6 ms·

The hardest part of dieting is realising that in order to keep it off, you will have to continue like that forever. In the back of your mind, you want to think

• chongli 8y ago
  True success is the acceptance that, no, your life will be worse in very real ways. You will no longer be able to just eat whenever you feel like it. You will no longer be able to eat until you are full, ever again. None of these things are true. With a good diet and exercise, you will feel better and be happier, with way more energy. That makes your life better, not worse. As another commenter mentioned, abstaining from sweets increases your sensitivity to sweetness. If you go long enough, you'll find most candy cloying rather than addictive. So throw away those cheap, mass market candy bars. By some expensive dark chocolate candy from a reputable chocolatier. Eat one piece instead of a whole bunch and just take your time to enjoy the flavours. It is sooooo much better! The way I see people (including myself at times) eat candy bars and potato chips bears more resemblance to a starving dog than a human who really enjoys good food. Stop being a dog! Take your time and enjoy something really good instead of swallowing a whole bunch of junk in front of Netflix.
  • mirceal 8y ago
    stop being a dog :| unless it's in another context where dog-like qualities are appreciated ;)
  • Negitivefrags 8y ago
    > None of these things are true. With a good diet and exercise, you will feel better and be happier, with way more energy. That makes your life better, not worse. I never said your life won’t be better overall. I said it will be worse in real ways. Eating pizza, Soda and so on are awesome. There is a reason these foods are popular. No amount of pretending is going to make that not true, and a life where you could eat them with no downsides would be better.
    • holri 8y ago
      > Eating pizza, Soda and so on are awesome It depends what you are used to eat. A few years ago I would have agreed that pizza and Soda is great. But today after changing my live style I cook for myself fresh vegetables from CSA and small bio farms I do not like pizza and all the crap any more. That goes so far that I can not go to restaurants anymore, because 95% of them serve crap for my todays taste.
      • pluma 8y ago
        > That goes so far that I can not go to restaurants anymore I would call that a direct impact to quality of life (if only because you're missing out on the social experience), which is the exact point the GP made.
        • holri 8y ago
          There are some restaurants with high quality food. And I enjoy them. After all my quality of live is way better than before. My social experience improved because I met interesting people with the same interest / taste at my local Foodcoop for example.
      • KozmoNau7 8y ago
        Pizza is only crap, if you eat crap pizza. Making good pizza at home, with high quality ingredients is maybe not 100% perfect nutrition, but it is damn good, and much better than anything you'd buy from a pizzeria or (heavens forbid) frozen pizza. Soda is junk, though. Only fit for extremely occasional use as a mixer in a good drink.
    • kstenerud 8y ago
      I moved off those a few years ago. It was painful for a year and a half. Now I can't even eat them anymore; they taste vile. It was the salt and sugar that made them addictive, but now that I'm off them, I can finally taste the rest of the ingredients that went into them, and they taste terrible.
    • coldtea 8y ago
  • hvidgaard 8y ago
    You're completely neglecting that sugar is addictive. No matter how sensitive to sweetness you are, the very moment you eat anything sweet, you will need something that is either more sweet next time to get the same chemical "fix" in your brain, or you will need to abstain from sweet stuff until your palate and brain have reset. So even when you cut back on sweet stuff, you will need to continually and consciously hold back, otherwise you will crave it more and your palate will desensitize to the sweet flavor - this is simple biology that no one can escape (except for rare medical conditions).
• flukus 8y ago
  > The hardest part of dieting is realising that in order to keep it off, you will have to continue like that forever. Why would that be? To lose why your are taking a net negative mass balance, once the weight is lost you probably can't go back to the exact diet you had (otherwise you wouldn't need to lose weight) but an mass neutral one should suffice to keep you at the same weight.
  • hnuser1234 8y ago
    If you are a 300 pound person and want to be a 150 pound person, you have to eat like a 150 pound person. Forever.
    • ramblerman 8y ago
      You are both correct, not sure why OP is downvoted though. If your caloric requirements are 2400 calories a day. You might eat at a deficit for your diet, say 1700. And after that you can eat 2400 again.
