"State of the art" for quantified weight loss

Quantified Self Diet, Nutrition, and Weight
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My girlfriend (23) needs to lose about 30lbs to reach a healthy BMI. There’s waaaay too much information online and we’re overwhelmed with choice.

What have QSers found to be the most effective ways to lose fat?

And how does one get started with the process?

Any step-by-step tutorials or personal experiences we could follow?

Thanks!!

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Great questions, Richard! I think it’s always best to start simple. Thomas Goetz and Tim Ferriss have both written about people who simply tracked their weight every morning - literally just get on a scale and record the number. This awareness alone can be transformative.

An additional step would be to honestly record food intake - in my personal experience, this is helpful and also very hard to do. Alternatively, activity levels could be tracked, which I’ve also found helpful. There are tools for food and activity tracking at http://quantifiedself.com/guide/tag/fitness

There is a risk of starting out tracking too many things, and then stopping altogether when the tracking itself becomes cumbersome. So taking things slowly is usually a good idea.

Hope that helps!
(Note! I am not a doctor and this is just my personal experience.)
Alex

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Hi Richard

I have tested quite a few of the smartphone apps for tracking my food intake. My personal favourite is MyFitnessPal. It is easy to use and just works for me. Analysis is fairly limited but it is getting better.

Whatever you use tracking all your foods is a chore. If you can both do it you may find it easier/less dull.

The best bit of advice I can give you is to double check when you are selecting foods on most of the apps. Some entries are user generated and only have basic (obviously wrong) data attached.

I also have a kiFit (the UK version of the Bodybugg). I track my exercise with that and food on MyFitnessPal. It would be lovely to be able to get the two to talk to each other.

I have radically changed my behaviour based on my findings.

Good luck.

Andy

Ps. I am not affiliated with either company. Most of the phone apps are free or have free versions - try them out and see which is best for you.

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[quote]Great questions, Richard! I think it’s always best to start simple. Thomas Goetz and Tim Ferriss have both written about people who simply tracked their weight every morning - literally just get on a scale and record the number. This awareness alone can be transformative.
[/quote]According to Tim Ferriss it’s a mistake to use weight as the only metric. Tim Ferriss said that it’s important to track either body fat percentage or waist circumference in addition to tracking pure weight.

I however still think that using weight is better than nothing. A recent study found:
“Self-weighing was a significant predictor of body weight over time”

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[quote=“Andy_Goodwin, post:3, topic:79”]Whatever you use tracking all your foods is a chore.

The best bit of advice I can give you is to double check when you are selecting foods on most of the apps. Some entries are user generated and only have basic (obviously wrong) data attached.[/quote]

I was very active on LiveStrong.com (aka TheDailyPlate) for about a year, and I’ve seen the same problem: lacking nutrition values, or user-entered data that was wrong. Due to their lousy technology, they couldn’t properly update their database, so I ended up using a low-tech solution that worked pretty well for me - an Excel spreadsheet with nutritional values for all the foods I usually eat.

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Just to “weigh in” here (OH HA HA):

This year I lost 15 pounds of post-baby fat (which was all I had to lose) within about 2 months. Went from 26% bodyfat down to about 22%. My waist went from about 31" (mommy belly!) down to 27" which is what it was in high school… 14 years ago.

Here’s what worked for me.

Diet: I ate ultra-low-carb (about 30g of carbs per day) for 6 days and then had a carb binge on the 7th day. This is similar to Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Body diet, however I didn’t eat beans. I went totally paleo and didn’t eat any of the “safe starches”. I also didn’t go totally calorie-crazy on the 7th day; I just chose foods that spike insulin with a hefty glucose load, like stone fruits, bananas, medjool dates, yams, and so on.

As for diet-tracking: DO IT. Even if only for 2 or 3 weeks. You will learn a hell of a lot about the content of the various foods you eat and are attracted to, and that’s supremely valuable information. You’ll start seeing patterns in your cravings (“I always seem to want something sweet around 9pm…”)

Most people also find that just by knowing they have to record everything they eat, they decide to eat less, or eat simpler things, and they stop “picking” at random foods (which can really up the caloric total at the end of the day). Having to record “4 M&Ms” along with lunch is just kinda annoying.

