Look at me, I'm skinny

http://www.fistfulayen.com/blog/?p=420

by feverishaaron • 17 years ago

43 74 17 years ago

I thought I would post this (via @bfeld) because of the discussion about startups and sacrificing health to succeed. Here's a guy who runs an up and coming startup who is doing the opposite.

Brad's post is here: http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/06/how-to-be-skinnier.h...

johnswamps• 17 years ago

I don't like being skinny. I've been skinny my entire life. Last year, I was 6'0 and 135 pounds. I started working out and eating more. I'm up to 160 and look a lot better. I don't look like I'm starving, I fit in my shirts a lot better, etc.

If you want to gain weight and are interested in a food hack, buy lots of milk. Over here it's about $1/1000 calories. You can't beat that. I drink half a gallon a day and it's done wonders for me. You probably want to be weight lifting if you do this though.

stevenjames• 17 years ago

could also eat lots of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches

pmorici4• 17 years ago

Peanut butter and jelly is horrible for you. Peanut butter just has a bunch of sugar in it.

sofal• 17 years ago

Being skinny definitely has its downsides. I've only recently begun weight lifting 3 times a week and running for half an hour 3 times a week. Walking into a gym for the first time is a very intimidating experience. It seems like every man in the entire place could crush my skull just by flexing their pectorals. I'm pretty tall too, and I feel like a friggin' grasshopper among all the manly men. It's all but impossible for me to increase my weight. One advantage I guess is that I can already do 3 sets of 8 pullups.

eoyola• 17 years ago

Don't forget the rule of moderation esp. with milk.

lanaer3• 17 years ago

135 lbs. at 6'0"? Wow. I’m 6', and when my weight got down to 140lbs, it was obviously unhealthy. Didn’t have enough in me to keep me going, really. Currently at 165, and ok there. Trying to get to ~180.

kingkongrevenge4• 17 years ago

> Eat five or six times a day

This is bad advice. You want to eat two large meals and a light one to minimize total insulin exposure. If you eat and snack all the time you keep insulin spiked up too much.

Working out six days a week to stay thin is completely ridiculous. Once or twice should be sufficient if you're eating right.

TFrancis• 17 years ago

Hmm...I think eating five or six times a day is generally considered good advice because it assumes you've selected food that are whole grain/have a low glycemic index so that your insulin levels remain level throughout the day.

kingkongrevenge4• 17 years ago

You don't want constant insulin levels. You want as much time with very low insulin levels as possible. You get that by eating two or three meals and avoiding snacks. It's also beneficial to skip a meal every now and then and have a longer than 12 hour fast.

scott_s4• 17 years ago

Eating many meals a day keeps your metabolism up. Spiking insulin is only a problem if you're eating mostly carb-rich foods, and it will happen no matter how many times a day you consume it.

kingkongrevenge4• 17 years ago

No it doesn't. It actually keeps your body in more of an anabolic and fat storing state, because of the constant insulin. Your body becomes poor at burning fat.

Longer fasting periods train your body to switch to running off fat reserves quickly. Metabolism does not slow.

thisisnotmyname• 17 years ago

What are you basing this on?

KirinDave7• 17 years ago

So let me get this straight:

1. Give up all your free time to working out. 2. Eat nothing that is delicious ever again. 3. Statistically, not significantly prolong your life. You could still die of heart disease at 50 because your genes are just not good genes. You could get cancer and keel. You could sleep an hour to long, and throw a clot and die. 4. Some people feel better in general doing the above 3 steps.

I am overweight, by a fair margin. But I'm not especially unhappy, insecure, or immobile. I have plenty of hobbies that involve outdoor things and my lifestyle doesn't inhibit those. My doctor says that losing weight is more for reducing long-term stress on my joints: my cardiovascular system is fine so long as I don't gain more weight.

