Anon figures out how dieting works

For weight, yeah. It's still unhealthy for many reasons but if you only care about weight that'the thing that matters

It's far better for your health to be a healthy weight and unfit than to be overweight and unfit.
- OTOH, if you eat a lot of shitty food, it can very well be the case, that you just get enough essential nutrients by the sheer amount of food you're eating. That would mean that by cutting the amount without changing what you eat, you'd get into malnutrition.

Yes, you can eat the same shit. Only way less, though.

Yeah, it is not easy.
We seem to have primarily high calorie foods. The reason people change diets to get some low calorie ones that keep them feeling full.
Another thing, but perhaps not as much related to losing weight is that food doesn't exactly work like most people think i.e. it isn't that we consume something then we get energy from it and then we excrement it. In reality our body absorbes the food and uses it for other functions. So unhealthy food still affects us negatively.
- Most people don't realize we loose weight by breathing, not excrements. You breath in O2, you breath out CO2. Same volume (since gases have more or less the same volume per molecule), but 37.5 % heavier. That's how you loose weight.
- So what ist better, eating too little or eating unhealthy?
Or the same quantity and start being active, much more likely to keep up with it long term as well.
- You can't outrun your fork. If OOP had 150lbs to lose, it's unlikely he could've continued eating the same amount and burnt that weight off.
- The problem about being active, is that the moment you stop you'll put the weight right back on. Most people don't take up going to the gym for decades, it'll last a few months, maybe a few years. Long term weight management needs to be about food intake.

I almost literally lost forty pounds eating nothing but buffalo wings

And then I turned into a vegetarian

Sorry chickens, ty for your lean protein (before they Buffalo'd it), I put it to good use

What do you like to cook?
- I figured out I was less interested in the meat than I was in what made the meat actually taste good, your buffalo sauces, barbeque, etc, and just did the same thing I was doing but with tofu and broccoli.
  When I first started I was all about these weirdo "secret tricks" to get tofu to "taste like meat" but I quickly figured out it just wasn't worth the effort for my tastes and stuck to pan frying or raw tofu afterwards.

Someone I look up to more convincingly said the same thing. I scoffed but he knows what he’s talking about.

I lost so much weight so fast—during the beginning of the pandemic no less—by only staying beneath the magical number everyday.

How do you calculate the calorie maintenance number¿?
- 2200 is about expected maintenance level for a man that does normal daily activities (going on walks, cleaning around the house and so on).
  If you currently maintain your weight with whatever you're eating and drinking then calculate how much calories there is in what you're currently eating and drinking (average for the week) and cut that by 500 a day to lose 1 pound a week.
  If you're increasing your physical activity as well then take that into consideration, it's much more healthy and effective in the long run (in most situations) to just continue eating the same but to start being active, this way you're not taking anything away, you're adding something to your life.
- It doesn't much matter how accurate your calorie estimates are. If you estimate that your daily caloric requirement is 2500 and you're eating 2000 calories a day, then you should be losing about one pound a week (1 pound of fat = 3500 calories). If you find instead that your weight is remaining constant, then either your caloric requirement estimate or your caloric intake estimate is wrong (or both are). In either case, your only option is to eat even less, per your measurements.
- I used the same awful but free (with option to upgrade but no need) app the guy I look up to used (and it also knows how many calories I burn in activity during a day). It even has an awful name, but the results are amazing and it already has a ton of the foods I eat in it and it gets easier to use with time.
  MyFitnessPal: https://myfitnesspal.com
- Don't bother with apps, many website even certain official healthcare sites will have info about food calories, even some calculators and the intake for your age/weight/gender/etc. It seems that if you're biologically female you're kinda screwed though, my partner had much harder time getting 1/10th of result I was getting.
  When it comes to counting food calories, you don't necessarily need exact numbers for raw ingredients and that info is out there, for anything else check out packaging and add it all up per day.
- The answer to your question is to calculate your BMR, or basal metabolic rate. It's an approximate calculation based on your sex, age, height, and weight. Your BMR is the amount of calories you need to maintain life when completely sedentary. If you only eat that number of calories, and do ANY physical activity, you will begin to lose weight as your body taps into your reserves for energy.
  There is more nuance, but the simple math is calories in vs calories out. If you have a deficit, your weight will decrease. People counting calories to lose weight generally target their BMR minus 200 to 500 calories daily, though 500 is a bit much in my experience.
- You kind of can't. Caloric intake from food varies by person, as does energy use. You can use a calculator for a ballpark measure and then see how it works out for your weight.
  Type of food can also matter, because depending on your stomach bacteria, you will also get different energy value from different foods. I thought an easy way for me to lose weight would be to stop eating sweets (since i prob averaged around 500kcal nominal value per day), but nope I ended up gaining weight, probably from eating slightly more normal food. What I found works for me was delaying each meal for longer so I end up eating one large and one smaller meal per day. Going to bed slightly hungry then I usually wake up not hungry and it takes a few hours before I feel the need to eat something, etc.
  I even once lost weight drinking about 2 liters of choccy milk per day but eating a lot less regular food, though I wouldn't recommend that because that much sugar is terrible for you anyway. Far worse than being a bit overweight, probably.

