This is for people who feel like me, who already know they can’t count calories, are unorganized and find fitness overwhelming.
This is personal experience and bits and pieces of knowledge I picked up along the way. A bit of warning, this might be a bit extreme. You don’t have to listen to any of this. You can just take what you need from it but it’s what my journey was, and I’m not in any way unhealthy and I’m pretty fit and I didn’t relapse so it is a tried and tested thing. But different people might need different approaches so take that into account.
My "credentials" .
I outlined these so that you know, that I’m a young male person, healthy as far as I know and didn’t gain or lose that much weight, and I wasn’t obese for most of my life. So take it into consideration if you keep reading.
The first and most important thing is EAT LESS.
Now this is obvious but there's no going around this one. It’s very hard to understand how little food you actually need (whatever your weight goal is), it’s just incomprehensible. Our brains are very bad with big quantities. And if you’re overweight you could eat so much less right now and still be alive and at a BMI that is considered healthy. But you can’t, you simply can’t make an instant jump like that. You have to work your way down and each time you will blow your own mind by the difference.
It is not pleasant and not easy. Maybe if I was perfectly organized and ate all the right things I could've gone through it without feeling like crap half the time. But I knew I could never do that, for me it's impossible. I knew myself. In the beginning all I could do was limit how much I ate (by limiting when I ate), and that was enough for a start. After I plateaued I started paying a bit more attention to what I ate and walked more, but that's it. Most of the weight loss was in that period, and exercising actually had a reverse effect, at least until I adjusted.
Your brain is going to resist this. It's a psychological battle more than anything. You're going to have to make a major change and it's not going to be easy. The truth is a diet can never be perfect, and you can only approach it from below. You might feel sick some of the time. You might have deficiencies. I ate salt for breakfast when I realized I actually needed salt in the morning, not food, and could put off eating just for a little bit. It's not a normal thing. Maybe that's not everyone's experience but it was mine.
If you’re going through a stressful period and need your brain, now is not really the time to make a major change. It was a chill period for me and I had it pretty easy. I could focus on building my life around this.
The only way to really hack it is to figure out a schedule, with tricks, with setting up the day so that there’s no space left for you to over eat. You start eating less and your brain is going to make you crave food even more until you’re back to your usual calorie intake. You have to resist this. It’s okay to not meet your “not eating” goal. If you still ate less than normally, that’s a success and you should treat it that way. Set goals high so even if you miss it you still do something. If you over ate don’t view it as a failure. Take your humanity into account. You’re going to make mistakes. Don’t let one day’s failure bleed into the next one. You can now go the next day a lot longer without eating. Try it. Don’t eat out of habit. Look at it as convenience. Use it.
It might affect your social life. I didn’t really have one so that was a help. In my opinion humanity has a fucked up food culture. We have 3 meals, and each one is a goddamn feast. It’s bad. That’s not how we evolved at all. I’m not saying return to monke, but there’s an over abundance of food and our brain is going to cling to this luxury until you break the cycle. It doesn’t know that tomorrow is also going to be feast day. It will make you eat like there’s no tomorrow. As much as your stomach and daily life allows.
For me it was a cascading effect. After a few days of eating less and seeing the “lost” weight, even though it was just the lack of food in my stomach, I just kept going. I had a streak and just didn’t stop. Feeling sick was a reward. I know this doesn’t sound healthy and it isn’t, really. I guess in theory you can make small changes and make it very gradual but that wasn’t ever going to happen with me. Too much info out there, too much hair splitting.
And I did use IF to do it, 8 hours in which I allowed myself to eat, but if I didn’t feel hungry I would push it even more for bonus points. I could always change my mind before the clock hit the limit, but if I ate out of habit the rest of time would be prone to over eating, even if I technically respected the schedule.
IN REALITY NUTRITION IS DEAD SIMPLE
Eat protein. That’s it. The rest will come by itself. You don’t need to measure it. You don’t need powder, you don’t need macros, you don’t need to understand it at all. Any diet stems from there. You don’t even really need enough for your current body weight and perhaps that’s where some of my sickness came from. I’m coming from the future to tell you how important this is. Maybe that would have saved me from some sickness in the past. But like I said you can only approach this from below, and I was okay with not always feeling right. All I had to do was make it to the next meal and it would fix it.
Now eating protein isn’t a full diet, but you’re gonna want to eat fiber and fiber comes with all the rest. Not because of health, not because of same vague advice to eat your veggies. Because it will make your time on the toilet much easier. That’s it. That was a good enough reason for me. You can learn some stuff about nutrition, but for me it was passive and slow journey. I still don’t know shit about it tbh, I don’t need to. For example, I had some muscle cramps so I looked it up. Lack of magnesium. Okay so then I looked up which foods have magnesium. Those foods probably contained other nutrients and knowing that was good enough for me. You don’t need all the knowledge to go forward. You can just dive in and adjust and learn when needed.
