Being fatter than Homer Simpson
nicky.bearblog.dev
nicky.bearblog.dev
Something that really was game changing for me was logging everything I ate with relatively legitimate counts of the calories and macros. Before even getting towards goals I realised that those random handfuls of cashews I might grab from the kitchen on the way to the restroom weren't say 60-100 calories, but more like 400!!! Fruit and especially fruit juices are another secret killer. There was just instant change in my calorie intake because so many things I was eating were much denser than I expected.
Now, many of these counters aren't perfect, all people are different, and you don't absorb at consistent rates across food. Don't try and optimise down to 10s or even say order of magnitude 100 calories. But you might find some massive surprises in your food intake this way.
I also did the whole diet / macro planning. Alongside going out of my way to log all food intake, having the plan added enough mental barriers to get snacking under control. Not everybody has success with these plans, but I'd still recommend the tracking and logging just to see if there's any surprises.
edit: You don't even have to keep the tracking up. Just do it for a a few weeks so you at least know. I don't really track calories anymore but it's largely since i have a much better idea of what I'm eating after tracking in the past.
edit 2: If you take care to track your macros, you can observe pretty significant differences in strength training results.
I guess this is also why I'm not great at keeping up with tracking for more than a couple weeks at a time.
The British TV show "Secret Eaters" is eye opening. While it may be an extreme example, it shows how people can be eating more than twice as much as they think.
It also protects you from the food industry marketing departments.
In 6 months I learned:
- Everything sold in packages blows the fat or carb budget;
- I don't really like sodas or icecream;
- I cannot live without bread. I would always make sure there was some carb budget available for bread;
- Tofu, eggs and milk pack a lot of energy compared with their protein content. Careful there!
- Fruits can cause quite a dent in the carb budget;
- Many thing sold as healthy pack an obcene amount of calories;
- (Sugarless) Milk tea is a powerful tool to fend off hunger.
I lost 14kgs in 6 months, and kept that result for 2 years now. Most importantly, I am more satisfied with what I eat.
There are certain food that you can eat if you aren't super diligent about tracking, weighing, etc. and still see great progress in whatever your goals are. Fruit definitely isn't one of them!
I personally find most fruit juice so acidic that I only drink it with a big meal.
Milk has a significant amount of sugar, and if you are drinking the whole fat version, has nearly as many calories as an equivalent amount of soda.
I don't think most milk teas have more than tablespoon or two of milk.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
Once my depression set in, like the author I ate to feel better because it was one of the few ways I could feel anything good at all. Not just the taste, but the anticipation was a form of hope for something better when I was hopeless. The worse I felt, the more I binged.
And like the author, between the behavior and the meds I climbed to 300lbs (up from 163).
I'm finally making progress on my weight again, through strength training and through being mentally healthy enough to make decent dietary choices.
But when I was in the thick of it I barely had the strength to hang on, much less exercise methodically-calculated denial of my immediate desires.
What worked best for me though was simply portion control. When I lay food out on my plate I can make a pretty good guess as to what's enough. The trick is to stop when you clear your plate — no seconds.
That ended up slowly taking the weight down. It only came back when I slacked off from my portion control regimen (started back on it again a few weeks back).
Not emphasis.
Don't lump whole fruit in with fruit juice. No one ever got fat eating fruit.
"It's simple math, calories consumed versus calories burned", and the solutions are correspondingly simplistic. Eat less, work out more, or both.
To me, it's like saying that poverty can be solved by people either working more or spending less. Well, perhaps, but it's not the core of the issue.
The widespread lack of empathy for people in the high BMI ranges freaks me out. The absolute majority of people WANTS to be healthy, happy and safe.
This post really did a great job breaking through the stigma and humanizing this condition.
"Wanting" something is completely meaningless, if you want other conflicting things more. I can say I want to lose weight, but if I also "want" to eat a whole pizza every night after eating my normal meals that's probably not going to happen.
For me and probably a lot of people, the first step towards getting my weight in control was to decide that losing weight was one of my top priorities, and not just something I think about once in a while.
Ultimately you have to reshape your life and environment a little bit.
Weight is a constant struggle as I think about eating something essentially non stop. There is that trope that men think about sex every 7 seconds - for me it is thinking about eating. I never feel full and always want more - I can finish up a big lunch and within mere minutes be thinking about dinner and what I can have for a snack or whatever.
It is a constant struggle. It consumes my mind and I often can't think about anything else.
I think it all comes down to the level of control you have over your effort and results. For some, it's a losing battle against long term mental health problems and coping mechanisms (like in my case), for others it's against physical conditions like thyroid and hormonal problems. Others it's just a simple case of 'I want to eat what I want'.
It is ultimately about making it a priority, but for this who aren't just eating because they want to, overcoming that problem becomes a whole bigger thing, and that's a much more insurmountable looking obstacle. That doesn't meant they can't achieve what they're looking for, else I wouldn't be trying myself. But it does mean the issue goes further, and support needs to look at the whole issue. Nutrition guides and workout programs don't resolve the deep seated mental blockers.
Or that there just might be an environmental issue as well. (Endocrine disruptors, perhaps?)
Otherwise, how the heck does one explain the obesity epidemic? It is not like most if any people choose to be fat. And no, amount of physical labor is still considerable.
It's very easy to individualize a systemic issue.
If someone forces themselves to eat X calories, where X is below their maintenance calories, they will lose weight. This is both obvious from understanding the mechanics, but also proven through many actual studies.
I'm not sure if you agree with that or not, but if you do, then what do you mean that CICO doesn't explain the phenomenon?
We should not celebrate morbid obesity as normal and beautiful.
We gain nothing from villanizing people that suffer from it either.
I personally have never suffered obesity but as the years go on, my body seems to want to put a ludicrous amount of fat in places it never used to. I maintain muscle mass by regular resistance training mixed with cardio and HIIT and that helps a lot with the otherwize natural loss of muscle over 40. Personally this is where excercise definetly helps me.
Also now at 50, I dont have insulin resistance or high blood pressure as many of my fellow 50 year olds are falling prey to.
Even the healthy weight 50 year olds around me are starting blood pressure medication. This is where I beleive the excercise regime I follow has worked wonders. Not so much for weight loss as many seem to think.
It gets harder every year though to maintain physique and low body fat.
Excercise has tremendous benefits for your health and looks but for great weight loss is a matter of nutrition and what particular combo suits your body, economy and culture.
I would swap out the 'beautiful' for 'healthy'. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder after all.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, yes, but it's also about how you carry yourself.
