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Comment by uptownfunk | Hacker News Reader

For those struggling, controlling your diet is the single most effective thing you can do to make progress on obesity.

Much easier to say no to a 300 cal donut than to run 30 minutes.

Cutting out the daily donut for two weeks is about a pound of fat.

Maybe we need a “just say no” to junk food campaign like we had in the 90s.

Lean meat, tofu, tempeh, seitan, veggies, low calorie sauces, limited fruits, protein smoothies (watching the sugar/fat)

Do a few pushups, a light run, increase slowly.

Make it sustainable, not a flash crash.

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True, but don't feel like you have to run for 30 minutes. Walking for that long will go a long way for a lot of folks. Really, walking should probably be looked at far more closely for many folks.

Walking for 30 minutes will go a long way to promote general health, but it's not a lot of calories burned.

In my experiments wearing a glucose monitor, even 5 minutes of walking has a massive effect on blood sugar. Might not make you slim, but might prevent your diabetes if you're borderline.

I counted the steps. Under 600 steps. Not even around the block, and a ~20mg/dL reduction in blood glucose.

On a day to day basis it usually isn't a lot of excess calories eaten either, but over a year or 10 those small discrepencies can add up.

This is an area where calories is scary misleading. The 30 minutes walking is indeed low in the direct impact. For some reason, it punches well above expectations, though. Probably something about base metabolism and such, but whatever it is, you will lose more weight from walking than you'd expect.

Similarly, people probably walk way way less than you would expect. It is kind of scary to see how few steps I can get on a standard day.

Yea, I suspect it has a pretty low effect in terms of calories, but it helps immediately bring your blood sugar back under control within <5 minutes of walking or so. At least that's what my experience is wearing a CGM for a few weeks now.

That's maybe the magic of "walkable neighborhoods." You just walk over to the store/the cafe/the restaurant real quick, and then you walk back. It was only maybe a few hundreds steps, but that's enough to put away a ton of the glucose you just dumped into your bloodstream.

It is shocking how little walking is necessary to have a massive impact on glucose. 500 steps or so is easily enough for me.

I started walking on my way to work and back (London, UK). It's about 5k + 5k steps. Plus a 4k step walk after lunch. Together with a limited calorie intake (2k cal a day) it made wonders. It was crazy to watch the first 5kg just vaporize in 2 weeks.

I went down to 1800 calories and the remaining 10kg were gone in 6 weeks.

You mind sharing your before/after weight and roughly how lean you were? If your metabolism is already dialed in (i.e. you were not obese) this might totally work and be very effective for fat loss.

93kg to 78kg, 180 cm. Did not look fat, but my face got round and belly was forming. Haven't seen my abs for years and years by then. Surprisingly, 80 kg was like no abs at all and 77.8kg was a 4-pack already.

I wrote earlier that reforming my diet to protein-centric, 1800-2000cal a day + 15k steps walking + some lightweight kettlebell work was enough to get things going. I used myfitnespal, really useful.

It wasn't too hard, to be honest, as I am relatively used to training. For some ppl even walking 10k a day is a challenge.

Especially for people who are very obese :)

For comparison, I recently went from 132kg (290lbs) to 111kg (245lbs) in the last 5 months without counting calories, on a very-low-protein, ultra-high-fat diet.

Re. the abs, I've never had them but my impression is they're hidden by basically the last 5lbs of fat you'll lose. So nothing and then they're suddenly there makes sense. Congrats!

Congrats! That's huge! I know it's a very liberating feeling, both physically and psychologically.

My collegue went from 115kg to 85kg some time ago. I know it's a different kind of game. Took a year for him. He was younger, in his late 20s, so running was still an option for him. I am In my late 30s, and traumas accumulated so i had to accept that calorie counting was the only remaining option.

Also, I'd suggest still working from a high-protein approach. You get to keep you muscle, especially if you do some reasonable amount of training.

My entire hypothesis this time around is that protein is making/keeping me fat, and I went super low protein on purpose :) Of course it could also be something else. Everybody freaks out about the low protein though haha.

And yes, abs are not the most important thing. Depends on genetics, max weight, fat distribution. Doesn't really matter In practice.

Back when i doing boxing in early 20s I was as low as 69kg, and still didn't see the full 6-pack. Go figure....

