Well, yeah. Adipocytes multiply when you get fat. But when you lose weight, they don't apoptose, they just shrink in volume by giving up their lipid stores.
I kinda went down a rabbit hole a while back with certain treatments that can kill adipocytes, as there's actually some significant research backing both heat-generating and cold-generating treatments. They do kill fat cells, and they are flushed out of the body. But people who undergo such treatments do not lose fat. At best, these devices can reshape your fat, pulling it out of one area and distributing it more evenly in other areas.
The problem is that when you kill an adipocyte, it releases all of its triglycerides, which are then free to move around the blood stream. But when blood triglyceride levels are high and there isn't significant oxidation, other metabolic processes are triggered to start to store them. So you kill an adipocyte, release the triglycerides, which get reabsorbed into still living adipocytes, which now get engorged and then multiply again, replacing the fat cells that have been killed.
After learning quite a bit about these processes, I think these devices might actually be useful, not for losing fat, but by eliminating this sort of fat memory. In other words, they should be used after significant weight loss, because adipocytes are relatively empty and externally triggered apoptosis can kill the cells without releasing significant quantities of triglycerides which can be reabsorbed and trigger adipocyte mitosis. I think this would effectively reset that person to a state as if they had never been fat in the first place. Thoughts?
seems like it would be a good idea then to do a heavy strength based training session and fast before getting this done to maximize effectiveness. Those liberated triglycerides would be sucked up by muscle tissue to be used for repair.
Similar adaptions occur in muscle. The extent of new muscle fiber development (hyperplasia) is debated, so there are multiples factors influencing how muscle retains some memory of past strength ability.
Once you’ve reached a level of physical strength it’s easier to return to that level in the future. This has been a topic of debate in the sports world because past anabolic steroid use could therefore carry benefits into the future long after the athlete has stopped using the steroid. Non-professional athletes shouldn’t get too excited about using steroids, though, because the damage steroids do to the body’s own hormone systems also has lasting effects unless you plan on doing TRT for the rest of your life, which has its own downsides.
For average people this does show the importance of getting at least some exercise when you’re young. It’s much easier to get a little bit fit when you’re young which then makes it easier to stay fit in the future. Never too late too start.
I can't remember exactly what I was listening to, maybe some kind of NPR podcast.
But the doctor was mentioning that none of the influencers influencing young people to try T and Steroids (which is rampant right now) are ever mentioning that you are on a ticking clock to infertility as soon as you start this stuff. Some people can regain their fertility but it might take years, and some people are going to be permanently infertile even staying on HRT.
Plenty of those "alpha male" guys on social media are shooting blanks.
> Once you’ve reached a level of physical strength it’s easier to return to that level in the future.
If you're reading this and you're < 30 and physically weak (not overweight, but lacking muscle mass) I cannot stress enough what a year or two hitting the gym could do for your permanent strength and muscle mass.
I was ridiculously skinny and physically weak going into my 20s and I just assumed that was the way I was built. But I got into fitness in my early 20s and packed on quite a bit of muscle and it's genuinely shocking to me how much base-level muscle mass and strength I've retained now 15 years on.
I always felt one of the most demotivating things about working out was that all the effort I was putting into the gym would eventually go to waste when I stopped, but that's not true. Had I known this I'd probably have started working out much earlier and for much longer than I did.
> For average people this does show the importance of getting at least some exercise when you’re young.
They’ve known this for centuries. Quoting the great Socrates:
“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable."
> This has been a topic of debate in the sports world because past anabolic steroid use could therefore carry benefits into the future long after the athlete has stopped using the steroid.
Similar advantage is conveyed to athletes who had elevated (~male) testosterone levels in the past, even if they subsequently take blockers / go on HRT to ~female hormone levels.
I always hear this "TRT for life" thing but every bodybuilder I've known on gear has had no problem going on/off on a blast-and-cruise with post-cycle therapy.
They tell your brain you have lots of food in your stomach, which triggers lots of behavioral and metabolic changes. This does not necessarily reverse every effect of obesity, maybe not gene expression changes described in this article. But enough to keep weight off with ongoing treatment.
Yea, this actually explains the transcriptional expression and weight gain very well. Strong than the methylation evidence imo. I didn’t see any causal analysis only correlated and the cells still being there makes sense.
Is this true? When I looked into this issue it seemed the medical consensus is that fat cells are mostly constant throughout life, and weight gain happens through adipocyte hypertrophy.
It seems fasting causes Adipocyte apoptosis. It makes sense, there is cell death.
I lost 100 lbs fasting over 1.5 years. I did gain some weight back after stopping, but not much. Strangely, where I saw fat return was not where most of it came off.
Worse than that. Subcutaneous fat (which is the one you can trim off with liposuction) usually expands relying more in cell expansion and not in hyperplasia. Visceral fat on the other hand, is way more likely to involve hyperplasia and you cannot use liposuction against this type of fat. This is also the fat that is very hormonally active and increases the risks of diabetes, heart disease, cancers, strokes.
As someone who's struggled with weight loss, and have known others to struggle with it well, I think we colloquially called this "slow metabolism".
It always did feel like it was easier to gain weight than lose it, especially fat weight and not muscle weight for me.
I was recently sent a video about fat adaptation (basically teaching your body to be better at burning fat) by a very fit friend, but I wonder how much of that is bro science and how much of it is grounded in reality. Maybe worth looking into more deeply if it can counteract or balance out this.
For me, sugar was the reason I couldn't lose weight. I got a CGM (continuous glucose monitor) and got my blood sugar under control, and with very little effort I lost a lot of weight.
I use 90% cacao Lindt to control my sweet tooth. 1/2 the bar has 4g of sugar, and I consume it over hours. It also has the side effect of reducing my hunger. If you eat much of 90% chocolate, it makes you feel nausea. The trick is to put a small chip in your mouth and let it melt. It's quite delicious and I've not had any sweets in 80+ days.
I'm a chocolate fan myself and it was something I used to buy often, but just as I started getting into the hard stuff (80% or higher) I learned about all the problems with heavy metals in dark chocolate and specifically in Lindt, and then later learned about the use of child slaves which is an industry wide issue and not exclusive to Lindt/Russell Stover/Ghirardelli/Lindor although Lindt and Hershey are reportedly worse than other brands.
You can find brands that claim to be more ethical in terms of sourcing their cocoa, but the smaller brands that do are also less likely to have been tested for heavy metals.
While it's unclear how harmful the heavy metals would be to me specifically at the amounts I was eating, the whole thing kind of put me off chocolate in general and dark chocolate in particular. I rarely have it anymore.
I thought a CGM would help me lose weight but it turned out my body is a hero at managing sugar spikes. A pint of ice cream? Back to baseline in under an hour. Big meal, no big spike, etc.
So it turns out you can still gain weight even if you don’t spike your blood sugar. At least for me.
This worked for me for a while but I learned to love dark chocolate toooooo much.
I can now eat a 100g bar of 100% chocolate in a single sitting if I feel like it… And that’s 55g of fat, so more or less the fat I should be eating in a whole day.
Insulin sensitivity is a real thing. The less sensitive to insulin you are, the more of it is produced to process a given amount of glucose. And the more insulin (anabolic) is produced, the less glucagon (catabolic) is.
In other words, low insulin sensitivity means your body remains in the feeding (fat building) state more, as opposed to fasting (fat burning).
Insulin sensitivity decreases with age, and with excessive intake of particularly simple carbs. It can be improved through fasting, certain dietary supplements, and low carb diet.
All of this is, to the best of my knowledge, not disputed or 'bro science'.
