9 ms·

Diet hacker data point

80 points by raleec 16y ago

iuguy 16y ago
I'm doing something similar to shift a few pounds. Two weeks ago I came home, I'd been particularly involved and forgot to eat. In order to get my calorific intake up to the minimum in my diet, I had to get some serious calories. So I had a small pizza, 4 bottles of Sol and a wife with a very suspicious look on her face.
mrj 16y ago
To curb calories, he avoided meat, whole grains and fruits. Hmm, confounding. There's a lot of crazy stuff in meat, stuff that might well have something to do with obesity rates rising. There are many studies that show that the vegetarian diet is the most healthy. His results may have less to do with Twinkies than with the meat he avoided. Edit: Not sure why I'm getting down voted to oblivion? I eat meat... I have no agenda here, just pointing out a deficiency in the article's reasoning.
- a1k0n 16y ago
  I would wager this is almost certainly why his cholesterol dropped and explains many of the effects. This is basically the central premise of the book The China Study, which is what convinced me to go vegetarian myself about a year ago (I dropped 30 lbs without even trying in about three months and now I weigh less than I did in high school). Still, he's eating a lot of refined sugar, so I'm pretty surprised. Then again, so am I (thanks Halloween!).
  - niels_olson 16y ago
    >I would wager this is almost certainly why his cholesterol dropped and explains many of the effects. His cholesterol dropped because he went from a consuming more calories than he burned to a diet where he was burning more calories than he ate. The excess calories were converted into fat and transported in LDL-labeled packets to the adipocytes. Once he started losing weight, adipocytes started releasing fat in smaller HDL-labeled packets for the liver to convert to glucose to meet his energy needs.
    - esponapule 16y ago
      Not all excessive calories are converted into fat. It all depends on blood glucose level, and liver/muscle glycogen storage levels and the level of activity after the meals.
      - niels_olson 16y ago
        Glycogen isn't excess. There's a fairly fixed upper bound to your glycogen stores. In fact there's a whole class of glycogen storage diseases which are very life-limiting, all due to excess storage (inadequate storage would be lethal in utero). Calories burned through activity are by definition not excess. I suppose you could argue that in diabetics with blood sugar above 200, then yes, the sugars become an osmotic diuretic and they literally pee out the calories, but otherwise, excess calories go to fat. Fat is the ultimate, infinite sink in this equilibrium equation.
  - Evgeny 16y ago
    This is basically the central premise of the book The China Study, which is what convinced me to go vegetarian myself You may also be interested to read the impressive critique of the China Study, which is based on Colin Campbell's own data: http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fallac/ http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fal... which is what convinced me that my diet, which contains a fair amount of meat, poultry, eggs and seafood is the way to go.
- esponapule 16y ago
  As a vegetarian, I can attest to the health aspect of it. I am more healthy than anyone I know (all meat/dairy/egg eaters). Whenever I get a checkup they always ask if i am an athlete or some weird health nut, I just say , "no I just don't eat animals." My last cholesterol test was 113 total.
  - fleitz 16y ago
    You can be unhealthy and be a vegetarian as well. I know plenty of overweight vegetarians. I also know a tonne of VERY healthy vegetarians. Mostly, vegetarians are just more interested in healthy eating than the average person. There is nothing inherently more healthy about a vegetarian diet than a non-vegetarian diet. How do you think they fatten up animals before slaughter? By feeding them meat? No, by feeding them grain.
    - dejb 16y ago
      > There is nothing inherently more healthy about a vegetarian diet than a non-vegetarian diet. Can you provide a reference for this totally unsupported assertion? There is a wealth of evidence that contradicts this statement. Here is a link to one highly respected and large study - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study > How do you think they fatten up animals before slaughter? By feeding them meat? No, by feeding them grain. What? This comment is stupid on so many levels I don't know where to start. Here's a short list - These animals are 'by definition' different to humans. You can't extend results beyond species. - The animals are mostly dedicated herbivores. Feeding them meat would make them sick and very unhealthy to consume. - Meat is a lot more expensive to produce than grain. It takes about 10 calories of plant material to produce 1 calorie of meat. Using meat to produce meat would be uneconomical and ultimately unsustainable. - I'm not sure about the 'species BMI' they aim for but I would have thought that meat from 'obese' cows wouldn't be all the popular. I thought consumers generally tried to avoid the obvious fat.
  - jules 16y ago
    Do you sport or have physical activity in another way? I've found that there is a huge difference between sporting 30 minutes a week and no high intensity physical activity at all.
- ceejayoz 16y ago
