Comment by saturdaysaint | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saturdaysaint | Hacker News Reader

Other people have pointed out that the author's stated theory of calory intake isn't universally accepted, but I'd add that the author's conception of exercise is also problematic. The value of the cardio she holds up as evidence of her subjects devotion to weight loss is suspect.

She mentions changes to her subjects musculature on restricted calorie/high cardio diets as an impediment to future weight loss. So why not do what's practically canon among modern athletes and bodybuilders - make healthy muscle development (or at least preservation) a primary goal of the diet/exercise regime. In other words, do the opposite of what all these beleaguered people are doing?

Bodybuilders disdain cardio because it results in hormone changes that actively inhibit muscle development. Conversely, weight lifting boosts testosterone and lean body mass.

The whole outlook here is so out of keeping with the wisdom of the highly fit people I know (and my own experience shedding and keeping off 50 pounds of excess weight for five years without the grueling effort she describes) makes me question her conclusions.

Other people have pointed out that the author's stated theory of calory intake isn't universally accepted

Very little in nutrition is universally accepted.

So why not do what's practically canon among modern athletes and bodybuilders - make healthy muscle development (or at least preservation) a primary goal of the diet/exercise regime. In other words, do the opposite of what all these beleaguered people are doing?

Because it generally doesn't work for weight loss. Each additional pound of muscle will burn about 3 calories per day more than that pound of fat. So if you lose 10 pounds of fat and add 10 pounds of muscle (no small feat), that will net about 30 calories per day. Less than about 5 minutes of jogging.

Adding muscle mass is great when you're already lean, which is why it makes sense for athletes and bodybuilders. But talk to NFL linemen who try to lose weight after they retire and you'll see that simply lifting weights isn't sufficient. They need to cut back on food and spend a lot of time running. And from people I know -- they'd much rather just lift weights.

It's very true that losing 10lbs fat and gaining 10lbs muscle will only net 30 calories/day. So what? The goal isn't to get your weight below a certain number unless you are a boxer aiming for a weight class. The goal is to get a healthy body composition.

I'm 6'5", and I weigh 242lb, for a BMI of 29. (Overweight is 25, obese is 30.) If you looked at me, you'd never guess I was overweight - the most you'd see is a little excess belly fat if I took my shirt off. On the other hand, I bench 170, squat 200 and press 120 (no deadlift due to back injury). When I hit 253, I'll be obese, just like pretty much everyone in the NBA. Yes, I know my squat is low.

And, like most people in the NBA, I'll be eating just as much as any fat guy. That's what gaining muscle buys you - it lets you eat as much as ever while being "that jacked guy" rather than "that fat guy".

This also ignores the fact that to build and maintain the muscle, you are burning calories anaerobically, the same as you would if you were sprinting (slower running burns fewer calories, since it's primarily aerobic).

I'm 6'5", and I weigh 242lb

Remind me stop disagreeing with you. :-)

At 6'2", 265#, bouncers at bars call me "sir".

NBA players also play basketball 4 hours per day. You can't really eat whatever you want just cuz you can bench press 1/2 your bodyweight. Retired athletes tend to balloon up because they keep eating the same way they did when they were burning 8000 calories per day.

Hold diet fixed and start lifting weights. If you start at 6'5" and weigh 254lb, you might end up the same way. But you'll go from 45" waist and 12" bicep to a 34" waist and 20" biceps.

In my book, that's a victory.

(This assumes you eat sufficient protein - if the calories are all fat + carbs, this won't work.)

[edit: to address rdouble's point, a 6'5" 254lb man who plays basketball also needs to eat more than the 6'5" 254lb man who doesn't, and cut back when he stops playing basketball. I never meant to dispute this.]

Because BMI is a crap measurement and you are not overweight, you are muscular.

You're not going to like hearing this, but unless those numbers are in kg's you're not likely to be "jacked". The reality is you're probably carrying significantly more fat than you think you are.

Um, what I said: "...the most you'd see is a little excess belly fat if I took my shirt off..."

I know I have some fat. I'll start stressing about it when my lifts stop going up, or when it becomes visibly excessive.

As for being "jacked", I wasn't describing myself now, but rather a hypothetical future self. You can infer this based on my use of the future tense: "When I hit 253, I'll be obese, just like pretty much everyone in the NBA...I'll be eating just as much..."

I know I've got a long way to go. That's why I'm describing the future rather than the present.

When I hit 253, I'll be obese, just like pretty much everyone in the NBA.

