this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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Losing weight is not an easy thing to do if you've been overweight most of your life. You literally have to fundamentally change everything about your life just to get it done. And it's a slow process and a commitment that you have to stick to for months or even years. It can really fuck with your motivation when the progress is so slow you could go months and only lose like 10 pounds. I only went from 250 to about 150 but it was one of the hardest things I've done and I've quit smoking.
It's like gaining muscle, enough to show in the mirror, to yourself. Yes, it's a process. Yes, it takes time. No one got fat overnight.
Drop the drinks, nothing with calories. Stop munching constantly, eat meals 3 times a day, not a single calorie inbetween. Anyone can start this way.
Working out? Won't help a bit, loss starts when one quits with the mouth intake. Exercise can cause problems by making you hungry! (You have to do it anyway for 100 other reasons.)
Dad was fat as fuck. Looked like he swallowed a cannonball when I met him. Later, he dropped it all. He had run into his bf after many years. Man was trim. "How did you do that?!"
"I just brainwashed myself into believing feeling hungry was good."
Yeah. That easy folks. Convince yourself that "hungry" is OK, a normal feeling. Worked for me.
IME, after getting used to hunger, it usually just goes away (although I have a hard time differentiating feeling hungry and sleepy - getting regular sleep helps me not overeat from mistaking the two). Getting use to it can be annoying, but it doesn't take that long. Personally prefer just eating once a day and think exercise can help a fair bit. Doesn't matter if it makes you feel hungrier if you already just fill your belly with relatively low-calorie-density foods and stop when it doesn't comfortably hold more. For some reason some exercises make me feel hungrier, others sometimes make me less interested in eating. Maybe its a timing thing; if its close enough to bed time, exercising til I'm exhausted and have like a 3K calorie deficit for the day makes me just want to sleep rather than cook (in this case, the not being able to tell the difference between hunger and sleep may mean I interpret it as sleepy at night).
Learning that the intensity of your hunger sensation is not related to how much you need to eat to satisfy the hunger, but rather, how soon you need to address the hunger, is what changed the game for me.
Instead of responding to feeling ravenous by getting in the kitchen cooking a big meal and sitting down to eat, 40 minutes after I felt hungry, eating easily 2-3 portions, and justifying it with "well I haven't eaten all day".
Now I have an orange or something the second I start to feel that intense hunger, go distract myself, and then 20 minutes later I can think clearly, without food noise and intense hunger to cause me to pile crap onto my plate. So now I can plan a well portioned meal that fits within my goals.
But I think part of that is that I have poor interoception, I never felt hungry unless I was already ravenous. Learning to identify hunger before it turns into "eat everything in sight" is something I need to do. I'm still not very good at it, but I'm better. (for context with my interoception, I also can't tell when I need to pee, or when I'm tired, or when I'm too hot or cold. I'll just randomly feel shooting pain in my hand, look down and notice my fingers are turning blue, then remember to put a jacket on)
I don't like feeling over-hungry because it gives me migraines and I get really nauseous and end up dry wretching when I know what I need is calories. Hence why in the past if I started to feel hungry I'd overeat to really try and nip that sensation in the bud. I failed at diets in the past because I assumed that you were supposed to be constantly hungry, and for me hungry is painful, so I'd give up on diets pretty quickly.
So I personally need to stay on top of my hunger to stay on track with my calorie intake.
I disagree with the 3 meals a day thing. Find the right amount of meals that works for you and adjust the calories of each meal.
Different eating habit for different people and lives.
But you are right that you need to become accustomed to be hungry so that you can learn what your real hungry signal is, so that you can hijack the false hungry signals.
I always think about it this way; I was a fat baby, fat toddler, fat kid, fat teen, and fat young adult, I spent 25 years learning how to be an obese fuck. I was a master at it.
Why should I expect myself to be even halfway competent at being a healthy person after just 1-2 years of practicing those skills.
The goal isn't to be healthy tomorrow, it's to take steps every day to learn to be a person who has naturally healthy habits, and grow into being that person for the rest of my life. If that takes 10 years to be able to say "this is who I am now, not a fat fuck" then it takes 10 years, and that's still a faster learning curve than the 25 years I spent obese.
