How to lose a bunch of weight fast
1. Intro
Hi. This is a description of a straightforward way to lose a bunch of weight. It’s opinionated, but in fairness it is also factual. It exploits well-understood, well-documented diet principles but is mainly at odds with the standard dietary advice from the last few decades. By straightforward I mean simple, but simple does not imply easy but follow the rules with a bit of rigour and it will probably work for you.
What I describe is not a discussion or debate on the near-religious camps of nutritional dogma, a suggestion for long term eating (though it might give some clues), nor a debate on the ethics of meat consumption.
It is a recipe only to lose a lot of weight fast, have more energy and reduce the sensations of hunger.
2. Approach
This approach is simple; hard-core ketogenic, real-food diet compressed into an 8 hour eating window every day. Backed with a bit of measurement to create a positive feedback loop to help with motivation and to hold yourself to account.
The simplest way to create a 16 hour a day fasted state is to skip breakfast, have lunch and dinner between midday and 20:00 every day.
3. Motivation
To be clear; half of the effort will not result in half of the results. It’s amazing how much I hear people opining that they would like the future to be different but seem unable or unwilling to make any change to their lives to achieve it. Sometimes you have to put in some hard yards.
Habits >> Willpower. Any attempt to use willpower alone to achieve pretty much anything are doomed to failure. You’ll win some battles, but you’ll lose the war. Every time you make a difficult decision you deplete your willpower, until you lose. Habits are amazing — they prevent you having a make a decision and slowly your brain will find it uncomfortable not doing them — whether they are good or bad. So our job is to slowly cultivate good habits, and dispel the bad. There is an excellent book in the references on exactly this topic.
4. What to Eat
Breakfast
Nothing
Lunch
3 eggs, 1/6th pack of butter, cheddar cheese. If you have a microwave make scrambled eggs. Or make yourself a nice omelette if you have the facilities. If not, and really worst case, pre-boiled eggs and cheese.
Dinner
Meat or fish, with non-starchy vegetables (see references), loads of butter and/or olive oil
You need plenty of salt on your food — which has the attractive benefit of making everything taste better.
5. What to Drink
- Lots and lots of water (my preference is for sparkling, or diet champagne as I like to call it)
- Black coffee
- A cup of boiullon / stock every day
- Green tea, Earl Grey, etc (anything without milk)
- White wine, spirits + no sugar mixers in moderation and not every day
6. Measurement
Measurement is critical to success. You need accurate, reliable scales and some Ketostix. Ketostix will tell you if your body has transitioned into a ‘fat-burning’ state, and whilst not perfectly reliable is cheap and easy and does not require the courage to prick your finger to extract bloody several times a day!
The most important bit — make yourself accountable. Write your measurements down, make a graph. Track the habits you are trying to embed into your routine.
Remember; the aggregate of the pleasure you feel along the way to achieving a goal with incremental small wins is counter-intuitively greater than that you achieve when you’ve made it.
7. Side Effects
There are a few side effects and I’m lucky to escape most of them. You might feel shit for a few days-in fairness your body is making some big changes to accommodate you forcing it to burn your fat stores for energy.
No worse than a hangover or two though right? Drink loads of water, add salt to your food, and you should probably take a magnesium supplement.
8. Exercise
Exercise is magical and a core pillar of a good life. However, there’s not a study in the world that demonstrates efficacy when it comes to weight loss.
9. References and Links
Books
- Why we get fat and what to do about it? by Gary Taubes
- Obesity Code by Jason Fung
- Better than Before by Gretchen Rubin
10. That’s it
That’s it. I would love to have feedback on the ideas, any suggestions for improvement and how you got along.
