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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

I eat the same 3 meals a day, 5-6 days a week. I spent a couple years refining what meals give me the nutrition I need, with enough energy to code, and help me keep weight off. When I stop this routine, I put on weight fast, so I try to keep jobs that let me work from home and keep my routine. I will meal-prep 4 days at a time, consume those 4 days worth of meals, then have a day where I take my wife out to lunch, buy the groceries for the next 4 days, and skip dinner.

I fully recognize the non-typical nature of this routine, but if you find something that works for you, go with it.

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I worked at a startup that tried to optimize the nutrients and micronutrients including synergistic and antagonistic components and it was pretty hard task. A blogpost regarding the recipies and your considerations would be interesting.

How do you know that you're getting enough of all the different micronutrients? Humans can eat a deficient diet for a long time and not notice serious side effects, so I'm wondering if you have some kind of good way of figuring out whether the different micronutrient quotas are fulfilled properly.

You are 100% correct. I did get vitamin deficient a few years ago, and worked with doctors to identify the deficiencies and resolve them, and have continued testing to make sure I'm doing OK. This routine is a result of that experience more than anything else. That is also one reason I go out to eat every few days - to get some variety into the mix.

>This routine is a result of that experience more than anything else

And I would just like to add everyone's body is a little different. People may have different level / type of deficiencies, and for me that is Vitamin B. So I guess you cant really have meal that works for you and works for everyone else. It is important for everyone trying this to do it themselves and test it out with your body. Not to mention you get to think about how to cook your favourite food.

I personally did something similar for 6 months, but due to different circumstances I can no longer do meal prep. During that time I had an idea about making a web app that help you select your meal prep. You input foods that you like and loath, input regional location so that we know what you can get and and not, and price range, how much it would cost per meal ( Not everyone is rich and well off ) It will hopefully have a List of Meal prep that you may like, along with instructions and where to buy those ingredients.

Did the resolution involve taking an OTC multivitamin? Please ignore if I'm prying.

I'd be super curious to hear what the 3 meals are.

My opinion as someone who's had extremely restrictive diets in order to lose weight: People overthink this. As you've said, our bodies are pretty good at making due with what they get. Aim for a baseline: protein plus some vegetables, some of which are dark green; and then just occasionally indulging in some cravings will probably cover the rest.

I'm in my late 40s, and I was shocked to find out several years ago that I'm the happiest when I just eat meats/proteins and veggies. While I like fruit, it generally makes me feel crappy, almost as bad as with processed carbs. It helped that I also "discovered" sauteed greens, which really helps boost many of my meals now.

Fruits are all sugar, they're nature's candy. They've also been genetically modified to be bigger and sweeter than they ever were before industrial farming.

The term you’re looking for is ‘bred’.

Genetic modification is a term of art, one which doesn’t apply (yet) to fruits on the market.

This will not be true forever, papaya and banana are likely to be the first ones.

Ah, got it. What are the GMO versions designed to do then?

work on GMO papayas and bananas is to render them less susceptible to diseases.

Bananas in particular are a triploid, so any given strain is effectively one big clone propagated by vegetative cutting, hence the lack of seeds. This leaves them unusually susceptible to funguses, which can adapt to them, while they can't remix their genome to adapt back.

Hmm I've found that carbs like bread and bagels work best for me. I usually have a sandwich or a bagel with cream cheese for breakfast and dinner.

How does anyone? I have plenty of coworkers who eat fast food for every lunch and not much better or more diverse for dinner. Certainly they are not getting all the different micronutrients?

Fast food often uses fortified ingredients. Perhaps the most common is fortified flour. Some chains use iodized salt. Preservatives like ascorbic acid or vitamin E effectively provide fortification.

Other than a lack of fiber and ease of consuming too many calories, one could do much worse than fast food--McDonalds, Taco Bell, etc. I think it's easier to get it wrong using a so-called whole foods diet. The ingredient diversity of fast foods makes it more fail-safe, particularly if you're disposed to repetitively eating the same kinds of foods.

I mean, obviously you can't subsist on french fries, but if the issue is laziness, lack of time, access to good groceries, or lack of money, it can make sense. It's difficult to beat a McDonald's Double Cheeseburger for dietary money-value!

Granted, the removal of trans fats has helped. And note that I'm not arguing a whole foods diet can't be better. I'm not recommending a fast food diet ;) But we sometimes underestimate the effort involved in following a good diet and discount the benefits of a good-enough diet.

Did you know if you only ate McDonalds for every meal of every day... you'd be underweight?

