Hacker News Reader

Comment by artdigital | Hacker News Reader

My advise: (as someone who does a lot of working out and calorie control)

Write down what you eat for a while and its calories. Weigh yourself daily as well and write that down too. If after a week your weight went up: Your calories are above your TDEE. If it went down: Your calories are under your TDEE.

And that's basically it, once you know what your TDEE is, eat under it to create a caloric deficit and you will lose weight. Even if you don't exercise at all and just sit at home.

Sure exercise will help putting your caloric deficit lower by burning some, but in the end it's always calories vs TDEE. Understanding that makes it very easy to go in either direction (gain weight vs lose weight), no matter what your metabolism is

(The easy solution is of course to just eat less, like skipping a meal or reducing the amount. Since your average daily food is already what dictates your current weight, reducing it means you will lose weight)

View on HN

> Write down what you eat for a while and its calories. Weigh yourself daily as well and write that down too. If after a week your weight went up: Your calories are above your TDEE. If it went down: Your calories are under your TDEE.

Not necessarily. It is important to remember that water weighs ~1lb/pt and there are a lot of things that affect how much water your body is carrying at any given moment. Depending on your body mass, it is not unrealistic to see 5lbs of fluctuation in a single day. On a calorie restricted diet your body will tend to retain water (because it does this for pretty much any stressor), so you may actually see a slight increase in body weight at first even though your TDEE is above your caloric intake.

A more reliable approach, in my opinion, is to do the TDEE calculation for your target weight and set that as your calorie limit.

That's why they are telling you (as is common) to compare the results on a weekly basis which reduces the variance. TDEE calculations from scratch are much much more unreliable than empirically finding out and mostly good for a starting point.

Yes, that’s why I suggested weekly

You can of course calculate the TDEE of your target weight but like you implied, unless you know your own, based on your own metabolism and intake, the data is never going to be accurate

For example I eat much less than my bodybuilder friends. When I went with the calories that they recommended to me I gained so much fat with a very active workout schedule and noone had a explanation why. Maybe it’s hormones, maybe medicine I take, maybe something else. I now eat much less than you’d expect from a person with my height and age, but I still gain weight, because my actual calculated TDEE is comparatively low

Having that data on hand as a reference is incredibly helpful to plan my weight progress

I'd love to count calories. I'm just too lazy to measure and research everything I eat, and the alternative is to have only processed foods that are labeled.

It's too bad that we can't just live on Soylent (the actual beverage, not the thing from the book)

I was very excited about Soylent years ago...until I tried it. I really disliked the flavor, so wouldn't have stuck with it regardless, but what really surprised me was how much I enjoy the act of sitting down and eating a meal. Soylent filled me up, but it never satiated me. Regardless of the time savings and predictability, I missed the act of eating, if that makes sense.

Makes total sense to me - we are creatures of habit and eating is one of our most sacred rituals. It's deeply rooted in our psychology so no surprise to me that one would miss the ritual even if satiated.

I tried it while on a trip to the states, and had the same experience as you. It was barely ok, and the taste was not great. Also, saved time from not eating a regular meal is not that much, cooking it is. As with many things, that can be fixed just by throwing more money at it.

With a 10 dollar scale and an App like Lose It, it is pretty easy. They have both things with UPC codes for easy look up and standard foods, for example brown rice or salmon. I keep track and probably spend less than 5 minutes a day getting everything down. Obviously it will be difficult at a restaurant unless you want to bring a scale with you or beg the wait staff but largely they won't mind and if you're order grilled chicken and veg most likely they won't mind measuring the chicken for you. Anyways, the stuff on labels are estimates so the whole process has some moderate error so as long as you estimate fairly you don't have to worry about being crazy accurate.

A few years back I lost 30 lbs over the course of a year using Lose It. I didn't make any major dietary changes other than reducing total caloric intake. I found that ballpark estimating calories for restaurant food was fairly easy and close enough. I never weighed my food. I even went over my caloric budget fairly often and would just make up for it the next day. Overall, it was surprisingly simple to lose the weight but I did find myself hungry more often than I would have liked. After regaining that weight over the last two years, I recently bought an exercise bike. I'm hoping that the regular exercise it provides will help suppress my appetite. I have been thinking about picking up Lose It again, and this thread has convinced me.

I dunno, me and the wife realised that certain foods are simply not worth the calorie count. Really nice curry vs Pizza? The curry wins on taste, nutrition and calories. Chocolate bar vs chocolate-chip brioche? If I'm honest, id prefer the brioche (warmed a little, with a cup of decent coffee). It also affected ingredient choices: if I'm gonna make an Indian dish like palak paneer, I find it impossible to get low-fat paneer. However I can get low-fat halloumi (lots of protein), and if it's cooked right, it works extremely well in place of paneer. Over 6 months using a calorie counting app we got to our "perfect weight" without having to go hungry. In fact, if anything, it just made me stop and think before having second helpings and overeating. So now we have "free meals" in the freezer, for when we want a lazy evening.

