Eh I had one for years then just took a pill and got rid of it. Hell, people intentionally infect themselves with tapeworms all the time as a way to lose weight.
I try to eat 80% to 90% minimally processed foods, and the rest is “fun” food. This is what makes me feel good and keeps me from putting on weight. If I consume too much processed stuff I feel like garbage - I’ll feel tired, get headaches, and feel achey (shit just hits you harder when you’re older).
Minimally processed is stuff like oatmeal, fruit, veggies, lean meats, beans, and rice. I try to eat some fermented stuff every day if I can, usually in the form of fermented dill pickles or kimchi. I try to vary my foods as much as I can, since variety is good for your gut microbiome.
I eat oats too, have you heard of the rumor that oats bind vitamins/minerals and thus you eat a a healthy breakfast with oats and fruit but the oats suck up all the nutrients and you get nothing out of it? I am not sure why but i think they claimed there was some binding agent in oats, like some chemical compound.
Can you find that claim in a reputable scientific study or at least a reputable journal (not an anti-carb paleo or keto blog)? I’d like to know more, but I can’t find anything that isn’t woo science.
While they contain phytic acid, I don’t know if they contain enough quantity to counteract all the veggie/fruit nutrients you eat with it.
That article indicates that isolated phytates resulted in reduced absorption of calcium, iron, and zinc, but no significant effect was found when consumed in a matrix. Furthermore, phytate-containing grains tended to contain other compounds such as fermentable fiber that increased the bioavailability of those minerals, resulting in very little effect. So if that’s the only evidence we have to go by, it doesn’t sound like oatmeal is going to prevent you from absorbing the nutrients from fruits and veggies you eat with it, nor does if have any affect on the other nutritional benefits derived from oats.
You’re probably thinking of phytic acid. While it is present in raw oats, cooking it breaks it down. Most oats you buy from the store have been steamed, so it’s even already cooked before you do anything with it. Cooking breaks down a lot of these types of compounds.
Intermittent Fasting is what worked for me. I’ve been on 16:8 for 3 months now and lost almost 10 lbs so far. I like it because it’s so easy. Just don’t eat for 16 hours. No need to avoid any particular food/ingredients and no need to count calories (relatively compared to other diets). I didn’t have to change what or how I eat other than the time I stop and start eating.
Yep, that's exactly what I do. Just started, so not sure if it will work. I plan to throw in a bit of exercise, too. I've been very sedentary since covid.
You’re right and it’s still hard no matter what, but remember that most of that time you’re going to be sleeping.
If you get 8 hrs of sleep going to bed at 10pm and waking at 6 am, you could split the fast evenly in the morning and night (eat your first meal at 10 am and you’d stop eating at 6 pm) or you could stick it in the morning or evening (last meal at 2 pm, OR first meal at 2 pm) or some combo in between.
It’s even easier if you’re a lazy person like me who sleeps ~10 hrs a day!
Still, absolutely no judgment if it still sounds hard or impossible. Everyone’s eating styles are different :-)
Been doing this as well. Not for weights reasons. But man do I feel the difference in focus and general well being. Also tried a 3 day water fast. A bit hard but also felt really good during the second day.
I found out what generally makes me feel good day to day, then I decided to pretty much eat those same foods everyday. Downside is that it’s probably not as varied as the ideal diet, upside is that it’s standardized which makes planning what you’re going to eat easy. I’ve also found that I’m able to make more progress in the gym from a standardized diet.
So I’m going to preface this by saying that I’ve been very fortunate on my weight loss journey including how much free time I have to dedicate to cooking, and what I’ve done won’t work for everyone. Also I recommend not being hyper focused on weight and instead focus on being healthy.
I used to be very overweight, and was always overweight growing up. I’m 6’3" and at my highest in my mid 20’s was 330 lbs. I basically didn’t pay attention to what I ate at all, so I ate both too much and not healthy. 8 years later and now I’m around 215, and I have much more thought and time going into how I eat.
I decided that I wanted to change that, and after research I learned a few general things:
If you want to have sustained weight loss you can’t go on a diet - you need to change your habits and relationship to food. If you ever plan to go back to eating how you are now, you will return to the same weight and health. If you’re not prepared to have a permanent change to how you eat, you’re probably better off just staying the course because going back and forth can be very unhealthy, both mentally and physically.
Losing weight and changing habits are slow processes. It will take months or years to see significant progress, and it won’t be a straight line. Because it’s a permanent change there will be ups and downs along the way and over time, and that’s normal and fine. For me it’s been about 8 years and I’m still making slow progress, but there have been slips where I’ve gained 20-30 lbs back (pandemic was a bitch!)
My results are probably not typical. Everyone is on their own journey and dealing with their own hurdles, so don’t compare your results to someone else’s. Progress is progress, no matter how small. And improving your health is absolutely progress, even if the number on the scale doesn’t change.
EXERCISE. But not for the reasons you think. You will never be able to outrun a bad diet, you just don’t burn calories that fast while exercising. But it boosts your energy, mood, and for me also helped a ton with leveling out my hunger levels. It’s also probably the single biggest thing you can do to improve your health.
Sorry about the novel before I go into the question, but I’ve seen a lot of unhealthy mindsets and advice and I think it’s important to share that even with success stories there is struggle and it’s a constant battle and lifestyle change. It’s not easy, and anyone telling you differently is selling something.
