The Hacker's Diet (2005)
fourmilab.ch
fourmilab.ch
The first time, I gained very gradually, the result of having moved to an employer with free food, and needing to learn new habits of self control.
The second time, I regained very rapidly, because I was a new dad, and really underestimated the combined stress of working and parenting.
Hoping I can pull off a third time and keep it off.
I did notice that the second “losing” time was much harder than the first. Possibly reduced metabolic rate due to aging?
It makes my life so much easier. That chocolate looks delicious. Can I have it?
Normal person: Ugh but I didn't work out today. Humbug my belly is getting big. Those pants from last year are kinda tight. I'm a little peckish and bored. Hm agony for 20 minutes before you finally give in and have the chocolate. Then you feel guilty for the rest of the day.
Swiz: Check calorie and macro tracker. Yup, all good. Eat chocolate. Enjoy life. Take 20 grams less potatoes at dinner.
Also after some time weighting all the food you get better at estimating how much each ingredient weights, and at knowing how much each thing "costs" in calories.
It will not be perfect, but better than nothing.
For other restaurants I guesstimate. After 5 years my guesstimates have gotten pretty accurate.
I also don’t sweat about perfect tracking. It’s more about observing general trends. 100 cals up or down all averages out over your lifetime. Or even a single week.
That said when you have strict goals, the only solution is not to eat out or at least to limit it a lot. Like when you have to be a certain weight or bodyfat for a specific event that’s X days/weeks out
I managed to look my best ever by doing that. But that's not the point. The point is that not counting obsessively is liberating.
If you are counting the calories of 20 grams of potatoes you're worrying too much.
From about 16% bodyfat to about 11% in the past year.
One slice (about 150g, they're dense) of those is equivalent to a whole standard meal. (like 500 kcal or so)
Animals with no analytic faculties still manage to live healthy lives, so how do they do it? Simply, our bodies have built-in systems for regulating automatic functions. The problem is it's built to survive in the state of nature and modernity is an unnatural environment that throws a wrench in the system.
Once you realize this, the solution is clear: minimize the bad influences of modernity and try to live as close as possible to how our ancestors did. Eat meat when hungry, drink water when thirsty, lift heavy weight, and sleep at night and wake up in the morning, get some air and sunlight etc.
I've been down the quantified-self road before and at best it leads to a big useless unanalyzed database. At worst, you become paranoid constantly questioning whether you're getting the optimal sleep, calories, sun etc.
If roughly two thirds of the population were at risk of serious health complications from doing any of those things too much, then we would.
a) as widespread as obesity
b) caused by ways that tracking the number of times you go to the bathroom, have sex or breathe would fix?
Obesity is directly caused by a failure to moderate how much we eat, so yes, some of us track how much we eat. It's not really that crazy. If you can do that without tracking it, cool, but its pretty damn clear a lot of people can't.
Actually research shows that people who watch WHAT the eat vs how much they eat lose the weight and keep it off. Calorie counting empirically doesn't work.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/well/eat/counting-calorie...
Read the article and study you posted. It doesn't show that, it just shows that you can lose weight without using the calorie counting technique.
Objective: To determine the effect of a healthy low-fat (HLF) diet vs a healthy low-carbohydrate (HLC) diet on weight change and if genotype pattern or insulin secretion are related to the dietary effects on weight loss.
Findings: ...weight change over 12 months was not significantly different for participants in the HLF diet group (−5.3 kg) vs the HLC diet group (−6.0 kg), and there was no significant diet-genotype interaction or diet-insulin interaction with 12-month weight loss.
A study on low fat vs low carb diets has got absolutely nothing to do with calorie counting.
a) people on caloric deficit almost always gain the weight back b) people can lose weight without calorie counting
I didn't say people can't lose weight without calorie counting, just that some of us do use it. Like I said,
If you can do that without tracking it, cool
You did. If you're walking back on it then ok, but don't lie straight to my face: "Obesity is directly caused by a failure to moderate how much we eat"
> If you can do that without tracking it, cool
You can too.
You can too.
Since I'm at 12% body fat, no, I probably couldn't, and I shouldn't
Dieting? That's passive: it involves not doing something. All I can think about is the fact that I shouldn't be eating, which makes me think about eating, which makes me eat.
