I can’t claim to be an expert on the subject of weight loss but wanted to share the steps I’ve followed to get from ~81 kg (178 pounds) to ~70 kg (154 pounds) over a period of 8 months. Several people have asked me for tips, so I’ve figured I might as well write it all down for future reference.
Axiom: CICO (Calories In—Calories Out = Weight loss/gain) works. If you’re a ~healthy individual and need to lose weight, it makes sense to just accept CICO as a given and use it as a mental shorthand. Of course there’s always exceptions: my own dad would eat at least 4,000 calories daily and never gained any weight. But if you’re reading this text, you’re probably not an exception.
Step 0: accept that you lack willpower
I’m not a fan of Nike’s Just Do It™ because it overlooks the fact that people’s willpower is finite and if you aren’t “just doing X” already, you probably won’t do it tomorrow without a change in circumstances. Hence the diet steps are all very gradual and try to get you to a plateau of discomfort before requiring the next sacrifice. Feel free to slow the progression down even further if that works better for you.
Step 1: start measuring your weight and food intake (30 days)
Buy these two products:
A Wifi-enabled scale. I recommend this model but any option with phone synchronization works fine. The linked scales have an app which can export its data into Apple Health or Google Fit.
Paid subscription for the Macrofactor app, which is currently the best app for tracking your calories. The app supports importing your weight data from Apple Health or Google Fit, which it can then use to track your daily energy expenditure and calculate your “true” weight by averaging out your weight measurements over a 7-day period.
Every single morning you’ll get up, remove heavy items of clothing, step on the scale and ensure the weight is recorded. I specifically recommend getting a Wifi-enabled scale because it removes the extra friction of having to pull out your phone every morning to write down your weight. Then during the day you’ll want to track everything you eat or drink with as much precision as reasonably possible.
Do not try to change your diet just yet! The goal is to build up an intuition for how many calories each food has, as well as how these calories affect your weight. I’ve been eating around 3,500 calories/day pre-diet, which was a shocking revelation as I didn’t realize just how much food I was consuming on a daily basis.
Do this for 30 days in a row, counting from the first day when you’ve both weighed yourself and entered all of your food into the app.
Step 2: stop eating added sugar (30 days)
Here we’re still not restricting our calorie intake but adding a constraint: no added sugar. This includes not just sweets but any food where added sugars are more than 30% of the contents, which you can calculate from the Nutrition Facts label. In the photo below, a standard serving (40g) of cereal contains 3g of added sugars or 7.5%, so its fine. On the other hand, Frosted Flakes contain 12g of added sugar per a serving of 37g or 32.4%, so you would avoid eating them. You can still eat whatever fruit you want, as sugar in fruit is “natural” rather than added.
The biggest issue with sugar is that its energy dense, so its easy to end up ingesting too many calories from sweet foods without feeling full. High sugar intake also causes a rapid increase in blood glucose levels, which explains why people are often sleepy after lunch.
If you’re feeling hungry you can eat extra portions of other foods to compensate. The goal here is to introduce yourself to the concept of dieting without this feeling onerous. Do this for 30 days starting from your first added-sugar-free day.
Step 3: stop eating past 7pm (30 days)
This is where we’re getting into the truly hard part. Here we’ll still allow ourselves to eat whatever we want (other than added sugars) but introduce a hard stop at 7pm. The goal here is to reduce the number of opportunities for last-moment excess calorie intake. Pre-diet I would sometimes go to the fridge for a “little” snack, only to “accidentally” end up eating an entire loaf of bread with cheese. The rule also extends to liquid calories, so you should do your best to avoid alcohol or nutritious drinks past the cut-off time.
In addition to being a frequent source of excess calories, late night food consumption can disrupt your sleep quality. I use Apple Watch to measure my sleep quality and there’s definitely a drop off on nights when I eat too close to bedtime. This can then lead to a viscious cycle where you consume lots of coffee and food in the morning to wake yourself up.
Step 4: reduce your total calorie intake (25-50 weeks)
Our next goal is to start a slow reduction in daily calories consumed until we reach a 250 calorie deficit. We will do this in increments of 5%/week to let your body adapt and reduce the risk of giving up. This is where MacroFactor will truly start to shine:
Check MacroFactor for your average calorie intake for the past 2 weeks. Lets say it was 3,500 calories/day.
Look up your daily energy expenditure in MacroFactor. Lets say its 2,100 calories.
Our goal now is to get to a deficit of 250 calories/day. In our hypothetical this would require us to reach 2,100 − 250 = 1,850 calories. You can safely go as low as 500 calories/day if you really want but its better to set a manageable goal.
At a rate of −5%/week it should take us roughly 15 weeks of slow intake reduction to get to our goal. Note that as you reduce your food consumption your body’s metabolism will slow down as well, so your daily energy expenditure will decrease. But don’t worry—as long as you keep entering your food and weight, MacroFactor will keep calculating this for you automatically.
One pound of body weight is approximately equivalent to 3500 calories, so at a deficit of 250 calories/day (or 1,750 calories/week) you can expect to lose roughly 0.25 kilos/0.5 pounds per week. You would then stay at this level until you reach whatever is your target weight. The average American is overweight by 25 pounds so with this system they’d need 50 weeks to reach a healthy BMI.
What should your target weight be? The medical answer is: in the BMI range of 18 to 25. My own answer is: whatever makes you happy when you look at yourself in the mirror. If you want a visible “six pack” you’ll need to get below a BMI of 22, though the exact value will depend on your personal fat distribution and muscle volume.
Word of warning: this part really, really sucks. You will feel hungry every single day and constantly dream of food.
Step 5: maintain your weight
Once you’ve reached your target weight you should increase your calorie intake to match your daily energy expenditure. At this point you will likely have developed a solid intuition for what foods have how many calories, as well as healthy eating habits. Personally I no longer enter my food into MacroFactor and sometimes skip weighing myself in the morning. Instead I simply adjust my food intake on a weekly basis: if I gain some weight I’ll eat a bit less, if I lose too much weight I’ll eat a bit more.
Unfortunately the sense of hunger doesn’t fully go away when you’re in maintenance mode. I still crave for extra food every single day and actively have to remind myself to moderate my diet. But after about a year of dieting the sense of hunger sort of faded away and it doesn’t feel as bad as it used to.
Wait, what about exercise?!
Lots of people believe they can eat more if they just exercise more. Unfortunately our bodies are highly efficient relative to the density of modern food, so “exercising it away” is not a realistic plan. A single burrito bowl with guacamole from Chipotle contains roughly 1,000 calories, which is equivalent to:
Walking: ~13.3 miles
Running: ~8.6 miles
Cycling: ~23 miles
Swimming: ~2 hours
High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT): ~1 hour 15 minutes
Weightlifting (vigorous effort): ~2 hours 30 minutes
Rowing (moderate effort): ~1 hour 40 minutes
Playing Basketball: ~1 hour 40 minutes
Jumping Rope: ~1 hour
Will you have the time to run 8.6 miles every single day for the sake of that extra burritto bowl? Or spend 2.5 hours at the gym? Most people don’t have enough or motivation for this much exercise, so its far easier to focus on reducing calorie intake instead. Don’t get me wrong—exercise is great but its also not the solution to weightloss for most people.
Disclaimer
I am not affiliated with MacroFactor in any way. I’m not your doctor and don’t know your personal health situation. Take all of the above with some grain of salt and tweak it wherever you feel like it makes sense.
My 1-step program for losing weight: semaglutide. From 103 kg in November to 89 kg in June, no hunger.
(Of course, the problem is what will happen when I run out of semaglutide. However, the same problem is with running out of willpower, and that usually happens much faster.)
I agree about avoiding added sugar, but I think that even more useful heuristic is to eat meals that contain a lot of protein. This is anecdotal, but it seems like eating meat or dairy or legumes makes me feel full, while eating e.g. pasta (lots of carbs, but technically no added sugar) makes me want to eat more and more. It is important to check the nutrition table, because there are many products with “protein” in their title that actually do not contain more protein that their alternatives. So maybe ignore all the “protein” stuff and focus on meat and diary and legumes. Also, the advice to “eat this” is easier to follow than “avoid this”; the latter costs more willpower.
I wonder if the temptation to eat late is because the same signal—feeling low on energy—can be interpreted by the brain as both being tired and being hungry. If you are tired and you eat some sugar, it wakes you up a bit, doesn’t it? Which of course is bad for multiple reasons. So maybe we could turn this around, and when we feel the desire to eat something in the evening, think “this is probably my brain felling tired, I should go sleep”.
This sucks not just because hunger feels unpleasant, but because it makes difficult to focus on things, and because it makes easier to get angry. So it might be a good idea to reduce other sources of stress, if possible. For example, if your job is too stressful, and your overeating is partially a reaction to that, it may be impossible to lose weight while keeping the job. Or you may strategically time your hunger for your vacation.
About exercise, I agree that you cannot outrun the food in short term, but perhaps in long term the muscles increase the passive metabolism. But yeah, if your goal is to lose weight now, exercising is not going to do it. Except maybe in the sense that you don’t eat while you exercise, so maybe five hours on a hike means five hours away from the fridge.
Hunger might cause cognitive and emotional regulation problems through the same general process as any other aversive experience, but for many people there’s also a very specific physiological pathway going through low blood sugar. If this is a frequent problem, it might be worth investing in a continuous glucose monitor, or just trying to eat a very slow-carb diet (avoid most concentrated sources of carbs and eat lots of beans, or just increase protein, or just go full keto). Improving blood sugar regulation is life-changing for some people, even without any weight loss.
What continuous glucose monitor do you recommend?
I’ve been trying Dexcom G7 for the data, and seems pretty good. Data every 5 min. A diabetic I know referred to it as “the good sensor”.
Thanks, looks like Dexcom Stelo is coming out this summer that will be available without a prescription. I’ll order it as soon as its available.
Oops, I totally replied from the LW account I mostly use for testing. I trust the 1st Viscount St Alban and father of modern scientific method won’t mind me using his name to encourage empricisim.
I got my Dexcom via Nutrissense. No prescription required. They offer an Abbot sensor by default (15-minute sensor readings) but ‘upgrade’ to Dexcom if you allow them to use your data for a study (Dexcom wants to get approval and wants data).
I’ve checked Nutrissense and they want $250/month? Definitely way too much for a glucose meter! :)
And here I am paying them $300. Their monthly costs seems basically what the Dexcom sensors cost on their own.
But also not definitely too much. Depends on the value of the data to you, etc. I was seeking to solve very distracting hunger, a problem that even a low chance of solving would be well worth the cost.
I’ve found a new box of Dexcom G7 on Ebay for just $90, ordered it now to try it out.
Wrt to the calorie deficit really sucking, I found, per the potato diet, that eating potatoes to satiety (wound up being about 25% of calories overall average) removed most of the hard part of the calorie deficit. I still had to pay attention, but I didn’t have to try to go to sleep hungry.
It was notable that, in practice, the diet wound up being both low added sugar and low added fat. This has a calorie effect of course, but also some think that these processed carbs and fats are doing some sort of metabolic shenanigans, perhaps being treated by the body structurally as damaged etc.
tone:neutral, noncritical
As I understand it, there are many strategies that can cause significant and safe weight loss over a number of months. But, and this is critical, none of those strategies appears to consistently produce effects on the scale of years. Human physiology seems to be designed to hoard weight for times of famine, not to permanently lose it. Only a few people in a hundred seem to be able to keep weight off after losing it.
And this makes sense: for nearly all of our evolutionary history we’ve had a hard time finding enough calories to sustain a large population. Currently, most of us live surrounded by more calories than we can reasonably consume pretty much all the time. We just aren’t built for the environment we’ve created! And all that before we discuss manufactured and superstimulus foods complicating the matter.
I’m more interested to see your data going forward over a 5 year span.
One of the hypotheses is that hoarding calories is supposed to be a fall preparing for winter thing and something about the modern diet is putting us in that state all the time rather than for three months out of the year. Eating a bunch of root vegetables seems to help. Might be gut microbiome related (starches) and/or hormone related or something else.
I heard this hypothesis about fruits and glucose-fructose syrup, that basically when you eat something that contains glucose-fructose syrup, your body thinks “oh, the autumn fruit, better get ready for the winter” and starts depositing fat in the fat cells. (Not sure how reliable is this story.)
I’ll post an update in 4 more years, sure. Though me not gaining weight would obviously not prove much either way :-)
I lost 25kg in 9 months using a very similar method. Some suggestions to help with the hunger/willpower:
1. Brush your teeth straight after dinner. It adds a point of friction between you and more food (“I’d have to brush my teeth again”). Then drink herbal teas in the evening.
2. You don’t have to feel hungry all the time. Choose when you consume your calories so that you’re hungry at the least inconvenient times and for the fewest waking hours. I usually eat a decent breakfast as late as I can, because I’m not as hungry in the mornings. Then I eat two half-sized meals, one at noon and one mid afternoon. Followed by a large dinner. I’m most hungry between noon and mid afternoon, but it’s not too hard to bare because I know I’ve got that smaller mid-afternoon meal coming up, and then a satisfying dinner.
3. Use exercise to “earn” treats. If you want ice-cream for dessert, calculate how many calories you’ll need to expend to make up for it and go for an appropriately long jog beforehand. Don’t do this the other way around (eat a treat, promising yourself that you’ll burn it off tomorrow).
‘Exercising it away’ seems misguided given our bodies’ energetic efficiency, as you said. What’s instead worked for me is raising my basal metabolic rate substantially by adding muscle, which is very energetically expensive, via ~3 resistance training sessions a week.
Admittedly I don’t know of a way to maintain the required muscle mass for this strategy to work long-term without enjoying physical activity, which I seem to enjoy the way most people enjoy good food, which probably makes this useless as general advice.
I’ve been doing weightlifting 5-6 days a week for 14 months now and progress has been very slow, so my metabolic rate hasn’t budged all that much. But if you’re lucky and can progress faster then its a valid strategy.
It took me about 5 years. Again, I don’t think it’s a useful approach if you don’t like exercising in the first place; for me 5 years of resistance training has felt less like a weight-loss strategy and more like an excuse to have fun chasing goals and make like-minded friends along the way.
Thanks for the post. I didn’t know about MacroFactor, and it seems like a great alternative to the all-too-popular MyFitnessPal. Do you (or anyone else) have a good recommendation for a food scale? Measuring individual ingredients, like those for a complex salad, for example, seems like a tedious task.
You don’t need to be more precise than 5 grams when measuring food so any scale will work. You also don’t need to measure low density foods like cucumbers or tomatoes—I would just enter a rough guesstimate into the app.