I’m currently a lump of chocolate and cheese, but once the new year hits, I’m determined to make 2026 the year I finally get back to a healthy weight (I’ve lost about 20 pounds, with about 80-100 to go). I’m pretty good about exercising regularly, but, as they say, abs are made in the kitchen. Those who have successfully lost weight, is there anything you particularly recommend for maintaining a calorie deficit to lose the weight, and then avoiding gaining it back later on?
Don’t just stop: swap.
Cutting things out leads to cravings and causes the entire process to be a constant fight. Instead, make small swaps over time that build habits.
I have a burrito every day. I swapped the tortilla for a high fiber one (get more fiber). It saved 50 calories a day and is still delicious. I swapped my side of chips for protein chips (when I can get them on sale). Lower cal, high protein, still crunchy and taste like cool ranch.
Think about what you can ADD to your meal. Having stew? Add beans and extra peppers. A sandwich? Add spinach. You’ll end up eating less of the calorie sense stuff. You’ll also get more fiber.
I found cutting carbs to be a big help. I eat massive amounts of protein and little to no carb and I’ve been losing a lot of weight that way
Track everything you eat. I use the Energize app becasue it’s private but there are lots out there. Eat the correct balance of carbs, protein, veg, etx. Get your daily calorie limit from your doctor…
Exercise as regularly as you can but remember you can’t outrun your fork.
Hydrate.
That’s it. Everything else is pretty much smoke and mirrors. It is not easy.
Mainly, cook your own food. Stop eating out.I found the America’s Test Kitchen Skillet Recipes and Best Soups to be amazing.
Track everything you eat, even when you’re in a good place, keep tracking. I have ADHD so I’ve found it best to treat it like I do financial tracking, it becomes habit very quickly and apps like waistline make it super easy to enter, especially if you’re in the habit of weighing everything.
I have to minimise the smacks kept in the house, and what we do keep tends to be “better” or at least less calorie dense. I don’t deny myself cravings, but I’ll follow servings and budget for it in calories. Waistline averages out calories over a configurable period so I don’t sweat going over one day, all balances out over the long term.
Therapy helped a lot, if only to help me have a healthier relationship with food, my therapist has a lot of experience with addiction & substance abuse and food can absolutely be a drug (which is not acknowledged enough imo). Between that and getting treatment for ADHD I’ve managed to get back down to one of the lowest weights I’ve been as an adult. I’ve tried to make it a lifestyle change which I credit heavily to success as well. My partner having a health scare that forced them to review their diet also helped tbf, but we were already on that path, was just some extra push.
What you eat can help too, fibre being a big one. Make friends with legumes, add them into your cooking. I like chickpeas and lentils, will add them into a lot of dishes I cook. Use seeds too, ground flax tastes great and adds a lot of good fats, sunflower and pumpkin seeds go well in salads. I like to do meals that can serve leftovers, stuff like soups & stews are great because they don’t have a lot of active cooking (you throw stuff into a pot and let it simmer for a while). Higher quality calories are helpful, tell you that personally I’ll feel fuller longer eating some porridge with flax and fruit in the morning than the occasions I’ll grab a McMuffin or something.
Hey, so I dropped weight casually and all I did was:
- Limit snacks. Best to zero, but minimum to one a week.
- Your food portion? Cut it in half. Fat folk tend to eat big portions, I know I did, cut it in half.
- Don’t eat constantly, predefine 3 times you are gonna eat, that’s it. For me it’s breakfast, second breakfast (at work) and dinner.
- Drink water when hunger is too big.
You will be hungry, a lot for some time but shortly it will stabilise and you’d mainly feel hunger around food time.
After time, my body stabilised around 15kg lower than I were when I began, and that’s with me breaking it quite often xD
Make soup (from veggies and beans). Eat fruit for your snacks multiple times a day. Always go for whole grains (bread, pasta, rice, etc.). Eliminate cheese entirely (seriously, it is terrible for you). Replace milk with soy milk (doesn’t have the saturated fat or sugar). Reduce or eliminate meat consumption. Avoid added sugars when possible.
A good rule of thumb that I find helpful is that the majority of ingredients in all meals should naturally contain non-negligible amounts of fiber. The things you eat should also mostly have plenty of water in them already for bulk and digestion. Dry foods (including oil-based foods) are far too easy to overeat.
These are relatively simple rules that leave tons of options for variety but force you to have a fairly healthy diet. They are easy to implement in a lifelong diet with no need for calorie-counting.
You need to track your calories and macros. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. You can go overboard sometimes, but you still need to track the calories. Someone else has recommended https://tdeecalculator.net/ which is a great starter point to set targets. Eat whatever you want, but follow your macros targets: I’d recommend a macros target high in proteins.
Cut out the sugars (including pasta, potatoes, corn,…) and ditch that addiction. You’ll not only lose weight and be healthier, but the cravings will also stop.
