Just went trough Yo-Yo. Any good strategies on how to overcome it for good?
replies(17):
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 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.