The weight loss slider
My history with weight loss and how I discovered various painless diets
Ever since I was a child, I had a belly. Ever since my 20s, I’ve had a quest to have a flat stomach for one point in my life. I’ve been at 22 BMI to 30 BMI, and in all cases, I had the same belly shape. On top of that, most dieting was difficult or ineffective and I had to stop after a few months or I would not be able to focus at my job.
I’ve tried calorie counting, working out with a personal trainer for 6 months, 3 days a week, doing barbell lifts. My dead lift got to 500lbs. I tried low carb, ‘normal keto’, vegan, intermittent fasting, water fasting, intuitive eating and a bunch of other things. I’ve had a wifi scale since about 2012 and I know a lot of about psychological principles. Nothing stuck that well, even if I got to 22 BMI. Still had the stomach, even though I was at a weight number that was perfectly fine, was wearing a medium shirt as a tall man and every other part of my body looked visibly skinnier.
It was an infuriating goal to reach, which led me to do a lot of research and experimentation to try to figure out how to solve it and why it was happening. There were many reasons to why, but what was the biggest thing for me was:
Weight loss diets were a painful experience
To lose weight, the experience was painful. My energy would go down a bunch, I would sometimes enter a partially depressive / low motivation state and my exercise endurance and recovery was bad. I would eventually build large cravings or aversions to parts of the weight loss diet, which I called “diet itchy” and I constantly had to control my eating.
The actual feeling experience of losing weight was the part that was difficult. There was also a general issue with diets that took a lot of time in the kitchen, since I was pretty busy and just don’t enjoy how time consuming cooking can get.
This fundamental attribute of ‘pain’ is what caused me to fail my diets. At best I could manage were general ‘default’ diets that kept my weight stable, such as ‘meat and veggies’ with carb avoidance and so on.
The diet experience itself felt bad (Intrinsic Pain)
The ability to integrate the diet into my life was a literal part time job (Extrinsic Pain)
I needed both to not exist for any diet to last longer than a few months. Aversions to the diet would last much longer afterwards too.
The search for painless weight loss
On top of this, I knew it didn’t have to be this way. When I had a few gap months in South East Asia during college, I lost weight like nobodies business. I ate whatever I wanted, as much as I wanted. I got visibly slimmer. I didn’t exercise that much more than I did at home. I didn’t feel bad, I felt better. It was convenient, painless and effective. This pattern repeated itself over and over again whenever I traveled to other thinner countries. 1 week in Taiwan = 5lbs gone, etc.
People brought up “but your exercising / walking more!”. But this was not the case in my research and personal experience. When I went to Hawaii for a week, I permanently gained 5lbs, even though I did 1000 calories of surfing exercise for 5/7 of those days, and didn’t eat that much differently than I did at home.
There was literally something in the air, water or food about these counties that made weight loss very easy for many people. Digging more into it, almost all immigrants from Asia or Europe to the USA gain 10-20lbs, and the opposite happens when Americans immigrate to Japan, they all lose +10lbs fairly quickly. They call it the freshman 10 for exchange students.
So in my quest to figure out what is going on, I stumbled upon my first painless weight loss diet: the Potato Diet.
I get a potato, you get a potato, everyone gets a potato!
As part of my general research, I ran into slime mold’s great blog series about how the causes of obesity is a mystery, called “A chemical hunger”. As part of the series, they mentioned how a potato only diet has been show to cause weight loss. I decided to try this diet when they wanted to do it as an experiment, since it was also relatively easy to do.
After about at week, it felt like a miracle. I wasn’t hungry, I didn’t have cravings, I also didn’t feel like eating more than about 1600 calories. I started losing weight! It felt like witchcraft, it was crazy. All other diets where fairly hard to conform too, had craving issues and prep issues, but this was the first diet where I really just didn’t feel like eating at a calorie deficit! My body temperature increased and my resting heart rate also went down. For every 1C of body temperature your body goes up by, you consume 10% more calories.
I had lower energy levels, and didn’t exercise much since I thought that eating at low calories and exercising at low energy levels will make the work load too high. But that wasn’t painful compared to all the other diets to do, I didn’t have to fight against myself using willpower.
I eventually stopped because after a 2 hour hike, walking downhill was considerably difficult, and I had a hard time depressing the gas pedal driving back. That level of muscle fatigue for that relatively low amount of exercise was unexpected and it made the diet feel dangerous. I got worried about nutritional depletion after eating potatoes long term and that strange experience.
The potato diet although showed me that it is possible to recreate my experience in Asia, back here in the USA.
