If you are embarking on a diet, I would highly advocate minimizing meal variability to remove the cognitive overhead associated with meal planning. If you pick 3-5 healthy meals that you can eat everyday, calorie or macro counting becomes simple because you already know that what you are going to eat will fit into your daily totals.

I cut from 300 to 215 lbs several years ago and kept the weight off. If you're interested in reading some high level dieting advice, please refer to my post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15604761

Make sure that you're getting your nutrients from a variety of foods. Things like beans, nuts, spinach, etc are all very healthy - but if you made them a staple of your diet you could be overloading your body with iron and/or oxalates.

Every person processes nutrients differently, so one person can eat a bag of spinach a day for years and have no ill effects - another person could find themselves developing kidney stones.

My point is not to focus on any one food or nutrient being "bad", just that moderation and variety applies even when eating healthy

I ended up losing weight just because sometimes I would rather not eat a late night snack, than find my phone and figure out the calories in 1/2 a cupcake.

Once you get a handle on serving sizes, something like this above is a much easier tool to utilize.

[0]Cheeseburger Equivalent scale:

- Average plain cheeseburger = 350 kcals. (Not a Whopper, Big Mac, or any deluxe burger - this is a "Where's the Beef" cheeseburger.)

- You get 6-7 cheeesburgers per day. And no other food.

- Trade 1 cheeseburger for 1 item of equal calories. Examples: Slice of pizza, Donut, 24 oz soda/beer, 5 chicken wings, etc.

Weight Watchers assigns points based on ingredients and amounts. This just uses straight up calories. Difficulty with Weight Watchers is it takes time to do data entry, and you cannot always accurately put it in because of complexity or incomplete database. With this, you still won't know how much calories something from a restaurant contains but every time you make your own food you can see the package. Except on fresh food such as vegetables and fruits you prepare yourself.

Yup, even the weekly total is very similar to the Weight Watchers system.

These kind of weight loss programs can be useful, but only if you are also committing to change the way you eat for the long term.

For some unknown reason cholesterol also went down. My only "gym" exercise are walking the dog - mile, two or three a day. Iron mind #2, #2.5 and #3 and few more like it, and recently started again doing occasional push-ups, pull-ups, dips, etc.

I know that once I get back into shape, and start going to the real gym, and hit the legs - I'll lose even more :)

I tried a keto diet last year.

Unfortunately, my cholesterol went through the roof. Shot up from "concerningly high" to "holy shit that's high" in a single month.

I think that any diet that doesn't limit carbs and nearly eliminate sugar intake is severely flawed. That's not to say weight can't be lost on a high carb diet, but it takes a lot more effort and still puts one at risk for diabetes. I also think that people who tried keto and claim it didn't work were doing it wrong; one of the problems I ran into was low potassium intake, which made me feel sick. Just adding some potassium, even if it's from a banana here and there, makes a ton of difference.

What I realized, compared to the last time I did atkins - is not take it so pedantic - e.g. just cut the sugar where makes most sense - like bread, potatoes, obviously sweet things (pastries, cake, chocolate, ice cream, etc., etc.).

I still eat berries, watermellon (sometimes), and vegetables (if tomato is a vegetable - I can't live without them :)).

Also more coffee than usual...

PS: The human body can only convert so much protean into energy per day. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning

However, whenever you have a million people try something some of them are are going to get it wrong. Someone who thinks they just 'need to avoid net carbs' can easily eat over 50% protean.

So, I will bring it up whenever people talk about Keto as it's a real issue that can and should be avoided.

I'm 35 pounds down from my high weight and have kept it off for 6 months now. I eat all the same crap (candy included). I just eat less of it.

It is only rocket science if you choose to make it rocket science.

The hard part is finding a way to do that, especially over a longer period of time. Generally people are working against some combination of social, cultural, psychological, physiological, and financial pressures so it is not necessarily simple to do.

I don't think "conventional advice" is to eat 6 times a day. And "conventional advice" is certainly not to eat lots of bread, pasta, and rice.

Fung is pretty obviously setting up a strawman argument here.

Furthermore, even accepting his absurd strawman, wouldn't the body still end up burning fat when you sleep (8+ hour fast)? Fung himself said so earlier in this article: "But what happens when you go to sleep? Because you are not eating, you are fasting."

