Quick, Easy Ways to Lose Weight (OT)

On the new site, which I hope to debut in November, I'm thinking that Wednesday will be "Off Topic Day," and I'll confine all the off-topic posts to that day. So people who want to can just skip Wednesdays.

Anyway, just as an aside: a reader recently commented that he was trying a whole food plant-based (WFPB) diet and wasn't losing weight. Here's a quick cure for that: stop eating after five o'clock.

If you're eating WFPB, by all means eat all you want before five. Eat as much as you can in fact. But after five, be strict—nothing but plain water till breakfast.

That ought to do it.

And if it doesn't? Try "modified alternate-day fasting" (MADF), which is a fancy name for eating nothing but breakfast every other day.

I don't know whether MADF would work if you're not eating WFPB. If you eat bacon and eggs for breakfast it might be tough; I wouldn't know. But this strategy has been no trouble for me when I've tried it. Unexpectedly, I actually quite like fasting days—I don't have to figure out what I'm going to eat, I don't have to shop or cook, or spend money eating out, and I get the dishes done and clean the kitchen if I haven't done so the day prior. And, surprisingly, I find not eating to be perfectly comfortable. I feel more alert and energetic on those days. Of course, YMMV. Try it for yourself; but give it seven cycles or so before you decide. Your body has to start getting used to it.

Plateaus
In any event, weight loss is definitely intermittent, or episodic. (I have the stats on myself.) First of all, if you weigh yourself morning and evening, you'll be amazed how much your weight fluctuates over the course of a day (hint: if you want only the good news, weigh yourself in the morning). Eating exactly the same way, I'll lose weight nicely for a while and then get on a hard plateau and stick at one weight for a frustratingly long time—a few weeks up to a couple of months. It's easy to get discouraged during these stretches. But stay the course. If you're eating well, weight loss will resume eventually.

Mike

P.S. A book I find highly valuable was republished in 2014. Eating on the Wild Side by Jo Robinson is an encyclopedia of vegetables and fruits—each entry gives you a little history of the cultivars, names the healthiest varieties, and tells you the best way to shop for, store, and prepare each food for maximum health benefit. Turns out there's no handy one-size-fits-all ideology. Some foods are better eaten raw, some cooked. Some foods keep well, some don't (case in point: broccoli is indeed a "superfood"—but only if you can eat it within six hours of harvesting! Otherwise it's just another good cruciferous veggie). Some are best eaten fresh, but sometimes canned or frozen is better. And so on. Author Jo Robinson did no original research, but spent ten years researching and collating the available science. An essential food reference, IMHO, no matter what kind of diet you eat.

P.P.S. Oh, and one other confounding factor occurs to me—alcohol. If you're trying WFPB but still drinking regularly it would interfere with weight loss. Try cutting back to two drinks on the weekend (Canada's Guidance on Alcohol and Health recommends this as a safe level of drinking) and nothing the rest of the week.

Alcohol is fattening, one of many odd things about it. It's the only addictive drug that's also a nutrient. It has seven calories per gram, more than sugar and only two calories fewer than pure fat. Late-stage alcoholics are often malnourished because they're getting the majority of their calories from alcohol. It's also both a stimulant and a depressant—a stimulant at first, and then, as the evening wears on and more drinks are consumed, a more and more severe depressant, affecting speech, vision, muscle control, impulse control, and eventually consciousness. Although this is strangely not well known, you can overdose on it, just like you can on heroin or fentanyl—that's called "alcohol poisoning," and almost 50 people die of it every week in the U.S., some of them college students engaged in drinking games. No one knows how many deaths it causes, because many deaths of drunk people are attributed to accidents, fires, drowning, falling, and risk-taking behaviors, but it's well known that alcohol kills many people who aren't alcoholics; in fact, it kills many people who weren't even drinking. Of all the major drugs, it has one of the lowest rates of addiction—only about 10 to 20% of people consistently exposed to it will become addicts (alcoholics), despite which, it's one of the worst addictions in the sense that it has some of the most awful long-term health effects, up to and including "wet brain"—thiamine deficiency, AKA Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome (WKS), a combination of Wernicke’s encephalopathy and Korsakoff’s psychosis. WKS is a common complication of long-term heavy drinking.

Another pitch here for Under the Influence by Ketcham and Milam. The only flaw in the book is that they're wrong about AA, for reasons I could be very clear about, but the cellular science is still current (I checked into it), and the section "The Myth and the Reality," in Chapter 1, is in my opinion worth the whole price of the book all by itself. It's been called "the best book ever written on alcoholism," and while I can't say that, I can certainly say it's the best I've ever read. I got mine in the "welcome packet" I was given when I arrived at rehab. Now it's one of a very few books I've read multiple times.

