Ask Lemmy

In the past, I have found crippling levels of poverty to be quite helpful.

• Daily long walks.
• Eat less.
• Eat better. I quit stuffing myself with industrially processed food, best decision ever. Even better than quitting smoking (which I did some 20 years ago). BTW, eating better helps a lot in eating less.

Edit: some improvements made to my (severely) lacking English.

I'm going to answer this as a physiologist: First, eliminate processed foods as they do make you over eat Next, start exercising. Any amount is fine as long as you do something at least 6 days a week. Don't get obsessive; just do something To maintain the proper deficit, you need to measure and plan your meals. Keeping to a mostly consistent calorie total is important. It doesn't have to be exact every day, but you need to stick to a weekly total. This should be about 200-400 calories less than your total caloric needs by day. Too much and your body will fight back and your metabolism will drop to match this new level and you'll stop losing weight. To find the right amount, you're going to need to see a nutritionist and a weight loss expert with a real degree. They'll be able to fill in the details. Any specialty diet only works short term. An active lifestyle with healthy foods will make the biggest impact. And you need to be think long term: losing more than 1 pound per week will cause your body to fight back. You need to very slowly nudge it to where you want it to be, but also realize where your genetics put you. There are so many things to consider, so you need to connect with a specialist.

Don't just stop: swap.

Cutting things out leads to cravings and causes the entire process to be a constant fight. Instead, make small swaps over time that build habits.

I have a burrito every day. I swapped the tortilla for a high fiber one (get more fiber). It saved 50 calories a day and is still delicious. I swapped my side of chips for protein chips (when I can get them on sale). Lower cal, high protein, still crunchy and taste like cool ranch.

Think about what you can ADD to your meal. Having stew? Add beans and extra peppers. A sandwich? Add spinach. You'll end up eating less of the calorie sense stuff. You'll also get more fiber.

It's easier to use your will power to not buy snacks at the grocery store than it is to not eat them once they are at your home.

Track your calories. Eventually you get skilled enough at it that you don't necessarily have to journal everything to have a good idea of how many calories you are taking in. If you can eat the same things day after day without getting bored, that helps a lot.

Learn to cook well. Chicken breast doesn't have to be dry and bad. Veggies can be dressed up and made tasty without adding too many calories.

Sugar snap peas are a tasty, crunchy snack and you can eat a lot of them without blowing out your daily calorie limit.

If you drink alcohol, stop, at least mostly. Even a shot of vodka with no mix is ~60 calories. In fact, try not to drink calories in general.

I know Lemmy thinks everyone that avoids carbs must be carnivore, but you can use your head and avoid sugar/starches and lose a lot of weight. Fruit is tough to drop but apart from a few blueberries or something, fruit is pure sugar, and juice is as bad as pop. Don't think because something is "healthy" that it's not loaded with sugar.

By the time you get full eating things like pasta, you've eaten way, way too much. Fats will make you feel full. I used to eat a 16 oz steak with potatoes and vege and still want dessert, and now 6 oz of something fatty like brisket with some broccoli or brussel sprouts will fill me up.

And you can't outrun a bad diet. Exercise will tone you, but you can't exercise enough to work off a cup of mashed potatoes without giving up the rest of your free time.

Start by cleaning the house out of that shit, don't bring it back in, and use something like Carb Manager to figure out the sleepers that are putting weight on you.

Fruit and veggies will fill your stomach up making it harder to eat anything else while being lower in calories, I drench them in steak fat, idc, about the extra calories gained there, if I dont eag vegetables I eat a ton of snacks, if my stomach is uncomfortably full I dont think about eating. It's just expensive (in my case I have limited fast food options, just restaurants) if you dont cook to get healthier options but you can save hella calories. Like keto bread instead of regular for hotdogs/hamburgers save me at least 100 calories a burger, coke zero instead of coke saves me like 600 calories a day drinking 4 cans (ik I should drink less soda but ive done much much worse to my body being fat and abusing drugs, this is fine in comparison so im sticking to it)

I just skip breakfast and lunch when I'm trying to lose weight. Your body gets used to it after a few days and doesn't send the same hunger signals.

