I was surprised that the essay ended where it did. I thought it was going to offer the alternative hypothesis of memetic contamination with “bad nutrition ideas” as “the contaminant”.
This seemed connected with “college” and “recently coming from some place with a different food culture” being protective. Then combine that with the title itself: “On not getting contaminated by the wrong obesity ideas”… I kept waiting for that shoe to drop… and it never did!
A thing that you didn’t do, that no one ever does, is regress on IQ, which would have the naive likely effect of giving people more thoughts about more ideas over time, and thus being able to notice good ideas and keep them, and notice bad ideas and reject them. I was kind of predicting you would add IQ though, because it would help with the thesis I thought you were driving towards.
This is the second time I’ve read something where it seemed like the obvious correct move was to write about “meta-nutrition” and then it never happened. The first time was The Omnivore’s Dilemma where the necessity of dealing (inside a single life) with complexly varying food sources is pointed to as a challenge for all omnivorous species including humans, and I was thinking I’d get a really fascinating book on the evolution of the parts of the brain that handle this challenge… and then for the entire rest of the book he just talked about “boo McDonalds” and “organic isn’t what it used to be” and other boring social takes :-(
It would have been funny if “the contaminant is coming from inside the memes!” was taken in a directly serious way, and I’m wondering if there is an explicit positive reason you didn’t go there, or was it maybe just not in your space of hypotheses, or… ?
If there’s a diet plan buried here, it might be “treat almost everyone in the modern environment as lying about almost everything almost all the time, including nutritionists and food advertisements, and anyone you pay or anyone who asks you for money, or anyone who offers you free stuff in a way that seems too good to be true… maybe not always literally technically lying, but almost certainly misleading, by violating norms of gricean implicature, or abusing the halo effect, or leaving key facts out, or polishing their shit to make it shinier and more convincing than it should be, or encouraging hasty generalization, or whatever”.
There is a meme going around about the now-morally-monstrous-seeming ads about sugar water.
Some of these, it turns out, were doctored to seem worse than they were, because of course everyone is lying about everything almost all the time, including about how much lying there has been and how it actually worked :cryglasses:
But you do not need a nutritionist or diet plan or fancy products.
A successful diet does three things:
It has fewer calories than you eat now.
It still has the nutrition you need (especially protein, omega 3, sufficient vegetables)
It is easy for you, you personally in particular, to adhere to. (This generally means: you think it tastes good; it makes you feel full; you can afford the money and time commitment for it permanently; it does not make you feel stressed, so you will happily maintain it while lots of shit goes down in your life, for the rest of your life.)
Here is a relatively good strategy for finding a tailored diet strategy for yourself. I am giving it to you for free.
Step 1:
Weigh yourself daily under the same conditions (e.g. after waking up, after peeing, before drinking; leave the scale standing in the exact same spot) enter it into an app. (There are apps that do this by syncing with your scale without you needing to look at the number, in case seeing it bothers you. The individual number is near meaningless, as fat fluctuations are massively outweighed by water fluctuations, especially if you are running on naturally produced estrogen. You want the trend. This data will not be remotely useful until you have tracked it for at least one month, and it is not what we will use in selecting the original diet strategy. I strongly recommend maintaining this habit indefinitely; it only takes a few seconds.)
Continue eating exactly how you feel like eating, but track all your food. (Including drinks, sugarfree sweets/gums, fish oil supplements, cheese samples in the supermarket, the French fries you stole from your partner). You will not have to do this indefinitely, though you can if you like; you are doing this while evaluating diet strategies, and again if you ever hit a plateau in your weight loss to debug. It will be tedious at first, but you will quickly get a lot faster as your favourite foods end on shortcuts.
Important: Weigh each item. I repeat; weigh each item. And enter the weight to the gram. Any guestimates are utterly useless, you might as well not track at all. Put it into an app that captures calories and protein for commercial and natural products. There are several apps that do this for free, I used to use fddb. You will also need a relatively fine kitchen scale. Those cost like 10 bucks.
A scale for yourself and the food are the only financial investments needed. Ask around: You might get ones for free as friends upgrade to fancier or prettier ones.
Also track workouts.
