How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how

If this is true, why don't we become incredibly fat or skinny over time? It would require incredible precision to maintain weight. But a lot of people seem to be able to do it with no effort...

The reason why this is not true is simple: our organism is not a closed system, so this thermodynamics truism does not apply. We are able, for example, to excrete nutrients without digesting them. Our organism is way too complex for this bromide to have any merit.

Yeah, and if you want to reduce your chance of auto accidents, limit the amount of gasoline you put in your car.

I'm a bit sorry to come across as rude, but this advice and then your later dismissal of ketogenic diets reflects the extraordinary ignorance that inflicted us with the food pyramid and war on fat 40 years ago.

Understanding and controlling the insulin cycle is key to understanding nutrition and its role in weight control. I tried "eating less" for years before I gave a low carb diet a try and permanently changed the way I ate and thought about food.

If you had actually read the article about which you added a comment, then you would have read a process of discovery paralleled by myself and an extraordinary number of others.

Atkins and even others before him explained the problems with carbohydrates, especially simple ones, decades ago. Calling low carb eating (you can't eliminate all carbs) a fad at this point is either ignorant or just mocking.

Not entirely. Try eating 2,000 calories of pasta versus 2,000 calories of chicken. It'll do immensely different things to your body.

IF and keto are valid. Liquid diet is nutty. keto isn't exactly "eat lots of fat" -- it's avoiding > 30-60g carbs per day (and honestly, mostly sugars. carbs with fiber delivery (e.g. vegetables and limited fruits) are okay) while seeking out, but not adding "lots," of complementary fat (like avoiding fat free things because fat free just means "we added more sugar to compensate for removing fat").

If you have a limited memory capacity, just remember: fat doesn't make you fat. Your body turns sugar and things that metabolize into sugar (carbs, breads, pastas, rice) into fat. Your body doesn't take what you eat and just glue it inside of you. Food is like the input of a program generating very specific outputs. You can't feed the function "Add two numbers" 1 and 1 and end up with anything but 2. You (probably[1]) can't feed yourself carbs and carbs and carbs and end up with anything but lardass.

[1]: Though, people are different. We have basic guidelines, but a lot is still genetics. I know people who basically live off pasta, chocolate, and smoothies and still weigh 130 pounds without workout out significantly.

You need a specific chain reaction for getting the molecules you could use to move your body, mainly this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenosine_triphosphate

You need to make the molecules that make this reaction possible, for every sugar, fat or protein, it is different. Those supplies you need to fabricate or get in your food. Some are very common(inexpensive), some are not. E.g you will need oligoelements, or vitamins.

Not only that, but those substances need to be able to share the same space, not react with other substances, or being toxic to other parts of the cell. Some of them are and need other substances to carry them safely.

You also need other substances to carry them around. Some of them have water affinity, some not.

The output of the reactions also need to be non toxic and some of the are over certain concentration. Some sugars output metabolic reactions produce toxic materials. At high rates you need your body to protect the arteries from acidic conditions with cholesterol layers and so on.

Also what you need to fabricate has a delay. You can't fabricate your supplies instantly, so you have a control system, normally a series of PID controllers(we copied them from nature) to decide how much to fabricate given your normal diet.

So if you eat pizza every single day and caramelize all the sugars, and denaturalize the proteins , like you do at 200C plus, your body will get used to it.

There are fads, but there is also scientific knowledge people ignore. It is frustrating that people that ignore so much try to give advice to others.

You see medicine doctors talk in 2013 about calories, they have knowledge in some areas but are ignorant in others, mainly chemistry and biochemistry, they won't admit that.

>>For anyone reading this post and inspired to lose weight, I recommend you keep the following basic tenets in mind when researching a plan/regimen...

--

There is something important to point out here, which is that the basic tenets you listed are simple, but they are not easy. If they were, everyone would follow them.

Most people don't actually want to lose weight. Rather, they want to already have lost weight. So they look for shortcuts that will get them there. That is why there is such a massive signal-to-noise issue in the fitness world. Fad diets and magic pills are invented because people are willing to pay for them.

People are fat because eating is a big part of their lives. They eat several huge meals everyday, plus snacks, and often times when they are eating one meal they are dreaming about and planning their next one. On top of this, food has become a "social currency" for them. Being able to cook delicious, unhealthy food at a family BBQ is seen as an admirable skill, and bringing a box of donuts to the office in the morning is seen as a way to score points with coworkers.

In order to lose weight they need to reverse that and make exercising and not eating an equally big part of their lives. They need to count calories, watch what they eat, do heavy workouts at the gym (none of this lift-pink-dumbbells or walk-on-the-treadmill-while-texting-friends bullshit), strictly regulate their sleep and wake-up times, and more. It is NOT supposed to be easy. It is supposed to be HARD. And as with all hard endeavors, success is a matter of discipline. Unfortunately most people don't have that.

I see this all the time on HN and like most things, there is truth in it, but it doesn't tell the whole story.

First and foremost, calories matter. Let's get that out of the way. They matter in that, yes, weight gain comes from eating calories in excess, loss from a deficit...normally (we'll get to that in a minute).

