Maintaining weight loss

This is so true. The mental pressure your body brings to bear to try to reestablish the old equilibrium, and the emotional energy needed to withstand that mental pressure until your body accepts the new equilibrium, are incredibly hard realities of weight loss.

Unfortunately, when you mention these realities, people react very negatively. They say that if it's hard, then it's unhealthy and you're doing it wrong. They preach that it should feel easy and natural, as if that's a path forward. It isn't. It's the end goal, and the path is long and hard.

Agree 100%. The best time to lose weight is making good choices during the 30 minutes you spend grocery shopping each week. Much easier than try to make a healthy choice every minute of every day at home.

I think "tracking your weight and calories" is useful, but only if you track it right.

You could look at just raw numbers, but IMHO, first you want to be tracking for you, how many calories it took eating X to achieve satiety / feel not hungry.

Then, hopefully, you can figure out how to meet your daily calorie needs/goals in a way that you don't feel hungry all day. It's hard to stick to your plan when your body is telling you it wants more.

People's hungry signals are different, which is why one size fits all advice doesn't work. Personally, if I ignore my hungry signal for long enough, it goes away; this sounds like it might be good, but then I get all headachey and grumpy because I haven't eaten and there's no signal telling me to eat; so I've got to use my analytic brain for that (but it would rather take a break because I haven't eaten). Some people I describe that to think I'm crazy ... if they don't eat, the hunger signal just keeps getting stronger.

True across the board, and unfortunately the average lifestyle promoted here on HN is one of massive, unavoidable stress, both inside and outside of work.

Fixing your diet is one of those sort of flywheel problems. It takes time to figure out what's both healthy and palatable for you, time and freezer and/or refrigerator space to do meal prep, time and energy to work out, and so on.

All of those are skills that are hard at first. Even with YouTube, you don't go from "burns water" to "Michelin star bodybuilder meals" without a lot of practice.

The better you get at all of that, the faster and easier it becomes, until you hit a point where it's just "how you live", and all that energy and time are again free to pursue other things.

If you have money, sure, you can outsource a lot of that. Zuckerberg has a personal chef and dietician, as well as a handful of dedicated personal trainers guiding his fitness regimen.

But most of us can't afford to invest $250k/year or more into that problem.

I wholeheartedly agree that mental health and stress levels are the primary determiner in whether you'll succeed with maintaining a good diet and an exercise routine. Just to make things more complex, though, my experience after two years of daily workouts and strict dieting is that exercise, eating clean and sleeping well are the primary drivers of good mental health in my life. It's absolutely a feedback loop. If you set yourself up for success, you'll tend to spiral upward as your metabolism improves, your sleep gets better and your blood sugar is no longer the primary cause of an emotional rollercoaster. Conversely, if you think that you can make the base mechanical changes without re-engineering your entire life you're not very likely to succeed and your success will plateau early.

In recovery, particularly AA, there is the concept of a "dry drunk" who is, eli5, a person who is trying to quit using by simply not using anymore and not examining themselves or their surroundings to determine how they ended up there in the first place. Addiction as a disease is a good model for empirically researching treatments on a population scale but for an individual in recovery it's much more effective to realize that addiction is who you are and the process is about changing yourself, not just being the same guy but without the drug. When I got clean I had to quit my job, ditch a lot of my friends, totally reengineer my life because staying clean is a matter of moments that could break one way or the other and the best way to ensure they never break the wrong way is two-pronged: you maximize the odds of you making the right choice and you minimize the number of times you have to choose.

This idea also works for diet and exercise: a gym membership is good, but an exercise bike in the basement means you don't have to go through all the intervening steps between "I should work out" and actually doing the thing. By the time you've started to try to talk yourself out of it you're already doing it. It's easy to eat cookies and hard to eat celery. But it's easier to eat celery from your fridge than it is to go to the store to get cookies. All of these things help you make choices that support your goals and not make choices that are detrimental to them. Eventually those choices go from efforts of will to part of who you are. I'm not fat me having a salad, I'm the guy who eats salads. I'm not checking out the gym, I'm the guy who works out. I'm not just not high today, I'm Sober and so are all of my friends. I'm a Sober man and a member of a Sober community.

I wouldn't just describe it in terms of mental stress, but in terms of physiological free energy.

I find that the less I eat, the more I need to sleep and the less energy I have for cognition. I also get sick more easily (less energy for the immune system no doubt).

However I have the opposite problem of being underweight.

