Calories in must be less than calories out for weight loss to happen.
Every other method is trying to sell you something.
Better diet can absolutely help loads, but if you are eating 15 pounds of broccoli and fish a day it's still too much fuel and not enough burn. You can definitely work out to burn some of that energy off but at some point you just have to eat less.
I say this as a current fat person who has lost the weight and put it back on in his life.
I eat my feelings away and I got BIG over the last few years. I was at 340 at my worst. I'm still overweight, but I'm slowly working on it again. It takes time and discipline. Two things I'm not great about.
Person for me I like to start off with a fast of a day or two without any solid foods. Just water and maybe some tea or something. this helps me get over the appetite hump and my huge black hole or a stomach.
If you stop eating huge meals your body will alter where it's "I'm full" feeling is at. Unfortunately food is delicious and I push past that feeling all the time because it's yummy God dammit lol.
Weight loss is not a sprint. It's a marathon. Don't quit if you fall off the wagon. Just get back up and keep joggin.
Step One. Count all of the calories you eat in a day. Check that nutritional info, do the math, add it up, see what you're eating without leaving anything out.
Step Two. Try to minimize sugar, carbs, and bad fat, while maximizing protein and fiber. My go-to daily meal plan is steel cut oatmeal in the morning, sweetened with baking splenda, pinch of salt, and cinnamon. Intermittent fast through lunch with coffee. Dinner is open face (so only 1 slice of bread) turkey sandwiches, Black bean soup spiked with tobasco and extra black beans. For dessert, make a big ol bowl of banana cream or vanilla pudding with skim milk. Find a meal plan that works for you, you don't have to eat the same thing everyday, but have that back-up meal plan ready to go in case you don't feel like making something different.
Step Three. Don't inhale your food. It takes your body 20 minutes between attaining a "full" stomach, and your stomach alerting your brain to that fact. Thus, pacing your food is important. How to do that? PUT THE FOOD DOWN. If you pick up your sandwich, eat half, then put it back down, take a drink of water, then you can finish it. Have a big ass glass of water with every meal. I also buy baby carrots, you can get a nice 1 lb bag, and in between dinner items, eat a handful of baby carrots. They're crunchy, full of water, and help you pace yourself through dinner.
Step Four. Go for a walk after you eat. A little bit of exercise, even a walk around the neighborhood for a few minutes, is enough to to tell your body that you want it to take all that energy you just took in, and use it immediately. You're telling your body "Hey, don't put all that energy into long term (fatty) storage, make it available, and of use right now."
Step Five. Add in Exercise at your own pace. Start with something manageable, achievable, and then make it routine. Whether that means walking your dog instead of just letting them out into the yard, start small, build at your own pace. Make it a daily habit. (Pro-tip, whenever you feel like skipping a day, tell yourself all you have to do is get dressed for the exercise and do it for five minutes. if you do that much and still feel off, you're allowed to take a rest day. The majority of the time, once you get started, you start to feel better and end up doing it. the key is getting dressed and putting yourself into the position to do it, even if you allow yourself to stop. just keep putting yourself into position to succeed with your new habit.) This also works as an effective daily anti-depressant.
Step Six. Reward yourself for achievements. When you start these things, your body will respond, and you will feel better, more confident, sexier in your own skin. Celebrate with some new clothes that let you show it off. Feel good about it, it's something you earned!
Step Seven. Allow for cheat days. This you can do every week, every two weeks, whenever you decide. If you find yourself going hard-core on the diet and then crashing into a food frenzy, it's because your going too hard, and need to allow for a cheat day. Be kind to yourself if you break your diet on a miserable day, and use that as information to consult when scheduling your next cheat day. The long term goal is to reorganize your thoughts around food, and having specific times when you let yourself go whole hog on a bag of Oreos or whatever, lets you recognize that behavior as a reward, or special circumstance, and not a daily activity.
Congrats, you're now feeling better, looking better, and those two facts will reverberate through the rest of your life like ripples through a pond, making you happier and healthier.
It's also highly effective and safe so long as you educate yourself properly before beginning.
I did 14 day fasts with an electrolyte slurry, psyllium husk, and multi vitamins. Take a month off, eat well balanced meals, repeat until goal weight. I lost ~15-20lbs each fast doing it a total of three times to hit my goal weight. Each time is less, because the daily caloric requirement to maintain your body decreases with your weight.