I think you’re on a good track. Some tips i’ve picked up though: Switch the milk you use with cereal/tea/coffee to soya milk, i found that it helps. Also don’t underestimate the power of a short stroll if you’ve been sitting down for a lot of the day - prompts the body to be in fat burning mode rrathee than fat building mode.
I think it’s pretty simple. Eat less. But it is not easy for some.
I switched to one meal a day for blood sugar management. I fast all day eat dinner then normally have a snack before bed. you learn to deal with minor hunger and it does not effect you anymore. Food is also better in general. Delayed gratification etc
Yeah I do a similar thing with intermittent fasting. I allow myself to eat as much as I want, but only after around 1600 (4pm for the temporally confused friends) or roughly the time the kid gets home from school and either has a small snack or we eat dinner straight away around that time. Couldn’t skip that, because I do need to show example too, since they, as many kids do, struggle to eat enough, sometimes just nibbling on stuff. Even if they’ve been very active with hobbies and friends and walking to and from school (around 4km total) and they really need the energy and the nutrients to build back and heal the body after all that, not to mention usual growing stuff. And as they often do, especially the salad sides are difficult without someone body doubling the experience, or if we’re doing something different, unusual food to slightly expand their comfort zone progressively. So I can’t really fast beyond that. But I’ve found I don’t really need to. I’ve lost around 10kg in a year just by this small fasting period. No other changes. I wasn’t obese before, just a bit overweight, but I have been back in the day, on the obese side even. I got back from that with keto diet, and luckily never let it slip back too much, but that isn’t an option anymore, for largely the same reasons; have to lead by example, show healthy eating habits (when they are there) and have diverse, nutritious food. Can’t do keto like that.
I’m not doing this for weight reasons though; my blood sugar is on the high side, almost pre-diabetic, and the docs tell me if I don’t get it sorted, I’ll eventually just slip over the line and that’s not something you get back from apparently. I also have vascular fat (or whatever it’s called in English, the inner fat) that I’d need to get rid of to get my liver values back to healthy bounds. Already gave up drinking some years back, even if it was occasional even then, and it wasn’t enough, so I have to try and get the fat off too. Keto would’ve been perfect for this, back in the day I lost crazy amount of that inner fat especially on it, but apparently this intermittent fasting is doing good things there too, although not nearly as effectively.
But the surprising thing to me is, I didn’t cut off any foods or food types, generally I’ve tried to keep the short carbs a bit lower than usual, but haven’t gone entirely off. And it still works. I haven’t been on the blood controls yet for either of the reasons, but my scale tells me about 2-3kg of that 10kg has been inner fat.
And even through Christmas and a lot of carbs, the weight didn’t seem to sway back almost at all, even with delayed monitoring.
Which is all to say, it seems easier to cut on the calories if you only consume them less than half a day, time-wise, even if you ate unhealthy food and generally not very diet-y. In the limited timespan it might just be impossible to get to similar amounts of calories vs. if you ate regularly throughout all day, if you like me have trouble regulating and tend to overeat fairly consistently (I have adhd so the dopamine rush gets me too excited every time and I guess I lose most of my sense of moderation for a while there).
Sorry for the weird digression. Just wanted to hop in with my experiences.
This works well for me. The hardest part comes from social interactions, not from hunger. Cooking for a family and not eating, that sucks.
Estimate your total daily energy expenditure:
Eat in a caloric deficit. You will need to weigh your food and track calories, at least for a while.
Weigh yourself and see if the weight is going in the right direction and not losing too fast either. Adjust calories as needed.
It’s way harder than just these steps but this is the foundation. Personally I found the food weighing and calorie counting massively stressful but I got a good sense of how much to eat from doing it from a few weeks. Now I check the scale and log weight and make sure it’s going the way I want it.
Also talk to a therapist. I needed one to get over certain mental barriers and to re-evaluate my relationship to food and my body image.
Good luck. You got this. OK so 100lb is quite a lot. And please stay above 100lb body weight. OK now then. I lost around 30lbs give or take. And here are some tips:
- It’s all about calories in and calories out. You’ll probably have to adjust your diet every now and then. I say this because a big deficit is not sustainable. When I tried a deficit like this I didn’t have the energy to exercise. So there’s that.
- exercise is a bit easier. specially when you body is new to the exercise. Just make sure to understand the routing or without.
- please remove unhealthy foods specially instant noodles.
- cook your meals when possible.
- follow the service size.
- if after a month you haven’t lost another pound, consider a meal journal.
- finally, gaining weight or losing weight is not easy. That’s because the difference in calories for the target weight.
- maybe try a intermittent fasting to get a feel for the fake hunger and real hunger.
- serious make better diet. Make sure your diet is balanced and within your calorie limits.
Good luck. You got this.
I personally use a calorie counting app, like Waistline, and when I start getting into that routine of eating less naturally without actively counting, I stop using the app.
