First of all, congrats - that is amazing and really shows true commitment. As somebody that lost 30+ pounds (I am 5ft 65 and went from 205lbs to 172lbs), I definitely understand can sympathize with the work it takes.
For anyone else embarking on the journey, I would add a few things:
- When you are in caloric deficit and thus loosing weight, you can choose not to go to the gym, but you will lose muscle mass faster. If you want to maintain muscle mass as much as possible you are better off doing some weight lifting instead of running. You won't gain muscle mass, but you'll reduce the loss.
- Ghrelin is the hormone that you will need to control. It is what makes you hungry and ultimately ruins your diet. Funny enough, you control it by constantly eating low caloric foods. You want to eat a lot of veggies, fats (avocado will be your friend) and protein throughout the day in low amounts. Just stay under your target caloric intake.
- The most difficult part is not eating out. Meal preparation is key, and this takes time. When you eat out, you just don't know how people prepared the meal you are eating. Sadly, meals that you eat outside have a huge amount of oil and counting calories will be next to impossible most of the time. Even in the cases where a restaurant lists caloric numbers with their plates, you can be certain that the cook is less interested in your caloric intake and more in getting your order out the door. Six tablespoons of olive oil instead of the one you are counting and you are off for the day already. The best you can hope when eating out is maintaining weight.
- Your body is designed for homeostasis and will fight you back to get you to regain it (through Ghrelin, mood swings, etc). After loosing the target weight, increase your caloric intake to stabilize it. If you can keep your weight for a year, it will be easy to remain at that weight later on.
I've found that intermittent fasting was easies to implement in 12, 14, 16 hour increments. I do "cheat" just a bit with a coffee in the morning, and 14 hour cheat days on the weekends. Intermittent fasting, allegedly, has numerous benefits. Stem cell regeneration of damaged, old immune system. Improved dopamine levels in the brain. Increased growth hormone production.
I personally have found that I do feel "run down" which turned out to be lower blood pressure. I attributed this to low sodium intake. So, I drink two very low sugar (6g) recovery drinks for my first caloric intake around noon.
One thing that wasn't covered, and likely isn't in many of these weight loss recaps, is not just caloric deficit; but also food content. Sugar's (and carbs) relationship to fat and our bodies cannot be understated. There's plenty of reading on how high sugar diets are detrimental. Here's an interesting listen: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/refined-sugar
I think most people are aware of this in principle, but don't often associate normal foods as being high in sugar. Orange juice is probably the worst offender. All the sugar, none of the fiber.
Drinking coffee is not cheating, as it does not spike your insulin and does not put your body in metabolic state. No sugar and no cream. You’re all good! :)
Ive been hearing more and more about IF. Curious how you manage it - for lets say 16 hours? Do you have a "dinner cutoff time" that works well? Does it mean you're skipping breakfast?
I never believed that breakfast was "the most important meal of the day". IF success sort of supports this & the fact that it was mostly marketing.
I recently started 5:2 fasting, on five days I try to eat roughly maintenance, I also eat a slice of my coworkers birthday cake.
On two days, I limit my intake to 600kcal which I eat at lunchtime (I prepare a bento box with rice, vegetables and meat). You do the math, and it boils down to a caloric reduction diet roughly. The difference is, that I am only hungry on two days during the week, and I feel like going a day with almost no food is not harder than doing a constant deficit every day.
Once you survive the first 24 hours of fasting (given you replenish electrolytes with salty water), i.e. some headache after 16-20 hours, then you can easily add another 48 hours, making it 3-in-a-row, and you can happily do high-intensity training as usually, without any effect on your performance. After 3 days you either start eating again or stop training. 3 days are recommended for "rebooting" the immune system; I try to do it once 1-2 months, not sure if it helps but I don't see any bad effects either, and it strengthens the will.
I embarked on a similar course as the author - just after Christmas I realised my BMI was well into the overweight category - and the same strategy of calorie counting worked for me. I can especially recommend using an app, this really helped me too. Turns it into a game almost - where can I cut out the unnecessary calories? Whereas before you might help yourself to a biscuit with a coffee now you know it is going to blow your budget right open. Makes it a lot easier to resist.
And it was easier than I thought - a piece of fruit for breakfast, a small lunch (single sandwich, down from two with crisps and chocolate bar on top some days), and a normal evening meal. That would come to around 1500 calories or less a day, easily enough to lose a few pounds a week. It becomes easier as time goes on - your body expects less, I guess. And you do gravitate towards healthier food, simply because you can eat so much more of it.
I've lost two and a half stone since then (I don't follow the diet at weekends so I could have lost more) and am back in the green. Not as much as the article's author - his loss was spectacular!
Alas I did not take a before and after picture, though others have commented, which feels good.
So yeah, great article that I can fully endorse, and encourage others to follow. Just set realistic targets, change will come eventually.
The hard part for me is mindset and willpower. Unfortunately, knowing the physics* behind weight loss doesn't make it any easier, and perhaps might make it more stressful. Why can't I do this simple thing that logically is as complex as 2+2. Our minds have their own prerogatives.
I wonder then what did you tell yourself? How many times did you have a bad day? What was your mood like throughout? I'd love to know so much more about the psychology. Great article though and thanks again for sharing!
Having lost and kept off half my body weight, yeah, the math is really, really, really stupidly easy part of weight loss.
I envy people who don't know what it is like to feel compelled to gorge themselves. It's an unstoppable force sometimes. You'd be amazed at what your mind will do to make you ingest more calories.
And then you get on the internet and, in addition to all the "it's really simple, just eat fewer calories" idiots, there's a thousand know-it-all fucks trying to tell you that if you just follow their fad diet you'll never feel hungry again and your dick will grow three sizes and you'll win the lottery.
In my experience, one of the easiest ways is to make the process enjoyable. Try and find some sort of exercise you enjoy, or let yourself listen to your favourite podcasts / music whilst you're exercising.
At the end of the day, if you're hating every minute of it, there's very little likelihood you'll keep with your programme. So do whatever you need to do in order that you enjoy yourself whilst doing it, and results will follow :)
> The hard part for me is mindset and willpower. Our minds have their own prerogatives.
Exactly right. Losing weight by counting calories is an almost entirely mental activity, not physical. We have a physiology that wants food and abhors not eating enough.
> I wonder then what did you tell yourself?
Like the author, I discovered counting calories a couple of years ago, after trying and failing to lose weight through exercise for 20 years.
I do have some mental tricks that worked for me.
