The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving (2019)

https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/27593253/why-grandmasters-magnus-carlsen-fabiano-caruana-lose-weight-playing-chess

by Tomte • 5 years ago

54 102 5 years ago

dang• 5 years ago

Discussed at the time:

The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20962780 - Sept 2019 (347 comments)

... not very interestingly. Diet threads tend to evoke the same basic comments over and over, and like most predictable topics, tend to turn nasty. My theory about why: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....

redis_mlc• 5 years ago

1) A lot of high-level chess players lift weights, so could be burning twice as many calories daily as an average person.

(Pro US bodybuilders average consuming over 10,000 calories per day, with the record being 20,000 per day. They all take insulin to burn it, which is the open secret inside that community.)

2) Most of the comments about CICO on the Sept. 2019 link miss the point. CICO works for young people with a normal metabolism. But a medical doctor and researcher on one of Joe Rogan's podcasts spent an hour explaining convincingly how that isn't true for others, mainly because fat cells are forever and interact with hormones. His advice on losing fat was, "Get lipo."

throwawaycities• 5 years ago

They all take insulin to burn it, which is the open secret inside that community.

Insulin is a hormone that puts the body into an anabolic (growth) state.

The reason body builders use insulin is partly the reason they consume so many calories, they are trying to eat at a surplus so they build mass…the insulin helps build that mass because it enlarges cells and allows them to store the excess calories. Body builders have notoriously gotten larger once they began using insulin. In particular their stomachs have changed significantly from the pre-insulin days, it’s because the insulin doesn’t just effect muscle growth it also enlarges the organs giving the cartoonishly distended stomach.

The second reason they use insulin is to promoted recovery (anabolism), after a strenuous workout you have broken down the muscle tissue and after a workout when amino acids/protein is consumed to begin repairing the muscle insulin is used with the idea the insulin will force the amino acids into the muscle tissue faster promoting a quicker anabolic effect (recovery).

nickthemagicman• 5 years ago

Very interesting.

I'm in a reddit forum called /r/progresspics about CICO/exercise weight loss and it massively skews young.

https://www.reddit.com/r/progresspics/

bengy5959• 5 years ago

So CICO works for young people, but older people can defy the laws of physics?

silicon2401• 5 years ago

CICO works for young people with a normal metabolism.

I assume by "young" you mean age 60 or under.

The study, of 6,400 people, from eight days old up to age 95, in 29 countries, suggests the metabolism remains "rock solid" throughout mid-life.
It peaks at the age of one, is stable from 20 to 60 and then inexorably declines.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58186710

Unless you have an actual medical condition, no, there's not an excuse for being fat before 60, you just eat too much. Look at how people eat nowadays and you'll see that it's the same for everybody else: ridiculous over-consumption. Eat less and you'd lose weight like any other normal person (without a medical condition)

Andrew_nenakhov8• 5 years ago

To lose weight, you simply need to intake fewer calories than you burn.

Exercising is almost irrelevant, because 30 minutes of cycling equals a rather small piece of cake.

So just eat less, count calories and weight the food using kitchen scales. This way I lost 12 kg in 2.5 months last summer. The only difficulty was to overpower myself to eat less, that's the obstacle that most people who try to lose weight fail to overcome.

Also. It is absolutely irrelevant when to eat: only the amount of calories intake matters. I routinely ate before sleep or after midnight

cglace• 5 years ago

I find exercise sets the tone for what and how much I eat. After a week of working out every day, I feel better and have more energy for eating well. Eating well, in turn, makes me feel even better, and I'm able to keep the whole thing going for longer. In the end, it's a game of willpower and finding what helps you maintain your willpower.

Not to mention, lifting weights increases strength and adds muscle.

rootusrootus• 5 years ago

I find exercise sets the tone for what and how much I eat

I agree. I can lose weight simply by restricting calories, but exercise is what makes restricting calories doable. I get far more from the exercise than just whatever few calories it burns.

sharadov2• 5 years ago

Agree, it's hard to eat badly when you are putting in the time to work out, that's the case for me at least. But I also hear from people that they decided to eat badly, because they had an intense work out, and feel it's ok to indulge.

