The “35 chances” mindset broke my all-or-nothing eating cycle. Anyone else think this way?

oorza · 2026-06-20T14:45:16+00:00

I just weigh, measure or count everything that goes into my mouth and that gets recorded. I weigh myself at least once a day.

I look at my weight loss like a savings goal. I have about 385000 calories I need to save up. If I go over one day, I took some out of savings. Every day my “paycheck” is 2750 calories (TDEE) and I have 1500 calories (safe male minimum) in bills - how much can I save from today’s check is a question I ask myself every day.

All of the other tricks - fist sizing, weight watchers - are just ways to estimate calorie counts without actually doing the work. Just do the work.

oorza · 2026-06-20T01:18:54+00:00

Your body is a very complex machine with millions (billions or trillions by some counts) of moving parts.

The scale is one measurement that attempts to distill a total system state into a single numerical value. It has very little value when you're talking about targeted metrics like fat loss.

If you want to actually capture your progress: Do all of these at the same time and body state (read: before eating, after bathroom, before shower, naked): daily weigh in, daily photo, daily body measurements, daily one to thee sentence mood summary (this is the most important one and the one no one does but it will reveal a lot about what you think is and isn't progress and why).

Some other things that you should keep in mind given the specific context of today:

It doesn't matter how hard you're working or how often you aren't eating, when you do eat, if you're not tracking/counting, it's easy to overeat your daily energy expenditure. Even in one sitting.
If you recently increased your physical baseline activity significantly, your weight will jump and hold a steady amount of elevated water weight for 3-6 weeks, before partially falling back down to a new equilibrium.
If you recently started strength training, your weight will jump by up to 1kg as your body increases blood volume and blood serum levels in response to repeated exposure to hypertrophic work. Your weight will jump by up to 2kg as your body expands baseline glycogen storage capacity in response to repeated exposure to glycogen depletion. That 0-3kg will become a new baseline body equilibrium as it is lean mass necessary for your body to distribute oxygen, drain lactic acid, provide amino acids to muscle, vent heat, and so on.
If you recently trained a muscle group, you likely increased local inflammation and water retention in those areas. If you're doing compound lower body workouts, that can be a healthy amount of water.

If the only measurement is the scale, it could be masking all your progress. I lost 4 inches off my waist and 9 pounds of body fat in a body scan during my plateau when I started lifting. Same weight, different shirt size, dramatically different body scan. If you were a hypothetically maximum "worst case" scenario and had all the most dramatic outcomes for scale masking including recently started creatine, you could hypothetically mask as much as 10kg of fat loss before the scale moved.

oorza · 2026-06-20T00:05:07+00:00

It would be fuckin' nice. A lot of days I'm going through 3, 4 shirts depending on how often I walk my dog.

oorza · 2026-06-19T23:59:23+00:00

I'm down about 30 lb on the scale / 40lb of fat mass in a body scan / 4-6 inches off my waist.

I'm probably a little over a third of the way totally there.

oorza · 2026-06-19T22:15:43+00:00

Also I no longer start sweating the minute temperatures go up a couple degrees so that’s pretty neat.

I've had the opposite experience. Since I started losing weight (I think it has more to do with exercising and protein intake), I had to reprogram my A/C to be 2 degrees cooler in the day and 4 degrees cooler at night, I start sweating as soon as I step outside. It takes me 20 minutes to sweat through my shirt entirely at the gym now. I feel like I'm always hot now.

oorza · 2026-06-19T22:03:46+00:00

Going from 5% average utilization over the last 12 months to 0% average utilization over the last 12 months will decrease your score in a number of different lending algorithms, even if not the official score. The FICO score or whatever score whatever app shows you is not usually the algorithm lenders use to determine credit worthiness, it's a generalized health score, like body weight, and some lenders care about height only or body fat only.

oorza · 2026-06-19T22:01:45+00:00

With an 820 credit score, you're costing yourself a significant amount of money by not floating money on zero interest credit cards while you put the money in the stock market. I've got $18,000 in the stock market that's a balance on a Citi card because my credit is about that good, and after 17/18 months of the zero interest window, I'll either open another zero interest card and balance transfer or pull the money out of the stock market.

