Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?

Eat less food!

Forget exercise for now.

  -Buy a scale and count calories scrupulously.
  -Stay under 1800 calories/day while you're trying to lose weight. Every calorie counts. Count them all.
  -once you reach your target weight, you can raise it up a bit (probably around ~2200/day if you're an average male)
  -make sure you measure and weigh everything you eat and DRINK
  -stop drinking alcohol (too easy to add unaccounted calories)
  -stop eating out
  -stop associating with overweight or obese people
  -never do a "cheat day". Every calorie counts
  -drink water and black coffee if you need caffeine. (Some of those starbucks drinks have 600 calories in them. Don't do it!)

You'll quickly learn to put together a menu that satisfies you at this calorie level. Example menu:

   - breakfast: two large eggs prepared in 1/2 pat of butter (210 calories) and one slice of toast (100 calories) = 310 total
   - lunch: chicken breast and a vegetable (330 calories)
   - afternoon snack: apple or banana (120 calories)
   - dinner: grilled fish or chicken and beans (400 calories)

Given that you explicitly ask for a weird tip: stop eating normal food, instead eat/drink Plenny Shakes from Jimmy joy, or something similar. It does not have to be for every meal, just be sure to do it consistently.

To share a bit of my personal experience: I was not especially fat but with a BMI "overweight". But since last year I started eating/drinking Plenny Shakes as my morning meal every day (for other health reasons than losing weight). Without changing anything else to my lifestyle I lost something like 6kg in ~8 months. And I actually enjoy drinking their shakes so it doesn't even feel like a task.

All the best in reaching your goals!

I've lost weight with Noom too. It has the usual things like tracking food you eat and weight but more importantly, it has a strong psychological component to address why you eat. It doesn't shame you into never eating pizza or chocolate, it reframes your relationship with food. I'm not sure if it is setting things up for long term success but it does work in the short term. It focuses a lot on foods that contain a high percentage of water which makes them less calorie dense.

Oddly enough, I've found that weightlifting is completely contrary to my weight loss goals. Lifting makes me ravenous, often in unpredictable ways, which makes it much easier to overeat.

I'm trying to lose a little weight, so after ten years as a huge gym rat, Im currently going once a week just to keep my body functional. It now feels almost trivially easy to eat few, healthy, small meals. Combined with fasting every few days, the lbs are just melting away.

People get mad when they hear this, but:

A) Obesity is HIGHLY heritable. Tons of twin and adoption studies prove this. The correlation between the adult BMIs of adopted (non-related) siblings raised in the same household is virtually zero. This means that parenting practices have no long-term impact on body fatness. The correlation between the adult BMIs of biological siblings raised in different households is strong, though.*

B) Virtually all attempts to lose weight eventually fail. "Eat less and exercise more" essentially doesn't work as a long-term weight loss intervention, because very few people are able to comply with it over the long term. The one exception is gastric bypass surgery, which does reliably produce long-term weight loss. There are some new medications that show promise, but it's too soon to tell if they'll work permanently.

*People will inevitably say "how can obesity be heritable when it's increased so much over time? Americans used to be much thinner!" But the same is true of other highly heritable traits, like height. In some Asian countries, people are six inches taller than they were 100 years ago. Nevertheless, height is heritable. Heritability exists within a specific environmental context, and our environment is much more conducive to obesity than it was in the past.