You're suggesting a diet that requires a discipline that, empirically, is obviously beyond the reach of most people.
Here's much, much simpler advice, that is also more enjoyable to do: Just eat better. Or just somewhat better, and do some exercise.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to purchase or cook a meal that is delicious and filling, but not all too heavy on calories. Vegetables are boring when you boil them. Properly seasoned and roasted, grilled, braised, or sauteed, they can be an absolutely amazing side dish. Hell, throw a bit of cheese on them, that little bit of Parmesan or Gruyère won't make a difference calorie-wise but will add a divine dimension of flavor. It's easy to make a delicious desert that doesn't contain >50g of fat.
Get some exercise. I enjoy lifting weights but you don't lose weight with that, you do it with endurance sport which I absolutely hate. Luckily, there's a solution for that: any halfway decent gym opened in the past decade has bikes, treadmills, cross-trainers etc. with built-in viewing screens and Netflix, Youtube, etc. An hour flies by when you're enjoying yourself, and with a heart rate of 130bpm or so, you're basically not even sweating, yet burning tons of calories. Imagine enjoying a full hour episode of House of Cards, Narcos, or whatever your thing is and getting healthy in the process. You're losing weight by watching TV.
I think most advice that requires a dramatic change in lifestyle (like limiting yourself to one meal a day) is extremely poor because it requires effort that most of us aren't willing to expend.
I enjoy food. A lot. I like to go out and try it, I like to cook it, I like to share it with others. For me, "eating one meal a day" is absolute punishment, I'm missing out on least two occasions to taste something enjoyable, maybe even remarkable. And it's easy to do that 3x a day when you just watch what you eat. Eat proper food for a while and you'll never crave a Big Mac again, because you can actually taste what crap it is.
That’s the mainstream method of losing weight. Every single person that’s wanted to lose weight has tried it, likely many times.
I’m not saying IF is the solution, but it’s insulting to say it’s as simple as “diet and exercise”. If it was, 80% of Americans wouldn’t be overweight.
You mentioned Americans in particular, but I think that the problem with obesity in the U.S. is a kind of its own. When even the bread is sugared, I think a significant part of the 80% problem is systemic.
In my experience, fasting is far easier than losing weight by a traditional diet. Consider that your body is finely tuned to make sure that you eat very close to as many calories as you burn. If you consistently eat 400 calories less than it thinks it needs, it will ratchet up the pressure on you. It takes continual self control to eat almost as much as your body wants but not quite.
Fasting is actually a lot easier. Your body is designed to fast, just as it's designed to run. As with running, once you exercise those chemical pathways, the actual fasting part isn't that bad -- it's much less unpleasant than being slightly low-calorie all the time. And it's a lot easier from a willpower perspective to eat nothing at all, and then eat as much as you feel like, than to continually eat a little less than you feel like.
I feel like a lot of people are afraid of fasting because they think that hunger will be linear -- after 8 hours without eating they feel twice as hungry as after 4, so after 16 hours they'll feel twice as hungry again, and after 24 hours they'll be writhing in agony. It's not like that at all.
Basically, if you can summon up the discipline to run 2 miles regularly, you can summon the discipline to do a 16/8 IF fasting cycle; if you have the discipline to run 5 miles, you have the discipline to do a 36 hour fast (basically skipping one full day a week); and if you have the discipline that you can train your body to run 10 miles, you have enough discipline to train it to fast for a week. (The last one you'd obviously only do once in a while.)
For me there are 2 main issues. 1) I’ve never found the point in IF when I stop being hungry. I start getting hungry typically after 5 hours of being awake and I stay that way until I eat. Whether that’s 2 minutes or 24 hours, I’ve never reached that mythic place where it’s not that bad. 2) it’s incompatible with my lifestyle. I work out in the morning which jacks up my hunger so skipping breakfast is miserable. I have a family and dinner is when we have time with each other. Having to not eat with them is awkward, unsatisfying and a burden.
Meanwhile switching each of my meals to be 20% smaller, a higher protein ratio and to be mostly vegetables doesn’t have any of these problems. It’s downright easy on a day to day basis.