  I think you're getting downvoted because it doesn't matter what he cut out - it matters that he was eating a caloric number conducive to weight loss. He could've eaten 1800 calories of steak, grains, and fruits each day and lost weight, too. It's just a lot easier to count calories for junk food, as the amounts are right there on the package. This diet was by no means healthy. It was simply a weight losing diet. Long-term, it'd be hell on your body, but it's an interesting approach to quickly bringing weight down (after which one'd hope he'd switch to a nice healthy diet).
  - techiferous 16y ago
    "I think you're getting downvoted because it doesn't matter what he cut out..." I agree that this is probably why mrj got downvoted. However, mrj's comments are valuable and further the discussion, so I really wish people didn't downvote. Furthermore, mrj could be right and the article's point--that cutting calories is all you need to focus on--could be wrong. That's the point of science: to form a hypothesis and then test it with multiple trials and multiple studies. If he got back up to 201 lbs and then did the same diet again but with fruits and vegetables instead of junk food, maybe he would've lost weight faster? Who knows until you do it?
  - mrj 16y ago
    Well, that's why I called it confounding, if he maintained the same diet and cut calories, that would be a much better experiment. Instead, he both cut calories and massively altered his diet, so there's no telling why he lost weight. I mentioned cutting meat as confounding his results, but the other alterations count just as much, too. Both the article and the diet are sloppy. Yes, he lost weight but even the nutritionist can't explain why, or even if it's a good idea to eat Twinkies for meals.
    - tbrownaw 16y ago
      > there's no telling why he lost weight Fat has about 3500 kCal/lb. If you consume fewer calories than you use, you will lose weight based on that ratio and your calorie deficit. Doing it wrong just means that your body tries to work against you (makes you hungry, makes you tired, makes you want to put on a sweater, etc) and you feel like shit, but for as long as you manage to stick to it you will lose weight.
spudlyo 16y ago
His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most -- not the nutritional value of the food. This should not be a startling revelation. Mind you we're speaking simply of weight loss, not "healthy eating" or "good nutrition" or any of the other topics that people often mix up with weight loss. It seems that in Professor Haub's case that the benefit to losing the weight outweighed the negative consequences of eating junk food -- at least in the short term.
- niels_olson 16y ago
  True. But a healthy weight is by far the single most important nutritional goal in our society. Malnutrition due to any other cause is exceedingly rare in the developed world.
- coffee 16y ago
  I think this is a startling revelation to MOST people. Most people do, as you've noted, mix up healthy food with weight loss. Have you ever told someone who wants to lose weight they should not add ton's of fattening (yet healthy) olive oil to their salads? Typical response: "But, it's healthy fat!" - yea, but it's fattening at 110 calories per tablespoon... Weight loss and good nutrition are mixed together. It's the premise behind a lot of marketing on food labels. Look how healthy some food product labels appear. "I want to lose weight, and the label says 'healthy choice' so it must be okay for me to eat!" A close review of the nutrition facts tells a completely different story. But who really reviews nutrition facts? I never looked at the nutrition facts, and I was always overweight. This last year I started tracking my food and it's calories ( one example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1828786 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1828786 ) - This is the first time in my life that I've been decreasing body fat percentage and increasing muscle percentage. No fad diet, hell, I drink beer and eat pizza. But the days that I do, I make sure to keep my calorie count in a deficit. It was startling to me, as obvious as it is now, that "healthy food" does not equal "low calorie food." And the way to lose body fat is eat less calories. Whodathunkit :)
  - niels_olson 16y ago
    > "healthy food" does not equal "low calorie food." And the way to lose body fat is eat less calories. Can't be overstated. Please tell anyone who will listen.
niels_olson 16y ago
Doc here. I'm not surprised that an adult male carrying 33.4% body fat dropped weight on an 1,800 calorie diet. Nor am I surprised that his cholesterol stayed down. If you've every seen a patient on total parenteral nutrition or g-tube feeds, they all move toward a normal BMI and then get scrawny. The switch over to skinny is due to muscle atrophy from disuse. If they survive and return to a normal activity level, they typically regain the muscle mass. The take-away: don't eat too much. Quiz: 1) what three food groups did he cut out of his diet? 2) What is the normal range of BMI for an adult male? 3) Fat is transported in the blood in various kinds of packets. HDL and LDL are proteins that label the outsides of certain packets. If HDL goes up during weight loss, where do you think those packets are coming from? Where do you think LDL packets are going to? If Professor Haub's weight equilibrates with his new 2100 calorie diet, what do you expect will happen to his HDL and LDL?
- techiferous 16y ago
  I'll take a stab at #1. I'd say he missed the "fish, poultry and eggs", "healthy fats/oils" and "whole grains" groups. He was eating from the "use sparingly", "dairy" (from the shake), and "vegetables and fruits". Eggs are often in the types of snacks he was eating, so it's possible you could argue he was also eating from the "fish, poultry and eggs" group. I'm using the groups as defined in the Healthy Eating Pyramid: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/pyramid-full-story/index.html http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-...