Step 2:
Review after you have some data. You will typically find that some days, you consumed a lot fewer calories compared to what you burned, or got a lot more nutrition, even though you expended the same amount of effort, and got the same amount of pleasure; you weren’t consciously dieting yet, after all. What characterises these days? Can you engineer your life to be more like them? This is where you might note that there are foods you aren’t that fond of or find that filling, but that are calorie bombs (I feel that way about whipped cream and cereal bars. How can something taste this bland and have such a boring consistency, while having this many calories? Incomprehensible); and others you fucking love and find filling, that aren’t actually that high in calories. You might also find that you are actually fine skipping breakfast. From now on, when you find two foods or dayplans equally satisfying but one of them has fewer calories or more nutrition, eat that one. E.g. I realised that on days where I eat pasta, I consume on average 400 (!) calories more, even though I genuinely do not feel like I have eaten more. So I eat pasta if I want to cram calories effortlessly (e.g. before a marathon), but avoid it when my weight is rising, instead having potatoes, where the opposite happens for me. I also found that a lot of supposedly “evil” foods (like chocolate sprinkles) are totally fine in small quantities (10 g of chocolate sprinkles make my yoghurt so much cooler, while doing so little to the calorie counts), while a lot of supposed “diet” foods have ridiculously high calorie counts for how shit they taste—and because they taste so shit, you end up eating several of them and still feeling grumpy, so you would have been better off having a small slice of real cake.)
Step 3:
Develop a strategy matching you personally for reducing calories while maintaining happiness.
You will typically begin noticing similarities and trends in your happyness-to-fat-ratio. Most diets come down to the same strategies for keeping happiness constant while reducing calories. Whether a particular strategy works is highly individual. Try it out. You determine whether the strategy worked if you are genuinely happy, and getting enough protein, omega 3 and veg, but your calorie consumption has gone down.
The common strategies are: (You can mix and match between them)
Reduce fat. (This works because fat is very calorie dense, so you still get to eat a lot of food volume-wise, but the calorie count is strongly reduced. In its extreme forms, it fails in people who find the resulting food tastes so bland (fat carries flavours and allows frying) they are so frustrated they eat even more of it, more than making up the calorie reduction. Also some fats are crucial to health, e.g. for fat soluble vitamin absorption, and omega 3. It also has a failure mode when people just replace the fat with lots of extra carbs, which are also highly caloric; this is very common in low fat ready made “diet” foods offered. In its minor forms—e.g. just measuring the cooking oil you use in teaspoons, being a bit more sparing with cheese and nuts, diluting coconut milk—it has surprisingly high impact. I detest extremely low fat diets, but lower fat diets work for me. Check your app to see the impact.
Reduce carbs, either
Radically reduce carbs total: This works because human bodies can generally do without ingesting carbs; they genuinely need very few, and your body can generate them from protein if it really has to. If you completely deprive your body of carbs, it switches to ketosis, which leaves you with more stable blood energy levels via ketone bodies, reducing hunger cravings. Many people on low carb diets find they are simply less hungry, and hence, eating less becomes effortless. Other people do badly on it. The people who do badly on it often run on estrogen; it seems to sometimes disrupt cycles. People also tend to hate these diets if their favourite foods are carb based. (If your favourite foods are bread, pasta and fruit, you will simply not become happy on keto, period.) And there are types of workouts—those relying on explosive movements—which simply don’t go as well without carbs. You won’t know until you try it. Warning: For many people, the transition to ketosis sucks; you might spend two days cranky with headaches. Some people have this experience every time they have some carbs and then take them away, so ketosis only works for them as an all or nothing strategy. Strong individual variation, but some people really find it miraculously easy and wonderful.
Reduce simple carbs. This is mostly relevant because it keeps carbs in your bloodstream, avoiding the problems above, but keeps the levels more stable. This basically operates by reducing sugar (keeping real, tasty sugar, but using less, by eating more savoury stuff, training yourself to like products which simply contain less, etc.; your taste buds will adjust after a while) or replacing sugar with lower calorie alternatives that are healthy (ideally with monk fruit extract, erythrol, vanilla, etc.). Try which of the two works better for you; some people find erythrol just as tasty, some find it so gross they would rather eat less sweet stuff than eat fake sweetness. Also using whole grain products instead of white flour/rice/etc. products. - I have found pairing limited carb reduction and simple carb avoidance works for me as a good intermediate strategy; not as restrictive and without the negative impacts on workouts from ketosis, and without the shitty going in and out I had when I broke ketosis. Also beneficial for your teeth and inflammation levels.