Of course for me the real trick is to stop drinking alcohol. The caloric density and it’s propensity to make you stop keeping track of how many you’ve had means a few drinks can blow a weeks worth of eating well.
This applies to me as well.
In addition to that, I don't want to fast. As I mentioned earlier, I enjoy food greatly. Good cooking is an art form to me. I don't want less of it, and by being somewhat more picky when choosing it and also getting some of exercise, I can have more of it.
Personally the 16/8 never worked for me for losing weight; and I also fast partially for religious purposes. So I typically fast Mondays (i.e., eat dinner Sunday evening, then breakfast Tuesday morning).
My British wife can't stand the bread in the US. She says it tastes like cake (and her UK friends agree). The funny thing is British bread doesn't taste any less sweet to my American palate.
We tried about 6 different supermarket chains in the Irvine area, and the only one that reliably stored affordable good bread was Whole Foods. Weirdly all Americans told us Whole Foods was an expensive supermarket, but it was less expensive for our diet than the other supermarkets. Of course Irvine is an expensive area, so it could just be all supermarkets were relatively expensive.
I wouldn't judge a culture by their hotel breakfasts though. I don't think they match typical breakfasts basically anywhere. I don't think many hotels would serve you a breakfast burrito, but as far as I can tell that's basically a staple for many working Americans and it looks like it is actually quite healthy.
edit: to be clear, supermarkets in western europe have always stocked fresh bread for as long as I can remember, but in the past 10-15 years have also started stocking "artisanal" fresh bread. So they sell your pick of sourdough rye/wheat/spelt breads that have all been baked that morning.
Just 1 data point confirming the parent post.
Weight lifting w/ hypertrophy is one of the most effective forms of exercise for weight (fat) loss.
In addition to causing a longer rise in post exercise caloric burn, it also changes body composition such that your calorie requirements/quota increases over time.
Cardio is not a particularly great option for fat losses for a number of reasons. Spend an hour on the treadmill and look at the caloric burn estimates for a glaring reason why.
The best exercise for weight loss though is the one you enjoy and will do. Nothing burns fat for me better than full court basketball a few times a week.
https://steelfitusa.com/blogs/exercise-and-training/why-card...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/well/move/weight-training...
The "afterburn" effect is, as far as I can tell, fairly minimal, on the order of 10s of calories per day only.
As for body composition, while it's true that your "calories out" increases if you add muscle, the increase is, again, negligible. Just plug in higher bodyweight numbers into TDEE calculators and see how little difference it makes. (Though they undershoot it a bit, IMO, because they don't assume that all the weight gained was muscle... it's still fairly small).
The only way to lose weight is to make sure you eat less than you burn. For most people, that means eating less, and possibly adding in a bit of exercise.
For example, I absolutely love good pizza (with the emphasis on good), and just get it whenever I crave it because I know that overall, I'm doing more than fine. I only ranted about Big Macs earlier because that particular product is crap; some restaurants here produce just absolutely fantastic cheese burgers and I enjoy them every now and then.
But I also enjoy a good Pho, which is basically just hot water with some rice noodles, and an immense amount of flavor.
I think the trick is just finding the balance of these things, not some form of overall abstinence.
Of course, making a proper broth takes time and does put some nutritional value into said "hot water" (as do onions fried on oil/butter, sauces you add and potentially sugar), but that doesn't really change the fact that the will be minimal amount of calories in that.
Yes, this is what I meant.
The science on caloric deficit seems pretty solid (unless you have other health complications eg thyroid issues). These days eg the UK’s National Health Service has a therapy[1] which is being rolled out to more and more people (morbidly obese people initially to control numbers) which puts them on an extremely restrictive diet to get them to lose weight.
And asking people, especially people who “feel” heavy and inactive, to exercise is a hard problem. Again, you’re not wrong, but ensuring that an inactive person watches TV on a treadmill is … challenging. Exercise is helpful, but it really increases quality of life, and in reality most obese people won’t do the exercise needed to make a significant dent in their calorie budget.
For most people (especially with 25..30 BMI — ie not quite at the extreme end of the spectrum), losing weight is mostly a psychological or motivational problem. This is the problem, because our ability to provide psychological or motivational therapy is limited.