  - niels_olson 16y ago
    Upvote. I wish it was more obvious that I wasn't using food groups as a proper noun. Since he wasn't eating fruit, you can see the friction between the language of reality to the use of language in food politics. "Fruits and vegetables" are different. Compared to stems and leaves, fruits are high in sugar, low in fiber and complex carbs.
    - DLWormwood 16y ago
      I’m going to have to plead some confusion or ignorance I here. I’m well aware that nutrition has become a political hot potato for the last few decades, but I’m trying figure out why you felt the need to bring it up in your response. What do you mean by “not food groups as a proper noun?"
sleepdev 16y ago
"For 10 weeks, ..." For his own health I am glad that he didn't continue the diet much longer. There are a number of confounding variables here that the article forgot to mention, which most likely played a larger part in his weight loss than any calorie counting: Stress. Stress can cause sudden weight loss. This weight will come right back if you give your body any time to catch up and yet the effect is significant enough to provide "evidence" for the craziest of dieting fads. Eating debbie cakes for 3 meals a day is going to put some serious stress on your body. Metabolism is not constant. Michael Phelps eats more for breakfast than I do in a week, and yet he is in much better shape. The scary thing about junk food is not so much the empty calories, but more how it affects your metabolism in the long term. If you draw out this sort of a diet for 2 or 3 years, then I would expect that not only could you give yourself diabetes, but also you will start craving more and needing less. That is when weight gain will start to become a serious problem.
- spudlyo 16y ago
  There are a number of confounding variables here that the article forgot to mention, which most likely played a larger part in his weight loss than any calorie counting. I disagree completely. Stress and metabolism are minor factors compared to the repeatable, testable, and well understood calculus of calories in vs calories out.
  - spinlock 16y ago
    What repeatable calculus? This is a story about one guy not a study of a population of people. I'd be cautious before you jump to the conclusion that these results will generalize. That probably says more about your own biases than it does any scientific learning that was produced by this experiment.
    - spudlyo 16y ago
      The Harris-Benedict equations are generally accepted as empirically corroborated and reliable predictors of weight change as a function of daily caloric intake.
  - 16y ago
ugh 16y ago
I’m not surprised at all. I lost 40 pounds just calorie counting, changing nothing at all about what I ate. (No happy ending here. You have to be really disciplined for a long time to keep your weight and over the following years I gained it all back.) You will automatically tend to eat healthier, though. 200g of potato chips make you happy for a few hours but you will feel terrible for the rest of the day (because you cannot eat anything else). Carrots taste nearly as good and you can eat a ton (not literally) of them.
- niels_olson 16y ago
  You're right. Tell everyone you know.
- SMrF 16y ago
  I've also lost 40 pounds with purely calorie counting. Although I've managed to keep it off for two years, and I don't see it coming back (easily). My approach was to kill bad habits one at a time and create new good habits to take their place. For example I replaced smoking with walking. I replaced high calorie snacks at home with fruits and vegetables so I would go for those instead. The key has been to take things slowly and not try to do too much at once. I still count calories, but what I eat is pretty much a mindless habit now, (the good kind). I have also gotten into the habit of weighing myself daily and plotting it on a graph. This gives me very good feedback when I'm going in the wrong direction. Almost 4 years ago I weighed 220 and smoked a pack a day. Now I weigh 175, ran my first 5K this year and I ride my bike 20 miles to work every day! Edit: I hope you give it a go again. It's not easy, but once you turn the corner it's really worth it.
- mikeklaas 16y ago
  I don't see how you can honestly say that carrots taste nearly as good as chips. I will admit that people generally underestimate the satisfaction of munching crisp raw vegetables, however.
  - ugh 16y ago
    They clearly don’t. That was a bit of hyperbole on my part. I do love them very much, though, they are definitely the best non-fried vegetable.
tomazmuraus 16y ago
It is no magic, in the simplest explanation it all comes down to the law of thermodynamics and calorie balance. If you are interested in this kind of stuff, check Lyle's website[1]. He has many good articles about this kind of stuff. [1]: http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/the-energy-balance-equation.html http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/the-energy-balance...
jakarta 16y ago
Warren Buffett is a big practitioner of this kind of diet. In his biography, there is a segment about his dieting habits and he used a two pronged approach: 1. Calorie restriction but eat a food he loved - so ice cream or milk shakes all day one day. 2. Make it so if he didn't stick to the diet, he'd have to pay one of his friends a large sum of money. The combination of greed and eating what you love seemed to pay off in terms of keeping his weight in line.
MtL 16y ago
Boom, there goes his insulin sensitivity.