This article is mere ad copy to sell Fung's books (and whatever else he is selling).

By the way, I personally think there may be something to intermittent fasting and I plan to try it sometime myself, I just can't stand con-men who have to puff themselves up by creating strawmen arguments and preying on people's insecurities about their weight, which is basically what Fung is doing here. Any benefit from intermittent fasting will just be a marginal improvement over achieving caloric reduction through other means.

If you want to lose weight, cut calories. You can do that by eating 6 meals a day, or occasionally fasting, or eating low-carb or eating low-fat, whatever works for you.

But if you consume fewer calories than you eat, you will lose weight. Read carefully and you will find that even people like Fung are forced to admit this. Be skeptical of anyone who tells you otherwise, they're almost always trying to sell you something.

The eating six times a day advice IS advice I have repeatedly heard and I have known many people who follow it. The idea that we should be eating lots of carbohydrates IS conventional advice if you consider the medical community's decades of instruction that we should not eat fat or meat: the only remaining macronutrient that most westerners will eat is carbohydrates. The popular prevalence of keto and paleo and Atkins makes people forget that the prevailing medical advice STILL effectively directs people to a high carb, low calorie diet.

Calories-in-calories out isn't wrong, but it is incomplete. It doesn't explain why the "Biggest Loser" winners see their base line calorie consumption drop way below what you'd expect for someone of their new weight. It doesn't explain why some people NEVER have to diet while other go through life starving but still gain weight. If it were just "calories in calories out", you wouldn't see these anomalies. In short, it doesn't explain hunger.

Fung's insulin theory has good science behind it and fits well with a lot of historical observations, such as the increase in sugar in our diets. And the ADF diet study had incredibly good results.

This is simply not true. I monitored behaviors of my friends or asked them probing questions where I suspected this was the case. They may 'skip dinner' or 'have a light dinner' the day you watched them gorge on cake, but you might not see that. They may run 10 miles the day after eating the same Mexican food as you.

Same with other side, people who say they don't gain weight in spite of eating 1000s of calories in surplus just aren't eating 1000s of calories in surplus. They think they are because they often eat candy, ... but they may take a bite or two and 'save the rest for later', or 'have dessert for dinner' and think that's eating lots of calories.

They may also be taller than you by a couple inches and you're underestimating the effect height has.

Yes to all of it. Probably so.

> It doesn't explain why some people NEVER have to diet while other go through life starving but still gain weight.

But there is a very simple explanation: Self-reporting is bullshit.

Never believe anyone who says "I can eat anything I want and not gain weight" or "I hardly eat anything and still gain weight". There's always something they aren't seeing. Anyone who says that needs to keep a very strict food journal for a month. No cheating, no "well it's just a mint". Strict. Everything gets recorded. You take a bite of someone's ice cream, you record it.

What you'll find is that their caloric consumption is right in line with their weight.

When I ran across this line:

"This is the reason that you do not die in your sleep every single night."

I just about rolled my eyes. You can go without eating for quite a while without dying. 8 hours isn't killing anyone who wasn't already knocking on that door.

Now, is calorie restriction the OPTIMAL diet? Maybe not, but half the problem with weight loss is that people get hyper fixated on finding the ideal dieting methodology and never just start. Calorie counting works, IIFYM works, zone diet works, keto works, weight watchers works. As long as you pick a validated plan that matches your lifestyle and you are adherent, you will have success.

The truth is that many people are metabolically imbalanced or diseased and will not respond the way a young otherwise healthy man does to caloric restriction. Calories in, calories out is certainly true because we know the laws of thermodynamics are obeyed by the human body. However, there are all sorts of subtleties here. For instance, one person might not absorb all the food they're eating and may shit out much more viable calories than another person. Further, we know that hormones play a dramatic role. Look at pubescent boys versus pubescent girls. In both cases, caloric intake goes up (it also doesn't go up consciously, the kids are signalled to eat more by their bodies and are nearly helpless to do otherwise) but what is done with the excess calories is different in boys versus girls due to hormonal influence. In boys, the majority of excess calories goes into creating more lean tissue whereas in girls it is much more balanced between lean tissue and fat growth and the fat distribution is not the same as boys. Hormones are an important factor in weightloss and weight gain and should be considered.