      • hnuser1234 8y ago
        As body mass increases, the caloric intake required to maintain said mass increases. Likewise, as body mass decreases the caloric intake required to maintain said mass decreases. Fat people need to eat like the not-fat version of themselves in order to both lose weight and maintain their new mass. If "balance" is 2400 calories for their fat body, resuming eating 2400 calories will lead to them becoming fat again.
  • yetihehe 8y ago
    I've tried mass neutral diet and it didn't work. Somehow my body was able to sustain 105kg on about 1000kcal daily for two weeks. After that, my mind broke and I thought about food like a narcotic, just couldn't continue that diet.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• ambivalents 8y ago
  I don't actually think that's true. If you're making positive lifestyle adjustments (and not just going on a flash diet hoping for instantaneous results), then there really isn't a "there" to go back to. You gradually adopt healthier habits, replacing older ones, and they become learned behavior. Your tastes change. Your stomach gets smaller. Not to mention your "set point" average weight will decrease and your body/metabolism adapt to living at a lower weight. This sounds a little vague, apologies. I've done many diets (paleo, keto, South Beach, etc.) and nothing worked. So instead, over the course of six months I gradually gave up sugar, I gave up meat, I stopped eating snacks between meals. I still ate delicious foods, but in smaller portions. Only sweets I had were fruit. I kept my exercise the same (3-5x/week). I lost 15 pounds and have kept it off. Have no intention of gaining it back. I can't imagine reincorporating old ways, they are an older me. I cringe at the thought of eating a full pint of ice cream after dinner, which I used to do on a near weekly basis. Tl;dr: as your body and habits change, so too do your desires and preferences.
• nsxwolf 8y ago
  No wonder that almost everyone who attempts this is certain to fail, and it will always be so.
• oska 8y ago
  > The hardest part of dieting is realising that in order to keep it off, you will have to continue like that forever. I'm going to reverse this. For me, the idea of having to eat what an obese person consumes every day to maintain their weight is an exhausting one. I think it's actually fairly easy to be a normal weight and only consume the amount of food necessary to maintain that weight and much harder to consume the amount of food required to be obese.
  • Noumenon72 8y ago
    I think you're correct assuming you're eating a healthy diet made of stuff like oatmeal, beans, and chicken. It's hard to keep enough of that on hand and hard to fit it all in your stomach. It's easy to consume 3500 calories in a day in cheese curls or going out to eat ribs.
    • kortilla 8y ago
      Good luck eating 3500 calories of ribs. Easy calories come from carbs so unless you drink the sauce the ribs are glazed with you’re not gonna make it.
      • clappski 8y ago
        2 full racks of ribs will bring you pretty close: https://www.nutritionix.com/i/nutritionix/bbq-ribs-1-rack-12-ribs/5602bce6b49dcc066e582593 https://www.nutritionix.com/i/nutritionix/bbq-ribs-1-rack-12...
• taneq 8y ago
  The biggest scam the weight loss industry ever pulled on society was to redefine "diet" from "a description of what you eat" to "a temporary modification to what you're eating". You don't "go on a diet", you HAVE a diet. And if your diet is what is making you fat, then to not be fat, you have to change your diet, permanently.
  • thepete2 8y ago
    In German, they're still separate words, I think "diet" made its way into German and became "Diät".
    • sshine 8y ago
      In Danish there's both "en diæt" (what you eat, permanent) and "på diæt" (on a diet, temporary). I didn't even think about the fact that that word didn't always have the temporary meaning of the word.
      • hvidgaard 8y ago
        The meaning is more fluent. The doctor can put you on a strict diet with a mealplan "lægen har sat mig på en streng diæt med kostplan og det hele", that isn't necessarily temporary.
      • MindTwister 8y ago
        There is also "slankekur" which more or less translates to "slimming-cure"
    • pluma 8y ago
      Ironically, the wages of government representatives are also called "diets" in German. I'd say "diet" for "Ernährung" just fell out of use at some point and was reintroduced when diet fads became a thing.
      • gaius 8y ago
        The Vietnamese parliament is called the Diet but I don’t think it’s etymologically related.
• thepete2 8y ago
  What's great though is that your body adapts. If you abstain from sweets for example, after a week or so fruit will taste much sweeter.
