What Do You Eat for Weight Loss?

[Lemur]

@delay

Great. So you do understand that energy can be transformed evident by your numerous examples that don’t contradict anything I’ve already stated previously.

Yes thermodynamics matters, is not “useless”, and the variables mentioned previously are all measurable in a lab. I have posted references previously that can be visited.

Because it seems we’ve fundamental disagreements on first principles, and perhaps even reality, I will now politely disengage.

[Stasher]

A 500 caloric deficit, for example, can be acheived from either food restriction alone, ramping up activity alone, or practically some combination (maybe I burn 300 calories off maintenance today with a jog and 200 through food restriction). Whether one wants to track calories or not is totally up to them. I'd advise it at least for a few weeks though for beginners just to get an understanding of what is going in and what is being burned. With enough experience, most don't necessarily need to track calories unless they just like the data. Just like how most of us don't need to track our budgets down to the penny (I know what my income is and I know what I spend) but it is useful for those starting out. To me, I like tracking anyway so it is not a problem.

Regarding a focus on restrictive diet - I am mostly in agreement. These set most people up to fail. But there are cases where a restrictive diet can be very useful initially to reset taste buds and other habits. For instance, someone might find that no amount of flexibility can stop them from binging on chips (maybe that is a trigger food for them) or they've a sweet tooth. In these cases, best to be restrictive in some areas and flexible in others.

Absolutely, much like finances unless we track what we are doing and explore the numbers we are unable to change our habits if we don't first understand them. Once that foundation is build and understanding gleaned, then we can start rebuilding and bringing the levels back up.

While excess caloric restriction for prolonged periods causes metabolic adaptation, excess activity for prolonged periods causes almost as much metabolic adaption to the activity being done.

This can be observed with things like step count. If you go from walking 5k steps a day to 10-12k steps you will see a nice boost in NEAT. If you go from 10-12k to 20-25k you will see a short lived burst in caloric expenditure but your body will become more efficient and over time the extra calories burned from those extra steps becomes negligible. It's quite a steep curve as you increase past that.

I can use myself as a perfect example, shifted my activities at the end of last summer from long distance backpacking as the alpine season ended and I decided to move from long distance bike races to go back to running. My heart rate and caloric expenditure was through the roof doing anything upper end of Z2 or Z3. Since September my speed has increased and my distances as well but because my body has adapted my heart rate has dropped by a large margin, so much so that I can see the relative effort graph on Strava has plateaued even though I'm doing more than ever. Thus I need to dial back my intake of food because my body has adapted efficiently.

[2Birds1Stone]

Kinda wild right? Last year when I got really fat in Italy (+15 lbs in 6 weeks!, that pistachio creme filling is no joke!) and finally got back on the health and fitness bandwagon I used steps to increase expenditure. At first I was burning ~30 kcal per 1k steps, by the end of month three when I ramped steps up to 20k+/day it was down to 15 kcal/1k steps. My heart rate during walks also dropped, but even trying to walk faster didn't yield nearly the same caloric expenditure when step count was lower.

This is where you can use some of this knowledge to "trick" your body in the short term and utilize the science to periodize many of these different strategies over a longer period of time.......but at the end of the day the body is just going to adapt to different stimuli and intakes. Sensible long term approach that's sustainable is necessary if you want lasting results.

[7Wannabe5]

@Lemur:

The 1951 Dairy Council/Michigan State College Co-ed Calorie Counting Diet Film is hilarious. Very close to being my mother's cohort, so I have convinced her to give that recommended diet a try, because she is supposed to be boosting her protein intake, but she hates the protein drinks. We had eggs scrambled with onion and peppers, sliced orange, and slice of super-seed protein toast for breakfast = approximately 400kcals/20 g. protein. I am guesstimating that the pattern in the film was around 400 kcals for each meal and 200 kcals for snack, totaling 1400 kcals/day and approximately 80-100 g. protein.