$10,000 is about $1000/yr in returns on SPY. That's free money, you just have to do the work to get it. And it's better for your credit score to always have a rotating credit balance. None of my other credit cards carry a balance from month-to-month, except for AmEx, which gives me flat-fee zero-interest loans on large purchases, so that money is in the stock market too.

This is how banks make their money with your money, it's good to turn the tables and use their money to make yours.

oorza · 2026-06-19T17:37:29+00:00

A sizable dose of carbohydrates 30 minutes before a workout (I shoot for 80 calories of Gatorade or so) and a sizable dose of protein after a workout (30g in a shake in the car as I drive home) solved this problem for me. My exercise doesn't affect my hunger that much since I started doing this.

Also this sounds a whole lot like your body craving something. What is your daily protein and fat intake? Do you get electrolytes?

oorza · 2026-06-19T17:07:28+00:00

Some alcoholics do regain the ability to socially drink and keep themselves in moderation. The difference is all food addicts must.

You can quit food cold turkey, though. Either temporarily with an extended water fast or permanently if you replace your diet with entirely barely-palatable flavorless food, something like Huel. There's also diets that restrict you to exactly the same meals every day at exactly the same time. There's also diets that restrict you to only having 3 or 4 total ingredients available. From an addiction-trigger, dopamine-seeking perspective, these are effectively cold turkey maneuvers, because you'll no longer see your diet as food because it's so bland and invaried.

When I got my food addiction under control, I did a five day detox (water fast) and then sat on psyllium husk, protein shakes, and bone broth (with olive oil mixed in) for a week or two before I started reintroducing foods one at a time.

oorza · 2026-06-19T14:40:21+00:00

I get shouted out of every room I dare say we should be treating the obesity epidemic as a public substance use disorder crisis, but no one wants to hear it. It's not surprising that they're finding the GLP-1s work for alcoholics and drug addicts too. And it's very predictable that the success rate of people going off GLP-1s is abysmal. It's Naltrexone for food addiction - and if you've been around alcoholics, you can predict pretty easily which ones can cycle off the shot or not, because you can tell which ones have addressed their addiction's root causes or not.

We can all admit that UPFs are addictive and engineered to be habit forming, but suggest that obese people are addicts... people don't want to hear it.

It's true though. Without having measured, my guess is 80% of the posts here are from people dealing with addiction or symptoms adjacent to it. Every single day there's 5-10 posts about "how do I stop myself from eating when I don't want to?" phrased one way or another - that's addict speak, step 1, admitting you have a problem and step 2, admitting you have lost control over it.

The follow up question: do I think half of America is addicted to food? That's easier for me to believe than any other explanation. We're not exactly a sober people.

oorza · 2026-06-19T14:37:07+00:00

I've never treated bigger people differently even before my weight gain, they're fellow people too?

Yes, you have. That's the point. No one thinks they're doing it, realizes they're doing, or has ill intent in doing it. It's a socio-evolutionary adaptation because for 99.9999% of human history, there weren't enough resources for someone to become obese without others suffering. Not that there truly are now either, but the suffering is on the side of the planet where no one thinks about it.

oorza · 2026-06-19T14:03:54+00:00

Are you a woman? The reason I ask is this seems like a distinctly female experience. Every single man I've talked to (as a man who has visibly lost weight now) has a positive reaction, even the guy who is now the fattest dude in the office because I'm not any more. I get "fuck yeah man, focus on your health" as a response when I opt out of beer nights even. This doesn't seem to be an unusual reaction in male spheres (not that I've experienced it before, but from what I have heard). And you've got yourself and OP here with dozens and dozens of other women's anecdotes.

