Calories in must be less than calories out for weight loss to happen.

Every other method is trying to sell you something.

Better diet can absolutely help loads, but if you are eating 15 pounds of broccoli and fish a day it’s still too much fuel and not enough burn. You can definitely work out to burn some of that energy off but at some point you just have to eat less.

I say this as a current fat person who has lost the weight and put it back on in his life.

I eat my feelings away and I got BIG over the last few years. I was at 340 at my worst. I’m still overweight, but I’m slowly working on it again. It takes time and discipline. Two things I’m not great about.

Person for me I like to start off with a fast of a day or two without any solid foods. Just water and maybe some tea or something. this helps me get over the appetite hump and my huge black hole or a stomach.

If you stop eating huge meals your body will alter where it’s “I’m full” feeling is at. Unfortunately food is delicious and I push past that feeling all the time because it’s yummy God dammit lol.

Weight loss is not a sprint. It’s a marathon. Don’t quit if you fall off the wagon. Just get back up and keep joggin.

Step One. Count all of the calories you eat in a day. Check that nutritional info, do the math, add it up, see what you’re eating without leaving anything out.

Step Two. Try to minimize sugar, carbs, and bad fat, while maximizing protein and fiber. My go-to daily meal plan is steel cut oatmeal in the morning, sweetened with baking splenda, pinch of salt, and cinnamon. Intermittent fast through lunch with coffee. Dinner is open face (so only 1 slice of bread) turkey sandwiches, Black bean soup spiked with tobasco and extra black beans. For dessert, make a big ol bowl of banana cream or vanilla pudding with skim milk. Find a meal plan that works for you, you don’t have to eat the same thing everyday, but have that back-up meal plan ready to go in case you don’t feel like making something different.

Step Three. Don’t inhale your food. It takes your body 20 minutes between attaining a “full” stomach, and your stomach alerting your brain to that fact. Thus, pacing your food is important. How to do that? PUT THE FOOD DOWN. If you pick up your sandwich, eat half, then put it back down, take a drink of water, then you can finish it. Have a big ass glass of water with every meal. I also buy baby carrots, you can get a nice 1 lb bag, and in between dinner items, eat a handful of baby carrots. They’re crunchy, full of water, and help you pace yourself through dinner.

Step Four. Go for a walk after you eat. A little bit of exercise, even a walk around the neighborhood for a few minutes, is enough to to tell your body that you want it to take all that energy you just took in, and use it immediately. You’re telling your body “Hey, don’t put all that energy into long term (fatty) storage, make it available, and of use right now.”

Step Five. Add in Exercise at your own pace. Start with something manageable, achievable, and then make it routine. Whether that means walking your dog instead of just letting them out into the yard, start small, build at your own pace. Make it a daily habit. (Pro-tip, whenever you feel like skipping a day, tell yourself all you have to do is get dressed for the exercise and do it for five minutes. if you do that much and still feel off, you’re allowed to take a rest day. The majority of the time, once you get started, you start to feel better and end up doing it. the key is getting dressed and putting yourself into the position to do it, even if you allow yourself to stop. just keep putting yourself into position to succeed with your new habit.) This also works as an effective daily anti-depressant.

Step Six. Reward yourself for achievements. When you start these things, your body will respond, and you will feel better, more confident, sexier in your own skin. Celebrate with some new clothes that let you show it off. Feel good about it, it’s something you earned!

Step Seven. Allow for cheat days. This you can do every week, every two weeks, whenever you decide. If you find yourself going hard-core on the diet and then crashing into a food frenzy, it’s because your going too hard, and need to allow for a cheat day. Be kind to yourself if you break your diet on a miserable day, and use that as information to consult when scheduling your next cheat day. The long term goal is to reorganize your thoughts around food, and having specific times when you let yourself go whole hog on a bag of Oreos or whatever, lets you recognize that behavior as a reward, or special circumstance, and not a daily activity.

Congrats, you’re now feeling better, looking better, and those two facts will reverberate through the rest of your life like ripples through a pond, making you happier and healthier.

Reading the labels on junk I’m tempted by helps me. That much sugar, really? How many calories?!? Palm oil, ugh. And wtf is pentasodium triphosphate?

Also, when I buy a bag of carrots, I peel them and put them in the fridge, so when I feel snacky I can munch a crispy carrot.

Removing the second “t” off the word “diett” will reduce its weight by 20%.

Stress helped me lose 20 pounds in three months last year ^.^

I wouldn’t recommend it.

Saw dad lose a cannonball of a beer belly. He had run into an old friend and was embarrassed by how fat he had become in comparison. Asking his friend how he lost it, John replied:

“Easy Bob, I just brainwashed myself into thinking being hungry was a good thing.”

Worked for me as well.

You’re not telling yourself food is bad, that way lies eating disorders. You’re simply telling yourself that being low-key hungry is a normal state of affairs for a homo sapien. Because it is a normal state of affairs. Stop horking down pork rinds every time a little hunger pings you. Fucking ignore it, go on. That behavior can become a habit.