Number one: the reason I got overweight is because I’m mis-calibrated. When I feel full, it’s because I already ate too much. What I need to do is re-calibrate to understand what “enough” is. By assigning a negative judgement to feeling full, and seeking the feeling of enough, it helps remove the idea that I just need willpower to overcome any hunger. A little bit of hunger (but not a lot) is a good thing, so I want to stay there.
Number two: I set my calorie budget to my future weight, not my current weight with minus a thousand. This is a “set it and forget it” plan. I want to calibrate my normal eating for the rest of my life, not diet for a month or two and then regress. I also don’t want to make adjustments when I’m done, I want to act like I’m already done. If I want to be 180lbs, and I should be eating 2k calories when I’m 180lbs, then I just start doing that and my weight will trend toward 180lbs. This takes longer than having a larger deficit, but mentally I don’t need to care how long it takes. I spent decades overweight despite trying, a couple extra months losing weight more slowly is nothing, it’s way ahead of where I was before.
Third, I also save some budget in my day for a treat at the end of the day. It leaves me just a tiny bit hungrier, but then when I get my treat it feels like I’m splurging.
Fourth, I still exercise. To lose weight fast I don’t count my exercise as calories burned. In maintenance mode, I use my exercise as a way to earn more calories. Now I’m actually going to the gym not to lose weight, but so I can eat more!
I had days where I went over, but I didn’t really have “bad” days or bad moods, it was never severe. It was more like go to a party when I’m not counting, and whoops, I’m 400 calories over my budget.
The hardest part about counting calories is the first few days. That’s when hunger is worst. After the first week, my body adjusts and my appetite goes down.
I had my “come to Jesus” moment about 3 months ago, at the green age of 39. I’ve since lost 10kg (1.5st or 22lb) and counting.
I am never hungry, I removed all starches and cheese from my diet and the stomach is now silent 100% of the time. I still have the occasional “fuck it, the world hates me, I want a pizza so bad”, but I learnt to manage it: when I feel angry or bored (my triggers), I get my mind busy with something else, anything really (from sudoku to programming, going for a walk with a podcast, or painting miniatures). After a few minutes the impulse is gone. I cheat once or twice a day, in small quantities and in a controlled fashion: knowing the worst time is right after a cheat, I make sure to be very busy and plan follow-up snacks with nuts, to slowly ease off the starch-induced crave.
Another trick is to metabolise the concept that the corporate world tries really really hard to sell you food; when you really start to see that it’s all a way to screw you out of your money, it gets easier to say “no thanks”.
I speak about what worked for myself about the psychological part (I lost 20kg in 2 years).
First it was to not enter in a willpower fight. I did accept that I will fail, and I did fail many times (sorry did not count, often in the beginning and I was still failing from time to time until the end). But every time i failed, instead of giving up i was telling to myself "ok you failed, but it worked for X days, you trained your body to eat less, let's start again, it will be more easy this time." And it was true. With time your body require less food to fill "full" even when you fail.
Also a lot of ppl here are talking about fasting. I'm not sure about it at all. Your brain may try to prevent the next "fasting time" and may try to trick you to eat more. I would advise to eat at very regular times so your brain "knows" when you will eat (for me: 6:00/12:00/19:00 +/-30mins). Take time to eat, move in another place, etc ... so you appreciate it more.
I liked the cheat days principle because it gives you short term goals, and it helps to keep some pleasure eating food. It also helps to not bring your diet with you when you go to lunch with friends/family. I also noticed that with time I was cheating less during these days.
Preparing food for myself also saved money, sometimes it helped for motivation.
I think daily tracking in combination with a long term goal is key here, because it allows you some wiggle room when it comes to progress while having a strong rubber band effect (that gets stronger the more you sway) to get you back on track.
>"The only thing you really need to know is that you should be eating fewer calories than your body burns everyday. If you do this, you will lose weight – it’s science. Nothing else matters for weight loss. The magnitude of the caloric difference will regulate how quickly or slowly you lose the weight.
[...]
I naturally started eating healthy foods because I could eat more of them. If you eat a chocolate bar, you will still be hungry. For the same amount of calories, you could eat a few bowls of vegetables and be full.
[...]
Somewhere along the journey I picked up intermittent fasting. I like it but it’s also not necessary. I found that it helped reduce my appetite which means I can eat fewer calories."
I don't really think this is consistent. Basically yes if you eat less calories than are used you must lose weight, but the ease of doing this depends on what you are eating.
The biggest challenges I've observed with people trying to lose weight with CICO (calories in, calories out) it getting a reliable estimate of how much your eating and how many calories your body is truly burning. Being off by 100 calories translates into roughly 12 pounds per year.
I know you can use a food scale to get a more accurate estimate of calories in but I'm still at a loss to determine an accurate estimate of calories out.
Yep. He even mentions fasting: "Somewhere along the journey I picked up intermittent fasting. I like it but it’s also not necessary. I found that it helped reduce my appetite which means I can eat fewer calories."
I tried that too. Lost 7lbs in 7 days and then a few more. I regularly skip breakfast, but to really make it work skipping lunch and keeping eating to a 4-hour window was really effective. I need to do some more of that. And it does reduce your appetite after a few days.
Great progress and tips! We're developing a "MyFitnessPal + UberEats" food delivery service that automatically counts calories and macros here in Shanghai, where ~16 million people order their food instead of cooking or eating out. I wonder why nobody did this in the Bay Area at least? Is it generally lower penetration of food delivery? Or gathering the data is just too much work? It's easier here with Chinese food: orders naturally consist of 2-3 dishes at least, and for 2-3 people it can be 5-6 dishes, making it possible for us to pick a right "combo" for the right macros. I think with Western food, most people would stick to one dish with a side, which is much harder to "configure" and meet the right target.
Also, of course, even a modest amount of exercise will kick off metabolic processes that speed up weight loss, not mentioning that increasing muscle mass will naturally increase the basal metabolic rate. Weight lifting routines like 5x5 or Greyskull LP can be squeezed into 20-30 minutes every other day, and provide lasting benefits almost immediately.
> [...] you should be eating fewer calories than your body burns everyday
and
> I never understood how simple it was before starting this.
Sounds so trivial, but sadly true for a lot of things in life. You read and hear something multiple times, but you have to make the experience yourself to get your eyes opened.
It's also massively dependent on the person. People like me, yes it really is that simple. I naturally don't even care about eating, and my metabolism seems quite active, as it's hard for me to even gain weight. My wife on the other hand, even just mentally, is another ball game. Food is a big part of her life, even just speaking emotionally. Then of course you have her cycle, which causes her normal urges to ramp up to 7->10.
