When I was a teenager, I looked at people who weighed 300+ pounds and though, how do you get that way. Don't you realize that you are gaining weight? Don't you know that you just have to eat less to lose weight?
Anyway, now I realize that I am hungry. It never goes away unless I eat a significant amount of food. My body told me to eat, so I ate.
It doesn't even take that much extra food to gain a lot of weight. One extra piece of cake a week is a few pounds in a year. If you live a few years, it adds up. You gain weight in kilograms and lose weight in grams.
Hunger is a sensation that happens inside a person's body and mind. You cannot compare your hunger to my hunger.
So many diets talk about not being hungry while you are on the diet. I've been to dieticians and told them I'm hungry, and they suggest eating more protein or more fiber. That does help, but I still feel hungry.
There is a very good chance that someone is writing a reply with some suggestion as to how I should eat so that I'm not hungry. Thank you for the thoughts, but realize that you don't live in my body, you don't know how I feel, you don't know what I've tried.
Hunger sounds like a problem to people. Hunger feels like a problem inside the body. People still tell me I shouldn't be hungry. Maybe part of the solution is realizing that eating to satisfaction is ... bad for some people. Maybe it's Ok to be a little hungry.
Anyway, these are just some thoughts. I'm down 30 pounds from my max. I think I have a good mentality now, but it took years to get here.
This is the key. On evolutionary time scales, human beings have only very recently come to inhabit a world where regularly being able to eat to full satiation (and beyond) is commonplace. Being "a little hungry" is actually the typical condition under which most of our ancestors over many thousands of years have operated. Put an organism evolved to survive amid scarcity in an environment of abundance, and it's going to gain weight unless it comes up with a method for stopping at or before the earliest signs of satiety.
“Eating less often” is also the primary recommendation given by longevity researcher Dr David Sinclair regarding how we can live longer. Not because it stops you being overweight, but because it triggers hormetic adaptations in the body that ultimately extend your lifespan. So being hungry definitely isn’t bad.
Thanks for sharing. Here's my perspective as a lean person who has no problems literally starving themselves to do other things.
It does indeed sound like your hunger is more intense than my hunger. I think I benefit from a ton of experience in transitioning past "I'm very hungry" to "I'm fine" when I choose not to eat. There's a clear point (for me) when the body just says "oh we're not going to eat now? ok, I'll stop interrupting the brain with 'I'm hungry' signals." It just goes away and I'm no doubt in a caloric deficit.
Some of this is self-discipline, and some of it is an ability to find something more engaging/interesting than eating. If I push past the hunger threshold, it's easy to just not eat for a long stretch of time. Eventually, I notice that I'm extremely physically weak and mentally fatigued (but still not very hungry), and I realize that I have to eat, or it's going to start causing problems.
I have the exact same experience with hunger. I’m only “hungry” for 10-15ish minutes max before the feeling disappears and the next time I eat is also to stave off the physical weakness.
I put “hungry” in quotes because what my overweight friends describe as feeling hungry I have only felt under the influence of marijuana, and what I describe as hungry is what they feel like all day other than right after a meal.
I haven’t found any literature on what drives human appetite that seemed non quackery science, but I’d be very intrigued whenever someone figures out what causes these different experiences
I've been on both ends of this. I was lean throughout college, gradually gained some weight after starting at Google and after a few years I was having trouble functioning after not having eaten for a while. I got some blood work done and everything was normal.
For me personally, I think it was completely driven by my mind. I was stressed while there and became further stressed when my willpower inevitably lost to my biology. Consistent, hard cardio; lowering my stress levels; and (most importantly) acknowledging and accepting that I don't have perfect control over the outcome were key to fixing it.
Secondary Loop: Weight Gain -> Notice Weight -> Diet -> Gain (loop)
I don't have a conclusion to this, I'm still trying to figure it out.
In the primary loop hunger keeps you alive.
When you get hungry and eat and feel satisfied, that operates on multiple systems in the brain and body. There are lots of hormones that are flowing and telling body systems to do things and also telling your consciousness what your condition is.
I'm not prepared to talk about the psychology in depth, but I do know that it feels very un-natural to be in a calorie deficit. I know that having low blood sugar makes it very hard for me to think. At times it's felt like my body is telling me I'm going to die and it's been very hard to ignore that feeling.
I’ve never been on a calorie deficit and not been hungry.
Calorie deficits are always a little unpleasant imo. It’s just suffering through that to get to a place where you want to maintain (which is much easier).
I’ve lost 73lbs, 53lbs, 35lbs (different times and gained weight over years in between). Each time the calorie deficit sucked. There is a 3 day hump and two week hump of misery until you get kind of used to it sucking, but I wouldn’t say it’s ever great.
Same here. I've never been obese or anything close to it, but even just eating healthy to maintain my weight or lose a little weight can be unpleasant. That unpleasantness is amplified 3x if I'm spending my days aimlessly as opposed to hyper-focused on activities that put me into flow, e.g. a work project I care deeply about and that requires lots of coding.
This is also my experience -- but I'll also note that it was very subjectively different depending on how stable/appropriately-treated my mental health was at the time. That feeling of the deficit hit very, very different when I was dealing with depression/compulsive tendencies. Right now I'm in a much better place, losing weight at a nice pace, and it's shocking to me how much easier it is than it had been, how much less disruptive to my life. Yeah, the math may always boil down to calories-in-calories-out, but comparing my own subjective experiences, I can definitely believe that the same deficit can cause different amounts of misery for different people.
WHO recently released a report on obesity in europe[1]
Stressing, among other things, that obesity is a chronic disease starting very early in life, indeed even before conception, and cannot be treated as an individual failing.
They also point out that health professionals should focus not on weight loss, but on life long prevention of comorbidities. To which end various treatment options are available. Weight loss may be part of it, but as little as loosing 10-15% maybe enough towards that particular goal.
They mention some drugs that might have an impact on hunger.
Unfortunately, its a disease that is very hard to treat, and for cases of severe obesity, drastic measures like bariatric surgery may be the only option. An option well worth considering in light of the alternative if nothing else works though.
(My personal opinion is that some drastic diet intervention with focus on undoing the epigenetic damage from early life should be possible, and far preferable to the surgery option if at all effective, but the science is still being worked out on that one)
The WHO and many other doctors have decided that widespread personal failings are beyond their purview to fix, and so redefined the definition. People simply refuse to take personal responsibility, and in the face of this the doctors are trying to help. Make no mistake: this is a personal failing and a societal failing. Just because a large percentage of people choose to fail does not make it any less of a failure.
Or it could be the things in the hundreds of papers from before 2005, when normalizing obesity was not politically expedient. All you have to do is live in any east Asian society for a period of time to understand that portion control and shame are extremely effective in preventing obesity in a population.
First generation Asian immigrants to the west generally do not become obese. They retain the ideas from their home country that being fat is shameful, and they retain their conception of a correct portion size. If they start getting even 3 kilos overweight, they take steps to undo that. The west has decided portions are to be huge, and is in the process now of destroying shame. Time has shown the results.
Unfortunately, doctors cannot do anything about widespread societal shift in attitudes toward health. All they can do is recommend what is most likely to actually help. While the correct answer is "stop eating so much; gather the willpower to be mildly hungry during the day; your entire mental conception of healthy food and portions has been fucked since birth," people won't actually listen to that. Thus, modern medical advice has been forced to basically admit that no one will ever lose weight in aggregate and begin making recommendations with that in mind. That doesn't make the older mindset incorrect, though. If a doctor could mind control you into being optimally healthy, there would be a lot less focus on "it's a disease; it's stress; you can't help it so just try to manage it best you can" and a lot more "stop constantly eating so many calories".
> obesity is a chronic disease starting very early in life, indeed even before conception
I'm very curious about your thoughts on life before conception. Does the unborn infant soul inhere in the egg? And if it does, are you suggesting that some people are conceived with fat souls?
But the basics of it is that paternal health impact sperm selection, and maternal health impacts the hormonal environment shaping genetic expressions of the developing child.
I think this is correct for health concerns. I'm also motivated to enjoy nature by hiking, biking, skiing, etc, and I can't enjoy myself doing those things right now.
WHO will do everything and spread as much lies and stupid study to keep the half adult on hearth which are overweight and obese as captive costumers to bigpharma industry and industrialised food industry. So basically using them as a valid reference is stupid.
So promoting paper which relate to prenatale conditions which would leads to adult obesity is just a smoke screen to hide that the whole modern society is just a big pathology factory at mankind scale.
better make people feel they are cursed by gene than just realise that the real war on drug should be against sugar and vegetable oil than cocaine and majiuana.
The biggest cartel around are industrial food and stores where everybody shop everyday. Not talking about all the shitty food restaurant where you pay high price to destroy yourself. Most modern food are more dangerous for health than cigarettes. But still Smoke screen to keep Smart ass from silicon valley such as this website audience whe believe to be litterate enough into the blind spot of all the comorbidities of modern society. but as far as my comment hurts your feelnig keep minusing it to silent it and punish me to not be blind like you :)
signed: a carnivorous troll who lost 45kg and reversed prediabetic conditions/highblood pressure/sleeping apnea/chronic gout/oversweating by just eating meat. Not talking about my improved libido and my bigger penis (in the way i can now see my feet when i wash) And all this after 40yo. (yes im not a young idealist who believe he knows everything while most of his experience is reading ramdom stuf on internet).
well telling half truth doesnt mean you are honnest...
Some stuff are so big that ignoring them is too difficult to ignore and would question others too easely on your motive.
But Devil hides in details. Read their updated diet recommandation and understand that beside yelling with the herd about obesity epidemia, they are doing everything to promote it with their diet guidelines (based on vegan wokism).
Also it's not like nutrition heterodoxia haven't been warning since 50 years an this major health crisis. After year of promotion of modern diet from WHO and associates.
Now that you cannot go in the street without being surrounded by Obesity everywhere it's hard to play blind.
Also after 2 years of COVID, more and more peoples realised that OBESITY poses a threat by fragilizing society at global scale, as far as Obese peoples are weaker to fight against virus, and vaccines are less efficient on obese peoples. So basically they are weak and difficult to protect from common virus, especially respiratory virus.
Not forgetting about Diabetes type 2 (almost 1/3 of adult in the world has diabetic condition mostly due to overweight and obesity). Which calls about talking also on Diabete type 3 which is commonly named Alzheimer disease. Type 2 Diabetic have 6 times more chance to developp Alzheimer than non diabetic in the 10 to 20 years after start of their conditions.
So with more and more young starting to develop T2D around 20 years old, a good part of them will develop Alzheimer disease around 35-40 years old which will also have an huge societal impact.
And even before that, cognitive performance are deeply tied to calories type of sources. Alzheimer disease just being the final stage of a long degradation process over decades due to abuses of bad calories. So basically cognitive performance are degradated long time before Alzheimer occurance.
everybody jokes about Karen, but nobody look at average karen's bodyshape...This could explain a lot.
This kind of hunger is what I've felt my whole life too, though my weight is still only in the overweight category. I can eat twice, three times what a normal portion is and still feel like I need to eat. I could easily eat multiple large pizzas by myself with no problem at all. There's a scene from The West Wing where the chief of staff describes his alcoholism and how people would ask him how could he drink so much and still want more. His answer is that he doesn't understand how anybody else could not want more. That it's the best thing in the world. And that's exactly how food feels to me.
A year ago I was diagnosed with ADHD (inattentive) and prescribed a very low dose of Vyvanse (amphetamine based). Suddenly it was gone. I'd want to eat at normal times, I'd eat a normal portion but I could easily walk away or I actually just didn't want more. I asked my wife, is this what other people feel like? It really rocked my world a bit. It's one thing to logically know that people experience reality differently, but I've rarely had such a stark example of it.
Yes, thanks I should have been more clear that I knew that going in. It was the contrast that surprised me. I wasn't sure if the original hunger was just my excuse for over eating, or something I was imagining. But after talking with other people who don't take ADHD meds, I found they had the same hunger level as I do on the meds, but naturally.
Chiming in to say I had the exact same realization after starting vyvanse. It’s helped me with my relationship to food, because now I know what it feels like to not clean my plate during every meal.
The most important thing anyone who wants to manage their weight has to realize is why they eat. You feel hunter but why?
Food is complicated and people eat for many reasons. People can eat because they're bored or they're anxious or even just to feel better, even briefly.
A healthy state to get to (which is easier said than done to be sure) is to treat food as fuel not as medicine or even a reward. You put gas in your car when it needs gas. Food should be the sam, ideally.
For me, I had a lot of success with intermittent fasting. This works for me. It may not work for you. But whether or not it works (and for some people it doesn't) one thing you do learn how much of hunger is just habit. Your'e used to eating a certain amount or at certain times. That feeling of feeling full actually isn't normal or even desirable. You'll be surprised at how little you actually need.
A good place to start is to inccrease protein consumption. A lot of high-calorie diets are surprisingly low in protein but really high in carbs (particularly sugar) and fat. It's actually much more difficult to overeat with high-protein. I've known more than a few people with weight issues who avoid eating protein just because of this.
Even small changes add up. Like people who scoop sugar and heavy cream into coffee and can end up consuming 700 calories per coffee multiple times a day. Drink black coffee. If you don't like that you should consider that you don't actually like coffee. You like coffee flavoured sugar and fat.
And if you don't like black unsweetened coffee, forcing yourself to drink it will actually kill your appetite. That's not such a bad thing.
But you need to figure out your relationship with food.
Also to increase fiber consumption. The modern diet is filled with foods that have their fiber removed and used as animal feed. Insoluble fiber fills you up psychically. Soluble fiber takes a long time to digest and helps regulate ones blood sugar. Have to get away from foods with a bad glycemic index as a start.
Do remember that, while it does make coffee insipid, the milk some people add in theirs is a good source of vitamins, calcium and protein.
The fact that it has "calories" shouldn't deter them from using it, especially if, like most people (at least where i live), you aren't overweight, and do not need to reduce your energy intake
I do think coming to terms with hunger is a huge part of weight loss - its can be an absolutely uncomfortable, anxious, or dreadful feeling for many and its a wrecking ball to well laid plans.
Like most primal drives - once its present in my mind its not long before it blossoms into behavior.
When I'm losing weight, I treat hunger like any other non-constructive impulse (e.g. anger, sloth, apathy, negative self talk, etc...):
1) I try to prevent it by not putting myself into situations where my judgement is compromised. With hunger, this most often means never waiting too long to nourish - I've got to feed the body before the mind starts producing urges that aren't consistent with healthy outcomes. Less often, this means not being hung over and heading for a fast food breakfast.
2) I keep busy so there's not much cycle time in my brain for it to take root. Anything will do as long as its immersive. Sipping something with no or few calories throughout is helpful. The devil will find work for idle hands to do, they say.
3) When these don't do the trick, I respond to any emergent internal pleading directly. When I sense the familiar "but I won't be satisfied if I don't do X, and don't I deserve to be satisfied?" I respond as I would with my child or any other 3rd person who's about to abandon the plan - I reaffirm that we're all in this together and being satisfied is definitely the goal and one we're committed to and in this case satisfaction looks like weight loss, not nachos.
I don't win every time, but these generally get me enough wins to tip the war in my favor.
> 1) I try to prevent it by not putting myself into situations where my judgement is compromised. With hunger, this most often means never waiting too long to nourish - I've got to feed the body before the mind starts producing urges that aren't consistent with healthy outcomes. Less often, this means not being hung over and heading for a fast food breakfast.
Yup. In my case, I find that not having foods that "I shouldn't eat" (think sweets, etc) in the house at all is better than having to deal with my urge to eat those.
Also, tied to the previous point: don't go shopping for food when hungry. This helps with not having those foods in the house. "I'll control myself this time" has basically never worked for me.
So if you eat less, your body eventually adjusts so that you're satiated earlier. People say that your "stomach shrinks" when you eat less, but it's really just your appetite that does.
When you eat a meal you should also try eating slower, or having more frequent but smaller portions. Have you ever noticed that you're still hungry after a meal, but after a few minutes it goes away? That's because it takes ~20 minutes for you to feel full after eating.
There's also appetite suppressants (both naturally found in certain foods + prescription drugs), that can work wonders for weight loss.
Also, if you ever try fasting, usually your appetite is strongest for the first 2 days, then falls off. With natural fat stores + an intake of water/electrolytes/potassium/magnesium, you can fast for many days at a time without feeling hungry.
> So if you eat less, your body eventually adjusts so that you're satiated earlier.
I have heard anecdotes from people who say this is true and anecdotes from people who say it is very much not true. It is certainly more comforting to believe that people who've gained weight aren't permanently doomed to hunger, but I'd love if anyone could drop a supporting source.
I am almost permanently hungry. It is extremely rare for me to feel full. My wife, friends, co-workers etc who eat the same meals as me (e.g. at restaurants or Xmas dinners etc) stop with comments like "man I am so full I could not eat another morsel!" yet I sit there with a clean plate thinking I could eat the entire thing again while also wondering what is for dessert. At home I will pretty much always finish off what my family leave on their plate.
I think I am just missing that gene or whatever that tells you you have eaten enough, kinda like how horses can eat themselves to death without a nosebag.
The only thing that has kinda worked for me is MyFitnessPal and eating sugar-free sweets or black coffee to distract my brain.
I don’t feel the need to comment on the GP because you’ve hit my anecdata on the head, I have to eat what other people consider a sickening amount of food in order to feel “full”. Luckily, also with MFP, I’ve done everything from six months of hardcore power lifting with at least 4500 calories a day, to 9 month cuts at a 1650 max. These days, with less time with two kids and a body hitting its mid 30s, I’ve learned my maintenance calorie amounts, combined with maintenance exercise to keep me at a decent lean level, but it means living with a mild perpetual hunger pang. The only way I’ve ever avoided it in the past is with a strict low carb diet, but again with young kids, it’s difficult to get everything perfect.
I have just accepted being hungry all the time. Lost 61 pounds in 6 months, still got 44 to go before reaching my ideal weight. Being hungry all the time became normal after 2 months. It was difficult, still is.
So, my diet plan was - eat less. And of that which I eat, avoid sugar like poison and avoid carbohydrates as much as possible, while still having at least some daily intake split between meals.
And regular blood tests and monitoring by doctors (endocrinologist, GP, cardiologist).
This worked for me. I lost 20 pounds in 30 days, which was my goal. Calories per day 808 average, 645 median. Persistent minor hunger in the afternoon, reduced with lots of carbonated drinks, sugar free jello, and a pickle or two.