A burger, medium fries and diet drink is 588 calories apparently. So three of those a day is only 1764 calories! A massive deficit for almost everyone.

Not really. I would file this under misleading-but-true (although when I checked your numbers I came up with 630, not 588, still a bit shy of 2000cal/day so a little low for most people.

However, it really relies on two things (three, if you count "no snacks at all or other drinks")

1 - diet drinks only. If you change your diet code to a medium coke you are now at 2500cal/day. So instead of a deficit, you have a surplus for most people.

2 - you picked the basic smallest burger. Even if you only change that to a 1/4 pounder, you're up at 2300cal. And it mostly goes (way) up from there (with some exceptions, but even the fillet-of-fish or mcchicken are >100cal more than the basic burger.

So if you change it to "if you only eat from a severely limited subset of the McDonalds menu 3x a day and nothing else, you might be underweight". Sure, that's true. I'd hate to be your GI tract with that severe lack of fiber and vegetables, but you could do it for a while.

If you eat anything like a "typical" order for breakfast/lunch/dinner there, you are likely to have a pretty severe surplus. Hardly surprising, really. Hell some of the breakfast offerings are > 1000cal by themselves.

I thought their hamburger as signature item would be what most people would get, but maybe not. I don't actually go to McDonalds myself so I was just going off their website.

> I thought the hamburger would be their signature item

In the general “hamburger” class (and overall, because hamburgers are their signature category) the Big Mac and Quarterpounder are their signature items.

I can understand how you would get there, and the McDonald's site (intentionally?) doesn't make it easy to see comparisons and product lines.

Their signature item is the Big Mac

Semi-frequent McDonalds eater here who wears size 30 - 31 jeans here.

I agree with the sentiment, but your numbers are somewhat off - a Double Quarter Pounder on its own is 750 calories, and a medium fries is 340 calories. You can get a cheeseburger at 300 calories, but I don't think that would feel filling.

If you're having McDonalds regularly, it works better if you just have one main meal a day. So you can have your 750 calorie burger, 340 calories fries, diet soda / water, and still have room for small snacks at other times of the day.

And personally, I'd be putting on weight at 1764 calories a day. I need to stay around 1500 - 1600, unless I put in a ton of extra exercise. I'm shorter than average.

[Edit: FWIW, not actually recommending others do this, do your own experiments. I've been keeping weight & body fat logs for 14 years, so I've got lots of personal data to track & measure against.]

> your numbers are somewhat off

I used the McDonald's calorie calculator on their website. I picked the hamburger 250 calories (it's their main item and I guess most people get it), medium fries 337 calories (so not even picking the smallest items), and Diet Coke 1 calorie (maybe that one is bending over backwards to be low calorie) = just 588 calories. A very light lunch!

As someone who spent literal years working at a McDonald's as a teenager, the basic hamburger is perhaps only eclipsed by the Filet of Fish sandwich as one of the least ordered regular lunch menu items. The Big Mac probably outsells all other regular lunch sandwiches 3:1, at least.

Of course it's been almost 20 years since I worked there, but I don't imagine it has changed all that much.

In many locations, the basic hamburger isn’t even on the menu. When I keep to the published menu and order a cheeseburger with no cheese, it only shows up on the receipt as a hamburger about 25% of the time.

How did the seasonal McRib fare?

Not sure but I had as many as I could.

   (it's their main item and I guess most people get it),

I suspect this assumption is pretty far off. I'd guess the single burger doesn't even crack the top 10 in sandwich sales for them. Not even close if you exclude sales to kids. At least in the US.

If for arguments sake a more typical lunch was 1/4pounder w/cheese, medium fries, medium (regular coke) you are something like 1100 calories - well into heavy lunch territory.

It's not a main item, it's the dollar menu smallest item. Have you ever been to a mcdonalds?

Highly variable. As a 5"4" woman I would gain a pound a week on that diet (until it leveled out and ~1700 calories was my new maintenance).

My experience with this is that those 588 calories will satiate you less than a 588 calorie meal elsewhere. (Cooking at home is ideal, but restaurants other than McDonald's will often do better too. Varies a lot with ingredients.)

I also know that 1764 calories is not a huge deficit for me.

I do something similar and after 7 years I discovered I was severely Vitimin D deficient. Thanks to an article that was posted recently about UV not penetrating glass.

Vitamin D deficiency has a lot to do with your climate. It's not realistic to get all of your vitamin D from food no matter what. I'm guessing you live in Seattle or some other place where you forget what the sun looks like sometimes?

Is there any easy way to know if you suffer vitamin D defeciency? I'm in Vancouver, and especially at this time of year you end up inside for pretty much all the daylight hours Monday-Friday.

