All good tips but I think it really boils down to the last bit: sustainable changes. This doesn't help one understand how to differentiate a sustainable versus unsustainable change.
In my experience, the single most important factor is realizing that the sensation of hunger is your primary enemy and that you can attack it head-on.
Satiety is not dictated by how many calories you've eaten but (mostly) by the physical weight of your stomach. If your goal is to eliminate the sensation of hunger while consuming the least number of calories, the nutrition label tells you everything you need to know: eat a lot of low caloric density foods.
What you'll find over time is that foods widely regarded as unhealthy are simply ultra-dense (e.g. peanut butter is an engineering miracle) while healthier foods tend to be extremely low-density (e.g. non-fat Greek yogurt and fresh vegetables).
The biggest error I see in people dieting is thinking they just need to muscle through the feeling of hunger. It doesn't work in the long run. Accept that it's an important sensation but it's distinct from actual starvation, and address it directly!
While the key takeaways from the article are indeed good, I think the main problem is seeing weight loss as a phase. Your body weight is a result of your lifestyle. Going on a diet implies that it's just a temporary thing (which can be great to speed up the process), but it's no wonder that people often revert back to their previous weight. To lose weight permanently, you don't go on a diet, you change your diet.
A friend of mine lost > 100 lbs over the course of 2 years by following a weight loss program with a heavy focus on education. The program made him internalize that he had to fundamentally change his life. He has since regained probably around 20 lbs over his minimum, but has maintained his new weight for > 8 years now and is living a life closer to what he wants.
As with many posts like this, it feels somewhat obvious that "stay active, sleep well, track your weight and calories, and don't go back to eating garbage" are pretty well understood. That said, this is an excellent summary of the research and underlying principles.
I think the real challenge with significant weight loss is in being consistent and maintaining those things, which everyone is pretty silent on.
Mental health and stress levels are the #1 factor in essentially all of those things and deserve more focus in the context of major lifestyle change. You emphatically cannot just willpower through a major change for the rest of your life, and given that, you have to find ways to reduce the active cognition component to a low-effort automatic cognition process.
Setting yourself up for success through organization and routine, avoiding being around situations that cause overeating, not purchasing and keeping in stock foods that are problematic, peer and family support are all things that make a huge difference.
Almost impossible to do while you're losing weight. You will lose muscle mass as well as fat.
Not that you shouldn't start (or keep doing) weight training. And after you hit your weight loss goals, you'll need to eat more than base maintenance calories (and mostly in the form of protein) to gain muscle back.
Less obvious things that I’ve found over the years are:
- Some people just don’t like to eat that much. They don’t actually have a faster metabolism. Eating is just a chore to them so they rarely do it.
- Some people like eating more and may eat when bored.
- If I’m busy working on something, I will go 12 hours without eating on accident. If I’m doing nothing at all, I may overeat.
- Some people eat much faster than others. It doesn’t matter if you’re eating protein or fat if you inhale two steaks in 10 minutes. You already consumed too many calories. And because you ate double the amount of calories doesn’t mean that you will be full for double the time.
- Some people who eat too fast do something called low-calorie volume eating so they eat fewer calories and this works better for them than eating protein and fat.
- It’s true that exercise doesn’t make up for a bad diet. It’s easier to eat less.
- There are days when I’m out playing sports for like 10 hours. I burn a ton of calories that does need to be made up by eating.
- A lot of people did sports or were outside for hours growing up but don’t anymore due to lifestyle changes (kids for example). That’s an extremely major loss of a calorie sink that isn’t obvious.
- Water weight is a thing but it really doesn’t matter in the long term. It’s more like an offset from your “real weight” but it can only get so far from it. Trends are better for tracking your real weight.
Diet is the way to lose weight for certain. People don’t get it but cut out one slice of bread or one coke out of your daily diet and it’s the same as running one marathon a month calorie wise. If you were at equilibrium before you’ll also lose a pound a month.
I’m on liraglutide (Saxenda) for more than a year now. I lost 68kg (150lbs) and incredibly easy to maintain my weight. I’m doing OMAD (1/23 intermittent fasting) and for me it’s pretty much the perfect meal plan. Not even a diet because I eat whatever I want, just roughly counting calories. My daily exercise is 1 hour walking in the morning and the evening too (~20k steps combined)
Formerly fat person here. That article is just an overblown list of common sense advice to sell you some crap you don't need. Losing and maintaining your weight is actually really simple. Here is what worked for me (I am not a doctor):
- First of all, drop sugar. Right now. Even if you are not fat, you should not eat it. It's not just extra calories, it's poison. Don't be like "oh, I'll just finish this stuff I still have around", throw it out. If your are only going to follow one point from this list, then let it be this one.
