Something like a hundred pushups and a dozen pull-ups. Increase the count as you get lighter and stronger so you're always within 10-20% of the maximum you could do in a set.
Make it a non-negotiable part of your day akin to brushing your teeth and showering.
This way when you fuck up your diet/lifestyle, you have a very strong negative feedback signal when you suddenly can only do 75% of the e.g. pushups you did last week.
When you work on this for years and get your sets up in a range that feels hard-earned, it becomes quite upsetting to see the numbers regress.
For me this is all it takes to correct any emerging bad habits that start putting on pounds like drinking socially too much or eating cookies at the cafe.
It's easy to ignore a slowly increasing number on a scale, assuming you even step on one. Not so easy to ignore yourself sucking at this thing you've been getting awesome at for years. Not for me anyways.
The final straw that began my diet (the Exercise re-lit and carries it on) was a batch of Costco Grapefruit cups with about 25g sugar per cup - Tasted like nothing, and was almost mildly nauseating. Leagues from the bitter grapefruit I imagined, and a waste of sugar and profit margins to add so much sugar IMO.
Poke about. I've done the challenge twice now. The progression was at the correct rate for me. It's tough, but it does work.
This is a maintenance/hygiene routine, the objective is to do this daily until you're dead or otherwise disabled. Just make sure the amount is enough to both have great negative feedback and confer obvious health/fitness/physique advantages you'll be upset about losing.
It doesn't matter if it takes you 10 years to reach 100/day, what matters is that you kept doing it every day up to and beyond that >=100 point in time.
I am a egg-etarian and have a reasonably healthy diet (no sodas, simple carbs etc). But I wasn't feeling sleek and light on my feet. The following changes did it for me ... I lost 6 kg in three months and my knees thank me every day.
1. Two cooked meals a day. Late breakfast (9:30-10), early dinner (6:00). If I call it "intermittent fasting", I feel hungry, so I stick to calling it "two meals a day". :) Avoid simple carbs and sugars, focus on being properly sated.
2. Satiety is important, and I find that an increase in protein has helped me resist the lure of carbs/snacks. I have eggs, tofu scramble (with tomatoes, onions, scallions etc) and sprouts of all kinds in industrial quantities.
3. If hungry in the afternoon, a whey/banana/nuts/berries/flax seeds smoothie.
4. I chop and blanch and freeze spinach and liberally add it to cooked meals or as a side. The satiety to effort ratio must be high, so I don't care to make salads any more. They are just too much work and I feel hungry shortly after the last mouthful.
5. Shortly after every meal, move a bit for about 10 min, say, or climb 5 floors of stairs.
Put differently: Only eat veggies + protein. Protein with the above is e.g. eggs, tofu, mushrooms, but can also be cottage cheese, chicken, protein powder.
No bread, pasta, noodles, heavy sauces, carb-y dressings. It’s all about the veggies.
I like to steam veggies, it’s both fast and easy and preserves the nutrients while making them more digestible.
I've found the easiest and usually cheapest way to control diet is to cook at home.
Look into the Mediterranean diet, it has consistently come up when researching health. Of course the mere word diet implies temporary, but the right way of eating should perhaps be permanent.
Get a blood test done and have it analysed to determine if anything is off.
Don't get dehydrated and get kidney stones. Drink enough water throughout the day. Sometimes I carry a stainless steel container with me throughout the day so I'm getting enough. Be careful about drinking something else for example two glasses of tea and getting sweaty.
Perhaps find and add some health books to your reading list. One interesting, seemingly irrefutable argument put forth in "The China Study" though the book controversial, was no single ingredient food will give more health as much as focusing on the overall diet for most people. Two good books are "How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease" and "On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen" are two good ones.
Basically: eat boring food. I live in the USA but I grew up in Australia. The USA is big on highly rewarding food. Australia is too, but not to the level the USA is.
Whenever I go back to Australia, I will always lose 5-10 pounds without changing anything about my diet. It’s just less rewarding to our cave man brain.
When I come back to the USA, the weight comes back just as quick as it comes off.
Looking up the actual meaning of chemical names from ingredients in fine print on every damn thing you eat, and filtering in and out based on gossip hype superfood of the year... is sad. Very sad.