[1] https://www.england.nhs.uk/2022/01/nhs-soups-and-shakes-diet...
How to maintain a caloric deficit is highly personal. I made my own strategy after thinking carefully about what would work and what would not work. I aimed for a fairly controlled daily calorie intake with a 500 kcal daily deficiency, and then thought hard about how to achieve that within my limits.
Once I had a clear strategy and some meal plans, I put it into practice.
For me personally that meant two meals per day, early lunch and dinner, as it was easier for me to avoid excessive calories with just two meals compared to three. I also never like to eat right after I've woken up, so win win.
In order to not feel hungry eating just two meals per day, I focused on high protein, high fiber meals. Things like 95+% whole grain bread for lunch and replacing potatoes with vegetables for dinner. For salads I'd use romaine lettuce rather than more common iceberg lettuce due to its higher fiber content. Every bit helped.
For me it was essential to not stress too much though.
The way I thought about it was that if I messed up today, then the finishing line just moved another day or two further ahead. This lead to my personal mantra "it's not what you did today, but what you do each day that matters", which I stuck to.
I enjoyed reading your strategy. The thoughtfulness that it came out of is clearly important. Mine differed from yours (I have a substantial breakfast and very little dinner), but there are some common themes — eg vegetables for dinner and choosing more fibre.
Personally, it's easier to eat less than to eat better. It's boils down to having a calorie deficit.
It doesn't matter how you get there, malnutrition is a separate issue, you don't have to tackle both at once.
You need to adjust your diet to calorie neutral once you lose your weight anyway. MAX the DEFICIT FIRST.
Bottom line, don't eat so many meals. Eat less and less each day, your stomach will shrink, you'll get full faster. Snack for breakfast, snack for lunch. Enjoy whatever for dinner.
If you want to eat pizza, fast food, or any other "bad" thing go right ahead, just do it once per day.
High protein food like cheese and jerky is great. A bit of carbs like crackers or something to keep sugars level and make the protein last.
When you're first reducing your calorie intake you will get hungry and you will get hunger pangs.
Drink some water and eat a couple pieces of jerky / cheese, a couple crackers, or drink some chicken broth / V8 to fill your stomach up just enough to stop the pangs.
DO NOT DRINK YOUR CALORIES (unless it's minimal & provides protein).
Don't underestimate walking! And stairs!
One advantage that I have of living in the center of a big city is that there are literally hundreds of restaurants in walking distance from my home. Lockdowns are over but my employer is still mostly in WFH mode. I've made it a habit to try out a new dining place for lunch at least 3x a week, and since I'm more than familiar with all the places in my immediate vicinity, that often means a 15min walk to some place I found on Google Maps.
The 30mins round trip are not about the exercise. All that's on my mind on my way to the place are the great tacos or banh mi or whatever I saw or heard about and that I'm about to try.
I just happen to also get 2km of walking exercise out of it.
I usually went for a light plain peanut butter sandwich once a day at very "tactical" times to cut the growling. Yes peanut butter is calorie heavy but just keep it light. The fat/protein/carbs in peanut butter is pretty hard to beat, in moderation it's really good for you.
This does go away after a while, but this was an issue for the first while.
Also, protein-based diets are heavy on one's liver.
Get a digital scale, weigh every morning after toilet. I find there is a very quick and variable response to the previous days food, which can be quite motivating. Seeing it up or down half a kilo each day is very noticeable, and informative about what works and what doesn't.
Eat less dense calories, try to move around a little bit, all there is to it. My general rule is: -2 small meals = weight loss -1 regular/big + 1 small = maintain -2 big = weight gain
Once you stop trying to bloat yourself all the time, it starts to feel nuts how frequently you did
Ultimately the treatment for what probably got me to gain so much weight helped me twice over: ADHD medication. Not only does not lessen your constant need for dopamine (and lots of bad foods are good dopamine bumps), but it also supresses your appetite. I of course wouldn't recommend it if you do not have ADHD, but the additional side effect is appreciated none the less.
