I’m really surprised that your research has led you to conclude that your proposed approach is the most effective way to permanent weight loss. Would you mind posting some of your cites?
My own research led me towards high-fat, low-carb eating as the best way to control appetite (my biggest problem and it sounds like it might be yours too) and therefore reduce my daily calorific intake.
But you won’t keep it up, and you’ll treat yourself to food as reward for your exercise. You are setting yourself up for failure.
If you’re really invested in the Soylent idea, why not do it for just two days out of the week? On the others days, you could eat what you normally do, but less.
The treadmill desk idea sounds great if you are already a committed walker. Otherwise, it sounds like something you’ll mention a year from now and say “what the hell was I thinking?!” Before buying something like this, why not try walking for five minutes on the top of every hour? Use Outlook to remind you. You don’t even have to leave the building–just go up and down the stairs a couple of times. If you can’t commit to something like this for at least a week, the treadmill desk will be a waste of money.
Start small, then work your way up. Starting too big is how people fail.
For the little this is worth … the actual evidence is pretty solid that LOTS of different diet approaches work to lose weight and fat (not quite the exact same things) and that what works best for each individual may vary. Exercise is more important to making more of the weight loss fat loss than just weight, has huge health impacts, and is an important part of breaking through plateaus and maintaining weight loss (it seems to help reset the “set point” longer term).
If this seems like a fit for you that you can stick with then it will likely work well for you.
But yes along the way plan for the transition from diet to lifetime of healthy habits so you do not become one of the many who gain it back. The lifetime of healthy habits is the more important goal than what the scale reports back.
There is an app for android and ios called “Lose It.” It isn’t a system of weight loss the app designers came up with on their own. It is basically the same system used by Weight Watchers. The app allows you to set a goal, calculates the number of calories you can eat each day, and then tracks how you spend those calories. A scale is helpful for weighing portions. It is easy to use, doesn’t require you to cut classes of foods entirely out of your diet, and is much more sustainable than a gimmick like soylent. I used it to lose 30 pounds following my stroke.
One thing not yet suggested for food instead of Soylent is to try Nutrisystem. You buy their food, it’s about $10 a day, and with their 3 lite meals and 3 lite snacks you don’t feel hungry. I started it recently and have a lot of weight to lose, about 125lbs. It is very simple, no measuring or weighing or cooking.
And WTF is Soylent? Will have to look that one up. Is it green? Rhetorical questions.
Also, Baker said in another thread somewhere that she recently dropped weight and got to her goal. I wonder what plan she followed.
Your plan is supported by evidence that it will fail miserably, unless you become a captive of those who will feed you that stuff and only that stuff and make sure you work like a dog*. As you have it you will quickly make the link that a diet and weightloss equals horribly boring food and living conditions (treadmill) and that will be your de-motivator- you will tend to rebel and tend towards eating what you want and gain back weight.
As for as supported by evidence, get support from others, that gives you a greater chance of success, set reasonable goals and reasonable food and get the help of a professional.
Make weight loss fun to establish a positive link to eating healthy, in weight reduction portions and eventually in maintenance. Seek positive activities to aid weight loss.
I can also attest that radical changes in diet just make you want to eat more and make you miserable to boot. Better to switch to eating healthy.
My philosophy is to not make any changes that you’re not prepared to stick with for life. So no diets – just changes in how I eat. Eat less in general, and try to eat more veggies and less unhealthy foods in particular.
I’ve lost perhaps a pound or two a month over the last couple of years, with some setbacks during holidays and travel, but overall weight loss of 10-15 lbs in a year or two. Which isn’t enough – I should lose another 30 lbs, but I’m fully prepared to spread out this weight loss over another few years, which I think will make it more likely that I will keep it off.
As others have pointed out, your plan sounds unsustainable and looking for a “lazy” solution that relies on willpower seems like a completely wrongheaded approach.
First, you should start with a medical workup, to find out whether you are testosterone-deficient, one exercise session away from a heart attack, or anything else relevant.
It sounds like your job does not involve any physical activity, so I suggest you start volunteering regularly at something that does. You could be walking dogs at an animal shelter or loading and unloading trucks at a food pantry and getting free exercise with built-in distraction and purpose. Yes, this will take up some time, but maybe you can find a situation that you can stop off at for an hour on your way home from work.
There is plenty of research to back up reducing your carb intake. Don’t drink sweet beverages at all, even artificially sweetened ones. Don’t drink beer or much alcohol–a few glasses of red wine per week should be your limit. Don’t eat bread, pasta, cereal, rice, crackers, desserts, etc. But don’t go overboard and eliminate fruit or certain vegetables or whatever. Eating this way need not involve much extra effort. Instead of a sandwich, have a wrap or salad. Instead of a side of fries at a restaurant, ask for sauteed vegetables, a fruit cup, or a side salad. If you are cooking at home, try substituting sauteed cabbage for pasta in your favorite dishes or chick peas for rice.
Don’t eat so little at a time that you are still hungry, but learn to recognize the difference between hunger and still being able to eat more. It is natural to eat opportunistically, but since you are not in doubt as to when you might see food again, fight the urge to fill up when you have the chance.
