[HN Gopher] Maintaining weight loss
___________________________________________________________________
Maintaining weight loss
Author : MattSayar
Score : 66 points
Date : 2025-07-30 18:05 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (macrofactorapp.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (macrofactorapp.com)
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| All good tips but I think it really boils down to the last bit:
| _sustainable_ changes. This doesn 't help one understand how to
| differentiate a sustainable versus unsustainable change.
|
| In my experience, the single most important factor is realizing
| that the _sensation of hunger_ is your primary enemy and that you
| can attack it head-on.
|
| 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.
|
| What you'll find over time is that foods widely regarded as
| unhealthy are simply ultra-dense (e.g. peanut butter is an
| engineering miracle) while healthier foods tend to be extremely
| low-density (e.g. non-fat Greek yogurt and fresh vegetables).
|
| The biggest error I see in people dieting is thinking they just
| need to muscle through the feeling of hunger. It doesn't work in
| the long run. Accept that it's an important sensation but it's
| distinct from actual starvation, and address it directly!
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > 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?
| russfink wrote:
| Not recommended but "almost." Eat a lot of watery foods -
| watermelon is the best: sweet, bulky, satisfying. Celery to
| hold that peanut butter. And like others said, go with
| protein.
| f1shy wrote:
| Just water is not recommended. 1- Would be too much. And 2-
| it gets absorbed too fast. But yes, it helps.
| rolisz wrote:
| Or eat lots of protein. That makes you fill full incredibly
| fast.
| keybored wrote:
| Eating high-fat foods makes me feel very full in my experience.
| dzink wrote:
| 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.
| iwanttocomment wrote:
| 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.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| try coleslaw with a dressing of apple cider vinegar, olive
| oil, salt, pepper, and herbes de provences. it's good takes
| up a good amount of space in your stomach
| humanrebar wrote:
| That might be a good tip, but people do get signals from
| their bodies when running a nutrient deficit. People crave
| calories when in a calorie deficit. And they crave
| carbohydrates, proteins, or fats when abstaining from them,
| at least some of the time.
| bregma wrote:
| 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.
| theoriginaldave wrote:
| 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
| strongpigeon wrote:
| While the key takeaways from the article are indeed good, I think
| the main problem is seeing weight loss as a phase. Your body
| weight is a result of your lifestyle. Going on a diet implies
| that it's just a temporary thing (which can be great to speed up
| the process), but it's no wonder that people often revert back to
| their previous weight. To lose weight permanently, you don't _go_
| on a diet, you _change_ your diet.
|
| A friend of mine lost > 100 lbs over the course of 2 years by
| following a weight loss program with a heavy focus on education.
| The program made him internalize that he had to fundamentally
| change his life. He has since regained probably around 20 lbs
| over his minimum, but has maintained his new weight for > 8 years
| now and is living a life closer to what he wants.
| jaggederest wrote:
| As with many posts like this, it feels somewhat obvious that
| "stay active, sleep well, track your weight and calories, and
| don't go back to eating garbage" are pretty well understood. That
| said, this is an excellent summary of the research and underlying
| principles.
|
| I think the real challenge with significant weight loss is in
| being consistent and maintaining those things, which everyone is
| pretty silent on.
|
| Mental health and stress levels are the #1 factor in essentially
| all of those things and deserve more focus in the context of
| major lifestyle change. You emphatically cannot just willpower
| through a major change for the rest of your life, and given that,
| you have to find ways to reduce the active cognition component to
| a low-effort automatic cognition process.
|
| Setting yourself up for success through organization and routine,
| avoiding being around situations that cause overeating, not
| purchasing and keeping in stock foods that are problematic, peer
| and family support are all things that make a huge difference.
| donw wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| taeric wrote:
| I mean, sure. But doing it poorly always comes before doing
| it well. So, the best advice for people that aren't aware of
| how much they eat is fine to start at anything basic.
| Probably the more basic the better. Though, as you note, that
| will be different for different people.
|
| That last is notable. I agree that personal signals are very
| different between people. But so is basic capability to track
| things.
|
| What is truly obnoxious here, is that what works for you will
| also not be static. Expect that what worked for you now will
| someday not work.
| snarf21 wrote:
| 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.
| dkarl wrote:
| 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.
| arp242 wrote:
| I think the thing is that different people are, well,
| different.
|
| I talked about this a few weeks ago[1], but for me losing and
| maintaining weight actually _is_ quite easy. I foresee no
| problems maintaining weight going forward because I managed
| to do that for 25 years without really paying much attention
| to it, and can easily identify the source of my weight gain.
| Even losing weight is just a few relatively simple
| adjustments to my diet.
|
| But the reality for other people is very different.
|
| Because I never had problems with my weight before I never
| really paid much attention to any of these discussion until a
| few months ago. I've been a bit surprised at the amount of
| aggression in some of these discussions at times (including
| on HN). It seems to me that people with different bodies and
| experiences are just talking past each other, and in addition
| to that there is a section of rather unpleasant people who
| are so high up on their moral high horse that they've become
| hypoxic.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44554154
| beeflet wrote:
| 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.
