Nutritional tricks I've successfully applied to loose 35kg in 6 months without exercise / only by walking

During a prolonged high stress period I've failed to keep my health in check and so I gained a lot of additional mass. At one point I've decided to correct this and then I devised a strategy based on my knowledge of physics and chemistry. I'd like to share some of those with the hope that somebody might find them useful.

My background is: A very successful PhD physicist involved in computational physics research, with a strong focus on organic chemistry. I know a lot about the chemical processes happening in our body. Furthermore there are many MDs in my family and we regularly discuss various health related topics. I am 199cm tall and I've had 134kg when I started with this goal. Being the scientist that I am, I've used the following equipment:

1. An industrial scale with a precision of 50g and a limit of 150kg.
2. A kitchen scale
3. A top quality non stick pan
4. An activity tracker watch that can track steps, floors, heart rate and transfer this via Bluetooth

General thoughts:

• The most important part is discipline. All of this will be in vain if you lack the self discipline to maintain the regime.
• People like to eat tasty stuff, however this is highly subjective. I will give describe what works for me and give you some general tips that you can use to build your own plan
• In general, e.g. eating a lot of eggs is often frown upon due to the high intake of cholesterol. However, being obese is far more detrimental to your health than a slight unbalance relative to the recommended nutritional values for carbs, proteins and fats. Also such an unbalance is not going to exist forever. When you reach your mass goal, you can look to optimize your nutrition for optimal health.
• Non-stick pans are nothing new, however not many people know that you can actually prepare meals without any oil in them. Just be careful to read the use instructions. E.g.:
  • place food inside only after the pan has reached medium temperature
  • avoid rapid heating since this can damage the coating
  • use suitable equipment (silicon?) that will not scratch your pan
  • clean immediately after use
  • note that these could be specific to my pan and that you should check your own
• You are loosing mass when you consume less calories than you are spending. This is something well known on this forum.
  • Human fat is your long time energy reservoir. If your body does not get enough in a single day, it will tap this energy source to keep running.
  • 1 kg of body fat corresponds to 7700 kcal. If you want to loose 1 kg, you approximately need to consume this much less than you require.
• There are many various diets. However, I, as an experienced scientist often find lacking evidence of their effectiveness. Many of the studies that claim to prove that a particular method is more successful, typically make one of the following mistakes:
  • To small of a sample (consequence of insufficient funding?)
  • failing to show causality (perhaps people are loosing mass because they are more disciplined when following a strict method, and thus are more successful at maintaining a calorie deficit over a prolonged time?)
  • If there really are any metabolic effects of e.g. intermittent fasting, these are almost certainly of second order compared to a caloric deficit. If you were to eat 5000 kcal in a single meal, thereby fasting 23.5 hours per day, while your daily requirement is 3000 kcal, you are 100% going to gain mass!
• Your base energy requirement is determined mostly by your weight.
  • Most of the food you consume is used to maintain the body temperature at approx 36.5 celsius.
  • There are many calculators that can estimate your daily requirements (e.g. https://www.calculator.net/calorie-calculator.html).
  • A consequence of this is that, if you are obese, you require more calories to maintain your mass. E.g. with 134kg and low activity, according to the linked calculator, I need 2950 kcal to stay at the same mass. At 99kg however, I require only 2394 kcal.
  • Thus: if you stick to the same kcal intake goal, the fitter you are, the more difficult it will be to loose mass.
• Dieting is much more effective than intensive exercise!
  • If you run for an hour, you will increase your daily consumption perhaps by an additional 20%.
  • While this is great, it will not significantly increase your daily calorie requirement. You can achieve a much larger caloric deficit by limiting your intake.
  • Still attacking the problem from both sides is great, so If you can, increase your level of activity
  • I hate running, so instead of actively exercising, I try to walk as much as possible, to climb stairs and to drive my bike to get some groceries. On average, I walk 6 km per day and climb 20 floors and this summarizes my daily activity.
  • As an extra, I think that ergo meters (training bikes) are excellent to increase the caloric requirement. You can buy used ones very cheap and you can train without depending on the weather.
  • Why do I think ergo meter are the best? You've been carying around your excess mass for quite a long time and this has probably strengthened your legs more so than your arms. Your legs have the capacity to push harder and thereby achieve a larger calorie consumption per hour.
  • Please dont drive by car to your fitness studio. This is damaging the planet, emptying your wallet and is wasting your time. I bet that by simply walking the amount of time you would spend in the gym plus the amount of time you would spend in your car, you would consume as much kcal as if you were exercising with a higher intensity
• Keep yourself busy
  • Doing boring staff motivates me to think about food. If were at home for a prolonged period of time, I needed to involve myself with something in order to reduce this crave. If you have too much free time, find something that needs volunteering and also help others/your community.
• Be careful when guesstimating the total caloric value of a meal. This is something I am quite good at, but still I was shocked at some of the mistakes I made.
  • Use your kitchen scale and a calculator
  • If you are making a stew, you can get a good approximation by summing all the ingredients together and then dividing by the number of filled plates
  • Always take oil in to consideration!