Also, eating.. pickiness too. I don't mind leftovers, hell I don't even mind eating the same thing for a week, two, etc. She hates leftovers and always wants freshly cooked. Also rotating food types, as it can't be too similar to what she ate recently.
All combined it means that finding hearty meals (and now keto for us) are more effort for her than for someone like me. To no surprise, I have no weight to lose (I need to workout to even maintain weight), but it really frustrates her at how different our bodies are.
She considers her food habits to be an "addiction" in large part due to how different her and my reactions are to food. Her struggles are far more than mine on this front.
> The much bigger mistake Wishnofsky made was misunderstanding how our bodies react to weight loss. As soon as we start cutting calories from our diet, the number of calories our body expends begins to fall. "It literally starts happening on the first day," said Hall. "And it continues to mount as you lose weight."
> The reason Wishnofsky, and so many others since, have botched this biological fact is that it's fairly counterintuitive
Basically our bodies are not simple in any way, in particular when it comes to how it handles energy, which is core to our survival. There is a good amount of survivor bias in all the "that's how I lost weight" tales floating around.
Well, this is another one of those weight loss articles that tries to say "calories in, calories out" and then laughs at the research that refutes that. I'm referring to this:
>There’s a lot of “science” that say low insulin levels in the fasted state lead to more fat burning.
That "science" he smirks at is the research primarily of Dr. Jason Fung, who specializes in diabetes and obesity. He wrote a book called the obesity code that advocates for intermittent fasting. I think I'll take the word of a man who has spent hours researching and analyzing over the snarky comments of some software engineer.
Some more examples:
> If you’re in a caloric deficit this will happen anyways.
That's not true. I could eat a reduced caloric deficit of bread every day and still not burn fat. The basis of intermittent fasting and the ketogenic diet is to force your body to break fat for energy as opposed to carbs. They take different approaches, but the end result is the same - to lower the amount of insulin. Keto is bit more restrictive in food because so much of the carbs in out food is sugar.
So, why did achieve results? Easy:
> I naturally started eating healthy foods because I could eat more of them. If you eat a chocolate bar, you will still be hungry. For the same amount of calories, you could eat a few bowls of vegetables and be full. That said, the best part about this overall approach is that you can still eat whatever you want – just count the calories.
There's a wide difference between how your body reacts to 100 calories of chocolate bars (sugar) and 100 calories of broccoli (fiber).
This is more junk science and using anecdotal data as opposed to research and science. If you want to lose weight, what you eat is just as important as how much you eat. End of story; caloric restriction alone isn't enough. However, this article is also incredibly short sighted. Losing weight is very much like getting married. People focus on the event and not the afterwards. You can't modify your diet, hit your target weight, and then stop. You need to keep going; fighting obesity is life long battle. I believe the majority of people who lose weight will regain that weight within 7 years. There's horror stories from the biggest loser.
My story, by the way, is that when I got married, I was 280 lbs. One night, I remember coming home from my in-laws house and deciding I was tired of being fat. I changed my diet. I cut out chips and soda at lunch and put in carrots and water. I stopped eating white bread and pasta in favor of whole grain foods. I cut the number of nights I had dessert to 1 to 2 a week. I picked up regular exercise. I tracked and measured my food. It worked. At my lowest, I was ~170 lbs. It's gone back up to 203 right now, but that's because I'm currently focusing on strength training. I will say that eating less is not enough. You have to pick the right food. As a friend of mine once wisely said, you simply cannot outwork a crappy diet.
A simple illustration that things are more complicated is that most people go roughly from weighing nothing much at conception, 8 or so lbs at birth and 150lbs or so at 18 regardless of calorie counting. It's mostly under genetic and hormonal control at those stages and identical twins come out much the same weight. As adults it's more a mix of factors.
Don't cheat, lie or harm any other human being in any way. Sounds simple enough. If all would be heeding this rules, we would have paradise on this planet. Every sane person must realize this when reaching adulthood. Rest should be treated by professionals.
Yet somehow, billions failed, fail and will fail spectacularly.
You should really exercise, no matter what people tell you, or how difficult it feels.
Controlling your diet seems like the easy way, and I don't think it's really healthy because you will lack energy, and it's easy to slip.
You should already stop drinking sodas and eating unnecessary snacks, but I'll never believe that it's the only thing you can do.
Remember that exercise gets easier over time, so just hang in there and take the pain. Sweating is good, all your body will be restarting if you exercise. All existing biology reacts to simulation, and dies if it stops moving. Just imagine your cells getting reorganized, cheese particles bring breathed out, and toxins getting filtered out.
Exercise will counter the problems created by bad diets but not only vascular. It will rebalance a lot of things. You will also sleep better.
There is truth in people living longer because they keep asking their body for more even when they age. All life forms thrived around biological movement. Sedentary lifestyle is the antithesis of living.
I lost 15 pounds over a period of 3 months. Just want to share the following,
a. remove sugar from all diet including coffee etc.
b. double protein intake and halve carbs. One way to do is make your dinners protein only. Find Greek yogurt with low sugar content (or its easy to make at home too). This is especially important if you are above 35.
c. Read about the difference between fat and carbs. Till the time you reach target weight, eat carbs as little as possible.
d. If exercising try things like HIIT or weights that make you 'exert' yourself. Even if its just 5 minutes per day.
Regarding motivation to avoid over eating, make sure your diets includes periodic snacks. There are lot of benefits of eating frequent but light meals (trail mixes with nuts, boiled eggs, green tea, fruits are good examples). Trail mixes with little bit of sugar are ok as they help stop the sugar craving if you have one.
Damn dude, that's awesome progress! I love the consistency.
On average, it takes about 3,500 calories to burn 1 pound of fat.
Suppose you eat 1,000 fewer calories than your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR).
After a week your body will burn 7,000 calories or 2 lbs of fat.
I'm almost surprised that the weight curve dropped off linearly -- I always thought weight fell off quickly at the beginning, before plateauing towards the end. Great personal "myth" to have dispelled.
Can I also compliment the site design? It's very clean, and presented the information well.
> I'm almost surprised that the weight curve dropped off linearly -- I always thought weight fell off quickly at the beginning, before plateauing towards the end. Great personal "myth" to have dispelled.
Commonly there's a sharp initial weight loss due to "water weight" loss: changing to a diet with lower sugars (simple sugar and carbs) and salt leads to retaining less water, which in turn yields a sharp initial weight loss. That doesn't keep going.
However as the essay notes you have to either keep cutting calories and/or start exercising[0]: as weight drops so will BMR, carrying less weight means making less effort (for the same result) and fatty tissues are still living tissue so they do burn some energy. And since "weight change" is a factor of calorie intake / metabolic rate, if BMR drops you have to drop calorie intake for it to remain below BMR (and sustain a ratio < 1).