[jesmine]

The fastest and easiest weight loss strategy for me is to make sure more than 80% of my caloric intake is fat.

[frommi]

The fastest and easiest weight loss strategy for me is to make sure more than 80% of my caloric intake is fat.

How does you diet look like in that case? Sounds very unhealthy and that fast weight loss is mainly the loss of water?

[jesmine]

For carnivores, bacon pretty well hits that target if you eat unfried smoked bacon or if you drink the fat after you fry it. Excessive protein can raise your blood glucose considerably.

For vegetarians, a tablespoon of olive oil, avocado oil, etc with a hardboiled egg or your favorite vegetable will do. Nuts, nut butters, fish oils, dairy butter, ghee make good variety.

Being an omnivore I mix and match any of these but stay away from seed oils or eating sugar and/or carbs with the fat. Butter is gold, and goes with anything. Fry an onion in half a stick of butter and add bacon bits. I love milk, but it's too much carbs with fat, so I stick to drinking grassfed heavy cream. Tomatoes with cheese on top and some basil and mustard drizzled with olive oil is great. Fats really aren't hard to come by and make any vegetable palatable.

Weight loss diets aren't maintenance diets. Make the meals be whatever "healthy" means to to you.

For God's sake, just drop the sugar and carbs. I can only do that if I jack up the fat to 80%.

[suomalainen]

^^ Been there, done that. It’s too boring to maintain for me.

CICO is the physics principle and it will always hold true. It just isn’t that actionable. Too many variables, such as bad labels or mis-weighings, etc on the in side and metabolic changes or absorption issues on the out side. CICO appears to only be helpful to filter out the bullshit sales. Anyone selling John Galt is a fraud.

Where I think people get confused is they mix the physics with the psychological. Food is about feeling, including hunger hormones, yes, but food is also tied to social cues and environmental cues like stress or relaxation. Personally, I think that’s why weight management is so hard in an era of cheap and easy calories. So, while it’s interesting to see what works for others, personal considerations reign supreme. You won’t know what works for you to balance the physics until you try a bunch of things to see what works with your particular psychology and environment.

[2Birds1Stone]

This is one of those threads that blunts your intelligence if you take some of the responses seriously.

[delay]

For God's sake, just drop the sugar and carbs. I can only do that if I jack up the fat to 80%.

Thanks for sharing your experience! Avoiding carbs and focussing on fat sounds like the keto diet? That's the one diet I couldn't complete, I got health issues like inflamed lips after 4 to 6 weeks.

I wonder how well your diet works for you. How happy are you with your weight? How easy is to you stay at a weight after you've reached it?

[frommi]

I followed a low-carb (Keto) diet for five years, centered around lots of vegetables, eggs, meat, butter, and heavy cream (fiber intake<20g). I lost about 20 kg on that plan. However, my LDL cholesterol shot up to 260, and my kidney markers gradually worsened. I was also constantly constipated—going to the bathroom was a miserable experience.

I can only imagine that a strict carnivore diet would have made things even worse.

About a year ago, after seeing my blood test results, I switched to a diet very similar to what Conwy described: lots of vegetables, fruits, berries, oats, yogurt, nuts, and fatty fish. (fiber intake>60g) I lost another 3–4 kg on this approach. In the end, it really is about calories in vs. calories out—but there are healthy and unhealthy ways to reach that balance.

What Conwy outlined is, in my opinion, a sustainable, long-term way of eating—there's no need for a separate "weight loss" diet. And best of all, my digestion is now fantastic—I have god-tier poops every day.

[IlliniDave]

^^ Been there, done that. It’s too boring to maintain for me.

CICO is the physics principle and it will always hold true. It just isn’t that actionable. Too many variables, such as bad labels or mis-weighings, etc on the in side and metabolic changes or absorption issues on the out side. CICO appears to only be helpful to filter out the bullshit sales. Anyone selling John Galt is a fraud.