What to eat?

• Eggs. Boiled eggs, scrambled eggs, scrambled eggs with onions, scrambled eggs with peppers, scrambled eggs with low-fet ham (max 110 kcal / 100g), fried eggs. It does not matter, only avoid using oil!
• Oil is the devil! A single table spoon of 14g has approx 125 kcal!!
• Coffe> black, no sugar, no milk. When I get hungry, It helps me to drink coffee, because I forget about the hunger over the next 2 hours.
• Eat as much vegetables as possible.
• Eat fruits, but take care, since there are many which have a high sugar content. E.g. pomegranate has 80 kcal /100g, i.e. 500 kcal for a large one.
• Drink water, lots of water.
• If water is not an option, drink something without kcal: tee, or coke zero/light
  • Now, no sane nutrioniost is going to recommend coke zero or light, but if you are obese, chances are this obesity is going to do in the long term far more damage to your health than drinking a liter of coke per day for a couple of months
• Switch to low-fat diary products:
  • Skim milk with max 40 kcal per 100ml (do you need milk?)
  • Cream cheese with max 110 kcal per 100g
  • no cheese!
• When you cook meals, reduce fat content as much as possible:
  • little or no oil
  • if you absolutely need oil at a certain stage, e.g. at the start when working with onions, after you are done, pure that oil out in to the drain
  • no butter
  • avoid bacon, e.g. by switching to low fat ham
  • Switch to low-fat meat parts, there are low-fat pork, beef and poultry peaces
  • Especial when buying minced meat, look for low fat alternatives
  • If using diary products, use the alternatives with low fat content
  • avoid cheese
• Cook stews as much as possible!
• Don't eat bread!
  • If you do, cut slices as thin as possible (experiment with different knifes or a rotary cutter, if you have one)
  • Consider switching to Crispbred (e.g. I like the one from wasa, which is available in Europe)
  • When you read on packaging how many calories there are in a slice of brown bread, consider that those guys have also cut as thin a slice as possible. Use your scale to check this!
• Avoid pasta
• no snacks
• no sweets

Some extras from a crazy scientist: I've mentioned earlier how most of the calorie consumption is for maintaining body heat. We can exploit this:

• You can increase your daily consumption by dressing lightly and sleeping with less cover. Do not try to freeze, but check with what you are comfortable.
• reduce your home temperature as far as you are reasonably comfortable with
• Drink cold water (4 degrees Celsius)
• When you go to the swimming pool, consider going in to the one with the lower temperature

Thanks for reading. This is all for now. I've got to do some science work now and I'll come back to proof-read and improve latter. I hope that somebody will find this useful.

submitted by /u/optimiz3r
[link] [comments]

source https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/edocfw/nutritional_tricks_ive_successfully_applied_to/