This morning I weighed myself in at about 175 pounds. I don’t weigh myself religiously, but here’s a few of the weights that I did measure (note, I stopped doing GOMAD on 4-11-12):
4-10-12 182 pounds
4-25-12 180 pounds
5-2-12 178.5 pounds
5-15-12 175 pounds
In other words, in the past 5 weeks I’ve lost 7 pounds! Taking into account water weight, bloat, and measuring error, saying I lost 5 pounds in 5 weeks is fair, and that would be mean about 1 pound per week. Doesn’t sound like much? If you lost 1 pound per week for a year, you’d have lost 52 pounds!
I have been following an intermittent fasting diet since 5-6-12, just over a week. It’s important to mention that my diet has been far less than perfect in the past week, due to birthdays and mother’s day. Yet, despite eating plenty of trash food, I have continued to lose weight!
Obviously I would lose weight in the first few weeks after I stopped drinking a gallon of milk a day; however, I believe that my progress would have stalled by now if I had not started intermittent fasting. I still have a bit of a gut, so the next few weeks will show if I can continue losing weight stay tuned!
Just an FYI, cutting calories/eating less used to be known by a different name: “semi starvation diet.” It was changed for obvious reasons, but the name is no less true. I have recently started a new self experiment with intermittent fasting to help me cut fat added during a recent muscle building phase. This is not the same as cutting calories because I still eat as much calories as I like, but I can only eat between noon and 8pm. Although I am still eating plenty, I still experience a good amount of hunger at night before I go to sleep and in the morning before noon.
I have only been experimenting with IMF for a week and I can already tell that I’d be going INSANE if I was trying to lose weight by cutting calories. When hungry it’s almost impossible to not think about food. My stomach is constantly growling and calling for my attention. Based on my experience with minor hunger for only the past week, I can’t believe:
A, that anyone tries to lose weight by cutting back calories
B, that (stupid) people and the mass media still tell overweight people to lose weight by eating less
C, how hungry I am just on intermittent fasting
I can definitely believe:
Anyone trying to lose weight with a semi starvation diet is going to be miserable
They will also cave after trying for a while and eat themselves silly, probably putting on more weight than before
If not cutting calories, what should be doing?
In my experience, eating the right food means you don’t have to count calories and your body will maintain a good weight. Throw in strength training and you’ll be unstoppable. To find out about both, read Stronglifts.com and Four Hour Body, which will tell you everything you need to know.
In the past month I’ve lost about 6 pounds without counting any calories. Of course, this is after I stopped drinking a gallon of milk a day, so take it with a grain of salt. At my current rate of weight loss, about one pound per week, I will be where I want to be in a month or two. Pics/video to come.
-Russell
PS Remember you can follow along with my workouts/weight measurements here.
5-6-12 Today I weighed in at about 178 pounds, and this is after cheating the past two days.
Four pounds in 1 month isn’t bad at all, but just for fun I’m going to add a new experiment, intermittent fasting, specifically the leangains diet.
The basics:
Eat only between noon and 8 pm.
Stay on same general diet. High protein, medium fat, s/low carb.
Keep off alcohol. Besides yesterday, I haven’t been drinking alcohol at all. May is the month when most of my friends have birthdays, so we’ll see, but I’ll probably minimize it to once per week at most.
And that’s it!
Hypothesis: I really have none. Even without intermittent fasting, I should continue to lose weight since I stopped drinking a gallon of milk a day and continue to workout intensely. After I get where I want to be, I’ll continue IMF and see if I can bring my BF% even lower without much effort.
Follow up: Video to come when I feel I’m where I want to be.
“The most important part of a diet is what you’re not eating. There is no such thing as a “healthy food” which will cancel out crap food. Exercising also does not cancel out crap food.”
The basic idea is that if you eat something good, it doesn’t mean you can also drink a soda. If you go to the gym and jog for 15 minutes, it doesn’t mean you get to eat a candy bar. Currently I have no real evidence except for observation, but it is something to consider if you are trying to lose weight and are unsuccessful. If you really want to lose weight, go all out and drop all the crap. If you need your crappy food fix, check out Tim Ferriss’s book Four Hour Body. The diet is available for free on Gizmodo.
A little bit of evidence
People with celieac’s disease cannot eat something to “cancel out” gluten. Gluten is crap for you, attacking your insides. Eating a bowl of vegetables won’t cancel out that bowl of pasta.
