A friend of mine lost > 100 lbs over the course of 2 years by following a weight loss program with a heavy focus on education. The program made him internalize that he had to fundamentally change his life. He has since regained probably around 20 lbs over his minimum, but has maintained his new weight for > 8 years now and is living a life closer to what he wants.
I think the real challenge with significant weight loss is in being consistent and maintaining those things, which everyone is pretty silent on.
Mental health and stress levels are the #1 factor in essentially all of those things and deserve more focus in the context of major lifestyle change. You emphatically cannot just willpower through a major change for the rest of your life, and given that, you have to find ways to reduce the active cognition component to a low-effort automatic cognition process.
Setting yourself up for success through organization and routine, avoiding being around situations that cause overeating, not purchasing and keeping in stock foods that are problematic, peer and family support are all things that make a huge difference.
Fixing your diet is one of those sort of flywheel problems. It takes time to figure out what's both healthy and palatable for you, time and freezer and/or refrigerator space to do meal prep, time and energy to work out, and so on.
All of those are skills that are hard at first. Even with YouTube, you don't go from "burns water" to "Michelin star bodybuilder meals" without a lot of practice.
The better you get at all of that, the faster and easier it becomes, until you hit a point where it's just "how you live", and all that energy and time are again free to pursue other things.
If you have money, sure, you can outsource a lot of that. Zuckerberg has a personal chef and dietician, as well as a handful of dedicated personal trainers guiding his fitness regimen.
But most of us can't afford to invest $250k/year or more into that problem.
You could look at just raw numbers, but IMHO, first you want to be tracking for you, how many calories it took eating X to achieve satiety / feel not hungry.
Then, hopefully, you can figure out how to meet your daily calorie needs/goals in a way that you don't feel hungry all day. It's hard to stick to your plan when your body is telling you it wants more.
People's hungry signals are different, which is why one size fits all advice doesn't work. Personally, if I ignore my hungry signal for long enough, it goes away; this sounds like it might be good, but then I get all headachey and grumpy because I haven't eaten and there's no signal telling me to eat; so I've got to use my analytic brain for that (but it would rather take a break because I haven't eaten). Some people I describe that to think I'm crazy ... if they don't eat, the hunger signal just keeps getting stronger.
That last is notable. I agree that personal signals are very different between people. But so is basic capability to track things.
What is truly obnoxious here, is that what works for you will also not be static. Expect that what worked for you now will someday not work.
Unfortunately, when you mention these realities, people react very negatively. They say that if it's hard, then it's unhealthy and you're doing it wrong. They preach that it should feel easy and natural, as if that's a path forward. It isn't. It's the end goal, and the path is long and hard.
I talked about this a few weeks ago[1], but for me losing and maintaining weight actually is quite easy. I foresee no problems maintaining weight going forward because I managed to do that for 25 years without really paying much attention to it, and can easily identify the source of my weight gain. Even losing weight is just a few relatively simple adjustments to my diet.
But the reality for other people is very different.
Because I never had problems with my weight before I never really paid much attention to any of these discussion until a few months ago. I've been a bit surprised at the amount of aggression in some of these discussions at times (including on HN). It seems to me that people with different bodies and experiences are just talking past each other, and in addition to that there is a section of rather unpleasant people who are so high up on their moral high horse that they've become hypoxic.
"Food noise" is the term people use nowadays.
Basically I'm always thinking about food. Always. It's a source of dopamine for me - I have others, but food is a constant.
It's like trying to get off a drug, but you still need to take that drug 3-5 times a day to not die.
Then there are people for whom food is just fuel. They can just ... stop eating. Or eat less. Food doesn't give them any pleasure, it's just a thing they have to consume to not die.
There are very few, if any, people like that; almost everyone enjoys nice food. The major exception being people with eating disorders.
I find that the less I eat, the more I need to sleep and the less energy I have for cognition. I also get sick more easily (less energy for the immune system no doubt).
However I have the opposite problem of being underweight.