Add fibre and water and probiotics and fermented foods
For one, extra fibre keeps you physically full. It varies how responsive people are to this; some people are tricked (they spent so much time chewing and now their stomach is full, so they are not hungry), others feel the full stomach but are hungry regardless (they feel stuffed with empty crap). Imagine eating four cucumbers. These have almost no calories, but you are now crammed with food. Do you feel satisfied or just annoyed? Does this change if you dip the cucumbers in a high protein food like yoghurt with garlic? Again, you just gotta try it out.
The most classic high fibre high water food is vegetables. Increased vegetable consumption is one of the very few dietary recommendations that is near universally accepted and has seriously good empirical backing. Whether this helps you lose weight or not, it will be good for your health if you eat more veggies.
Your gut bacteria have a massive impact on your food cravings. Shifting them will make things a lot easier. They like fibre they can eat (FODMAPS), fibre they can live in (e.g. psyllium), and novel good bacteria to trade genetic material with (fermented foods like yoghurt, kimchi, sauerkraut, soy sauce, natto, tempeh, etc.). A general probiotic can also help.
Eat everything, but less of it
This can easily be achieved by getting much smaller plates, and buying things in smaller quantities. Pros: Nothing is forbidden. You can have chocolate—just one piece. You can have snickers—just one every few days. Cons: It can be really hard to stop at one, even harder than having none at all. This one only works for me if I get my partner to hide the rest.
Avoid some things entirely
This is good if you are an all or nothing person. I recommend picking something you can really bear to lose, and that has a massive impact, or making this only a temporary thing, or having cheat days where you get a little. If you add absolutely every high calorie food to the avoid list indefinitely, you are likely to eventually lose your shit and binge eat.
Daily small changes (using the above ideas)
The idea here is that because the changes are small, they are less stressful, and because it is a permanent habit, you stay stable.
It is less stressful for your body, and comes with a lower risk of fucking up your muscle mass or getting a deficiency.
Regular weight monitoring and recurring intense diets
The basic idea here is you weigh yourself, and if you breach a particular weight and have the time, you do a couple weeks of intense dieting, using a strategy you cannot permanently maintain, but that has intense results and that you are happy to do for a while; then you go back to your former habits, and the weight slowly creeps back, until you breach it again and reset. As a consequence, you weight is on average between your end diet weight and your begin diet weight, which should both be chosen to be in the normal range. You gotta be careful here; intense diets require careful tracking so you make sure you get all the nutrients (especially protein, else muscle less), you will want to run blood tests and continue exercises and track what you are eating again. But despite how many people shit on this strategy nowadays, it is totally viable, and is often a good solution for people who need quick results for motivation and like intensity and freedom.
Fasting periods where you literally eat just nothing for a time.
In its gentlest forms, this means: if you don’t want to eat, don’t. Perfectly fine. There is no moral or health obligation to eat lunch or breakfast. Your metabolism won’t break, you damn metabolism is fine. If you aren’t hungry, or you wouldn’t enjoy the food, there is nothing harmful about just not eating it. There is this bizarre idea that if you do not eat breakfast, you will get fat, or if you skip lunch, your relationship with food is broken. There is zero empirical backing for this. There are many normal, happy people across all cultures and times who have done this.
If you notice that this not wanting to eat is common at some times (e.g. you hate having breakfast), you can do intermittent fasting. The idea is that you skip a meal, and then later have more calories left over for the others, and end up not using them all.
You can also combine this with the above “recurring intense diets”, e.g. doing a fast (eating nothing for e.g. four days every two months). Take it easy for those days, and be careful about going over (again, blood test, doctor supervision); eating nothing is stressful for some organs, and will after a while lead to nutrient deficiencies that cause damage.
Fasting utilises the same principle as ketosis; you will often find that you stop being hungry on day two, finding it relatively easy in contrast to constantly eating and having to stop yourself in quantity. It is easier than you would think.
This one might also have interesting longevity implications. Fasting within limits seems to be good for humans.
Burning more calories (primarily by working out).
Cardio: Burns a lot of calories in the moment. You can burn 800 in an hour on a crosstrainer.
