This is good news (probably?), but wanted to chime in with a tangent.
Also going to preface this by saying I have struggled with weight my entire life and have lost and gained substantial weight through diet alone, always gaining it back and then some — but I think I found something that has worked for me and I have been reflecting on what I wish I was told a long time ago.
It's not necessarily a problem to be "obese", meaning you can have extra fat on top of muscle but also be metabolically healthy. In those cases, the extra weight is just causing your calfs to be huge.
Instead of focusing on getting skinny, I started focusing on getting strong. All of a sudden diet was a supplemental tool to this goal, and not the main thing. I just made sure to eat more protein, and if I had a "bad day" of eating, I chalked it up to my body having more energy to synthesize new muscle :) Before a bad day would "undo" days of suffering on an energy deficit, and I would just give up. But if you frame it as: look, you have struggled your entire life to be 'thin', when in reality, your ability to be obese was a hidden superpower. Stop fighting it and lift weights, you were probably _made_ for this!
In this context I'm weirdly happy with my genetics? there are so many "hard gainers" that do everything in their power to put on 10bs so they can gain muscle. I'm gaining muscle without hardly trying. How many other obese, inactive people are like me and would respond amazingly to resistance training ALONE as well?
I focused on strength training and protein for a long time when I started, that was fun and easy, and my body composition started to change. Then I started to notice the changes, and now I have purposeful short-duration "cuts" in my routine and it seems like at some point I'll eventually not be obese.
Just trying to say that I wonder what would happen if people were told, "hey, you don't need to diet right now, just come in and train twice a week and eat more protein". Of course "energy toxicity" is absolutely real, but lean body mass can improve health markers A LOT before worrying about that.
This is really interesting. The idea of intentionally putting on weight terrifies me because I worked so hard in college to lose weight.
What does your plan look like long-term? Are you just going to keep gaining muscle and working out for the rest of your life, or do you plan to stop?
Obviously your TDEE is going to go up with more muscle. I wonder if there's a stable point where you can eat a 'normal' (read: not protein heavy) diet while working out, so that muscle is only maintained.
For the first 6 months I basically didn't worry too much about diet, except getting more protein and working extremely hard on my two workouts (which has since expanded to 3 workouts a week).
What happened was I put on a ton of muscle, and actually lost some weight... in the end I was 12lbs lighter, which doesn't seem like a lot but with the amount of muscle is EXTREMELY noticeable.
For me, seeing my body get more stronger and more muscular was a revelation, it's really fun to see the growth in those areas, much more than suffering to get "skinny fat". So now I'm actually working 4-6 week stints of weight loss into my program where I target 2lbs of fat loss week, while keeping the training intensity high (with lower volume to combat fatigue) to maintain the muscle I have built. I'll follow that with 2-3 months of maybe a slight surplus in calories to build (which comes with some fat gain). A few cycles of that and I'll be golden :)
From a health span and longevity standpoint, having lean body muscle is absolutely crucial for aging, and it's something I plan to not stop doing, even if I fall off the nutrition wagon completely, I'll at least be increasing my bone density and muscle mass which will counteract a lot of whatever bad food habits I'm doing at the time.
The cool thing about muscle vs just pure weight loss, is that muscle isn't super hard to maintain once you have it. The amount of stimulus you need to keep the muscle, especially in an energy balance or surplus environment is surprisingly small it turns out. So to me it's much more rewarding than a crash diet that can be completely erased and then-some in a matter of months.
I wish I had this frame of mind a long time ago, it has personally helped me tremendously.
I too found this valuable, I dropped 15-20kg doing this 5 years ago and slowly put it back on due to health problems. I’ve found recently that even cardio works - if I exercise, I don’t want to waste the effort by eating shitty food, if I do have a bad day or two (Xmas period) then it feels like a bank loan I must pay off before the interest kicks in.
Not 40 but about to turn 37: I hired a personal trainer that I see twice a week with the goal of getting as strong as possible (not focusing on weight loss which I think is important).
The change in 6 months has been unbelievable. I have put on a ton of muscle, gained a ton of strength, my metabolic health is now PERFECT, and I have a ton of energy and vigor which is spilling over into the rest of my life.
Getting physically strong and fit is an incredible place to start when you're feeling directionless. And with a personal trainer all you have to do is show up for the session and do the work. If you can find someone who has a private studio that's even better (imo) because it takes away the whole gym culture aspect that can be intimidating.
thanks, and you're probably right. But I do want to say for anyone looking on, personal trainers can be way cheaper than you'd expect, like half the price of a massage, I pay 50 bucks a session. Which again, isn't nothing, but in hindsight I would have payed way more for what I ended up getting out of it.
Really happy for you and your successful health transformation!
But...this is a great example of something working for someone, and then they go on a crusade of why "it's the best" with lots of random untrue statements.
> It seems the MAIN problem is NOT total calories
No that is the main problem, and you got healthy by restricting them, which resulted in loss of weight, which resulted in an improved sensitivity to insulin.
> MAIN problem is simple carbs / Sugar.
Simple carbs and sugars are not more fattening on their own.
> Exercise will just make you hungry.
Exercise is the single best thing you can do to improve your metabolic health, even above dieting, which is great that you do that too.
