How to lose weight: What worked for me, with graphs
danieltenner.com
danieltenner.com
Let me encourage folks that exercise is still the other very important part of the equation, and, like eating right, has other benefits as well: less back pain, more energy, better concentration, better self image. Exercise will also help preserve muscle mass.
I also give people a standard reading/homework list:
-- Michael Pollan's essay Unhappy Meals
-- Deborah Madsion's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
-- Howard McGee's On Food and Cooking
-- Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking
-- Watch "Food, Inc" and "King Corn"
Ever!
Instead of blindly trying what I tried before (calorie counting, exercise, etc), I've started reading books about nutrition & obesity research - the most informative one being "Good Calories, Bad Calories." I now come to the task armed knowing much more about how food affects my body than before (*atleast, according to the best research available today).
So, I've started reducing my carbs and sugars, and taking the opportunity to learn how to cook delicious vegetable+protein meals. I've lost 10kg so far, and more importantly, I actually really look forward to my meals.
I'm also trying to graph the weight like mentioned in the article, but it is a bit trickier as a girl (menstrual cycles interfere) and I don't have a fancy body fat scale. I've also taken pictures of myself (mostly my stomach), and have started taking pictures of my food to see if that keeps me more accountable (dailybooth.com/whatpamelaseating).
Anyway, it's going well so far, and I hope to use what I learnt to help my obese sister lose weight as well, before it affects her chronically.
Other suggested reading: Fast Food Nation, In Defense of Food, 4-Hour Body.
This got me down about 40lbs in a year or so. No tricksy diets, or really any giant exertions of willpower; like many, I am an inveterate creature of habit, so once I switched habits, I generally stuck to them.
At this point, I started YC, and stress played an important role in losing another 20lbs or so. Obviously not universally applicable. But the lack of exercise eventually had me hire a trainer and work out three times a week. This was fairly serious stuff, taking into account my poor baseline of fitness. Another 20lbs in about six months.
The final push was moving to a daily 6am boot camp style workout, and a dedication to running. I'm now hovering between 185 and 195 and dying to get running again (I did by ITB, so no strenuous exercise involving my left leg until February).
The biggest thing for me was walking up a staircase in IL3 and having a coworker comment on how hard I was breathing. She was Chinese and with characteristic bluntness said, "you're too fat". Hard to argue with that.
I've had good luck with a combination of what both the author and the first commenter said. Go a week forcing yourself to eat smaller portions, your stomach will shrink and it becomes natural. I can't eat what I used to call "large" portions before (kind of annoying when you're at a really good restaurant or a holiday dinner).
I also dusted my bicycle off and got back out and started riding. I hadn't been active on that since I'd been moving around cities which are terrible for bicycling (Las Vegas being my current). But I found some good roads and trails, found the right times to ride them to avoid traffic and I was set. In the past 6mo or so, I've gone from 5-10mi rides to just over 60mi. When the time changed I lost my every evening ride after work as I hate riding at night around here. So I commute a couple miles to work every day on my bike, then do a nice long ride or two on the weekend.
All this together has taken me from my high school to college to post-college weight of 210 lbs down to just north of 170 in about 6-8 months. I'm now lighter than the weight I wrestled in middle school.
1. Weigh yourself every day in the mornings.
2. Graph your weight. (I started doing this using fatbet.net with a few friends)
3. Eat less. (I stick to low carbs and make sure I eat less than 2500 calories per day - ideally less than 2000)
I also do light runs 3X a week and do a tiny bit of weight lifting to maintain my muscle mass and fitness level which ensures I continue to burn the same number of calories every day.
Also make darn sure you get enough carbs before going any intense exercise that last more than 45 mins (e.g. 3 hour hike, 3 hour mountain bike, etc) or you will crash and burn and it's very unpleasant and inconvenient if you're in the middle of nowhere.
I go a little further, having written a simple program that draws slightly more expressive charts than what a quick Excel job will produce, colour coding just about everything in a green=good, blue=neutral, red=bad kind of way.
In particular, I track total calories consumed, "bad" calories consumed, and calories expended during exercise. I plot these as a single blue bar for each day, with the total height being the total calories. I colour the top part of the bar red to show how much of the total came from bad calories, and shift the bar down to start below the zero line and colour the lower part green to show how much exercise calories offset the intake. I know I'm getting sloppy if the tops of the bars start going up, and it's easy to see from the red and green whether it's due to eating too much junk or not exercising enough.
