You're not wrong because it's about calorie deficit of which exercise can help you achieve. Also since the way fat gets "burned" for weight loss is by exhaling carbon atoms, aerobic exercise can assist with this process.
I think you know the answer to that question, but are trying to make a point, which is IMO very valid. I don't care if you call it genetics or luck or just who you are, but people have different bodies and tend to default to different sizes. This idea of "one diet fits all" does not work. You need to do what is and feels right to your body.
This is just not true; people are different, but we're not generally that different from one another. It's vastly more likely that an underweight person isn't eating enough than it is they're genetically predisposed to being underweight.
I think that if you're going to make such a strong statement you should back it up with data. Are you really convinced there is some misterious thing at play that keeps your weight down? Then actually record everything you eat in a week and what physical activity you do and see if your perception matches reality
Let's go with the standard 3,500 calories to gain a pound of weight. Let us suppose that an individual's ability to accurately gauge daily caloric consumption is off by a mere fifty calories. Now, for a 2,000 calorie per diemm budget, that is a mere 2.5% error rate. Rather trivial, sounds like. But over a year, that adds up to a little over five pounds.
Not even half a can of soda off and you gain five pounds a year, or fifty in a decade. The math matters, but does does the calibration and the ability to accurately estimate consumption. Even a tiny error amount means long-term weight gain. It's pretty easy to be glib about it.
A fidgeter, someone who wiggles, bounces their feet, etc., can burn perhaps three hundred extra calories per day. You can also see how that adds up.
Metabolic rate isn't the same for everyone. I also can eat in large amounts and not get fat.
Also don't think that because you are not getting fat that your body is in a healthy state.
You can be really skinny yet get insulin resistance, as I did.
Because you're not eating enough? You can eat only McDonalds and still lose weight if you're eating below your daily resting calories. Your body composition will probably change for the worse though.
Likewise the person who struggles to lose weight with diet and exercise is very likely eating more than they think they're eating (or opting for healthy options that aren't actually healthy, like salad covered in 600 calories of ranch dressing)
I don’t think you realise how calories can sip in unnoticed and calorie burning as well.
So, I’m fat. All my life I’ve been yoyo-ing in terms of weight. Sometimes methodically sometimes by the ear.
A few years back, I went from 130kg to 85kg methodically. Calorie counting, watching macros, targeted exercises, all the good stuff.
What I found out was, if I didn’t diet and just logged my calories, I was consuming 4000 sometimes even 5000 calories per day easily. And it didn’t feel like I was eating much.
Full English for breakfast, that’s about 1k right there. One or two lates, another 300-400 calories. Maybe pair that with a little pastry, another 300 on top of that. Lunch, burger and fries, big coke to drink, toss in another k. After work a couple of pins with the lads, another 300-400. Get back, have dinner, maybe snack something while falling asleep to Netflix, another 1k easy. Don’t get me started on getting pissed with 7-8 pints and then devouring 3 big macs like it’s nothing.
I also found out I’m burning far more calories then I was expecting for my sedentary lifestyle. Just the walk to work, climbing some stairs, moving around the office, going to lunch, doing some house chores put me in close to 1k burned. Without feeling like I was making any effort.
In my case, 4k input with 1k output still yields 3k which is 1k over what I should have.
It is very possible in your case your input is 3k, your output 1k so your staying exactly as you are.
Count your calories, wear a apple watch and you’ll find out precisely.
That was my whole point... the calories you eat is the main factor... but even if you are thin, you have to watch other things like cholesterol, vitamins, etc...
I've always been slightly below average weight my entire life (late 30s now), and it's a bit of a struggle to maintain that weight. I typically eat a little extra each day, not because I'm particularly hungry or interested in eating, just because I don't want to fall underweight.
I've counted calories closely before and it's not black magic at work, I just don't eat enough. It feels like I eat a lot (probably because it's mostly food I cook myself and not calorie dense fast food) and I feel full, but the calories don't lie.
I'm guessing it's the reverse for people struggling to lose weight. I feel full and comfortable 200 calories below the daily recommended amount, and they likely feel that same way 200 calories above. I easily fall underweight if I stop paying attention to my diet, and they likely become overweight when they do the same and listen to their body.
It actually does go both ways; while overweight people who struggle to lose weight are undercounting their calories, you're likely overcounting your calories.
Yes, but the most calories consuming activity we do is just living.
Your body spends calories to digest food and get more calories. Your brain needs around 400 daily calories. If you want to burn 400 calories doing some cardio, you'll need an intensive 30 min session or so.
If you don't fix your eating, the effort you'll have to put into exercising will be huge, sometimes even unachievable.
Yes but then you have to keep exercising for the rest of your life. When something happens (e.g. you are busy in job or you get injured) you no longer can exercise as much as you need so you start gaining weight.
Fundamentally using exercise to lose weight is long-term unachievable because it is unpredictable. Losing weight via diet is much simpler you just eat less, there isn't anything that would objectively stop you from following diet, where as simple incident or scheduling issue can prevent you from exercise. Exercise is fundamentally wrong tool for managing weight.
Exercise is for building muscles, diet is for managing weight.
I can’t agree with this enough. From 2000-2012, I was a part time fitness instructor and I did heavy cardio at least 10 hours a week without fail. I also trained for half marathons later on. I was easily burning 3000-5000 calories a week and I could eat anything and not gain weight.
As soon as I stopped, my weight ballooned. Even when I started eating less, I still can’t get my eating habits in sync with my reduced (3-5 hours a week) exercise schedule. I’ve been consistency about 15-20 pounds over my personal ideal weight.
Besides, my body can’t handle the type and frequency of exercise that it could in my mid 20s to mid 30s.
I think the confusion here is understanding that my point was exercise is to assist with weight loss and not be the primary thing to induce weight loss. If you use it as the primary tool for your weight loss you will fall into the trap that you did anything that disrupts your exercise causes your weight loss to reverse.
If instead you used diet as the primary tool and exercise has the supplement when the supplement falls away it's easier to adjust the diet to compensate. For example a moderate exercise of 30 minutes or so a day can burn an additional 200 calories a day that's 10% of a 2000 calorie diet. If you're in a situation where you cannot exercise cutting out an additional 200 calories is a relatively small amount of food.
Humans are very good at throwing everything into one bag and expecting it to remain forever. Your example of your high amount of exercise to induce weight loss is an example of this. It works but it's also very short-term because it cannot be maintained. I almost like him this to exotic dancers as a profession. It is a good way for a relatively low skill person to achieve a high amount of money in the short term. For example they could go to college and pay for it in cash. But often times the returns are so great it's a difficult to see that this cannot last forever. But as with the body cannot exercise at a high level for ever exotic dancers cannot remain profitable forever. This is why these are tools to allow a short-term process to evolve into a long-term sustainable game. Earn a large amounts of cash when you're young and viable to invest in a education with a future payoff or invest in another long-term payoff. Exercise to supplement your dieting, but the main goal should be evolving your diet to adjust to your caloric needs because that is the long-term.
Saying exercise can help you reach your calorie deficit is fairly misleading. Yes, exercise burns calories, but even a hard workout is a small part of your daily calories spent at best.
25-30 minute jog is about 200 calories buried. That can amount to 7-12% increase depending your body size. This is not small or insignificant amount especially for the amount of input work done.
Small boosts add up to big changes. It's always still about deficit.
it's four oreos. or two slices of cheese. 200 calories a day is significant long-term, but it's also trivially easy to eat that much without even thinking about it.
And if you do find yourself in circumstances where you're burning a significant enough amount of calories on a daily basis (say, a highschool water polo player treading water for 3 hours a day, working out to somewhere between 1000-2000 calories), then it just builds bad eating habits, because you get used to eating too much.
The only real long-term solution to weight management is not wanting to eat too much. Willpower controlled diets work on the short term, which might be fine if an individual's level of desired consumption is sufficiently close to their daily caloric needs, but are doomed in the long term.
Exercise may not actually help achieve calorie deficit, based on some relatively new research saying that when you exercise, your body compensates by burning fewer calories in other areas, like your lungs and your brain. [0]
this is another one of those things that's true in a sort of broad sense, but factually incorrect. exercise burns calories, and burning calories makes you lose fat - that's just basic math.
but exercise makes you hungry, and to the article's main point: people are terrible at estimating calories. a one-hour easy run, a two-hour bike ride, or a full day of alpine skiing burns what's basically an irrelevant amount of calories. if you're taking in any extra amount of calories, normal amounts of exercise doesn't help you lose weight.
It's not just that exercise makes you hungry, it's also that deliberate cardio exercise can lead to you unconsciously moving less throughout the day, therefore reducing your total daily expenditure, in effect cancelling the whole effect of the exercise. E.g. If someone were to run a marathon, especially if they're untrained, they would be too tired to do anything else during that day (I imagine).
You can theoretically try to counter this by also using a step counter to make sure you keep moving throughout the day, but at some point you might be too exhausted for even that to help.
That said, most people don't move or exercise nearly enough, not for weight loss nor for general health, so for most people's situation you're probably right, adding some exercise is a net benefit. It's still much easier and faster (and more important in the long run) to control caloric intake.
This seems like a good primer on how to look at food differently. The problem with diets is that people relapse due to the fact that dieting is done through force of will and willpower is limited. For long lasting change, you need to reshape your relationship with food and be content with what and how you eat. Understanding some of the things in this article can be a good place to start.
its exhausting to do that. Im switching my diet up a little to bit to reduce cholesterol and some liver enzyme thing lately and Im starting to get tired of thinking so much before every meal and shopping trip. wish it was easier to not fall in to unhealthy traps. so many labels, and so much meal planning.
What worked for me was starting simply. I started with one meal that I got really good at making, and then introduced another (and when I make it I make plenty extra to cover later laziness). I know roughly how many calories it is, so I barely have to think about anymore.
>I know roughly how many calories it is, so I barely have to think about anymore.
This is key for me. My wife loves variety and so she struggles with counting calories.
I prefer simple and known-to-be-delicious, and so I know about how much each of my meals is going to affect me. I came to hate calorie counting pretty quickly, and with that I came to hate eating out, because it's the hardest to count. And I'm not yet convinced that I've ever actually counted enough calories for any meal when eating out. There's so much self-deception involved, both my own and the people who are supposedly reporting the calories, both officially and unofficially.
>My wife loves variety and so she struggles with counting calories. //
I can't be bothered with all that, intermediate fasting (ie having a limited window of time in which you allow yourself to eat) seems to be a great workaround that leads to calorie restriction with less of the fuss.
IME, the trick to healthy long-term eating is to mix and match from a common palette of healthy foods/meals you enjoy.
After a few months, you’ll know the macros in everything without having to check labels, and the shopping/meal prep becomes easy because you know the right ratios of the things you buy and you’ve cooked them many times before. If a reframing might help, consider it an investment in yourself that pays off for life.
If you have had the luxury to learn to cook with simple ingredients, you'd not need to read labels.
Here's a shopping list for three meals, see if you can guess what they are?
1 kg apples,
1 kg other fruit in season,
White unsweetened yogurt,
Unsweetened granola,
Garlic,
1 can diced tomato (no salt, no sweetener, just tomatoes),
1 onion,
Olive oil,
150 gr dry pasta (bonus points for "integral pasta" -- don't know the translation, "pasta integrale" in Italian),
Baby spinach leaves,
Cherry tomatoes,
Risotto rice,
White wine,
Broth in powder,
Butter
The last step of cooking risotto is to add an acorn sized bit of butter. It helps the gloss and texture. Good (for you) food needs to be good for your eyes and tongue too!
For protein, tomorrow buy a can of chickpeas, one of tomatoes, some spices and some basmati and make "chana masala".
I've hit this before as well, and have come to the conclusion that, at least for me, detailed meal planning is not sustainable in the long run.
This is one reason why I think that dieting advice that is simple and straightforward has the most success. Some examples:
1. Cut out all sugar-sweetened beverages. This is a pretty easy rule to follow, and even if you find yourself missing a soda or something, my recommendation is to buy something like unsweetened iced tea and then add a couple sugar cubes - you'll be likely to add much less sugar than if you buy sweetened tea.
2. Cut out any refined carbohydrates. This was certainly harder for me, but since the rule is so simple and easy to follow, whenever I got hungry for carbs I had to make due with fruits or vegetables, so I ended up eating a lot fewer calories in any case, got more of other nutrients, and eventually just got "bored" with trying to find a snack and stopped eating until my next mealtime.
carbs is actually where im struggling the most. I defaulted to just making sides of white rice with everything for so long. I at least switched to brown rice, quinoa and couscous to make it a little easier but learning new sides to go with proteins is tedious. I struggle with feeling full too.
This is just what worked for me, but if you're struggling with feeling full, don't cut out starchy vegetables: potatoes, sweet potatoes, and legumes (things like lentils, black or pinto beans, butter beans, peas, etc.) satisfied my carb cravings, and I found I was still eating fewer calories because those carbs are much less "snackable", and they have a ton more fiber. That is, it's trivially easy to snack on chips, pretzels, cereal or bread, but I'm not just going to grab a sweet potato and start chomping.
Modern food is kinda weird in how high-energy and very energy-dense food is the default and cheap, and it somehow is more expensive to buy less calories.
A reservoir of easy to store for long periods of time food source is a national security issue for every state, so it tends to be subsidized everywhere.
Stable foods can be shipped and stored more cheaply.
This coupled with the native desire for salty/sweet/fat puts the modern human at a terrible disadvantage in our current environment.
I noticed that when Im not working out I have poor food choices and when I eat like crap I avoid training or it’s a lot more unpleasant than it should be.
Also training results in physiological changes that help losing fat and be generally healthy. Just make sure you’re not losing too much muscle size with the fat.
Yeah for this reason a mix of cardio and weight training is essential. Or at least time your runs. When I eat poorly I can still do my usual 5K with no trouble, and I often don’t even feel any slower, but the timer doesn’t lie…
Ego depletion (limited willpower) turns out not to be true [0]. It could not be replicated and is no longer considered how willpower works.
> Results from the current multilab registered replication of the ego-depletion effect provide evidence that, if there is any effect, it is close to zero. [1]
> Taken all together, experiments conducted at 24 different labs showed no signs whatsoever of Baumeister and Tice’s original effect. [2]
It's a really interesting result because the concept of limited willpower - over extended periods of time (years) - fits my lived experience very well.
Someone finally wrote this article. So refreshing. It's obvious when you live with a fat person why they have trouble losing weight, even when they're on a diet: they're usually not actually following it. Whether they don't understand portion sizes for calorie math, or look at calories at all, or eat things that they say "do not count", there is almost always a failure to understand what and how much they are eating.
Went from 230 to ~155 without exercise by calorie restriction alone (600-1200cal/day). It IS possible, though likely unhealthy to accomplish without exercise (I never, ask they say, consulted a doctor prior to the self-imposed restriction).
Exercise was uncomfortable until I had lost weight, now I can do 15+ mile hikes with a 60l backpack.
I don't want to discourage anyone from doing exercise at any time in their goal for weight loss, but it is possible to lose weight by calorie restriction alone.
> Exercise was uncomfortable until I had lost weight, now I can do 15+ mile hikes with a 60l backpack.
A simple walk on an incline (5km/hr @ 5% incline) can help you burn 400+kcals/hour. You can probably eat at 1500 kcals and start your day with a walk like that on the treadmill while watching some TV show :).
> .. but it is possible to lose weight by calorie restriction alone.
Indeed it is! :)
If you're obese or severely overweight, it's best to just do a PSMF to lose weight as quickly as possible. Btw, at 230lbs you can easily do strength training which will help you with body recomp (stimulating muscle growth while burning fat).
A good rule of thumb for a PSMF is 9.7x[protein intake]. For example: given 1.6g/kg*104kg = 166g of protein per day we get: 166g * 9.7 kcal/g = 1610 kcal. So your daily calories are at 1610 kcal max, and you need to eat at least 166g of protein (the rest of the calories can be filled with carbs/fat). I suggest min 50g of fat per day for men.
Walking is the most under rated weight loss activity. People don't understand how many calories walking on an incline on a treadmill will shred if you are obese. When I was 220 pounds, walking at 10% incline at 2.6mph was 770 calories an hour. It is actually hard to eat at a calorie surplus when you are burning that many calories a day.
If you want to lose weight you need to do one of the following
Be hungry,
Be in pain from exercise (running),
or sacrifice all your free time to low intensity exercise
I chose option 3 along with weight lifting and I don't regret it.
Walking also has this really cool effect of not increasing ghrelin unlike high intensity cardio
> To lose weight you have to do a lot more exercise than you think consistently. And you have to eat a lot less than you think.
Exercise doesn't help very much, it's really all about diet. Plus if you are exercising a lot, you'll feel hungier and it'll be harder mentally to not eat more to compensate.
I lost 60lbs in about a year almost exclusively based around a large amount of exercise.
My diet was bad and I was eating far above 2000kcal on many days. I just exercised a lot. 1h of fairly intense cardio at least 6 days a week, though I would always round up to the next 10 min mark and do more like 70 or 80 min per day.
Some days I would order pizza or something and some dessert in the evening when I knew this would push me into the 3000kcal range and in return did 2h or 3h exercise routines fairly regularly, often times while eating the pizza.
Depending on your weight, an hour of cardio is only 500 or so calories. Last night I showed my wife a hand with 5 Brazil nuts. That’s equivalent to a one mile run at my weight.
Obviously different things work for different people, but no amount of cardio is going to offset a terrible diet for most people. Caloric deficit and intermittent fasting combined with exercise is the easiest and fastest way (imho) to get your body to start metabolizing fat stores.
> Depending on your weight, an hour of cardio is only 500 or so calories.
That's a massive number of calories! Might not look like much compared to how much is in, say, a bagel, but use a calculator to figure out what your basal metabolic rate is (what your body consumes just you doing nothing, sort of) and you'll find that extra 500 gives you a ton of headroom in whatever your diet is. A week and a half of that would be a solid pound on it's own (yes yes a pound is less calories than 500x10.5, but weight loss is not 1:1 like that for many reasons).
Are you at all worried that your eating habits/patterns haven't changed and you are compensating with lots of exercise? It seems to work great for weight loss but at some point you will plateau and maintanance seems difficult that way?
Exercise is tricky. If you do no exercise at all, you get really sluggish and tired all the time as your metabolism slows down, which then requires further caloric restriction. This works (especially, it seems, in a time/place that feels like winter, as the cold and darkness coupled with the lethargy seems like it maybe downregulates hunger), but it's really hard because now you have to barely eat at all.
If you exercise a bunch, you burn energy exercising and you also upregulate your metabolism significantly, giving you a higher calorie budget -- but you also really, really heavily upregulate hunger. If you exercise enough that the calories burn "matter", you're likely to feel the need to eat way way way too much.
Doing "just enough" exercise that you don't become sluggish and lethargic is probably the right place to be purely from a weight-loss perspective.
But in my experience, the hard part about losing weight isn't really anything other than "the amount I have to eat to not feel miserable all the time is too much"
Diets do work, in that if you want few enough calories, you will lose weight. They "don't work" because asking someone to spend months or years continually in escalating misery generally eventually results in noncompliance -- and if your body tells you that it wants 2500 calories per day and you go on an 1500 calorie diet to create a 500-calorie actual deficit to lose about 0.8-1.0lb/week, you're go to feel really really hungry 24 hours a day.
Some folks report that if they force themselves to eat less after a month or two, their sense of hunger downregulates and it gets easier. Other folks report that hunger remains a constant companion, never relenting until they broke.
I started intermittent fasting, basically eating nothing between dinner at 8PM and lunch the next day at 1PM. The most striking thing is that I eat much less for lunch than I usually do, I'm full very quickly. And the effect continues throughout the day (smaller dinners, less / no snacking)
Had to give up coffee in the mornings because of the milk I put in it and the fact I can't just have coffee on an empty stomach. I have 3-4 cups of tea and 1.5L of water before lunch. Makes me piss like a race horse and gives me an overall "clean" feeling with no real hunger feelings at all.
It's only been 2-3 weeks so too early to say if the diet's any good, but at least there's no hunger / misery / counting calories. Overall pretty easy.
During lockdown, I ended up adopting roughly that eating schedule unintentionally -- just because my routine didn't have a "breakfast" gap.
It did not work for me at all, I gained SO MUCH weight, because by lunchtime I was ravenous and couldn't stop myself from eating way, way, way more than I would have if I split between breakfast and lunch. I mean, it was also a stressful time, so it's hard to compare, but I put on 20 pounds in a few months, after having been stable weight for 5-6 years.
I started forcing myself to get up earlier and have a breakfast of around 350ish calories (basically a bowl of cereal or oatmeal or something with milk), and that allowed me to immediately stop the weight gain, because I removed probably 750+ calories of "excess" lunch in exchange. Still struggling to lose what I gained, but I've been stable for 18+ months since I made space for breakfast.
It's really interesting how individual some of this stuff ends up seeming. For example, I have learned that I can not be a stable weight (at any weight, it seems) if I drink sugared drinks with food. It seems that if I have a sugary drink with my food, I actually feel the urge to eat more food in addition to the calories in the drink, leading to a massive downward (well, upward in weight) spiral. I almost completely cut out sugary drinks from my life when I figured this out. (I now have maybe two or three sweet drinks per month on average. I haven't lost any weight this way, but I have regained stability).
I am a firm believer that the real solutions to the obesity epidemic are all going to be around helping people control their hunger sensation (be that with dietary changes, coaching and counselling, routine changes, chemistry or other medical intervention). Learning how much you should eat to be the weight you want to be isn't that hard. Spending about a third of your concentration power at all times to avoid the overpowering urge to raid the pantry, on the other hand, is really hard.
I'm glad you found something that works for you. I'm still working on finding it for myself, though I did manage to stop the bleeding at least.
If you're already overweight then exercise is important for reducing insulin resistance. Any resistance keeps ones insulin levels high, which is bad for many reasons, but also increases the feelings of hunger.
>Exercise doesn't help very much, it's really all about diet.
