I did this years ago and lost some weight doing it at the time, but the basic premise of "a calorie is a calorie is a calorie" is provably not true. The body's metabolism plays a massive part in determining how many calories are consumed, and this in turn is driven by availability. Long term calorie deficit will result in your body learning how to operate more efficiently, and slow down your weight loss.
I've also tried low-carb twice, the first time I lost a reasonable amount pretty quickly, but gained it back over a few years when I reverted to a normal diet, and the second time when I shifted to intermittent fasting as I went back to a more normal diet.
There's lots of good advice available if you search for intermittent fasting, but the key take away is that insulin is produced in response to excess carbohydrates, and not only promotes storage of carbohydrates as fat, but also inhibits burning existing fat. Of course, if you are at a calorie deficit, you'll probably still lose weight especially with regular small amounts, because the insulin effect will be low, but if you have few carb-heavy meals, your body will still create a lot of insulin to get rid of all the carbs, and then after you work through the hunger phase after that's happened, then you will start converting that fat back to energy, and in a calorie restriction situation hopefully burn more than you need.
You are right in that caloric expenditure is going to affect the CI-CO balance, and at a deficit your expenditure will decline due to both a decrease in basal metabolism as well as decrease in spontaneous activity.. but at the end of the day a calorie deficit is by definition the only way to lose weight.
Choice of macronutrient composition directly (and indirectly through hormones) affects satiety, and many find it easier to eat less calories by restricting carbs, but for weightloss at the end of the day a calorie is still a calorie.
"A calorie is a calorie is a calorie" is true once the calories are in the bloodstream of your body, and that's clearly what "the hackers diet" means.
Every pound of extra fat on your body comes from a calorie surplus that at one time or another existed in your bloodstream. If that surplus came from bacon or carrots doesn't matter for the pound of fat (it might matter for your heart and health in other ways of course).
It's also true that in order to lose that pound of fat, you need to create a deficit of calories in your bloodstream.
The problem is that you can't know how many calories from various foods actually end up in your bloodstream in advance. Just like any given number of "calories per hour of running" is obviously just a rough estimate (varies by how heavy you are, how cold it is, if it's uphill, how good a runner you are and so on), the number of "calories per serving" on the box of food is also an estimate.
Your body could be particularly good at absorbing calories from rice, or particularly bad at absorbing calories from beans. This could also be temporary, or affected by what other things you eat, or when you eat during the day.
The hackers diet solves this complex thing by having you keep a record of what you eat and do over time, and /measuring the results/. Then you know what is true /for you/, personally, and you can adjust your habits and predict the results.
The best tip I got from it however was the idea that hunger is a signal telling your body to start burning fat. That made me able to endure the periods of hunger during the first few days without giving up.
Once the body started to burn fat, all the discomforts of hunger went away permanently for the duration of the diet. I think a lot of dieters fail just because they think the discomfort is unbearable and will last forever.
The “a calorie is a calorie” is on over-simplification, but it’s a fairly safe one to make, until you’re managing all the upstream concerns optimally. It’s like the eng. concept of first getting the orders of magnitude right, before zeroing in on the details.
(This is for people with normal metabolisms, ie not diabetics)
>the key take away is that insulin is produced in response to excess carbohydrates,
Citation? My experience is consistent with yours. However, my understanding is that insulin is mainly a signal to cells to take on nutrients, and it is not exclusively a response to carbohydrates, much less "excess carbohydrates." Certain amino acids provoke an insulin response, for example. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2660133/
I followed this plan and lost over 100 lbs (45 kg) in about a year and have kept it off for the last five years. Even more impressively, I did it while eating the very same junk food that made me fat, albeit in different quantities. I tried every diet you could imagine before reading the book and failed every single time. As a programmer, the approach Walker uses just clicks with me. If you're overweight and have an engineering mindset, it's absolutely worth the read. It changed my life.
I still follow the plan to this day, albeit with more sophisticated logging. I use a combinatorial optimizer web app that tells me what to eat every day so that it completely takes the element of choice (and ability to screw up) out of the equation. I've developed it for the last five years and am hoping to release it as a product and/or open source eventually. If anyone's interested, shoot me an email (link on my website) and I'll share access.
The Hacker's Diet has helped me lose a good bit of weight over the years, but it is a somewhat simplistic model. Metabolism isn't quite as simple as CICO and can adjust over time to compensate for lowered metabolic rate. Herman Pontzer's recent book, Burn: the Misunderstood Science of Metabolism, goes into metabolic differences in quite a bit of detail and is very well researched and based in science.
(just the first one that came up on a Google Search)
This doesn't look like a fit and healthy man and I don't some that isn't fit and healthy should dole out advice on how to control a chaotic system such as human physiology using engineering.
