I know food is everything, but is there been anything that helped you going down in weight other the food habits?
Calories in must be less than calories out for weight loss to happen.
Every other method is trying to sell you something.
Better diet can absolutely help loads, but if you are eating 15 pounds of broccoli and fish a day it’s still too much fuel and not enough burn. You can definitely work out to burn some of that energy off but at some point you just have to eat less.
I say this as a current fat person who has lost the weight and put it back on in his life.
I eat my feelings away and I got BIG over the last few years. I was at 340 at my worst. I’m still overweight, but I’m slowly working on it again. It takes time and discipline. Two things I’m not great about.
Person for me I like to start off with a fast of a day or two without any solid foods. Just water and maybe some tea or something. this helps me get over the appetite hump and my huge black hole or a stomach.
If you stop eating huge meals your body will alter where it’s “I’m full” feeling is at. Unfortunately food is delicious and I push past that feeling all the time because it’s yummy God dammit lol.
Weight loss is not a sprint. It’s a marathon. Don’t quit if you fall off the wagon. Just get back up and keep joggin.
Saw dad lose a cannonball of a beer belly. He had run into an old friend and was embarrassed by how fat he had become in comparison. Asking his friend how he lost it, John replied:
“Easy Bob, I just brainwashed myself into thinking being hungry was a good thing.”
You’re not telling yourself food is bad, that way lies eating disorders. You’re simply telling yourself that being low-key hungry is a normal state of affairs for a homo sapien. Because it is a normal state of affairs. Stop horking down pork rinds every time a little hunger pings you. Fucking ignore it, go on. That behavior can become a habit.
People see my skinny ass eat like a hog and marvel at my “metabolism”. No, hard no. I only put calories in my face two, maybe three times a day. Zero snacks, zero soft drinks. (OK, time to fess up. Many calories from beer. There, I said it.)
A long time ago, i decided to myself there are people starving all over the world. Maybe it’s okay if I occasionally feel some mild hunger sometimes, and that helped a lot when I decided to actively drop. I still eat snacks, but it’s zero while the sun is up. Then at night I can easily add up my meals and know how much chocolate I can have, which is a critical nutrient in my book, especially paired with peanut butter.
Stress helped me lose 20 pounds in three months last year ^.^
I wouldn’t recommend it.
Wait until you find out about terrible stomach viruses! I did that in about a week. Silly hospital had to rehydrate me with all that water weight, but I still came out way lighter!
Sorry to hear about that, friend. I really like your shares. All the best, matey. <3
That’s not great, I hope life is treating you well now. Keep up the good work here! I love your history posts especially. ❤️
One thing the diet industry hates:
Fasting. Hard to make money off not eating food.
It’s also highly effective and safe so long as you educate yourself properly before beginning.
I did 14 day fasts with an electrolyte slurry, psyllium husk, and multi vitamins. Take a month off, eat well balanced meals, repeat until goal weight. I lost ~15-20lbs each fast doing it a total of three times to hit my goal weight. Each time is less, because the daily caloric requirement to maintain your body decreases with your weight.
After that, I started gym/weight training.
edit: and never eating junk food or drinking sugar ever again. That includes fruit juice and dairy milk. Unsweetened Coconut “milk” for me now. Processed grains massively reduced too. Basically, flour. Honestly flour probably inflated the waist line for me more than sugar.
So I’m a physician and I support most things people do to import their health but I do try to make sure they’re fully informed. In terms of fasting, this cohort study found an adverse association between fasting and cardiovascular death. There are limitations to the study (self-reported diet, etc.) but it followed 20,000 people for 8yrs which is pretty good. Definitely need more study in this area, especially considering the complexity of human metabolism. Here’s the highlights from the study but the full text is available at that link:
- People who followed a pattern of eating all of their food across less than 8 hours per day had a 91% higher risk of death due to cardiovascular disease.
- The increased risk of cardiovascular death was also seen in people living with heart disease or cancer.
- Among people with existing cardiovascular disease, an eating duration of no less than 8 but less than 10 hours per day was also associated with a 66% higher risk of death from heart disease or stroke.
- Time-restricted eating did not reduce the overall risk of death from any cause. An eating duration of more than 16 hours per day was associated with a lower risk of cancer mortality among people with cancer.