I have been using MyNetDiary.com for the past year and totally love it. LiveStrong.com is so bad, it’s hilarious. They are essentially a Google-bait content farm at this point. SparkPeople is too feature-laden and flashy and who needs their stupid SparkPoints anyway. FitDay lacks too much in their database.

With MyNetDiary.com, you do have to watch out for the user-submitted entries, but the official database usually has what you need; just be careful which ones you select. Their iPhone app is the best I’ve tried (and I’ve tried them all at this point), which syncs with the website. It also lets you record what TIMES you ate things, which I find to be indispensable information when I’m really trying to hone in on a dietary problem.

The above tips will get you pretty far when you’re starting out, but here’s what you do if you don’t see any progress:

  • Start weighing EVERYTHING you eat (I use a cheap digital scale you can get for about $20 on Amazon). Record every ingredient in grams in your food log. (You’ll be surprised sometimes, e.g. a measured cup of oats may turn out to weigh 225g instead of the 200g you expected.)
  • If weighing what you eat makes it hard to eat out, and you’re not making progress, STOP EATING OUT. :slight_smile:
  • Avoid sugar as much as possible, but ESPECIALLY just after waking up. Try to make it to noon before eating anything sugary or starchy. Eat pure protein and fat instead. (Protein shakes become very useful for busy mornings.)
  • Exercise: the absolute least you can do which does provide metabolic enhancement is a 5-minute Tabata workout (Google it). But if you have 20 minutes per day to use, do INTENSE strength training with very little rest every other day. This will get you 80% of the results that people who train 4+ hours a week often still don’t see (because they’re DOIN IT WRONG).

The above is what worked for me. I’m still doing everything I just talked about – especially the exercise, because it’s FUN and effective – and I’m at about 21% bodyfat, which I really like.

Your Mileage May Vary.

1 Like
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Awesome post, Naomi! Thumbs up!

Might you comment more about Tabata intervals in this Fitness thread?

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Really? I find it remarkably “directionally accurate” over time. I’m careful how I use it, but I’ve tracked food and exercise there faithfully for 272 consecutive days now. Using the resulting gross and net calorie counts to populate a much more elaborate evaluation spreadsheet of my own, and comparing with the values derived from daily weight-logging using the Hacker’s Diet, I have found a real consistency in that one key weight loss number: daily calorie deficit.

I’ve lost 60 lbs with the help of these tools.

I will say this: I eat almost nothing that I don’t prepare myself from basic ingredients, and I’ve taken time to enter all my own recipes (and all my own cycling routes) into Livestrong. Perhaps basic foodstuffs are more accurately represented there than are packaged foods and restaurant meals?

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Oh, I’m sure numerically it works out just fine. You’re the first person I’ve heard to have had a good experience using it, but that doesn’t mean much.

The reason I say livestrong.com is horrible is because of all of the annoying, superfluous effluvia all over the site. The user-written content has become yet another tool of SEO-minded webmasters who write the same “articles” over and over again but with slightly different titles. Then there’s the unusable recipe database interface, and what I consider a very obnoxious exercise logging interface.

These are just my opinions. I wanted a very simple, “does one thing really well” kind of thing when I went looking for a diet tracking application or website, and the only site that fit the bill for me was MyNetDiary.com

–Naomi

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Christian,

Check The 4-Hour Body-“Pragmatic Laziness” on page 67. It is the story that Alexandra is referencing

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Check The 4-Hour Body-“Pragmatic Laziness” on page 67. It is the story that Alexandra is referencing

I have read the book. A while ago after the publishing of the book Tim Ferriss had a Q&A where he talked about mistakes that people make when they want to lose weight.
Only using a scale but not using bodyfat or waist circumference was one thing that he pointed out.
Unfortunately I don’t find the exact post, but a twitter post like https://twitter.com/#!/tferriss/status/84405834230153216 should give you an indication that Tim believes that the scale fails as sole measurement.

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