I’m currently a lump of chocolate and cheese, but once the new year hits, I’m determined to make 2026 the year I finally get back to a healthy weight (I’ve lost about 20 pounds, with about 80-100 to go). I’m pretty good about exercising regularly, but, as they say, abs are made in the kitchen. Those who have successfully lost weight, is there anything you particularly recommend for maintaining a calorie deficit to lose the weight, and then avoiding gaining it back later on?
I just skip breakfast and lunch when I’m trying to lose weight. Your body gets used to it after a few days and doesn’t send the same hunger signals.
I’m going to answer this as a physiologist: First, eliminate processed foods as they do make you over eat Next, start exercising. Any amount is fine as long as you do something at least 6 days a week. Don’t get obsessive; just do something To maintain the proper deficit, you need to measure and plan your meals. Keeping to a mostly consistent calorie total is important. It doesn’t have to be exact every day, but you need to stick to a weekly total. This should be about 200-400 calories less than your total caloric needs by day. Too much and your body will fight back and your metabolism will drop to match this new level and you’ll stop losing weight. To find the right amount, you’re going to need to see a nutritionist and a weight loss expert with a real degree. They’ll be able to fill in the details. Any specialty diet only works short term. An active lifestyle with healthy foods will make the biggest impact. And you need to be think long term: losing more than 1 pound per week will cause your body to fight back. You need to very slowly nudge it to where you want it to be, but also realize where your genetics put you. There are so many things to consider, so you need to connect with a specialist.
Saying “Don’t get obsessive” while stating you need to do something 6 days a week is an insane starting point… I agree excersie helps with weight loss, but being in a calorie deficit is enough to loose weight. Dont set the goal too high or else no one will be able to stick to it…
In the past, I have found crippling levels of poverty to be quite helpful.
I’ve got a mysterious health problem that’s causing near constant nausea and have lost over 50lbs this year without even trying.
What kind of test have you got done? Does medicine to stop the nausea help?
I’ve had bloodwork, stool samples, xray, CT, and upper/lower scope. I’ve got a hernia, and some intestinal ulcers, but insurance won’t approve the meds, so I’m still looking for a diagnosis they like.
It’s also likely to have an element of autonomic dysfunction too, since they’ve found bone spurs in my neck that are pushing on my spinal cord, but there’s not much I can do about that. It’s possible that overusing painkillers for my neck is whats causing the ulcers.
Fruit and veggies will fill your stomach up making it harder to eat anything else while being lower in calories, I drench them in steak fat, idc, about the extra calories gained there, if I dont eag vegetables I eat a ton of snacks, if my stomach is uncomfortably full I dont think about eating. It’s just expensive (in my case I have limited fast food options, just restaurants) if you dont cook to get healthier options but you can save hella calories. Like keto bread instead of regular for hotdogs/hamburgers save me at least 100 calories a burger, coke zero instead of coke saves me like 600 calories a day drinking 4 cans (ik I should drink less soda but ive done much much worse to my body being fat and abusing drugs, this is fine in comparison so im sticking to it)
You could always intermittent fast, eat like 4-8 hours of your day and the no food until the next 4-8 hour period, worked for me but I gained most of my weight back when I stopped, I wouldnt want to do it forever so its not viable for me. I lost like 90 lbs gained 70 back. Now I’ve been losing 10 a year but not gaining it back just trying to minimize calories through ingredients and less snacking.
For candy I swapped to stuff that last longer flavorwise and I get sick of faster like hichews over chocolate. ChocolateI can eat lbs of nonstop, once I start each bite just tastes better, so I try to avoid it or get a variety of minis, having a few small portions of different kinds is more satisfying than one extra large portion of one kind.
Cut out soda entirely. Skip breakfast and lunch. Maybe eat a light snack at some point during the day if you need to (real food, not sugary crap). Train yourself to just deal with being hungry. When you do eat, focus on things that are nutritionally dense, filling, and slow to digest.
I haven’t experienced this yet myself, but I’m considering starting to take a fiber supplement and have read that it helps a lot with satiety.
There are a few different strategies I have used at different phases in life.
Where I am at right now.
Don’t eat processed foods. They make it easy to over way by design.
