The lazy technologist's guide to weight loss
dberkholz.com
dberkholz.com
I thought it had already been shown that the only healthy amount of alcohol is zero. I'm also surprised that "moderate" is better than "occasional".
But the real world is full of trade offs and confounders. Like the increased socialization with friends & co workers could have health benefits that outweigh the negatives of alcohol. Or that many people who drink nothing are ex-alcoholics.
Considering only the contexts where you have trade offs and use it as public advice is plain wrong.
[1] which may not be true of humans, but it's not scifi either. Some species, like octopuses if I'm not mistaken, die after breeding (for the male this means "sometime after having sex", for the female it's more complicated).
>Put simply – many of the abstainers were either ex-alcoholics or people with factors that would increase the risk of premature death (that is why probably they stopped drinking).
It has been, but asking people to completely refrain from alcohol is basically a non-starter for a huge part of the population.
Turns out the researcher behind those studies faked data and got caught up in the replication crisis.
So no, I do not have any underlying mental / health issues. Just do not give a fuck about drinking. It did not impede my social life either. I still meet with friends just as before.
Non-drinkers might have reasons not to drink. Like taking medicaments, health issues, etc.
> An hour of intense exercise might burn 500 calories, and it’s very hard to keep up that level of effort for even one full hour — especially if you’ve been sitting in a chair all day for years on end.
This is probably true, though it doesn't factor in the effect of muscle mass and "afterburn" on resting metabolism. Muscle is expensive, that's why your body gets rid of it quickly when you don't use it. And you spend a lot of calories replenishing energy stores and repairing your muscles in the days after your exercise, because that's far from a 100% efficient process.
If you're male and an absolute beginner (as sitting in a chair all day implies), you can gain significant muscle mass with just 90 minutes a week of strength training.
The direct calorie expenditure of exercising that much may be minor. But you will soon be burning an extra 150kcal/day in afterburn and muscle maintenance just sitting on your ass on your off-days. That adds up to a nice beer budget.
Intensive strength training isn't for everyone though, I can see why a guide for the lazy person might leave it out. But if you're even slightly more of a minmaxer than just lazy you should consider it, given all the other additional benefits of exercise.
Finally the protein paragraphs are very spot on. Especially now quality protein shakes are cheap and easily available. One of those (125kcal) fills me up like lunch, and two like dinner. They're an incredible weight loss hack.
I'm extremely dubious of any answer to weight loss which isn't get your diet in line.
Though I will say that when it comes to my 50 minute strength sessions, I don't really feel that hungry after. I tend to do them after work, before dinner, and then eat the same amount as any off day. I'm no athlete, just doing the minimum, at which point additional hunger is not that noticable.
50 Minutes of strength is far from your continuous 277W output (nice!), for multiple hours. I think the target audience would literally die far before feeling anything like your levels of hunger, should they ever go on a bike ride with you.
I’ll second this. I’ve recently begun StrongLifts 5x5 and it has changed my appearance and strength so quickly as to defy my most optimistic expectations. I’ve been a daily runner for years, rarely skipping a day, and forgot the joy of trying something totally new and greedily getting all the early, low hanging gains.
Stronglifts 5x5 is super easy to start with and I’d highly recommend it.
https://gabriellereece.com/muscle-as-the-cornerstone-of-long...
Can confirm, almost 3 year ago I started lifting and carrying around a weight. I started with a bit under 8 lbs and I lift 32 lbs now, and I've gained about 10 lbs of muscle mass and doubled my upper body strength.
Mind you, it hasn't helped with weight loss. Eating her left overs has resulted in my gaining another 10 lbs of fat. :-(
Basically, lean mass / muscle you gain are weight you don't have to lose. Untrained can gain 20% of muscles in year of training. That's 4-6 months of fat loss. And it raises maintainance calories so keeping weight off is less difficult. It's almost stupid not to take advantage.
It's very true that for weight loss, diet is the single most important variable, but that doesn't mean exercise doesn't matter. The kind of exercise you do matters a lot, too, particularly once you start caring about lean mass vs fat, rather than just the gross scale weight. Cardio has this image as "the way you lose weight", but I think that strength training is vastly superior, overall.