After that, I started gym/weight training.
edit: and never eating junk food or drinking sugar ever again. That includes fruit juice and dairy milk. Unsweetened Coconut "milk" for me now. Processed grains massively reduced too. Basically, flour. Honestly flour probably inflated the waist line for me more than sugar.
So I'm a physician and I support most things people do to import their health but I do try to make sure they're fully informed. In terms of fasting, this cohort study found an adverse association between fasting and cardiovascular death. There are limitations to the study (self-reported diet, etc.) but it followed 20,000 people for 8yrs which is pretty good. Definitely need more study in this area, especially considering the complexity of human metabolism. Here's the highlights from the study but the full text is available at that link:
People who followed a pattern of eating all of their food across less than 8 hours per day had a 91% higher risk of death due to cardiovascular disease.
The increased risk of cardiovascular death was also seen in people living with heart disease or cancer.
Among people with existing cardiovascular disease, an eating duration of no less than 8 but less than 10 hours per day was also associated with a 66% higher risk of death from heart disease or stroke.
Time-restricted eating did not reduce the overall risk of death from any cause.
An eating duration of more than 16 hours per day was associated with a lower risk of cancer mortality among people with cancer.
I did 3 extended fasts, it's not a permanent lifestyle change for me so I don't think that info is relevant to me, more so to the other person who replied with intermittent fasting. Or people who permanent adopt stuff like OMAD.
Yes, came to say fasting. Start with intermittent. Work up to OMAD (one meal a day).
Then push it further out to 48 hr. plus depending on your weight, with just water, vitamins, electrolytes.
Autophagy is an amazing benefit of it to look into as well. Kicks in hard around 48 hrs, depending on how much sugar and carbs you have to burn off. Which is also why a ketogenic diet is good when you aren't fasting.
Green tea, coffee, tumeric are good at stimulating autophagy too, if you want to dirty fast
I prefer to eat two meals a day. It feels like a sustainable lifestyle instead of just a temporary fix. Normally, I have only breakfast and lunch. If I deviate from that by having something in the afternoon, my weight begins to increase gradually.
I’m very, very susceptible to addiction, but the thing that makes it easiest for me to curb a habit is to pretend I’ve already moved past it. If I think about junk food, I intentionally think of overly sweet, salty and artificial foods and (internally) express my distaste. With smoking, I think of the smell of an ashtray in the rain; with drinking, I think of cleaning up day old beer with a hangover.
Saying “I don't really have a sweet tooth” is what made me lose my sweet tooth.
This is very good strategy. Like the infamous "fake it till you make it". But actually vocalizing it makes it even more powerful.
If anyone remembers the movie Closer from 2004, there's a scene where Clive Owen's character refuses a cigarette while almost failing at it. He settles it with a phrase: "I've given up.". You can see he is not completely sure about that, but now that he said it out loud, he made it true.
Plain oats with chia seeds for breakfast (no more than a teaspoon of honey[real honey from bees or don't bother] because you still need to enjoy food). Table spoon on Saturday
this is dependent on your budget: Bananas are cheap AF. Eat one whenever you have a craving. Drink a glass of water, eat a banana, then take your supplements (fish oil and multi v) in the morning after oats
2a) Apples/pears/berries. An apple can kill a craving for sweets so quickly. Plus the fiber will clean you out. Other fruit is more expensive and goes bad quickly. But seriously apples can help to be one of those fillers in your diet
Tea. If you don't drink black coffee, switch to tea. No need for sugar and milk, tea is pretty good on its own. More importantly, it tastes just as good cold
Drink water. When I get up in the morning, I try to drink 1 1/2 pints of water. Then start breakfast. Just walked the dog? Chug a pint. Out of the shower? Slug a half pint. Cooking lunch? Drink a pint before you eat. Yes, you will pee a lot. But you skin will look better and you won't have those moments of "shit, I need coffee"
A pg* a
Rice and Beans. Make one pot a week. Use oil instead of butter. Lots of beans. Chop up one large onion. Put equal parts quinoa to rice. Last a while and you can spice it or add hot sauce. Use it as a filler for eggs or chicken or whatever
high volume food with low calorie density. Need a snack? Rice cakes, to raw carrots and celery, pickles, cucumber,
. Chips and salsa is a good one
And now I barely even have to keep track. I've gotten to know roughly what I'm consuming, and with some exercise thrown in, I've kept the weight off. Just being mindful was half the challenge.
