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There's a massive signal-to-noise issue in the fitness world, particularly because there's so much value to be made just by making some noise.

For anyone reading this post and inspired to lose weight, I recommend you keep the following basic tenets in mind when researching a plan/regimen:

1. You lose weight by eating less calories than your body uses. (As a corollary, you almost definitely consume more calories than you think you do. Get a calorie-counting app.)

2. Being active isn't necessarily crucial to losing weight, but it is crucial to being more healthy. In particular, lifting weights will help your overall physique even if you're eating at a caloric deficit -- but the most important activity is the one that you like enough to make a habit. (Mine is biking, and occasionally soccer.)

There are a lot of huge fads right now -- in particular, intermittent fasting (eat once per day), ketogenic diet (eat lots of fat, eat no carbs), and liquid diets (drink lots of things) seem to be the rage. The reason fads can be successful usually have less to do with the specific mechanics and minutiae of their gospel and more to do with the fact that you're conscientious about what you're putting into your body and diligent about treating it well.

> 1. You lose weight by eating less calories than your body uses. (As a corollary, you almost definitely consume more calories than you think you do. Get a calorie-counting app.)

If this is true, why don't we become incredibly fat or skinny over time? It would require incredible precision to maintain weight. But a lot of people seem to be able to do it with no effort...

The reason why this is not true is simple: our organism is not a closed system, so this thermodynamics truism does not apply. We are able, for example, to excrete nutrients without digesting them. Our organism is way too complex for this bromide to have any merit.

You lose weight by eating less calories than your body uses

Yeah, and if you want to reduce your chance of auto accidents, limit the amount of gasoline you put in your car.

I'm a bit sorry to come across as rude, but this advice and then your later dismissal of ketogenic diets reflects the extraordinary ignorance that inflicted us with the food pyramid and war on fat 40 years ago.

Understanding and controlling the insulin cycle is key to understanding nutrition and its role in weight control. I tried "eating less" for years before I gave a low carb diet a try and permanently changed the way I ate and thought about food.

If you had actually read the article about which you added a comment, then you would have read a process of discovery paralleled by myself and an extraordinary number of others.

Atkins and even others before him explained the problems with carbohydrates, especially simple ones, decades ago. Calling low carb eating (you can't eliminate all carbs) a fad at this point is either ignorant or just mocking.

You lose weight by eating less calories than your body uses.

Not entirely. Try eating 2,000 calories of pasta versus 2,000 calories of chicken. It'll do immensely different things to your body.

IF and keto are valid. Liquid diet is nutty. keto isn't exactly "eat lots of fat" -- it's avoiding > 30-60g carbs per day (and honestly, mostly sugars. carbs with fiber delivery (e.g. vegetables and limited fruits) are okay) while seeking out, but not adding "lots," of complementary fat (like avoiding fat free things because fat free just means "we added more sugar to compensate for removing fat").

If you have a limited memory capacity, just remember: fat doesn't make you fat. Your body turns sugar and things that metabolize into sugar (carbs, breads, pastas, rice) into fat. Your body doesn't take what you eat and just glue it inside of you. Food is like the input of a program generating very specific outputs. You can't feed the function "Add two numbers" 1 and 1 and end up with anything but 2. You (probably[1]) can't feed yourself carbs and carbs and carbs and end up with anything but lardass.

[1]: Though, people are different. We have basic guidelines, but a lot is still genetics. I know people who basically live off pasta, chocolate, and smoothies and still weigh 130 pounds without workout out significantly.

Imagine that you are not only releasing energy on the body. You are not using heat, like in a thermal motor.

You need a specific chain reaction for getting the molecules you could use to move your body, mainly this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenosine_triphosphate

You need to make the molecules that make this reaction possible, for every sugar, fat or protein, it is different. Those supplies you need to fabricate or get in your food. Some are very common(inexpensive), some are not. E.g you will need oligoelements, or vitamins.

Not only that, but those substances need to be able to share the same space, not react with other substances, or being toxic to other parts of the cell. Some of them are and need other substances to carry them safely.

You also need other substances to carry them around. Some of them have water affinity, some not.

The output of the reactions also need to be non toxic and some of the are over certain concentration. Some sugars output metabolic reactions produce toxic materials. At high rates you need your body to protect the arteries from acidic conditions with cholesterol layers and so on.

