I tried out-training my diet for 18 months
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1. Self-propelled motion to get around. Ski, bike, run, or even walk. Don't own a car. My friend sold his and bought a huge bike that his kids and groceries fit into. Yes it is possible. I've biked in -30C weather. It's not that bad.
2. Fiber, protein are your best friends. Some fats are kinda friends too, especially from veggies or fish. Sugar is the enemy. All other carbs treat like acquaintances, except for starch which can be safely eaten if it is cold where it acts like a fibre. Potato salad with bacon bits and green onions: Yes. Hashbrowns with pancakes: No.
3. Body weight workouts at least once a week. They're a bit fanatical over at https://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/ but the program is good. Follow it but don't push your self too hard. I got wicked tennis elbow when I was approaching a muscle up and had to take a year off.
That's it. It's simple. I don't understand why Weight Watchers even exists. Just cut out the sugar, move around, and eat more plants.
That's like asking a chain smoker to just stop buying cigarettes and have an apple instead.
We have to get to terms with the fact that obesity is an epidemic that has to be treated the same way tobacco has.
Stop putting so damn much sugar and salt into processed food. More physical education in schools and pre-schools/kindergarten (it's appalling how much the motor skills of children have deteriorated compared to previous generations). School gardens for every school so children can learn from an early age what food even is, how its grown and what it actually tastes like.
It's a bunch of measures that need to be taken and while it might be simple for some people (like you for example) to change their lifestyle, it's really hard for most.
> Just cut out the sugar
This is a great example for why it's so hard: most processed food (and even bread) contains tons of added sugar without the consumer even realising it. It's not necessarily the donuts, the chocolate, or candy bars. It's the sodas, fast food, bread, parfait, fruit drinks, the canteen food, etc. The practise varies from country to country, but some (e.g. Mexico) had to pull the emergency brake already and limit the amount of added sugar by law.
Since sugar is highly addictive, it's hard to let go of these products, especially since most of us are conditioned to primarily consume highly processed junk basically from birth.
I can't express how discouraging this is, at least in the United States. The high school I graduated from had a well meaning principal that believed milk was good for you and soft drinks were bad for you. By her reasoning, chocolate milk would at least encourage the students to drink milk, and the benefits of milk would outweigh the costs of having a ton of sugar. All of the soft drinks were taken out of the vending machines and replaced with "Vitamin Water". So our cafeteria was stocked with chocolate milk, orange juice, and vitamin water. The general public seems to be completely ignorant to why this is a problem. People I care deeply about are having health problems that I can't help but feel would be alleviated if they stopped drinking diet caffeine-free soft drinks as if it were an acceptable substitute for water.
It is, but it's really REALLY not. I'd bet that most everyone knows what they should be eating and doing to lose weight / be healthy. It's probably obvious to most adults. Some people just have conditions where they can NOT lose weight. And then there's the rest of us. We know it's that simple. We know we should not eat a bag of Doritos for dinner. We know a pint of ice cream is not a snack. But it's what our bodies crave, and fighting that takes energy and focus. And today we had a bad day at work. Today when we got home we had to fight with the kids to do homework. This weekend there's a big party and we're not ready. Next week there's a huge project due at work. Are we going fight the urge to eat a bag of cheese balls before bed? Nope, we just don't have the energy. We'll start next week, when there's not so much going on.
As simple as it seems to you, it's not at all simple for many MANY people. They need help, and they need support. And that's why Weight Watchers exists. Losing weight is somehow simultaneously very easy and nearly impossibly hard for most of us.
Why does it take so much energy to decline to buy bad things that we 'know' are bad?
Of course the laws of thermodynamics say that is impossible. You will lose weight if you don't eat. You may not lose weight if you eat moderately, while another person will.
If you believe it's "impossible" for people to have conditions where they can't lose weight (in other words: different people experience different difficulty levels in modifying their body composition), then why would you go on to claim that "you may not lose weight if you eat moderately, while another person will"?
Basically, my point is, some people have to suffer more to lose weight. But all people will lose weight regardless if they stop eating, because physics.
I lost 9kg down from 97 to 88 not changing much. Still want to go down more to 85, then ill be below bmi 25. :)
I strive to still eat three full meals a day.