Also no food is technically unhealthy in a vacuum. It’s all about quantity. A chocolate bar with nuts in it is still better than pure chocolate that weighs the same. It’s about small victories and replacing part of the “unhealthy” food with “healthier” stuff.
EXERCISE IS NOT WEIGHT LOSS
But it can help in indirect ways, like literally taking up time that could be used for eating, and doing it, if it’s intense enough it can suppress appetite, at least for me. After doing a whole lot of things it’s hard for me to push down food. These days I have to coax myself into eating after exercise. But that didn’t apply back then, and when I lost weight I didn’t really exercise much. Yeah if you build muscle you consume more calories standing around. But the act itself doesn’t burn that many calories. Or at least you would have to do some very intense things to make a dent. If you go with the exercise route take it into account when weighing yourself. If you are the same weight or even slightly more but can run faster or lift a little more that’s a success. Still, I went with the extreme variant and needed that number to go down so that’s what I focus on in this post.
For me it’s more like I need to watch my calories so that I can do the exercise not the other way around. If I gather too much fat it ruins my performance and I will revert to my not eating habits until manageable again. (this is really more about small quantities and it’s having too much food for a few days than actually getting significantly fatter but I have to cut myself off somewhere) I exercise because I like it, I like moving around, I like having a body that functions well. It’s a distraction, it keeps me from overthinking, it just fits nicely into my life. I recommend it to everyone, but this is loseit not gainit, so enough about that.
WEIGHT LOSS IS NOT A CONSTANT THING
It fluctuates, on the same day, if you can’t stop yourself from stepping on the scale all the goddamn time at least do it 200000 times a day like I did, because then you’d actually get a sense of how during one day your weight changes even if you don’t do shit. Yeah you can always weigh yourself at the same time on an empty stomach and naked but is your life really that stable? Do you always eat the same and sleep the same and drink the same? If you do it might be accurate.
It doesn’t have to be constant, if you lost a little bit and plateaued, forget about it, you’re still better off forever being that new weight. Being stable at a lower weight is a huge success even if it’s still far away from your goal. You can use this as an anchor point, and use the experience you gained in reducing calories to start again when ready. Maybe your life just isn’t right at the moment, maybe your compensating and need that brain power. Take a holistic approach. It’s not worth taking it too far and messing everything up in the process. When you lose major weight you are sick. Treat yourself that way. Your decision making is so much worse when you don’t feel right physically. I don’t think many people realize the full extent of this but that’s another topic.
There’s plenty of non scale ways to tell if you lost weight or not. The first is how much you ate. I think you know damn well if you ate a lot less or a lot more than normally. If you eat too little for a week you are sure to lose weight. Same thing for eating more. It’s important to know this, because one day won’t make a difference, it won’t make you gain or lose anything.
Also if you eat very little today, it doesn’t mean that this will show the next day, even tho it should based on the fact that you have an emptier stomach. At surface level it doesn’t make sense. But it’s delayed. If you paid close attention to your eating and your weight over several days you would find that it makes perfect sense. So if you eat too much one day and too little the next it’s only gonna consolidate a few days later. But don’t I don’t actually recommend following it, all you need to understand from this that it doesn’t make sense. Don’t use the number.
Another way to tell is feeling it. Your body will be lighter. You will feel your body changing, feeling bonier and bonier. You don’t really need a scale, not from day to day. Forget about the number. It’s about how you feel and look. If you lost a good amount you will definitely know.
ONE HUGE TIP before I wrap this up
Hunger is also delayed. You won’t know you’re full until after you stop eating. Being satiated is an illusion. Your brain will go “oh we stopped eating for a while time to go back to business” and you will feel full even if you all you ate was 2 peanuts and an onion slice or whatever. If you need more food your body will let you know. You will know. You can always eat more but not less. When you are thirsty you know. When you need air you automatically breathe. It’s the same thing with eating, it’s just that there’s a bigger margin of error since we evolved to store energy.
Okay so after all that here’s 2 benefits that I don’t really see mentioned
More mobility – holy fucking shit I love skipping and bouncing around like a child, it always made me so happy when my weight dropped and could move around more freely. Whether you exercise or not, being able to move around is a great feeling.
Less time on the toilet – I’m not going to go into detail on this one but it’s underrated.
Easier hygine - it makes a ton off differnce, from sweating way way less to just having less sufrace to worry about.
Anyway I don’t really know how to end this, so here’s some takeaways. It’s a means to and end and the act itself is not healthy or at least doesn’t feel like it is. HUNGER IS DELAYED. So is your weight. Eat protein. Don’t get lost in the details. Don’t eat out of habit.
AND DON’T BE TOO ROUGH ON YOURSELF, NO MATTER WHAT. IF YOU GENUINELY FEEL SICK DON’T HESITATE TO SEEK HELP.
