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Reading the labels on junk I'm tempted by helps me. That much sugar, really? How many calories?!? Palm oil, ugh. And wtf is pentasodium triphosphate?
Also, when I buy a bag of carrots, I peel them and put them in the fridge, so when I feel snacky I can munch a crispy carrot.
Step One. Count all of the calories you eat in a day. Check that nutritional info, do the math, add it up, see what you're eating without leaving anything out.
Step Two. Try to minimize sugar, carbs, and bad fat, while maximizing protein and fiber. My go-to daily meal plan is steel cut oatmeal in the morning, sweetened with baking splenda, pinch of salt, and cinnamon. Intermittent fast through lunch with coffee. Dinner is open face (so only 1 slice of bread) turkey sandwiches, Black bean soup spiked with tobasco and extra black beans. For dessert, make a big ol bowl of banana cream or vanilla pudding with skim milk. Find a meal plan that works for you, you don't have to eat the same thing everyday, but have that back-up meal plan ready to go in case you don't feel like making something different.
Step Three. Don't inhale your food. It takes your body 20 minutes between attaining a "full" stomach, and your stomach alerting your brain to that fact. Thus, pacing your food is important. How to do that? PUT THE FOOD DOWN. If you pick up your sandwich, eat half, then put it back down, take a drink of water, then you can finish it. Have a big ass glass of water with every meal. I also buy baby carrots, you can get a nice 1 lb bag, and in between dinner items, eat a handful of baby carrots. They're crunchy, full of water, and help you pace yourself through dinner.
Step Four. Go for a walk after you eat. A little bit of exercise, even a walk around the neighborhood for a few minutes, is enough to to tell your body that you want it to take all that energy you just took in, and use it immediately. You're telling your body "Hey, don't put all that energy into long term (fatty) storage, make it available, and of use right now."
Step Five. Add in Exercise at your own pace. Start with something manageable, achievable, and then make it routine. Whether that means walking your dog instead of just letting them out into the yard, start small, build at your own pace. Make it a daily habit. (Pro-tip, whenever you feel like skipping a day, tell yourself all you have to do is get dressed for the exercise and do it for five minutes. if you do that much and still feel off, you're allowed to take a rest day. The majority of the time, once you get started, you start to feel better and end up doing it. the key is getting dressed and putting yourself into the position to do it, even if you allow yourself to stop. just keep putting yourself into position to succeed with your new habit.) This also works as an effective daily anti-depressant.
Step Six. Reward yourself for achievements. When you start these things, your body will respond, and you will feel better, more confident, sexier in your own skin. Celebrate with some new clothes that let you show it off. Feel good about it, it's something you earned!
Step Seven. Allow for cheat days. This you can do every week, every two weeks, whenever you decide. If you find yourself going hard-core on the diet and then crashing into a food frenzy, it's because your going too hard, and need to allow for a cheat day. Be kind to yourself if you break your diet on a miserable day, and use that as information to consult when scheduling your next cheat day. The long term goal is to reorganize your thoughts around food, and having specific times when you let yourself go whole hog on a bag of Oreos or whatever, lets you recognize that behavior as a reward, or special circumstance, and not a daily activity.
Congrats, you're now feeling better, looking better, and those two facts will reverberate through the rest of your life like ripples through a pond, making you happier and healthier.
Diet Hacks!
Want to lower your LDL? (you shouldn't want to do this)
Want to lower your uric acid? (you shouldn't want to do this)
Want to dramatically improve your HBA1C before a blood draw?
Want to reduce your blood glucose levels dramatically? (do this)
Food Dietary Advice:
If your not in a rush, any whole food diet (no factory food), will work for most people
If you want to reverse a problem, a ketogenic diet (no sugar, no carbohydrates) will help you claw your way back to normal in steady consistent steps
If you have no time to waste and need to drop fat now... Go full carnivore
Diet Tips:
If you have gout you definitely need to lower your uric acid levels.
That's true, but the root cause of gout is carbs and fructose and alcohol. Lowering uric acid when gout is acute makes sense, but long term you want to get off the sugars and alcohols.
https://studyfinds.org/gout-genetic-fingerprint/
I don't have access to the actual text of the study but gout is primarily genetic and not solely the result of diet or lifestyle.
Quotes from the paper https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-024-01921-5
Over recent decades, the incidence of gout has steadily increased, largely due to lifestyle factors such as diet, obesity, and metabolic conditions
The paper also indicates a global rise in gout going hand in hand with the rise in global metabolic dysfunction.
