How to lose weight: What worked for me, with graphs | Hacker News Reader

How to lose weight: What worked for me, with graphs

danieltenner.com

92 pointsdaeken93 comments

I'm planning on following this pretty closely soon. I've lost a lot of weight over the last couple of years (somewhere around 130lbs, starting at nearly 400lbs), but it's been largely due to cutting out soda and simply getting off my arse. Now I'm walking 3mi every other day or so, and the next step is to figure out what to eat to maximize my energy while keeping my weight on a downward trend, and I think that having more data will help that.

Congrats! Keep it up. I've lost about 60lbs, and it started the same way for me: cutting out bad foods and doing a bit of exercise. It was nice motivation to say "no, I'm taking the stairs" or "I'll walk" and know that I could do it and it was making a big improvement in my life.

Pick up cycling! So much more efficient use of your energy, meaning you can utilize it more often to hop around town!

The last thing one wants when trying to lose weight is efficiency of motion. Cycling is a great alternative to driving (or taking public transit), but it's a horrible alternative to walking until you are at or near your target. Replacing a half-hour walk with a five-minute bike trip rather defeats the purpose.

Walking is great -- you'll need to pick up the distance soon, though, and perhaps make it a daily thing. As you walk more (and as you lose weight) your body will get better at walking. And don't worry too much about the food intake -- learn to listen to your body's needs rather than its wants. It can happen. If you are walking about an hour a day for exercise (along with the normal shuffling about), you should probably be able to get by on something in the neighborhood of 1500 calories -- and that can represent a lot of food if you're eating the right stuff, so feeling hungry doesn't have to be part of the deal. (Keep the time and effort constant -- if you're walking about 3 mph now, you'll find it steps up to 4 mph pretty much by itself. I regularly catch and pass "joggers" these days.)

I've lost just a little bit more than 160 pounds, but I started at a slightly more modest 300-ish (just shy). Just walking, dumping the egregiously horrid foodstuffs and being engaged with the meal I'm eating (rather than absently putting stuff in my mouth while doing other things) did almost all of the work. (Unfortunately, at fifty the skin doesn't quite snap back the way it might have if I'd done it at thirty -- I look way too much like a shar-pei these days.)

It really is about calories in versus calories out. Managing calories in doesn't have to be hard -- it's more about mindfulness than about absolute quantity. It's keeping that arse in gear, even if that means low gear until your capabilities catch up with your ambition, that makes the big difference.

Wow congrats man, and good luck!

Build muscle

I didn’t try the crazy diets like Atkins or the Maple Syrup diet. Anything that requires eating crazy stuff is probably bad for your health.

Now I'm starting to feel like an Atkins Zeolot, I've been defending low-carb on HN so much lately, but I can't let a statement like that sit on itself! There's tons of scientific evidence for Atkins and everybody I talked to that investigated it, agrees.

Furthermore "eating less" will not work, if you're eating mostly carbs. There's a high probability your body will just go into starvation mode. Meaning you'll store about the same amount of fat, while there's less energy to be spend for your body, making you sleepy and lightheaded. Graphing your weight won't change anything about that.

The simple fact is that most people dramatically reduce sugar intake when dieting. That alone is likely to shift their insulin balance in a favorable direction.

Weighing daily and graphing simply promote awareness and can be motivating.

One of the things that makes low-carb believers like myself seem like crackpots is our unwillingness to acknowledge that moderate carb consumption can be a reasonable diet because we believe it to be suboptimal.

For the average individual, simply eliminating most dietary sugar and refined carbohydrates would generate enough significant weight loss and health benefits to encourage them to maintain such a diet (which is likely to be more varied and interesting than a strict low carb diet) for long periods of time.

If you read the appendix, you'll see that I do recommend staying away from processed sugars and other assorted white-bread-and-white-rice.

In my third iteration, I'm also tending to avoid the starchy stuff most of the time (not always though). In the first two, though, I happily ate a sandwich for lunch and potatoes for breakfast, and still lost plenty of both weight and fat.

I won't get into a debate about Atkins. I am naturally dubious of extreme diets (and Atkins is extreme, no matter which way you slice it), but it's worth pointing out that "what you eat" is only one third of this method. The first 2/3rds are all about motivation, and they're the important part. The third part merely suggests one way to "eat less".

OK, so don't get into a debate about it, but I would like to point out that extreme is relative. From an evolutionary perspective (i.e. What we naked apes evolved to eat...) I would argue that a standard american diet is FAR more extereme than an atkins diet (at least one that avoids fake low-carb foods) based around meat, green plants, many kinds of fruit, and nuts.

