11 ms·

How I Lost 20 Pounds in 20 Weeks With My iPhone (or: Data is King)

89 points by bemmu 17y ago

rmanocha 17y ago
Couldn't agree more. I tried losing weight without keeping track of my daily weight, and got nowhere. Then I happened upon Jeremy Zawodny's spreadsheet (http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/006851.html http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/006851.html). Maintaining a daily record of my calorie intake as well as my weight has really helped me keep my eating in check. It has also helped me get motivated to keep going to the gym - everytime I see that graph flat lining, I kick it up a notch.
hop 17y ago
Site not loading?
- MikeCapone 17y ago
  Not working for me either.
- chadaustin 17y ago
  Ack, sorry. I'm in the process of moving to Dreamhost and my home DSL isn't very good at being a webhost... Sorry, this was bad timing. :)
edw519 17y ago
Very similar to "The Hacker's Diet" by John Walker, author of AutoCAD. He wrote a book about how he lost a bunch of weight using an engineering mindset. He also includes some very cool tools (Palm, Excel, and web-based). http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
- radu_floricica 17y ago
  Hacker's Diet is a bit scary, with all the excels and formulas. The "short version" worked well for me: count all calories, and better fast then slow.
tsally 17y ago
Hrm, a title with a healthy and realistic weight loss rate. Highly suspicious.
RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
Pretty much exactly how I lost 18 pounds in 24 weeks. Budget 400 calories (technical kCal) for each of three meals, allow 400 kCal for snacks, fruit, biscuits in meetings, etc., and allow a blowout every week. Works for me. Sneaking the weight back on - three weeks visiting the folks back home will down that, but getting back on the plan again and looking forward to seeing the progress again.
- radu_floricica 17y ago
  Blowouts and budgeting for snacks is damn useful. I used to exercise on blowout days, and had them somewhat more often (every fourth day). Also made sure I went over 2000 calories - this way for a couple of days afterwards I actually feel like eating less.
tocomment 17y ago
Why did you he say losing weight makes you smell bad? I've never heard of that. It sounds like a folk legend.
- cschneid 17y ago
  Fat is a storage device for lots of stuff. For example, THC (marijuana) builds up in fat cells. Losing weight releases some of that stored up junk. It's not out of the question that some of it would cause you to stink up a storm.
  - ovi256 17y ago
    Also, LSD and other drugs. So it must be weird? awesome? for an ex-consumer to try to lose weight.
- filosofo 17y ago
  I can't get the site to load, but if he's using the Atkins diet it's well-known to cause odors due to ketosis.
boundlessdreamz 17y ago
Site was loading extremely slowly. So I have mirrored it here http://www.manu-j.com/tmp/chad/ http://www.manu-j.com/tmp/chad/
peregrine 17y ago
For Android a similar app is called Calorie Counter(free) and is also very good at making counting calories easier.
isamuel 17y ago
The one thing that I wish Lose It! and similar weight-tracking apps did is report a moving average. This is crucial to Walker's "Hacker Diet"---otherwise progress looks random rather than, as a (say) ten-day moving average would reveal, steady and encouraging.
kingkongreveng_ 17y ago
It's great a calorie counting approach works for this guy, but it has a horrible clinical track record. Dozens of studies conclusively show it does not work in the long run absent focus on the composition of the calories. Even in clinical studies where they control everything the subjects eat it doesn't work. There is good empirical data on how to eat and exercise to get and stay thin. There's no reason to rely on outlier anecdotes like this. The prescription is: minimize starch and sugar (hard to do without eating fat), eat infrequently (don't snack), brief bouts of difficult exercise (sprinting, lifting) on an empty stomach. p.s. The headaches he describes are from very poor insulin sensitivity. He has a more serious health problem than body fat. The starchy/sugary diet he continues to eat leaves him at risk of disease. He says he still lives on junk fast food. What's the point of being thin but malnourished? p.p.s. Caffeine is not an appetite suppressant.
- radu_floricica 17y ago
  Calorie counting always works - when you want to lose a lot of weight and lose it quickly. For maintaining long term you can't stick with it though, so you most likely want to make lifestyle changes, including exercise. Exercise is fundamentally hard for weight loss. It takes a lot of time exercising in order to make a difference. Eating 600 calories less is not that hard - but from a bit of googling it looks like it would take 1.5 hours of continuous aerobics (plus time for changing and shower - that's over 2h every day). I'm not terribly out of shape, but I'm pretty sure I can't do 1.5h of aerobic and still stand. Also, I'd be famished afterwards. If you have good data for exercise, please share. Otherwise it's still anecdote vs anecdote.
  - likpok 17y ago
    A few points about exercise: Some of the point I have heard is to change the metabolism, so that while you are doing other things, you are burning more calories. The other issue is that simply eating less will cause you to lose muscle, not necessarily fat. Lifting will let you keep the muscle.
    - jamesbritt 17y ago
blhack 17y ago
