Numbers without which it's impossible to talk about weight loss

by red369 • 3 years ago

85 96 3 years ago

jmpman• 3 years ago

Can you lose fat if you still have calories available in glycogen storage? Or do you need to first burn through the glycogen? Will only carbs work to replenish glycogen storage, or will also fat and protein?

v7engine• 3 years ago

    "Your body burns a mixture of fat and glycogen where the glycogen decreases over time. But it does appear to deplete pretty quickly."

This is mentioned in the article.

tim-fan• 3 years ago

I believe in some conditions fat and/or protein can be used to restore glycogen via Gluconeogenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluconeogenesis

I remember reading that for keto diets it's important to not eat too much protein, otherwise the excess protein may be converted to glucose, replenishing glycogen and knocking you out of ketosis.

Blackthorn4• 3 years ago

Gluconeogenesis can't really turn fat into glucose, humans lack a key enzyme for that.

dawnerd• 3 years ago

From personal experience you’d have to eat a LOT of protein to kick you out. I do a pretty high protein keto diet and it works great. What really gets people is all the keto blogs talk about eating lots of fat. That great if you are doing keto for a lifestyle choice but if you’re doing it for weight loss you already have the fat and don’t need to boost your intake. Eating a fraction of the suggested macros still maintains satiety.

bzjlvewivezw• 3 years ago

Yes, I think so. This is most likely to happen with a high-fat diet and large amounts of low-mid intensity endurance exercise.

arcticbull12• 3 years ago

Studies show that exercise doesn't help you lose any appreciable amount of weight. It's good for you and you should do it, but it doesn't help with weight loss.

Only what you eat does. At a high level, it's mostly because (a) exercise just isn't inefficient enough to lose a ton of weight unless you do insane amounts of it. To lose 10lbs through exercise you need to run from SF to LA. (b) humans are notorious compensatory eaters. If you work out, you'll be hungry, and you'll rationalize or sneak extra food, and one muffin un-does like 5 miles of running.

[1] agrees, showing that moderate-intensity aerobic exercise done 5x weekly for 30m per day yields no measurable weight loss. [2] shows that adding exercise to diet yields no measurable difference between the diet and the diet+exercise group after 6 months, and after 12 months the difference was two pounds in favor of the exercise group. After a year.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00330...

[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-789X...

majkinetor• 3 years ago

There is no mention of

- brown fat which dissipates calories.

- state of other mater transition trough the body (food, water etc.)

- procentage of fat vs muscle cells

You don't need those numbers to lose fat, only a belt and knowing your carbs and micronutrients.

globular-toast• 3 years ago

I've been telling people for years how my weight can easily fluctuate 2kg over a single day. I knew it was water (we're mostly water anyway), but didn't know it was glycogen. I think a lot of salt increases water retention too.

Some people say you shouldn't weigh yourself every day because fluctuations are disheartening. I wholeheartedly disagree. You must weigh yourself every day. Then you'll be able to see the trend. If the line isn't going where you want it to, eat less (or more).

Having less water makes you look learner too. This is well known by bodybuilders, models, actors, fitness influencers etc. Every actor you see with their shirt off is dehydrated. Talk about unrealistic beauty standards...

semi-extrinsic• 3 years ago

Modern bodybuilding is so far gone off the deep end, it's insane. Competitors are so severely dehydrated at the time of competition that they can barely manage the exertion of standing on stage and posing. There are more deaths in bodybuilding than any other sport, even stuff like MMA.

zaptheimpaler• 3 years ago

It's cool seeing the numbers but on a practical level I think they're a distraction. To track weight loss, you only need to measure your weight at the same time every day (e.g morning before breakfast) and use a rolling 7-day average for good measure. The number on the scale is less real than the rolling average.

ajuc3• 3 years ago

Yup, there's like 10 different factors that change on daily basis.

iopq5• 3 years ago

You will have a lower 7 day rolling average on a low carb diet than on a high carb diet because of glycogen. A low carb diet will deplete it faster, so you will think it's working better, but in actuality the effect is temporary. You need to be cognizant of glycogen while dieting so you don't get fooled.

