YSK to lose weight, fill up with foods low in caloric density and high in fiber, like fruits and vegetables. This can trigger satiety without the overload of calories and beats going hungry long term.
YSK to lose weight, fill up with foods low in caloric density and high in fiber, like fruits and vegetables. This can trigger satiety without the overload of calories and beats going hungry long term.
Why YSK: many countries have issues with weight, such as mine with 74% of US adults being overweight or obese. The global weight loss industry is over $200 billion yearly, with many influencers, pills, and surgeries promising quick results with little effort. These often come with side effects, or don't work long term.
Studies suggest filling yourself with foods low in caloric density and high in fiber, like fruits and vegetables, can help reach and maintain a healthy weight. It's good to have these foods available in our living spaces to make the choice easy. Your taste buds will likely adapt to love them if you're not there yet.
That little clicker in the brain that goes off when you've had enough doesn't really work for me. I have to feel physically full or I still feel hungry. Even worse, my dopamine levels are garbage and eating makes me feel good.
Not saying this doesn't work. Only that I'm far from the only one where it is this simple.
Despite all the interesting advice in this thread the thing that helped me the most was accepting and getting used to the fact that if you're going to lose weight you're going to be hungry.
You're not starving to death, you're not dying, but there are times where you're going to just have to be hungry and deal with it. Our bodies are very good at doing their best to keep us alive, and hunger is our bodies way of saying "we need to look for food". The problem is we didn't evolve that skill at a time when looking for food only takes a few minutes and can involve thousands of calories.
If you're overweight your body is going to sound alarm bells that it's eating into the reserves, but you need to acknowledge that and let the reserves get used so you can lose weight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satiety_value
It's not just fruits and vegetables, but getting the right components.
A high sugar low fiber fruit won't do as much as a higher fiber fruit, so apple > blackberry, for example.You can also take advantage of your bodies insatiable love for protein and make that a key part of the meal as well, and it'll signal that it's full sooner and for longer.
Food that physically takes longer to eat also help because you can eat faster than you can "realize" you're full.
A trick of mine, that I don't know if there's any general basis for it but it helps me, is to not take a plate with as much food as I think I want, but to instead take a plate with about half that. That way I get to feel like I'm having two servings, and the gap between finishing the first and starting the second usually means that the second is less than the first.
Yes! The biggest factor with body weight is calories in vs calories out. Foods with volume and mass but fewer calories displace calorie dense foods. Even as simple as substituting popcorn vs potato chips is huge on calorie savings. Protein and fats (ideally plant based) can also help you feel full longer than say simple carbs like potato chips/white pasta.
I highly recommend Harvard's Nutrition Source for science-based nutrition info and recipes, the language is very accessible too!
Edit: fixed link
My own advice:
The diet I'm on, which has lost me 36 pounds (196 to 160) and counting since early April, is simple calorie restriction - I try my best not to go over 1500 calories/day, and if I do go over, I try to make up for it by going under on following days until things average out.
Every time I've tried this diet or similar diets, I've had great success, as long as I've meticulously tracked and wrote down how many calories I ate each day. The times I've tried this diet without tracking have all ended up failing, even when I "tried" sticking to it for months. The moment I start writing numbers down, things just fall into place. So for me at least, that's the key.
Some notes:
- Over the last 127 days my actual average calories/day has been 1472/day
- I try to avoid meals where counting is very difficult or impractical. That means I try to avoid going to restaurants that don't post calories and I'm not big on "real" cooking. If I do have a meal where a good count isn't possible I try my best to overestimate - usually with 2500 or 3000 depending on how full I am since it's really hard to eat more than that at once. I find it very difficult to go to most restaurants without getting more than 1500 calories, also, so I don't eat at restaurants all that often anymore. Fast food places like McDonald's are actually some of the easier options to work with, though.