So why the fuck should I, or the legion of people like me, care or listen to what this exercise freak says? I've got dogs, a girlfriend, and some hobbies taking up all the non-work time in my life. Who actually wants to do what he says, especially when the benefits are so incredibly dubious?

scott_s4• 17 years ago

Statistically, it does prolong life, since being overweight is correlated with heart disease. Yes, you can die of heart disease when you've done everything right, but it's not likely.

Your argument is "Look at these things that are very unlikely to kill me. That's why I feel justified doing things are likely to kill me."

Trying not to overeat and get more exercise don't have to take up all of your free time.

pmorici4• 17 years ago

I think you are missing the authors point. He's saying that he doesn't care what others do just don't assume his situation is god given.

This goes with something I heard on the radio last week. There was a news segment about how a group was lobbying the American Medical Association (AMA) to classify obesity as a "disability" which would give them free benefits under some government health insurance program. Then they trotted out a sound bite from a poor over weight soul who proclaimed "It isn't my fault I am the way I am".

I find it exceptionally hard to believe that that there is anyone who genuinely follows a healthy diet and is reasonably active and still can't maintain a healthy weight.

Bringing it back to this article it's like a broke business owner looking at a successful one and saying if only I was born with their smile and sense of charisma I could start a successful company too. When, in reality, it probably came down to persistence and hard work as the separating factor.

KirinDave7• 17 years ago

No, I got his point. He wants credit for spending all his time to be skinny. He doesn't like the idea that maybe hes naturally skinny, he wants credit to be given for the HUGE chunk of his life he's allocated to being skinny.

There's some credit. He sure does work hard at it.

And then he goes off, like everyone who talks about fitness, on how you could be like them. As if we wanted to. Just spend 6 days a week working out, run on the side, and eat like a tibetan monk. PS, listening to LL Cool J can also help.

I will never listen to LL Cool J. That is where I just have to draw the line, so I guess the whole diet isn't for me.

dkarl7• 17 years ago

Or just eat less.

To quote former FDA commissioner David Kessler from the book I just read (and the impetus for this post), The End of Overeating, “People get fat because they eat more than people who are lean…we finally have strong evidence that weight gain is primarily due to overeating.” Period.

This has been conventional wisdom for years now. Everything else is just details, though people love to obsess about the details, because "eat less" doesn't provide the same level of excitement and optimism as "eat this freaky diet." Even the theory behind most of the low carb diets is that avoiding high-glycemic-index foods smooths out your insulin levels, which helps regulate your appetite, which helps you avoid overeating.

Likewise, exercise is a big help for me in eating less, because it improves my mood, which makes it easier for me not to overeat. I've talked to lots of other people who, like me, find that a moderate amount of exercise actually decreases their appetite. (If you burn enough calories, you end up driving your appetite back up, but not many people burn many calories in relation to their intake. I work out about three days a week; averaged over the week, I burn about 150 calories per day, which is helpful but not a big deal.)

KirinDave7• 17 years ago

So you put "Don't eat delicious things" higher up the chain that he does.

And then you still burn a huge chunk of free time accomplishing no tangible thing in exchange for a dubious assurance of a fractionally longer life.

I used to be in much better shape than I am now, but my life was miserable. Exercise did not make me feel better, coming to terms with my life and my environment and having some control over my situation made me feel better. My opinion has been that the "workout high" is more about having control over yourself and your situation than any real lasting benefit.

jodrellblank4• 17 years ago

This has been conventional wisdom for years now.

It's also wrong. At least, it's not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

I was watching a video of a Gary Taubes lecture which I can't find where he addresses this, and cites many examples from history of societies and situations where groups of people were fat despite eating very few calories, where groups of people grew fat as their diet changed despite the calorie count not increasing, and vice-versa.

I think this is the same talk:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4362041487661765149

baddox• 17 years ago

All these facts, myths, and rules of thumb depend on the operating definition of "fat" as well as what group of "fat people" are being analyzed. People who are medically "overweight" or "obese," meaning having a BMI over 25, eat more on average than those with a BMI under 25. I would consider exercising and eating to be of tantamount importance in correcting this, but certainly genes and upbringing can instill a predisposition to obesity or even hinder sincere efforts to lose weight.

