6 ms·

I thought the article was going somewhere different, but it appears the answer is "diet and exercise"...

by ry0ohki 13y ago

whazzmaster 13y ago
It's tough to for any author to reduce the concepts of weight management beyond 'calories in' and 'calories out.' I've been on a weight rollercoaster for the past 10 years, varying between 180 and 230 lbs and I've read many of the same books the author names, and while they all may lead to self-discovery on what makes YOUR body tick, none of them contain the mystical ONE THING that will cause you to lose 20 lbs in one week. In this I agree whole-heartedly with the author. For those that are very overweight, I do highly recommend the advice to change your diet first, without starting an extensive exercise regimen. Many folks' regular diet is so bad that just eating healthy food and drinking water will cause them to lose 5+ lbs in the first week. You need to buy-in early on to the idea that exercise isn't about burning off the food you ate (as that's impossible) but about raising your metabolism and conditioning your body.
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  It's also not very hard to lose 5lb if you are morbidly obese. Harris-Benedict predicts that an individual should have an equilibrium bodyweight depending on their activity level and mean caloric intake. When your actual weight deviates from equilibrium, you will approach it along an exponential curve. This means that if you alter your diet, your initial loss (or gain) will be rapid, while later losses/gains will be very slow. Graphs here: http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/weight_stability.html http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/weight_stability.html
- stephengoodwin 13y ago
  I didn't lose 20 lbs in 1 week, but cutting wheat, corn, and dairy from my diet and upping my vegetable intake to 5-7 servings/day has caused me to lose 30 lbs over the past 4 months.
VLM 13y ago
"diet and exercise" He went in the "personality diet" direction, not just diet, which was pretty weird because he basically went paleo although is being very careful not to use the phrase. Tip toe all around it. I don't know if there's a legal explosion going on or what about the term, because I've noticed this elsewhere. The Paleo thing is pretty easy to implement if you know anything about food, most of the time, the more recently it was added to the rich western diet, the less of it you should be eating. Just make a ranking and try to reasonably optimize at the store. Pretty simple and cheap and easy to implement. Tastes pretty good too. It really pisses people off because there's no diet industry personalities to make money, no guilt inducing neo-puritanism, no weird expensive foods to buy. Kind of a post-capitalism diet, other than I have to haunt my produce aisle at the store about twice a week rather than once a week back when I mostly ate "psuedo-food" out of freezer boxes. I do spend less money on food, so what I waste in extra gasoline becomes just a rounding error.
- dalmaer 13y ago
  I am sorry that you think I tried not to mention "Paleo". I agree that many of the changes were Paleo, but I also don't know how much of the other things affected change. Over time I have also morphed the Paleo items of the diet. I don't think everyone needs to label things. I also enjoyed: http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/Debunking-the-Paleo-Diet-Christ http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/Debunking-the-Paleo-Diet-Chri...
  - VLM 13y ago
    "I don't think everyone needs to label things." Then in the article you "There was a period of fierce reading about nutrition" followed by a long list of interesting labeled diets where your chosen course based on research was to basically select the paleo-ish part of each different diet, resulting in a basically paleo conclusion, without mentioning it by name. Combine that with the section of the article beginning "I started first with what I was consuming:" and the following read like a laundry list from Robb Wolf himself... You're on the right path. Its a really good path. But there's a sign you haven't mentioned hanging over the trail reading "welcome to the more or less paleo diet". You don't have to read that sign, you apparently figured it out the hard way via research. I think its cool you found the path all by yourself with intense study. Great minds think alike and all that, Very encouraging results. But folks looking for it the easy way on google or whatever are going to find it a lot easier, if you just use the commonly accepted placename / label. The Warinner presentation is pure straw dog. There's some hilarious rebuttals to be googled for. The important point is they're PR style debates not scientific debates. A lot of credentialism, one paleontologist vs multiple actual MDs, lots of focus on minor meaningless details. Its a very strange PR event. I wouldn't read too much into either her presentation or the rebuttals. Thats nice that you say the captain of the titanic should have steered a course of 15 degrees to avoid the iceberg, but I think a more correct value is actually 16 degrees, now lets distract the helmsman from making any change at all by arguing, as the ship plows directly into the iceberg. Given that the presentation provides little information, it does however point out that an open mind toward research is a great outlook. This is not a revealed religion. I fully expect that within my lifetime the ideal % meat consumption will change by 5% or so, but up or down, who knows? The overall message will remain the same, you should mostly eat what your ancestors ate, more or less, and the western diet is a pretty horrible epic fail at that with some really nasty negative health and financial consequences.
mbrameld 13y ago
While the answer boils down to "diet and exercise" the point of the article was explaining the changes in mindset it took to get the author to change his habits. Knowing that diet and exercise is the most effective way to get healthy and putting that knowledge to practice are two different things entirely.

