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Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

Simply counting calories will reduce your weight. I can pretty much confirm that now. Over the last eight months I tried to stay below 1900 calories per day and I have lost 17 kilo. As much as I wanted to, I did not manage to change my diet in any meaningful way, I’m just eating less. I didn’t even manage to keep up a regular sports routine. But my fallback – mercilessly tracking my weight and counting calories – saved me. (I would very much want to eat better. Many of the things I’m eating now have so high calorie densities that I can only eat very little of them.)

I do know that I will have to track my weight and count calories for the rest of my life. That’s ok. (As a teenager I already lost a substantial amount of weight with the same method but I gained it all and more back because I stupidly stopped tracking my weight and counting calories. I’m confident that I won’t make the same mistake again.)

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Experiment with healthy foods you can pre-cook. Rice cooker with rice and beans takes 5 minutes to put on and feeds you all day. Leave it soaking in water overnight and it's 5 minutes of cleaning in the morning.

Can hard boil eggs with minimal attention (set the alarm on your cellphone), can make 6 or 12 at a time and those will last you a couple days.

Get some vegetables that require minimal preparation - I used pickled vegetables and like them, but canned would be fine too. Maybe tuna or sardines, try them all and see what you like.

Then you've got rice+beans, and you add on some vegetables to it, and then either hard boiled eggs, tuna, or sardines - fast, cheap, healthy.

If you simply cut out carbs you will lose a ton of fat.

But yeah if you want to eat carbs and be healthy you have to basically count calories for the rest of your life.

Changing my diet never worked for me. Counting calories does. Also: I do love pasta.

Counting calories is not that hard. I can do it in my head by now. Tracking my weight (which, I think, is equally important, especially for motivation) is more or less a reward and not a chore by now.

There is also some research that suggests fasting being beneficial in modulating insulin resistance. I try not to consume food after a certain time at night. It is not too difficult to do, and definitely stops short any thoughts of a late night snack.

I'm very skeptical that fasting is healthy, it probably is not. The only thing I do care about is losing weight and that works.

Read up. Fasting can be quite healthy. (The only actual debate is on how good it is for you, not on how bad.) Especially intermittent fasting.

Good on you, but it's a sad fact that lots of folks just can't keep things in check.

As someone who does not get food cravings and does not have blood sugar regulation issues, it's hard for me to understand, but the only way some folks can manage to eat less is by banning certain foods from their life.

Not necessarily. I went from counting calories on a sheet of paper to mentally keeping track of balances in my caloric regiment and keeping track of my weight everyday.

Perhaps it's a diet of coffee/cigarettes (appetite suppressants) that made me go from 200 lbs to 172 in a year but oh well.

Well, for a lot of people giving up bread and pasta is a lot harder than counting calories. Never mind the fact that there's an awful lot of "bro science" in the no/low/slow-carb crowd.

That definitely worked for me. I adopted the paleo lifestyle more than 2 years ago. Although I was never obese, just overweight, now I weight about 20 pounds less than when I started. My blood lipid levels were also corrected.

I used to eat rice, pasta, potatoes, and bread all the time. I only miss the bread, but I make exceptions when I go to a restaurant and they have a really good bread.

I agree with that. I lost around 10kg in a couple of months on a steady diet of ice-cream and chicken, counting calories as I happily ate my ice-cream.

Surely this is just an application of the maxim "Anything measured improves," rather than anything specific to weight control?

I do believe that measuring is vital but I don’t believe that it is enough (17 kilo are not random weight loss). There must still be an underlying cause. I attribute that to my calorie counting.

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