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > Maintain (or gain) muscle mass
|
| Almost impossible to do while you're losing weight. You _will_
| lose muscle mass as well as fat.
|
| Not that you shouldn't start (or keep doing) weight training. And
| after you hit your weight loss goals, you'll need to eat _more_
| than base maintenance calories (and mostly in the form of
| protein) to gain muscle back.
| prepend wrote:
| 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.
| p1esk wrote:
| I don't understand this: if I'm fat and I start exercising
| without changing my diet, I should be losing fat and gaining
| muscle mass. As a result, my weight can be going down.
| cyberax wrote:
| If you don't change your diet, you will likely be building
| muscles, but your weight is unlikely to change. You can
| even _gain_ more weight once you start exercising.
|
| It comes down to math. An hour of resistance training is
| just 200-500 calories above the baseline. That's just one
| sports drink worth of energy.
| theoriginaldave wrote:
| I think when you're in an energy deficit (aka losing
| weight), your body will attempt to reduce energy demand by
| metabolizing materials from the body.
|
| It prefers to power the body from stored glycogen
| (carbohydrates), next it will try to metabolize stored fat,
| next it will go for protein sources (muscle and other
| tissues). In extreme deficits, it'll even start consuming
| material from the digestive track and other important
| stuff.
|
| Many people lose weight, get stronger, get faster and
| surprisingly lose muscle mass at the same time.
|
| But you can prevent that by eating enough protein, adding
| strength training, not overtraining or extreme deficit,
| fueling your workouts with carbohydrates, getting high-
| quality sleep, and minimizing non-meal, non-workout related
| simple carbohydrates.
|
| #TLDR When you walk down the street, your body is doing all
| these things mostly carbs, some fat and a little protein.
| When you start pushing yourself, you burn more energy but
| in similar ratios. After about 90 minutes or at higher
| levels of effort, you'll shift to burning more fat and even
| more protein if you reach ketosis, as your body conserves
| remaining carb stores for important stuff like thinking.
|
| AND as you exercise, especially as you reach your strength
| thresholds, you incur damage in your muscles. When you have
| your recovery meal/drink with carbohydrates after your
| workout , especially when resting, the insulin spike,
| triggers your body to consume protein to rebuild your
| muscles and add more mass/strength.
|
| But if your workouts don't include enough strength
| training, your body may not get the anabolic muscle
| building signal, and it may instead focus on reducing
| weight (via fat and muscle), or increasing nutrient and
| oxygen flow to the muscles (building hemoglobin, growing
| capillaries), increasing muscle activation and engagement
| (new neural pathways), and/or increasing energy creation
| capacity (growing more mitochondria or expressing more
| efficient chemical pathways).
|
| Which is why you can get faster, stronger with smaller
| muscles.
|
| So my recipe for building muscle while losing fat: *
| Strength train each muscle group in sets of about 10 for 80
| reps per week (I shoot for 2 days, whole body, 4 sets of 10
| reps). * Prepare for every workout with some carbohydrates
| and electrolytes * For workouts lasting more than 90 min,
| especially cardio/endurance, begin consuming carbs at 30
| min and consume 90-12g/hr for high intensity (Zone 3 or
| higher) * Try to consume 2g of whole protein per kg of
| target body weight. Or 4g per kg of lean body mass. YMMV.
| these are all rules of thumb. * Wake up at the same time
| every day, and prepare for bed 9-10 hours before you have
| to wake up (have a last snack, some water, turn out the
| overhead lights, start relaxing) so that by the time
| bedtime rolls around you can fall asleep quickly and get
| 7.5-9.5 hours of quality sleep
|
| If you're really hitting it hard and you've induced severe
| muscle fatigue, bump up the protein intake and get more
| rest and recovery time.
| p1esk wrote:
| Thank you! That's quite a lot of information to digest.
| What do you mean by "Prepare for every workout with some
| carbohydrates and electrolytes"? What should I prepare?
| cyberax wrote:
| > 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.
| malfist wrote:
| 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.