Also what you need to fabricate has a delay. You can't fabricate your supplies instantly, so you have a control system, normally a series of PID controllers(we copied them from nature) to decide how much to fabricate given your normal diet.

So if you eat pizza every single day and caramelize all the sugars, and denaturalize the proteins , like you do at 200C plus, your body will get used to it.

There are fads, but there is also scientific knowledge people ignore. It is frustrating that people that ignore so much try to give advice to others.

You see medicine doctors talk in 2013 about calories, they have knowledge in some areas but are ignorant in others, mainly chemistry and biochemistry, they won't admit that.

>>There's a massive signal-to-noise issue in the fitness world, particularly because there's so much value to be made just by making some noise.

>>For anyone reading this post and inspired to lose weight, I recommend you keep the following basic tenets in mind when researching a plan/regimen...

--

There is something important to point out here, which is that the basic tenets you listed are simple, but they are not easy. If they were, everyone would follow them.

Most people don't actually want to lose weight. Rather, they want to already have lost weight. So they look for shortcuts that will get them there. That is why there is such a massive signal-to-noise issue in the fitness world. Fad diets and magic pills are invented because people are willing to pay for them.

People are fat because eating is a big part of their lives. They eat several huge meals everyday, plus snacks, and often times when they are eating one meal they are dreaming about and planning their next one. On top of this, food has become a "social currency" for them. Being able to cook delicious, unhealthy food at a family BBQ is seen as an admirable skill, and bringing a box of donuts to the office in the morning is seen as a way to score points with coworkers.

In order to lose weight they need to reverse that and make exercising and not eating an equally big part of their lives. They need to count calories, watch what they eat, do heavy workouts at the gym (none of this lift-pink-dumbbells or walk-on-the-treadmill-while-texting-friends bullshit), strictly regulate their sleep and wake-up times, and more. It is NOT supposed to be easy. It is supposed to be HARD. And as with all hard endeavors, success is a matter of discipline. Unfortunately most people don't have that.

> 1. You lose weight by eating less calories than your body uses. (As a corollary, you almost definitely consume more calories than you think you do. Get a calorie-counting app.)

I see this all the time on HN and like most things, there is truth in it, but it doesn't tell the whole story.

First and foremost, calories matter. Let's get that out of the way. They matter in that, yes, weight gain comes from eating calories in excess, loss from a deficit...normally (we'll get to that in a minute).

However, this is where everyone should be reading the rest very carefully, details matter here.

For one, if the ONLY thing you care about is number on the scale, eat at a deficit and you'll lose weight.

BUT, if you care about the type of weight you are losing (ie. losing fat vs fat/muscle vs muscle), you HAVE to care about the macronutrient ratios of those calories. For instance, I'm an athlete, recreational bodybuilder/powerlifter and fitness model. I work very, very hard for muscle gains. I don't want to lose muscle when I diet down for a show, competition or photo shoot. If I only cared about calories, I would QUICKLY catabolize my muscle. I need to keep my protein high, fat pretty high and the rest of my calories can come from carbs. In practice, depending on my goal at the time, I implement one of a variety of PSMF (protein sparring modified fast) & CKD (cyclic keto diet, which is Keto with carb refeeds) or TKD (targeted keto diet, which is eating carbs around workouts).

The problem with "just care about calories" is that very few people actually want that as the goal. Most people want to lose FAT, not muscle when they lose weight. If all you understand is calories, yes you'll lose weight, but you'll be losing fat and muscle. Most people, and I would guess everyone reading this, would rather keep whatever muscle they have, they need to understand how to SPARE their muscle when losing weight.

And if someone is overweight there is a very high chance they are or are becoming insulin resistant. If this is the case, Keto is actually appropriate for them.

Before I got into this world seriously, I just thought it was calories, like most people who haven't spent the time to understand the workings of the body. I literally wasted years trying to get lean with just a calories approach. It doesn't work that way.

The problem here is that mainstream nutrition "science" is also a fad. It is also a dramatic example on how the Internet + an incentive can produce better Science than the traditional grant (and lobby system). Many of the traditional dogmas of nutrition have recently come intro question: the idea that eating cholesterol is what increases cholesterol in your arteries, the idea that salt is bad for you, the idea that fiber is good for you and many others.