This approach makes the height of the bar relative to the zero line a daily "calorie balance". I label each bar with the balance figure, in green if it's under 1,500, blue for up to 2,000, and red for over 2,000. Again, the visual reinforcement is great: it feels like I want to get lots of green numbers, and I feel guilty if I get lots of red numbers, even though rationally I know that a red number is not actually that much.
I do realise that effective weight control isn't really as simple as this crude calorie balance approximation, but the chart serves its purpose. Throw in a graph of weight (a marker every day, again coloured for reinforcement, so it's green when I hit a new low, blue if I equal the previous low, and red if it's above the previous low) plotted above the calorie balance, and perhaps a line showing body fat percentage as well, and everything looks much nicer if you can get it green. It also starts to show patterns of real progress quite quickly: you can see a general downward trend in weight and body fat within a few days, and over time you start to see that when you slack off on the diet or exercise it really does lead to pausing or reversing the downward trends.
After doing this for several months and losing a fair amount of weight, I concluded that the recommended calorie intakes for adults don't work for me at all. Despite being over 6' and despite doing a fair bit of dancing in my social life, I do not require anything like the 2,500 daily calories recommended for an adult male to maintain my weight. Consuming around 2,000 calories per day is plenty for me, unless I'm planning a particularly long or intensive workout, in which case I eat more accordingly. As soon as I learned to ignore the official advice and adjusted all my expectations down by 500 calories per day, I permanently stopped my weight drifting up as it had been for a few months before I started this exercise, and started it back towards a level I consider acceptable.
Finally, a few things are really bad for calorie balance, and you don't necessarily realise unless you're actively checking what you're eating and drinking. Fizzy, sugared drinks are the kiss of death for any diet, but you have to be careful with "diet" versions as well, as they sometimes have secondary effects that cause you to be more hungry and thus eat more than you otherwise would! Also, if you're an "everything tastes better with cheese" person, you might want to moderate your dairy intake. Cutting down sharply on these two things alone reduced my daily calorie balance enough to be losing a substantial amount of weight, before I even started improving my exercise regime and looked at other parts of my diet.
This book was recommended on HN in a diet related article: The Hacker's Diet, http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html It's written by the founder of AutoCAD. That's where I got the moving average idea.
We encourage checking in your weight everyday and produce slick graphs automatically (which you can embed in a website or blog for that extra motivation to stop it from rising!).
If anyone signs up let me know how you get on and follow me:
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http://www.diabetesnet.com/diabetes_food_diet/satiety_index....
Eat until you are not hungry anymore rather than until you are full.
Burn off more calories than you eat. Adjust exercise and eating to follow this rule.
I had weight loss surgery and lost 160lbs. I also almost died almost a year to the date after the initial surgery because of an intestinal stricture that resulted when a permanent stitch become semi-permanent and came very close to my intestine tearing (sepsis from that is BAD). I basically had to have most of the surgery twice as a result, the second time in an emergency setting (fortunately from the same doctor as the original, who was chosen because his practice of doctors are so good).
Still, I am a proponent of the surgery for a certain class of individuals, like me, who had tried for years and years to lose and saw nothing but yo-yo'ing into BMIs of 40s, 50s and more. Quality of life is so low and health dangers so high, that the risks can be worth it.
Few people who haven't been morbidly obese can understand how bad the quality of life can be (note: QoL does not have to be bad for the morbidly obese; some people are very happy and I say more power to them! I was not one of them. I was miserable.).
Even knowing how close I came to dying, I would do it again, just for the opportunity to live. It is not a decision to be made lightly (I can give a list as long as my arm as to potential complications), and my heart goes out to every person who hoped for that better life and succumbed to complications. It is also not a silver bullet. You still have to think about how you eat, retrain yourself, etc., or you will be back at your weight again (I'm dieting now because I've gained back a bit more than I wanted because I didn't pay enough attention, but the tool still works and I am losing weight. I'm down about 20lbs and able to diet like a "normal" person.).
However, even with all that, I will still encourage everybody I talk to who is considering it to do it if they think it is right. Only they can decide that.
Edit: Rereading, I noticed you mentioned "especially if they have kids" and I think it is also important to address that. The decision is certain more grave at that point.