In the Data chart you can see that TFA's calorie intake drops by ~500 after the initial cut. They do note this issue in the conclusion, and that they attempted the exercise route but didn't care for it so stopped after 3 months.
[0] sustained exercise builds up muscle mass, and muscle increases BMR counteracting the BMR drop from the diet
It most likely follows a non-linear pattern in individuals who are consuming an extreme amount of calories. As the author notes, your calorie intake needs to drop as you lose weight to maintain that progress. If you're consuming 4000 calories a day it's really easy to cut to 2000 in the beginning by just not eating sugary crap, but getting down to say 1250 calories a day is a lot harder, which often requires meticulous management.
The consistency is hard to achieve because he had to regularly adjust his calorie intake as he lost weight. If you don't do that, it will work the way you thought - the weight loss slows over time. That's also one of the reasons people feel the last pounds are always the hardest to lose
> I'm almost surprised that the weight curve dropped off linearly -- I always thought weight fell off quickly at the beginning, before plateauing towards the end. Great personal "myth" to have dispelled.
I think that this is due to people not modifying behavior as they lose weight. A person weighing 250 lbs has a higher BMR than when they weigh 200 lbs. So if you lose weight and don't adjust your daily calorie goal, you're no longer eating as far under your BMR as you used to.
I lost 50 pounds in under 200 days, and then another 20 over the next year.
Here's what worked for me:
* Calorie counting to work out baselines
* Accept the feeling of being hungry and learn to relish it ("I'm losing weight if I'm hungry")
* Do light weightlifting at home
* Exercise naked in front of a mirror for positive and negative reinforcement
I've been struggling with weight problems and my self-image for as long as I can remember. I've tried the Dukan diet ten years ago, which was a total disaster. At my heaviest I was 84kg for 174cm. That's a BMI of 27.
Two years ago, I had a minor motorcycle crash, and at the hospital the doctor was scared about my heart rate. It was fast and it was loud, around 100 bpm at rest. I always had a heart with a fast beat so I didn't really care about it. Then, my son was born. At that moment I decided that I needed to take care of myself and started going to the gym. Alas, being a new parent takes a lot of time and energy, and I had to cancel my membership last year.
So I've been experimenting with intermittent fasting since then, and it's been the best thing I've done in a long time.
I started doing the usual "16/8", that is fast for 16 hours and eat during the following 8 hours window. Basically it meant skipping breakfast and having lunch at around 1pm, which is extremely easy to do.
The past two months, I cranked the notch a bit and I've been doing OMAD (One Meal A Day). I eat from 7pm to 9pm and the rest of the time I only drink water or black coffee. It just changed my life.
In the past two months I've lost 9kg, so now I'm at 73kg, and I've never felt so good in my life.
My mind feels sharper throughout the day, and I've developed a completely different relationship with food. I now consider it to be fuel, and I've started thinking about the quality of fuel I'm putting in my body. So now I cook and I try to chose good meat and vegetables, and I'm trying to cut on sugar and pasta. I still eat lunch sometimes (when I'm visiting my parents or I'm having lunch with a client) but I don't really care as I know that my weight is going to regulate itself in the few following days.
And my heart rate is now normal. At rest, it's beating at around 65 bpm.
If anyone's interested, I highly recommend watching Jason Fung on Youtube. His talks about fasting have been an eye opener for me. His approach on obesity through hormonal regulation is amazing.
I'm always amazed at the people who can drop a hundred lbs in a year. "I just changed my diet to 1500 calories and bam, the weight fell off."
Not that it isn't that simple, because it is. But, because for most people who are 100lbs overweight, they have a very unhealthy relationship with food. They stress eat, binge eat, binge drink, purge...
I guess it's kind of like the people who can just all of a sudden quit smoking, cold-turkey one day. Maybe they weren't addicted to nicotine in the first place?
I definitely need to lose some weight myself. Unfortunately I can never stick with anything. Including this simple method. I have done MyFitnessPal for weeks, and then fall out of the habit. Just never manage to stick with it, and not sure how to keep myself motivated for it.
Of course its always hard, half the time I eat at the salad bar at work, and I may not be able to estimate the amounts right. I always worry about underestimating how much I ate. I have even considered eating pre-packaged meals, but those always leave me hungry, and seem like a less healthy sodium filled alternative.
Not sure what my point is, but I guess I am wondering if anyone has managed to keep themselves motivated after years of failing to stay motivated? And if so, how?
Congrats!
I have started a similar approach for the last 2 months using LoseIt as my app to count calories, and the goal to loose around 64 pounds by end of the year (going from 244 to 180 pounds).
I did join a gym, and this weekend decided to get a personal trainer for a couple months to be sure that I build some muscle mass too: my core is definitely weak, and gaining some muscle will not hurt to strengthen my body: had a few injuries (ankle/knee) where having muscles will probably avoid it.
So far on track, with almost 20 pounds lost (19.4 as of yesterday), and going to the gym 4 to 5 times a week 45 minutes to 1 hour at a time...
Losing weight is all about triggering the body's mechanisms to convert fat into energy, and not triggering its mechanisms to turn food into fat. Counting calories or exercising more are the most basic attempts to do this. If you want to add a bit of nuance you can play around with what you eat, how you exercise, when you do each. But the key thing is this:
We're all different.
I've decided to lose weight a couple of times, on the order of 20-40 pounds each time. What has worked for me has been a combination of generally eating/drinking less, concentrating almost all of that into a small time window, and a fair bit of running. But the reason it works for me is very specific to what it takes to kick my body into fat-burning mode, how fast and how long my body sustains that, how this affects my energy levels, my physical ability to perform various kinds of exercise or tolerate various kinds of discomfort (e.g. I don't mind running on an empty stomach but I hate sleeping that way), and so on.
Something vaguely similar to what I do might work for a lot of people, but the devil's in the details. My specific formula won't work for you. Experiment and find your own. The best thing about the recent IF/TRF/OMAD/whatever fad is not that it provides a specific blueprint but that it encourages people to experiment with different variations to find their own balance points.
Welcome to middle age ;-). I had a stern talking to a few years ago by my doctor and was forced to take measures as well or face the prospect of likely complications.
This stuff is hard because we people are not very rational. So, here's a few simple practical things.
- Get a scale, put it in your bathroom, and use it as often as you can. Step 0 is simply knowing how you are doing. I know down to a few hundred grams what I weigh most of the time and I've learned the impact of my behavior on the scale. A big dinner, excessive drinking, etc. has a measurable impact that peters out over several days before I'm back to "normal". Simply knowing, has a moderating effect on what I do.