Now, different cultures I'm sure, but do you really experience "fat acceptance" proselytizing in real life, as opposed to in news articles linking to some bizarre part of Tumblr and its terminally online relatives?
Musical artist Lizzo:
"Throughout her career, Lizzo has been subject to body shaming. She is considered an image for body positivity and self-confidence. She partially credits social media, and the Internet in general, for changing the narrative around size and giving visibility to overweight women." [Wikipedia]
Also see:
https://headlinehealth.com/lizzo-308-lbs-is-clearly-and-visi...
Like blue-haired social justice warrior, this supposed celebration of obesity as an identity onto itself is complained about a lot online but not seen much in real life. In real life people merely seem to want to be left alone regarding their health instead of being accused of being sloths and the like—and health is in general a very private thing to many.
Virtually no one celebrates being overweight. And certainly not obesity.
You talk about middle age. It’s much more common to say that weight-gain is inevitable due to aging than it is to declare that one identifies with one’s gut belly now that one is 40+.
Personally, the thing that has consistently worked is portion control. It will always be easier to eat only the calories you need, than to burn calories from over-eating.
People look at the "recommended serving" and cry foul that it suggests they eat only 30-40g of cereal in the morning, but it really is plenty. I keep a digital scale in the kitchen and weigh out most of my food before eating or cooking with it. Even things like rice and pasta are really easy to over-do when guesstimating and not measuring.
It can take a little bit of adjustment to get used to this, but your body quickly adapts to the portions you're being served. And then on days when you do more than your usual exercise, it's easier to add a snack or increase the portion slightly, than it is to be always trying to "reduce" the calories on days when you don't work out. It's a small mental trick that can work wonders once you've set a baseline.
Weetos are quite good (compared to other child-targeted cereals), honeynut cornflakes very bad, etc., IME you need to read the label though because it can be hard to tell.
Of course the Nestle-style cereals you're talking about are not ideal. But especially bad for you if you're eating 100g and not 40g.
The thing is, moderate amount of exercise has fairly proven track record of improving peoples health. Whether they loose weight or not in the process, the statistic result in blood pressure and what not are real.
The same can not be said about weight loss based on portion size only. Which simultaneously make it easy to cut portion into malnutrition of some sort, despite still having many calories in it.
I've been known to experience blackout-like behavior where my brain just disconnects and I end up buying some unhealthy snack because I subconsciously want it.
It has gotten a lot better with age though, just last week a girlfriend called me "fit" and I was shocked. So I have lost a lot of weight and I've worked hard on managing my purchases. Just like drugs, as long as it's not in my home, I won't use it.
But any snacks, candy or ice cream in my home gets eaten. In my later 30s I started throwing shit out, like candy into the trash, ice cream in the sink, just like an alcoholic. It's not just math. It's a very difficult mental health problem.
And it's absolutely exasperated by in-store displays of candy and snacks. They're selling death to addicts, in color.
I think it's important that we not think it's complicated from a math point of view lest people start thinking that only the quality of their foods matters, not their amounts; some people actually think that eating fat itself (lard, butter, etc) is the primary cause of what makes you fat, which is false.
The function can be simple math, and the factors psychologically/emotionally difficult to deal with. Recognizing that is not lessening the struggle, from where I'm standing
FYI: exacerbated.
It's important to realize that the weight (loss) boils down to these fundamentals. Many people delude themselves that their extra weight is caused by eating not healthy foods. While that might be partially true, portion control is hugely important as well. Many people then switch to eating healthier food (containing the healthy weight loss calories, not those gain calories), but still in copious amounts, and then wonder how come they're not losing weight.
So, breaking such delusions by understanding CICO is an important first step, but of course it's not sufficient on its own and people need to develop more complex strategies based on this.
Keeping the weight at lower levels is a different thing entirely. This is why so many calorie-restricting diets fail when people gradually abandon them.
Humans have a built-in sensor of satiety. If the sensor is signaling that they are hungry, they feel uncomfortable, and go looking for food, sooner or later. This can be suppressed by willpower, but it's taxing and distracting. This is why so many calorie-restricting diets get abandoned: the initial serving of willpower allocated to the self-restriction ends, and people want to proceed with their lives without having to fight the feeling of hunger most of the time. Between keeping a healthy weight and performing well on a demanding mental job they usually choose the latter. Whoever can lose weight on pure willpower is a hero; others can strive to emulate them, but should not assume they will be as successful.
So substances that help blunt or remove the feeling of not having eaten enough are important. Some of them are medical drugs (say, modafinil has this effect), some are household substances (like caffeine), some are real dangerously addictive drugs (like nicotine or cocaine). But there are mechanical sensors right in the stomach, which are harder to suppress with substances. This is where surgical means can and do help. Cutting a part of your stomach is now done via a very small incision in one's abdomen.
Morbid obesity is a disease, and should be treated as such. Shaming someone obese is like shaming someone with a broken leg: both painful and not helpful.
This is true.
> that poverty can be solved by people either working more or spending less.
This is not true.
I understand your core message about the difficulty, but I dont see the similarities between both statements.
Basically, there are lots of people who have been working hard and saving that are still poor. But I haven’t met anyone that have been consistently doing fitness (nutrition, exercise, sleep,) that is out of shape.
Edit: What I mean is that getting in shape is simple but hard. We have a “universal” script for it. If I follow it I will get some results.
Getting out of poverty is both hard and complex. It involves more variables but using your message: What do you work hard on? Is there anything to even save at the end of the month? There is also a good amount of luck involved. My dad worked hard and spent frugally but was still poor.
The solution here really is simple. Eat less move more, and preferably eat healthier. It doesn't mean it's easy. And this is coming from someone who's been about 50 pounds overweight for 3 years and I'm finally losing the weight, down 25 pounds but still a long way to go.
Just like, your example of poverty, or smoking/drug use. Addictions are often "simple" to quit, just stop doing [bad thing], but they're far from easy because it ignores the underlying reasons people are addicts or have emotional regulation issues to begin with.
A common online solve-all is: "Just go get therapy." Which, while better intentioned than bullying, or yelling "CICO!!!" is often suggested by people who don't realize how expensive, inconsistent, and uncommon good therapy is. People treat it like a "just talk to a therapist, and you'll be fixed" rather than more realistically: "just spend $100 a session until you can even find a therapist who could help you, then spend thousands on that therapist."
When someone says "just go get therapy" it says more about them than anything else: they're demonstrating that they're misinformed, low empathy, or both.
It almost feels like a trick. One more way in which people are trained to assume that suffering because they've got a shitty job with a boss that hates them working for a faceless corporation and anonymous customers is just a property of the universe like gravity. I don't think that therapists are doing something wrong or that going to therapy is bad but there is something sick about how human suffering just becomes one more market where megacorps can extract wealth from the masses.