Learn to recognize the difference between hunger and boredom. Do not browse through your food supply between meals looking for snacks to pass the time. Go for a walk or clean your house if you are tempted to forage in the kitchen.
You can easily get a bit of extra exercise at work by parking farther away from your building and using stairs instead of the elevator. Maybe there is a restroom you can use on a different floor. The stand-up treadmill desk is a good idea, but going from sitting all day to treadmilling all day seems kind of sudden and also could be a huge distraction from your work until you get used to it, which could make you quit before that happens. I’d set up an extra stand-up desk sans treadmill if space permits. You don’t have to stand stationary at it. You can wander around a bit while you think. Extended periods of sitting should definitely be eliminated for the health of your back, regardless of weight.
Good luck with your weight-loss goals, but do keep the bigger picture in mind, which should be developing healthier habits, not just shedding the excess weight as fast as possible, thinking you will start living differently after that happens. Changing your habits once is hard enough, why put yourself through it two separate times?
First of all, you don’t have a food addiction. You may have an affinity for foods that are high in calories and/or fat. Big, huge gigantic difference. Affinities, like any bad habit, CAN be changed. It’s just not easy.
Second, can you point us to the double blind trials that show your Soylent diet plan is effective and sustainable over the long haul?
Kudos on the treadmill desk. That is a “step in the right direction”.
Your plan is crazy.
Look, losing weight is simple but it’s very hard. A key part of losing weight is making sure you don’t try to do too much, because you will fail and feel bad about it. It is important - I am speaking as a man who lost 25% of his body weight - to accept that diets do not work (to a nearest approximation.) What works is gradual changes to your lifestyle. Unless you p;lan on eating Soylent the rest of your life, it is a stupid solution.
What worked for me was a three stage process, suggested to me by my doctor:
I started eating smaller portions, but more frequently. I’d go out of my way to eat 4-5 times a day but keep the portions small. I tried to not go more than 3-4 hours without eating.
I changed what I ate. White calories and sugary drinks were my #1 problem. I stopped eating potatoes more or less completely, cut down on bread and rice, and stopped drinking most sugary drinks; I let myself have sugar in my coffee, though.
Gradually I started swapping out starches for vegetables and eating 8-ounce steaks instead of 10-ounce steaks. I just had no junk food in the house; if it isn’t there you can’t eat it. Health ysnacks, though, were always on hand and I didn’t limit myself, but if you eat every 3-4 hours your snacking really goes down.
My plan my not be ideal for you but it is very important to approach this with the idea that you’re better off losing a pound a month over a long period of time than 40 pounds in six months. You have the rest of your life to be healthy, so take is slowly. Ten years from now if you’re a trim weight you are not going to care if it took 3 years to get there. All that will matter is you got there and kept it off. I’ve kept off the weight I lost and it’s changed my life, but I have no doubt at all had I tried a “Diet” it would have failed.
I heartily endorse the app MyFitnessPal, which relies on good old fashioned calorie counting to facilitate weight loss. Rather than embarking on a radical, doomed-to-fail Soylent diet, why not use MFP (or similar) to identify how many calories you consume each day, and how many you actually need. Then it’s a simple matter of tweaking your regular diet to create a calorie deficit.
For me, I discovered I was drinking too many calories (specifically, too much milk in my coffee - I halved it), I made substitutions in recipes I already enjoyed to make them less calorie-dense (ie Butter Chicken: use half the suggested account of chicken and replace it with steamed cauliflower and beans) and some of the dishes in my regular rotation got demoted to occasional treats (we were eating way too much pasta).
You just need to find a way to create a calorie deficit. If you consume 500 calories a day fewer than you burn, you can lose a pound a week. You can lose weight eating all the foods you enjoy if you just identify ways to reduce your overall calorie intake.
What crash dieters never seem to understand is that the diet you choose needs to be the diet you will have for the rest of your life.
Yeah, you can eat soylent for the next year, but do you really think that you’ll be eating it in five years? In ten? I give your plan 0% chance of long-term success. Yes, you’ll likely lose weight under this program. Maybe a lot. But, unless you set up a sustainable, reasonable diet that you can stick to for the rest of your life, you have no chance of long term success.
My advice, which you don’t want, is to just make slightly healthier decisions than you are making today. Drinking 5 sodas a day? Try four. After awhile, 3. In time, maybe switch to diet. Then maybe mainly water. In a few years, you’ll have lost some weight and won’t feel the need to drink soda so much. Same thing with snacking. Three chocolate bars a day? How about one? Then apples or bananas instead.
Try healthier foods. Maybe you’ll like them. Gradually change your diet.
The important thing is to treat this like a ten year project. It took you years to reach your current weight, it will probably take you years to fall to healthy, sustainable weight. If you go into it with this attitude, you’ll be setting yourself up for success.
This has been my approach. Luckily, I love physical activity, so exercise is ‘easy’ for me. However, as I’ve aged, I’ve recognized that diet is really more like 60-70% of the equation. You must make healthier choices or you don’t stand a chance. Over the years, I’ve steadily improved my diet and have maintained a healthy weight.