Fun story. 12 years ago I lost 80 lbs with keto. 4 years ago I quit keto for convenience because grad school. Gain 10 lb/yr since.

January this year I started keto, didn't lose an ounce in 2 weeks. Eat less via IF and portion control but still keto, start losing. Eat a carb meal but still IF and portion control, still losing. Now I am on a standard ish diet (more emphasis on protein, more restriction on simple carbs) with portion control and gradually losing weight.

I tried dieting like this in 2010 but it "didn't work". In 2012 keto worked great but in hindsight it was likely the forced restriction and eventually calorie counting. Now that I'm good at calorie counting, CICO works great.

That's the thing with keto though. Being in ketosis doesn't make you lose weight on it's own. It just makes it way easier to eat less because you don't spend all day feeling hungry.
Losing weight is also just more difficult as you age

I wish I could just eat a pill once a day marked with desired bmi and forget about eating and focus on real stuff instead. I can barely hit 17.7 bmi even with some huel powder in a cup that is a hassle to wash. I want like 20 bmi to not look like a stick but it is hard to remember to eat that much

The part of this that sucks is that one day this shit just stops. Went from skinny stick figure constantly being told to eat more and put on weight while eating SO much, then I hit 35 and all of a sudden I'm 15kg overweight and sporting a nice double chin.
- Barely ever eating and still gaining weight must've been amazing a million years ago when there was no food but it's the bane of my existence now.
- I'm going to look good forever
  a 33 year old
- Sorry if this comes off as a aggressive, but ive yet to see any of the "changes in an instant" things people say actually happen. For example, before you know it 10 years has gone by! Or yours, suddenly your belly just pops out!
  When I gained 80 weight like that, it was very easy to point to the steps along the way. Its also important to realize how long it took to gain weight, as it can affect how quick you think you can lose it.
  I'm almost positive its just people not paying attention. If its important to you then pay attention to it. If it was so unimportant that it seemed sudden, was it really that important to begin with?
  Is it just people suddenly caring about something that they didnt for their whole lives and having to deal with all of it at once?
Skinnies rise up. For me I just don’t take the same kind of pleasure in food that friends do, even my slim friends will fight to finish every meal where I’m like nah bro I’m full why would I force myself to finish it.
So often think about how cool it would be to just get a food pill.
- Or we are permanently depressed or smh and not enjoy simple things as much as we could that’s a thought that is in the back of my head sometimes.
- Same for me dude
If you're able to you should try working out. It increases your appetite. I went from ~18 bmi to ~23 after I started weight lifting and look a lot healthier now. It also took care of a lot of the random aches and pains I had.
- Yeah I really need to. I spent a year trying to keep some working out routine. It’s so easy to slip and forget about it. I usually wake up and like wtf I had this healthy routine everything was nice but then some activity/project/idea absorbed me 24/7 for few days and it just evaporated like it never existed. Whether it was learning German, blender or drawing or suddenly writing scifi or warhammer painting or music making or playing guitar or physics learning etc… it is always few days of being utterly lost in that thing
  There’s no constant things ever for me but just a repeated cycle of relearning the same thing again and again. I keep enormous collection of tabs on my… developments but forget to come back to them too. I hope they stay somewhere in my subconsciousness
- I reasonate with this. Giving up smoking also helped my appetite.
- Apparently Lemmy uses as a markup symbol, so by sure to escape it by putting a slash in front like this !
  Fucking hell I can't get it to format right....
  Something goes wonky if you have two in one paragraph....
Working out made me take almost 10kg over 6 months, and even after stopping I did not really lose much (well the muscle turned to fat surely). Might be worth exploring. Am slightly above 1.80, and was below 70kg