- robchez 16y ago
  Exactly. Next stop, type 2 diabetes.
- niels_olson 16y ago
  No. Even with intense glycemic index spikes, the area under the curve isn't enough.
vb6 16y ago
Sugary snacks every 3 hours for 10 weeks. A trip to the dentist might be in order
patrickgzill 16y ago
I started to cook and eat more at home, with no particular plan or calorie counting. Started to lose weight just from that.
robchez 16y ago
As someone who is pretty active in the health/fitness community I HATE n=1 studies like this that get so much press. All this does is give people yet another excuse not to eat a healthy diet and it gets quite annoying. Of course if you starve yourself of calories you will lose weight, but how sustainable is that in the long term? The reason 90% of diets fail is because people can't keep to them, and who can keep on such a calorie restrictive diet. Never mind the fact that you will be losing muscle mass along with the fat in a starvation type diet like this. The Calories In = Calories Out dogma, has been ousted out of the hardcore Health/Nutrition community (See Gary Taubes book Good Calories, Bad Calories). The quality and type of foods you eat, i.e the macronutritent ratios, are infinitely more important than the total number of calories. That is not to say that we can eat 10,000 calories of the right food, but you can eat to satiety or to your BMR and still lose weight by eating food that in the right macro ratios. A diet like the one described here would be destroying this persons insulin sensitivity and in turn his leptin sensitivity. He will be at high risk of Type 2 Diabetes among other things. If you want to lose weight and get healthy easily, cut your carbs dramatically, eat protein and fat to satiety. Lift some weights and do some slow steady cardio every other day (brisk walk etc.) Fix your sleep hygiene (this is super important) and you will be blown away at how the fat will disappear.
- brandnewlow 16y ago
  Case in point: I started a diet like that about 3.5 weeks ago. No bread/cheese/beer/soda/candy/potatoes. I eat a good deal of meat and tons of broccoli, bean sprouts, and mushrooms each day. I also started a simple weight lifting regime (3 times a week), and hit the bike a few times. I'm down 15 lbs so far and feeling really good. The biggest problem with sustaining this I think is going to be boredom with my food options. I'm not a fan of how most vegetables taste.
  - robchez 16y ago
    Good work mate. With regards to boredom, if you have the time, learn to cook. I can't tell you how much my health has improved from just learning to cook. With the right amount of olive oil (or bacon fat ;]) you can make some pretty awesome salads.
joshklein 16y ago
The thing that makes healthy food healthy is that you become full & satiated on less calories. Proving that you can force yourself to eat 1,800 calories of unhealthy food doesn't say much.
rsheridan6 16y ago
Why does a pregnant woman gain weight? Because she consumes more calories than she burns. Why does someone with hypothyroidism gain weight? They consume more calories than they burn. Why does someone on prednisone or antipsychotics gain weight? They consume more calories than they burn. Why does someone on an 11-day meth bender lose weight? They burn more calories than they consume. All true, but it's not the most enlightening way to look at it. The more interesting question is why they eat so much/little. In my experience, and the experience of lots of others, eating food like Little Debbie's makes you want to pig out, whereas it's practically impossible to pig out on steak or chicken. I'm not surprised that you could lose weight on an 1800 calorie junkfood diet, but I think it would be hard to stick with it, even by the standards of diets, which are pretty much all hard to stick with. The fact that a doctor, a profession loaded with people who are a few standard deviations above the norm in terms of ability to delay gratification and self-discipline - a med school professor, no less (same but more so) - has the discipline to do this for 10 weeks, is not surprising, and probably not relevant for the average person who's struggling to lose weight.
- xiaoma 16y ago
  ...whereas it's practically impossible to pig out on steak or chicken. Speak for yourself. I've witnessed my ex-roommate eat in excess of 3000 calories of rotisserie chicken in a single sitting. Ditto for steak. And yes, like most big meat-eaters, he was obese.
joshklein 16y ago
Source: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/cookie-diet/AN02051 http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/cookie-diet/AN02051 Question: The Cookie Diet: Can it help you lose weight? What is the Cookie Diet? How does it work? Answer from Katherine Zeratsky, R.D., L.D.: "The original Cookie Diet was created in 1975 by Dr. Sanford Siegal to help his overweight patients lose weight. The Cookie Diet limits calories to no more than 1,000 a day, which come from six prepackaged cookies plus one meal, such as skinless chicken and steamed vegetables. The cookies are made and sold by Dr. Siegal's company and are said to contain a proprietary amino acid mixture that fights hunger. If followed, a diet of less than 1,000 calories a day will likely lead to weight loss. But such a restricted diet can make it hard to meet all of your nutritional needs. In addition, it's difficult to stick with extreme diets such as the Cookie Diet. As a result, any lost pounds come right back once the diet stops. The bottom line: To achieve and maintain a healthy weight, you need to make permanent and sustainable changes in your eating and exercise habits."