For me, exercise leads to me feeling pretty crappy if I eat badly/too much and drink alcohol. So the exercise leads to me not wanting to feel like that, which leads to improvement in diet.
> To lose weight you have to do a lot more exercise than you think consistently. And you have to eat a lot less than you think.
I think this is a misleading cliche. I seem to have a lost a significant amount of weight just from eating less, without exercise. Which makes sense.
It's amazing how many miles you'd have to run to burn the calories you get from a Big Mac. Basically, our food is super dense in calories, and our bodies are extremely efficient machines (meaning, they don't burn as many calories as you'd think when exercising). So, it should be much easier to lose weight by eating less than by exercising more.
> Most people just don't have that kind of willpower.
Most people aren't motivated enough. But "willpower" is a misleading and thus destructive way to describe motivation.
You increase motivation by thinking about whether the positive thing you want is "worth" whatever you're doing to get it. In other words, staying focused on the value. You don't increase motivation by "exerting willpower." That whole concept for motivation is a recipe for failure.
> It's more like they DO NOT want to believe how small portion sizes are required to consistently lose weight.
I found the same when I started counting calories. An extra slice of wholegrain bread is how much?!
Even just a thin spread of butter or margarine on the bread would blow my daily budget by a lot, so I had to find alternatives for that (like mustard).
Given my own preferences for having a "proper meal", I ended up only eating twice a day. I focused on making it high-protein and high-fiber to make me feel full longer, cutting down on regular carbs as needed.
> It's more like they DO NOT want to believe how small portion sizes are required to consistently lose weight.
In the immortal words of Jasper Carrott:
"This hole", points to mouth. "Is bigger than that hole", points to bottom.
> they DO NOT want to believe how small portion sizes are required to consistently lose weight
My problem isn't meals and their potions, it is absent-minded snacking between. I'm finding it a lot harder to drop the few Kg I put on over 2019/2022/2021 (largely in 2020, when I like many had a bit of a mentally unstable few months and comfort eat a lot) than I found it to drop a few tens of Kg in 2015/2016.
One of my roommates tried everything, including good hard exercise and all sorts of diets. Nothing seemed to be working. It was kind of perplexing me, actually.
Then we started working the same schedule, breakfast together. The whole thing unravelled with a casual comment he made. "Wow, you're really stingy with the sugar in your coffee."
Except I wasn't. I was actually indulging myself, like two tablespoons.
Show me how you make coffee? Ah. Yes. If you put 500 calories of sugar and cream into your coffee multiple times a day, you're not gonna lose weight.
He didn't believe me at first! I had to measure his quantities out and calculate it and show him. Liquids/powders in general seem to trip people up. We are bad at measuring them by sight. Soda, mayonnaise and dips. The oil in a nice salad dressing applied over-liberally can exceed the calories in the burger that goes with it.
Try measuring/weighing these sorts of foods and looking up their caloric content if you haven't before. You may be a shocked as my poor roommate was.
I can second this fully. Figured out the same thing when I spent a solid week nazi tracking my eating.
The thing that blew my mind. I always used heavy cream in my coffee. 150cal per 2 tablespoons. I would use like a quarter cup. I switch to milk, just 150cal per cup.
That's why I always drink my coffee black. The amount of calories in sugar and especially "Coffee Mate" is amazing (in a bad way). A serving size of Coffee Mate is actually 1/5 of what I see most people actually put in their coffee. It only looks "low-ish" calories because the serving size is so small.
For folks who don't want to drink their coffee black, erythritol and monkfruit powder make fine zero calorie substitutes. For a lot of things, actually.
Modern zero calorie sweeteners are really impressive. We've come a long way from the days of saccharine.
Sucralose is such a godsend. Cheap, meters extremely easily with a liquid dropper, mixes incredibly well into most things, has no bad taste (at least to me).
Thanks! I'll try this when I run out of my current bottle of sucralose (from Capella, which also makes interesting flavor additives). Shortages have made it occasionally hard to restock and I've yet to really try stevia as a sweetener that I personally add (as opposed to something already added) so I'm gonna enjoy trying something new.
I love cafe latte made with a high quality bean in a portafilter. I use special higher fat oat milk for it, which gives it a nice nutty flavor and still puts a cup at just about 150kcal. I'm fine with that.
The oat milk actually tastes disgusting to me from the fridge, but is super tasty once steamed. The higher fat version (Oatly calls it Barista Edition) is necessary to steam it. Regular oatmilk stays mostly liquid.
Yes, over one tablespoon is more sugar than an adult should have per day. (Not to mention all the added sugar these days.) Maybe an ice cream on the weekend.
I usually combine with a Almond/Coconut milk and it is fine without sweetener. May take a bit to get used to if you have habits to break.
But this is another reason why people don't lose weight / get fit / make progress on so many things. 50g / day is fine according to WHO. If that is correct (for argument's sake), we can't then use their 'better' guideline to mean "no adult should".
The perfect is the enemy of the good. People stop trying when they set unrealistic goals for themselves. We don't all need to be hyperfit. Etc.
I have made a ton of personal progress over the last 1.5-2 years in health and several other areas, by being vigilant in refusing to try to change too fast, even for mundane goals. It is important to find the right pace.
Some sites say 15, some say 12.5. Tablespoon quantities are typically rounded up to "heaping" as well, so who cares? It is clear from the ancestor post adults are healthier without all this sugar.
You're probably getting that and more just from additives to food. I'm of the opinion that adding additional sugar to anything isn't exactly the healthiest unless you're cooking everything from scratch and can control the amount of added sugar in your diet.
Nothing wrong with diet coke. (Well, I don't like the caffeine so I don't usually drink it, but still.) Gatorade zero after a workout can really hit the spot some days too.
Every time I've successfully lost significant weight, I was drinking mostly water and not diet sodas. I half-way wonder if our bodies release insulin into the bloodstream in part due to the presence of a sweet taste on the tongue -- even if noncaloric. Because anecdotally, I think I get hungrier faster after a Diet Coke.
I'd wager regularly consuming sweetened things also makes it a lot harder to quit sweetened things and get rid of the "sugar craving" reported by many.
If anyone remembers the internet personality Ulillillia, he claimed he lost weight by removing the grease from pizza he ate.
Not exactly the diet plan anyone should really choose, but it shows that even changes that feel like they shouldn't matter actually do, even when eating what most would describe as an unhealthy diet. There are a lot of calories in fats and oils, and apparently removing some of them can have significant effects on weight gain or loss.
Also, check out erythritol as a sugar substitute. I use it for everything and actually prefer it to sugar. It has a nice cooling effect in liquids it's dissolved in that you don't get with sugar.
I love pizza and never get to eat it because of the caloric load, and I really doubt that.
Fats are 9 calories a gram. If you remove the available grease you're getting, what, two grams off per slice, maybe? Doesn't seem like that's really moving the needle.
Though now I want to rigorously test this, so the next time I have pizza I'll weigh the napkin before and after soaking up available grease.
There's a lot more than 2 grams of fat in a slice of pizza. I've tried it before because Ulillillia's pizza degreasing meme has lived rent free in my head for like a decade, and I could easily soak a couple of paper towels in pizza grease from just a slice of pizza.
Apparently, all he ate were pizzas, so it wasn't just one slice he was degreasing, but whole pizzas.
A tablespoon of grease (or fat in general) is about 120 calories. A slice of pizza has anywhere from 1 teaspoon to 1 tablespoon of excess grease per slice (especially pepperoni pizzas).
That's almost certainly psychosomatic. The sugars in the two are basically identical, and the creamer presumably has some fat in it, which would actually make it have a lower glycemic index (meaning the crash would be slower with the creamer).
This is mostly what the article calls the "halo effect". People assume that "natural" things are lower calorie or healthier, which is sometimes the case, but fructose is fructose. It doesn't really matter if it's from corn or honey. Honey arguably has another couple marginal benefits, but it's absolutely not useful in losing weight. It's something like 90% sugar by weight.
What I'd actually suspect is something closer to: all diets work. Almost every fad diet works, even when they're completely counter to nutritional science because the simple act of paying attention to what you eat has positive effects.
I highly recommend weighing ingredients when cooking. It's so much easier to be consistent when cooking recipes this way, cup and tablespoon measiremts be damned.
Being from the UK I tend to use milk rather than cream in coffee. One pack of raw sugar is 20 calories. One ounce full fat milk the same. Being I only drink a cup or two a day, 40 calories a cup is a reasonable price to pay to avoid artificial sweetener.
What blew my mind is how many calories are in a couple ounces of trail mix. I used to snack on that whenever I’d pass the cupboard. I can pay for a week of coffee by avoiding a few handfuls of trail mix!
I take lactose free milk with my coffee, same amount of sugar technically but apparent sweetness goes up because lactose has broken down and lactose isn’t so sweet on the tongue
> What blew my mind is how many calories are in a couple ounces of trail mix
As a bit of an aside: putting as many calories in as little weight as possible is kind of the point of trail mix, so you're not carrying kilos upon kilos of food when hiking.
I used to drink my coffee with sugar. Next to the coffee machine at my office there was this big box of sugar sticks, I took one with every cup.
One day, we ran out of sugar sticks, the box was empty. I asked around in the office if anyone knew where we keep the boxes of sugar, everybody answered that they didn't know, because they didn't take sugar in their coffee. If found I was the only one in the entire office drinking coffee with sugar.
That box was 3kg... 3000 grams of sugar, that I consumed in my own in just a matter of a few months...
Kind of shocked by this, I told a colleague about this, and he replied with something that stuck with my till this day: "It's all between your ears, stop taking sugar in your coffee, and after just a week, you won't know better. In fact: you'll come to detest it".
So I did, stopped taking sugar in my coffee cold turkey. And, my colleague was right, after a couple of days, I didn't miss the sugar in my coffee. In fact: I came to appreciate the taste of pure coffee.
A couple weeks later my mother accidentally put sugar in my coffee, as a force of habit, and I actually spat it out. It tasted horrible.
So, If you drink coffee with sugar: just stop doing it and you'll get to enjoy the real taste of coffee, and safe yourself a lot of sugar intake.
Similar story, but with tea. I used to dump sugar into it but eventually I just stopped. Now I have plain black tea every morning. I really can’t stand drinking it with sugar now.
I also ditched soda (except for an occasional mixed drink) and when I want something cold and fizzy I pour a can of seltzer water with lime, orange, cherry, etc. It’s a game changer if you can kick the sugar habits.
In my family we don't drink calories. I do give my son some fortified almond milk and some juice if he squeezes it himself (the hard way, by grinding it against whatever they are called. By hand).
I realized when I was 20 that I could easily drink 15% of my energy needs. Mostly empty calories (soda and the like).
I recently returned home from a trip to the United States where I’d not been since the before times. They put so much sugar in everything and I just couldn’t understand it. I basically felt like I was eating pudding (that is, desert) for every meal. Breakfast was particularly bad (bread has sugar for some reason and I got a sausage that had apparently been soaked in maple syrup) and obviously less sugary things existed (eg sushi didn’t seem to have much). I think I have a sweet tooth but I still found it unpleasant there (and I avoided soda and mostly things that looked obviously sugary). Even if things didn’t have sugar in they would have sweeteners.
> "Wow, you're really stingy with the sugar in your coffee."
> Except I wasn't. I was actually indulging myself, like two tablespoons.
Is that correct? 2tbsp? 30ml? That's beyond indulgent. Sugar in hot drinks is typically measured in teaspoons, where two is a lot. And that's a third as much as yours; his I dread to think.
I don't say it to be condescending, but I am sceptical that sugared coffee drinkers have ever tried half-decent coffee (without instinctively adding/thinking they need to add sugar to it) anyway.
Yes. In my defence it is a large glass :) When I do that, I'm drinking it for the sugar + caffeine boost. Like I would a can of Coca Cola. It's about the same amount of sugar as a standard can. Absolutely not healthy, I know.
Similarly, I've heard of people giving up sugary colas that they used to drink multiple times per day at work and losing scads of weight while making no other changes.
Or alternatively, they know they are eating too much, but simply don't have the will power to quit. I'm no food expert, but to me it looks like any other addiction. They rely on food emotionally, so when they are ashamed or depressed that they aren't losing weight, they turn to food, which continues the addiction cycle.
American society is basically brainwashed as to what is and isn't healthy. It takes actual effort to become well informed.
So many food products are marketed as "Fat Free, Organic, High In Fiber, Heart Healthy" and so on, even though the products are just a bunch of processed low quality crap. Even beer is frequently marketed as "Low Carb". In reality, there is no reason in include any calories for alcohol in any diet where the goal is losing weight.
"Alcohol has no calories". Can't count the number of times I've heard that. Nope. The human body can metabolize ethanol. 7 calories per gram. A few shots of vodka is a light meal with no nutrients.
We have literally evolved to overeat. And one thing people don't consider is that genetics does play a real role. Just because it's easy for you to not overeat as much doesn't mean it's the same for others. I personally believe the solution will ultimately have to come from science/technology. We need a safe and efficient appetite reducer that people can take regularly.
You misunderstood what I said. We evolved in a world where food was scarce, hence why we evolved to overeat once we do find food. In the past 100 years, food has no longer been scarce (for people living in a first world country), hence the obesity.
There's been an upper class for whom food wasn't scarce for thousands of years. Socrates wrote about it, and it was looked down upon as type of gluttony and quite unhealthy. However, even those upper classes, who didn't have any food scarcity did not typically get fat.
Blaming it on food scarcity isn't the whole story. It's not enough that food scarcity stopped. It wasn't carbs either, as there are cultures without carb scarcity that weren't obese(Though we do put corn syrup in everything now).
My guess is that it's a dopamine addiction. We understand that sometimes we must do things we don't like, but the idea of eatings things we don't enjoy scares many people.
It's also how corps package food, and the ones that make their foods the most addicting(the most dopamine -> the most pleasure) survive.
>even those upper classes, who didn't have any food scarcity did not typically get fat. //
Some kings in the past had massive obesity problems, like Henry VIII. Apparently for him it was forced immobility following a hunting accident. Most people in the UK just haven't been able to afford to get obese until the last several decades, and I warrant companies have learnt how to hook us on high-fat and high-sugar foods to make bigger profits.
Obesity was literally always a thing, it was just hard for crap covered serfs to get the calories to make it a thing for them. For the other classes though...
There's a phenomenon that many island populations have abnormally high levels of morbid obesity. This comes from the huge advantage of having any genetic disposition to better store more fat/energy in a situation where more can not readily be obtained by increased hunting range, etc.
Which? The only case I heard of was the archipelago in thr pacific where the lands and water were so polluted from colonial agriculture that they couldn't eat their ancestral foods, and had to rely heavily on imports of canned and prepared foods.
If you follow the "see also" from that article studies find the genetic factors towards becoming obese in a favorable environment to be different in different ethnic groups, from 6-85%.
So a theory that fits the statistics is that colonialism brought in a favorable diet for weight gain to everywhere(?) but the percentage of people who became obese when subjected to a favorable diet was largely a factor of local genetics, genes most useful in an unfavorable environment did well and put the peoples in those places at the top of the list for obesity rates.
Populations with similar wealth and food abundance and genetics (eg developed countries in Europe/ North America with USA being an outlier in wealth) have quite different rates of obesity so I don’t really think this explanation is sufficient.
Right, there already are some on the market like Wegovy (1). But they're expensive AFAICT and seem to have lots of side effects. Hopefully as we get better with synthetic proteins we can create more targeted treatments with less side effects. Also, many types of foods and additives also manipulate appetite. So while the article is true, there's still huge variability in the body's appetite response. Eating "less" can backfire in subconscious ways of re-adding extra calories in other hidden ways.
Long term (centuries), as a species I suspect we may end up doing some light genetic modifications to tune our appetite for norms in modern civilization. Presuming modern western style lifestyles become more sustainable.
We're less than ~100 years into this crazy modern era where routine famines aren't the norm. Even in Western Europe post-WWI and post-WWII there were lots of famines. If you compare Western Europe with the USA-minus-1.5 decades you get similar curves of obesity increase [2]. That makes sense if you consider that post-WWII it took Western Europe about a decade or two to repair basic infrastructure. The whole bit of overall Europe having healthier cuisine than the US isn't true, with regards to obesity at least. It's largely seems to be availability of calories. Eastern Europe for example reflects the fall of the USSR and economic stagnation during 1990's pretty well too [3].
"I'm big boned" - show them an MRI or cat scan of a morbidly obese person and you see a tiny little skeleton surrounded by what looks like a giant, puffed up cartoon balloon body.
"I have a low metabolism" - obese people actually have a high 'metabolism', because moving all that extra weight takes a lot of energy
"Being overweight is not unhealthy" - weird then that they are having trouble getting pregnant and/or miscarriage regularly, need a machine to breathe at night lest their brain not receive enough oxygen, their knees and hips and eyes are that of someone several decades older, they're likely dependent upon insulin injections to live, and substantially more likely to develop cancer, etc.
Yes, there are a lot of negative attitudes towards obese patients in the medical community. That is partly because obese people think they know better than medical science, and are more interested in screaming about how they're being discriminated against thanks to the patriarchy and unrealistic beauty standards....than actually doing something about their weight...like accepting a referral to a nutritionist and accepting the advice to engage in more activity and weight-bearing exercise.
When someone needs a machine to breathe, artificial joint replacements, hourly/daily insulin, and Star Trek levels of intervention to reproduce, maybe they just need to shut the fuck up and lose weight.
You know what's really infuriating? Maintaining a healthy weight, getting exercise, making an effort to eat a balanced diet that hits lots of nutrients....and seeing these people cost my insurance company several orders of magnitude more money to keep alive than I do.
If any whole country gave up candy then they'd save a lot in direct cost and even more in related costs (diabetes, etc.) that they could certainly help feed many many people. Sure, the effect of one person not eating candy is easily lost, but I spend a few pounds a month myself on sweets (ie candy, I'm from the UK). I know that money could likely feed someone in a developing nation for a month.
It's so easy to tell ourselves that each small contribution adds to zero, but as someone noted elsewhere in this thread, calculus should tell us enough to be wary of dismissing little bits!
I don't know who needs to hear this, but being overweight doesn't make someone a bad person. Flying from New York to San Francisco a couple times a year also doesn't make someone a bad person.
BEING overweight doesn't, I'll give you that. Failing to take responsibility for it and blaming other people instead of fixing it? We are in moral territory now.
>You know what's really infuriating? Maintaining a healthy weight, getting exercise, making an effort to eat a balanced diet that hits lots of nutrients....and seeing these people cost my insurance company several orders of magnitude more money to keep alive than I do.
Not to veer too far off topic but this is something that always bugs my mind when people talk about how they don't want "socialized" healthcare because they don't wanna pay for other people to live unhealthy lives. Like dude, healthcare is already socialized, where exactly do you think the money the insurance companies uses to pay for all of your health costs comes from? From....other members paying into it. Which means that they already adjust prices to account for all their unhealthy members. You're already paying for it, might as well cut out the part where the company's incentivized to put turning a profit over providing quality care.
> seeing these people cost my insurance company several orders of magnitude more money to keep alive than I do.
Most healthcare costs come from old age related costs and diseases. Cigarette smokers and obese people are actually cheaper to insure in the long run, because they're much more likely to die before becoming old enough to incur significant old age related healthcare costs.
There are a lot of nuances to both nutritional understanding, and to the meta of nutritional understanding... how people understand it. A lot of methods, food types, rulesets and whatnot are actually very useful. Often, they have benefits in the meta. Fasting-ish methods help people deal with and experience what hungry is, and relate to the biological fact that they'll be just fine skipping a meal, or ten. Food type-ish diets help avoid getting into overeating modes^. Point systems
That said, totally agree. The basics starts with a basic understanding of "how much." Food is quantified calorically. If you don't have knowledge or intuition about how much is how much, you're not aware of your eating habits.
Mates of mine are vegan, and I think they make the mistake in the other direction with their kid. They're hyper focused on "quality calories" but they underestimate calorie quantity. A kid's meal consisting of cucumber, greens, carrot, and bean noodles is 100 calories, and the kid needs 300. They do put a lot of effort into learning about healthy vegan diets, but the basics... quantity estimation isn't there.
^BTW, I think the whole idea behind courses and other "feasting" traditions might be that it allows us to pig out more effectively. I'm all full on soup, but I could go for some of that potato. Then sweets. Mebe some cheese.
Gonna throw out an plug for Nutritionix and their calorie tracker iOS app for anyone inspired to go that route by the article - I tried a lot of options out back when I used to do serious powerlifting and it’s by far the best UX I found for recording macros. They’ve got a barcode scanner, a great DB of common fast food options, and you can even freetext stuff like “200 grams of chicken thigh” and record stuff that way if you use a food scale.
Eyeballing calories becomes way easier after a few months of practice and pays off for life. Was able to get all the examples listed spot on except the popcorn, which I had no frame of reference for.
You can just do the math and see how much exercise you have to do to make any difference in your weight loss. You definitely can’t “walk” your way to weight loss
Walking 5 miles a day can be done in an hour and a half and can burn ~250-500 calories. That’s half a pound to a pound of fat per week, which is pretty significant.
250 calories is nothing and most people are going to think it gives them the chance to eat that extra bagel that’s going to be more than 250 calories.
Are you really suggesting that people walk and hour and half with the intention of burning 250 calories? There are a lot of reasons to exercise. But weight loss isn’t one.
You shouldn’t be eating excess cookies if you’re trying to lose weight. That doesn’t negate the effect of walking for an hour (the most base of exercises)
And just like the Nobel Winning Economist says about why people don’t save for the future, “none of us are Homo Economicus”. The same can be applied to diet. No one is a completely rational being.
You tell me that I have to walk an hour to burn off 250 calories, I’m not going to bother and neither are most people. Every study shows that exercise is a completely ineffective method to lose weight for most people.
I mentioned in another comment that yes I did eat like crap and lost and maintained weight by exercising in my mid 20s to mid 30s. I was also a part time fitness instructor, taught 10 hours a week (spinning, step, weightlifting, cardio kickboxing) and I trained for runs and I lifted weights three times a week. I had a commitment device to go the gym - regularly scheduled classes that I taught and got paid for. I had to be in shape. I would teach 2 hour classes on Saturday and Sunday and teach during the week.