- stop eating after dinner, just drink tea (this took about 4 months to get comfortable with. Dropped 6 kg using this technique. Over the course of 6 months.
My weight plateaued for two months, so I changed the following.
- cut out the afternoon snack and changed breakfast to one egg and a bowl of oatmeal. I’m now losing approximately 1 kg a month again.
My weight loss is quite slow and varies day by day +/- 2kg, only over multiple months do I see results on the scale. Recently I’ve also started seeing changes to my gut and shape.
Maybe this will help other people in their weight loss journey. It’s not easy losing weight, but small changes over time can have results. I enjoy using the iPhone health app and then the year view as it averages out the daily variations. I log my weight every morning when I get out of bed.
Too many people are still in thrall of the calories in - calories out principle.
It seems to appeal especially to nerds, the idea of reducing something as complex as metabolism into a simple accounting trick is just too attractive, and so is the idea that only "unused, extra energy" gets converted to body fat and that everything is question of raw willpower.
It is not so simple, if you live in a state of chronic hyperinsulinemia, you won't be able to mobilize stored fat, it is just biochemically impossible, adipose cells just will not release any stored fat if insulin is high. Of course, then you start to be hungry, then you eat some 'extra' calories even though you have ample fat reserves.
But the core of the problem isn't willpower. It is inability of the human body to burn its own fat for consumption if insulin levels are chronically high.
Of course, that leads to weight gain. And one of the main culprits is sugar. Excessive amounts of sugar will mess with your insulin secretion and sensitivity.
Willpower certainly is the problem for most people.
Why was this not a problem prior to 1980? It is not as if we switched from hunter and gatherer society straight into postmodern world in 1980. People back then drove cars and ate in restaurants, and look at the photos: they looked far healthier. The fattest US state of 1980 was still much less fat than the fittest US state of 2020.
Why the same people who have a willpower problem can tolerate their bratty teenagers, rise up at 5 am to go to work, pull through arduous work etc.? After all, you would expect them to lack willpower generally, not in just one specific domain.
Humans are the same as they were. What changed is the amount of processed food and especially sugar in our diets. A lot.
People take in more calories today than in 1980, primarily through prepared foods. The guy in this blog post said he eats out for every meal. Basically no one but the super rich did that in 1980. Prepared food prices have fallen a lot since 1980.
Calories in/calories out is the only way that the human body can change mass, short of excision. However, it’s very hard to accurately keep track of calories.
Are people more fat today because they are less active, or are they less active because they are fatter? After all, it is no joy to move around with 30 or 50 lbs of extra fat. There seems to be a vicious cycle at work.
"Calories in/calories out is the only way that the human body can change mass"
True, but unproductive when it comes to understanding the phenomenon of rising obesity. WHY people consume more calories? What drives them? This is not a trivial question and without being fairly sure about the answer, we will not solve the situation.
An analogy: the only way that humans become alcoholics is by drinking a lot of alcohol. But that does not explain root causes of alcoholism, it is only a relatively trivial observation of the proximate cause. The reasons why some people can't keep their alcohol intake within harmless amounts and slide all the way to the bottom are anything but trivial.
They looked thinner, but afaik we are healthier all in all. Thin and healthy are not synonyms.
But diabetes 2nd type or chronic non-alcoholic steatosis were much, much rarer than today in < 50 population. Orders of magnitude rarer.
This is a significant disease load.
It just does not. If you focus on that only, it leads to diet that makes you feel like crap all the time. It makes you low energy, so you struggle or flat cant maintain performance and precision in work. It makes you irritable and it makes it much harder for you to handle normal stresses - meaning your kids and wife and coworkers basically suffer.
And what it does is that people eventually decide it is not worth it.
Is that true or just an artifact of screening? Hyperinsulinemia is not really well researched in "normal" population, because measurement of insulin in blood is not trivial; there are no simple devices similar to glucometers that could easily and affordably measure your current insulin level.
Eating a modern diet laced with hidden sugar is a surefire way to increase your total insulin level.
It is not as if a healthy pancreas has a choice. It automatically releases insulin as a response to certain stimuli, including sugar, but also interestingly protein. Only pure fat is "invisible" to pancreas AFAIK.
