I’m currently a lump of chocolate and cheese, but once the new year hits, I’m determined to make 2026 the year I finally get back to a healthy weight (I’ve lost about 20 pounds, with about 80-100 to go). I’m pretty good about exercising regularly, but, as they say, abs are made in the kitchen. Those who have successfully lost weight, is there anything you particularly recommend for maintaining a calorie deficit to lose the weight, and then avoiding gaining it back later on?
Count your calories and see what isn’t worth it. Usually the best thing to cut first is liquid calories, when I realized I could basically have another meal a day if I quit soda, it made things a lot easier.
I guess the most important thing would be to focus on lifestyle changes. You can have a super strict diet for months and lose tons of weight, but if you don’t incorporate that as a permanent change, it can be easy to gain it back while not in “diet mode.” Smaller changes that you stick with perpetually are better in the long run, even a 100 calorie daily deficit will eventually see results.
Also perhaps get a kitchen scale for portion control, this kinda ties in with counting your calories, but after I started measuring meals it was also easier to not overeat.
Last time I got serious about weight loss, I just counted calories really aggressively. It worked.
But my diet was boring and eventually I got tired of depriving myself, so I stopped. I gained back some of the weight, but not all of it, so that’s nice.
It also helps to not be constantly depressed and stress-eating through the fall of democracy.
I just skip breakfast and lunch when I’m trying to lose weight. Your body gets used to it after a few days and doesn’t send the same hunger signals.
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OMAD or IF works really well for a lot of people. What you eat and when you eat are critical, not just how many calories are going in and out. CICO is far from the whole story when it comes to metabolism and your endocrine system.
I once lost some weight not by focusing on what not to eat, but by making myself eat a large salad for lunch. I forget what order things went in, but at one point I was eating a lot of home made fermented vegetables (cabbage mostly with others things in the mix, so basically kraut) mixed with romaine to dilute the sourness. At another point I would buy the sort of thing I previously ate for lunch (like a sandwich) and eat only half of it, chopping it up and mixing it with my salad. I ate whatever for dinner.
I wasn’t trying to lose as much weight as you, I realize. But I think for some people, not focusing of deprivation / but focusing on something I like “I will eat this quantity of these vegetables” and letting the fullness from that reduce the amount of more caloric stuff you eat, can work better.
I love fermented veggies! I never thought to make them at home. What’s the process like?
Basically stuff chopped cabbage (I like to add some carrot, onion, maybe some herbs… garlic, ginger and chillis can make a kimchee-like flavor) and salt into a jar or crock and leave it for a few days. It will naturally ferment and acidify. The salt favors desirable beasties, as does the acidic pH that will develop.
The only tricky bit is you need to keep the veggies submerged in liquid to keep things anaerobic. The salt will usually draw enough liquid from the cabbage, but you can add water if necessary. There are various devices people use to keep air out: glass weights to put on top, airlocks like used in beer brewing. IMO the easiest thing is a fido jar: the kind of thing with a gasket and metal clamp on the lid. The fermentation produces CO2 and that will force the O2 out through the gasket, and a blanket of CO2 will keep the veggies safely anaerobic.
Thank you so much ❤️
You could try intermittent fasting.
In my experience, there’s an impulse to eat that can be curbed if you aim for foods you can chew on without outpacing your calorie count.
The classic is celery. Carrots, apples, and other crunchy foods all work pretty well, too. I can nosh and sate the raw impulse to eat without feeling like I need to starve myself at actual meal times.
For bigger meals, soup is a favorite dish. Lots of fluids leave you full. You can have the flavors you enjoy without housing an entire slab of meat.
For my sweet tooth, Japanese candy tends to have less sugar than the American stuff. Mochi is better than a candy bar. Pocky is better than a box of popcorn.
I straight up cut soda and beer out of my diet when I’m focused on losing weight. (Really, just ditch soda entirely, or go to the flavored seltzer water - it’s awful for you).
After that, it really does help to count the calories. When you know what you’re eating, your logical “is this worth it” brain can temper the base impulses of the “I just want it in my mouth” animal brain. I hate counting calories, because it’s annoying. But making the things that are hard to count annoying to keep track of also helps to focus my diet back onto foods I’ve got memorized and are low calorie.