Most people will never commit to that level or intensity of exercise. Even now, I have a home cardio gym and the only time I watch TV by myself is when I exercise.
Define enough. One hour workout every day? That's usually 500-1000 extra calories. It's not that hard for people to eat that much more extra, so they still put on weight.
Doesn’t work that way. Your basal metabolic rate is also increased. Squat and deadlift at least 3 plates for reps. Walk at least 20k per week. You’d have to force-feed yourself to get fat.
Add a large coke and you can easily hit 1500 in one meal. 1 lunch, 1 dinner, a snack, and a nice healthy breakfast and you can easily clear 4000-5000 a day without feeling like you ate an abnormal amount.
I don’t know what gp implied but I know that in my personal case, I’m way less hungry after physical effort. So I wouldn’t think he talked about calories but more about the ability to eat.
Can you be a little more specific? Wikipedia seems to mostly say that the science is still a work in progress, and at least I don't see much support for the claim that it reduces weight while allowing for the same calorie consumption.
The only way to lose weight (other than amputation and the like) is to take in less calories than you burn. If what you say is correct it just means that in those cases the intermittent fasting causes higher energy expenditure.
Exercising the same doesn’t imply their bodies expend the same amount of energy. One body may be more efficient than the other, for example producing less excess heat. Exercise also isn’t the only factor in energy expenditure. People have different basal metabolic rates (how much energy your body consumes when you’re doing nothing), and changing your diet, your sleep, your mood, etc., can affect it, as can stress and cognitive activity. Finally there’s differences in how efficiently people extract energy from food.
However, for any given individual, if they want to reduce weight, they can either reduce their energy input or increase their energy output, or both. There’s just no other way.
I am bothered by the author’s written use of ‘quote-unquote’ in place of actual quotes. This is a spoken form of scare quotes and takes ‘write like you talk’ too far for me.
it has a different meaning because it puts more emphasis on the author distancing themselves from what is being said. Just putting things in quotes in text may just be a value neutral quote. Writing it out is a rhetorical device because it's difficult to quote sarcastically in written form. It's basically the textual version of doing quotes with your fingers in the air. From the text:
Most of these quote-unquote marketed protein products are nothing more than glorified chocolate bars.
The “Health Halo” effect of food is when consumers believe foods that are advertised as healthier have fewer calories
That is called ‘scare quotes’, and the context is almost always sufficient to distinguish them from quotation marks, certainly in this piece they would suffice.
Recommend book by Herman Pontzer from last year. "Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy" Listened to on podcast 'Why is this happening with Chris Hayes' for 1 hour summary on it.
I admit I'm distrustful of such a dramatic title. The central message from the originally posted article is that losing weight is mostly a matter of maintaining a caloric deficit. This is has been understood for some time now. What is the "new research" that is so important, in this case?
I've had this unbearable urge to binge eat and it started a week ago. I'm sure it's something psychological that is causing this but I can't isolate the root of the problem. I have tried to fight it by taking walks, being social but it's failure every time. I always cave in and eat all the fast food, ice cream, cookies I can get my hands on but literally nothing seems to get rid of the urge to binge. How can a person get rid of the binge eating virus?
one of my favourite weight-loss tips is from youtube cyclist phil gaimon: instead of trying to eat less, set a goal for eating more of something with a very low calorie density. he was eating a whole 1lb pack of spinach every day. that's a lot of spinach, it'll take a lot of snacking to get through to the point where it's actually difficult to eat that much. but it's only 100 calories.
In my experience, you could be craving something you are not getting in you diet. Try multivitamins and a gallon of water a day. If that doesn't cut it in a coue weeks, get a comprehensive blood panel.
I got bad news for you: I know multiple people who lost weight for two months (as anyone can on literally any calorie-restriction diet) but simply couldn't follow it for much longer than that.
I myself stopped being keto a couple of days after the evening crying started.
Your advice is not actionable. I know several people including myself who were simply unable to action it for longer than the two months that anyone can stick to any diet.
If you are capable of sticking to a diet that literally brings you to tears on a daily basis, then sure, but do realise that you're probably in about the top percentile of willpower. (I imagine you were not in fact brought to tears by this diet, or you wouldn't be recommending it; in which case you may not be aware that it's not a panacea.)
Are you saying you were brought to tears because you weren’t eating carbs? I have known many people who have lost weight very successfully by switching a healthy, safe, and effective low carb/keto diet.
In fact I’ve never even heard of crying being a side effect. How are you suggesting these things are even linked?
All I know is that I couldn't think of anything other than carbs, and started crying because I wanted carbs so much, and then when I ate carbs it was blissful and I stopped thinking about carbs and I stopped crying. I don't know what more evidence it would be possible to have that they were linked.
> But you don't need to pick a team with all the tribalism that's involved.
Sometimes labels are just easier than a "wishy-washy" "yeah I'll do something in that general direction". That doesn't need to involve tribalism; pretty much all vegan and keto people I know are fairly pragmatic about it.
imo, organizations like NutritionalFacts.org offer the best evidence based guidence for health, and weight loss. They site studies for each talking point. There are years of content here.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCddn8dUxYdgJz3Qr5mjADtA
I like keto because it helps me maintain energy throughout the day, but I need to eat practically non-stop to avoid losing weight while on it. It's crazy.
Exact same experience. It honesty feels like unlocking a cheat code, and makes me really frustrated at the “diet industry” which is constantly pushing these absurd fad diets onto people.
When I was a teenager, I looked at people who weighed 300+ pounds and though, how do you get that way. Don't you realize that you are gaining weight? Don't you know that you just have to eat less to lose weight?
Anyway, now I realize that I am hungry. It never goes away unless I eat a significant amount of food. My body told me to eat, so I ate.
It doesn't even take that much extra food to gain a lot of weight. One extra piece of cake a week is a few pounds in a year. If you live a few years, it adds up. You gain weight in kilograms and lose weight in grams.
Hunger is a sensation that happens inside a person's body and mind. You cannot compare your hunger to my hunger.
So many diets talk about not being hungry while you are on the diet. I've been to dieticians and told them I'm hungry, and they suggest eating more protein or more fiber. That does help, but I still feel hungry.
There is a very good chance that someone is writing a reply with some suggestion as to how I should eat so that I'm not hungry. Thank you for the thoughts, but realize that you don't live in my body, you don't know how I feel, you don't know what I've tried.
Hunger sounds like a problem to people. Hunger feels like a problem inside the body. People still tell me I shouldn't be hungry. Maybe part of the solution is realizing that eating to satisfaction is ... bad for some people. Maybe it's Ok to be a little hungry.
Anyway, these are just some thoughts. I'm down 30 pounds from my max. I think I have a good mentality now, but it took years to get here.
I’ve never been on a calorie deficit and not been hungry.
Calorie deficits are always a little unpleasant imo. It’s just suffering through that to get to a place where you want to maintain (which is much easier).
I’ve lost 73lbs, 53lbs, 35lbs (different times and gained weight over years in between). Each time the calorie deficit sucked. There is a 3 day hump and two week hump of misery until you get kind of used to it sucking, but I wouldn’t say it’s ever great.
Same here. I've never been obese or anything close to it, but even just eating healthy to maintain my weight or lose a little weight can be unpleasant. That unpleasantness is amplified 3x if I'm spending my days aimlessly as opposed to hyper-focused on activities that put me into flow, e.g. a work project I care deeply about and that requires lots of coding.
This is also my experience -- but I'll also note that it was very subjectively different depending on how stable/appropriately-treated my mental health was at the time. That feeling of the deficit hit very, very different when I was dealing with depression/compulsive tendencies. Right now I'm in a much better place, losing weight at a nice pace, and it's shocking to me how much easier it is than it had been, how much less disruptive to my life. Yeah, the math may always boil down to calories-in-calories-out, but comparing my own subjective experiences, I can definitely believe that the same deficit can cause different amounts of misery for different people.
a) Thank you for writing this. I'm also quite a bit heavier than whatever some random committee's idea of my "ideal weight" is and it's tough to navigate these types of threads.
b) assuming it was intentional and desired, congratulations on the loss
c) constant hunger has been a theme for me as well. Since getting medication for a mental health condition I've noticed that I'm not really hungry while it has effect but as soon as it wears off I want to eat everything, even if I've eaten a reasonable amount throughout the day. Fighting against constant hunger is _exhausting_ and I think people that say "it's just calories in and out" are just not experiencing it.
So if you eat less, your body eventually adjusts so that you're satiated earlier. People say that your "stomach shrinks" when you eat less, but it's really just your appetite that does.
When you eat a meal you should also try eating slower, or having more frequent but smaller portions. Have you ever noticed that you're still hungry after a meal, but after a few minutes it goes away? That's because it takes ~20 minutes for you to feel full after eating.
There's also appetite suppressants (both naturally found in certain foods + prescription drugs), that can work wonders for weight loss.
Also, if you ever try fasting, usually your appetite is strongest for the first 2 days, then falls off. With natural fat stores + an intake of water/electrolytes/potassium/magnesium, you can fast for many days at a time without feeling hungry.
> So if you eat less, your body eventually adjusts so that you're satiated earlier.
I have heard anecdotes from people who say this is true and anecdotes from people who say it is very much not true. It is certainly more comforting to believe that people who've gained weight aren't permanently doomed to hunger, but I'd love if anyone could drop a supporting source.
I have found that my hunger is malleable. If I start eating breakfast, I will be hungry in the morning at around the time I started eating breakfast. But, if I stop eating breakfast and only do lunch and dinner, I will eventually lose my hunger for breakfast and have no problem coasting till lunch on nothing but a coffee.
That’s now known as intermittent fasting. 16 hour fast followed by a regular lunch and dinner. You can even keep a typical caloric input, but the extended period of not eating consistently is enough to “trick” your body into going after fat stores. Front recent reading it’s equivalent to fasting two days for an entire week, but at least for me skipping breakfast is much easier. I’m not overweight by any measure, but am middle age skinny fat. Waiting until noon for my first calories has worked well to start eliminating fat from undesirable places without impacting other training.
It's really odd how much you (read: I; I obviously can't comment on other people, everybody is different) actually can bend your appetite. In Ramadan I can easily coast until 8-9 PM without any thoughts on being hungry until like an hour before I break my fasts. And I always do OMAD while fasting, so I dont eat breakfast before dawn.
If anything, diets should focus on the psychological factor more than the actual food, but then again, people have different levels of willpower. So telling somebody to stop eating too many calories is not only not helpful, it's also highly condescending.
My personal problem with eating is that I like eating large meals. I can't cut out liquid calories as I dont drink any of my calories. I can't cut out sweets, as I don't eat sweets in any substantial amount (maybe a single gummy bear a week?). I just like eating large meals -- and I would do so several times a day if it wasnt for the adverse effects on my body.
Also, I'm kinda proud of how I was practically bang-on on the calorie quiz in the article, except for the pizza. Apparently large means LARGE in the US lol. I was off by 500 kcal.
yup, really interesting. It seems that hunger is tightly coupled with expectations.
Something else I have found interesting is that I will occasionally be really hungry, start cooking a meal, spend 30 minutes smelling all the things cooking, and then by the time I'm done cooking I've lost my hunger. It's as if my brain was tricked in to thinking that I ate and I'm satisfied.
I'm pretty sure the article's numbers were UK ones, by the way - I certainly knew the UK Domino's large pizza number from personal experience, and the photos of e.g. peanut butter were ones I recognise from UK supermarkets.
Couldn't agree more with hunger being a sensation rather than a problem in its own right. I'd recommend a two or three day fast to almost anyone at least once in their life, to experience that feeling of "I am hungry, this is unpleasant, but it's not the end of the world".
> There is a very good chance that someone is writing a reply with some suggestion as to how I should eat so that I'm not hungry.
Actually I was wanted to ask the opposite: what prevents you from letting yourself go hungry a fraction of the day? You might get a stomachache for a bit, I know, but have you tried and seen any consequences beyond that? Note I'm not suggesting "eat absolutely nothing the whole day", but like if you cut your portions into a half or a third of the usual (or eat fiber/etc. so as to at least fill your stomach)... is that going to actually cause you any problems beside a bit of stomach pain? (and might trying a mild pain reliever like acetaminophen potentially help with that until your body gets used to it?)
You could ask the same of someone addicted to smoking or cocaine or whatever. Every fibre of your body is telling you to go eat/smoke/get high etc. It is an all consuming urge that relentlessly interrupts whatever else you are trying to do or think about. You literally cannot stop thinking about your next think you are going to eat.
For me, it is not even physical stomach ache as you suggest, it is the mental aspect of total and complete brain derailment until you go eat something.
I guess I could ask someone to lock me in a room or something. That is not practical though as unlike smoking or drugs you need to eat something to stay alive - you cannot just go 100% cold turkey to try and break the addiction because you need to eat eventually.
> You could ask the same of someone addicted to smoking or cocaine or whatever.
That comparison with addiction to illicit drugs always perplexes me, because those drugs are clinically known to cause physical addiction to that substance, but that's not the case for (most?) food.
I do get the thing about it completely consuming your brain though (and being doubly painful if your stomach's in pain) even if it's a different phenomenon than drug addiction, so I'm not discounting that at all.
It sounds like this is something you've tried in the past. Have you given your body enough time to adjust when you've tried this? From what I know, when people start to fast (note I'm not suggesting you fast—just cut your portions > 50%), it's way more painful in the beginning (both physically and mentally) than it is, say, 2-3 weeks later. If you haven't tried this, do you think you could give yourself a chance and just tolerate it for (say) 3 weeks? I wonder if having a definite end date to look forward to might make it easier for yourself to convince your brain to tolerate some hunger?
Of course this has been tried. I think you are doing people a disservice (and with respect frankly it is quite insulting) by thinking they have not tried to use simple will power. People are on diets for years (potentially their entire adult and lives) - of fucking course people have tried giving their bodies time to adjust.
If it was just a matter of waiting a few weeks then we'd not have an obesity epidemic in the west, nor would the huge huge huge dieting industry exist.
Sorry, I didn't mean this to be insulting. The reason I was suggesting tolerating some of the pain to give your body time to adjust is that I've actually seen some people (obviously not everyone, just some subset) who don't do that, responding that they fear letting themselves feel hunger for a few days is to much of a health risk (because otherwise why would their body feel hunger/pain, etc.). You might believe everyone tries this but it's simply not the case. Of course lots of people really do try everything and still gain weight, but for every stage in the process there are some who don't give it a chance (and not all unreasonably either), and I've seen that for this one in particular, hence why I brought this one up.
There are different levels and kinds of hunger. When I do what you suggest my brain and body don't work very well. After some time, blood sugar gets low and the glycogen stores in the liver are depleted. At this point my body tells me I'm dying. Obviously I've gone through this and lived.
My main point is that people will give mechanical advice for losing weight, but it's very hard to tell someone what feelings they will go through. It's very hard to tell someone else what 'normal' should feel like for them.
I wrote a long comment, but I kept erasing it because I don't really want to come across as trying to give medical advice, or telling you how to feel. I'm just hoping that the medical assessments you're describing (about glycogen, risk of death, etc.) are accurate ones given by your doctor in response to cutting your portions, not your own personal extrapolations or speculations—otherwise you might be letting your fears harm you rather than help you.
Thanks for sharing. Here's my perspective as a lean person who has no problems literally starving themselves to do other things.
It does indeed sound like your hunger is more intense than my hunger. I think I benefit from a ton of experience in transitioning past "I'm very hungry" to "I'm fine" when I choose not to eat. There's a clear point (for me) when the body just says "oh we're not going to eat now? ok, I'll stop interrupting the brain with 'I'm hungry' signals." It just goes away and I'm no doubt in a caloric deficit.
Some of this is self-discipline, and some of it is an ability to find something more engaging/interesting than eating. If I push past the hunger threshold, it's easy to just not eat for a long stretch of time. Eventually, I notice that I'm extremely physically weak and mentally fatigued (but still not very hungry), and I realize that I have to eat, or it's going to start causing problems.
I have the exact same experience with hunger. I’m only “hungry” for 10-15ish minutes max before the feeling disappears and the next time I eat is also to stave off the physical weakness.
I put “hungry” in quotes because what my overweight friends describe as feeling hungry I have only felt under the influence of marijuana, and what I describe as hungry is what they feel like all day other than right after a meal.
I haven’t found any literature on what drives human appetite that seemed non quackery science, but I’d be very intrigued whenever someone figures out what causes these different experiences
I've been on both ends of this. I was lean throughout college, gradually gained some weight after starting at Google and after a few years I was having trouble functioning after not having eaten for a while. I got some blood work done and everything was normal.
For me personally, I think it was completely driven by my mind. I was stressed while there and became further stressed when my willpower inevitably lost to my biology. Consistent, hard cardio; lowering my stress levels; and (most importantly) acknowledging and accepting that I don't have perfect control over the outcome were key to fixing it.
Secondary Loop: Weight Gain -> Notice Weight -> Diet -> Gain (loop)
I don't have a conclusion to this, I'm still trying to figure it out.
In the primary loop hunger keeps you alive.
When you get hungry and eat and feel satisfied, that operates on multiple systems in the brain and body. There are lots of hormones that are flowing and telling body systems to do things and also telling your consciousness what your condition is.
I'm not prepared to talk about the psychology in depth, but I do know that it feels very un-natural to be in a calorie deficit. I know that having low blood sugar makes it very hard for me to think. At times it's felt like my body is telling me I'm going to die and it's been very hard to ignore that feeling.
> Please consider why you are choosing to be that guy.
I am trying to be helpful?
I've gone down to ~9% body fat, so I have experience with the "hard last steps." For me, the "first steps" were not easy and much harder than the last steps.
I think you just need to accept living with hunger. As in be hungry constantly and just learn to live with it. This is the only method by which I've ever successfully lost weight. Go at a large forced deficit. After a week or so you get kind of used to being hungry (your hunger decreases, but it never goes away) and it becomes easier, but it's never totally easy.
Some people are able to avoid hunger by sticking to certain foods, but that's never worked for me.
have you gone more than 2 weeks on a restricted diet (<1000 calories/day)?
in my experience, 2 weeks is about the boundary for when the body decides it's going to adapt its hunger point to the new realities. unfortunately, it shifts back much quicker, or at least seems to do so since we're usually not paying as much attention then.
The most important thing anyone who wants to manage their weight has to realize is why they eat. You feel hunter but why?
Food is complicated and people eat for many reasons. People can eat because they're bored or they're anxious or even just to feel better, even briefly.
A healthy state to get to (which is easier said than done to be sure) is to treat food as fuel not as medicine or even a reward. You put gas in your car when it needs gas. Food should be the sam, ideally.
For me, I had a lot of success with intermittent fasting. This works for me. It may not work for you. But whether or not it works (and for some people it doesn't) one thing you do learn how much of hunger is just habit. Your'e used to eating a certain amount or at certain times. That feeling of feeling full actually isn't normal or even desirable. You'll be surprised at how little you actually need.
A good place to start is to inccrease protein consumption. A lot of high-calorie diets are surprisingly low in protein but really high in carbs (particularly sugar) and fat. It's actually much more difficult to overeat with high-protein. I've known more than a few people with weight issues who avoid eating protein just because of this.
Even small changes add up. Like people who scoop sugar and heavy cream into coffee and can end up consuming 700 calories per coffee multiple times a day. Drink black coffee. If you don't like that you should consider that you don't actually like coffee. You like coffee flavoured sugar and fat.
And if you don't like black unsweetened coffee, forcing yourself to drink it will actually kill your appetite. That's not such a bad thing.
But you need to figure out your relationship with food.
Also to increase fiber consumption. The modern diet is filled with foods that have their fiber removed and used as animal feed. Insoluble fiber fills you up psychically. Soluble fiber takes a long time to digest and helps regulate ones blood sugar. Have to get away from foods with a bad glycemic index as a start.
Do remember that, while it does make coffee insipid, the milk some people add in theirs is a good source of vitamins, calcium and protein.
The fact that it has "calories" shouldn't deter them from using it, especially if, like most people (at least where i live), you aren't overweight, and do not need to reduce your energy intake
It makes 100% sense to be hungry while you are on diet. The opposite would be surprising.
But you are even hungry now that you are not on a diet. Do you prefer to be hungry and obese or be hungry and not be obese ? Not saying that it is just something that you can decide like that. But I would understand your point if you were not hungry now, but you say this is not the case.
Hey, I agree with you that it's different for everyone. Personally, if I've been eating too much and I try to eat a healthy amount I will always be a bit hungry for at least a few days - maybe longer -until my body adjusts to the new amounts. After a while it gets easier, especially if I'm smart in my food shopping.
Eating certain types of foods (the article calls them hyper-palatable) can also kick off feeling much more hungry. It's sometimes hard for me to get back into a healthy cadence, especially if I have stress in other areas of my life.
I think it's definitely OK to be a little hungry, or even a lot hungry. In fact, when I'm feeling like I have some willpower to spare I go on a fast. I think it really helps me calibrate my internal tolerance for hunger. After a fast, the mild hunger I feel after eating an appropriately sized meal barely even registers as hunger.
It's an individual struggle for many. Although I'm rather close to the weight I want to be(now) I struggle and have struggled with hunger too. My weight has gone up and down, I too have tried many things. The struggle with hunger is similar regardless of weight, until I get really quite lean.
I have gone from being in perfect control of my weight(I had to make weight for a sport), to being completely out of control(because the stuff that used to work didn't anymore), to being in control again(new stuff worked), to loosing some of the control(because it stopped working, but I found new stuff before it got out of hand again).
Everyone is different, different stuff works for different people and you yourself are different people when your weight changes significantly, as you age, and as your environment and knowledge changes.
Things that effect hunger:
fewer bigger meals (unless it doesn't and you do better with more small meals).
Protein, fiber (generally less hunger for most people), carbs (varies), fats (ditto).
