Ask HN: What's the current best research/understanding of healthy weight loss?

1 points by simonebrunozzi ↗ HN

5 comments

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Sustainable weight loss requires a holistic approach across 4 main areas:

  1. Diet - healthy eating habits that result in a caloric deficit while giving you the required energy
  2. Exercise - strengthen your body, contribute to caloric deficit, improve how you feel
  3. Psychology - work on the reasons that caused the excessive weight and develop habits that help maintain weight loss in the long term
  4. Medication - use of semaglutide and other GLP-1 medications in support of the above
It haven't changed. It's all about discipline: with eating and moving your body. There's no alternative to that so the best way is to keep trying until you figure out what works for you.
I found out that mental status seriously impact it, too. When I’m depressed I keep asking myself why bother losing weight (or anything I was doing that requires some discipline), then I gave up.
Diet. What works for me is to eliminate all processed carbs. This not a keto diet as you still to have sugar from sweet potatoes, milk, and fresh fruit.

I tried this in 2017 and am doing it again now, but less aggressively now. In 2017 I lost 30 pounds in just under 3 months. I was not exercising and I greatly increased my calorie intake, especially of fatty meats. The weight still fell off gradually and consistently.

You can also accelerate this with a cheat meal one day a week. A cheat meal is a meal that completely breaks the diet with a large high sugar item. This will cause your blood sugar to spike and rapidly accelerate your metabolism through the next day but will also result in a minor hungover sensation.

Greatly reducing caffeine also helps as caffeine can result in inflammation and blood flow restriction.