Eat the recommended amount of sodium or less a day. Sodium makes food more palatable. You will find yourself eating less calories simply because the food isn’t as good.
I’ve been eating the recommended amount if fiber on purpose. I eat oatmeal instead of rice/potatoes/bread. It’s filling and less ‘munchable’ if you think you are hungry put a bowl of oatmeal infront of yourself. I do season it with olive oil and spices.
I restrict sugar and high fuctrose corn syrup for the same reason I restrict salt. Sugar makes food taste to good making it easy to eat more then you need to without realizing.
These change help me eat the proper and filling portions of food without overeating. I eat till I’m full.
I also only eat like this most of the time. But even then I’m giving myself leeway on the holidays. I just try to make more good decisions then bad.
Sodium makes food more palatable. You will find yourself eating less calories simply because the food isn’t as good.
Eh, I don’t love this one. The idea of intentionally making food shittier so that you enjoy it less is never gonna work for me.
You do you.
It’s way easier to eat the right amount of food if you aren’t making it extra salty or extra sweet.
Basically I need to eat foods that actually taste good as opposed to making them palatable.
I have had to find different ways to season foods. I find I am more sensitive to salt and less salt makes me satisfied.
As an example, I salt my salads fairly precisely. After all, the word “salad” itself derives from the Latin word for “salted.”
But there’s also like literally no way that overeating a salad would be unhealthy for me, a person who doesn’t have hypertension (and who sweats a lot of salt so that I need a higher than normal sodium intake). I’m going to salt my salads as I see fit, and use the right amount of acid and maybe a source of umami for flavor, as well. I want my salads to be delicious, because I have basically zero fear that I’ll overeat them to the point of adverse health effects.
For plenty of other foods, I’m basically controlling portions before I plate anyway. If I’m at a restaurant, the portions are tightly controlled and I control what portions I eat by simply controlling what portions I order. If I’m cooking at home, I’m not accidentally meal planning for the week but running out of food on Wednesday. Everything I eat should be delicious, and if there’s a problem with overeating, it’s because I failed to control portions before it was placed in front of me.
To borrow an analogy from Homer’s The Odyssey, I prefer Odysseus’s strategy of tying himself to the mast and hearing the sirens anyway, over the crew plugging their ears and never hearing them in the first place.
Everyone can take their own approaches, but my own strategies for portioning already make it so that making the food less delicious wouldn’t do much for myself.
Great. Sounds like you have a strategy for you.
I just eat till I feel full, not paying attention to portions.
Even when I wasn’t watching what I eat at all I never salted a salad. Never found it necessary. I just like the way leafy greens taste.
We have pretty different sets of tastes.
I just try to make more good decisions then bad.
This is the only long-term sustainable answer.
I hope so.
It’s way easier to be extreme then constantly make choices. Takes a lot more brain power to says sometimes it’s okay as opposed to never.
Still I’m trying it out.
Don’t just stop: swap.
Cutting things out leads to cravings and causes the entire process to be a constant fight. Instead, make small swaps over time that build habits.
I have a burrito every day. I swapped the tortilla for a high fiber one (get more fiber). It saved 50 calories a day and is still delicious. I swapped my side of chips for protein chips (when I can get them on sale). Lower cal, high protein, still crunchy and taste like cool ranch.
Think about what you can ADD to your meal. Having stew? Add beans and extra peppers. A sandwich? Add spinach. You’ll end up eating less of the calorie sense stuff. You’ll also get more fiber.
Also: cooking anything at all? Add spinach. I eat so much spinach and kale because they’re so easy to add to anything.
Tracking my food made a big impact for me. I started not by changing anything, but just writing everything I ate down. From there, it was pretty obvious to me where I could make changes, but I didnt change everything at once. If I were to list the changes I made, nobody would be surprised. They were exactly the kinds of recommendations others have made here. It’s just that it was so much easier for me to pick something specific to change and have a good idea of the kind of impact that change would make when I could see the numbers.
Being overweight is a natural reaction to an unnatural food environment. Processed foods contain far too much energy and too little fiber (i.e., stuff that fills our stomachs but contains hardly any energy.