Where I think people get confused is they mix the physics with the psychological. Food is about feeling, including hunger hormones, yes, but food is also tied to social cues and environmental cues like stress or relaxation. Personally, I think that’s why weight management is so hard in an era of cheap and easy calories. So, while it’s interesting to see what works for others, personal considerations reign supreme. You won’t know what works for you to balance the physics until you try a bunch of things to see what works with your particular psychology and environment.

I think the biggest confusion comes in because the physics is embedded in biochemistry which acts as a constraint--a gatekeeper for what calories actually enter the body (the gut is technically outside the body) and a traffic cop directing where/how energy is used. Gasoline is calorically dense but it won't make you fat because it is poison. We lack the ability to digest fiber and can absorb very little in the way of polyphenols but with a healthy microbiome we outsource the "digestion" of fiber and polyphenols to microorganisms whose noncaloric byproducts are very beneficial. There's an emerging field called nutritional psychology that's delving into the role of micronutrients and the microbiome in mental/neurological health. It appears much of what drives cravings might be gut microbe communicating with mitochondria in our cells via a chemical language.

IMO there's a lot of merit to the individual makeup aspect of it. The easiest example that comes to mind involves lectins. Many of us are impervious to them at least in terms of detectable outward symptoms, while to others they are devastating, and in between there is a continuum.

I'd add physiological habits to environment and psychology, though maybe that could fall under environment. An individual will respond differently to a given nutrition regimen if they are vigorously active than they will if they are sedentary. It's also probably hard to unpack a person's psychology from their nutrition in many cases, and ditto for their relative activity habits.

[IlliniDave]

Thanks for sharing your experience! Avoiding carbs and focussing on fat sounds like the keto diet? That's the one diet I couldn't complete, I got health issues like inflamed lips after 4 to 6 weeks.

I wonder how well your diet works for you. How happy are you with your weight? How easy is to you stay at a weight after you've reached it?

I'm not sure if this was a general question or whether it was addressed to one person, and chances are I weighed in on this upthread at some point in the past.

I'm not a believer in "maintenance" diets, although if there was one I think the evidence clearly suggests something patterned after a "Mediterranean Diet", or an Asian analog to it, is probably most efficacious for the highest number of people.

For a couple of reasons I essentially have seasonal diets. The "justification" is that the human ancestral diet was highly seasonal, and the body seems to have mechanisms built in to leverage different patterns of nutritional intake. A simple example is what we now call fasting. We didn't evolve with a rock steady food supply, and at times our ancestors almost certainly went though periods with almost no food on a regular basis, and nature crafted us to to switch over to internal maintenance activities when the body is not busy processing incoming nutrition. Cellular repair, autophagy, toxin removal, etc., ramp up when our guts are empty. Carbohydrate-rich foods were generally available only seasonally, and we're built to store as much of them as we can while they are available to see us through season lean times like winter and early spring.

I've tried a lot of different diets. I don't thrive on a keto diet (in the strict sense). Part of that is likely because I had my gallbladder removed some time back. I don't do well on strict carnivore either. That said, for short stints I can either go keto or carnivore and actually feel very good.

My core regimen that I follow about 8 months of the year splits the bulk of my calories between protein and fat pretty evenly, and I keep carbs relatively low (I try to average under 40g per day). For the most part I avoid carb dense foods like grains, potatoes, and most fruit; and I limit legumes. I try to consume at least a little bit of 30 different low glycemic plant foods each week (I often probably only achieve 20). That includes spices. I also work in various styles of intermittent fasting, for reasons that have nothing to do with weight. When I stick to that regimen 90% or better I tend to lose weight slowly.

Then the last 4 months of the year I let my hair down a little and eat more carb dense foods, although I'm increasingly becoming attuned to avoiding highly processed foods and seed oils. I've turned into enough of a food snob that I won't eat pasta unless it is imported and non-GMO/glyphosate-free. I don't have a history of observations with that approach. With a normal SAD high carb diet I gain weight quickly (many observations). With the "clean"(er) version I seem to gain weight slowly.

