Weighty matters

[pozorvlak]

I've put on about a stone and a half in the last couple of years (that's about 20lb to the USians, and 10kg to the SI-users), and it's having all the usual negative effects - half my trousers don't fit any more, there are whole classes of stretches that I can't do any more because the fat gets in the way, and, worst of all, my mother's started commenting on the size of my tummy every time I go and visit. So I decided it was time to lose some weight now before it gets any worse - we tend to run to fat in my family.

Partly on a recommendation from someone (johnckirk?) but mostly because I liked the name, I read John "AutoCAD" Walker's free book The Hacker's Diet ("How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition!"). I've found it interesting and entertainingly-written, though much of it's undoubtedly old hat to a lot of you. Anyway, here's a summary:

• Hunger is part of a feedback system to keep you about the right weight: when you haven't eaten enough, you get hungry, and when you've eaten enough, you don't get hungry until you need to eat again. Unfortunately, if you're overweight it suggests that your feedback system is subtly misconfigured. But that's OK: if someone has subtly misconfigured eyes, we don't make a big deal of it, we just fit them with some glasses. And engineering has plenty of tried-and-tested ways of fixing misbehaving feedback systems.
• For the purposes of losing weight, we can think of the body as a very simple feedback system: a rubber bag which takes in food and liquid, burns some of them, excretes the waste, and either lays down or burns off fat cells to make up the difference between what it burns and what it consumes (to a limited extent, it will adjust metabolic rate to compensate before laying down or burning off fat - guess what, this bit's probably misconfigured too).
• Hence, if the energy content of what you eat is greater than the amount of energy you burn, you will gain weight at a rate proportional to the difference between them. Conversely, if you burn more than you eat, you will lose weight, again at a rate proportional to the difference. After that, it's just a matter of arithmetic. How much do you burn? How much do you eat? What's the difference between them?
• There are about 3500 calories contained in a pound of fat. So taking my case as an example, I've been over-eating at a rate of (3500*20)/(2*365) = 95 calories per day. That's nothing. That's a slice of toast per day, or 25 fewer grams of rice with my curry, or three pints less per week. Or, looked at another way, a ten-minute run per day. So once I lose the weight, maintaining it shouldn't involve too much disruption.
• However, exercise probably won't be enough on its own - it takes a lot of time to burn much energy, and you'll probably just eat more to compensate. Easier to eat less. Edit: exercise also raises your metabolic rate. Even with this effect taken into account, you still have to do a lot of exercise to have the same effect as even a moderate diet. See my response to shuripentu below.
• While exercise won't be much help losing weight, it's still a good idea - he describes an exercise programme based on the RCAF's 5 Basic Exercises programme (5BX) which only takes about 15 minutes per day and requires no equipment.
• Beyond the raw calorific content, it doesn't really matter what you eat - you can live exclusively on Big Macs and crisps and still lose weight, provided you eat few enough of them. For various other health reasons, you probably won't want to do that. Try to ensure you eat a reasonably balanced diet, but otherwise don't worry too much about it. Anyway, in your quest to stop feeling hungry, you'll probably naturally gravitate towards foods with high bulk and low calorific content - vegetables, in other words.
• Sorted. We now know how to lose weight - ensure that you eat less than you burn. The trouble is, it's quite hard to work out how much energy you burn. We can work out, using published tables and some arithmetic, how much energy is in the food that you are eating, and we can measure your weight, but burn rate is harder.
• Here comes the clever bit: you turn it around, and work out burn rate from your rate of weight loss! If you're eating E calories per day, and losing weight at a rate of L pounds per week, then you're burning E-(3500*L/7) calories per day. Use this formula to adjust E for whatever rate of weight loss you desire - about a pound a week (B - E = 500) is good.
• The trouble with this is that you don't just take in food, you also take in a lot of water, and your change in dry weight from one day to the next will be dwarfed by hour-to-hour variations in the amount of water in the rubber bag, even if you make efforts to (for instance) weigh yourself at the same time every day, after going to the toilet. Your time series of daily weigh-ins is, in other words, noisy data.
• But that's OK, because we know lots of ways of extracting useful information from noisy data. One of the easiest is by taking moving averages: take your last twenty days' weights, add them up, and divide by twenty. Slightly simpler to calculate is an exponentially weighted moving average. Calculate one of these, either by hand or by using a spreadsheet, and ignore the raw data. This both helps you extract the trend, and helps psychologically: no more thoughts of "Oh no! One biscuit and I've put on four pounds overnight! Why, God, why?"
• So, we can work out how much to eat: the only thing that remains is to actually eat that much, and this is largely a matter of willpower (in other words, I'm screwed). But there are things you can do to help: for instance, it's apparently much easier to plan meals in advance (200 calories for breakfast, 400 for lunch, 200 for mid-afternoon snack, 600 for dinner, 100 throughout the day in the form of milk in hot drinks) for instance. Work out some meals that have that many calories in, and then mix and match them. One of the easiest ways of doing this is, surprisingly, frozen microwaveable meals, which have the total calorific content printed right on the box - but you'll probably want to supplement them with some fresh veg or salad or something for fibre.
• That's it, you're ready to start. Get a pair of scales and a logbook for recording weights, plan some meals, and go for it. Try to pick a time when you'll have a couple of weeks uninterrupted to get used to it. And try to pick a time when you'll be quite stressed, so you've got something to distract from the hunger.
• You will be really quite hungry and will generally feel a bit dreadful for the first couple of days, until your body gives up trying to compensate by adjusting your metabolism and starts burning fat. I've certainly noticed this - I felt really quite out of it for the first couple of days. Apparently it gets better soon after.
• Burning fat cells releases various toxic by-products in a process called ketosis: be prepared for bad breath and general stinkiness. Make sure you drink lots of fluids and eat plenty of fibre.
• He also lists some "secret weapons" that will help with cravings - low-calorie but filling food, like caffeine-bearing drinks, bouillon, unbuttered popcorn and dill pickles.
• When you've reached your target weight, don't just stop suddenly: bring it to a halt gradually, reducing your rate of loss over the course of a month or so.
• Once you've lost the weight, you can't just decide "that's it, I don't need to diet any more!". You still have a broken feedback system, so you still need technological help to correct it. If not, you'll just overeat by a few calories a day, not enough to notice your slow weight gain, until suddenly it's a year later and you're a stone overweight and none of your trousers fit again. But the system of weighing yourself and doing trend-line analysis still works - all you need to do is adjust your intake for a rate of loss of 0. You still have to plan meals, but this shouldn't be too much of a hassle by this stage.

