Hacker News Reader

Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

I do t think that people who “over eat” Do so by so much that calries themselves count.

It’s the “strain” on the body by the excess fat that counts (heart pumping / clogged arteries etc)

So, let’s say someone over consumes 500 calries per day, or 3500 per week which is a 1lb of fat. Over one year that’s 52lbs or 3.7 stone - over 6 years that’s 300 extra lbs. There are very very few people who consume even at that level.

Over a 60 year lifetime there is not a lot of wriggle room if we think calries restriction is the way to go

I suspect it’s part of the “food is a class issue / some people are genetically disadvantaged / social taste as gatekeeper of power “ morass

View on HN

I was obese before I lost weight (now BMR 21).

I calculated, that my obesity amounted to 1 teaspoon of sugar extra, every day.

Our bodies are excellent, miraculous regulating machines if they can stay within those tolerances regardless of what kind of shit we put in.

The bad news is, for everybody who wants to lose weight, that we have much less free will when it comes to eating than we think. To lose weight long term we need to fix whatever caused the regulating machinery to malfunction as we can't really eat less (over long term).

I have no idea how you determined this: 16 calories a day (1 teaspoon of sugar) would make no difference either way.

Your day to day metabolism is not that precise, nor are calorie counts on packaging.

I think you misunderstood. I don't count calories. It does not work most of the time.

What I mean I calculated that amount of extra fat I gained over so many decades and divided it by the number of days and converted to amount of teaspons of sugar.

Well that is definitely not any sort of accurate representation of how you gained the weight.

What was your take on how to fix that regulatory mechanism?

(Also weird the use of word regulator for finance and other NGOs - but do they really adjust? What would a regulator that said “wow we are making too much profit this quarter, let’s slow down a bit boys we must be taking steam out of the rest of the economy”)

Not sure why this is downvoted. IT IS AN EXCELLENT QUESTION!

First is realising you want to get healthy to reduce weight. Not reduce weight to get healthier.

Understanding what causes disregulation which is mostly caused by and part of metabolic syndrome, which in turn is mostly insulin resistance. Almost every overweight and every obese person has some level of insulin resistance. Just because they are not officially classified as diabetic is because medical establishment needs binary definitions. I like to think diabetes typically starts early in childhood with a wrong diet but it takes decades for the accumulated damage to the body to start gaining weight and then can take some more decades for this in turn to cause diabetes.

How to fight this? Well... undoing insulin resistance is the way to go.

I started classified as prediabetic and currently have absolutely stellar scores on any measure like HBA1C, fasting/fed blood glucose, etc.

How I improved my insulin sensitivity:

* cut off all sugar, sweet or sweetened drinks, and most carbs (I still eat carbs, just much less of them). This also tends to help with hunger.

* Cut almost all snacking. If I need to snack, I have alternative snacks that do not raise blood sugar (fresh vegetables, fatty/protein snacks like beef jerky, etc.)

* Intermittent fasting -- I try to maintain short eating window throughout the day. Usually about 4-6 hours.

* Sometimes keto diet / longer fasts -- While I don't like the idea of staying on keto diet permanently, I think doing it from time to time exercises certain important chemical pathways. So is a water fast.

* Running in the morning in fasted state. Really forces body to get good at burning fat, promotes more and better mitochondria.

* Exercise after meals, especially if the meal contains carbs. Taking a walk right after a meal has clearing effect on blood glucose -- the muscles producing energy for movement are much more eager to clear blood sugars making it as if insulin is more sensitive. It is a trick, but if you do it every day the body does not care, from its point of view it uses X amount of insulin and it causes Y amount of sugar cleared.

* Never eat naked carbs. Carbs should always be accompanied by fat and protein which causes digestion to take longer time and effectively lowers maximum blood sugar levels.

* Better sleep and less stress -- stress causes the body to release cortisol which raises blood sugar levels which causes insulin. You want less stress if you want to lose weight. Running increases stress, unfortunately, but I think it is good tradeoff.

Excellent advice.

I actually lost 20kg over 6 month, roughly following this advice. Not strictly, like I would be more lenient on weekends with carbs & booze, and have sugar, like a small dark chocolate, but only at night (to avoid further craving and consumption the whole day). I avoided the exercise as it made me unbearably hungry.

I recommend this 100%

I lost 38kg over 9 months. I also haven't followed it strictly and there definitely were better and worse times. I did exercise regularly for the entire duration, though. Yes, it causes hunger and yes, it makes losing weight more difficult. But I think it is worth overall because you get healthier much faster than on diet alone. I think exercise is critical component if you want to lose weight and then keep your gains.

I also have stellar scores on all measures except that I am overweight, bordering obese. There’s no doubt that these are correlated measures, but there is significant doubt on causality.

>> To lose weight long term we need to fix whatever caused the regulating machinery to malfunction as we can't really eat less (over long term).

Hi, why do you say this? I mean I was a glutton (and still am), but I have been able to reduce the amount of food eaten by skipping dinner as a way of eating less. I've been at it for 2 years now, not long term maybe but medium term and I have no intention of stopping given the benefits I'm having.

I lost about 15kg last year over the span from August to December. That was a lot faster then expected, but the primary change I made was to cut out a lot of empty calories in favor of defined meals: i.e. I drink a lot of coffee, so I cut out the milk. I moderated morning cereal down to an exact serving suggestion and a specific amount of milk. Cut out having toast as snack food, cut out sour dough bread (which is absurdly dense). Reduced rice serving sizes.

And honestly? With those habits changed, I'd say I basically don't notice the difference. I'm not dieting now, and it's actually taken some effort to stop losing weight (which I just had a look at my calorie tracker app and realized accounting for thermic effects probably explains why 2750 naive calories is closer to 2275 if I'm targeting 120-150g of protein per day since now I chase muscle gains because it turns out I can get them).

Basically I eat better, and more frequently, then I did and enjoy it more. Which is to say: my bad habits were just unfulfilling, and as soon as I actually held myself accountable for the effects, the changes in my diet were all improvments in my overall quality of life.

So you’re saying if I eat 500 extra calories per day (or about ten Oreos) I will gain 300 extra pounds, ending up at ~250% of my current body weight? While extra calories probably aren’t good, this doesn’t seem like a realistic model of the way the human body stores energy.

If we're being pedantic, you'd need to eat 500 extra calories over your what your body burns daily.

But over a 6 year period, you would definitely accumulate 300 pounds of extra weight this way.

So the assumption here is that the pipeline for energy storage (including the human digestive system, insulin machinery and adipose tissue) converts calories to fat mass at a constant rate of efficiency, regardless of whether you're currently underweight, or at 350% of healthy bodyweight. Is there any human-built energy storage system that exhibits this type of performance? Do we really think that the human body exhibits it?

There are feedback mechanisms so that if you consume extra, you will want to move extra to compensate, and your basal metabolism might even rise to burn a few more. They aren’t perfect though, and something seems to have broken them on a really large scale the last 50 years or so. At least that’s my current thinking.

Yes, assuming you always keep eating 500cal over your burn rate. Your body will adapt over time and try to burn more calories to compensate for some of that, some purely just by having additional fat, but you would continue to gain weight.

A 500cal surplus is quite a bit though, so if you set that you’d probably gain 20 lbs over time assuming you kept everything else equal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com