Cravings are an amazing motivator. You may think you’d be too lazy to go to the grocery store to buy snacks. But that’s because you haven’t been eating nothing but watery pancake batter for the past week.
The point I was trying to make was about what you get for 500 calories. A stir fry is much more satisfying for most people. It is colorful, crunchy, smells good, has taste and the recipe can easily be altered to vary the flavor. It doesn’t take a high degree of skill to prepare, it doesn’t use many utensils or gadgets, it doesn’t need to be full of expensive ingredients. The OP will still need to visit the supermarket, one would imagine, as toilet paper, toothpaste and cleaning supplies will still be required so he will be going there anyway, though maybe less frequently. Clean up at my place takes maybe five minutes - 1 chopping board, 1 knife, 1 frypan, 1 wooden spoon, one serving spoon, three dinner plates, three forks, into the sink and done. Cook a double batch tonight, and tomorrow night you’ll have even fewer dishes.
A beige, creamy, pleasantly though indistinctly flavored drink doesn’t sound like the worst thing ever, but I know how hard it was for me to stick to eating the same salad for seven evening meals in a row. I’m projecting that on to the OP, who has previously sabotaged his own weight loss efforts because he found ready-meals unsatisfying and he was hungry. He says he’s not going to self sabotage this time because he will be too lazy to go out for junk food. I think it will be interesting to hear how he progresses if Soylent isn’t as filling as he hopes, or if he gets sick of the same thing 3 times a day for months.
And I completely disagree with you on the dessert. To me, one of the greatest advantages of calorie counting is that you can eat normal food and don’t have to deny yourself anything because you’re making sure you don’t over-consume. Hell, I’d go so far as to say that people trying to lose weight -should- make sure they allow themselves dessert. When you know you can have things you’ll really enjoy, it makes the whole process feel less restrictive and punishing. To know I did well today, I stuck to my limits and tonight I can have this bowl of ice cream and still be within my daily target is very satisfying. I lost 60lb in eight months, and I enjoyed dessert along the way. I call that a win-win.
You didn’t follow my references upthread. Point #3 is probably not due to fat producing cravings, but carbohydrates producing cravings. I’ve been there. A Snickers mini, just because I’m passing by the pantry. Then another. Then I better grab two, because I’ll want one later. The same with beer. One. Then another. Then another. No, it wasn’t alcoholism, it was carb addiction; I still drink, but certainly not 3L beer-worth of alcohol. If I’m in the mood, I’ll now have one whiskey and soda, with no compulsion to have another.
So, yeah, I was a pussy with no willpower. I still have no willpower, but I don’t need willpower.
THis. For someone who only wants to see empirical evidence, you really don’t seem to have done much of your own research,
Mostly agreed. It is of course necessary to have a diet be complete nutritionally. After almost all of the plans that work well share in common having foods that are high satiety (as you note) and not “hyperpalatable.”. Lots of ways that end up doing that and lots of individual variation.
The two overlap but are not quite the same but it informs why for some people initially the very fact that the sweet and sour chicken and ice cream are so much more “appealing” is a point for the less appealing nutritional plan.
I cannot comment specifically on Soylent as a complete nutrition plan but minimally there is solid evidence of the efficacy of medically supervised low calorie liquid diet and other “meal replacement” plans to lose weight. For some people that initial weight loss phase works best complete avoidance of exposure to foods that trigger their palatability brain centers too strongly for them.
Our op knows himself better than any of us do. Having his food not taste too good and in prepackaged serving sizes will reduce his chances of over-eating during a weight loss phase.
The issue is not that the evidence does not justify his plan as a plan that works to lose weight. The issue is that his plan is less than half formed.
The evidence is overwhelming that most people who diet to lose weight gain it back. Any plan that ONLY focuses on the weight loss phase without a plan to develop long term sustainable habits that can weather the brain’s efforts to push back to what it had learned to think of as “normal” will end up failing over the longer term.
A prepackaged People Chow approach is likely not sustainable for the long term so requires a plan to also introduce the elements that are. Lots of possible approaches.
For how our op describes himself - he may, as he approaches a reasonable goal, transition into preparing his own real food meals in bulk and prepackaging them into serving size portions, say as a once a week exercise. Again the focus is on high satiety, avoiding the hyperpalatable, and nutritional density.
This. You can try it, Habeed, and actually, I suggest you do, because I don’t think you will really believe us until you do. It’s very hard to make a lifestyle change, and you are making an extreme one.
You will find excuses to go and snack, I’m afraid.
But please, do try it. We are trying to save you money, but sometimes we need to do things ourselves to be really convinced of the efficacy thereof, or lack of.
Good luck!