Sadly, that's literally true in the US. The definition of obesity is dictated, by official US health policy, by BMI. Which means that every heavyweight bodybuilder on stage at the Mr. Olympia contest this past fall, at 4% body fat, is considered "obese" by official definitions.

BMI is an absolutely crap measurement. It's readily and easily replaced by far more accurate and useful measures (circumference measures for starters). While BMI remains vaguely useful in making obesity estimates of populations based on height/weight datapoints readily available in existing databases, it never was, and was never meant by even its first modern revivalists, to be used as an individual measure of fitness.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1062684...

http://www.slate.com/id/2223095/

http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_05_09.html

Yes, this is why I mentioned muscle preservation and focused on the hormonal impact of different kinds of exercise. The "calories-burned-per-muscle-pound theory" is probably a drastic simplification of the benefits of resistance training. Then again, the article in point shows that muscle mass isn't the only relevant metric - the article shows that changes in muscle quality (becoming more "slow twitch" in character) can have vast health implications. Conversely, it might follow, that nobody needs to gain a pound of muscle to accrue benefits from weight training.

You're discounting the calories burned while lifting the weights. Running also gets easier as you lose weight, so you'll top out unless you add miles/time or speed.

A lot of people exercise because its fun. In the same way that you should have a healthy diet because it will probably taste better. I would argue that weight loss on its own gives little immediate benefits. Doing sport because its fun has lots of immediate benefits, and gives a constant sense of achievement. Weight loss is just an added benefit.

If tracking weight loss doesn't lead to weight loss it is an invalid treatment for obesity.

Very true. Stress's impact on weight is probably underappreciated, both in terms of the hormone changes and the poor decisions people make when they're stressed. I think one of the biggest health benefits of exercise is the emotional uplift it gives, which in turn leads to making unhealthy things like drinking and eating bad foods less appealing.

Adding muscle is 1) extremely difficult (no, you cannot add 30 lbs of muscle in 30 days unlike the ads would make you believe) and 2) the effects are largely exaggerated.

Quoting Lyle McDonald, a noted leader in fitness science and nutrition :

"Some of this also comes from the still gross misconception that ‘muscle burns a ton of calories’ (a myth I took apart in Dissecting the Energy Needs of the Body – Research Review). That is, they hope to jack up metabolic rate by increasing muscle mass. Which is a futile activity because the effect is minimal (on top of the fact that the obese are already carrying extra muscle mass). A pound of muscle burns about 6 calories at rest, you have to add a ton to impact on metabolic rate (see also the next issue I discuss, low metabolic rate isn’t a problem). And that takes a lot of time, time better spent focusing on active fat loss."

I added 25 lbs of muscle in <month. Since high school I'd never been able able to gain much muscle. Even lifting heavily and being quite strong and eating voraciously the highest I could get to was 163 lbs at 5'11" when I was 25. Earlier this year, I heard of the Gallon of Milk a Day (GOMAD) diet and tried it. I went from 152 to 177 in less than a month, while doing CrossFit three days a week, and one day each a week testing my 1RM max in the squat and bench press. I've never had any appreciable bodyfat (~12%) and I did not gain any during this time. I did not use any supplements of any kind, not creatine, nor steroids, nor insulin.

Edit: Incidentally, since it did indeed happen, the incredulity expressed by the down votes indicates just how proud I should be about it. ;) I never complain about down votes, but there is something mind bending about being down voted for something you know to be pure fact and to realize your down voters literally have no idea what they're talking about.

I added 25 lbs of muscle in <month.

You do realize you lost all credibility right there. Saying you did 5lbs of muscle in less than a month would be questionable -- possible, but rare. 10 lbs in a month is virtually unheard of. Maybe among steroid users -- but even there, not common. 20 lbs? Probably never been done before. 25 lbs?

Seriously, if you really did that you would quite possibly be the first person in the history of the world to do so. You need to write a book, and start a training program. You'll make millions, if not billions.

But I have my doubts as to its veracity.

Yep, 25 lbs. It's not unheard of. You can do google searches to read up on some other peoples' experiences, but presumably you won't believe them either. You could read 4 Hour Body, which has pics, but I guess you won't believe that either. I don't know what to tell you, but it happened. You could ask anyone at the SEM firm I work at, many of whom I convinced to do CrossFit with me, what changes in my physique were readily apparent.

