Why YSK: many countries have issues with weight, such as mine with 74% of US adults being overweight or obese. The global weight loss industry is over $200 billion yearly, with many influencers, pills, and surgeries promising quick results with little effort. These often come with side effects, or don’t work long term.
Studies suggest filling yourself with foods low in caloric density and high in fiber, like fruits and vegetables, can help reach and maintain a healthy weight. It’s good to have these foods available in our living spaces to make the choice easy. Your taste buds will likely adapt to love them if you’re not there yet.
That’s a more complicated topic. Not everyone’s endocrine system is wired the same way, and you can’t always just willpower your way through it.
Insistence that willpower is sufficient for weight regulation is a big cause of people going on diet after diet that just doesn’t work. They’re fighting against the system that has a disproportionate influence on what you want in the first place, and if you push it too far you find yourself not giving a shit about your diet, and then being filled with a slew of complex feelings coming from your “lack of self control”.
It’s better to direct that energy towards getting your diet compositionally right than trying to be okay just being hungry.
You can’t get your body to stop insisting it needs food, but you can get it to insist less often. You can teach it that it doesn’t need “SUGAR”, it needs water and maybe an apple or banana. You can give it a little solid protein between meals to keep it from asking for a continuous stream of carbs.
You can learn to identify the difference between eating because you’re bored or want a little dopamine, and eating because you’re hungry. The first one is your brain and you can willpower through it to eventually unlearn the habit.
You can choose to make good choices at the store instead of failing to make them in the kitchen.
Willpower is critical, but it’s important to know what you can or cannot actually solve with it and work within that framework.
You’re in control of your body, but that doesn’t mean that you need to pick the harder path.
And, for some people, their endocrine system is a lot more forgiving. Those usually aren’t the people who have a lot of trouble loosing or keeping off weight because they try to just “eat less” and it works.
I am all about keeping it sustainable; nobody has willpower longterm. Any fool can come up with a diet of rabbit food and have amazing results for a month before their brain goes postal on them and they start inhaling cheeseburgers nonstop. Trust me, I totally get that. We always attribute vast reserves of motivation and discipline to ourselves that we just don’t have, and the results aren’t pretty.
But on the other side of the coin, your brain can get stuck in a short-term reward loop, and it howls blue murder when you first try to break out of it.
I’m an stress-eater and a boredom-eater, and if the loop gets out of control, not constantly snacking becomes stressful in and of itself, and yeah that’s a complete trainwreck.
But what I’ve found is that after a surprisingly short time of acclimating yourself to controlled amounts of hunger, you can break that loop. Your brain re-learns the difference between not-full and actually-need-calories, and only sees the latter as a problem.
What started out feeling like a catastrophe that you had to white-knuckle through just turns into a boring fact that takes little to no willpower at all to put up with at all.
It’s a really good investment of effort, and makes the whole process a lot easier.
Yup, I would definitely agree more with what you’re saying here than what I understood from above.
It definitely takes willpower to lose weight, and you definitely need to learn to identify why you’re eating and break those habits you don’t want, which also takes willpower.
I would characterize boredom/stress/comfort eating differently than hunger, since there’s the distinction between “want to eat” and “feel hungry”.
Whatever your reason is for wanting to eat, you need to handle it. If it’s boredom, you can use willpower to push through chips being more interesting than the show you’re watching, ideally by doing something else.
If you want to eat because you’re hungry, there isn’t a way to handle that beyond eating. So the smart move is to make choices about what and how you eat so that feeling stays away longer, which goes a long way towards helping to break the habit of feeling like you’re “supposed” to eat more often than you need to.
I think you’re initial comment came across much stronger than I see it is now, and we’re actually very close in terms opinion. :)
Thank you so much for both your posts I’m actually literally going through the exact same thing right now - Also a boredom and stress eater trying to get used to being hungry and honestly I enjoy the process of being hungry and denying myself bullshit food because I know it’s bullshit and a big part of my brain seems to agree and kick in just as you said. It’s a very freeing feeling!!!