80 points by raleec 16y ago

iuguy 16y ago

I'm doing something similar to shift a few pounds. Two weeks ago I came home, I'd been particularly involved and forgot to eat. In order to get my calorific intake up to the minimum in my diet, I had to get some serious calories. So I had a small pizza, 4 bottles of Sol and a wife with a very suspicious look on her face.

mrj 16y ago

To curb calories, he avoided meat, whole grains and fruits. Hmm, confounding. There's a lot of crazy stuff in meat, stuff that might well have something to do with obesity rates rising. There are many studies that show that the vegetarian diet is the most healthy. His results may have less to do with Twinkies than with the meat he avoided. Edit: Not sure why I'm getting down voted to oblivion? I eat meat... I have no agenda here, just pointing out a deficiency in the article's reasoning.

a1k0n 16y ago
I would wager this is almost certainly why his cholesterol dropped and explains many of the effects. This is basically the central premise of the book The China Study, which is what convinced me to go vegetarian myself about a year ago (I dropped 30 lbs without even trying in about three months and now I weigh less than I did in high school). Still, he's eating a lot of refined sugar, so I'm pretty surprised. Then again, so am I (thanks Halloween!).
- niels_olson 16y ago
  >I would wager this is almost certainly why his cholesterol dropped and explains many of the effects. His cholesterol dropped because he went from a consuming more calories than he burned to a diet where he was burning more calories than he ate. The excess calories were converted into fat and transported in LDL-labeled packets to the adipocytes. Once he started losing weight, adipocytes started releasing fat in smaller HDL-labeled packets for the liver to convert to glucose to meet his energy needs.
  - esponapule 16y ago
    Not all excessive calories are converted into fat. It all depends on blood glucose level, and liver/muscle glycogen storage levels and the level of activity after the meals.
    - niels_olson 16y ago
      Glycogen isn't excess. There's a fairly fixed upper bound to your glycogen stores. In fact there's a whole class of glycogen storage diseases which are very life-limiting, all due to excess storage (inadequate storage would be lethal in utero). Calories burned through activity are by definition not excess. I suppose you could argue that in diabetics with blood sugar above 200, then yes, the sugars become an osmotic diuretic and they literally pee out the calories, but otherwise, excess calories go to fat. Fat is the ultimate, infinite sink in this equilibrium equation.
- Evgeny 16y ago
  This is basically the central premise of the book The China Study, which is what convinced me to go vegetarian myself You may also be interested to read the impressive critique of the China Study, which is based on Colin Campbell's own data: http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fallac/ http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fal... which is what convinced me that my diet, which contains a fair amount of meat, poultry, eggs and seafood is the way to go.
esponapule 16y ago
As a vegetarian, I can attest to the health aspect of it. I am more healthy than anyone I know (all meat/dairy/egg eaters). Whenever I get a checkup they always ask if i am an athlete or some weird health nut, I just say , "no I just don't eat animals." My last cholesterol test was 113 total.
- fleitz 16y ago
  You can be unhealthy and be a vegetarian as well. I know plenty of overweight vegetarians. I also know a tonne of VERY healthy vegetarians. Mostly, vegetarians are just more interested in healthy eating than the average person. There is nothing inherently more healthy about a vegetarian diet than a non-vegetarian diet. How do you think they fatten up animals before slaughter? By feeding them meat? No, by feeding them grain.
  - dejb 16y ago
    > There is nothing inherently more healthy about a vegetarian diet than a non-vegetarian diet. Can you provide a reference for this totally unsupported assertion? There is a wealth of evidence that contradicts this statement. Here is a link to one highly respected and large study - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study > How do you think they fatten up animals before slaughter? By feeding them meat? No, by feeding them grain. What? This comment is stupid on so many levels I don't know where to start. Here's a short list - These animals are 'by definition' different to humans. You can't extend results beyond species. - The animals are mostly dedicated herbivores. Feeding them meat would make them sick and very unhealthy to consume. - Meat is a lot more expensive to produce than grain. It takes about 10 calories of plant material to produce 1 calorie of meat. Using meat to produce meat would be uneconomical and ultimately unsustainable. - I'm not sure about the 'species BMI' they aim for but I would have thought that meat from 'obese' cows wouldn't be all the popular. I thought consumers generally tried to avoid the obvious fat.
- jules 16y ago
  Do you sport or have physical activity in another way? I've found that there is a huge difference between sporting 30 minutes a week and no high intensity physical activity at all.
ceejayoz 16y ago
I think you're getting downvoted because it doesn't matter what he cut out - it matters that he was eating a caloric number conducive to weight loss. He could've eaten 1800 calories of steak, grains, and fruits each day and lost weight, too. It's just a lot easier to count calories for junk food, as the amounts are right there on the package. This diet was by no means healthy. It was simply a weight losing diet. Long-term, it'd be hell on your body, but it's an interesting approach to quickly bringing weight down (after which one'd hope he'd switch to a nice healthy diet).
- techiferous 16y ago
  "I think you're getting downvoted because it doesn't matter what he cut out..." I agree that this is probably why mrj got downvoted. However, mrj's comments are valuable and further the discussion, so I really wish people didn't downvote. Furthermore, mrj could be right and the article's point--that cutting calories is all you need to focus on--could be wrong. That's the point of science: to form a hypothesis and then test it with multiple trials and multiple studies. If he got back up to 201 lbs and then did the same diet again but with fruits and vegetables instead of junk food, maybe he would've lost weight faster? Who knows until you do it?
- mrj 16y ago
  Well, that's why I called it confounding, if he maintained the same diet and cut calories, that would be a much better experiment. Instead, he both cut calories and massively altered his diet, so there's no telling why he lost weight. I mentioned cutting meat as confounding his results, but the other alterations count just as much, too. Both the article and the diet are sloppy. Yes, he lost weight but even the nutritionist can't explain why, or even if it's a good idea to eat Twinkies for meals.
  - tbrownaw 16y ago
    > there's no telling why he lost weight Fat has about 3500 kCal/lb. If you consume fewer calories than you use, you will lose weight based on that ratio and your calorie deficit. Doing it wrong just means that your body tries to work against you (makes you hungry, makes you tired, makes you want to put on a sweater, etc) and you feel like shit, but for as long as you manage to stick to it you will lose weight.

