What's your secret diet tip you can share?

Integrate a substantial calisthenic exercise into your daily routine.

Something like a hundred pushups and a dozen pull-ups. Increase the count as you get lighter and stronger so you're always within 10-20% of the maximum you could do in a set.

Make it a non-negotiable part of your day akin to brushing your teeth and showering.

This way when you fuck up your diet/lifestyle, you have a very strong negative feedback signal when you suddenly can only do 75% of the e.g. pushups you did last week.

When you work on this for years and get your sets up in a range that feels hard-earned, it becomes quite upsetting to see the numbers regress.

For me this is all it takes to correct any emerging bad habits that start putting on pounds like drinking socially too much or eating cookies at the cafe.

It's easy to ignore a slowly increasing number on a scale, assuming you even step on one. Not so easy to ignore yourself sucking at this thing you've been getting awesome at for years. Not for me anyways.

This isn't much of a secret, but this has helped me immensely.

I am a egg-etarian and have a reasonably healthy diet (no sodas, simple carbs etc). But I wasn't feeling sleek and light on my feet. The following changes did it for me ... I lost 6 kg in three months and my knees thank me every day.

1. Two cooked meals a day. Late breakfast (9:30-10), early dinner (6:00). If I call it "intermittent fasting", I feel hungry, so I stick to calling it "two meals a day". :) Avoid simple carbs and sugars, focus on being properly sated.

2. Satiety is important, and I find that an increase in protein has helped me resist the lure of carbs/snacks. I have eggs, tofu scramble (with tomatoes, onions, scallions etc) and sprouts of all kinds in industrial quantities.

3. If hungry in the afternoon, a whey/banana/nuts/berries/flax seeds smoothie.

4. I chop and blanch and freeze spinach and liberally add it to cooked meals or as a side. The satiety to effort ratio must be high, so I don't care to make salads any more. They are just too much work and I feel hungry shortly after the last mouthful.

5. Shortly after every meal, move a bit for about 10 min, say, or climb 5 floors of stairs.

Get diet, sleep, and exercise right. If any of these three are off, energy is lower. I wish I could oversell this point a little more, there has been plenty of times over the years I've done something small on days - missed an hours sleep, ate too much, sit around to long without moving -- and my energy level and performance was affected without me realizing it.

I've found the easiest and usually cheapest way to control diet is to cook at home.

Look into the Mediterranean diet, it has consistently come up when researching health. Of course the mere word diet implies temporary, but the right way of eating should perhaps be permanent.

Get a blood test done and have it analysed to determine if anything is off.

Don't get dehydrated and get kidney stones. Drink enough water throughout the day. Sometimes I carry a stainless steel container with me throughout the day so I'm getting enough. Be careful about drinking something else for example two glasses of tea and getting sweaty.

Perhaps find and add some health books to your reading list. One interesting, seemingly irrefutable argument put forth in "The China Study" though the book controversial, was no single ingredient food will give more health as much as focusing on the overall diet for most people. Two good books are "How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease" and "On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen" are two good ones.

I just read this review of The Hungry Brain. It sounds interesting and matches some anecdotal experience I’ve had.

Basically: eat boring food. I live in the USA but I grew up in Australia. The USA is big on highly rewarding food. Australia is too, but not to the level the USA is.

Whenever I go back to Australia, I will always lose 5-10 pounds without changing anything about my diet. It’s just less rewarding to our cave man brain.

When I come back to the USA, the weight comes back just as quick as it comes off.

Some people are good at consistent moderation. I am not, but I am good at binary behaviors, even when they require a lot of discipline. Intermittent fasting works very well for people built this way since you are on or off.

I normally maintain a healthy weight if I only eat from 12-8. If I really don't pay attention and graze that entire window, I can still creep up doing this. If I hit 175lbs, my rule is I cut my eating window from 1-7 until I reach 165 which happens in less than a month on the 6 hour window.

I've kept this up for 5-6 years. You get over the hunger pangs within a few weeks and then it just becomes normal. I've only had to cut my window down to six hours I think three times since I started the routine.

PS: I have had diagnosed ADHD since middle school. I wonder if there is any correlation between ADHD and intermittent fasting as a successful diet strategy. I think there is something similar between struggling with focus and a proclivity for absent minded snacking. It makes it so much easier to have a binary rule that I can follow that tells me when this is or isn't allowed.

Learn the difference between eating until you are full, and eating until you are no longer hungry.