Studies don't really support that. They show that rapid weight loss is more effective, but slightly worse for body composition. And slower weight loss is of course the opposite.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5702468/

+1 for the rapid fat loss. It's just that we don't even really know how to do one or the other reliably :)

Haha that's true.

> Cutting out the daily donut for two weeks is about a pound of fat.

For many people, no it's not. Becuse their metabolism just decreases by the exact same amount they cut calories. They cut out the daily donut, and they find themselves fidgeting less and wearing a sweater because they're suddenly a little chilly a lot of the day. And the scale doesn't budge.

For many people, losing weight is a whole lot more complex than reducing by x calories per day. Getting your body to burn fat rather than slow its metabolism can be maddeningly difficult.

Metabolism does slow down, but there is a lower limit. The exact numbers and rate will change, but the fact is that sufficient caloric restriction will cause weight loss.

That said, as someone who struggles with weight loss, it's still hard. There are both physioloical and psychological issues that make it challenging.

As an aside, keto is the only thing thats worked reliably for me so far - largely because of the caloric restriction it inherently forces. I stopped following it because people kept telling me they were concerned it was unhealthy, but I'm sure the weight is worse than anything else.

Keto was the only thing that worked for me too. I found it a lot easier to just pick some days and say "I'm not eating anything on these days" than it was to constantly track and procure a perfect diet day after day without lapses.

Not sure who told you it was bad for you, I've predominantly heard it being touted as beneficial and longevity-increasing.

Metabolism changes is something like going down from 2100 maintenance calories to 1900 calories. A donut is /at least/ 300+ calories. Age-related metabolism changes are also not that serious.

I've seen people losing 40kg (120kg to 80kg) by just walking and counting calories. It's the last 5-6 kg that are harder than the first 20kg is almost trivial to lose - one all the right habits are in place.

And habits are the hardest part. It's not the body, not laws of thermodynamics, it's just your habits (most of the time).

No, it's more like going from ~2500 maintenance to ~1400 cal/day before your body finally decides to start burning fat instead of lowering its metabolism further. At least for me.

Obviously different people are different.

And it has utterly nothing to do with habits, you can see my other comment. It's about the whether you can even manage the other health consequences you suffer from your metabolism being so low.

1400 a day? For an immobilised hospital patient- maybe. It's like not moving at all! How would your body compensate for it?

Given lightweight excercise (walking,kettlebells, etc) that's almost impossible!

> but the fact is that sufficient caloric restriction will cause weight loss.

Yes, but at the cost of your immune system severely degrading so you suddenly get colds all the time. At the cost of extreme fatigue and brain fog. At least that's what's made weight loss difficult for me at times.

Because for some people (like me), your body drops its metabolism to well below what's healthy before it even thinks about burning fat. It's not any question at all of willpower or psychology, it's purely physiological.

That is why I said, you have to increase the workout intensity and duration gradually to offset the metabolic adaption that is triggered by the diet change

I think “for many people” is more like “for a minority of people.”

For a few people losing weight is complex. For most people, it’s simple.

Eat less. Move more.

Saying otherwise is a cop out.

Yes! Cannot stress it enough. Move. It doesn't even have to be intense! Running can be traumatic. But calories don't care if it's a walk you're doing or a run.

Unless you have some fundamental food-related disorders it's not that hard. Our bodies were meant to gain weight weight quickly - and lose it if necessary. For most people losing 10-20 kg is a question of 3-4 months, or even less.

> For most people, it’s simple.

If it were that simple, most people would be able to do it. The actual evidence shows it's far more complex than you think.

There's no cop out here. Many people's bodies simply refuse to burn fat until their metabolism has gone so low it has other dangerous health consequences.

Also, as for "move more", the evidence shows that people generally eat even more after exercise to compensate. Exercise is great for general health, but it's a terrible strategy for most people for losing weight. It simply backfires.

"Cutting out the daily donut for two weeks is about a pound of fat."

While I'm completely behind your post in general, unfortunately it's much more complicated. It comes down to calories in vs energy consumption. If you oversupply your buddy with calories however most science I read states 7.000 calories of surplus to be one kilo in fat in the average human. Highly recommend the Huberman episode about nutrition.

That's what I always felt like why keto helped me. Instead of just eating, I was now looking into everything. Almost 10 years ago, I went from 115kg to 86, and I had no issues keeping the weight.

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