Just remember that it gets easier, I think a lot of people struggling with addiction to unhealthy food try to resist temptation for a day and go through hell. They think "I can't live the rest of my life like this," but the thing they never make it far enough to learn is that it doesn't feel this hard all the time. Every night I go to bed resisting a sugar loaded soft drink I wake up stronger, and the sabotaging gut bacteria is one battle weaker than the healthy gut bacteria.
A very simple solution that definitely works is Clean Simple Eats. They give you a weekly shopping list and the recipes you need to eat every day. I said simple, not easy. It takes will power to stop eating everything in sight. It takes will power to spend so much time in the kitchen.
You don't need a weird tip. You need to do what is time-tested and true. Diet, sleep, and exercise. That's how you'll gain health and a better body composition.
80% diet, 20% exercise
Basically, about 6 years ago, I got into freediving while on vacation. Once I got back to the real world, I got obsessed with training to hold my breath for longer. So I started doing breathing exercises just after I woke up and just before I went to bed. Each session took 15-25 min and was done lying down to minimize the danger from passing out. I used an iOS app called Apnea Trainer (no affiliation besides satisfied user), but there should be a ton of apps available on both app stores if you search ‘apnea’. You can also read a ton of information (including safety tips) by googling ‘CO2 tables’ and/or ‘O2 tables’.
After dropping the 25lbs in my first month of training, I started looking into why that might be and, from what I’ve found, training your body for longer breath holds can increase resting metabolic rate.
I'll take more shit for saying this, but I think the negative health effects of smoking are quite minimal, for most people, for the first 20 years or so, and are probably less than the health effects of obesity. But you still need to recognize that you can't do this for life, and quitting, whenever the time is right, will be very difficult. You also need to recognize the social externalities, like smelling bad, people not wanting to associate with you, and places you can't go or live.
(Just reiterating that this is unlikely to be a smart strategy -- but you requested "weird", not smart)
I had been going to the gym for 2 years before that and no signs of losing weight... once I reduced the amount of food and calories I was ingesting, surprise: quick weight loss.
Your weight is a function of your diet and the amount of physical activity you perform. The problem is that when you increase the amount of physical activity you do, you unconsciously also increase calories intake.... very hard to not do that. It's a psychological problem: just accept that being hungry is fine sometimes. You don't need to have your belly full all the time. Go to bed hungry! With time, you learn that you won't even feel hungry anymore and consequently you lose weight... up to the point where your weight reflect your new calories intake again... I stopped at 75Kg exactly, and it just goes a few 100's grams up/down but I am happy with that (started off at nearly 90Kg).
Another option is to ask your doctor about semaglutide (e.g., Wegovy). Here is a study: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2032183 (Health insurance usually covers it. They have a coupon to bring down the copay to $25.)
The key is consistency and recognizing that you may be eating for reasons other than hunger.
2. 2 vegetable smoothies + Huel Black powder a day - I have a 400 calorie Black Huel powder smoothie at 10am and another at 1pm. This smoothie has > 40 grams of protein and I also blend it with frozen spinach (other vegetables as well on occasion) and the spinach tastes surprisingly good frozen. I also add a few bits of frozen fruit for taste. My wife does the same but adds pb2 peanut butter power for taste as well.
Benefits:
a. Protein makes you feel really full
b. Fiber from vegetables is almost zero calorie and makes you feel really full. It also has ummm.. other reliable benefits
c. Every day you are reliably at 800 calories going into dinner so you only have one meal to count calories for. If you want to lose weight, go low carb or keep dinner 600 calories or under.
d. This is essentially the same system as Jenny Craig, except the huel powder costs about $2 a meal. Its cheaper than Jenny Craigs/similar $10-$20 a meal and therefore sustainable
e. Vegetables are really healthy and you will feel better from the antioxidants
f. (Expert level) - I regularly add a fish oil capsule, and sometimes ginger or turmeric for added health benefits.
I started doing this in an effort to make a sustainable version of Tom Brady's diet as I started exercising again in my late 30's and kept getting injured. The increased vegetables actually fixed the issue and now I find I can adjust my weight with the diet at will. Interested in other opinions on it :)
At any rate, good luck! I hope you find something that works for you.
1. Eliminating liquid calories and substitute sweeteners. Once I figured out that substitute sweeteners made me crave genuine sugars I got rid of them which made it easier to get rid of all liquid calories. Other than one or two servings of alcohol a month in social settings and an espresso in the morning I've had nothing but water to drink for a couple of years. It's made a huge difference in the way I feel.
2. I got rid of "direct" sugars. No ice cream, desserts, other sweets. I don't worry about carbs (bread, pasta, etc) being converted to sugar.
3. As a general rule I'm not hungry until noonish. If I forced myself to eat breakfast it triggered something and I ended up being hungry all day no matter how much I ate. I've decided the 3 square meals a day thing doesn't work for me. I switched to eating on an unstructured schedule, mostly salty snacks (chips, jerky, cheese, etc) during the day with a protein heavy meal at the end of the day.
About a month after I had ^^^ figured out I started feeling much more energized which meant I was able to do a lot more walking. I live in a city, 90% of everywhere I need to be on a regular basis is within a dozen blocks. Where a couple of years ago I might have driven 4 blocks now I walk everywhere.
In response to your post: it's not necessarily the case that more oxygen will lead to positive outcomes. Respiratory illnesses like asthma and sleep apnea can be caused by overbreathing/hyperventilation. The lungs need to maintain a certain level of CO2 in order for oxygen to be properly absorbed into the blood, and where this hyperventilation happens, the CO2 drops too low, blood oxygen drops, and the impulse to overbreathe is further exacerbated.
If you're looking at oxygen/CO2 levels as a potential means of improved weight loss, look into the Buteyko Breathing Method, which teaches you to breathe so that your oxygen and CO2 stays in optimal balance.
Another big thing to look at is metal toxicity; mercury, lead, aluminium, cadmium, as well as bio-unavailable forms of iron and copper are the most common.
It's worth investigating if these are present, and look at natural ways of removing them. I'd avoid chemical chelation, but moderate use of saunas, and natural detoxifiers like cilantro are worth considering - though seek professional advice before undertaking any such approach.
Other than that, I've lost about 5-6 kg in the past few months, just by ensuring I walk plenty each day (7000 steps works for me), and keeping my sugars/carbs down so that I'm just in very-mild ketosis in the morning and the evening. There's nothing extreme about it; I'm not avoiding anything altogether and not feeling at all deprived, just ensuring I'm burning off more than I'm storing each day. (Regular barbell/dumbbell sets through out the day can help with this too, especially if you're not able to walk that much.)
- Lost 6 kg since January 10 (that’s 2 months), possibly because I am not allowed to snack in the evenings and I also have to skip breakfast
- I sleep better, because I don’t eat very close to sleep time
- I go to bed earlier so I’m less tempted
- I feel more energized in the morning, possibly because I didn’t spend all night professing food
I don’t use any app, I think that they’re just not needed, you just need to keep track of the last time you ate. I also don’t always stick to 20:00 because social life etc. and I can adjust the time I break the fast on the next day. I don’t fast week-ends because I don’t want to miss out on meeting with friends and drinking or eating together.
(If you actually search around the web for the topic of vinegar you will discover the apple cider vinegar cult. This is a thing that got started in the 50s from a book author who spun his marketing as old-timey folklore. ACV is not significantly different from other vinegars, though some may prefer the taste.)
1. You have to replace your food with healthy variants, fruits, vegetables, proteins, etc. Otherwise your body will not be satisfied and ironically eating healthy food with the right portion will fill you up just fine.
2. Drink water during the day, this reduces craving, keeps you hydrated and is refreshing!
3. Get your sleep under control. In my experience, if you lack sleep, your body will signal the need for more calories
4. KEEP TRACK. This is very important, every morning, before your routine, go on a scale and get your weight. You can get one of those fancy scales that automatically stores data; this is important because weight loss is not visible initially and you will be discouraged.
5. This is a lifestyle change, so be kind and patient with yourself, even if you slightly gain some back, it's ok because if your _mindset_ is of a healthy life, then you can always get back on track quickly.
Last point: Junk food really is poison for your body. Your body has been gifted to you through millions of years of evolution and it doesn't do it justice to fill it with disgusting sugary foods!
Best of luck to you.
Most people agree that cutting calories is the key, and exercise helps. No magic. But one major fact that is too often overlooked is the mental aspect and how to persist with your diet until you have lost the weight you want.
My trick was to target a very specific date. Let's say 3 months from now, at 10:00 AM. I wrote down that date, say "June 10 at 10:00 am".
Then I swore to myself that, until that very specific date, I would not cheat. Not once. Ever. I would not eat any meal that is not specifically designed to cut calories. I would not eat any snacks other than those I had already selected as allowed.
Then I started the diet with that date in mind.
Having that immutable target date constantly in my mind helped me a lot in resisting temptations to eat more during the diet. As soon as a thought like "Yum, that would be so good!" popped into my brain, it was immediately stopped and rejected as unacceptable.
Good luck!
Some sources for this:
- https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160201-why-the-calorie-...
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/science-reveals-w...
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/01/06/...
- https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/140307-ca...
- https://www.businessinsider.com/calorie-counts-arent-accurat...
- https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/stop-counting...
The biggest hacks are all mental though, and to know what you're actually up against. As hyped up as the fitness industry makes it all seem, there's nothing particularly special about fitness, you just gotta do it.
The majority of weight loss is dietary, but without exercise you can't really enable that diet process properly. So make sure you love what you're doing for exercise and that gives you all the necessary context for the diet.
Just dieting because you kindof should is a losing strategy. Dieting because you want to get faster on the bike, or because you want to be a beast at rock climbing, or because you want to look good doing laps, are all really great motivators. Also, to be frank, if all you want out of it is to have better sex, that's hardwired into our brains to motivate us to do crazy stuff, no harm in wielding that power.
Trying to convince yourself to diet when your only goal is to look good while sitting at the computer is a losing strat.
Just eat less man. It's pretty straight forward. Just eat one meal a day (lunch) and you'll see the weight fly off. It's what I did for a bit and lost the weight quickly. You'll lose 5lbs/month easily even for people who have a relatively lean body mass already. (Easier to lose a lot of weight when you're heavier because your BMR is high to begin with) I've done it as someone who is 5'10" and 150lb to get down to 140 or 130lb. (Basically cutting fat - yes, I have significant fat even at 150lb and 5'10") I've done it a few times. I would recommend it. Changing your diet permanently is a much more permanent solution but also requires a lifestyle/mental change. I've had too many other lifestyle changes going on that made it hard for me to commit to such a thing.
Nice part about it is that it really frees up a lot of your day too. You don't have to worry about eating another meal or two. You just have the one per day and it's a done deal. Kinda freeing in that sense. Just make sure your meal isn't 2000+ calories - otherwise, it'll defeat some of the point. Which I know for some people can be easy to push down because their stomach has grown in size and is able to hold that much weight. It'll take willpower at first but then once your stomach starts to decrease in size - you'll automatically be limited on your caloric intake from that one meal.
1. Don't overdo it, if you cant imagine living forever with a change in diet then it wont work. Your perspective on that change will maybe change later on, take it easy.
2. Nutrition > Exercise, but exercising (or movement in general) made me crave healthier food.
3. First step - stop drinking anything but water, plain tea and black coffee. Becoming a tea or coffee snob helps as you still have something with flavour (even better than before to be honest). This alone accounted for 15kg loss.
4. Reduce candy and sweets, potentially cutting them out completely. Do this only after you don't crave soda and other sweet drinks or it wont stick. Another 10kg.
5. Move, more than before. No specific goal. Walking is better than nothing. Ideally you start with strength exercises. I started with 2 water bottles that i would lift. Muscles burn calories.
6. Protein > Fat > Carbs really helped me. Mileage may vary, but after you get used to it you get hungry less frequently. BE CAREFUL WITH BIG DIETARY CHANGES. Best is to do it incrementally.
7. Better to lose continously and slowly than to force big weight losses in a short amount of time. Flabby skin etc.
8. Skipping breakfast / intermittend fasting helped me to reduce calories without having to count etc. Just a natural limit. Also my lunch is quite small now, but i eat a lot for dinner - not the healthiest but it works for me.
The only way to breathe out more CO2 and lose weight would be to make more CO2 by increasing your metabolism, for example by taking thyroid hormone. This brings us full circle to your theory as it shows that increased CO2 breathing isn't the cause of weight loss, but a consequence of a faster metabolism which will in turn burn more calories and create weight loss.
Another weird tip, be slightly cold. Your body will burn more calories to warm itself.[1]
I got downvoted, so here's a reference: [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/02/how-being...
- Take just a little less calories in than you use (you don't want jojo effect).
- Waive soft drinks (even sugar free).
- Drink a lot of water.
- Start flexing your muscles from time to time (build tension in your body).
- Stand up.
- Do Push ups.
- Increase the steps walked per day.
- Take stairs not the elevator.
- Eat low carbs in the evening.
- Eat enough proteins (at least your bodyweight in grams).
- Read rails source code (it will cause your brain to go 100% cpu which consumes a lot of energy)
It’s mostly mental, but you adapt quickly, and there are tons of health benefits beyond weight control.
To a lesser degree: eggs. They are a miracle food imho. Amazing fat/protein/vitamin combo. And anyone talking about cholesterol content hasn’t read any good science on serum cholesterol drivers in the last two decades (you can eat a dozen eggs a day and be fine).
Fresh air, bird song, chatting, river view, 10k steps, and she lost a pound a week for 50 weeks with no diet change (large sugar-based diet).
She eventually injured her foot, stopped walking and gained all the weight back in 2 months.
I think every individual body has some equilibrium activity level it anticipates for a given weight. If you are sitting most of the day, maybe start with a goal of standing most of the day and you will discover your standing weight. Then introduce walking, and so on.
Think of it as a years long process though, be patient.
I'm a naturally obese person, and I've read a thousand of these threads over the years. Nearly every comment is either:
* Telling you to "hack your body", with keto or whatever the latest low-carb fad is called. They are so adverse to exercise, that suggesting exercise seems offensive to them. They emphasize that it's entirely about diet.
or
* Telling you to "just eat well and exercise". Which is about as useful as telling drug addicts to "just stop using drugs", and is usually more about the speaker smugly moralizing to feel superior.
There are two things that ARE really useful for obese people to hear, and that hardly anyone says:
1. Exercise helps you eat well. When I was 100% sedentary, I had constant cravings for all kinds of junk. And the portions that I ate at mealtime were double those of a normal person. When I'm lifting weights (has to be lifting weights, I don't see this benefit from cardio alone)... the cravings magically disappear and I have a normal appetite at mealtime.
2. It... takes... so... LITTLE! You don't have to go full ham, with extreme workout advice that you find in bodybuilding magazines and forums. A 30 minute workout, two or three times a week is sufficient (i.e. hit 6 or 7 machines, for 3 sets each). If you're just trying to keep your hormones and appetite on a healthy track, then you don't have to go "to failure" either. Just enough to feel like a mild challenge.
- Eat potatoes and gourds. Here in holland we have 30% reduced calorie potatoes, an (uncooked) kilo of food can be less than 600 kcal
- Learn to steam vegetables. Buy an electric steamer if need be. If you properly steam vegetables, you will grow to crave them. Just a little salt and pepper on some perfectly steamed broccoli can be surprisingly mouth watering.
- Consider a carnivore diet (often includes fruits as well). It might be the most satiating diet and easiest to stick to. Regardless of it's long term health benefits or detriments, if you can stick to the diet and lose a bunch of weight it's likely a net positive.
Less weird:
- Eat a very high protein diet. I'm assuming if you're overweight you're not terribly active - you probably don't need a whole lot of carbs. Proteins are the hardest macronutrient for your body to store as fat. You don't need 0 carb but consider 2+ grams of protein per kg of bodyweight
- If you have the money, splurge on good quality fruits. I have had better mangos than I have cakes, better chocolate dipped strawberries than chocolate chip cookies, better grapes than potato chips.
Food addiction is like any other addiction, triggered by unhappiness.
Any diet will work if you have the discipline, that is if you have the mental strength to control your impulses, you can’t do that when miserable.
But you can try to induce a positively reinforcing loop with a good diet tailored to your character and habits, seeing progress can feel good enough to maintain mental strength.
Or you can wait to be in a very good place emotionally and use it to improve your body and habits.
The most difficult part is not regaining later, as your body will fight during a few months, again the trick is discipline.
Don't eat until you're full, eat until you're no longer hungry.
I've lost 25 pounds so far with this in mind. It requires reflecting while you're eating and realizing that while you may want to eat more, you may not actually be hungry anymore. While I may want to stuff myself and eat 4 slices of pizza, I'm generally no longer hungry after a single slice. In the morning, half an egg and a couple of sausage links is enough, or a few bites of oatmeal.
That's all well and good, but then you might be hungry in an hour. This actually hasn't been a huge issue for me, but if I am hungry, I'll generally eat a handful of nuts or a spoonful of peanut butter.
I'll typically eat a bigger dinner, and let myself cut loose a bit on the weekend when we order delivery.
I ended up using the clock to manage my intake. I started by having a hard stop at 7pm. I could eat whatever I wanted until then, but then it had to stop. A side effect of this has been an incredible improvement in my sleep. Having slept well often means I am able to manage my cravings better, it seems.
I then started reducing the hours in the morning when I could eat. First I just eliminated breakfast, then I also eliminated the mid morning snack. This took some discipline at first but I did get it.
I eat an early (11:30 usually) and massive lunch. That gives me time to do some digesting and have a productive afternoon. A big lunch also means I don't really crave sugary or other indulgent stuff mid afternoon. Dinner, I eat whatever I want. ANYTHING. I just try to make sure I drink a lot of water.
Pick your vector of optimization. For me it was time. So easy and you can't argue with or wonder about the clock. It's right there in front of you. I lost 25lbs without thinking about it. I could lose more if I wasn't a bit of a pig at lunch and dinner :)
You need to eat fewer calories. As lame as it may sound, install an app like MyFitnessPal and count calories for a while. You don't have to do it forever, just until you start developing an intuition as to how much things "cost" calorie-wise. The most important thing is that, when modifying your diet, you do it in a sustainable way, something that you will stick to. If you hit your target weight and then go back to your old eating habits, you will gain that weight back in no time.
You're also gonna have to exercise (in addition to the diet changes; exercise alone probably won't help that much). This doesn't have to mean going to the gym for two hours every day. A half hour walk once a day, or a half hour run three times a week is fine. There are many other aerobic options if walking or running isn't your thing. If you aren't feeling fit enough for something, start slow and work your way up to it. You can also do some light resistance exercises like push ups, tricep dips, squats, lunges, planks, etc. to build some muscle (running will build muscle, just it's mostly only in your legs). These exercises will burn calories in their own right, but adding muscle will increase the amount of calories you burn even while you're sitting around doing nothing.
I'm not saying this is easy. It's fairly simple. But it's not easy. Don't go for silly "tricks". They won't work, and you'll be trading one unhealthy situation for another. Change your diet and exercise more. That's it. Find something you can stick with and... stick with it. Simple. But not easy.
Edit: the only real "tricks" I can think of are mental. Throw out all your snacks at home and don't buy any to replace them. Only keep food that you'll eat as part of your regular meals. Avoid restaurants if you can; if you can't, only eat 2/3 of what you're given, as portion sizes and calorie counts are high. Keep a water bottle with you at all times, and if you're tempted to eat when you aren't supposed to, drink a bunch of water until you start to feel a bit more full. Oh, speaking of that: don't drink anything but water.
You need logging to be able to "debug" the weight loss
If you don't have logging you won't have a good idea of why it didn't work if you fail
Logging meaning tracking calories
There are a lot of heuristics like avoiding food X, or intermittent fasting but these are all just proxies for eating less calories
- ban sugary drinks. It's ok to slip, but just don't buy multiple at once. I sometimes go to the bakery to buy a sandwich and they have a formula with a free sugary drink: I don't even take it.
- avoid sugary breakfasts. Breakfast is an unnecessary meal. The later you break your fast, the later the first insulin spike, the less you'll store fat. I don't eat anything before noon. I just have black coffee or a tea, because they don't really break the fast.
- don't eat all day long. Especially not anything sugary. Stick to well defined meals.
- understand the role of sugar, insulin spikes, and fat storage.
- understand calories. Count them for a while to get an understanding of what you're eating. When I say "count", I mean "count", not "count and stop". It's important to get the feeling for calories and then stop counting as soon as possible.
- learn to read labels. You don't have to not buy anything with a bad label, but it's important to know what you eat. It helps you make informed choices.
- know the basics: you should not have more than 25g of sugar per day. That's 5 teaspons. One teaspoon is 5g. Fill a teaspoon and see what 5g of sugar is like.
- and look at the arguments of "trendy" things such as keto or intermittent fasting, you don't necessarily need to do them perfectly (unless that helps you), but you should take inspiration.
Nothing is absolute. You can slip. Just do your best and try to improve.
Of course you need to ensure vitamin and mineral supply; proper supplements can take care of that. The hard part is just finding an affordable source of protein that isn't tainted with sugar. Stay under a daily intake of 50g carbs. Aim for 10g, with no more than 15g per meal in any case.
The protein intake serves to keep your body from thinking of your muscles as food. You will want to have some physical activity, but regular walks suffice.
This requires drinking enough, or you can seriously hurt your kidneys. Your cardio capacity will be impacted, because your muscles switch to running on fat, which needs far more oxygen than sugar (iirc around double).
If needed, you can use Isomaltulose (an enzymatic rearrangement of Sucrose (table sugar)) to supplement carbs for physical activity without hurting the keto-state. Slightly under-dose based on the expected energy burn from the activity. It just fixes the insulin spike issue of carb consumption, not the blood glucose oversupply you have to counter to prevent acute Hyperglycemia. This is just a slower-uptake version of normal sugar, also just half as sweet (needs double the concentration in dilute sugar water for the same taste).
This while approach is basically "starving without losing muscle mass", and only marginally more healthy. It's effective, though, and allows for high caloric deficits (you can lose weight about half as fast as if you didn't eat anything at all). Your cognitive abilities are also barely affected, after the initial 48h of "keto flu".
1. Figure out your relationship with food. This is the most important thing. People eat for a variety of reasons. You could be bored or anxious or treat food like a reward or simply a sense of comfort. Whatever it is you need to adjust your thinking to view food as nothing more than fuel. Whatever you do, you are doomed to failure if you don't figure out your own motivations for eating;
2. A lot of people (myself included) find a lot of value in intermittent fasting. There are many forms of this. I started just eating lunch and dinner. Now it's just dinner. You realize how much of eating is just habit not need. You certainly don't need to be eating 3+ times a day. This will actually save you both time and money too;
3. Get sufficient nutrition. The main thing here is actually protein. Protein shakes are convenient as a supplement to your main meal(s). Other than that, don't worry about it too much. You can theoretically lose weight just eating cupcakes if they're under your calories;
4. Exercise has little to no impact on weight loss. You see this once you start looking at the calorific value of foods and the calorific expenditure of certain activities. Compare a Big Mac to how long you need to run for and you realize very quickly not eating the Big Mac is WAY easier. Exercise is for your health and wellbeing only. Walk half an hour every day;
5. Particular diets don't matter. Assuming sufficient nutrtion, the only thing that matters is managing appetite;
6. If this is a factor for you make it require effort to eat. This means where possible don't have junk food or snack food in easy reach. The effort required to leave your house and get chips and salsa (for example) vs just getting it from your kitchen makes a difference; and
7. Don't view the weight loss as a goal. That's a daunting long-term goal. View this as a permanent lifestyle and attitude change.