Stop eating when you are no longer hungry. I think that's a lot of it.

There are a lot of ways to make that work, I'm not sure which are best. For me avoiding sugar helped when it was difficult, but now that I've got things under good control my diet matters far less than the fact that I eat to handle hunger rather than as a way to feel full.

But I mean, also roast brussel sprouts, lentils, and nuts are delicious. These are just facts.

Drinking a lot of water or green tea (1.5l day) will help keep you satiated to some extent, and as a side benefit prevents some types of recurring kidney stones. I doubt it has any direct weightloss impact although I wonder how the body can maintain isotonic state without energy cost driving osmotic pressure differentials. It must be a small energy cost, compared to e.g. cognition which is huge. So, think, while you drink (water)

Green Tea has flavenoids. They sound yummy.

I also treat myself to two squares of expensive chocolate a night. Eat slowly. Really slowly. Let the chocolate goodness roll around and coat your mouth like a kid in a Roald Dahl book. If it helps, think about Gene fighting Johnny for who did Wonka better. In a tank of chocolate.

Over fifty, more protein and less carbs. Potato and pasta are a "sometimes" treat.

Life's too short to eat bad food. If budget forces it, eat the best bad food you can: MFK Fisher's "keep the Wolf from your door" would be good guidance. Jack Monroe in the guardian.co.uk brought Fisher up to date.

My budget doesn't force it, so I eat top quality cuts, but small portions.

Good olive oil is a delight but so is wagyu fat. Have both.

Calcium in tinned fish. And cheese. Anchovies and Sardines and Mackerel are full of umami. And parmesan. (Full of Umami. Not fish. Fish milk cheese? Yuk.)

Nuts have zinc. Too easy to have a lot. Mushrooms left in sunshine grow a bit of vitamin D. Bananas have inulin which is resistant starch which feeds the lower bowel. As does vinegar and fermented veg like kimchi and kraut. Both make meat taste yummy so forget the hippy bucha drink and have a bratwurst or grilled Korean style with pickle.

Cold roast potato and cold pasta is resistant starch too. Some leftovers are good for you!

You can safely eat more eggs a day than you can stand.

Read up on homeostasis and cholesterol before buying into good and bad fat theories.

Consume less energy than you burn.

Works for me for decades, my BMI is around 20.0. If it starts going up I just limit the intake (obviously I use for reference my weight in kg from my scale, instead calculating BMI each time).

Other than that I am eating whatever I want/like.

I am always amazed by people expecting some miracle diet to lose weight instead just either eat less or burn more or both, but they think they can cheat simple physics.

I found that I would gain weight much faster whenever I ate anything sweet after a meal. Since then, I’ve cut out all sugars and liquid calories from my diet. Helped me maintain the same weight despite not being able to workout for a year due to a shoulder injury.

Also, I found that regularly drinking 2tsp of turmeric dissolved in warm water at night helps reduce inflammation.

Don't eat after 8pm till 8am. Eat till your stomach is satisfied, not your tongue. To prevent cravings, don't restrict yourself any food, but eat everything in moderation.

Stop drinking alcohol. I used non alcoholic beers as a way to phase out alcohol from my life (mostly for diet and exercise reasons). Now i generally don't drink either.

Also, park in terrible locations, furthest parks in a lot, a block or two away from your destination so you have to walk more. Just inconvenience yourself into walking more. You'll also save a bit of money in the process.

As best you can to phase out any full sugar soft drink for soda water or the light equivalent. I've been trying this for a few years and I like the difference, though I'm not too rigorous. I do find in winter the sweet of a zero sugar soft drink to be a good morale boost.

Less is more, I realized that humanity definitely evolved from when food was scarce and population was confined to your village.

But everything bad now is because of industrialization. Cows are given hormones to constantly produce milk (which end up in the end product), vegetables are given pesticides so yield is much higher, fish are given antibiotics so yield is much higher.

Pretty much everything bad is done due to the huge demand of a massive population. The end game for healthy living is really just farming your own produce.

Calories in, calories out; but don't cut on the pleasure of eating. Treat yourself to some fancy tastes.

Eggs in quiche form. Not very high calories, high volume so you feel filled. To be eaten with salad. You get a bit of carbs with the crust. A bit of lipids; and a lot of proteins. Your body won't feel cheated out of the building blocks it needs.

Also some emotional work: feeling hungry 30mn before a meal is perfectly normal.

And of course for our US of A audience: no carbonated beverage ever. Cut that shit out.