And I should note that I am a constant tinkerer. When I'm focused on strength building I've experimented with sprinkling in a "carb feast" periodically. I didn't notice much affect from it, although it might have slowed the leaning process a little.

I'm okay with a gentle yoyo-ing of body weight over the course of a year. I think it's fairly natural. I've learned the hard way that paying attention to the quality of foods in the macronutrient categories is extremely important.

[jacob]

My favorite answer in this thread (I think it was @fiby47?) is still a single word: "Less".

The single meal of the warrior diet makes it easy or easier to gauge the amounts of food. Instead of topping up the dinner plate with "delicious water-based lentils", I top it up less. There's no ability to sneak in cheater donut which would kill the energy balance.

I prefer to make it up with calorie expenditure instead. 40 minutes of HIIT is worth a good 600kcal (same as 2hrs of walking!), so doing these 6 days a week is worth ~+1lbs of weight loss per week.

The main discipline/mental challenge is not to eat more because the body inevitably demands more calories to pay for muscle destruction and building and increased energy expenditure. It can get much of that from flab storage.

I like this method because it's simple and easy to implement. No need for structural change. I do note that it's mainly easy because the metabolic increase is rather high. Even if I didn't eat less, it would still work. Eating "less" simply makes the loss process work faster.

[delay]

I'm not sure if this was a general question or whether it was addressed to one person

Thanks for sharing, I'm always interested in experiences with weight loss!

My core regimen that I follow about 8 months of the year splits the bulk of my calories between protein and fat pretty evenly, and I keep carbs relatively low (I try to average under 40g per day).

After lots of experiments, I now believe the concept of proteins and fats and carbs is not useful for weight loss, and I ignore those numbers.

I also work in various styles of intermittent fasting, for reasons that have nothing to do with weight. When I stick to that regimen 90% or better I tend to lose weight slowly.

That's also my experience, for me fasting is the one thing I've found that works long term.

I'm okay with a gentle yoyo-ing of body weight over the course of a year. I think it's fairly natural. I've learned the hard way that paying attention to the quality of foods in the macronutrient categories is extremely important.

Right, it feels natural and effortless to put on some pounds from December to March and lose them again from April to August. My experience also agrees with your remark about food quality. My fasting requires whole foods to work. I can drink alcohol and eat chips and a host of unhealthy bakery products on top, as long as I eat good quality food and fast, my weight stays good.

[IlliniDave]

...After lots of experiments, I now believe the concept of proteins and fats and carbs is not useful for weight loss, and I ignore those numbers...

Right, it feels natural and effortless to put on some pounds from December to March and lose them again from April to August. My experience also agrees with your remark about food quality. My fasting requires whole foods to work. I can drink alcohol and eat chips and a host of unhealthy bakery products on top, as long as I eat good quality food and fast, my weight stays good.

That's interesting (first part of the excerpt). I am quite different and find that the level of carbs I eat correlates very strongly with how readily I add "bad" weight (i.e., visceral fat). That could well be because I brutalized my metabolism for decades being on the SAD with gusto. Of it could simply be my epigenetic state or underlying genome. I find consuming animal protein and fat to be self-regulating. Even during the part of the year I tend to shed a few pounds I'm eating as much as my hunger dictates. But add processed/refined carbs to the mix I can continue eating for as long as I'm awake.

For me it's September-December I tend to add a little. Holidays and football season is what I blame it on, lol. But I also tend to be a little more sedentary along with the changes in macronutrients. I've never really pursued fasting for weight loss, more for metabolic health, but obviously getting deeper into a ketogenic state will accelerate fat loss.

I always find it remarkable how different humans can be in terms of arriving at their own best approach. Maybe it's inherent to being highly adaptable omnivores at at the core.

[frommi]

When it comes to the whole topic, I think body weight is a pretty poor marker of metabolic health. I strongly recommend getting regular blood work and monitoring your waist circumference—these are at least equally, if not more, important indicators.

