I’m currently a lump of chocolate and cheese, but once the new year hits, I’m determined to make 2026 the year I finally get back to a healthy weight (I’ve lost about 20 pounds, with about 80-100 to go). I’m pretty good about exercising regularly, but, as they say, abs are made in the kitchen. Those who have successfully lost weight, is there anything you particularly recommend for maintaining a calorie deficit to lose the weight, and then avoiding gaining it back later on?
In the past, I have found crippling levels of poverty to be quite helpful.
I’ve got a mysterious health problem that’s causing near constant nausea and have lost over 50lbs this year without even trying.
What kind of test have you got done? Does medicine to stop the nausea help?
I’ve had bloodwork, stool samples, xray, CT, and upper/lower scope. I’ve got a hernia, and some intestinal ulcers, but insurance won’t approve the meds, so I’m still looking for a diagnosis they like.
It’s also likely to have an element of autonomic dysfunction too, since they’ve found bone spurs in my neck that are pushing on my spinal cord, but there’s not much I can do about that. It’s possible that overusing painkillers for my neck is whats causing the ulcers.
but insurance won’t approve the meds
I hope every employee of your insurance company involved with this decision gets obliterated by karma. Fucking assholes
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.
Saying “Don’t get obsessive” while stating you need to do something 6 days a week is an insane starting point… I agree excersie helps with weight loss, but being in a calorie deficit is enough to loose weight. Dont set the goal too high or else no one will be able to stick to it…
- 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.
These are all great suggestions, and I would just like to add: drink more water. If water gets boring, add some lemon / lime / fruit, have some herbal teas, or even some coffee (black). When I’m in ravenous eating mode and about to go for seconds, it’s helpful if I can catch myself and have a glass of water first. Then wait 5 - 10 minutes and see if I actually want more food.
+1 to all you just said :)
We quit drinking soda (and I quit alcohol, too). Now it’s, water, pressed fresh fruits (but not too much), tea and infusions. Maybe once a year I will have a drink of wine (I’m French, I have an excuse ;)
As for teas, my advice there would be to not cheap out on tea. quality teas, aka full leaves, are a thing of their own. Also I would encourage to get at least two tea posts (one for stronger teas and the other one for the lighter ones)
Drinking calories is so bad.
I only drink Coconut Unsweetened Silk and tap water outside of a zero cal soda now and then.
Be weary of artificial sugar that can still trigger hunger by impacting your blood sugar levels due to insulin release. Your body can respond to the sudden influx of artificial sugar the same way it does to real sugar.
What do you mean when you say artificial sugars? The insulin response to different sweeteners vary a lot.
I still lightly sweeten my coffee most mornings, but that’s about it.
What do you like to eat that’s less processed? I’d like to do that, processed food unfortunately requires just so much less prep.
Fresh veggies & fruits, a little quality meat (but not too much and not every day), no industrial bread (I live in Paris, we still have access to a few real artisanal bakeries where they make their own bread, but here too they’re getting replaced by industrial ones, so we’ve planned on learning to make our own bread soon), no industrial sweets/treats and no soda.
My spouse and I also learned to cook, instead of going out to a restaurant multiple times a week like we used. Saves us money and it’s a fine moment we spend together too ;)
As for the time it takes to cook fresh food: either we will make very simple meal, which takes minutes (plus we often have fun while cooking) or we will cook a meal that we will last us 2 or 3 days. So it’s really not that much of an issue. And since eating better helps us feeling a lot less tired too, well… we think it’s really worth it. The real effort is to be willing to change one’s own habits, at least if I can relate to my own experience.
Edit: maybe I should make it clear that the key change, and the very first step anyone should do is to stop eating those ready-made, over-processed and over-packaged shit food that we’ve learned to consider normal food. Sorry I this sound rude, even more so in the USA I would imagine, but this what I think they’re worth (with all their sugar and salt, and conservatives and colorants) and how good I think they’re for our health: barely a few weeks after I quite eating that I started getting better. To me, it’s the same shit as the cigarettes and if we don’t self-destroy in a nuclear holocaust (or ins ome ecological major crisis) before that I have little doubt this industrial food will end being an even worse scandal than tobacco ever was.