Resistance training: Changes how many calories you burn in general. So the effect in the hour of weight lifting is not so high, but once you have built the muscle, your daily consumption is permanently higher.
Higher NEAT by adding more minor movements through your day; think walking or cycling instead of driving, light yoga, a standing desk, etc. Individually little, but when you make it habit changes, the impact can be remarkable.
Disclaimer here: working out is wonderful and healthy and I recommend it in every way. But a lot of people get hungry when they work out, and they massively overestimate how many calories they burnt, and end up eating more than they burnt. Be very conservative in your estimates.
Metastrategy:
Whatever you are avoiding, make it easy to adhere to. That means: If you wish to eat less sugar, do not keep sugary things in your house. Don’t buy them and then try to win a staring contest.
Whatever you want to do more of, make it easy and nice to do. That means: If you want to do more workouts, find a workout you find fun, a workout buddy to push you, a personal trainer to push you, pair working out with music or something else you love; else you will eventually run out of energy to make yourself.
Make your social environment supportive. E.g. if possible, diet together with your partner. Eating diet food while your partner has French Fries right in front of you will nearly always end up with you stealing French fries. Go to places where people are supportive (e.g. the gym, weight loss forums, hiking groups, etc.) and avoid places where people will support overeating (dieting while walking into Dunkin’ Donuts is not easy). If you speak German, I can recommend the forum “Abnehmen ohne Unsinn”. It is the only diet forum I have ever been in that is radically pro science, open about multiple approaches as long as they leave the person with fewer calories and sufficient nutrition, neither supportive of anorexia nor panicky about disordered eating, and most of all, that forum has an incredible success rate. The vast majority of people in there lose a lot of weight (often from 150 kg to 60 kg and similar) and keep it off. A fair amount of the forum is in the maintenance state, where people have lost all the weight they wanted, and just want to make sure it stays off by keeping an eye on it, with many meanwhile thin people just there because they made friends.
Very important:
The measurement for whether your diet strategy works is not short term weight loss (this will be invisible/unreliable*), but whether you feel good while your calorie consumption has gone down across a longer time period. If your strategy has reduced calories, you will lose fat. For every 7000 calories you reduce, you will lose 1 kg of fat. 7000 calories is a lot. Play around with that, and you will get a pretty good idea of the speed you should be seeing, and realise that you are doing fine.
** The amount of water your body retains fluctuates massively. You are heavier in the evening than in the morning. Heavier before your period than after. Heavier when your inflammation is rising (e.g. when getting sick). Heavier when stressed. Heavier when sleep deprived. Heavier when eating a high carb diet. Heavier when eating a high salt diet. My water weight fluctuates by about 2 kg from morning to night, and around 4 kg per month, and I am slim. In fat people, this fluctuation can be 10 kg. It is so much faster and larger than the fact that you lost 100 g in fat. You will see the fat loss eventually (if you have lost 5 kg of fat, this is visible, and your data tracking will make it clear, as your highs and lows have shifted), but in the short term and when evaluating strategies, just focus on calorie reduction.
Final note: Anyone can lose weight. Your metabolism is fine; the variations that do exist can easily be outdieted, and speeding up your metabolism beyond what you can achieve with coffee is not a good idea. That said, we are living in a society in which high calorie low value cheap food is abundant and advertised, and movement is not necessary and often obstructed, and there are ridiculous numbers of diet myths. This is a shitty system, and it is not your fault if you fall for it. The system should change. But until it does, you can make meaningful changes within it and reach a healthy weight, it is just harder than it should be. It will be harder when you are poor. Harder when you are depressed. Harder if you have an above-average preference for fatty and/or sweet things or hunger. But it is doable, and it doesn’t have to be as hard as people make it out to be, once you throw out any strategy that does not work for you and just keep the ones which do.
TL;DR: You do not need to pay anyone in order to diet successfully. There are no magic secrets or magic products. Nor do you need them.
Maybe this is for someone other than me? You used the word “you” a lot in a way that probably wasn’t actually referring to me. I’m not fat. I systematically avoid “fake food made by lying liars”, avoid eating when not hungry, stop when full, and joyfully follow cravings and eating “real food” I’ve never eaten before. So far this is enough (for me anyway).