COVID slow burn fat loss
COVID was a unique experience. I ate at the company cafeteria a lot due to cost and time savings, but COVID forced me to make all of my meals at home, so for the first time, I had strict control over what I ate despite my eating out habits. I went with my casual maintenance “meat and veggies” carb avoidance diet and ground beef & veggies became my stable dinner, and a roasted chicken from Proposition Chicken became my default lunch. I had a similar amount of physical activity as I had pre-covid times.
I eventually noticed that I was losing 0.5lbs per month over a year, and got slowly more leaner. It wasn’t painful at all to have this diet plan. I made another discovery of a willpower free weight loss plan.
High fat keto
Keto diets have always been hard for me, I’ve never done them successfully. The keto flu induction phase hits me very hard energy and fitness wise, and I eventually give up because I can’t do my job well.
This time although, I decided to chug through keto flu and sacrifice my productivity to see if it works for me. I was inspired to try
‘s high fat keto diet, since it’s also a very lazy diet to execute, and his point about how most keto diets are not high fat enough made me think I was doing it wrong previously.I got bad keto flu, but I stuck with it, and eventually got through it. How hilariously bad my steep hill climb performance got during keto flu was quite comical. After keto flu, I was about 80% energy levels. My gut stabilized completely although and in one month I lost 10lbs, and for the first time, the weight loss was visible from my abdominal area. This was super exciting.
Beyond the lower energy levels and having issues eating cream directly, the diet wasn’t painful. I also eventually added %95 fat chocolate keto snacks made of coconut oil. An acquaintance I got on the diet also lost a bunch of weight, but eventually stopped after a few months due to nausea issues.
Add another painless diet to the list.
SIBO, DNA & a histamine avoidance diet
After one month of keto, I decided to try anabologies ‘honey diet’, which failed badly for me. I gained a lot of weight quickly, felt crappy and gave up after a week. Going to my default intuitive diet corrected the weight gain quickly after a few weeks. My keto weight loss stayed on!
I got diagnosed with IBS and low grade SIBO recently, a couple of months before I tried
‘s keto diet, so I was experimenting in trying to figure out what triggered my gut issues. I was living with low grade diarrhea for probably 12 years at this point, and I didn’t realize it was an issue until my partner got insistent about it since it caused no pain or other obvious issues. It also made me realize part of my ‘stomach’ was from the gas created from SIBO.I found that very high starch diets, like eating a lot of bread or potatoes as the majority of my calories and keto stabilized my gut significantly. The fat loss from keto was in a different spot than the ‘gas loss’ from SIBO correction.
I got into DNA analysis recently after getting a full genetic sequencing test result from Nucleus, and used Genetic Lifehacks, Genetic Genie and Genefood to help me understand what would work best for me. Some very interesting things popped up in the test results, which led me to try out a histamine avoidance diet focused on carbs. This means I need to eat very fresh foods, avoid leftovers and things like cheese. I ate a lot of frozen fruit because I love fruit and fresh sourdough bread, along with some fresh meat and other foods. It was very casual, and I ate cheese or restaurant food sometimes if it was in a meal.
From this casual histamine avoidance diet, I noticed some improved health outcomes and lost about 1-2lbs in a month. My energy & motivation (brain energy) levels were great, unlike keto & the potato diet. It reminded me of my COVID era diet and how it seemed like an improved version of that.
The weight loss slider
This showed me that effective weight loss is now possible without a lot of pain, and without drugs. If you want it fast, cheap and Ozempic like, you avoid protein and go all in on a nutrient source, be it starchy potato diet or a fatty keto diet. Your energy levels will go down a bit, like Ozempic, but cravings and such won’t be and issue, and it’s very easy to execute. You also probably wont get other Ozempic side effects like nausea, GI issues or an empty wallet.
If you want it truly painless, you can try ‘default casual diets’ that are customized to your body’s specific needs, and they will go slower, but they won’t have any compromises in how you live your life. You will slowly lose weight bit by bit.
If your life is flexible enough to work remotely, you could also move to Asia or Europe and lose a lot of weight with zero thought or issues, although this doesn’t work for some.
In a sense, there is now a painless weight loss slider you can choose from on how to lose weight, and a lot of hints that there are even better options we can add to the slider one day. But it will probably need to be customized to the person to figure out their set of root causes or sensitivities that make it hard for them to lose weight.
To figure all of this out although, I had to go through a lot of failures:
> On top of this, I knew it didn’t have to be this way.
This is so important. I had the same thing, also in Asia :) After effortlessly losing 100lbs, it's really hard to believe that you'll have to suffer for fat loss.
You just know it's not true.