Perhaps - and this is a theory I subscribe to: less fat/weight loss isn't what we're trying to achieve as a goal. Perhaps just being fit is. And fit looks different for different people because genetics. And what I mean is, is there lean muscle mass on a person's body (irregardless of % of fat, to a large degree). If I look at this photo of Mr. Walker, to me he looks skinny fat, which I think is just as bad as being "fat".
Just as an idea - as one who has a BMI of 25.8 and who could also run a marathon, then pump out 10 or so pullups. I think fat % or weight in general is just the wrong metric to use.
When you say that being skinny fat is bad, in what sense do you mean that, and what evidence is there for it? Are you talking about aesthetics, cardiac risk, mortality risk, quality of life, or something else? Do you mean e.g. with 5kg extra fat but no extra muscle he'd have equal risk of a heart attack?
Your logic seems to be “he doesn’t look like a fitness influencer, therefore he’s not fit and healthy”, and I’m not sure that stacks up. Maybe his goals are not the same as yours, and you shouldn’t conflate them?
I'm specifically not and as an aside I don't look like a fitness influencer either. I'm absolutely saying his goals are not the same as mine as I am literally saying losing weight shouldn't be the end all, be all goal. It should be having a good amount of muscle. The photo I posted makes me think that this guy is just skinny fat, which is what happens when champion diet over exercise.
Take a look at a sub elite/elite power lifter. They may be have a body composition of 20%+ fat, but they are also packing a lot of lean muscle. For the most part, I would call that a healthy individual, even though they're BMI (which is... problematic) would say that this person is overweight and in need of a diet. That doesn't even pass the sniff test for me.
Thinness is not the goal you want to achieve. It's a very easy goal to achieve when compared to being a fit individual. Starve yourself and you're done.
You can not starve yourself into being a fit individual.
As someone who follows too many fitness influencers, it sounds like you follow too many fitness influencers. Muscle is lean by definition. This guy isn't fit, but I don't think he claims to be. He's a software developer who seems to be uninterested in fitness as a concept, he just doesn't want to be obese, which he isn't.
Yes, being fit, strong, and lean is harder than not being extremely overweight. But not everyone cares about that.
We're actually not assessing him very differently. But I'm saying being "thin" and "weak" is just as big of a problem as, "fat" and "weak". The problem isn't being fat, it's being "weak". If I'm assessing someone and they have 30% bodyfat, but are as strong as an ox, I'm not worried about their long term health. I use the example of a advanced power lifter in a post, upstream - you know a someone that looks like this?
Chiseled abs and a penchant for energy drinks isn't needed. If I was to be critical, I'd say that low of a body fat % for long periods of time is counter productive to overall fitness and ugh: the shit you find in some energy drinks.
I found the local discount grocery store selling Soylent for 70 cents a bottle, normally $4, so I bought the store out, all 6 cases. I'm not living exclusively on it, but it's nice to have a meal in the bottle for someone who doesn't always like to cook. I especially like it for breakfast because I feel good afterwards, like it gives me everything my body needs.
Soylent was introduced in 2014 after a crowdfunding campaign...In January 2013, American software engineer Rob Rhinehart purchased 35 chemical ingredients—including potassium gluconate, calcium carbonate, monosodium phosphate, maltodextrin, olive oil—all of which he deemed to be necessary for survival, based on his readings of biochemistry textbooks and U.S. government websites. Rhinehart used to view food as a time-consuming hassle and had resolved to treat it as an engineering problem.
I read this pdf years and years ago.. I wish that I could say I followed it. It's rather brilliant in its simplicity, and honesty.
The math can't be argued with. Eat X, expend < x and M++.
For me the challenge is not to lose weight, but to gain weight and develop muscles. I'm an otherwise healthy young male but even with proper diet my weight gain rate is way too slow. I'm guessing I've a high metabolic rate. Is there any actually good guide for gaining weight quickly in a healthy way?
Are you assessing and recording your caloric intake and your macros currently? Are you assessing and recording your weight daily on a reliable scale? If not, those are the places to start. Buy some scales (body and food), get the MyFitnessPal app, and start collecting data on what you normally eat and how much you weigh over time. If you are losing weight over time, eat more of what you normally eat until you weight stabilizes.
Once your weight has stabilized and you have a baseline, go to iifym.com and develop a weight gain / bulking plan. This will be what you currently eat daily calorie wise + 200-300 calories with prescribed macros. Try to hit your newly prescribed calories and macros each day with a focus on healthy eating (track and record your food intake to monitor this) and keep track of your weight. You should aim for 1-2 lbs per week of weight gain. If you are not achieving that, increase calories by 100-200 per day until you do.
