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Comment by markbnj | Hacker News Reader

Guess I'll share my own story: close to seven years ago now I was nudging up against 270 pounds and had a 44 inch waist. I decided to make some changes and started walking 2 miles a night. This is less than half the distance spoken of in the OP, but in compensation the route involved several decent hills and I walked it briskly. I also did a couple of other things that I think were important: I stopped adding sugar to coffee and I stopped drinking soda and having desert every night after dinner. Over a period of around a year I dropped from 265-ish to 215-ish and shrank my waist to 36 inches. I'm still walking the two miles every night, seven nights a week. Coming out of the covid-19 year of sloth I've put about 15 pounds back on, so I am considering adding another mile or two to the routine and perhaps doing a few other exercises, but just walking those two miles a night worked wonders for me.

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I have a similar story I’ve posted about before. Cut sugar, made myself do 30 minutes of brisk activity each day, lost about 70 pounds.

Mind you, it got harder to do brisk activity as it went. What started as walking for 2 miles ended up being running for 5 miles. (5 miles became the target after a while so I stopped with 30 minutes. It would take 38-40 minutes at my best.)

Also got hit with COVID gain, so I’m back at it. Bought me a treadmill and am doing at least a 5k every day, training back up to at least 4 miles.

I found a lot of it was consistency. It felt like weight loss had an inertia to it. Took a while to really start losing, but once it started it was easy to keep dropping a pound per week. Even after stopping running for a bit, the weight stayed off for quite a while.

Anyway, good on you (us!) for regular exercise! It really can make all the difference.

> Cut sugar

This is a much bigger factor than most people realize. I've kept track of my weight for almost ten years and found that the thing it correlates most with is my sugar intake. More sugar, more weight. The time matters too. Late-night sugar packs on the pounds more than mid-day sugar.

What makes it really insidious is that there's a latency of a week or more. The problem is not so much that sugar itself causes you to gain weight. The problem is that over time sugar actually changes your metabolism so that your body stores more fat. And even that does not happen directly. What sugar intake does is make you feel hungrier, so you eat more in general. It also lowers your baseline metabolism so you feel more tired in between sugar rushes. The net effect of all this is weight gain over a long period of time, and it takes a long time to undo the damage. Quitting sugar really is a lot like quitting smoking.

Another thing many people don't realize is that alcohol has much the same effect as sugar.

Another thing many people don't realize is that alcohol has much the same effect as sugar.

A bit of an oversimplification, but for the purposes of diet, alcohol effectively is liquid sugar. The top ten list of caloric density starts with fat and alcohol pulls up second place.

Yes, that's true, but it misses the point. Caloric density is not what matters. What matters is how hungry you feel. Fat provides (vastly!) more filled-up-feeling per calorie than sugar. So eating fat will help you lose weight despite the fact that fat has more than twice as many calories per gram. You'll feel fuller faster, so you'll eat less.

Sugar actually has the perverse effect of making you feel more hungry after you've eaten it. This is one of the things that makes junk food so addictive.

Is this context, wouldn’t lean protein be the smarter choice over carbs or fat? It has lower caloric density than fat but doesn’t increase ghrelin like carbs

All of this is subject to Ron's First Law: all extreme positions are wrong. Eating too much sugar is bad. So is eating too much far or too much protein. Carbs are generally bad, but simple carbs (and alcohol) are worse than complex carbs. Fiber and vitamins matter too. Just about the only hard-and-fast rule is that sugar and alcohol are bad for you and the less you eat of them the better, at least in terms of your physical health. Personally, I choose to trade off some physical health risks in exchange for some boosts to my mental health because I do love me a margarita now and again. All things in moderation, including moderation :-)

Is this a real law? can't find anything online about either the law or its actual text

Do you mean Ron's First Law? I don't what you mean by "real law" in this context. It's obviously not a "real law" in the sense of being a law of physics or anything like that. It's a real aphorism, like Murphy's law, but obviously nowhere near as well know.

