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The Weight Loss Trap (time.com)
45 points by pmcpinto on May 28, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 58 comments



The article mentions a probiotic pill. I think that the microbiome is the place to look for answers, but not with pills, just with better fuel. I managed to lose 70 pounds (from 215 pounds down to 145) and keep it off so far. At the moment, I have to make efforts to get more calories now, not less.

- I think of food as fuel that goes into a fermentation-based engine. I make sure to add the right ingredients for proper fermentation.

- I only eat high-nutrient, whole foods that I mostly cook from scratch. The staples are vegetables, legumes, fruit, nuts, seeds.

- No meat or dairy except for fish (salmon, herring, and sardines).

- I eliminated: refined foods, alcohol, grains (except small amounts of brown rice and grain-like seeds like buckwheat), sugar, sweeteners, oils (except small amounts of coconut oil and high quality olive oil).

- I don't eat nightshade-family vegetables (including potatoes), but I do eat sweet potatoes (the regular yellow ones and satsuma "yams").

- I say, "I don't eat those foods", not "I can't eat those foods." (self identity vs. permission) I view junk food as a recreational drug. I don't eat junk in the same way that I don't smoke cigarettes.

- If I'm out, and there is nothing on a menu that I can eat, I don't eat, or I find some fruit or buy nuts and dried fruit at Berkeley Bowl.

- I restrict calories on some days, similar to the calorie restriction in the 5:2 diet.

- I eat a lot of fermented foods, often homemade: sauerkraut, pickles, water kefir, etc.

- It's sometimes difficult to get enough calories, but I often eat one avocado per day, plus a few handfuls of nuts.

I've also experimented with 2-5 day water fasting (very difficult) and alternate day fasting (too difficult for me to continue more than a week).

I don't know if those methods would work for anyone else, but maybe there is some information there that other people could find useful. (I'm not making recommendations -- just sharing my experiments. Check with a doctor before trying any unusual diets.)

The plan is based on thinking about the body as a farm of microorganisms. Different foods cultivate different microorganism. As far as I can tell, things like refined carbs and animal products (beyond small amounts) are not beneficial. It isn't "paleo" though -- I don't think that paleo is a good idea.


You say you eliminated sugar, but fruit has lots of sugar in it.

I actually think there are lots of different diets that can work. Mine is rather different than yours (keto, with tons of meat and fat) but I've lost about 60lb on it and never felt better.


I mean refined sugar. I don't add sugars or other sweeteners to my food.

The fiber in fruit reduces the effect of the sugar. See this article: https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/making-the-case-fo...

Also, I don't eat huge amounts of sweet fruits. Avocados, cucumbers, and squash are fruits too.


If it works for you, great.


I assume he means added sugar


> The article mentions a probiotic pill. I think that the microbiome is the place to look for answers, but not with pills, just with better fuel.

No, its the microbiome first.

http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/woman-becomes-...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gut-bacteria-...


That's what I'm saying. :)

I focus on creating the ideal environment for a healthy microbiome, and I don't think that people should wait around for a pill, because the most obvious answer is to change one's diet.

People say, "it's too hard to change my diet", but they don't realize that changing diet is much easier than dealing with health problems. Unhealthy food has literally become an addictive, recreational drug, and most people have trouble quitting or even admitting that they have a problem.


Congrats on your success. Just my two cents, but I suspect the fact that you've given up sugar, grains, and alcohol is probably the main reason for your weight loss. For most people that restriction would chop about a thousand calories off their daily intake.


Thanks. I'm not sure that it's just the calories. I suspect that it's a lack of certain types of fuel in the gut that results in the wrong balance of microorganisms.


Parent comment is definitely not suggesting it's just the calories.


I eat a very similar diet, and use good fats to move my total caloric intake up to my desired range. Eggs in butter, coconut cream in the smoothie, avocado oil for a vegetable stir fry...