However, I think what the article is talking about is skinniness as opposed to being "chubby" or "soft," not flat out obese. If you're somewhere in the region between "skinny" and "chubby," but not near being under- or overweight, then what you eat and how you exercise is important; even subtle changes to your routine can have noticeable effects.

jodrellblank4• 17 years ago

But I'm not especially unhappy

But you are very aggressive and defensive about it. What makes you think that healthy thin people devote "all" their free time to working out? Or that a "healthy weight" involves never eating delicious food?

Is it really fair to call him a "freak"? He's the unusual stand-out fairground attraction? A thin person who eats vegetables and bikes to work, excuse me, what?

So why the fuck should I, or the legion of people like me, care

I take it you are this aggressive and defensive when someone writes a blog post about Java or Flower arranging or anything else you're not interested in?

KirinDave7• 17 years ago

  > "But you are very aggressive and defensive about it"

I'm not aggressive or defensive. I'm tired of people who do this. "I am not a health freak, but I love my life and I'm pretty sure that it's great, and I feel I deserve credit for it. PS, this is how you can be like me."

> Is it really fair to call him a "freak"? He's the unusual stand-out fairground attraction? A thin person who eats vegetables and bikes to work, excuse me, what?

Sorry dude, working out 6 times a week means that you're exceptionally into it. I am a compsci and photography "freak", I didn't mean it as a pejorative, I meant it as a clear descriptor of someone who devotes nearly all his time to one specific task. My contempt for his article stems from the disdain for the same formulaic structure I see on all health posts.

> I take it you are this aggressive and defensive when someone writes a blog post about Java or Flower arranging or anything else you're not interested in?

I am not afraid to give my opinion. Check my twitter. Better yet, ask me about Python if you run into me. I'll see if I can achieve barfight status.

gchpaco• 17 years ago

Who wouldn't be aggressive and defensive about it? Since you speak English, statistically you are extremely likely to live in a society that likes to blame e.g. rising health care costs on "fatties", that fudges health analyses to ignore that being "overweight" by the usual standard is healthier than being "normal", that is full of people claiming that you are weak willed and "just" need to radically change your life forever to meet with some preexisting beauty standard.

The mere fact that you can claim what you do in your first paragraph means you have never seriously had to deal with these problems. Some people are genetically predisposed to being heavy. When I was 16 and swimming over a mile every day, I weighed 220 ("BMI" claims that the maximum permissible weight at my height with a "heavy" build is 180, FYI). Trying to be 180 would do me far, far more harm than being heavy would, or will; this, too, has been backed up by medical studies (see: miserable effectiveness of dieting. See: health complications from losing and gaining weight.).

strlen• 17 years ago

You don't have to give up eating delicious things. The original author does go extreme in not eating any meat, when in many cases meats are actually healthier than vegetable products (e.g. properly prepared chicken vs. deep fried potato fries or HFCS containing products). I'd probably wager that in many cases it's the vegetable products (sugars, white rice, white flour, HFCS, vegetable oil) that are the worst offenders.

I'd wager to say that fast food/chain restaurant food is not only less healthy, but is also less delicious. E.g. Thai Green Curry chicken with brown rice seems to be a lot more delicious than a meal at Denny's (and is actually cheaper).

(I'll address the exercise issue -- including the original authors' mistakes in a separate -- in a separate comment).

theorique• 17 years ago

It's a bit of an unfair comparison that you're making - you're picking essentially the worst, most high-calorie nutrient-free vegetable products.

Flipping it around, I could just as well say that fresh vegetables (kale, spinach, cabbage) are far healthier than animal products (bacon, beef tallow, chicken fat).

So much of the equation is in the specific foods you pick - a vegan could eat the foods you listed and be deeply unhealthy, while an omnivore could eat large portions of fresh vegetables with a bit of free-range meat and be quite healthy.

lanaer3• 17 years ago

> 2. Eat nothing that is delicious ever again.

Eh? You’ve never had delicious veggies? Or fruits?