Strength training doesn't have to be ultra time-intensive or strenuous, but it has huge benefits for both health and weight loss; muscle is metabolically-active tissue, taking 6-10 kcal/day/lb to maintain, vs 2-4 kcal/day/lb for fat. This has two implications: first, in a caloric deficit, the body will preferentially catabolize unused muscle tissue over fat, since it's more expensive to maintain, and second, maintaining a greater percentage of your weight as muscle rather than fat increases your daily "just keeping the lights on" caloric expenditure. A caloric deficit with a high-protein diet and even moderate weight training will result in a significantly higher level of retained muscle mass, resulting in more net calories/day burned, even on the days you don't train. Think of it as the difference between active and passive income - the more "passive caloric burn" you can rack up, the easier it is to make progress towards those goals.
Are you saying, for example, maintaining 20 pounds of muscle only requires consuming 200 Calories per day more of food?
Edit: According to the Internet, this is actually approximately correct, 20kcal/lb/day.
I must just have high metabolism, because I must consume more like 40kcal/lb/day or more to maintain muscle mass.
Cheers.
If I remember correctly, 1000 calories (with a lowercase “c”) makes one Calorie (with a capital C). The former is the energy to raise 1g of water through 1 degree Celsius, and the latter 1kg through the same amount of temperature change.
That maintenance requirement is just "keeping the cells alive when you're laying in bed in a coma" - actually using those muscles obviously requires more energy than that. Maintaining muscle mass is more than just a function of calories, though - in part because it's more expensive tissue, the body will try to make up caloric deficits from muscle before fat. Building and maintaining muscle requires that you keep your body in a state of muscle synthesis, which is itself a very metabolically-expensive process.
Numbers for energy/lb/day of muscle range from 6kcal-50kcal depending on who you're listening to, but the thing that everyone agrees on is that regardless of the number, muscle is multiple times more expensive than equivalent fat to maintain.
If I didn't skip it, it's not mentioned in the article, but it's very important in my experience. If you don't sleep enough, going through with a reduced calorie intake will be much harder.
I personally tend to overeat if I haven't slept for more than 6 hours the last night. Lost 88lb a long time ago within a (too) short time.
after life got busy i started doing the same for saturdays, too, and pushed the sat workout stuff to other days. didn't see any loss of performance or size, and felt much, much better.
big part of it, tbh, was because these were college-ish times and not staying out drinking == better overall sleep and health. yeah missed out on a couple of ragers, but also didn't really have any problems meeting people & staying social.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker%27s_Diet [2] https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
I've seen plenty of calculators like this around the web, and even seen calculators that estimate how many pounds per time you'll gain/lose depending on the activity level and food intake, but they never show their formulae or cite sources that give formulae. Does anyone know of reasonable sources for that?
I'd love to have a probabilistic model of "a group of people who eat X calories per day and weigh Y with Z body fat percentage, will weigh (in distribution) A +/- B with C +/- D body fat after T time period" or similar, but nutrition info is never written in that detail, even though these calculators must come from somewhere.
If you do want to know how many calories you burn as a sedentary person, then just go get a resting metabolic rate (RMR) test. This is a cheap, non-invasive test where they measure how much oxygen you metabolize and use that to directly calculate baseline daily calorie consumption. Any physical activity will then be additive to that baseline.
Effects on body fat or body composition vary tremendously based on dietary macronutrients, exercise, genetics, gut microbiome, and other factors so I don't think we know enough to construct an accurate probabilistic model of that. In general, to avoid loss of muscle tissue the recommendation is to maintain a high protein intake and do resistance (weight) training.
Other than your BMR, you can compute (weight loss / day) with 3 more variables, the activity calories per day (just added to your BMR), the number of calories in a pound of fat (most round to 3500kcal because it makes mental math easier), and the calorie intake per day. Then:
NET_DAILY_KCAL = (BMR + ACTIVE_CALS) - INTAKE
WEIGHT_CHANGE_RATE = NET_DAILY_KCAL * FAT_PER_KCAL
More power to him for pulling it off, but most people's bodies will fight them really badly with that kind of deficit.
