You’re suggesting a strategy that, empirically, is obviously beyond the reach for most people.

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.

Fair enough. Although my intention wasn't to imply that it was easy in general, just easier than the suggestion I was replying to. In any case, the first step in losing weight is actually wanting to do something about it, as the submitter of this story does.

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.

Have you ever tried fasting? I.e., are you speaking from experience, or just from your preconceptions?

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.)

I’ve tried IF many times, sometimes for a month at a time and I find it dramatically, incredibly harder than just cutting calories down.

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.

> 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.

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.

You cook artistically 3 times a day? One of the advantages of fasting to me is that you can eat really tasty food regularly without having to obsess over how many calories are in the food.

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).

I have spent a week in the US. The hotel buffet breakfast on its surface looked like any other. The typically ‘staple’ foods like bread was laden with sugar to the point where I couldn’t stand to eat them, and the typically “healthy” buffet breakfast options like fruit were remarkably low quality. I thought I had just picked a crappy hotel (though you wouldn’t know it for the price) but others have corroborated my experience. Losing weight in the US seems like pushing a rock uphill.

American breakfast is an abomination. Even the eggs and bacon taste worse than in Europe. In our family we only have it about once a month as a special treat. (My toddler gets it every day but it's not a typical breakfast)

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.

I recently spend 3 months in the US with my partner, we didn't stay in a hotel. It took some exploring but we eventually found all we needed to eat well. For some reason most supermarkets don't stock fresh bread. I think most Americans either don't eat bread, or eat toast so all bread is optimized for toasting. American bread toasts much better than European bread (because of the sugar content I guess).

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.

Each time I gain weight, it's indeed a LOT easier for me to skip some meals and get back to where I want to be, rather than eating less or better.

Just 1 data point confirming the parent post.

Why is it insulting? It's the truth. Unless you have some metabolic disease, eating less (or better) is the way to lose weight, along with a little exercise. There is no shortcut available.

> I enjoy lifting weights but you don't lose weight with that, you do it with endurance sport

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...

I used to think the same as you. I'm no longer convinced.

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.

I don't think we're saying different things, you're just pointing out that exercise's contribution pales in comparison to diet.

I'd say it's mostly personal. For me it was much easier to switch to one meal a day but not pay TOO much attention to what I eat than it was to keep eating multiple times per day but healthy all the time. The hardest part was only drinking water, but that's more a case of just not buying other drinks.

I never saw the goal as eating healthy all the time. Just more of it can already improve things dramatically.

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.

A friend’s mom makes us pho about once a year. Definitely not just hot water. It takes hours of prep to make the broth. Easy for a restaurant to make in a bat, and relatively low calorie and fat, but it’s denigrating to call it hot water (Annie Chun makes instant pho, which is basically hot water and some spices)

I believe the poster didn't mean this as "denigrating", and were rather referring to the caloric contents, where "hot water" implies minimal amount of calories.

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.

> I believe the poster didn't mean this as "denigrating", and were rather referring to the caloric contents, where "hot water" implies minimal amount of calories.

Yes, this is what I meant.

Tea should work too

The key to losing weight is to maintain a caloric deficit. You can do this and have the occasional celebratory meal. You don’t have to eat like a monk. Some people use strategies like IF (intermittent fasting), but just being sensible and accessing good nutritional advice is helpful. Eating more fresh fruit and vegetables, and drinking enough water, has been shown to be very helpful. Your point about cooking is also true.

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...

> The key to losing weight is to maintain a caloric deficit. You can do this and have the occasional celebratory meal.

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 agree, it’s very personal, and that’s key to keeping one’s mind happy and motivated, otherwise one would be wolfing down ice cream before long.

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.

> You're suggesting a diet that requires a discipline that, empirically, is obviously beyond the reach of most people.

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).

Even better, find something you enjoy doing that doesn't require you to binge media while doing it, and is just intrinsically motivating. If you can make enough of a lifestyle change to consistently show up at a gym, you're already past the difficult part of lifestyle changes in general, might as well find something that you want to spend your time on for the sake of it.

Avoid consuming media while eating?

That works for you because you enjoy cooking. If you hate cooking then one meal per day is much better because you only have to do the thing you don't like doing once per day instead of 3+.

> do some exercise

Don't underestimate walking! And stairs!

Absolutely.

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.

This I've noticed that since I have a car and don't walk as much anymore I have put on a lot of weight. Because I just didn't get my 10.000 Steps a day in anymore, because I didn't have to walk to the train station and to the grocery store any more.