I did something very very similar. I lost about 50lbs in about 2 months by very VERY closely tracking what I was eating. I wrote a super simple little web form for myself to input what I had eaten, and how many calories were in it. There were no fancy graphs or anything like this appears to have, but it made me very aware how what was going into my body. What made it great was that it was accessible from my phone, from my friends phone, from my computer at work, etc. etc. etc. If you care (although I suspect that anybody here could recreate this in about 10 seconds), you can check it out here: http://www.gibsonandlily.com/getskinny http://www.gibsonandlily.com/getskinny
bedris 17y ago
"If you vigorously lifted weights for an hour, you’d only burn ~400 calories, less than a single cheeseburger! You’d have to keep that up every single day without increasing your diet to lose a less than a pound per week. I decided it’s easier to simply eat less." What he is missing here is that lifting weights is anabolic and re-building damaged muscles from weight lifting takes lots of calories. Therefore, your metabolic rate increases and your fat burning increases 24/7 when you are progressively challenging your muscles by lifting increasing amounts of weight. Therefore, burning 400kcal in one hour lifting weights isn't the extent of the effect of that workout! This guy doesn't seem to know very much about physiology or metabolism...
- boots 17y ago
  Agreed completely. While calorie counting is a great start, a little weight lifting would have helped him achieve his goals sooner. More on the EPOC effect described in the comment above: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_post-exercise_oxygen_consumption http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_post-exercise_oxygen_con...
- chadaustin 17y ago
  "This guy doesn't seem to know very much about physiology or metabolism..." Exactly! With a bit of effort and really no impact to my life schedule, I reversed a weight gain trend. I very well could have lifted regularly or gone running, but I didn't want to.
iterationx 17y ago
My personal trainer said that weight lifting is better than aerobics because it elevates your metabolism for 36 hours whereas running will only elevate it for 4 hours. Also after my weight training session on Thursday my heart rate monitor / calorie counter unit said I burned 800 calories in an hour so I believe the guy.
- TrevorJ 17y ago
  I'm not completely doubting your trainer, but I'd be curious to hear some research to back this up.
- jrockway 17y ago
  I don't really trust the calorie measurements from heart-rate monitors. I have mine "calibrated" appropriately and I sometimes hit 1300 calories in an hour and a half on my bike. Yeah right...
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
pixcavator 17y ago
How about counting how many calories you buy? I understand people eat out a lot, but the grocery store is a place where you can make it both precise and effortless. That’s a business idea for you, or Kroger...
- eru 17y ago
  I thought about this, too.
speek 17y ago
http://www.precisionnutrition.com http://www.precisionnutrition.com These guys are fantastic if you want to change your lifestyle. In the past, I've done something like this program and I lost about 70 pounds (meanwhile becoming relatively buff and, if I might say so myself, rather sexy). I like this program because it's a laid back version of most ketogenic diets mixed with a whole food mentality (read: it's sustainable for life).
jamesbritt 17y ago
Interesting. I lost 20 lbs in about 20 weeks with my G1. ;) I've been going out running for about 30-40 minutes 2 out of every 3 days, and have pretty much stopped eating crap. The phone really didn't have that much to do with it, though having an app that tracked my time and distance has made it something of a game to see if I can improve my time. I got fed up with my gradually increasing weight, and started looking into what I was eating and the calorie cost. Granola will make you roly-poly! Who knew? Clearly I had some bad ideas on what to eat. I'm really bad at tracking calories or keeping regular regular records of stuff. For me it's simpler to just not have something around to eat at all rather than try to limit consumption. Luckily, I have something of a short food memory so I can eat the same thing most days (oatmeal with blueberries for breakfast; raw vegetables with Wasa crackers for lunch) and not get sick of it. A key factor was seeing real progress. I hate making myself get dressed and go out first thing in the morning, but losing belly fat and feeling (and looking) lots better makes me want to keep it up. I still eat junk now and then, and don't go crazy over it, since I know that on average I'm still getting fitter.
sophacles 17y ago
So calorie counting sounds great. Well not really. See I cook at home. By cook I dont mean "take out of box and put in microwave for specified time", I mean "chop, sautee, bake, stir, etc". If you have ever tried to figure calories from that, you understand why calorie counting sounds like 50-100x more trouble than it's worth.
- jrockway 17y ago
  I don't find it hard to estimate this. Sure, the cow killed to make your steak might be slightly different than every other cow in the world... but probably not. Unprocessed foods often have a predictable nutrition profile.
- chadaustin 17y ago
  You'd be surprised. After a couple weeks of obsessively counting calories and ingredients you get really good at estimating the caloric value of food. It's not hard to look at a sandwich and say "Oh, about 800." And if you're plus or minus 100, who cares? You don't have to be perfect, just show continued weight loss.

