Some people need extreme transformations like this to be successful. Most people, however, don't.
You'll have a much higher success rate if you're patient and change just one little thing at a time. Once you're comfortable, you move on to the next.
I myself have lost over 30lbs and increased strength tremendously (power clean 250+).
I went about it by doing one small thing at time. First I got used to going to the gym a couple days at a time. Once I was used to going to the gym, I started a strength program. Once I was used to going to the gym and being on a program, I started crossfit. Then after I was used to that, I started omitting wheat from my diet. Once I was used to that...you get the point.
Each time that I lost weight it was due to vigorous exercise while doing sports for fun.
Each time I gain weight it is due to insufficient exercise and eating wrong stuff.
What works for me is keeping starchy foods scarce in my diet. As long as my diet subsists of fat, protein and vegetables I am fine. If I start consuming flour, rice, potatoes, sweets and alcohol I gain weight.
I have only recently realized how eating a meal rich in protein and fats keeps me fed for as long as eight hours. If I eat some sweets or a piece of bread I will feel famished in two and a half hours. Whats even worse I will crave more of simple carbs.
Losing weight on protein and fats is easy and effortless. Eating a "balanced" diet in small portions feels like torture to me.
As an added bonus it is really hard to consume a large ammount of protein and fat.
Beer is not only caloric, but contains alcohol. When alcohol is ingested, the body's fat metabolism practically stops until it's out of your system. Drinking a beer each day would almost make it impossible to lose fat efficiently.
It wouldn't matter if you were eating under, because your body would not be able to easily burn fat for fuel. Instead, it would burn other things, acetate (from the alcohol), carbs, your own muscle, then fat, etc.
That's the first I've ever heard that a human body would burn muscle before fat. Also, a beer each day would be out of your system relatively fast, so it should have no lasting affects on your body's metabolism.
Also, if you're drinking a beer a day, then be sure it's at least bottle-conditioned craft beer since the suspended yeast has many nutrients. ;)
Can you provide a source for this?
I tried keeping soda and fast food to only one day per week, but bit by bit, "just this once", it kept spilling back into day-to-day habits, and/or miserable cravings. Only when the stimuli were removed entirely (and substituted with other goodies likes steaks and raspberries) did I start to get results, both in behavior and health (45 lbs in two months).
YMMV, different strokes, etc.
By the time I went back to starting strength I was able to start much higher at about 180 and kept increasing from there out, again 5 to 10 lbs a week. The key I feel was consistency. You hardly notice the weight going up if you're consistent.
I am a huge proponent of strength training for general fitness. Please do reach out if you have any questions!
At the moment you're simply relating a personal opinion against someone else's personal opinion.
It seems you have been struggling for a few years of losing and gaining it (like I have I hasten to add), trying different things:
https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=by%3Agxs+calor...
Note that 3 years ago you were actually recommending 100% wheat bread, now it's no wheat.
Let's just agree that no-one seems to know a reliable method yet. Some people find a way, I've a couple of friends who have, a couple who haven't. One did it on Dukan, which I found repulsive and made me feel ill. One simply pretends he lost no weight. Although if you've got good citations I'd be deliriously happy to eat my words and try it. Now, it really is time to sign up to the gym under my work...
EDIT: I suddenly realized, if it's working for you and you're happy with it, don't doubt what you're doing at all. My point was meant to be it seems different things work for different people.
Isn't that how conversations work?
If you burn more calories (energy) than you eat, you will lose weight.
Obviously, you have choices. You can cut down on all the really high calorie stuff. You can increase your exercise to burn more. You can (ideally) do a bit of both.
Of the hundreds of people I've known that have lost life-changing amounts of weight, I would estimate less than 1% of them had any idea how calorie dense the foods they were eating (and drinking) every day really are.
For the majority of people that are severely overweight, all they have to do is cut out high calorie snacks like chips, soda and anything deep fried and they'll lose significant weight, without even getting off the couch.
It really is that simple. There are many ways to lose weight, but dropping sugar (in all it's forms) is the most straightforward. It's the closest thing to a 'weight hack' I've ever seen.