ShinyRice• 5 years ago

While it is true that exercise itself does not make you spend much energy, doesn't strength training build additional muscle which in turn makes you need more energy to maintain that muscle, so you increase your basal metabolic rate? Sounds like it'd be more effective for losing weight than cardio on principle.

Decabytes• 5 years ago

You are correct. It's just that gaining an appreciable amount of muscle takes a long time. So for it to have any impact would take a couple years of growth

fsloth2• 5 years ago

"Exercising is almost irrelevant,"

But still crucial. It has several other advantages.

majkinetor2• 5 years ago

It can't be almost irrelevant and crucial, that is nonsensical.

It is irrelevant because your appetite will also go up. Nobody talks about other advantages on well being, only about your weight.

timbit42• 5 years ago

Exercise is crucial to health, but not to weight loss.

typon• 5 years ago

This story is simplistic and doesn't represent the dynamic nature of the human body and mind. For example, as you reduce your calorie intake, your metabolism also slows down. This means you have to exert more willpower to consume the same amount of calories below deficit than you used to. Exercising is absolutely vital in establishing long term habits for losing weight and just being healthier in general.

daneel_w• 5 years ago

But your basal bodily need (aka basal metabolic rate) does not really drop, as its bulk does not involve active digestive functions, but primarily circulatory processes, respiration, keeping your body's temperature up and so on - all the things that are non-negotiable to keep the body alive around the clock.

The number varies slightly with genetics and age, but does not vary notably between fasting and eating, nor between sedentary and active lifestyle, and averages at about 26 kcal per kilo body weight. This parameter is what makes up the resonable daily intake limit to aim at (or under) to let the body consume itself through catabolism (ideally lipolysis) in the safest way possible, without having to involve exercise.

ansible2• 5 years ago

To lose weight, you simply need to intake fewer calories than you burn.

While this is true, there a lot more complications.

You body has its own idea of your weight set-point, and tries to keep your body mass in that range. Any short-term intake / expenditure imbalance will be corrected when sufficient calories are available afterwards.

If you are suffering a longer-term shortfall of calories, your body will "turn down the thermostat" in a couple ways. One by literally producing less heat, but your metabolism slows down in other ways, and an emphasis is put upon storing calories as fat.

So if you cut your calorie consumption, and your body decides to cut calorie expenditure even more, you can gain weight.

Also, your body will reduce muscle mass in a reduced caloric intake situation, because it will burn that muscle mass as energy to power the rest of your body, and also because muscle mass just uses more energy even when it is not doing anything.

Going on a diet that causes you to lose muscle mass is a recipe for rapid weight gain after you stop dieting.

Unfortunately, many fad diets will work in the sort term, but will make it easier to gain weight back later on.

mumblemumble4• 5 years ago

So, in other words, that means that, even if "calories in, calories out" might be trivially true, which I would still imagine it is because thermodynamics, it's not actually useful as weight loss advice?

Because the human body is not a passive system. It has all sorts of autonomic processes designed to control both calories in and calories out, and they have a tendency to subvert and/or counteract anything you're consciously doing to adjust your overall energy intake and expenditure.

I'm obviously no health scientist, but, just thinking out loud, that seems pretty believable? Partially because, of course, nothing's ever that simple. But also, speaking purely speculatively, I can't imagine my body responds to me consuming a 1,500 calorie holiday meal by immediately producing three more pounds of fat tissue, and then making it disappear the very next day. So, even from that, it seems implausible that the body's arsenal of ways to deal with simple day-to-day and hour-to-hour variation in energy consumption has to go way beyond simply growing and consuming new tissue. Which is what it would seem to imply if useful weight loss advice really could be as simple as "calories in, calories out."

Elsewhere I linked an article on the variability of the brain's calorie consumption, and one of the sources it cited was a table of calorie expenditure per hour across several activity types. Including things like reading a book or preparing a meal. It wasn't nearly detailed enough to know for sure, but, based on what I saw from a cursory glance, it seemed at least plausible that your body could completely counteract several hundred calories' worth of reduced food consumption by, say, simply making you unconsciously be a little bit less fidgety throughout the day.

abstractbarista• 5 years ago

Is there data to back up an individual 'set-point'? People think differently, so I can only speak to myself:

If I was heavier than desired, and I noticed my body was gaining weight while I am suppressing caloric intake, I would reduce intake even further. Call the bluff.