I did 3 extended fasts, it’s not a permanent lifestyle change for me so I don’t think that info is relevant to me, more so to the other person who replied with intermittent fasting. Or people who permanent adopt stuff like OMAD.
I eat three times a day.
It’s a interesting poster, but look at those error bars!
I wonder why the pre-study ratios of CVD and Cancer were much lower on the 8 hour eating window population?
Fasting. Hard to make money off not eating food.
FFS, don’t give them ideas!
Now with exclusively made for you daily AI motivational messages! 2 months free if you subscribe annually. Fast better, fast with your wallet!
;)
Yes, came to say fasting. Start with intermittent. Work up to OMAD (one meal a day). Then push it further out to 48 hr. plus depending on your weight, with just water, vitamins, electrolytes.
Autophagy is an amazing benefit of it to look into as well. Kicks in hard around 48 hrs, depending on how much sugar and carbs you have to burn off. Which is also why a ketogenic diet is good when you aren’t fasting.
Green tea, coffee, tumeric are good at stimulating autophagy too, if you want to dirty fast
Heha, I’m scared, but I’m also interested! (frankly)
Cravings wear off fast. Especially if you are not dry fasting. It’s actually easiest after the second day or so if you are getting you electrolytes
Cravings wear off fast.
Long story short, some years back I damaged something in my esophagus / stomach, and was unable to eat for ~10days. Water was about it for all that time. Maybe a lollipop here and there. Anything more like ‘real food’ was true agony. I forget if I took man-made vitamins during that time; perhaps a tiny bit here and there.
Finally, whatever it was had healed up, and I was able to eat again, and had lost a good bit of weight, and felt so much more energetic for a few weeks, afterwards!
electrolytes
Stuff like gatoraid, or more exactingly-formulated stuff?
Any calories or sugar ends the fast and any autophagy benefits, so drinks like gatoraide aren’t good.
I get a powder blend from health food stores that I mix in water or green tea that’s sugar/calorie free. There are lots to chose from, but most have sugar. Stevia sweetened are okay, but may stimulate your appetite.
Please.
I’m drinking G-zero.
It’s a grand total of virtually *nothing* upon every sig. count.One more time, mssr-- what is your magical mixture?
I avoid all artificial sweeteners aside from a few plant based ones like stevia.
Technically, no sugar very low/no carbs don’t break fast.
But drinks like g zero have ingredients like starches and artificial sweeteners, which if you research the keto diet, your body basically processes just like sugar. Both are bad for insulin levels, could stop ketosis, and may be bad for autophagy.
Which is why processed foods with starches are very unhealthy even when they brag about being sugar free.
Do you, but I personally avoid always, not just when I fast as I try to stay in ketosis even when not fasting
I prefer to eat two meals a day. It feels like a sustainable lifestyle instead of just a temporary fix. Normally, I have only breakfast and lunch. If I deviate from that by having something in the afternoon, my weight begins to increase gradually.
I’m very, very susceptible to addiction, but the thing that makes it easiest for me to curb a habit is to pretend I’ve already moved past it. If I think about junk food, I intentionally think of overly sweet, salty and artificial foods and (internally) express my distaste. With smoking, I think of the smell of an ashtray in the rain; with drinking, I think of cleaning up day old beer with a hangover.
Saying “I don’t really have a sweet tooth” is what made me lose my sweet tooth.
This is very good strategy. Like the infamous “fake it till you make it”. But actually vocalizing it makes it even more powerful.
If anyone remembers the movie Closer from 2004, there’s a scene where Clive Owen’s character refuses a cigarette while almost failing at it. He settles it with a phrase: “I’ve given up.”. You can see he is not completely sure about that, but now that he said it out loud, he made it true.
Our lizard brain can be beat by our monkey brain, we just gotta use our monkey brain bits.