Absolutely true. CICO is an over-simplification and almost useless to many people who suffer from obesity. It also ignores that most people do better concentrating on the CI side of the equation (increasing CO is rarely enough for an obese person to permanently reduce their weight). Understanding the fundamentals of calories, the broader aspects of nutrition, glucose response (post-exercise, daily rhythms, etc) - if you’re desperate it can be quite overwhelming.
Telling an obese person to “eat less” or “exercise more” isn’t any more helpful than telling them “try harder” or “don’t be a fatty”.
It just kind of happened for me. I know I eat unhealthy food; I know I drink too much; I know I don't do enough (as in, any) exercise... I look at my face in the mirror and think 'that's not too bad!' but then catch my side profile at some point and think 'eek!'.
It's all a bit miserable, really. :-(
You should be so proud of yourself for your weight loss!!! I really hope things continue on the right path for you.
1. add exactly 16.8 to the value in your head
2. open the calc app (at which point you might as well put "84 kg in lbs" to google)
3. don't worry about the exact result, give a rough approximation: "it's about 180-something"
#3 will suffice, people are usually looking for a rough ballpark figure. If it was important then I'd obviously convert it carefully, but I'm talking about when I've done a conversion when talking with a US friend in the pub or something where I'd probably mess up whether you add a tenth of the original value or the doubled value anyway :)
It's weird, but I always use metric for 'small' measurements (a number of metres, for example), but for distances on the road it'll be miles. And I've used miles per hour for so long that I just can't get my head around how fast something's moving if it's quoted in km/h. (Of course, the fact that road signs are miles and MPH over here kind of drums that in somewhat...)
Likewise, when I'm cooking I'll work in grams and litres, but for body weight it's always been stones.
(Was born in 1970, by the way.)
That said, I have a reasonable intuition for the conversion factors. Enough that I wouldn't have to run to Google to understand the jist of the story.
People can spend their lives spiralling into depression and ill-health by constantly following diets or setting goals that even if they achieve doesn't always make them feel satisfied. I'm not saying you should or shouldn't do anything in particular - but I hope you don't feel pressured or guilted into something by what others say or what you think they feel.
The fact that you can look in the mirror and think "that's not too bad" means you're already happier than a lot of people - there are some shredded people with physiques you or I may envy, but who are either miserable about their lifestyle or who still just don't like how they look.
I don't know how this comment comes across - but my intent was to give a little support that wasn't just "you can lose weight too!" because that is not the be-all-and-end-all :)
Not quite, but it is important. Being ~100 lb overweight is a serious medical condition. It's bad for your knees, it's bad for your heart, and it puts you at much higher risk of tons of other problems.
- it is received wisdom that if you are fatter you are "unhealthier" and this is reflected in a lot of data whenever this is studied
- however this tends to not get controlled for some important factors (e.g. lower income people are generally more unhealthy overally than those on higher incomes) for a whole variety of reasons that aren't necessarily related to weight or whether you're categorised as overweight
- a very undeappreciated problem is that if you're "overweight"[1] you tend to be quite under-served by doctors currently. So it's common for an "overweight" person to go to the doctor with a problem - heart pains, gastro-intestinal problems, whatever - and to be told "lose some weight, you're overweight". While someone thinner would get some more attention even though they may both have a weight-agnostic root cause . This is not very well studied or measured, but this type of treatment is widely reported problem whenever you survey "overweight" people
- people with eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia are often excluded from these studies with the intent to get untainted data. These eating disorders are usually only diagnosed for people below a certain BMI, when in fact they are still definitely present among higher-BMI individuals and have a similarly detrimental effect on their health. Sustained dieting can have pretty serious effects on your body, and if you go to a doctor because, say, you're a woman on a diet who has stopped menstruating ... well, see the previous bullet point, you're just just get told "lose some weight"
There a few other additional issues, but I hope this is enough to make you stop and think that while yeah there's possibly increased health risks it's potentially less than we might realise and is a pretty complex subject that deserves careful study and to be treated with more nuance than it usually is.
[0] - the answer is "kinda yes, but not as much as you think and not in every way and it's more complicated": https://www.stitcher.com/show/maintenance-phase/episode/is-b...
[1] - Aubrey Gordon, a host of the podcast I mentioned, has suggested she doesn't like "overweight" etc euphemisms, but I chickened out of using just "fat" like she does ... but I still think "overweight" possibly incorrectly suggests there is a correct weight you should be - so I surrounded it in coward-quotes :) I do know for a fact that "obese" (and morbidly obese) are heavily frowned-upon and tbh not particularly helpful categorisations, I saw them floating around elsewhere in this thread.
That said... this is one of those cases where I have to defer to the experts here. Basically every expert I've heard on this topic has said that being obese is unhealthy. And while you (summarizing the podcast) raise a lot of interesting points, I don't think I'm in a position to disagree with the scientific consensus here. And it's not like the people studying this stuff haven't thought about a lot of these objections themselves.
Also, anecdotally, it seems fairly common sense that people who are obese are less healthy in many ways. I know that's just an impression, but c'mon, it's a pretty strong one, to me at least. I've seen so many people go from finding it hard to walk much without breathing hard when overweight, to being fine after. Just as an example of someone famous with many health problems that got much better- Penn Jillette.
But yeah does feel right (as an anecdotal aside I feel "healthier" at 84kg than when I was 94kg) and as I said in the extreme it does seem to be correct - the same is true for very thin people. But we're mistreating thin and fat people alike by boiling down a lot of health problems down to a single dimension and saying those who fall on one side of a line are healthy and those on the other aren't. I'm not suggesting you were doing just that - you seem to appreciate the nuance to it - but many people do and I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't that kind of person at one point in my past.
That said,I started listening to it... It's fantastic. They've made really great points so far. A bunch of questionable stuff too that I disagree with, but lots of great points.
And even not just about obesity. I think they made some analogies that will stick with me about correlations.
I have no idea who these are, but I'm super thankful you introduced me to them I'm definitely going to try more of their stuff.
I still hate exercise, I still have no upper body strength, I’m still overweight, but my overall fitness level has gone up significantly and I’ve lost some weight. Baby steps.
Just as I cannot explain why I am the way I am, it would be stupid to expect everybody to be the same as me. To look at an overweight person and assume they have no self-discipline. Or the opposite for a thin person. I don't see myself as any different from a fat person. I just somehow don't happen to be fat.