TBH a single Big Mac meal is 1350 Cal, so if you're an adult 5'9" male and dieting then that's already your daily limit.

It sucks but you've basically gotta choose between taste quality and quantity.

You can have nutritious, filling meals that taste really good without excessive calories, you just need to learn to cook. It's also a hell of a lot cheaper than eating fast food all the time.
- Yeah, the best bread I've ever had was the one I made last week. I use a focaccia recipe season with rosemary, sage, dried onion, dried garlic, and parsley. I sometimes stuff it with mozzerella with a touch of asiago and parmesian cheeses and Jalapenos, but alternatively I can make it into 2 slender loaves rolled in the cheese and jalapeno for sandwich bread. For soft crust it's a wash made of egg and water applied every 11 minutes until the cheese on the outside starts to darken, but for hard crust it's water or oil applied at the start and halfway through. It's important to make sure every ingredient is room temperature at the start, including the egg.
  That aside, we're discussing anon getting to eat McDonalds by only adjusting the amount, so please try your best to remain on topic.
If you're dieting you're probably overweight so the limit might be a couple hundred calories up.
Also if you skip out on the soda you can lower it a bit too.
- Yes, switching to water can drastically reduce the calories in my example.
  Daily Calorie use starts at around 2100 for a male 35 y/o at 5'9" and only goes up with physical activity. The number I cited for a big mac meal, 1350, is basically a consumption limit for dieting. Extreme diets go as low as 850 or even fasting. You can in theory still lose weight by consuming any number less than 2100 but the effectiveness will be hard to see and there will be a margin of error in nutritional labeling for calories.
Yeah, that is why vegetables especially are good for dieting. Low on calories, but full of fibre, which makes you feel full for a much longer time. A burger meal is full of carbohydrates and fat, and you will soon feel hungry again a short while after eating it, regardless of its high caloric content, simply because it lacks fibre.
- Some veggies are actually calorie negative.
The Mac alone is 563 kcal, and that easily fits. Ditch the fries and soda.
- Yeah fries and soda are an easy ditch. The burger is where it’s at.
In the past I've been able to lose weight by limiting myself to 1 meal a day + exercising but its really terrible that all is what it takes to stop gaining weight. The human body is too goddamn efficient to the point it's fucking everyone over.
- Have you considered changing DNA expression so you produce the correct beta-metabolites and develop fast-firing neurons? /s
They have smaller calorie options on the menu. A mcdouble is like 400 calories.
- If you think a McDouble is a considerable replacement for a big mac then you're in the wrong neighborhood.

Literally did this last year and lost like 50 lbs doing nothing and being lazier

Felt like an exploit

you should eat better food though. you will feel better

I dunno man. My neighbor is a big ass boi and his wife is a smoke show.

Maybe try getting a personality

Alternatively, having a lot of money also works.

Technically yes. But fewer calories can also come from eating different things that just earn you fewer, and adding a little activity can increase your caloric budget.

It’s a lot like saving money, but backwards.