I think your comment and the article both pointed toward the same thing without saying it: we don't know enough to brute force our way to good health with engineered food, so we should have humility and embrace a combination of tradition and what we find in nature.


I've heard most of the things you do suggested before, except for fermented foods - could you please elaborate on what is your reasoning behind that?


My goal with this way of eating isn't just to reduce calories, but it's to create the an environment that feeds a healthy collection of microbes. Basically this:

"a future step for researchers could be to identify probiotics or diets that encourage the right kinds of microbes to grow to promote weight loss."[1]

I don't look at myself as a single organism, but more as a farm that needs proper gardening. See this[2], and this[3]. Here[4] is an example of one beneficial organism that you can find in fermented foods. I think that humans are generally doing things the wrong way -- we shouldn't simply kill bacteria and other microbes, but we should create environments that cultivate a good balance of beneficial ones. Another interesting place to look is the hygiene hypothesis.[5]

Eating healthily after a lifetime of not eating well takes a lot of effort, but so does not smoking cigarettes (if one is addicted).

[1] http://www.sciencealert.com/gastric-bypass-surgery-gives-pat...

[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-...

[2a] That above ratio may be incorrect, but it is still significant. See also https://www.sciencealert.com/bacteria-cells-don-t-actually-o...

[3] http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/47125/...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactobacillus_rhamnosus

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis


Fruit, nuts, seeds, fish -- sounds at least in the "paleo" ballpark.


Paleo is high in animal products and low in carbs. My diet has no animal products except fish a couple of times per week, and I eat carbs -- just not refined ones. I don't eat most grains, but I do eat some brown rice, buckwheat, sweet potatoes, satsuma "yams", etc.


People get so sensitive about the word and weather it's paleo or not, but eating like that clearly works.


Before I was into computers, I studied "primitive wilderness skills" for a long time.[1] The paleo diet doesn't match with what I studied about hunter gatherer cultures. I don't like it for a few reasons, so I avoid the term. Check out some of the criticism of it online.[2] Paleo tends to rank pretty low relative to other diets.[3]

[1] http://artofmemory.com/forums/traditional-wilderness-living-...

[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-paleo-diet-ha...

[3] http://health.usnews.com/best-diet/best-diets-overall


I know paleo isn't an accurate term, but I am saying your dietary guidelines fall into what a lot of the "Paleo" talkers advise. Unprocessed meat and vegetables with carbs from sweet potatoes... Half the "Paleo for athletes" types articles advise even eating legumes.


> Unprocessed meat

That's one major difference. The Paleo Diet recommends getting 55% of all calories from meat and seafood, but I don't eat any meat other than occasional fish (maybe 700-1,000 calories per week), and I do eat some brown rice. Most healthy diets recommend eating a lot of vegetables. For me, sweet potato is the same as any other vegetable -- not exactly a staple by itself.

I would intentionally avoid the word paleo, because I think that it would confuse people or give some kind of implicit approval to ideas that I don't agree with. I used to seriously practice real paleolithic living skills[1], and I think that the Paleo Diet gets too many things wrong. If I would use the world "paleo", people might think that it has something to do with the other paleolithic activities I used to practice, so I'm making an effort to distance myself from it. :)

[1] http://artofmemory.com/forums/traditional-wilderness-living-...


In the article, they mention that RMR (resting metabolic rate) goes down when your weight goes down, but they don't really explain why, or how crash diets affect your RMR. RMR calories are used for basic movement, body heat, keeping your brain and organs working, etc.

If there's less of you (weight wise), there's less of you to maintain. You carry less when you walk, etc. Also, different types of body (bone, organ, muscle, fat) have different requirements. Muscles and organs take a lot of calories to keep going, and rebuild.

A lot of people when they diet, they lose both fat and muscle. The body will break down muscles as energy too, as well as your fat. This is usually because you're eating less than you expend, calorie wise, and you're probably not strength training.

Lifting weights is a great way to increase your RMR. It takes calories to build and repair muscles after working out, and those bigger muscles also take more calories to maintain. It also forces your body to build up something, preventing the saggy skin you may see on those TV diet shows.

