@tinker I'm on this journey (again) after taking a hiatus. There are things that I found that really helped me the time -- it was so effective in fact, that weight loss became effortless and I was losing weight so fast I got worried that my cancer had come back and I deliberately broke all my habits to see if my weight would level out. It did... and then went back up, but I digress. A friend told me to do this, and I was convinced it was a gimmick and wouldn't work so I made sure to follow it to the letter mostly so I could prove them wrong. Win/Win for me - I didn't prove them wrong, but I dropped 35lbs in something like 12 weeks.
1. Drink watered down orange juice all day. I carried around a water bottle full of 1:8 organic orange juice, and it helped keep enough sugar in my blood stream that I didn't feel shaky from low blood sugar between meals, it was sweet enough to help with sugar cravings but not so sweet as to reinforce a sugar addiction, and it helps keep your metabolism from going into fasting mode and slowing down.
2. Start with a period of time with no sweets, and no added salts. I think I did 2 weeks, and this includes cutting things like artificial sweeteners, fruit, and even things like condiments (Ketchup has a *ton* of sugar, it turns out). Basically, I had to break my sugar addition, and in doing so I went through a full course of withdrawal (headaches, sleepiness, etc).
3. Chew your food exceptionally thoroughly, with your whole mouth (both sides) and really pay attention to the flavor. In my experience, there's mouth hunger and there's real hunger. There are plenty of times where I've eaten enough to be full, but what I'm eating is really good... so I'm mouth hungry for it, but I'm not actually hungry. Chewing with your whole mouth and keeping your food in your mouth longer helps cut down on mouth hunger.
4. Eat slowly (goes with #3). Eat for 10 minutes, then wait 5 minutes and see if you're still hungry. If you are, keep eating until you're not. I found I ate about half as much when I did these things, and I didn't feel hungry.
5. Eat when you're truly hungry; don't snack when you're kinda hungry. If you're not hungry enough to go through the effort of making yourself a meal, you're not truly hungry. This can really f*ck with meal times, but most of the time that doesn't matter. If you're truly hungry but you've got a family dinner coming up or something, have a small, non-sweet snack. I would do like 1 oz of beef jerky, or even something as small as 6 peanuts, to tide me over till meal time.
6. Actually eat when you're hungry - if you wait too long, you'll get over hungry, then over-eat.
7. No more than 3 things on your plate. Eat one thing at a time - don't bounce around. When you're tired of eating that one thing, move on and don't come back to it. It's a bit of a game, but if you're chewing your food thoroughly (like, way longer than you think you should be chewing), you *will* get tired of eating the same thing and want variety. That's when you know you're not mouth hungry for those flavors anymore. Move on to the next until you're sick of it. If you go back to the first, you'll get mouth hungry for it again.
8. Smaller portions. You can always go back for seconds. If you finish what's on your plate, and you're not sick of it, go get more of that thing before moving on. It feels bad to waste food, so we're inclined to over-eat rather than tossing our food... but if our priority is losing weight, it's better the food goes to waste than to your waist. Smaller portions help eliminate both. Relatedly - at a restaurant, ask for an extra plate and cut your portion in half at the start. Restaurant portions are huge, but if you make your portion smaller to start out, you'll be less likely to eat more than you actually need.
The biggest things for my quality of life were #2 and #1 - getting through that 14 days *sucked*, but after having no sweet things for 2 weeks, I was far less inclined to want to eat them. Like, I could walk past free cookies or donuts and not stop and pick one up - it was shocking even to me.
I'm currently struggling to get back into that habit (turns out, it's *much* harder now that I'm married and have a kid than it was 20 years ago when I was single and had nobody else to share my schedule with). One thing I noticed is that I shed a ton of weight really fast early on (as much as 3% of my body weight in the first week), but then it tapers off. It's also not uncommon for me to fluctuate 1-2lbs daily in either direction depending on how hydrated I am, so I keep an excel spreadsheet of my daily weight, but only look at the average over the last 2 weeks when tracking progress. This whole thing is about forming new habits and lifestyle change for me, so looking at a long average is more motivating long-term than celebrating the wins.
I'd love to hear more about what you're finding successful - just because you mostly post tech stuff doesn't mean you can't post other things. There's lots of infosec folks who I'm sure are in my boat... I'm eager to learn any tricks I can use to try to get an edge on this... It sucks going through life with tens of pounds of dead weight that just make everything you do that much more difficult.