I know that weight loss happens differently for different people, so read this or ignore this. Hopefully you haven't heard this exact take before, but with the number of people who dump advice on you when they think you're unhappy with your weight, you probably have at some point.
Keto has consistently been the most effective way for me to lose weight. More important than the actual diet though, was that it became clear to me that there was a difference between, "Hey, you were supposed to eat by now." hungry and "OK, I'm a bit dizzy and forgetful and need to get something in my stomach." Just knowing that there were two completely different hunger signals made losing weight a lot easier. I ignore the one that generally occurs at set times or after a certain period of time since the last meal and make sure I have something on hand to straighten things out if my blood sugar needs some support.
For me, cutting out carbs and maintaining a reasonable calorie deficit works wonders. My mom can't sustain a keto diet very long and does super well counting calories. I've had friends in the past who maintained a healthy weight eating small, carby meals frequently in addition to exercise.
The actual combo of diet and exercise is very dependent on the individual, but I feel that knowing the difference between "hungry" and "need to get calories in to function" is a big advantage, however you get to that point.
a) Thank you for writing this. I'm also quite a bit heavier than whatever some random committee's idea of my "ideal weight" is and it's tough to navigate these types of threads.
b) assuming it was intentional and desired, congratulations on the loss
c) constant hunger has been a theme for me as well. Since getting medication for a mental health condition I've noticed that I'm not really hungry while it has effect but as soon as it wears off I want to eat everything, even if I've eaten a reasonable amount throughout the day. Fighting against constant hunger is _exhausting_ and I think people that say "it's just calories in and out" are just not experiencing it.
>People still tell me I shouldn't be hungry.
>Maybe it's Ok to be a little hungry.
I think you're 100% on to something. We suffer from avoidance of discomfort, as demonstrated by our obesity and opioid epidemics. Facing that discomfort is usually the fastest path to growth in every aspect of life across career, education, diet, love, exercise.
We always try to find routes around discomfort. There're endless dating gurus promising to save you the potentially horrible pain of rejection, cosmetic surgeries, drugs, and avoidance options. None of these shortcuts work, instead resulting in addictions, cowardice, unfulfilled dreams and lives.
There's mounting evidence of the health benefits from calorie restriction, though autophagy and inflammation reduction. We evolved to have maintenance pathways only function in times of caloric deficit, and to eat when food was available. Now food is always available.
I've found that taking coffee while I fast reduces the discomfort. Depending on the mechanism of action, this might decrease the benefits.
All of us have opportunities in our lives to practice equanimity with discomfort. There's no moral failure here. We can all support each other to face our discomfort as we endeavor every day to move a step closer to our goals.
Hey, I agree with you that it's different for everyone. Personally, if I've been eating too much and I try to eat a healthy amount I will always be a bit hungry for at least a few days - maybe longer -until my body adjusts to the new amounts. After a while it gets easier, especially if I'm smart in my food shopping.
Eating certain types of foods (the article calls them hyper-palatable) can also kick off feeling much more hungry. It's sometimes hard for me to get back into a healthy cadence, especially if I have stress in other areas of my life.
I think it's definitely OK to be a little hungry, or even a lot hungry. In fact, when I'm feeling like I have some willpower to spare I go on a fast. I think it really helps me calibrate my internal tolerance for hunger. After a fast, the mild hunger I feel after eating an appropriately sized meal barely even registers as hunger.
I think this is actually the most common experience. Everyone says they want to lose weight, but they just can't bring themselves to eat a sensible amount. Heck, I'm trying it now, writing down everything I eat, weighing myself each day, and it's still going pretty damn slowly.
> So many diets talk about not being hungry while you are on the diet. I've been to dieticians and told them I'm hungry, and they suggest eating more protein or more fiber. That does help, but I still feel hungry.
Have you thought about eating something that just has very few calories, in order to fill you up? Carrots have barely any calories and need a fair bit of chewing. Popcorn without salt/sugar/butter as well. Diet drinks or water.
What's helped me a bit is just looking at all the calorie labels on everything to get a feel for what the cost of each item is, then using that as a kind of "is it worth it" budget. A lot of things go out the door when you do that, but surprisingly some quite nice things stay on the menu.
> Have you thought about eating something that just has very few calories, in order to fill you up? Carrots have barely any calories and need a fair bit of chewing.
In my experience, this works kinda ok, but it doesn't actually feel like being full or sated. It feels like having a full stomach but still being hungry.
Isn't the feeling of having a full stomach what people normally mean by being full? I've never thought you could feel full bit hungry.
The other side of that is you can feel like you need to eat despite not actually feeling hungry. I've lost a bit recently, but not often with that hole in the stomach feeling. I still often get that "I should eat something" feeling while not feeling the physical "belly empty".
(Not GP) Apples make me hungry. No seriously. There's no fruit quite like apples that make my stomach sour for more food. It almost hurts. I can eat 4 apples and I'll be _stuffed_ but not _satiated_.
> Carrots have barely any calories and need a fair bit of chewing.
Not to undermine your point, because it's a good one, but the same guidelines should apply to anything you eat, even carrots. I was losing weight and tracking "calories" very closely. I started eating carrots for exactly the reason you mention and gained two pounds that week. At my next doctor visit, she told me she's never asked this question before, but "are you orange?" I was, from carrots.
Your hunger is partly driven by gut bacteria that want you to feed them. It is a genuine form of mind control. Your current mixture of biota aren't doing you any favors. It would be worthwhile to look into medical treatment that can kill them off and replace with a known good inoculation.
I have found that my hunger is malleable. If I start eating breakfast, I will be hungry in the morning at around the time I started eating breakfast. But, if I stop eating breakfast and only do lunch and dinner, I will eventually lose my hunger for breakfast and have no problem coasting till lunch on nothing but a coffee.
It's really odd how much you (read: I; I obviously can't comment on other people, everybody is different) actually can bend your appetite. In Ramadan I can easily coast until 8-9 PM without any thoughts on being hungry until like an hour before I break my fasts. And I always do OMAD while fasting, so I dont eat breakfast before dawn.
If anything, diets should focus on the psychological factor more than the actual food, but then again, people have different levels of willpower. So telling somebody to stop eating too many calories is not only not helpful, it's also highly condescending.
My personal problem with eating is that I like eating large meals. I can't cut out liquid calories as I dont drink any of my calories. I can't cut out sweets, as I don't eat sweets in any substantial amount (maybe a single gummy bear a week?). I just like eating large meals -- and I would do so several times a day if it wasnt for the adverse effects on my body.
Also, I'm kinda proud of how I was practically bang-on on the calorie quiz in the article, except for the pizza. Apparently large means LARGE in the US lol. I was off by 500 kcal.
I'm pretty sure the article's numbers were UK ones, by the way - I certainly knew the UK Domino's large pizza number from personal experience, and the photos of e.g. peanut butter were ones I recognise from UK supermarkets.
yup, really interesting. It seems that hunger is tightly coupled with expectations.
Something else I have found interesting is that I will occasionally be really hungry, start cooking a meal, spend 30 minutes smelling all the things cooking, and then by the time I'm done cooking I've lost my hunger. It's as if my brain was tricked in to thinking that I ate and I'm satisfied.
That’s now known as intermittent fasting. 16 hour fast followed by a regular lunch and dinner. You can even keep a typical caloric input, but the extended period of not eating consistently is enough to “trick” your body into going after fat stores. Front recent reading it’s equivalent to fasting two days for an entire week, but at least for me skipping breakfast is much easier. I’m not overweight by any measure, but am middle age skinny fat. Waiting until noon for my first calories has worked well to start eliminating fat from undesirable places without impacting other training.
Firstly, congrats on the weight loss. 30 pounds is huge. It sounds like you're on the right track.
My thoughts on hunger: I used to treat hunger as if my body was signalling that it needed food right to survive. Then one day I got sick and couldn't keep food down -- even though I was hungry -- so I stopped eating. To my surprise, my hunger went away. After the sickness had passed, eating anything at all would give me tremendous heartburn, so I continued not eating for about another week. I found it unusual that I could walk the streets in a completely fasted state, my body cannibalising its own muscle and fat reserves, and not feel any hunger at all. To me, it demonstrated that hunger wasn't the 'you require food right now' signal that I thought it was. It must mean something else.
When I began eating again, my hunger returned.
I walked away from that experience with a recalibrated understanding of hunger. It now seems more like a suggestion from the body: 'this is the time that food is usually available, so you should eat if at all possible, because we can't be sure when food will be available again', rather than 'I require food right now to survive'.
I don't live in your body, know how you feel or know what you've tried. But I can share my experience as it seems similar and had an solution that was overlooked by multiple professionals.
While my situation may be different, it may still provide an insight on what kind of things to look at.
Turns out times I felt most hungry were times when my blood sugar was low. If I ever eat something with a high glycemic index without something with a low GI along side it then I am bound to have low blood sugar inside of a couple hours especially if it's for breakfast (even medium sweetness cereals are a no go for that). When I get low blood sugar I feel like eating a horse. Turns out that even a small amount of food will sate me if I am patient enough (difficult when your body feels like it is telling you that you'll die if you don't eat cake or drink juice).
Being autistic doesn't help, I often forget to eat until my blood sugar drops.
> It doesn't even take that much extra food to gain a lot of weight. One extra piece of cake a week [...]
I honestly only say this in case it helps, and I'm firmly on the upper end of 'healthy' UK BMI so not in any health freak position of judgement by a long shot, but I last had a slice of cake months ago, so the casual 'just an extra slice of cake every week' really stands out to me.
(On a complete tangent I don't at all think regular cake eating is incompatible with a healthy diet, but I do think that in 2022 it's highly inversely correlated, and that going against that almost requires baking your own.)
I was raised in a family that used food treats as a reward. It was normal to have ice cream and cookies a few times a week. To be clear, I wasn't obese until after I moved out on my own, but part of the pattern was set.
I was raised in America where we are told that we can 'have it all'. If you don't order the large portion, people wonder what is wrong with you.
I'm not blaming my situation on these factors, but I do think they are important contributors.
1. It's ok to eat some "junk food" as part of your diet. That's not going to automatically kill your diet, if you still control calories. It might not be as satiating as eating other foods though, so it's worth experimenting with this. (personally I would still eat "junk food" on my diet and I enjoyed the extra flexibility).
2. Just cause you're eating junk food, since calories is what ultimately matters, it's still worth not ordering the large. Saying " well it's junk food I'm already lost" and then eating a larger portion is just making the sustain much worse than it needs to be.
3. Similarly, just cause it's a junk food place, doesn't mean there aren't better or worse options. I love McDonald's, and still eat there even when dieting to lose weight. But I'll eat only chicken nuggets, and skip the fries. Not nearly as good or healthy as eating other sources of protein, but definitely better than including an extra 500 calories of non satiating carbs.
I’ve been learning to bake and will make a batch of brownies or cookies at least once a week. It’s just my boyfriend and I that live together so it ends up being the equivalent of 2+ extra pieces of cake a week, probably. Now a dinner without dessert feels lacking.
I’ve been thinking about giving all but one serving away to friends each time I bake, but your comment reminded me that even one serving a week is likely more than I need.
Couldn't agree more with hunger being a sensation rather than a problem in its own right. I'd recommend a two or three day fast to almost anyone at least once in their life, to experience that feeling of "I am hungry, this is unpleasant, but it's not the end of the world".
Then I really tried to eat only salads and generally healthy things while doing a lot of sports.
I lost almost 95kg within less then 2 years and for most off the time, the hunger was gone.
At some point, the hunger came back however, and I'm back up to 160kg.
It is a terrible feeling, and while it's possible to ignore it for a while... At least I cannot for months or even years. I'm not sure why it went a away before, but I wish I knew. Switching over to salad diet and doing sports doesn't seem to work by itself, at least not within a reasonable amount of time
First : a lot of love and empathy to you. I mean it.
Second :
> Then I really tried to eat only salads and generally healthy things while doing a lot of sports.
Did you continue this after your weight loss ? If not, do you think you could (and not should) have done it ?
I’m from a different place : I weight "only" 93kg but I’m currently unable to loose anything. I just manage to keep it this way but watching my family tree in terms of obesity really scares me for what is to come.
For what it’s worth : I think buying a connected scale helped me a lot stopping my weight gain : you weigh yourself every morning and it allows you to clearly see the trend : up -> Pay attention to what you eat, stable -> ok, down -> nice. Generally when the trend goes up, I know I’ll eat less because it will be in my mind just before breakfast.
One suggestion, it's not just how much you eat but what you eat and when.
When dieting people generally want to loose weight from fat and not muscle.
Try to delay or skip breakfast if you can. It gives your body a longer overnight window for blood sugar to fall and start using fat stores to compensate.
Then try some low intensity exercise whilst you're in that pre-breakfast fasted state.
It's very important to keep the intensity low because you can only get so much energy from fat at a given time.
At higher intensities, in the absence of carbs, your body will break down protein i.e. muscle, for energy and you want to try to minimise this.
Give yourself some protein immediately afterwards to compensate for the loss as you can't totally avoid it. In the window just after exercise you should be able to absorb protein more efficiently.
When you want to do high intensity exercise make sure you have enough carbs to power that intensity. In cycling, we have the amusing phrase "avoiding the bonk".
The "bonk" being the point where you've used all your muscle glycogen stores and can't replace them. You generally slow right down, vision gets a bit blury and you get emotional as your body eats itself.
Everyone ends up doing it once but no one wants to do it twice. So eat carbs when you need to.
It is the annoying, aggravating, all consuming hunger that is the cause, not a misunderstanding about how many calories are in what foods.
I would have thought by now science would have a drug to modulate abnormal levels of hunger, but we still don't have one. And we don't know what causes them.
Your body craves carbohydrates, it's like an addiction. Overcoming that addition is all about training your willpower and delayed gratification.
It's the same as smoking. Strong willed people can stop smoking in a heartbeat. Weak minded people cannot, their minds are simply too weak to resist smoking and they need it every 2 hours. Same with eating.
Next time you feel that hunger feeling, out of spite just don't eat and the craving goes away within 1-2 hours and you'll get long term endorphins instead that make you feel good for your mind being stronger than that craving. It's not so hard, you just have to be a bit stronger than that desire.
You can also try fasting. Just don't eat for 24h and you'll feel a lot better than if you ate.
Some people simply cannot delay gratification, they need to be on their phone, watch tv constantly to get their dopamine hit. However, other people are able to delay gratification and get a much larger amount of endorphins and also the better ones.
It should become a habit to receive your dopamine hits from resisting the temptation and being stronger than this degenerate craving for unhealthy, processed food carefully designed to make the population addicted to their produce to buy more and more and eat more, so that they make more money.
There is a way to get out of this easily, don't eat any more sugar and carbohydrates, but plants and meat, which is the keto diet. It's very healthy and natural as well. You'll drop a lot of weight and you can still eat well.
I don't think this willpower explanation quite fits the facts.
I can delay gratification. I can quit coffee cold turkey no problem. I skip breakfast to increase my fasting period. I don't need TV or Internet, I'd rather work on my lifestyle property. I almost never take pain pills, I see myself as stoic, I can do long duration exercise.
I can count calories and force my weight down from 100kg to 74kg by sheer willpower and focus on the issue.
And yet I can't effectively keep the weight off. Because the hunger is 24x7, and my ability to focus on the issue isn't 24x7... I have other things to do in life.
I never have a craving for something sweet. Not since I was like 5 years old. I will eat sweets from time to time, but usually only when pressured socially to do so. Sweets seem repulsive to me, make my tonsils cringe. I haven't binged on sweets ever since that halloween stomach ache in 1976.
Long term endorphins from not eating?! Maybe once, the first time you ever successfully don't eat, but surely it stops being a surprise after the first time.
My experience is that hunger is a lot like the sensation you get when quitting smoking. And eating while hungry is definitely triggering the same stuff than smoking an overdue cigarette. It’s something in the throat that has must have neural connections in the upper back (at least for me!).
What I am trying now is to find hunger not too unpleasant. It feels unpleasant at first, then if you think about it, it’s not painful, it’s just different.
Like smoking, temptation is difficult to resist, so things like working in a place with no access to food is a must have. And filling days with activities which make you think about something else also works. I have really bad sleep sometimes, and when I do, my resistance to temptation is less efficient. So you need to know that kind of stuff about yourself.
Yup, exactly this. I quit smoking multiple times and dieted one time (lost ~20 pounds).
You have to "hack" your brain into enjoying the unpleasant sensation like it is something good. Even if you feel like the world will end, nothing happens.
Doing other activities help indeed, but in order to do this, you sometimes need massive changes in your daily habits/lifestyle. I feel like these changes are the hard to maintain part since you are constantly fighting to do "the right thing" instead of "the pleasurable thing"
Just a note, I've lost significant weight by having just one meal a day and snacking thru the day. The key is to plan your day's food and snacks and not to have extra food ready to eat. Why one meal? I found that every time I sat down to eat it would be a struggle not to over eat. So to reduce the possibility of over eating I only do it once a day.
Counting on willpower to help you lose weight is a lost cause for most people. The key is to put yourself in situations where you can't over eat and/or you have to follow what your past self thought was good for you.
Your weight loss should be gradual but consistent. People want to lose all the weight in a short time but they never reflect that it took years to gain the weight. It should take a while to lose it.
Maybe you should try embracing the hunger. I'm on the opposite side of the spectrum, too skinny. It was very difficult for me to gain muscle mass for the longest time. Eventually I came to enjoy the feeling of working out for the muscle soreness it caused. I still do not enjoy working out after 10 years, but I associate soreness with muscle gain and fitness, and so I enjoy it. If you are able to convince yourself that hunger is actually the feeling of yourself losing weight, it might be easier to embrace. Hunger can be torturous but it isn't dangerous.
So… I was never predisposed to put on weight, but as I got older I got less and less fit than I used to be. My doctor told me my cholesterol and triglycerides were up and suggested that I just stop eating desserts and candy entirely. It seemed impossible when he suggested it, but I’ve been able to stick to it for almost two decades now. When I made the decision that I just wasn’t going to have any more desserts, ever, it was much easier than it seemed it was going to be.
> There is a very good chance that someone is writing a reply with some suggestion as to how I should eat so that I'm not hungry.
I will write about a personal experience that has nothing to do with selecting different foods - intermittent fasting.
First I thought this was a torture people put themselves up to. Then a few friends tried it, said you get used to it, and this made me curious. I used to say black coffee was torture, until I stuck with it for a week and now I hate sugar in it - an eye opener that what I thought was an absolute truth about my preferences could be turned around with so easily.
