Created an account just to say thanks for the comment, and thanks for reading! A little taken aback by both - was not expecting 1000 reads overnight haha.
Thanks so much, really appreciate it. I didn't go into how I'm doing it in the post, because that's in flux at the minute, but I've largely kept to
1) Calorie counting - tried focusing on macros but that just adds another thing to manage when realistically, I just need the scale to go lower. Making it simple makes it sustainable.
2) Feel good exercise - enjoying yoga was a big surprise, but Sean Vigue Fitness over on YouTube really warmed me to it. I love free weights, I love rowing, I love running (although don't do it too much because of my knees).
It's a relatively new blog, but I'm posting more of the same every Sunday. Next one is about how SAD (seasonal affective disorder) is hitting me at the minute.
For metric folk, Homer Simpson gains 34 kg from his normal weight of 109 kg to 143 kg. The author of the blogpost also reached that peak, but is down now to about 120 kg.
Similar story here. Weight crept up from around 90 kilos (already a bit much for my height) to 110 kilos over COVID. I didn't even realize how little I liked being in my body until I lost the first 25 kilos or so. It's unfortunate that some of the damage is permanent :(
Yes definitely permanent damage here too. The interesting thing is that things that were wrong with me stopped getting worse. Was worth it just for that.
Thank you. Although I'm British I have no feel for weights in anything but metric units.
Keep it up Nicky.
Only bit of advice I have from giving up smoking about 20 years ago is, don't beat yourself up if slip up occasionally. Trying to take control of your situation is always useful in itself.
Even if you fall off the wagon multiple times just attempting to get back on again gives you more control and makes things easier the next time.
So, you lost around 2kg of weight every month? That is very impressive considering the weight and size you're started out from! Most people aim for less than that and don't even lose the 0.5kg of water weight. Great job, keep it up man!
In fact, 2kg per month is pretty reasonable. I know it's possible to achieve this goal without starving yourself and by eating tasty and satiating food. I already did it in the past and it worked.
You "just" need to eat better food. It's that easy.
Well, here I'm not telling lessons, because I fail to "just" eat better food. In fact eating it is the easy part. Getting good food in your plate everyday is what is hard because it means making a lot of changes in your habits because, well, food is not going to cook itself and you always have "better" things to do.
Well, depends on the person. Angus Barbieri was able to maintain a 0-calorie diet for over a year, losing 125 kg in the process. Not, perhaps, a feat to be emulated, but obviously physically possible.
Better food, yes. But also LESS food. I know it’s controversial to say so, but getting fat is a result of _eating too much!_. Yes, calorie dense food sure speeds up the process, but at the end of the day it’s a deficit between calories in, and calories burnt.
Source: experimented a fair amount with dieting/fasting in my 30s. When you talk about this with people, it’s startling how many believe that skipping some meals is dicing with death. Hardly surprising people struggle to lose weight, when they refuse to try changing the key variables
I think it's controversial not because it's false, but because calorie density variation in food is huge, a full order of magnitude, so only reducing quantity is not the best strategy in most cases.
100g of fries is about 250kcal, 100g of cabbage is around 30
You can quite literally eat 10 times as much cabbage as fries to have the same amount of calories
And eating less triggers a feeling of hunger (at least at the beginning), which makes following through harder.
> When you talk about this with people, it’s startling how many believe that skipping some meals is dicing with death.
Hahahaha, this, yes.
Last summer during a whole company offsite we happened to play some quizz game where you had to give the nearest answer. One question was « How much time could you survive without eating anything except water ? ».
Boy did I won this guess by trying a random « 30 days » because I knew world records are amounted in months. The other answers were all, without exceptions, around 2 to 3 days and nothing more than a week.
Kind of but you can eat a surprising amount of diced fruit and veg without sauce, or plain yoghurt, soup or boiled eggs or smoked fish without eating a lot of calories. I would eat 500/Kcal a day a couple of times a week and it actually wasn't too bad. I got out of the habit but might try it again in the summer.
Please don't aim at that. Aim at anything negative for first month or two AT LEAST if not longer, then increase it. I had biggest bounceback after that kind of rate of drop.
Fix habit enough that you don't gain weight first, and get used to that being new normal, then start dropping, else it is very easy to bounce back.
Then, once you figured out how to live and eat "post weight drop", start actual drop, and if you bounce it won't be as hard
I was very overweight until my late 30's, something clicked and I lost the weight and almost 10 years later I am lighter than I have ever been during my adult life.
I have found that it is possible to change.
Becoming lighter has encouraged me to exercise but what I eat has always been the main factor in what I weigh.
This seems to be the most common situation, but it is not the only one. Plenty of people have lost significant weight by taking up exercise and not doing any active, concious changes to their diet.
I myself have lost 15kg over the past couple of years, after going from zero high-intensity physical activity on a normal week to a few hours of running and swimming every week.
I'm sure there are some unconscious changes to my eating, in particular afternoon/evening snacking. But that just happened without me trying or planning for it. I still eat at the same lunch restaurants and it is still my wife making me dinner most evenings.
That's why it's sometimes better, especially for people with low muscle mass and not currently obese, to concentrate on liftings weights instead. If you do cardio to lose weight then eating just undoes any benefit, since the body is not very damaged and doesn't need to repair much. If you lift weights using a progressive overloading regime, you actually need a lot of calories over time to actually repair your body. Also, if you lose weight with only cardio, then you will end up quite skinny and have to be really careful not to put it back on pretty quickly. As a bonus, lifting weights is often more fun for most than doing steady cardio, which is often extremely boring
Repairing the tissue damage from weight does take a lot of energy (calories) but it also requires a high intake of essential amino acids. Otherwise muscle growth will be slow and the risk of injury increases. Many people aren't getting enough, and as we age our digestive system becomes less efficient at absorbing those nutrients. The easiest way to get enough is to eat a couple scoops of whey protein powder, but there are other good options for those willing to put a little more effort into nutrition planning.
There are many excellent benefits of exercise, but substantial weight loss is not among them. The human body evolved to be really efficient, especially in aerobic activity. A predator whose main method of hunting is long-distance running prey to exhaustion isn't going to last very long if it burns ludicrous amounts of calories during such activity since no predator is 100% successful.
There's approximately 3500 calories per pound of fat and the average human will burn about 100 calories per mile of sustained running. If you want to lose a pound a week (a pretty healthy weight loss rate) you can either run 5 miles a day without changing your diet or skip 2 energy drinks a day without changing your exercise regime. Unfortunately many people that think a big workout is burning huge amounts of fat often indulge in excess eating as a reward which leads to even less weight loss (or even weight gain).
Again, exercise has a ludicrous number of benefits and absolutely should be encouraged for those benefits but weight loss shouldn't be included among them.
I agree, I have tried to train my brain into thinking weightloss and fitness are separate entities.
It surprises me that this invalid logic is continually reinforced by the media and even health professionals.
The most weight I ever lost was during 2020 lockdown when I made the consious decision to eat a bit less. I did virtually no exercise, one 30min walk each day, and I had no access to fitness equipment at home.
I agree with the adage that one loses weight in the kitchen and gets toned in the gym. But Diet and exercise are very much convolved.
Many folks gain weight very slowly. It creeps up on them. Typical scenario is a sedentary office job, family responsibilities, and little time for oneself. Calories are very much cumulative, so all it takes is some regular snacking (or stress-eating) to get the weight trend going up and, whoops, 20 extra lbs can easily appear in a year. A lot of this happened during the pandemic.
Losing that 20lbs, in such scenarios, can be done with a simple exercise regimen (or even some thoughtfully increased physical activity). One thing that's interesting is that you DON'T have to RUN a mile to burn 100 Calories. You can burn the same amount, 100 Calories, by walking a mile. It takes longer, of course, but it's easier on the joints especially for overweight people.
What you're saying is absolutely true of aerobic exercise, but is emphatically not true of anaerobic, muscle-building exercise.
While the act of going to the gym won't burn many calories, putting on muscle can drastically increase your baseline metabolic rate. 10lb of muscle (easily gained by a "newbie" who is eating well) will add about 1,500 calories per day to your baseline metabolic rate. That's a whole meal! (and that's just the calories burned by existing, not by recovery/muscle building, the workout itself, etc).
The body is remarkably good at maintaining homeostasis when losing weight. So as one gets lighter, the body becomes more efficient and burns less calories, requiring deeper and deeper reductions in consumption. Increasing muscle mass negates this.
Edit:
@gduffy has a better source for how much energy a lb of muscle burns, which is "4.5 to 7.0 kcal/lb per day". So adding 10lb of muscle will increase caloric consumption by 450 - 700 Calories. So not quite a meal, but a solid 5 mile run.
It’s still helpful: even 50-70 Calories per day is 18k-25k Calories per year. At 3500 Calories per pound of fat that’s 5-7 pounds offset each year, but it’s not a panacea for someone with 100 pounds of body fat.
Your numbers are way off. Adding 10 lbs of muscle won't increase your basal metabolic rate by anywhere near 1500 kcal/day. Something like 150 kcal/day would be closer to accurate.
It's not just about calories and metabolic rate. Lean muscle tissue is also a crucial component of the endocrine system, and it acts as a glucose sink to prevent the energy in that glucose from being stored as fat.
So 4.5 kcal/lb per day * 10 lb = 45 large calories per day, not 450.
> The small calorie or gram calorie was defined as the amount of heat needed to cause the same increase in one gram of water. Thus, 1 large calorie is equal to 1000 small calories.
> In nutrition and food science, the term calorie and the symbol cal almost always refers to the large unit. It is generally used in publications and package labels to express the energy value of foods in per serving or per weight, recommended dietary caloric intake, metabolic rates, etc. Some authors recommend the spelling Calorie and the symbol Cal (both with a capital C) to avoid confusion; however, this convention is often ignored.
> In physics and chemistry the word calorie and its symbol usually refer to the small unit; the large one being called kilocalorie.
> A predator whose main method of hunting is long-distance running prey to exhaustion
A fun myth, but obviously false. Most human hunting was team oriented using javelins, or even stones and spears. Only a small number of human tribes have ever seriously practiced running to exhaustion. It's just easier to cut them off with a large gang and stab them with spears as you corner them.
Yes but you need the "something clicked", and often that something cannot be taught or even described. It's like one day you wake up and suddenly you have motivation for something you never had before, with no discernible cause. Just a random "act of God". That's why I find it impossible to blame anyone who cannot motivate themselves to better themselves or improve their situation. I know all too well what it is like to be totally unmotivated, and how fickle and random it is when that motivation finally arrives.
