What failed in weight loss for me

And what it taught me

I’ve been thinking about weight loss for a while, in my quest to have a flat belly without going insane. In my last article, the weight loss slider, I went over the things I discovered worked well for me. But there are many other failures that are behind those successes.

The weight loss slider

My Failures

These are all things I tried that either failed to help me lose weight or caused me to gain weight. I’m not even talking about weight rebound effects after you stop the intervention.

I gained 22lbs with stimulants

This is probably the most surprising to most people, but I actually gained weight with stimulants. About 22 pounds over 1.5 years, while in the previous 1.5 years I lost about 10-15 lbs with my slow burn casual weight loss COVID isolation diet.

In late 2021 I was diagnosed with adult ADHD. I was getting more and more frustrated with how I can’t seem to achieve my goals in life, especially if I was in a comfortable position, along with some other things. I gathered all of my medical history from birth (go Canadian healthcare!), got a comprehensive neuropsychological evaluation over 2 days and part of the diagnosis was ADHD. The diagnosis surprised me, but it explained a bunch of things.

With an ADHD Dx, also comes an option to get a stimulant prescription (adderal, ritalin, vyvanse, etc). My constant subconscious snacking to activate my brain was cut off immediately, along with significant decreases in appetite once I started taking the medications regularly. But along with that significant reduction in appetite from waking to 8pm, also got rid of my discipline to avoid certain foods so I don’t gain weight. There was occasionally a rebound effect with my appetite too once the medications wore off.

I was eating a significantly lower volume of food than I was previously, so according to my background calorie math, I could afford to have things like 400 calories of ice cream or other treats. I couldn’t be more wrong, and I gained weight at about a rate of one pound per month.

It was quite the lesson, that even with schedule II restricted drugs like amphetamines, you could still gain weight if you ate the wrong things for your body.

Diets that didn’t work for me

Emergence / glass noodle diet for a month

The emergence diet is 90% pure starch diet that limits the amount of protein, fat and BCAAs you consume, along with adding ~30g of glycine to your diet. The goal is to simulate the effects of the potato diet, without being limited to just potatoes and adding some more balanced protein and other food options such as veggies. The creator, Brad Marshall, also wanted to try out some effects seen in some studies with BCAA restriction and increasing glycine in the diet.

I tried it for a month and didn’t lose weight, but I noticed a bunch of interesting effects such as increased cardio performance, decreased strength training performance and increased body temperature. I was noticing some ‘body recomp’ effects, because I was working out regularly, but I also had similar recomp effects on my personal casual baseline diet. You can see more details in my reddit post.

Honey diet for a week

I was excited about the honey diet, by anabology, because it still lets you eat ‘whatever’ for the evening as long as it’s reasonably healthy, like a lot of protein and veggies. I was also interested in the mononutrient cycling concept and to see how another mononutrient, simple sugar, would work.

I found it difficult. It started making me feel bad, and white knuckling through the few hours before you can eat normal food was also distracting. I also gained something like 0.5lbs a day. Another bio PhD I mentioned it to said that much sugar would cause a lot of inflammation off hand, which might’ve been the cause for me. After a week I had to eject and I went back to my default diet and got back to my pre-honey diet weight fairly quickly.

Casual carnivore

My default diet for a very long time was “meat and veggies”, starch and carb avoidance along with avoiding things that are labeled junk food, like potato chips, candy, sugary sodas and ice cream. With this default diet I maintained my weight without too much trouble. Trying out carnivore wasn’t much of a stretch from that, I basically just had to also cut out the veggie part. I also didn’t notice much of a difference although and vaguely remember feeling bad eventually. I do admit I haven’t given this one a fair shot.

Intermittent fasting for a while

I tried intermittent fasting with 16 and 18 hour periods for a while. I was able to do 16h fairly well (basically just means skipping breakfast), but 18 and 20 hour periods I got distractedly hungry. I didn’t notice any significant weight loss effects. I did pick up a skipping breakfast habit from it although.

6 months of veganism

Back in my early college years, I tried being vegan for 6 months, to see if it would help with my eczema, psoriasis and other skin sensitivity issues. It did not, and I did not lose weight like a lot of vegans do. I was living at home during these years, and my step father was vegetarian, so going vegan wasn’t much of a stretch for my mom who was a housewife at the time.