Otherwise you will think your diet stopped working after a while

somenameforme4• 3 years ago

"Diets" don't really make any logical sense from a weight management perspective as a liminal thing. Your body will always trend towards a given weight for a given caloric input, because one of the biggest factors in your daily caloric burn is how much you already weigh. And as you lose weight, it goes down. In other words, your equilibrium caloric intake will decrease as you lose weight. So if you go on a diet, drop 30 lbs, and then go back to eating the same amount you were before, then you're going to regain those 30lbs right on back.

The reason checking the scale is useful is because they can clue you in on where a given caloric input is taking you, up or down. The details and timeline aren't really relevant, because if you want the gains to stay then that "diet" is your new, permanent, lifestyle.

lloeki2• 3 years ago

Once upon a time I gained a lot of weight (20+kg, crossing the "obese" BMI bar) over a dozen or so years, and started to physically feel really bad. I realised that if I want to save my life (as in not dying from a heart attack or something but also being a living entity while not feeling absolute garbage every day, which would be wasting my life) I had to do something. Since it took me that much time to gain that weight and wanted to go back to feeling my best in a way that sticks I set up a weight loss plan that would unfold over the same amount of time than it took, because there's just no shortcuts to it.

So I did a big ass spreadsheet, plotting rolling 7 day + rolling 24 days and their derivatives.

Key insights of my strategy:

- instant measurement does not matter, as in it's actually not worth looking at every day, only retrospectively when observed as a collection upon looking for root causes of deviations of the averages. most advices about weighting in at a certain time or a certain day of the week is about faking an average with discrete measurements (which kinda works but requires extremely effortful consistency to make sense, and any error throws the fake average off big time)

- 24 day average is really nice and meaningful: missing or mismeasuring (not weighting early morning+ after poop, scale glitch...) a few measurements would be inconsequential, a couple stray events would not affect it, a positive derivative would mean I must take immediate action (as in, get back on track with being consistent) to correct course and reverse the trend. when in the losing weight phase, a negative derivative closing in towards zero would mean I should pay a bit more attention to being consistent. as target weight† nears or is attained the meaning of that derivative shifts a bit (obviously one does not want to perpetually lose weight, so things offset and taper off)

- if weighting multiple times a day for averages it would consider only the minimum for that day, but it would also give me a spread for a given day, allowing me to understand fine grained details of my body behaviour in face of specific events (overeating, undereating, doing sports, drinking water, drinking alcohol when partying) and compare that to the next day(s). such events preceding each measurement were annotated on the corresponding row.

- from an initial data gathering and retrospective, 24 day appeared to be my body latency: when I did something effective or veered off course the effect would visibly settle in as long term weight loss or gain after that amount of time (this would be visible in raw data, not artificially come from the average construction, so I tuned that average to 24 days to produce the corresponding synthetic, immediately meaningful derivative value)

- 7 day allows for shorter term observation and reactions, but is more susceptible to noise. It appeared from observational data that it was the rough scale at which things would start to have long term effects happening at t+latency. e.g not doing sports, or overeating, or bad sleep from t to t+5~7 would produce a long term, lasting effet at t+20~25 days; lower than that and it would just evaporate.

overall it removed a whole lot of complexity, guesswork, and guilt, which translated in not skipping measurements, which produced more and better data, making the whole process a non-event, progressively building healthy habits, making it easier to course correct, and so on and so forth.

the end: I shed all the excess weight two years before the "deadline" without feeling that I put much effort into it (there was effort, especially when I needed to kick my ass a couple times, but it did not feel like I was constantly abusing my body; the "consistency" effort was spread out and thus much more manageable). concretely I ended up both feeling (internal assessment) and looking (external feedback) younger in my late 30s than in my late 20s.

I've since replaced that with a Garmin watch + scale and the Garmin app does pretty much what my spreadsheet did, minus the derivative bits, which I really miss.