- Forget about calories, a calorie is not a calorie. You cannot "work off" that cake your have eaten, your are not an oven. Calories are an upper limit (you cannot break thermodynamics), but the human metabolism is much more complicated than just balancing an equation.
- Exercise is necessary, but not sufficient. That means you should exercise to get your metabolism going, but exercising itself will not let your lose weight. And when I mean exercising I don't mean you need to get a gym membership. Just going for a walk for half an hour or an hour is good enough for starters.
- Fat won't make you fat. I grew up under low-fat propaganda, yet I kept getting fatter. Then when I increase my fat consumption I started losing weight. By fat I mean real animal fat from meat, not seed oils or other processed fats.
- Eat real food. If you cannot tell what it's made from by looking at it, then it's not real food.
- Processed fruits and vegetables are still processed food, and thus not real food. Don't be fooled by marketing, stuff like fruit juice is not healthy, no matter how many vitamin labels the manufacturer keeps putting on the packaging.
- Caloric restriction works in the short term, but will drive you crazy in the long term. This is why people lapse eventually and regain all their weight.
It is important to understand that obesity is not a "surplus of energy", it's a medical disorder brought about by disruption of your metabolism. I was able to keep eating and eating without ever feeling satiated. It is pure torture to be hungry with a full stomach. It was my body telling me "stop feeding me this garbage, give me real food". I have since been able to keep my weight and never feel hungry. It's only when I find myself unable to eat real food and lapse back into old habits that I start gaining weight again.
Uh no. You say you grew up under the low-fat propaganda, but still you fall victim to the overly broad "sugar is poison" propaganda. Yes, limit it by all means, but your overall caloric budget is way more important than the exact proportion of nutrients (same as with fat).
> then when I increase my fat consumption I started losing weight. By fat I mean real animal fat from meat, not seed oils or other processed fats.
Good that it worked for you, but this sounds like anti seed oil propaganda, which is debunked. "real animal fat" often means high saturated fat, which when replaced by polyunsaturated and unsaturated (from e.g. seed oils) actually tends to improve your health.
I agree, but I would add one very important thing:
If you consider the diet/lifestyle that allowed you to lose the weight as temporary, then you will fail.
I would diet to lose weight by stop eating sugar and desserts. Then, when I got to my target weight I would say “ok, one dessert a week” and before I knew it I was having them every day. And before long I had gained the weight back.
Currently down 21 lbs and 6 months free of sugar. This time I view it as something I will do for the rest of my life.
I found loosing weight was a lot easier than maintaining weight. When loosing weight you have a lot more wiggle room… As long as you are spending more calories than consuming you loose weight. It does not matter if you have a deficit of 20kcal or 200kcal.
Maintaining your weight requires one to have 0 deficit in either direction.
figure out deficit/maintenance/surplus calories
figure out what behavior changes to maintain consumption levels
level2 (extra work, but really what it's at)
figure out what how you want to look good naked... i.e. body composition
figure out workout (usually lifting with some cardio)
eat enough protein, eat other macros that can help you do your workouts. ironically dietting is the SIMPLEST... eat enough protein, fill the rest with what makes you feel "best" or helps "best" with your goal (exercise). This doesn't mean it will feel good depending on cut/bulk... just what feels least bad.
Extra work from level2 can make level1 easier - more lean mass from work out-> more maintenance + tdee calories. The process might be easier if you're 25 BMI with 15% bodyfat than 22 BMI with 20% bodyfat. You'll look better too, which let's be real, is what people usually want. Then health.
That's basically it.
But MOST IMPORTANT to recognize that some goals are simply things you're too mentally/physiologically "weak" / incapable of doing. You may simply not be built for to learn behavior changes (i.e. appetite control) for low BMI/BF. Your genes may simply prevent you from building good FFMI to pull off certain build. This stuff is simple, but not easy.
This is much more complicated than needed. Following the Hacker’s Diet [0] is simple to understand and sufficient, and yes, heed common-sense things like good sleep, some basic exercise, stress reduction, and eating healthy food.
Living in Japan made me get down to my all time lowest weight, returning to America made me shoot up past where I started… healthy lifestyle, lots of walking over driving, and healthy eating options is all it is!
15 years ago, I lost 32 kg. Ever since, I've been keeping a weight diary, weighing myself almost every day. I've now regained those kilos, plus an additional 15. The funny thing is that the yo-yo effect took 9.5 years to fully happen, and looking back at the entire 15-year span, it's perfectly clear. But year by year, I couldn't even notice it happening. I’d gain a few kilos, lose a few, gain again, lose again, except each time I'd gain slightly more than I'd lost.