Low glycemic index

I tried a low glycemic index diet many years ago, and it also didn’t do much. With a lower glycemic index, the idea is it keeps your blood sugar stable, I do use it as a principle today to help prevent myself from gaining a lot of weight. This was over 15 years ago so my memory is fuzzy here.

Girlfriend gets into baking

My college girlfriend at the time got into baking as a hobby, and as a result I got to the heaviest I’ve ever been at 230lbs with all the delicious desserts she made. We broke up and I stabilized back to my pre-baking weight fairly quickly without much effort. The baking wasn’t the reason why I broke up with her.

Multiple calorie counting attempts

I tried to lose weight via calorie counting multiple times, but the extra labor involved along with my reduced capacity from eating a low amount of calories inevitably ended up with me failing the diets.

Surfing 5 times in one week in Hawaii

I had a one week vacation in Maui with my partner. I surfed for 5 days, she did not do much physical activity beyond going on walks with me. We didn’t eat more than we usually do at home, maybe 125%. I gained 5lbs that never really came off, and she gained a similar amount. I’m guessing there was something obesity promoting about the food in Hawaii compared to food in the SF Bay Area.

Eventual failures

These are diets that had an effect, but I regained the weight quickly or eventually.

From left to right, circle 1: Badly done keto, 2: Diet2go food + calorie counting , 3: Body builder chicken, 4: Calorie counting w/ subway/chipotle 5: Going to Taipei (5lbs lost in 1 week) & calorie counting

Badly done keto

I tried keto several times, but got keto flu fairly bad, had too much protein in it and found it really hard to keep strict keto and make all the diet food myself. I was stuck in this twilight zone of constant keto flu. I quickly failed.

Diet2go calorie counting

Calorie restriction with frozen diettogo meals and just sticking with their full meal plan did work for me to lose weight fairly quickly. It got me to my lowest weight of around 172lbs. A big problem for me with diets was doing all the labor for it, and diet2go solved that in an expensive way. After I stopped I regained the weight back in a year. I was doing weight lifting with a personal trainer then too, so the amount of that was muscle mass is unknown. I do remember feeling a bit deprived, but not having to do the 20h/week of extra work it represented was a huge help.

Body builder chicken

When I had a personal trainer, I tried a body builder rice, broccoli and chicken breast cutting diet. I only lost a few pounds and didn’t taste that good. It wasn’t done that well on our end either although. It rebounded quickly.

Water fasting

I tried a few days of water fasting (no food) with charcoal as recommended in an old Dave Asprey blog post somewhere (back then it was called “the bulletproof executive”) in early 2013 / late 2012. I did lose weight fairly quickly and you could see it on my body, but people got worried and I was getting faint, so I stopped. I was worried about the danger of it. I quickly rebounded.

Chipotle & Subway calorie counting

Inspired somewhat by

Joseph Everett (WIL)

‘s “Why is it easy to stay thin in Japan” video, and my previous diet2go results, I decided to try calorie counting again, but this time with food from the 2 healthy US restaurants with calorie counts, Chipotle and Subway. One thing I didn’t like about diet2go was everything being frozen and microwaved, so I was hoping with these meals being fresh, it would be more appealing to eat.

It worked, I lost weight. I even wrote a blog article in 2018 called “losing weight the lazy way”. I eventually got to a level of “diet itchy” where I couldn’t tolerate the diet anymore and had to stop. Something was missing. I’m guessing I had some micro-nutrient deficiencies from eating the same 2 meals over and over again, despite them having a varied amount of veggies, fats, meats and carbs, exasperated from the limited calories.

South beach diet

In high school, me and my step dad tried the south beach diet. It was essentially calorie counting with low glycemic index foods to help with blood sugar crashes. It worked, but eventually I was starting to get faint in dance class and had to stop. My mom started getting concerned and we stopped the diet. I was kind of miffed because it was one of the rare few things that worked in getting me to lose weight, but I also agreed with her logic.