BTW, I'm Ron, the coiner of Ron's First Law, if that helps you put it in context :-)

>BTW, I'm Ron, the coiner of Ron's First Law, if that helps you put it in context :-)

I somehow guessed it, the moment I read it, though I didn't know your full name earlier, despite having read your comments on HN before.

Maybe because I've mulled making up such laws myself :)

Un bella domani, fratello!

(One fine day, brother. - From a Morris West novel. I think it is The Shoes of The Fisherman. Great read.)

You’re absolutely right, but I think the moderation extends to sugar as well. Sugar can be used prudently and beneficially. E.g., eating sugar (or other fast digesting carbs) immediately after a hard workout will actually enhance recovery.

The key is that soda and juice both contain way more sugar than you should be consuming regularly. 1 can of Coke contains roughly 140 calories of sugar which is roughly 100% of your daily recommended sugar according to the American Heart Association. (a can of orange juice is 160, though some weird regulation means they don't have to count it as sugar). As such it is pretty much impossible to have a healthy diet that involves regular consumption of soft drinks. Once a week or so is OK, but more than that is probably bad. (unless you are exercising for more than 3 hours a day)

If we’re constraining it the average semi-sedentary lifestyle, I agree. My point was more to the “only hard-and-fast rule is that sugar and alcohol are bad for you and the less you eat of them the better, at least in terms of your physical health” bit.

To the original point, I don’t agree that hard absolute statements are really good guidelines as they tend to oversimplify. For example, I believe the best recovery was found with 3:1 carb:protein post workout consumption. The typical protein supplement is around 25g, meaning it would be combined with more sugar than is in a can of soda (usually dextrose because it has a higher glycemic response). Some athletes consume sugar regularly (notably, Floyd Mayweather). Point being, I don’t believe it’s a good hard rule to say you should limit sugar as much as possible, but rather the appropriate (and less satisfying answer) is “it depends on your goal”

What you need to look at to figure out what makes you feel full longer vs shorter is GI index of food.

Lower is better, makes you feel fuller for longer.

It's a measure of how fast glucose is released in your bloodstream. It can be one big hike (like from deserts), or evenly spread out over a longer period of time (Natural Muesli).

Isn’t Glycemic Load more important than Glycemic Index since it takes into account serving size? No one eats 100g of table sugar the same as 100g of Apples.

That's just not true. Ethanol is ketone and is fine for diets like keto. It does not spike insulin.

The problem is that most alcohol isn't regulated the same way food is, and there is often a ton of sugar in it that is not required to be labelled. Beer, for example, has tons of carbs, and Captain Morgan is fulla sugar.

Is the implication that the real issue is calories or that alcohol and sugar have similar metabolic mechanisms? E.g., similar effects on insulin, blood glucose etc.?

I drink a soft drink every afternoon at work, and when I fill the recycling bin after 3 months I think about how many calories are in that bin, actually inside me. 12 240-260 calorie drinks is nearly a pound of body weight.

I have a similar story. Many friends asked me how I lost weight. Did I join a gym? Start running? Keto? The answer is boring but I cut out sugar.

I stopped adding it to drinks. I stopped drinking soda and fruit juices and smoothies (fruit juices/smoothies are as bad as soda imho as they all try and pretend they are healthy). Stopped having dessert (unless out for a meal for a special occasion), no biscuits, chocolate, crisps and snacks.

Plus I started viewing my calorie intake over a 7 day period rather than daily. This way I didn't 'feel bad' if I went out for a meal or had a movie and pizza night with the family. I found that 'feed bad' mindset made me quit many times as I felt I had 'failed'. So by removing it and viewing intake over a whole week I could easily reduce a bit over 3 or 4 days and still break even. A simple change of perspective really worked for me.

