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Comment by oomkiller | Hacker News Reader

I think weight gain has lots to do with diet and little to do with exercise. I started dieting this year, I've lost 60 pounds so far. If you want to loose weight and stay healthy, stop eating crap. You don't have to resort to crazy desks to be healthy. To lose weight, eat as few carbs as you can (under 20g per day). To maintain it, try not to eat as much bread, grain, sweets, etc. Also, don't sit on your ass all day, get up and walk about the building for a few minutes at least every hour!

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if you're combining a diet with a decent exercise regimen, cutting out carbs like that is a road to ruin.

Also you lost 10-15 pounds of muscle. sad but true.

How exactly are you calculating muscle loss? My lean mass weight percentage has remained the same or has risen while my body fat has fallen. And yes, exercising with a diet like that is a recipe for failure if you don't plan for exercise, you need glycogen stores etc to be able to work-out without hurting yourself.

Bodybuilders love low-carb ketogenic-style diets to lean-out and they are def not low on muscle. Jamie Lewis at chaosandpain.blogspot.com is currently breaking powerlifting records on a diet of little more than protein shakes and dry-rubbed beef ribs. Dave Asprey at bulletproofexec.com has a no-exercise six-pack with a claimed diet of almost no carbs and 2000-3000 calories of pure fat a day.

Wikipedia's insulin page even explains how the body stores excess sugars as adipose tissue and later burns that fat for energy.

Pro bodybuilders also love clenbuterol and DNP; you have to take their dietary advice with a grain of salt. Jamie Lewis, though, is one strong entertaining bloke.

Agreed about the body builders and Jamie Lewis. His site is very NSFW, but each blog post amuses and amazes me.

There are good reasons to introduce carbs before, during and after training for some exercises, but cutting down on them the rest of the time isn't going to kill him.

A common misconception is that you need lots of carbs if you work out. I've done up tp 10+ hours of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu training per week on a low carb diet, and felt great, so it worked fine for me.

Counter-anecdote: I've found that I fall into gluconeogenesis about 30 minutes into my Oly training and that I basically become a zombie if I don't drink some sugar water.

I guess it varies from person to person and sport to sport.

"I guess it varies from person to person and sport to sport."

That's it exactly. As I posted separately, what works for you may not work for the next person. Just look at how you can see some skinny people who seem to constantly eat a lot of crap, never work out, and yet still stay skinny, while you're trying to eat healthy, work out regularly, and still manage to do little better than maintain your current weight.*

*That, of course, doesn't mean the skinny guy is healthier, or in better shape overall, just that he's skinnier.

I personally suspect that in a lot of cases "my skinny friend is a pig" anecdotes are actually cases of availability bias. We vividly remember he or she tucking into 3 hamburgers. We don't account for the 2 days of nibbling on celery that came before it.

edit: I too have skinny friends on the must-kill list.

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