Good luck.
There is no secret hack for losing weight. The best thing you can do is limit food intake to 1 meal a day and cut your carb & sugar intake as much as possible. Basically you'll want to avoid things like sugary drinks, bread, rice, pasta, etc while eating more vegetables and meat. Doing this will lower your calorie intake while improving your insulin sensitivity significantly. Personally I also do a day without food once every couple of weeks, then once every few months I'll do a 5 day extended fast. You don't need to go this far, but there's plenty of evidence to suggest fasting is great for general health and insulin sensitivity so it's worth doing if you can. I can almost guarantee even if you don't get much exercise so long as you stick to a diet like this you'll drop to a healthy weight fairly quickly.
It's fine to have a cheat day (or two) every now and then because you need the diet to be sustainable. I find I have the will power to be very strict about what I consume from Mon-Fri then I'll allow myself to have a few treats on the weekend.
Also something you'll find when you become fat adapted is that you're way less hungry and much more mentally stable. When you're body wants a constant source of carbs you can only go so long before you're feeling hungry. These days I enjoy food, but I can easily skip a couple of days and feel fine. I've come to believe that what we think of hunger in developed countries probably isn't hunger, but just our bodies craving a hit of carbs. What I'm saying is that you'll probably find a low-carb diet very difficult for the first couple of months, but with time you'll find it gets much easier.
This may appear counterintuitive to somebody, but your basal metabolic rate increases with your lean body mass. In turn a higher metabolic rate will support your weight loss during the recovery days. Which is to say that exercising is of essence – As well as creating a caloric deficit, while insuring a sufficient protein intake.
Be sure to define a personal plan with your nutritionist.
My suggestion is something that helped personally, and is something like a psychological trick so your mileage may vary. I don't mention my weight loss/exercise routine/diet to anyone. The effect I think this has is that I don't prematurely rob myself of the dopamine hit for working out by simply talking about it. Anyway I can draw a line in my fitness history where I started doing this and I've been much more successful since.
I actually didn't expect much to happen, but it completely changed my diet. It was the first time I actually had to think about what to eat, and it turned out, that I ate a ton of meat, and not a lot of vegetables.
For the first few weeks it was pretty hard to find something to eat, but it got easier. Over time I discovered more vegetarian recipes I actually enjoy.
I'm not a vegetarian, but nowadays I hardly eat any meat, and still do the meatless lent every year. I lost about 15kg in the year after the first lent, and held this weight every since.
There's actually a lot of stuff that's known to work for weight loss but it's illegal and dangerous.
There's the stimulants route which suppresses hunger and raises your metabolic rate. They used to put this shit in supplements and it worked but some people have died from this and long term health side effects are probably not good.
There's stuff like DNP which screws up your body's ability to convert food into energy and turns it in to heat - you feel like shit and you can die from cooking yourself - it's probably the most effective thing and doesn't even require restricting calories. This is the only thing that would be what some people hope for as the magic bullet transformation (maybe outside of surgical/lypo) - but the chances of you dying are high and you're completely useless while on it.
There's the steroids route - the immediate side effects aren't life threatening but there are a lot of complications (hair loss, gyno, acne) and potential long term health damage (cardiovascular, can permanently screw up your endocrine system and force you on lifelong TRT). With steroids you can lose fat while gaining muscle, depending on the compound/dosage even when eating a surplus, they rewire your metabolism. There was a study where giving 500mg test a week for 3 months to a control group that did no exercise outperformed the muscle development of a group of untrained men who followed a weightlifting program for 3 months (and untrained people have the strongest response to training). Steroids take a long time and give you medium effects (nothing like DNP for example), eg. the progress you would make with steroids and training in 3 months would be like the progress you made in 6 months if you were just training. But if you're older TRT is definitely worth looking into.
(Plenty of normal healthy ways to lose weight but that's the weirdest hack I can think of)
1. Realize that losing weight is not about biology, it is psychology. So...
2. Log everything you eat. Accountability is important.
3. Step on the scale once a week, so you can spot trends.
4. Do a little exercise every day, because it sets the right mood.
5. Eat only when you are actually hungry, then eat only enough so you are not hungry. Learn to recognize the difference between an empty stomach and actual hunger.
6. Plan for failure, and how you will cope. Because you will.
7. Be careful taking other people's advice ;-). Since this is a psychological game, the strategy will need to be tailored to you.
8. Don't do anything you can't do every day, forever. Don't lose weight with a goal, or a target date, or anything like that. You don't gain weight at 100 pounds a year, don't try to lose it that fast. 100 calories a day adds up fast.
- go for an at least 30 min walk, every day
- hit the gym, increase your muscle mass
- try intermittent fasting
- if you're healthy, try to fast for a couple of days. Use that as start to improve your diet. For me, it really changed my perception of "being hungry"
- avoid highly processed foods
- get a CGM, see what spikes your blood sugar, avoid that
Joking aside, the path to losing weight is not dieting, but changing what and how you eat permanently. Weight is an equilibrium, and to reach a new equilibrium, you need to change something about your habits permanently or you'll just bounce back once you stop "dieting". For me personally, reducing sugars and filler carbohydrates was the most effective change to make.
On top of changing how you eat, exercise and strength training can help by making you generally healthier or by making you look slimmer when your muscles strengthen, and of course muscles require more energy to maintain so muscle mass will affect things as well.
Other then that, nothing weird, its all very very simple and complicating it just makes errors more likely. You arent a perpetual motion machine. You need to eat your sustaining calorie level every day. If you dont, you loose weight till you starve.
At the end of every day you have either a red or green number for your kcal. So all you do is figure out how much you eat in a normal given week and see if that leads to an increase or decrease.
Next step is finding your daily sustaining calories level and getting some plan ability into your eating habits. The number at which you neither loose nor gain weight. After that you just reduce in which ever tempo you like. Figure out what the big ticket items are (looking at you cream) and figure something out which with you arent hungry. Dont aim too high too early there is really no need to torture yourself.
Its also important to not just diet but change your eating habits. Otherwise you just jojo back and will sooner or later reduce your sustaining calorie level this way. Which might make a reverse diet necessary.
Good luck and relax. This wont be any harder then you make it
edit: I didnt take my own advice of taking it slow and went from 115 to 75kg in about half a year (after my doctor suggested some "weight normalization"). That was very unhealthy so dont. But i am confident in it working. Its how you deal with any addiction. If you cant just quit, you get some structure and then reduce. And do it smart. There is zero reason to torture yourself, this does not have to be hard.
Also, thanks to my bodybuilding friend who explained the mechanism to me plain and simply.
* Cook your own meals. Focus on good oils (butter, coconut oil, olive oil) and high satiety ingredients. My go to is rice, steamed vegetables, and meat
* Lift some weights. I do a HIIT type workout each morning. Pushups, chinups, dips, squats. Just with some basic home equipment, most of it bodyweight. 3x a week barbells is also a good alternative
* Walk a lot. I walk about 10,000 steps a day, and jog up a hill on my run at some point
* Prioritize sleep. This both improves health and also gives you the mental relaxation to take good choices
None of that is exciting but as a package it should work for most people
After I've gotten better control over my emotional situation, then comes the HOW of eating less. My answer, which got me to lose 24 pounds in 6 months and keep my weight for years later is -- eat only when hungry. stop eating immediately if you're no longer hungry. At first this seems trivial, but it's not. You will need to notice your feelings of hunger and become more sensitive to when you are hungry, when you are full. And to only eat when hungry. This method is super effective, you need nothing more. You can eat any food you want as long as you do so only when feeling hungry.
Orlistat works, as long as you can live your life near a toilet.
Semaglutide - looks very promising.
Gastric sleeving and other surgical intervensions are also known to work.
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Changes to oxygen levels due to altitude are still being researched. Higher altitudes in the USA and Europe correlate with lower levels of obesity at statistically significant levels; higher altitudes in Australia correlate with higher levels of obesity. No-one knows why.
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Most of the other advice in this thread has a very low probability of succeeding. There will be a lot of selection bias in this thread because the only people responding are the ones for whom it succeeded.
Most of the time for most people, interventions that focus on diet fail.
Interventions that focus on exercise average around 1-2 kg of weight loss in the general population. That said, if you aren't doing any exercise at the moment, then you can reduce your all-cause mortality pretty rapidly with a small amount of exercise (that would definitely fit into your lifestyle). Even if exercise doesn't help you lose weight, it improves your overall cardiac fitness, and that is probably the most important thing to work on.
You asked for weird tips... it seems that if you have the genetic factors that give you a higher predisposition towards obesity, then exercise will work better for you than average.
From intermittent fasting to only eating one meal a day. These are dangerous things to jump into and recommend without some fact finding first. Although I appreciate people are speaking from their own experience.
I don't know your particular circumstances so I'm not going to recommend specific advice.
I need to know some things about you such as:
How overweight are you? What weight are you? How many calories do you consume each day? Are you allergic to anything? Do you do much physical activity? Do you have injuries? Do you have any medical issues? What have you tried before?
and so on and so on.
The best advice I can give you is to seek out more knowledge on the topic and invest in your health education. Checkout exaimine.com against any of the claims made here. Buy books or even hire a personal trainer or dietician. You can also email me and I'll will happily help you out as best as I can but be warned. I will probably just do more fact finding than recommend what you could do.
Also, books such as Atomic Habits can help you slowly adapt your behaviour to be healthier.
Weight loss is not complicated. At the end of the day, it's energy balance.
That does not mean it's simple either. There is a combination of environment, psychological factors, culture and so much more that can affect your own relationship with health and fitness.
Best of luck of OP.
(1) fast. Doesn't have to be harsh (I do the 500 calories method) or often. However, I found that it helps reset my gut. If I'm in a phase where my stomachs churns, farts and I'm constantly trying to calm it with food (especially carbs), a short fast resets me somewhat. It also breaks up habits.
The side effect of fasting has been better body understanding and food related psyche. I can tell the difference between actual hunger and belly messages. I instinctively know that certain hunger feelings will pass in an hour or too. That I don't actually have to eat every few hours.
(2) is basic calorie, glycemic and macro awareness. Counting is (imo) too much and unsustainable. But, some counting sometimes helps you pick up an intuitive understanding of your diet and hunger. Where are you getting your calories. Why are you hungry? Did you eat a 250 calorie, carb based lunch?
For example, I've seen a lot of weight conscious friends plate <200 calorie meals. It's true that these are healthy, but unless your on a pretty strict short term diet... your going to make those calories up elsewhere. People unknowingly fall into patterns where most of their calories come from snacks, because meals are calorie poor.
- Breathe quicker, meaning more often per minute. Your body will adjust to the change in O2/CO2 balance after a short amount of time and the benefit is an increased metabolism, burning fat faster.
- Visit a prostitute once a week, better twice, for exhaustive full service.
- Eat and drink lots of cacao, mixed with poppy seeds. Better to inform yourself about how it works (and please know if you're allergic!), but this too speeds up your metabolism.
- Use Poppers. Well known in the gay community, it's known to increase heart rate significantly within seconds. Lasts only shortly and probably is a really bad idea to do it all day, every day, but you wanted weird tips and didn't mention they should be safe as well.
- Poke a bee's nest, once a day. Instant motivator for running. Once that's boring, poke a nest of wasps, then level up to hornets!
- Get sun. A lot. Go sunbathing every day. It'll help with melting your fat.
- Kind of weird: prefer sugar over any sort of artificial sweetener, but significantly prefer honey over sugar.
- Make twenty headstands lasting at least three minutes, over the course of the day. Unless you fear your blood vessels might pop. Then please don't.
- Spend a significant amount of time actively thinking about things. That burns lots of energy.
There. You didn't mention how effective the tip should be. All of these should provide benefits to some degree, even better if you combine them.
Weird enough?
90% of weight loss is cutting down on intake, there are plenty of effective techniques that might work for you, but in the end the only way to lose weight is to eat less.
https://www.amazon.com/Burn-Fat-Feed-Muscle-Turbo-Charged/dp...
Basically this:
0.) Weight loss isn't binary. Doing something good is always better than doing nothing. Little things add up.
1.) You can't lose weight by netting fewer calories than you use; you can't gain muscle by using more calories than you net
2.) A good macrobiotic (carbs|protein|fat) calorie ratio to go by is 50%|30%|20%. (if you're calculating percentages by grams instead of calories its 56%|33%|10%)
3.) It takes more energy to eat some foods than others (thermic effect of food). You see this in TV shows like "ALONE" where the contestants starve despite a surplus of lean protein since protein is hard to digest. Ditto salads.
4.) Do cardio
5.) Do resistance training
6.) Bonus: So your body doesn't adapt, go 3 days of lower calories, 1 day of higher calories
7.) Bonus: To lose weight faster, go 3 days of lower carbs, 1 day of higher carbs
8.) Bonus: Eat smaller meals as the day goes on
The first 5 are critical; the last 3 are if you want to dork out over it.
Weight management and fitness is not a difficult problem, but that doesn't mean it's easy. When we think of people who are fit, the stereotypical person we picture isn't usually a math genius. If it were HARD to figure these things out, we wouldn't have that stereotype.
IMHO, the order of effectiveness is: Sleep > Hydration > Diet > Workouts > ... many other things ... > Oxygen Tank
1. Spend an hour or two today learning about how to calculate macros and figure out your TDEE (google it.) 2. Spend an hour or two each week learning how to cook something new. 3. And spend a couple hours each week being active (just walking is enough to start.)
None of this is "exciting" or an "adventure" but it works. The "hard part" is mental. It's about continuing when it's no longer fun or interesting any more. Or making it fun by doing things you love. Look at surfers for example.
One way people get through that step is external motivation. Asking HN is a great first step. Join a team. Hire a coach. Sign up for a competition. Others will welcome you because many of them have been where you are now.
* enough sleep, if you don't sleep enough you get extreme hunger pangs and all the other tricks will be useless.
* strength training every other day. it reduces your hunger by a lot and doesn't have to take long or very be intense at all, 2-3 sets of 5 pullups is enough for me and can be done in 10m or less.
* skip breakfast. this doesnt work for some people, so if it doesn't, just go to 4.
* eat small meals, you can feel satiated from 250-300kcal so have that every time you eat, max 550 kcal for dinner.
* count calories and make sure you eat around 500 kcal under your TDEE, calculate yours at tdeecalculator.net
* your weight fluctuates 2 kg in either direction constantly, only when it moves beyond that there's been a significant gain or loss.
* eat more protein, you feel full quicker
* drink as much of your 0 kcal soft drink as you want, it's 0 kcal and can get you through tough moments.
* have one or two cheat days every week and just eat whatever you want, i did this and kept losing weight throughout.
* have go-to instant or low effort meals with the right amount of kcal and preferably high protein ready at all times, you want to conserve as much will power as possible.
* be kind to yourself.
that is all.
Put simply, it's when you're exposed to the cold and your body ramps up its metabolism to produce more heat to maintain your core temperature. This effect is pretty substantial, and it can even compete with moderate exercise even though it requires no exercise at all.
You can prove this by getting into a bath of cold water, taking the temperature of the water before and after your bath, and doing some basic math.
Remember that a calorie (kCal) is the amount of energy it takes to heat 1 Liter of water 1 degree Celsius. So if you've got a bath tub filled with 130 Liters and your body heated it up 2 degrees, then you've transferred 260 calories to the water.
2 x 130 = 260 kCal
Indeed, this is a direct measurement of calories burned because ultimately all energy eventually becomes heat. Although it's an imperfect measurement (it can be somewhat corrected), anyone can do it to demonstrate that there is something about the cold that burns a significant amount of calories. If you were to repeat the experiment with water that is exactly at human body temperature, the result would be very different, much closer to zero.
I actually built a calculator for this purpose because I got obsessed with the effect of cold thermogenesis and have done experiments around it:
https://bathtubcalorimeter.com
^^ Yeah, it's an ugly site, but I mostly made it for myself and I like minimalism. (and dang it, apparently I messed up some of the styling on Safari)
I do believe it's possible to lose a significant amount of weight by combining cold thermogenesis with a proper diet, but I think it's more practical as an adjunct to weight loss. Sitting in cold water isn't exactly fun or comfortable to a lot of people, but you do gain a tolerance to it. Usually I'll plunge into some 15.5C (60F) water and watch some YouTube or whatever. :D
The beauty of it too is that if you manage to shiver after you are done with the bath then that means you are still burning even more calories, and shivering alone helps increase the amount of brown fat on your body, which is capable of burning even more calories.
Eat different, move more; if those don't work, get your thyroid checked out. Don't go in for fad diets like intermittent fasting, focus on eating "normally" first; three meals a day, breakfast lunch and dinner, between 2000 and 2500 kcal total - or a bit more depending on how overweight we're talking or how active you are. Stick to that for a year. It won't be miraculous, but do you want a miracle or just improve your lifestyle?
A lot of the weight loss culture is about clever hacks, fads of the year, etc, but for anyone that follows these, when is the last time you had a normal meal? So many people go from one fad to the other, one form of self-punishment and guilt to the other ("I should feel bad for eating carbs", "I should feel bad for drinking", "I should feel bad for eating red meat"), but they've never been able to maintain a stable weight or, indeed, a stable diet / eating habits.
Unfortunately, humans are terrible at eating less, since you've been well trained by both evolution and society to eat as much as possible. So then there are things like, eat mostly fruits and vegetables, which aren't very efficient at giving you calories (since you're not a cow, that can extract the full set of calories from vegetables using its 4x stomach). Or become a vegetarian or choose a no-carb diet, maybe that makes it easier by just deciding ahead of time you won't eat anything calorie-efficient. Or exercising and living a more healthy lifestyle, can also help you not feel as hungry as often. Or keep a food diary. Or count calories. Or track your weight. Or train your self-control. But ultimately all just psychological tricks to just eat less calories, and which one works is different for everyone, since everyone's mental makeup is different.
If you can't make it happen psychologically, then you can also make it happen physically, by getting a gastric band or gastric bypass surgery.
It's a form of extreme intermittent fasting, but it works quickly and I'd argue it is not painful.
The first 2 weeks are going to be hell coming from a 3 meal lifestyle, especially towards the evening, but your body will adapt and after these 2 weeks, from my experience, I felt completely okay.
The big advantage is that you can eat whatever tasty, unhealthy food you want, but only during a meal and, hopefully, you will still lose a lot weight just because you eat less overall. You still need to be careful about sweets I'd say, if you want to have quicker results. I pretty much also removed sweets from my diet when I started the OMAD "diet", leaving only the occasional exceptions like eating cake at a birthday party.
Another advantage is that you save money!
This might not work for everyone and it most probably isn't (very) healthy, but it's relatively weird and it managed to help me lose weight. I lost about 30 kgs in 8 months with little effort imo.
So probably avoid that.
As far as weight loss goes, the only method that works is to modify your diet and decrease your dietary intake. Doing this is, often, hard. Food has many functions in our body, we don't often eat out of genuine hunger. A psychologist can be very helpful.
There seems to be reasonably good evidence that once BMI exceeds some number between 35 and 40 it's almost impossible to reverse that by willpower alone. In those cases the combination of willpower and bariatric surgery (but not surgery alone) can be effective.
Source: I'm a doctor in Australia. I lost 50kg through bariatric surgery, with ongoing psychology to support the behaviors required to maintain a healthy weight.
The Hacker's diet archived at fourmilab
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker%27s_Diet
https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
Under your theory, more respirations would work "in theory." I forget what they say about theory and practice ... Don't get an oxygen tank, "You'll burn your lungs out kid!"
Uncoupling mitochondrial metabolism can actually work with the risk that you will cook yourself to death from the inside out. i.e. 2,4-dinitrophenol (DNP) Look up the history and stories on this one! New mitochondrial uncouplers are out there now that modern pharma companies have caught on.
Squats and appetite suppression is the lazy person's way. I'd also look into the Country Club Wives' Club secrets. Nature or nurture?
OTOH what actually takes some discipline is the "traditional" dieting approach, of counting calories, finding recipes, buying different food, being choosy about what restaurants you now allow of yourself, and otherwise overturning your entire life surrounding food. That sounds like setting up for failure to me. Just go ahead and eat that big mac if that's your big meal of the day and you've eaten like a bird otherwise.
Bad carbs, that turn into sugar in your body, will stimulate appetite. When farmers want to fatten up pigs, they give them carbs. Avoid sugar, white bread, etc. Go for low glycemic breads.
Exercise has a lot of benefits and you should definitely exercise. It burns calories, but also stimulates appetite, so for weight loss, it's a wash. Sadly, exercise won't help you lose weight. But you should still do it for other reasons.
Fatty foods will actually make you feel full, so can be good. Snack on nuts. Eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, if you get jelly without added sugar and use it sparingly, on low glycemic bread.
In the end, you also need to up your mental tolerance for feeling hungry. Try to train your brain to be ok with feeling a little hungry, not eating at the first sign of hunger.
Track your calories for a few days. For me what was really helpful was trying to do the whole if it gets you the macros "diet". You should avoid thinking about it as a diet though. Diets are things people do briefly to lose one or two pounds and tend to be things like Atkins, etc. You're looking for a lifestyle change.
Understanding what you currently eat is hugely helpful in this. I went through a phase where I weighed everything I ate with a food scale and entered it in to MyFitnessPal, aiming for 50% carbs, 20% protein, 30% fat and a loss of ~1 lb a week. Pretty quickly I started to find myself surprised at things that in hindsight seem very obvious: fibrous veggies have very little calories, and especially if you steam them or prepare them in a reasonably healthy way, they can make you feel full without going over your daily calories, oils are incredibly calorie dense, 93% lean ground beef is much higher in fat than you think it is, etc.
Paying attention and tracking your calories for a few weeks is a great tool at understanding your current habits and how you can make an avalanche of small changes. Cutting out one can of soda every day is the difference between losing .5 lb a week and maintaining your weight.
You don't have to do the calorie tracking forever - within a few weeks I'd started to make small modifications to a lot of recipes that I cook or things that I eat out to make them much healthier.
Also, get a good scale that does BMI and measure your weight every morning after you go to the bathroom but before you eat anything. Ignore small daily changes, you're looking for the trend over a week or so. Seeing your progress in real numbers helps immensely at keeping you on track.
Ensure your body fasts for as long as possible. This means, always have a protein and fat based breakfast, consistently as soon as you get up, but try and make the last time you eat in a day as early as possible
Ensure you are properly hydrated throughout the day. You shouldnt be drinking less than half a litre of water every day, and preferably more.
Ensure to accompany your meal routine ending sooner, that you get as much sleep as possible. This is made easier by waking at exactly the same time every day, bedtimes can be less consistent as life demands it sometimes, but you no longer sleep in.
Daily exercise, no matter how small. Start with a daily walk around the block. This is absolutely essential. The consistency is more important than the amount. If you feel you can comfortably improve the amount without making it suck, this will massively help.
For most people, the real challenge is motivation - why do you want to lose weight? Is it a means to an end, or is it an end in itself? For instance, if you want to lose weight so you can go backpacking (less body weight to move around means less energy spent means can go longer distances; also means joints like knees don't wear out as quickly) you can focus your goal on that, rather than saying "I'd like to lose 10 pounds." Or if you're less outdoorsy and more inclined to competitive motor sports, you can think of each pound you lose as a fraction of a second off your lap time (or quarter mile, depending on your preference).