Obsessively counting calories? It makes me do something active: strive for a minimal caloric intake for the day (I say minimal but minimal for me is healthy for anyone else).
I need to do the same thing with reading papers. Reading a paper is a passive activity while writing a paper review is active. I try to find at least one major flaw with each paper I read so that I have something active to keep my attention, a goal.
Saying "behavior xyz is silly" is unfair and not super constructive. Each of us has a single data point of human experience. Generalizing from that is kind of silly if you think about it.
If I could curtail my bathroom activity healthily, and if that would lead to a better and happier life, then dammit I'd track that shit in a heartbeat. Ditto for breathing. And unless you are having an unhealthy amount of sex there is nothing to gain from tracking it (except for ego/lack thereof).
The examples you list above all have something in common: there is no benefit to tracking them. For calories, there is an actual benefit.
There are two kinds of animals that suffer from obesity, modern humans, and animals that modern humans feed. The culprit is clear, it's our interventionist mindset. It's the USDA telling you exactly to eat the opposite of what you're supposed to eat.
The answer is less intervention, not more. Try eating an all or mostly meat diet and I assure you'll feel a lot better and food will go back to being an automatic function for you: http://justmeat.co/
You also never see a bear walking on the Moon, or playing Candy Crush Saga.
> The culprit is clear, it's our interventionist mindset.
Or maybe that we no longer live on savanna, and the foods we have available are quite different from what our great-{n}-ancestors had.
If we do something right, like science and engineering, it doesn't mean we're doing everything right. In fact, most people are miserable and suffering from health issues that bears don't suffer from.
> Or maybe that we no longer live on savanna, and the foods we have available are quite different from what our great-{n}-ancestors had.
Although the megafauna are extinct (shame), meat is largely the same and that's what most of what our ancestors ate.
They also don't suffer from health issues that bears suffer from (and that preindustrial humans suffered from, too). As for misery, I can agree about the part caused by stress and ennui, but along most imaginable metrics, humans today are better off than in any other period of history.
> meat is largely the same and that's what most of what our ancestors ate
Technically, meat and fruits are "the same". In practice, meats are heavily processed products of factory farming exercises, and besides that, who buys just meats and fruits? Most food we buy has at least one more level of processing involved.
An increasing number of healthy people inclusing world record holder atheletes. http://justmeat.co
There could be a different reason. Getting more food is lot easier for these two animals. Other animals (at least meat eating) need a lot more effort to get their food. It's a natural limiting factor. Non-meat eating animals need to digest a lot of fiber which makes eating a lot quite hard.
If you want to improve something it is a good idea to measure it.
Sensible examples might include: repetitions and weights at the gym, body weight, running / walking distance, hours slept, time wasted on social media
Counting calories might not have to be done continuously depending on your diet and goals but definitely helps to realise how much sugar and carbs are in many foods. Calibrating your perception in this way might be enough to convince you to change your habits for good.
Many things can be tracked conveniently or automatically even without the need to go BigData.
A cheap air monitor can detect high CO2 or VOC in enclosed spaces. Without insight a simple fix such as opening a window may not occur to some.
The hope that our bodies can regulate everything intrinsically is not good enough in an increasingly artificial environment and natural is not always healthy.
For me, rigorously tracking my caloric intake by weighting nearly everything I've eaten with a food scale and recording it in the Cronometer smart phone app has led to a 100 pound weight loss over the last year, and normalizing my blood pressure & triglycerides.
But, you know, at best ... just a useless database. Good grief.
However, if you cleaned up your diet too then that might've been the causal factor and not the tracking which is to nerds what prayer is to the pious.
Other statistics tell us that calorie deficit is the required and sufficient condition for weight loss.
Frequentist statistics do not apply directly to individual cases.
I think the idea that calorie counting is something super difficult is a bigger barrier than the activity itself.
Much more straight-forward, much easier to adhere to.
My immediate reaction is how can someone with a programming background write 250 pages about a topic as simple as dieting?!
So I skimmed it a bit and it’s quite a fun read! It’s reads as if the author is speaking directly to you, with both pure facts and colorful analogies. Looking forward to going through the rest.