89 points by bemmu 17y ago

Couldn't agree more. I tried losing weight without keeping track of my daily weight, and got nowhere. Then I happened upon Jeremy Zawodny's spreadsheet (http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/006851.html http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/006851.html). Maintaining a daily record of my calorie intake as well as my weight has really helped me keep my eating in check. It has also helped me get motivated to keep going to the gym - everytime I see that graph flat lining, I kick it up a notch.

hop 17y ago

Site not loading?

MikeCapone 17y ago
Not working for me either.
chadaustin 17y ago
Ack, sorry. I'm in the process of moving to Dreamhost and my home DSL isn't very good at being a webhost... Sorry, this was bad timing. :)

edw519 17y ago

Very similar to "The Hacker's Diet" by John Walker, author of AutoCAD. He wrote a book about how he lost a bunch of weight using an engineering mindset. He also includes some very cool tools (Palm, Excel, and web-based). http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/

radu_floricica 17y ago
Hacker's Diet is a bit scary, with all the excels and formulas. The "short version" worked well for me: count all calories, and better fast then slow.

tsally 17y ago

Hrm, a title with a healthy and realistic weight loss rate. Highly suspicious.

RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago

Pretty much exactly how I lost 18 pounds in 24 weeks. Budget 400 calories (technical kCal) for each of three meals, allow 400 kCal for snacks, fruit, biscuits in meetings, etc., and allow a blowout every week. Works for me. Sneaking the weight back on - three weeks visiting the folks back home will down that, but getting back on the plan again and looking forward to seeing the progress again.

radu_floricica 17y ago
Blowouts and budgeting for snacks is damn useful. I used to exercise on blowout days, and had them somewhat more often (every fourth day). Also made sure I went over 2000 calories - this way for a couple of days afterwards I actually feel like eating less.

tocomment 17y ago

Why did you he say losing weight makes you smell bad? I've never heard of that. It sounds like a folk legend.

cschneid 17y ago
Fat is a storage device for lots of stuff. For example, THC (marijuana) builds up in fat cells. Losing weight releases some of that stored up junk. It's not out of the question that some of it would cause you to stink up a storm.
- ovi256 17y ago
  Also, LSD and other drugs. So it must be weird? awesome? for an ex-consumer to try to lose weight.
filosofo 17y ago
I can't get the site to load, but if he's using the Atkins diet it's well-known to cause odors due to ketosis.

boundlessdreamz 17y ago

Site was loading extremely slowly. So I have mirrored it here http://www.manu-j.com/tmp/chad/ http://www.manu-j.com/tmp/chad/

peregrine 17y ago

For Android a similar app is called Calorie Counter(free) and is also very good at making counting calories easier.

isamuel 17y ago

The one thing that I wish Lose It! and similar weight-tracking apps did is report a moving average. This is crucial to Walker's "Hacker Diet"---otherwise progress looks random rather than, as a (say) ten-day moving average would reveal, steady and encouraging.

kingkongreveng_ 17y ago

It's great a calorie counting approach works for this guy, but it has a horrible clinical track record. Dozens of studies conclusively show it does not work in the long run absent focus on the composition of the calories. Even in clinical studies where they control everything the subjects eat it doesn't work. There is good empirical data on how to eat and exercise to get and stay thin. There's no reason to rely on outlier anecdotes like this. The prescription is: minimize starch and sugar (hard to do without eating fat), eat infrequently (don't snack), brief bouts of difficult exercise (sprinting, lifting) on an empty stomach. p.s. The headaches he describes are from very poor insulin sensitivity. He has a more serious health problem than body fat. The starchy/sugary diet he continues to eat leaves him at risk of disease. He says he still lives on junk fast food. What's the point of being thin but malnourished? p.p.s. Caffeine is not an appetite suppressant.

radu_floricica 17y ago
Calorie counting always works - when you want to lose a lot of weight and lose it quickly. For maintaining long term you can't stick with it though, so you most likely want to make lifestyle changes, including exercise. Exercise is fundamentally hard for weight loss. It takes a lot of time exercising in order to make a difference. Eating 600 calories less is not that hard - but from a bit of googling it looks like it would take 1.5 hours of continuous aerobics (plus time for changing and shower - that's over 2h every day). I'm not terribly out of shape, but I'm pretty sure I can't do 1.5h of aerobic and still stand. Also, I'd be famished afterwards. If you have good data for exercise, please share. Otherwise it's still anecdote vs anecdote.
- likpok 17y ago
  A few points about exercise: Some of the point I have heard is to change the metabolism, so that while you are doing other things, you are burning more calories. The other issue is that simply eating less will cause you to lose muscle, not necessarily fat. Lifting will let you keep the muscle.
  - jamesbritt 17y ago