I was able to ween myself off of soda by buying the tiny 8oz cans for a while. It helped to reduce the amount I was drinking without disrupting my daily patterns, which was super important. I was honestly surprised at how effective this was. After a while, even 12oz started to feel like way too much.
- Prevent yourself from buying calorie-dense food. It's a lot easier to resist snacks in the grocery store (assuming you're not hungry lol) than it is to resist them in your home. Even if you find yourself eating out a lot, this is still a relatively easy step in the right direction.
Many “quick” weight-loss tips are not-so-healthy, if done for an extended period of time.
Also, the human body is an amazing machine. It adapts quickly to stressors. Since most “quick” weight-loss techniques are actually stressors, their effectiveness can decline, as soon as your body adapts.
As I’ve gotten older, losing weight (actually, not gaining weight) has become more difficult, but also, a lot of foods that I used to eat with impunity, now make me ill. I haven’t had ice cream in a couple of years, which is sad. I've also almost eliminated between-meal snacking.
I've always been a fan of moderate, consistent, exercise, and a moderate, varied, healthy diet, with small portions, eaten slowly (note the use of the word "moderate," there).
But I’ve heard that deliberately infecting oneself with a tapeworm works. It’s probably not as crazy as some of the stuff I've read about.
- Get addicted to video games and caffeine pills. If you get really into it, you can forget about food for hours. Your life will suck but perhaps it's worth it in the short term. Must not keep snacks in your gaming room, but you can keep your pills and your water bottles
Number one tip is this. Spend money on a real life internet personal trainer. I have one, I think of him when I'm about to eat something I shouldn't. Weird how a stranger can provide accountability.
Two, buy a Bluetooth scale with two decimal places of precision. Super easy to weigh and record each day. You can literally see the weight loss during sleep, it's a good few hundred grams a night. You can also weigh your toilet visits, haha.
Three, and this is from my coach. Eat enough. Don't try to have a mega deficit, that can only work temporarily. Have a moderate deficit and hit your macro ingredients count, a third of your calories each.
Walking at least 35 min per day. No need to do running. Just walk. Go out, walks some places, window shopping, walk you dog. Whatever, walk. 35 min minimum.
You get result within 30 days.
It's dead simple: calculate your BMR (https://www.calculator.net/bmr-calculator.html) and restrict your calories to about 150-200 calories more than your BMR. That's literally all you need for weight loss. It can be in the form of beer, chips, candy, whatever or you can do it all healthy with fruits and veggies; that's up to you, but you will still lose weight regardless.
Plus focusing on the food will let you realize when you’ve had enough and you’ll feel like you are more because you remember the experience better.
You wanted weird tips…
Every day/night, spend 30 minutes sitting alone in a quiet space, emotionally involved in how much you want to lose weight.
Then during the day -- and this is important -- don't fight the urge to eat. At all. Just live your life.
Once your daily meditation/prayer/yearning starts to take hold, you will automatically start making better choices.
This advice goes for anything you want to change about yourself. You have convince the part of your brain that runs your life moment-to-moment that you want to behave differently. And the only way to do it is by getting that part of your brain to understand how much you want it. You have to prove it by going emotionally deep over and over and over.
Pro-tip: Don't put a box of milanos on your kitchen tabletop. Put it on the tallest shelf behind all the god damn condiment bottles.
Muscle grows 0,03% / training. Daily muscle training will accumulate over time.
Protein diet destroys your metabolism, you can't just hop on and off. It will make things worse. People that have success with protein diets AFTER the protein diet have a "migration path" for getting off of it.
The goal is to improve your metabolism. Not to lose weight, losing weight is a side effect.
Note: lost 25 kg ( 1/4th) thanks to the book of Tom Venuto - Burn the fat, feed the muscle. It gives a lot of knowledge of why, instead of only how.
Oxygen has fuck all to do with weight loss. You wearing an o2 tank is literally going to do nothing.
Read up on keto. Again, it's not a fad. There is a ton of both evidential biological studies and personal anecdotes from people that done it to much success. Check /r/keto and look at the documentation in the sidebar.
Start by avoiding any sugars whatsoever (exception: fresh fruit), bread, fried food. This will be difficult for a few days to a week, but afterwards it gets easier and easier. You will end up consuming less food. Do this diligently, as even one chocolate might set you back by increasing desire for sugar.
Exercise by first walking and the running, depending on your level of fitness. Lifting weights also helps because it increases metabolism. After running, you may crave apples or bananas, both of which are very good.
Sleep well, it helps the body recover.
Get a scale which logs your weight automatically.
Remember that whole grain bread, whole grain cereals without sugar, are all replacements for sugar (carbs). They store it in a different format, which your body knows what to do with.
Learn about the relationship between sugar and fat, how your body can and when it will transform between the two and under which conditions.
Sugar is highly addictive, so quitting it is the first best step you can do, without harming yourself in the sense that you're nor depriving your body of energy. Your body knows how to extract the energy from real food.
Alcohol is the same as sugar but in a different, just as harmful sort.
1. Eat slowly, as slowly as you can, the feeling of being full takes a while to reach your brain ( I know this is not the scientific correct definition but gives the idea ), the slower you eat the less you eat.
2. Drink a lot, something I noticed is that sometimes I want to eat something but the reality is that I want to drink and I'm just eating to get the liquids out of the food, when you want to eat first drink a glass of water and wait 1 minute to see if you still want to eat.
3. Brush your teeth 5 minutes after you eat anything, I myself find washing my teeth a chore and I want to do as less as possible, brushing my teeth after lunch stops me from eating snacks after lunch because I don't want to dirty my teeth and wash them again.
4. Have a food journal, use an app to log everything you eat, before you eat it. It is important that is before because in this way you know how many calories you are going to eat, and sometimes that number is higher than what you expected, at least on me this usually has the effect that I choose to eat less of what I was going to eat or I will eat something else entirely.
5. Eat breakfast as late as you can, and dinner as early as you can. This is called intermittent fasting and works, but it requires quite a willpower.
6. This one is the one I find the hardest but also the most effective: Limit the amount of sweets you eat, I know it is hard as hell and when you see a sweet you already start salivating ( or at least I do ), but say to yourself: "today I will eat maximum 250kcal of sweets ( that is usually 1 croissant max )" or if you are more advanced you can swap today for "this week"
7. This one doesn't really apply to me because in my country we have the culture of cooking, but from what I heard around it helps in countries where cooking at home is uncommon: Cook your food from scratch, don't buy a ready meal, cook it yourself, in this way you have full control of what goes in that meal and you know what goes in it, it will save you from eating unnecessary sugars and conservants.
edit: formatting
The oxygen idea is pretty bad. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity
The oxygen thing works the other way around hypoxic environments increase metabolic rate for a small number of days. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4091035/
I know there's a book on the topic, and info on the internet. I don't know whether it works.
This has to be a life-long commitment. If you drop these, you will gain back the weight, sometimes even increase in weight.
There was a study done a few years ago, and they put one group of people on a traditional diet, and told the other group of people to do nothing different except take some fiber supplements. The group eating fiber supplements lost almost as much weight as the group on the diet. [1]
> After 12 months, researchers found many of the adult participants in the high-fiber group lost around 4.5 pounds. Meanwhile, participants in the AHA diet group lost nearly 6 pounds. The researchers concluded that while the "more complex" AHA diet resulted in more weight loss, they determined "emphasizing only increased fiber intake may be a reasonable alternative for persons with difficulty adhering to more complicated diet regimens."
The idea is that fiber both keeps things moving through your gut instead of staying put until every last calorie is absorbed by your body, and the bulk of it also keeps you feeling more full for longer so you eat less overall.
You do have to ease into it though over the course of a few weeks, because it can be rough of the digestive tract at first if you're not used to it.
[1] https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M14-0611?articleid=2...
That's the hack that worked best for me, but I wouldn't say its a "weird tip". It really boils down to the following three factors which really all need to be present.
1. Exercise - You have to demand things of your body so it will send energy to rebuilding rather than conservation.
2. Calorie intake - You have to consume fewer calories than your body is demanding.
3. Food quality - Eat mostly whole foods and low glycemic index carbs that are less calorie dense.
Many people tend to focus on just one of those three things, and while that can work, doing all of them is far more effective. I tend to think that the "weird trick" mentality is a significant obstacle to success (in this as well as many other areas of life). The one weird trick is that hard work is the path to accomplishing things.
Some ideas (pick any or all):
Buy fruit or veggies when you have cravings.
Don't buy much junk food. If you do buy junk food, don't buy your favorite stuff. For example, if you like chocolate, buy the "ok" chocolate, not the "damn this is great!" chocolate. Same with chips. For the double hack, just buy the "what's on sale," in this category.
Don't buy food you don't have to "fix," particularly junk food.
Exercise every day. It can be as simple as walk for 5-10 minutes or do body weight squats or jumping jacks. If you can only do 5 minutes, that's better than nothing. Committing to 5 minutes is easier than committing to 30. Once you start the 5 minutes, chances are you'll do more. For example, I commit to walking to the closest park. It's probably 7 minutes there and back. If I really don't feel like doing more, I don't. Most of the times I end up doing a couple miles. It's a leisurely walk.
Keep at it, that's the important part. Make the starting changes so easy it's manageable. Once you adapt to your minor change, add another change. When you feel weak willed due to a stressful event, go back a step rather than removing all steps.A tip he gave me was that humans were built to survive the winter on a calorie-restricted diet. Which means that your brain and body will tolerate you dieting for about 12 weeks max. After that, it will start screaming at you to eat more food, and you'll almost certainly give in, no matter how much willpower you think you have.
So the smart way to diet is to do it for 10 - 12 weeks and then quit, even if you haven't reached your goal weight. After stopping, your new goal should be to maintain your current (lower) weight but not to lose any more. After a few seasons, you can go back into "metabolic winter" again and resume the diet. You'll probably know when you're ready to do it again.
This was a huge eye-opener for me, and it explained why I'd failed at dieting so many times in the past. I'd tried to push past 12 weeks, failed, and then decided "dieting doesn't work."
Even if you can't manage 12 weeks, whenever you feel like your willpower is flagging, stop dieting (by which I mean stop running at a calorie deficit) but don't throw up your hands and start eating huge bowls of ice cream. Instead, switch from dieting to maintenance until you're ready to diet again.
OTOH, I have friends who can afford to eat whatever the hell they want, but they work out like crazy in the gym to remain athletic. Everything has a price, you need to decide how you want to pay for it.
We are extremely different and what works for me might be a disaster for you. Just some examples:
- friend of mine is almost a complete carnivore and it works great for him. When I tried going in that direction I was always bloated and my poop was so hard it tear up my intestines and had quite a bit of blood in my stools.
- I tried low carb diets which again, work great for some: zero energy, zero libido, bad mental states.
- my family has a thing with high triglycerides and cholesterol levels. We where always advised to limit fat intake. Well, it turned out that for me a high fat diet (about 50% of calories) gave me the first normal blood tests and it happened at 40 years old. I felt best too on this diet. Will it work for you? Probably not.
- there are foods out there that will make you feel great but you just can't eat long term. I could not touch chicken breast at all for about 4 years after eating lots of it. It made me gag just thinking about it. So what good does a food do you if you just can't eat it?
I could go on and on, but you get the point. Stop looking for shortcuts, stop copying what other people do (you can't even copy what you did last year, might not work anymore).
The challenge is “will power” at the start, but you adapt. Part of adaptation is getting accustomed to new feelings and part of it is learning how different foods effect your sense of satiation.
When I would be too hungry, I would go ahead and eat, but still count everything and then the next day I would experiment with different foods.
Through part of it I remember hitting a very low carb target (under ten percent) and this working for me.
I used an app, Fat Secret, which has a good product database for Poland, and I would actually just not eat things if they’re hard to count. So my diet would need to be more “legible” and so, ironically, I could eat McDonald’s but not other places because its food was better documented.
Once I hit my target I changed my diet to bulk deliberately (I am weight training) but I still count everything. It’s just different targets. (Learning to use free weights and lift is it’s own adventure. I recommend.)
I have to say a positive and surprising part of the experience is women blowing smoke up my ass about it. My pet theory is that basically everyone now lives like a 90s “nerd”, binge watching Star Trek with a six pack of beer, so if you put literally any effort into your body and clothing, you’re ahead of everyone.
Start moving more. Throw in some simple body weight exercises (push ups, sit ups burpees). Most people can drop 1kg a week by being mindful.
What worked for me really well was fasting. It's a radical thing for sure and not to be taken lightly, but is much easier for me to maintain. If I just don't eat anything, its a lot easier on the brain than "I'll eat here a bit, but will abstain from eating more".
Started with "no breakfast" and now I'm in the "no lunch and breakfast" camp. Takes about 2-3 weeks to get used to each, and wouldn't recommend jumping cold turkey on just doing dinner, but it has made it way easier to accomplish.
And an added (and very significant) benefit to this is the whole longevity science thing which is pretty much in agreement that eating just dinner should give you a significant lifespan boost, as well as reduce various other illnesses throughout one's life.
I love to eat, and would usually treat myself to bigger than normal portions, and got teased about it by friends quite a lot. But now since I'm eating only dinner, I can devour comical amounts of food and still be getting less or about as much calories as are required, even if you count desert!
Not only will you drop a few percent off your daily calories, but we are conditioned as children that we cannot leave the table until we eat everything on the plate, which apparently damages our ability to recognise being full. Leaving a little bit each time does seem to help break down that conditioning over time. You don't need to finish it all.
Other tips to feel full sooner, take longer to eat something and precede meals with a glass of water.
A) Obesity is HIGHLY heritable. Tons of twin and adoption studies prove this. The correlation between the adult BMIs of adopted (non-related) siblings raised in the same household is virtually zero. This means that parenting practices have no long-term impact on body fatness. The correlation between the adult BMIs of biological siblings raised in different households is strong, though.*
B) Virtually all attempts to lose weight eventually fail. "Eat less and exercise more" essentially doesn't work as a long-term weight loss intervention, because very few people are able to comply with it over the long term. The one exception is gastric bypass surgery, which does reliably produce long-term weight loss. There are some new medications that show promise, but it's too soon to tell if they'll work permanently.
*People will inevitably say "how can obesity be heritable when it's increased so much over time? Americans used to be much thinner!" But the same is true of other highly heritable traits, like height. In some Asian countries, people are six inches taller than they were 100 years ago. Nevertheless, height is heritable. Heritability exists within a specific environmental context, and our environment is much more conducive to obesity than it was in the past.
Most people who don't workout have this binary idea of what that means. You either go to the gym or do nothing. But the gym sucks for ppl who don't like it, and there are so many other activities out there.
So you need to either intake fewer calories or increase expenditure of calories. For the best outcome do both.
One easy way to increase caloric use is to dirnk ice water. Your body has to heat it up to body temperature which takes a not insignificant amount of energy.
As mentioned in other posts, walking is a low impact activity that is an easy way to expend more calories.
Be careful experimenting with oxygen ratios, you can die in a pure oxygen environment.
Eat lean protein (fish, chicken, beef - canned or fresh; even sardines). The original diets ignored fat, but I don't think it's to your benefit to do so. For greens, stick to cabbage, kale, chard etc, mostly raw.
After two or three days of this, you sense a very particular change in your body, and you detect notes of ketone in your breath and a bad taste in your mouth. You continue, and drink lots of water. You feel the change in your muscles and fat, too. Avoid artificial sweeteners, unless you're so hooked on sweet that you can't cope.
You can add dairy, but dairy is higher carbo and higher fat. 0% cottage cheese, farmers cheese work well; milk, yogurt, etc. should be avoided.
You will cheat, but get back on the horse and continue.
If you need "crunch", the most dogmatic protein diets tell you to get a bag of deep fried pork rinds. It works, but you have to like them.
You can add seeds and nuts to the diet; you can have as many bell peppers as you wish; onions, too. Protein stirfrys. Avoid grains and root veggies.
After a short while, your brain will change. You'll likely crave French fries less, and you never should have been drinking sweetened sodas and fruit shakes in the first place. The loss can last a long time.
1) First eat three times a day. Why? Food is our fuel we need it to have energy. By spreading out the intake you will be less inclined to snack. 2) except that you are beautiful the way you are and don't compare yourself to anyone else. 3) Stop drinking sugar. Just drink water instead. When I stopped drinking cola I started to lose weight instantly. 4) don't eat potato ships. 5) when starting out to lose weight. Focus on your meals. Diversify your evening meals. Eat fruit in the morning. Drink tea instead of milk. Do not go training right away. This will just make you hungry and result in eating snacks. After a month of getting used to your diet start slowly incoperating training like running. 6) make sure to feel relaxed. Make sure to go to sleep on the right times. Don't focus too much on your body. Enjoy life get a fun hobby. 7) don't drink alcohol 8) listen to music and let your body follow the beat. Don't see it like training see it enjoying yourself having fun.
Honestly good luck to you and anyone else who is trying to lose weight. There are so many ways to lose weight but it's really important to change ones lifestyle first.
The first thing is that if possible you should try both: eating better makes it easier to exercise and exercising makes you eat less. In my case at least, I eat more when I am nervous or depressed, and regular exercise keeps my hormones in check, reducing the cravings.
Another important thing is to find what works for you and, more importantly what you are both willing and able to stick to long-term. Eating better and doing exercise means not doing any more some of the stuff that you like, either because you don't have time anymore, or because it's not healthy: are you willing to do it for the next 50 years ?
For example it took me years to find the right dietary regimen; I finally found that for me intermittent fasting is the best solutions since I find it is easier to avoid eating most of the day than being much more careful about what and how much I eat.
Similarly for physical activity: try many alternatives until you find the one that you enjoy and keep doing for long time. You may realize that you like something unexpected (for me it was going to gym; I always considered it a stupid activity, but once I tried I realized it was perfect for me and I have being doing it for more than ten years).
1) Download the Lose It app
2) Buy an apple watch (or whatever matches with your phone)
3) Connect the watch up to the app
4) Fiddle about with the settings
5) Stay below the line
Excercise is optional. I did this for my dad and he can barely move, and he lost like 12kg.
The only reason ANYONE ever loses weight is because they consume less energy than they burn, there is no other way for energy you consume to leave your system:
I've recently read this here: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...
It's a long article series, but IMHO very worth it.
In it, the authors posit that the body has a "lipostat", like a thermostat, but for regulating body fat and weight.
If you are breathing pure oxygen and burning more calories, you'll just feel hungrier and eat more to compensate; if you don't, you'll feel sluggish and tired.
The authors also claim that the most likely cause for the obesity crisis is that some environmental contaminant causes the lipostat to be mis-adjusted.
That makes it pretty hard to deal with obesity, so the author's advise is:
* move to a high altitude, since contamination follows watershed
* avoid jobs that correlate with high obesity rates
* avoid highly processed food, since each processing step has the option to add contamination
I am not sure if all of this is real or some of it is bunk, but I found some of the arguments quite convincing, so I'd encourage you to read it and form your own opinion. (Do NOT just rely on my summary, it doesn't do the article series justice).
don't even try to restrict them (at first). just count them. get an app/spreadsheet. get a scale. and record the calories of everything and anything before you eat it. post it up on a whiteboard or sheet of paper every day.
you can keep eating whatever you want and as much as you want (at first). but you have to count _everything_.
every diet out there is going to try to restrict your calories in one way (e.g. eating more protein and less carbs "should" make you feel fuller sooner, leading to fewer calories). Every exercise program is going to try to increase the number of calories you burn (which is a lot harder to measure accurately than how many calories you eat). Either option is folly if you aren't recording your baseline. Your body is very good at convincing you to eat a bit more.
Counting your calories will tell you the actual value of the most important variable in weight loss. And what you measure you tend to improve; counting your calories alone will lead to new habits and eating less even without you trying to restrict it.
p.s. weight lifting or strength training is good advice generally. but I've been a competitive powerlifter and weightlifter for >10 years. lifting makes me hungry and makes me eat more. YMMV.
[0] Make it a one year goal.
[1] Track your calories.
[2] Do some exercise.
[3] Weight yourself every Sunday morning.
[4] No other rules. No restriction on quantity or timing or type of food.
1 is important, because you actually know what's going in. There's a ton of useful apps, and there's no need to be extra rigorous, just be consistent in how you estimate. Notice there is no limit, no restriction - eat whatever quantity you want, of whatever you want. Just log it. This is going to be shocking. It will also become automatic, a mindless habit, no effort required.
2 is important because it diminishes cravings. (And it is healthy at any weight). Even just walking 30 minutes every day is enough (a bit more is better though).
3 is for crossing with the calories tracking. After some weeks/months you can tell what your baseline consumption is, whether you lost, gained or maintained weight (specially if you track your exercise, as well, in case it varies.)
Here's the magic:
After some weeks, you will MAGICALLY START CONTROLLING yourself to not go over some values of total calories that puts you at a daily caloric deficit. Then you will WANT to implement all the other tactics (drinking water, not consuming liquid calories (soda), you will exercise more, you might try some sort of fasting, control your macros (calories, carbs, fat, protein), etc). The key is that you can now measure whatever you try, you have a budget, a long enough time frame and you are accountable.
I've read a comment about gut bacteria, and I've also read a study about it and I was able to lose weight. If you think about types of gut bacteria that are helping you digest your food like little populations, you need to stop eating bad food like pizza, fast food, etc so that you can starve the population that's constantly secreting hormones that make you hungry for that kind of food. Then the craving goes away.
Declare war on those bacteria. No, it's no easy, it's pain and suffering. The first two weeks are hell. Then it gets easier and easier.
What I did was: - Sunday I cook meals for the week, two small portions every day. - Two options of tasty but healthy food. - Like mashed potatoes and grind meat or chicken and rice. - One small cake that should last the entire week as an emergency craving snack. - A ton of fruits. - A cheat meal on Saturday.
Do your best to stick to it, if you feel hungry you can try to eat one more portion, or fruits and in the worst case, a piece of cake.
The cake should also be very 'fit' like carrot cake with no fillings or frostings.
I have no weird tips or hacks, I've tried and fooled myself too many times.
There are no cheats, there are no tricks.
I’ve used logging to great effect for weight loss, but I found it cumbersome to open my phone and log the calories every time I ate. Eventually I started logging my meals before I ate them just to get it out of the way. This led me to pre-logging the whole day. That made it much easier to time my meals and snacks so I wouldn’t get hungry and could stay under my calorie goal
When I feel like I am getting some extra weight and want to loose some, I will cut my carbs by cutting the portion of the food by 10-15% without affecting my energy level, it takes two-three days to adjust the feeling of hunger and then it is normal. The result mostly starts to be noticeable in 4 weeks.
When I feel like I got too skinny, I just increase my eating portion to adjust the weight in a month. I have successfully changed my weight from 65Kg to 75Kg and vice-a-versa multiple times. My height is around 178cms, currently weight is 63Kg and feeling to increase the diet ;)
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%09Intermittent+fasting
Opposite problem, trying to gain weight
Forget exercise for now.
-Buy a scale and count calories scrupulously.
-Stay under 1800 calories/day while you're trying to lose weight. Every calorie counts. Count them all.