A lot of people blame failure to lose fat on a "slow metabolism" but this is usually incorrect. Have you had an actual resting metabolic rate (RMR) test to quantity your baseline total daily energy expenditure?
Fat adaptation is a real thing. Endurance athletes focused on longer events will target some of their training around that energy system. This is more complex than can really be explained in an online comment but basically you want to do long training sessions below your lactate threshold in a glycogen depleted state.
They didn't mean it was literally a slow metabolism. They meant that what the article is about is often refered to as a "slow metabolism". It's a misnomer since that is not the mechanism but there is definitely a phenomenon at play, which is what the article is about, the actual phenomenon rather than the bro science.
There is also a conflation of a slowing metabolism and low energy availability, which can reduce the amount of energy expended during the day (because you feel tired and do less). It can be quite subtle but when I've done some extended periods in a calorie deficit I start to notice subtle things, like a propensity to sit a bit longer, or to reduce my overall body movements. My resting metabolism is the same (I've had it measured a few times) but my body looks for ways to expend less energy.
It is well known that if you gain muscle then lose it, it is easier to regain it than the first time (IIRC, the cells store extra nucleii?). This could be a similar effect but with fat cells.
As well as the "cell memory", the total number of fat cells you have in your body is set during adolescence, then it remains constant for the rest of your adult life. (https://www.nature.com/articles/ncpgasthep1189).
During adolescence, if you gain weight, you create new fat cells. During adulthood, the fat cells themselves just get larger. Arguably the best thing you can do is avoid obesity during childhood and adolescence at all costs.
The physical mechanism is mitochondrial uncoupling proteins (UCP). They regulate how much energy is wasted as heat when converting ADP to ATP, determining how efficient one’s metabolism is. When you lose weight, your UCP proteins start wasting less and less energy when producing ATP, which is one of the things that makes dieting so hard.
Actually affecting that pathway is largely beyond us at the moment (that’s the bro science) but the mechanism is relatively well understood.
I used to think the same. I would guess that you do not have a big breakfast. Without getting a real meal in for breakfast, hitting a huge calorie surplus is difficult. If you counted your calories and tried to get a 1000 calorie meal for breakfast, hit 3000 calories a day, you’d probably gain 10% in a few weeks. Weight training is good too… you don’t want to just gain fat.
1000 calorie breakfast = bagel with cream cheese, 3 eggs, banana, some berries, protein shake. It’s a whole lot more than a bowl of cereal.
It's hard for me to gain weight. But in my 30s, for a few months I was eating 3000 calories plus. My breakfast smoothie was about 800 calories - 2-3 scoops protein, a banana, almond butter. I gained about 5 pounds after 3 months. It was just too hard to eat that much while also eating healthy.
I had a friend who was trying to bulk up make that claim (he was 6', 140 lbs), and then when I finally convinced him to write down everything he ate in a day, it was like 1800 calories.
Fat adaptation is not bro science, it is what happens when you do not consume enough carbohydrates to meet your TDEE so your mitochondria “learn” to become really efficient at burning fatty acids. It’s the whole premise behind keto/low carb. When used to our modern high-carb diets, the adaptation takes some time for genes to activate, since we eat a lot and never have long enough fasting periods to be able to quickly switch between glucose and fatty acid metabolism.
If there really was a gene that allowed you to survive on substantially less food than your peers, pretty much all humans would have said gene. The history of humanity is rife with famine, and that gene would be a game-changer for survival
It's all about tradeoffs. In this case, I wonder if there's an "efficient metabolism" gene that makes your body put a higher percentage of incoming nutrients into long-term storage (mostly in fat tissue). Carriers of this gene would be more likely to survive a famine, but less likely to outrun a predator or defend against an attack by another leaner human, who's genes allocate incoming nutrients to be utilized more effectively in the short-term.
I think it’s quite the opposite because it would not be a gene that allows you to survive on less food - it would be a gene that favors replacing glycogen stores over lipid stores. That kind of mechanism would be pretty negative to survival until the modern era of sedentary civilization.
Samoan have a high degree of a particular variant of gene CREBRF that's highly associated with high BMI (see https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3620). Pop-Sci says it's an adaptation to the life in an island (might also be a founder effect?)
...don't we? According to [0], the amount of food (by energy intake) people get is very diverse worldwide. People can survive famine situations for a long time, and people' problems with obesity is linked to exactly those survival genes.
Granted, some animals are much better at it, crocodiles and bears and stuff can go without food for months.
I have had a slow metabolism since I was a teenager. I don't think I've ever experienced a day in my life where I haven't thought about my weight, body composition, or felt guilty about eating food. And I'm not even that big. I've just never had the physique I wanted, and I always attributed it to having a slow metabolism.
I'm turning 40 in May, so since the start of February, I've finally pulled up my bootstraps and started taking my health seriously. I was likely 225 lbs at 5'10". Easily 32+% body fat.
The first thing I did was a deep extended fast, drinking only water, electrolytes, supplements, bone broth, and black coffee. I was able to shed a good amount of weight, fast. However, the longest I could fast for was 6 days; No matter what I tried, I could not figure out how to get good sleep. I tried once more for 4 days, and saw no improvement, so I stopped trying to fast. Mentally I could handle it, but without quality sleep, there was no way I could continue. This was mid-March, and I was at 204.5 lbs.
Also in mid-March, I did a VO2 max test, while fasted for 72 hours. It was very apparent that my metabolism was fat adapted. My VO2 max was very low at 33.8 ml/kg, which was to be expected. My RMR was found to be 1998 kcal/day, and my fat max HR was 161 bpm. Crossover to 100% carbs was at 179 bpm.
Since then, I've done a 180, and started eating about 1800-2000 kcal per day. My first goal is to ensure I eat 170-200g of protein per day, through as much whole food as possible, using whey or protein when needed. The rest of my diet is very clean, with no real restrictions on fats, and keeping carbs as low as possible. It's a fairly ketogenic diet, but I don't get worked up if my net carbs go to 50+g. Foods are usually Greek yogurt, flax, pumpkin seeds, nuts, eggs, berries, fish, poultry, and green vegetables/salads. If I ever add fat to anything, it's extra virgin olive oil first, then maybe butter/cream (i.e. in coffee). I take a number of supplements like Omega-3 fish oils, multivitamins, magnesium, and make my own electrolyte drink. Creatine as well.
I find that by the time I've done all of this, I have a very difficult time eating, and even trying to fit anything else in. I am never hungry, nor do I feel cravings for other foods. We just came back from Miami, and I had some ice cream with the kids, and some baked goods. I enjoyed them, but I was very excited to be back to my normal foods.
Since then, I've been running 3-4 times a week, focusing on Zone 2 training. I do 4 days a week of weightlifting, focusing on the big compound lifts. I have a 10K race on May 11, and a sprint distance triathlon on July 27 that I'm training for.
For this entire month, I have stayed at a constant 207.5 lbs +/- 0.5 lbs. I have been tracking other measurements like circumferences and body fat (using calibers and BIA scale), and it's apparent that I have gained strength, regained muscle mass, and improved my overall fitness. Running is still at a slow pace, but actually enjoyable now. My wearables estimate that my VO2 max is 37 ml/kg; they did show 33 ml/kg last month when I had the test, so they seem to be correlated.
I think the hardest part of the last month has been the sheer amount of work I've put in, only to watch the scale stay steady. I track my intake rigorously, weighing everything I can and using MyFitnessPal to track it all. How are people able to eat anything else? I couldn't add rice or grains to my diet even if I wanted to, I would easily hit 2500+ kcal per day.
People eat that much? Or rather, burn that much? I burn 2000 kcal per rest day, and maybe 2800-3200 kcal on workout days.