If you are currently overweight, just cut out carbs completely for 3 months..don't bother to count calories; don't fret about nonsense like whether your food is organic, or free range, or locally sourced. Just stop eating sugar. No rice, no potatoes, no bread, no sugared soft drinks, no pasta.
You can do this with colors of food, textures, anything that eliminates ~30-40% of the available food options.
I've lost over 10% body fat cutting the bread and carbs with NO exercise. Get a clue and either 1. try a no wheat / sugar / starch diet for just 2 weeks 2. read up on insulin, its causes and effects.
I am two months into it - and have already lost 15 lbs, without any additional exercise. The carbs were rather easy to give up really - less sugar in my coffee, no pasta, few potatoes. Sodas were a little harder, but at 40g of sugar for a single Dr. Pepper, the choice between that or a whole sandwich is an easy one to make. The sodium is quite hard if not impossible though, unless you make every meal at home and only use fresh ingredients. If it is in a box, bag or can you can forget it. There is hardly anything at any restaurant you can get that is low sodium though. Even salads are absolutely loaded with sodium.
I will say I feel a little better, and not just from losing a couple inches around my waist. Water all day certainly helps. I don't think my cholesterol numbers are going anywhere really, I think my genetics are to blame, but I hope not.
Just a short anecdote, but if you sit behind a desk all day and have put on a few lbs, its fairly easy to give up the fast food and watch your carbs. It sure didn't seem like it at first though.
Good to see!! When you are burning this level of level of energy every day, its actually <hard> to keep a stable weight. (Author must have had some base fitness, too so good for him.)
At its core, Weight change is simple input/output math. The key variable is %deplete your glycogen levels (as % of full everyday.) That is the "cache" of energy from your daily diet. If you burn enough energy to deplete this, you will lose weight, as your body replenishes itself from non-dietary reserves (fat, protein en extremis).
Surprisingsly, these are highly realistic numbers (<1lb/day>), even for relatively fit (height/weight proportionate) people. Moderating the pace to emphasise endurance over power will lead to more loss of net-mass. Asympotically, you will reach a point of gradual returns, but it is not at all surprising to lose significant mass under such prolonged workloads.
TLDR: Glad to see this is not a crash diet.
edits: clarity
I made two small habit changes that I feel made a drastic difference:
* Bring lunch to work everyday (brown bag, leftovers)
* If I want to watch TV, I must be moving on the treadmill
The success stories all boil down to a few simple points: eat real food, cut down on alcohol, and do some exercise that you find enjoyable enough to do it every day.
At least when you're in the west second hand food smells better than second hand smoke.
And at the 1 year anniversary of his epic hangover: http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterjlambert/8753966380/
If you only care about weight loss: calories in vs calories out.
However
If you care about maintaining muscle while losing fat, the story is still pretty simple, and calories still count, but the macro ratio of those calories are very important. In this case, keep protein high and get the rest from carbs and/or fat. I personally recommend a more Keto approach in this case because most people will be satiated longer.
The point being, weight loss is one thing, but muscle sparring while losing weight is another. Understand what you are going after and know the correct path.
[1] - When most people say they want to "lose weight", they really mean fat. Really, who wants to lose muscle? Probably no one. That is why calories don't tell the whole story. If, however, you absolutely don't care about muscle (and if you say "yes" here, I would personally question that), sure, just pay attention to calories and ignore the macro ratios.
I tried it for years. I burn 2200 cal/day so I can eat a large Cinnabon every day (800 cal) and still lose weight.
The problem is it fucks your insulin resistance and turns into diabetes.
So, I don't consider a solution viable if one of the side effects is death.
Medically speaking, it is always about fat. If a doctor tells you to lose weight, they mean fat.
Banting knew carbs made you fat over a century ago, but of course since the scientists couldn't figure out WHY they discredited it. And so it ever was.