It's diagnosed through a blood test. As far as I know, you can't really diagnose it accurately in any other way. But in developed countries the rule of thumb on that is:

Do you work outside in the sun? Do you eat a lot of fish? Do you take a vitamin D supplement? If you answered "no" to all of these questions then you probably have a vitamin D deficiency. Vitamin D deficiency is very common.

>The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2005 to 2006 data were analyzed for vitamin D levels in adult participants (N = 4495). Vitamin D deficiency was defined as a serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentrations ≤20 ng/mL (50 nmol/L). The overall prevalence rate of vitamin D deficiency was 41.6%, with the highest rate seen in blacks (82.1%), followed by Hispanics (69.2%).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21310306

Looks as though I should probably be making a doctor's appointment...

I live in Kansas. I just don't go outside ever. I was always told I was at high risk of melanoma due to my mother having it so I learned to stay indoors. I start burning within 15 minutes of peak sun.

I'm not a doctor, and I'm sure you've gotten good information. But you don't need that much sun to get your vitamin D. 15 minutes is enough for a whole week.

I've found for me personally that vitamin D supplementation helps, but my tendons/muscle attachments are still weak and injury prone unless I get some real sun.

Do you experience symptoms of Vitamin D deficiency?

Yea and I had no idea what it was or that anything could be done. Some could be a coincidence, but it seems pretty likely to be the cause to me. Over the last few months there has been a constant pressure in my lower back that has since gone away. A foggyness in my head has since gone away. Maybe it is some confirmation bias since taking supplements for awhile now, but the change seemed drastic.

Getting less than 5 minutes of sun per month and never eating any foods that contains Vitimin D such as fish for several years might be to blame.

Go to a doctor. A simple blood test for vitamin deficiency takes a few minutes. If you are deficient, you'll receive a prescription for a high dose to help combat the deficiency immediately, and a plan to take the correct maintenance dose over time. If not, you will know there is another root cause behind your symptoms.

This isn't something you should self-medicate. It's tremendously simple for a doctor to confirm your hypothesis.

You dont even have to go to a doctor...there are online testing services that will test vit D w/out a prescription. IO checked mine quarterly for several years.

Supposedly it takes almost 60,000 IU a day for a long period of time to cause harmful levels of calcium in your blood. All supplements recommend 1 dose a day and the largest dosage is 10,000 IU. I see little risk in attempting self medication here. I'll consult my doctor at my next routine checkup, but I'm not worried about this.

From personal experience the head fogginess is a pretty strong indicator of vitamin D deficiency. I didn't even realize I was deficient until I took 5k IU one night and the next morning felt amazing. The Vitamin D deficiency brain fog is almost worse than a hangover or being high IMO.

You can use a tool like cronometer.com, at least that's what I started using when I started eating plant-based

> How do you know that you're getting enough of all the different micronutrients?

How do you?

The simple hedge of eating a variety of foods, plus medical wisdom around simple things like iodine that have eliminated certain deficiencies.

By definition you don't need micronutrients often, so you don't need to eat a lot of them every day, which is what makes the variety scheme work.

Use the app Chronometer to track micronutrients

Do you have a blog post or something that goes into detail about your routine? It sounds interesting.

I don't have it posted, but it isn't that complex, so I can give a quick rundown here:

Breakfast - 2 eggs, scrambled with generous amounts of mushrooms and spinach, and a little cheese tossed in.

Lunch - Veggie mix that I chop up all together every few days - green peppers, pasilla peppers, green onion, yellow onions, eggplant, jicama, cauliflower, and whatever other root veggies looked good at the store - turnips, rutabagas, and such things. I stir-fry them with lime juice, tomato paste, fish sauce, turmeric, coriander, ginger, and cayenne pepper. At the end, I add a little coconut milk, and it ends up being a decent approximation of a red curry.

Dinner - baked chicken wings with some hot sauce.

> and a little cheese tossed in

Or as I like it call it, salt. ;-)

huh. Seems both tasty and healthy. Well done.

I'm not sure about the fish sauce or coconut milk but you need some fat in there to allow the nutrients from all the plants to be carried into the body. You might consider throwing an ounce or two of chicken in there. Otherwise most of it goes to waste.

Coconut milk is extremely fatty.

Even without that when you’re thinking about macronutrients you should be thinking at the level of at least a day, probably closer to a month. Even without the coconut milk the eggs and cheese from breakfast is plenty fat to ward off deficiency diseases.

Does your wife also eat the same meals? Do you eat together for breakfast and dinner?

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