So I tried intermittent fasting. The first few days sucked, I was uncomfortable and moody in the morning, and starving by the time of lunch. Then I got used to it, didn't feel hungry anymore and stuck with it for a year - lost 10 kgs whike barely* thinking about it.
* I didn't lose weight for the first month, then I realized I was over compensating with big meals and eating more junk (believing the fasting would compensate it - it didn't). After I got back to my regular habits when eating, the diet was a breeze.
I never had weight problems… I naturally started intermittent fasting without realising it was a thing! I never have breakfast (only an espresso), I have lunch around 1pm (usually one dish and no dessert), then dinner around 8pm (again usually just one dish) and that’s it. No snacks or other meals during the day!
> There is a very good chance that someone is writing a reply with some suggestion as to how I should eat so that I'm not hungry. Thank you for the thoughts, but realize that you don't live in my body, you don't know how I feel, you don't know what I've tried.
I completely agree with this. I still do want to chime in a little. Don't feel obligated to try any of this, maybe you have already tried. I have a hunch you've tried it already. Perhaps someone else hasn't and will try upon reading it.
One rather simple change in diet is volume eating. As in, eat food that fills your stomach, but does not contain (many) calories. A prime example is lettuce, broccoli, or practically any vegetable.
When you're hungry try eating a large salad (a clean one that is, no sauces, or oil). When eating dinner add a large portion of broccoli, raw spinach, cauliflower. Try grilling or steaming vegetables.
In normal dishes try and replace as many ingredients with lower calorie alternatives, especially oils when cooking. These calories add up, quickly.
The above doesn't mean you cannot eat heavier sources of protein, fats, and carbs. Please just keep eating those, in balance. In balance meaning there's no need to have more grams of fats per day than a healthy weight in kg (e.g. 80kg -> 80 grams). Same story for proteins, but at a moderate ratio of 1-1.6 grams per kg body weight. Feel free to play with carbs.
> Hunger sounds like a problem to people. Hunger feels like a problem inside the body. People still tell me I shouldn't be hungry. Maybe part of the solution is realizing that eating to satisfaction is ... bad for some people. Maybe it's Ok to be a little hungry.
Strong agree with this. Funnily enough it's often thirst, which feels similar.
> When you're hungry try eating a large salad (a clean one that is, no sauces, or oil).
This is very important. The same goes also for many kinds of sauces added to meats. They are very, very tasty. But aside from their calories, a critical issue I have with them is that they interfere with your sensation of satiety. They just make you want to keep on eating. In my case, this tends to mess with my "hunger" signal: I get the feeling I haven't eaten enough, or I get hungry shortly after the meal. It's usually not actual hunger (I just ate a steak or whatever), but it does make me think of food and give me random cravings.
This basically never happens when I eat my food nature. [0]
I think this mechanism is a big factor in people's objections around "being hungry all the time". And yes, it's very distracting if you need to work, and even more so if you're just hanging out with nothing to do.
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[0] I actually tend to liberally add "dry" condiments (think pepper, oregano, etc). The taste is, of course, orders of magnitudes less "intense", but they don't mess with my feeling full after a regular meal.
It's depends on habit. People are not used to being actually in empty stomach since childhood.
Eating all the time makes our brain want food all the time. I did intermittent fasting and now I'm completely okay not eating during that time. For other times it becomes easy, after not eating like before.
The food doesn't have to be calorie heavy. Replace with meat, nuts, vegetable, fruits (not juice).
I used to think loosing weight was easy, and maybe it was when I was a skinny 20-something. Now at 35+ I'm skipping meals, reducing sweets and alcohol, and doing light exercise every day and it is still hard to just maintain the current weight, let alone drop a few kg. The thing that seems to help is fasting for a few days here and there.
It's an individual struggle for many. Although I'm rather close to the weight I want to be(now) I struggle and have struggled with hunger too. My weight has gone up and down, I too have tried many things. The struggle with hunger is similar regardless of weight, until I get really quite lean.
I have gone from being in perfect control of my weight(I had to make weight for a sport), to being completely out of control(because the stuff that used to work didn't anymore), to being in control again(new stuff worked), to loosing some of the control(because it stopped working, but I found new stuff before it got out of hand again).
Everyone is different, different stuff works for different people and you yourself are different people when your weight changes significantly, as you age, and as your environment and knowledge changes.
Things that effect hunger:
fewer bigger meals (unless it doesn't and you do better with more small meals).
Protein, fiber (generally less hunger for most people), carbs (varies), fats (ditto).
Avoiding trigger foods, (there are some foods and different for everyone, that once you eat a little it causes more hunger and triggers into more eating).
Psychological tricks: (1. realize that a state of being somewhat hungry all the time is the normal state that humans lived with for thousands of years, 2. realize that you can burry yourself with work as a good distraction from hunger and get a lot more done at the same time. 3. Realize that "Hunger is the best spice" - Epictetus 4. Every time you catch yourself thinking about the costs of dieting(hunger), make sure you spend even more time thinking about the benefits. Exercise: figure out what exercises increase and decrease hunger for you, today.
Liquid calories: your body doesn't register them and sometimes registers them negatively, best avoided all together. If you need a treat, prefer the ice cream over the milk shake. Cinnabon's highest calorie item is a drink.
I wish you the best, I hope something I said may help.
> There is a very good chance that someone is writing a reply with some suggestion as to how I should eat so that I'm not hungry.
Actually I was wanted to ask the opposite: what prevents you from letting yourself go hungry a fraction of the day? You might get a stomachache for a bit, I know, but have you tried and seen any consequences beyond that? Note I'm not suggesting "eat absolutely nothing the whole day", but like if you cut your portions into a half or a third of the usual (or eat fiber/etc. so as to at least fill your stomach)... is that going to actually cause you any problems beside a bit of stomach pain? (and might trying a mild pain reliever like acetaminophen potentially help with that until your body gets used to it?)
You could ask the same of someone addicted to smoking or cocaine or whatever. Every fibre of your body is telling you to go eat/smoke/get high etc. It is an all consuming urge that relentlessly interrupts whatever else you are trying to do or think about. You literally cannot stop thinking about your next think you are going to eat.
For me, it is not even physical stomach ache as you suggest, it is the mental aspect of total and complete brain derailment until you go eat something.
I guess I could ask someone to lock me in a room or something. That is not practical though as unlike smoking or drugs you need to eat something to stay alive - you cannot just go 100% cold turkey to try and break the addiction because you need to eat eventually.
> You could ask the same of someone addicted to smoking or cocaine or whatever.
That comparison with addiction to illicit drugs always perplexes me, because those drugs are clinically known to cause physical addiction to that substance, but that's not the case for (most?) food.
I do get the thing about it completely consuming your brain though (and being doubly painful if your stomach's in pain) even if it's a different phenomenon than drug addiction, so I'm not discounting that at all.
It sounds like this is something you've tried in the past. Have you given your body enough time to adjust when you've tried this? From what I know, when people start to fast (note I'm not suggesting you fast—just cut your portions > 50%), it's way more painful in the beginning (both physically and mentally) than it is, say, 2-3 weeks later. If you haven't tried this, do you think you could give yourself a chance and just tolerate it for (say) 3 weeks? I wonder if having a definite end date to look forward to might make it easier for yourself to convince your brain to tolerate some hunger?
Of course this has been tried. I think you are doing people a disservice (and with respect frankly it is quite insulting) by thinking they have not tried to use simple will power. People are on diets for years (potentially their entire adult and lives) - of fucking course people have tried giving their bodies time to adjust.
If it was just a matter of waiting a few weeks then we'd not have an obesity epidemic in the west, nor would the huge huge huge dieting industry exist.
Sorry, I didn't mean this to be insulting. The reason I was suggesting tolerating some of the pain to give your body time to adjust is that I've actually seen some people (obviously not everyone, just some subset) who don't do that, responding that they fear letting themselves feel hunger for a few days is to much of a health risk (because otherwise why would their body feel hunger/pain, etc.). You might believe everyone tries this but it's simply not the case. Of course lots of people really do try everything and still gain weight, but for every stage in the process there are some who don't give it a chance (and not all unreasonably either), and I've seen that for this one in particular, hence why I brought this one up.
There are different levels and kinds of hunger. When I do what you suggest my brain and body don't work very well. After some time, blood sugar gets low and the glycogen stores in the liver are depleted. At this point my body tells me I'm dying. Obviously I've gone through this and lived.
My main point is that people will give mechanical advice for losing weight, but it's very hard to tell someone what feelings they will go through. It's very hard to tell someone else what 'normal' should feel like for them.
I wrote a long comment, but I kept erasing it because I don't really want to come across as trying to give medical advice, or telling you how to feel. I'm just hoping that the medical assessments you're describing (about glycogen, risk of death, etc.) are accurate ones given by your doctor in response to cutting your portions, not your own personal extrapolations or speculations—otherwise you might be letting your fears harm you rather than help you.
If there's one thing I've learnt about hunger it's that not all hunger is real.
You have to think to yourself, am I hungry, or am I bored/idle?
I find keeping yourself busy/no snacking or food at desk etc helps a lot. It may be different for other people but if I get up and walk around a bit/stretch I usually realise I'm not hungry, just for some reason sitting & idling too long make me feel like food.
Another big one is hydration, drinking enough water helps a lot, count coffee, etc as a - for the amount of water you drink. If I'm a little peckish and I realise I haven't had enough water, just drinking half a glass usually staves off the feeling of hunger.
Just a theory. May be you are hungry because the bigger you get the more food is needed to maintain the energy levels at current weight? If you tend to over eat even 50% of the times, you are now getting bigger, and more hungry(to maintain the increasing weight) in a never ending loop?
I don't have a solution for this. But it does look like to reverse this you will have to do the exact opposite. Like under eat a little and exercise enough to burn calories, and go into this loop?
Next time you are hungry: take a hot bath with epson salts, while you read aloud. After your body is warmed up, do 30 minutes yoga. Followed by 10 minute guided meditation. Boho Beutiful has a Youtube channel where you can find Yoga/meditation vides. This routine will improve focus and mental clarity and help with the cravings while also being great for stretch. Can do it in the morning or at night, or even repeat it through the day instead of sitting at the computer.
I think you just need to accept living with hunger. As in be hungry constantly and just learn to live with it. This is the only method by which I've ever successfully lost weight. Go at a large forced deficit. After a week or so you get kind of used to being hungry (your hunger decreases, but it never goes away) and it becomes easier, but it's never totally easy.
Some people are able to avoid hunger by sticking to certain foods, but that's never worked for me.
People like to come up with all kinds of 'tricks' to lose weight without feeling hungry. To me it sounds like trying to gain muscle in the gym without feeling fatigued or sore. Just be hungry and deal with that feeling. It's okay to feel discomfort. I'm hungry right now but I have decided writing a post on HN is more important than eating immediately; fat people should decide that losing weight is also more important.
It makes 100% sense to be hungry while you are on diet. The opposite would be surprising.
But you are even hungry now that you are not on a diet. Do you prefer to be hungry and obese or be hungry and not be obese ? Not saying that it is just something that you can decide like that. But I would understand your point if you were not hungry now, but you say this is not the case.
I have a pet theory that obesity is linear to tastey food. As we have sugar and tastey food readily available it's far easier to continue to consume. I catch myself eating a whole bag of cereal, even though it's not fulfilling, simply because it tastes good and I'm hungry. If instead my only options were healthy foods I'd eat a lot less.
have you gone more than 2 weeks on a restricted diet (<1000 calories/day)?
in my experience, 2 weeks is about the boundary for when the body decides it's going to adapt its hunger point to the new realities. unfortunately, it shifts back much quicker, or at least seems to do so since we're usually not paying as much attention then.
Same. Had to go on keto and it was tough the first couple days but now I struggle to eat enough as crazy as it sounds. I’m just not hungry like I used to be. Consistently losing 2lbs a week. Hope you stick with what works for you!
My friend, I suggest seeing an obesity medicine specialist. There are medications that can help. Insurance more than likely will cover it. Obesity is no joke and leads to (or complicates) a vast array of medical issues.
Oh, I've thought about this a lot too. I know there are cultural and psychological components, and that is my main point. Everyone's experience and expectation are different.
> Please consider why you are choosing to be that guy.
I am trying to be helpful?
I've gone down to ~9% body fat, so I have experience with the "hard last steps." For me, the "first steps" were not easy and much harder than the last steps.
You will not die over night if you restrict calories, if you read the article you would have saw what the author wrote about the Minnesota starvation study. This tells me you have not ever tried to restrict calories and you lack the disciple or mental fortitude to cut out low density, high calorie foods such as the “cake” every week you referenced. Why not try replacing the junk food cake with steamed broccoli and fruit??
I’m sorry but I ballooned to 250 during COVID lockdown and am back to a healthy weight by lifting heavy in the squat rack (starting strength + 5x5) and eating nutritious foods at a deficit.
Until you try this or try and determine you have a medical condition and seek treatment (hyperthyroidism), you get 0 sympathy from me. Consider this some tough love from someone who put in the hard work to turn their life around.
I believe in you, please try change your mentality you are limiting yourself from any progress in weight loss and can only blame yourself.
“Anyway, now I realize that I am hungry. It never goes away unless I eat a significant amount of food. My body told me to eat, so I ate.”
Hunger =/ I NEED to eat to make this feeling of discomfort go away
While correct and useful advice for some people, this advice is useless for many (I suspect most) overweight and obese people.
I'm on the border of overweight/obese. I can lose weight if I focus on losing weight. I've dropped from 100kg to 74kg and back. I've gone back down to 91kg and back. How? Eating less, of course. By counting calories. But here is the problem. Anything below 95kg and my body and mind is hyper annoying, constantly interrupting my thoughts (amygdala?) insisting that I go eat something. It is impossible to program computers when my brain keeps interrupting me. I simply cannot focus on anything other than eating. It's like a very slow motion breath hold... eventually you will come up for air. I find life so miserable at those weights that I eventually learned to accept my fate and I'll die early I'm sure, but at least life will feel tolerable until then.
Why do some people's bodies/minds insist so insistently that they eat more when they clearly are already overweight? That's the question I would love to have answered. People often postulate the answer lies in the kinds of foods you eat, but I've proven that hypothesis wrong (for myself) many times. Avoiding sugars and fried foods and eating oatmeal, fish soup, salads, fruit and veg with lean proteins... does not make any weight difference for me, nor does it make low body weights any more tolerable. Sounds great, I'm sure it's healthy, but I've proven on myself multiple times that this technique does not work. Only counting calories works for weight loss (actually distance running works for me too), and it always leaves me famished and miserable.
Going on a zero-carb diet might work. I've seen success stories. I haven't seriously tried it. When I've tried in the past I was craving bread so massively that I caved in.
By the way, I recently read Slime Mold Time Mold's hilarious diet proposal (https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/04/29/potato-diet-communi...), namely "only eat potatoes, fry them lightly in vegetable oil if you want but prefer no extra fat, use hot sauce if you want but ideally literally just potatoes, supplement B12 and Vitamin A, definitely no dairy". They claim that this diet… just doesn't require willpower? Might be worth a quick go. God knows what nutrients are absent from the diet, but :shrug:
Since the big selling point is that it doesn't take willpower, you'll know nice and quickly if it's failed - it's a very low-commitment diet. (I have never tried it, I lift and I want more protein than the diet can provide.)
this is nutritionally a very bad idea. Potatoes are actually pretty nutritious but they are not a complete food. If you're going down the "bland food diet to kill cravings" then follow one of the nutritionally complete diets like soylent green (or any of the numerous competitors)
I can barely stick to an only-Huel diet (one of the competitors you speak of) for even a few days. It does sound like the potato diet may be uniquely interesting for someone who is desperate enough.
Have you tried protein heavy diet? Just try drinking protein whey protein powder drinks the whole day for a week and see what it does to you.
I dont have a problem with losing weight but It's incredibly difficult and annoying to get lean and burn fat while building muscles. I literally cant force myself to eat more if I try to do at least 200g protein every day. 2xmozarella light (42g protein), 2x66 protein drinks (132) and I am on 174g of protein and I cant force myself to eat anything else.
It completely depends on your lean weight, but 200g of protein is very high for most people who aren't athletes. I'm not in a state to work out whether the normal chorus saying that much protein will damage your kidneys is true or if I've just heard it enough times that it sounds true. Here's a publication that looks informative, but I haven't worked all the way through it and it may or may not support my presumption that 200 g of protein a day is too much for a male of average height who is not in an intense exercise regimen.
Not to defend (or bash) the proposed extreme diet but as far as we know your kidneys will be fine handling pretty much any amount of protein you can consume unless you have kidney disease. Most of it will end up being converted to glucose via gluconeogenesis. Said diet is certainly better for you than 30 years of fast food, as evidenced by the complete lack of protein-caused-disease in medical case studies opposed to... the obesity epidemic?
Don't worry about hypothetical lions around the bend when you're sprinting away from an angry tiger.
Definitely agree. If it helps control your appetite, it's not worse than continuing to carry all that weight. I just thought I'd throw that paper up because it seemed like a different take than I usually see. And just to stick my nose in and mention that 200 g a day is more protein than the vast majority of people need.
My gut would have something to say about all that protein before my kidneys even noticed, honestly.
This seems dangerous unless you are very young and fit and your kidneys can take it. I can see replacing 1 meal a day with say a 200 calorie casein protein drink but that being all you consume seems like a bad idea.
Oh god please don't, it's a terrible idea and recipe for gastric distress.
I've gone too far with protein shakes and felt terrible. I'm a body builder and have used almost all diets as I've bulk and cut. A protein shake only diet is effectively a Protein Sparing Modified Fast (PSMF) - zero carbs, zero fat, but shakes only is just the worst way to do it. Lyle McDonald's "Rapid Fat Loss Diet" is popular PSMF and more sensible. Focus on white fish, lean meats and moderate green vegetable with planned periodic cheat meals. Be in no doubt that it's an extreme crash diet with negative hormonal consequences. If you don't have a compelling reason to crash diet, I wouldn't do it.
The benefits I experienced with a PSMF are similar to keto which is much more sustainable with fat. Once I cut out carbs, my appetite just disappears. Without carbs, I don't get hungry as such, instead I get type of tiredness which indicates I should eat. The desire aspect of eating drops off which prevents overeating.
Doing keto for the first time was brutal for me though. 2-3 weeks of keto-flu - tired and ill feeling. But after adapting it's easy. These days I can snap in and out of keto without noticing any ill effects at all.
After 15+ years of various forms of diet, my main trick for cutting is just to eat less desirable food. Don't buy food I can lose control with. Don't use condiments that make things tasty. That turns out to be easier than portion control with delicious food but it's likely a personal thing.
