Weight loss – what works for me

Tl;Dr: Logging food is effective and can be easy, focus on that. I like Macrofactor.

Want to improve your quality of life and reduce suffering near end of life? For the vast majority of people that means losing weight. Heart Disease, Cancer and Stroke are how most people in the U.S. die, being overweight contributes to all of them.

Easier said than done, and it seems like almost everybody wants to sell you the secret to weight loss. Weight loss doesn’t take any money – ask any shipwreck victim what they did to lose weight, I guarantee you it wasn’t by using meds, surgery, or subscribing to an app or service.

However… there are things you can do to make a hard thing easier. Here are the top 3 most effective and realistic methods for weigh loss I know of:

1. Gastric By-pass surgery – incredibly effective, but violates my ‘no new holes’ principle.
2. GLP-1 receptor agonist – like Ozempic. Amazingly effective, as long as you take it (and can afford it)
3. Food Logging – Very effective, free, and kind of a pain in the ass.

If everything you ever ate came out of a package, food logging is easy. Unfortunately, ultra-processed foods (which all come packaged, btw) are horrible for you. Eating real food (like what Grandma makes) is much better for you, and much harder to log. Because: How many calories are in Chicken Pot Pie?

Imagine that you could simply give your food logger the recipe, and it would figure out the calories for you. That would make logging real food a lot easier. Macrofactor does that, and it’s the most effective and sustainable way I’ve lost weight in the last decade.

There are LOTS of other things you might do, I suggest you focus on the single most effective thing you can do and spend the rest of your time enjoying your life (living to diet is not really living).

Here are some other alternatives and my opinions on them:

• Focus on exercise: Do this for health & fun, not to lose weight.
  There are a million reasons to go be active, but exercising is not a good strategy to lose weight, for many many reasons. ‘You can’t out run a bad diet’ isn’t literally true but it’s still good advice. Keep exercising, don’t count it against your calorie goals (Macrofactor does a great job at this)
• Optimizing Macros/Protein/Fad diets: Some of these may have minor benefits but most are unhelpful expensive distractions or downright unhealthy bad ideas
• Starvation diets: Attempting to lose a lot of weight quickly is a great way to gain it back later. Ask the ship wreck victim (or me! I lost over 20lbs cycling across New Mexico. It all came back).
• Obsessing over every calorie, every detail: Don’t get started down this path. Being overweight is not going to kill you tomorrow, take it slow and easy don’t sweat the details.

I also do these things which I think are helpful for me:

• Intermittent fasting – Not eating anything til dinner (most days). This works well for me because it’s a simple habit that requires zero decision making. But honestly, while I’ve lost weight this way I’ve also gained weight this way. There’s good evidence it’s not harmful, and I know for sure the way I do it also builds some bad habits (like night eating).
• Nicotinamide riboside – I’ve tried a LOT of different pills for weight loss. I don’t know for certain, but it seems to me that since I’ve started taking this I’ve consistently lost weight.
• Coffee – This is part of intermittent fasting. Coffee reduces appetite, so it’s an easy (and nice) way to encourage fasting.

I’ll probably write more about this in the future, but at the heart of it this is what works for me. Want to avoid the other thing that kills most people? Get Vaccinated and wash your freaking hands.

Some data about deaths: