Then we started working the same schedule, breakfast together. The whole thing unravelled with a casual comment he made. "Wow, you're really stingy with the sugar in your coffee."
Except I wasn't. I was actually indulging myself, like two tablespoons.
Show me how you make coffee? Ah. Yes. If you put 500 calories of sugar and cream into your coffee multiple times a day, you're not gonna lose weight.
He didn't believe me at first! I had to measure his quantities out and calculate it and show him. Liquids/powders in general seem to trip people up. We are bad at measuring them by sight. Soda, mayonnaise and dips. The oil in a nice salad dressing applied over-liberally can exceed the calories in the burger that goes with it.
Try measuring/weighing these sorts of foods and looking up their caloric content if you haven't before. You may be a shocked as my poor roommate was.
I used to drink my coffee with sugar. Next to the coffee machine at my office there was this big box of sugar sticks, I took one with every cup.
One day, we ran out of sugar sticks, the box was empty. I asked around in the office if anyone knew where we keep the boxes of sugar, everybody answered that they didn't know, because they didn't take sugar in their coffee. If found I was the only one in the entire office drinking coffee with sugar.
That box was 3kg... 3000 grams of sugar, that I consumed in my own in just a matter of a few months...
Kind of shocked by this, I told a colleague about this, and he replied with something that stuck with my till this day: "It's all between your ears, stop taking sugar in your coffee, and after just a week, you won't know better. In fact: you'll come to detest it".
So I did, stopped taking sugar in my coffee cold turkey. And, my colleague was right, after a couple of days, I didn't miss the sugar in my coffee. In fact: I came to appreciate the taste of pure coffee.
A couple weeks later my mother accidentally put sugar in my coffee, as a force of habit, and I actually spat it out. It tasted horrible.
So, If you drink coffee with sugar: just stop doing it and you'll get to enjoy the real taste of coffee, and safe yourself a lot of sugar intake.
I also ditched soda (except for an occasional mixed drink) and when I want something cold and fizzy I pour a can of seltzer water with lime, orange, cherry, etc. It’s a game changer if you can kick the sugar habits.
I can second this fully. Figured out the same thing when I spent a solid week nazi tracking my eating.
The thing that blew my mind. I always used heavy cream in my coffee. 150cal per 2 tablespoons. I would use like a quarter cup. I switch to milk, just 150cal per cup.
The little things really damn matter.
Integral calculus ftw!
Modern zero calorie sweeteners are really impressive. We've come a long way from the days of saccharine.
I know that's a wide range, but you can't really do "half-packets" easily and the cup sizes I use vary.
https://chinchileproducts.com/products/iansa-cero-k?_pos=2&_...
About 6 drops is a teaspoon, so 125ml lasts forever. It is much more concentrated than other versions in the US.
The pure stevia versions and pure sucralose versions are okay, but for whatever reason the mix is really just perfect.
The oat milk actually tastes disgusting to me from the fridge, but is super tasty once steamed. The higher fat version (Oatly calls it Barista Edition) is necessary to steam it. Regular oatmilk stays mostly liquid.
Not exactly the diet plan anyone should really choose, but it shows that even changes that feel like they shouldn't matter actually do, even when eating what most would describe as an unhealthy diet. There are a lot of calories in fats and oils, and apparently removing some of them can have significant effects on weight gain or loss.
Also, check out erythritol as a sugar substitute. I use it for everything and actually prefer it to sugar. It has a nice cooling effect in liquids it's dissolved in that you don't get with sugar.
Fats are 9 calories a gram. If you remove the available grease you're getting, what, two grams off per slice, maybe? Doesn't seem like that's really moving the needle.
Though now I want to rigorously test this, so the next time I have pizza I'll weigh the napkin before and after soaking up available grease.
Apparently, all he ate were pizzas, so it wasn't just one slice he was degreasing, but whole pizzas.
I usually combine with a Almond/Coconut milk and it is fine without sweetener. May take a bit to get used to if you have habits to break.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. People stop trying when they set unrealistic goals for themselves. We don't all need to be hyperfit. Etc.
I have made a ton of personal progress over the last 1.5-2 years in health and several other areas, by being vigilant in refusing to try to change too fast, even for mundane goals. It is important to find the right pace.
> Except I wasn't. I was actually indulging myself, like two tablespoons.
Is that correct? 2tbsp? 30ml? That's beyond indulgent. Sugar in hot drinks is typically measured in teaspoons, where two is a lot. And that's a third as much as yours; his I dread to think.
I don't say it to be condescending, but I am sceptical that sugared coffee drinkers have ever tried half-decent coffee (without instinctively adding/thinking they need to add sugar to it) anyway.
