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Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?

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Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?

#51

Post by nradov »

One "weird" tip is to stop using heating and air conditioning. At hot or cold temperatures your body has to expend more energy on thermoregulation. Of course this may be uncomfortable.

Some people have reported good results with the Win Hof method for cold tolerance and weight loss. I don't think that it's ever been validated in a real randomized controlled trial, but there is at least a theoretical basis to believe that practitioners can learn to raise their metabolisms.

If you want to go the medical route, SGLT2 inhibitors have also shown good results and are well tolerated by most patients.

https://www.fda.gov/drugs/postmarket-drug-safety-information...

As others have commented, breathing pure oxygen is pointless for weight loss and will damage your lungs if you do it for too long.

Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?

#52

Post by AnEro »

arduinomancer wrote: post #40

Honestly the #1 thing that worked for me was not trying to do blind weight loss You need logging to be able to "debug" the weight loss If you don't have logging you won't have a good idea of why it didn't work if you fail Logging meaning tracking calories There are a lot of heuristics like avoiding food X, or intermittent fasting but these are all just proxies for eating less calories

This. it will help with alot more than you think. unironically started losing weight after bumping up my calories since I was going WAY too low thinking 1200 was fine. I was losing just as much and with no plateau with 2000(I'm very tall) until I lost more weight to justify fewer calories.

Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?

#53

Post by postalrat »

maxharris wrote: post #30

Sugar: the bitter truth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM When this first came out well over a decade ago, I completely changed my diet and lost 45 lbs. Since then I have kept it off, strictly through diet. My only exercise is walking, and I am not at all consistent about it. I am living proof that a correct zero-sugar diet alone works.

IMO healty food and reduced calories is all you need to worry about. Does it matter if you are getting a calorie from fat, sugar, protein, alcohol, etc?

Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?

#54

Post by gdfgjhs »

Since you asked weird tips, here are mine:

1. Video games are better than movies. When I played video games, I ate less snacks. Lately, I watch movies/shows with my SO, and end up gaining weight. But every once in a while I get a new game and every single time I end up losing weight until I beat that game.

2. Avoid unfit people. I have friends who worship food and alcohol, some of them are naturally skinny, so don't look unhealthy. But whenever I hangout with them for multiple days in a row, I end up gaining a few pounds.

3. And on other side of coin, seek environments with healthy people. When I was single, I spent a lot of time in gyms, coffee shops, chipotle, whole foods, etc mostly looking for a fit companion. As a video gamer, I never considered myself as a healthy person but slowly my identity changed and I became a healthy person.

Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?

#55

Post by gdfgjhs »

kleer001 wrote: post #15

If there was a weight loss hack like that that worked I bet it'd be well known. My weird tip? Flow state. Do something so compelling and interesting you forget to even care about eating. I've done it, but not consistently or for a long time.

Video games are where I forget to eat

Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?

#56

Post by spupe »

fatmoron wrote: post #10
spupe wrote: post #6

Your 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."

Sorry I was harsh before, I would delete my last comment if I knew how.

I used to be fat too and the only thing that worked for me was calorie counting. I hope you find some way to achieve your goals one way or the other.

Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?

#57

Post by PaulHoule »

nradov wrote: post #47
PaulHoule wrote: post #3

I 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.)

I lost 2kg when I got Omicron, I gained it back in the next month.

I had no fever though and I checked my temperature numerous times to be sure of it.

Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?

#58

Post by anotherevan »

I hate when weight loss comes up on HN because you always get multiple of the, "Eat less. Move more. Burn more calories than you consume," responses. Like, "Duh, never thought of that. Thank-you, thank-you! The scales have fallen from my eyes!"

The eat less, move more advice is like your typical Microsoft help manual. It's technically correct, but of little use whatsoever.

There's a huge amount of nuance going on. There's psychological pressures, hormonal pressures, food availability pressures and lots of other issues that I don't really want to list out as the ELMM zealots will just start arguing minutiae with a pronounced lack of compassion. It's too tiring and tiresome.

Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?

#59

Post by anotherevan »

Perhaps not that weird, but bariatric surgery. I had a gastric bypass in 2016 and am currently about 35kg lighter than I was when I started.

If I could go back and change things, I would have gone with gastric sleeving which seems to be the most popular (effective with less side-effects). Unfortunately it was not available to me due to a prior lapband.

Re: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?

#60

Post by mproud »

When you eat out (or even eat in), if you feel like you want dessert after you have a meal, tell yourself you can, but you have to wait 30 minutes first.

Chances are pretty good you actually aren’t hungry, and that after the wait, you’ll end up skipping the dessert after all.

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