Of course, easier said than done. It's perhaps a masochistic mindset, forcing yourself to feel hunger, and obstinately refusing to give in. Since I was young, my conscious response to hunger seems different than many. I can easily ignore it for hours, if I am focused on something interesting. Hunger is an annoyance I typically ignore. The body screams "Wahh, I'm hungry! I'm going to make you feel bad until I eat!" and my internal voice says "Go right ahead. Suck it up, you're fine. I'm having too much fun to tend to you. Maybe you get something in a few hours."

If anything, I probably don't eat 'enough'. But I don't try to eat less. I eat whatever I want whenever I want. I am very happy with my weight. I eat a wide variety of nutritious food. But ultimately it's just annoying that we have to eat at all.

marticode• 5 years ago

You body has its own idea of your weight set-point, and tries to keep your body mass in that range.

There's not much scientific evidence for "set point weight" or "starvation mode" or other similar concepts. People regain weight after dieting most likely because they go back to their old eating habits rather than making a lasting diet changes. But it's more convenient to blame their body stubbornness than their own lack of discipline.

sharadov2• 5 years ago

Basically what you allude to is the metabolic rate. Your body has a metabolic rate, and if for whatever reason this gets out of whack - eating unhealthy, gaining a lot of weight, it becomes very hard to come back to baseline. Hence the yo-you effect of most diets.

abfan11273• 5 years ago

Its more than just calories. What your body does to those calories matter too. Your body's chemistries matter.

You're absolutely right about exercising helping lose weight. An hour on a bike is 500-600 calories. A lb of fat is ~6000-8000 calories.

as a single example, I lost 35 lbs (16 kg) eating 4000-4500 calories a day (no carbs). I exercised 1 day a week playing ultimate frisbee in a local rec league.

IncRnd3• 5 years ago

A lb of fat is ~6000-8000 calories.

A lb of fat is always 3,500 calories.

Edit: Thanks to abfan1127 for pointing out my age. 4,100 it is!

tgb2• 5 years ago

Exercising is almost irrelevant

I get where this is coming from, but I really feel like everyone has over-corrected on this and ended up being wrong again in the opposite direction. Exercise burns a significant number of calories. An hour run can easily burn 700 calories for someone my size (~70kg). Running an hour a day 6 days a week burns more than one pound of fat a week. I run less than that amount and my phone estimates I burned 15,000 calories last month from running. That's not a get-slim-quick magic pill, but that's really significant!

Exercising for 20 minutes once or twice a week is pretty negligible and people over-correct by eating more. But a consistent, easily-doable exercise habit is a huge source of additional "calories out".

seppel2• 5 years ago

An hour run can easily burn 700 calories for someone my size (~70kg).

If you can run for 1h then you are quite likely already in a good shape (if not, running 1h every day would kill your joints).

Running an hour a day 6 days a week burns more than one pound of fat a week.

Usual advise is to run at most every other day to let the body regenerate. That said, eating 500kcal less each day has the same effect and is much easier then running 1h six days in a row.

tonyedgecombe• 5 years ago

I read a paper recently that showed we tend to offset exercise with lethargy elsewhere without even being conscious of it. Anecdotally this seems true as I'm currently sat on the sofa following a thirty mile bike ride this morning.

Andrew_nenakhov8• 5 years ago

Exercising does only one thing for weight loss: it builds up your muscle mass. Muscles have higher 'passive' calorie burn than fat tissue. Thus, you can take in more calories without adding weight, and if you eat the same as before adding muscles, you'll lose weight faster.

hughrr• 5 years ago

Completely agree.

However exercise is essential for your mental and physical health so you must keep doing it.

I found a weird side effect though. I lost a lot of weight. Then didn’t find exercise difficult and quite enjoyed it. Now I do a lot of exercise because it’s fun and eat more than I did originally. Reprogramming myself has been an interesting experience.

lowdest• 5 years ago

These kind of posts attract lots of debate, maybe less so on HN, but to strengthen OP's statement: every technique beyond total calories intake is an optimization. Sometimes, if your body and lifestyle is in a situation that has many opportunities for non-calorie weight loss optimization, it may seem like total calories is not the most important factor. This is a confusing illusion because those optimization opportunities will change over time, and as you address them. Total calorie intake is the underlying reality of weight loss that will not change.