It's not because something is simple that it is easy. Glad it worked for you, but let's not assume too much about an entire population based on your own experience.
This massively depends on how much sugar your diet have. I mean, plenty of us have issue with eating too much bacon.
Also any tips for tennis elbow? I’ve been resting it for weeks and no improvement!
From: https://camillathyme.com/2019/09/22/the-simple-potato-salad-...
I’m now racking my brain trying to think of ways to eat potatoes and corn without cooking! No luck yet.
I haven't heard about that starch foods being okay when cold thing, care to elaborate?
Want to eat pancakes? Eat a small amount. With butter. It's fine. Don't eat a stack that is shown in ads.
Want fries? Eat two normal potatoes fried in beef fat. Not potatoes the size of a human head.
It is conscious work to retrain your stomach, but it is possible. I'm saying this as somebody who just ate 2 slices of bread (1 sandwich) and now feels like I can't move, where before I'd easily eat 6 slices. That was my breakfast (at lunch), I haven't even had an earlier meal.
No bodily exhaustion, no pain, no excessive time commitments, no money (you even save money!), no feeling the need to punish and taking revenge on yourself, just being conscious.
Works well with alcohol consumption, too. Ask me how I know how those big red wine glasses which fit 25% of the bottle are bullshit, same as pints. Those are two portions, easily. Look at old photographs: The glasses are tiny.
Like I said in the previous comment, I applied a lot of energy studying nutrition in order to simplify it for myself and I have other take aways I didn't post and there is more complexity than I let on, but I try not to make people understand 99% of an issue with 10x the text when they could understand 90% of the issue and remember it.
But since you asked, there are different types of starches. Some of them, like the ones that come from potatoes, are fine if they are either uncooked or cooked then cooled. The reason potatoes taste so good is that they are extremely nutritious in every other way other than starch. They're a super food with an achilles heel.
You can research resistant starch and where it's found and under what circumstance on your own, but here is a starting point:
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/resistant-starch-101#ty...
Also, since you seem to like the details, I also found that other than fibre, my natural Torontonian diet was pretty deficient in potassium, which makes recovery from working out take longer. So I went out of my way to eat more of it and I was able to make much better gains working out. It also felt less painful to work out while I was working out. Try not to eat it at the same time as salt, since IIRC the uptake pathways compete with each other. And note that the lowly banana is only a good source of potassium per calorie not in general. Eating one per day does very little, which surprised me.
This is probably true, however you absolutely can out-train all but the worst diets, if you’re crazy/fit enough. It would mostly happen through cardio, HIIT, and sports however, not pure weightlifting.
If you were to play two hours of full court basketball a day (with intensity, not walking up and down the court), and combine that with a weightlifting routine, you could probably eat whatever you want without gaining much weight. The problem is most people’s bodies would break down with that kind of activity level.
Unfortunately I can no longer run and have since ballooned up to 200lbs.
You can definitely out-train a diet, it's sustaining it that's hard.
Then I injured myself so badly that I needed to stop running for 5 months. Never fully got back to my ritual and then I gained 40lbs. A few years have passed and my attempts to restart my running all end with me taking a break nursing weird muscle and tendon pains that last for weeks.
So I guess my point is: yes, it actually is possible to out-train your diet, but that's only a good plan as long as you never hurt yourself.
Here's where you hit the crux of the matter.
Yes, it is possible to burn a lot of calories. No, it isn't possible for most overweight people. When people are overweight, they also can't play two hours of basketball, or do HIIT, or something else intensive.
Most of them need to start with basic walking and build up from there, and it takes a looongg time for them to build up to a point where the calorie burn becomes sufficiently significant.
We have a lot of construction around our office and they eat in same places. They eat a lot.
Should check out the machine operators. Overweight (yet strong/having lots of endurance) construction workers aren't all that rare.
You can easily starve yourself to death by only consuming "empty" calories - you'd get fat and fatter but eventually die from undernourishment.
Also, people who train too much (like long-distance runners), seem to be vulnerable to heart disease. [0] The theory behind this is that heart, just like other muscles, needs rest to heal microdamage resulting from vigorous exercise. If you do not let it heal and press on the next day, the damage accumulates to potentially lethal levels.