When I cut out soda and other sweetened beverages for water, I lost 13 pounds in less than a month!
I never buy snacks or treats in my usual weekly shop - once in while I treat myself such as buying a box of stollen for Christmas… and even then I share with my family. Switching to unsalted/flavoured nuts and fruit after meals helped a lot.
Another thing is getting into the habit of intermittent fasting. At least three days a week, I only eat dinner in a 24hr period. This definitely isn’t for everyone - I only happened to get back into it noticing I was putting on weight working from home through COVID however there are other versions like 16/8
Don’t focus on what you can take out. Focus on what you can add. So like if you live instant ramen. Make a half pack and add bok choy and a soy egg or something. Kylie Sakaida on YouTube (actual dietician, dunno all her credentials) focuses a lot on this and gives examples. Changed my life and lost maybe 30 lbs just by following that train of thought.
For me meal prepping is big too. Make a bunch of something on Sunday when I have time and divvy it up throughout the week. My wife can’t eat the same stuff as much so I freeze some now and pull something out from a previous week. If you plan it out right you start building variety of your favorite stuff in the freezer for easy meals you just throw in oven.
- Daily long walks.
- Eat less.
- Eat better. I quit stuffing myself with industrially processed food, best decision ever. Even better than quitting smoking (which I did some 20 years ago). BTW, eating better helps a lot in eating less.
These are all great suggestions, and I would just like to add: drink more water. If water gets boring, add some lemon / lime / fruit, have some herbal teas, or even some coffee (black). When I’m in ravenous eating mode and about to go for seconds, it’s helpful if I can catch myself and have a glass of water first. Then wait 5 - 10 minutes and see if I actually want more food.
+1 to all you just said :)
We quit drinking soda (and I quit alcohol, too). Now it’s, water, pressed fresh fruits (but not too much), tea and infusions. Maybe once a year I will have a drink of wine (I’m French, I have an excuse ;)
As for teas, my advice there would be to not cheap out on tea. quality teas, aka full leaves, are a thing of their own. Also I would encourage to get at least two tea posts (one for stronger teas and the other one for the lighter ones)
Drinking calories is so bad.
I only drink Coconut Unsweetened Silk and tap water outside of a zero cal soda now and then.
Be weary of artificial sugar that can still trigger hunger by impacting your blood sugar levels due to insulin release. Your body can respond to the sudden influx of artificial sugar the same way it does to real sugar.
I still lightly sweeten my coffee most mornings, but that’s about it.
I would like to stress the eating better part. In the past, I’ve made the mistake of looking only at calories. I never chose the whole grain option because it had more calories. Weight loss was hard and I was constantly hungry. Now I stopped eating at the canteen for lunch and started cooking my own stuff instead with lots of whole grain pasta, whole grain rice, potatoes, lots and lots of vegetables, legumes and plant based protein like tofu and tempeh. For a sweet snack I eat fruit. Lost 9kg in 5 months and it didn’t even feel really hard, honestly. Cooking takes a lot of time though, but it’s so much easier than being hungry all the time.
What do you like to eat that’s less processed? I’d like to do that, processed food unfortunately requires just so much less prep.
Fresh veggies & fruits, a little quality meat (but not too much and not every day), no industrial bread (I live in Paris, we still have access to a few real artisanal bakeries where they make their own bread, but here too they’re getting replaced by industrial ones, so we’ve planned on learning to make our own bread soon), no industrial sweets/treats and no soda.
My spouse and I also learned to cook, instead of going out to a restaurant multiple times a week like we used. Saves us money and it’s a fine moment we spend together too ;)
As for the time it takes to cook fresh food: either we will make very simple meal, which takes minutes (plus we often have fun while cooking) or we will cook a meal that we will last us 2 or 3 days. So it’s really not that much of an issue. And since eating better helps us feeling a lot less tired too, well… we think it’s really worth it. The real effort is to be willing to change one’s own habits, at least if I can relate to my own experience.