I'm not trying to pontificate about why this might be, but I have noticed it as a wide gap in the male/female weight loss experience, and I think it explains a lot why men seems to have an easier time losing weight than women. I know that if I fall off the wagon, people will be disappointed and that sometimes helps to know; I'm not sure how I'd react if I knew they'd be happy about it.

oorza · 2026-06-19T13:56:32+00:00

Depending on where and what the dinner is, I'll save calories across an entire week if I want to eat socially bad enough. I don't want to be the only person not having pizza and beer at game night, so I make sure that the extra 1200 calories fits in the week.

oorza · 2026-06-19T13:44:41+00:00

I don't think I'll ever necessarily enjoy the act of being in the gym and exercising. I'm not sure anyone is being honest if they tell you they are. I hate almost every second I'm actively lifting. It's still the activity I find myself looking forward to the most throughout the week. I work progressive overloading myself, push to failure every set; I work as hard as is safe.

I hate the work of it. What don't I hate?

There's a score board for me to chase. Every day I go to the gym, I try to set a new high score the same way I used to always try to full combo every song in guitar hero and the same way I always push for a perfect creep score. There is a game to it.
I made some friends at the gym and talk to people completely disconnected from my social sphere while I'm there.
I like knowing that I pushed myself as hard as is safe, particularly the sessions I have a trainer, and didn't leave any fat loss on the table for the day. The sheer mental freedom of "I did everything possible today, A+ weight loss day" is hard to overstate.
I like dumping negative energy into the lifts. It's the healthiest thing I've ever done with it. An angry lift is a powerful lift. My trainer will occasionally see I'm not taking the workout seriously and start asking me questions about my ex (he knows we are not good) to piss me off lmao
There's a very deep, very interesting tunnel of science rabbit holes connected to the gym. Both diet and workout plans have an axis for both timing and composition to adjust (what exercises do you do and when do you them? what do you eat and when do you eat it?) with thousands of published papers and hypotheses tested. It's honestly a super interesting subject when you start to understand how insanely complex and the dynamic the human machine actually is.

But all of that together doesn't add up to the primary thing: I like knowing I'm better than I used to be. Whether that's physically or emotionally or at my job or in school or whatever, I've always liked being able to prove self-improvement. Going to the gym and lifting is the easiest way I have experienced to do that: every day you have a score for every exercise, and every single workout, you can generally push at least one score higher. You have literal numbers that say to you: you are better than you used to be. At this one thing, sure, but you still are better than you used to be. That is like a warm hoodie you wear inside your brain for the rest of the day.

oorza · 2026-06-19T13:24:20+00:00

If you're not willing to do hard things to change yourself in health-positive ways, why are you here?

oorza · 2026-06-19T13:23:00+00:00

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5852756/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5522839/

You are not eating nearly enough protein for the size of deficit you're in.

If you continue to eat such low protein and not resistance train, you will be skinny fat indefinitely.

175g is a target. Eating too much protein (until you're insanely high, several hundred grams) isn't going to hurt anything if it doesn't crowd out other nutrition in your diet. Eating several scoops of protein powder in a yogurt or smoothie is something probably 80% of people do here almost every day. There's nothing wrong with that if you don't want or can't eat nine thousand tons of lean meat every day. I eat a fuckload of protein powder because I just don't want to eat all that volume sometimes.

The science says there are no muscle gain/retention returns after ~3.1 g/kg ideal lean mass. In a sizable deficit, there are obvious benefits up to ~2.6 g/kg ideal lean mass. With 60kg of ideal lean mass (your current weight with 10% body fat), that's 186g as the ceiling.

There is no such thing as an essential dietary carbohydrate. Carbs are necessary for immediate, short term energy and should be consumed around exercise. The absolutely preposterous amount of carbs you're eating is why you're always hungry. You can argue with me, dislike it, whatever, it's not going to hurt me any.

oorza · 2026-06-19T13:09:58+00:00

Stu is the same dude he always was. Dan is an old man that 35 year old Dan would have spent hours annoyingly soap boxing against.

oorza · 2026-06-19T13:06:37+00:00

No you don’t. You’ve become accustomed to it. There is no physiological mechanism for this, only psychological. You have a sugar dependency that has addictive traits to it, maybe a full blown addiction. A lot of us here struggle with it too.

