Being Less Fat
uncrunched.com
uncrunched.com
If you can get by with a cheap treadmill, you aren't fat.
When I was shopping for a treadmill as a fat guy, every cheap treadmill I looked at had a weight limit low enough that if I was under that I wouldn't need the damn treadmill!
BTW, as someone who has twice lost a lot of weight, kept it of for a significant time, and then put it back, here's the most important lesson I learned: it is all about habit. Both times that I became fat again were after changes in life circumstances that changed my routine significantly.
For instance, the first time was after I left a steady job with a reasonable sized company (Unix hacker at Interactive Systems Corporation) to go work for a friend's small start up. At Interactive, my schedule was quite regular, and it was easy to maintain good eating habits. Essentially, I did not have to think about my weight because my habits were right.
The small startup was a consulting firm, specializing in what he called "crisis intervention programming". Typical job: someone is developing a new intelligent disk controller. Their firmware is a disaster, behind schedule and over budget, and pretty much not salvageable. The hardware side of the project may or may not also be buggy and behind schedule. We'd come in and take a contract to design new firmware from scratch and implement it, often on a schedule that would meet their original deadline...and our bid would be a fixed cost bid with penalties if we were late.
This was a very busy and stressful (but fun!) line of work, with many long days and nights of writing low level code. I simply completely got out of the habit of doing any food preparation myself. Say it's 11 PM and I'm finally getting around to dinner--what am I going to do? Go home, cook something, eat it, clean up, and then head back to the office? Or call the pizza place two buildings over that is open till midnight, order a pizza, pick it up, bring it to my desk, and eat it while cranking out another few hundred lines of code? The latter, of course.
1. If you want to take weight off and keep it off, forget most "diets". Most people think of a "diet" as a temporary change--and when they reach whatever their goal is they go off the diet. And then the weight starts coming back.
You are looking for a permanent change. If you are 300 pounds, say, and you want to be 200, you should be eating like a 200 point person plus enough extra so that your weight loss will not be too fast--a pound or two a week tops, unless your doctor tells you that you need to get the weight off faster.
The overall trajectory you are aiming for is a smooth decrease over time to your target weight.
2. Because you should be thinking long term, not meal to meal or day to day, you can simplify much of your calorie counting (if you need calorie counting) by working in bulk, at least if you aren't sharing a food supply with someone.
For instance, suppose you have determined that 2000 calories a day is right for healthy weight loss at your current weight and exercise level. 2000 calories a day is 14000 calories a week, or approximately 61000 calories a month.
If you set your goal as 61000 calories a month, rather than 2000 a day, you don't have to bother with keeping track of portions. When you buy a box of cereal that says it contains 12 servings of 150 calories each, you don't need to be careful to actually eat it over 12 breakfasts, or break out the scale and weigh it out whenever you eat it--you just record it as 1800 calories the day you buy it (or the day you open it--whichever convention you like better).
I built a table from Ikea that I had a laptop on ... I liked it but I could only use the computer when walking and then there wasn't enough room to run anymore. Also I only surfed the web and ripped cds when I had the computer setup. I didn't do any serious work but I could see myself getting into that. I think I would want to use the big tv for a monitor and a wireless keyboard/mouse.
I agree with the above comments about diet for weight loss. I'm trying to eat vegan for a while and I have noticed an immediate improvement in my blood sugar and how I feel. It is as if a whole body inflammation has cleared up.
My wife and I have a rowing machine and entertainment setup in the basement and we've both started working our way through TV shows that the other one doesn't want to watch (the relaunched Dr. Who for me, True Blood for her) while rowing. Both often feature cliffhangers and other incentives to keep watching, but the rule is that we only watch while we row. Makes us much more likely to do it.
