I’m not a part of the group you’re addressing, but I guess a heads-up for anyone taking notes:

My wife and I tried a number of different eating styles for a while, and discovered maybe 2 years ago that we were becoming malnourished in a couple of key micronutrients and doing a bit of damage to our metabolisms.

Whatever you decide to eat for your new lifestyle, make sure you listen to your body and try at least getting your metabolic support nutrients in spades.

Long story short for us: we were becoming really deficient in our minerals, to the point of suppressing our metabolism. We were consistently running 30% deficits and had to keep reducing our intake because we weren’t losing anymore. The last two years have been good, refocusing on hormone support and we’re feeling really great now, despite not being any smaller.

I think people forget that there’s more to being healthy than just losing weight.

The heaviest I’ve weighed was 334. I’m at 226.8 this morning.

What ended up working for me is a 3 chapter journey.

How it started: One of those periodic times when your laying in bed to sleep and you get super motivated to finally make a change (and usually don’t follow through come morning.)

Except one time was different and I actually did. It was a combination of recording food intake through a health app, walking around my neighborhood near daily(about a 45 min route), daily routine weight check ins, same time each day, and intermittent fasting. For IF I ate between 9:30 and 5:30pm. I usually tried to stick to about 500ish calories per meal as best I could, and avoided sugars as best I could.

Doing that for about 1-2 years got me to 274.

I hit a wall at 274, stuck there for a few months. I hadn’t been to the doctor for a while but after getting COVID they wanted me to do my physical so I did. I hadn’t seen my doctor for years but they noticed and were happy for my weight loss. I told them I hit a wall and after telling them the physical activity and measures I was taking for my own health they prescribed me an Rx for phentermine.

Phentermine (not Phen-Phen) is an amphetamine and stimulant that also suppresses hunger. I took 1 per day and it helped me avoid cravings for some a few hours in the morning to help me not over consume. During this time they warn you against excessive consumption of caffeine, which wasn’t a big deal to me, but may be for others. Eventually being on it for so long you can somewhat build a tolerance to it. I wouldn’t say I ever developed a legit addiction to it, but maybe others can.

Using phentermine tool me from 280~ to 227.

I got that wall, now I’m taking semiglutide, which has done me well but is slower progress. I started maybe 2 months ago. I gained a bit from 227 and started at about 240.

I’m currently 226.8 with it this morning.

I realize some people may consider my use of medication as “cheating” and I can maybe understand, however I’m also not just letting the medication do the work for me. You still need to eat right, and be physically active for results. The medication has helped me stay motivated and get out of ruts in my process when I feel demotivated and the routine check ins with my Dr. has helped me remain accountable.

Feel free to ask me any questions.

Simply stop eating garbage. I cut out processed foods, bread, soda’s and candy. I’ve lost a whole human over the last 10 years and never felt better. I still have chips and dip occasionally but I’m loosing interest. Mixed nuts have pretty much taken their place. We have sweets that are homemade with local honey, and real fruits etc. I’m a lazy sumbitch so no added exercise. If I can do this anybody can. Good luck on your journey.

Tracking calories, weighing and measuring my food, and moving more. Tracking taught me about what I eat, and what contributes to weight changes. I use MacroFactor. It’s really good.

GLP-1, and Mounjaro is much better than Ozempic. Follow up with SARMs and heavy weights lifting to regain muscle. Yoga and farmer carries for core. It’s been 2 years since I stopped the shots and am exactly the same weight.

Weight loss is all about “calories burned > calories in”; so in the simplest terms, you need to find a Way of Eating (WOE) that makes a caloric deficit bearable.

For me, that was keto. I managed to drop from 120kg to 78kg over the course of a year and a half.

My suggestion is to try a bunch of different diets/ways of eating (keto, paleo, vegetarian, pescitarian, vegan, Mediterranean, carnivore, Atkins and/or intermittent fasting) and see which one clicks.

Another really important point is to track your caloric intake, at least at the start - to build up the knowledge required to make better food choices.

The last bit of advice is probably toxic, but it did work for me - so you can consider whether it’s suitable for you too: “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”

P.S. r/FatPeopleHate was one of my sources of (albeit negative) motivation; so I guess self-loathing helps too! 😅

Greatly reducing sugar intake goes a long way.