They also knew carbs should be avoided by diabetics, but when insulin was invented they chose to (more profitably) just shoot people up all the time and make them sicker. Do you know what shooting yourself up with insulin constantly does, by the way? [2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Banting [2] http://garytaubes.com/2012/02/on-the-greatly-exaggerated-dem... [ see disturbing picture ]
Clothing is not sized that way in the USA. 36" waist fitting into a medium?
Also, one can get 'adjustable waist' pants with elastic slots in them that allow the waist to expand such that someone with a 42 inch waist might fit into a pair of '34 inch' pants comfortably. They don't help the situation any.
[edit: not to ask why you're losing weight so fast (because you're not eating, duh), but whether that rate is healthy.]
Isn't it obvious this is incorrect?
I mean, go to Japan, where people live on white rice and wheat noodles and count how many obese people you see on the street.
You will also notice that consumption of bacon, butter, eggs and dairy is very low compared to western diets and even though they consume fatty fish they don't eat it in the portions westerners consume meat.
1. Bike to work (~5 there plus ~5 miles back for a total of ~10 miles per work day)
2. Stopped drinking soda (and most sugary drinks)
3. Switched to a standing desk at work (I pace when I think so it's almost like walking all day)
4. Do minor exercise during down time at work (push ups, dips mostly)
5. Regularly asking myself if I have time to go to the gym and actually going when I find I don't have a good excuse (I got this idea from that lucid dreaming trick).
6. Consistently trying to eat less in general (based on rough calorie counts) by asking myself if I need to eat more or cook that much.
7. Continually improving balance in diet (more fruits/veggies is usually what I need to do)
8. Cooking as much as I would eat in one sitting, but saving half for lunch the next day (no more seconds)
I've always been pretty physically active, but I've also always had a tendency to eat as much as I wanted constantly. This led to rapid weight gain whenever circumstances had me exercising less. Restraining myself was a steady process, but now I actually can't eat as much as I used to, and I find I actually eat less when exercising less, which is good.
I began to exercise a lot. A lot to lose that beer belly. Finally it mostly came off. Then I fell for the excuse of "you need to eat more to gain muscle!" and ate the amount of calories some online calculator told me i'd need to maintain a given weight.
I've never had abs, and I didn't get them then. I could out-run, out-squat, out-jump any crossfit contender I met; and I was still kind of flabby. My motivation sank. I moved away and stopped my routine. I went back to drinking and eating a lot, without working out as much. I lost strength. The belly began to return.
Recently I arbitrarily decided to cut out drinking for two months, which helped a lot. Then I decided to cut out wheat. Not gluten, just wheat and products made from it. So far? I'm looking more cut than I ever did, and i'm hardly exercising. Eating smaller portions and less empty calories/alcohol is giving me the body image I always wanted. (It's probably just the lack of calories and not the wheat specifically)
Another one of interest is Forks Over Knives, which talks about the benefits of eating a mostly plant based diet.
Regardless, loseit is highly recommended.
Drink a lot of calorie free, caffeinated liquids. I probably drink more diet soda than I should, but tea and coffee are great as well and healthier
I find eating small amounts of crap can actually help. If your diet wasn't amazing in the first place, and your goal is to lose weight so you cut out all unhealthy foods, you're fighting two battles at once - cravings for sugary/unhealthy foods, and hunger cravings. Eating a small amount of ice cream or a few french fries can satisfy the unhealthy cravings, and work as diet foods as long as your calories are sufficiently low.
A good diet should almost never leave you hungry. The problem is the no meat/no fat diets that people try to go on. When you eat high carb you get very little bang for your buck in terms of both volume and satiety.
1 pound of chicken is only 520 calories and the protein will keep you fuller much longer than 520 calories of Oreos. 1700 calories is a good target for a typical male who wants to lose weight, which on a high protein diet can look something like:
Breakfast: 16 oz non-fat cottage cheese (300cal)
Lunch: 10 oz chicken breast (330cal), 1/2 cup dry rice = 1 cup cooked rice (300 cal)
Dinner: 10 oz chicken breast (330cal), two pieces bread (220 cal), bbq sauce (140 cal)
You're at 1620 cals so you can still have an afternoon snack and be right at your target. Add some veggies to your lunch and dinner and I challenge you to eat all that and still feel hungry.
