Comment by silencio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by silencio | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Were you originally eating unhealthily before you lost weight eating that way? I am REALLY struggling with losing weight at the moment, and it's baffling as to why.

Exercise - 3x/week 2 hours minimum cardio+weights and pilates, dance. I lost a lot of body fat and I'm in normal ranges for my age, but I'm just gaining a disturbing amount of weight via muscle mass to the point that simple BMI calculations think I'm obese.

Food - My new doctor and personal trainer were both confused at my heaviness after finding out what I normally ate in a two-week timespan. Whole grains across the board (brown rice, beans, my favorite quinoa), half my meals were salads with little to no dressing/sauce (and that was usually just sriracha or a little vinaigrette), almost always water or green tea for drinking, small portions spread out with a little fruit across the day. My only guilty pleasures were the occasional piece of dark chocolate and a glass or two of wine/beer in a week. All the meat and seafood I ate were cooked pretty healthily, and things like butter are only touched when we have guests over. The only time I deviated from any of this was for rare situations, like my birthday lunch at The French Laundry :)

Nobody could come up with a great diet solution for me that wasn't "eat less" or "exercise more", given that "eat less" would be sub-2000 calories for a moderately active person and "exercise more" would be quite painful and make me less likely to work out. I tried eating less for a short while anyway, and nearly passed out in the middle of a street. I can't possibly find a healthier way of eating than what I do now, and the people I talk to only wish their clients/patients would eat like I did. And yet here I am, looking fat, am still fat in some areas, weighing enough to be obese, running <10 minute miles, and still struggling with my weight despite being in pretty good shape. :(

So, there are a few problems I see in your diet.

1.) Low fat salad dressing is generally a bad thing. You should add olive oil, butter, or some natural fat source any time you eat vegetables because you can't absorb many of the vitamins in greens without some type of fat in the meal.

2.) Regardless of what many people believe, "Whole grains" are really not that great. The bran of many grains adds nutrients, but when you look at the actual bioavailability of those nutrients it's very low due to things like phytic acid. It adds fiber, but it's mostly insoluble fiber which doesn't have all of the benefits of soluble fiber.

This effectively makes whole grains "empty calories". They aren't completely empty, but there is a low nutrient to calorie ratio, and that's what you need to improve. Meat and vegetables have much higher nutrients compared to calories.

Eliminate grains and sugary items (especially fructose) and eat 'real' foods (veggies, meats, and natural coconut, olive, or animal fats), and you will lose weight without starving yourself or counting calories.

Here's a foolproof, safe approach to losing weight without any "cardio" exercise. How long it takes to reach your goal depends on how fat you are. You can safely lose at most half your body fat in 120 days, so if you start with 30 lbs of fat and want to get down to 15, it'll take 4 months.

1. Every week, calculate your bodyfat% with a bodyfat scale or via the Navy method (http://www.scientificpsychic.com/fitness/diet.html). It doesn't have to be perfect, just roughly accurate, say, within +/- 5%. Let f[d] be your bodyfat ratio on day d, so if you calculate 30% bodyfat, then f[d] = 0.3. For the rest of the week, assume f[d] remains the same as it did when you measured it at the beginning of the week.

2. Weigh yourself every day. Let w[d] your measured weight on day d, and let w'[d] be the 5-day moving median (that is, w'[d] is the median of w[d-4],w[d-3],w[d-2],w[d-1], and w[d]).

3. Calculate t'[d], your target weight for each day, as t'[d] = w'[d-14] ∙ (1 - 0.08 ∙ f[d-14]). The 0.08 is related to the maximum rate at which fat can be lost without losing lean body mass ([2]). In short, each pound of fat can supply 20 kcal per day, and a pound of fat can hold roughly 3500 kcal. so (1-3480/3500)^14 is about 0.92, which means you can safely lose at most 8% of your body fat in two weeks.

4. Every day, for the first three weeks of your diet (basically, until you become low-carb adapted), eat 90-110 g of carbohydrate. After that, eat 45-55 g of carbohydrate per day.

5. Every day, eat (h-100)-(h-90) g of protein, where h is your height in cm. (This is Kwasniewski's recommended protein requirement based on "due body weight").

6. Every day, get the rest of your calories from high-quality fats. (See [1] below). Start out so that you are eating enough total calories to maintain your weight. You can find this amount by measuring the number of calories you currently eat. Then adjust the number of grams of fat you eat each day so that w'[d] is as low as possible while still keeping w'[d] ≥ t'[d]. Remember to eat 5-6 more g of fat per day starting on week 4 to compensate for the 50 g drop in carbohydrate intake.

7. Track what you eat with a free site like http://cronometer.com (MUCH better than fitday).

8. Do some strength training to maintain your lean body mass. You won't gain lean body mass on this plan, but you should be able to avoid losing too much of it.

[1] http://www.archevore.com/panu-weblog/2009/8/27/how-to-lose-w...

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15615615

Reply on news.ycombinator.com