- Make changes in your behavior that you can turn into habits. Starving yourself definitely works short term but you'll bounce right back as soon as you resume your old habits. Kind of pointless. Regular fasting is great though because it becomes a habit and you don't have to take decisions.
- Try not to set your self up for being tempted to eat too much. In my case, going shopping after work when I'm tired and hungry leads to predictably bad decision making. Make sure you eat before you shop.
- Be honest about alcohol. I actually quit drinking completely for a while. Turns out that going for after work beers multiple times per week has a insanely huge caloric impact. I identified it as the single biggest thing that was impacting my weight and duly eliminated it for two years. These days I drink but much less than I used to. In my case I found it easier to not drink than to drink a little. One of the side-effects of alcohol is bad decision making. 1 Beer always leads to more beers. If this is hard for you, that's a good sign of being addicted. All the more reason to try to change things.
Counting calories in/out is a way to lose weight that works for a lot of people. It also works well in clinical & research settings, where control mechanisms are strong. That said:
"The only thing you really need to know is that you should be eating fewer calories than your body burns everyday. If you do this, you will lose weight – it’s science. Nothing else matters for weight loss"
This may be one of the most harmful statements about diet. It's mostly true, but in a fairly banal sense. A baby will have a caloric surpluss as it grow. So will a potato. Without the calories, growth will stunt. This is the trivial fact.
The growth trajectory of a potato or baby is not trivially determined by caloric surplusses. One big factor is genetics, which tell babies and potatoes to grow. There are environmental factors, many of which are calorie related.
"This is a scientific fact" is in the context it's used, an empty tautology. Caloric surplusses can be used in exactly the same way to "explain" why an elephant is bigger than a mouse, why there are 6 billion people on the planet, how a bodybuilder got his biceps or why you got fat. This makes it a nonexplanation.
A less abstract hint that we're dealing with a nonexplanation is apples. Add one apple a day to your diet, and calorie counting will tell you that amounts to 5kg fat per year.
We know from experience that people do not gain/lose 10 lbs per year by adding an apple a day to their diet. Your apetite or metabolism (these are related) will compensate for the apple.
That doesn't mean that intentional caloric restriction isn't a good method. It works well for some. Other things work well for others. We don't have perfect knowledge about what works "in the wild" or even in the lab.
After all that you typed out it still doesn't matter, the only way to loose weight is to consume less calories than you "burn". Everything else you talk about is either different ways to accomplish this or excuses. There is no beating conservation of energy.
People often promote energy restriction without mentioning the key fact - you will be hungry.
The human body has an amazing set of machinery that's dedicated to making you eat when your metabolism needs certain kinds of materials and would rather not break down tissue to get them.
[+] [-] rburhum|7 years ago|reply
For anyone else embarking on the journey, I would add a few things:
- When you are in caloric deficit and thus loosing weight, you can choose not to go to the gym, but you will lose muscle mass faster. If you want to maintain muscle mass as much as possible you are better off doing some weight lifting instead of running. You won't gain muscle mass, but you'll reduce the loss.
- Ghrelin is the hormone that you will need to control. It is what makes you hungry and ultimately ruins your diet. Funny enough, you control it by constantly eating low caloric foods. You want to eat a lot of veggies, fats (avocado will be your friend) and protein throughout the day in low amounts. Just stay under your target caloric intake.
- The most difficult part is not eating out. Meal preparation is key, and this takes time. When you eat out, you just don't know how people prepared the meal you are eating. Sadly, meals that you eat outside have a huge amount of oil and counting calories will be next to impossible most of the time. Even in the cases where a restaurant lists caloric numbers with their plates, you can be certain that the cook is less interested in your caloric intake and more in getting your order out the door. Six tablespoons of olive oil instead of the one you are counting and you are off for the day already. The best you can hope when eating out is maintaining weight.
- Your body is designed for homeostasis and will fight you back to get you to regain it (through Ghrelin, mood swings, etc). After loosing the target weight, increase your caloric intake to stabilize it. If you can keep your weight for a year, it will be easy to remain at that weight later on.
Good luck!
[+] [-] ericcholis|7 years ago|reply
I personally have found that I do feel "run down" which turned out to be lower blood pressure. I attributed this to low sodium intake. So, I drink two very low sugar (6g) recovery drinks for my first caloric intake around noon.
One thing that wasn't covered, and likely isn't in many of these weight loss recaps, is not just caloric deficit; but also food content. Sugar's (and carbs) relationship to fat and our bodies cannot be understated. There's plenty of reading on how high sugar diets are detrimental. Here's an interesting listen: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/refined-sugar
This image alone scares the snot out of me: http://reachingutopia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/sugar-i...
I think most people are aware of this in principle, but don't often associate normal foods as being high in sugar. Orange juice is probably the worst offender. All the sugar, none of the fiber.
[+] [-] nothrabannosir|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dominotw|7 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R-eqJDQ2nU
Dr. Panda goes into detail about fasting and coffee. Great podcast about fasting.
Intermittent Fasting Confers Protection in CNS Autoimmunity by Altering the Gut Microbiota
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(18)...
[+] [-] anonu|7 years ago|reply
I never believed that breakfast was "the most important meal of the day". IF success sort of supports this & the fact that it was mostly marketing.
[+] [-] wirrbel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitL|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] feintruled|7 years ago|reply
And it was easier than I thought - a piece of fruit for breakfast, a small lunch (single sandwich, down from two with crisps and chocolate bar on top some days), and a normal evening meal. That would come to around 1500 calories or less a day, easily enough to lose a few pounds a week. It becomes easier as time goes on - your body expects less, I guess. And you do gravitate towards healthier food, simply because you can eat so much more of it.
I've lost two and a half stone since then (I don't follow the diet at weekends so I could have lost more) and am back in the green. Not as much as the article's author - his loss was spectacular!
Alas I did not take a before and after picture, though others have commented, which feels good.
So yeah, great article that I can fully endorse, and encourage others to follow. Just set realistic targets, change will come eventually.
[+] [-] xevb3k|7 years ago|reply
Are there any similar apps which store the data locally?
[+] [-] rezz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pottspotts|7 years ago|reply
The hard part for me is mindset and willpower. Unfortunately, knowing the physics* behind weight loss doesn't make it any easier, and perhaps might make it more stressful. Why can't I do this simple thing that logically is as complex as 2+2. Our minds have their own prerogatives.