I was also gonna say fasting, intermittent fasting to be specific, and cooking at home more. But it seems that’s not answering your question because it’s a “food habit”. So instead, I would recommend:
Sugar substitutes. Yes they can make you gassy/poopy. It’s trial and error to find the right substitute and right amount to use, but once you get it, you’ll be able to avoid a ton of sugar. For example, a teaspoon of stevia on my coffee is fine. Monkfruit instead of sugar but only half as much for savory dishes works for me. Allulose for home made ice cream is fine as well. And so on.
Eat water-rich food to make you feel full but not consume a lot of calories. Celery and cucumbers are good snacks and can be paired with other food.
A bit more pricey, but shiratake is basically zero calories and comes in noodle, rice, or cube form.
Finding a brand of protein bar that you genuinely enjoy eating is a huge deal.
I have my preferred brand and when I have 1 or 2 I feel like I just had some chocolate bars, while its still a fair chunk of calories its also 50g of protein and not much fat or sugar.
I went vegan and bitch is skinnnay now, although it's not why I did it. Also low fat high carb, NOT keto, but just paying attention to your carb intake, and having a diet high in healthy fats will keep you full. Keto is for specific genetic epilepsy syndromes and not good for anything else no matter what people tell you.
Eat less. It sounds obvious, I know. But prepare your meal as normal, divide it in half and put half in a container in the fridge. Eat the other half, then distract yourself for half an hour. If you’re still ravenous, heat up the other half and have it. But you probably won’t be. And you’ve got your next meal ready to go!
You have to figure out a diet you can comfortably maintain forever, eat for your target weight. It's no use just losing weight, you have to stay at a healthy weight.
So it's going to be individual. For me, increased activity is the only factor, apparently I eat the same all the time. So walking everywhere or adding extra exercise works better.
I had a friend who lost weight by just reduced portions - she literally just took 1/3 less of everything. Like left more space on her plate. And another who ate popcorn for supper. Regular breakfast, regular lunch, then in the evening just popcorn. So again was eating 2/3 of what she had been. But then you have to keep it that way to maintain the weight.
Weighting every day at the same time.
Using a smart weight that logs the measurements. Using software that smoothens out the readings, so you don't stress about day to day changes.
Don't want to advertise, but combination of Withings scale and trendweight website works great for me.
And ultimately, combination of fasting and exercise is ideal for me. Every calorie spent and every calorie not eaten helps.
If you're finding it hard to get started, totally strict exclusions can force you to start actually thinking about what you're putting in your mouth. Even if you don't particularly care about veganism from a moral/ethical viewpoint, try following the diet for a while. You'd be surprised how much snack food contains milk powder, or other animal products. Strictly following the rules eliminates mindless consumption, then after a while you find yourself thinking whether or not something is worth consuming, rather than just sticking it in your mouth because it's there.
The timing of the day in which I eat certain things. I lost 15kg over a year just by cutting sweets and carbs after 4pm. I still ate them, especially in the morning.
And talking about morning - "breakfast like a king, supper like a beggar" also contributed to that weight loss.
Nowadays I am not strict but whenever I see myself going over my weight I first take those two measures up before making any calorie cuts
Edit: although these are food habits, so I don't know if it really answers your question. Exercise is the other thing that helps, you don't even need a lot of it
Weigh yourself consistently (i.e. same time, same outfit) - I find it easiest to do straight after jumping out of the shower in the morning, post-poop and pre-breakfast, but ymmv. And the important part, record it. I have smart scales, which makes life easier, but absolutely not essential. There's something very motivating about watching the line go down - and will quickly highlight if you're on the right track, or if you need to cut back a little more.
It sounds super counter intuitive but I recommend newbies weigh themselves multiple times a day for the first few weeks or months and write down the date and time of each new low (or use a tracking app) to get used to the idea that your weight fluctuates wildly throughout the day.
Just because you got a bad weigh-in doesnt mean the diet didnt do anything all week. A salty carb heavy meal last night (that was still within calories) can fuck up a weigh-in bigtime.