If you're struggling to lose weight on any particular diet, it might be worth checking whether your thyroid is functioning properly—it could be lacking essential nutrients. Many of these problems can be addressed with relatively simple fixes, once you know your blood markers.

With that information, you can use tools like ChatGPT or any other AI to help create a personalized plan to tackle your issues. That’s made a huge difference for me.

As for fasting, I’m a bit skeptical. I suspect it leads to significant muscle loss at least when overdone, which is something people often overlook.

[delay]

I find consuming animal protein and fat to be self-regulating.

Supposing you mean meat with "animal protein and fat", I agree, I don't gain weight from overeating meat.

I always find it remarkable how different humans can be in terms of arriving at their own best approach.

And so it is!

We live in a time of record obesity, yet few doubt our belief of "move more, eat less". It took me 20 years to doubt it. Mind boggling.

[jesmine]

Thanks for sharing your experience! Avoiding carbs and focussing on fat sounds like the keto diet? That's the one diet I couldn't complete, I got health issues like inflamed lips after 4 to 6 weeks.

I wonder how well your diet works for you. How happy are you with your weight? How easy is to you stay at a weight after you've reached it?

It's possible that the reason fat intake was so important to me when I started my weight loss at 170lb was that it granted me satiation at the same time that my mind/body was adapting to empty or nearly empty stomach conditions. Fat has more calories per volume than most staples. Eat two sticks of butter and 30 minutes later you will almost puke at the thought of eating one M&M. The stomach will become empty but satiation will last a LONG time. Sometimes days.

Honestly, my first impulse to this thread was to say I don't eat anything for weight loss. Cutting calories is the most frustrating response an overweight person hears, so I avoided it until now.

I'm 5' 8" @ 150 lbs. I can and do eat carbs if I want, and I don't feel like I'm restricting food intake. What one person calls "conscious consumption of calories," another may call "restrictive eating." I could eat a lollipop from the bank lobby, but how strong does the desire to eat a lollipop need to be before it's called restrictive?

Eating can be extremely addictive. If the thought of being able to maintain physical and mental well-being with half the food intake is a "downer" for you, than food consumption has become a vice and it's likely you are always looking ahead to the next time you can eat something.

If your body/mind is stable, you begin to understand and experience that introducing food to the system, as pleasurable as it is, is still a maintenance event from which the system needs to "recover" from.

[delay]

Eat two sticks of butter and 30 minutes later you will almost puke at the thought of eating one M&M. The stomach will become empty but satiation will last a LONG time. Sometimes days.

Thanks for your reply! That's an interesting experiment, I'll try it one day. I do remember that I never felt hungry on the keto diet. That matches with your experience that eating fat stops hunger.

Cutting calories is the most frustrating response an overweight person hears, so I avoided it until now.

So it is. With a background in physics, I try to explain that the law of conversation of energy is not a useful way to look at organisms eating organic food, but to little avail. Well, I believed the calorie in - calorie out = fat gain story for many years, and don't think I would be able to convince my younger self

I started my weight loss at 170lb
...
I'm 5' 8" @ 150 lbs

Translating to the metric units we use over here:
5' 8" = 1.73 m
170 lbs = 77kg @ 25.8 bmi
150 lbs = 68kg @ 22.8 bmi

That's nice! My journey was like:
6' 3" = 1.90 m
242 lbs = 110 kg @ 30 bmi
192 lbs = 87 kg @ 24 bmi

Been stable for 2 years now, after 20 years of bouncing back after various diets.

If your body/mind is stable, you begin to understand and experience that introducing food to the system, as pleasurable as it is, is still a maintenance event from which the system needs to "recover" from.

That's an interesting way to view it. I think what you call "recovery" I think of as "cleaning up". This cleaning up is only done when I give my body 16 hours without eating, and that's what intermittent fasting is. It looks like we mean the same thing with eat/recover and eat/clean.