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Comment by noodle | Hacker News Reader

i think he discounted a step: exercise. if you don't, you'll lose some weight, sure, but if you remain sedentary, you won't see that big of a difference. it doesn't even have to be much to start, just walk more.

i also would discourage the "skip dinner" plan. i think you'll find you'll have better results if you do eat SOMEthing for dinner. it could just be some of the low calorie foods he mentions, but just to have eaten something will be a bit better than not having eaten anything. don't want to kick your body into starvation response mode.

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There is a _long_ discussion about how much exercise helps weight loss, what kind of exercise is better (aerobic vs anaerobic, burning calories vs building muscle, priming the metabolism vs getting hungry), how much is enough etc. It's much safer to skip it altogether.

Well, overall the goal is to burn more calories than you take in. I wouldn't recommended "skip exercise" to anybody, but tell them that it's not necessary if they can control their intake enough. But, if you don't change your intake and also add exercise, it'll certainly speed things up.

He explicitly mentions not exercising to reduce your hunger and because he and other sources he cited don't think it helps.

If you track your weight every day then you can try different eating schedules for a week or so and see which on works best. I know people who ate three small meals every day and lost weight easily, while I found that either one or two meals a day worked well as long as I ate at least 2200 Calories one day per week.

no, he misreads or misattributes the the findings of the sources. for example, from one of his sources:

> But few people, an overwhelming body of research shows, achieve significant weight loss with exercise alone, not without changing their eating habits.

exercise alone is what is in question. but we aren't discussing exercise alone. we're discussing exercise within the context of a fairly major diet change.

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