It all sounds pretty sensible and straightforward to me. The real test, of course, is whether I'll manage to stick to it, lose the weight, and then keep it off. As Larry Niven reminds us, in one of the corollaries to his seventeenth law, telling friends about your diet won't make you thin, and buying a diet cookbook won't either. But I have the boundless optimism born of total lack of experience.

Apologies in advance to the Two Shaders: I will undoubtedly be rather tiresome on this subject, and hopefully I'll be stinky and halitotic to boot :-)

Comments

[johnckirk.livejournal.com]

Partly on a recommendation from someone (johnckirk?) but mostly because I liked the name, I read John "AutoCAD" Walker's free book The Hacker's Diet ("How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition!").

Yup, I mentioned that a while back (although others may have mentioned it to you as well). I haven't actually got round to finishing it yet, so my own diet plan is still a work in progress, but it's on my "to do" list...

[susannahf.livejournal.com]

In my experience, I've tried a number of methods. I used one of the proprietary systems (slimming world I think) - which uses "free" foods and "sins" and aims to teach you to eat more healthily. This sort of worked, but was slow and dull.
Then I tried the hackers diet exercise plan purely to get me to do some exercise, and kept it up for quite a while. Can't remember if I was even tracking weight though.
Then I moved house, which meant a 2 mile cycle each way every weekday. And suddenly started to lose weight without even trying.

So from my experience - find something that makes you do some exercise regularly (preferably not something you have to motivate yourself to do). Of course eating less / more healthily is also good.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Just from the numbers, exercise ought to be a lot less efficient than dieting at getting you to lose weight, but I guess it's the motivation thing...

[susannahf.livejournal.com]

Yes. I had to either cycle, walk, or skip work. Or get the overpriced bus which only takes me halfway. So the motivation aspect wasn't an issue. And every day for a year is a long time...

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm. Cycle, or skip work. I suspect that might not work so well for me :-)

[susannahf.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you need to find something you either want to or have to do. Food shopping? Juggling?