In recovery, particularly AA, there is the concept of a "dry drunk" who is, eli5, a person who is trying to quit using by simply not using anymore and not examining themselves or their surroundings to determine how they ended up there in the first place. Addiction as a disease is a good model for empirically researching treatments on a population scale but for an individual in recovery it's much more effective to realize that addiction is who you are and the process is about changing yourself, not just being the same guy but without the drug. When I got clean I had to quit my job, ditch a lot of my friends, totally reengineer my life because staying clean is a matter of moments that could break one way or the other and the best way to ensure they never break the wrong way is two-pronged: you maximize the odds of you making the right choice and you minimize the number of times you have to choose.
This idea also works for diet and exercise: a gym membership is good, but an exercise bike in the basement means you don't have to go through all the intervening steps between "I should work out" and actually doing the thing. By the time you've started to try to talk yourself out of it you're already doing it. It's easy to eat cookies and hard to eat celery. But it's easier to eat celery from your fridge than it is to go to the store to get cookies. All of these things help you make choices that support your goals and not make choices that are detrimental to them. Eventually those choices go from efforts of will to part of who you are. I'm not fat me having a salad, I'm the guy who eats salads. I'm not checking out the gym, I'm the guy who works out. I'm not just not high today, I'm Sober and so are all of my friends. I'm a Sober man and a member of a Sober community.
Almost impossible to do while you're losing weight. You will lose muscle mass as well as fat.
Not that you shouldn't start (or keep doing) weight training. And after you hit your weight loss goals, you'll need to eat more than base maintenance calories (and mostly in the form of protein) to gain muscle back.
Of course you’ll lose muscle mass, along with everything else. But it’s possible to increase the percent lean mass and especially your muscle:fat ratio.
It comes down to math. An hour of resistance training is just 200-500 calories above the baseline. That's just one sports drink worth of energy.
It prefers to power the body from stored glycogen (carbohydrates), next it will try to metabolize stored fat, next it will go for protein sources (muscle and other tissues). In extreme deficits, it'll even start consuming material from the digestive track and other important stuff.
Many people lose weight, get stronger, get faster and surprisingly lose muscle mass at the same time.
But you can prevent that by eating enough protein, adding strength training, not overtraining or extreme deficit, fueling your workouts with carbohydrates, getting high-quality sleep, and minimizing non-meal, non-workout related simple carbohydrates.
#TLDR When you walk down the street, your body is doing all these things mostly carbs, some fat and a little protein. When you start pushing yourself, you burn more energy but in similar ratios. After about 90 minutes or at higher levels of effort, you'll shift to burning more fat and even more protein if you reach ketosis, as your body conserves remaining carb stores for important stuff like thinking.
AND as you exercise, especially as you reach your strength thresholds, you incur damage in your muscles. When you have your recovery meal/drink with carbohydrates after your workout , especially when resting, the insulin spike, triggers your body to consume protein to rebuild your muscles and add more mass/strength.
But if your workouts don't include enough strength training, your body may not get the anabolic muscle building signal, and it may instead focus on reducing weight (via fat and muscle), or increasing nutrient and oxygen flow to the muscles (building hemoglobin, growing capillaries), increasing muscle activation and engagement (new neural pathways), and/or increasing energy creation capacity (growing more mitochondria or expressing more efficient chemical pathways).
Which is why you can get faster, stronger with smaller muscles.
So my recipe for building muscle while losing fat: * Strength train each muscle group in sets of about 10 for 80 reps per week (I shoot for 2 days, whole body, 4 sets of 10 reps). * Prepare for every workout with some carbohydrates and electrolytes * For workouts lasting more than 90 min, especially cardio/endurance, begin consuming carbs at 30 min and consume 90-12g/hr for high intensity (Zone 3 or higher) * Try to consume 2g of whole protein per kg of target body weight. Or 4g per kg of lean body mass. YMMV. these are all rules of thumb. * Wake up at the same time every day, and prepare for bed 9-10 hours before you have to wake up (have a last snack, some water, turn out the overhead lights, start relaxing) so that by the time bedtime rolls around you can fall asleep quickly and get 7.5-9.5 hours of quality sleep
If you're really hitting it hard and you've induced severe muscle fatigue, bump up the protein intake and get more rest and recovery time.
A small caveat here: unless you're totally new to resistance training. If you're a total noob and just start training for the first time, you'll likely have such a low base that you can actually _gain_ muscle mass even during the overall weight loss.