I was surprised that the essay ended where it did. I thought it was going to offer the alternative hypothesis of memetic contamination with “bad nutrition ideas” as “the contaminant”.
This seemed connected with “college” and “recently coming from some place with a different food culture” being protective. Then combine that with the title itself: “On not getting contaminated by the wrong obesity ideas”… I kept waiting for that shoe to drop… and it never did!
A thing that you didn’t do, that no one ever does, is regress on IQ, which would have the naive likely effect of giving people more thoughts about more ideas over time, and thus being able to notice good ideas and keep them, and notice bad ideas and reject them. I was kind of predicting you would add IQ though, because it would help with the thesis I thought you were driving towards.
This is the second time I’ve read something where it seemed like the obvious correct move was to write about “meta-nutrition” and then it never happened. The first time was The Omnivore’s Dilemma where the necessity of dealing (inside a single life) with complexly varying food sources is pointed to as a challenge for all omnivorous species including humans, and I was thinking I’d get a really fascinating book on the evolution of the parts of the brain that handle this challenge… and then for the entire rest of the book he just talked about “boo McDonalds” and “organic isn’t what it used to be” and other boring social takes :-(
It would have been funny if “the contaminant is coming from inside the memes!” was taken in a directly serious way, and I’m wondering if there is an explicit positive reason you didn’t go there, or was it maybe just not in your space of hypotheses, or… ?
If there’s a diet plan buried here, it might be “treat almost everyone in the modern environment as lying about almost everything almost all the time, including nutritionists and food advertisements, and anyone you pay or anyone who asks you for money, or anyone who offers you free stuff in a way that seems too good to be true… maybe not always literally technically lying, but almost certainly misleading, by violating norms of gricean implicature, or abusing the halo effect, or leaving key facts out, or polishing their shit to make it shinier and more convincing than it should be, or encouraging hasty generalization, or whatever”.
There is a meme going around about the now-morally-monstrous-seeming ads about sugar water.
Some of these, it turns out, were doctored to seem worse than they were, because of course everyone is lying about everything almost all the time, including about how much lying there has been and how it actually worked :cryglasses:
I tracked down an archive that might have a real example of circa-1956 memetic poison, however:
But you do not need a nutritionist or diet plan or fancy products.
A successful diet does three things:
It has fewer calories than you eat now.
It still has the nutrition you need (especially protein, omega 3, sufficient vegetables)
It is easy for you, you personally in particular, to adhere to. (This generally means: you think it tastes good; it makes you feel full; you can afford the money and time commitment for it permanently; it does not make you feel stressed, so you will happily maintain it while lots of shit goes down in your life, for the rest of your life.)
Here is a relatively good strategy for finding a tailored diet strategy for yourself. I am giving it to you for free.
Step 1:
Weigh yourself daily under the same conditions (e.g. after waking up, after peeing, before drinking; leave the scale standing in the exact same spot) enter it into an app. (There are apps that do this by syncing with your scale without you needing to look at the number, in case seeing it bothers you. The individual number is near meaningless, as fat fluctuations are massively outweighed by water fluctuations, especially if you are running on naturally produced estrogen. You want the trend. This data will not be remotely useful until you have tracked it for at least one month, and it is not what we will use in selecting the original diet strategy. I strongly recommend maintaining this habit indefinitely; it only takes a few seconds.)
Continue eating exactly how you feel like eating, but track all your food. (Including drinks, sugarfree sweets/gums, fish oil supplements, cheese samples in the supermarket, the French fries you stole from your partner). You will not have to do this indefinitely, though you can if you like; you are doing this while evaluating diet strategies, and again if you ever hit a plateau in your weight loss to debug. It will be tedious at first, but you will quickly get a lot faster as your favourite foods end on shortcuts.
Important: Weigh each item. I repeat; weigh each item. And enter the weight to the gram. Any guestimates are utterly useless, you might as well not track at all. Put it into an app that captures calories and protein for commercial and natural products. There are several apps that do this for free, I used to use fddb. You will also need a relatively fine kitchen scale. Those cost like 10 bucks.
A scale for yourself and the food are the only financial investments needed. Ask around: You might get ones for free as friends upgrade to fancier or prettier ones.
Also track workouts.