What blew my mind is how many calories are in a couple ounces of trail mix. I used to snack on that whenever I’d pass the cupboard. I can pay for a week of coffee by avoiding a few handfuls of trail mix!
As a bit of an aside: putting as many calories in as little weight as possible is kind of the point of trail mix, so you're not carrying kilos upon kilos of food when hiking.
I realized when I was 20 that I could easily drink 15% of my energy needs. Mostly empty calories (soda and the like).
I stopped. Now I drink water 98% of the time.
This is mostly what the article calls the "halo effect". People assume that "natural" things are lower calorie or healthier, which is sometimes the case, but fructose is fructose. It doesn't really matter if it's from corn or honey. Honey arguably has another couple marginal benefits, but it's absolutely not useful in losing weight. It's something like 90% sugar by weight.
What I'd actually suspect is something closer to: all diets work. Almost every fad diet works, even when they're completely counter to nutritional science because the simple act of paying attention to what you eat has positive effects.
It's most likely portion difference plus all the other crap in the highly processed creamer.
Long term (centuries), as a species I suspect we may end up doing some light genetic modifications to tune our appetite for norms in modern civilization. Presuming modern western style lifestyles become more sustainable.
We're less than ~100 years into this crazy modern era where routine famines aren't the norm. Even in Western Europe post-WWI and post-WWII there were lots of famines. If you compare Western Europe with the USA-minus-1.5 decades you get similar curves of obesity increase [2]. That makes sense if you consider that post-WWII it took Western Europe about a decade or two to repair basic infrastructure. The whole bit of overall Europe having healthier cuisine than the US isn't true, with regards to obesity at least. It's largely seems to be availability of calories. Eastern Europe for example reflects the fall of the USSR and economic stagnation during 1990's pretty well too [3].
1: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-appr... 2: https://www.niussp.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Schermata-... 3: https://www.niussp.org/health-and-mortality/impact-of-obesit...
Blaming it on food scarcity isn't the whole story. It's not enough that food scarcity stopped. It wasn't carbs either, as there are cultures without carb scarcity that weren't obese(Though we do put corn syrup in everything now).
My guess is that it's a dopamine addiction. We understand that sometimes we must do things we don't like, but the idea of eatings things we don't enjoy scares many people.
It's also how corps package food, and the ones that make their foods the most addicting(the most dopamine -> the most pleasure) survive.
Some kings in the past had massive obesity problems, like Henry VIII. Apparently for him it was forced immobility following a hunting accident. Most people in the UK just haven't been able to afford to get obese until the last several decades, and I warrant companies have learnt how to hook us on high-fat and high-sugar foods to make bigger profits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_Pacific
If you follow the "see also" from that article studies find the genetic factors towards becoming obese in a favorable environment to be different in different ethnic groups, from 6-85%.
So a theory that fits the statistics is that colonialism brought in a favorable diet for weight gain to everywhere(?) but the percentage of people who became obese when subjected to a favorable diet was largely a factor of local genetics, genes most useful in an unfavorable environment did well and put the peoples in those places at the top of the list for obesity rates.
So many food products are marketed as "Fat Free, Organic, High In Fiber, Heart Healthy" and so on, even though the products are just a bunch of processed low quality crap. Even beer is frequently marketed as "Low Carb". In reality, there is no reason in include any calories for alcohol in any diet where the goal is losing weight.
"I have a low metabolism" - obese people actually have a high 'metabolism', because moving all that extra weight takes a lot of energy
"Being overweight is not unhealthy" - weird then that they are having trouble getting pregnant and/or miscarriage regularly, need a machine to breathe at night lest their brain not receive enough oxygen, their knees and hips and eyes are that of someone several decades older, they're likely dependent upon insulin injections to live, and substantially more likely to develop cancer, etc.
Yes, there are a lot of negative attitudes towards obese patients in the medical community. That is partly because obese people think they know better than medical science, and are more interested in screaming about how they're being discriminated against thanks to the patriarchy and unrealistic beauty standards....than actually doing something about their weight...like accepting a referral to a nutritionist and accepting the advice to engage in more activity and weight-bearing exercise.
When someone needs a machine to breathe, artificial joint replacements, hourly/daily insulin, and Star Trek levels of intervention to reproduce, maybe they just need to shut the fuck up and lose weight.
You know what's really infuriating? Maintaining a healthy weight, getting exercise, making an effort to eat a balanced diet that hits lots of nutrients....and seeing these people cost my insurance company several orders of magnitude more money to keep alive than I do.