> - Some people just don’t like to eat that much. They don’t actually have a faster metabolism. Eating is just a chore to them so they rarely do it.

I had two friends exactly like this. One of them was 6' and 135lbs when he started college. Another was 5'5" and under 120lbs. They both said that growing up they thought food was gross and only ate because it was the only way not to be hungry all the time. They both started enjoying food in college and gained a bunch of weight. The one who is 5'5" topped out over 200lbs and now weighs around 180. The other I lost track of, but he was on the same trajectory, gaining 30lbs during our undergrad years.

Your first thought might be that they grew up poor, or that their parents didn't have tasty food around the house, but they were both middle-class, and there were lots of regular foods like pizza and burgers that they disliked as kids and ended up enjoying to excess as adults.

Diet is the way to lose weight for certain. People don’t get it but cut out one slice of bread or one coke out of your daily diet and it’s the same as running one marathon a month calorie wise. If you were at equilibrium before you’ll also lose a pound a month.

Adding a coke a day is the reverse of that.

> It’s true that exercise doesn’t make up for a bad diet. It’s easier to eat less.

That one always gets to me, because it's not universally true. I get the point, and to some extend even agree with it. To me personally, especially when I was younger and had the time, working out more always felt much easier. Controlling what I eat has always been incredibly tricky, simply exercising to the point where it doesn't matter what I eat, fairly easy, it's just a matter of putting in the hours.

Workout for 2.5 hours a day, plus 60-90 minutes transport on a bike, you can pretty much eat anything you like.

> If I’m busy working on something, I will go 12 hours without eating on accident.

I used to be the same when I was in my early twenties. Now i’m in my early thirties and I don’t seem to be able anymore.

> Caloric restriction works in the short term, but will drive you crazy in the long term. This is why people lapse eventually and regain all their weight

100%. However, imho it helps to use a tracker at first to better understand what food has how many calories. Track for a month and drop it afterwards.

Sugar is not a poison and claiming it is one does not help anyone.

Have to agree with most of the above, with one elaboration:

"If you cannot tell what it's made from by looking at it, then it's not real food."

I would change this a bit and say the ingredients should just be whole plant animal or fungal foods only, no extracts or processed derivatives or anything synthetic or refined. Nothing you couldn't make yourself using the whole food. So no refined flours, sweeteners, juices, oils, etc.

The point of this is to keep it simple. When I go to the grocery store 90% of what's there doesn't fit my criteria and I don't even consider it. Restaurant food or prepared/packaged food is almost all out since 99% of it is made with ultra processed ingredients usually oils/sugars/flours - I don't look at it as an option. If I'm really stuck there's usually nuts or cheese or fruit for sale anywhere.

So I'll buy vegetables, whole fruits, meat, eggs, dairy, butter or meat fat for cooking with, nuts, seeds, and mushrooms.

For social reasons I'll eat things outside of this on occasion in small amounts but whenever I'm providing my own food which is most of the time, these are the rules.

“Sugar is poison” is an absolutely insane claim to make

I agree, but I would add one very important thing:

If you consider the diet/lifestyle that allowed you to lose the weight as temporary, then you will fail.

I would diet to lose weight by stop eating sugar and desserts. Then, when I got to my target weight I would say “ok, one dessert a week” and before I knew it I was having them every day. And before long I had gained the weight back.

Currently down 21 lbs and 6 months free of sugar. This time I view it as something I will do for the rest of my life.

Calorie restriction, logging your calories and eating a deficit everyday, actually works for many people who can't figure out how else to lose weight. It also teaches you about how to eat healthy: portion sizes, how caloric each food is, how snacking impacts your total, etc.

> Fat won't make you fat

I had always understood this as true, but it's more complicated than that. The body converts calories from fat into fat much more efficiently than carbs, and protein is the least efficient.

How long ago was "formerly"?

Signed, a formerly formerly fat person.

What kind of sugar? Does raw organic honey count as sugar?

Nice one. Agree on all this. Once you lose the weight through proper eating/deficit, exercise will maintain it.

Some odd claims here.

> It's not just extra calories, it's poison.

Uh no. You say you grew up under the low-fat propaganda, but still you fall victim to the overly broad "sugar is poison" propaganda. Yes, limit it by all means, but your overall caloric budget is way more important than the exact proportion of nutrients (same as with fat).

> then when I increase my fat consumption I started losing weight. By fat I mean real animal fat from meat, not seed oils or other processed fats.