spudlyo 16y ago

His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most -- not the nutritional value of the food. This should not be a startling revelation. Mind you we're speaking simply of weight loss, not "healthy eating" or "good nutrition" or any of the other topics that people often mix up with weight loss. It seems that in Professor Haub's case that the benefit to losing the weight outweighed the negative consequences of eating junk food -- at least in the short term.

niels_olson 16y ago
True. But a healthy weight is by far the single most important nutritional goal in our society. Malnutrition due to any other cause is exceedingly rare in the developed world.
coffee 16y ago
I think this is a startling revelation to MOST people. Most people do, as you've noted, mix up healthy food with weight loss. Have you ever told someone who wants to lose weight they should not add ton's of fattening (yet healthy) olive oil to their salads? Typical response: "But, it's healthy fat!" - yea, but it's fattening at 110 calories per tablespoon... Weight loss and good nutrition are mixed together. It's the premise behind a lot of marketing on food labels. Look how healthy some food product labels appear. "I want to lose weight, and the label says 'healthy choice' so it must be okay for me to eat!" A close review of the nutrition facts tells a completely different story. But who really reviews nutrition facts? I never looked at the nutrition facts, and I was always overweight. This last year I started tracking my food and it's calories ( one example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1828786 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1828786 ) - This is the first time in my life that I've been decreasing body fat percentage and increasing muscle percentage. No fad diet, hell, I drink beer and eat pizza. But the days that I do, I make sure to keep my calorie count in a deficit. It was startling to me, as obvious as it is now, that "healthy food" does not equal "low calorie food." And the way to lose body fat is eat less calories. Whodathunkit :)
- niels_olson 16y ago
  > "healthy food" does not equal "low calorie food." And the way to lose body fat is eat less calories. Can't be overstated. Please tell anyone who will listen.

niels_olson 16y ago

Doc here. I'm not surprised that an adult male carrying 33.4% body fat dropped weight on an 1,800 calorie diet. Nor am I surprised that his cholesterol stayed down. If you've every seen a patient on total parenteral nutrition or g-tube feeds, they all move toward a normal BMI and then get scrawny. The switch over to skinny is due to muscle atrophy from disuse. If they survive and return to a normal activity level, they typically regain the muscle mass. The take-away: don't eat too much. Quiz: 1) what three food groups did he cut out of his diet? 2) What is the normal range of BMI for an adult male? 3) Fat is transported in the blood in various kinds of packets. HDL and LDL are proteins that label the outsides of certain packets. If HDL goes up during weight loss, where do you think those packets are coming from? Where do you think LDL packets are going to? If Professor Haub's weight equilibrates with his new 2100 calorie diet, what do you expect will happen to his HDL and LDL?