P.P.P.S. This, like most of my posts, was intended to be very short. Sigh.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Albert Smith: "This is just one data point about one subject: me. I'm coming up on 66, weigh 175 lbs. and have a consistent 32-inch waist. I've been retired from the military for 24 years and could go on base and pass the current fitness test that all the active duty troops take.

"Intermittent fasting has been THE MOST effective thing for my weight management. It worked very fast and it has stayed effective for going on a decade. By chance on the last day of the year in 2014, I was watching the nightly news and the last segment of the episode was on intermittent fasting. There were multiple testimonials about how it was life changing for people and being that the next day was the first of January, I had my resolution.

"I refuse to deprive myself of staples like bread and dairy as advocated by some diets that promise weight loss. These work because you artificially exclude things that humans have eaten for centuries before the epidemic of obesity became the norm. These diets fail because...can you really live your life never eating a sandwich, pizza, or pasta? The long term results say not too many people can. And besides, you call that living?

"I get up at 6:00 a.m. and do my workout in a fasted state...digging a deeper hole in my blood sugar and fat stores. I eat breakfast at 8:00 a.m., lunch at 1:30 p.m. and a final snack (cottage cheese, apple, spoonful of peanut butter) at 5:00 p.m. I only drink water until bed. Then 13 hours later I start over the next day with my 6:00 a.m. workout. Wash, rinse, repeat.

"One neat trick to prevent cheating...I floss and brush after the 5 p.m. meal. I'd rather skip a snack that do that again."

Mike replies: As to your point about things that humans have eaten for centuries, I've finally realized I have to incorporate just a little sugar into my diet...because that's the thing that always takes me down. I eat no sugar for months or years and then give in and give up. I have to realize that I need to learn to eat just a little in order for it not to become a diet-killer at some point in the future.

Roger Bradbury: "I've tried a couple of diet regimes. The first one I got so far on then couldn't lose any more weight. I gave up and the weight came back on.

"On the second diet regime I got to the same point, having lost about 37 lbs./17 kg from a start weight of 260 lbs./118 kg. This time I eventually realised that while controlling what I eat got me so far, I also had to control how much I eat, so I reduced my portion size.

"I now weigh 195lbs./89 kg; having lost about 65 lbs./30 kg I am now 5 lbs./2.3 kg off my target weight. But the second diet has, over the last 15 months, taught me an eating regime that is sustainable in the long term.

"That's my point. Once I'm at my target weight I'll be free to follow a slightly more relaxed version of the weight loss diet, because now I know how.

"I haven't told you which diets I've been on because different diets work for different people. But find a diet that doesn't make you miserable, because you might be on it for more than a year and when you've got to the weight you want you'll still need to follow it, but in a more relaxed fashion.

"By the way, even that first stone off (14 lbs./6.4 kg) made such a difference; I soon realised I could get up off the settee far more easily. It was very encouraging."

Mike replies: I like your last point. I've lost 17 lbs. since I started MADF and my sleep apneas, which the CPAP machine monitors, have gone way down already. Seventeen pounds ago I was having 6, 8, up to 13 events per hour. This morning it was 1.2 per hour, and I felt like a million bucks. Been happily working all day.

Nigli: "I personally don't wish for quick or easy ways to lose weight. I'm happy to make it slow and difficult. It's taken the better part of a year and thousands of kilometers cycling as well as a rethink about what I eat to lose about 7 kg. That's just fine. That change has now been hardwired in. I find the benefits or rigorous exercise cannot be overstated."

Comments

[Cateto/Jose]

My short advice:

Diets do not work, because you put them in your mind as a method to lose weight. And once you lose it (and often, even if you don't lose it) you will return to your old habits.

If you want to lose wait and stay with lower weight, there is only one way: to eat less, and to do more physical exercise. And this is where the hard work starts. Because some of us (me included, for sure) do like to eat, and have a metabolism which pushes me to eat, so that my body is pushing currently to be around 105 kilograms. If I stay firmly eating less (which in my case, is eating only a yoghurt after lunch, until breakfast), I will go lower than 100 kilograms. But me, just like almost anybody else, will often break those rules, go with friends, eat for dinner, take some drinks... and then you start all over again.

Is it worth to keep a strict rule to remain under a given weight (provided this one is pretty reasonable and not clearly into obesity territory)? THAT is the question.

(Now off for another "dinner" consisting in a yoghurt).

[Herman Krieger]

An expert on dieting-

[Andrew]

Another interesting feature of alcohol use is that in extreme cases, withdrawal can result in serious, life-threatening symptoms. As I understand it, this is not the case with other drugs, other than perhaps benzodiazepines.