It is garbage food-like industrial waste, mostly. Read the nutrition information and it’s mostly empty calories! And with a work schedule all over the map, it is challenging. But an air fryer and sweet/regular potatoes pack a lot of nutrients in with the denser calorie count and fiber!
Hi! Not the same person but I’m in the same process!
Firstly, take it in steps, don’t quit all processed food at once. I actually started with eating more veggies, both in the food and as a side salad.
Then read on the products, not all processed foods are equal, and it depends on what more you have in the meal. On meat products I often look at the meat percentages, it can vary A LOT. A sausage with + 80% meat is a lot better than 30%…
You can also look for E-numbers, concentrates, and other additives. How good or bad these are are still being discussed but I’m leaning towards bad, especially if it’s a lot.
For example a highly processed sausage with basmati rice and a decent amount of salad isn’t the same as said sausage with just mac and cheese.
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Some meals are easier to prep than others but more often than not I’ve found meals, especially the meat, to need time. Time to cook properly!
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Fry meat in a pan, let it simmer in water for half an hour or so ( I rarely keep time ), make a sauce in the pan.
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Or put a chunk of meat on a oven safe plate and trow it into the oven on 150-175°C for 1.5-3h or more depending on size and tenderness.
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Or make a soup, just make sure it boils long enough for the meat! :)
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I like to binge snacks (doesn’t matter if healthy or not) out from my house, so it sometimes feels hard to stay in specific calorie amount. What helps me with that is to either make snacking a process where I need to prepare it each time I want them or not to buy any from stores.
Also just generally preparing food yourself instead of just ordering/buying food helps with getting less calories. Not always possible due to time/energy/money, but it has helped me a lot.
Good luck with your plans!
Eat until you’re not hungry, not when you’re full. That may require eating more slowly. It will be an adjustment for sure.
That’s definitely a challenge for me. I grew up with a bunch of siblings, so if you didn’t eat fast, you’d be stuck with leftovers. Inhaling my food is an unfortunate habit I’ve held onto.
A weird way I learned to eat more normal portions was to buy frozen meals. Sure they are super processed but when looking at the ingredients it looks like completely normal homemade food so it can’t be that bad. We ate that for a couple of weeks before we got tired of it. But that was enough to learn
Try using a smaller plate which forces you to take a smaller amount initially and consciously makes you aware of going back for more.
You can get out in front of it by estimating how much food will get you to satisfied but not full and only place that much in front of you.
This is important! These small habit changes all add up.
And wait about 10 minutes before going back for seconds. For some reason when I still feel hungry after eating, if I wait a bit before seconds, I don’t feel hungry anymore.
It gives your body time to start digesting, and once digesting it is like “I got to work on this food, don’t need any more just yet.” If you eat fast enough that the digestion doesn’t kick in then you still feel as hungry as you did initially and you have to fill your stomach before that feeling kicks in.
Source: vague recollection of some nutritional information from years ago
For me the big problem is that as a kid I would eat something for breakfast and then one big meal a day after playing outside constantly, so my eating pattern is wolfing down food until I feel like I could burst. That doesn’t work well when life changed to have three scheduled meals a day, but it did take a decade or two and a desk job to really catch up with me. Still a struggle not to over eat, especially with people around me encouraging me to eat more.
Still a struggle not to over eat, especially with people around me encouraging me to eat more.
I can relate, and also not wanting to seem rude and turn down overly processed food/sugar laden cookies/pies, etc. I love sweets, I just don’t want them in excess, or hfcs/beet sugar, or really much cane sugar, especially white, and other things that are my own peculiarities.
Also yes, it seems I remember something about digestion kicking in, now that you mention it, thanks!
Noom. It’s not impossible to achieve your weight loss journey by making changes like eating better and exercising more, but it’s a lot easier with a cheerleading coach in your pocket giving you daily ways to break it down and make it more manageable. Lmk if you’re looking for a referral code, friend, and whatever route you take I wish you the best and hope you can achieve your goal! ❤️
regular excercise; doesnt have to be Hiit - e.g. daily walk (30-60mins) does wonders
Literally impossible to outrun overeating;
how much you eat is your size
how you work out is your definition