Have you ever read about athletes having heart attacks? I see at least one every 3 months. All their exercise isn’t canceling out their crappy eating. That or they’re on some form of drug, which is why this is a poor piece of evidence.
Diet and exercise. How I hate those words. Although true, they are 100% useless. Here’s a similarly useless answer to the question, how do I run faster? Turn your legs over faster. Again, while true, this is not useful advice to someone who wants to run faster.
Diet
Healthy or unhealthy?
There are a million diets out there, so telling someone to diet is pointless. Most people have no clue about the most effective diets, but assume stupid things the mass media tells them are true. If I were to guess what the typical American thinks a healthy diet is, I would say the only thing they think they know is that they should eat more salad, which by the way is not going to help much. To the right is an image of my breakfast: two eggs cooked in real butter, three slices of bacon, a fistful of frozen spinach and flax seed. I consider this to be a healthy breakfast. Most people probably think that oatmeal and fruit would be a healthy breakfast, but I think that is an average breakfast. Telling someone “you should diet” doesn’t help them choose a breakfast.
My above complaint addresses the idea that if someone says “diet and exercise,” they mean you should get on a diet. However, if by diet they mean “eat less,” then they are a complete idiot who is probably naturally thin and knows nothing. No one keeps weight off simply by eating less. It may work for a short while, but eventually they cave and regain the weight. There is one scenario in which losing weight by eating less could work: if they are overweight because they have been purposefully over eating, such as me doing GOMAD.
Exercise
Exercise can mean anything. When most people want to start exercise they go out and do the most useless things: super slow jogging at minimal distances and workouts like light weights and lifts such as bicep curls. Again, useless. Contrary to what you may believe, there is a correct way to run, and if you’re not doing it, you’re likely destroying your joints, which is why something like 70% of runners get injured every year (citation required). Lifting light weights does just about nothing for you, unless you’re doing it all day, which you’re not. To give you an idea of the intensity you need, below are two examples of me in my prime, in two different ways, running and lifting.
Below are a couple of videos of me, spaced 9 years apart. The first is me in my last two mile track and field event in 2002, I was probably 16 years old, 5’7″ tall, and weighed 130 pounds. I’m the one in yellow and green passing the two other guys in the final stretch and I believe my time was about 11:54, meaning I ran two miles sub 6 minutes. The second is me deadlifting 360 pounds, the most I’ve ever done. I was 25 year old, 5’10” tall, and weighed about 185 pounds.
I’ll try to give you an idea of the workouts I was doing leading up to both videos.
For cross country we ran 6 days a week, during training season it was like this: Monday 3 miles average pace, Tuesday 2 miles of sprinting (16 back to back 100’s, 16 200’s, or 8 400’s) with a mile warm up, Wednesday was 3 miles average pace, Thursday sprints again, Friday 3 miles again, Saturday 10 miles. Race season was similar but Thursdays were meets and Saturdays were lighter or off.
For lifting I did 3 months of stronglifts followed by a 6 weeks of Madcow. You can download my Madcow Excel sheet if you want to see how much I was lifting.
So now I have two questions for you. First, would you rather have a skinny build or a strong/athletic build? I ask because when most people think of “exercise” to lose weight, they think of jogging, and are thus aiming for a lame skinny build like me in CC. However, I think most people would agree that an athletic build is better, so they should be lifting weights instead of jogging. Second, are your workouts anywhere near as intense as the workouts I listed above? If not, don’t expect to see the same kind of results. People who jog/run don’t see much results because A: they don’t do enough mileage and B: they don’t do hard sprints.
Useful advice for you
You might be thinking to yourself, “well smartass, if telling people to diet and exercise is useless, and doing crazy training like what you did is out of my league, what is helpful?” The best advice I can think of off the top of my head: research healthy living/weight loss programs and then experiment with different programs with 3 month commitments. My suggestions are: stronglifts.com, paleo, primal blueprint, and Tim Ferriss’s Four Hour Body. This method involves (at least) 3 things you’re not doing.
1: Researching different programs that have worked for others.
2: Committing to a program for at least 3 months.
3: Experimenting with different programs.
Are you operating on this level, or are you just trying the latest fad diet and taking advice from coworkers?