This is just my long-winded way of saying: yes, simple caloric restriction works for many people, but among many people with hormonal and metabolic problems, caloric restriction is much more likely to result in needless suffering and poor results. If the conversation focuses solely on simple caloric restriction, then these people who likely make up the majority of obese people will likely never get the information they need to find strategies that work for them.

I don't disagree with that statement, no one can, but is it useful, actionable and helpful?

As a lifelong obese person, I disagree immensely that any of those things work. I have been asking doctors for years if they have any success stories of any of those things "working" for longer than 1 year and I have found none.

How should I contact you? There's no info in your profile. Thanks.

I have been successfully managing my weight for the last 8 years.

Do you mean I'm wasting their time because it's not their responsibility to know if they have had successes? Or because it's my fault for eating too much when I could decide not to?

I'm honestly asking this, please don't take this as an attack. I am very curious as to your thoughts about doctors.

I'm generally asking because I am hopeful that they provide me with a motivation to believe that someone else has done what they're asking me to do.

Similar to an alcoholic finding comfort in Alcoholics Anonymous, I would love to find someone who has been lifelong obese who has shed the pounds for more than a year.

Do you mean that it is wasting a doctors time because they don't owe me motivation? I am talking about my obesity specialists. They are giving me diets and exercise plans that I am doing. I don't feel like I am not trying.

Do you mean that I am not trying because I am not successful?

With respect to doctors and motivation though, do you think that I should not ask them for success stories?

I understand that you're saying that the doctor can't do anything if I'm so lazy that I find excuses all the time, but I don't feel like I have ever given a doctor an excuse. I feel like doctors give me excuses constantly about their success rates.

From my perspective, if they give the same advice to 100,000 people and of them they have 0 successful treatments by their own data, I'm going to assume I should find other advice

Do you know anyone lifelong obese that has had a year or more of losing weight?

I used to weigh 350 pounds, every diet I tried was just caloric restriction nonsense that just fed insulin resistance (thus making anyone who tries that without actual diet modification a dead walking zombie until they give up on the diet and remain fat)....

So, for exactly one year, I did something new: I cut out all grains, refined sugars, dairy, and legumes, but kept CICO the same.

After the end of one year, I weighed 214 (and kept going after the end of that year until 184). I do not exercise enough to explain losing 544 thousand calories (or about 1490 a day), nor did my diet suddenly drop 1490 calories (as I regularly eat 2000-2200 calories a day, before and after the diet modification).

Afterwards, I realized two things were true: one, the calories in the little nutrition facts panel is wrong, based on very outdated science; and two, some foods contain chemicals that trick your body into increasing the rate at which carbs are transformed into fat.

Once I quit tricking my body into shoving everything I ate into fat cells, I felt like I had lot more energy, my brain worked better, the fat just melted away, and I feel better than I ever have.

Unless you truly have an eating disorder, you don't need to count calories. You need to just stop eating foods that cause you to be fat. It isn't how much, but what.

The only problem I've found is people asking me what I did to lose the weight, and I tell them, and they look at me like I eat babies and worship Satan. "You stopped eating grains and refined sugars? But-but-but my doctor said count calories, he said nothing about grains and refined sugars! You must be wrong, or you're lying!"

So yeah, you're fat because you want to be fat. There's an effective way out there, it worked for me when nothing else would and it was the lowest effort diet I ever did. Don't fucking shoot the messenger when he's giving you good news.

Edit: and for the record, I was pre-diabetic at 350, was on my way to getting diabetes, which runs in my family (no, no one runs in my family), and now I have zero clinical signs of ever having had chronic insulin resistance (which is what being pre-diabetic, or having metabolic syndrome, means).

However your story doesn't jive.

If you were eating 2000-2200 calories a day before and after losing the weight, there is something seriously wrong somewhere. The difference between 200 pounds and 350 pounds is... about 1500 calories per day.

Most people are really bad about tracking what they eat in their head. They think they're good at eating for sustenance. It's quite possible that changing to an Atkins-esque diet also cut out a lot of calories because you weren't eating bread or sugar anymore.