Good that it worked for you, but this sounds like anti seed oil propaganda, which is debunked. "real animal fat" often means high saturated fat, which when replaced by polyunsaturated and unsaturated (from e.g. seed oils) actually tends to improve your health.

There is no way to write what I want to write without coming across like it's scolding you, so to get it out of the way, I apologize for that. I am certain you mean well and you're not lying. The most important thing in all of this is you found something that works for you.

But you didn't find universal truths. That's a danger of getting information from the Internet or from anecdote. I can give you the exact opposite anecdote. I've eaten every diet under the sun, from SAD to paleo. I've eaten no sugar. I've eaten tons of sugar. Never no fat, but the percentage of energy has varied tremendously. No processed foods at times to almost nothing but heavily processed foods. I've run over 100 miles a week at times and I've done no aerobic exercise of any kind at other times. Yet I found a post on physicsforums.com from 2003 a few weeks back from my old user account listing my height and weight at 6'2" 165 lbs. I use MacroFactor and weigh myself daily. Today, 22 years later, I was 162.4 lbs.

Why is that? I don't know. I have four cats. Two of them will eat everything you give them, then scour the entire house for more, begging and pleading the entire time. Give them infinite food and they'll eat until they puke, then eat the puke. The other two can be given infinite food and they'll stop when they've had enough and they've stayed the same size their entire lives, over a decade at this point. These are non-humans that don't give a shit about their physiques, don't feel shame, and are eating exactly the same foods with the same macro breakdowns and levels of processing. There are just genetic differences between mammals, for some reason we don't fully understand, that make overeating almost inevitable if enough food is available, without tremendous willpower and tricks like you try to employ, whereas other people will eat exactly what they need and no more, pretty much no matter what.

As for MacroFactor, things like this end up on Hacker News with no context, but it's the project of a guy named Greg Nuckols who is one of the better science communicators in the field of exercise science and has been for 15 years. He's held multiple world records as a powerlifter and has coached probably thousands of people at this point. He's also a lifelong fat person, but not really unhealthy, and as far as I'm aware, has never made much of an effort to change that. The app was created due to traditional meal planning and tracking by lifters who go through bulk and cut cycles. The way it worked in the pre-app era was to make spreadsheets weighing yourself daily and counting all of your calories, over a span of weeks. Get a moving average to remove daily water and gut content noise from the weight trend, then compare it to the average calorie intake to estimate your personal total energy expenditure. Now add or subtract from that to set targets for bulking and cutting. MacroFactor does exactly the same thing but automated most of the process for you, so all you have to do is log your food and weight.

It is not primarily meant to be a weight loss tool. It exists in large part because all other food loggers on the market at the time were exclusively targeting people trying to lose weight, and none of them personalized the targets based on estimated true energy expenditure, using population estimator formulae instead.

Saying they're trying to sell you crap you don't need is tremendously unfair. This was a tool made by a lifter for other lifters, but as it stands, the market for food loggers continues to be dominated by overweight people looking to lose weight, as there are a lot more of them in existence than there are lifters. Given that, the staff try their best to provide resources based on the best information they can find to support people who just want to lose weight. That is what this is. Maybe the information in here doesn't work for you, but it's based on research and coaching that has touched millions. It's looking at broad trends. If you know what works for you personally already, then absolutely stick with that. But you don't need to be slandering equally well-meaning people who have a very long track record of putting out the most reliable content that exists in the space they serve. Greg is in his 40s now and first became well-known in the pre-Tik Tok, pre-Instagram era. His takes on science and its limitations have been the most sober and reasonable I've encountered in any field of science, let alone the enormously fraught field of fitness now dominated by grifters. I understand why you would be skeptical or distrustful and you have no good reason to trust me any more than him. I'm just a random stranger on the web as well, possibly a sock puppet or being paid off for all you know. But his history is public. strongerbyscience.com has a back catalog of articles that stretches more than a decade. The Stronger by Science podcast is now defunct, but published hundreds of episodes. If you ever get the chance, you will never find more measured, honest content about this topic.

> a calorie is not a calorie

Sorry but this is antiscience.

Huh, this looks like the same thing I came up with about three years ago. I'd tracked my weight for a long time and only just started tracking calories, then a month or so in wondered if combining the two datasets would result in anything useful. After about six months there were some obvious patterns, and ever since a year in I've been able to control my weight however I want without much effort.

One graph I have that I don't see on there is average-calories-per-day on the X axis and weight-change-per-week on the Y axis (scatter plot). Sticking a linear regression on top told me all those online estimators for how many calories you burn in a day are just wrong, at least for me.