Regarding ketogenic diets, there are so many results and it seems to work so much better than what "they" have been telling us that the idea that this is a "fad" starts to sound a bit silly. Actually, some proponents of ketogenic diets are backing their claims with explanatory models, instead of simple epidemiological studies (which are, in my opinion, the lowest form of Science).

Check out this talk if you want to know more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6vpFV6Wkl4

edit: this talk provides some convincing arguments against your assumption #1.

> 1. You lose weight by eating less calories than your body uses. (As a corollary, you almost definitely consume more calories than you think you do. Get a calorie-counting app.)

True. For those who find it a pain to use one, I recommend sticking with it for a few months at least initially. After a while, your mind gets attuned to the idea of how much food is enough for you to be satiated. So don't obsess about getting every calorie in, it is easy especially if you are reading online communities to see people freaking.

2. Being active isn't necessarily crucial to losing weight, but it is crucial to being more healthy. In particular, lifting weights will help your overall physique even if you're eating at a caloric deficit -- but the most important activity is the one that you like enough to make a habit. (Mine is biking, and occasionally soccer.)

I don't like the go weight lift or run recommendation for a person who has never run or hates the gym. Most are there because of systemic lifestyle issues. The best way to do that is to start at the core, hang out more with active people, doing entertaining things that also get out outdoors. After a while of doing that, I feel like you will naturally gravitate towards taking care of your body.

> There are a lot of huge fads right now -- in particular, intermittent fasting (eat once per day), ketogenic diet (eat lots of fat, eat no carbs), and liquid diets (drink lots of things) seem to be the rage. The reason fads can be successful usually have less to do with the specific mechanics and minutiae of their gospel and more to do with the fact that you're conscientious about what you're putting into your body and diligent about treating it well.

It's funny. I spent a while doing lean gains. A couple of months were rather painful in terms of having to spend most of my time eating cottage cheese and tuna, finding it difficult to have dinner with friends. I was hitting all the marks though, then I got bored of it. A few months ago, I did something simple by being more mindful when I ate. I didn't particularly try to avoid any food group but I focused more on savoring it than as something to keep my mouth occupied while I listened to a friend or something. That got me way down on the scale than anything.

Keto is not a "fad diet" and is not about eating lots of fats. The core of what it's about is recognizing fat is not bad for you, and that the 3 main legs of what we eat are carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. Reduce the amount of carbs to a minimum and make up for it with increased protein and fats.

Keto is backed up by a ton of science and real-world success. Just visit the keto subreddit and spend a few hours perusing, http://reddit.com/r/keto.

> he reason fads can be successful usually have less to do with the specific mechanics and minutiae of their gospel and more to do with the fact that you're conscientious about what you're putting into your body

Another reason is that most fads are effectively big lists of restrictions on what you are allowed to eat. Since finding things to eat becomes harder you often end up reducing the total calorie count as a side effect.

"1. You lose weight by eating less calories than your body uses. "

As a former chemistry student(I did not finish it, because I made engineering instead), I tell you you are oversimplificating how the body works.

With a machine you could talk about calories because the way an engine works is so simple. Fuel, oxidant+Energy init reaction->Output + Energy out.

Not so with the body. There are different processes the body uses to get energy, and it is very complex.

E.g When you eat sugary drinks you put immense amounts of sugar in the blood, very fast which are dangerous(if insulin is not released you die), so the priority of the body is getting this sugar out of the bloodstream, converting it to fat. At the same time your liver could not process anything else as the rate it has to work to get rid of the sugar is too high.

Countries like the US of America or Central Europe has an obesity epidemic problem, and what changed the most was food. 40 years ago Germans or Americans ate more than 8 kilos of butter and other natural fats per year. Now it is way less.

I am six feet tall, constantly 5-10 pounds underweight. I eat as much as I can, always. I scare people with the amount I eat. My usual helping size is generally twice what most people take (which can cause friction if I'm not careful). I never, ever fluctuate in weight beyond the five pound fluctuations.

You lose weight by eating less calories than your body uses. (As a corollary, you almost definitely consume more calories than you think you do. Get a calorie-counting app.)