[shuripentu.livejournal.com]

I've heard from various sources that exercise not only burns calories whilst you're exercising, but also raises your metabolic rate for several hours afterwards. Thus, the calorie-burning f00 of exercise is higher than stated on the packet.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Aargh, aargh, aaaargh. Yes, I know this (and should really have listed it in the summary above). You're also the third person to share that piece of information with me.

Let's look at the numbers: suppose you cycle for an hour a day. That's about 300 extra calories burned. Suppose further that as a result of your cycling you have become super-fit, and your metabolic rate has increased to a level at which you burn an extra 200 calories per day at rest (this figure was made up by looking at the upper end of the range of burn rates and comparing it to the middle). You're burning an extra 500 calories a day, for the same weight-loss effect as a not-too difficult diet. However, you have to find an hour in your day to cycle, every day. This is no problem if, like susannahf, that hour is an unavoidable part of your daily routine, but in my case it isn't. I also have extremely poor self-motivation, and there's no way I can keep up something as demanding as that without additional pressure from team-mates or someone. I have learned this from long experience.

Besides, I've said already that I am exercising, but I'm going to do it as well as dieting, not instead of it.

...and relax. Sorry, I know you mean to be helpful, but I feel like I'm drowning in a torrent of dubious advice here.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I realise belatedly that I'm conflating two different effects: the tendency of muscle tissue to burn more calories than fatty tissue when at rest, and the tendency of exercise to raise your base metabolic rate for a couple of hours. Which makes you only the second person to share that bit of information with me. Anyway, while this makes exercise an even better thing than it was before, it still doesn't make it as effective as dieting for weight loss.

[shuripentu.livejournal.com]

I think it really depends on what you find more effective, actually. I would actually find doing an hour of exercise every day easier than dieting, but I get the feeling that I'm in the minority. :)

[totherme.livejournal.com]

Motivation is interesting. I've been gymming 5 times a week for... Must be about 2 years now. Gosh. This is not because I find it immensely entertaining (though I have learned to take pleasure in it), but (at least initially) because I really like being able to walk without the aid of a stick.

That's also interesting... I haven't thought about it in a while - but now that I do, I'm not frightened of that old injury any more. I think the motivation has shifted from the punisher ("if you don't do the exercises, it's walking stick time again") to the reward ("Dude! You have arms!" - this pleases me privately even though my old baggy t-shirt way of dressing probably makes the change nearly imperceptible to everyone else - the big mirrors by the sinks in the changing rooms really help here).

Hm - good health through fear and narcissism :)

If there's anyone I know who hasn't read this book by this person yet, go do so :) One of the things that book talks about is the importance of timing - you have to reward the dog the instant he does the thing you liked - or he'll get confused. You're the same way. It doesn't matter if you intellectually "know" that something was good - you have to feel it. The feedback loop has to be tight.

So, one of the things that I think happened with me, was that I got a tight feedback loop for the first time with my injury - a week off training, and I started to feel it in my knee. (The feedback could have been much quicker - that would have been better for the motivation - but this plus the family stubbornness turned out to be just enough.) Now, I'm in the position that I'm being rewarded for stuff I did months ago - but because I'm doing it consistently, it feels like it's for the stuff I did yesterday, so it kinda works.

Seems to me like susannahf got her instant positive feedback from the money and time saved by cycling. Then later on, even more positive feedback from the weight lost. Hopefully she'll be able to grab hold of that weight/health feedback loop and hold on to it when her circumstances change, and she's not so strongly economically motivated to cycle ;)

So - can you get a tight feedback loop in place to reward you for exercising or eating right?

If you can't do that, a tight feedback loop to punish you for not exercising and eating right would also kinda work - but that's not so good. It doesn't tell you what you should be doing, only that what you are doing isn't so good as some other mystery thing.

[susannahf.livejournal.com]

That's a good point. I'm going to have about 4 months soon (between me moving and my lab moving) where I'm across the road from the lab and won't have that cycle. Maybe I should try some sort of feedback for doing other exercise (eg. swimming)

[totherme.livejournal.com]

You could cycle to the pool too :)

[johnckirk.livejournal.com]

That's similar to me: I was pretty slim as an undergrad (without paying attention to what I ate), but I was also pretty active in those days, e.g. walking up and down "Cardiac Hill" twice a day to go to lectures. Similarly, when I've been away on holiday for the last couple of years I've completely ignored my diet but I've still lost weight overall because I've been yomping around in the fresh air rather than sitting in front of a computer all day.

