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>>The only caveat is that I try my best not to eat processed food; if I can't make it at home with whole ingredients, then I will likely not eat it.

This, by itself, is a huge step. I bet that's a significant reason why you're losing weight. It was definitely a huge part of my successful weight loss. Basically I don't eat junk(pretty much means processed foods) and I avoid carb sources like bread/rice/pasta. Success was had. But I won't lie, losing weight and keeping it off is by far the most difficult thing I've ever done(and still doing) in my life. It's no joke and I have a new respect for those with weight issues. It's not a trivial thing to fix and I almost gave up twice. Constant daily battles walking pass the pizza, cookies, etc.

Anyone here who works in a food store and keeps having to put the box of cookies/candies back in the right place when someone left it near the cashier? Sorry, that was me barely fighting off impulse.

It seems kind of strange to me that in America, we let marketers push junk food and all other means of unhealthy food with little to no regulation, and then when we can't resist the cravings and eat a whole box of Oreos, it's our fault for not having enough discipline to say "no" for the 100th time this week.

I know at the end of the day ultimately we are responsible for our own actions, but there is nothing in this country to make it any easier on ourselves.

Here in Texas, one of the first acts of the new Agriculture Commissioner was to grant a "cupcake amnesty", sponsored by a variety of cupcake businesses: https://www.texastribune.org/2015/01/12/commissioner-sid-mil...

Unfortunately any attempt at regulation, like Bloomberg limiting the size of soda containers, is met with cries of "But my FREEDOM. I need to be FREE to buy as large a container as I want!"

Never mind that the only freedom being preserved here is the freedom of marketers to manipulate the public. Nobody asked for the obscenely large sizes of drinks we have available now. Companies just realized they can sell 3 cents of extra soda for an additional 25 cents and went nuts.

The reason it's met with those cries of freedom is that I don't trust Bloomberg or you to be right about what's healthy or not healthy. In fact, public health authorities are frequently spectacularly, 180 degrees, catastrophically wrong about what is or is not healthy. So while I do not drink soda at all, much less 64 oz buckets of it, I don't want to give the power to ban that to the same people who think salt and animal products are also bad for you.

It wasn't even a ban though. It was a restriction on the size of the container. You could still drink soda, as much as you like. It's well known that when you put larger amounts of food and drink in front of people, they consume more, regardless of whether they felt a physical need for it or not. Instead of letting marketers use psychological tricks to make themselves more money, I'd much rather let the government use the same tricks to make the public more healthy.

Even if science later finds out that soda is super healthy and we should all drink nothing else, I'd much rather have regulations motivated by people asking "Is this healthy?" instead of "Does this make me the most profit?"

Neither I nor Bloomberg are the ones saying it's unhealthy, scientists are. It's a law based on science.

I don't want to discourage you so much as warn you; I too have spent a lifetime dieting and have lost and gained back weight many times. All working diets feel like you to maintain them for ever during what I call "the momentum phase". Your brain is amazing at slowly making diets cease to work over time.

That said, portion control and calorie counting are components of a working weight loss plan and one should be extremely skeptical of diets like the "eat only before midnight diet". I have never been a night snacker and managed to get morbidly obese just fine without it.

Thanks for the warning.

I feel that I'm out of "the momentum phase", because I've never maintained a diet for over a year, until now. However, I realize that I may be deluding myself on that point.

I think that the key to my success is eliminating all but portion control. I don't count calories, or anything else that would make more work for me. All of those things are the things that would make my diet cease to work over time. Now I eat whatever I want, but keep processed foods to an absolute minimum.

Growing up, my nickname used to be "Trashcan", because I would finish everything on my plate, and then eat whatever my dining partners didn't from their plate. I still do, but I take it as leftovers, and eat it for breakfast or lunch the next day. I used to relish being stuffed to the point where I couldn't move. I still very occasionally overeat, but now it's more of a sick feeling that I despise.

I lost 35lbs just following this comp sci professor's guide to weight loss: http://matt.might.net/articles/least-resistance-weight-loss/

I rode an exercise bike after dinner while watching netflix until I ran a 1000 calorie deficit and the weight fell off. I also follow his strength training guide for the laziest possible workout that still yields impressive gains. http://matt.might.net/articles/hacking-strength/

For motivation I have an instagram account that ghost follows personal trainers and competition athletes to see what they eat, as now I lift a lot. @erindimondfitness is a good one, since that's one of the few trainers I found that doesn't shill 'detox' and other pseudoscience.

