Comment by eshvk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eshvk | Hacker News Reader

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> 1. 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.)

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.

> For those who find it a pain to use [a calorie-counting app], 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.

But satiation is a built-in feature of your body. A healthy human body counts calories automatically, and governs appetite and metabolism appropriately to keep body weight in a narrow target range.

A calorie counting app is basically a prosthetic replacement for the part of your brain that's supposed to be doing the job automatically. And it's much inferior to the real thing.

Many people can at least remember a time in their youth when their weight was extremely stable, despite widely varying inputs. That's how it feels when your metabolic control systems are all functioning correctly. Many people assume that this ability naturally disappears with age -- but it seems much more likely that the system simply breaks down due to years of exposure to a very unhealthy environment.

Yes, it's prostetic. The problem is exactly that satiation doesn't work well enough, thus some people need a cybernetic add-on, just like some people need glasses.

Satiation seems to always lag when people age and their metabolism gets slower. It can also be trained for allowing more or less eating before it fires a signal. And a consequence is that you can train it to make it correct again, but it requires a conscient intervention.

> The problem is exactly that satiation doesn't work well enough, thus some people need a cybernetic add-on, just like some people need glasses.

Yes, but the important question is why. Why do an increasing fraction of people have broken metabolic feedback systems, and what can they do to fix them?

If we had cybernetic calorie counters that worked as reliably as glasses, it wouldn't be a big deal. But in practice, only a minority of people manage to stick to a calorie counting regime over the long term. And even the ones who succeed have to fight the battle their whole lives. It never becomes automatic.

That is why I think it's a mistake to pin people's hopes on calorie counting, when there is a lot of fascinating science about how to fix the built-in automatic system instead (see for example http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/, written by a biochemist who researches obesity and metabolism).

> Yes, but the important question is why. Why do an increasing fraction of people have broken metabolic feedback systems, and what can they do to fix them?

I saw a documentary on tv a while back, it contained some research that showed that overeating can break your ability to feel full.

> But satiation is a built-in feature of your body. A healthy human body counts calories automatically, and governs appetite and metabolism appropriately to keep body weight in a narrow target range.

It's not just the human body, but the mind as well.

Sometimes I'd get engrossed in a piece of work or reading something interesting and forget to eat for hours. Then I'd get hunger pangs, and eat some sugary crap or something laden in saturated fat (this often happened late in the evenings. Eating late in the evening is a terrible habit, as the carbs in your food is more likely to metabolise to fat.)

Now I find by simply calorie counting (MyFitnessPal is amazing, free, scans barcodes, you enter your goals etc.) and planning meals so that I have x4 relative low calorie meals (typically 400-600 calories) in a day, with no hunger pangs. I never feel like reaching for that 1200+ calorie pizza at 10pm anymore. It's simple, no bullshit, you don't have to massively overhaul your diet or starve yourself. Anyone could do it if they put their mind to it. I'm about a month into this new regime and I'm never going back.

> forget to eat for hours.... Then I'd get hunger pangs...

This is a typical symptom of impaired blood sugar control. If you need four meals a day to keep the hunger pangs away, you're on the road to type 2 diabetes. With a healthy metabolism, you can go all day without eating, with no discomfort and no loss of function (so long as you've been eating well in prior days).

> I'm about a month into this new regime and I'm never going back.

Study after study says that calorie counting diets work great for the first several months, up to a year.

And then by year five, only a tiny fraction of people are still doing it, and the rest have gained back all their weight and then some.

Maybe you will beat the odds. I do think that many HN readers are more likely than the general population to succeed this way -- geeks are better at living inside number-based systems of rules. Good luck.

> If you need four meals a day to keep the hunger pangs away, you're on the road to type 2 diabetes.

That's...a bit of an extreme way of looking at it.

Four small, low-calorie, healthy meals. Snacks, more like. For example, a day could look like:

- Breakfast: x2 small boiled eggs, cup of green tea, 1 teaspoon sugar

- Mid-morning: Banana, cup of coffee

- Dinner: Chicken and pasta meal (brown pasta)

- Evening snack: toasted ham and cheese sandwich (wholemeal bread)

This will comfortably last me the day without hunger pangs. I won't necessarily strictly follow this every single day, this is a rough guide. The overall point is regularly spaced out meals, before I get ravenous and eat crap food, with as little processed food and sugar as possible.

> Study after study says that calorie counting diets work great for the first several months, up to a year. And then by year five, only a tiny fraction of people are still doing it, and the rest have gained back all their weight and then some. Maybe you will beat the odds. I do think that many HN readers are more likely than the general population to succeed this way -- geeks are better at living inside number-based systems of rules. Good luck.

I don't think of it as a calorie counting diet. The whole point of calorie counting is a temporary measure (perhaps for a month or two total), more as a mental trick to make me realise the shit I was shovelling absently mindedly into my body every day. After a few weeks, I'll be able to roughly gauge the calories simply by memory, and hopefully be in a good habit of small regular healthy meals by then.

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