Serious exercise regimes I’ve done

Personal trainer weightlifting

I hired a personal trainer to train with me 3 days a week and get strong in 2014. I got my deadlift up to 500lbs and various other lifts. I did it after cutting with diet2go. I gained a whole bunch of weight back, right up to my pre diet2go weight during this weight lifting phase. He was my weightlifting coach, not diet coach although and was pretty good! If your in the SF south bay area you can train with him here: https://www.training-spaces.com/

Crossfit

I joined a crossfit gym close to my house where I worked out to the bone 3 to 5 days a week for 30m for some time from 2012-2015. I don’t remember any weight loss or very noticeable changes in my body. I got more fit although.

Apple Fitness

I’ve been doing 20 minute apple fitness weight training 2-4 times per week with my partner at home for the past 1.5 years For around 8 months I didn’t really see any effects on my body, but after that 8-10 month period I started seeing visible muscle growth and a slow body recomposition effect. I’ve been continuing to do it, although not as intensely when I’m doing rapid weight loss diets.

My baseline diet and exercise regime

During most of this period in the past 12 years, I had a ‘casual' diet that I mostly adhered to following a few principles. I learned these from personal experience what mostly worked for me, and I mostly did it to prevent myself from gaining weight. I knew if I didn’t follow them, I would slowly gain a lot of weight. My 22lbs gained with stimulants was a stark example of this, because even though I had far less appetite and ate far less until about 7pm due to the meds, not following my general principles still led to weight gain by default for me.

These casual principles never helped me lose weight unless I did something temporarily abnormal to gain a lot of weight, such as eat a lot of baked goods all the time or try a sugar diet. I called it ‘meat and veggies’ diet.

• Prefer high protein if you have a choice, eat meat, eat organ meats if available

• Avoid pure carb sources, such as bread, rice, etc. Try to be low carb, and have your carbs be low glycemic index.

• Eat a lot of veggies as a ‘carb replacement’ or stomach volume buffer

• Fat can add a lot of calories, don’t eat decadently rich fatty foods. Get the lean meats. Don’t make stuff extra fatty

• Avoid obvious junk foods and candies when you can.

• Don’t drink liquid calories, which meant a lot of sugar free sodas

• Avoid processed foods if possible

• Try to have quality nutrient dense foods

• Have the quality version of foods if you can. Eat a nice smelling fragrant tomato with a lot of flavor over a tasteless water bag tomato with no smell.

• Avoid seed oils in my cooking

I also tried for activity:

• Commute to work via bike, 20-60m of biking a day depending on the workplace. Sometimes I had periods where I didn’t bike to work, other times I did.

• Tried to take transit and walk vs. drive

• Go for walks around lunch time

• Occasionally pick up a workout program

There was a lot of social eating and desserts during this time, and many period of low activity. I wasn’t that strict about it.

Recently with some stuff I discovered about myself and how you don’t need that much protein I’ve reduced the meat and protein significantly, reduced veggies that seem to give me gut issues, avoid lactose infused dairy, try to have food very fresh / frozen and avoid things that might be high histamine such as cheese and reintroduced starchy carbs. It seems to also helped me maintain my weight and I still seem to be getting slowly more muscular despite reducing my protein.

There are a probably a bunch of other details here I’m missing, which comes from all the reading and listening I’ve done about this topic.

What I could probably do better or try in the first place

Of my few things I tried, I feel like if I executed them better, I might get an effect from them. I also might not. The difficulty in execution although points to issues with these systems for me.

• Emergence diet: Maybe it would work if I was really precise with all the food.

• Water fasting: I did this fairly casually, maybe if I did it seriously I would get a good effect.

• Carnivore: Also done casually, if I did it properly with organ meats, bone broth stews and so on, would it work better?

• Honey diet: I felt like I did something wrong here. Maybe really just eat pure sugars vs. a combo of sugars and some fruit. I also did it right after a keto diet.

• Calorie counting with meal kits: Diet2go has been my most successful intervention in pure numbers to date, but that was many years ago and I haven’t done something like long term potato or keto diets yet. I will want to try my potato and keto experiments properly before trying this again

• 2 hours of daily cardio: Although this is very time consuming, I’ve never actually tried 1000 calories of cardio a day. Many say you can’t outrun a bad diet although and many others have gotten bad results with this, thus me never really getting into it.

New things I want to try

Low histamine / low inflammation diet: The somewhat positive results I got with my casual low histamine eating makes me want to try a more serious version of this.

Low FODMAP Diet : Since I have gut issues and low key SIBO, I wonder what effects a FODMAP avoidance diet will have on my weight and other effects that isn’t just keto. It would be good to isolate the gut variables like this.