The treadmill deal sounds reasonable, please be more open minded about changing your diet.
I 100% agree with this. MisterAce and I have been using MFP since the end of January. He’s lost 35 lbs and made his goal while I’ve lost 39 and am 1 pound away from goal. It is really simple once you can actually see an accurate count of what you eat each day to see where you need to make changes. We still eat many of the same things just with slight changes. Heck I still have my glass of wine every night while cooking.
We both added exercise also. MisterAce goes cycling every evening while I walk for at least an hour at a good clip every day.
It boils down to calories in < calories out. Eat what you enjoy in the right portions and you will have greater results that will last longer.
People hate hearing it, but losing weight is a lifestyle change, not a magic trick. These 3 things need a be part of your lifestyle to lose weight and stay healthy after the weight is off:
For #3 pick something you like. if you pick running for your exercise, and you hate running, you’ll never stick to it. find an activity you enjoy so its not a chore to fit it into your schedule.
Cutting carbs was mentioned above. I usually hate to link to other forums, but I will in this case anyway: /r/keto. There are lots of success stories, and enough links to research there to satisfy your research requirements before I go into the personal anecdotes.
Essentially you eliminate carbs from your life by ingesting fewer than 50g per day while trying to target fewer than 20g per day. After a week of suffering (say others, I never had suffering issues), your body will be fat adapted. Your body will manufacture the energy you need from fat and protein. Your body will manufacture the carbohydrates you need. You will no longer binge, and it’s very likely you will have no appetite and have to remind yourself to eat from time to time. You will no longer have the insulin spikes and crashes that make you feel hungry when devouring the entire bag of potato chips or the entire plate of pasta.
The only downside is giving up carbs. Bread, pasta, beer, tortillas, most root vegetables, etc. On the upside you can eat lots of steak, bacon, most cheeses, and other delicious things instead.
High fat diets can be dangerous in the long term when paired with high carbohydrate diets, though, so if you go this route, don’t cheat; the mix of carbs and fat will increase your LDL and not let your HDL do its cleanup work.
I’ve lost 77 pounds since December, and my appetite is completely under control and I no longer binge, even after having a couple double bourbon and soda’s (distilling the beer removes the carbs!). I went for a 73 km bike ride on Monday before breakfast (it was a holiday here), and forgot to eat until mid-afternoon (one of the rare occasions where my body told me, “hey, I’m hungry.”).
People will tell you you’re killing yourself with a high-fat diet, but that’s okay if it’s true; I’m killing myself much more slowly at my current weight than I was at my peak weight.
About six months ago I started taking Metamucil with a small glass of OJ every evening. I also do powdered WHEY PROTEIN every morning with Soy Milk. With that and eating lower on the food chain during the day, I’ve noticed that I’ve been able to keep my weight down. I’m not as hungry. Seems to work for me.
I’ll echo what was said about your diet plan. It doesn’t sound sustainable at all, and even if you make it all the way to your goal weight, then what? You still haven’t learned or practiced how to eat food without sabotaging yourself.
Measuring food is less of a pain than you think it is. You may need actual measuring cups for the first few weeks, but you’ll develop the ability to measure by eye – which will serve you well when you arrive at the weight maintenance stage. There are even online guides for how to do that, easy enough to google. For example, 3 oz. of meat is about the size of a deck of cards. Also, I think you’d benefit a great deal from making a point of being more mindful of your food and eating habits, and this is one entry point. A lot of people gain weight because of mindless snacking while watching TV or whatever.
Also, by taking the time to learn how to eat healthier, with real food, you will over a period of months very likely adjust in your tastes to where tiny portions of rich food are plenty, and junk food loses its appeal. While you learn to love fresh fruits and veggies and meals made from whole foods. (Find yourself a farmers market. Best tasting produce you’ve ever had, I promise.)
Other things to consider:
Sleep. Sleep deprivation causes you to release stress hormones. Stress hormones make you gain weight around the middle. And exercising while sleep deprived SUCKS. Make sure you’re getting enough sleep.
HIIT: High-Intensity Interval Training. Several studies show that this tends to be more effective than steady-state cardio for weight loss. Both speed up your metabolism while you’re exercising, but after steady-state cardio it drops off back to ‘normal’ pretty quickly, while after HIIT it’s been measured at the higher levels up to 36-48 hours later (depending on the study). Who wouldn’t want to burn calories sitting around? I wouldn’t necessarily jump right into this, if you’re out of shape, but consider working it in down the line. Doesn’t need to be a lot, even 5-10 minutes will do something. Also really easy to google.
Missed the edit:
Water. It can fill you up before a meal so you eat less, very often when you feel hungry you are actually a little dehydrated, and exercising even slowly for 10 hours a day will take its toll. Drink at least 2 litres… with your exercise 3-4 litres a day may be more appropriate.
Me too! FWIW, MFP has pretty much revolutionized my approach to losing weight. For me it works SO MUCH BETTER than others, like SparkPeople. SparkPeople seemed to (very) inadequately account for my level of exercise, so I was always hungry. Not so with MFP.