Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?

There is a powdered food product called Keto Chow that you mix with heavy cream to scale up calories. Pretty easy to track calories with that.

I read that lifting weights for only 3 seconds a day has a positive effect. So it's not all about energy expended..

I don't know if what 16 year old me did will help you, but I solved my overweight with bulimia - forcefully throwing up after eating a chunk of food. I figured that I didn't care if my stomach was filled or not, I just wanted to eat. Once I ate, it didn't matter if my stomach was empty. If it was empty, I could just drink water and be fine for another couple of hours. So I would throw up all the food I ate on purpose, then drink water. Repeat this for 3 times a day, and you're going to sleep with only water.

The upside, I lost weight very, very quickly. The downside, I'm 21 years old, skinny, but still do it. It's like an unhealthy addiction, and it's a disorder that I don't know how to get rid of.

I think the ultimate weird tip for weight loss is the Shangri-La Diet[0]. Seth Roberts was a professor at Berkeley who pioneered quantified self, and he ran many experiments with N=1. While it didn't do much for me, about 50% of the people that try it have some success. I would skip directly to walnut oil if you try it, as the other oils are less palatable. Since I wasn't seeing any effect after a couple of months, I went back to using those 300 calories on food I enjoyed while losing weight.

Everyone on this forum should be familiar with The Hacker's Diet[1], a free book from the founder of AutoCAD with a very engineering orientation. I have been recording data into my free account at The Hacker's Diet Online[2] for four years, and I find the exponential smoothing very useful to turn daily weight measurements into the underlying weights. If you weight yourself every day, you can notice trends in a few days and make corrections, instead of catching a trend over a few weeks. Just be aware that something like 8.3lbs of "stuff" (food, water, feces) flow through your body every day, and there are major variations day by day. Don't panic just because your daily weight is up one day. And after awhile, if you are at least writing down what you eat (just the name, not weights) everyday, you will pretty easily predict your weight the next day because that list is rather longer than a normal day, or you had a big pile of french fries for lunch one day.

A few tips I use:

Eat quantized food if possible. Instead of sitting down with a bag of chips or a box of cookies, eat food that is always in the same size so you have to make the mental decision to eat more than one. Babybel cheeses, Snyder's 60ct box of 100 calorie pretzel packs, etc. work for me.

Weigh in every morning, naked, empty bladder (so the minimum possible for the day), and write that number down BY HAND. Do not use some automated app that saves you that mindfulness period between reading the number and writing it down. You will see a thousand messages today suggesting you eat. You must take some time everyday to think about what you weigh, and what you are going to put in your mouth. The food companies are counting on you not putting any attention on it. You must put regular attention on it, or you will gain weight.

Sometimes we have a minor craving for something sweet, but popping a cookie whenever that happens can blow the whole day. I keep jars of jalapeno relish and when I have an urge for something sweet, I eat a small spoonful of the spicy relish. I get the urge for something sweet in my mouth satisfied, but it is spicy enough that I'm not eating a lot of it. Walmart's Bread & Butter Pickles do the same for me: a few chips in the sweet/tangy juice and the craving is satisfied, and only $1.50 for a big 500 calorie jar.

Be very careful with fasting. It is a great technique if you manage to retain muscle tissue. If you fast without exercising, 25% of the weight loss is lean mass, which is an utter disaster for your health, especially as you age. Bone broth is high protein and may be a nice supplement while fasting. The more active muscle on your body, the more insulin sensitive you are and that mitigates the crashes from eating carbs.

Avoid potato chips like the plague. Since chips are dehydrated, you can eat an enormous number of calories at one sitting and not even feel full.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shangri-La_Diet

[1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/

[2] https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/online/hdo.html