[0] https://bcmj.org/articles/impact-excessive-endurance-exercis...
Now I'm trying something new that's working quiet well so far, 30 pounds down in 2.5 months. The real difference is that eating this way transforms me into a non-fat person behavioraly: I now stop eating when I'm full, which was a magic act only other people could do before. And now I just eat once or twice per day, not out of willpower, but because now that's all I want.
You may not want to hear about the food that does this for me. I sure didn't. As desperate as I've been, until recently I just closed my ears to it. It's a bad fit for me culturally, by taste (previously), training, and experience. But now I love it, and not just because it's working so well:
Meat. And organs. Mostly beef. High fat. I went carnivore. It seemed gross and impossible back when I was a raw vegan. Now here I am. And it's not just the weight. It has cleared up multiple digestive and inflammatory issues. It started as a one month cleanse but I'm not tempted to stop.
Many times a diet has worked for me because I was coming to it from a bad diet, and anything that got me off of junk food would have worked. Not this time. I had been on a clean very low carb diet for years, and managed to gain lots of weight on it after a large initial loss. Carnivore seeems to be reversing that, fingers crossed.
>> 1 lb of extra muscle = 50 extra calories burned per day
[..]
> But in reality — those 50 calories are a myth. Studies estimate muscle burns only around 4.5 to 7.0 calories per pound per day.
This was new to me, I always heard that building muscle is key to permanent weight loss and that increased metabolic rate from muscle mass is the main reason.
Use a smaller plate, order smaller portions etc. Less foods that contain a lot of fat or sugar
edit: and a big thing on how to stay on good diet is fixing behaviour, remove situations where you do bad choices on diet.
For a long time I did not have a being saturated feeling and could eat until vomiting. It's a bit better now, however I still need to do sports (road cycling mainly) 3-5 times a week as otherwise I gain weight because I eat too much (and I generally don't eat crappy food, just a lot). The upside is, if I had a period where I gained weight because I was not training enough, I will quickly loose it again when getting on a training regime.
However, weight trainingdefinitely do not burn enough calories, I notice that when in winter when I go to the gym much more. I think the whole weights training for loosing weight has been pushed by the gym industry largely. Do cardio and HIT and you will burn calories much more quickly.
I have no answers though, I was sure not drinking, and being on chemo therapy all year would help me lose weight, but somehow I gained.
The author of this blog post made a simple mistake: he thought that if he had big muscles, he would burn a lot of calories even when sitting still. That doesn’t happen.
The only way to burn a lot of calories is to do a lot of physical activity.
Edit to add: controlling diet is more effective than adding activity for most people in rich western societies because most of those people do not have the time, inclination, or opportunity to do a lot of hard physical activity every day.
I'm not sure if this is your point, but if your "calories in" stayed the same, and "calories out" significantly decreased, it's expected that you would continually gain bodyfat until you reach a new equilibrium point. That seems to have been what's happened.
If the amount of exercise changes, your diet should optimally change with it - but perfectly managing your habits in this way is hard.
For example, if you walk for 8+ hours per day, as people do when thru hiking, you will struggle to maintain bodyweight. Hikers spend a lot of time thinking about the most energy dense foods they can take with them to fuel their activity, which is low intensity but sufficiently high in volume that it drastically increases their energy expenditure due to activity.
The description of your own experience is most simply explained by your usual diet putting you into a caloric surplus at your current activity levels, whereas when you were more active it was just enough to maintain or put you into a small deficit regularly.
And definitely agree about the athlete diets--I was skinny all my life until I stopped playing sports 3-4 times a week. Oh, I also met my wonderful friend called beer, which certainly didn't help. Good luck with your own journey!
You can train away 1000kcal in an hour, which can be 1/3 to 1/3 of your daily requirement. This is relatively much. You wanna lose 1kg? Just train 7h. At 2kg a month you don't even need 1h of training a day.
Problem is, food can be very calorie dense, two cookies can have as much calories as a whole meal. Also, I read somewhere that there isn't really a sane upper limit of calories the body can ingest per day, something around 50k - 60k kcal IIRC.
This means, your diet can catch up no problem with any amount of training you do.