Sorry, but I eat delicious & healthy food regularly. All you need to do is learn to cook.

( I also eat horribly on a regular basis, when I’m too lazy to cook. )

antidaily• 17 years ago

He eats (what looks like¹) around 1400 calories a day:

Pre-workout: Protein power, Glutamine, and Lecithin mixed w/water

Breakfast: Whole grain non-instant oatmeal w/ Oat Bran, Raisins, Almonds, Skim Milk (no sugar), plus a multivitamin and some omega 3 pills

Lunch: Small salad w/protein (lettuce, broccoli, tuna, tofu, garbonzos, black beans, salsa, flax seed oil)

Afternoon snack: Cottage cheese

Dinner: Some lean protein (fish, eggs, etc) w/veggies, ideally

Bedtime snack: Plain yogurt w/berries and maybe some protein powder

¹Based on a calorie counter and normal serving sizes.

maximilian• 17 years ago

I was going to say that it didn't seem like much food, especially that salad at lunch and itsy bitsy afternoon snack. I'm a skinny kid and I have to eat waaaay more than that to keep my weight.

weegee• 17 years ago

it's a great article. lots of will power in there. I like it. I've recently decided to get into a routine as well to try to lose 25 pounds. I'm not fat, but if I can lose 25 pounds I'll be at my target weight. And working out is fun if you get into a habit of doing it regularly. Don't think I could go as far as to stop eating meat, but I am planning to stop drinking beer on weekdays as a start, and most likely stop all together later on this summer. Thanks for sharing the link on HN.

quizbiz• 17 years ago

Eating less is the one proven way to live significantly longer. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070502143834.ht...

evgen2• 17 years ago

You don't live longer on those diets, it just seems longer.

proee• 17 years ago

I can promise you that it takes more than a "lunch salad" to keep Oprah fat.

Your body is a two-port function - it's not rocket science.

What comes in must come out, and if your body doesn't use up all that food energy then... (you get the idea)

ciupicri• 17 years ago

> Trying to eat less sugar/carbs, so I swapped out the boxed cereal (even the healthy one I used to eat) for oatmeal.

As far as I know, oat is a cereal.

> I stopped eating meat

What's with this anti-meat movement? I'm not saying that we should eat a lot of meat, but still a steak (barbecue) tastes very good. I don't eat a lot of meat compared to other persons, I tend to eat the vegetables, but I sure like some steak once in a while, especially when it's pork. In case someone wonders, I'm thin.

shard3• 17 years ago

As far as I know, oat is a cereal.

In America, "boxed cereals" conjures up images of Captain Crunch or Frosted Flakes, which are full of sugar, and usually eaten cold with cold milk. Oatmeal, while it may be a cereal and may come in a box, is usually not placed in the same group as it is usually eaten hot.

jsz02• 17 years ago

Taking weight loss advice from someone who admits to always being slim seems a bit silly to me. This guy seems to have a long standing exercise routine and enjoys his flaxseeds and cottage cheese just fine. Very few people are going to just wake up one day and start exercising religiously, give up meat, and buy some tubs of protein powder. It may work for him but it's not going to work for most people who aren't used to it. So what's the net value of this article? Someone masturbating about their lifestyle choices after proclaiming that was not their intent? Lame.

Ultimately I think the biggest problem with obesity in the US is how out of proportion calories are to the amount of food ingested. It's probably something that the brain has trouble dealing with. Visually it's hard to imagine this little candy bar being more calories than a gigantic salad. And as Americans have proven time and time again they are found of not accepting logic and reality in favor of house wife superstitions and slack jawed common sense. Of course on the other extreme I've met (grossly) overweight nurses and doctors who obviously know better but cannot deal with it. That's also hard to explain given. If it were so simple I would think these smart people with first hand experience (everyday) of the health risks of obesity would be among the most capable group to deal with the problem. To me this suggests there is a very real mental or chemical cause for obesity that isn't as simple as "eat less, lose weight"

Look at me, I'm skinny

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