‘Breakthrough’ obesity drugs that have stunned researchers

That said, I red 3-4 dozen books related to weight loss, dieting, habit formation, nutrition, metabolism, diabetes, etc. and countless articles and youtube videos. I made notes of various topics that seemed important and repeated rather frequently and then tried cross-referencing to find which ideas are bunk and which seemed to be well supported.

Starting the process, my goals were to overdetermine the success (ie. do a bunch of things at the same time to ensure success) and to build understanding of topics to the point where I can see how everything fits together and builds confidence I know what I am doing.

Here is an unsorted list of ideas from my memory that I think helped me the most:

* building habits and prepare for what to do after achieving target weight is super important. Weight loss time should be spent learning right habits, building habit chains, discovering/learning healthy dishes, etc.

* managing family is also super important -- if your wife and kids have habits that will collide with your goals they can become worst enemies of the progress achieved,

* become healthy to loose weight rather than loose weight to become healthy -- focus on identifying and fixing health problems and weight loss should more or less come as a consequence

* it is better to do 20% of effort for 80% of benefit in each area rather than try to perfect any one of areas at the cost of others. Don't plan to become an athlete -- it is enough to jog every day for half an hour at comfortable pace. Don't plan for perfect diet -- it is enough to eat "healthy" most of the time. Etc.

* it is better to learn and get to love new, healthy foods and add them to your diet than to try to remove unhealthy things you love. Add new foods/dishes and let them slowly displace bad ones.

* commit to eating a portion of fresh fruit and vegetables, every day, however small. The goal is to build habits so that there is always fresh fruit/veggies at home, so that you automatically search/reach for them at the grocery, so that you have opportunity to test various things and learn new dishes.

* commit to doing any amount of exercise every day. As above, the goal is to build habits, not to become an athlete. The first thing I did was to improve my fitness to the point I could be jogging every day.

* don't start all changes at the same time -- introduce enough delay for each change to get accustomed and to be able to properly focus on that one change

* I found intermittent fasting (4-6 hours eating window, 18-20 hours of fasting) to be probably the single most important thing to improve health and loose weight. It also has benefit of being sustainable and can be additionally combined with calorie restriction and/or keto.

* The best eating window is probably somewhere in the middle of the day. There needs to be enough time before going to bed so that significant portion of fasting happens during sleep (aids recovery) but not too much or it might cause cravings in the evening and make it difficult to adhere.

* I found there are various easy strategies to decrease blood glucose ofter a meal that do not require making huge changes in diet: reduce carb intake during meal, precede carbs with protein/fat, precede carbs with any kind of acid (deactivates enzymes and further reduces blood glucose after a meal).

* A physical exercise like a walk immediately after a meal helps purge blood sugar. While exercise itself does not make the body any less insulin resistant, the effect is as if insulin was more effective.

* I found prolonged fasting and/or keto diet to be good temporary solutions to various problems. After some research I would probably not advise anybody to stay on keto for very long, but spending some time on it gives you superpower of metabolic flexibility, and this ease of being able to hop on and off carbs without ill effects greatly helps with being able to adhere to intermittent/prolonged fasts.

* Carbs make you crave more carbs. If you have problem with hunger while restricting calories, probably the easiest thing you can do is to cut carbs temporarily.

* You probably don't need to get on keto diet to get most of the benefits. MCT oil in morning coffee is enough to generate ketones to stimulate mitochondria to multiply and waste more enrgy.

* The main benefit of keto is that it is darn hard to eat so much fat and cutting carbs suppresses (unhealthy, extra) hunger.

* Running at easy pace (easy = you can still talk easily) for at least 20-30 minutes regularly is ideal to cause mitochondria to multiply. Mitochondria are your friends when loosing weight because this is how your fat gets turned to heat. The more mitochondria you have the easier it is to burn through fat.

* Running at any higher pace or for much longer probably is not advisable. The benefits are incremental but a risk of injury grows significantly making it absolutely not worth it from purely health/weight loss perspective.

The often-cited studies suggesting Inuit populations were protected from heart disease (Bang and Dyerberg, Feldman et al) comes from limited data which has since been refuted as unreliable and insufficient. The hypotheses they generated don't hold up to the greater balance of data we have, and despite attempts to confirm findings, it simply hasn't happened.

Some studies have suggested to a lesser degree that Inuit populations have marginally smaller rates of coronary artery disease (and other cardiovascular complications), but far more have determined that rates are the same or in some cases/time frames even worse, and risk of stroke has generally trended higher as well. These are all incidents of mortality which have a very, very high correlation with diets which are high in animal fats (as well as salt, regarding strokes).

Here is one very good look at this type of data, and if you look you can also find others: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25064579/

I agree that obesity is a major issue (especially in the case of sugar; it appears less harmful to the body when the sugar is needed and thus used immediately, but harmful when it hangs around and gets turned into fat. This is the main cause of the surge in fatty liver disease, for example), but there is very little and often very poor evidence that obesity is what causes atherosclerosis to occur and become a mortal danger. It seems to be dangerous regardless of weight, and exercise doesn't appear to be wholly protective against it either.

Inuits have actually served as a good example as to why this is true. Even when their obesity rates were lower, their lifestyles required more activity than average, and when studies accounted for BMI, their CAD rates were still on par with western populations according to most data.

I take Metformin (not for diabetes, but weight and age) and my doc has never said a word about alcohol. A quick google suggests the possible bad interactions are diabetes related, so probably not applicable.