Indeed. For those wanting to learn (a lot) more about this, with references to all the studies, check out Gary Taubes's book Good Calories, Bad Calories.

Some pretty good notes to Good Calories, Bad Calories, approved (perhaps temporarily) by the publisher:

http://higher-thought.net/complete-notes-to-good-calories-ba...

I'm not sure I'm understanding this correctly:

5. Obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation, not overeating, and not sedentary behavior.

6. Consuming excess calories does not cause us to grow fatter, any more than it causes a child to grow taller. Expending more energy than we consume does not lead to long-term weight loss; it leads to hunger.

So if I didn't have this disorder I can over-eat and become sedentary and not become obese?

I think he's just reframing the levels of causation a bit. You don't say pregnant women gain weight because they eat more than they consume, although from a thermodynamic point of view this is strictly true.

Have you ever met skinny unhealthy programmers who are very sedentary and eat a lot of junk food? I have met many. The point is that different people have very different reactions to food, in terms of hunger, mental reward pathways, tendency to burn off calories through adjusting subjective energy levels (e.g. lethargy) and things like jittering, and hormonal responses. Some of this is affected by the kinds of foods we eat, and much of it is affected by genetics.

The real point is that we can do better than saying "just eat less and exercise more" by looking at things from a different perspective. (I'm speaking as someone who lost 45 pounds in the last year and am currently at about 10-11% bodyfat by the way.)

Thanks, that's clearer to me. =)

Can you share how you got to where you are now?

A much better book, written by an actual scientist, is Life Without Bread.

Can you elaborate on what makes it "much better"? I thought Taubes's book was very well researched (I think he spent about 10 years on it) and very well argued. I'd love to see something even better.

Much more science, less story-telling, but extremely compelling research -- many more studies cited, not just weight but the effect of low-carbohydrate diets on things like gout. Graphs. Very much a "here's the science, here's why, make your own mind up" type of book.

Sounds good. Thanks.

The other thing to say here is that the latest research indicates that carbs may actually be a leading cause of heart disease rather than fat. For example:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=carbs-again...

So low carbs can be healthy even if you're not trying to lose weight.

The study says refined carbs are bad — that's an important distinction. Also, some research (The China Study, for example) suggests that proteins (not fat) from animal-based foods are a cause of heart disease (and cancers).

Sorry, you're right about the refined carbs. Also, going further along the meat lines, there was also recent research differentiating processed meats (e.g. bacon, sausage, lunch meats, etc.) versus unprocessed meats. If I remember correctly, the unprocessed meats had no real links to heart disease and cancers (in moderation). However, the processed meats did show some links to those health problems. The researchers speculated that it was probably either the high salt content or the nitrates in the processed meats that were the culprits, but the study didn't actually look at that.

My most successful weight loss was on a low carb, Atkins-like diet. It's not something I could see doing for a lifetime; I like fruit and good bread too much.

The article contends that graphing your weight on a daily basis is a good motivator, and I agree with this as well. Doesn't have to be a computer graph either, a piece of graph paper posted on the bathroom wall by the scale does just fine.

I did the maple syrup diet if anyone is curious - documented here: http://mastercleanselemonadediet.tumblr.com/ I just wanted to see if I could do it. I made it. Lost 16 lbs and have kept off 10 lbs.

I've lost 8 inches off my waist since august through not dieting and ramping up exercise (it's really important to not diet). and last year and I would say the advice is not good practice in places. I've not weighed myself once, I have no interest in my weight, or my BMI. My waist (and the requirement to have bought and thrown away quite a few trousers and shirts in the 10 months) are as much of an indicator as is needed. I want to become fit for life and not set goals to attain and get quick wins but make no long-term impact.

1) Never skip any meal. You are using a short-term, unsustainable, trick to drop some lbs you are guaranteed to put back on because you are not teaching yourself anything sustainable (same reason that low carb diets don't work long term for 90% of people).

2) Weighing yourself all the time when losing weight by diet alone is a psychological game that suggests you have a "goal" weight in mind which you will get to and have not gained any idea of food discipline or life-long control which should be your primary goal.

3) People who over eat can suffer from guilt cycles and your weight at any one point can induce more guilt (gaining pounds when you feel you have made even more effort to eat) even though it is not relevant as long as the over-all trend for life-long health is getting to and maintaining an approximate body shape which can fluctuate and still be healthy.

