Clydesdales/Athenas (200+ lb / 91+ kg) - Latest Weight Loss Celeb: Rick Rubin

Rick Rubin, responsible for the production work on albums by the Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Johnny Cash, is profiled in the latest issue of Men's Journal (article isn't online yet). Rubin lost 130 pounds over the past 15 months.

Aside from buying personal training and dieticians, which is only to be expected from a wealthy Californian, the one surprise is that Rubin was a vegan when he was north of 300 pounds. I don't understand how one can get that fat on a vegan diet. The vegans I've known have usually looked like they've been dead for a week. Rubin has added some beef back into his diet, although the article states he has his chef "hide it" so he doesn't know he's eating an animal.

Oh, and I should mention that the author of the profile gives two sentences to Rubin nearly hitting a cyclist. It's clear neither Rubin nor his biographer thought this of any importance.

I don't understand how one can get that fat on a vegan diet.

Carbs. They were and always will be my weakness. When I got up to 460, I was rarely eating meat. But I was eating a metric crapload of grains and other carbs.

My spouse is vegetarian (not vegan) and is obese, though now he has dropped some pounds so he probably is in the overweight category. His background is one that does not eat any animals or eggs so no one is going to be sneaking beef or other meat into his diet. However, the tradition he comes from does use lots of dairy, specifically milk, paneer, and ghee. We both got fat as vegetarians. Probably too much rice and too much daal and too much sweets. Rice pudding. Yum.

When I started weight loss I dropped being a vegetarian. I was never a religious vegetarian. I think the radical change in diet helped me lose weight in part because I could keep interested and curious with new found foods. In small portions. I didn't have to resist the temptation to eat too much rice pudding because it simply wasn't on the list of things that I was going to eat.

Good for him! He got it done. Can't find fault in that.

Meh.

I think he's awesome for doing what he did.

Dairy is the real enemy, cut that, you will feel a lot more awake, sugar how about getting rid of that too, Meat, legumes, veggies fruit in moderation

Dairy is the real enemy, cut that, you will feel a lot more awake, . . .

I think it depends on the person. I love dairy. I have a couple of glasses of milk a day.

Exactly. Chocolate milk (skim, of course) is about the best recovery drink there is.

Apple and a Cheese stick is a pretty good snack, too.

Dude looks totally different. Almost like the guy from Blues Traveler after he lost all that weight....

Article noted he ate a lot of almond butter (I like almond butter also but in teaspoons on a sandwich)..... logic was it is vegan it can't be bad for me..... calories are calories and there are lots of vegan options that are hight fat and caloriies......

and his personal trainer is Laird Hamilton......surfer, windsurfer, stand up paddle boarder..... ie waterman.

Avoiding fat and replacing it with carbs is probably the best ways to help fight weight loss. Fat - especially animal fat - is easily digestible, doesn't mess with your blood sugar levels, doesn't cause an insulin response, makes you feel full, etc. If you want to bulk up, eat lots of sugar and carbs. They'll keep you from feeling full, you won't get all all the nutrients you need so your body will want to eat more and more. Heck, if you're already obese, you probably have blunted insulin sensitivity so you can probably snack on high carb snacks until you're full and still want more and more of them. If you want to find a macronutrient that's responsible for weight gain, fat won't be it.

Seriously, the methodology of the studies that "prove" that fat is unhealthy is so bad that you'd be amazed anybody buys into them. There are large ethnic groups of humans who have survived for generations in the harshest of conditions (eskimos, siberian tribes) on extremely low carbohydrate, high fat diets. Remove almost all fat from a diet and seemingly insane things like rabbit starvation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_starvation) occur.

I know one person who does a low carb vegan diet, and the amount of time, preparation, concentration and just plain work he puts into it is almost mind-boggling.

Look, I spent the last 15 years trying to lose weight on and off, cutting out red meat, eating more salads, cutting fat. Nothing worked, nothing kept off the hunger. This time I started eating low carb - not a low carb diet, just low carb eat: avoiding starches (I'll have potatoes in some form now and then), cereals, breads, fruit, processed grains (flour!), pasta; avoiding sugar in all forms. I eat meat, dairy (tried giving it up, didn't feel any different, love the taste, came back) and fresh or frozen above-ground vegetables. When I ride a lot, I let myself eat more starches, get some fries with my steak or some potatoes with my roast chicken.

Result? Down 80lb in the first 4 months, a total of 130lb over the past 9 months. In that time I walked a couple hundred miles/km and did 3000miles/5000km a mountain bike, including a tour from Berlin to Copenhagen.

I do think avoiding some carbs is good. I do enjoy kashi cereal in the morning and it fills me up. I do avoid white flour as much as possible although if I do eat pasta, it is ok. it is what it is. I do enjoy brown rice, wild rice and cous cous and usually eat a little of it at lunch. I do always, in some way or another, have protein at each meal. Breakfest is cereal but it does have protein in it. Snack has almonds, lunch has protein... their pork, chicken, tuna or salmon, day snack usually has a protein shake and dinner is more protein. I do try to keep the protein to a respectable amount of 4 to 8 ounces. I do eat beef or lamb every once and a while. I do eat a lot of vegetables and fruit. Low in cals and very filling.

I tried low carb-once. Felt like crap. Well I was able to stick to it for about two weeks before I was too weak to run even three miles. Complex carbohydrates-- you NEED them for energy.