One problem that I do suffer from is anxiety and depression. In relating my experiences to others, I get the same sort of "helpful" suggestions. Go outside more. Exercise more. Meditate more. Drink more water. Eat healthier. I can only imagine what my life would feel like, if my mental health were on display the way weight is for fat people. The feeling that even though you're trying so hard, you're obviously not trying hard enough. Everyone giving unsolicited advice - I imagine the advice from former fat people is the worst.
At least with mental health issues, I can hide those, or not discuss them with "helpful" people. I have the greatest amount of compassion for fat people. People are so thoughtless and hurtful. Even when they're trying to help.
I can't say that every skinny person has a healthy relationship with food, but I can say that almost every overweight person does have an unhealthy relationship with food. Everyone is allowed to make their own choices, but if I smell liquor on your breath every morning, I'm going to assume you don't have a healthy relationship with alcohol. Same goes for food.
> I get the same sort of "helpful" suggestions
If someone is suffering from a cold and I tell them to "instead of going to work you could try taking the day off to sleep, it should help fight the cold virus", that's objectively true. If someone is suffering from depression and I tell them "try incorporating some exercise in your daily routing, it should help your mental and physical health", that's objectively true.
It feels like there's this viewpoint among many depressed folks where they want unconditional support from their friends/family, but only want the communication to go one way. It's incredibly difficult to support someone who is struggling with depression. If they offer suggestions, it's their way of trying to help because there's fuck all they can do outside of that.
Fat people, yeah "have you tried exercising? have you tried counting calories?" FFS of course they have. They weren't born yesterday. They're aware of their weight 100% of every waking moment of the day.
Don't give people advice unless they ask for it. Plain and simple.
edit: Regarding the first paragraph, what I mean to say is: When I discuss depression or anxiety with someone, and they come back with a bunch of "helpful" suggestions, in my mind the conversation sortof flips to where I have to justify myself. I have to explain or prove to them all the things I'm doing. It also sets up a conversation in my mind: "Am I doing enough? Should I be exercising more? Maybe I should take up yoga as well?" I don't want to justify my emotional state to someone. Especially to someone who, no offense to you, (but kindof?) does not know what the fuck they are talking about.
I was inspired by Paul Revelia - https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=paul+revelia+wa... - a body builder in his late 40's who does all his cardio with simple walking. I have lost about 25 pounds myself with just eating sanely and walking my dogs.
Keep it up Nicky.
Only bit of advice I have from giving up smoking about 20 years ago is, don't beat yourself up if slip up occasionally. Trying to take control of your situation is always useful in itself.
Even if you fall off the wagon multiple times just attempting to get back on again gives you more control and makes things easier the next time.
Try. Fail. Try again and fail again but better.
I have found that it is possible to change.
Becoming lighter has encouraged me to exercise but what I eat has always been the main factor in what I weigh.
That's exactly what I've found. I can exercise two or three hours a day; means nothing if I'm not watching my calories. Congrats on the weight loss!
I myself have lost 15kg over the past couple of years, after going from zero high-intensity physical activity on a normal week to a few hours of running and swimming every week.
I'm sure there are some unconscious changes to my eating, in particular afternoon/evening snacking. But that just happened without me trying or planning for it. I still eat at the same lunch restaurants and it is still my wife making me dinner most evenings.
There's approximately 3500 calories per pound of fat and the average human will burn about 100 calories per mile of sustained running. If you want to lose a pound a week (a pretty healthy weight loss rate) you can either run 5 miles a day without changing your diet or skip 2 energy drinks a day without changing your exercise regime. Unfortunately many people that think a big workout is burning huge amounts of fat often indulge in excess eating as a reward which leads to even less weight loss (or even weight gain).
Again, exercise has a ludicrous number of benefits and absolutely should be encouraged for those benefits but weight loss shouldn't be included among them.
It surprises me that this invalid logic is continually reinforced by the media and even health professionals.
The most weight I ever lost was during 2020 lockdown when I made the consious decision to eat a bit less. I did virtually no exercise, one 30min walk each day, and I had no access to fitness equipment at home.
Many folks gain weight very slowly. It creeps up on them. Typical scenario is a sedentary office job, family responsibilities, and little time for oneself. Calories are very much cumulative, so all it takes is some regular snacking (or stress-eating) to get the weight trend going up and, whoops, 20 extra lbs can easily appear in a year. A lot of this happened during the pandemic.
Losing that 20lbs, in such scenarios, can be done with a simple exercise regimen (or even some thoughtfully increased physical activity). One thing that's interesting is that you DON'T have to RUN a mile to burn 100 Calories. You can burn the same amount, 100 Calories, by walking a mile. It takes longer, of course, but it's easier on the joints especially for overweight people.
While the act of going to the gym won't burn many calories, putting on muscle can drastically increase your baseline metabolic rate. 10lb of muscle (easily gained by a "newbie" who is eating well) will add about 1,500 calories per day to your baseline metabolic rate. That's a whole meal! (and that's just the calories burned by existing, not by recovery/muscle building, the workout itself, etc).
The body is remarkably good at maintaining homeostasis when losing weight. So as one gets lighter, the body becomes more efficient and burns less calories, requiring deeper and deeper reductions in consumption. Increasing muscle mass negates this.
Edit: @gduffy has a better source for how much energy a lb of muscle burns, which is "4.5 to 7.0 kcal/lb per day". So adding 10lb of muscle will increase caloric consumption by 450 - 700 Calories. So not quite a meal, but a solid 5 mile run.
Per month?
https://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/metabolismcon...
It’s still helpful: even 50-70 Calories per day is 18k-25k Calories per year. At 3500 Calories per pound of fat that’s 5-7 pounds offset each year, but it’s not a panacea for someone with 100 pounds of body fat.
You can’t out-lift your fork!
It's not just about calories and metabolic rate. Lean muscle tissue is also a crucial component of the endocrine system, and it acts as a glucose sink to prevent the energy in that glucose from being stored as fat.
https://www.gabriellereece.com/muscle-as-the-cornerstone-of-...
Taking the numbers from @gduffy you end up with (4.5 to 7.0) * 10lb = 45 to 70 Calories.
So more like a half mile run for most people.
Unless I’m missing something?
So 4.5 kcal/lb per day * 10 lb = 45 large calories per day, not 450.
> The small calorie or gram calorie was defined as the amount of heat needed to cause the same increase in one gram of water. Thus, 1 large calorie is equal to 1000 small calories.
> In nutrition and food science, the term calorie and the symbol cal almost always refers to the large unit. It is generally used in publications and package labels to express the energy value of foods in per serving or per weight, recommended dietary caloric intake, metabolic rates, etc. Some authors recommend the spelling Calorie and the symbol Cal (both with a capital C) to avoid confusion; however, this convention is often ignored.