That said, there are a lot of useful optimizations and hacks out there. OP says exercise is almost irrelevant, but I can say that training up the ability for endurance exercise is really effective for me personally. During quarantine I've gone from sedentary to completing 10 mile runs, which have noticeably helped me lose fat. In the past I've also had successful experiments with restrictive diets like paleo, keto, and intermittent fasting. YMMV; experiment with optimizations, but never forget about total calories.

snarf21• 5 years ago

Right, exercise is good for your heart and bones but bad for weight loss if that is your goal. Also, weight loss is about stress and emotions. I've seen lots of people have desert at lunch because "I'll work out later" but then they bail on that too. Additionally, a lot of people feel famished post workout and tend to overeat even consuming more extra calories than they burned during their exercise session. There is also the time element. It takes 0 minutes to not eat 500 calories a day.

fouric3• 5 years ago

Half of this comment is wrong:

It's not a matter of "simply" taking in fewer calories. Your body has a weight setpoint that it likes to maintain, and if you just decrease your caloric intake while eating the same type of food at the same intervals, your body will start burning less. "So just eat less, count calories and weight the food using kitchen scales." is equally wrong in the same way.

There have been scientific studies done on this (from "The Obesity Code", which is a good book backed up by a lot of empirical evidence (some notes are at http://www.criticalthink.info/webindex/BkObesityCodeFung.htm)):

Thirty-six young, healthy, normal men were selected with an average height of five foot ten inches (1.78 meters) and an average weight of 153 pounds (69.3 kilograms). For the first three months, subjects received a standard diet of 3200 calories per day. Over the next six months of semi-starvation, only 1570 calories were given to them. However, caloric intake was continually adjusted to reach a target total weight loss of 24 percent (compared to baseline), averaging 2.5 pounds (1.1 kilograms) per week. Some men eventually received less than 1000 calories per day. The foods given were high in carbohydrates, similar to those available in war-torn Europe at the time--potatoes, turnips, bread and macaroni. Meat and dairy products were rarely given. In addition, they walked 22 miles per week as exercise. Following this caloric reduction plan, their calories were gradually increased over three months of rehabilitation. Expected caloric expenditure was 3009 calories per day.
[...] The men experienced profound physical and psychological changes. Among the most consistent findings was the constant feeling of cold experienced by the participants. As one explained, "I'm cold. In July I walk downtown on a sunny day with a shirt and sweater to keep me warm. At night my well fed room mate, who isn't in the experiment, sleeps on top of his sheets but I crawl under two blankets."
Resting metabolic rate dropped by 40 percent.
Interestingly, this phenomenon is very similar to that of the previous study, which showed a drop of 30 percent. Measurement of the subjects' strength showed a 21 percent decrease. Heart rate slowed considerably, from an average of fifty-five beats per minute to only thirty-five. Heart stroke volume decreased by 20 percent. Body temperature dropped to an average of 95.8°F. Physical endurance dropped by half. Blood pressure dropped. Men became extremely tired and dizzy. They lost hair and their nails grew brittle.
Psychologically, there were equally devastating effects. The men experienced a complete lack of interest in everything except for food, which became an object of intense fascination to them. Some hoarded cookbooks and utensils. They were plagued with constant, unyielding hunger. Some were unable to concentrate, and several withdrew from their university studies. There were several cases of frankly neurotic behavior.

Let me repeat a fragment of that from above: Resting metabolic rate dropped by 40 percent. If you just try to "overpower yourself to eat less", you will temporarily lose weight, but eventually you'll give in, and then your weight will return to a higher level than before - something that is also supported by scientific studies.

It is absolutely irrelevant when to eat: only the amount of calories intake matters.

This is also false - eating continuously during the day leads to insulin resistance and weight gain, while eating the same amount of food in a smaller region, while not necessarily health, does not cause that effect.

tpush• 5 years ago

I don't think the metabolic impact of a starvation diet (only getting less than 1000 kcal while expending 3009 kcal, that's a 2000kcal difference!) can be compared with a normal weight loss diet, e.g. net negative of ~500kcal.

stavros• 5 years ago

So what should you do?