I recall all you can eat bbqs actually resulting in weight loss the following day. But if I had a bowl of rice with them, I'd have the weight gain I feared. Moderate portions of Indian takeaway curries with Naan could keep my weight up for a few days.
That's not something I'd expect from pure calorie counting, nor do I understand what's actually going on or if it's good or bad etc. But it seemed useful to be aware of
Before the scale, I’d always bemoan that it was impossible for me to lose weight, that it was genetic, that it wasn’t under my control. More than anything, it made me realise that it was entirely in my control, and that my excuses were bullshit borne of not being able to perceive the outcomes of my previous, short-lived efforts.
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> You don't have to worry about eating another meal or two.
You do realize for many overweight people eating isn't something to worry about but to look forward to? It's not that we don't understand thermodynamics. It's just a big part of enjoying being alive.
In my experiment with alternating day fasting, I was surprised how quickly I was able to look forward to a meal that was 18 hours away.
Was I interested in eating sooner? Yes. But you learn quickly the difference between hunger as desire and hunger as need. 99% of what we feel in our lives wrt food is hunger as desire.
Caloric restriction is a requirement of sustainable weight loss, there are no weird hacks around it.
The fundamental thing is calories in/calories out. Then you just need to find a strategy that helps you implement that that you can adhere to - keto, intermittent fasting, low fat, whatever. Track your calories under a few regimes and see which is easiest to stick to. People might argue one is better than the other, and that could well be true, but I think only at the individual level. What works for me might not work for you.
What worked for me (losing 14kg in 6 months) was only having two meals a day (lunch and dinner, breakfast was a coffee), and having the same (low calorie) meal for lunch every day.
Eating the same thing every day is not a bad idea: https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/health/the-gro...
I run a lot, even ran a marathon. No amount of exercise did anything. Dieting is impossible for me. I'd rather run an ultra.
IF changes my eating habits. I don't know why or how but when I only have a short eating period I only want to eat mostly healthy foods. I'm inclined to drink water instead of soda which never, ever happens if I'm not doing IF.
If it's 8pm and I think I want ice cream I say "it's too late, but you can have it during your eating period tomorrow." And I mean that, I allow myself to eat whatever I want during my eating period. I just don't want to eat junk food somehow so as a result—I just don't have ice cream anymore and it's not a big deal.
That said, OMAD (for me it was 22:2) backfired a couple of times for me. It was too strict and I ended up giving up on fasting after trying it for just a day or two.
Easy hack that gives more energy & has health benefits is: Strength training for muscle growth. Muscles burn tons of energy, having more muscle mass will boost your daily resting kcal.
When starting out it's easy to gain quite a bit of muscle first months.
Ofc cut out the shit, mainly sweets & fried stuff.
I agree with you but wait what, that'd be 178 cm / 58 kilos? That's bordering on underweight: it doesn't feel right (or I'm converting it wrong?)
My first advice to people would be this: check your BMI first, and if you're perfectly in the middle then certainly do not get close to underweight.
Besides that: I don't drink much alcohol and do intermittent fasting (skipping meals like you do) and I've never been neither overweight nor underweight. To me it's all about discipline.
- eat less
- change what you eat
- work out more
- change your workout
Numbers 2 and 4 are by far the easiest.
To be honest dieting is only good if you're trying to get to a "goal weight" and you're capable of maintaining a weight. If you're not and that's what got you fat to begin with.. You need a holistic lifestyle change.
Said another way, you should adjust intake until weight starts coming off slowly. You'll reach a point where you either lost too much, or stopped losing, and adjust slightly accordingly. Then stay at that intake forever(assuming it's healthy).
Edit: Yes I'm wrong I should have said "if you eat 1800kcal of clean food", I forgot the existence of fast food because it is not something common in my country
Meaning it’s very easy to eat that depending on what it consists of.
Ice cream too is crazy - one Ben & Jerry’s is like 1600k
Fasting (intermittent and otherwise) causes several physiological responses that have a wide range of health benefits, including reducing risks for cancer and heart disease, and even completely reversing diabetic symptoms for some people. It is absolutely NOT some cheesy self-help way of tricking yourself into eating less because you "just can't fit any more in there" -- you completely made this up.
Nuts, cheese, and vegetable oils are really energy dense.