| wijwp wrote:
| It's so difficult though that it shouldn't even be in the
| same conversation as someone who has so far not been able to
| get to a healthy weight.
|
| It's telling a beginner that it's possible to do an expert
| level skill, without the beginner understanding that it's an
| expert level skill. It's yet another diet that will fail for
| that beginner.
| malfist wrote:
| The opposite is true here actually. The less trained you
| are the easier it is for you to gain muscle and lose body
| fat at the same time.
|
| It's not that difficult for a newbie to do, there's a
| reason it's called noob gains, usually the first year of
| weightlifting you can see insane increases in muscle mass
| that you just won't see on someone who is better trained
| and closer to their genetic maximum.
|
| Jeff Nippard recently did a year long program with his
| untrained, overweight brother and put it all up on youtube.
| profsummergig wrote:
| I agree. If one resistance-trains hard, the body will
| prioritize retaining muscle.
| jackero wrote:
| Less obvious things that I've found over the years are:
|
| - 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.
|
| - Some people like eating more and may eat when bored.
|
| - If I'm busy working on something, I will go 12 hours without
| eating on accident. If I'm doing nothing at all, I may overeat.
|
| - Some people eat much faster than others. It doesn't matter if
| you're eating protein or fat if you inhale two steaks in 10
| minutes. You already consumed too many calories. And because you
| ate double the amount of calories doesn't mean that you will be
| full for double the time.
|
| - Some people who eat too fast do something called low-calorie
| volume eating so they eat fewer calories and this works better
| for them than eating protein and fat.
|
| - It's true that exercise doesn't make up for a bad diet. It's
| easier to eat less.
|
| - There are days when I'm out playing sports for like 10 hours. I
| burn a ton of calories that does need to be made up by eating.
|
| - A lot of people did sports or were outside for hours growing up
| but don't anymore due to lifestyle changes (kids for example).
| That's an extremely major loss of a calorie sink that isn't
| obvious.
|
| - Water weight is a thing but it really doesn't matter in the
| long term. It's more like an offset from your "real weight" but
| it can only get so far from it. Trends are better for tracking
| your real weight.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > 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.
| robrenaud wrote:
| I recently got to know someone with a resting heart rate of
| 45, who will pretty frequently do 8+ mile trail runs and 100
| mile bike rides. He is also an amazing cook who makes
| decadent and delicious foods. He says he consumes 4,000
| calories a day. He still has a sizeable belly. I'd say he is
| at like 10/10 on exercise, but 3/10 on diet. I was surprised
| at his extreme cardiovascular fitness while still managing to
| be overfat.
| jackero wrote:
| Yeah it's not universally true.
|
| But for some people, there are low hanging fruit like "cut
| out 4 Pepsi's a day" (600 calories).
|
| If you are already eating reasonable healthy and still
| gaining weight, then adding more exercise can be easier than
| trying to skimp on food.
| dkarl wrote:
| > - 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.
| znpy wrote:
| > 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.
| bdz wrote:
| I'm on liraglutide (Saxenda) for more than a year now. I lost
| 68kg (150lbs) and incredibly easy to maintain my weight. I'm
| doing OMAD (1/23 intermittent fasting) and for me it's pretty
| much the perfect meal plan. Not even a diet because I eat
| whatever I want, just roughly counting calories. My daily
| exercise is 1 hour walking in the morning and the evening too
| (~20k steps combined)
| FredPret wrote:
| 1/23? So you eat for one hour and then you're done for the day?
| ffsm8 wrote:
| OMAD stands for "One Meal A Day"
| m348e912 wrote:
| The one good thing about OMAD is that you can basically eat
| as much as you want and what you want during that one hour,
| and as long as that the only time you eat you will likely
| stay lean. I truly believe that this is the strategy that
| competitive eater/youtuber beardmeatsfood uses to stay lean
| while eating an immense amount of food in one sitting.
|
| I have been toying with a 8 hour eating window followed by
| ~40 hours fasting (basically an evening + a whole day) of
| not eating, and seen some positive results.
| HiPhish wrote:
| Formerly fat person here. That article is just an overblown list
| of common sense advice to sell you some crap you don't need.
| Losing and maintaining your weight is actually really simple.
| Here is what worked for me (I am not a doctor):
|
| - First of all, drop sugar. Right now. Even if you are not fat,
| you should not eat it. It's not just extra calories, it's poison.
| Don't be like "oh, I'll just finish this stuff I still have
| around", throw it out. If your are only going to follow one point
| from this list, then let it be this one.
|
| - Forget about calories, a calorie is not a calorie. You cannot
| "work off" that cake your have eaten, your are not an oven.
