Re:Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
by pizza234 on Thursday March 10, 2022 @05:09AM
(#30625208)
> Unless you're a competitive weightlifter or similar, you're unlikely to see significant enough muscle loss with very significant calorie restriction over the kind of time frames people would stick to very strict diets like that for it to matter much.
I've always done weightlifting, although not competitively, as general support of the fitness regime (which may include other sports or not).
What I've observed is that when a dieting cycle goes bad, a short time after the end of it (to allow glycogen and water levels to come back to normal), I end it with approximately the same weight before the start. If/when I observe an increase in measured fat (which happens most of the times, on bad diet cycles), then muscle mass went down.
Re:Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
by vidarh on Thursday March 10, 2022 @05:31AM
(#30625325)
If a diet ends up with little enough weight loss that you'll just bounce back to the same weight, the changes are small enough that I really doubt you can reliably say much about change in muscle mass. For me the bounce back at the end of a diet is pretty much always ~2kg, so a "loss" below 2kg is really not an actual loss, but easily accounted for by less fluid retention and less food in my system. Yes, you're likely to lose some, but again I'l stress: not much for it to matter much for most people. Especially when the point of comparison is not doing nothing but just dieting slower. You'll lose muscle mass while dieting slower too. I've seen little to indicate there's a particularly meaningful difference in proportion other than for pretty advanced lifters for whom a "meaningful" difference in loss is much smaller than for most people.
When I was pushing my body to the max every week, then the difference mattered to me too. But most people are not there, or anywhere near those kinds of limits.
I wouldn't do it every day, but mostly because I find it too hard, but I do currently aim for ~600 kcal 4-5 days a week to drop down. I do it in multiple small meals, but I've also done intermittent fasting with narrow feeding windows. On the remaining days, I eat normally - I don't binge.
It'd likely have more of a negative effect on my muscle mass if I did it every day, but if I did, I'd also reach my target weight far faster, so even if I'd had to spend time bulking up again later I'd have done that if I was able to stick to it, but I know from experience I'm not.
I also power lift (not competitively), and I've had steady progress while doing that, with the caveat I'm not at my peak - I wouldn't expect to progress with this diet if I was. But most people are so far off hitting limitations caused by food intake in their exercise it matters for quite few people.
People should keep up resistance exercise while on diets to reduce muscle loss.
It's not sustainable over long periods of time in that sooner or later you get to an inflection point where it impedes your progress, but it works when your body fat percentage is high, and for most people looking to lose weight it's simply not what they should be worrying much about.
That you accumulated fat with what you think was a net daily deficit sounds to me like it wasn't a net daily deficit. Intermittent fasting works, and limiting yourself to a single daily meal is not nearly long enough fasting periods to mess much with body composition. But it may have messed with your activity levels. It takes little change in e.g. dozing off on the couch rather than walking around to have an effect.
People are mostly more sedentary than they think and burn fewer calories than they think. When I was at my peak, exercising every day and lifting heavily 3 times a week, to maintain my weight I needed to keep my intake around 1800kcal because my life outside of that was not very active. I'm 185cm, and at the time I was about 93kg, with body fat around 15%.
Someone with a more active life outside of the gym might burn more. Many burn less. Kcal guidelines for adults have remained static for way too long with declining levels of physical activity, and people really should count calories for a few weeks and adjust their intake and figure out how little they actually burn...