After two weeks on that kind of caloric deficit I get really angry and grouchy all the time. I have done it, but people around me definitely made comments when I went back to "normal" as to how much nicer I was.
I walk 10 km every day, no exceptions. (I still do this) I had a banana + coffee w. skimmed milk for breakfast. I had a plate of 2/3 heavy vegs (e.g. carrot, cabbage) 1/3 protein for lunch. I had ONLY one serving of whatever we were having for dinner. No alcohol, beer, crisps, candy at home - ever. When we went out I drank and ate whatever everyone else did.
Those are the broad strokes. Feel free to ask any questions you might have.
Most people don't want to put in the work it takes. That is primarily the reason why the sports and food industry is so big.
But you can't cheat your way into a healthy living. It is hard work.
As a long time amateur bike rider, the advice and habits you dictate here are very much in line with how simple it really is to have some good habits around ones life.
You can go easy on yourself after a while doing your routine. Your body will remember and adjust faster than previously, so you can easily start adjusting if you want and learn more about how your body reacts to certain things.
Sounds like you have dialed it in pretty good. Be proud. Good job!
Not that losing weight is easy; just way easier.
You'll notice that almost any comment or post about successful weight loss is written when the weight loss is recent. And of course, people tend to talk about their recent success, so fair enough.
But I almost see people going around saying, this or that worked great for me 3 years ago, and I'm still doing great. I know it happens, and to me, that's the more interesting secret. (And that said, there's a nice counterexample in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39082494 - 13 years!)
I've successfully lost a lot of weight through sheer force of will a few times when I was younger and competitive and had people to compete with.
I've successfully lost a lot of weight through ketogenic diet a few times before, and that has had better success at sticking. It's lasted up to 2 years, which is still great. But still comes back eventually. Eventually I stop being strict about macros and start just kinda labeling some food as keto and sticking to that, and that doesn't work.
Right now I'm on Mounjaro, one of the new weight loss drugs like Ozempic. This is truly the lazy (but expensive) way to lose weight. And of course I know I need a plan for keeping it off once I lose it all, if I wish to stop taking the drug.
Wife's also doing it for over 2 years now and reversed her pre-diabetic diagnosis and also lost close to 40kgs since she started it.
Is it just too preachy and is causing people to be tired from hearing about it?
Haha, yeah I think it's the "fanbase" around it (don't want to offend anyone). It's like that old joke, how do you know someone is (a vegan, doing keto, plays guitar)? They'll tell you. There almost seems to be people who want to turn these diets into a competition, oh you're keto? Well, let me tell you how crazy keto I am. Like dude, I'm just trying to not hate myself when I look in the mirror not win the Mr Keto award.
Having WiFi scales helped enormously - seeing my progress day by day, week by week - and being fascinated to see my weight fall but take on a gradual asymptotic curve as my metabolism adapted to the new regime.
Anyway. Eat less was the key, and seeing the measurable progress kept me going until I decided it was quitting time. That was 13 years ago, never regained the weight.
- WiFi scale with HealthKit. I use a Withings. Weight yourself every day, get a graph on your phone. No need to manually input your weight into a spreadsheet.
- Food: meal delivery service, only pick meals that match your diet macronutrient targets. I use CookUnity and pick meals <=650kcal. This makes eating right easier than ordering McDonald's.
- Diet planning: Macrofactor. You track calories/macros of every meal. Then it reads your weight change from HealthKit and adjusts your macro targets up or down to hit a target weight by a certain date. You can do this in MyFitnessPal and a spreadsheet, but this is easier.
- Exercise: Home smart gym, resistance training. I got Tempo Fit. Every other day, turn it on and do whatever it says. No need to plan workouts or think too hard.
These tools help me keep a 1% weight per week loss. So far down 25 lbs and 5" at the waist.
I think this is the recipe to weight loss, not once did I go on a special diet or crazy hard exercise routine, just eating less and a bit of exercise over time.
Im now down to 165lbs and the healthiest I've ever been.
I am fat despite eating healthy. Or rather, because of it: I almost entirely avoid junk food and alcohol, rarely have restaurant food, but I love healthy, nutritious, home-cooked meals and fresh fruits and vegs so much that I simply eat far too much of them. I wonder if anyone has been in my situation and has suggestions?