Avoiding trigger foods, (there are some foods and different for everyone, that once you eat a little it causes more hunger and triggers into more eating).
Psychological tricks: (1. realize that a state of being somewhat hungry all the time is the normal state that humans lived with for thousands of years, 2. realize that you can burry yourself with work as a good distraction from hunger and get a lot more done at the same time. 3. Realize that "Hunger is the best spice" - Epictetus 4. Every time you catch yourself thinking about the costs of dieting(hunger), make sure you spend even more time thinking about the benefits. Exercise: figure out what exercises increase and decrease hunger for you, today.
Liquid calories: your body doesn't register them and sometimes registers them negatively, best avoided all together. If you need a treat, prefer the ice cream over the milk shake. Cinnabon's highest calorie item is a drink.
I wish you the best, I hope something I said may help.
Same. Had to go on keto and it was tough the first couple days but now I struggle to eat enough as crazy as it sounds. I’m just not hungry like I used to be. Consistently losing 2lbs a week. Hope you stick with what works for you!
I think this is actually the most common experience. Everyone says they want to lose weight, but they just can't bring themselves to eat a sensible amount. Heck, I'm trying it now, writing down everything I eat, weighing myself each day, and it's still going pretty damn slowly.
> So many diets talk about not being hungry while you are on the diet. I've been to dieticians and told them I'm hungry, and they suggest eating more protein or more fiber. That does help, but I still feel hungry.
Have you thought about eating something that just has very few calories, in order to fill you up? Carrots have barely any calories and need a fair bit of chewing. Popcorn without salt/sugar/butter as well. Diet drinks or water.
What's helped me a bit is just looking at all the calorie labels on everything to get a feel for what the cost of each item is, then using that as a kind of "is it worth it" budget. A lot of things go out the door when you do that, but surprisingly some quite nice things stay on the menu.
> Have you thought about eating something that just has very few calories, in order to fill you up? Carrots have barely any calories and need a fair bit of chewing.
In my experience, this works kinda ok, but it doesn't actually feel like being full or sated. It feels like having a full stomach but still being hungry.
Isn't the feeling of having a full stomach what people normally mean by being full? I've never thought you could feel full bit hungry.
The other side of that is you can feel like you need to eat despite not actually feeling hungry. I've lost a bit recently, but not often with that hole in the stomach feeling. I still often get that "I should eat something" feeling while not feeling the physical "belly empty".
(Not GP) Apples make me hungry. No seriously. There's no fruit quite like apples that make my stomach sour for more food. It almost hurts. I can eat 4 apples and I'll be _stuffed_ but not _satiated_.
> Carrots have barely any calories and need a fair bit of chewing.
Not to undermine your point, because it's a good one, but the same guidelines should apply to anything you eat, even carrots. I was losing weight and tracking "calories" very closely. I started eating carrots for exactly the reason you mention and gained two pounds that week. At my next doctor visit, she told me she's never asked this question before, but "are you orange?" I was, from carrots.
I have a pet theory that obesity is linear to tastey food. As we have sugar and tastey food readily available it's far easier to continue to consume. I catch myself eating a whole bag of cereal, even though it's not fulfilling, simply because it tastes good and I'm hungry. If instead my only options were healthy foods I'd eat a lot less.
Your hunger is partly driven by gut bacteria that want you to feed them. It is a genuine form of mind control. Your current mixture of biota aren't doing you any favors. It would be worthwhile to look into medical treatment that can kill them off and replace with a known good inoculation.
I have just accepted being hungry all the time. Lost 61 pounds in 6 months, still got 44 to go before reaching my ideal weight. Being hungry all the time became normal after 2 months. It was difficult, still is.
So, my diet plan was - eat less. And of that which I eat, avoid sugar like poison and avoid carbohydrates as much as possible, while still having at least some daily intake split between meals.
And regular blood tests and monitoring by doctors (endocrinologist, GP, cardiologist).
This worked for me. I lost 20 pounds in 30 days, which was my goal. Calories per day 808 average, 645 median. Persistent minor hunger in the afternoon, reduced with lots of carbonated drinks, sugar free jello, and a pickle or two.
I am almost permanently hungry. It is extremely rare for me to feel full. My wife, friends, co-workers etc who eat the same meals as me (e.g. at restaurants or Xmas dinners etc) stop with comments like "man I am so full I could not eat another morsel!" yet I sit there with a clean plate thinking I could eat the entire thing again while also wondering what is for dessert. At home I will pretty much always finish off what my family leave on their plate.
I think I am just missing that gene or whatever that tells you you have eaten enough, kinda like how horses can eat themselves to death without a nosebag.
The only thing that has kinda worked for me is MyFitnessPal and eating sugar-free sweets or black coffee to distract my brain.
I don’t feel the need to comment on the GP because you’ve hit my anecdata on the head, I have to eat what other people consider a sickening amount of food in order to feel “full”. Luckily, also with MFP, I’ve done everything from six months of hardcore power lifting with at least 4500 calories a day, to 9 month cuts at a 1650 max. These days, with less time with two kids and a body hitting its mid 30s, I’ve learned my maintenance calorie amounts, combined with maintenance exercise to keep me at a decent lean level, but it means living with a mild perpetual hunger pang. The only way I’ve ever avoided it in the past is with a strict low carb diet, but again with young kids, it’s difficult to get everything perfect.
This is the key. On evolutionary time scales, human beings have only very recently come to inhabit a world where regularly being able to eat to full satiation (and beyond) is commonplace. Being "a little hungry" is actually the typical condition under which most of our ancestors over many thousands of years have operated. Put an organism evolved to survive amid scarcity in an environment of abundance, and it's going to gain weight unless it comes up with a method for stopping at or before the earliest signs of satiety.
“Eating less often” is also the primary recommendation given by longevity researcher Dr David Sinclair regarding how we can live longer. Not because it stops you being overweight, but because it triggers hormetic adaptations in the body that ultimately extend your lifespan. So being hungry definitely isn’t bad.
Maybe you should try embracing the hunger. I'm on the opposite side of the spectrum, too skinny. It was very difficult for me to gain muscle mass for the longest time. Eventually I came to enjoy the feeling of working out for the muscle soreness it caused. I still do not enjoy working out after 10 years, but I associate soreness with muscle gain and fitness, and so I enjoy it. If you are able to convince yourself that hunger is actually the feeling of yourself losing weight, it might be easier to embrace. Hunger can be torturous but it isn't dangerous.
WHO recently released a report on obesity in europe[1]
Stressing, among other things, that obesity is a chronic disease starting very early in life, indeed even before conception, and cannot be treated as an individual failing.
They also point out that health professionals should focus not on weight loss, but on life long prevention of comorbidities. To which end various treatment options are available. Weight loss may be part of it, but as little as loosing 10-15% maybe enough towards that particular goal.
They mention some drugs that might have an impact on hunger.
Unfortunately, its a disease that is very hard to treat, and for cases of severe obesity, drastic measures like bariatric surgery may be the only option. An option well worth considering in light of the alternative if nothing else works though.
(My personal opinion is that some drastic diet intervention with focus on undoing the epigenetic damage from early life should be possible, and far preferable to the surgery option if at all effective, but the science is still being worked out on that one)
> obesity is a chronic disease starting very early in life, indeed even before conception
I'm very curious about your thoughts on life before conception. Does the unborn infant soul inhere in the egg? And if it does, are you suggesting that some people are conceived with fat souls?
But the basics of it is that paternal health impact sperm selection, and maternal health impacts the hormonal environment shaping genetic expressions of the developing child.
I think this is correct for health concerns. I'm also motivated to enjoy nature by hiking, biking, skiing, etc, and I can't enjoy myself doing those things right now.
WHO will do everything and spread as much lies and stupid study to keep the half adult on hearth which are overweight and obese as captive costumers to bigpharma industry and industrialised food industry. So basically using them as a valid reference is stupid.
So promoting paper which relate to prenatale conditions which would leads to adult obesity is just a smoke screen to hide that the whole modern society is just a big pathology factory at mankind scale.
better make people feel they are cursed by gene than just realise that the real war on drug should be against sugar and vegetable oil than cocaine and majiuana.
The biggest cartel around are industrial food and stores where everybody shop everyday. Not talking about all the shitty food restaurant where you pay high price to destroy yourself. Most modern food are more dangerous for health than cigarettes. But still Smoke screen to keep Smart ass from silicon valley such as this website audience whe believe to be litterate enough into the blind spot of all the comorbidities of modern society. but as far as my comment hurts your feelnig keep minusing it to silent it and punish me to not be blind like you :)
signed: a carnivorous troll who lost 45kg and reversed prediabetic conditions/highblood pressure/sleeping apnea/chronic gout/oversweating by just eating meat. Not talking about my improved libido and my bigger penis (in the way i can now see my feet when i wash) And all this after 40yo. (yes im not a young idealist who believe he knows everything while most of his experience is reading ramdom stuf on internet).
well telling half truth doesnt mean you are honnest...
Some stuff are so big that ignoring them is too difficult to ignore and would question others too easely on your motive.
But Devil hides in details. Read their updated diet recommandation and understand that beside yelling with the herd about obesity epidemia, they are doing everything to promote it with their diet guidelines (based on vegan wokism).
Also it's not like nutrition heterodoxia haven't been warning since 50 years an this major health crisis. After year of promotion of modern diet from WHO and associates.
Now that you cannot go in the street without being surrounded by Obesity everywhere it's hard to play blind.
Also after 2 years of COVID, more and more peoples realised that OBESITY poses a threat by fragilizing society at global scale, as far as Obese peoples are weaker to fight against virus, and vaccines are less efficient on obese peoples. So basically they are weak and difficult to protect from common virus, especially respiratory virus.
Not forgetting about Diabetes type 2 (almost 1/3 of adult in the world has diabetic condition mostly due to overweight and obesity). Which calls about talking also on Diabete type 3 which is commonly named Alzheimer disease. Type 2 Diabetic have 6 times more chance to developp Alzheimer than non diabetic in the 10 to 20 years after start of their conditions.
So with more and more young starting to develop T2D around 20 years old, a good part of them will develop Alzheimer disease around 35-40 years old which will also have an huge societal impact.
And even before that, cognitive performance are deeply tied to calories type of sources. Alzheimer disease just being the final stage of a long degradation process over decades due to abuses of bad calories. So basically cognitive performance are degradated long time before Alzheimer occurance.
everybody jokes about Karen, but nobody look at average karen's bodyshape...This could explain a lot.
The WHO and many other doctors have decided that widespread personal failings are beyond their purview to fix, and so redefined the definition. People simply refuse to take personal responsibility, and in the face of this the doctors are trying to help. Make no mistake: this is a personal failing and a societal failing. Just because a large percentage of people choose to fail does not make it any less of a failure.
Or it could be the things in the hundreds of papers from before 2005, when normalizing obesity was not politically expedient. All you have to do is live in any east Asian society for a period of time to understand that portion control and shame are extremely effective in preventing obesity in a population.
First generation Asian immigrants to the west generally do not become obese. They retain the ideas from their home country that being fat is shameful, and they retain their conception of a correct portion size. If they start getting even 3 kilos overweight, they take steps to undo that. The west has decided portions are to be huge, and is in the process now of destroying shame. Time has shown the results.
Unfortunately, doctors cannot do anything about widespread societal shift in attitudes toward health. All they can do is recommend what is most likely to actually help. While the correct answer is "stop eating so much; gather the willpower to be mildly hungry during the day; your entire mental conception of healthy food and portions has been fucked since birth," people won't actually listen to that. Thus, modern medical advice has been forced to basically admit that no one will ever lose weight in aggregate and begin making recommendations with that in mind. That doesn't make the older mindset incorrect, though. If a doctor could mind control you into being optimally healthy, there would be a lot less focus on "it's a disease; it's stress; you can't help it so just try to manage it best you can" and a lot more "stop constantly eating so many calories".
I don't live in your body, know how you feel or know what you've tried. But I can share my experience as it seems similar and had an solution that was overlooked by multiple professionals.
While my situation may be different, it may still provide an insight on what kind of things to look at.
Turns out times I felt most hungry were times when my blood sugar was low. If I ever eat something with a high glycemic index without something with a low GI along side it then I am bound to have low blood sugar inside of a couple hours especially if it's for breakfast (even medium sweetness cereals are a no go for that). When I get low blood sugar I feel like eating a horse. Turns out that even a small amount of food will sate me if I am patient enough (difficult when your body feels like it is telling you that you'll die if you don't eat cake or drink juice).
Being autistic doesn't help, I often forget to eat until my blood sugar drops.
I do think coming to terms with hunger is a huge part of weight loss - its can be an absolutely uncomfortable, anxious, or dreadful feeling for many and its a wrecking ball to well laid plans.
Like most primal drives - once its present in my mind its not long before it blossoms into behavior.
When I'm losing weight, I treat hunger like any other non-constructive impulse (e.g. anger, sloth, apathy, negative self talk, etc...):
1) I try to prevent it by not putting myself into situations where my judgement is compromised. With hunger, this most often means never waiting too long to nourish - I've got to feed the body before the mind starts producing urges that aren't consistent with healthy outcomes. Less often, this means not being hung over and heading for a fast food breakfast.
2) I keep busy so there's not much cycle time in my brain for it to take root. Anything will do as long as its immersive. Sipping something with no or few calories throughout is helpful. The devil will find work for idle hands to do, they say.
3) When these don't do the trick, I respond to any emergent internal pleading directly. When I sense the familiar "but I won't be satisfied if I don't do X, and don't I deserve to be satisfied?" I respond as I would with my child or any other 3rd person who's about to abandon the plan - I reaffirm that we're all in this together and being satisfied is definitely the goal and one we're committed to and in this case satisfaction looks like weight loss, not nachos.
I don't win every time, but these generally get me enough wins to tip the war in my favor.
> 1) I try to prevent it by not putting myself into situations where my judgement is compromised. With hunger, this most often means never waiting too long to nourish - I've got to feed the body before the mind starts producing urges that aren't consistent with healthy outcomes. Less often, this means not being hung over and heading for a fast food breakfast.
Yup. In my case, I find that not having foods that "I shouldn't eat" (think sweets, etc) in the house at all is better than having to deal with my urge to eat those.
Also, tied to the previous point: don't go shopping for food when hungry. This helps with not having those foods in the house. "I'll control myself this time" has basically never worked for me.
I used to think loosing weight was easy, and maybe it was when I was a skinny 20-something. Now at 35+ I'm skipping meals, reducing sweets and alcohol, and doing light exercise every day and it is still hard to just maintain the current weight, let alone drop a few kg. The thing that seems to help is fasting for a few days here and there.
Your body craves carbohydrates, it's like an addiction. Overcoming that addition is all about training your willpower and delayed gratification.
It's the same as smoking. Strong willed people can stop smoking in a heartbeat. Weak minded people cannot, their minds are simply too weak to resist smoking and they need it every 2 hours. Same with eating.
Next time you feel that hunger feeling, out of spite just don't eat and the craving goes away within 1-2 hours and you'll get long term endorphins instead that make you feel good for your mind being stronger than that craving. It's not so hard, you just have to be a bit stronger than that desire.
You can also try fasting. Just don't eat for 24h and you'll feel a lot better than if you ate.
Some people simply cannot delay gratification, they need to be on their phone, watch tv constantly to get their dopamine hit. However, other people are able to delay gratification and get a much larger amount of endorphins and also the better ones.
It should become a habit to receive your dopamine hits from resisting the temptation and being stronger than this degenerate craving for unhealthy, processed food carefully designed to make the population addicted to their produce to buy more and more and eat more, so that they make more money.
There is a way to get out of this easily, don't eat any more sugar and carbohydrates, but plants and meat, which is the keto diet. It's very healthy and natural as well. You'll drop a lot of weight and you can still eat well.
I don't think this willpower explanation quite fits the facts.
I can delay gratification. I can quit coffee cold turkey no problem. I skip breakfast to increase my fasting period. I don't need TV or Internet, I'd rather work on my lifestyle property. I almost never take pain pills, I see myself as stoic, I can do long duration exercise.
I can count calories and force my weight down from 100kg to 74kg by sheer willpower and focus on the issue.
And yet I can't effectively keep the weight off. Because the hunger is 24x7, and my ability to focus on the issue isn't 24x7... I have other things to do in life.
I never have a craving for something sweet. Not since I was like 5 years old. I will eat sweets from time to time, but usually only when pressured socially to do so. Sweets seem repulsive to me, make my tonsils cringe. I haven't binged on sweets ever since that halloween stomach ache in 1976.
Long term endorphins from not eating?! Maybe once, the first time you ever successfully don't eat, but surely it stops being a surprise after the first time.
It is the annoying, aggravating, all consuming hunger that is the cause, not a misunderstanding about how many calories are in what foods.
I would have thought by now science would have a drug to modulate abnormal levels of hunger, but we still don't have one. And we don't know what causes them.
My experience is that hunger is a lot like the sensation you get when quitting smoking. And eating while hungry is definitely triggering the same stuff than smoking an overdue cigarette. It’s something in the throat that has must have neural connections in the upper back (at least for me!).
What I am trying now is to find hunger not too unpleasant. It feels unpleasant at first, then if you think about it, it’s not painful, it’s just different.
Like smoking, temptation is difficult to resist, so things like working in a place with no access to food is a must have. And filling days with activities which make you think about something else also works. I have really bad sleep sometimes, and when I do, my resistance to temptation is less efficient. So you need to know that kind of stuff about yourself.
Yup, exactly this. I quit smoking multiple times and dieted one time (lost ~20 pounds).
You have to "hack" your brain into enjoying the unpleasant sensation like it is something good. Even if you feel like the world will end, nothing happens.
Doing other activities help indeed, but in order to do this, you sometimes need massive changes in your daily habits/lifestyle. I feel like these changes are the hard to maintain part since you are constantly fighting to do "the right thing" instead of "the pleasurable thing"
I know that weight loss happens differently for different people, so read this or ignore this. Hopefully you haven't heard this exact take before, but with the number of people who dump advice on you when they think you're unhappy with your weight, you probably have at some point.
Keto has consistently been the most effective way for me to lose weight. More important than the actual diet though, was that it became clear to me that there was a difference between, "Hey, you were supposed to eat by now." hungry and "OK, I'm a bit dizzy and forgetful and need to get something in my stomach." Just knowing that there were two completely different hunger signals made losing weight a lot easier. I ignore the one that generally occurs at set times or after a certain period of time since the last meal and make sure I have something on hand to straighten things out if my blood sugar needs some support.
For me, cutting out carbs and maintaining a reasonable calorie deficit works wonders. My mom can't sustain a keto diet very long and does super well counting calories. I've had friends in the past who maintained a healthy weight eating small, carby meals frequently in addition to exercise.
The actual combo of diet and exercise is very dependent on the individual, but I feel that knowing the difference between "hungry" and "need to get calories in to function" is a big advantage, however you get to that point.
Next time you are hungry: take a hot bath with epson salts, while you read aloud. After your body is warmed up, do 30 minutes yoga. Followed by 10 minute guided meditation. Boho Beutiful has a Youtube channel where you can find Yoga/meditation vides. This routine will improve focus and mental clarity and help with the cravings while also being great for stretch. Can do it in the morning or at night, or even repeat it through the day instead of sitting at the computer.
Oh, I've thought about this a lot too. I know there are cultural and psychological components, and that is my main point. Everyone's experience and expectation are different.
This kind of hunger is what I've felt my whole life too, though my weight is still only in the overweight category. I can eat twice, three times what a normal portion is and still feel like I need to eat. I could easily eat multiple large pizzas by myself with no problem at all. There's a scene from The West Wing where the chief of staff describes his alcoholism and how people would ask him how could he drink so much and still want more. His answer is that he doesn't understand how anybody else could not want more. That it's the best thing in the world. And that's exactly how food feels to me.
A year ago I was diagnosed with ADHD (inattentive) and prescribed a very low dose of Vyvanse (amphetamine based). Suddenly it was gone. I'd want to eat at normal times, I'd eat a normal portion but I could easily walk away or I actually just didn't want more. I asked my wife, is this what other people feel like? It really rocked my world a bit. It's one thing to logically know that people experience reality differently, but I've rarely had such a stark example of it.
Chiming in to say I had the exact same realization after starting vyvanse. It’s helped me with my relationship to food, because now I know what it feels like to not clean my plate during every meal.
Yes, thanks I should have been more clear that I knew that going in. It was the contrast that surprised me. I wasn't sure if the original hunger was just my excuse for over eating, or something I was imagining. But after talking with other people who don't take ADHD meds, I found they had the same hunger level as I do on the meds, but naturally.
> It doesn't even take that much extra food to gain a lot of weight. One extra piece of cake a week [...]
I honestly only say this in case it helps, and I'm firmly on the upper end of 'healthy' UK BMI so not in any health freak position of judgement by a long shot, but I last had a slice of cake months ago, so the casual 'just an extra slice of cake every week' really stands out to me.
(On a complete tangent I don't at all think regular cake eating is incompatible with a healthy diet, but I do think that in 2022 it's highly inversely correlated, and that going against that almost requires baking your own.)
I was raised in a family that used food treats as a reward. It was normal to have ice cream and cookies a few times a week. To be clear, I wasn't obese until after I moved out on my own, but part of the pattern was set.
I was raised in America where we are told that we can 'have it all'. If you don't order the large portion, people wonder what is wrong with you.
I'm not blaming my situation on these factors, but I do think they are important contributors.
1. It's ok to eat some "junk food" as part of your diet. That's not going to automatically kill your diet, if you still control calories. It might not be as satiating as eating other foods though, so it's worth experimenting with this. (personally I would still eat "junk food" on my diet and I enjoyed the extra flexibility).
2. Just cause you're eating junk food, since calories is what ultimately matters, it's still worth not ordering the large. Saying " well it's junk food I'm already lost" and then eating a larger portion is just making the sustain much worse than it needs to be.
3. Similarly, just cause it's a junk food place, doesn't mean there aren't better or worse options. I love McDonald's, and still eat there even when dieting to lose weight. But I'll eat only chicken nuggets, and skip the fries. Not nearly as good or healthy as eating other sources of protein, but definitely better than including an extra 500 calories of non satiating carbs.