- Eh... Depends what kind of activity and your previous activity level. Just the fact that you're adding muscle mass means you're burning more calories even at rest. My maintenance went from 2500 to about 3200 just by starting to lift heavy shit and doing an hour of cardio 5 days a week.
  What people don't realize is that they start eating more because of the activities they do and they end up not losing weight, but in the end it's still much more beneficial than not doing activities and just cutting calories and contrary to going on a diet the odds of keeping the benefits long term are much higher as it's something that makes you happy instead of making you feel bad.
- I hear this, but don’t think it applies for people who get into sports. My story is not common, but I get annoyed when people talk about how a non athlete could never make a significant difference in their caloric output.
  I fell in love with dancing, started doing it fourteen hours a week, lost thirty pounds without really trying, and had to start eating a lot just to maintain.
  If you’re young, not overweight enough to seriously tax your joints, and that sounds fun to you, see if there’s a kind of cardio that’s enjoyable for you. If you do end up getting into it, check with your doctor, because heading straight into ten plus hours of cardio a week can cause injury.
- If you’re going from completely sedentary and low muscle mass to putting on even a fairly modest amount, it’s going to have an impact on your metabolism. Nothing to something is a big step.
  With that said, abs are definitely made in the kitchen. It’s not going to fix a poor diet.

When I was a teenager I went on an extreme fast, down to one meal a day, for a 6 week period. Problem is, I struggled to eat a normal amount again after the time I set for myself. I had to go to a food therapist after becoming a twig to try and get my calories up again. Even now, years later, I can easily slip back into eating a bag of crisps and then forgetting to eat the rest of the day.

What made you struggle to eat more again? Your fasting sounds like my normal diet.
- Trying to eat more again made me feel ill.

I envy the people who can diet by just eating less. That for me is a path to intolerable hunger

Only limiting carbohydrates has worked for me, and I had to increase my meat intake just to ensure I have enough nutrition, with the little you want to eat on low carb

I could never sustain a restriction like this without modifying what I ate. It would have a profound effect of how soon and how much I was compelled to eat next. Once this was very clear to me after dozens of attempts at weight loss, I began to cook and eat for satiety. A low-glycemic, minimally processed diet free of added sugar is what worked best for me long-term. I lost 115 lbs, resolved diabetes, hypertension and non alcoholic fatty liver disease. Also vastly improved some other chronic problems. I've remained at a healthy weight now for 23 years with little variation. A lot of effort really and likely not possible for everyone -especially now. I can say it was worthwhile for me.
The steely resolve of CICO will only take a person so far. In my view that's why it's so unsustainable for most.
- Why do you think it is especially difficult to follow this diet now? I keep trying to implement it myself but find the high effort required difficult to sustain, given other demands on my attention and will power.
I replaced meat with a protein shake
- I don't think a protein shake will have the nutrients actual meat has though. It's really hard to get the nutrition you need on a serious weight loss diet and any food substitute isn't going to cut it. To add, I'm over 40 with a history of dieting (I have tried all them), so I doubt I started this with full reserves of a well fed 20 year old
Low carb diets have been consistently shown to only cause short-term weight loss, followed by even greater weight gain if the person even bothers to adhere to the diet long term in the first place. This is in addition to the fact that low carb diets lead to a lower lifespan.
Calories per 1 gram of macros- Carbs: 4 Protein: 4 Fat: 9
https://www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition/nutrition-information/the-carbohydrate-advantage
- Indeed. Atkins made me thin, then fat again. I think the problem was that it was too easy to eat too little, making it hard to stick to long term
  More meat has fixed that for me. I have been successfully losing fat over the last two years just by making what I eat mostly meat
- Also, what does it matter that there's more energy per gram of fat versus carrots? Your body knows when it has enough energy* and you stop being hungry. Consider 19th century explorers eating pemmican (made of 50/50 fat and dried meat - they avoided the versions with berries and sugar) they would eat tiny amounts - less than the meat in a McDonald's cheeseburger as a days food, despite the fact it hardly filled their stomachs
  *Though on high carb your body will say it wants ~~more~~ all of it, since carbs are only available briefly in summer in history so you want to eat as much as you can. As a bonus, carbs from plants are half fructose and the fructose is turned to fat directly. You want to save some summer energy for winter

Dude lost a whole girl in weight.