I will stick with this, since it is working to improve my health and fitness. It would just be nice to see the scale move without having to fast for multiple days. Cursed slow metabolism.
In terms of where carbs fit in, you're eating 200g of protein a day, which at a guess is 2x to 4x your lean body mass in kg. I'm not saying that it's wrong, it's probably very effective, but the average diet probably swaps that (historically very expensive) protein out for (historically very cheap) bread and rice.
You aren't cursed with a slow metabolism, you have just been having too many calories. If you are truly never hungry but still not losing weight, then why not reduce your calories by 200-300 a day?
How's your light environment/sunlight exposure? What's your waking body temperature (under arm for 10 minutes)? Have you had a thyroid panel done? (TSH, Free T3, Free T4, Reverse T3)
>but I wonder how much of that is bro science and how much of it is grounded in reality
It's probably bro science or contributing a small amount to any effort. The biggest problem is the food industry serving shit in large portions, which can be hard for populations to psychologically resist (see: America). Most things in the grocery store are shit too.
I don't think you can effectively teach people to resist it though, you'd have to get rid of the shit being there so it's not even an option.
That's how my brother lost weight finally. He just never bought any of the stuff - so it wasn't even in his house. But he lives alone right now so if you live in a group setting you might be, in weak moments, snacking on bad things that other people brought in. It's kind of also why I don't think companies should provide candy machines etc.
metabolism is orthogonal . It's possible to have a fast metabolism and still be obese if you're eating at a surplus. But it's also possible people with faster metabolisms may be more successful at weight loss if already obese. So a 300-lbs person who eats 10,000 calories/day to be weight stable will find it easier to lose weight compared to to a 300 lbs person who is stable at 4,000 cal/day. This can also explain how some people lose tons of weight on GLP-1 drugs, whereas others lose less. The guy eating 10,000 calories/day will lose much more weight more rapidly owning to having a much bigger metabolic furnace, as soon as he restricts eating and his body is no longer getting 10,000 calories/day. Unfortunately, there are no studies that investigate the link, if any, with metabolism and dieting success.
10k calories a day is what a black bear eats preparing for hibernation. And it is what Michael Phelps would eat daily when training in the pool for hours on end.
Obese people can remain obese eating 1000 calories a day. I recall one episode of My 600lb Life and the show's featured person that day was at 900 or 1200 calories a day and still didn't lose weight. Might have still been gaining.
It is a dynamic system. People tend to only consider the CI in CI/CO.
Jason Fung is probably the world's leading research expert on obesity. If you want videos to watch on it, it starts and ends with this guy. He has done a ton of lectures and blogposts going back over a decade, and also has the stereotypical clickbaity YouTube videos.
He has surely dedicated a significant portion of his life to his own pet theories on obesity, but to consider him a well-regarded expert is very misleading.
He has quite a few claims that are just...ridiculous, and his pop science books have some serious flaws (as reported by actual experts).
I always used to think negatively about people that were severely overweight (still do unconsciously if I'm being honest) as I always attributed their obesity to lack of will power. I'm a huge proponent of better living through chemistry (steroids - with frequent blood work, nootropics, whatever) and recently I decided to get my abs back. I hopped on some compounded semiglutide and was blown away by the change in my attitude towards food. I had always snacked at night after the kids went to bed and had built up about 25 pounds over the past decade. I was able to drop it all in 3 months without any sort of dieting, I just ate when I was hungry. Decided to not eat after 6:30pm and just did it, no issues while on the semiglutide.
Really changed my attitude about food, and my body and minds interaction with it. A lot of this is subconscious and really hard to get control of. The fact a chemical compound was able to change my mental relationship with food also put an interesting spin on my ideas about consciousness and self control as a whole. We are just slaves to our biological processes.
I had this same experience, but I have not continued to take the medication after a short experiment.
I found I could get a similar outcome (subjective experience) through my food selection
Today I’ve eaten around 2kg of vegetables today (zucchini, capsicum, eggplant, cauliflower, spinach) all of which was under 500 calories,
and I’ve eaten fish.
If I eat a massive amount of vegetables and get ~200g protein, I don’t feel I’m depriving myself and am satiated on under 2000 calories, previously I would typically eat over 3000 on a normal day.
As for people lacking willpower, the genetics of hunger mean all of us experience vastly different levels of hunger. You might be interested to read about the family in Pakistan who could not produce a relevant hormone leptin, and the toddlers driven to fighting by insatiable hunger to steal food from each other, and the dramatic change in their lives after medical intervention with leptin injections
My brother's family has done something similar although in a different direction. They have been strictly carnivore for several years now. Able to eat large amounts of food while keeping calories low and feeling satiated. It's worked well for them.
As this article shows, there are incredibly complex feedback mechanisms around weight and metabolism, but thermodynamics are still fundamentally a thing.
After he died last year, I ran across this engineering and accounting approach to weight maintenance and loss written up by John Walker (one of the Autodesk founders). It worked very well for him and changed the way I thought about weight and eating. It is interesting reading because he is "one of us"
https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
Basically, he uses a first level approximation of the body as a control system with a feedback loop, and tries to pin down some techniques to bring the system to a known good state (target weight) and manage that loop for long term stability.
The problem with diets based only on calories is that they don't take satiety into account, nor health.
Calories is what makes you gain/lose weight, it's basic physics. Satiety is what makes you want to eat more/less. Nutrients are what is making you healthy.
Fiber and protein tends to make you feel full. Lack of them allow you to eat large amount of calories without feeling full. You need to keep track of micro and macro nutrient to stay healthy.
I would slightly tweak your last. Different nutrients (vitamins/whatever) also impact your body in specific ways. Not just "makes you healthy" but "causes you to do certain things." Caffeine is the easy example here.
This gets back to the "feedback loops" above. There are certainly feedback loops. But you are unlikely to be able to prime any of them by just increasing an input. And increasing output is something you have to train the body to do.
On that last, I think it is easy to model weight gain as something you train the body to do, as well? Certainly fits the model of the article.
There are also flywheel levels of energy use for some folks. Consider the amount of calories a professional athlete goes through. We can say exercise doesn't help weight loss at the population level with relative certainty. It is also relatively safe to say exercise burns an obscene amount of calories in athletes.
Beyond satiety, you also have to consider the role food is playing in the person's life. Is the person hooked on Dopamine, with food a (the?) main source of it? Can they introduce other enjoyable and meaningful activities that take their mind off food? Even if a person is not addicted per-se to the dopamine food provides, if their life is boring and seems to lack meaning, they will still turn to food as a major part of their daily routine.
You also have to consider that some people find daily planning and organization more difficult than others. Keeping to a good diet can require a great deal of planning on a daily basis.
So obesity is often only a symptom of more underlying issues like depression loneliness, a struggle for meaning and connection, ADHD, and more.
Sure; it's a layered system, each one taking more effort or thinking than the other.
Easy diets: drink this shake 3x a day. Don't eat $food_category. Limit calory intake to $amount / day.
More complex: The above, plus macronutrients.
More complex: The above, plus micronutrients.
Add dimensions like lifestyle choices (vegetarianism, veganism etc) or food sensitivities (celiac, lactose intolerance).
I'm no diet expert and need to lose some weight myself but the main advice I'd give is to get stable first. Plan your meals, eat regular meals at regular intervals, keep excess / luxuries / "rewards" to a minimum. Only when you have reached a stable and sustainable pattern should you start to make adjustments. The problem with diets or major lifestyle changes is that they're hard to keep up, simply because they are so different from your usual. The shake diets generally don't work long term because people suffer and go back to their old habits, if not overcompensate because their body signals a deprivation of some kind.