techiferous 16y ago
I'll take a stab at #1. I'd say he missed the "fish, poultry and eggs", "healthy fats/oils" and "whole grains" groups. He was eating from the "use sparingly", "dairy" (from the shake), and "vegetables and fruits". Eggs are often in the types of snacks he was eating, so it's possible you could argue he was also eating from the "fish, poultry and eggs" group. I'm using the groups as defined in the Healthy Eating Pyramid: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/pyramid-full-story/index.html http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-...
- niels_olson 16y ago
  Upvote. I wish it was more obvious that I wasn't using food groups as a proper noun. Since he wasn't eating fruit, you can see the friction between the language of reality to the use of language in food politics. "Fruits and vegetables" are different. Compared to stems and leaves, fruits are high in sugar, low in fiber and complex carbs.
  - DLWormwood 16y ago
    I’m going to have to plead some confusion or ignorance I here. I’m well aware that nutrition has become a political hot potato for the last few decades, but I’m trying figure out why you felt the need to bring it up in your response. What do you mean by “not food groups as a proper noun?"

sleepdev 16y ago

"For 10 weeks, ..." For his own health I am glad that he didn't continue the diet much longer. There are a number of confounding variables here that the article forgot to mention, which most likely played a larger part in his weight loss than any calorie counting: Stress. Stress can cause sudden weight loss. This weight will come right back if you give your body any time to catch up and yet the effect is significant enough to provide "evidence" for the craziest of dieting fads. Eating debbie cakes for 3 meals a day is going to put some serious stress on your body. Metabolism is not constant. Michael Phelps eats more for breakfast than I do in a week, and yet he is in much better shape. The scary thing about junk food is not so much the empty calories, but more how it affects your metabolism in the long term. If you draw out this sort of a diet for 2 or 3 years, then I would expect that not only could you give yourself diabetes, but also you will start craving more and needing less. That is when weight gain will start to become a serious problem.

spudlyo 16y ago
There are a number of confounding variables here that the article forgot to mention, which most likely played a larger part in his weight loss than any calorie counting. I disagree completely. Stress and metabolism are minor factors compared to the repeatable, testable, and well understood calculus of calories in vs calories out.
- spinlock 16y ago
  What repeatable calculus? This is a story about one guy not a study of a population of people. I'd be cautious before you jump to the conclusion that these results will generalize. That probably says more about your own biases than it does any scientific learning that was produced by this experiment.
  - spudlyo 16y ago
    The Harris-Benedict equations are generally accepted as empirically corroborated and reliable predictors of weight change as a function of daily caloric intake.
- 16y ago

ugh 16y ago

I’m not surprised at all. I lost 40 pounds just calorie counting, changing nothing at all about what I ate. (No happy ending here. You have to be really disciplined for a long time to keep your weight and over the following years I gained it all back.) You will automatically tend to eat healthier, though. 200g of potato chips make you happy for a few hours but you will feel terrible for the rest of the day (because you cannot eat anything else). Carrots taste nearly as good and you can eat a ton (not literally) of them.

niels_olson 16y ago
You're right. Tell everyone you know.
SMrF 16y ago
I've also lost 40 pounds with purely calorie counting. Although I've managed to keep it off for two years, and I don't see it coming back (easily). My approach was to kill bad habits one at a time and create new good habits to take their place. For example I replaced smoking with walking. I replaced high calorie snacks at home with fruits and vegetables so I would go for those instead. The key has been to take things slowly and not try to do too much at once. I still count calories, but what I eat is pretty much a mindless habit now, (the good kind). I have also gotten into the habit of weighing myself daily and plotting it on a graph. This gives me very good feedback when I'm going in the wrong direction. Almost 4 years ago I weighed 220 and smoked a pack a day. Now I weigh 175, ran my first 5K this year and I ride my bike 20 miles to work every day! Edit: I hope you give it a go again. It's not easy, but once you turn the corner it's really worth it.
mikeklaas 16y ago
I don't see how you can honestly say that carrots taste nearly as good as chips. I will admit that people generally underestimate the satisfaction of munching crisp raw vegetables, however.
- ugh 16y ago
  They clearly don’t. That was a bit of hyperbole on my part. I do love them very much, though, they are definitely the best non-fried vegetable.

tomazmuraus 16y ago

It is no magic, in the simplest explanation it all comes down to the law of thermodynamics and calorie balance. If you are interested in this kind of stuff, check Lyle's website[1]. He has many good articles about this kind of stuff. [1]: http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/the-energy-balance-equation.html http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/the-energy-balance...

jakarta 16y ago

Warren Buffett is a big practitioner of this kind of diet. In his biography, there is a segment about his dieting habits and he used a two pronged approach: 1. Calorie restriction but eat a food he loved - so ice cream or milk shakes all day one day. 2. Make it so if he didn't stick to the diet, he'd have to pay one of his friends a large sum of money. The combination of greed and eating what you love seemed to pay off in terms of keeping his weight in line.