† I never aimed for an actual weight value, but for an intrinsic feeling of healthiness, which for me happens to correspond to a specific weight range.

sn9• 3 years ago

Apps like Macrofactor do this for you.

You just track your weight and your caloric intake and it tells you how much you're burning and how much more or less you need to hit a particular rate of weight change.

dougSF70• 3 years ago

I think about reduction in volume rather than reduction in weight as a goal. Burning fat will reduce your volume but adding muscle will increase your weight (potentially).

trabant00• 3 years ago

When I was 40 I went from ~16% body fat to ~9% while also gaining about 5% of my body weight in muscle. It took me 2 years during which I experimented a lot with nutrition. I also consumed every article, video, study, advice, etc that I could find. Looking back I was pretty surprised to understand that all that information did almost nothing in helping me get results.

Getting "shredded" was mostly limited by finding out what works for me. What food I can easily buy and cook. What food I tolerated eating, because after 2 years I could not stand chicken breast any more. What fit into my schedule as I could not eat a big lunch because it made me sleepy at work. A big dinner meant I would sleep poorly. A big breakfast prevented me to train in the morning. I started by drinking almost a liter of milk a day but somewhere along those 2 years I became lactose intolerant. I ended up eating a lot of fat in the form of nuts, butter, cheese and that made my cholesterol go down somehow which puzzled my doctor. And so many other things I discovered about my body.

I am not even talking about bullshit science in the fitness industry (which is a lot). Articles and information like the present ones, which I can find nothing wrong with, do absolutely nothing in helping lose weight. This rant was provoked by the title "Numbers without which it's impossible to talk about weight loss". I call bullshit even as I recently started another weight loss journey as I'm close to 20% BF now. And very little of what I discovered before applies as I'm older, switched lifestyles, live in a different country with completely different food, etc. But one thing I am sure of: I will not waste another moment reading stuff like this.

eXpl0it3r• 3 years ago

I started by drinking almost a liter of milk a day but somewhere along those 2 years I became lactose intolerant.

Well this isn't really surprising to me, assuming that you didn't drink raw milk. Processed milk doesn't have the lactase enzyme, so your body has to produce it in order to break down lactose. Consuming that much milk puts your lactase production into overdrive, until it eventually fatigues and you become lactose intolerant.

It's rather ironic, that people who are lactose intolerant can actually consume raw milk, because it still contains the lactase enzyme, so your body doesn't have to produce (as much).

agos• 3 years ago

I didn't know about it! is lactase lost during pasteurization?

ffwd4• 3 years ago

I made a simple rule, but i'm not sure it will work for everyone, but I lost 77 lbs in 2022 due to a health issue and it seems to work.

Basically I have to be hungry from 6 pm to 9 am (and not eat), for at least a week, preferably 2 weeks. If I feel hungry for a period, i lose weight or at worst stay at current weight. Usually i lose a few pounds. Then I can have periods where I can eat more and gain a few, then I just go back to not eating as much and it goes down again. The key thing is to just feel that hunger feeling relatively often and it's usually a good sign.

I get used to the hunger feeling after awhile, so it's not that big of an issue after that.

gumballindie• 3 years ago

Isnt this called intermittent fasting?

ffwd4• 3 years ago

I didn't know that's what it was called but yes, it appears it is.

andreareina• 3 years ago

The hunger is more important than the fasting.

awestroke• 3 years ago

Do you ever have trouble sleeping due to feeling hungry?

Filligree• 3 years ago

Not OP, but I have trouble sleeping if I’m not hungry.

The sensation itself disappears quickly when I lie down.

ffwd4• 3 years ago

I actually sleep better when not eating before sleep. Sort of a bigger point about this - last year when I was losing a lot of weight I was eating around 1500 calories per day, and I felt pretty amazing ironically. Felt a lot more energetic and lighter, but I basically ate no fast food or any food I enjoy, and it was only this year when I started to be able to eat my favorite food I started to realize I feel a lot worse (basically a little more bloated, heavier, not as energetic) when eating it (things like pizza, burgers, etc). I had to stop with chips and chocolate completely though.