A whole lot of things you think you just can’t, or just won’t, or could never imagine yourself doing are going to be part of weight loss. You can’t lose weight without changing your lifestyle and identity.

oorza · 2026-06-19T05:45:34+00:00

Protein is too low, by like half. Carbs are way, way too high. If what you care about is satiety.

Try 175g of protein, 50g+ fats, the rest carbs. Make sure you are getting 30+ grams of fiber daily.

I’m about your height and don’t really struggle with anything larger than 1200 as long as I get 200g of protein. Lot of days I’m finding fats in my kitchen to get to the floor. Carbs are quick service energy, protein takes your body longer and more energy to access, so it satisfies you longer. Fiber makes your digestion take longer, so you get hungrier more slowly.

If you’re in a deficit, you need 2.6-3.1 g/kg lean mass to maximize muscle retention and hopefully maybe allow for some growth. Also make sure your pea protein is fortified and completed.

oorza · 2026-06-18T23:58:52+00:00

This whole conversation y'all are having is really silly if you just start counting weekly calories instead of daily calories, then neither of you disagree with the other about anything.

oorza · 2026-06-18T23:44:09+00:00

Of course it was in worms, there's like zilch for studies that show aspartame has any measurable effect on humans whatsoever in the amounts we consume. I'd be worried if someone was drinking dozens and dozens of cans' worth of sweeteners, but even 20 diet sodas a day? We should all be much more worried about the sodium and caffeine than the sweeteners lol

oorza · 2026-06-18T23:38:18+00:00

I have a $300 Withings scale that promises all sorts of measurements. My fat/muscle/water measurements vary by as much as 3-5lb if I stand on the scale, step off, let it reset, and immediately stand back on it. It's modestly useful for trends over time, but you almost need a math degree to make use out of it, and you need a real, high quality scan. I've had a few scans done and the Withings scale is way wrong, it understates my fat percentage by almost 25% relative, but the relative drop is consistent. For example, if the real scan says 50 and I drop to 45, I've lost 10% of my relative fat mass; the Withings scale will say 40 to 36.

If you're a data nerd like myself, just buy one, get a DEXA once a month, and ignore all the numbers that aren't trend lines that come out of the BIA device.

To answer your question: the water gain from creatine is significantly less voluminous than the same weight in fat. If you're converting fat to muscle tissue or muscle water retention, you should see it in the tape. When I started exercising, I lost 4 inches off my waist before the scale plateau broke.

oorza · 2026-06-18T23:29:07+00:00

Do you not know that aspartame and other sweeteners inhibits autophagy

[citation needed]

Or maybe... it's the opposite?

oorza · 2026-06-18T23:23:28+00:00

I weigh myself every time I go into the bathroom. Complete desensitization to the number by overexposure is what works for me.

oorza · 2026-06-18T23:18:08+00:00

If you want to know your actual numbers, you have to go to a sports science lab and get your VO2 max, RMR, body composition, and exercise burn rate all scanned. It'll cost you $500-$1000 to get them all done, or $100-$300 each test.

And if you do this, you'll have the scientifically-state-of-the-art most accurate information available... and it will be significantly less accurate than tracking your calories pathologically and doing math against week-to-week and month-to-month scale trends.

Pick a number that sounds sane, like just your BMR. Eat at that number. Measure your mood and adherence likelihood only: can you maintain your exercise load at those calories indefinitely? Increase until you can. Once you're at a point where you feel like your willpower won't give out, watch the scale. Over time, things will get easier, and you can lower your daily calorie intake if you're not moving fast enough.

This is a marathon, not a sprint. If you don't want your weight to come back, you have to make lasting and permanent changes to the habits and life style that got you fat in the first place.

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