Step 2:
Review after you have some data. You will typically find that some days, you consumed a lot fewer calories compared to what you burned, or got a lot more nutrition, even though you expended the same amount of effort, and got the same amount of pleasure; you weren’t consciously dieting yet, after all. What characterises these days? Can you engineer your life to be more like them? This is where you might note that there are foods you aren’t that fond of or find that filling, but that are calorie bombs (I feel that way about whipped cream and cereal bars. How can something taste this bland and have such a boring consistency, while having this many calories? Incomprehensible); and others you fucking love and find filling, that aren’t actually that high in calories. You might also find that you are actually fine skipping breakfast. From now on, when you find two foods or dayplans equally satisfying but one of them has fewer calories or more nutrition, eat that one. E.g. I realised that on days where I eat pasta, I consume on average 400 (!) calories more, even though I genuinely do not feel like I have eaten more. So I eat pasta if I want to cram calories effortlessly (e.g. before a marathon), but avoid it when my weight is rising, instead having potatoes, where the opposite happens for me. I also found that a lot of supposedly “evil” foods (like chocolate sprinkles) are totally fine in small quantities (10 g of chocolate sprinkles make my yoghurt so much cooler, while doing so little to the calorie counts), while a lot of supposed “diet” foods have ridiculously high calorie counts for how shit they taste—and because they taste so shit, you end up eating several of them and still feeling grumpy, so you would have been better off having a small slice of real cake.)
Step 3:
Develop a strategy matching you personally for reducing calories while maintaining happiness.
You will typically begin noticing similarities and trends in your happyness-to-fat-ratio. Most diets come down to the same strategies for keeping happiness constant while reducing calories. Whether a particular strategy works is highly individual. Try it out. You determine whether the strategy worked if you are genuinely happy, and getting enough protein, omega 3 and veg, but your calorie consumption has gone down.
The common strategies are: (You can mix and match between them)
Reduce fat. (This works because fat is very calorie dense, so you still get to eat a lot of food volume-wise, but the calorie count is strongly reduced. In its extreme forms, it fails in people who find the resulting food tastes so bland (fat carries flavours and allows frying) they are so frustrated they eat even more of it, more than making up the calorie reduction. Also some fats are crucial to health, e.g. for fat soluble vitamin absorption, and omega 3. It also has a failure mode when people just replace the fat with lots of extra carbs, which are also highly caloric; this is very common in low fat ready made “diet” foods offered. In its minor forms—e.g. just measuring the cooking oil you use in teaspoons, being a bit more sparing with cheese and nuts, diluting coconut milk—it has surprisingly high impact. I detest extremely low fat diets, but lower fat diets work for me. Check your app to see the impact.
Reduce carbs, either
Radically reduce carbs total: This works because human bodies can generally do without ingesting carbs; they genuinely need very few, and your body can generate them from protein if it really has to. If you completely deprive your body of carbs, it switches to ketosis, which leaves you with more stable blood energy levels via ketone bodies, reducing hunger cravings. Many people on low carb diets find they are simply less hungry, and hence, eating less becomes effortless. Other people do badly on it. The people who do badly on it often run on estrogen; it seems to sometimes disrupt cycles. People also tend to hate these diets if their favourite foods are carb based. (If your favourite foods are bread, pasta and fruit, you will simply not become happy on keto, period.) And there are types of workouts—those relying on explosive movements—which simply don’t go as well without carbs. You won’t know until you try it. Warning: For many people, the transition to ketosis sucks; you might spend two days cranky with headaches. Some people have this experience every time they have some carbs and then take them away, so ketosis only works for them as an all or nothing strategy. Strong individual variation, but some people really find it miraculously easy and wonderful.
Reduce simple carbs. This is mostly relevant because it keeps carbs in your bloodstream, avoiding the problems above, but keeps the levels more stable. This basically operates by reducing sugar (keeping real, tasty sugar, but using less, by eating more savoury stuff, training yourself to like products which simply contain less, etc.; your taste buds will adjust after a while) or replacing sugar with lower calorie alternatives that are healthy (ideally with monk fruit extract, erythrol, vanilla, etc.). Try which of the two works better for you; some people find erythrol just as tasty, some find it so gross they would rather eat less sweet stuff than eat fake sweetness. Also using whole grain products instead of white flour/rice/etc. products. - I have found pairing limited carb reduction and simple carb avoidance works for me as a good intermediate strategy; not as restrictive and without the negative impacts on workouts from ketosis, and without the shitty going in and out I had when I broke ketosis. Also beneficial for your teeth and inflammation levels.
