Ask HN: What's your secret diet tip you can share?

24 hr fasting once a week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

intermittent fasting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Eat a light breakfast, whatever light means to you.

Eat leafy greens and berries every day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whole foods.

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

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

Green Tea has flavenoids. They sound yummy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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