Is it less efficient at building muscle than a bulking diet? Sure. But you absolutely can.
It's telling a beginner that it's possible to do an expert level skill, without the beginner understanding that it's an expert level skill. It's yet another diet that will fail for that beginner.
It's not that difficult for a newbie to do, there's a reason it's called noob gains, usually the first year of weightlifting you can see insane increases in muscle mass that you just won't see on someone who is better trained and closer to their genetic maximum.
Jeff Nippard recently did a year long program with his untrained, overweight brother and put it all up on youtube.
- Some people just don’t like to eat that much. They don’t actually have a faster metabolism. Eating is just a chore to them so they rarely do it.
- Some people like eating more and may eat when bored.
- If I’m busy working on something, I will go 12 hours without eating on accident. If I’m doing nothing at all, I may overeat.
- Some people eat much faster than others. It doesn’t matter if you’re eating protein or fat if you inhale two steaks in 10 minutes. You already consumed too many calories. And because you ate double the amount of calories doesn’t mean that you will be full for double the time.
- Some people who eat too fast do something called low-calorie volume eating so they eat fewer calories and this works better for them than eating protein and fat.
- It’s true that exercise doesn’t make up for a bad diet. It’s easier to eat less.
- There are days when I’m out playing sports for like 10 hours. I burn a ton of calories that does need to be made up by eating.
- A lot of people did sports or were outside for hours growing up but don’t anymore due to lifestyle changes (kids for example). That’s an extremely major loss of a calorie sink that isn’t obvious.
- Water weight is a thing but it really doesn’t matter in the long term. It’s more like an offset from your “real weight” but it can only get so far from it. Trends are better for tracking your real weight.
That one always gets to me, because it's not universally true. I get the point, and to some extend even agree with it. To me personally, especially when I was younger and had the time, working out more always felt much easier. Controlling what I eat has always been incredibly tricky, simply exercising to the point where it doesn't matter what I eat, fairly easy, it's just a matter of putting in the hours.
Workout for 2.5 hours a day, plus 60-90 minutes transport on a bike, you can pretty much eat anything you like.
But for some people, there are low hanging fruit like “cut out 4 Pepsi’s a day” (600 calories).
If you are already eating reasonable healthy and still gaining weight, then adding more exercise can be easier than trying to skimp on food.
Trivial to debunk. Assuming 150 pounds. Weight lifting 2.5 hours: 1051 calories Cycling Moderate 1.5 hours: 1051 calories I'll generously add 2000 calories for the rest of the days activities.
Water intake daily 3.7 liters. 3.7 liters of soda: 1600 calories Burger and Fries: 1000 calories, 3 times a day: 3000 calories.
Calories burned daily total: 4102 calories Calories ingested daily: 4600 calories Yearly weight gain: 498*365/3500 = ~51 pounds.
You can flex the numbers a number of ways, but it's obvious that you cannot pretty much eat anything you like. Exercise does not make up for a bad diet.
I had two friends exactly like this. One of them was 6' and 135lbs when he started college. Another was 5'5" and under 120lbs. They both said that growing up they thought food was gross and only ate because it was the only way not to be hungry all the time. They both started enjoying food in college and gained a bunch of weight. The one who is 5'5" topped out over 200lbs and now weighs around 180. The other I lost track of, but he was on the same trajectory, gaining 30lbs during our undergrad years.
Your first thought might be that they grew up poor, or that their parents didn't have tasty food around the house, but they were both middle-class, and there were lots of regular foods like pizza and burgers that they disliked as kids and ended up enjoying to excess as adults.
I used to be the same when I was in my early twenties. Now i’m in my early thirties and I don’t seem to be able anymore.
Adding a coke a day is the reverse of that.
I have been toying with a 8 hour eating window followed by ~40 hours fasting (basically an evening + a whole day) of not eating, and seen some positive results.
- First of all, drop sugar. Right now. Even if you are not fat, you should not eat it. It's not just extra calories, it's poison. Don't be like "oh, I'll just finish this stuff I still have around", throw it out. If your are only going to follow one point from this list, then let it be this one.