Counting calories may not be correct and useful advice for most people. It ignores what the calories do in your body. As an absurd example, sand is very calorically dense, and you'll lose a lot of weight and then die if it's all you eat. Telling people they "eat too much" is usually ineffective, it just makes people feel bad that they can't tolerate hunger.
Ketosis will work (it's very low carb, not zero carb). You (as in you personally) won't be able to do it, you likely lack the willpower, and if you're social, it's difficult to do in a social setting, especially without taking a deep dive into the science to help understand the how and the why.
What is this answer? Are you being serious comparing eating actual sand to caloric dense food?
Obviously calories aren't everything in terms of diet and health; vitamins, nutrients and other parts come into play. But when it comes down to actual physical weight, nothing else matters, unless you have a medical problem. Learning how calories work and counting them for some time, so you understand what you are actually eating, is the first step.
Ideally this work would be done with a professional nutritionist, since calorie counting will get you to the weight you want, but it speaks nothing of how healthy your diet is. Sadly this is not something everyone is privileged enough to be able to do.
It is also important to remember that most people who struggle with their weight, and are making an effort, are actually struggling with their relationship with food. This is something that no matter what diet you are on, or how deep your understanding of biology and nutrition is, nothing can replace actually working that deeper issue, which is not trivial and something truly personal.
Saying that people gain weight because they consume more energy than they expend is both obvious and too blunt to be useful for weight loss. The same caloric intake of protein, carbohydrates, fat, fiber, preservates, sand, poison, all act differently in your body. You can lose weight in a caloric surplus diet and gain weight in a caloric deficit diet. One fun paradox is some people who train for marathons gain body fat.
I don't have the answer. Ketosis is an example of a weight loss diet where you don't have to count calories, since the body switches into fat burning / fat cell releasing mode by default. Veganism, which starves the body of fat required for normal operation (hormones, celular function), depletes fat stores to use for these functions, and also causes weight loss without having to count calories.
One of the most important things is probably to focus on eating whole foods over processed foods. I'd also consider that fat is more satiating than carbohydrates and protein. One overfeeding study wasn't successful because they couldn't get the fat-eating group to over eat, their bodies stopped them. I'd also consider the glycemic index of foods, since insulin is the signaler to the endothelium receptor to pull excess glucose from the blood into the cells to store as fat.
It's true that your body doesn't digest all the available calories in food, and the energy extracted from the food is going to vary by food source, along with the digestion profile, or glycemic index.
So, it is true that:
> You can lose weight in a caloric surplus diet
But I don't see how it's possible to:
> gain weight in a caloric deficit diet
There are many sources of digestible and energetic food, even outside the primary 3 macronutrients. There's alcohol, for instances, in addition to the basic fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. Sand I don't understand to be calorically rich at all. Quartz isn't even an organic compound.
Ketosis is not going to mess with a healthy person. Obviously if you have something like kidney problems then it could put a real strain on your kidneys if they are not healthy. If you have preexisting conditions obviously _any_ diet should be carefully monitored by your physician.
> Why do some people's bodies/minds insist so insistently that they eat more when they clearly are already overweight? That's the question I would love to have answered.
Pretty sure it's habit. Eating calorie all the time makes our brain want that food all the time. People are not used to being actually in empty stomach since their childhood. I did intermittent fasting and now I'm completely okay not eating during that time. For other times it becomes easy, after not eating like before.
The food doesn't have to be calorie heavy either. Replace with meat, nuts, vegetable, fruits (not juice).
Yes, 75% of the diet is psychology and not calories-in-calories-out. Obviously CICO is a thing inasmuch as it's a thermodynamic process. Those people who parrot it though aren't really using their brain and are trying to simplify a complex human process down to "eat less". Nutrition in humans is complex and psychology is more important than other factors (assuming you don't really have some limiting health issue). The only way I could lose weight was low carb. It lowered my cravings and I started eating two meals a day (I usually had a sizeable breakfast which I dropped). the first two weeks to a month were rough but after that the amount of will power needed decreased dramatically. I lost 80lbs this way and have kept it off by staying away from refined carbs and eating much much less sugar. Will it work for everyone? Probably not, but even if it works for a sizeable minority it's worth it, and I think it's like hitting a reset button on your relationship with food. You realize you're in control, your physical cravings lessen. I had tried all kinds of diets before, but low carb worked for me.
> Obviously CICO is a thing inasmuch as it's a thermodynamic process. Those people who parrot it though aren't really using their brain and are trying to simplify a complex human process down to "eat less".
Speaking for myself, the reason I often parrot the Cico advice is because it's become "common knowledge" that Cico is wrong, which is ridiculous.
Three years ago I would parrot all the usual anti Cico talking points, about how human fat gain is far more complex, there are good calories vs bad calories, hormone response matters, etc. Then when learning more about this, I eventually understood that really, if I count calories and start eating less, I'd lose weight.
I'm not f that explicitly counting calories is the correct strategy for everyone to create a caloric deficit. Your points are absolutely valid.
But after I lost weight, I've had multiple conversations with people insisting that the only thing that could work is cutting out carbs, or only eating meat, or intermittent fasting, etc. Those are great strategies to try, but it's fundamental to understand that they're only strategies to induce that caloric deficit. Otherwise you are setting up for eventual failure.
It's genetics. I think it's called the set point theory. You're genetically programmed to keep a certain body fat percentage. Anything below (or above) that set point and you're body will regulate your appetite with hormones. You can manipulate this set point with things like diet or exercise, but there is only so much you can do. If you're genetically programmed to keep a body fat percentage of 25% for example you're not gonna have a lot of fun staying below 15%.
I suspect something like that is going on. It is pretty clear to me that there is a strong genetic component. We know the hunger system is very complicated. It's the reason we still don't have a weight loss pill. If you decrease hunger along one channel, the other channels ramp up to compensate.
But there also may be other components that we can do something about. For example, perhaps the bacteria in my gut are causing half of my hunger, insisting that I eat bread (because they want it, not I). And if I starve them out on a zero carb diet, I can break free of the excess hunger.
I don't think it's just genetics, or genetics are rapidly changing in the last 100 years.
Personally I think it's some combination of gut biome, all than not messed up childhood eating habits (I've been taught to eat till stuffed, not so great in combination with my next point) , and way too calorie heavy (processed) food (it's not a challenge to find food where a quarter package is a healthy amount, way more challenging to find food where they food for a full package) not too mention it's made to keep you eating (so more is sold, sigh) . I'm always surprised people claiming not to have cravings whatever (even when the stuff is put in front of them), or be satiated by eating what for me is half a meal (even when I maintained a normal weight) .
Regardless eat less and try harder are hard to keep up, for me personally protein doesn't help to satiate me either. Part of it is that (for me) it's much easier to get into a habit to eat too much than to keep up the habit of eating just enough (I dare say 2+ years of keeping it low is a habit, but now for 3 wars annually 5kg was added: next try keto, hope it works as well as advertised)
You can think of your body as wanting to maintain homeostasis, which is one thing. That just means that if you binge once, you won't feel the need to continue binging at that level. It does not mean that anyone is genetically predetermined to be say 600 lbs.
To use that terminology though, your body could be said to have a "set point" that it aims for, but that "set point" can change. Nobody is destined to be fat, and if you lose weight, your "set point" will adjust.
> To use that terminology though, your body could be said to have a "set point" that it aims for, but that "set point" can change.
Which I acknowledged. You can decrease (or increase) your set point, but there is a limit to that. Thinking that everybody has the potential to be at BMI x simply does not match reality. The vast range of human physiology is stunning. Everybody is different. Some people need to carefully watch every bite they take and they still struggle with overweight, whereas others can eat "what they want" and they are underweight.
Totally neglecting any genetic component here is equally as false as neglecting the impact of factors like diet, exercise and environmental ones.
I see your point that there's no way that weight levels are entirely predetermined by genetics. To your point there are various cultures around the world who suffer more or less from obesity.
I don't understand this genetic determinism of weight to be the claim of Set Point Theory, which to my understanding is involved in energy homeostasis, which you acknowledged. Your body sets your metabolism, and it can tune it up or down. There are homeostatic processes in place such that your body "knows" whether it is underweight or overweight.
I'm not sure if there is a more specific objection you have to set point theory. It certainly has its limitations as to what it can explain, but it seems to be a useful concept or model.
You’re being downvoted, but as a genetically lean guy, I believe you’re right. I’ve never been particularly health conscious, but I’ve always been in “decent” shape - I eat the same things fat people eat, it just doesn’t stick to me for whatever cosmically unfair reason. Fat parents have fat kids - a fat five-year-old isn’t fat because he ate too much ice cream, it’s because he’s genetically predisposed to be.
There do exist some arguments for this, eg overweight parents with overweight kids, but obviously there isn’t some kind of ‘working class gene’ even though children are reasonably likely to have the same social class as their parents, and wealthier countries may have, on average, taller citizens even though height is strongly heritable. But one would certainly still expect genetic variation in eg thyroid function or whatever.
A few simple observations which don’t support the relevance of this genetic determinism argument:
- a few hundred years ago very few people were overweight. But maybe many people lived their lives incredibly hungry the whole time.
- wealthy countries where getting sufficient food is not the issue have variation in population-level statistics for obesity. Even if one claims that these countries are on-average different genetically in some ways (unlikely in the sense that genetic variation between large classes tends to be smaller than the variation within), one would expect America to mostly be a mix of old-world statistics whereas they come out exceptionally instead.
It seems to me that cultural expectations around food and weight will have a big difference and variation between countries, and that the kinds of food available and commonly consumed (eg sugary drinks, unhealthy fast food, etc) may be a big influence.
But none of this would mean that a particular individual is or is not overweight because of genetic factors rather than their environment.
Check out The Shangri-La Diet by Seth Roberts for a way to hack your set point with a daily tablespoon of flavorless cooking oil. I'm sure someone on the web has written up the details if you don't want to read the book.
I've been told that the reason carbs are such a problem is that once metabolized into glucose the body has to produce insulin to balance the blood sugar. Eventually this process makes us hungry especially if we eat too many carbs.
One way to reduce the affect of excess carbs is to follow a low glycemic diet similar to what people with diabetes follow. You might want to look into it.
The basic theory is that humans never evolved to handle the sheer amount (at least, a lot of us can't) of simple carbs and sugars that modern life makes available to us via a “typical” diet. The sheer amount of insulin that is needed to handle that much sugar in the bloodstream is constantly pumping, the body builds up a tolerance to it, which in turn stresses the pancreas. That can lead to pre-diabetes and diabetes, which is one of the most common chronic diseases, at least in the USA. Also leads to weight gain as a primary side effect.
We should learn from ranchers. The fastest way to fatten livestock is to feed them carbs. So you see ranchers feeding cattle sugar bi-products that can't be sold to humans. Carbs will fatten you(us) up.
Try to take a period of reprograming, where you just stick with it. Also consider a detox. Get all the garbage you don't want to eat out of the house, and insist on not buying it. Whenever you get a craving, just go drink water instead.
Lastly, consider carnivore or alternate day fasting. You can get there, if you want to.
> Try to take a period of reprograming, where you just stick with it.
While I'm sure you mean well, but "just try harder for longer" isn't new advice and certainly not good advice. All evidence we have is that you are entirely unlikely to stick it through. Dopamine is the most powerful mechanism in our existence.
BTW, I have (controlled) hypertension, (controlled) high cholesterol, high triglycerides, low HDLs, and a large beer belly gut (just like my dad, but unlike my brother)... but I have hba1c on the low end and high insulin sensitivity. Doctors used to insist I was on the path to diabetes (25 years ago), but now they are mystified. I chalk it up in part to fasting and drinking a lot of coffee, and my revulsion towards sweet tasting food (I love fat, starch and salt... but not sweet).
So I have a lot of doubt about insulin-related explanations given my well controlled blood sugar. But I still think hyper low-carb might work.
As an aside, long-distance running works to a limited extent. I drop weight without trying and my hunger does not increase. Other forms of burning calories, however (e.g. bicycling), have not had the same effect.
I just want to add that a "detox" as a holistic medicine approach is total bullshit. If you're talking about hitting reset on what you have in your house then that's different. That's just getting rid of temptation.
How long do those thoughts last? I used to eat a lot of snacks past dinner, and then tried intermittent fasting - after an (annoying) week without that habit, my body just got used to it and stopped craving for them.
Someone finally wrote this article. So refreshing. It's obvious when you live with a fat person why they have trouble losing weight, even when they're on a diet: they're usually not actually following it. Whether they don't understand portion sizes for calorie math, or look at calories at all, or eat things that they say "do not count", there is almost always a failure to understand what and how much they are eating.
One of my roommates tried everything, including good hard exercise and all sorts of diets. Nothing seemed to be working. It was kind of perplexing me, actually.
Then we started working the same schedule, breakfast together. The whole thing unravelled with a casual comment he made. "Wow, you're really stingy with the sugar in your coffee."
Except I wasn't. I was actually indulging myself, like two tablespoons.
Show me how you make coffee? Ah. Yes. If you put 500 calories of sugar and cream into your coffee multiple times a day, you're not gonna lose weight.
He didn't believe me at first! I had to measure his quantities out and calculate it and show him. Liquids/powders in general seem to trip people up. We are bad at measuring them by sight. Soda, mayonnaise and dips. The oil in a nice salad dressing applied over-liberally can exceed the calories in the burger that goes with it.
Try measuring/weighing these sorts of foods and looking up their caloric content if you haven't before. You may be a shocked as my poor roommate was.
I used to drink my coffee with sugar. Next to the coffee machine at my office there was this big box of sugar sticks, I took one with every cup.
One day, we ran out of sugar sticks, the box was empty. I asked around in the office if anyone knew where we keep the boxes of sugar, everybody answered that they didn't know, because they didn't take sugar in their coffee. If found I was the only one in the entire office drinking coffee with sugar.
That box was 3kg... 3000 grams of sugar, that I consumed in my own in just a matter of a few months...
Kind of shocked by this, I told a colleague about this, and he replied with something that stuck with my till this day: "It's all between your ears, stop taking sugar in your coffee, and after just a week, you won't know better. In fact: you'll come to detest it".
So I did, stopped taking sugar in my coffee cold turkey. And, my colleague was right, after a couple of days, I didn't miss the sugar in my coffee. In fact: I came to appreciate the taste of pure coffee.
A couple weeks later my mother accidentally put sugar in my coffee, as a force of habit, and I actually spat it out. It tasted horrible.
So, If you drink coffee with sugar: just stop doing it and you'll get to enjoy the real taste of coffee, and safe yourself a lot of sugar intake.
Similar story, but with tea. I used to dump sugar into it but eventually I just stopped. Now I have plain black tea every morning. I really can’t stand drinking it with sugar now.
I also ditched soda (except for an occasional mixed drink) and when I want something cold and fizzy I pour a can of seltzer water with lime, orange, cherry, etc. It’s a game changer if you can kick the sugar habits.
I can second this fully. Figured out the same thing when I spent a solid week nazi tracking my eating.
The thing that blew my mind. I always used heavy cream in my coffee. 150cal per 2 tablespoons. I would use like a quarter cup. I switch to milk, just 150cal per cup.
That's why I always drink my coffee black. The amount of calories in sugar and especially "Coffee Mate" is amazing (in a bad way). A serving size of Coffee Mate is actually 1/5 of what I see most people actually put in their coffee. It only looks "low-ish" calories because the serving size is so small.
For folks who don't want to drink their coffee black, erythritol and monkfruit powder make fine zero calorie substitutes. For a lot of things, actually.
Modern zero calorie sweeteners are really impressive. We've come a long way from the days of saccharine.
Thanks! I'll try this when I run out of my current bottle of sucralose (from Capella, which also makes interesting flavor additives). Shortages have made it occasionally hard to restock and I've yet to really try stevia as a sweetener that I personally add (as opposed to something already added) so I'm gonna enjoy trying something new.
Sucralose is such a godsend. Cheap, meters extremely easily with a liquid dropper, mixes incredibly well into most things, has no bad taste (at least to me).
I love cafe latte made with a high quality bean in a portafilter. I use special higher fat oat milk for it, which gives it a nice nutty flavor and still puts a cup at just about 150kcal. I'm fine with that.
The oat milk actually tastes disgusting to me from the fridge, but is super tasty once steamed. The higher fat version (Oatly calls it Barista Edition) is necessary to steam it. Regular oatmilk stays mostly liquid.
If anyone remembers the internet personality Ulillillia, he claimed he lost weight by removing the grease from pizza he ate.
Not exactly the diet plan anyone should really choose, but it shows that even changes that feel like they shouldn't matter actually do, even when eating what most would describe as an unhealthy diet. There are a lot of calories in fats and oils, and apparently removing some of them can have significant effects on weight gain or loss.
Also, check out erythritol as a sugar substitute. I use it for everything and actually prefer it to sugar. It has a nice cooling effect in liquids it's dissolved in that you don't get with sugar.
I love pizza and never get to eat it because of the caloric load, and I really doubt that.
Fats are 9 calories a gram. If you remove the available grease you're getting, what, two grams off per slice, maybe? Doesn't seem like that's really moving the needle.
Though now I want to rigorously test this, so the next time I have pizza I'll weigh the napkin before and after soaking up available grease.
There's a lot more than 2 grams of fat in a slice of pizza. I've tried it before because Ulillillia's pizza degreasing meme has lived rent free in my head for like a decade, and I could easily soak a couple of paper towels in pizza grease from just a slice of pizza.
Apparently, all he ate were pizzas, so it wasn't just one slice he was degreasing, but whole pizzas.
A tablespoon of grease (or fat in general) is about 120 calories. A slice of pizza has anywhere from 1 teaspoon to 1 tablespoon of excess grease per slice (especially pepperoni pizzas).
I highly recommend weighing ingredients when cooking. It's so much easier to be consistent when cooking recipes this way, cup and tablespoon measiremts be damned.
Yes, over one tablespoon is more sugar than an adult should have per day. (Not to mention all the added sugar these days.) Maybe an ice cream on the weekend.
I usually combine with a Almond/Coconut milk and it is fine without sweetener. May take a bit to get used to if you have habits to break.
You're probably getting that and more just from additives to food. I'm of the opinion that adding additional sugar to anything isn't exactly the healthiest unless you're cooking everything from scratch and can control the amount of added sugar in your diet.
Some sites say 15, some say 12.5. Tablespoon quantities are typically rounded up to "heaping" as well, so who cares? It is clear from the ancestor post adults are healthier without all this sugar.