People see my skinny ass eat like a hog and marvel at my “metabolism”. No, hard no. I only put calories in my face two, maybe three times a day. Zero snacks, zero soft drinks. (OK, time to fess up. Many calories from beer. There, I said it.)

Drinking much more water instead of diet soda all the time. I’ve never felt so hydrated and sated in all my life.

I’m very, very susceptible to addiction, but the thing that makes it easiest for me to curb a habit is to pretend I’ve already moved past it. If I think about junk food, I intentionally think of overly sweet, salty and artificial foods and (internally) express my distaste. With smoking, I think of the smell of an ashtray in the rain; with drinking, I think of cleaning up day old beer with a hangover.

Saying “I don’t really have a sweet tooth” is what made me lose my sweet tooth.

1. Plain oats with chia seeds for breakfast (no more than a teaspoon of honey[real honey from bees or don’t bother] because you still need to enjoy food). Table spoon on Saturday

2. this is dependent on your budget: Bananas are cheap AF. Eat one whenever you have a craving. Drink a glass of water, eat a banana, then take your supplements (fish oil and multi v) in the morning after oats

2a) Apples/pears/berries. An apple can kill a craving for sweets so quickly. Plus the fiber will clean you out. Other fruit is more expensive and goes bad quickly. But seriously apples can help to be one of those fillers in your diet

3. Tea. If you don’t drink black coffee, switch to tea. No need for sugar and milk, tea is pretty good on its own. More importantly, it tastes just as good cold

4. Drink water. When I get up in the morning, I try to drink 1 1/2 pints of water. Then start breakfast. Just walked the dog? Chug a pint. Out of the shower? Slug a half pint. Cooking lunch? Drink a pint before you eat. Yes, you will pee a lot. But you skin will look better and you won’t have those moments of “shit, I need coffee” A pg* a

5. Rice and Beans. Make one pot a week. Use oil instead of butter. Lots of beans. Chop up one large onion. Put equal parts quinoa to rice. Last a while and you can spice it or add hot sauce. Use it as a filler for eggs or chicken or whatever

6. high volume food with low calorie density. Need a snack? Rice cakes, to raw carrots and celery, pickles, cucumber, . Chips and salsa is a good one

One thing the diet industry hates:

Fasting. Hard to make money off not eating food.

It’s also highly effective and safe so long as you educate yourself properly before beginning.

I did 14 day fasts with an electrolyte slurry, psyllium husk, and multi vitamins. Take a month off, eat well balanced meals, repeat until goal weight. I lost ~15-20lbs each fast doing it a total of three times to hit my goal weight. Each time is less, because the daily caloric requirement to maintain your body decreases with your weight.

After that, I started gym/weight training.

edit: and never eating junk food or drinking sugar ever again. That includes fruit juice and dairy milk. Unsweetened Coconut “milk” for me now. Processed grains massively reduced too. Basically, flour. Honestly flour probably inflated the waist line for me more than sugar.

Keeping track of calories while also cutting out all snacking during the day, so that at night I know what sweets I can afford to eat.

I went vegan and bitch is skinnnay now, although it’s not why I did it. Also low fat high carb, NOT keto, but just paying attention to your carb intake, and having a diet high in healthy fats will keep you full. Keto is for specific genetic epilepsy syndromes and not good for anything else no matter what people tell you.

Eat less. It sounds obvious, I know. But prepare your meal as normal, divide it in half and put half in a container in the fridge. Eat the other half, then distract yourself for half an hour. If you’re still ravenous, heat up the other half and have it. But you probably won’t be. And you’ve got your next meal ready to go!

I was also gonna say fasting, intermittent fasting to be specific, and cooking at home more. But it seems that’s not answering your question because it’s a “food habit”. So instead, I would recommend:

• Sugar substitutes. Yes they can make you gassy/poopy. It’s trial and error to find the right substitute and right amount to use, but once you get it, you’ll be able to avoid a ton of sugar. For example, a teaspoon of stevia on my coffee is fine. Monkfruit instead of sugar but only half as much for savory dishes works for me. Allulose for home made ice cream is fine as well. And so on.

• Eat water-rich food to make you feel full but not consume a lot of calories. Celery and cucumbers are good snacks and can be paired with other food.

• A bit more pricey, but shiratake is basically zero calories and comes in noodle, rice, or cube form.

You have to figure out a diet you can comfortably maintain forever, eat for your target weight. It’s no use just losing weight, you have to stay at a healthy weight.

So it’s going to be individual. For me, increased activity is the only factor, apparently I eat the same all the time. So walking everywhere or adding extra exercise works better.

I had a friend who lost weight by just reduced portions - she literally just took 1/3 less of everything. Like left more space on her plate. And another who ate popcorn for supper. Regular breakfast, regular lunch, then in the evening just popcorn. So again was eating 2/3 of what she had been. But then you have to keep it that way to maintain the weight.