I do most of my dieting at the store, I dislike spending money, so it’s really easy to avoid the crap there.
For me it’s all about the list. I’m opposed to spending money in general, but I also enjoy, and am pretty good at, cooking.
If I don’t have a good list, my weakness is to start designing meals based on random ingredients I see at the store, and then I buy the stuff, go home and cook the food, and enjoy too much of it. Beyond eating too much of it, it’s just tricky to design a good dish that’s tasty and also not silly unhealthy while standing in the grocery store.
Took a bit to learn to make a note of the idea in my phone, and then design it at home. Then it can go on the list.
Thanks for saying this. I think the idea that it is just willpower causes so much unnecessary suffering. As someone suffering from an eating disorder and thyroid disease, I was getting a bit down reading all the “it’s just calories in vs calories out” remarks. It is so much more complicated than that.
For many, many folk, it is simply cal in vs out.
If you’ve some condition that affects metabolism, then yes, that sort of advice is not the best.
It’s calorie in/out in the thermodynamics sense, but humans are far too complicated to meaningfully model as a thermodynamic system.
Just doing calorie in/out dieting really doesn’t work for most people. That’s why you need to combine it with behavioral changes, strategies to change habits and attitudes towards food, which usually also involves changing what you eat and when so the downsides of eating less are less bothersome.
I think for most people it is not the best advice. In most cases, there are many other factors at play than just willpower and “calories in vs calories out”. Obesity should be viewed and treated more like a disease, because it is. If you are interested, I can link you some interesting papers on this.
Everybody is different so advice varies. For instance, some people do very well with carbs and grains. Other people’s bodies scavenge every carb and store it as fat so a high fiber, high fat diet works better for them since fat is satiating and a source of energy, Contrary to popular opinion fat does not make you fat unless it is combined with carbs, like a hamburger bun, fries and large Coke. Then again this only applies to good fats like salmon, sardines, olive oil and grass-fed meat, not the rancid vegetable oil that are pushed on us today - they actually cause allergy problems that contribute to weight gain. The 350 pound lady is starving because her system stored all the carbs she ate - your body needs about a teaspoon of sugar in its system to run and she doesn’t have enough in her system to run her body.
Good fats moderate a lot of metabolism problems for a certain groups of people. Our whole food industry is based on selling carbs. Try to buy food that aren’t carbed up - it isn’t easy. No wonder we have a weight problem in this country. Hungry? Try cutting carbs way back, increasing fiber and good fats - don’t forget potatoes, carrots and most fall crops in general tend to be high carb foods so eat salads, cabbage and leafy greens with olive oil and vinegar dressing, for instance. Carb addiction is real so give your diet change some time. Oh yeah, stay away from processed foods - they contribute to weight gain too. Again, this may not apply to you in the least, but forget the old carbs in, carbs burned shit. It simply doesn’t apply to some people.
Maybe I’ll just fill up on rice cakes
Aren’t those low-fiber and high carb?
As mentioned in a handful of other comments, it’s all about choices. Rice cakes are usually all carbs, low fiber, but they’re also close to puffed nothing.
So if you know that you’re gonna snack despite doing everything else right, choosing salted rice cakes over chips is a good choice, and if a snack option keeps you from feeling miserable while loosing weight, you’re more likely to stick with it and get to your goals.
Maybe not as fast as if you hadn’t snacked at all, but an attainable goal is better.
Ok, a pro-ricecake comment from an actual rice cake. Sounds suspicious! 😄
Ones that do not add flavoring with calories, ones seasoned with salt, and some garlic, or herbs, for example, only have 35 calories. White rice cakes are similar to white rice in glycemic index, however they create a lot of bulk, help sate cravings for snack foods, and likely won’t harm you unless you have a predisposition to blood sugar regulation issues. Brown rice cakes are much lower in glycemic index, and have more nutrients. So, if you like the taste go with brown, though white rice cakes are better than the vast majority of foods that can give you a replacement for salty, crunchy, snack foods.