I appreciate your warning. It seems worth keeping in mind.

Your "eat only before midnight diet" (which I've never heard of) is related to what I expected to read when I saw the title of the article. I thought this article was going to be about which twelve hours were the best for eating and staying slim.

I strongly suspect that if they followed up this "constrain all your meals to 12 of the 24 hour day and fast the other 12", with tests that compared results of different 12-hour segments, they would end up finding that eating during segments containing lots of daylight, such as 7am-7pm, would be superior to 12-hour segments with a lot of darkness, such as 4pm-4am.

I hope they do this followup, and if my folk-wisdom-derived speculation is correct, then "eat your last meal before X:00pm" wouldn't be a diet, per se, but a sensible constraint to include in any reasonable diet.

I will second the idea that avoiding processed foods has been a big part of your success. I started doing so just to keep my sodium intake down and lost a surprising amount of weight.

And thank you for providing a nice definition of it, "... if I can't make it at home". I've tried to explain to loved ones the idea of 'whole' foods vs. processed and found it harder than it should be.

It's a little dissapointing that the #1 comment on this extensive study currently is an anecdote about stronglikedan's different but 'amazing' diet.

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I didn't downvote you. I merely expressed my dissapointment after reading the article and looking for interesting discussion that yours was the first comment which spawned a whole unrelated side-thread.

It's great that you can eat at 2am.

Have you tried MyFitnessPal (an app for counting calories)? If not, is there a particular reason you haven't? If you have, why did it not work?

Let me preface this by admitting that, outside of work related tasks, I'm extremely lazy. I mean, so lazy that I have to set a reminder on my phone just to check my to-do list for the day.

That being said, I haven't tried calorie counting in years, but the problem was that I was just too lazy to look up each item, guess the weight, and calculate the calories. I think I had a Palm Treo at the time, and was using something on that to track things, but I would always forget to enter the calories.

Basically, after years of figuring myself out, I think I "know thyself" enough to know that that won't work. I do have a knack for remembering non-time-related things, so I've leveraged that to just remember portions. I can look at a plate, and know exactly how much to eat so that I will feel full 15 minutes later after I stop eating. I don't worry about the calories, just the ingredients, so limited processed food.

Thanks.

I suspect most calorie counting methods that are disruptive (require effort and attention) to making the food will have a high failure rate.

I'll briefly describe my workflow, with the caveat that I have not been using it for long.

I have a digital kitchen scale with a "tare" button. Just put the plate on the scale and press "tare". This resets the scale to zero. Then put on some bread: the scale now measures the bread only. Press "tare" again, and spread some butter on the bread: the scale now measures the butter only, etc.

In this way, measuring each ingredient requires very little effort.

MyFitnessPal makes logging easy. I scan the bar codes of the food I buy and the nutrient content is automatically downloaded from the web.

Ingredients that are used before are easily available from a list (your local database), so you don't need to scan bar codes every time you eat. (With vegetables and fruits, the bar code is only available in the store.)

It's also possible to bundle the ingredients into "meals" (a set of ingredients and amounts). So that you can add whole meals to your log with a single click.

Since you can log entries in advance, it's also possible to "budget" future calories, and it's easy to make changes to it.

E.g.: having oatmeal for breakfast. I click the meal "Oatmeal" from the app. The individual ingredients of the meal are automatically logged (80 grams Oatmeal, 300 grams milk, 30 grams strawberry jam).

I put my cereal bowl on my scale. Press tare, and measure out 80 grams Oatmeal. Press tare again, and measure out 30 grams jam. And press tare and measure out 300 grams milk.

If I use something else instead of jam that particular meal, it's easy to change single ingredients. E.g., delete the jam and add nuts.

It's not a perfect method, since it does not work for food bought in a restaurant or from the cafeteria at work, etc.

Btw, congrats on sticking it out for so long! :D

I tried diligently for quite a few weeks to log calories. I generally avoid pre-packaged foods, so no barcode to scan. I do eat out fairly often, but prefer non-chain places. It's hard to figure out how to break down everything in the Turkey Sandwich. I cook at home often, too. I just found it very difficult and time consuming to log all of the ingredients to a recipe and portion it out (if I made a recipe for my girlfriend and I, and I had 60% and she had 40% there wasn't really a way to convey that). I crave variety and I found that makes this way more difficult.

I feel like I make healthy choices, and those can be harder to log.

I also wasn't very confident about what I found in their database or online. Something like an apple can vary greatly in size and while number vary on the Internet, it was hard to correlate that to get a confident result.