I used to be like that. I couldn’t get above 75 kg no matter how much I lifted or ate protein and stuff. This solved itself by getting older. Now I still have trouble putting on muscle but getting fat is quite easy :-).
In hindsight I think it’s not a good goal to gain weight if your body doesn’t respond. I would focus on eating right and being strong, flexible and coordinated and let the weight settle wherever it wants.
Assuming you have been lifting/ exercise, you just gotta eat more whole grain carbohydates. Rolled or steel cut oats, brown rice, pasta 2-3 times a day and you can exceed your daily calories requirement pretty easily.
Its very unlikely you have a high metabolic rate, this has almost no factor in muscle building. You need enough workload, calories, protein and rest to gain muscle, its really that simple.
The amount of horseshit around the diet is unbelievable. Its not fun, its not catchy, do the work and results will happen.
You're very likely what's called "hardgainer" in the fitness field. Just search for it, you'll find lots of information.
However, starting with the idea of doing things "quickly" is the worst possible approach. In the fitness, quick improvements are also lost very quickly; plus, staying fit requires permanent, lifelong changes, and in this perspective, quick or slow don't matter.
Please don’t look up “hardgainer”… it’s full of a bunch of ad-speak designed to prey upon your insecurities in the hopes that they can take your money.
Some people are skinnier. If you are one of these people it is a very lucky thing, as you are much less likely to experience health issues due to your weight over the course of your life.
Gaining weight is harder for you, but i think you know that already? So you can skip the bizarre indoctrination of a relatively useless word like hardgainer. Anyone who insists otherwise is either drinking the cool-aid themselves or trying to take your money.
And at the end of the day what’s the point? All the fundamentals are relatively the same. If you want to gain weight you will just have to eat more food? How much is literally as personal as something gets. So start with counting what you eat, be empirical about it, and slowly raise/lower accordingly. This is the same advice as anyone, regardless of what category of marketing speak and I securities they have.
"Hardgainer" is simply the term for a person that struggles to put mass ("hard" "gainer") using generic programs; it's not associated to a specific methodology.
For this reason, by looking the term up, one will find different approaches, and try a few, to see what works.
> If you want to gain weight you will just have to eat more food?
This is imprecise/wrong for several reasons, the first being that the parent assumes already a correct diet:
> I'm an otherwise healthy young male but even with proper diet my weight gain rate is way too slow
Now:
> All the fundamentals are relatively the same
Even assuming that fundamentals are "relatively the same", each body responds differently, and there are lots of ways to structure a plan, even if the same exercises are performed.
It's ultimately a matter of finding what works effectively for a given body. I actually write as somebody who does only fundamentals (as in "multi-joint exercises" for the main muscle groups) with a nonconventional schedule.
"If you want to gain weight you will just have to eat more food?"
That is not correct. Food either gets digested or you just poop more. When I was younger I could eat as or train as much I wanted but I had a pretty hard weight limit I couldn't get above. Thank god I realized that gaining weight for its own sake is a stupid goal so I focused on general fitness.
The one I had was cheap and consists of fasting the night before then breathing in to a machine for 15 minutes. It measures the amount of oxygen your body burns in your breast to calculate your resting metabolic rate which then gives you the base number of calories your body burns a day if you did absolutely nothing.
They should then give you a recommended reasonably accurate number of calories to eat depending on your goal and lifestyle. This means you can calculate a reasonable surplus without going overboard and just getting fat.
Also if progress is slow gaining muscle, remember for the majority of people it’s is a long slow process. A lot of the rapid transformations/strength gains we see have help from synthetic testosterone which is a completely different ball game.
I’m certainly no expert. After reading “The Hacker’s Diet” and having some success counting calories, I started reading more about nutrition; but mostly what was in weight loss books. I stumbled across https://www.hockeytraining.com/nutrition/ , which has a lot of information I had never seen since it’s more focused on exercise.
It may not be what you’re looking for since hockey players aren’t trying to bulk up. But perhaps it can give you a good introduction to the basics.
I've also tried low-carb twice, the first time I lost a reasonable amount pretty quickly, but gained it back over a few years when I reverted to a normal diet, and the second time when I shifted to intermittent fasting as I went back to a more normal diet.
There's lots of good advice available if you search for intermittent fasting, but the key take away is that insulin is produced in response to excess carbohydrates, and not only promotes storage of carbohydrates as fat, but also inhibits burning existing fat. Of course, if you are at a calorie deficit, you'll probably still lose weight especially with regular small amounts, because the insulin effect will be low, but if you have few carb-heavy meals, your body will still create a lot of insulin to get rid of all the carbs, and then after you work through the hunger phase after that's happened, then you will start converting that fat back to energy, and in a calorie restriction situation hopefully burn more than you need.