Back in my late 20’s, I was obese (~80-100 lbs more than I should be) and finally made the decision to do something about it. Nothing fancy, I started tracking calories. I had a weekly food spreadsheet which listed each food item, how much I ate and the calories. Some foods were harder to figure out than others; but, there are a lot of resources on the internet for finding the calories of random foods. And it’s important not to overthink it. Sure, one website may list butternut squash as 80 calories per cup, another might have 90, just find one or two sites which have comprehensive lists and go with their numbers. You just need to be in the right ballpark, your measurements aren’t going to be that exact, and a few calories one way or the other isn’t a big deal. For me, it was important that this was as easy as possible. I know that, were this some complicated exercise in data entry, I’d stop doing it. Always remember: KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Once I had a handle on what I was eating, I worked to change how I ate. This wasn’t “a diet”. Diets are things you do for a while, but eventually you go back to eating normally and the pounds will come back, often with new friends. I needed to make a fundamental change to how I ate and what “normal” was. Eventually the new “normal” became a habit and the tracking fell off. These days, I can look at most meals and get a sense of the caloric content. I also still look at labels regularly. It’s a good habit to be in and can be really eye opening on what gets advertised as “healthy” and how it’s actually just sugar coated sugar floating in a bowl of sugar sauce.

Step one was figuring out portions. I got a food scale and started weighing what I was eating. And boy howdy was I eating way too much. Even to this day (a couple decades later), I don’t really understand that whole “I’m full” feeling people talk about. I tended to eat until either the food was gone, or I felt so overstuffed it made me kinda nauseous. There is no “this is just enough, I should stop” feeling. And this results in me being a bottomless pit, if I let myself go. For example, I can pack away an entire medium Dominos pizza in one sitting. Yup, the whole thing. That’s somewhere around 2,500 calories, in one sitting. And that even after having eaten normal meals all day. So now, I make a conscious decision to eat one or two slices and stop. Yes it sucks, and yes my stupid lizard brain is screaming at me to eat more, but that’s what’s normal. The upshot of understanding what portions are normal, is that I could start to seek our foods which are higher volume and lower calorie. It’s easier to fight off the lizard brain, if it thinks I did just eat a big meal, even when it’s much less calorie dense.

And that leads me to the second step, picking less calorie dense foods. Unsurprisingly, this often means less meat and more vegetables. Up above, I mentioned butternut squash, because that’s something I eat regularly. It’s tasty and you can eat a lot for not too many calories. Even better is when you can make a meal with a ton of leafy greens, as they add a lot of bulk, without adding a lot of calories. Sure, I hate salads as much as any other brainwashed American. But, lots of greens mixed into a budda bowl, with roasted chickpeas, and butternut squash; now that’s yummy. I’m not saying “go vegetarian”. While my BBQ can churn out some wonderful grilled asparagus, I’m still a product of American culture. I will shoot the motherfucker who tries to stop me smoking a pork butt on said BBQ (and dammit, now I want ribs). But, you will want to find different meals, which are both tasty and have less calories. Experiment, have some fun with it and understand that you will fuck up and will have a few meals which get tossed in favor of something else.

Speaking of ribs, look some days I just really want a rack of pork ribs, slathered in BBQ sauce and sitting next to a heaping pile of mashed potatoes with some token vegetable next to it, pretending to make the whole thing a “balanced meal” (grilled asparagus anyone? The grill is already hot). While that “balance” is complete and total bullshit, I’m still gonna want to eat said meal, push back from the table and drink a beer or six while I watch football. And that’s ok. I just do it less often. Again, this wasn’t about “going on a diet”, it’s about the new normal. And the new normal still involves having a decadent meal from time to time. Sure, it blows my calorie budget for the week. Fuck it. The important thing is to keep this to an uncommon treat and not a regular occurrence. If I have a blow out meal once a month and keep things reasonable the rest of the time, it still works out ok.

And that brings me to my last step, learning to cook. I didn’t become a five star chef, or even a really good one. But, I can cook an omelette, know how to make and use a roux, and can follow a recipe and make changes to accommodate my tastes. I spent a lot of time on YouTube learning to do things, read and tried (and fucked up) a lot of recipes. And I’ve sorted out a lot of what works for me and what doesn’t. I am also not afraid to try new things, and can accept that sometimes that means I order a pizza. Though, I’ve had to do that a lot less over the years. Like damned near everything else in life, it’s all about practice. And no one practices without failure. The upshot is that you can start to find some really tasty foods which don’t come from a box. It’s also easier to track a meal’s calories, when you know exactly what you put into the meal. Also, many of those terrible vegetables are actually really good, when cooked right. I used to HATE brussel sprouts. Just Christ on a pogo stick, why did anyone eat these slimy balls of mush? Turns out, that my mother had no idea how to cook them, so they got steamed in the microwave. When properly sauteed or roasted, they’re awesome.

