Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?

Bike daily. Even low speed, it will increase energy expenditure a lot.

not weird. but skip breakfast. fastest way to lose weight.

Disclaimer : just posting this for the sake of discussion, not recommending the use, especially not in your condition.

There's actually a lot of stuff that's known to work for weight loss but it's illegal and dangerous.

There's the stimulants route which suppresses hunger and raises your metabolic rate. They used to put this shit in supplements and it worked but some people have died from this and long term health side effects are probably not good.

There's stuff like DNP which screws up your body's ability to convert food into energy and turns it in to heat - you feel like shit and you can die from cooking yourself - it's probably the most effective thing and doesn't even require restricting calories. This is the only thing that would be what some people hope for as the magic bullet transformation (maybe outside of surgical/lypo) - but the chances of you dying are high and you're completely useless while on it.

There's the steroids route - the immediate side effects aren't life threatening but there are a lot of complications (hair loss, gyno, acne) and potential long term health damage (cardiovascular, can permanently screw up your endocrine system and force you on lifelong TRT). With steroids you can lose fat while gaining muscle, depending on the compound/dosage even when eating a surplus, they rewire your metabolism. There was a study where giving 500mg test a week for 3 months to a control group that did no exercise outperformed the muscle development of a group of untrained men who followed a weightlifting program for 3 months (and untrained people have the strongest response to training). Steroids take a long time and give you medium effects (nothing like DNP for example), eg. the progress you would make with steroids and training in 3 months would be like the progress you made in 6 months if you were just training. But if you're older TRT is definitely worth looking into.

Having good insulin sensitivity and becoming fat adapted is essential if you want to avoid holding excess weight.

There is no secret hack for losing weight. The best thing you can do is limit food intake to 1 meal a day and cut your carb & sugar intake as much as possible. Basically you'll want to avoid things like sugary drinks, bread, rice, pasta, etc while eating more vegetables and meat. Doing this will lower your calorie intake while improving your insulin sensitivity significantly. Personally I also do a day without food once every couple of weeks, then once every few months I'll do a 5 day extended fast. You don't need to go this far, but there's plenty of evidence to suggest fasting is great for general health and insulin sensitivity so it's worth doing if you can. I can almost guarantee even if you don't get much exercise so long as you stick to a diet like this you'll drop to a healthy weight fairly quickly.

It's fine to have a cheat day (or two) every now and then because you need the diet to be sustainable. I find I have the will power to be very strict about what I consume from Mon-Fri then I'll allow myself to have a few treats on the weekend.

Also something you'll find when you become fat adapted is that you're way less hungry and much more mentally stable. When you're body wants a constant source of carbs you can only go so long before you're feeling hungry. These days I enjoy food, but I can easily skip a couple of days and feel fine. I've come to believe that what we think of hunger in developed countries probably isn't hunger, but just our bodies craving a hit of carbs. What I'm saying is that you'll probably find a low-carb diet very difficult for the first couple of months, but with time you'll find it gets much easier.

I wouldn't actually recommend it, but One Meal a Day Diet(OMAD) actually made me lose weight. It required less discipline than other diets. You have 1 hour to eat you calories and nutrients. After that you don't eat. There's no question if a snack is allowed or not.

You have to pretty smart and make sure those calaries are high quality.

It caused me issues in that its completely changed my appetite. And now that I've reached my target weight, I'm having a hard time keeping weight on even not doing OMAD. It was like hitting the reset button on my desire for food.