Obviously this is true on some level but it's truth doesn't seem establish any automatic or definite cause-and-effect relationship between the amount of food a given person eats and their weight gain or loss. Some people may indeed find their consumption determine weight gain or loss. Fine but don't assume your experience will automatically carry to others.

I recall current research has shed light on some complexities of this. Perhaps someone has a link.

I agree; it's basically a physics problem (calories_in < calories_out to lose weight), with the body's metabolism being a second-order effect. I went on vacation recently, walked around all day taking photos and visiting museums, and ate well; but still lost 12 pounds in 3 weeks, without even trying.
> in particular, intermittent fasting (eat once per day)

FYI that is incorrect. Intermittent fasting simply refers to eating your calories in condensed time windows. For example, Lean Gains suggests eating 2-3 meals in an 8 hour window.

> There's a massive signal-to-noise issue in the fitness world, particularly because there's so much value to be made just by making some noise.

Yes, there are a lot of varying information out there, and a lot of those are conflicting. Case in point: just look at how many replies you got where people are disagreeing with you and each other about your recommendations... ;)

Am I the only person who enjoyed reading this guy's story? I'm happy that he's found a lifestyle that works for him. The amount of skepticism and criticism in this thread is off the charts...
I appreciate that. It is very interesting to see people jump on what I did or even more did not say in one post about a personal experience.

I think people need to realize that:

People are just trying their best!

Holy negativity. And in that I appreciate your comment Justin :)

The HN demographic overlaps with a huge demographic who have spent quite a bit of time reading through and analyzing different health based lifestyle choices. It gets annoying to hear the same damn story repeated again, except under a pretty link bait title.
When it comes to exercise I'm always concerned by how many people, when making changes like this, omit strength training. Don't do that-

1. Without strength training (and adequate protein consumption) during negative calorie periods, you will loose muscle. Without strength training your body will happily shed muscle and fat, most of use really just want to loose the fat.

2. Muscle increases your base resting calorie use, and is a multiplier of any other exercise you do.

3. Muscle is important for maintaining bone health and general health as we age.

I have even had health professionals tell me that when it comes to daily routines, diet + 30-60 min walking + 30 min weight training is better for your body then regular intense cardio. Thats not to say you should shy away from a tennis match or soccer game, or fencing a couple times a week, but if we are talking about what we do every day-

- Don't eat 600 calorie bombs from carls jr that fit inside the palm of your hand and don't fill you up still. Eat more satiating food for the calories, which is fibrous vegetables and proteins. Avoid liquid calories and other such things that are easy to overeat.

- Eat like my skinny indian friend. He takes a bite, chews it for quite a while, and then take another bite about a few minutes later. He doesn't do this on purpose, it's completely habitual. Such a slow eating speed really helps him stay skinny.

- Stop snacking on high calorie nuts, chips and bars. If you just habitually nibble on food that is in front of you until it's gone, recognize that and don't put food infront of you.

I thought the article was going somewhere different, but it appears the answer is "diet and exercise"...
ctrl+f "gluten" and "paleo" yup, circle jerk is on.

I'm sorry to be negative but it seems such a fad people convince themselves and others gluten is equivalent to cyanide. We've been through the Atkins junk he even died from it. I know people with Celiac and it's a daily struggle it's not a trendy disease if you actually have it, you can't even have pepper since most commercial pepper is dusted with wheat flour.

Can't we all agree to valid nutritional information from independent double-blind studies nothing with "supports" or a pil helping your immune system (an extremely complex...you guess it a 'system' not one thing that can be affected by one molecule.)

I weight more now than I ever have and I know why it's because I started working shift work, stopped going to the gym, drank energy drinks and went to Starbucks daily. To get back to being healthy I reverse what I did wrong so back to eating buckets of gluten and carbs but be active.

I'm all for health and good nutrition but these days it seems like nothing is good unless it's some extreme diet. US and Canada beverages are extreme, food portions are extreme, exercise is extreme (bootcamps jogging? bah!), vehicles are extreme now diets are extreme.

Interesting post, the author can be proud. Not being from the united states, and now living there since one year , here is my 2 cent , I think these are the most important points of the post and my own advices:

- Drink water only, no soda, even diet coke and whatnot.

