Just went trough Yo-Yo. Any good strategies on how to overcome it for good?
replies(17):
This idea sucks when you are looking at a plate of lettuce leaves - but you should also avoid extreme diets and extreme exercise as it is unsustainable.
Going to the gym helped me immensely. Not so much in losing weight directly but in feeling better and fresher.
food is no longer a reward for anything
fin.
Start with something easy and establish a rule that won't ever be broken. If you break a rule once, you'll lose the fight.
My rule, for example, when I started to train more:
- start with 10 crunches every morning and evening
- increase by 2 crunches every day
- no exceptions
When you are at ~2 months in, you can add weight training to it to get stronger.
Additionally, find a sport that you can do once or twice a week that is FUN to do. By FUN I really mean it. There's no point in doing sports if you don't enjoy it.
If you enjoy playing batminton, go for it! If you enjoy table tennis, go for it! If you enjoy Kung Fu, Krav Maga, or whatever ... go for it!
Sports isn't about reaching goals, it's about having fun while doing it. Otherwise, you will not overcome the struggles. Your brain needs a reward, and enjoying sports helps you keep wanting more of it.
1. One was not eating breakfast, this works well when I'm in the office. Then you have fasting built into your daily routine. This has many metabolic benefits.
2. Switching to a low carb diet (keto). I never thought I'd quit eating bread, but reducing carbonhydrates (esp. sugar) and eating more eggs & meat had the biggest effect on my weight. More so than doing sports. This is just a rough guideline, I don't follow this very strictly.
3. Sports + Fasting: Sometimes on the weekends I go on a hike or do some sports and only eat when I get home in the afternoon (e.g. steak). This forces my body to take the energy from the fat reserves.
Of course knowledge about diet and exercise is immensely valuable, but if there are psychological factors getting in the way, it’s going to be harder to adopt a consistently healthy lifestyle.
So rather than just eating less make sure to work out some. Consistently. Id suggest strength training. I did a full body strength training workout 2-3 times a week. Some may suggest doing leg days, arm days, etc but going there takes time on itself and i have other places to be than the gym.
To match that strength training eat more protein. Things like chicken are your friend. This tends to be higher on the satiety index so you'll feel full faster and you'll eat less without it being so painfull. Eat a bit of protein with every meal Really there's a whole lot of other stuff that you can fill yourself up with that won't be too bad for ya. And when you go for a carb? Get the complex one if it's a choice. It'll dampen that peak in insulin.
Avoid the sugary stuff. It's addictive for sure but taper off. Eat before going to the store. Make the hard decisions there not with the easy snack within reach in the evening.
Do a bit of everything that works until it becomes second nature. Overfocusing on one silver bullet doesn't tend to work.
I am currently at around ~120kg and my "goal weight" was around that area. I still have a tummy that I am not satisfied with, but my legs are mostly muscles due to me cycling a lot. I sold my car on purpose to force me to cycle in bad weather.
Currently I am also trying out a more hardcore exercise program because I never gained a lot of muscles in the past, even when I was doing MMA training 6 times a week.
I'm probably stating the obvious here: muscles weigh more than fat, meaning you'll always gain weight before you can lose weight. I mentioned the 2-3 months time span because that's (for me) when it switched, and my body suddenly had it easier to get into calories burning mode.
Suffice it to say: I don't eat nor drink any sweets, not even in my muesli. No artificial sweeteners either. I replaced sweets with fruits in my muesli, for example. And I just drink water, because soft drinks are the human brain's enemy.
The decision to not eat nor drink anything sweet is important, I think, because it helps me go into calories burning mode much faster with much less calories.
Also i mentioned strength training specifically since other than what you burn at a workout resting metabolic rate also increases and helps. I assume the average person on this website is notably rather sedentary and would see above average results depending on age and such.[1] (Even more so if he's a guy which I believed he was based on his name.) You'll always need a base and you're reducing your intake anything so something like a 15% difference is gigantic when you're struggling and super helpfull (even just 5% is worthwile).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8030593/
edit: and I'll acknowledge it would take a while before that increased resting metabolic rate starts to play more but again....it needs to be sustainable so whatever you're doing you need to be able to keep up anyway.
Hardcore diets and then falling back to the old habits are absolutely not the way to do it. There are things like diet fatigue, the mentioned Yo-Yo effect you don't want to deal with.