Not to veer too far off topic but this is something that always bugs my mind when people talk about how they don't want "socialized" healthcare because they don't wanna pay for other people to live unhealthy lives. Like dude, healthcare is already socialized, where exactly do you think the money the insurance companies uses to pay for all of your health costs comes from? From....other members paying into it. Which means that they already adjust prices to account for all their unhealthy members. You're already paying for it, might as well cut out the part where the company's incentivized to put turning a profit over providing quality care.
Most healthcare costs come from old age related costs and diseases. Cigarette smokers and obese people are actually cheaper to insure in the long run, because they're much more likely to die before becoming old enough to incur significant old age related healthcare costs.
*Cost you several orders of magnitude more
It's so easy to tell ourselves that each small contribution adds to zero, but as someone noted elsewhere in this thread, calculus should tell us enough to be wary of dismissing little bits!
That said, totally agree. The basics starts with a basic understanding of "how much." Food is quantified calorically. If you don't have knowledge or intuition about how much is how much, you're not aware of your eating habits.
Mates of mine are vegan, and I think they make the mistake in the other direction with their kid. They're hyper focused on "quality calories" but they underestimate calorie quantity. A kid's meal consisting of cucumber, greens, carrot, and bean noodles is 100 calories, and the kid needs 300. They do put a lot of effort into learning about healthy vegan diets, but the basics... quantity estimation isn't there.
^BTW, I think the whole idea behind courses and other "feasting" traditions might be that it allows us to pig out more effectively. I'm all full on soup, but I could go for some of that potato. Then sweets. Mebe some cheese.
Even if there was a device that could scan all food before eating it, they would still exempt some meals with the "do not count" argument.
Rule of thumb, that if a meal is easy and fast to prepare, then it is probably not suited for a diet.
To lose weight you have to do a lot more exercise than you think consistently. And you have to eat a lot less than you think.
Most people just don't have that kind of willpower.
Exercise was uncomfortable until I had lost weight, now I can do 15+ mile hikes with a 60l backpack.
I don't want to discourage anyone from doing exercise at any time in their goal for weight loss, but it is possible to lose weight by calorie restriction alone.
A simple walk on an incline (5km/hr @ 5% incline) can help you burn 400+kcals/hour. You can probably eat at 1500 kcals and start your day with a walk like that on the treadmill while watching some TV show :).
> .. but it is possible to lose weight by calorie restriction alone.
Indeed it is! :)
If you're obese or severely overweight, it's best to just do a PSMF to lose weight as quickly as possible. Btw, at 230lbs you can easily do strength training which will help you with body recomp (stimulating muscle growth while burning fat).
A good rule of thumb for a PSMF is 9.7x[protein intake]. For example: given 1.6g/kg*104kg = 166g of protein per day we get: 166g * 9.7 kcal/g = 1610 kcal. So your daily calories are at 1610 kcal max, and you need to eat at least 166g of protein (the rest of the calories can be filled with carbs/fat). I suggest min 50g of fat per day for men.
If you want to lose weight you need to do one of the following
Be hungry, Be in pain from exercise (running), or sacrifice all your free time to low intensity exercise
I chose option 3 along with weight lifting and I don't regret it.
Walking also has this really cool effect of not increasing ghrelin unlike high intensity cardio
I understand that sodium,potasium,etc.. are necessary, I'm just asking about why you think that the calories are a problem when 230 pounds?
I think this is a misleading cliche. I seem to have a lost a significant amount of weight just from eating less, without exercise. Which makes sense.
It's amazing how many miles you'd have to run to burn the calories you get from a Big Mac. Basically, our food is super dense in calories, and our bodies are extremely efficient machines (meaning, they don't burn as many calories as you'd think when exercising). So, it should be much easier to lose weight by eating less than by exercising more.
> Most people just don't have that kind of willpower.
Most people aren't motivated enough. But "willpower" is a misleading and thus destructive way to describe motivation.
You increase motivation by thinking about whether the positive thing you want is "worth" whatever you're doing to get it. In other words, staying focused on the value. You don't increase motivation by "exerting willpower." That whole concept for motivation is a recipe for failure.
Exercise doesn't help very much, it's really all about diet. Plus if you are exercising a lot, you'll feel hungier and it'll be harder mentally to not eat more to compensate.
If you exercise a bunch, you burn energy exercising and you also upregulate your metabolism significantly, giving you a higher calorie budget -- but you also really, really heavily upregulate hunger. If you exercise enough that the calories burn "matter", you're likely to feel the need to eat way way way too much.
Doing "just enough" exercise that you don't become sluggish and lethargic is probably the right place to be purely from a weight-loss perspective.