Just like a lot of people experience success going on Fuhrman's plan. You cut out bread, sugar, oils, most animal products. What you are left with just isn't that calorie dense. It becomes difficult to overeat calories because you just can't physically fit that much inside of you.

So while some of that may be true. There may be some variance in metabolism, nutrition labeling isn't 100% exact (and honestly, I don't see how it can be considering most of our methods of measuring are destructive so we're basing all values off of a sample), certain foods affect us differently. I don't believe that there is enough variance to account for some of the wild stories I hear like "I wasn't eating anything and not losing weight" or "I eat all day long and never gain a pound".

There's only been one Tarrare. Everyone else who has made that claim has been found to be mistaken about how much or little they eat.

Sure, but there was also a Charles Domery (AKA Domerz)[1]. They even overlapped in time, and were both in/around France.

I like to imagine an alternate history in which a military conflict was settled not with battle, but by pitting these two against each other in an eat-off. They're both alleged cannibals, so I guess the logical end for that competition would have been for the winner to eat the loser.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Domery

And no, it also isn't difficult to overheat on a diet that isn't calorie dense. I've since added OMAD, and can eat 2000 calories in one sitting.

Just because you don't have grains and refined sugars as a hyper-dense calorie crutch doesn't mean you cant. It merely means you aren't used to it.

I didn't say a diet that isn't calorie dense. I implied foods. As a lot of the "named" diets happen to cut out the foods that are denser in calories.

I also didn't say impossible. I said difficult. Most people aren't going to try and cram 130 cucumbers in a single daily meal.

And by tracking it "using the labeling on the package" isn't really tracking. That's just looking. And not everything has labeling or packaging.

I've always had success when I'm honest with myself and I ruthlessly record every single source of calories that I ingest.

What I'm saying is that if you eat a serving of something, the package says x calories per package (and x servings per package, for those packages that are clearly one serving but say 2), and you write down all of those values you ate, and you arrive at a number... that number is entirely fictional.

When I say I ate around 2000 calories a day on the SAD (standard American diet), I have no clue. That is the problem with processed food, you have to trust the numbers on the box are correct because you have no clue what the recipe is, if the food could even be expressible in terms of normal ingredients.

Once you cook everything yourself, which also came with the diet change (because everything is contaminated with grains, refined sugars, and just weird strange shit), which makes it much easier to track calories (as USDA values for generic foods seem to actually be in the realm of reality).

If the numbers on the boxes were that wrong, this guy couldn't have done what he did: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...

The linked article is a good explanation of why IF works; I don't disagree. But you can't say, "The key to weight loss is not to reduce calories"... because reducing calories is literally the only way you will ever lose weight.

This is one of those places where you can be entirely correct but entirely unhelpful. The problem is that calorie output is both a) non-constant (even your base metabolic rate changes over the course of your life, much less any lifestyle changes) and b) influenced by environment and physical condition (your calorie burn will change in response to environmental pressures, including caloric restriction and changing body fat content).

But you're right, this is a "technically correct" yet unhelpful answer.

One of my little side projects (perpetually in progress, unfortunately) is an Apple Watch app with exactly the same mechanic.

(That is, to budget food in terms of points where a 1 point == "my estimate of 100 calories", and you adjust your daily budget based on long-term weight change.)

The idea is to distill the benefit of tracking calories -- which I think is (1) the basic mindfulness around eating to stop and think for just a second before stuffing something in your mouth; and (2) the valuable feedback loop it creates... while minimizing the tracking tasks.

However, I think this is really best for experienced calorie counters because while the estimates don't need to be accurate, they do need to be fairly consistent and proportionate. And, I suspect, you need to be ready to calculate calories when you're facing an unfamiliar meal.

I'm encouraged that it has been working for our author.

I like the convenience of it. I do not have to pull out the phone to enter a number. I can discretely click it while it is in the pocket while in the restaurant without bringing up dieting topic. And I personally like mechanical feeling of it.

Just throwing an idea.. :)

So that he doesn't have to go write it to the spreadsheet all the time after every thing he eats, but just one per day.

