What I learned from reading over 100 weight loss studies

Source: it me.

Yes, perhaps in the short term you will experience cravings/withdrawal, but this is temporary.

it's telling you in compressed form what you need to do to be successful

People struggle getting of cigarettes multiple times even after a year long break. So sure you fail at weightless, but you can try again.

The only issue I have with the view is that losing and gaining weight over and over again can place a toll on your body.

You don't "go on a diet", you HAVE a diet. And if your diet is what is making you fat, then to not be fat, you have to change your diet, permanently.

This is totally false. Just eat a low-carb diet and you will feel "full" after consuming much less food.

Wrong. I just ate and I'm very full. I could even fuck off and eat like shit more often than I do but I choose not to. I'm 6'0" about ~175lbs/80kg.

And yet I often have people approach me in the gym to ask questions, advice, etc: https://www.instagram.com/adamjmorgan/. It's possible to eat until you're full and still look good.

-Signed, former chubby kid.

None of these things are true. With a good diet and exercise, you will feel better and be happier, with way more energy. That makes your life better, not worse.

As another commenter mentioned, abstaining from sweets increases your sensitivity to sweetness. If you go long enough, you'll find most candy cloying rather than addictive. So throw away those cheap, mass market candy bars. By some expensive dark chocolate candy from a reputable chocolatier. Eat one piece instead of a whole bunch and just take your time to enjoy the flavours. It is sooooo much better!

The way I see people (including myself at times) eat candy bars and potato chips bears more resemblance to a starving dog than a human who really enjoys good food. Stop being a dog! Take your time and enjoy something really good instead of swallowing a whole bunch of junk in front of Netflix.

Why would that be? To lose why your are taking a net negative mass balance, once the weight is lost you probably can't go back to the exact diet you had (otherwise you wouldn't need to lose weight) but an mass neutral one should suffice to keep you at the same weight.

This sounds a little vague, apologies. I've done many diets (paleo, keto, South Beach, etc.) and nothing worked. So instead, over the course of six months I gradually gave up sugar, I gave up meat, I stopped eating snacks between meals. I still ate delicious foods, but in smaller portions. Only sweets I had were fruit. I kept my exercise the same (3-5x/week).

I lost 15 pounds and have kept it off. Have no intention of gaining it back. I can't imagine reincorporating old ways, they are an older me. I cringe at the thought of eating a full pint of ice cream after dinner, which I used to do on a near weekly basis.

Tl;dr: as your body and habits change, so too do your desires and preferences.

I'm going to reverse this. For me, the idea of having to eat what an obese person consumes every day to maintain their weight is an exhausting one. I think it's actually fairly easy to be a normal weight and only consume the amount of food necessary to maintain that weight and much harder to consume the amount of food required to be obese.

Yes and no. It depends on your goals.

Some form of modification is needed from whatever you did that made you fat in the first place.

Some form of modification is needed from what is currently keeping you fat.

But you could 100% have a diet that is meant to shed weight quickly, and then switch to something to maintain weight. Add in moderate amounts of exercise and you can eat a bit more.

You need a sustainable, long-term, somewhat permanent diet. It doesn't necessarily need to stay the same for forever, because there might be less radical diets for maintaining. This might be a completely different diet than what got you to your target weight.

While broadly true, specific things such as sugar seem to be addictive in similar ways to drugs.

The only way to control your weight is to control your diet. It doesn't matter what your basal metabolic rate is. Will it play a role? absolutely, but it's not what you adjust to keep your weight in check. If you can manage your weight with a low metabolic rate, you can manage it with a high metabolic rate. Gaining muscle mass will make your body signal for more food, so it can be counter productive if you want to lose fat.

Oh and if you find that your food is a bit boring for some reason, you can add some spicy sauce(without sugar) on your meal.

After I graduated I cut how much I was eating and stopped snacking between meals. Lost 80lb in 6months... it was crazy and scary.

Even after half a year, it has barely changed at all. I usually don't really feel hungry until I'm at the point where I get a bit lightheaded because I haven't eaten for too long.

The most annoying part isn't even the inhibited hunger impulse, it's that even if I take that into account, and plan my meals accordingly, I don't really feel like eating much, and I'll eat like you would if you were daydreaming about a potential lover.