I don't have much more to add, other than it being really eye-opening how my body seemed to play the long game, eventually regaining all the weight I'd initially lost.
I will say that having switched to carnivore made a difference for me. It was hard for me to say no to junk food as a vegan or when on a healthy ”balanced” diet. With carnivore, the cooking is simple, the “no” is obvious, and the satiation lasts a long time.
That said, it’s hard for me to think this is actually a healthy way to eat, after so many years being vegan, and I don’t know what the staying power will be.
So we’re sharing anecdotes so here’s mine: the speed in weight loss matters, in the sense that faster weight loss might not be the best. Your body will try to regain weight if you don’t give it time to get accustomed to the new weight.
In late 2020 / early 2021 i did the Dukan diet and lost ~10kg in like two months and a half, i lost like a kilogram (about two pounds) per week, my body was perfect.
Then i stupidly eyed the next challenge (quitting smoking) and gained everything back (with intenterests, damnit).
I should have really focused on consolidation, that for the dukan diet means slowly reintroducing other foods slowly to let your body get used to the new state of affairs.
Last year started dieting again and i lost 10 kilograms again, over a year, by mostly eating less (i amicably call it “controlled malnourishment”). This time i’m not gaining it back and i think it’s because even in the weeks where I’ve exceeded, my body got time to get acquainted to the new weight. During this last year i hit a plateau as well… i just had to be patient.
24 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 51.7 ms ] threadIn my experience, the single most important factor is realizing that the sensation of hunger is your primary enemy and that you can attack it head-on.
Satiety is not dictated by how many calories you've eaten but (mostly) by the physical weight of your stomach. If your goal is to eliminate the sensation of hunger while consuming the least number of calories, the nutrition label tells you everything you need to know: eat a lot of low caloric density foods.
What you'll find over time is that foods widely regarded as unhealthy are simply ultra-dense (e.g. peanut butter is an engineering miracle) while healthier foods tend to be extremely low-density (e.g. non-fat Greek yogurt and fresh vegetables).
The biggest error I see in people dieting is thinking they just need to muscle through the feeling of hunger. It doesn't work in the long run. Accept that it's an important sensation but it's distinct from actual starvation, and address it directly!
A friend of mine lost > 100 lbs over the course of 2 years by following a weight loss program with a heavy focus on education. The program made him internalize that he had to fundamentally change his life. He has since regained probably around 20 lbs over his minimum, but has maintained his new weight for > 8 years now and is living a life closer to what he wants.
I think the real challenge with significant weight loss is in being consistent and maintaining those things, which everyone is pretty silent on.
Mental health and stress levels are the #1 factor in essentially all of those things and deserve more focus in the context of major lifestyle change. You emphatically cannot just willpower through a major change for the rest of your life, and given that, you have to find ways to reduce the active cognition component to a low-effort automatic cognition process.
Setting yourself up for success through organization and routine, avoiding being around situations that cause overeating, not purchasing and keeping in stock foods that are problematic, peer and family support are all things that make a huge difference.
Almost impossible to do while you're losing weight. You will lose muscle mass as well as fat.
Not that you shouldn't start (or keep doing) weight training. And after you hit your weight loss goals, you'll need to eat more than base maintenance calories (and mostly in the form of protein) to gain muscle back.
[0] https://macrofactorapp.com/recomposition/
- Some people just don’t like to eat that much. They don’t actually have a faster metabolism. Eating is just a chore to them so they rarely do it.
- Some people like eating more and may eat when bored.
- If I’m busy working on something, I will go 12 hours without eating on accident. If I’m doing nothing at all, I may overeat.
- Some people eat much faster than others. It doesn’t matter if you’re eating protein or fat if you inhale two steaks in 10 minutes. You already consumed too many calories. And because you ate double the amount of calories doesn’t mean that you will be full for double the time.
- Some people who eat too fast do something called low-calorie volume eating so they eat fewer calories and this works better for them than eating protein and fat.
- It’s true that exercise doesn’t make up for a bad diet. It’s easier to eat less.
- There are days when I’m out playing sports for like 10 hours. I burn a ton of calories that does need to be made up by eating.
- A lot of people did sports or were outside for hours growing up but don’t anymore due to lifestyle changes (kids for example). That’s an extremely major loss of a calorie sink that isn’t obvious.
- Water weight is a thing but it really doesn’t matter in the long term. It’s more like an offset from your “real weight” but it can only get so far from it. Trends are better for tracking your real weight.
Adding a coke a day is the reverse of that.
- First of all, drop sugar. Right now. Even if you are not fat, you should not eat it. It's not just extra calories, it's poison. Don't be like "oh, I'll just finish this stuff I still have around", throw it out. If your are only going to follow one point from this list, then let it be this one.