I second that! I've tried to explain the "click" before but to no avail. You just wake up one day and have the motivation. I wish you could DECIDE to have it!
Yes, if you could recreate that spark of motivation for others you'd be a billionaire.
For me it was a crazy little thing, nothing to do with being fat-shamed or even feeling guilty about my weight.
I heard a radio journalist doing a show at a UK Slimming World meeting (or Weight Watchers). He was essentially poking fun at those attending, saying they would never keep any weight losses off. I thought was pretty mean, so I went to my local Slimming World meeting and signed up. I lost weight, learnt about healthier eating, tracking my weight etc. I don't go to Slimming World now but the good habits started there.
I can't find the source now, but i recall reading that if you're obese by the time you turn 18, there's very low chances that you'll ever go down in the rest of your lifetime. It's not impossible, but really tough.
I'm around 310 lbs (a smidge over 22 stone for UK people). Like yourself, I always thought when I was younger 'how do people let themselves get that way?'.
It just kind of happened for me. I know I eat unhealthy food; I know I drink too much; I know I don't do enough (as in, any) exercise... I look at my face in the mirror and think 'that's not too bad!' but then catch my side profile at some point and think 'eek!'.
It's all a bit miserable, really. :-(
You should be so proud of yourself for your weight loss!!! I really hope things continue on the right path for you.
_Really_ sneaks up on you, doesn't it? Especially the side profile thing. I have a couple of shirts that make me look fine from the font, but I turn to the side and just see the gut.
Are you looking at losing weight at the minute?
It's something that I know I need to do, but - and I know this is pathetic - always gets put off ('I'll start next week; after Christmas; after my birthday...').
Yeah it's ~2.2 lbs to the kg, so when I have to convert I divide kg by two and then take off an amount that feels about right (or in the other direction, double it and then add a similarly gut-feel amount)
Yeah it's that one-tenth that I just sorta fudge, if you're converting 84kg to pounds then multiplying by 2 lands you with 168, at which point you can either:
1. add exactly 16.8 to the value in your head
2. open the calc app (at which point you might as well put "84 kg in lbs" to google)
3. don't worry about the exact result, give a rough approximation: "it's about 180-something"
#3 will suffice, people are usually looking for a rough ballpark figure. If it was important then I'd obviously convert it carefully, but I'm talking about when I've done a conversion when talking with a US friend in the pub or something where I'd probably mess up whether you add a tenth of the original value or the doubled value anyway :)
It's weird, but I always use metric for 'small' measurements (a number of metres, for example), but for distances on the road it'll be miles. And I've used miles per hour for so long that I just can't get my head around how fast something's moving if it's quoted in km/h. (Of course, the fact that road signs are miles and MPH over here kind of drums that in somewhat...)
Likewise, when I'm cooking I'll work in grams and litres, but for body weight it's always been stones.
I'm 39 and never used imperial weights despite living in the UK from birth until relocating in 2018. I don't even know how many pounds to the stone today without looking it up, and constantly get surprised by all the other Brits who don't think in metric by default (but that happens enough that I do know to multiply kg by 2.2 to get lbs).
Yeah Pounds to Stone is a pain in that it's fourteen while Ounces to Pounds is sixteen. I think the only thing I used imperial for is bodyweight and that's just due to either parents or doctors using it. Other than that we used to ask for a "quarter" of boiled sweets at the shop, but I never internalized what the exact weight was (I guess a quarter of a pound) it's just what my dad taught me to ask for when I was ~4 and I kept it up.
I think "the right path" here is finding happiness regardless of your weight. Whether that involves losing weight, or eating/exercising a bit differently or simply being happy and comfortable with the build you currently have.
People can spend their lives spiralling into depression and ill-health by constantly following diets or setting goals that even if they achieve doesn't always make them feel satisfied. I'm not saying you should or shouldn't do anything in particular - but I hope you don't feel pressured or guilted into something by what others say or what you think they feel.
The fact that you can look in the mirror and think "that's not too bad" means you're already happier than a lot of people - there are some shredded people with physiques you or I may envy, but who are either miserable about their lifestyle or who still just don't like how they look.
I don't know how this comment comes across - but my intent was to give a little support that wasn't just "you can lose weight too!" because that is not the be-all-and-end-all :)
Not quite, but it is important. Being ~100 lb overweight is a serious medical condition. It's bad for your knees, it's bad for your heart, and it puts you at much higher risk of tons of other problems.
Okay, but also being miserable about it isn’t going to help the fat guy. In fact being miserable makes it statistically more likely he stays fat or gets fatter.
This is where it starts to become complicated. I am not the best person to properly enumerate these complications so if this comment made you curious, check the podcast Maintenance Phase and their episode "Is Being Fat Bad For You?"[0]. However I can briefly try to summarise some of them for your curiosity:
- it is received wisdom that if you are fatter you are "unhealthier" and this is reflected in a lot of data whenever this is studied
- however this tends to not get controlled for some important factors (e.g. lower income people are generally more unhealthy overally than those on higher incomes) for a whole variety of reasons that aren't necessarily related to weight or whether you're categorised as overweight
- a very undeappreciated problem is that if you're "overweight"[1] you tend to be quite under-served by doctors currently. So it's common for an "overweight" person to go to the doctor with a problem - heart pains, gastro-intestinal problems, whatever - and to be told "lose some weight, you're overweight". While someone thinner would get some more attention even though they may both have a weight-agnostic root cause . This is not very well studied or measured, but this type of treatment is widely reported problem whenever you survey "overweight" people
- people with eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia are often excluded from these studies with the intent to get untainted data. These eating disorders are usually only diagnosed for people below a certain BMI, when in fact they are still definitely present among higher-BMI individuals and have a similarly detrimental effect on their health. Sustained dieting can have pretty serious effects on your body, and if you go to a doctor because, say, you're a woman on a diet who has stopped menstruating ... well, see the previous bullet point, you're just just get told "lose some weight"
There a few other additional issues, but I hope this is enough to make you stop and think that while yeah there's possibly increased health risks it's potentially less than we might realise and is a pretty complex subject that deserves careful study and to be treated with more nuance than it usually is.
[1] - Aubrey Gordon, a host of the podcast I mentioned, has suggested she doesn't like "overweight" etc euphemisms, but I chickened out of using just "fat" like she does ... but I still think "overweight" possibly incorrectly suggests there is a correct weight you should be - so I surrounded it in coward-quotes :) I do know for a fact that "obese" (and morbidly obese) are heavily frowned-upon and tbh not particularly helpful categorisations, I saw them floating around elsewhere in this thread.
This is very interesting, thanks for the detailed list. I will check out the podcast.
That said... this is one of those cases where I have to defer to the experts here. Basically every expert I've heard on this topic has said that being obese is unhealthy. And while you (summarizing the podcast) raise a lot of interesting points, I don't think I'm in a position to disagree with the scientific consensus here. And it's not like the people studying this stuff haven't thought about a lot of these objections themselves.
Also, anecdotally, it seems fairly common sense that people who are obese are
less healthy in many ways. I know that's just an impression, but c'mon, it's a pretty strong one, to me at least. I've seen so many people go from finding it hard to walk much without breathing hard when overweight, to being fine after. Just as an example of someone famous with many health problems that got much better- Penn Jillette.
Yep sorry it wasn't my intention to hide that - the consensus is that being very fat is bad for you in various ways. But specifically how fat and how much worse in which ways is a bit of a crapshoot because it seems some of the research on it is a bit methologically flawed or inconsistent or ideologically driven (the ep references a bit of back/forth between Katherine Flegal and Walter Willett on that which was very interesting).
But yeah does feel right (as an anecdotal aside I feel "healthier" at 84kg than when I was 94kg) and as I said in the extreme it does seem to be correct - the same is true for very thin people. But we're mistreating thin and fat people alike by boiling down a lot of health problems down to a single dimension and saying those who fall on one side of a line are healthy and those on the other aren't. I'm not suggesting you were doing just that - you seem to appreciate the nuance to it - but many people do and I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't that kind of person at one point in my past.
Oh I don't think you were hiding anything, I'm just saying a single podcast is not enough to convince me of anything.
That said,I started listening to it... It's fantastic. They've made really great points so far. A bunch of questionable stuff too that I disagree with, but lots of great points.
And even not just about obesity. I think they made some analogies that will stick with me about correlations.
I have no idea who these are, but I'm super thankful you introduced me to them I'm definitely going to try more of their stuff.
I hadn’t exercised for over 20 years, but then I bought an Apple Watch. I ignored the rings for the first few months, but finally started taking them seriously. The gamification of fitness is very much a thing.
I still hate exercise, I still have no upper body strength, I’m still overweight, but my overall fitness level has gone up significantly and I’ve lost some weight. Baby steps.
Same here with the Apple Watch. After a couple of months of thinking that the rings were ridiculous, I found myself taking intentional steps to close them. Last night, even though I should have been sleeping, I went for a brisk walk just before midnight… after I realized that I was just shy of closing a ring. I like it.
Yes, I think a key for stopping that is making sure you weight yourself once a week at least. It's much easier to catch the weight creeping up and manage it when it's 5 pounds and not 15.
I know it's an overused line, but this kinda blew up overnight! I did not expect to wake up to over 1k visitors.
Really appreciate you all reading and commenting. I've only recently started, but I'm going to be posting more of the same every Sunday, talking about mental health, physical health, and stuff I've learned along the way.
If you like this and want more, you can subscribe to my mailing list here - https://nicky.bearblog.dev/subscribe/
I'll be sending out an extra post by email every Wednesday.
Have a great day!
Hey, congrats on starting your journey. One thing that has really helped me was just walking and watching my very basic macros (Protein, Fat, Carbs). MyFitnessPal is great for that. Also, consider that you need to take care of yourself and activities that allow you to recover and be successful over the long term. The best thing I have found is walking.
I was inspired by Paul Revelia - https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=paul+revelia+wa... - a body builder in his late 40's who does all his cardio with simple walking. I have lost about 25 pounds myself with just eating sanely and walking my dogs.
Great to read your account. Impressed by your achievement so far with such a constraint, and your second footnote actually made me laugh - life is a cosmic joke sometimes. I hope the feedback you get hear spurs you through the winter months. You write well, so I will definitely follow your story.
Really appreciate your comment, thank you. I'm going to be posting more about this and my mental health as I go on, and would love your feedback as I go.
To his credit, the GP did apologise after he laughed at me.
A refreshingly honest read Nicky (and yes, I'm trying to lose weight too).
