
How I Lost 20 Pounds in 20 Weeks With My iPhone (or: Data is King) - bemmu
http://chadaustin.me/2009/06/how-i-lost-20-pounds-in-20-weeks/
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rmanocha
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>).

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.

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edw519
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/>

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radu_floricica
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.

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RiderOfGiraffes
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
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.

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blhack
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>

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jamesbritt
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.

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bedris
_"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...

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chadaustin
"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.

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speek
<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).

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

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sophacles
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.

~~~
chadaustin
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.

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iterationx
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.

~~~
jrockway
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...

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

~~~
cschneid
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
Also, LSD and other drugs. So it must be weird? awesome? for an ex-consumer to
try to lose weight.

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isamuel
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.

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pixcavator
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
I thought about this, too.

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

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

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hop
Site not loading?

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chadaustin
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. :)

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kingkongreveng_
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
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.

~~~
kingkongreveng_
Calorie counting doesn't even work well in the short term. Metabolism drops
dramatically at the _cellular_ level on restricted calories. Insulin levels
are the key to fat catabolism/anabolism. Calories are secondary. You can get
fatter in caloric deficit if you're just eating sugar, or injecting loads of
insulin.

The value of exercise for weight loss has little to do with burning calories.
It's about hormones. Brief, intense exercise boosts growth hormone and
testosterone, which make you shed fat independent of calories burned. Your
body reconfigures. Note that endurance exercise doesn't really have this
effect.

Anaerobic exercise on an empty stomach directly burns fatty acids released
from body fat. A quick lifting session (20m) while hungry followed by a one or
two hour fast will burn a lot of fat. Aerobic exercise with a focus on
calories is fairly useless, as you indicate. It simply burns down glycogen
levels which are then replenished at the next meal with little impact on fat
reserves, unless you go for a very long run or bike ride. But then this has
the effect of dramatically boosting appetite, which can negate the effect.

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Locke1689
As long as you're not doing anything drastic and your basal metabolism stays
fairly constant, reducing your caloric intake works fine. Second law of
thermodynamics.

~~~
jerf
"As long as you're not doing anything drastic and your basal metabolism stays
fairly constant, reducing your caloric intake works fine. "

But that's the entire point. Reducing your caloric intake _causes_ your
metabolism to drop, for reasons that ought to be fairly obvious if you think
about it. If you think about it, it also should become obvious why that's the
only possible direction of causality, too.

~~~
Locke1689
It doesn't necessarily cause your basal metabolism to drop. I just confirmed
this with two physicians and a nutrition student.

