> The thing is, I'm never full. I can eat until I physically can't eat anymore (not something I do regularly, of course), and as soon as my stomach has emptied a bit, I feel fairly hungry again. "Eat until you feel full" is literally a human experience I had never really had.
I feel exactly the way you do, and yes, I was fat, lost it in one go and never gained it back. I try to keep my BMI around 18, never went over 20 since losing weight. It's been around 15 years now. I still have the exact same unlimited appetite I have always had. If you put food I like in front of me, I'm going to eat it.
I don't do anything special. I eat the same foods I always have, just less of them. Got really good at counting and never get more food than I need. The trick is to not put yourself in a situation where you have to stop eating in the first place. It's hard to just stop eating something you want to eat. Not that hard to stop yourself from going to the store again or ordering more (especially when other people are around).
I feel like most people never get serious enough about counting, try to eat stuff they don't enjoy, waste effort on exercise or let other people interfere.
> Not that hard to stop yourself from going to the store again or ordering more
Well, actually...
I'm fat. Like BMI 40 fat. Most of my life I have been fat. I was laughed at in school for it, as far back as I can remember. It probably wasn't all that bad when I think back. Certainly not as bad as now. But I was the fat kid in class, and I felt like the fat kid.
Anyway, I have lost a lot of it at a few points. Once by going to a place with more disease than I could handle. Months of intermittent diarrhea helps apparently. And once I reduced intake to about 1200 kcal per day for a year, combined with walking around for 5 hours everyday. I got to BMI 26 or something. Not very obese, but still overweight. It felt amazing to be able to do a lot of things, but it also took a LOT of time and effort.
But then I got a job, and kids. And I started to backslide. Just an hour per day walking during my commute, instead of 5 during the day... And oh, that pastry looks gooood. Slowly at first, with intermittent periods of faster backsliding because life required a bit more from me.
I got it back faster than I lost it.
I have re-lost it a few times after that. Each time the losses are a bit less, and the peaks get a bit higher. I always gain it back faster than I lose it. And annoyingly, initially, gaining it back feels way better than losing ever does. Like finally laying down after a day of strenuous work. Or like the first breaths of fresh air after being cooked up in stale air for a while.
During my losing periods the things you describe help. Keep the food away, and you don't have to expend effort to not eat it. I even enjoy the healthy stuff.
But that's not how it is during my gaining periods, oh no. I get bored with the good food, and start craving the bad. I go to the shops to buy stuff. A small packet of candy at first, or a pastry. But that spirals out of control quickly. Soon I start scheming:
* How can I get the food without my family noticing?
* If I go to multiple shops I can buy twice as much without looking like a greedy fuck.
* Oh, and I won't be able to go tomorrow, so I should make sure I have supplies for the day.
* And eating only candy makes me sick, so I should also buy crisps so I can alternate and keep eating.
I'm in gaining mode now. I ate a box of Pringles, a box of cookies, and a box of candy, just today. In addition to the regular meals with my family. I'm here. I see myself doing this, but I can't seem to stop. Until it runs its course. After a few months or a year or two, I can usually cycle back into a losing mode for a few months.
A doctor might help, but I'm not going. The medical state of the art of dealing with obesity seems to be "just don't". A consult seems pointless and humiliating.
I've learned to take and make fat jokes, and other than that to not think too much about this. My BMI will probably keep oscillating higher and higher, and I guess that means I'll get some obesity disease at some point. Maybe that'll stop it, but I'm not confident it will.
I guess we all have our issues, and this seems to be mine. C'est la vie.
> And eating only candy makes me sick, so I should also buy crisps so I can alternate and keep eating.
This one hit hard. If you swapped "crisps" and "candy" for "MDMA" and "ketamine", people would tell you to go to rehab.
No judgment here, but a lot of your behaviour sounds like addiction underpinned by a coping mechanism. If you replaced <food> with alcohol or drugs people would point out how your relationship with the substance is pathological.
IMO food is the most cruel of addictions as it is fuelled by our most primal of instincts to survive, it is also why I think Big Sugar is the most sinister of institutions...
The problem with food is that you can't cut it completely like drugs or cigarettes, rehab schemes are not going to work because the temptation and use is always there, multiple times a day.
No, but maladaptive coping (eg addictions, including eating your emotions) can be replaced with something healthier. It's also possible they've been emotionally neglected or abused (trauma always makes these things much more messier to address without addressing it first) and that's how maladaptive coping develops (or maybe they never learned them from parents for another reason, or maybe they picked up on a parents unhealthy coping style).