Having looked at the paper, it good, really good... but the genetic factors are for a population in the current metabolic context (high carb diets, poor metabolic health). Some people can tolerate the modern food landscape really well, and those people don't get gout (hence this paper). But just because people's genetics are intolerant of the current food landscape, doesn't mean they HAVE to get gout.... It can be avoided, by cutting out carbs, fructose, and alcohol. So even if you have a genetic sensitivity that leads to gout, you can simply not eat the foods necessary for the condition.
Here is the full paper: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.07.25321834v1.full.pdf
Right below that it says
Genetic factors play a crucial role in the development of gout, with several studies highlighting its strong hereditary component. Twin studies have demonstrated a strong genetic component in gout, with heritability estimates reaching 60% for uric acid kidney clearance, 87% for uric acid-to-creatinine ratios, and 28% to 31% for gout itself.
And also towards the end
While observational studies have often linked alcohol intake with gout, our MR analysis suggests that this association may be confounded by other factors or may not represent a direct causal relationship.
yeah, 100%. Not everybody gets gout, there is clearly a genetic profile that can develop gout... in the current metabolic context, and the modern diet.
People can't control their genetics, they can control their metabolism, and their diet.
Fructose has uric acid as a byproduct of its metabolism [86]. Fructose induced hyperuricemia has a pathogenetic role in metabolic syndrome [78,87]. Higher insulin concentrations, associated with metabolic syndrome, reduce the renal excretion of uric acid [47,80,88]. Uric acid is an inhibitor of nitric oxide synthase, [78] which is the catalyst for nitric oxide, critical for circulatory and immune homeostasis.
Reducing circulating uric acid concentrations is one of the mechanistic components of improved blood pressure control that is observed with a reduction in fructose intake [89].
Here are the references
All of that is to say elevated uric acid is not the root of the problem, its a symptom of the core problem.
I would add that weight loss is a simple math problem. Calculate your rough TDEE with an online tool, then eat a little less most days, with the occasional normal diet day. Calories In < Calories Out = Calories Burned. (But not for too long, because it can become unhealthy)
But great list otherwise. Thank you for the little cheat sheet.
The CICO model isn't helpful to most people.
I strongly think we need to stop telling people about CICO. It's a thermodynamic model, not a clinical model.
It's much better to use the insulin obesity model, it's a clinical model - https://hackertalks.com/post/7617450
Basically we are not Bomb Calorimeters. You can eat uranium with billions of calories and not gain weight. We are hormonal machines, which have amazing homeostasis feedback already built it, we have to eat appropriately so those systems actually work.
An illustrative example: if you want to lose 1lbs in a month you have to eat 30 calories less per meal. Nobody is going to measure their calories that accurately, not to mention food labels can be 25% off the exact amount.. which means every meal you are eating +-208 calories.. (on a 2500kcal day diet).
Saw dad lose a cannonball of a beer belly. He had run into an old friend and was embarrassed by how fat he had become in comparison. Asking his friend how he lost it, John replied:
"Easy Bob, I just brainwashed myself into thinking being hungry was a good thing."
You're not telling yourself food is bad, that way lies eating disorders. You're simply telling yourself that being low-key hungry is a normal state of affairs for a homo sapien. Because it is a normal state of affairs. Stop horking down pork rinds every time a little hunger pings you. Fucking ignore it, go on. That behavior can become a habit.
People see my skinny ass eat like a hog and marvel at my "metabolism". No, hard no. I only put calories in my face two, maybe three times a day. Zero snacks, zero soft drinks. (OK, time to fess up. Many calories from beer. There, I said it.)
A long time ago, i decided to myself there are people starving all over the world. Maybe it's okay if I occasionally feel some mild hunger sometimes, and that helped a lot when I decided to actively drop. I still eat snacks, but it's zero while the sun is up. Then at night I can easily add up my meals and know how much chocolate I can have, which is a critical nutrient in my book, especially paired with peanut butter.
Fill up on vegetables instead of carbs. Eat dinner mid afternoon instead of evening, and exercise, even if just a long walk, afterwards.
Removing the second "t" off the word "diett" will reduce its weight by 20%.
I went vegan and bitch is skinnnay now, although it's not why I did it. Also low fat high carb, NOT keto, but just paying attention to your carb intake, and having a diet high in healthy fats will keep you full. Keto is for specific genetic epilepsy syndromes and not good for anything else no matter what people tell you.
Drinking much more water instead of diet soda all the time. I’ve never felt so hydrated and sated in all my life.
Keeping track of calories while also cutting out all snacking during the day, so that at night I know what sweets I can afford to eat.
Ding ding. It’s a math equation
And now I barely even have to keep track. I've gotten to know roughly what I'm consuming, and with some exercise thrown in, I've kept the weight off. Just being mindful was half the challenge.