-once you reach your target weight, you can raise it up a bit (probably around ~2200/day if you're an average male)
-make sure you measure and weigh everything you eat and DRINK
-stop drinking alcohol (too easy to add unaccounted calories)
-stop eating out
-stop associating with overweight or obese people
-never do a "cheat day". Every calorie counts
-drink water and black coffee if you need caffeine. (Some of those starbucks drinks have 600 calories in them. Don't do it!)
- breakfast: two large eggs prepared in 1/2 pat of butter (210 calories) and one slice of toast (100 calories) = 310 total
- lunch: chicken breast and a vegetable (330 calories)
- afternoon snack: apple or banana (120 calories)
- dinner: grilled fish or chicken and beans (400 calories)When this first came out well over a decade ago, I completely changed my diet and lost 45 lbs. Since then I have kept it off, strictly through diet.
My only exercise is walking, and I am not at all consistent about it. I am living proof that a correct zero-sugar diet alone works.
And for the love of Elvis, don't feel guilty or think of it as time theft. This is your health we're talkin about.
Here's a weird tip. Find a mountain and have a picnic on the top of it for your meals. It's ok to drive there. If there are no mountains, find a cave or hole in the ground and use that instead. Don't use artificial heating or light sources in this location
Will it work for you? You can only be the judge of that.
Also if Apple Fitness + [0] is available in your region, you should definitely check it out.
I don't know how you could do this yet safely or effectively, but studies increasingly show that from birth onwards, the gut microbiome affects numerous health aspects significantly, including obesity.
Example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7333005/
I'm pretty skinny but like to eat junk food and candy. My target weight is 80-82 kg. When I hit 90 kg I don't feel good about myself. Pants too tight etc.
First time I hit 90 kg was 2013. I tried intermittent fasting 8/16. This worked really well for me at that time. I lost weight really quickly. I could even continue my bad eating habits within the 8 hour window where eating is allowed and still loose weight.
I've stuck with a 8/16 diet with cheating up till now. Beginning of this year I hit 90 kg again. My old intermittent fasting diet did not seem to have the same effect any more (granted I cheated quite a bit at the end). I tried mixing it with Keto, counting every kcal, grams of carbs and fat in a log book. In one month I lost 8 kg so I think it was successful. I'm off Keto for now but I may be a trick you want to try. My main takeaways from Keto is that it really does take away your cravings. I could also do longer periods of fasting (did 36 hours two times) which I think would have been very hard for me when on a carb rich diet.
Most comments here are "It's so easy! Just do If we know anything about dieting, it's that "what works" is vastly different for different people. I'm not talking about thermodynamics, but psychology. For someone, eating once a day is easier than lifting weights, for someone else it's completely different. Different people are different.
Of course, eating less helps too as you're not storing more energy than you need. It's a balance. As pointed out in other responses, eat less carbs/sugar (no soda or bottled juices!), eat only good fats (non manufactured) and don't eat anything in a packet/can that has numbers in the ingredients. Frozen or canned vegetables are ok if they're 'plain' without sauces etc. Basically, eat real food.
Buy smaller plates. My partner has a uncanny ability to fill up a dinner plate no matter how big so I ask her to give me the smallest dinner plates we have and don't mound them too high :) If I'm still hungry I've found just a regular hand full of peanuts takes away the hunger pangs. This helps between meals too, plenty of water also helps.
Just don't buy rich foods over which you have no willpower.
Don't go down those aisles in the supermarket. Don't keep biscuits (by which I mean cookies) and snacks in the house at all.
Don't buy "meal deal" lunches that give you a discounted fizzy drink and snack.
It's all very well people telling others that they need to develop willpower over knowing when they've had enough, etc., and I admire people who can do that. But it's just a lot easier to exercise that control at the point of purchase.
And never, EVER go food shopping while hungry, for more than just lunch. Try to buy/order your lunches before you get hungry.
https://www.amazon.com/Burn-Fat-Feed-Muscle-Turbo-Charged/dp...
Basically this:
1.) You can't lose weight by netting fewer calories than you use; you can't gain muscle by using more calories than you net
2.) A good macrobiotic (carbs|protein|fat) calorie ratio to go by is 50%|30%|20%. (if you're calculating percentages by grams instead of calories its 56%|33%|10%)
3.) It takes more energy to eat some foods than others (thermic effect of food). You see this in TV shows like "ALONE" where the contestants starve despite a surplus of lean protein since protein is hard to digest. Ditto salads.
4.) Do cardio
5.) Do resistance training
6.) Bonus: So your body doesn't adapt, go 3 days of lower calories, 1 day of higher calories
7.) Bonus: To lose weight faster, go 3 days of lower carbs, 1 day of higher carbs
8.) Bonus: Eat smaller meals as the day goes on
The first 5 are critical; the last 3 are if you want to dork out over it.
The thing is, we evolved to have homeostatic regulation of our food-seeking behaviors. That means we have a set of unconscious impulses that guide most of our decisions for when and how much to eat. We didn't evolve to use executive function, and only executive function, to decide how much to eat. And if we fight those impulses, we're fighting ourselves.
Obviously, the problem isn't simple. Otherwise, everyone would be at their ideal weight! So what can we do?
Instead of fighting against your instincts, manipulate them. Why do we get those impulses to eat too much? In a modern environment, we have easy access to hyperpalatable food – in other words, junk food. It's highly rewarding for very little effort, so your brain not only tells you to eat more of it at once, it also tells you to seek it out more often.
But how do we manipulate our food-seeking impulses? By changing your food environment. Don't surround yourself with junk food. Choose to surround yourself with healthier foods, and choose to eat foods that require some effort to obtain or prepare. If you don't have time to cook, make time. You'll feel full after fewer calories, and your food seeking behaviors will naturally change. Don't do anything crazy, just eat healthy foods in sensible combinations.
Now, you can certainly throw some self-control into the equation. And if you can't fully control your food environment, you'll have to. But if you keep your self in the same food environment that got you fat and try to lose weight entirely through self-control, statistically your odds of success are quite low.
This is my answer. Your answer may be different, but this is what worked for me.
Use a BMI calculator to figure out where you're currently at and where you might want to be. A good one will tell you your maintenance calories and the calories you should target to lose weight.
Invest in a good kitchen scale and make it your best friend.
Use an A5 notepad and rubber-tipped pencil to count calories daily. Food, drinks and all. No more than one sheet per day is a constraint that works for me. Use a highlighter to reflect and identify your mistakes at the end of the day.
Be militant about portion control. Use the advice written on boxes for cereal and the like. Measure your milk portions with cereal and any hot drinks too.
Another tip is to replace treats with low calorie alternatives. Hartley's sugar-free jelly is magic!
In the UK, folks typically weigh themselves in stones (st). I prefer weighing myself in pounds (lbs). When looking at the scale every other morning, it takes weeks for 21.00st to become 20.00st. Weighing yourself in pounds seems more satisfying. May be the same for kilogrammes to lbs too.
I use a few spreadsheets. I took the numbers from the BMI calculator and created a spreadsheet with three columns showing how much I would weigh at particular dates in the year if I maintained -1lb a week, -1.5lb a week and -2lbs a week. It shows that I could reach my goal by next year - and that's incredibly motivating. Weekly weigh-ins going into a line graph with a trendline helps too.
The trick is that I don't feel like I'm on a diet. The food hasn't actually changed all that much. It's just that I'm now mindful of the portion sizes and learning to say no so that I hit my daily targets.
Eventually, I tried a diet from CSIRO which set minimum quantities of certain foods; 2.5 cups cooked green vegetables and 150g lean high-protein food (chicken, eggs, kangaroo, tofu).
It was genuinely difficult to force myself to consume those quantities every day, but I found it easier to follow "you must" than "you must not".
Bonus: You don't need to eat what's in front of you. My family looks weirdly at me because I remove half the bread from a sandwich where the bread is too large. You don't have eat anything, you don't have to waste your caloric budget on "bad carbs".
What this really means in practice: You won't be able to cut all sweets and treats, but surely you can commit to having them less often. You can eat less meat and more vegetables. Eat more legumes and more whole grains when you can stomach them. These changes eventually become normal, and really there is no failing. At the end of the week, if you are able to do this 4-5 days, you are better off than if you didn't. Always focus on a better overall diet. And in general, doing this means fewer calories consumed. Reasoning for this: If you eat more vegetables (for example), those vegetables generally replaces higher calorie foods. Since nothing is realistically off limits, the times when you really miss having (favorite food) are minimized.
You'll also probably want to eat less. For me, this means eating more at a time of day when I'm the most hungry: Evenings. I eat little during the day, and more at my evening meal. As a bonus, I feel completely satisfied (full!) after my evening meal, and that is a wonderful feeling.
If you can, work in more accidental activity. Walk to the store if one is close enough, for example. Walk the dog more, play with children in active ways, and so on. These don't seem like exercise, per se. Of course, if you like an exercise or activity, by all means, do that more.
Edit: I almost forgot to add to get rid of sugary drinks in general. This includes diet drinks - the taste sugary, and this is what you should get away from. I personally tend to drink only water or black coffee on a normal day. When I drink soda and other things, I tend to drink the fully sugared one. Also, if you drink alcohol, you probably have calories there.
- At breakfast I ate a fruit, some cereals and yogurts or milk.
- at lunch, eat a 1000gr plate of wholemeal pasta (I'm Italian) with whatever you want, expecially vegetables: i do pasta with sauce, with broccoli, with asparagus, with zucchini...
- at dinner, i divide my plate in three parts. First part is proteins and it can be a 100-120gr of chicken / salmon / tuna / cheese / eggs. Second part is 50gr of carboidrates and can be whole grain bread / pearl / barley / rice / cuscus. Third part is vegetables: no restrictions here: salad, tomatoes, zucchini, broccoli, spinach... whatever you can find.
- And now there's the sports part. I exercise almost every day (nowadays every 3 days I do a day of stop). Usually I do 30 mins of high cardio exercises. But I also practice tennis at an amateur level, even though I partecipate to local tournaments. So when I have tennis training or tennis match I do not do other sports that day.
Other things that really helped in getting motivated and on track:
- I use an italian app for fitness called FixFit. I am happy to say that their yearly subscription was a good deal. The diet explanation was in the app. They propose a track of exercises to you. Try as many fitness apps you can and choose the one you find more appropriate.
- I've got a friend that trains everyday. He plays football, but when he doesn't play, he does cardio exercises at home. We started during covid by whatsapp calling each other and doing exercises together. Whatsapp call on mobile and training video on chromecast. This is a huge motivation even for the days you can't find any will!
After a year of this crazy workout and diet regime, I can finally see my abs.
(from easier to harder)
1 - Reduce the amount of food you consume on every meal. A trick I use is to drink plain sparkling water while eating. It’s a healthy drink and helps you to feel full.
2 - DO NOT eat between meals. Only allow yourself to have water, tea or coffee (these last two only if you have them without any sugar nor cream)
3 - Avoid sugar as possible. Do not add sugar to something unless it’s strictly necessary.
4 - Consider doing intermittent fasting. I personally do 16 - 24 hours fasting one or two times per week. Every three months I also do a 72 hours one. Be careful and read about the topic because depending on your metabolism you might need a different program.
5 - Do cardio regularly. You don’t need to go outside for running. In my case, I have a stationary bike I bought on Amazon and use it for 30-45 minutes three days a week while watching some stuff in YouTube.
6 - Do muscular training. It doesn’t need to be on a gym lifting weights. Me personally do climbing and callisthenics.
Hope it helps.
What helps the most to lose weight:
Eat lots of foods high in fiber. This is the biggest hack and very few people talk about it - the fiber greatly increases your feeling of satiety. Fiber has a lot of good effects too on your cardiovascular system and (obviously) digestive system, so you should be getting a lot of it all the time. But to lose weight swap things with higher fiber versions. For breakfast have some oatmeal, for dinner have some beans and broccoli with whatever else, swap white bread with whole grain, etc
Protein also increases satiety to a lesser extent. Lean proteins are your friend. Chicken breast is really good but it has no flavor so don’t be afraid to add some sauce to it (within reason). Stay away from fatty meats.
Ideally you should count calories, but for most people they probably won’t. It’s not that hard once you build the habit. You are just adding vectors.
For exercise, you can start lifting and doing heavy cardio if you want. It will help if you stick with it. But something not a lot of people realize is that just walking can burn a lot of calories. It doesn’t need to be strenuous. So going on a 1-2 hour walk, or walking to work or on errands if you’re able to do so, can add a few extra hundred calories burned per day. And really you only need to burn an extra 500 calories per day to lose 1lb/week, so walking can make a big difference.
My weirder tips: nicotine and stimulants help but might be more destructive long term. You can get ephedrine supplements still if you know where to look but use at your own risk.
1) https://www.foundmyfitness.com/topics/time-restricted-eating
2) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41387-021-00149-0
3) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7262456/
4) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S155041311...
5) Also see the book The Circadian Code by Dr. Satchin Panda. TEDx talk : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erBJuxVR7IE
In the long term, however, more muscular bodies burn more calories at rest. But cut first, then bulk.
Greatly increase your intake of protein and veggies. 0.8 Grams of protein per your body weight in kgs. By cranking up your protein intake by a lot, you'll decrease how much you eat in "junk" Obviously you need veggies too, so make your plate mostly protein, a lot of veggies and you'll have very little room left for the rest. Tons of chicken and protein shakes (watch the sugar in them) are practically necessary.
Tons of water. No other liquids besides water (or black coffee or tea). Getting calories from liquids is useless. NO alcohol, sodas, or fancy coffee.
I think there are other places on the internet that give the same advice, as sometimes our bodies don't make the distinction between being thirsty and being hungry.
Some people have reported good results with the Win Hof method for cold tolerance and weight loss. I don't think that it's ever been validated in a real randomized controlled trial, but there is at least a theoretical basis to believe that practitioners can learn to raise their metabolisms.
If you want to go the medical route, SGLT2 inhibitors have also shown good results and are well tolerated by most patients.
https://www.fda.gov/drugs/postmarket-drug-safety-information...
As others have commented, breathing pure oxygen is pointless for weight loss and will damage your lungs if you do it for too long.
If you are tired, go to bed.
If you are thirsty, drink some water.
If you are hungry, eat a small amount (20g) of lean meat, cheese or nuts and leave the kitchen immediately.
2) Gradually cut all sweet food and drink from your diet. This will re-adjust your taste buds for a healthier diet, and you won't even notice.
So, my weird tip (not so weird) is to completely avoid added sugar. Start looking at labels. If sugar is an ingredient, do not consume. Simple as that. This implies that if there is no ingredient list (not packaged / processed food) then that item is acceptable. I'd further add that such an item is preferable.
Regarding your O2 hack, we don't use all of the oxygen we breathe in, we exhale a lot back into the atmosphere, so no, the lungs do not need to be saturated. But the hack here is to force the body to do work it doesn't really need to do for survival, that way it requires more O2. Exercise is the hack.
Very unlikely to do anything. If you can't get enough oxygen to your tissues, you'll already feel that (lactic acid buildup).
You're not likely to significantly increase your CO2 exhalation that way because you're not some simple "O2 in, CO2 out" machine. The air we exhale is still ~16% Oxygen.
Other than that, I've just started a 5:2 intermittent fasting program. It's not a full fast, two days a week I stick to sub-600 calories. The other days I have cut out or down on my snacking and try to eat 'better', but those two days I go hungry. After about 5 weeks of this, I appear to be adjusting quite well, the 'fast' days are much more bearable than they were at the start. I seem to be losing weight at a steady rate, about 0.8-1kg per week. It's not exactly a weird tip or a hack to ultra-fast weight loss, but it seems to work so far.
Especially if you mostly make your own food, buy a food scale and do as much measuring by weight as possible.
I think most people's diet quality is at least okay, but the portions and moderation is what gets you.
If this method makes you feel too hungry, increase your vegetable and fiber intake. Anything involving empty carbs and sugar is going to be the least efficient at making you feel full.
Cook with as many whole ingredients as possible. If it comes in a box or is packaged in some way, it's probably not as good. For example, eat fruit instead of having a packaged dessert.
Stay hydrated.
Try to maintain the joy of eating, or else you'll just hate your "diet" and quit. There are many delicious healthy recipes out there.
2. Healthy diet you enjoy - Find about 6-8 healthy meals you enjoy eating regularly - Fad diets are mostly BS (same BS as 'no pain no gain') - Shouldn't feel like your dieting.
3. Emotional Issues are often the biggest blocker - Emotional struggles easily attach themselves to eating habits. - Unhelpful attitudes about yourself also keep people back from trying new activities. I.e. thinking people will judge you for trying a new sport/going to the gym.
An underlying condition that affects, say testosterone, can result in much more limited impact from exercise. The situation is going to be very different for every individual. You may only need a very minimal boost to shed quite a lot of weight by getting closer to the middle of the normal range. Lifting weights or other exercise is often recommended as a booster for testosterone, but underlying conditions may be reducing the impact.
It is often unhelpful to search for information online, including Reddit on this topic, if you are not a skeptical type of person. There are people looking to sell all kinds of supplements, those that are abusing testosterone, people who feel like they need to be injecting versus using implants, etc.
The book "Eat to Live" explains why plant-based foods are better for you and how much of the processed food in the modern lifestyle is not good for long-term health.
Diets are temporary and so are their results. Lifestyle changes require a bigger commitment, but they will change your life.
This one is controversial but I see a lot in here about emotional eating, intermittent fasting, etc. I have Binge Eating Disorder, but only at night. There is one approved drug for BED...vyvanse. Do some googling. It works! But good luck finding a dr that will go that route.
Even if you don't have BED, do you have any symptoms that might be roughly equivalent to ADHD? If so, get diagnosed with ADHD and get a rx for Adderall. It's basically Vyvanse anyway. Just get yourself on a regimen where we do your intermittent fasting in conjunction with the adderal and then make sure you cycle off that on the weekends. Aderall is a wonder drug and I dunno why everyone is scared of it. I love it and have zero side effects. Be safe on it and you'll have no issues. I'm never hungry, lost 150 lbs on it, and feel wonderful.
1. Find out why you are overweight. For me it was comfort eating junk food and large meals.
2. Start working on what’s causing the first step. I very gradually changed my approach to eating, shifting from unhealthy foods to healthier ones. Now I have an pretty easy time to either not eat or just pick something healthy.
3. I cut out breakfast and just drink coffee or tea, then light lunch followed by healthy snacks and a large dinner. I use whatever amount of fat I need to cook dinner and make sure my food is tasty. I don’t avoid carbs.
4. It all mostly just boils down to cutting out sugary snacks, huge lunches, breakfast and eating “normal food”.
5. Oh, I also try to get 20 min of walking or cycling or something a day in. Then some push-ups , maybe a chin-up. Excercise is important but only like 20% of the whole thing.
What hasn’t worked for me:
Diets. Calorie counting, KETO, whatever. Weight always comes back after a while because it doesn’t address on why I eat.
Then work on your diet until you no longer get those cravings and can decide when and what to eat instead of being driven by impulse
I'm already high-fat keto and don't have weight to lose so I don't have personal experience with it, but I did purchase some of Brad's / fireinabottle's stearic acid and used it as an experiment, it does increase satiety and possibly ketosis to a degree.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27227051/
If you hit the right buttons in the sympathetic nervous system you activate a special population of fat cells that seems to thermalize fat without the fat cells fighting to get it back afterwards.
I don't think it's reproducible because the level of psychological stress required to make it happen is extreme so there would be ethical problems with any protocol to induce a psychogenic fever.
If I were you I'd consider going a week without eating anything. It is general advice to lift weights to put some muscle mass on to raise your metabolism. It's not fashionable to do cardio for weight loss today but if you can manage to do 2 hours a day for a while it will move the needle.
Very easy to stick to rules when there's an unreasonably large fine for breaking them.
Back to the primary topic: cooking your own meals makes 'eating less' a matter of dialing in the portion sizes over time. I eat ~110g of pasta, or 0.8 cups of rice, or similar, and about 0.3-0.5 lb of protein, and about 1-1.5 vegetables per meal. Overall, I eat two meals like this, black coffee, a breakfast bar, and a snack, which puts me at 2000-2500 cal.
Now, on to a weird tip: meal planning! What a fun mix of intuition and ideas from operations research.
(Speaking from personal experience of losing several tens of pounds over covid, due mainly to not eating out)
I count all the calories I consume and keep my daily intake to 1400-1800, except for 1 day a week where I am allowed up to 3000 (but I haven't gone over 2500 yet). This yields a roughly 5000 calorie deficit per week which is good for 6lbs of consistent weight loss per month so far. I also don't eat anything after 7pm which automatically eradicates high calorie snacking opportunities for me. I have no emotional connection to food which may help - I am not bothered by going 6 hours without food in the evening. I used to just eat random crap for the taste/fun of it but I didn't really need to.
It's not really "weird" but doesn't seem commonly recommended by all the folks obsessed with diet and exercise.
Prolonged 100% oxygen has no effect on this and is also toxic over time. People on oxygen therapy are really breathing 40%, and 100% is only used for short stints during anesthetic procedures.
This video explains how weight loss occurs: https://youtu.be/vuIlsN32WaE
1) Make yourself familiar with the energy contents of foods you usually eat.
2) Identify 500 kcal that you can cut out of your daily diet by eliminating the highest energy items or eating less of them.
3) Lose about 2 kg each month.
By reducing your caloric intake by 500kcal a day you save about 15,000 kcal a month. That is equivalent to 1.7 kg fat (assuming 9kcal per gram fat). Since there is also some energy lost in conversion of food to bodyfat the weight loss will be slightly higher than that.
500 kcal can often be saved by simple measures like swapping fizzy drinks with water. Another big saver is to not have second helpings (or renounce the third helping if you tend to have it).
Awareness of the caloric content of the foods you eat will enable you to control your intake much better. And reducing intake is the key to losing weight.
Increase your base metabolic rate (i.e. calories your body burns at rest) and you'll lose more weight without doing anything. Weight lifting is the most bang for buck way to significantly improve your metabolic rate without also eating back all the calories in the process (a problem with long aerobic exercise).
Look into a simple bodyweight exercise routine like DDP yoga and just start doing a little bit every day--even as little as 10 mins or so a day/an hour a week will bring significant benefits over a few months.
You asked for weird tips, so here’s mine. Caffeine pills instead of coffee. Gives you more room for water which is good for you, good for weight loss, and fills you up a bit. Plus replaces coffee which typically includes sugar (or replaces energy drinks which can have way more sugar). Double plus, you’ll get more consistent doses of caffeine which is even an appetite suppressant. All that, and you’ll still have the energy for whatever workout you want to do. Just make sure you keep some calories in and lots of water. And be careful, start slow like 100-200mg unless you know what you’re doing.
Good luck!
No seconds, no desert. Alcohol and calories you can drink are probably the easiest way to gain weight.
People say exercise but it’s mostly diet. I worked out for years and was strong but never lost much fat until dieting.
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/trailer-for-how-not-to-diet...
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/flashback-friday-dr-gregers...
Edit: Joking aside, the weight loss tweaks can also be found in the free "Dr. Greger's Daily Dozen" iPhone or Android app.
Amphetamine recommendation will probably get some hate, but it’s genuinely prescribed for people having issues with obesity. They also make life much nicer within moderation.
Oh yeah… absolutely NO soda with high fructose corn syrup. Seriously. Diet Dr. Pepper & Mtn Dew Spark Zero are great if you need the soda drink feel.