I'm not even recommending keto or paleo or any of that stuff, just that the reason people feel hungry when they diet is that they generally don't eat enough protein.
Excellent read, and keep up the good work!
This is so true... why do we always say we'll start something on Monday? I'll start eating better... on Monday. I'll start my new workout routine... on Monday. Where did this come from? Why is it so hard to make the same commitment to yourself today? Congrats on making up your mind and following through! Super inspiring!
Maybe not - I bet somewhere in your ancestry we're lean, ripped, warrior/hunters who were like that due to the type of work they did, and because people didn't bring donuts every time someone in their tribe had a birthday.
Serious congrats and well wishes to you in any case.
As an example, women gain weight during menopause because of hormones, not because they eat more.[1] So thinking of the body and losing weight as being purely calories in/out misses some important factors; namely, the hormone response to different kinds of foods.
It's uncontroversial that the body responds to carbohydrates with insulin, and also that insulin tends to provoke fat to store more of the available energy vs. it being available to muscles, brain, etc.
Putting that together into "Don't eat too many carbohydrates. Replace with healthy fats like grass-fed butter and meat, eggs, avocado, etc." is controversial; feel free to disagree. I've personally gotten a lot of mileage out of making that change, and even though I eat way more calories I'm 10 pounds skinner, more alert, etc.
That said, basically the anti-carb and anti-fat folks all agree on getting rid of chips, soda, deep fried stuff, so I'm not trying to say that advice won't work.
If this is interesting, it's all cribbed from Gary Taubes's "Why We Get Fat", which I can't recommend enough, lots of good science.
[1] http://www.kansas.com/2013/05/07/2791705/mayo-study-discover...
Edit: Added "too many" to "Don't eat carbs", since you do need to eat some, just not nearly what people typically eat.
It's physically impossible for a body to gain weight if it's burning more calories than it's using.
That's like saying my gas tank will overflow if I burn 10 gallons a day and put in 9 gallons a day... that makes no sense. I'm using more than I'm putting in, so it must go down over time.
Keep it simple, stick to the basics, play the long game (i.e. you're in this for the rest of your life, not the next few weeks/months)
Where the exercise comes in is keeping your metabolism from dropping off when you cut your calorie intake.
Let them figure that out on their own.
Once they have an appreciation for how many calories are jammed into that cookie, and how long they'll have to run on a treadmill to burn it off, they naturally won't be so interested in that cookie, which is great. Then show them how few calories are in an enormous garden salad.
About 6 weeks ago I started replacing a few high calorie meals with low calorie meals per week (e.g. where I would have eaten a big breakfast, I just have cereal and toast, or instead of a big dinner, I'll eat a grilled chicken salad). I have been losing a pound per week for the last 6 weeks, but I can still go to lunch with coworkers, family, etc.
I didn't want to do anything drastic, because I'd get fed up and quit.
That, in my opinion, is one of the most important attitudes to have. It's important to be realistic, and be aware of the fact that whatever you are trying to do, it's not just a fad you have to "tough out" for a few months until you get sick of it.
This is something you're going to do for the rest of your life.
We all need cheat days, and we all have bad weeks. The most important thing is to look at the long game, and always just slowly, slowly tend towards eating a few less calories, and trying to burn a few extra calories.
Sure dieting couch-potatoes will lose weight, but it will include losing a lot of muscle.
I believe the most well researched book on fat control is Carb-Back Loading by John Kiefer, the references chapter is 50 pages, it's terribly fascinating.
Who cares. A beginner doesn't need to know that.
It's like telling a first time driver to worry about double-clutching the gear changes.
Stick to the basics, as the person picks everything up, they can worry about the complicated stuff that builds on.
I'm 32, my last physical revealed that I'm 63 lbs overweight, I smoke (pack a day), drink fairly regularly, my blood pressure is fine, my cholesterol is fine, and have a great insulin response. Lung capacity is definitely not where it should be though.