GAPS Diet: Since I have an ADHD diagnosis, and there has been a lot of interesting psychiatry research with metabolism I am super curious how this diet will work for me. I haven’t seriously researched it although.

Serious DNA customized diet: I got my DNA results, I got a lot of facts about them related to my diet. The info I got from is a lot although, so I want to synthesize a complete DNA customized diet plan for myself beyond the casual things I’ve been doing and see it’s full effects.

Live in low obesity countries: I would like to try living in these low obesity countries for a month and see how my body reacts. I’ve met people who gained weight in Japan after all.

• France, the only developed country with a DECREASING MODERN OBESITY RATE that I’ve found. I haven’t looked that hard into it although.

• Japan or Korea

• South east asian surf town

• South american surf town

• Lower priority: Israel or Turkey, Dubai, Africa, India, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe

What I learned from my failures

Your body composition is an expression of your defaults

Whatever your long term maintained diet and body state is what your body will be long term. Work out at the gym doing strength training for 30m a day, your body will slowly get more muscular until your stimulus doesn’t change your current body state. This also applies for diet.

If you gain 20lbs because your GF gets into baking, removing that stimulus and going back to your default diet will have you go back to your default weight also. Calorie restrict hard, you will lose a bunch of weight temporarily. But if it’s not sustainable because of all the mental and physical negatives that come from it, you will go back to your body that your default lifestyle represents and gain it back.

This is partly why people are against diets, because your ‘forever lifestyle’ is what matters. But people do diets because they can’t figure out a ‘forever lifestyle’ that gets them into a healthy body composition, so they do a temporary unsustainable thing called diets.

This is why it’s vital to figure out a default system that will at least keep you weight stable or in a fit body.

Anything that requires continuous willpower will fail, because it can not be a default system

Any diet system that is inherently unpleasant in eating or experiencing, which probably comes from a nutritional deficiency that the body is screaming for, is something that will eventually fail. Anything that is difficult to integrate in your day to day life because of increased labor needed when you lack energy will eventually fail also. It needs to be a positive experience for you ideally. Many people love their yoga and crossfit classes. Many people love eating high quality fruits and veggies. Focus on making your diets enjoyable vs. painful.

I write more about this in this article:

Willpower is for losers

Diets & exercise programs are useful experiments to find new things to add to your default system

There are several diets that worked, and many that did not work for me taught me things about my body & mind. Carb avoidance and going for low glycemic index carbs if I do have them was a useful thing I learned via my diet. Learning that painless diet loss is possible by traveling to Asia was another. Diets are a way to test out and develop new default systems for yourselves, so even if it wont be successful in the long run, if it teaches you the right things, it was worth it.

I am probably skinny fat and have some other goofy physiological issues

It’s just my skinny fat also shows up as a belly even if the rest of my body looks skinny. Even with my workouts, it seems difficult for me to gain muscle tone. I had to work out for 8 months before I started seeing visible results in my upper body recently. When I was with my personal trainer in 2014, upper body strength gains seemed slow compared to my squat and deadlift.

Visible muscle gain is slow going, and getting it in my upper body is slower going. Although I’ve gotten random people asking me how did I get my quads so big, so maybe I’m just gifted in the legs department while being generally ungifted in the muscle department. Although this might be an ‘invisible foundation effect’ and because of my habit of regular biking I had a much better foundational base in my legs compared to my upper body, and other proportional things about my body making it look small, but not actually be small.

Oleg Verniaiev competed in the 2024 olymics in gymnastics and our arms are close, so it might be just a visual genetic thing.

When I was a prepubescent child, I couldn’t do the monkey bars and there was a note in my medical file about low muscle tone. Testosterone is ok-ish according to my blood tests over the years, but not in the ideal range. I’ve also always been fairly flexible, but not flexible to the point of being hyper-mobile other than in my shoulders. Part of this might be neurological although, due to a bunch of muscle coordination and proprioceptive issues I have. The body & brain might feel too unstable in the upper part compared to the more grounded lower part and thus not let me go full strength to prevent injury, and this is all on a subconcious level.

I plan after my diet experimentation to start hiring a personal trainer and do serious barbell weightlifting again, this time really focusing on my upper body.