Phil online

I love the Richard Muller lectures over at UCBerkeley. You can enjoy them too, for free.

I was stumbling through Dr. Muller’s web site today and I ran across this article on weight loss. He basically says the same things I’ve repeated here before (which I learned and repeated from The Hacker’s Diet). To wit,

1. Exercise will not help you lose weight the way you think it will.
2. Hunger is the way to lose.
3. Learn to appreciate the feeling of hunger as your body burning fat.

I’ve been challenged on these assertions before, sometimes by emotionally-charged lose-by-exercising proponents who are certain they needn’t be hungry. I hope they’re right, for their sakes. But it’s nice to see these ideas reiterated by a respected physicist. I wonder if I’ll ever see a nutritionist say the same thing.

If not, maybe it’s because it’s not true.

Want to lose a pound of fat? You can work it off by hiking to the top of a 2,500-story building. Or by running 60 miles. Or by spending 7 hours cleaning animal stalls.

According to Google and this site, I only have to run 22 miles to lose 1 lb of fat (or 25 miles if you go by Muller’s rounded-up 4000 kcals/lb).

I found a handy chart on this Fitness Software site which gives calories burned per hour for various activities based on a person’s weight. I’ll use the 190 lb column, and I run about a 6-minute mile, drop it in Excel [download my Calorie Burning Worksheet (Excel XLS)] and calculate the amount of running I have to do just to lose 1 lb.

Results:

1. 1 pound/week: eat 500-600 fewer calories/day, or run 3.5 miles per day (24 miles per week).
2. 2 pounds/week: eat 1000-1200 fewer calories/day, or run 7 miles per day (49 miles per week).

I’ll keep running (10 miles per week), but it’s not to lose weight.

I’ve hit another plateau, but this one was expected. I went “off-diet” for the weekend for various personal reasons.

Coincidentally when I was looking at Oatmeal Calories today, I found this article about plateaus. It has some other interesting tips about managing a weight loss program. Some of them I’ve been dismissive of before, but they do actually make sense.

Speaking of dismissive, I’ve been exercising a bit more. Some days I walk the stairs at the kayak center for 30 minutes. They’re big steps and it’s quite aerobic. I calculated that it’s the equivalent of walking up and down 28 flights of stairs, two at a time. According to some sources, that’s only 450 calories burned.

But I’ve noticed that I don’t even get winded walking up stairs at work anymore. I take them two at a time and carry on conversations while I’m doing it. I attributed this to my carrying less weight these days before, but now I think it’s the “stair training” I’ve been doing. I noticed the same effect walking up hills.
So, yes I do exercise, and yes I see some real benefits. But I’m not doing it for the weight loss. I’m doing it for my health.

We used to joke that you could lose 30 pounds in a day if you had your leg amputated. But here I did the old-fashioned way: I dieted. And it wasn’t hard. Last week I saw the scale show up with a 1 as the first digit. 199. Woo hoo!
I started in mid-July. Here it is mid-October and I’m actually 30 pounds slimmer. I don’t don’t know what I expected when I started, but it was pretty easy overall. I’ve had a few slides backwards; this week I’m at a conference and food is plentiful, so I’m probably up a few pounds.

“I should exercise more, but not for weight loss.” That’s been my mantra. Exercise for health; diet for weight loss. Dieting has made me drop 2 pounds per week, which coincidentally, is what most people seem to agree is the healthy loss rate.

Most of my exercise comes from climbing stairs at my office and at home. It’s not so much exercise anymore, because I feel like I stopped carrying 30 pounds of luggage with me everywhere. And I did!

I really did it just by eating less. Specifically, I ate about 1,250 calories less per day. 8,750 calories per week X 12 weeks = 105,000 calories. 105,000 / 3,500 calories per pound = 30 pounds. Dieting through algebra.

Yay! I’m into the “single digits” of the 200’s. And I appear no longer to be stalled. What’s more, my weight loss trendline looks spot on still, if slightly less steep.

I got a pingback from Andy who’s trying to lose weight — and has made it the focus of his blog. He’s making decent progress sometimes, but he also gets somewhat frustrated about the numbers on the scale. See, they’re not going down for him like he wants. He (probably correctly) attributes this to his build-up of muscle mass to replace his fat.

