Hacker News Reader

Comment by snarf21 | Hacker News Reader

Don't take this as aggressive, I'm glad you've dropped some weight. I'm not sure how overweight you are/were. How much of a calorie deficit did you have on a daily basis?

Also, I wouldn't count 10 lbs over 3 month proof that a calorie is a calorie. Actually, I think it proves the opposite. A person who is 30+ lbs over weight should drop 10lbs in around two weeks with a 500 calorie deficit per day. (Generally considered the max safe range for sustained weight loss)

I'd really be curious to how much you would lose if you cut the sugar completely.

View on HN

I didn't want to cut sugar because -- apart from the size of portions -- I didn't want to change the type of food I was eating or my eating habits. The habits include some chocolate with coffee almost every day and moderate alcohol in the weekends (so it's more like a 5/7-day thing). This means I can easily continue the diet and habits indefinitely even after reaching the goal as I reach the equilibrum.

Overweight from start was minimal (4, maybe 5 kgs over BMI 25) but I got rid of the "gut" that was starting to form and it was extremely successful. I actually have no idea what the calorie deficiency was: I just ballparked it for the first two weeks and then kept that while measuring my weight every morning. I'd say it's about 600-700 max with the weekends reserved for no fat-loss.

Where did you get those numbers? You're saying that 1lb for this person ~= 700 calories, which is absurdly low, based on my own personal experience as well as everything I've ever read on the topic.

I never said all the weight was from calories, most of it is water and waste.

For an "average" person they store 400g of glycogen in their muscles and 100g of glycogen in their liver. In this form, it is bound to 3-4 times as much water. So 500 * 3.5 is 2250g = 5 pounds just from this depletion.

As far as fat burning, a pound of fat has about 3500 calories. A 500 per day deficit will lead to 1 pound of weight loss. However, fat is also bound to water in a roughly 1:1 ratio so you'll also lose a pound of water too. So call this 2 pounds for the second week.

Add in all the weight in your digestive system over that two week period and you'll be ~10 pounds or more in two weeks. Again this assumes a person that is 30+ pounds overweight and has full glycogen stores.

I think this is making things too complicated with the water calculations, namely the 1:1 ratio. Adipose tissue is almost completely fat, which in turn is hydrophobic. See the picture on this wikipedia page for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adipocyte. The excess fluid (if any relevant amount exists in the body at the beginning of the diet) is lost fast (days) and early in the course of diest and the key is to have a constant, relatively slow (2-4 kgs / month) weight loss.

I'll need to redo some reading but I was under the impression that the TG (Triglyceride) which make up 90% of the Adipocyte require a gram of water for each gram of TG. I see some things that indicate the same thing online but it is less clear.

This is not true. 50% is too much even if you take into account the whole fat tissue (which is not what you lose when losing weight) and even there for extremely lean subjects with very little fat in the adipose cells. (Maybe anorectic / cacectic subjects are different in this regard for whole-body-average). You've probably read the conclusions of a confused self-taught "expert" who is making hypotheses based on exaggerated figures of water in fat _tissue_ vs. the fat that is lost when losing weight.

As an interesting sidenote: fat people have relatively a lot less water in their fat tissue than lean people.

You can also think about the fact that when you drop triglycerides in water, it will not solute at all. Also, human body creates fatty membranes (cell walls) to absolutely _prevent_ the influx / efflux of water.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com