Andrew_nenakhov8• 5 years ago

I don't agree. If you starve yourself very fast, the body starts to shut down, and of course your passive burnrate decreases significantly. It is like keeping only the most critical systems powered when you lose your main power generator. (See Apollo 13 movie for visual representation).

Still, this happens when you starve. If you do it gradually, the body adjusts. The main thing is to keep in mind that person can survive just fine on 1700 kcals, and that you are not dying when hungry, it's only a discomfort.

toss1• 5 years ago

It is a LOT more complicated than that, and your last sentence has one of the largest clues

Timing of eating relative to your daily metabolism, as well as utilizing (or not) different metabolic modes has a LOT to do with how food energy is stored vs burned vs dumped.

E.g., Intermittent Fasting is starting to be recognized as a highly useful method for weight and health control. At a high (oversimilified) level, consider that your body has two modes, storing energy vs removing energy from storage for burning. Intake of food more or less constantly (vs only at limited times) keeps the body in storage mode. OTOH constraining eating to limited periods during the day forces the blood sugar down and causes the body to switch to taking energy from storage. Thus, people can intake the same calories and do the same exercise/exertion levels, yet lose more weight when they restrict their calories to within a 8-12 hour period during the day.

Similarly, studies with holding amounts of food and exercise constant, but having Group A do their running before breakfast, vs Group B running the same amount sometime during the day resulted in greater weightloss for GroupA - they were forcing their body to dig deeper into their stored energy instead of just burning off of the circulating blood sugars from the current meal, because of the longer fast before the run.

And this is only one of the many factors that affects how storage works.

So, sure technically, it is 'intake fewer than burning', but that is a triviality considering all the other metabolic factors that can affect. So, good job cutting out those midnight snacks! (I've found that moving the last bite to before 4PM on several days a week makes a big difference, but YMMV)

majkinetor2• 5 years ago

Totally wrong. Not all calories are the same. And some chemicals promote hunger, take for example THC.

Exercise do seem irrelevant for this.

AnIdiotOnTheNet4• 5 years ago

Calories are calories is much more true than people give it credit for. Here's a guy who ate nothing but twinkies and not only lost weight, but had all his health metrics improve: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...

AnIdiotOnTheNet4• 5 years ago

My experience of losing >150lbs agrees with this statement. Ruthless, excuseless calorie counting was the only way to lose weight, and by far the hardest part was summoning the will to not eat more. There are strategies for hacking that last part, but it seems to be incredibly subjective as to what works for any given individual.

Teknoman1172• 5 years ago

Got any pointers you'd be willing to share? I need to lose a similar amount. I don't want to have a heart attack in my 30's or 40's. The existential dread and a strong hatred of my behavior have done horrible things to my psyche...

OhNoMyqueen• 5 years ago

It's worse than that. The body doesn't like to lose supplies, so any calories burnt by exercise will be reclaimed by the body, which means that in any case (exercise or not) you'll need to eat less than what your body asks of you.

For some people this is cancelled by the virtuous side-effects of exercising, most notably sleep quality and low stress levels, as sleep and stress are the two most important levers on hunger/self-indulgence. For some others this is compounded by a conscious decision to allow oneself to eat sizable portions (or snack) to make for the effort, which immediatly cancels the calories deficit induced by exercice, most probably with compensation, considering how few calories are burnt by standard exercise durations.

johnnyApplePRNG2• 5 years ago

You only need to eat less Calories, you don't necessarily need to eat less food.

Filling your stomach with the right foods can leave you feeling full while still losing weight.

Foods packed with fibre, mainly.

Which, surprise surprise, are mostly vegetables, beans, nuts, and whole grains.

Everybody knows those foods are healthy and will keep you trim, but hardly anybody eats them exclusively.

elliottkember• 5 years ago

Hardly anybody eats vegetables? This is the first I’ve heard of it. Did you know some people only eat vegetables?

arethuza• 5 years ago

There is always the Sir Ranulph Fiennes weight loss diet:

"I went from 15½ stone to nine at the halfway point, despite eating 5,000 calories a day!"

That's 91 pounds - with just one easy trick involving Antarctica:

https://www.buzzmag.co.uk/sir-ranulph-fiennes-interview/

Andrew_nenakhov8• 5 years ago

Probably, calories are burned to compensate for the heat lost due to extreme cold. Never tried counting calories in Antarctica, so it's just a guess.

dogma1138• 5 years ago

Losing 12.5kg without exercise would leave you quite weak and likely in a “skinny fat” state.