Just remember that a person's worth with God doesn't depend on how good looking, thin or tall they are. He doesn't see as humans see, but looks into the heart instead (1 Samuel 16:7). There are people on HN that need to know this.
Appreciate that, thank you! Honesty is what I'm aiming for with this blog; a space to be frank about my issues, myself, where I'm going, and how I'll get there.
I'll be saving the Bible quote to Obsidian for encouragement.
Every answer I saw to that points out to God not being as loving and holy as portrayed.
The whole premise of "God decided to show Satan (why God thinks he need to prove anything to Satan in the first place?) his point by tormenting some mortal is... sadistic at best ?". And doesn't really touch topic of "why someone is allowed to be tortured by disease from birth and dies due to no action of their own will".
My personal head canon is that God is actually the devil, and all of the books are his propaganda. "Satan" wasn't banished from heaven, he is the true God who escaped from Heaven after "God" invaded. The warning to not fall for the devil's temptation is just the perfect irony of the situation.
Though, in just a non-religious who grew up Christian, so this is all for fun and games.
My conclusion based on bible and state of the world was that either God doesn't exist or he is evil. There is no way way to be describe many of his actions as ones of benevolence.
How naive that you think that Job provides any consolation to this concern. Job is one man who after years of misery, at least still has his life. Meanwhile, I just read the rest of the Old Testament where God ordered the mass murder of tens of thousands of women and children who will find no such mercy. For the crime of merely being born in the place that the Israelites were supposed to invade and take their land from them through genocide. Maybe, instead of constantly rationalizing why there must have been a good reason, one can use their logical side to grapple with the "ultimate love" they were sold is very inconsistent with the primary source of their belief.
There was a time when I got used to eating a big plate of fries with my normal lunch (the student canteen at the university where I studied was just phenomenal), and after a couple of months, I had put on considerable weight. The problem was, I was thin my whole life, and I just couldn't imagine being overweight, so I didn't ever get on a scale, and had no idea how much I had put on. It was my mother telling me "my son, you've become properly fat" that made me realize that something significant had changed. The scale was now showing 90 kg, closer to 100 than my to my normal weight. After a couple of months of eating properly and running, everything was back to normal, but that was a stark reminder of how anyone can become obese given the right (or rather wrong) conditions.
Usually, it happens insidiously. After 30-40, metabolism slows down and it's easy to very slowly gain weight, even for people who didn't have weight issues before. Losing weight can be quite hard. To me the solution is to monitor my weight and avoid junk food as much as possible. I never drink soda, avoid fries. Sometimes you have no choice (e.g. traveling and no easy healthy options), then I try to only eat once or twice a day.
Good luck with the mirtazapine taper, and I mean that with all sincerity. I recently finished mine, and it’s been fascinating to watch the weight drop along with it. I’m glad that mirtazapine helps some people, but for me it was a poison that shocked my central nervous system with brutal discontinuation symptoms.
Thanks. It's a really difficult balance, isn't it? It's not kept me relapse free, but at the same time I've never been closer to ending it all since before I started them, and they absolutely calmed my mood impulses (at the cost of more or less knocking me out). I'd previously had discussions around changing meds only to be told I can't cross taper, so I just resigned myself to them.
The difference is night and day though. My wife has really helped keep me on an even keel, but already I'm starting feel more awake and eat a little less.
Glad you made it off them, though, and hope that means things are looking better your end.
Thank you for sharing. I often have the feeling that something that, to me, seems like a complex of issues around emotional regulation, impulse control, sensation seeking, etc is seen by most people as something much simpler.
"It's simple math, calories consumed versus calories burned", and the solutions are correspondingly simplistic. Eat less, work out more, or both.
To me, it's like saying that poverty can be solved by people either working more or spending less. Well, perhaps, but it's not the core of the issue.
The widespread lack of empathy for people in the high BMI ranges freaks me out. The absolute majority of people WANTS to be healthy, happy and safe.
This post really did a great job breaking through the stigma and humanizing this condition.
> The absolute majority of people WANTS to be healthy, happy and safe.
"Wanting" something is completely meaningless, if you want other conflicting things more. I can say I want to lose weight, but if I also "want" to eat a whole pizza every night after eating my normal meals that's probably not going to happen.
For me and probably a lot of people, the first step towards getting my weight in control was to decide that losing weight was one of my top priorities, and not just something I think about once in a while.
I guarantee you there are many, many people who think about their weight way more often than "once in a while" (more like "every waking moment"), but still struggle massively with disordered eating due to a variety of factors that make it far less simple than you're making it out to be.
For me it is more thinking about eating every waking moment.
Weight is a constant struggle as I think about eating something essentially non stop. There is that trope that men think about sex every 7 seconds - for me it is thinking about eating. I never feel full and always want more - I can finish up a big lunch and within mere minutes be thinking about dinner and what I can have for a snack or whatever.
It is a constant struggle. It consumes my mind and I often can't think about anything else.
> For me and probably a lot of people, the first step towards getting my weight in control was to decide that losing weight was one of my top priorities, and not just something I think about once in a while.
I think it all comes down to the level of control you have over your effort and results. For some, it's a losing battle against long term mental health problems and coping mechanisms (like in my case), for others it's against physical conditions like thyroid and hormonal problems. Others it's just a simple case of 'I want to eat what I want'.
It is ultimately about making it a priority, but for this who aren't just eating because they want to, overcoming that problem becomes a whole bigger thing, and that's a much more insurmountable looking obstacle. That doesn't meant they can't achieve what they're looking for, else I wouldn't be trying myself. But it does mean the issue goes further, and support needs to look at the whole issue. Nutrition guides and workout programs don't resolve the deep seated mental blockers.
And all while we're ignoring the fact that many foods are engineered for increasing appetite and higher caloric content.
Or that there just might be an environmental issue as well. (Endocrine disruptors, perhaps?)
Otherwise, how the heck does one explain the obesity epidemic? It is not like most if any people choose to be fat.
And no, amount of physical labor is still considerable.
Also what we eat affects hormones in complex ways, so while the CICO formula may be true in some narrow technical sense, even physiologically it doesn't explain the phenomenon to a useful degree.
If someone forces themselves to eat X calories, where X is below their maintenance calories, they will lose weight. This is both obvious from understanding the mechanics, but also proven through many actual studies.
I'm not sure if you agree with that or not, but if you do, then what do you mean that CICO doesn't explain the phenomenon?
Id say its not the lack of empathy that you feel, but maybe the non trivial effort to normalize morbid obesity that is met with hostility.
We should not celebrate morbid obesity as normal and beautiful.
We gain nothing from villanizing people that suffer from it either.
I personally have never suffered obesity but as the years go on, my body seems to want to put a ludicrous amount of fat in places it never used to.
I maintain muscle mass by regular resistance training mixed with cardio and HIIT and that helps a lot with the otherwize natural loss of muscle over 40. Personally this is where excercise definetly helps me.
Also now at 50, I dont have insulin resistance or high blood pressure as many of my fellow 50 year olds are falling prey to.
Even the healthy weight 50 year olds around me are starting blood pressure medication.
This is where I beleive the excercise regime I follow has worked wonders.
Not so much for weight loss as many seem to think.
It gets harder every year though to maintain physique and low body fat.
Excercise has tremendous benefits for your health and looks but for great weight loss is a matter of nutrition and what particular combo suits your body, economy and culture.
True enough for the average interpretation of what is essentially a subjective value, but it puts the focus on the wrong aspect of the issue. It's OK to not be beautiful (most people aren't, or are depending on who you ask), but not being healthy has a bigger impact on the individual (usually) and society (certainly) both. It is also a lot more objectively quantifiable than beauty.
Anecdotal, but one of my significant others is morbidly obese. They were already very overweight when I met them and fell in love. They gained even more weight since the pandemic and I still find them beautiful. Obesity is not imcompatible with beauty.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, yes, but it's also about how you carry yourself.
> the non trivial effort to normalize morbid obesity
Now, different cultures I'm sure, but do you really experience "fat acceptance" proselytizing in real life, as opposed to in news articles linking to some bizarre part of Tumblr and its terminally online relatives?
> the non trivial effort to normalize morbid obesity
Musical artist Lizzo:
"Throughout her career, Lizzo has been subject to body shaming. She is considered an image for body positivity and self-confidence. She partially credits social media, and the Internet in general, for changing the narrative around size and giving visibility to overweight women." [Wikipedia]
> We should not celebrate morbid obesity as normal and beautiful.
Like blue-haired social justice warrior, this supposed celebration of obesity as an identity onto itself is complained about a lot online but not seen much in real life. In real life people merely seem to want to be left alone regarding their health instead of being accused of being sloths and the like—and health is in general a very private thing to many.
Virtually no one celebrates being overweight. And certainly not obesity.
You talk about middle age. It’s much more common to say that weight-gain is inevitable due to aging than it is to declare that one identifies with one’s gut belly now that one is 40+.
Personally, the thing that has consistently worked is portion control. It will always be easier to eat only the calories you need, than to burn calories from over-eating.
People look at the "recommended serving" and cry foul that it suggests they eat only 30-40g of cereal in the morning, but it really is plenty. I keep a digital scale in the kitchen and weigh out most of my food before eating or cooking with it. Even things like rice and pasta are really easy to over-do when guesstimating and not measuring.
It can take a little bit of adjustment to get used to this, but your body quickly adapts to the portions you're being served. And then on days when you do more than your usual exercise, it's easier to add a snack or increase the portion slightly, than it is to be always trying to "reduce" the calories on days when you don't work out. It's a small mental trick that can work wonders once you've set a baseline.
Agreed, please don't eat cereal (at least the commercial ones) as they tend to be very high in sugar. It's like eating a tablespoon of sugar in the morning. Oatmeal and other non sugary breakfasts are fine.
Doesn't it rather depend on the particular cereal? I have wheat biscuits (a supermarket brand like Weetabix), 0 added sugar; almost any big brand cereal marketed at kids is extraordinarily sugary though.
Weetos are quite good (compared to other child-targeted cereals), honeynut cornflakes very bad, etc., IME you need to read the label though because it can be hard to tell.
>Personally, the thing that has consistently worked is portion control. It will always be easier to eat only the calories you need, than to burn calories from over-eating.
The thing is, moderate amount of exercise has fairly proven track record of improving peoples health. Whether they loose weight or not in the process, the statistic result in blood pressure and what not are real.
The same can not be said about weight loss based on portion size only. Which simultaneously make it easy to cut portion into malnutrition of some sort, despite still having many calories in it.