Try to switch to lower sugar, higher fat/protein products with as few ingredients as possible. Fat is generally good for you and helps satisfy and keep hunger controlled. Protein is similar in this regard and the two together are really good for dealing with hunger. Try to avoid simple carbs since they break down into sugar immediately; if you must, have them with a fat and protein to help reduce the glycemic load. For example, if you want a bagel, use a good amount of butter and/or cream cheese to help ease the escalation of your blood sugar.

Stay on the outside/perimeter inside of the center aisles in grocery stores. That's where the money really is for them and its mostly junk. Also, checkout the organic aisle(s) as most people think its too expensive and eschew all the deals that are happening with the actually decent food that otherwise goes bad or takes up needed space like any other food products.

Buy lemon/lime juice or pure cranberry juice and use it to make flavored water to help distract you from sugary drinks. Get a SodaStream to make soda water if you like and experiment with various pure juices to flavor the soda. Try to avoid fruit juice since its basically pure sugar without any of the fibre or need to digest that comes with actual fruit. If you must, go for ones that are 50% less sugar and do not use any sweetener (just the constituent fruit juices themselves) like Oasis Hydrafruit or whatever but still try to move away from juice.

Hemp seeds are insanely nutritious, use them wherever you can. Particularly salads, parfaits, shakes/smoothies, etc. They have it all: healthy fats, fibre, minerals and vitamins, etc. Great for satiety and pleasent subtle flavor.

>What is [a] secret you can share ?

One especially powerful secret is "decide in advance".

You will have some eating plan in place... then there will come a day when the food available does not match your eating plans, or some social/cultural event, or when you simply have a bad day and "fall off" your eating plan.

The secret is to anticipate/expect these things to happen. Decide now, when you can be dispassionate, where you can compromise, for how much, and how you will get back on track afterward.

Will you eat cake at the birthday? How much? You fall off the plan. How will you coach yourself back onto it? etc.

Waiting until the heat of the moment is how a small misstep (I planned to have one small handful of [whatever], and I just realized I've eaten half the bag) turns into a disaster (screw it! I already broke my diet. [insert bad self-talk and self destructive behavior here]. I'll just finish the damn bag)

Advance planning is how a small misstep is acknowledged (oh crap, I ate half the bag), then recovered (ok. I ate too much. What's done is done. I can't change that but I CAN stop the damage here so it doesn't get even worse.)

Visiting a foreign country and walking 5-15km a day is a sure fire way to lose weight

Eat as many fruits and vegetables as you truly want. You probably need the extra nutrients to get back to s leaner metabolism as smoothly as possible.

Hydration is a big one for me, especially drinking one or two normal size glasses of water before a meal. Helps regulate the appetite.

Also, not very secret since I got it from an interview with Salma Hayek but it really works: don’t eat meat more than once in a day. i.e., if you have steak for lunch make dinner a no-meat meal. It really eases digestion.

And cutting out sugar, that makes such a difference.

I have two:

The first is experiment, experiment, experiment. Consciously try different things with clear intent and be curious about what happens next. Two things that I've tried more than once are eTRF and Whole30, but I suspect the specific interventions matter less than the way experiments make you pay attention.

The second is to understand what you use food for. Food is such a primal thing; your relationship to it extends well beyond your memories and goes much deeper than just fuel for your body. But a lot of us don't notice. Just for myself, I have used food for entertainment, distraction, pain relief, celebration, avoidance, human connection, and to fight sadness. Experimenting will help you see this too. E.g., if I take a month off of sugar and other refined carbs, then I won't be able to use ice cream to cheer myself up. So I'll have to be present in the sadness for a while and figure out what else, if anything, to do with it.

I’m 173cm tall and used to weigh 83kg. It was too much. I stopped having breakfast and ate only between 12am and 6pm. I lost 22kg in about a year. Maybe my biggest trick was to, because I was counting calories, eat as much as I have to for the day and then go out and walk for at least an hour. This way there was small calorie deficit every day.

I'm lazy about cooking and tend to eat a lot of pre-prepared food. I've found it useful to only buy small portions so that I'm not tempted to eat more than I actually need to. I was surprised at how much less food would keep me full and energetic through the day.

Sneaky nutrition hacks: Avovado goes everywhere. Pickled ginger can sneak into many things. Crack an egg in it, whatever it is, see what happens.

Even if you usually do vegetables properly, keep some bags of frozen precut veg around for when you are tired. You can often drop it in the pan of whatever meat you're cooking, or into a stew or soup. Keeps you having veg even when you are behind.