  • tvmalsv 8y ago
    Very true. A few years ago I quit drinking sodas and switched to sugar-free flavorings (eg. Crystal Light, Mio, etc). After a year or so I ordered a Mt. Dew, my previous vice, while at a restaurant and it tasted like pure sugar syrup. Mind you, I got used to quickly ;)
• nonbel 8y ago
  >"You will no longer be able to eat until you are full, ever again" This is totally false. Just eat a low-carb diet and you will feel "full" after consuming much less food.
  • erik_seaberg 8y ago
    Protein has as many calories as carbohydrate, and fat has even more. To feel full you have to stuff yourself with placebos like fiber instead of food.
    • nonbel 8y ago
      It isn't the calories that matter. To feel full your brain needs to receive signals from your body that you should feel full. It appears that carbohydrates mess with these signals so that your brain thinks you are not yet full when you should be. You can easily try it for yourself.
• atom-morgan 8y ago
  > You will no longer be able to eat until you are full, ever again. Wrong. I just ate and I'm very full. I could even fuck off and eat like shit more often than I do but I choose not to. I'm 6'0" about ~175lbs/80kg. And yet I often have people approach me in the gym to ask questions, advice, etc: https://www.instagram.com/adamjmorgan/ https://www.instagram.com/adamjmorgan/. It's possible to eat until you're full and still look good. -Signed, former chubby kid.
  • Negitivefrags 8y ago
    It’s great that your body is in a place where you are able to do that, but let me ask you something. Have you ever been more than 130kg? I have, and getting down to being no longer overweight requires a substantial mindset change. It’s extremely unhelpful to talk to people who have been as large as I have about how you can eat how you want and still feel full. Maybe you can lose the weight and still few full, but it’s just not realistic to paint that picture because all you are doing is undermining the reality of long term change.
    • borski 8y ago
      I’ve been 118kg, and I’m 5’9’’. I started a keto diet 3 months ago and have lost 33 lbs. here’s the interesting part: I definitely feel full when I eat now, because fat and protein are just that much more satiating. It takes less food to make me feel full. Provided it’s high in fat.
      • quicklime 8y ago
        The article references a few studies that conclude that there is "no significant difference" between a low carb and a low fat diet. It also suggests that whether a keto (or any other) diet will work is an individual thing: > In this regard, saying that “diet X is the best way to lose weight” is probably not a globally-correct statement given the evidence so far. Instead, it should be the much less interesting: “no diet performs meaningfully better on average, but there exists some diet that is the best way to lose weight for you.” This matches up with my experience. I know a lot of people like yourself who swear by a low-carb/keto diet, whereas I find I have no problem maintaining a healthy weight (BMI=22) with a fairly high-carb diet with a lot of rice, noodles, pasta, oats and bread. I actually feel very unsatiated when I'm just eating meat/vegetables alone. I love to eat, and once or twice a week I'll literally eat until my stomach physically hurts (and I do mean literally, kind of like how some people feel after a Thanksgiving dinner). I exercise, but not a lot - probably 3-4 hours a week. I'm not saying this to brag, or to make overweight people feel bad (I'm sorry if I do), but just to give some anaecdata to balance out what the keto people are saying. One thing that I should mention is that I don't really eat much sugar, apart from fruit, and sports drinks and energy bars when I'm doing long bike rides. I just don't enjoy the taste of soft drinks (I almost exclusively drink water, and sometimes coffee or tea), or most heavily processed foods (most of my meals are home cooked, or at non-fast-food restaurants). I also find the sauces that most restaurants slather on food to be overpowering and over-sugared, so I don't eat a lot of that either (although this seems to be a US-only problem).
• cthalupa 8y ago
  >The hardest part of dieting is realising that in order to keep it off, you will have to continue like that forever. Yes and no. It depends on your goals. Some form of modification is needed from whatever you did that made you fat in the first place. Some form of modification is needed from what is currently keeping you fat. But you could 100% have a diet that is meant to shed weight quickly, and then switch to something to maintain weight. Add in moderate amounts of exercise and you can eat a bit more. You need a sustainable, long-term, somewhat permanent diet. It doesn't necessarily need to stay the same for forever, because there might be less radical diets for maintaining. This might be a completely different diet than what got you to your target weight.