It's not simple math. As someone who has struggled with overweight their entire adult life it feels more like an addiction. And it is heavily influenced by your mental state.
I've been known to experience blackout-like behavior where my brain just disconnects and I end up buying some unhealthy snack because I subconsciously want it.
It has gotten a lot better with age though, just last week a girlfriend called me "fit" and I was shocked. So I have lost a lot of weight and I've worked hard on managing my purchases. Just like drugs, as long as it's not in my home, I won't use it.
But any snacks, candy or ice cream in my home gets eaten. In my later 30s I started throwing shit out, like candy into the trash, ice cream in the sink, just like an alcoholic. It's not just math. It's a very difficult mental health problem.
And it's absolutely exasperated by in-store displays of candy and snacks. They're selling death to addicts, in color.
Weight loss being math and being difficult emotionally are not mutually exclusive. It is difficult, yes, but it still comes down to the math of calories in < calories out.
I think it's important that we not think it's complicated from a math point of view lest people start thinking that only the quality of their foods matters, not their amounts; some people actually think that eating fat itself (lard, butter, etc) is the primary cause of what makes you fat, which is false.
No of course not, and I'm smart enough to know the basic formula. But to simplify a lifelong struggle down to "simple math" is kinda disrespectful to all those struggling.
I really respected your post, I like the recognition of behaviours that can cause obesity as being common across other types of addiction. I also like the parent your responding to though, because while you make an insightful point, it's helpful to keep it grounded. You have the sense for the parents post to feel obvious, but I think others do overcomplicate it.
The function can be simple math, and the factors psychologically/emotionally difficult to deal with. Recognizing that is not lessening the struggle, from where I'm standing
I'd agree, not buying extra calories is easier than limiting consumption of things in reach. It's more complicated when the food is a shared resource, and you don't want to punish the people who already have good self control.
> "It's simple math, calories consumed versus calories burned", and the solutions are correspondingly simplistic. Eat less, work out more, or both.
> To me, it's like saying that poverty can be solved by people either working more or spending less.
It's important to realize that the weight (loss) boils down to these fundamentals. Many people delude themselves that their extra weight is caused by eating not healthy foods. While that might be partially true, portion control is hugely important as well. Many people then switch to eating healthier food (containing the healthy weight loss calories, not those gain calories), but still in copious amounts, and then wonder how come they're not losing weight.
So, breaking such delusions by understanding CICO is an important first step, but of course it's not sufficient on its own and people need to develop more complex strategies based on this.
Eating less calories than losing is what makes one lose weight. This is why so many calorie-restricting diets are a success in the first few months of them.
Keeping the weight at lower levels is a different thing entirely. This is why so many calorie-restricting diets fail when people gradually abandon them.
Humans have a built-in sensor of satiety. If the sensor is signaling that they are hungry, they feel uncomfortable, and go looking for food, sooner or later. This can be suppressed by willpower, but it's taxing and distracting. This is why so many calorie-restricting diets get abandoned: the initial serving of willpower allocated to the self-restriction ends, and people want to proceed with their lives without having to fight the feeling of hunger most of the time. Between keeping a healthy weight and performing well on a demanding mental job they usually choose the latter. Whoever can lose weight on pure willpower is a hero; others can strive to emulate them, but should not assume they will be as successful.
So substances that help blunt or remove the feeling of not having eaten enough are important. Some of them are medical drugs (say, modafinil has this effect), some are household substances (like caffeine), some are real dangerously addictive drugs (like nicotine or cocaine). But there are mechanical sensors right in the stomach, which are harder to suppress with substances. This is where surgical means can and do help. Cutting a part of your stomach is now done via a very small incision in one's abdomen.
Morbid obesity is a disease, and should be treated as such. Shaming someone obese is like shaming someone with a broken leg: both painful and not helpful.
> "It's simple math, calories consumed versus calories burned", and the solutions are correspondingly simplistic. Eat less, work out more, or both.
This is true.
> that poverty can be solved by people either working more or spending less.
This is not true.
I understand your core message about the difficulty, but I dont see the similarities between both statements.
Basically, there are lots of people who have been working hard and saving that are still poor. But I haven’t met anyone that have been consistently doing fitness (nutrition, exercise, sleep,) that is out of shape.
Edit: What I mean is that getting in shape is simple but hard. We have a “universal” script for it. If I follow it I will get some results.
Getting out of poverty is both hard and complex. It involves more variables but using your message: What do you work hard on? Is there anything to even save at the end of the month? There is also a good amount of luck involved. My dad worked hard and spent frugally but was still poor.
> etc is seen by most people as something much simpler
The solution here really is simple. Eat less move more, and preferably eat healthier. It doesn't mean it's easy. And this is coming from someone who's been about 50 pounds overweight for 3 years and I'm finally losing the weight, down 25 pounds but still a long way to go.
The phase: "Losing weight is simple, not easy." Sums it up nicely.
Just like, your example of poverty, or smoking/drug use. Addictions are often "simple" to quit, just stop doing [bad thing], but they're far from easy because it ignores the underlying reasons people are addicts or have emotional regulation issues to begin with.
A common online solve-all is: "Just go get therapy." Which, while better intentioned than bullying, or yelling "CICO!!!" is often suggested by people who don't realize how expensive, inconsistent, and uncommon good therapy is. People treat it like a "just talk to a therapist, and you'll be fixed" rather than more realistically: "just spend $100 a session until you can even find a therapist who could help you, then spend thousands on that therapist."
To add to this, therapists are the first ones to admit that not all disorders are curable, and that therapy doesn't work 100% of the time. Even the best therapists work with patients for years in some cases and fail.
When someone says "just go get therapy" it says more about them than anything else: they're demonstrating that they're misinformed, low empathy, or both.
I'm a big fan of therapy (it was definitely useful for me) but there is something even more insidious about how discourse has shifted towards promoting therapy for almost everything: therapy does not actually fix most causes of suffering. Tools like CBT give people the ability to endure suffering and even thrive in it but they do not eliminate suffering.
It almost feels like a trick. One more way in which people are trained to assume that suffering because they've got a shitty job with a boss that hates them working for a faceless corporation and anonymous customers is just a property of the universe like gravity. I don't think that therapists are doing something wrong or that going to therapy is bad but there is something sick about how human suffering just becomes one more market where megacorps can extract wealth from the masses.
I struggled a lot with weight but not since a least a decade, and my take is that we are missing the problem. Yes it's simple math, but it's not about the people having poor control, the real problem is some type of food are just no match for our will, they are just brain hacks. I find staying in good shape very easy, but at the same I absolutely cannot resist some types of food if they are available. What I found is simple is not buying them. E.g. if I can only snacks almonds at home I will be full before getting fat, whereas it's possible to eat a whole meal calorie equivalent of potato chips or ice cream without feeling full. What is complex is that it's all dependent on your options depending on where you live, your social circle, and yes a bit of control. Kind of like the difference between trying to stop smoking and having the pack with the lighter ready in front of you vs being in a smoke-free environment. So it's a bit of both, people have a responsibility for their state, but it's not entirely their fault. Now without regulation (but how do we even start banning some mixes of sugar, fat and salt), what options do we have?
To me, it's like saying that poverty can be solved by people either working more or spending less. Well, perhaps, but it's not the core of the issue.
Absolutely true. CICO is an over-simplification and almost useless to many people who suffer from obesity. It also ignores that most people do better concentrating on the CI side of the equation (increasing CO is rarely enough for an obese person to permanently reduce their weight). Understanding the fundamentals of calories, the broader aspects of nutrition, glucose response (post-exercise, daily rhythms, etc) - if you’re desperate it can be quite overwhelming.
Telling an obese person to “eat less” or “exercise more” isn’t any more helpful than telling them “try harder” or “don’t be a fatty”.
Problem is people want it all : health _and_ do whatever comes to my mind. Sometime reality is stronger than will. My advice : do not focus on a weight but on eating normally. If you can stop _gaining_ weight it’s the first step to health. Eventually and _very_ gradually your weight will decrease and in a very distant future it’ll be normal.
Just wondering what he finds so delicious to eat that he couldn't stop. I find the food in UK absolutlety disgusting, fast food, desserts, breakfast, all of it.
A) The comment was about "food in the UK" not "British food." He's eating food in the UK so his list is of food in the UK.
B) Domino's and McDonald's are not British foods but sausage rolls and pork pies are. Even the American chain food will taste different in the UK vs. the US.
This isn't weight loss advice but I've been eating unhealthy for most of my 20s. I felt alright for the most part with some very occasional stomach ache or acid reflux if I didn't sleep enough.
In the past couple of years I put some effort in learning how to cook. Nothing fancy, just following simple recipes and some occasional Hello Fresh boxes. At first, 30min recipes were taking me an hour to make and it was a hassle.
Now I'm at a point where I can cook a lot of things without having to focus on it and can improvise some dishes with what's left in my fridge.
The benefits have been huge. I'm eating a lot healthier, spending way less on takeaway and feeling generally lighter and a lot less bloated. I'm sleeping better and have less of a post lunch energy dip.
I can't recommend it enough. Even cooking twice a week can already be 4 healthy meals if you make two portions each time.
I don't feel like this works for everyone. If I cook only for myself, and I mostly do, then it's very hard to not make more than one meal's worth. And I know most of the effort I put into that cooking will be wasted for the part I eat as leftovers. It just doesn't taste as good.
Obviously, there are a lot of complex reasons why someone ends up overweight. I would just like to share a few hacks for anyone struggling with this issue that they may not be aware of:
- Try rucking. This is the name for walking with weight in a backpack. You may hear it referred to as 'tabbing' in the UK. You will burn almost as much calories as jogging but without the strain on your knees and it doesn't suck half as much. You can get dedicated rucksacks and weight plates for it or you can just sling some bricks or sandbags in a regular backpack. Try and get one with well padded straps. If you have a dog, just stick the backpack on whilst you are taking it for a walk and you are now essentially, in terms of calories burned, doing a run every day.
- Try meal shakes. There are quite a few of these available now. Huel is probably the most globally available. The problem with the whole philosophy of 'just track your macros and run a calorie deficit' is that it takes a lot of work. If you are overweight, you are likely already feeling tired and worn out. Adding on exercise AND meal prep AND calorie tracking on top is a pretty big jump. It is far easier to buy a meal replacement shake, have it for breakfast and lunch and then be relatively relaxed about what you have for dinner.