- Avoid sugars (I'd say especially high corn fructose syrup).

- Eat vegetables, cooked in good olive oil in a pan, it's really good. I don't know about other oils, the Mediterranean lifestyle with olive oil works great, and olive oil tastes better.

- Avoid too salty food (preprocessed food will be too salty.)

- Sleep well, stop watching at screens (TV/computer/ipad) an hour before sleeping. reading a book before going to sleep is great.

Attempting to reduce the problem to : >" it's basically a physics problem (calories_in < calories_out to lose weight)" is completely wrong I think, the "Try eating 2,000 calories of pasta versus 2,000 calories of chicken" comment speaks by itself.

I disagree with the " “listen to your body, and eat when it is hungry, not because it is a certain time” routine. " Stick to regular hours for eating, breakfast, meal and dinner. But the most important is not to eat in between the meals. If you eat good food you won't even feel hungry

Finally, stop trying to measure everything, relax.

There is a real problem for a subset of people regarding food addiction - particularly to sugar and certain carbohydrates. I am personally aware of people who have lost 50 to as much as 300+ lbs through a 12 step program called FA. It is not for everyone, but for some it has been a life-saver. http://www.foodaddicts.org/
That's an awful lot of words for saying that eating right leads to a healthier life.

Way too many people tend to write a poem to express even the simplest idea. Concision is paramount in communicating.

He doesn't know how but he knows he loses weight by dieting and exercise, link bait title.

Furthermore, what he describes is a typical low-carb diet which works by suppressing your immune system (my experience with a low-carb diet, and the experiences of most people I know who have done a low-carb diet for long enough). After burning all your fat, you will get sick as hell (I had a 1 month fever at my lowest weight before deciding to stop it).

People with great metabolism can be fine on low-carb. But if you're seriously overweight, your metabolism is probably not great.

Slow carb diet by Tim Ferriss is a bit better because you ingest more carbs (and the cheating day maintain your immune system).

If you have cold feets/hands, inflammation (swollen gums for example), bloating, slow pulse, low libido or anything not normal, then your diet is not the right one.

I am more interested in his next post: "Five years later and I am going to tell you how I managed to keep the lost weight off"

> I took some pills, specifically raspberry ketones, a multi-vitamin, and cod liver / fish oil. I went back and forth on these, and then decided to drop them. I may go back to the oils, but I think vitamins may be snake oil. It is hard to really tell though.

Vitamins are snake oil. Ok.

(And what the hell is a "dev aggregator" ?)

Calories in, calories out. Abs are 90% made in the kitchen. Go to the doctor when it hurts or feel unusual.

Seems to be a lengthy yet incomplete summary of the first 1/5th of The Four Hour Body (cited, at least).

Likewise I don't know where the 'I don't know how' bit fits in, given there's a massive explanation of how provided.

I am guessing written by a North American, given the 'we' in "I am frustrated with the lack of understanding that we have around nutrition, exercise and health". I shall assume the 'we' refers to 'people near me'.

Wow, this is almost exactly what I did last year, and I had the same results -- went from ~260 lbs to 180 lbs.

Cut out wheat, cut out sugar except whole fruits (no fruit juice because as Lustig pointed out, "you get all the fructose and none of the fiber" to counter balance), cut out diet soda and caffine and now only drink water (spring, filtered, or distilled), cut out peanuts (they were causing inflammation -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4344167), eat protein in the morning and make sure I consume enough nutrients throughout the day to keep my system in balance.

For me, cutting out wheat was one of the key factors (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5693679) because I suspect the wheat/yeast was throwing my intestinal microbes out of balance (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/28/health/studies-focus-on-gu...) and causing inflamation so when I cut it out, things returned to homeostasis.

Despite the sensationalist headline, the author knew exactly what he was doing. He basically did a paleo diet, and references a bunch of books that are popular in the community. Mark's Daily Apple features a success story like this every Friday: http://www.marksdailyapple.com.
I've suffered with excess weight most of my life. It doesn't help that sit at a desk for up to twelve hours a day. There's more to losing weight than just calories out are more than calories in. You have to be active. I've been on a reduced calorie diet. Sure, you'll lose weight at first; however, if you don't develop a healthy lifestyle (getting out and doing things on a regular basis) the weight will just come back.