The combination of daily weigh-ins and the exponentially weighted moving average I learned from the Hacker Diet has been absolutely magic for me. It gives me helpful daily feedback signal in the noise of ~5lb daily weight variation. Beeminder has replaced paper graphs for me. Their new moving average isn't quite as helpful for me, but is still workable. I target rates of weight loss on the order of 0.35-0.50lbs/week.

1/23? So you eat for one hour and then you're done for the day?

Maintaining exact calorie in = out every day is a fools errand. You only need net zero averaged over weeks.

Some days you have to allow eating more. Mainly because food is the original human social activity.

It's also a lot more fun to lose weight than maintain weight

Your body didn’t play a long game, your mouth did.

For all those years you’ve been consuming more energy than your body needs to run, so your body stored the excess for later.

Incidentally, this came up on my YouTube the other day: How Japan escaped Obesity while America got Fat – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH6Wq4KWu7M

You absolutely can lose weight and gain muscle at the same time. It's the whole basis of body transformation diets.

Is it less efficient at building muscle than a bulking diet? Sure. But you absolutely can.

> You will lose muscle mass as well as fat.

A small caveat here: unless you're totally new to resistance training. If you're a total noob and just start training for the first time, you'll likely have such a low base that you can actually _gain_ muscle mass even during the overall weight loss.

The key is maintaining or increasing muscle % of body weight.

Of course you’ll lose muscle mass, along with everything else. But it’s possible to increase the percent lean mass and especially your muscle:fat ratio.

They have a research summary on that too.

[0] https://macrofactorapp.com/recomposition/

Back to the OP, the hunger and satiety signals are very complicated and only partially driven by the digestive track.

I'm a fatty. I've lost a lot of weight but my body knows I used to be fat and it wants to be fat again.

A very potent signal for hunger or fatigue is when your fat cells get small i.e. you've burnt a lot of fat, and your little fuel cells are feeling empty. Each shrunken fat cell sends out a chemical "feed me" signal. And they are very very persuasive.

And the kicker is that when you fill them up, they want to be maintained at full. But if they're full too long, or get too full (persistently increase body fat by a few percent(, it triggers mitosis and you now have two half full fat cells who are both shouting "Feed me"

To add insult to injury when you lose weight, you don't kill off fat cells, you just have a bunch of really hungry fat cells shouting for a cheeseburger.

The nice thing about the GLP1 drugs is that they quiet the shouting. So you just don't get the demonic urge to feet all your wilting fat cells.

The bad thing about it is that the shouting is still there, and as soon as you quit the drug, you can get overwhelmed and go back to overeating and your weight and percent body fat go right back up

I regret to inform you that water, fiber content and weight don't move the bar on satiety for those chronically overweight. If so, we all could just down green beans or Metamucil and feel totally full. (Narrator: they were still hungry.)

Similarly, we would all be eating pounds of cheesecake without feeling full. (Narrator: they did get full, but not after eating too much calorically.)

Satiety is not dictated by weight. Please don't.

Satiety is mediated by cholecystokinin released in reaction to the presence of fatty acids and certain amino acids (partially digested fats and proteins) in the duodenum, or first part of the small intestines. That hormone stimulates the release of bile and pancreatic enzymes (necessary for the further digestion of fats and proteins) and also parts of your limbic system, which is the part of your brain that regulates satiety. In particular, it affects the ventromedial hypothalamus.

In other words, fats and proteins satisfy your hunger. You can eat really dense carbohydrates until your stomach bursts (it won't but it might feel like it's going to -- it's the stretch receptors signalling your limbic system to stop or it's going to tell you to vomit) and you still won't feel satisfied. Slather a bit of (protein-rich high-fat) peanut butter on your celery sticks and you'll be fine.

The best advice is balance.

Eating high-fat foods makes me feel very full in my experience.

Your brain needs protein and fat. Your brain tells your body when it is hungry and if the body doesn’t feed it, the brain is hangry. Protein satiates the brain and reduces cravings for less protein containing foods that the body will still eat in pursuit of satiating the brain.

Or eat lots of protein. That makes you fill full incredibly fast.

> Satiety is not dictated by how many calories you've eaten but (mostly) by the physical weight of your stomach. If your goal is to eliminate the sensation of hunger while consuming the least number of calories, the nutrition label tells you everything you need to know: eat a lot of low caloric density foods.

If that's all there is to it, can you just eat a little bit and then chug water until your stomach is convinced you're full?