- Rather than tracking ALL the food you eat which is time consuming, boring and can lead to an unhealthy obsessive mindset in some individuals, try tracking just the junk food. Then aim to reduce it each week until you get to a reasonable level. If you ate 20 bad things this week, aim for 19 next week. Personally, I wouldn't aim for this to ever be zero. Moderation in all things.
- Lift weights a few times a week. The more muscle mass you have the more calories you'll burn without having to do any work. Find a plan with an app and stick to it.
- Reduce your risk of injury. If you injure yourself, you lose all momentum and end up back at square one. If you're overweight you're already at higher risk of injuring yourself so you have to train smart. If you keep doing the same exercise every day, you increase the chances of injuring yourself. So if you run on Monday, cycle on Tuesday. Utilise low impact cardio. Find the two or three options you like most from the following list and keep rotating: row, ruck, swim, cycle, ski-erg, roller blading, elliptical, stepper, aqua jogging. Try to stretch every day for at least 15 minutes.
- If you've got the time, do lots of zone 2. If you have a heart rate tracker, you can separate heart rate into zones. Zone 2 is where you can go for hours on end. You will hear a lot at the minute about how HIIT 'can burn as much calories as endurance training'. I'm sorry, but it's bullshit. I've seen plenty of people doing Crossfit consistently for a couple of years that are still carrying extra body fat. It is unlikely you will see someone who has been at a local triathlon or cycling club for the same period of time carrying that weight. No matter how hard you exercise, if you're only doing it for 20 minutes a day you will not burn as many calories as someone doing cardio for 2 hours a day, 6 days a week. And if you are exercising for a couple of hours a day it is very hard to eat enough calories to stay fat.
- Reduce friction for desired behaviours, increase friction for undesired behaviours. Junk food lives on the top shelf at the back of the cupboard where it's harder to reach. Pack your gym bag the night before so all you have to do is grab it and go in the morning. Make your protein shake the night before etc.
- Attach a negative emotional response to food you don't want to eat. This one may be more controversial but I remember reading it in a Tony Robbins book and it does make sense. If you can't stop eating chocolate, eat nothing but chocolate for the next 2 or 3 days. Literally nothing else. You will start to feel sick of it and attach a physical repulsion to it which will lesson your chances of wanting to e...
I have a tendency to be heavier rather than lighter, for me exercise absolutely helps, how much I eat with moderate exercise is about the same as without. Once I go above the moderate range I start being more hungry and only applies to cardiovascular conditioning, weight training does not have that effect on me.
The problem with losing weight can't be reduced to calories in versus calories out, that's the outcome, not the method. What you need to control is hunger, which can be very difficult for one person and very easy for another. Hormones play a huge role in this (ghrelin and leptin are big players) and that differs from person to person. Combine that with the fact that certain people unconsciously dial down their energy expenditure (fidgeting, bouncing, posture, etc.) when they reduce their calorie intake.
You can do a lot with conscious decisions like getting your step count up, doing regular cardio, eating more things that fill you up like vegetables, fruit, potatoes, anything high in fibre. But that only gets you so far until you hit that certain point at which it becomes too hard and that point is different for every person. If you have a tendency to be overweight, you'll never walk around with a permanent sixpack. It's better to weigh 100kg than to weigh 120kg even if it would be better to weigh 80kg, there's no point in losing a lot of weight if you can't maintain it.
Pretty much, the "eat less than you burn" is the way to lose weight but the difficulty is figuring out a way to do it while still staying sane
After many bounces (biggest from 92 to 71kg which would be just at "normal" BMI for my height) I ended up aiming for a very little drop, while still eating "normal stuff". The aim is to make it psychologically manageable and not have to will thru the diet every day like I did before, only to eventually run out and get back to the bad habits.
Other thing I learned is differentiating between brain hunger and body hunger. Brain just likes to eat, preferably in nice regular intervals, especially once I got used before that the big evening meal is "reward" for hard day at work, and it took some time to figure out "no, your body is just fine, it's still metabolizing stuff, its your brain that's bored"
I've swapped the bread and other fast metabolizing stuff to help stave off the hunger and slowly get used to just eating one meal (around midday) per day so I get hungry right near the end of the day. Weirdly enough I don't get that much morning hunger and usually coffee with milk is enough to get me by for few hours before dinner.
When I get crave for something sweet I just do it instead of a meal or make meal smaller at later date as snack to stave off hunger till the end of the day. Baked potatoes instead of rice/fries/bread to the meal also work surprisingly well to keep me feeling sated.
WFH have been blessing here as I can just cook my meal instead of getting it in the office.
Excercise did pretty much nothing to me in terms of weight, sure, getting some to feel better is useful but it just makes me hungrier so calories even out...
It's fairly easy to lose weight by not eating anything for a few weeks (only first 1-3 days are tougher) though one risks developing vitamin & electrolyte deficiency that resembles effects of a major viral infection. Another way is to do HIIT but doing that properly is out of reach for most overweight people.
Healthy eating won't lead you to lose weight without losing your muscles. Radical fasting is the only known way to lose weight and mostly preserve muscles. Also, one could argue that historically people alternated between feast and famine (and you can still see it in some less developed countries these days) and we have the ability to run on our own fat for longer periods of time. Why else would we store fat?
I cant find the blog post now (its probably 20ish years old now), from the creator of AutoCAD (John Walker, I beleive). Where he details all the issues he had with various diets and weight loss plans. Finally he looked at the issue from a engineers point of view, and eventually came up with a solution that worked for him. I am under-weight all my life, so I cannot speak to the method myself, but he seemed quite logical to me. He more or less stated that the human body could be considered like a rubber bag with a hole in each end and that if the calorie in number exceeded the calorie out number then weight goes up, with the added complication of water retention (as far as I know, most programs recommend that you weight yourself at the same time every day so as to get a more accurate reading, due to water retention), and as such devloped an excel sheet which would show a rolling average of weight (like the way they guess the weather or some stocks). This he found, helped with motivation, instead of seeing big swings from day to day, a steady small reduction is seen via the charts instead.
I tried to google the blog, but couldnt find it, however it appears that he has released books and other such materials relating to it since then.
This isnt the post I read, however, it looks like some of the tools he created exist here:
Note, as stated above, my struggle with weight is gaining, not loosing, so I have not delved into this stuff on a deeper level, however, what drew me into the original post, was the amount of research he did in relation to how much calories various activities will burn.
Figuring out that you need to eat less than you burn to lose weight is nothing substantial (not to slight the method, the advice on keeping the calorie intake it gives is sound).
The hard part is doing it without going crazy and figuring it how to fit it inside your lifestyle while still keeping morale high.
Like simple act of going to a party, it sucks to have to keep calorie count and skip on this or that.
So I just... don't. I got used to doing one meal a day so I just shift the time of it (with maybe a tiny snack if I can't really keep it up, but that's rare) to the party evening, and shift the next day meal to later in the day so I can burn off the party.
> and as such devloped an excel sheet which would show a rolling average of weight (like the way they guess the weather or some stocks). This he found, helped with motivation, instead of seeing big swings from day to day, a steady small reduction is seen via the charts instead.
I use Libra Weight Manager for like 10+ years now for that. I think I read this article back then too
I wish there were far less stigma revolving around asking for help regarding nutrition. I feel its like going to the psychologist; its somewhat seen as shameful and a proof you've "given up", where its imo totally the contrary.
In my case I think I'd still be flirting with obesity had I not begged to see a specialist.
Is there a stigma around this? Nutrition and weight loss are both constantly advertised and regularly praised. Where is it considered shameful to see a nutritionist?
Maybe its a very regional issue, but where I grew up in Switzerland, I feel obesity and being overweight is mostly seen as a lack of willpower, a sign of neglect or laziness, and therefore when you see specialists, its seen as giving up, even cheating. I mostly take that from conversations Ive had with ppl. But perhaps it was just my environment that wasnt the most enlightened on those problems
Without devaluing your experience I've never really felt there was a stigma associated with working with nutritionists and even doctors on your weight and health.
On the contrary, it feels like the kind of thing people from higher socioeconomic groups do. Of course you work with a nutritionist, personal trainer, psychologist and life/business coach. Who has the time to keep track of that all yourself when you can pay someone else to do it.
Friendly post to those who might need it. There are support groups out there for people with eating disorders. One is Compulsive Eaters Anonymous [0]. Try it out.
One trick that might help people is reducing/eliminating seed oils. Safflower, soybean, sunflower oil. They put that in everything nowadays, and it adds a lot of extra calories. Its amazing to pick up stuff in the grocery story and look at the ingredients to see where they randomly show up. Restaurants also use them a lot as a cooking oil, cheaper than butter much of the time.
They might also trigger inflammatory disorders but I'm less convinced of that. I eliminated them and lost tons of weight, though I had a pretty restrictive diet and was exercising a lot too so its hard to untangle the effects.
Olive oil not less calorific than seed oils, butter is only slightly because it contains water...seed oils are a completely fine form of fat and don't cause weight gain
I don't think there's any evidence that they're inflammatory (great video about it here [1]), but obviously oils are almost 100% fat and therefore have a ton of calories. At the same time, some people feel incredibly satiated from eating fats, to the point where they might eat fewer total calories if they include some...
Generally, avoiding added high calorie fillers (that includes sugar and oils alike) is almost certainly a good idea if you're trying to lose weight though.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 348 ms ] threadIt's a relatively new blog, but I'm posting more of the same every Sunday. Next one is about how SAD (seasonal affective disorder) is hitting me at the minute.
Keep it up Nicky.
Only bit of advice I have from giving up smoking about 20 years ago is, don't beat yourself up if slip up occasionally. Trying to take control of your situation is always useful in itself.
Even if you fall off the wagon multiple times just attempting to get back on again gives you more control and makes things easier the next time.
Try. Fail. Try again and fail again but better.
You "just" need to eat better food. It's that easy.
Well, here I'm not telling lessons, because I fail to "just" eat better food. In fact eating it is the easy part. Getting good food in your plate everyday is what is hard because it means making a lot of changes in your habits because, well, food is not going to cook itself and you always have "better" things to do.
So, yeah, you can lose more than that, but it's probably not sustainable by someone who loves to eat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Barbieri%27s_fast
Source: experimented a fair amount with dieting/fasting in my 30s. When you talk about this with people, it’s startling how many believe that skipping some meals is dicing with death. Hardly surprising people struggle to lose weight, when they refuse to try changing the key variables
100g of fries is about 250kcal, 100g of cabbage is around 30
You can quite literally eat 10 times as much cabbage as fries to have the same amount of calories
And eating less triggers a feeling of hunger (at least at the beginning), which makes following through harder.
