alt Hacker NewsI’m sorry for the downvotes.
What you did takes a lot of discipline and hard work, and you did it.
Of course eating less calories than you consume results in weight loss, and you stuck with it. Congrats and Thanks for the details
Replies
It got downvoted because it's an anecdote and an anecdote isn't a substitute for a study that covers eighteen million people. We know the odd person can do it, 1 in 1667 per year if you're very overweight. That doesn't mean that 1 is representative of the set. In fact we know it's not representative. Because we have data.
It's like interviewing Michael Phelps and he's like "just swim! I did it! Anyone can win a gold medal by swimming." No, they can't.
And the reality is average weight gain over the 5 years following weight loss is 80%. Everyone who participated in the Biggest Loser weighs almost as much as when they started and has a metabolism an average of 17% slower than would be expected for someone of their new body composition. [1]
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4989512/
I'll push back and say anecdotes need more downvotes because they're actively harmful to the discourse, and are a large part of how we got to this point of just abject unhelpful information being passed off as useful.
This is how we get all sorts of medical misinformation like "I ate some almond seeds and my cancer went away." We don't accept these kinds of anecdotes in direct opposition to medical evidence for any other disease, we shouldn't accept them here either.
It's survivorship bias -- where are the anecdotes from the people who did exactly what parent said and didn't lose weight? They're in the study. Will OP update if they regain weight?
You can look up any of OPs rules, they've all been studied, and they don't work for most people.
You know what works? GLP-1s.
What matters for your health isn't that you tried real hard, what matters is that you lost weight. Nothing wrong with losing weight via GLP-1s then going to the gym and trying real hard to get jacked.
Thanks.
I must say that I really understand what is in the mind of those who claim that "it doesn't work", because this is exactly what I had believed during many years, after many failed attempts to lose weight.
I had become convinced that nothing that I can do could change my weight.
Nevertheless, now, after I had eventually done it, I can see clearly the errors of my previous ways, so I can no longer agree with the opinion that it does not work, when it can actually work very well, as long as you accept that you must be hungry all the time while you are doing it.
I want to add that the feeling of hunger can be diminished a lot when you eat food cooked at home instead of industrially-produced food, especially when you avoid sweetened food. Using modern techniques, like cooking all meat and vegetables in a microwave oven, it is possible to cook food at home in an extremely short time, so the lack of time is no longer a valid excuse for eating junk food.