You just need to keep it simple. Every time you are hungry have an enormous glass of water, and eat all the vegetables you want, always. Snacks are carrots, cauliflower, snap peas, cucumber.
Avoid sugar and fat as much as possible.
Remain in calorie deficit and you will lose weight and get plenty of nutrients.
Quite so, and I think he does address that, but those are all second level factors, along with activity level, exercise, and their effect on your caloric requirements. He puts together a bunch of excel spreadsheets for tracking many factors, but I have found the simple discipline of accounting for what I eat in a little txt file on my phone sufficient to align my choices with my desired outcome.
> ...it is plausible that epigenetic memory could also play a role in many other contexts, including addictive diseases. Recent advancements in targeted epigenetic editing global remodelling of the epigenome provide promising new approaches.
"Darn, I think I've contracted some alcoholism. Could you order me another bottle of the reset pills?"
More like "just take these GLP-1 agonists for the rest of your life". Those seem to have an effect on addictions etc. But at least when it comes to weight, people seem to put it back on once they quit. Perhaps the GLP-1 agonist is lacking an epigenetic reset button ...
Fat cells only turn over about 20% per year. You basically need to maintain a reduced weight for 5 years before the fat cells "forget" the higher weight.
If you come off it before that 5 years are up, yeah, you are probably expected to bounce back somewhat.
You might not need to be on GLP-1 forever, but you might need to be on it longer than people currently think.
> However, maintaining weight loss is a considerable challenge, especially as the body seems to retain an obesogenic memory that defends against body weight changes
This is validating as I’m very skeptical about this when looking for a partner that currently has a physiology I’m interested in but had one I wasn’t interested in at some point before, and this seems to be a shared experience
For me weightloss worked over a long period of time with a couple of strategies.
1. One was not eating breakfast, this works well when I'm in the office. Then you have fasting built into your daily routine. This has many metabolic benefits.
2. Switching to a low carb diet (keto). I never thought I'd quit eating bread, but reducing carbonhydrates (esp. sugar) and eating more eggs & meat had the biggest effect on my weight. More so than doing sports. This is just a rough guideline, I don't follow this very strictly.
3. Sports + Fasting: Sometimes on the weekends I go on a hike or do some sports and only eat when I get home in the afternoon (e.g. steak). This forces my body to take the energy from the fat reserves.
The magic is that just counting calories basically leads to the same outcome: less carbs and sugary stuff, less fatty meats, more lean meat, more veggies, etc.
I don't understand why I get downvotes for that. Those are the things I did in the past two years to get to my dream weight and hold it without yoyo effect.
Don't try to lose weight fast. Don't do a diet for a limited amount of time. Change your eating habits to something you can live with permanently. Avoid sugar in drinks, it's so easy to get a lot of calories without feeling full. Sugar in general will give you hunger attacks. For me personally I feel best if I have a big part of calories coming from protein, followed by less carbs and some fat. But removing sugar from drinks alone lost me 30kg, without changing any other habits. Better for the general health as well.
Going to the gym helped me immensely. Not so much in losing weight directly but in feeling better and fresher.
> Going to the gym helped me immensely. Not so much in losing weight directly but in feeling better and fresher.
This. I've found working out has changed the kinds of foods I crave, making it easier to adhere to a diet. I'd usually feel more like a steak with eggs and brocoli rather than a deep-fried burger.
Weigh yourself every day. Journal it. This sets up an objective metric to calibrate against.
Set medium term goals. Don't try to lose 20 kilos in six months. Lose the next kilo by this time in two weeks. Similarly, don't try to lose 0.1 kilos by tomorrow. Weight naturally fluctuates day to day based on water intake, sodium intake, muscle fatigue, and other things. But in the range of 2-3 weeks, you should be able to lose enough weight to see signal in the noise of day to day fluctuations.
If you aren't hitting your medium term goals, find a way to cut calories more. Starting the first month doing a comprehensive calorie log is valuable to help calibrate what foods and portion sizes are relatively problematic.
The rest is just finding eating patterns that work for you that help keep calorie levels low enough. There's a lot of advice about ways to do that, and most need to be taken with a grain of salt, but it's probably true that you can min/max at the margins by increasing fiber intake, increasing protein intake, drinking more water, eating more raw plants, intermittent fasting, and that sort of thing. But you'll mostly see fractional improvements on top of the bottom line math: calories burned need to exceed calories consumed.
As noted elsewhere here, it's a lot of exercise to burn off a few pieces of bacon. Exercise is good for weight loss, but again, it's mostly at the margins for the average person, especially if that person is not an athlete.
I agree with your point in general, but I think the paragraph below is the most important:
> The rest is just finding eating patterns that work for you that help keep calorie levels low enough. There's a lot of advice about ways to do that, and most need to be taken with a grain of salt, but it's probably true that you can min/max at the margins by increasing fiber intake, increasing protein intake, drinking more water, eating more raw plants, intermittent fasting, and that sort of thing. But you'll mostly see fractional improvements on top of the bottom line math: calories burned need to exceed calories consumed.
It's "easy" to lose a ton of weight if you don't eat anything at all. But that's obviously not sustainable. However, what I've found works, is that those things "at the margins" as you say actually have a huge effect on adherence to the "diet". Some foods require a tremendous amount of willpower to only consume in "reasonable" quantities. Think candy bars, chips, the like.
The point is to take note about how you feel after a given meal. Some foods, even though the meal would bring enough calories, leave you with a feeling of wanting more. Avoid these. Others leave you feeling full for hours. Go for those. What I've noticed is that sometimes, the effect may come from "secondary" ingredients, like the dressing on a salad, whereas the salad itself will leave you feeling full for the whole afternoon.
There are things you may enjoy quite a lot, so if they're of the "can't stop eating them sort", you'll have to forego them entirely. It's actually much easier to not eat them at all (and, ideally, not even have them in the house) than hoping you'll be reasonable. With time, these foods will lose their appeal, and you won't randomly crave them every day. Getting over this first step is what I find hardest.
I think you need to make it sustainable. I never had to do it consistently but even I know...
Nobody is going to live hungry all the time.
Nobody is going to grow old counting calories every damn day.
So rather than just eating less make sure to work out some. Consistently.
Id suggest strength training.
I did a full body strength training workout 2-3 times a week.
Some may suggest doing leg days, arm days, etc but going there takes time on itself and i have other places to be than the gym.
To match that strength training eat more protein.
Things like chicken are your friend. This tends to be higher on the satiety index so you'll feel full faster and you'll eat less without it being so painfull.
Eat a bit of protein with every meal
Really there's a whole lot of other stuff that you can fill yourself up with that won't be too bad for ya.
And when you go for a carb? Get the complex one if it's a choice. It'll dampen that peak in insulin.
Avoid the sugary stuff. It's addictive for sure but taper off.
Eat before going to the store. Make the hard decisions there not with the easy snack within reach in the evening.
Do a bit of everything that works until it becomes second nature.
Overfocusing on one silver bullet doesn't tend to work.
This is advice people often give, but unfortunately it's wrong. Exercise and working out are useful and healthy, but it's not a sufficient tool for losing weight in most situations. The core problem is that the amount of calories you eat is in the ballpark of thousands, while a workout will burn in the order of hundreds (excluding athletes and such). This along with metabolic adaptation means that it's always easier to out eat what you burn extra. In other words, you can't outrun your fork. Exercise is healthy for a wide array of reasons, but it's only a small part of losing weight. Nearly all of it has to come from your eating habits.