I also don't consider myself to be a glutton a have a BMI of 21.
https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/about-our-food/nutrition-...
We dove a lot of pizza places, but it is Italian pizza and it is not as caloric as the American version, ours is made with 200grams of dough and has less stuffing as possible, one pizza should be around 800kcal and majority of people I know usually eats 3/4 of it and leaves the remaining 1/4 for the day after
If you make a regular meal, one meal a day nets a negative of 1300/1500 calories per day, which will cause considerable muscle tissue loss (note how the parent writes "losing weight", not "losing fat", but also "yes, I have significant fat even at 150lb and 5'10"), besides having no energy.
If you make instead a massive mels, you're going to give a massive glucose shot to your body. I haven't gone to such extreme, but the times when I happened to do something similar (one huge meal, even with an overall negative daily intake), I ended up accumulating fat rather than losing it. I suppose that in a calorie deficit context (=dieting), the body takes advantage of a huge meal to build some deposits up (and unfortunately, deposits are everything except muscles...).
Dieting's hard, there are no cheap tricks, unfortunately.
Unfortunately I've gone back to some of my old ways over the past 9 months or so with restaurants and bars reopening, and I've gained back some of the weight. This tells me that it's not really how many meals I have, but what's in them, and how many calories. So I'd probably be fine with two or three meals a day, just healthier choices and fewer overall calories. But I don't believe one meal a day is a problem; just it isn't necessary, and you can still lose weight with a more normal meal pattern.
This meta-review seems to conclude fasting + resistance training might not only be harmless but actually beneficial https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7468742/
I think for most people who are looking for weight loss - this is not as much of a concern and going to the gym would likely be an extra hurdle for them that would make it too hard. So, 1 meal a day is relatively straight forward.
It is true that caloric deficit always causes muscle; the issue is how much one loses.
I'm not aware of any evidence to support that. Fasting patterns have been studied, and I'm not aware that any studies on fasting have shown the effect you describe, but I've not followed the research for some years.
In terms of anecdotal evidence, I have regularly measured body fat percentage during diet periods, and I do see steep drops in body fat percentage when I've done intermittent fasting with the vast bulk of my intake coming in a single meal (2k calories plus during one period). As mentioned elsewhere I now prefer 4-5 days of drastic cuts and eating normally a few days a weak, and without confining it to a narrow period, but I also did IF for many months while at my peak of lifting both in a deficit and not, after having previously done slight deficit dieting in the past, and could compare the difference, and I didn't see the slightest hint of the effect you're claiming.
I wouldn't do it every day, but mostly because I find it too hard, but I do currently aim for ~600 kcal 4-5 days a week to drop down. I do it in multiple small meals, but I've also done intermittent fasting with narrow feeding windows. On the remaining days, I eat normally - I don't binge.
It'd likely have more of a negative effect on my muscle mass if I did it every day, but if I did, I'd also reach my target weight far faster, so even if I'd had to spend time bulking up again later I'd have done that if I was able to stick to it, but I know from experience I'm not.
I also power lift (not competitively), and I've had steady progress while doing that, with the caveat I'm not at my peak - I wouldn't expect to progress with this diet if I was. But most people are so far off hitting limitations caused by food intake in their exercise it matters for quite few people.
People should keep up resistance exercise while on diets to reduce muscle loss.
It's not sustainable over long periods of time in that sooner or later you get to an inflection point where it impedes your progress, but it works when your body fat percentage is high, and for most people looking to lose weight it's simply not what they should be worrying much about.
That you accumulated fat with what you think was a net daily deficit sounds to me like it wasn't a net daily deficit. Intermittent fasting works, and limiting yourself to a single daily meal is not nearly long enough fasting periods to mess much with body composition. But it may have messed with your activity levels. It takes little change in e.g. dozing off on the couch rather than walking around to have an effect.
People are mostly more sedentary than they think and burn fewer calories than they think. When I was at my peak, exercising every day and lifting heavily 3 times a week, to maintain my weight I needed to keep my intake around 1800kcal because my life outside of that was not very active. I'm 185cm, and at the time I was about 93kg, with body fat around 15%.