- I've made little to no effort to eat healthier - just less. I can have a blizzard from Dairy Queen if I want, but that's 1100 calories and then I've only got 400 left for something else. I have mastered making delicious ice cream that's just 300 calories/pint though. In practice I usually eat processed foods from a can, box, or bag that you just need to heat up or follow the instructions on the box for.
- A scale is essential for getting accurate calories out of things like butter, milk, ketchup, ice cream ingredients, etc.
- In general meats are a pretty poor choice - compared to other foods they make me a lot less full compared to how many calories they take up. I can eat 8 hotdogs (without buns) and fill up my daily calories in that one meal, and still be hungry - or I can have two cans of spaghettios (580 calories total), and be so full I almost can't finish.
- For me at least, after the first week or so I just stop feeling hungry in general most of the time. There are occasionally days where I only eat because I know I should, rather than because I got hungry.
- When I'm on this diet, I basically never get heartburn, even after a day where I eat something that would usually have given it to me badly - probably the nicest part of all this.
- Despite what the post says, I eat basically no fruits or vegetables in my day-to-day life.
- In the past, I've incorporated extremely heavy daily exercise into my routine as well - I'm talking multiple hours a day, every day, for at least two months. While it did have some noticeable benefits like a very noticeably lower resting heart rate and increased strength, it had basically no visible effect on my rate of weight loss - looking at the graph, you couldn't even tell which portions of the diet were subject to heavy exercise vs. heavy leisure. The lesson learned is that diet is far, far more important than exercise - you can offset an entire workout with a single cookie.
- When I'm not making any dieting attempts at all, I'm a huge glutton. I've never gotten over 200 pounds, because any time I get close I start doing this diet - but if I ate the way I wanted to all the time, I could easily weigh 350+ pounds. I can very easily eat single 1200-2000 calorie meals multiple times a day. I've yo-yo'd a lot in the past few years but I'm hoping to more or less keep things permanently under control this time - once I get to 140ish I plan to raise my daily calorie allowance to the point where I maintain, rather than gain or lose, over time.
An added bonus of writing things down is getting to graph things too!
Note that I'm not claiming this is healthy. Just effective. Anyone can lose weight eating nothing but chocolate cake, as long as they eat sufficiently little. It doesn't mean you won't die from it.
Unless your brain is fucking broken like mine, lol.
I've been eating fruits and vegetables but it's really difficult to get hard full with them.
With that said, oatmeal helps. I've lost around 30 pounds and I hit a wall, I'm finding it hard to lose more, I'm increasing my exercise but I'm not sure if I'm eating too little now for my metabolism to kick in and help me lose more weight or if I'm eating too much and I need to cut down more. It's all about calories in calories out, up to a certain point.
It is somewhat simple, and I know some people live in "food deserts"; but really if you couldn't get it 500 years ago, it is probably not good for you.
Eat simple foods, with few steps from identifiable grown thing (veg, fruit, animal, fish) to what ends up on your plate.
This is not as easy as that, people don't know how to cook well or don't have access to good quality foods.
For me I found that I need summer levels of vitamin D, so when for September to April take 40000 IU per day. For me I took 2-3 months to get out of power saving mode. In the summer I try to be a long as I can sun without getting sunburn without sunscreen, midday.
Then I do intermittent fasting only eating dinner.
This has led me to losing 250g per day.
Eating fruits and vegetables might definitely help and it is in any case very healthy! However, people should not always expect to lose more than 10% of their weight in the long term (over years). This 10% can already provide great benefits for your health, so definitely try to lose that weight if you are overweight.
Often it is said that it is just calories in vs calories out. This is only true up until a certain point. For many people, after losing about 10% of their weight, their body starts to work against more weight loss. Their metabolism starts to slow down and their appetite will increase, making it more difficult to lose weight. It might make it almost impossible to keep on a diet and it might even cause people to gain more weight back than they lost.
The theory behind this is that your body has a set point or settling point for what it thinks your weight should be. When you are overweight, the set point changes to a higher weight. When you lose weight, your body wants to get back to this higher set point. The set point can be changed to a lower weight, but that might take years and years. There also is some limited evidence that building more muscles might help somewhat.