Your "diet" should be generally healthy and long term sustainable. It just does not work to replace one way of malnutrition with another one.
So here are the things i (BMI 22, bodyfat < 19% for now 20+ years, at age over 40) would recommend:
One is strength based exercise. Find 1-3 days in your week where you can dependably (!) spend an hour or two to go to the gym. It is better to go once every week reliably, than to go 3 times one week and then skipping the next.
Get a full body training plan consisting of multi joint exercises. For example don't waste your time on biceps if you can do rows which trains your biceps and back at the same time.
You must do strength training order to gain muscle mass. Muscles have a large influence on your hormones, which helps to suppress hunger and keeps you fit in general. The hunger suppression is important if you lose weight. It works this way: if you lose weight, you will usually lose muscle mass alongside fat. Losing muscles creates a huge hunger signal compared to fat. Doing strength training keeps you from losing muscle (or even building it) so your hunger is lower while you lose weight.
And you don't want to end up skinny fat with issues like back pain (which i ended up with at age 20 without ever being overweight).
Don't overdo it. But be consistent, do the smallest amount necessary but every single week no exception.
Don't do cardio (at least not cardio only). Cardio is fine if you do it for sporting reasons but since you seem to be overweight, i assume this is not the case ;) So cardio would just waste your time because it burns surprisingly small amounts of calories while increasing hunger by a lot. It also does not build muscles as much so why bother?
The most important part is to get your nutrition in check.
Basically do the following:
Close to every meal should, by volume, roughly consist of 1/4 protein, like chicken or other lean meat, or plant based alternatives 1/4 carbs, like rice, potatoes whatever (pasta has tons of calories so be careful here) 2/4 vegetables like carrots, broccoli... whatever just mix it up.
It is a ton of vegetables, which is good because it keeps your stomach full and is healthy in every conceivable way.
Do not skip fats, but skip pure sugars especially in liquid form like soda.
Don't do cheat days where you mindlessly eat thousands of calories, this messes with your psyche for no reason. But eating out, or some junk food is fine from time to time you are not a robot.
Inform yourself about the calorie content of your meals and try to control the amount.
There are many ways to exert control, which are highly individual. Some have no problem skipping breakfast, some make their meals smaller, some do keto or track calories. Whatever floats your boat you have to find out. Remember it has to be sustainable. Personally i try to get a good amount of protein into my meals and i keep an eye out for calories without counting.
Every single morning: Use the toilet, step on a scale, check your weight. It varies a bit from day to day but the average helps you track. You might want to use an app but its not really necessary. This is your main way to keep track. Gain weight? Try to eat a bit less next week.
Keep in mind that you are in it for the long run. There is no need to lose tons of weight in the short term. It is fine to be slow which is way more sustainable anyway.
You want to be fit for the rest of your life so you have to keep at it for the rest of your life.
In the end, these tips help to get into a different lifestyle and then reinforce the habits to stay there because it feels better.
1) Don't lose more than 10% of your bodyweight in the same weight loss period.
2) Don't lose more than 1% of body weight per week.
3) At the end of a weight loss period, transition to eating at maintenance calories for a while before starting a new weight loss period.
A common mistake is to completely stop dieting when you reach your goal weight. This is a bad idea because your body has adapted to the diet (e.g. decreased energy expenditure) and it's therefore easy to regain weight rapidly. What you should do is keep tracking what you eat while increasing calories to maintenance level, to give a chance to your body to slowly decrease hunger and increase energy expenditure.
Reality is more complex than memetic one-liners.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demethylase
some of which have vitamin cofactors like zinc[1] and riboflavin[2].
So nutrition is important. I will let you investigate the link between zinc, riboflavin and diabetes...
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7191051/ [2] https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/O60341/entry
Set medium term goals. Don't try to lose 20 kilos in six months. Lose the next kilo by this time in two weeks. Similarly, don't try to lose 0.1 kilos by tomorrow. Weight naturally fluctuates day to day based on water intake, sodium intake, muscle fatigue, and other things. But in the range of 2-3 weeks, you should be able to lose enough weight to see signal in the noise of day to day fluctuations.