Exercise is important for keeping our bodies fit, but it is not the right choice to lose weight. It is much easier not to consume 300 calories in the first place than to burn them off through exercise. Simply eating less does not help either. If your stomach is not full, you are constantly hungry, and no one can keep that up for long. To lose weight in the long term, you need to change your energy intake, i.e., the type of food, not the amount of food. So you have to change your diet, there’s no way around it. Move away from processed stuff and toward whole food, plant-based meals.
“Whole food” means:
Grown from soil, nothing good removed after harvesting and nothing bad added. Over time, your body and your gut flora will get used to it, your cravings for junk food will subside, and you’ll be able to eat your fill of vegetables, fruit, legumes, and nuts every day cheaply, healthily, and with a clear conscience. And you’ll still lose weight.So: Keep the junk out of the house! Don’t let that crap into your home anymore; if it’s there, you’ll eat it.
You gain weight in the gym but you lose it in the kitchen! If you really hate the taste (/ texture is usually the real issue), you can also consume the fiber separately before the meal (the brand name of psyllium husk is metamucil and it comes as a drink or as a pill and you can buy it generic too). If you do take it as a pill make sure to chase it with plenty of water to help it gel up properly and not constipate you. Like this user said it’ll help you feel fuller longer and it’ll also detox your bowels by sticking to stuff on it’s way through like one of those cleaning slimes where you push it into all the cracks of something and when you pull it out all the dirt / dust is stuck to it. Great when you eat a meal with a lot of capsaicin and your bowels are having trouble / still mad about it a few days later.
Or you start adding half a can of legumes like beans, lentils, chickpeas to your meals. It’s cheap, yummy, healthy superfood for you and your gut. :)
- Daily long walks.
- Eat less.
- Eat better. I quit stuffing myself with industrially processed food, best decision ever. Even better than quitting smoking (which I did some 20 years ago). BTW, eating better helps a lot in eating less.
Edit: some improvements made to my (severely) lacking English.
These are all great suggestions, and I would just like to add: drink more water. If water gets boring, add some lemon / lime / fruit, have some herbal teas, or even some coffee (black). When I’m in ravenous eating mode and about to go for seconds, it’s helpful if I can catch myself and have a glass of water first. Then wait 5 - 10 minutes and see if I actually want more food.
+1 to all you just said :)
We quit drinking soda (and I quit alcohol, too). Now it’s, water, pressed fresh fruits (but not too much), tea and infusions. Maybe once a year I will have a drink of wine (I’m French, I have an excuse ;)
As for teas, my advice there would be to not cheap out on tea. quality teas, aka full leaves, are a thing of their own. Also I would encourage to get at least two tea posts (one for stronger teas and the other one for the lighter ones)
Drinking calories is so bad.
I only drink Coconut Unsweetened Silk and tap water outside of a zero cal soda now and then.
Be weary of artificial sugar that can still trigger hunger by impacting your blood sugar levels due to insulin release. Your body can respond to the sudden influx of artificial sugar the same way it does to real sugar.
What do you mean when you say artificial sugars? The insulin response to different sweeteners vary a lot.
I still lightly sweeten my coffee most mornings, but that’s about it.
I would like to stress the eating better part. In the past, I’ve made the mistake of looking only at calories. I never chose the whole grain option because it had more calories. Weight loss was hard and I was constantly hungry. Now I stopped eating at the canteen for lunch and started cooking my own stuff instead with lots of whole grain pasta, whole grain rice, potatoes, lots and lots of vegetables, legumes and plant based protein like tofu and tempeh. For a sweet snack I eat fruit. Lost 9kg in 5 months and it didn’t even feel really hard, honestly. Cooking takes a lot of time though, but it’s so much easier than being hungry all the time.
What do you like to eat that’s less processed? I’d like to do that, processed food unfortunately requires just so much less prep.
Fresh veggies & fruits, a little quality meat (but not too much and not every day), no industrial bread (I live in Paris, we still have access to a few real artisanal bakeries where they make their own bread, but here too they’re getting replaced by industrial ones, so we’ve planned on learning to make our own bread soon), no industrial sweets/treats and no soda.
My spouse and I also learned to cook, instead of going out to a restaurant multiple times a week like we used. Saves us money and it’s a fine moment we spend together too ;)
As for the time it takes to cook fresh food: either we will make very simple meal, which takes minutes (plus we often have fun while cooking) or we will cook a meal that we will last us 2 or 3 days. So it’s really not that much of an issue. And since eating better helps us feeling a lot less tired too, well… we think it’s really worth it. The real effort is to be willing to change one’s own habits, at least if I can relate to my own experience.