Cut out soda entirely. Skip breakfast and lunch. Maybe eat a light snack at some point during the day if you need to (real food, not sugary crap). Train yourself to just deal with being hungry. When you do eat, focus on things that are nutritionally dense, filling, and slow to digest.

There are a few different strategies I have used at different phases in life.

Where I am at right now.

Don’t eat processed foods. They make it easy to over way by design.

Eat the recommended amount of sodium or less a day. Sodium makes food more palatable. You will find yourself eating less calories simply because the food isn’t as good.

I’ve been eating the recommended amount if fiber on purpose. I eat oatmeal instead of rice/potatoes/bread. It’s filling and less ‘munchable’ if you think you are hungry put a bowl of oatmeal infront of yourself. I do season it with olive oil and spices.

I restrict sugar and high fuctrose corn syrup for the same reason I restrict salt. Sugar makes food taste to good making it easy to eat more then you need to without realizing.

These change help me eat the proper and filling portions of food without overeating. I eat till I’m full.

I also only eat like this most of the time. But even then I’m giving myself leeway on the holidays. I just try to make more good decisions then bad.

Estimate your total daily energy expenditure:

https://tdeecalculator.net/

Eat in a caloric deficit. You will need to weigh your food and track calories, at least for a while.

Weigh yourself and see if the weight is going in the right direction and not losing too fast either. Adjust calories as needed.

It's way harder than just these steps but this is the foundation. Personally I found the food weighing and calorie counting massively stressful but I got a good sense of how much to eat from doing it from a few weeks. Now I check the scale and log weight and make sure it's going the way I want it.

Also talk to a therapist. I needed one to get over certain mental barriers and to re-evaluate my relationship to food and my body image.

I once lost some weight not by focusing on what not to eat, but by making myself eat a large salad for lunch. I forget what order things went in, but at one point I was eating a lot of home made fermented vegetables (cabbage mostly with others things in the mix, so basically kraut) mixed with romaine to dilute the sourness. At another point I would buy the sort of thing I previously ate for lunch (like a sandwich) and eat only half of it, chopping it up and mixing it with my salad. I ate whatever for dinner.

I wasn't trying to lose as much weight as you, I realize. But I think for some people, not focusing of deprivation / but focusing on something I like "I will eat this quantity of these vegetables" and letting the fullness from that reduce the amount of more caloric stuff you eat, can work better.

I've lost more than 70lbs of fat and have not kept it off for about 4 years. I've previously lost more than 50lbs, but then regained the weight later. What is different this time is I have a much better understanding of the forces at work and have made fundamental, sustainable lifestyle changes that will help keep me fit over the long term.

The saying is that "you'll never out exercise a bad diet," which is completely true, but even if the calorie burn isn't sufficient to put you in a calorie deficit, there is tremendous value in exercising. Muscle is an endocrine organ, and exercise helps produce things like brain-derived neurotrophic factor a protein that is vital for the functioning of your brain. Muscle is also a huge chunk of your metabolic overhead, so maintaining or increasing muscle mass makes it easier to manage your caloric intake and not be in surplus, adding fat. Something like 90% of people who lose weight gain it all back and then some, and among those able to keep it off, nearly all of them have adapted their lifestyle to increase their baseline level of physical activity. I've done it by using a bicycle for nearly all of my local transportation. I live in a warm climate and my city is fairly bikable (though there is definitely room for improvement!) This one change adds ~ 6-7 hours of additional cardio to my week.

When it comes to eating, whatever you do has to be sustainable. You can "go on a diet", but if you revert to your former norms once you've lost the weight, you're just going to gain it all back. Worse, if you didn't take care to boost your protein and do resistance training to maintain muscle mass while in a calorie deficit, you'll have lost substantial muscle mass as well, and you'll likely end up fatter and in a worse position when all is said and done. With strict caloric restriction without boosting protein or doing resistance training, about 40% of your weight loss will be muscle mass. Minimize the loss of muscle by boosting protein intake to around 1g of protein per lb of lean body mass, and doing some form of resistance training. Weight training in a gym is preferable, but you can do a lot with simply bodyweight fitness at home. Joe Delaney's beginner gym workout program is a useful starting point, and is what I'm doing now. However, I started with a basic bodyweight fitness program I put together from the info at reddit's r/bodyweightfitness, and it helped me a lot. Point is, something is better than nothing in this regard, and you need to do it as a matter of habit, like brushing your teeth.