Overall, if you work on building up your muscle, your metabolism will slow less, or maybe even increase, depending on how much you get into it.


I'd be more specific and say that you can far more easily increase your body's wastefulness by strengthening your​ legs rather than your arms, because a given increase in muscle should be smaller percentage-wise. And lunges don't take any equipment (you've already got resistance, moreso if you're overweight.)


.. although please folks, take the care (and pay a trainer, preferably) to teach you the techniques to do it safely so that you don't hurt your knees / back, which you can much less easily fix.


I didn't see anything in the article that showed that people lost weight without eating less then they burn. This is still as far as I know the only way to lose weight. What's stated in the article is that different people seem to manage to maintain doing so for longer with different strategies. They give as example people who are motivated enough to work through multiple plans and stratetegies over many years and continue to do so even when the weight loss is slow.

It makes me conclude that to sustain weight loss you simply need to be very motivated, have good discispline and great patience.

It seems they adapted strategies based on people's motivation. The girl who found logging all her meals too tedious instead adopted a more exercise strategy, etc. Nothing seems related to identifying which nutrients or foods are better processed, etc, for each individual.

I'm sure there could be genetic, social, or chemical related causes to obesity, but I'm not seeing this article say that we identified any of those. It seems to all be about simply getting your act together and sticking with it.

I suspect most people who gain back the weight lost do not do so while maintening the diet they used to lose it. The article makes it sound like so, but doesn't actually says so.


I think the problem with the "calories in < calories out" idea is that while it's not necessarily untrue, it's too simplistic to be useful. It's a bit like saying, well, if you'd just stop putting cocaine up your nose, you wouldn't be a drug addict anymore.


And it also ignores the very difficult problem of counting "calories out". There are so many factors that affect calories out.


It's also very difficult to count "calories in". Pop quiz question: how many calories are there in a gram of fiber? If you answered zero, you are wrong. The correct answer is "nobody knows". Check the wikipedia article

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_fiber

"In some countries fiber is not listed on nutrition labels and is considered to provide no energy. In other countries all fiber must be listed and is simplistically considered to provide 17 kJ/g (4.1 kcal/g) (because chemically fiber is a type of carbohydrate and other carbohydrates provide that amount of energy). In the US, soluble fiber must be counted as 4 kcal/g (17 kJ/g), but insoluble fiber may be (and usually is) treated as not providing energy and not mentioned on the label."


The ONLY reliable way to count calories out is to wear a mask that measures carbon dioxide exhaled - this is what you see them doing in labs with a volunteer on a treadmill or stationary bike hooked up to what looks like breathing apparatus.

This obviously isn't practical for every day use but the data has been used to approximate calories out correlated with heart rate if body weight is known - several sports watches such as Suunto use this approach.


You also need to collect all sweat, urine, and feces and figure out a way to exactly measure the undigested calories found in it.

So I would say the mask method is the BEST way, but not necessarily accurate.


I agree in the sense that it might not be sustainable for someone to forever keep track of their calories. It's also challenging in the sense that while you could max out your daily calories from eating only cake, it wouldn't really give you enough nutrients to be sustainable.

So I tend also to favor something that teaches people long lasting lifestyle changes and habits rewiring instead. This will be personal and different for everyone. Many lifestyle can work, and each can choose their own.

But nothing is novel about this. The article hints at something novel, of the sort that if you changed your gut microbiome you might suddenly lose weight even if you keep eating the same way, because the body would metabolise differently. Or that each person has foods that make them fat, and if you identify what they are and cut them out, you can eat an infinite amount of the rest and you won't get fat. This would be really novel, but I failed to see proof of this in the article.


Here's another related article: http://www.sciencealert.com/gastric-bypass-surgery-gives-pat...

This is exactly what I'm trying to do with my diet experiments, though for general health, not just weight loss:

"a future step for researchers could be to identify probiotics or diets that encourage the right kinds of microbes to grow to promote weight loss."