Unfortunately, cycling to work isn't really practical for me at the moment (about 17 miles each way), so I have to rely on making a specific effort to get to the gym.

[neoanjou.livejournal.com]

This seems quite good, especially as it goes beyond my generalised theory of dieting -

If you are compelled to think about what you eat you'll naturally (for a few months at least) eat less in general / more of what you know to be healthier (assuming you have some kind of awareness of this), therefore it *doesn't* matter what advice I give you in a diet

- so the Atkins diet (eat a lot of meat and protein, and fewer carbohydrates) can work; as can a cabbage soup diet (eat a lot of carbohydrates and cut down on the protein).

This means its great if you're ever in a position to get paid lots of money for writing diets for Sunday supplements - the 'anti-p' diet; you can't eat anything with a 'p' in its English name, the white diet; you can only eat white food (Chicken, butter beans, the stems of leaks)...

Anyway - good luck!

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

Protein and carbs have about the same calorific content, gram for gram. Atkins' supporters claim that the diet has more effect than you'd expect from simple calorific reduction, whereas its detractors claim it doesn't. The nice thing about a pure calorific approach is that weight loss becomes a simple matter of physics, rather than a complicated matter of biology :-)

But hey, if it doesn't work I can always try the anti-p diet :-)

[david jones (from livejournal.com)]

Hmm. I'm stick thin and very much not looking forward to the day when I'll have to control my diet, because I will be utterly uttrely rubbish at doing that. So good luck with that.

Become vegetarian and cook. That's my plan when it comes to it.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you know about the common effect whereby people who do a lot of exercise (as you do, it seems) suddenly stop, but continue eating at the same rate, and consequently put a lot of weight on. Something to bear in mind if you have to stop the climbing.

I have a vegetarian girlfriend, so I already eat quite a lot of home-cooked veggie food :-) Actually, one of my problems, I think, is starting to cook something, deciding I can't wait the half-an-hour it will take to cook, and snacking on something while it's cooking.

[short1sandwich.livejournal.com]

My parents have been trying to lose weight for about a year and a half now, and are doing really well, but they're going for lots of exercise as well as less food. They swear by cutting down on carbohydrate 'filler' foods like rice and pasta.

It's worth noting that although exercise itself burns relatively few calories (it's kinda depressing getting off a treadmill and realising you've burned off a small slice of toast), a fitter muscley body burns more calories at rest than a splodgy one. Although remember the muscle weighs more than fat thing - Mum got really miserable for a while as she gained weight to start off with, until someone pointed out that all her trousers were falling down.

Mint also works as an anti-snack device - chewing gum is apparently great as it gives you something to munch but reduces your appetite.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Indeed yes, and I'm going to try to increase the amount of exercise I do too (currently capoeira twice a week, gym once or twice a week, and a big long walk in the hills whenever my walking partners don't wuss out on me at the last minute).

[david jones (from livejournal.com)]

Do you think juggling with heavier objects will help?

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Bad for the wrists, I believe. But wrist weights are meant to help with strength, and would probably make it more of a workout, too - I've been meaning to get some.

[r-e-mercia.livejournal.com]

At the risk of sounding flippant, just eating less is probably the best way to lose fatty weight. This year I have eaten less by simply using a smaller plate than usual, and then not having seconds. Also as I love cooking, I have tried to cook small portions of really nice food rather than vast quantities of crap.

You could also try being really ill for a while, but probably wouldn't recommend that.

[neoanjou.livejournal.com]

My dieting technique for much of my time at University was to travel to European youth hostels for three weeks every summer at Astronomy Camp. I couldn't stand the food so ate less than usual and I think counterbalanced what I had put on over the year.

This of course failed last summer when I went with the VOLES and nice food was cooked most nights / Pizza ordered / having nice meals out and I didn't manage to lose my exam paunch!

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

At the risk of sounding flippant, just eating less is probably the best way to lose fatty weight.

That's the general idea, yes :-)

I lost 30lbs on the go outside to play system

[susoeffl.livejournal.com]

and the not eating glaswegian food anymore system....

I found activities that are "excercise" but that I do just for fun. Like playing volley ball, bodysurfing, hiking up and down the three hundered foot clif so I can get to the beach where I play volley ball and got bodysurfing....