I’ve been learning to bake and will make a batch of brownies or cookies at least once a week. It’s just my boyfriend and I that live together so it ends up being the equivalent of 2+ extra pieces of cake a week, probably. Now a dinner without dessert feels lacking.
I’ve been thinking about giving all but one serving away to friends each time I bake, but your comment reminded me that even one serving a week is likely more than I need.
So… I was never predisposed to put on weight, but as I got older I got less and less fit than I used to be. My doctor told me my cholesterol and triglycerides were up and suggested that I just stop eating desserts and candy entirely. It seemed impossible when he suggested it, but I’ve been able to stick to it for almost two decades now. When I made the decision that I just wasn’t going to have any more desserts, ever, it was much easier than it seemed it was going to be.
Just a note, I've lost significant weight by having just one meal a day and snacking thru the day. The key is to plan your day's food and snacks and not to have extra food ready to eat. Why one meal? I found that every time I sat down to eat it would be a struggle not to over eat. So to reduce the possibility of over eating I only do it once a day.
Counting on willpower to help you lose weight is a lost cause for most people. The key is to put yourself in situations where you can't over eat and/or you have to follow what your past self thought was good for you.
Your weight loss should be gradual but consistent. People want to lose all the weight in a short time but they never reflect that it took years to gain the weight. It should take a while to lose it.
It's depends on habit. People are not used to being actually in empty stomach since childhood.
Eating all the time makes our brain want food all the time. I did intermittent fasting and now I'm completely okay not eating during that time. For other times it becomes easy, after not eating like before.
The food doesn't have to be calorie heavy. Replace with meat, nuts, vegetable, fruits (not juice).
My friend, I suggest seeing an obesity medicine specialist. There are medications that can help. Insurance more than likely will cover it. Obesity is no joke and leads to (or complicates) a vast array of medical issues.
Firstly, congrats on the weight loss. 30 pounds is huge. It sounds like you're on the right track.
My thoughts on hunger: I used to treat hunger as if my body was signalling that it needed food right to survive. Then one day I got sick and couldn't keep food down -- even though I was hungry -- so I stopped eating. To my surprise, my hunger went away. After the sickness had passed, eating anything at all would give me tremendous heartburn, so I continued not eating for about another week. I found it unusual that I could walk the streets in a completely fasted state, my body cannibalising its own muscle and fat reserves, and not feel any hunger at all. To me, it demonstrated that hunger wasn't the 'you require food right now' signal that I thought it was. It must mean something else.
When I began eating again, my hunger returned.
I walked away from that experience with a recalibrated understanding of hunger. It now seems more like a suggestion from the body: 'this is the time that food is usually available, so you should eat if at all possible, because we can't be sure when food will be available again', rather than 'I require food right now to survive'.
Just a theory. May be you are hungry because the bigger you get the more food is needed to maintain the energy levels at current weight? If you tend to over eat even 50% of the times, you are now getting bigger, and more hungry(to maintain the increasing weight) in a never ending loop?
I don't have a solution for this. But it does look like to reverse this you will have to do the exact opposite. Like under eat a little and exercise enough to burn calories, and go into this loop?
Then I really tried to eat only salads and generally healthy things while doing a lot of sports.
I lost almost 95kg within less then 2 years and for most off the time, the hunger was gone.
At some point, the hunger came back however, and I'm back up to 160kg.
It is a terrible feeling, and while it's possible to ignore it for a while... At least I cannot for months or even years. I'm not sure why it went a away before, but I wish I knew. Switching over to salad diet and doing sports doesn't seem to work by itself, at least not within a reasonable amount of time
First : a lot of love and empathy to you. I mean it.
Second :
> Then I really tried to eat only salads and generally healthy things while doing a lot of sports.
Did you continue this after your weight loss ? If not, do you think you could (and not should) have done it ?
I’m from a different place : I weight "only" 93kg but I’m currently unable to loose anything. I just manage to keep it this way but watching my family tree in terms of obesity really scares me for what is to come.
For what it’s worth : I think buying a connected scale helped me a lot stopping my weight gain : you weigh yourself every morning and it allows you to clearly see the trend : up -> Pay attention to what you eat, stable -> ok, down -> nice. Generally when the trend goes up, I know I’ll eat less because it will be in my mind just before breakfast.
One suggestion, it's not just how much you eat but what you eat and when.
When dieting people generally want to loose weight from fat and not muscle.
Try to delay or skip breakfast if you can. It gives your body a longer overnight window for blood sugar to fall and start using fat stores to compensate.
Then try some low intensity exercise whilst you're in that pre-breakfast fasted state.
It's very important to keep the intensity low because you can only get so much energy from fat at a given time.
At higher intensities, in the absence of carbs, your body will break down protein i.e. muscle, for energy and you want to try to minimise this.
Give yourself some protein immediately afterwards to compensate for the loss as you can't totally avoid it. In the window just after exercise you should be able to absorb protein more efficiently.
When you want to do high intensity exercise make sure you have enough carbs to power that intensity. In cycling, we have the amusing phrase "avoiding the bonk".
The "bonk" being the point where you've used all your muscle glycogen stores and can't replace them. You generally slow right down, vision gets a bit blury and you get emotional as your body eats itself.
Everyone ends up doing it once but no one wants to do it twice. So eat carbs when you need to.
You will not die over night if you restrict calories, if you read the article you would have saw what the author wrote about the Minnesota starvation study. This tells me you have not ever tried to restrict calories and you lack the disciple or mental fortitude to cut out low density, high calorie foods such as the “cake” every week you referenced. Why not try replacing the junk food cake with steamed broccoli and fruit??
I’m sorry but I ballooned to 250 during COVID lockdown and am back to a healthy weight by lifting heavy in the squat rack (starting strength + 5x5) and eating nutritious foods at a deficit.
Until you try this or try and determine you have a medical condition and seek treatment (hyperthyroidism), you get 0 sympathy from me. Consider this some tough love from someone who put in the hard work to turn their life around.
I believe in you, please try change your mentality you are limiting yourself from any progress in weight loss and can only blame yourself.
“Anyway, now I realize that I am hungry. It never goes away unless I eat a significant amount of food. My body told me to eat, so I ate.”
Hunger =/ I NEED to eat to make this feeling of discomfort go away
> There is a very good chance that someone is writing a reply with some suggestion as to how I should eat so that I'm not hungry.
I will write about a personal experience that has nothing to do with selecting different foods - intermittent fasting.
First I thought this was a torture people put themselves up to. Then a few friends tried it, said you get used to it, and this made me curious. I used to say black coffee was torture, until I stuck with it for a week and now I hate sugar in it - an eye opener that what I thought was an absolute truth about my preferences could be turned around with so easily.
So I tried intermittent fasting. The first few days sucked, I was uncomfortable and moody in the morning, and starving by the time of lunch. Then I got used to it, didn't feel hungry anymore and stuck with it for a year - lost 10 kgs whike barely* thinking about it.
* I didn't lose weight for the first month, then I realized I was over compensating with big meals and eating more junk (believing the fasting would compensate it - it didn't). After I got back to my regular habits when eating, the diet was a breeze.
I never had weight problems… I naturally started intermittent fasting without realising it was a thing! I never have breakfast (only an espresso), I have lunch around 1pm (usually one dish and no dessert), then dinner around 8pm (again usually just one dish) and that’s it. No snacks or other meals during the day!
> There is a very good chance that someone is writing a reply with some suggestion as to how I should eat so that I'm not hungry. Thank you for the thoughts, but realize that you don't live in my body, you don't know how I feel, you don't know what I've tried.
I completely agree with this. I still do want to chime in a little. Don't feel obligated to try any of this, maybe you have already tried. I have a hunch you've tried it already. Perhaps someone else hasn't and will try upon reading it.
One rather simple change in diet is volume eating. As in, eat food that fills your stomach, but does not contain (many) calories. A prime example is lettuce, broccoli, or practically any vegetable.
When you're hungry try eating a large salad (a clean one that is, no sauces, or oil). When eating dinner add a large portion of broccoli, raw spinach, cauliflower. Try grilling or steaming vegetables.
In normal dishes try and replace as many ingredients with lower calorie alternatives, especially oils when cooking. These calories add up, quickly.
The above doesn't mean you cannot eat heavier sources of protein, fats, and carbs. Please just keep eating those, in balance. In balance meaning there's no need to have more grams of fats per day than a healthy weight in kg (e.g. 80kg -> 80 grams). Same story for proteins, but at a moderate ratio of 1-1.6 grams per kg body weight. Feel free to play with carbs.
> Hunger sounds like a problem to people. Hunger feels like a problem inside the body. People still tell me I shouldn't be hungry. Maybe part of the solution is realizing that eating to satisfaction is ... bad for some people. Maybe it's Ok to be a little hungry.
Strong agree with this. Funnily enough it's often thirst, which feels similar.
> When you're hungry try eating a large salad (a clean one that is, no sauces, or oil).
This is very important. The same goes also for many kinds of sauces added to meats. They are very, very tasty. But aside from their calories, a critical issue I have with them is that they interfere with your sensation of satiety. They just make you want to keep on eating. In my case, this tends to mess with my "hunger" signal: I get the feeling I haven't eaten enough, or I get hungry shortly after the meal. It's usually not actual hunger (I just ate a steak or whatever), but it does make me think of food and give me random cravings.
This basically never happens when I eat my food nature. [0]
I think this mechanism is a big factor in people's objections around "being hungry all the time". And yes, it's very distracting if you need to work, and even more so if you're just hanging out with nothing to do.
---
[0] I actually tend to liberally add "dry" condiments (think pepper, oregano, etc). The taste is, of course, orders of magnitudes less "intense", but they don't mess with my feeling full after a regular meal.
People like to come up with all kinds of 'tricks' to lose weight without feeling hungry. To me it sounds like trying to gain muscle in the gym without feeling fatigued or sore. Just be hungry and deal with that feeling. It's okay to feel discomfort. I'm hungry right now but I have decided writing a post on HN is more important than eating immediately; fat people should decide that losing weight is also more important.
>People still tell me I shouldn't be hungry.
>Maybe it's Ok to be a little hungry.
I think you're 100% on to something. We suffer from avoidance of discomfort, as demonstrated by our obesity and opioid epidemics. Facing that discomfort is usually the fastest path to growth in every aspect of life across career, education, diet, love, exercise.
We always try to find routes around discomfort. There're endless dating gurus promising to save you the potentially horrible pain of rejection, cosmetic surgeries, drugs, and avoidance options. None of these shortcuts work, instead resulting in addictions, cowardice, unfulfilled dreams and lives.
There's mounting evidence of the health benefits from calorie restriction, though autophagy and inflammation reduction. We evolved to have maintenance pathways only function in times of caloric deficit, and to eat when food was available. Now food is always available.
I've found that taking coffee while I fast reduces the discomfort. Depending on the mechanism of action, this might decrease the benefits.
All of us have opportunities in our lives to practice equanimity with discomfort. There's no moral failure here. We can all support each other to face our discomfort as we endeavor every day to move a step closer to our goals.
If there's one thing I've learnt about hunger it's that not all hunger is real.
You have to think to yourself, am I hungry, or am I bored/idle?
I find keeping yourself busy/no snacking or food at desk etc helps a lot. It may be different for other people but if I get up and walk around a bit/stretch I usually realise I'm not hungry, just for some reason sitting & idling too long make me feel like food.
Another big one is hydration, drinking enough water helps a lot, count coffee, etc as a - for the amount of water you drink. If I'm a little peckish and I realise I haven't had enough water, just drinking half a glass usually staves off the feeling of hunger.
The TLDR really is that counting calories is the only way to truly know. If you have a very regular diet it’s not too hard. For example I eat the same breakfast every day, and a handful of different lunches. So it’s easy to know what my macros are for those meals.
Incidentally at one restaurant I like, I always get the salad, because it’s one of the highest-calorie options they have.
It really is this simple. I never do explicit diets because changing food AND calories can lead to quick failure. I just continue getting the same food and reduce the amount--small fries instead of large. Next time, half the small fries. Introducing healthier foods and exercise should be done separately IMO
> You're Not Losing Fat Because You're Eating Too Damn Much (Even When You Don't Think You Are)
I read through the whole article, it is true, but the headline is wrong, you are not losing weight because you feel miserable. If it was just an issue of calorie restriction with no other effects, yes, this would be the reason.
n=1, but I’ve increased my iodine intake to the recommended daily dosage (ca 0.2mg), and have noticed (among other benefits) that I have to try quite hard now to gain fat. Probably something to do with thyroid hormones.
The ultimate cause is consuming too much, the proximate causes are various elements of modern culture (i.e. Bigger serving sizes, more readily available snacks, alcohol consumption, etc).
There are a few other variables that could play a role.
(1) Share of physical labor jobs vs office jobs
(2) Increased hormone and pesticide use in agriculture (dropping worldwide sperm counts is an underreported story, might or might not be related)
(2A) Less nutritional content in food - has gone down 60% since 1940s according to some studies; likely from over-farming. Need to eat more to get the same nutrients.
(3) Food deserts (related to (1)) - where healthy food options are rare
(4) Less general socialization (internet makes it less necessary to go outside, etc)
I got diagnosed with type 2 diabetes two years ago. I switched to a super low carb diet (30g per day). Contrast that with a 16oz Mt Dew, which has 77g. Or a bowl of cereal at 36g plus whatever is in the milk.
I ate all kinds of protiens and fats - cheese, meats, fish, veggies just to quell the hunger. I lost about 58 pounds in a year. Most of what I lost was fat. Two years later, I'm still doing a very low carb, but keep it under 50g per day. My weight has stayed ±3 pounds. I'm pretty convinced it's the super-high carb load everyone is eating three times per day.
> Now, I’m not sure about you, but I’ve never seen someone drink an actual [sic, 200ml] serving. Most people are going to be filling that glass to the top. This [pictured] is a full glass of OJ, coming in at 350 ml.
Personally I'd have less than that, 100-150ml maybe. Not calorie counting and never have. /Shrug/
And I agree with other commenter on the quote-unquote annoying writing style. I'll tell you why in a second. Ok here's why: it's annoying. I'll let that sink in.
This article is quite accurate I think. I use MyFitnessPal on and off. It is easy - you just scan the barcode and it tots up the calories.
MFP is excellent at making you face up to what you are actually eating. At first it was a huge eye-opener for how many calories were in everyday things - like a slice of bread is 80-120 calories etc. The article mentions fruit juice too - that was a big one for me as well. I figured that since I was not eating loads of pizzas and burgers etc that my calorie intake was probably "normal" but boy was I wrong and MyFitnessPal really helped understand that. Likewise it was good for a reality check that the 20 minute run actually was only like 150-200 calories burnt, not 750.
That was good, but where it really helped though was in measuring stuff out, and to realise what a serving really was. The biggest culprit for me was breakfast cereals - 30 to 45g of cereal is not a bowl full - it is a fairly pathetic covering at the bottom of your bowl. For years I was probably having like 4 or 5 (... or more!) servings of cereal (i.e. a full bowl, like it looks on the packet or on TV adverts!) a day without realising.
I'd recommend people give it a try, if only for a couple of weeks to get a grip on what the calorific levels of some of your staples are, and what a serving actually looks like. It is eye opening.
Just want to note here that I recently switched off MFP for Cronometer because MFP had a literal week long outage and is architected in such a way that it must phone home in order to save anything like a recipe you make. So that was a whole week where I couldn't save a new recipe.
I've found Cronometer to be a lot faster in every way, and actually has an up to date database and when you scan something it doesn't have, it lets you scan the label and updates the database. Highly recommend.
Only problem is what's endemic to apps in general right now. They want a subscription instead of buying the app outright. That's gonna be a no from me, dawg.
Cronometer I found was missing lots and lots of food items and restaurants though, and that makes it harder to report.
I unfortunately travel a fair amount and this means I can't just make restaurants a "cheat meal" some days. I try going to the grocery store while traveling, but it takes so much more time when I'm taking taxis and trying to cook in a hotel room.
HOWEVER
This is a lot of whining and excuse my brain is probably using to let me eat more when I travel.
Yeah, it doesn't have much in the way of restaurants. Then again, unless the restaurant itself publishes the figure, I don't trust it.
I haven't had too much trouble with missing food items since they are easy to add, I just wish they let you use the label scanner in the normal "make a custom copy" procedure.
Burgers get a bad rap, it was actually using MyFitnessPal that showed this to me.
There's no law says you have to get a fries and corn syrup drink with the burger, a burger and mineral water is a great meal, macros line up and I feel full for hours.
We joke at home that when we're on "fatness pal" then we can only eat dust and sand, which is what I assume you are referring to since everything has a barcode.
If you mean stay away from processed foods, then yeah readymeals and the like are best avoided. But pretty much everything has a barcode - raw chicken breast, raw fruit and veg, milk ... you name it - hell even salt and water have barcodes.
I love doing cardio, especially running gives me a rush like no other. If people don't want to do cardio you don't have to do it, you just have to adapt your calorie intake accordingly. But for those that don't mind it or even like it it's a neat way to squeeze out some more calories for a delicious meal or whatever.
I do agree that resistance training is important and often forgotten part of fitness. Having muscles means extra BMR and you will look better when you do lose that extra weight as opposed to that skinny fat look.
False. Cardio in the form of high intensity interval training is absolutely beneficial for your heart. I do agree that you should not neglect anaerobic training.
In my non-expert opinion, this is almost as good as it could be. People should face the harsh truths about their habits. I just dislike the underlying assumptions that things with fat or whatever is bad, every single macronutrient is great, just don't fucking overeat them. Also, life is absolutely better without sugar.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 297 ms ] threadAs always do not add more mass than you expel.
Why does the math not matter for me, while the next person watches every calorie, goes on long walks, and yet struggles to lose any weight?
Because it is about the amount you eat and not about eating healthy (whatever that means anyway).
Not even half a can of soda off and you gain five pounds a year, or fifty in a decade. The math matters, but does does the calibration and the ability to accurately estimate consumption. Even a tiny error amount means long-term weight gain. It's pretty easy to be glib about it.
A fidgeter, someone who wiggles, bounces their feet, etc., can burn perhaps three hundred extra calories per day. You can also see how that adds up.
The tiny increments matter little against time.
Also don't think that because you are not getting fat that your body is in a healthy state. You can be really skinny yet get insulin resistance, as I did.
Likewise the person who struggles to lose weight with diet and exercise is very likely eating more than they think they're eating (or opting for healthy options that aren't actually healthy, like salad covered in 600 calories of ranch dressing)
I used to eat at a salad bar every day for years. I got to observe what all kinds of people put into a “salad”.
My salads: spinach, romaine, broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, chick peas, mushrooms, balsamic vinegar (no oil).
Obese people’s salad: Four hard boiled eggs, ham, three leaves of lettuce, shredded cheese, a cup of ranch dressing.
So, I’m fat. All my life I’ve been yoyo-ing in terms of weight. Sometimes methodically sometimes by the ear.
A few years back, I went from 130kg to 85kg methodically. Calorie counting, watching macros, targeted exercises, all the good stuff.
What I found out was, if I didn’t diet and just logged my calories, I was consuming 4000 sometimes even 5000 calories per day easily. And it didn’t feel like I was eating much.
Full English for breakfast, that’s about 1k right there. One or two lates, another 300-400 calories. Maybe pair that with a little pastry, another 300 on top of that. Lunch, burger and fries, big coke to drink, toss in another k. After work a couple of pins with the lads, another 300-400. Get back, have dinner, maybe snack something while falling asleep to Netflix, another 1k easy. Don’t get me started on getting pissed with 7-8 pints and then devouring 3 big macs like it’s nothing.
I also found out I’m burning far more calories then I was expecting for my sedentary lifestyle. Just the walk to work, climbing some stairs, moving around the office, going to lunch, doing some house chores put me in close to 1k burned. Without feeling like I was making any effort.
In my case, 4k input with 1k output still yields 3k which is 1k over what I should have.
It is very possible in your case your input is 3k, your output 1k so your staying exactly as you are.
Count your calories, wear a apple watch and you’ll find out precisely.
Fat people eat a lot and often don’t know how much.
I've counted calories closely before and it's not black magic at work, I just don't eat enough. It feels like I eat a lot (probably because it's mostly food I cook myself and not calorie dense fast food) and I feel full, but the calories don't lie.
I'm guessing it's the reverse for people struggling to lose weight. I feel full and comfortable 200 calories below the daily recommended amount, and they likely feel that same way 200 calories above. I easily fall underweight if I stop paying attention to my diet, and they likely become overweight when they do the same and listen to their body.
Your body spends calories to digest food and get more calories. Your brain needs around 400 daily calories. If you want to burn 400 calories doing some cardio, you'll need an intensive 30 min session or so.
If you don't fix your eating, the effort you'll have to put into exercising will be huge, sometimes even unachievable.
Fundamentally using exercise to lose weight is long-term unachievable because it is unpredictable. Losing weight via diet is much simpler you just eat less, there isn't anything that would objectively stop you from following diet, where as simple incident or scheduling issue can prevent you from exercise. Exercise is fundamentally wrong tool for managing weight.
Exercise is for building muscles, diet is for managing weight.
As soon as I stopped, my weight ballooned. Even when I started eating less, I still can’t get my eating habits in sync with my reduced (3-5 hours a week) exercise schedule. I’ve been consistency about 15-20 pounds over my personal ideal weight.
Besides, my body can’t handle the type and frequency of exercise that it could in my mid 20s to mid 30s.
If instead you used diet as the primary tool and exercise has the supplement when the supplement falls away it's easier to adjust the diet to compensate. For example a moderate exercise of 30 minutes or so a day can burn an additional 200 calories a day that's 10% of a 2000 calorie diet. If you're in a situation where you cannot exercise cutting out an additional 200 calories is a relatively small amount of food.