I wonder then what did you tell yourself? How many times did you have a bad day? What was your mood like throughout? I'd love to know so much more about the psychology. Great article though and thanks again for sharing!
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuIlsN32WaE
[+] [-] AnIdiotOnTheNet|7 years ago|reply
I envy people who don't know what it is like to feel compelled to gorge themselves. It's an unstoppable force sometimes. You'd be amazed at what your mind will do to make you ingest more calories.
And then you get on the internet and, in addition to all the "it's really simple, just eat fewer calories" idiots, there's a thousand know-it-all fucks trying to tell you that if you just follow their fad diet you'll never feel hungry again and your dick will grow three sizes and you'll win the lottery.
[+] [-] jsty|7 years ago|reply
At the end of the day, if you're hating every minute of it, there's very little likelihood you'll keep with your programme. So do whatever you need to do in order that you enjoy yourself whilst doing it, and results will follow :)
[+] [-] dahart|7 years ago|reply
Exactly right. Losing weight by counting calories is an almost entirely mental activity, not physical. We have a physiology that wants food and abhors not eating enough.
> I wonder then what did you tell yourself?
Like the author, I discovered counting calories a couple of years ago, after trying and failing to lose weight through exercise for 20 years.
I do have some mental tricks that worked for me.
Number one: the reason I got overweight is because I’m mis-calibrated. When I feel full, it’s because I already ate too much. What I need to do is re-calibrate to understand what “enough” is. By assigning a negative judgement to feeling full, and seeking the feeling of enough, it helps remove the idea that I just need willpower to overcome any hunger. A little bit of hunger (but not a lot) is a good thing, so I want to stay there.
Number two: I set my calorie budget to my future weight, not my current weight with minus a thousand. This is a “set it and forget it” plan. I want to calibrate my normal eating for the rest of my life, not diet for a month or two and then regress. I also don’t want to make adjustments when I’m done, I want to act like I’m already done. If I want to be 180lbs, and I should be eating 2k calories when I’m 180lbs, then I just start doing that and my weight will trend toward 180lbs. This takes longer than having a larger deficit, but mentally I don’t need to care how long it takes. I spent decades overweight despite trying, a couple extra months losing weight more slowly is nothing, it’s way ahead of where I was before.
Third, I also save some budget in my day for a treat at the end of the day. It leaves me just a tiny bit hungrier, but then when I get my treat it feels like I’m splurging.
Fourth, I still exercise. To lose weight fast I don’t count my exercise as calories burned. In maintenance mode, I use my exercise as a way to earn more calories. Now I’m actually going to the gym not to lose weight, but so I can eat more!
I had days where I went over, but I didn’t really have “bad” days or bad moods, it was never severe. It was more like go to a party when I’m not counting, and whoops, I’m 400 calories over my budget.
The hardest part about counting calories is the first few days. That’s when hunger is worst. After the first week, my body adjusts and my appetite goes down.
[+] [-] toyg|7 years ago|reply
I had my “come to Jesus” moment about 3 months ago, at the green age of 39. I’ve since lost 10kg (1.5st or 22lb) and counting.
I am never hungry, I removed all starches and cheese from my diet and the stomach is now silent 100% of the time. I still have the occasional “fuck it, the world hates me, I want a pizza so bad”, but I learnt to manage it: when I feel angry or bored (my triggers), I get my mind busy with something else, anything really (from sudoku to programming, going for a walk with a podcast, or painting miniatures). After a few minutes the impulse is gone. I cheat once or twice a day, in small quantities and in a controlled fashion: knowing the worst time is right after a cheat, I make sure to be very busy and plan follow-up snacks with nuts, to slowly ease off the starch-induced crave.
Another trick is to metabolise the concept that the corporate world tries really really hard to sell you food; when you really start to see that it’s all a way to screw you out of your money, it gets easier to say “no thanks”.
[+] [-] proussea|7 years ago|reply
First it was to not enter in a willpower fight. I did accept that I will fail, and I did fail many times (sorry did not count, often in the beginning and I was still failing from time to time until the end). But every time i failed, instead of giving up i was telling to myself "ok you failed, but it worked for X days, you trained your body to eat less, let's start again, it will be more easy this time." And it was true. With time your body require less food to fill "full" even when you fail.
Also a lot of ppl here are talking about fasting. I'm not sure about it at all. Your brain may try to prevent the next "fasting time" and may try to trick you to eat more. I would advise to eat at very regular times so your brain "knows" when you will eat (for me: 6:00/12:00/19:00 +/-30mins). Take time to eat, move in another place, etc ... so you appreciate it more.
I liked the cheat days principle because it gives you short term goals, and it helps to keep some pleasure eating food. It also helps to not bring your diet with you when you go to lunch with friends/family. I also noticed that with time I was cheating less during these days.
Preparing food for myself also saved money, sometimes it helped for motivation.
[+] [-] quakenul|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonbel|7 years ago|reply
I don't really think this is consistent. Basically yes if you eat less calories than are used you must lose weight, but the ease of doing this depends on what you are eating.
[+] [-] bognition|7 years ago|reply
I know you can use a food scale to get a more accurate estimate of calories in but I'm still at a loss to determine an accurate estimate of calories out.
[+] [-] k__|7 years ago|reply
The devil is in the details.
Sure the rule is simple: Calories in == Calories out
But you need to find out rather exactly how much you really burn, it's often less than you think.
And then you have to eat stuff that doesn't fill your daily calories with one meal, or else you will crave more later that day.
[+] [-] phkahler|7 years ago|reply
I tried that too. Lost 7lbs in 7 days and then a few more. I regularly skip breakfast, but to really make it work skipping lunch and keeping eating to a 4-hour window was really effective. I need to do some more of that. And it does reduce your appetite after a few days.
[+] [-] mstaoru|7 years ago|reply
Also, of course, even a modest amount of exercise will kick off metabolic processes that speed up weight loss, not mentioning that increasing muscle mass will naturally increase the basal metabolic rate. Weight lifting routines like 5x5 or Greyskull LP can be squeezed into 20-30 minutes every other day, and provide lasting benefits almost immediately.
[+] [-] wukerplank|7 years ago|reply
and
> I never understood how simple it was before starting this.
Sounds so trivial, but sadly true for a lot of things in life. You read and hear something multiple times, but you have to make the experience yourself to get your eyes opened.
[+] [-] notheguyouthink|7 years ago|reply
Also, eating.. pickiness too. I don't mind leftovers, hell I don't even mind eating the same thing for a week, two, etc. She hates leftovers and always wants freshly cooked. Also rotating food types, as it can't be too similar to what she ate recently.
