Hacker News Reader

Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

> You should also count your calories, to make sure you're getting enough. Once you start being more penny-pinching with eating, you might find yourself getting hungry less, rather than more, and it's not hard to slip into caloric deficit that will make you sick. There are calculators on the Web for how much you should intake.

This is surprisingly easy.

Back at university, 20 years ago now, I was living on about £0.5/day, in the form of two big bowls of oats, 500ml semi-skimmed milk, a bit of sugar and dried raisins for breakfast; no lunch; and 108g pack of instant ramen for dinner.

In retrospect, this was about 1100-1200 kcal/day.

You can absolutely sustain that for a single university term at a time — it was so easy, so simple and devoid of negative sensation, that it didn't even occur to me to calculate the calories until someone here on Hacker News expressed disbelief because it was so little food.

View on HN

I knew a woman[0] who ate nothing but ramen noodles for six months during her freshman year at college. She collapsed in class and had to be taken to the ER. I forget what all was wrong with her, but she was at least severely malnourished and, if I recall correctly, had also developed a proper antique disease like scurvy.

0 - loosely, in a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend way

I actually mentioned scurvy because a friend of a friend had this happen to them in college. (Maybe we're talking about the same person.)

Friend thought they wouldn't have gotten scurvy, if they prepared the instant ramen with the seasoning packet, but they ate only the noodles brick. I don't know what brand ramen it was, but the Maruchan and Nissin nutrition info I looked at just now doesn't show any Vitamin C currently.

What's sort of crazy is it takes a very small amount of vitamin C occasionally to avoid scurvy. Basically, if once a month you get the RDA of vitamin C you are unlikely to get scurvy. Throw some broccoli or brussels sprout into a meal rotation and you'll be scurvy free.

What was wrong with her almost certainly wasn't hyponatremia[0].

I love ramen as much as the next person, but I wouldn't try to make it the entirety of my diet.

[0] low salt levels in your blood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyponatremia

If living on Ramen, you are definitely not having a problem with low salt. Maybe opposite, high blood pressure from excessive salt.

I heard that the only known case of scurvy in the US in the past few decades was one such student who lived only on Top Ramen.

A friend of mine doing pre-med about 20 years ago said there were a couple of cases of scurvy at her university from the ramen/vodka diet some had chosen. I think the student union started handing out juice boxes and the problem was solved™

Friend of a freind got scurvy studying architecture. Senior year was so intense that they basically spent the entire time inside eating vending machine snacks.

Apparently in the UK baked beans are fortified with vitamin C because baked beans on toast is such a common staple food for college students.

This was a compelling idea, so I looked it up. Unfortunately it doesn't appear to be true: https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/253034146

I don’t know that they’d need to be, though. British-style baked beans come in tomato sauce. I just checked my tins, and they’re 36% tomato according to the ingredients list. Unfortunately they’re not that cheap anymore. We pay over CDN$2+tax per tin these days if you buy the multipack. A far cry from the CDN$1.50 all-in those Tesco beans would be.

It's worse than you think — those are the more expensive brand in that supermarket.

The cheap baked beans from the same supermarket are just under 1/3 that price per tin: https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/299669062

Interesting, it's something I heard from a co-worker who grew up in the UK. So perhaps its some sort of urban legend there. Thanks for the check!

I did about the same kcal/day, in grad school, when I was very trim.

And then I wondered how I could hit the gym almost every day, yet not build much muscle bulk.

I accidentally did that low kcal/day again, many years later, when I had happened to have excess non-muscle bulk to support.

And then I wondered why I felt like total crud.

The US medical guidelines I've heard, from doctor and elsewhere, are minimum 1200 for XX female, 1500 for XY male. That minimum is regardless of how fast you want to lose weight.

That minimum is just a rule of thumb for people that don't want / can't have medical supervision.

There was a pretty well covered case something like 15 yrs ago of someone massively obese that completely stopped eating and only consumed supplements to keep the bodys micro nutritions In order (which was continuously monitored by doctors). Iirc, he kept it up for 2 years until he got his target weight.

It's definitely a solid advice to keep to that rule of thumb though, albeit it'd say it's mostly a caloric delta you've gotta worry about: don't go beyond a sustained deficit of ~1k (consumed calories - used calories). It's fine too spike it occasionally in both directions, but going beyond will likely get you in trouble unless you're monitoring your health very closely

Maybe you're thinking of Angus Barbieri [0]:

"Angus Barbieri (1938 or 1939 – 7 September 1990) was a Scottish man who fasted for 382 days,from 14 June 1965 to 30 June 1966. He subsisted on tea, coffee, sparkling water, vitamins and yeast extract while living at home in Tayport, Scotland, frequently visiting Maryfield Hospital for medical evaluation. Barbieri went from 456 pounds (207 kg) to 180 pounds (82 kg), losing 276 pounds (125 kg) and setting a record for the length of a fast."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Barbieri's_fast

Joe Cross did a similar thing in his documentary "Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead" [0] in 2010 when he went on a 60-day juice fast during which he lost 100 lbs.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat%2C_Sick_and_Nearly_Dead

Fasting is a funny thing, because the definition is highly variable. As a teenager I fasted a few times[0] while doing construction work —- mostly carpentry. How the hell does a 17 yr old get the energy to move lumber, swing a hammer, etc while fasting? The answer is liquid calories. Juice fasts feel the same to me, I’m going to guess that someone could easily gain weight on a juice “fast” if they drink enough.

0 - religion causes you to do strange things sometimes.

My cousin did the same thing - eat nothing but a vitamin for a month monitored by a doctor. He ended up in the hospital with type I diabetes which he probably could have held off for several more years if he had eaten more normally (genetics were against him so diabetes was probably in his future regardless, but he could have gone longer)

I wonder what the mechanism for that would be or if it was just coincidence. The medical consensus seems to be that T1D is triggered by a viral infection.

Who knows. This was 30 years ago and I'n not up on the latest. His family history though say he was susceptable

Fasting is a great way to induce massive muscle loss. In almost every case, cutting weight loss by 60% in order to preserve muscle is desirable

Reply on news.ycombinator.com