Weight has a Goodhart problem: “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
Whether you care about longterm health or even just about looking as hot as you possibly can, focusing on Scale Number Go Down has a lot of failure modes.
There’s a reactionary energy to this issue - people are gaining weight on average, so we who care about health and hotness must stand for the importance of losing it! Anyone who pushes in any direction other than “weight should be lower” is an enemy!
Like okay whatever fine this seems a little excessive to me I’m just here bc this approach has been a problem for me and there are better alternatives.
Specific habits changed over time but some version of extreme calorie deficit was part of my life most of the time from age ~14 until early in grad school, in my mid twenties. By 14, I was writing down everything I ate and running 2-3 miles most days of the week. I dropped 20 pounds between April and September the year before I turned 15, putting my BMI in the teens. Perhaps if it had been lower the feedback would have been more negative, but as it was I received a lot of praise. In 9th grade for a biology assignment we wrote and calculated our caloric intake over a day, and the boy who sat next to me refused to believe that I had actually eaten less then 700 calories the day before.
In high school and college I was known to take long naps (2-3 hours) multiple days of the week in addition to sleeping 9-10 hours a night. In grad school a lab mate was so impressed by my lunch (a handful of almonds, cucumber slices, and sparkling water) he called over a different lab mate to discuss it. Her face tensed slightly and she asked me if I was getting enough protein.
I tried to figure out how to change this when I was a PhD student because I had a sneaking suspicion that my brain was not running at full capacity on this program. It’s been a long, arduous, frankly horrible process and I may live with the effects of these early experiences for the rest of my life.
Here are the things I wish I had known when I was younger, and the approaches that I’ve found much more useful and healthful than just eating as little as possible while exercising as much as possible. You will note that only some claims are sourced and if you want to aktually me I’m going to have to accept that as a consequence of not bothering to find support for all statements before writing this.
Weight is not a behavior; you can only manipulate it using behaviors. You’ll often get the best downstream effects by focusing more of your energy on behaviors, which you can directly influence, for example:
Have a behavioral goal focused on improving a metric other than weight. Other bodily measures like resting heart rate, blood pressure, percent body fat, etc. tend to respond to behavioral interventions and often reflect overall health better than weight. Consider task-related measures like being able to lift heavier things, do new yoga poses, run further or faster.
Strict examples include:
-Lift x times a week, aim to add weight according to y schedule, in order to hit z bench/ohp/squat/etc by [date]
-Walk x times a week, increasing distance according to y schedule, in order to decrease resting heart rate to [range] by [date]
-Begin a lifting and diet program in order to decrease body fat percentage by x amount by [date]
Looser examples:
-Aim for a better macro balance and try to eat protein+fat+carbs simultaneously to minimize blood sugar spikes and increase satiety between meals
-Try to get 1g of protein per kg of body weight [if you’re like me this will be useful even if you can’t get anywhere near that without feeling like you’re trying to eat a herd of cattle daily]If you’re enforcing an energy deficit, attention to macros is higher roi and better for your health than calorie deficit that’s content agnostic
Insulin sensitivity is easier to fuck up than you think, and long periods of severe calorie deficits will have your metabolism doing weird stuff to compensate that will not go away when you start eating enough again (and usually will make you likely to gain weight faster when you do).
This is avoidable and it’s really basic. Eat fruits and vegetables, eat enough protein, try to eat multiple macros simultaneously as much as possible
When enforcing an energy deficit (whether decreased caloric intake, increased exercise, or both), take care to keep your energy deficits small, around <500kcals/day relative to the energy needs for your body (your weight*10 is an easy heuristic).
Sustainable weight loss means adjusting your body to a new equilibrium; aggressive changes are more likely to set a pendulum in motion. You’ve got time; your health and body are yours for the rest of your life. Rushing has huge costs, including weight gain over time - cyclical dieting and weight gain is heavily predictive of long term weight gain.Optimize for building muscle if possible. Energy deficits of every kind nudge your body into using less energy (this makes sense, our ancestors would not have made it if their metabolisms weren’t capable of responding to both famine and plenty). You can compensate for this to some degree by changing your body composition so that more of your body burns more energy = make more muscle to burn more calories when your body is trying to burn less.
That means weight training - barbell lifting, dumbbells, body weight exercises like squats or pushups (and even yoga or pilates, particularly if you’re a woman). I’ve been recommended stronglifts as a lifting starter program and found it accessible and a good place to begin if you haven’t done anything like it before. Increase protein intake to support muscle development.Intermittent fasting has some clear health benefits (despite not holding up for weight loss specifically in some trials), as does periodic fasting more broadly. This is a nice review from the heavy hitter journal.
The same principles applies to intermittent fasting as to calorie deficits writ large - balance your macros, try to stay within shouting distance of your body’s calorie needs, optimize towards foods you prepared yourself first.If you fast, watch your electrolytes (drink water with a small amount of sea salt, for example) because an imbalance in sodium and potassium taxes your heart, especially over time. [Anorexia and especially bulimia are associated with increased risk of cardiac events: the electrical balance maintained by potassium and sodium are critical to the function of muscle and nerve cells, and purging especially can push an already weakened heart into infarction]
One of my favorites from my dietitian in grad school: approaching your diet from a “what can I add in” angle as opposed to a “what can I take away” one. Make sure you’re getting enough protein, include vegetables, eat at home. For a lot of people, a full balanced diet will mean that a desire to eat other things, including hyperpalatable foods (e.g. pringles, candy, packaged desserts) decreases. Speaking of which,
Hyperpalatable foods have been singled out by some voices I trust (see: the barbell medicine podcast) as one possible factor in rising avg bmi. Hyperpalatable foods overlap broadly with the category you may think of as junk food: hostess snacks, chips, candy, etc. Weight gain requires evading the feedback mechanism that usually controls how much you eat, and hyperpalatable foods appear to be capable of decoupling “this tastes good and I want to eat more” from “I feel full so I’ll stop eating”
Extreme approaches in dieting often backfire so I lean towards “try to get fun calories out of home made desserts but don’t act like a lunch size bag of doritos will poison you” on this one.You can eat fun calories including desserts, donuts, whatever. The more intense your relationship with them the more likely you are to have a difficult time eating a reasonable amount of them when they’re available. The number one best thing about eating disorder recovery is that I have learned that I don’t have to exert tons of willpower to stop eating after only one cookie (nor do I feel weird about eating one) if I’m well fed.
Even if all you care about is looking hot, body composition and muscle tone influence appearance more than weight does. Macro balances and sustainable energy deficits will assist you in sticking to a program so that looking hot isn’t a temporary, hard to maintain local maximum.
It’s possible to lose quite a bit of weight quickly if you simply create a massive energy deficit. This tends to be unsustainable behaviorally and is suboptimal in terms of body composition, insulin sensitivity, and longterm health goals. It’s dead simple though, more than this post.
Let me give a TL;DR my best shot:
-Make goals based on expanding what your body can do in addition to/in place of weight
-Aim to eat balanced macros and meals you made at home
-Try to keep your strategies conservative and sustainable
-Focus on building muscle
It’s easy to refer to weight or BMI as an easy shorthand for health, but optimizing for the lowest weight can cause serious health problems, nutrient deficiencies, and even weight gain over the long term. Our focus on weight at the expense of other health metrics - making weight a target instead of a measure - has been a net negative for health, individually and globally, and there are absolutely better strategies.