Cookies, chocolate, etc. easily exceed 500kcal/100g.
Beer is a serious calorie input too.
Hahahaha, this, yes.
Last summer during a whole company offsite we happened to play some quizz game where you had to give the nearest answer. One question was « How much time could you survive without eating anything except water ? ».
Boy did I won this guess by trying a random « 30 days » because I knew world records are amounted in months. The other answers were all, without exceptions, around 2 to 3 days and nothing more than a week.
Fix habit enough that you don't gain weight first, and get used to that being new normal, then start dropping, else it is very easy to bounce back.
Then, once you figured out how to live and eat "post weight drop", start actual drop, and if you bounce it won't be as hard
I have found that it is possible to change.
Becoming lighter has encouraged me to exercise but what I eat has always been the main factor in what I weigh.
That's exactly what I've found. I can exercise two or three hours a day; means nothing if I'm not watching my calories. Congrats on the weight loss!
I myself have lost 15kg over the past couple of years, after going from zero high-intensity physical activity on a normal week to a few hours of running and swimming every week.
I'm sure there are some unconscious changes to my eating, in particular afternoon/evening snacking. But that just happened without me trying or planning for it. I still eat at the same lunch restaurants and it is still my wife making me dinner most evenings.
There's approximately 3500 calories per pound of fat and the average human will burn about 100 calories per mile of sustained running. If you want to lose a pound a week (a pretty healthy weight loss rate) you can either run 5 miles a day without changing your diet or skip 2 energy drinks a day without changing your exercise regime. Unfortunately many people that think a big workout is burning huge amounts of fat often indulge in excess eating as a reward which leads to even less weight loss (or even weight gain).
Again, exercise has a ludicrous number of benefits and absolutely should be encouraged for those benefits but weight loss shouldn't be included among them.
It surprises me that this invalid logic is continually reinforced by the media and even health professionals.
The most weight I ever lost was during 2020 lockdown when I made the consious decision to eat a bit less. I did virtually no exercise, one 30min walk each day, and I had no access to fitness equipment at home.
Many folks gain weight very slowly. It creeps up on them. Typical scenario is a sedentary office job, family responsibilities, and little time for oneself. Calories are very much cumulative, so all it takes is some regular snacking (or stress-eating) to get the weight trend going up and, whoops, 20 extra lbs can easily appear in a year. A lot of this happened during the pandemic.
Losing that 20lbs, in such scenarios, can be done with a simple exercise regimen (or even some thoughtfully increased physical activity). One thing that's interesting is that you DON'T have to RUN a mile to burn 100 Calories. You can burn the same amount, 100 Calories, by walking a mile. It takes longer, of course, but it's easier on the joints especially for overweight people.
While the act of going to the gym won't burn many calories, putting on muscle can drastically increase your baseline metabolic rate. 10lb of muscle (easily gained by a "newbie" who is eating well) will add about 1,500 calories per day to your baseline metabolic rate. That's a whole meal! (and that's just the calories burned by existing, not by recovery/muscle building, the workout itself, etc).
The body is remarkably good at maintaining homeostasis when losing weight. So as one gets lighter, the body becomes more efficient and burns less calories, requiring deeper and deeper reductions in consumption. Increasing muscle mass negates this.
Edit: @gduffy has a better source for how much energy a lb of muscle burns, which is "4.5 to 7.0 kcal/lb per day". So adding 10lb of muscle will increase caloric consumption by 450 - 700 Calories. So not quite a meal, but a solid 5 mile run.
Per month?
https://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/metabolismcon...
It’s still helpful: even 50-70 Calories per day is 18k-25k Calories per year. At 3500 Calories per pound of fat that’s 5-7 pounds offset each year, but it’s not a panacea for someone with 100 pounds of body fat.
You can’t out-lift your fork!
It's not just about calories and metabolic rate. Lean muscle tissue is also a crucial component of the endocrine system, and it acts as a glucose sink to prevent the energy in that glucose from being stored as fat.
https://www.gabriellereece.com/muscle-as-the-cornerstone-of-...
https://peterattiamd.com/ama27/
Taking the numbers from @gduffy you end up with (4.5 to 7.0) * 10lb = 45 to 70 Calories.
So more like a half mile run for most people.
Unless I’m missing something?
So 4.5 kcal/lb per day * 10 lb = 45 large calories per day, not 450.
> The small calorie or gram calorie was defined as the amount of heat needed to cause the same increase in one gram of water. Thus, 1 large calorie is equal to 1000 small calories.
> In nutrition and food science, the term calorie and the symbol cal almost always refers to the large unit. It is generally used in publications and package labels to express the energy value of foods in per serving or per weight, recommended dietary caloric intake, metabolic rates, etc. Some authors recommend the spelling Calorie and the symbol Cal (both with a capital C) to avoid confusion; however, this convention is often ignored.
> In physics and chemistry the word calorie and its symbol usually refer to the small unit; the large one being called kilocalorie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie
A fun myth, but obviously false. Most human hunting was team oriented using javelins, or even stones and spears. Only a small number of human tribes have ever seriously practiced running to exhaustion. It's just easier to cut them off with a large gang and stab them with spears as you corner them.
For me it was a crazy little thing, nothing to do with being fat-shamed or even feeling guilty about my weight.
I heard a radio journalist doing a show at a UK Slimming World meeting (or Weight Watchers). He was essentially poking fun at those attending, saying they would never keep any weight losses off. I thought was pretty mean, so I went to my local Slimming World meeting and signed up. I lost weight, learnt about healthier eating, tracking my weight etc. I don't go to Slimming World now but the good habits started there.
It just kind of happened for me. I know I eat unhealthy food; I know I drink too much; I know I don't do enough (as in, any) exercise... I look at my face in the mirror and think 'that's not too bad!' but then catch my side profile at some point and think 'eek!'.
It's all a bit miserable, really. :-(
You should be so proud of yourself for your weight loss!!! I really hope things continue on the right path for you.
1. add exactly 16.8 to the value in your head
2. open the calc app (at which point you might as well put "84 kg in lbs" to google)
3. don't worry about the exact result, give a rough approximation: "it's about 180-something"
#3 will suffice, people are usually looking for a rough ballpark figure. If it was important then I'd obviously convert it carefully, but I'm talking about when I've done a conversion when talking with a US friend in the pub or something where I'd probably mess up whether you add a tenth of the original value or the doubled value anyway :)
It's weird, but I always use metric for 'small' measurements (a number of metres, for example), but for distances on the road it'll be miles. And I've used miles per hour for so long that I just can't get my head around how fast something's moving if it's quoted in km/h. (Of course, the fact that road signs are miles and MPH over here kind of drums that in somewhat...)
Likewise, when I'm cooking I'll work in grams and litres, but for body weight it's always been stones.
(Was born in 1970, by the way.)
That said, I have a reasonable intuition for the conversion factors. Enough that I wouldn't have to run to Google to understand the jist of the story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Conversion_Act
People can spend their lives spiralling into depression and ill-health by constantly following diets or setting goals that even if they achieve doesn't always make them feel satisfied. I'm not saying you should or shouldn't do anything in particular - but I hope you don't feel pressured or guilted into something by what others say or what you think they feel.
The fact that you can look in the mirror and think "that's not too bad" means you're already happier than a lot of people - there are some shredded people with physiques you or I may envy, but who are either miserable about their lifestyle or who still just don't like how they look.
I don't know how this comment comes across - but my intent was to give a little support that wasn't just "you can lose weight too!" because that is not the be-all-and-end-all :)
Not quite, but it is important. Being ~100 lb overweight is a serious medical condition. It's bad for your knees, it's bad for your heart, and it puts you at much higher risk of tons of other problems.
- it is received wisdom that if you are fatter you are "unhealthier" and this is reflected in a lot of data whenever this is studied
- however this tends to not get controlled for some important factors (e.g. lower income people are generally more unhealthy overally than those on higher incomes) for a whole variety of reasons that aren't necessarily related to weight or whether you're categorised as overweight
- a very undeappreciated problem is that if you're "overweight"[1] you tend to be quite under-served by doctors currently. So it's common for an "overweight" person to go to the doctor with a problem - heart pains, gastro-intestinal problems, whatever - and to be told "lose some weight, you're overweight". While someone thinner would get some more attention even though they may both have a weight-agnostic root cause . This is not very well studied or measured, but this type of treatment is widely reported problem whenever you survey "overweight" people
- people with eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia are often excluded from these studies with the intent to get untainted data. These eating disorders are usually only diagnosed for people below a certain BMI, when in fact they are still definitely present among higher-BMI individuals and have a similarly detrimental effect on their health. Sustained dieting can have pretty serious effects on your body, and if you go to a doctor because, say, you're a woman on a diet who has stopped menstruating ... well, see the previous bullet point, you're just just get told "lose some weight"
There a few other additional issues, but I hope this is enough to make you stop and think that while yeah there's possibly increased health risks it's potentially less than we might realise and is a pretty complex subject that deserves careful study and to be treated with more nuance than it usually is.
[0] - the answer is "kinda yes, but not as much as you think and not in every way and it's more complicated": https://www.stitcher.com/show/maintenance-phase/episode/is-b...
[1] - Aubrey Gordon, a host of the podcast I mentioned, has suggested she doesn't like "overweight" etc euphemisms, but I chickened out of using just "fat" like she does ... but I still think "overweight" possibly incorrectly suggests there is a correct weight you should be - so I surrounded it in coward-quotes :) I do know for a fact that "obese" (and morbidly obese) are heavily frowned-upon and tbh not particularly helpful categorisations, I saw them floating around elsewhere in this thread.
That said... this is one of those cases where I have to defer to the experts here. Basically every expert I've heard on this topic has said that being obese is unhealthy. And while you (summarizing the podcast) raise a lot of interesting points, I don't think I'm in a position to disagree with the scientific consensus here. And it's not like the people studying this stuff haven't thought about a lot of these objections themselves.
Also, anecdotally, it seems fairly common sense that people who are obese are less healthy in many ways. I know that's just an impression, but c'mon, it's a pretty strong one, to me at least. I've seen so many people go from finding it hard to walk much without breathing hard when overweight, to being fine after. Just as an example of someone famous with many health problems that got much better- Penn Jillette.
