The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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I've finally had some success with my latest attempt at a keto diet (I've been on it maybe 4 times over my lifetime), largely due to properly using high quality electrolytes to overcome fatigue, extending the intermittent fasting period (thanks to Dr Boz), and maxxing leafy green vegetables within the carb limit. I've dropped 6kg in 3 weeks, but I expect that rate to slow down.
Does anyone have keto tips or tweaks that managed to break periods of stagnation or otherwise make good progress? I'm staying away from alcohol this time.
Lots of low net carb, high fiber veggies. It did a good job of keeping me regular, which was an issue at times on the diet. Saturated fat>>Monounsaturated fat>>polyunsaturated fat, especially when it comes to ketone production. Its pretty much the opposite advice you'd hear on any other diet, but I truly felt better eating 1/2 to 2/3 pounds of bacon plus broccoli than things like chicken thighs or lean beef cuts. The fattier the better.
I also ended up transitioning to a 5 on 2 off cyclical keto diet for a couple years. Felt great for the majority of time and was the lowest weight I had been in 15 years. Unfortunately, over time I ended up undereating due to lack of hunger and started to not feel well, ending the experiment.
I did gain a lot of the weight I lost over the following year.
Yes, I've been there before too. Like your advice I'm really trying to maximise healthy vegetables within the guidelines (spinach, broccoli, green beans (for cellulose). Daily multivitamins, extra potassium through 'light salt' etc. I've realised I need to stay away from diet soda which just feels like a micronutrient drain after the fact.
And this is the real crux. How to keep it off? I put most of it on during covid so I'm hoping I will re-engage with my more active pre-covid lifestyle. I'll also make an effort to work on reducing sugar intake and portion sizes. But many people have been where I'm going without success..
I completely agree on the soda. I feel pretty poor drinking it, especially if it is before any sort of workout.
For me, physical activity is key. When not on keto, I have difficulty with portion size and being active offsets this by a great extent. The healthiest I have been since ending the cyclical keto diet was this past fall, when I trained for a bike race. If you have friends or family that share similar goals, picking a race or just a weekly habit with them can help, at least it has for me. Over time, if I am not held accountable, I let the discipline slip a bit.
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This guy advocates very little protein or carbs, and very saturated fat (cream, in his case).
This guy is also a dumbass who claims that caloric reduction doesn't work because he tried a 1000 kcal diet and his mood and energy levels crashed through the floor. No shit, Sherlock, that's Auschwitz levels of nutrition. Right now he's consuming 2294 kcal daily, which is around the right amount of caloric reduction for a 113kg person. I'm glad he's found a diet that keeps him happy and motivated, but it's still caloric reduction.
I think you're misunderstanding the 'caloric reduction doesn't work' thesis he promotes (and which I share). Obviously CICO is true as an accounting tautology, if you're losing weight, then your body must be consuming/expelling energy at a greater rate than it is consuming it.
But CICO as a description of weight loss is very different from CICO as an actionable weight loss strategy. Simply eating fewer calories on a standard diet doesn't actually work. The weight always comes back because obesity is fundamentally a problem of a broken lipostat. This is the consensus among obesity researchers because obviously the entire world didn't just decide to start eating more in the 1970s for no reason and then get obese. As for what caused the broken lipostat? Gary Taubes think it's hyper-palatable food, I personally think it's vegetable oil, or rather an excess of linoleic acid that vegetable oils provide, far beyond what our biology requires.
The ExFatLoss diet (and high carb, low protein, low fat diets like the potato diet) are attempts to fix the lipostat by resaturating the body's fat stores. I recommended this one because CertainlyWorse was trying keto, and I think if keto is going to work then minimising polyunsaturated fats is the key part.
I simply think hyperpalatable food makes you overeat. I've eliminated most hyperpalatable foods from my diet and can now quite reliably hit my maintenance calories without feeling hungry.