However, this is where everyone should be reading the rest very carefully, details matter here.

For one, if the ONLY thing you care about is number on the scale, eat at a deficit and you'll lose weight.

BUT, if you care about the type of weight you are losing (ie. losing fat vs fat/muscle vs muscle), you HAVE to care about the macronutrient ratios of those calories. For instance, I'm an athlete, recreational bodybuilder/powerlifter and fitness model. I work very, very hard for muscle gains. I don't want to lose muscle when I diet down for a show, competition or photo shoot. If I only cared about calories, I would QUICKLY catabolize my muscle. I need to keep my protein high, fat pretty high and the rest of my calories can come from carbs. In practice, depending on my goal at the time, I implement one of a variety of PSMF (protein sparring modified fast) & CKD (cyclic keto diet, which is Keto with carb refeeds) or TKD (targeted keto diet, which is eating carbs around workouts).

The problem with "just care about calories" is that very few people actually want that as the goal. Most people want to lose FAT, not muscle when they lose weight. If all you understand is calories, yes you'll lose weight, but you'll be losing fat and muscle. Most people, and I would guess everyone reading this, would rather keep whatever muscle they have, they need to understand how to SPARE their muscle when losing weight.

And if someone is overweight there is a very high chance they are or are becoming insulin resistant. If this is the case, Keto is actually appropriate for them.

Before I got into this world seriously, I just thought it was calories, like most people who haven't spent the time to understand the workings of the body. I literally wasted years trying to get lean with just a calories approach. It doesn't work that way.

Regarding ketogenic diets, there are so many results and it seems to work so much better than what "they" have been telling us that the idea that this is a "fad" starts to sound a bit silly. Actually, some proponents of ketogenic diets are backing their claims with explanatory models, instead of simple epidemiological studies (which are, in my opinion, the lowest form of Science).

Check out this talk if you want to know more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6vpFV6Wkl4

edit: this talk provides some convincing arguments against your assumption #1.

True. For those who find it a pain to use one, I recommend sticking with it for a few months at least initially. After a while, your mind gets attuned to the idea of how much food is enough for you to be satiated. So don't obsess about getting every calorie in, it is easy especially if you are reading online communities to see people freaking.

2. Being active isn't necessarily crucial to losing weight, but it is crucial to being more healthy. In particular, lifting weights will help your overall physique even if you're eating at a caloric deficit -- but the most important activity is the one that you like enough to make a habit. (Mine is biking, and occasionally soccer.)

I don't like the go weight lift or run recommendation for a person who has never run or hates the gym. Most are there because of systemic lifestyle issues. The best way to do that is to start at the core, hang out more with active people, doing entertaining things that also get out outdoors. After a while of doing that, I feel like you will naturally gravitate towards taking care of your body.

> There are a lot of huge fads right now -- in particular, intermittent fasting (eat once per day), ketogenic diet (eat lots of fat, eat no carbs), and liquid diets (drink lots of things) seem to be the rage. The reason fads can be successful usually have less to do with the specific mechanics and minutiae of their gospel and more to do with the fact that you're conscientious about what you're putting into your body and diligent about treating it well.

It's funny. I spent a while doing lean gains. A couple of months were rather painful in terms of having to spend most of my time eating cottage cheese and tuna, finding it difficult to have dinner with friends. I was hitting all the marks though, then I got bored of it. A few months ago, I did something simple by being more mindful when I ate. I didn't particularly try to avoid any food group but I focused more on savoring it than as something to keep my mouth occupied while I listened to a friend or something. That got me way down on the scale than anything.

Keto is backed up by a ton of science and real-world success. Just visit the keto subreddit and spend a few hours perusing, http://reddit.com/r/keto.

Another reason is that most fads are effectively big lists of restrictions on what you are allowed to eat. Since finding things to eat becomes harder you often end up reducing the total calorie count as a side effect.

As a former chemistry student(I did not finish it, because I made engineering instead), I tell you you are oversimplificating how the body works.

With a machine you could talk about calories because the way an engine works is so simple. Fuel, oxidant+Energy init reaction->Output + Energy out.

Not so with the body. There are different processes the body uses to get energy, and it is very complex.

E.g When you eat sugary drinks you put immense amounts of sugar in the blood, very fast which are dangerous(if insulin is not released you die), so the priority of the body is getting this sugar out of the bloodstream, converting it to fat. At the same time your liver could not process anything else as the rate it has to work to get rid of the sugar is too high.

Countries like the US of America or Central Europe has an obesity epidemic problem, and what changed the most was food. 40 years ago Germans or Americans ate more than 8 kilos of butter and other natural fats per year. Now it is way less.

You lose weight by eating less calories than your body uses. (As a corollary, you almost definitely consume more calories than you think you do. Get a calorie-counting app.)

Obviously this is true on some level but it's truth doesn't seem establish any automatic or definite cause-and-effect relationship between the amount of food a given person eats and their weight gain or loss. Some people may indeed find their consumption determine weight gain or loss. Fine but don't assume your experience will automatically carry to others.

