Skip breakfast and walk everyday. Not weird tips but they sure work.
Why not skip supper instead?
Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
381–390 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#382Check out this great podcast for some ideas https://youtu.be/GqPGXG5TlZw
He's a Stanford Uni professor
And focus on reducing your calorie intake. See https://www.science.org/content/article/scientist-busts-myth...
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#383I failed to lose weight for years via "eat less".
Eventually, I tried a diet from CSIRO which set minimum quantities of certain foods; 2.5 cups cooked green vegetables and 150g lean high-protein food (chicken, eggs, kangaroo, tofu).
It was genuinely difficult to force myself to consume those quantities every day, but I found it easier to follow "you must" than "you must not".
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
any unhealthy side effects of only eating one meal a day? what if that meal is 1800+ calories?
It's called OMAD (one meal a day), you can google it. In my experience, it's something you quickly get used to and has no negative effects (for me). You adjust and don't get hungry until the time comes (e.g. dinner). It's a form of intermittent fasting.
I've done periods of time on OMAD throughout my life and one thing that would always get me is sleep. I'd wake up (not necessarily hungry) much too early, regardless of the time of my one meal. One trick that helped me was to break OMAD, and have a little bit of a slow releasing protein in the evenings before bed. My go to was low fat cottage cheese. Once I added that I was able to sleep through the night again.
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#385Weird tips like that? No, no definitely not. Just eat less man. It's pretty straight forward. Just eat one meal a day (lunch) and you'll see the weight fly off. It's what I did for a bit and lost the weight quickly. You'll lose 5lbs/month easily even for people who have a relatively lean body mass already. (Easier to lose a lot of weight when you're heavier because your BMR is high to begin with) I've done it as some…
IF works really well for me. I've struggled for years with losing weight. I'm an extremely very picky eater with a sugar addiction and doesn't like to cook. I've had weeks where I would almost entirely survive on sweets: several king size candy bars, ice cream, soda. Hardly much else.
I run a lot, even ran a marathon. No amount of exercise did anything. Dieting is impossible for me. I'd rather run an ultra.
IF changes my eating habits. I don't know why or how but when I only have a short eating period I only want to eat mostly healthy foods. I'm inclined to drink water instead of soda which never, ever happens if I'm not doing IF.
If it's 8pm and I think I want ice cream I say "it's too late, but you can have it during your eating period tomorrow." And I mean that, I allow myself to eat whatever I want during my eating period. I just don't want to eat junk food somehow so as a result—I just don't have ice cream anymore and it's not a big deal.
That said, OMAD (for me it was 22:2) backfired a couple of times for me. It was too strict and I ended up giving up on fasting after trying it for just a day or two.
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#386Eating plain boiled potatoes for a week straight to get rid of your sugar addiction and normalizing your appetite. Relearning the difference between unable to eat more, full and no longer hungry. Add some pepper and salt and some plain veggies if you must. No sugar, no oil, no sauces no nothing. You wont be hungry, it will just be rather plain. If you have problems doing this, then congratulations, you just realized you are an addict. Which is why you do a withdrawal. Cheer up, there are a lot worse things to go on withdrawal from.
Other then that, nothing weird, its all very very simple and complicating it just makes errors more likely. You arent a perpetual motion machine. You need to eat your sustaining calorie level every day. If you dont, you loose weight till you starve.
At the end of every day you have either a red or green number for your kcal. So all you do is figure out how much you eat in a normal given week and see if that leads to an increase or decrease.
Next step is finding your daily sustaining calories level and getting some plan ability into your eating habits. The number at which you neither loose nor gain weight. After that you just reduce in which ever tempo you like. Figure out what the big ticket items are (looking at you cream) and figure something out which with you arent hungry. Dont aim too high too early there is really no need to torture yourself.
Its also important to not just diet but change your eating habits. Otherwise you just jojo back and will sooner or later reduce your sustaining calorie level this way. Which might make a reverse diet necessary.
