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Comment by hazz99 | Hacker News Reader

Damn dude, that's awesome progress! I love the consistency.

    On average, it takes about 3,500 calories to burn 1 pound of fat.
    Suppose you eat 1,000 fewer calories than your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR).
    After a week your body will burn 7,000 calories or 2 lbs of fat.

I'm almost surprised that the weight curve dropped off linearly -- I always thought weight fell off quickly at the beginning, before plateauing towards the end. Great personal "myth" to have dispelled.

Can I also compliment the site design? It's very clean, and presented the information well.

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> I'm almost surprised that the weight curve dropped off linearly -- I always thought weight fell off quickly at the beginning, before plateauing towards the end. Great personal "myth" to have dispelled.

Commonly there's a sharp initial weight loss due to "water weight" loss: changing to a diet with lower sugars (simple sugar and carbs) and salt leads to retaining less water, which in turn yields a sharp initial weight loss. That doesn't keep going.

However as the essay notes you have to either keep cutting calories and/or start exercising[0]: as weight drops so will BMR, carrying less weight means making less effort (for the same result) and fatty tissues are still living tissue so they do burn some energy. And since "weight change" is a factor of calorie intake / metabolic rate, if BMR drops you have to drop calorie intake for it to remain below BMR (and sustain a ratio < 1).

In the Data chart you can see that TFA's calorie intake drops by ~500 after the initial cut. They do note this issue in the conclusion, and that they attempted the exercise route but didn't care for it so stopped after 3 months.

[0] sustained exercise builds up muscle mass, and muscle increases BMR counteracting the BMR drop from the diet

It most likely follows a non-linear pattern in individuals who are consuming an extreme amount of calories. As the author notes, your calorie intake needs to drop as you lose weight to maintain that progress. If you're consuming 4000 calories a day it's really easy to cut to 2000 in the beginning by just not eating sugary crap, but getting down to say 1250 calories a day is a lot harder, which often requires meticulous management.

The consistency is hard to achieve because he had to regularly adjust his calorie intake as he lost weight. If you don't do that, it will work the way you thought - the weight loss slows over time. That's also one of the reasons people feel the last pounds are always the hardest to lose

I think that this is due to people not modifying behavior as they lose weight. A person weighing 250 lbs has a higher BMR than when they weigh 200 lbs. So if you lose weight and don't adjust your daily calorie goal, you're no longer eating as far under your BMR as you used to.

It may have helped that he became more proficient at dieting and using the app as well as intermittent fasting.

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