When I fall off, I go back to it for a bit until I’m back in the rhythm.
I also exercise a few times a week and try to do at least one walk a day.
Wearables like Garmin also do great calculations of calories burned. If you don’t like the idea of your data being sold, which you shouldn’t, Garmins are often compatible with this FOSS app: https://f-droid.org/packages/nodomain.freeyourgadget.gadgetbridge
One key trick I did was be completely honest with my calorie counting app.
Lying to it only lied to myself.
After about a month, I started getting “lazy” by documenting it by not eating certain things. I knew adding cookies would add 200 calories, and I didn’t feel like opening up the app. So I didn’t eat it.
And My cheat days suddenly felt real. I ate a whole pizza and watched those calorie numbers go higher. When cheat day came around again, I “cheated” by picking healthier things.
- Daily long walks.
- Eat less.
- Eat better. I quit stuffing myself with industrially processed food, best decision ever. Even better than quitting smoking (which I did some 20 years ago). BTW, eating better helps a lot in eating less.
Edit: some improvements made to my (severely) lacking English.
These are all great suggestions, and I would just like to add: drink more water. If water gets boring, add some lemon / lime / fruit, have some herbal teas, or even some coffee (black). When I’m in ravenous eating mode and about to go for seconds, it’s helpful if I can catch myself and have a glass of water first. Then wait 5 - 10 minutes and see if I actually want more food.
+1 to all you just said :)
We quit drinking soda (and I quit alcohol, too). Now it’s, water, pressed fresh fruits (but not too much), tea and infusions. Maybe once a year I will have a drink of wine (I’m French, I have an excuse ;)
As for teas, my advice there would be to not cheap out on tea. quality teas, aka full leaves, are a thing of their own. Also I would encourage to get at least two tea posts (one for stronger teas and the other one for the lighter ones)
Drinking calories is so bad.
I only drink Coconut Unsweetened Silk and tap water outside of a zero cal soda now and then.
I still lightly sweeten my coffee most mornings, but that’s about it.
What do you like to eat that’s less processed? I’d like to do that, processed food unfortunately requires just so much less prep.
Fresh veggies & fruits, a little quality meat (but not too much and not every day), no industrial bread (I live in Paris, we still have access to a few real artisanal bakeries where they make their own bread, but here too they’re getting replaced by industrial ones, so we’ve planned on learning to make our own bread soon), no industrial sweets/treats and no soda.
My spouse and I also learned to cook, instead of going out to a restaurant multiple times a week like we used. Saves us money and it’s a fine moment we spend together too ;)
As for the time it takes to cook fresh food: either we will make very simple meal, which takes minutes (plus we often have fun while cooking) or we will cook a meal that we will last us 2 or 3 days. So it’s really not that much of an issue. And since eating better helps us feeling a lot less tired too, well… we think it’s really worth it. The real effort is to be willing to change one’s own habits, at least if I can relate to my own experience.
Edit: maybe I should make it clear that the key change, and the very first step anyone should do is to stop eating those ready-made, over-processed and over-packaged shit food that we’ve learned to consider normal food. Sorry I this sound rude, even more so in the USA I would imagine, but this what I think they’re worth (with all their sugar and salt, and conservatives and colorants) and how good I think they’re for our health: barely a few weeks after I quite eating that I started getting better. To me, it’s the same shit as the cigarettes and if we don’t self-destroy in a nuclear holocaust (or ins ome ecological major crisis) before that I have little doubt this industrial food will end being an even worse scandal than tobacco ever was.
It is garbage food-like industrial waste, mostly. Read the nutrition information and it’s mostly empty calories! And with a work schedule all over the map, it is challenging. But an air fryer and sweet/regular potatoes pack a lot of nutrients in with the denser calorie count and fiber!
Hi! Not the same person but I’m in the same process!
Firstly, take it in steps, don’t quit all processed food at once. I actually started with eating more veggies, both in the food and as a side salad.
Then read on the products, not all processed foods are equal, and it depends on what more you have in the meal. On meat products I often look at the meat percentages, it can vary A LOT. A sausage with + 80% meat is a lot better than 30%…
You can also look for E-numbers, concentrates, and other additives. How good or bad these are are still being discussed but I’m leaning towards bad, especially if it’s a lot.
For example a highly processed sausage with basmati rice and a decent amount of salad isn’t the same as said sausage with just mac and cheese.
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Some meals are easier to prep than others but more often than not I’ve found meals, especially the meat, to need time. Time to cook properly!
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Fry meat in a pan, let it simmer in water for half an hour or so ( I rarely keep time ), make a sauce in the pan.
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Or put a chunk of meat on a oven safe plate and trow it into the oven on 150-175°C for 1.5-3h or more depending on size and tenderness.
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Or make a soup, just make sure it boils long enough for the meat! :)
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