Macro hacks: Oats, oats, oats. Carbs and protein in a pinch. Flavour them however or don't. I don't.

Final word: fitness and health are the same thing. You can't be truly healthy and vital with diet alone. The mind needs movement, your body needs it. You don't need to be a bodybuilder, just get moving whichever way is fun for you. I do strength training and cycling.

* Don't let American portion sizes mess with your perception of appropriate amounts to eat for meal.

* When in a restaurant, don't eat an appetizer and an entree. It's way too much.

* Eat two or three meals per day. Don't snack

* Don't confuse being thirsty with being hungry. Drink enough water.

24 hr fasting once a week.

1. More activity (take bike instead of car, stairs instead of lift). This helps you body better process food because your system is more active. 2. Go to bed early, eat dinner early. This will improve regeneration over night because your body is not busy with processing food. 3. Big breakfast, warm lunch, little dinner. This is in line with the typical energy requirements over the day. Also, if you can, no sugar. It is the worst toxin for your body and fuels bad bacteria growth.

These are very simple rules. My point is, it does not really matter so much what you eat ( with the exception of sugar), but how, in which context, and when.

Stop eating salads with dressings. Or just eat more raw veggies in general.

Not so much as a calories thing, but as a way to recalibrate your taste buds to veggies. It’s so much easier to add veggies to your diet when you enjoy them in any form.

This is not a popular answer, but it's the primary reason I, and many others I know, have gotten into shape and stayed that way for well over a decade:

Hate yourself. Be fatphobic. Hold yourself to nearly unattainable standards and consider yourself a failure for not meeting them. Be disgusted by what you see in the mirror.

IMPORTANT CAVEAT: Note that I absolutely do not recommend this course of action for anyone prone to depression, but for anyone with normal seratonin chemistry and solid self-esteem elsewhere in their life, this is a mentality that absolutely works for attaining, and maintaining, fitness.

This is what works for me. I am not a doctor, dietician, etc. Not expert advice, etc.

Under normal circumstances I eat when I’m hungry, and I don’t eat when I’m not hungry. I realize this doesn’t work for many people as the mechanism that tells them when they are hungry does not function the same way.

If I want to lose weight, I change to plan B. Plan B is to only eat meals. I eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but no eating at other times. No snacks, no desserts, no nothing. Just eat whatever I feel like for the three meals.

My weight generally goes up in winter and down in summer because I do a lot of bicycling outdoors when it’s warm.

1) Eat for satiety and, as a rough proxy, focus on things high in fiber (beans, lentils, grains, vegetables, etc). You will likely eat a larger volume of food but that’s ok.

2) Don’t diet, switch lifestyles.

3) Still take time to enjoy in moderation that which does not fall into these categories.

4) Give calorie counting a go for 6 months or so as it will give you a good intuition on some surprising sources of calories; personally I would not do it too much longer as it can take the joy out of eating.

5) Check in periodically on a scale.

6) Exercise regularly if you’re not already; it’s helpful both physically and mentally. It’s OK to start small and work from there.

Tracking calories is annoying logistically. I had quite a bit of success with what I called"clicker diet" - tracking calories in abstract clicks, similar to how points used in agile software planning. A bit more here - http://web.archive.org/web/20180709144838/https://clickerdie...

(This is only taking care of calories counting aspect of losing weight, not a silver bullet on is own)

I stopped drinking alcohol. Immediately dropped weight. I wasn't a very heavy drinker as in not many drinks per session, but I had frequent sessions per week. Turns out alcohol encourages fat production. The drinks themselves have a bunch of calories, and when drinking I would also snack. Couple that with feeling a bit off the next day and sometimes that meant skipping a workout or doing it half-assed. Add those all together and its was enough to go from calorie surplus to deficit.

My "secrets" are motivation and time. I was very motivated to change my diet and changed my life to make sure I had the time (and energy) to cook a real meal every day. I also treated it (almost obsessively) as a quest to improve my cooking skills (and probably taste too) to use as little processed additives as possible. On average I eat more than 500 gram of vegetables a day now and really enjoy it. Edit: I also only drink water and one cup of decaf coffee with almond milk a day.

Muscle protein synthesis only kicks in after you’ve eaten 20g of protein. After working out, you ideally want to do this 4-5x per day, but it’s really hard to get that much protein with a western diet early in the day, especially if you don’t eat meat. Breakfasts are typically lighter than 20g. More than 20 per few hour chunk has diminishing returns. I’m not an expert but reading and listening to podcasts helped me realize that just eating healthy was extremely far from optimal for me.

