As with many posts like this, it feels somewhat obvious that "stay active, sleep well, track your weight and calories, and don't go back to eating garbage" are pretty well understood. That said, this is an excellent summary of the research and underlying principles.
I think the real challenge with significant weight loss is in being consistent and maintaining those things, which everyone is pretty silent on.
Mental health and stress levels are the #1 factor in essentially all of those things and deserve more focus in the context of major lifestyle change. You emphatically cannot just willpower through a major change for the rest of your life, and given that, you have to find ways to reduce the active cognition component to a low-effort automatic cognition process.
Setting yourself up for success through organization and routine, avoiding being around situations that cause overeating, not purchasing and keeping in stock foods that are problematic, peer and family support are all things that make a huge difference.
This is so true. The mental pressure your body brings to bear to try to reestablish the old equilibrium, and the emotional energy needed to withstand that mental pressure until your body accepts the new equilibrium, are incredibly hard realities of weight loss.
Unfortunately, when you mention these realities, people react very negatively. They say that if it's hard, then it's unhealthy and you're doing it wrong. They preach that it should feel easy and natural, as if that's a path forward. It isn't. It's the end goal, and the path is long and hard.
I think the thing is that different people are, well, different.
I talked about this a few weeks ago[1], but for me losing and maintaining weight actually is quite easy. I foresee no problems maintaining weight going forward because I managed to do that for 25 years without really paying much attention to it, and can easily identify the source of my weight gain. Even losing weight is just a few relatively simple adjustments to my diet.
But the reality for other people is very different.
Because I never had problems with my weight before I never really paid much attention to any of these discussion until a few months ago. I've been a bit surprised at the amount of aggression in some of these discussions at times (including on HN). It seems to me that people with different bodies and experiences are just talking past each other, and in addition to that there is a section of rather unpleasant people who are so high up on their moral high horse that they've become hypoxic.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44554154
> But the reality for other people is very different.
"Food noise" is the term people use nowadays.
Basically I'm always thinking about food. Always. It's a source of dopamine for me - I have others, but food is a constant.
It's like trying to get off a drug, but you still need to take that drug 3-5 times a day to not die.
Then there are people for whom food is just fuel. They can just ... stop eating. Or eat less. Food doesn't give them any pleasure, it's just a thing they have to consume to not die.
Changing the composition of your diet will do much to quiet this noise. If you’re eating a high protein diet with lots of fibrous vegetables, you will likely end up eating more food with fewer calories overall. And this type of food is very satiating - sometimes to the point that lack of appetite can be an issue.
> Food doesn't give them any pleasure, it's just a thing they have to consume to not die.
There are very few, if any, people like that; almost everyone enjoys nice food. The major exception being people with eating disorders.
A lot of this is mental. It really helps to deliberately shift your identity to match your target weight. Instead of thinking of yourself as a 220 pound person who has forced themselves to 180 through deprivation, you think of yourself as a 180 pound person who eats what a (healthy) 180 pound person would eat. The old lifestyle and food choices are something you have to detach from because they are gone forever. If you don’t do this, you’ll continue to feel as if you’re in a transient space, and that increases the lure of familiar old ways.
Agree 100%. The best time to lose weight is making good choices during the 30 minutes you spend grocery shopping each week. Much easier than try to make a healthy choice every minute of every day at home.
I think "tracking your weight and calories" is useful, but only if you track it right.
You could look at just raw numbers, but IMHO, first you want to be tracking for you, how many calories it took eating X to achieve satiety / feel not hungry.
Then, hopefully, you can figure out how to meet your daily calorie needs/goals in a way that you don't feel hungry all day. It's hard to stick to your plan when your body is telling you it wants more.
People's hungry signals are different, which is why one size fits all advice doesn't work. Personally, if I ignore my hungry signal for long enough, it goes away; this sounds like it might be good, but then I get all headachey and grumpy because I haven't eaten and there's no signal telling me to eat; so I've got to use my analytic brain for that (but it would rather take a break because I haven't eaten). Some people I describe that to think I'm crazy ... if they don't eat, the hunger signal just keeps getting stronger.
I mean, sure. But doing it poorly always comes before doing it well. So, the best advice for people that aren't aware of how much they eat is fine to start at anything basic. Probably the more basic the better. Though, as you note, that will be different for different people.
That last is notable. I agree that personal signals are very different between people. But so is basic capability to track things.
What is truly obnoxious here, is that what works for you will also not be static. Expect that what worked for you now will someday not work.
True across the board, and unfortunately the average lifestyle promoted here on HN is one of massive, unavoidable stress, both inside and outside of work.
Fixing your diet is one of those sort of flywheel problems. It takes time to figure out what's both healthy and palatable for you, time and freezer and/or refrigerator space to do meal prep, time and energy to work out, and so on.
All of those are skills that are hard at first. Even with YouTube, you don't go from "burns water" to "Michelin star bodybuilder meals" without a lot of practice.
The better you get at all of that, the faster and easier it becomes, until you hit a point where it's just "how you live", and all that energy and time are again free to pursue other things.
If you have money, sure, you can outsource a lot of that. Zuckerberg has a personal chef and dietician, as well as a handful of dedicated personal trainers guiding his fitness regimen.
But most of us can't afford to invest $250k/year or more into that problem.
I wholeheartedly agree that mental health and stress levels are the primary determiner in whether you'll succeed with maintaining a good diet and an exercise routine. Just to make things more complex, though, my experience after two years of daily workouts and strict dieting is that exercise, eating clean and sleeping well are the primary drivers of good mental health in my life. It's absolutely a feedback loop. If you set yourself up for success, you'll tend to spiral upward as your metabolism improves, your sleep gets better and your blood sugar is no longer the primary cause of an emotional rollercoaster. Conversely, if you think that you can make the base mechanical changes without re-engineering your entire life you're not very likely to succeed and your success will plateau early.
In recovery, particularly AA, there is the concept of a "dry drunk" who is, eli5, a person who is trying to quit using by simply not using anymore and not examining themselves or their surroundings to determine how they ended up there in the first place. Addiction as a disease is a good model for empirically researching treatments on a population scale but for an individual in recovery it's much more effective to realize that addiction is who you are and the process is about changing yourself, not just being the same guy but without the drug. When I got clean I had to quit my job, ditch a lot of my friends, totally reengineer my life because staying clean is a matter of moments that could break one way or the other and the best way to ensure they never break the wrong way is two-pronged: you maximize the odds of you making the right choice and you minimize the number of times you have to choose.
This idea also works for diet and exercise: a gym membership is good, but an exercise bike in the basement means you don't have to go through all the intervening steps between "I should work out" and actually doing the thing. By the time you've started to try to talk yourself out of it you're already doing it. It's easy to eat cookies and hard to eat celery. But it's easier to eat celery from your fridge than it is to go to the store to get cookies. All of these things help you make choices that support your goals and not make choices that are detrimental to them. Eventually those choices go from efforts of will to part of who you are. I'm not fat me having a salad, I'm the guy who eats salads. I'm not checking out the gym, I'm the guy who works out. I'm not just not high today, I'm Sober and so are all of my friends. I'm a Sober man and a member of a Sober community.
I wouldn't just describe it in terms of mental stress, but in terms of physiological free energy.
I find that the less I eat, the more I need to sleep and the less energy I have for cognition. I also get sick more easily (less energy for the immune system no doubt).
However I have the opposite problem of being underweight.