Not even remotely a doctor, so take all this with a grain of salt if you're in a similar spot. Mostly based on my own life experiences and having to work on childhood trauma and what that entailed in my case (food addition being just one amongst many maladaptive coping mechanism).
> A doctor might help, but I'm not going. The medical state of the art of dealing with obesity seems to be "just don't". A consult seems pointless and humiliating.
The point of this article seems to be that that is changing. Doctors actually have something to offer you now.
Thanks for sharing. I didn't really understand it (though I didn't doubt it) until I read your comment. What a hard burden to carry; I completely understand the state of watching myself do something unwanted (though not with food).
One thing that's helped me: I just make a rule to myself, 'go from one healthy thing to another'. I just try to find more and more relatively healthy (or at least harmless) and appealing outlets and tell myself that, whatever I do, I may not do something ideal but I'm going to choose one of them.
(A healthy outlet is one where I feel better after I do it than when I start.)
I don't follow it perfectly, of course, but it has helped result in a major shift.
Have you watched the new Brendan Fraser movie "The Whale"? If so, what did you think about it?
In the movie he does some of the things you mention, but I don't think he was vilified in the movie. I saw him as a hero at the end. Some fat people on youtube were very offended by "The Whale", I'm curious if it is universally offensive to large people.
If you're content with where you are then that's fine. I won't claim it's going to be easy to change things. But I do think there are few things you could change that will nearly guarantee success:
- There's no good or bad food. The number is the only thing that matters. Don't feel bad about eating chips and candy everyday. That's pretty much what I do. All you need is to hit the number.
- Always keep track of how much you've eaten. A big binge is not an excuse to stop counting. After a year or so, counting will become second nature and can be done purely with mental math. But initially, you want to write all the numbers down. Date | calories in | morning weight.
- Don't tie the counting efforts to any other effort. You mention walking 5 hours a day. That's some other unrelated thing. Don't ever mentally link this to your weight loss effort. If you want to do it, do it, but it should have nothing to do with losing weight. Counting and keeping records is your primary job.
- Your family should know what you're up to. They're there to help you achieve your goals. If you've already eaten, they shouldn't let you have a family meal with them. If they just let you get away with this, let them know you don't appreciate it. When you mess up, they should care and think it's a bad thing.
- Get this idea of a "cycle" out of your head. There is no cycle, every day is a new day. Your behavior only looks like some cycle caused by external forces post facto. Everybody trying to form a habit has a similar experience. There is nothing weight loss specific going on here. When you break a good streak everything can go out of the window. This is why it's important to keep the required actions as simple as possible. The more you couple different efforts the harder it's going to be. When you mess up you have to take the loss and move on. A good streak helps but don't dwell on breaking it.
- You have to have a sense of urgency and importance. Those around you should too. "I guess that means I'll get some obesity disease at some point" - just think how ridiculous that sounds. You know you can potentially prevent a serious disease (most people never have that opportunity) but you're just gonna sit there and let some cycle run its course. I mean, come on! How can you wake up everyday and not want to stop it today? What about your children? Perhaps they will inherit your eating habits (stats do show high heritablity), perhaps it would be nice to show them how to keep it under control? You owe it to them. Why doesn't your spouse think that's a huge deal?
It's one of the few things in life where you are literally guaranteed to get a good result if you do what you're supposed to do. There's a lot of advice on how to do this or that, get rich or whatever. But you can never prove these things are guaranteed to work so I can understand if people have a hard time motivating themselves. With weight loss you have a 100% guarantee of success. Personally, I don't see it as some random little problem. Pretty much any effort in life looks like this. You want an outcome, you think of the necessary actions and then the entire ballgame is about actually implementing these actions.
Hilarious and sad that he couldn't control his own impulsiveness in typing that comment and yet couldn't make the obvious connection to what he thought he was criticizing in others.
> But it's always true that if you manage to eat fewer calories than your body needs each day you will lose weight.
No, not necessarily. Several studies have shown that different people can get different amounts of energy out of the same food, depending amongst others on their gut micro biome, though stress also seems to play a role. It’s never going to be that simple.
> the laws of thermodynamics won't fail
Conventional thermodynamics don’t work when you consider a full human, which is a very out-of-equilibrium and not-isolated system. Conservation of energy does not tell you anything about the efficiency of the energy extraction process.
> No, not necessarily. Several studies have shown that different people can get different amounts of energy out of the same food, depending amongst others on their gut micro biome, though stress also seems to play a role. It’s never going to be that simple.
Sure, so they just need to compute their at-rest calorie consumption differently, and from there the rest is the same.
> Conventional thermodynamics don’t work when you consider a full human, which is a very out-of-equilibrium and not-isolated system. Conservation of energy does not tell you anything about the efficiency of the energy extraction process.