On the low fat halloumi vs paneer thing... We also found that low-fat soft cheese (like Philadelphia light) are amazing in soups. Simmer lentils and cubed potatoes with some spices and a can of chopped tomatoes, and just before you serve, add a large dollop of light Philadelphia and stir it all the way in. Boosts the protein content and makes for a really creamy soup. Also works great in other soups.

Absolutely. Preventing overeating was likely the biggest contributor to my weight loss. I stopped going back for seconds every time. The next biggest was probably eating higher quality foods, similar to your examples. My memory is fuzzy on this detail, but I believe the times I ended up hungry were largely the days on which I'd had an especially calorie dense meal, like pizza, earlier in the day, so my calorie allowance was smaller come dinner time. However, pizza being my favorite food, I'm unlikely to give it up. Rather, I try to make it the last meal of the day. I found that I was able to resist the late-night munchies easier than mid-day hunger pangs.

I'm trying to figure out if it's possible to make a healthy pizza. Adding gluten to the flour for extra protein, using low fat cheeses etc. If I crack the 500 calorie 12" pizza I'll let you know.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0MpL1KfYEJg

The Milton's brand cauliflower crust pizza (available at Costco among other places) is also pretty good. Not available outside the USA yet AFAIK, unfortunately.

Making the crust very thin is also an obvious way to reduce carbs, and using whole wheat crust also help, and using Khorasan wheat or similar whole grains.

For sweets, I adopted the snob diet: raise your standards so much the average supermarket chocolate bar just doesn't appeal any more, and you are less likely to snack casually :-)

Never had a decent cauliflower crust (yet). Unfortunately the Milton brand isn't available where I am. But checking out the nutritional value, they're replacing replacing wheat flour with "Rice Flour, Tapioca Starch", which smacks of gluten free rather than low carb. Having said that, it is lower in calories than my store bought pizza (690 vs 800 for the same weight). But is it as good? Like your snob chocolate diet: I would prefer to eat pizza less often and maybe walk an extra 5km on the days that I enjoy a real pizza.

I am going to experiment with low-flour dough with extra gluten and cauliflower to bulk it out. Might need xanthan gum and an egg.

MyFitnessPal does a pretty good job. You can scan barcodes and it'll (usually) have the calories and macros. Also just having a set of scales on hand makes it a lot more accurate!

If you eat a lot of similar stuff, after looking up things periodically over time you'll get to be able to ballpark calorie counts. Calories aren't really hidden that well.

When you cook for yourself it's pretty easy. After a month you remember kcal per 100g for each common ingredient and the weight is on the box or on the receipt anyway.

TDEE = Total Daily Energy Expenditure

For me at least it's not that simple. My weight (healthy to low BMI) has been very stable over many years with vastly different amounts of exercising and quality of eating habits within that period. Fat to muscle ratio does move but total weight is stuck even with long runs of lots of junk food.

Hmm I have trouble believing that. If you eat less and put yourself into a caloric deficit, your body is going to start using up fat and to a certain degree muscle, that's just how it works and your body is no exception. If you work out during a deficit, your body will try to retain muscle and use more fat instead. Gaining muscle in a deficit is possible, but only in small amounts, if at all.

> quality of eating habits within that period

To me this sounds like you aren't actually changing the amount of calories that you eat, just the quality of them. Eating 2000 calories of McDonalds or 2000 calories of high quality food does not matter (or barely matters) for losing/gaining weight. If 2000 calories is under your TDEE, you can eat 2000 calories of cheesecake and would still lose weight (but very unhealthy).

What I see often is people claiming stuff like "I can't lose weight" or "I have a slow metabolism", but they never actually bother counting how much they eat, and because of that have no understanding of what high-calorie and low-calorie food is. (For example if I'd ask how much calories an average hamburger or a glass of cola has, you'd likely have no idea if you haven't counted calories before).

It was the same for me, once I started counting I realized that I was not eating according to the goals I had set at that time, and that the food I ate was actually much much less in calories than I thought it was.

The key is “fat to muscle ratio”

It’s a body recomp from an untrained person. Pretty common for new lifters.

You’re right though - if they lift better and eat better, that’ll change.

Of course, eating less is the ideal solution if you can muster the willpower to actually do it - but that's a big "if" for many people...

Counting calories is still very useful, because you learn what's "worth it".

For example there are protein bars that are supposedly healthy, but they have 150-250 kcal per 50g bar.

On the other hand there are these watery ice creams that have about 65 kcal per piece and feel just as indulgent if not more.

Other things that are very much "not worth it" on the enjoyement/kcal scale is bread and other pastries.

2 buns with ham is 500 kcal and feels like nothing. A whole pan of hot vegetables with some meat is +- the same and feels like a proper dinner.

> these watery ice creams that have about 65 kcal per piece and feel just as indulgent if not more.

that shows why it’s easier for some than for others :)

Just do keto diet or carnivore then. Will be a lot easier. You have to give up the cake.

I came here for this.

You might try an other diet that‘s more filling and creates less cravings. So less carbs and more protein and fat. I don‘t think that willpower really works in this regard long term. It only creates frustrations.

The big trick is figuring out mentally how to eat less without requiring willpower. It is possible. Depending on willpower is setting up for likely failure, IMO.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com