Exercise extreme self-restraint at the supermarket and then take it easy at home. Related: Never go to the supermarket hungry.
Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
41–50 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#42I never tried this, but I've read multiple times (can't remember where) to use chopsticks for ALL your meals. This will generally increase how long it takes you to consume (i.e. more time for the "I'm full message to get to you brain").
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#43The Ramequin trick. The one thing that worked best for me: only eat out of a small container. A small ramequin bowl works best. That alone will make you eat less, and you won't really notice it. In fact, you'll feel like you ate more. Eating exactly the same food, but in a small container. Went from 90kg to 75 in less than a year. Now I'm back on regular plates, but I make sure I pour the amount that fits in that ram…
This is a good idea. Similarly, we use dinner plates that are more like appetizer plates: 50% the size of a "regular" dinner plate.
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#44A few years ago I finally managed to lose (and keep off) about 70 lbs after years of trying and failing. I think understanding nutrition is the biggest tool you can give yourself, which echos what most of the others here have said.
Track your calories for a few days. For me what was really helpful was trying to do the whole if it gets you the macros "diet". You should avoid thinking about it as a diet though. Diets are things people do briefly to lose one or two pounds and tend to be things like Atkins, etc. You're looking for a lifestyle change.
Understanding what you currently eat is hugely helpful in this. I went through a phase where I weighed everything I ate with a food scale and entered it in to MyFitnessPal, aiming for 50% carbs, 20% protein, 30% fat and a loss of ~1 lb a week. Pretty quickly I started to find myself surprised at things that in hindsight seem very obvious: fibrous veggies have very little calories, and especially if you steam them or prepare them in a reasonably healthy way, they can make you feel full without going over your daily calories, oils are incredibly calorie dense, 93% lean ground beef is much higher in fat than you think it is, etc.
Paying attention and tracking your calories for a few weeks is a great tool at understanding your current habits and how you can make an avalanche of small changes. Cutting out one can of soda every day is the difference between losing .5 lb a week and maintaining your weight.
You don't have to do the calorie tracking forever - within a few weeks I'd started to make small modifications to a lot of recipes that I cook or things that I eat out to make them much healthier.
Also, get a good scale that does BMI and measure your weight every morning after you go to the bathroom but before you eat anything. Ignore small daily changes, you're looking for the trend over a week or so. Seeing your progress in real numbers helps immensely at keeping you on track.
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#45Smaller portions. Eat whatever you want, just eat less of it. One of the best ways to do this is to avoid restaurants, or at least set aside half of the portion as soon as possible and save it for later; restaurant portions are insane, even at "healthy" restaurants. Get used to feeling a little hungry in the hour or two leading up to your next meal, and after a little while your stomach will shrink and you won't want…
A great way to do that is too use smaller plates. The mind is pretty easily tricked; a small plate overflowing may lead to feeling fuller than a large plate sparsely occupied. Not as much of a weird truck, but I agree it's also great to avoid eating out if you can. I've developed a few meals that I can prepare very easily (sometimes within just a few minutes), are decently satiating, cheap, and not unhealthy. Luckily…
Yeah, good point about dishes. Weirdly it seems like even dish sizes for home use have been inflating over time
My go-to easy lunch meal is just some sliced cheese, some crackers, and a good-sized piece of fruit. The fruit fills my stomach, the cheese provides some protein and combines with the crackers to feel tasty and satisfying
I also want to emphasize the "eat whatever you want" aspect. It can be quickly demoralizing to try and give up all of your comfort foods; for me it was really helpful to be able to keep all those in my life and just get used to a new normal when it came to the amount
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#46Hack your lizard brain. The easier it is for you to sneak a snack in the easier it will be for your rotten monkey brain to grab for it. Pro-tip: Don't put a box of milanos on your kitchen tabletop. Put it on the tallest shelf behind all the god damn condiment bottles.
Or don't buy it in the first place. If you do, throw it away when you get home. Hopefully you'll quickly get disgusted by this waste and stop buying it.
Absolutely! I would not purchase outright. But I have a wife and children, it makes it hard to not buy these things.
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#47I got a psychogenic fever and lost a few kg in a week that didn't come back https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27227051/ If you hit the right buttons in the sympathetic nervous system you activate a special population of fat cells that seems to thermalize fat without the fat cells fighting to get it back afterwards. I don't think it's reproducible because the level of psychological stress required to make it happen is e…
Many COVID-19 patients have experienced significant weight loss. Anecdotally that seems to be correlated with having a fever for several days. Patients aren't able to eat much, and seem to be burning a lot of calories just lying in bed.
https://www.clinicalnutritionjournal.com/article/S0261-5614(...
(I am not recommending catching COVID-19 as a way to lose weight.)
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#48Get on stimulants ;) – this was initially meant ironically, but going on lisdexamfetamine for binge-eating disorder is what fixed my weight issue.
Nicotine also works well as an appetite suppressant.
IMHO nicotine is the most efficient weight loss aid beside meth and it also dampens productivity decrease which is possible to experience if you don't eat enough. But there obviously are downsides.
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#49Your theory is quite illogical. Your premise is wrong - where did you get that estimate? -, but more importantly your fat cells aren't going to start dissolving if your blood has slightly higher oxygenation.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/26/health/lose-weight-where-does... "You exhale the carbon dioxide and the water mixes into your circulation until it's lost as urine or sweat. If you lose 10 pounds of fat, precisely 8.4 pounds comes out through your lungs and the remaining 1.6 pounds turns into water. In other words, nearly all the weight we lose is exhaled."
If you read your own dubious source, you will see that your method has no way of working.
Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the only correct answer. I've put on, and lost, 25 lbs probably 8+ times in my life (intentionally). I weigh 180 at my heavier end so that's a meaningful percentage for me. Depending how disciplined you are able/want to be, the easiest and most consistent way is to count calories. If you don't want to be that strict, then just cut either your portions by 1/4 or remove a meal/snack that you estimate to be 250-…
I managed to lose about 10% of my body weight with calorie counting in a few months. I was quite happy. But it made me generally very hungry and I gained almost all of it back within a year or two. I guess it only works as long as you don't stop calorie counting.
I think the idea is that once you've been counting long enough, you know the reduction that you need to make intuitively. Of course weight will come back if you revert to old habits, but I don't think counting calories forever is necessary.
If you're hungry between meals, eat low calorie density foods like broccoli and drink water. I realize that's not exactly as fun as eating doritos, but it's how sustainable change happens. Fad diets never work because they are by definition temporary.