But this is another reason why people don't lose weight / get fit / make progress on so many things. 50g / day is fine according to WHO. If that is correct (for argument's sake), we can't then use their 'better' guideline to mean "no adult should".
The perfect is the enemy of the good. People stop trying when they set unrealistic goals for themselves. We don't all need to be hyperfit. Etc.
I have made a ton of personal progress over the last 1.5-2 years in health and several other areas, by being vigilant in refusing to try to change too fast, even for mundane goals. It is important to find the right pace.
I recently returned home from a trip to the United States where I’d not been since the before times. They put so much sugar in everything and I just couldn’t understand it. I basically felt like I was eating pudding (that is, desert) for every meal. Breakfast was particularly bad (bread has sugar for some reason and I got a sausage that had apparently been soaked in maple syrup) and obviously less sugary things existed (eg sushi didn’t seem to have much). I think I have a sweet tooth but I still found it unpleasant there (and I avoided soda and mostly things that looked obviously sugary). Even if things didn’t have sugar in they would have sweeteners.
> "Wow, you're really stingy with the sugar in your coffee."
> Except I wasn't. I was actually indulging myself, like two tablespoons.
Is that correct? 2tbsp? 30ml? That's beyond indulgent. Sugar in hot drinks is typically measured in teaspoons, where two is a lot. And that's a third as much as yours; his I dread to think.
I don't say it to be condescending, but I am sceptical that sugared coffee drinkers have ever tried half-decent coffee (without instinctively adding/thinking they need to add sugar to it) anyway.
Yes. In my defence it is a large glass :) When I do that, I'm drinking it for the sugar + caffeine boost. Like I would a can of Coca Cola. It's about the same amount of sugar as a standard can. Absolutely not healthy, I know.
Being from the UK I tend to use milk rather than cream in coffee. One pack of raw sugar is 20 calories. One ounce full fat milk the same. Being I only drink a cup or two a day, 40 calories a cup is a reasonable price to pay to avoid artificial sweetener.
What blew my mind is how many calories are in a couple ounces of trail mix. I used to snack on that whenever I’d pass the cupboard. I can pay for a week of coffee by avoiding a few handfuls of trail mix!
> What blew my mind is how many calories are in a couple ounces of trail mix
As a bit of an aside: putting as many calories in as little weight as possible is kind of the point of trail mix, so you're not carrying kilos upon kilos of food when hiking.
I take lactose free milk with my coffee, same amount of sugar technically but apparent sweetness goes up because lactose has broken down and lactose isn’t so sweet on the tongue
In my family we don't drink calories. I do give my son some fortified almond milk and some juice if he squeezes it himself (the hard way, by grinding it against whatever they are called. By hand).
I realized when I was 20 that I could easily drink 15% of my energy needs. Mostly empty calories (soda and the like).
Nothing wrong with diet coke. (Well, I don't like the caffeine so I don't usually drink it, but still.) Gatorade zero after a workout can really hit the spot some days too.
Every time I've successfully lost significant weight, I was drinking mostly water and not diet sodas. I half-way wonder if our bodies release insulin into the bloodstream in part due to the presence of a sweet taste on the tongue -- even if noncaloric. Because anecdotally, I think I get hungrier faster after a Diet Coke.
I'd wager regularly consuming sweetened things also makes it a lot harder to quit sweetened things and get rid of the "sugar craving" reported by many.
Similarly, I've heard of people giving up sugary colas that they used to drink multiple times per day at work and losing scads of weight while making no other changes.
That's almost certainly psychosomatic. The sugars in the two are basically identical, and the creamer presumably has some fat in it, which would actually make it have a lower glycemic index (meaning the crash would be slower with the creamer).
This is mostly what the article calls the "halo effect". People assume that "natural" things are lower calorie or healthier, which is sometimes the case, but fructose is fructose. It doesn't really matter if it's from corn or honey. Honey arguably has another couple marginal benefits, but it's absolutely not useful in losing weight. It's something like 90% sugar by weight.
What I'd actually suspect is something closer to: all diets work. Almost every fad diet works, even when they're completely counter to nutritional science because the simple act of paying attention to what you eat has positive effects.
Or alternatively, they know they are eating too much, but simply don't have the will power to quit. I'm no food expert, but to me it looks like any other addiction. They rely on food emotionally, so when they are ashamed or depressed that they aren't losing weight, they turn to food, which continues the addiction cycle.
We have literally evolved to overeat. And one thing people don't consider is that genetics does play a real role. Just because it's easy for you to not overeat as much doesn't mean it's the same for others. I personally believe the solution will ultimately have to come from science/technology. We need a safe and efficient appetite reducer that people can take regularly.
Right, there already are some on the market like Wegovy (1). But they're expensive AFAICT and seem to have lots of side effects. Hopefully as we get better with synthetic proteins we can create more targeted treatments with less side effects. Also, many types of foods and additives also manipulate appetite. So while the article is true, there's still huge variability in the body's appetite response. Eating "less" can backfire in subconscious ways of re-adding extra calories in other hidden ways.
Long term (centuries), as a species I suspect we may end up doing some light genetic modifications to tune our appetite for norms in modern civilization. Presuming modern western style lifestyles become more sustainable.
We're less than ~100 years into this crazy modern era where routine famines aren't the norm. Even in Western Europe post-WWI and post-WWII there were lots of famines. If you compare Western Europe with the USA-minus-1.5 decades you get similar curves of obesity increase [2]. That makes sense if you consider that post-WWII it took Western Europe about a decade or two to repair basic infrastructure. The whole bit of overall Europe having healthier cuisine than the US isn't true, with regards to obesity at least. It's largely seems to be availability of calories. Eastern Europe for example reflects the fall of the USSR and economic stagnation during 1990's pretty well too [3].
You misunderstood what I said. We evolved in a world where food was scarce, hence why we evolved to overeat once we do find food. In the past 100 years, food has no longer been scarce (for people living in a first world country), hence the obesity.
There's been an upper class for whom food wasn't scarce for thousands of years. Socrates wrote about it, and it was looked down upon as type of gluttony and quite unhealthy. However, even those upper classes, who didn't have any food scarcity did not typically get fat.
Blaming it on food scarcity isn't the whole story. It's not enough that food scarcity stopped. It wasn't carbs either, as there are cultures without carb scarcity that weren't obese(Though we do put corn syrup in everything now).
My guess is that it's a dopamine addiction. We understand that sometimes we must do things we don't like, but the idea of eatings things we don't enjoy scares many people.
It's also how corps package food, and the ones that make their foods the most addicting(the most dopamine -> the most pleasure) survive.
>even those upper classes, who didn't have any food scarcity did not typically get fat. //
Some kings in the past had massive obesity problems, like Henry VIII. Apparently for him it was forced immobility following a hunting accident. Most people in the UK just haven't been able to afford to get obese until the last several decades, and I warrant companies have learnt how to hook us on high-fat and high-sugar foods to make bigger profits.
There's a phenomenon that many island populations have abnormally high levels of morbid obesity. This comes from the huge advantage of having any genetic disposition to better store more fat/energy in a situation where more can not readily be obtained by increased hunting range, etc.
Which? The only case I heard of was the archipelago in thr pacific where the lands and water were so polluted from colonial agriculture that they couldn't eat their ancestral foods, and had to rely heavily on imports of canned and prepared foods.
If you follow the "see also" from that article studies find the genetic factors towards becoming obese in a favorable environment to be different in different ethnic groups, from 6-85%.
So a theory that fits the statistics is that colonialism brought in a favorable diet for weight gain to everywhere(?) but the percentage of people who became obese when subjected to a favorable diet was largely a factor of local genetics, genes most useful in an unfavorable environment did well and put the peoples in those places at the top of the list for obesity rates.
Obesity was literally always a thing, it was just hard for crap covered serfs to get the calories to make it a thing for them. For the other classes though...
Populations with similar wealth and food abundance and genetics (eg developed countries in Europe/ North America with USA being an outlier in wealth) have quite different rates of obesity so I don’t really think this explanation is sufficient.
American society is basically brainwashed as to what is and isn't healthy. It takes actual effort to become well informed.
So many food products are marketed as "Fat Free, Organic, High In Fiber, Heart Healthy" and so on, even though the products are just a bunch of processed low quality crap. Even beer is frequently marketed as "Low Carb". In reality, there is no reason in include any calories for alcohol in any diet where the goal is losing weight.
"Alcohol has no calories". Can't count the number of times I've heard that. Nope. The human body can metabolize ethanol. 7 calories per gram. A few shots of vodka is a light meal with no nutrients.
"I'm big boned" - show them an MRI or cat scan of a morbidly obese person and you see a tiny little skeleton surrounded by what looks like a giant, puffed up cartoon balloon body.
"I have a low metabolism" - obese people actually have a high 'metabolism', because moving all that extra weight takes a lot of energy
"Being overweight is not unhealthy" - weird then that they are having trouble getting pregnant and/or miscarriage regularly, need a machine to breathe at night lest their brain not receive enough oxygen, their knees and hips and eyes are that of someone several decades older, they're likely dependent upon insulin injections to live, and substantially more likely to develop cancer, etc.
Yes, there are a lot of negative attitudes towards obese patients in the medical community. That is partly because obese people think they know better than medical science, and are more interested in screaming about how they're being discriminated against thanks to the patriarchy and unrealistic beauty standards....than actually doing something about their weight...like accepting a referral to a nutritionist and accepting the advice to engage in more activity and weight-bearing exercise.
When someone needs a machine to breathe, artificial joint replacements, hourly/daily insulin, and Star Trek levels of intervention to reproduce, maybe they just need to shut the fuck up and lose weight.
You know what's really infuriating? Maintaining a healthy weight, getting exercise, making an effort to eat a balanced diet that hits lots of nutrients....and seeing these people cost my insurance company several orders of magnitude more money to keep alive than I do.
>You know what's really infuriating? Maintaining a healthy weight, getting exercise, making an effort to eat a balanced diet that hits lots of nutrients....and seeing these people cost my insurance company several orders of magnitude more money to keep alive than I do.
Not to veer too far off topic but this is something that always bugs my mind when people talk about how they don't want "socialized" healthcare because they don't wanna pay for other people to live unhealthy lives. Like dude, healthcare is already socialized, where exactly do you think the money the insurance companies uses to pay for all of your health costs comes from? From....other members paying into it. Which means that they already adjust prices to account for all their unhealthy members. You're already paying for it, might as well cut out the part where the company's incentivized to put turning a profit over providing quality care.
> seeing these people cost my insurance company several orders of magnitude more money to keep alive than I do.
Most healthcare costs come from old age related costs and diseases. Cigarette smokers and obese people are actually cheaper to insure in the long run, because they're much more likely to die before becoming old enough to incur significant old age related healthcare costs.
BEING overweight doesn't, I'll give you that. Failing to take responsibility for it and blaming other people instead of fixing it? We are in moral territory now.
If any whole country gave up candy then they'd save a lot in direct cost and even more in related costs (diabetes, etc.) that they could certainly help feed many many people. Sure, the effect of one person not eating candy is easily lost, but I spend a few pounds a month myself on sweets (ie candy, I'm from the UK). I know that money could likely feed someone in a developing nation for a month.
It's so easy to tell ourselves that each small contribution adds to zero, but as someone noted elsewhere in this thread, calculus should tell us enough to be wary of dismissing little bits!
I don't know who needs to hear this, but being overweight doesn't make someone a bad person. Flying from New York to San Francisco a couple times a year also doesn't make someone a bad person.
There are a lot of nuances to both nutritional understanding, and to the meta of nutritional understanding... how people understand it. A lot of methods, food types, rulesets and whatnot are actually very useful. Often, they have benefits in the meta. Fasting-ish methods help people deal with and experience what hungry is, and relate to the biological fact that they'll be just fine skipping a meal, or ten. Food type-ish diets help avoid getting into overeating modes^. Point systems
That said, totally agree. The basics starts with a basic understanding of "how much." Food is quantified calorically. If you don't have knowledge or intuition about how much is how much, you're not aware of your eating habits.
Mates of mine are vegan, and I think they make the mistake in the other direction with their kid. They're hyper focused on "quality calories" but they underestimate calorie quantity. A kid's meal consisting of cucumber, greens, carrot, and bean noodles is 100 calories, and the kid needs 300. They do put a lot of effort into learning about healthy vegan diets, but the basics... quantity estimation isn't there.
^BTW, I think the whole idea behind courses and other "feasting" traditions might be that it allows us to pig out more effectively. I'm all full on soup, but I could go for some of that potato. Then sweets. Mebe some cheese.
Went from 230 to ~155 without exercise by calorie restriction alone (600-1200cal/day). It IS possible, though likely unhealthy to accomplish without exercise (I never, ask they say, consulted a doctor prior to the self-imposed restriction).
Exercise was uncomfortable until I had lost weight, now I can do 15+ mile hikes with a 60l backpack.
I don't want to discourage anyone from doing exercise at any time in their goal for weight loss, but it is possible to lose weight by calorie restriction alone.
> Exercise was uncomfortable until I had lost weight, now I can do 15+ mile hikes with a 60l backpack.
A simple walk on an incline (5km/hr @ 5% incline) can help you burn 400+kcals/hour. You can probably eat at 1500 kcals and start your day with a walk like that on the treadmill while watching some TV show :).
> .. but it is possible to lose weight by calorie restriction alone.
Indeed it is! :)
If you're obese or severely overweight, it's best to just do a PSMF to lose weight as quickly as possible. Btw, at 230lbs you can easily do strength training which will help you with body recomp (stimulating muscle growth while burning fat).
A good rule of thumb for a PSMF is 9.7x[protein intake]. For example: given 1.6g/kg*104kg = 166g of protein per day we get: 166g * 9.7 kcal/g = 1610 kcal. So your daily calories are at 1610 kcal max, and you need to eat at least 166g of protein (the rest of the calories can be filled with carbs/fat). I suggest min 50g of fat per day for men.
Walking is the most under rated weight loss activity. People don't understand how many calories walking on an incline on a treadmill will shred if you are obese. When I was 220 pounds, walking at 10% incline at 2.6mph was 770 calories an hour. It is actually hard to eat at a calorie surplus when you are burning that many calories a day.
If you want to lose weight you need to do one of the following
Be hungry,
Be in pain from exercise (running),
or sacrifice all your free time to low intensity exercise
I chose option 3 along with weight lifting and I don't regret it.
Walking also has this really cool effect of not increasing ghrelin unlike high intensity cardio
> To lose weight you have to do a lot more exercise than you think consistently. And you have to eat a lot less than you think.
I think this is a misleading cliche. I seem to have a lost a significant amount of weight just from eating less, without exercise. Which makes sense.
It's amazing how many miles you'd have to run to burn the calories you get from a Big Mac. Basically, our food is super dense in calories, and our bodies are extremely efficient machines (meaning, they don't burn as many calories as you'd think when exercising). So, it should be much easier to lose weight by eating less than by exercising more.
> Most people just don't have that kind of willpower.
Most people aren't motivated enough. But "willpower" is a misleading and thus destructive way to describe motivation.
You increase motivation by thinking about whether the positive thing you want is "worth" whatever you're doing to get it. In other words, staying focused on the value. You don't increase motivation by "exerting willpower." That whole concept for motivation is a recipe for failure.
> To lose weight you have to do a lot more exercise than you think consistently. And you have to eat a lot less than you think.
Exercise doesn't help very much, it's really all about diet. Plus if you are exercising a lot, you'll feel hungier and it'll be harder mentally to not eat more to compensate.
Exercise is tricky. If you do no exercise at all, you get really sluggish and tired all the time as your metabolism slows down, which then requires further caloric restriction. This works (especially, it seems, in a time/place that feels like winter, as the cold and darkness coupled with the lethargy seems like it maybe downregulates hunger), but it's really hard because now you have to barely eat at all.
If you exercise a bunch, you burn energy exercising and you also upregulate your metabolism significantly, giving you a higher calorie budget -- but you also really, really heavily upregulate hunger. If you exercise enough that the calories burn "matter", you're likely to feel the need to eat way way way too much.
Doing "just enough" exercise that you don't become sluggish and lethargic is probably the right place to be purely from a weight-loss perspective.
But in my experience, the hard part about losing weight isn't really anything other than "the amount I have to eat to not feel miserable all the time is too much"
Diets do work, in that if you want few enough calories, you will lose weight. They "don't work" because asking someone to spend months or years continually in escalating misery generally eventually results in noncompliance -- and if your body tells you that it wants 2500 calories per day and you go on an 1500 calorie diet to create a 500-calorie actual deficit to lose about 0.8-1.0lb/week, you're go to feel really really hungry 24 hours a day.
Some folks report that if they force themselves to eat less after a month or two, their sense of hunger downregulates and it gets easier. Other folks report that hunger remains a constant companion, never relenting until they broke.
I started intermittent fasting, basically eating nothing between dinner at 8PM and lunch the next day at 1PM. The most striking thing is that I eat much less for lunch than I usually do, I'm full very quickly. And the effect continues throughout the day (smaller dinners, less / no snacking)
Had to give up coffee in the mornings because of the milk I put in it and the fact I can't just have coffee on an empty stomach. I have 3-4 cups of tea and 1.5L of water before lunch. Makes me piss like a race horse and gives me an overall "clean" feeling with no real hunger feelings at all.
It's only been 2-3 weeks so too early to say if the diet's any good, but at least there's no hunger / misery / counting calories. Overall pretty easy.
During lockdown, I ended up adopting roughly that eating schedule unintentionally -- just because my routine didn't have a "breakfast" gap.
It did not work for me at all, I gained SO MUCH weight, because by lunchtime I was ravenous and couldn't stop myself from eating way, way, way more than I would have if I split between breakfast and lunch. I mean, it was also a stressful time, so it's hard to compare, but I put on 20 pounds in a few months, after having been stable weight for 5-6 years.
I started forcing myself to get up earlier and have a breakfast of around 350ish calories (basically a bowl of cereal or oatmeal or something with milk), and that allowed me to immediately stop the weight gain, because I removed probably 750+ calories of "excess" lunch in exchange. Still struggling to lose what I gained, but I've been stable for 18+ months since I made space for breakfast.
It's really interesting how individual some of this stuff ends up seeming. For example, I have learned that I can not be a stable weight (at any weight, it seems) if I drink sugared drinks with food. It seems that if I have a sugary drink with my food, I actually feel the urge to eat more food in addition to the calories in the drink, leading to a massive downward (well, upward in weight) spiral. I almost completely cut out sugary drinks from my life when I figured this out. (I now have maybe two or three sweet drinks per month on average. I haven't lost any weight this way, but I have regained stability).