Some bodies naturally store excess calories as fat, while in others the body ups its metabolism to try and prevent this. At the same time, diet certainly plays a role - some forms of carbs can be converted into body fat much more easily than other energy sources (the fat that you eat, for example, doesn't get converted into body fat nearly as efficiently as sugar, for example). And of course, once you've been fat, even if you lose the weight you will have to work harder to keep it off. --There was an NPR story about a study that if you have two people of similar weight and muscle mass, one of whom has lost a lot of weight, the person who lost the weight may have to eat as much as 500 fewer calories per day to maintain his or her weight. It's no wonder how few people manage to keep weight off.
Personally, I've been struggling with my weight since I was 9 years old. I used to be skinny, but I managed to catch hepatitis, and after that I started gaining weight. One of my doctors told me this wasn't that surprising as hepatitis can often cause drastic changes to your metabolism. At my heaviest I was around 290lb, but I'm down under 190, and have been as low as 175 - it's not easy, though. I try hard to watch what I eat (not always successfully, obviously). I used to do high intensity workouts of at least 1 hour 6 times a week - in 2010 I was at the gym more than 300 times. I suffered a setback earlier this year that accounted for a fair bit of the weight gain back from 175 to almost 190 when I caught mono and was advised by my doctor not to work out for 6 weeks, and lingering fatigue issues meant there were many weeks where I only managed to make it to the gym 2 or 3 times a week. I'm finally back up to 5 workouts a week near my old intensity, but it'll still take months of keeping this up to get my weight back down. I'd love to make it down to about 160-170, but that won't be easy.
Is it "that simple"? No, of course not. The body is stupidly complex and variability between individuals is enormous.
On the other hand, is it "that simple"? Yes, of course it is. Chemical reactions in human beings are much as anywhere else.
What matters for weight loss purposes is that your internal mechanisms are, for the most part, not observable. I personally can tell when I fall into gluconeogenesis (the breakdown of amino acids into glucose) because I can smell the ammonia produced as a by-product. But otherwise I wasn't born with a dashboard with helpful graphs of my insulin sensitivity over the past 5 minutes, my current circulating grehlin, testosterone levels or any one of a hundred variables that will have some effect on what happens to me today.
So what can I observe?
I can observe:
* My current weight on a scale
* My current physical appearance
* Some calliper fold measurements
* Weight lifting performance
* How much I am eating
As I said elsewhere, it's more important to find a dietary approach that works for you. Some people are good at counting calories (not me). Some find it surprisingly easy to give up carbs or fast or whatever. So long as you find an approach, that's what matters.
I'm sorry to hear about your illness. How are you training? Are you on fitocracy?
Also you lost 10-15 pounds of muscle. sad but true.
Wikipedia's insulin page even explains how the body stores excess sugars as adipose tissue and later burns that fat for energy.
I guess it varies from person to person and sport to sport.
That's it exactly. As I posted separately, what works for you may not work for the next person. Just look at how you can see some skinny people who seem to constantly eat a lot of crap, never work out, and yet still stay skinny, while you're trying to eat healthy, work out regularly, and still manage to do little better than maintain your current weight.*
*That, of course, doesn't mean the skinny guy is healthier, or in better shape overall, just that he's skinnier.
edit: I too have skinny friends on the must-kill list.
Personally I would have just started cycling to/from work (Although maybe he does already)
The simpler option is to eat less.
Of course, I know, this sounds simpler than you think. I'm just a single guy, so here's my personal anecdotal evidence: I gained about a kilo each year, reaching about 101 kilos this summer. Not huge, but not particularly thin either. (no clue how much that is in pounds btw). I decided to start eating less. I noticed, however, that it was very hard to resist cravings, so I needed rules.
Now, being Dutch, both my breakfast and lunch are centered around slices of bread. That's just how we do it here. I'd eat about 6 slices, with all kinds of nice toppings, for breakfast, and then again 6 for lunch. This is a lot - I'd eat a full loaf of bread (http://www.relouw-janssen.nl/wp-content/uploads/waldkorn.jpg) every 2 days. So I made two rules:
1) Only 3 slices of bread at breakfast, only 3 at lunch.
2) No candies, cookies, etc while at work.
