My 5-step program for losing weight
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My 1-step program for losing weight: semaglutide. From 103 kg in November to 89 kg in June, no hunger.
(Of course, the problem is what will happen when I run out of semaglutide. However, the same problem is with running out of willpower, and that usually happens much faster.)
I agree about avoiding added sugar, but I think that even more useful heuristic is to eat meals that contain a lot of protein. This is anecdotal, but it seems like eating meat or dairy or legumes makes me feel full, while eating e.g. pasta (lots of carbs, but technically no added sugar) makes me want to eat more and more. It is important to check the nutrition table, because there are many products with "protein" in their title that actually do not contain more protein that their alternatives. So maybe ignore all the "protein" stuff and focus on meat and diary and legumes. Also, the advice to "eat this" is easier to follow than "avoid this"; the latter costs more willpower.
I wonder if the temptation to eat late is because the same signal -- feeling low on energy -- can be interpreted by the brain as both being tired and being hungry. If you are tired and you eat some sugar, it wakes you up a bit, doesn't it? Which of course is bad for multiple reasons. So maybe we could turn this around, and when we feel the desire to eat something in the evening, think "this is probably my brain felling tired, I should go sleep".
You will feel hungry every single day and constantly dream of food.
This sucks not just because hunger feels unpleasant, but because it makes difficult to focus on things, and because it makes easier to get angry. So it might be a good idea to reduce other sources of stress, if possible. For example, if your job is too stressful, and your overeating is partially a reaction to that, it may be impossible to lose weight while keeping the job. Or you may strategically time your hunger for your vacation.
About exercise, I agree that you cannot outrun the food in short term, but perhaps in long term the muscles increase the passive metabolism. But yeah, if your goal is to lose weight now, exercising is not going to do it. Except maybe in the sense that you don't eat while you exercise, so maybe five hours on a hike means five hours away from the fridge.
Hunger might cause cognitive and emotional regulation problems through the same general process as any other aversive experience, but for many people there's also a very specific physiological pathway going through low blood sugar. If this is a frequent problem, it might be worth investing in a continuous glucose monitor, or just trying to eat a very slow-carb diet (avoid most concentrated sources of carbs and eat lots of beans, or just increase protein, or just go full keto). Improving blood sugar regulation is life-changing for some people, even without any weight loss.
I've been trying Dexcom G7 for the data, and seems pretty good. Data every 5 min. A diabetic I know referred to it as "the good sensor".
1Thanks, looks like Dexcom Stelo is coming out this summer that will be available without a prescription. I'll order it as soon as its available.
Oops, I totally replied from the LW account I mostly use for testing. I trust the 1st Viscount St Alban and father of modern scientific method won't mind me using his name to encourage empricisim.
I got my Dexcom via Nutrissense. No prescription required. They offer an Abbot sensor by default (15-minute sensor readings) but 'upgrade' to Dexcom if you allow them to use your data for a study (Dexcom wants to get approval and wants data).
I've checked Nutrissense and they want $250/month? Definitely way too much for a glucose meter! :)
And here I am paying them $300. Their monthly costs seems basically what the Dexcom sensors cost on their own.
But also not definitely too much. Depends on the value of the data to you, etc. I was seeking to solve very distracting hunger, a problem that even a low chance of solving would be well worth the cost.
Wrt to the calorie deficit really sucking, I found, per the potato diet, that eating potatoes to satiety (wound up being about 25% of calories overall average) removed most of the hard part of the calorie deficit. I still had to pay attention, but I didn't have to try to go to sleep hungry.
It was notable that, in practice, the diet wound up being both low added sugar and low added fat. This has a calorie effect of course, but also some think that these processed carbs and fats are doing some sort of metabolic shenanigans, perhaps being treated by the body structurally as damaged etc.
I lost 25kg in 9 months using a very similar method. Some suggestions to help with the hunger/willpower:
1. Brush your teeth straight after dinner. It adds a point of friction between you and more food ("I'd have to brush my teeth again"). Then drink herbal teas in the evening.
2. You don't have to feel hungry all the time. Choose when you consume your calories so that you're hungry at the least inconvenient times and for the fewest waking hours. I usually eat a decent breakfast as late as I can, because I'm not as hungry in the mornings. Then I eat two half-sized meals, one at noon and one mid afternoon. Followed by a large dinner. I'm most hungry between noon and mid afternoon, but it's not too hard to bare because I know I've got that smaller mid-afternoon meal coming up, and then a satisfying dinner.
3. Use exercise to "earn" treats. If you want ice-cream for dessert, calculate how many calories you'll need to expend to make up for it and go for an appropriately long jog beforehand. Don't do this the other way around (eat a treat, promising yourself that you'll burn it off tomorrow).
tone:neutral, noncritical
As I understand it, there are many strategies that can cause significant and safe weight loss over a number of months. But, and this is critical, none of those strategies appears to consistently produce effects on the scale of years. Human physiology seems to be designed to hoard weight for times of famine, not to permanently lose it. Only a few people in a hundred seem to be able to keep weight off after losing it.
And this makes sense: for nearly all of our evolutionary history we've had a hard time finding enough calories to sustain a large population. Currently, most of us live surrounded by more calories than we can reasonably consume pretty much all the time. We just aren't built for the environment we've created! And all that before we discuss manufactured and superstimulus foods complicating the matter.
I'm more interested to see your data going forward over a 5 year span.
One of the hypotheses is that hoarding calories is supposed to be a fall preparing for winter thing and something about the modern diet is putting us in that state all the time rather than for three months out of the year. Eating a bunch of root vegetables seems to help. Might be gut microbiome related (starches) and/or hormone related or something else.
I heard this hypothesis about fruits and glucose-fructose syrup, that basically when you eat something that contains glucose-fructose syrup, your body thinks "oh, the autumn fruit, better get ready for the winter" and starts depositing fat in the fat cells. (Not sure how reliable is this story.)
I’ll post an update in 4 more years, sure. Though me not gaining weight would obviously not prove much either way :-)
Lots of people believe they can eat more if they just exercise more. Unfortunately our bodies are highly efficient relative to the density of modern food, so “exercising it away” is not a realistic plan.
'Exercising it away' seems misguided given our bodies' energetic efficiency, as you said. What's instead worked for me is raising my basal metabolic rate substantially by adding muscle, which is very energetically expensive, via ~3 resistance training sessions a week.
Admittedly I don't know of a way to maintain the required muscle mass for this strategy to work long-term without enjoying physical activity, which I seem to enjoy the way most people enjoy good food, which probably makes this useless as general advice.
I've been doing weightlifting 5-6 days a week for 14 months now and progress has been very slow, so my metabolic rate hasn't budged all that much. But if you're lucky and can progress faster then its a valid strategy.
It took me about 5 years. Again, I don't think it's a useful approach if you don't like exercising in the first place; for me 5 years of resistance training has felt less like a weight-loss strategy and more like an excuse to have fun chasing goals and make like-minded friends along the way.
Thanks for the post. I didn't know about MacroFactor, and it seems like a great alternative to the all-too-popular MyFitnessPal. Do you (or anyone else) have a good recommendation for a food scale? Measuring individual ingredients, like those for a complex salad, for example, seems like a tedious task.
You don’t need to be more precise than 5 grams when measuring food so any scale will work. You also don’t need to measure low density foods like cucumbers or tomatoes - I would just enter a rough guesstimate into the app.