A single 16oz bottle of most soda’s are 110% the daily sugars portion, & HFCS is essentially the worst of all sugars for your health.
Stove cooked popcorn is great if you are the type to need to continuously snack, use coconut oil & buy Flavacol (popcorn salt) & it tastes amazing, ultra low calorie, & very filling.
(Note: this comment not brought to you by amphetamines, though it may seem :P )
There are no weird tricks for weight loss. My best advice is to commit fully and indefinitely. Kill the illusion of yourself living your current life as-is but with a thinner body. you must grow / adjust / embrace permanent lifestyle changes and then you will eventually find yourself having the body that reflects those changes.
The most efficient method is to raise your base metabolic rate while maintaining an appropriate caloric deficit. Be sensitive to the difference between hunger and starvation. Get comfortable feeling hungry, but dont let yourself starve
the only tricks or tips that might help with this are personal experiences on your end. Finding activities, routines, communities, support systems, etc that make it less of a chore to stick to a lifestyle fitting to the body you want
HIIT training is a good way to quickly increase your resting metabolic rate for a short period of time (like a day) - do it responsibly though ofc.
The thing is, if you use weight loss tricks (like HIIT) and dont intend to continue them after youve hit your goal weight - your base metabolic rate will drop, and you will start rapidly gaining weight if you dont adjust your diet to match (which is much easier said than done, and hard to even notice it is happening tbh)
So no matter what you do, by the end of it you need to be living an appropriate life for the body you want if you intend to keep it. Might as well work towards building that lifestyle from the beginning
I don't eat that much but am super sedentary, so for me increasing exercise does more than eating less.
If you need to eat less keto style diets are good for brain hacking yourself in to being less hungry. I am not suggesting going full keto just reduce refined sugar, whole fruit is still cool.
If you need to exercise more, start slow. Pick a routine (I like reddit's r/bodyweightfitness recommended routine). Just do the warm up for a week, then add the rest. Start the routine on a weekend when you have more time to do it slowly and figure things out. Then work it in to your daily routine, until it is just something you do like brushing your teeth.
The upside, I lost weight very, very quickly. The downside, I'm 21 years old, skinny, but still do it. It's like an unhealthy addiction, and it's a disorder that I don't know how to get rid of.
- eat less - intermittent fasting is easy: just skip 1 meal, everyday, make sure to have 16hours fast. For me 1 skip breakfast.
- drink water, coffee, tea when you want to eat during the fasting time , or want to snack. If you really need to snack, eat nuts.
- stop any soda and fruit juice - they have so much calorie and sugar into it... drink water, tea or coffee instead.
- workout / do any sport, at least 3 times a week, at least 1 hour session each.
- you gym needs to be at 5 minutes reach so you can't make any excuses.
- gym can be boring, try a new sport you can stick with. I usually do volleyball and go to gym, but willing to go to hikes or bouldering with friends from time to time.
Also, breathing pure oxygen for too much time without medical supervision is dangerous https://www.webmd.com/balance/features/rise-of-oxygen-bars (The effect is somewhat similar to put your face in a jar with diluted bleach.)
http://www.ernaehrungsdenkwerkstatt.de/fileadmin/user_upload...
It's a list of food items rated by calories and the time they will make you feel satiated. Potatoes are the best, especially if you cook them and allow them to cool down again, your body will take a long time to break down the carbs.
When you switch air to 100% oxygen, the primary effect is that the gas you breathe in do not have any of the non-oxygen gases. For carbon dioxide, this is about 0.04%, which your lung increase during exhale to 4-5%. The gain thus is those 0.04%, which isn't significant enough to do anything.
When we breathe in a gas the exhale matches rather closely what we breathed in. If it is air, the exhale will be 78% nitrogen which matches the 78% nitrogen that went in. Out of the 21% oxygen, about 17% will go out, together with those 4% carbon dioxide. the remaining 1% will be mostly argon, neon, and other stuff.
If we take in 100% oxygen, 4% will be metabolized into carbon dioxide and ~96% oxygen will go out during exhale. There will likely also be a small portion of nitrogen, but I don't recall how much if a person is fully decompressed to begin with (ie no diving, no climbing, no air travel, no change in elevation). Metabolizeing of oxygen generally do not increase in any significant amount with increased pressure.
But not only won't it benefit weight loss, pure oxygen is dangerous. The more oxygen is circulating in the blood, the more it will react and creating oxygen radicals. Too much and some very nasty effects occurs to the central nervous system, lungs, and/or eyes. People trained to deal with elevated oxygen exposure need to closely monitor the pressure and the exposure time (hours, total for a day, total for a full week).
Oxygen is however a great tool for other uses. One can use it to decrease nitrogen uptake when people are under increased pressure, and also help decompression of inert gases. During disease and injuries, the increase oxygen in the blood increases the odds that the cells can still take in oxygen, reducing cell death and improving outcomes. Oxygen is also used by the immune system, through there is a lot of unknowns there when it comes to over 21% in 1 ATA. Great stuff during specific circumstances under the right management.
Counting calories helps a lot at first just to get an understanding of how much you can eat each day. Myfitnesspal works well.
Limiting calorie consumption to an 8 hr window made a huge difference for me. If you get hungry outside that window try decaf coffee, tea, water, or anything else with no calories.
2. CICO is important, but those who say it's the only thing are simply wrong. If you replace the calories you get from sugars with the same amount of calories from fat/protein, you will lose weight.
3. Intermittent fasting is hard at first, but you can do it, and it works. It's much easier once you no longer have sugar withdrawals, so if you do try intermittent fasting then make sure you take a few days beforehand to let the moodiness/jitteryness/etc. pass. Sugar is a drug. It takes time to detox.
This helps really well for having an intuition in how many calories something has (a chicken sandwhich with mayo might have more calories in the mayo than in the rest of the sandwhich), and for stopping cravings (if I eat this cupcake now I'll have 200 fewer calories for dinner and I cannot afford it).
This is stressful, difficult, and kinda ridiculous, but for me it's the only diet that actually works. It helps if you cook at home and can choose ingredients easily.
The truth is that unless you have a medical condition it's 80% about food intake (and 20% about exercising if you want to build some muscles)
To eat less calories you have two options:
- eat a shitty western diet, which means you'll have kids sized meals and feel hungry 24/7
- eat mostly veggies/meat/simple carbs (skip anything you couldn't theoretically grow/make yourself, the most processed thing you should eat are things like pasta)
Consider food as fuel, you don't top up your car three times a day with rocket fuel (sugar), especially if it's not getting out of your garage, same goes for your body.
1. Drink a lot of water. Like, a lot. I aim for 1 gallon of water per day.
2. Don't drink calories. Water and La Croix are your friends
3. Intermittent fast. I don't eat from 8pm to noon the next day. It's easier than it sounds. After a week or two, your body will get used to it.
4. Your first meal after breaking your fast should be very filling but low calorie. I eat 3 eggs, 2 veggies (typically tomato + jalapeno/bell pepper), 1 avocado, a 100-calorie yogurt, and a protein shake. This will fill you up and its only around 500-600 calories.
5. On that note, focus on high-protein meals. These fill you up quickly and you stay full for longer.
6. Hot sauce is the secret. Hot sauce is low calorie (generally 0) and varies flavor substantially. Your budget for new hot sauces should be unlimited.
7. Limit eating out as much as possible. Not because you can't eat healthy while eating out, but you're introducing more room for error. Plus, restaurants vastly underestimate the amount of calories in their food.
8. Go for an afternoon walk. It's good for you mentally and physically.
9. Exercise is great for a lot of reasons. Of course it makes you feel great, but it also motivates you to eat healthy because you won't want to "waste" the hour you spent at the gym by eating unhealthy. It will not directly lead to weight loss, but burning 500 calories per day in a work out sure makes it easier.
10. Weight yourself every week. If you aren't making progress, diet harder. Weight loss is not a secret. You can be methodical about it.
11. If you need to snack throughout the day (which is normal), try to eat relatively healthy items. Beef jerky, protein bars, etc. Also, rice cakes. These fill you up but aren't high calorie. I like the Quaker cheddar ones.
12. Perhaps most importantly, try to stay busy throughout the day. When I'm not working or doing something is when I eat the most.
If you actually want to lose weight, you need to make small, compounding changes. Weight loss is as marathon, not a sprint. Any type of crash diet or lifestyle that lets you lose weight rapidly is not sustainable for the vast majority of people.
Start with something easy, like drinking water instead of soda. Start working in a 30+ minute walk a few days a week. Strictly limit (or cut out entirely) alcohol. Choose black coffee over lattes or blended drinks. Avoid the chip and cookie isle in the grocery store. Buy bread from a local sourdough bakery instead of the processed stuff at the grocery store. Gradually increase the amount you exercise. Vary the type so it doesn't get boring. Join a local gym/rec center and play pickleball or racquetball. Take a weekend hiking trip, realize you love spending time in nature and that simply walking around looking at beautiful things is insanely good for you. Just once or twice a week, choose a salad instead of a sandwich. Choose the small portion size. Wait a bit, and see if you're actually still hungry after you eat it. If you are, go ahead and eat more, but listen to your body instead of assuming you need the large. Don't buy stretch clothing - traditional non-stretch fabric will give you instant feedback if you are gaining weight. Spend time with healthy and fit people. It's much easier to make good choices if those around you are making the same choices.
Make just one of these changes per week. After a few months, you'll have completely changed your lifestyle. It creates a positive feedback loop. Living a healthy lifestyle makes you happier. Being happier makes you want to make healthy choices.
If your weight loss is remedial -- you have serious back or circulation problems, you need to lose weight for surgery, etc. -- then you have to follow the remedial steps you are given.
But apart from that, people always say "the problem is I lose weight and then when the diet stops it goes back on".
So skip the weight loss step entirely. Focus your attentions on not putting it back on, and you will lose weight over time even without doing more exercise.
This means focussing on your mood, your general habits, ways to avoid being thwarted by issues with lack of willpower.
I've said elsewhere -- avoid shopping for food when you're hungry; it's much easier to make good decisions and plan meals when you're not hungry. But also: cook for yourself as much as you can, eat less meat and more vegetables.
I am at a healthy weight (have been over the long term) and part of that is that I used to be underweight due to ARFID. Part of it also is not having a car; I walk everywhere.
But I do gain weight and have done at bad times. I have terrible willpower and an enormous capacity to eat sweet things. My main strategy to avoid putting on weight is to never buy more biscuits (cookies) or chocolate than I will eat in a single sitting. Never store it in the cupboards. Never stock up on stuff like that -- stock up on vegetables and fruit and try to consume them instead.
And just don't go down those aisles in the supermarket. Especially when hungry.
But I have also stopped buying loaves of sliced bread and started buying bread I have to part-cook myself. And I avoid ready meals of all kinds, if I can, apart from soups.
Unless you're seriously overweight and it has direct short term health implications, I think it's better to stop trying to solve weight loss for the short term, and instead aim to solve weight gain for the long term. And try to like yourself while you do it.
Made a big difference already. Then I’ve cut all simple carbohydrates or non-soluble fiber and unlike the low carb craze, increased my high soluble fiber intake from low GI whole grains like steel cut oat. Keeps me full for a while, low calorie, and I don’t feel sluggish.
I don’t eat anything above 50 on the GI scale. Once a week I might have pasta.
No fruits because of fructose but lots of vegetables.
No drinks containing sugar like sweetened Almond drink but I keep the milk because the fat and the protein helps feeling satiated.
Basically I lost about 20 pounds over 3 months and I’ve maintained the loss for 2 years now.
I've always been overweight and I lost 20kg over a year by eating less carbs (and not less fat) and move more.
Practically it's "simple":
- drink water before every meal
- don't drink anything with sugar/alcohol in it, there are plenty of drink with no sugar in them
- for diet, take smaller servings overall, take more meat/fish... and less rice/pasta/bread/potato, you don't need to do anything crazy
- eat often small things, do not go without eating for the whole day to eat 3 pizza in the evening
- avoid processed food, like morning cereals (kellogs...)
- do not eat at night
- take the stairs, walk in circle when you have to wait (like at a bus stop)
- feel good about yourself
- most importantly, diminish stress
I retired a year ago and decided to try and get into shape. And I wanted it to be a permanent life style change that I hopefully can stick to for a decade or two and also it shouldn't feel like I am depriving myself anything:
- Run for 30 minutes every second day.
- Eat fruit for breakfast. A banana and some berries.
- Lunch and dinner what ever I want. I often eat white bread, pasta, meat or fastfood. Just be mindful of portion sizes and if fastfood, skip any fries and icecream.
- No snacks in the evening. This was probably where I used to get most excess calories.
One year in I have lost 20kg and I am pretty much in the shape I was when I was a teenager. I can definitely keep this going, I don't really think about it anymore.
Also get a pressure cooker and use it to make seasoned unsalted black beans at the start of every week. Use them to substitute all your white carbs. You can read Gary Taubes book Why We Get Fat to understand this mechanism and how low GI helps.
My goto for the past years is 30 mins of yoga every day but that unfortunately requires consistency and is a time commitment. If you want to go this route, don’t bother with classes. Just get the Beachbody app and do the 3 Week Yoga Retreat which will teach you everything you need to get started and give you a solid foundation.
This should inform you of one thing: anaerobic respiration is inefficient and therefore great for burning more calories. An easy way to achieve such respiration is running or cycling (which I think is better on your knees) so fast that you start panting. Keep doing that for an hour and do it every other day.
This advice is IMO better than "eat less", because changing your dietary habits is very very hard. Moving more is much easier by comparison, though sadly it still won't be fun for you in the beginning.
There's a story that's relevant to this thread, and I wish I could remember the original author. It goes something like this: It's easy to dismiss naive writing when it's on a subject you understand. But when reading subjects outside your expertise, that naivety is difficult to detect, so much more seems plausible.
HN often seems extremely naive regarding pop-science topics like nutrition, weight loss, and exercise.
Today, decades later, I still pursue things that trigger stressful appetite loss, but that has become the opposite issue. I'm thin, but addicted to pursuing intellectual goals that are frighteningly difficult. I often have to force myself to eat.
Eating, drinking: track everything. In my experience it does the trick on its own. What you're aiming for is caloric deficit, so don't overcomplicate it. If there's a diet that works for you, great. If not, just analyze your intake from time to time and you will come up with your own diet automatically.
Exercise: depending on your current level of fitness, I'd strongly suggest taking small steps. Changing your diet while getting started with running and 1-hour workouts three times a week sets you up for failure. If you haven't been active before, aim for N steps of walking a day. That's it.
Be patient, the first results will show in 2-4 weeks.
Good luck!
It was a definitely aimed more at women than men and was a bit USA centric but I let that wash over and got very decent results.
I felt it was a bit expensive and by their own admission it doesn’t cope well as an app when you reach your target. I’m unsubbed now but have a new base level weight I’m much happier with.
Some tips/hacks to eat less: coffee is an appetite suppressant, so is nicotine, weed is the opposite. Some foods keep you fuller for longer like meat and fibrous veg or brocolli. Its easier (and more time efficient) to avoid eating the calories than exercising the same number off, a piece of cake 500cal is something like an hour or more jogging. Get busy and sleep earlier/longer, less time to think of food or snack.
It can start really small… maybe having a goal for a 5k would help give you a goal…
I don’t know about a runners high, but pushing myself and getting better… setting and beating goals (failing along the way of course). That’s the addictive part.
In no time at all you’ll be able to cover 5+ miles maybe 4-5 days a week. There is literally no wrong way to do it. Walk/run, run too fast, run easy all the time…
it’s empowering to be able to walk out the door, pick a distance, and do it while everyone else is asleep.
I am not overweight and rub every day but still my body composition is not ideal. I am not willing to count calories and my needs vary wildly with running volume. By cutting out the most abused ingredient I get rid of a ton of unhealthy choices as sugar is in all of them. Subsequently I need to eat healthier. No downsides so far. Weight loss is slow but without consciously cutting calories I was expecting that. I am down 1kg and if I can lose a total of 3-4 I am already happy. My wife once lost 12kg with just that one change so it is not limited to the small weight loss I experienced.
To share a bit of my personal experience: I was not especially fat but with a BMI "overweight". But since last year I started eating/drinking Plenny Shakes as my morning meal every day (for other health reasons than losing weight). Without changing anything else to my lifestyle I lost something like 6kg in ~8 months. And I actually enjoy drinking their shakes so it doesn't even feel like a task.
All the best in reaching your goals!
But to be honest I'm doing intermittent fasting for 4-5 years now. I don't count hours I don't follow up what I eat. I just exercise couple of times per week. Maybe 2-4, and start eating at 1pm, and stop eating at 7-8pm.
But that's most of the days. Sometimes I go out, drink couple of boozes with my friends, etc.
I tried to keep it simple. And here's the catch, I was overweight back then. I did workout a lot, do all the diets. Keto, Paleo etc. They're just hard to keep up with. It's hard to stay in those lifestyles.
So this simple routine makes things easier and simple for me tbh.
2. If you have 10-15 percent body fat (which is lean) you still have 5000 calories of food on your body ready to eat for a couple of days.
Look at Dr Sten Ekberg, or any oncologist for information about longer term fasting and insulin.
Anecdata you can ignore: for me, a 48h fast drops about 1% of my body fat, originally there's a 2% drop but it'll come back up to -1% after a few days.
The weirdest part is that I liked hunger. It made me feel alert. My body felt better, my mind was clearer, I needed less sleep. The less I ate the more energy I had. I ended up eating one good meal at lunch time and little or nothing for dinner. Combined with long walks the weight kept dropping steadily and quickly. And it’s not like I suffered. Hunger comes and goes in cravings that last less than half an hour two or three times per day. It’s quite easy to ignore them.
Calorie expenditure can't be determined by just plugging your height, weight, and activity level into an online calculator. The body is more complicated than a bucket with a fixed size hole in it and all you have to do is pour water in at a rate less than it drains out. The body produces hormones to signal to its systems whether to store food. Those hormones are determined by many factors including how much you eat but also what you eat, your genetics, your stress level, how much sleep you get, etc.
Exercising helps because of you build muscle mass, you increase 'passive' energy consumption, because muscle tissue requires more energy than fat tissue.
They will help you attain sustainable healthy weight loss. Most will actually ensure you are eating ALL of your meals + snacks in the proper portions (it’s not as restrictive as you think).
I would be extremely cautious of skipping any meals with regularity. You only make your body hold onto calories that way. A dietician can help you learn to give your body what it needs
1. Visiting a nutritionist. She helped me choose better foods and understand the process. The visit also validated that the process would have a high chance of succeeding (as opposed to praying that some weird trick on the internet works) and it won't have negative effects on my body.
2. No more oil fried food.
3. Significantly reduce sugar.
4. Eat only the calories I need. Snacks usually have the calories of a whole meal. Whenever you say no to a snack, the calories on the label are reduced from calories_in, giving you some dopamine.
5. Drink more water. The stomach gauges hunger by how large or small it is. By filling it with water, you reduce the sensation of hunger.
6. Some exercise (I managed 400 - 500 calories / day from small hikes). I could do hikes each day, because the view at the top of the hill is gorgeous, and it made the entire hike (which had some steep portions) bearable. But I started with an in-house stepper (5 minutes / day, then 8, then 15, then 20)
Consistency is key. If your basal metabolic rate is 1800 calories and you manage to have 1200 calories at the end of the day, that's 600 calories weight loss. A kilogram of weight is somewhere around 7500 calories. That means you'll lose 2kg / month. But if you skip 50% of days, you'll only lose 1kg / month. Also, consistency is key, because once you stop eating healthy, you'll gain the weight back.
Also, following hard diets can have many negative impacts:
1. You might only lose water
2. You might deprive your body of various nutrients, leading to health problems
3. When you stop, you gain all the weight back
I'd advise you find a method of counting your calories, and finding a solution of being below your BMR each day that works for you without feeling like a chore, that covers all macronutrients and that you can keep for as long as possible. Counting calories also gives you a measurable progress and a source of dopamine.
Most fad diets are either unhealthy or counterproductive. Or both.
At the very least ask for some citations of studies about them so you know if they work or are total bullshit.
Don't have snacks at home. Don't buy them at all.
Start home cooking if you are not doing already.
Track your progress, make a graph. It feels great to see that line going down. Track it even after you reach your goals so you don't bounce back.
Track what you eat, especially at the beginning. There are a lot of stuff that are very high in calories but people often have very little idea about them.
Exercise is a nice bonus but don't think you can out-exercise a bad diet.
The tip: do whatever you can to feel good about yourself and take care of your mental health. That's the bottleneck. You're on HN, so you're good at figuring things out. If you're in a good enough place to think rationally, you'll pretty quickly figure out the ways that work for you to burn more calories than you consume, and more importantly, once you're done with that, to burn the same number of calories as you consume for the rest of your life.
Depending on your relationship with food, it does have _some_ learning curve (learning to not eat most of the day), but it works like magic.
Once your used to your IF schedule, you’ll feel sharper (hungry brain is really powerful in my experience), your skin will be clearer, you’ll have more energy, and it’s a very realistic lifestyle change that in my experience is different than a traditional diet.
I’d highly recommend it.
You have to pretty smart and make sure those calaries are high quality.
It caused me issues in that its completely changed my appetite. And now that I've reached my target weight, I'm having a hard time keeping weight on even not doing OMAD. It was like hitting the reset button on my desire for food.
Also, if it costs money and is unhealthy, cut it. That's the number one priority.
Still, my weight does not increase, because I drink only water and sometimes no-calories sodas. There really should be more awareness on how many calories sweetened beverages have - way too many.
I lost weight very quickly when I heavily limited the amount of food I ate, on top of not drinking or eating anything sweet.
When it comes to exercise, I'm only really doing one thing: 2 hours of walking with my dog every day. I imagine if you have no exercise at all, my tips will not work that effectively.
The fastest and healthiest way to get a better body (which is not loosing weight) it is to start lifting heavy things over and over again.
You can starve yourself and loose wait, also rather fast, but as soon as you go back to your standard eating, that weight will come back.
If you increase your muscle mass, you won't necessarily loose weight, fat will be replaced by muscle, but your appearance will be much better, you will be healthier and overall you will just feel better.
As always there are not shortcuts.
Target weight management more than weight loss. I watch my weight every day now, and as soon as I feel heavier, and the scale confirms it, I know that my previous week or so is the culprit.
Therefore, if my actions caused my weight gain, they will fight against all shortcuts, and they will win.
Fight against your own bad habits, may sound weird to many people. (also, I lost all my weight doing intermittent fasting, which helps with many things not just weight loss)
Losing weight is probably 85% about eating fewer calories. So eating less, making healthy choices for what you eat. Eat more vegetables, skip liquid calories is one way to address this without a big change. Also eating slower, drinking more water can help with eating less
But that doesn't mean you have to suffer. There are great foods that are also healthy. Take it slow, one meal at a time and find something you like eating that's healthier. Over time you'll learn new healthier meals that will replace what you've been doing.
And then do the same thing to add movement into your routine. Maybe you like walking or virtual reality games that make you move. Just add bits of movement into your routine over time. You'll start liking them!
Do whatever it takes to turn any form of exercise into a game, challenge, or fun.
Going strict keto (<20g net carbs a day) was fun for me too and allowed me to have a single metric to focus on reducing.