Read the book "Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle" by Tom Venuto. Also get the app Lose It! for your mobile device and start using it.

The book explains that you want to eat well and burn off calories with exercise since a caloric deficit will lead to weight loss, but reaching it through exercise rather than pure diet is much healthier. The app simply gamifies your diet and exercise and will help you track your journey towards your target weight (and you can do this on the free version)

Fizzy drinks are the devil, the occasional one won't kill you but drinking them with any regularity will have a distinct effect.

If you must drink them at all go down to a maximum of one a day. Then try to replace them with non sugared drinks. Fizzy water with half a lemon/lime squeezed in will do in a pinch.

If you want to scare yourself about the amount of sugar in a fizzy drink take a glass of water and see how many spoons of sugar you need to add before it tastes anything as sweet as a soda.

I'm sure some of these have been said. But fat is satiating. Carbs are not.

So fill up on fatty meat, not fries and pasta.

Salt salt salt! It's not health advice, but just season to taste, and slightly over if you are preparing meals at home, not out of a can. In fact, forget the canned food.

Meat grinder, large cuts of beef, free scrap fat from butcher. Boil large cut and fat for 1 minute to kill surface bacteria. Grind. Cook medium rare. It's a real nice and satisfying meal. Forget cooking to 165.

Energy in = Energy out

That tasty Christmas cake is allowed if you compensate by lowering other Energy in, or alternatively increasing Energy out.

Think like an engineer.

And stay away from processed food, sugars, wheat, and eat what your ancestors for thousands of years ate. That is what your body evolved to process.

Also, fasting is great for detoxing, cleaning your intestines, and regenerating cells. Try 7 days of cold pressed vegetable juices only (make 2L every morning), no solids. Do this every 3 months.

Eat a light breakfast, whatever light means to you.

Eat leafy greens and berries every day.

I got too much in my head with intermittent fasting (it made me obsess about food) but I agree that not eating after 8pm is hugely beneficial, since it often eliminates mindless, unhealthy eating.

Edit: one addition from Michael Pollen that I love due to the simplicity of the heuristic, never eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize.

Make more meals at home. Don’t buy stacks therefore you can’t eat them when you’re bored. Upgrade your stacks - carrots and hummus.

Not exactly a diet tip, but first thing every day (after stretching) I drink a large glass of water (16oz), drink another large glass with a tablespoon or so of psyllium husk, then another large glass of water. Then whatever breakfast I feel like. Psyllium is cheap, safe, and readily available (and most of us should be eating more fiber, right?).

For beverages, I drink something other than water maybe once every two weeks. I don't miss the other stuff at all.

Trust the fundamental physics: spend more calories than you consume.

For the rest:

- Cut alcohol and sugar(-y drinks).

- Prioritize plant-based, whole foods.

- Minimize processed foods.

- Drink water.

Seek out new things to try, recipes, veggies you've never tasted, dives you've never been in, cooking techniques by cook or by you. Food is one of the best ways to seek adventure, or at least understand yourself, humanity, and the planet better, in so many ways.

Don’t be overly restrictive. A diet is only valuable if it is sustainable.

Diets should be goals you strive for and take seriously but allow for cheat days particularly when under intense social pressure.

Read this: https://physiqonomics.com/eating-too-much/

A piece of garlic before bed - I don't know why, but the teeth get really white after a few days. As if the garlic kills candida or something.

Stop eating when you are full. Really. Pay attention to when your body feels sated and don't eat anything beyond that point.

> Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

- Michael Pollan

Interval fasting 16:8, which means 2 meals within eight hours, then 16 hours (over night) to the next meal.

Not much of a secret but eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.

intermittent fasting

When traveling short distances by car (maybe 2-5 hours), pack a healthy lunch and bring water.

You won't die if you starve for 3 to 7 days, and drink only water.

Take a 10 minute break between serving 1 and serving 2.

Half your portions then you can eat twice as much :)

Apples are very filling.

Whole foods.

Duromine.

Eliminate sugar except with fiber: Apples good, apple juice not. Glucose is fine. Saturated fat is fine. Vegetable oil, less so.

What used to be blamed on saturated fat turns out to be from fructose and trans fat. Trans fat was finally tracked on labels, and then banned. Backing out fructose will be a bigger fight.