> In physics and chemistry the word calorie and its symbol usually refer to the small unit; the large one being called kilocalorie.
A fun myth, but obviously false. Most human hunting was team oriented using javelins, or even stones and spears. Only a small number of human tribes have ever seriously practiced running to exhaustion. It's just easier to cut them off with a large gang and stab them with spears as you corner them.
For me it was a crazy little thing, nothing to do with being fat-shamed or even feeling guilty about my weight.
I heard a radio journalist doing a show at a UK Slimming World meeting (or Weight Watchers). He was essentially poking fun at those attending, saying they would never keep any weight losses off. I thought was pretty mean, so I went to my local Slimming World meeting and signed up. I lost weight, learnt about healthier eating, tracking my weight etc. I don't go to Slimming World now but the good habits started there.
In my case I think I'd still be flirting with obesity had I not begged to see a specialist.
Start with a Registered Dietitian instead.
https://www.cdrnet.org/certifications/registered-dietitian-r...
On the contrary, it feels like the kind of thing people from higher socioeconomic groups do. Of course you work with a nutritionist, personal trainer, psychologist and life/business coach. Who has the time to keep track of that all yourself when you can pay someone else to do it.
It's all a matter of framing.
....you don't have to tell everyone you're going to the doctor, or to what kind of doctor.
And I can tell you from experience that doctors neither know anything significant about weight loss, nor do they care.
The difference is night and day though. My wife has really helped keep me on an even keel, but already I'm starting feel more awake and eat a little less.
Glad you made it off them, though, and hope that means things are looking better your end.
I say this so you understand that I believe I speak from a place of authority when it comes to struggling with and losing weight.
I think it is impossible for anyone who spent their life not having to pay attention to what they ate to maintain a "normal" BMI to understand precisely what it is like to not be that way. They look down on people like me because they think I must have gone out of my way to eat so much, when the truth is that I experience food in a completely different way from them. It's like I don't have an "off" signal for my compulsion to eat. I have to constantly pay attention to what I'm eating and try to ignore my hunger and non-hunger eating compulsion. Constantly. As in all the fucking time. It frequently makes me wish I were dead rather than have to put up with it.
Frankly, I kinda hate people who don't struggle with this. Partially that's because those are the kind of people who made me feel like shit my entire life for being the way I am, and partially it is for making it look so easy that it trivializes my constant war with my own fucking body, but mostly I think it is envy. I have said many times, and I'm not sure it was entirely exaggeration, that would kill and eat such a person if I thought it might grant me their power to simply stop eating when they've had enough calories.
I can tell you from experience that doctors and nutritionists don't know shit about this. And neither do you, random Hacker News about to promote a keto diet or intermittent fasting. Any diet will work for about 10lbs, I had to lose 15x that. There is a lot of bullshit science done on behalf of people selling food, selling diets, etc. making it pretty much impossible to separate useful information from marketing.
I wish I could offer an answer. I have spent the past 15 years or so of my life constantly looking for one, to no avail. The best I've managed is that if I can put myself in a sufficiently manic state I no longer seem to have an appetite, but that's hardly viable.
It's not like I don't know what cravings are. I, too, have eaten way more than I should when really trying not to. I'm fully aware that it's just dumb luck that I only experience that sort of thing once in a while, usually in connection with life situations I can somewhat change, rather than all the time. "I'm human, nothing human is alien to me", as they say.
> The best I've managed is that if I can put myself in a sufficiently manic state I no longer seem to have an appetite, but that's hardly viable.
Yeah, I can relate to that too. I took up foraging for mushrooms some years ago, which was a ton of fun, and thought, "You know what? I could probably live on what I find in the woods for dinner for a while!". So I actually did, and naturally I lost some weight. A year later, next mushroom season, a few kilos back on (I'm still overweight by the BMI definition, though it's nothing to the problems some people in this thread have), thought I'd try that again, and... hell no. Turns out it wasn't the mushrooms, it was the excitement.
They might also trigger inflammatory disorders but I'm less convinced of that. I eliminated them and lost tons of weight, though I had a pretty restrictive diet and was exercising a lot too so its hard to untangle the effects.
Generally, avoiding added high calorie fillers (that includes sugar and oils alike) is almost certainly a good idea if you're trying to lose weight though.
Just remember that a person's worth with God doesn't depend on how good looking, thin or tall they are. He doesn't see as humans see, but looks into the heart instead (1 Samuel 16:7). There are people on HN that need to know this.
Good luck with your weight loss!
The whole premise of "God decided to show Satan (why God thinks he need to prove anything to Satan in the first place?) his point by tormenting some mortal is... sadistic at best ?". And doesn't really touch topic of "why someone is allowed to be tortured by disease from birth and dies due to no action of their own will".
Though, in just a non-religious who grew up Christian, so this is all for fun and games.
This is true in general. Nobody's worth as a human is measured by their appearance.
Biblical quotes can be off-putting if you aren't Christian, but you can find wisdom even in things you disagree with/don't believe.
You "just" need to eat better food. It's that easy.
Well, here I'm not telling lessons, because I fail to "just" eat better food. In fact eating it is the easy part. Getting good food in your plate everyday is what is hard because it means making a lot of changes in your habits because, well, food is not going to cook itself and you always have "better" things to do.
So, yeah, you can lose more than that, but it's probably not sustainable by someone who loves to eat.
Source: experimented a fair amount with dieting/fasting in my 30s. When you talk about this with people, it’s startling how many believe that skipping some meals is dicing with death. Hardly surprising people struggle to lose weight, when they refuse to try changing the key variables
100g of fries is about 250kcal, 100g of cabbage is around 30
You can quite literally eat 10 times as much cabbage as fries to have the same amount of calories
And eating less triggers a feeling of hunger (at least at the beginning), which makes following through harder.
Cookies, chocolate, etc. easily exceed 500kcal/100g.
Beer is a serious calorie input too.
Hahahaha, this, yes.
Last summer during a whole company offsite we happened to play some quizz game where you had to give the nearest answer. One question was « How much time could you survive without eating anything except water ? ».
Boy did I won this guess by trying a random « 30 days » because I knew world records are amounted in months. The other answers were all, without exceptions, around 2 to 3 days and nothing more than a week.
Fix habit enough that you don't gain weight first, and get used to that being new normal, then start dropping, else it is very easy to bounce back.