But in my experience, the hard part about losing weight isn't really anything other than "the amount I have to eat to not feel miserable all the time is too much"
Diets do work, in that if you want few enough calories, you will lose weight. They "don't work" because asking someone to spend months or years continually in escalating misery generally eventually results in noncompliance -- and if your body tells you that it wants 2500 calories per day and you go on an 1500 calorie diet to create a 500-calorie actual deficit to lose about 0.8-1.0lb/week, you're go to feel really really hungry 24 hours a day.
Some folks report that if they force themselves to eat less after a month or two, their sense of hunger downregulates and it gets easier. Other folks report that hunger remains a constant companion, never relenting until they broke.
Had to give up coffee in the mornings because of the milk I put in it and the fact I can't just have coffee on an empty stomach. I have 3-4 cups of tea and 1.5L of water before lunch. Makes me piss like a race horse and gives me an overall "clean" feeling with no real hunger feelings at all.
It's only been 2-3 weeks so too early to say if the diet's any good, but at least there's no hunger / misery / counting calories. Overall pretty easy.
It did not work for me at all, I gained SO MUCH weight, because by lunchtime I was ravenous and couldn't stop myself from eating way, way, way more than I would have if I split between breakfast and lunch. I mean, it was also a stressful time, so it's hard to compare, but I put on 20 pounds in a few months, after having been stable weight for 5-6 years.
I started forcing myself to get up earlier and have a breakfast of around 350ish calories (basically a bowl of cereal or oatmeal or something with milk), and that allowed me to immediately stop the weight gain, because I removed probably 750+ calories of "excess" lunch in exchange. Still struggling to lose what I gained, but I've been stable for 18+ months since I made space for breakfast.
It's really interesting how individual some of this stuff ends up seeming. For example, I have learned that I can not be a stable weight (at any weight, it seems) if I drink sugared drinks with food. It seems that if I have a sugary drink with my food, I actually feel the urge to eat more food in addition to the calories in the drink, leading to a massive downward (well, upward in weight) spiral. I almost completely cut out sugary drinks from my life when I figured this out. (I now have maybe two or three sweet drinks per month on average. I haven't lost any weight this way, but I have regained stability).
I am a firm believer that the real solutions to the obesity epidemic are all going to be around helping people control their hunger sensation (be that with dietary changes, coaching and counselling, routine changes, chemistry or other medical intervention). Learning how much you should eat to be the weight you want to be isn't that hard. Spending about a third of your concentration power at all times to avoid the overpowering urge to raid the pantry, on the other hand, is really hard.
I'm glad you found something that works for you. I'm still working on finding it for myself, though I did manage to stop the bleeding at least.
My diet was bad and I was eating far above 2000kcal on many days. I just exercised a lot. 1h of fairly intense cardio at least 6 days a week, though I would always round up to the next 10 min mark and do more like 70 or 80 min per day.
Some days I would order pizza or something and some dessert in the evening when I knew this would push me into the 3000kcal range and in return did 2h or 3h exercise routines fairly regularly, often times while eating the pizza.
Obviously different things work for different people, but no amount of cardio is going to offset a terrible diet for most people. Caloric deficit and intermittent fasting combined with exercise is the easiest and fastest way (imho) to get your body to start metabolizing fat stores.
That's a massive number of calories! Might not look like much compared to how much is in, say, a bagel, but use a calculator to figure out what your basal metabolic rate is (what your body consumes just you doing nothing, sort of) and you'll find that extra 500 gives you a ton of headroom in whatever your diet is. A week and a half of that would be a solid pound on it's own (yes yes a pound is less calories than 500x10.5, but weight loss is not 1:1 like that for many reasons).
For me, exercise leads to me feeling pretty crappy if I eat badly/too much and drink alcohol. So the exercise leads to me not wanting to feel like that, which leads to improvement in diet.
I found the same when I started counting calories. An extra slice of wholegrain bread is how much?!
Even just a thin spread of butter or margarine on the bread would blow my daily budget by a lot, so I had to find alternatives for that (like mustard).
Given my own preferences for having a "proper meal", I ended up only eating twice a day. I focused on making it high-protein and high-fiber to make me feel full longer, cutting down on regular carbs as needed.
In the immortal words of Jasper Carrott:
"This hole", points to mouth. "Is bigger than that hole", points to bottom.
> they DO NOT want to believe how small portion sizes are required to consistently lose weight
My problem isn't meals and their potions, it is absent-minded snacking between. I'm finding it a lot harder to drop the few Kg I put on over 2019/2022/2021 (largely in 2020, when I like many had a bit of a mentally unstable few months and comfort eat a lot) than I found it to drop a few tens of Kg in 2015/2016.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/your-fat-cells-never...
She lost 90 pounds doing that in under a year.