Stress helped me lose 20 pounds in three months last year ^.^
I wouldn't recommend it.
Sorry to hear about that, friend. I really like your shares. All the best, matey. <3
That's not great, I hope life is treating you well now. Keep up the good work here! I love your history posts especially. ❤️
Wait until you find out about terrible stomach viruses! I did that in about a week. Silly hospital had to rehydrate me with all that water weight, but I still came out way lighter!
One thing the diet industry hates:
Fasting. Hard to make money off not eating food.
It's also highly effective and safe so long as you educate yourself properly before beginning.
I did 14 day fasts with an electrolyte slurry, psyllium husk, and multi vitamins. Take a month off, eat well balanced meals, repeat until goal weight. I lost ~15-20lbs each fast doing it a total of three times to hit my goal weight. Each time is less, because the daily caloric requirement to maintain your body decreases with your weight.
After that, I started gym/weight training.
edit: and never eating junk food or drinking sugar ever again. That includes fruit juice and dairy milk. Unsweetened Coconut "milk" for me now. Processed grains massively reduced too. Basically, flour. Honestly flour probably inflated the waist line for me more than sugar.
So I'm a physician and I support most things people do to import their health but I do try to make sure they're fully informed. In terms of fasting, this cohort study found an adverse association between fasting and cardiovascular death. There are limitations to the study (self-reported diet, etc.) but it followed 20,000 people for 8yrs which is pretty good. Definitely need more study in this area, especially considering the complexity of human metabolism. Here's the highlights from the study but the full text is available at that link:
- People who followed a pattern of eating all of their food across less than 8 hours per day had a 91% higher risk of death due to cardiovascular disease.
- The increased risk of cardiovascular death was also seen in people living with heart disease or cancer.
- Among people with existing cardiovascular disease, an eating duration of no less than 8 but less than 10 hours per day was also associated with a 66% higher risk of death from heart disease or stroke.
- Time-restricted eating did not reduce the overall risk of death from any cause. An eating duration of more than 16 hours per day was associated with a lower risk of cancer mortality among people with cancer.
It's a interesting poster, but look at those error bars!
I wonder why the pre-study ratios of CVD and Cancer were much lower on the 8 hour eating window population?
I did 3 extended fasts, it's not a permanent lifestyle change for me so I don't think that info is relevant to me, more so to the other person who replied with intermittent fasting. Or people who permanent adopt stuff like OMAD.
I eat three times a day.
Fasting. Hard to make money off not eating food.
FFS, don't give them ideas!
Now with exclusively made for you daily AI motivational messages! 2 months free if you subscribe annually. Fast better, fast with your wallet!
;)
Yes, came to say fasting. Start with intermittent. Work up to OMAD (one meal a day). Then push it further out to 48 hr. plus depending on your weight, with just water, vitamins, electrolytes.
Autophagy is an amazing benefit of it to look into as well. Kicks in hard around 48 hrs, depending on how much sugar and carbs you have to burn off. Which is also why a ketogenic diet is good when you aren't fasting.
Green tea, coffee, tumeric are good at stimulating autophagy too, if you want to dirty fast
Heha, I'm scared, but I'm also interested! (frankly)
Cravings wear off fast. Especially if you are not dry fasting. It's actually easiest after the second day or so if you are getting you electrolytes
I’m very, very susceptible to addiction, but the thing that makes it easiest for me to curb a habit is to pretend I’ve already moved past it. If I think about junk food, I intentionally think of overly sweet, salty and artificial foods and (internally) express my distaste. With smoking, I think of the smell of an ashtray in the rain; with drinking, I think of cleaning up day old beer with a hangover.
Saying “I don't really have a sweet tooth” is what made me lose my sweet tooth.
This is very good strategy. Like the infamous "fake it till you make it". But actually vocalizing it makes it even more powerful.
If anyone remembers the movie Closer from 2004, there's a scene where Clive Owen's character refuses a cigarette while almost failing at it. He settles it with a phrase: "I've given up.". You can see he is not completely sure about that, but now that he said it out loud, he made it true.
Our lizard brain can be beat by our monkey brain, we just gotta use our monkey brain bits.
You have to figure out a diet you can comfortably maintain forever, eat for your target weight. It's no use just losing weight, you have to stay at a healthy weight.
So it's going to be individual. For me, increased activity is the only factor, apparently I eat the same all the time. So walking everywhere or adding extra exercise works better.
I had a friend who lost weight by just reduced portions - she literally just took 1/3 less of everything. Like left more space on her plate. And another who ate popcorn for supper. Regular breakfast, regular lunch, then in the evening just popcorn. So again was eating 2/3 of what she had been. But then you have to keep it that way to maintain the weight.