In this thread: A bunch of Dunning-Kruger effect

You don't need to have a level 200 IQ or 20 years experience to work out that eating less is going to help with weight loss.
- Yet there's a whole bunch of people who can't understand that increasing the number of calories you burn without increasing how much you eat achieves the same result.

Yes. People who just cut out anything "bad" are suckers. But exercise certainly helps, too, and gives you some leeway.

I think it’s that he had 150 lbs to lose. If he’d had 20 lbs to lose, it wouldn’t have mattered as much.

For me to drop from my high of 205 back to a working weight under 180 it took lots of travel for work where I was away from my munchies for 3 to 4 weeks. The first time I got down to 185 in Brazil and then a trip to India got me down to about 170. I quit drinking soda pop, and started eating more fiber and no sugar for breakfast other than the raisins and dates in my muesli and quit eating bagels for breakfast as much. A T-bone accident on my motorcycle 18 months ago left me with a bad leg/foot so I'm a lot less active and loss a lot of muscle weight. I'm down to 155 now. I was 145 when I got out of the Marines 40 years ago

Losing 25 pounds is vastly different then having to lose 150 pounds.
- Absolutely, and 25lbs is half of the 50lbs I lost in 3 years. I've never dieted, I just changed the way I eat to get to my healthy weight

Technically this is true, but in practice strict calorie deficit diets don't work for most people. To be in a calorie deficit state is a state of starvation, and most people's entire biological drives rail against it. What usually happens with these kinds of diets is the person will do well for a time, but the constant starving will drive them to either start unconsciously sneaking in more sources of calories, or they'll outright rebound into eating even more than they did before.

Sustainable weight loss ultimately comes down to living healthy by default.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventist_Health_Studies

https://thankful2plants.com/obesity/21-tweaks-by-dr-greger/

https://nutritionfacts.org/book/how-not-to-diet/

The problem with losing weight the healthy way is this. Go look up how many calories you burn per hour on various types of exercise. Now look at how much calories different food has. That's a lot of time you have to give up just for exercise. I have a hard time justifying eating lunch for example if I'm going to have to exercise for 2 hours to burn that off. I don't doubt there are all kinds of good reasons to not attempt to lose weight via restricting food intake but at least it's passive and it does sometimes work for some people.
- This. It's an absolute joke to lose weight through exercise. "But you can't sustain deficit forever" well duh I never said I want to disappear. Lose the weight, then learn a new maintenance normal.
- If you burn calories (exercise), and eat the same calories as before, you are in a calorie deficit. (The same as if you just eaten less).
  If you eat exactly as much calories as you need to you can tecnically transform fat to muscles, but its really hard and you need to almost count every nutrient.
  Most ppl reduce it too much and risk a rebound. Just eat 50/100 calories less than your daily burn rate and you are on the way. (It's not really fast, but steady)

The alternative is getting a tattoo or buying branded clothes and accessories /s

Considering the usage of lbs and the picture of MacDonalds, it's likely OP is American, so he should try eating less ultraprocessed food and sugar next.

Except metabolism will slow to counter lost weight it happens too fast.

If it you it to the extreme, sure. But the foundation of losing weight in any context is calories in calories burned.
I tried to get my dad to stop drinking soda for years when I was growing up. Dude drank 8+ cans a day. He finally quit drinking soda, and was for some reason surprised when he started losing weight. Changes as simple as that, just ordering a size down of what you normally would when you do esst fast food, etc. all can add up big time.
- I just recently learned about liquid calories and why are they dangerous when you care about weight.
  For those who are not aware. A liquid will be processed very quickly by our body. For example you get your favorite soda that has 150 calories your drink it, and your body processes it quickly, you urinate it but the 150 calories stay with you and you feel hungry again really soon so you eat another meal to fill your stomach.
- 8+ cans a day
  Jesus yeah that's 1600 calories right there. Conservatively lol. Talk about a liquid diet.