I recall current research has shed light on some complexities of this. Perhaps someone has a link.

FYI that is incorrect. Intermittent fasting simply refers to eating your calories in condensed time windows. For example, Lean Gains suggests eating 2-3 meals in an 8 hour window.

Yes, there are a lot of varying information out there, and a lot of those are conflicting. Case in point: just look at how many replies you got where people are disagreeing with you and each other about your recommendations... ;)

I think people need to realize that:

People are just trying their best!

Holy negativity. And in that I appreciate your comment Justin :)

I've been on a weight rollercoaster for the past 10 years, varying between 180 and 230 lbs and I've read many of the same books the author names, and while they all may lead to self-discovery on what makes YOUR body tick, none of them contain the mystical ONE THING that will cause you to lose 20 lbs in one week. In this I agree whole-heartedly with the author.

For those that are very overweight, I do highly recommend the advice to change your diet first, without starting an extensive exercise regimen. Many folks' regular diet is so bad that just eating healthy food and drinking water will cause them to lose 5+ lbs in the first week. You need to buy-in early on to the idea that exercise isn't about burning off the food you ate (as that's impossible) but about raising your metabolism and conditioning your body.

He went in the "personality diet" direction, not just diet, which was pretty weird because he basically went paleo although is being very careful not to use the phrase. Tip toe all around it. I don't know if there's a legal explosion going on or what about the term, because I've noticed this elsewhere.

The Paleo thing is pretty easy to implement if you know anything about food, most of the time, the more recently it was added to the rich western diet, the less of it you should be eating. Just make a ranking and try to reasonably optimize at the store. Pretty simple and cheap and easy to implement. Tastes pretty good too.

It really pisses people off because there's no diet industry personalities to make money, no guilt inducing neo-puritanism, no weird expensive foods to buy. Kind of a post-capitalism diet, other than I have to haunt my produce aisle at the store about twice a week rather than once a week back when I mostly ate "psuedo-food" out of freezer boxes. I do spend less money on food, so what I waste in extra gasoline becomes just a rounding error.

Why?, there are a lot of diet sodas that do not contain any calories.

> Avoid too salty food (preprocessed food will be too salty.)

Why, salt doesn't contain any calories.

Going on a diet is very hard in the first place, giving up these two things doesn't seem to make much sense. It will only make a difficult lifestyle change even more difficult.

I think that evolution was the author's journey, and it was what he was trying to communicate by recounting it for us.

Also: "Make me re-think the “wisdom” of the food pyramid, “low fat” diets, and nutrition vs. exercise"

I thought that was a great one liner... I believe that critical, honest analysis of official dietary guidelines and conventional wisdom around our diet is something we need much more of.

And the medical version: http://www.drnicklowe.com/article/zeltiq-one-year-on-is-the-...

There seems to be science behind it. Fat cells die at a higher temperature than skin is damaged.

Recent vitamin research are also in line with his comments. There have been studies showing taking more than the 100% recommended daily value can increase cancer rates. So if you are getting decent nutrition from your food, lots of vitamin pills are actually bad.

FWIW, it was the "Latest in Paleo" podcast that inspired me to try a paleo approach to life. It's one of the overall best podcasts I've had the pleasure of subscribing to: http://www.latestinpaleo.com/podcast/

I wish Dion all the best with making his success long term!

However, I have some personal experience eating low carb, and the rate of weight loss, for me at least, was around 2 lbs/week, as predicted by my food/calorie tracking app (MyFitnessPal).

If I understand correctly, it's because some carbs are stored in the liver compounded with water as glycogen. When you start low carbing, the glycogen starts being used and the extra water is released (via your kidneys).

I started carb reduction without reading much about it and experienced the classic effects: quick weight loss, dehydration, muscle cramping, sudden loss of appetite. Maintaining hydration and electrolyte balance is important when adjusting your body towards using less carbs.

A pound of fat is a mere 3500 calories. Why can he only be losing pure 100% fat? As a farmer rule of thumb a pound of raw cow is only about 1000 calories. I looked it up on google and its actually closer to 1300. Anyway the point is that your average people-of-walmart dieter probably biologically internally resembles a cow more than, say, a tank of olive oil, so I'd expect a delta-one-pound for a human to be much closer than 1300 or so input calories. If on the other hand you are a tank of biodiesel wondering how many calories of olive oil to add to weight one more pound, then sure it'll take 3500, but us mammals are more "a bit over a thousand cal per pound" in overall bulk average. Not this 3500 foolishness.

Finally maybe TMI but at the fattest weight I was ever at, given my height, a basal metabolic rate calculator estimated me at around 2500 calories just laying around doing nothing, like in a coma. But I like long distance hikes and stuff like that and even just housework burns more than the catatonic basal estimate. So I can easily see 3500 cal going out per day, cutting intake back to a "mere" 2200 calories per day coming in, net big mammal carcass equivalent of 1300 cal per pound, ta da, loss of a pound a day still eating a chezeburger for dinner.

Its quite achievable.

It's clearly possible that he lost 20 pounds.

It is simple, not easy. Do not confuse the two.