4) Being on a diet means coming off a diet. You will learn no long-term lessons about how your body and eating habits work for you.

I think that you will be healthier and look better and also weight more if you exercise a lot, just because muscle is more dense than fat.

My biggest concern with this guys method is he simply glosses over exercise.

I agree with him that exercising for weight loss is a _lot_ harder than simply not eating shit/unhealthy food (or excess amounts of healthy food)

However going into caloric deficit without a solid resistance training plan is a sure way to shed more muscle than you likely want.

You shouldn't think in terms of weight loss, you should think in terms of fat loss. You don't want to be shedding muscle. A simple resistance/calisthenic training program such as body weight exercises like pushups/planks/squats/burpees/pullups(if you can) will ensure that you have a better chance at retaining muscle, while shedding fat.

Also, using scales is simply not an accurate way to measure fat loss. The simplest way to measure your fat-loss progress at home is the good old tape measure.

Good luck.

I’ve gone through this “diet” three times (see graphs). The first time I went from 83kg to 75.5kg over about 3 months. The second time, from 80kg to 71kg over 4 months. My latest iteration of this diet has me down from 75kg to 68.5kg in about 2 months.

Note how each time the starting weight is over the last ending weight? And this is the problem, right there. It is not hard to find an eating regime that will help you lose weight. That's the easy part. The hard part for many is not gaining weight when you are not "manning the store", so to speak.

Yep. The simple method I've found to deal with this is to keep on weighing myself every day. I can eat all sorts of crap, as long as I keep weighing myself.

There's a lengthy period of time which I haven't typed in the data for where I just weighed myself every day. I still managed to keep the weight off when I did that. The minute I stopped weighing myself, though, the weight piled back on.

A daily ritual of stepping on a scale seems a small price to pay for not needing to worry about weight gain, though.

I've just been through exactly what you've described. I'd weighed about 88 kg for 15 yrs. Before that I'd dieted sometimes with low fat diets but they never worked: I always ended up binging on cheese sandwiches! So for 15 yrs, I ate whatever I wanted (except for sweets) and sat on 88 kgs (BMI 32= obese).

Then I moved to China a few years ago, and late last year heard about the Chinese proverb: "Eat heaps for breakfast, eat enough for lunch, and eat little for dinner". This was news to me because all my life I thought I had to eat dinner every day. So I started following that rule, still eating the same food I always did, including heaps of eggs for breakfast. I also started keeping absolutely no food in my apartment, apart for milk for coffee, and instead ate out for every meal. In China there's always many restaurants a short walk from one's home.

Winter arrived, with the cold, some snow, and occasional rain, and I started skipping dinners because I was too lazy to go out, and dinners were now just snacks. After a few weeks, I noticed I weren't ever hungry in the evening. Even when I ate lunch when the restaurants opened at 11:00am, then nothing else for the rest of the day, I still weren't hungry, as long as I had a big breakfast. After a few months, I noticed I didn't have much fat where there'd been some for at least a decade, so I weighed myself: only 80kg. I've since come down to 75kg (BMI 27), but have sat at that weight for 2 months. I now weigh myself every day because (for some reason :-) I always remember to.

One other thing: I stopped eating white rice with my meals. The restaurants I frequent around here probably think I'm a foreign oddity who pays for two dishes instead of just one with free bowls of rice. I still eat noodles or potatoes every day though.

All this weight loss happened without trying very hard: eating the same fatty food I always did, virtually never eating after lunch, not exercising except for a few long walks every week, and not eating rice with my meals. Just a few simple rules. One thing I've accepted is: If I want to stay at this weight, I'll never be eating after lunch time again, and I can live with that.

This is actually where exercise can come in to play. The author is right that recent research says that exercise is not necessarily the most effective way to lose weight. However, there is evidence that exercise can help you maintain your weight.

So if you backslide a bit and stop watching what you eat, you can still help yourself out by exercising.

What's worked for me is to stop thinking about how hard it is to lose weight and to just approach it as a big math/science project that I can geek out on and run the numbers.

I exercise daily, 20-40mins on a bike and usually a 30-60min swim, and I'll do some light weights a couple of times a week. This may sound like a lot of exercise, but it's really not. It's an hour or two a day of being active. That's in no way overdoing it, even though when I tell people this, a lot of times their reaction is that to tell me I am. I built up to this from an almost completely sedentary lifestyle in which I did almost nothing but sit at the computer and work.