As far as diet goes, there are lots of opinions out there and you have to find what works for you. If you have a lot of fat to lose, the ketogenic diet is helpful but restrictive. I did this for a while, and transitioned into what is more or less a Mediterranean diet. I eat whole foods, minimize highly processed foods, exclude highly processed foods with added sugars, and emphasize lean meats for protein and also fiber intake. I shoot for 160g of protein per day and 50-100g of fiber. If I consume carbohydrates, they have to come with fiber. Whatever dietary regime you choose, calorie tracking with a tool like myfitnesspal is vital. It is so easy to overlook consumption that if you don't strictly measure and log everything that goes into your mouth, you really have no idea where you're at with respect to being in a calorie deficit. After you've done it long enough you end up with a good grasp on your calorie intake and can relax the burden. No matter what dietary regime you select, it has to be a sustainable part of your life or the results will only be temporary.

In my experience, there's an impulse to eat that can be curbed if you aim for foods you can chew on without outpacing your calorie count.

The classic is celery. Carrots, apples, and other crunchy foods all work pretty well, too. I can nosh and sate the raw impulse to eat without feeling like I need to starve myself at actual meal times. Just having vegetables you enjoy on hand to indulge in is a good for you generally speaking, even when you're not aiming to lose pounds.

For bigger meals, soup is a favorite dish. Lots of fluids leave you full. You can have the flavors you enjoy without housing an entire slab of meat or a bunch of carbs. I also try to avoid sauces (which often means avoiding eating out generally speaking). All that stuff is packed with sugar, which makes everything more expensive to consume. Dry fried meat and veggies, spices and rubs for flavor, and grilled food rather than fried or stewed keeps me away from excess junk.

For my sweet tooth, Japanese candy tends to have less sugar than the American stuff. Mochi is better than a candy bar. Pocky is better than a box of popcorn.

I straight up cut soda and beer out of my diet when I'm focused on losing weight. (Really, just ditch soda entirely, or go to the flavored seltzer water - it's awful for you).

After that, it really does help to count the calories. When you know what you're eating, your logical "is this worth it" brain can temper the base impulses of the "I just want it in my mouth" animal brain. I hate counting calories, because it's annoying. But making the things that are hard to count annoying to keep track of also helps to focus my diet back onto foods I've got memorized and are low calorie.

Last time I got serious about weight loss, I just counted calories really aggressively. It worked.

But my diet was boring and eventually I got tired of depriving myself, so I stopped. I gained back some of the weight, but not all of it, so that's nice.

It also helps to not be constantly depressed and stress-eating through the fall of democracy.

Count your calories and see what isn't worth it. Usually the best thing to cut first is liquid calories, when I realized I could basically have another meal a day if I quit soda, it made things a lot easier.

I guess the most important thing would be to focus on lifestyle changes. You can have a super strict diet for months and lose tons of weight, but if you don't incorporate that as a permanent change, it can be easy to gain it back while not in "diet mode." Smaller changes that you stick with perpetually are better in the long run, even a 100 calorie daily deficit will eventually see results.

Also perhaps get a kitchen scale for portion control, this kinda ties in with counting your calories, but after I started measuring meals it was also easier to not overeat.

Eat until you're not hungry, not when you're full. That may require eating more slowly. It will be an adjustment for sure.

Tracking my food made a big impact for me. I started not by changing anything, but just writing everything I ate down. From there, it was pretty obvious to me where I could make changes, but I didnt change everything at once. If I were to list the changes I made, nobody would be surprised. They were exactly the kinds of recommendations others have made here. It's just that it was so much easier for me to pick something specific to change and have a good idea of the kind of impact that change would make when I could see the numbers.

Being overweight is a natural reaction to an unnatural food environment. Processed foods contain far too much energy and too little fiber (i.e., stuff that fills our stomachs but contains hardly any energy.