And that’s really it. I started tracking calories and learned to eat differently. Smaller portions, less calorie dense foods and finding new foods that I actually enjoyed. I changed up what “normal” eating was for me and dropped that extra weight. Eventually, I did stop tracking (I hate data entry), but I still have a good sense of what my portions should be and I still weigh foods, it’s just habit now. It also helped that my wife started on the journey at the same time I did (we were both “fluffy”). Having that support and keeping the bad foods out of the house helped, a lot. I also stand by the idea of going “off script” from time to time. Some folks do well with the aesthetic lifestyle, most don’t. If you try to live a live of privation, it’s going to be hard for that to be “normal”, as you’ll always be wanting something else. So, don’t beat yourself up when you have that cheat day, just try to keep it to one or two cheat days a month. 'Cause ya, you can take my ribs when you pry them from my cold, dead, BBQ sauce covered hands. Or just ask nicely, I can make you your own rack.

By eating only every other day. No clocks, wake/sleep mark a day, so it’s cca. 16 hours eating, 32 fasting, but you’re asleep for almost half of those

I’ll be up front: it wasn’t permanent because I didn’t keep doing the work but I lost about 60lbs over a year and kept it off for about 5 years. I think I never hit my ultimate goal of 175, but I did get under 200.

My wife had bariatric surgery and went on a liquid diet and I did almost the same, having only a simple keto dinner with the kids. Afterwards, we continued to avoid low density carb foods because her stomach was so small. We’d generally share a meal when we went out. Which sucked because my wife has such basic bitch taste in foods lol. I love sushi and dynamite shrimp and pad Thai, and she likes plain cheeseburgers and wet burritos (no spice).

I’m sure not eating the foods I enjoy probably helped me avoid over-consumption, as did splitting everything. Also, being on stimulants for ADHD certainly helped a lot. It could be a little awkward at restaurants as we split a $15 meal but we always tipped like we both ate full meals.

I keep meaning to get back on the train, but man, I really enjoy eating more flavorful dishes. Just did a Korean hot pot place for the first time last week with my daughter. And when I spend that kind of money to eat out, I go all out. No ragrets.

I still have a protein shake for breakfast and skip lunch most days, but clearly not enough, or the keto was key—we have pizza way too god damn much because it’s the only thing all four of us can agree on.

I just started moving more and eating less garbage

GLP-1 and then drinking less alcohol, eating better and more exercise to maintain once off it.

keto + IF, from 109kg to 59kg, it took me like 8mos, the early months was the hardest one, felt like having a flu, not fun but im glad with the results. Now I toned down a bit with keto but still monitoring my carb intake, and the IF part got ingrained, my current weight hovers around 69 to 72 kg

PS: did not consume any sugar or alternatives like artificial sweeteners, i just avoided them as much as i could.

PPS: i kinda felt bad to those places where vegetables and fruits are priced in premium, from where i live, my daily meal would cost around 10-15 in USD and that includes some meat, it would double if i couldn’t cook.

https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/new-fat-cells-created-quickly-but-losing-them-/

From https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/everything-you-know-about-obesity-is-wrong/ :

Since 1959, research has shown that 95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail and that two-thirds of dieters gain back more than they lost. The reasons are biological and irreversible. As early as 1969, research showed that losing just 3 percent of your body weight resulted in a 17 percent slowdown in your metabolism—a body-wide starvation response that blasts you with hunger hormones and drops your internal temperature until you rise back to your highest weight. Keeping weight off means fighting your body’s energy-regulation system and battling hunger all day, every day, for the rest of your life.

…

A 2016 study that followed participants for an average of 19 years found that unfit skinny people were twice as likely to get diabetes as fit fat people. Habits, no matter your size, are what really matter. Dozens of indicators, from vegetable consumption to regular exercise to grip strength, provide a better snapshot of someone’s health than looking at her from across a room.

The responses you get here will be subject to survivorship bias,

a form of sampling bias that can lead to overly optimistic beliefs because multiple failures are overlooked, … [It can] lead to the false belief that the successes in a group have some special property, rather than just coincidence