This is like saying that even if you don't refuel your car it will never stop, because different cars have different mpg ratings. A human is indeed a closed system when you consider the works it outputs and the calories it ingests, unless I somehow missed a newfound capacity for photosynthesis. The fact that it might be a bit harder to compute calorie requirements than what might be naively done does not allow you to just dismiss everything else.
> Sure, so they just need to compute their at-rest calorie consumption differently, and from there the rest is the same.
Not at all, because different gut biomes are more efficient than others at processing some kinds of foods. Famously, some populations are more effective at processing fish than others. Really, "amount of calories" works on average, but people with food issues tend not to be average, otherwise they would not be outliers.
You cannot take any assumption for granted. If it were so easy, we'd have solved it. It's only very recently that we started to grasp the role of the microbiome, and we are far from having explored it all.
> A human is indeed a closed system when you consider the works it outputs and the calories it ingests, unless I somehow missed a newfound capacity for photosynthesis.
You missed a lot of things. Radiative heating and convective heat exchange, for one. Our body spend a lot of energy to heat up when it's cold, and try really hard not to do anything when it's hot. This works differently for different people; I tend to heat up fairly efficiently and I am very rarely cold; my GF is the other way around. Obviously, this is also environment dependent.
Plus, we eat all the damn time. How can you seriously be arguing that we are a closed system? Again the problem is not that it's slightly harder. The problem is that it is multifactorial, that we don't know all the factors, and that the importance of each factor varies with genetics, history, and the environment.
> The fact that it might be a bit harder to compute calorie requirements than what might be naively done does not allow you to just dismiss everything else.
I can get that some people have different satiety levels or have lower resting energy consumption, but this is just stupid. Unless you're running a nuclear reactor inside of you, there is a limit to how much calories/joules you extract by oxidizing things.
Yes, there is a limit. Efficiency still varies across people and types of food, enough that "you need to eat x calories" might be fantastic for one person and terrible for another one.
Even when running a nuclear reactor, there is still a limit, even though it is much higher than that of our puny built-in chemical reactors.
I don't know about anyone else, but I also feel miserable with low energy when restricting calories heavily. It's like my body would rather partially starve itself over of adding too much body fat to my "energy mix".
>>Several studies have shown that different people can get different amounts of energy out of the same food, depending amongst others on their gut micro biome, though stress also seems to play a role. It’s never going to be that simple.
Nope still that simple. Your claim just means those people need less calories in to be in a state of calorie deficiency
I told myself this as well, but as an anecdote: I started to lose weight from counting each and every calorie and never exceeding the exact amount my weight-trainer set for me.
What did I eat? Fries, Pizza, Chocolate, Burger, … still lost weight.
I've lost 90 lbs, achieved a healthy body weight, and kept it off for years, but I keep trying to lose just 10 more pounds. I only make progress when I'm religious about calorie counting, including weighing every meal or needing to do precise food prep beforehand.
That's such a pain in the ass that I inevitably fail and keep returning to my body's new average weight.
I think you're right about truly obese people. They're eating so many calories that they would lose weight if they could manage a better diet.
For people who aren't obese, the same principle may apply, but it's now a matter of much tighter margins and much greater precision, and it's remarkably difficult.
Natural bodybuilders seem to manage their weight with precision, so it's not impossible with knowledge and effort. But I suspect very few people are capable of managing that if they tend towards obesity to begin with.
Strange, I've found doing meal prep one day a week that you partition into fixed quantities for each day to be way easier than making a meal every day. I'm surprised you found it such a pain in the ass. It's a pain to setup and do the calculations that first time, but once you do it's fairly easy to maintain the routine.
I have a family. I could do meal prep for only me and eat separately, but I value eating the same meal with everyone. And I'm not doing meal prep for our entire family.
I do this sometimes for lunches, which we eat separately anyway. But that's only 1/3 of my meals.
This indeed makes it harder. If I wok some dish for 4 people and use 1 tbsp of olive oil, did I consume 1/4th tbsp? What if 2 of those 4 were kids, so I ate slightly more than 1/4th?
Over time it will even out. Also if you weight out the whole dish it's easier.
I'm assuming we're talking about e.g. rice dishes or stews, curries, etc. "one pot" dishes. Otherwise if it's like steak and vegetables, you can weigh each steak and the vegetables, do them in different racks of a steamer etc.
Sure, there are other ways. For instance using different dishes than the rest of your family to limit portion size. You can share most of a meal, but have a specific side for yourself, etc.