I thought the article was going somewhere different, but it appears the answer is "diet and exercise"...

by ry0ohki 13y ago

I thought the article was going somewhere different, but it appears the answer is "diet and exercise"...

It's tough to for any author to reduce the concepts of weight management beyond 'calories in' and 'calories out.' I've been on a weight rollercoaster for the past 10 years, varying between 180 and 230 lbs and I've read many of the same books the author names, and while they all may lead to self-discovery on what makes YOUR body tick, none of them contain the mystical ONE THING that will cause you to lose 20 lbs in one week. In this I agree whole-heartedly with the author. For those that are very overweight, I do highly recommend the advice to change your diet first, without starting an extensive exercise regimen. Many folks' regular diet is so bad that just eating healthy food and drinking water will cause them to lose 5+ lbs in the first week. You need to buy-in early on to the idea that exercise isn't about burning off the food you ate (as that's impossible) but about raising your metabolism and conditioning your body.

yummyfajitas 13y ago
It's also not very hard to lose 5lb if you are morbidly obese. Harris-Benedict predicts that an individual should have an equilibrium bodyweight depending on their activity level and mean caloric intake. When your actual weight deviates from equilibrium, you will approach it along an exponential curve. This means that if you alter your diet, your initial loss (or gain) will be rapid, while later losses/gains will be very slow. Graphs here: http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/weight_stability.html http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/weight_stability.html
stephengoodwin 13y ago
I didn't lose 20 lbs in 1 week, but cutting wheat, corn, and dairy from my diet and upping my vegetable intake to 5-7 servings/day has caused me to lose 30 lbs over the past 4 months.

VLM 13y ago

"diet and exercise" He went in the "personality diet" direction, not just diet, which was pretty weird because he basically went paleo although is being very careful not to use the phrase. Tip toe all around it. I don't know if there's a legal explosion going on or what about the term, because I've noticed this elsewhere. The Paleo thing is pretty easy to implement if you know anything about food, most of the time, the more recently it was added to the rich western diet, the less of it you should be eating. Just make a ranking and try to reasonably optimize at the store. Pretty simple and cheap and easy to implement. Tastes pretty good too. It really pisses people off because there's no diet industry personalities to make money, no guilt inducing neo-puritanism, no weird expensive foods to buy. Kind of a post-capitalism diet, other than I have to haunt my produce aisle at the store about twice a week rather than once a week back when I mostly ate "psuedo-food" out of freezer boxes. I do spend less money on food, so what I waste in extra gasoline becomes just a rounding error.

dalmaer 13y ago
I am sorry that you think I tried not to mention "Paleo". I agree that many of the changes were Paleo, but I also don't know how much of the other things affected change. Over time I have also morphed the Paleo items of the diet. I don't think everyone needs to label things. I also enjoyed: http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/Debunking-the-Paleo-Diet-Christ http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/Debunking-the-Paleo-Diet-Chri...
- VLM 13y ago
  "I don't think everyone needs to label things." Then in the article you "There was a period of fierce reading about nutrition" followed by a long list of interesting labeled diets where your chosen course based on research was to basically select the paleo-ish part of each different diet, resulting in a basically paleo conclusion, without mentioning it by name. Combine that with the section of the article beginning "I started first with what I was consuming:" and the following read like a laundry list from Robb Wolf himself... You're on the right path. Its a really good path. But there's a sign you haven't mentioned hanging over the trail reading "welcome to the more or less paleo diet". You don't have to read that sign, you apparently figured it out the hard way via research. I think its cool you found the path all by yourself with intense study. Great minds think alike and all that, Very encouraging results. But folks looking for it the easy way on google or whatever are going to find it a lot easier, if you just use the commonly accepted placename / label. The Warinner presentation is pure straw dog. There's some hilarious rebuttals to be googled for. The important point is they're PR style debates not scientific debates. A lot of credentialism, one paleontologist vs multiple actual MDs, lots of focus on minor meaningless details. Its a very strange PR event. I wouldn't read too much into either her presentation or the rebuttals. Thats nice that you say the captain of the titanic should have steered a course of 15 degrees to avoid the iceberg, but I think a more correct value is actually 16 degrees, now lets distract the helmsman from making any change at all by arguing, as the ship plows directly into the iceberg. Given that the presentation provides little information, it does however point out that an open mind toward research is a great outlook. This is not a revealed religion. I fully expect that within my lifetime the ideal % meat consumption will change by 5% or so, but up or down, who knows? The overall message will remain the same, you should mostly eat what your ancestors ate, more or less, and the western diet is a pretty horrible epic fail at that with some really nasty negative health and financial consequences.

mbrameld 13y ago

While the answer boils down to "diet and exercise" the point of the article was explaining the changes in mindset it took to get the author to change his habits. Knowing that diet and exercise is the most effective way to get healthy and putting that knowledge to practice are two different things entirely.