Eat boring food is solid advice.
Veggies, fruits, no bullshit carbs and protein, stuff that grows in the region where you live. Takes some effort to search and then its just autopilot mode.
It can be made super sexy and delicious. But it needs making. Point I was trying to make is its not hard after a few tries.
Both junk food and pornography hijack the reward center of your brain. Whereas real food and sex are both normal, healthy things.
This also lines up with my anecdotal experience, and the best boring food I've ever found were potatoes. I used to avoid them because of the carb content, but they always seem to give me good energy while also being 'filling'. If you look up various satiety indices, potatoes always seem to be at the top, even higher than most meats.
With regular consumption, I've found simple, unprocessed potatoes to become very boring even while being very satiating. It's strange, like I have this strong psychological urge to consume something with more exciting flavor to it (i.e. processed food) while being completely satisfied physically. Regardless, I think it's a food that can really help people who struggle to lose weight.
I normally maintain a healthy weight if I only eat from 12-8. If I really don't pay attention and graze that entire window, I can still creep up doing this. If I hit 175lbs, my rule is I cut my eating window from 1-7 until I reach 165 which happens in less than a month on the 6 hour window.
I've kept this up for 5-6 years. You get over the hunger pangs within a few weeks and then it just becomes normal. I've only had to cut my window down to six hours I think three times since I started the routine.
PS: I have had diagnosed ADHD since middle school. I wonder if there is any correlation between ADHD and intermittent fasting as a successful diet strategy. I think there is something similar between struggling with focus and a proclivity for absent minded snacking. It makes it so much easier to have a binary rule that I can follow that tells me when this is or isn't allowed.
Stop eating when you are no longer hungry. I think that's a lot of it.
There are a lot of ways to make that work, I'm not sure which are best. For me avoiding sugar helped when it was difficult, but now that I've got things under good control my diet matters far less than the fact that I eat to handle hunger rather than as a way to feel full.
But I mean, also roast brussel sprouts, lentils, and nuts are delicious. These are just facts.
Green Tea has flavenoids. They sound yummy.
I also treat myself to two squares of expensive chocolate a night. Eat slowly. Really slowly. Let the chocolate goodness roll around and coat your mouth like a kid in a Roald Dahl book. If it helps, think about Gene fighting Johnny for who did Wonka better. In a tank of chocolate.
Over fifty, more protein and less carbs. Potato and pasta are a "sometimes" treat.
Life's too short to eat bad food. If budget forces it, eat the best bad food you can: MFK Fisher's "keep the Wolf from your door" would be good guidance. Jack Monroe in the guardian.co.uk brought Fisher up to date.
My budget doesn't force it, so I eat top quality cuts, but small portions.
Good olive oil is a delight but so is wagyu fat. Have both.
Calcium in tinned fish. And cheese. Anchovies and Sardines and Mackerel are full of umami. And parmesan. (Full of Umami. Not fish. Fish milk cheese? Yuk.)
Nuts have zinc. Too easy to have a lot. Mushrooms left in sunshine grow a bit of vitamin D. Bananas have inulin which is resistant starch which feeds the lower bowel. As does vinegar and fermented veg like kimchi and kraut. Both make meat taste yummy so forget the hippy bucha drink and have a bratwurst or grilled Korean style with pickle.
Cold roast potato and cold pasta is resistant starch too. Some leftovers are good for you!
You can safely eat more eggs a day than you can stand.
Read up on homeostasis and cholesterol before buying into good and bad fat theories.
> You can safely eat more eggs a day than you can stand.
I think you’re grossly underestimating how many eggs some of us can stand.
Empirically North of 150
Works for me for decades, my BMI is around 20.0. If it starts going up I just limit the intake (obviously I use for reference my weight in kg from my scale, instead calculating BMI each time).
Other than that I am eating whatever I want/like.
I am always amazed by people expecting some miracle diet to lose weight instead just either eat less or burn more or both, but they think they can cheat simple physics.
Also, I found that regularly drinking 2tsp of turmeric dissolved in warm water at night helps reduce inflammation.
I’m stealing that
Also, park in terrible locations, furthest parks in a lot, a block or two away from your destination so you have to walk more. Just inconvenience yourself into walking more. You'll also save a bit of money in the process.