- Forget about calories, a calorie is not a calorie. You cannot "work off" that cake your have eaten, your are not an oven. Calories are an upper limit (you cannot break thermodynamics), but the human metabolism is much more complicated than just balancing an equation.
- Exercise is necessary, but not sufficient. That means you should exercise to get your metabolism going, but exercising itself will not let your lose weight. And when I mean exercising I don't mean you need to get a gym membership. Just going for a walk for half an hour or an hour is good enough for starters.
- Fat won't make you fat. I grew up under low-fat propaganda, yet I kept getting fatter. Then when I increase my fat consumption I started losing weight. By fat I mean real animal fat from meat, not seed oils or other processed fats.
- Eat real food. If you cannot tell what it's made from by looking at it, then it's not real food.
- Processed fruits and vegetables are still processed food, and thus not real food. Don't be fooled by marketing, stuff like fruit juice is not healthy, no matter how many vitamin labels the manufacturer keeps putting on the packaging.
- Caloric restriction works in the short term, but will drive you crazy in the long term. This is why people lapse eventually and regain all their weight.
It is important to understand that obesity is not a "surplus of energy", it's a medical disorder brought about by disruption of your metabolism. I was able to keep eating and eating without ever feeling satiated. It is pure torture to be hungry with a full stomach. It was my body telling me "stop feeding me this garbage, give me real food". I have since been able to keep my weight and never feel hungry. It's only when I find myself unable to eat real food and lapse back into old habits that I start gaining weight again.
If you are aware of it you can avoid it.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=dBnniua6-oM&t=8s
A good debunk of his nonsense claims is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZPKTaVB1IU&t=64s
"If you cannot tell what it's made from by looking at it, then it's not real food."
I would change this a bit and say the ingredients should just be whole plant animal or fungal foods only, no extracts or processed derivatives or anything synthetic or refined. Nothing you couldn't make yourself using the whole food. So no refined flours, sweeteners, juices, oils, etc.
The point of this is to keep it simple. When I go to the grocery store 90% of what's there doesn't fit my criteria and I don't even consider it. Restaurant food or prepared/packaged food is almost all out since 99% of it is made with ultra processed ingredients usually oils/sugars/flours - I don't look at it as an option. If I'm really stuck there's usually nuts or cheese or fruit for sale anywhere.
So I'll buy vegetables, whole fruits, meat, eggs, dairy, butter or meat fat for cooking with, nuts, seeds, and mushrooms.
For social reasons I'll eat things outside of this on occasion in small amounts but whenever I'm providing my own food which is most of the time, these are the rules.
Only buy and eat things with one ingredient.
Vegetables, fruit, meats, beans, rice, etc. you are now eating real food.
And there are two-ingredient foods that I do eat, like "peanuts, salt" or "cultured milk, salt, enzymes"
Sorry but this is antiscience.
We are not ovens. We really are not extremely precise ovens burning samples in the presence of stoichiometrically optimal quantities of pure oxygen.
Like there are entire communities of practice that know how to do this effectively at will. This is a learnable teachable skill.
I am absolutely certain that I know more about what calories actually are, and how badly fitted they are to actually managing our body mass — the best way to manipulate your weight is to change gravity wells — than you do. I can manipulate my body mass at will, effectively, and to a degree you would, I’m sure, find impossible to accomplish. I learned how to take that “skill” to an extreme any community you’ve survived to be member of has not yet approached. Anyone who teaches that “skill” is immoral.
We are not bomb calorimeters. We do not consume calories, nor do we engage, in even the most ludicrously “basic” sense, in anything resembling the simple combustion of our food supply. There are calories in coal and, for that matter, plutonium… try to metabolize either.
The heat potential of what we consume is not relevant to the safe (much less effective) regulation of our metabolic machinery; the nutrient density and distributions in what we consume is, but is very hard to summarize in marketing copy to idiot monkeys that want a simple eat / no eat light.
Having a mental disorder does not change how physiology works and does not depend on how it works, but it does explain a lot of what you're writing and why.
> I am absolutely certain that I know more about what calories actually are, and how badly fitted they are to actually managing our body mass — the best way to manipulate your weight is to change gravity wells — than you do.
I have a degree in biology and have been reading and researching enough about fitness and health for well over a decade to know how to take someone from the couch to at least 80% of their genetic potential in terms of strength and size while being as shredded as they'd like in a deterministic process.