Good luck and relax. This wont be any harder then you make it
edit: I didnt take my own advice of taking it slow and went from 115 to 75kg in about half a year (after my doctor suggested some "weight normalization"). That was very unhealthy so dont. But i am confident in it working. Its how you deal with any addiction. If you cant just quit, you get some structure and then reduce. And do it smart. There is zero reason to torture yourself, this does not have to be hard.
Also, thanks to my bodybuilding friend who explained the mechanism to me plain and simply.
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re suggesting a strategy that, empirically, is obviously beyond the reach for most people. That’s the mainstream method of losing weight. Every single person that’s wanted to lose weight has tried it, likely many times. I’m not saying IF is the solution, but it’s insulting to say it’s as simple as “diet and exercise”. If it was, 80% of Americans wouldn’t be overweight.
Fair enough. Although my intention wasn't to imply that it was easy in general, just easier than the suggestion I was replying to. In any case, the first step in losing weight is actually wanting to do something about it, as the submitter of this story does. You mentioned Americans in particular, but I think that the problem with obesity in the U.S. is a kind of its own. When even the bread is sugared, I think a sign…
Have you ever tried fasting? I.e., are you speaking from experience, or just from your preconceptions?
In my experience, fasting is far easier than losing weight by a traditional diet. Consider that your body is finely tuned to make sure that you eat very close to as many calories as you burn. If you consistently eat 400 calories less than it thinks it needs, it will ratchet up the pressure on you. It takes continual self control to eat almost as much as your body wants but not quite.
Fasting is actually a lot easier. Your body is designed to fast, just as it's designed to run. As with running, once you exercise those chemical pathways, the actual fasting part isn't that bad -- it's much less unpleasant than being slightly low-calorie all the time. And it's a lot easier from a willpower perspective to eat nothing at all, and then eat as much as you feel like, than to continually eat a little less than you feel like.
I feel like a lot of people are afraid of fasting because they think that hunger will be linear -- after 8 hours without eating they feel twice as hungry as after 4, so after 16 hours they'll feel twice as hungry again, and after 24 hours they'll be writhing in agony. It's not like that at all.
Basically, if you can summon up the discipline to run 2 miles regularly, you can summon the discipline to do a 16/8 IF fasting cycle; if you have the discipline to run 5 miles, you have the discipline to do a 36 hour fast (basically skipping one full day a week); and if you have the discipline that you can train your body to run 10 miles, you have enough discipline to train it to fast for a week. (The last one you'd obviously only do once in a while.)
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#388[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#389Regarding messing with your gas exchange: The body is well adapted to 21% O₂. If you flush the CO₂ of of your lungs (which you can do without the tank, just hyperventilate) you'll actually bugger up your blood's pH (CO₂ in water is carbonic acid), and you'll get pins and needles and nasty cramps in your hands. So probably avoid that. As far as weight loss goes, the only method that works is to modify your diet and de…
I've tried eating less for weight loss, but when I do I sometimes (multiple times a week) feel really low on blood sugar (break out in a huge sweat and feeling the shakes) and the only thing that helps is eating. (I've tested for diabetes and it's not that...) So on these threads that say "just eat less", is there a way of eating less while preventing that crappy, hypoglycemic feeling? (I exercise a lot, so I've got…
Have you tried a ketogenic diet?
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#390This will likely be buried in all the answers, but I'll try anyway.
I've recently read this here: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...
It's a long article series, but IMHO very worth it.
In it, the authors posit that the body has a "lipostat", like a thermostat, but for regulating body fat and weight.
If you are breathing pure oxygen and burning more calories, you'll just feel hungrier and eat more to compensate; if you don't, you'll feel sluggish and tired.
The authors also claim that the most likely cause for the obesity crisis is that some environmental contaminant causes the lipostat to be mis-adjusted.
That makes it pretty hard to deal with obesity, so the author's advise is:
* move to a high altitude, since contamination follows watershed
* avoid jobs that correlate with high obesity rates
* avoid highly processed food, since each processing step has the option to add contamination
I am not sure if all of this is real or some of it is bunk, but I found some of the arguments quite convincing, so I'd encourage you to read it and form your own opinion. (Do NOT just rely on my summary, it doesn't do the article series justice).