What's funny is people say: potatoes. Pasta. Hell, people: are you eating them plain or something on them? A lot of people put calorie dense things and blame the thing underneath. Anyone put bacon or nuts on his salad?

Simple carbohydrates on the other hand are a metabolic snafu. There's two basic kinds of carbohydrates-- monosaccharides, polysaccharides-- different kinds of fat-- triglycerides and the type of fatty acids comprising said triglycerides: long chain, medium chain (good stuff here), short chain / poly-un, mono-un, saturated) and two kinds of protein-- complete and partial.

For ACTIVE people, such as myself, a calorie is pretty much a calorie. And they can add up from seemingly innocuous sources. Many, if not most diets work via calorie replacement, that is replacing calorie dense food with calorie sparse food. That's it. That's the science.

I won't preach but I've just finished reading "How we get fat,and what to do about it" by Gary Taubes and have just started "Good Calories,Bad Calories" by the same author. I'm easing into the low/no carbs way of eating and do feel different. I love all that stuff anyway so it won't be a chore. But finding food that doesn't have carbs or is very low is a chore. Haven't been on the scale since I started so it'll be awhile before I see results. Read up and be surprised. Very controversial however it's science backed by research over more than 100 years.

Sorry for the hijack but it fits the general run of the thread.

I won't preach but I've just finished reading "How we get fat,and what to do about it" by Gary Taubes and have just started "Good Calories,Bad Calories" by the same author. I'm easing into the low/no carbs way of eating and do feel different. I love all that stuff anyway so it won't be a chore. But finding food that doesn't have carbs or is very low is a chore. Haven't been on the scale since I started so it'll be awhile before I see results. Read up and be surprised. Very controversial however it's science backed by research over more than 100 years.

Sorry for the hijack but it fits the general run of the thread.

Try grocery shopping on a bicycle. I've started doing this lately, and I find it amusing how my thought process in a store has changed. Before, I would simply toss things into the cart without thinking too much about what macronutrients they consisted of. But now that I've got limited cargo capacity, suddenly those large bags of carbs don't seem like a very worthwhile choice at the store anymore. Once I'm done grabbing all the required proteins for the week, there's hardly any room for carbs left.

It's an interesting way to go shopping, to say the least. Going grocery shopping on the bike later today actually :)

Rick Rubin, responsible for the production work on albums by the Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Johnny Cash, is profiled in the latest issue of Men's Journal (article isn't online yet). Rubin lost 130 pounds over the past 15 months.

Aside from buying personal training and dieticians, which is only to be expected from a wealthy Californian, the one surprise is that Rubin was a vegan when he was north of 300 pounds. I don't understand how one can get that fat on a vegan diet. The vegans I've known have usually looked like they've been dead for a week. Rubin has added some beef back into his diet, although the article states he has his chef "hide it" so he doesn't know he's eating an animal.

Oh, and I should mention that the author of the profile gives two sentences to Rubin nearly hitting a cyclist. It's clear neither Rubin nor his biographer thought this of any importance.

I'm 265# and I've been vegan for 7 years. At my heaviest I was 285#. Vegan isn't a "diet" though, it's a lifestyle.

But, as others have said, calories are calories, no matter where they come from.

Avoiding fat and replacing it with carbs is probably the best ways to help fight weight loss. Fat - especially animal fat - is easily digestible, doesn't mess with your blood sugar levels, doesn't cause an insulin response, makes you feel full, etc. If you want to bulk up, eat lots of sugar and carbs. They'll keep you from feeling full, you won't get all all the nutrients you need so your body will want to eat more and more. Heck, if you're already obese, you probably have blunted insulin sensitivity so you can probably snack on high carb snacks until you're full and still want more and more of them. If you want to find a macronutrient that's responsible for weight gain, fat won't be it.

Seriously, the methodology of the studies that "prove" that fat is unhealthy is so bad that you'd be amazed anybody buys into them. There are large ethnic groups of humans who have survived for generations in the harshest of conditions (eskimos, siberian tribes) on extremely low carbohydrate, high fat diets. Remove almost all fat from a diet and seemingly insane things like rabbit starvation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_starvation) occur.

I know one person who does a low carb vegan diet, and the amount of time, preparation, concentration and just plain work he puts into it is almost mind-boggling.

Look, I spent the last 15 years trying to lose weight on and off, cutting out red meat, eating more salads, cutting fat. Nothing worked, nothing kept off the hunger. This time I started eating low carb - not a low carb diet, just low carb eat: avoiding starches (I'll have potatoes in some form now and then), cereals, breads, fruit, processed grains (flour!), pasta; avoiding sugar in all forms. I eat meat, dairy (tried giving it up, didn't feel any different, love the taste, came back) and fresh or frozen above-ground vegetables. When I ride a lot, I let myself eat more starches, get some fries with my steak or some potatoes with my roast chicken.

Result? Down 80lb in the first 4 months, a total of 130lb over the past 9 months. In that time I walked a couple hundred miles/km and did 3000miles/5000km a mountain bike, including a tour from Berlin to Copenhagen.

I think most everyone will agree that fat is not evil. But, like anything else, you have to moderate your intake.

Low carb vegan? I've often wondered how people do that. I couldn't survive without carbs.

But, I think you have found the solution - calories spent > calories taken in = weight loss