> We are not bomb calorimeters. We do not consume calories, nor do we engage, in even the most ludicrously “basic” sense, in anything resembling the simple combustion of our food supply. There are calories in coal and, for that matter, plutonium… try to metabolize either.
Yes but if you'd ever opened a biochemistry textbook, you'd see what we actually do and you'd understand why what works in bodybuilding works at all, and how it's all downstream of that.
I hope you get help but you are simply not an authority on this topic. I'll go with all the people with proven track records teaching people how to successfully manipulate their body composition with methods rooted in understanding basic physiology over a random person on the internet.
I feel so much sorrow for those you are actively harming. May they survive your naïveté and arrogance.
Always remember the Prof who lost 27lbs on the convenience food diet:
https://www.acsh.org/news/2010/11/09/food-for-thought-twinki...
Also remember that before the days of tracking apps and watches and services like Zoe, many of us were losing weight, keeping it off and improving athletic performance without any of that stuff.
No one “resorts to twinkies”. It was a dumb experiment to show that cutting calories really can work. The stupid foods show that you can improve health markers and lose weight by just watching calories.
It’s not the be all and end all of anything. Just a counter point to the silly “calorie is not a calorie” saying.
A calorie of A is not the metabolic equivalent to a calorie of B because a calorie is only a measure of thermodynamic conversion by direct combustion in a bomb calorimter and cannot tell you anything about metabolic usage of A or B. Thank you for pointing out that you can lose weight and improve your BMI by eating Twinkies… you can do the same thing by sucking your brain out through a straw, or for that matter amputating only one limb; those are also examples of false equivalence and poor quantitative reasoning.
And, yes, when I see people fight to spread what I know to be extremely harmful mythological beliefs, I have a bone to pick.
100%. However, imho it helps to use a tracker at first to better understand what food has how many calories. Track for a month and drop it afterwards.
Signed, a formerly formerly fat person.
But you didn't find universal truths. That's a danger of getting information from the Internet or from anecdote. I can give you the exact opposite anecdote. I've eaten every diet under the sun, from SAD to paleo. I've eaten no sugar. I've eaten tons of sugar. Never no fat, but the percentage of energy has varied tremendously. No processed foods at times to almost nothing but heavily processed foods. I've run over 100 miles a week at times and I've done no aerobic exercise of any kind at other times. Yet I found a post on physicsforums.com from 2003 a few weeks back from my old user account listing my height and weight at 6'2" 165 lbs. I use MacroFactor and weigh myself daily. Today, 22 years later, I was 162.4 lbs.
Why is that? I don't know. I have four cats. Two of them will eat everything you give them, then scour the entire house for more, begging and pleading the entire time. Give them infinite food and they'll eat until they puke, then eat the puke. The other two can be given infinite food and they'll stop when they've had enough and they've stayed the same size their entire lives, over a decade at this point. These are non-humans that don't give a shit about their physiques, don't feel shame, and are eating exactly the same foods with the same macro breakdowns and levels of processing. There are just genetic differences between mammals, for some reason we don't fully understand, that make overeating almost inevitable if enough food is available, without tremendous willpower and tricks like you try to employ, whereas other people will eat exactly what they need and no more, pretty much no matter what.
As for MacroFactor, things like this end up on Hacker News with no context, but it's the project of a guy named Greg Nuckols who is one of the better science communicators in the field of exercise science and has been for 15 years. He's held multiple world records as a powerlifter and has coached probably thousands of people at this point. He's also a lifelong fat person, but not really unhealthy, and as far as I'm aware, has never made much of an effort to change that. The app was created due to traditional meal planning and tracking by lifters who go through bulk and cut cycles. The way it worked in the pre-app era was to make spreadsheets weighing yourself daily and counting all of your calories, over a span of weeks. Get a moving average to remove daily water and gut content noise from the weight trend, then compare it to the average calorie intake to estimate your personal total energy expenditure. Now add or subtract from that to set targets for bulking and cutting. MacroFactor does exactly the same thing but automated most of the process for you, so all you have to do is log your food and weight.