It took a while but now I don't like how sweet many things are. Like a mars bar is disgusting to me now. Two bites and I feel kind of sick from how much sugar is in it. It shocks me how desensitised I was to sugar as it is added to literally everything.

Also an added bonus to the weight loss was that I also saved a lot as my appetite changed and I was naturally less hungry than I used to be. Smaller meals and less processed crap meant my shopping bill was much lower than before.

To be fair, I eat sugary foods regularly and I too find Mars bar disgustingly sweet. Same with Snickers bar. They're just too sweet, regardless of who is eating them.

Shows just how desensitised to sugar I was as I could easily eat two or three(!) full size Mars bars before I cut out sugar.

If I was running late in the morning I would have a Mars bar and a 330ml bottle of Coke or Pepsi for breakfast!

Looking back I am embarrassed at how shit my diet was. I would eat sweets and sofa for breakfast and a grab a takeaway on the way home (often Chinese as it was near my house). The only "normal" meal I would eat would be lunch at my work restaurant. However it was subsidised which would also lead me to over eating as it was so cheap and I was always hungry from having junk for breakfast.

By my late twenties/early thirties I was around 112KG (~247lbs) on a 184cm (6 foot) body. Shocking.

Your story sounds a lot like mine. I didn't get to 270, but I was getting around 230 before I decided to change things. Fortunately, I didn't have a job at that point, so I got to shed about 1/3 of that weight in ~6 months by doing lots of walking, hiking, and improving my macros (i.e. cutting out sugar and high carbs). Today I'm at 150.

In my opinion, it really doesn't help to tell people what kind of exercise they should be doing. Just sweat. Do whatever it is that you can do consistently. No matter what, you are almost certainly burning more calories than you did sitting around. Combine that with better macronutrients, and you'll almost certainly lose weight.

Once you get slimmer, this can get more difficult because people with more body weight have a greater basal metabolic rate. What I do now when I need to shed some weight (sometimes I get up to 160) is do those things you did before but also eat less. I calculate my BMR, divide it by half, and only eat that many calories. This is a short term strategy, not a long term one.

People argue endlessly about which exercise is "best" but the fact is that the difference between forms of exercise is a rounding error compared to the difference between ANY exercise and being completely sedentary. The most important thing is just to find something that you personally enjoy and don't get inured doing. The constraint for the vast majority of people is just motivation.

Cutting the sugar might have been the bulk of the effect, it's very difficult to burn calories over the base metabolic rate, but it's very easy to consume an extra 200 calories a day in sugar.

> it's very difficult to burn calories over the base metabolic rate

You can run _flat out_ for an hour, or you can just skip the french fries with lunch. I found the latter to be orders of magnitude easier to accomplish on a day-to-day basis.

Calories in, calories out (CICO) will certainly work for weight gain or loss.

But cardiovascular exercise, muscle strengthening, etc do confer other whole-body benefits that going for the french fries won't convey.

Reducing calories on the plate was way easier for me too.

It was both important to control portion size as well as content though.

So for me, the key point was adjusting my meals to make me feel fuller, so I could reduce portion sizes without feeling hungry.

I primarily did this by increasing the relative amount of protein and fiber, and trying to reduce fat or carbs.

For my saturday steak I swapped french fries with peas, and cut the butter for the bearnaise in half.

For my "tacos" I limited the number of tortillas, increasing the amount of salad and also swapping out regular iceberg lettuce with romaine (more fiber). I also stopped using additional oil or fat for cooking the mince meat.

For breakfast I swapped butter for mustard or similar, and tricks like using more mature cheeses so I could use less cheese while still enjoying a lot of flavor.

I think the important thing is being honest with yourself about your goals and limitations, and use that to find something you can live with.

I just had to have that saturday steak, but I identified what about it that was important and as such managed to tweak the dish. I knew I couldn't cut chocolate entirely so instead I found ways to get the chocolate I needed while having far less of it in total.

Absolutely true.