This helped, and definitely made me feel better, physically. I'm healthier than I have been in a long time, and doing this, I started slowly losing weight, but the big difference came when I cut out processed sugars and lowered my carbohydrate intake. It's not a super-low low-carb extreme diet, but it's definitely a lot lower than it was.

I felt even better, more energy, more weight loss (about 3x faster than I was before), headaches went away, and I started sleeping better.

Once I got used to not having all the sugar and carbs, my body stopped craving it. It took some willpower at first, but now it's basically easy to stick to, because I'm used to eating healthier and just don't have any desire not to anymore.

As I suppose many of the people here do, I have a long list of pet projects that I plan to one day finish.

One of them is lineardiet.com.

The idea is simple. You just enter your current weight (C) and your desired weight (D). The service then plots you a graph with a line from weight C to weight D. The Y axis is the weight and the X axis is time.

Now you have to weigh yourself every day.

If you are above the line it's BROCCOLI DAY (as in: watch what you eat).

If you are below the line it's PIZZA DAY (as in: eat whatever you like).

That's it. It's guaranteed to work! :)

Could be a fun little service. Business model? I plan to collect all the fat people are losing and sell it as eco-fuel. ;) No, not really. It's just for fun.

Now if I only didn't have a ton of other projects like this plus a life to lead... one day...

Actually, I leave this as a question to the HN community: what would be fastest way for me to finish this service? I'm talking hours of development time, not days.

How would you build it?

There is an iPhone app called Bang Bang that does just this. It has warts[1], but overall does the job.

If I were doing it I'd use the HTML-5 localStorage and the 'manifest' offline web page stuff and just keep it all on person's phone.[2] Maybe I'd sync it up to a server somewhere in case they lost their phone.

[1] Warts list:

• Bang Bang is inexplicably slow. I'm down the stairs, through the house and out the door sometimes before I can get my weight entered.

• The keyboard entry is inappropriate. Even assuming you want keyboard, you only need 10 digits and a decimal point, the whole keyboard makes the touch points to small and fiddly. Still better would be a roller. Today's weight is pretty close to yesterday's. One motion would suffice.

• Some error checking wouldn't be bad. If I accidentally enter 600 pounds more than yesterday, maybe flag me instead of just graphing the result.

• The starting date is lost in the UI.

• The UI to get the starting weight and ending targets is unintuitive and will only be found by accident. Like by tapping at the screen while yelling "Why is this tiny graph so slow to draw‽"

On building it quickly:

* Use a tiny framework like Flask that will let you get up and running quickly. It's a two-page site -- you don't need Django/Rails.

* Pare down the features to the bare minimum: no signups, accounts, etc. You put in your numbers, get sent to lineardiet.com/diet/abc123/ and have to bookmark that if you want to get back to it..

* Use an simple data model like: ID -> {start_date, end_date, start_weight, end_weight}.

* Render graphs in-browser with Raphael.

This idea is exactly how my and Bethany Soule's pet project, kibotzer.com, started. It has worked great for a bunch of family and friends (although they often yo-yo back when they stop reporting their weight to kibotzer!).

A tweak to your broccoli vs pizza day (great way to put it!): It's hard to take broccoli day seriously if it's just a random fluctuation. So we have a Yellow Brick Road that you follow to your goal. The centerline of the Road is what you call the line from C to D. And then there's a right and wrong lane of the Yellow Brick Road (lane width dynamically adjusts to account for random fluctuation) and broccoli mode starts in earnest when you're in the wrong lane and in danger of going off the Road.

The biggest failure mode of kibotzer/lineardiet seems to be painting yourself into a corner by going above the line a bit planning to catch back up, and then a bit more, until it's hopeless. We have a bunch of ideas for how to address that...

http://www.myweightracker.com/about

Is the site in german?

It is a parked domain. Interesting choice to shill from a parked domain in a language with only 100 million native speakers.

Actually, only 10 million speakers.

It's swedish.

Hacker's Diet Online has a nice graphing utility. It's much easier to see progress on the average than with daily fluctuations.

https://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/HackDiet

My "weekend hobby" is a site that aims for a better user experience that John Walker's site, while remaining true to the hacker's diet tenants. http://myhackerdiet.com

I've also integrated the Withing's wifi scale, so daily readings are fully automated!

>My breakfast would involve stuffing myself with as much food as I could fit in my morning stomach. I followed that with a light lunch around 2-3pm, and then almost no dinner (or a low-calorie snack if I was hungry – examples in the appendix

In college I lost a fair amount of weight by eschewing snacks altogether and eating three large meals every day, meals filled with whole grains that take a while to eat and a while to digest too.