Aerobics is indeed not a good way to lose weight and yes you can’t outrun a bad diet but simply eating less isn’t a good solution because you end up with a low metabolic rate at the tail end of it and you’ll gain that rather quickly.

Weight training with eating at or just above sustenance for your target weight (as long as it’s now below 10-15% of your current rate) is really the best way to go.

You end up building muscle which maintains or even increases your metabolism and unless you starve yourself (or you had an extremely high muscle mass to being with) you’ll maintain and likely even increase your muscle mass even with an effective caloric deficit.

You won’t come out as a body builder out of this regiment, but you’ll lose weight and or do a body transformation over a course of 3-6 months depending on how much weight you actually want to lose.

That said it doesn’t work that well if you are obese and in terrible shape at that point diet + low intensity mobility exercise is needed until you can get into a shape that would allow you to do weight training without injuring yourself.

I do agree that the time of your meals isn’t that critical yes it has an effect but most people aren’t in a spot when they need to min max everything, macros, fasting, and other shenanigans can make a difference and when stacked correctly a big one but they also require even bigger investment and self control.

Find the minimal effort routine that would prevent you from turning into the humans from WAL-E and stick with it, it’s far easier to do something for 1-2 months longer if it’s less demanding than put in a lot of effort to try to get there a little bit faster.

Beyond that just maintain a reasonable level of strength to defer the effects of aging. If you are a male and you can’t bench your body weight in your mid 30’s or do pull ups you are weak.

bena• 5 years ago

I think the title is kind of misleading. Or at the very least, they're trying to be a little tongue in cheek.

These people aren't doing anything special to try and lose weight during a competition, it's just that the competition itself is causing them to lose weight even though they are not engaged in strenuous physical activity. Which is interesting. I wouldn't have pegged chess to cause a person to burn 6000 calories in a day.

AnIdiotOnTheNet4• 5 years ago

Well, the brain is the largest consumer of calories in the human body so it isn't ridiculous that intense mental activity over a prolonged period could burn a lot more calories... but yeah, 6k is on the level of daily caloric expenditure you'd see in a farmer working with hand tools, so it is difficult to believe.

stonemetal12• 5 years ago

I don't get it, they note that while playing chess that they burn extra calories "Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. "

Why would playing chess burn more calories than say watching a football game?

jasfi• 5 years ago

They are likely very psyched up and stressed. Possibly even pacing a lot. Possibly eating less without thinking about it. Your average game of chess wouldn't have the same effect.

1980phipsi• 5 years ago

Your brain uses more energy when it's working hard.

mumblemumble4• 5 years ago

Though, at least according to some of the figures cited in https://www.healthline.com/health/does-thinking-burn-calorie..., it doesn't sound like the several thousand extra calories a day that the article suggests doesn't seem terribly plausible.

taneq• 5 years ago

Interesting point - chess is something we perceive as "intellectual" but it might actually use less metabolic energy (even in the brain) than other physically stationary activities like video gaming or watching sports. It'd be interesting to see some proper research into the topic, would love links to any!

IncRnd3• 5 years ago

Because you do more while playing chess than passively watching other people do things. Using your brain expends calories.

Retric2• 5 years ago

That number is unlikely to be correct. 20% of the bodies energy is used by the brain so ~400 calories per day, bumping that to ~4400 while playing chess and would mean people where seriously overheating etc.

It’s very likely they made some significant error.

checker3• 5 years ago

Your focus on the brain is too narrow. Competition leads to adrenaline which triggers the body outside the brain to burn more calories (elevated body heat, etc). I'd bet these players have elevated body heat - ever sweat during a stressful meeting or exam?

vinceguidry• 5 years ago

The brain is a surprisingly hungry consumer of energy. During childhood, it can make up 60% or more of the body's energy usage. Adult brains generally use around 20-25%.

I have a friend who has ADD that I'll play Super Smash Bros. with. If I'm playing well, his competitive instinct kicks in and he'll start sweating heavily and has to turn on a fan. I keep telling him he needs to study the fundamentals of the game so he doesn't have to use so much energy processing our interactions. But he just doesn't get it, so the cognitive load of playing the game takes a lot out of him, while I can sit and play for hours and hours.

