And another one from the “other people’s weight loss” department.

From Tobias Buckell:  How I lost 30 pounds while eating a donut every day.  He sounds like the same sort of trial-and-error type person that I am.  Some excerpts:

The nitty gritty is, I’ve come to believe after eight years of reading weight-lifting books, nutrition books, and eight years of self-experimentation and logging the results in detail on excel spreadsheets, that you have to figure out how much your body can take in calories a day without gaining weight, and that becomes your upper limit. You also need a lower limit, your ‘base metabolic rate’ so that your body is getting the calories it knows it needs to move you around for the day. These are rough calculations, based on large populations, so logging helps one refine and test one’s own upper and lower bounds (which also change with body composition.)

Using a BMR calculator sets my lower bound (about 1,800 calories a day for me). If I eat less than that, there are chances my body will slow my metabolism down because it thinks its starving. That’s also good because it stops me from falling into the trap that might lead to a failed diet: trying to simply starve yourself of calories. That leads to people who look ‘skinny fat’ and to bouncing diets. But those are the calories my body would like to have.

The same calculator lets me ballpark how many calories it will take before I start to gain weight, right now that’s ~2,500 calories a day.

So that’s my window: more than 1800 calories a day, less than 2500….

What’s missing here? Kinds of foods. After all the reading, everyone insists that eating a certain kind of food will cause weight loss. Vegetarians on one side. Atkins dieters on the other. I followed some of these carefully, but after reading about BMR, I quickly came to believe that the reason high protein diets helped slim me down weren’t magical science-y sounding justifications, but just simply that 300 calories of a steak fills you up and takes longer for your body to process than 300 calories of chips that leave you hungry again in half an hour. And stripping that bread off the burger gets rid of calories, often by a half. Tracking my calories in 2005 correlated this fairly effectively, I was eating 30% fewer calories by going high protein, and I was losing weight as a result….

I know that I can eat four apples for the price of one donut, and that I’m full to bursting after just two full apples.

But I also no longer deny myself *any* kind of food I like. I said I have achieved this weight loss and had a donut every day. I’m not half kidding. Every week day, at the coffee shop, I have a donut (creme-filled, 360 calories). If it doesn’t put me over the daily limit, I’ll have it. Three days ago I had one of my favorite high-calorie foods, a Li’l Debbie Nutty Bar (500 calories). There was no guilt. I really enjoy and love the good foods now, because I know exactly how much they cost me in calories and know that they’re not hurting me. However, I do steer clear of ‘high cost’ foods that would bloat the calorie budget for no reason.

Thought that might interest.