All combined it means that finding hearty meals (and now keto for us) are more effort for her than for someone like me. To no surprise, I have no weight to lose (I need to workout to even maintain weight), but it really frustrates her at how different our bodies are.
She considers her food habits to be an "addiction" in large part due to how different her and my reactions are to food. Her struggles are far more than mine on this front.
[+] [-] hrktb|7 years ago|reply
It's often not that trivial, nor true. There's a ton of litterature on the subject, here is an articla I like:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/28/why-t...
A good quote:
> The much bigger mistake Wishnofsky made was misunderstanding how our bodies react to weight loss. As soon as we start cutting calories from our diet, the number of calories our body expends begins to fall. "It literally starts happening on the first day," said Hall. "And it continues to mount as you lose weight."
> The reason Wishnofsky, and so many others since, have botched this biological fact is that it's fairly counterintuitive
Basically our bodies are not simple in any way, in particular when it comes to how it handles energy, which is core to our survival. There is a good amount of survivor bias in all the "that's how I lost weight" tales floating around.
[+] [-] toomanybeersies|7 years ago|reply
We've finally, as a general society, grown out of telling people with clinical depression to just cheer up.
Yet we tell obese people to "just eat less". I think most obese people realise that if they want to lose weight they need to eat less.
[+] [-] Delmania|7 years ago|reply
>There’s a lot of “science” that say low insulin levels in the fasted state lead to more fat burning.
That "science" he smirks at is the research primarily of Dr. Jason Fung, who specializes in diabetes and obesity. He wrote a book called the obesity code that advocates for intermittent fasting. I think I'll take the word of a man who has spent hours researching and analyzing over the snarky comments of some software engineer.
Some more examples: > If you’re in a caloric deficit this will happen anyways.
That's not true. I could eat a reduced caloric deficit of bread every day and still not burn fat. The basis of intermittent fasting and the ketogenic diet is to force your body to break fat for energy as opposed to carbs. They take different approaches, but the end result is the same - to lower the amount of insulin. Keto is bit more restrictive in food because so much of the carbs in out food is sugar.
So, why did achieve results? Easy:
> I naturally started eating healthy foods because I could eat more of them. If you eat a chocolate bar, you will still be hungry. For the same amount of calories, you could eat a few bowls of vegetables and be full. That said, the best part about this overall approach is that you can still eat whatever you want – just count the calories.
There's a wide difference between how your body reacts to 100 calories of chocolate bars (sugar) and 100 calories of broccoli (fiber).
This is more junk science and using anecdotal data as opposed to research and science. If you want to lose weight, what you eat is just as important as how much you eat. End of story; caloric restriction alone isn't enough. However, this article is also incredibly short sighted. Losing weight is very much like getting married. People focus on the event and not the afterwards. You can't modify your diet, hit your target weight, and then stop. You need to keep going; fighting obesity is life long battle. I believe the majority of people who lose weight will regain that weight within 7 years. There's horror stories from the biggest loser.
My story, by the way, is that when I got married, I was 280 lbs. One night, I remember coming home from my in-laws house and deciding I was tired of being fat. I changed my diet. I cut out chips and soda at lunch and put in carrots and water. I stopped eating white bread and pasta in favor of whole grain foods. I cut the number of nights I had dessert to 1 to 2 a week. I picked up regular exercise. I tracked and measured my food. It worked. At my lowest, I was ~170 lbs. It's gone back up to 203 right now, but that's because I'm currently focusing on strength training. I will say that eating less is not enough. You have to pick the right food. As a friend of mine once wisely said, you simply cannot outwork a crappy diet.
[+] [-] tim333|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzahola|7 years ago|reply
"You can't tell people anything" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17384703
[+] [-] saiya-jin|7 years ago|reply
Yet somehow, billions failed, fail and will fail spectacularly.
[+] [-] jokoon|7 years ago|reply
Controlling your diet seems like the easy way, and I don't think it's really healthy because you will lack energy, and it's easy to slip.
You should already stop drinking sodas and eating unnecessary snacks, but I'll never believe that it's the only thing you can do.
Remember that exercise gets easier over time, so just hang in there and take the pain. Sweating is good, all your body will be restarting if you exercise. All existing biology reacts to simulation, and dies if it stops moving. Just imagine your cells getting reorganized, cheese particles bring breathed out, and toxins getting filtered out.
Exercise will counter the problems created by bad diets but not only vascular. It will rebalance a lot of things. You will also sleep better.
There is truth in people living longer because they keep asking their body for more even when they age. All life forms thrived around biological movement. Sedentary lifestyle is the antithesis of living.
[+] [-] seshagiric|7 years ago|reply
a. remove sugar from all diet including coffee etc.
b. double protein intake and halve carbs. One way to do is make your dinners protein only. Find Greek yogurt with low sugar content (or its easy to make at home too). This is especially important if you are above 35.
c. Read about the difference between fat and carbs. Till the time you reach target weight, eat carbs as little as possible.
d. If exercising try things like HIIT or weights that make you 'exert' yourself. Even if its just 5 minutes per day.
Regarding motivation to avoid over eating, make sure your diets includes periodic snacks. There are lot of benefits of eating frequent but light meals (trail mixes with nuts, boiled eggs, green tea, fruits are good examples). Trail mixes with little bit of sugar are ok as they help stop the sugar craving if you have one.
[+] [-] hazz99|7 years ago|reply
Can I also compliment the site design? It's very clean, and presented the information well.
[+] [-] masklinn|7 years ago|reply
Commonly there's a sharp initial weight loss due to "water weight" loss: changing to a diet with lower sugars (simple sugar and carbs) and salt leads to retaining less water, which in turn yields a sharp initial weight loss. That doesn't keep going.
However as the essay notes you have to either keep cutting calories and/or start exercising[0]: as weight drops so will BMR, carrying less weight means making less effort (for the same result) and fatty tissues are still living tissue so they do burn some energy. And since "weight change" is a factor of calorie intake / metabolic rate, if BMR drops you have to drop calorie intake for it to remain below BMR (and sustain a ratio < 1).
In the Data chart you can see that TFA's calorie intake drops by ~500 after the initial cut. They do note this issue in the conclusion, and that they attempted the exercise route but didn't care for it so stopped after 3 months.
[0] sustained exercise builds up muscle mass, and muscle increases BMR counteracting the BMR drop from the diet
[+] [-] fabricexpert|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tallanvor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] organsnyder|7 years ago|reply
I think that this is due to people not modifying behavior as they lose weight. A person weighing 250 lbs has a higher BMR than when they weigh 200 lbs. So if you lose weight and don't adjust your daily calorie goal, you're no longer eating as far under your BMR as you used to.