I lost 40+ lbs over 2 years due to a combo of fun outdoor activities, changing things up when I got bored, and finding others who would always show up which guilted me into being consistent.
Intermittent fasting became easy and enjoyable and gave me the perfect excuse not to eat shitty airplane/airport food and as a reward, I'd get a nice dinner or meal instead.
I'm not fat but lost 3 kg in 2 month: Jan 2 I was 71kg, this morning I'm 67,9kg. I'm eating everyday around 1900calories, just a bit lower than what I need, and slowly losing weight. My goals is being fit, and 65kg by Jul/Aug.
Automatically (eg withings/fitbit scale) is important not to cheat yourself and track only good days. Every day is important because you can see the trend and not be fooled too much by daily fluctuations, but even more important because it will make you actively think about it every day.
Tip 1: Track what you eat.
This is much more work than the previous tip, and less weird. But basically logging what you eat in a notepad and even without counting calories will make you aware of what and how much eating is going on.
In addition to being highly nutritious and satiety inducing (therefore leading to relatively low effort weight loss) there are immense health benefits (markedly reduced chance of cardiovascular disease and cancer), ethical benefits (you will reduce the demand for ethically bankrupt, cruel factory farming practices that permeate more than 90% of the food industry) and environmental benefits.
Suggested reading: - 'Whole' by T Colin Campbell. - 'Eating Animals' by Jonathan Foer
I found a few key things.
1. Decide you want to loose weight.
2. Up your plain flat water intake... Like a ton. Your body will get used to it after a day or two and you'll start feeling naturally thirsty. You notice all these skinny fit people are always drinking? That's plain water they are drinking. Seriously if your diet is crap at the moment if you start just drinking loads of water you will loose like half a stone cause you will stop retaining water. How to know how much to drink? I guess for the first 3 days go cold turkey on pop, coffee, literally any liquid other than plain water. If you keep a bottle with you all the time you will naturally just drink a ton.
You will piss like a racehorse of course but with good comes bad.
3. Get a food diary and write down everything that goes in your mouth. I tell you this alone will blow your mind and get you thinking a bit differently.
Try these to get you started.
Best of luck, fuck the begrudgers and let me know if this helps a bit and if you want more chats about it
Source: https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2007/00...
(Sarcasm, obviously. Do not do this.)
Their key idea is that you _need_ some level of CO2 to keep the blood level acidic, otherwise even if there is plenty of O2 is available, it won't be absorbed into the blood stream. Hyperventilation, for example, results in respiratory alkalosis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4WU4ghe7BY
Perhaps someone knowledgeable can comment on whether this explanation makes sense.
I personally would advice to stay away from wonder-diets, and all "quick-weight-loss" methods entirely. Rather aim for a permanent change in eating habits - something you can keep up indefinitely and that slowly helps you become more healthy (and maybe reduce weight in the process).
Trying to go the "quick and easy" way only sets you up for a relapse. Take it slow, and with baby steps.
For a first step, maybe don't even aim for weight loss at all - but try something like integrating more fiber into your meals. Like, add a salad, or some vegetables and completely replace white bread with whole-grain. Eating a salad as a starter, before your regular meal, can help to naturally reduce the portion size, without having to force yourself.
Take your time - it will take weeks for your gut bacteria to adopt to digesting more fiber (pro-biotics like yogurt, kimchi and sauerkraut can help with that), and it will probably take longer for you to get accustomed to it taste-wise. But I assure you, once you do get accustomed to it, a salad can become a tasty and enjoyable treat.
For further steps - slowly, one after the other - you can: Try to reduce intake of refined sugars. Get accustomed to drinking plain water. It may taste bland and boring at first - but it's the most refreshing drink you can have, once you got accustomed to it. Try to cut back on snacking between meals, and replace your snacks with nuts (neither roasted nor salted - just plain nuts) and stuff like oatmeal soaked in yogurt and fresh fruit like apples or berries. Try to stay away from processed foods - go for fresh produce instead. Maybe try to get into cooking - preparing your own meals can be easy and fun and gives you full control over the ingredients used. Try to eat more legumes (beans, lentils, etc.). Try to opt for preparation methods other than frying, whenever you can. Try to prefer fish and poultry over red meat. Try to reduce intake of animal fat: opt for olive oil over butter.
Don't feel guilty about occasionally splurging on some less than healthy food - just do so in moderation. Like once a week, or less.
The general way is to maintain a caloric deficit while keeping your protein intake decent and lifting weights so that you don't lose lean muscle mass (and end up being skinny fat). There are some programs that are from a fitness trainer who's other programs which I've had success with that I can recommend. Let me know if you're interested.
Bottom line - no hacks. Just consistent effort over a period of time.
Lightweight soups are great during a diet. If you feel too hungry and your planned meal doesn't seem to be working? Eat a little soup. It will calm you down without adding too many calories.
A lot of the time one person's overweight is someone else's underweight
I don't think it matters much exactly where you are on that spectrum.
No matter who you are, regardless of wide differences in metabolism or tendency to resist change, for any one person it always takes more time & effort to keep your weight up than it does to let it slip.
It's very unlikely that someone else is making the exact same efforts to keep their weight where it is at the time anyway.
Only you can adjust the effort to keep your weight up or let it go down to be as close to where you want it.
If there is a challenging goal for change, it can be more worthwhile to very carefully focus on the few strongest efforts you in particular are making which allow you to keep your weight up to where it is.
If you want to gain in size then you're going to need to beef up your efforts in those areas most strongly if you're going to get the most visible results the soonest.
OTOH when you want to trim down, those same well-identified efforts can then be relaxed and nature will take its course.
Theoretically it's always less work to let your weight slip but it can take a while for this relaxation of effort to pay a dividend, if that's the direction you're moving toward.
Everyone needs to first overcome the resistance to change but this is a completely different kind of effort.
When challenges are big I think it really helps to highly categorize the efforts being made to keep your weight up, completely separately from the effort that might be needed to initiate momentum up or down to begin with.
It can really give you more bang for the buck if you can better balance these types of efforts for your own particular situation. And make adjustments over time in response to degree of progress under dynamic conditions.
Once momentum is underway, everyone benefits from the relaxation of effort that it can take to get moving in one direction or the other.
Nothing revolutionary, however tracking everything that I eat really makes a big difference because otherwise I tend to overeat as tend to be always hungry.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC7693552/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC6683132/
You don't have to exercise, just consider this a progress bar for the day (I used calorie counting apps on iPhone or Apple Watch).
This is not medical advice, but you don't have to be a martyr while doing this - you can still eat 4x Big Mac, Salad (with light sauce) and Coke Zero per day and have 200 kcal of wiggle room for a Snickers.
You will lose weight, but this is not really good for blood pressure/cholesterol, but it works ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Salt intake is partially linked to hunger and satiety. Increasing salt (and potassium) intake while lowering total calories is a way to control hunger while dieting. Combine it with time restricted feeding (the whole skip breakfast deal) and you've got yourself an easy winning combo.
Going to the gym regularly helps as well, increased muscle protein synthesis leads to increased calorie expenditure
Tire out your jaw. Chewing gum, those stupid jaw exercise rubbers will help. Chew something to make your jaw super fatigued and you will find yourself giving up half way through a meal.
Drinking a ton of luke warm water helps. You will end up having no room in your stomach.
Menthol chewing gum makes everything taste horrible.
If you don’t wash your dishes, you should. Easy way too address your action by resolving the consequences.
Use smaller utensils and dishware.
If your BMI is high, then Keto + intermitten fasting + calorie deficit is your best bet (I use to be 300 pounds and lost 50 pounds in 3 months.)
If your BMI is low, then regular cardio (i.e. calorie deficit at the cost of increased hunger) is your best bet (how I got myself down to 200 pounds.)
If your lazy, then strength/weight training (i.e. increased muscle weight to replaced fat trading off with an increased metabolism) is your best bet (how I plan on getting to 150 pounds)
I stopped eating fortified foods, changed my diet a bit and started getting cravings for leaf parsley and lentils.
You wanted weird? Here’s weird. Just track your weight. That’s all I’m asking you to do. Every morning, just stand on the scale for 5 seconds, log your weight in an app or whatever, and go about your day. The hard part is not skipping days. Sometimes you won’t want to face the scale. You’ll make excuses. But whatever, it’s just standing on a scale and tracking the weight, that’s the whole thing, so how hard can it be? Track your weight every single day.
The theory is that obesity is cause by a misalignment between the body's sense of how much food it's eating (which it determines largely by smell and taste) and the actual number of calories consumed. High density, tasteless calories fool that system into thinking you're already full, so you won't want to eat more. Search for "Shangri La Diet" to learn more details.
And focus on reducing your calorie intake. See https://www.science.org/content/article/scientist-busts-myth...
I started losing weight when I counted calories and switched to an intermittent fasting window where I only eat between Noon and 5 PM. Yes, I feel hunger when I wake up but I'm "OK" with feeling that way until I allow myself to eat at noon.
Advantages: easy to incorporate within an ordinary lifestyle because you can join friends for dinner or get togethers without worrying about what will be served, your single meal can be satisfying, each day you can look forward to your single meal, no need to count calories as long as you eat a reasonable meal.
Weighing in once per day is motivating because reasonably rapid weight loss is possible.
They're also delicious. They're usually sold in a brine, which you'll want to switch out for fresh water at least once to lower the salt content.
(I'm talking about healthy meals / nutrition-oriented channels. If you subscribe to generic cooking channels that include sugary desserts or cakes that will be counter productive!)
I would absolutely not use a tank of pure oxygen.
Persoanlly, I've swung a quarter of my body mass in the past five years. It really came down to eating less, but it wasn't a healthy situation. The key is change behaviors that you don't need to actively think about. Just change habits.
You do not deserve to eat to excess. You deserve the discomfort of eternally unfulfilled hunger.
You deserve the pain of exercise, and the struggle of lifting weights, and the only thing you can look forward to, if you get comfortable with the current weight you're lifting, is adding more weight.
I can't recommend it though as the cons far outweigh the pros.
Lifting weights though, do it, but start slowly to develop technique without risking injury. Make a habit of it.
specifically, eat "zero calorie" veggies before meals. Like raw mushrooms or peppers, or steamed cauliflower and broccoli. (not roasted with oil, and no butter added).
Then continue eating as you normally would. Helps in 2 ways:
1. you're taking up space, so you won't be able to eat as much calorie filled food 2. you're more conscious about what you're eating, which makes you think more carefully about what you're eating
I have found that a weight tracking app that connects to a digital scale gives you a very accurate picture of your weight. When I was really trying to lose weight, I would weigh myself multiple times a day, and the app would be able to show trends in the data.
But my tips, drink more water, eat less and move more. If you do a combination of these things relative to where you are now, you will lose weight.
- Cut back on soda/sugary drinks
- 10 minutes of exercise a day, even if just walking
- Get into a good sleep routine
Once you're at the weight you're happy with you'll need to keep it off. This is when you really need to think about your lifestyle choices. Ideally you'll stick with the above 3 tips even after you hit your target weight.
Instead of worrying about how much you eat, worry about what you eat.
Stop drinking sweetened drinks. Stop eating refined carbs.
- consistent meal times. Previously my meal window would be 2-3 hours wide, leading to increased amounts of hunger.
- less stress. Apparently this is different depending on the person, but stress can increase weight (I’m sure there are a ton of other health issues it causes too).
- avoid snacking too much. No hard and fast rule, just remind yourself you have a meal coming up.
That and switching from sugar in my teas and coffees, and getting diet when I occasionally drink pop.
I'm lucky enough that my walk commute to work is enough exercise for me.
Cut out calorie dense foods. Oil, fat, etc. A pound of spinach has as many calories as a tablespoon of oil.
Stop using ingredients which add calories but don't add to the meal. For example, when cooking don't use cooking spray. Rely on the non-stick coating. If its an older pan, half second spray of cooking oil is enough to keep food from sticking.
2. Join a good + intense Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) gym.
Also, don't eat pizza, burgers, beer, soda, bread, rice, pasta, sugar or any desserts. Stick to grilled meat, eggs, bacon, chicken, fish, milk, cheese, yogurt and lots of greens.
Keep your mind occupied and don't forget you reason for doing it.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48664748-allen-carr-s-ea...
It's simple mathematics, figure it out how much do you need calories per day, then drop the intake of that amount of calories, and body will get the rest from your fat.
For example. I love McDonald’s. But I don’t drink the coke. I have water instead. If I buy a coke while at 711, I get the smallest can.
I lost 20kg over 2 years just by cutting down on sugar or replacing some items so I could continue to eat what I love.
COVID has messed me up tho, since I no longer walk to work or go out as often :(
Cortisol can play a big role here as does metabolism. Are you chronically stressed out? What about your metabolic reactions to different foods?
Get some hormone tests done for the cortisol.
Pick up a CGM (from levelshealth ideally) and keep an eye on your glucose reactions to different foods.
Also, educate yourself about the insulin / glucagon cycle, likely change when you eat
Now that I have three kids, it's a lot harder. I try to walk the younger kids to daycare when the weather and schedule permit it; otherwise, I take a walk after the bus picks up my older daughter.
Eliminate all sugars and most carbs from your diet, and lift weights. Pay attention to how you feel, and learn to differentiate between cravings and real hunger. Ignore cravings and eat when you're hungry. If you can't easily control the composition of your diet, then calorie count. That 3rd slice of bread loses its appeal once you realize it will blow up your daily budget before 3pm. Don't "reward" yourself with cheat days to look forward to, but rather schedule in days with a bigger budget, or give yourself a weekly use-it-or-lose-it bonus budget to eat into. If you're doing the calorie counting, then be diligent about it. If you do it every meal it becomes effortless, but if you allow yourself to skip it for one reason or another, it won't become a habit.
You're going to have to get used to some amount of discomfort to lose weight, whether it's physical or mental. The sugar cravings subside after a week or so, but you have to cut it out like it's poison. Sore muscles from lifting hurts, but it's a mark of accomplishment. If you use food as a comfort, you're going to need to rewire your brain to not do that anymore.
The low carb diet or calorie counting literally causes you to lose weight, but it's a means rather than an end and it takes discipline to sustain long enough to get meaningful results. If you stop and fall into old habits, you'll just gain the weight back. The purpose of the weight lifting is to build up muscle so that your metabolism changes. You may end up the same weight as when you started a year later, but you'll carry the weight differently. The exercise also releases some pleasant hormones that make you feel good, and helps you get in touch with real visceral hunger. A sugar craving is mindless and hollow, "oh let's just open up this cabinet and grab an Oreo. One won't hurt even though it's bad for me. What, the bag is empty?! Now I'm sad," while exercise hunger has some primal depth to it, "I don't care this can of tuna is expired, it's the most delicious thing in the world right now, and eating it will make me stronger than I've ever been. I'm glad I live in a society, because otherwise I'd be in a river trying to punch a salmon unconscious right now. Who am I kidding, that would be awesome."
It will have some effect by itself, and it will make all the rest of the good advice in this thread much easier - eating less, eating one time a day, eating better (less carbs, esp simple carbs), walking a lot, strength training.
I've been on it for a few months and it's been absolutely miraculous. Ask me again in 10 years what the long-term effect is.
If I exercise I feel great but the more I do the more I eat, because it makes me hungry and I justify eating more because I'm working out.
In the first month of our first lockdown I lost 15lb with virtually no exercise, just cutting out the snacks/beer/sugar and measuring my portions.
Go to the nutritionist. I've been there, got myself the eating plan tailored for me (my preferences, I don't have things I don't like in this plan), I've lost 14 kilograms by simply following it. I didn't even excersise much.
Don't listen to 95% of the comments from here. People often don't know what they're writing about.
Doing exercise, even just walking or (slow) cycling will itself not burn that much calories, breathing will only be twice as fast, so not much energy is being burned. What it does do is turn on the burning of fat, very slowly. During exercise I do eat to keep my glucose blood level up. The burning of fat goes very slowly, what came on in years time will not burn in half an hour. It can last a few days, at least, if I make sure to not have a high glucose blood level. So after exercise I prefer to eat a bit of fatty foods (salmon, peanuts) and proteines (cooked eggs) and fiber. Not too much, just a bit, and I feel my body doesn't ask for more food. If I do cause a glucose high, my body will stop burning fat and ask for more fast energy by feeling hungry again.
I do understand not every body works the same, but this works for me in dropping weight. Doing exercise and not eating much for a few days. I am sure exercise has other benefits that are more indirect and less visible, but since the aim is losing weight, this is my direct way of dealing with it.
Professional athletes do this the other way around. They don't want burning of fat, they are sharp as a knife already. So after sports, they eat a huge bowl of pasta, or something similar, to stop that burning of fat immediately.
This toxicity affects things like your retina, btw.
Early morning sunlight configures our endocrine system, which has a major impact on digestive processes, feelings of motivation, and basically every system in our body.
It’s a domino effect. Just one minute of sunlight is sufficient to kick off numerous positive dynamics.
For example, hypothyroidism is a relatively common condition that will make you gain weight indirectly, by making you less active in general. A blood analysis can routinely identify it, and the treatment is simple - one small pill every morning.
Yes, regular exercise is important (lifting + some light cardio like power walking); but the real battle is around your food intake. Find a way of eating that works for you. Many of us find low-carb or macro-focused ways of eating helpful, mostly because of what you AVOID.
It takes a little getting used to but it totally worked for me. A tablespoon of oil first thing in the morning and I wasn't hungry until the afternoon.
100% oxygen is probably unhealthy, and also a fire risk. Unless OP meant targeting 100% oxygen saturation? High inspired O2 fractions have been associated with worse outcomes in conditions like stroke and myocardial infarction, although this may be a specific sub case where hypoperfusion injury creates oxidative stress.
Five years ago, I was diagnosed with the sole medical condition for which GHB was approved for therapeutic use: narcolepsy. After other medications started to fail, my doctor prescribed Xywav, the commercial version of GHB. I’ve been using it as directed for about a year. And I’ve lost about 30 pounds. I’m probably at an even lower body fat percentage (the metric I care about, not bodyweight) than the weight loss reflects because I began lifting weights three times per week at around the same time.
A comprehensive scientific understanding of all of the ways how sleep, sleep disorders, and GHB all affect health still eludes us, but enough correlations have been established to allow us to hypothesize without being too far afield, i think:
Correlation 1: 80% or so of narcoleptics struggle with healthy weight control Correlation 2: 80-90% of narcoleptics have abnormally low levels of the neuropeptide orexin, which has been shown to control sleep, arousal, and appetite Correlation 3: One characteristic feature of narcolepsy is an abundance of REM stage sleep, with a deficit of so called slow-wave stage III sleep compared to baseline. Correlation 4: Stage III sleep is where a lot of beneficial physical restorative effects of sleep happen, like muscle repair. Correlation 5: The therapeutic dose of GHB sends a person straight to stage III sleep. For narcoleptics, this restores the stage III sleep that they are lacking.
Putting it all together: quality sleep is important for maintaining healthy weight and neurological/physiological aspects that tie in, like satiety, appetite control, muscle repair, metabolism, etc. The specific stage of sleep that appears to have the strongest correlation with same appears to be Stage III. GHB artificially prolongs the amount of time a person is in stage III sleep, thus fortifying weight management.
As an aside, GHB is also noted to stimulate the indigeonous production of Growth Hormone, and before GHB was regulated as a recreational drug, it was banned by athletic organizations as a doping agent.
In no way do I suggest that off-label or illegal use of GHB is a safe, or even effective method of weight-loss for people who don’t suffer from a hypersomnia disorder. However, now that your curiosity has been piqued by the “weird” tip, it suggests a much more mundane weight loss tip that is probably just as if not more effective for neurotypical people: start a sleep log, and focus on getting the highest possible quality sleep you can.
You have to be methodical and dedicated, and most of the problem is diet and sleep.
Or block ghrelin. The person who figures out the ghrelin blocker will make millions.
i started drinking only water and tea which helped with my weight loss. before that i already was cutting out most carbs from my diet and felt stuck. for the longest time i did not believe that drinking soda that contains no sugar but art. sweetener could sway my weight in anyway, but now, without the sweet drinks, i dont feel the need to snack so much, so i eat less sweets and snacks across the day, so i lose weight.
look... its working for me, im not saying you should do this, or try to breathe 100% oxygen from a tank, talk to a doctor maybe... i think i heard of people who set themselfs ablaze because there was oil/grease on their skin when the oxygen hit... :shrug: maybe you could try running high up in the mountains until you are used to being deprived of oxygen a little so you get more down here? idk
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30626791
Weird tip: stop eating at 15:00.
Not so weird: reduce your calorie intake. Don't go stupid, just a few 100 cal deficit will make you lose weight without feeling particularly hungry.
Instead of thinking about it as a pleasure, I thought about it as a way to satisfy an urge in much the same way we need to satisfy many other bodily functions.m
Over time, this made it way easier to eat rather bland food.
1. Video games are better than movies. When I played video games, I ate less snacks. Lately, I watch movies/shows with my SO, and end up gaining weight. But every once in a while I get a new game and every single time I end up losing weight until I beat that game.
2. Avoid unfit people. I have friends who worship food and alcohol, some of them are naturally skinny, so don't look unhealthy. But whenever I hangout with them for multiple days in a row, I end up gaining a few pounds.
3. And on other side of coin, seek environments with healthy people. When I was single, I spent a lot of time in gyms, coffee shops, chipotle, whole foods, etc mostly looking for a fit companion. As a video gamer, I never considered myself as a healthy person but slowly my identity changed and I became a healthy person.
Now the question is: How would you reach that goal the best way? This depends very much on why you are eating like you are. What is it for you etc. My grandfather e.g. was a Nazi soldier on the eastern front when he was 16, where he nearly starved — which is why my brothers and me had to eat every last crumb of a plate over half a century later, because this got so hammered into my father, that he passed ot onto his kids. I managed to reflect on this and watch myself from the outside and sort of get rid of that habit. Your history and relationship with eating might be different, but you should also see it as an psychological issue, as much as an health issue — because usually it is.
One thing that you might try is instead of focusing too much on what you are eating, to focus more on what you are buying and when. So instead of going for groceries hungry and buying unhealthy trash and a lot of it, only go to the store when you ate, buy healthier stuff and exactly the amount your body needs. Then at home you have no choice but stick to the plan and make something good out of what you got.
I know, eating is enjoyable, but it can also be enjoyable if a meal doesn't leave you completely stuffed. In fact it might be more enjoyable if you are not.
Come up with a plan, stick with it, at least for a certain predefiend time (as an experiment), then if you feel better, decide how to go ahead
Food scale. Weigh EVERYTHING you eat for a few weeks. Use an app like MyFitnessPal or something similar to gain and understanding of how many calories you're taking in. You'll be shocked at first
Then, make small adjustments until you get between 1600-2000 calories a day.
Add in walking 2-3 miles 2-3 days a week.
They do all their eating in a 6 hour window (6am ~ 12 noon) And fast during the other 18 hours - only plain fluids such as water or plain tea.
Practically, you can try with do all your eating between 11am and 7pm
Drink cold water and try to keep your passive blood sugar low. If you eat something sweet drink a lot of water at the same time. Reduce the amount of oils that you consume. Fill up on vegetables.
Cardio exercise is a really effective way to exhale carbon.
I feel like the constant monitoring is important as a reminder to actually keep me on track, and to show me granular changes.
You have to be careful not to let daily fluctuations drive you crazy though.