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This is not true. In fact, you admit as much in the silence between this period and the next sentence, because presumably something happened during this silence.
This does not follow. There is a missing intermediate step.
Be charitable. You know what I meant. Appetite goes up, metabolic rate goes down, and then yes, people either eat more food and regain the weight, or their metabolism slows down so much that it doesn't make a difference how little they eat, they still regain the weight.
Simply white-knuckling your way to thinness doesn't work for 95% of people because the body fights back. People don't decide to get obese by choosing to eat more calories, telling them to simply choose to not be obese by eating less calories doesn't work. To recommend a strategy which will fail almost everyone who tries is cruel, particularly if it involves judging them for lack of willpower afterwards.
By contrast, ExFatLoss describes his weight loss through his version of keto as easy, compared to calorie controlled diets that he had tried before. Something else is clearly going on. Much better to try and work out what it is than just sneering at the fatties.
Yup. And where this plateau occurs controlling for height and sex is determined by genes. Some ppl have such crappy metabolism genes they are still fat cutting to 1500kcal/day and cannot lose more. many such cases. ironically, being a bigger glutton makes wight loss and leanness easier. A guy who maintains at 250 lbs eating 5kcal/day will find weight loss easier than the same guy at same height and weight who eats 3kcal/day.
Any specific examples?
https://x.com/Ed_Realist/status/1837975714622296202?
There is enormous individual variably of metabolism, about as much as IQ, controlling for height,.
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Ah, so there is an intermediate bit that lives in the silence.
This is not true. We know, from science, how this works.
I didn't hear any claims from you about things being easy or not; that's pretty subjective and hard to measure with science. You made factual claims that are scientifically false.
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Yeah, the problem with that guy is that he is fat. Maybe his diets work for a very fat person with extreme insulin resistance, but I'd rather follow the advice of someone whose body looks like I'd want mine to be.
what would that be? A fitness model? A lot of those ppl either have superior genetics, take stims and steroids, or do tons of cardio. it's the same 'cut calories' advice seen everywhere else
Just a normal dude with a good body is fine by me. But I'm not taking diet advice from a fat man.
The best diet advice comes not from a fat man, but from a man that used to be fat.
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This.
Listening to my in-laws talk, you'd think they're experts on nutrition and have nothing else on their minds. But just look at them.
The number of conversations I have had with people that have tried every diet under the sun and firmly believe they have arrived at a deep understanding of nutrition despite the obvious failure of their diets boggles my mind. People will tell me, to my face, that carbs make you fat. I can observe that I am, in fact, not at all fat and eat rice and noodles on a regular basis. This has zero impact on their belief that carbs make you fat.
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probably lot of this is water
fewer calories. there is nothing really else that works . even cardio will be offset due to metabolic adaption effects. Or up protein due to higher thermic effects
Fewer calories also runs into metabolic adaptation problems. If you eat less energy your body will adjust such that you burn less (and feel awful). Or, if that doesn't happen and you manage to lose weight without crashing vitality, your body will sneakily make tiny adjustments such that as soon as you're not paying attention your weight will start drifting back up to what it used to be.
The only way I've ever found out of this hole is building muscle. Idk why it works but it does for me. I can be fat or I can be ripped; skinny was never an option.
Yeah this is why dieting is hard, why most people who diet regain it, etc.
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I'm trying to keep cardio to a reasonable degree with 1 hour sessions of alternating walking and jogging, with a couple of weights sessions per week (barbell, but nothing crazy).
I'm currently on OMAD (One Meal A Day) to exploit the hunger suppressant effects of keto, and I'll try to maintain this. Dr Boz says the next step is fasting on alternate days, but I'm happy at the current rate and want to keep things sustainable as well as get micronutrient intake.
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Mission Zero brand tortillas are very good and only have 25 calories each with zero net carbs I think.
I found something similar locally. I'm a bit worried that even with low/zero net carbs that they'll somehow throw out my ketosis, but I can try one at least.
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