Someone with a more active life outside of the gym might burn more. Many burn less. Kcal guidelines for adults have remained static for way too long with declining levels of physical activity, and people really should count calories for a few weeks and adjust their intake and figure out how little they actually burn...
I've always done weightlifting, although not competitively, as general support of the fitness regime (which may include other sports or not).
What I've observed is that when a dieting cycle goes bad, a short time after the end of it (to allow glycogen and water levels to come back to normal), I end it with approximately the same weight before the start. If/when I observe an increase in measured fat (which happens most of the times, on bad diet cycles), then muscle mass went down.
When I was pushing my body to the max every week, then the difference mattered to me too. But most people are not there, or anywhere near those kinds of limits.
Yep. The best “weird tip” is to avoid weird tips. I'm sure they've all worked for someone, though I suspect in many cases by some variant of a placebo effect or an indirect effect, and some work for a noticeable subset of people, but very few work generally and trying all the tricks and having them not work is a recipe for “I'm just not destined to manage this” style demotivation.
Always start with the practically undeniable basics: eat less if you can, try eat better whether you are eating less or not, do more physical activity where you can, try not to undo the effect of the activity by using it as an excuse to eat significantly more, monitor what effect your changes have, and try not to have too high expectations or push too fast (weight lost slowly is more likely to stay off, because you fall into better habits/routine over the longer period and are less likely to flip straight back into all your old habits once you get close to your goal).
Once you have those habits down, then maybe think about tweaks & tricks to optimise the process. Getting yourself into the habits might require some self-management tricks, but don't think of them as weight-loss or getting-into-shape tricks as they are really general self-management behaviours.
One note on monitoring: be careful not to obsess over single readings. The human body can be more random than you expect and your daily/weekly life is not as predictable as you think. I stand on my scales almost daily, but don't care about individual readings: things could be high because I've been at parties recently, low because I've had two long-ish runs this weekend, weight can vary a fair amount either way just be hydration levels. I tend to watch a fortnightly average: two weeks of my normal routine seems to be enough to aggregate out most of the blips most of the time.
On being more active: the challenge there is to find something that is either easy to fit into your routine, or that you enjoy enough to want to make the effort, or both. I accidentally discovered I enjoy running, though I've since gone off pounding the streets for speed and now take more steady paces, often but not always for longer distances, through countryside trails. Some prefer cycling. Martial arts are good too (wrestling can be a great full-body workout, and if you actually enjoy it you don't realise how much work you are actually doing). Just walking more can make a noticeable difference, and is usually easy to fit into daily/weekly life.
[for reference: about six years ago I dropped from ~110KG to <64KG over the course of about two years (most of this in the middle year of that period), mostly through diet but partly through activity, <64 I feel is too little for me though over the last couple of years I've put on more than I want to (hit ~75 at one point in 2021) and not in useful mass (its around the gut, I can feel it jiggle when I run!) and I'm slowly (more slowly than I'd like, but at least steadily) getting back down to hovering around the 68KG point which seems to feel optimal]
Just eat less man. It's pretty straight forward. Just eat one meal a day (lunch) and you'll see the weight fly off. It's what I did for a bit and lost the weight quickly. You'll lose 5lbs/month easily even for people who have a relatively lean body mass already. (Easier to lose a lot of weight when you're heavier because your BMR is high to begin with) I've done it as someone who is 5'10" and 150lb to get down to 140 or 130lb. (Basically cutting fat - yes, I have significant fat even at 150lb and 5'10") I've done it a few times. I would recommend it. Changing your diet permanently is a much more permanent solution but also requires a lifestyle/mental change. I've had too many other lifestyle changes going on that made it hard for me to commit to such a thing.
Nice part about it is that it really frees up a lot of your day too. You don't have to worry about eating another meal or two. You just have the one per day and it's a done deal. Kinda freeing in that sense. Just make sure your meal isn't 2000+ calories - otherwise, it'll defeat some of the point. Which I know for some people can be easy to push down because their stomach has grown in size and is able to hold that much weight. It'll take willpower at first but then once your stomach starts to decrease in size - you'll automatically be limited on your caloric intake from that one meal.