But yeah does feel right (as an anecdotal aside I feel "healthier" at 84kg than when I was 94kg) and as I said in the extreme it does seem to be correct - the same is true for very thin people. But we're mistreating thin and fat people alike by boiling down a lot of health problems down to a single dimension and saying those who fall on one side of a line are healthy and those on the other aren't. I'm not suggesting you were doing just that - you seem to appreciate the nuance to it - but many people do and I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't that kind of person at one point in my past.
That said,I started listening to it... It's fantastic. They've made really great points so far. A bunch of questionable stuff too that I disagree with, but lots of great points.
And even not just about obesity. I think they made some analogies that will stick with me about correlations.
I have no idea who these are, but I'm super thankful you introduced me to them I'm definitely going to try more of their stuff.
I still hate exercise, I still have no upper body strength, I’m still overweight, but my overall fitness level has gone up significantly and I’ve lost some weight. Baby steps.
I was inspired by Paul Revelia - https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=paul+revelia+wa... - a body builder in his late 40's who does all his cardio with simple walking. I have lost about 25 pounds myself with just eating sanely and walking my dogs.
To his credit, the GP did apologise after he laughed at me.
Just remember that a person's worth with God doesn't depend on how good looking, thin or tall they are. He doesn't see as humans see, but looks into the heart instead (1 Samuel 16:7). There are people on HN that need to know this.
Good luck with your weight loss!
The whole premise of "God decided to show Satan (why God thinks he need to prove anything to Satan in the first place?) his point by tormenting some mortal is... sadistic at best ?". And doesn't really touch topic of "why someone is allowed to be tortured by disease from birth and dies due to no action of their own will".
Though, in just a non-religious who grew up Christian, so this is all for fun and games.
This is true in general. Nobody's worth as a human is measured by their appearance.
Biblical quotes can be off-putting if you aren't Christian, but you can find wisdom even in things you disagree with/don't believe.
The difference is night and day though. My wife has really helped keep me on an even keel, but already I'm starting feel more awake and eat a little less.
Glad you made it off them, though, and hope that means things are looking better your end.
"It's simple math, calories consumed versus calories burned", and the solutions are correspondingly simplistic. Eat less, work out more, or both.
To me, it's like saying that poverty can be solved by people either working more or spending less. Well, perhaps, but it's not the core of the issue.
The widespread lack of empathy for people in the high BMI ranges freaks me out. The absolute majority of people WANTS to be healthy, happy and safe.
This post really did a great job breaking through the stigma and humanizing this condition.
"Wanting" something is completely meaningless, if you want other conflicting things more. I can say I want to lose weight, but if I also "want" to eat a whole pizza every night after eating my normal meals that's probably not going to happen.
For me and probably a lot of people, the first step towards getting my weight in control was to decide that losing weight was one of my top priorities, and not just something I think about once in a while.
Ultimately you have to reshape your life and environment a little bit.
Weight is a constant struggle as I think about eating something essentially non stop. There is that trope that men think about sex every 7 seconds - for me it is thinking about eating. I never feel full and always want more - I can finish up a big lunch and within mere minutes be thinking about dinner and what I can have for a snack or whatever.
It is a constant struggle. It consumes my mind and I often can't think about anything else.
I think it all comes down to the level of control you have over your effort and results. For some, it's a losing battle against long term mental health problems and coping mechanisms (like in my case), for others it's against physical conditions like thyroid and hormonal problems. Others it's just a simple case of 'I want to eat what I want'.
It is ultimately about making it a priority, but for this who aren't just eating because they want to, overcoming that problem becomes a whole bigger thing, and that's a much more insurmountable looking obstacle. That doesn't meant they can't achieve what they're looking for, else I wouldn't be trying myself. But it does mean the issue goes further, and support needs to look at the whole issue. Nutrition guides and workout programs don't resolve the deep seated mental blockers.
Or that there just might be an environmental issue as well. (Endocrine disruptors, perhaps?)
Otherwise, how the heck does one explain the obesity epidemic? It is not like most if any people choose to be fat. And no, amount of physical labor is still considerable.
It's very easy to individualize a systemic issue.
If someone forces themselves to eat X calories, where X is below their maintenance calories, they will lose weight. This is both obvious from understanding the mechanics, but also proven through many actual studies.
I'm not sure if you agree with that or not, but if you do, then what do you mean that CICO doesn't explain the phenomenon?
We should not celebrate morbid obesity as normal and beautiful.
We gain nothing from villanizing people that suffer from it either.
I personally have never suffered obesity but as the years go on, my body seems to want to put a ludicrous amount of fat in places it never used to. I maintain muscle mass by regular resistance training mixed with cardio and HIIT and that helps a lot with the otherwize natural loss of muscle over 40. Personally this is where excercise definetly helps me.
Also now at 50, I dont have insulin resistance or high blood pressure as many of my fellow 50 year olds are falling prey to.
Even the healthy weight 50 year olds around me are starting blood pressure medication. This is where I beleive the excercise regime I follow has worked wonders. Not so much for weight loss as many seem to think.
It gets harder every year though to maintain physique and low body fat.
Excercise has tremendous benefits for your health and looks but for great weight loss is a matter of nutrition and what particular combo suits your body, economy and culture.
I would swap out the 'beautiful' for 'healthy'. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder after all.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, yes, but it's also about how you carry yourself.
Now, different cultures I'm sure, but do you really experience "fat acceptance" proselytizing in real life, as opposed to in news articles linking to some bizarre part of Tumblr and its terminally online relatives?
Musical artist Lizzo:
"Throughout her career, Lizzo has been subject to body shaming. She is considered an image for body positivity and self-confidence. She partially credits social media, and the Internet in general, for changing the narrative around size and giving visibility to overweight women." [Wikipedia]
Also see:
https://headlinehealth.com/lizzo-308-lbs-is-clearly-and-visi...
Like blue-haired social justice warrior, this supposed celebration of obesity as an identity onto itself is complained about a lot online but not seen much in real life. In real life people merely seem to want to be left alone regarding their health instead of being accused of being sloths and the like—and health is in general a very private thing to many.
Virtually no one celebrates being overweight. And certainly not obesity.
You talk about middle age. It’s much more common to say that weight-gain is inevitable due to aging than it is to declare that one identifies with one’s gut belly now that one is 40+.
Personally, the thing that has consistently worked is portion control. It will always be easier to eat only the calories you need, than to burn calories from over-eating.
People look at the "recommended serving" and cry foul that it suggests they eat only 30-40g of cereal in the morning, but it really is plenty. I keep a digital scale in the kitchen and weigh out most of my food before eating or cooking with it. Even things like rice and pasta are really easy to over-do when guesstimating and not measuring.
It can take a little bit of adjustment to get used to this, but your body quickly adapts to the portions you're being served. And then on days when you do more than your usual exercise, it's easier to add a snack or increase the portion slightly, than it is to be always trying to "reduce" the calories on days when you don't work out. It's a small mental trick that can work wonders once you've set a baseline.
Weetos are quite good (compared to other child-targeted cereals), honeynut cornflakes very bad, etc., IME you need to read the label though because it can be hard to tell.
Of course the Nestle-style cereals you're talking about are not ideal. But especially bad for you if you're eating 100g and not 40g.
https://nutrail.com/
The thing is, moderate amount of exercise has fairly proven track record of improving peoples health. Whether they loose weight or not in the process, the statistic result in blood pressure and what not are real.
The same can not be said about weight loss based on portion size only. Which simultaneously make it easy to cut portion into malnutrition of some sort, despite still having many calories in it.
I've been known to experience blackout-like behavior where my brain just disconnects and I end up buying some unhealthy snack because I subconsciously want it.
It has gotten a lot better with age though, just last week a girlfriend called me "fit" and I was shocked. So I have lost a lot of weight and I've worked hard on managing my purchases. Just like drugs, as long as it's not in my home, I won't use it.
But any snacks, candy or ice cream in my home gets eaten. In my later 30s I started throwing shit out, like candy into the trash, ice cream in the sink, just like an alcoholic. It's not just math. It's a very difficult mental health problem.
And it's absolutely exasperated by in-store displays of candy and snacks. They're selling death to addicts, in color.
I think it's important that we not think it's complicated from a math point of view lest people start thinking that only the quality of their foods matters, not their amounts; some people actually think that eating fat itself (lard, butter, etc) is the primary cause of what makes you fat, which is false.
The function can be simple math, and the factors psychologically/emotionally difficult to deal with. Recognizing that is not lessening the struggle, from where I'm standing
FYI: exacerbated.
It's important to realize that the weight (loss) boils down to these fundamentals. Many people delude themselves that their extra weight is caused by eating not healthy foods. While that might be partially true, portion control is hugely important as well. Many people then switch to eating healthier food (containing the healthy weight loss calories, not those gain calories), but still in copious amounts, and then wonder how come they're not losing weight.
So, breaking such delusions by understanding CICO is an important first step, but of course it's not sufficient on its own and people need to develop more complex strategies based on this.
Keeping the weight at lower levels is a different thing entirely. This is why so many calorie-restricting diets fail when people gradually abandon them.
Humans have a built-in sensor of satiety. If the sensor is signaling that they are hungry, they feel uncomfortable, and go looking for food, sooner or later. This can be suppressed by willpower, but it's taxing and distracting. This is why so many calorie-restricting diets get abandoned: the initial serving of willpower allocated to the self-restriction ends, and people want to proceed with their lives without having to fight the feeling of hunger most of the time. Between keeping a healthy weight and performing well on a demanding mental job they usually choose the latter. Whoever can lose weight on pure willpower is a hero; others can strive to emulate them, but should not assume they will be as successful.
So substances that help blunt or remove the feeling of not having eaten enough are important. Some of them are medical drugs (say, modafinil has this effect), some are household substances (like caffeine), some are real dangerously addictive drugs (like nicotine or cocaine). But there are mechanical sensors right in the stomach, which are harder to suppress with substances. This is where surgical means can and do help. Cutting a part of your stomach is now done via a very small incision in one's abdomen.
Morbid obesity is a disease, and should be treated as such. Shaming someone obese is like shaming someone with a broken leg: both painful and not helpful.
This is true.
> that poverty can be solved by people either working more or spending less.
This is not true.
I understand your core message about the difficulty, but I dont see the similarities between both statements.
Basically, there are lots of people who have been working hard and saving that are still poor. But I haven’t met anyone that have been consistently doing fitness (nutrition, exercise, sleep,) that is out of shape.
Edit: What I mean is that getting in shape is simple but hard. We have a “universal” script for it. If I follow it I will get some results.
Getting out of poverty is both hard and complex. It involves more variables but using your message: What do you work hard on? Is there anything to even save at the end of the month? There is also a good amount of luck involved. My dad worked hard and spent frugally but was still poor.