Then, once you figured out how to live and eat "post weight drop", start actual drop, and if you bounce it won't be as hard
In the past couple of years I put some effort in learning how to cook. Nothing fancy, just following simple recipes and some occasional Hello Fresh boxes. At first, 30min recipes were taking me an hour to make and it was a hassle. Now I'm at a point where I can cook a lot of things without having to focus on it and can improvise some dishes with what's left in my fridge.
The benefits have been huge. I'm eating a lot healthier, spending way less on takeaway and feeling generally lighter and a lot less bloated. I'm sleeping better and have less of a post lunch energy dip.
I can't recommend it enough. Even cooking twice a week can already be 4 healthy meals if you make two portions each time.
To his credit, the GP did apologise after he laughed at me.
I recently went through a similar journey - I've lost ~80 lbs since March of 2022 and am now focused on maintaining (Before/After: https://www.instagram.com/p/CjG4AmDvG2w/ - still technically obese though). I was a college athlete and really struggled after college with "working out". I never "worked out", I always "trained". I couldn't bring myself to go to the gym for a couple hours a day without something to work towards. At one point I got super into CrossFit but all that went out the window when I had my first kid. I wish I could say I found balance, but getting super into Jiu Jitsu has been the latest thing to get me to drop weight.
Honestly I find maintaining harder than losing. When I was focused on losing weight I would just think "If I'm a little bit hungry I'm OK", but now focusing on maintenance I had to be much more diligent about tracking calories/macros.
The problem with losing weight can't be reduced to calories in versus calories out, that's the outcome, not the method. What you need to control is hunger, which can be very difficult for one person and very easy for another. Hormones play a huge role in this (ghrelin and leptin are big players) and that differs from person to person. Combine that with the fact that certain people unconsciously dial down their energy expenditure (fidgeting, bouncing, posture, etc.) when they reduce their calorie intake.
You can do a lot with conscious decisions like getting your step count up, doing regular cardio, eating more things that fill you up like vegetables, fruit, potatoes, anything high in fibre. But that only gets you so far until you hit that certain point at which it becomes too hard and that point is different for every person. If you have a tendency to be overweight, you'll never walk around with a permanent sixpack. It's better to weigh 100kg than to weigh 120kg even if it would be better to weigh 80kg, there's no point in losing a lot of weight if you can't maintain it.
After many bounces (biggest from 92 to 71kg which would be just at "normal" BMI for my height) I ended up aiming for a very little drop, while still eating "normal stuff". The aim is to make it psychologically manageable and not have to will thru the diet every day like I did before, only to eventually run out and get back to the bad habits.
Other thing I learned is differentiating between brain hunger and body hunger. Brain just likes to eat, preferably in nice regular intervals, especially once I got used before that the big evening meal is "reward" for hard day at work, and it took some time to figure out "no, your body is just fine, it's still metabolizing stuff, its your brain that's bored"
I've swapped the bread and other fast metabolizing stuff to help stave off the hunger and slowly get used to just eating one meal (around midday) per day so I get hungry right near the end of the day. Weirdly enough I don't get that much morning hunger and usually coffee with milk is enough to get me by for few hours before dinner.
When I get crave for something sweet I just do it instead of a meal or make meal smaller at later date as snack to stave off hunger till the end of the day. Baked potatoes instead of rice/fries/bread to the meal also work surprisingly well to keep me feeling sated.
WFH have been blessing here as I can just cook my meal instead of getting it in the office.
Excercise did pretty much nothing to me in terms of weight, sure, getting some to feel better is useful but it just makes me hungrier so calories even out...
I tried to google the blog, but couldnt find it, however it appears that he has released books and other such materials relating to it since then.
This isnt the post I read, however, it looks like some of the tools he created exist here:
https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
Note, as stated above, my struggle with weight is gaining, not loosing, so I have not delved into this stuff on a deeper level, however, what drew me into the original post, was the amount of research he did in relation to how much calories various activities will burn.
Figuring out that you need to eat less than you burn to lose weight is nothing substantial (not to slight the method, the advice on keeping the calorie intake it gives is sound).
The hard part is doing it without going crazy and figuring it how to fit it inside your lifestyle while still keeping morale high.
Like simple act of going to a party, it sucks to have to keep calorie count and skip on this or that.
So I just... don't. I got used to doing one meal a day so I just shift the time of it (with maybe a tiny snack if I can't really keep it up, but that's rare) to the party evening, and shift the next day meal to later in the day so I can burn off the party.
> and as such devloped an excel sheet which would show a rolling average of weight (like the way they guess the weather or some stocks). This he found, helped with motivation, instead of seeing big swings from day to day, a steady small reduction is seen via the charts instead.
I use Libra Weight Manager for like 10+ years now for that. I think I read this article back then too
But being overweight by itself is bad, and there's more and more research ongoing on how to fix that specific problem, without fixing the underlying causes that stop people from making the kind of lifestyle changes that will result in a healthy weight.
Matthew Yglesias has a writeup of his own experiences [1] and his research into the state of the art of obesity research. If you have been trying and failing to lose weight, you don't have to beat yourself up about your failed attempts. Well, you can beat yourself up, it's a free country, but also consider looking into solutions that take your willpower out of the equation.
[1] https://www.grid.news/story/science/2022/09/14/why-arent-med...
Research for what? If the normal food that people can buy is stuffed full of subsidised HFCS, it becomes the default to gain weight.
> that stop people from making the kind of lifestyle changes
This is not about individual choice: you can't design a system so that the default is way too many calories, then blame an individual for getting fat.
Make the default healthy.
Secondly, while I think it is unquestionably true that the composition of our diet has a significant effect on the propensity for obesity, it does remain a propensity. There are innumerable people that maintain a healthy weight, some with dedication and willpower, others with an almost effortless ease, and everything in between. And, we know from very basic science that reducing the inputs and increasing the burn will absolutely cause weight loss. Homeostasis is not necessarily easy to achieve, but it is certainly possible.
But practically there's some combination of diet, genetics, psychology, metabolism, gut biome, viral agents, endocrine system and a million other unknown and unmeasured phenomena that feed into it. At least in the USA, there is an overwhelming feeling that if you have the capability to fix things yourself (change your diet, change your lifestyle), then pursuing an alternative that takes it out of your hands (bariatric surgery or non-surgical interventions or weight-loss drugs like semaglutide or liraglutide) is admitting failure. I propose that it is less productive to dwell on failure than it is to actually lose the weight. We should remain skeptical of a "free lunch" -- extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof -- but it does appear that we are getting closer to having workable solutions to curing obesity.
If HFCS in everything is the problem, they will have to.
But there is no fixing going on (not in the sense of mending anything).
Because of this I never judge fat people. Always wondered if lots of obese people are just a victim of society or their own metabolism.