At the same time I've noticed I'm much hungrier if I don't exercise. And exercise displaces time I could be eating. So, at least for me, it seems to have an indirect impact on weight loss.

I can't the exact details but IIRC there is a canonical study which tracked physical activity, calorie intake and obesity in large cohort. There was a high correlation between calorie intake and level of activity in the sample and likewise only a weak correlation between level of activity and obesity (or lack thereof). Basically, people were good at calibrating their calorie intake to their level of physical activity. EXCEPT for the sedentary people, who tended to consume calories way outside of their needs based on little or no physical activity and (not surprisingly) tended to be obese at high rates.

Our bodies seem to be good at calibrating hunger and calorie intake to maintain balance between calories in and calories out, but there is something about being completely sedentary which causes that mechanism to malfunction.

It depends whether your goal is health or aesthetics. If you are after health, moderate about of sport is working intervention. It actually works to make you healthier.

If you go only diet route, you may or may not become healthier.

I think there's an age factor there too. In my 20's as long as I was exercising regularly I could easily burn off that extra 200 calories, but in my 30's I've had to (try to) avoid the calories in the first place.

As a brief counterpoint, for the last few years, I walk at least 5 miles a day (just writing this on the way home from a 15 mile hike), 12 mile cycle commute in normal times, don't drink any sugar, eat one meal a day, caffeine/alcohol free and vegan, resting heart rate is 45-50 bpm.

I'm 270lbs/5'11" with a bunch of weight related health issues. I do have an appetite, for sure. But careful calorie tracking says I should be at a 1000kcal/day deficit, but my weight is stable. Go figure.

I don't know your personal situation but most people underestimate their caloric intake. They don't weigh portions, or forget to count snacks and beverages.

It's also possible that your insulin response is messed up. This Peter Atria Drive podcast has an excellent explanation of the biochemistry which prevents some people from losing fat, and treatments which usually work.

https://peterattiamd.com/ama22/

I don't snack or drink calories. However yeah there may be some systemic issue affecting how I'm measuring calories, it's just hard to figure out what that might be.

As far as blood tests show, my insulin/glucose/hb1ac/etc. is all essentially optimal. Indeed, better than one might expect for a man of my rotundity. Thyroid is lower than average, but not outside of normal range.

I'll check out the podcast, thanks.

Yes, we know next to nothing about nutrition/metabolism, except that people are different. But...

Have you tried varying your eating regime?

1000 Cal is a very large deficit. AIUI large Calorie deficits will cause your basal metabolic rate to slow down, and so will long intervals between meals. Your low resting heart rate may be related to a slow basal metabolic rate - one normally only sees 45 bpm in dedicated athletes. Low BMR might mean your deficit is not actually a deficit. (But this is a very weakly reasearched area.)

If I were you and wanting to lose weight, I'd try for a daily deficit no greater than 200 Cal (averaged over a week), and eating your daily allotted Calories in four or five small meals spaced a few hours apart. (But, of course, this regime might not work for you either.)

I haven't deliberately tried this regime, but I have seen it repeatedly recommended on bodybuilding fora. (And thinking about it, it's approximately what I am doing.)

Getting a job in which I stand for nine hours per day (with mild upper body exercise) and am more or less forced to follow that eating regime has resulted in me losing about 7.5% of my body mass over three months. Fat loss will be higher since I have put on some muscle mass in that time.

I now consume a little more sugar (in diluted electrolyte drinks) than I did before I started.

I'd also note that cycling seems to be ~ 20x lower energy cost per mile than walking. You'd be better off driving to work and adding a mile to your daily walk in the time saved.

Edit to add: a hikers' rule of thumb (based on US Army research) is that an extra pound on your feet increases energy expenditure by 5%. Wear heavy boots when walking.