The solution here really is simple. Eat less move more, and preferably eat healthier. It doesn't mean it's easy. And this is coming from someone who's been about 50 pounds overweight for 3 years and I'm finally losing the weight, down 25 pounds but still a long way to go.
Just like, your example of poverty, or smoking/drug use. Addictions are often "simple" to quit, just stop doing [bad thing], but they're far from easy because it ignores the underlying reasons people are addicts or have emotional regulation issues to begin with.
A common online solve-all is: "Just go get therapy." Which, while better intentioned than bullying, or yelling "CICO!!!" is often suggested by people who don't realize how expensive, inconsistent, and uncommon good therapy is. People treat it like a "just talk to a therapist, and you'll be fixed" rather than more realistically: "just spend $100 a session until you can even find a therapist who could help you, then spend thousands on that therapist."
When someone says "just go get therapy" it says more about them than anything else: they're demonstrating that they're misinformed, low empathy, or both.
It almost feels like a trick. One more way in which people are trained to assume that suffering because they've got a shitty job with a boss that hates them working for a faceless corporation and anonymous customers is just a property of the universe like gravity. I don't think that therapists are doing something wrong or that going to therapy is bad but there is something sick about how human suffering just becomes one more market where megacorps can extract wealth from the masses.
Absolutely true. CICO is an over-simplification and almost useless to many people who suffer from obesity. It also ignores that most people do better concentrating on the CI side of the equation (increasing CO is rarely enough for an obese person to permanently reduce their weight). Understanding the fundamentals of calories, the broader aspects of nutrition, glucose response (post-exercise, daily rhythms, etc) - if you’re desperate it can be quite overwhelming.
Telling an obese person to “eat less” or “exercise more” isn’t any more helpful than telling them “try harder” or “don’t be a fatty”.
- Custard Creams
- Bramley apple turnovers
- Sausage rolls
- Walkers crisps
- Magnum ice cream bars
- Breakfast cereals
- Pork pies
- Pizza (Domino's is my favourite big chain, but there is a local chain that do a decent 12 inch pizza for a lot cheaper)
- McDonald's double cheeseburgers
- McDonald's double sausage and egg McMuffin
- Doughnuts
- Cakes in general, but Mr Kipling's slices are very binge worthy
- Dairy Milk chocolate
- Full fat milk
- Cheese of most varieties
All just off the top of my head.
B) Domino's and McDonald's are not British foods but sausage rolls and pork pies are. Even the American chain food will taste different in the UK vs. the US.
Sometimes it's more about the person and less about the food.
For example, I know some people who simply can't stand to feel even a tiny bit hungry.
In the past couple of years I put some effort in learning how to cook. Nothing fancy, just following simple recipes and some occasional Hello Fresh boxes. At first, 30min recipes were taking me an hour to make and it was a hassle. Now I'm at a point where I can cook a lot of things without having to focus on it and can improvise some dishes with what's left in my fridge.
The benefits have been huge. I'm eating a lot healthier, spending way less on takeaway and feeling generally lighter and a lot less bloated. I'm sleeping better and have less of a post lunch energy dip.
I can't recommend it enough. Even cooking twice a week can already be 4 healthy meals if you make two portions each time.
- Try rucking. This is the name for walking with weight in a backpack. You may hear it referred to as 'tabbing' in the UK. You will burn almost as much calories as jogging but without the strain on your knees and it doesn't suck half as much. You can get dedicated rucksacks and weight plates for it or you can just sling some bricks or sandbags in a regular backpack. Try and get one with well padded straps. If you have a dog, just stick the backpack on whilst you are taking it for a walk and you are now essentially, in terms of calories burned, doing a run every day.
- Try meal shakes. There are quite a few of these available now. Huel is probably the most globally available. The problem with the whole philosophy of 'just track your macros and run a calorie deficit' is that it takes a lot of work. If you are overweight, you are likely already feeling tired and worn out. Adding on exercise AND meal prep AND calorie tracking on top is a pretty big jump. It is far easier to buy a meal replacement shake, have it for breakfast and lunch and then be relatively relaxed about what you have for dinner.
- Rather than tracking ALL the food you eat which is time consuming, boring and can lead to an unhealthy obsessive mindset in some individuals, try tracking just the junk food. Then aim to reduce it each week until you get to a reasonable level. If you ate 20 bad things this week, aim for 19 next week. Personally, I wouldn't aim for this to ever be zero. Moderation in all things.
- Lift weights a few times a week. The more muscle mass you have the more calories you'll burn without having to do any work. Find a plan with an app and stick to it.
- Reduce your risk of injury. If you injure yourself, you lose all momentum and end up back at square one. If you're overweight you're already at higher risk of injuring yourself so you have to train smart. If you keep doing the same exercise every day, you increase the chances of injuring yourself. So if you run on Monday, cycle on Tuesday. Utilise low impact cardio. Find the two or three options you like most from the following list and keep rotating: row, ruck, swim, cycle, ski-erg, roller blading, elliptical, stepper, aqua jogging. Try to stretch every day for at least 15 minutes.
- If you've got the time, do lots of zone 2. If you have a heart rate tracker, you can separate heart rate into zones. Zone 2 is where you can go for hours on end. You will hear a lot at the minute about how HIIT 'can burn as much calories as endurance training'. I'm sorry, but it's bullshit. I've seen plenty of people doing Crossfit consistently for a couple of years that are still carrying extra body fat. It is unlikely you will see someone who has been at a local triathlon or cycling club for the same period of time carrying that weight. No matter how hard you exercise, if you're only doing it for 20 minutes a day you will not burn as many calories as someone doing cardio for 2 hours a day, 6 days a week. And if you are exercising for a couple of hours a day it is very hard to eat enough calories to stay fat.
- Reduce friction for desired behaviours, increase friction for undesired behaviours. Junk food lives on the top shelf at the back of the cupboard where it's harder to reach. Pack your gym bag the night before so all you have to do is grab it and go in the morning. Make your protein shake the night before etc.
- Attach a negative emotional response to food you don't want to eat. This one may be more controversial but I remember reading it in a Tony Robbins book and it does make sense. If you can't stop eating chocolate, eat nothing but chocolate for the next 2 or 3 days. Literally nothing else. You will start to feel sick of it and attach a physical repulsion to it which will lesson your chances of wanting to e...
The problem with losing weight can't be reduced to calories in versus calories out, that's the outcome, not the method. What you need to control is hunger, which can be very difficult for one person and very easy for another. Hormones play a huge role in this (ghrelin and leptin are big players) and that differs from person to person. Combine that with the fact that certain people unconsciously dial down their energy expenditure (fidgeting, bouncing, posture, etc.) when they reduce their calorie intake.
You can do a lot with conscious decisions like getting your step count up, doing regular cardio, eating more things that fill you up like vegetables, fruit, potatoes, anything high in fibre. But that only gets you so far until you hit that certain point at which it becomes too hard and that point is different for every person. If you have a tendency to be overweight, you'll never walk around with a permanent sixpack. It's better to weigh 100kg than to weigh 120kg even if it would be better to weigh 80kg, there's no point in losing a lot of weight if you can't maintain it.
After many bounces (biggest from 92 to 71kg which would be just at "normal" BMI for my height) I ended up aiming for a very little drop, while still eating "normal stuff". The aim is to make it psychologically manageable and not have to will thru the diet every day like I did before, only to eventually run out and get back to the bad habits.
Other thing I learned is differentiating between brain hunger and body hunger. Brain just likes to eat, preferably in nice regular intervals, especially once I got used before that the big evening meal is "reward" for hard day at work, and it took some time to figure out "no, your body is just fine, it's still metabolizing stuff, its your brain that's bored"
I've swapped the bread and other fast metabolizing stuff to help stave off the hunger and slowly get used to just eating one meal (around midday) per day so I get hungry right near the end of the day. Weirdly enough I don't get that much morning hunger and usually coffee with milk is enough to get me by for few hours before dinner.
When I get crave for something sweet I just do it instead of a meal or make meal smaller at later date as snack to stave off hunger till the end of the day. Baked potatoes instead of rice/fries/bread to the meal also work surprisingly well to keep me feeling sated.
WFH have been blessing here as I can just cook my meal instead of getting it in the office.
Excercise did pretty much nothing to me in terms of weight, sure, getting some to feel better is useful but it just makes me hungrier so calories even out...
I tried to google the blog, but couldnt find it, however it appears that he has released books and other such materials relating to it since then.
This isnt the post I read, however, it looks like some of the tools he created exist here:
https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
Note, as stated above, my struggle with weight is gaining, not loosing, so I have not delved into this stuff on a deeper level, however, what drew me into the original post, was the amount of research he did in relation to how much calories various activities will burn.
Figuring out that you need to eat less than you burn to lose weight is nothing substantial (not to slight the method, the advice on keeping the calorie intake it gives is sound).
The hard part is doing it without going crazy and figuring it how to fit it inside your lifestyle while still keeping morale high.
Like simple act of going to a party, it sucks to have to keep calorie count and skip on this or that.
So I just... don't. I got used to doing one meal a day so I just shift the time of it (with maybe a tiny snack if I can't really keep it up, but that's rare) to the party evening, and shift the next day meal to later in the day so I can burn off the party.
> and as such devloped an excel sheet which would show a rolling average of weight (like the way they guess the weather or some stocks). This he found, helped with motivation, instead of seeing big swings from day to day, a steady small reduction is seen via the charts instead.
I use Libra Weight Manager for like 10+ years now for that. I think I read this article back then too
In my case I think I'd still be flirting with obesity had I not begged to see a specialist.
Start with a Registered Dietitian instead.
https://www.cdrnet.org/certifications/registered-dietitian-r...
On the contrary, it feels like the kind of thing people from higher socioeconomic groups do. Of course you work with a nutritionist, personal trainer, psychologist and life/business coach. Who has the time to keep track of that all yourself when you can pay someone else to do it.
It's all a matter of framing.
....you don't have to tell everyone you're going to the doctor, or to what kind of doctor.
And I can tell you from experience that doctors neither know anything significant about weight loss, nor do they care.
[0] https://www.ceahow.org/
They might also trigger inflammatory disorders but I'm less convinced of that. I eliminated them and lost tons of weight, though I had a pretty restrictive diet and was exercising a lot too so its hard to untangle the effects.
Generally, avoiding added high calorie fillers (that includes sugar and oils alike) is almost certainly a good idea if you're trying to lose weight though.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xTaAHSFHUU