Whereas I'll break out into cold sweats trying to process social interactions.

Everybody optimizes their brains to store and process different kinds of information. When we run into situations that we haven't learned how to efficiently process, we use more energy. The body pumps blood into the brain, heating up the body, causing us to sweat.

A chess grandmaster pushes this system close to the limit.

https://www.livescience.com/burn-calories-brain.html

NikolaeVarius• 5 years ago

Just stop eating. It works just fine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Barbieri%27s_fast

fouc2• 5 years ago

waterfasting is legit, and muscle sparing.

just gotta take electrolytes with water.

tomasdore• 5 years ago

why electrolytes?

etskinner• 5 years ago

Guinness no longer officially endorses records relating to fasting for fear of encouraging unsafe behaviour.

That's a good way to keep your record forever

vasiliys• 5 years ago

tl;dr: Do something like professional chess, that:

1. Takes hours each day.

2. Creates a persistent stress response while you do it.

3. Distracts you from food.

---

Using heart rate to estimate calories burned is mentioned. Has anyone here actually used their fitness tracker to discover an unexpected calorie sink?

e.g. I've had an action movie fight scene on the gym TV grab my attention for a couple minutes, and transition me into a sprint on the elliptical machine, without me realizing. Nifty, but I couldn't reproduce the effect.

eptcyka• 5 years ago

How does the fitness tracker measure calories burned? Mine always require to know my bodyweight so that they can approximate the amount of calories burnt by calculating the energy needed to transfer the specific amount of meat via locomotion. I don't think measuring the heart rate would be a useful proxy either. I think the only reasonable way to properly mesaure the amount of energy used by playing chess would be to measure the amount of CO2 that's exhaled during a game and at rest and compare that.

doubled112• 5 years ago

Sounds like my time as a system administrator at a smaller software shop.

1. At least eight hours a day, usually more.

2. Often two or three people lined up waiting for help by my cube, relentless Slack messages, it's release day but they found a bug. Sounds persistently stressful.

3. Who has time to eat with all that going on?

Sounds like a YMMV kind of solution. In fact, I've since moved on and I think I'm losing some pudge I'd put on there. Point two probably grew my list of bad habits though, so maybe chess grandmasters have a discipline level I don't.

Bostonian• 5 years ago

I am an international master and did notice that I tended to lose weight while playing in 2 to 3-day tournaments. I wonder if intensive mental effort in general burns calories. What if you are programming for 8 hours a day, trying to work as fast as possible?

jvanderbot• 5 years ago

I boxed for a while. In a match, tension caused significant fatigue above and beyond equivalent time training even if the training was more 'active'. I suspect that's part of it.

MS90• 5 years ago

That would make sense, IIRC our brains use something around 20% of our caloric intake just at “idle” so it’d make sense to me that they consume more energy when we push them harder.

qw3rty01• 5 years ago

I think it's more likely that you eat less during 2 to 3-day tournaments.

frankbreetz• 5 years ago

Do you keep track of what you eat during these tournaments?

I would assume you would have at least a somewhat different diet during these days and your mind would be more focused on the tournament then what you are going to eat, and you might forget to eat enough. It's like going into survival mode when you are focusing on something important to you. Most likely it is a combination of eating less calories and burning more, if you are losing a noticeable amount of weight in a couple days.

Paedor• 5 years ago

My, completely unverified, thought, is that under those conditions of stress and focus, we turn off our digestive system to some extent and literally absorb less calories. It fits well with other factoids I have, like getting sudden stomach trouble under stress.

fiftyfifty• 5 years ago

According to the article it's not the mental exertion that causes the weight loss, it's the stress and anxiety players experience for extended periods of time, quote from the article: "Grandmasters sustain elevated blood pressure for hours in the range found in competitive marathon runners".

So it's unlikely extended periods of mental exertion would have the same effect without having additional stress or pressure.

fouc2• 5 years ago

"Grandmasters sustain elevated blood pressure for hours in the range found in competitive marathon runners," Sapolsky says.
It all combines to produce an average weight loss of 2 pounds a day, or about 10-12 pounds over the course of a 10-day tournament in which each grandmaster might play five or six times.

The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving (2019)

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