I agree with this. My point was limited just to discussing the nutritional profile of that particular meal. Calories aren’t everything in a diet. Macronutrient balance also matters. And it’s much easier to hit your macronutrient goals when you don’t eat sugary dessert. (Not impossible, by any means, of course.)
In my view, as I’ve expressed a couple of times in this thread, the easy part of the diet is figuring out what to eat. The hard part is actually doing it. Forever. At every turn I would sacrifice a little bit of strict adherence to a macronutrient profile, say, for any psychological benefit of sticking to the diet.
Didn’t you say upthread that food addiction was one of your problems?
No one gives up on their addiction because it is too much trouble to get their fix and your addictive items are legal, cheap, and readily available. Laziness is not going to work in your favor here.
Actually amazingly enough one of the best ways for heavy drinkers who drink lots at home to cut back some is to not have alcohol in the house. Making cigarettes a bit more expensive and less easily gotten cuts down on smoking significantly.
As a general rule making a behavior more difficult to engage in decreases how often it occurs, and making something easier to do increases it. Not rocket science this.
If op has a “craving” and can just open a cabinet to indulge on the impulse he is much more likely to do so than if he has to drive somewhere to do it and has a chance to reconsider the choice.
The op is pretty much exactly right … loss of fat mass (not loss of carbs, oy) … triggers a wide variety of neuroendocrine responses (with brain centers in charge and fat tissue acting as a major player in its endocrine capacity) to “defend” what it has come to accept as its normal. Metabolism shifts down, amounts of natural non-exercise activity decreases, appetite (including cravings) increase.
He is approaching it from intelligent perspectives, even if he may need to modify them as he tries them in real life. He is hoping to prevent the decrease in non-exercise activity (and possibly increasing it) with the treadmill desk. He is also adding resistance training to decrease the loss of fat-free mass and preserve as much as possible of his baseline metabolic rate. He is decreasing his exposure to foods that trigger overconsumption and making it such that he has a chance to engage cognitive control before giving into an impulse.
The areas to improve are increasing his intake of high satiety/moderate palatability foods, and planning for how to develop the long term habits as he gets close to achieving a reasonable weight loss goal.
Prepackaging himself some raw unsalted nuts to allow as a mid day snack up to some X moderate amount per day (found to decrease appetite dramatically) and as goofy as it sounds (especially to the low carb people) one small cold baked potato as a snack (the resistant starch in cold potatoes make them a very high satiety food with limited palatabilty) may decrease cravings dramatically. Baby carrots may help with stress noshing.
Again his big gap though is the long term transition plan. Without one he is doomed to regain afterwards.
I agree that he should not fill his cabinet with junk food and that he is less likely to eat crappy things if they are not sitting around the house. Filling your cabinets only with pancake-batter-tasting meal shakes however, will serve as sufficient motivation to get in the car and then be confronted with a variety of tempting bad choices at the nearest convenience store. Why not just fill the cabinet with a variety of normal things that are neither one’s favorites nor completely disgusting?
Exactly. Treadmilling a daily half-marathon while you do desk work when you are normally sedentary is difficult, so he will likely not engage in it often.
This is why “keep lots of unhealthy treats” around would be terrible diet advice, but who ever suggests that? Driving is kind of a hassle, but way more people drive regularly than exercise regularly and once pancake batter is the only food left in the house, even the laziest among us generally manage to forklift ourselves out of bed and get to a store or restaurant. Plus, he can order a delivered pizza right from his phone.
He’s not a lab rat with someone else controlling his food and activity level. Planning drastic lifestyle changes to lose weight usually results in failure. It is not a done deal just because the science checks out. Most people that plan to lose weight in this manner fail to lose the weight because the plan is unnecessarily hard to follow; those that do lose the weight fail to keep it off for the reasons you say. That’s what makes it a bad plan.
I’ve been pretty vocal on this board that weight loss as the goal is a fool’s errand more often than not, and that what matters for health far far more is establishing and maintaining healthy nutrition habits and exercise for their own sake. If an obese individual loses only 5 to 10% of their body weight (which for our 200 pound op is only 10 to 20 pounds) and maintains it with those habits then they will capture the lion’s share of the health benefits right there. Aim for the habits and usually the weight follows to the degree it needs to for health as a matter of course. His goal of a 60 pound weight loss is not one that is required for health … it would be for vanity and only vanity.