Humans are very good at throwing everything into one bag and expecting it to remain forever. Your example of your high amount of exercise to induce weight loss is an example of this. It works but it's also very short-term because it cannot be maintained. I almost like him this to exotic dancers as a profession. It is a good way for a relatively low skill person to achieve a high amount of money in the short term. For example they could go to college and pay for it in cash. But often times the returns are so great it's a difficult to see that this cannot last forever. But as with the body cannot exercise at a high level for ever exotic dancers cannot remain profitable forever. This is why these are tools to allow a short-term process to evolve into a long-term sustainable game. Earn a large amounts of cash when you're young and viable to invest in a education with a future payoff or invest in another long-term payoff. Exercise to supplement your dieting, but the main goal should be evolving your diet to adjust to your caloric needs because that is the long-term.
Small boosts add up to big changes. It's always still about deficit.
it's four oreos. or two slices of cheese. 200 calories a day is significant long-term, but it's also trivially easy to eat that much without even thinking about it.
The only real long-term solution to weight management is not wanting to eat too much. Willpower controlled diets work on the short term, which might be fine if an individual's level of desired consumption is sufficiently close to their daily caloric needs, but are doomed in the long term.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/22/well/move/weight-loss-exe...
but exercise makes you hungry, and to the article's main point: people are terrible at estimating calories. a one-hour easy run, a two-hour bike ride, or a full day of alpine skiing burns what's basically an irrelevant amount of calories. if you're taking in any extra amount of calories, normal amounts of exercise doesn't help you lose weight.
You can theoretically try to counter this by also using a step counter to make sure you keep moving throughout the day, but at some point you might be too exhausted for even that to help.
That said, most people don't move or exercise nearly enough, not for weight loss nor for general health, so for most people's situation you're probably right, adding some exercise is a net benefit. It's still much easier and faster (and more important in the long run) to control caloric intake.
This is key for me. My wife loves variety and so she struggles with counting calories.
I prefer simple and known-to-be-delicious, and so I know about how much each of my meals is going to affect me. I came to hate calorie counting pretty quickly, and with that I came to hate eating out, because it's the hardest to count. And I'm not yet convinced that I've ever actually counted enough calories for any meal when eating out. There's so much self-deception involved, both my own and the people who are supposedly reporting the calories, both officially and unofficially.
I can't be bothered with all that, intermediate fasting (ie having a limited window of time in which you allow yourself to eat) seems to be a great workaround that leads to calorie restriction with less of the fuss.
After a few months, you’ll know the macros in everything without having to check labels, and the shopping/meal prep becomes easy because you know the right ratios of the things you buy and you’ve cooked them many times before. If a reframing might help, consider it an investment in yourself that pays off for life.
Here's a shopping list for three meals, see if you can guess what they are?
1 kg apples, 1 kg other fruit in season, White unsweetened yogurt, Unsweetened granola, Garlic, 1 can diced tomato (no salt, no sweetener, just tomatoes), 1 onion, Olive oil, 150 gr dry pasta (bonus points for "integral pasta" -- don't know the translation, "pasta integrale" in Italian), Baby spinach leaves, Cherry tomatoes, Risotto rice, White wine, Broth in powder, Butter
Buon appetito.
Meal 2: Half of the white wine
Meal 3: Everything else, other half of the white wine
For protein, tomorrow buy a can of chickpeas, one of tomatoes, some spices and some basmati and make "chana masala".
In the UK I think that's variously: whole wheat pasta, wholemeal pasta, wholegrain pasta, or brown pasta.
This is one reason why I think that dieting advice that is simple and straightforward has the most success. Some examples:
1. Cut out all sugar-sweetened beverages. This is a pretty easy rule to follow, and even if you find yourself missing a soda or something, my recommendation is to buy something like unsweetened iced tea and then add a couple sugar cubes - you'll be likely to add much less sugar than if you buy sweetened tea.
2. Cut out any refined carbohydrates. This was certainly harder for me, but since the rule is so simple and easy to follow, whenever I got hungry for carbs I had to make due with fruits or vegetables, so I ended up eating a lot fewer calories in any case, got more of other nutrients, and eventually just got "bored" with trying to find a snack and stopped eating until my next mealtime.
A reservoir of easy to store for long periods of time food source is a national security issue for every state, so it tends to be subsidized everywhere.
Stable foods can be shipped and stored more cheaply.
This coupled with the native desire for salty/sweet/fat puts the modern human at a terrible disadvantage in our current environment.
To some extent you always need to manage your caloric intake of course - but if you exercise regularly, the occasional indulgence isn’t a big deal.
Running is quite good for this, it will tell you how things are going, far better than any scale.
I noticed that when Im not working out I have poor food choices and when I eat like crap I avoid training or it’s a lot more unpleasant than it should be.
Also training results in physiological changes that help losing fat and be generally healthy. Just make sure you’re not losing too much muscle size with the fat.
> Results from the current multilab registered replication of the ego-depletion effect provide evidence that, if there is any effect, it is close to zero. [1]
> Taken all together, experiments conducted at 24 different labs showed no signs whatsoever of Baumeister and Tice’s original effect. [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion#Reproducibility_...
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916166528...
[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story...
Even if there was a device that could scan all food before eating it, they would still exempt some meals with the "do not count" argument.
Rule of thumb, that if a meal is easy and fast to prepare, then it is probably not suited for a diet.
To lose weight you have to do a lot more exercise than you think consistently. And you have to eat a lot less than you think.
Most people just don't have that kind of willpower.
She lost 90 pounds doing that in under a year.
Exercise was uncomfortable until I had lost weight, now I can do 15+ mile hikes with a 60l backpack.
I don't want to discourage anyone from doing exercise at any time in their goal for weight loss, but it is possible to lose weight by calorie restriction alone.
A simple walk on an incline (5km/hr @ 5% incline) can help you burn 400+kcals/hour. You can probably eat at 1500 kcals and start your day with a walk like that on the treadmill while watching some TV show :).
> .. but it is possible to lose weight by calorie restriction alone.
Indeed it is! :)
If you're obese or severely overweight, it's best to just do a PSMF to lose weight as quickly as possible. Btw, at 230lbs you can easily do strength training which will help you with body recomp (stimulating muscle growth while burning fat).
A good rule of thumb for a PSMF is 9.7x[protein intake]. For example: given 1.6g/kg*104kg = 166g of protein per day we get: 166g * 9.7 kcal/g = 1610 kcal. So your daily calories are at 1610 kcal max, and you need to eat at least 166g of protein (the rest of the calories can be filled with carbs/fat). I suggest min 50g of fat per day for men.
If you want to lose weight you need to do one of the following
Be hungry, Be in pain from exercise (running), or sacrifice all your free time to low intensity exercise
I chose option 3 along with weight lifting and I don't regret it.
Walking also has this really cool effect of not increasing ghrelin unlike high intensity cardio
I understand that sodium,potasium,etc.. are necessary, I'm just asking about why you think that the calories are a problem when 230 pounds?
Exercise doesn't help very much, it's really all about diet. Plus if you are exercising a lot, you'll feel hungier and it'll be harder mentally to not eat more to compensate.
My diet was bad and I was eating far above 2000kcal on many days. I just exercised a lot. 1h of fairly intense cardio at least 6 days a week, though I would always round up to the next 10 min mark and do more like 70 or 80 min per day.
Some days I would order pizza or something and some dessert in the evening when I knew this would push me into the 3000kcal range and in return did 2h or 3h exercise routines fairly regularly, often times while eating the pizza.
Obviously different things work for different people, but no amount of cardio is going to offset a terrible diet for most people. Caloric deficit and intermittent fasting combined with exercise is the easiest and fastest way (imho) to get your body to start metabolizing fat stores.
That's a massive number of calories! Might not look like much compared to how much is in, say, a bagel, but use a calculator to figure out what your basal metabolic rate is (what your body consumes just you doing nothing, sort of) and you'll find that extra 500 gives you a ton of headroom in whatever your diet is. A week and a half of that would be a solid pound on it's own (yes yes a pound is less calories than 500x10.5, but weight loss is not 1:1 like that for many reasons).
If you exercise a bunch, you burn energy exercising and you also upregulate your metabolism significantly, giving you a higher calorie budget -- but you also really, really heavily upregulate hunger. If you exercise enough that the calories burn "matter", you're likely to feel the need to eat way way way too much.
Doing "just enough" exercise that you don't become sluggish and lethargic is probably the right place to be purely from a weight-loss perspective.
But in my experience, the hard part about losing weight isn't really anything other than "the amount I have to eat to not feel miserable all the time is too much"
Diets do work, in that if you want few enough calories, you will lose weight. They "don't work" because asking someone to spend months or years continually in escalating misery generally eventually results in noncompliance -- and if your body tells you that it wants 2500 calories per day and you go on an 1500 calorie diet to create a 500-calorie actual deficit to lose about 0.8-1.0lb/week, you're go to feel really really hungry 24 hours a day.
Some folks report that if they force themselves to eat less after a month or two, their sense of hunger downregulates and it gets easier. Other folks report that hunger remains a constant companion, never relenting until they broke.
Had to give up coffee in the mornings because of the milk I put in it and the fact I can't just have coffee on an empty stomach. I have 3-4 cups of tea and 1.5L of water before lunch. Makes me piss like a race horse and gives me an overall "clean" feeling with no real hunger feelings at all.
It's only been 2-3 weeks so too early to say if the diet's any good, but at least there's no hunger / misery / counting calories. Overall pretty easy.
It did not work for me at all, I gained SO MUCH weight, because by lunchtime I was ravenous and couldn't stop myself from eating way, way, way more than I would have if I split between breakfast and lunch. I mean, it was also a stressful time, so it's hard to compare, but I put on 20 pounds in a few months, after having been stable weight for 5-6 years.
I started forcing myself to get up earlier and have a breakfast of around 350ish calories (basically a bowl of cereal or oatmeal or something with milk), and that allowed me to immediately stop the weight gain, because I removed probably 750+ calories of "excess" lunch in exchange. Still struggling to lose what I gained, but I've been stable for 18+ months since I made space for breakfast.
It's really interesting how individual some of this stuff ends up seeming. For example, I have learned that I can not be a stable weight (at any weight, it seems) if I drink sugared drinks with food. It seems that if I have a sugary drink with my food, I actually feel the urge to eat more food in addition to the calories in the drink, leading to a massive downward (well, upward in weight) spiral. I almost completely cut out sugary drinks from my life when I figured this out. (I now have maybe two or three sweet drinks per month on average. I haven't lost any weight this way, but I have regained stability).
I am a firm believer that the real solutions to the obesity epidemic are all going to be around helping people control their hunger sensation (be that with dietary changes, coaching and counselling, routine changes, chemistry or other medical intervention). Learning how much you should eat to be the weight you want to be isn't that hard. Spending about a third of your concentration power at all times to avoid the overpowering urge to raid the pantry, on the other hand, is really hard.
I'm glad you found something that works for you. I'm still working on finding it for myself, though I did manage to stop the bleeding at least.
For me, exercise leads to me feeling pretty crappy if I eat badly/too much and drink alcohol. So the exercise leads to me not wanting to feel like that, which leads to improvement in diet.
I think this is a misleading cliche. I seem to have a lost a significant amount of weight just from eating less, without exercise. Which makes sense.
It's amazing how many miles you'd have to run to burn the calories you get from a Big Mac. Basically, our food is super dense in calories, and our bodies are extremely efficient machines (meaning, they don't burn as many calories as you'd think when exercising). So, it should be much easier to lose weight by eating less than by exercising more.
> Most people just don't have that kind of willpower.
Most people aren't motivated enough. But "willpower" is a misleading and thus destructive way to describe motivation.
You increase motivation by thinking about whether the positive thing you want is "worth" whatever you're doing to get it. In other words, staying focused on the value. You don't increase motivation by "exerting willpower." That whole concept for motivation is a recipe for failure.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/your-fat-cells-never...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18454136/
I found the same when I started counting calories. An extra slice of wholegrain bread is how much?!
Even just a thin spread of butter or margarine on the bread would blow my daily budget by a lot, so I had to find alternatives for that (like mustard).
Given my own preferences for having a "proper meal", I ended up only eating twice a day. I focused on making it high-protein and high-fiber to make me feel full longer, cutting down on regular carbs as needed.
In the immortal words of Jasper Carrott:
"This hole", points to mouth. "Is bigger than that hole", points to bottom.
> they DO NOT want to believe how small portion sizes are required to consistently lose weight
My problem isn't meals and their potions, it is absent-minded snacking between. I'm finding it a lot harder to drop the few Kg I put on over 2019/2022/2021 (largely in 2020, when I like many had a bit of a mentally unstable few months and comfort eat a lot) than I found it to drop a few tens of Kg in 2015/2016.
Then we started working the same schedule, breakfast together. The whole thing unravelled with a casual comment he made. "Wow, you're really stingy with the sugar in your coffee."
Except I wasn't. I was actually indulging myself, like two tablespoons.
Show me how you make coffee? Ah. Yes. If you put 500 calories of sugar and cream into your coffee multiple times a day, you're not gonna lose weight.
He didn't believe me at first! I had to measure his quantities out and calculate it and show him. Liquids/powders in general seem to trip people up. We are bad at measuring them by sight. Soda, mayonnaise and dips. The oil in a nice salad dressing applied over-liberally can exceed the calories in the burger that goes with it.
Try measuring/weighing these sorts of foods and looking up their caloric content if you haven't before. You may be a shocked as my poor roommate was.
I can second this fully. Figured out the same thing when I spent a solid week nazi tracking my eating.
The thing that blew my mind. I always used heavy cream in my coffee. 150cal per 2 tablespoons. I would use like a quarter cup. I switch to milk, just 150cal per cup.
The little things really damn matter.
Integral calculus ftw!
Modern zero calorie sweeteners are really impressive. We've come a long way from the days of saccharine.
I know that's a wide range, but you can't really do "half-packets" easily and the cup sizes I use vary.
https://chinchileproducts.com/products/iansa-cero-k?_pos=2&_...
About 6 drops is a teaspoon, so 125ml lasts forever. It is much more concentrated than other versions in the US.
The pure stevia versions and pure sucralose versions are okay, but for whatever reason the mix is really just perfect.
The oat milk actually tastes disgusting to me from the fridge, but is super tasty once steamed. The higher fat version (Oatly calls it Barista Edition) is necessary to steam it. Regular oatmilk stays mostly liquid.
I usually combine with a Almond/Coconut milk and it is fine without sweetener. May take a bit to get used to if you have habits to break.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. People stop trying when they set unrealistic goals for themselves. We don't all need to be hyperfit. Etc.
I have made a ton of personal progress over the last 1.5-2 years in health and several other areas, by being vigilant in refusing to try to change too fast, even for mundane goals. It is important to find the right pace.
Not exactly the diet plan anyone should really choose, but it shows that even changes that feel like they shouldn't matter actually do, even when eating what most would describe as an unhealthy diet. There are a lot of calories in fats and oils, and apparently removing some of them can have significant effects on weight gain or loss.
Also, check out erythritol as a sugar substitute. I use it for everything and actually prefer it to sugar. It has a nice cooling effect in liquids it's dissolved in that you don't get with sugar.
Fats are 9 calories a gram. If you remove the available grease you're getting, what, two grams off per slice, maybe? Doesn't seem like that's really moving the needle.
Though now I want to rigorously test this, so the next time I have pizza I'll weigh the napkin before and after soaking up available grease.
Apparently, all he ate were pizzas, so it wasn't just one slice he was degreasing, but whole pizzas.
This is mostly what the article calls the "halo effect". People assume that "natural" things are lower calorie or healthier, which is sometimes the case, but fructose is fructose. It doesn't really matter if it's from corn or honey. Honey arguably has another couple marginal benefits, but it's absolutely not useful in losing weight. It's something like 90% sugar by weight.
What I'd actually suspect is something closer to: all diets work. Almost every fad diet works, even when they're completely counter to nutritional science because the simple act of paying attention to what you eat has positive effects.
It's most likely portion difference plus all the other crap in the highly processed creamer.
What blew my mind is how many calories are in a couple ounces of trail mix. I used to snack on that whenever I’d pass the cupboard. I can pay for a week of coffee by avoiding a few handfuls of trail mix!
As a bit of an aside: putting as many calories in as little weight as possible is kind of the point of trail mix, so you're not carrying kilos upon kilos of food when hiking.
I used to drink my coffee with sugar. Next to the coffee machine at my office there was this big box of sugar sticks, I took one with every cup.
One day, we ran out of sugar sticks, the box was empty. I asked around in the office if anyone knew where we keep the boxes of sugar, everybody answered that they didn't know, because they didn't take sugar in their coffee. If found I was the only one in the entire office drinking coffee with sugar.
That box was 3kg... 3000 grams of sugar, that I consumed in my own in just a matter of a few months...
Kind of shocked by this, I told a colleague about this, and he replied with something that stuck with my till this day: "It's all between your ears, stop taking sugar in your coffee, and after just a week, you won't know better. In fact: you'll come to detest it".
So I did, stopped taking sugar in my coffee cold turkey. And, my colleague was right, after a couple of days, I didn't miss the sugar in my coffee. In fact: I came to appreciate the taste of pure coffee.
A couple weeks later my mother accidentally put sugar in my coffee, as a force of habit, and I actually spat it out. It tasted horrible.
So, If you drink coffee with sugar: just stop doing it and you'll get to enjoy the real taste of coffee, and safe yourself a lot of sugar intake.
I also ditched soda (except for an occasional mixed drink) and when I want something cold and fizzy I pour a can of seltzer water with lime, orange, cherry, etc. It’s a game changer if you can kick the sugar habits.
I realized when I was 20 that I could easily drink 15% of my energy needs. Mostly empty calories (soda and the like).
I stopped. Now I drink water 98% of the time.
> Except I wasn't. I was actually indulging myself, like two tablespoons.
Is that correct? 2tbsp? 30ml? That's beyond indulgent. Sugar in hot drinks is typically measured in teaspoons, where two is a lot. And that's a third as much as yours; his I dread to think.
I don't say it to be condescending, but I am sceptical that sugared coffee drinkers have ever tried half-decent coffee (without instinctively adding/thinking they need to add sugar to it) anyway.
So many food products are marketed as "Fat Free, Organic, High In Fiber, Heart Healthy" and so on, even though the products are just a bunch of processed low quality crap. Even beer is frequently marketed as "Low Carb". In reality, there is no reason in include any calories for alcohol in any diet where the goal is losing weight.
Blaming it on food scarcity isn't the whole story. It's not enough that food scarcity stopped. It wasn't carbs either, as there are cultures without carb scarcity that weren't obese(Though we do put corn syrup in everything now).
My guess is that it's a dopamine addiction. We understand that sometimes we must do things we don't like, but the idea of eatings things we don't enjoy scares many people.
It's also how corps package food, and the ones that make their foods the most addicting(the most dopamine -> the most pleasure) survive.
Some kings in the past had massive obesity problems, like Henry VIII. Apparently for him it was forced immobility following a hunting accident. Most people in the UK just haven't been able to afford to get obese until the last several decades, and I warrant companies have learnt how to hook us on high-fat and high-sugar foods to make bigger profits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_Pacific
If you follow the "see also" from that article studies find the genetic factors towards becoming obese in a favorable environment to be different in different ethnic groups, from 6-85%.
So a theory that fits the statistics is that colonialism brought in a favorable diet for weight gain to everywhere(?) but the percentage of people who became obese when subjected to a favorable diet was largely a factor of local genetics, genes most useful in an unfavorable environment did well and put the peoples in those places at the top of the list for obesity rates.
Long term (centuries), as a species I suspect we may end up doing some light genetic modifications to tune our appetite for norms in modern civilization. Presuming modern western style lifestyles become more sustainable.
We're less than ~100 years into this crazy modern era where routine famines aren't the norm. Even in Western Europe post-WWI and post-WWII there were lots of famines. If you compare Western Europe with the USA-minus-1.5 decades you get similar curves of obesity increase [2]. That makes sense if you consider that post-WWII it took Western Europe about a decade or two to repair basic infrastructure. The whole bit of overall Europe having healthier cuisine than the US isn't true, with regards to obesity at least. It's largely seems to be availability of calories. Eastern Europe for example reflects the fall of the USSR and economic stagnation during 1990's pretty well too [3].
1: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-appr... 2: https://www.niussp.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Schermata-... 3: https://www.niussp.org/health-and-mortality/impact-of-obesit...
"I have a low metabolism" - obese people actually have a high 'metabolism', because moving all that extra weight takes a lot of energy
"Being overweight is not unhealthy" - weird then that they are having trouble getting pregnant and/or miscarriage regularly, need a machine to breathe at night lest their brain not receive enough oxygen, their knees and hips and eyes are that of someone several decades older, they're likely dependent upon insulin injections to live, and substantially more likely to develop cancer, etc.
Yes, there are a lot of negative attitudes towards obese patients in the medical community. That is partly because obese people think they know better than medical science, and are more interested in screaming about how they're being discriminated against thanks to the patriarchy and unrealistic beauty standards....than actually doing something about their weight...like accepting a referral to a nutritionist and accepting the advice to engage in more activity and weight-bearing exercise.
When someone needs a machine to breathe, artificial joint replacements, hourly/daily insulin, and Star Trek levels of intervention to reproduce, maybe they just need to shut the fuck up and lose weight.
You know what's really infuriating? Maintaining a healthy weight, getting exercise, making an effort to eat a balanced diet that hits lots of nutrients....and seeing these people cost my insurance company several orders of magnitude more money to keep alive than I do.
*Cost you several orders of magnitude more
It's so easy to tell ourselves that each small contribution adds to zero, but as someone noted elsewhere in this thread, calculus should tell us enough to be wary of dismissing little bits!
Not to veer too far off topic but this is something that always bugs my mind when people talk about how they don't want "socialized" healthcare because they don't wanna pay for other people to live unhealthy lives. Like dude, healthcare is already socialized, where exactly do you think the money the insurance companies uses to pay for all of your health costs comes from? From....other members paying into it. Which means that they already adjust prices to account for all their unhealthy members. You're already paying for it, might as well cut out the part where the company's incentivized to put turning a profit over providing quality care.
