I know food is everything, but is there been anything that helped you going down in weight other the food habits?
Stress helped me lose 20 pounds in three months last year ^.^
I wouldn’t recommend it.
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.
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!
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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
I prefer to eat two meals a day. It feels like a sustainable lifestyle instead of just a temporary fix. Normally, I have only breakfast and lunch. If I deviate from that by having something in the afternoon, my weight begins to increase gradually.
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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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:
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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.
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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.
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A bit more pricey, but shiratake is basically zero calories and comes in noodle, rice, or cube form.
Finding a brand of protein bar that you genuinely enjoy eating is a huge deal.
I have my preferred brand and when I have 1 or 2 I feel like I just had some chocolate bars, while its still a fair chunk of calories its also 50g of protein and not much fat or sugar.
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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!
Drinking much more water instead of diet soda all the time. I’ve never felt so hydrated and sated in all my life.
Removing the second “t” off the word “diett” will reduce its weight by 20%.
One extra tea.
Solves all problems.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah I love my Withings scale
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. 🙃
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