>Strange, I've found doing meal prep one day a week that you partition into fixed quantities for each day to be way easier than making a meal every day
I can't stand eating the same thing multiple days a week. Are you preparing multiple different meals for each day, one day a week?
Not to mention that it's never going to be as nice as a freshly-cooked meal anyway.
> I can't stand eating the same thing multiple days a week. Are you preparing multiple different meals for each day, one day a week?
There are some things I can eat multiple times, some things I can't. Chicken breast is one of my repeat foods. I'll do a few different dry rubs and bake a bunch at once, then all I have to do is pick which rub I'm feeling on the day, cut and reheat when making a meal.
You could see it as a half-prep plan: pre-cook and prep a bunch of base ingredients in approximately equal quantities, and when ready to eat, create some permutation in a few minutes so you have a half-freshly cooked meal that's semi-unique. My gotos were: eggs, chicken breast, tuna, permuted with quinoa, rice, kale, broccoli all sliced and/or diced in various ways to make one of a stir fry, salad, plate, or wrap, with varying hot sauces or oils to keep it interesting.
One day I'll do a wrap, another day chicken salad, another day I'll eat it as is on some quinoa or something, and I'll cycle through options like that that are easy to mix up on the fly. Making a meal to eat usually takes about 5 mins. Apply your programming mind to this like a permutation/optimization problem!
I liked most of the meals because they were tasty and hit all the macros, and with the work put in the gym I could see the results, so there was a great positive feedback loop.
Every meal doesn't have to be a culinary masterpiece, just like every coding session doesn't have to be a symphony of mathematical elegance. Some coding is just glue, and food is primarily just fuel.
i don't know... we don't deviate much from what we eat so it's really about that initial tracking and seeing the results. after that you can kind of "eye-ball" what you are eating. the hard part is just being brutally honest with what you are actually eating and tracking at the beginning.
tbf it's like any learned skill, it sucks at the beginning but over time it gets easier. when i started getting serious about my fitness i was tracking it meticulously but now i rarely do.
I find when I begin eyeballing things I inevitably start to get them wrong.
For example, apples with peanut butter is my favorite snack. I initially measured out and weighed the peanut butter, then used the same entry for calorie counting and eyeballed it for a while.
I eventually measured again, and I was eating nearly 50% more peanut butter than my initial entry! I imagine I probably added just a little bit more each time, because my brain really loves peanut butter.
I don't think I do this with proteins, but with carbs and anything sweet I definitely do. So I have to be very careful.
I somewhat agree. The issue though, at least for me, is that I can only "eyeball" somewhat reliably when I know what I'm looking at. So, when I eat something "new", meaning that I've never measured, all bets are off.
I'm thinking restaurant / takeout mostly. Because you never know what they put in the food. And the usual suspects of carbs and fat loaded with salt can easily throw you off if you don't pay attention.
Why? My sugar-free protein bars say exactly how much calories they are. I also eat some zero-calory fiber (psyllium), vitamin and minerals pills, a spoonful of fish oil, feel great and loose weight :-)
It is harder to count calories when you make your food at home from fresh ingredients, or go out to restaurants. Not that you can't, but it is both harder and less accurate.
Mostly. I believe the other things I eat per month account for the caloric intake an average person takes in a day or two and can this way be ignored.
I used to eat a lot of cookies until November but stopped as soon as I noticed (at the clothes store) I gained some belly fat. I don't want to switch my clothes size. I firmly believe any visible increase in waist size (unless attributed to muscle growth) is a strong sign I must lose some weight (by reasonably healthy means - I would hesitate to take incretin mimetic drugs, they seem risky).
For how long are you doing that? I'm skeptical that could be healthy as you would be missing a lot of essential nutrients like fiber, vitamins, minerals. Also the palm oi in the proteins bar being the only source of fat will imbalance your lipids. Concentrated whey protein powder (without added carbs) are cheaper and better than protein bars though it still is a supplement and not a replacement for real food. But you can mix it with oats, nuts, chia, fruits to improve taste and nutrition.
I feel exactly the way you do, and yes, I was fat, lost it in one go and never gained it back. I try to keep my BMI around 18, never went over 20 since losing weight. It's been around 15 years now. I still have the exact same unlimited appetite I have always had. If you put food I like in front of me, I'm going to eat it.
I don't do anything special. I eat the same foods I always have, just less of them. Got really good at counting and never get more food than I need. The trick is to not put yourself in a situation where you have to stop eating in the first place. It's hard to just stop eating something you want to eat. Not that hard to stop yourself from going to the store again or ordering more (especially when other people are around).
I feel like most people never get serious enough about counting, try to eat stuff they don't enjoy, waste effort on exercise or let other people interfere.