Adipose tissue retains an epigenetic memory of obesity after weight loss

For me, sugar was the reason I couldn't lose weight. I got a CGM (continuous glucose monitor) and got my blood sugar under control, and with very little effort I lost a lot of weight.

I use 90% cacao Lindt to control my sweet tooth. 1/2 the bar has 4g of sugar, and I consume it over hours. It also has the side effect of reducing my hunger. If you eat much of 90% chocolate, it makes you feel nausea. The trick is to put a small chip in your mouth and let it melt. It's quite delicious and I've not had any sweets in 80+ days.

This also speaks to another point, when trying to lose weight: you must find new things to enjoy.

This is actually great advice for any bad habit you're trying to break. In general, just thinking "Stop doing this thing" (or "do less of this thing"), doesn't really work. It's usually more effective to find something else that you do enjoy (and is better for you), and try to do more of that thing and have it "crowd out" your bad habit.

When it comes to eating, there is a nutritionist with a pretty sizable online following (Kylie Sakaida), and I love one of her mantras of "add, don't subtract". That is, don't think of abstaining from foods you like that might be unhealthy, but instead try to add more healthy things to that food to make it a balanced meal. For example, she gives the example of wanting a frozen waffle for breakfast. Instead of thinking "No, I can't have this frozen waffle", she instead makes a spread using Greek yogurt to add protein, then adds fresh fruit and nuts for more nutrients, fiber and healthy fats, so what started as an 'empty carbs' meal is turned into a pretty balanced, filling breakfast.

I’d be interested to hear more here - what CGM did you buy? What was your process for monitoring?

This worked for me for a while but I learned to love dark chocolate toooooo much.

I can now eat a 100g bar of 100% chocolate in a single sitting if I feel like it… And that’s 55g of fat, so more or less the fat I should be eating in a whole day.

Wow!! I feel queasy if I eat more than 1/2 a bar of the 90%. It also completely takes the edge off my hunger, which is great for me.

So true. I've done this very often:

- See some goodies my wife bought (for herself or me).

- Thinks about having my 90% Lindt later/next day.

- Walks away.

The Stelo. 2 for $99. Oddly, it shipped from Amazon but Amazon doesn't sell them.

The app is subpar on iOS, but if you give Apple's Health app permission, you can get more data in there. Graphs that have absolute numbers. I think they reason their app doesn't give absolute values (for historical values, they give the current value only), is because it's not a calibrated device. It can't be used to control an insulin pump, for that reason.

I just completed two weeks with Lingo by Abbott. It was decent. I wish it had better integration of the data with Apple Health, but I liked the Lingo score as a way of "gamifying" it and the UX overall was decently done.

I thought a CGM would help me lose weight but it turned out my body is a hero at managing sugar spikes. A pint of ice cream? Back to baseline in under an hour. Big meal, no big spike, etc.

So it turns out you can still gain weight even if you don’t spike your blood sugar. At least for me.

Isn't 90% Lindt the worst (of their chocolates) for Cadmium and other heavy metals though?

I was realizing that spicy food can be that.

Does that imply you are paying $99 / month?

All I could find is this: https://www.snopes.com/news/2024/12/31/lindt-chocolate-heavy...

I am worried about it. Ugh.

No, this was a one-time thing for me, to work out how food impacts my blood sugar. I've used 1 of the 2 I bought, and I plan to use the other in 3-4 months, to see how I react then, after 6+ months with low sugar intake.

If you don't spike your blood sugar and you eat fewer calories that you need, I don't know how you wouldn't lose weight.

For me, a small piece of pie after dinner impacted my BS for 6-12 hours, according to the sensor. That was shocking.

I was high calorie, low spike.

I had just assumed before the cgm that my blood sugar regulation would be terrible with how easily I put in fat. But it was extremely well run.

I'm a chocolate fan myself and it was something I used to buy often, but just as I started getting into the hard stuff (80% or higher) I learned about all the problems with heavy metals in dark chocolate and specifically in Lindt, and then later learned about the use of child slaves which is an industry wide issue and not exclusive to Lindt/Russell Stover/Ghirardelli/Lindor although Lindt and Hershey are reportedly worse than other brands.

You can find brands that claim to be more ethical in terms of sourcing their cocoa, but the smaller brands that do are also less likely to have been tested for heavy metals.

While it's unclear how harmful the heavy metals would be to me specifically at the amounts I was eating, the whole thing kind of put me off chocolate in general and dark chocolate in particular. I rarely have it anymore.

Here's one (besides CR & asyousow tests) from 2022 from the ConsumerLab

https://www.ahealthylife.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/DarkC...

I think I started getting addicted to the caffeine

Interesting. I do go days without it and don't have headaches, as I would expect from caffeine withdrawal, so I guess I don't eat enough. What happens when you stop for a day or two?

I just really craved it!

In the end I just accepted I wanted to have caffeine and started drinking coffee instead.

That’s made it easier to have a few squares here and there and enjoy them properly. Which is good because chocolate good enough to eat at 100% is not cheap! Eating a whole bar a day was an expensive habbit.