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Comment by iLoveOncall | Hacker News Reader

Because if you want to lose quickly, and once you get the discipline to lose you do want it to be quick, you have to restrict your calories A LOT.

I'm not OP but when I was losing, as a 6"2 male, I was eating between 1200 and 1400 calories a day. This does not allow you to eat anything outside of small meals and drink anything outside of water or diet sodas.

I was still going sometimes to the restaurant with friends but my choice was limited to the unique salad on the menu (which you can't eat whole because it would be too much) and my drink would be a diet coke. Same when we were going to the bar, I would just have diet soda or water.

I was lucky that all of my friends were absolutely supportive and didn't mind at all, but it still limits you. Going to a night club without drinking is not fun at all for example.

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> Going to a night club without drinking is not fun at all for example.

This is where coke and mdma come in.

I would love to know what sort of healthy cut has a 6"2 male eating that low a calorie count. That is approaching weight class athlete cutting numbers which is near uniformly considered very bad for you.

If he’s not exercising and is largely sedentary then 1400 calories for an adult male is a serious deficit, but not extreme. If he added in an hour of high intensity interval training or something that would be extreme and potentially hazardous.

The problem with severe caloric restriction is that your metabolism slows down. This isn't true of water fasting up to 4-5 days at a time where your metabolism increases ~10-15%, and your body produces significant quantities of HGH which help you burn fat while preserving muscle.

Severe caloric restriction diets are actually not particularly effective if your goal is to permanently lose significant quantities of weight and keep it off - once you plateau it really sucks. Of course I mean if you power through and keep at it you will, but IME, periodic fasting is a much easier way to lose weight and keep it off.

Not hazardous, really, as you point out. The whole point of stored fat is to be used.

Citations available on request, I have NCBI links for each of my points but it takes a while to dig up.

I've tried many things and I prefer intermittent fasting over diets and calorie counting. Changing diet a bit is still important (cutting carbs and focusing on stuff that keeps me satiated for longer), but it's easier to manage say going to event (just fast day before/after), or when having some bigger meal for whatever (socializing etc) reason I can always just eat later tomorrow.

Usually one big meal after noon and that's about it, plus occasional coffee or cup of cocoa. If I have event in the evening I just don't eat during the day or get a milky beverage to get me by, then depending on how much I ate I either delay dinner the next day or skip the next day altogether.

What's severe caloric restriction mean, here? From memory I've read that 750kcal and even 1000kcal under TDEE are effective. A TDEE of 2400kcal would be normal for a young 6'2" male who does a bit of light cardio, and 2150kcal wouldn't be unusual for someone who's sedentary.

Some studies, including one that followed The Biggest Loser contestants [1] showed that your basal metabolic rate goes down as much as 23% as a result of significant caloric restriction and remains lower for at least the 6 years of the study - even if the weight is regained. For these contestants the restriction was very significant, though I'm not sure if it's quantified in the study.

Here's another interesting one. Check out the Energy Expenditure section of [2].

> The gross BMR decreased in all the subjects during semistarvation, the average decline being 17.1% after 19 days (54) and 21.4% after 13 days (55). [3]

Based on this data, I would expect your BMR to go down by 20% over a period of three weeks, and remain there for the rest of your life were you to continue this for a while. So you'd have to, as an 'average' person, reduce intake by 500kcal to account for metabolic adaptation, then another 500kcal to lose 1lb per week.

That aligns with your suggestion that 750kcal-1000kcal reduction should show results for most people.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27136388/

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3673773/

[3] https://journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/jappl.1958.1...

Someone who is 6'2" would need to weigh 195 lbs to be considered at all overweight. The BMR for a median 55 year old male is around 1800 calories, and thats for someone just marginally overweight.

I don't believe these BMR calculators are reliable at all. I am 45 and 6'1" and 1800 a day keeps me locked at 240.

I don’t think they are particularly accurate either and I know self reported calorie counts aren’t accurate either.

The important thing here is that a 1200 calorie diet for someone that big is an extreme outlier and I’d like to know what the actual protocol was.

If there wasn’t a lot of consideration about actual composition of diet or if this was a longer term protocol I’d be extra leery of it.

You can be healthy with a zero calorie diet if done correctly and for the proper time period, but you should be consulting an expert if you do.

And for anecdata I’m 6’0, 215 and 45. 1700 calories is a crash diet for me.

Yeah, I don't weigh my food, so I am just making educated guesses. The only time I knew for certain how much I was eating was when I ate about 0 calories for an entire month - due to advanced gallbladder disease and a hilarious series of diagnostic missteps. I lost 20 pounds. Gained it all back almost immediately after my surgery.

same

This amount of calorie would be without taking into account any exercise. Then on top of that, if you exercise (I didn't), you would just eat back the calories you consume via exercising to not be at an unhealthy level.

I would _strongly_ suggest you consult a qualified dietician or physician before cutting that dramatically.

Potassium. They always forget the potassium.

I'd rather fast day before/after than go to event only to be miserable when everyone around me is eating food I want to eat

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