That said the science is what was asked for and when weight loss is what is desired (for whatever reason, be it even simply vanity), your statement is plainly untrue. Most people who use a meal replacement plan (using liquid or prepackaged meals that are designed to be complete nutritionally, usually relatively high in protein and fiber, such as Medifast) do in fact succeed in losing weight. See this meta-analysis, for example. Note however that while those on meal replacement plans lost somewhat more than those on traditional reduced calorie diet plans both at the 3mo and 1y time points, both resulted in modest losses, not the 30% of body weight loss the op is listing as his goal. (Which does not mean that such a goal is unattainable, just rarely attained, and needless to attain.) A more recent randomized control trial confirms that the approach is an effective one in the real world. And some people can maintain weight loss long term with continuing with the meal replacement plan on a partial basis.
What is easy and hard to follow varies greatly from person to person. For some having ice cream in the house and doling out a 100 calorie serving of it for dessert once a day is very hard indeed; for some allowing themselves that small treat each day is what makes a plan not hard.
Most people who lose substantial amounts of weight, be it by meal replacement plans, or by counting and measuring in a reduced calorie plan, or low carb, or paleo, or a variety of other approaches … gain most or all or more than all back. Losing weight is a significant accomplishment for any obese person and anyone who does it should be proud of themselves. Each of them does it by figuring out what works for them, not what worked for you. Achieving the goal of keeping substantial amounts of weight off (for whatever reason such is desired) is something that none of the approaches does so well in achieving. His adding in built-in non-exercise activity and increasing exercise, if kept up, is a very important ingredient of maintaining weight loss after the fact … again, even if his initial plan may need to be modified once he starts up and sees how it works for him. It is not a complete approach however.
Unfortunately, a meta-analysis makes it difficult to analyze whether the studies studied truly studied the relevant question.
The outcome for “people who announce and intend to lose weight using liquid meal replacements” is what should be analyzed. Even if we eliminate the enormous number of people who don’t even make it to the first shake, the rate of follow-through to the point of success is key.
Huh?
The question is: can partial meal replacement (PMR) plans (like what our op plans) work?
The meta-analysis looked at studies which included
Both had similar drop out rates at 3 months and more had dropped out of the reduced calorie diet plans at 1 year.
Results were
Again, I am not endorsing the method as “the” method. I am not recommending it. But a claim that “[m]ost people that plan to lose weight in this manner fail to lose the weight” is inconsistent with the evidence. Reduced calorie diet plans work. Partial meal replacement plans work. Low carb works. Lots of approaches work.
The best choice for weight loss (if that is “the” goal) for any individual is only the best choice for that individual.
Thanks for stepping in, DSeid. I know it’s a big task. The reason I have to do it is obvious - to compare on a more even basis with other men where I live, many of whom are much taller than me and drive pickup trucks, I need to lose the belly fat I have.
I didn’t use to have this much fat, I weighed in at 160 just a couple years ago. Since nature is working against me, my plan will have to be done in stages. First, work up to the much higher intensity of exercise. Maybe leave the meal replacement powder at the store until I’m actually at full exercise intensity for a month or 2. Then, switch to MRP but don’t try to limit total amount consumed. Hmm.
Maybe I could measure out a fixed quantity of the MRP and keep it in separate ziplock baggies or something. Don’t try to limit how much I eat in a given day, but do limit how much I eat in a given portion, so that the various sensors in my gut can detect the food bolus and send signals to reduce hunger after each portion.
The stage after that - after I’m at a steady level of exercise for a prolonged period of time, after I’ve been consuming MRP for several months - is when I’d have to consider calorie restriction.
I wonder how increasing muscle size factors in to all of this. From a physiologic level, muscles are also stores of energy just like fat.(less energy per pound, but starving humans often need protein more than they need simple calories) Does the body have a way to know if you have more lbm and thus some way to reduce the amount fat kept in storage? (without having to fight your own control systems and basically starve yourself which is what you are doing when you calorie restrict)
I think we know less about this area than you might think. I believe the basic hypothesis currently is that a caloric surplus goes to both muscle and fat and a deficit comes out of both muscle and fat. The ratio depends on the macronutrient balance of your diet and your exercise (and your genetics, and age, and other factors). Thus, if you’re doing resistance exercise and getting plenty of protein, on a caloric deficit you’ll lose more fat and less muscle than otherwise.
But there’s much debate about whether it is possible (or practically likely) to gain muscle while losing fat. AFAIK, most of the evidence suggests that it is not possible.
I’ve seen at least one study where it was measurable - but testosterone injections were being used. The control group, yeah, didn’t change their muscle : fat ratio, but the group on steroids did.
I wonder what would happen if I tried to lift weights while calorie restricted. I wouldn’t get any stronger at all? My muscles would get stronger, but not by much, and all the gains would actually be slow twitch fibers converting to fast twitch? From a physical level, if my calorie restricted diet contained enough protein, the energy (from my fat) and the protein would both be present. It would be physically possible for muscles to grow. They just wouldn’t?
