward to solving that problem when it becomes one.

Long-term IF essentially made hunger a non-issue for me. I believe something neurological happened where my vagus nerve system got decoupled in some way from my CNS brain. I get hungry, but it's easy to ignore and to make my decisions on socially-practical grounds rather than the purely immediate.

Yesterday I had called up my business partner for dinner in my car right as I was about to leave. He didn't pick up, so I started driving. I get a few blocks down the road and he calls back, accepting my invitation. I did not mention that I was already in my car and hungry, simply drove back home. It was another two hours before we finally sat down for dinner. None of it bothered me, the hunger just went away when I willed it to.