There are probably so many more parameters, both important on an individual level and commonly, that we do not know about yet.
Same with exercise. Walk a certain amount on weekend days until it’s a habit. Then try weekdays too. Then increase the length.
tldr: play the long game
That's all.
Do cold showers and stay in cold. Eat less carbs and drink less alcohol and more water.
Skip breakfast. Or even lunch or dinner and have one meal a day.
I be recommend espresso or instant coffee for this though, as it tends to have less acids and is thus gentler on a fasting stomach.
This is what I do :)
1. Eat your dinner at-least 2 hours before you go to bed
2. Don't drink water for 2 hours after the meal. Let the food digest
3. Eat more of easy to digest foods - fruits and veggies
4. Try to have a gap of 14 hours between your night meal and morning/noon meal
5. Don't snack all the time, even on nuts
Chances are pretty good you actually aren’t hungry, and that after the wait, you’ll end up skipping the dessert after all.
Weird tricks for weight loss? Try Clenbuterol.
Otherwise eat less and move more.
The other trick is to eat as much as you did before, just substitute less calorie dense foods.
So, in other words: you may want to lose some fat but you may also want to con very some body mass from fat to muscle.
=> do not only rely only on the number on the balance.
We want a trick because losing weight is hard. Our bodies fight us because they are stupid, and our society fights us because it encourages hedonism. But short of a few dangerous and largely illegal medications, there isn't any trick, you just have to embrace the suck.
You're right that most of the weight you lose leaves your body in the form of CO2, but the best way to exhale more CO2 is through aerobic exercise. I was at my lowest weight when I was running regularly, then I developed a knee issue that forced me to stop. Of course, if you don't control your caloric intake it's likely you'll just eat enough to replenish whatever you burned anyway. Our bodies are really stingy about calories and our brains are really good at rationalizing reasons to eat more when we're running a deficit.
Don't get me wrong, I would love if you could find some hack like you propose that would make this easier, but a decade of riding this rollercoaster leads me to believe you won't.
If you want to get serious about losing weight (and I'm not saying you have to!): start by calculating the sedentary BMR for your ideal weight, then institute a strict daily calorie restriction[0] regime where you never go above that number. Even if you do no exercise and sleep a lot you'll still eventually get there, but exercise will help in a few ways. For one, you might find a form of exercise that's actually fun and you'll want to improve at it, which will further motivate you to follow the calorie restriction, in general you'll have less time to sit staring at a screen getting bored and feeling the munchies, and obviously you'll burn extra calories.
[0] Seriously it doesn't even matter that much what you eat as long as you can hit the target number. A nutritionist did an experiment where he ate nothing but convenience store junk food and all his health metrics improved including losing (IIRC) 30lbs. That said, certain foods will make it much easier to avoid overeating than others. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out which ones.
Stay with it. 6 months in it will be a new you.
Do NOT do this if you are diabetic or on other meds like statins.
a weird i have done is one is to make food just super inconvenient, and order groceries online only when my stomach is full, and buy lots things that are easy to eat raw, like cauliflower and carrots; you can even add pi-hole rules to block ordering groceries before lunch or before dinner when you are especially hungry.
i think its also important to drink just water, but each day try few drops of lemon or orange or something to change the taste if you are bored of it.
make sure your vit d is good as it will help with the stress as well
My weird tip? Flow state. Do something so compelling and interesting you forget to even care about eating. I've done it, but not consistently or for a long time.
I'm not suggesting this is good for you, because steroids have a ton of negatives, however steroids will increase lean mass and consequentely metabolic rate at rest, inducing weight loss even if you do not exercise.
A high stress and dysfunctional workplace also was an effective way to loose weight for me personally.
Don’t expect to have a lasting impact of your diet if you don’t understand how your body works with regards to food.
Truly recommend. Get the audiobook version and just listen an hour every day
- skip breakfast
- go for a walk / run in the morning
This will mainly use your stored fat for energy and is 1 less meal you consume
Note, this is different from freezing. If you’re too cold, you’ll run into different problems like getting slow, getting weak, not being able to sleep, or getting ill.
Personally, I've always found moderation and exercise worked for me. But the successes I've seen with this other diet are impressive.
Skip breakfeast, don't get a refill on your lunch plate. Realize 1 burger is enough, you don't need the fries.
Stop eating bread.
And if you are hardcore, skip pasta,rice,potatoes (Carbohydrates).
Easy weightloss
That's a very good system to lose fat. It helped me more than daily runs. And I was already in decent shape so I imagine it will work better for you.
No impact, at home, and easy to follow instructions.
Focus more on diet composition than quantity. Dietary fiber is your friend.
Getting better sleep helps you not eat at night. Staying hydrated makes you rest better, and nourishing foods will help you move more.
Each of your meals should contain 1/3 of cereals, 1/3 of proteins and 1/3 of vegetables.
Try to avoid sugar and red meat, and you'll lose weight without effort.
Personally I've also found exercise to decrease appetite.
In the end it's about calories in vs calories out which can be dealt with in serveral ways.
You can train yourself to go from 8 hours (sleep) to 16 hours pretty easily.
Once you get to a point where you can one-meal-a-day comfortably, then extending this to a 48hr fast once a week becomes relatively easy too.
Intermittent failure is fine - it’s better to go 20 days at 90% consistent than 7 days at 100% consistent. Persistence is key.
Get yourself a bicycle, take two weeks holiday and ride from A to B where A and B need to be >2000km apart. You can eat as much as you want and you will loose weight.
Don’t let junk food come in the house. And that includes white bread.
Pickles are great snack food.
Maybe try wim hof, for breath?
also if you can get into walking, I've found that to be the easiest way to lose weight, and if you combine it with a friend or an audio book it can be really enjoyable.
calorie tracking has worked well for me too- the first 2 weeks you should just be getting a sense of how much you're consuming though, don't try to cut right away
The first few weeks will be tough. Then the cravings and hunger will go away. So will the excess weight.
Religiously, at least for a few months. You'll develop an instinct for actually eating "intuitively". Re-calibrate as needed.
1. Eat as much volume or more, but lower calorie density. Find the calorie dense items in your diet and be more controlled about these. (For me that meant cheese and cream, but for many people things like potato chips, cookies etc might be a larger culprit). I now use these minimally for flavour, rather than in large quantities.
2. Focus on getting more fibre and protein, both of which aid satiety. The first part means eating a lot more vegetables and beans than you might have before. I get at least 50g fibre most days. The average American gets about 15g.
3. Avoid ultra-processed food. For one thing, UPF is low in fibre and protein. Secondly, for reason which aren't yet clear, UPF encourages overeating even when matched for fibre and protein, as compared with whole foods. See this study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31105044/
4. Don't have problem foods in the house. If there are foods that you fail to resist binging on time and time again, get them out of the house, permanently. I mean it.
5. Have a plan for maintenance, to avoid regaining the weight. For me, that has basically been to keep on calorie counting as a permanent lifestyle. It ain't so bad once you get used to it. Your plan may be different. Mine has worked for me so far.
6. Get at least 7000 steps a day. Everyone agrees being sedentary is bad, and at least one study (https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/102/6/1332/4555181?log...) suggests that levels of sedentariness below ~7000 steps a day or equivalent may result in appetite dysregulation (i.e. you eat more).
7. Weigh yourself every day, and use a weight trend app like Libra. Keep doing this in maintenance.
8. Don't consume any sort of media when you eat. Just eat mindfully and enjoy it.
For me, low-carb vs low-fat hasn't made any difference as long as I'm controlling calories. I suspect the reason some people have dramatic success with one or the other is all to do with satiety, and that this varies a lot between people. That is, some people feel a lot more satisfied when they eat hardly any carbs, others feel a lot more satisfied when they don't eat much fat, and others don't see a difference.
For me, I found reading how other people made changes to their lifestyle to improve their health to be motivating. After seeing enough stories about that, eventually I started thinking, why not me? So here's my personal account, should you care.
Personally, once I switched from eating out/ordering DoorDash for my one big meal of the day to cooking all my meals, I began to eat far fewer calories. Turns out the average meal you make at home has fewer calories than a delicious al pastor super burrito or a dutch crunch sub.
I did Hello Fresh for a few weeks, and I appreciated the variety of meals but eventually canceled it because I want more flexibility/spontaneity in my cooking, which is something you lose when you subscribe to a meal plan. Many of the meals left me feeling like I did a damn good job, so I can see myself trying the service again in the future.
I found a very easy breakfast I can make in 15 minutes that I like. 2 slices toast with jam, 2 eggs in a tortilla with cheese and salsa, and 2 pieces of bacon. Before I had always skipped breakfast, leading me to that one big meal a day strategy, which always led to me overeating. My dog appreciates the now frequent bacon in her life (don't worry, she hardly gets any).
I found cooking to be much easier once I got an induction stovetop, because you can see the actual temperature you're cooking with. I always hated the guessing game of turning a gas stove knob, which prevented me from cooking regularly.
At the same time, I've started going to the gym every day, doing a simple linear progression PPL program. I also make a delicious shake every day, which I look forward to after every workout.
Over the last couple months I made these changes and they are now part of my daily routine.
Before, I couldn't really see myself randomly going to the gym or cooking at home. Now that's absolutely flipped- I can't really see myself not doing these things. It's early, but I feel I've done the work to change my habits for good.
And to bring it back to the topic at hand, with these weird tricks of changing my daily defaults my weight is trending down at a rate I'm happy with.
Oh, and I did count calories for like a month, but only to get a feel for how many calories are in the foods I tend to eat, and how my body weight fluctuates based on my intake. I don't any more, at least I don't write it down. It's all just sort of done on my head in a wishy washy way.
Drop all processed foods.
Cut out all carbs.
Pick one of these, use it until you plateau, then add another one until you're doing all 3.
Get a kitchen-scale, it makes tracking serving sizes/portions 20x easier & accurate
2. Quit your desk job and do manual labor for a couple months.
1. Hydrate a lot.
2. Keep only healthy/lower calorie foods in your home. The easiest way to not give in to temptation is just to remove the option.
When I was hungry I was taking an apple instead of eating biscuits.
- Recognize that media and the weight loss industry have absolutely no interest in helping you lose weight permanently. The incentives are wrong. They want a captive audience and repeat clientele. If there's any truth to what they say it's incidental. e.g. Blueberries are not a magically healthy food that will transform you into a greek god or goddess if you eat them. Some asshole blueberry farmers just commissioned a study to drum up sales and idiot health reporters picked it up on a slow news day. I'm not saying blueberries are bad for you. They're just fruit.
- Everyone has advice that has worked for them (or maybe hasn't really). That doesn't mean it will work for you.
- Maybe you stress eat or eat when you're bored. Maybe you eat way too much of the wrong foods. Everyone is different. The path to being healthier starts with observation. Keep a food and activity journal and crunch the numbers. An apple isn't so healthy that you can ignore the calories in it. Write things down and figure out where you're paying the biggest costs.
- Change your behaviour. This is what works. Read a book on cognitive behavioural therapy if you have no idea where to start. Your weight isn't a temporary condition that can be permanently fixed by temporary action, such as a short-term diet. It's a reflection of your diet and activity habits. Permanent changes to how you think, eat, and act are necessary to change your weight. Little changes can yield big results. e.g. Get in the habit of asking yourself, whenever you open the fridge door, "Am I hungry, or am I bored?" If you're bored, close the fridge door and go do something interesting.
- It may seem like there is a sea of advice and help out there that might make things easy. However, you really have to figure this shit out for yourself. It's going to take some mental effort, but it's worth it. You can do it if you try.
Additionally, weight is lost mainly as CO2 because of the metabolic processes that convert fat into energy and this process' byproducts ~(84% CO2 and 16% H2O). Additional O2 intake would not cause your body to burn more calories, and it's unlikely this strategy would result in passive weight loss.
Then all the loose advice you hear around will fall in place and make sense.
Physics is on your side on that quest!
The most effective way is to simply strictly (water) fast until you reach your desired weight. [You don't even have to be that strict and can drink some <10kcal drinks like coffee, tea etc. Watch out for electrolytes, vitamins, EAA and probiotics (gut biome)][0]
But most people in the modern world want "another" ("easier", "high-tech" etc.) way. Some magic exercise, pill, protocol, weird thing ... indulging in the myriad choices.
Why? Because habit-forming for adults is frikkin' hard. For some the best benefit-cost ratio is Bariatric surgery with all its nasty side-effects.
As with other addictions (loosely defined here) the optimal way (most of the time =/ effective way) is quite personal one has to account for the history, motivation, etc.
So for some an O2-tank might be the right trigger.
That's why - at the end of the spectrum - I'm even all for homeopathy if it facilitates a powerful placebo effect to change one's habit. It has by definition no side effects (except of course for nocebo).
- Get a full on 80 hr/week job
- Swim in cold water
- Do HIIT - e.g. run like a lion is chasing you for a minute every day
- Watch horror films
- Drink coffee
- Have sex
Your plan needs to be simple and reduce the mental capacity used up by thoughts about food.
Detailed calory tracking is counterproductive as the logging makes you think about food all the time.
Example low-mental capacity plan: Only eat one moderate meal per day (and one little other thing if you really get too hungry) for a set number of weeks, maybe 6. Don’t look at the scale more than once per week. Have one cheat day per week. Recover, then repeat.
Less difficult example: Fast for one or two days per week. Track calories with a method requiring low mental capacity all other days. (Noteworthy trivia: Obama fasted every Sunday.)
Use gamification like:
* AppleWatch with CaliCalo (you get exp for every calory saved) plus some simple fast way to enter calories into AppleHealth on your wrist
* Fitness games like RingFit Adventure, Fitness boxing (sports don’t help you loose weight substantially but do improve health)
- Semaglutide shots
- Have you heart broken
Ban sugar and salt as much as possible.
Bonus: replace coffee or tea by maté => awesome fat-burner.
o hair cut
o fasting
o amputation (It will messed up BMI-calculations)
o going to the toilet
o undressing
o going off-world and g < 9.98
o donate blood
o get the common flu (not recommended)
o drugs
o start smoking
o avoid stress
o make sure you get enough sleep
o exercise/activity
o muscles are heavy, if you start exercising, don't worry if you gain
o reduce intake of of calories, but must match you level of activity1. Question the premise you're starting with (because it's false).
2. Do more physical activity. Ramp up slowly, but ensure movement and cardio every single day.
3. Eat less, and eat healthier.
STOP EATING
that's really it, if you can't grasp this concept you will not lose weight no matter how many 'tricks' you attempt
That’s weird in this day and age apparently.
Find something to reduce energy intake that you can consistently and persistently follow. Eating a bit too much for a long time is easy, but eating too little is very difficult, because you will be hungry, so managing this is key. Establish a routing where you don't need to think too much about eating and you do not feel too hungry so easily. Plan ahead what to eat, don't delay the decision until it's time and you open the fridge. This way, you think less about this question. You need something you can do for months or even years, ideally without stress.
How to best manage this is individual, so experiment and observe yourself. Maybe there are times a day when you do not feel hungry that much: then don't eat at those times. Maybe volume of food makes you feel less hungry even if calory intake is low: then eat a lot of low calory food. Maybe you cannot do this every day, so structure your week, have some low and some normal calory days. Still control the normal days to avoid eating way too much -- it should be normal and fun to help you keep the routine.
Eat delicious and healthy and natural and fresh food -- no half-, or quarter, or reduced, or 0% sugar/fat stuff, or artificial sweetener, or whatever other crap -- this takes out all the fun of eating. And without the prospect of fun, you probably won't manage your routine for months. You should always be looking forward to your delicious food that you planned for the day.
Maybe sugar is not essential to you, so cut that down. But maybe you need chocolate, so just put it on your plan to keep it fun. Same for oil or fat. Food without fat may taste like sh*t to you. Plan with that, put some amount of delicious oil or natural fat in the delicious food you will eat. It only works if you plan ahead: only if it is on your plan you have control of the amount. You cannot evaluate this when the fridge is already open.
And excercise. Strictly speaking, a different thing, but also important.
Barring medical condition, it’s really as simple as eat less and move more … consistently.
Extra weird: adopt a tapeworm.
My suggestion:
Skip breakfast. Take a cup of black coffee.
A lunch consisting of a salat made of half a cucumber and a medium sizes tomato and either 1) a can of tuna (in brine, not oil) or 2) smoked salmon (100 gram), will make you quite full without adding more than 200 calories.
Afternoon snack: Lots of chewing gum is a great way to feel full.
Eat a normal dinner. One portion. Why dinner? Because that's usually the social meal and usually the hardest meal to skip. Look at what skinny people are eating if you wonder what a normal potion is. Don't eat two portions. Don't eat dessert.
If you want a drink after dinner, drink carbonated water (club soda) in a nice glass with ice cubes.
Do this, and you will lose around 1 kg per week, give or take. It may sound slow, but it's actually about as fast as it gets and after 2-3 weeks you will notice the results.
It will speed up the process a bit if you walk 1-2 hours a day and exercise 2-3 times a week, but it's really not required. Reducing calorie intake is key.
TLDR: eat slowly, your brain feels stomach is full with small portion.
If I could go back and change things, I would have gone with gastric sleeving which seems to be the most popular (effective with less side-effects). Unfortunately it was not available to me due to a prior lapband.
* Drink at least 2L of water a day
* Walk for 30 mins a day.
- forget about the idea of a "diet"; pretty much every popular "diet" doesn't result in sustained fat loss for most people when tested experimentally. if you want to lose body fat and keep it off, what you're trying to do is modify what you habitually eat "ad libitum" (eating freely) such that you end up completely satiated despite eating fewer calories than you do now. (yes, it just comes down to calories; some otherwise-sharp people will misinterpret a few studies to conclude that it doesn't, and those people are wrong.)
- there are lots of factors that go into satiety, but one of the most important ones is just having a lot of stuff in your stomach. so, the "caloric density" of what you eat, as in energy per mass, is good to know: if you want to eat less energy, then you want to eat more foods that have few calories per gram, and less foods that have a lot of calories per gram. this mostly reproduces the generic conventional wisdom on what you should be eating -- fruits, vegetables, unprocessed meats, cottage cheese and yogurt, and starches with high water content (potatoes, rice, pasta) are generally your best bets in the former category, while desserts and fast food and so on fall in the latter category -- but there are some surprises you might observe if you actually calculate that "calories per gram" ratio for the stuff you eat, e.g. nuts are ridiculously energy-dense and you should probably eat less of them if you'd benefit from losing body fat. (this doesn't apply to liquids, pretty much every liquid besides milk has negligible effect on satiety.) that said, you shouldn't plan to completely cut out whole categories of food, since that's much harder to adhere to than just eating more of the types of food that will make you full more efficiently.
- i believe that macronutrient-focused "diets" typically work for people to the extent that they cause you to accidentally eat a diet with lower caloric density. both carbohydrate intake and fat intake seem to be relatively uncorrelated with how much you eat ad libitum, but the average caloric density of what you eat is a much better predictor of ad libitum caloric intake. (protein is probably good for satiety though independent of caloric density.)
- rigorously logging your caloric intake for at least a few months is a good idea for multiple reasons, but i think the most important one is that it helps you develop an intuition for which foods are "worth it" in terms of satiety per calorie and result in you effortlessly hitting your calorie target, especially when fuzzier factors besides caloric density are at play (e.g. your own eating habits around specific foods). when i say "rigorously" i mean weighing absolutely everything you eat or drink unless you have nutrition facts for exactly how much of the thing you ate (i.e. single-serving packaged foods and food from restaurants that give nutrition facts), then looking up how many calories you ate based on how many grams of each thing you ate, and actually logging every single thing with calories that you put in your mouth, not just 80% of it. not everyone has the temperament to do this, and that's fine if you don't, but if you do then i'd highly recommend it. personally i just keep my food log in workflowy (you can use any note-taking app), but you could also look into "noom", which has a nice educational program in addition to the food and weight logging, or "macrofactor", which doesn't have the educational program but does do you the favor of actually telling you your macro intake and estimating your long-run TDEE for you.
- even if you're solely trying to lose body fat, regular exercise of some kind is a good idea because your satiety in relation to your energy balance becomes "dysregulated" when you're completely sedentary -- with at least a little exercise, you'll tend to match your caloric intake to your caloric expenditure, but with none at all, you'll be more prone to overeating. as a corollary, exercising a lot for fat loss is probably not a good use of time unless you intrinsically enjoy it, because you'll likely end up compensating for most of the energy you used by eating more.
In most cases, the reason you are overeating is rooted in something else. Not fixing that would not really give you a proper solution - and you need to have a critical eye to analyse where it is coming from.
Some potential examples are;
* You are stressed - the way you deal with it is by eating. (You could explore ways of reducing stress and/or different coping strategies such as daily nature walks etc.)
* For whatever reason, you don't sleep early. Research shows that when you don't sleep, you are more likely to eat and eat bad (e.g. McDonald's, KFC etc.).
In my case this was because I was doing what's called "reverse bedtime procrastination" (I hope I remember it correctly). Essentially "I don't want tomorrow to come, I haven't spent time for myself/my project etc. I will stay up a bit more."
* You have been conditioned to "clean up your plate" to the point that you eat even when you are full. (Usually from childhood)
Apart from these;
* Remember to drink water (if hungry, just drink a glass of water and then if you are still hungry, eat.) * Prefer "unprocessed over processed" and "protein over carbs". You don't need to avoid everything - just make sure to pick one over the other when you can. (e.g. instead of bread with Nutella as your lunch, eat bread with an egg.) * Do NOT starve yourself. If you feel hungry, eat! Otherwise you will end up bingeing. Just keep your portion size "intentional". * In order to keep your portion size intentional - prepare your food on kitchen, put it on your plate in terms of whatever is a "good size" and then leave the kitchen, eat in another room. Having food on the table where you eat as much as you want usually leads to overeating - mainly because at some point you switch to "eating for pleasure" and it takes a while to notice that. * While this won't make you lose weight by much - please walk for 20 minutes a day. Make sure to leave your house for this. Don't use your phone, don't listen to a podcast or anything just go out, and walk for 20 minutes. It will be good for your mind and your weight (it is quite a short period of time but it is your _disconnecting_ time.). * Finally - sleep, sleep, sleep! I am saying it twice but it is extremely important that you get your proper amount of sleep. There is always a next day, and you need rest. A well rested mind & body makes for better decision making & will-power as well.
I hope it helps. Remember - weight loss is not a goal, a balanced life is. You need to find a sustainable lifestyle that is healthy for you, and then your weight will fall into place.
Everyone on this forum should be familiar with The Hacker's Diet[1], a free book from the founder of AutoCAD with a very engineering orientation. I have been recording data into my free account at The Hacker's Diet Online[2] for four years, and I find the exponential smoothing very useful to turn daily weight measurements into the underlying weights. If you weight yourself every day, you can notice trends in a few days and make corrections, instead of catching a trend over a few weeks. Just be aware that something like 8.3lbs of "stuff" (food, water, feces) flow through your body every day, and there are major variations day by day. Don't panic just because your daily weight is up one day. And after awhile, if you are at least writing down what you eat (just the name, not weights) everyday, you will pretty easily predict your weight the next day because that list is rather longer than a normal day, or you had a big pile of french fries for lunch one day.
A few tips I use:
Eat quantized food if possible. Instead of sitting down with a bag of chips or a box of cookies, eat food that is always in the same size so you have to make the mental decision to eat more than one. Babybel cheeses, Snyder's 60ct box of 100 calorie pretzel packs, etc. work for me.