The diet has not “worked” until the person has reached their weight loss goals, which in this case means a loss of 30%, not the 7 - 8% average loss that you are calling success.
The question is not can one lose weight this way, but what percentage of people intending to actually manage to. This is not addressed in an analysis of people randomly assigned to groups and monitored in a study.
Yep.
You definitely get stronger. Most strength gains for a novice are neuromuscular, not from muscle growth.
It’s not just about energy. It’s about what your whole metabolic system is telling your body to do. Generally, the sorts of signals being sent on a caloric deficit are the opposite of the sort of signals you want to be sending to grow muscle. But as I said earlier, I don’t think we really know everything involved or how it works yet. IIRC, **DSeid **is pretty knowledgeable on that stuff, so he might know better.
I have no meaningful comment to make about your motivation to lose that much weight. I can only comment on what is important from a health perspective and what is more likely achievable by most.
The studies that support meal replacement plans do not use it the way you are thinking about it here. They are not a eat as much as you feel like eating, ad libitum, approach; they are controlled reduced calorie (and also sometimes low carb) approach. My suspicion is that while a liquid meal is likely to be low palatability, it is not likely to be high satiety. Here you skate without solid evidence beneath you; I don’t think it is a good idea, FWIW.
As a weight loss measure exercise alone is not super effective. As a health intervention it is amazing. Couple with healthy nutrition it is pretty dang effective at improving body composition. It helps maintain weight loss once achieved and helps the brain get convinced that the old set point no longer applies. From my (health focussed) perspective I heartily endorse ramping up your activity … but it won’t have much scale impact as a stand alone.
I’d echo most of what RP just said in posts above. In particular to above is that gaining muscle mass is minimally extremely difficult to do while running a calorie deficit. It is possible, but requires timing of protein intake and only modest calorie deficits. OTOH exercise (in particular resistance exercise) during a calorie deficit, with adequate (not excessive) protein, substantially limits the amount of muscle mass lost. Here’s one example. The police officers who were modestly hypocaloric while maintaining adequate protein (1.5g/kg/d) with casein or whey intake and doing a resistance program lost as much fat mass as hypocaloric alone while gaining muscle mass and gaining in strength. Here’s another.
Strength gains are, as RP notes, not the same as muscle mass gains, especially in the early phases of a resistance program. Exactly right that a large portion of strength gains are from neuromuscular adaptations (getting the motor units you already have to fire in a manner most efficient for the lifting task demands). Those you can get just fine even as your muscle mass stays the same, or even decreases some.
Thus this similar study in obese T2 diabetic men and women which compared low calories high protein (1.2 g/kg/d which came to about 33% of calorie intake given the degree of calorie restriction) and standard low calorie diets with and without resistance exercise over 16 weeks and found greater weight loss, significantly improved body compositions scores, and increased strength in the “high protein” plus resistance training group … even while fat-free mass decreased comparably in all groups (see Table 2 for detailed break-out).
As far as what the body is defending … total weight (fat mass plus fat-free mass, inclusive of muscle) or fat mass … most experts put the emphasis on fat mass to a much greater degree. But exercise (cardio as well, so it is not a fat-free mass effect) seems to allow the brain the alter what is accepts as what it should be defending.
AnaMan the relevant issue is the belief, expressed by some here, that the partial meal replacement plan method is inferior to traditional methods … doomed to fail. The evidence is solid that it works as well as other methods do if not better for the measure of weight loss. Not much better than traditional methods either. End.
Habeed, if you want an ad libitum approach then meal replacements are not for you. Nor of course is calorie counting.
You also are not someone who has been obese for a very long time … your defended fat-mass point may be less sticky.
You may be best matched to a plan that couples your plans to increase activity and resistance exercise and to eliminate your exposure to junk choices from your household, with a focus on high satiety/moderate palatability foods. These foods will in general be real foods high in protein and and high in fiber, not highly processed. The small portions at a time but as many portions as you need to not be hungry is fine in that approach (try waiting at least five minutes before the next portion though and only take it after honestly assessing if you really are still hungry). Use a Mediterranean diet, or Paleo, or Low Carb … whichever appeals most …they all mostly share that in common. And the bonus is they get the long term transition done during the weight loss phase!
Who expressed this belief?
The aspect of his diet plan that seemed preposterous was his plan to throw away ALL other food and eat Soylent only except for “maybe one pre-packaged meal” per day. He wasn’t planning to have Soylent once a day instead of lunch or something. That is why it is unsustainable, not because meal replacements cannot be useful for weight loss.
Plus, he hasn’t even tasted Soylent, making the plan even more unlikely to succeed since it probably terrible. Uncooked pancake batter is not easy to choke down in quantity.