As best you can to phase out any full sugar soft drink for soda water or the light equivalent. I've been trying this for a few years and I like the difference, though I'm not too rigorous. I do find in winter the sweet of a zero sugar soft drink to be a good morale boost.
But everything bad now is because of industrialization. Cows are given hormones to constantly produce milk (which end up in the end product), vegetables are given pesticides so yield is much higher, fish are given antibiotics so yield is much higher.
Pretty much everything bad is done due to the huge demand of a massive population. The end game for healthy living is really just farming your own produce.
Eggs in quiche form. Not very high calories, high volume so you feel filled. To be eaten with salad. You get a bit of carbs with the crust. A bit of lipids; and a lot of proteins. Your body won't feel cheated out of the building blocks it needs.
Also some emotional work: feeling hungry 30mn before a meal is perfectly normal.
And of course for our US of A audience: no carbonated beverage ever. Cut that shit out.
Stay on the outside/perimeter inside of the center aisles in grocery stores. That's where the money really is for them and its mostly junk. Also, checkout the organic aisle(s) as most people think its too expensive and eschew all the deals that are happening with the actually decent food that otherwise goes bad or takes up needed space like any other food products.
Buy lemon/lime juice or pure cranberry juice and use it to make flavored water to help distract you from sugary drinks. Get a SodaStream to make soda water if you like and experiment with various pure juices to flavor the soda. Try to avoid fruit juice since its basically pure sugar without any of the fibre or need to digest that comes with actual fruit. If you must, go for ones that are 50% less sugar and do not use any sweetener (just the constituent fruit juices themselves) like Oasis Hydrafruit or whatever but still try to move away from juice.
Hemp seeds are insanely nutritious, use them wherever you can. Particularly salads, parfaits, shakes/smoothies, etc. They have it all: healthy fats, fibre, minerals and vitamins, etc. Great for satiety and pleasent subtle flavor.
One especially powerful secret is "decide in advance".
You will have some eating plan in place... then there will come a day when the food available does not match your eating plans, or some social/cultural event, or when you simply have a bad day and "fall off" your eating plan.
The secret is to anticipate/expect these things to happen. Decide now, when you can be dispassionate, where you can compromise, for how much, and how you will get back on track afterward.
Will you eat cake at the birthday? How much? You fall off the plan. How will you coach yourself back onto it? etc.
Waiting until the heat of the moment is how a small misstep (I planned to have one small handful of [whatever], and I just realized I've eaten half the bag) turns into a disaster (screw it! I already broke my diet. [insert bad self-talk and self destructive behavior here]. I'll just finish the damn bag)
Advance planning is how a small misstep is acknowledged (oh crap, I ate half the bag), then recovered (ok. I ate too much. What's done is done. I can't change that but I CAN stop the damage here so it doesn't get even worse.)
Also, not very secret since I got it from an interview with Salma Hayek but it really works: don’t eat meat more than once in a day. i.e., if you have steak for lunch make dinner a no-meat meal. It really eases digestion.
And cutting out sugar, that makes such a difference.
The first is experiment, experiment, experiment. Consciously try different things with clear intent and be curious about what happens next. Two things that I've tried more than once are eTRF and Whole30, but I suspect the specific interventions matter less than the way experiments make you pay attention.
The second is to understand what you use food for. Food is such a primal thing; your relationship to it extends well beyond your memories and goes much deeper than just fuel for your body. But a lot of us don't notice. Just for myself, I have used food for entertainment, distraction, pain relief, celebration, avoidance, human connection, and to fight sadness. Experimenting will help you see this too. E.g., if I take a month off of sugar and other refined carbs, then I won't be able to use ice cream to cheer myself up. So I'll have to be present in the sadness for a while and figure out what else, if anything, to do with it.
Even if you usually do vegetables properly, keep some bags of frozen precut veg around for when you are tired. You can often drop it in the pan of whatever meat you're cooking, or into a stew or soup. Keeps you having veg even when you are behind.
Macro hacks: Oats, oats, oats. Carbs and protein in a pinch. Flavour them however or don't. I don't.