But my point is it feels like that's sort of the issue I'm dealing with right now is not eating much at all reduced my appetite to almost nothing, but I basically had to stop eating any food I enjoy (like pizza, burgers, etc), so I had to choose between food not being a part of my life much (and get stable blood sugar), or eat unhealthy in periods and then feel worse. I haven't come up with a perfect solution but I felt like I couldn't give up the food so...

Edit: Also by the way, regarding sleeping hungry directly, my motivation was that I knew I was losing weight or "accomplishing the goal" when doing it, so mentally I felt good about feeling hungry. I couldn't wait till the next day came around and I had slept and knocked off those hours up until 9 am.

taskforcegemini• 3 years ago

was my first thought as well. I find it difficult to fall asleep on an empty stomach

prmph• 3 years ago

Is it really a feeling of hunger, or high-calorie withdrawal symptoms?

ffwd4• 3 years ago

In 2022 it was definitely hunger as I stopped eating high calorie stuff completely. But that level of eating was unsustainable and only possible because of the health issue I was forced to. I was basically thinking about food 24/7.

However after I started eating less healthy food it definitely can be. That's the issue I have atm, giving up food I enjoy vs feeling high calorie withdrawal (at least relatively, I eat a lot less now than before).

appplication• 3 years ago

I’ve never struggled to keep a healthy weight (always have been athletic), but your thoughts here are consistent with my general experience. I spend a lot of time hungry. I feel like it’s normal and healthy to be hungry, and less normal to always have to actually do something about it.

I also am not really familiar with most junk food. Growing up, we never had snacks in the house, or sugary drinks. I think there is likely a very real correlation to the habits you learn around unhealthy foods when you’re young and your ability to not be tempted by these later in life.

pif• 3 years ago

Don't give me numbers, I've already enough of them.

Give me hunger suppressing pills and I'll give you gold in return!

oezi2• 3 years ago

This is exactely what those Ozempic injections do.

nirui• 3 years ago

I'm not fat in most (if not all) measurements, but I can see my belly fat when I sit down. I've read quite a few articles/papers discussing weight loss, but it ended up helped me very little. The number provided in the articles (including this one) while important, is still too abstract to directly act upon.

Guess what I wanted is a list of specific food/stuffs that I need to consume everyday in order to stay healthy and strong. Maybe some experts in the field can create an app/webpage which allow you "shop" consumables with your daily calories as budget.

Also, as far as I understand it, calories is just one part of the game, the end goal is being healthy, not just weight loss.

lloeki2• 3 years ago

I'm not fat in most (if not all) measurements, but I can see my belly fat when I sit down. I've read quite a few articles/papers discussing weight loss, but it ended up helped me very little.

Maybe the issue is not "being fat" then, one of the things I noticed in my journey to understanding my body is that since I sit a lot (I can't seem to be able to code while standing) my core would atrophy and lose natural tension. Without that wall viscera fall down because gravity, pushing outwards like jello resting on a flat surface, and making normal fat feel uncomfortably present. Doing planks and working on fixing posture usually solves that for me. YMMV though.

foxyv• 3 years ago

Doing rolling 72-hour fasts I found I can lose an average of 0.25 lbs of body fat per day. If you look at the daily numbers it looks like I'm gaining and losing weight really fast, but the trend line over a month is a perfect line with 0.25 slope.

Instantaneous measurements of weight are worthless for understanding weight loss. A lot of people freak out when they see the scale go up on a carb heavy day thinking "Oh my god I ruined everything!" Keeping daily measurements in a log and reviewing it once a week makes more sense. Just write it down and forget about it. Keep to the routine and then adjust as necessary during the weekly review.

Edit Note: I wonder if there would be a market for a "Encrypted Scale" that doesn't actually show a reading and just saves the weight to a server and gives you a report every once in a while.

Numbers without which it's impossible to talk about weight loss

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