When I left for undergrad over ten years ago, I was heavy. During my undergrad years, I walked everywhere or rode a bike everywhere. I lost about fifty pounds in two years. I put all of it back on and more once I graduated and started working at a desk all day. I feel miserable everyday now because of all this excess weight I carry, which is why I've decided to start riding a bike again everywhere when I get back to California on Monday. I'm finally going to put the car to rest.

> Within two weeks I lost ~20 pounds.

More than a pound a day, I can almost not believe this. In pure fat that would be about 5000kcal a day.

You can gain back a lot more than you lose, even if you get into a habit of "better" eating and more exercise for months.

You probably think that exercising and eating "better" should be fine, because anything you do for three weeks becomes a habit, right? Well, not exactly. Bad habits can be much harder to break, and you may not have really broken them the way you think you have: http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/form-a-habit.htm

Be really careful before a drastic change to your diet and exercise habits just to lose 10-15 lbs, especially if your doctor and the majority of those close to you don't think you need to lose weight. It can backfire.

However, a gradual change, especially when you can do it in a reasonable, sustainable way, can be a great idea.

I think he contradicts himself by saying,

"I am the same person now as I was then. I am not a better person,"

and then, a few paragraphs down...

"Mentally I was so much happier, my mood changed and I was able to deal with other things so much better."

I think when you shed weight, you change -- both physically and mentally.

I wrote an article about phantom buzzing/ringing (when you feel/hear your phone ringing when it's not) and its occurrence follows the same principle of your brain making adjustments to your body. I think the key takeaway in this article is you have to "re-program" your mind, over time, to get certain outcomes.

I don't get the title at all. It seems like a very concerted effort using a bit of trial and error, changing things, seeing what works, what doesn't and having success. Or did I miss the joke?
I've read an awful lot on the topic of weight reduction. I wont say that the article states something unique but I do appreciate the detailing. Good read.
“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food” ― Hippocrates

As for myself, I don't know whom to trust anymore, but there are a few common themes: - varied diet is better - raw food (not processed) is better. You haven't evolved eating processed food. - use very little or no sugar. It's related to be above, really - humans used to be unable to get so much sugar.

front page? seriously? you guys don't cease to surprise.
Figured I might as well take advantage of this thread to ask the opposite question: what is the best way to gain weight?

I stopped gaining weight at around 17 and have weighed 120 since. I wish I could eat more but I am just not that hungry every day, it's hard getting in my 3 meals.

Weight loss always seems to be the most compelling of all personal transformations. Maybe its the before and after pics.
Misleading title. Was expecting article on some mystery disease.
> 20 pounds in first 2 weeks... > vegetables... high protein... no sugar... > purposefully didn’t start exercising yet... > Gary Taubes ...

I've seen exactly this a few times. None of those people were very fat to begin with.

3/4 of the way through I thought I might be reading a big ad. But I'm glad this guy is doing well anyway.
I've lost over 120 pounds. It's not very hard. I started powerlifting and eating extremely clean, counting all my calories, getting in 8-9 hours of sleep a night.

Now I can squat 315lbs+, Deadlift 450+, and bench 250+. Feels good.

If losing fat were as easy as "calories in = calories out", then more people would do it. While it is strictly true, the problem is that you we don't understand the exact equations for both calories in and calories out, and we often don't have control over the parameters. What will you do about you gut flora, which can alter just how efficiently calories in concerts to calories out?

There are many and powerful issues at hand. You cannot just dismiss the issue as thermogenic.

>I am annoyed at myself for letting me get to be ~300 pounds in the first place (the main point about that is that I let myself get that unhealthy, to a point where I increased my risk of death, which was irresponsible given the fact that I have family and friends)

Though I would feel worse about it if you did not have friends, either way becoming unhealthy is irresponsible because it causes a public burden. If you die, someone is going to have to come clean your body up. Whether any of your money makes it to the pocket of those people is irrelevant.

No one likes cleaning up dead bodies. Just because you are paying a doctor, does not mean you are 100% entitled and you aren't creating a burden. Doctors take an oath to help the sick. They have to help you in an emergency. Whether you are paying or not.

This for me is one of the major holes in libertarianism.