MtL 16y ago

Boom, there goes his insulin sensitivity.

robchez 16y ago
Exactly. Next stop, type 2 diabetes.
niels_olson 16y ago
No. Even with intense glycemic index spikes, the area under the curve isn't enough.

vb6 16y ago

Sugary snacks every 3 hours for 10 weeks. A trip to the dentist might be in order

patrickgzill 16y ago

I started to cook and eat more at home, with no particular plan or calorie counting. Started to lose weight just from that.

robchez 16y ago

As someone who is pretty active in the health/fitness community I HATE n=1 studies like this that get so much press. All this does is give people yet another excuse not to eat a healthy diet and it gets quite annoying. Of course if you starve yourself of calories you will lose weight, but how sustainable is that in the long term? The reason 90% of diets fail is because people can't keep to them, and who can keep on such a calorie restrictive diet. Never mind the fact that you will be losing muscle mass along with the fat in a starvation type diet like this. The Calories In = Calories Out dogma, has been ousted out of the hardcore Health/Nutrition community (See Gary Taubes book Good Calories, Bad Calories). The quality and type of foods you eat, i.e the macronutritent ratios, are infinitely more important than the total number of calories. That is not to say that we can eat 10,000 calories of the right food, but you can eat to satiety or to your BMR and still lose weight by eating food that in the right macro ratios. A diet like the one described here would be destroying this persons insulin sensitivity and in turn his leptin sensitivity. He will be at high risk of Type 2 Diabetes among other things. If you want to lose weight and get healthy easily, cut your carbs dramatically, eat protein and fat to satiety. Lift some weights and do some slow steady cardio every other day (brisk walk etc.) Fix your sleep hygiene (this is super important) and you will be blown away at how the fat will disappear.

brandnewlow 16y ago
Case in point: I started a diet like that about 3.5 weeks ago. No bread/cheese/beer/soda/candy/potatoes. I eat a good deal of meat and tons of broccoli, bean sprouts, and mushrooms each day. I also started a simple weight lifting regime (3 times a week), and hit the bike a few times. I'm down 15 lbs so far and feeling really good. The biggest problem with sustaining this I think is going to be boredom with my food options. I'm not a fan of how most vegetables taste.
- robchez 16y ago
  Good work mate. With regards to boredom, if you have the time, learn to cook. I can't tell you how much my health has improved from just learning to cook. With the right amount of olive oil (or bacon fat ;]) you can make some pretty awesome salads.

joshklein 16y ago

The thing that makes healthy food healthy is that you become full & satiated on less calories. Proving that you can force yourself to eat 1,800 calories of unhealthy food doesn't say much.

rsheridan6 16y ago

Why does a pregnant woman gain weight? Because she consumes more calories than she burns. Why does someone with hypothyroidism gain weight? They consume more calories than they burn. Why does someone on prednisone or antipsychotics gain weight? They consume more calories than they burn. Why does someone on an 11-day meth bender lose weight? They burn more calories than they consume. All true, but it's not the most enlightening way to look at it. The more interesting question is why they eat so much/little. In my experience, and the experience of lots of others, eating food like Little Debbie's makes you want to pig out, whereas it's practically impossible to pig out on steak or chicken. I'm not surprised that you could lose weight on an 1800 calorie junkfood diet, but I think it would be hard to stick with it, even by the standards of diets, which are pretty much all hard to stick with. The fact that a doctor, a profession loaded with people who are a few standard deviations above the norm in terms of ability to delay gratification and self-discipline - a med school professor, no less (same but more so) - has the discipline to do this for 10 weeks, is not surprising, and probably not relevant for the average person who's struggling to lose weight.

xiaoma 16y ago
...whereas it's practically impossible to pig out on steak or chicken. Speak for yourself. I've witnessed my ex-roommate eat in excess of 3000 calories of rotisserie chicken in a single sitting. Ditto for steak. And yes, like most big meat-eaters, he was obese.

joshklein 16y ago

Source: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/cookie-diet/AN02051 http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/cookie-diet/AN02051 Question: The Cookie Diet: Can it help you lose weight? What is the Cookie Diet? How does it work? Answer from Katherine Zeratsky, R.D., L.D.: "The original Cookie Diet was created in 1975 by Dr. Sanford Siegal to help his overweight patients lose weight. The Cookie Diet limits calories to no more than 1,000 a day, which come from six prepackaged cookies plus one meal, such as skinless chicken and steamed vegetables. The cookies are made and sold by Dr. Siegal's company and are said to contain a proprietary amino acid mixture that fights hunger. If followed, a diet of less than 1,000 calories a day will likely lead to weight loss. But such a restricted diet can make it hard to meet all of your nutritional needs. In addition, it's difficult to stick with extreme diets such as the Cookie Diet. As a result, any lost pounds come right back once the diet stops. The bottom line: To achieve and maintain a healthy weight, you need to make permanent and sustainable changes in your eating and exercise habits."