I am a firm believer that the real solutions to the obesity epidemic are all going to be around helping people control their hunger sensation (be that with dietary changes, coaching and counselling, routine changes, chemistry or other medical intervention). Learning how much you should eat to be the weight you want to be isn't that hard. Spending about a third of your concentration power at all times to avoid the overpowering urge to raid the pantry, on the other hand, is really hard.
I'm glad you found something that works for you. I'm still working on finding it for myself, though I did manage to stop the bleeding at least.
If you're already overweight then exercise is important for reducing insulin resistance. Any resistance keeps ones insulin levels high, which is bad for many reasons, but also increases the feelings of hunger.
I lost 60lbs in about a year almost exclusively based around a large amount of exercise.
My diet was bad and I was eating far above 2000kcal on many days. I just exercised a lot. 1h of fairly intense cardio at least 6 days a week, though I would always round up to the next 10 min mark and do more like 70 or 80 min per day.
Some days I would order pizza or something and some dessert in the evening when I knew this would push me into the 3000kcal range and in return did 2h or 3h exercise routines fairly regularly, often times while eating the pizza.
Depending on your weight, an hour of cardio is only 500 or so calories. Last night I showed my wife a hand with 5 Brazil nuts. That’s equivalent to a one mile run at my weight.
Obviously different things work for different people, but no amount of cardio is going to offset a terrible diet for most people. Caloric deficit and intermittent fasting combined with exercise is the easiest and fastest way (imho) to get your body to start metabolizing fat stores.
> Depending on your weight, an hour of cardio is only 500 or so calories.
That's a massive number of calories! Might not look like much compared to how much is in, say, a bagel, but use a calculator to figure out what your basal metabolic rate is (what your body consumes just you doing nothing, sort of) and you'll find that extra 500 gives you a ton of headroom in whatever your diet is. A week and a half of that would be a solid pound on it's own (yes yes a pound is less calories than 500x10.5, but weight loss is not 1:1 like that for many reasons).
Are you at all worried that your eating habits/patterns haven't changed and you are compensating with lots of exercise? It seems to work great for weight loss but at some point you will plateau and maintanance seems difficult that way?
>Exercise doesn't help very much, it's really all about diet.
For me, exercise leads to me feeling pretty crappy if I eat badly/too much and drink alcohol. So the exercise leads to me not wanting to feel like that, which leads to improvement in diet.
> It's more like they DO NOT want to believe how small portion sizes are required to consistently lose weight.
I found the same when I started counting calories. An extra slice of wholegrain bread is how much?!
Even just a thin spread of butter or margarine on the bread would blow my daily budget by a lot, so I had to find alternatives for that (like mustard).
Given my own preferences for having a "proper meal", I ended up only eating twice a day. I focused on making it high-protein and high-fiber to make me feel full longer, cutting down on regular carbs as needed.
> It's more like they DO NOT want to believe how small portion sizes are required to consistently lose weight.
In the immortal words of Jasper Carrott:
"This hole", points to mouth. "Is bigger than that hole", points to bottom.
> they DO NOT want to believe how small portion sizes are required to consistently lose weight
My problem isn't meals and their potions, it is absent-minded snacking between. I'm finding it a lot harder to drop the few Kg I put on over 2019/2022/2021 (largely in 2020, when I like many had a bit of a mentally unstable few months and comfort eat a lot) than I found it to drop a few tens of Kg in 2015/2016.
This seems like a good primer on how to look at food differently. The problem with diets is that people relapse due to the fact that dieting is done through force of will and willpower is limited. For long lasting change, you need to reshape your relationship with food and be content with what and how you eat. Understanding some of the things in this article can be a good place to start.
Ego depletion (limited willpower) turns out not to be true [0]. It could not be replicated and is no longer considered how willpower works.
> Results from the current multilab registered replication of the ego-depletion effect provide evidence that, if there is any effect, it is close to zero. [1]
> Taken all together, experiments conducted at 24 different labs showed no signs whatsoever of Baumeister and Tice’s original effect. [2]
It's a really interesting result because the concept of limited willpower - over extended periods of time (years) - fits my lived experience very well.
Modern food is kinda weird in how high-energy and very energy-dense food is the default and cheap, and it somehow is more expensive to buy less calories.
A reservoir of easy to store for long periods of time food source is a national security issue for every state, so it tends to be subsidized everywhere.
Stable foods can be shipped and stored more cheaply.
This coupled with the native desire for salty/sweet/fat puts the modern human at a terrible disadvantage in our current environment.
its exhausting to do that. Im switching my diet up a little to bit to reduce cholesterol and some liver enzyme thing lately and Im starting to get tired of thinking so much before every meal and shopping trip. wish it was easier to not fall in to unhealthy traps. so many labels, and so much meal planning.
I've hit this before as well, and have come to the conclusion that, at least for me, detailed meal planning is not sustainable in the long run.
This is one reason why I think that dieting advice that is simple and straightforward has the most success. Some examples:
1. Cut out all sugar-sweetened beverages. This is a pretty easy rule to follow, and even if you find yourself missing a soda or something, my recommendation is to buy something like unsweetened iced tea and then add a couple sugar cubes - you'll be likely to add much less sugar than if you buy sweetened tea.
2. Cut out any refined carbohydrates. This was certainly harder for me, but since the rule is so simple and easy to follow, whenever I got hungry for carbs I had to make due with fruits or vegetables, so I ended up eating a lot fewer calories in any case, got more of other nutrients, and eventually just got "bored" with trying to find a snack and stopped eating until my next mealtime.
carbs is actually where im struggling the most. I defaulted to just making sides of white rice with everything for so long. I at least switched to brown rice, quinoa and couscous to make it a little easier but learning new sides to go with proteins is tedious. I struggle with feeling full too.
This is just what worked for me, but if you're struggling with feeling full, don't cut out starchy vegetables: potatoes, sweet potatoes, and legumes (things like lentils, black or pinto beans, butter beans, peas, etc.) satisfied my carb cravings, and I found I was still eating fewer calories because those carbs are much less "snackable", and they have a ton more fiber. That is, it's trivially easy to snack on chips, pretzels, cereal or bread, but I'm not just going to grab a sweet potato and start chomping.
If you have had the luxury to learn to cook with simple ingredients, you'd not need to read labels.
Here's a shopping list for three meals, see if you can guess what they are?
1 kg apples,
1 kg other fruit in season,
White unsweetened yogurt,
Unsweetened granola,
Garlic,
1 can diced tomato (no salt, no sweetener, just tomatoes),
1 onion,
Olive oil,
150 gr dry pasta (bonus points for "integral pasta" -- don't know the translation, "pasta integrale" in Italian),
Baby spinach leaves,
Cherry tomatoes,
Risotto rice,
White wine,
Broth in powder,
Butter
The last step of cooking risotto is to add an acorn sized bit of butter. It helps the gloss and texture. Good (for you) food needs to be good for your eyes and tongue too!
For protein, tomorrow buy a can of chickpeas, one of tomatoes, some spices and some basmati and make "chana masala".
What worked for me was starting simply. I started with one meal that I got really good at making, and then introduced another (and when I make it I make plenty extra to cover later laziness). I know roughly how many calories it is, so I barely have to think about anymore.
>I know roughly how many calories it is, so I barely have to think about anymore.
This is key for me. My wife loves variety and so she struggles with counting calories.
I prefer simple and known-to-be-delicious, and so I know about how much each of my meals is going to affect me. I came to hate calorie counting pretty quickly, and with that I came to hate eating out, because it's the hardest to count. And I'm not yet convinced that I've ever actually counted enough calories for any meal when eating out. There's so much self-deception involved, both my own and the people who are supposedly reporting the calories, both officially and unofficially.
>My wife loves variety and so she struggles with counting calories. //
I can't be bothered with all that, intermediate fasting (ie having a limited window of time in which you allow yourself to eat) seems to be a great workaround that leads to calorie restriction with less of the fuss.
IME, the trick to healthy long-term eating is to mix and match from a common palette of healthy foods/meals you enjoy.
After a few months, you’ll know the macros in everything without having to check labels, and the shopping/meal prep becomes easy because you know the right ratios of the things you buy and you’ve cooked them many times before. If a reframing might help, consider it an investment in yourself that pays off for life.
Yeah for this reason a mix of cardio and weight training is essential. Or at least time your runs. When I eat poorly I can still do my usual 5K with no trouble, and I often don’t even feel any slower, but the timer doesn’t lie…
I noticed that when Im not working out I have poor food choices and when I eat like crap I avoid training or it’s a lot more unpleasant than it should be.
Also training results in physiological changes that help losing fat and be generally healthy. Just make sure you’re not losing too much muscle size with the fat.
This article is quite accurate I think. I use MyFitnessPal on and off. It is easy - you just scan the barcode and it tots up the calories.
MFP is excellent at making you face up to what you are actually eating. At first it was a huge eye-opener for how many calories were in everyday things - like a slice of bread is 80-120 calories etc. The article mentions fruit juice too - that was a big one for me as well. I figured that since I was not eating loads of pizzas and burgers etc that my calorie intake was probably "normal" but boy was I wrong and MyFitnessPal really helped understand that. Likewise it was good for a reality check that the 20 minute run actually was only like 150-200 calories burnt, not 750.
That was good, but where it really helped though was in measuring stuff out, and to realise what a serving really was. The biggest culprit for me was breakfast cereals - 30 to 45g of cereal is not a bowl full - it is a fairly pathetic covering at the bottom of your bowl. For years I was probably having like 4 or 5 (... or more!) servings of cereal (i.e. a full bowl, like it looks on the packet or on TV adverts!) a day without realising.
I'd recommend people give it a try, if only for a couple of weeks to get a grip on what the calorific levels of some of your staples are, and what a serving actually looks like. It is eye opening.
Just want to note here that I recently switched off MFP for Cronometer because MFP had a literal week long outage and is architected in such a way that it must phone home in order to save anything like a recipe you make. So that was a whole week where I couldn't save a new recipe.
I've found Cronometer to be a lot faster in every way, and actually has an up to date database and when you scan something it doesn't have, it lets you scan the label and updates the database. Highly recommend.
Only problem is what's endemic to apps in general right now. They want a subscription instead of buying the app outright. That's gonna be a no from me, dawg.
Cronometer I found was missing lots and lots of food items and restaurants though, and that makes it harder to report.
I unfortunately travel a fair amount and this means I can't just make restaurants a "cheat meal" some days. I try going to the grocery store while traveling, but it takes so much more time when I'm taking taxis and trying to cook in a hotel room.
HOWEVER
This is a lot of whining and excuse my brain is probably using to let me eat more when I travel.
Yeah, it doesn't have much in the way of restaurants. Then again, unless the restaurant itself publishes the figure, I don't trust it.
I haven't had too much trouble with missing food items since they are easy to add, I just wish they let you use the label scanner in the normal "make a custom copy" procedure.
Burgers get a bad rap, it was actually using MyFitnessPal that showed this to me.
There's no law says you have to get a fries and corn syrup drink with the burger, a burger and mineral water is a great meal, macros line up and I feel full for hours.
We joke at home that when we're on "fatness pal" then we can only eat dust and sand, which is what I assume you are referring to since everything has a barcode.
If you mean stay away from processed foods, then yeah readymeals and the like are best avoided. But pretty much everything has a barcode - raw chicken breast, raw fruit and veg, milk ... you name it - hell even salt and water have barcodes.
I am bothered by the author’s written use of ‘quote-unquote’ in place of actual quotes. This is a spoken form of scare quotes and takes ‘write like you talk’ too far for me.
it has a different meaning because it puts more emphasis on the author distancing themselves from what is being said. Just putting things in quotes in text may just be a value neutral quote. Writing it out is a rhetorical device because it's difficult to quote sarcastically in written form. It's basically the textual version of doing quotes with your fingers in the air. From the text:
Most of these quote-unquote marketed protein products are nothing more than glorified chocolate bars.
The “Health Halo” effect of food is when consumers believe foods that are advertised as healthier have fewer calories
That is called ‘scare quotes’, and the context is almost always sufficient to distinguish them from quotation marks, certainly in this piece they would suffice.
Gonna throw out an plug for Nutritionix and their calorie tracker iOS app for anyone inspired to go that route by the article - I tried a lot of options out back when I used to do serious powerlifting and it’s by far the best UX I found for recording macros. They’ve got a barcode scanner, a great DB of common fast food options, and you can even freetext stuff like “200 grams of chicken thigh” and record stuff that way if you use a food scale.
Eyeballing calories becomes way easier after a few months of practice and pays off for life. Was able to get all the examples listed spot on except the popcorn, which I had no frame of reference for.
I'm sick of the "it's just calories in, calories out, idiot!" bullshit. It's at least partially wrong an woefully incomplete. Telling a fat person to eat less is like telling a depressed person to get out more. I know because I've been at the receiving end of both.
For one thing, it ignores that the calorie consumer has feelings. First, running a calorie deficit makes you physiologically hungry. You can fight the hunger, but no willpower or strength of character is going to make it disappear. Going on a diet is a constant fight against your body. And that doesn't even get into the psychological reasons people eat. Articles like this one make no effort to account for this. They don't explore the negative effects. Being hungry all the time is really fucking distracting. And they certainly don't try to weigh those downsides against the potential benefits.
And those benefits to dieting are very much "potential". Study after study has shown that diets don't work in the long term; people usually gain the weight back. The article smarmily dismisses metabolism as a factor. But losing weight slows your metabolism down. You end up needing to cut you intake even further than someone who's been steady at the same weight [1].
I've been fat and I've lost weight. My maximum weight exceeded my minimum (post-max) weight by about 100 pounds. Right now I'm somewhere in the middle. To the extend that I've had sustained weight loss, it has been by making gradual, sustainable changes to my lifestyle. And these changes haven't used weight as a target. Getting into running, replacing some foods with other foods, and working on my mental health are all fairly sustainable in their own right. They make me feel better and healthier. The correlated weight loss is incidental. When I did use weight as a target, I did more harm than good. Exercising and dieting to the point of passing out for a whole day after a long run did make me lose weight, but it didn't make me healthier. In fact, my running got slower.
Leave fat people the fuck alone about their diets. The panopticon of shame and ridicule doesn't help.
"And those benefits to dieting are very much "potential". Study after study has shown that diets don't work in the long term; people usually gain the weight back."
I'm sorry, but this is misleading BS. Studies have found that diets don't work for most people cause most people just suck at sticking to diets, not because CICO is somehow fundamentally flawed. To imply the second is dishonest.
It would be like saying that suggesting people to work out to get in shape is useless cause studies have found that most people don't stick to exercise plans.
"Leave fat people the fuck alone about their diets."
Unfortunately we can't. Cause obesity is a real public health crisis and diets is why. That's not to say that we should encourage fat shaming. But we need to be honest and not coddle people
The fact that people don't stick to diets is why they don't work. This is what I mean about discounting the human element. A solution requiring every individual to do something incredibly difficult is no solution at all. It's like if we tried to help everyone having a hard time with technology to RTFM and ridiculed those who didn't. It's not what you do when you're actually trying to solve the problem.
You said it yourself in your original comment: small and sustainable changes are the way to go. I agree that much of the cultural discourse around dieting is harmful. The promise of every diet commercial is that if you eat in this special way for three months you'll be the picture of health and then there is no need to worry about what you put into your body. This is not only a bad plan for being healthy, but it also heaps additional shame on a person when they are unsurprisingly unable to maintain the significant lifestyle changes required by the diet.
The bottom line for me is that both 1) CICO is the dominant consideration in weight loss and 2) small and sustainable changes made over time are far healthier in the long run than an instantaneous and significant change. Of course, point (2) applies much more broadly to any health or lifestyle goal.
The title statement, while true, is not really useful, because it fails to tackle the really interesting question, which is why we are eating more calories than our bodies expend.
Particularly interesting is why this started happening around 1980, and not before. Food was calorically dense enough and available before that point.
I recommend checking out the writeup by Slime Mold Time Mold on this subject - see it here: http://achemicalhunger.com/
> You're Not Losing Fat Because You're Eating Too Damn Much (Even When You Don't Think You Are)
I read through the whole article, it is true, but the headline is wrong, you are not losing weight because you feel miserable. If it was just an issue of calorie restriction with no other effects, yes, this would be the reason.
I've had this unbearable urge to binge eat and it started a week ago. I'm sure it's something psychological that is causing this but I can't isolate the root of the problem. I have tried to fight it by taking walks, being social but it's failure every time. I always cave in and eat all the fast food, ice cream, cookies I can get my hands on but literally nothing seems to get rid of the urge to binge. How can a person get rid of the binge eating virus?
In my experience, you could be craving something you are not getting in you diet. Try multivitamins and a gallon of water a day. If that doesn't cut it in a coue weeks, get a comprehensive blood panel.
one of my favourite weight-loss tips is from youtube cyclist phil gaimon: instead of trying to eat less, set a goal for eating more of something with a very low calorie density. he was eating a whole 1lb pack of spinach every day. that's a lot of spinach, it'll take a lot of snacking to get through to the point where it's actually difficult to eat that much. but it's only 100 calories.
It's pretty unpleasant for me. I have a metabolic disorder for which even a mild caloric deficit of ten percent can send me to the ER, during which the recommended treatment, besides the painkillers, is roughly a pound of sucrose delivered via IV. That's not fluid, that's a pound of sugar they want in me. And they want me on a high-carbohydrate diet, to boot.
Weight loss for me entails either being in pain or taking the meds to mask it and being unable to function. Previously, I could just diet, cut down, whatever. Now, cutting down for more than about a couple days starts it off. Even missing a meal can set it off (as well as infection, lost sleep, a wide array of medications). I have considered a celiac plexus block over Schedule II meds, then I could say a big fuck you to the pain because the wires have been cut.
I got diagnosed with type 2 diabetes two years ago. I switched to a super low carb diet (30g per day). Contrast that with a 16oz Mt Dew, which has 77g. Or a bowl of cereal at 36g plus whatever is in the milk.
I ate all kinds of protiens and fats - cheese, meats, fish, veggies just to quell the hunger. I lost about 58 pounds in a year. Most of what I lost was fat. Two years later, I'm still doing a very low carb, but keep it under 50g per day. My weight has stayed ±3 pounds. I'm pretty convinced it's the super-high carb load everyone is eating three times per day.
The ultimate cause is consuming too much, the proximate causes are various elements of modern culture (i.e. Bigger serving sizes, more readily available snacks, alcohol consumption, etc).