Final word: fitness and health are the same thing. You can't be truly healthy and vital with diet alone. The mind needs movement, your body needs it. You don't need to be a bodybuilder, just get moving whichever way is fun for you. I do strength training and cycling.
* When in a restaurant, don't eat an appetizer and an entree. It's way too much.
* Eat two or three meals per day. Don't snack
* Don't confuse being thirsty with being hungry. Drink enough water.
These are very simple rules. My point is, it does not really matter so much what you eat ( with the exception of sugar), but how, in which context, and when.
Not so much as a calories thing, but as a way to recalibrate your taste buds to veggies. It’s so much easier to add veggies to your diet when you enjoy them in any form.
Hate yourself. Be fatphobic. Hold yourself to nearly unattainable standards and consider yourself a failure for not meeting them. Be disgusted by what you see in the mirror.
IMPORTANT CAVEAT: Note that I absolutely do not recommend this course of action for anyone prone to depression, but for anyone with normal seratonin chemistry and solid self-esteem elsewhere in their life, this is a mentality that absolutely works for attaining, and maintaining, fitness.
Under normal circumstances I eat when I’m hungry, and I don’t eat when I’m not hungry. I realize this doesn’t work for many people as the mechanism that tells them when they are hungry does not function the same way.
If I want to lose weight, I change to plan B. Plan B is to only eat meals. I eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but no eating at other times. No snacks, no desserts, no nothing. Just eat whatever I feel like for the three meals.
My weight generally goes up in winter and down in summer because I do a lot of bicycling outdoors when it’s warm.
2) Don’t diet, switch lifestyles.
3) Still take time to enjoy in moderation that which does not fall into these categories.
4) Give calorie counting a go for 6 months or so as it will give you a good intuition on some surprising sources of calories; personally I would not do it too much longer as it can take the joy out of eating.
5) Check in periodically on a scale.
6) Exercise regularly if you’re not already; it’s helpful both physically and mentally. It’s OK to start small and work from there.
(This is only taking care of calories counting aspect of losing weight, not a silver bullet on is own)
The book explains that you want to eat well and burn off calories with exercise since a caloric deficit will lead to weight loss, but reaching it through exercise rather than pure diet is much healthier. The app simply gamifies your diet and exercise and will help you track your journey towards your target weight (and you can do this on the free version)
If you must drink them at all go down to a maximum of one a day. Then try to replace them with non sugared drinks. Fizzy water with half a lemon/lime squeezed in will do in a pinch.
If you want to scare yourself about the amount of sugar in a fizzy drink take a glass of water and see how many spoons of sugar you need to add before it tastes anything as sweet as a soda.
So fill up on fatty meat, not fries and pasta.
Salt salt salt! It's not health advice, but just season to taste, and slightly over if you are preparing meals at home, not out of a can. In fact, forget the canned food.
Meat grinder, large cuts of beef, free scrap fat from butcher. Boil large cut and fat for 1 minute to kill surface bacteria. Grind. Cook medium rare. It's a real nice and satisfying meal. Forget cooking to 165.
That tasty Christmas cake is allowed if you compensate by lowering other Energy in, or alternatively increasing Energy out.
Think like an engineer.
And stay away from processed food, sugars, wheat, and eat what your ancestors for thousands of years ate. That is what your body evolved to process.
Also, fasting is great for detoxing, cleaning your intestines, and regenerating cells. Try 7 days of cold pressed vegetable juices only (make 2L every morning), no solids. Do this every 3 months.
Eat leafy greens and berries every day.
I got too much in my head with intermittent fasting (it made me obsess about food) but I agree that not eating after 8pm is hugely beneficial, since it often eliminates mindless, unhealthy eating.
Edit: one addition from Michael Pollen that I love due to the simplicity of the heuristic, never eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize.
For the rest:
- Cut alcohol and sugar(-y drinks).
- Prioritize plant-based, whole foods.
- Minimize processed foods.
- Drink water.
Diets should be goals you strive for and take seriously but allow for cheat days particularly when under intense social pressure.
- Michael Pollan
What used to be blamed on saturated fat turns out to be from fructose and trans fat. Trans fat was finally tracked on labels, and then banned. Backing out fructose will be a bigger fight.