Add fibre and water and probiotics and fermented foods
For one, extra fibre keeps you physically full. It varies how responsive people are to this; some people are tricked (they spent so much time chewing and now their stomach is full, so they are not hungry), others feel the full stomach but are hungry regardless (they feel stuffed with empty crap). Imagine eating four cucumbers. These have almost no calories, but you are now crammed with food. Do you feel satisfied or just annoyed? Does this change if you dip the cucumbers in a high protein food like yoghurt with garlic? Again, you just gotta try it out.
The most classic high fibre high water food is vegetables. Increased vegetable consumption is one of the very few dietary recommendations that is near universally accepted and has seriously good empirical backing. Whether this helps you lose weight or not, it will be good for your health if you eat more veggies.
Your gut bacteria have a massive impact on your food cravings. Shifting them will make things a lot easier. They like fibre they can eat (FODMAPS), fibre they can live in (e.g. psyllium), and novel good bacteria to trade genetic material with (fermented foods like yoghurt, kimchi, sauerkraut, soy sauce, natto, tempeh, etc.). A general probiotic can also help.
Eat everything, but less of it
This can easily be achieved by getting much smaller plates, and buying things in smaller quantities. Pros: Nothing is forbidden. You can have chocolate—just one piece. You can have snickers—just one every few days. Cons: It can be really hard to stop at one, even harder than having none at all. This one only works for me if I get my partner to hide the rest.
Avoid some things entirely
This is good if you are an all or nothing person. I recommend picking something you can really bear to lose, and that has a massive impact, or making this only a temporary thing, or having cheat days where you get a little. If you add absolutely every high calorie food to the avoid list indefinitely, you are likely to eventually lose your shit and binge eat.
Daily small changes (using the above ideas)
The idea here is that because the changes are small, they are less stressful, and because it is a permanent habit, you stay stable.
It is less stressful for your body, and comes with a lower risk of fucking up your muscle mass or getting a deficiency.
Regular weight monitoring and recurring intense diets
The basic idea here is you weigh yourself, and if you breach a particular weight and have the time, you do a couple weeks of intense dieting, using a strategy you cannot permanently maintain, but that has intense results and that you are happy to do for a while; then you go back to your former habits, and the weight slowly creeps back, until you breach it again and reset. As a consequence, you weight is on average between your end diet weight and your begin diet weight, which should both be chosen to be in the normal range. You gotta be careful here; intense diets require careful tracking so you make sure you get all the nutrients (especially protein, else muscle less), you will want to run blood tests and continue exercises and track what you are eating again. But despite how many people shit on this strategy nowadays, it is totally viable, and is often a good solution for people who need quick results for motivation and like intensity and freedom.
Fasting periods where you literally eat just nothing for a time.
In its gentlest forms, this means: if you don’t want to eat, don’t. Perfectly fine. There is no moral or health obligation to eat lunch or breakfast. Your metabolism won’t break, you damn metabolism is fine. If you aren’t hungry, or you wouldn’t enjoy the food, there is nothing harmful about just not eating it. There is this bizarre idea that if you do not eat breakfast, you will get fat, or if you skip lunch, your relationship with food is broken. There is zero empirical backing for this. There are many normal, happy people across all cultures and times who have done this.
If you notice that this not wanting to eat is common at some times (e.g. you hate having breakfast), you can do intermittent fasting. The idea is that you skip a meal, and then later have more calories left over for the others, and end up not using them all.
You can also combine this with the above “recurring intense diets”, e.g. doing a fast (eating nothing for e.g. four days every two months). Take it easy for those days, and be careful about going over (again, blood test, doctor supervision); eating nothing is stressful for some organs, and will after a while lead to nutrient deficiencies that cause damage.
Fasting utilises the same principle as ketosis; you will often find that you stop being hungry on day two, finding it relatively easy in contrast to constantly eating and having to stop yourself in quantity. It is easier than you would think.
This one might also have interesting longevity implications. Fasting within limits seems to be good for humans.
Burning more calories (primarily by working out).