| Calories are an upper limit (you cannot break thermodynamics),
| but the human metabolism is much more complicated than just
| balancing an equation.
|
| - Exercise is necessary, but not sufficient. That means you
| should exercise to get your metabolism going, but exercising
| itself will not let your lose weight. And when I mean exercising
| I don't mean you need to get a gym membership. Just going for a
| walk for half an hour or an hour is good enough for starters.
|
| - Fat won't make you fat. I grew up under low-fat propaganda, yet
| I kept getting fatter. 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.
|
| - Eat real food. If you cannot tell what it's made from by
| looking at it, then it's not real food.
|
| - Processed fruits and vegetables are still processed food, and
| thus not real food. Don't be fooled by marketing, stuff like
| fruit juice is not healthy, no matter how many vitamin labels the
| manufacturer keeps putting on the packaging.
|
| - 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.
|
| It is important to understand that obesity is not a "surplus of
| energy", it's a medical disorder brought about by disruption of
| your metabolism. I was able to keep eating and eating without
| ever feeling satiated. It is pure torture to be hungry with a
| full stomach. It was my body telling me "stop feeding me this
| garbage, give me real food". I have since been able to keep my
| weight and never feel hungry. It's only when I find myself unable
| to eat real food and lapse back into old habits that I start
| gaining weight again.
| homie wrote:
| "Sugar is poison" is an absolutely insane claim to make
| lithocarpus wrote:
| The dose makes the poison, and with refined sugar the dose
| required to be harmful is quite small compared to sugar
| embedded in while fruits.
| Catbert59 wrote:
| I prefer calling it "Hidden sugar is poison for your soul and
| body".
|
| If you are aware of it you can avoid it.
| pjmorris wrote:
| The claim seemed less overblown to me after watching 'Sugar:
| The Bitter Truth' by Robert Lustig, MD [0].
|
| [0]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=dBnniua6-oM&t=8s
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Most long distance runners fuel in form of gels on their
| longer runs and races. Those gels are mainly simple sugars
| and water. They're fine.
| mingabunga wrote:
| Nice one. Agree on all this. Once you lose the weight through
| proper eating/deficit, exercise will maintain it.
| lithocarpus wrote:
| 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.
| testing22321 wrote:
| Even easier.
|
| Only buy and eat things with one ingredient.
|
| Vegetables, fruit, meats, beans, rice, etc. you are now
| eating real food.
| baal80spam wrote:
| > a calorie is not a calorie
|
| Sorry but this is antiscience.
| yawpitch wrote:
| No, it isn't... keep reading to the bit about thermodynamics.
| The calorie represents the potential heat energy present in a
| sample of a material if that material were fully oxidized (ie
| burned) in a bomb calorimeter... it has never represented
| (much less accurately represented) the amount of energy that
| can actually be released via digestion into a human body
| (which is very extremely not analogous to a bomb
| calorimeter).
|
| We are not ovens. We _really_ are not extremely precise ovens
| burning samples in the presence of stoichiometrically optimal
| quantities of pure oxygen.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| Eating 1 cal of raw sugar isn't the same as eating 1 cal of
| almonds. Thats the sense in which they say this.
| watwut wrote:
| That is actually what science says.
| watwut wrote:
| Sugar is not a poison and claiming it is one does not help
| anyone.
| theyinwhy wrote:
| > 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.
| neilk wrote:
| How long ago was "formerly"?
|
| Signed, a formerly formerly fat person.
| HiPhish wrote:
| Seven or eight years. I did have the occasional lapse when I
| was under high negative stress and would just let myself go,
| but I just had to drop the bad habits I was falling back
| into. The initial wakeup call was when I was diagnosed with a
| non-alcoholic fatty liver in my late 20s.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| 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.
| umpalumpaaa wrote:
| I found loosing weight was a lot easier than maintaining weight.
| When loosing weight you have a lot more wiggle room... As long as
| you are spending more calories than consuming you loose weight.
| It does not matter if you have a deficit of 20kcal or 200kcal.
|
| Maintaining your weight requires one to have 0 deficit in either
| direction.
| jmugan wrote:
| It's also a lot more fun to lose weight than maintain weight
| kingstnap wrote:
| 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.
| maxglute wrote:
| as usual simple not easy etc...