Edit: maybe I should make it clear that the key change, and the very first step anyone should do is to stop eating those ready-made, over-processed and over-packaged shit food that we’ve learned to consider normal food. Sorry I this sound rude, even more so in the USA I would imagine, but this what I think they’re worth (with all their sugar and salt, and conservatives and colorants) and how good I think they’re for our health: barely a few weeks after I quite eating that I started getting better. To me, it’s the same shit as the cigarettes and if we don’t self-destroy in a nuclear holocaust (or ins ome ecological major crisis) before that I have little doubt this industrial food will end being an even worse scandal than tobacco ever was.
It is garbage food-like industrial waste, mostly. Read the nutrition information and it’s mostly empty calories! And with a work schedule all over the map, it is challenging. But an air fryer and sweet/regular potatoes pack a lot of nutrients in with the denser calorie count and fiber!
Hi! Not the same person but I’m in the same process!
Firstly, take it in steps, don’t quit all processed food at once. I actually started with eating more veggies, both in the food and as a side salad.
Then read on the products, not all processed foods are equal, and it depends on what more you have in the meal. On meat products I often look at the meat percentages, it can vary A LOT. A sausage with + 80% meat is a lot better than 30%…
You can also look for E-numbers, concentrates, and other additives. How good or bad these are are still being discussed but I’m leaning towards bad, especially if it’s a lot.
For example a highly processed sausage with basmati rice and a decent amount of salad isn’t the same as said sausage with just mac and cheese.
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Some meals are easier to prep than others but more often than not I’ve found meals, especially the meat, to need time. Time to cook properly!
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Fry meat in a pan, let it simmer in water for half an hour or so ( I rarely keep time ), make a sauce in the pan.
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Or put a chunk of meat on a oven safe plate and trow it into the oven on 150-175°C for 1.5-3h or more depending on size and tenderness.
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Or make a soup, just make sure it boils long enough for the meat! :)
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OMAD or IF works really well for a lot of people. What you eat and when you eat are critical, not just how many calories are going in and out. CICO is far from the whole story when it comes to metabolism and your endocrine system.
In my late 20’s, I managed to cut to probably the lowest body fat percentage of my life.
I learned which foods I found to be satisfying despite a lower calorie count, and vice versa. In my case, it’s water, fiber, and protein that are important for feeling full even when I’m not eating a lot of calories. That means lots of soups, lots of green vegetables, lots of lean meats and cheeses, and some member of the legume family in almost every meal (beans and lentils, and also things like green beans, peas, peanuts). It also meant a dramatic reduction in sugars, especially in beverages, and a big reduction in alcohol consumption.
I started running a lot. Some people say you can’t outrun a bad diet, but running 25 miles (40km) per week goes a really, really long way and buys you a big buffer that allows you a few high calorie meals here and there.
I stopped keeping snacks on hand. Almost everything in my house required some degree of prep or cooking to eat.
Many of those I’ve kept up in the 20 years since, but I’ve re-added whole grains and fruit into my previously low carb diet because they have a good satiety to calorie ratio (probably because of the fiber). And I’ve stopped running but also tolerate a higher body fat percentage and higher overall weight in support of a significantly more muscular build (and a lot more measurable strength). Finally, I do keep certain ready to eat foods in the house, but mainly because I have kids and need to feed them without spending all my time on that task.
Use foods with a low calorie density as fillings. Things like cabbage and other veggies are very filling leaving you feeling more satisfied
You can’t. Your metabolism will just start being more conservative.
Everything in the body is balanced and the body does not want to lose its reserves.
Once you change the system, it will react to revert it back to how it was.
You can increase your metabolism with a lot of exercise. The less calories you eat, the more tired you will be. The harder it will be to force yourself to exercise.
Dieting will ultimately reduce your metabolism burn rate. And make you more tired.
You can offset it by forcing exercise. Which will be hard due to the fatigue.
It’s why loosing weight is hard for people.
It’s never as simple as “eat less”. Unless you are literally starving yourself. Like with lap band surgery.