I found that this made the willpower thing a lot easier to deal with. Once you're in the habit of eating well three times a day, and not at all at other times, it becomes easier to cut down on overall food intake. You just don't even consider snacking if you're used to not snacking.

There are two points I wish to add to this discussion:

1. This is what works for one person. Every body is different and everyone's daily routines are different, so what works for one may not work for another.

2. This diet distinctly lacks any form of exercise and implies that by simply eating less and weighing yourself every day is the key to losing weight.

While this may be true and may make you lose weight, it will not make you healthy. It's a fine balance between diet and exercise and it takes some time to find a solution that is right for you.

If you really want to be healthy and not just lose weight I would suggest seeing both a personal fitness instructor and a dietician, both of whom can tailor a program depending on your own body and level of fitness. It is really the safest (and I stress safest as following any sort of dietary or exercise advice from the internet can be extremely dangerous) and easiest way to lose weight and become healthy.

As the author, I couldn't agree more. This diet is about losing weight, not being healthy. My overall plan is to get rid of the weight first, then, once I reach my target body fat percentage, focus on being healthy without regaining the fat.

I've found that losing the fat was impossibly hard no matter how healthy I tried to make my lifestyle. I suspect that once I have gotten rid of most of that fat, exercising will result in more visible improvements (muscles are much more visible when not covered in thick layers of fat), which will generate motivation for me to keep exercising. We'll see.

He says, as I've heard, that those body fat scales are wildly inaccurate. But it looks like the variance is less than a percentage point, which seems really good to me. I guess it's more of an issue of a constant error?

EDIT: Yea, I guess it is probably a constant (person-specific) error. The first google result said

>Use [the scales] to measure your progress only. Don't compare your body fat percentage to tables or to your friends score. It is probably inaccurate no matter what the manufacturers say.

I guess if you calibrated this with a one-time, accurate body-fat measurement, it would be pretty good set-up.

EDIT2: Well, maybe not. Some people apparently report that the (cheap?) scales vary several percentage points during a single day. My calibration method also seems vulnerable to the fact that people store their fat in different places on their body depending on their genetics. Maybe this can be fixed with two calibration measurements...

Yes, they vary widely. If you control for certain variables, they can give you decent directional information.

One of the biggest factors in the accuracy of the older Tanita brand scales (this is the brand I have had for many years) is your hydration. For example, if you weigh right when you get out of the shower (even toweled dry), your reported body fat will be much lower than your reported body fat before the shower.

They are also sensitive to callouses on your feet.

My brother reports much more consistent results with a handheld body fat analyzer, but I've never tried one on a consistent basis.

Worth noting that I did the measurements at the same time each morning. When I tried measuring my weight at various times of the day, I easily got several percentage points of difference.

Other things that influenced the percentage included:

* eating some very salty stuff the previous day (drives down the percentage)

* getting drunk the previous day (same, weirdly enough)

* eating something late the previous day (same)

You can get decent progress tracking so long as you keep your diet relatively steady and weigh yourself at the same time each day. Even so, there will be odd variations of up to 1.5% in a day, but as you can see from the graphs they usually melt back into an average trend.

> You’ll notice this plan says nothing of exercise. That’s because you don’t need to exercise to lose weight. In my case, I’ve found that exercise, by stimulating hunger, actually makes it harder to eat less. Whereas the weighing and charting generates motivation, exercise sucks it away. In the context of a healthy lifestyle, of course, exercise is very important. I just don’t think it’s that helpful for weight loss. Some notable publications agree with me.

Here's another data point: I lost 3kg when I started running. It was not my intention to lose weight at all, it just happened. In my experience running makes you eat less, I had to make a conscious effort to eat more.

Great article for folks that aren't physical in which case the only way to loose weight really IS to just manage what you eat -- this has never worked well for me.

This can also be a dangerous path for people that are not great self-starters. Using the scale every day teaches you to become obsessed with your weight. A lot (not all) make the association of:

My weight == My self worth

So if they slip up and put on 3 pounds, they feel horrible about themselves. I also think this doesn't promote a healthy long-term method of thinking because at some point you will stop loosing weight. At some point you will have that beach body you wanted -- and then what? If you were obsessed all along with the weight of BF measurements, then you can potentially loose your cause to continue.

This happened to me when I lost 30 lbs. I was so obsessed with the weight, I took it off in 2 months, and kept it off for about 6... then gained it all back + 10lbs over the next 2 years due mostly to being "bored" once I was "done" with the diet and had been at my goal weight for so long.

