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For me, sugar was the reason I couldn't lose weight. I got a CGM (continuous glucose monitor) and got my blood sugar under control, and with very little effort
by e40 2y ago
For me, sugar was the reason I couldn't lose weight. I got a CGM (continuous glucose monitor) and got my blood sugar under control, and with very little effort I lost a lot of weight.
I use 90% cacao Lindt to control my sweet tooth. 1/2 the bar has 4g of sugar, and I consume it over hours. It also has the side effect of reducing my hunger. If you eat much of 90% chocolate, it makes you feel nausea. The trick is to put a small chip in your mouth and let it melt. It's quite delicious and I've not had any sweets in 80+ days.
- amonon 2y agoThis also speaks to another point, when trying to lose weight: you must find new things to enjoy.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoThis is actually great advice for any bad habit you're trying to break. In general, just thinking "Stop doing this thing" (or "do less of this thing"), doesn't really work. It's usually more effective to find something else that you do enjoy (and is better for you), and try to do more of that thing and have it "crowd out" your bad habit. When it comes to eating, there is a nutritionist with a pretty sizable online following (Kylie Sakaida), and I love one of her mantras of "add, don't subtract". That is, don't think of abstaining from foods you like that might be unhealthy, but instead try to add more healthy things to that food to make it a balanced meal. For example, she gives the example of wanting a frozen waffle for breakfast. Instead of thinking "No, I can't have this frozen waffle", she instead makes a spread using Greek yogurt to add protein, then adds fresh fruit and nuts for more nutrients, fiber and healthy fats, so what started as an 'empty carbs' meal is turned into a pretty balanced, filling breakfast.
- e40 2y agoSo true. I've done this very often: - See some goodies my wife bought (for herself or me). - Thinks about having my 90% Lindt later/next day. - Walks away.
- djmips 2y agoI was realizing that spicy food can be that.
- nfg 2y agoI’d be interested to hear more here - what CGM did you buy? What was your process for monitoring?
- e40 2y agoThe Stelo. 2 for $99. Oddly, it shipped from Amazon but Amazon doesn't sell them. The app is subpar on iOS, but if you give Apple's Health app permission, you can get more data in there. Graphs that have absolute numbers. I think they reason their app doesn't give absolute values (for historical values, they give the current value only), is because it's not a calibrated device. It can't be used to control an insulin pump, for that reason.
- tchock23 2y agoI just completed two weeks with Lingo by Abbott. It was decent. I wish it had better integration of the data with Apple Health, but I liked the Lingo score as a way of "gamifying" it and the UX overall was decently done.
- jonplackett 2y agoThis worked for me for a while but I learned to love dark chocolate toooooo much. I can now eat a 100g bar of 100% chocolate in a single sitting if I feel like it… And that’s 55g of fat, so more or less the fat I should be eating in a whole day.
- e40 2y agoWow!! I feel queasy if I eat more than 1/2 a bar of the 90%. It also completely takes the edge off my hunger, which is great for me.
- jonplackett 2y agoI think I started getting addicted to the caffeine
- e40 2y agoInteresting. I do go days without it and don't have headaches, as I would expect from caffeine withdrawal, so I guess I don't eat enough. What happens when you stop for a day or two?
- jonplackett 2y agoI just really craved it! In the end I just accepted I wanted to have caffeine and started drinking coffee instead. That’s made it easier to have a few squares here and there and enjoy them properly. Which is good because chocolate good enough to eat at 100% is not cheap! Eating a whole bar a day was an expensive habbit.
- bilsbie 2y agoI thought a CGM would help me lose weight but it turned out my body is a hero at managing sugar spikes. A pint of ice cream? Back to baseline in under an hour. Big meal, no big spike, etc. So it turns out you can still gain weight even if you don’t spike your blood sugar. At least for me.
- e40 2y agoIf you don't spike your blood sugar and you eat fewer calories that you need, I don't know how you wouldn't lose weight. For me, a small piece of pie after dinner impacted my BS for 6-12 hours, according to the sensor. That was shocking.
- bilsbie 2y agoI was high calorie, low spike. I had just assumed before the cgm that my blood sugar regulation would be terrible with how easily I put in fat. But it was extremely well run.
- djmips 2y agoIsn't 90% Lindt the worst (of their chocolates) for Cadmium and other heavy metals though?
- e40 2y agoAll I could find is this: https://www.snopes.com/news/2024/12/31/lindt-chocolate-heavy-metals/ https://www.snopes.com/news/2024/12/31/lindt-chocolate-heavy... I am worried about it. Ugh.
- XzetaU8 2y agoHere's one (besides CR & asyousow tests) from 2022 from the ConsumerLab https://www.ahealthylife.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/DarkChocolate_Cocoa-ConsumerLab.pdf https://www.ahealthylife.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/DarkC...
- autoexec 2y agoI'm a chocolate fan myself and it was something I used to buy often, but just as I started getting into the hard stuff (80% or higher) I learned about all the problems with heavy metals in dark chocolate and specifically in Lindt, and then later learned about the use of child slaves which is an industry wide issue and not exclusive to Lindt/Russell Stover/Ghirardelli/Lindor although Lindt and Hershey are reportedly worse than other brands. You can find brands that claim to be more ethical in terms of sourcing their cocoa, but the smaller brands that do are also less likely to have been tested for heavy metals. While it's unclear how harmful the heavy metals would be to me specifically at the amounts I was eating, the whole thing kind of put me off chocolate in general and dark chocolate in particular. I rarely have it anymore.