Most healthcare costs come from old age related costs and diseases. Cigarette smokers and obese people are actually cheaper to insure in the long run, because they're much more likely to die before becoming old enough to incur significant old age related healthcare costs.
That said, totally agree. The basics starts with a basic understanding of "how much." Food is quantified calorically. If you don't have knowledge or intuition about how much is how much, you're not aware of your eating habits.
Mates of mine are vegan, and I think they make the mistake in the other direction with their kid. They're hyper focused on "quality calories" but they underestimate calorie quantity. A kid's meal consisting of cucumber, greens, carrot, and bean noodles is 100 calories, and the kid needs 300. They do put a lot of effort into learning about healthy vegan diets, but the basics... quantity estimation isn't there.
^BTW, I think the whole idea behind courses and other "feasting" traditions might be that it allows us to pig out more effectively. I'm all full on soup, but I could go for some of that potato. Then sweets. Mebe some cheese.
Eyeballing calories becomes way easier after a few months of practice and pays off for life. Was able to get all the examples listed spot on except the popcorn, which I had no frame of reference for.
Are you really suggesting that people walk and hour and half with the intention of burning 250 calories? There are a lot of reasons to exercise. But weight loss isn’t one.
You tell me that I have to walk an hour to burn off 250 calories, I’m not going to bother and neither are most people. Every study shows that exercise is a completely ineffective method to lose weight for most people.
I mentioned in another comment that yes I did eat like crap and lost and maintained weight by exercising in my mid 20s to mid 30s. I was also a part time fitness instructor, taught 10 hours a week (spinning, step, weightlifting, cardio kickboxing) and I trained for runs and I lifted weights three times a week. I had a commitment device to go the gym - regularly scheduled classes that I taught and got paid for. I had to be in shape. I would teach 2 hour classes on Saturday and Sunday and teach during the week.
Most people will never commit to that level or intensity of exercise. Even now, I have a home cardio gym and the only time I watch TV by myself is when I exercise.
They'd be horrified how many of those combos I could eat in an hour while easily enjoying it.
Exhibit A. https://d3h9ln6psucegz.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/201...
My point is that hiding this fact is not telling the whole story.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114833
However, for any given individual, if they want to reduce weight, they can either reduce their energy input or increase their energy output, or both. There’s just no other way.
This is exactly my point.
It's not even wrapping any text! It's just 'quote-unquote" used by itself as a prefix modifier on the next noun phrase.
Disgusting.
Most of these quote-unquote marketed protein products are nothing more than glorified chocolate bars.
The “Health Halo” effect of food is when consumers believe foods that are advertised as healthier have fewer calories
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes
https://youtu.be/klKAzJ4FUzg?t=715
He’s a well known power lifter who owns a gym. He walks about 20,000 steps a day and works out 4-5 days a week. He consumes ~2800 calories a day.
I’d say unless you work in manual labor or are a professional athlete you do not need to be consuming nearly this much.
one of my favourite weight-loss tips is from youtube cyclist phil gaimon: instead of trying to eat less, set a goal for eating more of something with a very low calorie density. he was eating a whole 1lb pack of spinach every day. that's a lot of spinach, it'll take a lot of snacking to get through to the point where it's actually difficult to eat that much. but it's only 100 calories.
Got the popcorn perfect, pretty close otherwise. Guess years of calorie tracking paid off.
My guesses were 800, 2400, 100, 400 (assumed cream and milk), 1200.
I've basically maintained my same weight from age 23 to 33 and I think knowing the calorie count of most things plays a big part in that.
I feel like this topic is basically resolved. Stop eating carbs.
I myself stopped being keto a couple of days after the evening crying started.
Eating a healthy diet for two months doesn't mean you can go back to eating trash and expecting to stay healthy.
If you are capable of sticking to a diet that literally brings you to tears on a daily basis, then sure, but do realise that you're probably in about the top percentile of willpower. (I imagine you were not in fact brought to tears by this diet, or you wouldn't be recommending it; in which case you may not be aware that it's not a panacea.)
In fact I’ve never even heard of crying being a side effect. How are you suggesting these things are even linked?
But you don't need to pick a team with all the tribalism that's involved. It really is as simple as eating less, like the article lays out.
And eating less is much easier if the foods you are eating are fiber rich (more filling).
Sometimes labels are just easier than a "wishy-washy" "yeah I'll do something in that general direction". That doesn't need to involve tribalism; pretty much all vegan and keto people I know are fairly pragmatic about it.
Here's a few from a quick search: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7145128/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23372809/
https://www.thelancet.com/article/S2468-2667(18)30135-X/full...
imo, organizations like NutritionalFacts.org offer the best evidence based guidence for health, and weight loss. They site studies for each talking point. There are years of content here. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCddn8dUxYdgJz3Qr5mjADtA
When I was a teenager, I looked at people who weighed 300+ pounds and though, how do you get that way. Don't you realize that you are gaining weight? Don't you know that you just have to eat less to lose weight?
Anyway, now I realize that I am hungry. It never goes away unless I eat a significant amount of food. My body told me to eat, so I ate.
It doesn't even take that much extra food to gain a lot of weight. One extra piece of cake a week is a few pounds in a year. If you live a few years, it adds up. You gain weight in kilograms and lose weight in grams.
Hunger is a sensation that happens inside a person's body and mind. You cannot compare your hunger to my hunger.
So many diets talk about not being hungry while you are on the diet. I've been to dieticians and told them I'm hungry, and they suggest eating more protein or more fiber. That does help, but I still feel hungry.
There is a very good chance that someone is writing a reply with some suggestion as to how I should eat so that I'm not hungry. Thank you for the thoughts, but realize that you don't live in my body, you don't know how I feel, you don't know what I've tried.
Hunger sounds like a problem to people. Hunger feels like a problem inside the body. People still tell me I shouldn't be hungry. Maybe part of the solution is realizing that eating to satisfaction is ... bad for some people. Maybe it's Ok to be a little hungry.
Anyway, these are just some thoughts. I'm down 30 pounds from my max. I think I have a good mentality now, but it took years to get here.
Calorie deficits are always a little unpleasant imo. It’s just suffering through that to get to a place where you want to maintain (which is much easier).
I’ve lost 73lbs, 53lbs, 35lbs (different times and gained weight over years in between). Each time the calorie deficit sucked. There is a 3 day hump and two week hump of misery until you get kind of used to it sucking, but I wouldn’t say it’s ever great.
b) assuming it was intentional and desired, congratulations on the loss
c) constant hunger has been a theme for me as well. Since getting medication for a mental health condition I've noticed that I'm not really hungry while it has effect but as soon as it wears off I want to eat everything, even if I've eaten a reasonable amount throughout the day. Fighting against constant hunger is _exhausting_ and I think people that say "it's just calories in and out" are just not experiencing it.
When you eat a meal you should also try eating slower, or having more frequent but smaller portions. Have you ever noticed that you're still hungry after a meal, but after a few minutes it goes away? That's because it takes ~20 minutes for you to feel full after eating.
There's also appetite suppressants (both naturally found in certain foods + prescription drugs), that can work wonders for weight loss.
Also, if you ever try fasting, usually your appetite is strongest for the first 2 days, then falls off. With natural fat stores + an intake of water/electrolytes/potassium/magnesium, you can fast for many days at a time without feeling hungry.
I have heard anecdotes from people who say this is true and anecdotes from people who say it is very much not true. It is certainly more comforting to believe that people who've gained weight aren't permanently doomed to hunger, but I'd love if anyone could drop a supporting source.
I have found that my hunger is malleable. If I start eating breakfast, I will be hungry in the morning at around the time I started eating breakfast. But, if I stop eating breakfast and only do lunch and dinner, I will eventually lose my hunger for breakfast and have no problem coasting till lunch on nothing but a coffee.
If anything, diets should focus on the psychological factor more than the actual food, but then again, people have different levels of willpower. So telling somebody to stop eating too many calories is not only not helpful, it's also highly condescending.
My personal problem with eating is that I like eating large meals. I can't cut out liquid calories as I dont drink any of my calories. I can't cut out sweets, as I don't eat sweets in any substantial amount (maybe a single gummy bear a week?). I just like eating large meals -- and I would do so several times a day if it wasnt for the adverse effects on my body.
Also, I'm kinda proud of how I was practically bang-on on the calorie quiz in the article, except for the pizza. Apparently large means LARGE in the US lol. I was off by 500 kcal.
Something else I have found interesting is that I will occasionally be really hungry, start cooking a meal, spend 30 minutes smelling all the things cooking, and then by the time I'm done cooking I've lost my hunger. It's as if my brain was tricked in to thinking that I ate and I'm satisfied.
> I'm down 30 pounds from my max.
Huge congratulations on the progress!
Actually I was wanted to ask the opposite: what prevents you from letting yourself go hungry a fraction of the day? You might get a stomachache for a bit, I know, but have you tried and seen any consequences beyond that? Note I'm not suggesting "eat absolutely nothing the whole day", but like if you cut your portions into a half or a third of the usual (or eat fiber/etc. so as to at least fill your stomach)... is that going to actually cause you any problems beside a bit of stomach pain? (and might trying a mild pain reliever like acetaminophen potentially help with that until your body gets used to it?)
For me, it is not even physical stomach ache as you suggest, it is the mental aspect of total and complete brain derailment until you go eat something.
I guess I could ask someone to lock me in a room or something. That is not practical though as unlike smoking or drugs you need to eat something to stay alive - you cannot just go 100% cold turkey to try and break the addiction because you need to eat eventually.
That comparison with addiction to illicit drugs always perplexes me, because those drugs are clinically known to cause physical addiction to that substance, but that's not the case for (most?) food.
I do get the thing about it completely consuming your brain though (and being doubly painful if your stomach's in pain) even if it's a different phenomenon than drug addiction, so I'm not discounting that at all.
It sounds like this is something you've tried in the past. Have you given your body enough time to adjust when you've tried this? From what I know, when people start to fast (note I'm not suggesting you fast—just cut your portions > 50%), it's way more painful in the beginning (both physically and mentally) than it is, say, 2-3 weeks later. If you haven't tried this, do you think you could give yourself a chance and just tolerate it for (say) 3 weeks? I wonder if having a definite end date to look forward to might make it easier for yourself to convince your brain to tolerate some hunger?
If it was just a matter of waiting a few weeks then we'd not have an obesity epidemic in the west, nor would the huge huge huge dieting industry exist.
My main point is that people will give mechanical advice for losing weight, but it's very hard to tell someone what feelings they will go through. It's very hard to tell someone else what 'normal' should feel like for them.
It does indeed sound like your hunger is more intense than my hunger. I think I benefit from a ton of experience in transitioning past "I'm very hungry" to "I'm fine" when I choose not to eat. There's a clear point (for me) when the body just says "oh we're not going to eat now? ok, I'll stop interrupting the brain with 'I'm hungry' signals." It just goes away and I'm no doubt in a caloric deficit.
Some of this is self-discipline, and some of it is an ability to find something more engaging/interesting than eating. If I push past the hunger threshold, it's easy to just not eat for a long stretch of time. Eventually, I notice that I'm extremely physically weak and mentally fatigued (but still not very hungry), and I realize that I have to eat, or it's going to start causing problems.
Anyways, take that for what it's worth.
I put “hungry” in quotes because what my overweight friends describe as feeling hungry I have only felt under the influence of marijuana, and what I describe as hungry is what they feel like all day other than right after a meal.
I haven’t found any literature on what drives human appetite that seemed non quackery science, but I’d be very intrigued whenever someone figures out what causes these different experiences
For me personally, I think it was completely driven by my mind. I was stressed while there and became further stressed when my willpower inevitably lost to my biology. Consistent, hard cardio; lowering my stress levels; and (most importantly) acknowledging and accepting that I don't have perfect control over the outcome were key to fixing it.
It's hard to talk about this without getting circular.
Primary Loop: Hunger -> Eat -> Time -> Hunger -> Eat (loop)
Secondary Loop: Weight Gain -> Notice Weight -> Diet -> Gain (loop)
I don't have a conclusion to this, I'm still trying to figure it out.
In the primary loop hunger keeps you alive.
When you get hungry and eat and feel satisfied, that operates on multiple systems in the brain and body. There are lots of hormones that are flowing and telling body systems to do things and also telling your consciousness what your condition is.
I'm not prepared to talk about the psychology in depth, but I do know that it feels very un-natural to be in a calorie deficit. I know that having low blood sugar makes it very hard for me to think. At times it's felt like my body is telling me I'm going to die and it's been very hard to ignore that feeling.
Not to be that guy... but are you eating low calorie dense foods or high calorie dense foods?
The article points out that an Apple and a Donut have roughly the same volume, but an Apple is half the calories.
Also, as the article suggests, cutting out liquid calories (that don't satisfy hunger) are easy first steps.
I am trying to be helpful?
I've gone down to ~9% body fat, so I have experience with the "hard last steps." For me, the "first steps" were not easy and much harder than the last steps.
Some people are able to avoid hunger by sticking to certain foods, but that's never worked for me.
in my experience, 2 weeks is about the boundary for when the body decides it's going to adapt its hunger point to the new realities. unfortunately, it shifts back much quicker, or at least seems to do so since we're usually not paying as much attention then.
Food is complicated and people eat for many reasons. People can eat because they're bored or they're anxious or even just to feel better, even briefly.
A healthy state to get to (which is easier said than done to be sure) is to treat food as fuel not as medicine or even a reward. You put gas in your car when it needs gas. Food should be the sam, ideally.
For me, I had a lot of success with intermittent fasting. This works for me. It may not work for you. But whether or not it works (and for some people it doesn't) one thing you do learn how much of hunger is just habit. Your'e used to eating a certain amount or at certain times. That feeling of feeling full actually isn't normal or even desirable. You'll be surprised at how little you actually need.
A good place to start is to inccrease protein consumption. A lot of high-calorie diets are surprisingly low in protein but really high in carbs (particularly sugar) and fat. It's actually much more difficult to overeat with high-protein. I've known more than a few people with weight issues who avoid eating protein just because of this.
Even small changes add up. Like people who scoop sugar and heavy cream into coffee and can end up consuming 700 calories per coffee multiple times a day. Drink black coffee. If you don't like that you should consider that you don't actually like coffee. You like coffee flavoured sugar and fat.
And if you don't like black unsweetened coffee, forcing yourself to drink it will actually kill your appetite. That's not such a bad thing.
But you need to figure out your relationship with food.
You’re not taking a huge portion of your calories budget to have your coffee with cream. The sugar is a killer.
I do agree that coffee with milk has no taste tho
Or try eating more protein. 1kg of chicken breast (1600 kcal). I couldn't (but I'm "normally sized" and my stomach is as well)
But you are even hungry now that you are not on a diet. Do you prefer to be hungry and obese or be hungry and not be obese ? Not saying that it is just something that you can decide like that. But I would understand your point if you were not hungry now, but you say this is not the case.
Eating certain types of foods (the article calls them hyper-palatable) can also kick off feeling much more hungry. It's sometimes hard for me to get back into a healthy cadence, especially if I have stress in other areas of my life.
When this is going on I think a lot about Ego Depletion - the idea that willpower is a limited resource. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion
I think it's definitely OK to be a little hungry, or even a lot hungry. In fact, when I'm feeling like I have some willpower to spare I go on a fast. I think it really helps me calibrate my internal tolerance for hunger. After a fast, the mild hunger I feel after eating an appropriately sized meal barely even registers as hunger.
Keep up the good work!
I have gone from being in perfect control of my weight(I had to make weight for a sport), to being completely out of control(because the stuff that used to work didn't anymore), to being in control again(new stuff worked), to loosing some of the control(because it stopped working, but I found new stuff before it got out of hand again).
Everyone is different, different stuff works for different people and you yourself are different people when your weight changes significantly, as you age, and as your environment and knowledge changes.
Things that effect hunger: fewer bigger meals (unless it doesn't and you do better with more small meals). Protein, fiber (generally less hunger for most people), carbs (varies), fats (ditto). Avoiding trigger foods, (there are some foods and different for everyone, that once you eat a little it causes more hunger and triggers into more eating). Psychological tricks: (1. realize that a state of being somewhat hungry all the time is the normal state that humans lived with for thousands of years, 2. realize that you can burry yourself with work as a good distraction from hunger and get a lot more done at the same time. 3. Realize that "Hunger is the best spice" - Epictetus 4. Every time you catch yourself thinking about the costs of dieting(hunger), make sure you spend even more time thinking about the benefits. Exercise: figure out what exercises increase and decrease hunger for you, today. Liquid calories: your body doesn't register them and sometimes registers them negatively, best avoided all together. If you need a treat, prefer the ice cream over the milk shake. Cinnabon's highest calorie item is a drink.
I wish you the best, I hope something I said may help.
> So many diets talk about not being hungry while you are on the diet. I've been to dieticians and told them I'm hungry, and they suggest eating more protein or more fiber. That does help, but I still feel hungry.
Have you thought about eating something that just has very few calories, in order to fill you up? Carrots have barely any calories and need a fair bit of chewing. Popcorn without salt/sugar/butter as well. Diet drinks or water.
What's helped me a bit is just looking at all the calorie labels on everything to get a feel for what the cost of each item is, then using that as a kind of "is it worth it" budget. A lot of things go out the door when you do that, but surprisingly some quite nice things stay on the menu.
In my experience, this works kinda ok, but it doesn't actually feel like being full or sated. It feels like having a full stomach but still being hungry.
The other side of that is you can feel like you need to eat despite not actually feeling hungry. I've lost a bit recently, but not often with that hole in the stomach feeling. I still often get that "I should eat something" feeling while not feeling the physical "belly empty".
Not to undermine your point, because it's a good one, but the same guidelines should apply to anything you eat, even carrots. I was losing weight and tracking "calories" very closely. I started eating carrots for exactly the reason you mention and gained two pounds that week. At my next doctor visit, she told me she's never asked this question before, but "are you orange?" I was, from carrots.
So, my diet plan was - eat less. And of that which I eat, avoid sugar like poison and avoid carbohydrates as much as possible, while still having at least some daily intake split between meals.
And regular blood tests and monitoring by doctors (endocrinologist, GP, cardiologist).
Sure, it's still there, but I find it much easier to deal with than if I'm eating too much sugar.
Good luck, I also struggle with weight and it's clear there's something we have not figured out yet.
I am almost permanently hungry. It is extremely rare for me to feel full. My wife, friends, co-workers etc who eat the same meals as me (e.g. at restaurants or Xmas dinners etc) stop with comments like "man I am so full I could not eat another morsel!" yet I sit there with a clean plate thinking I could eat the entire thing again while also wondering what is for dessert. At home I will pretty much always finish off what my family leave on their plate.
I think I am just missing that gene or whatever that tells you you have eaten enough, kinda like how horses can eat themselves to death without a nosebag.
The only thing that has kinda worked for me is MyFitnessPal and eating sugar-free sweets or black coffee to distract my brain.
This is the key. On evolutionary time scales, human beings have only very recently come to inhabit a world where regularly being able to eat to full satiation (and beyond) is commonplace. Being "a little hungry" is actually the typical condition under which most of our ancestors over many thousands of years have operated. Put an organism evolved to survive amid scarcity in an environment of abundance, and it's going to gain weight unless it comes up with a method for stopping at or before the earliest signs of satiety.
Stressing, among other things, that obesity is a chronic disease starting very early in life, indeed even before conception, and cannot be treated as an individual failing.
They also point out that health professionals should focus not on weight loss, but on life long prevention of comorbidities. To which end various treatment options are available. Weight loss may be part of it, but as little as loosing 10-15% maybe enough towards that particular goal.
They mention some drugs that might have an impact on hunger.
Unfortunately, its a disease that is very hard to treat, and for cases of severe obesity, drastic measures like bariatric surgery may be the only option. An option well worth considering in light of the alternative if nothing else works though.
(My personal opinion is that some drastic diet intervention with focus on undoing the epigenetic damage from early life should be possible, and far preferable to the surgery option if at all effective, but the science is still being worked out on that one)
[1] https://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/noncommunicable-di...
But the basics of it is that paternal health impact sperm selection, and maternal health impacts the hormonal environment shaping genetic expressions of the developing child.
So promoting paper which relate to prenatale conditions which would leads to adult obesity is just a smoke screen to hide that the whole modern society is just a big pathology factory at mankind scale.
better make people feel they are cursed by gene than just realise that the real war on drug should be against sugar and vegetable oil than cocaine and majiuana.
The biggest cartel around are industrial food and stores where everybody shop everyday. Not talking about all the shitty food restaurant where you pay high price to destroy yourself. Most modern food are more dangerous for health than cigarettes. But still Smoke screen to keep Smart ass from silicon valley such as this website audience whe believe to be litterate enough into the blind spot of all the comorbidities of modern society. but as far as my comment hurts your feelnig keep minusing it to silent it and punish me to not be blind like you :)
signed: a carnivorous troll who lost 45kg and reversed prediabetic conditions/highblood pressure/sleeping apnea/chronic gout/oversweating by just eating meat. Not talking about my improved libido and my bigger penis (in the way i can now see my feet when i wash) And all this after 40yo. (yes im not a young idealist who believe he knows everything while most of his experience is reading ramdom stuf on internet).
Also it's not like nutrition heterodoxia haven't been warning since 50 years an this major health crisis. After year of promotion of modern diet from WHO and associates.
Now that you cannot go in the street without being surrounded by Obesity everywhere it's hard to play blind.
Also after 2 years of COVID, more and more peoples realised that OBESITY poses a threat by fragilizing society at global scale, as far as Obese peoples are weaker to fight against virus, and vaccines are less efficient on obese peoples. So basically they are weak and difficult to protect from common virus, especially respiratory virus.
Not forgetting about Diabetes type 2 (almost 1/3 of adult in the world has diabetic condition mostly due to overweight and obesity). Which calls about talking also on Diabete type 3 which is commonly named Alzheimer disease. Type 2 Diabetic have 6 times more chance to developp Alzheimer than non diabetic in the 10 to 20 years after start of their conditions.