Again, this just happened to work for me.

I actually like excercise, but I liked food more. So without giving up the good quality foods I liked (eating fast food for every meal doesn't count) I upped my activity level to compensate and have enjoyed a much healthier method of taking off weight for my personality type.

I still have a bit of a gut, but I'm stronger, faster and cardio is much better with better blood work -- and that is what matters to me long-term. These are the type of habits I want to carry forward... needing to work out every day, enjoying what I do.

I want to pass good habits to my kids some day, and that all starts with learning to love physical movement I think (unless you are a phenomenal eater, then that's good too... but most of us aren't)

If you don't mind playing sports or exercise and LOVE food, then try and play with upping your activity level instead of dialing back your diet.

Fight 1 battle at a time.

The pride and confidence you will gain from feeling better will naturally translate to not eating so much of the really terrible food (drive thru) and instead replacing it with something slightly worse... maybe a veggie pizza or something.

That being said, I'm by no means a guru, I just know for 10 years I've tried everything and this is the only thing that worked for me.

Also, if you are the type that likes to push yourself and kick your own ass to see if you can take it -- you need to look into CrossFit, it's awesome.

Most people want to lose too much weight too quickly. Patience is a virtue. I lost 55 pounds with what I considered minimal effort, but it took one year.

Changing to a car-free lifestyle is also a great way to lose weight. If you are considering relocating to a new city soon, that's a good time to investigate whether your new city would be conducive to car-free living. When I moved to Boston and ditched my car, I lost 50 lbs without even trying.

I really like the main idea: it's a willpower management issue, not a diet issue. A lot of stuff is approached differently if you think about it this way, especially in the light of studies who found out willpower is a finite resource, which is replenished easiest by... eating.

I actually completely disagree with this main idea. Everybody eventually gives up, no one has 100% steel willpower, we're all human. I would be very interested to see and update in a year or so, to see if the author has managed to keep the weight off.

A much better idea is to change your diet completely, so your taste buds change and you stop craving unhealthy things.

A wrote a similar article 3 years ago, and took a completely different method. I lost 40 lbs in 4 months, and has kept it off since (ok, I may have gained 5-10 lbs since the peak). Not adding a "shameless plug" since I've stopped updating this site a long time ago, but I think it's still useful: http://www.alexanderkharlamov.com/2007/07/22/how-to-lose-wei...

But you're agreeing with it! By far one of the most elegant ways of solving a problem is avoiding it in the first place, which is what you are doing by attempting to change your taste in food. But it is still very much about willpower - you're not ignoring it, you're taking great pain to go around it.

The first graph is from 2.5 years ago.

I have regained weight only when I stopped weighing/charting. Weighing yourself once a day is not an onerous expenditure of time and energy, and I believe it achieves the goal of faking "100% steel willpower" by generating a little willpower for you every day.

Right. What looks like iron clad will over the course of a year is nothing more than the will to go one more day, every day.

I've lost close to 90 pounds over the last year. Honestly, I didn't expect to be this successful. I thought that after a few months, I'd lose the motivation. But every day I tell myself, "Forget yesterday. Forget tomorrow. Get through today, that's your goal."

Now some days, I didn't get through. But the next day, I'd begin all over as if it never happened. If you don't worry about willpower lapses, you will find it easier to get back to it. 100% willpower is an illusion created by having over 50% willpower along a great enough timeline.

For me, weighing myself has little to do with helping willpower - I still get days where I just feel like gorging on whatever's available in the fridge, willpower be damned. And I think the trick is to get yourself to a point where you don't need willpower at all - just a habit to eat healthy.

But - if it works for you, that's awesome. I definitely don't want to discourage you from what you're doing if it works. It looks like you have a lot of willpower, much more than I or most people I know do, so just keep doing it.

Withings makes a scale (about 150 on amazon) which automatically uploads your weight daily to their servers where you can view it on their website or your iPhone.

It has helped a lot with the recordkeeping part of dieting I always do so poorly at.

Link to the wifi scale: [http://www.amazon.com/Withings-WBS01-Wifi-Body-Scale/dp/B002...]

Even though its called weight loss, most people I know want to lose fat, not lose weight. If you skip exercise altogether you'll go from being large fat, to average fat, and finally to skinny fat.

I had a friend who was "skinny fat" as you call it. He had gone to the doctor and the doctor basically told him that he was essentially bones wrapped in fat, very little muscle.