The most effective solution I've seen so far is to not chain the doses like it's usually advised, ie, one pill every four hours, but to plan your meals and your pill timings such that you'll eat when the medication is wearing off. It's annoying, because of course this half-hour to hour period after medication wears off is very annoying, but it's the better alternative, especially if you take into account that Ritalin has a more stable and gentle impact if you take it on a full stomach.

Taking Ritalin on an empty stomach is like drinking two double-espressos on an empty stomach after a bad night's sleep, right after you wake up. :c

It's getting better, with restaurants especially. But it's still a large hurdle to any diet and/or healthy lifestyle. I'm sure it's better in some areas of the country than others.

When would you need to follow a diet for 5 years if most people can reach their goal weight in 1-2 years? Once people reach their goal weight, they'll transition off to something else, which usually isn't a specific diet, but "eat more veggies" or whatever.

Given that long term diets are quite niche, I think limiting the study to 1 year makes a lot of sense.

Convincing myself a particular food is disgusting has been an effective way to cut it from my diet.

Started with donuts. Horrible greasy dough blobs, dripping with artificially colored sticky, bug-collecting sugar slime. Blehhhh. (Unless it’s hot out of the fat at Bob’s or Leonard’s, then it’s something completely different.)

Next up was fries/chips. Horrid frozen potatoes coated in preservatives, sugar and salt, then boiled in rancid grease. (Unless it’s the Anstruther or Fochabers chipper, local potatoes, barely fried, mashed potato insides.)

Sweetened drinks are on the block now. May as well inject that lab-made carb goo straight into my pancreas, let those guys fight it out.

Fruit juices have been tough. I’ve been doing a trick I saw in Zurich, which is serve the only the best, fresh squeezed juice, but in a shot glass.

Damn though, I like a bowl of cereal (unsweetened, whole grain) at midnight. Will back it off to a small glass.

Overeating without white carbs just feels uncomfortable and I rarely do it. The rush I get from pizza or fries (which I hadn’t identified until I stopped) masks that discomfort.

There's a huge difference between "a bit hungry" and actually properly hungry. Most people with weight problems probably never let themselves feel more than peckish, and so their perception of hunger adjusts to amplify that feeling. When I'm below my target weight (sitting at a fairly low body fat percentage) and I try to maintain a calorie deficit, the hunger I start feeling is insanely more intense than when I'm a bit chubby and losing weight.

I think eating too much is a symptom of an underlying problem and drugs may help with it. This is also why I think regular exercise is very important for weightloss. Not because calories burnt but because neurotransmitters levels and their impact on mood and impulse control.

>>So if your friend have counted calorie counting without losing weight she didn't count correctly or truthfully.

She very likely knew she is eating too much. It's not rocket science and calorie counting won't help unless you are in very deep denial. The problem is controlling yourself and constant cravings you have to fight. It's just way more difficult for some people than others the same way some get easily addicted to drugs and some use them recreationally for years without problems or sign of addiction.

https://www.active.com/fitness/calculators/calories for example.

The amount of calories lost per day = the metabolic rate from the calculator - the amount of calories you eat that day.

The amount of pounds lost per day is: burned calories (above) / 3500 (number of calories in a pound of fat).

After a couple months of measuring my weight daily and knowing exactly what my caloric intake was, I calculated my real average metabolic rate by doing the reverse.

total calories lost in a period = lbs lost * 3500

calorie burn (metabolic rate) = total calories burned + total calories eaten

The above is per period so I calculated the average values for the days in a month and used them.

I didn't exercise much so the basal metabolic rate was fairly close to my real burn.

My point was more along the lines of the existing environment being largely responsible for the emergent property of being overweight/unhealthy.

Unless you change the environment, it makes it very difficult to sustainably alter the emergent outputs, which is what we are.

I found it easiest to simply replace and/or eliminate the major environmental problems rather than try modify them in-place. Nobody likes to be forced to live differently, and in my experience, the relationship's happiness was largely derived from the shared unhealthy activities.

After enough time living the healthier life as an individual, access to the healthier environments improves. Healthy members of the opposite sex that have also figured it out become attracted to you, employers who secretly discriminate against unhealthy employees start making offers, same for friend circles. But it's a privileged lifestyle, so it's not the easy/likely default option open to all.

(It also looks like it helps with keeping the weight off once it's lost.)