It is garbage food-like industrial waste, mostly. Read the nutrition information and it’s mostly empty calories! And with a work schedule all over the map, it is challenging. But an air fryer and sweet/regular potatoes pack a lot of nutrients in with the denser calorie count and fiber!
Hi! Not the same person but I’m in the same process!
Firstly, take it in steps, don’t quit all processed food at once. I actually started with eating more veggies, both in the food and as a side salad.
Then read on the products, not all processed foods are equal, and it depends on what more you have in the meal. On meat products I often look at the meat percentages, it can vary A LOT. A sausage with + 80% meat is a lot better than 30%…
You can also look for E-numbers, concentrates, and other additives. How good or bad these are are still being discussed but I’m leaning towards bad, especially if it’s a lot.
For example a highly processed sausage with basmati rice and a decent amount of salad isn’t the same as said sausage with just mac and cheese.
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Some meals are easier to prep than others but more often than not I’ve found meals, especially the meat, to need time. Time to cook properly!
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Fry meat in a pan, let it simmer in water for half an hour or so ( I rarely keep time ), make a sauce in the pan.
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Or put a chunk of meat on a oven safe plate and trow it into the oven on 150-175°C for 1.5-3h or more depending on size and tenderness.
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Or make a soup, just make sure it boils long enough for the meat! :)
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I would like to stress the eating better part. In the past, I’ve made the mistake of looking only at calories. I never chose the whole grain option because it had more calories. Weight loss was hard and I was constantly hungry. Now I stopped eating at the canteen for lunch and started cooking my own stuff instead with lots of whole grain pasta, whole grain rice, potatoes, lots and lots of vegetables, legumes and plant based protein like tofu and tempeh. For a sweet snack I eat fruit. Lost 9kg in 5 months and it didn’t even feel really hard, honestly. Cooking takes a lot of time though, but it’s so much easier than being hungry all the time.
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.
Also: cooking anything at all? Add spinach. I eat so much spinach and kale because they’re so easy to add to anything.
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.
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)
You could always intermittent fast, eat like 4-8 hours of your day and the no food until the next 4-8 hour period, worked for me but I gained most of my weight back when I stopped, I wouldnt want to do it forever so its not viable for me. I lost like 90 lbs gained 70 back. Now I’ve been losing 10 a year but not gaining it back.
For candy I swapped to stuff that last longer flavorwise and I get sick of faster like hichews over chocolate. ChocolateI can eat lbs of nonstop, once I start each bite just tastes better, so I try to avoid it or get a variety of minis, having a few small portions of different kinds is more satisfying than one extra large portion of one kind.
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.
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.
Also it’s probably better to not start with tossing all snacks out altogether, as your willpower can only take you so far. Can be easier to switch to healthier snacks, then start leaving them out once you figure how to eat well enough on meal times
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.
Sodium makes food more palatable. You will find yourself eating less calories simply because the food isn’t as good.
Eh, I don’t love this one. The idea of intentionally making food shittier so that you enjoy it less is never gonna work for me.
You do you.
It’s way easier to eat the right amount of food if you aren’t making it extra salty or extra sweet.
Basically I need to eat foods that actually taste good as opposed to making them palatable.
I have had to find different ways to season foods. I find I am more sensitive to salt and less salt makes me satisfied.
As an example, I salt my salads fairly precisely. After all, the word “salad” itself derives from the Latin word for “salted.”
But there’s also like literally no way that overeating a salad would be unhealthy for me, a person who doesn’t have hypertension (and who sweats a lot of salt so that I need a higher than normal sodium intake). I’m going to salt my salads as I see fit, and use the right amount of acid and maybe a source of umami for flavor, as well. I want my salads to be delicious, because I have basically zero fear that I’ll overeat them to the point of adverse health effects.