I also eat almost entirely meat and carbs, save for lettuce/salad. I can drop 5 lbs in a couple weeks just giving up soda, 10 lbs if I give up carbs entirely.
I think the low fat / no meat thing is a load of crap. At least for me all I have to do is drop the carbs, and especially sugar.
Some people hit a plateau and get discouraged or think they're done and start eating carbs again and shoot right back up. Others continue on at a healthy 1 - 2 pounds/week until they reach their goal.
If salt is hard and the rest is easy, you may find losing weight and exercise the two you worry about, and ignore salt.
The impact of alcohol (ethanol) on the metabolism starts around minute 50. Still, I strongly advised watching the entire lecture/presentation.
Since there is no inexpensive seltzer in my region (only stuff that costs more than milk or juice) I finally got a CO₂ tank and carbonate tap water myself, usually with a squirt of lemon. It's easier than I had expected.
Office job plus free pop and chips plus stress = massive weight gain. I think for me at the core it's a stress + easy access to unhealthy food issue.
http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=121373121&pag...
Higher Metabolism, more water weight to shed.
That said, he (and anyone doing it) should probably check in with the doc just to make sure something internal isn't getting out of whack.
They found that the body cycle for salt is more complicated that thought before and "It is not only worthwhile reducing the amount of salt added to food for those who are ill - even the blood pressure in healthy individuals such as the Mars500 test subjects was reduced." [1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARS-500
[1] http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/4329/lessons-from-mars-...
According to Harvard School of Public Health, salt sensitivity is a myth: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/salt-questions/#...
It looks like I had my high end off, it was actually > 7000mg / day.
> Another study, published in 2011, followed 28,800 subjects with high blood pressure ages 55 and older for 4.7 years and analyzed their sodium consumption by urinalysis. The researchers reported that the risks of heart attacks, strokes, congestive heart failure and death from heart disease increased significantly for those consuming more than 7,000 milligrams of sodium a day and for those consuming fewer than 3,000 milligrams of sodium a day.
If you are fasting or in nutritional ketosis, your brain still needs about 120 grams of glucose (or as low as 20 grams after it adapts to producing and using ketones for fuel). If you aren't getting the glucose it needs or ingesting carbohydrates that can be broken down into glucose, your body will begin gluconeogenesis, a process that turns amino acids (from the breakdown of protein) into glucose. If you are still consuming dietary protein, it will break this down first, but if you are not, it will get these amino acids from your muscles and other "lean" tissues.
Basically, if you are consuming an adequate amount of protein, it's pretty hard to lose muscle mass without losing a significant amount of fat.
RE: the only circumstance -- I think sleep deprivation would do the trick, too.
I used to work out a lot, and was in good shape- muscular and probably 12% body fat.
I haven't been working out for about eight months and I've lost probably ten pounds. I don't feel leaner though. I'm pretty sure I'm still at least 12% body fat, and that I've lost a significant amount of muscle.
I think I have been significantly losing muscle without losing any significant amount of fat.
You'll need to work out a lot and be very careful with how much of a deficit you're running if you want to isolate fat instead of just reducing total body mass.
[1]http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v32/n3/full/0803720a.html
I'm unsure what amount is required to produce the supposed fat effect though.
It's extremely actionable, and I've seen it work for hundreds and hundreds of people (I attended Weight Watchers to support my roommates. Both of them went on to become WW leaders, and I made so many good friends there I kept going back year after year. I have personally been involved in the lives of well over 500 people losing well over 100lbs each)
> as changing what you eat can be easier than insisting that you have to eat less and go without something your body is demanding.
I never said anything about eating less. You miss read.
> It's extremely actionable ...
There is no clear-cut action from that optimization request. In comparison, "eat less" or "eat different in this specific way" are examples of things that are actionable.
> and I've seen it work for hundreds and hundreds of people (I attended Weight Watchers to support my roommates. Both of them went on to become WW leaders, and I made so many good friends there I kept going back year after year. I have personally been involved in the lives of well over 500 people losing well over 100lbs each)
This means that it is "effective", not that it is "actionable".