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Plain oats with chia seeds for breakfast (no more than a teaspoon of honey[real honey from bees or don’t bother] because you still need to enjoy food). Table spoon on Saturday
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this is dependent on your budget: Bananas are cheap AF. Eat one whenever you have a craving. Drink a glass of water, eat a banana, then take your supplements (fish oil and multi v) in the morning after oats
2a) Apples/pears/berries. An apple can kill a craving for sweets so quickly. Plus the fiber will clean you out. Other fruit is more expensive and goes bad quickly. But seriously apples can help to be one of those fillers in your diet
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Tea. If you don’t drink black coffee, switch to tea. No need for sugar and milk, tea is pretty good on its own. More importantly, it tastes just as good cold
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Drink water. When I get up in the morning, I try to drink 1 1/2 pints of water. Then start breakfast. Just walked the dog? Chug a pint. Out of the shower? Slug a half pint. Cooking lunch? Drink a pint before you eat. Yes, you will pee a lot. But you skin will look better and you won’t have those moments of “shit, I need coffee” A pg* a
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Rice and Beans. Make one pot a week. Use oil instead of butter. Lots of beans. Chop up one large onion. Put equal parts quinoa to rice. Last a while and you can spice it or add hot sauce. Use it as a filler for eggs or chicken or whatever
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high volume food with low calorie density. Need a snack? Rice cakes, to raw carrots and celery, pickles, cucumber, . Chips and salsa is a good one
cries in irritable bowel syndrome
Great advice tho
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I was also gonna say fasting, intermittent fasting to be specific, and cooking at home more. But it seems that’s not answering your question because it’s a “food habit”. So instead, I would recommend:
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Sugar substitutes. Yes they can make you gassy/poopy. It’s trial and error to find the right substitute and right amount to use, but once you get it, you’ll be able to avoid a ton of sugar. For example, a teaspoon of stevia on my coffee is fine. Monkfruit instead of sugar but only half as much for savory dishes works for me. Allulose for home made ice cream is fine as well. And so on.
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Eat water-rich food to make you feel full but not consume a lot of calories. Celery and cucumbers are good snacks and can be paired with other food.
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A bit more pricey, but shiratake is basically zero calories and comes in noodle, rice, or cube form.
Finding a brand of protein bar that you genuinely enjoy eating is a huge deal.
I have my preferred brand and when I have 1 or 2 I feel like I just had some chocolate bars, while its still a fair chunk of calories its also 50g of protein and not much fat or sugar.
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Removing the second “t” off the word “diett” will reduce its weight by 20%.
Eat less. It sounds obvious, I know. But prepare your meal as normal, divide it in half and put half in a container in the fridge. Eat the other half, then distract yourself for half an hour. If you’re still ravenous, heat up the other half and have it. But you probably won’t be. And you’ve got your next meal ready to go!
Drinking much more water instead of diet soda all the time. I’ve never felt so hydrated and sated in all my life.
One extra tea.
Solves all problems.
- Daily walks. I started barely being able to walk more than a few steps, I was in a really terrible shape. Nowadays, I will walk at least 8km daily. More as often as I can. It feels too good. Exercising regularly and in the long-run is key.
- Eating healthier food, aka fresh fruits, veggies, real fresh bread and NOT eating industrial pre-processed food anymore. Like none at all. No ‘just this one time’ or ‘just one byte’. No more feeding myself with ready-made dishes, no more fast-food (I still ate delicious burgers and fries mind you… just all hand-made with fresh food), no industrial sweets or whatever either. And no industrial beverage either, aka no soda not even light.
- Not being an asshole with myself. I failed many times at keeping my motivation. No blaming and no hating (I was already punished enough by all that wasted time it meant for me to fall back into my bad habits) but I kept on going while trying to understand how/why I failed (so I would not do the same mistake again).
I halved my weight and I still eat plenty (even chocolate, pastries or things like that, just… a lot less and never industrially made), I replaced me eating shit (literally, industrial are feeding us shit) by me eating actual food (and enjoying preparing it), and I also retook control my body, muscles and joints, by starting to move it… like it is was designed to. We’re not designed to sit on a couch or in front of computer all day long (be it to work or to play).
The timing of the day in which I eat certain things. I lost 15kg over a year just by cutting sweets and carbs after 4pm. I still ate them, especially in the morning.
And talking about morning - “breakfast like a king, supper like a beggar” also contributed to that weight loss.
Nowadays I am not strict but whenever I see myself going over my weight I first take those two measures up before making any calorie cuts
Edit: although these are food habits, so I don’t know if it really answers your question. Exercise is the other thing that helps, you don’t even need a lot of it
Reading the labels on junk I’m tempted by helps me. That much sugar, really? How many calories?!? Palm oil, ugh. And wtf is pentasodium triphosphate?
Also, when I buy a bag of carrots, I peel them and put them in the fridge, so when I feel snacky I can munch a crispy carrot.
Not eating works pretty well, though I understand it’s probably harder for someone with a desire to eat.