It is not primarily meant to be a weight loss tool. It exists in large part because all other food loggers on the market at the time were exclusively targeting people trying to lose weight, and none of them personalized the targets based on estimated true energy expenditure, using population estimator formulae instead.
Saying they're trying to sell you crap you don't need is tremendously unfair. This was a tool made by a lifter for other lifters, but as it stands, the market for food loggers continues to be dominated by overweight people looking to lose weight, as there are a lot more of them in existence than there are lifters. Given that, the staff try their best to provide resources based on the best information they can find to support people who just want to lose weight. That is what this is. Maybe the information in here doesn't work for you, but it's based on research and coaching that has touched millions. It's looking at broad trends. If you know what works for you personally already, then absolutely stick with that. But you don't need to be slandering equally well-meaning people who have a very long track record of putting out the most reliable content that exists in the space they serve. Greg is in his 40s now and first became well-known in the pre-Tik Tok, pre-Instagram era. His takes on science and its limitations have been the most sober and reasonable I've encountered in any field of science, let alone the enormously fraught field of fitness now dominated by grifters. I understand why you would be skeptical or distrustful and you have no good reason to trust me any more than him. I'm just a random stranger on the web as well, possibly a sock puppet or being paid off for all you know. But his history is public. strongerbyscience.com has a back catalog of articles that stretches more than a decade. The Stronger by Science podcast is now defunct, but published hundreds of episodes. If you ever get the chance, you will never find more measured, honest content about this topic.
Obviously you could do this on your own with spreadsheets, but the app takes all the unnecessary overhead out of it and uses more sophisticated algorithms to account for things like missing days.
It's just a total gamechanger. Totally worth the very low cost.
> Fat won't make you fat
I had always understood this as true, but it's more complicated than that. The body converts calories from fat into fat much more efficiently than carbs, and protein is the least efficient.
Does it now? I have some doubt considering carb consumption stimulates insulin more than fat consumption and this is ultimately the storage hormone.
It's a lot easier to drink and eat X calories of sugar than the same amount in animal fat + protein.
> It's not just extra calories, it's poison.
Uh no. You say you grew up under the low-fat propaganda, but still you fall victim to the overly broad "sugar is poison" propaganda. Yes, limit it by all means, but your overall caloric budget is way more important than the exact proportion of nutrients (same as with fat).
> then when I increase my fat consumption I started losing weight. By fat I mean real animal fat from meat, not seed oils or other processed fats.
Good that it worked for you, but this sounds like anti seed oil propaganda, which is debunked. "real animal fat" often means high saturated fat, which when replaced by polyunsaturated and unsaturated (from e.g. seed oils) actually tends to improve your health.
If you consider the diet/lifestyle that allowed you to lose the weight as temporary, then you will fail.
I would diet to lose weight by stop eating sugar and desserts. Then, when I got to my target weight I would say “ok, one dessert a week” and before I knew it I was having them every day. And before long I had gained the weight back.
Currently down 21 lbs and 6 months free of sugar. This time I view it as something I will do for the rest of my life.
Maintaining your weight requires one to have 0 deficit in either direction.
Some days you have to allow eating more. Mainly because food is the original human social activity.
level1
figure out deficit/maintenance/surplus calories figure out what behavior changes to maintain consumption levels
level2 (extra work, but really what it's at)
figure out what how you want to look good naked... i.e. body composition figure out workout (usually lifting with some cardio) eat enough protein, eat other macros that can help you do your workouts. ironically dietting is the SIMPLEST... eat enough protein, fill the rest with what makes you feel "best" or helps "best" with your goal (exercise). This doesn't mean it will feel good depending on cut/bulk... just what feels least bad.
Extra work from level2 can make level1 easier - more lean mass from work out-> more maintenance + tdee calories. The process might be easier if you're 25 BMI with 15% bodyfat than 22 BMI with 20% bodyfat. You'll look better too, which let's be real, is what people usually want. Then health.
That's basically it.
But MOST IMPORTANT to recognize that some goals are simply things you're too mentally/physiologically "weak" / incapable of doing. You may simply not be built for to learn behavior changes (i.e. appetite control) for low BMI/BF. Your genes may simply prevent you from building good FFMI to pull off certain build. This stuff is simple, but not easy.
