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
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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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.
Anyways, take that for what it's worth.
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
It's hard to talk about this without getting circular.
Primary Loop: Hunger -> Eat -> Time -> Hunger -> Eat (loop)
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.
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.
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)
[1] https://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/noncommunicable-di...
If obesity weren't linked to eating too much, how come there are no obese people in concentration camps?
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.
Reduced appetite or appetite suppression is a very common side effect of those types of medications.
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.
You’re not taking a huge portion of your calories budget to have your coffee with cream. The sugar is a killer.
I do agree that coffee with milk has no taste tho
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Congratulations on your progress!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction#Life_exten...
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.
When this is going on I think a lot about Ego Depletion - the idea that willpower is a limited resource. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion
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.
Keep up the good work!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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 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.
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.
> I'm down 30 pounds from my max.
Huge congratulations on the progress!
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I don’t know man, just do what you can.
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"
P.S : I still smoke & overeat
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.
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.
Good luck with your journey. Years of life can be hard to change.
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 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.
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.
---
[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.
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 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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
Or try eating more protein. 1kg of chicken breast (1600 kcal). I couldn't (but I'm "normally sized" and my stomach is as well)
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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?
Some people are able to avoid hunger by sticking to certain foods, but that's never worked for me.
I know that doesn't solve the problem. But try treating this as an addiction, it will help.
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.
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.
To me, this sounds like your body wants something and it never gets it.
Good luck, I also struggle with weight and it's clear there's something we have not figured out yet.
Ultra false. It takes years to get fat while in few months you can lose a significant amount.
Not to be that guy... but are you eating low calorie dense foods or high calorie dense foods?
The article points out that an Apple and a Donut have roughly the same volume, but an Apple is half the calories.
Also, as the article suggests, cutting out liquid calories (that don't satisfy hunger) are easy first steps.
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
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.
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.)
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.
https://jasn.asnjournals.org/content/31/8/1667
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Hope springs eternal.
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.
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.
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.
Lastly, consider carnivore or alternate day fasting. You can get there, if you want to.
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.
My point is that "there" is a miserable place, and so I don't stay "there".
Your view is contradicted by the scientific evidence.
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.
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.
The little things really damn matter.
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 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.
> 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.
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!
I realized when I was 20 that I could easily drink 15% of my energy needs. Mostly empty calories (soda and the like).
I stopped. Now I drink water 98% of the time.
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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.
"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.
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.
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.
*Cost you several orders of magnitude more
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.
Even if there was a device that could scan all food before eating it, they would still exempt some meals with the "do not count" argument.
Rule of thumb, that if a meal is easy and fast to prepare, then it is probably not suited for a diet.
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.
Most people just don't have that kind of willpower.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/your-fat-cells-never...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18454136/
She lost 90 pounds doing that in under a year.
> 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]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion#Reproducibility_...
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916166528...
[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story...
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.
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.
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
Buon appetito.
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.
To some extent you always need to manage your caloric intake of course - but if you exercise regularly, the occasional indulgence isn’t a big deal.
Running is quite good for this, it will tell you how things are going, far better than any scale.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A good tule of thumb is to minimize the number of things you eat with barcodes.
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.
Barcodes aren't only for whole meals, they're also food ingredients. When I cook at home, most of the stuff that goes into the recipe has a barcode.
It's not even wrapping any text! It's just 'quote-unquote" used by itself as a prefix modifier on the next noun phrase.
Disgusting.
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
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes
https://youtu.be/klKAzJ4FUzg?t=715
He’s a well known power lifter who owns a gym. He walks about 20,000 steps a day and works out 4-5 days a week. He consumes ~2800 calories a day.
I’d say unless you work in manual labor or are a professional athlete you do not need to be consuming nearly this much.
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.