[+] [-] pottspotts|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nigelk|7 years ago|reply
Here's what worked for me:
[+] [-] fbnlsr|7 years ago|reply
Two years ago, I had a minor motorcycle crash, and at the hospital the doctor was scared about my heart rate. It was fast and it was loud, around 100 bpm at rest. I always had a heart with a fast beat so I didn't really care about it. Then, my son was born. At that moment I decided that I needed to take care of myself and started going to the gym. Alas, being a new parent takes a lot of time and energy, and I had to cancel my membership last year.
So I've been experimenting with intermittent fasting since then, and it's been the best thing I've done in a long time.
I started doing the usual "16/8", that is fast for 16 hours and eat during the following 8 hours window. Basically it meant skipping breakfast and having lunch at around 1pm, which is extremely easy to do.
The past two months, I cranked the notch a bit and I've been doing OMAD (One Meal A Day). I eat from 7pm to 9pm and the rest of the time I only drink water or black coffee. It just changed my life.
In the past two months I've lost 9kg, so now I'm at 73kg, and I've never felt so good in my life.
My mind feels sharper throughout the day, and I've developed a completely different relationship with food. I now consider it to be fuel, and I've started thinking about the quality of fuel I'm putting in my body. So now I cook and I try to chose good meat and vegetables, and I'm trying to cut on sugar and pasta. I still eat lunch sometimes (when I'm visiting my parents or I'm having lunch with a client) but I don't really care as I know that my weight is going to regulate itself in the few following days.
And my heart rate is now normal. At rest, it's beating at around 65 bpm.
If anyone's interested, I highly recommend watching Jason Fung on Youtube. His talks about fasting have been an eye opener for me. His approach on obesity through hormonal regulation is amazing.
[+] [-] Mashimo|7 years ago|reply
For a few seconds I was confused as to how much running 30 meters would help :D But I guess he means 30 minutes.
[+] [-] bluedino|7 years ago|reply
Not that it isn't that simple, because it is. But, because for most people who are 100lbs overweight, they have a very unhealthy relationship with food. They stress eat, binge eat, binge drink, purge...
I guess it's kind of like the people who can just all of a sudden quit smoking, cold-turkey one day. Maybe they weren't addicted to nicotine in the first place?
[+] [-] Bedon292|7 years ago|reply
Of course its always hard, half the time I eat at the salad bar at work, and I may not be able to estimate the amounts right. I always worry about underestimating how much I ate. I have even considered eating pre-packaged meals, but those always leave me hungry, and seem like a less healthy sodium filled alternative.
Not sure what my point is, but I guess I am wondering if anyone has managed to keep themselves motivated after years of failing to stay motivated? And if so, how?
[+] [-] weliketocode|7 years ago|reply
The guy refused to eat at dinner because he gets his energy from the sun using photosynthesis.
As laughable as it sounds, it's not out-of-line compared to all the dietary marketing myths and superstitions that somehow persist.
[+] [-] yoda_sl|7 years ago|reply
I did join a gym, and this weekend decided to get a personal trainer for a couple months to be sure that I build some muscle mass too: my core is definitely weak, and gaining some muscle will not hurt to strengthen my body: had a few injuries (ankle/knee) where having muscles will probably avoid it.
So far on track, with almost 20 pounds lost (19.4 as of yesterday), and going to the gym 4 to 5 times a week 45 minutes to 1 hour at a time...
[+] [-] notacoward|7 years ago|reply
Something vaguely similar to what I do might work for a lot of people, but the devil's in the details. My specific formula won't work for you. Experiment and find your own. The best thing about the recent IF/TRF/OMAD/whatever fad is not that it provides a specific blueprint but that it encourages people to experiment with different variations to find their own balance points.
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|7 years ago|reply
This stuff is hard because we people are not very rational. So, here's a few simple practical things.
- Get a scale, put it in your bathroom, and use it as often as you can. Step 0 is simply knowing how you are doing. I know down to a few hundred grams what I weigh most of the time and I've learned the impact of my behavior on the scale. A big dinner, excessive drinking, etc. has a measurable impact that peters out over several days before I'm back to "normal". Simply knowing, has a moderating effect on what I do.
- Make changes in your behavior that you can turn into habits. Starving yourself definitely works short term but you'll bounce right back as soon as you resume your old habits. Kind of pointless. Regular fasting is great though because it becomes a habit and you don't have to take decisions.
- Try not to set your self up for being tempted to eat too much. In my case, going shopping after work when I'm tired and hungry leads to predictably bad decision making. Make sure you eat before you shop.
- Be honest about alcohol. I actually quit drinking completely for a while. Turns out that going for after work beers multiple times per week has a insanely huge caloric impact. I identified it as the single biggest thing that was impacting my weight and duly eliminated it for two years. These days I drink but much less than I used to. In my case I found it easier to not drink than to drink a little. One of the side-effects of alcohol is bad decision making. 1 Beer always leads to more beers. If this is hard for you, that's a good sign of being addicted. All the more reason to try to change things.
[+] [-] dalbasal|7 years ago|reply
"The only thing you really need to know is that you should be eating fewer calories than your body burns everyday. If you do this, you will lose weight – it’s science. Nothing else matters for weight loss"
This may be one of the most harmful statements about diet. It's mostly true, but in a fairly banal sense. A baby will have a caloric surpluss as it grow. So will a potato. Without the calories, growth will stunt. This is the trivial fact.
The growth trajectory of a potato or baby is not trivially determined by caloric surplusses. One big factor is genetics, which tell babies and potatoes to grow. There are environmental factors, many of which are calorie related.
"This is a scientific fact" is in the context it's used, an empty tautology. Caloric surplusses can be used in exactly the same way to "explain" why an elephant is bigger than a mouse, why there are 6 billion people on the planet, how a bodybuilder got his biceps or why you got fat. This makes it a nonexplanation.
A less abstract hint that we're dealing with a nonexplanation is apples. Add one apple a day to your diet, and calorie counting will tell you that amounts to 5kg fat per year.
We know from experience that people do not gain/lose 10 lbs per year by adding an apple a day to their diet. Your apetite or metabolism (these are related) will compensate for the apple.
That doesn't mean that intentional caloric restriction isn't a good method. It works well for some. Other things work well for others. We don't have perfect knowledge about what works "in the wild" or even in the lab.
[+] [-] mlrtime|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thomasfedb|7 years ago|reply
The human body has an amazing set of machinery that's dedicated to making you eat when your metabolism needs certain kinds of materials and would rather not break down tissue to get them.