Though I will shout out "the paper towel effect", the first 25-30kg I didn't really see a difference, nor did anyone around me, but every other kilo since then has been a visible change to my appearance and that's very motivating, especially as it gets harder to induce a calorie deficit because I'm getting closer to my goal and maintenance weight range, plateaus are more common. But at the same time it's exciting to be slowly shifting gears into maintenance.
One of the most motivating things for me is going to the gym and grabbing weights equal to the weight I've lost, picking it up and just thinking "fuck, I used to carry this weight around with me 24/7"
My strength training is falling behind my weight loss, I can't even bench the amount of weight I've lost, I can RDL it but that's because I've still got the glutes of a fatty.
You should weigh yourself in kilos. 1 pound is about 0.5 kilos, so twice the progress.
Edit: never mind, I can't do math
Isn't it the other way around? A kilo is about 2.2lbs
Yes it is, I fixed it. Now it doesn't makes sense I said "twice the progress". You loose 20 or 40 kilos was my idea, but that's wrong...
I wish I was used to kilos but my American brain was trained on stupid freedom units and I hate it. I'm trying to get better at it, though. The hardest one for me is Celsius and fahrenheit because fahrenheit is so bad it's hard to convert.
Until the end of your life, essentially, because underlying biological conditions that made a person overweight aren't going anywhere. Most people fail to lose weight or quickly gain it back for a very good reason.
I am currently listening to atomic habits and I like his take on it, and the story he tells about someone losing weight, they did it by thinking what would a skinny/fit person do when choosing what to eat etc.
If you adopt the habits of someone who is ripped there is a good chance a few years down the line you will be ripped too.
I am a fat fuck because my habit was to eat away my feelings, eat out of boredom etc, now I am trying to eat with a goal of establishing habits that will lead me to better fitness.
And I like the takes by DR. mik israetel from his ted talk, we can all look at a plate of food and judge if it's healthy or not, it's not that hard, but consistently making the right choice of eating healthy (not always but most times) is not easy.
My SO is trying to lose weight, and they've had to make fundamental changes in their daily habits to break the bad behaviors. This was quite hard, especially since they have friends on the other side of the world and would stay up late chatting/gaming with them, which resulted in late night snacking and overeating.
I am naturally quite thin, so it's hard for me to appreciate the work they put in to lose weight. But they've already lost ~10 lbs by changing routine over the last month or two, so I'm trying my best to encourage them to continue, especially with the holiday season coming up (we exchange treats with neighbors). We set a goal together, where once they hit their target weight (in the normal range), they'll get a significant reward (in this case, it's minor cosmetic surgery for something that has been bothering them).
My guy, you've lost 40% of your bodyweight. That is something to be proud of. Never undersell yourself and the effort you've put in.
I got on unrelated meds and now am dropping like a stone. Was fat way before covid , covid made me extremely sedentary (105kgs). Got on new meds a month ago, then at 94kgs - I just stop being hungry when I take them. Meaning I take the pills in the morning, I'm not hungry till lunch at 2pm, I take them again around 3pm and they hold me till late evening (12pm, later) and I snack on the unhealthiest sweets in bed. I eat like shit too - burgers for lunch, KFC chicken, sometimes I treat myself to a healthy poke bowl (but that stuff's expensive af), always order out since I suck at cooking for myself. Dropped to 91kg and holding. With this keeping up, I expect to go to 80 - 85kg which should be a healthy weight for me. So tldr, I dropped from 105kg on new meds, then dropped from 94kg to 91kg in a month because I got different meds.
What medication?
It's ADHD meds, ritalin basically.
I got a pullup bar and do a lap around the office if I get bored. Lost 65 pounds with minimal effort after being off medication. Other people notice before you do and its a bit of a surprise.
I had a pullup bar too when I was young, I got my back to ridiculous shape by doing a few pullups every now and then. Like people were surprised - I do pushups like a geriatric paraplegic, then go to a pullup bar and do a set of 20 with perfect form.
And yeah, people went "oh you lost a bunch of weight!" When I said "naaah I eat the same live the same". Then I stepped on the scale and wow.
I went from not able to lift my fat ass to 10 pull ups in less than a year and only crank out a few if I walk past and got energy to burn.