Diet and nutrition has to be one of the most complex and divisive topics currently. There is an incredible amount of anecdotal advice and "scientific" evidence for every theory imaginable, driven by the vast diversity of the human population and commercial agendas.
Or do you think in terms of "calories in - calories out = weight gain", which is as simple as it is useless?
I have found this mindset helpful. Is it regarded as useless in a dietetic context?
1) The body is good at up and downregulating its calories use and cravings depending on what you eat.
2) The "calories in/out" approach doesn't depend on particular foods you eat, which means you can't sell your new magic fad diet without doing your best to discredit it.
2) Everyone wants a magic bullet, but sip far there isn't one. On the other hand, specific diets and restrictions may be easier to keep and cause faster or more weight loss than others, as well as suppress appetite more or less.
Yes. For example, it's why a dietitian will tell you to eat whole fruit, and tell you not to drink smoothies or juices (apart from very limited amounts).
For example, a tbsp of coconut oil contains 117 calories while the same volume of sugar contains 48. Yet anyone following a ketogenic diet would argue in favor of calories from the coconut oil over sugar any day.
Another great nutrition book for the analytically-minded among us (not actually a prescriptive "diet" despite the title): Perfect Health Diet http://perfecthealthdiet.com/the-diet/
Personally, I think low-carb diets seem to work better for most people, because almost all junk food is high in carbs, and therefore forbidden. Obviously if you want a healthy and lean body, you need to focus on healthy foods and keep the junk to a minimum.
It’s good stuff, and I trusted it because he was “one of us.”
IOW, 100 calories of fat are very different from 100 calories of sugar, and that's completely erased when everything is standardized as a simple "calorie".
Oh, and when you're hungry eat a meal first then snack later. Don't start snacking first or you can find yourself over indulging in chips to make up for the meal you didn't eat on time.
Another very healthy way to reduce your caloric intake is to make fresh vegetables the center of your diet and then fill in from there instead of eating the occasional side salad.
I feel pretty full and rarely take in more than 2k calories a day - I'm not limiting intake in any way.
I've never struggled with weight though, just a few pounds after college prompted me to start cooking.
The more you can rely on appetite control, the better.
For a start, you should not be aiming to "lose weight". You should be aiming to maintain weight, and that weight might be lower than what you currently maintain. A diet is not a short term thing that is hard. If you think about it like that then when you finish "losing weight" you'll just go back to your normal mode of eating too much. This is what most people do. What you actually want to do is change your lifestyle forever.
Changing your lifestyle forever cannot actually include counting calories. You are not going to do that for the rest of your life. Counting calories should be merely an educational exercise. Before long you should just know how much to eat. If you're the kind of person who can't drive a route you've already driven with GPS a second time without GPS then you won't have much luck. Learn to be that person.
The biggest lifestyle change you can make is cooking everything you eat yourself and do not snack at all. Learn to be hungry and look forward to your next meal. I observe fat people all the time and they don't necessarily eat huge meals, they just eat constantly throughout the day.
A hacker's diet should be one that is incredibly easy to follow. I eat two meals a day. I weigh out starchy ingredients because I know how much I need. I do not place calorific items into my mouth between meals. Never ever.
Otherwise I prepar my meals, and mostly avoid snacking. If I snack it’s going to be some carrots or similar that I log in a tracking app.
Though now after a year of nearly continuous meal and excrsice tracking I have found I tend to eat appropriate sized meals.
>Bacteria grow most rapidly in the range of temperatures between 40 ° and 140 °F, doubling in number in as little as 20 minutes. This range of temperatures is often called the “Danger Zone.” That’s why the Meat and Poultry Hotline advises consumers to never leave food out of refrigeration over 2 hours. If the temperature is above 90 °F, food should not be left out more than 1 hour.
It's super easy to bring food to work and just eat it at room temperature. But instead people insist on this weird fridge then microwave ritual then complain about it being too difficult.
I don't understand the romanticization of a time period where it was normal for people to die before they were 40.
My personal experience: 1) Using MyFitnessPal I can enter what i ate in less than 2-3’ (split during the day) 2) Being self-aware of how much I eat is extremely harder and amazingly less accurate than counting calories on Mfp 3) Whenever I stopped counting calories my weight loss either or even turned it weight gain.
Not everyone is the same. Different things will work for different people.