Muscle weighs more than fat per unit volume. That is, it’s denser. So a pound of muscle is smaller (better looking, better for you) than a pound of fat. If you lose inches by building muscle, (more…)

Just stop eatin’ so fuckin’ much! — Jonesy’s one-step weight loss program on Penn & Teller’s Bullshit!

There is one, simple, unavoidable fact of dieting. To lose weight you have to eat less food than your body needs. — John Walker, The Hacker’s Diet

Another unpleasant fact of dieting it’s worth facing up front is that while you don’t need to go hungry to maintain your weight, you will need to go hungry in order to lose it. — John Walker, The Hacker’s Diet

These seem like simple rules to me, but I learned a lot in the last few months about weight loss. It’s stuff most of you know if you’ve already been on diets before. I’ve never seriously been on a diet. I’m 5′10 and weigh about 225 pounds. That means I weigh between 220 and 230, but it varies around there. That’s considered “seriously overweight” by all the health scales I can find. But am I fat?

Yeah. A little.

A couple of years ago I was training in Tae Kwon Do. I lost about 10 pounds over the course of a year, during which I continued my normal diet for the most part. I did cut out fries for a while, but they crept back in. When I dropped TKD (I broke my toe) the pounds came back.

So I’ve been reading The Hacker’s Diet in my spare time. I stopped reading it around March, actually. Life got in the way. But I started watching how much I ate, and how much I needed to eat. I remembered that John’s book told me these simple facts:

• Fat, carbs, protein don’t matter to weight loss. Calories are all that matter.
• 3,500 food calories (kcal) is equal to one pound of body fat.
• Therefore if you eat 3,500 calories less every week (500 per day) you will lose a pound. Every week.

Simple right?

Some days I’ll work through lunch without noticing. Once I’m past the normal noon hunger level, it doesn’t get much worse. I’ll bet that’s about 800+ calories I missed that day.

I don’t have food around me, so I don’t eat compulsively. But when I do eat, I go to the cafeteria and get a sandwich, some chips, and Oooh!Look-they-have-cobbler-today! Here come the pounds.

When I do eat lunch (most days) I noticed that I could eat just half a sandwich and no chips and be satisfied until dinner. So I could save half a sandwich for tomorrow. I even did it a few times. But not often. But I knew I could.

I also noticed that that little bag of chips was 180 calories. That’s a pound and a half per month, right there!

And then I had a Breakstones Cottage Doubles cottage cheese snack one day. 140 calories. I thought, hey, I bet I could just eat this for lunch and nothing else, just to get me through the day. So I tried it one day. And it worked. Then I bought a week’s worth of these little snacks and kept them in the fridge at work. Every day, I don’t go near the cafeteria. I get my Breakstone’s and a cup of water and eat in my cubicle.

I didn’t change the rest of my diet. I didn’t change my activity levels. I do try not to overeat at dinner, but I don’t try to avoid calorie-rich foods any more than I used to. I have a dark chocolate bar at my desk that I nibble on sometimes (one square = 67 calories), and a pack of sugarless gum to help clean my teeth and tide my hunger (5 calories).

The results were immediate. Day by day, the scale began to show a decline. I began to lose almost three pounds a week. I’ve been at it for four weeks now, and I’m proud to say I’m 10 pounds (35,000 calories) lighter today.

Am I hungry right now? You bet. But it’s lunch time. Time for some cottage cheese.

Things that helped me

I encourage you to read the The Hacker’s Diet book (read it online for free!), especially if you’re an engineer. Read it all the way through. Then start thinking about your diet. John Walker only eats one meal a day, so he had to cut it back to lose weight. I eat three meals per day, but I only cut one of them back (and I became more sensible about indulging at other times).

I use the FitDay online software (it’s free!). It tracks my daily calories and nutrients as well as my weight. You can see my progress here.

And for those foods that FitDay doesn’t know about, I go to DietFacts.com. It will even add foods there to my FitDay account automatically.

Update [07-11-07]: I’ve been tracking weight and food with Calorie-Count.com instead of FitDay.com. I tried to find some php script that implemented weight loss tracking like John Walker’s Excel spreadsheets (Excel is too buggy for me); I didn’t find any I liked, but Calorie-Count.com comes very close. I was able to write a script to import my data from FitDay right into Calorie-Count. (Don’t ask me for it; I lost it. But it’s simple with Curl or even wget.)