> It is VERY VERY hard to stay away from simple / carbs / sugar but you can do it
I think when you say "simple carbs and sugars" you're referring to the droves of hyper-palatable, calorically dense packaged foods that are out there. These are not necessarily "dangerous" on their own, but they are easy to over-consume which leads to a caloric surplus, which leads to weight gain, and thennnnnn all the bad stuff follows.
I respectfully disagree. Even without a caloric surplus, you can develop metabolic disease from simple carbs and sugars being over represented in your diet. Your body can burn fat and it can burn sugar, and the fat burning pathway is generally more sustainable and healthy long term. Sugar burning pathways are there for quick bursts of energy. Overdevelop the glucose pathways and under develop fat burning pathways and you get a whole bunch of nasty diseases.
This is why there are some chubby people who are in better overall health than some skinny people.
You can't cheat the laws of metabolism. If you're in a large caloric deficit, the body will not waste energy building muscle, which is an EXTREMELY expensive process. If you weight train and consume hundreds of grams of protein per day, you can work to maintain the lean tissue, and in some cases if you're a beginner and/or obese, you can put on some muscle in the beginning, but it won't last.
Building muscle requires a slight caloric surplus and sufficient protein intake spread out through the day (last part is more about optimization)
Exactly, like I said, if you're overweight like the cops in the study, or new to training, or you take steroids, you can build muscle and lose fat. But it's not forever, at some point you'll plateau and need to pick a lane: lose fat and maintain LMB, gain some fat and gain muscle.
We're not talking insane caloric surpluses for the latter either.
Came here to say the same thing. Lots of studies on fasting and time restricted eating and when calories are equated and put up against low fat, low carb, balanced, all groups show the same improvements in metabolic health and fat loss.
It's a tool to restrict calories, which is the _actual_ thing that improves health. It's slightly less optimal if you're trying to conserve lean body tissue since you're spending more time in a negative nitrogen-balance.
Bottom line from lots of research, do the form of calorie restriction that is most easy for you to adhere to :)
Clojurescript has been the real hero for me coming from a heavy Javascript background. The UI patterns are basically 1:1 with the functional standards in Javascript land, but you're working with a language that has immutable data structures by default (I can ditch Immutable.js) and the core library has all those goody functional helpers I'd include ramda or lodash for.
But in addition to that, shadow-cljs is truly incredible, kudos to Thomas Heller. When developing, my editor is connected to the browser app through a repl, and I can switch namespaces and sort of TDD new code, or debug an issue by cracking into the actual pipeline and interactively spelunking. In JS land, everything is transpiled, so really you have to put debuggers, refresh the page or action, catch the debugger, and do stuff that way. If you're developing new code you can't test out a function if it uses some transpiled feature, so you write a test or do the debugger thing.
It's takes some dedication to get there, and you don't need emacs even though it's really fun to learn and get proficient in. I use Spacemacs and am constantly learning some new package that's installed to help me. I recently switched from parinfer to paredit, and it's reaalllllly cool. With the repl driven development and structural editing you can achieve this kinda mind-meld with your development process. I don't think that necessarily makes this better than Javascript, but if you're into stuff like that there's a really high skill-cap with how you can optimize your development workflow.
And really, at it's core to me Clojurescript is like my perfect Javascript. There were not any new concepts for me to learn as I had been programming Javascript functionally for some time, it's just everything I wanted in Javascript without the friction and bolt-on libraries.
For developer happiness, it has a ton to offer, and there's always something else to dig in to.
ClojureScript is basically an s-expression version of the good parts of JavaScript with lodash built in. It’s pretty cool. That said, if you don’t mind losing the benefits of s-expressions and macros, you can get mostly the same experience in vanilla JS. And even then there’s sweet.js which can get you part way there.
Also going to preface this by saying I have struggled with weight my entire life and have lost and gained substantial weight through diet alone, always gaining it back and then some — but I think I found something that has worked for me and I have been reflecting on what I wish I was told a long time ago.
It's not necessarily a problem to be "obese", meaning you can have extra fat on top of muscle but also be metabolically healthy. In those cases, the extra weight is just causing your calfs to be huge.
Instead of focusing on getting skinny, I started focusing on getting strong. All of a sudden diet was a supplemental tool to this goal, and not the main thing. I just made sure to eat more protein, and if I had a "bad day" of eating, I chalked it up to my body having more energy to synthesize new muscle :) Before a bad day would "undo" days of suffering on an energy deficit, and I would just give up. But if you frame it as: look, you have struggled your entire life to be 'thin', when in reality, your ability to be obese was a hidden superpower. Stop fighting it and lift weights, you were probably _made_ for this!
In this context I'm weirdly happy with my genetics? there are so many "hard gainers" that do everything in their power to put on 10bs so they can gain muscle. I'm gaining muscle without hardly trying. How many other obese, inactive people are like me and would respond amazingly to resistance training ALONE as well?
I focused on strength training and protein for a long time when I started, that was fun and easy, and my body composition started to change. Then I started to notice the changes, and now I have purposeful short-duration "cuts" in my routine and it seems like at some point I'll eventually not be obese.
Just trying to say that I wonder what would happen if people were told, "hey, you don't need to diet right now, just come in and train twice a week and eat more protein". Of course "energy toxicity" is absolutely real, but lean body mass can improve health markers A LOT before worrying about that.