One thing that this thread shows is that it’s a very individual thing. Weight loss is simple and the same for everyone: eat less energy than you expend. But how you get yourself to do that and sustain it is unique to each person.
Manda JO, I’m with you on the calorie levels. As I’ve posted here before, I probably burn as much as 2600 calories a day just living my life, never mind going to the gym. And I’ve been doing OK trying a 1900 limit, but last night I was just really really starving, so I’m thinking of going to 2000-2100 and see if I still lose.
One thing I’ve noticed is my blood sugar is really labile. I’ve been tested for diabetes and hypoglycemia and I’m OK, it’s just if I eat certain things I tend to crash about 3 hours later. And it is much much worse if I drink caffeine. I can get away with a coffee mid-afternoon, but if I start in the morning, my glucose gets on a very unhappy roller coaster.
I am losing mostly by walking more and eating less overall. But when I am craving some cheesecake or a hot fudge sundae I just calculate how long I would have to walk to walk it off. Then I have one oreo.
You might lose more on a slightly higher calorie count per day. Anything below 2000 a day and my weightloss completely stops. There’s actually a kind of reverse sweet spot where if I get low enough that my body is trying to conserve energy but high enough that there’s a little spare I actually gain weight while eating less. I think it comes from years of skipping meals and forgetting to eat.
There’s a book called Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink, who’s a food researcher and has done a ton of experiments on this and other food triggers. He and other researchers have found that even if you know about the effect that container size has on your consumption level, you are still affected by it. Less is eaten with smaller plates, smaller bowls. Tall thin glasses look like they contain more than short, wide glasses.
I saw this at my departmental Christmas party; people who got short cocktail glasses complained that those who got tall glasses were getting bigger drinks. First, it was an open bar with no line problems so those weren’t factors. Glasses were selected based on drink style; the bartender finally did a quick demonstration that they contained the same volume, by pouring water from one glass type into another.
Wansink and others have also done “bottomless container” tests with things like fixed soup bowls and hidden thin tubes slowly piping in (creamy) soup to replace the eaten-up volume. If the bowl still appears to be full, people eat lots more than they would with a regular bowl.
Give moviegoers free popcorn as a supposed taste-test and ask them to return it later - people eat more if given bigger containers, even when stale day-old popcorn was used. They’d report it wasn’t that good, but they’d still eat more out of bigger containers, and because they were distracted by a movie (that “mindless eating” from the book title).
My husband and I recently replaced our everyday dishes, and intentionally bought a set with smaller plates and bowls. It definitely works - if we’re used to getting second helpings of soup, we haven’t gone on to get thirds and fourths due to the smaller helpings.