I think it is important to add this to the discussion, as often there is the idea that weight loss is just based on self-control and limiting calorie-intake. While this might play a role, the idea that these are the only factors that determine your weight causes a lot of suffering for people. It might also cause more weight gain in the long term.
So, try to lose about 10% of your weight and if you feel like you are struggling after that, go to a specialised doctor who can help you with losing more weight (doctors without this specialisation are often clueless about weight loss in my experience). In addition, a psychologist might be able to help if your are overeating due to an eating disorder.
74%? That's actually lower than I thought
if that method would work, then it would have a higher success rate than 5 %.
(NOTE: I am not a doctor, nutritionist, etc - just someone who has learned a lot of lessons the hard way and likes to share). Without challenging the focus of these stats, I'd like to add two interrelated side-notes (from decades of being professionally physically active, and then decades of being professionally deskbound and too burnt out to move in my spare time, and then getting it mostly back under control later): (1) If you have reached the point where you have long-term struggled with losing weight then - unless you are a very rare exception - changing diet alone will likely not be enough because (2) the steepest but most important curve is "reprogramming your metabolism". One of the most common psychological obstacles I see people hit after years of sedentary living is naively changing only what they eat and getting disappointed when their body doesn't magically "change gears" by itself. The second most common obstacle I see (when people do also start moving their body too) is "counting kilos/pounds" and giving up in frustration when the numbers don't go down straight away, or even go up. When you do "any old exercise" you burn energy while you exercise (which is of course better than not doing any, and helps with aerobic/cardio/psychological fitness too) but beyond that one of the best secrets to serious body transformation is to build muscle (including the women, and not necessarily to a "bodybuilding" degree - a lot of muscle building happens before the "looking jacked" phase). When you do that the increased muscle burns more energy all day and night, not just during the exercise - it reprograms your metabolism. Even better, the longer you do it it doesn't just "change gears" in those moments/days, it teaches your body to become better at "changing gears" in the future. Eventually (unless you have a medical condition, etc) the excess fat burns itself off in service of your body's new functional requirements. Another thing that surprises many is how little resistance training is actually needed for a good baseline to start with (for many people three "adequate but not crazy" workouts per week is enough to see steady progress). BUT a big confusion happens for people weighing themselves all the time - muscle is more dense than fat so there is a good chance if doing it the right (emotionally & financially sustainable) way your overall weight might appear to plateau for ages (or even increase) at first while the increase in dense muscle offsets the loss of sparse fat. I suggest for "tracking weight/fat loss" in most typical cases do so indirectly, not by naively counting loss of overall kilos (of fat, muscle, bones, organs, tendons, ligaments, and so on combined). Regarding diet (especially when exercising) some good rules of thumb are to ensure a broad spread of micro nutrients by shopping for various fruits, veges, nuts, seeds, etc (including semi-regularly surprising yourself with things you usually wouldn't buy to cover the edge-case micros), ensure a good balance of macro nutrients (often the "40 30 30" guide is near enough - 40% carbs, 30% protein, 30% fats - but when strong muscle-building you will need higher amount of protein, covering broad amino acid spectrum), reduce processed foods which are "energy dense" (a euphemism for "nutrient sparse"), keep hydrated, get sun (or other source of vitamin D) every day, reduce sources of stress (stress-addiction to adrenaline and cortisol is real and devastating to your body, and highly addictive if you continue for too long). The most important part is - whatever positive changes you achieve - you need to win the mind-game by making them part of your unquestioning routine, not a novelty that you try to keep kicking down the road. The best equivalent I can think of for this is brushing your teeth - most people find it boring but "just do it" without pondering "will I manage to brush my teeth today". Internalise the other changes the way you brush your teeth.
Start every day by drinking 1-2 liters of room-temp water, then waiting an hour to eat.