For many people (presumably OP as well), what you are describing is very much "effort". There are many "normal" people who have to put in a lot of effort to just eat three meals a day and nothing else. Food is very often a coping mechanism for handling stress, etc. Eating literally causes their body to release chemicals that make them feel better, and replacing that coping mechanism with something else is something that require a significant amount of ongoing effort. It's (truly) great that this isn't your experience, but that doesn't mean it isn't the reality many other people are living with every day.
- Try rucking. This is the name for walking with weight in a backpack. You may hear it referred to as 'tabbing' in the UK. You will burn almost as much calories as jogging but without the strain on your knees and it doesn't suck half as much. You can get dedicated rucksacks and weight plates for it or you can just sling some bricks or sandbags in a regular backpack. Try and get one with well padded straps. If you have a dog, just stick the backpack on whilst you are taking it for a walk and you are now essentially, in terms of calories burned, doing a run every day.
- Try meal shakes. There are quite a few of these available now. Huel is probably the most globally available. The problem with the whole philosophy of 'just track your macros and run a calorie deficit' is that it takes a lot of work. If you are overweight, you are likely already feeling tired and worn out. Adding on exercise AND meal prep AND calorie tracking on top is a pretty big jump. It is far easier to buy a meal replacement shake, have it for breakfast and lunch and then be relatively relaxed about what you have for dinner.
- Rather than tracking ALL the food you eat which is time consuming, boring and can lead to an unhealthy obsessive mindset in some individuals, try tracking just the junk food. Then aim to reduce it each week until you get to a reasonable level. If you ate 20 bad things this week, aim for 19 next week. Personally, I wouldn't aim for this to ever be zero. Moderation in all things.
- Lift weights a few times a week. The more muscle mass you have the more calories you'll burn without having to do any work. Find a plan with an app and stick to it.
- Reduce your risk of injury. If you injure yourself, you lose all momentum and end up back at square one. If you're overweight you're already at higher risk of injuring yourself so you have to train smart. If you keep doing the same exercise every day, you increase the chances of injuring yourself. So if you run on Monday, cycle on Tuesday. Utilise low impact cardio. Find the two or three options you like most from the following list and keep rotating: row, ruck, swim, cycle, ski-erg, roller blading, elliptical, stepper, aqua jogging. Try to stretch every day for at least 15 minutes.
- If you've got the time, do lots of zone 2. If you have a heart rate tracker, you can separate heart rate into zones. Zone 2 is where you can go for hours on end. You will hear a lot at the minute about how HIIT 'can burn as much calories as endurance training'. I'm sorry, but it's bullshit. I've seen plenty of people doing Crossfit consistently for a couple of years that are still carrying extra body fat. It is unlikely you will see someone who has been at a local triathlon or cycling club for the same period of time carrying that weight. No matter how hard you exercise, if you're only doing it for 20 minutes a day you will not burn as many calories as someone doing cardio for 2 hours a day, 6 days a week. And if you are exercising for a couple of hours a day it is very hard to eat enough calories to stay fat.
- Reduce friction for desired behaviours, increase friction for undesired behaviours. Junk food lives on the top shelf at the back of the cupboard where it's harder to reach. Pack your gym bag the night before so all you have to do is grab it and go in the morning. Make your protein shake the night before etc.
- Attach a negative emotional response to food you don't want to eat. This one may be more controversial but I remember reading it in a Tony Robbins book and it does make sense. If you can't stop eating chocolate, eat nothing but chocolate for the next 2 or 3 days. Literally nothing else. You will start to feel sick of it and attach a physical repulsion to it which will lesson your chances of wanting to eat it in the future the same way you probably have an alcoholic drink you can't stand anymore if you threw up after having it when you were first trying out drinking. You can do the same the other way and attach a positive emotion for foods you don't like but are healthy. Prepare whatever it is in advance then go without food until you are absolutely ravenous and then eat it. If you only drink fizzy drinks and don't like plain water, stay in a steam room or sauna until you feel uncomfortable and make sure you have a bottle of cold water outside waiting for you. You may have to repeat it a few times when you're trying to build a positive association. You probably won't with the negative associations.
- Most of all, find something you enjoy. If you don't enjoy it, you're not going to stick with it in the long term.
It's a relatively new blog, but I'm posting more of the same every Sunday. Next one is about how SAD (seasonal affective disorder) is hitting me at the minute.
I've always been fat. My entire life. I joke that when I was born, my mother gave birth to a toddler. I've never known what it's like to be skinny, thin, fit, or whatever word you want to use. I wish I did, though.
I'm sick of being told how to be healthy by people who have never been fat. Or, even worse, people who have been fit when younger, then put on weight for a few years only to go back to being fit. They have the delusion that their experience is possible for everyone and therefore the fat person is just lazy or lacks self control, and therefore make a moral judgement about the fatso. I cannot stand that type of person.
All of the "Just do this..." quips don't help.
"Just cut back on the alcohol." I have never drank in my life. Ever.
"Just cut back on the sugary drinks." I cut out sodas 3 years ago. I'm heavier now than I was 3 years ago. Since then, I only drink water at restaurants, and I only drink water or 0 calorie flavored water at home. No exceptions.
"Just exercise and you'll feel better." I have never felt good exercising. Never. Exercising makes me miserable. I don't mean just while I'm exercising, but I mean that I feel incessantly exhausted during the times in my life when I did exercise regularly. In my 20's I did Tae Kwon Do consistently for several years. I jogged. I rode my bike. I was consistently miserable. And I was still fat.
"Stop eating out." I did that with my switch to keto (mentioned below). Not a huge change. It's more expensive to cook "good" food than to eat the McDonald's dollar menu, but I guess I make more $$$ now than I did when I was a poor student.
"It's just calories in and calories out." Yeah, and programming is just ones and zeroes. It's not technically wrong, and yet it's obvious that the person doesn't know what they're talking about beyond this rudimentary quip. They don't understand how the gut microbiome can make absorption of nutrients/calories more efficient, or genetic predisposition and the relative strength of those predispositions, or any other nuance. It's like talking to a racist or woke person; neither one sees how their naive and myopic understanding of the world doesn't actually match reality, but they are proud to spout their nonsense and then judge you for not meeting their standard.
My blood sugar has never been caught "high" so I had never worried about it much, but in an annual insurance checkup, my A1C was 10.6. That's bad. The insurance person tried to make me go to the ER right at that moment. They were REALLY pushy. I thought that they were overreacting. They were not happy that I didn't panic or react in the same way that they were acting. I didn't go to a doctor. I switched to a keto diet. It's been 4 months, and I've only lost 20 lbs. My A1C is down to 6, though, when I checked it a few days ago. No meds.
