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Closed-loop body weight control
- JPLeRouzic 10y agoI find this interesting as for long decades I gained weight (~1kg/year), topping at a BMI of 34. Then I had some health problems and decided to weight myself everyday in exactly the same conditions, which is not easy to achieve over a long period of time. At the same time I refused any of the small social transactions like shared cookies, etc. I also wrote my daily weight in an Excel file. Since 1.5 years I lost 1.5kg each month, then weight stabilized at a BMI of 31 (still obese). Loosing so much weight (25kg) is frightening, is it a cancer? My wife and myself joked about the power of the Excel file. When I read this article I made a correlation between the proposed approach and mine. However in the article the duration was only one month, often people gain more weight afterward than they lost (I learnt it the hard way several times), and in only one month the social cost is bearable, try to do that for years, your friends and family will slowly learn to hate you, even if doing that means your health is improving. (edited for typos and clarity)
- kranner 10y ago> decided to weight myself everyday in exactly the same conditions Water weight fluctuates too much day-to-day anyway. It's probably better to consider a moving average of the last n readings than to bother to control for conditions.
- JPLeRouzic 10y agoYes, that what people usually says, but the article says exactly the contrary. Anyway I don't see why it makes more sense to make readings everyday and make an average on the last n, then use this average to make a continuous set of decisions. What you are probably thinking, is about making one decision, like "do I have to diet or not?". It is also the case if someone is only slightly interested in her/his weight, for me I weight in exactly the same conditions everyday. I told it in the previous post, it's a bit hugly on the social side, it has to be an obsession to make it work. My main question everyday is: How my weight relate to last day meals, and there is a very close correlation, that why it is so useful to weight often.
- akjainaj 10y agoCan somebody explain this to me like you'd explain it to your grandmother?
- popra 10y agoI would love this too
- leephillips 10y agoEat less.
- akjainaj 10y ago1) Having a BMI of 26.1 kg/m2, you don't lose 7.4 kg over one month just by eating less (unless you just stop eating), 2) I'm sure what the article explains goes a bit beyond "eat less"
- leephillips 10y agoSince I have the advantage of having read the article, I can say that your speculation is correct: the author describes a systematic way to control how much less to eat. But "eat less" is still the bottom line. He lost weight because he ate less over the month of the experiment that he had been eating previously. How else did he lose the weight? Note that he doesn't report increasing his caloric expenditure through exercise, for example.
- cardiffspaceman 10y agoI have occasionally remarked, you can't gain more weight than the weight of the food you eat, because conservation of mass. This is sometimes my response to people who don't eat a single donut on a special occasion. Naturally the pound or less of food you might eat in a day is not permanently conserved. I also think that a pound of food sounds like an enormous amount, but it really isn't. If you like hamburgers (and let's say you make your own so they are wholesome) you might cook a third of a pound of ground meat to make one.