I might consider working with a cognitive behavioral therapist. Since you’ve already lost weight, you do know (in big picture terms) how to lose/not gain weight: eat a healthy diet consistently and get regular exercise. For most people who struggle with their weight, there are emotional eating patterns or even just bad habits that are just hard to break on their own.
Of course knowledge about diet and exercise is immensely valuable, but if there are psychological factors getting in the way, it’s going to be harder to adopt a consistently healthy lifestyle.
Probably my only good advice is to not take internet advice too seriously, which I'm sure you are aware of. The most epistemologically sound advice i can give is try everything and find what works for you. Lots of internet people advocate for low carb approaches for many apparently valid reasons. Recently, i tried eating whole food plant based and it's been an amazing 2 weeks (yes incredibly short time to report). I'm not trying that hard, i'm eating well, and feel amazing. If i keep going I'll probably supplement protein, vitamin b, omegas, fish, etc, but my weight is just falling off so far, unlike any other eating plan i've tried. Not super strict either. Eating whatever i want when i eat out, but i like how it makes me feel so i tend to stick with it when possible. Your mileage will vary. It's literally 2 weeks so far lol
Its a lifestyle change not a diet. Don't stop the diet / exercise when you get to the "target" weight.
This idea sucks when you are looking at a plate of lettuce leaves - but you should also avoid extreme diets and extreme exercise as it is unsustainable.
in addition to this, start by making small, but permanent changes to your lifestyle over time, if you change everything at once then of course you'll revert pretty quickly
There aren't any, statistically speaking. All strategies are about equally ineffective, long-term. Only really expensive, high-touch, long-term personal engagements by professionals achieve really significant results, and even there, less so than you might think.
The answers that actually work are "move to an environment where you will likely get and stay skinnier" (maybe a different, skinnier country) or (this one's new! There's finally a semi-reasonable answer to this question!) "take GLP-1 agonists". There's no strategy that'll do it (for outliers, yes, but over a population, no)
Well, if the above paper is correct there is something you need to know. Epigenetic changes are caused my the methylation of DNA. So if there are epigentic chnages that are causing you to gain weight, what needs to be done is to Demethylate the DNA. This is done through Demethylase enzymes:
It's not about the weight, it's about the exercise.
Start with something easy and establish a rule that won't ever be broken. If you break a rule once, you'll lose the fight.
My rule, for example, when I started to train more:
- start with 10 crunches every morning and evening
- increase by 2 crunches every day
- no exceptions
When you are at ~2 months in, you can add weight training to it to get stronger.
Additionally, find a sport that you can do once or twice a week that is FUN to do. By FUN I really mean it. There's no point in doing sports if you don't enjoy it.
If you enjoy playing batminton, go for it! If you enjoy table tennis, go for it! If you enjoy Kung Fu, Krav Maga, or whatever ... go for it!
Sports isn't about reaching goals, it's about having fun while doing it. Otherwise, you will not overcome the struggles. Your brain needs a reward, and enjoying sports helps you keep wanting more of it.
Have you actually lost weight like that? I think exercise is a huge trap for weight loss. Cardio exercise makes you healthy, but it will also make you hungry. Especially if you are not used to it. Overweight people are usually already overeating. They can't deal with hunger and cravings well. If you make them do cardio, they will likely eat back whatever they burned and most likely much more. And even if they don't, they were already overeating, so chances are high you are not in a caloric deficit still. I have lost a lot of weight (30kg) three times now (gained some of it back every time unfortunately) and I think there is much truth to "You don’t lose weight at the gym, you lose weight in the kitchen.".
Here's what the "The Renaissance Diet 2.0" book recommends:
1) Don't lose more than 10% of your bodyweight in the same weight loss period.
2) Don't lose more than 1% of body weight per week.
3) At the end of a weight loss period, transition to eating at maintenance calories for a while before starting a new weight loss period.
A common mistake is to completely stop dieting when you reach your goal weight. This is a bad idea because your body has adapted to the diet (e.g. decreased energy expenditure) and it's therefore easy to regain weight rapidly. What you should do is keep tracking what you eat while increasing calories to maintenance level, to give a chance to your body to slowly decrease hunger and increase energy expenditure.
Yes, unfortunately. I was a world class yo-yo dieter, bouncing over 100 pounds four times, with many many lesser yos. This is, officially, a type of bulimia. I binge and diet instead of vomit. After more than five decades of that I found stability via sufficient protein, but I've lost my previous knack for losing weight. So now I'm stuck right in the middle of one of my previous yo-yos. It's better here than at the top though.
If all else fails, look into GLP-1 meds. At this point ,it's not even controversial anymore and some of the social stigma is gone. it's hard enough losing weight even with medical intervention.
Its all about long term habits, basic knowledge about nutrition and the 80/20 rule.
Hardcore diets and then falling back to the old habits are absolutely not the way to do it.
There are things like diet fatigue, the mentioned Yo-Yo effect you don't want to deal with.
Your "diet" should be generally healthy and long term sustainable.
It just does not work to replace one way of malnutrition with another one.
So here are the things i (BMI 22, bodyfat < 19% for now 20+ years, at age over 40) would recommend:
One is strength based exercise.
Find 1-3 days in your week where you can dependably (!) spend an hour or two to go to the gym.
It is better to go once every week reliably, than to go 3 times one week and then skipping the next.
Get a full body training plan consisting of multi joint exercises.
For example don't waste your time on biceps if you can do rows which trains your biceps and back at the same time.
You must do strength training order to gain muscle mass.
Muscles have a large influence on your hormones, which helps to suppress hunger and keeps you fit in general.
The hunger suppression is important if you lose weight.
It works this way: if you lose weight, you will usually lose muscle mass alongside fat. Losing muscles creates a huge hunger signal compared to fat.
Doing strength training keeps you from losing muscle (or even building it) so your hunger is lower while you lose weight.
And you don't want to end up skinny fat with issues like back pain (which i ended up with at age 20 without ever being overweight).
Don't overdo it. But be consistent, do the smallest amount necessary but every single week no exception.
Don't do cardio (at least not cardio only).
Cardio is fine if you do it for sporting reasons but since you seem to be overweight, i assume this is not the case ;)
So cardio would just waste your time because it burns surprisingly small amounts of calories while increasing hunger by a lot.
It also does not build muscles as much so why bother?
The most important part is to get your nutrition in check.
Basically do the following:
Close to every meal should, by volume, roughly consist of
1/4 protein, like chicken or other lean meat, or plant based alternatives
1/4 carbs, like rice, potatoes whatever (pasta has tons of calories so be careful here)
2/4 vegetables like carrots, broccoli... whatever just mix it up.
It is a ton of vegetables, which is good because it keeps your stomach full and is healthy in every conceivable way.
Do not skip fats, but skip pure sugars especially in liquid form like soda.
Don't do cheat days where you mindlessly eat thousands of calories, this messes with your psyche for no reason.
But eating out, or some junk food is fine from time to time you are not a robot.
Inform yourself about the calorie content of your meals and try to control the amount.
There are many ways to exert control, which are highly individual.
Some have no problem skipping breakfast, some make their meals smaller, some do keto or track calories.
Whatever floats your boat you have to find out. Remember it has to be sustainable.
Personally i try to get a good amount of protein into my meals and i keep an eye out for calories without counting.
Every single morning:
Use the toilet, step on a scale, check your weight.
It varies a bit from day to day but the average helps you track. You might want to use an app but its not really necessary.
This is your main way to keep track. Gain weight? Try to eat a bit less next week.
Keep in mind that you are in it for the long run.
There is no need to lose tons of weight in the short term. It is fine to be slow which is way more sustainable anyway.
You want to be fit for the rest of your life so you have to keep at it for the rest of your life.