Cardio: Burns a lot of calories in the moment. You can burn 800 in an hour on a crosstrainer.
Resistance training: Changes how many calories you burn in general. So the effect in the hour of weight lifting is not so high, but once you have built the muscle, your daily consumption is permanently higher.
Higher NEAT by adding more minor movements through your day; think walking or cycling instead of driving, light yoga, a standing desk, etc. Individually little, but when you make it habit changes, the impact can be remarkable.
Disclaimer here: working out is wonderful and healthy and I recommend it in every way. But a lot of people get hungry when they work out, and they massively overestimate how many calories they burnt, and end up eating more than they burnt. Be very conservative in your estimates.
Metastrategy:
Whatever you are avoiding, make it easy to adhere to. That means: If you wish to eat less sugar, do not keep sugary things in your house. Don’t buy them and then try to win a staring contest.
Whatever you want to do more of, make it easy and nice to do. That means: If you want to do more workouts, find a workout you find fun, a workout buddy to push you, a personal trainer to push you, pair working out with music or something else you love; else you will eventually run out of energy to make yourself.
Make your social environment supportive. E.g. if possible, diet together with your partner. Eating diet food while your partner has French Fries right in front of you will nearly always end up with you stealing French fries. Go to places where people are supportive (e.g. the gym, weight loss forums, hiking groups, etc.) and avoid places where people will support overeating (dieting while walking into Dunkin’ Donuts is not easy). If you speak German, I can recommend the forum “Abnehmen ohne Unsinn”. It is the only diet forum I have ever been in that is radically pro science, open about multiple approaches as long as they leave the person with fewer calories and sufficient nutrition, neither supportive of anorexia nor panicky about disordered eating, and most of all, that forum has an incredible success rate. The vast majority of people in there lose a lot of weight (often from 150 kg to 60 kg and similar) and keep it off. A fair amount of the forum is in the maintenance state, where people have lost all the weight they wanted, and just want to make sure it stays off by keeping an eye on it, with many meanwhile thin people just there because they made friends.
Very important:
The measurement for whether your diet strategy works is not short term weight loss (this will be invisible/unreliable*), but whether you feel good while your calorie consumption has gone down across a longer time period. If your strategy has reduced calories, you will lose fat. For every 7000 calories you reduce, you will lose 1 kg of fat. 7000 calories is a lot. Play around with that, and you will get a pretty good idea of the speed you should be seeing, and realise that you are doing fine.
** The amount of water your body retains fluctuates massively. You are heavier in the evening than in the morning. Heavier before your period than after. Heavier when your inflammation is rising (e.g. when getting sick). Heavier when stressed. Heavier when sleep deprived. Heavier when eating a high carb diet. Heavier when eating a high salt diet. My water weight fluctuates by about 2 kg from morning to night, and around 4 kg per month, and I am slim. In fat people, this fluctuation can be 10 kg. It is so much faster and larger than the fact that you lost 100 g in fat. You will see the fat loss eventually (if you have lost 5 kg of fat, this is visible, and your data tracking will make it clear, as your highs and lows have shifted), but in the short term and when evaluating strategies, just focus on calorie reduction.
Final note: Anyone can lose weight. Your metabolism is fine; the variations that do exist can easily be outdieted, and speeding up your metabolism beyond what you can achieve with coffee is not a good idea. That said, we are living in a society in which high calorie low value cheap food is abundant and advertised, and movement is not necessary and often obstructed, and there are ridiculous numbers of diet myths. This is a shitty system, and it is not your fault if you fall for it. The system should change. But until it does, you can make meaningful changes within it and reach a healthy weight, it is just harder than it should be. It will be harder when you are poor. Harder when you are depressed. Harder if you have an above-average preference for fatty and/or sweet things or hunger. But it is doable, and it doesn’t have to be as hard as people make it out to be, once you throw out any strategy that does not work for you and just keep the ones which do.
TL;DR: You do not need to pay anyone in order to diet successfully. There are no magic secrets or magic products. Nor do you need them.
Maybe this is for someone other than me? You used the word “you” a lot in a way that probably wasn’t actually referring to me. I’m not fat. I systematically avoid “fake food made by lying liars”, avoid eating when not hungry, stop when full, and joyfully follow cravings and eating “real food” I’ve never eaten before. So far this is enough (for me anyway).