>> as changing what you eat can be easier than insisting that you have to eat less and go without something your body is demanding.
> I never said anything about eating less. You miss read.
Well, now it isn't clear what you mean at all, because you've said you advocate Weight Watchers while also advocating a simple belief that "it's physically impossible for a body to gain weight if it's burning more calories than it's using". The people at Weight Watchers are very clear that "we know that a calorie isn’t just a calorie": they advocate modifications in the kinds of things that you eat and the way you live your life that will lead to a healthier body and, as a side effect, weight loss; in the process, they have a fairly complex equation that assigns "points" to different food items based on a bunch of different quantifiable metrics. This is exactly the kind of "too complicated" advice that you complained at glaugh about.
(1) person who wants some simple, clear guidance
(2) you and me who are debating at a slightly different level what advice we should give to #1.
So here's maybe a better way of making my argument:
1. Eat fewer carbs.
2. If you want evidence/science/logic, read the Taubes book.
[Addressed towards #2ers only:] I agree that too often people make great the enemy of the good. But I actually think it's just unhelpful to say "Eat less or exercise more" relative to "Eat fewer carbs". The amount of energy your body burns is dramatically influenced by hormones and the type of food you eat, that's by far the easiest lever to pull to lose weight. The Taubes book talks at length about the flaws in the thermodynamic metaphor. I confess I'm doing a poor job of communicating the argument.
Also thanks for the feedback, the good vs. great thing is a bit tricky.
> 1. Eat fewer carbs.
I don't agree. I could cut out all the carbs I'm eating and still be eating well over 3000 calories a day (in fact, I do that right now, personally). Eating fat-soaked deep fried junk is the bad one. Carbs are no the enemy. Calories are.
I also never say to a beginner "eat less calories" because people trying to lose weight have a very, VERY big emotional attachment and reaction to the word calories. That's why weight watchers hides that with their points system. They just say you can eat x points today, we don't care how you do it, go nuts. (The formula is points = calories/50). Eat a whole loaf of white bread or a massive pile of pasta today for all they care. As long as you stay under your points allocation, it doesn't matter, you will lose weight.
In the long, long run, you can tweak that.
But, there's a significant difference in what people want to do or think they do), and what they actually do.
The fact that sugars and starches spike blood sugar, which later falls rapidly causing hunger pangs, makes it very difficult to stay on plan. These people feel like they're starving.
Alternatively, a person eating fish and veggies soaked in olive oil never experiences the spike, burns fat slowly, and can stay hunger-free for most of the day. I.e., what may be a higher calorie meal in the short-term, allows one to take in fewer calories over the course of the full day... since there is little desire to snack.
>Well, now it isn't clear what you mean at all, because you've said you advocate Weight Watchers while also advocating a simple belief that "it's physically impossible for a body to gain weight if it's burning more calories than it's using". The people at Weight Watchers are very clear that "we know that a calorie isn’t just a calorie": they advocate modifications in the kinds of things that you eat and the way you live your life that will lead to a healthier body and, as a side effect, weight loss; in the process, they have a fairly complex equation that assigns "points" to different food items based on a bunch of different quantifiable metrics. This is exactly the kind of "too complicated" advice that you complained at glaugh about.
You know what the complicated formula is? calories/50.
(Full disclosure: It has some very tiny adjustments if it has too much fat it gets an extra 1/2 point.. lots of fiber gets -1/2 point.)
You wanna know how well this works? I've seen people eat their daily points intake by eating nothing other than Big Macs (for most people it's around 4 daily). I've also seen a guy eat nothing other than chips and beer, but not go over his points.
They all lost weight, because they ate less calories than they used, which the WW points system is all about.
As I said, I've seen hundreds of people lose staggering amounts of weight, and I've never seen a single person that didn't lose weight when they ate less calories than they used. It never made a lick of difference what they ate, only the amount of calories they consumed.