So, on to what I do!
Best advice I’ve heard boils down to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
Don’t try to follow fad diets. I haven’t seen any good reliable science that supports any super strict diet. The day to day doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as the week to week and month to month. Don’t beat yourself up because you went to a party and indulged, or spent a holiday week with your family and went a little overboard. But if you’re doing that every week, it’s going to have an impact.
For me what worked was a combination of counting calories and substituting foods. I started by logging everything I ate without trying to change anything, just to get a baseline (this was VERY illuminating, it’s shocking how easy it is to eat 3000-4000 calories when you’re mostly eating junk food). Try not to judge yourself here and make sure to log everything you eat, but don’t try to go insane accuracy. Again, aim for broad trends not the small details.
Once you have a good baseline, figure out where you can substitute out higher calorie dense foods with lower calorie dense foods. This usually means more veggies, less junk food. The goal here is to be able to still eat until you feel full, but to decrease the total calories. You want to be able to feel full, because if you’re constantly hungry you likely won’t be able to maintain it long term. A good strategy is to identify some foods that you like that are low calorie density that don’t require any prep. If you’re hungry and it’s not meal time, eat those. My foods were carrots, apples, and celery. I can eat as much of those as I want until I’m not hungry and it won’t have a huge impact on my daily calorie intake.
And honestly, that’s kind of it - rinse and repeat. Experiment with new foods and recipes that are healthier and keep looking for substitutions you can do. Like stew or pasta sauce? Increase the amount and variety of veggies you throw in. Start to learn which foods are high calorie density and which ones are lower. Look to eat a variety of foods to improve overall nutrition.
If you are lucky enough to have the time, learn to cook more. A lot of processed foods have a bunch of sugar in them, and that increases calories a ton without making you feel more full. Cook in big batches so most of the time it’s still quick and easy to eat healthy. Get a few recipe staples that you can cook without thinking or looking up the recipe to lower the effort for home cooked food. An instant pot is great for making large batches of healthy food - a beef and bean chili with tons of veggies over rice is super healthy, fairly low touch time, and you can make like 10-15 meals at a time. Air fryers are great for cooking 1-2 portions at a time of food you prepare in advance, so actual touch time is pretty low.
It’s really hard at first. It gets easier over time (months and years). I’m 8 years in and these things are much more natural to me, but if I’m not actively putting thought and effort into what I eat I still skip into bad habits.
Hope this helps, and best wishes to everyone on a journey for their own health and relationship with food!
You’re right about exercise. I’d go even farther and say don’t even bother with dedicated exercise if you’re just starting to lose weight, because it’s completely irrelevant to the weight loss part.
Happy to share! If you (or anyone really) wants more detail about anything let me know! I’m happy to share tips or recipes that I’ve discovered on my journey if it will help others!
This is quite frankly what we should be teaching in schools, it pains me so deeply that it’s not standard knowledge and that people still think temporary diets are useful for anything unless they’re prescribed by a doctor.
I basically just eat whatever I feel like whenever I feel like it. Lots of meat and fat and salt. Seems to work great, I’m reasonably skinny and healthy. To the extent I’m not just getting randomly lucky I think I’ve stumbled into something in the Atkins diet genre, with unlimited calorie and nutrient dense foods not being an issue because they fill me up when I’ve had enough.
It’s your genetics. I’m the same way. Can eat basically anything. At my absolute heaviest I was 5’11 165lbs, which is heavier than I like to be. But I just cut out the 10 sodas I drank a day and lost the 10 lbs I wanted to in like a month.
I’m not going to highlight all the phones I’ve ever owned, quite a few were second-hand and didn’t last long.
But I WILL use this opportunity to wax nostalgically over my old Sony Xperia Z3 Compact. It was tiny, the battery lasted for two days easily, water proof and it was bright orange/red.
It was the perfect phone for me and I’ve never seen anything like it again. Sure it was slower and the resolution was nothing spectacular, but it did everything I wanted and it was so easy to carry with me.
I’ll be 40 in a few months. I think for people who grew up at the beginning of the internet, we know how much things can change and how quickly.
My guess is that we’re less willing to put up with bs changes, and more willing to move on because we know something’s popularity doesn’t neccrsarily make it the best choice.
I think that by adulthood into mid-life and older, adults care less about what their friends are using and more about how well things work for them. That’s certainly the case for me
I think that humans are, evolutionary, omnivores but with vegetarian food outweighting meat. Dairy came in later with the ability to domesticate animals and turning formerly non digestible food (grass) into milk and hence increasing the availability of food resources.
I would like to have a vegetarian diet for the most part and reduce meat intake to maybe twice a week. I prefer unprocessed meat (steak or chicken beast). But I was not able to find the muse to change my diet.
This is not driven by moral concerns. Eat or be eaten is something I, as a human somewhere at the top of the food chain, can live with. I just feel like meat is not as scarce as it should be and many people have lost the connection between meat consumption and the animal where the meat comes from.
Regular food items, nothing in particular, though one thing you might notice is I usually skip breakfast. Most of the food are simple items, like raw fruits and vegetables. Not sure how else to describe it.
Controversial opinion perhaps, but I think because in general humans aren’t funny and they don’t really have anything new to add to anything. Babies love to see the same joke a million times, it never stops being funny to them, but it’s something that only changes a little as we age and not as much as we would think to think about ourselves.
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