For plenty of other foods, I’m basically controlling portions before I plate anyway. If I’m at a restaurant, the portions are tightly controlled and I control what portions I eat by simply controlling what portions I order. If I’m cooking at home, I’m not accidentally meal planning for the week but running out of food on Wednesday. Everything I eat should be delicious, and if there’s a problem with overeating, it’s because I failed to control portions before it was placed in front of me.
To borrow an analogy from Homer’s The Odyssey, I prefer Odysseus’s strategy of tying himself to the mast and hearing the sirens anyway, over the crew plugging their ears and never hearing them in the first place.
Everyone can take their own approaches, but my own strategies for portioning already make it so that making the food less delicious wouldn’t do much for myself.
Great. Sounds like you have a strategy for you.
I just eat till I feel full, not paying attention to portions.
Even when I wasn’t watching what I eat at all I never salted a salad. Never found it necessary. I just like the way leafy greens taste.
We have pretty different sets of tastes.
I just try to make more good decisions then bad.
This is the only long-term sustainable answer.
I hope so.
It’s way easier to be extreme then constantly make choices. Takes a lot more brain power to says sometimes it’s okay as opposed to never.
Still I’m trying it out.
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 have sugar but not eating fruit for that reason is one of the worst mistakes I used to make. Fruit are full of good things your body needs, including fiber, vitamins, antioxidants. It’s the perfect sweet snack. Eat fruit. It will make you eat less of the stuff that will actually make you fat.
Sugar makes you fat. 15-20g of sugar in an apple. I used to eat a bag of apples in the combine in a day of harvesting, and I still had room for sandwiches and cookies too. They don’t fill you up.
Apples have loads of fiber (especially pectin) which makes you feel full and actually take in fewer calories of what you’re digesting. Apples IN MODERATION do not make you fat. If you eat 10 apples a day on top of your normal food, yes, they will make you fat. They will not make you fat if you eat them when you feel snackish and would otherwise eat a cereal bar or worse. Even if you eat nothing instead and decide to stay hungry, I think studies show that during your next meal you will overeat more calories than the fruit would have had, if you had eaten it as a snack. I can try to find the source if you’re interested.
Strawberries and raspberries are very low in sugar.
Not only that but many fruits are full of fiber and water. Pretty sure it’s not eating too much fruit that causes weight loss/gain issues, unless it’s all being blended into easily consumed drinks.
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Those are acceptable answers as well.
i was raised on SAD…been trying to break to the habit but goddamn is it hard.
I used Carb Manager to monitor my diet completely and break the habits, but my wife couldn’t manage that, she just went full carnivore. But we farm, hunt, make sausage and jerky, so it’s not hard to get meat. I can see where that would be damn expensive for others though.
Eating fats to stay thin when you are young will lead to cardiovascular challenges when you older.
It does work a treat for a few decades. High Cholesterol helps build testosterone and suppress appetite. It’s just long term bad.
Estimate your total daily energy expenditure:
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’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.
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 love fermented veggies! I never thought to make them at home. What’s the process like?
Basically stuff chopped cabbage (I like to add some carrot, onion, maybe some herbs… garlic, ginger and chillis can make a kimchee-like flavor) and salt into a jar or crock and leave it for a few days. It will naturally ferment and acidify. The salt favors desirable beasties, as does the acidic pH that will develop.
The only tricky bit is you need to keep the veggies submerged in liquid to keep things anaerobic. The salt will usually draw enough liquid from the cabbage, but you can add water if necessary. There are various devices people use to keep air out: glass weights to put on top, airlocks like used in beer brewing. IMO the easiest thing is a fido jar: the kind of thing with a gasket and metal clamp on the lid. The fermentation produces CO2 and that will force the O2 out through the gasket, and a blanket of CO2 will keep the veggies safely anaerobic.
Thank you so much ❤️
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.
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.
When I cut out soda and other sweetened beverages for water, I lost 13 pounds in less than a month!