When I go out and have a big day hiking or biking, I’ll eat more to fuel that activity and recovery. But on a rest day or day at home, ill eat a good bit less since my body doesn’t need the fuel.
Second, try reducing simple sugar/starch intake in favor of complex and higher fiber alternatives where possible. Increasing the ratio of protein and fat in your diet can help you reach satiety much faster, too. Fat is 9kcal/g, protein and carbohydrates are 4 kcal/g, but in terms of satiety, fat > protein >>> carbohydrate.
If you're biohacking-inclined, look into how your specific diet impacts ghrelin (hunger hormone) and leptin (satiety hormone) production and uptake. You might find that you're eating things which provoke hunger or delay satiation. And don't discount that many of us just eat because it makes us feel good - that's a much harder hill to climb, but it is possible.
Altough I never quite understand the mechanical "kcal" focused approach. We're not machines. It's not just calories – altough in the end, it is – it's also how they make you feel.
It's easier to eat a full plate of seafood, rice and vegetables than eat only 1/5 of a fast food burger.
About exercise: You're also not only burning 600kcal swimming, you're also getting hungry – a lot!
Every successful diet adheres to that, but none mentions it explicitly.
My current approach is fairly simple but hard.
* Exercise 4 hours per week (Mostly cardio)
* Drink a lot of water and no alcohol (Social events one or twice a month are an exception)
* Eat no processed food. No crisps, no candy.
* Try to eat as much protein as possible. Meaning 1-2g protein per kg bodyweight per day.
I’m also investigating water fasting as both a rapid weight loss and longevity strategy, due to the forced senescence of unhealthy cells. Have you or anyone else here tried that?
Fasting promotes autophagy and improves insulin resistance, if you do actual fasting (no calories during fasting). Many people have what's called "metabolic syndrome" which is low insulin sensitivity (high insulin resistance) and that causes many problems eventually leading to Type 2 diabetes.
Fasting with small "breaks" (100-200cal snacks) breaks a true fast (>50cal) but still results in overall reduced calories, and is more sustainable for many (or a path towards true fasting).
You lose weight in fasting due to reduced calories. How you do it determines the benefits - merely reduced calories, or more. Some people have very little weight loss with reduced calories diets b/c their metabolism (insulin sensitivity) is really messed up and won't see benefit until they do true fasting.
I like OMAD (one meal a day) as it feels the "easiest", though I have done regular multi-day fasts in the past and the hardest part is figuring out what to do with yourself since you're not spending time cooking/eating.
A good book is The Obesity Code[1], with lots of background and fasting schedules.
Really, the most benefit I've had from fasting is resetting my appetite - I am now satiated and full from a "normal" meal, and thus eating a reasonable amount of food. I used to easily be able to eat a large pizza and then a pint of ice cream every night (obv that leads straight to obesity). Now 3-4 slices of pizze + side salad is more than enough to fill me up and I have some pieces of chocolate for dessert.
Techniques like fasting and OMAD can certainly be effective as temporary measures for some people to lose weight. But they probably aren't a great idea as a sustained practice to maximize healthspan. In particular, to prevent sarcopenia as we age, we should probably be eating at least two high-protein meals per day. There are limits to how much protein the digestive system can absorb in a single meal.
On a side note, the article started in US customs (pounds), and then uses kcal for measuring the energy, and finally uses grams and g/lb for proteins. Just switch to metric :)
While different kinds of exercise are good for many, many things, there is no form intrinsically good for losing weight.
See: https://podcastnotes.org/huberman-lab/episode-86-what-alcoho...
Not saying everyone should be sober 100% all the time (I drink occasionally myself), but there are much safer and more fun alternatives (med dose psilocybin etc.)
If the best software engineers in the role all consistently use rubber duck debugging, it may not be the case that rubber duck debugging is what makes them the best software engineers in the world, but it’d take a whole lot more evidence than some academic on a podcast saying “rubber duck debugging is harmful to software engineers” to convince me it isn’t at least worth a shot.
I don't know who is saying it's "THE" problem, but it definitely isn't A solution.
Edit: Billions if you add China to that list.