Weigh in every morning, naked, empty bladder (so the minimum possible for the day), and write that number down BY HAND. Do not use some automated app that saves you that mindfulness period between reading the number and writing it down. You will see a thousand messages today suggesting you eat. You must take some time everyday to think about what you weigh, and what you are going to put in your mouth. The food companies are counting on you not putting any attention on it. You must put regular attention on it, or you will gain weight.
Sometimes we have a minor craving for something sweet, but popping a cookie whenever that happens can blow the whole day. I keep jars of jalapeno relish and when I have an urge for something sweet, I eat a small spoonful of the spicy relish. I get the urge for something sweet in my mouth satisfied, but it is spicy enough that I'm not eating a lot of it. Walmart's Bread & Butter Pickles do the same for me: a few chips in the sweet/tangy juice and the craving is satisfied, and only $1.50 for a big 500 calorie jar.
Be very careful with fasting. It is a great technique if you manage to retain muscle tissue. If you fast without exercising, 25% of the weight loss is lean mass, which is an utter disaster for your health, especially as you age. Bone broth is high protein and may be a nice supplement while fasting. The more active muscle on your body, the more insulin sensitive you are and that mitigates the crashes from eating carbs.
Avoid potato chips like the plague. Since chips are dehydrated, you can eat an enormous number of calories at one sitting and not even feel full.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shangri-La_Diet
I spent my 20s being unfit and overweight (periodically pushing into obese). In my late 20s I started playing soccer (two seasons a year), but did not train or exercise beyond the games. At the beginning of the season I'd be gassed in 5 minutes, by the end I might have been able to stay in for an entire half. So I established a fitness goal (run a 5km in < 30 minutes, consistently) in order to be fit enough to participate in soccer. I did not track my weight during this time, I just tracked my fitness level (basically running performance + heart rate measured ~5 times a day: on waking, before run, after run, about five minutes after the run, before bed). I happened to lose weight, because you almost can't help it when you go from being sedentary to running 3-5 times a week (which started as walking, not as running).
I didn't, initially, make any dietary changes other than cutting out sodas (which were a daily habit at that point), switched to coffee (about two espressos a day in the office break room, we made a coffee club) for my caffeine source. As I got into running (versus the initial walking) I started adding more fruit and nuts as snacks, because I was getting hungrier and found myself craving them (versus a candy bar, like might have been my snake previously), they were not a deliberate choice (that is, I didn't say today I switch to fruits and nuts, I just started craving them, and I didn't deliberately drop candy bars, I just stopped wanting them). Again, the goal was not weight loss, I wasn't measuring my weight at all and only learned my weight at my annual (or 6-month, I had very high cholesterol at that point) physicals.
I think the above is important, I had, in my 20s, made a few efforts at weight loss where weight loss was the goal. The problem was that once I hit it, I lost track of what I'd done to achieve it and the weight would come back. By having some longterm objective (being "fit", which for me meant being able to play 70 minutes of soccer without needing more than the half-time break) I was able to make sustainable habits. I have had my weight go up a couple times, but it's been because of things like injuries (car accidents, in my case) that took me out of my training routine. When I reestablish some fitness goals, I find that the habits that encourage weight loss (or maintaining a healthy weight) come right back with them.
Another aspect of this is that I wasn't training for a thing or event. I did that, actually, with a half-marathon. But it was because I was already getting fast and improved my endurance so I thought, "Why not try for this?" and I did. But as soon as it was done my running routine went back down to 5km 3-4 times a week with an occasional 7-10km run versus the 3-4x 7-10km runs a week. Why? Because that was enough for my overall goal (being fit for soccer), above that was unnecessary and I found it hard to maintain a higher training level when I didn't have a motivation for it. Training for an event is like dieting to hit a weight target, once it's hit it is harder to maintain the training regimen or the diet. So create longer term goals that encourage sustainable habits.
Personally, I am searching for a different way to experience hunger.
So far I have learned a few things:
1. I experience different kinds of hunger - low blood sugar leads to cravings (and eating sugar can cause a blood sugar crash, which will in turn cause cravings); social hunger means I feel hungry around lunchtime; empty stomach hunger can feel like a stomach ache; post workout hunger means I need to feed my body to continue building capacity; starvation hunger leads to reduced mental and physical capacity and exhaustion in the short term, and leads to physical deterioration in the long term.
2. Hunger will always speak up, but it doesn't get the only vote
3. Cravings are managed by planning.
4. Learn to notice when you eat. I did an experiment with jelly beans. I put 3 jelly beans on my desk in front of me while I was working. They disappeared and I did not remember eating them. I did it again and concentrated on noticing when I actually ate them. It was very difficult. Only put as much food in arm's reach as you plan on eating.
5. My goal for exercise is health, not weight loss. When I exercised for weight loss I became despondent because I always gain weight at the start of an exercise program. I started walking 2 miles a day at lunch and gained 15 pounds over the course of a month.
6. Weight is only one number. Track your waist size, or your ability to lift weights, or your lap times, or just about anything ALONG WITH your weight.
7. Learn what different foods do to you. This can be very confusing and time consuming, but it will benefit you for the rest of your life.
8. Protein and fiber are good. Fat can be good. Carbs in whole fruits and vegetables are good. Processed carbs are the literal devil.
9. We eat like kings. Imagine a king 200 years ago. Only a few of them could have ice cream and all the rich foods we eat now. I eat 'celebration' foods from different cultures regularly - tamales, barbecue, cake, etc. The American assumption of "you can have it all, and as much as you want" is not good when it comes to diet.
10. Find a physical activity you enjoy. Physical activity is a triangle - weight lifting, general movement (aka "cardio"), and limberness/freedom of movement (often represented by stretching). Each one of these helps the others. If you only lift weights, you may neglect your ability to enjoy a long hike for instance. Gains ain't shit if you can't have fun.
11. I'm almost certainly wrong about a lot of important details, your experience WILL vary. Don't follow someone else's plan uncritically. There are many good places to start, but realize you may need to update the plan after your initial success.
The current gold standard for weight loss is a combination of medication (for appetite suppression) and following the advice of a registered dietician (for implementing the lifestyle changes that are required for maintenance). If you're in the US, you can search your insurance company's website for a list of RDs in your area that take your insurance.
The medication you want is semaglutide (brand name Wegovy), which was FDA-approved in June of 2021 for weight loss (it was previously approved for treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus, under the brand name Ozempic; Wegovy is just a dose increase from 1.0mg to 2.4mg). Stephan Guyenet has a good article on the subject [1], which links directly to the FDA studies [2][3] that consistently find a previously-unheard-of 15-18% weight loss over 68 weeks.
You'd be taking this as a once-weekly subcutaneous autoinjection, and its function would roughly be described as appetite suppression (although hunger/satiety is a very complex mechanism, and it actually does a lot more than that). Your primary care doctor could prescribe this to you, assuming you can get prior authorization for it from your insurance (for me, they asked for my current weight and what I've tried previously, which was a lot). My doctor also recommended that I test my blood sugar regularly, since this can result in you not eating enough at first, which can cause issues.
The hard part with this approach initially would be getting a hold of the first 3 dose packs, since Novo Nordisk underestimated demand and was impacted by supply chain issues. I called around at every pharmacy in my local area, and found that my local Costco (supplied by McKesson) was the best at getting it in stock. NN focused their initial efforts on building up manufacturing capacity of the final two doses, so once you get up to 1.7mg you should be in the clear on this problem.
The second hard part (besides insurance shenanigans) is tapering off. That's where you start heavily relying on the habits your dietician helped you set, the lifestyle changes you've made, and good old-fashioned willpower. Ultimately, though, the consensus on most obesity experts is that since obesity is a chronic condition, most people who want to maintain the weight loss will need to stay on this drug indefinitely. Personally, I'm keeping an eye on the semaglutide subreddit [4] to see how this develops.
Exercise has a wide variety of health benefits, including assisting with weight loss, but many overweight and obese people find that it's hard to stick with (probably because carrying around the equivalent of a 30 kg. weighted vest means most of the movements you'd be doing require much more energy), and ultimately most of your weight loss is going to come from dietary changes. Also, losing weight requires you to eat less, which in the short term means you have less energy to exercise and it's much harder in general, and focusing on the weight loss will make it easier to exercise in the long term (because you're ditching the weighted vest). So I'd recommend starting with the weight loss first, and then you can work on setting habits around exercise as you continue to lose weight.
I'd also recommend that you work with a licensed psychologist who specializes in obesity to examine the factors that led you to develop the obesity in the first place, and work on addressing those concurrently. For me, this turned out to be chronic stress caused by multiple undiagnosed mental health issues, and getting treatment for those (which did include making other lifestyle changes) helped immensely. If you're in the US, Psychology Today's Find A Therapist tool [5] is good for finding someone.
I started at 132kg five months ago, and now I'm down to 111kg with 34kg more to go, and this is how I did it so far. It's a lot of balls to juggle at first, but setting those initial habits around weight loss helped me set more habits, which makes this easier.
One last thing I want to address: increasing the amount of oxygen in your environment may help give you some more energy (taking it from a canister very likely won't in practice, since those canisters are quite heavy and any affects would only last for as long as your increase in O2 saturation does, which would be about 1-2 minutes after you disconnect from it to do any sort of physical activity), but for many people it's not practical to redo their home/work's HVAC to add a concentrated O2 line. However, going outside regularly (where the CO2 buildup is very likely much lower than it is in indoor environments), as well as finding a good place to work outside when the weather permits (if you work from home), can definitely increase how energetic you feel and provide a wide variety of other health benefits.
So, to summarize: * Start by talking to your primary care, as well as a registered dietician * Try Wegovy if you can, it's pretty great * Talk to a psychologist who specializes in obesity * Carrying around an O2 canister probably won't help, but going outside probably will
Best of luck!
[1] https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-future-of-weight-lo... [2] https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2032183 [3] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2777886 [4] https://old.reddit.com/r/semaglutide [5] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists
Chicken. Fish. Rice.
Make that the core of your diet. If you're a vegan or vegetarian this obviously won't work for you. White rice is perfectly fine (just as it is in healthy long-living Japan), with this diet it simply won't matter whether you eat white or brown rice.
Ideally throw in some stray vegetables that you like (cold broccoli, carrots, cauliflower happen to be my favorites). The vegetables are sides or snacks, you never need to consume actual salads-as-meal, it's purely optional.
Stop consuming any beverages with high-fructose corn syrup in it, including all sodas (if in the US). Ideally stop drinking sugar in general, avoid sugar sweetened beverages. Drinking lots of sugar is typically one of the most common and dumbest things overweight people do.
Never consume high-calorie breakfasts, switch instead to lower calorie breakfasts (if any). I prefer yogurt, turkey bacon, or egg & cheese sandwiches. There are a lot of ways to go with a low calorie breakfast though.
No garbage snacks during the day. The little high-calorie snack fillers are weight monsters and people often don't notice them, they don't count them into their dietary problems when they're trying to figure out what has gone wrong.
Once per week you can eat anything you like. You can eat a bag of doritos. You can eat an entire pizza. Chocolate. A tub of ice cream. Consume a soda. Fast-food / drive-thru. Whatever you like. The once per week garbage day is meant to be slightly over-done (so you don't want those things for a while), it's meant to get rid of cravings and act as an outlet to consume unhealthy things. Unless you're a savage about it, you won't be able to consume enough calories in that one bad day to meaningfully wreck your progress from the other six days.
No weight lifting or working out required at all. Although I'd suggest if you don't like working out, to just go on long walks every day for the general health benefit.
Count your daily calorie intake before you begin changing your diet (for two weeks or so). Understand your body and its metabolism. How many calories do you need to consume each day to gain / lose / hold steady on weight? Then as you begin to change your diet, continue to count daily calorie intake, this is part of the experimentation process for yourself.
~1400 to ~1800 calories per day is the consistent target (depending on your height; if you're much shorter or taller than 180-190cm, adjust accordingly), and it's easily reached. You can vary that based on what weight you prefer, how strict you want to be.
If you're consequentially overweight (let's say you weigh 210lbs / 95kg and would like to weigh 170lbs / 77kg), the weight will melt off over time quite trivially. Your body won't have a choice. You won't have to kill yourself in the gym every day, you don't need to do anything special at all.
What you'll find is that there are likely just a few killers in your diet, particularly bad villains (eg soda, ice cream, pasta) that are causing most of the problem. Usually if you eliminate just a few things from your diet, you'll see a big change. The calorie counting is also meant to reveal the primary villains in your diet, they'll typically jump out from the paper after a few weeks of tracking what you're consuming.
Eventually, one day I decided that I really must do it, and after about 10 months I lost 36 kg (78 pounds), reaching a normal BMI. That was 15 years ago. Now I still easily gain weight, the next day after a culinary orgy I may gain 1 kilogram, which will need a week of eating less to lose the extra weight and reach again the target weight.
In my opinion, the main secret of losing weight and the one which determined the success of my last attempt, in contrast with all earlier failures, is the permanent use of accurate weighing instruments, one digital weighing scale for your body and one digital weighing scale for your food.
You must measure your body weight once per day, every day, and at the same time and in the same sequence in relationship with eating, drinking or relieving yourself, because all such activities will change your weight by several hundred grams, i.e. by much more than your expected weight loss per day, which should be around 100 to 150 grams.
You must also measure all the food you eat either by weight or by volume (e.g. a certain number of spoons). Eating anything in random quantities, or until you are satiated, guarantees that you will fail to lose weight or you will regain it immediately.
Once you have begun to eat predetermined quantities of food everyday, losing weight is trivial. You look at your weight this day, and if it is not less than in the previous day by about 100 to 150 grams (one quarter to one third of a pound), then you must diminish the planned quantity of food. You must cut calories, i.e. carbs and fat. You must not reduce proteins and vegetables.
The hard part is to form the habit to eat according to a plan, i.e. no spontaneous snacks or sweet beverages at random times. It is likely that in order to reduce enough the number of unwanted calories, you need to eat no more than twice per day.
Otherwise the quantity of food eaten at one time will be too small to satiate you. It is much easier to resist the idea of starting to eat, than to stop eating after you have started. So fewer larger meals are better than more small meals.
Besides the 2 meals, you should not eat anything, but you should drink only beverages with neither sugar nor artificial sweeteners (nor milk or other fatty drink).
The beverages with calories are not only more difficult to count in your eating plan, but they would also increase your hungriness, because they provide some of the nutrients that your body desires, but not enough of them.
After the first difficulty, of making an eating plan and sticking to it, the second difficulty is coping with the hunger. That cannot be avoided, but it can be minimized when eating fewer larger meals and nothing between them, to stimulate the hunger. The hunger sensation is usually periodic, i.e. when it is not satisfied it disappears when you are busy with something else, even if it may reappear some time later.
Usually after a few weeks of continuous slow weight loss it should become easier to cope with the hunger.
Even after you reach the target weight, you must persist in eating preplanned food quantities and not until satiety, otherwise regaining weight is very likely.
I would do some reading about that before trying it.
The "weird tip" I have is this: Do many different diets, sequentially.
Most of us who have been significantly overweight and spent time dieting will have noticed that in the first weeks or months of a new diet (keto, low calorie, paleo, vegetarian, unprocessed-food-only, or whatever), it works well, it's easy or not-too-hard to stick with, you feel great, and the numbers go generally down.
Eventually, the numbers aren't going down noticeably, you no longer notice feeling great compared to last week or last month, and even though you're eating exactly the same thing as you were a month ago, now it's unappetizing and always leaves you wanting more. You're not looking forward to the next meal, and the cravings are enormous.
Congratulations! If you have iron will, you can just stay in this mode, live an ascetic life, and your weight troubles are over.
Many of us do not have iron will, it turns out.
Portions we have to measure start increasing a bit. We convince ourselves that we'll have a few more calories right now but a few less tomorrow. If we miss some calories due to circumstance on day N, we feel entitled to "reward" ourselves with at least most of those calories on day N+1, when the surplus will certainly be stored.
But, didn't we start out by saying we know how to lose weight for a few weeks or months? That happens when starting a new diet, right? Sure, eventually the downward trend flattens, we get less strict or stop constant reminders not to snack and to carefully measure each portion of everything, and maybe even go "off" the diet for a while. For a lot of people, this is when all the lost weight plus a few units comes back.
What if we found a way to keep our diet interesting without increasing caloric intake, without eating a lot of diet-specific hacks ("I'll just replace all the sugar with xylitol!") and without spending more and more time researching and preparing slightly different recipes? What if we could do this without portions slowly sliding up, and without massive cravings?
So, that's the idea: Try (e.g.) low carb. Dive in, read all the popsci that cherrypicks studies, etc. Watch the scale numbers decrease. At the first hint of boredom ("I only have broccoli, eggs, and steak in my fridge. Ugh!"), figure out another diet to do! Dive into Weight Watchers! Read supportive articles about how WW is all you need, and load up your fridge with WW meals. After a few months, when you are tired of the thought of eating yet another one of those WW meals (but before you've started adding 5 points every other day), figure out another diet to do!
Will this work long-term? I don't know yet, and even if I lose 100 kg on this diet, it'll still be a single data point, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Recommend following these steps in order. The biggest issue people face with weight loss is education. While this sounds simple, the amount of misinformation out there is extreme.
1.) Watch “that sugar film” << Available on prime. Think hard about what you learned. This is the truth about weight gain and loss. There are other documentaries like it, but I personally like this one.
2.) Read “eating clean” and follow the recommendations OR hire a good nutritionist, preferably one that bodybuilders use. Bodybuilders have mastered weight loss and a nutritionist targeting bodybuilders is probably competent.
3.) Exercise daily using a combination of resistance training and cardio. Start with reasonable intensity level. Hire a personal trainer or train with an experienced friend if you have not done resistance training before. Hire a personal trainer who trains bodybuilders using conventional methods. You don’t need to train like a bodybuilder, but these personal trainers are actual experts and not frauds. This advice applies to both men and women. They can help you get the most out of exercise without getting hurt.
4.) Don’t consume alcohol or consume very little as rarely as possible. Alcohol consumption can interrupt sleep and stunt human growth hormone, which slows down weight loss. Impact can last for several days and also causes a loss of motivation for some individuals.
5.) Drink at least a gallon of water per day.
6.) Stop eating 3 hours prior to bedtime to sleep better and increase HGH production.
7.) Eat small meals more frequently, like 5-6 times per day. I would recommend logging all food intake along with calories consumed / time of day each meal was consumed.
You might experience withdrawal like symptoms for at least a few days if you have been consuming enough high glycemic index foods on the daily. After withdrawal ends you can loose weight while never being hungry. Hunger caused by high glycemic index / sugar crash is a vicious cycle. If you want to know more, watch “that sugar film”.
Also, keep in mind that diets, which is IMO anything not like “eating clean” are just scams that tend to cause metabolic syndrome. Your body ends up consuming muscle to get the protein it needs on many of them. This lowers your BMR. To fix years of damage done from scam diets, resistance training is the solution.
This is the honest truth in a world full of misinformation. I hope this helps make the world a slightly better place!
There are tons of people who call the metabolic state of being in nutritional ketosis a "fad", but those people are wrong, or don't understand what a "keto" diet is.
A lot of times these people will want you to adhere to some complex, confusing, and ultimately prone to failure diet.
Carbs are very nutritionally dense. If you remove them from your diet you will probably lose weight.
Is it really that easy? Yes.
The eat less, move more advice is like your typical Microsoft help manual. It's technically correct, but of little use whatsoever.
There's a huge amount of nuance going on. There's psychological pressures, hormonal pressures, food availability pressures and lots of other issues that I don't really want to list out as the ELMM zealots will just start arguing minutiae with a pronounced lack of compassion. It's too tiring and tiresome.
Aside from that, prayer and fasting. With God all things are possible!
"Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fullness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy."
- Ezekiel 16:49
Derek can cheer you on a little:
Other animals do it out of real scarcity during various times. We have evolved for scarcity, so we store fat for when food is not available. (Un)fortunately, there has been no food scarcity most people in developed nations for decades on end, even centuries... hence the obesity problem.
The lack of food scarcity for longer times has happened before in various cultures in various parts of the world. Therefore, all of them had introduced ritualistic fasting into their culture. The current western culture (which is also prevalent in most of the westernized world) is based on selling, so they have only ever sold eating something else to lose weight... which is not the real solution. Lately, selling apps, books and other content at scale became profitable so we have seen some rise in fasting but it is still drowned out by other highly profitable non solutions... like pointless physical labor (a.k.a. "working out" or "exercise") or complicated and mostly pointless dietary restrictions (a.k.a. "diets").
I can point to some resources to get you started with fasting:
- Book: Complete Guide To Fasting by Jason Fung
- YouTube Channel: The Fasting Fatman: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheFastingFatman
- YouTube Channel: Snake Diet: https://www.youtube.com/c/SnakeDiet
- Forum: Reddit's r/fasting: https://www.reddit.com/r/fasting/wiki/index
1. Develop a "I'm better than you" attitude towards overweight people. In the woke age of "no body shaming ever", a lot of external motivation (i.e. fat jokes) has gone away. But for me, it was exactly those fat jokes or remarks about being chubby that finally put me over the edge of doing something about my weight. Let's face it, nobody actually thinks that being overweight is OK. It's merely tolerated, but thin people judge you for it. I know, because I was judged when I was at 85kg and I am judging overweight people now as I'm not one of them anymore. You're simply lesser than me, no matter how much you make, what car you drive, or how beautiful your girlfriend may be. Because deep down I know you're still not happy until you are thin, which for some reason is a higher mental hurdle for you than getting and keeping a high-6-figure job. You're weak.
2. In the same vein as 1. but more specifically, I was always interested in street wear, and especially Japanese street wear brands. But the thing is, until you're rail thin (like a 20-something Japanese skater dude, for instance), those clothes will look bad and try-hard on you. Nowadays I don't wear street wear anymore but I still want to be able to tuck a dress shirt without showing "the bulge". Making clothes look good on myself was another huge motivating factor to lose weight.
How exactly you limit your calorie intake while starting to burn off more, i.e. the specific diet is the uninteresting part. You first need the mental framework that allows you to change your habits, and will keep you adamant in the hard times of resisting that will definitely come. You're already starting to realize that, using the nickname "fatmoron" which hints at a healthy self-hatred caused by your current weight. Keep on in that spirit and soon you'll be the one who judges, not the one who's being judged.
Every piece of advice will go into exceedingly detailed depth on how to achieve one or more one of those factors. And it is worth listening to those details - but don't lose sight of the basics. Way too many people get caught up in their rituals of weight loss and forget to stay simple.
If you do all this, you are guaranteed to lose not just weight but also any leftover fun in life
This leads to two approaches to weight loss that are non-obvious: 1. Cognitive behavioral therapy. Often food is used as a coping mechanism to manage stress or negative emotions. It’s very possible to improve these coping mechanisms. Many of the guys we work with see other life improvements when doing CBT. 2. Medication, particularly the new wave of GLP-1 therapy including Wegovy. Once you’ve been at a heavier weight for a long period of time your body’s hormonal systems resists change, making it hard to have significant weight loss.
We’re a Y Combinator backed company which combines these two approaches specifically targeted towards men.
Here’s our website if you want to learn more https://www.joinfella.com/ or shoot me an email at Luke.harries@joinfella.com