I had four kids, the youngest was 3 when I had my surgery. It factored significantly into the decision, but in the end, it actually encouraged me to have the surgery. Let me explain:
1. Children of obese parents tend to be obese and unhealthy. I wanted to try to help break that cycle. 2. I could not really play with my kids, do the things I wanted to with them, because of my weight, so it was negatively impacting my relationship with them. 3. My health was deteriorating to the point that it was questionable whether I would have 10 more years with them at the current trajectory (high blood pressure, high cholesterol, beginnings of type 2 diabetes), and those 10 years would be miserable, watching me decay.
So, in the end, I did the surgery for myself and for my family.
Harder than skipping the cookie, sure, but also better for you. For example, look at the thighs of a chronic eater/exerciser and a chronic dieter.
I'm in pretty good shape and did a real 1000 calories workout one time with a trainer friend of mine (he has a body bug which does an okay job of tracking calories). It took an hour of high intensity exercise and I nearly puked a few times during the workout. That's how hard it was.
[1]http://www.fitsugar.com/Ten-Ways-Burn-200-Calories-1081158
Your own link suggests 12 minutes of vigorous biking will burn 200 cals as well as 10 minutes of boxing.
You hit on the rest of the equation though, specifically about what people think is high intensity. Vigorous biking means going all out for 12 full minutes likely with the resistance turned up pretty high. When it comes to elliptical machines they are notoriously bad at making people think they do all this 'work' when in reality it's momentum unless they turn the machines resistance way up. Treadmills do some of this by 'carrying' people along, but they are not nearly as bad as ellipticals.
Boxing is very good, but really doing boxing for 10 minutes with a heavy bag is not easy. Notice how long the rounds are in a real boxing match and how tired the fighters are. Reminds me of the only other time I've puked while exercising was doing 2 minute on/1 minute off BJJ rounds.
You should actually swap your warmup method around [3]. If you can do a minute full intensity with only 30 seconds rest then that would lead me to believe the intensity isn't as high as you think. Instead do 30 seconds full intensity with 90 seconds rest[1]. Personally, I have to do this on a track b/c it scares me to even try to run at a true full speed on a treadmill (I had a 5.0sec 40yd at one point in my life hah!). 60 second splits with 180 second rest is also popular. I can't find it now [2], but the original HIIT research found the 1:3 sprint:non-sprint ratio as a key factor.
[1]http://www.intervaltraining.net/HiitTraining-30.html
[2]Darn all the 'fitness' crap on the internet because it makes it near impossible to find anything a second time
[3]To clarify - I would actually do a different warmup more focused on the up coming workout and do true HIIT post workout or on it's own day.
As for my interval times, it corresponds to 1 minute rounds, 30 seconds rest. I could jack up the intensity more if I wanted to do 30/90, but in the ring that would correspond to 30 seconds dishing it out, 30 seconds getting killed.
By the way, could you explain the rationale behind [3]?
The rational with 3 is simple. Some of the recent writings from people like Alywn Cosgrove and Lou Shuler (2 guys who I think know what they are talking about) have talked about how useless the standard treadmill warmup is for people. Instead they advocate people focus on dynamic stretching and a focused warmup prior to weight lifting. So if I'm benching that day my warmup might consist of shoulder mobility stretching/pre-hab and progressively heavier bench weight until I'm ready to do my work sets. Running on the treadmill would have done nothing to prepare my chest and in particular my shoulders for what was about to happen.
If you love running on the treadmill before working out then go for it, but make sure to also warmup whatever you're working on that day from a weight standpoint. Also, since most people are time constrained that 10 minutes on the treadmill before doing anything else could be better used.
When it comes to doing full HIIT, I simply don't have the energy to do it properly and then lift or vice versa. For example, when I dead lifted this week I did 365x5, 405x5, 455x2, 510x1 after my active warm up. I followed that with SLDLs, pull throughs and then some plyo work (high jumps, long jumps, etc...). There is no way I could do any sort of HIIT with the proper intensity after that considering I had a hard time walking :)
On days when there is less lower body work I can sometimes squeeze HIIT in at the end of the workout depending on how spent I am. Generally I'll just mix in 1/6 mile sprints in between various upper body sets.
My main cardio comes from doing various other activities like hiking, snowboarding, basketball, etc...
Check it out sometime.
By the way... I see people all too often misunderstand "cheat days". On a cheat day, you don't get to pig out on junk food. You get to pig out on good, healthy food (i.e., double-up on serving sizes), or have just a serving of less-than healthy food (such as pizza, etc).