There are a few other variables that could play a role.
(1) Share of physical labor jobs vs office jobs
(2) Increased hormone and pesticide use in agriculture (dropping worldwide sperm counts is an underreported story, might or might not be related)
(2A) Less nutritional content in food - has gone down 60% since 1940s according to some studies; likely from over-farming. Need to eat more to get the same nutrients.
(3) Food deserts (related to (1)) - where healthy food options are rare
(4) Less general socialization (internet makes it less necessary to go outside, etc)
I’m realizing I’m slowly gaining weight year over year.
I have more abundant food now. Now that we have kids. We have regular 3x meals per day. Also I feel more hungry nowadays. Not sure why. I feel like I stress eat.
With kids and moving to Suburbs, I’m not hitting the gym 3x per week like I used to.
I could use some tips on how new parents stay in shape.
Just chiming in that I am in this boat too. I find it easy to fast at the office, provided there's not some ridiculous snack brought in by coworkers. However, at home the sheer amount of food I see while I'm preparing it for the kids, who constantly want snacks, makes it difficult for me to resist eating. I've had a bit of success by "skipping" some meals and only eating the kids' leftovers.
Honestly, get a trainer / coach. Ideally one who will help you both on the training and nutrition side. You can even get one of those online ones (it's what I did). When you have children, you don't have the time to think about this stuff yourself, so outsourcing it to a trainer makes a lot of sense.
I've lost a lot of weight before and obese -> overweight was relatively straightforward but I find getting from overweight to 'normal' weight a challenge. I've done it before with pretty austere fasting (many multi-day water fasts) but to loose some pandemic pounds I'm trying a more conventional wegightlifting+cardio+deficit to try and preserve more muscle. Even with a fitbit reporting I'm burning 3200+ calories a day and running a supposed 1-2lb/week deficit and I'm still pretty much plateauing. I'm at like 40%p/35%c/25f% macro split - higher protein is at least good for satiety.
This article tries to dismiss metabolism but I think it's actually a hugely important factor. Your body is a magical machine that has a huge capability to adjust energy spend so you need to extract the most fat-burn out of each % deficit as possible. So optimally have to start at a 'bulking' surplus for a few weeks and then slowly nudge the nose down until you plateau and only then nudge further. If you just immediately go to -2lb a week or whatever you lose initially but after a few weeks invariably adapt and then you're kinda screwed, going further starts to get pretty bleak.
A couple things I wonder about, and maybe someone has research on them(?)
Are many of us hungry because the food we are eating does not have the same vitamins / other nutrients that we used to get from more whole foods?
From craving a sunkist / orange drink and consuming it - only to want more later - is this craving the nutrients in oranges / fruit and we eat something to satisfy the immediate hunger then long for more cuz it didn't absorb from what we ate?
From processed shelf stable food, to industrial farmed foods that may sometime have less nutrients that a properly feed vegetable - we must be getting less vitamins and minerals even if we are getting some tomatoes slices and such in the meals right?
I also have though for a long time that if there was less stigma for mood altering things.. some people I have known would eat ice cream regularly in a way that I think if they had the ability to smoke a joint they would not.. or find some other solace from counseling to spiritual stuff or exercise or mushrooms or whatever... I think we as a society do not have enough socially acceptable / sanctioned things to do to release stress / feel better doing things.. and what is it in ice cream that makes you feel different?
chocolate too - is it dl-phenalmymine or something like that, it gives you a feeling everything is better / love feels a little? - you can buy that as a pill instead of consuming the calories for the feels - but it's not a popular thing.
For some it's socially acceptable to reach for a beer or benzos, but I think we need better options, both short term feels and longer terms heals.
random thoughts I hope someone else has found more info on.
Oh - and cooking / preparation methods - what has been researched about this and nutrients we are not getting because of them?
From my very limited understanding - cooking some foods a bit helps to unlock calories easier and better - but certainly there must be a sweet spot where things are better and a point where more is lost than gained (?)
Look cooking a food at 350 for 10 minutes is good, but cooking in 500 degree hot oil for 20 minutes burns away stuff?
I was thinking about this when I learned that some folks have an allergy to fresh shrimp being cooked on a stove because proteins are being released into the air... well if you overcook them, or if you are taking cooked then re-burning them them again before eating, is there a substantial amount of protein or/and other things being lost?
Like a 1/3 burger of high fat is cooked down to less than a quarter pound patty, are we still calculating the calories and protein of a 1/3 pound?
I wonder the same with squashes and other vegetables when cooked a long time or and microwaved / re-cooked as well.
One thing I would add is about the importance for avoiding processed food when you can and why.
Not all calories are equal and basically it's about if your body can absorb them or not.
To borrow an example from Gerald Yeo[1] if you eat 400g of sweetcorn a large amount of it will turn up undigested in your poo. i.e. It's just passing through you and not making you fat.
If you process that corn though, by grinding it up and making something like bread out of it, it will become much more easily absorbed by the gut.
The calorie count will be the same on each packet but one case is clearly being used by the body and the other is not.
Also, processing foods thends to strips them of flavour, so to compensate manufacturers will often compensate for that by adding in more salt, sugar and fat to get closer to that "bliss" point mentioned in the article.
For the same absorption reason I personally try to avoid liquid calories where ever possible. e.g. no milk in coffee, keep the beers and wine to a minimum, etc.
Why the hell does everyone bring up calories for fat loss? I lost 45 pounds by not counting my calories at all (only in the beginning, when I didn't know any better). You lose fat by reducing insulin resistance, not by food intake. I didn't even exercise, I basically sat all day and those pounds flew off. I did intermittent fasting, learned to cook, and slowly started replacing my diet with healthier foods. I'll be honest, I lost a good portion by going keto and avoiding the majority of carbs but I quit because there's no way I could keep a diet like that long-term. Now I eat complex carbs and indulge in junk food once in awhile, with my diet being mostly whole foods. I keep a steady 150ish at 5'8.
The more important factor is ALWAYS the psychological factor, which NEVER gets brought up in weight loss advice. If someone is obese or nearing obesity, they have a food addiction. They keep eating because they're filling a void in themselves. I'll be honest, I had to deal with it and if you're overweight and trying to lose weight you'll have to deal with it too. When I was overweight, I was also depressed and in an abusive environment so I ate the pain away. It's related to emotional nourishment, which unfortunately not many people get enough of these days and it fuels food addiction. It fuels any addiction, really. Most likely there's no one around the obese person who understands them and has any type of real, deep connection with them as a person so they eat to keep that void away. At least that's what it was for me, maybe it's different for someone else. That's the real reason someone can't lose weight, there's an underlying psychological problem fueling it. No mentally healthy person is overweight. No amount of "calorie counting" will solve the empty void someone who's obese is trying to fill.
I've struggled with weight my whole life. The only thing I've figured out for sure is that cutting out nearly all added sugar is essential to keeping my calories where they should be. Firstly because of the calories in the sugar. But more importantly because I believe sugar makes me hungry and causes me to overeat other foods.
You're not wrong because it's about calorie deficit of which exercise can help you achieve. Also since the way fat gets "burned" for weight loss is by exhaling carbon atoms, aerobic exercise can assist with this process.
Yes but then you have to keep exercising for the rest of your life. When something happens (e.g. you are busy in job or you get injured) you no longer can exercise as much as you need so you start gaining weight.
Fundamentally using exercise to lose weight is long-term unachievable because it is unpredictable. Losing weight via diet is much simpler you just eat less, there isn't anything that would objectively stop you from following diet, where as simple incident or scheduling issue can prevent you from exercise. Exercise is fundamentally wrong tool for managing weight.
Exercise is for building muscles, diet is for managing weight.
I can’t agree with this enough. From 2000-2012, I was a part time fitness instructor and I did heavy cardio at least 10 hours a week without fail. I also trained for half marathons later on. I was easily burning 3000-5000 calories a week and I could eat anything and not gain weight.
As soon as I stopped, my weight ballooned. Even when I started eating less, I still can’t get my eating habits in sync with my reduced (3-5 hours a week) exercise schedule. I’ve been consistency about 15-20 pounds over my personal ideal weight.
Besides, my body can’t handle the type and frequency of exercise that it could in my mid 20s to mid 30s.
I think the confusion here is understanding that my point was exercise is to assist with weight loss and not be the primary thing to induce weight loss. If you use it as the primary tool for your weight loss you will fall into the trap that you did anything that disrupts your exercise causes your weight loss to reverse.
If instead you used diet as the primary tool and exercise has the supplement when the supplement falls away it's easier to adjust the diet to compensate. For example a moderate exercise of 30 minutes or so a day can burn an additional 200 calories a day that's 10% of a 2000 calorie diet. If you're in a situation where you cannot exercise cutting out an additional 200 calories is a relatively small amount of food.
Humans are very good at throwing everything into one bag and expecting it to remain forever. Your example of your high amount of exercise to induce weight loss is an example of this. It works but it's also very short-term because it cannot be maintained. I almost like him this to exotic dancers as a profession. It is a good way for a relatively low skill person to achieve a high amount of money in the short term. For example they could go to college and pay for it in cash. But often times the returns are so great it's a difficult to see that this cannot last forever. But as with the body cannot exercise at a high level for ever exotic dancers cannot remain profitable forever. This is why these are tools to allow a short-term process to evolve into a long-term sustainable game. Earn a large amounts of cash when you're young and viable to invest in a education with a future payoff or invest in another long-term payoff. Exercise to supplement your dieting, but the main goal should be evolving your diet to adjust to your caloric needs because that is the long-term.
I don’t think you realise how calories can sip in unnoticed and calorie burning as well.
So, I’m fat. All my life I’ve been yoyo-ing in terms of weight. Sometimes methodically sometimes by the ear.
A few years back, I went from 130kg to 85kg methodically. Calorie counting, watching macros, targeted exercises, all the good stuff.
What I found out was, if I didn’t diet and just logged my calories, I was consuming 4000 sometimes even 5000 calories per day easily. And it didn’t feel like I was eating much.
Full English for breakfast, that’s about 1k right there. One or two lates, another 300-400 calories. Maybe pair that with a little pastry, another 300 on top of that. Lunch, burger and fries, big coke to drink, toss in another k. After work a couple of pins with the lads, another 300-400. Get back, have dinner, maybe snack something while falling asleep to Netflix, another 1k easy. Don’t get me started on getting pissed with 7-8 pints and then devouring 3 big macs like it’s nothing.
I also found out I’m burning far more calories then I was expecting for my sedentary lifestyle. Just the walk to work, climbing some stairs, moving around the office, going to lunch, doing some house chores put me in close to 1k burned. Without feeling like I was making any effort.
In my case, 4k input with 1k output still yields 3k which is 1k over what I should have.
It is very possible in your case your input is 3k, your output 1k so your staying exactly as you are.
Count your calories, wear a apple watch and you’ll find out precisely.
Because you're not eating enough? You can eat only McDonalds and still lose weight if you're eating below your daily resting calories. Your body composition will probably change for the worse though.
Likewise the person who struggles to lose weight with diet and exercise is very likely eating more than they think they're eating (or opting for healthy options that aren't actually healthy, like salad covered in 600 calories of ranch dressing)
Let's go with the standard 3,500 calories to gain a pound of weight. Let us suppose that an individual's ability to accurately gauge daily caloric consumption is off by a mere fifty calories. Now, for a 2,000 calorie per diemm budget, that is a mere 2.5% error rate. Rather trivial, sounds like. But over a year, that adds up to a little over five pounds.
Not even half a can of soda off and you gain five pounds a year, or fifty in a decade. The math matters, but does does the calibration and the ability to accurately estimate consumption. Even a tiny error amount means long-term weight gain. It's pretty easy to be glib about it.
A fidgeter, someone who wiggles, bounces their feet, etc., can burn perhaps three hundred extra calories per day. You can also see how that adds up.
I think you know the answer to that question, but are trying to make a point, which is IMO very valid. I don't care if you call it genetics or luck or just who you are, but people have different bodies and tend to default to different sizes. This idea of "one diet fits all" does not work. You need to do what is and feels right to your body.
This is just not true; people are different, but we're not generally that different from one another. It's vastly more likely that an underweight person isn't eating enough than it is they're genetically predisposed to being underweight.
I've always been slightly below average weight my entire life (late 30s now), and it's a bit of a struggle to maintain that weight. I typically eat a little extra each day, not because I'm particularly hungry or interested in eating, just because I don't want to fall underweight.
I've counted calories closely before and it's not black magic at work, I just don't eat enough. It feels like I eat a lot (probably because it's mostly food I cook myself and not calorie dense fast food) and I feel full, but the calories don't lie.
I'm guessing it's the reverse for people struggling to lose weight. I feel full and comfortable 200 calories below the daily recommended amount, and they likely feel that same way 200 calories above. I easily fall underweight if I stop paying attention to my diet, and they likely become overweight when they do the same and listen to their body.
Metabolic rate isn't the same for everyone. I also can eat in large amounts and not get fat.
Also don't think that because you are not getting fat that your body is in a healthy state.
You can be really skinny yet get insulin resistance, as I did.
That was my whole point... the calories you eat is the main factor... but even if you are thin, you have to watch other things like cholesterol, vitamins, etc...
I think that if you're going to make such a strong statement you should back it up with data. Are you really convinced there is some misterious thing at play that keeps your weight down? Then actually record everything you eat in a week and what physical activity you do and see if your perception matches reality
It actually does go both ways; while overweight people who struggle to lose weight are undercounting their calories, you're likely overcounting your calories.
Saying exercise can help you reach your calorie deficit is fairly misleading. Yes, exercise burns calories, but even a hard workout is a small part of your daily calories spent at best.
And if you do find yourself in circumstances where you're burning a significant enough amount of calories on a daily basis (say, a highschool water polo player treading water for 3 hours a day, working out to somewhere between 1000-2000 calories), then it just builds bad eating habits, because you get used to eating too much.
The only real long-term solution to weight management is not wanting to eat too much. Willpower controlled diets work on the short term, which might be fine if an individual's level of desired consumption is sufficiently close to their daily caloric needs, but are doomed in the long term.
25-30 minute jog is about 200 calories buried. That can amount to 7-12% increase depending your body size. This is not small or insignificant amount especially for the amount of input work done.
Small boosts add up to big changes. It's always still about deficit.
it's four oreos. or two slices of cheese. 200 calories a day is significant long-term, but it's also trivially easy to eat that much without even thinking about it.
Yes, but the most calories consuming activity we do is just living.
Your body spends calories to digest food and get more calories. Your brain needs around 400 daily calories. If you want to burn 400 calories doing some cardio, you'll need an intensive 30 min session or so.
If you don't fix your eating, the effort you'll have to put into exercising will be huge, sometimes even unachievable.
Exercise may not actually help achieve calorie deficit, based on some relatively new research saying that when you exercise, your body compensates by burning fewer calories in other areas, like your lungs and your brain. [0]
this is another one of those things that's true in a sort of broad sense, but factually incorrect. exercise burns calories, and burning calories makes you lose fat - that's just basic math.
but exercise makes you hungry, and to the article's main point: people are terrible at estimating calories. a one-hour easy run, a two-hour bike ride, or a full day of alpine skiing burns what's basically an irrelevant amount of calories. if you're taking in any extra amount of calories, normal amounts of exercise doesn't help you lose weight.
It's not just that exercise makes you hungry, it's also that deliberate cardio exercise can lead to you unconsciously moving less throughout the day, therefore reducing your total daily expenditure, in effect cancelling the whole effect of the exercise. E.g. If someone were to run a marathon, especially if they're untrained, they would be too tired to do anything else during that day (I imagine).
You can theoretically try to counter this by also using a step counter to make sure you keep moving throughout the day, but at some point you might be too exhausted for even that to help.
That said, most people don't move or exercise nearly enough, not for weight loss nor for general health, so for most people's situation you're probably right, adding some exercise is a net benefit. It's still much easier and faster (and more important in the long run) to control caloric intake.
My god there are many people in this comment thread who trivialise weight loss, clearly having never done it themselves.
I'm a healthy weight, do heavy workouts 5 days a week and am in very good shape. When I cut my body fat down to ~10%, I go through hell in terms of hunger. There's not a minute I'm not thinking about how hungry I am, and how much I want to eat. I'm completely unable to do productive work, spending a majority of my mental energy restraining myself from getting food.
It's very clear to me, that the only difference between me and someone obese is at what point our brains start telling us that we're hungry.
The only purpose this article serves is to make people who have never struggled with diet feel superior.
1. Count your calories and pick food that let's you stay within your goals.
2. Do intermittent fasting. After a few days, (some?) people's body just adapt and stop craving for food during the fasting hours - I was a late-night snacker but after doing it for a week, the cravings diminished a lot, so much that I stuck with it for a year.
People like me who are obese(I'm Obese III) can't control the urge to keep intake food, which is a death spiral loop(we know!).
I suspect that this is partially influenced by gut bacteria, which sounds like pointing fingers to blame something instead of not enough "self-esteem".
It's more of multiple factors in motion, while the effects apart from self determination are heavily downplayed.
I'm currently trying to shake down some of my weight, but as soon as I started consume less, my mind gets fuzzy and work will not get done. And my blood sugar gets dangerously low. Counterintuitive I know, heh.
I hope for that one day I'll break the vicious cycle.
I’m tracking my calories intake for more than 2 years. Every meal, every day (due to my fitness goals and I’m very serious about it) and I totally agree, that if you haven’t nazi-tracked your calories at least for a while, you have totally no idea how much do you eat. People can miss-judge their daily intake by 1000 calories easily.
Most people simply confuse calories with being full. It has nothing in common. You can eat 400kcal and be full and 1500 and be hungry.
There’s no other way to gain or loose weight, but to track calories.
Energy balance is a proximate cause though. It's not wrong that it works, the problem is how to actually make yourself do it. It's like how profit is revenue minus cost, that doesn't tell everyone how to make money.
> Now, I’m not sure about you, but I’ve never seen someone drink an actual [sic, 200ml] serving. Most people are going to be filling that glass to the top. This [pictured] is a full glass of OJ, coming in at 350 ml.
Personally I'd have less than that, 100-150ml maybe. Not calorie counting and never have. /Shrug/
And I agree with other commenter on the quote-unquote annoying writing style. I'll tell you why in a second. Ok here's why: it's annoying. I'll let that sink in.
I got bad news for you: I know multiple people who lost weight for two months (as anyone can on literally any calorie-restriction diet) but simply couldn't follow it for much longer than that.
I myself stopped being keto a couple of days after the evening crying started.