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The problem is that when you kill an adipocyte, it releases all of its triglycerides, which are then free to move around the blood stream. But when blood triglyceride levels are high and there isn't significant oxidation, other metabolic processes are triggered to start to store them. So you kill an adipocyte, release the triglycerides, which get reabsorbed into still living adipocytes, which now get engorged and then multiply again, replacing the fat cells that have been killed.
After learning quite a bit about these processes, I think these devices might actually be useful, not for losing fat, but by eliminating this sort of fat memory. In other words, they should be used after significant weight loss, because adipocytes are relatively empty and externally triggered apoptosis can kill the cells without releasing significant quantities of triglycerides which can be reabsorbed and trigger adipocyte mitosis. I think this would effectively reset that person to a state as if they had never been fat in the first place. Thoughts?
Why can't we just remove the triglycerids from the blood before they trigger adipogenesis? Basically we need a form of dialysis.
Once you’ve reached a level of physical strength it’s easier to return to that level in the future. This has been a topic of debate in the sports world because past anabolic steroid use could therefore carry benefits into the future long after the athlete has stopped using the steroid. Non-professional athletes shouldn’t get too excited about using steroids, though, because the damage steroids do to the body’s own hormone systems also has lasting effects unless you plan on doing TRT for the rest of your life, which has its own downsides.
For average people this does show the importance of getting at least some exercise when you’re young. It’s much easier to get a little bit fit when you’re young which then makes it easier to stay fit in the future. Never too late too start.
But the doctor was mentioning that none of the influencers influencing young people to try T and Steroids (which is rampant right now) are ever mentioning that you are on a ticking clock to infertility as soon as you start this stuff. Some people can regain their fertility but it might take years, and some people are going to be permanently infertile even staying on HRT.
Plenty of those "alpha male" guys on social media are shooting blanks.
If you're reading this and you're < 30 and physically weak (not overweight, but lacking muscle mass) I cannot stress enough what a year or two hitting the gym could do for your permanent strength and muscle mass.
I was ridiculously skinny and physically weak going into my 20s and I just assumed that was the way I was built. But I got into fitness in my early 20s and packed on quite a bit of muscle and it's genuinely shocking to me how much base-level muscle mass and strength I've retained now 15 years on.
I always felt one of the most demotivating things about working out was that all the effort I was putting into the gym would eventually go to waste when I stopped, but that's not true. Had I known this I'd probably have started working out much earlier and for much longer than I did.
They’ve known this for centuries. Quoting the great Socrates:
“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable."
Similar advantage is conveyed to athletes who had elevated (~male) testosterone levels in the past, even if they subsequently take blockers / go on HRT to ~female hormone levels.
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"Tirzepatide promotes M1-type macrophage apoptosis and reduces inflammatory factor secretion by inhibiting ERK phosphorylation" [1]
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15675...
Googled for "Adipocyte apoptosis" and oh boy... It does happen, but I don't trust the AI summary. This looks like a deep rabbit hole.
I lost 100 lbs fasting over 1.5 years. I did gain some weight back after stopping, but not much. Strangely, where I saw fat return was not where most of it came off.
But maybe it can also be a useful and healthy weight loss strategy?
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It always did feel like it was easier to gain weight than lose it, especially fat weight and not muscle weight for me.
I was recently sent a video about fat adaptation (basically teaching your body to be better at burning fat) by a very fit friend, but I wonder how much of that is bro science and how much of it is grounded in reality. Maybe worth looking into more deeply if it can counteract or balance out this.
I use 90% cacao Lindt to control my sweet tooth. 1/2 the bar has 4g of sugar, and I consume it over hours. It also has the side effect of reducing my hunger. If you eat much of 90% chocolate, it makes you feel nausea. The trick is to put a small chip in your mouth and let it melt. It's quite delicious and I've not had any sweets in 80+ days.
You can find brands that claim to be more ethical in terms of sourcing their cocoa, but the smaller brands that do are also less likely to have been tested for heavy metals.
While it's unclear how harmful the heavy metals would be to me specifically at the amounts I was eating, the whole thing kind of put me off chocolate in general and dark chocolate in particular. I rarely have it anymore.
So it turns out you can still gain weight even if you don’t spike your blood sugar. At least for me.
I can now eat a 100g bar of 100% chocolate in a single sitting if I feel like it… And that’s 55g of fat, so more or less the fat I should be eating in a whole day.
In other words, low insulin sensitivity means your body remains in the feeding (fat building) state more, as opposed to fasting (fat burning).
Insulin sensitivity decreases with age, and with excessive intake of particularly simple carbs. It can be improved through fasting, certain dietary supplements, and low carb diet.
All of this is, to the best of my knowledge, not disputed or 'bro science'.
Fat adaptation is a real thing. Endurance athletes focused on longer events will target some of their training around that energy system. This is more complex than can really be explained in an online comment but basically you want to do long training sessions below your lactate threshold in a glycogen depleted state.
During adolescence, if you gain weight, you create new fat cells. During adulthood, the fat cells themselves just get larger. Arguably the best thing you can do is avoid obesity during childhood and adolescence at all costs.
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https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3892465/
Actually affecting that pathway is largely beyond us at the moment (that’s the bro science) but the mechanism is relatively well understood.
It is the exact, polar opposite for me. I cannot gain even if I eat junk all day.
1000 calorie breakfast = bagel with cream cheese, 3 eggs, banana, some berries, protein shake. It’s a whole lot more than a bowl of cereal.
Granted, some animals are much better at it, crocodiles and bears and stuff can go without food for months.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_food_ener...
I'm turning 40 in May, so since the start of February, I've finally pulled up my bootstraps and started taking my health seriously. I was likely 225 lbs at 5'10". Easily 32+% body fat.
The first thing I did was a deep extended fast, drinking only water, electrolytes, supplements, bone broth, and black coffee. I was able to shed a good amount of weight, fast. However, the longest I could fast for was 6 days; No matter what I tried, I could not figure out how to get good sleep. I tried once more for 4 days, and saw no improvement, so I stopped trying to fast. Mentally I could handle it, but without quality sleep, there was no way I could continue. This was mid-March, and I was at 204.5 lbs.
Also in mid-March, I did a VO2 max test, while fasted for 72 hours. It was very apparent that my metabolism was fat adapted. My VO2 max was very low at 33.8 ml/kg, which was to be expected. My RMR was found to be 1998 kcal/day, and my fat max HR was 161 bpm. Crossover to 100% carbs was at 179 bpm.
Since then, I've done a 180, and started eating about 1800-2000 kcal per day. My first goal is to ensure I eat 170-200g of protein per day, through as much whole food as possible, using whey or protein when needed. The rest of my diet is very clean, with no real restrictions on fats, and keeping carbs as low as possible. It's a fairly ketogenic diet, but I don't get worked up if my net carbs go to 50+g. Foods are usually Greek yogurt, flax, pumpkin seeds, nuts, eggs, berries, fish, poultry, and green vegetables/salads. If I ever add fat to anything, it's extra virgin olive oil first, then maybe butter/cream (i.e. in coffee). I take a number of supplements like Omega-3 fish oils, multivitamins, magnesium, and make my own electrolyte drink. Creatine as well.
I find that by the time I've done all of this, I have a very difficult time eating, and even trying to fit anything else in. I am never hungry, nor do I feel cravings for other foods. We just came back from Miami, and I had some ice cream with the kids, and some baked goods. I enjoyed them, but I was very excited to be back to my normal foods.
Since then, I've been running 3-4 times a week, focusing on Zone 2 training. I do 4 days a week of weightlifting, focusing on the big compound lifts. I have a 10K race on May 11, and a sprint distance triathlon on July 27 that I'm training for.