Those people have always irked me because they would have the same amount of fat as me, but wouldn't get crap for it because it wasn't as visibly obvious. Whereas, for most of my life, I've been what you could call "fit fat(?)". Reasonably strong with above average endurance but obviously carrying a lot of baggage. Unfortunately, I eventually got an office job and went to being just plain fat. But I've decreased my caloric intake to lose weight and started training to increase my strength and endurance.

Interesting ideas and great detail to back it up. I'd like to insert my 2 cents, which is that people have widely varying experiences using exercise for weight loss. In my case, exercise suppresses my appetite. My overeating is mood-driven, and exercise is known to improve mood, so this isn't surprising. Anyone whose overeating is driven by depression (mild or serious) or another mood disorder should consider regulating their mood through exercise.

I tried the fruitarian diet recently and lost 8 pounds in 2 weeks. Of course, how much you lose is highly dependent upon your current weight and body fat %.

The fruitarian diet is where you only eat fruits and vegetables and drink water and 100% pure juices. Avocados have the protein you need, and you can do without starch for 2 weeks.

It really cleanses your body and leaves you feeling great! I'd suggest doing a fruitarian diet once every few months for cleansing purposes.

Your body doesn't need cleansing. What it needs is a healthy diet to start with. Eat healthily, get exercise and fresh air, and you won't need to go on extreme diets that will only cause you to put all the weight back on later.

A normal to health body doesn't, you're right. But at some point, and depending on your age, it might need cleansing. Either way though, cleansing isn't bad. Especially if you stick to a good diet afterward. It'll give you a head start. Even if you put it back on later, but through a good diet, as opposed to junk that may have caused it in the first place, you're better off than before.

People might want to integrate brewer's yeast with this kind of diet, which will provide you with much-needed B12. It's great on popcorn.

> My breakfast would involve stuffing myself with as much food as I could fit in my morning stomach. I followed that with a light lunch around 2-3pm, and then almost no dinner (or a low-calorie snack if I was hungry – examples in the appendix).

I wonder how this plays into a more muscle-building oriented plan. Doesn't seem like being calorie deficient all evening into next morning would be good for building muscle.

Probably not. This is a weight loss method, not a muscle gain method. In fact, you will probably lose some muscle along with the fat. Whether that's something you're willing to accept is up to you. Personally, I don't think putting the muscle back on is all that hard - but losing the fat was almost impossible previously.

You can do exercise on the "big breakfast" approach - but you'll find it much easier to do so in the morning. I doubt you'd gain much muscle while in a 500-1000 daily calorie deficit, but you could certainly help maintain it, and after a nice big breakfast you wouldn't be short of energy to lift weights.

if he was exercising in the morning, it would be a pretty good plan.

Most of my diet consists of carbs, and I am in pretty good shape, which is why I would tend to agree with the author in dismissing the low-carb diets. The key for me, I think, is an active lifestyle. People who think that they don't have time for exercise, should try to think of creative ways to bring activity into their lives. Bicycling to work is one that works for me, and many others that I know.

How does one determine body fat percentage? This seems like a really hard problem to me. How do body fat percentage scales work?

The scales use electrical current to measure your body's resistance and compute it based on your weight. Using a fat caliper where you take multiple points of measure tend to give more comparable measurements.

OK, let me just talk about the low-calories idea and some other stuff for a second. It's gonna be a little long. This is pretty much all copy-pasted from Gary Taubes' ideas, so please don't accuse me of plagiarism!. [Notes, from http://higher-thought.net/complete-notes-to-good-calories-ba... Really really great resource, everyone should read it if they haven't read Good Calories, Bad Calories]

1.) This guy is saying that the

    Delta Fat Stores = Energy In-Energy Out

Well, which is the cause and which is the effect? Isn't it possible that when Energy Out changes, so does Energy In? And, if that's not the case, why don't kids grow obese when they start eating as if they're bodybuilders? The kids eat a lot because they're growing; they're not growing because they're eating a lot. A hormonal drive increases appetite. Pregnant women also grow fatter because of hormones.

2.) Folks say that even an extra 100 calories per day will make you get fat over a year. Bogus; the variables Energy In and Energy Out are dependent. As Energy In changes, so does Energy Out. Also, have you ever had a really, really indulgent meal? I mean, over a fat-pound's worth of calories. You didn't wake up with an extra pound of fat, though.

Based on these, it shows that trying to lose weight by adjusting the quantity of calories is pretty counter-productive.