Plain oats with chia seeds for breakfast (no more than a teaspoon of honey[real honey from bees or don't bother] because you still need to enjoy food). Table spoon on Saturday
this is dependent on your budget: Bananas are cheap AF. Eat one whenever you have a craving. Drink a glass of water, eat a banana, then take your supplements (fish oil and multi v) in the morning after oats
2a) Apples/pears/berries. An apple can kill a craving for sweets so quickly. Plus the fiber will clean you out. Other fruit is more expensive and goes bad quickly. But seriously apples can help to be one of those fillers in your diet
Tea. If you don't drink black coffee, switch to tea. No need for sugar and milk, tea is pretty good on its own. More importantly, it tastes just as good cold
Drink water. When I get up in the morning, I try to drink 1 1/2 pints of water. Then start breakfast. Just walked the dog? Chug a pint. Out of the shower? Slug a half pint. Cooking lunch? Drink a pint before you eat. Yes, you will pee a lot. But you skin will look better and you won't have those moments of "shit, I need coffee" A pg* a
Rice and Beans. Make one pot a week. Use oil instead of butter. Lots of beans. Chop up one large onion. Put equal parts quinoa to rice. Last a while and you can spice it or add hot sauce. Use it as a filler for eggs or chicken or whatever
high volume food with low calorie density. Need a snack? Rice cakes, to raw carrots and celery, pickles, cucumber, . Chips and salsa is a good one
cries in irritable bowel syndrome
Great advice tho
I was also gonna say fasting, intermittent fasting to be specific, and cooking at home more. But it seems that’s not answering your question because it’s a “food habit”. So instead, I would recommend:
Sugar substitutes. Yes they can make you gassy/poopy. It’s trial and error to find the right substitute and right amount to use, but once you get it, you’ll be able to avoid a ton of sugar. For example, a teaspoon of stevia on my coffee is fine. Monkfruit instead of sugar but only half as much for savory dishes works for me. Allulose for home made ice cream is fine as well. And so on.
Eat water-rich food to make you feel full but not consume a lot of calories. Celery and cucumbers are good snacks and can be paired with other food.
A bit more pricey, but shiratake is basically zero calories and comes in noodle, rice, or cube form.
Eat less. It sounds obvious, I know. But prepare your meal as normal, divide it in half and put half in a container in the fridge. Eat the other half, then distract yourself for half an hour. If you’re still ravenous, heat up the other half and have it. But you probably won’t be. And you’ve got your next meal ready to go!
Weigh your portions. Especially on things like pasta.
What the pack says is a portion is unlikely to be what your eyes think is a portion.
Weighting every day at the same time. Using a smart weight that logs the measurements. Using software that smoothens out the readings, so you don't stress about day to day changes. Don't want to advertise, but combination of Withings scale and trendweight website works great for me. And ultimately, combination of fasting and exercise is ideal for me. Every calorie spent and every calorie not eaten helps.
Enjoy experimenting with cooking and food prepping a lot more to find new healthy Staples you like with more vegetables, protein.and healthy fats (edited). Eat more fermented foods. Don't buy junkfood/sweets, cook or bake healthy versions of junkfood instead. But avoid artificial sweeteners, they mess with your gut biome. Add less sugar to things. Just look for zero added sugars on packages. Bam, easy. 🙃
Weigh yourself consistently (i.e. same time, same outfit) - I find it easiest to do straight after jumping out of the shower in the morning, post-poop and pre-breakfast, but ymmv. And the important part, record it. I have smart scales, which makes life easier, but absolutely not essential. There's something very motivating about watching the line go down - and will quickly highlight if you're on the right track, or if you need to cut back a little more.
Not eating works pretty well, though I understand it's probably harder for someone with a desire to eat.
I halved my weight and I still eat plenty (even chocolate, pastries or things like that, just... a lot less and never industrially made), I replaced me eating shit (literally, industrial are feeding us shit) by me eating actual food (and enjoying preparing it), and I also retook control my body, muscles and joints, by starting to move it... like it is was designed to. We're not designed to sit on a couch or in front of computer all day long (be it to work or to play).
The timing of the day in which I eat certain things. I lost 15kg over a year just by cutting sweets and carbs after 4pm. I still ate them, especially in the morning.
And talking about morning - "breakfast like a king, supper like a beggar" also contributed to that weight loss.
Nowadays I am not strict but whenever I see myself going over my weight I first take those two measures up before making any calorie cuts
Edit: although these are food habits, so I don't know if it really answers your question. Exercise is the other thing that helps, you don't even need a lot of it