- Forget about calories, a calorie is not a calorie. You cannot "work off" that cake your have eaten, your are not an oven. Calories are an upper limit (you cannot break thermodynamics), but the human metabolism is much more complicated than just balancing an equation.
- Exercise is necessary, but not sufficient. That means you should exercise to get your metabolism going, but exercising itself will not let your lose weight. And when I mean exercising I don't mean you need to get a gym membership. Just going for a walk for half an hour or an hour is good enough for starters.
- Fat won't make you fat. I grew up under low-fat propaganda, yet I kept getting fatter. Then when I increase my fat consumption I started losing weight. By fat I mean real animal fat from meat, not seed oils or other processed fats.
- Eat real food. If you cannot tell what it's made from by looking at it, then it's not real food.
- Processed fruits and vegetables are still processed food, and thus not real food. Don't be fooled by marketing, stuff like fruit juice is not healthy, no matter how many vitamin labels the manufacturer keeps putting on the packaging.
- Caloric restriction works in the short term, but will drive you crazy in the long term. This is why people lapse eventually and regain all their weight.
It is important to understand that obesity is not a "surplus of energy", it's a medical disorder brought about by disruption of your metabolism. I was able to keep eating and eating without ever feeling satiated. It is pure torture to be hungry with a full stomach. It was my body telling me "stop feeding me this garbage, give me real food". I have since been able to keep my weight and never feel hungry. It's only when I find myself unable to eat real food and lapse back into old habits that I start gaining weight again.
> It's not just extra calories, it's poison.
Uh no. You say you grew up under the low-fat propaganda, but still you fall victim to the overly broad "sugar is poison" propaganda. Yes, limit it by all means, but your overall caloric budget is way more important than the exact proportion of nutrients (same as with fat).
> then when I increase my fat consumption I started losing weight. By fat I mean real animal fat from meat, not seed oils or other processed fats.
Good that it worked for you, but this sounds like anti seed oil propaganda, which is debunked. "real animal fat" often means high saturated fat, which when replaced by polyunsaturated and unsaturated (from e.g. seed oils) actually tends to improve your health.
If you consider the diet/lifestyle that allowed you to lose the weight as temporary, then you will fail.
I would diet to lose weight by stop eating sugar and desserts. Then, when I got to my target weight I would say “ok, one dessert a week” and before I knew it I was having them every day. And before long I had gained the weight back.
Currently down 21 lbs and 6 months free of sugar. This time I view it as something I will do for the rest of my life.
Maintaining your weight requires one to have 0 deficit in either direction.
level1
figure out deficit/maintenance/surplus calories figure out what behavior changes to maintain consumption levels
level2 (extra work, but really what it's at)
figure out what how you want to look good naked... i.e. body composition figure out workout (usually lifting with some cardio) eat enough protein, eat other macros that can help you do your workouts. ironically dietting is the SIMPLEST... eat enough protein, fill the rest with what makes you feel "best" or helps "best" with your goal (exercise). This doesn't mean it will feel good depending on cut/bulk... just what feels least bad.
Extra work from level2 can make level1 easier - more lean mass from work out-> more maintenance + tdee calories. The process might be easier if you're 25 BMI with 15% bodyfat than 22 BMI with 20% bodyfat. You'll look better too, which let's be real, is what people usually want. Then health.
That's basically it.
But MOST IMPORTANT to recognize that some goals are simply things you're too mentally/physiologically "weak" / incapable of doing. You may simply not be built for to learn behavior changes (i.e. appetite control) for low BMI/BF. Your genes may simply prevent you from building good FFMI to pull off certain build. This stuff is simple, but not easy.
[0] https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
https://frequal.com/cf/
It is built on the Flavour framework:
https://flavour.sf.net
I don't have much more to add, other than it being really eye-opening how my body seemed to play the long game, eventually regaining all the weight I'd initially lost.
That said, it’s hard for me to think this is actually a healthy way to eat, after so many years being vegan, and I don’t know what the staying power will be.
In late 2020 / early 2021 i did the Dukan diet and lost ~10kg in like two months and a half, i lost like a kilogram (about two pounds) per week, my body was perfect.
Then i stupidly eyed the next challenge (quitting smoking) and gained everything back (with intenterests, damnit).
I should have really focused on consolidation, that for the dukan diet means slowly reintroducing other foods slowly to let your body get used to the new state of affairs.
Last year started dieting again and i lost 10 kilograms again, over a year, by mostly eating less (i amicably call it “controlled malnourishment”). This time i’m not gaining it back and i think it’s because even in the weeks where I’ve exceeded, my body got time to get acquainted to the new weight. During this last year i hit a plateau as well… i just had to be patient.