Your advice is not actionable. I know several people including myself who were simply unable to action it for longer than the two months that anyone can stick to any diet.
If you are capable of sticking to a diet that literally brings you to tears on a daily basis, then sure, but do realise that you're probably in about the top percentile of willpower. (I imagine you were not in fact brought to tears by this diet, or you wouldn't be recommending it; in which case you may not be aware that it's not a panacea.)
Are you saying you were brought to tears because you weren’t eating carbs? I have known many people who have lost weight very successfully by switching a healthy, safe, and effective low carb/keto diet.
In fact I’ve never even heard of crying being a side effect. How are you suggesting these things are even linked?
All I know is that I couldn't think of anything other than carbs, and started crying because I wanted carbs so much, and then when I ate carbs it was blissful and I stopped thinking about carbs and I stopped crying. I don't know what more evidence it would be possible to have that they were linked.
I like keto because it helps me maintain energy throughout the day, but I need to eat practically non-stop to avoid losing weight while on it. It's crazy.
Exact same experience. It honesty feels like unlocking a cheat code, and makes me really frustrated at the “diet industry” which is constantly pushing these absurd fad diets onto people.
imo, organizations like NutritionalFacts.org offer the best evidence based guidence for health, and weight loss. They site studies for each talking point. There are years of content here.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCddn8dUxYdgJz3Qr5mjADtA
> But you don't need to pick a team with all the tribalism that's involved.
Sometimes labels are just easier than a "wishy-washy" "yeah I'll do something in that general direction". That doesn't need to involve tribalism; pretty much all vegan and keto people I know are fairly pragmatic about it.
When I started the article I thought it would be completely misguided, but there was a lot of good information inside. I just don't agree with the emphasis on counting calories. As the article says, we are bad at it. But supposing we could do it perfectly, then what is the right number we should ingest? Besides, we eat for more than just calories. Nutrients are more important. Your body might tell you to keep eating after you get enough calories because it is missing something else.
Our body has an amazingly good, built in mechanism to control what we eat without us consciously tracking our input. The only problem, as mentioned in the article, is some modern foods throw off our system. So don't eat those. I don't find avoiding processed foods or even foods with processed sugar a sacrifice in any way, at least from a pleasure point of view.
Disclaimer - eating refined sugar gives me headache so maybe that makes it easier. (Fruit does not give me a headache. Fruit cooked in the oven at high temperatures to caramelize the sugars does. ? )
Here is a very specific counter example I heard recently: a woman contestant in one of those weight loss shows, overweight all her life, all her life on yo yo diets, doctors told her to lose weight if she wants kids since her hormons were messed up. Lost 200lbs in one year by dieting and exercising 6 hours a day, felt miserable, lost her period completely, doctors told her her body is behaving as if she was anorexic so she still could not get kids and of course unless she continued dieting kept gaining weight. So the images of people looking like concentration camp survivors does not mean much - in this one case the person finally looked normal, but her body did not work normal anymore.
Great article. Even as an endurance athlete I struggle to lose weight w/o intermittent fasting and I can only do that in the off-season. Knowing your body comp also will help understand what’s going on - get a smart scale.
One metric I find useful is that if you don’t wake hungry you are probably eating too much. Dial back slightly until you wake hungry.
I see a lot of people mentioning counting calories and I've never had success doing that. I stick with Tim Ferris's 4 hour body method of only consuming meat beans and vegetables and getting the 1 cheat day or meal. There are a few other rules like eating 20g of protein right when you wake up, but I can't recommend his book enough to people that are struggling with losing weight. The biggest thing about his book is it makes you understand your body fat percentage and gives you more ways to measure weight loss than just what the scale says, which can be deceiving. Anyways, different things will work for different people, but everything takes time to adjust.
I love doing cardio, especially running gives me a rush like no other. If people don't want to do cardio you don't have to do it, you just have to adapt your calorie intake accordingly. But for those that don't mind it or even like it it's a neat way to squeeze out some more calories for a delicious meal or whatever.
I do agree that resistance training is important and often forgotten part of fitness. Having muscles means extra BMR and you will look better when you do lose that extra weight as opposed to that skinny fat look.
False. Cardio in the form of high intensity interval training is absolutely beneficial for your heart. I do agree that you should not neglect anaerobic training.
What I've found out, after going from a pretty damn athletic lifestyle (10+ years of boxing) to turning into a full-fledged couch potato (smart working, working from home, pandemic, accumulated injuries preventing me to exercise regularly), is that the body is pretty forgiving as long as you keep it under a constant exercise routine, but it suddenly starts taxing you as soon as you become sedentary. Pretty recently I've taken a photo with a colleague coming to visit my hometown, and I couldn't recognize that fat f#@k in the photo which was supposed to be me.
My family mostly cooks at home, and we avoid heavily prepared ingredients, e.g., instant meals. I've never computed the calories, but I just looked up a few things. I can't even think of what to put in a pizza, to bring it up to 2370 Calories. I think a benefit of home cooking with mostly basic ingredients is just that we're engaged in the process, making it much harder to "hide" Calories in what we make. Also, we don't expect the food to be as yummy as restaurant food.
I also don't feel bad about the fact that I can't make an "authentic" restaurant pizza.
It’s not that you’re eating too much, it’s that you’re eating (and drinking) too much sugar. Consume less sugar, and don’t eat when you’re not hungry, and you will be amazed at the results.
Sugar isn't specifically worse than other ways to consume calories, as far as I understand. The way we know this is that there have been many studies in humans, some with high-sugar diets and some with low-sugar diets, and as long as calories are equated, almost everything else about them is the same. Same amount of weight loss, blood markers look similar, etc.
References? Because I remember reading that the metabolic path for sugar (fructose in particular) produces some pretty nasty by-products.
But that's not the main problem with sugar. The main problem with sugar is that it doesn't fill you up. In fact, it has the opposite effect: it makes you feel hungrier. So yes, if you eat the same number of calories in sugar or fat & protein that in and of itself will have the same effect on your weight. But the sugar will leave you feeling hungrier than the fat&protein, and that is what messes you up.
> References? Because I remember reading that the metabolic path for sugar (fructose in particular) produces some pretty nasty by-products.
I'm not someone actually working in this field, I just read a lot and watch YouTube a lot on this topic. So I'm just going to give the first refernce I found on Google: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5174149/.
I'm mostly basing what I'm saying based on watching videos by Layne Norton, Mike Israetel and others, who are credentialed in this topic.
> But that's not the main problem with sugar. The main problem with sugar is that it doesn't fill you up. In fact, it has the opposite effect: it makes you feel hungrier.
I mostly agree. I think this effect is different for different people, but for the most part, sugar is less satiating vs. eating other foods. It's incredibly easy to overeat sugar compared to, say, overeating proteins (though both are possible).
Still, lots of sugar-containing foods are pretty great to eat, e.g. fruits. They might have sugar, but they are usually incredibly low on calories for the amount that you're eating.
I think that article actually sums it up quite nicely:
"The potential for overconsumption of sugars in the form of sugary foods and drinks makes targeting sugars, as a source of excess calories, a prudent strategy. However, sugar content should not be the sole determinant of a healthy diet. There are many other factors in the diet—some providing excess calories while others provide beneficial nutrients. Rather than just focusing on one energy source, we should consider the whole diet for health benefits."
Reducing sugar consumption != eliminating sugar from your diet altogether. But I think it's a useful first-order heuristic.
It really is this simple. I never do explicit diets because changing food AND calories can lead to quick failure. I just continue getting the same food and reduce the amount--small fries instead of large. Next time, half the small fries. Introducing healthier foods and exercise should be done separately IMO
Recommend book by Herman Pontzer from last year. "Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy" Listened to on podcast 'Why is this happening with Chris Hayes' for 1 hour summary on it.
I admit I'm distrustful of such a dramatic title. The central message from the originally posted article is that losing weight is mostly a matter of maintaining a caloric deficit. This is has been understood for some time now. What is the "new research" that is so important, in this case?
I have a different problem. I'd like to maintain my body weight and get even leaner but I just enjoy going out with friends and I can go out like every day.
And it's impossible to go out and not eat/drink something.
Whatever people tells you how to eat, if you decide to eat less than 1200 Kcal, consider that this is less than the minimum required for a standard person to stay alive (whatever a 'standard person' is).
Add a large coke and you can easily hit 1500 in one meal. 1 lunch, 1 dinner, a snack, and a nice healthy breakfast and you can easily clear 4000-5000 a day without feeling like you ate an abnormal amount.
I don’t know what gp implied but I know that in my personal case, I’m way less hungry after physical effort. So I wouldn’t think he talked about calories but more about the ability to eat.
Define enough. One hour workout every day? That's usually 500-1000 extra calories. It's not that hard for people to eat that much more extra, so they still put on weight.
Doesn’t work that way. Your basal metabolic rate is also increased. Squat and deadlift at least 3 plates for reps. Walk at least 20k per week. You’d have to force-feed yourself to get fat.
You can just do the math and see how much exercise you have to do to make any difference in your weight loss. You definitely can’t “walk” your way to weight loss
Walking 5 miles a day can be done in an hour and a half and can burn ~250-500 calories. That’s half a pound to a pound of fat per week, which is pretty significant.
250 calories is nothing and most people are going to think it gives them the chance to eat that extra bagel that’s going to be more than 250 calories.
Are you really suggesting that people walk and hour and half with the intention of burning 250 calories? There are a lot of reasons to exercise. But weight loss isn’t one.
You shouldn’t be eating excess cookies if you’re trying to lose weight. That doesn’t negate the effect of walking for an hour (the most base of exercises)
And just like the Nobel Winning Economist says about why people don’t save for the future, “none of us are Homo Economicus”. The same can be applied to diet. No one is a completely rational being.
You tell me that I have to walk an hour to burn off 250 calories, I’m not going to bother and neither are most people. Every study shows that exercise is a completely ineffective method to lose weight for most people.
I mentioned in another comment that yes I did eat like crap and lost and maintained weight by exercising in my mid 20s to mid 30s. I was also a part time fitness instructor, taught 10 hours a week (spinning, step, weightlifting, cardio kickboxing) and I trained for runs and I lifted weights three times a week. I had a commitment device to go the gym - regularly scheduled classes that I taught and got paid for. I had to be in shape. I would teach 2 hour classes on Saturday and Sunday and teach during the week.
Most people will never commit to that level or intensity of exercise. Even now, I have a home cardio gym and the only time I watch TV by myself is when I exercise.
In my non-expert opinion, this is almost as good as it could be. People should face the harsh truths about their habits. I just dislike the underlying assumptions that things with fat or whatever is bad, every single macronutrient is great, just don't fucking overeat them. Also, life is absolutely better without sugar.
n=1, but I’ve increased my iodine intake to the recommended daily dosage (ca 0.2mg), and have noticed (among other benefits) that I have to try quite hard now to gain fat. Probably something to do with thyroid hormones.
The TLDR really is that counting calories is the only way to truly know. If you have a very regular diet it’s not too hard. For example I eat the same breakfast every day, and a handful of different lunches. So it’s easy to know what my macros are for those meals.
Incidentally at one restaurant I like, I always get the salad, because it’s one of the highest-calorie options they have.
CICO is one of the few things in nutrition which is 100% fact: if you’re not losing weight after months, you’re eating too much, and if you eat less, you will lose weight.
But CICO alone is terrible nutrition advice, because hunger - true physical hunger - is not something anyone should live with. Those people in the Minnesota Starvation experiment? They were thinking about food 24/7, obsessing about it, it became nearly the only thing they cared about. One of them reported when watching a movie, he would pay most attention to the few scenes with the characters eating, not the action or romance or the actual plot. Furthermore, your body really does have sort of “starvation mode”: it won’t lower your RMR to 0, but it will cause brain fog, tiredness, loss of sex drive, mood dysregulation, and ultimately depression. You stop getting pleasure from anything except food.
Furthermore, you can get “physical hunger” even if you’re gaining weight, if your hormones are messed up. A cited example is hypothyroidism, which has symptoms like brain fog, fatigue, mood disorders synonymous with starvation. And you can avoid “physical hunger” even while losing weight, if your hormones are in check, you’re not in too steep a calorie deficit, and you’re getting enough nutrients (aka eating whole foods). This is why people emphasize eating nutritious foods even when you can reach the same calorie goal with junk foods.
There’s also the willpower component. Nutritious foods can improve your mood and give you more willpower, so it’s easier to eat less. They also tend to make people less (mentally) hungry. Generally when losing weight it’s a good idea to not just focus on nutrient-dense “whole” foods, but also low-volume and satiety-inducing foods. Nuts and whole grains are generally considered healthy but they’re also calorie-dense so it’s easy to pass your daily calorie needs them without getting full: in contrast, lean proteins and non-starchy vegetables are low-calorie and filling, it’s much harder to gain weight on fish and broccoli. Eating in a smaller time window and eating less meals (IF) also makes it easier to not overeat.
But even with IF, volume eating, and sometimes keto, you can still deal with physical hunger if your hormones are just messed up. To see if it’s your hormones first you need to stick to a consistent diet for at least a couple weeks: you will probably feel hungry and tired the first few days of any diet but that’s just your body adapting. After a few weeks if you’re “doing everything right”, including eating truly “healthy” foods (whole foods), eating low-calorie foods, and eating a moderate but not too steep deficit from your estimated TDEE; if you’re doing all that and either you’re not losing weight or your still white-knuckling it and getting symptoms like tiredness and hair loss, you should see a doctor and get your hormones checked.
> The golden child of the food industry: organic produce. Even though studies have shown that organic food doesn’t have any additional health benefits versus conventional
While this may be true, I was able to go from 240lb to 185lb (I’m 6’2) in 10 months by:
1) Eating only organic, non-gmo, and gluten free
2) Only shopping at expensive health food stores that only carry specialty brands (no Oreos or Poptarts in stock!)
3) Eating a vegan diet
..So why did those things cause me to lose weight?
Simple: by dramatically self-limiting the categories and types of food I allow myself to eat, it’s simply harder to overeat.
I don’t care about the vegan lifestyle or philosophy, but I love that it broke my habit of eating cheese and crackers every night. When out at a restaurant, while I would normally order a burger, I’d end up with a salad (the only vegan thing)
And eating only organic/non-gmo/gluten free? Same reason: it dramatically reduced the variety of food I was able to buy without breaking the 3 rules above. I pick up a bag of chips, and if it’s not organic gluten free, right back on the shelf it goes.
And why shop at expensive health food stores? Not because the food is better, but because when everything is priced 50-100% higher than a regular supermarket, so I bought less food. Do you really want that $8 bag of chips?
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All of this is to say: if you’re looking to lose weight, don’t care so much about any specific diet, etc… think about your eating habits and how to change them.
If you’re motivated to lose weight and have the determination, I recommend going vegan paired with eating only organic.
Again, not recommending it because vegan or organic are magic diets (they’re not)… BUT by following an organic vegan diet you are forcing yourself to completely rethink nearly all of your eating habits, and once you break your current eating habits, you can begin to form new (healthier) eating habits.
Best part is that I didn’t gain the weight back since the way I lost it was by changing my habits and the way I think about food, rather than caring about calories or dieting.
If you’re overweight, it’s because of your eating habits. People who say “eat fewer calories, you must be in a deficit” aren’t wrong, but it’s hard to do because it requires so much thinking constantly about portion size, etc.
Weight loss can become much easier by establishing 1-2 strict “eating rules” that you commit following and that are simple to remember,
Honestly, I could have achieved the same weight loss by coming up with a silly rule like “I will only buy food that comes in blue packaging” instead of vegan/organic.
You need to figure out a way to change your eating habits, period. If my approach doesn’t resonate with you, think of something, anything, that will get you to replace your current habits with new ones.
Even if that means telling yourself you’ll only eat food that comes in blue packaging.
> 2) Only shopping at expensive health food stores that only carry specialty brands (no Oreos or Poptarts in stock!)
This is one of the reasons I like shopping at Whole Foods, everything sold is has been vetted and doesn’t contain crap like high fructose corn syrup. I remember reading an article somewhere where like 75% of the groceries sold at Walmart can’t be sold at Whole Foods.
this article sucks. because of widespread issues like hypothyroidism that aren't routinely screened for (in some cases yes but i don't think this is largely the case), there are serious endocrine and metabolic disruptions, so for the author to brush that off in an article that is clearly designed for people who are struggling to lose weight, it's just way off base. there should at least be footnotes for people to have their T3, T4, and TSH checked if they are struggling to lose weight at a caloric deficit.
The only way to lose weight (other than amputation and the like) is to take in less calories than you burn. If what you say is correct it just means that in those cases the intermittent fasting causes higher energy expenditure.
Exercising the same doesn’t imply their bodies expend the same amount of energy. One body may be more efficient than the other, for example producing less excess heat. Exercise also isn’t the only factor in energy expenditure. People have different basal metabolic rates (how much energy your body consumes when you’re doing nothing), and changing your diet, your sleep, your mood, etc., can affect it, as can stress and cognitive activity. Finally there’s differences in how efficiently people extract energy from food.
However, for any given individual, if they want to reduce weight, they can either reduce their energy input or increase their energy output, or both. There’s just no other way.
Can you be a little more specific? Wikipedia seems to mostly say that the science is still a work in progress, and at least I don't see much support for the claim that it reduces weight while allowing for the same calorie consumption.
When I was a teenager, I looked at people who weighed 300+ pounds and though, how do you get that way. Don't you realize that you are gaining weight? Don't you know that you just have to eat less to lose weight?
Anyway, now I realize that I am hungry. It never goes away unless I eat a significant amount of food. My body told me to eat, so I ate.
It doesn't even take that much extra food to gain a lot of weight. One extra piece of cake a week is a few pounds in a year. If you live a few years, it adds up. You gain weight in kilograms and lose weight in grams.
Hunger is a sensation that happens inside a person's body and mind. You cannot compare your hunger to my hunger.
So many diets talk about not being hungry while you are on the diet. I've been to dieticians and told them I'm hungry, and they suggest eating more protein or more fiber. That does help, but I still feel hungry.
There is a very good chance that someone is writing a reply with some suggestion as to how I should eat so that I'm not hungry. Thank you for the thoughts, but realize that you don't live in my body, you don't know how I feel, you don't know what I've tried.
Hunger sounds like a problem to people. Hunger feels like a problem inside the body. People still tell me I shouldn't be hungry. Maybe part of the solution is realizing that eating to satisfaction is ... bad for some people. Maybe it's Ok to be a little hungry.
Anyway, these are just some thoughts. I'm down 30 pounds from my max. I think I have a good mentality now, but it took years to get here.