Also, unless you're class 2 obese or above, you are probably healthier not losing any weight. Being thin is more about looks than actual health.

Want to be healthy? Exercise. Toss the scale.

- Breakfast + dinner <= 500 cals

- Lunch eat what the company gives or go out with teammates, don't get 2nds or lots of dessert. Keep it to 1000 cals.

also just memorize a bunch of common food items you eat, bananas are about 100 calories, bowl of cereal + milk, protein shake, etc. Should be less than 10 items you need to commit to memory, you can guesstimate everything else off of these. For reference, a burrito bowl from chipotle w/ everything but guac is ~1000 calories, ~300 calories for a tortillia shell, its a good balance eyeball measurement to use, since most of the food groups are in there.

Have some nonperishable consumable foods to balance calorie vs hunger intake. I use jerky.

Drink increased amounts of water to reduce appetite on weight loss

Unfortunately my dinner and lunch meals have too much variability so it becomes hard to keep track of though. Mine looks like breakfast <300 calories, early lunch and late dinner <800 calories.

For bulking you just need to adjust the breakfast / lunch / dinner values. Easiest way is to make breakfast a fullmeal, and add a 4th meal (protein shake) at night, but keep everything else the same

(I use it mainly to count pushups by putting my phone on the floor and touching my nose to the phone with each pushup.)

I lost weight and maintain it without any exercise, dieting and only minimal portion control (which is now super easy and I can cheat whenever I want, even every day).

How I have lost weight, and not only maintained the lost weight, but also continue to slightly lose more, is to be ok with being hungry.

Being hungry is good and normal and if you can get to this point mentally then every meal tastes better, you eat less automatically (some portion control is related, next paragraph) and when you are hungry your stomach has contracted some and you need less food to feel full. Also, you have more energy, and more time (less spent on dealing with food).

To ensure you are hungry before the next meal, eat less and less every time until you understand your body intuitively. Not with measures, but with skill honed by experience, customized information/data to your exact body and life.

An average day (currently), I make an egg/milk (add ice to make a shake) type drink for breakfast and lunch. Sometimes a very light lunch, and then I eat whatever I want to for dinner. Anything I feel like. (anyone can find something super light, just to get you through a few hours, and then be hungry before lunch.)

If in the future my energy level changes? (from more/less exercise or activity) Then so will my hunger status, which automatically adjusts how much I eat.

But feeling hungry has to be ok. I like being hungry for about an hour before I eat a meal.

This is with no exercise at all, none.

Also, when on vacation, if I pig out (not as enjoyable as it used to be) or drink more than usual, then it doesn't matter at all, because if I go up a few pounds, they will shed easily in the next couple days.

--Experiment from the past year.

Last year (summer) I did intermittent fasting, and got up to running 2 miles a day. I lost 15 pounds in a month. I kept most of it off, but limited my running a lot after this, and by December I decided to see if pure strength exercising would be enough to control weight. It was not, I gained weight, mostly muscle, but my waist did not shrink.

Then last January, I decided to try the "be hungry and ok" technique, and I've done this for about 8 months. My weight has consistently fluctuated in a downward trend. I will never go back to gorging, exercise for weight loss or any of that really stressful stuff, it doesn't work long term for me.

I will start running again soon, and it may help with weight loss, but I won't rely on it. I exercise to be strong and healthy, not to fix my eating problems anymore.

Cheers and encourage to everyone dealing with health and weight issues.

Consider simple water. I once read a book which recommended to drink water right before dinner so you'd eat less; it seemed to work. Drinking water in general when I'm hungry helps, and has far less calories than soda or alcoholic beverages. Best of all, if you're in a restaurant in The Netherlands you may ask for tapwater and it has to be free (IIRC they could ask you service costs, not sure). But you need to make sure you ask for tapwater.

Also, learning to fast (practicing) can aid with feeling OK to be hungry. Some people start to feel terrible if they don't eat for a while (my partner has this problem) whereas I fasted for a longer time and it certainly changed my perspective on food in general. I'm not eating for a few hours? I'll survive. I've been through worse (whilst I was on smoking cessation I barely ate for a week, with very light foods such as cucumber).

And, you will lose more weight if you sleep well and a decent amount. (your results may vary)