Exercise is important for keeping our bodies fit, but it is not the right choice to lose weight. It is much easier not to consume 300 calories in the first place than to burn them off through exercise. Simply eating less does not help either. If your stomach is not full, you are constantly hungry, and no one can keep that up for long. To lose weight in the long term, you need to change your energy intake, i.e., the type of food, not the amount of food. So you have to change your diet, there's no way around it. Move away from processed stuff and toward whole food, plant-based meals.

"Whole food" means:
Grown from soil, nothing good removed after harvesting and nothing bad added. Over time, your body and your gut flora will get used to it, your cravings for junk food will subside, and you'll be able to eat your fill of vegetables, fruit, legumes, and nuts every day cheaply, healthily, and with a clear conscience. And you'll still lose weight.

So: Keep the junk out of the house! Don't let that crap into your home anymore; if it's there, you'll eat it.

Intermittent fasting worked for me. By setting a limit on the number of hours I can only eat, it effectively put me into a calorie deficit. There’s only so much you can eat within several hours.

The great part is I didn’t have to be selective with what I eat. I just needed to quit eating before my daily eating window closed. No need for overly complicated diets.

In my late 20's, I managed to cut to probably the lowest body fat percentage of my life.

I learned which foods I found to be satisfying despite a lower calorie count, and vice versa. In my case, it's water, fiber, and protein that are important for feeling full even when I'm not eating a lot of calories. That means lots of soups, lots of green vegetables, lots of lean meats and cheeses, and some member of the legume family in almost every meal (beans and lentils, and also things like green beans, peas, peanuts). It also meant a dramatic reduction in sugars, especially in beverages, and a big reduction in alcohol consumption.

I started running a lot. Some people say you can't outrun a bad diet, but running 25 miles (40km) per week goes a really, really long way and buys you a big buffer that allows you a few high calorie meals here and there.

I stopped keeping snacks on hand. Almost everything in my house required some degree of prep or cooking to eat.

Many of those I've kept up in the 20 years since, but I've re-added whole grains and fruit into my previously low carb diet because they have a good satiety to calorie ratio (probably because of the fiber). And I've stopped running but also tolerate a higher body fat percentage and higher overall weight in support of a significantly more muscular build (and a lot more measurable strength). Finally, I do keep certain ready to eat foods in the house, but mainly because I have kids and need to feed them without spending all my time on that task.

Preperation. If my house is full of healthy food, I'm much less likely to impulsively order delivery food or head to 7/11. You have to learn how to cook without using highly processed foods too.

Edit: This includes flour btw, it's as bad as refined sugar, basically! There's nuance sure, but tell it to the ghosts of my flab rolls!

Hey, so I dropped weight casually and all I did was:

• Limit snacks. Best to zero, but minimum to one a week.
• Your food portion? Cut it in half. Fat folk tend to eat big portions, I know I did, cut it in half.
• Don't eat constantly, predefine 3 times you are gonna eat, that's it. For me it's breakfast, second breakfast (at work) and dinner.
• Drink water when hunger is too big.

You will be hungry, a lot for some time but shortly it will stabilise and you'd mainly feel hunger around food time.

After time, my body stabilised around 15kg lower than I were when I began, and that's with me breaking it quite often xD

I personally use a calorie counting app, like Waistline, and when I start getting into that routine of eating less naturally without actively counting, I stop using the app.

When I fall off, I go back to it for a bit until I'm back in the rhythm.

I also exercise a few times a week and try to do at least one walk a day. 

Wearables like Garmin also do great calculations of calories burned. If you don't like the idea of your data being sold, which you shouldn't, Garmins are often compatible with this FOSS app: https://f-droid.org/packages/nodomain.freeyourgadget.gadgetbridge

I found cutting carbs to be a big help. I eat massive amounts of protein and little to no carb and I've been losing a lot of weight that way

I never buy snacks or treats in my usual weekly shop - once in while I treat myself such as buying a box of stollen for Christmas... and even then I share with my family. Switching to unsalted/flavoured nuts and fruit after meals helped a lot.

Another thing is getting into the habit of intermittent fasting. At least three days a week, I only eat dinner in a 24hr period. This definitely isn't for everyone - I only happened to get back into it noticing I was putting on weight working from home through COVID however there are other versions like 16/8