Hacker News Reader

Comment by dlytle | Hacker News Reader

I've personally lost 35 pounds in 5 months on keto, and I've had all my cholesterol levels drop, along with my blood pressure. (Which probably has more to do with my weight loss than the meat-based diet.) I literally can't lose weight while eating any amount of carbs; I ate 1250 calories a day for 2 months, lost 5 pounds, and was miserable. (Yes, 1250. I was super anal about calorie counting, and only drank water + black coffee. It sucked.)

The long and short of it is that every person has a slightly different combination of body chemistry quirks, so there's never really a one-size-fits-all method for losing weight. You've got to find something that works for you, considering both weight reduction and quality of life. If I didn't love meat so much, I'd probably be in a tough situation.

View on HN

What you did was not a healthy way to lose weight and unless you make a LIFESTYLE change that you can live with for the rest of your life then you will find yourself repeatedly using this starvation technique to lose weight unhealthily. Find something sustainable, keto is not sustainable for most people, and especially not at 1250Calories...

I think you misread the comment. Ketogenic was one diet, 1250kcal/day was another. I lost a significant amount of weight on a ketogenic diet as well but it's been about a year and a half and it's hard to keep away from those carbs...

Getting into a keto state is by the far the fastest and most reliable way to lose weight. Probably also hard to maintain as it can be hard to get that full feeling like you do with carbs.

It is the same diet which professional bodybuilders use. And they know EVERYTHING about how to lose weight since every % of body fat they lose can make a massive difference in muscle definition.

Bodybuilders generally have not bothered with keto, until recently.

They just do the standard bulk (overeat in the off season, gain muscle and fat) in the off season and cut (heavy calorie restriction to cut the fat) to look good on stage.

Schwarzenegger's book on bodybuilding (which I read in the late 90's) had a fairly long section on ketosis. He actually bought urine testing strips to make sure he didn't go into ketosis. When cutting, he reduced his carbohydrate intake, but he immediately increased it again at the first sign of ketosis for reasons he explained in some detail. AFIK, most successful bodybuilders eat tons of carbs while bulking and then try to go as low as possible without going keto while cutting.

Either way both methods are not sustainable which is the point I'm trying to make. 1250kcal is way too low and as taligent said, keto is used by bodybuilders to lean out a few weeks before competition, it is not something they do for long periods of time. I think the key to prolonged success is to make permanent lifestyle changes that you can commit to for the rest of your life.

There are more and less extreme forms of every diet. What Keto is for weight loss, Low Carb is for maintenance.

If you are 5kg overweight, a "sustainable lifestyle change" will be sufficient. And there are those people for who even the severe risks of a gastric bypass outweigh the damage their weight does. Quite obviously, in between those extremes, there will be people were an unsustainable diet will be healthier than staying at their weight or losing it only slowly. And why not choose a diet that has been shown to minimize the loss of lean body mass.

1250kcal is unhealthily low for an adult male. My weight loss intake is between 2000 and 2500. BMR in a healthy adult male is 2500ish alone, tack on any sort of activity and it's easy to get your TDEE well past 3000. A deficit of ~1000 a day should be enough to sustain about 2lbs of loss per week.

I actually did the 1250kcal method for a full year when I was 10 years younger, and it worked like a charm. It required a LOT of discipline and extremely careful calorie counting, but it definitely worked.

Being in my late 20s now, 1250kcal is just not sustainable, but going with keto is working great and is likely to remain so for a long time. It helps that all I ever drink are water, tea, black coffee, and milk. (That's been the case my entire life, so that part isn't unusual.)

I eat eggs/sausage/bacon for breakfast (one of the three), then I eat an earlyish dinner of steak or bratwurst. Since I'm on Adderall XR, lunch never happens. On days I feel like carbs, I go out to Ivanna Cone (amazing local gourmet ice cream) for half a scoop. That consistently puts me at less than 30g of non-fiber carbs per day, with a fairly steady decline in overall weight. I'm never hungry outside of meal time, and I don't have problems saying no to carbs, aside from when I'm eating out with friends.

Once I've lost the weight I want to lose (another 20 pounds or so) I'll be able to figure out what level of carbs I can have without gaining on a daily basis, and live with that.

I have to eat carefully, but not eating carefully is what got me fat in the first place, so that's just what I'll have to deal with.

I was in a similar situation to yours, until I took MSM (review: http://www.vitaflex.com/res_msmreva.php). It's a little-known, little-researched substance (my link only contains refs to veterinary studies), but reportedly contained in raw meat and vegetables. Once I began taking 3-5g a day (powder form), I have been almost unable to put on bodyfat, and already lost a good deal of it. People say it changes carbohydrate metabolism, but I suspect it's also got to do with detoxification (bodyfat stores toxines - can't find studies for that) and the fact that it does away with candida.

Very interesting, it's available from health food shops in the uk, labelled as helping with joint pain. Since I also get a bit of that I'm going to have to try this. Do you have any other links that discuss its use for weight loss?

Interestingly there is hardly any information on weight loss. I'm quite sure that there are not many people taking as much as I do (the effect occurs with 2 teaspoons daily). I know for certain that this dose has quite quickly done away with candida (no white tongue anymore, and IBS almost gone), while lower doses were not as effective.

For a counterpoint: http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/DSH/msm.ht...

Hm the conclusion there appears to be that claims for it aren't based on research as there is very little, which the parent acknowledges.

The weight loss claims here are of course anecdotal, but it certainly seems worth a try, given that it seems perfectly safe. Presumably the worse that can happen is you simply pass it out of your system and it does nothing.

According to the research, unused MSM is processed by the renal system. In relatively high doses, no adverse effects were observed but I'd be cautious about effects which didn't get observed, especially from prolonged use for which there are inadequate studies. So the worst that can happen in passing it out of your system might be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renal_failure

Ah, point taken! That wouldn't be such a good outcome :-)

I slightly regret the response now actually, I was being quite majorly hand-wavey, I guess the fact that there is a great deal of uncertainty here and the promise of easy weight loss has combined to provide some bias here :-)

There is no indication (neither anecdotal nor peer-reviewed) that this poses a problem. All the quackwatch page says is "Well we found no objections, but be careful nonetheless, even though there is no indication that it it's dangerous to take MSM". That's a speculative conclusion based on assumptions, not exactly what I would expect from someone debunking quack myths based on scientific reasoning.

This part is also notable:

  In October 2000, the FDA warned [Karl Loren] that the long list
  of therapeutic claims he was making for these products made them
  drugs would be illegal to market without FDA approval. The letter
  stated that the FDA had seen no evidence that the products were
  safe and effective for their intended uses.

Absence of evidence that it's safe doesn't necessarily imply that it's unsafe. However, one should be cautious until peer-reviewed research on the long-term effects have been studied.

You lost me at detoxification

Why? What's wrong with that? Do you think the stuff we ingest nowadays will completely leave our bodies? Side products from maldigestion? Traces of BPA, pesticides, antibiotics? Don't you think the body will deposit some of those toxines _somewhere_ if we don't drink enough every day, allowing for flushing them out?

Are you still on that diet? If not, how are you maintaining your new weight?

I am still on keto, and it's continuing to come off. I'm not insanely strict with myself, so I'm not losing weight as fast as I could be, but I've found a good balance based on my personal activity level and quality of life considerations.

Once I've lost the weight I want to lose, I'll keep on with keto, and just gradually increase+track my carb consumption, until I find the a point where I start to gain weight... then I'll set that as my limit.

Long story short, it's a lifestyle change.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com