For this entire month, I have stayed at a constant 207.5 lbs +/- 0.5 lbs. I have been tracking other measurements like circumferences and body fat (using calibers and BIA scale), and it's apparent that I have gained strength, regained muscle mass, and improved my overall fitness. Running is still at a slow pace, but actually enjoyable now. My wearables estimate that my VO2 max is 37 ml/kg; they did show 33 ml/kg last month when I had the test, so they seem to be correlated.
I think the hardest part of the last month has been the sheer amount of work I've put in, only to watch the scale stay steady. I track my intake rigorously, weighing everything I can and using MyFitnessPal to track it all. How are people able to eat anything else? I couldn't add rice or grains to my diet even if I wanted to, I would easily hit 2500+ kcal per day.
People eat that much? Or rather, burn that much? I burn 2000 kcal per rest day, and maybe 2800-3200 kcal on workout days.
I will stick with this, since it is working to improve my health and fitness. It would just be nice to see the scale move without having to fast for multiple days. Cursed slow metabolism.
It's probably bro science or contributing a small amount to any effort. The biggest problem is the food industry serving shit in large portions, which can be hard for populations to psychologically resist (see: America). Most things in the grocery store are shit too.
I don't think you can effectively teach people to resist it though, you'd have to get rid of the shit being there so it's not even an option.
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Obese people can remain obese eating 1000 calories a day. I recall one episode of My 600lb Life and the show's featured person that day was at 900 or 1200 calories a day and still didn't lose weight. Might have still been gaining.
It is a dynamic system. People tend to only consider the CI in CI/CO.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpllomiDMX0
He has quite a few claims that are just...ridiculous, and his pop science books have some serious flaws (as reported by actual experts).
Really changed my attitude about food, and my body and minds interaction with it. A lot of this is subconscious and really hard to get control of. The fact a chemical compound was able to change my mental relationship with food also put an interesting spin on my ideas about consciousness and self control as a whole. We are just slaves to our biological processes.
As for people lacking willpower, the genetics of hunger mean all of us experience vastly different levels of hunger. You might be interested to read about the family in Pakistan who could not produce a relevant hormone leptin, and the toddlers driven to fighting by insatiable hunger to steal food from each other, and the dramatic change in their lives after medical intervention with leptin injections
I'll look at that study you mentioned, thank you.
After he died last year, I ran across this engineering and accounting approach to weight maintenance and loss written up by John Walker (one of the Autodesk founders). It worked very well for him and changed the way I thought about weight and eating. It is interesting reading because he is "one of us"
Basically, he uses a first level approximation of the body as a control system with a feedback loop, and tries to pin down some techniques to bring the system to a known good state (target weight) and manage that loop for long term stability.Calories is what makes you gain/lose weight, it's basic physics. Satiety is what makes you want to eat more/less. Nutrients are what is making you healthy.
Fiber and protein tends to make you feel full. Lack of them allow you to eat large amount of calories without feeling full. You need to keep track of micro and macro nutrient to stay healthy.
This gets back to the "feedback loops" above. There are certainly feedback loops. But you are unlikely to be able to prime any of them by just increasing an input. And increasing output is something you have to train the body to do.
On that last, I think it is easy to model weight gain as something you train the body to do, as well? Certainly fits the model of the article.
There are also flywheel levels of energy use for some folks. Consider the amount of calories a professional athlete goes through. We can say exercise doesn't help weight loss at the population level with relative certainty. It is also relatively safe to say exercise burns an obscene amount of calories in athletes.
Beyond satiety, you also have to consider the role food is playing in the person's life. Is the person hooked on Dopamine, with food a (the?) main source of it? Can they introduce other enjoyable and meaningful activities that take their mind off food? Even if a person is not addicted per-se to the dopamine food provides, if their life is boring and seems to lack meaning, they will still turn to food as a major part of their daily routine.
You also have to consider that some people find daily planning and organization more difficult than others. Keeping to a good diet can require a great deal of planning on a daily basis.
So obesity is often only a symptom of more underlying issues like depression loneliness, a struggle for meaning and connection, ADHD, and more.
Easy diets: drink this shake 3x a day. Don't eat $food_category. Limit calory intake to $amount / day.
More complex: The above, plus macronutrients.
More complex: The above, plus micronutrients.
Add dimensions like lifestyle choices (vegetarianism, veganism etc) or food sensitivities (celiac, lactose intolerance).
I'm no diet expert and need to lose some weight myself but the main advice I'd give is to get stable first. Plan your meals, eat regular meals at regular intervals, keep excess / luxuries / "rewards" to a minimum. Only when you have reached a stable and sustainable pattern should you start to make adjustments. The problem with diets or major lifestyle changes is that they're hard to keep up, simply because they are so different from your usual. The shake diets generally don't work long term because people suffer and go back to their old habits, if not overcompensate because their body signals a deprivation of some kind.
And fat. Primarily fat is what will satisfy you (I mean eating it, not listening to Lizzo or Meghan Trainor.)
Put some butter in those eggs as you fry them. Use olive oil and coconut oil while cooking. Drink whole milk and have some raw eggs with the yolks.
Or just 1,000 cram rice cakes into your mouth all day until you choke
Avoid sugar and fat as much as possible.
Remain in calorie deficit and you will lose weight and get plenty of nutrients.
"Darn, I think I've contracted some alcoholism. Could you order me another bottle of the reset pills?"
If you come off it before that 5 years are up, yeah, you are probably expected to bounce back somewhat.
You might not need to be on GLP-1 forever, but you might need to be on it longer than people currently think.
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"Adipose tissue" means "fat tissue".
This is validating as I’m very skeptical about this when looking for a partner that currently has a physiology I’m interested in but had one I wasn’t interested in at some point before, and this seems to be a shared experience
1. One was not eating breakfast, this works well when I'm in the office. Then you have fasting built into your daily routine. This has many metabolic benefits.
2. Switching to a low carb diet (keto). I never thought I'd quit eating bread, but reducing carbonhydrates (esp. sugar) and eating more eggs & meat had the biggest effect on my weight. More so than doing sports. This is just a rough guideline, I don't follow this very strictly.
3. Sports + Fasting: Sometimes on the weekends I go on a hike or do some sports and only eat when I get home in the afternoon (e.g. steak). This forces my body to take the energy from the fat reserves.
The magic is that just counting calories basically leads to the same outcome: less carbs and sugary stuff, less fatty meats, more lean meat, more veggies, etc.
Going to the gym helped me immensely. Not so much in losing weight directly but in feeling better and fresher.
This. I've found working out has changed the kinds of foods I crave, making it easier to adhere to a diet. I'd usually feel more like a steak with eggs and brocoli rather than a deep-fried burger.
Set medium term goals. Don't try to lose 20 kilos in six months. Lose the next kilo by this time in two weeks. Similarly, don't try to lose 0.1 kilos by tomorrow. Weight naturally fluctuates day to day based on water intake, sodium intake, muscle fatigue, and other things. But in the range of 2-3 weeks, you should be able to lose enough weight to see signal in the noise of day to day fluctuations.
If you aren't hitting your medium term goals, find a way to cut calories more. Starting the first month doing a comprehensive calorie log is valuable to help calibrate what foods and portion sizes are relatively problematic.
The rest is just finding eating patterns that work for you that help keep calorie levels low enough. There's a lot of advice about ways to do that, and most need to be taken with a grain of salt, but it's probably true that you can min/max at the margins by increasing fiber intake, increasing protein intake, drinking more water, eating more raw plants, intermittent fasting, and that sort of thing. But you'll mostly see fractional improvements on top of the bottom line math: calories burned need to exceed calories consumed.