One graph I have that I don't see on there is average-calories-per-day on the X axis and weight-change-per-week on the Y axis (scatter plot). Sticking a linear regression on top told me all those online estimators for how many calories you burn in a day are just wrong, at least for me.
It is built on the Flavour framework:
I don't have much more to add, other than it being really eye-opening how my body seemed to play the long game, eventually regaining all the weight I'd initially lost.
For all those years you’ve been consuming more energy than your body needs to run, so your body stored the excess for later.
Even your reply implies you think you need to consciously decide to gain weight for it to happen - which is very much not correct.
You can’t fix something if you don’t understand the whys involved.
That said, it’s hard for me to think this is actually a healthy way to eat, after so many years being vegan, and I don’t know what the staying power will be.
In late 2020 / early 2021 i did the Dukan diet and lost ~10kg in like two months and a half, i lost like a kilogram (about two pounds) per week, my body was perfect.
Then i stupidly eyed the next challenge (quitting smoking) and gained everything back (with intenterests, damnit).
I should have really focused on consolidation, that for the dukan diet means slowly reintroducing other foods slowly to let your body get used to the new state of affairs.
Last year started dieting again and i lost 10 kilograms again, over a year, by mostly eating less (i amicably call it “controlled malnourishment”). This time i’m not gaining it back and i think it’s because even in the weeks where I’ve exceeded, my body got time to get acquainted to the new weight. During this last year i hit a plateau as well… i just had to be patient.
sorcerer-mar•19h ago
In my experience, the single most important factor is realizing that the sensation of hunger is your primary enemy and that you can attack it head-on.
Satiety is not dictated by how many calories you've eaten but (mostly) by the physical weight of your stomach. If your goal is to eliminate the sensation of hunger while consuming the least number of calories, the nutrition label tells you everything you need to know: eat a lot of low caloric density foods.
What you'll find over time is that foods widely regarded as unhealthy are simply ultra-dense (e.g. peanut butter is an engineering miracle) while healthier foods tend to be extremely low-density (e.g. non-fat Greek yogurt and fresh vegetables).
The biggest error I see in people dieting is thinking they just need to muscle through the feeling of hunger. It doesn't work in the long run. Accept that it's an important sensation but it's distinct from actual starvation, and address it directly!
yjftsjthsd-h•19h ago
If that's all there is to it, can you just eat a little bit and then chug water until your stomach is convinced you're full?
russfink•19h ago
f1shy•18h ago
rolisz•19h ago
keybored•19h ago
dzink•19h ago
iwanttocomment•18h ago
Similarly, we would all be eating pounds of cheesecake without feeling full. (Narrator: they did get full, but not after eating too much calorically.)
Satiety is not dictated by weight. Please don't.
pazimzadeh•18h ago
humanrebar•17h ago
bregma•18h ago
In other words, fats and proteins satisfy your hunger. You can eat really dense carbohydrates until your stomach bursts (it won't but it might feel like it's going to -- it's the stretch receptors signalling your limbic system to stop or it's going to tell you to vomit) and you still won't feel satisfied. Slather a bit of (protein-rich high-fat) peanut butter on your celery sticks and you'll be fine.
The best advice is balance.
theoriginaldave•18h ago
I'm a fatty. I've lost a lot of weight but my body knows I used to be fat and it wants to be fat again.
A very potent signal for hunger or fatigue is when your fat cells get small i.e. you've burnt a lot of fat, and your little fuel cells are feeling empty. Each shrunken fat cell sends out a chemical "feed me" signal. And they are very very persuasive.
And the kicker is that when you fill them up, they want to be maintained at full. But if they're full too long, or get too full (persistently increase body fat by a few percent(, it triggers mitosis and you now have two half full fat cells who are both shouting "Feed me"
To add insult to injury when you lose weight, you don't kill off fat cells, you just have a bunch of really hungry fat cells shouting for a cheeseburger.
The nice thing about the GLP1 drugs is that they quiet the shouting. So you just don't get the demonic urge to feet all your wilting fat cells.
The bad thing about it is that the shouting is still there, and as soon as you quit the drug, you can get overwhelmed and go back to overeating and your weight and percent body fat go right back up