Let's look at some people who intentionally try to fatten themselves. Massa tribe males eat an extra 1000 calories worth of milk and sugarcane. Japanese Sumo wrestlers eat a high carb, very low fat diet. Maybe it's the type of calorie that matters more than the quantity. The diets used to fatten farm animals are also high in carbs. Hmm, coincidence? Obese people tend to eat the same amount of calories, but a greater proportion of carbs. Another thing about high carb diets is that they're the only way humans get deficiency diseases; they happen usually when glucose gets crowded in a cell so it takes more of it to even be used in a cell. Deficiency diseases are usually carbohydrate wastage diseases.

(Hint: if you want to skip some boring sciency stuff, just read the last paragraph)

Hunger, satiety, and physical activity are physiologically regulated (not psychological). Imagine if people started attributing the hunger in diabetics as a psychological problem!

Most people think of fat as an inert storage medium; "like a garbage can.” Nope; fat tissue is dynamic and really kind of like a coin purse rather than a long-term savings account. Fattening is when the rate at which fat is deposited exceeds the rate it is mobilized (getting richer). Fat is controlled by hormones in the body, not by quantity of fatty acids in the blood. When fasting, fat provides 85% of energy and protein is converted to glucose (via gluconeogenesis) for the rest. Likewise, the presence of glucose or insulin (the only hormone behind storing fat) removes fatty acids from circulation; cells burn glucose first, fat second (e.g. having a credit card is more convenient than using cash).

The fat stored in adipose tissue is called a triglyceride (3 fatty acids on a glycerol backbone). Some trigs come from fat, the rest from carbs. Fat can only go past the cell membrane in the form of free fatty acids - trigs are too large and must be broken down first. In fat cells, trigs are continuously broken down into FFAs and recomposed into trigs. Fatty acids not immediately recomposed are sent into the bloodstream as fuel. The rest of FFAs are converted into trigs and loaded on VLDL (read: the super bad cholesterol) and shipped back to fat cells. Simple control mechanism: blood sugar. Glycerol phosphate is the result of burning glucose, and also happens to be the backbone of triglycerides. The rate of trig formation (fat deposition) depends on the availability of glyerol phosphate. So carbs = glucose = glycerol phosphate = trigs = fattening.

So hormones control the control mechanisms. Insulin stimulates transport of glucose to fat cells, thus controlling trig formation and fatness. Every single other hormone mobilize fat, but they can only do so if insulin is low. Virtually anything that increases insulin will decrease other hormones.

You heard of fructose? It gets turned into glycerol phosphate much more efficiently than glucose. It's the most fattening carbohydrate. Couple this with the fact that table sugar (sucrose) is one molecule of glucose with one of fructose, it's more than their sum since now glucose is increasing insulin with the higher triglycerides from fructose. Even worse? High Fructose Corn Syrup.

What I'm trying to say is that the only thing you should be monitoring when you're trying to lose weight is carbohydrates. Eat as much protein and fat (eat a whole stick of butter if you'd like) as you want. Avoid sugar and other carbohydrates. It's safe. Read the book Good Calories Bad Calories (or just the notes, which I pretty much copy-pasted: http://higher-thought.net/complete-notes-to-good-calories-ba...) for more info. That is all.

Carbs are quite fine if you're an endurance athlete, much less so if you are sedentary. Take a look at what a pro cyclist consumes during a tour: thousands of calories a day beyond what most people would consume, the majority of which are carbs. It works for them, because not only do they need the energy from it, but they are burning it. And these are not fat people (some of them are close to being underweight, by some people's standards). But if you're not active, eating a lot of carbs is like shoving extra gasoline into a car that never goes anywhere; useless, and counter-productive.

I think the reason why carbs work well for endurance athletes is because it gets stored in the muscle glycogen and they actually use it. Yeah, otherwise it's useless.

So is excess protein, which can stress the kidneys. The right balance, for the right lifestyle.

The studies that have been done on protein stressing kidney's were on bunnies, animals not meant to eat much protein in the first place. Send me any other studies, though.

Sounds pretty unbelievable. So your saying you could eat chicken wings (unbreaded) for dinner every day and not get fat? What does the body do with all that extra energy? Don't the laws of physics have to apply?

Yeah; it just gets metabolized instead of stored. You become more energetic, so to speak.

I'd suggest not weighing yourself everyday, but every week at the same time of day. This is because each day your body weight varies from water weight lost and gained. So one day you may be a few lbs. more than usual, which can be discouraging.

It's not discouraging if you graph it too, so that you can see it in perspective.