I want to exercise, but I absolutely hate my life when I do it. I have a bad knee, so it's often painful to exercise. Exercise makes me feel bad in general.
I'm currently 6'0" and 269lbs. The only time I guess that I'll actually be skinny is about 10 years after I'm dead.
At the time, I was 290 pounds, which alone stressed me out - I remember having the same realization as the writer of this piece and feeling dejected.
So, I gritted my teeth, started seeing a trainer and hired a nutritionist. The nutrionist was useless, I assume I just had the wrong person, but that didn't help. Exercise and cutting back on drinking dropped 10 pounds, cutting out breakfast and switching to lighter lunches cut another 10.
After that, though, it got really hard. I had long ago gotten rid of the "easy" adjustments - I never liked sugary soda, never was a big snacker, don't like fruit, and didn't have a big sweet tooth. By cutting out booze entirely and going down to one meal a day I was able to grind out another 5 pounds over a span of months, but it was real work. I tried tracking my macros fanatically and by all measures I should be way below my baseline amount of calories but the weight just didn't want to come off. I stalled out at 265-ish and couldn't get lower.
The next level of commitment would have been to do keto or one of the other very low-carb diets combined with one meal a day, but I was already pretty miserable. When covid hit, I backslid, but eventually got back on track, but same problem - I can grind it out to 265, but couldn't get below it. I did find that I could maintain at around 270 and still enjoy a decent quality of life.
So I stuck there for a year or two, still felt gross, but less gross than I did previously. I got my blood work done earlier this year, and my a1c showed I was pre-diabetic, which I took hard - it felt like I'd done all this work and I was still losing the battle.
My psychiatrist suggested I look at taking Ozempic - I qualified due to my a1c, and thought it might help me lose weight as well. Started taking it about 6 months ago, and I've lost almost 30 pounds. The side effects suck - constipation, nausea, etc., but it's been a game changer. My a1c and cholesterol are back in normal range, and my blood pressure is normal. I'm still losing weight, but more slowly, I don't know when things are going to settle out.
All this to say, from my own struggles to lose weight, I think it's more complicated than CICO - obviously that's a huge part of it, but I think everyone has a baseline below which your body starts to make it increasingly difficult to go and stay beneath, and I think everyone has a different tolerance level for fighting that baseline. I don't think it's very helpful to just tell people "CICO".
For me, it took 1) finding a good therapist, 2) finding a good trainer, 3) taking an expensive and unpleasant medication, and 4) CICO. I'm incredibly fortunate that I have good insurance and a high-income job in a major city with lots of treatment options. I'm starting to gear myself up that I'm going to have to double down on 1, 2, and 4 to keep moving towards a healthier weight, but Ozempic has at least dialed that hunger sensor down far enough that I feel like I can make headway.
Losing weight IS as simple as calories in, calories out. A pound of fat has about 3500 calories, so you must deficit slightly more than that (glycogen stores will buffer) to lose a pound. 2nd law of thermodynamics means there's no room for opinions here. It doesn't matter what medications you are on, what hormones you have, what body type you are, you must burn more calories than you consume to lose weight.
Now, why are people making this distinction? Well, my best guess is that it's because a few years ago there was a coordinated and highly visible campaign for body positivity, spearheaded by a number of models who were overweight/obese, which kind of went off the rails and claimed that in addition to being OK with their weight, that they were medically healthy and there was no downsides to their weight. They also circulated claims about why they were that weight, a number of which were in violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. As for obesity:health correlations? They are all bad, very bad.
That said, one thing body weight does not correlate with is self-worth. An overweight or obese person still has precisely the exact same self-worth as anyone else. This gets tricky, because many overweight people feel they should feel bad about their weight. In general, I don't disagree with that. It's your health, and you are responsible for it, so if you aren't taking care of it, feeling bad is a natural and valid response. Again, nothing to do with self-worth. Weight is not tied to self-worth in any way. Just like smoking cigarettes or any other destructive pattern. You should stop because it's bad. You are the only person capable of doing it - no one else can do it for you, stopping will be tricky, feeling bad about not stopping is natural and healthy, your value as a human being is independent of whether you stop or not.
All that said, it still leaves a glaring hole that sometimes gets misinterpreted as the root of the issue, which is that humans are complex biological systems, that, when dysfunctional, often get that calorie thing unbalanced. The game is rigged: evolution selected people who want to eat. Eating is pleasurable, mentally and physically. Food has never been this abundant, so we haven't selected much for moderation. Hormonal and other chemical imbalances, as a result of medical conditions or stress can tip the scales unfairly toward eating. Medications can make it hard to exercise, or stimulate appetite. Time, illness, diet, can all affect this complicated balance, and make it difficult or impossible to lose weight.
There are certain maxims: eat healthy. Well, if I eat more healthy food than I burn, I will gain weight. But healthy food will probably lead to better hormone balance, that might supress appetite (or not increase appetite), so maybe it's easier to eat less when you eat healthy. Another one is exercise. Exercise is good for your health, but it's a mixed bag for losing weight. For starters, exercise, especially cardio, barely burns any calories. Secondly, exercise is associated with overeating in many people. So exercise can help with calories out, but does little to help with calories in, sometimes even making it worse.
It all boils down to something like.... being overweight is bad for you. Feeling bad about being overweight is a normal, healthy response and you shouldn't lie to yourself about it. The only way to lose weight is to eat less than you burn. There is no magic bullet or way to sidestep that, so just accept it. It's not easy to eat less than you burn, so it's worth examining with a fine toothed comb why you might be eating too much, and there's all sorts of little things tht make calorie restriction harder or easier. So it's worth examining those. And regardless of where you are in that process, it has no impact on what you are worth as a person.
- Custard Creams
- Bramley apple turnovers
- Sausage rolls
- Walkers crisps
- Magnum ice cream bars
- Breakfast cereals
- Pork pies
- Pizza (Domino's is my favourite big chain, but there is a local chain that do a decent 12 inch pizza for a lot cheaper)
- McDonald's double cheeseburgers
- McDonald's double sausage and egg McMuffin
- Doughnuts
- Cakes in general, but Mr Kipling's slices are very binge worthy
- Dairy Milk chocolate
- Full fat milk
- Cheese of most varieties
All just off the top of my head.
B) Domino's and McDonald's are not British foods but sausage rolls and pork pies are. Even the American chain food will taste different in the UK vs. the US.
Sometimes it's more about the person and less about the food.
For example, I know some people who simply can't stand to feel even a tiny bit hungry.