blhack 17y ago

I did something very very similar. I lost about 50lbs in about 2 months by very VERY closely tracking what I was eating. I wrote a super simple little web form for myself to input what I had eaten, and how many calories were in it. There were no fancy graphs or anything like this appears to have, but it made me very aware how what was going into my body. What made it great was that it was accessible from my phone, from my friends phone, from my computer at work, etc. etc. etc. If you care (although I suspect that anybody here could recreate this in about 10 seconds), you can check it out here: http://www.gibsonandlily.com/getskinny http://www.gibsonandlily.com/getskinny

bedris 17y ago

"If you vigorously lifted weights for an hour, you’d only burn ~400 calories, less than a single cheeseburger! You’d have to keep that up every single day without increasing your diet to lose a less than a pound per week. I decided it’s easier to simply eat less." What he is missing here is that lifting weights is anabolic and re-building damaged muscles from weight lifting takes lots of calories. Therefore, your metabolic rate increases and your fat burning increases 24/7 when you are progressively challenging your muscles by lifting increasing amounts of weight. Therefore, burning 400kcal in one hour lifting weights isn't the extent of the effect of that workout! This guy doesn't seem to know very much about physiology or metabolism...

boots 17y ago
Agreed completely. While calorie counting is a great start, a little weight lifting would have helped him achieve his goals sooner. More on the EPOC effect described in the comment above: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_post-exercise_oxygen_consumption http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_post-exercise_oxygen_con...
chadaustin 17y ago
"This guy doesn't seem to know very much about physiology or metabolism..." Exactly! With a bit of effort and really no impact to my life schedule, I reversed a weight gain trend. I very well could have lifted regularly or gone running, but I didn't want to.

iterationx 17y ago

My personal trainer said that weight lifting is better than aerobics because it elevates your metabolism for 36 hours whereas running will only elevate it for 4 hours. Also after my weight training session on Thursday my heart rate monitor / calorie counter unit said I burned 800 calories in an hour so I believe the guy.

TrevorJ 17y ago
I'm not completely doubting your trainer, but I'd be curious to hear some research to back this up.
jrockway 17y ago
I don't really trust the calorie measurements from heart-rate monitors. I have mine "calibrated" appropriately and I sometimes hit 1300 calories in an hour and a half on my bike. Yeah right...
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]

pixcavator 17y ago

How about counting how many calories you buy? I understand people eat out a lot, but the grocery store is a place where you can make it both precise and effortless. That’s a business idea for you, or Kroger...

eru 17y ago
I thought about this, too.

speek 17y ago

http://www.precisionnutrition.com http://www.precisionnutrition.com These guys are fantastic if you want to change your lifestyle. In the past, I've done something like this program and I lost about 70 pounds (meanwhile becoming relatively buff and, if I might say so myself, rather sexy). I like this program because it's a laid back version of most ketogenic diets mixed with a whole food mentality (read: it's sustainable for life).

jamesbritt 17y ago

Interesting. I lost 20 lbs in about 20 weeks with my G1. ;) I've been going out running for about 30-40 minutes 2 out of every 3 days, and have pretty much stopped eating crap. The phone really didn't have that much to do with it, though having an app that tracked my time and distance has made it something of a game to see if I can improve my time. I got fed up with my gradually increasing weight, and started looking into what I was eating and the calorie cost. Granola will make you roly-poly! Who knew? Clearly I had some bad ideas on what to eat. I'm really bad at tracking calories or keeping regular regular records of stuff. For me it's simpler to just not have something around to eat at all rather than try to limit consumption. Luckily, I have something of a short food memory so I can eat the same thing most days (oatmeal with blueberries for breakfast; raw vegetables with Wasa crackers for lunch) and not get sick of it. A key factor was seeing real progress. I hate making myself get dressed and go out first thing in the morning, but losing belly fat and feeling (and looking) lots better makes me want to keep it up. I still eat junk now and then, and don't go crazy over it, since I know that on average I'm still getting fitter.

sophacles 17y ago

So calorie counting sounds great. Well not really. See I cook at home. By cook I dont mean "take out of box and put in microwave for specified time", I mean "chop, sautee, bake, stir, etc". If you have ever tried to figure calories from that, you understand why calorie counting sounds like 50-100x more trouble than it's worth.

jrockway 17y ago
I don't find it hard to estimate this. Sure, the cow killed to make your steak might be slightly different than every other cow in the world... but probably not. Unprocessed foods often have a predictable nutrition profile.
chadaustin 17y ago
You'd be surprised. After a couple weeks of obsessively counting calories and ingredients you get really good at estimating the caloric value of food. It's not hard to look at a sandwich and say "Oh, about 800." And if you're plus or minus 100, who cares? You don't have to be perfect, just show continued weight loss.