So with more and more young starting to develop T2D around 20 years old, a good part of them will develop Alzheimer disease around 35-40 years old which will also have an huge societal impact. And even before that, cognitive performance are deeply tied to calories type of sources. Alzheimer disease just being the final stage of a long degradation process over decades due to abuses of bad calories. So basically cognitive performance are degradated long time before Alzheimer occurance.
everybody jokes about Karen, but nobody look at average karen's bodyshape...This could explain a lot.
First generation Asian immigrants to the west generally do not become obese. They retain the ideas from their home country that being fat is shameful, and they retain their conception of a correct portion size. If they start getting even 3 kilos overweight, they take steps to undo that. The west has decided portions are to be huge, and is in the process now of destroying shame. Time has shown the results.
Unfortunately, doctors cannot do anything about widespread societal shift in attitudes toward health. All they can do is recommend what is most likely to actually help. While the correct answer is "stop eating so much; gather the willpower to be mildly hungry during the day; your entire mental conception of healthy food and portions has been fucked since birth," people won't actually listen to that. Thus, modern medical advice has been forced to basically admit that no one will ever lose weight in aggregate and begin making recommendations with that in mind. That doesn't make the older mindset incorrect, though. If a doctor could mind control you into being optimally healthy, there would be a lot less focus on "it's a disease; it's stress; you can't help it so just try to manage it best you can" and a lot more "stop constantly eating so many calories".
If obesity weren't linked to eating too much, how come there are no obese people in concentration camps?
While my situation may be different, it may still provide an insight on what kind of things to look at.
Turns out times I felt most hungry were times when my blood sugar was low. If I ever eat something with a high glycemic index without something with a low GI along side it then I am bound to have low blood sugar inside of a couple hours especially if it's for breakfast (even medium sweetness cereals are a no go for that). When I get low blood sugar I feel like eating a horse. Turns out that even a small amount of food will sate me if I am patient enough (difficult when your body feels like it is telling you that you'll die if you don't eat cake or drink juice).
Being autistic doesn't help, I often forget to eat until my blood sugar drops.
Like most primal drives - once its present in my mind its not long before it blossoms into behavior.
When I'm losing weight, I treat hunger like any other non-constructive impulse (e.g. anger, sloth, apathy, negative self talk, etc...):
1) I try to prevent it by not putting myself into situations where my judgement is compromised. With hunger, this most often means never waiting too long to nourish - I've got to feed the body before the mind starts producing urges that aren't consistent with healthy outcomes. Less often, this means not being hung over and heading for a fast food breakfast.
2) I keep busy so there's not much cycle time in my brain for it to take root. Anything will do as long as its immersive. Sipping something with no or few calories throughout is helpful. The devil will find work for idle hands to do, they say.
3) When these don't do the trick, I respond to any emergent internal pleading directly. When I sense the familiar "but I won't be satisfied if I don't do X, and don't I deserve to be satisfied?" I respond as I would with my child or any other 3rd person who's about to abandon the plan - I reaffirm that we're all in this together and being satisfied is definitely the goal and one we're committed to and in this case satisfaction looks like weight loss, not nachos.
I don't win every time, but these generally get me enough wins to tip the war in my favor.
Yup. In my case, I find that not having foods that "I shouldn't eat" (think sweets, etc) in the house at all is better than having to deal with my urge to eat those.
Also, tied to the previous point: don't go shopping for food when hungry. This helps with not having those foods in the house. "I'll control myself this time" has basically never worked for me.
It's the same as smoking. Strong willed people can stop smoking in a heartbeat. Weak minded people cannot, their minds are simply too weak to resist smoking and they need it every 2 hours. Same with eating.
Next time you feel that hunger feeling, out of spite just don't eat and the craving goes away within 1-2 hours and you'll get long term endorphins instead that make you feel good for your mind being stronger than that craving. It's not so hard, you just have to be a bit stronger than that desire.
You can also try fasting. Just don't eat for 24h and you'll feel a lot better than if you ate.
Some people simply cannot delay gratification, they need to be on their phone, watch tv constantly to get their dopamine hit. However, other people are able to delay gratification and get a much larger amount of endorphins and also the better ones.
It should become a habit to receive your dopamine hits from resisting the temptation and being stronger than this degenerate craving for unhealthy, processed food carefully designed to make the population addicted to their produce to buy more and more and eat more, so that they make more money.
There is a way to get out of this easily, don't eat any more sugar and carbohydrates, but plants and meat, which is the keto diet. It's very healthy and natural as well. You'll drop a lot of weight and you can still eat well.
I can delay gratification. I can quit coffee cold turkey no problem. I skip breakfast to increase my fasting period. I don't need TV or Internet, I'd rather work on my lifestyle property. I almost never take pain pills, I see myself as stoic, I can do long duration exercise.
I can count calories and force my weight down from 100kg to 74kg by sheer willpower and focus on the issue.
And yet I can't effectively keep the weight off. Because the hunger is 24x7, and my ability to focus on the issue isn't 24x7... I have other things to do in life.
Especially in the afternoons, the craving for something sweet is the strongest. A protein shake completely satisifies hunger until dinner very well.
That way, you can have lunch, protein shake and dinner to get through the day very well and not binge on sweets.
Glad that a protein shake works for you.
It is the annoying, aggravating, all consuming hunger that is the cause, not a misunderstanding about how many calories are in what foods.
I would have thought by now science would have a drug to modulate abnormal levels of hunger, but we still don't have one. And we don't know what causes them.
What I am trying now is to find hunger not too unpleasant. It feels unpleasant at first, then if you think about it, it’s not painful, it’s just different.
Like smoking, temptation is difficult to resist, so things like working in a place with no access to food is a must have. And filling days with activities which make you think about something else also works. I have really bad sleep sometimes, and when I do, my resistance to temptation is less efficient. So you need to know that kind of stuff about yourself.
I don’t know man, just do what you can.
You have to "hack" your brain into enjoying the unpleasant sensation like it is something good. Even if you feel like the world will end, nothing happens.
Doing other activities help indeed, but in order to do this, you sometimes need massive changes in your daily habits/lifestyle. I feel like these changes are the hard to maintain part since you are constantly fighting to do "the right thing" instead of "the pleasurable thing"
P.S : I still smoke & overeat
Keto has consistently been the most effective way for me to lose weight. More important than the actual diet though, was that it became clear to me that there was a difference between, "Hey, you were supposed to eat by now." hungry and "OK, I'm a bit dizzy and forgetful and need to get something in my stomach." Just knowing that there were two completely different hunger signals made losing weight a lot easier. I ignore the one that generally occurs at set times or after a certain period of time since the last meal and make sure I have something on hand to straighten things out if my blood sugar needs some support.
For me, cutting out carbs and maintaining a reasonable calorie deficit works wonders. My mom can't sustain a keto diet very long and does super well counting calories. I've had friends in the past who maintained a healthy weight eating small, carby meals frequently in addition to exercise.
The actual combo of diet and exercise is very dependent on the individual, but I feel that knowing the difference between "hungry" and "need to get calories in to function" is a big advantage, however you get to that point.
To me, this sounds like your body wants something and it never gets it.
A year ago I was diagnosed with ADHD (inattentive) and prescribed a very low dose of Vyvanse (amphetamine based). Suddenly it was gone. I'd want to eat at normal times, I'd eat a normal portion but I could easily walk away or I actually just didn't want more. I asked my wife, is this what other people feel like? It really rocked my world a bit. It's one thing to logically know that people experience reality differently, but I've rarely had such a stark example of it.
Reduced appetite or appetite suppression is a very common side effect of those types of medications.
I honestly only say this in case it helps, and I'm firmly on the upper end of 'healthy' UK BMI so not in any health freak position of judgement by a long shot, but I last had a slice of cake months ago, so the casual 'just an extra slice of cake every week' really stands out to me.
(On a complete tangent I don't at all think regular cake eating is incompatible with a healthy diet, but I do think that in 2022 it's highly inversely correlated, and that going against that almost requires baking your own.)
I was raised in America where we are told that we can 'have it all'. If you don't order the large portion, people wonder what is wrong with you.
I'm not blaming my situation on these factors, but I do think they are important contributors.
I think if 'order the large' is an option, you're already ordering from a takeaway/in a 'junk food' place.
1. It's ok to eat some "junk food" as part of your diet. That's not going to automatically kill your diet, if you still control calories. It might not be as satiating as eating other foods though, so it's worth experimenting with this. (personally I would still eat "junk food" on my diet and I enjoyed the extra flexibility).
2. Just cause you're eating junk food, since calories is what ultimately matters, it's still worth not ordering the large. Saying " well it's junk food I'm already lost" and then eating a larger portion is just making the sustain much worse than it needs to be.
3. Similarly, just cause it's a junk food place, doesn't mean there aren't better or worse options. I love McDonald's, and still eat there even when dieting to lose weight. But I'll eat only chicken nuggets, and skip the fries. Not nearly as good or healthy as eating other sources of protein, but definitely better than including an extra 500 calories of non satiating carbs.
I’ve been thinking about giving all but one serving away to friends each time I bake, but your comment reminded me that even one serving a week is likely more than I need.
Good luck with your journey. Years of life can be hard to change.
So… I was never predisposed to put on weight, but as I got older I got less and less fit than I used to be. My doctor told me my cholesterol and triglycerides were up and suggested that I just stop eating desserts and candy entirely. It seemed impossible when he suggested it, but I’ve been able to stick to it for almost two decades now. When I made the decision that I just wasn’t going to have any more desserts, ever, it was much easier than it seemed it was going to be.
Counting on willpower to help you lose weight is a lost cause for most people. The key is to put yourself in situations where you can't over eat and/or you have to follow what your past self thought was good for you.
Your weight loss should be gradual but consistent. People want to lose all the weight in a short time but they never reflect that it took years to gain the weight. It should take a while to lose it.
Eating all the time makes our brain want food all the time. I did intermittent fasting and now I'm completely okay not eating during that time. For other times it becomes easy, after not eating like before.
The food doesn't have to be calorie heavy. Replace with meat, nuts, vegetable, fruits (not juice).
My thoughts on hunger: I used to treat hunger as if my body was signalling that it needed food right to survive. Then one day I got sick and couldn't keep food down -- even though I was hungry -- so I stopped eating. To my surprise, my hunger went away. After the sickness had passed, eating anything at all would give me tremendous heartburn, so I continued not eating for about another week. I found it unusual that I could walk the streets in a completely fasted state, my body cannibalising its own muscle and fat reserves, and not feel any hunger at all. To me, it demonstrated that hunger wasn't the 'you require food right now' signal that I thought it was. It must mean something else.
When I began eating again, my hunger returned.
I walked away from that experience with a recalibrated understanding of hunger. It now seems more like a suggestion from the body: 'this is the time that food is usually available, so you should eat if at all possible, because we can't be sure when food will be available again', rather than 'I require food right now to survive'.
I don't have a solution for this. But it does look like to reverse this you will have to do the exact opposite. Like under eat a little and exercise enough to burn calories, and go into this loop?
Then I really tried to eat only salads and generally healthy things while doing a lot of sports.
I lost almost 95kg within less then 2 years and for most off the time, the hunger was gone.
At some point, the hunger came back however, and I'm back up to 160kg. It is a terrible feeling, and while it's possible to ignore it for a while... At least I cannot for months or even years. I'm not sure why it went a away before, but I wish I knew. Switching over to salad diet and doing sports doesn't seem to work by itself, at least not within a reasonable amount of time
Second : > Then I really tried to eat only salads and generally healthy things while doing a lot of sports.
Did you continue this after your weight loss ? If not, do you think you could (and not should) have done it ?
I’m from a different place : I weight "only" 93kg but I’m currently unable to loose anything. I just manage to keep it this way but watching my family tree in terms of obesity really scares me for what is to come.
For what it’s worth : I think buying a connected scale helped me a lot stopping my weight gain : you weigh yourself every morning and it allows you to clearly see the trend : up -> Pay attention to what you eat, stable -> ok, down -> nice. Generally when the trend goes up, I know I’ll eat less because it will be in my mind just before breakfast.
When dieting people generally want to loose weight from fat and not muscle.
Try to delay or skip breakfast if you can. It gives your body a longer overnight window for blood sugar to fall and start using fat stores to compensate.
Then try some low intensity exercise whilst you're in that pre-breakfast fasted state.
It's very important to keep the intensity low because you can only get so much energy from fat at a given time.
At higher intensities, in the absence of carbs, your body will break down protein i.e. muscle, for energy and you want to try to minimise this.
Give yourself some protein immediately afterwards to compensate for the loss as you can't totally avoid it. In the window just after exercise you should be able to absorb protein more efficiently.
When you want to do high intensity exercise make sure you have enough carbs to power that intensity. In cycling, we have the amusing phrase "avoiding the bonk".
The "bonk" being the point where you've used all your muscle glycogen stores and can't replace them. You generally slow right down, vision gets a bit blury and you get emotional as your body eats itself.
Everyone ends up doing it once but no one wants to do it twice. So eat carbs when you need to.
I’m sorry but I ballooned to 250 during COVID lockdown and am back to a healthy weight by lifting heavy in the squat rack (starting strength + 5x5) and eating nutritious foods at a deficit.
Until you try this or try and determine you have a medical condition and seek treatment (hyperthyroidism), you get 0 sympathy from me. Consider this some tough love from someone who put in the hard work to turn their life around.
I believe in you, please try change your mentality you are limiting yourself from any progress in weight loss and can only blame yourself.
“Anyway, now I realize that I am hungry. It never goes away unless I eat a significant amount of food. My body told me to eat, so I ate.”
Hunger =/ I NEED to eat to make this feeling of discomfort go away
I know that doesn't solve the problem. But try treating this as an addiction, it will help.
I will write about a personal experience that has nothing to do with selecting different foods - intermittent fasting.
First I thought this was a torture people put themselves up to. Then a few friends tried it, said you get used to it, and this made me curious. I used to say black coffee was torture, until I stuck with it for a week and now I hate sugar in it - an eye opener that what I thought was an absolute truth about my preferences could be turned around with so easily.
So I tried intermittent fasting. The first few days sucked, I was uncomfortable and moody in the morning, and starving by the time of lunch. Then I got used to it, didn't feel hungry anymore and stuck with it for a year - lost 10 kgs whike barely* thinking about it.
* I didn't lose weight for the first month, then I realized I was over compensating with big meals and eating more junk (believing the fasting would compensate it - it didn't). After I got back to my regular habits when eating, the diet was a breeze.
Ultra false. It takes years to get fat while in few months you can lose a significant amount.
I completely agree with this. I still do want to chime in a little. Don't feel obligated to try any of this, maybe you have already tried. I have a hunch you've tried it already. Perhaps someone else hasn't and will try upon reading it.
One rather simple change in diet is volume eating. As in, eat food that fills your stomach, but does not contain (many) calories. A prime example is lettuce, broccoli, or practically any vegetable.
When you're hungry try eating a large salad (a clean one that is, no sauces, or oil). When eating dinner add a large portion of broccoli, raw spinach, cauliflower. Try grilling or steaming vegetables.
In normal dishes try and replace as many ingredients with lower calorie alternatives, especially oils when cooking. These calories add up, quickly.
The above doesn't mean you cannot eat heavier sources of protein, fats, and carbs. Please just keep eating those, in balance. In balance meaning there's no need to have more grams of fats per day than a healthy weight in kg (e.g. 80kg -> 80 grams). Same story for proteins, but at a moderate ratio of 1-1.6 grams per kg body weight. Feel free to play with carbs.
> Hunger sounds like a problem to people. Hunger feels like a problem inside the body. People still tell me I shouldn't be hungry. Maybe part of the solution is realizing that eating to satisfaction is ... bad for some people. Maybe it's Ok to be a little hungry.
Strong agree with this. Funnily enough it's often thirst, which feels similar.
This is very important. The same goes also for many kinds of sauces added to meats. They are very, very tasty. But aside from their calories, a critical issue I have with them is that they interfere with your sensation of satiety. They just make you want to keep on eating. In my case, this tends to mess with my "hunger" signal: I get the feeling I haven't eaten enough, or I get hungry shortly after the meal. It's usually not actual hunger (I just ate a steak or whatever), but it does make me think of food and give me random cravings.
This basically never happens when I eat my food nature. [0]
I think this mechanism is a big factor in people's objections around "being hungry all the time". And yes, it's very distracting if you need to work, and even more so if you're just hanging out with nothing to do.
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[0] I actually tend to liberally add "dry" condiments (think pepper, oregano, etc). The taste is, of course, orders of magnitudes less "intense", but they don't mess with my feeling full after a regular meal.
I think you're 100% on to something. We suffer from avoidance of discomfort, as demonstrated by our obesity and opioid epidemics. Facing that discomfort is usually the fastest path to growth in every aspect of life across career, education, diet, love, exercise.
We always try to find routes around discomfort. There're endless dating gurus promising to save you the potentially horrible pain of rejection, cosmetic surgeries, drugs, and avoidance options. None of these shortcuts work, instead resulting in addictions, cowardice, unfulfilled dreams and lives.
There's mounting evidence of the health benefits from calorie restriction, though autophagy and inflammation reduction. We evolved to have maintenance pathways only function in times of caloric deficit, and to eat when food was available. Now food is always available. I've found that taking coffee while I fast reduces the discomfort. Depending on the mechanism of action, this might decrease the benefits.
All of us have opportunities in our lives to practice equanimity with discomfort. There's no moral failure here. We can all support each other to face our discomfort as we endeavor every day to move a step closer to our goals.
Congratulations on your progress!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction#Life_exten...
You have to think to yourself, am I hungry, or am I bored/idle?
I find keeping yourself busy/no snacking or food at desk etc helps a lot. It may be different for other people but if I get up and walk around a bit/stretch I usually realise I'm not hungry, just for some reason sitting & idling too long make me feel like food.
Another big one is hydration, drinking enough water helps a lot, count coffee, etc as a - for the amount of water you drink. If I'm a little peckish and I realise I haven't had enough water, just drinking half a glass usually staves off the feeling of hunger.
Incidentally at one restaurant I like, I always get the salad, because it’s one of the highest-calorie options they have.
I read through the whole article, it is true, but the headline is wrong, you are not losing weight because you feel miserable. If it was just an issue of calorie restriction with no other effects, yes, this would be the reason.
The ultimate cause is consuming too much, the proximate causes are various elements of modern culture (i.e. Bigger serving sizes, more readily available snacks, alcohol consumption, etc).
I think sugars and processed food increase hunger rather than reducing it.
(1) Share of physical labor jobs vs office jobs
(2) Increased hormone and pesticide use in agriculture (dropping worldwide sperm counts is an underreported story, might or might not be related)
(2A) Less nutritional content in food - has gone down 60% since 1940s according to some studies; likely from over-farming. Need to eat more to get the same nutrients.
(3) Food deserts (related to (1)) - where healthy food options are rare
(4) Less general socialization (internet makes it less necessary to go outside, etc)
I ate all kinds of protiens and fats - cheese, meats, fish, veggies just to quell the hunger. I lost about 58 pounds in a year. Most of what I lost was fat. Two years later, I'm still doing a very low carb, but keep it under 50g per day. My weight has stayed ±3 pounds. I'm pretty convinced it's the super-high carb load everyone is eating three times per day.
Personally I'd have less than that, 100-150ml maybe. Not calorie counting and never have. /Shrug/
And I agree with other commenter on the quote-unquote annoying writing style. I'll tell you why in a second. Ok here's why: it's annoying. I'll let that sink in.
MFP is excellent at making you face up to what you are actually eating. At first it was a huge eye-opener for how many calories were in everyday things - like a slice of bread is 80-120 calories etc. The article mentions fruit juice too - that was a big one for me as well. I figured that since I was not eating loads of pizzas and burgers etc that my calorie intake was probably "normal" but boy was I wrong and MyFitnessPal really helped understand that. Likewise it was good for a reality check that the 20 minute run actually was only like 150-200 calories burnt, not 750.
That was good, but where it really helped though was in measuring stuff out, and to realise what a serving really was. The biggest culprit for me was breakfast cereals - 30 to 45g of cereal is not a bowl full - it is a fairly pathetic covering at the bottom of your bowl. For years I was probably having like 4 or 5 (... or more!) servings of cereal (i.e. a full bowl, like it looks on the packet or on TV adverts!) a day without realising.
I'd recommend people give it a try, if only for a couple of weeks to get a grip on what the calorific levels of some of your staples are, and what a serving actually looks like. It is eye opening.
I've found Cronometer to be a lot faster in every way, and actually has an up to date database and when you scan something it doesn't have, it lets you scan the label and updates the database. Highly recommend.
Only problem is what's endemic to apps in general right now. They want a subscription instead of buying the app outright. That's gonna be a no from me, dawg.
I unfortunately travel a fair amount and this means I can't just make restaurants a "cheat meal" some days. I try going to the grocery store while traveling, but it takes so much more time when I'm taking taxis and trying to cook in a hotel room.
HOWEVER
This is a lot of whining and excuse my brain is probably using to let me eat more when I travel.
I haven't had too much trouble with missing food items since they are easy to add, I just wish they let you use the label scanner in the normal "make a custom copy" procedure.
There's no law says you have to get a fries and corn syrup drink with the burger, a burger and mineral water is a great meal, macros line up and I feel full for hours.
A good tule of thumb is to minimize the number of things you eat with barcodes.
Barcodes aren't only for whole meals, they're also food ingredients. When I cook at home, most of the stuff that goes into the recipe has a barcode.
If you mean stay away from processed foods, then yeah readymeals and the like are best avoided. But pretty much everything has a barcode - raw chicken breast, raw fruit and veg, milk ... you name it - hell even salt and water have barcodes.
Cardio doesn't help you look and feel better. Build muscle, and that muscle will burn calories, even when you're asleep.
I do agree that resistance training is important and often forgotten part of fitness. Having muscles means extra BMR and you will look better when you do lose that extra weight as opposed to that skinny fat look.
[0] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/the-many-benefits-of-a-ca...