If you want an unsolicited bit of internet feedback I'd suggest your writing would be even better without the puns - it's engaging enough without them - but that's purely a personal opinion.
Fixing my vitamin d deficiency
Multiple day fasts every few weeks
Probiotics
Sleeping better and getting enough sleep
Not having any time alone to be bored
If I’m outside and doing something all day, or I’m really involved in reading a book or painting something, over half a day will pass before I realize I forgot to eat breakfast.
But if I’m relaxing, wasting time on the internet, or not really doing much, I get an urge to grab a snack or have a glass of milk that’ll hit me once an hour.
Beware: I did it for a few years, but it burned all my motivation. I can't even fast a day now.
Electrolytes seem to be key. Plus keeping distracted.
My stomach wasn't hungry but my brain wanted to eat. This experience burned my motivation to basically starve myself and now I can't even do a one day fast, the mood isn't just there.
> keeping distracted
This is probably the key. I was bored to death and was watching YT cooking videos.
I guess for me, improving sleep involved lots of small changes:
Consistent bed time.
More exercise and sun exposure during the day.
Black out blinds at night.
The kids started sleeping in more so I can wake up naturally.
Cutting back on caffeine.
No meat. No soda. No fast food. Sweets and booze only on rare occasions.
Black beans are good for your brain and leave you full & satiated for longer than most food. Their notorious side-effects -- to those around you -- are somewhat exaggerated. Fats and sweets make me feel lazy. I like to stay active (weights, hoops, doing things outside) but can slack for weeks at a time w/out consequence.
I don't give myself credit for being disciplined -- just have good habits and decent genes. What I am proud of is that in spite of not being the most mentally healthy person, instead of turning to food or drugs to comfort myself, I use exercise, good food and a sense of humor to lift my spirits.
I've been overweight (90kg/200lb at 1,8m/6ft) since going to college and tried dieting but never managed to be lean. In my 20s I would diet and lose 20lb but then gain it again. Over time I convinced myself "that wasn't a big deal".
I went to an endocrinologist last month and I feel like the scales have fallen from my eyes. Suddenly all that resistance to losing weight wasn't because I suck at dieting. It's because my hormones and my fat keep me from losing weight. The medicine I'm taking even drove away the binge factor. Even though I'm still at the start of my weight loss journey just lifting that burden from my shoulders.
I'm already ate 25% of the book. Great read, thank you!
I'm taking semaglutide (brand name ozempic) once a week and it raises your insulin secretion, reducing hunger and fat storage.
My visceral fat was high even though I don't appear fat. This fat is bad for pretty much all metabolic functions.
Working out to compensate for a piece of cake or some other food is a total non-starter. You calculate and compare the calories (between food and exercise) and realize that intake control is the only place you can (as an average person) work on for decent results. This is all the more so if your genetic or bodily makeup is such that it’s easier to gain weight than lose it.
Obvious typo here.
Figure out how to hack your satiation (it is very different for different people), and you have started to unwind the stack on how to address your intake challenges. Start your rabbit hole research with the search string "long term induced satiety" (but without the quotes), and branch off from there. That starts you off with physical and chemically-constrained satiety, but there are cultural, mental, social, financial, and many other factors at play as well that might be dominant in your particular situation so go in those directions if it makes sense to you. YMMV.
You intestine cannot extract every calorie, especially those in unprocessed (fiberous) plant cells get excreted.
I find eating more helps me: eat more volume/weight, of less calorie dense foods. Diets like WFPB and raw mornings-and-or-afternoons do that for me.
Good luck finding many foods like that or enjoying them though.
Also: not trying to lose weight, more trying to build some :)
It took some serious lifestyle changes for me to become and stay in shape - and habits _are_ a hard thing to change. ;-)
I think, from my experience and from the experiences I've read of people who have lost weight and kept it off, the key is finding a sustainable diet. One that your future, goal-weight self can be trusted to follow even after you're done losing the weight. People tend to get to that point and then go back to eating like they did when they were overweight, which reverses all the hard work they did.
Telling someone to eat less to lose weight is technically correct, but in reality is useless advice. And no, it really is hard.
Maybe if you got lucky with a great metabolism it might be easy, but a lot of people don’t have that and will struggle.
It’s not about eating less and more about eating correct.