Note that there is no rule 3: I can eat whatever I want for dinner. These rules aren't the "best" or "healthiest" rules; they're rules that are easy to apply in my current situation. You'll probably need different rules.
Turns out I needed these to be simple, strict, and well-defined rules, for this to work. I tried many times before with all kinds of approaches, but I failed each time, and discovered it was because the rules were either too vague or too difficult to meet.
I started with rule 2: no candies and cookies. Our office is littered with candies and cookies, so I needed to learn to resist, and I knew I could not do that if I'd just went from 6 to 3 slices of bread at breakfast.
I managed this without exceptions for 2 weeks, so I decided to start on the bread. Breakfast was easiest, because I bike to work and then eat buns at work that I made the day before. I could just make less and there'd be less for me to eat, whether I wanted to eat more or not. Our office lunch has a walk-by buffet where you take what you want, so I could apply a similar principle here: take only 3 slices. Then the only rule became: don't walk back to the buffet.
Putting a big bag/pot/jar of food in front of you while you sit down to eat is the killer. You'll have a very hard time resisting taking another batch. Take how much you think you're allowed to have elsewhere (in the kitchen, at the counter, whatever), take it to where you'll eat it, and don't go back to get more. No getting more. This really made it easier for me.
Now, I computed that I'm eating about 500-ish calories less every day. On the male average of burning/using 2500 calories, this is not a lot. Results match this: over a bit less than 3 months, I lost just under 6 kilos.
6 kilos on 3 months is not a lot. Losing 30 will take a long time, and that's even assuming that it'll keep going as fast (which it won't). This is fine, however. Fast weight loss probably means you're not changing your patterns, but you just decided to suffer for a while. There's absolutely no point in suffering for a while. Change your patterns, and you'll be able to really get thinner, and also not get fatter again anymore. It'll be suffering in the very beginning, but your body will get used to it! This is very important to realise. I do still feel somewhat hungry most of the day, but I don't mind anymore. It's not driving me nuts like it used to.
My next steps are cutting back on dinner, too (using the "don't go back to get more" rule). I really think I'm on the right track here.
On a slightly related sidenote: I can really recommend "The Hacker's Diet" by John Walker of Autodesk fame (http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html). I didn't manage to do it, because all the heavy calory counting did just not fit my patterns ("is this hamburger 500 calories? or 700? how the hell will I find out?"), but the first chapters have some great info about what does and does not matter in weight loss, and why that's the case. There's a lot of bullshit out there about the topic, and the Hacker's Diet really helps cutting through to the core.
Note: I agree with the other commenters about exercise: you should exercise, no matter what. I bike to work (20km a day) and go to the gym once a week, so I think I've got it covered. Just losing weight without exercise is stupid, you'll turn into a sissy who can't bend a ballpoint pen.
For me personally, the diet approach that's sticking is "Cheat Mode"[1], which is a variety of intermittent fasting. The short version is: no breakfast, low-carb lunch, whatever I want for dinner so long as there's plenty of meat. Simple and effective.
[1] http://www.silverhydra.com/2011/03/cheat-mode-the-official-g...
I did use it once, to drop down from 290 to 220, but that was by limiting myself to 1200 calories a day and very carefully counting everything that I ate. I never went back to it - even after climbing back up to 260 and then dropping down to about 175.
What I could add is that obviously, bread, pasta, pizza etc. are real killers. I literally eat 45% full fat cheese by the kilo every day, but reducing cereal intake was the real changer.
Other than that, kudos for your discipline!
1. Take in fewer calories.
2. Do some exercise with weights to prevent muscle loss and bone weakening.
That's about it. The secret is finding a "less calories" approach that works for you. The Hackers Diet appeals to lots of nerds, but I've seen people do well with Weight Watchers, Paleo, Keto and Intermittent Fasting. Do what works for you.
Those of you on reddit should look at /r/fitness and /r/loseit.
edit: I'd be interested in rebuttals, rather than downvoting. Entirely too much downvoting in this thread already, IMO.