An interesting side-effect from the experience is that I finally diagnosed my angioedema without major urticaria that I'd been having since I was twelve, off-and-on. I'd always had swelling of the face or fingers or tongue or throat, periodically, that would occur in the morning. It went away for some years, but came back a couple years ago. It wasn't coincident with any particular food or activity so it was hard to see how it could be a food allergy. I would take Zyrtec once a day to manage it. However, after going on GOMAD, I couldn't manage it anymore, it was getting to dangerous levels. I went to an immunologist who didn't know what was happening either. After extensive research, I discovered that some people are sensitive to the casein protein found in the milk from common breeds of cattle in the US. It breaks down into an opioid in the body, and some of us produce a histamine response from it. I thank the a2milk company of Australia for providing the resources to help me figure it out. I've since been able to keep the acquired muscle by taking pure whey protein with water.

Anyway, so unless you think I just made up that food intolerance anecdote, yeah, it happened.

Yep, 25 lbs. It's not unheard of. You can do google searches to read up on some other peoples' experiences, but presumably you won't believe them either.

Probably not. I can find Google searches of people who made millions from their couch.

Send me a link from a credible muscle researcher that states that 25 lbs of lean muscle mass in a month is possible. I can't find one.

I don't think you are very well acquainted with the state of exercise science research. There is no one who can credibly claim what the upper limit on muscle mass accumulation is. Our current understanding of strength and hypertrophy pathways is primitive. Even incredibly basic foundational stuff is not agreed on: Some researchers claim you can only process 25g of protein in one sitting while others point to research that shows better protein synthesis and turnover when the entire day's consumption happens at one sitting.

People with my traits are very rare: A hard gainer who had over 10 years of lifting experience, could bench press 250 lbs at 5'11" and weighed 152 lbs? This made me oddly experienced, strong, skinny, and light. Perhaps that matters.

The state of health research is incredibly conflicted and ambiguous, including exercise science. There is more in this heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

I'm a programmer. I have nothing to sell and no agenda. I've been posting on hacker news for a long time. It's bizarre that you think I would lie about this.

First, I never said you were lying (at least not the way most people think about the term). You might be or there might be some other factors at play. I don't know.

What I do know is that no one gains 25 lbs of lean muscle mass in less than month.

What if I said that I ran 50 MPH over a one mile span? You'd probably say, "Not likely. No human has ever done that. If you can, you need to let people know because it would be a huge breakthrough in human athletics." Likewise, gaining 25 lbs of lean muscle mass in less than a month is unheard of.

As noted by another poster -- there's a story of someone who gained about 12# in a month and that story bordered on being so unbelievable that the author of the story has to continously inform the reader that this really happened. You're saying you did more than double that in less time.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. With that said, you have nothing to prove to me. I'm just saying that I don't think what you said is credible and I don't think I'm alone. If you are being sincere, I hope at the very least, you can appreciate how hard your claim is to believe.

That's at the high end of reasonable, but lean gains on the order of 3# per week aren't unheard of. Mark Rippetoe documents one in his "Novice Effect" in which the gains were 2.84#/week over 11 weeks: http://startingstrength.com/articles/novice_effect_rippetoe....

I'd suspect that OP was hitting 50-50 for lean vs. fat mass, but that's still 12 pounds in a month, or about 3# per week. For a highly talented, untrained novice just starting to lift heavy on a milk-heavy diet, within reason/credulity. Though it'd be nice to see witnesses or supporting docs.

From the article you linked, "A best case scenario is Zach’s – he comes in skinny and weak, trains to his full potential, recovers to his full potential, and therefore expresses his optimum capacity for growth and strength. If Zach’s is the best-case scenario, the fact that you don’t really believe it happened the way I’ve described (you really don’t, do you?) means that it happens infrequently enough that less-than-best-case scenarios are the norm."

I don't doubt Mark. But Mark had to couch Zach's story so many times in, "I know... hard to believe"isms that it's super clear that it's something even rare for him to see. Double that rate of lean musle mass gains? I find that seriously hard to believe. I suspect Mark would too.

Look, of course it would be nice for documentation. I didn't set out to prove anything. This was just my experience. I would like for people to believe, but I'm not selling anything, and I have nothing to lose.

Was it 50-50 lean to fat? Well, I can say that my waist size didn't increase, and no one by visual inspection could point to any subcutaneous fat deposits. A normal person looking at me before and after would say that I had strictly increased in muscularity.

Easy there ... I'm mostly agreeing with you.

I work with ellyagg and I can confirm that he did in fact gain 25 lbs in a month using GOMAD, CrossFit and some additional strength work at the gym.

In the same time, I lost about 23 lbs with a diet of few carbs and no processed food, and doing the same exercise routine. I've kept it off even after going back to more normal diet. But, I plan on doing it again since I've still got some weight to lose.

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