> I didn't see anything in the article that showed that people lost weight without eating less then they burn. This is still as far as I know the only way to lose weight.

It isn't just calories in, calories out. There are other ways to lose weight that suggest there are other things at work.

- https://www.sciencealert.com/human-trials-will-test-freeze-d...

- http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/25/health/fecal-bacteria-obesity/


It will be interesting to see the result of those studies, and I hope it turns out true, and a pill is all we will need in the future to allow ourselves to eat what we want while not gaining weight. But for now, there's no proof this is true, and it could turn out that it's diet which changes the gut. I'll be patient on this one though.


I'm generally skeptical about instant pill solutions. Food is fuel, not a recreational drug. If you don't eat the right fuel, there will be problems, even if you don't gain weight. I don't think that there is a way around that.


How I changed my body shape in 7 months: https://00f.net/2017/03/07/weight-loss/


"Mommy? Why are healthcare cost so high?" "Obviously Virginia, it's Uncle Sam and the healthcare industrial complex. It has NOTHING to do with our diets, lifestyle, etc. You have a Good given right to over indulge..."

Per the article: "The vast majority of American adults are overweight; nearly 40% are clinically obese. And doctors now know that excess body fat dramatically increases the risk of serious health problems, including Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, depression, respiratory problems, major cancers and even fertility problems. A 2017 study found that obesity now drives more early preventable deaths in the U.S. than smoking."


> A 2017 study found that obesity now drives more early preventable deaths in the U.S. than smoking.

Well, smoking has declined a lot in the past few decades. So it's not surprising that something else has taken the lead in causing preventable death.


This is actually true and I have no clue why you were downvoted for it.

>The percentage of U.S. adults who smoke cigarettes declined from 20.9 percent in 2005 to 16.8 percent in 2014. Cigarette smoking was significantly lower in 2014 (16.8 percent) than in 2013 (17.8 percent)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_tobacco_consum...


Keyword: preventable.

Point being, we're not ill because we need to be, we're ill because - wait for it - we want to be.

Welcome to The Matrix. We're just fuel for the machines. And apparently, we're more that happy to be as such.


You're not taking into account the dairy, meat, sugar, and corn lobbies. They are at least partially responsible for the diet and lifestyle of the lower-consciousness population.


[flagged]


Would you please not post rants on divisive topics to HN? That's effectively trolling and leads to the sort of low-rent flamewar we hope to avoid here.


Um. Sorry?

But at some point someone somewhere doesn't someone have to speak The Truth? We keep hearing how the cost of healthcare is the fault of X, Y and/or Z. That's a lie. It's #prolefeed.

How can we solve a problem when where not even looking in the right places for answers?


Speaking the truth is important. As with anything so important, there are concerns to be aware of. One is that most of us overestimate how much of the truth we possess. A second is that speaking the truth can do harm, e.g. when using it to blast people who don't yet see it—they necessarily become defensive and then the cause of truth is set back. A third is that truth has a lot of energy and if you drop it like a bomb on the playing field, you damage the space in which we're trying to explore the truth together.

The one who knows more has greater responsibility. Two unhelpful ways to speak the truth are to yell it out because it's frustrating to see something that other people don't, or to provoke people with it. The first is venting and the second is trolling, and both are incumbent on the truth-bearer to resist. If you do them, you discredit the truth you're trying to show.

Take this into account and there will be a bonus benefit, too: in cases where you don't really know as much of The Truth as you believe you do, you'll do less harm.


That point is, NO ONE BUT YOU controls: what goes in your shopping cart

Technically yes but in practice not really. Most people aren't professional nutritionists; they look to trusted authority figures for advice. And when the government says "most of your calories should come from carbs" and so on, people, not unreasonably, believe them.


I agree, they're listening to someone else, and not their own bodies. But that's like Oprah more than it's Uncle Sam. People hear what they want. And anyone who says "Eat whatever you want because your 'body type's doesn't matter."