I also started doing yoga which is fun. and just playing on playparks in general. riding my bike (before I killed it).

excercise boosts your metabolism and builds muscle which will burn fat while you are passive.

also if you eat healthy Whole foods , your body will respond to you better about what it wants. Sugar and alcohol and cheese activate receptors that just keep saying, "I want more" which is different than the "I'm hungry" feeling but we listen to it anyway. I would say your feedback isn't broken just muddled with junk food.

Re: I lost 30lbs on the go outside to play system

[susoeffl.livejournal.com]

also read "sugar" to include other refined carbohydrates like white flour or even (but not the same extent) white rice.

[shuripentu.livejournal.com]

I highly recommend developing a deep-seated love of vegetables. Have twice as much veg at every meal as you normally would, and reduce the amount of carbs and protein accordingly. (Is it odd that I sort my food into the categories of: carbs, protein, and veg? :p)

Quick, tasty, and low-calorie ways to eat veg wot I like:
- frozen veg + gravy
- steamed pak choi with oyster sauce
- steamed choi sum with oyster sauce
- steamed kai lan with oyster sauce (I think I'm seeing a pattern here)
- corn onna cob
- enormous salads of doom with vinaigrette

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

My girlfriend, though perfect in all other respects, claims not to like Chinese food, so some of those might be a tough sell. I don't understand it either, and can only assume that she was scarred by early exposure to bad Clackmannanshire Chinese takeaways. Sounds nice, though.

[shuripentu.livejournal.com]

Most of the Chinese food you get here is nothing like the proper stuff. Take her to Vancouver sometime. Or Hong Kong. :)

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I'm aware of that - I went to Hong Kong a few years ago, and had a brief glimpse of the real thing. But even in the UK, there's a wide variation in the quality of "Chinese" food...

Diets

[(Anonymous)]

Hey Lad. As someone who has been fascinated by nutrition diet and health for years and years I am sorry to tell you that the 'science of dieting' you have talked about above is really not the whole picture at all, The body is by no means such a simple system, just calculating the calories that you burn and the calories that you consume and balancing them out will not work for most people. Factors like your metabolism, in what form you consume the calories and how well your digestive system is working will all play a role. That is why some people can eat absolutely anything and as much as they like and never gain a pound and others blow up just thinking about a cheeseburger.
There is no need to eat less to lost weight, just eat better and different. Cut out sugar, most dairy and refined processed foods and caffeine. Eat as much fruit and vegetables as you want and then fill the rest with whole grains (brown rice, oats, quinoa (avoid wheat)) nuts, seeds, pulses. Eat small amounts of protein - fish, eggs, lean white meat, but not with carbohydrates. Stop drinking alcohol (the major provider of empty calories in many diets). Drink loads of water or herbal tea. That's it. There is no trick to it. Do not bother counting calories.

Re: Diets

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Hello, Hype person who hasn't signed his/her name :-) Happyrobot?

You seem to be confusing me with someone who lives on chips and burgers. This isn't the case: my diet's actually fairly healthy. There's just a bit too much of it. The other thing is that a lot of what you suggest will happen anyway under a calorie-controlled regimen: sugary stuff is high in calories but doesn't fill you up, so it gets avoided, whereas vegetables are the opposite (nuts and fruit, however, aren't nearly so good, in that they're high in calories and not terribly filling. All the fat and sugar, you see).

But here's the thing. I'm aware that it's more complicated than that, and that various factors affect metabolic rate (this is discussed in the book, in fact, but I left it out in my summary). This is a complicated matter of biology, and I'm in no way equipped to evaluate the truth of the various claims. There's almost certainly an easier way to lose weight involving various nonstandard combinations of foods, but I simply don't know enough to sort the truth from the bullshit, and don't much fancy doing a biology degree in order to do so.

Reducing calories, however, is guaranteed to work. It's physics, which I do understand. Conservation of energy: use more energy than you consume, and the deficit has to be made up from somewhere. Frankly, I'm tired of being fat, and I want it gone, and I don't want to muck around with rule-of-thumb diets that might work or might do nothing (or, worst of all, might work for a couple of weeks until the neoanjou effect (http://pozorvlak.livejournal.com/63230.html?thread=516350#t516350) bottoms out). Once I've lost the weight I can apply the data-smoothing and analysis techniques discussed above and see if they work for me or not.

Besides, a life entirely without caffeine, alcohol, dairy or bread? Screw that. And I can't stand quinoa.