Daily walks. I started barely being able to walk more than a few steps, I was in a really terrible shape. Nowadays, I will walk at least 8km daily. More as often as I can. It feels too good. Exercising regularly and in the long-run is key.
Eating healthier food, aka fresh fruits, veggies, real fresh bread and NOT eating industrial pre-processed food anymore. Like none at all. No 'just this one time' or 'just one byte'. No more feeding myself with ready-made dishes, no more fast-food (I still ate delicious burgers and fries mind you... just all hand-made with fresh food), no industrial sweets or whatever either. And no industrial beverage either, aka no soda not even light.
Not being an asshole with myself. I failed many times at keeping my motivation. No blaming and no hating (I was already punished enough by all that wasted time it meant for me to fall back into my bad habits) but I kept on going while trying to understand how/why I failed (so I would not do the same mistake again).
I halved my weight and I still eat plenty (even chocolate, pastries or things like that, just... a lot less and never industrially made), I replaced me eating shit (literally, industrial are feeding us shit) by me eating actual food (and enjoying preparing it), and I also retook control my body, muscles and joints, by starting to move it... like it is was designed to. We're not designed to sit on a couch or in front of computer all day long (be it to work or to play).
Enjoy experimenting with cooking and food prepping a lot more to find new healthy Staples you like with more vegetables, protein.and healthy fats (edited). Eat more fermented foods. Don't buy junkfood/sweets, cook or bake healthy versions of junkfood instead. But avoid artificial sweeteners, they mess with your gut biome. Add less sugar to things. Just look for zero added sugars on packages. Bam, easy. 🙃
The best thing I ever did was fast 16 ish hours until after noon then broke with a light healthy snack. You can almost eat whatever you want after that because you eliminating 1/3 of your meals. I lost a ton of weight that way
Track your calories, macros, and any micronutrients that you're concerned about (e.g., sodium, fiber). Set a goal and stick to it. I use the LoseIt app and a digital kitchen scale.
Drink a lot of water. Half your body weight (in lbs) in ounces. So if you weigh 130 lbs, drink 130 ÷ 2 = 65 oz of water daily. This is your baseline; add more for exercise. Don't go overboard because too much water is bad for you.
Aim for 45-60 minutes of vigorous exercise 3-4 times a week. I like weightlifting for this. On the other days, be active, but don't push yourself too much. You need rest for recovery.
After your workouts, don't eat back all your calories, but do consider having something protein-heavy.
Sleep. I can't emphasize enough how important sleep is. Try to get 7-8 hours every night. This is the hardest one for me personally; I don't have a ton of advice. But developing a bedtime routine helps.
Weigh yourself every day first thing in the morning, after you've used the bathroom and before you've had anything to eat or drink, with no clothes on. I like my Withings scale because the app tracks my measurements over time.
Have a mindset of lifestyle change - otherwise, if you go back to old habits, you're likely to gain back any weight you lose.
don't consume sugar. get that shit out of your house. do not snack, ever. do not cheat. habits are all about consistency. get used to being hungry at the end of the day. eat a carrot, fatass.
I track my macros. I have a jar of Chilli Crisp and a jar of hot honey on hand at all times.
If I make my lean chicken tacos for dinner and Ive got a bunch of carbs left i put the hot honey on, if I have fats left over I use the Chilli Crisp, if Im running light on both just a small pinch of chilli powder.
Ice cubes peppermint gum. To chew when others are having dessert. I've eaten, I don't need empty calories, but my teeth are still hungry. Gum gives them something to do, and the little crunch of Xylitol helps it feel more like eating than other sugarless gums.
I find it easier to maintain a hard no-snacking policy, than to try to reduce snacking but with case-by-case exceptions. Stick to eating at mealtimes only, rather than allowing yourself to rationalise that slice of cake (it's a colleague's birthday, rude not to), bag of chips (I only had a small lunch) or dozen donuts (they'll go stale if I don't eat them, that's wasteful).
I'm working on losing a few kgs for playing sports, so I'm trying to make changes that are sustainable for the rest of my life. E.g. quark and granola instead of bread for breakfast, and no more snacks in between meals (RIP stroopwafels).
That way I only need to change habits once instead of multiple times like when you're dieting, and the effect is slow but noticeable.