|
| level1
|
| figure out deficit/maintenance/surplus calories figure out what
| behavior changes to maintain consumption levels
|
| level2 (extra work, but really what it's at)
|
| figure out what how you want to look good naked... i.e. body
| composition figure out workout (usually lifting with some cardio)
| eat enough protein, eat other macros that can help you do your
| workouts. ironically dietting is the SIMPLEST... eat enough
| protein, fill the rest with what makes you feel "best" or helps
| "best" with your goal (exercise). This doesn't mean it will feel
| good depending on cut/bulk... just what feels least bad.
|
| Extra work from level2 can make level1 easier - more lean mass
| from work out-> more maintenance + tdee calories. The process
| might be easier if you're 25 BMI with 15% bodyfat than 22 BMI
| with 20% bodyfat. You'll look better too, which let's be real, is
| what people usually want. Then health.
|
| That's basically it.
|
| But MOST IMPORTANT to recognize that some goals are simply things
| you're too mentally/physiologically "weak" / incapable of doing.
| You may simply not be built for to learn behavior changes (i.e.
| appetite control) for low BMI/BF. Your genes may simply prevent
| you from building good FFMI to pull off certain build. This stuff
| is simple, but not easy.
| layer8 wrote:
| This is much more complicated than needed. Following the Hacker's
| Diet [0] is simple to understand and sufficient, and yes, heed
| common-sense things like good sleep, some basic exercise, stress
| reduction, and eating healthy food.
|
| [0] https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
| carlcoryell wrote:
| 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.
| Izkata wrote:
| 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.
| TeaVMFan wrote:
| For the "logging" step, I created and rely on CalorieFreq, a
| local-first Java SPA:
|
| https://frequal.com/cf/
|
| It is built on the Flavour framework:
|
| https://flavour.sf.net
| oceanhaiyang wrote:
| Living in Japan made me get down to my all time lowest weight,
| returning to America made me shoot up past where I started...
| healthy lifestyle, lots of walking over driving, and healthy
| eating options is all it is!
| arp242 wrote:
| 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
| poszlem wrote:
| 15 years ago, I lost 32 kg. Ever since, I've been keeping a
| weight diary, weighing myself almost every day. I've now regained
| those kilos, plus an additional 15. The funny thing is that the
| yo-yo effect took 9.5 years to fully happen, and looking back at
| the entire 15-year span, it's perfectly clear. But year by year,
| I couldn't even notice it happening. I'd gain a few kilos, lose a
| few, gain again, lose again, except each time I'd gain slightly
| more than I'd lost.
|
| I don't have much more to add, other than it being really eye-
| opening how my body seemed to play the long game, eventually
| regaining all the weight I'd initially lost.
| testing22321 wrote:
| 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.
| poszlem wrote:
| Thank you for this unhelpful response. Obviously my mouth was
| involved, but so were my brain, gut, and the rest of my body.
| The point I'm making is that I never consciously decided to
| gain weight. My body, however, seemed to have its own plan.
| testing22321 wrote:
| My comment was helpful, because you are demonstrating a
| lack of knowledge about why you gained weight.
|
| Even your reply implies you think you need to consciously
| decide to gain weight for it to happen - which is very much
| not correct.
|
| You can't fix something if you don't understand the whys
| involved.
| stavros wrote:
| I know all the theory, but how do I stop food noise? It's
| extremely annoying to always be thinking about food, no matter
| how full you are.
| christophilus wrote:
| I will say that having switched to carnivore made a difference
| for me. It was hard for me to say no to junk food as a vegan or
| when on a healthy "balanced" diet. With carnivore, the cooking is
| simple, the "no" is obvious, and the satiation lasts a long time.
|
| That said, it's hard for me to think this is actually a healthy
| way to eat, after so many years being vegan, and I don't know
| what the staying power will be.
| znpy wrote:
| So we're sharing anecdotes so here's mine: the speed in weight
| loss matters, in the sense that faster weight loss might not be
| the best. Your body will try to regain weight if you don't give
| it time to get accustomed to the new weight.
|
| In late 2020 / early 2021 i did the Dukan diet and lost ~10kg in
| like two months and a half, i lost like a kilogram (about two
| pounds) per week, my body was perfect.
|
| Then i stupidly eyed the next challenge (quitting smoking) and
| gained everything back (with intenterests, damnit).
|
| I should have really focused on consolidation, that for the dukan
| diet means slowly reintroducing other foods slowly to let your
| body get used to the new state of affairs.
|
| Last year started dieting again and i lost 10 kilograms again,
| over a year, by mostly eating less (i amicably call it
| "controlled malnourishment"). This time i'm not gaining it back
| and i think it's because even in the weeks where I've exceeded,
| my body got time to get acquainted to the new weight. During this
| last year i hit a plateau as well... i just had to be patient.
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