Futhermore, at some point don't you look at your expanding waistline, look at a non expanding friend and ask "What's your diet and lifestyle like?" Or do you just blame the system?

No doubt it's tough. No doubt being mindful of what goes into your being - mind and body - is tough (#sarcasm). Why be your own (gate) keeper when you can just let loose and let someone else pick up the tab?

In any case, I do agree with you to some extent. So let's talk about that as part of the problem. But we don't. We blame the system yet refuse to talk about health. That's clearly not working.


Damn them LIBRULS!

Never mind that actual healthcare costs are more expensive than in other countries on a pill by pill and procedure by procedure basis.

Healthcare cost in the United States isn't about liberal or conservative or progressive or whatever label. Get over your tribal blame game.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/why-an-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/03/26/21-gr...

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/health-costs-how-the-us-...


Yeah. Thanks. And nevermind that cost is a function of demand. It's simple...they cost more because they can. People's health is so f'ed they have no choice. Try this: look at the cost of those pills and then look at the p/c occurrence of the diseases they enable in that country? Again, go back to the pull quote from the OP.

Decrease demand (i.e., stop eating and lifestyle'ing in ways that are unhealthy) and prices will fall. But we refuse to prevent the preventable, and then complain about costs?

My point is simple. You can't talk responsibility about healthcare and costs without talking about personal health and personal responsibility for health. Health and healthiness drives healthcare cost.


People do the best they can with the level of awareness that's available to them.


You embarrass yourself by responding to parent's inane political jab. It's pure signalling, without any hint of substance to contradict.

But, if you insist on making a straw man out of it, as you have, the popular term seems to be 'lib-tard', to judge from my Very talkative coworker.


I like to stick with the first law of thermodynamics. It's worked very well my entire life.


Do you have something specific to the article to contribute? While as far as we know the laws of physics apply to human respiration, a general statement like this ignores at least endocrinology and amounts to trolling.


Human biology is complex. Reducing it to simple thermodynamics completely ignores factors like metabolism, psychology and microbiome.

Eating nutrient deficient/extremely tasty sweets (or junk food) has very different effects than eating nutrient dense/bland red meat or vegetables with the same calories.

Reductionism is counterproductive in this case. You should re-read the article. It describes a number of ways where human metabolism responds to calories and/or body weight in unexpected ways (hence the biology is 'complex').


The difference between junkfood and healthy food is the "calorie density". A big mac is 500kcal, but you are still hungry after eating one.


That's not the whole story.

Do this experiment: drink/eat fat, 38% sweet cream is probably the friendliest to the uninitiated, but butter, olive oil, coconut oil would also work.

It doesn't get more dense than pure fat (and only about 2.5 as much as 38%fat sweet cream), and you will NOT be hungry afterwards.


Again, an oversimplification. Different flavors, salt intake, even psychology can come into play in how your appetite is affected and how your body may react to what you just ate.


Dunnings Krueger much?

We have calories in down to a pretty good science (although more and more studies are finding very incorrect measuring going on). Good luck counting calories out. That's a rabbit hole of extreme complexity.


I agree with the DK reference, but I disagree that we have the "calories in" nailed down (and of course, calories out is completely out of the question).

For example, food temperature must (calorically) make some difference - e.g., if I drink a liter of 3 deg(celsius) water every day, and remain at 36 dec(celsius) myself, vs. if I drink a 43 deg(celsius) tea (and remain at same temp), the "in" is significantly difference (to the tune of 40kcal/liter between the extremes), whether you count it on in or out.

Furthermore, we don't even have carbs properly - depending on microbiome, undigestable fiber to you might be digestable to me, e.g. [0], and whether you eat digest papaya or carbon at the same time as other things can significantly change how much "calories in" the represent.

[0] http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2010/04/japanese-guts-are-mad...


Yes, I left that part out of my answer just to keep from muddying the water even further.




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