If you aren't hitting your medium term goals, find a way to cut calories more. Starting the first month doing a comprehensive calorie log is valuable to help calibrate what foods and portion sizes are relatively problematic.
The rest is just finding eating patterns that work for you that help keep calorie levels low enough. There's a lot of advice about ways to do that, and most need to be taken with a grain of salt, but it's probably true that you can min/max at the margins by increasing fiber intake, increasing protein intake, drinking more water, eating more raw plants, intermittent fasting, and that sort of thing. But you'll mostly see fractional improvements on top of the bottom line math: calories burned need to exceed calories consumed.
As noted elsewhere here, it's a lot of exercise to burn off a few pieces of bacon. Exercise is good for weight loss, but again, it's mostly at the margins for the average person, especially if that person is not an athlete.
The obese people and sedentary office workers don't and would need to train for months to be able to out-run a single piece of cake on a regular basis without injury.
The phrase is good advice for that group of people.
> The rest is just finding eating patterns that work for you that help keep calorie levels low enough. There's a lot of advice about ways to do that, and most need to be taken with a grain of salt, but it's probably true that you can min/max at the margins by increasing fiber intake, increasing protein intake, drinking more water, eating more raw plants, intermittent fasting, and that sort of thing. But you'll mostly see fractional improvements on top of the bottom line math: calories burned need to exceed calories consumed.
It's "easy" to lose a ton of weight if you don't eat anything at all. But that's obviously not sustainable. However, what I've found works, is that those things "at the margins" as you say actually have a huge effect on adherence to the "diet". Some foods require a tremendous amount of willpower to only consume in "reasonable" quantities. Think candy bars, chips, the like.
The point is to take note about how you feel after a given meal. Some foods, even though the meal would bring enough calories, leave you with a feeling of wanting more. Avoid these. Others leave you feeling full for hours. Go for those. What I've noticed is that sometimes, the effect may come from "secondary" ingredients, like the dressing on a salad, whereas the salad itself will leave you feeling full for the whole afternoon.
There are things you may enjoy quite a lot, so if they're of the "can't stop eating them sort", you'll have to forego them entirely. It's actually much easier to not eat them at all (and, ideally, not even have them in the house) than hoping you'll be reasonable. With time, these foods will lose their appeal, and you won't randomly crave them every day. Getting over this first step is what I find hardest.
This. I've found working out has changed the kinds of foods I crave, making it easier to adhere to a diet. I'd usually feel more like a steak with eggs and brocoli rather than a deep-fried burger.
That's what I've noticed, too.
But I've also noticed that it makes me crave different foods than when I sit on my ass all day. So, on average, I tend to actually eat less, because I don't have random cravings in between meals.
I doubt that people who are overweight and sedentary only eat "healthy" meals, only too much.
I was right; we didn't lose any weight, but we did get much better at running without gasping to a stop within a couple minutes.
Just stop overeating. That's the magic bullet. Always has been.
What's not helpful is looking for weird workarounds all the time. Just stop eating so much.
The answers that actually work are "move to an environment where you will likely get and stay skinnier" (maybe a different, skinnier country) or (this one's new! There's finally a semi-reasonable answer to this question!) "take GLP-1 agonists". There's no strategy that'll do it (for outliers, yes, but over a population, no)
To quantify this, on a weekly long ride they may consume 300g of refined sugar, far far beyond the often recommended limit of 20g of sugar per day.
So perhaps the sedentary person would benefit from walking or leisurely cycling to work a whole more than by trying to restrict their diet
I gather that you have never met an endurance cyclist. Randonneurs are notorious for devouring whatever they can find when they stop for lunch.
Since you said you went through three weight loss cycles (bravo, it is hard to do!), is exercise an important part of the effort? Example: Did you ever try cardio vs weight training? It seems like weight training is the more likely of the two to change body composition (more muscle, same or less fat). And higher muscle weight almost always leads to higher resting calorie burn rate.
Last thing that almost no one is talking about in this discussion: Once you start doing exercise, something changes in your brain. I cannot precisely explain it, but a huge number of men experience a drop is depressing thoughts after starting regular exercise. My guess: Exercise helps to de-stress which has all kinds of other positive impacts in your life.
> Currently I am also trying out a more hardcore exercise program because I never gained a lot of muscles in the past, even when I was doing MMA training 6 times a week.