"Your low resting heart rate may be related to a slow basal metabolic rate - one normally only sees 45 bpm in dedicated athletes"

I did consider this. However if I stop exercising, my RHR increases up to about 60 within a month or so. Indeed my exercise HRmax is around 230, which is, as I understand, on the high side. I'm guessing it is still related in some way though because clearly I'm not an athlete. Additionally I have a low respiration rate and sleep a fair amount. My doctor has done a few blood tests and such - and as far as he's concerned, I'm metabolically completely normal with no diabetes or hormonal issues - but on the low side. For example, my thyroid hormone levels are quite low, but still just within the normal range.

The doctor suggested that some people's weight issues don't respond all that well to exercise in his experience. He said research in the area was weak, but said it may be due to higher levels of fitness combined with favourable body mechanics in some meaning total energy consumption from exercise didn't amount to much. I come from an extremely athletic family, so it's possible that might have some truth. So for me, perhaps, the adage that you can't outrun a bad diet is even more truthful.

"daily deficit no greater than 200 Cal"

To do this (on paper), I'd have to eat a lot more than I'm able to, or cut down exercise. What I might do is try and get booked in for one of those metabolic studies after Covid, to actually accurately calculate my cycling/walking/resting energy consumption. That way I should be able to accurately calculate what exactly a 200kcal deficit really is for me. Thermodynamically, I must not be at a calorie deficit or else I'd lose weight. I'm just not exactly sure where my calculations could be so wrong.

> Getting a job in which I stand for nine hours per day (with mild upper body exercise)

I would love this. On holidays and such, I spend at least 10hrs a day active, and I feel a ton better. Back pain disappears, etc. Unfortunately not too easy with programming. I tried a standing desk and found it didn't really work for me. Might try a treadmill desk, but I can totally see myself getting a head injury from that!

" I'd also note that cycling seems to be ~ 20x lower energy cost per mile than walking. You'd be better off driving to work and adding a mile to your daily walk in the time saved."

Definitely true per mile, but per hour, cycling should be more energy intensive than walking (but less than running). Certainly I spend longer with my heart rate above 180 when cycling, and feel more exhausted after. Metabolic study is the only way to confirm it for me though.

It's sort of irrelevant anyway because bicycle is the quickest way to get to work for me and I don't own a car.

I gained a ton of weight after I stopped smoking. To take it off and keep it off, I made several similar changes.

I stopped drinking sweetened drinks, cut out refined carbs, and took up learning to cook everything from scratch as my new hobby. (It's hard to really get the sugar in your diet under control unless you cook everything from scratch.)

I didn't change my level of physical activity.

This has worked to keep the weight off for more than a decade.

> Coming out of the covid-19 year of sloth I've put about 15 pounds back on

My mom calls these "the covid 19".

Also "the 2020 20".

Doesn't have the same allusion to "the freshmen 15" :P

Great job on your progress. I have a question for people who drink a lot of soda: is this something that started in your household growing up and was carried into adulthood?

I drank very little soda as a kid. Once I got to college, though, I felt like I needed to be a cool hacker dude, and that included lots and lots of Mountain Dew. I'm on to Coke Zero these days, and cutting that out too, but I've got no one to blame but myself for my soda habit.

I drank a lot of soda as a child/adolescent but somewhere in my early twenties I mostly just stopped. Not for any particular health reason either. I just stopped liking it. And now I actually find it pretty disgusting and don't quite understand how anyone actually enjoys it.

I lost my weight by eating less and better. I experimented with a literal "no exercise" regime to see if exercise matters in losing weight.

My findings is that food intake is 100% of weight loss based purely as ratio to movement/use of food intake. (you can run all day, and if you eat too much, you stay overweight)

Worth remembering that almost all processed foods have added sugar, salt or fat these days - apart from other additives like preservatives, stabilizers, emulsifiers, and the list of -ers goes on.

Read product labels closely, and/or don't buy ones without labels. For unprocessed products, to know their natural composition, use Wikipedia and sites like USDA nutrition data site.

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