As noted elsewhere here, it's a lot of exercise to burn off a few pieces of bacon. Exercise is good for weight loss, but again, it's mostly at the margins for the average person, especially if that person is not an athlete.
> The rest is just finding eating patterns that work for you that help keep calorie levels low enough. There's a lot of advice about ways to do that, and most need to be taken with a grain of salt, but it's probably true that you can min/max at the margins by increasing fiber intake, increasing protein intake, drinking more water, eating more raw plants, intermittent fasting, and that sort of thing. But you'll mostly see fractional improvements on top of the bottom line math: calories burned need to exceed calories consumed.
It's "easy" to lose a ton of weight if you don't eat anything at all. But that's obviously not sustainable. However, what I've found works, is that those things "at the margins" as you say actually have a huge effect on adherence to the "diet". Some foods require a tremendous amount of willpower to only consume in "reasonable" quantities. Think candy bars, chips, the like.
The point is to take note about how you feel after a given meal. Some foods, even though the meal would bring enough calories, leave you with a feeling of wanting more. Avoid these. Others leave you feeling full for hours. Go for those. What I've noticed is that sometimes, the effect may come from "secondary" ingredients, like the dressing on a salad, whereas the salad itself will leave you feeling full for the whole afternoon.
There are things you may enjoy quite a lot, so if they're of the "can't stop eating them sort", you'll have to forego them entirely. It's actually much easier to not eat them at all (and, ideally, not even have them in the house) than hoping you'll be reasonable. With time, these foods will lose their appeal, and you won't randomly crave them every day. Getting over this first step is what I find hardest.
So rather than just eating less make sure to work out some. Consistently. Id suggest strength training. I did a full body strength training workout 2-3 times a week. Some may suggest doing leg days, arm days, etc but going there takes time on itself and i have other places to be than the gym.
To match that strength training eat more protein. Things like chicken are your friend. This tends to be higher on the satiety index so you'll feel full faster and you'll eat less without it being so painfull. Eat a bit of protein with every meal Really there's a whole lot of other stuff that you can fill yourself up with that won't be too bad for ya. And when you go for a carb? Get the complex one if it's a choice. It'll dampen that peak in insulin.
Avoid the sugary stuff. It's addictive for sure but taper off. Eat before going to the store. Make the hard decisions there not with the easy snack within reach in the evening.
Do a bit of everything that works until it becomes second nature. Overfocusing on one silver bullet doesn't tend to work.
Of course knowledge about diet and exercise is immensely valuable, but if there are psychological factors getting in the way, it’s going to be harder to adopt a consistently healthy lifestyle.
This idea sucks when you are looking at a plate of lettuce leaves - but you should also avoid extreme diets and extreme exercise as it is unsustainable.
The answers that actually work are "move to an environment where you will likely get and stay skinnier" (maybe a different, skinnier country) or (this one's new! There's finally a semi-reasonable answer to this question!) "take GLP-1 agonists". There's no strategy that'll do it (for outliers, yes, but over a population, no)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demethylase
some of which have vitamin cofactors like zinc[1] and riboflavin[2].
So nutrition is important. I will let you investigate the link between zinc, riboflavin and diabetes...
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7191051/ [2] https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/O60341/entry
Start with something easy and establish a rule that won't ever be broken. If you break a rule once, you'll lose the fight.
My rule, for example, when I started to train more:
- start with 10 crunches every morning and evening
- increase by 2 crunches every day
- no exceptions
When you are at ~2 months in, you can add weight training to it to get stronger.
Additionally, find a sport that you can do once or twice a week that is FUN to do. By FUN I really mean it. There's no point in doing sports if you don't enjoy it.
If you enjoy playing batminton, go for it! If you enjoy table tennis, go for it! If you enjoy Kung Fu, Krav Maga, or whatever ... go for it!
Sports isn't about reaching goals, it's about having fun while doing it. Otherwise, you will not overcome the struggles. Your brain needs a reward, and enjoying sports helps you keep wanting more of it.
You cannot outrun a fork.
1) Don't lose more than 10% of your bodyweight in the same weight loss period.
2) Don't lose more than 1% of body weight per week.
3) At the end of a weight loss period, transition to eating at maintenance calories for a while before starting a new weight loss period.
A common mistake is to completely stop dieting when you reach your goal weight. This is a bad idea because your body has adapted to the diet (e.g. decreased energy expenditure) and it's therefore easy to regain weight rapidly. What you should do is keep tracking what you eat while increasing calories to maintenance level, to give a chance to your body to slowly decrease hunger and increase energy expenditure.
Hardcore diets and then falling back to the old habits are absolutely not the way to do it. There are things like diet fatigue, the mentioned Yo-Yo effect you don't want to deal with.
Your "diet" should be generally healthy and long term sustainable. It just does not work to replace one way of malnutrition with another one.
So here are the things i (BMI 22, bodyfat < 19% for now 20+ years, at age over 40) would recommend:
One is strength based exercise. Find 1-3 days in your week where you can dependably (!) spend an hour or two to go to the gym. It is better to go once every week reliably, than to go 3 times one week and then skipping the next.
Get a full body training plan consisting of multi joint exercises. For example don't waste your time on biceps if you can do rows which trains your biceps and back at the same time.
You must do strength training order to gain muscle mass. Muscles have a large influence on your hormones, which helps to suppress hunger and keeps you fit in general. The hunger suppression is important if you lose weight. It works this way: if you lose weight, you will usually lose muscle mass alongside fat. Losing muscles creates a huge hunger signal compared to fat. Doing strength training keeps you from losing muscle (or even building it) so your hunger is lower while you lose weight.
And you don't want to end up skinny fat with issues like back pain (which i ended up with at age 20 without ever being overweight).
Don't overdo it. But be consistent, do the smallest amount necessary but every single week no exception.
Don't do cardio (at least not cardio only). Cardio is fine if you do it for sporting reasons but since you seem to be overweight, i assume this is not the case ;) So cardio would just waste your time because it burns surprisingly small amounts of calories while increasing hunger by a lot. It also does not build muscles as much so why bother?
The most important part is to get your nutrition in check.
Basically do the following:
Close to every meal should, by volume, roughly consist of 1/4 protein, like chicken or other lean meat, or plant based alternatives 1/4 carbs, like rice, potatoes whatever (pasta has tons of calories so be careful here) 2/4 vegetables like carrots, broccoli... whatever just mix it up.
It is a ton of vegetables, which is good because it keeps your stomach full and is healthy in every conceivable way.
Do not skip fats, but skip pure sugars especially in liquid form like soda.
Don't do cheat days where you mindlessly eat thousands of calories, this messes with your psyche for no reason. But eating out, or some junk food is fine from time to time you are not a robot.
Inform yourself about the calorie content of your meals and try to control the amount.
There are many ways to exert control, which are highly individual. Some have no problem skipping breakfast, some make their meals smaller, some do keto or track calories. Whatever floats your boat you have to find out. Remember it has to be sustainable. Personally i try to get a good amount of protein into my meals and i keep an eye out for calories without counting.
Every single morning: Use the toilet, step on a scale, check your weight. It varies a bit from day to day but the average helps you track. You might want to use an app but its not really necessary. This is your main way to keep track. Gain weight? Try to eat a bit less next week.
Keep in mind that you are in it for the long run. There is no need to lose tons of weight in the short term. It is fine to be slow which is way more sustainable anyway.
You want to be fit for the rest of your life so you have to keep at it for the rest of your life.
food is no longer a reward for anything
fin.